Russian civil war starting today? · 6:22pm Jun 24th, 2023
Sometime Friday evening (American time), the Wagner group finally turned against Putin. 5,000 of his 25,000 soldiers occupied Rostov-on-Don, while another 5,000 began marching on Moscow. They were already past Voronezh, the halfway point, by 6am today NYC time (if I understand the timestamp on the video of a convoy.) They've encountered little resistance so far. A helicopter fired on them near Voronezh.
This began on Friday when, according to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of Wagner, Russian forces launched an artillery bombardment on Wagner's main camp. I find this believable. Prigozhin is basically the only powerful Russian who openly speaks in ways that Putin allows no one to speak. I'm not surprised by his rebellion, because he had already gone over the line so far that he can, realistically, never return to a Russia where Putin is in charge.
5,000 troops seems a small number to attack Moscow, considering that 2,000,000 Germans failed. But Prigozhin probably has as accurate information about the military situation as anybody else. And there's no chance it's a bluff; you can't declare war on Putin and then say you're sorry. So my guess is that I should trust Prigozhin's assessment that he can win, more than any assessment I make. Putin's actions provide no information; he would respond the same way whether he thought the attack had no chance or was certain to win. He may have already run away; the Daily Mail reports a claim that two Presidential jets, with transponders turned off, left Moscow today.
25 minutes ago, Prigozhin announced that he is stopping his attack to avoid bloodshed. That, I didn't expect. Prigozhin has never had any problem with excessive bloodshed before, and surely didn't expect to capture Moscow bloodlessly. And he's already crossed his Rubicon. Putin won't let him live. Most likely, he was relying on support from the Russian military, didn't get it, and is now hoping for a life in exile.
Personally, I feel a little dirty from checking the news. Because there's nothing I can do about it, I can't interpret my desire to keep checking the news as anything but a desire for entertainment.
I don't plan to post on this again; this is just to notify you all that this is happening, and because I think it would seem uncaring to our Russian friends for all fimfiction to simply continue ponying on as usual and take no notice of it. Please tell me in the comments if you think I should or shouldn't post notices like this on fimfiction.
Also, PLEASE don't ask Russians posting here to express their opinions on the situation. That's not safe.
As a Russian who lives in Moscow I find it fascinating, keep writing. Sort of 'I am on the internet' feel
Hope I won't get into a death toll though if worst will occur, but well, if I dissapear you'll know.
A fimfic blog post would definitely be a very surreal way to find out about this.
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Not for me. I don't check fimfiction much, but I check the news less.
I wouldn't say entertainment, more like curiosity. Saying you only read it for entertainment makes you sound awful, and you aren't, even if you're checking up on news you can't personally influence. It isn't a bad thing.
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And I only found a few minutes ago via one of the traditional tumblr supernatural meme formats (which sounds mean but is the way most breaking news is stated there, alongside a link to relevant articles about the topic and more information, usually. 64.media.tumblr.com/12895d7ce3b25ec65346d87f41816862/b45aec6576fe1ffe-f6/s500x750/ac03ec113654487f3f7b060d0c4a501c0e2a43c2.pnj ) So... fimfiction would be the second strangest place I'd learn about it, but honestly I try to keep my escapism-via-reading/writing and reading-the-news-and-the-state-of-the-world spaces separate as much as I can.
Honestly, I kinda doubt that --- it isn't particularly compatible with being that high up in Putin's system. After all, PMC is just his hobby project, previously he was known as internet bullshitmeister extraordinare, provider of rotten food for school children, provider of rotten food for Russian soldiers and so on. Gentleman of many talents indeed.
Although I don't have any good idea of what's happened. Maybe Lukashenko guaranteed him safe passage out to commit further atrocities in central Africa? (I'm sure locals would be eternally grateful to Russia for this divine gift)
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Yeah, the prior odds are against it. What struck me as moralistic was when he reprimanded some of his soldiers for disrespecting the Ukrainian dead, and the fact that he speaks up against Putin's policies in situations in which it seems very disadvantageous to do so, and no one else does. His strident, indignant tone says "moralistic" to me, though amoral people often mimic that tone.
Just also saw the news over here in China a few hours ago, It was just the video of Putin's speech, which isn't as informative or easy to understand as you might think, but still (somewhat) matches with the news you are telling here. (and some noticed that his facial expression is more tense than usual)
Of course, all we can do is sit and wait (most of us over here thinks we should wait for things to develop a bit before we can say for sure how should we see situation). Hopefully things would calm down a bit by then.
Honestly, TNaB was probably going to post on it at some point. He tends to do that for anything military.
Well, now I'm terrified😨
Could this be the end? Like the end end? 😟
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He doesn't have much to lose --- Ministry of Defense was likely planning for his mercenaries to tragically (but heroically!) die in siege of Bakhmut. That conflict lasts for ~half a year already at least and probably originates from Putin's classic 6D chess move of pitching them against each other by heavily favoring Prigozhin in the beginning and forcing MoD to suck him off (that actually could be a very poetic way for Putin to be ended with his own stupid meddling).
What he's saying is probably targeted at common Russian soldiers (they, well, aren't treated good by MoD) to discourage them from fighting him --- he has 25000 troops, but fighting whole Russian Army would be a bit suicidal. (that's indirectly confirmed by Kadyrov recently publicly leaking stuff on "rotten food for soldiers" business)
That honestly is really impressive. His main talent is PR, though (and he probably considered having relations with Ukrainians which kinda-sorta are compatible with negotiations)
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Who's TNaB?
Sad, but I've found the most accurate assessment of the current/past coup to have been one account on Twitter (@MarioNawfal), and even that is "Squint at before applying any credibility and wait 48 hours to see what happens." The real people mainstream media has been about as useless as any MLP news media in a story anybody has written about when dealing with this topic. They're all "We don't know what's going on but we'll whine about it and try to find somebody to blame."
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Totallynotabrony Another reliable news source on here. He's also a pretty good author and generally solid human being.
Regrettable that this didn't continue longer. A protracted military crisis within Russia would be an excellent thing from a "get them out of Ukraine so they stop doing war crimes and genocide" perspective.
