From Gerard Toal and John O’Loughlin in The Washington Post, who have in general done some very useful and objective (at least, quantitative) work on geopolitical attitudes in Russia’s Near Abroad over the years.
Here is the key observation:
Overall, Belarusians in early 2020 appear content with their country’s slightly pro-Russian geopolitical position. The median value (7) on the scale does not change from the perceived actual placement (where Belarus is) to the preferred one (where Belarus should be). As some moved their preference to the West, an equal number wanted to link their country closer to Russia. What these numbers disguise, however, is a generational divide. Of the sample aged 18 to 40, 50.4 percent want to move toward the West on the scale and 23.3 percent want to move toward Russia. But for the over-60 sample, 14.7 percent want to move toward the West and 62.0 percent want to move Russia’s way on the geopolitical scale.
While allowances may be made for youngsters drifting towards more conservative positions with age, the divide is surely far too stark for that effect being canceled out by the younger cohorts being much more Occidentophile. This suggests that the opportunity for the (smooth) reunification of the Russian and White Russian people is time-limited by boomer lifespans (unless other factors, such as total Western soft power collapse, intervene in the meantime). And that settling for “conserving” the status quo would be a mistake, at least from the perspective of long-term Russian national interests.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Millennials suck. They are a plague on the Earth even worse than boomers. I’m sorry but, I’ve never seen a generation more zombie-like, they support gay marriage, they support BLM, they support immigration, whatever the System tells them to do, they support. And yet they think that they are “rebels”, somehow, even if they support exactly the same things that the giant corporations do.
Also, what about this? Another CIA/Mossad/German ploy?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53871617
This is very weird:
“Cinema for Peace”? How come they have money for that, and what does it have to do with cinema, except for it being probably some kind of fictional production involved?
Someone should do a post about German — or (((German?))) — NGOs, they are behind a lot of evil in Europe right now, they are also behind the flooding of Italy with nig, er, African refugees.
Millennial
s are different in different countries. Eastern European millennials are nationalist and patriots.The recent hostility towards Russia is not caused by homosexuality or mass immigration but with Russia slide back to Stalinism.
Even if Russia`s current flirt with WW II is fake to ramp up patriotism, then in longer perspective it will end up like in the West. After WW II Nazi bashing was beneficial to make everybody feel good about war. But as we now know, this self invented ghost now taking entire Western Civilization down.
Putin probably thinks that he can keep those people with Stalin pictures and in WW II uniforms in line but lot of Eastern Europeans think that Putin is making now the same mistake what West post WW II leaders did, when they opened hell`s gate.
What the Belorussian youth should think, when they see such parades.
https://miro.medium.com/max/1023/1*hFSFHN2DuoqidkogHyHrJA.jpeg
I agree when it comes to Western millennials. They are, to use a term, very collectivistic, not really that different from Mao’s Red Guards or the young pioneers. I am very interested in how such a generation came about and what they will be as elders but I think I have a good idea. As elders, they will be like the old Soviet generation, talking fondly about the good old days.
Eastern Millennials however are different. They are, to put it mildly, more conservative then their Western counterparts. However there is still a liberal impetus there, as we saw in the polish elections. The further east you go, the more desire for liberalism starts to grow.
If I’m being honest, I think the Millennials are a lost cause. Although still small in number, I’m noticing that it’s the Zoomers starting to reflect more right wing values and I am presuming generation alpha will start to do the same as time goes on.
Each generation reflects the values that were instilled in them by their education and the prevailing social norms in their youth. Unless the society in question is breaking down, because then it’s more difficult for education or society to do so.
I personally doubt that zoomers are going to be any better than the ones preceding them.
Yup. Soyid roaches. The generations that’s above 22 and below boomer age (so gen x too) are mostly such brainwashed retards that the boomer-zoomer coalition should just use them as slaves or something. No practical use for anyone.
As much as zoomers appear cringe and brainwashed, they’re infinitely more beligerent and based
To what extent is Lukashenko associated with Russia in the eyes of young Belarussians? If the perceived link is strong the game may already be over, long-term. They will remember as the Boomers die off.
Is there any data on what those pro-Western younger Belarussians see in “the West”? From my perspective this enthusiasm seems distinctly odd, since the EU is clearly in a major crisis and might eventually break apart, given the acrimony and resentment between northern and southern EU countries. And the situation with demographics and immigration in all of Western Europe is of course extremely bleak. Is none of that even registered in Belarus, is “the West” for them just the Visegrad countries?
Eastern Europeans aren’t conservative. They have the lowest birthrates in Europe, and they’ve been that low for 30 years now. Your women are insufferable bulldykes and frigid self-absorbed careerists, and prostitutes, just like women in the West are.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Emma_Lodato/publication/249995018/figure/fig6/AS:614009216704535@1523402613891/4-Fertility-rates-of-Eastern-European-countries-in-comparison-to-the-average-of-the.png
The fertility rate is the only true measurement of how conservative a country is. Being against gay marriage is a form of virtue signalling among “conservatives”. It is a surrogate issue that no normal person cares or thinks about. Nobody cares about gay marriage, and the obsessive focus on it (and also transgenderism) by Eastern European nationalists just makes it look like there is a national paranoia in Eastern countries about LGBTQ; ostensibly because there undeniably more homo-erotic energy and transgenderism in the non-Western world, than there is in the USA and Western Europe. Latin Americans and Asians are natural M-to-F transsexuals. This is the hard truth that is going to make you squirm in your chair but you know that it is true and your cowardly attacking LGBTQ, and refusal to address your useless whore women, just reveals your own impotent transsexualism and subhumanity without admission.
Show me one Eastern/Central European country with above replacement fertility. You can’t do it. Orban couldn’t do it, and neither could Putin, despite all his efforts to bring more Muslims from former SSR states to Russia.
There is no more deviant and anti-conservative condition than low national fertility. It makes LGBTQ look good by comparison. Until your country has raised its fertility above replacement, there are no conservatives there. And your societies are headed in exactly the same trajectory as the West and East Asia for that reason. Until you reverse this trend you “conservatives” are just LARPing little boys complaining about surrogate issues and virtue signalling, every bit as much as Leftists. You are just a bunch if bullshitters and your agendas are so fake and gay that you could be considered LGBTQ yourselves.
Presumably, Visegrád borders them and many of them or their friends/relatives work there, so this is much more of a model. Leftist progressives can like Germany but regular people have Visegrád to emulate. This can make pro-Western support widespread. Russia offers Soviet nostalgia. It’s not progressive, nor are wages competitive with Poland’s. There is only Orthodoxy.
The problem is hardly limited to Germany:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-8-2019-0239_EN.html
This resolution was adopted by the votes of 535 of then 751 members of the EU parliament (only 80 voted against, rest abstained or were absent).
Anyway, I understand that something like this must seem remote and irrelevant to many people in Eastern Europe, but even apart from that, is something like the terrible youth unemployment in Southern Europe not noticed at all? I really don’t understand this enthusiasm for closer ties to “the West”.
People want and need liberty. That’s natural. Thats why they are pro-EU, pro-West, pro-America. Ofc there are problems in the West, and unfortunately there are authoritarian tendencies now, I would say coming from the Left to a large degree, also a lot of self-doubt, but still western societies are vastly superior to others because they are build on universal human values. Tyrants and shitty dictators are incapable to understand that. Regular people should know better, especially regular people who are greatest victims of lack of liberty, lack of rule of law and other totalitarian stupidity.
