A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
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User ID: 645
tl;dr: Yes, it would not degrade readiness against China, at all nor require out of theater assets. NATO air forces would quickly defeat Russia, NATO land power would help but not change things without air support.
Ok, let’s pretend that we actually have the balls to go fight Russia and curb-stomp them out of Ukraine (including, of course, Crimea). Does the US and her allies really have the ability to fight a two-theater war? I would question this.
Ukraine is conventionally equal to Russia. (Ignoring making Russia sad and nukes), a small increase in power would result in local overmatch cascading to relatively cheap victory. Even just the EU's F-35s (though they're probably lacking in munitions) are more than enough to shape the front (like 2022 with HIMARS in Kharkov) or even win the war (there's debate how effective Russia's air defense would be, but failures in Syria (of Russian operated systems) against Israel suggest not very.)
NATO minus the US and Turkey doesn't have especially more ground power than Ukraine (e.g. in brigade numbers, due to lack of mobilization and equipment). ( /r/credibledefense there are some comments giving detail) but even some 10 brigades would be enough to break the current stalemate (if not for drones and the recon fires complex. That is, the stalemate is of a different kind.) But if F-35s' EW capabilities are able to saturate the spectrum, degrading Russian C2-5 or degrade air defense enough for other assets, existing Ukrainian forces could very well suffice (but more would help.)
Why do you exhort against acts and tales of greatness, the fuel of millennia of glories passed? Why do you suggest (fetishize) victimhood? Domesticating the dog is great, other animals too. Milk... Eh.
The greatest things Man's done:
- language
- literacy - overcome death and forgetfulness to a fair extent (more than oral tradition)
- industrial revolution - conquer nature, replacing human work with fuel's work
- leaving for the stars
These are transcendent acts, overcoming our animal nature, becoming something greater. You can disagree, find others etc. but arguing the Romans conquered the Greeks ignores that the Greeks colonized the Romans' minds. We remember them for their works, not their pointless civil wars and petty treasures. As Caesar said, describing Cicero:
It is more important to have greatly extended the frontiers of the Roman spirit than the frontiers of the Roman empire
Primarily Russians, Poles, Jews, Tatars, Greeks, Romanians, Hungarians etc.
Historically, the key event which formed Ukraine was the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth forming in 1569 (from a centuries long personal union). Poland and Lithuania continued to have different legal codes etc. but this shifted the border of Poland East, making the modern day Lithuanian-Ukrainian border to the North and the Russian-Ukrainian border to the North East. (Eventually, Ukrainians and Belarusians would have different national geneses due to different cultural contexts after this point, namely the Lithuanians not being exposed to the following.) Note, Lithuania was primarily an Eastern Slav state, using a legal code written in Church Slavonic etc. but the upperclasses started Polonizing in the 1500s.
Now become Poland, the South East of the commonwealth was flooded by rich Poles (only Lithuanians could own land in Lithuania) and Jews. They brought Polish methods of farming over, namely serfdom (a different form existed further East) to sell grain westwards. Many Eastern Slavs followed suit, adopting Renaissance learning, Catholicism and the Polish language. Many others were able to stay free, but didn't enjoy rights. Poland was rather democratic at the time, with the nobility (making up 10-20% of the population) participating in representative democracy. Outside of the nobility, even the "registered cossacks" couldn't make full use of the courts etc. To the South were the Ottomans (the Crimean Khanate (a mongol successor state) shifted in and out of their sphere) who often launched slave raids on the coasts and southern steppe. In a war in 1648, discontent at getting enserfed, at not being able to use the courts etc. boiled over and the cossacks rebelled. Somewhat losing, they then signed a treaty with Russia, which didn't go well. A lot of interesting stuff happened (Polish nobility converted to Protestantism, then back to Catholicism, part of the Orthodox church went into communion with the Catholic church, Ukrainian churchmen brought scholarship to Moscow, Lazar Baranovych came up with the 3rd Rome story etc.) Then Russians came under Catharine, who settled the steppes and coasts, which were primarily empty (fear from slave raids) or inhabited by Turks (Tatars) so Russians came. Greeks had been living on the coasts the whole time under the Turks at this point (Athens got its wheat from Southern Ukraine).
In the 19th century, looking at all of this, inspired by the German national awakening which threw off Napoleon, the Hungarians, the Croats/Serbs etc. etc. further West in Europe, many theoreticians of Ukrainianhism appear. They worked to fight Polish landlords (for reasons). Whereas other nationalists came up with historic narratives, made notes of the nobility's roots etc. to justify their people, the Ukrainians didn't have these things. Others had ruled them for many centuries etc. But there were a lot of them, speaking the same language(ish). Wasn't that enough?
Well, to answer your question, finally: Hrushevsky tried the traditional method, writing massive tomes of past history describing the existence of the Ukrainians or their lands from time immemorial (until the 1660s). He tried to provide a legitimizing context, showing the people's engagement in politics, what they were doing etc. If Hungary had a king ruling by divine right, the crown's actions described the nation. But if Ukraine doesn't, you have to describe the people's actions, customs, social history etc.
