Tucker Carlson says Russia is a great country because a communist-era subway station in Moscow has a chandelier

Sure, it’s functional, but there are plenty of comparable metro systems around the world.

I decline to state any one as being “The Best”, I prefer to group them in tiers - London and Tokyo for example are also good examples of top tier systems.

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fixed

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Jesus Kee-rist, where does one even begin to unpack this video.

He begins by saying he’s not defending Stalin, then praises Soviet infrastructure, then dismisses any reply from the left as “stupid slogans”, says he’s just going to “ask the question”, THEN admits he’s not really interested in an answer anyway.

Right now I could go on some message board and mention how the Soviets were good at anything and within minutes a conservative would accuse me of defending the atrocities of Stalin.

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All this is rather quaint for a guy who lives on a sequestered island.

For reasons.

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Other awesome underground stations that weren’t executed with slave labour are available in nice countries.

Off the top of my head - Westminster on the Jubilee Line in London (‘Bladerunner’ chic); Rådhuset on the Blue Line in Stockholm (primeval awesomeness); Arts et Métiers, Line 11 on the Paris Métro (steampunk goodness) and the stations on Line A in Prague (definite bubblewrap/LEGO vibes).

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The Moscow metro map is beautiful - it’s clearly inspired by the London Underground topological map - but it has curves:

https://www.artlebedev.com/metro/official-map/

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yeah. unfortunately, in florida.

i just want to say to him:
“go to the light, tucker. go to the light”
14ioc4

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Cities like London were bombed by German Airships many times in WW1, and the writing was definitely on the wall long before the Spanish Civil War. And that’s setting aside defenses against shelling, which many major cities had experienced in WW1 and earlier.

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The Soviets did have a better track record than the United States by a few metrics. For example, the rate of homelessness was very low because the right to shelter was (and remains) enshrined in their Constitution

Well, it kind of depends on when you are talking about – Lenin era/Civil War, Stalin Era, or later when things were comparatively more stable and prosperous. During the first two periods thare were plenty of homeless children, either because they were war orphans or because they were children of “enemies of the people”

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Since they realised that Marxism-Leninism has little to do with Marxism, socialism and communism, other than a shared ancestry.

They found that out about 100 years later than anarchists and libertarian-Marxists did, but no-one believed us.

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Wow, there’s a name I haven’t heard in forever. Took me a while to remember that I learned of them from the oled keyboard they were working on back in the day.

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So what Carlson is saying is that the US should invest more in public transport? Unexpected take coming from him, but I’m all for it.

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You left out the Gotha raids.
The point in this context is that the WW I air raids had a much larger impact regarding the growing popularity of pajamas than regarding the post WW I planning of extending/upgrading the London Underground. Despite people having sought shelter some of the existing stations. (To the best of my knowledge, this goes for any other subway system. Including 1930ies Berlin. I am a bit hazy on the Métro Paris, though; I couldn’t find too many sources that are not in French so far.) Maybe because this had been the war to end all wars, maybe because of post-war austerity and the various economic crises, maybe because of lack of imagination.

In Britain, the first body to push for the construction of air raid shelters, Tube-adjacent or not, was the Cement & Concrete Association, founded in 1935. Their stated “inspiration” (apart from selling cement and concrete) was the Spanish Civil war and Mussolini’s little genocide in Abyssinia.emphasized text The government did basically nothing until 1940 when the shit had already hit the fan. The first uses of the Tube as air raid shelters were due tu personal initiative, i.e. the people being bombed forcing their way into stations against the will of the authorities.

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Wait til you see what he thinks of their grocery stores. I’m not sure what he wants. Does he want our leaders to control the prices?

“So we were guessing what this would cost,” Carlson said as he puts his items on the belt. “Everybody [in the crew] is from the United States … and we didn’t pay any attention to cost, we just put in the cart what we would actually eat over a week. We all [guessed] around $400 bucks. It was $104 U.S. here. And that’s when you start to realize that ideology doesn’t matter as much as you thought.”

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Does he want people in the US to earn Russian-level wages, too?

Also, he’s in Moscow. Once you leave Moscow, or St. Petersburg, the quality of everything plummets rapidly. As much as people joke about the backwardness of rural America, deep rural Russia is terribly undeveloped, deprived, and hopelessly poor.

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As that stupid Canadian couple no doubt found out when they moved their family to Putin’s wonderland of traditional values.

Taking the train from Moscow to St. Petersburg and looking out the window was instructive. Once past the suburbs, there was an abrupt switch and suddenly there was only birch-tree wilderness and wooden villages that looked like sets from “Fiddler on the Roof” (without the Jews, judging by the many churches and Eastern Orthodox shrines).

An extreme contrast between centre and periphery is also the conservative endgame for America, just with different characteristics.

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You can literally hear the sound of Tucker choking down Putin as the symphony plays

See The Hunger Games.

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In 2019, I visited several large and small Russian cities, and I went grocery shopping at least once in each. Would you believe that Tucker Carlson is on to something? In Moscow (the largest) and St. Petersburg (No. 2), the flagship supermarkets are indeed spectacular. The Azbuka Vkusa branch next to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow is more luxurious than any grocery store within 100 miles of Washington, D.C. Other branches in Moscow vary in quality, and they are usually smaller than American supermarkets. But to some extent that’s just a matter of culture: The U.S. has fewer supermarkets, but each one is big enough to feed the 82nd Airborne Division for a month; in Europe, supermarkets are more numerous but tiny.

Makhachkala (22), the capital of Dagestan, followed a similar pattern to Moscow. One supermarket downtown was amazing, the equal of an upscale supermarket in Washington or Dallas. On the outskirts the quality varied, but not drastically. Local residents were not eating soups made from grass clippings. In Murmansk (71), the cramped bodega near my rented flat had a good wine selection and enough fresh staple foods to prepare a different meal your mom would approve of every day of the week. Only in Derbent (134) did I start to wonder whether the bad old days of the Soviet Union were still in effect. But even that would be an exaggeration. In Derbent, for $15, you could get champagne and caviar with blini and velvety sour cream. If you want to flash back to Cold War communism, go to Havana. There the grocery stores stock only dust and mildew.

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