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Mikhail Gorbachev has died

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Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#371

Post by gpm »

colechristensen wrote: post #359
karaterobot wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment makes it sounds like you believe the U.S. had the power to decide whether or not Russia would turn into a kleptocracy or not. Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but if I'm not, I'm skeptical. Marshall plan notwithstanding, I would give credit to the people and government of Japan for their post-war success: it could easily have gone another direction, and the U.S. couldn't have stopped that from happening. L…

> I don't think the U.S. should take on the burden of developing other countries; going down that road has been a bad idea more often than not. From what I can tell from history, our successes involved US taking sovereignty and ruling absolutely for a period of years while setting up a government of our choosing to replace us. Our failures involved quickly setting up a local democracy and allowing self rule while we…

What successes are you thinking of?

The only two that come to mind for me are Korea and Japan (I could easily be overlooking some), and really the former happened as a part of the latter (Korea was ruled by Japan for the 35 years prior to WWII).

As I understand it South Korea was at least nominally under local democratic rule from the start.

I'm not sure that's a big enough sample set to be making generalizations from, and even if you are happy with a sample set of 2 I'm not really sure south korea fits the mold you're describing.

That said, I could definitely be missing some examples that would make the argument more convincing.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#372

Post by wahern »

pastacacioepepe wrote: post #267
DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like needless pedantry at least for a conversation outside of school. The USSR (with whom the Cold War was being fought) was dissolved and Germany was reunified. For all intents and purposes it did end, just a new conflict (now with Russia) began.

If the cold war did end, why didn't NATO dissolve as well? It was born exactly to contain the USSR! Instead NATO kept expanding east...

> NATO kept expanding east

You make it sound like NATO was unilaterally pushing for this. Eastern European countries were begging to join NATO. All of them had been independent multiple times over the centuries, always ending up under Russian control. NATO offered a plausible mechanism to end the historical cycle--an historical cycle for which Russia, in 2022, is proudly nostalgic and not afraid to go to war to continue.

Moreover, national security is expensive, especially for small countries who cannot benefit from scale--they need to spend much more for even minimal deterrence. For newly independent nations, NATO provides leverage for their security expenditures. More importantly, it also motivates peaceful resolution of conflict among neighboring NATO states, which makes NATO a keystone institution for peace in Europe, Russia notwithstanding.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#373

Post by rkagerer »

eloy wrote: post #20

RIP Gorbachev, one of the few genuinely good people in politics. After he retired from politics, he was featured in several advertisements: - In 1994 for Apple Computer: https://www.upi.com/Archives/1994/10/07/The-first-advertisem... - In 1998 for Pizza Hut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorbachev_Pizza_Hut_commercial - In 2000 for the ÖBB, the Austrian railways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLscz8kEg6c - In 2007…

Anyone have a link to a picture of the Apple ad?

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#374

Post by tylersmith »

patentatt wrote: post #349
ptero wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was one way. Another was not paying salaries for months ("company has no money" was a common case) until employees sell their "vauchers" to those who wanted to buy.

I've heard variations of this story a lot. Common people and workers received a share of the company they work for, but times were so dire most people sold them to those with money for a pittance. So foreseeable, why was it allowed to happen?

Some people chose to put their assets to work for later and others to sell their assets for cash right now. Why shouldn't people be allowed to make those decisions?

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#375

Post by bolton_strid »

spamizbad wrote: post #290
paganel wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War l There was such a plan, at least in the twisted minds of the people behind the Washington Consensus. They were calling it privatization or price liberalization or some other non-sense like that, thing is the common people got the very, very short stick (like my parents, who lost their jobs, their city apartment and who had to resort to literally subsistence agricultu…

What’s crazy is the minds behind the Washington Consensus favored a form of extreme capitalism that no western democracy would ever tolerate such a system on their own soil. Some ultra-capitalist die-hards have even retreated away from Liberalism in general as they found it too restrictive for their extreme ideology (they know their economic regime could never gain sustained popular support; it would need to be impos…

What’s crazy is the minds behind the Washington Consensus favored a form of extreme capitalism that no western democracy would ever tolerate such a system on their own soil.

It had been tried in many places already: Chile, Indonesia, the Philippines, and (before 1979) Iran. The data were clear: it had worked very well for capitalists, but very poorly for people in the countries affected. And it mostly has come to the US. There are remnants of the welfare state, but your employer can basically do whatever he wants because he calls himself "a job creator"... and education is debt-financed... and getting sick will wipe out everything you have... and we've transitioned away from productive investment to asset bubbles... and you better not end up in a lawsuit because the rich have the best lawyers and lobbyists and therefore effectively own the court system (you only have a shot if you can find a rich person who hates your adversary enough to back you). The EU has held out to an extent, for now, but it won't if the Davos people get their way. The "Great Reset" is their plan to implement extreme capitalism under a guise of ecological caution and "woke" multiculturalism [1].

The Marshall Plan was written by people who believed market systems were superior to central planning given the technological level and geographical complexities (e.g., general low trust between nations) of the time--they were capitalists, but not capitalist ideologues. Alas, the successes (for "business interests", meaning rich people in the US) in Santiago, Jakarta, and Manila led them to become more brazen, to the point of using the former USSR for some of their most aggressive experiments to that point.