What's interesting to me is how very feudal this all is. Putin trying to run a modern nation-state like a pre-modern one sort of made it inevitable things would devolve to this point. This is literally a case of a powerful warlord seizing territory and making demands that the Czar replace major members of his court because said warlord has basically personal conflicts with those court members over power, resources, prestige, and access, right down to him trotting out the centuries-old line or professing loyalty to the Czar, but enmity toward their evil councilors. All of Prighozins complaints and justifications are essentially personalist in nature, rather than strongly ideological like you'd expect in a modern context, but which make complete sense in a feudal context.
And upon this not working, he brokered a deal that ends in exile rather than fighting to the last.
It's like once you hit the Urals its the 1600s again, politically.
Turns out it was just a Belaruse.
5734804 The Urals are 800 miles east of Moscow, and beyond them is basically 3000 miles of wasteland. But otherwise... sort of, but the Middle Ages were really dual-tracked. There were a bunch of openly feudal wars, and a bunch of ostensibly ideological religious wars. The 30 Years War, of course, but a lot of other major religious wars that we rarely hear about. After depopulating southern France for resisting the mass atrocities of Pope Innocent III, the Catholic popes sent, if I recall correctly, at least three devastating genocidal crusades against Bosnia, on the grounds that they let the laity drink the wine during communion. That's about as ideological as you can get.
I'd rather think of modernity as having introduced pragmatism and sent feudalism into hiding, while still being stuck with a lot of still-strongly-medievalist ideologies, like Christianity, Marxism, and Nazism. Stalin and Hitler were both about as feudalist as Putin, and most Christian denominations still have a feudal hierarchy.
We can call Enlightenment beliefs an ideology, but it's so different in design and in its behavior and effect from all those other ideologies that doing so may be more misleading than, um, enlightening. "Ideological conflict" is not a category when we consider the Enlightenment to be an ideology, because the Enlightenment changed the paradigm for conflict, from conflict theory to mistake theory. But I know you don't believe that.
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I mean... many if not most conflicts are ideological at the root, really, but when I referred to how feudal this is I meant more about the structure. Feudal politics were structured to be intensely personalistic; institutions tended to be weak or nonexistent, and the modern Westphalian nation-state as we conceive of it straight-up didn't exist. Everything was about social obligations and reciprocal relationships, to a degree that's unthinkable in a modern nation-state. Getting access to those in power and leveraging that is still a major problem in a modern political economy, but typically private wars don't start anymore because I think my neighbor declining an offer to marry their son to my daughter means they're preparing to move against me and don't want a family tie complicating things, and so I should strike first, and we don't base legal precedent on the memory of the oldest living person in the town.
The conflicts you list off all occurred within the context of that overall structure. Indeed, that was of great consternation to the one powerful, robust institution that existed at the time; the Church. The Catholic Church was powerful and established enough as an institution to have recognizably modern politics going on inside it; it wasn't an medieval autocracy in there, it was an ANCIENT one, recognizable in form and function of the great bureaucracies of the ancient world, with strong institutional buy-in. If you look at internal political documents from the time period, internal debates within the Church tended to look very modern to our eyes in structure and were about institutional control, whereas the relatively weak and flabby states around them were still personalist, feudal in nature.
And that was of intense frustration to the Church, because anytime it decided to try and flex its institutional muscle for an ideological goal it had built a huge internal consensus around, it suddenly slammed headlong into a bunch of assholes who were absolutely on-board with going to war in the name of Christ and Mother Church, as long as the Church honored and upheld the eight million different obligations and privileges they'd negotiated with themselves, their vassals, and those they were vassals OF. The Church hated that! They were expecting warriors for Christendom, and instead what they got were guys going "If the Pope doesn't personally grant me an audience and declare to everyone I'm the most special servant of God, I'm going home with my boys" because their conception of the proper interplay of political power meant making a personal, face-to-face deal, and to them "he doesn't have time for that, he's running the church" isn't a practical argument, its a direct insult.
That's what I mean when I talk about how what happened in Russia over the past two days was very, very feudal. It of course had an ideological component to it, but Putin has, deliberately in my view, hollowed out every institution in Russia he could get his hands in order to construct a political order where EVERYTHING depends on personal relationships, and the most important personal relationship one can have is with him, the Czar.
That's an incredibly pre-modern form of autocratic control, only still around in states like Saudi Arabia and Brunei. Most developed modern autocracies eschew building a state around feudal-style personal relationships; modern nation-states are too large and complex for that to work. There are other ways a modern autocracy can maintain control, Putin not only isn't using them, he dismantled the Soviet-era tools that would have allowed him TO use them. The USSR would be appalled at what Putin has done to the capacity of the Russian state; they were corrupt, evil assholes, but at least after Stalin they were dedicated to building state institutions that could run the great empire they saw themselves as building. Ukraine, Little Russia, being able to withstand Russia for over a year would shock and appall them; they'd want to know why that was allowed to happen, and "Well, the guy in charge put a construction worker in charge of the MOD and allowed a former hot-dog vendor to set himself up as a private warlord" would not be a good answer.
I actually dispute this to a degree with the Third Reich. Hitler HATED personal-relationship politics, like really loathed them. He didn't like people in general, really, having few close friends. He explicitly preferred to govern via the bureaucracy and the party apparatus, and built up the capacity of the German state appropriately. If he'd been trying to govern in a feudal way, he'd have been working to hollow out those institutions because they posed a threat to his position.
Hitler liked giving a speech and basking in the roar of the crowd. But he hated having to press the flesh and listen to people like they were important to him, like his relationship with them mattered, and resolve their disputes and reward them and make them understand that they were his special people and his glory was their glory. He preferred to do that via state apparatuses and a modern bureaucracy, NOT by them having a personal relationship with him, which is the opposite of feudalism.
Indeed, and I shouldn't, because conflict theory and mistake theory have always been around and always WILL be around together. I would go so far as to say that mistake theory contexts can only exist because conflict theory contexts establish them. After all, we literally live in a country whose founding statement of political principles says "sometimes its justified to up and wreck shit when talking isn't getting you anywhere." And that was written by guys who saw themselves as masters of Enlightenment principles.
The whole thing seems to have fizzled out in a confusing way, that IMO leaves Putin exposed as weak, Prigozhin at great risk of getting polonium in his tea and/or a push out of the window, and everyone left without any kind of catharsis, violent or otherwise.
Well that
escalatedended quicklyI don’t mind either way. I view news on this scale as an important piece of the modern world. Not as entertainment.
