212 Comments

I read somewhere that the words to the Soviet anthem were written by Roger Doucet, the Montreal Canadiens anthem singer (the best anthem singer ever, I say even as a Leafs fan). There were no lyrics, and he wanted something to sing.

Hang on, let me Google ... here's a link.

http://www.greatesthockeylegends.com/2010/04/how-roger-doucet-wrote-soviet-national.html

Expand full comment

A comment there says it's a myth -- that Doucet sang the original lyrics, touched up to remove references to Stalin.

Expand full comment

> Sergei Mikhailov

It's actually Sergei Mikhalkov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Mikhalkov (also the father of the filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov). For that effort, he is affectionately called "gimnyuk" by Russian people, which is the combination of words "gimn" (anthem) and "govnyuk" (shithead).

Expand full comment
author

Thanks for the correction; the mistake was mine and not Gessen's.

Expand full comment

Speaking of corrections, "inyo" in "turning himself inyo a one-man substitute for the hijacked news media" should actually be "into".

Expand full comment

As elaborate methods for suicide go, handing Vladimir Putin a critical biography you wrote is certainly up there.

Expand full comment

It would indeed be a bad idea, which makes me wonder: did Gessen really want to do that, or are they only saying they were going to do that, in order to increase the perception of what a big damn hero they were? If you've just written a book about what a corrupt, vicious. murderous guy Putin is and how he gets rid of the opposition, why would you hand the same to him when he now knows your name and face?

Gessen might be fibbing a teensy bit there, or they might have wanted to provoke "look, look, I am being martyred!" incident.

Expand full comment

Eh, I’ve had the experience on working on a project where public criticism would have been incredibly harmful to me, and it still took a lot of willpower not to do it.

Expand full comment

Masha Gessen is a very influential jewish-american descended from the soviet elite. She worked for american-supported NGOs, Radio Liberty, the NYT and brazenly expressed so many anti-russian views that at the time I thought that she was deliberately trying to get herself arrested to create a scandal. The truth is that she is too elite to ever be in any danger from Putin and she knows it.

Expand full comment

It's not that she's too elite, but rather that she poses not even the slightest threat to him.

Expand full comment

It's weird that while Putin is "offpage," he's set up as some kind of menacing supervillain, but in all his "onpage" appearances, at least the ones excerpted for this review, he comes across as perfectly reasonable, even likable: in the story of how he proposed to his wife from the main review, the vignette here of how he took the news of his dog dying, and how he handled Gessen's petty defiance in refusing to cooperate with his Siberian crane photo-op.

Expand full comment

I'm not sure that "reasonable" and "likeable" are the qualities that come across in those scenes for most readers.

Expand full comment

Gessen lives after defying him to his face. A man who does not see reasonableness in that is being wilfully blind.

Expand full comment

Simply not murdering anyone who disagrees with you in any way is a pretty low bar for reasonableness.

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2023·edited Aug 4, 2023

I don't recall ever killing anyone that defied me, but admittedly my memory isn't the greatest.

Expand full comment

I expect you lack the power to do so and get away with it, so of course it doesn't mean as much when you spare people's lives.

Expand full comment

Not murdering anyone who does something you dislike is pretty low standard for reasonableness. I mean yes, technically such behavior can be described as "reasonable", but declaring a man is completely reasonable because he is not psychotic maniac instantly murdering everybody who slighted him is taking that too far, I think.

Expand full comment

Can you name anyone who doesn't meet that standard of reasonableness?

Expand full comment

Just one? Sure, the emperor Tiberius.

Expand full comment

Wow, you have low standards.

Expand full comment

Augusten Burroughs wrote a book called "A Wolf At The Table: A Memoir Of My Father", which describes his father as the same kind of over-literal emotionless man, who is also extremely capable of petty vengeance. So, it doesn't strike me as weird at all.

Expand full comment

Who is Augusten Burroughs?

Expand full comment

A writer, most famous for his various memoirs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusten_Burroughs

Expand full comment

Evil people are often likeable, Stalin seems like a great man to meet in a pub.

Expand full comment

Before WW2, people who met with Hitler often came back raving about what a lovely man he was.

Expand full comment

There are many many descriptions of Hitler as a terminally boring poorly educated boor obsessed with a limited repertoire of topics he would harangue his listeners with. He apparently did know how to turn on the charm to fund raise though. Stalin climbed the ladder by being a bureaucrat whom none of the charismatic party star intellectuals considered a threat. Putin does fit that mold.

Expand full comment

Yes, Stalin has not been prominent in any pre-revolution groups, and the big guys treated him rather condescendingly - sure, he's useful for many tasks that do not require particular brilliance, but that's it. He's certainly not part of the elite. His rise to power was very slow and included a lot of alliances with one powerful group against another, and somehow at the end he was always the last man standing, and nobody really noticed that until it was too late. Very similar to what is described about Putin - maybe that's how real dictators are made?

Expand full comment

Similar to Xi

Expand full comment

There's also this:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1091768/Hitler-perfect-boss-Former-maid-breaks-silence-charming-dictator.html

And a few more like it from other household servants. Apparently one can be quite pleasant in one's domestic life, while simultaneously pursuing genocide as a public policy. I can't help but feel that people who want to paint Hitler as a slavering beast are trying to persuade themselves that "no, I could never do something like that".

Expand full comment

Unfortunately, there's no good reason to believe that kind and pleasant people are unlikely to commit murder. It's not a bit hard to get us to murder. The military and the police do it to recruits all the time. It's probably a lot easir to convince someone to commit murder in some context that redefines it as justice, or as protecting the US, than it is to convince the same person to give a bunch of money to these worthy causes. Fuck.

Expand full comment

I think humans have a setting where we can treat other humans as people, or not as people, and that's kind of what was going on with the Nazis. They could be nice if you fit into their circle of "good people like me", but if they thought you stepped out of bounds... And yeah, this sort of "selectively sociopathic" thing is one of the things military training is supposed to do.

And of course, there's anger. I don't think most people have the faintest clue what anger can lead to. Or at least that's what I tell myself, because if I let myself start thinking that the people saying "you should be angry", "you should be outraged" know what the effects can be, my PTSD starts coming up with ideas that would get me banned if I described them. :-/

Expand full comment

I would hazard an estimate that >90% of Americans would be *horrified* if they told their friend that said friend's dog died and the friend showed no emotion other than a mild annoyance that it was mentioned to them

Expand full comment

Stoicism is not an American virtue, true.

Expand full comment

Stoicism does not mean completely unfeeling. Putin’s behavior, if true, is closer to psychopathy.

Expand full comment

We don't have access to Putin's inner experience, only his outward expression of it, which is highly controlled (as with all politicians).

Expand full comment

Or, not that I think this is the case with Putin, a victim of abuse.

There's a lot of reasons why people may develop the habit of controlling their emotional expression very tightly. Being in the KGB, and being in politics, both seem like very good reasons by themselves.

Expand full comment

In the sentence, "Putin wanted a photo op with rare Siberian cranes and told Volkrug Sveta they would be providing it.," who is "they"?

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2023·edited Aug 4, 2023

Presumably Vokrug Sveta, that is, the magazine would organize the photo op.

Expand full comment

> Masha Gessen [...] self-described as “the only publicly out gay person in [Russia]”; since then (like everyone else) they have declared themselves nonbinary with they/them pronouns.

^ from the main review

Expand full comment

If that’s right, that’s confusing as hell. Better to just use „Masha“ then.

Expand full comment

That stupid pronoun thing makes me take her less seriously.

Expand full comment

Especially when the pronouns don't even exist, like ze or zey. What's that all about? It's just a ridiculous affectation.

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2023·edited Aug 4, 2023

I suppose another reason it bothers me in her case: One of the first things you're told as a young journalist--of the news variety anyway--is that "You're not the story. Keep your opinions to yourself. Facts front and center." She's distracting attention from her actual work.

