Every piece of Russia's seeming incompetence in this war -- the bad logistics, the desertions, the poor planning -- seems to come back to the fact that the people making the plans felt ashamed of what they were doing, and knew that soldiers would feel ashamed too.
The reason they didn't tell Russian soldiers what they were doing -- leaving them confused and disorganized and demoralized -- was that they knew they were ordering them to do was bad.
Ultimately, the justice or injustice of a war's cause matters a LOT. It takes years -- or decades -- of mass indoctrination to get an army to fight wholeheartedly for a bad cause. You don't just order them to slaughter their innocent cousins and neighbors and assume they'll obey.
Modern social media may make mass indoctrination more difficult. Power has shifted from the talking heads to the masses; this makes it easier for both good and bad ideas to spread, but it also makes top-down coordination harder.
As the Ukrainians are demonstrating, people WILL still unite and fight wholeheartedly for a cause. But only if that cause has enough moral force that nearly everyone sees it as a GOOD cause.

Defending your home against unprovoked aggression is a good cause.
Future leaders may have to be more like Zelensky -- getting down in the trenches with the regular people -- rather than Putin, haughtily issuing bad orders from thousands of miles away.
This doesn't necessarily mean that indoctrination is impossible, or that justice will now always prevail. But if it makes it just a bit harder for dictators to order mass destruction on a whim, that is a good thing.

(end)

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More from @Noahpinion

Mar 3
I'm this post from 1 year ago, I predicted that leftists, frustrated that they were having trouble bashing Biden's bold economic agenda, would switch to focusing on foreign policy so they could bash Biden for being a "hawk".

noahpinion.substack.com/p/biden-is-tri…
I think that happened, and you could see that in the eagerness of leftists to blame the Russian military buildup on NATO expansion.

Then Russia rolled into Ukraine and started blasting cities, and the "blame America" line was proven to be ridiculous.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/a-moment-of-…
So now leftists are left with very few avenues to bash the Biden administration and the American establishment in general.

They can still bash the Right and the GOP, of course, but every normie lib does that too, so that doesn't let leftists bash the Dem establishment.
Read 11 tweets
Mar 3
Amazing thread explaining Russian logistical difficulties, and perhaps the entire course of the war, by looking at tires!

🔥🔥🔥
Today I learned more about tires than the last time I tried to drive in a Michigan blizzard
Read 4 tweets
Feb 25
OK, how the hell is the Gulf of Mexico a "gulf", Hudson Bay a "bay", and the Sea of Okhotsk a "sea"???
And how is the Arabian Sea a "sea" but the Bay of Bengal is a "bay"? They're basically twins!
And let's not even talk about the Baltic "Sea" vs. the Persian "Gulf"...
Read 4 tweets
Feb 23
1/Everyone talks about diverse casting in shows like Witcher, Wheel of Time, LotR, etc. like it's all because of wokeness.

But I think the biggest factor is that producers want to show audiences a world where the people look like the people those audiences are used to seeing.
2/I live in a country where the people are about 60% white, 20% Hispanic, and 20% Black, Asian, and other. And I have spent most of my adult life living in cities that more or less reflected that ethnic mix.

That is what is "normal" for me to look around and see.
2/If I am in a place where everyone is white, I don't think "Ahh, the people around me look normal". I think "I am in a foreign country." Because I can't even remember being in such an environment in the U.S.
Read 10 tweets
Feb 23
1. A thread of online leftists getting mad at Bernie Sanders for condemning Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

2/Bernie literally and repeatedly said he wanted the U.S. to be like Denmark, which is a social democracy. Where was this "mask"?

(Also being a social democrat is good, obviously)
3/Remember, a very large fraction of this "ideology" is just dumb-butt anti-Americanism.
Read 15 tweets
Feb 23
Agreed. Sorry, Italians, we have appropriated your food and made it ours. But in turn, we will lose ownership of pizza to Japan, when broccoli-corn-mayonnaise pizza becomes the global norm!
Here's fried shrimp and sausage pizza
Teriyaki chicken mayo lettuce pizza
Read 14 tweets

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