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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34949 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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I suspect Vladimir Putin is dead. I think the man in charge of the country is a double. World leaders are known to have body doubles, often multiples. For clarity, I'm going to introduce "Vlad", a person who resembles Putin and was recruited into performing as a double, likely after some cosmetic surgeries to tighten up the image. Putin has reportedly had some nasty health problems over the last 3 years or so, and I have seen multiple articles suspecting a double acting in certain capacities, with side by sides of Putin and "Vlad". I found this reporting credibly speculative, and I felt that I could reliably and consistently distinguish "Vlad" from Putin, particularly over time.

There is a problem of course: if "Vlad" exists, how can we be sure any particular Putin photo is actually of Putin?

Here is some evidence I've found, and I did not look very hard. I was reading https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12231813/Prepare-deeply-dangerous-unpredictable-Russia-Putin-replaced-says-security-expert.html and happened to notice "Vlad", and scrolled down further to find what appeared to be an older photo of Putin.

"Vlad": https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/06/25/15/72511321-12231813-Russian_President_Vladimir_Putin_on_state_television_today_said_-a-9_1687704720258.jpg

Putin: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/06/25/15/72483879-12231813-Out_of_jail_and_free_to_run_his_large_mercenary_army_Prigozhin_l-a-16_1687704764143.jpg

Note, I am not saying that these are great examples. If someone looked much harder, they could make a stronger case. "Vlad" to me looks softer and smoother, without the hardness or sharpness that I've come to associate with Putin's gaze.

My best guess at a narrative, if Vladimir Putin is in fact dead at this moment:

Putin probably has a double even before he gets sick. This may or may not be the current "Vlad". I think Putin realizes he has a likely terminal disease before the Ukraine invasion. As he gets sicker, the need for the double increases, both in terms of scheduling around illness and heightened scrutiny. Perhaps there is additional recruitment or cosmetic procedures. Putin invades Ukraine. Perhaps within a year of the invasion, he becomes incapacitated, and the double takes over, likely with the assistance of high level FSB.

  • -11

This conspiracy theory is very popular in Russia. In fact, it posits not that there is a single double, but that there are several: "The banqueting one" ("Банкетный"), "the Udmurt", "the Talking One" ("Говорун"). It's a fun theory, but the Western intelligence services would have known (as they knew about Prigozhin preparing his putsch even though Russian services completely missed it). And they would have leaked this, I think.

No, sorry. You can't simulate the voice and little mannerisms he had and still has, quite clearly. Maybe it's not as clear if you don't speak russian natively, but he has quite a distinctive voice and the way of speaking. And I don't have any internal protests against discussing this theory seriously even though it sounds ridiculous. It is in fact ridiculous unfortunately.

Not even arguing about his doubles, it's irrelevant.

I don't think Putin is dead and has a body double, but ML could simulate those voices and mannerisms (certainly in audio, video is harder). Compare to the tom cruise lookalike who used ML to make it more convincing. edit: Yeah, I agree with below comment, also I'm pretty sure there are things like phone camera recordings of him

I'm sure it can be done, but his talks aren't rare and often they're taken with other people in various natural situations. So while it's not completely eliminating the scenario the op is talking about, it reduces the plausibility of that theory to something similar to the flat earth.

Worth noting that the body double theory is much more plausible, not to the level when I personally think it's likely, but there's a lot of "research" done there by various autistic people (anons mostly to my knowledge, also by Ukrainian low-iq propaganda outlets understandably).

something similar to the flat earth.

This theory is orders of magnitudes more probable than the flat earth, there is no comparison.

In fact, Putin himself said they considered to use doubles at the start of his presidency:

https://meduza.io/short/2020/02/27/putin-skazal-chto-on-nastoyaschiy-udmurta-i-banketnogo-ne-suschestvuet

something similar to the flat earth.

I was saying that about the theory that the real Putin is dead. The theory that Putin has doubles is indeed much more plausible, as i was saying.

I think storytellers in general have always been very fond of “the king is actually dead” tropes (list) because they serve to make things interesting, but real life examples are very much rare.

The big problem is that the inner circle who actually do encounter and know the leader personally (and who would therefore know he was dead) also stand to benefit the most from his death, and so are the least likely to maintain the veil of secrecy.

Putin’s death is a great opportunity for Medvedev or whoever else to clean house, declare the invasion a mistake made by idiots, and to focus on the old pastime of personal enrichment and kleptocracy. For nobody in the inner circle to do it would take the genuine and sincere ideological commitment to the Ukrainian war as a national project that I suspect is lacking in the Kremlin.

So…how does this make any more sense? Looks like a bunch of extra complexity—coordination, secrecy, motivation—for no actual benefit. It doesn’t explain any of Wagner’s actions, let alone the MoD.

Putin taking a break from the public isn't actually new. IIRC when other members of his inner circle had issues with Kadyrov (who then fled went to Dubai for a bit) he took his sweet time coming out despite Kadyrov clearly trying to feel him out and get his attention via social media.

It has precedent.

EDIT: Looked it up to confirm I wasn't crazy, it was in 2015 after the murder of Nemtsov.

It's unmistakeable, Vlad has less hair, and it's almost completely grey, that's sloppy doublesmanship.... Another hypothesis would be that Vlad is merely an older incarnation of the entity previously known as Putin, which itself once appeared as Vova, a cute child full of life. Are you the same person you were yesterday?

Also, a double doesn't make sense. If Putin is alive, he can credibly threaten, as well as lead, his inner circle. A double can't, while still making negotiations with the west much more difficult.

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?

  1. A coup can only succeed if key military leaders support it, or at least refuse orders to oppose it

  2. A person who wants to launch a coup can never know for sure whether what those military leaders will do once the coup starts.

  3. So, if I start marching on Moscow, my subsequent steps are dictated by what those military leaders do. If I do not see tangible indications of support PDQ, continuing my march becomes very, very risky.

  4. So, the best bet for me at that point is to negotiate an end to the coup attempt in a manner which at least gives me a reasonable chance of avoiding lethal repercussions.

That seems to be what happened here.

My issue with that is that "a reasonable chance of avoiding lethal repercussions" seems to be very small indeed.

Putin is certainly not known for being particularly forgiving.

Also, "marching" is kinda eliding what Prigozhin did, there's a world of difference between a demonstrative march and one that involves seven aircraft downed in anger, and possibly deaths on the ground too.

Phrased another way, if you're looking for plausible deniability and leaving room for de-escalation, you don't go this far.

To me it, it seems one of the following is likely true:

  1. Prigozhin pussied out and wasn't fully on board the coup process even if he'd crossed nominal red lines already. I'd hesitate to call that outright irrational, but it's certainly questionable.

  2. Putin is so weak that this was a rational demonstration of strength, and he's quite confident that no punishment will come, or at least little of it.

I'm going to leave aside the option of Prigozhin having actually succeeded in his aims, because preliminary evidence suggests that's not the case.

History also shows us that being declared emperor, or figurehead of the revolution, is dangerous even if you disclaim any intention of leading it. If Prig becomes a figure of veneration on the Russian far right, he's dead whether he'd accept the crown or not.

My issue with that is that "a reasonable chance of avoiding lethal repercussions" seems to be very small indeed. Putin is certainly not known for being particularly forgiving.

Very true. I would certainly be wary of people bearing umbrellas were I him. But at some point he had two choices: 1) continue the coup and almost certainly die within a week; 2) negotiate and create a chance, small though it might be, to eventually die of natural causes.

Also, "marching" is kinda eliding what Prigozhin did, there's a world of difference between a demonstrative march and one that involves seven aircraft downed in anger, and possibly deaths on the ground too. Phrased another way, if you're looking for plausible deniability and leaving room for de-escalation, you don't go this far.

I was using "marching on" in the sense of a military advance, not a protest march. And I said nothing about plausible deniability; that would be dumb. The only way to get people to come out in favor of your coup is to make it clear that a coup is exactly what is happening. No one is going to stick their neck out for a coup that might not be happening.

Basically, what happened is exactly what one would expect to happen in the case of an unsuccessful attempted coup that fails in its earliest stages.

Very true. I would certainly be wary of people bearing umbrellas were I him.

Please. This is the Bulgarian MO. KGB were never that subtle.

It sounds like you have been absorbing the narrative instead of looking at the concrete facts. In the big picture, nothing has changed. Russia has superior manpower and production. In a war of attrition Russia will eventually win unless the government collapses.

This has been the strategy from the start. Russia wants to bleed out Ukraine, NATO wants regime change in Russia. It stands to reason that this coup attempt was in some capacity supported by NATO. If I had to guess, Prig was fed bad intel by NATO spies in the MoD. Some say the mysterious $6.2 billion accounting error was paid to Prig. We may never know. My prediction is that Prig lives for at least a few years.

I appreciate the concrete prediction, but I find the idea that Russia was will due to manpower and production advantages dubious at best.

Leaving aside the former, in the latter regime they're not just competing against Ukraine's anemic MIC, but the largesse of NATO as a whole. Even breadcrumbs dropped from the whiskers of Uncle Sam hit like MOABs.

I see the most likely outcome becoming a stalemate and white peace, or withdrawal after an internal collapse of Russia, most likely the former. What I don't see are decisive Ukrainian or Russian victories.

I'm also highly leery of claims of NATO being able to subvert the Russian military hierarchy to that degree. If that was the case, they'd be able to outright buy out most of Russian leadership. Russia might be corrupt, but I don't think it's that corrupt.

I appreciate the concrete prediction, but I find the idea that Russia was will due to manpower and production advantages dubious at best.

Leaving aside the former, in the latter regime they're not just competing against Ukraine's anemic MIC, but the largesse of NATO as a whole. Even breadcrumbs dropped from the whiskers of Uncle Sam hit like MOABs.

Russia has a population of around 150 mil while Ukraine's population is around 40 mil. Russia simply has much deeper reserves to pull from. It is true that NATO is committing some production capacity to the Ukraine war, but it is still a fraction of what Russia is willing to commit. The Russian regime will fight the war of attrition until the regime collapse.

I see the most likely outcome becoming a stalemate and white peace, or withdrawal after an internal collapse of Russia, most likely the former. What I don't see are decisive Ukrainian or Russian victories.

If Russia is able to consolidate on its territorial gains, this is decisively a win for Russia. It is not the total victory that they originally hoped for, but it is still a clear win based on the instigating causes of the war.

I'm also highly leery of claims of NATO being able to subvert the Russian military hierarchy to that degree. If that was the case, they'd be able to outright buy out most of Russian leadership. Russia might be corrupt, but I don't think it's that corrupt.

A lot of my favorite anon Twitter accounts said that the rebellion was overblown from the beginning and was a nothingburger. But still, it went farther than most people would have thought possible the day before. Given that NATO's win condition is regime change in Russia, the reason for suspicion is obvious.

It seems like Russia has more manpower reserves to pull from, but Ukraine is willing to pull deeper.

NATO wants regime change in Russia.

NATO doesn't want it (apart from hardliners from Estonia, or wherever). Why is it gets repeated?

Russia has superior manpower and production.

This simplistic thinking lead to wide assumption about Kyiv falling in first days, or Donbass army being surrounded etc.

If I had to guess, Prig was fed bad intel by NATO spies in the MoD.

And Putin has doubles.

Some say the mysterious $6.2 billion accounting error was paid to Prig.

No, triples! Why are you saying stuff that has zero relation to reality?

NATO doesn't want it (apart from hardliners from Estonia, or wherever). Why is it gets repeated?

I'm not going to put in the effort to convince you, but it is my view that they have been pretty clear about this. Sure, NATO will never have a press release that says "DEATH TO PUTIN" but their actions and their propaganda has made the intent clear to me and many others. I am not intending to persuade you, but you merely contradicting me is not going to persuade anybody either.

This simplistic thinking lead to wide assumption about Kyiv falling in first days, or Donbass army being surrounded etc.

I predicted day 1 that Russia was not going to take Kiev any time soon. Just because you fell for it does not mean that everybody did.

NATO doesn't want it (apart from hardliners from Estonia, or wherever). Why is it gets repeated?

Because Biden said they wanted it. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3982406-we-need-regime-change-in-russia-but-how/

While Biden's obviously a checked out zombie who can be animated with a bevy of top shelf stimulants and given detailed instructions with the important bits in all capitals, he is still ostensibly the US president and so when he says things like “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” people assume he means that he doesn't want "this man" to remain in power - and that would obviously entail regime change.

This has been the strategy from the start. Russia wants to bleed out Ukraine

It was not. Russia opened the (hot phase of the) war with a series of incredibly ambitious maneuvers and risky airborne operations, indicating they expected to be able to end the war very quickly. These efforts all failed, mostly disastrously (the southern axis of advance towards Odessa stumbled at the gates of Mykolaiv and :checks notes: Voznesensk?, but they still wound up in possession of Kherson Oblast and didn't get mauled, so massive W compared to the northern axes).

Some say the mysterious $6.2 billion accounting error was paid to Prig.

The people saying that are idiots. Not only do they have zero evidence, it doesn't make any sense. The "accounting error" was not a pile of cash or a number in a bank account. It's games with the valuation of equipment transfers.

The people saying that are idiots. Not only do they have zero evidence, it doesn't make any sense. The "accounting error" was not a pile of cash or a number in a bank account. It's games with the valuation of equipment transfers.

It's somewhat besides the point. It was probably not a $6.2 billion ACH transfer. The point is that "aid" being given to Ukraine is not being tracked particularly carefully and bribery of Russian officials is hardly out of the question.

"Prigozhin accepted CIA bribe, coordinated with Putin to put on a good show until the bribe was paid, then turned back" is apparently popular on the Chinese internet, and fits what we do know pretty well. Russia letting its men be sacrificed in the ruse seems brutal, but it's not unheard of. Also possible that the helos could have have been destroyed without killing anyone, and the deaths manufactured as part of the ruse.

