Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Saturday, July 17, 2021
·
51 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter
You know what’s nice? When you wake up thinking it’s Friday, then realize it’s Saturday.
@dazedandconfused and @JohnSf had and very interesting exchange yesterday about Russia’s perceived “sphere of influence”.
Focused on Ukraine. Not always specifically about in that exchange, but most applicable to.
I read it hours after the exchange happened: d&c’s arguments enraged me. Jsf responded respectfully with counterpoints.
On another thread someone (@Kathy maybe? Others chimed in) about Autocracy, state, Orthodoxy, and power/influence thought within Russia.
Russia views the world through a very different lens than does western Europe and the US. They see themselves as beset and threatened by foreign foes and cultures on every front.
When it was the former USSR it encompassed much more internal ethnic diversity than likely any other nation. I would have to look it up, but it likely borders more neighbor states than any other country on earth.
When it was the heart of USSR and even before it often dealt with control and authority issues by internally exporting / colonizing ethnic Rus populations into their borderlands as the new de facto upper class and ruling class.
Russia sees Ukraine as a rogue separatist break-away state. Everyone else sees Ukraine as a sovereign nation.
In retrospect, I can see dazedandconfused POV while still firmly, wholeheartedly within JohnSf’s camp and worldview.
That is by design and in the playbook of every autocracy. Tell the populace that the real enemies are out there and trying to get them, and they will be distracted from the rogering they are getting in every way from the man at top there at home.
@Kathy:
Last month I was off on the date by a full week when I had to sign something and date it.
“What date is it today? The 7th?” I asked.
“Um… It’s the 14th, sir.”
I was both embarrassed and pleased. Retirement has privileges.
You no longer have to care and pay attention to matters crucially important to people still working about things like days or dates. It’s pretty fucking sweet, actually.
To me, it really does not matter. I still pay attention to days mostly for shows I want to watch.
Not long ago I tuned to PBS at 11 am expecting to see America’s Test Kitchen. It took several minutes before I figured out today was actually Sunday not Saturday.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Putin is quite good at it.
Internal enemies too. Homosexuals and Navalny. Amongst others.
Ex-St. Louis Police Officer Gets Two Weekends in Jail, (3 years) Probation for Covering Up Beating
Her boyfriend got 52 months, the other 2 cops were convicted in a 2nd trial after their first one ended with a hung jury and have yet to be sentenced.
I bring this up for the sole purpose of quoting the closing paragraph:
In other news, water is still wet, fire is still hot.
Heh:
This isn’t really surprising. Grifting now, grifting tomorrow, grifting forever!
MAGA World’s ‘Freedom Phone’ Actually Budget Chinese Phone
But wait, there’s more!
The ‘Freedom Phone’ that far-right leaders are hawking is a cheap Chinese Android—and a security nightmare
I’ve never mentioned this before, but the curt directive to “Speak Your Mind” always makes me smile. I should put it on my voicemail.
@CSK:
Do it!
It will make you smile and amuse your friends.
Annoy telemarketers. There is no downside.
@de stijl:
I believe you’re right about that.
In the matter of the January 6 insurrection, here’s a Trumpkin, one Sandra Kiczenski, age 56, providing her perspective:
“We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
Whew. Glad she cleared that up.
@CSK:
An abrupt “State your business” would work too. I had a better idea.
I leave my voicemail greeting intentionally blank, null. Ten seconds of silence.
People who know me know they can leave a message. People who don’t get weirded out and hang up. Telemarketers and phone bots can fuck right the fuck off.
I do not do “X is not available now. Please leave a message.” Leave ’em guessing. It freaks actual human cold callers out.
“Um… Is this X? I want to contact X… [hang up]”
Highly recommended.
@de stijl:
That’s exactly what I already do. Works like a charm.
One obscure Twitch streamer I sometimes tune into did a blind, first playthrough stream of a game I have sunk hundreds of hours into – a bit obsessively.
I immediately wanted to help and guide, but that would have been wrong. I had to stop myself repeatedly from offering advice.
Figuring out stuff for yourself is key. That’s a huge part of the fun.
I would never take that away from someone.
I gave two very vague nudges in chat then decided that was too much and decided to shut up.
It was very hard to watch. “Dude! No! Don’t do that!” It was so excruciating I had to switch to something else after a half hour.
