billbindc

What are the stakes? A good six pack of hazy IPA work? Because it's at worst a 70/30 that a deal is made.

North Korea of any era isn’t Russia of 1990 or today and Stalinist states don’t happen because there happens to be Stalinist sitting around. They happen because a lot of structural factors exist that make them possible. Putin would happily run that sort of state if he could right now and certainly possesses the ruthlessness to do it. Why hasn’t he? Because it wouldn’t work now and already didn’t by Gorbachev’s era.

It is simply not true that Gorbachev eschewed violence. It was that when he tried using it, the effects didn't stick. Gorbachev's Russia wasn't Stalin's Russia in the same way that Putin's isn't either...and also why he has chosen another path than Stalinist repression. https://www.rferl.org/a/gorbachev-legacy-crackdowns-inaction-empire-intact/32014336.html

b and c are simply two sides of the same coin.

Quite the opposite. The contemporary KGB was seeing bogey men and programs everywhere.

If Russia drops a city killer on Lvov, it faces an overwhelming conventional response that would drive it out of Ukraine forthwith, a sanctions regime upped to an out and out embargo and abandonment by China, India, etc. And, of course, the full panoply of American nuclear retaliatory capabilities if it went further up the escalation ladder. It could happen. It's very unlikely.

It's a pretty significant thing for US officials to say that they think Ukraine did it and what the article does not say, for obvious reasons, is *who* on the Russian side was confused by the attack and blamed it on the Ukrainians.

That gets into very ugly territory but that transition is harder than it looks. Trump benefited from a political milieu that was having trouble catching up with the norm breaking he was engaged in. That's over and the institutions are hardened now in ways that they were not before. If Trump or the next of his ilk tries to go the route of violence, I think they will be in for a shock.

Don't say I didn't tell you so: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/24/us/politics/ukraine-kremlin-drone-attack.html

It was designed as a check on the judiciary and heretofore not notably abused. It should be clear too that Trump was dissuaded from trying it on himself, his family or directly in aid of a crime. In those cases, it's of a certainty that the Supreme Court...even this strongly conservative one...would have knocked him back.

Unless you are well into your early 120's, you missed the era of waxing Congressional power and responsibility.

You would essentially need a reversal of the norms, laws and Supreme Court decisions from 1940 to 2020 to fix that and a bunch of structural changes in how politics works. Make no mistake...Congress is by much the more powerful branch but individual members don't want to be on the hook for difficult decisions. So, neither does the institution and decisions are handed over to the White House. Edited to add: the pardon power is a central constitutional provision given to the Presidency. It is a plenary power that would require a constitutional amendment to change.

It absolutely bent the process in DC. The DC MPD leadership and rank and file knew that Trump as President has the power to take over the department any time he liked. That would have been catastrophic as he could have simply ordered them to not enforce the law against his political fellow travelers. Their response was to go easier on violent right wing protesters and come down harder on those on the left to forestall a worse outcome. It was obvious in how enforcement was carried out and drove the events that led to the clearing of Lafayette Park. It was an ugly choice but it bore out. Had the President been in charge of DC MPD on 1/6 they never would have been ordered in and Congress would have been over run. But in the meantime, BLM and Antifa were being kettled while Proud Boys were taunting police, starting fights on our streets and getting let go. And btw, it turns out that the head of the DC MPD intelligence wing was suborned by the Proud Boys and was indicted for it last week.

I have to say...and this is coming from the center left...that a lot of the antifa folks in DC were completely obnoxious. The BLM folks were what we would call around here 'good protesters'. They did their thing, acted coherently and didn't randomly attack whatever for the thrill of it...the burning of the lobby of the AFL-CIO being a particularly egregious example of the tendency to burn for the fun of it tendency of some of the Antifa folks. A lot of them looked like teenagers burning off covid isolation. But...neither one had anything like the sheer nastiness of the radical right wingers. Patches like RWDS (that stands for "Right Wing Death Squad") and Confederate flags were routine and far more common than outright Nazi regalia. People telling my neighbors with a pride flag at their house that they "will come back for you later". Or the 100 or so Proud Boys that charged a police line my kid and I were behind because they were trying to get at BLM folks on the plaza on 16th Street behind us. Oh...and did I mention the guys with the long guns that got arrested at one of my places of business? We got to see the monster with it's mask off...because they were sure that they were going to get a pardon sooner or later as they would tell DC MPD who had to deal with them...and I would strongly suggest you all take it seriously. Out of patriotism if nothing else. Nobody benefits more from it than Vladimir Putin.

I saw plenty of Nazi regalia, had guys sneer at my multiracial kid, etc in the years leading up to 1/6 in DC. Sure, we are sort of fly paper for the worst people but anyone who thinks there isn’t a virulent underground of this stuff is kidding themselves. As we saw with Teixeira, we have a legitimate insider threat from reactionary extremists and it’s a thing we have to defend ourselves against. How does this tie into this topic? Just take a look at some of the more obscure names on Russia’s latest sanctions list.

One thing not to sleep on is the pervasive cynicism that exists in the Russian milieu. Russians assume there are nefarious motives for people on Prigozhin's level and they assume that they are lying to put the best face on things. That Prigozhin is admitting to 20k+ losses and that Ukraine (rather than NATO) has been turned into a formidable opponent aren't taken at face value. They are taken as the *best possible way to describe what's going on*. In other words, what they are hearing from Western media using VPN is right.

"Fight for us....we suck!" is a hell of a message.

Prigozhin is talking about revolution, the preponderant power of the Ukrainian state, confirming that tens of thousands of casualties, etc. And he is quite specifically pointing at Russian elites being the cause. There may be an argument that this sort of talk helps Putin on some level but I have yet to see it.

I have to concur with this. Prigozhin is starting to get beyond comments that benefit Putin. The tool is starting to cut the hand that wields it. Putin will have a lot of factors obscure to us to consider if he wants to put Prigozhin out of his misery and timing will matter. Doing it while Wagner is “reconstituting” would make sense except that he may really need Wagner to hold the line somewhere if Ukraine scores a major breakthrough in the next few months. Interesting times.

If the principle of economy of force applies, I would imagine the best option is to pull back after Russia begins to seriously deploy and then do it again at another point in order to create the least efficient situation possible for the Russian MoD.

Beating my usual drum on this...I would suggest that what is militarily sound will take a back seat to what is politically necessary in Moscow. That goes beyond what Girkin and his ilk commentate and gets at who can knife who to Putin. If events in Belgogrod get embarrassing enough...and it's already pretty embarrassing for the Kremlin that it had to threaten to nuke it's own city to defend the Motherland...you will see the political necessities diverting efforts better spent elsewhere. As the Capt likes to say...war is communication...and this war has consistently been about communicating to Russians that their reactionary dictatorship isn't going anywhere.

Ganz is a cantankerous old man (he's 30, I think) who has read virtually everything and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the antecedents, history and current manifestations of the reactionary right. He comes from the left but his analyses are unfettered by ideological shackles. Strongly suggest everything he writes on Dreyfuss, the Second Republic and the February 1934 riots in Paris as they inform much of our current experience.

I strongly recommend digging into John Ganz (who Twitter suspended on the lightest of pretexts today). He explains with both excellent historical context and a sharp contemporary eye how and why vultures like Musk and Sacks are going ever more in a Völkischer direction: https://johnganz.substack.com/

It would be difficult to find a part of the front that is more distant on exterior lines from where the big fight is likely to be and it's being done in a way that Russia, caught up in the coils of its own propaganda, cannot ignore. Somebody in Kyiv decided to demonstrate the concept of initiative in the most humiliating way possible for Moscow.