Ukraine Invasion: Part 17

[MagicFox]

A new place for us to convene, thread 17.

@KonTikki

Ooh yes please ... Let's sanction Farage and Banks.

I am so on board with doing that !

I'd rather we just exiled them to Siberia.

Bear in mind that if India and China are getting Russian hydrocarbons at a discount, and are competing against countries which are now paying more for their energy, this bolsters India and China's industrial competitiveness.

There's also something else coming down the line, although it's dropped down the attention scale because of Ukraine. There is increasing pressure to reduce purchasing of China's products because so much of China's industry and farming involves forced labour and severe human rights abuses. It's a long way over the line from the mere poor pay and working conditions found in other low-wage countries. And the abuse is embodied in the products, it's not merely something unrelated happening elsewhere in the country.

The Chinese government pays subsidies to employers to use forced labour. The rest of the cost of running what's essentially the manufacturing arm of the forced "re-education" programme is, of course, covered by selling the products. So we overseas buyers of China-made goods are directly subsidising the "re-education" programme.

The forced labour isn't limited to Xinjiang. Uyghur people are being shipped to work in other parts of China. Xinjiang also advertises for companies based elsewhere in China to open Xinjiang factories to exploit the forced labour. So one can't avoid the issue by avoiding obviously Xinjiang-made products.

Further, by making China's products so cheap both through this artificially cheap labour and through subsidies, the Chinese government undermines the manufacturing base of other countries.

The icing on the cake is that Xinjiang is a significant supplier in the solar panel manufacturing industry.

I don't know how this one is going to play out, but at some point this issue will go from "niche awareness" to OMFG.

Xinjiang’s New Slavery
Coerced Uighur labor touches almost every part of the supply chain.
foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/11/cotton-china-uighur-labor-xinjiang-new-slavery/

In Broad Daylight: Uyghur Forced Labour and Global Solar Supply Chains
www.shu.ac.uk/helena-kennedy-centre-international-justice/research-and-projects/all-projects/in-broad-daylight

Data leak reveals how China 'brainwashes' Uighurs in prison camps
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-50511063

Lucy Fisher @LOS_Fisher
Head of British military says Putin 'allowed himself to be misled' regarding his own strength & that of Russian forces.

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin tells @ifgevents : 'Putin is a weaker and more diminished figure today than he was a month ago; Nato is stronger and more united.'

MoD's perm sec says the Integrated Review still stands, but its threat review needs to be recalibrated

The IR correctly identified Russia as the most extreme threat to European security, but the 'immediacy & brutality was possibly off', accepts David Williams

The 'timeframes' and 'perspective' of such a threat review by the MoD will take careful consideration, signals perm sec.

He says: 'The lessons about Ukraine you might have taken on day 1 or week 1 are not necessarily the same you’d take 5 weeks in… [It's] not something to rush'

The Uighurs have become a slave nation and I can't see that changing at all. Pressure on China about this isn't going to work, especially as China will probably be looking to reduce reliance on Western imports so the economic leverage will reduce. Plus they deeply resent pressure from outside. I fear that the Uighurs are fairly much a lost cause :/

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-60942633

This was on the BBC front page. I wonder how the 'letter' would be delivered given the internet in Russia is being censored etc. Would the Russian mayor now think Coventry City Council is run by Nazis. The irony of that.

@Ijsbear

The Uighurs have become a slave nation and I can't see that changing at all. Pressure on China about this isn't going to work, especially as China will probably be looking to reduce reliance on Western imports so the economic leverage will reduce. Plus they deeply resent pressure from outside. I fear that the Uighurs are fairly much a lost cause :/

Historically, China being isolated from the world didn't really do them any favours. The divergence of western technology due to glass technology remains a fascinating view of history.

And I take a lot of this "isolationist" analysis with a skip load of salt. I see absolutely no reason why Chinese leaders are any less mendacious, venal, greedy and self serving than anything we can grow in the west. Which means 99% of "isolationism" is really more a case of wanting cake (the nice shiny) but not the culture and society necessary to develop it. With all sorts of spurious "reasons" to (back)justify it.

(This may seem vaguely familiar to some).