Does she want to be recalled as "that Russian-born journalist for the New Yorker who used to be a lesbian but is now ... I dunno ... but she uses the 'they' pronoun"? Or for a compelling piece of reporting and writing?

Expand full comment
author

It isn't mentioned in the book; I can't remember if I got it from the postscript or Gessen's Wikipedia article. I think that counts as Gessen not centering themselves in the story. I don't think journalists have an obligation not to be interesting people in any way such that nobody ever thinks about them when writing about their work.

Expand full comment

Neopronouns avoid the problem at the top of this thread (where it's not clear whether it's plural or singular 'they'), but I do wish we could settle for one of them. Maybe in some decades it'll be true.

Expand full comment
User was indefinitely suspended for this comment. Show
Expand full comment

I understand that point of view (although I disagree quite strongly with your classification of people who feel otherwise, even if I have my own gripes with Twitter and SJWs; and I think your argument glosses over older existing terms like 'tomboy'), but iff you accept that some people are nonbinary and treating them as such is a good idea, having unambiguously singular neopronouns is a good reason for them to exist versus relying on a singular they. That's all I'm saying here.

Expand full comment
author

Banned for this comment.

Expand full comment

Unfortunately for you, language is ambiguous, and culturally, singular they is what culturally most people (outside of teens on Tumblr) have settled on, presumably because it was already in common usage for a long time when speaking about someone whose gender was either abstract (ie "a teacher should not hit their students") or unknown (ie "John told me that his friend Pat will be bringing their kids to the party" when you don't know if "Pat" is "Patrick" or "Patricia").

Expand full comment

I think you're making some wrong assumptions about me, given I don't know why you think this is "unfortunat[e] for [me]". I'm fine with the singular they, I'm just explaining why some people might want to introduce singular non-binary pronouns that don't have an alternate meaning yet (and have expressed that I wish that there'd be only one of those, but oh well).

Expand full comment

Neither of those usages of “they” are actually singular. In the first case “teacher” does not imply an individual but a class of individuals with that profession. So plural “they” makes intuitive sense. In the second case this usage only works for me if we assume Pat has an unstated partner. Otherwise it could imply the kids belong somehow to both John and Pat. Singular “they” in the sense that gender advocates now want us to use it has never existed in English. A sentence like “Masha knocked on the door, Putin asked them to come in” is just grammatically wrong and ambiguous.

Expand full comment

"Singular they" has rather a long history in english:

https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/677177#:~:text=The%20Oxford%20English%20Dictionary%20traces,Hastely%20hi%C8%9Ded%20eche%20.%20.%20.

with confirmed use stretching back to middle ages,

so at the very least it is a correct, historically justified english language form

Expand full comment

Those "neopronouns" seem to be in the decline, with "they/them" taking over.

(See the 10th and 11th charts here: https://www.gendercensus.com/results/2020-worldwide/)

Expand full comment

Really? It's a pretty basic Nietzschean struggle to escape the chains of group identity, to be perceived without all of the baggage that comes the second you hear "he" instead of "she" or vice versa.

Expand full comment

I feel like if we're going to use Gessen's preferred pronouns then we should also use Putin's, which as I understand it are Он/Его/Ему/Им/Нём.

Expand full comment

Which, in English, simply translates to essentially "he/him", if Google translate is to be trusted. And everyone does use his preferred pronouns, because those are words in a specific language, not names.

Seems uncontroversial, unless there's some nuance to Russian language speakers with the pronouns you've shared that doesn't easily translate.

Expand full comment

There isn't. Melvin's merely being cute.

On the other hand, in heavily grammatically gendered languages, the logistics of acknowledging non-binariness do become a little more involved. Still worth it, by my lights, of course. Where there's a will, there's a they.

Expand full comment

How I interpreted it is that Putin asked Vokrug Sveta to provide the photo op, so "they" refers to Vokrug Sveta. Then Vokrug Sveta told Gessen to do it, Gessen refused and was fired. I don't know why Putin would have told Vokrug Sveta that Masha Gessen specifically would need to provide the photo op, especially since it is claimed that he didn't know who Gessen was.

Expand full comment

Same here.

Expand full comment

Regarding the last passage, I mean, Putin is a tyrant and a mass murderer, but why would it be strange and sign of his shallowness and non-perceptivness that he isn’t well informed about something which is obviously of very low importance to a head of a huge empire? I don't presume that, like, Obama (or Eisenhower, to keep it non-partisan) would be better informed in that situation.

Imho this speaks more to a vanity and exaggerated sense of self-importance on the part of the author than about Putin. As I wrote previously below the review itself, based on Scott’s writing, I am not impressed by this book and don't think it is a good source.

Expand full comment

As someone, who left Russia less than a year ago, I agree. Gessen is a really talented journalist and writer, but boy is she biased. First of all, Putin is smart. For example, he is no economist, yet he's been able to choose qualified (and quite liberal) IFC-style people to run Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank. When several years ago local industrial lobby tried to criticize inflation targeting (and thus high interest rate) policy of the RCB, he came back with "look at what happens in Turkey". His prime-minister is actually one of the most capable technocrat of his generation. And the apparent incompetence of the military and secret services looks more of a feature (coup-proof) than a bug.

Actually, the amount of reforms that Putin conducted in the 2000s s quite remarkable (e.g. there is private property for agricultural land in Russia; there is none in Ukraine for that matter).

So I think the story is actually much more simple: a smart and capable, but cynical bureaucrat gradually gets corrupted by the absolute power and 23 years of sitting on top of a post-soviet system of governance.

It's a cautionary tale that power inevitably corrupts and peoples of the world have to enforce the goddam term limit if they want to be governed properly.

Expand full comment

Yea, I agree that Putin is competent. Amount of contortions people go into when they try to portray him as bumbling bufoon is embarassing. About being corrupted, I am not so sure; isn't the whole invasion of Ukraine thing a proof that he is an actual true believer in Russian imperial ideology?

He would be much better off had he not done that. As would we all.

Expand full comment

There's an alternative interpretation that Putin does everything to maximize his popularity ratings, and the invasion is simply his latest gambit in response to the latest slump. At first I thought that this was ridiculous, as the open war surely would quickly lead to disastrous consequences. But it did not, despite the offensive quickly getting bogged down, and the ratings remain close to all-time high, so clearly he had a realistic assessment of the situation.

Expand full comment

To be even more cynical, this was the same ploy as Maggie Thatcher and the Falklands. Nothing like invoking the Dunkirk Spirit and national unity to head off criticism of domestic policy!

Expand full comment

A more neutral reading of history would cast Argentina as the "unprovoked and unjustified" aggressor, and analogize Thatcher to Zelensky.

Expand full comment

So what are you suggesting, that Thatcher somehow forced the Argentine dictatorship to invade?

Expand full comment

I mean invading Ukraine was a pretty big gambit, you'd have to be in a desperate enough situation to be willing to take that risk. Even though Putin's popularity was wanning pre-invasion it was still relatively high.

Expand full comment

Presumably he thought that the risk was not all that high. And, considering that the invasion went about as badly as anyone could have reasonably expected back then, and still turned out basically fine for him, who's to say that he was mistaken?

Expand full comment
Aug 8, 2023·edited Aug 8, 2023

>Presumably he thought that the risk was not all that high

What are you basing that on?

>still turned out basically fine for him, who's to say that he was mistaken?

It's severely damaged Russia's standing internationally, to the point where there is an ICC warrant out for his arrest.

