Many admired bravery of Kadyrov who personally went to Ukraine and posted a lot of cool photos from the frontline. Consider this: Kadyrov is praying having put his gun lays nearby. It's a shame we see a Pulsar gas station nearby. So it's not Ukraine. It's Russia🧵
Pulsar gas stations belong to the Russian oil company Rosneft (Роснефть) which is led by Igor Sechin, Putin's close aide. Russia has lots of these gas stations but there are none in Ukraine. Kadyrov took tough-guy-photos in Russia and claimed he did it in Ukraine
So is Kadyrov lying? Consider Peskov's answers on a press conference. When asked if Kremlin knows about Kadyrov's visit to Ukraine, Peskov responded:
- No, we don't have such data (=he didn't go there)
Peskov also clarified that Kadyrov "didn't directly say he went to Ukraine"
Russian TV host Tina Kandelaki wrote a post praising Kadyrov and he reposted it his channel. I'll quote it because it might give an insight into how Russia works:
"Ramzan confidently entered the social media space and immediately realised it is the modern battlefield"
"Kadyrov's Telegram grew unprecedentedly: at the start of Special operation it had 60 thousand subscribers and now it has 1 250 thousand. The Head of Chechnya became an absolute headliner in covering the current events - many my journalist colleagues have a lot to learn from him"
"Kadyrov's reports are much more interesting, lively, better than those produced by our TV channels. Showing his readers the very frontline, Kadyrov created the best military blog in Telegram. That's amazing. We are a country of content producers, too. We can do it, too"
"Elon Musk and Pavel Durov are responding to Ramzan. We are literally in one step from Biden himself starting to publicly react to Kadyrov's Telegram - that's a unique case in political technologies"
"The key factor are the endless memes [about Kadyrov], modern folklore. Stars - bloggers, tiktokers, macro and micro influencers exist for few days, being lost in terabytes of new content. But folklore puts you beyond the time & circumstances. That's how true success looks like"
Kadyrov shared this post and commented:
"Thank you, Tina. I didn't know I'm so famous 😂🤷🏻"
Tina Kandelaki's post with praising Kadyrov's PR skills was considered important enough to make an article about it in a Chechen official media Chechnya Today
(also notice the headline on the left they want to show you "Ramzan Kadyrov became the most quoted governor in Russia)
Naive Westerners perceive Kadyrov as a premodern person. A true, authentic spirit. In reality he's very postmodern. He's a PRmaxer, attention seeker obsessed with likes and dreaming that one day not only Elon Musk, but also Joe Biden will react to him. That's what defines success
Now why is he doing it? Well, because it works. Kadyrov is pursuing a thorough PRmaxing strategy which is entirely based on assumption that you guys are dumb. That you see no difference between the phenomena and noumena, what is perceived and what truly is
Kadyrov's troops are very tough. How do we know it? Just watch endless videos they are posting "from the frontline". We see strong, heavily armed and equipped bearded men. What do they do on these videos? Mostly interviewing civilians about and forcing them to shout "Ahmat Sila!"
Kadyrov's henchman is interviewing civilians who are fleeing from Mariupol:
- Tell me boys, how did those Bandera criminals torture you? They didn't allow you to leave, yeah? And who did help you out?
- You did
Only after making them yell "Ahmat Sila!" he allows them to leave
Kadyrov's TikTok troops seem to be "real fighters". Meanwhile these lightly equipped, tired and soiled guys don't look that tough. And yet, these Chechen mujahideen smashed Russia in the First Chechen War. A particular case of @nntaleb rule: real warriors don't look like warriors
Why do Kadyrov's soldiers take so much stuff to the "battlefield"? Why are the always so fresh, their uniforms so clean, without even a little bit of dirt? Well, because they don't fight. They are TikTok troops of a TikTok warlord. Watch him reading a poem with threats to Ukraine
And you know what? This TikTok warlord has a very high place in Russian dominance hierarchy. Watch this video with the commander of 8th army:
- Ahmat is really strong!
- That's what our commander says, the best commander!
