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Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

Aug 12, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X

https://twitter.com/KonicekMarcel/status/1557825717991268353

That's the East-West gatekeeping differential

At St Andrews I discussed my master's thesis with a very good professor:

- Are you planning to make a PhD out of it?
- Let's be honest, would I ever be able to make here a career as a researcher of *British* history?
- No

https://twitter.com/KonicekMarcel/status/1557825717991268353

Another very smart and altruistic professor encouraged me to concentrate on China instead. Indeed, we both knew that if I potentially focused on China, I would probably do well, even in the UK and even coming from Eastern Europe. There's *way* less gatekeeping in this area

I don't really know how it is in Japan/Korea studies but in my experience China Studies have very, very little gatekeeping. You literally can be a noname from the backwoods and do great. And by doing great I don't mean glorifying the Party, I mean actual academic research

Why? Two reasons. First, countries like China (and may be India) suffer from the lack of attention. Yeah, China is kinda discussed often. But the Chinese internal discourse, public imagination, etc. are virtually unknown outside of the narrow pool of niche experts. Nobody cares

Second, in China there's lots to study. Consider the New Qing Historiography, they literally revolutionised our understanding of the Qing period and probably of the entire Chinese history. How? They started reading the Manchu archives which had been kinda ignored previously

In China (and may be in India) it can be very easy to revolutionise the entire filed just by introducing tons of new documents. Because there's hella lots of primary sources that are not used, not read, not referred to. There's a lot of informative sources to dig in

I know many would disagree, but I feel that in Britain it may be more difficult to introduce something *completely* new into the debate. Yes, you can always find something interesting and obscure. But I can't imagine an archival revolution of the Chinese scale happening there

I would argue that while China suffers from the lack of attention, Britain may have the opposite problem. This asymmetry has a heavy impact on the academic market and may be a major cause of the East-West Gatekeeping Differential. The end

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More from @kamilkazani

Kamil Galeev

@kamilkazani

Jun 1

Growing up in Russia in the 1990s, I used to put America on a pedestal. It was not so much a conscious decision, as the admission of an objective fact of reality. It was the country of future, the country thinking about the future, and marching into the future.

And nothing reflected this better than the seething hatred it got from Russia, a country stuck in the past, whose imagination was fully preoccupied with the injuries of yesterday, and the phantasies of terrible revenge, usually in the form of nuclear strike.

Which, of course, projected weakness rather than strength

We will make a huuuuuuge bomb, and drop it onto your heads, and turn you into the radioactive dust, and you will die in agony, and we will be laughing and clapping our hands

An old man yelling at clouds

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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

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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.

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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

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