No, it doesn't. Putin's legitimacy and power rest on the appearance of strength and stability. This proposes he decided to jeopardize that so an unruly subordinate could scam the CIA. That's far more of a stretch than "Prigozhin acted out of desperation and then lost his nerve or was persuaded/threatened into backing off."

It is never 5D chess.

It is never 5D chess.

Whenever someone claims that n-dimensional chess is being played in the FSU, my go-to response is "Gary Kasparov has repeatedly said nobody in the FSU is playing n-dimensional chess and the cock-up theory of history applies the same there as everywhere else - are you claiming to know more about chess than him?"

and fits what we do know pretty well.

Prigozhin was possessed. Then he was exorcized, and then he recalled his troops. Fits pretty well, doesn't it? It's like epicycles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle

when ancients astronomers wanted to explain the movement of planets using geocentric system.

I don’t believe it was even an accounting error. It honestly sounded to me like they wanted to spend more money without announcing they were spending more money. I believe they changed some accounting from “replacement costs” to “historical costs” - which I think is just lifo accounting to fifo accounting.

Just so. There's a lot of creative accounting that can be done to make numbers look the way you want them to look. If you want to provide more aid but don't want to get a new authorization, just fiddle the books a bit.

What the hell is going on in Russia?

In general, I think far too little credence is given to what one might call the "retardation hypothesis", namely that a lot of powerful people are kind of stupid, or at least - if they are intelligent - also impulsive, prone to anger and lack of self-control and often unwilling to consider the advice of smart people around them.

I don't think Prigozhin's run to Moscow was a psy-op or 5D chess. At the same time, I also think it was never likely that the few thousand fighters that made it to Moscow would be able to make a play for the whole country. He lacks the regional powerbase, lacks the ideological column, lacks the administrative expertise, much of the public still has some degree of fondness for Putin, and the estimated 50,000 strong FSO, plus the air force, plus large remaining portions of the military appeared to stay loyal to Putin. It was not a 1917 situation, and nor was it a present-day Sudan situation where the rebel/mercenary army was much better funded and much larger relative to the official military.

Assuming I'm right that it isn't 5D chess, I think Prigozhin's initial gambit was to occupy Rostov-on-Don as a 'protest', win some major concessions from Putin (maybe firing Shoigu, giving Prigozhin more of what he wanted, maybe money, whatever) over the phone immediately, then go back to Ukraine. Instead, something seems to have gone wrong, maybe Putin played hardball, and some portion of Prigozhin's forces decided to march on Moscow. This caused some degree of panic. Putin eventually semi-relented and here we are.

It's obvious why Prigozhin accepted the deal: he never actually wanted to die, he wanted concessions. Marching on Moscow forreal forreal, to borrow from the zoomers, would have been certain death for him and the men he might care about (eg. senior Wagner officers). He couldn't escape to the West or any Western-friendly country because he'd be extradited to the Hague for war crimes. He's too hot for the Arabs to accept him now, and neither them nor the Iranians want to annoy Putin. A Prigozhin that was Putin's enemy would be stranded with nowhere to go, wanted by both Russia and the 'West'.

Taking Lukashenko's deal (which Putin might have put him up to) was Prigozhin's only option by Saturday evening. As to why he attempted the move in the first place, I think a combination of impulsive rage and a desire to show Putin he was serious explain it pretty easily. Putin called Prigozhin's bluff and - at great cost, I'd argue, but nevertheless - he won.

I am sympathetic to this hypothesis, God knows that centuries of fetal alcohol syndrome can't have done good things for the average Russian warlord.

I'm still surprised that Lukashenko had that much autonomy, and even if Putin put him up to it, that still reflects poorly on Putin's control. Sure, it could have been the least bad decision he had available.

In general, I think far too little credence is given to what one might call the "retardation hypothesis", namely that a lot of powerful people are kind of stupid, or at least - if they are intelligent - also impulsive, prone to anger and lack of self-control and often unwilling to consider the advice of smart people around them.

To be charitable, I think acting irrational is often the most rational course of action. The whole point of anger is that you're willing to engage in mutually destructive behavior, to your own detriment, if you feel slighted. This ideally works as a deterrent against being taken advantage of too much.

Generally, it aligns with what is known

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/06/25/putin-was-nowhere-to-be-found

In general, I think far too little credence is given to what one might call the "retardation hypothesis", namely that a lot of powerful people are kind of stupid, or at least - if they are intelligent - also impulsive, prone to anger and lack of self-control and often unwilling to consider the advice of smart people around them.

I'd normally be behind this, but I think this undersells a bunch of things. Like how stable or sensible things are in a cutthroat oligarchy in the middle of a war that threatens to drag many of them down.

This isn't some country ruled by common law pedantry with six million precedents and the comfort of a stable constitutional settlement. You can have "experts" in the former you can just offload most things to. This is the late Republican trap: there is no easy guarantee of safety in the game and the "smart people" don't necessarily have the same skin in the game (or anything to offer you). Caesar would have been an idiot to stay in his camp and trusting in the Republic's processes, even though we certainly would have called him an idiot for marching and losing.

In this situation Prigozhin was seeing himself lose a battle for internal influence and what made him valuable to his feudal leader had basically been burned taking Bakhmut for some reason that the more militarily inclined might know but I certainly don't. His men were going to be signed with the government and his men are his power. What future he would have had is unclear in a place you really don't want to be in a gray zone in.

It's a situation that provides a rational incentive for "dumb" behavior

It's simple really. No one involved wanted Russia to lose the war, and a full blown fight between Wagner and whoever else would mean just that. No one involved wanted to start an actual civil war. Prigozhin probably thought that almost everyone would support him and quickly transfer him the power, or maybe that air strike on his troops really did happen after all, by mistake or as a false flag. Either way, that didn't happen and therefore he conceded the moment he was offered acceptable terms. Lukashenko is just a trusted third party that mediated the dispute.

I am somewhat surprised by the amount of bizzare theories about the coup. Seems like people have been told the Russian state is about to collapse and implode so many times, they find it really hard to believe the Russian troops would actually go to great lengths to avoid shooting at each other.

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 thought, and still think, that warfare is highly mathematical. I guess it stems from my love of games like Panzer General, or Hearts of Iron. There are things like esprit de corps, or civilian morale, or troop experience that still can be modeled — e.g. through modifiers. There are political events that are difficult to simulate (like the recent putsch) — but surely you can simulate events on an operational level, like Zaporizhzhia/Western Donbas front? Wargaming is a thing, but do they utilize a huge progress in compute to quickly work through numerous scenarios to find the most optimal ones?

I agree that war is in principle fully simulatable, but in practise it's not particularly effective.

The reason is that data collection is incredibly difficult, since both sides will do their best to obfuscate.

Further, a lot of high level decision making still hinges on the decisions of a very few people, who are also near impossible to model. Seriously, how would anyone model Rommel in code?

To the best of my limited knowledge, even modern wargaming heavily relies on humans to mediate the rules, there's no single program or set of programs that is capable of doing so. No, not even my beloved Arma 3 :(

Right, but people like Rommel have just bigger phase space of possible decisions which stems from their better intuition and greater experience. I had in mind simulations like what they do e.g. in astronomy when they try to simulate formation of star systems, galaxies, and such. It is also highly probabilistic — they'll say something like "with the probability of 60% the planet with Jupiter mass will form at the distance of 1 au away from the central star" based on thousands of simulations they run; unlike wargaming where you have only a specific scenario you run several times with imperfect humans.

I read somewhere that US DoD has some precise models for logistics — I'll try to research.

Plus the risk of black swans.

Maybe one of your best generals gets taken out by a pulmonary embolism prior to a critical battle. Or adverse weather conditions delay the arrival of your fleet or, worse, sink your fleet before even engaging the enemy. Maybe a lucky enemy spy manages to sneak a bomb into a factory that is critical to your war effort.

To a large extent these will average out over the course of a long, large scale conflict, but it can also result in a series of dominoes falling such that outcomes you didn't intend or expect are the result.

And thus the problem is that computerized models tend to be sterile and overly deterministic where such crazy events don't get proper consideration.

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?

Why would you not assume that Lukashenko was used as a more palatable face of an existing negotiation?

As you point out, it's kind of insane that Prigozhin isn't dead already (assuming he isn't). Hearing that Putin personally reached out to him to turn back would be an even bigger blow to prestige.

I'd also wager that Lukashenko has more agency and freedom than most suspect

You wouldn't be the first. But it doesn't mean that Putin wasn't across this.

Short story - Wagner as a private mercenary group was a useful tool for MoD/Putin when they were doing something in Syria/Africa. However after they've relocated to Ukraine MoD was increasingly annoyed by them for several reasons:

  1. Prigozhin seems to be very vocal about certain things which aren't discussed publicly. And what's worse - he gradually raises his rhetoric, adding some stabs against MoD(he always was very careful to not touch Putin personally in his speeches, and until only very recently he wasn't even mentioning Shoigu directly) and clearly trying to raise his own significance using Wagner's perceivable successes for that(so basically he became a political figure, a dangerous position to be). He clearly assumed a posture of a "folk-hero", just a simple no-nonsense guy who's doing his job, he talks things plainly as they are, without any PC nonsense and not trying to save someone's feelings. He wasn't saving his words for the state of the army and especially the level of commandment and basically the only one(together with Strelkov i guess) who was for some reason allowed to do that.

  2. MoD doesn't have any notion of private military contractor company, so noone really understood of what to do with them officially. So i guess the communication and logistical support with Wagner was always done by semi-official connections, rather than official. Basically Prigozhin knew who to speak with, who to ask, who to pressure in MoD so things would be going forward. But the fact that MoD didn't had any direct control on a significant portion of military with heavy armaments was very annoying to them. Also as i understand due to the personal nature of Prigozhins contacts in MoD, it was very hard for them to force Prigozhin to do anything.

So basically it was going towards the conflict for a long time. Strelkov(a guy who's largely responsible for 2014 Donbass insurrection and who always heavily criticised russia's actions, he's basically much more of a hard-liner than Putin/MoD) was saying that directly, rebellion, mutiny and so on. But he was just translating what everyone else were thinking. MoD tried to get rid of Wagner by refusing arms to them as well as logistics(a lot of Prigozhin memes came out of it), and recently they were trying to force any armed people in the conflict to sign direct contracts to MoD, which is a direct stab at Wagner's mercenaries, an attempt to put Wagner under MoD control. Prigozhin said that noone in Wagner will sign them.

Basically MoD were avoiding the direct conflict and tried to gradually push Prigozhin under it's control and Prigozhin was refusing any attempts to it increasing his rhetoric while a week or two ago he went completely ballistic, started directly naming Shoigu, was saying a lot of things which are openly hostile to MoD(that they were lying to everyone, they were using people as a meat in a meat grinder, shells cost more than people to them, the operation goes badly and so on) and it ended up with that direct conflict.

It's essentially boils down to the fact that Prigozhin wasn't under MoD/Putin control, and it was increasingly dangerous to allow that to continue. MoD were trying to increase the pressure to Prigozhin under the table(they tried to gradually boil the frog, basically), but he double-downed and eventually broke leading to the direct conflict. It seems like the direct conflict was a bit of a surprise to MoD(or maybe not?), based on their urgent actions after it all started.

What's up with the whole Lukashenko deal - noone is really sure just yet. The simplest explanation is that Prigozhin made some emotional decision and after realizing that there's no way back he just took any deal which allows him to prolong his life. Lukashenko is just in a position when he can broker that, but it doesn't seem that Prigozhin can be a chooser. So the exact nature of the deal is likely not very interesting.

Thank you, that helps put things into context.

That being said, this seems to be to suggest that there's a large degree of misalignment between the MOD and whoever sanctioned the creation of Wagner in the first place. It seems to me that Wagner largely behaved itself, both abroad and at home, and the MOD's hardline approach suggests more of an internal powerplay than something that Putin was directly orchestrating. Of course, I don't think Prigozhin could lash out at the MOD and not insult Putin in the process, you don't beat the servant without asking the master, especially if you're another servant.

That being said, this seems to be to suggest that there's a large degree of misalignment between the MOD and whoever sanctioned the creation of Wagner in the first place.

Presumably that was the point - what passes for separation of powers in an autocracy.

It may just be that it's apparently no longer a luxury Russia can afford in such a pivotal and unsuccessful war. Or Prigozhin is now sufficiently weak/used up that it isn't worth it.

I don't think the attempted gelding would have gone ahead without Putin's support, given he set up this situation, but it's hardly the most transparent regime.

Wagner was created to solve external military tasks in Syria/Africa, and proved it's an effective tool there. But then MoD screwed the war and were scrapping for anything they can throw in the fire, so Wagner was relocated. So Wagner is by nature of its creation is quite an independent corporation, which makes sense abroad, but that independence backfired in Ukraine clearly. MoD tried to control it but failed. Or "succeeded" if you can count the current state of things as success.

You're trying to infer the nature of MoD relationship with Putin, as well as Putin motivation out of the situation, that's very understandable. However it's worth noting that Putin himself goes into great efforts to hide his involvement and the nature of his involvement with MoD(or anything and anyone else). It allows him to bank on the winner effectively and to maintain the image of 10D player while he's not doing anything or doing very little. So I wouldn't overestimate Putin's involvement or 300 iq moves out of it. He's likely to largely follow the flow making simple, boring and suggestive, however consistent decisions. Whatever happens - you can always smirk and suggestively joke about it maintaining composure. And half of the world starts - oooh, he planned it 15 years ago! Aaah, 10D chess! He's just consistent and avoids emotional steps, that's the whole chess.

I know the feeling. I was also surprised that Russia wasn't able to even get to Kiev with the main body of it's forces. Miles-long convoys, a dominant air force, and an underprepared defender should have, one thinks, enabled a Thunder Run to the Capital and they should have been able to at least temporarily control the territory.

It's like if the U.S. decided to invade Mexico and could only penetrate about 100 miles from their own border before bogging down. But then again, if China was providing ample material support to the Mexican fighters maybe that is what would happen.

