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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
There is no way such a rule would be backed by the Western countries unless they could get reassurance that it would never be applied against them in the court of public opinion. A quick search reveals USAID spent $63 billion in 2024, and this is not counting other allied financial moves like the EU's offer of more than 10% of Moldova's GDP as a loan to help the pro-EU candidate. (Imagine the pandemonium if Georgescu's campaign had a promise of a $35B loan from Russia attached to it if they leave NATO!) Then, there is the circumstance that Western culture is "Universal Culture". The West out-spends and out-memes its adversaries on its periphery regularly; losing one rare match is not a good reason to throw a tantrum and quit the game.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
Without looking it up, how many people do you think are shot by police in the US, a country of 330,000,000?
Unfortunately looked this up already in the context of the argument earlier, I think it was 600.
Without looking it up, how many times do you think police engage in "police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building"?
I would guess significantly more - if we make it something well-defined like SWAT dispatches, perhaps on the order of 100k? Is that data collected anywhere or is it another thing where you could only find local data and not everywhere due to how fragmented the police force is?
As you said, Europeans and Americans have very different perspectives. Americans would characterize this as state ownership of children and very authoritarian.
I think there's a general theme that relative to Europeans, Americans are more concerned with impositions by the state but much less concerned with impositions by non-state actors, even though from the perspective of an average citizen the two might not be readily distinguishable as lofty authorities. As a caricature, we figure that an American would get very upset by the government banning him from soapboxing for some political position, but would see nothing wrong with it if a corporation bought up all roads and public squares in his city and instituted a ban against voicing the same position on company property (along with a host of other house rules). Moreover, if someone then proposed to force the company to surrender roads or parks to the public hand, or circumscribed its right to enforce rules of its choosing on it, the American might be up in arms about that being an intrusion upon the company's free speech.
When Europeans call America authoritarian, it comes off as preposterous to us. Putting people in jail for mild social criticism is nuts and authoritarian and has nothing to do with "libel and slander."
Right, and putting people in jail for 25 years to life for all sorts of one-off transgressions comes off as nuts and authoritarian to us, as to million-dollar fines and jail terms for software piracy (...).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
I'm getting the sense that you switch between taking my words overly literally in some cases and loosely reinterpreting it in a way that is convenient for your argument in others. To rehash:
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I think that searches, SWAT calls and other similar "they come to your house because they think there is a threat in it to neutralise" situations in particular are a scenario in which I would feel much less safe around US police than around European police.
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Data supports that US police in general are much more likely to injure and kill those they interact with than European police
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Personal experiences support that US police are more hostile and less helpful than their European counterparts. This is in their interactions with me as a Caucasian academic with naive good-kid vibes; who knows what they would do if they were responding to a SWAT call or following a lead from someone in the computer security "industry" I know.
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I grant that there are reasons they turned out like that, but I see no evidence that they are not like that to everyone, i.e. that the hostility is precisely targeted at the uniquely American problem elements. There are more YouTube bodycam videos of American police roughing up harmless-looking white kids than total incidents of German police doing that.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
It was an example. As I said in response to your other post, in every easily-delineated scenario where there is evidence that can be compared, US police look worse. To try to rebut this by dismissing each easily-delineated scenario as an irrelevant small sample seems like a god-of-the-gaps argument to me - "surely in some other domain that we just so don't happen to have good data on, US police are actually nicer and more professional than European police! What, they're also hostile and violent in this one? Guess they must be nicer and more professional in one of the many others!"
I said that I think that 2% do, but based on the data I could find the only thing that can be proved is that there is an upper bound of about 25% (about 600 total killings, of which an unknown percentage happened during federal searches, vs. ~2000 federal searches).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
No, I never said those were the only two...? Those were just on my first visit to the US. I later came back to spend several years there, which involved a few more interactions of my own that were mostly not any better, and many stories from people I knew personally that were significantly worse.
which even you seem to acknowledge diverges wildly from the available statistical data?