Watching someone else grasp the bare basics is really difficult. I almost chewed my fingers off not helping. It’s too stressful.
@CSK:
Everybody I know I want to talk with is already in my contact list.
If it comes up with a name, I answer. (Mostly. I have limits on a few folks.)
If it comes up with random number/unknown caller, I never do. Why would I? Why would anyone?
@Mikey:
I’m not saying every product labeled as MAGA is a scam, but that is the way to bet.
@de stijl:
That tends to happen when I’m on vacation. One of the joys of extended goofing off is losing track of time.
2 physical therapists: 7 exercises you should do every day
They’re mostly stretches.
@CSK:
@de stijl:
A friend long used this greeting.
Hello, this is Jim
Pause
Uh Huh,
Pause
Uh huh,
Beep
would you be Shocked to discover that Manchin has made millions off coal? I can hardly believe he is blocking filibuster reform!
Bout to be some unhappy rednecks who work for major corporations.
@de stijl: Yes, being retired does undercut the influence of the work week cycle On the other hand, it does kinda ruin weekends and holidays. I keep track because school activity drives a lot of traffic in this bedroom community and so I can be sure to avoid dining out on Fri or Sat evenings. Much less crowded on, say, Tuesday. As are beaches. (We only dine out outdoors and we mask, although in our little corner of FL we’re about the only people who do. Cases have quadrupled over the last couple weeks.)
@gVOR08:
I will take undifferentiated days over Sunday evening blues any day of the week.
There were times I was semi-psyched to get back to work. The thought of Monday morning was fairly juicy. There were times when the thought of Monday morning filled me with dread.
Times when there was no delineation between work week and week-end. It was work all day every day.
The antithesis of retirement is crunch. On one project I worked every single day for almost seven months is a row. Average day was 14 hours.
Weekends were easier, less fools getting in my way. No phone calls. No e-mails. No bosses.
I could tick boxes off my task list quickly and efficiently.
Same for after 5 pm on weekdays. All the bosses have gone home. Time to get some actual work done instead of talking about it. 5 to 10 pm was my sweet spot.
Once I went to work Friday 8 am and went home on Sunday 3 pm. Crunch plus there. That weekend was very intense and ultimately really pointless. Many hundreds of person hours wasted on minor thing no end user noticed ever. To satisfy one person’s ego.
Collapse Raises New Fears About Florida’s Shaky Insurance Market
Insurers were already skittish after losses from repeated hurricanes. The recent condo collapse has brought new insecurity. How long will Florida’s coast be insurable?
When Champlain Towers South collapsed I was curious as to how the insurance payouts would occur. As would be expected the owners will be screwed.
Understandably the insurance companies are beginning to withdraw from the FL coastal market (and likely other high risk markets), so socialize the losses.
@Sleeping Dog: Mine says, “You know what to do.”
3% of Scientists have confidence in Republicans.
@OzarkHillbilly: frank luntz posted that this was troubling, and everybody replied, yeah, thanks for being a bigly contributor to this, Asshole.
@de stijl:
Sorry I offended you, perhaps my comment of today on that thread will abate that a bit.
@Teve: He’s innocent, INNOCENT he tells us.
@dazedandconfused:
Offended me? Initially yes. I got Grr! Angry Man for a bit, but I get over shit pretty quick.
I don’t know if there is wisdom in your POV in the Russia vs. Ukraine scuffle. I believe not.
I do know Putin is a rat bastard and Russia would be better served by almost anyone else.
You taught me that I was seeing this as sovereign nation vs. nation only. But within Russia it is seen differently by establishment influential folks.
I still do not agree, but you gave me insight to a different POV.
Have not read your new comment yet. Just telling you where my head was at earlier.
@dazedandconfused:
I have to ask. Why no value judgement statement in your comment?
@de stijl:
My interest is only in relating the way the Russian feel about it, and it’s more plausible to me than their being ideologically bent on destroying democracy. They have become capitalists IMO, and also IMO their actions have been entirely consistent to that hypothesis. The USSR ran around trying to tamp down democracy and instill Marxism, but that was the past. I see no evidence they have adopted authoritarianism as an ideology in the way the USSR adopted Marxism, yet that appears to be the prevailing view in the US at the moment.
