remzem
7mo ago
This propaganda has been circulating from both sides since early in the war. It seems unlikely considering neither side has seen mass desertions. One bit of info that seems to be missing from this more mainstream take is that there are different groups fighting in Ukraine. Usually the propaganda goes on about how professional soldiers like VDV are shooting the conscripted prisoners, or the ultra-nationalist like Azov and Kraken are shooting the recent conscripts ripped from the street. I guess if this were true then how it effects morale would be variable, as neither side is just some homogeneous group. I agree with everyone else that it's probably happened but sporadically and is exaggerated by both sides for propaganda purposes.
remzem
7mo ago
Or more likely it's just a convenient stance to take when there are big donors like the MIC putting bags of money on the scales behind the scenes.
remzem
7mo ago
More bad press for them, the base is riled up and wants them out, elections are coming up, etc.
remzem
8mo ago
Because moderation is often inflammatory, far more than trolls, they should be held to higher standards. Should police not be held to higher standards than civilians? What a bizarre question. Mod straight up admitted that most other mods would have just warned the user and not banned and then did it anyways due to personal vendetta.
remzem
8mo ago
I generally skim the top levels and am just here for the comments. Much like media posts on reddit. We don't all derive the same utility from the same things.
I forgot that people were posting bare links and then effortposting in replies. I actually think that is a better method of posting than the current top level effortpost style. Maybe that would be a happy medium. That at least requires some good faith, but also doesn't completely narrow down conversation. It also would make it easier to post more general things. Sometimes events happen that have about a dozen differnet culture-war aspects to the point where if you did want to effortpost it's hard to even start. If you wanted to write about the government shutdown right now you could focus on the metapolitics of who it's hurting for the election, general disagreement with how necessary funding is held hostage by culturewar pork, the funding of the border and how dire that situation is getting, the funding of Ukraine now that the majority of voters have turned against it.
edit: There are also just a variety of interesting people here and often I'd like to hear their response to the event itself not their response to the response of the handful of try-hards that get off on imaginary internet kudos.
Though I also agree with the most upvoted reply, effort and quality don't necessarily correlate. That's even more true these days with chatgpt making the appearance of effort effortless. Some of the recent mysteriously (some new style of trolling) deleted top levels had a bot feel to them recently.
remzem
8mo ago
Well thanks for the PSA to posters to edit out posts in addition to deleting them like on reddit.
remzem
8mo ago
From what I remember it also became so popular that people were hardly posting in the main thread. Effort is just not a great measure of whether a post will generate interesting discussion or not. Plenty of effort posts end up being one-offs that barely get a response because there isn't much to talk about that hasn't already been covered by the post. On the other hand there are effortposts that don't get warnings that are obvious schizoposts that also don't generate useful discussion but get no warnings.
Length is often conflated with effort, you can find an article and copy out a few long blocks of text and end with a short paragraph that boils down to, "what does the motte think about this?" and not get a warning. If you post the link by itself and ask what the motte thinks, then you do get a warning. It's a bad rule because it doesn't accurately capture what makes posts good contributions and it's too arbitrary, it allows moderators too much room to abuse it when they are having an off day or you happen to get a mod with a weird vendetta to protect the effortposters above and beyond what the other mods would do, like OP did with this post. We had a similar phase with Hylnnka or w/e seeing himself as forum batman for awhile.
If you want to effortpost just create a blog or substack and then post as a new thread. I don't see why you'd spend enough time to be half a day late to a discussion (at least 12 hours) be sad about it and not take the tiny bit of extra effort it would take to make the post more visible and get away with it.
remzem
8mo ago
Not sure why you consider it worth it.
The people here are interesting, but everything else about this place makes it so obnoxious to use that I go through phases of being frustrated by the limited means of engagement and the convoluted rules.
It's rather ironic to complain about posts generating more heat than light when you obviously don't apply the same standards to your moderation. Maybe the reason this post when to shit was you jumping in all "bad cop" to try and save the quokka effortposters from their despondency. You think of that maybe?
remzem
8mo ago
lol, I mean sorry, but picturing someone despondent because their internet post didn't make it out of the oven fast enough is just embarrassing.