That’s why they should be put in a situation where their preference doesn’t signify, as God intended.
The Belarussians view the EU the same way the Africans do – a shambling corpse to be plundered for gibs while the gibsing is good.
Actually sounds a lot like boomers, too. They thought they were being subversive and rebellious in the 60s even though multiple institutions like academia and media were fully behind them, not to mention elements of government bureaucracy and corporations that knew how to make a quick buck on them (the Rolling Stones weren’t on an indie label until they were big enough to make their own).
AK seems to agree with you, except with one big difference. Whereas you point to the Visegrad group as a model for Belarusian youth to strive towards in the future, Karlin envisions some sort of a “reunification” with Russia as the correct response, the sooner the better. A black and white difference of opinion, you may not have noticed.
Young Belarusians (and Ukrainians, and Eastern Europeans in general) favor the West over Russia because the West is cool and Russia is not cool. The West is the land of “freedom” as young people define it: partying, drugs, sex.
I had a Ukrainian describe Euromaidan to me in this fashion (paraphrasing): “the West was offering nightclubs and dancing. Russia offered supply lines and trucks.” No young person ever got hot and bothered over supply lines.
It’s a classic imperial maneuver: the side that offers people the chance to engage in hedonism always wins. The British used opium, the U.S. uses gay sex. Nobody in history has managed to figure out a way to counter this. Russia and China can resist within their own borders but they can’t export their models to other countries; I suppose China could try by assisting other countries in setting up social credit systems, but social credit is so innately tied to the Chinese mentality that its usefulness in other cultures is limited (have fun implementing social credit in Latin America, a region known for being ungovernable).
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Poland is much closer and more similar.
Young people have an optimism bias and want prosperity. Young Belarusians are not looking at Ukraine and think we need daddy Lukashenka and his corrupt KGB siloviki to keep us safe from the danger of crisis, they look at the Baltics and Poland and see they reached South European levels of prosperity and they want that for themselves.
That’s not something that Luka or even Russia can offer them.
Russia has rockets and dead classic composers, but most normal people don’t give a damn about those. Regular people want euros, work permits in civilized countries, quality consumer products and somebody to occasionally tackle corruption and abuses. And the pozzed European Union can deliver all that.
Romanian GDP/capita rose x20 between 1990-2020 and it shows in everyday life.
I find it funny that western leftists deny my experiences of the poverty of communism and western right wingers deny my experiences of rising prosperity since EU accession. People don’t care about the facts that don’t fit their opinions. Arguments-as-soldiers and all that.
lol, sure, because most heterosexual men dream of being anally penetrated by other men, really powerful argument for Western superiority.
See, you hit the nail on the head with this. Society in the West is starting to break down. I’m not saying the majority of Zoomers are going to the right but compared to Millennials, I’ve noticed on twitter quite a decent number of right wing Zoomers. Some sympathise with a basic form of white Identitarism, others are just mainly conservative and complaining about the lack of family values. I was surprised to see yesterday on twitter young women complaining about lack of religious values and how they want to have a trad marriage. All zoomers.
I don’t predict the Zoomers are going fully right wing entirely but the push is going to start back with them and gain momentum due to the simple fact that you can’t go left anymore without turning into a full blown Sodom and Gomorrah.
As for the Millennials, they were too indoctrinated by the education system when times were good and many were helicoptered around by leftie boomer parents who had all the money in the world so they were more concerned about what was happening in the third world then back on the home front. Hence why the Millennials are actually fighting for the system like obedient drones.
In regards to Eastern Europe, it all depends on the generation you grew up in. My experience with Russians told me that those who came of age during the 90s and 2000s had a relatively relaxed education system and the entire country was engulfed in Western culture. As a result, they grew up more liberal and want to emulate the West. However their Zoomers and younger generation is growing up under the ideas of Putinism and I think when they come of age, they will be tilting more towards the right.
Exactly a point very well made. I think this generational divide that I have noticed happening between the West and the East is down to the history of capitalism and communism.
In the West, capitalism remained triumphant until 2008 and the life of the party carried on. However due to a declining economic base and more problems, it is inevitable that the West is going to start to push towards the right and probably start to embrace Caesarism until the ship of state is stable once again. To the youth of the West, the future is not bright anymore and one filled with problems.
The East is different. They came out of communism, embraced caesarism and now want to do what the West has done. They want to have the party life and all the riches that Westerners had access over the successive decades since 1945.
However, the East’s hedonism might become very short lived compared to the West due to the nature of the changing times. Fossil fuels are now starting to become harder to extract and eventually will start to decline in this century. Their birth rates are low. Compared to the West that had a strong industrial economy that produced the middle class boomers, the youth in the East do not have access to this.
In other words, the Eastern youth want to repeat what the Western baby boomers had but are coming to the party way too late. I predict looking at the overall bigger picture a decline in the East and a new crisis period starting around the 2050s. Plus if the West continues to decline (and it will), it’s going to heavily effect the youth and their mindset on how the West is so “cool”.
In Russia, and I assume Belarus – there is at least as much freedom of youth, drugs (except cannabis), social life and sex, as in Western Europe.
Also nobody looks at Western Europe for more sex or girlfriends (and in terms of drugs, it is just cannabis which you would idealize from some Western countries), but for a lower political corruption, better job opportunities, higher salaries, and better urban planning, infrastructure and health services.
Surrounded by students in Western Europe, my culture shock has been that they seem surprisingly quiet and boring for people of this age. Students seem like they are mostly studying in the evenings, and even in warm weather streets can be very quiet already at 9-10pm. Women of that age also dress less sexually. Western youth are mostly “pacified” and not very wild – the only noisy protests are related to climate change.
One of the problems with the current youth generation in West (and quite soon in Russia), is that they are more insulated from real life than any people in world history, so that they now need “safe spaces” even at the elite university, so no-one offends. Youth in the West live in hyper-luxury conditions by international standards; and what is quite unique in history, that they can dress in pink and rainbows, argue about being misgendered, and no-one beats them up.
Not more than 1-2% of the population are interested in gay sex, and people perceive Western Europe as a place of tolerance and liberalism (and gay religion) – but America is not perceived this way. The perception of America and Western Europe is quite different.
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The problem for youth with Russia (Belarus/Ukraine, etc) compared to the West (North West Europe) is what happens after university. Until the end of university, it’s not much worse at all to live in Russia (Belarus/Ukraine) aside from some potential conscription issues – especially for Ukrainians -, and better in some ways.
You are talking EU as a political mechanism (and bureaucratic monster). But the referent of “EU”, for people living outside of the EU, is usually is to countries which compose the EU, rather than the political agglomoration.
So when you ask “What those pro-Western younger Belarussians see in “the West”?”
Of course, not to the EU bureaucratic system – but for example, e.g. salary of the same job in Germany, that they have in Belarus. You are talking about Germany and Sweden and even Poland, funny as it must seem to people in Germany that anyone could aspire to work or study in Poland (but for Ukrainians, even Poland can be an upgrade).
If a nation’s fertility rate is below replacement levels, funding medical research is–in so many ways–a form of displacement activity. If you think about it, it’s worse than just “virtue preening”; it’s a form of displacement activity by those being displaced for the benefit of those who are displacing them. I say this not to denigrate medical research, but to emphasize the importance of a nation’s fertility rate to be above replacement levels for that nation to survive. Losses are losses; e.g., Japan’s annual population loss due to its low fertility rate is far more serious than that from COVID-19.
