Maybe there should be a "time out" for any and I mean *any* visits from Russia.
Up to the invasion of Crimea these people were arrogantly demanding visa-free travel with the EU.
Just freeze visas except for family emergencies.
It is Europe's security at stake.
Enough.
— toomas ilves, ex-verif (@IlvesToomas) April 17, 2021
I would unironically endorse this, if perhaps not for Ilves Toomas’ reasons.
I wouldn’t have several years ago when I still thought there was some chance of productive relations between Russia and the West, and thought that examining misperceptions about Russia in the Anglosphere was a legitimate and effective way of achieving that.
But today, it’s more of a zero-sum game, in which Western antagonism works to Russia’s advantage:
- Diminishes lustre of emigration (brain drain), while creating the converse effect with respect to repatriation.
- Russian elites become at least slightly more recalcitrant to park capital abroad.
- Makes the West and its bad Western memes (#BLM, etc.) as well as their domestic agents and promoters toxic by association.
There remain, to be sure, significant economic and technology transfer reasons to avoid a full breakdown in relations. But these have become much diminished through Russia’s own domestic development, the rising profile of China, and its development of good relations with third parties like South Korea and Israel.
Just why all cartoons that fuse demonization with ethnic identifiers invariably remind of nazi anti-Semitic propaganda pic.twitter.com/UDmA0zSQA8
— Leonid ХВ Ragozin (@leonidragozin) July 23, 2020
I suspect, as with anti-Semitism and Jewish/Israeli interests, a background of moderate Russophobia is ultimately net good for Russian state and Russians. Probably in fact more so than the Jews/Israel, because Russia has economies of scale that they do not.
And those relative benefits have increased over the past year, as the West has become more unhinged and less attractive.
Last but certainly not least, is that precisely Russians who are likeliest to want to go to the West and associate/engage with it who are the most Occidentophile. It will be very funny to see the likes of @kirlant cope and seethe as they are deported the Central European University.
Even better, there will be a pack of svidomy Ukrainians and Butthurt Belters – their only sympathizers in Russia – mocking, heckling, and laughing at them receiving their just desserts, simply because they are just very hateful and not very bright people who hate them just for being Russians (even if they hate Russia themselves).
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And i didn’t. I knew that it is impossible even back then in 2012.
The (((West))) is the Borg. It needs to take over and assimilate the world. Any sily ideas about “multipolar world”, or “Sovereignty” or “Orthodox Christianity”, or “Live and Let Live” will not be tolerated.
The West will become increasingly fanatical entity, just like the communists were.
It is trying to create the latest (((Utopia))) and for that purpose all other systems must be destroyed or taken over.
And the more it declines, the more crazed and fanatical it will become, to try to stop the decline and have a chance at taking over the world, no matter what.
Only hatred and snarling is coming from the West towards the free world, and nothing else.
Please don’t deport Russian women from Germany! Me and other German men would suffer immensly. They are far more beautiful than German women, look more feminine and are not so spoiled ( easily to impress with a German middle class standard of living). Otherwise I would have to date German SJWs again. You can have the Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia, but let your women stay here. These sanctions would be to hard for us!
That seems to be true about the gradual liberal fanatization, but communists were becoming less fanatical over time, not more (with some exceptions in Asia).
What we are observing in the West is different: a burst of missionary madness combined with a sense that it is over. I don’t see optimism, more often despair. Why they insist on doubling down on their more stupid ideas is a mystery. I usually write it off as simple increasing stupidity, but that is too simplistic.
I recently saw a program about US Reconstruction after the Civil War, 1865-76. It struck me as a very similar combination of liberals, opportunists and black freedmen lording over a defeated enemy. Today US is experiencing Reconstruction 2.0, and not just in the South. The same missionary and virtuous instincts with greed and a thirst for revenge. If Russia succumbs, they would get a Reconstruction 3.0 (on steroids). Not a nice prospect.
Based.
