FaibleEstimeDeSoi
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User ID: 2072
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
11mo ago
EU, US and Russia can all end this war, Ukraine can't and it can't fight alone. That's the problem with being a minor power, you are not independent. And of course politicians aren't homo geopoliticus so rational models will not always work in real life.
Putin isn't an imperialist, he isn't based right winger or actually communist shill, he is cleptocrat who wants to stay in power, that's all. His Russian nationalist rhetoric coexist with his speeches about multinational Russian nation and how he is Dagestani, Chechen, Tatar. He talks about evil Lenin who created Ukraine and then praises Soviet Union, he calls maidan a coup but then recognizes supposedly illegitimate government. Putin's words contradict themselves every other week. Look at his actions, his revealed preferences and you will see that he cares about being Peter the Great only when he heeds popularity boost.
Real Russian nationalist fascist like Strelkov wouldn't stop at Crimea in 2014, wouldn't arrest all Russian nationalist organizations, wouldn't walk out of Kazakhstan, wouldn't propose the peace deal that was proposed in April. You can read Anatoly Karlin Twitter for more proofs in more details, like the size of military budget, non-committal atlitude to the supposed fight against evil nazi Ukraine and Satanist NATO. In Russia Russian nationalists that support the regime are generally laughed at for all the aforementioned reasons.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
11mo ago
They can — just instead of sparsely populated Azov steppe battles will happen in Poltava (pop. 280k), or Zaporizhzhia proper (pop. around 700k). They repelled Russians from Kyiv back when American assistance was meager.
Kremlins shifted their course to freezing the conflict at the approximately current borders after their failed push to Kiev that was meant to facilitate regime change. And without western assistance they would be successful as they were 9 years ago. And American assistance was not meager if you look at it in all years from 2014.
He is a kleptocrat, alright, but calling him non-ideological is just demonstrably false at this point. You could have had doubts back in 2012, not now. Karlin is just as delusional as ever, just instead of "Kiev will fall in 2 days" he swung in the opposite direction.
But policies of his government that consists from his cronies aren't ideological nor specifically Russian nationalist. We can look at many aspects: immigration, internal federal policy, cultural and just politics where nationalist parties and organizations were outright banned. Even if he is in some way sincerely ideological it doesn't matter, because it doesn't affect his mishmash rhetoric and policy.
I lived in Russia for quite some time, I know Russian, so I think I have some understanding of what Russian nationalists really think. Are you Russian?
Yes, I am Russian and live in Russia currently. While Russian nationalist that are pro-Putin exist they are unknown to the mostly apolitical wide public and treated with disdain by politically active youth.
And Nazi Germany didn't go full war time economy until 1942.
People can be ideologically-driven psychopaths, and ineffective at the same time. And I assure you — if Strelkov came to power, economic efficiency would just drop. Because he would fire Nabiulina, actually competent banker, and would put someone like Glazyev in her stead, who is even less competent than Erdogan when it comes to monetary policy. But hey, at least he hates hohols.
There is wide gulf between full war-time economy proposed by Strelkov and current Vietnam level spending. Girkin wants to "liberate" whole Ukraine, with smaller goals kremlins need less commitment but still higher than current one. I am talking about not inefficiency but policies that are going against Russian nationalist or imperialist belief supposedly held by Putin.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
11mo ago
It is beside the general point of the discussion in which I mostly agree with you but it is interesting how these videos while emphasizing agency of countries in Eastern Europe don't extend it to Abkhazia, South Ossetia or Transnistria mirroring the pro-russian talking point that foreign support equals foreign rulership.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
10mo ago
In countries with government provided free higher education there is a contest for limited number of places in specific programs. In Russia people who get free college are generally smarter than those who pay for it.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
9mo ago
Look at Moscow or hell, any other large European capital. There is large population of "undesirables" generally immigrants working low-paying jobs and it doesn't make public transport impossible or limited to poor people. If incompetent corrupt autocracy i. e. Russia can do this than Americans sure can.
