That's exactly what we will have if we reach peace right now. Except this state will have more living Ukrainians in it.
It won't, because it won't exist, because you can't reach peace right now.
Among the reasons you won't have peace right now is because the Russians are uninterested in peace right now that results in a European-Ukraine as opposed to maintaining what they know to be untenable and belligerent-unacceptable capitulation terms that would result in a Russia-dominated Ukraine that they know the Ukrainians will not accept.
Which is unsurprising to anyone with a vague awareness of the geopolitical calendar and the logistics of the conflict, because they would already be aware that Putin's predictable windows for a stronger hand in actual negotiations is late next year, after the results of the US presidential election are known, after a fighting year where the Russians are anticipated to have an artillery ammo supply advantage, where it's not clear if Ukraine will have enough for an offensive rather than grinding defense, and where the Russians will have a general year-long opportunity to making propaganda hay of a nominally one-sided conflict even as they are already spinning up various military-posturing dynamics to otherwise further their inevitable-victory narratives to try and have a stronger hands in relevant negotiations late next year than they do this year.
My initial bias was that Russia would score a quick victory. Then, influenced by my American media diet, I thought that the Russian economy would collapse and that the Ukraine counteroffensive, backed by advanced American weapons, would be effective.
Admitting a susceptibility to propaganda narratives for nearly the entire duration of the conflict isn't the defense of your reading between the lines that you think it is.
By contrast, the sort of people who recognized the logistical limitations of western artillery ammo were also the people predicting a long drawn out conflict (guerilla or west of the Dneiper), had no pretensions that the Russian economy would collapse, and warned against dramatic territorial expectation-metrics for the offensive.
When that didn't pan on I questioned my assumptions.
You adopted new, and in the current case old, propaganda narratives.
Reading the comments here, I believe that I have arrived at a more realistic stance than most people, who think things like reconquering Crimea are on the table still.
Your belief is irrelevant to your lack of realism, assuming that by realism you are alluding to an accurate understanding of reality of the conflict.
I hope there is a cease fire because I don't think the war is winnable by Ukraine without unacceptable costs from the U.S. Confidence level: 80%.
False appeals to probability are common in pseudo-rationalist posturing, but it only betrays a lack of understanding of what other people consider unacceptable, and acceptable, costs.
You are (allegedly) a utilitarian. Trading real costs for theoretical units of value (utils) is the core conceit of utilitarianism as a model.
That's the problem isn't it? How do value these fuzzy future utils that rest on things like predictions of future actions of dictators?
It's not a problem if you are not actually a utilitarian, but are adopting a utilitarian persona for gravitas while disclaiming the central conceit of considering abstract and future value considerations.
In such a case, the feigned confusion is an appeal to authority, in much the same way the classic 'I don't understand how one could disagree' is an appeal to the unstated reasonable-informed observer rather than an admission of personal limitation.
My prejudice is to take a "greedy algorithm" approach. Let's take the utils right in front of our face before hypothetical future utils (which might even be negative utils!). If you know finance, then think of it like a present value calculation with a high discount rate.
Your prejudice is a poor model for international conflicts in general, and Russia and Putin in particular, who neither collectively or individually follow your preferred paradigm.
Models that are not used by, not followed by, and do not predict the decisions or actions of others are useless for understanding others.
People are FAR too confidence about the future.
Clearly.
Also. Please don't be a jerk, especially to people who are making an effort to argue an unpopular opinion.
Still yawning. Repeating the latest iterations of a nearly two-year old propaganda narrative with even shoddier justifications is not a commendable effort to argue an unpopular opinion. It's simply repeating the latest iterations of a nearly two-year propaganda narrative without acknowledging or dealing with why the opinion earned it's unpopularity. In other words, trite.
@The_Nybbler believes that my post was pretextual, in other words that I was falsely claiming to write a post about the US legal system as a way to conceal my hidden purpose of criticizing Trump.
Strangely, @The_Nybbler did not say that you were falsely claiming to write a post about the US legal citizen as a way to conceal your hidden purpose of criticizing Trump.
We can tell this because on reviewing what @The_Nybbler wrote, which you quoted, which was-
Or, for instance, when someone writes a long comment purporting to be about the US legal system, but is really just a vehicle to take a shot at Trump.
...which does not say you were falsely claiming to write a post about the US legal system, or that you were doing so as a way to conceal a hidden purpose, or that your purpose of critizing Trump was hidden. In fact, key framing words such as 'falsely' and 'hidden' do not appear, which the key word 'vehicle' as a metaphor in the context of a criticism of pretext is removed, thus creating substantive change of position from what Nybbler wrote and what you claim he said.
This would politely be called strawmanning, except that strawmanning is a device when engaging in an argument with someone, but you aren't engaging with Nybbler, you are deliberately re-characterizing what Nybbler said in conveyence to external audience.
Which would politely be called 'lying about what someone said to someone else.' Which is a reoccuring feature of yours.
I maintain that my real purpose was always from the beginning to write a post criticizing Trump, but given how long my intro about the US legal system was, I can understand why someone might potentially be mislead. Since I can't add a title to the comment I added a content warning to more explicitly signal what the post was about. What would you alternatively suggest for me to do to address The_Nybbler's concerns?
