Less Heineken is a good thing really. Leaves more room for good beers.
The McDonalds peace theory has already been put to bed, numbnuts.
Translated into English through Google:
The video app TikTok is full of pictures of young Russians who tell of their lives. Freshly renovated apartment blocks with kindergartens, full supermarkets and busy streets design an image of comfortable normality.
The influencers are happy to show how local companies have replaced McDonald’s and Coca-Cola with at least equivalent offers. The subliminal message of the propaganda videos: Western sanctions cannot harm Russia.
A platform of several economic research institutes funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics now supports this message with data. It proves how the Russian economy is booming in the midst of Ukraine war.
While China, India, and Turkey have not quite offset the elimination of foreign trade with Europe, rising domestic demand is leading to a real job miracle. The Federal Government could make the Federal Government envious of upgrades-driven economic growth and low public debt.
The European hope from the first day after the attack on the neighbouring country to force Russia quickly to return with economic sanctions has not been fulfilled. The Russian citizens do not rebel simply because they lack Nescafé and Heineken. Payments and banks have not collapsed. The Russian state can easily pay pensions, wages and benefits.
This shows that in a multipolar world, the West has lost global economic power. Russia is finding new trading partners – also for oil and gas, the foreign exchange providers. Unlike other rogue states, the country has a historically grown full-fledged arms industry. Display
And Putin has even succeeded in stabilising the fluctuating order and eliminating opponents such as mercenary leaders forefying Prigozhin.
More to the article if you want to read more.
It is truly astonishing to consider how anyone could believe that Russians would rise up over frivolous matters like this. Moreover, I'd argue that there is a certain degree of racism in these narratives that rely on the notion that Russians or Chinese cannot independently produce products comparable to Western standards on their own.
In fact, the whole portrayal of liberal democracy as the sole legitimate form of governance amounts to little more than contemporary marketing for colonialism. This concept functions as a pretext for invasions disguised as benevolent civilizing missions and is directly connected with the notion that Western goods are superior. It's part of an overarching narrative that portrays the West as bringing enlightenment to "uncivilized" societies.
Can you imagine the blood in the streets if americans couldn't get their chicken nuggets? No more coors light? I think it's an american-centric line of thought to believe that other countries would revolt over losing their little treats like the US would.
Reminds me of Prohibition and how violent it got all because Americans couldn't get booze. To this day, I don't doubt there'd be an uprising if they ever tried that again here. We're dependent on bread and circuses, and we project like no other.
Ya know, I don't think this is that far off from the truth, though naturally there are degrees to product worship and dependency on it among USians. I do think it makes a kind of sense if you consider how many in the US (in varying degrees) are void of a sense of identity or social responsibility and drift in nihilism. I mean, people are to some extent encouraged to form their identity around what products they're into. And on a national level, what else have USians got? Jingoism? Pride for being a colonizer and imperialism in a barbaric legacy? Some people in the US do have religion, but with varying levels of taking it seriously.
I myself have had times where I get very into a product (such as a video game) and the surrounding "community" (though the word "community" in this kind of usage is sort of silly with how loosely affiliated and discordant it tends to be). I'm lacking sources on it right now that I can recall, but I feel like I read once that this was intentional in some way, the conjoining of "product" and "community."
But either way (intentional or no) you can observe it with ease online, where it's virtually inevitable to run into zealots for a given product who will defend it so viciously, you'd think it was their firstborn on trial.
I'm lacking sources on it right now that I can recall, but I feel like I read once that this was intentional in some way, the conjoining of "product" and "community."
If you find it, I'd appreciate a share. Any searches including the two words are poisoned by articles trying to tell you how to turn your brand into a community. Each search is just page after page of that shit.
I'll try to remember to if I can find it. Web searching has indeed become a pain. I tried to do some just now, but didn't have much luck. Through a link in one article, I came upon one source that is vaguely related to what we're talking about, but not really on the point of specifically combining product and community. It's also sort of a shallow summary and may be stuff you've already heard of: https://www.businessinsider.com/birth-of-consumer-culture-2013-2
These quotes from it specifically stand out to me:
"We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture," wrote Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers. "People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man's desires must overshadow his needs."
Bernays shattered the taboo against women smoking by persuading a group of debutantes to light up at a parade — an event he leaked to the media ahead of time with the phrase "Torches Of Freedom" — thereby linking smoking with challenging male authority.
But, this isn't really the specificity of intent I thought I had found something on before. Maybe I confused someone extrapolating intent from outcomes in the past, or it's just out there in the mass of the internet somewhere and is hard to find.
Well, I'm for a democracy, just not Western liberal democracy.
It's bourgeois democracy at best and fascism at worst.
That's right, I want proletarian democracy which the dictatorship of the working class. Liberal democracy is a democracy for the capital owners.
It is truly astonishing to consider how anyone could believe that Russians would rise up over frivolous matters like this.
It is on a logical level, but it's also so much like typical feel-good story which Germans tell themselves about the end of the DDR and reunification. The story goes that life sucked in the DDR because people didn't have frivolous material goods, so the people rebelled and were rewarded by reunifying with the west.
