The sad thing is that this obviously manufactured reality, combined with a long history of oppression and betrayal, has eroded any national pride among a significant slice of population. For years we survived in a state of having emotionally given up on the country, state of mild cognitive dissonance, seeing those who genuinely cared labeled by the authorities as 'foreign agents'.
To fight now is to fight against the system and against your fellow citizens, your friends and classmates imbued with nostalgia about the USSR by their parents.
And what will this fight be for?
Would you definitely see the Western system, that erodes the environment and feeds people microplastics in the name of maximising shareholder value, as the obvious "side of the light"[0]?
Once you have been betrayed enough times, can you really go all in and believe that whoever rises to power thanks to your fight will act in your interests (maintaining freedom and democracy, not abusing power) thereafter?
[0] I happen to believe that capitalism is fundamentally the best form of peaceful cooperation and abuses of it can be regulated, but I can't count the hours I spent in philosophical arguments making my point to lucid, independently thinking friends.
Nothing in politics is ever obvious. That is why we should shun leaders who rely on gut insticts, "common sense" and napkin math. The real world is messy. Answers are hard. Ideology must always remain an ideal, not a howto guidebook.
Dare we forget anytime soon the ~75 million fools who voted for a fool with autocratic tendencies, who's still giving Putin's ego lap dances this week. There's a pile of fools at Fox News being Putin apologists. Out of all the harm done by billionaires, Rupert Murdoch has been a worse menace to America than any of Putin's oligarchs. So yeah, it certainly remains very messy in the U.S. too.
It's not obvious in itself, that's why I have a barrage of supporting arguments. However, it takes time to understand and adopt this viewpoint, especially if many people around you are conditioned to believe in the opposite and consider capitalism as evil or evil-adjacent.
For your honour. So that you do not become a citizen of North Korea; so that you do not take part in <this>.
Honour systems developed independently in many chaotic/violent societies - not irrationally, but because they are _good_ systems, perhaps the only way to protect yourself from fates worse than death. Kamil Galeev explains it fairly well here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1498692916511924232.html
My honour is supposed to compel me to quit software, go back and start a bloody fight with my fellow citizens (on whose side the tanks and the truth, for all they know, are)? For a country I have no pride in, to facilitate the next dictator to trample on our blood up the throne if we succeed, while you watch with popcorn from your office?
I don't see the alternative though, it's not like Putin is a hardcore Leninist. There's no real ideology there, he doesn't care for the people. What's the attraction?
Maybe people don't like what is pejoratively called "globohomo", plenty of people in the West don't either, but having everything dictated by a mafia thug and his oil-rich cronies seems far, far worse. I don't get it.
Aleksandr Dugin's work is the philosophical/ideological cover for whatever Putin's doing. The gist is to create a conservative Eurasian state/alliance to combat Western liberalism.
I think that when a cooperative relationship is reduced market-trade (money in exchange for goods by well defined contract laws) it's at its minimum. for example, one may trade with a rival or somebody whom one deeply dislikes, hence you just give them the money and they give you your goods or services and that is it. no pleasantries no nothing, bare minimum.
The point is that this is a degraded form of cooperative relation. If things degrade even more that ceases to be cooperative and becomes enmity.
Capitalism isn't bad, but there must be constant pressure from market competition for it to work for the benefit of the society at large. What we see now with companies like Apple (wrt app store) and Facebook is that the US government protects their monopolistic status and doesn't let people compete with them. You can't build a Facebook app that's better than the official one because Facebook would sue you, and there unfortunately are laws that would protect them. In a saner legal system, Facebook would've been laughed out of the court building with this case.
99% of my friends consider the current Russian government completely dysfunctional and in dire need of replacement. And we would totally accept the Western values. USSR was a mistake and there needs to be a clean break from that ideology, no continuity.
90+% of americans think thier government is disfunctional. Russia is no great outlier there. The better question is what will those people put in its place the day after the revolution. Few have a reasonable answer beyond some other person they think is somehow above reproach.
Russians' patience is maddening really. Soviet generations would accept anything the government throws at them and say thanks. They view the government like the weather: you have to just accept it but don't you dare try to change or even understand anything about it. Many Soviet people have no idea who runs their city district for example. They don't know that they can have the government serve them and be accountable to them, so it naturally evolves away from serving them, instead serving its own interests. Like territorial expansion for its own sake.
