are you seriously suggesting that cheating and corruption are not serious systemic problems of the Greek society?

http://www.helleniccomserve.com/biteoutofcorruption.html
http://www.oecd.org/topicdocumentlist/0,3448,en_33873108_33873421_1_1_1_1_37447,00.html

I could be posting links like that the whole day. Perhaps *you* need to get serious mate.

Well, seriously mate. Your finger is not big enough to hide you. I took this pic from a Greek blog, but really, I hope you're not saying the picture is not representative of what is actually going on in Greek universities. I also hope you're not somehow attempting to compare Germans and Greeks when it comes to integrity.

Other than that, kinda contradictory your post, in that preaching against one-sidedness and a realistic perspective you are unashamedly suggesting that in a complex universe like ours, the two alternatives (i.e. naiveness or self-interest) that you present are the only possible ones.

Notice also your indiscreetness in making this personal.
You're Greek right?

Let's analyze our dialogue so far piece-by-piece:
1) in my 1st paragraph I clearly state that I agree with you on a lot of issues, which you bypass (why would someone looking for an argument ever focus on the common ground?)
2) in my second paragraph I clearly state that greek students cheat, but the photo is not from a greek university. this to you means "greek students don't cheat, and germans do"
3) in the third paragraph, I describe a position, and in the forth I draw a conclusion. Instead of answering to that, you try to legal-talk me about only two possible alternatives, and basically don't respond to my accusation
4) my accusation is personal, yes. if you expose yourself and your views, one assumes you are also open to criticism. if this is just a mental exercise to you and don't like people judging you on what you write, you can close the comments and write whatever you like undisturbed...
5) i remind you that, in our last disagreement you were the one to make it personal, and in a much uglier way than i did here. talking about contradictions...
6) what does my being greek have to do with anything? what are you?

PS for some serious criticism of Greek Olympic athletes, read here:
http://fvasileiou.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/doping/

Sorry Dimitrios but I don't feel the first two points and first half of the the third deserve my time.

Now, as far as the second half of no3 goes, concerning my answer I thought I gave it to you in a "fill the blanks" way, but since your pedantic attitude seems to require compulsive explicitness, here is my answer ala Dimitrios. Certainly none of the two options you suggested hold. My reason for consistently criticizing Greece, Italy and occassionaly the UK while not doing so for say the US is very simple and in fact I don't see what the problem is or why you don't see it prima facie. All blogs have a certain focus; my blog's focus is currently that. Political correctness and plurality of opinion, especially in the blogosphere, do not emerge by perfectly balancing criticism in a single blog. There is a multitude of blogs with different focuses and often opposing views. If you would like to read blog posts that criticise the US there are thousands and you know where to find them. Right? Becoming even more pedantic, I would like to say that in my opinion the criticism that I do does its part in exposing the truth about certain things in the countries that I criticise. This is the service that my blogging offers or in any case I would like it to. I have selected these two countries because I think they deserve it while US does not. My opinion, my blog, right? My purpose and my goal in doing what I do is to stir some emotions, to make the concerned people angry and have people react not towards me but towards the wrong-doing that they and their families do every day. Also, I think that by having non-Greeks and non-Italians exposed to the sad truth about certain things (often in a graphic way) increases the pressure on these people to clean up their act. So, instead of complaining here why don't you go and find a close relative or friend that is an unashamed law-breaker or corrupt kissup and put them in their place. What, you don't have one?

Having explained my case thoroughly, I think, we are now expecting - breathlessly - your explanation on how you initial comment was not contradictory. Provincial arguments like "legal talk" won't be accepted.

Regarding number 4, look up "ad hominem"

Number 5 is actualy pedantic again but I will answer it because I would very much enjoy witnessing your attempt to answer. So tell me man, how is me making a post about an unidentified Greek guy, regarding a convo that I and that guy had in private (meaning nobody besides me and that guy were present - notice how pedantic I can get), the same with you coming to my public blog (which is not anonymous) and calling me naive?