Expand full comment

I'm not yet ready to discard the possibility that the stated reason - planned Ukrainian offensive on separatist Republics - isn't somewhat true. The situation with Donetsk and Lugansk was going nowhere - neither side could let the other have them, because local nationalists would eat the leader who made this decision alive. I believe Zelensky initially planned to try to solve the conflict peacefully, maybe by following Minsk agreements, or maybe some other way, but was blocked at every opportunity by his nationalist allies, who threatened him with the second Maidan. And, to be honest, by lack of interest from Russia, either because Putin did not believe (correctly) he could pull it off with domestic resistance, or because Putin wanted more.

But with both sides at a dead end, and constant shelling of big cities? Many in Ukraine pushed Zelensky to return the republics by force, and soon. NATO was already slowly re-arming Ukrainian military even before Russian attack, so it doesn't seem impossible that the generals might want to test the new toys. A quick and decisive strike against republican militias - not yet supported by main Russia army - could have resulted in significant advances, maybe to the point where it would be too costly for Russia to try to rescue them. Ukraine would have full international support for this, too. So if Putin wanted to keep the republics - and prevent Ukrainian forces from threatening Crimea, which also seemed like a possibility in the worst case - he might have decided to launch a preventive attack. Interestingly enough, it was preceded by so much warnings and posturing I think he didn't really WANT to do it - the burst of diplomacy right between the invasion almost seemed enough to prevent it. But in the end, Ukraine and NATO refused to yield a single point, and called Putin's bluff. Turned out, he wasn't bluffing.

Expand full comment

I don't see how this is in contradiction with the fact he is a true believer in Russian imperial ideology; that ideology is the reason why Russia tries to conquer, and hold on to (bits of) Ukraine. It's not like Putin has some large fraction of his corrupt personal wealth invested in Crimea or something.

Expand full comment

Where was that the “stated reason”? Putin gave a mixed bag of reasons for the war, including the nonsensical “denazification”.

Expand full comment

"Denazification" is stated as a goal (one of several), not the reason in his initial speech. The reason given is protection of people in separatist republics and Crimea, and prevention of NATO expansion to Ukraine. I guess "imminent invasion" appeared in a later speech, and stuck with me, but it wasn't really out of question, was it?

As an aside, I don't see denazification as nonsensical - current Ukrainian national heroes were, at the very least, nazi allies - even Polish recently chastised Ukraine for its celebration of Bandera, and Poland was very supportive of Ukraine in everything else. And since the war began, German crosses were spotted enough times on Ukrainian armor to at least raise questions, not to mention they actually named one unit "Edelweiss" - a very well known SS unit on the Eastern front, and certainly a name to avoid if you don't want to sound like a nazi. But in general, I suspect "denazification" is a smokescreen, same as "decommunization" in Ukraine was a smoke-screen for purging anything Russian. I don't know what officials really mean by it, but if I were in their shoes, it would first and foremost mean forcing Ukraine to restore Russian language in schools and remove all bans on Russian media, to return the country to Russian propaganda sphere. A military victory that doesn't achieve that is a long-term loss. So this goal is no more nonsensical than announcing to try to bring "democratic values" to Whateverstan - nothing, but time can teach random sheep-herders democracy, but at least they will be able to watch Coca-Cola ads and Hollywood movies on their village TVs instead of non-stop prayers.

Expand full comment

Most of America’s national heroes were slave owners; if someone were to invade the US today and rationalize the war under the auspices of anti-slavery, it would be nonsensical. And aren’t many of Ukraine’s tanks German? So why wouldn’t many have the German cross on it? It’s the symbol of the bundeswehr, in your opinion does that make the bundeswehr a Nazi organization?

Lastly, many leaders of Russia’s largest paramilitary organization in the Ukraine are Nazi-sympathetic; so the ‘some Ukrainians are Nazi-sympathizers’ argument can be as easily (and I would still say nonsensically) turned around to say Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a ‘Nazi invasion.’

Expand full comment

That's absolutely insane russian propaganda, Medvedev can use that text for inspiration. Checked who MaxEd is and it's "Game programmer from Russia".

There was never any "separatist Republics", it was always just russia.

//"constant shelling of big cities"

Constant shelling of big cities never happened. When constant shelling happens cities start looking like Mariupol and Bakhmut, and nothing looked like that before the full-scale invasion. Russian army bombed not occupied by them cities, Ukrainian army answered sometimes. One of the episodes from 2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2015_Mariupol_rocket_attack

//"Many in Ukraine pushed Zelensky to return the republics by force, and soon"

That's a lie. No one was supporting or pushing that. Just no one at all. Who are those "many"? Which party supported that? It was absolutely unpopular idea among all population, among all politicians. No one was pushing Zelensky for war. That was absolutely insane idea for everyone. No one was ready, no one was preparing for that. But that's a classical Russian lie.

//"republican militias - not yet supported by main Russia army "

Again, it was russian army from the very beginning. A lot of obituaries are appearing in Russia with the phrase 'he was fighting since 2014".

// "NATO was already slowly re-arming Ukrainian military even before Russian attack"

NATO wasn't doing anything when Russia attacked in 2014 and annexed Crimea, and NATO wasn't even popular in Ukraine before that. Western governments were pushing Ukraine for not acting, not doing anything, and this war is partly the fault of those politicians. We should've fought in 2014 and it would be less blood and suffering and death.

And this "Game programmer from Russia"... Scott was writing: " I’m glad the Ukrainians are resisting and glad that most of the world has avoided his particular style of thuggish despotism, but can’t help feeling heartbreak for everyone still stuck in Russia." And this dude is one who is "stuck in Russia", and he's fine and we're dying trying to resist country of people like him. We're gonna fight and die and win, I hope, but these people don't deserve any "heartbreak" from anyone.

Expand full comment

>> There was never any "separatist Republics", it was always just russia.

And where did people like Alexander Zakharchenko, Pavel Gubarev, Mikhail Tolstykh (and many more far less well-known) come from?

IMHO, it would be fairer to say that Russia extensively supported those republics, but they would not have ever appeared without deep dissatisfaction with Ukrainian state (and longing for the greener grass over the fence, in Russia) within sizable share of the population.

>> Constant shelling of big cities never happened

Constant, but low-intensity shelling was happening, and occasionally big cities were hit. There are plenty of OSCE reports about that.

Also, am I correct that you are not debating the 'But with both sides at a dead end' part?

If so, what were the remaining options for both sides?

>> Again, it was russian army from the very beginning. A lot of obituaries are appearing in Russia with the phrase 'he was fighting since 2014".

There were a lot of volunteers from Russia joining locally-controlled militia in the first few months (up till July'14); then Russian army briefly directly intervened to prevent annihilation of that militia (July-Sep'14), and then militia was reorganized to be fully controlled by Russia... but even after that reorg, lower-ranked officers and all soldiers were volunteers (locals or from Russia).

If we say that volunteers make it 'Russian army' - should we also say that UK supported ISIL? (There were hundreds, if not thousands of UK nationals in the ISIL?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_and_the_Islamic_State )

>> NATO wasn't doing anything when Russia attacked in 2014

Well, in 2013, there were

contract opportunities N33191-13-R-1240 and N33191-14-R-0601 - reconstruction of school and hospital in Crimea by US Navy. And US Navy doesn't improve civilian infrastructure in foreign countries - unless it is next to the US Navy base and then it is standard part of PR / relationship-building with the local community.

So perhaps there was _something_ going on, with the intent of replacing Russian naval base in Crimea with US one?

>> We should've fought in 2014 and it would be less blood and suffering and death.

FWIW: Ukraine fought and lost in 2014; fighting stopped after Minsk-I accords, which Ukraine didn't implement.

That prompted another round of heavy fighting in 2015 (Debaltseve). Ukraine lost; fighting stopped after Minsk-II accords, which Ukraine didn't implement.

So if 'less blood and suffering and death' is the goal - perhaps doing what Russia wanted would have helped?

