Of course.
Putin’s worldview
A lot of people figured that Putin’s stated intentions weren’t really his stated intentions, and are belatedly realizing that apparently he meant what he said.
So it might be a good idea to familiarize yourself with what he’s been saying for quite some time. Here’s a very simplified and incomplete summary: Ukraine belongs to Russia, and it doesn’t matter what the Ukrainians might think.
Here’s a transcript of his invasion-announcing speech from February 22. And here are two analyses of his aims and his justification for those aims: this and this. And yes, they’re from Vox, which sometimes does does have good analyses. I happen to agree with the basic analysis in those two essays (although the speculation in them about whether the invasion will occur and what its scope will be is moot).
Both essays, and many people, think what’s described there represent Putin’s sincere beliefs. I agree with that as well. It’s a window into his thinking and a possible help in anticipating his moves and perhaps even preventing a worse result than already seems in the works. But I wouldn’t swear to his complete sincerity about these beliefs, either.
Dialogue
Yesterday I had a doctor’s appointment, and while I was sitting in the waiting room I was reading on my cellphone. An elderly man (more elderly than I am, anyway) was sitting across from me. He had a walker and seemed frail, and his wife was sitting near him.
Suddenly he looked straight at me and said in a surprisingly booming voice, “A whole lotta bullshit going on in the world today.”
I had to say I agreed.
Random thoughts on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
(1) For sanctions to work, they should not necessarily be considered a deterrence or a punishment. I suppose they would be a deterrence if the leader or leaders involved could be deterred that easily, but that sort of leader isn’t usually involved in the kind of aggression we’re talking about. What are sanctions, then? They are a predominantly economic tool most effectively used not only before overt aggression begins but before the country involved has assembled all the tools for that aggression. In other words, sanctions are meant to deny the country’s leaders the wherewithal to implement their plans. There’s also a second goal, which is to make the country’s population blame those leaders for the hardship of sanctions and perhaps unseat them, but that is rarely possible for the very same reason that sanctions don’t deter those leaders: their powerful determination to accomplish their desired ends. It also can, paradoxically, rally the population behind the leaders in shared sympathy.
(2) Putin got a goodly portion of his funds from providing Europe with energy, and Biden’s energy policy increased the price of the fuel Putin provided, thus enriching him even more. That’s in addition to the obviously Putin-encouraging element of Biden’s cluelessness, incompetence, and weakness – and that of the US in general lately.
(3) Europe could have embraced nuclear power as an alternative – and they may yet turn to it more – but in recent years it’s been closing plants rather than opening them:
As of 2016, countries including Australia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Estonia, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Portugal and Serbia have no nuclear power stations and remain opposed to nuclear power. Belgium, Germany, Spain and Switzerland plan nuclear phase-outs by 2030. Globally, more nuclear power reactors have closed than opened in recent years[when?] but overall capacity has increased…
As of 2022, Italy is the only country that has permanently closed all of its formerly functioning nuclear plants, with Germany phasing out the remaining 3 plants by the end of the year. Lithuania and Kazakhstan have shut down their only nuclear plants, but plan to build new ones to replace them, while Armenia shut down its only nuclear plant but subsequently restarted it. Austria never used its first nuclear plant that was completely built.
Chancellor (1998-2005) Gerhard Schroeder negotiated the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, increasing European dependence on Russian gas. His successor Angela Merkel (2005-21) increased it much further, abruptly decreeing a phaseout of Germany’s nuclear power, scheduled to be completed later this year, and promoting Nord Stream 2.
(4) Putin seems to believe that Ukraine isn’t a real country, so it’s fine for Russia to take it over. Again. And Ukraine’s not the only country Putin feels that way about.
(5) It’s my impression that the people of Europe are shell-shocked (metaphorically speaking) to see an invasion and hot war breaking out in what is considered to be part of Europe.