But man, there's simply no systemic way to exercise good rationality here for various reasons:

  1. Russia is pretty good at the propaganda game. They're even better at the 'muddy the waters and deny objective reality as much as needed' game. Being confident that Russia is lying or withholding the truth doesn't actually help you determine the real truth.

  2. War is chaos. Determining which signals are good and which are misleading at best is nigh impossible in the moment.

  3. Ukraine has massive incentive to lie about stuff too (Ghost of Kiev, etc.) and will exaggerate Russian 'atrocities' and casualties as a matter of course.

  4. The "Russia is evil empire, Ukraine is brave freedom fighters" narrative is firmly locked-in, so anything that makes Ukraine look bad or weak will be downplayed and ignored whilst likewise Russia's 'wins' will be minimized by Western media.

  5. As seen from the Wagner situation, the nature of the conflict can shift unexpectedly on a dime, so any prediction over the medium-long term is eminently susceptible to black swans.

  6. The situation on the ground is subject to information you simply cannot get. Local knowledge which can't be easily summarized and translated.

So you can't understand a situation this complex and dynamic simply by absorbing all possible information you can find. You have no way to verify said information, and the information you DON'T have will probably end up being critical to accurate predictions anyway. And the good info will become outdated rapidly. Adjust your confidence levels accordingly.

In lieu of making predictions on week-to-week occurrences I've tried my best to understand the broad-strokes motives, capabilities, and weaknesses of the relevant parties. A few things I'm relatively confident about:

  1. 'Russia' (the government that is representing it, at least) has to view this conflict as existential, since they need to control certain geographic positions if they are to be safe from future invasion. Further, they are now beginning a terminal decline in demographics. Beyond anything else, they'll never have as many fighting-age males as they do now. So they are committed to see this through and will throw bodies at the problem as long as it can.

  2. Ukraine's demographics are even worse. They cannot win a war of attrition unless Russia knuckles under.

  3. Ukraine is not generally valuable in-and-of-itself to ANYONE but the Ukrainians. Neither the U.S. nor Russia stands to achieve much economic gains from merely controlling the territory, so in that sense broad destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure is acceptable to both parties.

  4. Russia's logistics are in atrocious shape, so Ukraine is punching above its' weight regardless of anything else because their soldiers have ammunition, food, and working equipment.

  5. Even the U.S. Manufacturing capacity isn't quite filling the gap, however.

What do these facts allow me to predict? Not much. Other than a long, bloody, conflict which will probably result in a Russian 'victory' but also with Russia ceasing to be any kind of major player in world affairs.

Ukraine is not generally valuable in-and-of-itself to ANYONE but the Ukrainians. Neither the U.S. nor Russia stands to achieve much economic gains from merely controlling the territory, so in that sense broad destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure is acceptable to both parties.

They found a bunch of large natural gas deposits in Eastern Ukraine and in the sea off Crimea, in the early 2010s right before everything kicked off.

Neither the U.S. nor Russia are short on natural gas as of the moment.

Europe, maybe.

Europe's not short on natural gas either. In a pinch, they can revert to burning coal just like they did in 2022. And the world has centuries worth of coal that can be easily extracted.

Europe was only short on natural gas because they chose to be.

The world is awash in fossil fuels. The amount of natural gas and oil that can be extracted at an economical price is far in excess of the world's needs for at least the next 2-3 decades.

Perhaps Russia is that boneheaded, I don't know. But it feels unlikely. Similarly, the U.S. invasion of Iraq wasn't about oil. For the cost of the war, we could have purchased the entirety of Iraq's oil reserves (more or less).

Oil is cheap.

Russia is pretty good at the propaganda game. They're even better at the 'muddy the waters and deny objective reality as much as needed' game.

I'm always puzzled by that statement. Let's just say russians have exactly the opposite point of view, no matter their affiliations. However what I do notice is that west gets constantly confused by their own propaganda narratives which often go against each other, which sometimes looks like Putin outsmarted everyone.While in practice it means your own previous propaganda narrative was wrong and it can't explain well what's happening. So someone comes up with some new bullshit explanation and everyone are suddenly experts on Russia for a while, until the next happening. Sometimes Russia tries to help some of those narratives, but i'm not sure those efforts convincing many.

I'm talking about stuff like Russia denying that there had been any missile strikes when the Moskva was sunk and indeed tried for a long time to deny that the ship had been sunk at all.

I don't even feel confident that it WASN'T just an accidental fire caused by incompetence.

Keep in mind that Russia is good enough at muddying waters that most people were betting against Russia actually invading Ukraine, even as they massed forces on the border.

I would guess a lot of people were betting against Russia invading because they, including myself, thought this would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.

Year and a half later, I stand by this assessment.

It also isn't clear what the smart move would be if we assume that Russian goals (as defined by Putin) is to enhance the security of the country, avoid turning into a vassal of the West/America.

How do you maintain your functional independence in such a scenario?

Like, there was literally never going to be a better opportunity in the foreseeable future, with the rest of the world reeling from Covid and attendant supply chain and energy issues, and with Russia's supply of fight-age males about to enter a long period of decline.

So why would we expect Putin to wait for another few years?

No excusing the grievous miscalculation that they apparently expected to be able to seize Kiev in the opening moves of the war, of course, but I don't think they hinged their entire war plan on that.

I dunno, I think armed military conflicts tend to be stupid choices simply because they destroy the wealth of all involved nations, but if the alternative is to surrender to the Western Cultural blob and lose control of your country's own destiny, I think I can understand the logic.

I wonder what makes this line of thinking so tenacious that I have to keep having this conversation again and again. Maybe its time to compose a copypasta for this occasion or something...

Anyway, a state with a nuclear triad just doesn't suffer the same risks as Russia did during the times of Napoleon or Hitler. It's true that any state would prefer to not have potentially hostile neighbors on its doorstep, but for Russia, this train has departed long time ago. As for Ukraine, it didn't look like they would be invited to NATO anytime soon, especially not after annexation of Crimea. (I would say that, at least, was a well executed operation, but still argue that it did Russia more harm than good).

Moreover, let's say they seized Kiev, and everything to the east of Dnipro. Now what? You still got an aggressive "anti-Russian" half of Ukraine on your border. Let's say they conquered Ukraine in its entirety. It has to be pacified, at quite a steep cost. What is achieved? Security against Western land invasion (really outlandish scenario)? Not even that, there is still Baltic border, even closer to Moscow, and Kremlin would never have the balls to invade a NATO country.

As it is, I'm actually mad at Putin for not being able to present an alternative to the West, a multipolar world as he says. He had infinite money, common cultural heritage that he could leverage to expand influence in eastern Europe, instead he preferred to get high at his own supply, believing that Ukraine is a pseudo country that would collapse the moment Russian soldier's foot stepped into it, and that Ukrainians are Russians anyway, and decided to play conqueror.

'Russia' (the government that is representing it, at least) has to view this conflict as existential, since they need to control certain geographic positions if they are to be safe from future invasion.

This is flatly wrong. Russia could leave whenever it wanted to and their security situation would not change significantly, even if Ukraine joined NATO (which is very much still an open question, not a done deal by any means). The Russian fever dream of NATO launching an unprovoked ground invasion Barbarossa-style is ludicrous in the age of nukes and China. The invasion of Ukraine has always been about Russian influence, not security.

Russia's logistics are in atrocious shape, so Ukraine is punching above its' weight regardless of anything else because their soldiers have ammunition, food, and working equipment.

Russian logistics are performing reasonably well actually. There are problems of course, and they're not up to US standards, but that's pretty high bar.

The Russian fever dream of NATO launching an unprovoked ground invasion Barbarossa-style is ludicrous in the age of nukes and China.

I disagree with that, alongside the majority of russians i believe. Situations change, opportunities arise, provocations happen, things change and if west at some point decides that now can be a good opportunity to solve its Russia problems with some sudden strike or occupation or anything else - noone really thinks that you won't use it because you're "good guys". I can easily imagine those good guys can easily kill 150mil people and spend the rest of their days writing books and directing TV shows how it was necessary, lesser evil and it saved much more lives so it was totally justified (and what's worse - some soldiers had PTSD pressing buttons killing everyone, so they're sad now!). And i'm as far from being Putin's supporter as you can imagine. So no matter what you think about the possibility of that, being good guys and all that, it's not an obviously ludicrous fear. Consequently it is definitely a factor, or at least can be named as a casus belli in the invasion of Ukraine.

If you want to handwave nukes and the geopolitical impact of the rise of China and everything else, then maybe, but at that point you could handwave everything with "maybe it will change at some point in the future, perhaps". That's a blank check to invade all neighbors at all times... which is arguably Russia's MO for most of its history. It's completely understandable for people outside of Russia to look at that and say that's unjustified.

It's completely understandable for people outside of Russia to look at that and say that's unjustified.

Yes, and they are right fearing it too. Where's the error in any of those fears? People were genociding each other since forever, it's hard to justify that now suddenly we're free from that somehow. Even if it's not genocide, it can be bad and scary. It's enough to pose a big enough threat(existential threat is a fine term i guess) for you to start considering nukes/coups/inverventions/occupations and other nasty things which are completely justifiable from your point of view. And that other guy can think the same way and consider to do those things to you. That's what the whole cold war was about, remember? So how the hell is Russia's fears unjustifiable exactly? The only solution is to avoid escalation of the threat from both parties, but western elites thought it's no longer necessary after the cold war was won. Well, here we are. People fear each other with all the reasons to do so and eventually it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

You can reasonably fear an invasion, you‘re just not allowed to allay those fears by invading another country. Build a fort or something. Everyone fears invasion by their neighbours, and would love an extra one hundred km or two of defensible terrain. And if you think you‘re special because nukes: if we tolerate your invasion for that reason, soon every two-bit country will nuclearize, claim land phobia, and expect free real estate.

Glad that someone unambiguously lays the actual rules, finally! However i fear Putin already got the tip from Americans so he may think he still has a quota to invade 2-3 more countries, just like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and so on.

Whatever, I'm not american. I'm just telling you the rules for little fishes with an italy-size gdp. All the other little fishes in europe think your actions are unjustified, and if that's the way it's gonna be, they'd like karelia and königsberg back to allay their reasonable fear of russian invasion.

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Russia could leave whenever it wanted to and their security situation would not change significantly, even if Ukraine joined NATO (which is very much still an open question, not a done deal by any means).

I'll point to the demographics issue as a key factor once again. They're going to run lower and lower on fighting-age males over the coming decades.

It's less about NATO invasion, per se, and more about the various states that border Russia that might consider a land grab if their military no longer appears up to the task of repelling invaders.

To me this presents a really simple calculus: either commit to an aggressive offense now, with hopes of shoring up your defensive posture (i.e. making it possible to defend your land with fewer people and less equipment) or risk being parceled up 15-30 years down the line as you lose the means to hold the territory you claim.

You have to make the call now because even if your people suddenly start popping out kids en masse today it'll be 18 or so years before they grow into a useful fighting force.

Russian logistics are performing reasonably well actually.

Considering they're apparently not even palletizing their equipment for shipment, I guess.

I would assert that they would have lost this war a long way back if the territory they're fighting in wasn't right across the border. So poor logistics doesn't doom their efforts so long as they can shovel enough weapons and men to the front without losing most in transit.

Because for comparison I'm looking at the United States' ability to maintain a conflict in Iraq, which it doesn't even share a continent with, for years.

The impact of population is becoming less and less of a factor for militaries as technology advances. Modern soldiers are so ridiculously lethal that wars are fought with a fraction of the manpower that previous wars were. A nation's economy, human capital, and technology base are going to be far more important in wars to come, and all of these have been damaged in Russia's case due to this conflict. Future wars won't be won by conscripting a horde of musketeers like it's the 1700s.

Also, this completely ignored the points about nukes and the rise of China.

Because for comparison I'm looking at the United States' ability to maintain a conflict in Iraq, which it doesn't even share a continent with, for years.

The US's logistical capacity flatly outmatches every other country by far, so it's not a great comparison for a nation like Russia who's mostly going to be focused on conflicts near its borders. Russia's ability to supply absurd numbers of artillery shells to its units has been a key driver of Ukrainian casualties, and doing so while under fire was a big reason why the Kherson offensive took as long as it did.

The impact of population is becoming less and less of a factor for militaries as technology advances.

Good luck maintaining a technologically advanced military without the people to maintain the increasingly complicated systems said militaries rely upon.

Modern soldiers are so ridiculously lethal that wars are fought with a fraction of the manpower that previous wars were.

We haven't seen any modern war that was fought in the style of years past... until now.

And it's looking a lot like standard trench warfare with some fun additions like kamikaze drones.

Future wars won't be won by conscripting a horde of musketeers like it's the 1700s.

Allow me to do a reducio ad absurdum.

Would you be willing to pit a 12 man squad of modern soldiers with a single modern tank against 100,000 soldiers who are limited to WII-era weaponry?

There's clearly a tradeoff here, where the sheer weight of manpower allows attrition against a technologically superior foe.

Especially if the foe has their own population issues.

Also, this completely ignored the points about nukes and the rise of China.

I mean we can get into all of this but I don't think it really changes the calculus from Russia's POV.

Especially now that we've seen that security threats can come from DOMESTIC sources, and I doubt Putin et al. were willing to nuke their own soil to stop Wagner.

So again, either Russia establishes geographical security as fast as possible or it risks getting parceled up.

We haven't seen any modern war that was fought in the style of years past... until now.

Ukraine vs Russia is mostly fighting using old Cold War tech on both sides, and the troop concentrations are still far lower than they were in Barbarossa.

Would you be willing to pit a 12 man squad of modern soldiers with a single modern tank against 100,000

Bad example since population levels aren't falling by 99.99% like in this scenario. they're falling by around 20% in the most extreme cases by the end of the century.

