In this thread I'll be collecting podcasts and broadcasts where I have presented my position on the current war. I'm including here both English and Russian language talks in a chronological order, so they will be easier to navigate through🧵
On Noah Smith's podcast we discussed why Putin's Russia is *way* more personalist than the USSR ever was. I argued that sanctions are efficient, and that Putin can't back off in Ukraine or he is done (= and thus appeasement strategy won't work out) podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pod…
On Yulia Latynina's program (Rus) we discussed the Russian army. The main rationale behind the Russian army organisation is not maximising its fighting ability, but rather preventing a scenario when it could challenge or question the political leadership
Brief commentary for Navalny Live (Rus). Russian army wasn't prepared for a conventional war. It was prepared for the 1) nuclear war 2) picking potatoes 3) pacifications of satellite states. They wanted to pacify Ukraine too but faced unexpected resistance
Commentary for Mikhail Svetov (Rus). Public opinion overrated the Russian army, underrated the Ukrainian one and misinterpreted political goals of Z-operation. Once Russia declared a total war, it can't take anything less than the destruction of Ukraine
I gave a short commentary on the current war to the Wall St Tv - a US-based Chinese-language media outlet. Russian-Chinese economic cooperation had been heavily advertised but little work had been done before this war started. And now it may be too late
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For decades, any resistance to the Reaganomics has been suppressed using the false dichotomy: it is either “capitalism” (= which meant Reaganomics) or socialism, and socialism doesn’t work
Now, as there is the growing feeling that Reaganomics don’t work, the full rehabilitation of socialism looks pretty much inevitable
I find it oddly similar to how it worked in the USSR. For decades, the whole propaganda apparatus had been advancing the false dichotomy: it is either socialism, or capitalism (= meaning robber barons)
Now, as there is a growing feeling that the current model does not work, we must try out capitalism instead. And, as capitalism means robber barons, we must create robber barons
We have to distribute all the large enterprises between the organized crime members. This is the way
Truth is: the words like Rus/Russian had many and many ambiguous and often mutually exclusive meanings, and not only throughout history, but, like, simultaneously.
For example, in the middle ages, the word "Rus" could mean:
1. All the lands that use Church Slavonic in liturgy. That is pretty much everything from what is now Central Russia, to what is now Romania. Wallachians, being the speakers of a Romance language were Orthodox, and used Slavonic in church -> they're a part of Rus, too
2. Some ambiguous, undefined region that encompasses what is now northwest Russia & Ukraine, but does not include lands further east. So, Kiev & Novgorod are a part of Rus, but Vladimir (-> region of Moscow) isn't
These two mutually exclusive notions exist simultaneously
The greatest Western delusion about China is, and always has been, greatly exaggerating the importance of plan. Like, in this case, for example. It sounds as if there is some kind of continuous industrial policy, for decades
1. Mao Zedong dies. His successors be like, wow, he is dead. Now we can build a normal, sane economy. That means, like in the Soviet Union
2. Fuck, we run out of oil. And the entire development plan was based upon an assumption that we have huge deposits of it
3. All the prior plans of development, and all the prior industrial policies go into the trashbin. Because again, they were based upon an assumption that we will be soon exporting more oil than Saudi Arabia, and without that revenue we cannot fund our mega-projects
Yes. Behind all the breaking news about the capture of small villages, we are missing the bigger pattern which is:
The Soviet American war was supposed to be fought to somewhere to the west of Rhine. What you got instead is a Soviet Civil War happening to the east of Dnieper
If you said that the battles of the great European war will not be fought in Dunkirk and La Rochelle, but somewhere in Kupyansk (that is here) and Rabotino, you would have been once put into a psych ward, or, at least, not taken as a serious person
The behemoth military machine had been built, once, for a thunderbolt strike towards the English Channel. Whatever remained from it, is now decimating itself in the useless battles over the useless coal towns of the Donetsk Oblast
Yes, and that is super duper quadruper important to understand
Koreans are poor (don't have an empire) and, therefore, must do productive work to earn their living. So, if the Americans want to learn how to do anything productive they must learn it from Koreans etc
There is this stupid idea that the ultra high level of life and consumption in the United States has something to do with their productivity. That is of course a complete sham. An average American doesn't do anything useful or important to justify (or earn!) his kingly lifestyle
The kingly lifestyle of an average American is not based on his "productivity" (what a BS, lol) but on the global empire Americans are holding currently. Part of the imperial dynamics being, all the actually useful work, all the material production is getting outsourced abroad
Reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Set in southwest England, somewhere in the late 1800s. And the first thing you need to know is that Tess is bilingual. He speaks a local dialect she learnt at home, and the standard English she picked at school from a London-trained teacher
So, basically, "normal" language doesn't come out of nowhere. Under the normal conditions, people on the ground speak all the incomprehensible patois, wildly different from each other
"Regular", "correct" English is the creation of state
So, basically, the state chooses a standard (usually, based on one of the dialects), cleanses it a bit, and then shoves down everyone's throats via the standardized education
Purely artificial construct, of a super mega state that really appeared only by the late 1800s