Expand full comment

For this to make any sense, one would have to assume that the Ukrainians would have been willing to invade the Republics. Given that the Russians would almost certainly have counter-invaded, I think that requires a level of stupidity on the Ukrainians side that hasn't been in evidence. They also would have lost NATO support (it's a defensive organization), and probably the chance to enter into the EU. Can't see it.

Also, saying "Ukraine and NATO refused to yield a single point, and called Putin's bluff", is a strange claim (it sounds very much like "Don't force me to hurt you"). What point could Ukraine have yielded?

Expand full comment

Why would Ukraine lose NATO support if it invaded? That "defensive organization" did enough invading of its own. Also, Ukraine would be reclaiming their own territory, so there would nothing stopping NATO from supporting this assault, morally or politically. Not directly with troops, of course, but by continuing to re-arm Ukrainian army. I'm not sure what level of support was for forceful return of republics, but from pre-war articles from Carnegie Foundation, which I found even-handed and trustworthy, it seemed to me that Zelensky was constantly being pushed toward this solution by various factions. And I think that it might just be possible that Ukrainian generals were sure enough of their troops that they promised president they will reach Russian border before Russian could react. In hindsight, I think, they could have been right - Ukrainian army proved to be much stronger after 8 years of conflict, training and re-arming. I don't believe Russia had enough troops on the ground to stave off a really serious invasion, and might not be able to bring them in quickly enough.

On the second point, "don't force me to hurt you" is exactly what was going on. But blackmail is a norm in geopolitics (see current situation in Niger). Ukraine could have promised non-aligned status, I think, and it might have been enough, or at least put things off for a few years, and then, who knows? Putin might have died, or whatever. Or, before that, it might have actually tried to follow Minsk Agreements, no matter how bad they were (Uh, European leaders saying those agreements were a sham to give Ukraine a chance to re-arm aren't doing a lot of good to their cause this year).

Expand full comment

Please tell me when NATO endorsed a war for territorial acquisition.

But I've been in conversations like this before. So to "cut to the chase" as it were, I have a strong bias in favor of democratic institutions. I admit that I probably give greater benefit of the doubt to institutions and nations that at least plausibly claim to be acting to promote democracy in some form. I also have a strong bias against "real politik" or "political realism" that, while claiming to be objective and simply recognize the reality of machiavellian politics between nations, in fact normalizes it. So, with that in mind...

I'm sure you have seen how tepid Western European support was in the beginning of this war (I'm referring to 2014). Public support was also tepid. No one was in favor of "intervention by proxy". Even after the Russians attacked Kiev, Western national leaders dragged their feet and didn't commit to much until after it became clear that the Russians weren't going to achieve their territorial goals. Only within the last year has significant military support and training been made available at a scale that could significantly affect the outcome. So, no, I regard it as extremely unlikely that the Ukrainians would assume enough Western support and material to keep any territory they might have taken from the Russians in some sort of rapid attack (which they have never shown any capacity to pull off, even now, let alone then).

Expand full comment

> Amount of contortions people go into when they try to portray him as bumbling bufoon is embarassing.

Having watched his speeches for years, there’s been a visible decline in him in the past ~5 years, especially since Covid. It’s a bit like with Biden where you keep questioning how much he’s really there. Putin was capable and shrewd in his heyday, but describing his current demeanour as bumbling and confused is totally valid.

Expand full comment

Very interesting. Can you point to specific examples where he's clearly less competent than five years ago, or link something that does?

Expand full comment

Frankly just watch any of his media interviews from the past few years, especially the interactive ones where he’s not just reading from a page. The Direct Line from June 2021 is a good example and was memed to death when it came out. It’s mostly stuff like mannerisms and the way he constructs sentences so idk how apparent it is if you don’t speak Russian.

Expand full comment

Yes, term limits is the heart of the matter. Putin was a competent ruler the first years, but he has held absolute power for too long. It is the classic problem with enlightened autocracy: When it across time slides toward non-enlightened autocracy, there is no one around (no institutional mechanism) to interrupt the slide.

Expand full comment

Though countries where absolutism is the widely-accepted norm don't seem to have so many problems with rulers becoming corrupt over time, at least not to the same degree. Maybe persistently circumventing the official (democratic, term-limited) process has a coarsening effect on a person's character.

Expand full comment

Um, I think Russia is a paradigmatic example of a country where absolutism is an accepted norm.

Expand full comment

If that were really the case, Putin wouldn't have to go through ostensibly democratic elections, or resort to chicanery like periodically stepping down from being President and getting one of his political allies accepted instead.

Expand full comment

Well, compared to what? There are ostensible elections even in North Korea. I cannot think of any present country where autocracy is legitimated solely on the basis of the divine right of the ruler, although North Korea is close. Its not an 18th century anymore. So I honestly don't know what country do you think of as being less corrupt because absolutism is more accepted there. Of course North Korea is imho not a well governed country.

When I said that that Russia is a paradigmatic example of country with the norm of absolutism, I meant it in a historical sense, that constraints on the Russian rulers were unusually weak since the founding of premodern Russian state by an appropriatelly named guy called Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century. Imho that tradition is an important part of the reason why liberal democracy has such difficulty to take roots in Russia compared to e.g. Poland.

Expand full comment

It’s only the Arab monarchies that aren’t officially democratic, although places like China don’t pretend very hard. Russia’s a heavily rigged democracy, not a ceremonial democracy though.

Expand full comment

As jumpingjacksplash said, the Arab monarchies. Also, I don't see why we can't compare with historical examples as well. If "absolute power corrupts absolutely" is true, it should hold true for all time periods, not just the twenty-first century.

<i>When I said that that Russia is a paradigmatic example of country with the norm of absolutism, I meant it in a historical sense, that constraints on the Russian rulers were unusually weak since the founding of premodern Russian state by an appropriatelly named guy called Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century</i>

But the official constitution is democratic, which is more relevant for my suggestion that "Maybe persistently circumventing the official (democratic, term-limited) process has a coarsening effect on a person's character" than something Ivan the Terrible did five hundred years ago.

Expand full comment

Haven't we discussed this already under a different post, as to why the Western attempt to export democracy has led to a lot of sham 'democracies' where in effect it's a dictatorship or authoritarian rule, but they keep the veneer of 'free elections' and 'term limits' (until they get the courts or parliament to over-ride those) to show off to the UN/US that "Look, we're a democracy, the Leader For Life was democratically elected with 98% of the vote!" and keep the farce of "we won't invade a democratic country - until we have a good reason to do so, said good reason being what benefits us and never mind how long the people of that country have been suffering" going.

Expand full comment

I don't remember that discussion, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2023·edited Aug 4, 2023

I guess a large part of the reason he isn't well-informed, if such is the case, is because people are understandably hesitant to bring him bad news!

Expand full comment

That is definitely part of it, wanting to avoid "shooting the messenger", but I do wonder how much was Gessen not being as important as they think they are. The part about "I wanted to give him my book" sounds like an attempt to get attention and boost their importance as a 'threat' to the regime. If Gessen really was All That, Putin probably would already have had a copy of the book. We've seen what he does when he genuinely wants to get someone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko

Expand full comment

If Obama or Eisenhower met one-on-one with a journalist they would make sure, and their staff would make sure, that they were briefed on who they were talking to. So I think it counts as being poorly informed (it wouldn’t if they met at a party or something). I think this is about Purim’s staff not wanting to bring bad news—which *is* his fault (in general, not the specific instance).

Expand full comment

Especially in the days of the internet where it takes 15 seconds to find out.

Expand full comment

Yea, but in Russia, journalists are far less important than in the US. Gessen's potential to cause trouble by recording a gaffe or something was zero. This was an equvalent of a meeting with a minor bureaucrat. Something which maybe wouldn't happen in the US, but Russian managerial style is, you know, more personal.

