@Background Pony #2321

Word to that. I'd love to retroactively erase the Khans from existence. Them and Rome, and the Turks. Just a few people with the "brilliant" ideas how to trap humanity in self-inflicted ruin forever. All we can do is try to get out of their death spiral though; the trap was laid and sprung before any of us were born. Forgive all debts, betray all kings… no gods, no masters. I dunno what to do really. Make some friends.

@skybrook2
Not trying to be argumentative or a dick, but please re-read the first paragraph. I said I don't think genetic differences account for the different culture, because children of Russian descent living in the US have, at least thus far, not demonstrated any unusual tendency to invade and annex Mexico.

I think that the patterns we see today are cultural, not genetic, resulting from 800+ years of strongarm rule by maniacs, with invasions by the Mongols, Tatars, and Turks every generation or two. I think the Mongol invasions in particular cemented certain tendencies of governance that we do not see quite so much of in, for example, Scotland, or France. I don't know how Russia would have developed, culturally and historically speaking, if not for Batu Khan's brilliant idea to make Russia's kings and aristocrats into his tax collectors, or if Mongolia had been completely uninhabited in the 13th Century. Human beings are highly adaptable. Pour water into a jar, and the shape of the water flows to match the shape of the container. Russians and Russian culture have adapted to rule by Ogodei Khan and Ivan the Terrible, and I think that what we see now reflects this.

@Background Pony #2321

Yeah, problem with your reasoning is oligarchs love making gullible tools out of people by lying to you about genetics and/or eugenics, so whatever study says there are differences is quite likely paid for by their shitty propaganda machines; no way to find the good ones. Any time anyone talks about being "predisposed" to aggression, I have to assume it's another rich fuck, trying to make bank off of duping people into fighting each other and jumping at shadows.

Fact is we don't know what effect genes have on societies. There's no way to measure or experiment; any studies are full of confounding factors. 100% of people convicted of a crime get convicted, even if they were framed. I won't deny that Russia has been through some shit though. The casulties in WWI were… they were fighting tanks and machine guns with sticks and rocks.

@skybrook2
Well, you aren't wrong, but there are profound cultural differences. There are genetic markers for many aspects of human temperament and behavior. In particular look up the gene called MAO-A. Ethnic Russians are genetically noticeably different from white Americans and white Western Europeans, but do not seem to carry the genes linked to violence or psychopathy to a greater extent than anyone else. Persons of Russian descent living in the US do not seem to act out any genetically hard-wired impulse to invade Poland.

I think it stems from the historical fact that the Russians always had some pretty vicious neighbors to their east, from whom they picked up some nasty cultural tendencies. Back when Herotodus called them "Scythians" they were known for raiding their neighbors to the south and west for slaves, cattle, and loot. Their legendary first ruler, Rurik of Novgorod, if he ever existed, was a Rus' chieftain—a Viking, in other words—who was less interested in governance than in using a fortified city as a base from which to loot the surrounding countryside, back in the 9th Century. Succeeding rulers did not improve much upon this, and about four hundred years later the Mongols conquered the area and Russian "Grand Princes" went into the business of being their local enforcers and tax collectors, taking enthusiastically to the new duties for the next several centuries.

What is significant about this is that Western monarchs and aristocrats always at least paid lip service to the claim that they derived all of their authority and all of their legitimacy from being their people's protectors and defenders. They said "obey us, because we protect you and maintain peace and order." This is not how the Tsars did things. The Tsars said "fuck you, pay me," and were more than happy to rule over a nightmarish police state that maintained its hold on power by torture, mass murder, and mass deportation to Siberian concentration camps. The Tsars and the Russian aristocracy didn't stop this behavior when Catherine the Great reclaimed the last of the old Mongol colonies only about three hundred years back. This general attitude toward those 98%+ of the population who were serfs, who were in Russian custom and law the chattel property of the local aristocracy until late in the 19th Century, persisted, and persists, long after the end of the line of the Tsars. Fundamental to Russian society is the axiom that the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. Use the whip or feel the whip, and if they can't fight back, that means you're better than they are and they deserve to suffer. This is why Russian nationals are utterly terrified of badges, uniforms, and guns, because for centuries seeing them meant nothing good, and the only rebellion against the Tsars and the aristocrats that ever succeeded, in 1917, was not an improvement.

All of this is why the Russians today believe themselves entitled to live like the people in the staged photos in musty copies of "Soviet Life" magazine from 1972. Their grandparents tell them how much better things were under the Soviet regime, how there was food in the stores. That is half true, because it's easy to fill the grocery stores when you're looting neighboring countries, and when the USSR disintegrated, the Russian economy was no longer artificially pumped up by goods from neighboring nations, and so appeared, to those living there, to contract by more than half. But the difference between then and now is less than Grandma in the babushka says it is. She views the past with rose-colored glasses, and wants a nice strong man like Putin who'll drive out the perfidious Western spies who are stealing all the cheap booze and cigarettes for themselves, and put those uppity Finns and Litvaks and Poles in their place. Grandma in the babushka is, with rare exception, more than willing to see as many Chechens and Azeris and Yakuts as necessary press-ganged and forced into cattle cars and sent to die in Ukraine—and elsewhere—to recreate the glorious past she thinks of every time she sees an old socialist-realism mural showing Russian scientists and cosmonauts.

