Ya'll got any of that... global warming?
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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I don't think any liberal has self-hatred. Rather, they attack white people so that they appear to be "one of the good ones". These people really have no elevated motives beyond self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement.
A while back, the EU was proposing a tax on aviation. Guess what was exempted. Their private jets. I mean, there may be idiots among the elites who actually believe it, but even if they did believe this stuff, they would not be supporting the specific policies unless they were to their benefit.
Only ordinary people who support this grift do so against their self-interest.
Even Stalin and Mao were plenty constrained. According to Kotkin, Stalin solidified his position post-Ryutin by implementing what all the elites wanted (collectivization) and none were able to actually accomplished. Mao faced a lot of backlash after the Secret Speech, and especially after the Great Leap Forward, which is why he started the Cultural Revolution - which was a true revolution in the sense that Mao instrumentalized the people in order to increase his own power.
Now image if something hit Putin on the head, and he announced that he was going to withdraw from all of 'Ukraine' and give Rostov to 'Ukraine' as reparations. What do you think would happen? He would be assassinated within 24 hours, and all these promises would be repudiated, because he does not actually hold power. All leaders are balancers between various forces of the elites, in order to maintain their own independence and whatever power they have - which is never enormous.
This is at least my take. You will have to admit that who holds power, how, and how much is extremely opaque. It's never who holds power on paper.
Holding 1.2% of the power would make you the most powerful person in America. Is that amount of power significant? No, because it is outweighed of the 98.8% that the rest of the elites hold.
I don't believe that at all. Putting aside the silly Rostov thing you threw in to rig the hypothetical, if Putin simply said "war is over, we will withdraw to the prewar borders and leave Crimea/Donbas" he would receive broad support from both his people as well as the elites.
Putin is dragging his elites along grudgingly into this war, and pushing their limits. The Russian elite don't want this war and hope it will be over ASAP. While they won't be happy with a national humiliation, if that means an end to sanctions and if it means they can play in their private jets and yachts in Europe again, they'll be happy.
The far right in Russia is very weak, and quite a lot of them are dead now, since those are the type of people who would have volunteered last year.
I wanted to make the treason as plainly obvious as possible. What you describe would certainly lead to his fall, and quite possibly to his death a la Beria, who was thought by the Politburo to have pulled a similar stunt (causing the German uprising with his liberalization).
Question: do you think the bureaucracy, the army and the FSB are going to be happy at that? The oligarchs don't have any power anymore. That's one of the good things Putin did. The security forces are in charge.
The army has been gutted by the war and is relying on mobiks. Even the hard core nationalists on TV are clearly showing signs of despair. Look how many Russian bodies are being thrown at Ukrainian lines to take tiny bits of land. At this rate, the whole Russian military will be ground to dust before it can even take the remainder of the Donbas.
YOU won't accept a Russian capitulation easily from the comfort of your room, but would the russian nationalists try to murder Putin, when he controls the whole murder regime? No, it is much, much more likely that the nationalists who threw a fit over any retreat would find themselves falling of of balconies before Putin would.
I don't believe that at all. If it were true, Putin would have ordered a full mobilization already. It's his only chance of winning the war, and he still can't do it because the oligarchs would all flee like rats off a sinking ship if he tried, and the economy would collapse.