>Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative coverage of Russia by the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments. I can drive through the Appalachians or towns in the South or Detroit and describe an "America Left Behind"- but we all know that those places do not represent the USA as a whole.
But... This is not about a cherry-picked stagnant area, this is about a main highway between Russia's two largest cities. It seems to be woefully neglected, while facilities used by Putin are done up to @#$%-the-expense standard. This is about the leadership of the country gone morally astray, and not caring about who sees it.
> Russia has problems everyone knows that, ...
Oh well, that's allright then. No point actually doing something.
Ever here the Bob Dylan song The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll? It's about a 1963 incident when a white Maryland farmer named William Zantzinger got drunk and started harassing a middle-aged black barmaid and hitting her with a cane. She collapsed and died and he got a six month prison term. In the early 90s Zantzinger went to jail again - this time for charging rent on shacks that were actually owned by the local government. These shacks didn't have running water and they were located 30 miles down the road from Washington, D.C.
Obviously the United States is not Russia and our leaders aren't kleptocrats. But they have been willing to ignore abject poverty for generations. I suspect that the dismissive, contemptuous attitude that many middle and upper class Americans have towards, say, the inner cities, would not be unfamiliar in Moscow or St. Petersburg.
'Willing to ignore abject poverty' was a part of conservative ideology which states that people must be directly responsible before God, not government, and government is not in place to support the people. This was the better part of conservative ideology as i see you, and times when it was dominant on U.S. political landscape were the best times in U.S. history.
> this is about a main highway between Russia's two largest cities
Go ahead and drive around in Brooklyn or NYC, the roads are much worse compared to Russian highway or Moscow streets, also it's not like in US where the most goods travel by highways, in Russia goods travel by trains, so there is not as much need in road highway compared to US.
Also I have no idea what does the gypsy wedding has to do with Russia? Gypsies have the same wedding rules everywhere they live..
Most goods in the US travel by train. Even more so than Europe. It's the main reason why passenger rail in the US is shit. Rail companies make more per mile transporting freight than they do passengers so freight gets priority.
I understand.
Africa(-Americans) & Oakland can almost never catch a break either... trying to explain the imbalance is an uphill battle. If you only got your world-view from western-TV, you'd think America is paradise with perfect people, aside from blacks & mexicans. Everyone outside of it are savages not worthy of respect or consideration; perhaps a bit of pity though...
> If you only got your world-view from western-TV, you'd think America is paradise with perfect people, aside from blacks & mexicans.
That's not the view of the US I get from Spanish news: there's a /lot/ of coverage of gun crime, obesity, etc. This is "balanced" by the amount of US TV shows that are imported, of course.
The US gets a lot of bad press here. Obesity, corruption, disfunctional government, inequality, surveillance, religion, puritanism, gay hate, gun violence etc are much more in the focus in the news about the US than the positive sides of the US are.
Most Norwegians thinks of the US as this slightly weird, ignorant country that believes it's still the best at everything and doesn't bother with the rest of the world.
> Most Norwegians thinks of the US as this slightly weird, ignorant country that believes it's still the best at everything and doesn't bother with the rest of the world.
Most Canadians think the same. Visiting the US several times, having family that lives there and listening to Bloomberg radio every morning and afternoon during my commute reinforces that opinion...
While I have no doubt the US has some benefits (high pay in certain industries), overall it seems like a strange, ignorant, backwards place. The fact that the Republicans have shut down the government to block health care (which is pretty much universally regarded as a good thing) makes it seem even more backwards (especially when watching a protest on TV in which someone was waving a confederate flag in front of the White House...).
Of course 'health care' is a good thing, that's a fairly meaningless platitude. This particular implementation being good or bad has yet to be determined. I personally don't find the ACA to be a 'good' system, but I wish they would just shut up and let it succeed or fail in production.
Also, a large part of why you have cheap healthcare and access to lots of drugs because we paid the cost to research and make them. With the ACA, a lot of that (potentially) goes away, though from the look of the early prices it seems the cost of healthcare has gone up for most, and near free for some, meaning the healthcare industry still gets massive profits. I'm wondering if it was good for the rest of the world to have our healthcare system be so expensive.
Hopefully not, I'm pretty tired of being terrified of becoming sick enough to need medical care.
> Also, a large part of why you have cheap healthcare and access to lots of drugs because we paid the cost to research and make them.
Not entirely sure about that. It seems like many (most?) of the 'important' drugs worldwide were either developed by educational institutions or laboratories (some belonging to corporations) from a wide variety of countries, not just the US.
The only reason it is currently profitable to make drugs at all (and the reason we've seen research in so many) is that US consumers will buy them at market rate with IP protection, i.e., too expensive for most places. If we didn't exist as that profit center, many would not have been put through clinical trials and brought to market.
I'm scared to get into healthcare debate, but I will say that while I understand the importance of clinical trials, if there wasn't any.... then the drugs would just be brought to market regardless even if it means people die. In Nigeria; even just in ChinaTown San Francisco, you can get some questionable origins drugs. But indeed, all bets are off when you take that stuff. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, maybe DOOM! Not saying this is a good thing, but the drug market would continue without USA, IMHO.
It does not look like Russia tries really hard to do something positive recently. There are many smart and interesting people in Russia or from Russia (I speak about culture and science) but they are only small part of Russia (I don't even speak about culture and science people who work for evil side). Putin, FSB and oligarchs is Russia.
IMHO Western media could be even more negative but that's most probably because I'm from one of Baltic states and we really have got (and still are getting) a lot of injustice from Russia.
> a main highway between Russia's two largest cities
It is not.
Moscow and St. Petersburg are 900 km apart and they never had a highway between them. Instead it's a patchwork of provincial roads most of the way. He could've chosen any city 900 km away from Moscow and his cherry-picked story would've stayed absolutely the same.
But... This is not about a cherry-picked stagnant area, this is about a main highway between Russia's two largest cities. It seems to be woefully neglected, while facilities used by Putin are done up to @#$%-the-expense standard. This is about the leadership of the country gone morally astray, and not caring about who sees it.
> Russia has problems everyone knows that, ...
Oh well, that's allright then. No point actually doing something.