@TargusEasting

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-60942633

This was on the BBC front page. I wonder how the 'letter' would be delivered given the internet in Russia is being censored etc. Would the Russian mayor now think Coventry City Council is run by Nazis. The irony of that.

Quick interruption to big up www.theherbert.org/ - easily a good spot for a couple of hours at least. A very moving hall dedicated to the efforts between Coventry and Germany at healing wars wounds.

As you were.

@PerkingFaintly

How do you think it will go?

The end of globalisation and two separate economies, with one quarter of the world's population under a democratic economy and three quarters under dictatorships or autocracies where modern slavery is acceptable?

Or will the young people of Russia reject that and yearn for the West and usurp the oligarchs eventually? What about India?

Pretty much every young person has experienced the internet now so why should they accept loss of freedom?

What about Africa. Most of those people live under dictatorships?

Just curious because I think it is really hard to tell whether parts of the world are eventually going to collapse into white dwarfs or explode into a super nova, in this generation or the next.

I see absolutely no reason why Chinese leaders are any less mendacious, venal, greedy and self serving than anything we can grow in the west I'd agree that many leaders are like that! and tbh, most cultures. I'm starting to think that the idea of democracy and determination-by-the-people is a recent aberration (except for the Faroe Islands and Iceland) and not one that will survive that long.

I've studied this a bit and an increasing rich/poor divide and climatic stressors are very frequent indicators of coming collapse. I don't think it will be quick though unless either climate problems snowball or Putin really does press the big red button. Interesting book on this, though not recent: www.amazon.co.uk/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Archaeology/dp/052138673X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&crid=IIWWN6RVGJM8&keywords=the+collapse+of+complex+societies&sprefix=the+collapse+of+co%2Cstripbooks%2C70&tag=mumsnetforu03-21&qid=1648734943&sr=1-1

This got me thinking about that NYT article upthread; that says Putin is actually after Ukraine's gas deposits. If it were not for his own essays and past actions (reuniting the USSR), I would believe it as most of Russia reserve gas supplies appear to be in the Artic and therefore economically unviable to drill.

I think that could be a reason, along with the agriculture like wheat and sunflower oil. It feels like a war over commodities, which is something I thought would happen in the future with climate change, I didn't expect it would happen so soon. It shows that we need to make the change to renewables asap and make sure our food production is more independent. The government needs to support farmers in a difficult time with rising fuel, energy and fertiliser costs. Regarding the previous posts on here about less than half of Russia's hospitals having central heating, it would make sense in the context of the gas running out, that they only have enough to export and not enough for domestic consumption. Unbelievable that they aren't heating their own hospitals to sell the gas abroad, whilst all the profits go to the government and oligarchs and the ordinary people there have a low standard of living.

We've been trying to reduce petrol consumption since just before the pandemic, which really helped focus our minds on that. We decided to go solar off the back of fuel prices and the war. It was something we've ummed and arhhed over for several years anyway. Events have pushed us over the edge with the solar. I doubt we are alone. We will ditch gas asap but we can't afford to both at once.

We're doing the same with petrol and gas, managing to reduce the gas usage by half against the same period last year. I use a dehumidifier to stop any damp (running it costs very little in electricity, compared to the extra heating in gas as more humid houses feel colder and are harder and more expensive to heat). It wasn't that high in the first place, the house was never heated to over 19c. We would like solar panels too, I'm hoping the prices will come down.

I've studied this a bit and an increasing rich/poor divide and climatic stressors are very frequent indicators of coming collapse.

with the very architects of that divide pointing at squirrels like morality, ethics, and anything else to cause a diversion.

I enjoy Roman history, Coming from an Italian bloodline, you really can't avoid it. However it's fair to say that part of the schizophrenia of the Age of Enlightenment has centred around the paradox that what (for many) was the paradigm of civilisation - Ancient Rome - managed to succumb to the barbarians. Even more puzzling when you cast it in the light of (Catholic) Christians versus pagans.

Even at the height of the Golden Age of Rome contemporary commentators would be pining for "the good old days" in a odd mirror to the oft-used "15 years away" for any jam-tomorrow statements today.

