teleoplexy
2mo 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
2mo 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
3mo ago
I'd be grateful if you could spell out which social crisis you are thinking about.
teleoplexy
3mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
5mo 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
5mo ago
Who are the people whose preference is "legal immigratns > illegal immigrants > fewer/no immigrants"?
teleoplexy
7mo ago
The brain drain impact becomes more severe with time. The longer the war, the harder it is to rebuild because emigrants start to settle down in their host countries and there's less reason for them to return. Anecdotally, 2 years ago my programmer friend and his wife planned to go back after the war ends and now they are looking to buy a house and start a family here in Canada.
teleoplexy
7mo ago
Immigrating with their boyfriends/husbands who are evading the draft. The same is happening in Canada, many European countries (especially Cyprus), Thailand.
You know what raises the status of men? Fighting in wars. It's no secret that women love men in uniform. And many will confess to being aroused by male violence. For better or worse, violence raises male status.
That's what the Russian government has been betting on long term. They plan to introduce a project called "Time of Heroes" to provide additional training for the veterans and "make them the new elite". The plan is to insert the veterans as educators, allow them to become government officials.
There was a project like this called "School of Governors" which initially aimed to create new cadre for leading the whole regions of Russia, which, IMO, wasn't successful because most of the participants of the school already had connections. It kind of legitimizes the governor positions of the people who graduated it but the participants were specifically handpicked to participate in the program. Kirienko was the organizer and from my understanding "Time of Heroes" is going to follow the same template.
So, in addition to the natural affinity towards the men in the uniform, the government is also planning to boost their attractiveness artificially via increasing their social status. I have reasons to doubt that the program will be successful due to the previous implementations being faulty, but in general I think you hit the nail on the head in this regard.
I am Russian, so I can theorize/speculate about Russia and I'm not that in tune with the trends in Ukraine. All that said, commenting on your thesis in general, outside of the objective measures taken to increase the fertility (like subsidies) and subjective status increase of men (a quick glance through the studies didn't produce anything conclusive about the attractiveness of the males in the uniform), I don't think we can definitively conclude that the conditions in Russia and Ukraine will be conducive to increasing fertility in general. The main reason, in my opinion, is the current cultural environment, which might act as a counterbalance to the conditions you describe. Short theses before I go back to work:
- More and more over the years, liberalism has been a dominant trend amongst the most fertile population, especially amongst women. The liberal women see the participation in a war as a negative trait rather than the positive.
- The main task of the government is to bring up the new generation in a patriotic way so that it can counteract the dominant liberal cultural trend among millenials and zoomers. I project this to be the generation alpha rather than zoomers, although I may be wrong. If I am right, it might be a little bit too late for the regime as it hinges on a whim of a single aging ruler.
- The government has also been failing on the cultural front. They try to create the media which would be appealing to millenial and zoomer generations but they haven't succeeded yet. To an extent, the current media output is definitely not patriotic and is liberal adjacent in its values.
- Russian liberals have been aggressively importing and adopting western culture war issues (e.g. feminism, trans rights, cancel culture).
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.
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