No 6 is a good one. What I am has quite a complex answer and I currently don't have the time to answer it pedantically enough. However, I can tell you who I am: I am your daddy! Do you want me to get pedantic on that as well?

Blog means a digital diary, or binary log. It is supposed to be someone's collective opinions. Now, some blogs decide to only talk about one (or a few) subjects exclusively. They usually claim so in the title (or the about page). Others (like mine or Athanasios's) write about everything that comes to mind. So, not all blogs need to have a specific focus. Yours does. I wanted you to admit it. Now you did.

Point 2: as I explained in my first comment, when someone only judges one side (e.g. political party), I know (or suspect) he belongs to the other party and has some self-interest in only praising his party and blaming the other one. The same for a sports team. The same for a business's newsletter. In all these cases, you know why they are one-sided and don't expect any better.

Otherwise, people are usually much more objective in their judgements. I was just wondering what your self-interest is in being so one-sided. And spare me the "providing a service to these countries" bullshit, or I will blame you that you don't care about America and don't want to help that one improve :-)

On my 1st argument being contradictory, I don't see your point. I basically said "people should be objective, otherwise they're either naive or have a self-interest". You consistently criticise specific countries (overly generalising, and in an offensive way). How am I contradictory?

Since you like to ridicule my style of writing, let's copy yours and see what it sounds like:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/08/19/patient.death.ap/index.html
ALL Americans are insensitive to the human life, they let everyone who is not rich die! Motherfuckers! This happens only in America, and it's because human life has no value. Worthless pieces of shit!

Pretty close, no? I got my references and everything, I put in a few swearwords to sound really pissed-off. And I am only doing this to provide a service to the American Nation, help them improve, you know. I'm so nice!

not that I expected anything better from you.

What an argument! I don't know how to respond to that.

why don't we leave it to other readers to decide who's talking and who's bullshitting. You stick by what you wrote, right?

One more, a special present for you: go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_sport
and count the number of Greek and US athletes caught doped:
GR=23, USA=148.
Oh my God! What's going on? This can't be right!!!
You know what? I figured out why there's so many more US athletes than Greeks: it's because Greece has people like you, who truly care about it and report any misdeed to try and improve it. Instead, no one cares about the poor and lonely United States. That's why they've gone down this bad road... The lack of a parent figure like you.

Seriously now, much more athletes get performance-enhancing drugs than those who get caught. They just have better nutritionists, who find for them drugs that are undetectable. You know why they take them? Because they make a living out of winning. If they lose, they don't get anything. So, in my view, we have two options:
A) pull our heads out of the sand, and admit that these people are professionals, and they will do whatever they can to win
B) follow the advice of the freakonomics blog (if i'm not mistaken), and keep the urine samples for maybe 10 years. this way, what is not detectable today may be detectable in 5 years. since the athletes (and their trainers) cannot guess if the drug they take today will become detectable after -say- 8 years, they might actually stop taking them. if this happens, however, be ready for much less exciting sports events (and probably no more world records)

I told to Athanasios before to compare these numbers to the number of athletes the two countries have presented internationally since say doping control started being enforced. I won't even try to verify the numbers you posted.

I told you Fotie, that NOT EVEN ONE GREEK ATHLETE WHO WON A MEDAL WAS CAUGHT DOPPED...
Let go the ratio you propose. I can also find ratios that are not convenient for you.

1. Why do they have to win a medal to qualify for the calculation of the ratio?
2. Explain to us why you choose to be so hypocritical regarding Thanou and Kenteris

...for the same reason that you do not say anything about the LATE (at the age of 39 years, after three heart attacks) american sprider.
Cause everybody is innocent unless the opposite is proven... And also, because Kenteris and Thanou won Olympic medals in Sydney, and their "accident" was in athens 2004.

thank you Athanasie

Ok, let's see how inventive we can become in statistics to support one side: we (me and Athanasios) gave you numbers for doped athletes in all sports events. You counterpropose to normalize these numbers by the number of athletes from each country (as if 148 magically stops being bad if the country has many athletes). Hmmm, let me see what I can come up with:
lets divide by the history of a country. Or let's normalize by technological progress (i.e. a less advanced country would use older/inferior drugs, which are easier to detect with modern methods).

i.e. technology produces not just better undetectable drugs but also better detection methods and technologies. In the case of Greece, what we probably have is high-tech doping and low-tech detection. Don't take my word for it. Check and find out about the huge gaps in detection capabilities that Greek labs had and have as well as the strange phenomenon of Greek athletes being overwhelmingly caught by non-Greeks (probably has to do with corruption as well).