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I'm no expert by any means, so take my opinions as uninformed at best. Ahem. I'd say Putin has set himself up as more of a classic dictator than the traditional Russian Czar with the structure of the Russian State to back him up. It's a matter of trust. In the classic USSR, there was a three-legged stool of trust: The Army, the KGB, and the Party. None of them trusted each other, so if one rose up in a power struggle, the other two would cut it down to size. The Czar had the bureaucracy and each cog in the immense (and highly corrupt) machine leaned on each other with knowledge that a new Czar would be much like the old Czar. Putin... um... When, and not if, he dies or loses power, there is going to be a massive struggle for the Big Chair that makes this micro-revolution look like a firecracker, probably involving nuclear weapons. There is no trust structure as you said. All threads go to him and only him. Or perhaps fuses would be a better word than threads.
That was a thing that happened
Wish it had lasted longer to draw away more resources that would have been used against Ukraine, but anything that blackens Putin's eye I am generally in favor of
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Not to mention 25,000 leaderless soldiers wandering around Belarus, tens of thousands more to be punished for not resisting them, and an uncounted (but soon to be counted!) number of civilians to be detained for responding to it "inappropriately".
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That's an interesting claim. But I don't know of any internal political documents from the time period, and couldn't read them if I did. Do you mean private letters, directions to subordinates, or what?
Official Church pronouncements of policy were theological, and their most-important internal debates were at church councils, which I've always seen summarized in strictly theological terms. The most-important institutional-control question, over who leads the church and how much authority they have, was always argued using theological justifications AFAIK. Politics happened behind the scenes (eg, Athanasius hiring thugs to prevent his opponents from attending a council, and using his political influence to get Arians exiled).
I've read a lot of medieval Church history, and can't think of any instances of that happening. The Church was remarkably successful at throwing crusades; more so than the history books confess--the only crusades you hear about are the numbered crusades, against Muslims; but the most-devastating crusades were against other Christians, like the Albigensians and the Bogomils. Some nobles joined and some didn't, but the reasons for not going were mostly "I'm too old" or "not enough in it for me." Crusades didn't have much opportunity to interfere with obligations and privileges, given that they took place in foreign lands.
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Yes. This is a godawful mess, and it doesn't even have the decency to be a mess that makes sense.
That contradicts everything I've read about the Nazi state. It was held together by charisma and personal ties. The "institutions", like the SA and the SS, weren't institutions; they began as private fiefdoms, originally beyond Hitler's control. At the top, there was no org chart and no real rules, just guys trying to guess what Hitler wanted. Power at the top depended on Hitler's good will, not on any kind of official authorization. Hitler didn't hate personal-relationship politics; he hated people, and taking time out of his day to deal with them, and making decisions. He liked making people guess what he wanted. He wanted to watch films, stage parades, and monologue about art more than he wanted to govern.
Hitler, Goering, Röhm, and Himmler each assembled their own power bases independently, without any authorization from anyone, and jockeyed for power; and Hitler came out on top, but not until 1934 (more than halfway thru the lifespan of the Nazi Party). Big organizations like the SA and the SS were built by Roehm and Himmler going around talking to guys and convincing them to join, for free, with no budget and no legal authority or responsibility. "Authority" came later, in the form of Hitler assigning someone a task, or of somebody guessing Hitler wanted something done and just doing it, in the confidence that Hitler would back them up. Even today, we can't prove that Hitler ever ordered the Holocaust. Usually several organizations had been given the same task by Hitler or some underling at different times, and were competing with each other. It was utter chaos from a bureaucratic standpoint.
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Well, I was using Czar somewhat facetiously, and mockingly, but you raise an excellent point. In many ways what Putin has set up is weaker than pre-modern autocracies, because he lacks some of the key tools they relied on, AND he's thrown away modern tools as well because they don't fit in with is project of centralizing all power into personal relationships with himself.
Putin has tried vaguely to build a social compact with his people, primarily by presenting himself as the defender of traditional Christian, masculine values against the decadent, corrupt, perverted West who seek to infiltrate and destroy Russia, to obliterate it. But he hasn't done this very well. He certainly hasn't put in the effort that the more competent Czars put in to portray themselves as the "little father" and sell that social compact to the masses.
He also hasn't invested in developing a more modern ideological basis for a social compact. Modern nation-states have to do this very well in order to cohere; when people ask the question "Who is in charge, how are they picked, and why should they be obeyed?" you need an answer, and "Because I'm a badass warrior-aristocrat anointed by god; I bring glory, peace, and rewards to you, my people, and death to traitors and my enemies, who are also your enemies" doesn't cut it these days. We joke about the cynicism with which the citizens of the USSR regarded their state, but many of them actually believed in the vision it was selling, because that state made a real concerted effort to sell that vision and the social compact. "We're all brothers in international communism, comrades, that's why you should obey the will of your soviets, who after all represent the true voice of you, the workers" may have been full of lies, but its a vision you can sell people.
But doing that required robust institutions, as you pointed out. The Party, the Army, and the security services all worked hard to build themselves up in service to their ideological goals and to better serve the state. (Yeah, with a lot of corruption and incompetence in there as well.)
Putin hates that sort of thing. He wants everything to be run by people who owe their positions to him, and he doesn't want them to be able to count on institutional support from what they're running. It's the equivalent of a king appointing people to important positions at his court not because they'll do a good job but to keep them sweet and ensure their loyalty.
It's part of why he's allowing a lot of PMCs, not just Wagner, to flourish. That is CLASSIC feudal autocrat behavior. A centralized modern army develops an internal culture where they're loyal to their fellow officers, their fellow soldiers, and their institution. (That can cause problems when other organs of the state weaken, which is how military coups happen, as you're no doubt well aware. Putin is aware of that too.) Competing military forces that squabble with each other and owe their positions directly to him and his patronage, though... chef's kiss as far as he's concerned.
Of course, if you hollow out your army too much, and one of those private armies notices that... that's its own problem.
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I'm talking about those to an extent, but what I mainly mean are the internal records of meetings and the decision-making process of the Papal bureaucracy and the College of Cardinals. The Church was REAL REAL good at keeping those. Any official pronouncement was discussed to death usually, even under the more in-control, autocratic Popes.
