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User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
Why do you expect that nuclear bombs would be the weapon of choice if China wanted to knock out US bases in the Philippines? The comparatively short distance from the mainland, relatively difficult setting for air defense against numerous low-flying targets and likelihood that China would consider its immediate neighbours to be soft-power targets to some extent all point to it being a good use case for their rapidly evolving drone technology. I'm also not sure if nuking a base in the Philippines would be seen as safer than nuking Guam - American servicemen would die all the same, and my sense was that most of the world, America included, does not even think of Guam as an area with a civilian population. If the US leadership at that point is at all concerned with the opinion of the peanut gallery, nuking a US (directly involved belligerent) base and large numbers of hapless civilians of a third country that happened to be in the way will surely be seen as giving the US more of a moral mandate to nuke back than just nuking a US base?
(Remind the world that the Guamese exist? Might take too long on global thermonuclear war time if done afterwards, and inspires questions about colonialism that nobody particularly wants to deal with. Grant it statehood? Altering the hair's-breadth equilibrium of US politics in such a fundamental way is usually not seen as worth the political capital it would cost.)
(edit:
What do you see about that sub? The substance seems essentially indistinguishable from /r/worldnews or the long-degraded /r/geopolitics, except everyone is LARPing as an FP writer.)
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4mo ago
Is it so hard to imagine that it might be the first one, and he simply fumbled? One thing that it is easy to forget, or might get lost in translation, is that Zelenskiy is not a strong politician. I still remember when I saw his address to the Russian people, which he released when Russia first invaded, and realised just how little he fit the mold of any successful or competitive politician archetype in the Eastern Bloc (or elsewhere). He does not have the cold judgmental mien of old-school apparatchik types like Putin or Mishustin, nor the artificial boorish anger of the People's Tribune types like Zhirinovsky, nor the slick scammy '90s businessman aura of Medvedev or Poroshenko; instead, in that particular moment, I really couldn't see him as anything other than a tired middle-aged Slav who got interrupted during a shirtless solo grilling session at his dacha by a bunch of thugs with baseball bats. Next to hawkish Russian Telegram channels gleefully posting mugshots of gentle-faced Ukrainian pilots to declare them "annihilated", this was probably the saddest moment of the early days of the war for me.
Everything he has done seems consistent with having the best intentions at every turn while fate takes improbable turns from bad to worse, but not having the cunning or foresight to plan further than one step ahead, nor the latitude to assert himself over the multitude of forces that are constraining and threatening him, nor even the people skills to see through or even just resist all the natural politicians* that he is forced to play ball with, nor any superhuman mental fortitude. Unfortunately, almost everyone either subscribes to the Western propaganda picture of him as a brilliant Churchillian leader, or the Russian propaganda picture of him as a wily actor wrapping people around his finger. He is not the former, and even though he is a former actor, the quality waterline of acting in the Eastern Bloc is very low (and Russians are probably blind to this). In this light, I would propose that he simply misjudged - everybody probably told him that Trump tests your mettle but ultimately respects nobody more than a tough negotiator, and between 8 hours of jetlag and three years of ducking around in bunkers and not knowing when you will be hit by a Russian missile or shot in the back by your underlings, he just may have been understandably too out of it to read any warning signs that this was not working out after all and stop himself from digging in deeper.
*Western politicians are scary. Almost every real-life interaction I had with one felt like a Voice of Saruman moment.
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4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
Azerbaijan has already crossed the internationally-recognized borders in some places, too.
A big story that might have gotten little play in Western media due to the Ukraine conflict is that Armenia currently has a pro-Western president, who has been gradually cutting ties with Russia in favour of French guarantees - there is even mutual finger-pointing between him and the Russians, with his allies claiming that the Russians let the Azeris take NK unopposed to spite him, while Russians and their allies in Armenia claim that he ordered the Russian peacekeepers to stand down and remain in their base.
Some more conspiracy-theory-minded Russians even think that he used Armenia's CSTO access to pass some information about Russian air defense and strategic forces disposition to the Ukrainians via France, as part of a larger deal that looks something like "Russia humiliated, Nagorno-Karabakh surrendered, Zangezur Corridor connected, but Turkey and Azerbaijan refrain from further squeezing Armenia".
