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This story is a great encapsulation of two important phenomena:
These two points are circular. A complacent and lazy Europe leads to a complacent and lazy Russia where the priority is people enriching themselves instead of furthering national goals. That's why recent events are such a disaster for the west. Russia is adapting to foreign pressure, which means this kind of corruption is decreasing as a necessity lest they lose to the US and get color revolutioned into a failed state.
Russia is transitioning from authoritarianism to totalitarianism, which typically increases corruption, not decreases it. At the same time, Russia is devoting more resources to fighting the West, so it's entirely plausible that it's becoming both more dangerous and more corrupt simultaneously.
This really does not seem to track with the definitions of authoritarianism and totalitarianism I'm familiar with. Would you call the PRC totalitarian? Ukraine? Turkey? Ukraine is broadly similar to Russia on every relevant metric now, PRC has much more political control and state meddling in private life (which I'd consider the definitional core of totalitarianism), and Turkey seems only slightly better (and their crackdown on Kurds and Gülenists still exceeds anything Russia did so far in scope, though you might pin this on those groups being more determined than any opposition in Russia).
Totalitarianism is a more extreme form of authoritarianism. E.g. Imperial Germany during WW1 was authoritarian, while Nazi Germany in WW2 was totalitarian.
China was totalitarian under Mao, authoritarian with the Deng Xiaoping reforms, and is tilting towards totalitarianism again with Xi, although that might have paused (unclear at the moment). I wouldn't really call Turkey totalitarian yet. Ukraine was authoritarian, but have had freeish elections since the Maidan, although they have a ton of other problems and are by no means a consolidated democracy yet.
This looks a lot like degree of hostility of the US is the best predictor of your measure of totalitarianism. If we use the Wikipedia definition of totalitarianism as a baseline,
Political repression of opposition is present in all (Russia, China, Ukraine, Turkey), though I'd broadly say the degree is Turkey < Ukraine <= Russia << China. In Ukraine this got much worse since the war; while before it they only banned the communist parties and engaged in soft repression of others, after the war started they went after more or less the whole opposition. Meanwhile, while Russia did visibly crack down on some of the most promising opposition parties (ex. Navalny's, Nadezhdin's), some manifestly oppositional parties like Yabloko are still operational and occupy positions of power, and the biggest one (the Communist Party) could be called cozy with Putin's but not exactly aligned either.
None of them have a real cult of personality around the leader, though China is the only one to come up with a construct like "Xi Jinping thought" so it gets close; I don't think any of them have controlled wages and prices; in terms of official censorship once again China is way in front of everyone (being the only one with a Great Firewall and actual proactive censorship regime), but my sense is that there Ukraine currently is actually ahead of Russia since they are thinking out loud about even banning Telegram; China is the only one with mass-surveillance policing of public places; for state terrorism none of them score particularly highly but Russia might win with the occasional false flags associated with Putin's rule.
This is backwards. The US has democracy as a big part of its ideology, and thus is naturally allies with most democracies and is inherently hostile towards most autocracies. However, it's not black and white; Saudi Arabia has long been authoritarian, and is creeping towards totalitarianism under MBS, yet they're still an important regional ally of the US.
Russia has also gotten worse since the war started. There's no real opposition. The closest thing to it died in a Siberian labor camp not too long ago. You're not even allowed to openly criticize Putin any more, which people like Girkin have found out. Ukraine has done a bunch of bad things too like postponing its election, but I'm pretty sure people are still allowed to criticize Zelensky without getting Girkin'ed.
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methinks the Wikipedia definition is self-serving to some sections of the West, too. I think it is plausible there to be a totalitarian state presenting itself run by a committee without the Leader.
A better definition would concentrate on the degree of total control of the society, both private and public, or aspirations thereof. Instead of merely being satisfied by frustrating their political opponents in the public political life and being the boss, a totalitarian wants to use power of state apparatus to get rid of opposing thought.
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The classical definition of the totalitarian/authoritarian distinction is that authoritarian regimes have non-state actors with real power which can act as a check on the state(eg the Catholic Church in Latin America), whereas totalitarian regimes don't tolerate any. Now obviously this is a definition that, for the USA, is rather self serving, but also cold war era Latin America genuinely didn't have a great leap forwards equivalent.
Yeah, that's not a bad definition. Do you have a link or source you can give me that defines it that way?
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I don't really see any evidence that authoritarianism is the sole variable when it comes to corruption. It can be a factor but on the other hand the west is nominally democratic and it's ruling classes central ideology, DEI, is an ideology that exists entirely to enable grift. Lots of things can lead to corruption. In Russia's case the necessity of winning the war now that things have gone hot is reducing corruption. Can't win a war if your bombs are full of water and your intelligence gathering agencies are lying to you.
