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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Less, if Russia resolves its governmental intemperance first.

The events of the last few days make it at least plausible that Putin's days are numbered. If so, that's very bad in terms of absolute apocalyptic risk, but probably a good thing as measured by expected outcome. The chances of getting a stable democracy in the next decade might be, I dunno, 40% or greater (and those of dying in a nuclear fireball surely under 1%, right?). So as geopolitics it's probably a mistake, but as investment decisionmaking I think it makes sense.

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>Russia resolves its governmental intemperance first

i see the history of the last 30+ years as clear indication that Russian society is progressively becoming less and less able to manage large issues. As result i think there is high probability that Russia will breakup after that catastrophe of Ukraine war similar to USSR after Afghanistan (the key to such breakup isn't external forces, instead it is clear disillusionment with existing power). For example, the Far East in particular has no good connection to Russia (and Putin was basically trying to buy them up by sending money which will definitely become problematic once the war related bills, like compensation to Ukraine, start to hit the treasure) while say getting high-speed rail Vladivostok-Dalyan/Bejing would include it into the Pacific ring of the future boom of economic development.

China is already buying off ex Soviet satellites like Kyrgystan and Mongolia. Kazahstan is also economically dependent on China. If Japan is given any reason to rearm itself to the teeth again (like a Chinese invasion of Taiwan) and Russia breaks up, they'll almost certainly retake Sakhalin and Kurlil islands back. The rest will probably all become China satellites, except maybe for South Korea.

I'm hoping that Russia actually attacking Ukraine against the strong wishes of the world will cause a similar desire to reign in China and protect Taiwan and other small country democracies. Strategic ambiguity didn't work in Ukraine and it won't work in Taiwan either. Eventually China will attack. So let's get over our fear there and just sign a mutual defense treaty. Ideally we form a NATO of the Pacific with SK, Japan, Australia, NZ, and many other small countries. It would drive China bat shit insane with anger, but they are just going to do what they want eventually unless we get together and stop them.

Russia has basically never had a democratic government, perhaps except during the 90s. There is no tradition of it. It’s current form of government is more like the fiefdoms of Tsarist Russia: the Tsar giveth and the Tsar giveth away.

Russian may want democracy (though do we know that they do?), but there’s more than just Putin in the way.

I mean, there was no tradition of democracy in Korea or China, but South Korea and Taiwan transitioned reasonably successfully to democracy in the 80s and 90s respectively. It has been done.

For that matter, a number of Soviet successor states are successfully functioning democracies.

Not sure about South Korea, but Taiwan's democracy is kind of a joke. Since the end of the WW2, the grand total of the number of parties holding power is...two - DPP and KMT.

There are no differences between them in foreign affairs. Both favor wage suppression policies. Both favor currency manipulation to suppress consumption in order to help exporters. None of them is doing anything about the worst housing crisis in the world, leading to a demographic suicide of the country - fertility rate is below 1.3 for 20 years and counting. In many way, it's a choice between Pepsi and Coca-cola

So, it's a joke largely in the same way that democracy is a joke in the united states.

Agree, the above comment (2 above) was inaccurate, extremely misleading. Taiwan is absolutely a free and open democratic country as is Korea. It's pretty inconceivable that someone who is not a democratic or republic candidate would be elected president in the US or win congress. Korea has at least been successful at convicting previous leaders when they were taking bribes or doing other illegal stuff, including the leader of Samsung. The US could do a lot better there.

Before the KMT lost power I think it was reasonable to see Taiwan as a one party state, but no longer. You are a little ambiguous in the "two countries" do things, but I guess you mean Korea and Taiwan. Yeah, both countries are not paradises that have solved all issues, but they keep improving their freedom, industrial bases, and living standards for the average person. Is that true for the us - we should aspire to do that. Instead we have people arguing on school boards whether books that dare to discuss slavery or jim crow laws should be discussed at all. We aren't clearly moving to be a better society with that kind of stuff.

Eh... my statement was deliberately ambivalent. I don't know anything about Taiwan politics, but the US brand of Democracy, specifically the 2-party system with first-past-the-post elections, is driving the citizenry towards a civil war while the oligarchy enriches themselves while otherwise maintaining the status quo.

Absolutely and Americans are waking up to this fact now with a terrorist faction taking power in the Republican party.

But would this faction be as terrorist as they are without extensive Russian effort to ensure that they are? I'm skeptical.

Given that this is hardly unique to the US, I think Russia is reaping the whirlwind: they've been up to this sort of thing pretty much everywhere. This is not the WWIII. They have been waging the WWIII already, this whole time, in relatively novel ways, with a lot of success… until now.