I haven't read them in the original latin myself, of course. But when I read histories of the Church, or ones that deal with it, that include modern English translations of some of the primary sources to buttress their narratives, what jumps out at me is that the way it does politics looks a lot more like how the old Roman Senate and bureaucracy did politics, AND more how modern institutions do politics, than they do how the kingly courts of their western European contemporaries were doing politics. The transition can actually be jarring; you'll read an account of a carefully built political compromise over who will be, say, an Archbishop, and then they send the guy out to his see and the local nobleman is all "I don't know this guy; why isn't one of MY guys my bishop?" Not a theological objection, but one rooted purely in "this is a new dude and now I gotta build a relationship with him, and maybe he already has relationships with my enemies, and I don't like that."
Here's a wild fact; in some ways the Papacy preferred to interact with Byzantium, which did not acknowledge its spiritual authority, than they did the kings and princes of western Europe, who did. Constantinople and the Patriarchate had maintained state capacity after it collapsed in the west, and so they were dealing with institutions much like their own. Dealing with polities that were basically unending nesting dolls of people who wanted to have personal relationships with the Pope (and who regarded having personal relationships with their enemies as an insult) was exhausting for the Papal bureaucracy; they were deluged with requests from local Bishops and Archbishops asking for this-and-that special considerations for their local rulers, who of course they had to maintain good relationships with because those guys had a lot of control over whether or not your Abbey got sacked, and who wanted Papal favor because being able to prove you had a personal relationship with the Vicar of Christ on Earth was a big deal.
The Byzantines didn't do politics that way, and that could be a welcome relief.
Yeah, but you gotta keep in mind that for these guys theology and politics were the same thing. The summaries don't quite tell the whole story there unless you're reading more dedicated histories, which tend to go deep into the politics.
Every official church pronouncement had a lot of internal politicking behind it.
They were always eventually JUSTIFIED that way, but discussions within the church often turned on things like ability and feasibility. There was a fair amount of "of course we all agree that this person is a righteous, sound man, he'd make a fine Bishop/bureaucrat/Abbott/what have you, but perhaps God calls him to service in other positions more suited to him?" that are thinly veiled justifications for "this guy doesn't have the political juice" or "he's not actually the best guy to push forward our goals." There was also a fair amount of theological dickering that was nakedly about temporal goals.
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There have been, and I expect always will be, conflicts and mistakes. The difference here is that mistake theorists recognize that sometimes mistake theory is appropriate and sometimes conflict theory is, while conflict theorists assume, at least in practice, that mistake theory is never appropriate. A Christian, Marxist, or Social Justice warrior never thinks, as Socrates might have, that bad deeds, or even the mere failure to live up to expectations, might be the result of ignorance or laziness rather than of evil influence. Your claim that silencing, even if it's silencing the majority, is a necessary tactic for progressive reform, seems to me to be a clear case of assuming that conflict theory is the only game anybody ever plays.
BTW, the Declaration of Independence is not a founding statement of America's political principles. It didn't found anything; it declared a vague union between 13 independent, autonomous states. What political principles it implied were later embodied in the Articles of Confederation. Notice that it nowhere refers to "the united States" as a nation, nor does it ever even capitalise "united States". People had little idea what political form those states would later take in 1789, and even less what forms they'd take in 1824 (the Commerce Clause), 1865, and 1935 (establishment of the welfare state).
I don't happen to think that the Founding Fathers had good or even honest reasons for declaring independence in 1776. But I think they were smart guys, much smarter than the ones we have now, and that they eventually cobbled together something that worked very well.
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I've wondered whether that holds in Russia. The pro-Putin Russians I've spoken with seem to be okay with that. Long ago, I was seeing a pro-Putin Russian woman, and asked her why she supported him when he was so obvious evil, and she said, "Because he makes Russia strong." That was what nationalist Russians cared about most after the fall of the Soviet Union. I don't think the Enlightenment caught on as much east of Poland.
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This is certainly a line I've seen pushed. In my experience its pushed a lot by people who want to de-legitimize any particular claim that conflict theory may be appropriate.
There are plenty of people of all those self-identified groups (and social justice warrior is not a proper noun) who absolutely believe that ignorance or laziness cause bad deeds. Or even that some people aren't under "evil influence" but are in fact malicious actors themselves.
I've never claimed that. I have claimed that attempting to make certain opinions so politically toxic that nobody wants to publicly express or be associated with them has been a tactic for not just progressive social and political change, but social and political change of all types, and that this tactic is entirely legitimate from a procedural standpoint (though it may be illegitimate due to substantive reasons) because its grounded in the exercise of the right to free speech and free association. People have the right to say whatever they like; other people have the right to say "that's awful; it's so awful I don't want to associate with you or anyone who DOES associate with you, and will encourage others to behave in like manner."
Hell, the biggest example of this happening in the country right now is non-progressive; the ongoing Budweiser boycott, which boils down to "we are disgusted you chose to associate yourselves with trans people; we are SO disgusted by this we will not associate ourselves with your product, and will encourage others not to do so, and might not associate with them either."
That's appalling and disgusting from a substantive standpoint, but not a procedural one. It's also not new. People try and pretend that "silencing" is some sinister new thing that poses a new and existential threat to liberal democracy, when in fact its always existed and always will exist.
I have never claimed it is a NECESSARY tactic in all situations and all contexts, however.
It's working to an extent, especially since its one of the few political viewpoints you can express publicly in Russia and not face consequences for. But its also working nowhere near as well as it COULD be.
Putin has largely outsourced that kind of thing to ultranationalist Russian movements that tend to be fragmented and prone to fighting among themselves. You haven't seen vitriol until you've seen two ultranationalist Russians who both believe Ukraine should be genocided get into a shouting match on Telgram over which one of them is the more belligerent manly man. These are fights that occasionally end in a for-real murder!
But Putin hasn't put a lot of state capacity behind this, and it shows. Have you noticed how WEAK Russia's propaganda game has been throughout this war? Say what you will about the Ukrainians but their PR efforts have been goddamn near immaculate, and they understand how to work the levers of western media to appear congenial; stuff like the NAFO dogs plays real well over here.
All Putin has is "I'm a big strong man and make Russia big and strong, so you should follow me because of that." That doesn't fail completely but its a very, very weak option in a modern context, especially when you're trying to run a modern war, which requires a certain amount of buy-in and willingness to fight and die even among conscripts. A society with a lot more buy-in as to be something worth fighting for and with a military that had a much stronger internal bond to itself would be preforming much better. "Putin is strong" isn't worth nothing... but it also isn't near enough.
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Oh, say that again. I hear it so rarely. I'm married, after all.
