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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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They are not assholes. They are in fact very smart and steadily moving towards their goal.
They are reducing applicability and efficiency of the means they themselves don't need. Their crimes are done the old-fashioned way, plus when you are a high-ranking official or a businessman or a politician, who'll even try to investigate you if you've done nothing clearly wrong?
By the way, I'm not saying it's a sign of some USSR 2.0 . Rather mafia becoming stronger. Well, look which people hold high posts in EU institutions. They are almost openly mafia tools.
You just described people looking after the interests of number 1 at the expense of others. We call them “assholes”. That’s the appropriate term for what you describe.
(btw, this is orthogonal to intelligence… there are smart assholes and there are stupid assholes).
O-okay, but then it's too weak a word.
Citation for what?
You're going pretty far calling all(?) influential EU politicians "mafia tools" whose deeds will not be investigated. I see that there's a certain lobbyist influence and surely a bunch of other corruption, affecting a number of politicians. But there's a lot less actual mafia influence and scandals are in fact uncovered regularly.
UvdL is an obvious mafia tool, Borrell too, Ylva Johansson is connected to a few things with clearly negative effect, that chat control of theirs included, and Kaja Kallas is a not too remote relative of Anton Vaino, who is the head of Russia's AP, and I've read they are not on bad terms.
Which would make sense with more mafia influence, not less.
I am still unclear on your definition of mafia. Do you count every lobbyist as "mafia"?
I'll try to illustrate what I mean and I'll also use examples of how the term "mafia" is usually used:
Prosecution usually means the judicial system is working. E.g., OLAF prosecuting the head of Frontex is imo a good sign, not a bad one. (Also, no, that guy isn't "mafia", he's just corrupt.)
No, I count Ilham Aliyev and Anton Vaino and Putin and Lukashenko as mafia. For European politicians connected to them - in the general meaning of the word, as in abusing their posts to help criminals kill people. For example, in Artsakh.
Italian mafia I actually consider beneficial against such people.