Delete the post, apologize for poor writing quality, and apologize to @The_Nybbler for poor conduct.
Edit: And I see he has edited back out the troll he had edited in, but no apology in the post. Typical and meeting expectations, I suppose.
Not particularly, but it's considerably less one-note and lacking. Your posting is unexceptional, but you intend to insult fewer people and ignore fewer prior discussions than when you fixate on Trump unprompted.
If you meant your writing on a technical level, I find it generally poorly structured and lacking in content, conflating a lot of words with good word choice and links for sufficient sourcing. The arguments are often too reliant on insinuation by word connotation in lieu of supporting arguments, and generally lacking in the ability to anticipate or address counter arguments completely or factor in contextually relevant history while relying on narrative momentum for an emotional climax. It's passable verboseness, and I am certainly a sucker for long-winded arguments, but also leads to basic failures like overly long intros that fail the principles of effective written communication, or speaking around past and still standing counter-arguments.
And I say this as someone who is naturally prone to comma splicing and writing essays on my hobbies, and who writes more the groggier she is.
Dean
5mo ago
That is an impressive number of mis-chosen historical allusions that don't quite demonstrate what you think they do and even less about nuclear deterrence, but as already noted we'll be dead before it would be disproven by not manifesting as relied upon so again, general shrug at unconvincing perception in lieu of evidence.
Oh, hey, look who evaded acknowledging the inconvenient factor of Yanukovych granting himself the right to shoot people without legislative consent.
That it was orchestrated by the US? Yeah, that's long since been established. (1, 2)
Oddly, neither of your sources indicate that the pro-European protests were orchestrated by the US as opposed to the US supporting protests that would occur from organic pro-EU support following Yanukovych's backing out of a highly popular agreement with the European Union also suppored by EU advocates well implaced.
Typical hyperagency / hypoagency framework, but American fanatics are American fanatics even if they are haters.
Further, your conspiratorial framing is outdated. Everyone who wants to trace the money and media flows knows that the Ukrainians were primarily reading German-owned media, not American.
If your historical metaphors are on par with the propagandists you find running the narrative, I see no reason to not treat them as roughly equivalent.
Fortunately they are not, and I tend to avoid them unless there's an amusing parallel, such as who in the current day might be analogous to a warmongering expansionist imperialist power with dreams of establishing itself as a global power pole against western decadence.
Personally I don't think Ukraine meets that model, but such is life.
If there's a solid historical argument in there that doesn't evade the facts of what happened, I haven't seen it. Only an egotist's internal monologue.
Again, the self-reflection.
Dean
1yr ago
This statement is, very obviously, factually untrue, as the war will also end if enough Ukrainian soldiers die, or if Ukraine sues for peace, or of any combination of outside actors forces both sides to enter a ceasefire,
This doesn't make the state factually untrue, it adds additional truths not included in the statement. Which is true of all true statements, because there is always more true things to add.
Just by adding addition end states of the same categorization scheme, you are supporting the claim of the statement.
Dean
1yr ago
Your motivation was already fulfilled from your own source's context. You need to make an argument that the motivation was to carry out the threat twice, not once, for the 'speaks to motivation' to be relevant to your prior argument.
Your initial and broader argument that it's important to carry out one's threats is rendered moot if the threat has already been carried out. Arguing that the NS explosion was the threat being carried out requires an implicit argument that the prior action- the German decertification under American pressure- was not the Americans carrying out their prior threat.
If it was the American carrying out their motivation, then the stated motivation/threat was already fulfilled. NS2 was stopped. It wasn't in any imminent risk of being reactivated. Further action would require a different justification, because the stated justification- 'you must carry out a threat' - is not the same as 'you much carry out a threat twice', which is required unless you reject the relevance of German decertification under pressure.
The defensible claim is 'the Americans have opposed Nord Stream in the past and threatened to work against it, and their credibility would be worsened if they didn't.' The expansive claim is 'the Americans have to be the ones blowing up the pipelines to maintain credibility, because decertification doesn't count.' This is just a motte and bailey that serves to justify a pre-arrived bias, it doesn't actually support that the (successful!) pressure to decertify and stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline wasn't actually a proof of capability that would meet credibility needs.
Dean
6d ago
That would be the micro-aggressions that the woke-americans claim are being conducted, obviously.
And yet you didn't articulate it directly.
Because it was historically illiterate for missing key relevant context that contradicts the desired framing. For example, this was additional historical context that you neglected-
Setting aside that the Minsk agreement did not actually propose to restore Ukrainian's sovereignty due Russian-demanded poison pill provisions that would give its proxies vetoes over Ukrainian national institutions, which would lose the ability to govern the country as a whole even as the Russian-separatist regions could engage in diplomatic agreement with Russia (thus giving the Russian-supported proxy groups more foreign power sovereignty than the government) while proposing elective systems that did not require Russia give up proxy control (which they did not relinquish)-
-and this was your evasion of that context.
In 2019 Zelensky got elected on a peace platform to resolve the conflict between Eastern Ukraine and Russia. He began to move forward on it and tried to go to the Donbass. What it would have meant was a kind of federalization of Ukraine that gave a degree of autonomy for the Donbass, which is exactly what they wanted. Something like Switzerland or Belgium, but he was blocked by right-wing militias which threatened to murder him if he persisted with his effort. If you're essentially telling me that the inhabitants of that part of Eastern Ukraine don't have a right to their own freedom and self-determination because it would mean their interests would play into the hands and service the objectives of Russia, that exposes the prejudice of your personal political views on the matter; but does little to address what the source of the conflict was actually about.
