Kind of. That would take very long to explain though, plus most foreign audience won't get it anyway. But yes. Much of the Russian nightmare results from adhering to "positive" cultural values
Conflict avoidance -> Extreme violence
Justice and equality -> Slavery and destitution
Disclaimer: I mean it literally. People yearn for justice and equality and that's a major factor of why they end up as destitute slaves. For example, enthralment (закрепощение) of urban population historically happened under the public pressure. They petitioned to be enthralled
That may sound paradoxical, but extremely suboptimal outcomes do not necessarily result from adhering to "negative" values. Very, very often it's the opposite. You act according to something that sounds kinda "positive". And that's how you build hell on earth
Antonov-Ovseenko, a major early Bolshevik, recalled that Bolshevization of Ukrainian village went very hard, way harder than that of villages in Russia proper. Because Russian rural population yearned for fairness, while Ukrainian peasants were largely ok with things being unfair
Popular demand for fairness was a major driving force behind Bolshevism. Central Russians were concerned about fairness more than any nearby culture. That's why Bolshevization of periphery (e.g. Ukraine) had to be executed through direct military intervention from Central Russia
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Interesting dialogue between Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan presidents. They don't conversate in Russian, but in their native tongues. Both languages are Turkic, but belong to different language sub-groups: Azeri is Oghuz, Kazakh is Kipchak. Therefore, pronunciation is very different
Oghuz speaking area stretches from Khwarazm in Uzbekistan to Eastern Thrace. Turkish, Azeri, Turkmen have the most speakers. Oghuz languages have harsh pronunciation, much harsher than Kipchak ones
Kipchak speaking zone is stretching from Kyrgyzstan in the southeast to the Tatarstan in the northwest, plus plenty enclaves in the Caucasus. Kipchak accent is much softer. From my perspective Anatolian Turkish sounds as if Russian who doesn't know Tatar was trying to speak Tatar
If possible, I would also like to ask for Mikhail Khodorkovsky's @mbk_center comments regarding the following blogpost of prominent nationalist Yegor Kholmogorov, who is now calling for the full destruction of Ukrainians as a nation
Putin-worshipping among the Western far-right is not so much a result of his propaganda as of their neediness. They're are very needy. They're desperate to project their hopes and dreams on a saviour like figure. He doesn't need to do much, their imagination gonna do all the work
Regarding Darya Dugina. Many are calling her a "child". But she wasn't. She was a 30 years war old propagandist calling for "tougher", "less forgiving" mode of war. Publicly she acted as an aspiring Julius Streicher, trying to surpass her dad. Privately she mocked all this agenda
Let me show you some more innocent children to cry about later. This 62 year old child is Russian war propagandist Sergey Mardan
Scientific rationality is overrated, evolutionary rationality is underrated. If such behaviour is common, it suggests it is evolutionary stable = rational
Tribe needs mythology to unite it. And mythology must be dumbed down for the entire tribe to get it, otherwise it won't work
It is absolutely rational to believe in some dumbed down crap. Reality is incomprehensible in all of its complexity anyway. And when you start adding 1st nuance, 2nd nuance, 3rd nuance, it can't unite the tribe anymore. Working tribal mythologies are very dumb. Hence, rational
That's a common mechanism of social changes. When a party is small, its myth is nuanced, complicated. But once it expands, it *must* dumb it down to unite everyone. As a result, the old core (inner party) has a nuanced myth and the newcomers (outer party) have dumbed down version
"There is destructive energy in the air this month and it will manifest someway. So I must take preemptive action and trigger a crisis *of my choice*. All the bad energy gonna flow there and voila, it's all gone"
That's very easy to understand. In some countries they trigger forest fires for this very reason. There's lots of dry wood in the forest, so we create a controllable fire artificially. Otherwise, we'd have to wait for the uncontrollable one, which is more dangerous
In other places they provoke the avalanches with special cannons for this very reason. There's *objectively* lots of snow on the mountains, so if we just let it lie there, it will go down in an uncontrollable avalanche. Creating a controllable one artificially is way better
Most analysts would dismiss a hypothesis that numerology plays a big role in Russian scheduling of key events (invasion, important political assassination, etc)
While it is almost certainly true.
Russia is run by state security. Who are not "rational"
Let me get it straight. There are plenty of absolutely "rational" (Western-style) people in Russian bureaucracy. They're smart, they're following the recent Western intellectual fashion, mimic the language, the conceptual framework
But they're not rulers. They're servants
Russia has high ranked officials who would easily communicate with people on the US campuses and fit in well. *These people do not make decisions*. They follow orders, that's it. When hearing an order they consider dumb/counterproductive/dangerous, they just bow and execute it