Dean
10d ago
The unmeasurable concept of popularity is creating a self-referential loop here, which is what avoids the original question. Putin is as popular as he is because he runs personality cult -> Putin runs a personality cult because he was popular -> the propaganda of the personality cult is what creates / proves his popularity. It's not an answer to the earlier question of how popular Putin actually is independent of the suppression state in which anti-popularity factors are squashed.
(One insight would be the result of the Wagner Mutiny. No one joined in on the mutiny against Putin... but there was no mass popular uprising in his favor either. There was no equivalent to, say, Erdogan flooding the streets with his supporters during the failed Turkish coup.)
On the other hand, we could compare Putin's popularity with Russians outside the scope (and reach) of his personality cult. This is primarily Russians abroad, but they do exist as a counter-example of Russians, and Putin is not, shall we say, particularly popular amongst those who are not imbibing on the Russian state-influenced media apparatus. The tendency to murder high-profile dissidents does tend to keep people from wanting to be high-profile, but that's a suppression of dissent, not a popularity, unless the undefined standard of popularity is claiming that people keeping their heads down are actually a sign of popular support.
And it's not like there was much of a substantial alternative to him in particular. His biggest opponent was Primakov, another ex-KGB goon, not exactly someone to expect kindness to dissidents from.
Putin and his backers actively worked/conspired to undercut all substantial alternatives to them in general and him in particular. It's been one of his more consistent strategies over the decades, both domestically and externally.
This is not surprising on the Russian political front- the Security Services were the most capable and coherent survivors of the Cold War and had the best means of coordinating formally and informally for mutual benefit and a common understanding of a better vision that a critical mass could get behind- but this is and was a political consequence of policy decisions, not an inevitability or even a testament to popularity.
It turns out that a one-party state with no meaningful civil society does not have coherent political party groups to fall back on if the uni-party collapses.
Dean
1mo ago
Which was also state terrorism.
Unless it was for the purpose of terror, especially against civilians, for political purposes, it really wasn't.
State terrorism isn't a catch-all term for any sort of lethal activity done by a state, or even illegal actions. And that, in turn, turns to the legality when a party is a military target.
If you want to make an international law argument of it, international laws of conflict absolutely do allow for the deliberate targeting of military commanders, which Soleimani and Zahedi were, of belligerent parties, which the IRGC is and has been.
If we're going to go the route of "political assassinations are okey-dokey", then you can't object to foreign countries attempting to assassinate American political and military figures on American soil.
There's never been a legal objection to parties in conflict killing eachother in the course of armed conflict. It's curious you think that is a retort.
Ultimately international law exists to regulate conflicts between nations by the mutual agreement of said nations, and the derivative force behind this is reciprocity, not external enforcement. The flip side is that if Country A attempts to assassinate Country B military and political figures, Country A doesn't get to claim any defense when struck back... and in this context, Iran has a long history of assassinating political and military figures, as well as targeting civilian targets.
The Americans killed Soleimani because Soleimani was involved in the business of killing Americans. Likewise, the Israelis killed Zahedi because Zahedi was in the business of killing Israelis. Under the laws of armed conflict- which do not require that either beligerrent declare a state of war- that made them legitimate military targets.
Unless you deny that the states involved were in a state of armed conflict- which is not prevented simply due to Iran working through proxies- that would make them valid military targets under the international laws of war. The same laws of war are constructed in such a way that when a valid military target moves into a location protected by laws of armed conflict, that location is no longer protected due to having a valid military target.
Ultimately, international law for armed conflicts is not nice, and does not have an 'It's okey-dokey for me to hit you, but no hit backs' requirement. States may voluntarily choose to refrain from retaliating militarily, but they are under no obligation to.
Dean
27d ago
I don't know any statistics, but I do remember reading multiple articles to that effect during the Black Lives Matter protests of groups bringing in out-of-state protestors who were regularly playing the role of agitators.
There are absolutely career activist networks as well, generally parts of political machines whose job it is to organize protests using established channels. They're the sort of people who work with the people who do things like bus students to protests. The student isn't necessarily showing up for any given protest, but the network behind the mobilization is regularly being tapped and exercised.
Dean
2mo ago
The refusal to be alone in a room with a woman that wasn't his wife, yes. That it was on grounds he couldn't be trusted is the partisan strawman.
...did you forget a negative and mean to say 'if Trump wins'?
A significant part of the drama of the last decade of American politics centers around the modern Democratic party's collusion with various state and non-state actors to perpetrate a series of conspiracies and smear campaigns to a degree not seen in political generations for the purpose of making Trump lose no matter what. Russia-gate wasn't simply an election-year smear, but a sustained multi-year conspiracy that was on national television so often that the Democratic party convinced a plurality of itself that it was true. Well-established precedents in various legal subjects were tossed or ignored in the name of lawfare against policies, nullification theory was directly resurrected in the name of resistance, and entirely new and novel legal theories were embraced in the name of prosecution and attempted disqualification. There are a whole host of tactics and escalations that have been unleashed on Trump that are not even close to matched when he was in a position of actual power.
If Trump is destroyed, the message is not clear or firmly set that 'heads I win tails you lose' election will result in the person doing it's total annihilation, because the Democratic coalition has been doing that for most of the last decade would not have been annihilated. Trump's defeat would be a validation, not a discreditation, to that style of politics.
There are three general sets of US sanctions / trade restrictions on Cuba, which for political convenience/tradition are often grouped together under the misnomer of 'blockade.'