Nowadays the more hostile you are to the West the better. It baffles me how the big brains in DC’s think tanks completely bungled relations with Russia and China.
Had they maintained a friendly veneer with the two, they could’ve slowly but steadily poisoned their countries with SJW brainwashing, Jeffrey Epstein style blackmail rings, Blackrock could’ve been deployed to buy up their media and economy all the while assimilating Russian and Chinese intel services into the Anglo-American-Israeli intelligence Borg.
Instead, the fools launched a coup in Kiev and tried to color revolution Putin twice. Even now Russia is quite willing to trade with the US but DC acts as an intractable enemy to the Russians. This ironically ruins western chances of subjugating it.
The same with China. Which genius in DC thought it would be a good idea to pick a fight with the largest industrial base and population in the world? They could’ve slowly penetrated China and eaten away at its society over decades. The Jews are masters at this type of slow poisoning and infiltration.
Just look at the WASPs of America and Britain. Through a century of intermarriage, trapping through debt(eg Churchill), sexual blackmail and spy infiltration, they have completely conquered these countries. Once the WASPs used to deny Jews access to the ivy league. Now the Ivies are almost White Gentile free zones.
Anywhere you look, WASPs wipe the boots of Jews. Serves the anglo cuckolds right I suppose, but their addiction to buttgoying is a threat to the world.
I just can’t comprehend why they thought this was a good idea.
More and more I veer away from the FTN view of the world where Jews are these almighty string pullers to the view that the elites are actually degenerate and out of touch. Having eliminated all opposition voices, they probably live in an alternate reality. Its still 1997 in their mind and they can regime change or sanction anyone into submission.
RAND unironically thinks that Russia’s military budget is lower than Saudi Arabi(clueless about PPP) and the US military thinks it can fight and win against Russia and China at the same time.
Gone are the days when the US was ruled by cunning masterminds like David Rockefeller, George Schultz and Henry Kissinger. Now its low T tech fags like Gates and Zuckrbergs and the unworthy sons of Soros and Rothschild.
Russia should start a scheme to flood Europe with as much scum as possible. Literally take my idea of using massive cargo ships packed to the brim with arabs and africans and just drop them in western ports.
When the damage is done, just saturate the area with VX and colonize with actual humans.
I am now fully convinced that there can never be any sort of world order or human prosperity as long as they exist, as what we would call globohomo or the pozz is now BOTH genetic and memetic, which means you basically need to commit ontocide to get rid of it. Dropping globohomoid birthrates won’t fix it because the cognitohazard aspect will only increase
It can certainly be argued that Russian women are the most beautiful in the world. I wonder if it’s because they have a trace of Mongoloid ancestry, that gives a slight oriental softness to the otherwise angular Northern European features.
BASED
Genetically there is not a trace of Mondoloid ancestry in the Russian gene pool.
Mostly R1a1a. What’s the word? Oh yes, Arians.
I don’t know where this misconception comes from, but fact is, Russia is protecting the interests of Russia as a state, and nothing else. It resist the Empire because it does not want to become a pathetic imperial lackey, like Ukraine or Republic of Palau, or even a bit more dignified imperial vassal, like the EU states, Japan, or Australia. That’s all there is to it, the rest is irrelevant.
Geopolitically Russian and Chinese resistance and impending downfall of the Empire have a lot of consequences for the world, many of them good. But in and of themselves these are not objectives, they are side effects of moving to the objective.
Regarding “Russophobia” and what sucks about Fox News, minus Tucker Carlson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNc9h8aFU2o
Like Russaigate, the Russia-Taliban bounty story against US troops is a hoax. Nonetheless, the above segment includes Jason Chaffetz and a former State Dept spinster, spewing broadly inaccurate necon, neolib talking points, which Trump didn’t support during his presidential campaign.