If I grasp the value judgement question correctly, I don’t seek to judge the Russians, I only seek to understand them.
This is beautiful:
@dazedandconfused:
In ostentatiously studiously not making a value judgement you risk looking like you support the thinking you describe.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Awesome find!
I bookmarked that.
Take That, Libtards!
@dazedandconfused:
I understand a jilted ex power play. Petty and vengeful and controlling.
When the aggrieved party contacted a lawyer in this scenario (EU and US) the stalker relented fearing harsh retribution.
You are implicitly asking me to side with the creepy vengeful stalker. They legit broke up in front of everybody.
Will not. That would be monstrous.
@OzarkHillbilly: As you obviously know electric cars were part of the beginning of motoring. Here’s a sort of catalogue composed for the internet I s’pose of 1907 advertising for electrics:
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/overview-of-early-electric-cars.html
Arriving a bit late to this.
@dazedandconfused:
That’s my interest also, but I really think the basis of understanding the action of Russia is in elite opinion, rather than public opinion.
I don’t think one of your starting points, that Powers should be somewhat cautious when dealing with other Powers perceived key interests, is wrong headed in itself. Not deferential, mind, but duly prudent.
But I don’t think that can allow the West to ignore flagrant violations of international norms. Norms that are themselves in Russia’s longer term interest.
Or to disdain protestors against oligarchic rule as illegitimate because they irritate Russian pride.
My interest is of fairly long standing; my thesis advisor was a specialist in modern Russian history and the history of European communism.
(In some respects, at least some of his likely arguments on this subject might be closer to yours than mine)
I also have a cousin married to a Ukrainian; whose family happens to come from near Kaharkov, speak Russian, but are nonetheless Ukrainian nationalists.
I think you are making a basic error in assuming that a shared language and history entails a common national identity.
If you doubt me, I invite you to visit Edinburgh or Dublin and inform the Scots or Irish you meet that because they don’t speak Gaelic, they are therefore “really” English, and they must defer to English interests.
You may not find all the replies polite.
I doubt that they are determined on that; more they find jamming a spoke in the wheel amusing
I do think they have ZERO inclination toward non-decorative democracy in Russia.
Perhaps more important, they will not permit the Law to be a impartial system, but are determined it should be a tool in the hands of the rulers.
Without legal autonomy there is little hope of a market modernization and a move away from a slowly declining oil/mines based economy.
Agreed. But of an oligarchic, cartelised capitalism. It is legally rule based markets they reject, not the pursuit of profit.
On that we must agree to differ; it is not a proselytising ideology like Bolshevism, but IMO it is definitely a set, coherent worldview of “anti-liberalism”.
(Liberalism in a very broad sense, not that of US politics; which some foolish American “Conservatives” fail to grasp. Don’t mean you here 🙂 )
I’m rather inclined to both.
I don’t think this is the settled opinion of the Russian people; but I also think the Russian ruling class have not the slightest inclination of inviting the peoples opinions on the matter.
I wish to understand the rulers of Russia; but I cannot refrain from judging them.
I believe them to be self-serving fools.
@de stijl:
Yes, I am aware of the danger, confusing analysis for advocacy is quite common, just don’t fear those particular slings and arrows.
@JohnSF:
We can disagree. I will ask what the international norms are in the area of fomenting revolutions in other countries though.
I have not implied shared languages are THE marker of national identity, just that the language and history of the Donbass and the rest of what we call the Ukraine are very different, and that somebody drew a line on a map around it all does not a nation make. The different languages are but a marker of those differences.
@dazedandconfused:
Hi.
Just looked at that comment.
I agree that Russian motives in election meddling and hacking etc is more based on a dislike for American policy than any “anti-democracy” crusade.
Though I would also include pure, spiteful, malice; consider the resentment of the defeated in other historic situations (say the US South; or Weimar Germany) and turn it up to 11.
The Russian regime would doubtless be perfectly happy with a world order that allowed them to trade with the West, launder and bank their gains there, and retain nice villas on the Riviera, mansions in London, and luxury apartments in New York.
And the West accepted the view of Moscow that the “successor states” are required to subordinate themselves to the Kremlin.
Problem: we cannot, and will not, do so; not without abandoning key components of the post-Cold War legal order.
Even if the US did, the EU will not.
