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Vacations in the Soviet Union

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Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#391

Post by ActorNightly »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #206
ActorNightly wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>its more popular than ever among young people Its only popular as an aesthetic. On both left and right, most politically inclined people don't have the reasoning skills to talk about politics effectively, nor would the actually enjoy living under their hypothetical best system of government. Most political discourse is used as a signal to show what kind of person you are in conversation. And generally, there is a tr…

>> You make it sound very simple. Its not. It's clearly not that hard, if most of Europe can pull it off with dramatically less money than the US. Where's our American exceptionalism when it comes to catching up with any random European country? The issue in the US isn't a lack of means, it's a lack of will. Our political system is bought out by unimaginably rich interests, who's interest in the common welfare will o…

>if most of Europe can pull it off with dramatically less money than the US.

... with a whole different set of legislature, political history, and even cultural history, all of which GREATLY matter for implementing something like healthcare.

Simplifying this all down to "capitalism bad" is virtue signaling just like I talked about in my original post. Either talk about real solutions or don't talk about it all.

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#392

Post by orbital-decay »

thriftwy wrote: post #376
ido wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess they meant the national identities like Ukranian, Georgian, Uzbek, etc.

This is what gets peddled across the world, but for the most part, Soviet Union eas busy creating those national identities. Sometimes it took a break when it became too inconvenient, only to resume it later. Soviet Union is who created these national states in the first place. There were no Georgia and no Uzbekistan before the USSR. In both cases there were a bunch of unaligned tribes or much smaller principalities…

Unaligned tribes? That's... quite a thing to claim, especially about Georgia which had unified national monarchy and long dynasties since Middle Ages, only falling to endless external conquests due to being located between several large parts of the world.

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#394

Post by thriftwy »

orbital-decay wrote: post #392
thriftwy wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what gets peddled across the world, but for the most part, Soviet Union eas busy creating those national identities. Sometimes it took a break when it became too inconvenient, only to resume it later. Soviet Union is who created these national states in the first place. There were no Georgia and no Uzbekistan before the USSR. In both cases there were a bunch of unaligned tribes or much smaller principalities…

Unaligned tribes? That's... quite a thing to claim, especially about Georgia which had unified national monarchy and long dynasties since Middle Ages, only falling to endless external conquests due to being located between several large parts of the world.

That's exactly the vibe of Soviet nation-building propaganda that you have quoted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Mingrelia

But the actual maps show a mosaic of principalities in place or Georgia.

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#395

Post by orbital-decay »

thriftwy wrote: post #394
orbital-decay wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unaligned tribes? That's... quite a thing to claim, especially about Georgia which had unified national monarchy and long dynasties since Middle Ages, only falling to endless external conquests due to being located between several large parts of the world.

That's exactly the vibe of Soviet nation-building propaganda that you have quoted. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Mingrelia But the actual maps show a mosaic of principalities in place or Georgia.

I don't really understand what you claim to be the Soviet propaganda. 400 years of the unified Kingdom of Georgia founded in 11th century?.. Mingrelia was one of the pieces of a single country torn apart by Arab, Persian, Turkic, and Mongolian conquests.

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#396

Post by thriftwy »

orbital-decay wrote: post #395
thriftwy wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the vibe of Soviet nation-building propaganda that you have quoted. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Mingrelia But the actual maps show a mosaic of principalities in place or Georgia.

I don't really understand what you claim to be the Soviet propaganda. 400 years of the unified Kingdom of Georgia founded in 11th century?.. Mingrelia was one of the pieces of a single country torn apart by Arab, Persian, Turkic, and Mongolian conquests.

A lot of ethnicities are torn apart and stay that way. Ask Kurds. Or XXI century Russians for that matter.

I am just pointing out that Soviet Union has encouraged large ethnicities to coalesce, collect their shared history and culture (often inventing large portions in process) and build a nation state on top of that. This is not something you should take for granted, but that's what you've got under Soviet rule.

