In Moscow, McDonald's packs up, radio falls silent and the brain drain begins
lite.cnn.com
lite.cnn.com
Utterly sad and tragic. But I am no longer expecting spectacular revolt and a feel good ending. History suggests this going to go down the same way it has for a long time.
I really hope and want to be wrong on this one.
You can always argue, correctly, that it’s hard to know what’s going on in an autocratic country, but many of these polls were un controversial and simply not stating support for eg the annexation of Crimea wouldn’t be an offence.
I do feel sorry for how badly this is going to affect people in Russia, but equally Russians don’t seem to mind serving up hot hell to their neighbours. I don’t know how you can break this cycle without making Russians understand how badly they are hurting others.
Russia may not be a democracy but the state does rely on popular support for legitimacy, and has had it in the past 30-odd years.
I am pretty sure some of them understand, but if they try to tell their neighbors, they spend the next 15 years in prison.
>Webb was found dead in his Carmichael home on December 10, 2004, with two gunshot wounds to the head. His death was ruled a suicide by the Sacramento County coroner's office. According to a description of Webb's injuries in the Los Angeles Times, he shot himself with a .38 revolver, which he placed near his right ear. The first shot went through his face, and exited at his left cheek. The coroner's staff concluded that the second shot hit an artery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb#Death
>The Supreme Court declared last week that Americans have no right to learn the grisly details of CIA torture because the CIA has never formally confessed its crimes. The verdict symbolizes how the rule of law has become little more than a form of legal mumbo-jumbo to shroud official crimes. Why should anyone expect justice from a Supreme Court that covers up torture?
https://mises.org/wire/supreme-court-uses-twisted-logic-prot...
If you looked, you could find a full page of citations like this. The difference is who's propaganda bubble you are living inside of. This doesn't excuse Putin or statists anywhere.
There is nothing gutsy because it's nothing out of the ordinary.
And idk what you’re referring to regarding “vulnerable”? Vulnerable to addiction? Alcohol is addictive and bars are legal. Casinos are still heavily regulated, but beyond that people are allowed to make their own decisions and gamble if they wish.
Not OP but worked in the industry and enjoying a casino visit once in a while: People left so far behind by society that they see their only hope of escaping poverty in gambling. Or people with issues (poverty, domestic violence, PTSD, ...) who don't have access to other outlets for their frustrations. Lotteries and gambling are called "taxes on the poor and stupid" for a reason!
> Vulnerable to addiction? Alcohol is addictive and bars are legal.
Yes, but you usually can't drink away your life savings in one night out (expensive whisky, wine and strip club champagne aside). You'll pass out before being able to spend more than 200$ in most bars. With gambling, it's scary how fast you can win and especially lose a lot of money - I watched someone at a roulette wheel winning 35k $ in one round (bet a grand on a single number), and lose that and more the next ten minutes.
It feels like there's a certain style of "1980s mall", and another style of "2020s mall". The former is 2 stories of indoor corridors, primarily retail shops, with interspersed fully-enclosed restaurants and few areas to sit down. The latter is mixed-use, with condos, hotels, restaurants, and retail shops surrounding an open-air green space with lots of public seating and lawns. 1980s malls are dying fast, but 2020s malls are springing up in their place, and successfully drawing people to them.
https://www.newark.org/home/showpublisheddocument/7665/63758...
I remember arguing with my mom loudly in English in its halls, and kids would come up to us to practice their english and try to help us :)
At the Motorola store in GUM I bought an unlocked Motorola ROKR with Cyrillic T9 keys, for the equivalent of US$200.
Our tour guide smiled on how much GUM was such a social hub for Russians since the 1920s. I couldn't comment on how the haves and have-nots viewed the location, or what it stood for over the years or today, but it was obvious to me its social status.
