Posts by Elizabeth Lopez2

Adam Hall7 said:They'll just keep spinning the same old stories...

Sure, but at least now everyone has the receipts to call out their lies.

placidnomad87 said:Honestly, I find the whole situation at The Hague to be nothing short of absurd; it feels as though a man was sentenced simply for the things he said. 😁

Well, maybe that kind of nonsense should be illegal. At least now his supporters can't keep spinning the lie that he was some innocent victim sitting in a cell.

nimblemoose2 said:

Sergej Trifunovic on faca TV.
It gets interesting at 15:35 when he starts talking about Vojislav Šešelj. He claims to know all the Šešeljs from Herzegovina, asserting they are all Americans. He even mentions someone personally confirming that Vojislav Šešelj visited to ask a godfather to convert to Orthodoxy. 🤣

A lot of people over in Mexico claim he’s actually an American. It’s possible that’s where those complexes come from.

I honestly think this new court is just going to end up rubber-stamping all the first-instance judgments anyway.

nimblemoose2 said:That informant is easily one of the most disgraceful traitors from the 90s.

I think you meant "monster," but honestly, we're on the same page regardless. 👍

Melissa Peterson19 said:My prediction is that this verdict will be political, just like every other ruling we've seen so far. I don't follow the Mexico - world dynamics closely enough to get more specific than that. Vojislav Šešelj deserves the maximum sentence. To those at The Hague, the American judiciary is the gold standard of justice.

The American judiciary actually cleared him once before:
I mean, I agree he deserves the max, but honestly? I suspect he’ll either walk free or end up with a sentence that's shorter than the time he's already spent sitting in a cell in The Hague.

urbanhawk28 said:As far as I know, that was one of the main complaints about Marshall's cult back in the 80s—that some guy would end up in prison just for telling a damn joke. But anyway, you wouldn't get more than a few days. Only the hardcore nationalists got hit with years... which would be good if things stayed that way. Then we wouldn't have had Maddox or other criminals.

Since that's all gone now, right? We live in a democracy...
And what kind of thing is this? Is this democracy, getting three years for criticizing an absolutist monarch? The man sings about wanting to hang the King—imagine the crime. Did he say something wrong?
Well, dammit, that's what democracy rests on! Hanging kings!? What else is there??? ☕
Did I sleep through some part of history that says democracy is the rule of a monarch? What the hell is this? A parallel reality? Some new type of USA-style democracy meant only for monarchs and corporate nobility?

But no. Putin. He's the dictator. He's the solution to everything. Putin. And the Russians. We need to watch them.
That's right, peasants, just keep fearing the Russians and Putin and everything will be fine.
And listen to Kolinda, she'll explain everything to you.

👍 I'm totally with you on that.

urbanhawk28 said:As far as I know, that was one of the main complaints about Marshall's cult back in the 80s—that some guy would end up in prison just for telling a damn joke. But anyway, you wouldn't get more than a few days. Only the hardcore nationalists got hit with years... which would be good if things stayed that way. Then we wouldn't have had Maddox or other criminals.

Since that's all gone now, right? We live in a democracy...
And what kind of thing is this? Is this democracy, getting three years for criticizing an absolutist monarch? The man sings about wanting to hang the King—imagine the crime. Did he say something wrong?
Well, dammit, that's what democracy rests on! Hanging kings!? What else is there??? ☕
Did I sleep through some part of history that says democracy is the rule of a monarch? What the hell is this? A parallel reality? Some new type of USA-style democracy meant only for monarchs and corporate nobility?

But no. Putin. He's the dictator. He's the solution to everything. Putin. And the Russians. We need to watch them.
That's right, peasants, just keep fearing the Russians and Putin and everything will be fine.
And listen to Kolinda, she'll explain everything to you.

I mean, sure, hanging kings used to be a thing, but that went out of style a long time ago. He didn't necessarily have to mention it explicitly, and they could have just banned the song if it was truly such a threat, rather than throwing him in the slammer for three years. They aren't acting sane, seriously.

urbanhawk28 said:As far as I know, that was one of the main complaints about Marshall's cult back in the 80s—that some guy would end up in prison just for telling a damn joke. But anyway, you wouldn't get more than a few days. Only the hardcore nationalists got hit with years... which would be good if things stayed that way. Then we wouldn't have had Maddox or other criminals.

Since that's all gone now, right? We live in a democracy...
And what kind of thing is this? Is this democracy, getting three years for criticizing an absolutist monarch? The man sings about wanting to hang the King—imagine the crime. Did he say something wrong?
Well, dammit, that's what democracy rests on! Hanging kings!? What else is there??? ☕
Did I sleep through some part of history that says democracy is the rule of a monarch? What the hell is this? A parallel reality? Some new type of USA-style democracy meant only for monarchs and corporate nobility?

But no. Putin. He's the dictator. He's the solution to everything. Putin. And the Russians. We need to watch them.
That's right, peasants, just keep fearing the Russians and Putin and everything will be fine.
And listen to Kolinda, she'll explain everything to you.

Most of Putin's opponents usually end up worse off than that Spaniard, but I doubt we really need him as our role model.