I'm willing to bet cold, hard cash that they never expected those records to be read by anybody other than their peers, let alone a bunch of heathen discussing them centuries later without one of the anointed providing guidance
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(going to get opinion-risky here, salt well before reading)
In a way, you can see that same metric in modern Presidential politics. Bill Clinton, Trump, George W Bush, and Ronald Reagan were all-in with personal-relationship interactions. Bill for example could spot you across the room, get you into a handshake, ask about your kids in college, compliment your wife on her hairdo, and be off to another person in moments. Obama, Biden, John Kerry, Hillary, Al Gore and such were institution-relationship people, constructing a inter-related web of organizations with themselves at the top as a Great Leader figure where they didn't have to interact with lesser beings. Both approaches work in various ways, particularly in our system where no matter how much power you can accumulate, eight years and you're out without the ability to appoint your successor.
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Darned straight. If the King of England had extended the colonies fair representation, we'd probably be a whole set of Canadian provinces. (and without the First amendment protections we have here.) That being said, our conflict-system is trusted enough that the most heavily armed political party in the world (except maybe Somalia) lost the presidential election last time and there have been no banana republic stunts like arresting the previous president and... um... Stopping there.
.
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That's no better. Find me a Marxist who will admit that sometimes, a CEO does something because he thinks it's the moral thing to do.
Putin's main propaganda tactic has been to accuse the Ukrainians of harboring Nazis. Wonder where he got that crazy idea from?
Guys, you're taking it entirely wrong.
It's Russia! It wasn't a civil war it was just a raider takeover of a business. It's a classic 90's Russia situation. Prigozhin had a nice business, Putin wanted it, and that was that. I mean, usually, people cave straight away, but Prigozhin thought he was too cool, hence the five minutes of fireworks. which was 100% Prigozhin's bluff.
There was nothing political about it, no civil war, no coup attempt. Just a slight escalation over gopniks shooting each other on the streets that was the norm there 30 years ago.
Good point! I must retract a thing that I wrote to you in a PM.
I'll say, though, that while your description isn't wrong--I live in a rural area, and some of these boycotters really are disgusted by trans people--you're ignoring the element of betrayal. There's an economic war between the city folk and the country folk, and the rural people feel very much oppressed, shat-upon, and besieged, and felt betrayed by Budweiser. It wasn't just the act of having a single trans spokesperson, but also the association, in present times, of such acts with total capitulation to the other side in other matters as well, eg hiring diversity officers, setting racial hiring quotas, and running advertisements which represent different ethnicities equally by number rather than by proportion.
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The context there is actually interesting; Parliament (George III had jack-all in the way of formal power to grant the colonies much of anything) basically couldn't extend fair representation to the colonies. Or, well, it could, but it had a major problem: doing that would mean extending it to people back in Great Britain as well.
In the late 1700s Britain was in a slow-rolling domestic political crisis that wouldn't be resolved for another half-century. Basically... Parliament at the time was under no obligation to make sure boroughs had equal population numbers in them, or to re-draw them at certain intervals. There were boroughs that hadn't been touched since the early 1600s; to put that in an American perspective, imagine if we had a fair number of Congressional districts we hadn't bothered to look at since the Civil War.
This created massive population centers (Manchester) that were grievously underrepresented because their population had been much smaller the last time seats were drawn (or because they pissed off the wrong people after the English Civil War), and other places that had once been important political and population centers (Sarum) that now had maybe ten people living in them; the infamous "rotten boroughs" and "pocket boroughs."
Now, it wasn't hard to look at that map and go "we should change things." But a lot of powerful vested interests really liked having seats in Parliament you could buy for the low low cost of ten to twelve voters. So there was a lot of foot-dragging and smoke blown. I'm particularly fond of the justification that was trotted out most often; that all members of Parliament represented the interests of all the British, everywhere, so it didn't matter if the hundreds of thousands in your big city got one guy while a county that hadn't been important since Edward IIIs day and had less than a thousand people in it got three; you were still represented!
Ideologically speaking, none of the major political factions in the 1760s would have minded having colonials in Parliament; both Tory and Whig interests had extensive social and political and economic contacts in the colonies and would have liked having the allies and buy-in. But practically speaking giving the colonies representation would have meant re-drawing the domestic map too, and THAT was an absolute non-starter.
The American and French Revolutions killed reformist efforts in Great Britain stone dead; anyone talking about increased democracy and rights for voters was smeared as a Jacobin. It wouldn't be until the Reform act of 1832 that things would change.
The TLDR on that is that basically, denying political rights to the colonies was less an act of calculated tyranny based on "fuck you, you're not REAL British" principles than it was an act of banal political corruption.
It's only banana republic stunts if the former president didn't do anything worth arresting him over. Otherwise, its called "being a former president doesn't mean you get to do crimes."
The guy should be in the dock for treason given his, you know, coup attempt. THAT was banana republic shit. But I'll take what I can get.
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There really isn't. It would be an odd kind of economic war, considering the massive economic and service subsidies that urban folks provide to rural folks, and that urban voters are the champions of policies that would massively economically help rural areas, which those rural areas often fight tooth and nail.
The biggest quality-of-life benefit rural folks received over the past two decades was the Affordable Care Act. Enormously beneficial policy for rural folks... who hated and loathed it. Just one example.
You could argue that there's a cultural war on between city folk and rural folk, or that there's an economic war on between late-stage capitalism and rural folk, but framing the urban/rural divide in terms of "urban folk making economic war on rural folk" is simply not accurate, especially given that the public policies that would most help economically help rural folk are championed by urban folk and resisted by rural folk.
Being mad at Budweiser because they treat their employees badly, run their breweries in an environmentally unsound way, and generally do all the shitty things big corporations do is something I can respect. Being mad at them for some of the very few good things they do is not. "You have a diversity officer and your advertisements are too multicultural for my tastes" isn't a viewpoint I respect, nor should I.
5734881
Did he really tried? Putin is publicly divorced and there are heavy rumors of him having kids outside of marriage --- that has never given him any significant criticism. Religion have never went away really and is having a bit of renaissance, but there's no such thing as "traditional Christian values" on a huge scale in Russia after 70 years of USSR. If you mean anti-gay stuff, then it's more from criminal subculture than Christianity. Masculinity? Yeah, previously, but now he's old and likes to sit in a bunker a lot. Talking shit about the West? Definitely! But not too hard, since majority of powerful people (or at least their children/families) of Russia kinda live there (before the war at least).
