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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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It seems to me more likely that Putin took a gamble, a good gamble, which had positive expected value, and came up absolutely snake eyes on the heroism of a relative handful of Ukrainians.

All speculations about Putin’s plans being actually smart or reasonable or a part of some 4d chess master plan, must factor in the fact that, as it turned out, Russian military was in shambles, badly provisioned and making blunder after blunder especially when it comes to logistics.

Like if Putin’s so smart, then why is he unable to execute? One would expect the value calculations to be on basically the same level of competence: old man’s delusions weaved out of the lies of his sycophant inner circle.

People execute with the military and the information they have, not the military and information they want to have - Putin would hardly be the first leader to be undermined by the incompetence of others. I would be reluctant to say that Putin's war failed because of his personal failings. I don't think, for example, that the US war against Saddam Hussein was successful because of some awesome talent on the part of GWB.

People execute with the military and the information they have, not the military and information they want to have

This sounds a lot like a famous Donald Rumsfeld quote.

It seems like bad-logistics was something that Putin could have known if he had bothered to check.

Is it? What would checking actually involve? Would it involve Putin personally visiting storage facilities and conducting MOTs on all the thousands, hundreds of thousands of vehicles used by the Army? Unlikely. Certainly that's not what Biden would do. Biden, like Putin, would convey instructions to the ministry in charge of the Army, which would then be written into doctrine, which would then be given to the army, who would then act on that doctrine, write a bunch of reports, that would then percolate back up to officers who might then report back to the President. He would rely on the diligence and willing cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people, which in turn, depends on having a professional and effective military culture which is developed over years, if not decades. On the other hand if the military culture is one of negligence and corruption, then there's countless opportunities for that long, delicate chain of information to be corrupted.

Putin has been president since 2000. Two decades should be enough to build an organization -- from doctrine to senior appointed personnel -- that gives if not accurate, then directionally truthful reports. Ukraine built a fighting army in 8 years. In the meantime, Russia has had an epidemic of people falling out of window.

I don't know how long it takes to build a nation, or to change a low-trust society into a high-trust one. I would say somewhere between five and five hundred years.

Have you considered that maybe the Russian army was so bad that what we are seeing is actually the vastly improved version? I mean Russians didn't perform well at the current war so far but it hasn't been catastrophic compared to the massacres of Chechnya for example (I have a strong prior that the casualty numbers put out by the Ukrainian government are totally made up).

"He took a gamble that didn't pay off" is not equivalent to "4d chess master plan."

It seems obvious that if the government had fled Kyiv, that would have negatively impacted the resistance from Ukrainian forces. There really wasn't a lot of ground left to give at key spots before kyiv fell, and if kyiv fell, then there's likely a quisling government there right now. If there's a quisling government in the historic capital, there would be more international opposition to support for the rump Ukrainian state lead by a government in exile. Without near unanimous NATO/EU support the Ukrainian resistance in maneuver warfare is DOA.

Playing aggressively isn't always a losing strategy just because you actually lost.

Playing aggressively isn't always a losing strategy just because you actually lost.

Playing aggressively is, however, a generally losing strategy in iterative social games where you're the weaker party more susceptible to catastrophic defeats undercutting future goals compared to the richer, stronger, bigger club whose main limitation is consensus. Underdog aggressors have to be successful every time, in order to catch up with accumulated power, but by the same respect every failure- or reversal- costs them more. Given that Putin and Russian narratives have repeatedly framed this not in terms of Russia-vs-Ukraine, where Russia is the overdog, but in Russia-vs-the-US/West/NATO, where Russia very much is the underdog, an aggressive under-dog strategy is high-risk, without corresponding high-rewards.

Putin is the worst of both worlds as a strategist, as he's an aggressive player who historically goes for low-risk options. In iterative strategy games, this is a bad option that gets worse over time, because it greatly increases the reputational costs that drive other people's decision-making against you, even as the low-risks that generally entail low-stakes mean that the gains are marginal. The reputational damage that Russia got in, say, Georgia in 2008 far outweighs the benefits of South Ossetia as a Russian-backed unrecognized state, and didn't exactly deter other post-Soviet countries from seeking closer ties to NATO/European countries, but it absolutely validated and strengthened the Russia-skeptic factions in other governments, who would get further empowered by further Russian opportunistic actions.

As a result of such past actions, there were no low-cost options in Ukraine, no matter how aggressive Russia chose to be. Aggression itself was the wrong play, as either Russia was going to find itself in an insurgency, or a (surprise surprise) conventional conflict, neither of which it was prepared to execute in a way where the cost-benefit would reward aggression.

Given that Putin and Russian narratives have repeatedly framed this not in terms of Russia-vs-Ukraine, where Russia is the overdog, but in Russia-vs-the-US/West/NATO, where Russia very much is the underdog, an aggressive under-dog strategy is high-risk, without corresponding high-rewards.

