Dean
11mo ago
I see we've come all the way from 'resistance is futile, Russian strength is overwhelming and their victory inevitable' to 'it's abject proof of weakness you haven't defeated the Russians already.'
Dean
11mo ago
It is far away from the argument, but it's also far more correct. Note that your framing is selectively allocating agency to the Poles and the Brits/Germans to choose in response to the German demands, just as Flynn's framing attributes agency to the American influence driving others decisions, but neither address that the Germans themselves had the agency in not only making unreasonable demands, but also the agency to not make those demands. The dictator is not an immovable fact of nature, for which there is no reasoning and agency only exists with the responder. The dictator is an agent, and has used their agency to posit the demand in the first place.
Avoiding this point- that people are resisting unreasonable German demands- is required to credibly claim that the Poles were unreasonable in not compromising to them, because there is no failure in reason or competence to resist the unreasonable. But the German Nazis were being unreasonable, and the other actors were being reasonable in resisting the unreasonable, and so re-establing the actual originating context- that the Germans were the originating actors and making unreasonable demands- is the more correct point for conveying not the argument, but the actual context the argument is trying to ignore.
Dean
10mo ago
Your contention relies on the Germans requests being unreasonable when you could just as easily say that they weren't.
It would be very easy to say many false things, but they would remain false, hence why not even you claim that the German grivance narrative driving the demands was justified.
Not the least considering Poland could have been much better for it, along with all of Europe, if they had aligned themselves with Germany against communism and what National Socialists recognized as capitalism in the hands of the international jew.
Their reward would have been to be colonized, treated as subhuman, and progressively enslaved and exterminated, as per the policy statements and intentions of the German rieche.
My argument isn't selective about anything.
It is very selective about many things.
I think you should step back and recognize just what narrative is being revised. Hitler could have done things differently, but the obvious case here is that so could everyone else.
This is irrelevant to the reasonableness of other people, as Hitler did NOT do things differently, and people were making decisions based on what he DID do, which was unreasonable by standards both contemporary to now and contemporary to then.
In the context of general WW2 narratives that shovel all blame on Hitler in particular, and to a lesser extent the Treaty of Versailles,
These narratives are false, not least because Stalin had his fair share in allying with Hitler, and the Treaty of Versailles was a red herring that was not a justified grievance for German actions.
there exists an obvious angle of blame that is never talked about lest it draw attention away from the great myths we have created out of Hitler and the holocaust.
There are no great myths of Hitler or the holocaust. There is banality of incompetence and evil, and those who wish to dismiss it away in their mediocrity.
Dean
10mo ago
Single-Issue Posting: Similarly, we're having trouble with people who want to post about one specific topic. "But wait, Zorba, why is that a problem" well, check out the Foundation:
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.
If someone's posting about one subject, repeatedly, over and over, then it isn't really a discussion that's being had, it's prosletyzing. I acknowledge there's some value lost in removing this kind of behavior, but I think there's a lot of value lost in having it; letting the community be dominated by this behavior seems to lead to Bad Outcomes.
For clarity, is this 'posting' is as in starting a topic, 'posting' as in 'turns every topic about their pet topic,' or 'posting' as in 'replies consistently about a topic they are interested in when it comes up, but mostly lurks otherwise'?
There's a spectrum of single-topic interest, and while I assume you mean the more obnoxious one-topic posters who hijack/drone out/etc., that's not quite how the point is framed.
Dean
10mo ago
I replied that having done quite a bit of business in Zimbabwe, including with white Zimbabweans who still run many major corporations and are quite prominent in business in Harare, I didn't think that seemed to be the case, and had never noticed much racial animus toward whites by blacks in the country.
...and did they counter-argue the pretty obvious selection bias given your context and who you were working with specifically, i.e. the surviving winners and those who had monetary incentives to put you at ease?
I don't think your argument supports what you think it does. The point of 'the collective hates [X]' isn't that every member of the collective shares the same vibe of the group, an objection which itself would be a form of fallacy, but that the group effects is dominated by those who do. Most ordinary Germans may well not have hated Jews in 1939, but they were also onboard with a regime that absolutely did, hence why so much of German post-war political identity had to confront the 'I wasn't directly involved, and thus not my issue' collective identify in order to rehabilite a collective German political identity.
Likewise, the successful surviving white business men you met who were willing to work amiably with you may not have had significant expeirences with those who shared a regime stance... but the white businessmen were, by definition, the survivors who made accommodations and allies and friendships with/within the regime to protect themselves. The ones who didn't- the ones who would have been dispossesed out of spite- wouldn't still be in business for you to deal with.
Dean
10mo ago
The point is that Mugabe was more like Carl Schmitt than he was like Hitler.
Well, obviously, but the scope of people who have both the animosity and the means to attempt genocide are very narrow. This is a bar so low the only reason it's not a tripping hazard is the straw.
The point you were challenged on was that you weren't in a position to hear the contrary experiences of others who might have differed from your business partners, who had financial incentives to assure you that you could make good money with/for them.
Many whites, including an extremely racist Australian I know who met him and knew him quite well, think he didn’t hate white people.
