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Official Champions League 2018/2019 - New & Improved: Arsenal AND Chelsea Free (NWT)

Lol Warsaw Pact was Brezhnev Doctrine at its awful Soviet corrupted logical conclusion. It was a way to stop the West from putting bases in a bunch of countries the Soviets didn’t want them in, and it, like most of Soviet Marxist-Leninism, was more an explicit protection of Soviet elites. The same Russian oligarchs from the Warsaw Pact are now billionaire football owners in Europe, you absolute sailordeac turd. That there is not currently predatory capital in domestic football leagues in failed post-Soviet bloc states is less a repudiation of Marxism and more a testament to the fact that some countries at least tried to give a fuck you to capital, a couple decades where labor didn’t lick boots, and now it’s not a place friendly to the new VC imperialism. Go back to your racist Facebook memes about Ilhan Omar already.
 
Lol Warsaw Pact was Brezhnev Doctrine at its awful Soviet corrupted logical conclusion. It was a way to stop the West from putting bases in a bunch of countries the Soviets didn’t want them in, and it, like most of Soviet Marxist-Leninism, was more an explicit protection of Soviet elites. The same Russian oligarchs from the Warsaw Pact are now billionaire football owners in Europe, you absolute sailordeac turd. That there is not currently predatory capital in domestic football leagues in failed post-Soviet bloc states is less a repudiation of Marxism and more a testament to the fact that some countries at least tried to give a fuck you to capital, a couple decades where labor didn’t lick boots, and now it’s not a place friendly to the new VC imperialism. Go back to your racist Facebook memes about Ilhan Omar already.
:popcorn:
 
Looking increasingly likely that the final will not actually be played at the Ataturk in Instanbul since Turkey is now on the "red list" for Covid risks.

The British government would have to issue waivers to both Chelsea and Man City for them to travel there, so the venue might just be changed to elsewhere in Europe, to Wembley, or to some other stadium in the UK.
 
Looking increasingly likely that the final will not actually be played at the Ataturk in Instanbul since Turkey is now on the "red list" for Covid risks.

The British government would have to issue waivers to both Chelsea and Man City for them to travel there, so the venue might just be changed to elsewhere in Europe, to Wembley, or to some other stadium in the UK.

They should hold it here, in the National Stadium of the Faroe Islands

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Man, what a LOSER that one person was that died in the Faroe Islands from Covid. Nobody else died from it, FINNLEIF, good job, good effort...
 
Looking increasingly likely that the final will not actually be played at the Ataturk in Instanbul since Turkey is now on the "red list" for Covid risks.

The British government would have to issue waivers to both Chelsea and Man City for them to travel there, so the venue might just be changed to elsewhere in Europe, to Wembley, or to some other stadium in the UK.

It's going to be played in Porto
 
Is Portugal really good at public health or does their government just give zero fucks about COVID because they've hosted everything for the last year
 
Just read something on twitter about fans having to charter in and out on the same day in order to attend the final
 
Lol Warsaw Pact was Brezhnev Doctrine at its awful Soviet corrupted logical conclusion. It was a way to stop the West from putting bases in a bunch of countries the Soviets didn’t want them in, and it, like most of Soviet Marxist-Leninism, was more an explicit protection of Soviet elites. The same Russian oligarchs from the Warsaw Pact are now billionaire football owners in Europe, you absolute sailordeac turd. That there is not currently predatory capital in domestic football leagues in failed post-Soviet bloc states is less a repudiation of Marxism and more a testament to the fact that some countries at least tried to give a fuck you to capital, a couple decades where labor didn’t lick boots, and now it’s not a place friendly to the new VC imperialism. Go back to your racist Facebook memes about Ilhan Omar already.

Quite the take there. You got the word "corrupt" right. Because that is exactly where Marxism leads. It leads to the protection of the "elites". And those elites were incredibly ruthless and often rose from absolutely nothing. Stalin was born dirt poor and rode to elite status on the graft and corruption that are hallmarks of all nations that have professed to be Marxist. And that isn't a coincidence.

Marx was openly hostile to all sorts of things - private property, individual liberty, religion. To be a Marxist is to engage in ridiculous circular thought that in some ways is nihilistic in its approach and utterly lacking in practical guidance. In his never ending circular logic Marx even suggested we should abolish "morality" (that's pretty much the ultimate in crazy given that if you remove morality in your pursuit of communism you will by definition replace it with whatever version of right vs. wrong you might choose). He gave quite little guidance about how he would actually form a government. Suffice to say if you aren't in favor of private property, believe individual liberty takes away from the greater common good and want to assure equal distribution of goods to everyone; that inevitably leaves you perhaps not wanting to admit what it would mean to "govern" in order to make that vision come online. It pretty much goes without saying whatever government someone who bought into your worldview formed would feel justified in centralizing everything to assure their Marxist vision happens. And that, not surprisingly, is what the nations which have proclaimed themselves Marxist have all fallen into as a pattern. Even Lenin himself, who was open to forming a multi-party political system, abandoned that thought completely a year or two after the Russian revolution. Why? Because you can't really be a Marxist if you are open to all sorts of basic ideals that entail letting people have freedoms or contrary ideas to whatever ideas you, the guy who has asserted you're the "Marxist", might have. So yeah, even as Marx himself said little about "how" to govern and sort of said some semi-dreamy things about a borderless world, his philosophy fails because it inevitably leads to the centralization of all power in a state. And when you end up with state control of all that society can make and produce you inevitably end up with a corrupt, inefficient mess.