Note, audience, that he does not actually challenge the existence of the sovereignty-sabotaging clauses, or that it would give the autonomous region more autonomy than the central government as a whole. It does try to claim a new equivalence instead with other countries- but does not acknowledge that neither government has the sort of diplomatic veto and autonomy to enter into its own agreements that the Russian interpretation of Minsk insisted. Nor has he addressed the role of Russian military proxies as the in place, and to be still in place in the system due to the autonomy protections preventing the central government to allow free and fair elections that would empose on the 'self-determination' of the Russian supplied, and Russian-manned, proxies.
You're actually thinking Japan has this much autonomy and independence in its foreign policy establishment? It's widely accepted in most foreign policy circles that its own foreign policy conduct is ultimately subordinated and dependent upon continued American economic and military support.
You also widely deride the foreign policy establishment as inaccurate and untrue, yet now you appeal to them even as you'd be wiser not to. People who are unable to understand the difference between a choice of alignment and an inability to choose otherwise are poor foreign policy experts, and believing that the current warm US-Japanese relationship is a direct continuation of the American occupation-state is negligent of several decades of intervening history that saw the US and Japan reconsider their relationship multiple times.
The ultimate Russian justification against Ukraine is NATO's military expansion up to the borders of Russia.
This is not a justification against Ukraine, as Ukraine is not a part of NATO, was not close to becoming a part of NATO, and multiple NATO members had for nearly a decade been actively blocking Ukraine's ability to formally become a part of NATO. A successful conquest of Ukraine doesn't even reduce the NATO borders to Russia- it expands the NATO - de-facto-Russian border.
It is also completely unrelated to the reason for Japan's subjugation to American reconstruction, which was not planned to deny or destroy Japanese national identity.
You can appeal to undetectable, subliminal and nefarious ulterior motives all day, but short of having direct access to his mind, all you're left with in the end are Putin's own statements on the matter. And that fundamentally hasn't changed since he began talking about it.
Sure they have. Putin's Russia's position on NATO and Ukraine has evolved numerous times over the years, including when he wanted to be a part of NATO and when he explicitly avowed that he had no territorial designs on Ukraine.
Putin's posture on NATO shifts with the narrative wind. There's a reason that there was a multi-month pre-invasion buildup focusing on non-immeninet prospects of Ukraine in NATO, and virtually no significant reaction to the largest expansion of Russia-NATO borders as a third of Russia's naval forces found themselves in a NATO lake. In one context Russia was building a pretext for war that was already determined over a notional threat that wasn't a threat, and in the other it was also not a threat.
You completely missed the point I was making.
No, I got the point you were making, it was just historically illiterate.
The Minsk II agreement was initially adopted by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in 2015, and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council. It presupposed withdrawal of George W. Bush’s invitation to Ukraine to join NATO and was reaffirmed by Obama, then vetoed by France and Germany. It called for disarmament of the separatist Russia-oriented region (Donbass) and withdrawal of Russian forces and spelled out 3 mutually dependent parts: demilitarization; a restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty that included control of the border with Russia and complete autonomy for the Donbass in the context of the decentralization of power in Ukraine as a whole. Which wasn't at all unlike the conditions the US imposed on Japan in the postwar period, by banning Japan from having an army, called for disarmament and economic integration with the western powers.
Setting aside that the Minsk agreement did not actually propose to restore Ukrainian's sovereignty due Russian-demanded poison pill provisions that would give its proxies vetoes over Ukrainian national institutions, which would lose the ability to govern the country as a whole even as the Russian-separatist regions could engage in diplomatic agreement with Russia (thus giving the Russian-supported proxy groups more foreign power sovereignty than the government) while proposing elective systems that did not require Russia give up proxy control (which they did not relinquish)-
-this was not only significantly different from the US government design for Japan, which not only did not enshrine foreign proxy sub-states at a constitutional level, but the post-war Japanese occupation also was in no way a respectful recognition of Japanese sovereignty to negotiate, but a result of unconditional surrender. The American occupation system was imposed, not a result of amicable negotiation, and there was no pretense of Japanese sovereignty until a good deal after the US occupation forces left and Japanese elections were able to be held without American occupation shaping permissable conduct.
Nor, and this is also relevant, does the comparison acknowledge the context of the imposition: that Japan was denied sovereign rights and agency due to having just lost a war of regional conquest in which Japan was an imperialist aggressor against most of its neighbors including the US itself. Whereas the Russian justification is that Ukraine warrants a Japanese-style submission because... America bad, or the Ukrainians were killing fewer Russian-speaking civilians over a decade than the Russians did in a few months, or something equally heinious.
Again, as for reasons why the positions emerge, Russia in a future defeat and occupation to the US would be far more analogous to Japan occupation than Ukraine is to Russia.
It seems you don't even understand my position enough to coherently disagree with it, sadly.
Understanding your position doesn't mean it's a good position, sadly.
Dean
6d ago
What's your ingroup?