Money. Gross wages in Germany is €4000 on average per month. In Belarus you’d be lucky if you get €400. It’s easy to discount financial wealth when you’re already living in a wealthy country, was born in it, and in some sense take it for granted.
Also, as AP has pointed out, most Belarussians go to V4 countries, just as Ukrainians do. The latest Eurostat data (2018) shows a similar per capita flow to the EU from both Belarus and Ukraine.
Yeah, of which half goes off for taxes and social security, for a state that is increasingly failing in its core responsibilities (like not actively importing rapists and murderers) and a pensions system that everybody knows will collapse in a few decades.
Anyway, of course material conditions in “the West” are much better than in Belarus or other Eastern European countries. My point was that “the West” is on a downward trajectory, imo this should be painfully obvious by now, I don’t understand the enthusiasm for joining such a failed model, it’s very short-sighted imo.
Russia has given huge oil/gas subsidies to Belarus (10% of GDP) and invested/subsidised 100+ billion USD in Ukraine over the past few decades. By comparison, whatever the West invested is peanuts in comparison. The EU itself barely does anything. Ukraine mostly gets small IMF loans (whose largest shareholder is the US).
Yet the West gets their young, both as migrants, and get favoured by their youth. It’s pretty amusing, really. What an utter and spectacular Russian failure.
Everything is relative in life. Belarus’ economy is declining faster. Have you seen what has been happening in Argentina, Lebanon and even Turkey lately? Brazil has been an utter mess since 2014. South Africa has had 5 years straight GDP per capita decline (pre-COVID).
The reality is that outside of a small set of East Asian & CEE countries, most of the “emerging world” isn’t really emerging. It’s stagning, declining or even collapsing.
You have a very myopic view of the world. Take comfort in knowing that you’re surrounded by loads of people with the same issue on this blog. Nobody sane would choose to go to Russia because “the West has too much LGBT and feminism” outside of a small niche of nutjobs.
How about the derelict parenting by the parents of the millenials?
Did they ever get rid of their indoctrination box, the tv, at home, in favor of time talking or walking together, exercising, praying or reading? Or were Negroball or their retarded “shows” too important?
Did they get off their ass to learn about the curriculum in their kids’ government schools and either demand change or shift to homeschooling or private schooling where possible? Millions of them apparently “couldn’t afford” private-school tuition but COULD afford to spend the same substantial amount each year on TV and vices or luxuries for themselves (tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, espressos, new vehicles) and interest on the systematic overspending.
Were the parents of the Millenials so lazy — or so inexcusably naive and out of touch — as to let their kids watch tv unattended, and later, much worse, surf the perversion and indoctrination on the Net unattended for thousands of hours?
Were the parents of the Millenials so afraid of being unpopular or mocked for intolerant views that they didn’t stand up forcibly to the schools and media pushing deviant dead end inherently unhealthy lifestyles like homosexuality on their children? And now are they standing by largely silent while outright mental illness and selfmutilation are glorified and encouraged, I.e. quote transgenderism, to their kids and grandkids?
Millenials didn’t just spring up suddenly the way they are.
Says the guy who within a few months developed from “We’re all living in Jewish-run oligarchies” to a personification of the “Sweden Yes” meme.
I never wrote anything about emigrating to Russia either, imo Westerners who are indulging such fantasies of emigration are cowards.
So the empire is defeated by Panjabi music..
Dhol first
Nagara (war drum) last..
I have a Polish friend who ended up married to an East German guy who goes on about missing the days before the Wall fell. For laughs I take them jars of Spreewalder pickles when I visit them in what used to be West Germany. I wish I had a Trabi for these visits.
Millenials will be wistful for the days when their iToys actually worked and having to dig new waste pits when their composting toilets are filled.
Globohomo fever looks as if it’s going to rage through the youth of Eastern Europe just as it did with young Russians in the 90’s. Latecomers to Blackrock/Google-based “prosperity” like Ireland have embraced the poz with equal fervor and haste.
It’s a lesson these generations are going to have to learn the hard way. Russia needs to ignore the caterwauling of the zeitgeist and look to its strategic interests. Belarus will benefit in the long run and its prodigal children will thank Putler in their later years.
Yes. And as a bonus, Germany’s anti-white and anti-Christian government is using more of its resources to subsidize the colonizer and their brood, at the direct expense of actual german people. See the large and growing number of older Germans who live in poverty:
https://www.dw.com/en/poverty-among-the-elderly-in-germany-skyrockets/a-19542060
I was married to a Belarusian for some years. She had a fair amount of experience of living and working in the UK and the USA and was a lecturer in English, anyway, we used to joke about the attitudes of <40 year old Belarusians towards the West, just the level of ignorance and innocence about it among the ones who had never had extended contact. I guess this wouldn't apply to Poland and Lithuania, Belarusians are much more familiar with these.
The thing the EU has to offer is obviously money and economic opportunities, a kind of international prestige. The long term reason for Belarus to stay closer to Russia would be the potential impact of the rising tide of colourful vibrancy in 'old' western countries, I was living in an area in the UK that was about 40% Islamic/diverse and going to Belarus found it an amazing country, seemed like a great place to raise children in comparison.
You could just say hedonism instead of gay sex if you couldn’t figure out the main point.
Irrespective of what post-1991 maps may show, I’ve always been under the impression that the area around Minsk, is part of Russia. And that an independent Belarus is really just an historical accident caused by the surprise break-up of the USSR (kinda like Crimea winding up on the other side of an international border with respect to Moscow, due to a quixotic gesture on the part of Khrushchev circa 1957).
The re-unification of Russia with the Minsk-centered oblasts, is never going to be easy. Putin should just do it now. And by “now”, I mean ideally not until after the U.S. elections in November. But I understand that such a delay may not be practical. But it sure as Hell would be desirable.
German taxpayer is wasting a large part of their income on immigrants and to subsidize comparatively poor and unproductive Eastern and Southern countries of Europe.
But how do you think this will be a disincentive for potential immigrants and poor Eastern, Central and Southern countries of Europe? The fact Germans are wasting their money to subsidize poorer countries and immigrants, is one of the main incentives for poorer countries and immigrants.
You can complain that “we are so stupid that we leave the diamonds in the safe unlocked overnight”, but why would that be a negative fact for gypsies?
Of course, Westerners are stupid to leave the diamonds unlocked in the safe, and invite all kinds of third-world trash into their countries, without at least filtering for quality of people. But that stupidity is not going to be disincentive if you are in Ukraine or Belarus, anymore than unlocked safe will be disincentive for gypsies.
Rather it is the unthinking generosity of wealthy Western European countries, which is one of the main things fuelling the attraction of the EU.
In reality, talk about different salaries in different countries is not so much reflective of – “material” conditions- but more also about peoples’ sacrifice of time, and their limited youth. It can also reflect working conditions.
I am sure that nobody immigrates to West for “hedonism”. Perhaps this might be true if you are a gay living in Saudi Arabia, or some very specific conditions like that. But even then, it is not exactly “hedonism” that will motivate them to emigrate.
In some ways, most countries in the world are more hedonistic, than protestant America or North West Europe – which are often seeming a bit boring in terms of social life, and society of workholics.
Outside of wars and refugees, motive for immigration is usually money, improved working conditions, free welfare benefits.
Perhaps you might claim that desire for money and higher salary is “hedonistic”. But I’m not sure this is a correct description. Salaries are translation of the value of the limited hours of your youth, that will soon be lost. A person with the good job might work 1 hour, for equivalent of 10 hours of the person with a bad job.
