Harlequin5942
No bio...
User ID: 1062
Harlequin5942
23d ago
I think the parallels are better:
(1) The more powerful and invading force is Russia/the USSR in both cases. Putin's view of the world was formed in the latter days of the USSR, during the Soviet-Afghan War. The US intervention in Vietnam was led by a very different generation of leaders from the US today, with an overarching view of the world (early Cold War anticommunism) that has no applicability in the Russia-Ukraine war.
(2) Afghanistan did not have a clear political, cultural, and geographic division akin to Vietnam, with a narrow border between them. The same is true of the parts of Ukraine that the Russians have been invading since 2022, though not the parts where they intervened in 2014-2022.
(3) North Vietnam is not analogous with Russia, obviously. The US is not going to start bombing missions over Moscow because of Ukraine. The same was true in the Soviet-Afghan War: the US was never going to attack the Soviet Union because of Afghanistan, let alone a land intervention analogous to North Vietnam.
(4) As with the Afghan War, Russia has local allies that have popularity and legitimacy over a certain area (the Donbas + Crimea / Kabul) but lack an insurgency over the area of their enemy. In contrast, the Viet Cong provided both a powerful insurgency in South Vietnam AND a useful device to prevent escalation ("We North Vietnamese aren't invading you, oh no, so it would be escalation for you to invade us!").
(5) In Afghanistan, the US was in a position of funding people fighting its major enemy. In the Vietnam War, in the early phases, the US was funding the South Vietnam government against an insurgency supported by the North Vietnamese supported by the Soviets. So the link between US actions and frustrating Soviet interests was much stronger in the case of Afghanistan. It is obvious that the Russia-Ukraine War is more similar to the Soviet-Afghan War in this important respect.
(6) In Afghanistan, the US had extremely useful support from Pakistan, while Iran was neutral and successful in remaining neutral. In the Vietnam War, Cambodia was theoretically neutral but unable to be useful for the US, for a variety of reasons. South Vietnam had to worry about both its border with North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, with no adjacent land allies. In the Russia-Ukraine War, the US has a chain of adjacent allies from Romania/Hungary/Poland/Slovakia/Poland to the Atlantic.
(7) In Western opinion, the South Vietnamese were a colonial remnant. The North Vietnamese were commies, but they were anti-colonial commies, and as anti-communism faded, support for the Vietnam War faded. In the Soviet-Afghan War, this was reversed. In Western opinion, the Russia-Ukraine War is seen as closer to the Soviet-Afghan War. You might disagree, but I'm talking about opinion, not truth.
(8) The Ukrainians were expected to do much worse than they have, just like the Soviets were expected to swallow up Afghanistan - maybe even make it an SSR. I don't know of any parallel with the Vietnam War, where the best case scenario for the US was always a frozen conflict akin to Korea.
The most important points here are (3-5). The US is not going to attack Russia over Ukraine, it is in a position of hurting Russia across multiple dimensions of power without losing a single US soldier, and there is no parallel to the Viet Cong insurgency.
The most important disanalogy is that the Russia-Ukraine War is not a guerilla conflict. However, this is a disanalogy with both the Vietnam War and the Soviet-Afghan War. Instead, we have a position were Russia - due to a mix of lack of public support, economic weakness, and military incompetence - is making slow progress at best against a conventional enemy.
Not that I'm not predicting the outcome, except that whatever happens it will be far less costly to US power and prestige than the Vietnam War.
Harlequin5942
24d ago
This conflict really rhymes quite well with Vietnam (before the US came in), where at some point the motley coalition of inept French, decadent Southern leadership, genuine anti-Communist locals and peasants that were tentatively accepting the proposition that they will have a better life under the West started fraying as 2 and 4 were only willing to give so much for 1 and 3 and the US faced the choice between full commitment and humiliation.
I'd compare it more to Afghanistan after 1979: a conflict where the West was never going to intervene and expected a simple Soviet assimilation, but found that it was possible to bleed the Soviets and wear down their will to fight, without losing any Western troops. Of course, Ukraine is not a guerilla conflict, but it is also one where Russia has been frustrated militarily and faces accelerating costs. When Putin dies/retires/becomes senile, there might also be a similar period of instability to the USSR in the 1980s, since there is no young, popular, and competent successor.
Harlequin5942
24d ago
A lot of our GDP is in services, finance and real estate, not heavy industry.
But things like steel, rare earth metals, and oil are traded on world markets, so nominal GDP is very important. Domestic heavy industry is more important if you're at risk of sanctions by other countries.