There isn't much to build upon here, just one of narratives that propaganda pulls out when they need to do something messed up. And maybe concessions for the Church. Furthermore, maybe tomorrow, I don't know, aliens will invade and they'll need to be besties with the West again.
That is social contract of Putin with Russian populace (before mobilization). In 2000-s there also was economic growth (and private life improvement, correspondingly).
If you say that going into major war with that is a really bad idea, you'll be... correct
Was allowing. But if he'll be still in power next incarnation probably isn't far away.
5734896
I'm a bit curious what (and more importantly when) do you mean?
That's by previous design.
5734926
How do you figure that urban folk provide massive subsidies to rural folk? I don't see any breakdown of taxes paid and benefits reaped into rural and urban, only by ethnicity and income level.
Do you just think rural people are stupid, voting against their friends, the Democrats? They aren't stupid. You should try to figure out why they do that, and why the division between Democrat and Republican is almost nothing but city versus country. The only exceptions are majority-black former-cotton-farming areas in the old South, Native American reservations, and Colorado Springs.
There are big and obvious ways that urban policies are destroying rural communities. The most-obvious is Biden's tuition-payment plan, which is straight-up robbing rural areas to pay urban folk to go to college. There's no need for a college degree for most rural jobs, and most rural people see college as a waste of time and money that they can't afford. Most would rather start a family than go to college. Family is much more-important to rural people. What's worse, after rural teenagers who don't want to go to college are pressured to by the economic incentives, they'll leave rural areas for cities where they can do something with their degrees.
Another big way is the Americans with Disabilities Act. This is applied to tiny rural business which can't possibly afford the upgrades needed to comply. Plenty have gone bankrupt thanks to the ADA. This entire category of over-regulation is the main way of attacking rural areas, and also includes environmental regulations, licensing regulations, food safety regulations, manufacturing regulations... Most of these regulations make sense in cities, but a lot of them are insane out here.
Another is the complexity of the tax code, and regulations on business, and laws and rulings that favor big businesses. Small businesses were overwhelmed by new regulations under Obama; they don't even have the resources to figure out what they're required to do, let alone to do it. You'd think the Internet could help businesses in in rural areas, but the Internet is now a lot harder for small businesses because the proliferation of legal restrictions and conflicting tax codes on internet commerce. Try to ship liquor from Ohio to California and see how much fun that is.
Another is gun control. This is an attack on rural security and on rural culture. Security, because if you've got a farm out in the middle of nowhere, out of sight of any neighbors, it's up to you to protect it. One of my great-grandfathers was murdered on his farm because he didn't have a gun, and some thieves wanted to steal his wagon full of produce, which was loaded up to take to market and was all he had to get his family through the winter. He tried to stop them, and they beat him to death; and his kids were sent to work as child labor on other people's farms. Culture, because getting your first rifle is still a rite of passage in some families, and is a key motivator for children to learn responsibility, civic duties, and respect for others. A child who won't act mature, won't get a rifle.
This is mostly true. I love the ACA, flawed as it is, when combined with state support. But
5734926
[NOTE: See schooling by Chris, below.]
The job of diversity officers is to ensure that white males have less chance of getting hired than anyone else does. If diversity officers were there to be anti-racist and anti-sexist, they wouldn't be hired in such a racist and sexist fashion! Have you ever seen a white male diversity & equity officer? They are only hired by places that already discriminate against white males, typically have no clear limits to their powers, and are paid an awful lot for a job which doesn't seem to require any special skills or knowledge. They never seek diversity in high-income jobs in which white males are underrepresented (such as psychologists, NFL players, or diversity officers), or low-income jobs in which they're over-represented (such as garbagemen); only in high-paying jobs in which they're over-represented.
Furthermore, the ostensible reason for ALL of this employment discrimination against white males is... that certain ethnic minorities have less money! But since people having less money is the problem, how about hiring people who have less money, or paying them more? The ACTUAL PRACTICE of nearly every high-tech company in America is, instead, to require applicants to tell them how much money they made in their last job, so they can keep on paying less to the people who've made less! THIS is what should be outlawed.
There's no justification for basing hiring practices on ethnicity to redress wealth inequity. It's pure-and-simple racism.
And, yes, advertisements which deliberately and consistently under-represent white people are as morally reprehensible as ones which under-represent others.
5734959
Two ways. First, at the federal level, it's the heavily rural states that receive enormous amounts of re-distribution from the heavily urban states, which are the economic engines of the country. Those breakdowns are easily available.
But I suppose you could argue "sure, but that doesn't prove its the urban areas of those urbanized states that are those economic engines; maybe the rural areas of those states are the real powerhouses. California grows a lot of food, after all! And it doesn't show what's happening at the state level."
That's vanishingly unlikely but technically possible. I don't have on-hand data for every single state. But I can point to multiple studies in multiple states demonstrating the opposite. Atlanta provides sixty percent of Georgia's revenue but receives only forty percent of state funding; it massively subsidizes the rest of Georgia. Minneapolis/St.Paul and Rochester similarly subsidize the rest of Minnesota. The Seattle metro area subsidizes the rest of Washington State.
And of course, New York City subsidizes the rest of the New York State.
These are facts. They are widely known. Urban American subsidizes rural America, at both the state and the federal level. It simply does.
A hell of a way to make economic war, that is; by shipping lots of money off to your enemies.
New Mexico. Vermont.
Weren't you the one just a few posts ago telling me "hey, sometimes people do things because they're ignorant and/or stupid, not evil?"
Because you know what, I have figured this out, and the conclusion I've come to is "rural America has decided that its culture war priorities are more important to it than economic priorities, and acts accordingly."
I agree with you that rural people are not stupid. But claiming that they're having economic war made on them by urban America specifically is badly supported.
This is an absurd statement. "Robbing" the rural areas that are already being heavily subsidized by the feds by... forgiving student loans?
This policy may or may not be sound, but it cannot fairly be characterized as "straight-up robbing."
So you're complaining that they can't afford it right after claiming that subsidizing it is robbing them.
Bullshit. "Urban people don't care as much about their families as rural people" is a disgusting thing to say.
So colleges is a waste of time and money they can't afford, because jobs where they are don't need one, but then they go anyway, and then they leave.
Weren't you the one saying they weren't stupid?
"Disabled people in rural areas don't deserve to be reasonably accommodated; they should be able to be discriminated against freely. And rural food shouldn't be safe, nor should items made there be regulated, nor should the environment be protected, nor should tradesmen be properly licensed" is a hell of a stance to take.