Americans, from what I see, are quite different. There's actually fierce competition both on elections and when controversial bills are discussed. There are representatives that do legit represent people's interests (but also some that do not). US government has its own share of problems ("lobbying" aka legalized bribery being one), but it's still better than the dictatorship we have.
This is a nice tech bubble way of framing it but the oil, plastic, logging, chemical, and agricultural industries will be the ones that get us in the end, and heavy market competition would only make it happen faster.
> I happen to believe that capitalism is fundamentally the best form of peaceful cooperation and abuses of it can be regulated
I would not be so confident of that claim. I believe you're assessing that based on capitalism from the perspective of the predator states that exploit victim states. If there were no victim states, then capitalism would not work as well as it has for the predator states. Is everyone in the world better off with the current version of capitalism and the 'global order'? Steven Pinker may say yes but I'm not that convinced. The more I read about his research and some of the flaws like bias in the Yanomami analysis, the less I am convinced that things are better overall for everyone.
Are you talking about sweat shops in third world countries, some of which (not all) people choose to work at because they are such an economic improvement over any other jobs available to them?
Sorry to make an assumption about your argument, but you honestly didn't supply much.
I'm not sure what got downvoted, but your attitude in this comment makes me skeptical that you are approaching this with an open mind. Sharing a viewpoint is great. Ignoring people responding to it thoughtfully, not so much.
> your attitude in this comment makes me skeptical that you are approaching this with an open mind.
It makes me uncomfortable when a genuine viewpoint is downvoted. That plus your own snarky response above tells me the community here isn't able to have an open mind to respectfully discuss viewpoints and data that may contradict their mainstream narrative. In other words I'm skeptical of the intellectual maturity of yourself (not saying that as an insult, but to clarify my opinion) and this community in facilitating a discussion on this topic. I'd urge you to apply your skepticism and same intellectual rigor that you demand of my comment to your own. Thank you for your understanding.
I used a few trigger words like attitude, open mind, and ignoring. This was in response to a post which I truly didn't understand because it came off as directed at me and was shutting down the conversation based on a downvote I did not give. If you have a better explanation for it, I would love to hear it and apologize.
I get downvoted all the time, but it doesn't bother me if I get a cogent response because it usually leads to a good conversation.
I was going to respond to your comment, but every time I read it, it honestly upsets me a little more. I think you've read snark and ill intent where there was none, and you've insulted me and the community. I know you said it wasn't an insult, but calling me intellectual immature is quite uncalled for. You know nothing about me, and I frankly have every right to be offended by it.
I do want you to know I'm flagging your last comment because I don't think it belongs on HN. And at least know that I'm providing an explanation to you. I bear you no ill will, but I do hope you reconsider the way you are posting. I would posit that we both probably have quite a bit of growing to do.
I haven't heard of any systemic selling of organs; my understanding was the go-to for organs was illegally harvested ones out of certain authoritarian states. Where is this semi-voluntary sale of organs happening?
Exploiting each other in a directed way is kind of what capitalism is all about. If you ask me, organ harvesting should be illegal, and sex work should be regulated.
Anyway, I think you have an implied point. Care to state it?
When you say capitalism would not work as well for predator states, how are you defining capitalism? Free market? Is the alternative a centralized planned economy and price controls? Limitations, regulations and protections for developing nations?
That's the whole problem, isn't it. Coming up with and installing regulations every time the system is abused is no easier than inventing and installing a new system of governance.
When the system is sufficiently complex, you can't patch it.
The regulations are only necessary while there are rogue actors who are motivated to abuse the environment and others, exploring the limits of the law, following the letter but not the spirit, in order to secure themselves.
These people often grew up in adverse conditions (mentally or physically) and are coping with the resulting mental issues. Elon Musk with his South African upbringing and history of extreme bullying is one example; there are many more less obvious ones.
Once we improve the mental well-being of the population as a whole, there would be no incentive for one to ruin things for others for personal gain, and free market would be able to work as intended.
