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galeev author:daseindustriesltd

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

I happen to agree with the framing of the basic conflict, that is, the war itself, as a clear case of good vs. evil.

Putin really is a cardboard villain, and if he doesn't assert his villainy like some Commodus but excuses it, this only underscores his low character. He's begun a war that has killed and harmed an insane number of Eastern Slavs, ruined the faint potential of the EU as a sovereign pole, and, what offends me near-infinitely more, doomed Russia herself to disintegration. Yea, that'll be worse than another ethnic cleansing in the ME – even though many among his detractors will pop open champagne. If not for disillusionment with paranoid narratives that have sent us into this deathtrap in the first place (e.g. the «Ukrainian attack on Donbass», which makes sense in the long term, seeing UA commitments, and which I had believed, but which had proved to be a fake casus belli in the early 2022) – I'd have said Putin is consciously playing the villain's role°, or is manipulated into it. But – Conquest's 2nd Law.

Still. This is only true about the war. Let me piggyback here with my own rant.

Russians are being canceled. Gleefully and unjustly, with all the dynamics of American cancellation, by a coalition of groups with nakedly particularist morality, jeering and exploiting SJ sophistry. Ruskies are learning for the first time what canceled Westerners have felt. I've always sympathized with those – in the abstract, worrying mainly about consequences of their disenfranchisement, from the perspective of a man expecting, unlike them, no fairness and reciprocity. Perhaps I can't feel what they (and many of you) feel, and the analogy is still flawed. But… it's probably a good deal more accurate then their own projections of cultural tribal warfare onto Russian-Ukrainian war.

Of course, current problems of Anglophone right wingers are, in my opinion, a joke compared to what's happening to Russians. Over a hundred million people, captive audience to Kremlin as well as their opponents, not just demonized, but – cut off from the financial infrastucture, put on effective no-flight lists in the first world, like some Fuentes or Torba, much of their property seized (likely for reparations), and that's only starting. Perhaps the whole culture war was rehearsal for this; and COVID for its institutional dimension.

That's cause for dread. But what enrages me is minor specific deceit.

The best exhibit is this story. A French Spanish girl of Ukrainian descent has created a viral thread on a hate crime:

❗️Breaking!❗️: Yesterday at about 10:30 pm in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, #France, rue le Cheman blue, the Russians beat up two women from \Izyum, mother and daughter! They were walking, listening to a song in Ukrainian on their phone. A huge man ran up to them, 1/ #russians who was in the company of another one, a woman was following them, and started hitting them on the head. The daughter was hit twice on the asphalt with her head, the mother - three times. They have abrasions of hands and knees. 2/ #russiansagainstukrainians #eu #russia #france

[some details on the criminal passivity of French police etc.]

UPD: The well-being of girls is not very good: “… I'm lying in my bed my head hurts badly, my nose and eyebrows are all swollen, I can’t even go to police. Alinka went by herself.” “…It was all in the blood, my blood was running from the nose” #RussiaIsATerroristState)

Note the hashtags. She knows Twitter game well.

Our smart British friends, @doglatine or @BurdensomeCount, driven by the traditional hatred of Russia, tend to accept those outlandish victim stories at face value, as confirmations of a tendency, «what we always expected from those swine, uh, not YOU SPECIFICALLY, dear Ilforte, but… you know…»

I do. But I, too, am a Russian swine through and through, jaded as they come, from a caste so hated by smaller peoples of the Empire that our genocide is still OK to celebrate openly, and I know that this smells of more bull than Jussie Smollett, a Noose or Chanting Nigger or Indigenous Graves or some Toppled Tombstones. A Russian in France, now? 20 to 1 that he's driven from home by fear of potential mobilization or generic distaste for fascism, like me – and he's not keeping his eyes down and trying to blend with the crowd, but barbarically attempting a one-man genocide of ethnic Ukrainian culture, against women, and the cops are not doing enough?

What else, «This is SUKA country»?

Indeed:

❗️UPD: A man was arrested and taken into custody after the assault on Sunday of two #Ukrainian refugees in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. According to @Nice_Matin information, he is of Ukrainian nationality.

(Other commenters say, he attacked those women because they were listening to Russian music and he assumed they were Russians, or perhaps wanted to punish them for betrayal of Volk; I can't check so will leave it at that).

106 likes, 27 QTs. The original: 5802/379, with a coordinated endorsement of #VisaBanForRussians hash tag. If you check, many have Doge profile pictures. That's NAFO, a growing pro-UA community with paid membership, headquarters in Discord and a rule against mentioning CIA («it doesn't exist», tee-hee); they credulously retweet all out-there stories demonizing Russia, like Galeev and Sumlenny’s «analysis» of Dugin sacrificing his daughter to Moloch. This is a typical one.

The hole in the narrative is downplayed by the author. A Russian with an anti-war flag says:

But there are no 2700 reposts and 5000 likes under this post. Everyone remembered that Ukrainian women were beaten.

