After being chased away from Malaysia by an antisemitic mob, Balaji’s Network School has officially relocated to Kazakhstan – a country that has a saner population and a friendlier government. As I’ve written before, it’s not perfect, but it’s a solid choice:

Balaji’s plan B for the Network School seems to be Kazakhstan, which is not the worst pick. While also a Muslim country, it’s much more secular thanks to the Soviet legacy and doesn’t have an issue with widespread hysteria over “Zionism.” Kazakhstan’s own “smart fraction” minorities – Russians, Germans, and Koreans – are underrepresented in the government, and the regime has pursued policies to strengthen the country’s Kazakh ethnic majority, but they aren’t openly discriminated against and are generally doing fine. While in an inferior location – no Singapore nearby! – it can potentially become a magnet for Russian and other post-Soviet tech talent that is increasingly hesitant to work in Russia’s previously prosperous but declining tech economy for obvious reasons.

Kazakhstan has also joined the ranks of developing nations that are making an active effort to attract digital nomads with talent visas, making it a relatively easy place to move to. And despite the -stan part sounding scary to most westerners, it’s actually not that poor – it’s a solidly middle-income country with a GDP per capita similar to Chile or Serbia – and very secular.

One thing that’s interesting, however, is that within Kazakhstan, Network School decided to move to the city of Astana rather than Almaty. Because despite being the national capital, Astana is not the largest city in the country.

Almaty has been the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan since 1929 and of independent Kazakhstan until 1997 – when, in an unexpected turn, the government decided to move to what would become Astana. Despite not being the government’s seat for almost 30 years, it’s still by far the biggest and most important city in the country.

Almaty is home to about 2.3 million people, over 10% of the country’s population. Astana has been trying to catch up for the last three decades but is still significantly behind, with some 1.6 million residents – barely above Kazakhstan’s third-largest city of Shymkent, a deeply provincial place of little notoriety that some people enjoy but no one considers a start-up darling.

Almaty is richer – its regional GDP is twice that of Astana, and locals earn slightly more. It’s also a nicer place to visit and to live in. The city has a pretty and walkable historic center that Astana mostly lacks, and its climate is more pleasant. Astana is in the middle of the Great Eurasian Steppe – a flat, windy, dry grassland that used to be a perfect highway for Mongol invasions of Eastern Europe. It’s not too bad in the summer but gets really cold in the winter, with average winter temperatures of around -22°C (-8°F). Almaty, meanwhile, has a much milder climate, barely below freezing during the winter and warm and pleasant during the summer. It’s surrounded by beautiful, scenic mountains. Astana is surrounded by dry grass.

Ankara is the capital city of Turkey, but if you’re an international business moving to Turkey, you are moving to Istanbul, and in general if you’re an important international person in Turkey, you are probably in Istanbul and not in Ankara, and if you are a tourist, Istanbul is your first choice too. Astana is Ankara, and Almaty is Istanbul. Well, sort of, so far.

Why Astana?

If Almaty is a superior city, why did Balaji choose Astana?

While Almaty moggs Astana in population and GDP, Astana moggs Almaty in growth. In the late 1990s, before it became the new national capital (changing its name from historic Akmola, which ominously translates as “white grave”, to Astana, “the capital”), it was a deeply unremarkable provincial city of 300,000 people. It doubled in the next ten years, and doubled again in the decade after that. Right now it’s x5 of what it was at the beginning of the century – a “hypergrowth city,” some believe. Almaty grew too, but at a pace twice as slow.

Kazakhstan’s government is also trying to lure foreign capital and foreign talent specifically to Astana by offering them a better deal there than elsewhere in the country. Network School has moved to Astana Hub – an international tech startup park created in 2018 that offers, on top of a nice coworking space in a developed neighborhood not too far from the downtown, very generous tax benefits, including 0% corporate income tax, VAT, individual income tax, and more.

But this little tax haven wasn’t established by the city of Astana. Kazakhstan is a centralized, authoritarian country where decisions like this are made by the president. So why does the president keep trying to prop up Astana rather than Almaty, a city with vastly superior fundamentals?

The answer is actually quite simple. That’s because the city of Astana exists as a deliberate project in ethnic re-engineering of the country.

Building a city to reshape a nation

In a sense, Astana is a startup city – a startup created by Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s former president and a dictator who ruled for three decades and shaped the country to an extent comparable with Lee Kuan Yew’s influence over Singapore.

Nazarbayev is an underappreciated Great Man of History. Gorbachev’s protégé, he was appointed leader of Soviet Kazakhstan in 1989 and managed to keep power after the Soviet Union’s collapse forced the country into independence. He stepped down in 2019 and appointed Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, a competent and intelligent man, as his successor, preventing a squabble for power that would have surely happened if he clung to power until his death.

In 1991, when Kazakhstan first showed up on the world map, it was a desperately poor country with GDP per capita of some $1.4k (similar to modern Uganda); that number has increased by a factor of 10 since then. A country that never really existed as a nation was put on the map as a secondary but very real regional power. Years of careful diplomacy also made Kazakhstan one of the few nations in the world that has great relations with both the West and China, as well as its towering neighbor Russia.

Another important thing he did, however, was establishing Kazakhstan as a country dominated by the Kazakh people.

While Malaysia is very Chinese, Kazakhstan is very Russian. Most people don’t realize just how Chinese Malaysia is (23% nationally and 40% in Kuala Lumpur), and most people don’t know how Russian Kazakhstan is – and how Russian it was very recently.

In 1989, right before independence, Kazakhstan was 40% Kazakh and 38% Russian, and Russians dominated in all major cities. The place was so Russian that Gorbachev broke with established Soviet practice and appointed a Russian to govern it (the locals protested, and he was eventually replaced with Nazarbayev). With another 5% of the population being Ukrainians, Slavic people held a firm plurality in the republic’s population, with a prospect of a Kazakh nation-state seeming increasingly unlikely.

Russians (and Ukrainians) have been settling the territory of modern-day Kazakhstan since the times of the Russian Empire, and they continued to move in during the Soviet period. Stalin also had a bright idea of using Central Asia as a dumping ground for ethnicities he wanted to deport, and that’s how Kazakhstan got very sizable German and Korean minorities (Stalin feared they might be loyal to Germany and Japan during the Second World War and act as their agents). Together they’ve formed the Russian-speaking, distinctly non-Kazakh community that occupied the same role Chinese and Indians do in Malaysia: they were the productive minority — urban, educated, working in more advanced sectors of the economy.

After Kazakhstan became independent, many Russians decided to leave for Russia — a lot of them still had families in Russia, and most believed they would have a better life there. Some Ukrainians chose Russia as well; some went to Ukraine. Most Germans were able to repatriate to Germany. Kazakhs also had a higher birth rate. By the start of the 21st century, Kazakhstan had a slight but stable Kazakh majority.

Russians, however, remained a majority in the north of Kazakhstan, a region that shares an enormous border with Russia. Kazakhstan is very big, and it has a huge desert right in the middle, separating its relatively dense, Kazakh-majority south from the Russian-majority north. So many of the Russians started to have ideas. “Russia is right across the border. We are Russians as well, not Kazakhs. Maybe the border is just wrong and we should move it quite a bit further south?”

While there was never an active, influential domestic separatist movement in northern Kazakhstan, it was never an impossibility, and it would have likely emerged if Kazakhstan was a democracy. And in Russia itself, a need to “return” this “historic Russian land” – rebranded as “Southern Siberia” – became a popular talking point among Russian nationalists. A disproportionate number of Russian right-wing leaders were born in Kazakhstan themselves – people like the late Vladimir Zhirinovsky or Roman Yuneman.

Nazarbayev made plenty of reasonable concessions to the country’s Russian population, including making Russian an official language on par with Kazakh, and was careful to never antagonize the Kremlin. He had no desire, however, to give away half of the country he now had in a firm grip to “Southern Siberia” separatists. So the Russian majority in the north had to be broken.

Akmola was right in the middle of Southern Siberia. It was 54% Russian, 10% Ukrainian, 7% German – and 18% Kazakh. This was typical for the region. Very importantly, it was just north of Karaganda, which at that time was the largest city in the north and the 2^nd-largest city in all of Kazakhstan (it has since fallen to the 5^th place), and some two-thirds Slavic. It would have been a natural capital for the rebellious Russian rump state.

When Astana was established as the national capital, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Kazakhs from the south of the country moved in, chasing economic opportunities and government jobs. A major Kazakh-dominated city emerged in the middle of Southern Siberia. It cut Karaganda off from the rest of the region, and quickly overshadowed it as the economic leader of northern Kazakhstan.

Can Astana survive?

Nazarbayev’s project worked very well. Southern Siberia was dead in the water, and even after Russia embraced expansionism and took the Russian-majority region of Crimea from Ukraine, Russians of northern Kazakhstan never followed suit. The country didn’t break into two halves. Astana firmly established itself as an equal to Almaty in its importance to the nation and is now even a hub for foreign investment. It’s impossible to call it anything but a success story.

But can this success be sustained?

Slowly, continued out-migration of the Russians and high fertility of the Kazakhs turned northern Kazakhstan’s previously formidable Russian majority into a plurality, and then into a large minority. In the north, almost all important cities are now majority- or plurality-Kazakh, and nationally Kazakhstan is now 71% Kazakh and just 15% Russian. It still has 3 million Russians, by far the largest ethnic minority in the country, but the separatist threat is gone. In a few decades, it wouldn’t even be noticeable.

Which means that Astana will soon have played out its role. A binational country was turned into a conventional nation-state, and the regional differences are no longer strong enough to tear it apart. So while now the government is still actively working to keep it growing, it’s not at all unlikely that in a few decades it will turn back to Almaty – which is still a much nicer place to live.

Astana is similar to Dubai, which is also a hypergrowth, international city that only exists because an authoritarian regime willed it into existence in the middle of a desert. It’s a great place for many people, and its existence is a great testimony to UAE’s tremendous success, but it wouldn’t have happened organically. It’s a desert.

Dubai, however, is already too big to fail – no matter what, it will remain a very important and very wealthy place for a long time. I don’t think Astana is in the “too big to fail” territory yet – it’s just not that big and important outside of Kazakhstan – and that means its growth is dependent on regime stability and policy consistency. Neither is a given.