Not everybody got that privilege, of course. Ethnic Russians, but also Jews and Germans, did not get to have their own nation state in USSR. Technically, Jews had one but it was a joke[1]; Germans briefly had one[2]; Russians hoped to have one after WW2, with capital in Leningrad, but were derailed (Leningrad affair[3]). RSFSR was like a one huge Washington DC in that regard, with glistering Moscow and Leningrad but it was more like Puerto Rico as you descended into Nechernozem'ye[4]. No statehood.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_German_Autonomous_Soviet... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_affair 4. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Нечерноземье

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#397

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

tsukikage wrote: post #351
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know one of them. They make some good points against capitalism, but like Democracy is the worst form of government other than all the others, capitalism is the worst economic system other than all the others. But I simply cannot agree with a world that make everybody equal, no matter how much or how little work they do. People who work jobs that require extensive studying (ie, medical doctors) or jobs that almost…

Capitalism alone doesn't do that either though? Doctors, bankers and rich people's children get rewarded. Nurses, public restroom cleaners and teachers don't.

Right, but we should. If the state's purpose is to do things like provide education, the state needs to make it worthwhile for people to do the work of education. Despite what some people claim, capitalism is not the solution to every problem. But at the same time, if citizens are apathetic about education, they won't want to pay for it.

It's one of those weird catch-22s. If we actually incentivized those jobs nobody wants, they'd get done better, and then people would be more proud of the work, and be willing to pay for it. But because people don't pay for it, the work is done poorly, and so people aren't proud of it, and thus don't want to pay for it.

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#398

Post by [deleted] »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #397
tsukikage wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism alone doesn't do that either though? Doctors, bankers and rich people's children get rewarded. Nurses, public restroom cleaners and teachers don't.

Right, but we should. If the state's purpose is to do things like provide education, the state needs to make it worthwhile for people to do the work of education. Despite what some people claim, capitalism is not the solution to every problem. But at the same time, if citizens are apathetic about education, they won't want to pay for it. It's one of those weird catch-22s. If we actually incentivized those jobs nobody…

[deleted]

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#399

Post by mannerheim »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #332
mannerheim wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you should have gone to China last year or the year before to enjoy the authentic Chinese experience of living in a cage without food because grocery shopping was verboten.

This is exhibit A of how the media in the US and Europe misrepresent China. The fact that you think this is how things were perfectly illustrates the problem. If zero-CoVID had really meant endless lockdowns, Chinese people wouldn't have put up with the policy for nearly 3 years. There were lockdowns in China, but they were limited in time, and before mid-2022, they were relatively rare (as in, nobody I knew was subj…

> endless lockdowns

Didn't say that. It's a fact that some parts of China were locked down for months, and that people were going hungry because they couldn't get food. That was all over Chinese social media.

Re: Vacations in the Soviet Union

#400

Post by mannerheim »

janalsncm wrote: post #340
mannerheim wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I've been to China many times. Enough times to appreciate not having been born there. Western media about China, while somewhat one-sided, isn't particularly unfair in my experience.

You and I must have different definitions of “unfair” if being one-sided isn’t at odds with fairness.

For example, I could say that Mao ordered the killing of all of China's sparrows, leading to a massive famine. Is it one-sided to not mention that this was under the mistaken belief that the sparrows were eating all of the food? Maybe. I don't think it's unfair, though. It was idiotic and it had disastrous consequences.

One could also mention that the one-child policy was kept in place for years after China's looming demographic issues became apparent, and the silliness of replacing it first with a two-child, and then a three-child policy before its abolition. Perhaps it would be one-sided to not mention the massive bureaucracy of the family planning commission consisting of millions of workers at both the central and local government levels who would have to find other work without it (of which I even have family who used to coerce women into getting abortions), but I don't think that makes it any better.

Or ghost cities, which appear in Western media, but rarely mentioning that most of the apartments in these cities end up getting bought because of a real estate bubble in which Chinese citizens pour their savings into buying empty apartments in empty cities. It is 'one-sided' perhaps to not mention that the apartments have owners, but it is factually true that they are empty and the ghost cities exist.

Is Western media sometimes unfair? Sure. The BRI gets painted as a debt trap, but the reality is the projects really are intended to be profitable. Will travelling to China help with that? I don't see why, since the BRI is investment in countries outside of China.

The biggest misconception most Westerners have, though, is that they are under the illusion that the Chinese are yearning to be free from their oppressive government. And perhaps that is the 'distortion' you are thinking of. Is this a result of the media? Perhaps. But in my opinion, it is a factor of Westerners implicitly believing that all people are just like them, when in reality tyranny is only possible because the people who live under it accept it. Every nation gets the government it deserves.

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