(6) As a result of this action by Russia, smaller or moderate-sized countries – especially ones that are not members of a defensive alliance such as NATO – will almost certainly feel an increased need to have nuclear arms in order to deter an invasion such as the one that’s occurring now in Ukraine. The threat of serious retaliation of that type against Russia – as opposed to sanctions – is a more effective threat. This could lead to more nuclear weapons in the hands of smaller powers – in other words, nuclear proliferation. Ukraine has neither nuclear weapons nor a NATO alliance, so what chance does it have against Russia if Russia is determined to take it over?
(7)A quote:
If there’s anything that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has taught us, it’s that he is serious about his hatreds and is contemptuous of the rationalist tolerance that undergirds how we see the world.
(8) One of the reasons Putin gave for invading Ukraine is that it’s a corrupt state. That seems absurd because there are plenty of other corrupt states as well as plenty of corruption in Russia, and also because Russia has encouraged and participated in corruption in Ukraine. Also, who was an obvious part of the corruption there, and profited from it? Why, Hunter Biden and other family members (perhaps Joe as well), that’s who. See this from Austin Bay.
Recall, also, that Trump was impeached the first time for asking that such corruption in the Biden family be investigated. Zelenskyy was elected specifically as an anti-corruption president and outsider.
(9) “Putin is not Hitler” is quite obvious. However, he does share a desire to acquire more territory through war. But so far the Nazi analogies I’ve seen are to Hitler’s claim to the Sudetenland, a region that was given to him by Chamberlain et al at the Munich conference. But saying that Putin’s using a similar tactic doesn’t mean that he’s similar in all ways or even most ways to Hitler. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, all dictators are somewhat different.
(10) Russia has been doing this in stages:
The George W. Bush administration rolled out the idea of NATO membership for the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia [Germany blocked this, citing Ukraine’s corruption – link] But Bush was unable to stop Putin from seizing two breakaway provinces of Georgia in 2008.
Similarly, former President Barack Obama, despite his ridicule of Mitt Romney’s anti-Russia statements, was unable to stop Putin from annexing Crimea and effectively seizing Luhansk and Donetsk in 2014. Interestingly, the only president this century during whose term Putin hasn’t seized territory was Donald Trump, a Putin pawn according to the Russian collusion hoax.
(11) Putin has said several times that the breakup of the Soviet Union was a great disaster. You may dislike Bolton – I’m not a fan either – but in 2014 he correctly described the situation regarding Putin:
“I think Putin knows that he has the high cards, militarily, economically and politically, and he’s prepared to use them,” Bolton said. “He gave us notice of his strategy seven or eight years ago when he said, in what is now one of the most frequently repeated quotes from his leadership in Russia, when he said, ‘The breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.’
“It’s clear he wants to re-establish Russian hegemony within the space of the former Soviet Union. Ukraine is the biggest prize, that’s what he’s after. The occupation of the Crimea is a step in that direction.”
Putin had made the comments in a state of the union speech in 2005, and several times later, including his speech on February 22 justifying the Ukraine invasion (see this).
(12) Putin resents NATO and declares it a threat to him. It’s certainly true that it is more dangerous for him to invade a NATO country than one that is not a member, so in that sense NATO does have a chilling effect on his ambitions to reassemble glorious Greater Russia. He doesn’t think many countries that were part of the old Soviet Union have a right to be independent from Mother (Father?) Russia. In that way, NATO’s a threat to his territory-grabbing ambitions, not to Russia proper.
(13) The UN continues to be a joke, but not a funny one. For example, as all of this was going on, Russia was chairing the Security Council in a meeting to try to head it off. Ha ha! Good one, Putin. A real knee-slapper.
(14) Ukrainians with long memories might recall the Holodomor of the 1930s, when its good friends in the USSR instituted policies that helped to starve millions of Ukrainians:
The term Holodomor emphasises the famine’s man-made and allegedly intentional aspects such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs and restriction of population movement. As part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country, millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.