Group one, and the longest and the original source of the blockade moniker, is the Embargo. The Embargo restricts US citizens, companies, and foreign subsidiaries of US companies from doing trade with Cuba outside of specific Humanitarian niches (i.e. food). The Embargo doesn't legally stop others from doing so, and while there have been arguments to the effect that it was a soft-ban- mainly because of past US threats to stop giving foreign aid to countries that did non-food business to Cuba- this is neither a blockade nor an obstacle to those who saw greater value from business with Cuba than in aid from the US. Foreign companies, including European ones integrated with (and thus at risk to) the US economy can and have done trade with Cuba without sanctions retaliation, especially in the last 3 decades since the Cold War. Rather, the reason the Europeans and Chinese and others don't invest much in the Cuban is that Cuba is notoriously bad at paying back its loans, and has been since the cold war when it was a regular frustration of the Soviets, and the early-2000s belief that foreign companies could get into the Cuban market before the American companies did but reap the American money flowing into Cuba weren't worth the steady losses. The countries continuing to offer Cuba loans or sell things in exchange things for IOUs are typically doing so for ideological interests / strategic concessions (Venezuela, Russia, China), rather than economic.
Group two, and sometimes cited but rarely carried further on inspection, are the more targeted sanctions, typically on senior leaders and for humanitarian abuses. These are not massive impacts on the broader economy, but do limit the ability of Cuban party elites and security officials to establish themselves as Russian-style oligarchs in the international system, as they become non-viable business interests even as they monopolize business opportunities at scale, but few people seriously argue that a Venezuela or Russian oligarchic model is some moral imperative as a step forward and that non-sanctioning these people would create some significant material change for the population.
Group three, and the one that modern Cuba actually would have the most grounds on saying impacts them but which is the furthest from the traditional Embargo rhetoric, is Cuba's status as a state sponsor of terrorism under post-9-11 counter-terrorism-finance legislation. For those unaware, that's the actual and wide-reaching legislation which unlike the Embargo isn't just for US-actors, but very much an international 'if you want to do business with or through the US, you won't with the countries on this list' dynamic. No one actually denies that Cuba's Cold War history of waging revolution would qualify, or that Cuba hosts people or groups that qualify for the list, there's just irregular (and usually weak) pressure that it just shouldn't matter that much / that Cuba is really hosting them to facilitate peace. Cuba was on the list pretty much from the start of the post-9-11 changes, but since the state list is as much a political tool as anything else, Obama dropped Cuba in 2015 when it was pursuing normalization with the expectation of a Hillary hand-off (which, implicitly, would have meant an election win where the Cuban vote in Florida didn't derail the Democrats), but Trump won and... didn't actually re-apply it until 2021, right before leaving office, and the Biden administration has maintained the same core assessment for upholding it that Cuba wasn't cooperating to general expectations. So not actually a partisan wedge issue, and not a 'anything but the predecessor' American policy decision.
Overall, the US Embargo had an effect but was mostly a propaganda deflection for the Communist system, general sanctions aren't particularly relevant, but the state sponsor of terrorism restrictions have real teeth... but, of course, have to compete with the point that Cuba is still run by the same sort of people who believe state control of the economy is a moral as well as strategic security for the party-state.
And yet, far less so than ignoring nuclear weapons as a deterrent for invasion.
The argument that Russia was not under threat from the US axis is not made on the basis that the US wouldn't if it could beat Russia in a conventional war- not least because nothing about the Ukraine war changed the underlying reality of Russia's conventional deficit vis-a-vis the US and has only made it worse- but rather that beating Russia in a nuclear war wouldn't be worthwhile when the cost is measured not in divisions, but cities.
The Russian national security argument for invading Ukraine has always fallen to the point that it does not change the actual nuclear balance of power against the US in any conflict, and that it has been nuclear deterrence that Russia had, and all those others have not.
Dean
1mo ago
Americans have an exceptional ability to get involved in every corner of the planet.
This is the motte, and yet not the same as an implicit claim that the Americans are exceptionally involved in every corner of the planet, let alone in every administrative decision of the planet, let alone vis-a-vis the ability of local actors.
That the Americans have more ability to project power to distant corners than others is quite different than that Americans have more ability to be involved than local powers who may not be able to project far, but are actually local.
Given that the exceptional US ability to get involved in every corner of the planet is dependent on having allies and partners in every corner of the planet able or willing to facilitate their involvement, the ability of the US to effectively influence needs to be compared to places where it lacks critical enablers- and thus who they are.
If there is a village in Afghanistan that isn't ruled by them, they will bomb it for 20+ years.
Interesting claim. Identify the villages, please, and why the bombings were on grounds of not being ruled by the Americans, as opposed to other reasons that other non-US powers wouldn't emulate if placed in equivalent contexts.
The US is in a league of its own when it comes to starting wars and meddling in other countries.
Are we conflating wars and meddling as the same category, and are we comparing to historical trends?
If it's just in terms of starting wars, the US is unexceptional in historical terms. The only interesting point in relative terms is its relative ability in the Pax Americana, which is notable for being one of the most peaceful periods in human history precisely because the US had- and exercised- unique ability to pick conflicts.
If the argument is simply in ability to meddle in non-war-instigating forms, this is a reflection of evolving technology and economic growth over time, which the American system coincided with and encouraged, but which is not a uniquely American pathology in nature. The Americans certainly conduct more cyber-espionage than the colonial empires of old ever did- this is because the colonial empires lacked computer networks to spy on, not the willingness.