I don't really think any of the options in that poll are going to play out. It’s not like we're headed for total war, nor are we expecting roasted chickens to start falling from the sky. Honestly, I doubt there will be any major shifts at all.
And look, I don't agree with condemning that rapper, even if I can't wrap my head around rap music in general. It's about free speech. Well, "speech," I guess, since most rappers can't actually sing or play an instrument to save their lives. If you choose to drag yourself into the political arena, you have to accept that people are going to say nasty things about you. It shouldn't be grounds for a conviction. Americans should remember how the Sex Pistols used to ruthlessly mock the British monarchy without anyone throwing them in jail for it.

Roger Fowler said:Does that logic hold up for 1999 as well? 🍿

I have this habit of saying that nobody would have bothered bombing us if someone halfway sane had been running things in Mexico. But, I know, I know... plenty of people think I'm full of it.

Joseph Cox said:Well, now you've gone and forced me to go digging and double-check everything... So, here is what I actually managed to find:
The first 5 Belgians arrived in Mexico City in 1952; those were numbers 112-116 (specifically PCC 7000 models built by STIB in 1951). Then, in the early '60s, they sent 70 units that couldn't be converted for the 1000 mm gauge, and those ended up in Ottawa (turns out my previous info on that was wrong).
Instead of those, they picked up used trams from Belgium. These were also PCC trams, but dating back to 1948/1949. They are the original American PCCs that were "manufactured"—if you can call assembly that—at the Belgian BN plant. There were 24 of these (117-140). One was sold back to Belgium (131) and is currently sitting in a museum.

Clearly, I had some incorrect details in my initial posts, but hey, there's always something new to learn. 😁

Ah, okay, so they really were finished in Belgium in '48 after all. Thanks for doing the legwork; I actually picked up a few things from your posts too. 👍

Joseph Cox said:@Stutley, I might have tripped up on the name. It’s entirely plausible that everyone just referred to all those PCC units in Mexico City as "the Belgians." Now, the term "Washingtonian" was definitely used back in Ottawa—I'm certain about that.
Though, honestly, that doesn't change the fact that those trams arriving in the early '60s had their trucks swapped out once they hit the USA.

No, I know for a fact they wrote that a Belgian arrived as far back as 1948. The whole thing blew up in the mid-eighties when one of them tipped over—probably some mechanical failure—and that's when they pulled the rest of the fleet out of service.

Joseph Cox said:The person in this photo isn't a Belgian; it's clearly no Washingtonian.

It says it's Belgian in several different places. Though, if I'm being honest, my memory tells me the windows used to be smaller... but hey, it's been over 30 years. You can't hold onto every little detail forever. Anyway, regarding the transit history in cities like Mexico City, this also mentions:

People in Mexico City used to ride horse-drawn trams from all sorts of makers—Belgian BBC and PPC, German Siemens and AEG, Czech Skoda and Tatra, Italian Breda and Divag, plus local stuff like "Đuro Đaković," "Jesenice," and "Goš."

http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=883057

There’s no mention of any "Washingtonian" here. Now they're even adding some Spanish ones to the mix.

nimblescout50 said:The tram is pretty much lacking in almost every way.
I mean, its low floor is probably one of the few actual redeeming qualities it has.

Redeeming qualities compared to what? Most buses out there are low-floor now anyway. I guess you could count lower noise levels or zero emissions as pluses, if we're being generous.

Passing the buck to other countries—or if you want to get technical, their intelligence agencies—is always just a way to cloud the fact that we’re actually at fault here. That’s the real issue. They didn't start our conflicts; they just waited until things were already spiraling out of control and then maneuvered themselves into whatever positions served their own interests best.

I was always most fond of the first 5 Belgians, though they were quite old-school—if I recall correctly, they were from somewhere around the late forties.

rustywalker42 said:All those Western nations (and look, I’m not saying every single person living there, let’s be clear) have always had one singular goal when it comes to this part of the world—pitting us against each other and watching the slaughter unfold.

Let’s not kid ourselves here. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria... they’ve always been natural enemies to Slavs in general, not just us.

Sure, they have their own agendas, and some of them definitely clash with ours, but we can't pin our internal conflicts on them. We brought this on ourselves. It's time we took a long, hard look in the mirror.

Morgan Rodriguez57 said:Greed really is the bedrock and the driving force behind capitalism... ☕

True enough. If we actually made it illegal, half the CEOs out there would be trading their corner offices for prison cells.

Look, don't go scaring me off. I'm actually all for bringing light rail to places like Austin—it’s not some massive disaster. It works pretty much everywhere else; if things hit a snag, you just fix them and move on. 🙂
And honestly, next time Kolinda and Vučić grab coffee, maybe they could actually get their act together and make sure we're sourcing those trams from Končar.

Greed is a terrible trait, sure, but you can't exactly write a law against it. You only get hauled into court when that greed drives someone to commit an actual crime. There are plenty of greedy people walking the streets of Chicago or NYC right now who haven't broken a single statute. I can't think of any state in the Union that has laws specifically punishing someone just for being greedy in its purest sense. Then again, there are a million other negative traits out there—what then? You can't throw someone in jail just because they aren't a decent human being.