Huh? Germany continues having <20 people killed annually by police. That's <1/30 the killings, at ~1/4 the population. I'm not going to try to dig up statistics to compare every single detailed scenario, because where comparable statistics are easy to find it clearly backs up my narrative - for just about any possible hostile/violent action by police, US police do it at a higher rate than European police. I'm completely sympathetic to explanations along the lines of this being inevitable/justified because the population being policed is much more dangerous and unruly, but this does not mean you have to deny the basic discrepancy of symptoms
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
Eh, I could see this argument making some amount of sense for generic bankmen (who both value their own time highly and are likely to be cut off from reoffending opportunities by even moderate prison terms and non-prison punishments such as professional bans). If you are a Shkreli, spending your best 10 years behind bars may not be a prospect that is worth any number of billions in your account. In the case of this particular Bankman, who by all accounts was really an idealist with an agenda beyond lining his pockets, the logic of deterrence, which says keep the expected value of the crime negative, requires greater punishment. If he really thinks he is saving the world if he succeeds, and his value function looks a lot more like his understanding of saving the world than like hedonism-maxxing for himself as a bag of meat and bones, the natural cap of hedonic saturation is blown off and he presumably needs to be threatened with a lot more personal suffering to bring the expected payoff of would-be imitators below zero (at least as long as we can't punish criminal effective altruists by mass incineration of mosquito nets or farming more shrimp).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
Others have compiled stats on the number of injuries and deadly shootings, but note that I was talking about searches, not all interactions. It seems that there are on the order of 2000 federal searches a year, but I can't find either data on how many of those resulted in discharge of a firearm or how many search warrants were issued to non-federal police, so I guess the only thing I can say is "up to 25% deadly and 100% attempted" for searches. My somewhat arbitrary guess would be that it's about 2% in reality for searches where the target individual is present.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
Huh, where are you from? My very first impressions of US police (when I came for the first time as a tourist) consisted of a border guard interrogating me for half an hour because he wasn't convinced I would not illegally enroll to study without authorisation on my one-week trip to visit a friend at MIT, and two NYC cops getting into a fighting posture when I asked them for directions before settling down and merely staring at me like I am insane, and finally barking a useless answer. I have never been to a place in Europe where you couldn't ask police for directions and get a helpful and detailed answer.
I'm sure there are exceptions to the view I described, but I stand by most. It also is to be expected that exceptions would be highly overrepresented on a right-leaning American politics forum.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
I think it registers as clearly WEIRD on the one fairly culture-independent marker of weird self-actualization (as in Scott's "black people less likely"), perhaps in excess of any Western demographic apart from White Americans. As for the rest, the congeniality to the red tribe is being severely overstated in part due to American culture war projection, turning Japan into some sort of anti-Sweden in American memespace (which is funny because, having pretty deep familiarity with both, I keep being surprised at how similar they turn out to be to each other in random aspects). There are some aspects of Japan that code right wing in the American scheme, but all in all it's very "blue-and-orange morality" to the black-and-white of the Western left-right divide.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
Maybe in the US? I'm pretty much core millennial, but nothing I heard in Europe suggested that children were supervised more at any point since WWII.
