#matovic

[to-coyly-go]

watching a video of two politicians fighting in a car like fifth graders while cussing each other out was not on my bucket list

[callanthas]

Marko Matovic

[baketothefuture]

i wanna be a cowboy, baby *raygun sound effects fire in the background*

[mariacallous]

The two frontrunners in the Slovak presidential race easily won in the first round as the pro-Western diplomat Ivan Korcok defeated Peter Pellegrini, the parliamentary speaker and a close ally of the populist prime minister.

The two will now go through to a second round on April 6, in an election seen as offering a choice between Russia and the West. Slovakia’s populist and pro-Russian premier, Robert Fico, is looking to install his ally Pellegrini in the presidential palace, thereby removing a major check on his power. Korcok was the lone pro-Western voice in the nine-man field and the only candidate looking to continue the current president’s support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia.

According to the election results, on a turnout of almost 52 per cent, Korcok won 42.5 per cent of the vote, compared with Pellegrini’s 37.1 per cent. Their nearest rival was Stefan Harabin, a former Supreme Court judge and notorious disinformation peddler, at 12.8 per cent.

Harabin may be out of the race, but his supporters could prove crucial in the runoff. A poll by the Focus agency for TV Markiza had Korcok losing any run-off against Pellegrini 45-55 per cent. While Harabin has said he himself would not vote for Pellegrini, he said on Saturday evening: “My voters know what to do.”

Likewise, Krisztian Forro, who leads the Hungarian minority party Aliancia and came in fourth place with almost 3 per cent of the vote, is expected to endorse Pellegrini in the second round. “I can’t imagine that the majority of the Hungarian community could vote for Mr Korcok,” Forro told the TV station Markiza, according to the Slovak Spectator.

Korcok, meanwhile, can expect to attract the voters of ex-prime minister Igor Matovic. Korcok served as Matovic’s foreign minister from 2020 to 2022.

Although the post of president is largely ceremonial, it nevertheless holds certain powers important to Prime Minister Fico, such as a power of veto over legislative proposals, and nominating judges to the country’s top court as well as appointing and dismissing the court’s chair. The incumbent Zuzana Caputova, who decided not to run for a second term, has been a key player in thwarting Fico’s drive to pass illiberal laws since he returned to the prime minister’s office last year.

According to Grigorij Meseznikov, founder and director of the Bratislava-based Institute of Public Affairs (IVO), the election is a showdown between “liberalism and the rule of law”, defended by Korcok; “and the systemic degradation of democratic rules towards illiberalism and authoritarianism”, embodied by Fico and his coalition partner Pellegrini.

[mara-r-g]

How to not appropriate Judaism in these trying times

Since antisemitism is (surprise!) on the rise again, I suspect y’all may find yourselves at an event supporting Jews or against antisemitism. Most folks will be there to help and may worry about what they can do without accidentally being appropriative, so I thought I might chime in.

(My bona fides: I’m a Jewish atheist, moderately well-educated but not expert in Jewish law and tradition, and also a frequent attendee at rallies, marches, protests. Also, I volunteer with Jews United for Justice. My fellow Jews can feel free to add, correct, or debate what I say.)

The good news is that the vast majority of the time you won’t have to worry about appropriation as long as Jews organized the rally! They know what non-Jews can and can’t do and will let y’all know. Generally if Jews are in charge, you can do whatever everyone else is doing.

Important note: The “Jews for Jesus” or “Messianic Jews” are not Jews. Do not attend any event run by them or grant them any legitimacy.

If a rally is organized by non-Jews or if you’re unsure, here are some things to know:

Under no circumstances should a non-Jew wear a tallis (prayer shawl with fringes on the ends). Never. Nope. Don’t do it.

Non-Jews generally shouldn’t blow a shofar (the curly ram’s horn that makes an amazing racket). The only exception is if there are no Jews with the appropriate musical training and you happen to play a wind instrument. But do not offer to blow the shofar unless the event is run by Jews. It’s fairly common for some Christian denominations to appropriate the shofar and it’s super rude.

Most of the prayers will be in Hebrew, so you’re likely not in danger of doing something problematic. There are some songs that are just fine for non-Jews and you may get a paper with the lyrics transliterated. For example, “Hinei Matov” is fine. (It’s also lovely and should be sung more.)

If a song is sung in English, it should be fine for you to sing along.

If you’re at a candlelight vigil, you may hold a candle. It’s probably best to avoid doing anything that looks like a ritual candlelighting, just in case. You can be a spectator, but don’t light anything yourself.

