
In a remote corner of Romania, neighbours kill each other over strips of land - yitchelle
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/19/the-murderers-next-door-romania
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sebastianz
> In the poor and remote province of Maramureş in the northern Carpathians,
> cut off by bad mountain roads from the rest of Romania to the south...

Sadly, even from the first sentence, this article is full of sensationalist,
incorrect and exaggerated information.

I lived 20 years of my life in Maramureș - albeit in the city - and it is
neither a poor region, nor remote, nor cut off by mountain roads from anything
[1]. It's very hard to take anything in this article seriously.

It was a very sad and disappointing thing to read this morning about a
beautiful region with friendly people and old traditions...

[1] [http://tinyurl.com/q98g9g5](http://tinyurl.com/q98g9g5) (google maps)

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fijal
I like how the article start with making fun of ancient body measures, but
then uses feet to compare.

~~~
lostlogin
I'm currently working on a (very very basic) knitting app. Proof reading text
is awful. Patterns use skeins, yards, metres, mm, cm, inches, gauge (arbitrary
units) etc all interchangeably. It is kind of impressive how the units
coexists. It pains me.

~~~
mc32
Orwell would love the more rustic and humanistic imperial measures over the
sterile metric system.

[http://orwelltoday.com/metricorwell.shtml](http://orwelltoday.com/metricorwell.shtml)

~~~
cubix
He might have a point with other units, but when it comes to temperature,
Celsius strikes me as more humanistic and intuitive. Zero as the freezing
point of water, and 100 as the boiling point is easy for any human to relate
to since we interact with water every day.

~~~
nitrogen
Fahrenheit is fairly humanistic as well: 0 is very roughly as cold as you'll
ever see, and 100 is about as hot as you'll ever see.

~~~
lostlogin
I'm not generally interested in the temperature when it is 'normal'. However
when it is unusually hot or cold I might check.

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jacquesm
The biggest thief of land in that region (and in most of the rest of Romania)
is the Romanian state itself. Land that was confiscated under communist rule
is only given back or compensated for after many years of lawsuits against the
state (in some cases decades), which drags her heels in an attempt to outlive
the bringers of these suits.

The state has enormous resources compared to the people involved and so they
tend to either lose or fail to collect if and when there finally is a
judgment. During my time there I learned of two families in this situation and
it is not as if I know a whole lot of Romanians.

Quite possibly the land-grab under the communists is yet another (direct or
indirect) factor in driving land-scarcity for extremely poor, small-time
farmers like this. Unfortunately they are so poor that if that's the case they
are not going to be able to get the state to give back any land. That's mostly
reserved to those that are wealthy enough to see that whole process through
_and_ then wealthy enough to force the state to pay up or give back their
possession.

Quite a few people simply die waiting for a resolution of these cases.

~~~
rdtsc
Well but palinca that was mentioned in passing doesn't help either... with
killing, anger and then regret later next day.

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Thimothy
In the village I grew up, in a forested and mountainous area of western
Europe, there were a pair of farmers who lived quite apart from the main part
of the town. They were house-to-house neighbors, and were the only humans who
lived in several km around. One of them had a vegetable garden as secondary
means of sustenance, while the other had a herd of goats.

A single month would not go by without the people of the town talking about
their last argument, sometimes involving gunshots, maybe a dead goat and, in
the right time of the year, viciously defended mushrooms. I regret not knowing
what finally happened to them, but the point is that little towns will be
little towns, everywhere. When the only human contact you have is the neighbor
you don't get along with, and you are not precisely in the top percentile of
cultural and social graces, the results are consistent in every small town I
have ever seen.

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moonchrome
>He had been sitting on the river bank across from his house, just at the spot
where a favourite cousin of his had died years before, accidentally
electrocuted when illegally electrofishing in the river.

That sounds like something out of Borat.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
All the ghetto stuff the first world scoffs at is pretty commonplace.

here's a summary of a conversation about fishing my friend had with a group of
school children when he went to India

friend: so how do you guys catch fish?

kid: (indicating order of preference) explosives, electricity, bleaching
powder and nets

friend: beaching powder?!?!

kid: yup

At face value it sounds like bleaching powder would contaminate the meat but
my friend and I figure that the bleaching powder chemically burns their gills
causing them to suffocate.