At the end of it, Astana’s impressive growth is purely a project of Kazakhstan’s government and isn’t based on any sort of organic geographic advantage. Maybe at some point it will grow so big that it won’t matter. People live in cold places. Russia’s St. Petersburg – another start-up city that was created as a Russian wedge in the Swedish-controlled, Finnish-speaking region and was successful at pushing Sweden away from the Baltics for good – definitely shouldn’t exist in a place that cold, but 6 million people live there, with more moving in every year. Economies of scale can do miracles. Maybe Astana will get there.

I don’t think it’s a bad idea for a business to move to Astana – a 0% tax is a 0% tax! Almaty, however, probably remains a safer bet, and almost certainly a superior one for an individual digital nomad.

Astana, nevertheless, is also sort of a “you can just do things” story. You can just create a huge city in the middle of nowhere and change the ethnic composition of an entire country. You can make it a tech hub. You can have it compete with an SEZ with direct access to Singapore. Great things can happen in places you don’t expect them to – but they do, sometimes against all odds.

St. Petersburg, with a population of over 5 million people, is the second-largest city in Russia as well as in the whole former USSR (towering over Kyiv, Tashkent, and other national capitals). A former capital of the Russian empire, it is abundant in culture and history on top of serving as an economic heart of Russia’s northwest. One of the few things it does not have, however, is a large black population.

Russia’s larest census of 2021 finds St. Petersburg 92.5% ethnic Russian, with much of the rest being other Eastern European groups like Ukrainians, Belarusians, or Jews. This might be a slight overestimate: immigrants from Soviet Union’s Asian republics, such as Armenia or Uzbekistan, often slip through the cracks of official registries. But it is quite safe to say St. Petersburg is over 90%, probably over 95% white, the rest almost entirely being Middle Eastern and Asian ethnic groups.

It’s hard to tell exactly how many blacks live in Russia, but it isn’t much. According to a website called “ethno-Petersburg”, there are 4 000 black people in St. Petersburg. That seems like an underestimate (especially considering a visible rise in black presence on the streets in the last decade or so), but the real number probably isn’t above the low tens of thousands. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to approximate that St. Petersburg is around 0.2% black.

5 000 people ran the half marathon yesterday, and 0.2% of that would be exactly 10 people. Common sense would tell us that blacks would likely be overrepresented in any marathon, and adjustment for age is also due, but it’s exceedingly unlikely more than a few dozen black people ran yesterday. So a few dozen out of five thousand – and yet one of them snatched the first place.

Moreover, Arthur Burtsev is 38 years old. While endurance running taxes age less extremely than most sports, it still matters massively. Indeed, athletes that finished 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th – all white Russians – were 26, 23, 28 and 21 respectively. Arthur is a whole decade older than the second-oldest athlete in the top 5.

Arthur was born in Russia in 1988. His father was a Bissau-Guinean exchange student in late USSR; after fathering two children with a fellow student in Leningrad (Arthur and his younger sister), he returned to Guinea-Bissau and cut off all contacts with them. Both children were raised by their mother, who herself was a Yakut — an ethnic group (also known as Sakha) native to Yakutia, a sparsely populated region in Northern Siberia, similar in size to India but home to only one million people, as well as the coldest inhabited region in the world.

Yakuts look East Asian, speak a Turkic language (although knowledge of Russian is universal in urban areas), and in terms of religion are not particularly devout Orthodox Christians with a modest pagan revival movement. Yakuts are well-regarded in Russia, not known to be particularly violent or criminal, integrate effortlessly when they move to larger cities, rarely show aversion to intermarriage, and have no particular beef with ethnic Russians or any other people. No one hates them, really.

What happens when you mix a native Siberian with a West African? Apparently, a Khoisan.

Arthur’s sister, Nyrguyana (a traditional Yakut name), herself a champion of several local running competitions, rejects the idea that her brother’s success has anything to do with his race:

It’s complete nonsense that the color of your skin can affect your athletic achievements! What about Liu Xiang, a famous runner from China? As for me, I’m happy to represent my hometown and defend the honor of my ancestral land, the district of Ust-Aldansky.

Despite the fact that Chinese people can run too, it’s not a secret that African runners are overrepresented among marathon winners. Kenya and Ethiopia alone – two countries that account for 2.3% of the world’s population – are home to some 90 percent of the world’s fastest marathon runners.

Western Africa (where our Arthur’s ancestral Guinea-Bissau is located), meanwhile, is more famous for its diaspora dominating short-distance running: Jamaica, a country of 2.8 million people, most of whom are descendants of West Africans, is infamous for producing an insane amount of famous sprinters, including the current world record holder in 100 metres, Usain Bolt.

Arthur Burtsev has never been to Guinea-Bissau (although he has been to Kenya) and hasn’t seen his father since very early childhood. He speaks Russian with the fluency of a native, understands Yakut to an extent, and surely doesn’t speak Fulani. Yakutia, where his relatives still live (while he himself is a lifelong resident of St. Petersburg), seems to be very proud to claim him as one of their own, with local media closely following both his professional and personal life. He recently married a blond Russian woman and became a father to a, at best, very light-brown boy.

Until yesterday, I didn’t know there was a single Bissau-Guinean-Yakutian person in the world, and now I know there is at least two, and one of them just outran 5 000 white people. If this isn’t amusing, I don’t know what is.

What is there to say? Glory to the power of socio-economic factors!

Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School is a tech bro community in Johor, Malaysia, that has been raided by the Malaysian police over a false rumor that some of its participants were Israelis with dual citizenship, which led to Balaji suspending investments and potentially pulling out of the country altogether. You can read the whole story here.

1. The only reason there is a conflict in the first place is that Malaysia has a blanket ban on Israeli citizens entering the country — a law that is obviously antisemitic in nature. The Malaysian side says it’s dissatisfied with the Network School because it doesn’t respect Malaysian laws — however, the laws in question are immoral and unjust.

2. By making a decision to build the Network School in Malaysia and abide by the country’s unjust laws, Balaji agreed to exclude all Israelis from the project. I don’t think it was an indefensible trade-off – both proximity to Singapore and a relaxed visa regime for most countries are major benefits, and Israelis, while overrepresented in tech, are 0.1% of the world’s population. But it was a trade-off.

3. The reason Malaysia has an antisemitic law is because it has an antisemitic population, as is evident from the popularity of the original hidden Israelis hoax, the mob’s bizare insistence that Balaji is a Zionist (he obviously isn’t), and the conspiracy theories about the Network School being a “Tech Zionist” project to settle Johor with Jews. In some countries, like Trump’s America or Putin’s Russia, the ruling regime is more backwards than the population it is ruling over, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in Malaysia. That means that this country is unlikely to become better in the nearest decades.

4. Homosexuality is not only illegal in Malaysia, but also punishable by public caning (in addition to more “normal” fines and prison time). The current prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, has been tried for and convicted of sodomy several times, and even served some prison time, which is probably not something that can be said of most countries.

5. Malaysia also has affirmative action laws that privilege ethnic Malays – lumped together with several smaller ethnicities as Bumiputera – over the country’s Chinese and Indian minorities, who are much more economically productive and constitute the nation’s “smart fraction”. Malaysia is 70% Bumiputera, 22% Chinese, and 6.5% Indian; Kuala Lumpur is 48% Bumiputera, 41% Chinese (!), and 10% Indian, and used to be plurality-Chinese until 2000s.

6. All that is to say, Malaysia is a country with issues. All countries are, and there are many places that are much worse. Malaysia is, after all, one of the most developed nations in Southeast Asia. But it’s naïve to expect a country with sodomy laws to be a great place for Silicon Valley libertarians, and it’s only logical that a country that discriminates against its homegrown productive minorities wouldn’t welcome foreign talent.

7. A lot of Malaysians seem to be offended by the fact that the Network School (accurately) advertised itself as “close to Singapore” and downplayed the fact that they were actually in Malaysia. The reason they did that is because everyone wants to live in Singapore and few people want to live in Malaysia, because Singapore is a very impressive country and Malaysia is not. Maybe Malaysian patriots should contemplate that.

8. Malaysian patriots are concerned that the Network School is a threat to their sovereignty. While in theory that kind of is the long-term goal of the Network State project, in reality a bunch of tech bros renting a building on the outskirts of Johor is not a threat to anything, and the fact that anyone in the country is talking about this seriously is a strong sign of massive national insecurity.

9. Balaji’s plan B for the Network School seems to be Kazakhstan, which is not the worst pick. While also a Muslim country, it’s much more secular thanks to the Soviet legacy and doesn’t have an issue with widespread hysteria over “Zionism”. Kazakhstan’s own “smart fraction” minorities – Russians, Germans, and Koreans – are underrepresented in the government, and the regime has pursued policies to strengthen the country’s Kazakh ethnic majority, but they aren’t openly discriminated against and are generally doing fine. While in an inferior location – no Singapore nearby! – it can potentially become a magnet for Russian and other post-Soviet tech talent that is increasingly hesitant to work in Russia’s previously prosperous but declining tech economy for obvious reasons. Still, it’s an authoritarian regime, and while Tokayev, Kazakhstan’s president, is a reasonable man, it’s a risky move to put your project’s fate into a nation that has a limited history of the rule of law.

10. What makes a state a state is a monopoly on violence. A lack of a roadmap to having that is the Network State project’s glaring weakness – and it’s especially important considering its attempts to establish outposts in developing countries with weaker rule of law. “Let’s buy plots of land in various places and then start a pressure campaign to recognize them as a nation” sounds nice until the police shows up. What if the next time it’s the tanks? Unless the Network Staters find an answer, they will keep losing even to thoroughly unimpressive nation-states.

A few days ago the noted anthropologist Kunley Drukpa posted a chart that mapped factions that exist in Russian politics. The chart itself was made by some Russian guy a few months ago, and while it can be legitimately criticized, it’s actually pretty comprehensive and works quite well as a guide into Russian politics of 2026. It was clearly created by a deeply online person with extensive knowledge of relatively obscure Russian political fugures. Above is my humble translation.

The chart kind of resembles a political compass but it isn’t one – there are no axes. Insted it identifies four major factions in Russian politics – the Kremlins, the Nationalists, the Liberals, and the Left – and then divides each of them into four sub-factions. There is no consistent logic in their exact placement on the chart.

So what are those factions and what’s their deal? Let’s do a deeper dive-in on all of them.

THE KREMLINS

The Kremlins have the power, and no one but the Kremlins has the power. This is their defining characteristic as a part of the Russian political landscape that transcends any sort of ideological alignment. The (vaguely defined and often mythologized) sub-factions of the Russian government are often dubbed “Towers of the Kremlin”.

