Why Russian leaders kill
And other things that I discovered on the web this week
And one sleep to go before finding out Stan’s fate
Why Russian leaders kill
Putin doesn't need a reason to attack Ukraine
Disturbing piece about Putin from an Eastern European which has the distinction of being written in 2014 and thus of being a very fine and spooky prophecy.
Why did Smerdyakov kill cats? Just because. The lackey is one of the most washed-out faces in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. He is inconspicuous, elusive, slippery, always hiding, always doing things on the sly. And yet behind this mask of anonymity there lies something frightening: a compulsion to do evil for its own sake. When Smerdyakov is introduced, we learn of him that “as a child he was fond of hanging cats and then burying them with ceremony”. …
Smerdyakovism is an obscure, yet tremendous force that runs deep throughout Russian history. Its basic principle is formulated succinctly by the lackey himself: “The Russian people need thrashing”. Why? Just because. Smerdyakovism flares up especially in the form of leaders and institutions that rule through terror alone; repression for the sake of repression. Its impact is overwhelming, its memory traumatic, and its social effects always paralysing. Joseph Conrad sees “something inhuman”, from another world, in these Smerdyakovian institutions. The government of Tsarist Russia, relying on an omnipresent, omnipotent secret police, and “arrogating to itself the supreme power to torment and slaughter the bodies of its subjects like a God-sent scourge, has been most cruel to those whom it allowed to live under the shadow of its dispensation”. And that was just the beginning. …
Putin can be a politician, a thinker, a hunter, a fisherman, a hockey player, a fighter pilot — he can be anything he likes because he is nothing in particular. “He is an excellent imitator”, writes Anna Politkovskaya. “He is adept at wearing other people’s clothes, and many are taken in by this performance”. Journalists have often noticed how difficult it is to “read” Putin, since he is always so slippery. Yet for any serious reader of The Brothers Karamazov this is something familiar. Featurelessness itself can be a feature — that’s one of the indications that you are in Smerdyakov’s presence.
Putin, too, is Smerdyakov. The institution that created him (the KGB) is one of the most Smerdyakovian institutions ever devised. His unapologetic defense of the Soviet Union and his attempts to revive it, his recycling of the Stalinist propaganda machine, the silencing of human rights movements all over Russia, the manner in which he annihilates his opponents — all are signs that Smerdyakovism enjoys a new life in today’s Russia. Most significant of all, however, was Putin’s first vivisection of Ukraine; Smerdyakov’s signature all over it. An army of faceless, nameless, insignia-less “little green men” who steal themselves into the country under the cover of night and, before anyone knows it, cut off a piece of it. Since they do everything on the sly, and the whole operation looks more Mafia-like than military, people liken Putin’s army to a gang of thugs. That’s inaccurate: the “little green men” are not thugs, they are Smerdyakovs in action. There is nothing fake about them; their modus operandi is the lackey’s 100%.
Who’dda thunk? Not me
Don Watson’s Passion of Private White
I’ve really been enjoying the Audible version of Don Watson’s new book, a powerful story of the confluence of two groups cast out of the Great Australian conversation, though in very different ways — Vietnam vets and the indigenes of Arnhem Land. So I was naturally interested in a review of his book by an anthropologist. (The choice of reviewer is inspired — but then Peter Browne’s Inside Story is far and away our best review site). It’s a very interesting review raising many ways in which (it argues) Watson has missed his mark because of a Europeanised understanding of Indigenous culture. Thus she explains:
Bafflement is not surprising in the face of a traditional society organised in ways fundamentally at odds with those of Europeans. There are other clues to these balandas’ misunderstanding of Yolngu social structure. When Watson says White was “granted the name Balang” and, later, that balang means brother, he shows a common confusion about the everyday language of kinship. Personal names are private and not used as English names are. A “skin name” like balang refers to one of the eight categories that position everyone within a system of relationships Yolngu absorb in infancy. Because I became ngaritjan, my husband became balang, and my children gamarang and gamayn.
