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Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#191

Post by greggarious »

blaser-waffle wrote: post #182
electrondood wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apathy is one consequence of living in a post-truth society, created out of using decades of gaslighting and disinformation on your own people.

See also: The Russian Firehose Model of Propaganda https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

Why would I trust RAND on anything policy related? The last time we crossed paths, the woman who referred me for an interview had to move to Switzerland, and they made a show of hazing me. (The last interviewer literally said the words "Autistic people can't work for RAND")

They need to retool their insider threat program, at least the employees at SEI know how to lock down their devices :-)

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#192

Post by jcranmer »

pandaman wrote: post #190
jcranmer wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia has, in my lifetime, conducted no fewer than five invasions, all of which could be fairly characterized as driven by naked territorial aggression ("this land deserves to be ours"). In the same time, the US has invaded three times, none of which could be characterized as naked territorial aggression, even if you squint at it really, really hard.

I don't see how is this possible, are you counting each operation as a separate "invasion" so you get two invasions in Ukraine (2014 and in 2022) for Russia, then I imagine Syria and Georgia? But what is fifth - is it Transnistria/Abkhazia/Ossetia in 1990s? Then the US had 20+ invasions in the same sense (Yugoslavia, multiple ops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and various countries in Africa) over your lifetime.

Russia invaded Ukraine twice (once in 2014, once this year), Chechnya twice (1994 and 1999), and Georgia once (in 2008).

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#193

Post by pandaman »

jcranmer wrote: post #192
pandaman wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how is this possible, are you counting each operation as a separate "invasion" so you get two invasions in Ukraine (2014 and in 2022) for Russia, then I imagine Syria and Georgia? But what is fifth - is it Transnistria/Abkhazia/Ossetia in 1990s? Then the US had 20+ invasions in the same sense (Yugoslavia, multiple ops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and various countries in Africa) over your lifetime.

Russia invaded Ukraine twice (once in 2014, once this year), Chechnya twice (1994 and 1999), and Georgia once (in 2008).

Chechnya is a region of Russia and always has been, how can Russia invade itself? And let's say Chechnya is some kind of independent country that Russia really invaded, in 1994. So you had been born before 1994 and only recall three US invasions since then???

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#194

Post by tptacek »

pandaman wrote: post #193
jcranmer wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia invaded Ukraine twice (once in 2014, once this year), Chechnya twice (1994 and 1999), and Georgia once (in 2008).

Chechnya is a region of Russia and always has been, how can Russia invade itself? And let's say Chechnya is some kind of independent country that Russia really invaded, in 1994. So you had been born before 1994 and only recall three US invasions since then???

Chechnya, apparently, deserves to be part of Russia.

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#195

Post by 082349872349872 »

RC_ITR wrote: post #177
082349872349872 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you can answer a different question of mine: what, if anything, did Japan get out of the Plaza Accord? By weakening USD (and hence USD-denominated commodities?) West Germany got a strong DM and hence could LBO East Germany and reunify. Japan got a strong JPY and ... what, besides stagflation? edit: am I calculating this right? to do a Plaza today would need, not the G5, but pretty much the entire G20?

Japan got the opportunity to go on an international asset-buying spree (which is always less impactful to real GDP than it seems cough Belt and Road cough ) [0] [1] [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/10/31/j... [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-11-19-fi-22750-...

Aha, so the japanese didn't really care about domestic stagflation because they'd internationally diversified? Seems like that might lead into "absentee landlord" moral hazards at some point?

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#196

Post by euroderf »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #6
eloff wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's millions[1] between the number the have been drafted and the number that have fled, and that's taking the Kremlin at their word about how many people they drafted. Also Russia has a brewing demographics collapse, similar to what Japan is experiencing. This is going to royally fuck them for the next 50 years. I think the Ukraine invasion might be the beginning of the end for Russia as we know it, I wouldn't be su…

A disorderly failure of the Russian state is pretty much one of the nightmare scenarios.

