80 000 ppl attended Z-rally in Moscow. Midwits compared its size with smaller anti-war protests and concluded it's a proof of mass Z-enthusiasm. Midwits are unable to comprehend two factors that rule this world: leverage and incentives 🧵
Journalist is asking Z-attendees "Friends, wanna give a small comment - what does this day mean for you?" They turn away in silence. He insists - they shake their heads and refuse to answer. Finally he asks - why did you come? Response "They pushed us into a bus and brought here"
When looking at Z-rallies in Russia you need to understand they're all 100% staged. Putin suppresses any independent political action and won't allow any protest either pro- or against war. Russian nationalists who are trying to do Z-rallies are arrested and threatened with jail
Kremlin allows only one single type of rallies - the ones which it orchestrated. Putin doesn't want any enthusiasts. That makes sense. If you have convictions, you may support Putin out of conviction. But it also means you may fight Putin out of convictions. You are dangerous
Putin wants only controllable people who do whatever they are told. He promotes such people o all positions of power, which explains poor Russian performance in economy, war, technology, etc. This also explains why he forces unenthusiastic people to political rallies
The main tool for filling pro-government rallies in Russia is сгон бюджетников - pressing the government employees. Government forces university, vocational school ПТУ and other students, school teachers, doctors, civil servants and whoever is on payroll to come to rallies
This for example is a public protest of an independent teachers' union Учитель. In 2014 teachers were forced to participate in demonstrations in support of the Donbass War and annexation of Crimea, and the union protested against it. You can find dozens of such publications
And this is a WhatsApp chat message. Administration forces teachers to collect school kids letters, paintings and posters in support of Z-invasion of Ukraine
This may be the most creative illustration of how they use administrative resource to demonstrate support of Z-campaign. They forced terminally ill children from hospice and their parents to form a Z-letter, supporting the invasion
How does сгон бюджетников work in practice? You command people on government's payroll to come to pick up point. You put them on a bus and drive them to Moscow. When the rally is over, you put them on a bus and drive home. This time they brought people from as far as Smolensk
If you think about it, it makes total sense. These people don't want to come, they are bored, want to go home. They don't do anything stupid, don't network. If you brought real enthusiasts they would network which is super dangerous. You just need to feed them and put onto a bus
Huge size of pro-war rallies is explained by government fully using its leverage and incentives to make people come. They literally order this school to bring 50 people, that civil service office to bring 100 and will fire the boss if he doesn't fill the quota of fake protesters
Yekaterinburg. This woman says she supports the Z-operation (though standing with the poster "for peace"). However, when asked why did she come she responded - they asked us and we came
The only articulate statement in support of the war I've seen so far. She is very happy Putin restored the authority of the country and thinks that display of Russian flags is very patriotic
This is a more typical case:
- Why did you come here?
- They called us
- Did they tell where you are going
- No, they said it will be some event, that's all
Some Z-supporters express even less enthusiasm and run away from cameras. They lool very uncomfortable and probably ashamed of attending the pro war rally
On the other hand, government uses its leverage to discourage people from protesting against the war. Here police breaks the door of Timur Tuhvatullin to arrest. He's accused of "inciting the mass riots"
Police are searching the homes of those who signed an open letter, condemning the Z-war - designer Anna Kantser, activist Gulnaz Ravilova and politician Russian Zinatullin. They had to open the door after police started cutting it
They started a criminal investigation against Liberman, a philosophy teacher of Kazan university who wrote an open letter condemning the war and started collecting students, professors and alumni signatures under it
Tons of people arrested for protesting against the war. All of prisons and detention centres in Moscow and nearby, like Saharovo, are full with people. Now they are treated much harsher than before. Last year they didn't typically beat arrested people, now they do
At this point things didn't get that bad yet. For example this guy who spit on Z letter will be just fined between 30 000 - 50 000 rubles. However, now, after Putin declared that society should "self-clean" such acts might entail far harsher consequences
This sort of explains why we see so much public support of Z-war and so little condemnation of it. Government uses leverage and incentives to promote the former and suppress the latter. This quite cringe propaganda video explains it much better than I could. Watch it. End of 🧵
Soviet output of armaments was absolutely gargantuan, massive, unbeatable. “Extraordinary by any standard” , it was impossible for any other country to compete with.
From 1975 to 1988, the Soviets produced four times as many ICBMs and SLBMs, twice as many nuclear submarines, five times as many bombers, six times as many SAMs, three times as many tanks and six times as many artillery pieces as the United States.
Impossible to compete with.
Which raises a question:
How could the USSR produce so much?
It is not only that the USSR invested every dime into the military production. It is also that the Soviet industry was designed for the very large volumes of output, and worked the best under these very large volumes
We are releasing our investigation on Roscosmos, covering a nearly exhaustive sample of Russian ICBM producing plants. We have investigated both primary ICBM/SLBM producers in Russia, a major producer of launchers, manufacturers of parts and components.
Each material includes an eclectic collection of sources, ranging from the TV propaganda to public tenders, and from the HR listings to academic dissertations. Combined altogether, they provide a holistic picture of Russian ICBM production base that no single type of source can.
Overall, you can expect tech moguls to have much, much higher level of reasoning abilities compared to the political/administrative class. But this comes at a cost. Their capacities for understanding the Other (masses count as the “Other”) are much poorer.
E.g. Putin is much, much less of an outlier in terms of intelligence compared to Thiel. He is much more average. At the same time, I am positively convinced that Putin understands the masses and works with masses much better.
One problem with that is that too much of the supply chain for drone production is located in China. The thing with drones is that they grew out of toys industry. Cheap plastic & electronic crap that all of a sudden got military significance
That is also the major problem I have with "China supports Russia" argument. China could wreck Ukraine easily, simply obstructing & delaying the drone/drone components shipments. That would be an instant military collapse for Ukraine.
Both Russian and Ukrainian drone industries are totally dependent upon the continuous shipments from China. To a very significant degree, their "production" is assembly from the Chinese components which are non alternative and cannot be substituted with anything else (as cheap).
No, Israel being a republic causes it to be more barbaric towards the conquered population than Russia, and with no escape. There is simply no room and no possibility for any sort of integration whatsoever.
Were Israelis slaves to a Big Man, integration would be conceivable.
Crawling on the knees before your Big Man is Lindy
Scaleable, manageable, robust
Every nation on earth will concede to it, after the sufficient amount of sticks (and may be some carrots, but that is optional). Which makes it very, very scaleable
In contrast, crawling on the knees before an other nation is not Lindy. No people on the earth will ever accept it, no matter the degree of violence applied.
That's why republican dominion over the disenfranchised colonial periphery is always so fragile. Not scaleable at all.
Today I will introduce one more concept critical for understanding of how the manufacturing industry has evolved over the last few decades. It is the shift of technological knowledge from esoteric to exoteric
In the pre-digital era, manufacturing used to be mysterious, esoteric
To visualize how the manufacturing worked in the pre-computer/early computer age, imagine the atmosphere of magic, mysticism, enigma. That would be not very far from truth.
To illustrate the idea, I will give you one simple, straightforward example. The train car production.
Train production is a very, very rare example of a Russian machinery industry that survived through the post-Soviet collapse. Of course, it contracted. Of course, it suffered losses. Still, it made it through, while most of the Soviet machinery sector was simply wiped out.