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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34922 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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What the hell is going on in Russia?

I've been following the Russo-Ukrainian war since the livestreaming of the first tank that spooked some poor border guard, and frankly speaking the whole affair has been great for calibrating my epistemics.

Did I expect the "3 days to Kiev" thing to work out? Yes. I thought Ukraine was fucked.

I was also wrong about the duration of the war, for reasons little more than vibes going off war exhaustion, I expected the fighting to wrap up in a year. Still going.

Did I expect the UA counteroffensive to be a success? Yes, I was sufficiently inundated with pro-Ukrainian memes and their anti-Russian counterparts that I thought the Russians would fold to a stiff breeze.

Turns out that attacking is a lot harder than defending, especially when the offensive was widely telegraphed and even your relatively incompetent adversary had plenty of time to prepare accordingly.

My takeaway from the above is that forecasting something as anti-inductive as war is incredibly difficult, and that's it far too easy to fall for a cheerleader effect. I wanted Ukraine to win, and badly, and not only was this desire reflected in the sources of news I peruse, but the sheer hatred for the Russian side was sufficient to bury most evidence of them ever doing anything right. The Just World fallacy is hard to avoid personally if all your sources of information fall prey to it.

On /r/CombatFootage, anything remotely pro-Russian, or even depicting their success without obvious bias, gets buried. While I'm fond of /r/NonCredibleDefense, its NAFO sympathies make a honest calibration impossible, and as the name suggests, its members aren't particularly focused on academic rigor or epistemics.

But with that said, the whole Wagner affair confuses me.

Prigozhin managed to get within 2 hours of Moscow, prompting a panicked evacuation, and then suddenly stopped and took his ball home.

What the fuck? In normal circumstances, I'd say he just signed his death warrant, is Putin really going to forgive him for his quasi-coup? Wagner shot down around 7 Russian aircraft in the process!

And there I was thinking Lukashenko was largely a lap dog, unable to exercise agency except when it came to desperately avoiding sending Belarusian troops to Ukraine since it would upend the only thing keeping his dictatorship going. How did he become powerful enough to mediate a truce between Prigozhin and Putin?

It's not like the dust has settled, even leaving aside more questionable rumors, I've seen footage of the VDV cartel-killing one of their own for expressing sympathies for Wagner. Even if Prigozhin himself manages to avoid most consequences of his actions, his men are going to be making their pants desert-camo'd.

So far, I've only come up with one model that I think reasonably fits the evidence, albeit it's more consistent with the era of warlords and medieval feudalism than what I expect to see even in a failed state today:

Prigozhin is actually loyal, or at least he thinks of himself that way, and came to believe that Putin, like the well-meaning Emperor kept in the dark by a coterie of eunuchs (Shoigu and Co), simply wasn't involved in the attempts by the Russian MOD to swallow up Wagner whole.

Thus, he embarked on his crusade more as a demonstration of his ability to perform a coup, rather than a genuine desire to do so. Like an indecisive general crossing the Rubicon, shaking his fist in the direction of Rome and then high-tailing it back.

Cause some chaos and embarrassment, but stopping before what he thinks the red lines are, namely an occupation of Moscow.

I'd also wager that Lukashenko has more agency and freedom than most suspect, or rather Putin's power has declined relatively, such that he can credibly offer to shelter Prigozhin and fend off the dogs.

As far as I can tell, his gambit only partially worked, because Shoigu hasn't gone anywhere, and Prigozhin ended up like a dog that finally caught that damn car but isn't sure what to do with it.

"Sure, let's try and Thunder Run to Moscow, I'm sure we'll run into some real resistance along the way, and we can both rattle sabres at each other and go home."

"Huh. This is awkward, everyone is just giving up and letting us walk right past them. Might as well shoot down a few helicopters, they're the only things that have directly engaged us."

"Uh.. We're about two hours away from Moscow. Now what?"

I'm not going to weight my assessment heavily since I claim no particular expertise, but I'm outlining it here for the more knowledgeable to poke at.