You're conflating the individual for the group, which was the same error with your Nazi metaphor. Just as members at the bottom of a faction may not share the vehemence of a faction, but it's still fair to characterize the faction in a way, this is also true for the people at the top of a faction. Leaders may not believe a certain narrative, but can also be comfortable co-existing with it / leveraging the people who do / the general complicity of not challenging an unjust system they partake of.
Mugabe did not act against whites for the entire first 20 years of his presidency.
Aside from not really being relevant to changes over time (Mugabe not having static policies over 30 years implies he had changing opinions, not that he never had certain opinions), the first 20 years of Mugabe's presidency were more or less the American unipolar/western hyper-power period, which included multiple American interventions in Africa, while the last 10 years coincided with both the post-American/western low of the financial crisis and pre-ISIS/post-Iraq... both of which offered opportunity and basis for movements to arise blaming nebulous white-west types as scapegoats.
And I think, by the way, that my theory is borne out in practice. The far right, as linked by OP, believe American blacks - by and large - have a deep and unrelenting hatred for American whites. Do you agree? I don’t.
Am I expected to deny the OP before or after I deny beating my spouse?
I don’t think most black Americans care much at all about American whites. That, and nothing more, was my point.
And your supporting argument of personal experiences in Zimbabwe don't support this point, and was not immune to challenge on grounds of you self-selecting the narratives that would deny an issue if there had been one.
People whose jobs it is to convince white people, or people with many white bosses and coworkers, to invest money in a place are typically not going to tell said white people that their money is more likely to be stolen on account of them being white.
Dean
10mo ago
I'd like to start by saying this isn't intended to be a nit-pick, but rather that you combine a lot of points in a few lines, points I think are worth bringing up separately.
In any case, this article has been making the rounds recently that presents a more pessimistic look at the US-India alliance.
I'd disagree that the article is pessimistic. While the title is pessimistic ('America's Bad Bet on India'), the article is much more measured in a 'don't have unrealistic expectations,' and the author- Ashley J. Tellis- was allegedly one of the key actors in Washington in the Bush years who helped facilitate the nuclear normalization agreement that fundamentally changed the trajectory of US-India relations. I don't think it's fair to say Tellis is pessimistic, or even that the article actually says the US wrongly (badly) invested into the relationship with India, as much as telling people not to be unreasonably euphoric... and I think there's a
India has historically been a friend of Russia, and while that friendship has been slowly melting as Russia kamikazes itself in revanchist furor, there are still several downstream ramifications. First, India has refused to join Western sanctions regimes against Russia and is actually probably the second-largest economic lifeline to Russia after China.
This is a Eurocentric viewpoint on the Western sanctions regime against Russia. Most of the world hasn't joined the Westerns sanctions regime against Russia in the sense the Europeans did. This is one of those times where 'Europe' does not mean 'the international system.' There is no expectation of participation by most of the world, because for most of the world this is a European problem, not their own problem, and their policies tend to be for reasons other than Russia or Europe itself. This goes for the US far eastern allies as well, where there are some substantial parallel interests in play with support to Ukraine- such as the South Koreans getting paid a lot of money for ammo, and the Japanese having a view for shaping the precedents for a Taiwan scenario.
India isn't joining the Western sanctions regime... but India IS aligning with one of the most critical points of the regime, which is the structured energy sanctions to depress the cost- and profits to Russia- of Russian energy exports. India likes this because that means they get to buy below-cost energy. India buying great volumes of Russian is the sanctions working as intended. What India isn't doing is aggressively trying to screen dual-purpose technologies- of which they are a drop in the bucket.
Second, there's a significant amount of anti-US sentiment in India, often portraying the '03 Iraq war as just as bad, or even far worse than what's going on in Ukraine.
There's a significant amount of anti-US sentiment in Europe, who before Ukraine portrayed the '03 Iraq war as reason not to support the US in a Taiwan scenario. There's a significant amount of anti-US sentiment in South Korea, where the Americans are in some circles tied to the rightwing dictatorship and preventing national reunification. There's a significant amount of anti-US sentiment pretty much anywhere in the world, even in the US, where self-flagellation is practically a political sport.
This isn't the sort of thing parties base their pragmatic balance-of-power interests off of either. This would be an obstacle if there were no other topics to consider.
India is a curiously isolationist country. There hasn't been a single invasion going out from India in recorded history, and its generally tried to eschew formal alliances if at all possible.
There also hasn't been a polity known as India for most of recorded history, which makes this a bit of a just-so narrative. India as a unified polity is a consequence of the the British Empire, before which no one had a major maritime empire and the geographic region of India being divided was precisely what enabled the East India Company's divide-and-conquer strategy to work.
In the brief historical span of India being a unified and independent power, much of it was spent not only trying to maintain internal coherency and getting over the legacies of colonialism, in the international context of the Cold War (where it was not a superpower) and the American hyperpolar period. The next period of multipolarity will be the literal first historical opportunity for India to both be a polity to act with agency and have the means to.
The USA wants to do to India what the UK did to the USA, i.e. use a nation with a bigger population to secure a favorable future. But thus far it looks like India has no real appetite to be a global actor. It's refused to join any agreement to help defend Taiwan
And why should it, when not even the US has done so?
