America...Too Cocky?

[Factor]

thats the scary part, that im even partly right about that.

 

honestly, most people in russia would not mind blowing up the whole world. heck, u guys mighta tried it by now if it didnt mean u guys were goin out too...

 

haha!

[Seemann]

Well, if you lived in a large prosperous country where most people were REALLY equal, and than one day a bastard fired the white house with a tank

You'd become violent too. We'd be a prosperous country if we kept USSR's legacy, but Yeltsin ruined everything. He wanted to start the country from the very beginning, but wasn't smart enough to do that. Drunk mazaf***er! So who said that Putin's worse?

anyway, our country's a little more than 10 years old, we'll see how everthing gonna be.

[Moody]

Dude..Russia barely have internet connections!

 

And why is your flag German?

[Seemann]

lol, was waiting for someone to notice

Since there is no Rus flag there(hope it's "yet") i decided to choose some of that were there, and... I just love those colours

 

P.S. look at my sig., dude

 

[[FF5]Knix]

Gosh with me away, these forums are deader then Goo Boy's love life.

 

Just clicking in for 2 secs. I got sunburned down here in Tampa, and the fishing has sucked. That being said the Jack Daniel's has not. R&R all the same.

 

Ok real quick.

 

Ronald Reagan realizing that the USSR's economy would bankrupt itself to keep on par with US military expenditures, increased spending during the 80's to the US's military budget. As Reagan predicted Andrapov, then Gorbachev followed suit. While not the only reason for the fall of the Soviet Union, it was (unlike Goo Boy's usual hating on anything positive the US or its government has every done) a major impact on the fall of the USSR's economy. This plus the loss in Afganistan in the late 80's caused great dissension within the USSR. Gorbachev seeing the writing on the wall, went on to allow more private ownership of business, and the whole Glasnost thaaaaaang. This opened up Pandora's box, a few select individuals on teh "elite Soviet" tried to hold a coup, when Gorbachev was vacationing in the Crimea in his "dacha" Boris Yeltsin came to the front of the pack, led a counter revolt against these individuals...coup fails...all the coup tryers get thrown in prison, one commits suicide, countries break away from Soviet Union claiming independence. Bye Bye CCCP...McDonalds opens up near St. Bassel's Cathedral in Red Sqaure, and immediately becomes the best food offered in the country.

 

Moral of the story, don't mess with Ronald Reagan.

[Alexa]

Knix' date='Mar 25 2006, 02:19 AM' post='42442']

Gosh with me away, these forums are deader then Goo Boy's love life.

[...]

(unlike Goo Boy's usual hating on anything positive the US or its government has every done)

Hmm, you never talk about my love life or my hate. I feel unloved

 

Just a question for you Seemann to answer in easy, short sentences: Why the hell would russia put an iron grip on countries that want to be free and independent? What is the greatness about the violent occupation of countries? Is russia alone that weak? I bet if russia pulls something stupid (like right now fostering dictatorship in its general area), the next russian flag will be the white eagle on white ground.

 

By the way the story behind the German flag (from mind, reality might differ slightly):

 

Some frat boys in 1830, while having a big party (with lotsa beer I guess) had the idea of a united, free and democratic Germany with equality for all. That is symbolised by the 3 colors. They were liberals, wanted freedom of speech etc. and created most of the basic constitutional rights Germany is still having today. The colors apparently come from the uniforms student armys were wearing, black (dyed since they originally all had different colors), red ornaments and golden buttons. The last color is gold, even if it's printed yellow for some reason.

 

Well, guess nowadays frat boys would hardly look up from their PSPs when the call for revolution would come.

[Factor]

knix, honestly, how do u know all this, thats crazy schtuff...

history major?

[Seemann]

Just a question for you Seemann to answer in easy, short sentences: Why the hell would russia put an iron grip on countries that want to be free and independent?

eww-ew. The're so free and independent... Like georgia under saakashwili or ukraine under youshenko. Poorer than ever. Without Russia they just wouldn't survive.

[Natter]

Knix' date='Mar 22 2006, 07:42 PM' post='40907']

Cold war was never over?!!!..(Goes to look up USSR/CCCP on a current map)

 

Be patience Knix...bcs of the cold and icy weather they

need...lets say...15 to 20 years to realize what happened

 

[Seemann]

CCCP is gone, but Two ONLY powerful nuclear weapons and space* countries are left, and the cold war continues in a more modern and hidden way.

 

*Oops, already not! Rememba that china is already capale of sendind the man into space? Behold communism in action. You just need to set it right.