Once your kids get into semi-specialized sports or activities, you're going to drive. If one kid is into fencing and the other is into rock climbing, and next year it's hip hop dance and jiujitsu, there are only two solutions. Either you drive them everywhere, or you live at Tokyo density and the bus comes every five minutes.
It's special genre of comedy for me personally to see Americans on this site with severe lack of knowledge about how things can be different from their own "exceptional way of doing things." In my noname 200k Russian town I could go to all these activities by myself at age 6. Bus or in my case "marshrutka" can arrive every 5 minutes without even remotely Tokio level of density, more accurately seven times smaller than it.
I understand that it's your own favorite way of life and you're trying to defend it but the problem is that it's forced on everyone. And generally we can see worldwide tendency of people wanting to live in big cities where all the job opportunities and interesting things are. Urbanists hate car-centric policies because they are artificially stifling this trend not because they want to force people like you out of suburbs. Europe has suburbs, they are an option there.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
9mo ago
Problem is "self-control or exercise" is not a solution to fatness in modern food environment like it maybe was for some king or rich merchant in the past. General populace just can't beat hyperstimulus, not without semaglutide at least. Fat shaming is bad because it isn't solving the issue of population becoming more and more obese it just makes lifes of unhealthy people more miserable.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
9mo ago
And why do they refuse? Do you think that people want to be fat and unhealthy? They can't apply it like how average person can't just "learn to code" despite the existence of freely available courses and free time.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
9mo ago
In my opinion what matters is the trend not current value, Japan's obesity rate only risen through out the last decades, like in almost any other country on Earth. Problem isn't limited to westerners, much poorer and culturally distinct Middle East has rates similar to European ones. Western hyperstimulus is no longer western it is global.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
9mo ago
I specifically said "modern" instead of "American" or even "first world" one because food environment is quite globalized and obesity rates are rising world-wide, start points and speed differ but they rise nonetheless even in Japan. European 25% isn't very reassuring compared to American one of 40% if 20 years ago it was 15%.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
9mo ago
Mostly it means strict attention to avoiding self-delusion, which is perhaps one place where fat-shaming helps. If every time a fat person complained they weren't eating much but still gaining weight, they were told that maybe they should put down the snack they're eating while they're complaining, it might have an effect.
It might be mostly an American phenomenon. All fat people I know(and there are many of them with 20% obesity rate and majority of population overweight) are honest about their eating habits and often make related self-deprecating jokes. And of course they relentlessly try many different things to lose weight from brand new diets, to calorie counting, to all kinds of exercising and it doesn't help because they can't maintain them.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
9mo ago
You can phrase everything like this. Oh, can't imagine people spending hours at a time contracting their muscles presumably for fun, instead of enjoying gathering new knowledge or engaging in the debates with educated people from around the world. But I can imagine, it's quite easy to understand that people have different preferences.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
9mo ago
Actually, technologies allowed us making many terrible choices that in the past would have surely killed us. I'm certain that people became more care-free outside and at various worksites after consequences of unlucky cut changed from likely gangrene or tetanus to basically nothing.
Conservatives of course are for all technological wonders apart from the modern ones. Virtuous(ones who got lucky at genetics roulette) people will lose their status gained from being able to remain fit in the modern food environment and these disgusting(visually ergo personally) fatsos will get help to adapt their brains evolved for completely different circumstances to the food abundance of current time. Horrible! I will tell you more, when new drugs appear that will directly boost your metabolism rates and not making you want to eat less, people, regardless of their virtue, will become more hedonistic, healthier and happier, as they already did many times before.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
9mo ago
It's the typical sort of 'dirtbag left bernie bro' nihilism
Aren't Bernie bro people even dirtbag ones being much further to the left than film, more likely to point out classicism of the movie and its eugenics endorsement(like they already did many times on YouTube)? Specifically labeling poor whites as breeding morons is much more general liberal democrat or "shitlib" thing to say.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
9mo ago
Reading something on the Internet is quite popular activity indeed. As is reading books that is also today involves "staring at a screen".