You can eat any food that’s offered. We don’t have an equivalent to Mass or sacred crackers. In fact, if you don’t eat, that might be more offensive ;)

In return, I’d love to know what I should/shouldn’t do at (for example) a Black Lives Matter rally or a march in support of our Muslim neighbors. I do know that “rest in power” is for non-White activists only and that as a white person I shouldn’t put myself in front of the other marginalized people (unless it’s to stand between cops and protestors).

[y0ud0ntkn0wwh0]

(loosely)

Tov: Friend from childhood

Matov: Child of friend from childhood, or friend from late teens.

Ygmatov: Grandchild of friend from childhood, or friend from adult.

Suhr Ygmatov: Great-Grandchild of friend from childhood, or friend from middle age.

Alsuhr Ygmatov: Great-Great-Grandchild of friend from childhood, or friend from old age.

Ulmat Ygmatov: Friend of last days, someone an elf is friends with that will live to see the elf pass away. Not necessarily related to any other friend.

In Dnd, elves usually live for 800 years and mature at 100, so it's probably not too unusual for elves to know your great-great-great-grandparents.

Which also probably means there's a simpler word for that relationship than great-great-great-grandparents in elvish

[theklaapologist]

They don’t make music like that anymore man fuck that’s why the Balkans are in shambles

[callanthas]

Marko Matovic

[uraverageimp]

Real :( (it's matover 😔)

matpat is leaving im in mourning no one speak to me

[belgradeoldschool]

23.kolo aba lige: partizan - fmp 88:57 (16.3.2024)

aleksandar matovic (asistent prvog trenera)

bogdan karacic (asistent prvog trenera)

josep maria izkuierdo ibanez (asistent prvog trenera)

vladimir androic (asistent prvog trenera)

zeljko obradovic (prvi trener)

luka vulkic (tim menadzer)

[tomsquitieri]

We Do It For You; Now You Can Look And Act

WASHINGTON -- The first massacre victim I met was really two, an elderly couple still holding hands three days after an ambush along a dusty Bosnian road left them and a dozen others dead.

The only way to find out who they, and the others who were slain — to give them their voice, to tell their story — were was by getting close, looking at any documents they may have had, trying to piece together the bloodied event that left innocents baking and rotting in the hot August sun, or those who never made it out of the bus they thought would bring them to safety.

Moving their hands from pockets, rolling them over, whispering questions in their ears hoping for answers to help me tell their stories and, ideally, make them the last to suffer like this.

In the dust was Veselinka Masic, her birth certificate in her left front pocket; Mlade Todorovic, atop a school diploma and working papers; Veselinka Todorovic slain nearby, her bankbook showing 77,000 dinars - then around $385; Ninela-Nia Galvanic, 16; Dragica Pljevaljcic, 84; Joka Ikohic, 65; Dalibaor Matovic, 11; Dragon Spasogevic, 24.

And a baby, tiny, helpless, whose name I was never able to get.

It was called a small war, Bosnia. The elderly couple and those murdered with them would be faces of hundreds I would see, smell, touch, ponder, come far too close and internalize far too much.

Here is some of what I learned, no matter if it was in Bosnia, Haiti, Burundi, Rwanda, Iraq, Corsica, Afghanistan, and dozens of other places where innocents were murdered, bullied, raped, and tortured:

First, those who commit the crimes always say they did not do it. Second, the war crimes we journalists learn about - or discover on our own — are just a smattering of the horrors that have occurred.

The war in Ukraine has from the start been like those I had covered, one reason I considered steps to get to Ukraine, to get to besieged cities, to follow the flow of weapons from the United States to the hands of Ukrainian troops to their use. I knew, like others who crouched and ran with me in past wars, what was going to happen in Ukraine — and it did — and what is still to happen as that war worsens.

Destroyed buildings, attacks on schools and hospitals and shelters, hundreds fleeing, lawless troops. We knew that once the Russians arrived and then would retreat, greater horrors would be unleashed.

One of the biggest single horrors of the Bosnia war was the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre, where more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men were slain and dumped in several mass graves as the area was “ethnically cleansed” of all Muslims. A war term to soften the horror, “ethnically cleansed.”

We found some of those mass graves and relayed the information to authorities. We trekked across mine-strewn roads and wound up arrested, but we did not stop.

Be a “voice for the voiceless,” my first editor told me again and again. So I, and others, did.

Those victims of those wars needed us to give them a voice. Just as those who are deep in Ukraine reporting are doing for these latest victims.

