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Paljas
Germany6926 Posts
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/world/europe/the-saturday-profile-blogger-aleksei-navalny-rouses-russia.html Liberals, meanwhile, have deep reservations about him, because he espouses Russian nationalist views. He has appeared as a speaker alongside neo-Nazis and skinheads, and once starred in a video that compares dark-skinned Caucasus militants to cockroaches. While cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says that in the case of humans, “I recommend a pistol.” | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On March 30 2017 05:19 opisska wrote: You are (somewhat rightfully) accusing me of not understanding what is the current situation in Russia, yet your "description" is very simplistic to the level of being propagandistic. It is true that during the "wild privatization" a lot of assets were essentially stolen. This however happened everywhere such endeavor was attempted, only to a varied extend. What is simply not true is that Putin somewhat "solved" the issue. The money still remains majorly in the hands of those same people, they only play along with Putin now. "Working in the nation's interest" can mean essentially whatever the government wants and even your tendency to use this phrase so naturally hints that there are likely structural issues with the arrangement. It's actually pretty hard to find nonconflicting sources on how big a part of Russian economy the oligarchs control; I came repeatedly across an estimation that a hundred people own 35% of assets in Russia (which makes it the most inequal country on the planet!) but how much of the ownership structure is transparent enough to evaluate? In any case, this alone is a huge issue for any attempts at democracy, as at this scale, any opposition can be bought pretty easily. Who exactly did Putin "crack down" on, when such a overwhelmingly large concentration of wealth stayed in place? Your story of "Putin dealing with the crooks" doesn't really check out. To me it seems he only convince them that they are better of crooking alongside of himself. I have to say, I must file this under "proof by ignorance." You say "I don't know but I know what you say is just propaganda," a clever way to "know" something while knowing nothing. But to be fair, let's unpack this to explain why what you said is wrong. Any such "agreement" is of course informal so I can't point to any specific contract. But "work in the interest of the country" does have a pretty specific meaning. Namely, paying taxes, respecting the rule of law, and supporting Russian strategic interests abroad as appropriate (a rather standard requirement for any sufficiently important corporation). It was pretty much either that or prison. Yes, of course it would probably be more "just" to just instantly put them in prison for being crooks. Unfortunately they happened to be the crooks who actually knew how to run their business. A shitty problem but there's only so much you can do about it. The only real solution is to slowly but surely root out sources of corruption until the overall picture looks quite good - which is what is being done. Now, could you argue that maybe Putin didn't do the best job, that maybe he has conflicts of interest, that he's been around too long? Sure. Plenty of people think so. But perhaps it's important to give credit where credit is due considering how much things have improved as a direct result of his presidency. It's certainly fashionable to dislike Putin from abroad, as you can clearly see in any East European circlejerk of your choosing, but try at the very least to find an accurate picture of what he did and didn't do. Because while there are reasons to oppose his government, most people from the aforementioned countries have little more than "waaaaa Russia was meaaan to meee" to justify it. Or the American version which is even funnier. Wealth inequality in Russia is about at the same level as that of the US, as per its Gini coefficient. Which is not to say it's great (the US has its fair share of inequality) but it's not awful either. The older relics of a collapsing working class without work have disappeared and skilled workers do have a genuine path to advancement. Rather than complaining about starving, the problems are increasingly more resembling that of a developed economy - providing for schools and healthcare, sufficiently high salaries, more efficient bureaucracy, and so on. I suppose another way you could describe what happened, in order to better capture the rather forceful nature of the deal, is that he wrestled control of assets from the oligarchs in order to give to the government. Not exactly flattering, but that could be fair. The influence of those oligarchs, while not gone, became secondary to that of the federal government. And the government does serve the people, as a rule, whether or not it ultimately does so as well as you want. And this probably came with a fair share of profiteering - the claims of infinity billion dollar supermansions are questionable at best, but rare is the politician who doesn't make his own fortune in high office. In any country. Naturally, there were wealthy folks who didn't like this arrangement. They can generally be found with second passports in a completely different country (I think London and Switzerland are the destinations of choice these days?) complaining about how mean and evil Putin is for taking their money. Oh well. Guess making your billions through stealing national wealth while the common man suffers