Isn't that pretty much what happened when the USSR crumbled ? That collapse peeled away an outer ring of subjugated nations.

My armchair analysis tells me that there might be coming another round of peripheral nation(alitie)s peeling away.

Not such a bad thing. And let the center - the Burkina-Faso-with-nukes - keep the comfort of their nukes, if it's what it takes to keep them from actually using those weapons in fear or in anger.

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#197

Post by bell-cot »

bell-cot wrote: post #154
jcranmer wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The deadliest war before WW1 was the Napoleonic Wars (which essentially set up the then-existing European system), and before that, the Thirty Years' War and similar wars of religion were incredibly destructive. When were "the good old days" you were referring to?

For the winners (recall that the ruling classes were rather indifferent to the deaths of large numbers of the less-well-born) many of those wars turned out pretty well. In "let's play Prisoner's Dilemma" terms, the payoff matrix for "Go to War?" was, for the ruling classes, far more favorable back then. (Vs. for modern industrialized warfare.) Add the Mongol Empire and Russian Empire to my "war & conquest worked out…

Clarification - by "Russian Empire" here, I mean the old Empire - say, from the Battle of Kulikovo (1380) up until the Crimean War (~1855). The latter was against several modern-ish, getting-industrialized major powers.

Yes, plenty of parallels can be drawn between the Crimean War and the current Russian "special military operation" in Ukraine. The former ended with the Treaty of Paris on March 30, 1856 - which was a very clear Russian defeat.

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#198

Post by 082349872349872 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #145
opwantx wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a citation for the threat of invasion apart from unhinged Russian TV commentators? For example, the most hawkish interview with Dugin (Pozner is the interviewer) is from 2014. The interview is in Russian and Dugin is clearly enraged about the Maidan events, so he is more straightforward than in English interviews. If the English subtitles are correct, Pozner explicitly asks which countries should be part of…

> I don't think either that NATO is a threat in the case of Russia (unlike for Kosovo You think NATO is a threat to Kosovo?

Of all places, TIL from FIFA that the Kremlin line probably is that Kosovo is part of Serbia, which would make gp semantically consist.

If that is the case: «ты всё Россию прославляешь; а лучше б мусор выносил!»

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#199

Post by qikInNdOutReply »

IgorPartola wrote: post #24
qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: Are there plans to get hostages in russia to get your citizens back? After all there are citys beyond the border?

Not that I am aware of. Children being relocated are being adopted into Russian families, they aren’t treated as hostages.

I guess, that is.. very much a perspective thing.

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#200

Post by foverzar »

simion314 wrote: post #144
foverzar wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They will fight between them with their remaining soviet weapons Says who? They can just as well harass non-Russian neighbouring states. Or quite likely form some kind of > since they are not competent to fight any large country That doesn't prevent them from trying though. > Maybe some of those would actually become a democracy. Democracy in such states is an illusion. You are either USA with sustainable, refined…

Ex sovitet/communist states prove that democracy is possible. Go ont hose countries subrteddits and ask them if they feel they are vassals or if they would prefer to be part of USSR, I know imperialists prefer to see the small countries as brainwashed nations that need to be put back in their place and probably this is the reason Putoin is threatening this countries all the time, they show non brainwashed Russians th…

Wow, what a rant. You don't really travel much, do you? Given that you srsly experience the world through "countries subreddits". JFYI, Reddit is something rather obscure in ex-soviet states, especially to non-teens.

Sorry, but when just a few of many countries had managed to barely setup an election process, but can't go on without some violent political crisis every 10 years, that is hardly a functional and sustainable democracy.

What does this have to do with Russians anyway? It's a general principle, which works all ways with all actors. The fact that some west-leaning ex-soviet states are hard on censorship and restriction of Russian media illustrates my point perfectly.

Americans loosing sleep over the idea that TikTok is a threat to national security is another good illustration of this general principle.

See, one really doesn't have to be an imperialist to assess how popularity-based systems can be hijacked in the era when internet and targeted propaganda exist.

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