Harlequin5942
24d ago
Military Summary Channel will always make me smile when I remember him, just because of his "Mongolian Tactics" cope when talking about the loss of Kherson by the Russians, and similar setbacks in that period. I stopped following him as he became both less balanced and less amusing.
Harlequin5942
24d ago
Civ 1 is very primitive and silly, but I really like the balance of simplicity and immersion in Civ 2. For me, it was the best balance of those two in the series (and in strategy games in general) though I never had time to properly learn Civ III onwards, because by that time I was a postgraduate student and I had very little time to learn new games that I might not enjoy.
Harlequin5942
24d ago
I wouldn't want to deny the existence of gholas.
Harlequin5942
25d ago
Hunting heretics/Muslims/Jews gets conflated with hunting witches.
Harlequin5942
25d ago
I don't think there's ever been a point where a given leader was race or gender-swapped
A half-example: the female Zulu leader in Civ 2 was a gender-swapped Shaka.
Harlequin5942
25d ago
Um actually black samurai were totally a thing historically. But even if they weren't, why does it matter and why are you so bothered about an ahistoric depiction of a black man pairing up with a young Japanese woman to kill a bunch of Japanese men? It's only a video game.
We need a general name for this two-step strategy of a claim + poisoning the well: P, and if you argue against P, then you are ungoodthinker.
Harlequin5942
25d ago
That seems like an unnecessarily high standard of what "victory" involves.
Harlequin5942
25d ago
There's also 'birthing persons' for to denote what would otherwise (problematically) be called real women.
Let's just hope that 'birthing vessels' isn't next: https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Axlotl_Tank
Harlequin5942
28d ago
I find young men gain status from having somewhat, but not overly disagreeable opinions. The goldilocks zone is on the fringes of the overton window; you'll get shunned for throwing a roman salute, but merely tut-tutted and quietly respected for shrugging off the dotted-i's and crossed-t's of political correctness.
Absolutely. If you're not a "Fiscal Conservative, Social Liberal" or "I think it's men's responsibility to be providers", then how can she try to civilize you? Note the usefulness of underlying attractive traits (financial ambition, provider mindset etc.) whereas whining about something is never a good way to seduce a woman.
Even my ultra-socialist students tolerate "I'm pro-markets" and it doesn't affect my evaluations. If anything, it makes my approval of their coursework (which tends to be relatively good, compared at least to the median deeply apathetic and relativist student) more meaningful to them.
Harlequin5942
29d ago
Sure, being a mother kicks maternal instinct into overdrive, but it also channels and focuses it on your offspring.
Anecdote: my mother was a hippie liberal commie until she had children, then she has gradually drifted right, but she apparently became very conservative on law-and-order issues more or less as soon as she had her first child. Lifestyle wise, she ended up going 75% tradwife and 100% Christian, having been a classic careerist feminist. Talk about a "transformative experience."
Harlequin5942
29d ago
Men and women are both interested in politics if you ask about the actual issues in my opinion. But I’d concede that women are much more susceptible to “it’s called being a GOOD PERSON, GET IT?” reasoning. Women don’t want to be left out of the tribe, women are more willing to show fealty to high status ideas (a man will become a sycophant, will bow to his betters, but internally he is more likely to chafe at this; he won’t do it unless he is certain it’s absolutely necessary).
I have noticed that older women are sometimes extremely skilled at exploiting this tendency to try and fulfil expectations in younger women. I recently talked with someone doing her second PhD (an obvious masochist) and she said that, while her first supervisor (an older woman) had been able to run rings around her emotionally, she now found that female academics were less able to "emotionally manipulate" (her words) her.
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
none of the groups targeted by the communist regime meet this description
Not all, but some, including large numbers of Red Army soldiers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union
Never underestimate the capacity of communist regimes to target a wide range of people.