Here’s another featuring Mark Levin and John Ratcliffe:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-wrong-decisions-putin-russia-china-iran-john-ratcliffe.amp
In a belittling tone, Levin states that many “Russiaphiles” in the US say that the neocons have misrepresented Russia. To be accurate, those of a neocon, neolib and flat out anti-Russian lean, have had the upper hand in US mass media, body politic and academia. In turn, many Americans who aren’t well versed on the subject get subconsciously duped, on account of the barrage of unchallenged anti-Russian propaganda.
With the exception of Tucker Carlson, every US mass media TV news show is top heavy with anti-Russian propaganda. Levin, Ratcliffe et al stay away from a lengthy enough and well moderated exchange of views that challenge their flippantly broad image of Russia “stealing” Crimea and recently increasing tension with Ukraine.
The Levin-Ratcliffe takes run counter to what Donald Trump campaigned on, in terms of seeking improved US-Russian relations, premised on a better understanding of Russia.
Related:
https://www.academia.edu/37358188/Michael_Averko_Consistency_and_Reality_Lacking_on_Crimea
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/04/14/cnn-blatant-disinformation-about-russia-ukraine-activity/
Femtarakan ftw.
Ilves is an Estonian ‘liberal democrat’ ie neo-fascist, whose parents fled Estonia after WW2, no doubt as they sympathised at least with the Nazis. ‘Educated’ in the USA, he was President of Estonia. He worked at ‘Radio Free Europe’ so is probably a CIA asset. He’s now on Facebook’s thought control panel, tasked with eradicating Thought Crime. Quite a peach. The hatred of creatures like this tells you that Putin is doing something right.
Levin is the quintessence of slime. The ‘bounties’ lie was rehashed, for a brief while, to libel Iran, and no doubt will return to defame China at some future date.
Arianism is a brief-lived Christian cult, not a ‘race’.
He meant Aryans, which was originally the ethnic self moniker of Indo-European people of the steppes of Southern Russia and Central Asia. Russians definitely have lots of real Aryan blood, but there are no “pure” Aryans left. For ancient Aryans dispersed far and wide, during their migrations and conquests. Also Russians do have a little bit of East Asian admixture, especially in Volga-Urals region and Northern Russia, but that’s not all, Russians also have genetic heritage from Ancient North Eurasians, who are hard to classify racially.
Ancient North Eurasians originated in Siberia which is in North Asia thus qualifying as ‘Asians’.
He’s indeed the son of Estonian refugees and he grew up in the USA. Some 80 000 Estonians escaped from Soviet occupation, so labelling them all Nazi sympathisers is rather cheap. The Soviet Union wasn’t exactly a great deal for the country, neither economically nor demographically. There are very few Estonians that miss the regime.
That said, this makes Ilves definitely very pro-USA, much more so than an average Estonian. This made him favourable as a counter figure to all the presidential candidates in 2006 that had had ties with communist organisations (which encompassed most of people of the required age and competence). At that time, USA and Russia were not at such odds, so the anti-Russia part has been a more recent addition.
It was during Ilves’ term that the 2007 riots happened in Tallinn, where thousands of Russian-speakers looted the city centre due to protesting relocating a Soviet memorial (sovok BLM, lol). This had a strongly negative impact on Russia’s image in the country and killed any remaining attempts of having Estonia as a bridge between the West and Russia.
And it was precisely during his last years of his presidency, 2014–2016, when there was a total collapse in relations between the West and Russia. So he’s a product of his past and his term, all of which make up the perfect cocktail for a fervently anti-Russian figure.
President of Estonia is mostly a ceremonial figure, though, so what matters more is what the government says. And he’s not even the serving one anymore, so that allows him to not refrain from statements otherwise seen as poor diplomacy.
That’s an aspect that Putin and his coterie like to play up. Naturally, when they come out as enemies of this kind of scum, their approval in Russia goes way up. Remember the peak it reached after he brought Crimea where it belongs in 2014?