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
9mo ago
a society with a more cynical default conception of other people (Russia?)
I actually already seen the poll replicated in Russian social network(VK) and the results are similar to twitter one - 65% Blue.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
9mo ago
Personally I believe that solution to low birth rates will be state funded industrial production of human capital via artificial wombs(if AI won't make it irrelevant by this time). Women often don't want to struggle through pregnancy, parents don't want to spend time on necessary work related to children and automation in the sphere of humanoid robotics is very far from achieving affordable replacements for servants.
Facilities created for raising these state children could be used by individual parents, so would be similar to your idea of 24/7 daycare. This can be a great time to reform our "modern" education system that was largely created in 19th century Prussia to something more applicable to current technological environment and honest of it's role as basically daycare for teenagers.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
9mo ago
Huxley's dystopia has many more problems apart from artificial wombs. Caste system and pacification of population by drugs do not necessarily stem from destruction of traditional family structure. But generally to me, this theme of "terrible utopian technology destroying traditional way of life" and "loss of authenticity/connection to nature" repeated ad nauseum by dystopia authors such as Huxley or author of The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is disgusting in its denial of how much better our lives are compared to our ancestors because of technologies and how their imagined societies are often better compared to us in the same way and for the same reasons.
Prigozhin's death was quite an expected event, it is rather surprising that it happened now, two whole months after the failed coup. But I suspect his story is not over yet. Ignoring Yevgeny's personal qualities, he was not a stupid person, and therefore, even if he believed in the secret agreements that was made on June 24, Prigozhin necessarily kept or created an additional reason not to kill him, and soon we will find out about it. The reason may be some compromising material, military secrets, or, if he had confidence in the loyalty of his people, the threat of a second "march of justice" from the Wagner PMCs. The latter scenario is unlikely, further complicated by the death of Dmitry Utkin, but according to the rule of "interesting events" in Russia it may very well happen.
It is also interesting how exactly the "plane crash" occurred. Stories about bad pilots or incredibly successful Ukrainian terrorists may of course appear in the Russian media, but it is obvious to everyone who is responsible for the elimination of the mercenaries leader. From the point of view of constructing plausible deniability it would be much more correct to kill Prigozhin during his stay in Africa, recent one or in the future. There you can find hundreds of different convenient culprits with motivation and weapons: from the French to the Islamists. Instead, his plane "crashed" in the middle of European part of Russia, not so far from Moscow.
Plausible deniability is bad in one case - when you want to convey a message by your action. This is what the kremlins most likely planned. As many said at the end of the deflated coup: "if it turns out that you can occupy one city, march in columns on Moscow, and then if you fail you will not suffer any consequences, then there may be many who will want to try to do this themselves. No harm if you failed in the end." The message from the ruling clan concerns the second part - the consequences will be much more severe than mere exile to Belarus. The official version will still find a way to declare Prigozhin's death a "fatal accident", but the real message, barely fitting between the lines will be visible to everyone.
Will the death of the former chef become a last note in his life story or just the beginning of the third act? - we'll find out soon.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
9mo ago
I generally label all my ideas so banal that any smart person could have come up with them, as it happens often. Nothing is original after 100 billion people lived and died.
So there is one thing about both sides' media coverage of Russian-Ukranian war that bugged me for the last two years - accusations of deliberate targeting of civilian buildings, specifically non-military hospitals, schools, malls and houses. Am I wrong in thinking that regardless of evidence in specific cases probability of this happening is so low that we should expect to see almost zero cases of it?
I specifically talking about deliberate strikes because there are many alternative explanations revolving around mistakes, negligence, and faulty weapons. Of course all blame for this still lays on the initiator of the war but I think claims of deliberate hits are generally explained by these reasons.
