The thing is: we don't really understand other societies. We don't really understand their realities, balance of power or mechanics of functioning. There is always a cultural barrier preventing this understanding. We tend to assume that a foreign society works just like ours
Smart PRmaxers can leverage this assumption to brand themselves abroad more successfully than at home. Consider a Ukrainian (pro-Russian) oligarch Medvedchuk. In Ukraine he is always styled as Putin's "kum". If A baptised B's child, A and B become "kum" after that
Indeed, Putin baptised Medvedchuk's daughter. And a PRmaxer Madvedchuk leveraged it to the fullest for PR purposes. I'm the Putin's kum, the Putin's kum I am! Very important!
In reality he leveraged a cultural barrier. Because in Ukraine being kum matters. In Russia it doesn't
Russia and Ukraine seem to be very close culturally. They can speak the same language, share the same cultural memes, profess the same religion (mostly). So most Russians and Ukrainians often assume that things in their countries work alike
But they don't. They're very different
In Ukraine being "kum" is very important. The term for nepotism "kumovstvo" must be understood literally. In Russia the same word must *not* be taken literally. When discussing "kumovstvo" nepotism networks, Russians do not mean they are actually kums. That is just unimportant
Medvedchuk weaponised the cultural barrier between Ukraine and Russia. He became Putin's kum. Russians do not take being kum seriously, but Ukrainians do. So he persuaded the Ukrainians that he is super close to Putin, has influence on him, represents him
That backfired
I agree that Medvedchuk is Putin's agent of influence. But I will also argue that the Ukrainian public opinion tends to exaggerate his importance. Why? Because Medvedchuk himself successfully exaggerated his own importance weaponising the cultural barrier between two countries
I do not have any evidence of who organised the yesterday's attack, but the factor of Dugin having successfully exaggerated his own importance on the world arena might have played a role. He made his surname a global brand, far more successful abroad than in Russia
His daughter Darya weaponised the dad's brand and tried to act as an intermediary between:
1) Kremlin and the European far right 2) interest groups in Russia
Both of which could have had her killed. The first one, for financial reasons. The second, for political ones. The end
The younger guy on the previous photo is Akim Apachev, a Wagner-connected musician. Both Alexander and Darya Dugina took pro-war stance and were very active in the Z-movement. Neither of them was innocent
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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.
As I have already pointed out, general audience, analysts, strategists & decision makers included holds unrealistic notions of how the global economy is organised. Now that is because they never see the back end of industrial civilisation
So let me show you some
There is a major delusion of seeing Europe as a sort of retired continent that "lags in tech" or even "doesn't produce anything". To some extent, it is just American hubris.
But there is more in there than just hubris. There is also some honest, sincere ignorance. The thing with most people is that they see only facade of industrial civilisation. They never ever had a chance to look behind the curtains
Tu-160M, the "White Swan" is the largest, the heaviest and the fastest bomber in the world. Originally a Soviet design, the plane you see today has limited continuity with the USSR. It was created in late 2010s, as a combined project of Putin's Russia and Siemens Digital Factory
Original Tu-160 was created as a domesday weapon of the Cold War. Designed in the 1970s, it was officially launched into production in 1984. And yet, with the collapse of the Soviet Union the project was aborted. In 1992, their production ceased.
No Nuclear War, no White Swans.
With the fall of USSR, Russia suffered a catastrophic drop in military expenditures. As the state was buying little weaponry (and paying for it highly erratically), entire production chains were wiped out. That included some ultra expensive projects such as strategic bombers.