----

[1] This is not to say ecological caution isn't important (it is). Nor is it to disparage the broader set of social movements classified by their detractors as "woke", most of which have nothing but the best intentions. The issue with "woke capitalism" is that it retrenches in identity politics in order to divide working people against each other for Capital's benefit, and that it is designed not to provide significant help to people in marginalized groups (most of whom are working class, and who will therefore not be helped) but to neuter a powerful, morally righteous leftist movement toward genuine and universal social justice.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#376

Post by derefr »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #235
Beltalowda wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as "real capitalism"; it's a broad and somewhat vague set of ideas with many possible implementations, none of which are more "real capitalism" than any other, although I'd argue that some implementations definitely better than others (and 90s Russia is a good example of that).

Capitalism is just an economic system with predominantly private ownership of the means of production. Whether a country's set of economically productive organizations are owned by shareholders via a stock exchange or by whomever was powerful enough to take control of them by corrupt means seems irrelevant, no?

If the people who own them aren’t willing to sell them for economically-rational prices, then you don’t have equilibrium capitalism; you have temporary capitalism as a reaction proceeding toward aristocracy / feudalism. When all the assets are illiquid, there’s no capitalism.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#377

Post by eloy »

rkagerer wrote: post #373
eloy wrote: post #20

RIP Gorbachev, one of the few genuinely good people in politics. After he retired from politics, he was featured in several advertisements: - In 1994 for Apple Computer: https://www.upi.com/Archives/1994/10/07/The-first-advertisem... - In 1998 for Pizza Hut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorbachev_Pizza_Hut_commercial - In 2000 for the ÖBB, the Austrian railways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLscz8kEg6c - In 2007…

Anyone have a link to a picture of the Apple ad?

I wish I had it! I think I would have to travel to some physical German archive to lookup old magazines... Or maybe Apple itself has the original digital version in their archives.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#378

Post by nickpinkston »

lapcat wrote: post #22

The United States didn't do enough to help Russia transition to democracy in the 1990s. There was no "Marshall Plan" after the Cold War like there was after World War II. This was a huge mistake, and we see the consequences now, with Russia having turned back toward totalitarianism and imperialism. Sadly, it seems that Gorbachev's efforts were mostly for naught. But it was courageous at the time to open up the Soviet…

I hope that if Putin's regime falls that the West will welcome the next Russia with open arms and such a Marshall Plan with far more commitment, scale, realism, and humility than before.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#379

Post by DubiousPusher »

karaterobot wrote: post #298
DubiousPusher wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would give credit to the people and government of Japan for their post-war success: it could easily have gone another direction, and the U.S. couldn't have stopped that from happening. I suggest you read more about the post war occupation of Japan. The U.S. put its thumb heavily on the scale forcing Japan to accept democratization throughout. Unusual for the U.S. this included pushing economic democracy by suppor…

Thanks for the suggestion about learning about the occupation. To be clear: my statement wasn't that the U.S. did nothing, but that there is no amount they could have done which would force Japan to succeed against their will, or their own ability. There are many examples of the U.S. putting its thumb on the scale, so to speak, in countries where there was not a subsequent, successful democratic transition. The diffe…

I see what you mean.

I guess we'll never know. Because there was a remaking of Japanese society after the war in a democratic image. That just doesn't even appear as though it was attempted in post Soviet Russia.

I don't kmow the origins of why America departed from its usual course of propping up the traditional land owning and wealthy bourgeoisie classes in it' s occupation of Japan. I know FDR personally held very pro democracy and anti colonialist views. He had ambitions to remake America's relations with the developing world after the war though how far he would've progressed on that front is unknown. And of course he was dead by the end of the war and Japan was in the more conservative hands of Truman.

Perhaps the Japanese people ran with this program because of their cultural tenacity. Or perhaps because their defeat had been so total that they truly considered themselves defeated and simply wished to move on whatever with whatever power structure was presented.

Ultimately though, America began a campaign to turn the "subjects" of the Japanese Empire into "citizens" of a Japanese constitutional state. They did not undertake a similar project to turn "comrades" of the Soviet Union into "citizens" of a Russian Republic.

Re: Mikhail Gorbachev has died

#380

Post by somat »

jollybean wrote: post #318
DubiousPusher wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would give credit to the people and government of Japan for their post-war success: it could easily have gone another direction, and the U.S. couldn't have stopped that from happening. I suggest you read more about the post war occupation of Japan. The U.S. put its thumb heavily on the scale forcing Japan to accept democratization throughout. Unusual for the U.S. this included pushing economic democracy by suppor…

The US military defeated Japan and was an occupying power. The US had the power to dictate whatever terms. Japan was on it's back. Russia in 1992 was it's own entity. Still a nuclear power. Making it's own decisions. Not only would Russia not have tolerated US intervention, I'm extremely doubtful there could have been such a thing on any terms. As it stands, much of the money used by Oligarchs to buy up Natural Resou…

This is true, the question is, what was the difference between the occupation of japan and germany and the occupation of afganistan, iraq or vietnam. The lesson of the latter is that all it takes is 20 years of low level combat until the occupying country gets tired and leaves. the lesson of the former is that defeated countries can become your greatest allies. As to what leads a nation to choose one path or the other... That is complicated. as a interesting special case consider korea
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