The towers on our chart can more or less be divided into two “hardline” and two “moderate” ones.

🚩 Siloviks (or Siloviki) is a word English ended up adopting from Russian. It means the guys with the guns: the Feds, the Police, and the Army. Of those three, the Feds (FSB, the successor to the Soviet Union’s KGB and Stalin’s NKVD) are the most important and the most powerful. They tend to be genuinely ideologically commited to the war and the larger confrontation with the West, and very socially conservative (not least because their leadership is men in their seventies). What sets them apart is that they are a powerful institution on its own that predates Putin and has power independently of Putin.

🚩 Putin loyalists, in contrast, are completely dependent on the current president in their position. They are people who were promoted by the institutions he built himself, like the United Russia party, and who are very likely to perish with them if Putin ever goes down. Ideologically, they are identical to the Siloviks in being war hardliners but often care less and would switch their positions in an instant if told so.

🚩 Kremlin liberals and Technocrats are often seen as almost the same group; they do overlap. They are the competent people who keep the system running, which is why they are still around. While the Siloviks take care of the state secutity and the military matters, Liberals and Technocrats control Russia’s economic policy. They are often silently war-sceptical and open to restoring relationships with the Western world – although probably don’t have the guts to oppose the hardliners in any real way. The most prominent example is Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the Central Bank of Russia, rumored to have been denied a resignation after the start of the war in 2022, who managed to save the country from economic collapse in the same year.

***

THE NATIONALISTS

Nationalists should not be confused with the Kremlins — they might share ideas, but they do not share the power. Some of those people are loyal to the regime, but some actually oppose it from the right.

🚩 Ziggers. War is their only priority. They just really hate Ukrainians. Many of the people who fall into this category are actively fighting or are closely connected with the military in some other way.

🚩 Hardline Patriots. Ziggers who got blackpilled. Often those are people who have been fighting for the Donbass cause since 2014 or even earlier. They believe the regime is not doing enough to win the war (not starting a mass mobilisation, not trying to assasinate Zelensky, not dropping nukes, etc.) and hate it for it. People like Igor Strelkov, a popular commander who played a major role in starting the war in 2014 and was jailed in Russia in 2024 for criticizing Putin from the right, is a good example.

🚩 Schizo Patriots. Ziggers who are motivated by religion, mysticism, or some other bizzare grand ideas. People who believe the war is necessary because Russia’s geopolitical dominance is instrumental in stopping Satan from conquering the world or something like that. Alexander Dugin is one of those guys.

🚩 Democratic Nationalists. Those are right-wingers more focused on internal issues, like immigration. Before the war, they sometimes used to partner with the Liberals. Many of them are quietly war-sceptical, or at least war-weary, and believe starting it was a mistake. However, they still view Ukraine as hostile, believe any collaboration with Ukraine is unacceptable, and tend to “root for” Russia on the battlefield.

***

THE LIBERALS

The Liberals are united in their strong opposition to the war and to Putin personally. They are the most persecuted group, as well as the most visible one in the West. Most of its leaders have emigrated in 2022, although a few less prominent ones remain in Russia.

🚩 Libs. The basic kind. They have been in opposition to Putin for decades, opposed the war strongly since day one, and want Russia to become a liberal democracy. The educated urban professionals tend to belong to this category.

🚩 Z Libs. Right-leaning liberals who got disillusioned with Ukraine and the West. The “Z” part is more of what other liberals believe they are rather than self-identification: they largely still oppose the war and want Putin gone. However, they also have a negative view of Zelensky and the EU leadership, and also tend to believe Russians who fled the war are treated unfairly in the West. At this point they basically hate both sides equally.

🚩 Pro-EU libs. Well-connected people on Western (usually European) payroll who work for various foundations, organisations and structures with connections to Western governments and institution. Every single one of those peiople is in emigration. Strongly pro-Ukraine.

🚩 TransUkrainians. People who are so pro-Ukraine that they rejected their Russian identity altogether. They define themselves as an opposition not only to Putin and his regime but to Russian society itself. They believe Russians are evil and probably can’t be reformed, so they don’t care about democracy in Russia anymore and just want it to lose the war. They often support dismantling Russia as a state and align themselves with separatist movements and Russian volonteers fighting for Ukraine.

***

THE LEFT

The Russian Left is kind of its own thing. They are united by their general opposition to capitalism and support for the Russian Revolution of 1917 (although opinions on later Soviet periods may vary). They are quite divided on the current war, and have generally taken a back seat in 2022. I do, however, believe they will be back as a major force sooner rather than later.

🚩 Red conservatives are Soviet-nostalgia-driven boomers. They like the Soviet Union and Stalin but aren’t really interested in Marxist theory or the international Socialist movement, and basically view USSR in the same way American conservatives view the US in the 1950’s – as a better, simpler time when men were men and women were women, and the state took care about the common man. They mostly support the war and are often loyal to Putin, although tend to otherwise dislike the ruling class and especially the Kremlin Liberals.

🚩 Commies are the actual Marxists. They read theory and they take it seriously. They mostly have a negative opinion on Putin, whom they view as a stooge of the big business owners, although they often hate the liberals even more. They are mostly neutral on the war, viewing both sides as enemies of the working class.

🚩 Social Democrats and Democratic Socialists are two overlapping groups of pro-democracy, socially liberal leftists. While they still support the 1917 Revolution and usually have a positive view of Lenin, they are critical of Stalinism and believe the Soviet Union took a wrong turn by embracing authoritarianism and social conservatism. While they are distinct from the liberals, they are often open to allying with them in opposition to the regime. They are strongly anti-Putin and anti-war, although often sceptical of the Ukrainian leadership.

***

The groups are not fixed and the boundaries can be blurry. Siloviks share most of its ideology with the Nationalists; the Red Conservatives aren’t too far either; Social Democrats are pretty close to the Libs; Z Libs have a lot in common with the Democratic Nationalists; etc. Nazbols could easily be put in at least 3-4 categories.

But this is a decent starting point for understanding the mess that is the contemporary Russian politics – in all its chaos and beauty.

1. Midway on my Warsaw-Helsinki trip I realized that I will spend the whole journey without leaving the borders of Russian Empire — that acquired Finland in 1809 and Poland in 1815 during the Napoleonic wars, and lost both in 1917.

2. Warsaw looks and feels a lot like Moscow, and Helsinki looks and feels sort of like St. Petersburg. Warsaw was nearly wiped off the face of the Earth during World War II and was rebuilt when Poland was an Eastern block country – with Moscow, the ultimate Communist capital, clearly being a source of inspiration. Helsinki, historically a small town, was turned into the national capital in the 19^th century by the will of the Russian Tzar as a deliberate project to shift the center of power away from Åbo with all its Swedish connections and closer to Russia proper. Its expansion was overseen by the same architects that worked on St. Petersburg.

3. Warsaw is what Moscow would have looked like if Russia picked a different path 25 years ago, and Helsinki is what St. Petersburg would have looked like if Russia picked a different path 110 years ago.

4. It’s ridiculously easy to get by in Warsaw as a Russian speaker. Most clerks at grocery stores or baristas at cafés are Ukrainian or Belarussian. There are about 2 million Ukrainians in the country and 0.5 million Belarussians, and they are dominating the service industry. This is the power of cheap labor.

5. Amusingly, many of the taxi drivers are Central Asian or other sorts of post-Soviet Muslims. A young Uzbek guy gave us a small history lecture on how Russia conquered Uzbekistan (which was “a little good and a little bad”) only to get stalled in development under the Soviet Union (which was created in 1906). An older Azeri man furiously insisted that Ukrainians and Poles are terrible passangers because they “have no culture”, while Russians and Belarussians are great passangers because they “have culture.” He also had some heterodox opinions on geopolitics.

6. Poor Ukrainians gave Poland a large pool of cheap labor. Rich Ukrainians created a lot of high-end, fancy-looking cafés and restaurants that are as abundant in Kyiv as they are in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Both Russia and (especially) Ukraine are much poorer than Poland, but they are also more unequal — they have more poor people and more rich people at the same time, which means both high demand for upscale places and low labor costs. This is how you get Russia’s famously excellent service industry, and a smaller but similar one in Ukraine.

7. One of those Ukrainian-owned fancy places was a good contender for the nicest café I’ve ever been to. I asked the barista, a very young blond girl, if she spoke Russian. She looked me dead in the eyes with thinly-disguised hatred and replied, in Ukrainian, “I can understand you.”

8. Many witnesses told us that Ukrainian refugees are reviled in Poland, and that being Russian there is actually safer than being Ukrainian. One friend, a Russian libertarian who fled persecution, recalls two encounters with Polish gopniks: in one instance, he confessed he was Russian and was met with “Russia, Putin, very cool!”, and in another, in a major faux pas, he lied he was Ukrainian and had to run for his life.

9. Polish gopniks might not be very smart. The influx of East Slavs was a clear win for Poland: it got loads of labor, capital, talents, all from an ethnically and culturally close population that will completely assimilate in a few generations. It’s hard not to see Poland as a huge success story for culturally close immigration. Even after the war ends, most of those people are definitely not coming back.

10. Poland is one of the few modern countries for which the future looks pretty great. It’s getting richer every year and retains good potential for more economic growth, which means it’s almost guaranteed to get to the Western European level pretty soon. It’s both a law and order society – one that calls the cops on a homeless guy for peacefully sleeping in an underpass at 1 AM near the cleanest McDonald’s you’ll ever see – and politically free. I saw more right-wing patriotic graffities than rainbow flags, but the fact that there were both is a good sign of a healthy pluralistic nation. Today is a pretty great time to be a Pole.

11. Other than a statue and a few streets, there isn’t much in Helsinki that reminds you of Russia. Its vibe is decisively Scandinavian, as it should be — it was a part of Sweden five times longer than a highly autonomous part of Russia. Helsinki very much looks like a smaller Stockholm.

12. Small pieces of Russian heritage are scattered around the city: a cathedral here, a statue there. In Russia itself, no monuments to Alexander II, Russia’s reformer Tzar who ended serfdom and propelled Russian empire into modernity, survived the Bolshevik revolution, but in Helsinki, it’s still there, right in the city center, and an Alexander street is there too. The Russian Merchant Quarter on Sveaborg/Suomenlinna is very well-preserved – better than many historic sights in Russia. It’s all very nice.

13. Finns renaming Sveaborg (“Swedish fortress”) into Suomenlinna (“Finnish fortress”) immediately after independence will never stop being funny to me. Russians used it as a naval base for a century and were perfectly fine with Sveaborg!