Open thread 2/25/22
These babies take that “Please keep off the grass” sign very seriously:
Virtuals vs. Physicals; Imagology vs. Reality
This article is worth reading:
Many have slotted this drama [in Canada] into a familiar framework of right-wing populists versus left-wing elites. But a different way of looking at it may be more helpful in explaining not only what has happened in Canada but also why the political divide now looks so strikingly similar across the developed world, from Ottawa to Wellington…
Consider instead two main classes of people in society, who tend to navigate and interact with the world in fundamentally different ways. The first are those people who work primarily in the real, physical world…This class necessarily works in a physical location or owns or operates physical assets central to its trade.
The second class of people is different. They are, relatively speaking, a civilizational innovation. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases, the information exists at a level of abstraction from the real world…[T]hese people build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role have any direct relationship with or effect on the physical world.This class can therefore often do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting…
For simplicity’s sake, let’s call these two classes the Physicals and the Virtuals, respectively. This division maps closely onto another much-discussed political wedge: the geographic split between cities, where most of the Virtuals are concentrated, and the outlying exurbs and rural hinterlands, where the Physicals remain predominant…
But the most relevant distinction between Virtuals and Physicals today is that the Virtuals are now everywhere unambiguously the ruling class.
It’s a generalization that seems correct to me. The author goes on to point out that, nevertheless, the Virtuals do exist in the physical world and therefore need goods and services provided by the Physicals, and that what happened with Canada’s Freedom Convoy is that the Physicals scared the Virtuals into remembering that. That’s why the Physicals were put down so harshly. This clash will continue because the Physicals will resist and the Virtuals will insist on control.
The dichotomy reminds me of one of my favorite passages by Czech expat author Milan Kundera. It was written over thirty years ago, when things were very different or maybe not all that different, because the split was already happening. The following is a quote from Kundera’s 1990 work Immortality:
For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.
Public opinion polls are the critical instrument of imagology’s power, because they enable imagology to live in absolute harmony with the people. The imagologue bombards people with questions: how is the French economy prospering? is there racism in France? is racism good or bad? who is the greatest writer of all time? is Hungary in Europe or in Polynesia? which world politician is the sexiest? And since for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that would break its power.
Biden’s speech on Ukraine
Here’s a thread to talk about Biden’s speech.
I’ll probably discuss it further this evening.
The invasion of Ukraine: who’s Putin’s puppet now?
When Obama was elected I suspected that I knew what we were in for concerning foreign policy: withdrawing from Iraq, empowering Iran, weakening our military, and general movement towards the leftist position.
When Trump was elected, I was worried that he was in way over his head and would do something foolhardy. He had no experience, he was a braggart and a blowhard, and the world stage was not the world of real estate development. My nervousness lasted a while, but by the end of the first year of his administration I started to relax. None of the predicted catastrophes had occurred, and he seemed to actually be able to make good on his promises about what an effective dealmaker he was and how he would act in America’s interests.
On Biden’s election, it was easy to predict what he would do, at least in the general sense. He’d continue Obama’s policies and add huge extra doses of stupidity, incompetence, and undeserving bravado. Every wannabee aggressor on earth would get the picture: this might just be a good time to make a move.
Thus, Ukraine. What better time could there be? The US struggling with inflation, Europe more dependent on Russian oil thanks to Biden’s energy policies, the US unable to exercise any kind of effective international leadership, and Putin’s knowledge of Biden’s traditionally poor judgment and more recent cognitive difficulties.
Some people didn’t expect the large scale and scope of the invasion last night, although the numbers massing on the border did make some people predict it. It seems Putin wants to take over the whole country, although he might just want to strike a series of blows to weaken its defenses and then take over just Donetsk and Luhansk in the eastern portion of the country. There are many reports from the area, and it’s hard to know what’s true and what’s false (fog of war), and certainly hard to know what’s next.
