teleoplexy
8mo ago
I'd venture to say that it's a simplistic lens to view the current election, considering the history of Russia. The process of depoliticization has its roots in Stalin's purges, the threat of Gulags silencing any political dissent, the culture of snitching and secrecy. Russian people retreated from the sphere of politics into their own lives because their lives depended on it. The parallels do not seem convincing to me, and I'm not sure if there are any.
I'm not entirely sure what your comment is meant to highlight.
The comment I responded to says that Russian liberals failed because Russian people "don't buy it".
I said that Russians don't follow/believe liberals because they are depoliticized to a point where the majority of people don't believe any politician at all, not just liberal politicians.
The depoliticization aspect is unique to Russia. American society is deeply political. Both states are cultivated by propaganda.
teleoplexy
8mo ago
The lack of success by the Russian liberals should be attributed to the general depoliticization in the Russian society. It’s not that the Russians just don’t care about politics, the apathy comes from being disconnected with their country and the world in general. Why watch the news if you can’t tell what the truth is? “What’s truth anyway?” is a common way to think. If there’s no way of telling there truth from lies, there’s no meaningful way to act.
This mental state is not only dominant, but also deliberately cultivated in Russia by its government.
Yeah, not being a party member certainly was a career barrier, but it’s not the case that you had to become a true believer if you became a party member. In fact, in the book author describes a guy who became a party member just so that he had more leverage to do really important things in his profession (sorry I’m fuzzy on details, read it a while ago) and privately even condemned the party. That’s also the case for the people in my life.
teleoplexy
8mo ago
What separated us from the Soviets during the Cold War was you didn't have to be an activist to do things like medicine.
I highly recommend reading “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation” by Alexey Yurchak. You can fully ignore Yurchak’s own postmodernist ranting, but at the same time he collected a fascinating account of what it was like to live in post WWII Soviet Union. In short, it’s a myth that you had to be an activist or even a believer. Regular people despised both true believers and open critics of Soviet Union. This sentiment is even more true for the STEM professions.
teleoplexy
8mo ago
Lenin didn't say that
Although it is now overshadowed by his later work, Keynes wrote a brilliant and enduring book in 1919, in the aftermath World War I, titled The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In it, he states:
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
… Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
Given the unambiguous parallels between this passage and Ronald Reagan’s quote, it seems Reagan read Lord Keynes (or at least, read someone who had read him), and somewhere between 1919 and 1974, what Keynes interprets Lenin as saying became a direct quote from Lenin, which was later embellished and merged with other powerful imagery about inflation and taxes circulating at the same time (grinding millstones crushing the middle class and the bourgeoisie).
teleoplexy
9mo ago
I'd be grateful if you could spell out which social crisis you are thinking about.
teleoplexy
9mo ago
Would you pay one-time $5 fee to be able to post on a forum you like to read?
What if it was $5/year?
teleoplexy
10mo ago
No, it hasn't moved the needle. I think now that the Russian liberals are finally out of the state of shock from what happened, the majority position is that nobody has any idea why he did that. His reasoning was that he is a Russian politician, which means he can't be abroad. In hindsight, this was dumb because he already almost got killed once and nobody understands why risk it again on the enemy turf outside of some dubious martyr value.
It came out that there were negotiations to swap him for some Russian prisoners in Ukraine, but the details are really foggy. I guess this means that he regretted it after all?
As for non-liberals, i.e. everybody else, nobody gave a crap and still doesn't.
teleoplexy
10mo ago
produce horrible optics
This might be an understatement. I foresee the left quickly labeling the policy as "narcophobic" and proclaiming that we are genociding the drug users. I would even venture as far as saying that it's impossible to implement this policy in the first-world countries.
I think that Scott's latest article on how to defeat homelessness, was an okay steelman argument for the liberal policies with regards to the issue. At least, it's completely in line with the arguments I hear regarding my city's issues. There are a couple of things missing, though.
- People don't become psychotic out of nowhere. Years of unrestricted drug use does that to a person. And no, I don't want the continuation of the war on drugs, but I'm convinced that without somehow removing the drugs from the equation it's infinitely harder to approach a solution.
- Why do other countries don't have this problem? It's multifaceted, for sure - Finland and Japan use the "housing first" system Scott suggests and achieve great results, but I'll highlight one factor that I don't see anyone talking about in the first world: shame. In some societies like China or Turkey it's shameful to have a relative who is homeless. It's largely a cultural thing, but ultimately having relatives care about the homeless is a cheaper solution than building endless fields of Soviet blocks and intentionally creating ghettos that require policing. Is it possible to change a culture? How exactly is the western culture different? This is much harder to answer, but if we are talking about an ideal world with ideal outcomes, I'd prefer the community that experiences the issue to directly handle the issue.
teleoplexy
11mo ago
US is likely to lose WW3 pretty soon (~5 years )
Can you please elaborate? Maybe even in separate thread? Or please send me the links if you wrote about this previously.
teleoplexy
11mo ago
Who are the people whose preference is "legal immigratns > illegal immigrants > fewer/no immigrants"?
If you haven't tried Balatro yet, you should give it a shot
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