And they splashed out another portion of bile on those who are from Russia.

And only few have learned the truth that he was a Ukrainian. You Maria are just acting ugly, playing on people's feelings.

Manipulator.

Her response? Classical ass-save:

This is far from the first case of Russian men attacking Ukrainian women, so don't manipulate either, it's ugly - that's the number of Russian criminals who are outside their country.

Might as well have gone with this.

…

There may be no pure good in this world. There are blemished things, and things massively worse. At times it's plain to see which is which. The war of aggression started by Russia under Putin is a cut-and-dry case of evil inflicted on people who are innocent in comparison, and specifically not guilty of this evil.

But they are not innocent in all matters. Ukrainians are famed for self-serving narratives with cute female touch, hiding their darkness; ask a Pole or a Jew if they own up to it enough. Northern Eurasia is a blood-soaked graveyard, and it won't become a happy-go-lucky communion of peoples if only The Prison of Nations is torn down at last and those imperialist ruskies are dealt with. Russia propped up South Ossetia and Abkhazia; democratic and NATO-aligned Georgians did ethnically cleanse Ossetians in the past. And the great Georgian thinker Mamardashvili, superstar so kindly treated by the (ostensibly Russocentric) Soviet regime, did pen this Hottentot-worthy masterpiece:

There is a situation where it is possible to solve the problem of human and national rights by giving the small, surrounded by the big, symbols or rights of the big. This can be a solution in the context of the Russian Federation, where some national territories are a product of Russian history and an ethnic minority is surrounded by the Russian population. This is a perfectly reasonable democratic position. But this principle of matryoshka is not applicable in the conditions of Georgia.

The word «Abkhazia» is synonymous with the word «Georgia». So to tell a Georgian that Abkhazia can exit Georgia is to say roughly the same thing as «Georgia can exit itself». Or to put a finer point on it: the same as showing red cloth to a bull and then being surprised that the bull is so undemocratic.

Armenia has committed war crimes, and sides with Russia&Iran. NATO-aligned Turks and Azeris have committed a genocide – the genocide, class-defining one – against Armenians, and are killing Armenians as I type; this is their hero.

Kamil Galeev, with his training in the Holocaust center and his coked-up wordcel power, can ape the rhetoric of Twitter Anti-Fascists and SJWs well, but in Russian he justifies continental-scale devastation effected by Genghis Khan, the deified champion-father of his race, and gloats at goreposting.

An Estonian fella with a cute doge pfp or a checkmark and bio of «expert», complaining of Russian barbarity, may be not some traumatized Anti-Communist but a bona fide Nazi, still butthurt about the Germanic Reich's failure to purge Slavs and Jews.

A self-appointed Russian Anti-Nazi may have powerful takes on the legitimacy of Baltic states...

So it goes. Civilization is skin-deep, there's dirt on every collective body, and the cheapest way to excuse one's group is to dogpile on the common enemy. In the US, that's white people. In Eurasia, Russian people. This is unjust in principle, and unjust in these specific cases. Let's not cancel peoples and races.

Okay?

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

If you are smarter, you align yourself with perceived enemies of the elites: Putin, Xi, Orban, .... You say things like:

«What does this have to do with Lenin?»

Nowadays, John Locke is considered to be the founder of English liberalism. But Locke became widely popular only in the 19th century; in the 17th-18th he was scarcely read or quoted. Algernon Sidney was the ruler of minds at that time – it was his ideas, for example, from which the founding fathers of the United States drew. Sidney was an active participant in the English Revolution and a staunch Republican, so after the establishment of Cromwell's dictatorship he resigned from all posts. After the Stuart restoration he went to the continent, first to the Netherlands, then to France, unsuccessfully trying to organize a mutiny against the king. After an amnesty he returned to England, where he was arrested for treason. Two witnesses were required for a conviction for treason, but the authorities found only one. Then Lord Jeffreys did a feint and brought in Sidney's own book, Discourses on the government, as a second witness. The fact that the book had not even been printed and was kept in Sidney's desk failed to deter the judges and they sentenced him to execution. So Sidney became the chief martyr of the Whig movement and an icon of English liberalism and republicanism.

Much later, documents were published proving that the tyrannicidal Sidney lived on the money of the main tyrant of Europe and the enemy of England, Louis XIV, and sought money from him to organize a rebellion. The only thing they did not agree on was the price – Sidney wanted one hundred thousand ecus, but the king agreed to give only five times less.

This publication caused a furor. One of Sidney's friends said he could not have been more ashamed if he had seen his son fleeing the battlefield with his own eyes. The liberal historian Macaulay wrote that few things hurt him as much as seeing Sidney's name on Louis XIV's list of pensioners.