If the argument is simply about the size and capability of the US, because it's big, that's neither an argument of moral inclination nor an argument that the size and capability actually have been disproportionate in starting wars and meddling relative to the size and capability of other actors.
Not all problems are caused by the US but the US is a driving force behind instability.
'Driving force' is a meaningless term bar a relative comparison of forces, which you have not and consistently do not provide comparisons to.
Dean
1mo ago
I've noticed that sci-fi games are far more likely to qualify as "quality writing" for me. Even my contemporary examples (such as Prey) are sci-fi as well. That's not to say I can't enjoy other types, but I'm wondering if I either have a bias; if sci-fi lends itself to deeper writing, or attracts writers who can do so; or both. Note that I can give some very bad sci-fi examples of games (I am outspoken in how much I find Mass Effect completely awful in almost every way).
Whoah. I was just about to bring up Mass Effect as an example of popular bad sci-fi. Not simply for its ending, but from structural design perspective (a terribly managed/planned trilogy structure that led to the ending), an inability to stick to character arcs (many reoccuring characters flip from their initial story arcs to fit into the narrative / character appeal niches as needed), it's heavy power fantasy dynamic verging into sycophantism, the tendency to emotionally heal traumatized women by boning them, and so on. A good enough contrarian could even write an amusing spiel on it's fascistic themes and narrative style (though admittedly most who do aren't good enough to pull it off).
Dean
1mo ago
Setting aside that you confused two different countries in two different hemispheres with over 200 million population difference, your own article has the slight issue with ignoring some inconvenience context- like the numerous Russian demands that were rather obviously not close to being agreed to.
For example, terms like what Ukraine could defend itself with if Russia launched a third continuation war-
The draft treaty with Ukraine included banning foreign weapons, “including missile weapons of any type, armed forces and formations.” Moscow wanted Ukraine’s armed forces capped at 85,000 troops, 342 tanks and 519 artillery pieces. Ukrainian negotiators wanted 250,000 troops, 800 tanks and 1,900 artillery pieces, according to the document. Russia wanted to have the range of Ukrainian missiles capped at 40 kilometers (about 25 miles).
-or who the question of security guarantors for Ukraine in lieu of NATO-
Other issues remained outstanding, notably what would happen if Ukraine was attacked. Russia wanted all guarantor states to agree on a response, meaning a unified response was unlikely if Russia itself was the aggressor. In case of an attack on Ukraine, Ukrainian negotiators wanted its airspace to then be closed, which would require guarantor states to enforce a no-fly zone, and the provision of weapons by the guarantors, a clause not approved by Russia.
In other words, Russia was perfectly willing to accept a peace in which Ukraine dismantled the military that had just stopped it's advance, Ukraine limit itself to being unable to hit back to any significant distance against the extensive Russian use of long range fires, and so long as Russia could veto any external support to Ukraine in case it invaded a fourth time.
Truly, the Ukrainians and Russians negotiators were close to the same page.
Or, alternatively, the Ukrainians lack agency, and the UK-US-ians are to blame.
But my money is that history will remember that the people who launched the war of national destruction, on claims that there was no Ukrainian nation, who went prepared for mass graves and torture chambers and kill lists, and who deliberately attempted to trigger humanitarian crisis of winter power outages and mass floodings and endangering nuclear reactor plants... I suspect they'll be the one blamed for any genocide they cause.
Dean
1mo ago
Aside from the border being closed, I would assume that Finland takes a dim attitude towards mass murderers, even if they're mass murderers of Russians.
Finland has one of the largest unmonitored borders in the region, as only the SE-most is actually populated and monitored. You could literally walk across most of it and the only thing to notice would be if your vehicle was obviously abandoned near the road. The first the Finns would really be aware of is if you walked into their cities... which might get you turned over, or maybe not, but if you can stage the weapons and such to conduct a major terrorist attack, you can stash the hiking gear and supplies to go cross-country.
Ukraine, on the other hand, is a barely-functional society for which "hating Russia" is a number one priority, and trying to lay low in Ukraine for long enough to figure out how to get to IS controlled territory in some shithole in the caucuses or central asia is a plan that's at least a plausible level of dumb.
To get to Ukraine from Russia, you have to go through mutliple no-civilian zones, drive through a papers-please occupational region, and go through two generally parallel trench systems with a minefield inbetween.
The far, far simpler option than either of these is, of course, to go through the caucuses or central asia, or just hide in rural russia for awhile.
Dean
27d ago
Thanks!
Ye are welcome.
I didn't realize it had gotten that bad in the last few decades. I'd assumed that the Israeli left had come up with a different vision, but it sounds like they never did?
There's always going to be different visions, but there's also a reason that Israeli politics over the last several years began to center around removing Netanyahu as an individual than on the security front. Even in that the Left is damaged goods in that while Netanyahu is almost certainly corrupt, there's nothing particularly partisan-unique about it. Olmert, the guy who was PM for 2006-2009 as sort of the last gasp of the Israeli left, was under corruption prosecution and convicted in a prolonged chain of events that lasted until 2017, making that a non-contrast per see.
Ultimately, the Israeli left's different vision on the security front has always been the importance of the Two State solution both as a matter of appropriateness, as an argued necessity for normalizing relations with the rest of the Arab world, and as key to maintaining relations with the West. However, there again history and the right did no favors: Oct 7 dissuades that a truly autonomous Palestinian polity wouldn't use said autonomy to attack, and one of the purposes of Oct 7 was to disrupt the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia that Netanyahu was nearly achieving despite the dogma. Which leaves the claim of being necessary to maintain relations with the west, which is a fair bit more contentious and starts going into your perspective of the effectiveness of the Israel lobbying and Palestinian protest movements in the West especially since Oct 7.
