Technically, we've had a commitment for decades. But also even if Ukraine loses you're failing to consider the counterfactual where Putin just took over in weeks. That would be worse.
That's a matter of perspective, for sure. Fewer deaths overall, and I don't see how it makes Russia so much stronger that U.S. hegemony is threatened (more than it already is).
I do NOT like bringing back 'War of Territorial Conquest' as a feature of global diplomacy again, but Russia made that call unilaterally.
Stopping Putin from conquering his neighbors at will? Preserving norms of liberalism and Western mutual support against aggression?
If the 'norm' for 'support against aggression' is to just pump money and weapons into any force fighting against someone we don't like, I'd be able to offhand point out like half a dozen examples of where we did that and it directly backfired or blew over into unforeseen, possibly worse consequences.
Afghanistan, of course, being one of those, that instantly folded as soon as we removed our presence. Call it 'cheap' if you want, it was never sustainable, I'd straight up say almost every dollar we pumped in there (to say nothing of U.S. lives) has gone to waste.
I worry about the same here, with one of the foreseeable consequences being Ukraine's utter collapse on the population level.
Its a very ill defined way to run things, outside of explicit treaty agreements like NATO. "If the U.S. State Department thinks you're aggressing against your neighbor they will pump said neighbor's combat capabilities up to even out the odds, but otherwise won't intervene" is like "if we see someone being stabbed by a mugger, we'll toss the victim a knife (and maybe a stab-proof jacket) and cheer them on from the side."
We're STILL not officially at war with Russia, so on the political level, it is genuinely unclear what our true objective for participating in this conflict is.
You're leaving out the side of equation where Ukraine is also facing demographic challenges. It's a symmetrical problem.
Yes, and its sharpening the impact of the conflict. The people being lost each day aren't being replaced, they can't be retrieved, every loss is irreversible.
I guess it depends on which one you view as the 'worse' issue. As stated, I see demographic collapse as likely to trigger more and more conflicts going forward.
Ukraine can do what it wants with the population it has. I don't begrudge them the urge to fight off an aggressor in the least. But if its really such a great moral and strategic goal, its strange that the U.S., with the least to lose in this situation, is the one that is continuing to make the largest investments.
faceh
1mo ago
More to the point, sometimes you can't even determine how much people will 'want' something until you take the risk of producing it and trying to sell it.
And sometimes you guess wrong, or you underestimate the ultimate demand and have to adjust.
That risk doesn't go away, its just a matter of who absorbs the risk of getting it wrong (or gets rewarded for getting it right!), and the existence of such a risk makes for one hell of an incentive to get it right.
Vs. the Soviet Commissary who is only punished if the widget factory doesn't produce enough widgets in a given month, even if those widgets are just being thrown out. So he'll happily keep the widgets flowing as long as he can.
Breathlessly awaiting someone to upload "The Marxist Explanation of the Labubu Phenomenon" to Youtube.
I gave up on Marxism as a 'serious' ideology (maybe such a thing is already an oxymoron) long ago when I learned that they've failed to resolve the Economic Calculation Problem even though it was introduced 100 years ago. Even though it kept rearing its heads every time they actually got their way and were able to implement the system.
The trajectory of Venezuela and (recently) Argentina alone should make someone skeptical of their ideals!
You can redefine 'efficiency,' you can try to redefine people's desires or propose that as long as things are more 'fair' (as defined by you) it doesn't matter if people's desires are fully sated...
But end of the day if your economy is not producing as much of [desirable things] as efficiently as a comparable economy using a different system, you are losing the argument.
Even more telling that even the partial solutions require re-introduce market mechanisms, and thus private property and trade.
But rather than take this critique (and the various real-world experiments that have occurred) seriously and throwing their efforts into truly solving it or at least trying solutions at smaller scales... they just plow on ahead trying to remake various economies into their preferred system and damn the predictable consequences.
Someone I read recently (might have been here?) pointed out that almost all notable lefties these days aren't even trying to pretend there's any place where socialism works and people are thriving, or that Marxism has viable answers... its literally just power politics at this point, leverage grievances, make exorbitant promises, and lie through your teeth to get to a position where, ironically, you can leech massive amounts of wealth off the Capitalist system, and deliver some of that to your supporters as reward. The more earnest ones might still try to claim they're opposing fascism but its almost impossible to believe that they don't know how their proposed system has failed to achieve its goals everywhere it has been tried (this is the part where someone says "ALWAYS HAS BEEN").