That's a good point I haven't considered. There's already an underlying mythology this narrative taps into.
It is truly astonishing to consider how anyone could believe that Russians would rise up over frivolous matters like this.
To be fair, western baubles and treats have been notable factor in the fall of socialism 35 years ago, but 35 years passed and now they aren't this attractive now and back then it was huge mistake from socialist governments to allow propganda penetration of their countries.
I very much agree, the whole perestroyka and glasnost business that Gorbachev started was ultimately what fucked USSR over.
Yeah, though it started much earlier, in '68 and the subsequent opening in Poland for example. In 1980 we were already prepared to demand Pewex (imported) goods.
That's true the trends go back further, but I think it was still possible to turn things around in the late 80s if more competent people were in charge. In my opinion, the most important aspect of USSR that needs to be analyzed going forward is how to improve the political system in order to keep opportunists and the incompetent out of positions of power. It's a general unsolved problem pretty much all human societies have that quality of leadership declines when the times are good.
I doubt if it could be just entirely averted, but if we got Deng instead of Gorba... on the other hand, USSR and Warsaw Pact wasn't China, imperialists were way too invested into toppling and looting it, they would never left us just be there and rule ourselves on the promise of capitalism.
For sure, USSR was put under far more stress than China. The other aspect was that, unlike China, USSR was seen as an ideological threat.
A lot of it was the aging of the population and leadership, combined with loss of political knowledge caused by the loss of an entire generation during ww2.
Right, but the question remains of how to make sure things stay on track even under such conditions. Catastrophes like WW2 will happen sooner or later, and the ability to recover from such disasters is a critical aspect of ensuring the continuation of the system.
Racism is fluid, and in times like this, US and UK media likes to try and spin Russians as asiatic barbarians. They invoke tropes associated with the Mongol empire and call Russians "orcs". This goes back as early as the nineteenth century when the British and Russian empires were in an intense rivalry over control of central Asia.
Whiteness isn’t fundamentally about having white skin, which is what I assume you mean by referring to Caucasian ancestry.
The simple equation of whiteness and having light skin might be approximately true inside the US because of the whole slavery thing. The influx of African slaves prompted the Europeans to reconcile their ethnic differences on that superficial basis alone. But that didn’t erase racism between nominally white ethnicities. For example, Italians and Irish people have not always been accepted as white in the US.
The basis of racism is the categorization of certain peoples into pseudo-scientific races, and Europe has a long history of excluding Slavic peoples as a distinct race from the “civilized” western Europeans.
This shows that in a multipolar world, the West has lost global economic power
Sweet sweet schadenfreude
Well the thing is Russia was smart. They knew this kind of thing was coming or strongly possible for a decade now. And they took steps. They required certain amounts of presence of key information for running businesses be kept in country, they planned for a disconnect of their internet from the global system. They required global tech companies to store Russian information and act on it via hardware and software located within Russia. This all meant that foreign powers, mainly the US/NATO could not completely forcibly take all their stuff and go home. They could stop taking the profits home, they could cut ties and refuse to bring new things over, to engage with Russia. But they couldn't take the knowledge, the infrastructure, etc which could simply be re-sold at a massive punishing discount to local Russian interests which is one of the reasons why their economy didn't implode (if they were able to do that, to just shutter all McDonalds, all western branded consumer businesses, to shut down electronic services, networks, etc remotely and wipe everything) then Russia's economy probably wouldn't be in such a good state.
It's one of the reasons that as much as I think Russia waited too long to do the Ukraine operation. I can understand why. They only really understood and began taking the years-worth of planning to protect themselves around 2014-16 and it took some time to implement all that to make them resilient enough that we get the result we have today which is Russia not only withstanding sanctions but flourishing because of them in some respects.
China is also smart in this respect. They require western internet businesses to use a Chinese partner company so the west cannot destroy everything on its way out by ordering its corporations to just wipe everything and get on a plane.
Indeed, Russia quietly prepared for this eventuality and they started the SMO on their own terms. The west, by contrast, just took their superiority for granted and didn't even see the need to prepare. Now we see how that's all playing out.
I'd argue that in case of China, the situation is far worse for the west because of just how dependent the west is on China. Cutting Russia out of the western economic system hurt, but it has been manageable so far. If there was a confrontation with China, then the west would be cut off from a lot of necessities that simply cannot be sourced elsewhere. My expectation is that it would lead to a rapid economic and societal collapse here in a very short order.
Thanks for the analysis both of you. Didnt really think abt it till now
Russia pulls out the biggest nuke in its arsenal and reintroduces Soviet-era Plombir
can the US get embargoed from these things for invading other countries too?
They've been embargoing themselves with all those sanctions, surely the rest of the world will keep taking the hit on dollar hyperinflation instead of joining BRICS
Why do you think they started so many wars? It keeps failing so they have to keep starting another one
I mean, what can one expect? Anything but "they know they are on the right side of history"
