Russia is attempting, accidentally on purpose, to blow-up Europe’s largest nuclear power plant: Enerhodar in Zaporizhzhia, which it has been violently occupying since 3 March 2022.
[full thread cataloguing in hundreds of Tweets Russia’s attempt to hold Europe hostage to nuclear blackmail: Provoke the Distress, then Purport to Salve It, which is part of Russia’s Provocation Logic: https://x.com/decodingtrolls/status/1760275518321021345?s=46].
Then yesterday Russia bombed an electricity substation that feeds power to Chornobyl’s reactor number 4 which Soviet Russia blew up in 1986.
This week I want to talk about Mental Routines. They’re immanent in Disinfolklore. Stories that inculcate rules. We’re not really aware of what’s going on and therefore we don’t put up our what I call our Incoming Troll Radar. So we’re not aware that not only are we being told a story but the story itself is going into our minds. It is inculcating certain rules and certain logics. One of the most important logics that most of us come across in this world is what I call the Provocation Logic of Wife Beater Logic: Look What You Made Me Do To You…
I want to talk about an element which I call, I call them mental routines. Basically, they are ‘logics’ which are transmitted through stories and through Disinfolklore.
So a perfect example of what I mean is in... In a folk tale, for instance,
“Elderly Laplanders used to tell their children about the big sea snake that lives in the deep and very cold feet. fjord. When the big sea snake finds a child alone on the shore, she may come out of the death and swallow that child. So this one story advises the children to keep a little bell in their belt.”
Clearly most of us will recognise the mental routine inside the story. The purpose of the story is to inculcate rules into the a child’s mind so that they’re safe; that they don’t go off alone without this little bell.
So we’re not aware that not only are we being told a story and also that the story itself is going into our Inner Minds. It is inculcating certain rules that affect our Mana (our Inner Mind’s energy). Certain logics are being transmitted via Disinfolklore. One of the most important logics that most of us come across in this world is what I call the Provocation Logic. Provocation Cycle Logic, which is: You Made Me Do This.
Basically, we can also call it wife-beater logic. So you provoked me. You forced me to invade your country. You... And this comes into almost every statement that Putin makes. We see it countless times a day in whether it’s on Telegram chats or in other means that we come across.
It comes in to all authoritarians. So Donald Trump. also inculcates this particular logic. Everything is someone else’s fault. Every action which the people take is someone else’s fault. What I realized is that these mental routines are actually taught. So we’re not just sitting listening to a story that inculcates this mental routine that “Ukraine supposedly discriminates against Russian language speakers. So we came in and killed 100,000 native language Russian speakers in Mariupol.”
That’s the logic of what they’re saying. When this is repeated a lot, then we not only hear the story, but we then take into our mind this logic as a unit, as a module.
What put me in mind this week was something that the great @NatalkaKyiv. Natalka Kyiv on X, who is just brilliant. She gives me so much source material. She quotes this guy called, it wasn’t really on my radar, his name is Nesmayan. And then she’s just updated, actually, it said that this guy Nesmayan was added to the Russian government’s extremist list after making this post.
So on the face of it, this post, but there’s just one element in it that I just wanted to take out. So basically, he writes this post about the spiderweb operation. Now he’s been added two days later to the Russian Rosfin Monitoring Service list of terrorists and extremists. From his perspective, it’s going to be, it’s really unfair because he’s a very loyal Putinist from the sound of it. You know, he’s a totally loyal Russianist. He’s basically exactly like Igor Gherkin in a different sense in that he’s a total patriot. He’s just speaking what he thinks is the truth.
Now he’s going to be, God knows what’s going to happen to him. But there was one element in it that really made me think about this idea of mental routines, which are inculcated through stories and which we often take on into our minds without thinking about them.
So the provocation logic one, which is the most eminent one, not only in Russian Disinfolklore, in what every time Putin speaks. But also in certain kinds of personality. People who have certain kinds of personality inventories, particularly authoritarians. It’s also part of Russian military doctrine. I first came across it in eastern Ukraine. But the element in this guy’s post, which really interested me and provoked me to offer to speak, tonight about this briefly was his second point.
So he’s trying to interpret spiderweb (Ukraine’s operation that successfully annihilated 1/3 of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet in one night) and as ever with these Russian thinkers and intellectuals, their minds (from my perspective) are so rotten. They’ve inculcated so many contradictory mental routines. Their education is so terrible, absolutely so terrible. They’ve lost the ability to reason in a way that most of us, uh, thankfully still can reason (but obviously my people who’ve gone MAGA can’t anymore).
Their minds are rotten, basically. So this guy is saying, he says that, um, the second point is that the Kremlin is being provoked to use a nuclear strike on Ukraine.
So in all seriousness, this is what he’s saying. He’s saying, uh, Ukraine obviously isn’t, doesn’t have any agency. So Ukraine is a child. And everything it does is the product of some Western conspiracy against Russia. So, again, it’s inculcating this narcissistic mental routine. Clearly, this person probably believes it in their own life. They also believe it on behalf of Russia. Every time they listen to Putin or any of the other intellectuals, it’s like a circular firing squad. They’re listening to these mental routines. They think they’re normal. Uh, and they really believe it. So they think the Spiderweb thing, uh, operation is a way of provoking Russia to, um, to use a nuclear strike on Ukraine.