He said he saw some fish markets disturbingly far from water considering the
lack of refrigeration. The electrical grid was beyond horrible and there was
tons of smog in the city.

He saw two guys welding hand rails in a stairwell by jumper cabling the welder
to the railing at the bottom and attaching the leads to the railing at the
top. To change between which rail they were working on they'd yell down and
have someone flip the cables. Technically safe but not OSHA approved.

Now that I think about it, I really gotta try fishing with my stick welder...

~~~
moonchrome
I know but it's still (morbidly) hilarious.

Also are you sure bleaching powder is used for burning gills ? When I was a
kid my grandfather took me fishing for eels after tides were high enough that
they could get from sea to small ponds on the shore. We would drop this plant
that secreted white liquid and supposedly blind them then they would swim a
shore and you could just pick them up in the morning - I'm thinking maybe
bleaching powder is for the same purpose ?

IIRC it was illegal because it killed tadpoles and tiny fish that would eat
mosquitoes eggs (the entire village used to do it regularly before).

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andreiv
I really don't like the Hollywood-style of describing the work on the fields:
"But then, in another light, you see the tools of violence being carried into
the fields: the steel crowbar, the ranga, for making holes in the earth, the
axe with its bright and burnished edge, the cleft oak posts, the hoes, the
hedge slashers – all the instruments with which management can be imposed.
Cutting, controlling, slicing, hacking, killing: these are aspects of everyday
existence". This is hardly a "Texas chainsaw massacre" pre/sequel.

Most of the people lack proper education. Everything "higher" as 4 school
years is a "gift". The majority were children when WW2 broke out and saw their
parents being striped of possession, such as lands. After the war came the
communists, which did the same thing, again. These are people which have a
deeply rooted passion for their ancestral land. The have, unfortunately, never
learned to solve their problems in a civilized manner, because they haven't
seen that in practice. They've mostly seen abuse and react the same way...

~~~
buro9
> never learned to solve their problems in a civilized manner, because they
> haven't seen that in practice

Oh they have. They've observed that the people with the most power (legal or
otherwise), force, or money get what they want.

They've observed that the only way to not lose their land is to stand on it
with weapons and physically confront those who would take it away from them.

~~~
andreiv
It really depends on how far the physical confrontation goes. You can't farm
the land from prison. That's the "best case", when they go to prison. If
they're wounded, for example, and can't move, they become a burden for the
remaining family members.

I do agree that they are filled with hopelessness with regards to the legal
process of solving problems. This falls into the same abuse category of
loosing their lands, with the exception that it's not by force, but by law...

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gloves
_All over the world, neighbours kill each other over strips of land_

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cafard
In the Denver suburbs about 35 years ago, two neighbors had a dispute about a
small strip of property. These were not subsistence farmers. They were not
unschooled; one had a Ph.D. in the sciences. It got to the point that the
Ph.D. was mowing his lawn with a firearm strapped to his hip. The local police
were called repeatedly. I don't think that I ever heard how it was resolved,
but it must have been.

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andrewbalitsky
Wouldn't be the first time a different land made a different people in modern
times. The Pirahã in the Amazon killed a sick infant with alcohol. Why? I'd
let Daniel Everett explain... [http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-
Snakes/dp/0307386...](http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-
Snakes/dp/0307386120)

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mci
The real cause is geometry. They have narrow strips of land because they were
divided this way when inherited.

In Poland, the government has been joining farmland since 1919: they give you
the same area you had scattered into strips or even a bit larger one, but in
one squarish piece. Win-win.

~~~
elros
I wonder how this plays out when the consolidated land you get sits on less
farmable earth than the fragmented one you had.

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luke1972
So in the West we have kids shooting each other over the colours of the
clothes they wear but in Romania you have adults killing each other over land
rights.

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supergirl
so hn is just reddit now?