isn't very well-liked among the new leadership. Neither is having close ties to the mafia. On March 30 2017 05:19 opisska wrote: I am not surprise that you think that "a government that understands the issues related to your own nation" is superior - after all, we know how big a fan of EU you are. But this is again just a buzzphrase commonly abused by local politicans to shrug off criticism when their enact policies that aren't efficient for anyone but them. Those policies will obviously differ from the general norm in the more developed countries, but that is being played as "local specifics", usually just a veil for thievery. I don't care that you consider it "pitiful", but from the Czech experience it is obvious that we would have been much better off had we just copied the German legal and buearocratic system to a letter instead of letting it get influenced by whomever was able to grasp enough power in the "wild 90s". That is what "democratic tradition" is about - it's much easier to push dishonest agendas when the system is being defined on the scale of months than on the scale of decades. I must say, this insistence on "we just need to do what the Germans did" is kind of... simplistic and laughable. Perhaps your country should just seek to be a part of Germany - you want European integration and German government, and wouldn't that just solve both problems at once? Is there any reason you two have to be separate countries? But I'm actually going to move slightly away from the topic of Russia - which has been addressed above in about as much depth as it needed to be - into the more general issue of what problems a country might have to deal with that may make it more difficult to make things work out. Size is one thing - it's generally much easier to make a much smaller nation economically productive than a large one (not to mention it's cheaper to just bribe them into being happy). Ethnic diversity is another - too much of it and it can be dangerous. Next, neighbors. If you have a bunch of highly developed economies on your border - my, my, the money that could be earned from trade as a strategically placed country! But if your neighbors are all countries on the brink of bankruptcy or in the middle of a war or allowing for passage of millions of refugees - well sad for you. Further: do you have military commitments? Is there someone willing to take over all military matters in your country for you so that you can lower your budget? Do you have any strategic interests to speak of that need defending? Any satellites you need to maintain? Anyone who will do all of these things for you so that you don't have to bother? Terrorists within your border that you have to properly deal with? You get the gist of it. To each situation there is a suitable government and it's not always the same one. If you want a (somewhat more extreme) example of where the ol' "democracy" didn't work, you can go look at the Iraq nation-building project. The old nation-building idea worked great in highly developed nations that happened to be down on their luck due to a war that caused severe damage (from which they would surely recover) but less so in pretty much any other circumstances. Maybe the Iraqis should have just copied the Germans and it didn't work because their economic and political system wasn't a carbon copy of the German one. But yes, Iraq is a little far from the countries in question, so let's move back to Europe. In Russia specifically, Yeltsin did indeed have about the leadership talent of one of your groveling lost children, following the recommendations of Western advisors all the way down towards ruination. All the problematic situations mentioned above rather than none of them, go figure. It might not be a surprise that that is not a particularly popular game to be played by people who know better. A few countries nestled between wealthy nations like Germany or the Nordics - they had some nice trade gains. Often a whole lot of free money too. Southern/Southeastern Europeans, or larger nations with significant ethnic conflicts? Not so lucky. Although, perhaps an even more interesting trend is that said nations have an interesting tendency to be not-so-fond of their own government, yet enamored with the EU. As if it's an organization that exists to clean up their own local mess for them. And to be fair, perhaps some of that does get done; regulations from up above come down into those countries, and financial basket-cases get lots of free German money. But it is of course interesting how long it's going to last. After all, the EU does like to pretend like it's a 70-year-old project that is responsible for everything good that has ever happened in that time - but it did just expand aggressively and quickly within the span of the existence of the European Union as the organization of that name. And hell, the organization has never had a crisis as serious as the one it has right now. And maybe, with a sufficient amount of strain on a few well-intended, but ultimately short-sighted, decisions, it may turn out that instead of having someone else handle their problems, said nations simply externalized them onto an organization that wasn't capable of dealing with it. Europe dreams are a great addiction that I'm sure a lot of people found enticing. It makes you just positively want to think that if you go and be a mindless copycat then you will one day be just as amazing and awesome as those Westerners are. But I guess this is the first time it's really had to come to terms with reality - and it's going to suffer for it. Probably not this year, when all signs seem to point to a very calm and steady voting season, but absolutely in due time. | ||
