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Russian nightly "talk-shows"

I've been really struck by how one of the most popular shows features presenters and guests standing on a stage discussing or arguing about the day's news in front of an audience; literally news theater. Of course, one could argue that western TV formats are also theatrical in their way; sitting around or behind desks to give an air of collegiality or authority, respectively; or just explaining visual events with a disembodied voice, inviting its adoption as internal monologue.

Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media was written early the cold war and though it's dated in many respects, it was sufficiently forward thinking that it's still a useful and thought-provoking read today: his basic idea is that there are different paths toward the construction of meaning in the mind of audience members, and that the way in which information is presented is often far more important than the content of the information.

> I've been really struck by how one of the most popular shows features presenters and guests standing on a stage discussing or arguing about the day's news in front of an audience; literally news theater.

So, they've copied CNN Crossfire (first aired in 1982), but added “standing up”?

> It has to lose, and it has to be unequivocally seen to lose, for this fascist fantasy to end.

Can't agree more on this part, its a bully that understands only force of the stronger, any concept of law, fairness, democracy etc. are simply not present there. Soft approach is publicly maybe welcomed, but privately laughed at as clear show of weakness.

I am vastly disappointed by Macron's attempts to still please him, to have some sort of 'graceful loss' like something similar is possible right now or acceptable by either side. I guess you can afford some pompous PR bullshit like that if there are multiple big countries between you and the invader.

A bit sad considering France didn't have it rosy with germans in WWII but I guess that memory is too old now, and its more important to get french car factories in Russia again running (or honestly I can't get another good reason for such stance, EU is facing by far biggest military threat since its existence and such stance is completely irrational when looking on it from long term perspective).

I didn't see any concessions having been offered by Macron. Talking at lengths on the phone? Yes, and I'm fine that - a phone call is a phone call and nobody dies because of that. Much better than a ww3 by any measure. I couldn't care less about what Putler is laughing at in private, important is that Russia, maybe maybe, stops killing.

Good point. It costs so little to keep the channels open. Provided we keep the deterrence effective. It is okay to talk, if we at the same time demonstrate we aren't weak and are not afraid.

I think Macron is coming from a realistic position.

Ukraine cannot win in the traditional sense (capturing Moscow (although even that was insufficient for Napoleon) and forcing a surrender). It has to force Russia's surrender through other means - making the war unpopular, too costly in men and money, etc. This could literally take years since Russia is a dictatorship with lots of humans to sacrifice. Giving Putin an "honourable out" is probably the fastest way to bring the war to a stop. It's highly unlikely it will work, on multiple levels - Russia wouldn't agree, Ukraine sure as hell won't, and even if they did, it wouldn't last. Still, you can see where Macron is coming from - be it for humanitarian or practical reasons ( like the fact that the EU needs Russian gas for the foreseeable future and keeps paying to Russia, or that pushing an unhinged man with nuclear weapons to desperation might not end well).

In any case, yes, Russia must lose decisively, Germany WWII style, not Germany WWI style where the population didn't get it.

It would be great if Macron could clarify exactly what he means by "allowing Putin to save face" and not "humiliating" him. Does it involve Ukraine agreeing to territorial concessions, for example? A simple yes or now will let Ukrainians know exactly what adjectives/expletives to use when referring to Macron going forward.

It's not up to Macron to decide that. It looks like he's just trying to keep a dialogue open, and casually remind that the lunatic on the other side has backed himself into a corner and has nukes.

Unfortunately that lunatic interprets any attempts to negotiate as a sign of weakness. So until he's forced to negotiate, he won't. Why try?

Because he's dictator, when he's forced to negotiate he'll appear weak, which can be lethal for a "strongman" like him.

Macron has put too much faith in French diplomacy. While I somehow got to like him, I think this attempt is misguided. What France should do now is arm Ukraine. They sold weapons to the Russians for far too long. Anyway, I really hate how everybody (especially on Russian TV) makes fun of him wasting time on the phone. Macron has to ask himself what would De Gaulle do. Of couurse, the context today is quite different.

> its a bully that understands only force of the stronger, any concept of law, fairness, democracy etc. are simply not present there. Soft approach is publicly maybe welcomed, but privately laughed at as clear show of weakness.

I almost agree, except on democracy. This type is not something strange unseen at home, it is a common mindset among ambitious powerful persons in Europe and the West as well. And here at home just as in Russia, these types often enjoy democratic support. Hitler was a democratically elected and supported leader. Orban is too. Brexit leaders were too. Trump just as well.

We can't just magically get rid of this type of leader and its threat to us, calling for more democracy and law. Our politics, business and culture are full of such gangster types, and in some cases they do have democratic support.

I write this to point out that we should be realist on these things, not indulge in indignation and moral superiority. Russia has a strongman leadership that we fear, but they probably look at us the same way, with valid reasons. After all, the West did reveal its nasty face in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, and so on. That did not evade Putin's attention.

> I am vastly disappointed by Macron's attempts to still please him... A bit sad considering France didn't have it rosy with germans in WWII...honestly I can't get another good reason for such stance, EU is facing by far biggest military threat since its existence and such stance is completely irrational when looking on it from long term perspective).

France benefited by folding to Hitler - they limited destruction and loss of lives. And Hitler did not even have nuclear weapons. Some people do not realize it, but the game has changed, it now involves planetary scale destruction. Americans/NATO understand this and measure their response carefully. Macron's activities seem a valid strategy, considering it is just good manners, keeping that channel opened. It is infuriating for the Ukraine leadership, yes, it helps Putin, yes, it is not ideal, yes, but it is in the interest of big business to get back to business.