14. I’ve seen maybe two EU flags in Finland and dozens, if not hundreds, in Poland. As the saying goes, if you went to Dartmouth, you went to an Ivy League school, and if you went to Harvard, you went to Harvard. If you live in Poland, you live in the European Union. If you live in Finland, you live in Finland.

15. Speaking of flags: I happened to visit on Midsommar/Juhannus, which is a national holiday in Finland, so downtown Helsinki was pretty stacked with Finnish flags. However, they only do this on national holidays, so the next day the national flags were down and the Ukrainian flags were up, as they always are. I get the message, but they are low-key overdoing it.

16. There are countries that clearly had too much immigration. If you have full-on ghettos in your country, like Sweden’s 99% immigrant Rinkeby, it’s probably not ok. Finland is not one of those countries: the crowd on the streets is still overwhelmingly Finns (who all look like they are each other’s distant cousins), and the visible immigrants largely look well-integrated and well-behaved. I haven’t seen any of them cause any troubles. This is basically fine?

17. Finnish alcoholism is real, and basically all anti-social people I’ve seen in Helsinki were not immigrants but native Finnish alcoholics. Even Russian major cities aren’t that bad, honestly.

18. My plane seat neighbor, a russophillic rural Finn who thinks Helsinki is the worst place in the world, drank two beers on a two-hour flight, and really likes fishing, said about Russians and Finns: “We make good neighbors, but we are very different people.”

19. A few years ago, you could get from St. Petersburg to Helsinki in a few hours on a train or a bus for the price of a lunch. The train was closed in 2022, and since 2023, the border has been shut down completely for all travellers. Even after the war ends, we probably won’t return to the 2021 level of interconnectedness in quite a while. Civilization is fragile. Hopefully, one day it will be back.

Drunk Wisconsin

Are Russians Evil?

This is a guest post by Shanggyangg, who writes the Substack newsletter Cultivated Wastelands (English). He also runs a popular Telegram channel Шангъянг as well as Карты для русских (Russian). You can find him on Twitter/X @shanggyang…

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2 months ago · 14 likes · 24 comments · Drunk Wisconsin and Shanggyangg

And if you are here as a Drunkard-Wisconsinite, feel free to subscribe — I don’t post that often, but I don’t think this is the worst newsletter out there. Welcome!

1. In 2023, Richard Hanania wrote an article titled “Why I Oppose Eugenics”. This came to a surprise to his many fans who followed him because they thought he actually loved eugenics, which is not an unreasonable assumption if you have any familiarity with Hanania’s work.

The piece was a response to an article “You’re probably a eugenicist” by some Diana Fleischman.

She argues that most individuals support policies that are aimed at ensuring that children are not born with massive handicaps, like bans on incest. People also choose sperm donors and even partners based on what qualities they will pass on to their children. Therefore, “We are all eugenicists—but in selective, inconsistent, and often hypocritical ways.”

Hanania says – duh, of course we all want babies with better genes! But you are not going to convince anyone running around and calling yourself a eugenicist. For an average person, eugenics is racism, racism is fascism, and fascism is Hitler. If you want to make a case for better genes, you have to wrap it in a way that doesn’t trigger a chain of associations that leads to Hitler. So instead of talking about selective breeding, make it a story about children’s health or women’s rights.

Hanania also has another article (he is a prolific writer!) It’s called “Shut up About Race and IQ”. Scott Alexander already summarized it better than I ever could:

A cynic might notice that in February of this year, Hanania wrote Shut Up About Race And IQ. He says that the people who talk about [race and IQ] are “wrong about fundamental questions regarding things like how people form their political opinions, what makes for successful movements, and even their own motivations.” A careful reader might notice what he doesn’t describe them as being wrong about. The rest of the piece almost-but-not-quite-explicitly clarifies his position: I read him as saying that race realism is most likely true, but you shouldn’t talk about it, because it scares people.

We might have found a motif here. Richard Hanania holds some opinions that he believes are true, but society thinks are bad and dangerous. Richard understands that to have influence on society as a writer, he has to present his beliefs in a carefully curated way to make them more acceptable to the average person.

Which is why he has taken a bold stance in support of Jeffery Epstein.

***

2. Richard Hanania is “working on an article discussing something [he has] been wondering about, which is why hysteria over pedophilia is the surest sign of low human capital at every point of the political spectrum.”

Let’s make an important clarification. Hanania is not, in fact, talking about capital P Pedophilia, as in rape of prepubescent children. He is talking about sexually active teenagers engaging in consensual and willing intercourse with young adults.

We have all seen the news stories. An incredibly attractive 20-something new teacher (always blond!) sleeps with a high school student. The boy (who can easily overpower a young woman) has a time of his life. His parents find out, decide to call the police. A teacher gets decades behind bars for “pedophilia”. A bipartisan lynching mob appears in the comment section calling for woodchippers.

I was a teenage boy once, and while I can’t say I found older women particularly appealing compared to my peers, I don’t think it’s likely that I would have been traumatized by an occurrence like this. Most of my male readers probably feel the same. And while it’s more complicated with girls, it’s obviously not very hard to find women who had similar experiences as teenagers and don’t regret it. (Of course, it is also incredibly easy to find people whose teenage sexual experience was traumatic, and my intuition is that there must be a correlation with older partners.)

Pedophilia is very bad, and pedophilia is when an adult has sex with a child. Everyone under 18 is legally a child and everyone over 18 is legally an adult, so when two people aged 17 and 19 have sex, they are technically on two different sides of the divide. Woodchipper!

Of course, smart people understand nuance. People age gradually, not in a blink of an eye after crossing some threshold. You have to put a number somewhere, and 18 is as good as 17 or 19, but there is a very clear difference between a college student dating a high schooler, and an adult raping a kindergartener. Stupid people, however, struggle with nuance. They see “adult”, “minor”, “sex” in proximity and cry wolf even when there is no evidence anyone involved was harmed, or not old enough to understand the situation.

So, here it is, I wrote Hanania’s piece before he himself could. “Hysteria over pedophilia” is a “sign of low human capital” because unintelligent people lump wildly different cases together, because nuance requires IQ.

Still, something is wrong here.

***

3. Diana Fleischman, a self-admitted eugenicist, does not support forced sterilization of people with trivial health issues, poor grades in school, bad looks, or ethnic admixtures. She supports banning sibling marriages and making embryo screening for genetic disabilities more affordable for young mothers. Yet, most people who read the word “eugenicist” would jump to a conclusion that she is a National Socialist before bothering to learn any of this.

Richard Hanania does not support rape of children. He supports chilling out about teenagers having some sex and opposes ruining lives of young adults over it. But he is not making it very hard for his opponents to paint him as a pedophile when he is framing it as a fight against “hysteria over pedophilia”, or when he keeps talking about Jeffery Epstein being innocent of most things people blame him for.

Political movements form when fractions of Elite Human Capital align with fractions of low human capital. EHC-only movement is called a club. Some concessions to the masses are necessary for change.

US Democrats combine progressive stances on freedoms of women and gay people with with “anti-billionaire” economic populism and black racial grievances. Old-school Republicans were an alliance of economic liberals and religious obscurantists. In post-war Europe, liberals had to balance between class-populist Social Democrats or religious-populist Christian Democrats. The list goes on. You can’t have a pure Smart Party in power, you always need the dumbs.

Low human capital people hold a lot of very harmful beliefs: protectionism and economic nationalism, price control, billionaire hate, strongman worship, zero-sum thinking, etc. A lack of nuance about whether we should allow adults to date 17.9999 year-olds is probably not the most dangerous thing on the list.

Richard Hanania thinks it is, in fact, important:

Those points aren’t unfair. But I don’t think Richard believes that a connection between Race and IQ – something that explains a very large part of not just American, but global socio-economic dynamics and debunks much of mainstream understanding of what policy on education and crime should look like – is unimportant. He still understands it’s something you shouldn’t be very on the nose about if you want to be taken seriously.

Jeffrey Epstein is less popular than racism. It might be true that most people’s idea about what he was doing on that island is complete nonsense, and that he was a less demonic person than your uncle believes. Some interesting racial statistics you see on X dot com might also be true. Still, is defending Jeffrey Epstein really a smart thing to do for someone who wants to influence people’s minds?

Richard Hanania is not a pedophile. His taste in women, while horrendous, reveals preference for the body types that are anything but child-like. He is a married father of three children, and nothing suggests his sex life is anything but completely ordinary.

He is something worse: a contrarian. I am also a contrarian. But I have read some smart Substack posts before, like “Why I Oppose Eugenics” or “Shut up About Race and IQ”, that taught me to be a smart contrarian. Which is why I strongly, very strongly oppose pedophilia.

0. Two days is not nearly enough to understand a world-historic Great City. It was, however, enough to see that Paris really is one of them. The following is but a glimpse, a brief impression.

1. Riding a RER train from the airport to the city was quite a radicalizing experience. Station after station, not one European entering. Whatever Le Pen is advocating is a center-left option.

2. Paris itself, however – the nice areas where I roamed – did not feel that much less White than Moscow or St Petersburg. Plenty of minorities around, of course, but still an overwhelmingly European city.

3. The French have an unmistakable racial type. People just look French – not White, not European, but French specifically. I did not find it particularly beautiful, but rather dignifying in some subtle way. The type is seen in the young and the old, but becomes especially visible with age. Old men are bald with disproportionate frequency, and the way female faces age is hard to put into words but extremely easy to notice. The French age gracefully.

4. I walked into a Catholic church near (but not affiliated with) Les Invalides, and it had three strollers parked inside. Almost every person there was with a child or a grandchild, and almost everyone was White French. It looked like a very healthy and thriving community.

5. Les Invalides itself was a place with an exceptionally inhospitable atmosphere, which I did not enjoy. It was, however, where I’ve met the only Parisian who spoke to me in fluent English: a 20-something hazel-eyed hijabi girl employed as some sort of guard. Her directions were useful.

6. Every single employee at the CDG airport was not just black but Nilotic. Every single employee at Notre-Dame de Paris was White French.

7. The only time in my life I have seen a longer line than to Notre-Dame de Paris was on the funeral of Alexey Navalny. It was worth the wait: the Cathedral itself was exactly as great as its fame suggests and ten times more. A magnificent creation of a great civilization.