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opisska
Poland8852 Posts
 One thing I always wondered is, why do you live in the US while having these opinions? Was it a personal choice, or a matter of life beyond your control (family, whatever)? | ||
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RvB
Netherlands6230 Posts
Alexei Navalny is in jail. When he gets out, the man determined to unseat Russian President Vladimir Putin next March probably won’t be permitted to run. Banned from Russian TV, he has to barnstorm the vast nation to drum up support for his long-shot bid. Yet he is Putin’s most formidable rival. (Here’s why.) The Kremlin has failed to shut Navalny down despite several legal prosecutions. An estimated 60,000 Russians across eight time zones took to the streets on Sunday to back Navalny’s campaign against corruption, which he calls the “pillar” of Putin’s government. Bloomberg spoke with Navalny earlier this month, as he embarked on the Siberian leg of his tour. Here are condensed excerpts of that interview. www.bloomberg.com A condensed interview with Navalny from Bloomberg is anyone is interested. Just follow the link for all of it. | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On March 30 2017 16:02 opisska wrote: I have no intention to "argue it out of you" at this point, I know well there is no purpose to that. But I like hearing your detailed responses. Even if I think a lot of it is terribly wrong (mainly because you are just starting from wrong premises - "the government does serve the people" is really absurd), it is interesting to read - I can't be made to believe that Putin would pay someone to spread propaganda on a videogame forum, so I take those opinions to be truly yours The government serves the people. Whether it does so effectively or not, it provides services for the benefit of the people. Even the shittiest and most self-serving ones. On March 30 2017 16:02 opisska wrote: One thing I always wondered is, why do you live in the US while having these opinions? Was it a personal choice, or a matter of life beyond your control (family, whatever)? Money, in a manner of speaking. Employers in the US pay really well for people with my qualifications, and most Americans are financially inept which is even better for acquiring more money. Nothing uncommon; plenty of highly qualified people of all countries move for financial reasons, including Russians. People from the EU should be more than a little familiar with that. Not that I hate the US or "Western values" mind you. There's a lot that could be learned from the US, especially in the field of how to make market economies. But it goes both ways, in that there's plenty the Soviets did better than Americans. The "Western values uber alles" is a euphoria that will eventually give way to a more nuanced understanding of both its strengths and its shortfalls if you spend enough time on both sides of the fence. Which most never do. | ||
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warding
Portugal2394 Posts
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maybenexttime
Poland5623 Posts
On March 30 2017 22:46 warding wrote: What did the Soviets do better? Kill their own people, spy on them and make them content with what little they had. Oh, there were also no serial killers in the USSR, allegedly. | ||
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LightSpectra
United States1697 Posts
Not that I think the USSR was a wonderland, but let's not get into nationalist dickwaving when just about every country has an awful lot to be ashamed of. | ||
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opisska
Poland8852 Posts
On March 30 2017 23:14 LightSpectra wrote: The US's surveillance state is orders of magnitude more panoptical than anything Stalin and Brezhnev could ever dream of. And let's not be under any illusion that the US never killed its own people. And "make them content with what little they had"? Yeah, grand ole Murica takes the crown for that one. You know, the land of "it's a shame that millennials can't afford houses or a college tuition anymore, but least everybody has an iPhone now." Not that I think the USSR was a wonderland, but let's not get into nationalist dickwaving when just about every country has an awful lot to be ashamed of. I don't think you properly understand the level of surveillance that was going on in USSR and the whole Eastern Bloc when you compare the perceived "surveillance state" in US to it. Today, there are just vastly more possibilities for technological surveillance, but what happened back then in communism was that basically everyone was personally spying on everyone, for the state. | ||
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LightSpectra
United States1697 Posts
In Eastern Germany or Soviet Russia, the state paid your neighbors to tattle on you. In the developed world of 2017, they don't need to. | ||
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opisska
Poland8852 Posts
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Big J
Austria16289 Posts