This does not mean that everything he does is right. His internal policies (e.g., pension reform) create a lot of justifiable grievances among Russian population. I suspect that his decisiveness today vs the Empire is partially designed to increase his internal approval: he is trying to ride the wave of Russian’s disillusionment with the West, which is visibly decaying (BLM, mask mandates, massive fraud in the US elections in 2020, senile US “president”, and promotion of sexual deviancy being the most obvious symptoms of this terminal disease).
Understood. Now how about you get going and have at least four German-Russian babies? Both peoples need it desperately. And talk about hybrid vigor!
Haha, thanks for your proposal, but no. While I like Anatolys Blog I don’t identify as part of the alt-right. I’m more of a hedonist. Me and my girlfriend just want to enjoy our life and having children (at least rn) collidates with that idea.
You should not look West (for 300 years this has been Russia’s biggest mistake)
There is nothing in the West today that Russia can learn from or it is more superior to Russia
You should look East, for both:
Learning and Fear, Fear for you life.. fear of China
USA will not finish Russia, it will be China ( with USA in agreement),
if at all, you still have a chance
I have two responses to this good commen.
1. For these reasons, I believe the Chinese must have banned access of Jews to the Chinese banking system. That’s the only way this makes sense.
2. The wacky neocon junta ruling us may believe they can fight Russia and China, but I believe the Pentagon knows better. Notice how the US always backs off from any other opponent then Libya or Syria level. All hat and no cattle with Iran, let alone Russia or China. It’s hard to have a war when the generals won’t fight.
Moderate hostility between Russia and the West, is useful for the clique which controls government, elites in Russia, and many government-aligned oligarchs, and general people who have investments, properties and children in the West (e.g. which need there to be a lack of intergovernmental information sharing agreements, intergovernmental tax agreements , and even in some cases extradition agreements) and people who want various channels to subsidize their friends (import substitution), and various other industrial and bureaucratic interests in the West and in Russia (e.g. the respective military industrial complexes and thinktanks, and political technologists that need the concept of external enemies, and politicians which need the regular supply of “bread and circuses” provided by the Russia vs. West series).
Interests of the government and upper class, though, doesn’t always match perfectly that of the working and middle class people. In this case, there isn’t quite so much benefit for working and middle class people in the conflict, as there is for the political elites.
Did this get the feminist from the screenshot at the end of the post eventually banned? He banned me ages ago for one reply in which I merely pointed out a fact and in a rather neutral way at that. The guy is deranged.
Severe hostility is great though for developing actual food and and import-substitution industries.
Of course, ideally people can have sensibly protectionist and self-sufficient economies without hate or spite or fear, but these days it takes a mix of them.
There isn’t much of a problem of strategic food security in Russia. If you talk about problems in relation to food in Russia – is more simply, and less “geopolitically”, just that food is expensive relative to household income, so that (at least in comparison to Western Europe), the grocery shopping constitutes a lot higher proportion of peoples’ incomes than in Western countries.
https://i.imgur.com/rDhCPIP.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/dpxYco6.jpg
The strategic vulnerability of Russia’s economy is mainly that it is coupled to the international commodity cycle, and this was also Achilles’ heel of the Soviet economy. Even the fact that the USSR had an import substitute version of every imaginable product, didn’t allow the economy to be decoupled from the commodity cycle, and the fall of global oil prices in the 1980s-1990s was one of the main causes of its collapse and subsequent economic vicissitudes of the postsoviet space.
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The term “import-substitution” was introduced by Chatham house in the 1980s, to criticize the failure of the protectionist development attempts in Latin America.
Without knowing much about the topic, it seems on average, an increase the diversification and shockproof the economy more benefit from foreign investment and being a trading hub.
Some of the economies with the most diversification, and higher level in rankings like “economic complexity”, are the more central trade hubs, like Switzerland and Singapore.
