re: #249 goddamnedfrank

Putin’s import restrictions are such an incredible, incomprehensible own goal….

A year or two of heavy machinery shortages would also be less likely to cause massive hardship to the average person, but a food supply shortage and price spike at the supermarket is guaranteed to piss everyone off. The thing is though, Putin seems like such a stubborn man that there’s good odds he’ll stick with this cluster fuck rather than to admit error and reverse himself.

My guess is that making things harder on the average person isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It looks like a lot of people will buy that it’s the West’s fault (although certainly not all), and Putin doesn’t have any use for a middle class anyways. You need to buy off the rich and impoverish the rest so they’re too busy trying not to starve to make trouble. It’s the unhappy middle class that usually starts shit.

I believe it’s far more likely that Putin is at risk from a coup from his buddies than any sort of popular uprising, but he seems to have an irrational horror of more color revolutions.