The Germans are all for conciliation, and unrealistic devotion to “Wandel durch Handel”
(“But the vandals stole the handles”, as I usually add 🙂
But they are not prepared to abandon the concepts of legal order, of the Rechtsstaat that is fundamental to the system structure.
BTW: IMO Americans tend too default to viewing the people (and hence democracy) not the state as the basis of legitimacy.
European concepts are rather different; e.g in the UK the Crown is the formal sovereign authority, as it was in pre-1919 Germany. British people are both citizens AND subjects (it’s messy).
Key difference from Russian autocratic tradition: eg the rechtstaat and the English concept of the Crown’s obligation to uphold and act within the law etc
This contrasts with the Russian tradition (which derives in turn from Byzantine/Roman concepts of absolute imperial power OVER the law).
The law is to be a tool in the hands of the ruler, not a constraint upon his rule.
@dazedandconfused:
Maybe not.
But the nations, including Russia, are obliged to respect those boundaries, no matter how they find them disagreeable.
This was a lesson hammered into Europe by the events of the 1930’s.
Germany may or may not have had some sort of transcendentally extra-legal right to overule the sovereignty of Austria, or Czechoslovakia re. the solidly German Sudetenland, or Danzig, or Upper Silesia, or…
Such argumentation is perilous in the extreme.
Donbas and/or Crimea may (or may not) be “pro-Russian”.
That does not mean Russia has a right to declare them Russian and seize them
There may have been a case for international mediations, and agreed border adjustments, or internationally guaranteed autonomous authorities. There was none for unilateral land-grab by Russia, that was clearly motivated by the regimes sheer rage at the overthrow of Yanukovich rather than any long-standing demand for separation.
Also, for even more egregious Putinist intervention, we could consider the oft forgotten Russo-Georgian War of 2008.
Which was, of course, solely motivated by the intense and long standing sentimental devotion of the Russian people to status of South Ossetia and Abkahazia in Georgia.
@dazedandconfused:
You only “analyze” one side repeatedly. You do not “analyze” the competing side ever.
Another comment dazedandconfused:
No, it has merely asserted its right to decide by military force that parts of the Ukraine belong to Russia.
@de stijl:
I need a specific on what I am not analyzing to respond.
@dazedandconfused:
Actually, rather hazy, and dependent on who’s doing the asking, and the “fomenting”, usually.
The EU would certainly argue it was not fomenting revolution, but insisting that a trade agreement was conditional on meeting norms re. the rule of law.
Other actors continued to support the Ukrainian protests (as they have indicated sympathy for more recent ones in Belarus) but is that “fomenting”?
Moscow says yes; but then they would, wouldn’t they?
I may be a little prejudiced insofar as in the UK various Brexiteers, ultra-Tories and other anti-EU types (including ones traceable to City interests in “handling” Russian “investments”) have been trying to use this a a stick to beat Brussels for years. And IMO its a crock.
Besides which:
“Fomenting” may be dodgy; invasions of “little green men” followed by armoured divisions and massive artillery bombardments are a whole other thing entirely.
This is no “asymmetric response” or “hacking” or whatever: it is an invasion of a sovereign state, in flagrant contravention of international law, that has caused the deaths of some 30,000 people, and the displacement of some 2.5 million refugees in Ukraine.
Doubtless they were all so eager to welcome their Russian liberators they got confused in their joy and ran in the opposite direction by mistake?
I’ve had several opportunities to discuss shots with people I come into contact with that are Trumpies. They absolutely refuse to get vaccinated because of stories they’ve heard “from people in healthcare”, (i.e, my aunt is a nurse, my friend’s a doctor, some person they know is an EMT nurse in Vegas) of horror stories they’ve been told about people who’ve had a bad reaction to the shot itself. From their perspective, the reaction to the shots has been as bad as COVID itself, so they’ll continue to take their chances.
I can gently point out that we’ve given over 300 million shots so far and fatal reactions have been next to none, but they’re not gonna give up what they’ve heard second hand.
Shame on their friends in the healthcare field for spreading so much misinformation. Or maybe they don’t actually have friends in the healthcare field, they’re basing it on shit they saw on YouTube and rephrasing it so it’s “a friend, or person they trust”…..
Whatever, they’re not getting their shots.