The number of treaty allies Taiwan has is 0. The number of international agreements to help defend Taiwain is 0. There's no agreement to join.
This comes off as selective standards no one else is held to... but also no one has proposed. If your standard for India is vocal intent to defend Taiwan, you'll be disappointed by everyone, which says less about everyone and more about the standard.
and instead looks only to counter Chinese influence within its own subcontinent. It's kind of bizarre that a nation with the third largest GDP (by PPP) has minimalistic international aims, but it might be just something about the Indian character.
What major international aims does it need to have? The American-led world order was very conducive to allowing India to develop in peace under its own terms. The security threats are not particularly existential. India doesn't need a navy to go secure vital imports, it doesn't need an empire to provide raw materials, it's primary ideological project of Hindu nationalism is internal rather than missionary, and it's people and politicians can make very real cases that spending attention and resources abroad detracts from very real domestic concerns. India doesn't have a primary international problem that can be 'solved' by being more active- nukes in Pakistan see to that- so why not, beyond appeals to ambition?
India's not, say, the United States, whose international system will be taken apart or changed if it doesn't actively compete. India is generally content with the system for the time being, and changes/attempts by others to change the system now have a good chance of either being in its favor, or offering it a good position to solicit concessions from courting powers.
In any case, it'll most likely take decades before any larger India-US alliance happens, by which point the world will look far different.
Here's I'll conclude by agreeing whole heartedly... and say that's probably the expectation. The US attempts to court India haven't been about immediate-term things like Taiwan, but with a view for long-term balancing, which will exist regardless of what happens with Taiwan.
Dean
10mo ago
Oh, I fully agree with 'surprisingly little', and absolutely acknowledge the political divide on the views of the dictatorship. It certainly helps the later that they (a) actually did improve living standards more than North Korean socialism, and (b) actually did give way to democracy. There was definitely a time in the early post-dictatorship period and even into the early 2000s where there was a much rawer nerve of anti-Americanism / 'we are not a colony and will seek reunification our way.'
North Korea squandered that, of course, and I think it's a consequence of American patience at the time that allowed the mainstream South Korean left to accept that the US wasn't so much pro-rightwing-dictator / wasn't trying to treat Korea as a colony.
I say 'significant' because- aside from University backrooms and such- some of that American skepticism does find itself into ROK national politics/policy from time to time. It was much stronger in the sunshine policy period, but recent President Moon who did his efforts with Trump and KJU was himself from the sunshine era, and some of the influences could still shine through in what was considered a priority in the relationship and such. (Like the often-stalled United Nations Command OPCON transfer from the US to the ROK, which goes back and forth be party.)
Dean
10mo ago
What, exactly, is India supposed to achieve in this alliance?
It's times like this I read one of your posts, see two possible readings from connotation/insinuation, and then wonder which of them was intended as both can make sense with what follows. In this case it's 'what is India supposed to achieve (for the US interest)' or 'what is India supposed to achieve (for its own interest)', either of which would fit fine in what follows.
(This isn't a critique, just a note that it's something that causes me to regularly re-read your posts to try and understand your intent.)
In this case, I don't disagree with your general thrust. I doubt the Americans pushing for Indian ties think of it in those terms / to those exact effects- I'm not sure the American establishment is as bullish on the economics of computing as much as the military-competition sense- but the point of 'what if China doesn't invade Taiwan?' is valid. More than valid, even, as the question can also be framed outside of the context of Taiwain entirely. Win Taiwan, lose Taiwan, the American logic for wanting to leverage India against China exists regardless.
And, of course, the desire to leverage the US against China can equally exist from their perspective. Never do for free what someone else is willing to pay you, so to speak. If India believes itself already in competition with China, why not seek to profit from the Americans?
Dean
10mo ago
I don't know any specific paper on that specific claim, but this article might point towards something. The general framing is that smart people are more able to rationalize their biases away as something else.
https://bigthink.com/the-present/the-dangers-of-being-smart/
Dean
10mo ago
Building on this, I saw no recognition by the OP of the distinctions between types of strength, or even the distinction between power and strength. Weak leaders can have much power, and use the power of their position / context / brute force to paper over their weaknesses against those with less power.
Moreover, the 'strong men are where the survivors are dominant' easily misses that Darwinian selection doesn't select for strength, it selects for survival. Survival only correlates with strength when the selection force is targetting weakness- but it often doesn't. Wars will kill the brave and the selfless first, while cowards who flee live. Purges will select for those with the strength of the (wrong) conviction, but spare the sophists or the deceitful. Darwinian survival isn't survival of the best, it's the propagation of those most likely to multiply. Calling those features 'fitness' is assuming the conclusion.
Dean
10mo ago
This is a sentiment I hear often, but it's a cop-out to some degree. During the early days of the war, there were many who wanted the sanctions to entail full isolation of Russia, and India's refusal to sign on caused a few minor diplomatic incidents. Eventually the West decided that the oil price cap was all they could reasonably achieve, but that in turn has meant that Russia's economic situation is far more stable than it otherwise would have been. Saying after-the-fact that "we never actually wanted a FULL oil embargo" is Western cope more than anything.
Fortunately, I am not many people, and I never said that, nor did the people who were proposing the oil price mechanism, who were separate from the people who wanted a full embarge (or, good heavens, a blockade).