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4mo ago
Well, but this war was started and heavily propagandised on the basis of Ukrainians not being considered a separate people by the Russians. As a matter of fact, Putin's Chief of Staff is apparently half Ukrainian (and half Jewish). Russians sometimes have a measure of disrespect for them as "backwater swineherds", but it's not genocidal hatred - more people in either country have some relatives in the other than don't.
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4mo ago
I assume he is referring to the Gonzalo Lira case. Most outright killings (that we have documentation of) seem to have happened before Zelensky (though not all). There is more evidence of non-killing crackdowns on the press since well before the 2022 invasion.
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4mo ago
being part of Putin's empire is not something you can quit -- Ukraine tried that with the orange revolution and look how Putin reacted.
You mean the revolutionaries, who evidently couldn't win by democratic means, tried? Meanwhile, de Gaulle did not in fact quit the club, and I hear Georgescu (who was anti-NATO and ahead in polls) just got arrested in Romania. Armenia also seems to be well in the process of quitting "Putin's empire", though that's still a wait-and-see situation.
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4mo ago
They might well accept one if it is provided by a party that would not be seen as likely to help or look away as Ukraine + backers prepare to reconquer lost territories. China or India, on the face of it, would be good candidates - the problem is that it's unclear if you could actually convince the Indians to do it, and the West might not fully trust China and moreover under Trump is unlikely to be interested in raising its diplomatic prestige in such a fashion.
The problem is that it also seems unlikely that the Ukrainians would accept such a security guarantee, or in fact any security guarantee that is not actually a guarantee of cover and support as they prepare for reconquest. Especially in the eyes of the leadership, the prospect of being left in perpetuity with exactly what they have now might be scarcely better than actual complete defeat, and they still estimate the value of their position as higher than that. I mean, European boots on the ground are, if anything, more likely now that Trump has sent everyone into hysterics - South Vietnam and France also held out for years with their situation going from bleak to bleaker until the US finally caved and sent in its own GIs.
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4mo ago
As someone coming from a family that emigrated west from the ruins of Soviet Union myself, I can tell you that there is an obvious candidate for that magic spell, namely the dangled opportunity to freely move to a Western country (as far as I can tell, the use of Ukrainian colours in that video is pure serendipity) or perhaps even have their country turned into one (like Poland or Slovenia). The degree to which life in the West is mysticized in those cultures is hard to comprehend for those of us spending our lives on forums kvetching about it, and the median person would absolutely be ready to kill and risk death in return for a chance for themselves or their children to enjoy it. This offer was never really put on the table for the South Vietnamese, Iraqis of Afghans.
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4mo ago
Are you unable to make your case without insinuating that those who disagree must also hold some other beliefs (that you presumably find it easier to argue against)? Unfortunately for you, I am not an Ivermectin believer.
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4mo ago
Huh? Even the lowest-ball estimates of civilian Iraq War casualties are about 6x those for Ukraine. The wars have been going on for a similar amount of time, too.
On that matter, even in Ukraine, we have ample evidence of Ukrainians executing and torturing POWs and targeting civilians, which makes it through even though any Western organisation (and thus any organisation that you would trust) gets dogpiled (see the Aug 22 Amnesty report on Ukrainians using civilian facilities for cover) for daring to report about it.
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4mo ago
I think this gloss you are using is abstracting away too much detail. You can remove detail from almost any scenario to make it not sound "improbable by definition" - imagine if I told you that Donald Trump is a cannibal, and then if you were skeptical, I asked you if you generally believe that "an omnivore avails itself of a source of animal protein" is by definition so improbable (...).
The combination of it being a small army controlling the area for a short amount of time, the ethnic similarity of the two peoples, the lack of claims of a proportional scale from other, larger places where the same army was in control for a longer amount of time, the conspicuous lack of independent verification and the incongruences in early evidence (such as, as I mentioned in another response, the white armbands on the depicted victims), and the existence of a means and motive for the Ukrainians to make it up (extremely friendly and uncritical media-NGO complex, the knowledge that rousing sufficient moral indignation in the Western public may be necessary and sufficient to win the war) and parallel anti-motive on the Russian side (they had enough trouble just fighting the Ukrainian military, and were equally aware that Western support weighs more than anything either Russia or Ukraine can bring to the table), together warrant the basic assumption.