If you have a long effort post to make, why not just make it as a reply to a less narrow top level post like the one above? Shorter posts like this generally have a much broader scope and therefore you can have a lot more replies and jump off into a larger variety of topics. If someone writes a 10 page essay about that time Feinstein almost got killed by left wing terrorists in response to her passing then people that might want to discuss some more topical aspects of the event are forced to post an entirely new top level comment. Which is obnoxious considering this place is already a chore to navigate and horribly disorganized. Especially for anyone trying to find older discussions.
remzem
8mo ago
It's a stupid rule. Should just be some kind of keep it neutral in top posts type rule. It's more interesting when there is a variety of discussion. Often when you wait for someone to make some long effortpost it will narrow the context down to some aspect of the event that isn't very interesting. Then people are less likely to participate in discussing other aspects of it. I even feel like some users do it on purpose as a way to head off obvious discussion points. If anything it should be the opposite. Discussion starters should be more open and short, responses should be higher effort.
This place is beyond bleeding heart, 90% of the pro-ukraine "arguments" are just dressed up feelings with little to no reasoning.
Russia is going to invade Poland and Germany and eventually the US if we don't do something! -anxiety
We are destroying our great enemy for a pittance! -hate and phobia
Something Chamberlain yada yada appeasement. -anxiety
etc.
There is nothing to argue with, when people are being emotional you can only reach them with emotion. I find shaming them works well.
Edit: but I will take the hint and timeout myself from this topic. No more posting in this or the other thread on the same topic for me.
remzem
8mo ago
I guess it wasn't clear but that first bit should be read with a /s. I'm making fun of the idea that the US isn't at war. The US is eternally at war. Which is why the "defense" budget is so much higher than everyone else's.
remzem
8mo ago
Yea the US is not at war, weird how we still end up spending on this garbage. Why don't the people on this forum that are so concerned about Ukraine ship themselves there? They are taking foreign recruits.
It's only peanuts because youre comparing it to the world's most inflated and ridiculous military budget. 100 billion is more than any country other than China spends on defense. Also both the US and China are rather larger countries than Ukraine with more people to defend.
2023 population estimates for Ukraine are around 36million. The US alone has spent 113 billion according to cnn 6 days ago.
Per Ukrainian we're spending 3138 USD
2023 population estimates for the US is 332 million. Budget is 773 billion a year.
Per American we spend 2328 USD x 1.5 since the war has been more than a year. 3492. We're spending nearly as much per Ukrainian as we are per US citizen, and realistically most of that budget isn't defending us, it's supporting imperialist projects abroad.
remzem
8mo ago
I'm not claiming that Russia = USSR.
USSR controlled Ukraine more or less directly up until 91.
Ukraine was then it's own state on paper, but in reality a Russian satellite state up until 2014. "A russian satellite state for 20 years" Technically 23.
It only entered the western orbit after the coup in 2014. (Well the western part of it)
Russia isn't trying to expand its sphere of influence to USSR levels, that would mean going as far west as Germany. It's just trying to maintain it at post USSR levels and even that is seen as some extreme aggressive act while NATO bombs and murders everyone outside of the west indiscriminately and people that think they're civilized make endless excuses for the abuse.
remzem
8mo ago
The Arab spring was the US as well... Saying Iraq would've been destabilized anyways because the US would start destabilizing MENA countries again a decade later doesn't really make US foreign policy look better.
remzem
8mo ago
but sadly they actually believed that they are still superpower entitled to rule over central and eastern Europe
How do you arrive at this conclusion from Russia invading what was literally their own satellite state for 20 years after the USSR fell until the US took it away? It's just completely out of touch with reality.
remzem
8mo ago
Yea the logic is clearly there for why Russia would nuke Ukraine. The whole point of nuclear deterrence is to keep other great powers from waging war on you directly. If a great power can wage a war by slow boiling how direct the conflict is until they're eventually providing everything from intelligence and guidance for your cruise missiles to the missiles themselves, everything short of the meat doing the fighting than nuclear deterrence isn't effective.
On top of that the repercussions just aren't there on the other side. In nuclear power vs nuclear power engagement neither side wants to use nukes as it means they both get wiped out. In a proxy vs proxy war there is no real point in using nukes as it's a massive escalation and a loss on either side isn't an existential threat to either nuclear power. With the proxy in direct conflict with a nuclear power situation that changes. The nuclear power directly engaged still has the incentive to make sure it wins, it's existence could be at stake depending on how the situation unfolds. The nuclear power backing the proxy doesn't have the same skin in the game. If their proxy is nuked they are still fine and escalating to a nuclear exchange brings us back to situation one, where both sides get wiped out.
remzem
8mo ago
You referring to the Admiral that showed up on tv today?
