u/rottingleaf

He's a Russian businessman who became one in the last 35 years. He's "dissident" in the sense that he picked the wrong side.

Khodorkovsky's close associate has been named by French, I think, police as the main suspect for ordering an attack on a Russian opposition figure recently.

Look up Navalny's organization's opinions of all those people. Navalny was a controversial figure for many intents and purposes, and I really hope he didn't return to Russia because of getting desperate and tired of idiots like me mentioning those controversies. His organization might not parrot the western narratives the way Khodor and others do, but it is genuine.

The western countries are dependent on the imperial framework of "the eyes" cooperation, other intelligence and security cooperation, NATO cooperation, similarity of financial, patent and IP regulations, similarity of legal systems, interconnectivity of their elites and various blackmail material on those, and their common crime networks (one would hope that at least mafia groups should align along some other clusters on the map, but it doesn't seem so).

Those regulations support the status of western elites, which means the elites themselves won't reform anything in any good direction.

The NATO cooperation is extremely efficient and comfort-providing - instead of countrywide mandatory conscription you have small groups of professional soldiers and military bureaucrats, military matters are not something that all the society cares about.

Instead of domestic military industries sufficient to fulfill the needs of a military you can have as much silent and respectable corruption as you wish. It's both convenient for the population and for the elites (criminals) to have a small professional military, an international (imperial) MIC framework, all not influenced significantly by domestic popular opinions.

Intelligence cooperation allows domestic intelligence services to bypass all limitations that exist for them on paper about their own citizens. It also makes every such service more powerful than intended.

Similar financial regulations lead not only to good things, like smaller cost of doing business, but also to bad things, like monopolies. Even the EU supposedly big regulations don't prevent big tech from abusing honestly whatever they want. GDPR is a farce in its actual enforcement.

Patent and IP regulations - well, that's basically a way to legal monopoly, and that's how it works. BTW, let's just remember that even trademarks are a relatively new thing legally. And copyright. And patents. And when all these were introduced, that was similar to state monopoly on alcohol beverages in some countries or state monopoly on tobacco in others, and was reasoned legally in exactly that way - authorship and right to print something should be registered for the crown to have an income from that, not because of some ownership of ideas or protection. It still works like an imperial mechanism.

Similarity of legal systems - I'll admit at some point I thought English law is the best thing after sliced bread. But I'm not so sure at this point. At some point a German court acquitted Tehlirian, after all. As an example of the main competing family of legal systems.

Elites and crime - I mean, your whole part of the world is in the "trade and denial" stage after really buying the 80s and 90s idea that democracies and institutions don't require perpetual struggle to maintain. That is, fiction of those years would usually argue with that idea, but sometimes wide masses just want to believe something so badly that no art can dissuade them. And in the 00s it was decided.

OK, too much text.

What I really mean is that for Canada it doesn't make sense to join BRICS unless it manages to pull a Brazil and somehow switch the camp from "imperial" to "fringe kingdoms".

Without the home front there wont be any weapons, ammo, rations, aso…

Your countries are part of an empire, their possible home front is intentionally limited for these. Due to US unreliability they are changing, but it's not yet done.

Would be the other way, if USA can use it over fakes, then its actuality for real purposes is less certain.

Poland has a military.

target Yevgeny Chichvarkin, a dissident Russian who owns Hide, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Mayfair

So funny, such a "dissident" to reach there in Yeltsin and Putin years.

It's not just a multicultural area, it's as if they made the African continent two states, drawing the border randomly for one of them to be majority Muslim (and consisting of two unconnected parts).

It's a whole world with a few language families of completely different cultures, inside which there are languages as big as German not mutually intelligible with their related languages near them.

There's no such ethnicity as "Indian".

BTW, about religion - there is an ethnic and religious group in India, their Church is Apostolic Christian, Miaphysite, and it's in communion with Coptic and Armenian churches, and it has way more members than there are Armenian Christians in the world. Yet when listing Miaphysite churches, it's usually not even remembered.

I mean, they use English as the main international language inside India, the fact that there's no native language fitting the role of lingua franca more talks for itself. It's not about policy, it's about the fact that Hindi or Urdu are nothing for Dravidic regions. Not even oppression, just WTF and why should they use it.

This is also funny in the sense that one of explanations of Bitcoin is "digital gold" - that world economies and societies went in a wrong direction once they stopped being gold-backed, except gold and everything RL is controlled by governments, while Bitcoin is a subject to freedom of speech and whatever.

An already archaic viewpoint TBH, that many even western governments respect freedom of anything and human rights. And in another sense too archaic - the idea that a currency being gold-backed is something valuable was kinda libertarian around year 2007.

Which is also an answer to people saying that Bitcoin is not backed by anything (like country's economy in this sense and not technical ability to exchange it for gold), it's _the_ main cryptocurrency, and it seems to work well enough despite high volatility.

This won't be a circle though. Today they really like their control and surveillance. A gold-backed currency is where _anyone_ owning N of M can exchange them to gold with which an M is guaranteed by a rate that doesn't change, load that gold into bags, carry it to another country, go to a bank and exchange that gold to its currency. Perhaps declaring that they are carrying that gold at customs.

Gold-backed for governments - we-ell, maybe in some way.

Well. There was a time when currencies were to an extent interoperable, via a certain portion of silver called joachimstaler, or just taler, or yefimok, or dollar ... being approximately the same everywhere. Still, that was mostly used in colonies and in international trade, locally they'd use different incompatible currencies.

The British Empire is most notable on this picture with its glaring absence.

