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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1731 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 7, 2026

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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.

But are you correcting for the fact that Tsarist Russia was basically a feudal backwater? It’s not like the communists inherited a shiny industrial state and then drove it i to the ground. They’re the only reason the industrial state exists at all.

So historians tend to have either a pro-Soviet or anti-Russian bias. If you start looking into the numbers Russia was well behind the great powers but industrializing.

At the dawn of WW1 Russia had more km of railway than anyone except the US. Note that sources split the UK and British India, so you can easily argue that the UK was ahead. Obviously that's spread over a massive territory, but it's still something. The Trans-Siberian Railway was pre-communist.

During WW1 the Russian Empire was making it's own artillery, rifles, and armoured cars.

Sure it was underdeveloped, but it was a major oil producer during the age of oil. A more moderate government would have been able to industrialize a bit more slowly but with far fewer corpses.

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