I lived in the Balkans for 30 years. Serbs have great culture and kafanas, but they are extremely political. It’s so hard to hold a normal conversation without them mentioning Russia, Yugoslavia, Kosovo/Albanians, NATO la-la-la. Especially in kafanas, I can confidently say that a majority of them still live in the past and can’t move on and it’s really sad.
I've also lived in the balkans and my work involved tourism, I have to say this does sound like a complaint made primarily by germans and americans. I'm not sure if it's because germans and americans are the ones who get an earful of it most often due to heavier national involvement in the yugoslav wars and/or if we take it as a more of a personal affront.
The triumphal liberal cosmopolitanism of the 90s is starting to fade in Europe and the US, what's left looks more and more like cynical window dressing for brutal realpolitik. Nationalism, irredentist attitudes, ethnic cleansing and military conflict seem to be very much back on the menu as of late.
I see all of those as negative developments, but it's maybe time to wonder who's living in the past, them or us.
As the first generation out of the Portuguese dictorship, I really feel we are slowly back to the days before the Wall fell down.
How everything used to be during the first decade of EU is really going away, and I have no hurry to live under the same kind of goverments that my parents had to endure.
Many of the "nationalists" have no clue what it actually means, when the folks that vote on them as protest, discover the real meaning it will be too late.
>Nationalism, irredentist attitudes, ethnic cleansing and military conflict seem to be very much back on the menu as of late
Hardly surprising when the last 3+ years saw the biggest wealth transfer and biggest erosion of the middle class in history. And the average people who suffered that decline aren't comforted by the typical "ackchyually, the economy's great, look how well the stock market is doing" when they have too much month left at the end of their paychecks and no chance of getting out of the serfdom cycle.
The ownership class will do anything to stop fascism except allow the public to vote on the continuous upward transfer of wealth from the workforce to the already wealthy. War and nationalism are a surefire way to distract the public and muzzle critics, to tell a story about national greatness stolen by outsiders instead of by your very own titans of industry and politicians who have more in common with their opposite number in other countries than with anyone foolish or unlucky enough to be born outside of the circles of capital and access to capital.
The parent comment is ridiculous hyperbole. I spend several months every year cycling around the Western Balkans, largely for the sake of maintaining my knowledge of the languages and therefore I spend a lot of my time in cafes chatting with whoever’s around. Sure, Serbs sometimes bring up politics like any people would, but it isn’t at all “hard to hold a normal conversation”. I can and have talked with them about everything under the sun.
Some people seem to deliberately change the topic to war, whenever there is a thread about anything in the Balkans. This phenomenon also happens on Reddit and other places.
I don't know where are you from, but imagine your country being under devastating economic sanctions, then bombarded by enormously more powerful armies, then annexing a part of the country, all of that against international law. Make that process displace hundreds of thousands of people. Now when you imagine that, be honest with yourself and see if you would keep conversations at weather and sport.
This was actually the second time NATO has bombarded serbian forces, the first time was in Bosnia, which eventually led to Dayton peace agreement later that year:
Have you been to Vietnam? There is no comparison between what was done to them and Serbia, yet Vietnam has moved on. Victimhood is strong in the Balkans, it's a way of life. I know because I was born there.
Vietnam won decisively and Serbia lost decisively; measured in destruction it was incomparably worse for Vietnam, but they have no outstanding border conflicts while experiencing peaceful economic development and national sovereignty since the last war in 1979. When your story has a happy ending (and your government needs the US to counterbalance China) it's a lot easier to move on.
This is essentially the reverse of former Yugoslavia where things were fairly placid from 1945-1980 then fell apart.
There's a tendency to equate the grievances of a generation with immutable national character because it makes analysis easy and change impossible. But this gets used for purposes of denigration of peoples or excuses for policy failures, if not by race and culture, then by economic class and individual good fortune.
I'm guessing you were born to educated professionals who immigrated or helped you do so, rather than say, grew up in a refugee camp with a non-citizen passport.
It sounds like you are from the West. Thank you for explaining the psychology of my people so clearly to me. I think I understand it better now but it looks like I can use some book reading. Any recommendations?
Sorry your genetic ancestral memory of the Balkans doesn’t stack up to actually studying the history/economics/politics, visiting and befriending people in all the republics, not just passively listening to a single perspective around the dinner table. But I’m not a racial essentialist so I probably have an easier time absorbing differing narratives without having to decide one is the real truth.
These five are a good start,
I can list some journal articles if you’re interested…
- Yugoslavia, Death of a Nation
- Tito: the story from the inside
- Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945-1990
- Miss Ex-Yugoslavia
- Religion and The Politics of Identity in Kosovo
PS. Was I right about the educated professionals part, or were you a displaced person whose village was razed?
> Sorry your genetic ancestral memory of the Balkans doesn’t stack up to...
Ah, we have a serial West-splainer. I emigrated when I was 24 and I speak for pretty much everybody I've known in those years. I've studied and wrote essays on the literature and the history of the region daily through high school and college. I speak the language and the customs.
You on the other hand seem completely oblivious to the cultural significance of Kafana, or its different incarnations throughout the region, to recognize that arguing about politics, whining about history, the Great Powers, life, and the Universe, has and still is pretty much the purpose of their existence.
> PS. Was I right about the educated professionals part, or were you a displaced person whose village was razed?
I'm having a hard time comprehending the relevance. Did the displaced people in Yugoslavia 30 years ago define the pathos of the region, which BTW is more than just former Yugoslavia, in the last 600+ years?
You sound like you’re from Belgrade and have never been to Kosova or Bosnia or even to the countryside. Would you prefer to say “western Balkans” or do you presume to also speak for Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, etc.
I would engage with your sources rather than once again retreat into claims of irreducible essence of identity that can never be understood by outsiders. If the Balkans has a curse, it’s that dishonest rhetoric being peddled by corrupt westernizers and corrupt nationalists.