Expand full comment

We're getting all this from Gessen's side, and it's in their interest to present Putin in the worst possible light. We don't actually know for a fact that Putin was unaware of who they were.

It's equally possible that Gessen is just not that important for Putin to know or care about 'oh some nobody journalist'.

Expand full comment

Given his habit of murdering regime-critical journalists, and Gessen's extreme criticality, that seems out of character

Expand full comment

Perhaps his murderous tendencies are played up in the west, and are not as extreme or all-encompassing as his opponents would like us to believe? I have no doubt that he's ordered the murder of lots of opponents, but likely far less than some people imply.

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2023·edited Aug 4, 2023

I can imagine the American equivalents of this, because after all didn't we see it with the Parks Service or Department of the Interior or whatever after Trump was elected?

Imagine there's some nature magazine (not National Geographic) and the President wants to do a photo-op with it and some endangered species or rare animals, but the editor refuses because they disagree politically. How would the mainstream media cover that, do you think, in the following instances?

(1) It's Trump

(2) It's Obama

I propose that in (1) they'd be all over the brave critic and the freedom of the press and speaking truth to power and how the bad president is only using this as a cynical ploy and doesn't really care about the rare animals, this is yet another example of why he's a bad man.

In (2) the roles would be flipped: now the president is a good man who is trying to get the cause of endangered species publicised and get the public to act on it, and the dissident editor is a bad person who is probably a racist as well because why else would they object to doing this with this president?

Expand full comment
author

I'm not sure. I had heard of Gessen (in a weak sense; when I saw their book in the list of Putin biographies, I thought "oh, that's by that famous person I've heard of for writing stuff about Russia"). I have no special interest in Russian politics and they might be the only Russian journalist whose name I know. I suppose I have the advantage that Gessen is more West-facing, plus I'm writing ten years later once they've become more famous, but I'm still surprised that I know something about Russian politics that Vladimir Putin doesn't.

Expand full comment

For what it's worth, I've never heard about Gessen before, or maybe I've just forgotten. They are probably far more widely known in the US than in Czechia, where I live.

According to wikipedia, the book in question was written in English, and I’ve found no record of Russian edition (although there is a Czech edition, from 2016).

Like, Putin gets his briefing papers in Russian, and when they are not on international affairs, probably from people who don't speak English. This would be an equivalent like when US president would unknowingly meet someone on unrelated domestic business who wrote his biography in Chinese, sold to a middling success in China. It doesn't seem that strange that this would slip past whoever prepares the briefing.

And therei is another possibility that Putin knew and just pretended he doesn't.

Expand full comment

OK, not sure if I by myself fully agree with what I will wright next, but - as somebody who leave a Russia about a year ago - big part of why Russian liberals (of those Gessen is part of) were so unsuccessful is because they think that knowing who is who in liberal circles is a main state business.

Expand full comment

I don't know if this is something I'm "not supposed to talk about" (appropriately for the Putin context) but...is anyone else bothered by Scott's persistent use of "they"? It actually makes it difficult to follow some of these paragraphs, which I had to read several times to work out that he was just talking about Gessen herself rather than the magazine staff as a whole.

I'm surprised enough that Scott is bending over backwards to be ultra-woke on this issue, after getting so much attention and respect for criticising other parts of wokeness (including things much less absurd than this). But when it extends to interfering with readability and clarity, I really think it's crossing a line.

(Not trying to start a fight, just perplexed and a little disappointed that ACX is not standing up for the "no, logic and objective reality do not subordinate to ideology" position as much as I hoped.)

Expand full comment

I agree it makes parts of this post and the main review very hard to comprehensibly read. I wonder if perhaps an earlier draft used "she", some prereader pointed out Masha's latest preference, and Scott hastily patched the pronouns without rereading to check it's possible for anyone to understand the theyified version.

Expand full comment

I found it easy to understand throughout for what it's worth.

Expand full comment

"I scheduled an appointment with a new doctor for next week. I hope they can figure out what's wrong with my shoulder" sounds normal and fine and clear.

"I scheduled an appointment with a new doctor for next week. I hope he or she can figure out what's wrong with my shoulder" seems clearly worse, but also like the only way to avoid singular they.

I'm not a big fan of neo-pronouns and certainly not very 'woke', but singular they has been used forever and I think is a great compromise position.

Expand full comment

Absolutely. But when being used in a context where there's also an organisation and another group of people, both of whom would be just as natural referents for "they", it renders a passage confusing; just in the same way that when narrating an interaction between four girls, it'd probably be quite confusing to use "she" too much.

Expand full comment

Yes. I'm a big fan of singular "they", but this is one of the main problems. Different people have different intuitions about what it can apply to, and so sentences get written which are ambiguous or ungrammatical under one set of intuitions.

Personally I like the idea from some conlang or another, where there's a set of pronouns that begin with each sound in the language, to be used referring to entities which have names starting with that sound. You'd still run into problems if you have a sentence involving Albert and Alice in Alsace-Lorraine, but most of the time it does the job of simplifying the rest of the language.

Expand full comment

Singular they is fine for talking about a hypothetical or as-yet-unknown person. It's a ridiculous affectation when demanded by a real person, much like if I demanded that you use "you" for my third person pronoun and "I" for my second-person pronoun.

Expand full comment

You can use generic "he" as well.

Expand full comment
Aug 11, 2023·edited Aug 11, 2023

>"I scheduled an appointment with a new doctor for next week. I hope they can figure out what's wrong with my shoulder" sounds normal and fine and clear.

Maybe it's an ESL thing, but it definitely introduces a decrepancy/doubt/confusion in the sentence. Are you implying that you'll meet "the doctor and some other people (his team?)"? Is it a typo? Is there an information you forgot to write? I can't know, and if one hasn't been paying attention to a very specific milieu (and, say, still relies, silly as he is, on his highschool english textbook), the notion that "they" can be singular is utterly alien.

Expand full comment

I found it confusing wherever I encountered it, for what is worth.

Expand full comment

"Not trying to start a fight" and claiming that using they/them pronouns is "bending over backwards to be ultra-woke" in the same paragraph. Nice trolling.

On a funnier note, this reminds me of Dylan Moran's standup: "I don't want to make any huge generalizations about women, you know, not here to do that, it's vulgar... but all I'd say is that they have no feelings" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUH34iqK7cI

Expand full comment

I agree with you but also with the basic premise of the OP. I too had trouble understanding who is meant. Especially since I didn’t remember Gessen‘s preference, so it was just confusing.

Expand full comment

Yes, it was confusing for me too.

Expand full comment

Look, I could read your accusation of trolling in two ways. On the one hand, that by disagreeing with the pronoun ideology I am by definition being provocative, because every reasonable person knows you're not allowed to disagree with that. Or on the other hand, that you interpreted my "not trying to start a fight" as "not trying to disagree with you". I'll charitably assume the second, and say that I meant that I am trying to pointedly disagree, but not to be insulting. And that I wish you'd extended me the same charity.

Expand full comment

Curaj might also think that it is hyperbole and thus needless provocation to describe using "they" as "bending over backwards to be ultra-woke".

(I do not think that this was intended as hyperbole. I think I'd personally use one less intensifier than you did i.e. drop the "ultra" or the "bending over backwards" but keep the other, but it's certainly the sort of thing from which I'd feel extremely comfortable drawing conclusions about an otherwise-unknown author's politics.)

Expand full comment

Ok, fair point. However, I really am not sure how else to phrase it without appearing to concede something I don't think should be conceded. I respectfully submit that Scott (for all I greatly value his writing) has in this instance (1) adopted a "woke" practice (2) that is far from the poltical centre (both in how recent its invention is and in how many ordinary people would think it's a normal to do) (3) in a way that directly detracts from the primary purpose of a piece of writing: to be clearly understood. Thus "bending over backwards (3) to be ultra- (2) woke (1)". I feel like dropping any of these is implicitly conceding either that it's a mainstream behaviour or that it had no costs in this context.