To begin with, "latchkey" seems to suggest that you go home and stay home alone. We were playing outside alone, and maybe half the time the parents were actually home - it's not that they couldn't supervise the children, they just didn't choose to.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
Funny enough, when I was in primary school (this was in Germany, though probably further north than your username suggests), perhaps around 3rd grade (though memory is fuzzy on that), we had an incident when several girls actually reported having a stark naked exhibitionist jump out from the bushes in front of them on the way home from school. This resulted in some evening information session for parents and a special lesson where we were told to run away and scream for the kids, but at least as far as I remember it put no long-term dent in the frequency of kids (of either gender) playing in the gravel pit, which was right next to unpaved road (cutting through some fields) where the flasher flashed.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
The flipside of the rules of the US hegemony being that US interests at best end at the adversary's border is that the victory conditions for the US, as far as perceptions are concerned, are much steeper. Just like both sides agree that a loss for Ukraine would be a loss for NATO, the US would likewise already lose if Taiwan were taken, or SK/JP forced into neutrality (with the attendant removal of US bases): geopolitical implications aside, there is the cold logic of bluster that says that if you assert or imply that you will never allow something happen and then you let it happen anyway, all other claims you made that you will never let something happen will also become suspect in the eyes of pretenders. Each bluff called successfully moves the boundary to be tested a bit further inwards, and if the US getting its way does not seem quite as inevitable anymore, Iran would be a little more tempted to make a swing at Israel, assorted South American populists might once again be tempted to kick out DEA and the United Fruit Company for cheap votes, Turkey would seize some Greek islands and/or buy more Russian air defense with telemetry enabled, and before long even Germany might resume trading with the Russians and installing Huawei tech. How many of those could the US actually weather in the long run, without all the interlocking benefits it currently reaps from its position entering a downwards spiral?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
You raise a good point that it's at least not so clear-cut regarding authoritarianism, because each side weighs and interprets the freedoms they have or don't so differently. Through my Euro eyes, US prison terms and the circumstance (responding more to @Hieronymus's point) that police turning up to perform a search in the US are likely to shoot me without asking questions if they are having a bad day and don't like how I move my hand weigh a lot more than the right to have guns (especially considering that the possibility of me having guns in the US is what creates the near-necessity of police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building), or that the US has some more arcane rules that may restrict when and what police can search a wee bit more. Our absence of "education"/"religious freedom" reads as freedom from the ability of having one's life ruined by crazy parents. I will grant the superiority of the US free speech principle, but that flags me as an unusual European; most people would say that things such as a "right to be forgotten" and protections against libel and slander actually make the individual more free from the tyranny of the masses.
On COVID, neither side has made a good showing, but I actually get the sense that the intensity of the response in Europe was nontrivially fuelled by imported TDS.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
If you look at the US political spectrum through a lens of economics and authoritarianism, both parties do look pretty far right compared to most of Europe: European-level levels of tax and social benefits are well outside your Overton window, most pro-corporate policies like Citizens United and the DMCA have strong bipartisan support, both parties are in favour of prison terms and conditions that would make the eyes of Europeans water, and both parties are in favour of foreign interventions and maintaining the size of your military-industrial apparatus.
In Europe, support for US-style business-friendly policies exists but generally feels pretty artificial (backed by politicians recognized to be US plants and understood as the cost of doing business with the US), US levels of taxation and benefits are not backed by any serious party, US-style punishment is sometimes advocated for particular cases by tabloids but I have not seen it as a general platform, and support for militarization has only noticeably crept up since about 2014 (Ukraine) or perhaps 2016 (Trump's first term).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
in the second instance an extremely phlegmy cough, both of which persisted for months after the acute symptoms went away.
I had a persistent (dry) cough for half a year after a non-COVID respiratory illness, and such a thing was never too uncommon among people I knew as they grew older. If after COVID this counts as "long COVID", then long COVID is not as unique or novel a threat as it is made out to be.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
some common through-line that connects feminism, White people, desire to be ill, environmentalism and suicide
Christian folkways, especially of the New England Puritan kind? It's all there: the meddling, purity spirals and slave morality, the ethnic association, the extending circles of care, the glorification of restraint, acts of penitence and self-denial. Christian devotional hypochondria has a long tradition, and if you go further back there is plenty of antinatalism (monks) and suicide-adjacent practices (martyrs, anchorites) only tempered by a prohibition against explicit suicide.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
I think people are still in willful denial about how much the unforced costs of childrearing have increased in the past decades. Starting around age 2, I would routinely be left with a grandparent for the day or multiple days while my mother went to work (harder nowadays since mobility in upper strata of society increased, and nobody I know lives within 100km of their parents anymore). Starting around age 7, I would spend large stretches of the day home alone, or playing outside (in the streets, or the abandoned gravel pit beyond our housing development) alone or with any number of neighbourhood kids who were also outside unsupervised or could be easily summoned by just walking up to their apartment block and ringing the doorbell. (Much of this is probably illegal an/ord might result in loss of parenting rights nowadays in most Western countries.) If I needed something from my parents, I would take the bus into town to find them at work (another CPS case?), where they would probably get me some food at the university cafeteria and then drive me home (in a way that is no longer legal, since Germany now mandates child seats in cars up until age 12 (!?)). I got into a good free public school just based on an admissions exam, and into a series of very good universities just on strength of grades and math/science olympiad participation; nowadays I gather you have no chance without an array of eclectic extracurriculars that also need to be found, organised and paid for by your parents. As a result of this increase in safetyism and credentialism, I now see little possibility to raise children and give them remotely as good a life as I had without investing a much larger fraction of my money and time than my parents (really: my single mother and her series of boyfriends) had to for me.
