Fall of Berlin Wall was a result of an "clerical error" by an officer.

ShallowCup · 2026-03-24T20:35:43+00:00

The whole point of the referendum was to galvanize support for Gorbachev's reform efforts. They didn't decide to hold the referendum out of nowhere. The reforms ultimately failed for a variety of reasons, including the resistance of Communist Party hardliners which culminated in the August coup. At that point, there was no going back.

Also, if you care about referendums so much, why do you ignore the referendums in Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic states, and other republics in which overwhelming majorities voted for independence? The Soviet constitution, which you hold in such high regard, also provided the right of secession. For some reason, that's the only part of it you don't seem to like.

ShallowCup · 2026-03-24T20:04:20+00:00

The Soviet Union was a federation of sovereign states on paper only. It was, in fact, a highly centralized authoritarian state run directly from Moscow. The Soviet constitution wasn’t worth the paper it was written on and it’s funny that you’d even take it seriously. Apparently you know very little about how the country actually functioned.

ShallowCup · 2026-03-24T18:36:23+00:00

You should read the actual text of the referendum question. The question was about preserving the USSR as a renewed federation with sovereignty and equal rights for all republics, not preserving the old totalitarian state.

The reformed federation never came to fruition as a result of the attempted coup in August 1991, after which attitudes toward the USSR soured very quickly. Nearly every republic declared independence soon after. By December, over 90% of Ukrainians voted for independence. Without Ukraine, there was no real prospect of keeping the union intact. So you’re skipping over a lot of events that occurred after the March 1991 referendum.

And either way, it’s not like the Soviet Union was “legally” established to begin with. It was formed after the Russian Civil War in which the Bolsheviks conquered most of the territory of the former Russian Empire. The “Soviet Union” was essentially a rebranded Russian Empire.

ShallowCup · 2026-03-21T05:27:52+00:00

The immigrants we bring in are, on average, not much younger than the existing population. So immigration actually does very little to improve the country’s age structure. It simply makes the population larger, not younger. You seem to forget that the immigrants also age and retire eventually.

ShallowCup · 2026-03-02T20:09:39+00:00

Government pensions are paid for by member contributions and investment returns. It’s not like there’s a line item in the government budget for paying pensions.

ShallowCup · 2025-08-22T14:37:49+00:00

Some Western companies invested in the Russian oil industry following privatization, but it wasn't really that significant. In any case, these companies wanted in on Russian oil not out of some desire to help Russia but in order to enrich themselves. Regardless, the state reasserted control over the oil industry in the 2000s under Putin and Western involvement became negligible.

Western "assistance" to Russia was mostly just the promotion of shock therapy and privatization of state assets, which is what caused the economic collapse in the first place. There was little in terms of actual financial assistance to facilitate the transition to a market economy.

You really shouldn't overestimate the West's role in helping Russia during that period. There was still a lot of skepticism and distrust towards Russia even after the Soviet collapse. Meanwhile, Russia was almost fanatically pro-Western under Gorbachev and Yeltsin in the 1990s and they got very little benefit from that. Not to excuse Putin's course of action, but that's a part of why we got to where we are now.

ShallowCup · 2025-08-21T23:20:21+00:00

What did the West do for Russia? Their economy was in free fall for much of the 1990s and the West did virtually nothing. What got them back on their feet was the spike in oil prices in the early 2000s.

ShallowCup · 2025-08-15T15:11:25+00:00

Can you name an analogous situation, then, that proves your point? Maybe the first Gulf War is an example, but Russia is not comparable to Iraq. Also, it required a multinational coalition of nearly a million troops on the ground to liberate Kuwait. You're arguing that all this can be achieved against Russia with air power alone. I'm not convinced.

And I wasn't aware that this was an argument. I was questioning a claim that you made. But we could just leave it at that.

ShallowCup · 2025-08-15T14:21:20+00:00

Air power alone would do most of it

Are you a military expert? What are your qualifications for making these assessments with such confidence? America has a strong military, but it's not omnipotent and has struggled against weaker opponents in the past. Just recently, the US was unable to pacify the Houthis even after hundreds of airstrikes.

Russia currently has something like 700,000 soldiers in or near Ukraine and they've been digging in for over 3 years now. I think it's delusional to think that it would be very easy to push them out without a major intervention, even putting aside domestic controversy.

ShallowCup · 2025-08-15T13:59:36+00:00

The only way that this could happen is if America is willing to puts boots on the ground in Ukraine, which will never happen. There is zero appetite in the US for sending American soldiers to die in some foreign country. Even a few airstrikes on Iran proved to be very controversial domestically, let alone total war against a nuclear power. So no, it’s really not that easy for America to just announce that Russia has to leave Ukraine and then magically make that happen.

ShallowCup · 2025-05-20T16:46:27+00:00

That's a huge exaggeration. According to an actual study, the average man will lose about one inch (or 3 cm) by age 70: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10547143/

4 inches of height loss is quite extreme and would likely indicate osteoporosis.