At this point I am genuinely in favor of a permanent exchange/exile program where avowed communists/marxists over the age of, say, 25 can be sent to any given country of their choice that will take them, and we will accept one citizen from said country that can correctly answer some economics 101 questions.
On the other hand, if there's any "moderate" Marxists who dislike Capitalism but aren't actively trying to dismantle it, I'd also be willing to put them into a policy thinktank where they can propose methods of possibly addressing the worst excesses of Capitalist society (measured in a quantifiable way and compared to a meaningful alternative/baseline!) and work on making Capitalism better. I don't want to remove all ideological competition to Capitalism, that would be hypocritical, and our own theory says competition helps improve most things. But these Marxists would have to understand that the very instant they're caught doing any of that activist shit, I, personally, will be loading them on the one-way flight to North Korea.
faceh
1mo ago
I'm playing around with the idea of them basically becoming a semi-colonized nation where they sign various deals for access to their resources with enough countries, and have enough 'foreign' infrastructure built up in certain areas of their territory, (ideally nearer the Russian border) that there's now broader interest in maintaining their independence.
This would also grant more interest in providing foreign investment to rebuild. Unfortunately I probably underestimate Russia's motivation to crash such a party.
However, given that Russia, our #2 main rival, is having its military trashed pretty hard it's not like we aren't getting a pretty great ROI.
Makes you wonder why we were willing to commit so much materiel to Afghanistan for so long if we care about maintaining military strength for larger enemies.
Keeping the U.S. locked in Afghanistan gave our enemies pretty solid ROI too, and we have virtually nought to show for it now.
I dunno, seems like the actual winning move would be to encourage Europe to build up enough force to deter Russia directly. Certainly less taxing on our reserves.
Why were we concerned about Russia's military at all for such purposes? What threat did they pose to the U.S.'s interests outside of our need to reassure allies we're still top dog?
Now we've got an ongoing commitment to sustain a conflict that isn't going to pay off much for us unless the Ukrainians pull off an increasingly unlikely win.
And to the extent people expect Ukraine to functionally bounce back if peace is established, surely the same could be expected of Russia.
I guess that, unless the actual strategic objective is to bring Russia to heel and then absorb it into the larger Western Coalition that is culturally liberal and directionally opposed to China becoming a global superpower (which I'm not inherently worried about either), what exactly do we think we're doing here that's worth so many deaths.
I'm sorry but I really can't take Peter Zeihan seriously at all. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 because it views the risk of Ukraine becoming aligned with the West economically, politically, and militarily to be too serious a threat to its interests of regional dominance.
That doesn't really address the point that any invasion by Russia relies on sufficient manpower, and by absolute definition, with declining birth rates, their manpower will only decrease if they wait.
The timing is the issue, not the motivation itself.
I've yet to see anyone explain why the point that "declining demographics = economic stagnation = less globalized world = greater conflicts everywhere" doesn't follow, logically, other than us being in very uncertain times in general.
faceh
1mo ago
Yes, the Taliban pulled this off to massive success (by their standards/on their terms) not too long ago.
But in Ukraine's case, WHAT IS THE LONG-TERM STRATEGY.
Beat back Russia, maybe even join NATO, fine.
Your population still drops off a cliff. Protracting the war is hastening the decline there.
What sort of deal can you make that even lets you feel safe for the next couple decades?
faceh
1mo ago
Let's not exaggerate here. The US has in almost no actual way "stretched itself thin" in supporting Ukraine.
I keep reading stories like this:
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-stockpiles-missiles/
Now, granted, there is only one possible opponent on the world stage we could maybe be concerned about challenging the U.S. directly.
But I think it's pretty obvious that the U.S. is less able to intervene in various conflicts than it would be in the world where the Ukraine war didn't pop off.
Some places are going to notice that.
If wars of conquest (not motivated by ideological commitments that aren't "rational" in the usual sense) are shown to be more costly than they are worth, even in victory, then that's a huge deterrent.
Right.
And seeing that both you and your potential opponent are in a demographic spiral, the 'costs' of doing so shift. This is the problem as I see it, we have not seen this particular phenomenon in the modern era: governments hitting economic crises that they will only expect to worsen as their populations collapse, and getting desperate enough to try and seize territory and resources to stave off disaster.
so older populations would seemingly be less warlike by default.