There can also be very significant between employers and office culture, between different industries, and also between countries. It’s not secret that in some industries and places you will feel more like slave, and in other employers’ offices you feel more like an aristocrat.
It’s normal that people will seek employers where the working conditions are more tolerable, where working culture is polite, where there is less competition for jobs. And if you live in an economy where competition for that kind of job is very high, then emigration is the most rational response.
Agreed on the first part, the second part is more complicated imo.
But anyway, I can understand that Western material living conditions are attractive to younger Belarussians, I’m just surprised that this survey seems to indicate neither awareness of the geopolitical risks of conflict with Russia nor of the very real problems the EU has on multiple levels. Seems very naive and anachronistic to me, as if time had stood still in the 1990s or early 2000s.
I have a friend in Germany, an immigrant from Russia; he already has not been able to receive his student or social services for over a year. He would be on the streets now, except for the fact that he’s loaning money from his parents in Russia. Essentially, rather than sending remittances back to Russia, he’s getting remittances from Russia to survive in Germany.
IMO the social system is already dead from what I can infer from him. People on the fringes depending on the social system are showing up on the streets. Its not yet obvious to the outside, which is unfortunate, but the collapse is already here.
Because German companies also seem to dominate a lot of the projects that the poorer countries in EU are subsidized to spend on. And Germany probably benefits to some extent from labour immigration of talented people, from those poorer countries.
I’m no expert, but I think Germany’s relation as net contributor country in the EU seems a bit less one-sided than UK.
Well here is survey of 1998.
So back then, the majority of the people in their 20s supported accession to the EU.
https://i.imgur.com/zCkTc5A.png
1998 was a very different world. Relations between Western countries and Russia hadn’t yet deteriorated that badly then, so I suppose one could still hope to reconcile European integration and close ties to Russia (sort of being a bridge between Europe and Russia maybe). Putin himself spoke in the German Bundestag in 2001 about working towards a common European house.
It was also before an entire generation in Southern Europe had their economic prospects dashed, and before it became obvious that the EU establishment is hell-bent on importing dozens of millions of Near Easterners and Africans to Europe. Situation today is very different, being pro-West in Belarus today indicates hostility towards Russia, and imo a naive willingness to join Western Europe on its road to oblivion.
Well, neither of these things actually appear to have deterred Ukrainians from their EU path, so …
Low birth rates in the former Soviet Union are partially due to scarcity of housing of adequate space (state was the only housebuilder, and it never managed to catch up with demand). Most of the housing stock are flats and very few of them have more than 2 bedrooms (and even those are hardly affordable for a median family).
Nah, it has nothing to do with that.
The Caucasus minorities, the Altai Turks and Yeniseians in Siberia, Yakuts, and the Tungusic people in the far east all have above replacement fertility. Many of these people live in tents approximately the size of a small bedroom, holding 8-12 members of extended families at any given time.
https://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/russia-fertility-map-2008.png
Even in Kamkatcha, Sakhalin and Primorsky krai, where Slavic Russians can get free land from the government and where there is adequate housing due to depopulation, the fertility rate is a garbage 1.4.
Housing and space is never an excuse for not repeoducing. In fact, the fertile people of the world always live in cramped housing which they share with others, including Western Europeans up ’til about 130 years ago.
To reproduce, you must get mean and start MAKING women do things they don’t want to do. With your fists!!!!!!!
Not get free shit from the government/a bigger house/a more bourgeois lifestyle.
Most people moving to a rich country will immediately feel much richer. Part of it is optical illusion: by eating out less, or living in a small room in a bad part of the city, you are effectively reducing your living standards. The other thing is not thinking about the implications of the high cost of accommodation: you will be forever unable to afford a decent home. But the toys will be cheap. And the big item is that going home you will feel like a king. It only works out really well if you do move back after a while, but moving back means an immediate reduction of income, so many people postpone it indefinitely.
In short, Germany feels like El Dorado for people living in Belarus, even if it is not really so. The trends are meaningless, because it feels so much richer that even on a downwards trend it feels like a century (i.e. forever) before it will meet Belarus (or even Hungary), even assuming the trend won’t stop and reverse. so people just don’t care.
I emigrated to Russia from the West, not so much because of LGBT, which still hadn’t gotten into full swing at the time (in retrospect, of course, it’s a huge bonus). Getting away from feminism, though, was definitely a motivating factor. Russian women are much more feminine, but I guess that’s just a matter of taste. Mostly, I wanted to live where there were as few blacks as possible. Anyway, while perhaps not for everyone, it worked out quite well for me.
Being called insane or a “nutjob” (sic) from a conformist cuck is the highest of compliments. To me, hell would be living in Sweden, thinking half a million SEK is a significant sum of money, and screeching nonstop about global warming to people who simply don’t care. I suppose it’s equally strange to you why someone would want to live where men are men, women are women, and racism is socially acceptable.
I think that you are “hoovering” over the essence of why Eastern Europeans youth, Slavs in particular, want to move to the West, no matter what.
Young people not only want all that they are brainwashed to believe represents “successfull and fulfilling life”, they also want it now. The ancient wisdoms that one should work through life only to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor later and in older age, surrounded by family, are long vanquished and gone.
It is replaced by the “commands” of modern consumer society: spend now, own now, enjoy now, you can be whatever you want now. Such behavioral patterns help consumption, increase profits and ultimatelly raise GDPs.
So, taking young Belarrusians as an example, yes, experiencing the same urge not to “miss life”, they compare the average 400 EUR salary in Belaruss to the 4000 EUR average in Germany and see an instant solution: move to the West or even better bring the West home.
Little they realize that 4000 EUR in Germany will provide roughly the same standard of living as back home. They don’t realize yet, all that afluence and glitz is mostly on credit and for debt.
In the end, vast majority will probably end up faring not much better then the ones that stayed behind with the difference of being uprooted.
What perplexes me most is that even when faced with the ugly reality, people don’t give up on their illusions. Perhaps they confuse illusions with hope and achievements.
Imagine typing this out unironically and believing it. What’s next, usage of Poor People’s Parity meme measurements?
You can try to contort the data all day long for all I care. In the end, people vote with their feet. Belarussians flock to the EU – not the other way around.
If QoL was really equal, you’d see an equal flow or maybe even a slight edge for Belarus for those sensitive souls fleeing in sheer horror from the LGBTQ+ dictatorship of the EU 🙂
That much is clear.
Germany’s net spending to the EU budget constitutes 0.1% of GNI per year . The vast sums of subsidies you talk of in previous comments are in actuality a rounding error. You also ignore the central role that German plays in the CEE supply chain. Indeed, some German economists have claimed that the reason why Germany avoided a ‘China shock’ like the US in the 2000s was because CEE played that role in the 1990s and forced German companies to adapt ahead of time. The full argument can be read here.
Finally, these public subsidies ignore massive private outflows into Western coffers. Nor does it count the labour infusion we get. Though I understand the economic arguments, I am less sanguine on freedom of movement within the EU from a socio-cultural perspective. I think the UK’s non-discriminatory approach to nationality is better, with a focus on highly skilled migrants. Though I would have added a genetic character test, since IQ alone is insufficient.