However, let's look at the situation from the other side. Suppose you are a revolutionary and want to overthrow the regime. How exactly are you going to do it? By crushing it with authority? You basically have no choice but to turn to other regimes that are enemies of yours. Simply because loners don't solve anything in this world, only corporations do. Meanwhile, in the second half of the 17th century it was the states that became the strongest corporations on Earth, and in the second half of the 18th century they subjugated or destroyed all their rivals. So it turns out that opposing one state you are forced to turn to others for support, with no options.

So the moronic lamentations about Lenin and the money of the German General Staff just don't make any sense. Of course Lenin would have taken money from the devil, the alternative would have been to sit in Switzerland and smear snot on his face for the rest of his life.

Kamil Galeev, May 18, 2018

This, like a great deal of Galeev's old writing, says more about his own life strategy than about history. Nevertheless, his facts seem correct. And Lenin, after all, succeeded.

Fair enough. But then please don't take a high moral ground. You are just as evil as "elites".

You appeal to principle, but that's a principle of peacetime, not of genocide time. Would you have given the same counsel to, ah, Ukrainian soldiers siding with unironic Nazis? Or anti-Chinese Uighurs receiving support from hardcore Muslim movements? No, «the arrow doesn't turn», «this is different»? (Of course I won't say «siding with the US» because that's axiomatically righteous).

Let's not pretend that this is about anything other than objective incompetence and subjective lack of merit of the ideology. Right-wingers (more to the point, nationalists of any stripe sans the most shallowly «civic») are thoroughly routed in the West, same as in Russia incidentally. Russian rump looks to Ukrainian Nazis for guidance, Western one seeks salvation in Baste Putin. It's desperation tactics. Both right-wing camps understand their situation as genocide, slow or rapid, open or concealed. The same way Galeev understood the condition of Tatars before going to Washington DC.

Many camps assert to be driven by fear of genocide. It's the absence of attempts to unscrupulously find external sponsors that gives the lie to all the hand-wringing.

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

I've updated my estimates for his poisoning story and other botched poisonings to near 1.0 in light of the war. Main reason to doubt them was not lack of evidence but the prior for FSB, GRU etc. not being staffed by actual retarded mooks from some Austin Powers movie – I've lived my whole life under kakistocracy, but still… – uh, well.

With that out of the way: Navalny is a simple honest guy. He's not a liberal nor a Western agent of influence nor «another Putin». He is an extremely rare sort of a political figure – a Russian ethnic nationalist, with necessary civnat aspects. The notion of Russian Nationalism is, in the corner of the world that @Stefferi speaks from, usually conflated with «Russian Imperialism» and just generally «Russian», which is to say, dangerous scum. There is a difference, however. Nationalism holds that the state exists for Russian people, while Imperialism says, in effect, that Russian people are to be abused and impoverished, so that they seek dignity and livelihood through the collective greatness of the state.

This distinction may be hard to parse for Russian neighbors, because 1) they live in nation states or indeed ethnostates, and 2) their political culture is democratic – putting it bluntly, attuned to sensibilities of a humble xenophobic peasant. That implies absence of reciprocity, game theory, or any other nerdy high decoupler shit we indulge in here. The late Krylov, a more extreme nationalist than Navalny but of the same basic mold, had spent his life trying to explain to Russians why this is the way to go. His quote comes to mind:

If Russia is part of Europe and the Judaeo-Christian civilization, then it is among European countries. And it should behave like a European country.

How do European countries behave?

1 No European country recognizes itself as «on the fringes», even if it, in fact, is (like Romania, Croatia or Lithuania, say). On the contrary, it invents a version of history in which it has at least a place of honor. At the slightest opportunity this place changes from honorable to central. Or, well, one of the central ones.

2 Arrangements in the country are determined by considerations of convenience of the nation inhabiting this country. Moreover, every European country tends to impose (by force or covertly) those convenient arrangements on everybody else. It is possible to deviate from this principle and submit to supranational forces - but then those must PAY for it. Preferably not even with money but with market shares and a place in the distribution of labor. And respect for the identity is NON-NEGOTIABLE.

3 All those who oppose or doubt theses 1 and 2 are representatives of Evil so concentrated that everyone who «thinks the European way» should fight against them and stoop to any low, for the nature of this Evil does not allow squeamishness. If they call themselves «Westernists» and «liberals», they deserve especially cruel extermination - for blasphemy.

And so on. The problem is that our «Westernists» DO NOT WANT to be European and do NOT consider Russia to be a part of Europe. They regard it as the COLONY of Europe, and themselves as colonists. And as such – yes, «sodomites will walk in his streets and enter his house and sit on his head».

A typical Westernist in Russia is someone like the social anthropologist Alexandra Eikhenwald, who has said just a month ago that «The Eichenwald family has contributed enough to Russian culture and we don't belong here any more». What contributors does she include in her boast?

