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Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

Jul 16, 2022 • 8 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X

Moscow woman reported on her son who was dodging the draft. He is 26 and would turn 27 in three months. In Russia you can't be conscripted once you're 27, so time is short. He tried to launch an IT startup but failed and closed it in Jan 2022. After a conflict she reported on him

gazeta.ru/social/news/20…

Another similar publication. A mother was upset about her 22 y.o. son playing in Counter Strike and earning on it, so she reported about him dodging the draft. Btw: that's a news from late May 2022, so the war had been going for three months mk.ru/social/2022/05…

PS These stories make total sense. Quite a few parents from the world view their kids as a financial resource. That's absolutely normal. Some sell them into prostitution, others - as a cannon fodder. In modern Russia sending your son to army can be a great investment

If it were up to me, parents of dead soldiers should receive zero monetary compensation after the war. I would even say that it is the payouts from Putin that explain strange indifference of families towards the ongoing war. Who's gonna complain if investments pay off lavishly?

There's nothing dehumanising in these stories. Parents who sell their kids into a brothers are fully human, just as these mothers. They just see their children as resource and invest it smartly. Once the system of incentive changes, their behaviour gonna change immediately, too

If you advocate for *any* form of financial support for these "grieving families", you reinforce the system of incentives that made this war possible. After the war they should be receiving zero humanitarian aid or other support. The system of incentives gonna change accordingly

The only way for a system of incentives to change is that all those families just lose 100% of their investments with no monetary compensation at all. It means that in the future others will be disincentivized to sell their kids as the cannon fodder since that doesn't pay off

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More from @kamilkazani

Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

May 2

Fake jobs are completely normal & totally natural. The reason is: nobody understands what is happening and most certainly does not understand why. Like people, including the upper management have some idea of what is happening in an organisation, and this idea is usually wrong.

As they do not know and cannot know causal relations between the input and output, they just try to increase some sort of input, in a hope for a better output, but they do not really know which input to increase.

Insiders with deep & specific knowledge, on the other hand, may have a more clear & definite idea of what is happening, and even certain, non zero degree of understanding of causal links between the input and output

(what kind of input produces this kind of output)

Read 6 tweets

Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

Apr 12

There is a common argument that due process belongs only to citizens

Citizens deserve it, non citizens don’t

And, therefore, can be dealt with extrajudicially

That is a perfectly logical, internally consistent position

Now let’s think through its implications

IF citizens have the due process, and non-citizens don’t

THEN we have two parallel systems of justice

One slow, cumbersome, subject to open discussion and to appeal (due process)

Another swift, expedient, and subject neither to a discussion nor to an appeal (extrajudicial)

And the second one already encompasses tens of millions of non citizens living in the United States, legal and illegal, residents or not.

Now the question would be:

Which system is more convenient for those in power?

Well, the answer is obvious

Read 10 tweets

Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

Apr 5

I have recently read someone comparing Trump’s tariffs with collectivisation in the USSR. I think it is an interesting comparison. I don’t think it is exactly the same thing of course. But I indeed think that Stalin’s collectivisation offers an interesting metaphor, a perspective to think about

But let’s make a crash intro first

1. The thing you need to understand about the 1920s USSR is that it was an oligarchic regime. It was not strictly speaking, an autocracy. It was a power of few grandees, of the roughly equal rank.

2. Although Joseph Stalin established himself as the single most influential grandee by 1925, that did not make him a dictator. He was simply the most important guy out there. Otherwise, he was just one of a few. He was not yet the God Emperor he would become later.

Read 30 tweets

Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

Mar 16

The great delusion about popular revolts is that they are provoked by bad conditions of life, and burst out when they exacerbate. Nothing can be further from truth. For the most part, popular revolts do not happen when things get worse. They occur when things turn for the better

This may sound paradoxical and yet, may be easy to explain. When the things had been really, really, really bad, the masses were too weak, to scared and too depressed to even think of raising their head. If they beared any grudges and grievances, they beared them in silence.

When things turn for the better, that is when the people see a chance to restore their pride and agency, and to take revenge for all the past grudges, and all the past fear. As a result, a turn for the better not so much pacifies the population as emboldens and radicalises it.

Read 6 tweets

Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

Mar 1

Three years of the war have passed

So, let’s recall what has happened so far

The first thing to understand about the Russian-Ukrainian war is that Russia did not plan a war. And it, most certainly, did not plan the protracted hostilities of the kind we are seeing today

This entire war is the regime change gone wrong.

Russia did not want a protracted war (no one does). It wanted to replace the government in Kyiv, put Ukraine under control and closely integrate it with Russia

(Operation Danube style)

One thing to understand is that Russia viewed Ukraine as a considerable asset. From the Russian perspective, it was a large and populous country populated by what was (again, from the Russian perspective) effectively the same people. Assimilatable, integratable, recruitable

Read 32 tweets

Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

Feb 8

Why does Russia attack?

In 1991, Moscow faced two disobedient ethnic republics: Chechnya and Tatarstan. Both were the Muslim majority autonomies that refused to sign the Federation Treaty (1992), insisting on full sovereignty. In both cases, Moscow was determined to quell them.

Still, the final outcome could not be more different. Chechnya was invaded, its towns razed to the ground, its leader assassinated. Tatarstan, on the other hand, managed to sign a favourable agreement with Moscow that lasted until Putin’s era.

The question is - why.

Retrospectively, this course of events (obliterate Chechnya, negotiate with Tatarstan) may seem predetermined. But it was not considered as such back then. For many, including many of Yeltsin’s own partisans it came as a surprise, or perhaps even as a betrayal.

Let's see why

Read 24 tweets

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