If the GP had gone to Kosovo or (as the common English shorthand for “Bosnia and Herzegovina”) Bosnia, do you think that would change anything? In my experience, northern Kosovo and Republika Srpska are the very hotbeds of banging on about Serb identity and national character in the region, more than Beograd.
Vojvodina is a good escape from all that. Obviously the ethnic Hungarian population there doesn’t care about “Kosovo is Serbia” stuff, but even a lot of the Serb population feel those disputes are far away.
>In my experience, northern Kosovo and Republika Srpska are the very hotbeds of banging on about Serb identity and national character in the region, more than Beograd.
Most definitely! Not coincidentally, they also are dirt poor, ruled by the biggest crooks, and generally have limited opportunities for educational or economic mobility. The alliance that drove Serbia to war was between the resentful and opportunistic minority in the capital and the resentful and ignorant in the periphery.
Vojvodina is a great example of what the real tragedy is for Serbia. The Serbs were not united and their legitimate concerns about the future of Serb minorities was abducted by brutal people who cared about their own power only, effectively dooming not only those Serbs over the republic borders but also tainting the entire nation with their crimes.
Some of the most politically sophisticated people now are the men who started as country bumpkins taken in by Milosevic, served in the JNA or ancillary serb forces, and saw that it was all bullshit. Incompetence, drunkenness, and horrifying crimes against civilians for purposes of simple theft. They saw that the best of Serbia was against what they were doing and they were serving amoral people of low character, limited intelligence, who would shoot not only the enemy but anyone who got in the way of their ransacking. Yet now that they're in this dead end and the bridges have all been burned, how to go forward?
When I go elsewhere, I like to transmit these stories to people who (understandably) would not feel comfortable going to where those stories are told. At times there is a spark of recognition and solidarity in the shared problems, a willingness to reconcile if it comes first with full accounting and sincere apology that will never come from the political class.
And on the way back to serbian areas, I pass on the stories of not just random destruction but personal betrayal. How when the serbian paramilitaries came into a majority albanian village, they had kill lists provided for them by a local with names and addresses: the mayor, doctors, journalists, and anyone whose prominence had bred resentment. How after that, it makes simple tolerance of the western liberal type impossible, even basic trust impossible for a generation.
It certainly makes it hard for them to even pretend to care about Serbian families who experienced similar or historical Serbian architecture, because while everyone committed ethnic crimes, they did not all do so first or on the same scale.
And yet, all the refugee children of any ethnicity or religion who have become adults have much in common with each other: the feeling of being driven out of their home, hated for who they are, betrayed by neighbors they had grown up with, beset by economic uncertainty, and being continuously used in the most cynical way by politicians who make no real effort to provision their country for the future.
It should go without saying that neither "The West" in the form of the EU/Nato/KFor nor Russia have any interest in acting as honest brokers for untangling the complexity. If the conflict is reignited in earnest by local intragisence, everyone involved will likely become a tool of foreign powers who see the people there as little more than disposable proxies in a larger conflict.
I benefit from not just being an outsider but from being sincere in my sympathy for everyone. There is nothing more disrespectful than to tell someone in pain that their pain is not real, or that they deserved it because of what their government did, or that it's so proportionally insignificant compared to someone else's that they shouldn't even express it.
Telling people to shut up and get over it is (as is common among emigres and westerners) is so incredibly destructive. Refusing to listen is greatest gift to those who want to radicalize and dehumanize, it gives them an endless source of legitimacy as "the only one that cares" no matter what lies they tell.
I thought what drove Serbs to war was the Bosniak's desire to create a Muslim state and treat everybody else (Serbs, Croats) as second class citizens; and the Kosovar Albanians desire to create Albanian ethnostate and treat everybody else as second class citizens, which they did.
You are placing blame on Serbian militias' greed and power hunger, which sounds as an underwhelming explanation to me.
The modern wave of Albanian-Serb hostility goes back to the early 1980s, a time when the breakup of Yugoslavia was not yet on the horizon and so there was no fear of an oppressive Albanian ethnostate. Rather, the Serb rhetoric was driven by a claim that Albanians were squatters on historic Serb land.
An independent Kosovo would have become a state chiefly for the Albanian ethnicity simply due to demographics, but it need not have become completely hostile to Serbs and Bosniaks, if the Serbs had acted more wisely. The Republic of Albania itself contains a number of Greek, South Slavic-speaking, and Aromanian villages. And had the Serbs acted more wisely, Kosovo undoubtedly would have been partitioned at Mitrovica.
The latest claim sounds disingenous. I'm too painfully aware that no partitions of USSR were redone with regards of actual ethnic occupancy (especially when talking about Russians, that's Serbs in case of Yugoslavia).
So all the new states are extremely imperialistic and will not give up on any of "their" lands even if they did not have ethnic dominance there. So no, Kosovar Albanians will still demand Mitrovica.
However, it is actually outrageous that Serbs were made to give out their actual UN recognized lands, and they had full motivation to try and keep those, like Azeri did. And in fact it's not off the table yet. Let's suppose something bad happens to NATO, Serbs can try to Karabakh-2023 Kosovo.
At no point did it exist as an independent entity with popular support, it was first created by the French and propped up by the US. It’s about as credible as saying the Soviet war in Afghanistan was between two competing regimes or that the liberation of France in WW2 was a conflict between pro-German and pro-American regimes.
Formally true, but not a meaningful distinction given the massive disparity in capabilities and supporters.
You are very articulate but you don't have a clue of what you are talking about, no matter how many books you have read. The southern vietnamese have a very distinct identity, and they haven't moved on at all, if they had a chance they would declare independence from the north in a split second.
Source: I have lived in Saigon for a decade, which beats hands down the many books I had read about the subject before that
I could say the same as an American southerner! The existence of distinct regional identity preexists the state and continues after reunification. The North dominates in their politics just as in ours and there’s resentment about it in both countries, but it does not follow that there is no national identity or that a regional dictatorship created and funded foreign powers which could not survive without their indefinite aid is true expression of regional identity.
