Any recommendations?

“Putin’s Wars” by Mark Galeotti “The Road to Unfreedom” by Timothy Snyder “Darkness at Dawn” and “The Less You Know The Better You Sleep” by David Satter “Putin v. the People” by Graeme Robertson and Samuel Greene Basically anything by Anna Politkovskaya

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en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putin%2... en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putin's...

Imagining eg Apple as an inherent resource that was previously burdened by a command economy. Yeah, sure. Fuck it.

Tim Apple's shooters wiping out some startup crew that's getting a bit out over their skis.

now i do actually think, as something of a westoid connoisseur of immediate post Soviet Russia and its pathologies, that we are going to see a lot of things that look like 90s Ru. But it's going to be the weird idiosyncratic stuff, not structural. Minor political factions getting their own SOF etc.

Similarly as a fan of what I like to call "Everyone* else got to have fun in '90's Mosscow but I was not alive yet" we lack a lot of the structural factors (ie everyone already doing crimes) to get the full structure but a lot of the weird periphary things *US diplomats

Let's hope that the White House analogue is the other White House rather than Congress.

he pretty much just had unlimited political support, didn't he? everything else was downstream of that. it's not comparable to the us. more comparable would be nazi germany where the opposition just lies down and gives him everything he wants because to fight back is scary and violates norms

Nah. Hitler's popularity is understated by apologists for the German people of the time. When the beer hall Putsch failed, they let him live in a nice room where he could get visitors and presents. And they let him out early. The majority weren't Naziz, but they were right-wing.

And the majority were Nazis (ideologically, not registered) by the time the war and the Holocaust started.

Putin famous for crashing the Russian economy as his first act

It worked the other way around — as it usually does! First the economic disaster *then* the rise of authoritarianism as a consequence! I mean, guess score one for American exceptionalism in that we are voluntarily choosing to do this the other way around.

Honestly don't think I can think of an authoritarian regime that has started out with such a clearly self destructive economic push

Should have given out the DOGE dividends *before* destroying the government

Pol Pot

to be very fair, yeltsin himself (he was an authoritarian nationalist)

...... CPK? Only ??

Of course they didn't control a monopoly on force for very long

Like Erdrogan waited a decade before nuking the CBRK

And reason he stayed in power afterwards is because his opposition was more racist than him.

It's intended to aim the economic destruction at all potential opposition. Money is the fuel for political opposition. He's destroying all possible platforms for mounting opposition. This is why Canada is a target.

Trump isn't smart enough to design & execute this on his own. He's getting coached by Putin and the Project 2025 cabal of rabid fascists.

I think some of their thinking is based on the proposition that in this environment true popularity is impossible, for Trump or anyone else. So the plan is not to unite the country but to make it even more atomized. A bad economy and the chance to use precarity as a weapon hastens that process.

No. These are stupid people

One of Putin's superpowers is just how totally atomized the Russian public is. I've heard it explained as "Russians love Russia but hate other Russians." Americans are increasingly thinking and acting the same way...

True, but did they have a media elite and opposition party leadership so weak and useless?

Russian media famously capitulated to Putin without a fight The main Russian opposition party was the Communist Party In most modern overthrows of authoritarians, the opposition parties were not in the forefront; various student groups etc have been; opposition party coalitions were assembled later

The books people need to read are yet to be written

I thought Snyder’s book Road To Unfreedom was kind of libcringe during Trump I and I think I was right but also the book was right

What are your thoughts on Garry Kasparov? I know he’s considered kind of loony but I think he accurately called it long ago on this subject.