Next time, do try reading more carefully.
btw, according to all kinds of RF propagandists such thing as soaring and expanding DACIA (or SKODA) production is just some kind of mass hallucination which should not be existing in reality as all evil westerners want to do in former Eastern bloc is to destroy everything and be happy with it, lol 🙂
Belarus with free acess to EU markets potentially is more than capable to emulate Romania with proper Western investment in its manufacturing sector instead of having now just RF market, but still with chronical losses and relying on cheap energy (coming with political strings attached) just to stay afloat.
Eastern Europeans are conservative, just not young people in childbearing age. Elderly Eastern Europeans are conservative but they are too old to have children.
Same goes for countries like Chile.
Right, pal, that’s why the US military and CIA have had to be deployed in seemingly limitless countries to destroy budding nationalist/trad movements for decades now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPKsDE4FfTg
That’s all very plausible. But imo the negatives, both for individuals and society, shouldn’t be that hard to point out. Lukashenko’s regime doesn’t seem to be very good at propaganda if it hasn’t found a way to combat such overly rosy perceptions of the benefits of moving to a Western country, despite the experiences of much of the former Eastern bloc since 1989.
You are correct; Forney’s “main point” was not well-considered.
Thulean is Indian, he just happens to reside in Sweden, of course Sweden is immensely rich in comparison to India.
Are there not clubs and dancing as good as or better in Moscow-SPB?
I’m afraid not.
The fertility rate has been below replacement since the 1980s in Eastern Europe, meaning women born in the 1960s and 70s (today in their 50s) were infertile.
It’s a multi-decade trend that shows no sign of slowing down. In all developed economies, the fertility rate of ethnic majorities is trending toward 1 and even 0.5, with no signs reversal despite billions of dollars wasted by our governments in the attempt to bring it to a sustainable level.
France and Sweden are at around 1.8. Whilst below 2.1 it still shows that they have maintained one far above 1.0. Also even if immigrants and their descendants drag that figure up by around 2% or 3% it is still insignificant.
At the time of the Orange protests, Moscow was far more decadent in terms of drink, drugs and loose sex than anywhere in the EU.
I see Zoomers moving even further to the left than Millenials. Part of the problem is that the current generation of “nationalists” focuses on appealing to Boomers. This is especially true of Trump, Orban and Kaczynski. This is a conservatism that focuses on rural values, tradition and fear of foreigners. The aging sort of Buchanan or Derbyshire whines that one reads here at Unz. It tends to be a very negative sort of conservatism and it doesn’t resonate emotionally with young people. Western and Eastern European Zoomers would probably respond better to a positive white nationalist message but most of the “nationalists” now in power are not willing to be openly racist because that would alienate the over-60 demographic they rely on. In Zoomer eyes conservatism looks like a dying ideology of old people who are economic losers and who are afraid of their own shadows. Hardly appealing.
At the same time Zoomers are angry, and realize that liberals are hypocrites. Zoomers have also seen how Millennials mostly tried to play ball with the System under Bush and Obama and got steamrolled by it. Unfortunately that leaves the militant left as the most emotionally appealing ideology available. What Zoomers probably want is a new Mussolini – someone who can make conservatism appeal to the young by stealing a lot of the anti-elite rhetoric of the left, providing a postive radical vision of a future built around youth, but combining it with patriotism and ethnic loyalty. That is kind of what Bannon wanted to do, but Trump was not the right vehicle, and neither are the aging ex-nomenklatura elites turned “nationalist” in power in Central and Eastern Europe.
To be fair, Moscow has actually gotten less decadent over the past 20 years. Not sure where else in the world one can say that.
Maybe you are confusing Germany with the US? Germans don’t have a lot of credit card debt. 4000 EUR gross in Germany is an excellent standard of living by any objective measure, and provides you with far better housing, food options, education and healthcare than you would enjoy in Minsk on 400 EUR. I know a lot of Russians who live in Austria. Absolutely none of them want to ever move back to Russia, and Austria is poorer than Germany and Russia richer than Belarus.
It’s nonsense to take about gross wages (Gross wages in Germany 4000 euros per month). You have to look at what you have left after taxes,accommodation cost,transport cost to work, the cost of food etc.
I live in the UK. If I worked in London then maybe i could earn £3,000 a month gross ( 3,300 euros per month). I would pay every year £4,700 tax and £3,180 National Insurance ( a tax used to finance the health system, pensions,unemployment benefits) That leaves me with £28,120 after tax. Deduct another maybe £1,200 to pay the local government Council Tax and you are left with £26,920 per year. To rent a property in London i would maybe pay £1,600 a month (£19,200 a year). Transport costs to work in London maybe cost £1,000 per year, Food costs £4,160 per year ? This leaves me with £2,560 a year (£213 a month) i,e.nothing !!
Nonsence.
I doubt that an young emigree, not owning an appartment and having to pay rent, will live any better than back home to the extent that would justify uprooting. Not to mention raising a family with all the costs it incures, without the help of parents or relatives.
I have heard of many, though, who share their appartments to cut on living costs.
That is not why young Esterners leave for the West at all. They leave because they are lured by the prospects of making it big and easy. They leave because they are tricked into believing life is somewhere else and not at home.
Yeah, I’ll take your word for that.
Unfortunately, I think you fail to realize how toxic some of the attitudes you advocated are.
Of course it is gone, though. It is often a bad idea.
Its pleasant to speak of such ideals but in practice, such Old Country wisdom often means in practice that someone elder than you will be yelling at you and telling you what to do, when he doesn’t know anything about modern technology. He will demand things to be done by hand when you can automate it; he may think it is social responsibility to hire his son’s friend or his mistress to adorn the office, but there’s a cost to all this frippery: monetary and temporal. A company with such attitudes will not expand as quickly, will not be as competitive, and in today’s world of winner-take-all, will likely not exist for very long at all.
I’ve seen it myself.
So yes, you do have a real issue where if you’re younger and smart, there’s no compelling reason to stay in such a situation if you avoid it. In your old country, you will not be able to work 100 hours a week and become a superstar; you will have to work at the same pace as everyone else no matter how good you are; this is surely great for people with families, but if you’re a single man with passion without children, its much better for you to go to Silicon Valley, wire yourself up with caffeine and drugs, and you probably will come out ahead. You’ll be a hero to all of your old friends and kin, and you never will have to take crap from the old fogey who can’t program*. And if not, its at least the fun risk-taking adventure of life.
And from the group level, the company and society that promotes such attitudes will come off faster, with better technology and destroy their slower rivals.
*you might have to learn to take crap from the diversity hire with no programming knowledge, but you wouldn’t know that until you have made the sunk cost to travel and resettle. Haha.
You should. He’s not all that wrong, though its not the entire story.
Due to the importance of nepotism and connections in more traditional countries, once you’ve left it, going back is difficult. You’ve lost years of your life when you could have made connections and by definition such countries are less welcoming(even of new ideas).
Odds are that you’re better off trying to hack it in your new world.
China is an exception, but it is the exception that proves the rule.
Viewing that it is consumerism or “high time preference”, is not quite containing all of why you would seek improved employment conditions and working cultures, in Western Europe.
Coronavirus is an example where we could see what it is like to have good employers.
In my case, in Western Europe, we have immediately been allowed to not go to office, and to return only depending on our personal preference. In addition, we return only after we could make the office safe.
So employees discuss for hours how to make the environment safe, and then everything we demanded has been operationalized, and paid for, before employees have to return (and it’s still voluntary).
Now are there employers like this in Belarus? I’m sure, but there will be only a small amount of employers with such employee-oriented culture, and they will be a result of international investment in Belarus.