I happen to think that Putin wants to take over Ukraine itself, or at least to install a puppet or satellite government there. As this analyst said a short time before the invasion actually occurred:
The main reason for Putin’s aggression toward Ukraine is to reinforce Russia’s security importance in Europe, according to Edmonds.
He wants to ensure that Moscow is deeply involved in “any kind of decisions or the overall structure in Europe,” he said. It’s about “restoring Russia to the place, it believes it leads in Europe.”
And I don’t think sanctions will have much effect on his plans.
Nor do I think Putin’s designs are only limited to Ukraine. Those of us who remember the Cold War recall the extent of the Soviet empire. Much of eastern Europe was part of the USSR, and although it may not be the case that Putin would like to recreate that – and certainly not in that exact form – I believe that he may want to have a greater hand in the governance of several of what used to be known as “the captive nations.”
Do I know this for certain? Absolutely not. But that’s what my gut is telling me.
One more thing: many people say that Biden isn’t in charge of our policy. I think it depends on what is meant by “in charge.” Of course there are others who influence him. But I thought he was mostly in charge of our disastrous Afghanistan pullout, and I think the same is true of Ukraine. Remember, Ukraine was his special field of interest as vice president. Remember also that Biden fancies himself a highly experienced, highly knowledgeable, highly effective foreign policy expert in general. Even in his younger days he was a blustering fool, but he never had to answer for his decisions back then because he wasn’t president. Of course, with his friends in the press he may not even have to answer for them now.
Open thread 2/24/22
Trudeau revokes emergency powers
This news just broke. I may revisit this story later tonight when I have more information:
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Wednesday he is removing emergency powers police can use after authorities ended the border blockades by those opposed to COVID-19 restrictions as well as the occupation of downtown Ottawa.
Trudeau invoked the powers last week and lawmakers affirmed the powers late Monday. Trudeau said then the powers were still needed but noted they would not stay in place a day longer than necessary.
“The situation is no longer an emergency, therefore the federal government will be ending the use of the emergencies act,” Trudeau said. “We are confident that existing laws and bylaws are sufficient to keep people safe.”
But it wasn’t needed at all in the first place; the police could have handled it without any special declarations. And it certainly wasn’t needed on Monday, when that vote took place. Will Trudeau now drop the charges against those arrested or imprisoned? I doubt it. Will he unfreeze bank accounts? I don’t know, but I have my doubts about that as well.
Did Trudeau plan from the start to declare the emergency in order to get the power to do these things and show who’s boss, scare the opposition and anyone who might support them, and then magnanimously and with a big show of his great dedication to liberty declare the crisis over and get plaudits for that? In other words, a few days of such powers accomplished all his ends. He served notice on the Canadian people to beware his power, and that was his real goal: to have a chilling effect on protest from the right (again, just as with January 6th and the treatment the demonstrators received in the US from the Biden administration and the press).
And what of the vote Monday in Parliament? Why did he let that charade go on? I think that’s somewhat obvious as well. There was no emergency anymore when it was taking place, but he wanted the vote as a substitute for a new election, which he might have lost. He knew the House would support him and he wanted to demonstrate his domination over them, and he also wanted to show that he had a mandate to do whatever he wanted at any time.
Did he withdraw the emergency powers because the Senate might not have approved? I supposed that’s possible, but I doubt it. I think what’s going on is that he had accomplished his goals spectacularly (for example, he has the names of everyone who contributed to the convoy) and he felt it was time to pretend to be far more moderate than he is. Polls becoming more negative towards him as time went on might have been a factor, as well.
Trudeau may seem dumb. But like most people who get where he is, he’s very canny and that is a form of intelligence. I absolutely would not underestimate this man.
Walter Williams on liberty
This is more important than ever, and more timely. I believe this interview occurred in early 2018:
A detransitioner describes some of her original motives for transitioning
The following wasn’t her only motive. But this was certainly part of why transitioning appealed to her as a troubled teenager, and I strongly suspect it’s a common motivation for today’s teenagers.