I'm not saying population doesn't matter; rather, I'm saying it matters mostly in the economic and technological spheres. If Russia loses 20 million people over the next century then that impacts its ability to have a large economy to produce extremely lethal modern weapons. Worrying about population in terms of "nobody will be around to hold the guns" on the other hand is not particularly credible.

Especially now that we've seen that security threats can come from DOMESTIC sources, and I doubt Putin et al. were willing to nuke their own soil to stop Wagner.

This is a non-sequitur. Priggy's revolt was a case of internal Russian factionalism boiling over. There are some pro-Russian cheerleaders who think Prigozhin was a NATO plant in some 4D chess sort of way, but that's not particularly credible.

It's less about NATO invasion, per se, and more about the various states that border Russia that might consider a land grab if their military no longer appears up to the task of repelling invaders.

Which? Estonia? Finland? Georgia? Mongolia taking their shot at it again?

The only credible threat to Russia is China, but it's indeed some 6d chess — to attack Ukraine in order to be better prepared for a possible war in the Far East.

The Russian fever dream of NATO launching an unprovoked ground invasion Barbarossa-style is ludicrous in the age of nukes and China. The invasion of Ukraine has always been about Russian influence, not security.

I was always under the impression that it was precisely nuclear security that had Russia concerned, specifically NATO missile interdiction systems, which was one of the motivating factors behind their development of hypersonic weaponry. Beyond that, security and influence are heavily tied together - good luck selling all your fossil fuels to Europe if you can't stop your pipelines from getting blown up.

US missile shields could never credibly protect from most, or even just many Russian nukes. They can protect from single strikes which eliminates some of the bargaining power of nuclear blackmail, because you'll be hemmed into all-or-nothing strats even more than normal. Again, it's about influence, not security.

Security and influence are two distinct concepts. They can interact in some cases, but it's not like Belgium fears getting invaded by Germany or France these days if it doesn't maintain Belgian Influence in those countries. Russian pipelines weren't getting bombed until the war started.

US missile shields could never credibly protect from most, or even just many Russian nukes. They can protect from single strikes which eliminates some of the bargaining power of nuclear blackmail, because you'll be hemmed into all-or-nothing strats even more than normal. Again, it's about influence, not security.

A missile shield doesn't even have to credibly protect most of the US. All it needs to do is give US decision-makers the false belief that they could survive or win an exchange and then the world is in such catastrophic danger that it would be worth letting the holocaust happen twice over in order to prevent it. That's the threat that the Russians are concerned with, and my estimation of American politicians is such that the Russians are absolutely correct to be concerned about what Bill Kristol wants for them.

Your position is not backed up by recent evidence. If US politicians thought the missile shield would give them an overwhelming advantage, why were they so cagey against Russia's invasion? Why did Biden come out so quickly against sending US troops or establishing a no-fly zone? Why have people like Jake Sullivan had so much influence to make each weapon system like pulling teeth when it came to sending them to Ukraine (e.g. HIMARS, MBTs, Patriots, F16s). The cautious tiptoeing does not strike me as US politicians being blinded by hubris.

If anything, the endless Pascal's Muggings that have occurred around discussions of Russia's nukes have been one of the clearest incentives towards proliferation that we've seen in decades. A large-scale nuclear exchange would be absolutely terrible, but that doesn't mean the reaction should thus be to always back down in the face of nuclear blackmail. Doing so means vastly more nukes in the world in the long term, which means the likelihood of an eventual nuclear exchange goes up by orders of magnitude.

Your position is not backed up by recent evidence. If US politicians thought the missile shield would give them an overwhelming advantage, why were they so cagey against Russia's invasion? Why did Biden come out so quickly against sending US troops or establishing a no-fly zone? Why have people like Jake Sullivan had so much influence to make each weapon system like pulling teeth when it came to sending them to Ukraine (e.g. HIMARS, MBTs, Patriots, F16s). The cautious tiptoeing does not strike me as US politicians being blinded by hubris.

The missile shield system is not actually in place yet - do you think the US military is setting up large anti missile defence batteries in the middle of Ukraine right now? They presently do not have confidence that they would survive a nuclear exchange, and we are not actually in the position that Russia was so scared of (in no small part due to the invasion). As for why the US has been so cagey, that's an incredibly complicated question with an equally complicated answer. The short answer is that the US absolutely does not wish to be seen as the instigator of the conflict - they will be unable to muster popular support for military intervention, both domestically and among the international community. Their usual strategy for this is to manufacture or make up an incident like the Gulf of Tonkin, and that's a lot harder to do in the modern day. As for why they are so cagey with specific weapons, there's a lot of reasons for that too - they don't want Moscow getting hit with missiles covered in American flags that say MADE IN THE USA, they don't want their fancier weapons getting visibly and public shown up on the battlefield while wielded by undertrained conscripts, etc etc.

If anything, the endless Pascal's Muggings that have occurred around discussions of Russia's nukes have been one of the clearest incentives towards proliferation that we've seen in decades. A large-scale nuclear exchange would be absolutely terrible, but that doesn't mean the reaction should thus be to always back down in the face of nuclear blackmail.

Actually I think the clearest incentive was what the US did to Libya, but what Russia did to Ukraine is another. Both the US and Russia have made it clear that if you get rid of your nuclear weapons your security is irreparably harmed. But this isn't a case of Pascal's mugging - nuclear war is absolutely a world-ending event and that threat should be taken extremely seriously. The idea that you should just ignore the legitimate security concerns of a nation like Russia and trigger a nuclear exchange that ends all life on earth that isn't a cockroach or bacteria because you don't want to make them think that they can stand up to the US is such a dangerous proposition that I have to disagree in the strongest possible terms. A nuclear power is a nuclear power and while I agree that having more of them is a bad thing, the US and Russia together have made it clear that if you disarm you are going to cease to be a legitimate state in short order.

Doing so means vastly more nukes in the world in the long term, which means the likelihood of an eventual nuclear exchange goes up by orders of magnitude.

Having more nuclear powers in the world does indeed make a nuclear exchange more risky - but I don't think just starting the nuclear exchange right away and setting the probability to 1 is a better outcome.

is Putin really going to forgive him for his quasi-coup?

Based on past actions, nope, and he'd better book a seat on Musk's mission to Mars because there's hardly anywhere on Earth he'll be safe.

I have no idea what the hell was going on there. Plainly he could see the writing on the wall when the attempt to fold his mercs into the conventional army was put forward, so he was losing whatever happened. I can only imagine this was "with your shield or on it" attempt that if he did this, and there was anyone willing to pull the rug out from under Putin, this would be their chance and then he could later make a deal with the new guy.

Well, didn't turn out that way, and in his shoes I would not bank on Belarus as any kind of guarantee of continuing breathing in the long run.

book a seat on Musk's mission to Mars because there's hardly anywhere on Earth he'll be safe.

I'd say safer to book a ticket to visit the Titanic wreck.

IMO I’m not sure why people thought the Ukraine offensive would be fast. Supposedly most of their offensive troops haven’t been deployed. Ukraine seems cautious in their offensives then aggressive when they can be.

Removing Russia from Kherson was very slow too. Attritional warfare until they retreat. Kharkiv was a bit different but supposedly that’s because Russia had moved troops to protect the south and was very opportunistic. Ukraine just seems very fine with attritional warfare and degrading Russias rear with HiMars etc.

Ukraines goals are not entirely to take back territory. Attrition has its own benefit of hollowing out Russian personal so they can’t attack again for a generation.

That's a fair point. I was given the impression by NAFO-adjacent commentors that NATO vehicles would be such a massive advantage that the current anaemic pace of progress seems slow and fitful.

Also some people mistakenly thought that Russian combat effectiveness degraded to such degree that the Ukrainian counter-offensive will be a repeat of Operation Faustschlag of the First World War when Germans completely obliterated Russian defenses and took most of Ukraine and Baltics in just a couple weeks. But by then Russians fought for 4 years, and two Revolutions happened. Right now, they are nowhere near this point.

I have nothing charitable to contribute to most of this. I find 99% of the speculation about this conflict to be in bad faith and based on very little in the way of facts (which as faceh points out, we don't have and can't separate from non-facts reliably or quickly). I find myself intensely frustrated with the expert class and their endless essays and videos that at this point seem clearly to be little more than self aggrandizement and wish casting.

That out off my chest, I would like to point out that over the last couple of months Prigo had made a few videos that seemed increasingly unhinged and paranoid. He was complaining about the contract negotiations with the MoD falling through and them straight up refusing to communicate with him about it and he was convinced the MoD was going to assimilate and take Wagner from him when the contract ended (I believe in July). With the current rumors of Prigo's deal with Putin and Lukashenko consisting of cash, voluntary exile for Prigo and his men who mutineyed, and assimilation of the rest of Ukraine-front Wagner into the MoD, I think it is quite likely that this entire event was the result of a banal contractual dispute mated with (justified) paranoia and personal enmity with the military bureaucracy. Yes, yes, I know, it's a lot more boring than it being some 4D chess by Putin or [long philosophical argument on the inherent inability of those subhuman Russians to self govern because of reasons].

As you point out there are still some very big questions left here. There were videos at the time of Rostov's occupiers denying that they were Wganer. There is the effectively painless penetration of Russia almost to Moscow in just hours despite this being exactly the kind of thing Russia has been worried about, preparing for, and strategizing over since the czars. I don't know what to speculate other than that I do not think it was 4D chess, but once Wagner mobilized, it may have been used that way for a variety of reasons (did Putin's very close relationship with Prigo keep the MoD from raining hellfire on them until a settlement could be worked out?) Will there ultimately be a shake up with the MoD in the next months? Will Belarussian Wagner open up a new line of attack into Ukraine? Where were the Rosgvardiya, who report directly to Putin in my understanding, in all of this and why is the death toll almost non existent?

Prigozhin survives, the regular Russian army slips out of direct civilian control. Civilians in eastern Ukraine find out that things can in fact get worse. Putin keeps bumbling along and attempts to replace Shoigu with an even more incompetent and unpopular yes man, but he proves unable to control the Russian army. The chechens become Moscow’s security force and fragging becomes a common practice.

Putin keeps bumbling along and attempts to replace Shoigu with an even more incompetent and unpopular yes man, but he proves unable to control the Russian army.

I love devarbol Shoigu-posting.

Putin: pathetic, afraid, hides in a bunker, an international war criminal

Shoigu: chills in the palace in Tuva, does woodworking, afraid of nothing, even of the goblin-looking guy with a person army who promises to kill him, hasn't done anything wrong

People have a lot of discourse about "Putin will remove/will not remove Shoigu" and reasons for it but why do they assume that Putin can remove Shoigu in the first place?

There is a schizoid Kremlinology point that Shoigu can be actually more powerful than Putin (at least he is politically older for sure) and hence all the current stuff.

The role of Shoigu in the political system of Russia is far weirder and more important than you normally get from any news about him (just this incompetent clownish guy), but he is one of the few people who took Yeltsin into the government and is still in power, for example.

The official theory is that Shoigu is the reincarnation/avatar of this person, they talk about it in his personal museum in Tuva.

I can't recall any cases when Shoigu isn't just a regular nobody who's only good quality is loyalty to Putin. I guess loyalty for Putin is the main attribute he values, quite understandably. Any other good qualities are just getting in the way of loyalty. Is there any cases which suggest more complicated relationships?

A true loyal nobody is someone like Vaino, a terrified worm who owes Putin his everything (not much) in life. Shoigu is, indeed, closer to the generation that had made Putin, he has an aggressive cult of personalty and clearly was being groomed into a possible successor at some point, possesses an ethnic stronghold in Tyva (which, incidentally, had been sovereign until 1944, and iirc has elite continuity from pre-Soviet era – in a sense, it's more ripe for secession than Caucasus or, certainly, Tatarstan meme), a private army (Patriot) on top of control over the regular army and, indirectly, МЧС, and fails upwards with zero reproach for thirty years now. I'm not sure there's anything to the «shizoid Kremlinology», but he does look like a genuinely powerful figure, with his obsequiousness not much more indicative of his essence than Kadyrov's exaggerated insistence that he's «Putin's infantryman» is the reason his people can harass federal center siloviki when they feel like it.

I do not actually believe the theory that Putin is just a frontman and that the real power is behind the scenes, but if Putin was just a frontman it would be a good choice because, various conspiracy theories about his "true" ethnic background notwithstanding, most Russians seem to buy the idea that he is an ethnic Russian. Having an Abramovich, Shoigu, Kadyrov, or even Lavrov in charge might rankle too many feathers given their mixed or entirely non-Russian ethnic backgrounds. On the other hand, many Russian ethno-nationalists respect Stalin even though he was not Russian, so who knows. Probably you have to either be Russian or at least seem competent and tough. A leader who is non-Russian, incompetent, and weak is too much for even the Russian people to put up with.

That is plausible. It works every which way, of course – one can speculate either that Russia is ran by a cabal of noviops, or that the all-powerful Putin allows said noviops to amass power, secure in the knowledge of his ethnically based legitimacy.

many Russian ethno-nationalists respect Stalin even though he was not Russian

I very much doubt they do. Unless one subscribes to the (popular among formerly occupied peoples but completely incoherent) school of thought that Soviet Communism is great Russian ethnic nationalism, in which case that's true by definition.

In practice there's a grain of truth here, Russians who stan Stalin can be arbitrarily casually racist toward non-Russians, gloat about resettlements, endorse The Great Purge on grounds of «at least he got some Jews» etc. But very rarely (that is, much rarer than outside their camp) do they have any sort of positive ethno-nationalist belief, whether mild or extreme, such as interest in Russian demographics, advocacy against immigration, blood purity maxxing, or losses of ethnic Russians themselves from Stalin's policy successes or failures.

I very much doubt they do. Unless one subscribes to the (popular among formerly occupied peoples but completely incoherent) school of thought that Soviet Communism is great Russian ethnic nationalism, in which case that's true by definition.