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4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
Not believing that Bucha is reality is like believing that ivermectin is effective in treating covid and covid vaccines are pure poison (instead of not very effective in stopping infection but moderately effective in elderly reducing death and severe outcomes).
This is pure polemic. In what way are those two beliefs similar?
You are trying to argue for your position by tarring its negation by association. Would you find a "counterargument" like "Believing Bucha is reality is like believing that Donald Trump is a fascist dictator who was hypnotised by the KGB in 1980 to advance Putin's agenda" convincing? I'm sure we could find some people who believe both, too.
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4mo ago
Not just some random "elsewhere", but "where your allies were in charge". If you want to argue that a Russian control of Ukraine is undesirable because atrocities were committed under Russian auspices, then it surely is relevant if the side you want to control Ukraine instead committed greater atrocities in areas it dominated.
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4mo ago
MH17
That argument is as relevant to this topic as if I brought up Ukraine apologists doubting that Azov is led by neonazis as an argument against a Bucha massacre.
FUD
I'm pretty sure the term was around long after the average Mottizen (wasn't our average age in the mid-thirties last time anyone polled?) started using the internet.
Anyway, I actually reviewed the Wikipedia page before making my initial response, and from what I can tell, there is still no evidence of more than some tens of victims from any party that is not either directly controlled by pro-Ukrainian interests or citing their numbers. We used to have mechanisms to get neutral information in these situations (e.g. the Indian observers in the Korean war, who also uncovered a lot of BS that was and is sometimes still being treated as fact in US reporting - just compare the account of the Geoje uprising in "This Kind of War" to what has by now even made it into the Wikipedia article); if this case is so clear-cut, why is nobody inviting a neutral party to investigate here?
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4mo ago
The problem is that there are few plausible ways to offer security guarantees that would actually be reassuring to both parties. Between the Minsk agreements, Western insistence that making Ukraine acknowledge Russian sovereignty over land it captured is off the table, and a simple look at any Western newspaper or comment section, it is clear that any Western country would see it as not just possible but morally and strategically imperative to use any ceasefire or peace treaty as an opportunity to prepare Ukraine for an eventual reconquest of lost territory. Even if the text of the treaty were to preclude it, what would be the consequences for the Western side for breaking it? The problem is that when you are the top dog, giving yourself more latitude to act, as the US-led block did (snubbing the ICC, freezing Russian assets and thinking out aloud about confiscating them and sending them to Ukraine, flexing its public opinion control machinery, forcefully aligning NGOs like Amnesty), paradoxically turns out to actually weaken your hand in a situation like this - you gave up something akin to what certain legalists like to call the "right to be sued", that is, the ability to be held to your promises.
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4mo ago
Think about Bucha multiplied hundreds of times.
The whole Bucha story still stinks to high heaven. I don't think nothing happened, but it seems like the number of killings of civilians that are actually backed by solid evidence can be counted in the tens, and is more in the class of wanton violence by undisciplined military units that both parties in this conflict have been engaging in whenever they were in an area with a hostile civilian population than anything resembling the systematic massacre the pro-UA press wants it to be. The initial messaging about it was chaotic, too - I still remember the strangely arranged shots of "streets full of corpses" that were circulated in the earliest days of the narrative, with the bodies wearing something resembling military fatigues with white armbands (before the Western press had realised that white armbands were and continue being used as friend identification by Russian units - Ukrainians use blue).
There is really no reason to assume that a few civilians killed by trashy soldiers shooting at everything that moves, in a chaotic situation where an expected victory was turning into a rout, would have translated into many more in a setting where the victory proceeded as expected. Of course it's plausible that there would have been a French-style resistance, which attracted many more participants who would die in their subsequent armed struggle - but resistance fighters are not hapless civilians.
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4mo ago
School mathematics and school PE are rationalised differently. Mathematics (and English, and other subjects) come with an understanding like "you must know at least this much to be ready to be released into adult society", with grades tracking how close to the bar you are; sports instead are justified by "you must have done this much for your own good", with grades just serving as a way to incentivise those who never would voluntarily do enough sports otherwise to fill the quota.