First of all, apologies, the way I started my reply was too brusque.
Yes, at the end of the day it's all about who has the power. I just wanted to point out that present Vietnam is far from united and that you can't imagine how much resentment there is in Saigon towards the communist government in the north.
Saigon had a "good" war, barely saw any fighting, but the post-war was horrible, scarring southerners to this day, many people repeatedly tried to flee on dingies out of desperation from human (northern) caused starvation and scarcity, this in a land that had never experienced hunger (the Mekong Delta is extremely fertile and milked by the north). They haven't forgotten.
The world is full of hopeful irredentists, and whether they will ever succeed or not is not a matter of right, but might (maybe in the shape of a foreign power). It is just that in southern Vietnam most people are irredentists, which I suspect is not the case in the US south, isn't that right?
No apology needed, and I can believe it! I happen to have some personal contacts in Hue who are in middle but in the divide between northern and southern communists they were treated as part of the south. I know there's some real bitterness even among just the communists, in part because the Hanoi-driven war strategy led to the formations in the south taking incredibly heavy casualties which then further cemented their political subordination in the postwar era.
From what little I know, both the center of the country and the south, party and non-party alike, generally feel that the northern elite is clannish and doesn't allocate jobs and investment fairly, which is kind of a big deal for a country with such a large state sector.
I can well understand some feeling persisting a mere 65 years later.
That said, for American southern irredentists of past, present and future, they're stuck with the confederacy alone, which is inextricably connected to slavery even for people like Robert E. Lee who was personally but not politically opposed to slavery. That's simply a much harder thing to identify with morally and practically, especially when 30-40% of the population of the south are descended from freed slaves.
The Republic of Vietnam flag stands for the hundreds of thousands of ARVN soldiers and administration and their families, but it also stands for things like a catholic dictatorship attacking temples in a 90% buddhist country, rigged elections, coups, and being the junior partner of a foreign power that carried out a brutal and dehumanizing counter-insurgency.
Unlike the American south, the southern Vietnamese have a much older identity and much richer history to draw upon. So, I wonder if in time a prior symbol/flag/something from their distinct history will become more resonant for them in the future, which conveys the identity without the baggage.
For much of history (i.e. millennia) the north and the south of Vietnam have experienced different degrees of voluntary and involuntary separation. For hundreds and hundreds of years they existed as different countries and even tried to conquer each other. The vast majority of south Vietnamese people today have more sympathy for the US than for Hanoi.
Source: half my family is Vietnamese and I lived there for 3 years.
Vietnam didn't move on! That's the one thing they most certainly did not do. For decades the Viet refused to move on until they won. After they won, they then fought a war with China and another proxy war with America.
The Viet do not move on. They stick to their guns. Or feces covered bamboo sticks, or any weaponizable itsm they have on hand.
Nor did the Afghanis. They just kept at it until they won.
In fact, giving up and moving on is what just about only the peace loving Serbs did.
> your country being under devastating economic sanctions, then bombarded by enormously more powerful armies, then annexing a part of the country
All of that just out of a sudden, without anything else occurring to trigger these events, right? No genocides, no invasions, no massive civilian casualties? No war criminals walking around free doing DJ gigs 30 years later?
No, none of that is forgotten either. It's hell as far back as anyone alive can remember, from the 90s to the 40s to WWI and the Balkan wars, and all of the fighting with the Ottoman empire throughout the 19th century.
Are you suggesting that because other genocides have happened, the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats is just business as usual?
Perhaps NATO should have just left them to it. Sure, tens of thousands of civilians were killed, but I suppose that pales in comparison to the millions killed in WW2.
> the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats
We've just seen a massive, 150k people ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh and nobody in the whole world went so far as lifting a finger to stop it. Except Russia, which did lift one of its fingers but that was it.
It happened this autumn.
But yeah, let's pretend that NATO is in business of preventing ethnic cleansings around the world, as opposed to ruining countries it doesn't like for profit. And BTW, what happened to Krajina Srpska?
Sorry, how many died? Where are you getting your figures?
The implied defence of russia is particularly inappropriate, given the russians have raped, tortured, and massacred tens of thousands of Ukrainians just in the past couple of years. If you're taking ethnic cleansing to simply mean displaced, then russia is guilty of ethnic cleansing to the tune of millions of civilians.
Not many has died, but they have all left and have no hope to ever return to their homes. Contrast that to Balkans where a lot of people already returned to their homes, and way more could return if the hatred could be held in check, to which "humanitarian bombardments" history is a huge deterrent.
I'm not talking about defence of Russia, or Serbia, because they needn't one. The USA/NATO need to defend their involvement in civil wars to help one of the sides which make these civil wars worse every single time, as well as making at least one side even more bitter and preventing normalization of affairs for longer.
I, for one, do not want to ever hear any more moral judgements from you. You have no moral basis to have them.
Right now, the US is backing up an ethnic cleansing agent that is IDF, while placing high hopes on ethnic cleansing as a way to resolve the conflict.
I would be very glad to remove my comments if you remove the whole branch of your accusations, which are wildly out of place.
It is difficult to all sides of the conflict to return to their homes while being dead.
This is why fuel should not be put in the fire of ethnic civil wars. By encouraging your party of preference to score a win you encourage the other party to stiffen their resistance, leading to massive casualties and no resolution. Because the only actual resolution would involve sides talking and making concessions, and you didn't want your preferred party to do that, because you decided they are right all around and so should just get what they want, in full.
What happened in Bosnia with Dayton agreements could still happen, just earlier and with way fewer deaths.
By your own admission, "not many has died" [sic] in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. This contrasts with the tens of thousands of Bosniaks who literally died because they were massacred by Serbs.
That's a civil war. People die on all sides and lose their homes. In Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian population was so sure of its upcoming fate that it packed its bags and left as one, in about two weeks period.
