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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

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Razengan

> Fidesz is basically a russian backdoor

I love (hate) this:

Western rich people are billionaires.

Russian rich people are oligarchs.

Western-backed leaders are democratic, progressive etc.

Others are backdoors.

China is tricky because they make our iPhones. For now

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Meanwhile, there's almost nothing on the news or social spaces about how indigenous populations are still fighting for independence from Western colonizers, such as New Caledonia, an amazing place that I was planning to visit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6S1AFh88PE

(I don't know where else to mention this, this conversation seemed close enough to be relevant)

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Equating the west, to Russia is such an unserious opinion. The west has it's problems, don't get me wrong, but generally we have liberal democracies, which are more free, successful, better on human rights, and have the capability to improve the world(as it has).

Of course, you can get an abortion across all of Russia. You can't do that in the USSA.

You can express dissatisfaction with your child's school curriculum in Russia without being interrogated by the police, not so in the UK.

Last I checked, Russia isn't having plainclothes agents of the state abduct and deport people for publicly sharing criticism of Israel, either.

Perhaps not, but in the USA you don't have a sudden fight with windows and gravity if you do something against the regime, either.

Not so sure about that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson

lol not to mention the ongoing history of police brutality etc. Americans are so twisted up in their "us vs them" mentality even in this day and age it's just bizarre.

https://old.reddit.com/r/2020PoliceBrutality/

Russia is an interesting case as it has a president for life (China has gone this way too) and if your billions aren't available to said president you fall out a windows. The US is diving towards an oligarchy but I'm not seeing our billionaires fall out a window or disappearing when they say the wrong thing.

Yeah because in the US the billionaires actually run the country.

I wish that were true but it's not. If billionaires ran the country we wouldn't be starting trade wars and restricting immigration.

During trading war the US stock skyrocketed.

We live in an era where the wealthiest are made by devaluing fiat and moving the purchase power from average citizens to the richest ones. Creating value, if people are still doing that, is mere a byproduct now.

During the announcement of the tariffs and the subsequent period, pretty much everything I had invested dropped across the board: https://blog.kronis.dev/user/pages/blog/my-investments-in-20...

(I was doing an experiment of putting 1k into a bunch of stocks each through Revolut instead of my usual bank funds and seeing how they do after a year)

Yet it recovered afterwards. I’m certain that some transfer of wealth took place there, with at least some people panic selling.

> During the announcement of the tariffs and the subsequent period, pretty much everything I had invested dropped across the board

Noise. The drop was short lived, the news was used as an excuse to take some profits and realign portfolios, a lot of other announcements wrt tariffs looked a lot like market manipulation too.

Then the market figured that foreign competition is being stomped in the mud and the officially sanctioned inflation is the new and endless excuse for higher prices and profits without actually increasing production in a monopolized and cartelized economic environment.

the net worth of the current president is several billion dollars.

that is the same person who ran a crypto pump-and-dump scheme in their first month back in office.

billionaires may have competing interests and also act irrationally.

Not only ran a pump n dump, but he had to change laws to do it. Dude literally made it legal to scam folks within days of returning to office.

Then he scammed people.

The billionaire running the country is the one starting the trade wars and restricting immigration.

> If billionaires ran the country we wouldn't be starting trade wars and restricting immigration.

I'm not sure if you're joking, so if you are, this comment is not for you.

In the current monopolized and cartelized economic environment, the only effect of trade wars is the reduction of competition due to the suppression of foreign competition - billionaires just love that because it allows them to increase prices and profits without increasing production.

Immigration wasn't really restricted for billionaires, it was restricted only for the small fish who may not be able to afford the new and not-quite-high fees. The end result is again suppressed competition which benefits the cartels and monopolies controlled by billionaires. As I've already said, they love that.

> The US is diving towards an oligarchy but I'm not seeing our billionaires fall out a window

Probably because it -IS- an oligarchy? Why would they chuck themselves out of windows?

> but I'm not seeing our billionaires fall out a window or disappearing when they say the wrong thing.

This doesn't happen overnight. You need to thoroughly corrupt the judiciary (which has not yet been accomplished, even if SCOTUS and a number of lower court appointments and many of the federal prosecutors have been) first. [1]

Or, alternatively, just go full fucking might-makes-right police state, for which ICE's blatant disregard for the law and your rights is a trial run.

If the country is ever retaken from this, the guilty will have to be punished. Deprivation of rights under color of law is, incidentally, a capital crime.

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[1] The end-game for this sort of thing is 'Punch a nazi -> Go to a camp'. 'Nazi punches you -> Pardon and a pat on the back'. Rule of law is anathema to these people, which is why they put so much effort into corrupting it.

What Russian billionaires you have seen to fall out of a window or disappear?

If we take GP's post not quite literally, here's a useful list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_Russia-related_deat...

It looks quite literally and "falling out of window" had been repeated many times in this thread. I believe the original meme predates 2022 and stems from this event: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mikehayes/russian-lawye... If you can read Russian you can find that it was an accident during a house renovation with a whole bunch of people present and the person was airlifted to the hospital.

Now this is rebranded into "oligarchs" not giving money to Putin and being thrown out of the windows of their apartments. None of the people on the list is a billionaire and if a manager of a company falling out of the window constitutes some kind of dictatorship then how about this:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/bed-bath-cfo-falls-deat...

Probably did not give money to Biden?

Equating two "bad" things as if they weren't worlds apart in gravity is baby's first fallacy. An ingrown toenail and the Holocaust are not the same thing.

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