And, see—those starving skeletal people aren't invisible. Grandma in the babushka may deny their existence, or say it's exaggerated, but she really doesn't care one way or the other. She wants her cheap smokes, cheap booze, and TV propaganda cosmonauts, and it doesn't really matter how many people die, so long as they aren't ethnic Russians. In Western nations we have this idea that all human lives are valuable. It's an aspect of living in what they call a "high-trust society." This isn't universal. In China thousands of years of Emperors conscripting the men of Village A to march twenty miles to Village B and carry out horrific mass slaughter in reprisal for some farmer plowing his fields in a different direction and disturbing the province's feng shui has resulted in most of the population not really regarding strangers, much less foreigners, as fully human. This is just how it is in low-trust societies. Russia doesn't have it quite as bad as China does, but it's bad enough that Putin has engaged in three very open, very obvious, completely naked wars of conquest since he took power and there's not even any kind of organized dissent.

As I said, I don't know how you fix this. Russians aren't demons. They aren't subhuman. They aren't stupid. But their culture is fucked, and the government of their nation-state—any government—does horrifying things as a matter of course. I don't know what the hell to do about it.

@Background Pony #D12E

Sad thing is the Russian people do deserve butter and cigarettes, and fruit brandy. It's great if they can get all those things, and it's bad that they can't. But how many would still want those things, if they knew about the starving skeletal people lining the railroad tracks begging for food while the Soviets feasted within?

Colonialism is the scam that by hiding your crimes in distant geographical regions, you can get the support of people who would shoot you in the face if they knew what a monster you really were. So the question is how to stop that deception? How do you tell a Russian about the Holodomor, and have them believe you?

@Background Pony #DC0B
If Russia's trillionaire oligarchs wanted Putin dead, he'd already be dead. The fact that he is permitted to continue waging the war means they assent, at least silently.

There is in post-Soviet Russian culture this malignant, destructive meme, about which almost the entire population seems to be highly enthusiastic. There is this demonstrably false idea that the USSR represented a Russian golden age, and that they were completely entitled to pump up the Russian economy by looting 40% off the top of the GDP of every nation between the Don and the Rhine. Russia's neighbors do not share this enthusiastic nostalgia for something that never existed. The nations Russia illegally occupied, enslaved, and looted for generations have very different memories of that era, and have spent almost three years fighting to prevent Putin from recreating it.

All of that having been said, Putin is not the cause. He is the symptom. Dugin is a symptom. Zhirnovsky was a symptom. The Russians want the GUM stores in Moscow to be stocked once again with cheap Polish butter and cheap East German cigarettes and cheap Czech fruit brandy, like they see in the yellowing pages of forty-year-old copies of "Soviet Life" magazine. They believe that the West is unjustly depriving them of all these goodies—that mostly never existed, because the pictures were propaganda, fakes—and manipulating the populations of their good friends and neighbors in Finland and Latvia and Ukraine to reject Russia's jolly cooperation and heartfelt friendship.

Every day they sit in their sixty-year-old prefabricated concrete block apartment cubes with leaky ceilings with a bottle of shitty vodka that they almost couldn't afford and feel deprived and humiliated. Their grandparents tell them how much richer Russia was when they were able to force the Ukrainians to harvest wheat at bayonet point and take it all for themselves while the "hohols" starved, and it's not like non-Russians are really human, now is it? Their history books tell them that Russia is the fount and guardian of civilization, and single-handedly saved the world from "fascism" (a word that seems to mean "anything Russians don't like") during the Great Patriotic War. They deserve those cheap East German cigarettes and they vote for leaders who promise to bring them back.

Similar memes existed in the German and Japanese cultures early in the last century. You may recall what was necessary to erase them and replace them with saner perceptions of the world and their place in it. I do not know how you fix this. It isn't going to stop when Putin dies. If he vanished tomorrow the Russians would elect someone else who tells them what they want to hear, someone else who promises to restore the USSR.

From what I've heard, Russian elites are just waiting for Putin to die so they can end the war. The only reason it's still going is that Putin knows he'll be lynched once it's over so he's sacrificing Russia's future to prolong his rule as long as possible.

@Background Pony #51A6

@FluttershyFanN80085

Clown World is the new normal. Get used to it.

@FluttershyFanN80085
>>6357963p

@Background Pony #51A6
A normal life world will come only when the world will be managed by artificial intelligence. Which will achieve the goals set by mankind in the most economical, durable and environmentally friendly way possible. Without the ability to access resources for people in general, with their short lives full of stupidity, self-interest, greed and selfishness.
Before this AI, the best way is just to change the president every 4 years. To keep it fresh. If not, you can find plenty of examples of countries ruled by dictators for more than 30 years, and how people live there.

Normal life will begin only when a multipolar world is finally formed

I think the russian pony will be happy if Putler die. After all, she'll stop getting raped every day, and finally will be able to eat some normal food.
Of course, she doesn't know about it yet, and thinks it's a normal life.

Death to Ukrainian pigs