Counter examples would require ingroup to be identified, but give us one of reasonable scale and it's generally trivial to find some policy or practice that can framed as an act of aggression towards others. Even hobbyists can rightfully be accused of taking money that could spent to benefit starving people and squandering it on unnecessary self-satisfaction instead.
And it says quite a bit about the integrity of one side of the argument when they won't even fully and accurate represent what the position of the other side is.
Fortunately I am still willing to engage you as to why anti-globalization conspiracy theorist is not a full or accurate representation of what the US State Department position is.
I'm still waiting on the counterargument. If we're essentially at a standoff where either side at liberty to disregard an argument by calling it's proponent a moron, then expect the same kind of dismissive, low effort diatribe from me in return. Otherwise, I see no rebuttal to evaluate.
If you choose to call Chomsky a moron, that's on you. I call him a tribalist and a sophist, but fully recognize his intelligence in his field of competence- which is not geopolitics, but linguistics. (Though I have heard from others in the field that he devolved to non-falsifiables in defense of his fame-earning theories, so it's not particularly relevant.)
Let me try the same thing in kind.
"Lol. Sounds like some bullshit to me."
Good ma'am, clearly you've never had to deal with both French and Government officials in the same conference room presenting why their strategy is the better one.
They'd never be so crass as to swear, but the knives of politeness are all the sharper.
Evidently I did miss the satire. I figured your statements were worth taking seriously and not given in bad faith. I stand corrected.
See? There's the learned language issue. You're using the words, but not matching them to the right contexts and so create the unintended ironies. A more native speaker wouldn't make the prior mistake of making an accusation of not representing another's position after citing a conspiracy theorist deriding another's position.
This is blatantly not true: The US refused to make a guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would not join NATO.
This is untrue. Offers that Ukraine would not join NATO were made and duly ignored, on grounds that the US would not make unamendable changes to the US Constitution that were beyond the US Executive's ability to offer in order to meet the level of Russian demands for what a legal guarantee would consist of, which entailed requirements that no future legislature or executive could change their position on.
As the ability to prevent future administrations for reconsidering a policy, a legislature proposing a law, or constitutional amendment from reversing an amendment would require a level of legalistic restriction that the US has never negotiated in its history, and which the Russians have never negotiated upon themselves, it was a notably new and novel proposal for Russia's concerns on how an already vetoed state would not enter NATO. (It was also a unilateral demand as Russia reserves the sovereign right to walk away from treaties they sign, and had done so repeatedly in contemporary history at the time.)
Of course, these demands were also made when Russia had already was in the midst of the final operational preparations for the invasion, and was in the process of generating casus belli justifications and justification narratives, so the sincerity of the Russian interest in the specific demand is highly suspect given their familiarity with US government structure, and the concurrent demands for NATO withdrawals from former warsaw pact states as equally unrealistic demands that served little role other than to say that it was the Americans who refused to negotiate in good faith.
Dean
4mo ago
I think you're doing a good job representing an unpopular position and your contributions are valuable.
I would disagree. The OP is repeating old arguments and narratives rather than addressing the history or context, simply projects a personal value system and uses rhetorical conflation of positions and strawmen to avoid addressing them.
That said, I think you should delete your last paragraph. Complaining about downvotes just summons more downvotes. And take it from someone who has written such screeds, writing about how you're mad at the motte will just generate worse blowback. If you need to step away, just step away.
Or block people, as they already have been.
Yawn. No improvement in your argument, or your approach to arguments already made, or your demonstrated understanding of arguments you are responding to.
And also no surprise for that. Never missing an opportunity, and all that.
Dean
5mo ago
I do appreciate that whatever I’m perceiving is unintentional. However, “reminders for truth and accuracy,” when I am here in good faith and you do not have a monopoly on those things, do rather rub the wrong way.
As does the accusation of condescension when none was intended... which is ironically demonstrative of part of the discussion, of the difference between perception by a victim and the purpose by a perpetrator.
I do appreciate the appreciation, and do wish to be clear that I appreciate your participation (in this discussion and in the forum more generally) as well.
Lynching was indisputably used as a form of social control during its peak era. The lingering and very human, understandable fear that it left, even two or three decades after it became extremely rare, made it easier to keep blacks subjugated. The threat of violence in the background makes other measures more effective. This seems pretty natural and obvious. Given that peaceful Civil Rights marches resulted in torched buses, beatings, murders, bombed churches, etc, the threat of violence was never that far away if black people stepped out of line. From the perspective of a black person: the lingering fear is part of what constrains you, and the fear is borne out just often enough to keep it alive.
The disagreement isn't on your broader point on the relevance of political violence to fear, but rather the timing of what lynching's 'peak era' is, and thus it's applicability to other times and places. This is where we get to anachronisms, the disparities between perceptions (especially politically-resonant perceptions more than a half-century after the facts) and realities, the conflations of different sorts of actions, and so on. I remain focused on lynchings and not other forms of violence not because other forms of violence weren't prevelant, but because they were even as lynching was not come the mid-century as it- far too belatedly- followed the trend of white lynchings by a quarter of a century. The socio-political dynamics of lynchings, as a specific sort of crime and cultural norm, are separate from other forms of racial discrimination and violence of the eras. I do not find them equivalent and interchangeable, for the same reasons I do not find other categories of crimes with different severities and political dynamics equivalent.