I would say that this 'being under pressure' is the bigger underlying factor when it comes to corruption. At least corruption that doesn't get caught quick and exists long term. That's basically the way that democracy and capitalism combat corruption when they actually function properly. If you're a corrupt business or politician you are going to have unhappy constituents or products that aren't competitive, they vote you out / don't buy your stuff. Authoritarianism is kinda like Monopoly where this pressure is removed. Though I think people overestimate the amount of power and freedom to act that authoritarians have, people still have the power to 'vote' via violence, but the stakes are a lot higher and coordination issues mean that this 'vote' is rarely exercised.
In the textbook definition of authoritarianism where one entity does have sole power to do whatever, like if a god came down to earth or something, this pressure is entirely removed though. This probably ties in with the idea that ,"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."
It's easily one of the biggest factors, if not the single biggest factor period. Look at the corruptions perception index, and notice how many of the least corrupt countries are democratic, while many of the most corrupt are authoritarian or totalitarian. Look at the differences between Taiwan and China, or between the two Koreas. Same cultures, but different governing styles make a huge amount of difference. Look at Post-Soviet states that escaped Russia's orbit vs those that didn't, like Poland vs Belarus. The entire Ukraine conflict that's been going on since 2014 is in large part because Ukrainians want to be more like Poland than Belarus. DEI, while being a terrible ideology, is worlds apart from actual dictatorships like Russia or Venezuela or North Korea.
Dictators are never entirely secure, and totalitarian dictators can freely devote more of the state's resources towards maintaining their own positions than authoritarian ones can. They accomplish this largely through corruption.
This is just a right-wing version of whig history, and relies just as much on cherrypicking historical datapoints as liberal whig history does.
Link just seems to be to a globalist ngo that ranks globalist countries positively?
WEF and World Bank? really?
Just write your own list of countries you don't like and it'd have as much credibility.
Plenty of researchers use corruption perceptions in their research on country outcomes. Do you have a better metric you'd like to use?
If we can't agree on some underlying data then there's no point in continuing this conversation.
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They're also geographically and/or culturally clustered together indicating that them all being democracies is a historical coincidence more than anything else. Also Nordics/Protestants being stuck up by-the-book types was a stereotype well before Europe started moving towards democracy.
Less decisive historical observation than one may think, as the confound of comparatively democratic power structures in the Nordics goes all the way back before the French revolution. Things were meetings of free men since before the middle ages. When the Swedish realm adopted European style Riksdag of estates, they had a fourth estate of free land-owning peasants.
If states with elections can be authoritarian, and various forms of mnarchy, from feudalism to absolutism can be democratic, it's starting to sound like democracy is just the friends we made along the way.
"Comparatively democratic" is intended to be read literally, as in, comparatively more cratos in the hands of demos than in other parts of Europe. Not as, it was democratic as 20th century had democracies. But lack of serfdom since early Middle Ages, continuous presence of institutions for deliberative, representational decisionmaking, and right to participate (in the said institutions) granted to large part of population, all of that, it is the traditional social capital argument.
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The east Asian democracies are quite far from the Western democracies, and many have similar cultures to eastern autocracies, yet the corruption of the autocracies is far, far worse. Again, look at South Korea vs North Korea, or Taiwan vs China.
That's communism vs. Non-communism, if anything (a system that pretends to be democratic, I might add), you even see it's echoes in the democratic Europe. There's also no shortage of corrupt democracies you're ignoring, and like I said, the lack of historical comparisons to when the non-corrupt countries weren't democratic makes this very low quality evidence.
Left wing authoritarianism is still authoritarianism. Further, modern China isn't particularly communist, and hasn't been since at least the 80s. It's more like Fascism With Chinese Characteristics. Openly fascist countries like Nazi Germany also pretended to be nominally democratic by carrying around the corpse of the Reichstag, but the illusion fooled nobody.
The corrupt democracies are mostly the ones that have shaky democratic fundamentals, i.e. ones that are either hybrid regimes, or the ones that wobble in and out of coups.
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I wouldn't call Germany asleep at the wheel with regards to Russia. I would consider them turning the wheel as sharply as they could towards Russia.
The only surprising thing is that a crisis as immense as the current war in Ukraine was what was needed to wake up their leadership.
"Let's shut down some nuclear power plants and replace the energy with imported Russian fuel."
-Actual for-real recent German policy.
It's like they read Frank Herbert's bit about hydraulic despotism and decided to become the dependant helpless party in that exchange.
Well, the idea was more like "let's shut down all the bad energy (nuclear and fossil) and replace it with renewables".
The first was easy, the second was not, so here we are.
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Really? Just before the Ukraine invasion, 50ish% of German natural gas came from Russia, accouting for roughly 25% of their total energy generation capacity, not to mention roughly a third of their oil (not counting other Russian allies). They laughed at Trump when he told them they were too reliant on Russian energy. Short of rejigging their economy to be entirely reliant on the Russian hydrocarbon teat, I cant think of a deeper national slumber.
It surprises me not in the slightest it took a war to (sort of) wake German political leadership to the dangers of their energy strategy- they are the same idiots who shut down their domestic nuclear power industry at the demand of uneducated Green Party morons, only to a) buy French nuclear power anyway, and b) mine a shit load more coal to make up for the shortfalls.