Bosniaks just considered it's better to risk death but keep their homes. Serbs who lived there also did the same choice. The peace talks should have started immediately.
I have exactly zero faith in any accusations coming in from US/NATO because that's Jack the Ripper handing out traffic tickets scenario. So let's pretend I didn't hear about "blah blah massacred blah blah", and you didn't post that. That, and you are trying to pass a list of news report at eleven as a list of document war crimes in the other thread.
"How many died" and "Where are you getting your figures" are disturbing questions when speaking about ethnic cleansing. These people have had their homes and lives taken away from them.
Like the Ukrainians. Like the Ugandans. Like the Armenians of the early 20th century. Like the Jews. Like the Cambodians. Like the Bosnians. Like the Croats. Like the Serbs.
All of this is history, all of this damages a people and their culture. Let's not put a yardstick next to it to prove how bad things are. Let's remember why these things happened so we don't do them again.
Fair enough, but in that case, why are you replying to me? Shouldn’t you instead be replying to the guy who used whataboutism and compared the deaths of tens of thousands of Bosniaks to the displacement of 150k Armenians?
My comment on the comparison was in response to their comparison.
You are claiming tens of thousands killed, tortured and raped by Russians, but this data actually contradicts your claim: while there are lots of injured, the death toll is about 9k, half of them killed in Donetsk and Luhansk, which makes it more likely that they were killed by Ukrainian Armed Forces.
And that's ignoring all the casualties in Donetsk and Luhansk before the escalation.
Civilians getting in the crossfire is always a tragedy that each side tries to exploit to their own benefit, acting like they've totally transcended the problem of collateral damage and those other guys are doing it on purpose.
> There are many, many documented cases of russian soldiers raping women and children in Ukraine.
a) The X soldiers raping women (and children!) is a basic dehumanization technique. Serbs did it, Iraqis did it, Russians are doing it, Chinese are doing doing it, Palestine does it. Apparently literally everyone at odds with "western" political block seems to be doing it, which begs for some questions. The matter of sexual violence gets an easy emotional response and and demands very little burden of proof. And then we also have characters like Lyudmila Denisova, who are happy to craft stories like that.
b) You aren't seriously claiming that things you've linked could be held to a standard of "documented"? Hell, one of them is an "intercepted call" (somewhat popular medium to portray those evil orcs, and my god, does that LTE encryption sucks) with a woman literally saying: "so, hubby, how's fucking all those Ukrainian women going on :)))))))" - that totally sounds natural AF.
Not to turn this into a blindly dichotomic argument, war obviously sucks and obviously there are people who are killed, tortured and raped, and each one is one too many. But spinning propaganda and dumbing everything down to a perfect dichotomy of all good vs all evil is only going to make things worse for everyone, especially for ordinary normal people who just want to live in peace.
Just as you do, Russian media also have a shit load of "documented" cases of some evil shit and narratives of grannies having their legs torn off by HIMRAS missiles.
And in both cases, instead of a wakeup call, it's used as an excuse for MOAR weapons, MOAR warfare, MOAR destruction and death.
I don't think you're arguing in good faith, but for anyone else that takes this kind of commentary serious:
Take a look at a map. Even if there was political will, "The West" has extremely limited options for military intervention in a landlocked country surrounded by non-aligned states. It's not like the US is going to fly sorties through Iran or Russia. Armenia is in a tough spot.
No, and don't put words in my mouth. There's nothing business as usual about genocide. Neither are the people of the Balkans so flippant, none of this is forgotten. There's an awful lot of talk about "moving on" here, though, which is radically unsympathetic to the people who live across the Balkans who, for the last century, have had their lives and livelihood threatened seemingly every 30 years or so, one way or another.
> All of that just out of a sudden, without anything else occurring to trigger these events, right? No genocides, no invasions, no massive civilian casualties?
Do you also support Russia's invasion in Ukraine?
Because you are clearly rationalizing involving a larger military power whose brutality ends up hurting orders of magnitudes more innocent people than the actual bad actors. Thus, bringing ever more people into the cycle of hatered.
Do you really imagine that some random person whose house was bombed and family was killed saying "yeah, that is totally just, thank you, good guys!"
> Do you also support Russia's invasion in Ukraine?
No, because any Russian claims about civilians attacked in Ukraine are lies. If we lived in an alternative reality where those claims were true, I would support it — but in a much limited capacity. Like an aerial campaign.
> whose brutality ends up hurting orders of magnitudes more innocent people than the actual bad actors
That's patently false. US military involvement in Serbia was limited and hurt much less innocents that would be slaughtered otherwise.
> Do you really imagine that some random person whose house was bombed and family was killed saying "yeah, that is totally just, thank you, good guys!"
That's a tragedy. Why was his family living in a military installation? Whoever settled them there, or set up a military installation under his house is to blame — that's what he should be angry against.
It's like criticising Israel for bombing Hamas installations in civilian areas — that's not the actor who's responsible for breaking the rules or war and resulting casualties.
This comment is so ridiculous and so orientalist, it has all the stereotypes.
And to add something more constructive, the Americans made a big strategic mistake in bombing out Serbia/Yugoslavia, as many of the people there were some of the most Westernised populace East of Dover. I'm from nearby Romania and somehow I got to listen to one of their national radio stations last week (Radio Belgrade 202 I think), and I have to say that the music there was profoundly Westernised, as in R.E.M. songs and the like in the middle of the day, and we're talking about a State-run radio station. We don't have that here in Romania, where half of the pop music (and more) is now local/Romanian.
Of course that dropping uranium enriched bombs on people's heads, as the US has done, might have changed the opinions of some of them.
.. and, as it subsequently produces deformed babies at an alarming rate for generations after its use on the battlefield, it should be 100% banned and its usage treated as a crime against humanity.