"Status" is only relevant insofar as I think it would both be low-status to raise kids that are obviously miserable and have no prospects, and we would also coincidentally have to sacrifice other things that convey us status (like having full-time academic jobs) to make it not so. To overcome this, you wouldn't just need to fix some putative recent drop in the status conveyed by parenthood; rather, you would need to socially engineer a status reward for it that exceeds all the novel status penalties, which would require entirely new and hypothetical types of machinery. To roll back the cost increase seems like a hopeless ambition - while there may be groups of people (especially here) who could be convinced to oppose the credentialism ratchet, the consensus for safetyism is entrenched to the point that the tribes mostly wage war against each other in the language of harms and dangers that their opponents have not done enough to address.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
For what it's worth, I had no idea that the 25th and 26th had relevance beyond "two days to sleep off the hangover from Christmas (the 24th)" until coming to England to study. Curiously, this is reverted for Halloween (All Hallows' Eve?), which is only observed in Germany as an American import, while the following Day is a bank holiday which Christians actually assign great significance to.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8mo ago
You'd have to codify the actual-but-unspeakable moral intuition that most people have, which is something like: the only sacred/protected category is femininity, and once it has been tainted with masculinity it forfeits its protections. Gender segregation, discrimination and reservations all only serve the purpose of elevating "pure" females.
This is why the anti-trans faction is primarily concerned with MtF as an intrusion upon female privileges and FtM as a threat to impressionable girls, while the pro-trans faction (to a lesser degree) exhibits a preference for focussing on MtF rights as something that men must be compelled to grant and FtM rights as a freedom that women ought to have (and why radfems are a massive nuisance that they would rather forget about). Both sides understand that "protect women" is the only widely shared moral foundation.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8mo ago
Blech, I was half asleep when writing that post. I did indeed mean the Polish gap as the one they would ram through, but you are totally right about the Cold War one.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8mo ago
Whuh? Warsaw? Do you mean Gdansk?
Whoops, yes, my bad. Another instance of posting while half asleep.
Sure, you wouldn't get landings like this, but controlling the Baltic (or, even more importantly, preventing NATO control of Baltic) would still give Russians considerable strategic advantage, starting with the security of Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg. The Arctic circle even moreso - that's where the big missiles would be flying, after all.
Kaliningrad would be better secured by seizing Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania (which would also be significantly easier), and if Sweden and Finland remained neutral then NATO would be hardly "in control" of the Baltic at that point. Even then, though, I figure they would still be perfectly capable of knocking out any major ship in it, which would render it essentially useless (especially since in an open war against NATO I imagine even "civilian" shipping would be targeted - the taboo against that is only maintained by Western public opinion and the implicit threat of the collective West taking its gloves off if a violation is too egregious, which would not work if Western gloves are already off and would not be aimed against the West itself to begin with). As for the Arctic circle, why is Sweden and Finland relevant here? Russia extends further north than either; the only clay that would meaningfully extend its northern/northwestern reach is Norway's, and that's already in NATO.
If we're talking about 1944, we're talking about a completely different situation due to there already having been 3 years of war. And Winter War was precisely the sort of an invasion of a neutral country to obtain a strategic advantage in the midst of an ongoing separate greater-power conflict we are talking about here.