You would surely have seen that the main thing they talk about is about how fiscal policy already manages the macro system with automatic stabilizers for the last 80+ years, not requiring congress to manually fiddle with tax rates all the time to respond to demand and inflation
There's nuance between "fiscal policy to control demand" and "manually fiddle with tax rates all the time". I never attributed the latter to MMT advocates. Please read this comment again: https://www.themotte.org/post/995/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/210377?context=8#context
And you would have heard Wray say in every book or every talk that we could certainly get some demand-pull inflation before true full employment if simply pumping fiscal stimulus via general spending, which is a demonstrated lesson from the 60s keynesians
"An approximately flat SRAS curve". Please read my comment again: https://www.themotte.org/post/995/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/210377?context=8#context
As for your last paragraph, sorry: I am not going to go through the dynamic I mentioned in the comment you responded to, when I have literally explained how I have waded through the same incredibly tedious rhetorical strategies (strawmanning, motte-and-bailey etc.) from MMTists in the past. Unfortunantely, nothing you have said makes me expect discussing the issue with you to be any different. I am not going to go through dismantling a whole set of unattributed strawmannings again. Based on how you're trying to frame things, I could show chapter-and-verse that every economists believes X, but you could still say, "Ah, but here's a politician who said..." Can you try to empathise how tedious that would be for me?
But please read my comment again, especially before you make assertions about whether I have read things or read them carefully.
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
Such a discussion would be hard. MMT advocates tend to see themselves as primarily stating a profound critique of standard theories of public finance that is true as a simple matter of institutional facts + accounting, whereas I see them as warming up a few ideas that almost all Keynesians abandoned long ago. So the very terms of the debate would likely be messed up. This has been my experience debating MMTists in the past, e.g. they say, "Do you admit X?", I show that X has been standard econ for 100+ years, and they say "Oh, so you admit X!", I say "Of course", and then they say, "Well, this politician says otherwise, and he did PPE at Oxford, so economists must teach otherwise!"
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
Bingo.
I looked deep into MMT many years ago to find out what descriptive claims they made that were different from mainstream economics. I found three:
(1) Confidence in fiscal policymakers to e.g. time fiscal policy to control demand.
(2) An approximately flat SRAS curve, though many of its advocates don't realise this and haven't read about SRAS curves, because they have never read an intro macro textbook. In plain English, it's like an on/off model of how increased demand affects prices: until full employment, stimulus is more or less non-inflationary. Mainstream Keynesians used to believed this.
(3) Various Old Keynesian claims about the monetary policy or interest rate changes, though this is not universal among MMT advocates.
That's it. Everything else is motte-and-bailey, rhetoric, distractions which have performed the useful function of hiding MMT from most rigorous scrutiny, or uninteresting errors that some advocates of MMT make when they mix up normative with descriptive claims about how e.g. the Treasury works.
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
I'm illustrating the motte-and-bailey by analogy.
"I don't want CP in video games" is the motte. "This particular censorship is desirable, at a minimum" is the bailey.
I think it's true of how some men think of sexually relating to women. Also some women: a lot of romance novels are explicitly about emotionally subjugating a powerful man, with a "he gets down on his knees and begs" scene being a very common trope of the genre. Not so much "civilizing a bad boy into a mature man" as "having control over a bad boy".
IIRC, romance novels are disproportionately read by middle-aged women and AFAIK Tatism appeals to low status/young men. Two of the bottom feeder groups of their respective sexes, who fantasise about debased devotion of a partner in the absence of perceived opportunities for healthy romantic fulfillment. The equivalent submissive pathologies are femdom pornography for men and rape fantasies for women, both of which seem to be largely a matter of despair at forming a mutually loving connection.
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
not wanting underaged girls depicted sexually in video games
That's the motte.
You don't want women to get raped as a result of wearing immodest clothing, do you?
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
Calling a specific subsection of women unrapeable is a pretty clear implication that you consider other subsections acceptable to rape
What does "clear" mean here? Reliable? Or subjectively persuasive?
I also think you're probably wrong about the semantics. "Raping Jane is impossible because she's so ugly" doesn't ordinarily imply that "Raping Sally is permissible because she's attractive." That's conflating two different types of modality: moral permissibility and practical possibility.
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
In the feminist mindset, rape is an expression of power, not an act of lust, and hence it is quite disconnected with a woman's attractiveness.
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
it would be if the genders were reversed, like in that South Park episode
You don't think many teenage girls rank male classmates?
I remember ranking boys in terms of cuteness (albeit ordinally rather than quantitatively) being a repeat conversation among some girls from age about 11 onwards. How else can you work out which boys you can date without getting bullied?
Excellent summary.
Back then, he still had a tendency towards drama and hyping Russian progress, but the war was more dramatic and Russian progress was more worth hyping, so he was still very much worth watching. Sure, his forecasts of Russian advances were almost always wrong (for those of us who grew up reading about the Great Patriotic War, this war is amazingly static) but they provided a rare insight into pro-Russian expectations. Every time I look at his video titles now, it feels a little embarassing.
More options
Context Copy link