Even if it's one in ten thousand, the system still needs to be resilient to being exploited to malicious actors. Many cases of mental issues are caused by genetic factors and chance, not environment, to address your argument specifically.
And of course there's plenty of incentive to ruin things for others: having a monopoly on something is the best way to profit, and destroying competition helps a lot.
I'm guessing you're aware of this, but it's not so simple. There's no indication that after a baseline level of prosperity, greed and malice will simply disappear. While I agree that capitalism is the best system altogether which we have seen in action, I don't believe it is the best one.
My hope is that in the long run, technological progress will eliminate scarcicity, and we will see some combination of capitalism and communism to realize utopia.
I am aware it's not so simple, but I strongly believe that fundamentally greed and malice arise from mental issues and insecurities.
There is no incentive for a healthy mind that is calm, confident, and knows that others are the same, to maximise own security at the expense of the society.
I disagree. Greed and malice are just consequences of an unfair society.
The more the people know that rules don't apply to the powerful, then the more the people try to climb the social ladder to become the powerful.
Ideally, on a fair system, you are respected because of your skills or your contributions to society. On an unfair one, you are respected because you have a higher hierarchy than them and nothing more.
My concern with western people criticizing non-western and non-democratic countries is that, aside from some exceptions like South Korea, Costa Rica or Japan, unfair societies that adopted the western-style model of democratic government didn't become more fair in average. On the contrary, western societies got more unfair over time.
> then the more the people try to climb the social ladder to become the powerful.
This happens with people who are deeply insecure. They need to climb the ladder to secure themselves. Greed, power greed, malice comes from insecurity.
If you grow up in a world where everyone is respected and everyone feels secure, your parents didn't hurt you, you were not bullied at school, etc., then the only reason for you to strive to secure yourself at the expense of others is if you have grounds to believe others have such issues and will take advantage of you.
> Ideally, on a fair system, you are respected because of your skills or your contributions to society
No. You are respected. Period. Everyone is.
As an aside, capitalism does not make a statement what you should or should not be respected for. We are arguing about something else.
> This happens with people who are deeply insecure. They need to climb the ladder to secure themselves. Greed, power greed, malice comes from insecurity.
> If you grow up in a world where everyone is respected and everyone feels secure, your parents didn't hurt you, you were not bullied at school, etc., then the only reason for you to strive to secure yourself at the expense of others is if you have grounds to believe others have such issues and will take advantage of you.
The world is insecure by itself. Security is ensured through working institutions and organizations. And that, sadly, happens way more rarely than people in developed nations think.
In most countries in the world, the institutions are not strong, and the rule of law is relative. Specially to the rich and powerful.
In a society where institutions can't give you security, where there are no ladders to become respected in a legit and ethical way, then malice will be rampant. Because, in that context, that's the only way.
The world is not insecure by default. I can't even understand the semantics of that statement. We are talking about actors in human society.
Humans are insecure, not the world. Humans are insecure, because humans are hurt. (By other humans, who are trying to secure themselves because they were hurt once, and so on the cycle goes.)
The whole concept of the state (and the government as the current people representing it) is to give people a sense of belonging and heavily influences how society works in their territory.
What you label as unethical, insecure or malicious, may be normal life for a person living in, say, Middle East or Subsaharan Africa.
Not everyone is born into a context where they can thrive by themselves without hurting anyone else.
And we shouldn't assume that everyone has a legit path laid out for them so they can be succesful without being malicious.
In corrupt countries, either you become corrupt or you resign any possibility to achieve anything.
Thanks. You basically are restating my point. The world is full of circumstances in which people hurt other people, in a vicious circle where people grow up with insecurities and try to secure themselves at the expense of others.
In a free market that expresses itself as abusing the law, meaning regulations are necessary.
Subtract our issues that cause us to abuse our fellow humans and our environment, and capitalism is the way to peacefully coexist while keeping making progress.
> This happens with people who are deeply insecure.
I hugely disagree here. You can feel insecure and try to better yourself. Alternatively, i've seen very secure people (financially at least) being at the apex of self-justifying greed. The number of people who try to buy a conscience or justify "their" spot in this world by whichever myth they suscribe to is way too high. Way too high.
You are looking at the topmost layer and missing most of my point. Extreme financial security, especially self-made, is often compensating for insecurity.
