ionised

My partner grew up in Poland and Ukraine and lived there through the collapse of the USSR and I've spent plenty of time in both countries. Believe, me I know how much they fucked up.

That doesn't change the fact the US engaged in market distortion and economic coercion on ideological grounds.

If that fact makes you uncomfortable, I suggest you inform your representatives, because they are still doing it to weaker nations that don't dance to the American tune today.

It might surprise you to hear as well that there are quite a few things people in Eastern Europe miss from the Soviet days. The heavy focus on community, childcare, free healthcare and and quality education in the trades and higher professions for example.

My partner and her family hate how individualistic and self-serving people can be in the west. There's basically no solidarity that compares to what they had in that system. That doesn't mean they want to go back to it, it just means there are lessons that we can learn from that system to improve our own.

Make no mistake, the USSR did some things right. It's mistakes do not erase them. Don't hold them to a standard you are not willing to hold your own country to, because the failings of capitalism and the lives lost due to those failings each year are legion.

To think otherwise is nothing short of ideological fundamentalism.

Posting something more substantial than "they deserved it" would be appreciated.

Otherwise don't bother.

> Larry Summers, when he was "advising", didn't make a secret of the fact that he didn't really care who "owned" most Russian assets provided it was in private hands.

Ideology over practicality. Lovely.

> after all people didn't starve before Russia had modern farming equipment.

Yes, they did. You don't know your history or are deliberately ignoring parts of it.

Russia and the Russian Empire was always struggling to produce enough food due to the nature of its landscape. Barely any of it is suitable for farming.

This is the main reason Russia always tries to expand westward (that and its lack of warm-water ports for trade). It's simple self-preservation. I'm not excusing some or all of the horrible shit they've done to pursue this goal either, but it is understandable. The US did exactly the same when it swarmed over North America wiping out or subjugating every Native tribe it encountered.

The arable land in Russia is incredibly slim and was mostly situated on its western countries bordering Europe. Most of Russia and many of its satellite states during the USSR is and were unsuitable for farming.

On the subject of US/NATO trade embargoes, the US did a similar thing to Cuba and some South American states for decades for no good reason other than 'communism bad!'.

Trade embargoes used as a tool to fight an ideological war by weakening the target country's economy, thereby discrediting its economic model by artificially limiting supplies of grain and efficient farming equipment.

All they ended up doing was hurting the regular people who probably couldn't have cared less what system they were under. They were too busy trying to live their lives.

There was nothing in the Soviet system that prevented it from trading with the west from an ideological standpoint either. The refusal to trade came from the west; and the only reason trade with the west was hindered was because the US wanted to fight an ideological war by undermining its enemies economies.

The reality is, the so-called free-market champion that is the United States engages in market distortion to eliminate rivals all the time. The best example recently was the Iraq War. That was a response to Saddam Hussein's plan to stop trading oil in dollars and switch to Euros instead.

I feel like you are deliberately ignoring information that doesn't satisfy your world view.

I cannot help you with that.

Some more info on Russia's motives:

https://www.businessinsider.com/10-maps-that-explain-russias...

The West contributed more than you think.

The famines in the USSR were partially caused by US trade embargoes on the USSR preventing them from buying modern farming equipment and grain supplies.

That's not to say the USSR itself bore no blame. They definitely did, but the US did everything it could to ensure that system would collapse.

> > let's be honest here. Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Thailand and many other countries have these laws, and while I disagree with them on many points, they deal harshly and swiftly with the dregs of society.

And what paradises those places are!

And you want to hold that up as something immoral by...repeating it?

It doesn't make things right. Nothing ever will, but it's better than the alternative.

We shouldn't.

Are you sure it's not just a case of armchair engineering as in the case of armchair psychology?

Lots of HN comments pretend to know everything about depression and its cures despite posting totally incorrect information on the subject.

People here tend to speak with authority on many things they actually know next to nothing about.

Sorry, but accusing others of whataboutism doesn't detract from your own double standards:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism#Criticism

Others have criticized the usage of accusations of whataboutism by American news outlets, arguing that the accusation whataboutism has been used to simply "deflect" criticisms of human rights abuses perpetrated by the United States or its allies.

They argue that the usage of the term almost exclusively by American outlets is a double standard, and that moral accusations made by powerful countries are merely a pretext to punish their geopolitical rivals in the face of their own wrongdoing.

In fact, invoking 'whataboutism' in the way you have done is a misuse and a deliberate attempt to deflect.