Everyone is enfolded within this system and everyone is family. Some are close, others distant, and their roles carry specific but not necessarily strict obligations and expectations. English terms such as brother, mother and cousin mean quite different things here. Concerns are all personal but not individualistic, meaning that an impersonal “community interest” is often absent. Moreover, one does not interfere with others, something “we” balanda do constantly with our opinions and judgements.
Watson is not to blame for misunderstanding Yolngu naming practices and interpersonal manners and protocols that are quite different from those of English speakers. Like an unfamiliar language, they can be learned only with experience. …
Watson’s dry wit and clever, often ironic phrasing are born of his interest in Private White’s passion rather than his own experiences in Arnhem Land. He wisely limits his explanations and judgements of Yolngu; those he does offer can be disturbing. In the wake of the workshop destruction, he says: “Nothing so grieves a balanda — especially, perhaps, a balanda army veteran — as the casual anarchy and selfishness the [Yolngu] philosophy allows” (my emphasis).
What Watson and presumably White judge as “casual anarchy and selfishness” is better understood as a deeply held belief in individual autonomy, often expressed as “I am boss for myself.” Yolngu people don’t moralise, instruct or interfere with each other in ways familiar and normal among balanda. Nor do they expect interference and instruction, especially from people from elsewhere. Yolngu communal enterprises require careful suggestions and inducement rather than taken-for-granted cooperation or attention to “time constraints.”
All very interesting, except that the reviewer’s reinterpretation of Watson’s way of presenting the scene is present in Watson’s presentation as well.
So I was glad to have read this review, but in the end found it prim and stunted by contemporary preoccupations with not giving offence — put more crudely, with political correctness. I’m very willing to believe that Watson has misunderstood some things, and imagine that he’d expect that to be the case. But his task is not to avoid all errors or even offence — though one might expect him to try to be sensitive to that, which I think he is. To borrow an image from Manning Clark, having gone to the cupboard like Old Mother Hubbard, his task is not to come away empty-handed. To do that he must speak across the chasm, to make something of these three streams of experience: the dominant European culture and two ‘victims’ of its lazy disinterest or perhaps unease with those who can’t play along, because they’ve been wounded in ways that, it seems they can’t overcome.
I think he does a great job and commend the book to you wholeheartedly.
Changing New Zealand’s police recruitment
I learned about this ad in a new book which I recommend. Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us by Brian Klaas. The ad is great fun and I extract the material in the book about the initiative at the end of this newsletter.
Aboriginal politics, the voice and income management
An interesting article on two conservative aboriginal politicians. Noel Pearson and Jacinta Price.
The spending choices of many welfare recipients have been managed since 2008 by the Basics Card or, since 2017, by the Cashless Debit Card, or CDC. If you receive income support via either card you can’t make purchases deemed harmful to you and/or your community.
In September this year the Labor government abolished the CDC, and many of its users are now being “transitioned” to the Basics Card. Critics of compulsion were encouraged by Labor’s decision: they hope the Albanese government will soon take the next step and make the Basics Card optional, giving the swelling ranks of its users the choice of whether to continue under its discipline.
It is an orthodoxy of our times that only extensive Indigenous consultation will assure good Indigenous program outcomes. … Price’s recent pledge to lead the No campaign in the referendum was scornfully slapped down by one of the leading advocates of a Yes vote, Noel Pearson. On 29 November, he dismissed Senator Price as trapped in a “redneck celebrity vortex.” But this spectacular confrontation on the referendum issue obscured the extent to which Price and Pearson are in agreement on the question of whether Labor erred in abolishing the CDC. Both of them believe compulsory income management should continue for individuals whose unfettered use of welfare income poses a threat to community.
Invention: what comes after
I nearly didn’t persevere with this article because of its lugubrious formulaic introduction which takes you through the long, long story of the prehistory of Edward Jenner’s discovery of the protective effect of cowpox in order to establish the proposition that it was what happened then that mattered. Yes folks, you not only have to invent something useful, you have to iron out its bugs and bring it to market. Anyway, that long story is quite interesting, and then there’s a laborious introduction to the idea that I’ve just summarised.