Ds is heavily involved even though he is still at Uni with campaigning against the genocide of the Uyghurs, both on social media and lobbying MPs.

He's very aware of the Uyghurs being exploited for slave labour. When I was buying part of his birthday present last year, I was told to check where the jeans were made and anything made in China was a No No (iirc, the jeans I got for him in M&S and he's an awkward size to find were made in Bangladesh which probably has its own issues of exploitation )

getting a bit distracted from the thread here but the Roman empire is fascinating. I read Tom Holland's book and it blew me away about how heavily the Roman machinery ground masses of humanity up.

Two things that stuck with me were that the silver mines were so toxic that birds fell dead out of the sky above them, and that men's life expectancy was (iirc, if!) about 2 years. Also that the first client-state that the Romans inherited, Bythinia iirc, was so plundered that even the nobles sold their children into slavery to stop them from starving to death. Now he seems to be well respected, and perhaps I am misremembering, but if that's the case then it indicates that it was a great deal more savage state than China.

I hope very much Im wrong but historically it seems to me that most countries have been run by bandits who enrich themselves and sit at the top of a very broad-based pyramid where most people are poor. The rise of the Middle Class was an excellent thing for people generally with lots of positive consequences.

TargusEasting I really don't know!

I don't think there will be two separate economies.

I think Putin's yapping about the dawn of a multipolar world is nuts, because it's been a multipolar world for a long time. He's actually being incredibly insulting to China to suggest otherwise. Putin's narrow-minded gripe is just that Russia hasn't been one of the poles...

Islamist extremism will continue to play a part. It's stoked by (among other things) grievance about the treatment of the Muslim Uighurs. It is also something Putin loves to leverage. He'll happily bond with the Chinese government and bomb Syria to bits, while bot-spamming the Middle East about the evils of the West and claiming to be a victim.

Of course Islamic extremism is a force in its own right, regardless of Putin. China and India also forces regardless of Putin.

Africa... Don't know. Big continent, very varied. China already well involved in some countries (Belt and Road Initiative).

As a side comment, from personal experience I'd say accepting refugees and immigrants and treating them well is a really important part of the UK setting its future place in the world. It fosters peer-to-peer connections that can outweigh govt-level politics. For this reason Theresa May's hostile environment is one of the most STUPID things I've ever seen. It's cruel too, but it's overwhelmingly stupid and against the UK's best interests in the long term. (I'm not referring to immigration control itself, but to deliberately making life difficult in the hope that perfectly legal residents and people legally entitled to asylum will somehow go away. Kind of how to lose friends and alienate people – with no tangible upsides only costs.)

The peer-to-peer relationships are, I think, particularly important for the UK's relationships with African countries and India.

Shashank Joshi @shashj
Ukraine's demands for guarantees. "three days after the start of the war...guarantor countries hold consultations, after which they are legally obliged to provide military assistance to our country, in particular ...armaments and the closure of the skies."

"It is suggested that the guarantors will be permanent members of the UN Security Council [and] Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy, Poland and Israel"

China seemed to pour cold water. Germany said maybe. Turkey said maybe. The UK made a statement about them not being NATO - which is curious given this seems to suggest Ukraine are trying to do it under the umbrella of the UN Security Council.... (note: we clearly haven't ruled this out). Fuck knows what the French think given their defence intelligence appears to be completely useless. And the US are obviously going to remain silent on this for as long as possible.

Shashank Joshi also pointed this out...

Shashank Joshi @shashj
Curious about this Boris Johnson line from last week—on "deterrence by denial" as a substitute for Article Five-type security guarantees. Are there other examples of this? Arguably many arms sales have this purpose, though usually not so explicitly.

For this reason Theresa May's hostile environment is one of the most STUPID things I've ever seen. It's cruel too, but it's overwhelmingly stupid and against the UK's best interests in the long term.

There are many indicators of dimness - low quality thinking. One of the more reliable is a tendency to only be able to conceive of changes as deterministic and fixed around an unchanging universe when the reality is all changes are differential equations.