Uncle-in-law Semyon Brudnik, commissar of the 3rd Insurgent Regiment of Bogun, the first Ukrainian division of the Red Army, commanded by Shchors, which was particularly cruel to Russian officers and intelligentsia. «Was head of the finance department at Mosfilm», together with her aunt actually raised her. Grandfather Alexander Eichenwald who scientifically justified collectivization – «He had a paradoxical way of thinking, and tried to get to the bottom of everything. He stood for social justice, joined the Bolshevik Party at 16, was a member of the Bukharin School and authored the first monograph on the Soviet economy» – which contributed to a famine and several million deaths under Stalin. Got purged. And another grandfather, the most fondly remembered, Moysey Gorb - NKVD Senior Major, Molchanov's loyal aide. Purged too. Wiki about Molchanov: «1931-1936. - Head of the Secret and Political Department of the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) under the SNK - GUGB NKVD of the USSR, Commissar of State Security of the 2nd rank. As head of the key department of the GPU-NKVD of the USSR he was engaged in arresting all real and imaginary opponents of the Soviet power - peasants who opposed collectivization, Trotskyites, supporters of «rightwing opposition», clergymen, monarchists, ex-activists of minor parties, national movements, members of foreign communist parties, etc». Her parents already regressed to the mean: «dissident, poet, translator, critic», «teacher, human rights activist». All those names are mentioned as victims of oppression and great noble souls, with the quiet dignity of a lineage that has left an indelible mark in the history of Russian people.

But I digress. Hopefully you can understand, if not endorse, the fact that such candidates are non-starters in any sort of a democracy that asks Russians; and their friends too. Navalny is not a Westernist in this sense. Thus he is popular, yet harassed both within and without Russia. I suspect he came back after his poisoning precisely to avoid getting killed by some zealous «anticolonial» activist.

His position is unapologetically pro-Russian and pragmatic. Wars of expansion are bad because Russians die in them for no gain; some purported greatness of the Empire does not matter more than this toll. This calculation could have been different in another age; we should be content with how much was recognized after ages have changed. (The implication that things could conceivably change once more is not lost on readers seeking to find fault). Liberal parliamentary democracy is good: it allows for easier development and removal of corrupt parasites. Wokeness and anticolonial apologetics are bad because they get easily exploited by e.g. tribalist peoples from Caucasus. Racism bad: leads to delusions and precludes the possibility of cooperation with non-Russians who are amenable to that. Deportations of illegals and criminals; concerns about demographic replacement due to an open border with Muslim states; all that stuff. And so on and so forth – a systemic application of a position of a right-wing European politician who has a shot at winning, someone like Orban, Meloni or Zemmour. Even Trump, perhaps. That thread of his of his linked by @sliders1234, and the original Russian text, are both written from this perspective, and thus concede: commitment to 1991 borders, non-intervention in Ukrainian affairs, reparations, for the Russian benefit.

But consider QTs. «your country shouldn’t be developing. It should be paying for the development of the countries it hurt.» «The world needs sanctions to be sure russia doesn't have a possibility to start the war again» . «no no no. You guys have no say in it. You will pay reparations whether you like it or not. We don't care what is acceptable to you.» etc. This is a popular sentiment. Think of this for a moment, can you imagine an electable politician in any Western country – strike this, any country – being expected to cheer for his country' loss in a war? However, what is expected of Navalny is not that but unconditional submission and kowtowing. This is clearly a politically suicidal attitude, unless imposed by outside force; which is also admitted by some as the goal.

It's worth pausing on Galeev's tactics. Here he frames Navalny's old gun rights ad as part of a campaign advocating violence. It is unseemly, but the situation with guns in Russia is that they're mainly owned by cops and [ethnic] mafia. The video about deportation of illegals that he opens with is supposed to enrage the same crowd that hyperventilates on Twitter about genocidal Trumpists; it explicitly denounces violence of the sort that Galeev seeks to pin on Navalny for the rest of the thread.

Navalny of that era is a shitposter and an equal opportunity dehumanizer – calling Georgians during the war «rodents» (it's a one letter substitution), depicting ethnic criminals as the Men in Black cockroach, labeling Russian Neo-Nazis «Caries», with solutions being respectively: an HQ missile strike, legalizing guns, and «sanitizing». But also, arguably, he was a deradicalizing force. This trend persists: he offers Russians a way to step back and make amends with a semblance of self-respect.

But that is no good to «Russia experts» from Baltics or Poland who drive these decisions in Washington, nor to peoples near the border. Russia is a historical threat. Therefore, no positive – for Russians – movement ought to be supported, while separatism and all harmful tendencies – including tyranny, corruption, militarism! – aided and exploited. Helping the enemy die is worth the temporary pain, they think.