Perhaps this is a little tautological, but countries which were in the centre of the trade flows, seem to be also become relatively more robust and diversified economies. Switzerland has very high economic diversification, partly as a result of a being a nexus trading with multiple neighbours.
https://i.imgur.com/OzGsHpG.jpg
WTF, the Brits were still fighting the war with Germany a year after it was over and that stopped them from helping the Finns to overthrow the Bolsheviks?
https://quillette.com/2021/04/20/stopped-cold-remembering-russias-catastrophic-1939-campaign-against-finland/
This and many of your other comments remind me of a recent Russian joke:
– Who loves people regardless of their race, ethnicity, faith, or gender?
– Crocodile.
Not much import substitution in Putin’s Presidential address. In fact Investment Protection to encourage more investment including from foreigners.
There was a huge emphasis on improving Russia’s human capital in terms of quantity and quality. Processes to obtain child support of different kinds improved. A focus on education and culture. Substantial measures on medical care, especially against cardio vascular disease. 1.93 trn Roubles for new science. The 3rd mission (UK terminology for encouraging interaction with business) for the university sector.
Mannerheim was one of the finest Russian Imperial Army officers, a personal friend of the Russian Emperor, and a Russian intelligence officer in the Far East. Had quite an interesting life.
Oh, I was referring to industrial and high tech production as well.
A wide variety is great, but having a wide variety of options be closed off, leaving one with NO options is much worse than having a lot of local options, supplemented by optional\supplementary foreign products (or an exotic material not found locally, like bananas or lithium.)
The USSR couldn’t produce a lot of things. A few examples.
They made agreements with their COMECON satellites to build a pipeline to Western Europe, and in exchange for building the pipeline, they would get cheap natural gas and oil. Hungary made an agreement broadly along those lines. So Hungary had to build a pipeline, but it didn’t have the technology to build certain parts of it, I can’t remember, but I think it was some special high pressure valves which needed to be installed many places along the pipeline. Other COMECON countries, including the USSR, didn’t have this technology either. So in the event Hungary bought it from France. But we didn’t have the foreign currency to pay for it, so we had to borrow from the West.
There were other examples. The huge dock which got destroyed when a crane fell during the modernization (?) of the aircraft carrier Kuznetsov – that dock was built by Sweden for the USSR. The USSR needed American or Swedish ball bearings for a number of special high technology products, including Soviet ballistic missile MIRV warheads.
In general the USSR imported lots of consumer goods and similar (including Ikarus buses from Hungary), many of which it couldn’t produce at all, or only in lower quantity or quality. While many believe that these were unaffected by capitalist price cycles, in reality the USSR raised its COMECON prices for the oil it sold even within COMECON when the prices increased (but with a lag), and then was forced to cut them when they came down (again, with a lag).
So neither the USSR nor COMECON were self-sufficient.
I forgot to mention food imports. The USSR wasn’t self-sufficient in those either, resulting in a huge drain on its foreign currency coffers. This meant that because of their idiotic ideological agriculture, they had to work that much harder elsewhere to keep themselves afloat. This was one of the main reasons why they were approaching bankruptcy when oil prices were dropping.
Another issue was propping up their weaker “allies” like Cuba. Part of it was paid for by more developed Soviet satellites like Hungary (but in turn those were getting weaker and weaker as well), but the bulk of the costs was borne by the Soviet economy. This resulted in further deterioration of their economy.
Neither of these are factors today, so the situation is very different.
A lot of it was to support economic friendship and integration with countries in the Warsaw Pact, rather than because the USSR could not have produced them domestically if it needed. For example, we still have many Tatra T3 trams. Although the Czechoslovakian trams was obviously a really good quality and reliable product, its import was not likely because there was any inability to produce such a tram in Russia.
A few years after the breakdown of СЭВ, in the 1990s, they were producing equivalent version of the Tatra trams in Uralmash.
At the same time, there are some luxury products of Czechoslovaskia like Petrof, and that probably couldn’t have been produced in the Soviet Union without years of training, technology transfer and investment.
Although on this point, I doubt the quality of Soviet consumer products, was the cause of economic problems. However, they were often shown not to be overall competitive after the collapse of the USSR.