We are talking about more than simply higher-salary, but re-locating to Western Europe can providing selection of employers with very different resources, contractual conditions, and office culture.
It’s not true, but you might imagine that it is when you first arrived in Western Europe from Belarus, because you don’t understand the local market.
When I first came to my current city in Western Europe, I believed that food was expensive. But the reason was because I don’t have a car, and was shopping in small luxury supermarkets in the centre of the city.
In the elite, luxury supermarkets, prices for the same products can be 7 times higher than in the budget supermarkets. In the budget supermarkets in Western Europe, the prices for most products can be the same as in a normal city central supermarket in Russia.
Of course, the price of food is mostly the same, as the price of the actual commodities is internationally quite uniform Most of the price difference is a result of difference preferences of the consumers.
In areas of a wealthy Western European city where there are far more people with too much money, then there can emerge culture of luxury supermarkets, selling $10 for a small jar of jam. But this isn’t a sign of “high cost of living” in Western Europe – but rather that there is a luxury shop culture, reflecting preferences of a overpaid population.
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To be honest I did not expect to be called toxic.
Especially not when your counterargument is this:
Ok, my question is than, to what end? Is the world going to be any better because of that?
I don’t think so.
To be clear, I don’t advocate the “elders yelling at ya” scenario at all, God forbid.
But to have 20 something, suposedly technological wizards, super rich adolescents, like Facebook Mark or Google Serg, as raw models is just devastating, in my opinion.
And they are just puppets, by the way. Their puppet masters are of considerable older age, as in my world view.
Finally, what can many other ordinary boys and girls feel and do seeing Mark and Serg? Right: wire themselves with coffeine and drugs hoping to make it big overnight like them.
By the way, I like your comments very much.
Lukashenko on the streets with Kalashnikov in hand himself … based and chad
https://i.ibb.co/JprnTk7/lukashenko-with-ak.jpg
My apologies. It is toxic because it is a culture that can lead to its institutions dying due to outside competition. I’m not fond of words also used by SJWs but there’s a certain utility when it is true.
I think for better or worse, the narrative is that the world will be better for your efforts. In practice, you probably will at most created the next e-thot sensation, or more likely, created a minor optimization practice, but its “cooler” than doing something normal like repairing cars. Its cooler to build robots to harvest potatos than it is to hire people to do so, even if the latter provides more jobs and may in fact be more efficient for the cost; the former makes you feel like you have changed the world permanently(and perhaps you have).
Unfortunately, the alternative is often very much the “don’t work so hard, wait your turn for your seniority promotion.” I’ve personally experienced it. I didn’t take it well, and I doubt most other “hotshots” will.
But they are. An unfortunate reality of our new hyperreality of technology is the entire “girls want to be pop stars” and “boys want to be superheroes.”Of course, it isn’t everyone, but this means that a large proportion of the highly motivated sort get skimmed off into the “exciting churn.”
One could draw an analogy to Hollywood machine that draws in ambitious, attractive young girls who want to be actresses. Most don’t end as superstars.
Thank you very kindly.
It can be higher salary for the same hours, but there is also possibility of less competition for attaining jobs in the same industry.
If you talk about graduate level of job entry: applying to a country or region where there is oversupply of jobs to applicants in your industry, there is a good probability of less competition to begin the career, with a larger or more interesting company.
There might be less competition in the company itself, and sometimes (depending on industry/company) much more automatic progress. There’s a lot of difference to be in a company where you automatically progress, than one where there are not enough middle and senior jobs to allow a person to progress (and where employees can pause for a decade with no advancement).
Finally in some companies/industries, there are more positions that would allow promotion, without having to accept management duties. (For those of us employees, who want to avoid as much as possibly any management duties – you usually need to be in larger company to aim for this).
Employment situation for migrant workers can be more determined by the local situation on city-basis, more than national-basis. It’s quite possible that in the same country, there can be investment hotspots, and other places where there is an industrial decline. Obviously the latter is not relevant, as migrant labour flow to where there is an excess supply of jobs in their profession.
£3000 a month is a lot of money even in London. Established member of a lower profession.
If you go to google and search for “France birth rate”, you should be instantly provided with a disturbing interactive graph that shows the fertility rate in France going back to 1960.
The last time French fertility was above 2.1 was in 1975. That’s 45 years of below replacement fertility and shrinking generational sizes. Bringing the fertility rate back to 2.1 won’t make up for 45 years of shrinking ethnic French generations and the soon-to-be dying French boomers. It would have to be brought back closer to 4 to accomplish that a reasonable time period (i.e., 50 years).
2.1 is never the goal or an acceptable fertility rate; it’s just the rubicon of failure in developed societies. We passee that rubicon 45 years ago in the West, and those 45 years have added up to a debt that we can never pay off with a 2.2 fertility rate.
All political and legal activity and advocacy must end for the birth rate to rise to a sustainable level. Yet, we have to maintain the modern agricultural apparatus for these efforts to pay off. It will require a “mutual cooperation between farmers and STEM under lawless and speechless conditions” to replenish population structure.
Except when you look at Frances population pyramid it looks like a column, the generations are of almost equal size. The population is relatively mature, but there are plenty of young people aswell. A 2.1 fertility rate would suffice to grow it without migration.
The fertility rate was in fact above two in the last decade.
Now compare Luka to the President of Estonia w/ her husband. (I don’t think that’s actually her son – at least, I hope not).
Matt is right. West is cool. Russia and China have industrial complexes. West have Musk. Eats have 1 billion people raised from poverty.
China and Russia only hope is West decline. They aren’t able to provide cool propaganda. Hell, even using truth would good enough.
Belarusia is lost to Russia. Russia should push Luka to make union state in few months or cut losses and prepare for lossing of Belarusia industry complex. I bet when protest die down, Luka would be back with multiple vector policy. As for the protestors, they’re are EU/ NATO pushers. Only now, it is bad optics to advocate for NATO membership. It is not only for discussion. USA is still very good in color revolutions. Look at the Bolivia
I recall reading in the NY Post on August 9 that the average millennial net worth is $8,000. I’m a last-year Xer, which would make the earliest wave of millennials nearing 40.
I don’t understand how you can expect a generation to become stable, right-wing, family-builders when most can’t afford to rub two nickels together. They’re going to need a GI Bill or something to turn them into people with something to lose — because right now, it is awfully easy for them to become “revolutionaries” for whatever cause offers them the ability to devour the boomers who continue to occupy the power-dom positions in society and the housing market.
If you (not you obviously, but “global capitalism” [Shlomo]) create an entire generation with negative assets, expect them to give you negative outcomes on a social/societal level.
TF is a classic Swedish hyper-autist type, this retarded meme he’s Indian needs to end.
You said that the population pyramid (France) resembles a “column”.
This is the population pyramid of France:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/france/2020/
It instead looks like a pyramid on top of a column.
France is a stage 4 column which is the contraction (final) stage of population pyramids:
https://image.slideserve.com/228323/population-pyramids-for-the-four-demographic-transition-phases-l.jpg
There are not “plenty” of young people in France and the most important demographic (women age 25-35) are a mere 6% of the total. They won’t breed on time nor enough and there’s no way a 2.1 fertility rate could grow the population without immigrants. The UN has France contracting by 2047 and losing 2 million people by 2100, with a 1.83 fertility rate AND immigration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6veU1vP-tA
^ as we can see those young people bars just get smaller and smoller….