I'd heard talk about Netanyahu being unpopular and his coalition being shaky, prior to Oct 7, but from what you say it doesn't seem like there's anything coherent that could replace him? It's just "stomp hard" or "stomp harder"... :-(
Before or after 7 October?
Before 7 October, the argument was (and still is) that Netanyahu was preventing the two state solution from solving the issue, so the alternative was to re-commit to the two state solution process. This was just part of the host of the anti-Netanyahu coalition, which included the 'I'm strong on defense but not as corrupt' alternative, the 'Israel should be more secular' perspective, and so on. But no, there was no particular coherent alternative on, say, the West Bank issue, where the politics and the various military / strategic / ideological rationals for the settlements have their own mass and inertia in Israeli politics, but the left wasn't going to do a unilateral withdrawal after how the much smaller Gaza strip worked out.
After 7 October, the main differentiating question is what to do with the Gaza Strip after anti-Hamas operations conclude, which itself is going to depend on what specific context they conclude under. There is anything from outright military occupation, to turning it back over to the PLO eventually, to a multinational security force to keep the peace. There are downsides to all of these, but I also don't believe there's anything coherent enough to match a left/right divide, not least because it's still not clear what context the war will end in.
Sure, it's not trivial to disentangle. I've seen notions aired to the point that if only true free speech/press was reestablished for a year and then fair elections held then Putinism would stand no chance, and somebody like Navalny could win. This seems extremely naive and out-of-touch to me, I'm sure that Putin (or a better anti-Western demagogue) would win.
And again, I'd disagree with your conclusion and your framing. Fortunately the naive position is not my position, and on a historical point Putin's ascent did not base itself on anti-Western demogoguery, which was not particularly potent at the time, but far more of an anti-Russian-internal-factors. While the early 2000s Russian political moment was ending the chaos of the 90s, that chaos was primarily internal in nature and origin (corruption, oligarchic abuse, failures of governance), and Putin didn't run on any particularly anti-Western tenor. Anti-western political themes began in earnest in the later 2000s, well after Putin's ascent, consolidation, and transition to killing dissidents who'd threaten popularity.
Of course there are obvious selection effects too. Also, when the invasion began and hundreds of thousands of Russians most willing to flee did so, they found no particularly warm welcome anywhere they tried to go. Most of them have since returned, and even they grudgingly agree that there is something to the Russophobia that state propaganda doesn't shut up about, having personally experienced it.
You, uh, should probably re-check your migration data, because your impression is very likely to be a propaganda selection effect.
While unbiased sources are certainly hard to find, reporting from last year was generally around the 15% return rate. Even it the return rate was double that, it'd still be very far from most. While there is certainly a national interest / Russian propaganda narrative to create a consensus perception that Russians are returning in mass, to date this has been propaganda to normalize and encourage mass returns, not actually reflective of mass returns. The Russians are still several hundred million in the hole.
I meant before he consolidated power.
So did I. A significant part of Putin's consolidation of power was via his allies- which almost certainly included parts of the Intelligence apparatus if not also organized crime- going after rivals.
The thing is, after the collapse and botched reforms, Western-oriented political forces in Russia have been dead in the water, and the real question was what flavor of dictatorship would take over. The second most likely one was the Communist party back in power.
I disagree with your premise because where you start the look for alternatives is arbitrary.
Since we're discussing historical possibility, this is where it's simple to point out that there was nothing inevitable of the botched reforms and failure of Western-oriented political forces in Russia. We have multiple counter-examples of other Soviet economic and political systems implementing successful reforms and adopting pro-Western orientation. That the Russians did not is a result of a number of policy decisions- some bad decisions of incompetence/corruption, but also some deliberate ones. What these choices resulted in misses the point that these were choices in and of themselves, with alternative choices with alternative outcomes available.
To pick just one field with substantial impacts to Putin's claim to popularity: a significant part of Putin's early-2000s popularity was reigning in the Oligarchs, but the Oligarchs themselves only were able to arise and have the impact they did due to how the Russians chose to handle the de-Sovietization of the economy and management of the state-owned enterprises. Other Soviet-block countries mitigated / avoided the oligarchic problems due to how they approached it as a legal/policy question.
Dean
6mo ago
I didn't read the substack in question and don't have a particular opinion on it, but from personal discussions / observations / distant review, the issue is more the aging-out/retering cohort's effect on military families and communities.
While there is a core demographic argument, the demographic is more regional/cultural than demographic per see. South/MidWest/etc. have always been over-represented. The thing the OP's summary paragraph doesn't seem to address is that a lot of enlistment is from military families/communities, rather than blank regional. I forgot the statistics precisely, but in generally any country you go you're likely to see far more volunteers from people with parents/grandparents who were in the military than a random first-generation enlistment. There's a family, not just demographic, dynamic in play, which means if the family member advises against rather than for the enlistment... well, 'I'll join the military' isn't exactly social rebellion.
The issue for the US's current recruitment woes comes from how the generational transition has matched to politics. The 9-11 recruitment cohort is dead, dead, dead. If you look at age averages, the vast majority of US service members were born after 9-11. If you joined just after 9-11, you are that tiny minority of people who serve a full 20 (for a pension) or go beyond. That means people who joined during the Bush years, have gradually and progressively lost during the Obama years / saw the Trump years / are back in the Obama 2.0/Biden years. There's any number of things that could justify a feeling of disenchantment, from perceptions of futility of the wars, to the progression culture war aspects into military culture/life, and so on.
