Are you trying to judge the West by objective standards?
Are you trying to judge Russia by objective standards?
Are you judging the West objectively, finding it a failure, and then exalting “BRICS” because it subjectively represents an alternative?
Or do you really like Putinism, and hate-- oh I don’t know-- the gay conspiracy?
But it won’t go away. Only a fraction of the agricultural output is exported to Russia. More importantly, European agriculture is so heavily subsidized that it isn’t really operating in a market economy anyway. Sure, financialization may be responsible for its relative size, but the bottom line is that we can continue to bankroll it whatever the fuck Russia does.
That anti-gay agenda really baffles me. On one hand, I guess it is happening just because Putin is a homophobe. On the other hand, part of me balks at that - like are all those people being oppressed not because of a strategy or a plan but just on a whim? I guess that’s the problem with dictators.
Another hypothesis is that he does not care much either way but needs/wants the support of the church and this was a convenient low-cost-for-him thing to do.
It feels good to trust a dictator. It means I’m not in prison.
If you are going to attempt rebuttal, address the actual points in my post and keep the delusional flagwaving to a minimum.
@zlantzix Cut back on the snark.
As I said, use turning the economic pain up to 11 isn’t an existential threat. It just ensures that you get to experience minimal growth, have constant shortages, and in general not have all that great of a time. The USSR already did it once, I am sure Russia can do it again and have about as much fun as they had the first time around. Hell, I’m not even advocating that the US and EU do that. I am personally end the embargo of Cuba without a second thought. I just recognize the objective reality that if you get cut off from half of the worlds, you are in trouble. Further, it is actually a lot worse because the US and EU can cut off multi degrees of banking. A bank in China that wants to deal with bank in the US can’t deal with Cuba.
Rationalize a little harder. Russia is the way it is because they have an autocratic spymaster running it who is propped up by a very nasty and infinitely corrupt oligarchy. Putin is in that position because he is a ruthless sociopathic asshole.
I’m sorry, exactly what is Russia doing to “assert their sovereignty”? Annexing the land of their neighbors? If Russia wanted to “assert its sovereignty”, they could try building a functional non-kleptocratic non-authoritarian state. Hell, they don’t even need to get so crazy as building a functional representative political system. They could just follows China lead. China isn’t giving up their right to rule autocratically, but at least they are trying to build their infrastructure and make token attempts to reduce corruption and implement rule by law. China’s leaders certainly enrich themselves, but you can see that they also through either patriotism or fear want to improve the lives of their people and work actively to achieve that.
There is nothing unnerving or even remotely surprising about Russia annexing hunks of its neighbors. It is just sad. It would have been nice if the Cold War ended with Russia looking like the EU; a powerful axis in their own right with its own values, but still fundamentally liberal and free. Hell, it would have been nice if Russia ended up looking like China; a bit autocratic and illiberal, but still working for the enrichment of its own people. Instead, Russia is little changed from the Soviet days. It is still an illiberal kleptocracy ruled by autocrats. It is corrupt and unfit for economic activity outside of state owned resource extraction companies, and it is getting actively worse. It isn’t unnerving, scary, or anything of that nature. It is just sad. Russia is going nowhere.
I am pretty sure that the US and EU will just eat food… you know… all the food it grows and imports everywhere because it has so much? Regardless, it is a paltry percentage of the economy, even if you yank out finance. Just look for yourself: Economy of the United States - Wikipedia See the item at the very bottom of the list? Yeah, agriculture makes less than waste management and the arts.
You say that like that is a counter argument to something. You know that you are allowed to have two thoughts in your head at the same time, right? You can think “It is bad when the US knocked over democratic leaders” and “It is bad when Russia curb stomps its democratic neighbors”.
Russia isn’t working on anything of the sort. Russia is such a corrupt kleptocratic mess that only an idiot would put money in there that isn’t going into a state run resource extraction industry ruled by a member of the oligarchy. China and, to a lesser extent, Indian and Brazil and are certainly working on building their own infrastructure, but it is because they want to plug it into the world economy and reap the rewards, not because they want to annex their neighbors without having to worry that their government will implode.
Not really taking issue with the rest of what you are saying, but the fact that agriculture is such a small fraction of the economy strikes me as evidence that how we measure the importance of things is completely messed up, not as evidence that agriculture isn’t important. When agriculture is severely impacted by a disaster of some sort we couldn’t just make up for the different with waste management and the arts - people starve.
In developed nations we have an abundance of food, but there is still hunger and that’s a distribution problem. If you mess up distribution (trade) then people go hungry. Those people are a blip in the economy, but they are also people.
I don’t disagree at all that as things currently stand, a lack of trade between Russia and the west is not a huge disruption to people’s access to food, but that’s not because agriculture is a small part of the economy, it’s because dividing the world in half isn’t a sufficient division to cause huge problems.
Meh. Society would also collapse if all the engineers and programmers got bored and walked off the job. Most tech infrastructure would be dead within a year, power would be out in days, the internet would collapse, you would stop getting water, etc. Just because something is vital doesn’t mean you need to blow a huge portion of your resource on it. Frankly, I am happy to see that we only spend a tiny fraction of our effort keeping ourselves from starving to death. I am sure that a much larger portion of North Korea’s GDP is spent on agriculture. I don’t envy them even a little.
I’m not saying we should find novel ways to waste resources producing food, I’m saying we can’t dismiss how critical something is just because we expend few resources on it - and we also shouldn’t overestimate the value of things like the financial sector based on their large dollar values.
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