> Several times during the 1960s and 1970s, the Second Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Suslov, who hated the idea of having a Department store across the Mausoleum of Lenin, tried to convert GUM into a Exhibition hall and Museum showcasing the achievements of the Soviet Union and Communism, without the knowledge of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. Each time however, Brezhnev was tipped off and put a stop to such plans.[8]
I guess you had to be there.
It did take for a long time in other areas. (Long = approximately the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.) But visits to malls across the US have been declining for some time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retail_apocalypse (Not mall-specific.)
In fact, many are quite happy to visit the “Mall of Scandinavia”
And many / most smaller towns only have chains.
That Euro charm that so many romanticize is not evenly distributed.
Los Angeles probably has the most non-chain businesses in any of the cities I've lived in.
> In Thomas L. Friedman's 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree,[56] the following statement was presented: "No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's". He supported his belief, as a theory, by stating that when a country has reached an economic development where it has a middle class strong enough to support a McDonald's network, it would become a "McDonald's country", and will not be interested in fighting wars anymore.
Nothing new there, this time it's just extremely compressed on the time scale.
And in some areas like Eastern Europe that's exactly what did happen of course.
It also didn't leave a power vacuum in the country afterwards that allowed a worse enemy to grow (Like Isis in Iraq, the Taliban's return in Afghanistan). Civilian casualties were also an order of magnitude lower. The local population was better off with the intervention than if it hadn't taken place.
PS I don't despise Americans at all! Although I was opposed to the wars in Iraq (2003) and Afghanistan and my own country's involvement in them. However I don't blame the American people for it, same way I don't blame the Russian people for Ukraine.
These wars are orchestrated by interests so far above the heads of common people that they really have no control over it.
And after a certain period of suffering and unrest, people just want "stability" and that's when any well-intention-ed politician in a country with 5min of democracy experience don't stand a change against the quintessential competent strongman savior of the once-great empire.
The problems and solutions for Russia are inside, but I don't see how that society after 70 years + 20 under alternate realities can change to actually modern and democratic ( which is very different from being Americanized ).
Being geographically closer to the West probably also made a difference; after the fall of socialism, more people could take a trip across the iron curtain and observe how things worked on the other side.
Maybe these days, people living in Russia should be invited to visit Europe and see how people live there. Like, maybe as a part of "propaganda budget", EU should offer one month of fully paid vacation here to every citizen of Russia. To see that we are actually not a hellhole full of Nazis; to see how even the life standards in Eastern Europe are these days closer to the West than to Russia; to understand that they could do even better (because they could do whatever Eastern Europe did, plus they would still have the oil).
Generally, people should travel more, see the world more. So that they can later return to their country and ask: "How is it possible that other countries have X, but here at home we say that it is impossible?" (And this applies to everyone. Like, Americans would probably also benefit from seeing that universal healthcare is possible and actually considered normal in some places.)
All in all, thousands of Russian service members have died, but Russian representatives refuse to collect bodies from Ukrainian authorities for proper burial. Relatives are kept in the dark. Many will receive a letter months from now saying that their father/husband/son died in undefined military exercise. Those relatives who speak up get a visit from security service intimidating them into shutting up.
It's a total nightmare. There'd be a violent revolution the next day if Russian TV showed truth for one evening: orthodox churches burning, entire towns razed to ground, kids getting limbs blown off from cluster munitions dropped onto residential areas, all kinds of unimaginable suffering.
The scale of this is such that there's no way to conceal truth for an extended period of time. It will lead to implosion of Russian society just like the Afghan war did in the 1980s.
Determined people may seek out independent online sources if they can digest that everything they've been told is a lie, but that's an insignificant fraction of the whole population and their activism is mercilessly crushed by security services. The critical majority remains unaware of what the whole world has seen on front pages for the past several weeks and instead lives in a parallel reality where the widely reported bombing of Mariupol's hospital didn't happen, or if it did, they were all Nazis and crisis actors. It's Alex Jones and InfoWars adopted as state religion. Insane.