Yes, about the British and the French - these are countries that still fought small undeclared colonial wars after USSR ceased to exist.

They still fucking do.

Jordan is still not very different from a UK puppet regime.

Also why the West loves Arab monarchies so much - because they don't change anything in inconvenient directions. They sell oil, buy weapons, build nice shit. But their countries are not just staying on one place in terms of democracy, enlightenment and human rights - they are further into medieval shit than they were after liberation from the Ottomans. Then they were sort of "naturally", traditionally tribal and medieval. Not much different from many parts of the world. But since then those puppet monarchies, installed by empires, have been changing their societies in the opposite direction. The West not just supports Muslim religious movements against Leftist movements, the West supports Muslim monarchist and fundamentalist creme-de-la-creme (not) basically Nazi movements like our recent time's ISIS against Muslim republican and Leftist movements. So some Muslim and socialist mojaheds, like those US supported in Afghanistan, are not good enough when guys like HTS are available. Even Egypt's ikhvans, with their democratic component, are not good enough. Only Salafi beheaders in black with their nasheeds.

Germany - at some point their society realized firmly that there are mistakes in the past to be worked through. Unfortunately that was somewhere in the 90s, and in the middle of that process they for whatever reason abruptly decided that they have understood enough and are now a morality specialist nation. Which is why a German often feels entitled to express their opinions on the Holocaust as if their nation were participating in the victim role.

In some sense USSR was a huge spoiler. It took upon itself a lot of hopes of this world, despite Stalin and repressions, and then Brezhnev happened - just covering every budget inefficiency by selling natural resources to the supposed enemy, covering every pipeline hole by buying technology of the supposed enemy, resolving every deadlock between interested local producers by cloning technology of the supposed enemy, and so on. Then after 10 years or so the whole Soviet society and even more its elite were confident in Soviet system's inferiority, and it couldn't end any other way than it did from that point.

they elected a race to superiority

Unless a member of that race is against Israel, then you'll get sometimes the nicest kinds of things like "or, so then it was all right for you?" from them - that being about Holocaust.

BRICS has the downside of including Russia.

It might not seem that way, but Russia is actually the shittiest of USA's minions. Its "independent" actions like war with Ukraine are no more independent in fact than those of Saudis.

It's definitely aligned with the stinkier part of USA's elites, but somehow had good enough relationship with all of them.

Maybe reforming UN as a candidate for some actual world confederation would be a better idea.

EUR is honestly a better reserve currency, more stable already.

About divesting from dollars - I dunno how hard this is. Probably would be better for the US to provoke it to signal that time is nigh. Because otherwise this can only happen very slowly.

Nah, the more time passes, the less incentive there is for many people to pursue justice when there are newer things on their plates.

Same as modern Web's "attention economy".

But frankly in classical cultures they knew that too, catch the moment, now or never.

are not dropped, “all options remain on the table,” he declared.

That being dicks offered to him

Compared to before, no, there aren’t.

Well, that can be said about Greeks and Armenians in Crimea as well as Crimean Tatars. That's because after Stalin's forced movement to Kazakhstan (which is barbaric act, of course) or wherever, when descendants of those people were allowed to return, they were more likely to move elsewhere in the union. And after 1991 Greeks would often repatriate, well, to Greece, changing the ethnic character of the whole Russian and Ukrainian Black Sea coast, and Crimean Tatars to Turkey.

I think you also underestimate the role of Sevastopol. Purely due to strategic importance there'd be people coming from all parts of the empire and the union, and the "melting pot culture" there was Russian.

There has been an ongoing genocide since the tsarist times,

That's a weird way to say this, before Crimea becoming part of the Russian Empire the actual Crimean Khanate didn't exist for too long. It seems you have a misconception of Crimean Tatars being some sort of _the_ native population of Crimea. They were not. They were a nomad vassal state to the Ottoman Empire, conquerors themselves. They weren't the majority there ethnically under that khanate either.

That’s why people are “wary” of Russia - because it is a genocidal state since time immemorial.

That's gross from someone who's likely a US-American or a European. Also "time immemorial" doesn't quite mean what you seem to think.

It's not only that, it's also that USA is doing the competition with China the rough way.

China is mostly building up peaceful (of the cutthroat kind, but still) economic influence, USA is mostly not countering that with the same, but just disrupting possible logistical projects beneficial to China with wars.

So they'd want, I think, to have USA at least keep applying force where it already does, allowing China to keep growing. They don't want to do military solutions, their military is not that experienced and it's not necessary when economically time is working in their favor.

Putin is basically mocking (or imitating) the US, it's his inferiority complex - he thinks Russia should be perceived as some superpower of the kind of the US, and the same things to be "allowed" to it, so he does what he sees as the same things that US does. The results are secondary. While the US establishment and current, eh, leadership in turn too have an inferiority complex - they think today's US should be as "great" or at least "reliable" in perception as the US of 1960s, except they forgot the context and why even US of 1960s needed to be what it was. The results, in foreign policy, are mostly secondary too to that, I think.

IMHO it's because of the stagnation of the elites. The more involved wide population is into decisions, - even USSR had something reminiscing meritocracy in ministries and in industries and in the military, - the better is the quality of the whole state mechanism with its culture and elites. While the more narrow and closed it is, the more similar it is to a Hearts of Iron game.

Tell me, why are there no more Tatars in Crimea?

There are, in fact, Tatars in Crimea.

You are literally saying "fucking moron" to something you imagined yourself and I didn't write.

You are right.