But then it really does get going explaining how governments retreated from the task of partnering with the market to develop new inventions (they tended to retreat into mostly funding pure science). And it suggests that the breakneck development of COVID vaccines offers the prospect of a new beginning elsewhere.
The U.S. directly advanced airplane technology during World War I; radar, penicillin manufacturing, and nuclear technology during World War II; the internet and GPS during the Cold War; and mRNA technology during the pandemic. A crisis is a focusing mechanism. But it is up to us to decide what counts as a crisis. The U.S. could announce a Warp Speed for heart disease tomorrow, on the theory that the leading cause of death in America is a national crisis. We could announce a full emergency review of federal and local permitting rules for clean-energy construction, with the rationale that climate change is a crisis. Just as it did in the ’60s with smallpox, the U.S. could decide that a major disease in developing countries, such as malaria, deserves a concerted global coalition. Even in times without world wars and pandemics, crises abound. Turning them into national priorities is, and has always been, a political determination.
Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s imagine what an Operation Warp Speed for cancer prevention would look like. It might include not only a larger cancer-research budget, but also a search for regulatory bottlenecks whose elimination would speed up the approval of preventative drugs that have already been developed. According to Heidi Williams, the director of science policy at the Institute for Progress, from the time the War on Cancer was announced, in 1971, until 2015, only six drugs were approved to prevent any cancer. This reflects an enormous gap in clinical trials: From 1973 to 2011, nearly 30,000 trials were run for drugs that treated recurrent or metastatic cancer, compared with fewer than 600 for cancer prevention. How could this be?
In 2022, the medical journal The Lancet published an analysis of which variables best predicted the rates of COVID infection across 177 countries. Outside wealth, one of the most powerful variables was trust in government among the public. “Trust is a shared resource that enables networks of people to do collectively what individual actors cannot,” the authors of the Lancet paper wrote. When I first read their definition, I stared at it for a while, feeling the shock of recognition. I thought of how much that could serve as a definition of progress as well: a network of people doing collectively what individual actors cannot. The stories of global progress tend to be the rare examples where science, technology, politics, and culture align. When we see the full ensemble drama of progress, we realize just how many different people, skills, and roles are necessary.
Thanks to Muneeb for alerting me to this article. Oh, and if you can’t get past the paywall, the link to listen to it appears before the paywall!
What’s wrong with economics?
The same old thing actually.
Swedish economist Lars P. Styl hops into economics for its reductive scientism, the idea, common among the mainstream that ‘real thinking’ in economics can only be done in determinate formal models. There’s nothing wrong with determinate formal models where they’re helpful, and a lot wrong with them when they’re not. In this Styl indicts Dani Rodrik who, as he says is often touted as ‘heterodox’. He's kind of ‘heterodox mainstream’. As Styl puts it:
Just like Krugman, Rodrik likes to present himself as a kind of pluralist anti-establishment economics iconoclast, but when it really counts, he shows what he is — a mainstream economist fanatically defending the relevance of standard economic modelling strategies. In other words — no heterodoxy where it really would count.
Almost all the change and diversity that people like Krugman and Rodrik applauds only take place within the analytic-formalistic modelling strategy that makes up the core of mainstream economics. All the flowers that do not live up to the precepts of the mainstream methodological canon are pruned. You’re free to take your analytical formalist models and apply it to whatever you want – as long as you do it using a modelling methodology acceptable to the mainstream. If you do not follow this particular mathematical-deductive analytical formalism you’re not even considered doing economics. “If it isn’t modelled, it isn’t economics.” This isn’t pluralism. It’s a methodological reductionist straightjacket.
Still, as one of the commentators on Styl’s post points out, he doesn’t give examples of what he prefers. Given how abstract the discussion is, I think he’s right. I tried to explain with examples in my own debate with Krugman a while back.