For a meta context, this is a more general tendency of mine as well. I tend towards disliking these conflations of events and purposes across decades and different actors in different contexts well, unless there is a generally strong continuity of points to justify the comparisons. I find it unhealthy for civil discussions (where historic grievances are re-raised and conflated with domestic disputes in innaccurate ways) and for understanding situations and histories that are often highly emotive in the present.
I think you’re absolutely right that the pressure of outside media affected the town’s response in the Till case. There was more, rather than less, condemnation before outsiders showed up to pass judgment. But acquitting the murderers of a 14 year old to save your in-group’s face is only psychologically possible if you find the murder at least somewhat understandable - if you still identify with the murderers and their motives.
And that ending is something I flatly disagree on. I'd even go so far as to say it's an out-group characterization of group-first loyalties by a principles-first alignment (as in, you value principles more than abstract group loyalty), and I say that as someone who prefers principle-first approaches to justice issues over tribalism. I take a position that when people prioritize groupings over values, it doesn not mean they suddenly adopt/identify with the values of the abberant members of the group- that would counter the premise of group-first overriding principles-first cultures, which is reflecting of trying to impose a principles-first paradigm on people who don't share it.
I fully agree that they identified with the murderers, yes, but identify with the motives, I disagree on. I disagree it was about saving the in-group's face, rather than defying the out-group, and I maintain that this distinction matters more than any commonality of the perpetrators motives across the grouping. This is without even discussing practicalities in specific contexts, such as key actor analysis of specific cases. This is a disagreement on social dynamics assessments, of group identities versus principles, which seems foundational enough that I doubt we will reconcile to a common position or characterization of what the dominant truth/factor in characterizing the situation is.
Since I suspect we'll just revolve around this well past the thread's expiration date, especially if foundational positions are divergent, I'll freely (and sincerely) offer you a last position point if you'd like, with a respect departure of ways.
Have a good day and week and rest of the year!
And that's before we even get to the question of why my tax money should be the money that Ukraine gets.
What makes you think it's your tax money that's the money that Ukraine gets, as opposed to your pro-war fellow citizenry's money?
Your money tax money could be the tax money covering the roads and services that directly and indirectly support you. There's more than enough government expenditures to go around.
Dean
1yr ago
Because you explicitly asked me to. Don’t ask me a question and then turn around and cast aspersions on me for answering it. That doesn’t incline me to take on your questions in good faith going forward.
I asked you to because you made an insinuation/claim for the public record without making an argument. When challenged, you simultaneously claimed you were not making any assumptions, after providing a favorable assumption, and since claimed you could not make an equivalent assumption on the same amount of information.
This is less a challenge of faith and more a challenge to you to speak clearly, with the intended purpose of letting any late-readers of your thread read your last position with the note that the implied argument was not only contested, but identified.
when the thread was already going cold
Then why didn’t you just let it cool, and instead decide to pepper me with elliptical, leading questions which have obviously been motivated by drawing out some perceived fault on my part, rather than just forthrightly saying what you thought I was doing and why you objected to it? That would have saved us both some time.
Because I was curious how you would respond in hopes of being proven wrong, and how you did was telling (and expected).
Also, as a framing device for future readers, and a tertiary goal of nudging you into being a bit better meta-awareness next time you want to post a thread.
I also note that you didn’t match the favorable section with a section that was not conceded or dismissed as wrong
McFaul didn’t give any such section. I looked at all his tweets and replies since the piece came out. I can’t do the impossible.
You did, however, feel comfortable assuming a section that agreed with you despite the same lack of information. Which was the point- that you would assume a favorable and expansive interpretation when allowed, but then retreat to a more defensible position when challenged.
IE, the archetypical motte-and-bailey fallacy this community is named for.
Though your response were more demonstrative than descriptive, it highlighted in the possible final exchange of the thread your approach to the topic, and how your prior positions on the topic further down (in the default sorting way) will be perceived going forward.
Yes, this is pure meta.
Without an argument being made, McFaul is only relevant to be raised or identified to appeal to his authority.
Or to inform interested parties as to the reaction of the subject of the piece to that piece. Not exactly an alien practice! You seem determined to interpret a one-line comment in the most expansive and least charitable terms possible.
Over-representing a one-line twitter comment in a more expansive and less charitable (to your opposition) way was rather the point of citing him. This is why we are calling out the contrast for meta purposes.
As for lack of charity, this sort of flaw is expected from you, hence why this response focuses on the meta-argumentive structure.
And I simply forgot to write a submission statement. I haven’t been very active here of late, so I’m not fresh on those rules, and if you look at my other link posts you’ll notice that I have a bad habit of forgetting to write them in general. With that said, I agree with Lemoine’s position, so he does speak for me in that sense, as should have been clear from the rest of my comments.
This is, alas, far too late to be particularly relevant to your execution of this debate, which has shifted firmly to the meta of this thread, and will continue to be meta so long as you lack an opening argument. Nor is it about the rules about this website specifically. While they are helpful reminders, it's hardly unique that a link to a source is not an implicit endorsement of the source or its framing, and that assuming so is a fallacious assumption.