[[TNT] Sonic Goo]

Knix' date='Mar 25 2006, 02:19 AM' post='42442']

Gosh with me away, these forums are deader then Goo Boy's love life.

[...]

(unlike Goo Boy's usual hating on anything positive the US or its government has every done)

 

Yeah, people were actually discussing stuff rather than insulting each other. Why don't you go do some research for a while?

[Seemann]

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=myth+reag...=utf-8&oe=utf-8

In reality, Reagan did nothing to bring down the Soviet Union.

Yes. A man from SU brought it down, and long before the collapse. Guess, who he is?

[Alexa]

Be patience Knix...bcs of the cold and icy weather they

need...lets say...15 to 20 years to realize what happened

Nice one Natter!

 

*Oops, already not! Rememba that china is already capale of sendind the man into space? Behold communism in action. You just need to set it right.

Oh, there is communism hidden somewhere in China? Whenever I see a documentary about German companies in China, I see that the great achievements of the Chinese system is that 14 year olds just have to work 8 h slave work instead under 10 year olds more than 12 h. Like a manager said a short while ago: 'Automatisation for this [stupid and dangerous] work would be more expensive than the Chinese workers. In no other country this work could be done manually because of the costs.' It sure looks like the worst form of capitalism from the outside.

 

And Knix, don't mock Russian food! It is not known to many that indeed a pot of borschtsch ended the cold war! The farmer Boris Ywane wanted to get back to his wife who made Russias best borschtsch. He stomped on the gas of his tractor and thus blew the distributor. He had to order M8 screws which unfortunately were also used to secure the warheads to the Russian carrier rockets. They were out of screws but by 2020 the Soviet Union could have easily produced a new charge of them...

[RXS]

Sonic Goo' date='Mar 25 2006, 04:32 AM' post='42583']

Yeah, people were actually discussing stuff rather than insulting each other. Why don't you go do some research for a while?

Goo, look at how you searched the topic...I'd say you are poisoning the well so to speak...if you go looking for people who hated Reagan or his policies, you'll find them.

 

By deleting the word 'myth', I get 7,800,000 hits to your 1,500,000 hits when I leave 'Myth' in the search. Furthermore, look at the top result from your search...it's just some guys opinion (like it came from a friggin' forum like ours)...no facts or supporting statements. In fact, the first five that I looked at were all the same - obviously from sites that are anti Reagan and/or anti-conservative.

 

This is why Knix and I enjoy beotch slapping you; you tee stuff up for us all the time. I'd say it's time for you to do some research for a while.

[RXS]

 

 

Oh, and Seeman, are you the same kid that used to haunt the ST forums...Kirov? You sound just like him...talking about the 'glory days' of communism, how communism will return and take over the earth, the best generals of WWII were Russian, trying to rewrite WWII history, blah blah blah. Ring a bell?

 

 

[[FF5]Knix]

I mock you Goo Boy, cuz its easy and you deserve it. Go hug a maple tree, you bed wetting, rash inducing, American hating, bi-spectacled liberal weeney. (waiting for Goo to Launch a formal protest with the UN )

 

Not sure if you were upset that I didn't talk about your love life Alexa or not. Nothing personal, I don't mock women that easy...chivalry is not dead!

 

I ate Russian food, back when in the good ole CCCP in '89. That meat was more fat then meat, and the veggies had hair on it. Nasty stuff. Leningrad/St. Petersberg was pretty though.

 

Goo, don't be lazy, post some stuff that actually disproves anything (granted i wrote the Reader's digest version) I wrote.

 

Back to your lazy linking ways again....

 

Gives me a warm fuzzy inside that you are like Don Quixote trying to fight the windmalls. You will never win....but you sure keep trying.

 

Yes Factor, all I wrote is true. I'm sure Goo put his tech support clients on hold for 45 minutes trying to dissprove what I wrote....hope you don't own a gateway and call Dublin for help .

 

Ok back to my fishing (lost an anchor yesterday, will tell when I get back).

 

 

[Spacko]

Kirov! Surely this is my boy Kirov. Buddy you are certainly steadfast, if nothing else. Keep it up!

 

Hokay America too cocky? Economically? Well to me it would appear the sheer force of the market and globalization is stronger than anyone who wants to stop it. China and India can see that industrialization and modernization is the way to go to increase power and living standards for their people, so why not. Frankly I don't think a cocky attitude from the US in the face of competition in the global economy will do them either good or harm.

 

Don't know much about Reagan. Going to Nolf now.