The world always wants to look away. It does not want to hear about the grandmother who dropped to her knees to kiss my muddy boots as she begged me to take her grandchildren to safety. It does not want to hear about the trembling voices from the pre-teen girls who were raped. It does not want to hear the boasts of the bullyboys who chortled — when I asked how they knew who the “others” are — said “they smell differently” and it made it easy to pick them out to murder. It does not see the bodies bobbing in an eddy of a river, after floating downstream from a Rwanda massacre site or the Burundi bodies chopped by “pangas” — machetes — to finish them off after first being gunned down.

And it never even seems to know of the bandaged bodies of the wounded, the bloated stomachs of the starving infants, and the soft whimpers of those slowly dying.

The world does not want to be the ones going through the pockets of rotting corpses to find out who these people were, the precious lives they led, before they were ruthlessly ambushed, now strewn for animals and nature to dismember their remains on that dusty road.

We do it for you. As uncomfortable as it is, at least you can do is look and act.

[mariacallous]

Long subjected to harmful practices, including forced sterilisation, transgender people in Slovakia are still finding themselves a political target even in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on an LGBT bar in Bratislava.

The October 2022 terrorist attack against the LGBT community in Bratislava marked a new era for transgender people in the country, but not one many expect to be more positive.

Even though existing requirements to undergo transition were already challenging and included surgical sterilisation before a transgender person could change their documentation, the aftermath of the attack has contributed to even greater fears about the future inside the community, rights groups say.

On October 12, a 19-year-old man shot two people dead outside Teplaren, one of the few LGBT bars in Bratislava. A bisexual man and a non-binary person were killed, while a third person was injured but survived. After an investigation, the National Crime Agency concluded that the act constituted a terrorist attack – the first in the history of modern Slovakia.

The tragic event came at a time when the climate was already hostile for LGBT people. Diana Pruchnerovicova, an LGBT activist and ex-director of Rainbow Pride Bratislava, said in the aftermath of the attack that her community frequently bore the brunt of hostile statements by politicians from across the political divide in parliament. She referred to a 2013 comment from Slovak MP Stefan Kuffa in relation to LGBT rights, in which he said that, “it would be better to put a millstone around your neck and toss you in the water”.

“We are the target of many such statements, and we have no way to defend ourselves,” Pruchnerovicova said.

Zara Kromkova, a trans woman and community worker for Prizma, an LGBT support group in Kosice, pointed out that five legislative proposals aiming to ban legal or medical gender transition have come before the current parliament since it began in March 2020.

“All of them brought hate narratives against transgender people among the general public,” Kromkova said. “Politicians use transgender people to cover for their failures in other areas, such as fighting the pandemic, inflation or the energy crisis.”

Victim blaming

Igor Matovic, the former prime minister and finance minister, has been one of the most outspoken critics of transgenderism on his Facebook account. One of his comments in early January read: “Turning 12-year-old girls into men? That’s sick. Remade men competing in women’s sports? That’s sick,” he wrote.

Critics say Matovic’s attacks on the transgender community are part of his strategy to gain more support among conservative voters. “He is doing this as an attempt to save his political career,” wrote Matus Kostolny, editor-in-chief of the Slovak daily Dennik N.

Matovic is also notorious for publishing a controversial Facebook post only a few days after the terrorist attack on Teplaren. “I am hetero,” he wrote at the time. “I am a man and I feel like a man.”

In November, it came to light that the archbishop of Trnava, Jan Orosch, had written in an internal document sent to Slovakia’s priests that he did not consider the two queer victims of the terrorist attack to be innocent, and questioned whether the police had actually carried out a drug search of the bar.

Orosch later apologised, but his remarks exemplified a conflict between the Slovak Catholic Church and people with more liberal views that can be traced back to a 2013 pastoral letter read out in churches, in which the leadership compared the queer community to a “culture of death”.

Cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment

For years, Slovakia was one of those European countries that required mandatory sterilisation for transgender people involving the removal of internal reproductive organs – a practice that has been criticised by a wide range of international bodies, including the UN.

A 2013 UN report by the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment stated that there is “an abundance of accounts and testimonies of persons being denied medical treatment, subjected to verbal abuse and public humiliation, psychiatric evaluation, a variety of forced procedures such as sterilization, state-sponsored forcible anal examinations for the prosecution of suspected homosexual activities, and invasive virginity examinations conducted by health-care providers, hormone therapy and genital normalizing surgeries under the guise of so called ‘reparative therapies’, all of which can have serious impact on the persons’ wellbeing.”

The report further stated that, “the mandate has noted that members of sexual minorities are disproportionately subjected to torture and other forms of ill-treatment because they fail to conform to socially constructed gender expectations,” adding that 29 European states required forced sterilisations at the time.

