On numerous occasions in post-Soviet Russia, conservative politicians and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) have called for anti-abortion measures and the return of traditional gender roles. However, medical experts have defended accessible abortions, and no health minister has previously argued that women should prioritize childbirth over education in order to raise the birthrate.
unloved Children are the worst thing you can do to a society
Part of me believes it’s not necessarily just a conservative, or religious thing. I think part of it may be more capitalistic. More people = more taxes/money generated.
No, it’s really just conservative old men pushing their “values” onto everyone. They’re not actually values because it’s not like they honestly believe in them or have any good reasoning to oppose the pro-choice arguments, but rather just outdated views they grew up with and refuse to further grow out of.
The current Russian govenermnt, led by Putin, is not about planning or long-term goals of any kind - all of them, on every level, both federal and regional, only care about their own wellbeing, not the country, its budgets, or anything that a government is supposed to care about.
Trust me, I’ve been living here for decades.
I think that’s actually a great obersvation and put very precise. Indeed, it seems like most of what could be considered as “old values” is just the result of missing out on new information hence the strong connection between conservatism and misinformation. Even the problems around climate change, which seems like a mere evidence based phenomenon, leads back to the moment, where humanity realised that it exists, but failed to immediatly implement sustainibility as a new value.
IDK about Russia specifically, just from American. Our politicians always seem to have hidden agendas being paid for by corrupt lobbying.
We’re past that phase because the government today is largely comprises of people installed by Putin, with many de-facto owning a lot of big and economically important companies, so we technically don’t see a lot of lobbying, because it’s not like anyone forces Putin or his clique to make certain decisions one way or another - everyone got there because of Putin, and they’re either loyal to the end, mortally afraid to not be loyal, or already dead.
I think it’s fair to say that we used to have lobbying and such when the oligarchy was much more rampant and had maybe more influence on the government, but Putin made sure to deal with that. Not in the best way, of course, because given the choice between having multiple people calling the shots amd just one, I’d always pick the former, for there’s at least some chance that they may discuss things and arrive at a compromise more sensible than anything that a single ego maniac surrounded by yes-men (non-yes-men to be terminated) could ever conceive. That being said, I’d much rather get rid of both and live in proper democracy, even with all of its supposed flaws - may not be perfect, but much closer to perfect that any of the crap.
Not if you conscript them to force that dissatisfaction to be lashed out at your political enemy.