From Maori Teens to M113s
Herewith the extract from Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us by Brian Klaas on policing as mentioned above
After the horrific murder of George Floyd in the spring of 2020, police reform has taken center stage in the United States and around the world. The problem is that most of the reform efforts are making the same kind of analytical error that the World War II generals were making before Abraham Wald set them straight. Departments are thinking too much about how to change the behavior of police officers they already have while thinking too little about the invisible would-be police officers they don’t have. To fix policing, we need to focus less on those who are already in uniform, and more on those who’ve never considered putting one on.
Doraville is a small town of just over ten thousand people in northwest Georgia. Its top attraction on Tripadvisor is the Buford Highway Farmers Market (narrowly edging out Treat Your Feet massage). About twenty miles northeast of Atlanta, Doraville’s crime rate is slightly higher than that of many small towns in America, but it’s hardly a war zone. Most years, there are zero murders.
Nonetheless, Doraville’s police department owns an M113 armored personnel carrier—a “close-combat battlefield vehicle” that has been used in fighting the Vietcong, insurgents in Fallujah, and terrorists in Afghanistan. If anything goes down at the local Home Depot, the police are ready.
A few years ago, anyone considering putting on a badge with the Doraville PD was greeted with a recruitment video on the department’s website. For fifteen seconds, a logo flashes on-screen, a menacing skull set against a black background. It’s a reference to the Punisher, a comic book vigilante who uses murder, kidnapping, and torture to punish criminals. Then, the armored battle cruiser emblazoned with SWAT: DORAVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT screams into view at top speed, its treads kicking up dirt. A hatch opens. A shadowy figure tosses a smoke grenade out. Six men dressed like soldiers emerge from the vehicle. They’re wearing camouflage, ready to blend in should they be deployed to the concrete jungle next to the Shaking Crawfish restaurant or if they need to impose martial law at Marshalls. Their assault weapons are drawn. The Punisher logo flashes again, followed by the image of an eagle carrying a lightning bolt in one talon and a gun in the other—the insignia of SWAT operators. Mission accomplished, the soldier cops return to their combat vehicle. The M113 drives off. The whole spectacle is set to the dulcet tones of “Die Motherf**er Die” by Dope.
Most people watch that video from a small-town police department and think, “This is insane.” But others watch it and think, “Sign me up!” Whether you fall into one category or the other isn’t random. After watching that video, people drawn to acting like a soldier in an occupying army are more likely to submit an application. People drawn to being a community support officer who helps elderly residents cross a busy street probably won’t. And women, or minorities, who weren’t depicted in the Doraville recruitment video at all, would understandably wonder whether they’d be welcome in the department. When you recruit into positions of power, it’s not just about who gets the job and who doesn’t. It’s also about who applies in the first place.
In 1997, the US government created something called the 1033 Program to deal with surplus military equipment. The idea was to send it to police departments rather than to the junkyard. Win-win. Or so it seemed. Over two decades, more than $7 billion in military hardware—helicopters, military-grade ammunition, bayonets, mine detectors, mine-resistant vehicles, you name it—has been transferred to police departments large and small. A two-man department in Thetford Township, Michigan (population 6,800), acquired a million dollars’ worth of army gear, including mine detectors and Humvees. The sheriff’s office of Boone County, Indiana (population 67,000), has a heavily armored amphibious assault boat. No matter that the largest body of water in the entire county is a small pond near an isolated farmhouse. The police department in Lebanon, Tennessee (population 36,000), has a tank.
Why have toys if you can’t use them? Or to put it in the form of an aphorism, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you have a police tank, even Walmart looks like a battlefield. And that changes who tries to put on the uniform.