The people who wanted the sanctions to entail full isolation of Russia were never realistically going to get that, and I noted at the time that sanctions were crafted from the start to leave critical parts of the Russian-European trade, including significant parts of the energy relationship, untouched. That the oil price cap was all that they could reasonably achieve does not change the point that the oil price cap is not nothing, and that it is having the intended impact by the people who won the push for that instead of an embargo.
I meant that no Indian power has tried to conquer outside of the subcontinent. I wasn't referring specifically referring to the modern state of India. For the most part it's true for the thousands of years of recorded history, apart from brief incursions trying to control Himalayan passes like Kabul, and notably the Chola empire which I had never heard of until this thread.
More most of the thousands of years of recorded history, there was no technological ability to meaningfully conquer outside of or into the subcontinent. The two primary historical actors that conquered into the subcontinent at all (Alexander the Great and the Mongols) fractured from their outside polities almost immediately, and even the Mongols were promptly stuck in the functional non-unity of the system which was so busy locally competing there was no meaningful point in trying to conquer outside of the continent, far away and technologically unsustainable, when there were still immediate neighbors who weren't conquered.
This has nothing to do with cultural character, and everything to do with a lack of means and opportunity. The hindu kush is big and expensive to move armies through. Armies that hadn't even dominated the much richer neighbors. Even the Romans prioritized their conquests.
I wasn't specifically referring to binding treaties here, but rather future intent. The US clearly signaled an intent to defend Taiwan IF Taiwan actually chooses to resist (which is still an open question at this point, admittedly). Japan has also indicated that its open to the idea. There's near-zero interest from anyone else though, including Europe and India.
And yet, you're still not explaining why they should, which was the point of the question.
This is, again, a selectively claimed standard based on, well, not even a notional obligation. If only two countries maybe- conditionally- without any binding obligation to- might involve themselves, where is the obligation of expectation for future intent coming from. That Europe- formal treaty allies, openly aligned- are not interested in such a position only weakens any basis of expecting India to take a higher position than them.
You're claiming India fails some nebulous standard... but why should anyone care about this standard in the first place that they never pretended to agree to?
What major international aims does it need to have?
You could ask a similar question to basically any geopolitically active country.
I... am. India is a geopolitically active country. You may be unaware of its activities, but this just sets up the point that your understanding of India's priorities and interests and the Indian government's are not aligned.
For India it could be countering the BRI, countering Chinese influence in SE Asia, building a Middle Eastern network to isolate Pakistan, forging diplomatic and economic links around the rim of the Indian Ocean to turn it into an Indian lake, etc.
These are nice for you to want India to seek, but that's not what I asked ('needs'), or a position of what India believes its needs are.
This is a pushback against a sort of typical minding of 'India makes no sense for not pursuing its interests as I see them,' without actually identifying if those interests are what India agrees are goals ('countering' BRI means what?), practical (how is a Middle Eastern network going to practically isolate Pakistan rather than the same Arabs maintaining relations with both), or not already in the process (forging diplomatic and economic links around the Indian Ocean).
Dean
9mo ago
No, because you're switching connotations of acceptance from 'willing to tolerate' to something more like 'acknowledgement / recognition.' 'I acknowledge that this is bad, but I will not/ do not have to tolerate it' is not acceptance in the form that stoicism advocates.
Dean
9mo ago
That article claimed Russia was openly waiting for Ukraine fatigue to set in but never provided any evidence to back this statement.
I'm not sure what you'd consider 'evidence,' but it is consistent plausible end-state motivations for most Russian strategic efforts since last summer. After it became apparent that Russian conventional offensives would be generally ineffective and disproportionately costly even as Putin demonstrated that mobilization waves would be a resort rather than a primary means of maintaining offensive mobility, there were three general dynamics for Russia: to keep trying to attack irregardless, to try and escape the conflict, or to adopt a defensive posture to conserve power and extend the clock. Putin has progressively tried to axe any viable Russian withdrawal route by various means to limit the political viability of such (the annexation of unoccupied territory, blowing up dams), and redirected offensive capabilities away from conventional targets towards things like the attacks on civilian power grids, which is classic economic transition that had the effect of running up the bill for western support, i.e. trying to strain western electrical industrial support and increasing the economic costs if Europe wanted to rebuild Ukraine after a war to incentive a shorter war.
The spring offensive aside- and that was at least conceptually supposed to be a more limited offensive to get territory that was part of the initial nominal casus belli- Russia has generally adopted the defensive posture to extend the clock, even as it has tried to continue its usual sort of IO efforts to fan anti-war efforts or actors and encourage divisions in the western coalition backing Ukraine. I'd personally consider that 'waiting for Ukraine fatigue to set in' a fair characterization, though it's a bit more proactive than that.
Of course, this is not 'evidence' as much as 'assessment,' based on things that are presumably open knowledge but not claiming any Russian internal document saying 'this is the goal,' a standard which would largely preclude evidence from being relevant.
Selection of propaganda framings. Framing the conflict as being over unimportant podunk farm towns is the Russian-desired framing fit for westerners, not for Ukrainians, which is rather the point.