People often believe what they want to believe. Repression of the press is not helpful. But it isn't hard to find the truth in Russia. You can find whatever truth you want to find.
I hope either that the Russians withdraw without a very bruised ego so they leave poor Ukrainians alone to rebuild their country or that they simply collapse altogether and start afresh without Putin. Would like to live to see Putin condemned and perhaps imprisoned or executed by his own people, that would completely vindicate the Russian people in my eyes but I very much doubt that.
“Take over Ukraine!”
“Yes!” But nothing (?) about 1. very hard, 2. unprepared military, 3. external risks.
There's no rational benefit, it's just the bizarre thinking that a physical buffer between Moscow and NATO is somehow helpful in a world with thousands of ICBMs.
On the flip side, it's ridiculous that the US and NATO leaders are willing to risk nuclear war over something symbolic with miniscule strategic value. If WW3 is started over something as foolish as this when all we had to say was 'Ukraine will never join NATO'.
In a way it is hypercritical to say Russia is overreacting when the US was extremely close to escalating to all-out war over the missiles in Cuba.
It was never about NATO, that was just a fig leaf to people with terminal “both sides” mentality. This has always been sold to Russia has returning to its rightful place as a glorious empire. That’s Putin’s personal motivations as well and he was damn clear about it in his invasion-eve speech.
This is about liberal democracy versus ruthless authoritarianism, and if you repeat Kremlin talking points, you’ve chosen the side of ruthless authoritarianism. Russia faked evidence and used it as pretext for their invasion. This is a war of aggression based on misinformation.
Even if NATO is just a fig leaf, why give it to him? Why give him the chess piece that makes it easier to justify this war?
One of the great things about a liberal democracy is that we can openly criticize the strategic choices our government has made. I sure hope that we can continue to do that without labeling those dissenters as supporting ruthless authoritarianism.
It’s great to be skeptical of our government. It’s not so great to repeat kremlin talking points nearly verbatim.
Are invasions and overthrow of governments somehow okay when they install a pro-democratic and/or US-friendly leader? What if it fails and that leader turns out to be worse than the previous one?
Keep in mind that the US/NATO has been closely involved in many of these overthrows: Libya, Yemeni, Syria, Iraq, Uganda, Somalia, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada. Pretty much all of these involved lots of civilian death and collateral damage.
These aren't kremlin talking points, this is history. It's important to try to break out of the filter bubble and consider alternative viewpoints. At least consider the possibility that NATO is abusing its power and taking actions that are far beyond its original charter/purpose.
The US almost started WW3 over exactly that same thing in the not so distance past during the cuban missile crisis.
We get mad when Russia interferes with US-elections with a few online bots but the US directly funded and participated in the overthrow of the pro-Russia Ukrainian government in 2014. There was violence involved, why is it okay when the US murders Ukrainians to install a sympathetic government but not when Russia does it? It's hypocritical.
If it were up to me, I'd disband NATO entirely (too much polarizing history) and replace it with a new organization with a very similar charter, but open membership to Russia and China. The purpose of this organization should be to prevent world wars, not to decide local elections, especially when those elections/conflicts involve non-member countries.
However note how aggressive a stance that is. NATO is supposed to be a defensive organization but with the charter/purpose you suggest, it is rational for Putin and Xi to fear US/NATO aggression and do whatever it takes to fight its expansion. It is very much a threat to their survival, and the existence of their countries as they know it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations...
His current plan likely: 1. destroy Ukrainian military and establish control over all major cities, roads and borders (russian losses to achieve this goal is no-brainier for him) 2. starve population (repeat Holodomor [1]) 3. sent millions to prison camps.
I'd argue the blunder is on the yes men surrounding him who now will lose their perks because they didn't think of dealing with the problem first
Also many (from my experience at least) generally just have lower expectations... the joke is "we never used to live well, no reason to start now" (никогда хорошо не жили, нечего и начинать).