> As an aside, capitalism does not make a statement what you should or should not be respected for. We are arguing about something else.
Yeah, but some people think that socialist countries are unfair only because they are socialist. They believe that turning those countries into liberal democracies will make those countries more fair.
And Russia is the perfect example of why that doesn't happen.
I believe there is no example of a socialist country that is not also a de-facto dictatorship, and I believe if there is a rule by a minority with no democratic election process then it is indeed unfair.
The nordic countries are though? I'd say i would consider any country were the state expenditure account for more than 50% of GDP socialist. And any company where the workers own more than 50% of the share communist (those exist). Unless we have different definition?
Edit: I'm not opposing socialism to capitalism though. For me capitalism is that the capital own the means of production, aka: more than 50% of the shares belong to investors, not workers.
Yes, we have different definitions. I meant capitalism in the most layperson's definition: a system where you sell something and I buy something from you, then you take that money and go to the milkman and buy yourself cheese. As opposed to a system where people work for some fixed minority, and then that fixed minority distributes the outcome across everybody. (Of course, keeping the bigger chunk to itself.)
Absolutely. "best so far" != "best there can ever be". Western liberal capitalism is heavily flawed, it's just marginally better than the alternatives currently in existance and therefore the best starting point to build an even better one.
Yeah, I rejected all these lies being a Russian, I thought it was for stupid people, but for a couple of years I started to notice that sometimes roles reversed. Just like the meme "In Soviet Russia..." We are not doing constructive things, while explaining failures by lies, no. We are constructing lies, without any thought of real constructive things. It was funny. But then Putin invaded Ukraine and there are no more fun. They are really believed their own lies. In hindsight it was predictable: the reversal of roles is a sign of systemic failure, of priorities of system shifting from reality to lies. And I had thought that it would end in a lot of fun, some spectacular failure of the whole system. But I didn't thought that others can be hurt, not on this scale at least. I thought about Russians only and we deserve some spectacular failure, to stop thinking imperial thoughts, to stop believing bullshit.
I'm so sorry it turned so bad for Ukrainians.
THOU SHALL NOT KILL.
CLAY OF MY CLAY.
SHAME.
SORROW.
I dig into rational reasoning and I like long lists of fallacies, but I never have read anything like what Putin is doing. In some sense it reminds me of "Cobra Effect" and "Goodhart's law": when you measure success based on a hindsight plausibility of lies telling about success or failure, then there will be no more successes, just lies about them. They were thinking only about what is can be stowed by propaganda. And anything that could be is fine.
But "Goodhart's law" doesn't catch the scale of a stupidity, it doesn't catch the idea of creating an informational bubble, the very alternative reality, and then willingly going to live there. I think we need to invent new fallacy and call it "Putin's fallacy". Or maybe "Putin's idiocy" would be better.
Manufactured realities believed by large groups of people are definitely a thing at the moment, and not just in Russia.
Another example is in the USA where, reportedly, 40% of people don't believe Biden won the 2020 election despite the vast number of lawsuits and recounts that have occurred (source for the 40% number https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/america-bide...)
So, what's a charitable interpretation of that? For five straight years, we were bombarded with how awful it is that someone could be so extreme and racist, then we elected a card-carrying KKK member into office? Seems implausible.
That 40% of people spent decades being given the false choice between big-government shill D and big government shill R. They finally were given a real alternative, so they trusted him. He told them that 2020 was a manufactured win by a big government shill D, just like the last 15 elections. Why wouldn't they believe him?
You ask them to trust the experts. Well, he supplied a lot of experts to back him up. You ask them to trust YOUR experts. If you bothered to ask them, they'd ask you to trust theirs.
Normally the way we fix these things is have discussions and try to understand each other. That, apparently, is no longer on the table.
Instead we get veiled "the other guys are idiots."
I don't think it's intellectual idiocy at fault here. I actually think it's emotional immaturity and incomplete theory of mind.
When I was younger, conspiracy theories seemed quite plausible. Perhaps I was the only one who saw the truth, and perhaps everyone was aligned on keeping certain secrets.
Now that I'm older, I realize people are people, and I'm not very different. Most of us are not good at keeping secrets, and all of us are pattern finding machines, seven when the pattern is not there.