[Factor]

could it be kirov?

you guys are right, a lot of connections.

and i mean, nolf is too good of a game to drop...even if the community like, shunned him...haha, i knew he'd come back.

[Natter]

Kiroov Duuude.....wheres my medal?

stop smoking this weird russian stuff

who smells like rotten socks and enjoy ur live...

[Seemann]

i'm not kirov. and i neva said that communism and stuff would return. It won't. I just say with collapse of SU coldwar didn't finish. That's why bush was so...irritated when Putin visited china last week. Russia together with china is the only force to really threaten american interests, isn't it?

 

and i am reeeeeely not kirov.

[Factor]

oki ill just have to take your word for it...

man, but this just scares me more about russia...

it means that there are more than one of u that are um..."different"

[Seemann]

Nah, we're all like that. Especially witta foreigners. We like to scare them perhaps.

[Factor]

haha, well, no use tryin to scare america...

we wernt scared 20 years ago when u guys actually had a little power...

we really wont be scared now

[[TNT] Sonic Goo]

Since the mods seem to allow this sort of thing here, I'd just like to state that Knix is a mouthbreathing, knuckledragging piece of manure whose mental capacities don't go beyond parrotting what someone else tells him. Hey Knix, have you stopped beating your wife yet?

 

Alright, back up some stuff for a change rather than pulling it out of your 'donkey'. I asked you to factcheck your own bs for a change because I'm getting really tired of all the lies posted here.

 

As Reagan predicted Andrapov, then Gorbachev followed suit.

Where did he predict this? Reagan increased defense spending because he thought the Soviets were way ahead of him.

"America's defense strength is at its lowest ebb in a generation,

while the Soviet Union is vastly outspending us in both strategic

and conventional arms." (Ronald Reagan, Republican National Convention, July 17, 1980)

He called it the Window of Vulnerability. And here's how he came to that conclusion.

 

Now for the most important part, USSR military spending

"No one in Washington foresaw the collapse of the Soviet system, but the conservatives were the very last to see that the system was vulnerable and that it was changing. In his memoir, published in 1990, Caspar Weinberger wrote that, 'In a world in which there are two superpowers, one of which has the governmental structure and military might of the Soviet Union, it is essential for our very survival that we retain the military strength we acquired in the 1980s....' And 'My feeling has always been that no general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union will be allowed to alter in any fundamental way the basically aggressive nature of Soviet behavior.'

 

Yet, as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, conservative pundits began to advance the argument that the Reagan administration had played a major role in its downfall. Among others, George Will and Irving Kristol argued that SDI, Reagan's military buildup and the ideological crusade against Communism had delivered the knockout punch to a system that had been on the ropes since the early 1980s. A parade of former Reagan administration officials, including Weinberger and Richard Perle, came forward to assert that Reagan had known all the time that the Soviet Union was on its last legs and had aggressively foreclosed Soviet military options while pushing the Soviet economy to the breaking point. According to conservatives, the combination of military and ideological pressures gave the Soviet Union little choice but to abandon expansionism abroad and repression at home, and SDI was the key to this winning strategy. The Star Wars initiative had put the Soviets on notice that the next arms race would be waged in areas where the U.S. had a decisive technological advantage.

 

This argument contrasted sharply with previous conservative complaints about Reagan's embrace of Gorbachev, and it did not persuade scholars of the Soviet Union. Yet, since it is the inveterate propensity of Americans—or at least of American pundits—to relate the falls of sparrows in distant lands to some fault or virtue of American policy, it went against the grain to deny the argument entirely and to propose that the enormous military buildup of the Reagan years had no role at all in the demise of the Soviet Union.

Thus a vague and unexamined version of the movement conservative thesis entered the public discourse: SDI and the U.S. military buildup forced the Soviets to spend more than they could afford on their defenses and/or convinced them of the inherent weaknesses of their system. But the evidence for this proposition is wanting.

 

From 1983 to 1987 the Strategic Defense Initiative alarmed Soviet leaders because it threatened to reverse what they saw as the trend toward strategic stability and stable costs. Nonetheless, they did not respond to it by creating their own SDI program. That is, they continued their existing research programs on lasers and other advanced technologies, plus their existing design-work on space weaponry, but they did not mount an effort to test or develop SDI-type weapons. In addition they studied counter-measures to space-based weaponry, but since the SDIO never designed a plausible system, they had nothing specific to study, and their military spending was not affected. Between 1985 and 1987 Gorbacheve spent a great deal of effort trying to convince the Reagan administration to restrain the program, presumably because he thought his own military-industrial complex would eventually force him to adopt a program of some sort to counter SDI, but by the end of 1987 the Soviet leadership no longer regarded SDI as a threat.