(And I'll happily avoid "woke" if the advocates of that ideology provide me with an alternative term that has at least some pretense of neutrality.)

I do want to be polite and avoid provocation, while unequivocally refusing to allow subtle attempts to redefine words or rewrite where the centre is, in order to avoid having to rationally justify one's positions. Finding that balance is difficult.

Expand full comment

I'm not a particularly big fan of neo-pronouns, but willingness to address people in the way they'd like to be addressed does not strike me as an especially important hill to die on if you're irritated by a package of policies your opponents are promulgating.

They has been used as a gender neutral singular pronoun for much, much longer than the current Neo-pronoun push, BTW, so if you were irritated by "ze" or something like that, I'd be more sympathetic.

Woke is not a word I associate with anyone except Very Online conservatives, BTW, so just using that word puts you in "starting a fight" territory for most of my social circle (many of whom are quite skeptical of trans political positions).

Expand full comment

What's something that qualifies as woke, but not ultra-woke to you? Because I would expect pronoun courtesy to be entry-level, table-stakes wokeness. The kind of wokeness that major corporations engage in. Ultra-woke would be more like, reparations.

Expand full comment

This can quickly become a second semantic debate (and a less important one imo). But I'm using "woke" to mean something specific and distinct from "left" more broadly. And the matter of degree is largely based on how common the sentiment was in, say, 2010, as opposed to something basically invented in the last decade.

Some things I'd consider mildly woke:

"Never speak the n-word, not even when quoting someone"

"Never make sex-based generalisations, even light-heartedly (e.g. "video games are for boys", "women don't get Star Wars" both extremely common sentiments in the 2000s with only the occasional person having a problem with them).

"Don't use 'he'' for a generic person"

"Say 'Native American' instead of 'Indian'" and so on.

Some things I'd consider substantially woke:

"Write Black instead of black"

"Say person of colour instead of non-white"

"Say spouse instead of wife; don't assume he's straight!"

"Don't say a situation is insane; that's offensive to the mentally ill!"

Some ultra-woke things:

"My pronouns are whatever I say they are. Neither rules of grammar nor logic matter."

"Men aren't allowed to talk about feminism"

"Disagreeing with my political positions is an act of oppression"

"Teaching Shakespeare and Dickens in school is colonialism" etc etc

The first group are clearly understandable as to why some people would be offended by them. The second are only so understandable if you buy into certain theories of privilege and language. The third are such that, even if I accept those theories I still find it inconceivable that a remotely reasonable person could be, not simply annoyed, but offended or oppressed by the existence of views of reality contrary to theirs.

And I also think it's important to remember that even the statements in the first group are very controversial and go against normal rules of language: quoting something is by definition not saying it yourself, we make generalisations every day and everyone knows they're not meant literally. By calling the third group mild, you're implicitly saying the first group are basically undisputed, or that to reject them is a far right position. It's a nefarious and dishonest way (when done deliberately) of moving the goalposts and redefining what's moderate and radical, to take a shortcut past having to argue persuasively for all your positions.

Similarly to how getting reparations widely discussed makes "defund the police" look moderate by comparison, which in turn makes "it's inhumane to lock a serial rapist-murderer up for life" look even more moderate (when I'd guess that at least 80% or so of people would find the latter disgustingly radical).

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2023·edited Aug 4, 2023

From what I read I see Scott's views as something in the vicinity of "I use them as an act of human courtesy towards an individual but would be opposed to any kind of mandates" which I find completely moderate and unremarkable, yet you push him to the extreme by calling it ultra-woke. This is anything but "not trying to start a fight".

As an analogy, imagine subscribing to mainstream economic views and being called a Marxist by one side of the barricade and a fascist by the other. It's not helpful and it's why there's only an infinitesimal amount of nuance left on the internet.

Expand full comment

To add another reason, obvious to me, is that mentioning pronouns thing (both positively or negatively) on the, um, mixed ideology English internet forum is almost guaranteed to start a fight, and smart people should learn that by now.

So if someone says that he mentions pronouns thing and also that it is not trying to start a fight, I tend to assume that he/she/whatever (haha) is either not very socially savvy or deliberately trolling.

Expand full comment

It's obvious to me, this last comment didn't come off as self righteous at all.

Expand full comment

FWIW (probably not much), I did not find it hard to read.

Expand full comment

Agreed.

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2023·edited Aug 4, 2023

>I'm surprised enough that Scott is bending over backwards to be ultra-woke on this issue, after getting so much attention and respect for criticising other parts of wokeness (including things much less absurd than this).

Scott tries hard to be polite to people, and he *does* live in the Bay Area and *does* have a giant pile of trans friends and AIUI patients. He's also not *that* far opposed to SJ, it's just that, y'know, SJ doesn't accept "60% in our camp" as a tolerable thing so he's mostly stuck in the other camp.

Expand full comment

Scott has always been on the woke side of the trans issue. He wrote a famous piece on it in all the way back in 2014: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/

I don't agree with him, but I appreciate the fact that he's not 100% in the anti-woke camp, because there's no shortage of people who have party line opinions on everything.

Expand full comment

It's courtesy, and while it makes me grit my teeth, I follow likewise because that's the style bible on here. I don't know Gessen or care enough about them to make a fuss about it, even if it does show the limits of using these neuter pronouns in English and how they can be confusing (but doncha know that it is bigoted to raise criticisms like that, you bigot?)

I care about what Scott does, and if this is how he wants to write it, I'll follow suit.

Expand full comment
author
Aug 4, 2023·edited Aug 4, 2023Author

In whatever part of the vast culturesphere I'm in, this is way past the 70% mark on the hyperstitious slur cascade. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way and doesn't even sound awkward.

Expand full comment

Well, I have to say, getting a personal response from you makes me feel bad for attacking you. Even though it was the pointed attack that got the response, wasn't it?

I accept the consensus that I went overboard in calling this ultra-woke. And I get the courtesy thing, which didn't really occur to me in those terms, to be honest. But I still have a couple of issues.

First, would the same courtesy be extended to all groups? I'll admit that you seem pretty polite when discussing, say, Christianity (from what I remember). But you also regularly link approvingly to Eliezer Yudkowsky, who may very well be the single most arrogant, most condescending, and most insulting atheist I've seen on the internet; a dubiously notable disinction. I get that linking to someone is different from doing it yourself, but I just get the feeling that certain left-favoured groups are given more deference than others and it bothers me, even though it's obviously your blog.

Second, if the 70% thing is subculture-dependent, it leads to weird results: e.g. if you're living in San Fransisco you need to follow pronoun demands, while if you're living in rural Texas not only is insulting or bullying gay/trans/whatever people fine, but maybe you shouldn't even speak out against it. That's the cost of defining the (ideological) centre locally instead of objectively.

Third, "you must call me they" seems to me less akin to "you must call me a Reformed Post-Millenarian Evangelical" and more akin to "you must refer to Jesus as The Lord". Not so much a matter of respecting a person as endorsing a metaphysical ideology. And this is backed up by the way most activists I've seen discuss it. It's rarely "please call me x because it hurts my feelings otherwise" or even "I demand you call me x because of my feelings" but rather "I demand you call me x because I AM, in fact, gender x". Where the latter "fact" is to be considered true just because that person says so, and requires no rational argument of any kind. I find this an incredibly obnoxious, and incredibly dangerous, attitude to reality and truth.

Expand full comment

I spent about fifteen years feeling the way you feel, but now it doesn't bother me anymore. Maybe I can help you.