A few years ago the author was a somewhat depressed, isolated and troubled teenage girl who turned to the internet for information and companionship, and became heavily involved with Tumblr:
On Tumblr, the situation was such that any claim to being “oppressed” would accumulate social credibility, while any unfortunate “privileged” status was justification for verbal abuse. As a “privileged” person, you were expected to constantly grovel and apologize, you had no right to speak on any issue involving the group you were “oppressing”, and you could not object in any way to any mistreatment hurled against you because of your race, gender, or sexuality.
I found myself in a bit of a double bind. On one hand, I had found what felt like the perfect group of friends who understood me on an intuitive level, who I was able to talk to openly about the things I liked and made me “weird” in real life, but on the other hand I was a “cishet white girl” in an environment where that was one of the worst things to be. Since Tumblr users are mostly biological females, the “cishet white girl” holds the position of most privileged and therefore most inherently bad group. In this climate, you are made to feel guilty and responsible for all the horrors and atrocities in the world. No hardship you could possibly go through could ever be as bad as the prejudice and genocide POC and LGBT people face every. Single. Day. Insert clap emoji. LGBT people and POC can’t even walk out of their houses without being murdered by cishet white people just like you!
Its understandable that any young person exposed to this kind of belief system would grow to deeply resent being white, “cis”, straight, or (biologically) male. The beauty of gender ideology is it provides a way to game this system, so that you can get some of those targets off your back and enjoy the camaraderie of like-minded youths. You can’t change your race, pretending to have a different sexuality would be very uncomfortable in practice, but you can absolutely change your gender, and it’s as easy as putting a “she/they” in your bio. Instantly you are transformed from an oppressing, entitled, evil, bigoted, selfish, disgusting cishet white scum into a valid trans person who deserves celebration and special coddling to make up for the marginalization and oppression you supposedly now face. Now not expected to do as much groveling and reaffirming to everyone how much you love checking your privilege, you can relax a little and talk about your life without wondering if you are distracting from the struggles of or speaking over marginalized groups, because you are marginalized too…
Teenagers are very vulnerable to that sort of group pressure, and the internet intensifies it greatly.
I said it wasn’t her only motive. Here were some others, and they are not uncommon in young girls of that age (post-pubescent teenager) today:
This is the incentive I felt to comb through my thoughts and memories for things that might be further evidence that deep down, I wasn’t really a girl. I hated my body; it must be because I don’t like that its female. Boys have never been interested in me like they are with other girls; well, maybe I would be attractive as a boy, and then I could be like all these cute “gay trans boys” I saw dating each other online. I didn’t have many friends, it must be because being a girl isn’t my “authentic self”, and that was getting in the way of my social life. Plus, people were nicer to me since I said I was trans so that must be an indication that being trans is the right thing to do to make friends. Female sexuality is hypersexualized and pornified, yet it’s supposed to be “empowering” for women to do porn, be prostitutes, or have dangerous, kinky, scary sounding sex with many different men. I heard that my discomfort with this made me “vanilla”, and a girl who is vanilla has no chance of really pleasing a man when competing with “empowered” women. I must not have really been meant to be a girl, because if I was, this wouldn’t all be so scary and confusing.
It’s a long article, but I found it riveting. The author, who is now in her early twenties, finally stopped taking testosterone and accepted – and is trying to embrace – her status as a heterosexual young woman. She’s a good writer, too, and obviously intelligent. And yet those things didn’t protect her from falling into a deep well from which it took a great deal of effort to emerge.
One of the worst things about her story, and the story of many others, was how every mental health and health professional with whom she interacted during that period was negligently and irresponsibly (in my opinion) and uncritically facilitating what happened to this girl. In contrast, they were singularly unsupportive when she realized that she needed to detransition back to being female. Her story is not unusual in that regard.
I’m so glad I’m not growing up today, although it would be nice to be young – nice in the abstract. But I do have grandchildren, and I do worry about the attitudes prevalent in the world surrounding them.