After assuming incompetence instead of massive and applying Occam's razor, the world all still makes sense. It's a simple duck that looks like an elaborately constructed rabbit.
> The law they passed initially lowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped tax increases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019.
by 2027, the over $75k earners will represent far more than 65% of tax payers. even at ordinary inflation, which is very unlikely going to remain as "low" as for the last 5y.
interesting struggle ahead.
Thanks for posting some sources. it's fascinating.
A charitable reading of both Putin and Trump fans could be that both are in the thrall of small but immensely wealthy groups who need some level of legitamacy from the masses. And while it is cheaper and easier overall to just make peoples lives better, for that powerful minority they can make themselves much, much wealthier by feeding propaganda to their people.
So they did and do.
And lots of people helped them, for lots of different reasons, but primarily because people paid them to or because they got conned by the people getting paid to con them.
Does that make the Russian and American public dumb? I don't think so, but they're definately misinformed about reality and contributing to their own problems (up to and including death) as a result.
You can't even enjoy people getting caught out by their own propaganda (like Trump getting booed for saying vaccines work) because it basically signals that even they have lost any semblence of control over where things are going and the horrible monster they created.
Now we have a mob of angry, scared people who don't trust politicians, media, science or experts (because powerful groups attacked and undermined all of these) and they're leading the way.
Reading the article, it’s hard to not see the parallels to actual Republican State Governments and politicians today:
> The alternative reality was nothing but a crooked mirror of the living public sphere, filled with clowns in the place of politicians, cheap imitations instead of functioning social welfare organizations, and propagandists instead of journalists and analysts. It was easy enough to cope; you could just never vote for the clown, never read the fake pundits [...]. They were nothing but terrible actors performing other people’s scripts — tools in a crude political game.
There is an entire political party in the US that’s following this exact playbook. The difference with the GOP has simply been bringing back election manipulation schemes that were outlawed by the Voting Rights act to hold on to political power while claiming to be democratic.
I mean Hilary Clinton said, as recently as 2019 that Trump was not a "legitimate president". And this is someone who was the Democrat candidate for US president.
So let's not pretend both sides don't pretty much say whatever they want, lies included, to score political points.
Hilary went off the rails after losing a sure bet, and she's even less popular now than she was during that election. She also is a former candidate, which is incredibly different from a former president.
Stupid comments aside, she didn't contest the results or encourage people to violently protest after she lost.
But yes, you can draw parallels to just about anything if you really want to.
> I mean Hilary Clinton said, as recently as 2019 that Trump was not a "legitimate president". And this is someone who was the Democrat candidate for US president.
She accepted the results of the Presidential election. Not the same; don’t both sides this.
Do you have references for there being far more evidence of fraud than against it in the US 2020 presidential election? From what I've seen there have been a large number of recounts and reviews in battleground states, including recounts carried out by the republican party, none of which have found evidence of substantial fraud.
Territorial expansion is part of Russian nationalism. Putin may get away with this, because nationalists support this cause. On the left it's Soviet nostalgia, on the right Imperial White Russia.
There is people on left [1] and right within Russia who views this as western war against Russia. They view Ukraine as part of Russia, and thus west is waging war on Russia.
Danger is, if Putin can portray this as west vs Russia, he could start enlisting people from far-left and far-right. That army would be quiet different in it's morale than the first dumbfound army he sent which thought they were going to exercises.
There are more areas, such as parts of Kazakhstan which could be targets, Russian ambassador has already warned them to not stage exercises with NATO. [2]
This is not about internet trolls, read about Sergei Udaltsov [1] for instance.
He was once seen as charismatic leader of somewhat sane part of leftists in Russia. If he is now willing to think this is war between west and Russia then it will be huge trouble.
His influence cannot be overestimated, if man like him starts to agitate to join Russian military to fight west, we don't know what we will see.
And it is. So is Transcarpathia (Zakarpattia Oblast) part of Hungary, and other parts or Ukraine that should belong to Romania and even some to Poland.
Their current borders are an accident that should have long been solved diplomatically, but alas here we are.
>Danger is, if Putin can portray this as west vs Russia, he could start enlisting people from far-left and far-right.
