This is a general thing that happens to resource-rich nations - the Dutch Disease, the resource curse. If a country makes too much money pumping stuff out of the ground, it depresses industrial growth. The country gets rich, which means it can buy lots of stuff from everyone else instead of paying its own people to make it (who now expect more pay for less work). Its stronger currency accelerates imports, depresses exports. Over time the country falls behind in economic development while its resource production falls as mines are depleted. Then it ends up as a poor backwater behind its developed neighbors (unless other factors intervene).

However, this story gets oversold a bit. Being resource rich has costs (which break countries if ignored), but it has more benefits. E.g., Saudi Arabia/Qatar/Bahrain/Kuwait have regional and even global significance due to oil wealth, even though they’re patches in the desert hampered by ultraconservatism.

The Spanish Empire didn’t just spend all its gold and silver on wine and fancy clothes - it bought giant professional armies. It absolutely dominated 16th and 17th century Europe, conquering half of Italy and repeatedly challenging France, the strongest European power, despite having a lower population and starting in a weaker position. It also colonized much of the New World plus the Philippines, making Spanish a world languge. Sure, Britain, France, and the Netherlands preyed on and eventually supplanted Spain (and did so without Inca slaves mining for them), but Spain was the number one world power because of all the wealth it acquired.

Another user in the same situation: @hogposting - July member, banned for “trauma delegitimization” (???) and “reactionary” when all he did was participate in the VCJ arguments, saying you can be a leftist, but not a vegan, and a vegan, but not a leftist. As far as I can tell, nothing that can be construed as harassment or wrecking or even anti-veganism, just someone reacting to the VCJ debacle.

And I’m gonna mention @GrandAyatollaLenin and @ElonMarx again. Banned earlier for arguing with mods in good faith - which shouldn’t be a permaban offense, especially when the rules aren’t clearly stated and the mods themselves get into petty arguments.

First Vietnam doesn’t like democracy, then Iraq doesn’t like it, now Americans have a problem with it! Clearly we haven’t been enforcing it hard enough.

Have you tried to remote control 4 airplanes at once while Cheney’s trash-talking you?

Reagan only got bad in the final years of his second term, and they still kept it on the dl. How are they gonna survive 4 years with Biden unable to hold a simple press conference? Will they have to switch to Harris early?

It’s astounding how much grift you can assemble at one table - and Joe Rogan really is the most decent among them, which is saying a lot.

“Oh, shit! It’s a recession! Everyone else is gonna sell: SELL SELL SELL SELL!” … “Oh, fuck! The economy is growing and corn is cheap! Everyone else is gonna buy: BUY BUY BUY BUY!”

Tolkien’s dwarves are an Antisemitic caricature at their worst (though not as bad as the racist descriptions of orc-aligned humans in LotR) … but yeah, at the end of the day it’s a great story of timeless lessons about human nature. I enjoy it immensely and heartily second your comment. Don’t take my mockery too seriously.

USSR was trying to reform agriculture (collectivize, maximize output to enable industrialization, fight reactionary/independent farmers) when a poor harvest happened. The government interpreted the initial low yields as a sign of peasant rebellion/resistance to reform and doubled down on force/punishments, which only deepened the problem. Later they backtracked and sent help, but it was already too late for millions of people in grain-producing areas (Ukraine, Southern/South-Central Russia, Northern Kazakhstan).

Nazis then used it as propaganda to undermine support for communism. Ukrainian Nazi collaborators picked up this line and carried it with them into US/Canadian emigration, which was reproduced as Cold War propaganda.

Modern Ukrainian nationalists then re-imported it and spun it into a founding myth for a new independent Ukraine, with the Soviet/Communist government (full of many nationalities, including tons of Ukrainians) now painted as Russians killing Ukrainians in a genocide to replace ethnic Ukrainians with ethnic Russians, which is used as a justification to purge Ukraine’s communist history and displace the Russian language in Ukraine. There’s zero evidence that any plan to target/kill Ukrainians existed under Stalin and all the evidence that grain-producing areas were the ones affected, not ones with any specific ethnic composition.

The event is thus best understood as “the Soviet famine of 1932-33”, not a Ukrainian-specific tragedy. It was of course a horrible tragedy that was exacerbated by existing policy and initial mismanagement, with some leaders guilty of criminal negligence. There’re lessons to draw from it for the Soviet government specifically and for leftist government generally. There’re parallels to the British-caused famines in Ireland and India. But the way it’s used today is a heap of lies constructed by some of the worst people with the most hostility to anything leftist.

Tolkien got better over time.

In the Hobbit, the class story is “fat rich boring kulak can be a badass hero - maybe because he comes from an adventurous bloodline on his mother’s side”.

In Rings, it becomes “fat rich kulak can be a badass hero - but only with the help of the landless bum who is actually noble of spirit”.

Maybe he’d have gotten to “hobbits and orcs have more in common with each other than with Aragorn or Sauron” eventually.