The only thing that has made a difference in the war so far has been numbers. Ukraine had more of them at the beginning of the war. Their offensive on Kherson pulled enough Russians from the north that they were able to roll through the Kharkov areas. Russia bailed on holding Kherson to make the front more defensible until they could catch up. Russia mobilized more and that mostly equalized the forces and since then Ukraine has made no real gains despite the huge injection of western kit for their Spring offensive.
that is blatant nonsense and repeating russian propaganda warmongering
This is childish and not an argument.
remzem
8mo ago
They have around 4x the population of Ukraine, for Russia to run out of manpower before Ukraine they would need to have a more than 4:1 loss ratio. I don't think even the Ukrainians are claiming that and they're been claiming absolutely absurd things the whole time.
The military production is up in the air, but so far Russian production appears to be up significantly from what it was prior to the war. They might've exhausted soviet stockpiles but they're producing 1k tanks per year, we're sending 31 Abrams. The US is trying to up artillery shell production but it costs 10x as much to make a single shell here. We've gone and strong armed basically every ally we have to provide them with their spares and even sent cluster munitions when that ran out.
It's just not realistic thinking. It's cynical as hell to boot, basically saying eventually enough Ukrainians will die that Ukraine will win.
remzem
8mo ago
Russia has plenty of AD systems but Ukraine can still hit them. Problem right now is that drones are too cheap relative to the cost of any of the intercept systems. Can easily just over saturate and overwhelm them.
To get to exist as a people
See this right here makes no sense to me. Are you claiming that all of Ukraine will be killed if Russia wins? Some kind of Nazi concentration camps but on an even grander scale? That seems incredibly unlikely, probably not even possible given logistics of attempting to round up all of the Ukrainians to exterminate them, unless Russia goes total mobilization or something.
If you're claiming some kind of more hazy spiritual collective sense, then I think you really misunderstand how divided things are in Ukraine.
I agree with most of what was said below, but I think the education rift / credentialism as well was a big factor. Though that could really just fit under the same "political realignment" label that everyone else is commenting on.
Culture and race are big dividing lines that led to the realignment, but realistically so many americans are white (or see themselves as white like a lot of asians and hispanics) that dems couldn't realign purely around minority identity, not yet at least. A big portion of their new voting base are the upper class educated white people.
Globalism, outsourcing, low trade barriers etc. tends to be less of a threat to the more highly educated, as education and development levels are generally lower in foreign countries. So you're effectively increasing demand for high skill jobs by giving them access to a larger market where their skills are more in demand. On the other hand for low skill jobs things feel the opposite. Labor goes on strike and they just ship your job overseas. They can find plenty of people that can work in a factory in east asia. Or import them here from south of the border. They've effectively increased the supply of low skill labor.
I guess according to neolibs the low skill americans still benefited as overall the pie grew more, prices were lower, etc. Not sure if that mattered when their power relative to the upper class educated was reduced, their cultural power eroded, status was gone and professions like plumbers were the butt of every joke.
Can see why the urban and educated upper class would feel more positive towards globalism while the rural less educated lower class felt cheated by it. So they ended up in opposite camps politically and I think that has changed the calculus for leadership in both political camps as well. With dems no longer being protectionist towards labor and republicans doing a 180 on their earlier neolib econ ideas that kinda kicked off globalism. Though it's kind of wild to watch them try to fit this change in with their older communism vs capitalism vision of the world. Mass immigration is treated as a sort of welfare for the 3rd world by the left, even though it's hurting labor at home and brain draining foreign countries into permanent poverty. On the right people want to overthrow the elite! but not like those commies, in a cultural sense, not a material one. Basically just read the lyrics of 'rich men of north richmond' to get the picture.
This general attitude towards globalism has also influenced attitudes towards foreign policy, that's why anytime you go on a republican leaning subreddit it's spammed to death by people called RandomWord1234 that say, "We're getting a great deal! weakening our enemy for pennies on the dollar!"
A big focus is on how the elites are spending money on their foreign pet projects while people rot at home, so most of the commentary to try and influence conservative minds revolves around that.
"It's not things you could actually use to have a better life, it's old surplus military equipment that would've gotten thrown away anyways."