This is purely anecdoctal, but the straw that broke the back for some life-longers was how the Biden administration approached the Covid vaccine mandates. The US military, like many in the world, is legally allowed to employ experimental medicines / vaccines on the forces. US troops have been used not only for experimental medical treaments, but also as medical experiment test subjects in the past. When the Biden administration decided to make Covid vaccines mandatory for all forces no matter what, they weren't on particularly legally shakey ground.
What they did run aground on, however, was the disparity between culture war politics and needs-based buy-in. Whatever your competence-expectation for the average junior soldier, US career military professionals are career professionals. They are not only educated, but educated with an eye to practical implications and effects and cross-specialty coordination that many topic-focused specialists are not. And the politically inconvenient facts of COVID- such as that it was not a death plague for the young and the healthy (which most of the armed forces are) or the sort of politically-influenced media pressures were being used in a propagandaist fashion (which the military is above-average aware of as both a target and a perpetrator of) or active suppression of inconvenient medical dissent (which the more conservative-tuned military would be more aware of)- where thus part of the awareness environment even as the administration used brute force command-control precisions to not only demand, but overrule requests for exceptions despite cases of special forces personnel (a highly respect internal community) requesting exceptions for practical concerns, religious personnel requesting exceptions on religious grounds (which have variously been respected in the past), and so on. The evidence that the Covid vaccine wasn't even stopping transitions- and as such not making self-vaccination a breakwater to protect others- undermined a public good argument that the pandemic would end once everyone was vaccinated to stop transmissions. Instead, it was pure formal power demands on institutions of people who are explicitly trained on formal versus informal power dynamics as part of good-leadership training on the assumption that demands from compliance on basis of formal authority is bad leadership. Instead, people that people knew- people with long terms of service, unquestioned loyalty, generally high levels of competence, people who had put up with the worst of the military life and some of the worst strategic decisions of national leadership in a generation- were systematically kicked out for not bending to the political hysteria of the moment. People for whom loyalty was not an ironic thing, for whom a culture of reciprocal loyalty both up and down was both the formal instruction and often found informally, were kicked aside saying 'your services aren't needed anymore.'
What did anyone expect them to tell their families? Or for their friends who kept their heads down but also got out to tell theirs?
American military recruiting was always declining as the 9-11/War on Terror legitimacy faded, but Covid was an inflexion point in at least some US military family circles, where the military went from 'you can be safe and have a successful career as long as you keep your politics to yourself,' to 'you are not safe if you do not defer to the demands for conformity by politically-driven misinformation.' This would be unhelpful regardless, but is especially counter-productive if you (a) are drawing recruitment from the political opposition, and (b) embitter a core part of your informal recruitment advocates who shape the willingness of those most open to joining.
Dean
1mo ago
I don't know how well read you are on the history of what happened...
Ah, I see we are going to play the pretend we don't know game, such as--
Seems we both agree at the outset that he was democratically elected, do we not? His overthrow was explicitly supported by the US and it's allies.
-that US support for Yanukovych stepping down followed Yanukovych starting to process of shooting protestors in the streets with government snipers.
Are you not aware that there was even leaked audio of Victoria Nuland and the Ukraine's Ambassador that revealed deliberate planning of his overthrow?
Oh, hey, called it-
including the ever-handy reference to the conspiracy theory that the US Ambassador discussing candidates for Yanukovych's invitation for a unity government and considering people who could work with Yanukovych and others was actually plotting a coup against the person who she was going to discuss the candidate list with in the coming days.
Come now, we can go over the transcripts if you'd like. We can even go over Yanukovych's invitation for the opposition to join the government, which was the basis of Nuland's discussions of who would actually work well within Yanukovych's government which- again- was invited and being discussed in the context of Yanukovych running it.
NATO was never a European alliance of 'peace', it's an alliance that's aimed at destabilizing Eastern Europe, with the intention to weaken Russia
While this certainly nails your flag high, it doesn't really establish your awareness with Euromaiden-
Do forgive a homie for challenging American imperialism unipolarity.
-or that, as far as challening American imperialism unipolarity, Ukraine was such an own-goal by Russia.
This whole quagmire has absolutely zero to do with high minded moral idealism against the Next Hitler, who at the same time the media tells us is losing, running out of gas, is out of ammunition, is incompetent beyond belief; and simultaneously is preparing for world domination and his next target is going to be Poland or Scandinavia. It has everything to do with continued projecting of American and western geopolitical dominance across the planet.
Yawn. Like I said, I'd rather you build a competent historical metaphor, not your naval gazing. If your media is telling us Putin is Next Hitler, or running out of gas, or out of ammunition, pick better media, not other trash.
Are we pretending Yanukovych wasn't overthrown?
Are we pretending Yanukovych wasn't fleeing the country rather than being procedurally removed from office for granting himself the authority to shoot not only the supporters of his political opponents but also the supporters of his unity government partners that he brought into his own government, at the direct pressure of the foreign government that he fled to after his own party loyalists didn't want to conduct a bloodbath?
And are we going to pretend that giving yourself authority to shoot political opponents in the streets without legislative support wouldn't drive legislature retaliation against an Executive clearly bowing to foreign government pressure and incentives?