So even if Navalny miraculously took power and proved to be the opposite of Putin in all ways that matter, he'd still be decried as a tyrant, and likely a worse one. The only good Russian is a dead one; the only good Czar is one who presides over Russian deaths.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

I don't follow the war news; they seem to unfold roughly as I've foreseen on 24th, and specific timing and extent of events is not that significant. Russia has an inept army and dysfunctional leadership; it was not in any position to pick this fight against the hegemonic power via attacking Ukraine. Mobilization might change the tide for a while (and I expected it to happen in early March, which it did not, presumably for the same reasons of ineptitude and dysfunctionality), but supplying Ukrainian capacity for resistance and eventual counterattacks is trivial for NATO, so it wouldn't amount to much, and there's an effectively unlimited supply of Ukrainian men, starting in 2023 women too... For me, what matters more these days is stuff like visa processing guidelines.

Clearly, the best solution for Russia is the removal of Putin

For the longest time, many in Russian intelligentsia spoke of the «collective Putin», assuming that this forgettable guy («Who is Mr. Putin?» – remember that, ages ago?) is merely a front, a consensus-approved talking head for interlocked elite interests. Oligarchs, siloviki, mafias, even the (downplayed) «little old me» – liberal NGOs and the like – and the see-through product of TV magic running around puffing his cheeks pandering to the plebs, asserting that everything's going according to plan.

Well there are no longer independent oligarchs, nor NGOs, and it's not clear that the dude isn't just running the whole show as an old style autocrat. But it may not matter: there is nobody to remove him anywhere close to him, so the entire upper echelon of Russian leadership could as well be a distributed Putin. They are all neck-deep in this, and apparently the top enforcers are either true believers, perhaps more driven than Vladimir himself, or fear the consequences of defection more than the outcome of the war. It doesn't help that they, bound by blood as they are, really have no reason to expect lenience from the victors. We don't know how deep in the echo chamber they remain after all the news, but they have the capacity to maintain the echo chamber for a big enough share of Russian population (including, crucially, Interior Troops) to not worry about their own necks before the disintegration of Russia.

As for how the war will go – I'm pretty sure neither Ukrainans nor their backers are intent on returning to the uneasy post-2014 status quo. So after the success of repealing these Special Operation forces, we will see the escalating siege of Crimea, supplies of even more capable tech, and continued nuclear bluff, and Russian refusal to recognize the outcome of the war upon exhaustion of offensive and even defensive capabilities. The best case scenario for everyone at this point is self-Jucheanization of Russia, which will win maybe 6-10 years for the regime, until its resource base is expended and it collapses with relatively little noise (which is to say, some nuclear accidents, minor wars and something like 5M dead from infrastructure collapses). However, if things go well for them, Ukrainians and co. can opt to force the issue and strike deep into Russian territory, on grounds of demilitarizing the unrepentant and consistent threat to European security; it's also probable that Galeev types will succeed to solicit funds and political momentum in the DC for the Operation Liberation of Oppressed Peoples. At least that's their plan.

But that's more far-fetched for now.

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

While I cannot know for certain, I think @HalloweenSnarry references the classical Prison Riddle, i.e. a shit test used as part of a «registration» rite for a new cell mate, popularized on Russian imageboards (this stuff was recently brought to the attention of Westerners by Galeev).

The riddle in question is a near-perfectly polished psychological attack against a relatively powerless newcomer in a honor culture setting; it's really pretty crude, but lazily googled translations are lacking, so here goes. «There are two chairs. On one, sharpened pikes. On the other, jerked [erect] cocks. On which one do you sit, on which do you put your mother?» As is common with riddles, it rhymes.

Supposedly, default passwords are:

  1. «I'll take the sharpened pikes, cut down the jerked cocks, will sit myself and sit my mother».

  2. «I'll sit on the pikes and sit my mother on my knees».

In principle, the universal counter «For what reason do you inquire?» (literally), or some blah like «We're fine with standing, thank you very much» are also valid, though I haven't had the opportunity to try it out.

There is a whole family of those riddles, sadly their charm is untranslatable. The most reductionist one is «Offer your ass vs. sell your mom?»

I like the trolley problem one:

You're on a train, chained to levers that can turn either left or right. There's a fork in the road ahead - your mother is tied to a pole on the right and your buds, ten of them, are on the left. Which way do you turn, who do you hit?

Answer: today's buds [could be] tomorrow's cops.

Russian (and broader Russophone) culture pays a lot of attention to the problem of choosing between terrible options and false dichotomies, captured in the saying «horse-radish ain't sweeter than radish». E.g. the Escobar Axiom of Choice (Escobar is a Ukrainian black metal character):

In any choice between only two mutually exclusive and opposite entities, both alternatives will be exceptional fucking shit.

Or in the original form:

«this [one] is fucking shit, and that one is fucking shit. Both fucking shits are such that I just fuck her mom's mouth».

Pelevin has developed this idea into a faux-dialectical method, e.g. in «Batman Apollo»:

– The Chinese Taoists, – he said, – had a similar notion, I will retell it in my own words. Struggling for hearts and minds, discourse workers constantly demand that people answer 'yes' or 'no'. All human thinking must flow, like an electric current, between these two poles. But in reality there are always three possible answers: "yes", "no" and "fuck you". When too many people begin to understand this, it means there is some wiggle in the skulls. In our culture, it has reached a critical point. It needs to be reduced drastically.