> Maybe a better term would be satisfying? That covers that the individual parent benefits but also doesn't imply that having children is hurting others.

I certainly wouldn't say satisfying, because you are deliberately ignoring any negative impacts of having children and focusing only on the positives. You say so yourself above.

I don't know if you agree that there can sometimes be negative consequences but you're opting not to speak of them to spare the feelings of parents (perhaps including yourself) or whether you genuinely believe that child birth has no negative consequences on other people or society, ever.

I'd say that's debatable at best. It depends entirely on where you live and what the impact of that child is on society and the environment.

A child's immense carbon footprint throughout life is a good example of how a child being born can be detrimental to the ecosystems we all depend on. That will remain true until (if we ever do) find a way to reduce our carbon footprints to zero or negative and in my opinion, is a reason to limit the number of children you have.

Two kids seems like a good compromise. More than that and you are adding to the problem. 'Be fruitful and multiply' does not serve our species as a mantra as well as it once did.

Why are you and the poster above you (espeed) posting the exact same sentences under different user names?

Honestly, yes.

The United States meets its own definition of a rogue state.

Might be referring the the fact that it is a barbaric tyrannical state.

Is revenue the only thing you consider when looking for a new role?

Animal Farm was a critique of Stalinism and the hijacked Bolshevik revolution more than anything, and it's a good one considering Orwell himself leaned socialist (which Stalinism certainly was not).

You don't have a deterrent to begin with.

$$$$

> would be happy to be alive

That's debatable, honestly. You can't possibly know the child will be happy to be alive or will live a life without suffering, it's a gamble.

Most people alive on Earth today I would wager experience suffering more than they do happiness.

> happiness gives joy to the parent

Not denying that, but you can't deny that that is a selfish thing, wanting to bestow joy to yourself.

Don't wince in disgust at the word 'selfish'. People do selfish things all the time for mere survival. Again, I wouldn't admonish anyone for it.

> I don't see anyone deluding themselves other than the people who think not having children is a moral position to take

I never said anything of the sort.

Thankfully, the EU disagrees with you as do a growing number of people around the world.

There a few places you can go with no little to no government if that's what you prefer.

I guarantee you'll be crying to come home in short order though.

My evidence (as I explained above) is the entire field of evolutionary biology and the fact that we are still mammals with the same instinctual drives behind our reproduction.

What's yours, beyond a sense of disgust at the suggestion that you are still just an animal; and a desire to be seen as a paragon of virtue because you had sex and made little versions of yourself?

Or change the law.

We separate plenty of human concepts from evolution and nature already. Choosing not to do so here seems arbitrary.

And I wasn't so much casting a moral judgement on the selfishness of the act. I was just pointing it out as a selfish act as in, it is done primarily for you and your genes whether you realise or not. You are no different than any other mammal in this regard.

(I'm referring to the collective 'you' here, not you specifically.)

That's just life and evolution. I'm not admonishing anyone for it, but I can't accept the idea that having children is somehow an altruistic act done to spread the concept of happiness when the rest of the natural world and mounds of empirical data on the study of evolution and biology screams otherwise.

That makes no sense whatsoever.

You are a mammal. You will mate and reproduce to ensure the survival of your own genes. Those are your instinctual drives. This also strokes the ego if you're successful. You get to see little versions of the your own genetics populating the world.

Some of us choose not to participate in this willingly, others will delude themselves into thinking they are somehow separate from the rest of nature in terms of their biological drives.

I think this is the revisionism to be honest.

Chrome became as widespread as it did because it was bundled like crapware with installers for various pieces of software and they plastered scare-mongering banners all over their service telling people they had to use Chrome to get the correct experience, or deliberately gimping their own services on other browsers.

Chrome may have been the better browser at release, but simply being better did not get it to where it is.

How is Firefox any different in that regard?

It's exactly the same, go to the Firefox add-on store and install uBLock Origin.

> And, aside from that, you're just plain wrong.

Convincing argument.

That says it was true historically, not any longer.

> You’re literally sustaining the human race.

While true, that's not the reason people reproduce.

Most people are only truly concerned with their own offspring and their own bloodline.

That everybody in the world is primarily focused on their own legacy but just happens to contribute to the numbers of our species as a whole is an evolutionary mechanic, not a human one.

Even without the autism, the only thing that 'kicking his butt' will accomplish is teaching him to despise his parents.