People love talking about politics and history in the balkans, and its because the balkans have been politically and militarily torn apart hundreds of times in the past 200 years. History and politics are a big topic of discussion. I think its much better to have this than the random americans on youtube who dont know who their president is or why they invaded iraq or any basic fact about their country. Its like they live in this tiny bubble of just going to work and back and not belonging to any community out there besides a costco membership.
> but they are extremely political. It’s so hard to hold a normal conversation without them mentioning Russia, Yugoslavia, Kosovo/Albanians, NATO la-la-la
> them still live in the past and can’t move on and it’s really sad.
Heh, but that's exactly my experience with Americans and their Cold War mentality, and that very specific idea they have about "fighting tyranny", "bringing democracy" and the whole childish image of good guys (tm) vs bad guys dichotomy. (And yes, also Russia, Nato, Ukraine and yada-yada these days)
I've spent a lot of time in Serbia. They're not all obsessed with politics. Most of the younger generation are resolved to the reality that Kosovo is lost forever (and never really mattered much anyway). Unfortunately, the political ruling class is still trying to maintain support from hard-core nationalists and maintain their distance from the EU and NATO; this won't work out well for such a small, poor country.
Some foreigners criticize Americans for being ignorant of history, and they're correct. But ignorance is also a strength in that it allows us to move on without holding grudges. It's not a perfect analogy but to some extent Americans have found it easier to get over the Civil War that ended in 1865 than Serbs have from the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.
As someone who knows the people and the place, I have to say that a lot of the political takes I ever heard from regular Serbians have either been of a fatalistic self-defeating kind ("everything is shit and it cannot be changed") or of a nationalist self-defearing kind ("everything is shit and it is the fault of $other_nations").
I can emotionally understand why the stances are often so fatalistic — it has to do with the way society in Serbia works on a daily basis — but as a foreigner who worked there once and has friends living there I could witness myself that a lot of the problems there are home grown. The focus on the unfair outside world is a great way to ignore the shit that goes on at home.
That being said I have been talking about regular Serbs. Like everywhere you will also find sharp analytical minds with singular positions in Serbia and it is well worth listening to them.
I don't believe any serious intellectual position in the west still believes the myth of the end of history.
Cafe discussions are not about „serious intellectual position“ though. And I've a feeling that lots of regular Westerners still believe in this myth. Or at least want to believe.
All-in-all, I think the most important part is to keep talking about what is in one's head. Pushing people to just get over it and change what is in their heads does not exactly work.
Nowhere did I say it was about serious intellectual positions. That is why I specifically made the distinction between regular people and academics.
Also it feel funny to be called a westerner based on a city that is actually a 6 hour car drive from where I grew up. And I grew up next to a couple that fled the war, he was a Serb, she was a Bosnian. My parents took them in and gave them our cellar, he got a job at my fathers company (and works there to this day).
I didn't call you a westerner. I said that in my experience a lot of regular westerners still believe in that myth. And that this crowd is closer to Cafe crowd.
As for „serious intelectual position“ as a split between academia and regular crowd, I'd argue that many people in academia today are con artists at best. And boy do they have end-of-history-ish views. But yes, that's not „serious intelectual position“.
Can't blame the children. They only learn from their parents. If people like you decide to leave, the majority of people with that attitude only grows. In my experience, people don't leave because of political discourse. People leave because of economic situation and lack of opportunities.
1. lot of smoking which is terrible for your skin.
2. life was harder and farming/factory/mining jobs were very popular, first one involve burning in the sun, second in dirt and bad air. Both hard physical work.
It hasn't receive any meaningful update in years now. For those wondering if you'll be fined if piracy is forbidden in your country by using WebTorrent the answer is yes, at least in Germany. They have some good trackers, speaking from experience. :)
This is a great piece of tech. But of course, game companies don’t care much about players after they sell their game. I don’t expect many old games to adopt this, but I expect new ones because it’s going to be a selling feature. In general, expect a IPv6-level of adoptation for this feature.
This is about being able to sync your photos from iPhone to Windows 11 photo app automatically just as you can currently do with a Mac. Nothing to do with games.
How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved. Just like Signal.
I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason! The app doesn’t solve any privacy problem, default chats are unencrypted, keeps personal info. App should be dead already or turned into a dating app because it’s clearly not seriously privacy fucused.
> I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason!
Any reason? I’ll give you some serious ones.
Signal sucks really bad on user experience and features. If you try both for a week or two and learn about the features, you’d be able to conclude the same.
Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!
Signal still has message delivery issues (like long delays)…it’s 2022!!!
Signal keeps pestering me to allow notifications and to allow contacts access. I can only choose “Not Now”, since there is no option that says “No”. When I choose “Not Now”, it will say “we’ll remind you later” and pester me again. I don’t understand why anyone would assume that this app cares about privacy or about users’ time.
> Signal sucks really bad on user experience and features. If you try both for a week or two and learn about the features, you’d be able to conclude the same.
Hm, for me Signal does all I need: Chat, voice chat, video chat, group chat, sending text, pictures, videos, whatever. All of that of course encrypted and not financed by a Russian millionaire/billionaire.
> Signal still has message delivery issues (like long delays)…it’s 2022!!!
Haven't noticed those. How sure are you, that your contacts are actually looking at Signal messages (two filled cirles checkmarks) or have network to receive the messages (two unfilled circles checkmarks)?
> Signal keeps pestering me to allow notifications and to allow contacts access. I can only choose “Not Now”, since there is no option that says “No”. When I choose “Not Now”, it will say “we’ll remind you later” and pester me again. I don’t understand why anyone would assume that this app cares about privacy or about users’ time.
OK, that's really annoying then. I usually use Signal on my computer, from which it works very nicely and never asks me any of those things.
Signal operates on the idea that anything sent through chat is ephemeral and not worth keeping, which just doesn’t work in practice in my experience.
When you’re knee deep in conversation with someone you’re probably not going to say, “oh hey we should switch to email so we can keep a record of this”. It might not even occur to you that the conversation could ever be of value.
