Yushchenko named Ukraine president!
According to the BBC,
Deliberations at Ukraine’s Supreme Court continued until 0230 (0030 GMT), when chief presiding justice Anatoly Yarema announced that the court was to uphold Mr Yushchenko’s election victory.
“The decision is final and cannot be appealed,” Mr Yarema said.
Le Sabot Post-Moderne has a helpful wrap up of politics in Ukraine. It’s exhilirating to see Ukraine achieve such independence from Russia and put an end (we can hope, at least) to Russian imperial ambitions in the region. It’s good for the Ukrainians and good for the Russians, too.
Update: The perils of revisiting “flawed privatizations”; the good news about the Russian government agreeing to withdraw troops from Georgia (to the horror of Justin Raimondo and other apologists for Russian imperialism).
“Yanukovych’s people have put up seven tents and roped off 15 square meters in Lenin Square in Simferopol, Crimea and declared it a “Yushchenko-Free Zone.” That’s fine, we have the rest of the country.”
hehehe
The real triumph here is that the population won’t get involved in mass violence over which petty bureaucrats get to mismanage the tax revenue. Neither of these men strikes me as being worth getting killed over, and now that won’t happen.
TJ-
Some people would do better to study than to spout.
A real triumph for liberty would have been if no president had been elected. Any successful election is a triumph for the State, which is the natural enemy of Liberty. You should label your posts more carefully, Tom.
Aaron states that nothing other than the achievement of statelessness can be called a triumph of liberty. That simply can’t be right, unless by triumph Aaron has in mind a “final victory beyond which there can be no other.” If used in that sense, he may be right. It’s not the sense I had in mind, however. I used “triumph” in the phrase “A Triumph for Liberty” (over a photo of Yushchenko giving a victory sign) in the sense of the exultation that comes from a victory. If the election of Yushchenko was a victory for liberty, then a triumph accompanies it.
Would Aaron have objected had I used the term “victory,” a term that more clearly implies that other victories may be still to come? If not, then we don’t disagree. If he would have objected, then we hold different understandings of the nature of liberty, which for Aaron would be purely binary (you’ve got it you don’t), but which I believe can be enjoyed in greater or lesser degrees. Surely North Korea is less free than Canada, and were North Korea to move toward a Canadian-style political system, that would be a tremendous victory for liberty. The success of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, while much less dramatic and significant for Ukrainians than a change of the sort I describe would be for North Koreans, nonetheless represents a shift away from the gangsterism and repression from which Ukrainians have suffered since the breakup of the USSR (which breakup was itself a great advance in liberty). That counts as a victory for liberty, about which Ukrainians should triumph, in the sense of exultation and rejoicing.
I should remind you that we’re talking about a politician…an eastern European politician. You may as well call the latest ascenscion of a mafia Don as a victory for liberty for the Italians. Oh, look everyone, the Ukrainians have someone new to take a crap on them, and I hear his bowels don’t move as often, it’s a victory! Give me a break.