1. Do you have room in your worldview for separate concepts named "sex" and "gender"? If no, why not?

2. If yes: if you take the concept of "I am gender X" and subtract out the concept of "X is the pronoun I prefer to be referred to by", what facts remain to be argued about?

3. I railed against "the singular They" for a long time. I called it aesthetically displeasing and needlessly obstructive to comprehension. But deep down I was just being a grammar prescriptivist and a pedant. In reality, language is fluid and our brains are plastic. If you can hold your nose and embrace the singular They and immerse yourself in its usage, I promise that after a year you won't find it grating or confusing anymore.

Expand full comment

I'm not ascend, but I'll answer for myself:

1. No. Sex is a biological reality, and gender is identical to sex if one accepts that biological reality. Acting or thinking differently from typical members of one's sex is not a denial of biological reality. Even the intense desire to become the other sex is not in itself a denial of biology, any more than the intense desire to go faster than light is itself a denial of physics. Actually calling yourself a man when you're not, just like actually calling yourself a faster-than-light traveler, is however such a denial. Inventing an alternate concept that means "how you identify your speed" where you can claim to be traveling faster than light is at best a sign of mental illness, at worst an attempt at deception.

Expand full comment

In my opinion “gender” is not a well defined concept, so in that sense I don’t have separate concepts for sex and gender. For example, gender is used both to refer to culturally bound behaviors and conventions and by different people to some innate psychological property of individuals.

Language changes but that doesn’t mean I have to like or accept any particular change (especially one that is ideologically motivated).

Expand full comment

> 1. Do you have room in your worldview for separate concepts named "sex" and "gender"? If no, why not?

My understanding is that "sex" is a property of animals and some plants, while "gender" is a property of nouns in some languages. At some point, certain squeamish Victorians started using "gender" as a synonym for "sex" so they wouldn't have to say S-E-X, and in very recent times there has been an attempt by certain people to repurpose it for other means.

I don't accept any of it myself. I feel like if we started using a different word for "quality that a person actually has" and "quality that a person lies or deludes themselves about having" then we'd need to start doing it for every quality that you might lie or be deluded about. My height is 5'11" but my loftiness is 6'2". My age is 35 but my chronoduration is 29. My wealth is $2500 but my richistity is forty million dollars.

Expand full comment

To all those who answered No, I claim that the territory is more complex than you are allowing your map to be.

And while I don't think this slope is particularly slippery, I actually think "loftiness" is a great example. Suppose that after being 5'11" for 30 years, you step on a landmine and lose both legs at the knees. As your doctor is fitting you with prosthetics so you can walk again, would you want them to be curious about concepts like "when you reach for a light switch, how high does your hand go relative to your shoulder?", "when you kiss your longtime spouse, how much incline in your neck feels natural?", or "when you walk with your natural gait, how far do you expect to travel per step?"? Or would your rather they say "The objective reality is that your body is 4 feet tall, and I refuse to do anything to accommodate any delusions of loftiness that exist only in your mind."?

Expand full comment

So to be clear, are you endorsing the need for a separate word to "height" to cover self-perceived or self-identified height?

Expand full comment

"Loftiness" is hilarious! "Richicity" is very good too.

Expand full comment

I propose that "loftiness" replace "height" on dating apps (at least for men's profiles).

Expand full comment

The other replies have said it well. I'll add three things.

1. To answer your question, no not really. I'm a strong individualist and I don't see any need for a concept of gender at all. There is biological sex, and that should not determine or restrict what social roles you may adopt or how you must live. One reason the gender ideology bothers me so much is that it takes away this freedom: instead of telling everyone their sex is an irrelevant biological fact and they can do whatever job, hobbies etc they want, it reinforces the collectivism of gender roles but just defines its basis differently. Why not just say every person has their own gender, which we'll just call personality? What purpose is there to grouping people into self-chosen genders if not to restrict their individual freedom?

2. Regarding your second point, I think this functions as a motte-and-bailey. The motte is as you described it: gender just is the pronoun you prefer. The bailey is that gender is a metaphysical fact that determines how you must be categorised in all contexts. Thus, having agreed to recognise someone's chosen gender (on the basis that all that means is the pronouns) they will then expect to be given access to the bathrooms, sports, and so on of their chosen gender without question, without at any point being expected to give an actual argument for why their access is compatible with the (obviously biological) reasons these things were gender-segregated in the first place.

I don't see how we can ignore the social context in which this entire pronoun push is happening, and treat it like an isoloated courtesy. And that's not even getting into the absolutely horrific things that are being done to children (that they cannot consent to) in the name of this ideology.

3. It seems that whenever someone opposes the gender ideology they get met with (when they're not getting violent threats and murderous rage) "is this really a hill worth dying on?". This response seems to assume truth doesn't intrinsically matter, and is merely instrumental. There's a part in 1984 where Winston remembers a photograph he once saw that conclusively proved the Party's official story on something was false. He quickly destroyed it but now wishes he'd kept it. Julia expresses disbelief, regarding it a completely pointless thing to risk your life over. But Winston's, and I think Orwell's, point is that truth matters, for its own sake. There's a quote from Orwell about how the ability to rewrite the past is more terrifying than bombs. And this is a fundamental aspect of the trans ideology. From how Scott describes it, it sounds like Gessen changed her pronouns after this book was published. Yet he still describes her experiences before and while writing the book with the new pronouns. This happens routinely: a person goes most of his life going by "he", then one day declares he is now "she", and references to his early life are rewritten with the new pronoun! "She is now a woman; she has ALWAYS been a woman". "We are at war with Eastasia; we have ALWAYS been at war with Eastasia".

(And as an aside to the trans activists: if you made pronoun requests as requests, acknowledging it as either an irrational OCD-like complusion or a controversial philosophical position that you don't expect others to accept, I feel like I can almost-promise you would get the vast majority of people, even most conservatives, willingly accomodating you. But so, SO many of you have for some reason decided to present it as a demand in THE most aggressive and entitled way imaginable, that you ensure that many people will go out of their way, even at cost to themselves, to defy you. I think that should be remembered whenever someone is deliberately "misgendering" you.)

Expand full comment

When has he ever criticized any part of wokeness? He HASN'T denounced everyone who isn't on board as fascist neo-Nazi white supremacist bigots or whatever, and that counts for a lot, but that isn't quite the same thing.

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2023·edited Aug 4, 2023

Yeah he has criticised quite harshly some forms of things that seem (to me) to be parts of wokeness. It did take getting Scott angry and he does try to prevent those posts from getting too prominent out of context, but they were published. (I guess to look for quotes it's better to agree on definitions of wokeness enough first and go digging afterwards)

Expand full comment

See his old arguments with mainstream feminist dogma about having compassion for the romantic difficulties experienced by men on slatestarcodex, for example

Expand full comment

He's generally pretty anti-woke on anything having to do with race.

Expand full comment

The use of singular "they" in English is older than singular "you", it just went out of fashion for about 200 years.

Expand full comment

The use of singular "they" is normally used for an indefinite, hypothetical or imaginary person -- "If anyone comes looking for me, tell them I'm out getting lunch." I don't think it was used for a specific, known individual until the present gender controversies.

Expand full comment

This is a super fascinating set of anecdotes. Thanks for it.

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2023·edited Aug 4, 2023

I wonder if Gessen is as important as they think they are; while it's possible nobody told Putin they were editor of the magazine because they didn't want to admit a slip-up about appointing a critic of Putin, it's also possible nobody cared because they were too small potatoes. Yeah yeah you wrote some book that sold in America, who the hell cares about that shit?

The description of the meeting between Gessen and Putin doesn't line up with what they said elsewhere about how he handled people who dissented or refused him; there were no threats, veiled or otherwise, no shouting or demands; he was polite but puzzled (and I can see that - he just wants to do a photo-op, why are they refusing, why are they saying it's his fault they got fired?)