There’s been several occasions when my life has been made much more easy for having been able to dig up some old message in iMessage, Telegram, etc from as far back as multiple years ago sometimes because the way things played out the pertinent info didn’t exist anywhere else simply because nobody involved could’ve ever guessed it had any importance.
> Signal operates on the idea that anything sent through chat is ephemeral and not worth keeping, which just doesn’t work in practice in my experience.
Why do you think that? Did you lose any messages? 'cause I can scroll back months and still see all my messages there. Never noticed any loss.
> Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!
Switching out devices is something that happens often enough for many users that transferring history should not be an ordeal. Even the most careful users will occasionally break their phones, and sometimes people need to switch platforms for whatever reason.
WhatsApp suffers from this issue too, at least when trying to migrate histories between platforms.
just to add, telegram can NOT transfer or back up E2E encrypted chats either. unencrypted chats transfer because they are saved on the telegram server.
i think deltachat is possibly the only one that can transfer encrypted messages because you can copy the encryption keys and the messages are just mails, easy to copy (and usually stored on your mail server too)
i don't know how matrix handles this, but from the way verification works there, i am not confident.
> Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!
My chats being gone from new devices is one reason I use Signal over others.
> Signal still has message delivery issues (like long delays)…it’s 2022!!!
I've sent tens or hundreds of thousands of messages over the course of years and the only time i've had delays is when I had spotty service.
I for one am 100% satisfied with Signals UX, and a big reason for that it precisepy that it does not evolve into a communications platform, but just pushes chats around. The delivery issues are very rare, and not a btother anyways. Chat is not time sensitive nor should it be.
Signal cares about privacy (unlike Telegram) and the evidence is right there in their respective source repositories.
UX of Signal is terrible. Part of that is a direct result of security-usability trade-offs.
> The app doesn’t solve any privacy problem, default chats are unencrypted, keeps personal info.
I am using it for public chats.
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EDIT: this is inacurate, see replies
For example I get repeated "insert PIN password here to remember it".
I have a password manager. There is no way to get rid of it, even via deeply hidden settings. For example, what about disabling it for password with length over 40? Or something?
> There is no way to get rid of it, even via deeply hidden settings.
At least on iOS: Settings > Account > [ ] PIN Reminders. I would be very surprised if there isn't a similar way of disabling those reminders on Android.
I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason!
telegram is the only chat app that offers Free Software clients, does not force me to share my phonenumber, is easy enough to use even for old people.
matrix is ok. but element is still buggy and the ux is complex and takes some learning.
another alternative is deltachat. it uses smtp as transport and works with an email account. the UX is also easy enough to use. easier than matrix/element.
The multiple third party clients feature is huge for me. It’s means I’m not stuck with living with whatever set of trade offs have been made in the official client, and it means there are true native (UWP, UIKit, etc) clients for just about every platform that don’t use UI as branding and behave the way one would expect apps of those platforms to behave.
Last time I tried Telegram to see what it is like, it did automatically broadcast to all my contacts, that I use Telegram, and as a consequence people thought they could message me there, even though I was only testing the app. Also it did require associating with my phone/SIM. Do you mean, that it does not publish your phone number to other people on Telegram?
I keep an eye on deltachat, hoping, that it might become a viable alternative to phone number associated chat solutions. Not sure how mature deltachat is already.
it should have asked you about that broadcasting. i am very sensitive about that so i am careful not to allow it.
deltachat is pretty mature for the features that it has. one nice one is that the autocrypt feature works with some regular email clients, so you can exchange encrypted deltachat messages with people who don't have a deltachat client.
it handles groups, image sharing, and integrates videochat with a configurable url (so you can use any video chat that can be opened through a webbrowser)
It requires a phone number, but it doesn't require sharing the phone number with other people. On signal you are only reachable via the phone number, Telegram has User names and allows to hide the number from the profile.
It asks for a phone number when you sign up, but you don't have to share the phone number with people you want to add as a contact/share it in groups.
For a lot of people, Telegram does a good job of being "less evil than Facebook Messenger", and private in ways that matter to them. I'm more worried about some nutcase from a video game meetup group getting hold of my phone number than I am law enforcement finding out I was in that video game group in the first place.
I have a Matrix server and an XMPP server for 'truly private' communication anyway.
that's very subjective i suppose, i don't have much to compare it to. if by fun you mean stickers and animated emojis. sure. it doesn't get in my way. it is possible to find groups and people through searching for keywords.
i can name my contacts as i like. (which matrix/element for example does not allow, and that's a real problem)
the only thing annoying is that anyone can just talk to me, whereas eg. in wechat people have to make a contact request before they can talk to me directly. but i have the impression that wechat is the unusual one here, which a feature that i'd like to see adapted by other messengers too.
i also miss wechat's feature of being able to choose a custom name for myself in each group. but again, i don't know if any other messenger offers that.
That wouldn't work for groups. Abusers could then destroy the groups with impunity for the purpose of censorship. Telegram is mostly about groups. Telegram is often used for activism.
Signal claims to not store data about who is talking to who. That doesn't mean that they don't. If they were, say, a secret subsidiary of the CIA they would act exactly as they are acting now. In general you can't trust the providers of these sorts of things. See Crypto AG...
To some degree you can trust them, as data request to Signal have been through the court systems which is public. You can actually look up and see what data they have turned over after receiving court orders to do so.
Would a secret CIA subsidiary hand over data for a routine civilian court request? If anything not doing so would make their covert surveillance tool even more trustworthy and effective.
That's my point, if Signal were a CIA front with some kind of secret backdoor, it would probably not reveal that in response to a request from a Central District of California grand jury.
Suppose an update is rolled out in app stores, and many people update to it. Suppose this new version contains surveillance instead of matching the published/reviewed code. Won't there be some substantial period of time during which many messages can be stolen before somebody eventually goes on twitter to say "hmm, wireshark shows more data than I'd expect" and/or "hmm, I can't get the source to build quite like the store's new apk"?
