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we've begun to celebrate the virtues of dictators
It's not a new thing at all. For a lot of the 20th C the US was doing precisely that. Fighting democracy and supporting dictators. There are dozens of countries where that happened. The accounts are depressing, horrifying. Which, yes, has happened with such regularity that you could say the US
kills people. It imprisons people. It poisons people. It cheats, it steals (from masses of poor people). It lies in the face of the world (bare chested).
One quick way to get some sense of the reality is to look at the voting in the United Nations, (GA and SC). I did that once for votes in the 80s and 90s. Typically, there's a vote on something that almost every country in the world thinks is a good idea, except for 1 or 2 of the worst dictatorships...and the USA. It's quite amazing to see that in 'black and white'. Nothing like the God-Is-On-Our-Side picture painted on the US news TV shows.
Italy, Estonia, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Romania and Finland also expelled between one and three diplomats each.
President Donald Trump on Monday ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats the US identified as intelligence agents and the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/26/politics/us-expel-russian-dip...
Unless you're willfully living under a rock, you must admit that it strongly appears that Trump is beholden to Russia in the same way that a middleman is under the thumb of his mob boss. Based on the available financial evidence (the countless companies and countless financial failures and defaulted loans), it's quite plausible that Trump owes some wealthy Russians a lot of money. His house of cards is built on OPM.
Really there's no point debating this. Those who cannot see this are either extremely young and naive, or they are wilfully ignorant. I don't care what political figure it is on what side... thinking people can observe behaviors and identify patterns that illustrate (highly) likely back stories. Trump has a LOT of back stories. You need only to research his US endeavors to see that he has never, at least until becoming President, built a successful business on his own. Now, of course, he has the benefit of the perceived promise of his customers having access to him (a la Mar a Lago, for example).
U.S. Forces Killed More Than 200 Russian Fighters in Syria Attack
https://www.thedailybeast.com/report-us-forces-killed-more-t...
And there are sanctions:
Trump administration slaps more sanctions on Russia after Skripal poisonings
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/08/politics/us-state-department-...
It is plausible that Trump owes some wealthy Russians a lot of money, but on the other hand, there is zero actual evidence that it is true. Lot's of things are plausible. It is plausible you are a Russian agent planting propaganda to undermine faith in the government, but there is zero evidence of it being true, so I wouldn't go around claiming it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/us/politics/russians-indi...
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-reportedly-bragged-abo...
It doesn't suggest someone beholden to Russia.
In the US, quite honestly, the trend has been negative since the mid 1960s. That's not ideal for those of us in the prime of our lives now.
If you look at the US trends in the late 50s, it was far better than the trends in the 90s, 2000s, and beyond.
But I certainly wouldn't trade my life currently for the 1960's in a second -- going tremendously backwards with civil rights and LGBTQ attitudes, the Vietnam War debacle, no internet, missing out on five decades of health care advances and new treatments, vastly safer cars, I could go on and on and on...
Really not sure what trend you're talking about. If you say the "trend" has been negative since the 1960's, you're saying things are worse today than the 1960's... and I just fail to see how that's true except in very specific areas like student debt or healthcare spending, but certainly not overall.
It seems like people view the 1950s to 1980s with rose colored glasses now.
The mood in the late 1980s and early 1990s was much better than it has been the last few years. And better than it was in the 1970s.
The best realization of the American dream was on the decade after the end of WW2.
Incidentally, it was a period with comparatively high corporate taxes. Now we have historically low corporate taxes, not even counting maneuvers like the Irish/Dutch indefinite tax deferment scheme.
What has been promoted as common free market wisdom at least since the 80s has no subsantive evidence to back it up. If you want a current example of reality vs "common wisdom" economics, compare California to Wisconsin, Kansas, or Texas.
An essential caveat: That only would apply if you were a white male, a Christian to a significant extent, and possibly a Protestant. For women, African-Americans, and many other minorities, the American Dream was far out of reach. African-Americans were still being lynched.
> Incidentally, it was a period with comparatively high corporate taxes.
An excellent point, and don't forget much higher regulation.