The point is more that countries will run out of young, male citizens to man their military force. If your country is composed mostly of the old and infirm... you'll look pretty vulnerable to your neighbors whose population pyramid is slightly more favorable.
This is likely the primary impetus for Russia invading Ukraine at all.
Oh, and having a country made up of the old and infirm means you aren't as productive, so you can't produce as many weapons nor can you afford to purchase as many weapons. Non-nuclear states are going to have a hard time keeping neighbors at bay, potentially.
So I worry that we will simultaneously see economic crises that provide the impetus for wars to seize territory, and demographics crises that make certain countries more vulnerable to such attacks.
ALL OF THIS whilst the U.S. is increasingly less able to intervene in places that flare up.
faceh
1mo ago
I think you're overly concerned with demographic collapse scenarios and insufficiently concerned with the risk of a resurgence of wars of conquest.
I actually think the former feeds into the latter, so my concern encompasses both.
I'm prepared to defer to Ukraine's wishes on HOW they want to go out. This war has had shockingly little direct impact on my life.
I'm just noting the dismal reality.
Ideally, the Russians have overextended themselves militarily and economically such that some kind of crisis forces the Russians to back off and Ukraine survives.
"Survives" is doing a lot of work here. Check out that population projection. Not enough young people to rebuild and support the older generations = Ukraine has no economic prospects to speak of.
Likewise Russia (the government) probably sees this as an existential crisis, which implies they will NEVER back off unless they run out of men.
and other would-be aggressors are sufficiently deterred from further warmongering then I can only thank the brave Ukrainians and their will to fight for dying on behalf of improved regional security.
Or the aggressors who have been able to stockpile weapons might believe they've got an opening to re-open old conflicts now that the U.S. has stretched itself thin.
One thing is certain, a lot of Ruskies and Ukes have died to develop the absolutely Bleeding edge in drone-based warfare, which has probably changed the face of any conflicts from here on out. And that's BEFORE we've figured out how to have AI guided drones produced en masse.
I have my thoughts on how conflicts will go based on what's been proven to be possible and effective
I also think conflicts have become more likely under current economic and demographic constraints, and that Ukrainian sacrifice isn't doing much to decrease that likelihood because that doesn't change the underlying incentives.
faceh
1mo ago
I mean they can pivot straight over to Palestine or like a half-dozen other slightly more trivial matters.
They're probably already addled with anxiety and depression, so it'll result in a spike of therapist visits.
I'd guess they keep the Ukraine Flag in their profiles for at least a couple months.
These guys could really use a win, but it sure seems like they won't get one. They've been losing ground on abortion rights, gun control, most of their favored economic policies, climate change, affirmative action... and things ain't going well for either Ukraine or Palestine.
Genuinely hope we don't get more of them setting themselves on fire.
were pleasantly surprised that the Russians proved so incompetent at modern maneuver warfare, and the Ukrainians so resilient.
I mean... this outcome is almost the precise definition of a Pyhrric victory.
There is not a long term strategy that results in Ukraine happily returning to status as a decently prosperous second-world country. Not that they were very happy before anyway.
I don't want Russia to 'win,' but look at my comment from just over two years back.
What do these facts allow me to predict? Not much. Other than a long, bloody, conflict which will probably result in a Russian 'victory' but also with Russia ceasing to be any kind of major player in world affairs.
(Russia's victory will be Pyrhrric as well, but will at least advance some of their goals)
Oh, and this comment chain from two years ago about the children being kidnapped (Russia KNOWS it needs more young blood), the Ukrainian demographic collapse, and Ukrainian women fleeing the country.
Even if all the people who fled come back there is no chance of Ukraine repopulating over the short term. And it would take hundreds of billions of dollars of investment to rebuild the country. From whence is all that money actually going to come?
All in all, the best case scenarios for Ukrainian survival (regardless of who rules the territory) were:
#1 Russia never invades.
#2 Russia invades, Kiev falls quickly, the country folds, NATO reinforces every border and contains further aggression.
#3 Russia Invades, makes a mess of it, and decides to keep at it, and the U.S. happily works to prolong the conflict to the tune of hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars of military hardware and aid.
...
...
#45 Russia deploys nukes.
We're deep in scenario 3, and whether Ukraine or Russia 'wins' does nothing to solve the demographic hole that's been blown into both countries.