I can also see why the magazine would fire her if she's going to make a point of getting into fights with the regime. What it reminds me of, more than anything, is the cancel culture examples we've seen of people getting bounced for having the wrong opinions, or their employers are afraid they might have the wrong opinions.

Other things - like the dog death - make me wonder (semi-seriously) if maybe Vlad is on the spectrum (One Of Us! One Of Us!). That would explain a lot of things - his obsession with the KGB as a kid, his seeming inability to read expressions or get on with people, lack of emotion (I hate to be expected to put on a performance of emotion when people tell me things, when I prefer to process the news in my own time and react in private, so I could well do the same if someone came in and told me 'your dog's dead - oh why aren't you crying about it?'), the "seeming lack of perceptiveness" and why he rose by being a diligent nobody who just did his job and wasn't labelled as being 'this guy' or 'that guy' so he was bland and compromise enough not to be objectionable.

Honestly, the descriptions of cutting off resources for the opposition remind me of the same attitudes as in the XKCD strip about "free speech": 'it doesn't mean anyone has to host you while you share it'

https://xkcd.com/1357/

You're free to talk about setting up a different political party, but nobody has to rent you a hotel room or conference space, there's the door, bigots!

There's a lot of would-be 'Nazi punchers' out there who want the same kind of 'don't give them any room in the public space, disrupt them if they try to meet, don't sell them anything or rent them anything, shut them down by any means possible'.

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2023·edited Aug 4, 2023

Gessen is still important enough for Putin to meet with them, though. I feel like if I were a world leader who felt it was worth my time to talk to someone face to face to try to convince them to do something for me and I didn't have a firm grasp on why they were refusing, I would first have some underling get me a two minute rundown on who this person is and what's their problem.

I suppose another possibility is that Putin did in fact know exactly who Gessen is and was trying to be tactful, like "hey look I'm not a monster and can actually be polite and reasonable?" That does seem a little out of character from what else we know about him though.

Expand full comment

Well, it seems like Putin personally liked the magazine which is why he announced the partnership with it, and wanted to do this photo-op, and Gessen was the editor who refused and then claimed online that Putin got them fired.

So I can see Putin being "No, I want to meet this person and talk with them, because I got nothing against them so why are they so angry with me?" simply because he didn't know - or didn't care - about Gessen's book, because it wasn't that big a deal (who cares if it sells in America, if it's not selling in Russia?)

Expand full comment

That all makes sense to me. But if it's worth 15 or 20 minutes of the President's time to meet with this person, surely it's also worth having his assistant spend an hour or two first figuring out who they are and what they want, and bringing him up to speed?

Expand full comment

<i>Honestly, the descriptions of cutting off resources for the opposition remind me of the same attitudes as in the XKCD strip about "free speech": 'it doesn't mean anyone has to host you while you share it'</i>

Also the Canadian government freezing the bank accounts of anti-vaccine mandate protestors, or the current British debanking scandal.

Expand full comment

"Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences."

Expand full comment

Also the scandal that the White House dictated social media what information to censor, including the factually correct information that covid vaccines do not limit the spread of infection.

Expand full comment

The cutting off resources from the opposition in this case means that the government went around mafia like and threatened businesses so they wouldn’t rent out their properties, in a country where politicians and journalists are assassinated. That’s quite a bit different from “no one has to host you if they don’t like you”. False equivalency.

The Gessen meeting Putin thing is just an anecdote, it’s not all that important in my opinion.

Expand full comment

Of course, things in Russia are more serious. But often managers would not be assassinated, just fired from their jobs and even without the involvement of the

government. People self-censor themselves and others due to this fear.

And in the US Jennifer Sey was fired from Levi because she wouldn't stop talking about how lockdowns are harming children. Her concern was absolutely justified and yet everybody ignores this type of censorship in the US in the same way as in Russia.

Expand full comment

I am not saying that there isn’t a problem in the US and the West with censorship and woke mobs and the like. But the situation in Russia is so different that drawing equivalencies is just misleading and unhelpful (and easily comes across as Putin apologetics).

I don’t think people in Russia “ignore” censorship, they are probably quite aware of it. In fact there are explicit laws against criticizing the war.

There’s a long list on Wikipedia of Russian businessmen or officials who have mysteriously died since 2022, like “fallen out of windows” or something like that. I don’t know exactly what’s going on there, I am just saying it because it is particularly fascinating.

Expand full comment

I think that Russians ignore censorship in their lives.

I lived in Russia in a closely knit community around 1995-2000 and while it was exactly as it is described, we never really thought that there is a serious censorship. Maybe some but no more than an average American thinks about censorship. Even today most Russians take that apathic attitude.

Furthermore, we saw how Russians were openly laughing at police in Rostov during Wagner resurrection. Completely destroys the myth that Russians are afraid of their police.

https://twitter.com/nastasiaKlimash/status/1672753211793350657

It just happens that most Russians are either pro-Putin or neutral and the small minority who are against the war are suppressed by them. The government doesn't even need to start large scale repressions.

Expand full comment

The conclusion is that Putin could happen in the US. We are lucky that it happened only with covid when people out of fear cancelled and censored reasonable voices and most people just silently accepted it.

No reason to think that it couldn't happen with democracy. A rare event, like return of a small group of communists could instil fear in the current government and population that all democratic norms will be easily broken and ignored. Maybe in the current society it is not even necessary to kill people when firing them and blocking their voices on social media is enough?

Expand full comment

I like that comparison with the infuriating XKCD. I'm going to try to remember it.

Expand full comment

Wonderous post. thank you

Expand full comment

Does the rule against misgendering (from https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/) not apply to non-commenters, or was it just dropped entirely at some point? I'm trying to figure out how much I want to engage with Scott's posts in the future, and constant misgendering gives me the impression that this would be a hostile environment for me.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

Misgender *whom*. If we're going to be complaining about using the wrong pronouns anyway we should at least get this one right.

Expand full comment

Thou'rt technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. :-)

Expand full comment

Masha Gessen

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

Well yeah, that's why the rule starts with "you’re allowed to (politely) express your philosophical disagreements with the idea of transgender".

Expand full comment

The misgendering in the comments? It seemed like Scott himself respected the preferred pronouns (unless I missed something).

Expand full comment
Aug 5, 2023·edited Aug 5, 2023

couple of things:

- first, the most obvious reason for Putin to meet Gessen was to recruit one more useful idiot to whitewash his image in the West. Putin isn't interested in professional work per se, he's trading influence and misinformation with whoever fit. Good for them they weren't recruited; bad they were seen as material. Putin wouldn't try it with Ann Applebaum or Timothy Snyder.

- second, Gessen themselves. They aren't really an investigative reporter, there's no any original piece produced by them. Their Russian is poor and social competence low to make any productive research. All they did is compiling material on miscellaneous hot topics like Perelman, Putin, Pussy Riot etc, in none of which they're an expert, hence the silly discrepancies mentioned by other commenters. "Vokrug Sveta" was some mix of tabloid and Discovery Channel. Gessen's short tenure at Radio Svoboda was a public scandal and disaster.

And by the way, Gessen's positioning as the only queer and last investigative journalist alive is pathetic, given how many queers, activists and journalists in Russia have been jailed, murdered or pushed to exile and keep reporting and investigating despite all risks.

Expand full comment

typo: "define the issue>"

">" should be a piece of punctuation

Expand full comment

I -with some minor skepticism- of his writing and videos think Ritter's reporting on the news from Ukraine and elsewhere is pretty spot on and convincing. Gessen's portrayal of Putin is as she sees things. I'm very skeptical... Will probably not read her book but probably should. The reviewer of her book may be equally biased. The truth is so foggy

Expand full comment

And being Russian. There is a reason that alcohol abuse is so prevalent there.

Expand full comment