Practically, there is nothing non detectable. Modern techniques (and Greece by the way, has very high quality instruments, after the 2004 games, a friend of mine worked there during the games) can detect almost anything. The thing is whether the athlete is taking something that is listed as doping or not. If you get a chromatogram of an urine sample, you will see hundreds of peaks, each of which corresponds to a chemical compound. Modern techniques (HRGC-HRMS, LC-MS-MS etc) can even give you the chemical structure of unknown compounds. But the operator of the analytical instrumentation, and not even WADA people, can say that you are dopped if they find strange peaks. Because, simply, these chemicals are not listed as banned. Therefore, and for this reason they say that doping is always ahead of the anti-doping, they will never be able to catch athletes who are using the avant-garde drugs of the doping technology. And if you allow a personal opinion on that, the states as in allmost all fields in science, are always using the state of the art products and they will only be caught if they want so. What do I mean? That if they want to discard -say-Marion Jones, they will give her something already banned and then there is no way for her to get away with that. In some cases, the use of doping compounds can be detected even long time after the use.

A no-way to detect doping method, is the transfusion of blood. They take 1-2 lt of blood from the athlete and they conserve it in -20oC. The athletes body will recover it shortly. Then, and before the games, they put it back in the athletes body and that way the athlete has blood in excess (instead of 5-6 lt, he has 7-8 lt) and this means more oxygen, more resistance (ά-ντο-χή? ά-τέ-λεί-ώ-τή) and finally better performance. Ofcourse that way your heart, instead of pumping 5-6 lt, pumps 7-8, and then "loses track" with any possible consequence. A possible way to detect this is by measuring the red corpsules, but for anti-doping purposes they do not take blood from the athlete (not sure for the olympic games medalists) (The American cyclist Tyler Hamilton failed this test during the 2004 Olympics but was allowed to keep his gold medal because the processing of his sample precluded conducting a second, confirmatory test. He appealed a second positive test for homologous transfusion from the 2004 Vuelta a España to the International Court of Arbitration for Sport but his appeal was denied. Hamilton's lawyers proposed Hamilton may be a genetic chimera or have had a 'vanishing twin' to explain the presence of RBCs from more than one person. While theoretically possible, these explanations were ruled to be of 'negligible probability') [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_doping#Detection_of_EPO_use]. (I did not read the whole wikipeadia article, thus what I said be4 might not be totally accurate).

Finally, there are ways to dope, where you get the doping substance, but you also get the so-called "mask". The mask is a compound that either reacts or in some other ways hides the doping chemical.

But you did not explain to us the crux of the issue: Forgetting the status quo of doping detection in Greece before 2004, why, since 2004 they had the needed technology, the samples of the Greek weight-lifting team, for instance, were only found to be positive when they were surprise tested in Germany instead of in Greece?

Bottom-line is that it all comes down to Greek corruption again - not of individuals but of a whole society with rare exceptions. This is what this article, and many others on this blog, are about.

Dear Fotios,
what about the universities of the countries that produce cyclists???
Only in 2008, 4 italians. Belgians, dutch, french, germans, kazaks, anything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_cycling

But, as you can see, NO AMERICAN. What conclusions can we extract???

a) american cyclists are not dopped (and when they are, they manage to get away with this, see Hamilton in athens 2004)
b) americans have newer drugs
c) none of the above...

It's too good to be true Fotie. On one hand we say that by being dopped you reach records impossible to be done by humans, and on the other hand, americans (non-dopped) superate the dopped athletes? what makes you believe this (apart from your blind trust to anything american)?