That sounds like a fair definition for 'escalating pace.'
Not sure what can be done for Ukrainian morale if their sole foray into Russian Territory is now completely reversed. With, allegedly, 70k casualties? the scale of this war still blows my mind sometimes.
And man, a lot of westerners who have staked so much of their personality on the belief that Ukraine can win this thing will presumably be inconsolable for a while if Ukraine throws in the towel with Russia making actual territory gains.
faceh
1mo ago
This is kind of why I despise the inherent Pro-Ukraine bias of most western reporters/forums, they can't reliably report on Russian successes since that reads as treason to the good guys, even if its more accurate as to the situation on the ground.
That and the tendency to outright lie. I still remember the Ghost of Kyiv story, and that was just the most egregious of several from that time.
faceh
1mo ago
Yeah, my priors are VERY high on this just being a meat grinder of men dying in droves to secure a couple square miles of additional territory.
The only viable play (for either side) seems to be to acquire as much leverage as possible when talks finally occur.
I'm not counting out a breakthrough (Prighozin's little adventure two years ago could have shifted outcomes, for example) but claiming a breakthrough is too easy without actual real territorial gain to show for it.
Hell, Syria's civil war seemed to be at standstill then all at once Assad was suddenly ousted and on a plane to Moscow. It can happen, but good luck predicting it precisely in advance unless you were one of the people planning it.
faceh
1mo ago
Ukraine didn't want to agree too even though they have, at present, a snowball's chance in hell of regaining any territory and are inexorably losing more at an escalating pace.
Curious about where the "escalating pace" point comes from.
I'm too bubbled up on this, I think. I occasionally see videos of Russians getting mowed down by FPV drones or the Ukrainians pulling off a strike inside Russian motherland territory, and then usually Russian retaliation, but very few updates on battle line movement.
Also suggesting that the Epstein files are a bit of a MAD situation going on with the parties and perhaps even other elites.
Contingent on there being actual evidence that could tie important people to felonious activity, this was the most probable reason things have been held up regardless of who was in power.
Its why I generally don't count out the existence of major conspiracies, even somewhat complex ones, when everyone involved has either legal protection or strong reasons to be quiet. Everyone having the incentive for the story NOT to come out/be corroborated means cooperation is pretty cheap/easy... unless one of them gets investigated and pressured to flip, that is.
If Mossad can maintain a fake electronics company for years and sneak explosives into pagers sold to dozens of their enemies, well, a lot of things seem possible to achieve without alerting the world at large.
As someone who was aware of the general Epstein situation well before he didn't kill himself and became a meme, I am heartened that people are tenaciously clinging to the story even as a lot of influential folks claim there's nothing to see. Most people are doing it for misguided or outright fallacious reasons but they got the spirit and are aiming it in the general correct direction.
Of course, what are the dogs going to do if they, miraculously, catch the car? Assuming they can make sense of anything, seems like the only just and meaningful outcome requires a bunch of trials and criminal consequences, which will be litigated for literal years to come and I'd wager will result in less than half of the people named being convicted.
Me, I'd just settle for removing all those people from power permanently and banishing them from the public eye and also polite social contexts.. Castration of their status and influence, in lieu of literal castration, if you will.
But we don't have a reliable mechanism for doing that at scale.
faceh
1mo ago
Define "Substantial."
The majority of retirees fit that criteria, and most of them make it through life just fine without becoming a target.
Like, the very idea you should forgo a wife and kids in order to avoid being targeted for having a modest amount of money sounds absolutely insane to me? That just doesn't happen.
No, I'm agreeing. I'm pointing out how going FULL Hermit mode is really the only way to mitigate certain risks created by having people you care about enough that you'd pay lots of money to avoid them getting hurt.
Realize that in several countries, kidnapping for ransom is a big business.
You should not live in such countries if your goal is to keep your 'fuck you' money. This is not an excuse not to have a family, just a vector by which you might get fucked in spite of having the fuck you money.
Total risk mitigation is just miserable. Every time you drive somewhere, you are accepting a small probability of dying horribly in a car crash.
Well, if you drive around in a a modern large Pickup truck, you're probably going to survive almost any accident short of getting pancaked by a freight train. I argue that you also shouldn't dismiss the risk of a debilitating injury that you have to live with, as well.
Me, I mitigated that risk by making sure that every part of my daily commute falls within a 5 mile radius of my house, and almost entirely in the same direction, and almost entirely off of main artery roads.
