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With stories like this, it's surprising the US even "won" the cold war. It feels much more like the Soviet Union collapsed than the US won.
by noobermin 3y ago
With stories like this, it's surprising the US even "won" the cold war. It feels much more like the Soviet Union collapsed than the US won.
- luxuryballs 3y agoI think that’s exactly what happened and also strikes me as the only way to win a cold war short of surrender.
- wpietri 3y agoI'm far from an expert, but my understanding is that the USSR was well more corrupt at the time. Something that provided a firm foundation for Russia's current situation, with Putin as gangster-in-chief: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/13/alexei-navalny-yulia-navalnaya-putin-russia-election/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/13/alexei-na...
- bboygravity 3y agoImpossible to say since it's impossible to measure corruption in the US without actual practical access to information.
- wpietri 3y agoIt's impossible to say definitely, something that's true for quite a lot of topics, but that doesn't mean there's nothing useful to be said. E.g., Transparency International's corruption index.
- pphysch 3y agoIs there any actual evidence that Putin is actively corrupt on the level of say Jared Kushner or Hunter Biden (and their father figures), or is it just kinda an a priori thing so we can pat ourselves on the back?
- metabagel 3y agoVideo by Alexei Navalny - "Putin's palace. The story of the world's biggest bribe" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_tFSWZXKN0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_tFSWZXKN0 Also bear in mind that Putin has a record of killing or imprisoning people he regards as being insufficiently loyal.
- pphysch 3y agoRespectfully, this is like me asking about Obama and you replying with a Dinesh D'Souza hitjob. That video has been thoroughly debunked as a baseless conspiracy theory.
- AlexeyBelov 3y agoDebunked where / by whom?
- pphysch 3y agoArkady Rotenberg and others have claimed current or prior ownership of the property. It really is just a conspiracy theory produced by rabidly anti-Putin media operatives like Navalny -- the exact same playbook as Dinesh D'Souza or "Project Veritas".
- metabagel 3y agoIt hasn't been debunked. Putin is a crook. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/comrade-capitalism-putins-palace/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/comrade-... The original allegation was made by Sergei Kolesnikov, not Navalny. Reuters traced the money which was used to build Putin's Palace. Any of Putin's associates can claim ownership in order to take the heat off of him, but it is his to use as he sees fit.
- metabagel 3y agoThere isn't any evidence of corruption by Joe or Hunter Biden. https://apnews.com/article/hunter-biden-fbi-informant-smirnov-ukraine-impeachment-113c1104052dbdc9302606f6d42c9939 https://apnews.com/article/hunter-biden-fbi-informant-smirno...
- snakeyjake 3y agoComparing Soviet corruption to US corruption is like comparing a decapitation to a papercut.
- pfdietz 3y agoIn a way, the Soviet economic system only worked as well as it did because of corruption.
- ta_1138 3y agoIt's a common problem in all kinds of low-perforing governments: You get extremely tough regulation that makes it very difficult to do any economic activity legally, and then you can bypass said regulation with corruption. The high barriers to entrepreneurship, or just constructing a building or buying materials are a feature, as it means more advantages to those that can ignore the regulations. We can see this even in relatively well functioning states: Say, when you make infill development expensive, but provide tax abatements to compensate, but said abatements must be approved by a board of aldermen or something like that. Being able to control who builds more cheaply is valuable, an then you just make sure that you only vote yes to good friends that patronize your cousin's consulting business. The less discretion the bureaucrat has, the harder it is for them to be corrupt. And in the soviet union, they had a lof of discretion.
- kelnos 3y ago> The less discretion the bureaucrat has, the harder it is for them to be corrupt. This is what pisses me off about the SF planning commission. They shouldn't get to make case-by-case decisions about what building projects go through. This should be handled by career employees that consult a checklist of items that need to be completed, and codes that need to be followed, and when all those boxes are checked, that's what approval looks like. It's not even relevant whether the planning commission is corrupt or not. The fact that they get to make arbitrary value judgments is a problem.
- underlipton 3y agoOnly if you consider what Americans tend to consider corruption. If you, instead, get a little creative and include things like segregation (essentially a massive state-sponsored in-group grift that cost the country an untold fortune in the lost proceeds of misallocated capital, primary among that being the very concept of the modern suburb and the automobile-based infrastructure required to head off its ever-imminent lack of sustainability) and a great deal of our foreign policy (meant to direct funds into the coffers of the MIC and the politicians directly invested in it, at the cost of untold blood and treasure)... well, we've been pretty damn corrupt.
