Botond173
3mo ago
It depends. What level of nuance is warranted in your view with regard to social policy? Would you say that American society practiced totalitarian levels of paternalism /social control over blacks before the Civil Rights Movement, relative to its treatment of whites? What knobs do you regard as reasonable?
Botond173
3mo ago
I've read a theory by one of the commenters on Steve Sailer's blog that the unprecedented economic prosperity between 1945-73 in the US had the effect of large masses of impulsive, low-IQ people with high time preference from the rural areas of the South and the Midwest moving to Great Migration cities to work in manufacturing (heavy industry in particular). After the oil shocks, stagflation and deindustrialization, it was mostly these people and their descendants who were hit hard, and had no practical means of moving away and getting re-trained to do other things, so they're just stuck there in their misery.
Botond173
3mo ago
The opioid epidemic has been going on for something like two decades already though.
Botond173
3mo ago
I don't think I did. You stated:
With those revolutions kicking off its impossible for me to imagine there SSR’s not following suit.
"SSR" is an abbreviation for a member state / republic of the USSR. And there's no evidence that they followed suit, with the exception of the Baltic states.
Botond173
3mo ago
I was commenting on the SSRs of the USSR, not the other Warsaw Pact / COMECON member states.
Botond173
3mo ago
It's the 'new elections' part that may have a cascading effect resulting in civil war in the end, with Islamist groups active in the political field, for example.
Botond173
3mo ago
Every day on my drive home I pass a large banner advertising temp tags from Virginia. This is an illegal service, intended to circumvent the costs of registering a car and getting insurance in Maryland, or at least getting around having a suspended license, or no license.
Is this also happening because car insurance is cheaper or more loosely regulated in Virginia? Or is there something else also at play here?
Botond173
3mo ago
It's no surprise that this is what her campaign is arguing now, when Trump is her opponent and the election is coming up. But this is rather likely to change after (and if, although I doubt it's a big if) she assumes office. The narrative will then change.
Botond173
3mo ago
I'll nitpick that Gorby in fact wanted to reduce the Soviet Army's manpower, but this was actually happening simultaneously with the introduction of various types of new equipment, which meant an increase in military spending. Most of the Russian military tech that is in service today is derived from types that were introduced in this era. This shouldn't have been a problem in itself, as it is normal to replace equipment that is obsolete and rusting away, but it was happening at a time of economic collapse.
Botond173
3mo ago
As far as I know, the foreign investments that accompanied Deng's economic reforms mostly came from enterprises in Taiwan, Hongkong, Indonesia etc. that were owned by local Chinese. American investments started happening much later. It's not like nobody was going to invest in the USSR.
Botond173
3mo ago
had no solution for the country's problems other than continuing the stagnation
I'd say that has been a usual characteristics of many regimes throughout history, and yet most of them didn't crumble in spectacular fashion as the USSR did as a result of Gorby's decisions. Also, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos should have all collapsed a long time ago according to your logic, and yet they didn't. Burma and the countries of post-Soviet Central Asia aren't that different either.
demographic cliff, uncompetitive industries, and the ruling elite's lack of faith in its own ideology
Again, none of these are that uncommon anywhere.
Botond173
3mo ago
You can be assured that there was not one higher-level officer anywhere in the Soviet armed forces willing to start shooting in order to keep the Warsaw Pact / COMECON together in 1989.
Botond173
3mo ago
But none of this means that the USSR couldn't still exist.
Regarding the part on independence, let's be more precise. Out of all SSRs, it was the three small Baltic ones which had significant independence movements, and this happened years after Gorbachev created an atmosphere where political dissent was normalized. He wasn't willing to do any bloodshed to keep the USSR together indeed, at least not to an impactful degree, precisely because his entire political line hinged on the assumption that he needed to capture the West's goodwill in order to have his reforms implemented and secure foreign loans, and he believed this all could only work without bloodshed. Outside the Baltics, the fact was that independence movements were rather weak or nonexistent, even in Ukraine, for that matter.
Botond173
3mo ago
It depends on how we define the word.
In the case of the USA, if we define 'system' as 'the political structure founded after the War of Independence and the constitution's ratification', then I'd say it's indeed not discredited by any class other than left-wing activists and their sympathizers who see it as implicitly white supremacist and classist. But if we define it as 'the Global American Empire's globohomo Deep State as it exists in 2024', the situation is pretty much the opposite. On a related note, I'd refer to this comment of @RenOS as a good description of the overall loss of societal trust in the US.
The USSR, on the other hand, did not have such political longevity, so the system meant 'socialism in one country, as founded by Stalin', and I can largely agree with your assessment, although I think the idea that the system discredited itself was the main driving force behind Gorbachev's popularity, for the short time it lasted, that is.
Botond173
3mo ago
I was thinking about posting it in the small-scale questions thread for this very reason, but then realized that it's a culture war issue as a whole. I also thought that spelling it all out in detail would narrow the discussion down too much and derail it at the start. But I'll take more care next time.
Botond173
3mo ago
Obama was relatively young, but I think it was already observable back during his double term that the political class in general is unwilling to let people of his age or younger to enter electoral politics as candidates. I can only assume that such politicians are generally seen as too radical and too likely to screw up in elections, and maybe the entire Democratic Party become too conceited after Obama's win to recruit and train younger cadres who can appeal to the normies. Either way, I think that era didn't start in 2016 or even 2008.
Botond173
3mo ago
See my reply to @stuckinbathroom below.
Botond173
3mo ago
The USSR would probably still exist without Gorbachev's efforts to reform it.
I'd say the mirroring only applies with regard to rates of drug abuse and alcoholism.
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