When the Russian special military operation started, the collective West was quick to denounce it. The hope was to get Russia to capitulate in response to economic sanctions. Some people were even fantasizing about breaking up Russia, just like it had been done to Germany or Korea in the not-too-distant past. As it turned out, however, Russia is a much more resilient enemy than expected. The West got so high on its own farts that nobody in power seemed to have noticed that countries without a decent manufacturing base, a demoralized populace, and a rotten culture do not make for strong opposition.

As a Ukrainian victory in battle seemed elusive, sanctions were pushed harder and harder. A key figure was the Jewish Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who assigned grades to companies, depending on their involvement in the Russian economy. This is the kind of public shaming that seems to be very effective in the current year. In particular women, who are much more concerned about public opinion than men, respond strongly to it, but the same is true of feminized men, of course. By the way, these faggots at Yale even wrote a 118-page paper with the title “Business Retreats and Sanctions Are Crippling the Russian Economy“, which must be some of the most deluded research to ever have come out of academia. Western sanctions had the effect that the collective West shot itself in the foot. In contrast, the Russian economy is thriving and going from strength to strength.

In my view, hysterics are to blame for a lot of the poor actions of Western companies. In law or related fields like “compliance”, there are a lot of women, and executives who avoid taking risks at all costs listen to anything their compliance officers tell them. Of course, the issue is not breaking the law but foregoing perfectly legal and highly lucrative profit opportunities because three people who have no interest in your product anyway might not like it. Women are also getting more board seats nowadays. On top, even men leading companies are getting more and more pussified. Thus, a bullying campaign reminiscent of teenage-girl high-school methods is catnip to these people. They feel good about “sticking it to Putin” or following some supposed rules that do not even exist, not realizing that they are damaging their own companies in the process.

Interestingly, there is also the aspect that withdrawing from the Russian market does not really harm Russia. There were a few cases were companies sold their Russian subsidiaries at fire-sale prices. Yet, the demand for these products is there, and the profits are also very real. However, instead of some Western company extracting these profits you have Russian business men lining their pockets instead. With a bit of long-term thinking, this would have been easy to see. However, if you are caught up in hysterics, then thinking just one move ahead is an insurmountable problem.

For a while I have followed the hysteria surrounding Russia. Some companies sold off properties at laughably low prices. There are a few rules-of-thumb for valuing companies, for instance using a profit multiplier. Of course, this gives you just a rough indication, but it still shows that selling off part of a business for 1/10 of what it should be worth is not a smart decision. I even came across cases where the Russian arm of the business made a lot of money. Well, these businesses make somebody else rich now. In the extreme, you could imagine that there are companies who make more money in Russia than elsewhere, but still sold off that business. I came across at least one such case in the list I linked to above. Thus, some business may already be sinking due to the knee-jerk reaction of selling off perfectly healthy subsidiaries. However, companies that do this are probably not all that well run elsewhere either. Whenever there is management-by-hysterics, there is thus a compounding effect of bad decisions, which invariably leads to a death spiral.

There are a few cases of big businesses who went down after less-rational people took over. An easy example is that chick who ran Yahoo into the ground. However, there are also other tech executives who made poor decisions. For instance, think of that Indian guy who ran Twitter before Elon Musk bought the company and fired him. He exhibited poor leadership and fell over himself to censor everybody he was told to censor. I wonder if the Indian guy who runs Google has a similar problem. Of course, Google is hugely profitable. However, this company enjoys an artificial monopoly. They have not managed to come up with a new product that could complement their search engine. Thus, I wonder if the CEO just tries to not offend anybody and therefore does not dare to make big bets. The homosexual CEO of Apple was cut from the same cloth. Since Steve Job’s passing, Apple has been stagnant and not produced anything truly innovative. Here, the problem is not so much hysteria but the female fear of risk. You can play it safe, but you are not going to win in the long run if you do so. Hysterics and compulsive risk avoiders do not care about winning, of course.