The Ukrainian support for the war is sky-high because the Ukrainians see this as an existential struggle that wouldn't end with a cease fire (because Russia could consolidate, regroup, and try yet another continuation war in what is already a series of continuation conflicts). If the Russians were trying to target Ukraine, they would focus on themes undermining this perception, and conceal, rather than amplify, narrative claims about how Ukraine was a fake country (that does not deserve to exist) and Nazis (for which total war and destruction is jusitfied) and properly russion (annexation). Anti-Ukrainian resolve IO would try to dissuade that Ukrainians in their power will be killed / kidnapped / tortured / moved as demographic pawns, and cast such allegations as ridiculous.
Instead, the state media and state-influenced media spheres practically revel in it, validating Ukrainian perceptions of Russian threat.
Framing the war as being a futile struggle over nothing important is a messaging theme for westerners providing Ukraine support. It is an entirely temporally-isolated narrative framing that focuses on ignoring what came before and what could come after, and stresses material value contrasts in the present tense (podunk farms vs billions in military/economic aid to continue fighting). This creates a maximally unfavorable framing for supporting the Ukrainians in terms of people providing things of value to them, which works in parallel with Russian efforts to use political proxies in Europe to act as 'peace activists' for pro-Russian settlements, signal boost or inflame opposition/dissident actors framing domestic complaints in terms of the war.
There were also the really unsubtle narrative campaigns regarding last year's energy cutoffs and Nord Stream Pipeline politics. Germany has long been the target of Russian information efforts. It failed, but not for lack of Russian trying.
Returning the previous post's point: at some point when beating their head against walls didn't work out, the Russians had to make a choice between cutting losses but also loosing gains, and playing for time in hopes they could end up keeping gains. They chose to play for time. The strategy to make that time turn to their favor is to change the conditions that enable the Ukrainians to resist against Russia's larger economic mass, which is to say the even larger Western economic mass. If Western mass can be disconected, then the conflict may go back to one Russia can 'win.'
Is it a probably stupid plan? Yes. But it's also very characteristic of Putin.
Dean
9mo ago
Who desires that framing seems to depend largely upon who's currently in possession of the podunk towns -- I certainly saw Bakhmut referred to this way in Western media as Russia was on the cusp of occupying it; ie. "Look how hard it has been for Russia to capture this one little town, they are so dumb/ineffectual/whatever". Now that Ukraine is making progress (?) on retaking it's bombed out husk it has suddenly been framed as a more important place. I have limited exposure to Russian/Ukrainian media, so IDK how it's framed to the people who are actually getting killed over it.
You're confusing propaganda narrative for assessment of value.
Bakhmut was referred to as strategically insignificant by non-Russian analysts because it's capture was (correctly) analyzed as not going to allow Russia the sort of breakthrough or impact to Ukrainian offenses to meaningfully change the strategic posture in a way to facilitate more effective follow-on Russian operations. Early in the war, Bakhmut falling was a pre-requisite for the Russians having a pincer attack that threatened the entire Ukrainian position in the Donetsk, one of the key territories in Russia's nominal casus belli for the administrative boundaries of the Donetsk separatists they claimed to be fighting for. As a pincer at a theater level, it would have allowed the Russians to deny the pocket access to artillery, given localized air superiority, and greatly diminished the ability of the Ukrainians to defend, as we saw earlier in the summer elsewhere during the grinding artillery offensive. After Kharkiv, the Russians lost both the territory and the logistics hubs required for any sort of pincer, negating the potential for overlapping artillery to keep out the Ukrainian artillery, greatly limiting the effectiveness of aviation, and so on. Without the second pincer to weaken the Ukrainian defenses by denying them safe space for artillery in the 'pocket', the advance from Kherson became the same general prospects as the advance into Kherson, which was not only massively wasteful in manpower, but the political consequences ended up resulting in a mutiny. Analysts didn't know the later would happen, but they were completely correct about the former, hence why it was a fight for a city and not what was beyond because the city became it's own target regardless of anything else.
By contrast, referring to the current offensive as over (non-specific, temporally isolated, inherently insignificant) podunk farms ignores that the podunk farms are simply where a defensive line is that- if broken, would radically reshape the viability of follow-on operations in war-altering ways. Namely, that the southern offensive threatened to reach the black sea, or at least put it into artillery range, thus cutting off land-based resupply of Crimea. Russia was highly dependent on the Crimean bridge to move forces and supply the Crimean peninsula, a logistics lift which was throttled by the bridge attacks but somewhat mitigated by the land corridor. Compromising that land corridor forces the Russians to be far more dependent on a far more limited supply chain itself still vulnerable to disruption, and by limiting that supply chain would enabled the Ukrainians to have future more favorable operations against the Russians in those undersupplied areas (i.e. by going from the sea and then west, towards the peninsula's opening).
The Ukrainians don't/didn't care where particularly the southern lines were breached, but no matter where it was, it would be through podunk farms. Framing the offensive as over podunk farms, as opposed to being over what the podunk farms are in the way towards, is a propaganda framing, not an analysis of what the target.
The Ukrainian support for the war is sky-high
I believe it -- just that it seems not-unreasonable to think that this might change at some point before NATO tires of spending single digit percentages of its military budget on having other people kill Russians for them? "Ukraine is little puppy, we are big bear" seems like a pretty easy sell for the Russian leadership?
