Saturday, August 27, 2016
Resisting Soros
I like to keep track of Belarus, a rare example of a modest 'good enough' country that understands limits. Belarus basically retained the Soviet system in its final soft form because it WORKS.
How does a country resist the Sorosians? Russia didn't resist at first; the 1991 coup was the first Soros coup. Putin is heroically pulling away from Soros. Belarus never succumbed, so it doesn't need heroic efforts now. What's the secret?
Belarus is branching out from agriculture and heavy machinery to software. Not overly surprising. Soviet bloc programmers pursued their own path in the '80s by necessity, which gave them superior skills and a special regard for UX/UI. See Eastern Orthodox Editors, or see Irfan.
A gaming company in Belarus made a connection with actor Steven Seagal whose ancestors came from Minsk. Seagal visited to make some sort of cameo-appearance arrangement in the game (stories aren't clear about this), and got a personal visit with the president. "American" media mocked the event because we have to mock everything remotely connected to Russia, but the video shows a simple human encounter with typical heavy-handed Slavic hospitality. I'd expect a celebrity like Seagal to mock the event even while participating. Nope. No multi-level irony. He's just there, simply enjoying the location and the locally grown food and the companionship.
Maybe that's the secret of resisting globalism. Hospitable and comfortable localism.
Labels: skill-estate, switchover
¶ 8:21 AM