8. French Catholics seem to be very good at incorporating modern elements in old churches tastefully.

9. If there is anything to compliment Paris on, it must be the sense of taste. I haven’t seen a single thing that was really in bad taste in the whole two days; in most places you can see a dozen in half an hour.

10. The shores of the Seine are filled with old White people selling, among the usual tourist-junk, 19th century used books, early 20th century pornography, pre-WW1 antisemitic newspapers and WW2-era Germany-sponsored magazines. Compared to any other place I have seen or can imagine, it's, again, an exceptionally tasteful selection of souvenirs.

11. The city is not particularly clean, nor is it particularly comfortable. It shouldn't be that hard to deal with the broken windows or the homeless encampments. A lot of things close early, and basically nothing works late at night. Why have all the immigrants if they can't even work night shifts?

12. The mere dencity of History's footprints is hard to comprehend for someone who, like me, has grown up closer to the perephery of Civilization. There aren't that many cities where you can casually walk past Samuel Beckett's grave or the house where Voltaire died.

13. Paris feels like a city where Communists did not shoot most of its residents of good character and ability 100 years ago. For a Russian, it's a novelty. It does improve a place a lot, and it's visible even through the signs of decline. For the last hundred years, there were people to take care of the old family graves on the Montparnasse cemetery. In some hard-to-grasp sense, it's a Nation that, for all the problems of our age, hasn't yet been broken.

14. The proverbial romantic and tender side of Paris probably exists somewhere. Maybe I am too old already, or maybe late December is not the time. I did not find Paris tender. I do, however, recommend holding hands in front of a Van Gogh in Orly.

15. Can a city be both friendly and grand? I don't know; I assume not. Paris is grand; it is not friendly. It's probably a good place to live for a certain type of Frenchman; and there are mindless people from all possible corners of the world who can live anywhere without thinking of it much. Paris is full of both. But it doesn't welcome you and it doesn't love you (no matter what they write on the airport walls). It doesn't have to, of course — it has a line of unrequited lovers long enough to stretch it all the way to Marseille. For me, it was a city to admire but not to adore.

If Paris was a man, his posture would be uptight, and his gaze cold.

In his recent Tucker Carlson appearance, a high point in his groyper-adjacent influencer career, Nalin suggested that naturalized citizens should not be able to hold public office, that the number of foreign students in American universities should be limited, and also that the US should ban dual citizenship.

This essay is specifically about the idea to restrict or forbid dual citizenship – an idea that has become increasingly popular among the MAGA Right.

On December 2^nd,, US Senator Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), himself a former citizen of Colombia (renounced at age 18, when he was naturalized as an American), introduced a bill that would ban Americans from holding second citizenship and give every current dual citizen one year to renounce their other citizenship or be stripped of their US nationality. The bill will obviously not pass (it’s clearly unconstitutional1, won’t stand in courts, gives unrealistic timelines and will simply have too many powerful enemies) but it’s quite telling that a Republican Senator thinks a stunt like this will give him good publicity.

Personal good vs. public good: sometimes it’s neither

It’s extremely easy to argue against restrictions on dual citizenship from the perspective of personal liberty. States and governments are untrustworthy, unstable, and generally evil. They are optimized to tax you and then spend the tax money in the least effective way possible. They are very probably not your friends.

You do not necessarily trust private entities or “the people” more than the government (although I do), but you definitely trust yourself more than the government. You never really know if it won’t screw up in a major way tomorrow, and if the situation in your country will be fine in the next five or ten years, so it’s extremely reasonable to want to have options and a plan B.

I think this is a logical approach for an individual, and I would recommend to any friend with the option to give it a thought. But what’s good for an individual is not always good for a collective, such as a nation. So if you are a part of a nationalist political movement like America First and you believe that collective interests should have priority over individual interests, should you fight for restriction on dual citizenship?

To answer this question we must figure out if the ban on dual citizenship is actually good for the nation.

The dual loyalty argument

The most common argument – the one Nalin makes in a Tucker interview, the one behind Sen. Moreno’s bill – is that a person should only be loyal to one nation. This idea sounds very reasonable – no one likes dual loyalties. But it doesn’t make much sense if you think about it for a minute.

Loyalty is a feeling, and citizenship is a legal status. There is no causal relationship between nationality and national loyalty. I’m not saying a citizen shouldn’t be loyal to his country of nationality, but many – including many native-born citizens – are evidently not. The major practical effect of holding a certain citizenship is not a symbolic sense of loyalty but rather a permanent and generally unretractable right to live and work in certain places, as well as some level of travel privileges. This is why most people get citizenships – to expand their opportunities, not as a gesture of allegiance to a national concept.

You can be a citizen and have no patriotic feelings at all. You can also not be a citizen and still be loyal to a nation – in fact, that’s explicitly expected for millions of immigrants on the years-long path towards naturalization. The hard reality is that nationality is a terrible proxy for loyalty, and there is no way to change that without radically transforming the entire global system of citizenship on a conceptual level.

Do American nationalists like Nalin actually think dual citizens are dually loyal – as in, loyal to both America and their second country? No – they clearly don’t think they are loyal to America at all! But if we are talking about a group of people with presumably no loyalty to the US, why would a change in their nationality status change their hearts? Unless we assume they are intensely patriotic towards their country of birth and would refuse to naturalize if that meant loosing their first passport, a ban would simply increase the number of disloyal American citizens.

Of course, many, if not most, of those people are not firebrand patriots of Mozambique but rather people who feel no strong attachment to any particular nationality and just want a higher quality of life in a nicer country. They would gladly exchange their original weak passport for the coveted US citizenship. Does that make them “loyal”, is that the nationalist dream? I don’t think this is exactly what Nalin Haley wants.

It would be a mistake, however, to call a ban on dual nationality simply meaningless. Rather, it would be actively harmful.

Citizenship, immigration, and remigration

In terms of its real effect on immigration, it would do two things:

1. Reduce White immigration;

2. Reduce non-White remigration.

The former is pretty obvious. Europeans have good passports – arguably stronger than the US one because you get unlimited access to all 27 countries of the European Union, and also don’t get taxed when you live abroad. It’s a pretty bad deal to give it up. A rule that would require them to do it will greatly discourage European immigration to the US.

And Europeans are a valuable resource. EU’s left-leaning regulatory attitudes are a huge source of frustration for the entrepreneurial types who are attracted by America’s relative economic freedom. The US has been brain draining Europe for centuries, which is a substantial part of the reason why Americans are way richer than their Old World cousins.

More importantly for the far-right, the influx of Europeans will work against the numerical decline of the White America. Europeans assimilate perfectly within a generation, so every American interested in survival of their country’s White population should support encouraging European immigration.

However, an even more important consequence is that a ban of dual citizenship will make it much harder to get the third-worlders out of America.

Imagine that you are Pakistani.

You grew up in a pretty bad environment (Pakistan). You want to get out (who doesn’t?). With some luck, family savings, and nepotism you manage to immigrate to the US, get a job, and eventually even become a US citizen.

But you never really feel at home. You never managed to get rid of the funny accent and make real friends in the US. There are no mosques around, and people look at you weirdly when you pray on your little rug. The people around you are way too liberal, and you don’t want your children to grow up gay. You miss speaking Punjabi with your friends. Your parents stayed in Pakistan, they are old now, and you want to spend some more time with them while you can.

You are firmly in the lower middle class in the US, not great, not terrible. However, your modest American savings are actually enough to live a top 1% life in the dirt-cheap Pakistan! You can afford a modern apartment in one of the best neighborhoods of Karachi for yourself and a few rental properties to cover all monthly expenses.

Most importantly, you are still a citizen of Pakistan. That means that you can live, work, and own property in your home country without any extra paperwork or permissions – which is not the case for non-citizens. If you want to move back, nothing at all is stopping you. No friction. You buy a plane ticket and never come back.

This would not have been possible if this person was forced to give up his Pakistani citizenship when he naturalized in the States. He would have been left an American, an American only, and there is no way in hell he would have gone back to Pakistan. Which is not a good scenario from the perspective of American nationalism.

Now, is this sort of self-repatriation of citizens something that we should expect to be common? No. But remigration is hard in general. We haven’t really figured it out. What is quite clear is that stripping immigrants of their original citizenship means they are never going back.

***

Let’s sum up. If someone is naturalizing down, we probably want them in the country and shouldn’t put up any additional barriers. If someone is naturalizing up, they would gladly ditch their old passport even if they aren’t particularly loyal or patriotic towards their new country; and if they felt like going back, we don’t want to make it harder for them to remigrate.

“You are either American or you are not” sounds right for many Patriots whose hearts are in the right place. However, it’s important for a policy to actually make sense, not just sound right. A ban on dual citizenship does not make sense, and it does not advance the nationalist cause in any real, non-symbolic way. It’s time for the Right to figure out ideas that would actually work if they are serious about winning.

This is because Russia is the key to the security of Europe. Europe has natural borders on its North, West and South — but on the Eastern side, there is no natural border all the way until the Ural mountains deep into Russia. And Russia itself is a huge concentration of population, as well as economic and military power.

The geography is very simple. If Russia is friendly, Europe is secure. If Russia is hostile, it is not.

This vulnerability has a very simple solution: integration of Russia as an equal European nation, a friend, a part of the club. If Russia is integrated, Europe has no enemies close by. Africa and Asia are separated by seas. China borders distant Siberian wilderness. Perfect conditions for long-term peace and development.

Of course, there is an issue: Europe is a free countries club, and Russia has a scarcity of freedom.

In the 90s, there came a perfect opportunity: the despotic Soviet regime in Russia collapsed, and the new regime was liberal and pro-Western. What’s more important is that the population also became very pro-Western. They wanted to be wealthy like Europeans — but they also wanted Europe’s prestige. They wanted to be in the Cool White Men Club.

Europe basically solved its Russia problem. The only risk was an autocratic comeback.

If a country liberalizes, there is always a chance that it slips back into authoritarianism. If this happened to Russia, Europe would be vulnerable again. And it was obvious from the start that Russia is high-risk. Transitions from dictatorship to democracy are hard, transitions from communism to capitalism are hard, transitions from superpower to just another nation are hard. Russia had to do all three.

I sure hope Europe does everything it can to strengthen Russian democracy and prevent a revanchist takeover!

Russia had tremendous enthusiasm for liberalism after the USSR collapsed. Communism sucked! People wanted a normal life! Then the economy crashed, crime skyrocketed, Chechens rebelled, and the West mostly said: welp, good luck!