All users here whose names begin with “Th”, are called Indians – I can recall being called Indians so far three users: Thorfinssen, Thom, and Thulean Friend. Is there some kind of mythological connection between usernames beginning “Th”, and the Hindu land?
The wage issue is enticing but not critical for Belarussians. Remember,different to Russia where we have certain labour markets filled by central asians and different to Poland that has had the lowest paid jobs filled by Ukrainians in a method much closer to human traffiking than it is to free-market economics……..Belarus fills all it’s jobs with it’s own population and only minimal decline in population.
That means it isn’t much of a problem of “losing Belarus’s youth to Germany/the west”. Of course the country needs to continue development and not stagnate…..and it’s perfectly normal for some of the aspirational people in various age demographics to be very interested in going to the west, but due to the facts stated above these numbers should not be critical.
Similar claims about Ukrainian youth were made also ( in relation to west versus Russia)…..but Ukrop internet is as Russian dominated as it ever was – other factors are what influence events
One of the three is not like the others.
Have you ever lived anywhere outside the US? You seem like someone with very little life experience.
I hope you tell those East Europeans that this is not true – and you know it. There’s far more of that in poorer countries than in the West. Anyway, if people want sex and parties there’s nothing stopping them but themselves – and it could even improve their TFR. What they have in the West is simply WORK, or they used to have it, but that’s getting harder to find too, so some just settle for the social security benefits.
Is Laura Loomer cool?
If every Western white woman resembled her pre-nose job, I’d see where Forney is getting his ideas about the attractiveness of gay sex.
Here’s an excellent writeup by someone from Croatia on his job environment. Its probably exceptionally terrible but its a good example of the memes a young man will consider when he thinks about the West.
https://sceptremag.com/2019/11/28/eastern-europe-pt-2/
Note that the writer later went to the West and quite dislikes the wokeness. But he concluded if suffering is equal everywhere, at least he’ll get more pay.
Great essay. Imagine, until perhaps 20 years ago, the West enjoyed both generally good interpersonal business ethics, and non-toxic culture. A lot of the drive for Maidan was to reduce the crap described in the article.
It’s the same guy who wrote the original Swine Right essay: https://sceptremag.com/2017/11/22/eastern-europe-and-the-swine-right/
It will be interesting to see how fast interpersonal business ethics degrades along with culture in the West.
Automation isn’t just about productivity. It is about quality too.
As a star potato picker in my youth (I was asked to pickover the field, at higher rates, after the masses had done their token effort) I will say people are inevitably less productive and abuse the crop. As go potatoes so goes everything else. If parts of the process can be automated, even at breakeven, they should be.
Part of the reason we can feed so many more people on less land than the 1950’s is not crop yield but less waste. Automated harvesting and processing brings in a higher %age of the crop, works faster so no losses to rot and wastes less during processing. High labour cost Britain still has food factories but not with women in white hats as in the ’70’s or Russia now. They are totally automated other than unloaded the lorries and loading them up again at the other end. Everyone else does maintenance or programming.
So with potatoes as with the world. Engineering driven by capitalism is the game changer. (Not military engineers who have been around since forever with almost no spin off-cannon boring maybe)
I have often suggested to Russians that leaving Russia will not make them happier. No more than 1 in 3 believe me. The Bad Boys in the Yard who smoke cigarettes all want to go to America. In the gymnasium those who want to leave prefer the EU.
Although he wrote “Eastern Europe” in title, I feel like author is referring more to a stereotypical, provincial Southern European, Mediterranean, small family business – where your boss is drinking glasses of olive oil, and shouting all day about gypsies, while elevating his incompetent son to be your manager.
This is a stereotype of a Mediterranean kind of office environment of provincial Spain, Italy, Greece, Balkans, Turkey, etc.
Although people like to romanticize about Southern Europe’s culture of having your own family business, there is likely rather a negative side of it from the employee perspective.
It would be fun to be a Mediterranean paterfamilias with his own business, who is friends with the village Mayor, and doesn’t have to pay taxes. But probably – not so fun to be employee of him.
At least workers in Southern Europe stereotypically try to enjoy themselves in other ways, and in countries like Spain, even workers of large companies are viewed often having 2 hour lunch break with colleagues, drinking a couple bottles of wine on the bar in middle of day.
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In Russia, the office culture for most people will be more professional, or at least not such a byzantine nightmare as described in the text (except salaries in Russia can be even lower than most of Southern Europe).
You might attribute the the better working conditions in America on a century of management science, or development of worker rights, and possibility of legal representation for employees. But a larger reason for the better working conditions, are simply that businesses have more money to spend on it.
One of the main reasons for the good working conditions, will be, simply – excess money, and a situation where the supply of jobs can be high relative to supply of workers, in the particular industry or location.
Necessary condition for businessmen to have the traditional American “three-martini lunch”, is that your company can afford to give its employees’ a generous expenses account i.e. that your company has enough money to pay for it.
Similarly, if we look at the stereotype luxuries of certain office cultures: for example, in startups in technology sectors, you except there will be all kinds of useless but expensive gadgets in the office. Ostensibly, the idea is that “we are eccentric geniuses”, or even “we are a democratic business and industry, where every employee’s autonomy is valued”.
But the real causality, is really more like “we can afford to buy this useless random things to put in your office”. I.e. that we have excess money or investment.
You’ve begun to overegg the pudding. Such things have gone the way of the dodo since at least 2008, if not earlier.
The days of overtly generous compensation in general went away with the more intense business culture since the 1980s; before that, yes, you had plenty of engineering companies overcharging hours and living it up. Those were also the days of smoke-filled backroom deals, so in some ways, not so different from the bad office culture that Comrade Virag commented on. Globalization sufficed to kill that.
The second wave of overtly generous compensation was in the technology sector, during the time when Silicon Valley companies would waste money on 4 star restaurant chefs and comfortable expense accounts; this was built off the dot com bubble, which burst in 2001. What recovered then got ganked again in 2008, and instead there has been a steady increase of “temporary contract workers” with vastly reduced benefits.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2019/05/31/google-follows-a-growing-workplace-trend-hiring-more-contractors-than-employees/#516b32f3447f
Because in reality, it is better to hook on future individuals for the hope of getting those benefits than actually give it to them. Working hours are also high. Unpaid work is hardly uncommon, and widespread drug use just to keep working and stay ahead of others is virtually a norm in SV(what, you thought drugs were for fun? You fool.)
No doubt the office environment is more pleasant in the West because the general values of treating others are people is higher due to the culture but its hardly the gilt of excess wealth that it can be portrayed to be. And at its worst, its very much a machine to lure in hopefuls, squeeze out people of all their value, burn them out, and spit them out.
Its amazing how much value you can create when you don’t give a shit about externalities.
Sadly its true and even when I look at Russia I see my own country just a few decades ago, we used to be proud too. Now only idiots are proud.
Until recently Putin’s low-touch strategy seemed to be the best bet. I think that has changed now but will Putin notice? He seems more concerned with masks (gags). Turkish insults to Orthodox Christianity don’t seem to concern him much. Did I mention masks?
I don’t think Russia is aligned with globo-homo but sometimes I wonder.
I’m responding to Thulean mocking you with an LOL. Laugh, Thulean, if you are a heartless prick or simply cannot admit what Germany is allowing to happen to its own people while subsidizing millions of hostile and or unassimilated Islamic and African settlers.