> If you want a current example of reality vs "common wisdom" economics, compare California to Wisconsin, Kansas, or Texas.
Yes, I try to point out: Name one great American industry that came out of a 'red' state, other than extractive industries like oil. Does the whole country want an economy and human welfare like Alabama or like Massachusetts?
Ok, let me try.... Semiconductors in California?
California was a red state up until the 1992 presidential election. Long after the birth of the semiconductor and computer age.
What do I win?
And looking back to earlier in the 1900s, it was states like Ohio, Michigan, Illinois (all red states back then) that were major economic powerhouses.
I would argue that states like NY and CA are economic powerhouses in spite of their politics, not because. Just take a look at what democratic policies have done to NJ. It's been on the decline for a long time.
But at that point in time the Republicans would have been the blue guys and the Democrats the red guys.
(Though the contemporary US colour scheme doesn't make much sense since historically/elsewhere the left is associated with red and the right with blue. But my point is that the Democrats were the more conservative party at that point in time and the Republicans the more progressive party.)
Yeah, surprising how being the only Western power not destroyed economically can do that. Your theory of higher corporate taxes is just cherry picking numbers. Yes rates were higher, but there were way more ways to get around them than there are now.
But with every breathless proclamation like yours of Russia as a cartoon villain I started to have doubts. It seemed like everything was suddenly Russia's fault--they were the absolute root of all evil in the world. Anyone who disagreed was obviously a Russian bot.
The last straw for me was when Theresa May declared, without any doubt, that the Russian state had attempted to assassinate two British citizens using nerve agents (10 days after the fact, before the conclusion of any investigation and without any concrete evidence to implicate Russia).
This Russia-phobia is dangerous. We have made a bogeyman and a scapegoat out of a desperate, nuclear-equipped nation that less than 30 years ago had its federation, economy and national identity shattered. I'm afraid that this delusion won't stop until a full on conflict breaks out which should be a much scarier prospect than yet-another-evil-dictatorship.
But we, in the West, and countries aligned with the West, fail to understand their motives. Like China, they have internal motives that while they look like they are strategizing against the West in particular, at times it’s just due to internal issues.
Russia didn’t anex Crimea to poke the West. They took it because not having it exposed them militarily (as well as domestically made them looked weak).
For all his faults, Kissinger understands those things better than most public figures in their public speaking (are willing to admit, at least).
It's dangerous to assume this only holds true for one side, imho it's much more likely all the involved players think like that and act accordingly.
Case in point: Many Russian people also don't understand "Western motives" and they actually feel backstabbed due to cultural differences leading to, rather massive, geopolitical misunderstandings like that whole "No NATO Eastward Expansion" promise during German reunification talks. [0]
While Russians think "A word is a word", most Western responses to this pretty much boil down to a lawyered "nothing was ever ratified" response, which might be formally correct but is the diplomatic equivalent of flipping somebody off you just scammed.
There are so many barriers at work here, not just in terms of language, but also the cultural context, also ain't helping that pretty much everybody is running communication and information interference, so finding common ground is actively fought against.
[0]http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-ex...
Ok, I'll bait - it exposed them to what?
Any other "exposures"?
I don't follow you here. The toxin in question is known, or at least widely assumed, to be produced and controlled exclusively by state-sanctioned facilities in Russia.
So, scenario one is that Putin's agents committed the assassination attempt. That's obviously bad.
Scenario two is that Putin has lost control of his country's WMDs, and that they are being deployed in foreign countries by rogue actors without his permission. That's arguably even worse.
So, which is more likely, in your opinion?
[1] http://www.spectroscopynow.com/details/ezine/1591ca249b2/Ira...
[2] https://medium.com/@gregclay/usa-synthesized-novichok-in-199...
[3] https://twitter.com/davidbcollum/status/998613563680882694?l...
Are the Swiss in on it, too? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-russia/russian-agen...
Then 2014 came. I was wrong. Russia is exactly what the majority of its citizens want it to be. And what they want it to be is something that others are afraid of.
Less messy than poisoning I suppose.