I am as familiar with the Yanukovych coup narratives as you, and probably a bit more familiar with various political events during Euromaidan, including the ever-handy reference to the conspiracy theory that the US Ambassador discussing candidates for Yanukovych's invitation for a unity government and considering people who could work with Yanukovych and others was actually plotting a coup against the person who she was going to discuss the candidate list with in the coming days.
Perhaps you'd like to raise the protestor-sniper theories that justified the claim to shoot-to-kill authorities, which I might counter with the state sniper evidence and various security service suspect defections to Russia in the investigations after? Or perhaps you want to make the position that the protestors had no right to protest against the sovereign right of the government to join the Eurasian Union economic association, after Yanukovych made a rather abrupt about face on the already-sovereign-agreed to European Union association agreement that was followed by Russian pressure and incentive campaigns? Maybe you'd like to retreat to the defense of Eastern Russo-phile suppression of the Russian speakers, who were so uninterested in joining in the Russian novarussia campaign that the Russian millitary had to directly intervene to keep the separatist republics from collapsing?
Come now, there's so much history we can banter on!
Dean
1mo ago
Eh. I don't intend to challenge your feelings / say that your enjoyment was in any way wrong, but I feel ME1's writing was in many respects emblematic of the problems the trilogy had a hole, which is to say a clear lack of planning.
In RPGs like Mass Effect, the 'critical path' refers to the series of must-make choices that the player cannot avoid. Sidequest choices may never be seen if you don't take a side quest, but you can't complete the main story and reach the sequel without the critical path. And every. Single. Choice. in ME1's critical path amounts to 'Kill person X, or not.'
And there was no plan- as seen in how ME2 picked up these choices- for what would follow if you actually killed someone (in several contexts, literally no content vis-a-vis a cameo of the surviving person), even as at the same time anyone who could be killed could no longer be relevant to the plot. As soon as you had the option to kill Wrex, every story arc Wrex could touch if he survived had to be carried forward if he was dead (because game development resources are limited if you weren't the Witcher 2 of the era), and this applied to everyone and everything. Later ME started to learn that not all choices needed to kill people off to suggest a difference- ME Andromeda actually had a good dynamic for its planets, like what sort of hive and scum and villainy would be the criminal underworld's dominant player- but from the start, ME1 didn't know how to build a choice structure to provide meaningful content contrasts. Especially with a penchant for choices too big to mutually co-exist as narrative drivers: the hyper-expansive rachni could only matter as much as they could exist in a narrative where they didn't exist at all, while the saved Council and the all-Human council could only lead to the same general location. No understanding that bigger choices aren't better.
Nor did it really understand how to do an ideology-morality system. Paragon was internally consistent in ME1- just defer to the Council when it's not literally the end of galactic civilization- but Renegade was just a mess. It couldn't decide whether it was human-first, Council-skeptic, xenophobic, utilitarian, sociopathic, or if it could tell a difference between them all. ME2 got even worse, as it would have the same argument positions flip sides of the morality wheel in the same conversation, but ME1 was the one to get to define a morality curve, and it couldn't.
I do agree that the writing strictly went downhill immediately after- the second game spent about a third of the trilogy introducing or reintroducing a character cast who could be dead by the end of it (thus guaranteeing they couldn't be plot-carrying characters for a game that didn't move forward the meta-plot)- and the ending of the trilogy is practically a case study for why you need to know how your story will end from the start so that you can work towards it.
Black sheep opinion as it is, but from a writing perspective my favorite games of the series were not quite ME3- which aside from the ending was actually quite solid as an apocalypse story- but actually Andromeda. While I fully accept and respect people who didn't like Andromeda's choice of tone for being campy, and the mechanical issues in presentation were real, the writing was trying to be both a deliberate sort of campy and a 'new introduction' spiritual reboot, and I honestly thought it worked better at that than ME1 did. There was enough deviations so that it was a spiritual reboot rather than a clone, even as it wrote itself out of the corner that the ME trilogy painted itself into with choices too big to ever properly reflect. Andromeda was much more judicious with its choices, leaning more on emotional relevance than 'massive geopolitical differences'- the sort of thing like which person is the hero-figure to a nation, rather than whether the nation would die or not- and these were things that were much better set up for being reflected in a sequel than the ME trilogy did. As far as writing for a trilogy, it was much better founded.
But, alas, it seems the next one will be in the Milky Way.
As always whenever US military recruitment woes comes up, it's relevant to bring up that something like 80% of new recruits come from a family where someone else has served. The implication of this isn't that the US has a racial demographic recruitment option, but a familial one: that families that once would have encouraged children to join, are no longer doing so / encouraging them not to do so.
Failing to work around this issue makes many of the options presented pretentiously comedic rather than serious, because the audience that needs to be convinced isn't the recruits- it's the already-separated family members who are dissuading recruitment.
Behind a paywall, but one of the better breakdowns of the US recrutiment issues from the WSJ.
Dean
1mo ago
The Jack romance certainly ends with a lovers relationship, and her romance is the only one where she makes meaningful emotional healing and interpersonal progression in ME2. Miranda is uniquely characterized as smiling in a way she never did before and is also only able to have a healthy emotional relationship solely if Shepard is the one to provide it (with their dick). Kelly Chambers, in so much as that one qualifies, resolves it's emotional catharsis by having her do stripper dances in your room after she was kidnapped, locked into a pod, and nearly turned into bio-goop. Tali is much less emotionally traumatized, but certainly emotionally questionable given that she risks death itself for the sake of the Shepard bone out of a mix of captain-crushing hero crush (and the fact that you covered up her father's cultural war crimes).
