Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
How can you (at least some of themotte posters, if you are not such a poster, i ask to you guess insight into their view) can say 'no appeasement towards Russia' given that the West has huge appeasement towards low IQ populations to that degree that even Ireland (once dubbed "the black man of Europe") who never did anything bad to non-Europeans participates in appeasement towards low IQ populations?
Seems like a category error to me: Russia is a nation-state, not a population. And if you're trying to suggest that Russia is a low-IQ nation, I don't think that's right. Russia is much like the United States of America, a geographically large multi-ethnic society. Its sharpest people are pretty sharp (in fact, there's an argument to be made that it's leadership class is better than Western equivalents, but that's a bit ol' tangent).
I'd like to hear that tangent. Was Russia's leadership class always better or is just relatively better in the present, due to the culture wars in the West?
Not always better. Despite always having ardent defenders on the left, the communists were just terrible.
Basically in the post communist era it's been clear that Russia was much poorer than it should have been. So a lot of bright minds went into government to improve things.
In the West improving things inevitably involves fighting tooth and nail with entrenched powers.
I post-Soviet Russia smart people can dedicate their lives to looking for easy wins.
The big problem that the West has is that their elite has been focussed on how to get rich in the global economy. That doesn't require them to improve things in their actual countries at all, and in some cases making them worse will be more personally profitable.
That’s been true since Columbus; clearly it can coexist with a desire for local improvements. Conversely, local industry does not automatically trickle down to local quality of life. For every urban core there were a dozen company-operated mill and mining towns operating on the margin.
On the other end, if you look at the top American companies or billionaires, they all sell stuff to Westerners. After all, we have the most money. If those purchases mean anything at all, we’ve been getting something out of this massive, interconnected mess. Clothing, food, electronics—none of those markets look the same under an autarkic model. The real benefits came from extending specialization of labor.
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