The ADA is literally the least America can do for its disabled people, and you're here claiming its too much, too heavy a burden, people and businesses shouldn't have to reasonably accommodate the disabled.
The guy who is clamoring for massive and sweeping de-regulation is complaining about favoring bug business.
I can't help but notice you've now completely abandoned economic arguments about how urban America is making war on rural America altogether.
Rural farms in countries with immensely draconian gun control laws seem to be doing just fine here. Farmers in Lancashire or Auvergne don't seem to feel they need an arsenal to be safe.
Gun control is manifestly good policy. We pile up the bodies like cordwood here in America, and the violence that entails results in paranoid, heavily-armed police forces, which results in MORE bodies piled up.
There are two possibilities here:
1) America is a uniquely violent country filled with uniquely violent people; we are monstrous killers, marauders and thieves without compare, and if you remove guns from our society we'll simply either obtain them illegally or, failing that, hack each other apart with knives or other weapons.
2) If you remove most guns from our society we'll be like every other industrialized country that has removed most guns from their society; far safer, with far less death, far safer streets, and far fewer bodies. "If you outlaw weapons, only outlaws will have weapons" has not materialized anywhere in the developed world.
Well, that's certainly worth the enormous volume of bullet-riddled bodies we generate every year!
Yeah, because if there's one thing rural areas are known for, its only letting responsible people who act mature get their hands on rifles.
Moreover, you're framing this in fairly banal terms; a farmer having a rifle. Cool. Canadian farmers can have rifles too. So can English or French or German or Spanish ones.
But rural America doesn't just seem to want to have some rifles on farms. They want to have tons of full-auto rifles, handguns too, and they want'em completely untracked, unregulated, and unencumbered. They want to be able to take them anywhere they like, displayed openly or concealed as they prefer, and do as they please with them.
That's an aspect of rural culture that can, and should, be attacked heavily. But its a poor case for economic warfare being carried out.
Weren't you the one saying these people aren't stupid?
So you love the ACA, which regulated employer-provided health insurance and drugs and medicine as never before, a truly massive expansion of the regulatory state... because you think health care in the US is over-regulated.
You point out that the ACA is "flawed." This is true, but its true because it doesn't go nearly far enough. We need MORE regulation and government involvement in health care, not LESS. Every developed nation in the world has mammoth government involvement in, and regulation of, their healthcare systems that dwarf what we do here... and they uniformly spend less money to get better results.
To make the statement that healthcare costs are hugely inflated solely because of over-regulation is baffling to me.
So, there's a WHOLE LOT in this comment--and this comment section--that I'm just not even gonna touch, but let me pull this bit out for a couple of points on the little bit I'm quoting here:
1) My current workplace's DEI committee is headed by a middle-aged white male. My previous workplace had a young (older millennial, maybe?) white man as its "Executive Director of Equity and Engagement." Two ain't a big sample size, sure, but insofar as they are literally the only DEI heads I know, my answer to "Have you ever seen a white male diversity & equity officer?" is, "Yes, literally 100% of them have been."
2) I don't know about fields outside of K-12 education, but "The job of diversity officers is to ensure that white males have less chance of getting hired than anyone else does" is pretty obviously false in this field. Most of what my current DEI committee (which I work with, by the way! I'm not an "officer," but I'm definitely a white male, so there's another data point!) does is work on student achievement, and identifying systemic issues that do or can affect students based on gender, culture, and race. I don't know about my last workplace, but at my current job, the DEI committee isn't even under the HR umbrella, it's under Services and Support. [EDITED TO CLARIFY: the committee does do things like equity trainings as relate to inter-staff environment too, but my point is that we don't, say, have a direct role in hiring decisions, so we could hardly stop white men from getting hired even if for some unfathomable reason we wanted to.]
3) Speaking, again, as a white male, I have encountered exactly zero professional discrimination from administration or coworkers at my current workplace based on my being white and/or male. Ditto my previous workplace. Now sure, maybe I just got really lucky at those jobs--again, sample size of two!--but two is still plenty to make your categorical statement at the end of that bit I quoted an obvious falsehood. And you could say something like "obviously I wasn't speaking literally, but the vast majority of DEI hires occur at places that discriminate against white males," and hell, maybe that's true! But it's opposite my lived experience, and, er, sounds pretty absurd on the face of it, if you'll forgive me for saying so.
I'm not sure what your DEI experiences have been, but they've clearly been very different from mine. Enough so that I figured I'd better throw this out there, if only to observe the absolute and categorical divide between what you claim is the norm and what I've personally experienced.
5734978
I accept that rural areas generally take in more tax dollars than they provide.
If that's just a matter of the average income being lower in rural areas, though, then I think that should be separated out from the systematic oppression of the country by the city. Most people in town and country agree now, I think, that it's good for taxes to redistribute from the rich to the poor. That doesn't excuse the imposition of rules made for the city on the country.
(I also wonder how much of the distributions to rural areas are farm subsidies, or extraction-industry subsidies, which are both paid almost entirely to big corporations, whose stockholders live in big cities.)
Besides which, if you studied the antebellum south, you'd find that masters spent more on their slaves than slaves spent on their masters, but that didn't make it a good deal for the slaves. Rural areas don't want handouts as much as they want the freedom to support themselves like they used to.
A combination of different economic conditions and different cultural values make many laws made that are good in cities, oppressive in the country. Valuing family is an important one of these. I'm sorry if it makes you angry that people in the country act like they care more about their families than people in the city, but they do. They want to start bigger families, sooner; and they stay together with their families and kin for life, instead of hopping around the country to make more money. And "People living in rural areas (Agree & Glaser, 2009; Bédard et al., 2004) are more likely to be informal caregivers" to their parents when they're old.
The approach to economic activity is pretty different in rural areas. Until a couple of decades ago, it was common for children to acquire a skill or trade by helping out a parent with some of their work. That's basically outlawed now, by child labor laws and licensing laws, which are very good things to have in a big firm, and in some families, but are a heavy-handed way to deal with a parent training a child. Quite a few people do odd jobs, or seasonal work, or set up small part-time businesses in their homes: haircutting, pie baking, raising chickens. Little entrepreneurs are common in the country. But state and federal regulations now make much of that nearly impossible. For instance, the small time pie-bakers here have all been shut down, quite recently, by the state, because you're not allowed to sell pies that you bake in your own kitchen. One of the best restaurants in town was shut down, permanently, by the state health inspector, but nobody ever got sick from eating there that I know of. Lots more restaurants were shut down, permanently, by the covid closures.