The danger was these maneuvers that even in the Bush era, people recognized they would be deemed unacceptable by Russia.
And the whole handling of the relations with Ukraine since the events of 2014.
This situation is far more complex than "Kremlin man bad".
Unfortunately the people who will pay for these are not diplomats or the big interests that played this situation as a game, it will be the average Ukrainian who see their country torn apart, and in a lesser extent the average Russian, severely affected by sanctions.
And who gets to decide which moment in time should be taken as reference for the "true" borders? Because borders in Europe changed so much and so many tomes over history, that pretty much everybody can make territorial claims about everybody else and not be totally wrong. I wish I was exaggerating.
Parent post is prime example of this nationalism. Changing borders in Europe (or elsewhere) is very dangerous. Even in central asia, there is hints of separatism in many small areas, fuelling those fires will lead to mass graves.
If you look at the map in Europe, many of them make no sense, if you travel in Europe many people tell you weird feuds with their neighbors. Even between Polish and Ukrainian nationalists there have been massacres and mass graves, these memories still exist between each other.
If we allow changing borders based on history books, blood will be spilled way more. Unfortunately the genie might be out of bottle, because this war will be very long one.
cause the West is clean from manufacturing reality ? LOL
For 2 years the Western was under a massive and unprecedented fake reality with a massive fake pandemia narrative, and dramatic consequences leading to major loss of freedom of mouvement, major economical losses and lot of preventable death. But for thoses who surender to this fake narrative they are fully compliant with mass medai narrative about Russia.
Western world is going down to third world status but still try to lead the world with senile president, unelected influencers leading all kind of lobbying institution representing privates interests. But Russia is living in a fake reality.
Dude When you born with a penis the reality is that you are a Male. Whatever is your nevrosis and fake reality you try to build inside your brain.
If you cannot see that Western world is under heavy fake reality you are insane.
And the most radical and subversive thing you can do today to fight this issue is to enter a church.
And all -1 this post will get will be a livivg proof of how right i am :)
> This “reality” had seemed so crudely constructed that it was impossible to imagine anyone in charge (especially those who created it) to believe it seriously. As it turns out, however, somebody does believe it. His name is Vladimir Putin.
I may be incorrect but I feel that’s what Adam Curtis is trying to describe with his documentaries. I’m thinking of “HyperNormalization”, “Century of the self”, and “Can’t get you out of my head”. For the past few month as I tried to follow Russia-Ukraine developments I found myself thinking about Curtis work a lot.
> meduza is considered a foreign agent in Russia. I would take it's words with grain of salt
Given the Russian government has labeled numerous foreign journalists, news organisations, and even Nobel peace prize winners as foreign agents, I'm not sure it's Meduza's word we should be taking with a grain of salt.
Obama, the same person who bombed kids with drones is a Nobel peace prize winner[1], so I wouldn't go around brandishing that as a status symbol. There is definitely an element of not understanding a place and talking about it in Western media in a negative manner. Be it even China or India.
if the accused people in fact are, sure. and surely too many terrible people in fact deserve the accusation, but many don't, too many were/are characterised as such purely because they disagree publicly with official views on certain events.
If Snowden is some "terrible people" then ok I'm also a bad one and deserve the conspiracy theorist hat. Except that I disagree with the government's characterisation of Snowden (in his case danger for the nation) hence even also risk to be called something in the list, whatever fit my profile best.
When US government starts an official register of "terrorists", adding to it literally everyone who does not agree with its official position, we can talk about the word being similar to "foreign agent".
To fight now is to fight against the system and against your fellow citizens, your friends and classmates imbued with nostalgia about the USSR by their parents.
And what will this fight be for?
Would you definitely see the Western system, that erodes the environment and feeds people microplastics in the name of maximising shareholder value, as the obvious "side of the light"[0]?
Once you have been betrayed enough times, can you really go all in and believe that whoever rises to power thanks to your fight will act in your interests (maintaining freedom and democracy, not abusing power) thereafter?
[0] I happen to believe that capitalism is fundamentally the best form of peaceful cooperation and abuses of it can be regulated, but I can't count the hours I spent in philosophical arguments making my point to lucid, independently thinking friends.