Even after the 90s were over, there was still eagerness to join the club. As late as Medvedev there were talks about free travel.

But no feasible pathway to real integration was ever in sight, and revanchists were increasingly winning public opinion.

The fundamental issue is that Russia wanted to be treated like an equal — so either to be properly integrated into the Western alliance or to be recognized as a regional power with a sphere of influence. Neither was offered, so Russia slowly turned hostile by the 2010s.

Any empire transitioning into a nation wants to preserve its dignity. Putin rode a wave of national embarrassment into dictatorship — a wave that rose in the population because the unspoken promise "destroy the empire and become a wealthy Western nation" wasn't fulfilled.

Russians, both the people and the elites, saw that:

- They still aren't seen as equals by the West
- The club is closed
- Russia essentially dismantled its empire for nothing
- Meanwhile, NATO is expanding
- And the US bombs a new country every year

This is how you get Putinism.

So, oops, you messed up! You allowed a revanchist takeover of Russia, and now your geopolitical security is screwed. Congratulations.

Then the regime in Russia consolidates and radicalizes, and you end up with a huge European war.

Does Russia itself bear responsibility for the war? Duh, obviously. But it is a result of a fundamental regime transformation that could have been prevented. The disaster could have been avoided if the West saw post-Soviet Russia as a serious integration project.

Now we are all back to square one.

Russia is still the key to European security. Geography is still real. After the war, there will still be two options: integrated Russia and peace, or hostile Russia and instability. So if Europe wants peace, it needs to be ready to make friends with a post-Putinist Russia.

And here the Kaja Kallases of the world enter the stage.

EU integrated a bunch of Eastern European countries before it even considered Russia. Those countries brought with themselves their ethnic grievances against Russia — and are now running the anti-Russian circus.

Now, do Poles and Balts have good reasons to hate Russians? Sure, our history isn't nice. The French also have good reasons to hate Germans. They had enough sense to step over the hatred and build something great together instead.

A post-war peace requires a reformed Russia.

But the Eastern Europeans, the Kaja Kallases, the NAFO people have a different idea — that Russia is unreformable, Russians are all evil by blood, and Europe should just prepare to kill them.

They have created a mythological version of history in which a liberal Russia never existed, and all post-Soviet conflicts in Moldova, Georgia, or Chechnya are the same thing as the Ukraine war. You see, when Georgian or Moldovan nationalists scare their ethnic minorities into starting a secessionist war and Russia sends a few internationally approved peacekeepers in the 90s, it was actually Russian imperialism all along! And while Georgia has a total right to bomb Abkhazians and Ossetians into submission, Russia doing the same with Chechens in Chechnya — legally a part of Russia — is agression.

There are legitimate ways to criticize Russian foreign policy in the 90s and 00s. There sure are good arguments that Moscow should have allowed Chechens to secede. But the idea of an Eternal Moscovite waging wars all over former USSR in the 90s is ahistorical, and no one in Europe at the time thought that’s what was happening. Russian liberalism was real. Normal Russia existed.

NAFO does not believe that normal Russia existed, because their view is fundamentally not based on values — it’s based on ethnic animosity.

This is the main problem with Eastern European elites (and their constituencies). They pretend to be enlightened Westerners — but on a fundamental level there is very little difference between Russian nationalism of Putin and Estonian, or Moldovan, or Polish nationalism of anti-Russian Eastern European elites.

Here the former president of Estonia (now a NAFO shitposter) is replying to me (not a former or current president, and a superior poaster) on Twitter to say that Russians are evil because they are Asians.

Is this man a liberal? Is he a universalist humanist? Is this different from Solovyov and Russian propaganda?

The NAFO vision of eternally hostile Russia is a vision of eternal war.

Under their guidance, instead of building bridges with Russian liberals and Kremlin moderates to stop the war, reform Russia, and finish the European project together, Europe pushed them away.

Restrictions on travel, emigration, banking, money transfers, and many other measures that were completely useless to stop the war or undermine Putin’s regime have made life miserable for the most pro-Western part of Russian society. Now, even the Russian liberals who fled after the war (and there are many of them) are increasingly disillusioned with Europe, which has positioned itself as openly hostile to the Russian people and not just the regime.

Every day this policy continues, the chances of post-Putinist Russia becoming liberal, democratic, and peaceful go down. Every day brings us closer to endless war.

Which is a disaster for Europe — because Russia is the key to European security.

Any guy with a phone can make a guess, and someone will be right. Don’t take this too seriously. Still, I was onto something, right?

Right now, the line of control follows my prediction closely enough, with one major exception being the northwestern part of the Donetsk region – the area around the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration. Slavyansk was briefly held by Igor Strelkov’s rebel group in early 2014 and remains an important symbol for Russian nationalists. If Russia establishes control over it and completes the conquest of Donbass, it could credibly claim (Pyrrhic) victory.

After the Alaska meeting between Putin and Trump, this map became the new ceasefire deal outline. Reportedly, Putin agreed to stop the fighting and turn to diplomacy if Ukraine cedes all of the Donetsk region to Russia. This is a major step down from Russia’s previous, clearly unrealistic demand of ceding the entirety of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions – including their capitals, the cities of Kherson (which Russia captured in 2022 but lost to Ukraine half a year later) and Zaporozhye (which Russia was never even close to taking). Slavyansk and Kramatorsk are much smaller cities, and historically much more pro-Russian. They are not regional capitals either.

The demand is still not Ukraine-friendly in the least – Putin wants land that he never conquered, land on which Ukraine’s army had years to prepare defense lines. It’s also a very dense, highly industrialized area that is basically one big fortress. It is a lot to give up for a ceasefire.

It’s a bad deal. Ukraine should take it.

Why Ukraine should take the deal

The war keeps bleeding out both Russia and Ukraine. Both sides are likely at 200k+ dead at this point – a scale of human life loss that was unthinkable for Europe a few years ago. The war in Afghanistan, still remembered in Russia as a major disaster, was an order of magnitude less costly.

“Busification” – forceful mobilization of unwilling Ukrainian men – has become a Russian propagandistic cliché, but it remains true. Manpower shortages are real. They are real for Russia too – it has larger reserves, but more political risks, and bribing your poor into enlisting with large salaries and compensations only gets you so far – but Ukraine is seemingly in a worse place.

Russia has been advancing at a glacial pace for the last few years, suffering insane losses for every square mile. Yet, it has been advancing. Ukraine has overperformed all expectations in defending itself. Yet, it has been slowly retreating. Last week wasn’t good for Ukraine.

With the way things have been going, there is a good chance Putin can brute-force his way to Slavyansk and Kramatorsk in another year, or two, or three. By that time, the total death toll of the war will far exceed half a million. The end result will be the same for both sides, except more people will die. Way more people will die.

Ukraine is not well. It’s in a tough demographic position. It doesn’t have another hundred thousand men to spare. The southern offensive in 2023 didn’t work out. The invasion of Russia’s Kursk region didn’t work out. It’s time to quit.

If Russia is not defeated on the battlefield, won’t Putin just reinvade a few years after the peace deal? I don't think that's likely — the plan was always a quick victory, Putin didn't want a prolonged war and didn't prepare for it, and the costs were several orders of magnitude larger than anyone expected. He wants out on his own terms, not back in. The ceasefire will last.

Ideally, Russia should relinquish claims to Ukraine-held parts of Kherson and Zaporozhye. It’s not implausible legally: while Russia did put both regions in its constitution, it might circumvent it by noting the constitution doesn’t outline their exact borders. The official capital of Russian Zaporozhye region is not Zaporozhye, but rather Melitopol, a smaller (and more historically Russophilic) city that Russia captured in the first days of the war – a fact that might suggest that control over the city of Zaporozhye was never really in the plan. After the war, Russia might even reorganize the regions into a unified Melitopol oblast or something similar, which will make a lot of sense geographically and administratively.

Even if Russia doesn’t give up its claims officially, it is clearly already prepared to give them up de-facto. It needs Donbass, and doesn’t really need anything else.

Russia doesn’t really need anything else

Among pro-Russian commentators, there is a strong tendency to overestimate Ukraine’s Russophilia. Some claim that all of Ukraine is basically Russian, maybe except for the westernmost, Catholic Galicia. A more common and grounded version is that the Southeastern half of Ukraine is Russophilic and the Western half is russophobic.

Historically, indeed, this has been somewhat true. Regions of Odessa, Nikolayev/Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporozhye/Zaporizhzhia, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, and, of course, Crimea were significantly more Russian-speaking than the rest of Ukraine and tended to vote for pro-Russian parties. They still speak Russian, and are still electorally distinct.

Presidential election of 2004, one of the clearest examples of Ukraine’s political geography.

The roots of this divide are deep, centuries old. To simplify it, the “Russophobic” Western and Central Ukraine is its ethnic core, while the Southeast is a settler colony. A region known historically as Novorossiya, or New Russia (a name that is now heavily politicized and only used by hardcore Russophiles) was only really settled by the 18-19th centuries as a colonial project of the Russian Empire. Most settlers were ethnically Ukrainian, but a substantial portion were Russian, and some were foreigners from Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

Novorossiya’s melting pot produced a territory that was a strong Russo-Ukrainian mix, with Russian being a dominant language of urban areas, as well as of commerce and culture, while the peasant majority was still Ukrainian-speaking.

Russian Ukraine’s ethnic map, 1897, by me. Urban and rural areas separated. Orange is Ukrainian, blue is Russian, green is Tatar, purple is Jewish.

Bolsheviks made things even more complicated. They allotted Novorossiya (the name itself quickly fading into obscurity) to the nascent Soviet Ukraine and expanded the official role of the Ukrainian language, but also ramped up industrial urbanization which shifted the population balance in favor of Russian-speaking big cities. The result was a population that retained a vague sense of Ukrainian identity, but mostly spoke Russian at home and was culturally in sync with Russia proper.

It produced a specimen called a Russian-speaking Ukrainian. Nationalists hated it: its existence defied the myth of Ukraine’s ethno-linguistic purity. Nationalists wanted a monoethnic, monolingual, centralized unitary nation-state, and the southeastern people wanted nothing to do with it. They preferred a bilingual society with more regional self-rule and cultural variation.

The thing is, however, that separatism among them was never strong.

It was more real in Crimea, which was a very late addition to Soviet Ukraine and never had anything close to a Ukrainian majority. Outside of the peninsula, though, separatist activism was mostly concentrated in Donbass, which has a far greater share of ethnic Russians (and not just Russian speakers). Both Odessa and Kharkov did have some Russian nationalists, and were predominantly Russian-speaking, but its political life was dominated by Russophilic reformists who stood for a Russia-friendly but independent Ukraine.