A gangster knows when to go to war, and when to make a deal with another gangster. That's the realpolitik.

> EU is facing by far biggest military threat since its existence and such stance is completely irrational when looking on it from long term perspective

Soviet Union was much bigger threat. Nobody expects present-day Russia to take on any NATO country.

> > This expansion will only end with WW3.

> Attempts to meet this expansion with appeasement will end in WW3.

Or, perhaps, this war already is WW3, the question is how it ends, not whether it starts. (Yeah, most of the big powers aren't openly directly engaged, just supporting one of the belligerents with military and economic aid and intelligence and sanctions on the opposing belligerent. But that's a choice of how to fight the war, and that's been made very clear—the US explicitly invoking lend-lease in naming it's aid bill for Ukraine couldn't be a more pointed declaration of how it sees the situation.)

It absolutely is. People often forget how the abrupt action at the beginning of WW2 then subsided into an uncomfortable but relatively quiet new status quo for a good 8 months, with only minor skirmishes around the margins until Hitler moved against France and the low countries. Movies and TV mostly emphasize the kinetic and chaotic action of pitched battles, but through 1939-40 the public in multiple allied nations were perplexed by the idea of a conflict where nothing much seemed to be happening.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoney_War#Terminology

It is nothing like Phoney War. Plenty of action involving Britain and France took place - Saarland campaign, invasion of Norway, etc. That was obviously a war that hasn't reached its deadliest phase. This, on the other hand, is not a war in which NATO is anything like a belligerent.

Why wasn't Vietnam "already WW3" then? The USSR was doing a lot more to help the North Vietnamese, without all the navel-gazing about the dangers of WW3. They correctly figured that if their SAMs openly shoot down American jets - that's dangerous. But if the same SAMs with the same Soviet operators covertly shoot down American jets, without acknowledgement of their presence - the US will swallow that.

> Why wasn't Vietnam "already WW3" then?

There's plenty of arguments, some reasonable, that there have been one or more World Wars since WW2.

Feel free to read WW3 in GP as “WWn+1”; I’m not interested in arguing against any particular construction of the number of prior world wars.

This renders the concept of a "world war" essentially meaningless and not worth discussing. If everything is a world war, even a local proxy war, then who cares? Sure, bring on "WWn+1".

Or may be we need to view things as a series of events, than just one big bang event that triggers every thing after.

Things are always building up to one major event. Those events are as much responsible, as much as the last event before the big war?

To be blunt, it doesn't really feel like a real world war unless there's substantial fighting in Europe. Other places as well of course, but particularly Europe.

What is the difference between a forceful response (Russia vs the world) and WWIII?

The difference is not engaging in the fight openly, but otherwise giving Ukraine everything it needs to fight. e.g. what the Soviets did in Vietnam (which is even more than what the West is doing for Ukraine right now).

I'm surprised they haven't seen core infrastructure within Russia collapse due to "independent" actors. (E.g., power grid shutdowns in Moscow; refineries venting poison gas into populated areas; perfectly timed forest fires; pretty much everything the DHS says would be trivial for terrorists to do in the US.)

> I'm surprised they haven't seen core infrastructure within Russia collapse due to "independent" actors

In the first couple months of the war, there were lots of explosions/fires at major Russia industrial or infrastructure sites that got reported; I’ve seen fewer reports recently, but I don't know if it is happening less or Russia has clamped down on the news more effectively.

One aspect of that which is a bit apples to oranges, is that the US is both incredibly easy for foreigners to enter and travel throughout, as well as being diverse enough that such travel wouldn't raise any eyebrows.

At any given moment there are a million foreign people freely traveling around the US- some on vacation, some visiting family, some for school, some for work, some for medical treatment, etc. It's relatively trivial for a nefarious organization to find a person who speaks English and can legally enter the US.

For Russia (among other places) none of this is true. Visas to enter the country are harder to acquire, movement within the country on such a visa is still constrained, a smaller number of foreigners means easier for intelligence to monitor, and far fewer people have the language skills or physical characteristics to blend into the local populace.

There are many ethnic Ukranians living in Russia. I have no idea how closely they're surveiled, how many of the "troublemakers" moved to Ukraine decades ago, etc.

I don't think the US is going to engage in this, even indirectly via Ukraine, because this does have some potential to escalate to WW3. And it's hard to see how it'll substantially help Ukraine without killing scores of Russian civilians.

>refineries venting poison gas into populated areas

Hard to think of a better way to become the villain in the story. This has not occurred, but not necessarily because the means of making it happen aren't there.

A second front

> Russian nightly "talk-shows", start to finish, to get a feel for how Putin's propaganda machine is changing over time. Well, since February, it's been in such overdrive, pumping Russians full of vicious hatred of all things "Western" and delusions of grandeur

the recordings of those shows will be a class material for the classes on modern nazism for the decades to come. A "master-nation" constantly talking on TV about getting rid of "ukraininess" while the Putin's SS force "Russian Guard" abducts and disappears on the occupied territories Ukrainian business an political leadership, activists and armed forces veterans (the same approach what USSR did in 1939 in Poland) - after days of torture some of them appear back very lifelessly claiming change of views and becoming pro-Russian and collaborating with the occupant regime while others just disappear probably into the mobile crematoriums and mass graves like in Bucha.

> but what if Putin is offed or dies suddenly and the populace, driven to such jingoist frenzy that it lost all sense of reality and actually believes they can take on NATO and win, puts an even more evil and reckless "rebuilder of empire" on the throne?

That seems like a job for the Russian propaganda machine. Just as they manipulated malleable minds towards one idea, they can do it towards another: "We were never at war with NATO".