And earlier, in «P5: farewell songs of the political pygmies of pindostan»:

Ludwig Wittgenstein had claimed in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that he had discovered a general form for describing the sentences of any language. In his view, this universal formula accommodates all possible signifier constructions – just as the infinite space of the universe accommodates all possible cosmic objects.

"That there is a general form of sentence," writes Wittgenstein, "is proven by the fact that there can be no sentence whose form cannot be foreseen (i.e., constructed). The general form of the sentence is: "The issue is so und so" ("Es verhält sich so und so").

However, philologist Alexander Sirind, an associate professor at the Irkutsk Pedagogical Institute, recently managed to disprove the famous formula, by giving an example of a sentence that goes beyond the all-encompassing paradigm outlined by the Austrian philosopher. It goes like this: "Fuck you, Wittgenstein".

But as for the CCP vs the Globohomo, I think another piece of imageboard fancy is more relevant – the 4chan «freedom is best, and hard choices» or maybe the Ben Garrison remake «the march of tyranny». If you don't have negotiating power except in the form of defecting in protest, and your defection threshold is only reached after both tyrants have curtailed freedoms of their subjects, just to a different extent (and that's still a better case than what we have here) – eventually both tyrants converge to absolute dominance and all subjects are maximally debased.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

Why do you assume that MoD is in any position to fight? That soldiers will shoot at all?

I think the mutiny will fail, but mostly for boring logistical reasons and because their actual targets are guarded by the FSO, as again Galeev notes (that said, the role of FSO is obvious to anyone who's looked even once at the makeup of Russian internal forces). It's far from obvious that most of the regular army will even bother engaging them. Prig's reputation is far higher than anyone's in there, esprit de corps in the Russian army is non-existent (by design), and frankly they would rather pass the buck to the next regiment. The whole army is dysfunctional, no matter what Twitter guys say about offensive, counteroffensive or whatever.

We'll see if he's negotiated this with Kadyrov soon.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

You are missing the point of Galeev's parable, I'm afraid. Far right dissidents are not representatives of their states, nor do they recognize the legitimacy of incumbent representatives. Of course the specific project of European identitarianism (or local populism) was still doomed, but the idea of shaping conditions for sovereignty via alliances of convenience with repulsive outsiders is well-supported by historical track record in the Old World. Indeed it's not even reputationally costly – you can fight for communist tyranny and then become heroes to some of the most anti-communist people on the continent, to have wistful songs composed in your honor. (Or you could fight for Nazis, so long as you have some cute songs to the effect that Fuhrer sucks). How does that work? A Russian pig dog slave won't understand, this is very subtle stuff. Freedom is best, and hard choices, after all. Unironically.

If anything, DRs are unusual in their tendency to justify their allies and sponsors ideologically as well, and to sincerely buy and propagate those excuses; it took the war to snap them out of it – incompletely, at that.

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

Also funny pics to keep the attention.

Kulak is finally living up to the libertarian/objectivist ideal of ruthless optimization.

Galeev, by the way, is lately posting in Russian on the futility of developing unique products in peripheral countries:

[…] 3. The most complex, but also the most interesting case. The development is there, it works, it is really unique - and yet objectively not bad. If it were at the centre of the world system, it might even have a future. But it is taking place on the semi-periphery, so there is no future for it and there won't be one. It will remain unique.

The relationship between the centre and the periphery/semi-periphery is asymmetrical. Original solutions - technological, economic, or anything else - can emerge anywhere. The problem with the semi-periphery is not that original solutions don't emerge here, but that they don't scale.

The scaling happens in the centre. Here an original and promising solution may be seen, invested in, polished and brought to fruition. And then, in a package with other ready-made solutions, they export it to the semi-periphery. Which in most cases is the most grateful and solvent consumer for the producers of solutions from the centre

This is generally understandable. From the point of view of the managers and authorities in the semi-periphery, buying a ready-made package of solutions from the centre >>> creating their own solutions. They are, incidentally, almost always right: imported solutions are indeed better. Largely because the centre has the environment and infrastructure to bring them to fruition, while the semi-periphery does not. And because of this fact, it is doomed to perpetual catch-up, while its truly unique and truly good solutions are doomed to remain unique

Uniqueness = (In the best case scenario) inability to scale

His tweeting style is designed to scale. So is Kulak's. It's not unique but it gets the job done.

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

Wait, Russia wants to conduct population replacement?

In effect yes. Or at least people who matter in Russia do and act on this intention. You can consider this analysis to be representative of the underpinning rationale. Immigrants are an economic necessity in the simplifying Russian economy (simplifying, to some extent, because of adaptation to uneducated slave labor), see. Russians don't want to work for subsistence wages, don't breed enough, and we sure can't entice people from nations with high human potential to come over.