The desire to be protected by the state, whether from crime, sickness, bad food, bad luck, or bad decisions, is less in rural areas.
Look at the Amish, who are almost entirely free from government regulation and government handouts, and appear to usually be at least as prosperous as their neighbors, who have all sorts of technological advantages over them in work efficiency. (I say "appear" because they're poor if you measure wealth in electronics, labor-saving devices, and the resulting spare time.)
Minimum wage is another way the city suppresses the country. Minimum wage is set according to the cost of living in a city. In PA the minimum wage is currently $7.25, which is so low that I don't know anybody making that little. The semi-standard wage for non-unionized, unskilled workers is about $12/hr. The governor wants to double the minimum wage, which will hit some rural businesses hard.
You can't just naively raise the minimum wage and say you're helping workers. Rural businesses are generally smaller and have fewer customers than urban ones, and fewer returns to scale, and can't pay as high wages. That doesn't necessarily imply a lower standard of living for the workers, because land and housing are much less expensive in rural areas. You can't directly compare rural dollars to city dollars; that's a little like comparing dollars to yen. But it does seem to be the case that a rural environment is just less-profitable in general, and people who live there willingly, do so because they value some things higher than city people do, like family, nature, land, quiet, low crime, and low pollution.
I'm over-generalizing "rural culture". Just in my region, the cultures of the Amish, the small towns north of Pittsburgh, and the small towns close to West Virginia, are quite different. West Virginia is hillbilly area, and the things I wrote about family, land, and independence go double or triple there, plus they have just the opposite attitude of the Amish towards spare time. They're more likely to want more spare time than more money.
5734978
Your statement is baffling to me. Clearly the outrageous salaries of doctors, the outrageous prices of new drugs, and the outrageous prices charged to the uninsured, are all direct consequences of government regulation. I'm not gonna bother arguing with it. That would be like arguing with your claim that universities aren't controlled by leftists, or that Silicon Valley is right-wing.
5735062
I appreciate the gentle correction. I'm glad to hear that DEI does other things. My experience is indirect, and limited to the staff of (A) universities that I've attended or tried to get hired at, and (B) tech companies I've tried to get hired at. Most of them discriminated against white males (and often Asian males) in hiring, because they'd set target ethnicity and sex ratios based on the demographics of the population at large, in industries in which the qualified applicants are 80% or more male, and non-Asian people of color with degrees are uncommon. For instance, 50% of 23andme's bioinformaticians are female, even though only 18% of the worker pool is. (Though my 23andme interview was scotched for a totally different reason: their HR flew me in to interview for a position that wasn't actually open.) 0% of the computer science faculty at the university nearest to me are white males.
I don't know how this is done internally nowadays. I just know that I see their workforce demographics pie charts, or the names and faces on their faculty pages; and if you compare them to the worker pool demographics and do the math, you'll usually find discrimination against white males. Not against males, or against whites; just against white males.
Also, one of the universities I attended had a big witch-hunt recently, hiring dozens of diversity officers and giving them a mandate to root out "systemic racism" university-wide, via unspecified means. I don't know how that turned out. I asked my thesis advisor, but he wouldn't talk to me about it over the phone.
This doesn't seem to apply to European companies, and Google's worker demographics are pretty close to the worker pool demographics, despite their "progressive" culture. And I have a limited dataset, so I probably shouldn't be spouting off so confidently.
The main thing is that I never, ever get a job offer, not in the past 10 years, despite having a PhD and some great workplace accomplishments. There are other reasons for this. Age discrimination is the harsher and more-obvious discrimination in tech industries, and the preference for ivy-league graduates is a major factor in both places. Discrimination against people who've been out of work for years in the tech industry is probably the worst of all. But I don't know. People never tell me why they've decided not to hire me.
5734978
You understand that the money for those student loans comes from tax money, right?
When you tax the lower class to subsidize the middle class, I call that "straight-up robbing".
I realize you think college education is a right, but--news flash--not everybody wants to go to college. The cost of college should be borne by the people who want to and do go to college, who, so the reasoning behind this tuition reimbursement goes, will be made wealthier by doing so. This is by definition just. Anything else is unjust.
5735097
I suppose this is a bad time to point out that rural areas in the United States receive a WILDLY undemocratic political subsidy to their voting power, both at the federal and state level (except in Nebraska for the latter), which they're not shy about exploiting to the fullest extent.
So not only is rural American receiving big economic subsidies, they're receiving big political subsidies. Those are very odd things to describe as oppressive.
This is not true at all. The singular core value of the rural-centered political coalition in this country, the one they prioritize above all else, is that wealth should be redistributed from the poor to the rich, not the other way around. This political coalition is aggressive, and successful, at implementing this policy priority, and receives massive voter support to do to so.
This is sometimes not an unreasonable desire (because "support themselves like they used to" has a lot of baggage) but put bluntly, it can't happen without big subsidies one way or the other. Either direct cash handouts, OR massive subsidies for the sorts of jobs they'd like.
Now, I'm all for massive subsidies for job creation, but there are countervailing forces there. You mention the extractive industries upthread; a LOT of rural workers with history in the extractive industries want those specific jobs back. A friend of mine wrote an entire book, Empire of Timber, about labor and logging in the Pacific Northwest, and a theme he kept coming back to was "these guys want to just cut down all the trees like their fathers and grandfathers did, environmental consequences be damned, and even if sufficient support were given to them to allow them to do other work (which isn't being provided, which is a policy calumny) they reject that; they want to chop down trees and ONLY that, and they'd prefer to do it in lumbering teams with no women and no black people, please."
It's straight-up the opposite. Those countries that have cheaper prices for all of the above have them via MASSIVE government regulation that dwarfs ours.
Especially doctor salaries! American doctors, especially specialists, have... I forget the precise number but its something like a twenty to thirty percent wage premium above their counterparts in other developed nations. And the major reason for this is that all of those countries adopted various universal healthcare schemes many decades ago, and part of those schemes involved tamping down doctor compensation, bending the cost curve down. They solved the problem via... massive regulation.
Getting back to the topic of civil war, I've found this clip to be instructive (although I can't help but think of the actor in Game of Thrones)