If you want to speak clearly, you have to speak. It is not on the other party of a debate to strawman a position you may or may not agree with, nor are they obliged to have the debate you might prefer but didn't set out.
when the very premise of disagreement is being questioned
Sorry, what does this mean? I can’t tell from context.
It means that your argument of providing more information for the original debate is flawed, because the original debate never existed.
The common theme of the top-level reply to your link is that the posters consistently felt that the link-author's argument lacks what they consider extremely relevant information needed to discuss the topic, which challenges the very premise of a debate on the article's subject. It innately turns any debate on the argument itself into a meta-argument not on the original link's line of argument, but on the argument construction and composition. In a thread literally including 'lies of omission' in the threat title, these amount to charges of... omission, a central challenge to the thesis.
Counter-arguing a meta-argument of insufficient evidence never relies on introducing new evidence not previously included. If you are convincing on the grounds of the new evidence provided, it demonstrates the objection's point that the original argument was lacking sufficient data. If you are not convincing on the grounds of new evidence provided, the meta-objection still stands.
The proper way to counter-argue a meta-argument of insufficient evidence is not to bring in new information, but to refute the relevancy of the categories of insufficient information. This is, however, a much harder task in the context of NATO expansion and Russia, as categories of relevancy referred to (contemporary and early post-cold-war Russian history, nuclear deterrence modeling, the relative relevance of sincerity, the presumption of spheres of influence to be respected, etc.) have relatively obvious relevance in an article touching on several of these things, to which you tried to counter by... making new arguments that the author didn't. Which is adding new arguments. Which returns to the previous paragraph on meta-argument by new information.
So, I leave it to any future thread finder to enter the thread, read through this latest exchange as one of their firsts based on the default thread formating, and approach the rest of the thread with the mindset this exchange is intended to give them.
Now is your turn, of course, to have the last reply in a dead and dying thread, to prove that you do not, in fact, have better things to spend your time on than the last word, etc. etc. I'm here for the framing, not the last word, so I'll even let you keep it.
Now, mind you, responding for the last word after describing it as wasting your time, and thus demonstrating you both did not, in fact, have better things to do with your time and were predicted in doing so. A successful prediction would indicate my successful modeling of you, and thus a handling of the meta of the conversation, regardless of what you actually say and do, and whether or not I reply. Whereas you not replying would undercut that specific argument, but would leave the main thesis present, and from a public perception of loss of control of the argument. If you continue, I am validated, if you do not, non-continuation comes off as a retreat.
...is what I would end with if the goal were to patronize you rather than try to improve you.
Yes, it would be a meta trap of sorts... but I bring this in the spirit of concluding meta-arguments, which is that seeking the last word in a public argument (such as the post-thread reference) isn't always an advantage, and if you're arguing for effect, can be actively detrimental. Which is why one should rarely refer to the end of the argument in final terms unless one is willing to leave without the last word. Continuing after you characterize an argument a waste of time is self-defeating, as is being predictable in one's reaching arguments. Rhetorical over-reach is something that can be leveraged against you, which is why identifying fallacies is a regular form of discrediting someone's position.
If you intend to argue for effect- which you clearly intended to by the way you approached this thread and topic in general- this is the sort of meta-dynamics you need to be cognizant of lest you undermine your own side. It is not enough to go 'this person's arguments are my own.' You will be in the position of defending the flaws of the other's argument, and in ways you are not capable of correctly defending against but will become party in discrediting them.
I would leave with asking if you thought this exchange brought about by your after-the-fact addition of a reaching insinuation strengthened or weakened the audience perception of the link-author's position, which you share. I will leave with asking you if you think that replying in any form will do the same. The answer will likely demonstrate the difference between arguing to argue, or arguing to have an impact.
[Insert sign off joke here]
Probably the part about how Putin was not in fact totally gung-ho about NATO expansion in the early 2000s, seeing as that’s the sole topic of the article. But I know exactly as much as you do right now, so I don’t see much point in speculating.
Apparently you do, or else you wouldn't have speculated a favorable interpretation of a non-position and thought it relevant a day later when the thread was already going cold.
I also note you didn't match the favorable section with a section that was not conceded or dismissed as wrong. This would have better demonstrated your awareness of the strengths, and limits, of the arguments being made, which might have helped justify the assumption of what section was being referred to positively.
I’m puzzled as to what you mean by an “appeal to authority.” The subject of the piece that I posted responded to the post, and I simply updated the thread with that fact, because it’s obviously relevant to anyone who was interested in the original debate. There’s no argument being made here. If and when McFaul expounds in more detail, I will edit the above post to reflect that as well, and for the same reason.
Without an argument being made, McFaul is only relevant to be raised or identified in order to appeal to his authority. This authority may be 'as the person this argument is critiquing, my concession of legitimacy bestows weight on the argument's validity,' but (a) this is still appealing to the authority of a target to bestow legitimacy to the critique, and (b) there isn't actually a concession here to carry weight or bestow validity. It's only 'obviously relevant' in so much that it is used to present an assumption of agreement with an inferred argument to buttress on un-made stance because you started this thread without any sort of submission statement or position.