Moreover, even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, Russia continues to be in need of foreign workers. Marat Khusnullin, RF Deputy Prime Minister, in an interview with the RTVI television channel at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, emphasized that "...the lack of migrants is a great risk for the country's economy, and now is the main problem in construction. Nearly 50 per cent of migrants work in the construction sector. And unfortunately there is a low level of productivity in construction which makes it impossible to do without migrant labour in the next one to two years. Russians, unlike migrants, are not prepared to work 12 hours a day at a construction site for around 50,000 rubles at the most. The average wage makes up 25 per cent of the cost of construction and up to 50 per cent in some cases. Using the labour of migrants reduces the cost of construction. [46].

Of course, one must recognize that experts arguing for it are mostly blank slatists with leftist politics (and their sponsors are capitalists who couldn't care less about identities of worker bees), so they're not really thinking of this in terms of population replacement where populations are substantial entities. Like the late demographer Vishnevsky (also known as Rabinovich) argued,

Russia does not need Chinatowns or African villages, but a real migrant adaptation machine. [...] When there was a mass migration of peasants to cities in the USSR, essentially they were the same Africans. Yes, the language was the same, the people were identical, but very different cultures clashed. There was a system of "digestion": elimination of illiteracy, workers' schools, cultivating a desire for education. It was not always good, but it was implemented on a large scale and more or less functioned, allowing many immigrants from the countryside to master the urban culture. The authorities recognised the need for this work and allocated funds. Teachers were enthusiastic and felt they were missionaries, bringing culture to the masses, and their work was not tedious. If we managed to re-create something like this in relation to migrants, there would be a result. But there is no demand for it. Meanwhile, it would be fatal to hesitate: the larger the population of a country, the more migrants it can digest. Right now we have one hundred and forty-three million people, and when we finally recognize what needs to be done, there may only be one hundred million left.

So, if done well, there's no loss here, Russians and non-Russians are fully fungible.

And who do they want to replace their population with?

The same offer you've seen above, Central Asian Turkic peoples mainly.

I was under the impression that the country was fairly racist and slavic-supremacist.

Sure, that's what one can get from listening to Western Neo-Nazi Putin Stans and from resentful Washington "policy experts" of Baltic stock (who are, ironically, wielding quasi-woke anti-colonial discourse and Pride badges to obscure their own SS roots) alike. Or from our pal Kamil Galeev, who seeks to advance his tribe and admits gleefully to exploiting gullible Westoids by feigning admiration of their naive slogans. There's plenty of trivia to substantiate the accusation. «Russians have a slur for every nation and ethnicity they've interacted with», so popular on Twitter (who doesn't?). «Russian landlords discriminate against non-Slavs» (of course, Americans of all people know how this goes and just why the market may reward making inferences from a person's ancestry; except their supposedly most-oppressed minority is American, genetically different but of the same language and faith and comprehensive civilizational background, and not straight out of an impoverished society stuck between tradition and modernity, in the middle of a tribal conflict, rife with opiate abuse, underground Salafi mosques and ISIS sympathies). «Here's a list of a dozen minority surnames of military dead in Ukraine, this is evidence Ruskies have smuggled an ethnic cleansing into the war!» Or, like, «there was an unironic Neo-Nazi march in Moscow... just 10 years ago!» People who seriously parrot this crap are either ignorant or knowingly deceptive, just happy to get some rhetorical ammo for their preconceived attitude with regard to Russians.

In reality, Russians are about as racist and supremacist as is typical for Eastern Europe. Of course, far more ethnic Russians than Western Europeans are racist as hell, but they have about as much systemic power to act on this prejudice as Appalachian Whites. Many, especially of the older generations, are thoroughly brainwashed by the false Communist era messaging of давно поперемешались все/нет никаких русских – «we've all been mixed up long ago anyway/there aint such thing as an [ethnic] Russian» – message that fails to convince peoples with healthier ethnic self-identification and thriving diasporas. All have to respect the authoritah of «ethnics»; not a single one among well-known people in Russia is more dangerous to offend than Ramzan Kadyrov, privates serving on a strategic nuclear site can be wantonly bullied and robbed by a random local ethnic bandit, and for your average small business owner local Dagestani mafia matters at least as much as local cops. Putin tries to appeal to our schizophrenic «multinational Russian people» by saying he's a Lakh, an Ingush and so on. He sometimes courts with Russians too, saying that we should try to attract diaspora Russians even more than other immigrants. And of course there's the 'Triune Russian People' pretext for the war.

But that's about it.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

This is just Galeev's narrative, he's quite irrelevant. But those conspiracy theories are indeed his invention.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

Kamil Galeev, who once hyped China up (and studied there; now seeking career opportunities in Washington), says in his telegram channel:

On the Coming U.S.-China War:

Pamela Crossley, one of the most thorough scholars of the Qing era, quoted British intelligence reports of the First Opium War era about the garrisons of coastal Chinese forts. How many soldiers are there in the garrison?