And yet, the Russians don't believe this (which I believe is correct), and are focusing their propaganda efforts at the west instead (which is reflected in the prevalence of themes and prioritization of efforts).
The question is not whether you think the Russians are doing the sensible thing. The war was not a sensible thing. The question is what the Russians are doing, and how we might know it.
Framing the war as being a futile struggle over nothing important is a messaging theme for westerners providing Ukraine support. It is an entirely temporally-isolated narrative framing that focuses on ignoring what came before and what could come after, and stresses material value contrasts in the present tense (podunk farms vs billions in military/economic aid to continue fighting). This creates a maximally unfavorable framing for supporting the Ukrainians in terms of people providing things of value to them, which works in parallel with Russian efforts to use political proxies in Europe to act as 'peace activists' for pro-Russian settlements, signal boost or inflame opposition/dissident actors framing domestic complaints in terms of the war.
None of this is working, at all, though?
'At all' is totalizing language that would be inherently wrong. There are anti-war / 'don't support the Ukrainians' movements, and there have been diplomatic flareups between the western coalition that Russia has signal-boosted and amplified.
It is not working enough at the moment, but that's why the Russians are playing for time in Ukraine while trying to shape the western information sphere via propaganda over time.
"Current Thing" support for weapons delivery/profile flags seems strong as ever -- and even if it weren't there would be a long ways to go before public opinion stopped the Pentagon from doing as they please, no?
Hence why they are strategically playing to the defensive and buying time and going after the long-term viability of the Ukrainian government (which would collapse without Western aid).
The Russian wish-fantasy-strategy is that someone like Donald Trump comes into power on a wave of discontent (that the Russians help amplify), and once in power overrules the military / fundamentally breaks the alliance / does things that Russia would like.
It doesn't matter that even Donald Trump didn't do that when in office, that's just what the Russian hail mary is, and Putin is well into hail-mary territory.
I mean it's probably the only plan -- full retreat would be the end of Putin I should think.
Putin still has full control of the internal security forces, and the ability to shoot dissenters. He'll be paranoid and miserable, but it's not like he'll lose an election. Wagner's mutiny was worse for showing how little the military was able/willing to stop it, not for it's (in)ability to take over Moscow or a lack of government control of the internal security services. Moscow would have been bloody and embarrasing, but not the end of Putin for the same reason that the war itself isn't: Putin has made all his potential successors complicit, so that they would share his fate, so they have an interest in avoiding it.
I realize this is late and you may not have been actually asking for 'have you tried this?', but heck a friend and I brainstormed various trans-character concepts when we were scoffing at ham-fisted character insertions, and it feels a waste not to put some of the points.
One of the basic premise we agreed on is that if you want a character who is trans to not have their trans-ness be the thing, it's not enough for the writer not to focus on it- other characters need to not focus on it to, even if made aware. And one of the best character roles to do this is when antagonists- not sympathetic characters- didn't make a deal of it. In a hamfisted approach that could be a 'even evil has standards' trope, but a more thematic way would be for utilitarians in the setting not to find utility in it. When even disagreeable antagonists don't bother to jump on, then it's truly Just A Thing.
For us, since one of the premise here was that a successfully passing trans person should be, well, passing to casual inspection, that made inspections with ulterior motives a primary venue. As in, someone goes looking into the person for dirt... and doesn't find the transness the most relevant point. At which point, since transitioning persons often make breaks with the past as part of the transition, the narrative hook that could be tugged is those gaps in missing years / continuous contacts before/after transition.
One example was a mystery setup, where the antagonists/players are both chasing a (secretly/passing Trans) person of some repute/influence who has a Mysterious Past. For reasons the someone who is assumed to have a fake identity... because none of the public records / school book photos / etc. show the post-transition person during their pre-transition youth. As the person's post transition identity is assumed to be 'fake', the question of the miniplot was 'why?'- with various theories being witness protection programs, identity theft, etc. When the person's pre-transition name is discovered, it was even framed as a case of a family scandal being shushed up, with speculation like the current persona being a once-illegitimate child legitimized after the 'death' of their dead-name 'sibling,' a case of someone hiding gender to escape the notice of the law for some mysterious crime, or so on.
The antagonist's- and thus the protagonist's- motives for finding out the past weren't about the gender per see, but for the implications of what a mystery box sort of answer might allow them to do to influence the person. Say they're looking to blackmail to force the trans-leader's cooperation, to protect the reputation of the (completely unrelated to trans) cause they trans-person is aligned with, or whatever.
The kick in the plot concept was that the antagonist could find the secret... but then not find it worth exploiting/insufficient leverage, to the point that they give it up rather than try and exploit it, and go on to something else instead. By having the antagonist with utilitarian motivations dismiss that part of the trans-person's identity as relevant, it was signalled to the audience that in the setting, being trans wasn't some overwhelming thing. What made the person relevant wasn't their transition, but what they were in a position to do- and the society was such where the insinuations of misconduct conflated with the transition overwhelmed the social relevance of the transition itself.