And it's been the kind of success that is short-sighted: got their way again and again at the cost of building enormous hostility, which is now rebounding upon them. Russia made this bed and all of this is not that much of a surprise, really.

While I agree with thinking of the Russian influence campaign as just that, a hostile influence campaign, given the cultural distance and surprisingly small reach of identified Russian networks I think that the Republican Party's descent can't really be explained as Russian meddling.

The Republican Party has been the safe harbor for christian and white supremacists beginning with Reagan and the moral majority. The love of violence, "I got mine" attitudes, gleeful wastefulness, etc have been American ills long before ~2010s era Russian misinfo campaigns.

Also, speaking as an American who has had their worldview impacted by living in Europe for a while, it is beyond pathetic for liberal Americans to tell the world "Don't worry we aren't crazy! The Russians made us do the bad stuff!". As the richest country in the world, we have to take accountability.

It's not like Russia forced them, they at least took money and free PR support. Now it has created a monster than cannot be controlled.

I think more seriously the US is a limited democracy because neither party really works for the people. They both work for the donors, one just a lot more and transparent than the other.

The potential has been there to go way out crazy in the Republican party for a long time, remember Pat Buchanan? He was a legit threat, but didn't have the crazy wacko charisma that Trump has, that dictator tough guy thing down that appeals to so many conservatives apparently. The thing I suspect Russia did do was take advantage of facebook and q-anon type stuff.

>Absolutely and Americans are waking up to this fact now with a terrorist faction taking power in the Republican party.

They're terrorists because they don't want to give the government absolute power? You're doing the same thing Republicans did to Middle Eastern countries in past decades, abuse the shit out of them then call them terrorists when they try to defend themselves.

MAGA terrorism is not self defense. Not any more than southern rebellion was when they were losing at the ballot box as well.

I think they mean terrorists as in, literally committing acts of terror - like January 6, or Charlottesville.

Defend themselves against what?

Wait, progressives and peaceful (but fiery and violent) protestors are considered Republican now?

South Korea and Taiwan currently have more functional democracies than the United States does. The Economist's Democracy Index classifies Taiwan and South Korea as full democracies, while the US is a flawed democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

Taiwan, I don’t really know about now, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an overnight adoption of democracy in the 1940s. It took time, a small few generations, to get to that point.

It might be similar in Russia, though I’d imagine the heavily entrenched establishment, with massive reliance on various police forces, lends itself less to rapid democratisation-though you never know.

It was a long and hard road toward democracy for the Taiwanese and it is both (a) very impressive and commendable on their part and (b) a definitive refutation to the "Asian values" nonsense that the CPC likes to use to justify autocracy.

Both Taiwan and South Korea were brutal dictatorships until late 70s or early 80s. Now they are real democracies as much as anyone is.

My personal opinion, South Korea deserves a big asterisk. They had a president that was trapped in a cult, and the large conglomerates still decide a lot.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/democracy...

Taiwan is #11 on the list, that is higher than the US and UK (obviously), and one spot ahead of Switzerland. If Taiwan was in Europe it would still be among the most democratic countries.

Sure it has flaws, but so does almost every country on the list. Heck, I'm Norwegian and Norway is #1 but I think it still has flaws. My main beef is some technicality called sperregrense, basically if your party is less than 4% it will get less representation than it deserves. This quite often decides the coalition in charge depending on which parties ends up at 3.9 or 4.0.

I think you're giving too much and too little credit here. Martial law only ended on the island on July 15, 1987 with opposition parties being officially outlawed up until 1991. There's a lot still to be done.

I mean, you could say that of quite a lot of two-party states. I'm not claiming that it's a particularly shining example of democracy, or anything, but it's clearly a democracy.

Well, you could say that for sure it can be done, because we didn't really have democracies before 1776, excluding some super short and unstable versions, and democracies with universal suffrage are even newer, after about 1900.

According to the Democracy Index, ~75 countries are full or flawed democracies, so 75 countries made the leap.

Most strong democracies were born through a very long and drawn out process of democratisation. UK Houses of Parliament date back to 13th century; of course at that point there was no democracy, but a tradition of open debate on government is very old.

In fact in the UK it’s probably hard to pinpoint where real monarchy ended and democracy started. The monarch had less and less power over time, and an increasingly wide circle of privileged voters held more and more power.

Many struggling democracies had to make that leap much more quickly and often the failures of democracy are to do with the cultural remains of the previous systems.

> In fact in the UK it’s probably hard to pinpoint where real monarchy ended and democracy started.

I would put it more or less around Oliver Cromwell's tenure, even though the monarchy enjoyed some resurgence in power after the monarchy was restored it was short lived and the threat of parliament removing an unruly monarch, as they had done fairly decisively, became a real constraint on their power.