Take offshoring (for example). Yes, it was great to funnel huge swathes of work to a much cheaper country (we will put to one side the appalling cost in quality that happened). However one effect of that was that said country started getting richer. Not just richer, but more aspirational. To the extent that some offshored development is now more expensive than in house.

Brexit is another good example. Where some people forget the EU has moved on since 2015 when they voted. It wasn't going to be pickled in aspic just because the UK fucked off.

If you look at the lives of any of the great entrepreneurs, you'll see what breadth of vision" means.

People who use "impossible" as a synonym for "I can't be arsed" or "I can't imagine" too.

But we already know that Theresa May era Tories were more than happy to spend far more money punishing the poor than it would ever have cost to help them.

@Ijsbear

getting a bit distracted from the thread here but the Roman empire is fascinating. I read Tom Holland's book and it blew me away about how heavily the Roman machinery ground masses of humanity up.

Two things that stuck with me were that the silver mines were so toxic that birds fell dead out of the sky above them, and that men's life expectancy was (iirc, if!) about 2 years. Also that the first client-state that the Romans inherited, Bythinia iirc, was so plundered that even the nobles sold their children into slavery to stop them from starving to death. Now he seems to be well respected, and perhaps I am misremembering, but if that's the case then it indicates that it was a great deal more savage state than China.

I hope very much Im wrong but historically it seems to me that most countries have been run by bandits who enrich themselves and sit at the top of a very broad-based pyramid where most people are poor. The rise of the Middle Class was an excellent thing for people generally with lots of positive consequences.

Distraction is good at the moment . Sounds fascinating , where are you reading this please?

Apparently Russia is considering nationalising the personal property of the Zelensky family in Crimea. Seems rather Communist. I used to know someone who grew up in Moscow in two rooms of a grand house appropriated from a Russian noble. (If that sounds fancy, the living conditions were squalid and awful.) I wish we could respond in kind by seizing the property of kleptocrats, but I suspect there are vested interests who wouldn't like the precedent that would set.

Fuck knows what the French think given their defence intelligence appears to be completely useless.

There’s no need to worry about what the French think - they have been informed.

TBH from what I saw a few weeks back I honestly don’t think you can slip a cigarette paper between what was said pre-invasion publicly by many French officials and other nations officials with regard to Ukraine/defence… and the French TV pundits here were flagging up the risks before the invasion just as much as those on CNN, BBC etc.

Fast forward to today and French rolling newscoverage is pretty much a match and a parallel, in terms of punditry and opinion, with what goes out on UK broadcast news.

Obviously there’s a lot gone on behind the scenes but I suspect there’s more to the sacking of the French official than simply the state of their defence intelligence.

Multiple reports of Russian military retreating from Kyiv’s suburbs and the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.

Waiting for official information.

twitter.com/mrsorokaa/status/1509554907631788036?t=AeYdS2c04KLwfS5FuYMWLg&s=19

There was also a report of a large explosion in Kyiv.

Re: Africa and Russia; the relationship between kleptocracy and worldwide autocracies has a big part to play there.

Nexta

#Putin signed a decree on a new procedure for settlements for Russian gas in rubles with "unfriendly countries".

According to the new law, from April 1, these countries must open accounts in #Russian banks. If they refuse to do so, the existing contracts will be stopped.
twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1509542753860034570?t=zFr0NLEscFfNsZC_fO56qw&s=19

@Alwayscheerful en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubicon:_The_Last_Years_of_the_Roman_Republic If I recall correctly, it was a few years ago. Ill try to check later once the kids are in bed

[quote Ijsbear]@Alwayscheerful en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubicon:_The_Last_Years_of_the_Roman_Republic If I recall correctly, it was a few years ago. Ill try to check later once the kids are in bed[/quote]
Thank you

There is, of course, Gibbons seminal "Decline and Fall" - a book whose very title belies it's agenda.

One thing that captivates me about our Roman forbears, is how modern they were. To the extent that you could plop a Roman middle class citizen in any European city and they'd pick it up in hours if not minutes.

Ultimately the Roman empire collapsed because it changed. Whatever was going on in 400 AD was nothing like what was going in in 400 BC.

And - like it or not - even our name "Britain" was given to us by the Romans. Gawd knows what we called ourselves back then.