 

Then, too, the Soviets did not respond to the Reagan administration's military buildup. As CIA analysts discovered in 1983, Soviet military spending had leveled off in 1975 to a growth rate of 1.3 percent [per year], with spending for weapons procurements virtually flat. It remained that way for a decade. According to later CIA estimates, Soviet military spending rose in 1985 as a result of decisions taken earlier, and grew at a rate of 4.3 percent per year through 1987. Spending for procurements offensive strategic weapons, however, increased by only 1.4 percent a year in that period. In 1988 Gorbachev began a round of budget cuts, bringing the defense budget back down to its 1980 level. In other words, while the U.S. military budget was growing at an average of 8 percent per year, the Soviets did not attempt to keep up, and their military spending did not rise even as might have been expected given the war they were fighting in Afghanistan.

 

During Reagan's first term, some in the Kremlin were concerned that the U.S. might possibly be gaining a first-strike capability and might actually launch a nuclear war. This was, of course, the mirror image of the fears expressed in Washington in the mid-seventies. Nonetheless, though the strategic arsenjals on both sides grew like Topsy in the 1980s, the strategic balance remained extremely stable. Without any spending increases, the Soviets continued to turn out and deploy strategic warheads at about the same rate the U.S. did. When the START I treaty was signed in 1991, the U.S. had deployed 12,646 strategic warheads, the Soviet Union 11,212—the numbers so large as to be almost meaningless in terms of deterence.

 

At the beginning of Reagan's first term, some conservative enthusiasts in the administration might have believed that the U.S. could spend the Soviets under the table in an all-out strategic arms race. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff never thought this, nor did the CIA, for the simple reason that Soviet spending on strategic weapons was a very small fraction of the overall Soviet military budget. According to one MIT expert, Soviet spending for the procurement, operations, and maintenance of its strategic offensive forces amounted to only 8 percent of its entire defense budget. In other words, had Gorbachev achieved the 50 percent reductions he was seeking at Reykjavik, he woul not have made savings of any significance in terms of the Soviet economy.

 

What happened during the 1980s was that the Soviet economy continued to deteriorate as it had during the 1970s. The economic decline, of course, resulted from the failures of the system created by Lenin and Stalin—not from any effort on the part of the Reagan administration. Without Gorbachev, however, the Soviet Union might have survived for many more years, for the system, thought on the decline, was nowhere near collapse. It was Gorbachev's efforts to reverse the decline and to modernize his country that knocked the props out from under the system. The revolution was in essence a series of decisions made by one man, and it came as a surprise precisely because it did not follow from a systemic breakdown.

At the time the American public understood this better than most in Washington—and thanks in large part to Ronald Reagan. Reagan had no idea what Gorbachev was up to, but he always described the world in terms of individuals rather than institutions and portrayed U.S.-Soviet relations as the personal relationship between two heads of state. His own officials considered this naive. But it was Gorbachev who changed the Soviet Union, and Reagan's 'embrace' of him as an individual was surely the most important contribution the United States made to the Soviet revolution... (source)

 

Though Reagan did manage to nearly bankrupt one superpower.

For more than a third of a century, perceptions about U.S. national security were colored by the view that the Soviet Union was on the road to military superiority over the United States. Neither Team B nor the multibillion dollar intelligence agencies could see that the Soviet Union was dissolving from within.

For more than a third of a century, assertions of Soviet superiority created calls for the United States to "rearm." In the 1980s, the call was heeded so thoroughly that the United States embarked on a trillion-dollar defense buildup. As a result, the country neglected its schools, cities, roads and bridges, and health care system. From the world's greatest creditor nation, the United States became the world's greatest debtor--in order to pay for arms to counter the threat of a nation that was collapsing.(source)

 

RXS: If you think researching something is like a popularity contest, I'll explain it for you very slowly. Look for 'astrology'. Now look for 'debunk astrology'. Which gives more results? Does that mean astrology is true? And another thing, peabrain. Of course you'll get arguments against the sanctifying of Reagan from people who don't like him. Do you think www.ilovereagan.com would have that kind of info? As for poisoning the well – that's what YOU just did.

[Factor]

haha, this is almost as good as desenter's paradis!

i dont know who i want to win, i like knix and goo...

crud!

well, since goo is helpin finish a map of mine, ill take his side