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You mean all those things the US did to stop the spread of communism which we now know definitely to be a giant dead-end. People make it sound like USSR and com

by lvl155 1y ago

You mean all those things the US did to stop the spread of communism which we now know definitely to be a giant dead-end. People make it sound like USSR and communism was so great and it only failed because of the US. This is like saying Intel failed because of Nvidia. No, Intel failed because they sucked all on their own.

K0balt 1y ago
Make no mistake, we spent the USSR to death. We made our military advances so expensive to stay at parity with that it simply overwhelmed their economic production capacity as a nation. Sure, they did it to themselves, but we made the situation lose/lose by exploiting our position as an economic powerhouse. With the very sad state of US manufacturing, where just trying to buy US made bolts and nuts can be impossible, it is entirely possible that China could use the same play against us. We don’t have the critical skilled manpower to recover overnight, it’s at least a 5-8 decade process just to get enough qualified die makers to build the tools we need to build the tools and products we want. Die making is a skill that takes decades to master, and a master can only teach so many apprentices in a lifetime. This leaves us in a very vulnerable position. We need to buy the tools from China at scale in order to build the tools that we need to rebuild our capabilities. We cannot build them ourselves at scale. If we had a BRICS embargo against selling certain tools to the USA, like we used to have with China before Reagan, we would be well and truly up a creek without the proverbial paddle. Right now it’s almost impossible to manufacture in the USA at any significant scale, and cheap and easy to do in China. We can assemble, but manufacturing not so much. The people with the skills needed to rebuild this capacity now number in the low thousands or even high hundreds , and the average age of those that are left in the field is 64. Deregulation and outsourcing, kicked off in earnest during the Reagan years, cut us off at the knees. Pointing out that China is much better positioned than we are to lead the world in economic and industrial production isn’t unpatriotic. The first step to a solution is to recognise the problem. There’s an interesting video that is on this tangent: https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=D3ngTOl7xvxN340q https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=D3ngTOl7xvxN340q I believe he has made some headway since this video, but the trials involved in manufacturing in the USA even at a very modest scale are salient.
jrflowers 1y ago
If your position is that nothing the US did, despite how well-documented and agreed upon it is, had any influence on the fall of the USSR, then I can see how it would be easy to get confused. So if “what did the US do?” wasn’t a question and you actually meant to write “I as a matter of ideology do not accept any US involvement in history”, then okay, cool. Otherwise if you actually want the question answered there’s a ton of information available, likely even some from whatever ideological angle you would prefer, since, again, it was so incredibly well-documented. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_(1985%E2%80%931991) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_(1985%E2%80%931991)
- lvl155 1y ago
  If you want to die on this hill that communism failed because of the US, there’s nothing I can do or say to convince you otherwise.
  - apprec8 1y ago
    [dead]
  - jrflowers 1y ago
    Do you have any references to support your “The USSR fell because of bad luck” theory? It is clear that you do not believe that it fell because of something inherent to communism, as by your own reasoning there was no external force on earth that could have taken it down — even decades of antagonism by the richest and most powerful country on earth and all of its allies. It isn’t possible to say that a system is the single most durable thing on earth but also so fragile that it it’ll obviously just collapse, those are mutually exclusive statements. You can be 4’11 or 7’2 but not both. I personally haven’t read any books that say that the Cold War was unnecessary and if the US had simply sat back and done nothing, communism would never have posed a threat to anybody since it would just end on its own. I would absolutely love to read more about Whoopsie Theory though, it is a fascinating proposition even if “communism was so chill that the world would’ve been better if nobody fought it” sounds like something you’d read on tumblr.

by lvl155 1y ago

K0balt 1y ago

Make no mistake, we spent the USSR to death. We made our military advances so expensive to stay at parity with that it simply overwhelmed their economic production capacity as a nation. Sure, they did it to themselves, but we made the situation lose/lose by exploiting our position as an economic powerhouse. With the very sad state of US manufacturing, where just trying to buy US made bolts and nuts can be impossible, it is entirely possible that China could use the same play against us. We don’t have the critical skilled manpower to recover overnight, it’s at least a 5-8 decade process just to get enough qualified die makers to build the tools we need to build the tools and products we want. Die making is a skill that takes decades to master, and a master can only teach so many apprentices in a lifetime. This leaves us in a very vulnerable position. We need to buy the tools from China at scale in order to build the tools that we need to rebuild our capabilities. We cannot build them ourselves at scale. If we had a BRICS embargo against selling certain tools to the USA, like we used to have with China before Reagan, we would be well and truly up a creek without the proverbial paddle. Right now it’s almost impossible to manufacture in the USA at any significant scale, and cheap and easy to do in China. We can assemble, but manufacturing not so much. The people with the skills needed to rebuild this capacity now number in the low thousands or even high hundreds , and the average age of those that are left in the field is 64. Deregulation and outsourcing, kicked off in earnest during the Reagan years, cut us off at the knees. Pointing out that China is much better positioned than we are to lead the world in economic and industrial production isn’t unpatriotic. The first step to a solution is to recognise the problem. There’s an interesting video that is on this tangent: https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=D3ngTOl7xvxN340q https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=D3ngTOl7xvxN340q I believe he has made some headway since this video, but the trials involved in manufacturing in the USA even at a very modest scale are salient.

jrflowers 1y ago

If your position is that nothing the US did, despite how well-documented and agreed upon it is, had any influence on the fall of the USSR, then I can see how it would be easy to get confused. So if “what did the US do?” wasn’t a question and you actually meant to write “I as a matter of ideology do not accept any US involvement in history”, then okay, cool. Otherwise if you actually want the question answered there’s a ton of information available, likely even some from whatever ideological angle you would prefer, since, again, it was so incredibly well-documented. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_(1985%E2%80%931991) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_(1985%E2%80%931991)

lvl155 1y ago
If you want to die on this hill that communism failed because of the US, there’s nothing I can do or say to convince you otherwise.
- apprec8 1y ago
  [dead]
- jrflowers 1y ago
  Do you have any references to support your “The USSR fell because of bad luck” theory? It is clear that you do not believe that it fell because of something inherent to communism, as by your own reasoning there was no external force on earth that could have taken it down — even decades of antagonism by the richest and most powerful country on earth and all of its allies. It isn’t possible to say that a system is the single most durable thing on earth but also so fragile that it it’ll obviously just collapse, those are mutually exclusive statements. You can be 4’11 or 7’2 but not both. I personally haven’t read any books that say that the Cold War was unnecessary and if the US had simply sat back and done nothing, communism would never have posed a threat to anybody since it would just end on its own. I would absolutely love to read more about Whoopsie Theory though, it is a fascinating proposition even if “communism was so chill that the world would’ve been better if nobody fought it” sounds like something you’d read on tumblr.