Enjoyed the cautious optimism of this conversation. So much good would come in linking Russia and USA through peaceful commerce via tunnels/railways. The immensity of the project itself would ensure quality jobs for Americans. And one can glimpse the power of a northern trade network that bypasses the oceans and incorporates close ties to Japan, Korea, and of course China. We know who would be left out in such a network, but as the panel seems to suggest with unanimity, a new vision is necessary for our people to truly flourish.
27:00 On Constantin's understandable question 'Why don't any of the criminals in the US government ever get arrested?', I'd argue that it's a result of the deliberate design of the US government system, going back to its creation.
One of the major differences between the American versus the European conception of government is ( or 'was') the American distrust of government power; therefore the ability of even a popular ruling party to take drastic actions is greatly limited. Compare, for example, the powers of the US Congress and Executive branch put together put against that of Parliament in the UK. There are simply far, far more legal blocks in the way of arresting prominent members of the (former or present) US government.
Now, that has been quite helpful in the past. However, the obvious problem of making it near-impossible to actually crack down harshly on corruption or criminality in the US government has only fairly recently become a massive issue, thanks to certain 'cultural changes' in the US over the last ~century or so. I suspect that the original designers of the US governmental system had simply assumed that A) criminality as we see today just 'wasn't done' by their class of people, and that B) if it ever did come up, then certainly the states or the individual American people would enact extra-legal one-off solutions to that rare problem.
This leads to the modern day where one party in the US is perfectly fine in attacking their opponents viciously with no regards for established laws or precedent, while their conservative opponents never actually strike back because doing so would by necessity have to violate many of the legal and cultural restrictions that American conservatives value so greatly.
Or as Phisto might put it, 'America needs a Franco, but American conservatives hate the mere idea of a Franco.'
I don’t think the war is primarily about borders. I think the black hand is running all parties and the point is to punish the Ukrainians and keep them from talking about the Holomodor and who the culprits really were
Enjoyed the cautious optimism of this conversation. So much good would come in linking Russia and USA through peaceful commerce via tunnels/railways. The immensity of the project itself would ensure quality jobs for Americans. And one can glimpse the power of a northern trade network that bypasses the oceans and incorporates close ties to Japan, Korea, and of course China. We know who would be left out in such a network, but as the panel seems to suggest with unanimity, a new vision is necessary for our people to truly flourish.
27:00 On Constantin's understandable question 'Why don't any of the criminals in the US government ever get arrested?', I'd argue that it's a result of the deliberate design of the US government system, going back to its creation.
One of the major differences between the American versus the European conception of government is ( or 'was') the American distrust of government power; therefore the ability of even a popular ruling party to take drastic actions is greatly limited. Compare, for example, the powers of the US Congress and Executive branch put together put against that of Parliament in the UK. There are simply far, far more legal blocks in the way of arresting prominent members of the (former or present) US government.
Now, that has been quite helpful in the past. However, the obvious problem of making it near-impossible to actually crack down harshly on corruption or criminality in the US government has only fairly recently become a massive issue, thanks to certain 'cultural changes' in the US over the last ~century or so. I suspect that the original designers of the US governmental system had simply assumed that A) criminality as we see today just 'wasn't done' by their class of people, and that B) if it ever did come up, then certainly the states or the individual American people would enact extra-legal one-off solutions to that rare problem.
This leads to the modern day where one party in the US is perfectly fine in attacking their opponents viciously with no regards for established laws or precedent, while their conservative opponents never actually strike back because doing so would by necessity have to violate many of the legal and cultural restrictions that American conservatives value so greatly.
Or as Phisto might put it, 'America needs a Franco, but American conservatives hate the mere idea of a Franco.'
I don’t think the war is primarily about borders. I think the black hand is running all parties and the point is to punish the Ukrainians and keep them from talking about the Holomodor and who the culprits really were