I was thinking of the 41-44 war after the siege of Leningrad. I don't think being different means that it's not applicable; the Soviet war machine was only gaining steam, and Soviet planners were clearly already thinking about a future standoff against the West, so I don't understand why they would not invest more resources in it if they actually thought it strategically advantageous for such a scenario. As for the original Winter war, I think circumstances then were actually materially different to modern ones: the Finnish border was significantly closer to Leningrad, between Mannerheim's White sympathies and Finnish irredentism towards the Russian parts of Karelia a proactive/opportunistic attack by the Finns on Russia would have seemed plausible, and there was an ideological component about Finland's abortive communist revolution that is wholly absent today.
The scenarios that I described wasn't concocted in 2022 - they've been standard fare in Finnish and Swedish security debates from the times of Cold War on, a part of a greater security calculus of whether it makes more sense to join NATO and risk getting directly involved a great-power conflict or not join the NATO and still risk being targeted by a separate SMO in preparation of such a conflict or as a separate but still connected part of such a conflict.
The scenarios you described might have been more relevant during the Cold War and into the mid-2000s, when the consensus among the major militaries of the world was still that littoral combat and naval landings are a winning strategy against great powers. (The US started its Zumwalt-class littoral destroyer programme somewhen around 2005, I think?) I remember hearing the first rumblings that A2/AD may render all of this obsolete in the 2010s in the context of China, and the the Ukraine war has now delivered fairly compelling proof.
For a long time, that calculus pointed towards the "not join" option, with majorities of both the population and the leadership of these countries sharing this view, but a full Russian attack on Ukraine of course upended the calculus almost completely (the year of Russia beating the war drum before the invasion had already started this process but the invasion made the opinion switch permanent) by demonstrating Russia's capacity for brash, previously unthinkable action, with both the people and the leaders basically changing course almost overnight. I live here and follow local politics closely, I am very familiar with how this process happened.
I mean, I actually lived in Sweden around the time of the 2022 invasion, and though I was not so rooted that I would be familiar with what average locals had thought before, within my academic bubble the sequence looked like (moral outrage at the invasion) -> (media blitz pushing the message that Sweden is also threatened) -> (skepticism gradually making way for socially backed belief that it is obviously so). For a few months in 2022, there would be almost non-stop charm offensives with US navy ships visiting Stockholm for photo-ops every other month and what-not as well; all in all it hardly read as a purely organic, bottom-up sentiment.
In general, the notion that Russia invading Ukraine was "brash, previously unthinkable action" itself seems to be a psyop to me. The writing was on the wall for a long time - Ukraine's pro-Western elements stood out as Russia's public external enemy number one not even just since the Donbass conflict or the 2014 revolution, but for several years before that as Russia accused Ukraine of stealing gas in transit while also threatening them with the possibility of cutting off their ability to export gas westward entirely, while colluding with the Baltics to interfere with any project to build new pipelines that would allow them to bypass Ukraine entirely. (Western media either mokusatsued this or at most reported on it with "Russia blackmailing Ukraine with gas"/"Russia unreliable in delivering gas to the West" framing.) The frequently repeated assertion that the invasion of Ukraine was unexpected/unpremeditated seems to mostly serve as a catechism to reinforce non-acknowledgement of this background, as Western governments are concerned that this would legitimize the invasion in the eyes of some of their population and thereby sap internal support.