In a setting where sports actually is "taught" for the purpose of everyone clearing a minimum bar (military training?), it seems absolutely conceivable that failing would be addressed by being held back.
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4mo ago
I put it in quotation marks for a reason. It's stupid, but not particularly more stupid than expecting Putin to pull a reverse Hitler (and Blitzkrieg his way within a few tens of kilometres of Berlin?) if we don't do whatever it takes to make him return Crimea to the Ukrainians now.
People have been wishfully thinking the idea that China could seize a part of the Russian Far East if Russia is sufficiently weakened for a long time. If you believe in this, you should be able to persuade the Russians that a resurgent China is more of a threat to them. Besides, if you actually believe that Putin pines for a great Gathering of Russian Lands, Port Arthur/Dalian seems like a much more valuable prize to offer him that is in the running (being the site of a great historical Russian battle - the smart Kremlinologist, looking to Serbia as a Mini-Me version of Russia, takes note of how and why they are so determined to retake the Kosovo).
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4mo ago
What exactly is the way you see this benefitting Europe? Some sort of authoritarian magic where you 1. pump money into the military, 2. institute 3 years of Korean-style military service, 3. ????????, 4. experience great revitalization? There is not actually any existential threat to Europe from being dumped by the US, so any change would have to either be driven by delusion and/or resentment (towards Trump, Vance and everything they stand for). Resentment against Trump will surely not drive Europeans to make any policy change that looks like something he would want, and delusion is a crapshoot.
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4mo ago
Reading the comment sections in German papers during the past weeks, I am starting to genuinely feel a little afraid. The general population, or at least those who bother to comment under those articles, are positively hysterical, in a way that I imagine a deadbeat limerent live-in girl/boyfriend who refused to see the writing on the wall and wound up being dumped and dumped on the street with no plan B in short order would be. If it were an individual, this would be a point at which I'd call in a welfare check on them lest they harm themselves. Tropically, this would be due to emotional discombobulation or a line of thought like "He loved me, right? He still cares enough that he wouldn't just let me die, right?". Following this schema, I would not be surprised if they soon started floating a spontaneous deployment of European military, fueled by some vain hope that surely even Trump's US would turn around and step in before France/Poland/the UK goes in and outright loses (which is a distinct possibility, because I don't see immediately available European capabilities even just making up for US intel and Starlink if those are withdrawn, and a European mobilisation would surely be enough to convince even Putin to escalate at last). The comment sections would cheer right up until the point where they get draft letters themselves, and depending on what happens between now and then even beyond.
Of course, it could be that for all of Trump's seeming randomness, the whole plan was actually signed off by someone in the State Dept who went above and beyond on the "how can we make Europe contribute more" assignment and is now waiting for just that to happen.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
I would counter that I went to grad school at a fairly high-ranked US institution in a hard science and I saw plenty of unprofessionalism and activism. We had
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the well-known DEI criteria on hiring and admissions
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several subfields (attached to a general cluster of "Science and Technology Studies") that were fed from the department's common funding pool and openly advocated for the full range of clichés from exploring connections between Marxist theory and [area that you would think has nothing to do it] to criticising $discipline because its usage of hard mathematical formalisms is exclusionary to women and minorities (this was an actual talk that a PhD student with them was invited to give at a $discipline retreat!)
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undergrads who agitated against in-class exams and generally any form of assessment that is somewhat resilient against cheating with SJ lingo about stress and disparate impact, and deferred to them
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profs joining organisations such as the UCS, which directly aim to leverage their academic status for partisan ends
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pronoun pressure in internal email threads, Zoom meetings etc.
...and of course, there is the general wagon circling between everyone under the umbrella of "academia". I am not in medicine, but suggesting that it is sketchy that several of the core actors on the US side who were cited as authorities on the COVID lab leak question had clear conflicts of interest was treated as somewhat traitorous by many in my social environment, and conversely it was seen as good and pro-social to participate in outreach activities such as participating in a meeting at some local town hall to assure people "as a scientist" that the expert position (that we had no special expertise on) must be believed.