By 2014 pro-Western attitudes were strong even among some Russian speakers. A great illustration is this map:

What is depicted here is the ratio of subscribers of the pro-Western and pro-Russian VK groups in February-March 2014, right when Russia was annexing Crimea. Pro-Western attitudes absolutely dominate Ukraine’s West and Center, but even in the Southeast they prevail. Crimea and Donbass are the only regions where the population was actively and predominantly pro-Russian. A notable exception is the light-blue Melitopol, the largest (modestly) pro-Russian city outside Crimea and Donbass. It’s not a coincidence that Russia’s reign over it was pretty peaceful.

Russia’s popularity in Ukraine, including the Southeast, has obviously fallen after the Crimea takeover, and collapsed after the war started. Anyone who was online in February 2022 could see that people in Odessa were not happy about being bombed. But the pro-Russian parties were not winning much in the Southeast – outside of the Ukraine-held parts of Donbass – since 2014.

2019 presidential election. Centrist Zelensky dominates the country, but Donbass stands with the uncharismatic Russophile Boyko.

With very few minor exceptions, Russia’s takeover of Slavyansk-Kramatorsk will complete its conquest of the Russophilic Ukraine. Outside of Crimea and Donbass – and a relatively Russophile, lightly populated, and strategically crucial Crimean corridor – Russia will have a hard time finding new supporters. And every inch of conquest has a price tag in blood.

There are no good endings to a war that have already killed hundreds of thousands for control over dilapidated villages and Soviet rust belt towns. Ukraine will not have its borders back, and Russia isn’t getting a cool empire. Wars usually end in disappointment. This one will – for everyone.

But a deal now will be the least-bad ending for both countries. If there is a time to stop, it is now.

My first kiss was on the doorsteps of an old Soviet-era apartment block. The girl — my friend since early childhood — went to visit her grandmother, and I walked her to the door. We parted; she went up the staircase, and I went home with a racing heart.

It was a bad kiss; we both didn't really know what we were doing. We tried going out, and it didn't really work either. We remained good friends. I don't regret any of it.

She kept visiting her grandmother almost every day whenever she was in town. Back then the old woman was still of sound mind, she just needed help with the chores.

That changed soon. She started forgetting things. She forgot in which city she lived. She forgot that her husband died 15 years ago, and started hallucinating that he was in the other room, or out shopping, or was there just now. She forgot how to take care of herself, how to cook, how to wash. She forgot the meaning of words. She forgot names and faces of people who were with her every day.

She was largely immobile and almost non-verbal in her last months. Her descent into dementia was faster than for many, but slow enough for everyone to understand that she was dying.

Yesterday she forgot how to swallow. She tried drinking some water from a glass and took a sip but forgot what one does next.

She died this morning. It was expected.

The girl kept visiting her until the last day. After it was over, she was there to clean the empty room and to take care of the cat. She is taking it better than I thought she would.

My grandmother had a stroke yesterday. She was hospitalized quickly enough to survive the day. She remains on life support, half-paralized and half-sentient.

Her descent into dementia was much more gradual. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's some ten years ago. She was losing her mind slower than many were expecting — five or so years past diagnose she was still recognising her family, although she struggled with telling apart her son from her grandson. She now tells no one apart, and can't take care of herself in any manner. Her ability for cognizant speech was reduced to rudimentary.

I won't wait for her to die before I publish this post, but she likely will soon. Even if she survives past this week, she will have maybe a few more months of barely sentient, diminished existence.

Her mind has long been dead. She doesn't remember the names of her children. The stroke, indeed, was expected.

There is a verb in Russian — отмучаться — with the exact meaning of „for a person to stop suffering because of their death.“

This is the word my mother used when her own grandmother died at 96 after several months of pain, blindness and madness. It was a harsh word to use, but it was true.

By all accounts, the woman lived a long, accomplished life. She saw her grear-grandchildren grow, myself among them. She outlived her eldest son by half a year, although her family kept it a secret from her. But when she went away, she did so in agony.

She was 96. It was expected.

We talk a lot about the tragedy of unexpected death. Some people die young. Some people die in accidents that could have been avoided. Some people are killed by criminals or die on the battlefield. It is tragic, of course. But to me, the silent terror of expected death is more horrifying. There is no going out with a blast, no way to romanticise it, no honor. You just rot, until you rotted to the end.

My first introduction to the idea of optional death was a Russian sci-fi novel for kids. I read it at 12 or something, and only remember two things from it: a nude scene, and that by the end of the book humanity solved aging and death.

The book presented the same argument that any other RLE proponent would: death is simply a huge waste of life. No one likes to die, and no one likes when their loved ones die. If we ascribe any value to life, we must ascribe negative value to death. It just made sense. It still makes sense to me. A few people have already died on me when I read it; many more since.

When you stop for a moment and think about it, you realise that it's absolutely insane that it's a fringe topic and not the official global issue #1. It's maddening.

What if right after killing smallpox the UN declared that their next target is aging and age-related mental decline? What if we spent 1% — way less than we really should — of global GDP on RLE research? Would we still live in the world where millions upon millions of kind and smart people perished every years after going through a long torture and losing their human mind? No one really thought smallpox would become history either, until it did.

I'm ranting. This is not a science post, and I am not a biologist. All I can do is lament and hope people smarter than me will figures it out.

Maybe we will get there. Maybe the magical breakthrough is already in development in some California lab, or maybe something something ASI will do it for us.

Or maybe we will just keep dying and keep burying people we once loved. Maybe I, too, will forget how to eat and drink and die as an empty human shell, a former person.

I don't know. I just wish I lived it a world where it was not expected.

https://aging.fyi/

Bellow are my seven loosely connected thoughts on this war, Syria, Israel, Middle East, and human stupidity.

1. The Middle East doesn't make sense. Look at this thing! It doesn’t make sense! Borders are random and terrible. Because borders are random and terrible, states inside them are also terrible, and they don’t work. Because states don’t work, war never ends.

This is not optimal: if something breaks all the time, it means it was poorly designed. A poorly designed nation is a death trap for its citizens. A poorly designed region of several nations is a live horror show, and the whole world is watching one.

2. Israel doesn't make sense either. It's a country of seven million Jews in a region of hundreds of millions anti-semites. In anti-Zionist reading, the Jews made the Arabs anti-semitic by being mean to Palestinians. In Zionist reading, Arabs simply hate Jews because they are evil by nature. Either way, it does not look like an equilibrium.

A successful settler-colonial project requires significant numerical superiority over the colonized. Europeans settled the New World because they were breeding like crazy, and because Native population of the Americas wasn’t very large. Jews do not have this advantage: they are a small group, and while their fertility is remarkable for a developed nation, it’s comparable to that of local Muslims. Jews barely have a slim majority in the combined Israel-Palestine, and outside its borders it’s zero Jews and a trillion Arabs.

It’s a miracle that Israel still exists, given how stupid it is as a concept. It survived because Jews are a remarkable people. But wasting them on a piece of desert because of 2000-years-old grievances and religious symbolism is probably one of the greatest misallocations of human capital in history.

3. On the other hand, Israel makes perfect sense. Look at the map: inland Middle East is a sea of Sunni Arabs, but the Levantine coast is a weird sect country – from Alawites to the north, to the Maronites, the Shias, and then the Jews are just another link in the chain.

Instead of thinking about Israel as a bastion of the West in the sea of barbarians, perhaps we should be thinking about it as a key member of the Weird Coastal Levantine Nations Club. Maybe they can all be friends?

Weird Coastal Levantine Nations, small but nice and better-developed, each a homeland to its own unique ethno-religious group, on one side; Sunni Arabs, an inland populational behemoth, on the other – perhaps that could be a more reasonable regional balance. The border would be clear, the divide would make sense. This might actually be the least bad option for the region.

Now, of course, this is a fantasy. Palestine makes Israel toxic, and right now Tel Aviv seems to have no idea what to do with it. Lebanon is a mess, and its Christians have lost the holds on power. And the Alawite state doesn’t exist.

4. Alawite independence is not a new idea (credit to Anatoly Karlin for bringing it up recently). Latakia and Tartus make up a nice small coastal nation that would finally give this sect a national home (with local Christians joining). It might even become a decent place to live: it’s relatively developed, well-positioned, and has great weather and nature. Think Cyprus.

Alawites are now the backbone of the regime, because Assads are Alawites themselves. But if it’s Basharover, their special status would be gone. That would probably be dangerous for them.

Could Russia become a protector of the Alewite state? After all, Russia already has a naval base in Tartus. And while keeping all of Syria under control might be challenging, a relatively small coastal region might be an easier task. The objection is obvious: Russia is now stuck in Ukraine. But it does seem likely (if far from certain) that 2025 would be the last year of the war; the progrev appears to be in process.

Maybe not. None of it is happening anyway.

5. Most Syrians are Sunnis, but Assad is not. That means that Sunnis are likely to rebel, and minorities are mostly regime loyalists.

Assad has displaced a significant number of Sunni Arabs and replaced them with Shias and Alawites, most promioinently in Hama and Homs. The fog of war is thick, and there is no good data, but it seems like central Syria is no longer majority-Sunni.

(I rely on a series of Russian blog posts by Ivan Vladimirov: one, two, three)

This is great for Assad regime’s stability: he’s engineering a more loyal population to counter-weight the Sunni opposition. Long-term, it’s probably a recipe for more ethnic cleansing and war.

If Homs and Hama fall, it’s probably the end for Assad. In that case Alawites should probably exit. Then they will be very lucky to avoid more blood.

6. Secular pan-Arabism has failed, probably due to lack of secular Arabs.

Islamism might have the least impressive track record of all ideologies. It produced either mediocre dictatorships or cartoonishly evil terrorist states, and is yet to give the world anything of value. But it turned out to be incredibly successful at mobilizing young Arabs to participate in organized violence.

Assad rules over a fractured society. Divisions empower him, sectarian animosities keep his regime alive. If the Islamists win, they might actually unify the Syrian majority. But they will unify them around the causes of stoning unveiled women and slaughtering Christians.

Assad’s regime is not a good state. The opposition, if empowered, is probably going to be worse.

7. Seriously, what were the English and the French even thinking when they designed this mess? That they would just rule over those Frankenstein territories indefinitely with whiteness and magic? And for what? Prestige?