Though that one has dropped off now that it's become more apparent that we are spending a lot to keep their government and services afloat.
remzem
8mo ago
I don't think they have to push further into Ukraine though. They have the combat power to maintain the pressure they're putting on Ukraine, whereas Ukraine does not. Ukraine lacks any industry to produce more weapons so without western support they'd be short on those. They also lack people, so even with western support if its just a long war of attrition eventually Ukraine collapses. Attritional wars are ugly and boring, which makes western public interest less likely to stay high. If Russia were to make big gains the western MIC could sell that as a threat and push for more support, if Ukraine makes gains people keep supporting them because they think they can win. Long ugly stalemate of a meat grinder with Ukraine eventually collapsing seems the most likely outcome with current western support.
I don't know that they'd go for a peace treaty after the last one was just used to arm and organize Ukraine. If they did it'd be seen as just a pause in the war while both sides reorganized imo, not a real peace.
One thing that's always bugged my about progressivism and especially EA is that despite all their claims of being empathetic and humanistic they completely ignore the human. They are ironically the paperclip maximizers of philanthropy.
The argument is that despite some of the questionable things EA has been caught up in lately, they've saved 200 thousands lives! but did they save good lives? What have they saved really? More mouths to feed? Doctors and lawyers? Someone that cares about humanity would want to ask these questions. A paperclip maximizer that discounts a persons humanity entirely and just sees each life as some widget to maximize the number of would not.
The purpose of empathy is to be able to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to understand their feelings. Except, to do that you have to have some level of understanding of how they function, some mental model of their mind. Else you are simply projecting. It's easy to just imagine what you'd feel like if you were in Palestine or Israel etc. Except that isn't empathy. Even just listening to what a person says isn't truly empathy. If I were an alcoholic and I said I wanted a drink, to someone that has no knowledge of me it might seem a nice thing to do, but clearly it would not be. I'm not sure what it even means to have empathy for someone you don't know. I'm not sure it's possible. What is it really that you are feeling? Do you believe people are all the same, with the same wants? same needs? some values? It's such a dim view of people and of the world.
I suppose some people do, "We're all human," is something you'll hear espoused by this ideology, but that is literally the least you can have in common with another person. Trying to apply it to any other human interaction is instantly ridiculous. You wouldn't apply that logic anywhere in life, you don't hire someone just because they're human, you don't befriend someone, care about someone, hate someone. It's basically an open admission that you have nothing convincing to say. Even if someone was forced to compliment their worst enemy they'd manage to ad lib something more convincing than, "he's human."
Anyone that has had relationships with other humans, so basically everyone, knows how complicated it is to actually know someone. You can have spent years living with a partner and still be completely caught off guard when your mental model goes awry and your attempt at empathy then completely falls flat. The idea that some ideological group is more moral or more caring because of the sheer number of lives they've saved completely discredits and belittles one of the pillars of being human, getting to know each other, socializing, learning friend and foe. It discounts their humanity itself, that it's even necessary to get to know or to understand someone before you can help them. Your wants and needs don't matter, you are a widget, you need x calories, y oxygen, to continue existing and I will supply these needs, such altruism, wow.
Looking around at social media and world events I can't help but wonder if this is some major glitch with human psychology in the digital age. Too many strangers, too much opportunity for, "selflessness." So many people caught up in an empty and self serving empathy that has no imagination for others. Meanwhile people that have normal empathy are dismissed because they aren't as "selfless" as the newer movements. Spending time with and focusing on people that share your values isn't altruistic because if they share your values than you are less selfless than the progressive who cares about the stranger. (Not to mention the bay area tech bro that managed to save 0.0345 persons per dollar spent, blowing away the nearest tech bro competitor who only saved 0.0321)
This logic seems mad though, taken to it's extreme the most altruistic move would be to help someone that shares none of your values, and since altruism is a core value you should be exclusively helping the least altruistic of people as that is the most selfless thing you could do. Of course this is obviously ridiculous and self defeating (like the lgbt groups supporting hamas)
More cynically I think this sort of caring is just a way to whitewash your past wrongs, it's pr maximizing, spend x dollars and get the biggest number you can put next to your shady bay area tech movement that is increasingly under societies microscope given the immense power things like social networks and ai give your group. If you really want to help others you need to understand them, that means spending time with others, not with concepts. If you're lucky you might eventually find a few people that you understand well enough that more often than not your actions are positive and beneficial to them. Congratulations you have now invented the family and traditional community.
More options
Context Copy link