Well, if you were non-Russian, it looked this way. Capital of the empire was in Moscow, official language of state, army and administration was Russian, Russian culture was promoted in schools and all media, higher education was Russian, non-Russians who wanted something else than herd sheep or pick cotton had to learn Russian.

Of course, Russian nationalists had higher standards.

(similar case was the Habsburg empire - hated by non-German nationalists as oppressive Germanizing tyranny, and by German nationalists as mongrel Slavic shithole crushing German people)

It's not a question of standards, it's a question of purpose. Would Estonian nationalists approve of a reversed empire, where everyone has learned Estonian and the capital is in Tallinn, but you still live in the Soviet Union, have no protected representation even in Estonia, and then get purged by Georgians, Russians and Jews? No, I think they consider the current condition much more nationalistic.

Shoigu isn't just a regular nobody

I wish Craig Manzin made a sequel to Chernobyl. Not about Fukushima, obviously, but about Spitak. That's when Shoigu stopped being just a regular nobody, in 19-bloody-88.

Does it play any role currently?

Yes, yes it does. There aren't that many politicians in Russia that have their own legitimacy that isn't lent to them by Putin. Shoigu and Kiriyenko (First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration) are probably the biggest ones remaining. Medvedev and Sobyanin are weird cases. On one hand, they drew upon Putin's legitimacy to win the elections; on the other hand, they both won them relatively fair and square.

Some quite good YouTube travelogues on Tuva. Apparently Feynman was obsessed with it. Shoigu himself is only half-Tuvan, which makes sense since he looks Hapa.

For non-romantic, non dewy-eyed take on Shoigu, Tuva and Tuvans, see this.

How Shoigu Got His Post - The Tuvin Mafia Conspiracy

If combination of hardcore Russian nationalist takes, mystical anti-Christianity, deep conspirationism and vantablack pills is your thing, this substack is the place to get it.

There's a paywall unfortunately.

Falling in line with miras_chinotto that I've got little beyond speculation. I'd register another avenue of possibility that it could be a trojan horse-like situation. What better way to send an army into a formerly Russian territory than with the warm welcome of said countries president under the guise of refuge status. Clearly, and perhaps much too conspiratorially, Wagner "pisses off" Putin, is invited to refuge in Belarus, and suddenly Lukashenko finds himself with a dangerous and loyal (to putin) military force of 20,000 inside his gates. Simple bait and switch and now putin is simultaneously occupying two former territories. More to come?

What would be indicators of this? Perhaps Prigozhin resting in Minsk? or more likely a decrease in dollarization, and re-uptake of the ruble in the region.

With Lukashenko apparently indebted to Putin, I would wonder if the populace would even necessarily be aware of the direct reasoning behind said changes.

I find this hard to take seriously.

Putin has been moving military forces through Belarus for months, and they literally staged there.

Further, Russian false flags tend to be less than perfect, certainly not to the extent that they burn 7 aircraft and Putin's prestige over it.

loyal (to putin) military force of 20,000

What makes them loyal to Putin? I can understand loyalty to Prigožin: he's the guy who pays them and at the same time he's not some celestial bureaucrat who manifests only as a payslip signature or an image on TV. The big man is right there in the compound, close enough to be relatable.

There are basically no neutral sources on the war, with everyone cheerleading for one side or the other. That said, there's still degrees of credibility, and if you focus on the better sources you can get a decent idea of what's going on. The ones I keep up to date with are /r/credibledefense, Perun, and Kofman. There are also prediction markets for some things.

The fog of war will be thick around Prig's insurrection for a while yet, but from my outside observations it smelled like Prig launched the uprising because he was desperate. Despite this, he got surprisingly far with it, and likely took the first offramp that would allow him to escape with his life (for now). The deal he got was interesting because Lukashenko wants to remain independent from Russia and this might give him some leverage somehow. I'd estimate Prig has a 90% chance of dying if he remains as high-profile as he was before the uprising, while the chances go down to 50-50 if he quiets down or goes fully pro-Putin. His power base is likely to be severely degraded in the short to medium term with many of Wagner's soldiers being switched to MoD control and Prig being effectively banished from Russia for the time being. His ability to reconstitute seems uncertain, but it's a possibility.

What I find annoying about the whole things is that none of the talking heads manage to predict the way it will unfold. And yet I am supposed to take them and the news they bring of the war seriously.

Imma tap the "skin in the game" sign again.

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.

You find that convincing? Empty repetitions of "I hear your concerns, dear voters compatriots" peppered with equally vacuous applause lights. We have "direct" at home.

I don't know what convincing you're referring to, I don't know if the problem was actually solved.

I just can't recall any American politician admitting that there's a problem, getting into the details on use-it-or-lose budget rules, saying that this is an instance of a more general failure case, and then admitting the constraints of what the state can achieve.

Even admitting the existence of a problem that happened on your watch is vanishingly rare.

And this was just a random scroll.

Direct would be:

Next year, you‘ll get 12%, and you‘ll like it. Money doesn‘t grow on trees, my good man. Extra hospice money is obviously a matter of low priority to the state, and I personally couldn‘t care less. Have no doubt. Most of the time I don‘t even know where the vital bribe money goes. We will certainly keep doing it.

Life is very complicated for me right now. Society and religious organizations should get off my ass, or they will be folded into United Russia. I‘ll show them how fast-changing and fairly dangerous our world can be. So I need everyone in the traditional faiths to pray for my inner strength in these trying times.

I promise to look at the issue you brought up, when I‘m not doing PR or otherwise engaged. Do not worry, this will never happen.

There are plenty of Harvard and Yale (and before that Andover and Exeter) types in the State Department who can do ‘erudite statesman’ if you want them to (and they sometimes do, although usually not on CNN or the evening news). American politicians cater to the American public. As DeSantis is currently demonstrating, being smart and educated and intellectual does precisely nothing for you with the American public.

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.

You will not grasp her with your mind

or cover with a common label,

for Russia is one of a kind —

believe in her, if you are able...

https://ruverses.com/fyodor-tyutchev/russia-cannot-be-known-by-the-mind/424/

Like many, I have overcorrected on Wagner's mutiny somewhat, though less so than e.g. Karlin who had found a new delightful opportunity for youthful wonder. At this point, the story looks boring and in line with what normal pro-Western analysts are saying, e.g. here or here (I don't follow the war very closely though, there surely are better sources).

For a while now, MoD has been in the process of first diminishing and then dismantling Wagner as an autonomous force (for understandable reasons that all functional states have figured out by, like, Renaissance). Prig is, well, a warlord whose relevance overwhelmingly rides on controlling a private army, so he was understandably opposed to it, justifying his opposition with (arguably, maybe, true) arguments about relative performance and the great common task of fighting the accursed hohol. His contempt for Shoigu was perhaps a little affected to resonate with the common man (and indeed, even pro-regime voenkors shitting on Wagner now can't bring themselves to say that Shoigu&Gerasimov have legitimacy, they'll just get clown-emojid to hell and back – incidentally, as of now there's 420K clown reacts under Prigozhin's declaration of turning back). His goals were ensuring his survival at a minimum, and his unchallenged control over Wagner at the maximum.

I believe we don't yet know how this will shake out. The default outcome, corroborated by the renewal of treason case against Prig, is that Putin+Luka have prevailed and shooed everyone into apparent compromise, which just means postponed execution for Prig and likely his inner circle. Maybe not – the murky current status of Wagnerites suggests there's uncertainty remaining. It was close anyway. Prig has failed in securing his maximalist terms (removal of MoD heads who directly threaten him) but has successfully demonstrated that their worthlessness is a Schelling point and the army's integrity is hanging by a thread. It's just a thicker thread than he hoped. Maybe it's thin enough for Putin to fear touching him again.

My prediction is 60% Wagner dissolving and Prigozhin being eliminated in some manner (maybe not killed but actually convicted, maybe he offs himself), 25% Prigozhin, Utkin etc. somehow weaseling out of it, brokering some deal with Luka and either just chilling in Belarus, «going missing», or escaping to… Africa?, and 15% «anything goes», because Russia is, after all, a magical place.

P.S. Lukashenko has always had more agency and character than Putin, this only changed somewhat after Russian aid in suppression of Belarus protests and EU issuing Luka a black mark; as you can see, he owes Putin his very survival, yet cannot be forced into substantially committing to the war. For years, he was propping up his quasi-Soviet economy with Russian subsidies and markets. Hell, he's the nominal supreme commander of the Union State, He's a tough and crafty man (also much taller, and Putin straight up fears tall people), a real self-made dictator who uses Russia/Putin for his convenience and ponders incurred obligations at his leisure. But the same is true for Kadyrov, Tokayev (also rescued by Russia, also lukewarm), probably even Shoigu – literally anyone with their own army and power base.

Putin's image of a strongman is as fraudulent and laughable as his mafia empire's image of some based Orthodox Christian Bear. He's our curse, nothing more. A murderous curse, but not particularly politically savvy.

Ok so I’m not understanding what people think Prigs goal was if it was not overthrow. He marched on Moscow unopposed. What didn’t he expect? Actually making it to Moscow and having a bloody battle? What were the alternate scenarios? Putin crushes Wagner faster or Putin made a faster proposal to make Prog happy? Or I he could have assumed more of the military would have backed him.

I have a big issue in not being able to see what scenerio Prog thought would play out. Putin telling Prog I love you bud here’s Shogs and Gerasimovs heads is the only better scenerio I see he could have expected other than taking power.

The 4-D chess scenerios just seem way out there because it made Putin look weak and that Moscow is exposed to the next general with some troops.

There is no next general. The army is gelded and atomized; they could only support an external force articulating their dissatisfaction with S&G. And they failed to support that force.

Yes, I think Prig desperately gambled on Putin fearing general mutiny and loss of control of big parts of the army, and personally guaranteeing, overriding S&G's authority, that all attempts of MoD to absorb Wagner are hereby terminated. When it became clear that the army, for the moment, won't seriously stop him from getting to Moscow, but also won't actively help him fight whatever loyalist forces Putin can muster, and that Putin doesn't plan to give up on S&G or their plans, he folded. The key reason was probably high-ranking Army figures like Surovikin refusing to endorse the mutiny.

Kamil Galeev thinks there are more coming and he seems to have been right more than mosts. Putin looked weak. You just need a general popular with other generals. Or you could see a break away Republic by a local governor or some oligarchs. Siberia is where the wealth comes from so with the army artitted perhaps a few oligarchs try and take over some wealth. Who knows there are many possible scenerios that I don’t know enough about local power structures to know what they can do. When you lose a world war you usually lose your empire.

Galeev is a delusional Turkic supremacist and tries to conjure his dreams of Russian dissolution into reality with prolific twitter posting. He has been right exactly once – predicting that Russia will not succeed at conquering Ukraine, the rest is downstream of that take; but this could have been and was predicted by anyone with a modicum of insight into Russian system, e.g. me.

Putin looked weak.

This obsession with signaling is predicated on the idea that people in power don't know the real state of events and have to infer them from tea leaves and gestures, and is exactly why most popular analysis is hopeless. Looks don't matter, only actual capabilities. Putin looks like a pitiful monkey and he has been looking this way for a long time, but he has proven still having the capability to make Wagner run. This is enough. It'll be cold comfort for a rebelling general to know that as he dies, he's taking a few batallions' worth of FSO with him.

You just need a general popular with other generals.

So, Surovikin? He's refused to join the mutiny.

There isn't anyone. Putin has worked extraordinarily well to purge every charismatic figure from the army. Killing people cooler than him is his whole edge.

Or you could see a break away Republic by a local governor or some oligarchs.

Yes, well, which republic? Tyva or Chechnya, maybe. If Kadyrov and Shoigu remain "loyal", this doesn't happen. Governor, oligarchs – haha, as if.

Russia can well unravel, don't get me wrong. But this will have very little to do with the fact that Putin has looked weak the other day.

You’re forgetting here that Wagner Group are mercenaries. Mercenary armies marching against the cities which hired them happens all the time throughout history. They don’t do it because they want to overthrow the regime. They do it because they want to get paid.

I do not know the financial situation of Wagner. Perhaps this is not about payment in money. Maybe Russian troops really did fire upon Wagner mercenaries. What’s clear is that Prigozhin felt ripped off, and as a mercenary leader, marching his army to the doorstep of the palace is a tried and true method of litigating counterparty risk. It’s much easier for Putin to give these guys what they want than it is to risk urban warfare in Moscow.

“Merceneries”. These aren’t men without a country. They are still Russians. I don’t know the exact amount they have better pay, but they aren’t guys fighting for a random flag paying them more money.

I... don't have a good model of how mercenary these mercenaries are or how committed to Russia they are. I can definitely imagine having citizenship in a state and still having far more stake in my mercenary group than in that state. Especially in a state like Russia. And I think the believability of that is what makes marching on the capital a viable tactic for getting paid. (believability because, you don't even need to intend to ever follow through as long as you can win the game of chicken.)

I think thinking in terms of loyalty at all is a mistake; at least at oligarch levels.

Prigozhin wanted to be in Ukraine for aggrandizement (and financial) reasons when it looked like a sure thing; now that it is in doubt he wants to go back to larping as a rhodesian (and collecting rent on gold mines and such.)

He gets legitimacy and metal from being aligned with the russian state; but I can't imagine that's worth getting battle of the somme'ed.

That said, he must be pretty sure that Putin is either gonna be dead or gone before too long because Prigozhin is for sure on the isotope injection list now.

Rule 1 of coups is not to announce them before you do them. The element of surprise is essential, as is being in the capital ready to go (not a thousand kilometers away in Rostov). Prigozhin didn't seem to have anyone outside Wagner supporting him (or if he did they didn't do anything). This is very strange.

