As far as I know about 70% people in Russia don’t have an international passport. And I think many people who have it visited only Egypt or Turkey.
Alaric
Karma: 124
About “Information war” in Russia.
In Russia there are many loyalists with believes that can be described as “Yes, we agree that people in the government are sons of a bitch but they are our sons of a bitch.” Or “Yes, we agree that all government media are liars but all media are liars.” For all examples of bad deeds of the regime they have some example of something similar in the West. (Example: “Kremlin is persecuting participants of peaceful meetings”—“Ha-ha, Canadian authorities do the same with convoy protesters”.) Often these people are interested in western news more than in Russian news.
Also there is a “paradox”. One of the main lines of Kremlin propaganda is a statement: “In Russia we value non-material things and the West agents teach people to value only money and base pleasures.” (This inherited from the Soviet Union.) But it seems to me the most Kremlin supporters don’t trust in somebody’s altruism absolutely (excluding maybe members of their families or very intimate friends).
So Kremlin has big difficulties when it needs to force people to do something. For example Russian vaccination campaign was failed despite the propaganda. But it is much easier to force people not to do something.
About Kamil Galeev.
Twitter thread sounds reasonable for me. A little remark: Post in the Account Chamber after the governorship hardly can be treated as a promotion. Orlova lost the election and it seems to me that people in Kremlin was disappointed. But for now Kremlin don’t practice hard punishments for their people and sometimes it moves they to unimportant posts.
The Russians in our community tend to have very high English proficiency.
I think it may be a selection bias. Probably you have communicated with Russians with good English because Russians with bad English have a little chance to communicate with you.
In Russia there are many people who interested in ideas of rationality. HPMoR is very popular in Russia. But in the Russian rationalist community there are many people who cannot even read in English.
The mentioned resolution didn’t say anything about Kosovo independence.
I think about several reasons:
1. Mistakes about the magnitude of the power centralization in Russia.
I don’t know how it was perceived in other countries but in Russia there were many debates about how many powers belongs to Putin himself. Real process of decision-making was hidden and people had different hypotheses about it. Many people thought about Putin as an arbiter between oligarchs/other forces or as first among peers.
As far as I understand last week broadcast from Russian Security Council was very surprising for many people. Openly Putin practically humiliated some high officials (especially Chief of Intelligence Service).
2. Mistakes about Putin’s motives.
I think a problem is a changing in Putin. In the beginnings of his rule Putin demonstrated that he is very pragmatic. He said words which sounds very reasonably. He very rare did something non-reversible. I think all missed a moment when this was changed.
3. I suppose people underestimate the magnitude of Russian intelligence service degradation.
I think in Russian defense agencies people were used to say things which their superiors wants to hear. I think Putin understands Ukrainians very inadequately because he read many reports which only confirm his point of view.
In addition to Konstantin words. Many conservators in Russia honestly believe that USA/NATO want to destroy Russia and to seize Russian resources. They don’t think that Ukraine and Ukrainians are the agents. They believe that Ukrainians are the pawns of the West. They think that Russian army are saving Ukrainian people from NATO agents and crazy Ukrainian nationalists.
A decline to accept the agency of opponents is very common for Kremlin propaganda and Kremlin supporters.
I think it may be depends on what a donor expect about competence of people who make decisions in an organization.
Sometimes a person want delegate a task to an agent but they don’t trust fully this agent. They may expect a lack of competence or a lack of motivation or some another problem. And they think they need to control. And they think they can control something.
And sometimes a person expect that this agent is more competent in a task and motivated enough. And then they think they don’t need to control this agent.
And sometimes people evaluate a competence of another agent right and sometimes wrong.
if you start assigning “the probability that X will go wrong and not be handled, conditional on everything previous on the list having not gone wrong or having been successfully handled,” then you’d better be willing to assign conditional probabilities near 1 for the kinds of projects that succeed sometimes
(Bold is mine.)
Is this sentence correct? May be probability that X will go wrong, conditional … must be near 0 for project that may be successful?
Russian online meetups
Could you explain (or give a link) what is “Mindful Cognition Tuning”?
Window opening limiters (window restrictors with several positions). It’s a cheap way to decrease common dilemma “very cold or very stuffy”.
I can access to these articles from Russia. But it seems some of them have not translated into Russian. As far I can see there are no strict correspondence between articles in English and articles in Russian. For example there are articles in Russian about meeting Zelensky and European delegation but there are no article about “unequivocal support” for Ukraine from this delegation.