So basically, uh, to put it in Wife Beater logic, uh, by, uh, attacking it, um, through this amazing operation that we all witnessed, uh, Ukraine has put on a short skirt and, uh, in order to lure Russia to its fate.
Everything here, he goes on to say, is strictly according to Russia’s nuclear doctrine. A strike has been carried out, undermining the strategic balance. All the reasons to use nukes are there. So basically, the West in this conspiracy has got its agent, Ukraine, to strike these fighter bombers. The reason it’s done this is because it knows what Russia’s military nuclear doctrine is. So obviously Russia is going to respond with a nuclear attack.
This is the whole conspiracy. Metz, Zelenskyy, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump, you name it. Everyone is in on this conspiracy. And Operation Spiderweb is in order to do that.
Then it’s clear that all persons involved in the adoption and execution of such a decision will be declared war criminals. So then he goes on to say in the West with all the ensuing consequences. So he’s talking. So what he’s saying is he’s saying that Ukraine is deliberately provoking Russia into annihilating the entire world with nuclear weapons.
Then he’s switching to say that basically any Russian who falls for this troll will then be declared war criminals in the West with all the ensuing consequences. So basically, according to this mad logic, the operation was to get Ukraine to provoke Russians into using nuclear weapons. Then when Russia uses those nuclear weapons, the West, the collective West, will declare the people... responsible for using those nuclear weapons to be war criminals, with all the ensuing consequences.
When I read this, I was just thinking: this is mad. Like, this is crazy logic. People will read this and go, oh, that’s quite because we’ve seen many of the posts saying over the past few days, oh, it’s going to be nuclear war and all of this stuff. The kind of mind, the kind of brain which can think this through itself is addled with what I call Disinfolklore and all of these false logics.
Basically, he’s equating the idea that the main problem with the nuclear strike that Russia makes is that they’ll be declared war criminals in the West. With all the ensuing consequences. So that they won’t be able to travel presumably to their Mayfair flats or to Italy or whatever. So it’s completely valueless. There’s no values in there about thinking about the millions of people who might die or that the reason not to use the nuclear weapons is that they’ll be declared a war criminal doesn’t even make sense inside their own logic: because they don’t believe in the primacy of international law, it simply doesn’t make sense.
So this really struck me as being a perfect encapsulation of the rottenness in the minds that we’re dealing with here. These kinds of logics. So in this sense, I mean, the logic, the logos, the argument is: There’s a conspiracy. Ukraine, the main purpose of the attacks is not because we’re fighting a war here. It’s to provoke Russia. Russia’s response will be nuclear, obviously. Then the West will celebrate because it can then declare Russia to be war criminals. So the story doesn’t even make any sense in their minds because they don’t really believe in international law.
This got me to thinking how mad these people are in the sense of they have driven themselves all crazy with these logics. I suspect the reason he’s been declared... a terrorist now or an extremist isn’t because of why I’m highlighting this particular mental routine.
It’s because he’s, um, he’s trying to, uh, well, actually I have no idea. I have absolutely no idea. I’m not going to even, um, Well, it’s perhaps because he says it’s a zugzwang in its pure form, but something else. So basically, he’s saying that having got this conspiracy together, Russia is zugzwanged.
As I understand it in chess, it’s a move that you make that, um, that you’re, uh, you’re basically it’s, it’s whatever Russia has done in Ukraine, they’ve zugzwanged themselves. They can’t get out of this mess, um, without collapsing, uh, Russia basically.
So maybe that’s why he’s been, um, designated an extremist. I was thinking about this as well, because a lot of us see a lot of people using AI. So they’re asking Grok in the way that we might ask the Oracle at Delphi. Then they post, many of us have probably done this, then they post Grok’s answer and say, oh, look, this is Elon’s, not even Grok is against Elon, all of this kinds of things.
I was put into mind this, that if the Russians, as we know they are, they are infecting the models, they’re infecting the data sets, the training models for Russia, all the different AI models with different logics, as indeed are many other MAGA, that we risk also teaching AI these mad inferences, these what we call heuristics.
So in the Disinfolklore analytical method, I want to look for these structures. The provocation logic structure is immanent. It’s the most common one I’ve identified. If we see this, usually the word provoked is used. So that’s very helpful.
In Russian “provocatsia” so that’s really helpful because that can signal it but often it’s uh sometimes it’s hidden. But the meaning is the same that it’s Wife Beater Logic. You made me whatever I do to you is the result of uh your provocation.
In the ai thing I wanted to find out was um where Pakistan was getting its weapons from. So I asked, does India sell Pakistan weapons? Which is obviously, I don’t think so. But I wanted to see what it did. And it inferred that they, it said that they didn’t but then inferred that they might on the basis that the countries were next to each other.
It struck me that this is a similar kind of heuristic or mad logic. Many of us with MAGA or Brexit or other things or anti-vaccine stuff, you know, it’s the “logic” that the vaccine is causing the illness, not the deadly virus. Not the five rounds of COVID which you’ve had. So many of us learn and we inculcate these heuristic logics. Disinfolklore is full of them. The Russians are geniuses at broadcasting them out. If we’re looking for them, then we have a chance of defeating them.