Ashley... is a more mature frank attraction in ME1, but Ashely's character arc also jumps to the point that the tomboy not-a-model gets a major model glow up come ME3, so who knows there.
Dean
1mo ago
There's also the points that one of the key premise of the Iron Dome system as a system that doesn't just bankrupt the country is it's trajectory tracking for when things are believed to be going for low-risk impact areas. Rather than shooting expensive interceptors at everything, it, well, doesn't, and the parameters for what it does/does not accept risk on are subject to different factors.
As such, Ranger's twitter doesn't really indicate as much as one might want one way or another. Things 'getting through' the Iron Dome isn't the failure state, it's the intended state. At the same time, it doesn't mean the system wasn't being overwhelmed... but also doesn't mean that the system was running out of ammo / got hit / etc.
Without clarity on to what was being hit, there's not much saying whether the system succeeded of failed at it's purpose.
Did you even read the content of the article?
Yup. And I even noticed it wasn't by the American State Department, whose own words you were claiming to link to, and then tried to defend not referring to in favor of a detractor's take before taking issue for positions not being accurately reflected.
The article was less interesting than the irony, and not particularly relevant to the post the citation was meant to refute.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that one went right over your head...
A common mistake you make, I'm sure.
Lol. Okay.
Okay indeed.
Now, would you like to drop further points to a more defensible motte, or just try one more time for a last word? There aren't many more positions left for you to abandon in the face of challenge, but I doubt I'll see more than a downvote.
Dean
1mo ago
And he tried exercising it to find more amicable solutions to the problem. That's what the Minsk Accords were.
The Minsk Accords were many things- including the functional erosion of national sovereignty by legislating an external power's veto by proxy- but an amicable solution they were not.
Why was the west encouraging Ukraine behind the scenes to give Russia a run around, while the west poured arms into the country to bolster its strength so the government could betray the terms of their agreement?
Why wouldn't the west encourage Ukraine not to submit to unreasonable Russian demands that the Russians knew were unreasonable and would not be accepted, while bolstering the ability to resist the military coercion that pushed the demands in the first place?
The demands were unreasonable, and were made at the end of a military intervention. Europeans, as with many other cultures, tend not to support those things against their neighbors lest it be applied to them.
Dean
3mo ago
My take on this is that it has less to do about museums, and more a general decline in the US-American cultural/social reelvance of the Native American groups.
From an admittedly distant view, even as the sort of progressive/SJW criticisms of problematic Native American cultural references and caricatures increased in the 2000s/2010s, my sense is that rather than replace these with 'better' alternative symbols, there's been a broader trend of simply stripping Native American references entirely, with no indian cultural identifier left. Whether it's a butter company removing an iconic native american from branding, or the (American) football team Washington Redskins changing to the Washington Commanders following years of activist pressure, 'you can't have bad things- change it' isn't the same as 'do better things.'
Dean
12d ago
Well, the point is that Russia hasn't had any other context basically throughout the entire thousand years it existed,
Sure it has. It had so in living memory, even. The rise of the Putin personality cult and the decision to murder dissidents abroad was a policy decision, not a pre-existing or unavoidable fact of nature.
Sure, in the sense that planning is a good practice. However, bad planning can easily produce results worse than no planning, especially when built on bad foundations, such as understanding one's own strengths, surrounding contexts, and how others respond. For a more modern example of a failure of this, Russia indisputably has a national strategy, is led with people with very deliberate intent for national-interest maximization, and the invasion of Ukraine was well within the scope of that vision, but it has been the biggest national strategic disaster for the Russians since 1941.
The importance of contextual understanding matters to strategy just as much, and that includes acknowledging costs and benefits. DEI as a policy is unpopular with substantial parts of the US public.... but it's also popular with other substantial parts of the public, and there are a variety of strategic benefits of a DEI 'strategy' that acrue from the sort of mentality/policy considerations making that generates DEI, such as how corporate-demographic interest behind DEI is also what drives how the US relates with population inflows that will occur regardless and to structure relations with the sources sending them.
For all the political tension and contortions it brings- and there are arguments that the costs of migration outweigh the benefits, or that actively facilitating illegal migration against established laws undermines popular support- if in the Cold War the US had a strategic opportunity to take 5% of the Soviet population in a 3 year and incorporate them into the Western coalition, few would fail to see that as a meaningful strategic shift. Well, that hasn't happened with China- but that is basically what happened with Cuba in the last four years, and similarly anti-American Nicaragua since Ortega got back in power in 2007, while something like 3% of the Venezuelan population has left the Bolivarian revolution for the US alone- and the US is far less than the migration into Latin America. While DEI didn't cause that, DEI-mentality is behind the sort of policy construct of the sort of people to accept that migration flow and try to incorporate it.
So when you say DEI is a strategy, you allude terms of its more pejorative/unpopular form of discriminatory hiring policies. But when I hear DEI as a strategy, a DEI-strategy for the US entails the US's most bitter and ideological foes losing or even sending their own people to be part of the US's labor and potential military pools, the built-in cultivation of loyalist interests more interested in the DEI-archetecture than in their source country interests, while coincidentally closing one of the more significant gaps between the US and the PRC.
Is DEI worth it, on a strategic level? That could be an interesting discussion, but it's not the one that was being raised.
Similarly, just as understanding strengths is important, so is understanding weaknesses behind strengths. A common failure of armchair strategizing is to treat states like they exist in strategy games, where the populace is implicitly supportive of the controlling player and where the agent only has to get the Technologies and Industry and all the good metrics just go up and up and up. There's almost no reflection on the implications of the Tang Ping subculture growth, how that relates to the Chinese demographic trajectory, and how that (or both of those) relate to the unfolding property debt crisis, and how that is likely to rebound on both of those.