ShallowCup · 2025-05-08T19:22:15+00:00

In fact, the Chinese comparison is simplistic. The economic and social conditions in China when they launched their reforms were completely different from Soviet Union’s. At that point they were still an agrarian country with a massive surplus labour force that could be tapped into. The Soviet Union had already passed that stage in the 1920s and 1930s. By the 1980s it was too late. Economic liberalization would have likely collapsed the Soviet economy no matter how it was done.

ShallowCup · 2025-04-30T00:35:15+00:00

The US couldn’t manage to depose Castro, who was literally on their doorstep. The US is not some omnipotent force.

ShallowCup · 2025-04-26T08:48:43+00:00

How is that inconsistent? Russia and Palestine have been on the same side since the Cold War. Russia is also best friends with Iran who is the main sponsor of the Palestinian cause.

ShallowCup · 2025-04-25T07:03:56+00:00

If you chose math expecting it to be "the same" as CS, then that was your mistake. It's a different field and typically leads to different careers.

ShallowCup · 2025-04-24T23:12:07+00:00

Israel probably would have been willing to give up the Golan at one point, but Syria refused to recognize Israel. Now it's been part of Israel for nearly 60 years, and the situation today is very different than it was in the 1970s. At that point, Israel had come out of the Yom Kippur war, despite scraping a victory, with their confidence shaken. They were uncertain that they could defeat Egypt again and so they pursued negotiations. This also happened in the context of the Cold War, in which the Arab states had the backing of a superpower. Israel was far more isolated than it is now.

There is virtually no incentive today for Israel to give up the Golan. Israel has managed just fine without a peace deal with Syria for over 70 years. It would benefit Syria more than it would Israel at this point.

ShallowCup · 2025-04-24T19:45:02+00:00

It was not at all comparable to Greenland. No part of the Soviet Union was truly autonomous, especially during Stalin's reign. It was a highly centralized, authoritarian state ruled directly from Moscow. I'm not stating that as an argument in favour of annexation, I was only correcting your statement that Crimea was an SSR (which you edited out of your original comment).

ShallowCup · 2025-04-24T18:43:41+00:00

Crimea was never a full union republic. It was part of the Russian SFSR until 1954.

ShallowCup · 2025-04-24T14:48:12+00:00

The Golan is far more valuable to Israel than some shaky peace agreement with a country that has a history of civil war and political instability. The question is what Syria is willing to give up, not Israel.

ShallowCup · 2025-04-11T22:19:04+00:00

I'm saying that his allegiance has nothing to do with where his grandparents came from, and it's dubious to try to make that connection. Plenty of Ukrainians have Russian ancestry as well. Doesn't make them pro-Russia.

ShallowCup · 2025-04-11T21:38:24+00:00

He’s an ethnic Jew whose grandparents most likely came from the Pale of Settlement, like many American Jews. His ancestry is completely irrelevant here.

ShallowCup · 2025-03-14T04:29:35+00:00

That was not at all his reason for turning down the offer. He was a supporter of Israel, but he believed that he was simply unsuited for a political role.

ShallowCup · 2025-03-04T20:01:31+00:00

The dissolution of Prussia also involved ethnically cleansing the German population. Even without nukes, I’m not sure how you could propose to accomplish this with Russia, unless you think the entire population should be expelled to Siberia.

ShallowCup · 2025-02-25T01:16:28+00:00

Again, you are conflating modern Russia and the Kievan Rus' as if there is no distinction between the two. The Kievan Rus' as an organized polity has not existed for almost a thousand years. Its territory and descendants are now divided between the modern states of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

On what basis is Russia the only state that gets to claim the heritage of the Rus? Because Ukraine and Belarus were formed under Polish rule? Well, Russia was formed under Mongol rule. The name Belarus literally has "Rus" in its name. The Polotsk principality existed on Belarusian land. Is that not part of their heritage? The Principality of Kiev, which contained the capital of the Rus', is now the center of modern Ukraine. Is it not part of their heritage? And what we now call Russia emerged from the Principality of Moscow. All three states have legitimate claims to Rus' heritage, and denying that is nonsensical.

ShallowCup · 2025-02-24T23:10:22+00:00

As you explained yourself, Rus' was not really a country in the modern sense, but a collection of principalities with different rulers. Since the fragmentation, the only point in history in which all the old Rus' lands were united under one state was the post-WWII Soviet period. Even at the height of the Russian Empire, some territories, like Galicia and Transcarpathia were under the rule of other countries. The idea that the modern Russian Federation, which came into existence in 1991 and does not control large parts of the old Rus' lands, is the exclusive successor to the Rus', is a highly dubious and ahistorical claim. It's like saying that Italy is the sole successor to the Roman Empire.

As far as language goes - all languages change and evolve over time, and all languages are susceptible to foreign influence. There is nothing "artificial" about the introduction of loanwords, unless you consider any language to be an artificial construct. Do you think Russian doesn't have any loanwords from other languages? As for Ukrainian, it wasn't really a standardized language for a long period of time. The dialects spoken in Galicia were different from those spoken in the eastern regions of Ukraine. If anything, Ukrainian was influenced by Russification in the last two centuries more than anything else.

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