Dean
9mo ago
It also would have proceeded better had Obama not tried to approach foreign policy without the buy-in of the opposition party in general.
Later-term Obama basically ran foreign policy conflating executive fiat with presenting a fait accompli. This was done on the assumption that there wouldn't be an opposition party succession, let alone willing to pay the political costs of not going along with it, which was hubris.
Dean
9mo ago
That is partly because Iran consistently goes out of its ways to not only be bad by generally neutral standards, but especially the standards the Obama administration claimed to care about.
Rapproachment with Iran wasn't something that could be neatly simplified as 'de-escalating American hawkishness in the Middle East.' It involved things as over-the-top as flying literal planeloads of cash to a known state-sponsor of terrorism, who was involved in killing American soldiers in Iraq and made no promises to stop, for a deal even its adherents claimed would only result in Iran reaching breakout capability, i.e. what it would reach without it. You don't need to be 'hawkish' to think that that's not a particularly good play, and that was even as Iran was one of the most extreme global examples of the institutionalized homophobia (as in, literal stoning the gays) and gender discrimination. Not only was the later a flaw on the human rights front, Iran's sins were the sort of accusations that the Obama administration and the progressive-millenials were using as political cudgels in the domestic culture war at the same time.
Obama seeking rapproachment with Iran by fiat and trying to avoid Congressional scrutiny didn't come across as 'at last, reason will give peace a chance!'- it came across as a really short-sighted stupid bit of political hypocrisy, for which the primary beneficiary on the American side was Obama himself in terms of international laurels for giving the Europeans endorsement to trade with someone who at the time was helping blow up American soldiers and was in no way required to stop doing so.
Dean
9mo ago
I mean, take out the very subjective word "terrorism"
If you disagree that Iran supports groups that are broadly and internationally recognized as terrorist groups, feel free to disagree with the object level claim, but you haven't actually said you disagree.
and this is the same thing that the US is currently doing in Ukraine.
And if a Russian politician tried to make a series of major concessions to the US without the US reciprocating with major policy changes, and without convincing their political base of the appropriateness or necessity or usefulness of doing so for even marginal effects, their efforts would probably not last very long.
If you want to make a deal with an adversary, you need to sell it to your political base. The saying 'only Nixon could go to China' reflects the belief that only Nixon had the political capital and credibility to sell a deal as a valid thing, as opposed to being seen as a sell out. Without the popular legitimacy that requires buy-in, the deal itself means nothing. This is why weak leaders can rarely make enduring changes, as the changes they can implement through their formal power rarely outlive their terms in office. By contrast, strong leaders can make changes to public perception that even their political opponents accept the reframings on some level.
It's not like the Iranians were blowing up Americans who were peacefully sitting on bases in the US.
Why would a reasonable American political establishment or voting base would only care about Americans blown up in the US?
Your claimed confusion why Americans would dislike the Iranians. Part of this is because, regardless of whether people supported the Iraq War or not, only a relative minority are indifferent about the Americans who were there being blown up, or indifferent about who helped blow them up. The US government- even the Democratic parts of it- has long memories of people they have spent in some cases literal decades in conflict with. It only required a short-term memory- contemporary even- to find personal and living grievances with Iran.
For true rapprochement to happen, generally both sides have to make compromises, not just one.
That was one of the arguments against the deal, yes- a lack of equivalent Iranian policy compromise.
The functional compromise the Iranians were agreeing to in the final versions of the deal were... breakout capability, for a limited period of time, without the sort of verification systems that would prevent the Iranians to cheating and completing it unnoticed if they wanted to. This is the same capability the iranians have without a deal.
Ultimately Obama wasn't actually interested in true rapproachment, and didn't even try to sell the deal as such.
As for breakout capacity, I don't see why the US should try to stop Iran from building a nuke to begin with. Why should I care if they have a nuke?
Why should anyone care about the nuclear proliferation opinions of someone who doesn't value nuclear non-proliferation?
The answer is of course your opinion doesn't matter- the question was about why people didn't care for Obama's plan.
Whether you agree or not, most politically-engaged people are not, in fact, indifferent to nuclear proliferation. They tend to be opposed to it in fact. The deal did not stop nuclear proliferation. As a consequence, the deal's maintenance could not be credibly be argued to be needed to prevent nuclear proliferation, because by the design the deal wouldn't do that because it lacked verification and enforcement mechanisms at Iranian insistence.
Also, being belligerent towards Iran is pretty unlikely to get them to treat homosexuals better. Soft power could potentially do it. A full-on invasion could also do it, but that was not an option in 2008 and even if it was, it would have killed probably hundreds of thousands of people, so the tradeoff is questionable.
You seem to have missed the message to the domestic audience. The point isn't that the Obama administration had any hope of making the Iranians change policy (nuclear or gay). The point is that the Obama administration was willing to make major policy compromises to a major abuser, while using far lesser alleged character condmenation to justify not making domestic political compromises.
For his own base, who broadly considered the line of attack valid on a domestic front, it served as an easily co-optable tool against the Iran deal, which they would have a hard line refuting. For the opposition he used the attack against, the contradiction spoke of hypocrisy and insincerity, which undermined any political argument that the opposition should try to maintain a deal whose maintenance could be used to validate a line of political attack against them.