We know exactly how much metadata can be collected. You can just look at how the official client works. You can reverse engineer what the server has to do. This not a matter of uncertainty. Signal doesn't mention the collection of the push messaging device IDs explicitly. But that ID doesn't yield a government level adversary any advantage that they don't already have from knowing the phone number, so it doesn't matter. Contact intersection can be logged, then pre-imaged. We can't know. But we already know it can because we know how the clients work. That's it.
Signal doesn't claim cryptographic security against that metadata collection, but then there isn't currently any working system that can make such a claim, so why bust their balls over it?
No, it simply does not matter what modified version of their server they run. We know what the clients do, and we know what the servers can log. This is a fact as sure as day follows night, and that an apple will fall to the ground when dropped. It isn't even debatable. Your comment is incorrect, full stop.
Because you lose all your chat history without any way to export it.
I unfortunately have convinced some of my relatives to use Signal without me looking into it beforehand.
Now because of Signal’s moronic design I dread the day when something happens and I decide I want to save all our chats for posterity / memories, but wouldn’t be able to. There is simply no “export” button. There is some way to do it on Android but on iOS we are SOL.
I would prefer them to be clearer to say "we will redesign our systems so we no longer store IP addresses".
"Change our data structure" sounds like they might just host the servers outside the country and use a "Telegram Deutschland Inc" company that doesn't have access to any user data to run the service.
Just to remind that Signal is bu//sh*t messenger that ask you for your phone number. And keep and share all the information with authorities. Since it is a US based company, and it is what US based companies do.
If you want to make a protected application, don't tie it to any real world data. That is very easy.
I love Signal, but in some jurisdictions government request for data can be accompanied by gagging orders with serious penalties for breach. I'm not sure that list can be considered complete.
Does the design of Signal's applications or server infrastructure change because of the jurisdiction? Does the information they gather or store change?
> How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved. Just like Signal.
Yeah, give S̶i̶g̶n̶a̶l̶ Twilio your phone number instead. Problem solved.
> I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason! The app doesn’t solve any privacy problem, default chats are unencrypted, keeps personal info. App should be dead already or turned into a dating app because it’s clearly not seriously privacy fucused.
They don't care and Signal offers less that what Telegram has despite Telegram being less secure. Signal is bad at selling itself.
Maybe Signal needs to offer a better user experience, backup chats across all devices and offer more useful features; not less than their competitors rather than pushing a private cryptocurrency scam project useful for criminals, scammers and money launderers.
If the cryptocurrency weren't useful for criminals, scammers, and money launderers, then it wouldn't be useful for political dissidents either. The reason the undesirables use those technologies is because they work. Yes, bad people are going to use effective tools. Does that mean nobody should have them? Granted, I wish they would have just implemented Monero instead, especially since MobileCoin was (is?) unusable in the US. I agree they definitely could use some work on the backups side of the house as well.
Telegram has a great bot feature, that you can use to do a bunch of stuff (from smart house notifications, to "uptime robot" tracking of services up/down states, build results, temperature alarms, server monitoring, etc. One curl oneliner, and you get a message on your phone with whatever data needed (even with an image/graph or a file attachment).
Signal bugs on ios really are a pain point for people that I have convinced to switch. Even basic things, the ios app does not seem to use the correct camera API which makes using the internal camera lower quality which also makes video calls blurry.
You can install Telegram with f-droid, and it works well on a degoogled phone. Signal forbids alternate clients and is not on f-droid. It's thus just not an option.
It was mainly moxie who was hell-bent against that though. I'm hoping they'll reverse their stance since he left. And on federation as well.
Moxie was against all these things because it would make new features more difficult to implement. But personally I care much more for an open infrastructure. Most of their new features weren't even useful.
I'm currently using a matrix bridge and I didn't get banned (officially that's a third party client too) so that's a good sign.
I'm not messaging to you but to HN via E2E https connection.
You can't read that messages as they are transported, you can read them afterwards because HN makes them public not because my message wasn't send encrypted.
You seem to be mistaken about what the "ends" refer to in end to end encryption. If I whisper something in my friend's ear and she whispers it into your ear, that is not a secret message between you and me even if each "hop" was private.
E2E means no intermediaries see the plaintext, only the original sender and ultimate recipient see the plaintext. HN is not the recipient of your message, it's an intermediary.
With HTTPS alone, I can assure you that HN is, indeed, the recipient/end. If you post something like a PGP-encrypted message on HN, now you've got a situation where HN is no longer a recipient/end.
I think the better point to make is that we all collectively agree to refrain from using the term "end" (as in E2EE) in situations like the former, as it's misleading despite being accurate; please only use it for the latter.
Messenger like the telegram are something different than sites like HN.
I am aware that I send my messages to HN, they are not forwarded to you but you open the HN page to read my response.
HN is more like a message board with message hierarchy.
The communication is public, the transmission path is encrypted.
I am aware that I send my messages to HN, they are not forwarded to you but you open the HN page to read my response.
HN is more like a message board with message hierarchy.
The communication is public, the transmission path is encrypted.
It's more like whispering in your friends ear and she/he writes in down and pins it to a public board. My communication was private, but he/she is a chatterbox and I'm well aware of that.
Telegram is just the middleman between sender and receiver.
When you write on HN, the receiver is HN. That message is transported via E2E https encryption so it's secure.
But because HN displays all messages publicly you can read them after they were received.
This doesn't change the fact that the transport as such is E2E.
Ideally it would be the human at each end doing the encrypting and decrypting. But humans can't be bothered, so we let some code that we know very little about do it for us. Obviously having that code run on the client device (the one in your hand) is preferable to having it run elsewhere (like some web server), but either way the human (the true end) is delegating the job to an entity that isn't quite at the end, it's ever so slightly toward the center.
