Local Presidential Debate. Leading Candidate Is A No Show.

[Gringoboy]

In retrospect, one of the many things I like about Argentina are the amount of 'grey areas', most of which can be manipulated in one's favour.
Oh and Amigo, you leave the impression that you believe Bradly is defending Kirchnerism and the FPV. I don't see it like that and believe he's simply viewing through a prism to get all the angles.

 

[AmigoArtistico]

In retrospect, one of the many things I like about Argentina are the amount of 'grey areas', most of which can be manipulated in one's favour.
Oh and Amigo, you leave the impression that you believe Bradly is defending Kirchnerism and the FPV. I don't see it like that and believe he's simply viewing through a prism to get all the angles.

On your first point, that's one of the things I also like about Argentina.

And as I've stated before, I generally (actually mostly) like Bradly's posts. They're usually intelligent, thoughtful and logical. I just happen to vehemently disagree on this particular point, for the reasons I've given, plus more that I could add if I wanted to elaborate further.

Bradly's a little (and sometimes more than a little) to the left of me, but I'm definitely left of center. Just because I despise the corrupt, illegally rich, outrageously arrogant political aristocracy running this country (and what they've done to it) doesn't change that fact.

 

[sesamosinsal]

AmigoArtístico - I want to keep this respectful. Sometimes I trip up, and maybe something has been misinterpreted. However, it isn't my intention to insult you or say that your perspective on this issue is any less meaningful than mine or anyone else's.

I agree with you that the branches of government are politicized and corrupt. This is inevitable, in my opinion, and will continue to happen so long as you have humans making decisions for other humans. (Bring on neural networks and the machines) Whether we like it or not, the judicial branch evaluates compliance of the laws, and it is the judiciary that determines whether something is lawful -- not you or me, although it might be fun if we did.

My personal opinion is that the judiciary's interpretation of the law is good, but my personal opinion on the cadenas isn't good. As I said, if I were president, I wouldn't be doing them.

Politically speaking, I prefer to deal with issues rather than political parties or categories, and I certainly wouldn't generalize my vast perspective on politics by throwing a label on it.

That said, if I were eligible to vote this month, I'd be voting en blanco, without a doubt.

 

[Matiasba]

Ok, now I have to say one last thing. Your argument presumes that Argentina is a reasonable, rational country, with a true division of powers, and you and I and everyone else here know that that is simply not true. If I weren't so lazy and had the time, I could site dozens of examples which unequivocally prove this, and I'm sure that you're aware of many of them. Many judges here are bought, or do horse trading with the Executive branch all the time.

Just to site two recent examples (both affecting CFK), look at the recent highly-sensitive rulings of judge Carnicoba Corral, who very suddenly began to make ruling after ruling in the Executive's favor in the Iran case, while, coincidentally, his son was made a judge. Or look at judge Eduardo Freiler, who voted to remove judge Bonadio in the Hotesur scandal and days later bought a mansion across the street from Cristina worth US1.4 million dollars.

Within a day or two, I'm sure I could quote another 20 or 30 of such cases, with sufficient detail to make the point that these are not isolated incidents.

To use a "division of powers" argument in Argentina is disingenuous, and I think you're more than intelligent enough to know that, based on the many posts of yours that I've read.

I'm sure that you've also looked at the content of these Cadenas Nacional, and as a reasonable person, you know that they don't rise to any reasonable standard of "institutionally important," even giving the most generous benefits of doubts. Not even mentioning that she included Scioli, Maximo, and Alicia Kirchner in her recent Cadenas, even during the veda, another clear violation of the law.

Even in countries at war, the president doesn't go before the people and make hours-long speeches 44 times in a year.

There are about 5 people that visit these forums that would buy your argument, and that's because they'd already bought it 8 years ago.

But you might be able to use it to get a guest spot on 6,7,8.

[That's it. Truly no more from me on this.]

I love these "Argentina is not a serious country" arguments, always coming from the right or extreme right.
Which is a "serious country" where you can not buy judges? The US ?? :lol:

 

[ElQueso]

Counting Matias, you seem to confuse the difference between a country where bribes and cronyism and such things are accepted by most people as "the way things are", and many places in the world where people understand what the the human condition is and try to fight it. There is no country in the world, which is made up of human beings, where corruption doesn't exist. It doesn't mean that people should accept it. Of course, that also depends on one's definition of corruption - whether it is tied to party lines, is a cultural acceptance, or whether one defines corruption as trying to get around those pesky impediments that keep people who are in power from doing what they please, etc. Your apparent not understanding of the difference is an example of one of the reasons people don't consider Argentina a "serious country". There are other reasons as well that I won't go into here, now. But that is just one of the things I, personally, like about Argentina until someone like Cristina tries to make it serious, and in her own opinion of what "serious" should be.

Bradly, I find myself agreeing with you about the legality of the cadena nacional. "Institutional Importance" is indeed quite a wide scope. As others have mentioned, Argentina does indeed have many areas which are gray, and it is another reason that I like living here. It is unfortunate that there are not at least better separations of powers here - indeed if the separations are well enough defined and more difficult to break through, we would perhaps have less impact by stupidity (perhaps! though ignoring those separations in the US is more difficult than here and yet we still have abundant stupidity, enough for both "sides" to at least agree with that statement, though from opposing points of view) or by outright tyranny (which Cristina has also managed to move towards here, though not completely, during her tenure) and I think more people would be happier if snap decisions by the executive branch were not so easily implemented, but that's not where we live.

As yet another said or alluded to, Cristina is just shooting herself in the foot with this stuff anyway, at this point. She has plenty of good press from a multitude of other sources that the "opposition" press being against her surely isn't a good enough reason to use something that seems to have been instituted for urgent or emergency communication for something as mundane and without real merit (towards there being urgency) as announcing yet another opening of a factory. But mostly the people who actually listen to what she has to say are people who already agree with her and she is irritating the rest as they are listening to their music and get interrupted by the queen trying on new clothes (as in the Emperor's).

But illegal? Doesn't seem to be, given the context of this country's laws and the people who are interpreting them. It just sucks.

 

[EJLarson]

I love these "Argentina is not a serious country" arguments, always coming from the right or extreme right.
Which is a "serious country" where you can not buy judges? The US ?? :lol:

ElQueso's eloquent answer is sufficient, but I'd like to suggest a simple example:

Citizen A lives in a country where it only rains ten days a year. In Citizen B's home rain falls two hundred days a year.

So they both live in rainy climates, right? Can't hardly tell the difference, no?

I live mostly in the US and make no apologies for its failings and weaknesses. I spend a lot of time in Argentina and have studied, informally, its politics and history. So I state as a fact that, like the difference in rain, the level of judicial corruption (and official corruption in general) in Argentina is many magnitudes greater than in the US. So the fact that we can read from time to time about some backwoods judge caught with his hand in a cash register is not an indictment of the nation's courts, and in no way validates any spurious attempts at moral equivalence.