These estimates look something like this (I quote from memory):

Fortress A: 30,000 Chinese, 1,500 "Tatars" (obviously meaning Manchu-Mongolian "banner" armies).

Fortress B: 15 000 Chinese, 500 "Tatars".

And so on.

«Banner» Tunguso-Mongolian units were a very small part of the Qing forces in South China. Nevertheless, it was the Banner contingents that the British very clearly distinguished from all the others. Because they were the only units that tried to resist at all

For example. The British fleet approaches the fortress of Zhapu (random name). Initiates bombardment. A few hours later, Marines land and go into the breaches made by the artillery. The fortress is taken, and the prisoners are taken. 30 «banner» Manchus, 0 Chinese.

It turns out that both the Manchus and the Chinese are not easy to take prisoners. But for different reasons.

The Manchus are «samurai». They stand to the end – with bows and muskets against rifles. They try not to have to surrender; if taken prisoner, they often try to commit suicide.

The Chinese are smarter and don't wait for the Marines to land. They flee at the bombardment stage.

When planning military operations, the British proceeded from the size of the «banner» contingent of the enemy, not from the size of the larger Chinese contingent. The first (small) figure was real. The second (huge) was imaginary.

Now Galeev is a Tatar supremacist, but I concur about the Chinese. PRC's contribution to the Nature Index is an indictment of the metric.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

I can, but it deserves an effortpost. Basically, it's not so different from late stage Russian Empire and USSR, only more dystopian, and it'll be scripted on the basis of Kamil Galeev's wet dreams.

It starts with war exhaustion in the ethnic provinces and far periphery (Saha, Dagestan...), provoking sabotage and conspiring in draft avoidance, which then grows into collective scorn for Moscow loyalists who fight against it, and general insubordination to the federal center. This provokes relocating additional police and, soon after, interior troops there, which exposes economically precarious Russian provinces to organized crime, that has been symbiotically coexisting with local administration.

Economy keeps tumbling down; military expenses grow; infrastructure and social services decay, perhaps evoking petty crime and protests of feeble desperate pensioners that need to be put down; everyone with half a brain tries to flee, increasing the load on border patrols and such; Ukraine/NATO keep crossing «red lines» without nuclear response, eroding the credibility of threats; manpower wanes, and less prestigious interior troops too are getting consumed by the war effort – when they fail to provide a quota of conscripts from a province. At some point, state capacity is overextended so much that there's no effective control over a region with a particularly capable criminal or ethnic leadership, nor political will to subjugate it, and it gets ignored by propaganda, like the Ukrainian bombing of Belgorod is mostly ignored now. And those new local elites decide that they needn't be burdened by the toxic Muscovite brand, nor bear the cost of sanctions. They either declare independence outright, or stop paying taxes and begin to surreptitiously trade with international actors cutting out Moscow middlemen. When it becomes clear that Moscow cannot put this down, it sets off a chain reaction and economically, logistically, demographically handicaps Moscow even more.

Soon, the breakdown of order in the interior army begins as local regimens decide that they can be paid as well by breakaway provinces and risks do not justify benefits. At some point Putin's regime either collapses, or its domain is reduced to an impoverished, desperately coping rump state; maybe Zolotov/Kadyrov/Prigozhin/Dyomin/janitor uses the snuffbox at last and pleads for mercy at the condition of accepting American General Governor to sort things out, dismantling Russian nuclear arsenal and personal safety.

This is one relatively optimistic scenario of how Russia might end, with combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties in the low tens of millions over 15 years.

Nuclear use would make it worse but not very different.

Putin's success at maintaining order, coupled with proliferation of the attitude Dean ascribes to Baltics and Finns, could make it substantially worse.

Some of that is already happening.

Galeev in his Russian channel, with more of the mask off than on Twitter:

I see two scenarios for Russia's future: positive and negative.

  1. The positive scenario is to walk around like a fucked bitch of a douche bag, under sanctions and paying reparations for decades. We could say that our grandchildren will make it, but let's be realistic. Given the demographic dynamics – they won't be your grandchildren.

  2. Negative – a candidate for nuclear bombing. After that, see point 1.

The common denominator in both scenarios is the «fucked bitch of a douche bag».

At the same time it is possible to cast off the seal of scum: if you change the brand. Look at the Austrians, for example – they made it work very cleverly after World War II.

If you value the future of your children and your region, start thinking about a new brand right now. Just like Austria isn't getting called out for Hitler (although it would seem...), neither will independent Siberia/Urals/Pomorye get [called out for Russia].

And everything associated with Russia will be banned for generations and to a greater extent than it was with Germany. Because no one will be able to explain why those fuckers couldn't sit at home.