This is exactly right - and Russia and the Russian people experienced this lifestyle in the Soviet Union. They are fully prepared to endure it once again…
After all, the elites & sub-elites will still get everything that they want, and the Russian people thesmelves are not doing any worse than folks in third world countries (that’s for sure!) which manage to putter along under their own corrupt oligarchs, rain or shine.
… The way which you wrote this made me think there was a far more dramatic ending than being stuck at an airport for several hours due to mechanical failure.
My brother in Christ, I experienced that in Cleveland…
But I am not sure what you mean at the end - are these guys STILL in Dubai?! You said they were stuk at the airport for several hours… Like… What, they had to stay at the airport to wait for their boat because, as you said, they couldn’t return by plane? … Or they waited several hours at the airport to catch another flight…? What are you saying?
Russia lived with sanctions for 70 some years as the Soviet Union, and has always been prepared to endure more. They are an economy built around raw, natural resources and can be largely self-sustaining…
And it has been pointed out, that Iran has been fighting off sanctions very successfully over the last twenty, thirty yeas…
Their secret then is Russia’ secret now, more or less:
India will trade with anybody and be neutral, and it isn’t a large task to create a shell company in India that peddles your wares throughout the whole of the world, repackaged and rebranded. At the height of Trump’s reintroduced sanctions on Iran, I was able to eat Iranian dates in South Korea - a country that followed US protcols and actually made it impossible for Iranians to start new private bank accounts unless in specific circumstances and did everything they could to place barriers on trade.
Heed you, these shell companies used to exist in places like Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc., but US sanctions shut this down. It all moved to India…
Which is likely where a lot of Russian exports head when they aren’t just being imported completely independent of the Western world to places like Iran and China… China, of course, is another factor, as trade between RU and CN have increased exponentially over the last few years since the war started…
I could go on but, already, I am rambling… Suffice it to say, there’s a mssive block of countries that hate Western imperialism and/or are neutral and/or already face sanctions, and this network continues to trade with one another, and they also have begun to help facilitate one another trading with the West, either knowingly or just because they lack the will or robust enough resources to police it up.
Globalization is its own enemy when it comes to the West trying to impose sanctions, IMO.
That’s just funny - the Simpsons riffed on that for the longest time and nobody batted an eye.
It’s satire meant to make people chuckle about it… and it’s old satire, because everyone knows that the Indian immigrant now is far more likely to be your cardiologist or running the entire IT department than working at 7/11.
… and everyone knows the babylon Bee is not alt right, lol.
OH yeah, there’s stuff like that on there now, which i agree should be allowed on platforms. I believe in free speech. This stuff is not persuasive - it’s not detrimental to anybody that it exists.
My point is that major figures on the far right are still banned. It’s hypocritical of Musk to some degree, especially in the case of Taylor, but this is also the sort of thing that you should be kind of satisfied with, isn’t it? Yes, he allows no name accounts to post stuff like that, but the people who actually have a following are off.
Not wrong at all - it’s also the case that the guy who founded Netflix had dozens of sticks in the fire - lots of failed enterprises he was trying out elsewhere, and this one just hit. He didn’t even come up with the model, really, for Netflix… he’s just a privileged venture capitalist.
But what does that mean for us? Obviously, I wish it was me with the generational wealth, and not them. Obviously, I would prefer for 10,000 people to be lifted out of generational poverty in the Congo than to create more millionaires… But I treat the super wealthy capitalists tossing around massive wealth like this as something I do not have the right to do much about other than taxing them at a higher rate.
When they deliver good products by creating companies that utilize a lot of talent, I clap.
I think it is the case that technology and the mass production of goods will do more to alleviate poverty than anything else…
I mean, you go to poor countries now and even the poor people have access to a wealth of information and such through their non-flag smartphones you’ve never heard of. That’s just wonderful. It has also assisted us by letting us see what is going on in Gaza first hand. So, all these billionaires & multimillionaire investors have actually contributed to society through the decades by bringing us to a point where even fairly poor people in India or Iran can not just enjoy having internet access and a smartphone, but can also use it to report on corruption and undermine corrupt & terrible governments.
Right, he isn’t entirely consistent.
But it is also not the case that he is bringing back literal Nazis - last I checked Jared Taylor was not reinstated, Andrew Anglin is nowhere to be seen, and Kanye West was banned after his remarks. I think the list goes on- every once in a while you do see the Nazis complaining about this because, of course, it isn’t hard to stay on that platform… Which si also why it’s silly he didn’t bring Jared Taylor back on - he was not removed because he said any slurs or was obscene, but was simply removed by Dorsey and the gang because he is an open “race realist.”
Of course, I was flabbergasted when I saw that they would treat “from the river to the sea” as a call to genocide on X, and I really felt like he completely dropped the ball there. Nonetheless, it was a general improvement, though it is not what I would have envisioned.
There’s all these things that people say about how he’s garbage and does nothing right, but the guy has managed to be involved with the project that made it easy to make payments over the internet, and then went on to be behind the most successful electric car and, of course, there’s also SpaceX…
I have no idea about the details behind this other than what a Redditor coworker who totally negs on Elon has told me - all this inside baseball at PayPal that seems unflattering, and, of course, the persistent accusations that he brings nothing to the table…
But does lightening really strike thrice like that? IDK. Plus I am sympathetic to his desire to make X more free speech friendly - he isn’t completely consistent in this, but it is better than what came before.
I am just going to give him the benefit of the doubt on this - not in saying that he absolutely deserves this raise, but in saying that he has a right to ask for it without being laughed out of the room.
Very cool, thank you