I think this was a fake coup that was used to lure out Putin's enemies. Either Putin knew about this and decided to let it happen, in a controlled way, so as to unmask the disloyal, or he plotted it with Prigozhin himself. The governors and oligarchs who were not swift enough to give Putin their support have probably been marked down. Prigozhin is now disqualified as a competitor to Putin after withdrawing, even if he doesn't end up irradiated. Wagner is being dissolved as an independent actor, its soldiers mostly being integrated into the Russian military.

There's a precedent in the 2016 Turkey coup and the 2021 Capitol incident (how could a mob of unarmed protestors possibly get inside a hardened-against-terrorists building against the will of the government and why did they leave when the government activated the alarm system telling them to do so). A weak coup attempt can function like a vaccine, immunizing against political threats.

Furthermore, were seven aircraft shot down? There are photos circulating of a downed helicopter and a communications plane - are these contemporary, geolocated images?

how could a mob of unarmed protestors possibly get inside a hardened-against-terrorists building against the will of the government and why did they leave when the government activated the alarm system telling them to do so

Because the capitol building is not hardened against terrorists. You used to be able to just walk in without any screening whatsoever (this is still true of many state capitols) and even more recently the only security was a checkpoint with a metal detector manned by garden variety police officers. Breaches have not been that rare, though they seem to be quickly forgotten. It does seem like the idea of a "People's House" that any citizen can wander into to observe the miracle of democracy at work is just about dead and buried, so I suspect this won't be the case for much longer, though it had a good run.

As for why the protestors left when they were asked to, it is because for all their fiery rhetoric they were still the pampered residents of a first-world country and uncomfortable with violent conflict. I watched the video of Ashli Babbitt being shot and the reaction of the people nearest to her was telling; in an instant they transformed from would-be revolutionaries into scared children begging for help from the same officers that they had been pushing back and hurling abuse at for hours, as though the prospect of being hurt while battering down a door guarded by armed police was inconceivable. In a word, they were LARPing, and their bluff was called, just as Prigozhin's was when his forces got within striking distance of Moscow without any intent to follow through and overthrow the government.

All I can be confident of is that Prigozhin made a catastrophic political miscalculation. I'm not sure what that miscalculation was, people can delude themselves into all sorts of weird ideas about how things will play out. But this was surely not the outcome he wanted.

I don't think he could have possibly expected things to go better from a military standpoint - he encountered basically no resistance and had a clear run to Moscow.

Personally my best guess is that he expected Putin to side with him somehow. From where I'm sitting that seems like a crazy thing to expect, but he was always careful to avoid laying blame on Putin personally even in his most unhinged rants. He never declared a goal of overthrowing the regime, even though charging an army at the capital does carry a certain implication.

Also Putin was very slow to say anything publicly. I don't know what he was waiting for, but it's at least possible he was himself weighing the situation and deciding which way to jump.

My three current hypotheses are:

  • coup gone wrong. Prig had some supporters he relied on, but they decided to sit this one out, so he got off on the first face-saving stop

  • escalation gone wrong. Prig had specific beef with the MoD, but they called his bets at every step until he ended up leading an actual coup, so he finally folded

  • hail mary move. Prig was told he would lose Wagner and his life, so he went all-in and took the first offer that was better than that

  • the meds kicked in, or what @2rafa wrote. No one is a purely rational actor, Prig could've been drunk, high, stressed out or just mentally unwell

The idea that makes the most sense is Prig thought he had other support perhaps even Putin. When the best case scenerio became battle of Moscow and decapitating Putin he backed down since he didn’t want to be the barbarian that led to the fall of the Russian Empire.

coup gone wrong. Prig had some supporters he relied on, but they decided to sit this one out, so he got off on the first face-saving stop

The speculation is that it was Surovikin, who Prigozhin was complementary of but quickly came out with a cease and desist video.

Of course, that might be US intelligence trying to get him Rommel'd.

I finished reading Peter Turchin's new book, End Times this past week, which visits many elements of the culture war, including Trump, immigration, 99%ers, even Ukraine. I hadn't read his previous books, but apparently they included more of the data and graphs that he works with for his research. This one is branded more populist, from the name, bright red cover, and relegation of models and graphs to the final third of the book, which is all appendix. He comes across as a moderate Marxist, who's trying not to alienate American conservatives.

The basic argument is that a core part of nation ending turmoil is a cycle of what he calls the wealth pump and overproduction of elites. A society will start out an epoch with a more or less equitable share of power and money between the workers and the elites, but at some point, this is disrupted by the elites ovedrawing resources from the economy, often because they have too many children, or allow more upward mobility than downward. Then popular immiseration sets in, where the workers have decreased access to the kind of resources they need to thrive -- land, capital, opportunities -- and the elites have a "wealth pump," which seems to be his way of talking returns on capital outpacing returns on labor. Also, increased immigration to keep labor costs low, and benefit employers. The wealthy grow, the poor grow, and the middle class shrinks. Elite competition becomes more and more intense, both because there are more people competing for roughly the same number of positions, often simply because population growth outstrips the growth of important positions, and because the alternative of downward mobility looks worse and worse in comparison. So everyone with any money or influence tries extra hard to get their kids a good position at whatever their era's version of the ivy leagues are, so they can benefit from the growth of the top 10%, while desperately fearing falling into the precariat. There are a bunch of young intelligentsia without money or positions, but a lot of education and family investment, ready to become counter elites or revolutionaries. Often they wage wars until enough of them die to relieve the social pressure, and the cycle starts over.

Turchin's main prescription follows the outlines of the New Deal -- high tax rates for the rich, a growing minimum wage, labor unions, low immigration, perhaps public works projects, that kind of thing.

I found the prescription, especially, underwhelming. Turchin doesn't really go into the kinds of jobs workers do, or how that might influence things, and there's no real commentary about going from an agricultural labor base, to industrial manufacturing, to service, and the growth of a suspicion that it isn't just the aspiring elite jobs that are basically useless, but many of the "workers" are as well. A large component of the current malaise seems to be the impression not only that there are too many leaders, not enough followers, but that, increasingly, the followers are all simulated, automated, or passive consumers, not workers at all. It seems like any plan that could hope to stabilize society over the next hundred years would need to incorporate the possibility that most middle class jobs, especially, as well as a decent number of working class ones, will be automated, while higher level positions and things like garbage collection and construction continue to be necessary much longer. Sure, we could probably move to an economy where each person's job is to care for some other person's parent, child, or pet, but that doesn't seem like a great outcome. He does not mention this at all.

Ever since the ACX guest review of two Jane Jacobs books, I haven’t been able to get the idea out of my head.

Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines.

Jacobs focuses on this “import replacement” as the force of actual quality-of-life improvement. Replacing imports means capital investments pay back into your own city. Otherwise you’re just getting wealth siphoned off to someone else. Someone with a cooler city.

Here we have our analogy to Turchin’s wealth pump. Elites concentrated in the most effective city. A precariat born of those lower-class, fortunate enough to occupy the city regions, who transition to a service economy. And proles populating the rest of the country, unable to share in the proverbial rising tide.

So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. …

Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline.

Her three categories are military production, specific types of unbalanced trade, and…oh. Welfare. Turchin’s prescription cannot make more successful, growing city regions. It just delays the descent of flyover country into open rebellion. (Wait, now I want to read an application of this theory to the National Socialists.) Jacobs’ outlook is quite grim, and the closest thing she gives to a solution is secession. I guess that beats the mass die-offs hypothesized by Turchin?

There might be a third way. Jacobs notes the importance of “city regions,” hinterlands surrounding a productive city core. These sort of reap the benefits of that city investment, engaging in some form of import replacement. They’re explicitly much better off than the periphery of her model. Can we incentivize development of these regions wherever past nations, with worse transportation and less surplus, might have sucked them dry?

Turchin seems to say—it doesn’t matter. Fill a nation with productive, import-replacing regions, and you’re just going to overproduce elites faster. Human nature ensures the rest. I am very uncomfortable with this conclusion! I don’t want the future to converge on separatist social Darwinism, nations doomed to collapse or fission. Neither does Turchin, I suppose. Maybe he can keep the intelligentsia busy until we work something out.

If Turchin is a Marxist, then that conclusion follows.

I also liked the review, but I feel like this is too pessimistic:

Jacobs’ outlook is quite grim, and the closest thing she gives to a solution is secession. I guess that beats the mass die-offs hypothesized by Turchin?

IIRC, the main issue was that there isn't a feedback mechanism for cities to realize when they aren't gaining from trade, since they don't have their own currency. Jacobs recommends secession because if there are a bunch of city states, they can all have their own currency, and the value of that currency compared to other cities will give them a very accurate and up to date feedback mechanism of their local surplus.

Now let me think... isn't there a bunch of stuff going on with some sort of... digital currency...? Could it be that this is actually a real problem solvable with crypto?!

Jokes aside, I really do believe that if you buy into Jacobs' import replacement hypothesis, city based or city + hinterland based cryptocurrencies are the solution. Many smaller countries and places like Miami have already experimented with it. While it hasn't exactly gone well, I think the better explanation to the failure of these projects is that the traditional finance system essentially tried to sabotage crypto for over a decade, before declaring outright war.

If we could bring in crypto protocols and clear, fast, transparent exchange rates to merge with the traditional finance system, I don't see why over time we couldn't build a state that gives each city its unique currency, without the risks and impossibilities of secession in the modern world.

Utah has a state level currency called the Goldback. No one uses it.

It seems like adoption issues are the main obstacle to local currencies.

What is the advantage of cryptocurrency here as compared to conventional digital currencies, or indeed conventional currencies?

That was a good review.

It's plausible that more city region autonomy could help both Jacob's problem, and Turchin's, since part of the problem of elite overproduction is that influential positions don't scale with population. When the US population increases by 100 million people, we don't automatically get more Ivy League universities, legislators, states, or even newspapers. He likens this to a game of musical chairs, where instead of removing a chair each round, you keep the same number of chairs, but add more contestants and higher stakes.

If a region grows a mid-sided city like Phoenix, maybe some power should be encouraged to build there, even if it's kind of an ugly city in the middle of a desert, and not a cool, hip, popular coastal city. Maybe it wouldn't be so ugly if there were a mechanism for people to gain status from improving it. Perhaps there should be things for aspiring elites to do there, and a currency to keep track of how well they're doing at it, so that there's some status to be had out of managing it well. Maybe it was a bad idea to concentrate all the most capable young people at a few colleges on the East Coast and perhaps a couple in California. It's not so bad even now. Sure, Phoenix isn't cool, but it's sort of competently run, and its university is sort of acceptable, with a few good programs, its state legislature occasionally makes useful decisions, so things aren't completely failing to work, but it does seem like there's a lot of room to improve without millions of people dying as in most of the examples. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be too many cases of this happening without societal breakdown.

I would use the detroit example to go the exact opposite direction. There actually is a very strong signal to detroit when their trade balance is off. If detroit is consuming more than it's producing then on net dollars are flowing out of detroit and very quickly the citizens will run out of money and be forced to either start making detroit more productive or move somewhere else where they can be productive. The only way a city in decline can be sustained long term would be if somehow dollars were continually being injected into the local economy in a way that was completely disconnected from production. Oh wait, that's exactly what's happening. So now the prescription is clear, end the entitlements and redistribution and the city will be forced to come back to a trade balance.

The issue isn't that there isn't a signal, the issue is that prices and wages are sticky. This is just basic Monetarist/New Keynesianism macroeconomics. Foreign exchange markets are extremely price flexible they change every second. Wages from union contracts are not. Their is a whole literature on optimal currency areas that covers this.

This is also why I think Jane Jacobs is severely overrated. She seems like someone who wants to opine on macroeconomics without even having an undergraduates understanding of the topic. If you don't even try to deal with and refute the ideas they teach in an undergraduate course how can you even say you are making a serious intellectual contribution? There are ideas like Paul Krugman's new trade theory and the agglomeration effects that deal with these things that could make your ideas work, but you don't understand them; or, even macroeconomics 101 stuff like price stickiness.

Isn't her quote above basically about nominal price rigidity and optimal currency areas? She's saying that if Detroit, hypothetically, had its own currency, it would depreciate and the real prices and wages would decrease, but this isn't possible because its currency is shared with the entire US.

That can't explain the long run growth of countries overtime; unless, you also allow for something like agglomeration effects. Detroit having it's own currency prevents a short run recession, but doesn't prevent the auto industry moving to other areas and depressing the economy in the long run. Once again, assuming agglomeration effects like those Paul Krugman talked about in his work.

The thing is, though, that Detroit's trade balance isn't really off. The city itself is bad but the more accurate indicator is the metro. For all the talk about how the city has become a ghost town, the metro population has been stable since 1970, and is higher than it was at any time prior to that. This would be pretty meaningless if everyone left were poor, but that isn't the case either; the metro GDP per capita ranks 92nd out of 382 metros in the US. It's not great, but it's higher than a lot of trendy Sun Belt metros like Phoenix, Tampa, Hampton Roads, Las Vegas, Orlando, and Jacksonville.

The city itself, on the other hand, lost half of its population since 1970, and that's its biggest problem—it's underpopulated. The infrastructure was built for double the population, and combine that with the fact that the only people left living there are those without the resources to move to the suburbs, and the tax base erodes further, making it even harder to maintain all that infrastructure, making it even more desirable to leave, etc. Meanwhile, all the people from the good old days who got nice municipal pensions are retiring, and, you get the idea. Then again, the same thing happened in Pittsburgh except people left the area entirely and it never got nearly as bad as Detroit and is now one of the better-regarded cities in the country so you're mileage may vary.

I don’t see a new deal working. The elephant in the room is AI which can easily replace the bulk of the workforce in most industries. We simply don’t need the people anymore and unless we can grow ourselves into needing the tens of thousands of new college graduates on top of the displaced workers also looking for the same jobs. I would expect the demand for white collar workers to decline by half within a generation. We’re going to be shedding those jobs at the same time we’re training people to be essentially useless because we’re training them for a job that won’t exist.