The struggles around that were also significant inspirations to French and American revolutions that followed.

Poland would like a word: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Liberty

Russia in the 90s wasn't a true democracy either. US press liked to depict Yeltsin as a democrat because he was weak and subservient, but his methods of power were deeply autocratic. Yeltsin ordered artillery shelling of the parliament in 1993, killing 140 people. Had elections in 1996 been fair, they'd highly likely mean the return of the Communist Party to power, so he rigged them in all sorts of grotesque ways (naturally, western leaders praised him for it). As his incompetence grew more and more untenable, he threw the hot potato to Putin and resigned

This is largely accurate - and it's also worth mentioning that 90s Russia was an absolute hell-hole.

Whether people approve or disapprove of Putin, a lot of them remember what life was like before he became Tsar-for-life, and it isn't something that most of them want to tangle with again.

> perhaps except during the 90s.

And that proved to be one of the most disastrous decades in Russian history (I think only surpassed by the 1940s that saw them getting invaded by Hitler), so democracy doesn't have too much solid ground to stand on when it comes to Russia.

> If so, that's very bad in terms of absolute apocalyptic risk, but probably a good thing as measured by expected outcome.

That's beautifully put, so concise.

> The events of the last few days make it at least plausible that Putin's days are numbered.

Citation needed. I believe Putin enjoys a very strong approval in Russia and I have never read or see anything that could disprove it (except from self styled experts that are notoriously clueless about everything).

For a comparison there were just hundreds of protestors in Moscow on a 12 millions pop. This is nothing.

I visited quite a few Russian blogs with the help of a translation plugin, I didn't see anything looking like they disapprove, on the contrary most of them ask why it took 8 years.

from what i read anti-war protesters in russia get arrested. so the threshold to show one’s disapproval with the invasion is fairly high.

> from what i read anti-war protesters in russia get arrested.

Not only arrested. Beaten up and treated with electro shocks. Putin's Russia is not about humanity.

Again, citation needed. These accusations are way too serious to just put it like that.

I read interviews with protesters yesterday, sorry no link available.

But my favorite search engine immediately brings up these ones:

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-moscow-navalny-protests-polic...

https://www.ifj.org/media-centre/news/detail/category/press-...

https://freedomnews.org.uk/2018/02/13/russia-arrested-antifa...

They are a couple of years old, but that things would have changed for the better in Russia does not sound likely, all reports are talking of the opposite.

There are also many reports about systematic rape in Russian prisons. Committed by inmates who are forced by the guards in exchange for less inhuman treatment.

Search for Nawalny's reports how is being treated if you still have not enough. Of course he gets carefully selected treatment because they know that the international press is reporting. But still it's a country where not only the leader is a brutal criminal.

Yes! Nobody can just claim such terrible acts from a state that openly murders political opponents and currently is carrying out an invasion of a peaceful country.

Nothing stoping Russians from starting sabotage operations internally in protest.

> Nothing stoping Russians from starting sabotage operations internally in protest.

A lot is stopping most people.

First you need somewhat objective information what is happening. A vast majority of the population does not have that. All independent voices have silenced, except if you are a political activist and know what to search for.

Then you need to take significant risk to commit crimes. As a small saboteur they won't have Novichok for you, but Russian prisons are very close to systematic torture. Especially for prisoners with a political background.

According to independent Levada polls over 90% of the population approved Putins politics after the occupation of Crimea in 2014.

Last August "only" 61% approved his politics, mainly because of the masses getting poorer and large failure to fight the pandemic.

While 61% would be a good figure for most Western politicians, it was obviously a worrying trend for Putin. So he changed the agenda from a domestic one to a war. In January while he was still threatening support had indeed gone up to 69%.

Whether it is possible to get and publish any trustworthy polls in the current situation I don't know. After all the words attack and war are censored in Russian media, protesting against the war is illegal. They only have a special operation...

Does someone sharing their opinion that something is possible need a citation?

Indeed, how could there possibly be a citation for the possibility that his days are numbered? Demanding a citation for a future event does not make sense.

Yes when it's outlandish from the known reality. I don't need citation for "there are people in Russia that don't like Putin" but I need one when "his days are numbered".

I (try to) look at the world like it is, not like I want it to be. Thinking that Putin days are numbered (be it by the people or his security apparatus) is delusional. If it is not, then back it up with something, I have no problem correcting my views when confronted with good data.

> I believe Putin enjoys a very strong approval in Russia

An autocrat who routinely imprisons and murders his critics does not inspire honest opinions to be shared by his people.

> Citation needed. I believe Putin enjoys a very strong approval in Russia

His approval rating is as genuine as his 146% election victories https://bloknot.ru/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/rostovsakaya-1...

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