

Russian Federation Anti-Gay Laws: An Analysis and Deconstruction [pdf] - jophde
http://gallery.mailchimp.com/d0e55f3197099944345708652/files/RussianLGBTLawWhitePaper.pdf

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ongoodie
"10 Things You Didn’t Know About Russia’s Anti-Gay Law & LGBT Rights" on page
7 is a good summary

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memracom
Finally someone who takes the time to actually INVESTIGATE a news story, who
goes to actual sources (not talking heads grabbed off the street) and analyzes
what is going on.

Unfortunately this guy is not a journalist, and this so-called "Putin's anti-
gay law" is only one of a number of news stories in which the media seem to be
driven by a hidden force to toe the party line, and therefore investigative
journalism has almost disappeared. Even the most elementary investigations are
no longer done by the state controlled media in the USA, namely all the major
TV networks and newspapers.

Even the most elementary falsehoods are repeated and repeated. As the analysis
points out this is not an anti-gay law, and it is not Putin's because it was
introduced and voted on by the Russian parliament with almost unanimous
support in the legislature and in society at large. Even some gay groups have
spoken in support of this child protection law.

Now I don't happen to agree with the law and the way it was created because I
think that child protections laws should focus more on mandating positive
things and less on fining people for negative things. But that is another
discussion which we are NOT HAVING because the media have hijacked this issue
to tar Putin as black and evil.

Funny thing is that all of this twisted Western media coverage is just
increasing the amount of support that Russians give to Putin, and is suckering
Russsia's neighbors into incredibly stupid moves like Georgia's attack on
Tskhinvali which led to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordering Russian
troops into Georgia. Yet the media still call this Putin's war. And look at
Ukraine? It doesn't take much digging to come up with a realization that
Ukraine is a seriously confused country, that the EU was strong-arming them
into a fat punitive association agreement and that Russia's bond purchase deal
was remarkably free of strings attached. There are dozen's of questions that
the media simply ignores about Ukraine. Somebody shot a couple of foreigners
dead with hunting rifles and this is being painted as police brutality. Yet a
study of the media reports paints a pictured of a fractured protest movement
that contains factions that are strongly racist and nationalist. One should at
least suspect that this is some kind of internal cleansing in a neo-nazi group
and do some investigation. And what about the videos of a guy who is reported
to have had his ear cut off while videos show that he has two ears on his
head. And he had no bruises, just a stream of dried blood that could have come
from a single cut or scrape. And the claim is that his hands were nailed to a
cross, but in the video he picks up and uses a mobile phone. No visible nail
holes in palm or wrist and his hands are only a bit scratched up like I myself
have done by pruning blackberry bushes without gloves.

When will some journalist at least ask how Ukraine can become a part of Europe
if the protest groups will not come together and democratically agree on a
single position?

And when will a journalist ask the EU why they demanded Ukraine to sign a
mammoth punitive association agreement instead of negotiating a series of
agreements, one subject at a time like they did for the early members? Why
couldn't Ukraine maintain its existing trade deals with Russia until it is
ready to shift its trade flow to the EU?

And the most interesting question of all. Given that the Eurasian Union is
modelling itself on the EU, and given that a core part of the EU is a large
number of product standards that a product needs to meet in order to be sold
in the EU, when will Russia itself be demanding its own trade partners to meet
a higher set of standards than exist today? I'll bet that such things are
waiting in the wings except that the Eurasian Union is looking for a
collective way of bring all of its industries up to a higher level of quality
rather than trying to lock out products the way that the EU tends to do.