Things like PGP help to maximize the endianness, since the human has a better sense that the crypto software is legitimate, and can read the code before executing it, although there's still plenty of points of compromise between that code and the human (compiler, Intel ME, etc.) so unless you're doing crypto with a pencil and paper, you're always putting your trust somewhere that isn't precisely the "end."
That your message is transferred from your computer to the recipient, HN's servers, encrypted. At no point should anyone in the middle be able to read your message. After arrival, HN then publishes it on a public forum for everyone to see.
Kind of, but as they aren't lying about allowing private conversations not really. More saying https is end to end encrypted, but what one end does with that data isn't necessarily private.
>End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a system of communication where *only the communicating users can read the messages*. In principle, it prevents potential eavesdroppers – including telecom providers, Internet providers, malicious actors, *and even the provider of the communication service* – from being able to access the cryptographic keys needed to decrypt the conversation.[1]
If the server can read the content, it isn't end-to-end encryption.
The server is the communicating user in this instance, it is the intended recipient of the message. No potential eavesdropping can happen.
Even though I intend for you to read this message, I am sending it to the HN server to post publicly. My communication with HN is E2EE, my communication with you is not. This isn't meant to be useful information, and it certainly isn't advice. It's just an accurate nonstandard way of looking at things.
The people signing up for telegram in droves aren't looking for a replacement for signal or wickr or whatever "secure" messaging platform.
They're joining their friends' group chats and subscribing to their friends' channels. It's a replacement for twitter/facebook more than anything else.
> How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved. Just like Signal.
just so you know, Signal does permanently store sensitive user data in the cloud. They collect your name, photo, phone number, and a list of every person you contact using Signal. That data is stored in your profile on their servers.
Signal really used to not store anything, but that hasn't been the case for a long time now and if this is the first you're hearing about that, it should tell you all you need to know about how trustworthy Signal is.
> Telegram may disclose IP addresses and phone numbers
How do you propose this data is masked? You need a phone number to use Telegram (and Signal), and you need an internet connection, thus exposing your IP address.
I’m not sure why you think Signal does not have this information.
Signal has been subpoena'd in the past, and the only relevant information they were able to provide were account creation date and account's last connection date. Literally nothing else. It's actually a little funny to read:
That was in the past though. Now Signal is storing exactly that same information permanently in the cloud. Specifically they store your name, phone number, photo, and a record of every person you contact.
Metadata is enough to execute people (by certain country but anywhere in the world--it is immoral for Signal to position itself as secure if it provides such data).
Last I checked Signal was outright lying in their privacy policy which was never updated after they started collecting and storing user data in the cloud. You can't morally market yourself as secure while you lie to your users about what their risks are.
But did you actually read that? It specifically doesn’t mention the obvious data that they do have (phone and IP), but instead focus on other sensitive metadata:
> variety of information we don’t have, including the target’s name, address, correspondence, contacts, groups, calls.
Telegram and Signal has basically same problem. Thats centralised storage of data. So if you care about privacy, Signal is not alternative to Telegram.
Matrix is decentralised open-source solution. I don't understand why people don't use it more instead of Signal or Telegram. Or Session, but it is not very user friendly.
I'm not sure what you mean. Messages sync just fine between my iPhone and Linux machine.
> Horrible UX
It got way better in the past few years. When I did the initial push with my friends, we failed. Mainly because the basic functionality was buggy at times, such as messages that would simply not be received. But now it's running real smooth imo. Sure, there are a few things I would like to see. Polls is a big one. Maybe a smooth gif creation like WhatsApp -- but those are fairly minor. My experience is that it gets pretty much the job done and that's all I want from it. What exactly is so horrible about it in your experience?
> only thing: not Facebook & open source
Those two are pretty big positives, at least for me. That's pretty much exactly what I'm looking for.
> You can have all of that with a Matrix client
Well ... unfortunately that's a bit much for your average Joe, simple as.
No they don't sync just fine. A device cannot receive chat history from before it was added and signal regularly "forgets" linked devices, losing all messages on the device and starting from scratch after relinking.
>I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason!
Very easy to integrate custom notifications with bots. Signal is more like "maybe it works with this 3rd party tool". Also being able to use custom buttons with bots.
I invested a lot of time on his identity, not for anything just because I was bored and curious. I highly suspect it’s Adam Back and he currently sits in a tax haven, Malta.
Very unlikely. Hal Finney is the more likely candidate.
Adam is/was not a good programmer like Satoshi was.
Satoshi was in favor of alt coins in Adam is notoriously against them.
"Adam put enough effort into proclaiming that Bitcoin was based on the concept of HashCash that, if he was Satoshi, Satoshi would have given HashCash more credit." - Another HN User.
Satoshi had a positive attitude and Adam is notoriously unpleasant.
Hal is a great programmer, worked for Phil Zimmerman on PGP.
Hal is the first person Satoshi contacted, first person to mine outside Satoshi (op sec).
Hal was aware of all the prior works that failed, b-money, bit gold, hashcash, etc.
Linguistic analysis of the Bitcoin whitepaper and Satoshi's forum posts most closely match Hal's writings.
Hal lived in the same town for 10 years as did Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto.
Hal died of ALS shortly after Satoshi disappeared (he knew it was coming and that he couldn't continue).
I also think living somewhere he could have seen Dorian Nakamoto's name is a very, very strong pointer towards Finney.
It may seem like a dumb opsec mistake to pick a name from your town, but lets remember, at that point we're talking about launching a cool experiment about digital money worth $0, not about picking a pseudonym as the figurehead of a project worth a trillion dollars.
After reading an article about it, I do wonder about Len Sassaman, who apparently fits Satoshi's timezone and "accent" better. It could even have been both of them collaborating...
However, there are some valid counter arguments in this thread, such as Satoshi coming out of retirement in March 2014 to state that he was not Dorian Nakamoto, in the wake of a Newsweek article that falsely fingered the latter as Satoshi.