To update, there must be a date to 'up' so to speak, but so far your debate has been primarily in counter-arguments of people critiqueing the linked article. In the motte and bailey metaphor, that may be an attempt at guerrila warfare behind the attacker's line, but it's not clear there's an attacker here in the first place. An article writer made a critique. One of the personal subjects of the critique made a polite but non-committal concession of nothing specific or in particular. This changes, or challenges, none of the arguments involved by any of the players, on either side.
One of the common themes of the comments regarding this article has been it ignores relevant context, ie that it doesn't actually challenge a real position as much as a strawman or a framing. Counter-arguments by you to these charges do not constitute the original debate when the very premise of disagreement is being questioned. It may be an awkward attempt to have a debate, but it's poorly structured as one, not least for the fact that you neither claim the author speaks for you, which would tie you to a position you'd have to defend, nor do you speak for the author, which means your disputes on his intended meaning are as much a matter of opinion and position as anyone else's.
Really this thread is just an awkwardly formatted comment thread for an opinion peace on another website.
Dean
1yr ago
Firstly, it doesn't matter even if they did blow up the pipeline with another method. I explicitly said that was possible in my first post.
'I don't know or care how they did it, but they totally did it since they were in the geographic neighborhood' has been a good part of why your theory hasn't been taken as seriously as you'd like.
So when winter comes and the Germans realise they really do need more gas and public opinion shifts in favor of Nordstream,
Substituting your theorizing and opinions on what's reasonable for other people's viewpoints and assuming their views accordingly is why you're not going to understand. I believe I raised this before.
the US should blow the pipeline then? When it's even more obvious (if that's possible) that it's the US behind it?
If it's not going to make a difference in attribution, then obviously yes, since doing it before it's needed pre-empts all the other measures and options to prevent paying a lesser political cost.
In your argument of if the US being responsible, the US is presumed from the start to be willing to be obviously responsible for blowing up the pipeline if it judges it necessary. This would support doing it when necessary, but would not justify doing it before it's necessary, or doing it before other actions that might be less attributable. Like, say, a cyberattack.
In my argument of if the US is responsible, the US waits the maximum amount of time until it pays an unavoidable cost, while attempting other efforts across the elements of national power to prevent the activation without having to pay the cost of such an overt action. The American concept of government power pretty clear- Diplomatic, Information, Military, and Economic measures are all means of national power to affect others, and as one of the more expensive for the US military is not the first resort against allies, especially those who are already doing the desired action.
Accepting a cost only when necessary is not silly. Incurring an unnecessary cost earlier than necessary when other elements of the state paradigm of national power are working is silly. If sillyness is to be minimized...
The Russian strategic goal is to get Europeans using THEIR energy. If they favour renewables, it's because it means gas is needed for reliability, gas that they supply. If they attack nuclear, it's to ensure there's a market for their fossil fuels. If they attack fracking... it's so they export more and Euros are less self-sufficient. Notably, they do not attack their own gas infrastructure! This does not create revenue or achieve leverage.
Substituting your theorizing and opinions on what's reasonable for other people's viewpoints is why you're not going to understand other people's viewpoints of other people's viewpoints.
If you're doing minesweeping exercises, you have to lay some mines. Fake mines, but mines nonetheless.
Aside from that you actually don't, are you even aware of how mines are laid in practice versus how they would have to be laid for your theory to work?
We have loitering munitions in the world of aviation, why not underwater too?
Repeat 'I don't know how they did it, but they totally did it!'
The question is not capability. The capability is not hard, even if you prefer to insist that it's beyond the scope of the Russians.
Wouldn't defending against Russian loitering munitions make a lot of sense as part of your official mine-warfare tests?
I graciously accept your concession of Russian capability to deploy loitering munitions that could cause this incident by your standards of capability.
I wouldn't trust the Russian navy to do anything correctly, let alone detect stealthy underwater UUVs and divine their mission.
Since your trust is irrelevant to their capability, this falls back under projecting your own presumptions of what other people perceive as reasonable.
Well, yes. Two actually happened, establishing a pattern of spiteful strategic incompetence, and the third is an accusation you've expressed confusion about why people won't accept as true without evidence.
No. The third is YOUR accusation, that Russia blew up its own pipeline.
I am not accusing Russia of blowing up the pipeline.
I accuse Russia, and Putin in particular, of the sort of strategic shortsightedness and malice that has repeatedly led them to do self-destructive stupid decisions in the recent past, to the point that blowing up their own (inactive, defunct, politically un-activatable, not-meeting-it's-strategic-function) pipeline for various reasons many would consider unreasonable is not a disqualifier for considering them in the slightest. But I am not accusing them, or anyone, as I wait for facts to emerge.
You have not provided any new facts, even weeks later, and continue to regress from anything resembling a falsifiable claim for a charge that would be very atypical of how the Americans normally go about resolving disputes with allies.
This is obviously contrary to its own interests!
It's not obviously contrary to their own interests. You reject other alternative frameworks of the prioritization of relevant interests where it's rational, but this is why your opening post here was 'I can't understand,' and I agreed, that, indeed, you will not understand.
This is your limitation, self-confessed even. As long as you retain this inadequacy, you will continue to not understand and resort to silly justifications instead.
You can be cruel, thuggish, corrupt and misinformed but still recognise your own strategic interests and not blow up your own pipelines that you built and paid for, that provide you with leverage on other countries, that you control! How is this so hard to understand?