Yet in April 2022, guidelines for gender recognition in Slovakia were changing. The health minister at the time, Vladimir Lengvarsky, signed a new gender reassignment protocol suspending surgical sterilisation, which activists openly welcomed. But in the months that followed, conservative politicians, such as Anna Zaborska from the Christian Union party as well as 20 conservative politicians from the coalition-leading Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OĽaNO) opposed the document.

Lengvarsky was subjected to sustained political attack, which led him to suspend the protocol shortly after it was signed.

In December 22, a group of medical professionals signed a collective statement opposing any form of transition therapy for transgender people. The signatories, which now number over 400, referred to a medical definition of “transsexualism”, that “the origin of the disease remains unknown and does not have a biological origin”, and that medical or social transition are not therefore a solution.

The petition has been widely criticised by human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, which accuses the signatories of “misleading [their audience] and basing their demands on wrong interpretations of data and studies of dubious sources”.

As of today, the practice of sterilisation remains in place in Slovakia. A transgender man who wished to stay in anonymity for fear of reprisals told BIRN that a psychiatrist is currently “forcing him to undergo a hysterectomy”, causing great psychological distress.

“There is still an ‘F’ for female on my legal documents, impossible to change without the sterilisation. It has been like that for seven years,” he explained, adding that the doctor still uses his female name and tells him their “anatomy cannot be lied to”.

“I was also told that I was a ‘deviant’ by a urologist and a gynaecologist who saw my body,” he told BIRN.

Kromkova from Prizma told BIRN that similar cases are frequent and that many doctors “use obsolete methods that often include checking the underwear of the trans person.” She added that humiliation, doubting trans people’s true feelings and conditioning the transition by forcing a divorce on the person in cases they were married before, are also frequent.

Andrej Kuruc, a psychologist working for InPoradna helpline for LGBT people in Slovakia, told BIRN that many transgender people don’t even dare to go out on the streets.

“They go through distressing attacks at the hands of politicians and medical authorities – such as the comments of Igor Matovic. They hear that they are sick or deviant, and should undergo conversion therapies, which further worsens their psychological health,” Kuruc said.

He added that in the current climate, many transgender people consider leaving the country or even entertain ideas of suicide.

[coolreader18]

what about the Miami Boys Choir version of Hinei MaTov

there are always jewish tune floating around my brain

[mestankurier]

Nun, Fico führt die Umfragen mit 20,3 % an, vorgezogene Parlamentswahlen finden Ende September statt... Am 30. September 2023 finden in der Slowakei vorgezogene Parlamentswahlen statt. Mit dem Ausscheiden von SaS aus der Regierung zerfiel die von OLaNO geführte Koalition im vergangenen September, und am 15. Dezember drückte das Parlament der Minderheitsregierung des Premierministers kein Vertrauen aus Eduard Heger. Im Mai dieses Jahres ernannte Präsidentin Zuzana Čaputová eine Übergangsregierung unter der Leitung von Ľudovít Ódor. Ipsos-Umfrage: Smer – SD 20,3 % Fortschrittliche Slowakei 16,9 % Hlas – SD 13,4 % Republik 8,8 % OLaNO 7,9 % SaS 6,7 % Wir sind eine Familie 5,6 % KDH 5,4 % SNS 5,2 % Es ist ziemlich offensichtlich, dass die Linke in der Slowakei führend ist, egal ob konservativ oder progressiv-liberal. Wäre die Sozialdemokratie noch eine Partei (Smer-SD & Hlas-SD), käme sie auf 33,7 %. Die linksliberale Progressive Slowakei kommt auf knapp 17 %. National - Konservative Republik fast 9 %. Die Partei des ehemaligen Ministerpräsidenten Matovic liegt bei 7,9 %. Sulik SaS auf 6,7 %. Kollár Wir sind mit 5,6 % eine Familie. KDH bei 5,4 % und Slowakische Nationalpartei bei 5,2 %. Wenn Fico die Wahl gewinnt, hat er die Möglichkeit, eine Regierung mit der Republik, Wir sind eine Familie, KDH, SNS, aber auch Hlas-SD zu bilden. Autor: Redaktion, 6.8.2023 Quelle: https://www.ipsos.com/sk-sk/0723-volebny-model-volebne-preferencie-slovakov www.mestankurier.info Unterstützen Sie originellen unabhängigen Journalismus! Kontonummer: 1511201888/5500 IBAN: CZ7755000000001511201888 BIC/SWIFT: RZBCCZPP Kontoinhaber: BulvarART GmbH © Copyright 2023

[atomiccreatordinosaur]

hero politic man IGOR MATOVIC