Let’s be clear: A huge number of police officers have admirable motives for serving their community. But some don’t. “If you’re a bully, a bigot, or a sexual predator, policing is a really attractive career choice,” says Helen King, who served as assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London. She’s right. There’s considerable evidence, for example, that domestic abuse by police officers is a significant problem. Some argue that such abuse is correlated with an intense, high-stress job. But other intense, high-stress jobs don’t seem to have similar levels of domestic abuse. There’s a more convincing explanation. Perhaps some abusive people are drawn to a powerful occupation, such as being a police officer, where it’s easier to get away with abusing others. Who do you call if your abuser is the police? “The challenge for the establishment is to try and weed those people out in the recruitment process,” King told me.
To get the right people in the uniform, the image of the police department matters enormously. The presence of tanks and assault vehicles skews who are drawn to the uniform and how they behave once in it. To request an assault vehicle from the 1033 Program, local police departments need to justify it by filling out a form that includes this prompt: “Provide estimated usage/mission requirements for the requested armored vehicles.” When local police officers start seeing their job as military missions, they’re going to hire more soldiers to complete them.
That’s precisely what happened. Six percent of Americans have served in the military, but 19 percent of American cops are ex-soldiers, according to the Marshall Project. Government programs—and lots of funding incentives—encourage that transition for retiring soldiers. Some government grants are only given to police departments that hire veterans. That can be a great idea, in moderation. The traits for being an effective SWAT team captain do overlap significantly with those for being an effective marine captain. Military personnel are often disciplined. They’re often drawn to service. And like police officers, they’re willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. But policing the streets of Boston or Kansas City isn’t the same as patrolling Baghdad or Kabul. Yet, Kabul and Baghdad are often what today’s soldiers turned cops are used to. The jobs of soldier and beat cop shouldn’t be the same, and conflating two distinct skill sets too much can be disastrous. Should we be surprised if some former soldiers revert to their earlier training to use deadly force while in the police Humvee instead of the army Humvee?
But here’s the kicker: this effect is most pronounced in the departments that make policing feel like an army. Even after controlling for confounding variables such as crime rate or population size, researchers have found that police departments that bought the most surplus military gear killed more civilians to begin with and saw the numbers of civilians that they killed in a given year rise significantly after the military equipment arrived. Departments that kill more civilians want to become more militarized. Adding military gear makes them even deadlier.
Nonetheless, so much of the debate about police reform in the United States is focused on changing police tactics: de-escalation training, body cameras, banning choke holds, better oversight when force is deployed. All are worthwhile reforms. But they’re all aimed at changing what the police do. Too little attention has been paid to a more fundamental cause: who the police are. What’s likely to be more effective, spending millions trying to retrain the small group of overly aggressive people who view themselves as soldiers and see policing as a war, or attracting less aggressive people to the profession in the first place? America’s police chiefs need their modern version of Abraham Wald to explain that they need to start thinking more about who isn’t in their force.
New Zealand is doing precisely that.
An Asian woman wearing a police vest sprints up a hill, following an unseen suspect. She turns to the camera. “New Zealand police are looking for new recruits who can make a real difference!” There’s a quick cut to an indigenous Maori police officer in hot pursuit of the same suspect. “Those who care about others and their communities!” The Maori officer sprints past an elderly man with a walker slowly traversing a zebra crossing. The officer does a double take and returns to help the old man safely cross the street. For more than two minutes, the chase continues. Finally, a female officer catches up to the perpetrator. “Drop it!” she shouts at the suspect. A dog barks, revealing itself as a canine criminal. It opens its mouth and relinquishes the stolen handbag from its teeth. The entire hot pursuit has been of a fluffy border collie. “Do you care enough to be a cop?” flashes on-screen.
This scene is from a playful police-recruitment campaign launched by the New Zealand police in 2017. The contrast with the Doraville, Georgia, advertisement is so stark it’s almost comical. No weapons are shown. The stated goals of policing are directly linked to helping the community. Throughout, the series of amusing gags helped the videos spread like wildfire across social media (this video has 1.7 million views on YouTube in a country of 4.8 million people). “We take policing seriously, but not ourselves,” says Kaye Ryan, deputy chief executive for people with the New Zealand police.
