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The US Government doesn't do these things. The people running businesses do these things.
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Have no idea what happens in the US but in Australia nearly all PFAS in the country comes from government properties, most often military bases or airports.
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Sure, that's why my water supply is contaminated by pfas from the Air Force base nearby washing it into the water table for decades.
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And yet the Russian foreign policy is almost this: they know they can't compete on competence/science/tech so they try to tear everything down to their level.
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Russia has always been famous for science and technology, if not political competence.
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The jewish exodus from Russia due to the disaster of the Soviet era put a dent in that I'm sure.
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Also the separation from Ukraine, who were a major contributor to Soviet science.
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The name of that entity was the soviet union
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I think this is a bad take. The Russian government wants to tear things down because they are a kleptocracy, and functional nations act as a check on corrupt governments. The more corrupt the US is the more theft russia can get away with and collude with pals inside the US gov on.

The framing of nations as inherently in competition with each other doesn’t track for me. Sometimes, in specific instances, nations will be in competition, but finland having a good or bad education system does not impact me even slightly.

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>finland having a good or bad education system does not impact me even slightly.

Yet you do depend on Linux.

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And SSH.
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Is *sshole the result of Finland failing to compete with Russia? Curious minds need to know!
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> The framing of nations as inherently in competition with each other doesn’t track for me.

Where it tracks for you or not isn't relevant. It tracks for Putin and he's been extremely clear about that for hours and hours of extremely boring monologues :P

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They have placed agent Krasnov though, so they influence US politics anyway. What is even more surprising is that Krasnov is now doubling down, despite the clear loss in the latest election.
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The regulatory state didn’t fail out of bureaucratic clumsiness; it was systematically bought and gutted so private balance sheets wouldn’t have to carry the cost of your cancer.

Blaming "the government" for toxic tap water and runaway prices is like blaming the getaway car instead of the bank robbers.

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Private balance sheets wouldn’t have to carry the cost of your cancer is interesting. Do public balance sheets have to carry the cost of alcoholic's cirrhosis, smoker's lung cancer, and Type 2 diabetic's myriad of issues? Or does personal responsibility only apply to governments and corporations, not people?
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Yes? Remember, the government decided alcohol and tobacco could advertise the way they do because it helps them make money.
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>Blaming "the government" for toxic tap water and runaway prices is like blaming the getaway car instead of the bank robbers.

Blaming the government for toxic tap water is like blaming an organised private/public coalition of bank robbers for a bank robbery.

>it was systematically bought and gutted so private balance sheets wouldn’t have to carry the cost of your cancer.

The US Government, day 1, was bought and sold to defend the right to own slaves, even from the predation of states that had made it illegal. It's not some recent malformation that it just started defending the interests of rich people over poor people lmao. The explicit purpose of the US government is to do the shit it does. The machine has been designed well, not poorly.

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Sure, and the US was also home to the first abolitionist society, and fought its bloodiest war in history (by % of population killed) in a war to end slavery.

"...this sparkling analysis from Wood (History/Brown Univ.; ed., The Rising Glory of America, 1971) impressively argues that [the American Revolution] was anything but conservative. Wood's contention that the Revolution was ``the most radical and far-reaching event in American history'' may stretch the point (did it really have more of an impact than the Civil War?). But from now on it will be hard to argue that the rebellion was a genteel event that left fundamental institutions unscathed. Wood pictures colonial society as overwhelmingly deferential—to king, to family patriarch, and to aristocrats—with ``personal obligations and reciprocity that ran through the whole society.'' But patriots such as Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin, aspiring to become gentlemen, resented this entrenched order of patronage and kinship. Their classical republicanism stressed benevolence and government by an enlightened elite. To their dismay, however, they discovered that their rhetoric unleashed all the latent entrepreneurial and egalitarian energies of American life, which even the elaborate mechanism of the Constitution could not completely contain. Among the results, Wood says, were a new concept of the dignity of labor, improvements in the lot of women, the first significant antislavery movement, and the frank acceptance of private interest underlying the political party system. Above all, Wood suggests, the Revolution produced the messy, fractious politics of liberal democracy, dominated by ordinary people pursuing commercial interests."

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gordon-s-wood/the...

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Recent history also proves that adherence to the constitution was mostly an honor system. Rhode Island negotiated its Royal charter with King Charles in 1663 it has gender neutral language and freedom of thoughts. The best parts of the US constitution. Unfortunately it was also the center of slave trade.

Commerce gets in the way of ideals.

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