The build quality of the domestically produced consumer goods in the USSR, could be better than what globally people are happy to buy nowadays, even if it would not be at the same quality level as the prestigious Western or Japanese brands of the time.
For example, in the Soviet times, the domestically produced piano “Lira”, was not necessarily worse for its epoch, than pianos buy nowadays, but the brand died from its lack of business competitiveness.
The bestselling piano today in Russia today is a “Young Chang” from Korea – the mass market is not competing with Fazioli, but the Russian piano industry was not able to compete in business terms, in the lower price segments either.
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Build quality of mass consumer products (especially electronics, but even things like furniture and clothing) globally has been falling in the last twenty year, as a result of the outsourcing of production to China. But the globally lower quality products are cheaper because of being produced in China, and we have seen that there is a global preference of people is to buy lower quality products if it means lower prices, and so the lower quality products can still be competitive.
Yes, the economy is less vulnerable today to the commodity cycle, than the Soviet one. And there is example of how import-substitution, while successful in some ways like providing full employment and a local self-esteem of the workers, was a failure for the USSR in terms of reducing the strategic vulnerabilities of the economy.
Today, the strategic problem of the economy is still being coupled to the commodity cycle, with a lack of economic complexity, diversification and globally competitive companies.
But import substitution policy, is likely to support the latter. For a case study – look how Telegram is successful, as Durovs know how to build a globally competitive product with international financing, while their VK has stagnated pathetically despite attempts to apply import substitution style of support to it.
Or “Masha and Bear”, which was created by funding of local animators by American venture capitalists.
Edit on this comment
“is not likely to support the latter”
It’s not an issue of competitiveness, it’s an issue of monopoly. As far as clothes, shoes, electronics, and many other things go, today in the US you can buy Chinese-made crap and almost nothing else. Even if you are prepared to pay 2-3 times more, you can’t find anything of good quality. Besides, the prices of Chinese crap in the US went up a lot in the last 5-10 years. Not because this crap got any better, but because there is no choice any more. Welcome to the “free market”.
Consumers today have a disposable mentality, and they prefer cheap Chinese-made trash, if you look at the shopping behaviour. I feel like it is even more like this in Russia and Europe, than in the USA.
Just visit Spain, where the Chinese convenience stores on every street, sell openly counterfeit trash; and yet Spanish people seem to filling their apartment with such trash.
In Russia, millions of people are buying unregulated dangerous Chinese electronics on aliexpress, and there are occasionally stories of people killed by such kind of electronics. But the average consumers will be happy to accept the risk of unregulated electronics, if the price of product will be sufficiently cheap.
Similarly, a lot of the furniture is built from “particle board” and “manufactured wood” from the China, that will have often higher formaldehyde emission than the regulated Russian locally made product – but I don’t think the average consumer will care about this topic, and the Chinese furniture is very popular in Russia, even as it is often offgassing dangerous chemicals for two years after you bought it.
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This is an analogous trend in music reproduction, where in the 1990s most people were listening to higher quality audio samples than today, as they listened to music on CD. Whereas Mp3s were introduced in the 2000s with almost unlistenable compression, but the majority of consumers preferred the convenient but low quality experience of the Ipod, in comparison to the high quality but less convenient Sony discman.
In the 2000s, Sony’s Hi-MD (Mini disc player with lossless codec), was a failure with consumers, selling a few thousand machines, while Ipod was selling 10 million.
Sony have lost of money, before learning that lossless formats, was not the reason for the earlier success of the CD. The CD was a masterwork of audio engineering, but the reason that consumers liked it was because they could be more lazy and easily changing songs, not because of its excellent quality of the sound.
In some areas, consumers benefit from stricter government regulation.
I guess the most infamous example at the moment is with the Dubai lamp. Because in the Dubai, the Sheikh has forced Philips to not overpower the filament LED bulbs. (Usually LED bulbs are overpowered and electronics fail prematurely from overheating, which is good for the manufacturer who can sell the bulbs to the consumer again to replace the failed bulbs after a couple years).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4
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