[thechat] No-one likes us... we don't care (apparently)

[Lauri Vain]

> | Maybe I'm just old, but all of these song just *suck*. OK, I'm old.
> 
> nah, you're not old. The songs are never great ... just plain vanilla
> euro-pop ... and some a lot worse than that ;)

+1 

As to Martins concern regarding politically motivated voting - I do not
think that it's all political ('though with a topic as hot as war, it
certainly may have played a role, although not that big of a one). The
reason that neighbors give each other higher points can't be written off
to the political motifs (especially now that mostly people, not juries,
vote) - they are simply in the cultural space. The average citizen of
every country, of course, is stupid, but they rarely give a damn about
foreign politics and they simply can't reach to the point where they
start thinking about that when voting. 

For example, almost every year, I think that the Turkish song sucks like
hell (to anybody from Turkey: it's nothing personal). Turks probably, on
the other hand, think that their song is ok and ours sucks like hell
(granted, I usually think that our sucks too - it's Eurovision after all
and 1.5% of the total number of songs are perhaps okay [not even good,
but okay] -- what does it shake out to, one song per three years?). 

Yet I almost always think that Sweden's, UK's, Germany's, Latvia's etc
songs are much better than the Turkish or, say, Israeli ones. The
historical background, culture and music traditions are simply so
different. 

That is the main reason why neighboring countries give points to each
other - year after year. Cultural background that is shared between
neighbors. Period. 

Granted, there is an element of political motivation, but I think that
under normal conditions it is no more than 10%. 

Cheers, 
Lauri @ Estonia