What we really need is a worker sink. One of the things that worked fairly well in the past — across civilizations actually— was priesthood or monks or nuns being a prestige position. If you had too many kids, you could highly encourage one or two to become monks or nuns or something else. Another thing that would work is space colonization, which would provide a sink for the surplus population, jobs, and people to work out the logistics of managing a space colony. There would be need for construction as well, as you’d be building the New New World. This would be something like what happened in Europe. The extra people went to America, Australia, or some colonial conquest elsewhere thus giving the elites fairly secure positions.

I'd argue that we already have a large priesthood in government (15% of all jobs in the U.S.) and non-profits (10% of all jobs – nearly all of which have been created since 1970).

I have no doubt these categories of work will continue to mushroom.

But I'm not sure a larger priesthood will solve the problem. For one, look how many people have bullshit jobs who still have sucky lives. They are overwhelmed with pointless meetings and have a great deal of stress about their "job" which if it ceased to exist no one would even notice. And of course, no matter how many bullshit jobs are created, there will still only be a finite amount of status to go around.

When it comes to space, I'm not sure that gets us where we need to go either. When space exploration does happen, it will be the machines to do it. Sending bags of meat into space is incredibly difficult and expensive, so it's not likely to solve our problem of having too many bags of meat.

Status is zero sum. But is it really? I agree that you can't make say, 10 more "POTUS" positions. Being the leader of a global superpower isn't something you can print, and neither are many other relative positions.

But you can split large ponds into small ponds. You can get people to be happy with being treated as high status by their peers instead of needing to be treated as high status by their underlings. There will always be that guy who has a million followers when someone else has only a hundred, but there's no reason the guy with only a hundred has to actually feel less self worth. It seems largely psychological to me.

I do agree that- more bullshit jobs alone wouldn't be the solution here. Since I'm describing a more cultural and perceptive shift.

One of the things that worked fairly well in the past — across civilizations actually— was priesthood or monks or nuns being a prestige position.

That worked well for grain-farming civilizations; I don't know if there was a celibate class of priests/shamans/full-time religious people in pastoral societies. Space colonization could work, but conditions up there are a good deal more hostile than Antarctica and as such it's going to be expensive as all hell. Not like you can load a boat with a bunch of convicts and send it over to Australia or something.

Being expensive and difficult might be a good thing. It would thus require more minds working to make it successful and efficient.

I s'pose you could have a bunch of high-status maybe-celibate people working on the space program as support staff for the space colonists? But that too is expensive as hell. Monasteries used to be at least theoretically self-supporting; the monks brewed beer or made cheese or whatever. Can that space mining program pay for itself by bringing back a bunch of gold or something?

Yes.

There's incredible mineral wealth floating around up there. A bit hard to get it down though.

Yeah, the space mining has to turn a profit. And not become a victim of its own success by crashing the price of gold or whatever it is they're mining.

One of the things that worked fairly well in the past — across civilizations actually— was priesthood or monks or nuns being a prestige position. If you had too many kids, you could highly encourage one or two to become monks or nuns or something else.

This more or less describes the conditions among traditionalist Catholics today, and they have not really ironed out the kinks. Particularly already-difficult courting norms find it difficult to cope with the gender imbalance from girls being more status conscious, and the norms surrounding entrance to a monastery or seminary result in a large fraction of the most talented young men doing... more or less nothing because they're trying to decide whether to go to a monastery as a full time job(that is, deciding as a full time job. Obviously being a monk is a full time commitment.).

What we really need is a worker sink.

What we have now suffices. More prolonged and more useless "education" and "training", more sinecures and bullshit jobs, more generous disability, more early retirement, in extremis even universal basic income. No need for upturning whole society.

One of the things that worked fairly well in the past — across civilizations actually— was priesthood or monks or nuns being a prestige position.

When this was the case, priests and monastics were tiny part of population, recruited from elite classes, not from losers and rejects.

Classic article

The Clerical Population of Medieval England

If the total population was about 2,200,000 in 1377, the combined numbers of the

religious (10,600) and seculars (24,900) should have been about 35,500 or 1.6 per

cent of the total population. Omitting the nuns, the total is about 33,500 men

or about three per cent of the male population.

...

Another thing that would work is space colonization, which would provide a sink for the surplus population, jobs, and people to work out the logistics of managing a space colony.

This will provide jobs for few highly skilled and well paid professionals, equivalents of today deep sea divers and offshore oil platform workers.

You do not want on space station someone who was fired from minimum wage McDonald job because robot can flip burgers cheaper and better.

Another thing that would work is space colonization, which would provide a sink for the surplus population, jobs, and people to work out the logistics of managing a space colony.

If anything, space colonization is a sphere extremely amendable to automatization. Extreme temperatures, pressures, lack of gravity — robots will perform any work in those conditions better than any man in a space suit. Then all the food, amenities for colonists — they weight a lot, and take a lot of space. No, I think if mass scale space exploration will happen — it will be through Von Neumann probes.

Marxism has been tried, over and over again. Always it produces shortages, usually it produces skulls. Why do we have to keep doing it?

The progress should "progress" somewhere, right. So what's more obvious way to progress than to make everything more fair? The urge to try something "fairer" is quite understandable i think. I do agree with you that it's not the right way, but it's hard to propose any actual alternative to that. "The universe is inherently unfair so no point trying" isn't convincing many. Stupid dysfunctional species cornered themselves into playing god and constantly failing, obviously.

"Fair" is just an applause light. Marxism doesn't result in "fair". It results in "poor". Try something else.

The urge of the majority of marxism supporters, at least the idealistic ones, is to make the reality more fair. That's why they're trying and trying and will keep trying. You don't need to convince me, but can't you really see how any random fact of perceived unfairness brings people towards trying to make things more "fair" the way the understand it?

As I said "fair" is just an applause light. Brought to the concrete level it just seems to mean they want more for them and theirs and (very important for many Marxists) less for not-them and theirs, which is a common desire but lacks the high-mindedness of "fair". There's always going to be perceived unfairness, and Marxism is always going to be one of the worst ways to attempt to alleviate it.

There's always going to be perceived unfairness

Sure, so there always will be the way to "progress" things towards. Look, you've asked a very simple question - "Why do we have to keep doing it?", i've explained why. Are you arguing because you think people keep trying marxism for other reasons? Or are you arguing because you think the reason i say is correct, you just don't agree with it?

It's not my fault that young people find marxism or any of it's many versions convincing enough to make the world a more fairer place. There's very little alternative ideas which can in simple words address that "fairness" urge directly. The others are mostly sidestepping the problem - oh, the unfairness is always and eternal, we're in hell and nothing you can do about it, be a good boy and clean your room(sure! thinks 15yo boy whos mother killing herself every day on the heavy job and he sees that, while watching western celebrities on TV), ah, the world is already perfectly fair and harmonious, don't you see? (yup! thinks the father whos son just returned without half of his head from a war over someones bank account) and so on.

Look, you've asked a very simple question - "Why do we have to keep doing it?", i've explained why.

Your explanation amounts to the Politician's Fallacy -- "We must do something (to alleviate unfairness). This (Marxism) is something. Therefore we must do it."

We don't have to take Marxism at its word that it makes the world more fair, not when the actual results have been demonstrated over and over again. Nor is it necessary to have an alternate solution in order to reject Marxism.

I'm sorry, i have a stupid habit of editing my message a lot, so if you care enough to look at it again - i think i'm trying to explain there that it's not just that the marxism is "something", therefore we must do that. But it's trying to address the problem(real or not, but it's very common perceived problem in our world full of terrors) directly, and it's doing it convincingly enough for many. And the lack of simple enough alternative way towards is helping marxism greatly.

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Arnold Kling has a saying, a sort of right wing spin on this, that, "Markets are unfair. Use markets."

It has the same He Giveth and He Taketh Away result.

This is, as usual, only a very modern, liberal and materialist view on the matter.

I submit to you that the universe is perfect, that everyone gets their just desserts, and that attempts at improving on God's design by Man are doomed to the failures all our ancestral tales chronicle for they are nothing but sinful hubris.

There's no alternative to this world, there's choosing life, and choosing death.

Those enlightened thoughts aren't convincing everyone as well, "weirdly" enough.

Are you forgetting about Plato and his work The Republic where he lays out a rational plan for how an ideal state should be run. Or the religious reforms of Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Mani, Mohmmed, et al. They tend to present themselves as bringing back old wisdom, but they clearly believe that God's designs have gone astray and it is up to humans to change them.

There is definitely an alternative to this world in Buddhism and Christianity. Nirvana through enlightenment in Buddhism; or, the Kingdom of Heaven through Christ in Christianity.

You are confusing the views of a few ancient and medieval sources with what people believed in general. Hell you sound more like you are parroting the views of the early modern philosopher Leibniz then any ancient or medieval person.

Oh I'm not forgetting Plato. I'm accusing people of forgetting Aristotle.

Turchin's opinion of Stalin seemed somewhere between neutral and "he got the job done," and seems basically neutral about piles of skulls in general. Sure, he would prefer not to be shot in a purge, but he's also something of a Tolstoyan -- things happen as they must, because of the forces of history, and sometimes all the cliodynamics professors are sent to the hard labor camps for world historical reasons. He's very Slavic, and not much of an optimist about this.

He seems to like the New Deal era partly because, unlike the Civil War, it did not result in piles of skulls. He also speaks well about British colonialism, because at least it wasn't their empire that was falling apart at the time.

Sure, Marxism mostly fails to create good economies. However, the part of Marxism where you drag rich people out of their homes in the middle of the night, shoot them in the back of the head, and toss their still-warm bodies into a ditch is appealing to many people. So what if everything goes to shit afterwards? You still got your revenge on the previous elites, and nothing can ever take that away from you.

The other thing is, command economies are pretty effective if you want to speed-run a society's development from mostly agricultural to mostly industrial and if you want to introduce stuff like public education and women's rights on a mass scale. Many people die in the process, but a few decades later the survivors look back and see that they went from having no prospects except subsistence farming when they were children to now working as factory professionals or bureaucrats.

Can capitalist economies accomplish the same thing? Sure, and probably with less death on average. US-aligned dictatorships murdered over a million civilians during the Cold War, whereas the failures and repressions of communist regimes led to probably an order of magnitude more deaths in communist-controlled countries during the same period. However, this is a rather subtle point and the difference is not so obviously glaring as to immediately cause the average person to throw out Marxism as a clear failure. For most of the history of the competition between capitalism and communism, in most of the world, the average person's choice has not been between modern-style US liberal democracy and communism, it has been between non-communist dictatorship and communist dictatorship.

However, the part of Marxism where you drag rich people out of their homes in the middle of the night, shoot them in the back of the head, and toss their still-warm bodies into a ditch is appealing to many people.

Indeed. So practicing Marxists should be treated approximately similarly to those practicing Nazism, and those merely preaching it should be considered evil by the mere fact of doing so

I wonder what "practicing" Marxists means here. Most of them are just people with an opinion.

Funny how you didn't wonder what "practicing" means in relation to Nazis.

I know it's hilarious right. But yes that too, sure.

For most of the history of the competition between capitalism and communism, in most of the world, the average person's choice has not been between modern-style US liberal democracy and communism, it has been between non-communist dictatorship and communist dictatorship.

Granting that this is true, Park Chung Hee was a much better ruler than Kim Il Sung. Pinochet was a much better ruler than Allende. Etc, etc.

Park Chung Hee was a much better ruler than Kim Il Sung.

Both killed many people but yeah, I imagine that Kim Il Sung probably killed an order of magnitude more people.

Pinochet was a much better ruler than Allende.

Not sure about this. I have never heard of Allende being responsible for killing anyone, although being a politician he probably was. Pinochet, on the other hand, clearly was responsible for killing many people.

I have never heard of Allende being responsible for killing anyone

In large part this is because Allende was overthrown before he could transition to actual communism. So perhaps my statement should have been "a much better ruler than Allende would have been".

Allende is set to opposed the threat of a good example. But now Pinochet exists as an example of a bad capitalist.

I have a friend from Chile who is absolutely opposed to the woke (and to a somewhat lesser degree the broader left) but wants to vomit when you bring up Pinochet. His family personally suffered.

I'm going to take a page out of the tankie playbook and say that if your friend's family suffered, it must mean they were commie bastards who deserved it.

Cycle of violence my friend. I'm going to assume with a comment like that that your family ought to be Roman-offed.

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What is this comment supposed to achieve? Are you being ironic? Are you literally saying someone whose family personally suffered deserved it? Speak plainly and less inflammatorily.

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Allende completely cratered the economy of Chile though. If we're talking what's better for the average citizen I would take a good economy plus a medium sized purge over permanent economic ruin under socialism.

The other thing is, command economies are pretty effective if you want to speed-run a society's development from mostly agricultural to mostly industrial and if you want to introduce stuff like public education and women's rights on a mass scale. Many people die in the process, but a few decades later the survivors look back and see that they went from having no prospects except subsistence farming when they were children to now working as factory professionals or bureaucrats.

What do you mean by speed run? China tried all this and floundered hopelessly. It wasn't until they liberalized that they started to industrialize. Russia was already quite heavily industrialized before the revolution and it's not clear that central planning helped at all in the process. Other more liberalized countries like Germany were and continued to be more industrialized.

Countries can develop under central planning sure. The question is does it do better than the alternative and every natural experiment we have shows it doesn't. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are richer than China. South Korea richer than North Korea. West Germany even now is richer than East Germany.

Technological growth made everyone better off and assigning this boon to the totalitarian state that happened to take power while the rising tide lifted all boats is an easy mistake to make, but a mistake all the same.

Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are richer than China.

This is not good comparison, esp. the latter two. These cities are population sinks, compare them say, to Shanghai, low TFR higher GDP per capita, in constrast to more inland regions in mainland China.

However, the part of Marxism where you drag rich people out of their homes in the middle of the night, shoot them in the back of the head, and toss their still-warm bodies into a ditch is appealing to many people.