Framing oneself as the underdog is not equal to being the underdog or even believing oneself to be one. Downplaying one's strength advantage is the default posture of the strong (or those imagining themselves to be strong), rarely wholeheartedly believed. American posture in the «war on terror» and this current «strategic competition with China» is often painfully disingenuous too; cheap mop-up operations disguised as struggle for survival of the valiant minority standing up to some looming civilizational threat. Ministries of War have been renamed to Departments of Defense for a related reason.

Every autocrat, according to his PR, «stands up to the globalist West» as a valiant underdog, to build up a sieged castle mentality, even West-friendly ones like Erdogan. Or Orban. It's clear from his actions, though, that he does not believe the West to be actively invested in toppling Orban, and fights for real mainly with the domestic opposition, being very much the overdog there. Now we see that Putin, likewise, tawked a great deal about the Western threat – but genuinely thought that the West won't care enough to maintain support in the event that Ukraine doesn't fold rapidly, that his lobbying in Europe is reliable, that this is a low-stakes war on a cheeky backwater, in and out for 5 days; that Western politicians are tawking about their commitments only to dupe the plebs, like he does.

It's important to realize which fight exactly you are in.

\8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

Framing oneself as the underdog is not equal to being the underdog or even believing oneself to be one. Downplaying one's strength advantage is the default posture of the strong (or those imagining themselves to be strong), rarely wholeheartedly believed.

I don't think this is generally true. The late 20th/early 21st century West has the heroic archetype of "plucky underdog who defeats superior force through extreme physical and moral courage, ingenuity, and luck" which causes Western overdogs to falsely claim to be plucky underdogs in order to make themselves feel heroic. It also has a set of egalitarian instincts (one of the other consequences of which is vulnerability to wokeness) which make underdogs more sympathetic, other things being equal, therefore creating another incentive to claim to be the underdog. Everywhere else, "the nail that stands up and is pounded down" is a strong anti-heroic archetype and third parties are most likely to choose the side which is more likely to win. So the incentive is to signal strength, and people did.

Incidentally, the fact that the most broadly popular media franchise in the early 21st century West is actually the MCU suggests that normies prefer heroes who don't falsely claim underdog status and Han Solo didn't actually succeed in changing the basic rules of Story.

Don't MCU characters, superhuman though they are, often fight Avenger Level Threats? It's one of the reasons I hate MCU, it's clear that their opponents are monsters of the week, but the presentation is exactly that Avengers are desperate underdogs. There are weak antagonists (Ivan and some old man from Iron Man 1-2 etc.) but Ultron is an AGI; Dormammu and Thanos are ontologically superior to the cast, even to relatively strong heroes (i.e. not Hawkseye); there usually are gimmicks that make heroes even bigger fish in theory, some artifact or cosmic energy or whatever that blonde butch has, but the stakes are high, and villains often gloat, and boast of being inevitable, crushing maggots or something. So it is congruent with the underdog aesthetics.

I concede that there's more power-worship in non-Western cultures. But it's inconsistent. Russia stronk big can destroy the world, but also is bullied by the decadent, rich, plotting West surrounding us with military bases. Crucially, Russians think of themselves as «weak and bullied» in the context of Ukraine, not trying to annex an (assumed to be weaker) neighbor but bravely standing up to the oppressive West, allegedly swinging the nuclear baton in self-defense. China has a similar but more verbally assertive and less actually aggressive posture («whoever tries to humiliate us will smash his head against the iron wall of 1.4 billion Chinese people», then allows Pelosi to land), and thus both countries abuse anticolonial rhetoric.

I think consistent affirmation of one's collective power may be characteristic of somewhat less developed groups with surviving honor culture – MENA, LatAm, Turkic and perhaps all/most Muslim countries. @2rafa, what's your impression?

China has a similar but more verbally assertive and less actually aggressive posture («whoever tries to humiliate us will smash his head against the iron wall of 1.4 billion Chinese people», then allows Pelosi to land), and thus both countries abuse anticolonial rhetoric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_final_warning

"China's final warning" (Russian: последнее китайское предупреждение) is a Russian proverb from the 1950s, which originated in the former Soviet Union, referring to a warning that carries no real consequences.[1]

American military fighter jets regularly patrolled the Taiwan Strait, which led to formal protests being regularly lodged by the Chinese Communist Party in the form of a "final warning", for their fighter maneuvers in the strait. However, no real consequences were given for ignoring the "final warnings".

More than 900 Chinese "final warnings" had been issued by the end of 1964.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the proverb has remained a common metaphorical catchphrase within the post-Soviet countries, especially in Estonia.

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