The ‘what color is the sky in your world?’ bit is that you somehow manage to blame that on western deception.
Post-soviet Russia got, if anything, a quite generous see-no-evil package from western Europe and the US, not a surprise given their enthusiasm for financial services; and all you had to do was not fuck it up.
It’s the bad old “Everything bad is always the fault of the West and Russia is innocent of anything” dodge.
Part of the Soviet / post-Soviet Russian victim complex.
They got the market shoved down their throat as a “solution” to the very real problems of the Soviet system, and it did not actual fix the problems of the Soviet system. It only reinforced the worst aspects of it.
I don’t think the market economy is to blame here. In my opinion it’s horribly botched transition to market economy that caused most of previously government-owned wealth go into hands of organized crime and shady oligarchs. In some other Warsaw Pact countries (for example here in Poland) transition to market economy brought significant improvement to living standards on average, even though it was done in far from perfect way.
Because a market economy is working at all… for anyone. Ever.
I didn’t say that. It’s just that I remember things here in Poland improving a lot after transition to market economy and democracy.
Market economy obviously won’t solve any problems if country gets overrun by organized crime or authoritarianism. Market economy will also only cause more problems like increasing wealth inequality if it’s not well regulated.
But that’s my point, that the market economy and the command economy as “solutions” are a myth. The current situation that we’re ALL dealing with comes from the hubris of neo-liberalism, that the “market” can solve all our problems. But there is no doubt that the scramble for power and privilege in the former Soviet Union did nothing to further the well-being of former Soviet citizens…
Until we learn to put people and their needs first, rather than abstract concepts based on intellectual exercises instead of the real world, we’re going to continue to be fucked. In the US, in the former Soviet Union, in Poland - where ever. 
Should the word “not” be in here somewhere?
Or the sarcasm is assumed?
The Insider asked Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) experts to examine the video:
“The footage shows the smokestacks of the Zaporizhzhia Thermal Power Plant, which can also be seen in this panoramic photo from Google. The footage is being filmed from the opposite bank of the Dnieper River and the camera is pointing to the south. This means that the location of the MLRS launch is to the west of the Zaporizhzhia TPP. Also, the site of the NPP itself is west of the TPP, but it is impossible to say exactly whether the rockets are being really launched from the plant site.”
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/09/the-involuntary-ally-iranian-arms-in.html
Brought to them in part by bumbling American neoliberal economists (in an economic analogue to PNAC’s political clown show in Iraq years later). While the idea that it was deliberate sabotage by the West is Putinist nonsense, I’ll allow that letting Larry Summers meddle with a nation-state’s economy might be interpreted that way.
was also an economic clown show. IIRC they cut import duty to zero, killing off the vestiges of industry that had survived sanctions, and concentrated on “business-friendly” neoliberal reforms instead of the basics like security, water, electricity and communications that businesses actually need.
True. Neoliberalism and neoconservativism are intertwined like a hairball and have the same tolerance in their technocracies for serial screw-ups and arseholes.
To give another example, these same chuckleheads also did serious damage in Georgia (the post-Soviet republic, although it could be argued that this also applies to the American state).
IIRC, Coalition officials publicly praised the admirable entrepreneurship of state company employees who stole equipment from their employers to start their own businesses. They also gave preference to “women-owned” businesses for reconstruction contracts. This led to businessmen registering companies in the names of their wives and sisters, because, surprise, there weren’t any women in the Iraqi construction industry.
Getting back on topic:
Don’t get me wrong; if they’d nuked us for sending them a plague of management consultants and financial engineers back in the day I’d have been tempted to sympathize.
It’s the “we declared a war of imperial aggression and now I can’t get a Schengen visa quite as easily; can a more perfidious knife in the back by the Atlanticists be imagined?” nonsense I find impossible to take seriously.
During the early days of the Russia-Ukraine war, the invading force was approaching the Irpin River and the gates of the Ukrainian capital. But the river waters suddenly rose, forcing the Russians to turn back and leaving a trail of abandoned tanks and military hardware. Kyiv breathed again and a wetland ecosystem was reflooded for the first time in more than 70 years.
Miraculous as it might have seemed, it wasn’t the hand of God that helped save Ukraine. “That’s warWilding,” says Jasper Humphreys, director of programmes for the Marjan Study Group in the department of war studies at King’s College London, which researches conflict and the environment.
“I woke up in the middle of the night, a few days after reading the ‘hero river’ story in the Guardian about how the Ukrainian army reflooded the dying Irpin River and its former wetlands to save the Ukrainian capital,” says the academic, of how he came up with the word. “And I just sat up in bed and whispered to myself, ‘It’s warWilding’.”
Russia claims that it destroyed four Ukrainian Bradleys today. Ukraine does not have any Bradleys.