The body language is telling. You see who's a boss here
Technically Kadyrov and 8th army commander Mordvichev have the same army rank: they're both lieutenant generals. And yet, during their meeting a (somewhat) professional military Mordvichev will be reporting to this TikTok warlord Kadyrov as if he were his superior. Because he is
What does incredibly high status of a TikTok warlord Kadyrov in Russian dominance hierarchy tell us about modern Russia? It reflects a general tendency of Russian ruling class to PRmaxing. If Soviet Union was the Evil Empire, than Russian Federation is Bullshit Empire. End of🧵
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Many are trying to explain his success with some accidental factors such as his “personal charisma”, Cuomo's weakness etc
Still, I think there may be some fundamental factors here. A longue durée shift, and a very profound one
1. Public outrage does not work anymore
If you look at Zohran, he is calm, constructive, and rarely raises his voice. I think one thing that Mamdani - but almost no one else in the American political space is getting - is that the public is getting tired of the outrage
Outrage, anger, righteous indignation have all been the primary drivers of American politics for quite a while
For a while, this tactics worked
Indeed, when everyone around is polite, and soft (and insincere), freaking out was a smart thing to do. It could help you get noticed
People don’t really understand causal links. We pretend we do (“X results in Y”). But we actually don’t. Most explanations (= descriptions of causal structures) are fake.
There may be no connection between X and Y at all. The cause is just misattributed.
Or, perhaps, X does indeed result in Y. but only under a certain (and unknown!) set of conditions that remains totally and utterly opaque to us. So, X->Y is only a part of the equation
And so on
I like to think of a hypothetical Stone Age farmer who started farming, and it worked amazingly, and his entire community adopted his lifestyle, and many generations followed it and prospered and multiplied, until all suddenly wiped out in a new ice age
1. Normative Islamophobia that used to define the public discourse being the most acceptable form of racial & ethnic bigotry in the West, is receding. It is not so much dying as rather - failing to replicate. It is not that the old people change their views as that the young do not absorb their prejudice any longer.
In fact, I incline to think it has been failing to replicate for a while, it is just that we have not been paying attention
Again, the change of vibe does not happen at once. The Muslim scare may still find (some) audience among the more rigid elderly, who are not going to change their views. But for the youth, it is starting to sound as archaic as the Catholic scare of know nothings
Out of date
2. What is particularly interesting regarding Mamdani's victory, is his support base. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that its core is comprised of the young (and predominantly white) middle classes, with a nearly equal representation of men and women
What does Musk vs Trump affair teach us about the general patterns of human history? Well, first of all it shows that the ancient historians were right. They grasped something about nature of politics that our contemporaries simply can’t.
Let me give you an example. The Arab conquest of Spain
According to a popular medieval/early modern interpretation, its primary cause was the lust of Visigoth king Roderic. Aroused by the beautiful daughter of his vassal and ally, count Julian, he took advantage of her
Disgruntled, humiliated Julian allied himself with the Arabs and opens them the gates of Spain.
Entire kingdom lost, all because the head of state caused a personal injury to someone important.
One thing you need to understand about wars is that very few engage into the long, protracted warfare on purpose. Almost every war of attrition was planned and designed as a short victorious blitzkrieg
And then everything went wrong
Consider the Russian war in Ukraine. It was not planned as a war. It was not thought of as a war. It was planned as a (swift!) regime change allowing to score a few points in the Russian domestic politics. And then everything went wrong
It would not be an exaggeration to say that planning a short victorious war optimised for the purposes of domestic politics is how you *usually* end up in a deadlock. That is the most common scenario of how it happens, practically speaking
Global politics are usually framed in terms of kindergarten discourse (“good guys” vs “bad guys”) with an implication that you must provide “good guys” with boundless and unconditional support
BUT
Unconditional support is extremely corrupting, and turns the best of the best into the really nasty guys, and relatively fast
Part of the reason is that neither “bad” nor “good” guys are in fact homogenous, and present a spectrum of opinions and personalities. Which means that all of your designated “good guys” include a fair share of really, really nasty guys, almost by definition.
Purely good movements do not really exist
That is a major reason why limitless, unconditional, unquestioning support causes such a profound corrupting effect upon the very best movement. First, because that movement is not all
that purely good as you imagine (neither movement is),