To be clear, the lead cause of that end point isn't in some dreamy vision of whatever Utopia he felt he was promoting. The lead cause is the fact humans are prone to act in their self interest. So when you create a centralized system the people at the top inevitably use the system to promote their own ends with no one to offer any check or balance. No system is perfect, including capitalism. But because capitalism isn't per se reliant on the erosion (or even destruction) of personal choice and doesn't per se rapidly lead to the consolidation of power in a centralized state, the seeds it holds for its own destruction take a whole lot longer to evolve than the hot mess of theory Marx dreamed up. Which brings me to the rest of your take.

"Post-Soviet-bloc states at least tried to give a fuck you to capital". That is just false. For starters it presupposes all Post-Soviet bloc states" handled the Post-Soviet era in the same manner relative to internal economic policies and foreign investment. And I know from personal experience that is not true. I spent a significant amount of time in the Soviet Union and other bloc nations leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. And I worked with people who engaged in investing in the region on occasion into the mid-1990's. The best example of how things differed by nation is how investment into Russia on a relative level has never taken off at anything approaching the relative per capita levels experienced by nations like the Czech Republic, Poland or the former Baltic states.

Every one of these self proclaimed "Marxist" countries was placed into complete and utter chaos by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Taka a visit to Berlin today and you can still see how it lags in terms of general economic activity relative to cities from West Germany. And that's a city in a nation that went through reunification.
All of these nations were governed by corrupt regimes. When the governments fell all the institutions had to be rebuilt from scratch. Entire systems of governance had to be recreated and formed. There was no capital. In Russia and elsewhere these collapses led to massive displacements and enormous economic hardship. That was not the result of capitalism. It was the result of complete stagnation of their "Marxist" system that led to the downfall of their governments. These nations were all basically starting from scratch. Some rebuilt more effectively and quickly than others. By the time you got towards the late 1990's places like Poland, Estonia, Czecko, etc. were getting multiples a dozen fold or more the level of foreign investment into their economies vs. Russia on a per capita basis. Private capital does not readily flow absent stability. Those nations that were able to bring greater political and institutional stability more quickly were able to more quickly attract meaningful foreign investment Those that could not or did not continued to suffer. Fast forward 30 years and the nations that reformed and attracted investment have joined NATO - that includes three former Soviet Republics. That is the exact opposite of a "fuck you to capital".

You know who did end up pretty much doing a fuck you to capital - Russia. And that was not the initial intent. They were simply destined to struggle to reform more than any other nation because they were the seat of all the power under the old system and were therefore the most engrained in corruption and infighting. They did not stabilize their institutions quickly, they engaged in a massive internal privatization to try and stabilize their budget. That program essentially moved assets from the government via "loans" to, shocker, people who used to run the Communist government. It accelerated a business climate rampant with organized crime and it ultimately led rapid and large capital outflows from the country. That's some "fuck you to capital" all right. The people who used to run the show got sweet loan deals to take state companies private and then shipped all their money not used to repay the government for the loan to offshore bank accounts. Like seriously, what the fuck are you even attempting to argue? That this is somehow a preferred societal path. Then comes along Putin who a few years into his power starts nationalizing all the businesses associated with natural resources and moving back towards a centralized economy. Worked pretty well until, as with Venezuela, the price of oil plummeted. So sure, today Russia finds itself, what, with a stagnating economy that is less diversified than it should be, a shitty currency and only a few billion dollars a year in direct investment from overseas. Hint, that is not a recipe for long term success although they may do OK in the nearer term given the prices of a host of commodities at the moment.

And then we're back to football. You know why all those leagues from these self-proclaimed Marxist nations sucked ass. They sucked ass because they came from countries that had driven themselves into the ground economically. I can't even begin to drive home what it was like to travel in that part of the world in the late 80's and early 90's. No one liked their lot in life. They had crappy jobs, received crappy goods and services and, because it was a well educated population, were getting enough information from the outside world even in the pre-internet days to know they were being sold a bill of goods. Pretty much everyone hated the government and if they were not Russian they not only hated the government but they hated Russians as well. Did they hate "Marxism"? They certainly were disillusioned.

This almost romanticized notion that they all gave a big FU to VC imperialism is odd. Russia ranks first on the global corruption index of all European nations (that is not a good thing). More than one of its big clubs is owned, effectively, by the Russian government via Gazprom, VTB, etc. (because the Russian government owns the majority of these companies). There is literally nothing more "imperial" than a government renowned for corruption running a for profit business in its own country.
 
Just to say I don't want to ignore the very long and reasoned post here, DeacMan, but I didn't think this was the right thread to discuss my thoughts on it, except to say you could plug in capitalism or more appropriately late capitalist neoliberalism to a lot of what you're describing in your early paragraphs here and it'd be pretty similar! And further, I won't challenge your lived experience of post-fall Soviet life as I was born right at the end of the Cold War myself. My understanding of all this is through primary and secondary texts, not being there. I found "Secondhand Time" a really good and evenhanded look at firsthand accounts of life after the wall came down and especially after the Soviet Union dissolved, for example.

I think generally we agree on some of the problems of communism or socialism as it was implemented in the 20th century across Europe, fruit of the poisoned tree, and such things. I was just kinda trying to poke fun at the idea behind a Marxist nation because I think no nation is or has ever been solely run like the political theories of a single man. And I think where we broadly disagree on the motivations of post-Warsaw Pact European states and their respective feelings towards vulture capital, I'm comfortable agreeing to disagree and say I appreciate the post.
 
Mateo Kovacic has won 4 Champions League winners medals over the past 6 seasons.

He has played a total of 10 minutes in the finals.
 
Sooooo I think pot 2 will be stronger than pot 1 next season after summer transfers

No?
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