From your perspective, likely very, but that's the demonstration of how you're struggling, and not the reason why. Among other analytic failures, this specific analytic model objection rests on the model's assumption that the Nordstream pipeline was actually giving Putin the leverage he wanted.
Your presumption that it did is, again, projecting your own beliefs onto others.
Given the course turn of the German government from before and after the war, and Putin's many repeated failures for the last half-decade to try and insert Nord Stream approval/activation as a solution to a variety of situations (including post-2014 Ukraine, the Belarus migration crisis, 2021 'offramp' negotiations, and more), it would be quite reasonable for people-who-are-not-you to come to the conclusion that no, Nord Stream was not providing Russia sufficient leverage over Germany to advance Putin's prioritized interests. German not only did not embrace neutrality on Ukraine, but continued to provide significant financial and even some military support despite Russian pressure attempts, german lobbying efforts, and not-very-subtle demonstration energy cutoffs. In fact, with the 2022 turning point and massive, deliberate shift of energy import strategy to gas import terminals despite the higher cost, the relevant time window for the leverage argument was rapidly shifting, as once the Germans did complete gas infrastructure much of the economic logic of bucking the EU and NATO would dissolve once the German capital investments were complete.
If a pipeline that is not supplying gas, is not providing the demanded geopolitical leverage (German neutrality on Ukraine), has a very visible shelf-life of geopolitical relevance (use-it-or-lose-it), and is not providing the effect of dividing the Germans from their NATO allies... well, by golly, it sure is lucky for Russia that some NATO ally decided to obviously blow it up before the Germans completed their import infrastructure! That sort of direct sabotage and attack might actually get the Germans to oppose supporting Ukraine, and break with Europeans out of righteous anger and look to reactivate the pipelines that can be reactivated! Including those non-bombed parts of the previously dead assets!
...no Russian President with a history of strategic shortsightedness would ever entertain the thought of when trying to grasp at straws to turn around a losing war he thinks he can win if he breaks European support for Ukraine.
Once you take away the assumption that it was actually providing geopolitical leverage, the rest of your 'it couldn't happen because it makes no sense' argument starts to fall apart. That money was spent to build and pay for is irrelevant- that applies to the military as well, and the state of the Russian economy as a whole which Putin's oligarchy consistently loots via corruption, and the economics of Nordstream itself from the start. If money were the goal, the Russians wouldn't have been selling the Germans cheap gas in the first place, but market-value gas for more money, nor would they have done pretextual shutdowns.
Saddam Hussein spitefully burned Kuwaiti oilfields to temporarily disrupt them, denying them to the West as his forces retreated from Kuwait. He did not start blowing up Iraqi oilfields or Iraqi infrastructure.
Because the Americans were very clearly not following him, and they were still of use for him. When the Americans did follow him, and it was of no further use, he absolutely did start trying to blow up Iraqi infrastructure.
This comes back to the assumption that the Nord Stream pipeline sections bombed were providing more use to Putin as they were at the time (inactive, not generating concessions, losing value over time) compared to, say, some other option that might deliver strategic benefits.
Dean
7d ago
And where would you expect to see the other side that vested western interests have an interest in keeping suppressed? CNN? Fox? MSNBC?
Non-American or European media, to start. Al Jazeera has good production value if you're insistent on English language, but if you're willing to indulge in machine translation then there are entire other continents of geopolitical fans with viewpoints- and memories- outside of anglosphere cultural frameworks.
However, your citation wasn't to have someone on the other side of vested western interests- your citation was on a claim of what the vested western interests were themselves supposed to be admitting. Citing someone accusing them of stuff is not them admitting to... well, you were very vague and generic, to a degree it's not clear what was supposedly being confessed to (or not).
Which, admittedly, was probably the rhetorical technique intended, it was just an odd appeal to authority to neither cite the authority, or anyone with special insight into the authority's position, but then to immediately appeal to an outsider with no authority when the lack of authority was noted.
How about the world's foremost critic of US foreign policy? Or is he just a senile old man at this point?
Chomsky was a senile old man at heart decades ago, given that he's been an anti-american tribalist for longer than you've likely been alive with no particular moral creed to peg consistency to otherwise, and not a particularly impressive one unless you're awed by sophistry. If you think he's the world's foremost critic of US foreign policy, you have a very shuttered view of the world of American critics.
If you want intellectual heft, try the French foreign policy establishment and its advocates. Defiantly not-American enough not to buy into Anglophone tropes by default, but familiar enough with both western cultural contexts and a cultural inclination towards argument structure to be delightfully relevant, and with significant national patronage in order to define themselves against the US in their attempts to align Europe to their interests.
You're the one who obliged with the logic of that statement. Makes it difficult to argue against if you stand with it.
I suspect the difficulty is that you don't seem to recognize- or at least acknowledge- a satirical tone of non-agreement. Neither he nor I were standing with the position, and your continuing insistence that they were (and your word choice in the process) is suggestive that part of the reason why may be that English isn't your first language.
It's absence. Not liking Trump is fine. Regularly and consistently making top-level comments about it with poor conduct towards the posters you are a moderator for is not. The dead horse doesn't become less dead if there's more of it to beat, especially when the complaint is about the stench.
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