And just the property crisis alone- no matter one's politics- has significant implications for Chinese strategic strengths and vulnerabilities, as the loss of private consumer life savings at a nearly unprecedented scale is almost certain to neuter the prospects of a Chinese consumption-based economy, and thus it's dependence on a maritime-blockadable export economy, which in turn drives a number of third and fourth order effects on how the Chinese economy is structured, it's external-trade and financial dependencies the US could target, demographic pressures, and so on.
(And while the PRC certainly isn't seeing the sort of demographic outflow that, say, Latin America is, in the last two years the Chinese have become the largest extra-hemispheric source of southern border migration the US receives, with an exceptional growth rate, and the Chinese private-capital flight from the country has been leagues ahead of it. These are consequences not only of current strategic policies, but almost certain to increase as a result of the housing investment crisis.)
Will that make it a net negative? It doesn't really matter. The point is that it's a factor of consideration, and evaluation, and something someone else could benefit from.
Finally, to return to the starting question, there's always the metacontext that not having a strategy is, itself, a strategy, it just is one that is far more reactive and non-deliberate and these are rarely good things in and of themselves. A bad strategy can be worse than no strategy, but a lack of strategy is rarely as good as a competent strategy.
Not really, though this is more structural to the argument, and as a consequence most of your follow-on arguments fail.
Edit: And also, as revealed down threat, because you never actually read the national strategy for the United States.
For one, the US has a public national security strategy, which is the American strategy as far as country strategy goes, and your characterization-summary is really not really reflective of that position. Which itself is helpfully summarized in its own agenda as-
PART IV: Our (US) Strategy By Region -Promote a Free and Open Indo-Pacific -Deepen Our Alliance with Europe -Foster Democracy and Shared Prosperity in the Western Hemisphere -Support De-Escalation and Integration in the Middle East -Build 21st Century US-Africa Partnerships -Maintain a Peaceful Arctic -Protect Sea, Air, and Space
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf
Now, you could argue that the US fails to achieve that (meh), isn't consistently being followed (sure), that it's not the real strategy of the United States (it is), or that Biden has a separate strategy (possible- the Democratic Party is not the US government, and it has its own strategy which itself would have a different success criteria).
But summarizing a strategy down to a pejorative boo-word (DEI) that isn't advanced by the other party in that way* makes as much sense as saying China's strategy is a property crisis. That's a strawman to jouse against, to which the fair refutation would be- no, the property crisis isn't the strategy, it's a consequence of the strategy (industrial development driven by infrastructure investment fueled by local-area land sales). To which the defenders against the DEI-strategy can agree, and say that DEI isn't the strategy, it's a consequence of trying to manage a large number of regional relationships with migratory implications in a way that promotes buy-in to the American international system.
*And to be clear, DEI is referenced in the strategy... but in the following terms-
Note that this is on page 46- sharpening statecraft. As in, as a tool for how to influence other states.
...and now consider how that fits into the 'stealing the enemy's pops' strategy, as part of a series of policies. IF you're going to face mass-migration regardless, THEN you might as well leverage. But how do you leverage demographic dividends, get buy-in from emerging demographic interests/power centers, bolster perceptions of legitimacy from people without historic ties, and frame it in a way that boosts relations with outside powers from across the world?
Well... there's a reason that the DEI mention is in the 'how do we shape our national security workforce to meet our statecraft modernization needs', and not as one of the seven modernizable statecraft tools above it. Because DEI is not the strategy- it's a policy to support a workforce to pursue the strategy.
Which is also the point of structural disagreement two, the difference between policy and strategy.
You fail to draw a distinction between them, treating them as synonyms, but the former are a subset of the later. Strategies will encompass many policies, but a policy should not be the strategy. If it is, this is a red-flag of the weakness of the strategy, as singular policies can dominate all other considerations, or reconsiderations, as those invested in the continuation/growth of the policy have interests distinct from the achievement of the strategic objective.
More prevalent in your post is your handling of DEI, when DEI would be the archetypical policy as opposed to strategy. DEI is a principal of action to be pushed and adopted by bureaucracies, but it's not a national strategy in and of itself, any more than traffic lights are street crossings are. Those are means, a part of a larger strategy (the overarching traffic control system, with overlapping systems of public signals, enforcement, penalization, maintenance, and so on). DEI, in turn, is part of something else- and while 'what' that strategy is a part of is up for debate, if it's being framed as part of an international competititon strategy, then it should probably be framed in terms of how it fits into the overarching picture of racial-diversity organization and co-option, i.e. the idea of a strategy of stealing the enemy's pops and making them your own citizens.
The reason this matters- aside from the accuracy of the merits of a policy in and of itself- when you compare policies to strategies, it's only natural that the strategies are going to come off looking better. Of course they would- they tend to be broader and more comprehensive, because that's what they are by design. But this is as relevant to the relative merits as comparing a horse to a herd- a 1.25 horsepower horse is always going to be out-muscled by a 40 horse-herd, and it also doesn't matter. The policy of 1.25 horsepower horse-breeding can still be a winner as part of a strategy of herd-quality competition. Choosing to frame policy versus strategy is apples to fruit basket comparisons at best, or little more than argument gerry mandering at worse.
The result is not a surprise- and often not an accident per see- but it's not that useful.
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