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Owling Howl posted:The claim seems to be "People liked the USSR" implying "People liked communism" but capitalist propaganda turned younger generations against it. I think it's a somewhat useless observation. The USSR had incredible amounts of resources at its disposal - chiefly oil, gas and coal - so it would be a matter of staggering incompetence if they had somehow managed to build a society that benefitted no one. this seems once again to be a rather suspicious reading. the claim, in plain text, is that attitudes towards the soviet union vary dramatically depending on whether one experienced it as an adult. the interpretation in plain text is that the soviet union has been demonised following its fall, and that this leads to the discrepancy. i agree with this, at least insofar as agreeing that this is an effect which influences the generational outcomes measured in all the polls used in this discussion. Alchenar posted:Well this is actually where Neuroliminal's points about free speech, coercion and hard-soft power come round to bite. The Soviet Union used less of the extreme ends of hard power towards the end, but still was extremely coercive over the information space to the point where everyone knew that everyone was lying to everyone else. elites care a lot more about principles of accountability, censorship and suchlike than mass polities do, in general, because they're usually the ones being censored or arbitrarily harassed and expect to not be censored or harassed. people experience for themselves just how bad life is before and after the collapse of the soviet union, and many people whith this experience don't agree with the assessment that life improved upon its abolition. they could be wrong, of course, but that they have this attitude is interesting because it speaks to the new regime not being notably more legitimate to them than the soviet regime was. i fly airplanes posted:I think you are over-analyzing my post, and I also beg that you use capitalization in your posts. you realise you ought to provide some evidence for this argument other than polling data which appears to support the claim you're trying to rebut e. i'm really not especially invested in defending the soviet union here, as i hope is clear from my previous posts about stalinist cultural policy etc., but a critical examination of the fall of the soviet union as it relates to the people's republic of china needs to have a reasonable basis and cannot fall into the trap of convenient demonisation when that very thing is what is being discussed. it clearly was a repressive society in many over ways, and this had consequences. what was the basis for such repression? what were the consequences? was the soviet union an imperial core exploiting the periphery or was it subsidising its periphery at the expense of the core? many claims have been made about this itt, many of which do not seem to be reconcilable. the observation that older people in the former soviet union systematically have a more positive opinion of the soviet union is in my opinion pretty clearly demonstrated by the polls posted itt. the interpretation that the drop has something to do with the subsequent demonisation of the soviet union seems eminently reasonable to me. i think that the further analysis that the post-soviet elites mostly had a stridently anti-soviet project (being largely generated and alienated by soviet repression of various kinds) and imposed such demonisation as part of their own political agendas is also reasonable. i think that the other explanation provided, that russian control of the information space is the main determinant, is weak and ignores key observations, not least that the ruling ideology of russia was also strongly anti-soviet until relatively recently and that this generational effect is also visible within russia itself. V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Nov 23, 2023 |
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Nov 23, 2023 21:17
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Nenonen posted:There's also the generational thing, which is that someone over 65 in Russia might not remember with fondness the everyday queues for or outright shortages of meat, bread, anything - but then, the new system has been a roller coaster ride for them and not everyone was able to land on their feet. Those now getting only the basic pension still can't buy meat and bread as often as they'd like, just not because of queues - but at least in USSR if you waited in line for four or six hours, you might get what you were looking for, and pensioners have nothing but time. Rents in big cities also skyrocketed in the last decade or so, although western sanctions on Russian oil seem to have had a calming effect on costs of living in Moscow in recent years. to be clear and to restate a previous post, i also agree that the fall of the soviet union being such a traumatic mess likely is also an explaining factor here. i just don't think it's reasonable to claim that the new regime's strong and loudly proclaimed anti-communism has not had a meaningful effect on younger people's attitudes towards the soviet project.
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Nov 23, 2023 21:39
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the punitive expedition to vietnam is probably the most obvious, as is their related solid support for the khmer rouge and the afghan mujahedeen you could count korea as well but imo that's rather iffy
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Nov 25, 2023 01:11
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Koramei posted:Invasion, annexation, and then sustained genocide in Tibet is probably #1 and its timeline is entirely post-revolution. ah, but there's the restriction that it be "outside china" which in tibet's case is known to be a matter of some controversy, especially to the chinese government
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Nov 25, 2023 01:19
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using state censorship to do what amounts to stock market manipulation makes perfect sense in a contemporary financialised world economy, and the people's republic of china has been pretty clear that it considers censorship a legitimate tool under some circumstances in a way it's more surprising that we haven't seen a push towards such intervention from e.g. germany
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Feb 12, 2024 19:00
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Owling Howl posted:It might be convenient for the government but I think the upper class very much prefers to have as accurate information as possible to make their investment decisions and they do not particularly care if it makes the current stable of politicians look bad. In any case lying about it while the underlyjng numbers steadily deteroriate is just pissing yourself to stay warm in a snowstorm. a case can be made for stephen harper having done something of the kind in canada (though obviously much, much milder than what the PRC is getting up to and more as a means of managing the political development of the country than as an investment strategy), but realistically it would probably amount to asserting more direct control over bureaus of statistics and intervening in the various definitions of economic KPIs to fudge them - think how "inflation" is technically used. this is rather different than what one might intuitively expect it to mean due to the removal of certain inelastic goods from the basket, but for stuff like bankruptcy measures. in the specific german case, they would want the medium-term future look better to make the manufacturing crisis look less structural, though obviously something like this would be very inconvenienced by a lot of this stuff being subject to EU regulations outside of the german government's direct control. in many cases it's actually pretty easy to generate almost monolithic consensus on fairly major stuff (even when it directly impacts the pocket books of very rich people, e.g. the attempted severing of economic ties with russia), and the haute bourgeoisie are not really especially intelligent people with well developed critical thinking skills, and so are not immune to this. it would have to be very gradual, but there's imo no obvious reason to believe that some version of manipulating key economic indicators to manage the stock exchange couldn't be done - though the price of introducing such uncertainty is probably very high for now, as you note. this is a bit of a digression to my main point, though, which is that within a heavily financialised world economy where "political risk" is a well-understood and very important term, information management is a huge deal and so it makes sense that governments use whatever tools they can to try and manage information. apparently ridiculous stuff like this level of blunt censorship can be rationalised given the rather peculiar but often quite effective chinese constitutional arrangment
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Feb 12, 2024 22:51
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ronya posted:^cough well if the idea is to induce general investment beyond what your economic fundamentals would normally induce, then controlling information seems like a good way of exerting political control over international capital
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Feb 13, 2024 21:07
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