In another video called “Hungry Boy,” the police department conducted an experiment. They sent a child who looked severely malnourished to rummage through garbage cans looking for food in the center of a city. Secret cameras videotaped the reactions of those who encountered him. Some people walked by. Others stopped, asked if he was hungry, and tried to help. The compassionate people are highlighted in the recruitment advertisement. “They cared enough,” it says on-screen. “Would you?” The ad ends with the “Do you care enough to be a cop?” logo. The implication was that the people who would stop and help a child should be in uniform. The others who walked past need not apply. If you had compassion for the vulnerable, New Zealand’s police wanted you in their ranks.
Rather than the Punisher, New Zealand’s police wanted the Helper. Camouflaged combat gear and “Die Motherf**er Die” are nowhere to be seen. Any Kiwis who think police officers should act like a militarized occupying army aren’t likely to fire off an application after seeing the videos of helping a malnourished child or the chasing of a mischievous dog. But does it matter? Did New Zealand’s police recruitment strategy actually change who became a cop?
In the last few years, New Zealand’s police force recruited eighteen hundred new officers. The recruitment videos deliberately highlight women as well as ethnic minorities, particularly Maori officers and Asians and Pacific Islanders. “It’s not that we don’t want the white men,” Ryan told me. “It’s just that they come anyway.”
Whoever comes to apply—from older white men to teenage Maori women—has to spend twenty to forty hours out on the beat with a police officer for an assessment before the actual vetting process even begins. “If they take quite a military-style or adversarial approach in dealing with the community, it doesn’t work out for them,” Ryan explains. “Our own cops say, ‘Hang on, they’re coming in for the wrong reasons.’ ” Rather than equipping their community cops like soldiers and emphasizing recruitment from the army, the New Zealand police guarantee that behaving like a soldier on the streets of Wellington means you won’t get to put on a police uniform in the first place. They recruit and screen in a way that tries to entice those who aren’t naturally drawn to policing.
It worked. Total applications are up 24 percent. That’s a big deal, because as we’ll see shortly, increased competition is crucial to getting better people into power. The number of female applicants rose 29 percent, while Maori applicants are up 32 percent. Today, roughly one in four police officers in New Zealand are women, compared to just over one in ten in the United States. The force is also close to being representative of New Zealand’s ethnic breakdown. Compare that to America, where hundreds of major police departments are, on average, 30 percent whiter than the communities they patrol. (In 2014, when riots broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, after an unarmed black man was killed by police, two in three residents of the local community were black. Meanwhile more than eight in ten of Ferguson’s police officers were white.) Beyond the obvious issues that creates, the perception of racial bias in policing creates a vicious cycle. If people believe that the police abuse racial minorities, then people who want to abuse racial minorities will be more likely to sign up. That’s one of the difficulties of police reform. To fix policing, you need better recruits—and to get better recruits, you need to fix policing.
New Zealand tackled that problem head-on. They focused on the equivalent of the invisible planes in Germany—the invisible desirables who weren’t applying for the job. As a result, New Zealand has one of the most effective and least abusive police forces on the planet. Only twenty-one New Zealanders were killed by police between 1990 and 2015, an average of 0.8 deaths per year. If you scaled that rate up to adjust for the much larger US population, you’d expect American cops to kill about 50 people per year. Instead, in 2015 alone, police officers in the United States killed 1,146 civilians. Perhaps America could learn a thing or two from New Zealand.
What the police do matters. But who the police are may matter even more. And if you don’t design recruitment policies properly, you’ll end up attracting all the wrong moths to the flame of power.
Sometimes, the problem can be even worse. From Doraville to Wellington, there are usually a lot of people who want to be cops. But what happens when a position of authority isn’t particularly attractive? Without competition, self-selection is the only thing that matters. If only one person applies for a powerful job, then any power-hungry cretin can waltz right into authority. That’s like rolling out the red carpet to the worst kinds of control freaks. And they, too often, are precisely who run our neighborhoods.