Dean
9mo ago
In reference to Trump, they argued that the events on and surrounding January 6th intending to overturn the election would constitute "insurrection or rebellion" as understood at the time of the passing of the amendment.
Why?
The 14th amendment was, after all, passed after the Civil War, a conventional war in which field armies were marshalled to fight against the uncontestedly lawfully elected government. (The Confederates did not deny that Lincoln won the election, which is why they cited other casus belli.) The contemporary acts of insurrection included federal garrisons being overrun, cities sacked, massive civil destruction the likes had never been seen in North America since maybe the fall of the Aztecs, and millions dead directly or indirectly. In the drafters' own lifetime, non-insurrectionary violence in the capital included beating Congressional representatives with canes and honor-duels.
January 6, by contrast, wasn't even in the top 5 violent acts of political violence within a year of it happening.
I can't see this not being important,
Why not?
Trying to frame January 6 as an insurrection or rebellion has been an attempted narrative line since January 6, 2021, with generally only partisan effectiveness. It has been approximately 945 days and American public polling has consistently held viewing this along partisan lines. What, besides the appeal to Federalist society credentialism, is supposed to make it more significantly more persuasive after day 950?
Again, why?
I hate to consensus build, but this seems a pretty transparent 'the definition means what I want it to mean at the time, not consistently applied,' and the argument that the conclusion is self-enacting is just assuming the conclusion in a way that would drastically expand the power of the executive branch vis-a-vis the other branches by creating a precedent that the people who would make the determination can invoke magic words to make the appropriate un-appealable conclusion.
I see no reason why the members you cite would suddenly be onboard with a very expansive and novel interpretation of the executive branch's authority to arbitarily ban opposition politicians for conduct less severe than members of the ruling party that remain in good standing.
Dean
9mo ago
They go into the cotemporary legal definitions, and note that there were smaller scale insurrections that were considered insurrections.
Insurrections smaller than January 6, but which other events in contemporary American politics haven't surpassed? Which?
Their main argument was that the January 6 mob was an attempt to use at least the show and threat of force in opposition to the constitutional order, and maybe, but more dubiously, that the assorted plans, second sets of electors, etc. could be considered rebellion even without force.
But the argument made was that this is an interpretation should qualify as a rebellion to the perspectives of the people who drafted the amendment- but the amendment was drafted by people whose concept of Rebellion was intrinsically one of mass, organized force on the scale of war.
So again- why should anyone believe the Amendment drafter's views of Rebellion were such that Jan 6 qualified?
What makes this newsworthy to me isn't so much that people are arguing that January 6th was an insurrection, for the reasons you say, but the fact that actions could be taken because of that that could have a substantial effect on the upcoming election.
Which actions can be taken because of this that couldn't have been taken already?
This is not a position claiming a consensus of Federal Society legalists, or concurrence by government lawyers, or a position made by anyone else in the last several years of lawfare. It's novel, not authoritative.
Because they are heavily involved in the conservative legal movement, so ideas that gain traction within the conservative legal movement are likely to have traction with them.
But we don't have evidence that the ideas have gained traction within the conservative legal movement.
This is assuming the conclusion by backwards reasoning that because the two members are Federalist Society affiliated, both the reasoning is conservative in nature and shared broadly amongst conservatives.
If this argument was coming from a fringe Marxist or something, I would expect it to carry much less weight among the Republican lawyers that make up the majority of the court. But it's coming from Republican lawyers, written from an explicitly Originalist perspective.
That is what is what is being challenged!
The Originalist perspective would be, of course, the viewpoints on what rebellion meant to the people whose framework of rebellion was the civil war. Hence asking for by what standard the January 6 is being held as rebellion, but which other actions in that year did not. If the original framers wouldn't recognize something of the scale of January 6 as a rebellion, then the originalist interpretation works against the claim that it's an originalist interpreation of the amendment. If the legal argument is that they were all insurrection, but this legal standard has not, is not, and will not, be enforced consistently, it's not an Originalist perspective, it's an argument for arbitrary political interference on grounds of special pleading, which is not an Originalist principle, as one of the points of the original writers of the Constitution was to prevent arbitrary use of government power against citizens.
Moreover, the amendment isn't the only Originalist perspective relevant to the subject, since the implications to division of powers of course broach on the other parts of the Constitution, and those originalist perspectives, for what self-executing would imply when functionally meaning giving the ruling party to ban opposition party members doing what potentially election-winning pluralities of the American public view as legitimate democratic processes.
This has nothing to do with executive branch authority. Their argument is that the disqualification is automatic, with no executive act to make it happen.
And this argument is nonsensical, because nothing in the government happens automatically, but is executed and enforced through the Executive branch.
As the saying goes, organizations don't make decisions, people in organizations make decisions, and the people who would decide to execute- and then enforce- this policy proposal are the executive branch.
There is no guarantee of safety anywhere, but they wouldn't be dependent on Russia's navy or airforce for logistics. Wagner in Africa wouldn't exactly be in high-tempo combat operations needing such a train, there are no logistics trains in Africa, and the Wagner model in Africa is to work through local actors, supporting them in exchange for resource rights (such as mines), which would be a more independent revenue source than MOD.
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