Still reading the details, at least based on this Reuter's article, but this seems to exemplify why Machiavelli warns against using mercenaries over troops.
Interestingly by the the Machiavelli was writing, the condottieri he was referring to were in serious and terminal decline as independently powerful forces for a number of reasons, but you can find better parallels in either the later Roman Empire as suggested above, or in the warlords of the late Roman Republic (Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, etc) who took nominally state forces, made them their own private armies and then used them to seize power. Wagner seems to be a quasi-official force somewhere between state and private - vs say Blackwater (currently known as Academi), which operates closely within the U.S. military-industrial complex but is still clearly a private contractor - so you can see Prigozhin as a kind of farcical Sulla. or actually, someone less competent like Cataline.
Interestingly by the the Machiavelli was writing, the condottieri he was referring to were in serious and terminal decline as independently powerful forces for a number of reasons, but you can find better parallels in either the later Roman Empire as suggested above, or in the warlords of the late Roman Republic (Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, etc) who took nominally state forces, made them their own private armies and then used them to seize power. Wagner seems to be a quasi-official force somewhere between state and private - vs say Blackwater (currently known as Academi), which operates closely within the U.S. military-industrial complex but is still clearly a private contractor - so you can see Prigozhin as a kind of farcical Sulla. or actually, someone less competent like Cataline.
another thing that this and the submarine story have really hammered home to me is that there is an entire section of society, or at least Twitter and however much that translates to society, for whom no news is real and everything is a psy-op unless it's on a topic they care about ("wokeism" and/or Hunter Biden's dick or laptop, basically). they don't have takes, or rather their take on literally everything is "this is fake and you're a dupe if you believe it". it's a totally fucking crazy worldview, maybe even crazier than QAnon etc, bc things that at least have an internally consistent logic of sorts even if it resists on numerous unhinged pillars of belief. this is just a kind of nihilistic (the bad kind, not the good kind) refusal to believe that anything outside of your worldview is real. it's a logical endpoint of conspiratorial thinking, I guess. instead of believing everything, you believe nothing. also a kind of extreme solipsism - that there are vast forces out there consistently churning out fake global news events to distract you from whatever you're narrowly focused on.
Yeah personally I find that paranoid/solipsistic epistemology fascinating, because on one level it seems borne of a widespread and largely warranted distrust of institutions, but on the other hand it also seems to involve an unwillingness to actually process information and arrive at informed opinions. I suspect it is also attributable to something like a societal growing pains with globalized information overload, EG its easier to keep track of your neighborhood events than global events.another thing that this and the submarine story have really hammered home to me is that there is an entire section of society, or at least Twitter and however much that translates to society, for whom no news is real and everything is a psy-op unless it's on a topic they care about ("wokeism" and/or Hunter Biden's dick or laptop, basically). they don't have takes, or rather their take on literally everything is "this is fake and you're a dupe if you believe it". it's a totally fucking crazy worldview, maybe even crazier than QAnon etc, bc things that at least have an internally consistent logic of sorts even if it resists on numerous unhinged pillars of belief. this is just a kind of nihilistic (the bad kind, not the good kind) refusal to believe that anything outside of your worldview is real. it's a logical endpoint of conspiratorial thinking, I guess. instead of believing everything, you believe nothing. also a kind of extreme solipsism - that there are vast forces out there consistently churning out fake global news events to distract you from whatever you're narrowly focused on.
well, that's a complicated question so this simplifies some thing, butI still need a better sense of Machiavelli's actual geopolitical context. I assumed there weren't forces quite like private military contractors in his day, but are you saying there were? I also am vaguely of the understanding that the main geopolitical actors at that point weren't quite nation-states, but something like proto-nation-states which were more like rough confederations of kingdoms and fiefdoms and whatnot, no?
I know the usual types were yelling "CIA coup!" about the Wagner thing the other day - because heaven forfend that anyone who isn't American could have sentience or agency, right? - but I hadn't seen anything about Titanic tourism sub being a 'psy-op'. Did you get any impression of what the They supposedly responsible for it were meant to be getting out of the exercise?another thing that this and the submarine story have really hammered home to me is that there is an entire section of society, or at least Twitter and however much that translates to society, for whom no news is real and everything is a psy-op unless it's on a topic they care about ("wokeism" and/or Hunter Biden's dick or laptop, basically). they don't have takes, or rather their take on literally everything is "this is fake and you're a dupe if you believe it". it's a totally fucking crazy worldview, maybe even crazier than QAnon etc, bc things that at least have an internally consistent logic of sorts even if it resists on numerous unhinged pillars of belief. this is just a kind of nihilistic (the bad kind, not the good kind) refusal to believe that anything outside of your worldview is real. it's a logical endpoint of conspiratorial thinking, I guess. instead of believing everything, you believe nothing. also a kind of extreme solipsism - that there are vast forces out there consistently churning out fake global news events to distract you from whatever you're narrowly focused on.
I'm sure the monied interests in Big Cruise weren't thrilled about the tourism industry latching onto one of their biggest blunders.I know the usual types were yelling "CIA coup!" about the Wagner thing the other day - because heaven forfend that anyone who isn't American could have sentience or agency, right? - but I hadn't seen anything about Titanic tourism sub being a 'psy-op'. Did you get any impression of what the They supposedly responsible for it were meant to be getting out of the exercise?
on the one hand I'm sure that's true, information overload until it's all noiseI also think it's an organic development from being immersed in 'news' and 'content' on a daily basis. You can eventually just glaze over, everything becomes noise.
on the one hand I'm sure that's true, information overload until it's all noise
otoh, events happened before the Internet and social media
like it's one thing to say "the CIA orchestrated a coup" and another to say "the coup didn't happen, it's a made-up psyop to distract us"
it's like an extension of Baudrillaud - there's no event on which a simulacra is based, just the simulacra itself
like every event is being produced Wag the Dog style, by nefarious powers, for reasons, unless you decide it's real
as always, 9/11 seems like the basic breaking point with reality from which this kind of worldview culturally flows
distraction from whatever matters to these people, which as I said is basically "wokeism" and whatever other nonsenseDid you get any impression of what the They supposedly responsible for it were meant to be getting out of the exercise?
distraction from whatever matters to these people, which as I said is basically "wokeism" and whatever other nonsense
the basic idea I think is that Biden admin/global elites/lizard people/whoever is continuously making up fake events to distract you from their nefarious activities, unless it's a story that reflects badly on them in which case it's real (and despite controlling everything they're unable to prevent such stories from coming out bc...who knows?)
I don't see it directly, more in quote tweets of people being like "this is fucking crazy"