Without the resentment and often downright seething towards Ukraine in the population, it seems inconceivable from a Russian perspective that the invasion would have gone through. More generally, I think the West still underestimates to what extent modern Russian foreign policy is based not on rationally optimising for some complex future goal, but purely on a calculus of rewarding allies and especially taking revenge for perceived slights. We can even see this in the context of smaller decisions within the war itself - Russia only started targeting Ukrainian power infrastructure as a response to the Crimean bridge bombing, and the strikes were actually referred to in official media as "strikes of revenge". Despite their effectiveness they basically ceased as the thirst for revenge was sated, much to the consternation of many milbloggers and armchair generals (some of whom were annoyed because the strikes were effective, and others because they felt that this was not enough revenge yet). Another volley of strikes came recently only as revenge for US deep strike authorisation. There are several other steps that would have been no-brainers if winning the war were actually the goal, such as deep strikes against bridges across the Dniepr; I can only surmise that they are being held back to have a topical target for revenge if the Ukrainians were to actually destroy the Crimean bridge, and despite their sabre-rattling the Ukrainians actually understand this and that is why it still stands. The thing is, even now, Russian resentment towards Finland and Sweden is basically negligible, and the two countries actually enjoy tremendous goodwill among the population. There might be some argument (even though, as I said, I think it is weak) that Russia would attack them if it actually operated under a goal-oriented framework to defeat the West; there is really no case to be made that Russia would attack them if it operates under the "prison social hierarchy" framework that I think actually drives them. (The Baltics, on the other hand, have done their utmost to actually be in danger now. Russia still isn't so irrational as to attack them without being prepared for a full-blown world war, but I would at least expect that in a putative nuclear standoff they have many more warheads set aside for them than would be warranted by their military significance.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8mo ago
· Edited 8mo ago
Even if we assume that Russia would actually engage in a direct conventional war against NATO (which continues seeming very far-fetched to me), and somehow could magically summon the manpower and materiel for such an undertaking, I don't see what benefits it would gain from expending its resources (which would presumably still be finite, even if we assume for the sake of argument they are ~10x what they have now) on such an undertaking. The Ukraine war clearly shows that naval area denial currently has the upper hand in a near-peer conflict, so all major surface combatants would be disabled or pinned in port within a few weeks of the beginning of such a war; and with anti-ship missiles taking some one-digit number of minutes to strike a target, an Incheon-style landing around Warsaw would be as unrealistic to stage from Åland as it would be to stage from Kronstadt (or more so, since it would be harder to get an air defense umbrella even over the staging area).
The obvious strategy for Russia to pursue if it for some reason decided to fight a conventional do-or-die war against NATO on the offensive would be to seize the Baltics and then try to ram through the Suwałki gap as in Cold War planning scenarios. They didn't attack Sweden in WWII either, when it still would have made more sense (as naval action had not yet been rendered quite as impossible by modern reconnaissance and targeting) and they had a bigger and better army; and even their action against Finland was decidedly half-hearted, seemingly only serving to loosen the Finnish chokehold on Leningrad's northern supply lines that gave them trouble during the first half of the war. (As much as it may be flattering to you, it seems implausible that they would have been unable to make it past Vainikkala after fighting their way through to Berlin, if they actually were equally motivated.)
It seems pretty clear to me that the Åland/Gotland explanation was advanced by politicians who had personal incentives to make your respective countries join NATO, and lapped up by a media and population eager to see themselves personally involved on the right side in a conflict that they perceived as just (much like in religious apocalyptic fiction in the vein of Left Behind, the devil always takes very specific personal interest in the author's/reader's country and people).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8mo ago
On what basis do you figure? There is little use arguing about counterfactuals, but I would have taken a bet against Russia attacking either Finland or Sweden conditional on them not joining NATO at very high odds. I never saw an argument for why they would do so that was not based on some form of "because it would be the evil-maxxing thing to do", or ascribing territorial expansion to them as a motive (which also doesn't really seem to mesh with reality, and is instead fielded as part of a rhetorical trick to deny their stated reasons for attacking UA).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8mo ago
Well, on the other hand Georgia (erstwhile NATO candidate) just reelected an anti-Western party, and Erdogan is flirting with BRICS. It may be fair to say that the war galvanised the cultural West, so Sweden and Finland (which realistically had nothing to fear from Russia either way) joined as a symbolic gesture of support; but as far as the idea that siding with NATO will make your life materially better (as opposed to any spiritual satisfaction you may derive if you sympathise with its cause) goes, we have at least weak evidence (and justification) that fence-sitters became more skeptical.
I think Sweden is may be an outlier in terms of the hassles they put up for international transactions. I had to go through what sounds like the same process so that I could make a SWIFT transfer to pay a bill to a German company; the bank (Nordea) representative told me that they have to do this due to some new regulation concerning international money laundering. I have not encountered anything like it between other EU countries (I get around a fair amount), Eurozone or not, even in recent years.
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