- keybored 3y agoThe US continued, the Soviet Union fell, and the successor state transitioned to a corrupt oligarchy. How’s that not winning? The Cold War wasn’t about a clash of ideologies. And if it was then Russia becoming a corrupt capitalist nation rather than a corrupt communist one would be a win for the other side.
- dingnuts 3y agoI hate to be this cynical but are we sure the US hasn't also become a corrupt oligarchy?
- keybored 3y agoIt is but I don’t see the relevance.
- krapp 3y agoIt absolutely has, and that isn't even controversial[0-2]. [0]https://www.thenation.com/article/society/cbo-american-wealth-inequality/ https://www.thenation.com/article/society/cbo-american-wealt... [1]https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 [2]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
- reaperducer 3y agoare we sure the US hasn't also become a corrupt oligarchy? Guess how we can tell you've never actually lived in a corrupt oligarchy, and only read about it on the internet.
- kelnos 3y agoI think we're sorta talking about a couple different (but related) things. One "feature" of many corrupt oligarchies that US doesn't have (yet?) is the totalitarian or authoritarian nature of the executive government, which leads to persecution of critics of the system and especially of critics of the oligarchs. While I'm not comfortable with the wealth concentration in the US, at least people aren't getting rounded up and "disappeared" when they talk about it.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago> It feels much more like the Soviet Union collapsed than the US won. That is what happened.
- scotty79 3y ago> It feels much more like the Soviet Union collapsed than the US won. Soviet union just collapsed faster than US. US was in orders of magnitude better shape after WWII. This gave it >5 decades longer slippery slope than USSR had. But it will collapse in a decade, especially if it attempts to go head to head when China takes back Taiwan in 3-5 years.
- _pi 3y agoYeah the reality is that a lot of people think that prior to and after WW2 and/or the Russian revolution the USSR was equivalent somehow to the US. That was never the case the USSR was a backwater and always behind. Tsarist Russia was a backwards undeveloped slave state. In that light the USSR punched above its weight. The reality is that rapid industrialization regardless of your ideology is an extreme productive process which magnifies the effects of production which are not in and of themselves free of negative outputs. In USA capitalism like in USSR communism the negative outputs of production are simply ignored and the people who they affect have no choice in what negative effects they must bear and what is being produced.
- kelnos 3y agoI doubt that's the case. The countries of the world were much less interdependent after WWII than they are today. The collapse of the US will take much of the rest of the developed world with it -- including China.
- metabagel 3y agoDon't be so sure. China's military appears to be somewhat hollowed out by corruption. China doesn't have the military experience it would take to invade Taiwan. Taiwan will resist being invaded. A Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan could end catastrophically for China.
- rasz 3y agoEmbarrassingly, not catastrophically. US proved they will do everything in their power to not risk even the slightest provocation of weak russia (because nukes). Even the prepared response to russia nuking Ukraine was supposed to be sinking of Black Sea Fleet - something Ukrainians managed on their own in ~70% by now despite not having operational navy of their own. Do you really think there will be US response to full on Chinese invasion? I can already predict strongly worded letters and condemnation. US doesnt even have nor want to have a base there.
- yks 3y agoIron Curtain is what saved the US from being corrupted by Soviets. Now there is no barrier and Putin can freely use his unlimited funds to "create outcomes" via corrupt US politicians. I'm surprised China didn't get to do it first but I guess they have a branding issue of being "godless commies". It's difficult to see how the modern West can withstand this corruption.
- _pi 3y agoThe Iron Curtain was the barrier erected by the Soviets to prevent American media into the USSR. Not to prevent Soviet media into America. What are you even talking about?
- yks 3y agoIt doesn't matter who erected the barrier, the end result is that the USSR was not able to run successful influence campaigns or inject money into the US politics on the scale Russia is doing today.
- _pi 3y agoThere's some apocrypha that I'd need to dig up the source to but IIRC the story goes that after WWI Keynes was researching the economic impacts of the WWI war economy. His conclusion was essentially that if normal people understood how capitalism worked in practice, they'd revolt because all industries effectively become rackets.
- rqtwteye 3y ago“ It feels much more like the Soviet Union collapsed than the US won” That’s probably true. I never understood the assertion that the US or Reagan “won” the Cold War. The US just persisted longer.
- dragonwriter 3y agoWars, hot and cold, are often won by one side experiencing political and/or economic collapse, taking them off the table. It's not a “this or that” thing. You win by being the last standing.
- kelnos 3y ago> It feels much more like the Soviet Union collapsed than the US won. I mean, that's literally what happened. The USSR collapsed. I'm sure the US had some part in that, but I don't think it was a major part. The US "winning" the Cold War was just spin. But still, being the last one standing is indeed a certain kind of winning.