Already four years ago, no less an establishment source than Deutsche Welle reported widespread and worsening poverty among older Germans, coincidentally just as Germany diverts many billions of euros to facilitate their own dispossession.
https://www.dw.com/en/poverty-among-the-elderly-in-germany-skyrockets/a-19542060
Russia had better make its move in Belarus, hopefully soon after the US presidential election. Depose Lukashenko and replace him with a leader who will finally complete the union state quickly. They cannot sit on their hands and wait as western propaganda and the fifth column work to confuse, pervert, and deracinated their younger people, while prouder, more patriotic, more normal, more traditional people die off.
Meanwhile, appeal to the Belarusian people by rounding up and very publicly prosecuting some of Lukashenko’s corrupt cronies. Then confiscate their wealth and distribute it to all citizens of Belarus. Or use it to build something that directly helps the average person, such as expanding and modernizing a hospital in every city in Belarus or instituting a public works job program improving infrastructure.
Germany is not doing well at all.
He probably thought I was making it up. It is pretty crazy.
You wouldn’t pay 3180 in NI
Thanks for the link.
My impression of interpersonal business ethics in the west is that it has moved from interpersonal to Brezhnev-Dilbert levels of bureaucracy so far down the road that youngsters do not even have a concept of what it means to have an efficient clique of people getting the job done.
This is quite logical once it sinks in that the whole job is not about getting XYZ done, it’s about keeping the complex ecosystem of the office jungle alive and kicking and following the unholy liturgy of the middle management. The rituals of emails, registers, forms, tasks, stats etc. have to be followed religiously. I perfectly understand why young people in the USA believe that Trump’s wall cannot be built in less than 10 years – because what you see is that it takes 9 years of emailing to get a public toilet built – and that is a rational, scientific, highly efficient system in their minds.
A friend of mine is a structural engineer who just moved to UK to work on a very large international project. He called me last night to whine:
This seems to be the new normal – project management is the skill required of his manager, not knowing some highly technical things such as what material is the building made of.
And having said all that we both agreed that it’s still a better work environment than having a neurotic sow with a golden cross around her neck and a cigarette in her mouth telling people to “shove that contract into their mother’s c**ts”. And it’s not just the lack of basic manners – she will literally ignore the contract and not pay you. And it will be perfectly normal not to receive your money because “she’ll be angry”, as if she’s some General Butt Naked who will chop off your legs if you look at her the wrong way.
It’s just less stress and less hassle. And it’s really easy to see why young people fall in love with all this and embrace the whole package – the rainbow flags, open borders, childlessness and exotic vacations.
Relevant:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1194185331555233792.html
If you are responding to my comment, then you miss the point. “Three-martini lunch”, is an example taken from the Wikipedia article, which says it is a historical tradition of 1960s America, that became extinct as a result of changing attitudes to alcohol in the 1980s.
The point of the example is that the main necessary condition for such a luxury, is having a wealthy company. It’s dependent on having money. It’s only a product of a “better working culture”, to the extent it’s an indication of a wealthy working environment of 1960s America.
It depends what you call “overtly generous”. Perhaps if point of comparison is to professional footballers, actors in Hollywood, etc. But even when an office pays for you to send your things from your home to a different location, or buys a professional espresso machine instead of a normal espresso machine, – this is usually indication of excess money in the company.
And for every luxury employees received in one company, I know people who are working in companies which don’t have it. The difference between a company with a luxury, and another without that same luxury, is usually related to its budget (although many people like to complain about the ungenerous bosses and efficiency cuts instead).
Depending on your industry and location, office environment can more pleasant in the West primarily because there is far more money in the companies. It’s result of excess money, not a magical “Western culture”.
I believe you are vastly more acquainted with WikiReality than Western Reality.
I live and work every day in Western reality, so it would be strange if I was not acquainted with it.
Culture of the office is not different to how it would be in Russia, if it was the same industry and size of company. The difference is level of salary, and the level of competition is much lower than it would be at the same level (as the ratio of jobs and workers is very much better).
To the extent there is a more pleasant environment (and indeed there likely is, as the environment is generally pleasant), it is mainly because of more investment, larger companies investing, excess jobs – not especially anything to do with a different culture.
Yes, but have you worked elsewhere? I see a cultural difference of the office on a daily basis. And judging by all other people I know who worked in both systems, they all seem to prefer the Western one.
The office is a huge dialysis machine that takes your blood out and returns it into your body without testosterone. In the West it adds some estrogen, in the East it also sucks out a bit of spine.
We need to get you into a Japanese office so you can wax your particular brand of observance and poetry on modernized feudalism.
Are you talking about office culture in Russia compared to Western Europe? And in what industry?
In my industry, in Russia, I only was in unpaid work experience. But I was very impressed by the nice experience and modernity of experience where I did work. It was a nice upgrade from a bit of a chaotic, fading and badly organized university where I studied
Because if your working life has been in North West Europe, and in professions which are strongly demanded – then probably your experiences have been mostly excellent, and in terms of income you will not be “starving”, to say it mildly.
Most of things about living in North West European countries, are at an excellent level – or at least in my experience. And that’s aside, from the easier (because less competitive) career opportunity in certain industries.
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For my experience, working in an office doesn’t remove testosterone, and I often feel more relaxed there than in my home. Perhaps I am just naturally suited as office cattle.
I find office is terrible dialysis machine, if you are talking about removing the hours and years of life, and re-injecting these weeks and months as an undifferentiated mass. Lot of the problem is simply from being in the same building for too long. It’s a problem from lack of daily mobility. It’s also why it’s preferable if your offices are in a city centre, rather than a technology park – in the latter too much of the feeling of being on an island.
Some things of the Japanese corporate culture seem very attractive (at least when described to me) – for example, their internal diversity of corporations, which allow employees to transfer between different branches, and sometimes to change industries, professions, and countries, while still working in the same company.
For example, I know a Japanese man who was an electronics engineer, and after some years, his corporation tells him to become a software engineer, so he retrained as a software engineer. Then they transfer him to work in the venture capital offshoot of the company. So his profession changed three times, and his country changes when he has the opportunity – and he was all in the same company. On the other hand, he tells this like it is a terrible curse, and that he wants to return to being a software engineer, and that he doesn’t want to return to Japan. That Japan is impossible for living, etc,
Due to the extensive interconnections among Japanese megacorporations, this can extend even to moving from company to company while still staying in the “same settings.” A company like Mitsui owns everything from groceries to hotels to mining apparatus to technology; they are essentially worlds onto themselves.
Japanese megacorporations can be dominated by actual trappings of ritual, rather than the faux ritual of Western companies with various interminable rules and good practices: they have set expectations of bowing, of “appropriate attitude”, formality of separation and fairly explicit nepotism similar to your hypothetical “Mediterranean” company: your odds of advancement as a woman are pretty much nil and its not unlikely that your director was someone who was obligated to marry the previous director’s daughter.
In some ways, it very much is feudalistic.
But that said, there can be an overall sense of comfort which is hard to describe, since your superiors will generally not act in ways that are irrational or angry; in a culture where honor suicide is still seen as very respectable(same as all of East Asia, to be honest), for their department is fail utterly is extremely shameful to them personally and as a minion, one can reasonably expect to be taken care so as long also cooperates with the usual agenda of your department – which unfortunately usually means a lot of extra work.
And surprisingly despite the explicit and unapologetic adherence to ritual, innovation can be surprisingly strong. Both companies I worked for actually had a “moonshot” department much like Google did, along with a corporate research and development department(this is very much disappearing in the US), but this is all essentially a function of how Japanese megacorporations are “worlds within themselves.”