The best thing I can say in its defense is that the core mechanism of inward-facing capital building, that is, publication at conferences and in journals, has not been ideologically subverted yet (in our particular area - I gather that the situation is quite different in e.g. genetics). The closest they got was attaching workshops of the form "social issues in X" with their own acceptance criteria to prestigious conferences, but participation in those generally did not translate to any respect in the field proper (though it may be useful/necessary to clear some diversity statement criteria at later career stages, which I dodged as I returned to Europe).
4bpp
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4mo ago
Russian World
Apart from Ukraine, that maybe covers part of Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania at most, and they have only been talking about those populations less and less over the past several years (unlike, again, 1938s Germany, which only doubled and tripled down on its ideology). It seems like they have resigned themselves to writing them off.
here
This is also what that article talks about. From how the article is written, the "tragedy" expression seems to come from a longer sentence about Soviet Russian internal migrants who found themselves stuck abroad as a consequence of the SU collapse: "It was impossible for them to return, to reunite with their relatives. They didn't have a place of work, nor of residency. This is a great humanitarian tragedy, without exaggeration."
The thousand year quote does sound a little more ominous, but "we want to be powerful" is hardly an ideological basis for expansion in itself.
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4mo ago
"Option D: Apologise profusely to Russia and provide them with any support necessary to completely subjugate and annex Ukraine, in return for a promise that they will cooperate in containing China"
I think the choice of options you consider, and the ones you choose to ignore, is tendentious, and the arguments you present for them are based on a several load-bearing assumptions that you never justify. To begin with, you keep coming back to 1938 Germany comparisons, but in what way is Russia similar to it? Nazi Germany did not get bogged down in a stalemate in the Czechoslovakian trenches; Putin's Russia does not have the ideological basis for expansion or even risk-taking (except when they are deluded by bad intel), no shortage of land, resources or sea access, nor the demographics to support a mass war based on general mobilisation; nuclear MAD ensures that no actual existential interest of any major power can be violated; either way we are arguably in a setting where there is an increasingly realistic probability that either the US or China will go FOOM within a few years, which ought to completely reshape the risk-reward calculus if we were not so hardwired to follow established patterns.
That said, a negotiated peace ceding territory might end the fighting but could set a precedent that territorial conquest pays off
How do you imagine that precedent would not exist otherwise? Azerbaijan just conquered territory with minimal effort from Armenia while everyone was looking at Ukraine, Israel somehow keeps growing, the US was having great successes bombing its way through Yugoslavia in the '90s, and BP, Exxon and Shell are currently yielding $billions in revenue per year in Iraq. Just because the median CNN consumer is successfully kept placid and morally assured by non-reporting (in the first case) or "we have received reports of whataboutist antisemitic misinformation, but rest assured these are totally different" (in the latter), that doesn't mean the entities that actually have agency over whether to engage in territorial conquest haven't been watching.
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4mo ago
Who would be sanewashing what?
(I think most instances of "sanewashing" are in fact also in service of this manner of culture warring - if the crazies on your side win, that's good because it demoralises the outgroup)
Right, but will the Chinese interpret (and expect the Americans, and other observers, to interpret) Guam as American soil for this purpose? In a limited (non-MAD) nuclear exchange, it seems that optics/bystander moral buy-in would matter nontrivially for escalatory decisions, and accepting any civilian nuclear casualties in the Philippines (and of course fallout, which is still itself treated as beyond the moral pale to inflict upon someone) would surely, in descending order of confidence, (1) be seen as making China more deserving of retaliation in the eyes of third-party bystanders and (2) the same in the eyes of the American public. It would also put everyone else hosting American bases on high alert - Japan might grit its teeth and mostly sit out a Taiwan invasion, but how would that calculus change if it also had to make a snap decision between kicking the Americans out and having Okinawa nuked?
(On that matter, there is perhaps some argument that if the Chinese do prefer to fire a warning shot at American overseas bases, the Japanese ones would be preferable over the Philippine ones? In a CN-TW conflict scenario, Japanese hearts and minds would be as lost to the Chinese as Polish ones are to the Russians over RU-UA; the same can't be said of the Filipinos)
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