I don't know Athanasios - I mean, I see this kind of posts that you make and I am wondering: does this guy actually don't get it or is he deliberately throwing himself into a bout of convoluted and plain wrong reasoning in order to, he thinks, protect his beloved country?

Man, I have no idea why there are no American cyclists found doped. I don't even know anything about that sport, except that I have a bike that I use for my cardio training; but I know the obvious: sure many countries have athletes that dope, but in late years probably no team (or very few) has doped by as much and by so many as team Greece. Look at the data. In the last 10-15 years we suddenly had this super-spike of Greek athlete distinctions at top level (we are talking Gold medals, 1st, 2nd position in international tournaments, etc.)

For instance, here is the track and field Olympic medals Greece has won in all Olympiads

Greek track and field medals

See the spike in the 2000 and 2004 games?

We have seen strange things from 1992 until today:

• An unknown Greek sprinter (Kenteris), with a previous career in shambles, suddenly consistently outrun well-known sprinters with a certain history and from countries with great traditions
  
• A weight-lifting team that became a super-power in a few years starting with nothing. See explosive spike 1992 and after
• A short Greek woman (Ekaterini Thanou), built like Arnold, run faster than taller girls with much longer legs
  

We now know that the bulk of the athletes or teams that caused this spike were either found doped or were presumed doped.

All this stuff, this incredible and improbable spike in wins, would have never happened if team Greece just doped as much as everybody else. Don't you see it? For example, if Kenteris doped and everybody else he run against doped, he would not have won coming out of nowhere. You said it yourself, fireworks smell bad.

Even more shameful is the fact that it appears that the state and even regular everyday Greeks have been covering and protecting them. The other day I saw a Greek reporter getting into a Greek spectator crowd (before the Olympics) and asking relatives of Greek athletes how they felt about steroids. I was shocked and amazed to hear them either declaring neutrality or in a couple of cases actually supporting the use "for the good of Greece". None of the people there reacted negatively to these comments.

Then you have the nerve of 400m women 2004 Olympic medalist Halkia declaring, doped to the bone, after her win (source): "Greeks were born to be winners. They are born to be first. It is inscribed in our cells. It is the best gift our ancestors bequeathed upon us." This is probably one of the most racist/ethnicist statements that I have heard especially given that it was declared by a gold medalist to public media. There were many Greeks who applauded this (Athanasios, were you one of them?) and some others proposed that this stuff should be taught in Greek schools (I wonder what the class name would be: "The genetic superiority of Greeks" kinda strikes my fancy and evokes certain associations).

Shameful fact: again virtually nobody in Greece complained about the obviously unacceptable comment. Halkia was treated like a Greek goddess.

Athanasie, if you love your country, you should admit the shame that was brought on it by its own people and work towards a solution starting with a good hard look at yourself. I certainly have been doing so for some years now.

Fotie,
listen:
a) I never said that I am not ashamed of the dopped greek athletes.
b) Kenteris was not unknown athlete. Instead, he was the super talent of the ealry nineteen's (he was running 400m) but he had huge financial problems and he had to work for living, unlike Federer. Fotie, an unknown can never do what Kenteris did, no matter how much doping he gets.
c) I agree about the boom in the greek field and track, but there might be an explanation. MONEY MONEY MONEY. When the country started to spend, in view of the olympic games of Athens, athletes became professionals (with sponsors etc), started training in a serious way (taking also the best from technology), whereas before they were amatures (as I just mentioned about Kenteris).
d) You continuously "spit where you eat" Fotie. If you want to write about Kenteris and Thanou, refer also to Balco. The american company that was (probably) selling doping substances to them. The company that was giving doping substances (proven) to Maurice Green, Tim Montgomery and Marion Jones. Try to see all the truth and not only the bad greeks. If you love greece of course. Otherwise, I will go on saying that you (for some unknown to me reason) hate your country of origin...