On March 30 2017 23:44 opisska wrote: I understand that it's bad, but, at least so far, the data isn't actively used against the people. In the communist regimes, you would be constantly evaluated on your loyalty to the party and if deemed untrustworthy, you whole life would be ruined - you'd either go to prison, or be reassigned to a terrible job, forced to move, your children wouldn't get education and proper jobs, etc... Again, now it's just technically easier to collect the data, but what is done with the data is crucial. Not to say that you shouldn't actively oppose the surveillance, but you just should be aware that what the communist did was still orders of magnitude worse - even though their methods were much more primitive. It hasn't? Then why is it being collected again? And how is someone spying on me not an action directed against me itself? | ||
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maybenexttime
Poland5623 Posts
And I never said that the US never killed its own people. But we're talking about different orders of magnitude. | ||
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Krikkitone
United States1451 Posts
On March 30 2017 17:03 LegalLord wrote: The government serves the people. Whether it does so effectively or not, it provides services for the benefit of the people. Even the shittiest and most self-serving ones. . No the people in the government serves themselves...always and forever (not necessarily just financial benefits, but also ideological benefits) The issue is if the government is structured in such a way that the best way for people in government to serve themselves is to "serve the people". There is some debate about what it means to "serve the people" (see Twilight Zone). But you should never assume "the government" is serving the people, unless you know that government is set up in such a way that it will (and you know the ways that it fails) | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On March 30 2017 22:46 warding wrote: What did the Soviets do better? Establishing a system in which education and healthcare were free and employment was essentially guaranteed. Kind of like what people like about Nordic welfare states, only on a larger scale in a much more complex political environment. Would have probably worked great with a stabler society and a more developed economy than what was available. Also did a very good job of promoting academics and academic ventures on a scale that exceeds the patience of most Westerners. I suppose we'll see how well the European integration project handles all the unpleasantries that those East Europeans are known for. We're in our first major stress test of the EU since it decided to expand eastward and it does seem to have taken some significant harm from it. Maybe in 20 years we'll hear about how unfair the Europeans treated the Poles as they continue to try to pretend that their national pride is worth a damn in the face of economic reality. Given that their government is perfectly happy to take hefty EU subsidies while running their mouths I think that their leadership at least gets it. | ||
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opisska
Poland8852 Posts
- Healthcare was free, but many procedures were available only in theory, upon a waiting list long enough for many to die beforehand or, most commonly, upon producing a sufficient bribe or having enough connections. - Education was free, but only for those deemed worthy by the party. Typical reason for refusing education were that your family comes from the wrong class, that someone in your family said something against the party at any moment in the past etc. - Employment was not only guaranteed, but it was compulsory, while enterprenourship was forbidden, so you had to work for a state-owned company. The party would decide, which jobs you are worthy, based on the same evaluation as for the education. - Academical research was officially promoted, but any ties to existing Western research were severely limited and even learning about Western research was difficult and a lot of fields that move fast were tragically behind. Research into anything like social sciences or even psychology was closely monitored so that the results follow the official doctrine. Comparing the half-functional state-planned corrupt-from-top-to-bottom system of the communist times to the Nordic welfare state is about as insulting as describing Russia as vodka and bears. | ||
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Plansix
United States60190 Posts
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On March 31 2017 04:19 opisska wrote: Shame it doesn't hold up when you look into the actual details. I don't know the exact situation in the USSR from more than hearsay and anecdotes Same as usual. | ||
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opisska
Poland8852 Posts
Should I rather pretend that everything I say is the immutable truth, as you do it? I prefer to comment on things I have first hand experience with and let the reader do the extrapolation. Surely, we were repeatedly told for forty years that everything is so much better in the USSR than in Czechoslovakia, so by that logic, our experience is irrelevant. Although it's then a little surprising that after those forty years of having Soviet experts here present and trying to implement their methods, things were getting worse, not better. But nah, that's probably just because we are naturally inferior to the Russian people and thus we just couldn't make it worse. What are your reputable sources for all that claims of things working well in the USSR, anyway? | ||
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Big J
Austria16289 Posts
From what I've heard they (in particular Stalin) pulled Russia from out of the gutter (causing millions of deaths due to "missplaning"). All of that despite Capitalism and Fascism trying their best to destroy it over and over again. | ||
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