The post-war German political establishment is propped up only by the competence of their manufacturing sector, and as that slice of the economy falls under increasing strain, there appears to be a turbulent future in the offing.
Funded by Russians.
I'm not convinced; I think following the money on environmental and socialist fifth-columnists leads back to Washington, not Moscow.
This is something I would like to hear more about.
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It's worth noting that China is coming for Germany too. Germany's trade balance with China gets more negative every year as China's manufacturing sector eats the world.
Coming next is automobiles. Without tariffs, Germany will lose most of its worldwide market share to China within the next 10 years. There's nothing special about German manufacturing that can't be replicated at much lower cost in China (and with much stronger network effects to boot).
You might be right, but I wonder how sure of this we can be? Is there any reason why this might not be true?
I guess one thing I can think of is that China apparently can't copy TSMC or that Dutch Lithography company. Not yet anyway. Although I realize that's a somewhat different story.
Yes it’s true that China doesn’t dominate every industry right now. But follow the trend line.
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QC. A lot of German-designed stuff is pretty convoluted and is banking on higher-than-normal precision in manufacturing to work properly; you tend to find that out pretty quickly when you buy their cars.
That's not to say that China can't do that, but just like salaries for [competent] software developers in India, it's going to cost you just as much for China to make high-performance parts as it is for you to source them locally (and the way to make those parts isn't going to suddenly walk off, and counterfeits aren't as easily going to make it into your parts stream)- turns out globalization works both ways. So getting them to do it instead is neutral at best.
And there are indications that the Chinese in fact cannot reproduce the most specialized parts because its manpower surplus meant people who could focus on that were out-competed (this is why polities that [can] depend on slave labor generally don't industrialize, and a manpower surplus is not meaningfully distinguishable from slave labor simply because the individual wages are so low). Which is why, despite Chinese expertise in industrial espionage, their attempts to actually build from the plans they steal generally don't end well, which makes them cost even more than it does Westerners. And when you realize how much Westerners spend developing these things...
Now, that isn't to say that advanced manufacturing will always redeem an overcomplicated shitty design that barely works in the first place (something the Germans have been historically, and are still to this day, guilty of), but it's arguably better than the alternative.
Though really, all the Western nations have to do to save their automotive sectors is to ditch the "we're banning the good cars by 203x" mandates. Which is part of why Tesla is mostly focused on, surprise surprise, using their engineering and advanced manufacturing expertise to widen their already-high profit margins even more by doing things like die-casting the entire car (something that will pay off, and another technology that can be licensed for other things, even if governments ditch the mandates).
Is Tesla’s corporate strategy now, in part, to get ahead of the West canceling the “ban all the good cars by 203x” initiatives? Does it look like that will happen?
California, Washington state, Massachusetts, the EU, Canada, etc are banning the sale of ICE cars in 203x. Hypothetically it is happening. Maybe they'll push back the deadlines as we approach them.
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Given how foolishly and self-destructively governments acted in the face of 2020? I'm not holding my breath, though the governments that are about to replace the most foolish of them might punt (at least on a federal level; the Biden administration delaying the nastier EPA mandate until '28 makes sense for a couple of reasons and I suspect the other car-manufacturing countries are going to follow suit with punting- I question whether or not Japan ever will since the only thing less useful than a BEV compact car is a BEV kei car).
This is all just armchair speculation; but I think it lines up considering just how awful battery technology is at the moment. Either the mandates aren't reversed, in which case they never bother with a cheaper car and still manage to undercut every other automaker (who are still doing the "build a normal car, except with a battery" thing); or they are, and they need to drop the price dramatically in order to have half a chance competing with cars that are still objectively better (and having very few parts will help them significantly with that) and sandbag until better batteries come out.
Which... I'm not holding my breath about that either; electrochemistry is a harsh mistress.
Oh, just wait for AI! It'll recursively self-improve until it's mega-ultra-super-god tier genius level, then it will crack all the mysteries of all the laws of physics and pull inexhaustible limitless clean energy out of the cornucopia! Just because your puny human brain can't see an easy solution doesn't mean there isn't one, the AI will solve it all along with overcoming aging, death, and the end of the universe. Simples!
(You see why I'm a teeny bit sceptical about the fairy godmother future AI?)
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I just want to confirm this. Every company I worked for so far was in the business of making overfitted and overengineered clockwork software that went over time and over budget and tended to fall apart at the seams when any changes were attempted.
Germans cannot do things like agile, modular, minimum viable product or cost-efficient, it seems.
I don't think that's a particularly German problem. Bad software knows no borders.
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I think you and Hyperion are agreeing with each other.
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Oh, I completely agree with you. I'm just coming at it from the other side.
Given how insane their policies were, for all the reasons you listed, they should have never gone down that path; or, realized long ago that it was fruitless.
Given that they did do all those things anyway; yes, only something really shocking could have changed their minds.
Oops, posting too late at night. But yes, ze Germans are a weird lot politically speaking.
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