I'd like to see everyone at least attempt to make concrete predictions about the near future. Does Prig make it out of this alive and with his power base intact? Does Putin slip him some unusually heavy and radioactive teabags?

If you really want your bubble burst on Putin, read some of his Valdai speeches and chats. I don't agree with all of his politics or his war, but he's refreshingly direct and erudite. I can't recall seeing an American President speaking in such a way since Eisenhower.

I just randomly scrolled through this 2018 appearance and landed on this, a response to a question on mismanagement of government funds in hospice care:

Firstly, I completely agree with you that our discussions, our internal discussions should be centred on our problems, domestic problems, our people’s lives, which is actually a major part of our work. And as you said, the fact that we are discussing war – and not just war but terrorism and other similar issues – is due to the way our host Mr Lukyaunov organised the discussion, I am not the one who organises it, it is done by the host, so let us put all the blame on him.

As to the problem you raised, it is obviously very sensitive, demanding special attention and tact from the state. Ultimately – you said it yourself – the state allocated the funds. The fact that only 12 or 16 percent were used means the work was poorly organised. I assure you that it does not mean that I will say to you, “The money was allocated and you did not use it, so that’s it, good-bye.” Do not worry, this will never happen.

I know the way money is spent, and very often, funds allocated by the state to handle certain matters of absolute priority do not reach the end receiver. If they are returned to the budget, it does not mean that they will stay there for good and the necessary funds will never be allocated again. We will certainly keep doing it.

Yet we have to admit that whatever the state might do, it is impossible to completely solve any problem 100 percent. Life is more complicated and keeps throwing in more and more of new problems for us. Of course, efforts by the state are very important, as are those by society and religious organisations, by the way. It is religious organisations, and I mean our traditional faiths, that create the internal strength and internal basis for any person to feel secure in this fast-changing and fairly dangerous world.

The state will definitely pursue all the tasks in the context you have just mentioned. Do not worry. I will take your documents, of course. It does not mean we will wrap up the topic just because someone underused the funds. Have no doubt. I will see why such a small percentage was spent. It looks strange.

Maybe he's actually a bumbling fool and the English transcripts are a poor representation of what he's said, but I've never seen anyone assert that.

Russians in general are artistic. Putin, too, loves LARPing as this meticulous micromanager with a good grasp on detail, this genuinely impresses older technical folks. Again, as devarbol said of Stalin, this doesn't necessarily translate into anything like understanding of the war, what is at stake, which details matter, whom to trust, when to act. In fact he's often very much behind the times; why, it seems that Wagner mutiny caught him by surprise, even though Prigozhin was making these noises for months. Putin is performing a particular role; he has imagemakers and various Turkic speechwriters (whose successors now feed him Twitter right-winger context about teh gays, it seems) and all that staff and it's probably pretty compelling – from afar, and when you don't remember decades of vacuous big picture pointification interspersed with occasional autistic detail and coyly wagging the finger at some guilty official, as the country rusts and rots and is pillaged by his friends and people trying to do anything productive give up and escape.

When you have that context in mind it looks pretty demonic.

Stalin, though, is believed to have been rather smart (+3SD intelligence, at least) and someone who spent a lot of time reading on his own initiative.

Karlin suggests that with Putin, this is more of a facade than real - and that he at times has some solid speechwriters.

and people trying to do anything productive give up and escape.

I understand that cronies will want to acquire any up-and-coming company and thus the creative destruction seen in more functional market economies doesn't occur ?

Yes. Basically you either fail to pass the bureaucratic filter, end up insolvent, or get big enough to attract attention of some oprichnik who wants a personal turf. If it were a hard-and-fast rule we'd all have starved of course but it's enough to ensure that Russia never gets back to like 2013 levels of wealth. Like in many other mundane things I concur with Galeev in his analysis here.

Wait in, had there been no war, would the the economic climate re: business would be worse now than in 2013 ?

Well, the war had started in 2014 and so did Russian economic woes. I think metrics which suggest Russia had been successfully coping with that are not credible. Holistically, what we have now is… like… 2006 maybe. Only without the positive outlook.

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