4 ms·

I think people wishing for the death of Putin have a real lack of imagination for what comes immediately after. Maybe the replacement just wants to end the war

by iinnPP 3y ago

I think people wishing for the death of Putin have a real lack of imagination for what comes immediately after. Maybe the replacement just wants to end the war? How do they do that exactly? I know at least one way with a high probability of success.

nkozyra 3y ago
> I think people wishing for the death of Putin have a real lack of imagination for what comes immediately after. Well I'd suggest in the continuum of latter-day Andropov to Putin he's the most authoritarian, so we have a couple of decades of less oppressive examples.
- noduerme 3y ago
  But we're now at 20 years of this. And the world has gotten more authoritarian and more autocratic on the whole, much of the backing for which has emanated from Russia. People call Russia a gangster state, but that's not really true; it's a secret police state, run by a KGB man. And its favored tools of assassination, secret trials, disappearances, silence through fear, domestic mass mind control and international information warfare reflect that. The chances of something less malevolent crawling out of that swamp seem highly unlikely, since the country has functioned for over a century as an evolutionary experiment in eradicating anyone who shows a shred of conscience.
jfengel 3y ago
There is a strong sense that almost anything would be better than Putin. Putin leans heavily into a Russian tradition of confusing your enemies into making a mistake. That tactic necessarily means confusing your allies as well, and you're just as likely to make a mistake as your enemies are. A successor who is more brutal but more "rational" can be reckoned with. Sometimes you really can just pay a bully to knock it off. Everybody hates it, and it would leave Ukraine paying most of the price, but they can be told that they won't get any more military aid. And then everybody goes back to undercutting each other diplomatically and economically instead of conquest (until the next time). Right now all anybody knows is that a successor will be different. And since Putin appears to be capable of preserving an unacceptable status quo indefinitely, a lot of people would rather guess that the situation will improve without him. Which sucks. That's Putin's goal: to make it suck. He'll play what happens from there by ear, which sounds stupid but it "works" from his own point of view.

by iinnPP 3y ago

nkozyra 3y ago

> I think people wishing for the death of Putin have a real lack of imagination for what comes immediately after. Well I'd suggest in the continuum of latter-day Andropov to Putin he's the most authoritarian, so we have a couple of decades of less oppressive examples.

noduerme 3y ago
But we're now at 20 years of this. And the world has gotten more authoritarian and more autocratic on the whole, much of the backing for which has emanated from Russia. People call Russia a gangster state, but that's not really true; it's a secret police state, run by a KGB man. And its favored tools of assassination, secret trials, disappearances, silence through fear, domestic mass mind control and international information warfare reflect that. The chances of something less malevolent crawling out of that swamp seem highly unlikely, since the country has functioned for over a century as an evolutionary experiment in eradicating anyone who shows a shred of conscience.

jfengel 3y ago

There is a strong sense that almost anything would be better than Putin. Putin leans heavily into a Russian tradition of confusing your enemies into making a mistake. That tactic necessarily means confusing your allies as well, and you're just as likely to make a mistake as your enemies are. A successor who is more brutal but more "rational" can be reckoned with. Sometimes you really can just pay a bully to knock it off. Everybody hates it, and it would leave Ukraine paying most of the price, but they can be told that they won't get any more military aid. And then everybody goes back to undercutting each other diplomatically and economically instead of conquest (until the next time). Right now all anybody knows is that a successor will be different. And since Putin appears to be capable of preserving an unacceptable status quo indefinitely, a lot of people would rather guess that the situation will improve without him. Which sucks. That's Putin's goal: to make it suck. He'll play what happens from there by ear, which sounds stupid but it "works" from his own point of view.