Specific targeting of civilians is not new to wars, it was done quite often for loot and plunder in the old times and with mass proliferation of planes and missiles it, and Douhet's doctrine were at its height in WW2. Strategic bombing(e.g. targeting general use infrastructure and in some case industry somewhat related to the war) never went out of fashion and was used in almost all wars where the participants had a large enough air fleet since. But terror bombing(e.g. striking civilian targets for the purpose of lowering the enemy morale) is generally not used because time and time again it was proved ineffective and even damaging to its goal. I can't recall any country that engaged in the open terror bombing campaigns from, again, WW2, and if you decide to go this route you should be open about it. Main effect is on morale, it should be supported by propaganda and fiery speeches of inevitable death in case of continued defiance. I was quite obviously wrong about this(Thanks @ymeskhout for the correction). There is a modern tendency of doing things almost in the open and then fervently denying that you did them, that Russia follows often(recently with Prigozhin's untimely demise). What I wanted to communicate is that terror bombing needs to be open, or almost open because this doctrine by necessity requires large parts or even majority of your air force to have a desired effect.
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I'm interested in the process that happens before such strike as imagined by people who disagree with me. Does Russian/Ukrainian command has a secret policy of terror bombings but to keep it secret limits it to some fraction of its forces? What do they or some random rogue commander hope to gain from it? How do they justify wasting precious ammunition on targets that aren't relevant to the war effort?
I don't think that on any side of the barricades there exist some human-hating berserks that can answer "blood for the blood god, skulls for the skull throne!" to all of these questions and even if they did exist we would expect them to not have any power from the evidence we see.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
8mo ago
Thanks for the correction. Don't know what came over me when I wrote this, in my head I was mainly talking about amount of resources that you need to relocate to engage in this doctrine. Edited.
Russia intended to launch a war of national destruction. It didn't expect to have to fight to hard to do it, but the target lists for anyone thought to be pro-Western/anti-Russian were always part of the plan.
Ok, then where is there any evidence of some genocide that happened in Kherson that was controlled by Russian forces for almost a year and was generally pro-ukranian city with absolute majority of Ukranians? If you expect Russia to want kill any pro-Western person in Ukraine and see average as pro-western(so strike on soviet bloc is strike against the enemy) we should see tens of thousands of deaths in Kherson as it happened in history where one side of the war had national eradication as the goal.
Instead we see hundreds of cases and not of killings but detainment and torture - general brutality of the Russian state that it dishes out to it's citizens. In somewhat larger proportion because of vastly larger amount of potential violent dissidents but in the same category nonetheless. This piece for example tries to frame 320 victims in 9 months of occupation of a large as an evidence of genocide but it's quite poor if you can count. “The pattern that we are observing is consistent with a cynical and calculated plan to humiliate and terrorise millions of Ukrainian citizens in order to subjugate them to the diktat of the Kremlin.” says Wayne Jordash, managing partner and co-founder of Global Rights Compliance. On average Russia humiliated/terrorized 1.185 Kherson denizen a day, deciding to adopt this as baseline(as does the article) and correcting for the population, if on 24 February somehow Russians occupied all of Ukraine we would see 160.8 Ukrainians brutalized every day on average. If we accept that millions means at least two millions, to reach this number with rate Russia would need approximately 34 years. Not even mentioning the difference between war and peace time or that you expect to see the rate lowering with time because number of dangerous dissidents is quite limited, this is not looking like a genocide to me, more old and boring authoritarian state thing.
In this I agree with Macron - words do have meaning.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
8mo ago
don't feel like bothering with game piracy anymore either. My need to consoom just isn't that great.
Piracy nowadays in most cases easier and takes less time than buying something officially. For single player games there only disadvantages are non-availability of some modern games that aren't cracked yet and the absence of automatic updates(in some cases it can be a positive). Both of these do not relate to Fallout 4.
Kraut in his 40 minute video makes a critique of realism but of 20th century variety not school of offensive realism to which Mearsheimer belongs to.
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