It's appealing to all people with some absolutely minor editing. Lefties aren't uniquely bloodthirsty and the layer of civilization on people is paper-thin.

What's unique is the acceptance. Someone proposes gassing Jews and they're properly viewed with horror. Someone proposes shooting kulaks and they're given professorships, important positions on NGOs and government advisory committees, and occasionally made Secretary of Labor.

Weren't you the one who was ready to collect commies skulls just yesterday? In self defense assumably, but as they're as evil as Nazis then being given some actual power - are you sure you wouldn't be happy to shoot them just for being evil commies or after something from them will trigger that ancient "it's now you or me" instinct?

Weren't you the one who was ready to collect commies skulls just yesterday? In self defense assumably, but as they're as evil as Nazis then being given some actual power - are you sure you wouldn't be happy to shoot them just for being evil commies or after something from them will trigger that ancient "it's now you or me" instinct?

There's no "but". Self-defense is different from shooting the kulaks. (And yes, I realize communists and Nazis both will sometimes phrase their murders in the form of self-defense, but at some point you have to get down to the object level and note that they're just lying or at the very best deluded)

So if you're sure that the enemy will kill you if they have an opportunity, will you wait for them to start shooting first?

I understand your point but you're wrong. You're claiming that commies have uniquely wicked METHODS for some reason, and you would never use their wicked methods (killing their enemies), just in self defense. While the methods you would use are exactly the same if you're as convinced in you being right as they are(or just if you're being rational organizing your "self defense", it's very rational to shoot first when you're past some point). It's not the methods which differ you from them, it's the content of your ideology. Methods are the same. You're not more or less bloodthirsty and not more or less "accepting of violence" than commies, look in the mirror.

Not interested in giving you an opening to make the villain speech ("We are alike, you and I"...)

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As an aside, I find Turchin's theories to be unconvincing. His "overproduction thesis" doesn't explain why the social unrest and "woke explosion" happened in the US during the 2010s but not in, say, Denmark or much of Europe.

I think his main problem is that he's a materialist, like most Marxist intellectuals are. The core issue driving social unrest in the US is race and secondly gender (particularly the trans issue). None of those things have any direct bearing with elites per se in a material sense, but rather about identity. Marxists are notoriously bad at understanding this distinction and frankly so are many right-wingers with their naïve (but admirable) colorblind ideology.

That said, on the trans issue, the right has a much better and clearer understanding of the underlying conflict which is why they are, for once, doing quite well in the culture war in this area. Marxist materialism is simply useless here.

His "overproduction thesis" doesn't explain why the social unrest and "woke explosion" happened in the US during the 2010s but not in, say, Denmark or much of Europe.

Because US had a headstart on the whole whining begets winning. And in EU the whole blood and soil thing still holds stronger.

As I recall, he considers Denmark and the Scandinavian countries some of the places that are following his preferred policies to reduce inequality, so would consider their lack of drama a sign that his theory is on the right track.

One of the reasons I am willing to hear Turchin out, despite some obvious flaws, is because it seems like it would be better to consider the race and LGBT+ drama in America as inter-elite, since it seems to mostly be that top 10% vying for position and showing off how unusually tolerant, good, special, and thus deserving they are, unconnected to the challenges of the black working class, or the underclass who could, if circumstanced improved, be working class. This has been discussed to death here already.

As an aside, I find Turchin's theories to be unconvincing. His "overproduction thesis" doesn't explain why the social unrest and "woke explosion" happened in the US during the 2010s but not in, say, Denmark or much of Europe.

Some hypotheses:

  1. Because the US viciously exploited black people not too long ago, on average white Americans probably feel more guilt towards black people than, say, white French people feel towards Algerians. Of course the French fought a brutal war in Algeria not long ago, but it did not practice chattel enslavement of Algerians on a massive scale. When Algerians riot in France, white French feel relatively little guilt-sympathy towards them compared to how white American feel towards black Americans. And if, say, Chechens riot in France then white French have essentially no reason to feel any guilt towards them at all.

  2. The police in the US are more heavily militarized and more able and willing to shoot people than police in Europe are. This is in part because the US has higher violent crime rates and much higher private gun ownership than Europe does, so as a reaction cops are heavily armed and jittery. And it is probably also in part because of other factors that have to do with the particular history of police forces in the US as opposed to Europe. In any case, the result is that in the US there is a constant stream of stories about cops shooting black people, mentally ill people, and members of other groups that are widely considered to be victims of oppression. This then provides evidence to buttress the woke ideology that "America is a near-fascist state that is massively oppressing black people", etc.

  3. Stronger social safety nets in Europe compared to the US make people more relaxed overall, less willing to believe that their societies are horribly oppressive, and less interested in getting into political ideologies that call for sweeping social changes.

  4. The sudden 2015 migrant crisis caused Western Europe, in reaction, to lurch on average away from wokism on at least some issues. In the US this did not happen.

  1. Slavery ended 150 years ago. In contrast the French were beating up algerians well within living memory.

  2. This is not the anecdata usually reported by Americans who get off the beaten path in Europe, who report that police brutality is a lot more brutal there.

3 and 4 are possible, but I think the real reason is that African Americans are unambiguously American in a way that French Algerians are not unambiguously French.

less interested in getting into political ideologies that call for sweeping social changes.

That doesn't match up with the histories of Europe and the USA either today or historically. The USA like the UK and other Anglo countries have always been less prone to sweeping social movements like Communism or Fascism then their continental cousins. You can't really compare the USA to countries like France, Germany or Russia. Just look at the amount of regime change in these countries compared to the Anglos that have remained remarkably stable.

Stronger social safety nets in Europe compared to the US make people more relaxed overall, less willing to believe that their societies are horribly oppressive, and less interested in getting into political ideologies that call for sweeping social changes.

European countries, which have much more generous social safety nets, far-right/left parties have actual seats in government, unlike in the US. I posit a bigger social safety net means people have less reason to compete professionally, or to get ahead at work, or be obedient for fear of being fired, so have the discretion and free time to take up fringe political causes, knowing that being fired is not a big deal compared to here. in the US a lot of people outgrow this sort of stuff because they have jobs.

I’m not going to defend Turchin, but I would point out that the emergence of the Woke/Anti-Woke dynamics would require something of an explanation simply because all of the groups involved have always existed in the USA and could get along fairly well until 2010.

Black people and most of the rest have never gotten along. We had detente, but never peace. And Jefferson was probably right -- they never will, the "ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained" will never fade.

There is no such thing as all black people and all white (or other racial groups) people getting along.

This is a quibble; we can speak meaningfully of groups "getting along" without worrying about whether it's true for "all people".

wokeism existed well before social media. people have been getting cancelled and protested long before the 2010s such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Jensen#cite_note-scarr-14

After the paper was released, large protests were held, demanding that Jensen be fired. Jensen's car tires were slashed, the university police provided him with plain-clothes bodyguards, and he and his family received threats that were considered so realistic by the police that they temporarily left their house. Jensen was spat on and was prevented from delivering lectures by disruptive protests. The editorial board of the Harvard Educational Review for a time refused to let him have reprints of his article, and said that they had not solicited the section on racial differences; Jensen later provided correspondence in which the board had requested he do so.[14][15][16]

this was 1969

They still do largely get along. The feeling they don't is a manifestation of the inescapeability and heightened new sense of memetic domination and the always-on media mindshare.

ditto. i don't think grand narratives can or should be dismissed outright but I think his is wrong . some narratives are better/accurate than others

why the social unrest and "woke explosion" happened in the US during the 2010s but not in, say, Denmark or much of Europe.

American white liberals feel guilty. They feel guilty over their treatment of natives and black people in a way Europeans never will. Their closest analogues are colonial victims, and those are different from American blacks in that they were never our people to begin with: did we wrong them? Sure. Now they have their own nations to fuck up (or not) and while the guilt's there, it just comes with easier solutions than black Americans do. They're more American than half the other demographics in the nation.

But race and gender would not be so salient if we could sufficiently get out of each other's faces, and that has a dry, materialist component, implicating techno-commercial and economic trends.

Tangentially, I wonder, who might be an example of a right materialist? James Manzi?

Michael Lind might count but I think he's sort of been slid into the right wing camp by default, via the left changing its tune.

The more market-oriented libertarians - as opposed to Gadsden flag-waving anti-government types - have been called the Marxists of the right, so there's that.

I think his main problem is that he's a materialist, like most Marxist intellectuals are.

It depends on what you mean by materialist. Even Karl Marx himself spent most of the 1840ies laying groundwork for his later thinking, but in 1840ies he was much more theoretical. In his books such as Economic and Philosophical Manuscript he inverts Hegelian idealism on its head. But only in so much as to claim that it is not some ultimate idea , or Geist trying to use history and dialectics, but for Marx the role of the Geist is replaced by Man, specifically Man as species being. For Marx the man recreates himself via his Work, unalienated labor that takes paramount position.

But it is this cycle where man uses Praxis of work to refine Theory, which then shapes society which in turn reshapes man in dialectical cycle. The nature of The Work itself is malleable, for Marx it was literally the manual labor of proletariat wielding literal hammers and sickles. But for modern Marxists it may also be broader work, reality is socially constructed is it not? It is our duty to socially shape reality by doing The Work to bring about better tomorrow, reshaping institutions and seizing the means of cultural production. It is at least as important as seizing the means of industrial and agricultural production, because in the end what we are sculpting is the New Soviet Man and he is product of culture broadly defined.

Turchin seems to believe in, for lack of a better term, socio-economic Malthusianism, and his more formal historical work requires Rube-Goldberg-style epicycles to substantiate his grand theory (constantly zooming in and out of geographic regions and gerrymandering timescales to make data fit). But even even though his Spengleresque ambitions won't amount to anything, "elite overproduction" is an exceptional framework for explaining local conditions in varied social environments, like the American media or academia. I can't see any reason to take him more seriously than that.

it is unconvincing. it's like he's working backwards: creating a theory to justify something he wanted all along, that being bigger social safety net and a general 'blue' policy

as i wrote in an earlier blog post (https://greyenlightenment.com/2022/09/01/elite-overproduction-not-that-big-of-a-deal-yet/) , the case for elite overproduction, assuming such a thing is real, being societally destabilizing seems weak, imho. I agree society is much more competitive at the top-end compared to generations ago, such as math and coding competitions, Silicon Valley tech jobs, NYC finance jobs, high-stakes admissions, etc., but I fail to see how this is a threat per say even if it creates more anxiety among the striver-class or disillusionment. If anything, it's beneficial to have smarter people at the top, running companies, which is a tailwind for innovation and economic growth. Brain drain and capital outflows are way bigger problems than having too many elites. I would go so far as to say that elite overproduction is at the bottom of the ladder of possible things that are a problem. This is why emerging markets and most other foreign markets have done so poorly relative to the US economy and the S&P 500 since 2009 or so.,.,fewer brains, exiting capital, lack of innovation.

I think the problem comes from those who don’t make it, as they have time and money, and are upset or disillusioned from doing “everything right” but now living a different lifestyle than the one promised.

I would assume they become the activist class, agitating for tearing down the system and instituting Marxism.

I find this interesting because my introduction to the idea of elite overproduction came back in 2018, and had much less to do with economics in the sense that you've analysed. To quote the author in question:

Part of that blowback came from within the working classes that took the brunt of the policies just named, and part of it came from other sectors of society that were shut out of the benefits of the bipartisan policy consensus and forced to carry a disproportionate share of the costs. Another element of it, though, unfolded from a policy that elites always embrace sooner or later: the habit of making sure that the educational system produces more people trained for managerial tasks than existing institutions can absorb.

Why should elites do this? For them, at least in the short term, the advantages are obvious. If you’re going to entrust the running of society to a hierarchy of flunkeys who are allowed to rise up from the underprivileged masses but are never quite allowed to join the overprivileged elite—and this, of course, is the normal condition of a complex society—you need to enforce rigid loyalty to the system and the ideas it considers acceptable. The most effective way to this is to set candidates for flunkeyhood against each other in a savage competition that most will lose.

As your prospective flunkeys climb over one another, kicking and clawing their way toward a sharply limited number of positions of wealth and influence, any weakness becomes a weapon in the hands of rivals. You thus can count on getting the best, the brightest, and—above all—those who have sedulously erased from their minds any tendency to think any thought not preapproved by the conventional wisdom. Your candidates will be earnest, idealistic, committed, ambitious, if that’s what you want them to be; ask them to be something else and you’ll get that, too, because under the smiling and well-groomed facade you’ve got a bunch of panicked conformists whose one stark terror is that they will somehow fail to please their masters.

It’s the losers in that competition who matter here, though. There are always some of them, and in modern America there are a lot of them: young men and women who got shoved aside in the stampede for those positions of wealth and influence, and didn’t even get the various consolation prizes our society offers the more successful end of the also-rans. They’re the ones who for one reason or another—lack of money, lack of talent, lack of desire—didn’t take all the right classes, do all the right extracurricular activities, pass all the right tests, think all the right thoughts, and so fell by the wayside.

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars-part-two-in-the-shadow-of-the-cathedral/

The problem isn't that you have a lowered GDP, the problem is that you create a cohort of people who have nothing tying them to the existing system and a huge swathe of incentives to tear it down. These are the cohorts that produce people like Jean-Paul Marat and Maximilien Robespierre, and when your society is producing large numbers of Jacobins (or their equivalents) it usually portends serious problems coming down the line, even if doing so is responsible for a modest increase in GDP.

I think he’s discovered one part of the puzzle, but he’s like a workman with a hammer— everything must be a nail.

My hypothesis is that instability can come from any part of human society, not just economics. The problem is that it’s increasingly hard to organize in any part of society. None of the problems we have right now are unsolvable. Police reform isn’t impossible, the border isn’t unsolvable, poverty and homelessness are not unsolvable, education, you name it. What we lack isn’t the ability, but the will to pick a solution and actually do it. And this comes from us not having the coherent ideas about how to solve things.


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