By the way: Maurice Green had also a "non-show" in a sudden anti-doping control during the Athens games, while he was hidding in Crete. I sent you the staff in Greek, but you decided not to put it. (I attach some links for Greek speaking readers; of course in english these things are hidden, wondering why?: http://www.oakke.gr/na392/antiditikismos392.htm; http://www2.rizospastis.gr/page.do?publDate=21/8/2004&pageNo=22&direction=1)

Well, Athanasios, imagine a world where slaves would think they "spit where they eat" when revolting...

I guess you consider yourself a slave...

Beware of Dimitrios - heard somewhere that his ailment is contagious

I am not saying that whoever wins is dopped. There are cases, like for example the swiss tennis player Federer, for whom I believe that he never got doping. And I believe it, because he is a wealthy guy who has always played tennis, he has the talent (just see how his wrist operates), is a german dutch (meaning typical and always focussed on the result) and has very good trainers.
But in cases of athletes-fireworks who appear 1-2 years, they win some gold medals and you never hear about them again, then there is something that smells. And smells really bad.

I dunno about the Federer stuff you mention - I mean obviously this is your subjective view on him and why he is who he is. Regarding your "fireworks" theory I basically agree.

I found the convo you're talking about. It's on a different post. Are you on drugs? Or do you actually demand that people read all the comments on all your posts before writing here?

I only said that I have replied on this before. No prob if you did not read it before - you have now, right? Regarding the drugs, I am not on them, but since I see that you appear to be well in need of some dope, I would recommend the plaza right outside Milano Centrale. Probably your arguments will be better appreciated there as well.

In Western countries, people have become more open-minded towards drugs. Drugs are still technically illegal, but the law is not enforced and there are very strong movements for legalization. However, some professional categories are not allowed to do drugs. For example, aircraft pilots agree to take mandatory drug-tests several times a week: it is a pre-requisite for their job-position and they might be punished if they fail to comply with this requirement. Similarly, professional athletes agree to take mandatory drug-tests and face a draconian punishment if they test positive for drugs.It is not about puritanism or prohibition: it is a pre-requisite for being a professional athlete. This is also why I think that Fotios has taken the right approach to doping in sports. Honesty is a pre-requisite for being a professional athlete. Finally, don't get so personal. That is an international issue: don't feel that your country is being offended.

just two things:

a) The fact that you took it from a greek blog, does not mean that the foto is taken in Greece. The situation might be similar to that in some cases in Greek universities (for certain subjects only), but I udersign with 100 hands that nobody can graduate the university in greece just by cheating. No way.

b) Tell us Fotios, how many times every year a student or even a pupil enters a university or scholl class in the states and starts shooting against everybody? What is your conclusions by this repeated phenomenon in USA? WHy is this happenning? Why don't you post something about that and you just post about Greek universities, where if I am not wrong you didn't study. Instead you did study in the states (always if I am not wrong)

a) So, how is the claim you make here a good thing? It is like saying, being in a comma is not as bad as being dead. Well, duh, yeah, it's still bad though...

b) See my replies above. However, to give you a short answer, this is what you get when mad people get guns in their hands. I mean imagine if this mad guy in Santorini had a kalasnikof and a bazooka. Now, obviously this takes us to the big debate about whether guns should be legal or not. There are various blogs that examine this question. You can go post your comments there.

Fotie, I think that you try hard to "fail to understand what I am saying".
It is quite clear and I never talked about legal possession of guns or not.

I mean, perhaps you should try and write something substantial explaining to us your theory about why these things happen in America. I will comment on it - rest assured! :)

exactly Antonio - exactly!

Plagiarism is a problem that exists all over the world in many universities and academic circles. I will not attempt to compare percentages or qualify kinds of plagiarism that happen in Greece and other countries. What I will say however is that the phenomenon of mass cheating during exams is very uncommon if not non-existent in say US and UK Universities, while the opposite is true of Greek ones.

hmmm, let me guess... I should not be rude to Greek University students because...you are one of them? To me, what is really rude to society as a whole, is to claim the various rights (professional and other) that graduates are entitled to, after graduating the way they do.