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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   31155 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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Putin hates democracy because it shows his people what life could look like if they didn't exist in a kleptocratic dictatorship. It's the same reason why he screwed over Armenia when they democratized a bit, and why he went after Georgia. There's a reason Russian leadership seethes so much over Poland too, given that it's a shining example of how much better the West is than the Warsaw Pact (i.e. the former Russian sphere of influence). Ukraine was threatening to become that, but even closer to home. Dictators are always thinking of ways to coup-proof their regimes, and getting rid of pesky alternative political systems on the borders is one option.

To support this:

Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. -- Milton Friedman

Putin, and Xi, and their various functionaries and courtiers etc, know this in their bones. In a crisis, change will result, and the kind of change you get will be based on what ideological infrastructure exists. The Bolsheviks didn't launch the revolution, they hijacked it, but they were able to do so because they had an existing ideological discipline and infrastructure.

Culturally compatible countries with alternative ideas provide soil for alternative ideologies to grow. And when the mother country goes into crisis, those chickens come home to roost. An ideologically hostile Ukraine is dangerous because so much of it is Russian, Taiwan is dangerous because it is Chinese.

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