The Null Device

As Russia annexes Crimea and makes threatening noises towards the rest of Ukraine, many people have opinions, not least among them the Pick-Up Artist community, where the consensus is that anything that prevents Ukraine from joining the EU is good for the supply of beautiful, submissive women, uncorrupted by Western notions of equality:

“If Ukraine joins the EU, the girls will vanish like cockroaches when the lights are turned on,” one wrote. “It saddens me deeply because Ukrainian girls were always much more accessible than Russian ones,” lamented another. “Joining the EU may reduce overt corruption in favour of systematised ones, but feminism will spread like wildfire and destroy all the traditionalism that lays in that land.”

As of mid-March, gendered pontificating continued apace both among prominent conservatives and on Roosh’s “Ukraine Conflict Lounge” subforum. One PUA shared his thoughts on why it would be better for Crimea and East Ukraine to go to Russia: “It seems to me this will insulate Crimea from the feminism . . . that will over take Ukraine as they move towards the EU. Fat feminists, slut walks, and mass muslim immigration could be in store for the parts of Ukraine that wish to join Europe instead of Russia.” Meanwhile, Sarah Palin told Sean Hannity that the perception of Obama’s “potency” is one of “weakness.”

“Putin sees himself as a macho man who’s going to do pretty much what he wants,” said Fox News talking head Bill O’Reilly. “The president sees himself as a renaissance man who wants to accommodate.” K.T. McFarland, another Fox News analyst, tweeted, “Putin seizes countries, Obama threatens maybe to kick Russia out of the G-8 club. Bet Putin’s sorry now! Winners write history, not whiners.” Fox even published a “must-watch highlight reel of Putin doing macho things,” including karate and riding a horse shirtless.

There seems to be a new reactionary axis forming on the fringes: on one hand, you have the PUAs going from fedoras and subliminal crotch-pointing in bars to an almost Talibanic hostility to the very idea of unsubjugated women, and from there, to a hostility to any relations not predicated on dominance and submission. And approaching from a slightly different angle, you have the “Dark Enlightenment”, that odd offshoot of Libertarianism which contends that the Enlightenment, and the notions of democracy and human rights, were bad ideas, and longs for a return to feudalism.

(via cshirky) ¶ gender libertarianism pua putin russia seduction ukraine 2

Russian president Vladimir Putin, it seems, has a fan base in the US, whose membership leans conservative and admires his red-blooded, two-fisted old-world machismo with perhaps a hint of envy:

There are many faux Putin fans in America—those who mock the hero worship ironically or half-ironically. But plenty of his fans are serious. Three months ago, Americans for Putin, a Facebook group, sprang up "for Americans who admire many of the policies and the leadership style of Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin" and think he "sounds better than the Republicrat establishment." The group has an eight-point policy platform calling for "a unified [American] national culture," a "firm stance against Israeli imperialism," and an opposition to the political correctness it says dominates Washington. Though that group is relatively small (167 likes as of Wednesday afternoon, ticking up every few hours), the Obama's-so-bad-Putin-almost-looks-good sentiment can be found on plenty of conservative message boards. Earlier this year, when Putin supposedly caught—and kissed—a 46-pound pike fish, posters on Free Republic, a major grassroots message board for the Right, were overwhelmingly pro-Putin:

"I wonder what photoup [sic] of his vacation will the Usurper show us? Maybe clipping his fingernails I suppose or maybe hanging some curtains. Yep manly. I can't believe I'm siding with Putin," one wrote. "I have President envy," another said. "Better than our metrosexual president," said a third. One riffed that a Putin-Sarah Palin ticket would lead to a more moral United States.

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The Russian feminist punk collective Pussy Riot have, as expected, been found guilty, and sentenced to two years in a gulag, a sentence less than the 3-7 years the prosecution wanted, but still alarmingly severe given the nature of the incident. Given the brutality of the Russian prison system (in which almost half of the prisoners are ill with HIV or antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis and disfavoured prisoners, a category into which unrepentant enemies of the powers that be may end up being coerced, are singled out for brutal abuse), their chances of emerging two years later more or less OK don't look good.

The trial, if anything, has been a turning point, in that Russia has given up the pretence of being a liberal democracy, and publicly reasserted the Czarist autocratic model, with the Russian Orthodox church acting as a Caesaropapist arm of the absolute State. Der Spiegel has a piece on Russia's reembracing of autocracy:

In the summer of 1991, for example, when the Soviet realm was collapsing, Putin moved into his office in St. Petersburg and promptly had the portrait of Lenin removed and replaced with one of Peter the Great. A janitor had brought Putin two images of the czar. The first one depicted the young Peter, looking amiable and idealistic, a modernizer who wanted to open the "window to Europe" for his giant, backward country. Putin rejected the picture. Instead, he chose one of a serious-looking older czar, marked by many battles and conflicts, one who had expanded his realm with new conquests, and one whose rule was so ruthless that he had his own son tortured to death after accusing him of being involved in a conspiracy.

And in other news, Moscow's top court has banned gay parades for 100 years.

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Russian Prime Minister and President-in-waiting Vladimir Putin has been awarded the Confucian Peace Prize, created by the Chinese government to "promote world peace from an eastern perspective", beating a field of other candidates, including Bill Gates, Angela Merkel and a Beijing-appointed Tibetan Panchen Lama:

The 16-judge panel said that Putin deserved the award because his criticism of Nato's military engagement in Libya was "outstanding in keeping world peace", regardless of the fact that it had no bearing on the outcome of the north African conflict.

The Chinese organisers claimed they established the award last year after preparing for years to create something that would "promote world peace from an eastern perspective". But the Confucian peace prize appeared more like a rushed and botched attempt to upstage the Nobel laureate status granted to jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

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Everyone complains about the procession of doom and gloom in the news, but only the Russians are doing something about it. After a bank loyal to Russia's President Vladimir Putin bought out Russia's largest independent radio news network, they decreed that at least 50% of reports about Russia must be "positive".

As well as protecting the Russian people from doom and gloom, they are also committed to guarding them from the pernicious influence of unapproved politicians, all mention of whom has been banned.

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A former KGB colonel and critic of the Russian government resident in Britain appears to have been poisoned with thallium, after investigating the recent murder of Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya (another critic of the Putin government). Alexander Litvinenko, who was granted political asylum in Britain in 2001 and was reportedly a British citizen, had made a number of claims about the Putin government, including that the Russian security services orchestrated a catastrophic terrorist attack on Russian soil to create a pretext for an offensive in Chechnya. Could the Russian security services once again be assassinating troublemakers abroad, as the KGB and their Warsaw Pact allies did during the Cold War?

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