Welcome
Any person petty, conformist people strongly dislike probably can't be all bad or else the petty conformist people would not feel sufficiently threatened by the person to want to take the person down because they don't care about much of anything except suppressing anything which threatens to make them feel they are petty conformists. Why, especially if it's true that they are petty conformists, don't they try to raise themselves up instead of trying to pull him down?
They, for instance America's current President Mr. Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., do not like Vladimir Putin. We may hypothesize there is something about Dr. Putin which makes them feel they are petty conformists.
Whence the rat (above)? My guess is that Americans might like it because they think Dr. Putin is worse than a rat: they ideate he is another Adolf Hitler. They, especially the one of them who can do womething about their hate-Putin feelings, Mr. Biden, want to corner the rat and destroy him. Good riddance! Life will be good again when the root of all evil is gone.
That is not my intention at all. the picture reminds me that when Dr. Puitin — and he does have a Ph.D. unlike Mr. Biden —, when Dr. Putin was a young person, a juvenile delinquent who aspired to better himself in the brutish world he lived in, one of his formative experineces was being cornered by a large rat. He was terrified. He finally slammed a door on the rat and won.
Dr. Putin facing a rat is a symbol of something very iportant in his life: knowing what it's like to be cornered by a mercilessly threatening creature. Sounds familiar? U.S. President Biden and his Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have publicly stated their intention to overthrow his government and castrate his military so that "he cannot cause any more aggression".
They want to corner Dr. Putin (whom they probably do think of as no better than a rat). Only a fool or a person with overwelming force tries to corner a person whoe formative expereinece in life was facing death by being cornered and won. Either take him out or watch out.
Who, what is Vladimir Putin? I don't think "we" know or care. Petty conformists never want to understand their enemies because then they might see that their way is not the only way, which might threaten their self-complacency which is a bedrock of their existence.
"A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel." (Robert Frost, cited by Barak Obama)
Many petty conformists, such as Mr. Biden are "liberals", of course: they are so broad-minded that they take the other side in any quarrel where the other side agrees with them.
One thing for certain: Dr. Putin is not either a capital 'C' or a lower case 'c' communist. While he misses The Soviet Union, he does not want to revive it. He is a capitalist. Mr. Biden's problem is tht Dr. PUtin is a deviant player in , not "the", but "his" global market. Mr. Biden, lie any good cpitalist, wants no competition except ffriendly competitoin rom franchisees. (I amost typed: "chimpanees").
Scott Ritter: "The World Needs to Wake Up", Dialogue works, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti3OHPRfxwg. (I may have mis-transcribed a few things but I think I got it good enough to get Major Ritter's message across.) Aside: Major Ritter specifically cites Jeffrey Sachs as not understanding the situation in Russia in the 1990s. Is this relevant? Is it fair? Certainly it seems Prof. Sachs wanted to help Russia and to help build friendship between the U.S. and Russia, unlike, as Major Ritter says, many others.
The Soviet Union suffered from centralized planning. If we take a look at their ballistic missile production, you know they produced very good missiles and they produced a lot of missiles, but the mechanism of producing missiles wasn't something that the West could readily comprehend. You now, it wasn't that the factory received money for the missile, like if I contract with Boeing to produce a missile, we have a price marked for each missile. That price generates funding that then gets budgeted and used to pay salaries, build infrastructure, etcetera, etcetera. That's not how it worked. For there was a whole bunch of factors that went in that did not have direct economic correlations. So it was unustainable especially when the Soviet economy ried to transition away from centralized planning into the more cost effective cost-accounting where they had to account for each dollar, where ot go to traditional Western style accounting. And what they found when they made that transition is you couldn't sustain, for instance, the factory city. One of the things about hte Soviet Union is that when they produced these missiles in Botkensk(?) whre I was, you know, the factory was responsible for schooling, for the roads, for housing, for social things, so the budget that they received from the state didn't just pay for the missiles: they paid for everything. When you went over to cost accounting, suddenly you are paying for a missile but there is no money for everything else. The system started to collapse. So it wasn't that The west caused Russia to collapse. that's just not true.
The Soviet Union could very well — there's a school of thought today that [Gorbachev] — that the reason the Soviet Union collapsed is because Mikhael Gorbachev precipitously transitioned from Soviet style economy to a Wsetern style economy [with] no planning how to do it, and the whole thing collapsed. Had he continued the Soviet style planning but sought to tighten it up —, make things better, not make a direct model of Western capitalism, there wouldn't have been this precipitous collapse, but he didn't have that vision. He wanted to — he had bought into the notion that The West was better and the next thing you know you have Boris Yeltsin, the decade of the 90s and the absolute devastation of Russia because of this. If you take a look at Russian capitalism today, it's a totally different concept but it's not American capitalism — it's something different. You know, the Russians have a unique economy today. But what's interesting is the West has no clue how the Russian economy works. Just like we had no clue how the Soviet economy works. I'm just being sraight up honest. THe CIA had no clue how the Soviet economy worked. They were just guessing.
This is why people like Jeffrey Sachs who went into Russia in the 1990s couldn't grasp what he was trying to fish because he was coming in with a Western economic planning model that did not translate into the reality of Russia. Russia has emerged from the 1990s. And they had to deal with some new artificialities: the rise of an oligarch class that didn't exist during Soviet times had to be factored in, but the saving grace here is that when the West sanctioned Russia in 2022, it was a full divorce. and it forced Russia to do things that it would have been very difficult to do, like untangle The West from the Russian economy, to shut down the oligarchs, to insist on the reinvestment of money in Russia. The West doesn't know Russia's economy today. I keep telling people you need to go the the St. Petersburg economic forum every year so you get an understanding of what makes the Russian economy tick. Nobody wants to go because that's Russian propaganda. No, it's Russian reality....
We've created a myth abou the collabse of the Soviet economy. It didn't collapse the way they say it did. I would challenge them on that. I think it's far more complicated than saying we put so much pressure on them in terms of producing weapons that the system collapsed. No. The system was there. It was working. It wasn't firing on all cylinders. The problem was to transition that system to Western style capitalism. That's where the collapse took place, not because we put too much pressure on Russia. And today, that notion that we could pressure Russia. How do you pressure a system that you don't understand?....
We study Russia from afar, through a filter that's defined by Western academics who are inherently opposed ot Russia and therefors paint everything that happens in Russia in a negative light.
The net, it seems to me (BMcC[18-11-46-503]), is that a Soviet "factory" was not just a production facility where the employees got a paycheck and had to take care of their lives for themselves, but rather a community that supported the whole life situation of the workers in addition to producing some specific product. This sounds at least prima facie good to me, more like Prof. Richard Wolff's "Democracy at work", question-mark?
Not only from what Major Ritter writes here but from other things, it seems Mr. Gorbachev was a naive person who was not up to the job of leading The Soviet Union through the 1990s and into the 21st Century. I seem to recall even seeing Mr. Gorbachev featured in an advertisement for designer handbags (Hermes? Gucci?) a few years ago: pathetic.
 Invenit et fecit |
|