Well, congratulations: Syria is no longer French, Iraq is no longer British, and the whole world is stuck dealing with endless desert wars because someone one hundred years ago didn’t think twice and didn’t look at a map a bit more. You killed millions for nothing. Well done.

And it’s not getting better. We might dream of a rational rearrangement of borders and nations, but in the end the dumb scenario almost always wins, and the dumb scenario means bloodbath.

It was all preventable at some point by simply not doing stupid things, and now it is not.

What’s much worse is that he’s a death supporter. It’s fine that most people are in peace with the idea of death, they don’t know any better. But Elon absolutely, extensively knows about RLE and is consciously against it. I think that’s discrediting.

He hasn’t a Promethean spirit, ‘tis what I’m saying. He hasn’t a heart of a tiger.

But his rightward shift was a pivotal point in the emergence of the Tech Right. And for all his personal flaws, he’s a flagship of the only salvageable and relevant movement within modern Western conservatism. Therefore, he matters.

His alliance with the Right is absolutely situational; seemingly, it’s almost entirely a consequence of his eldest child transgendering out. In that sense, funnily enough, Xavier Musk/Vivian Wilson might be one of the most consequential people of our time just by existing. However, Elon is deep into it now, and all stars point to him getting an office.

Rumors are now that Elon is going to get a position in Trump’s cabinet. He might, and maybe he thinks he wants it. But I’m pretty sure he will hate it: it’s a nasty job with not that much power. What’s worse, he will have a boss. And Elon Musk is not the person who would enjoy being someone’s employee.

If Elon was born American, I’m positive he would run for president. Of course he would: he’s a narcissist, he dreams of being king. But he’s South African, so he can’t.

His second-best option is to run for Governor of Texas.

With 30 million people and an economy larger than Russia the largest right-wing state in the country, is quite a prize even for a man with Musk’s ambitions. And it’s already his home state of a sort: he has moved Tesla HQ to Texas in 2021, and SpaceX and Twitter/X in 2024.

It just makes sense. If he ever runs for anything, it’s to rule Texas.

Can he do it?

Probably, conditional on getting Trump to support his bid.

I think Musk would be a terrible campaigner. He’s autistic and doesn’t understand people well. But he is insanely wealthy and can outspend literally any person on earth on his campaign, he seems to have Trump’s favor, and Texas is still red enough for this to work.

Now, of course, Texas already has a Republican governor, Greg Abbott. I don’t think he would be happy to let anyone take his throne, and he isn’t terribly unpopular.

The best hope for Elon campaign would be to get Trump’s support and quietly push Abbott to step down and run for senator instead (as a senator, Abbott would replace John Cornyn who is old and irrelevant and should just retire). Senator isn’t too much of a downgrade compared to governor, it’s not the worst fate.

If Abbott doesn’t step down, Musk would have to primary him. Would that work? I have no idea. Abbott is a way better politician (Musk is not a politician at all, and probably would be very bad at being one). But Musk became popular among the MAGA base, and he has infinite money. So, maybe? Ultimately, it’s probably for Trump to decide.

Of cource, if a Dem candidate beats Elon, it’s over for his political career. I don’t think it’s impossible, but it’s probably not terribly likely.

But whether Elon could win Texas is a technical question. The interesting one is why he should.

What would that achieve?

Elon Musk is not a real Republican. He voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and has been more or less a liberal for all his life. Then Xavier became Vivian, and he drifted hard to the right. But other than his deep, personal animosity for “the Woke”, he has little to do with “conservatism”. So you shouldn’t expect him to do much in terms of GOP’s most toxic issues: abortion restriction, Christian identity politics etc. Which is good, because those are looser issues. He would probably talk a lot about “fighting the Woke Mind Virus” and do something like ban drag queen story hour. But he’s not a social conservative at heart, so he wouldn’t go beyond that.

What you should expect from him is a lot of pro-capitalist policies, because he’s the richest man on earth who likes capitalism a lot. He’s also a tech billionaire who escaped California.

A tech cluster of a sort is already forming in Austin. What I would expect from a Musk governorship is to accelerate it.

Elon owns a lot of very big businesses headquartered in Texas. It is, therefore, in his interests to make Texas a super business-friendly place, even more than it is now. What would probably be even more important than policies is the symbolic meaning of the world’s largest tech billionaire becoming a head of a state that’s already been attracting tech businesses. It would solidify Austin as the Tech Right capital of the world.

With Elon in charge, I expect a new wave of startups and businesses moving from California to Texas. A large one, if Elon doesn’t fumble it.

As Peter Thiel noted in his latest Joe Rogan appearance, everyone has long been expecting California to collapse because it’s horrible, yet it never does because the network effect is too strong. Could Elon’s Austin become large enough to finally destroy California’s monopoly? Probably not, but it might, and I think it’s worth a shot.

If Texas becomes strong enough of a competitor, it might also push California to become less dysfunctional and adopt more market-friendly politics, and maybe even put their insane homeless drug addict criminal army in jail. In terms of weather California is probably the closest we have to a Paradise on Earth so if some competition might push its government to a saner direction, that would be a win for humanity.

Ultimately, all roads lead to a better future. Texas becoming a real global tech hub not restrained by a sclerotic Socialist government would be good for progress. US tech sector becoming less centralized would be good for progress. Silicon Valley facing real competition would be good for progress.

And even if Elon is a boomer, he is still a net positive for the human race. I hope he will still be one as a part of the American Right.

Now, can he fix Haiti? I’m not exactly optimistic. El Salvador, as bad as its gang issues were, is a much lighter patient than Haiti, which is more or less the closest we have to the Hell on Earth. Bukele crushed El Salvador’s gang with military force; Haiti doesn’t have a functioning state, let alone a functional country. On top of that, Haiti’s population is twice that of El Salvador. In all likelihood, it’s all a bluff: he says he can fix it because he knows he wouldn’t have to try.

Still, on the off-chance the Pacification of Haiti by Bukele does happen, here’s a fun proposal:

Bukele should use the gang members he locked up as foot soldiers for the operation. If they survive, they get to live as free men, but only on Haiti.

There are 60 000 + gang members put in prison by Bukele. They will stay in prison until they die, which means 30-50 years for most of them – they are mostly young men.

This is not a particularly great situation (although much better than allowing them to roam free). It’s expensive, you need to sustain large prisons, you need a ton of guards. Worst of all, there is absolutely no guarantee that some future president wouldn’t set them free to please some Western liberals who are “concerned with the human rights violations”. “It’s been 15 years, they’ve learned their lesson, we’re a better society now who can treat them as human beings”. That would, of course, be an insane idea, but leaders make insane decisions all the time.

To exclude that scenario long-term, there must be no prisoners to release. Executing them all would be one solution, sure, but that’s probably too much even for El Salvador. Mass executions, even of violent criminals, are a bad look. Politically that’s off the table.

However, sending criminals to die in a war isn’t. Russia did that, most infamously with late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group. They recruited prisoners with a simple deal: you fight for us, and if you survive long enough, you are a free man. Bakhmut was, to a large extent, taken by soldier-criminals. Violent, cheap, expendable, won’t be missed by many – they made ideal cannon fodder.

The obvious problem with that approach was that some did survive Bakhmut, and are now free men. Which they shouldn’t be: they are violent criminals, murderers and rapists, who are dangerous for normal people. As a result, every couple days you read stories like “Former rapist who was sentenced to 10 years in prison but was pardoned by Putin after serving in the Wagner group for 6 months rapes three more women and murders one just a week after getting freedom”. This shouldn’t happen.

Now, was the short-term increase in crime in Russia because of the released criminals greater than the long-term decrease in crime because of all those who died in Ukraine instead of getting released after serving their full terms in 5-15 years? I don’t know; very likely not. Still, even if it wasn’t an awful trade-off, it’s not ideal.

Which is why Bukele should make the same deal with his own prisoners, but then just leave them in Haiti. Forever. If they ever step a foot on the soil of El Salvador, they get back to prison for the rest of their lives.

For the gangsters that’s a pretty good deal! Life in Bukele’s prison is miserable. It’s not like you’re safe either: gang-on-gang violence happens all the time, and Bukele stopped separating prisoners by gangs. Sure, you can die in a war, but people who value their lives a lot don’t join gangs. Even if you die, you die a war hero, fighting for the better future for Haiti, not as a despised petty thug. Your poor mother may even be proud.

And if you make it, you are a free man! Now, you’re a free man in Haiti, which isn’t great. But that’s still better than 50 more years in prison. After Haiti is pacified, your services will still be needed to keep the country from collapsing again. So you just become an elite policeman for the rest of your life. That’s a great life compared to what you had in prison, and probably even as a gang member before the crackdown.

El Salvador’s gang members are a pretty horrible human capital. El Salvador itself isn’t exactly impressive, and its criminals are the worst part of its society. Still, even they are better than the Haitians, which are probably one of the worst human capital in the world. So not only shipping them away to Haiti makes El Salvador a better place, it also makes Haiti a better place. They will become a natural local elite. They will have children with local women, who will also be better than average Haitian children. An entire new race will be born. They will probably pass down the gang face tattoos as a status symbol.

Now, some dozen thousands Latin Americans won’t make a huge impact on Haiti, population 11 million. But it would probably still be a change for the better. At the very least, it would be fun.

Can an El Salvadoran gangster army actually restore order in Haiti? I have no idea. Taking out the Haitian gangs shouldn’t be particularly difficult: El Salvadorans are smarter, and they will be better-armed. Establishing military control of Port-au-Prince would probably be pretty doable. All of Haiti might be a harder task. But I’m not a war guy, I’m just taking guesses; again, I actually have no idea.

After we conquer Haiti, what’s next? Well, that’s a whole another question. One thing that we did was establishing the monopoly on power. The local gangsters are out, we control the country now. If new gangsters arise, we crush them. That’s a state. Haiti’s government was supposed to do this, but it failed, so foreigners had to do their job instead.

I have no idea of what comes after. Without the permanent gang war, Haiti would be a nicer place to live. To ensure the gang war doesn’t break out again, the island now has a permanent population of armed El Salvadorans with face tattoos. But beyond establishing some most basic order, I don’t know if there is a way to reform the country.

Still, you can’t make Haiti worse. And a pacification operation against the worst anarchy in the Western Hemisphere is a better use of 60 000 violent young men than just letting them rot for decades.

If Bukele manages to pull that off, he might really be Latin America’s savior he aspires to be.

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