Minimizing road time is pretty much the best practice, as I see it. You can't control what other people on the road do. Also my dad had me take a defensive driving course almost as soon as I got my license, which has saved my bacon a few times.
I think many people underestimate the magnitude of certain risks they absorb, and overestimate how much it costs to mitigate most of said risk. Not counting people for whom the risk is the point. I've seen like six different videos in the past month of people blowing their hands to smithereens by holding lighted fireworks, for instance.
Speaking of that, Famed risk-seeker Felix Baumgartner just died at age 56 while doing something characteristically risky. Ken Block, despite his skills handling vehicles, died in a snowmobile accident at 55.
Felix apparently had a wife but no children. Ken had a wife and three daughters. Now sure which one seems 'worse' to me. Block at least has a genetic legacy.
Although sometimes its the mundane that gets you. Robbie Knievel died of Cancer, his dad died of Diabetes and some lung disease.
I can certainly say that I'm glad I don't have whatever genetic quirk gives makes for that level of adrenaline junkie.
faceh
1mo ago
No argument from me, really.
I am just paranoid enough to think that making yourself 'untouchable' on an economic and social level could have the unintended effect of making you a target for malicious actors who want your wealth.
I did used to believe in 'security through obscurity' (i.e. just blend in and make yourself 'beneath notice') but that can be compromised at any time given how freely information flows, you can't rely on or maintain that indefinitely.
So situating yourself in a location where it is hard for attackers to even reach you is... probably wise.
And yeah, if you take risk mitigation to an extreme, then you might decide to not even have a wife and kids since they can be a tool to blackmail you or a weakness in your security scheme.
Obviously that is not an ideal way to live.
faceh
1mo ago
Yeah I was specifically thinking of WHERE you would reside to mitigate a lot of the random elements of life.
And having enough money to pick up and move if you need to is, IMHO, the final "fuck you" step.
Not to be the Debbie downer, but how much have you hedged against exogenous black-swan type risks?
Being able to say fuck you to any given job or walk away from any situation where they treat you unfairly is truly powerful.
But its always the thing you didn't expect coming in from the angle you weren't guarding that gets you.
Divorce, or credible accusation of criminal conduct, or randomly getting on the bad side of some psychotic, violent asshole are hard to ward off just with "fuck you" money.
I'm in an intermediate stage, I'm aggressively paying down (unsecured) debts, and I've got some money saved up to throw towards a big play the second I see one.
Good luck.
faceh
1mo ago
Trump successfully dodges every other attempt to scandalize or imprison him (and a literal bullet) and yet people still think THIS is the one.
faceh
1mo ago
It is interesting to think about what sort of evidence you personally would need to bump your personal probability of "God" existing to like 99%.
There's a bit of a problem in that '1 off' events can be 'explained' as an extremely rare confluence of factors that produced an unlikely (but not impossible!) occurrence. And events that seem impossible but are repeated with some kind of regularity can be studied and eventually 'explained.'
And a lot of things CAN be written off as hallucinations or misperceptions of an otherwise normal event.
For me, I'd count "Reviving someone who was proclaimed dead, on demand" as pretty high up the scale of things that can't be explained (yet) with current science, and thus proof of 'divine' intervention.
Sure.
But for being so big on "Material Conditions," they should notice that if material conditions are more favorable in the other system, that's going to supercede their clever wordplay.
If we're talking about a "satisfying human desires" contest, that seems pretty fair.
I think even the Hunter-Gatherers were playing that game, and could probably grasp that a tribe that was bringing home more meat and berries and could use its surpluses to make things like fur coats and better tools and weapons were 'winning' in some meaningful way.
Capitalism's great "insight" was that you didn't have to go over and raid and pillage the neighboring tribe to benefit from their bounty. Instead you can identify things you have, that they want, and trade such things for mutual gain, then use those gains to bolster your productive capacity again. At some point someone invents 'money' and its off to the races.
Not sure what Marxism's great "insight" was, or at least what insight they have that improved people's lives since it was implemented.
They want to CLAIM things like "the five day work week" or "liberation of slaves" or "unionization/collective bargaining," but I think even their own theories support the materialist interpretation that such things only ever came about because Capitalism made us productive enough to spare more resources for leisure and alleviation of suffering, and to give workers the leverage to demand better compensation for their labor.
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