Now that's all fun and good, but how is a state supposed to form? How are the peasants supposed to conduct trade, pay taxes etc. when the cities are primarily filled with others? Should Ukraine be the countryside while the cities are not Ukraine? Lypynsky answers: Hell, even our fairy tales have Tatars, we've had these others here for ages! They belong here. Indeed, he wanted the Polish and Russian nobility to stay and guard the Ukrainian people, he was a monarchist... If Polish nobility existed in Russia under the Tsar and Austrian Kaiser, why couldn't they under a Ukrainian Hetman? Hrushevsky adopts this. Of course, his past work included many "non-Ukrainians" and besides, what is a Ukrainian? An Orthodox Eastern Slav? How's that different from the historical Lithuanians or the Russians or? It's different because we have this land touched by so many foreigners. The Russians in the East lived centuries under the mongols, they had serfdom for much longer, they didn't have nobles with rights or property, but we got Western serfdom, we had scholars of Greek, thousand year old cathedrals, elections etc.! And from those in the North, they didn't suffer under the Polish landlords.
(A lot happens. Austria-Hungary fell (where Ukrainians throve and fought Poles), independent Poland gained control over millions, removing their rights (universal male suffrage in Austria-Hungary's lost), famines, wars, mass murder, communism, fascism (everyone but the Czechs were Authoritarian to fascist in the 1930s...) The same bad things happened in most of Eastern Europe, with huge ethnic cleansings, expulsions etc. resulting in today's rather unmixed states. Anyway...)
Rudnytsky continues this further. He studies in Poland, a multiethnic state desiring a Central European union of sorts (as a bulwark against Germany and Russian imperialism, some of the minorities called this Polish imperialism), then Nazi Germany (weird, eh? Still trying to understand these points visawise), but leaves to Prague (still during the war) fearing being caught as a Jew. He eventually finds himself in the US. There, he writes many articles for a dissident Polish publication in Paris: Kultura. These Poles get read a lot by Polish dissidents - and have specific policy pieces. One of which is accepting Vilnius and Lviv as Lithuania and Ukraine (and not Poland, saying no to territorial disputes). When socialism falls, their policy suggestions are implemented immediately in Poland. As are Rudnytsky's in Ukraine. Writing to the Ukrainians diaspora, he said Ukraine shall be a virile push into the future, not dwelling in the past. Instead of Lypynsky's loyalty to the Tsar, loyalty to the Ukrainian people! And everyone who's loyal to them is Ukrainian! (Who's American? The Americans! That guy waving the flag with a slight foreign accent who came last month, what about that guy [insert politics you don't like]? Still American, technically. Embracing it makes you one, being there also does etc.
(For whatever reason, many Ukrainians ended up in the Canadian plains. They were sort of an incubation chamber for Ukrainianism, in communion with ideas from Austria-Hungary and then the 20s USSR, but not being exposed to famine, war and genocide. Many were also in the North Eastern US. They would sort of move into Ukraine in the 90s, but their influence was spotty in a way I don't fully understand. In constant contact with other diasporas, they largely maintain a bit of Polish, Russian and Ukrainian, so you don't get too many ethnopurists.)
Now, Rudnytsky's family language was Polish, their mother's family language was Yiddish, Dontsov's brother was a Russian bolshevik. Lypynsky was a Pole. (Hrushevsky seems fully Ukrainian.) They all just embraced and made Ukrainianism. This was common in Hungarian, German, Czech, Finnish and Russian nationalisms too, where e.g. a Swedish speaking Ethnic Swede would compile the great epic of Finnish literature or German factory owners (like emigrated from Germany) would research the origins of Hungarian and make their kids Hungarian politicians. (Hungary's great project was to turn everyone they could into a Hungarian through forced schooling, much like Argentina in the late 19th century did with the Italian etc. immigrants.)
Contrary to this, in the interwar Poland great resentment appeared, where in some provinces in the 20s regular assassinations of government officials took place. (This stopped in the 30s after people saw what was going on in the USSR, so less rights in Poland than in the past under the Austrians was still better than... Yeah.) In this milieu you get guys like Dontsov. He quit socialism before it won out in Russia, and thought Hitler was the bomb. Obviously independent Ukraine failed after WWI because of the minorities. When the Nazis appeared, many of this ilk in Poland joined in the killing of Jews, and Poles. Similar happened in Lithuania. Much was less than ideological and just police continuing to police under the new leadership, just with different commands. (These guys also disliked the Czechs and wanted to incorporate Rusyns, who are sort of Eastern Slavs further West than Ukraine.)
So, did they just cleanly disappear, these guys who genocided 200,000 Poles for the Nazis? Oh no, their plans succeeded. They won. The USSR pushed Ukraine West, expelling a few million Poles, beyond their greatest dreams. (Ukrainians still in Poland were either sent to Ukraine, or sent to resettle the lands taken from Germany in 1945. Socialist Poland was fixated on the Polish ethnicity, declaring the country purely Polish in the 70s. Thus the Kultura Poles, opposing socialism, also opposing such mononationalisms. Socialist Romania and Bulgaria were also extremely nationalist, deporting a few million Germans, Bulgarians etc.) Some survived the war, floated around the diasporas etc. but all the far right parties in Ukraine get less than 1% of the vote now.
This is the Ukrainian narrative, generated from talking to Ukrainian friends, living there, reading 6 books, seeing some lectures. My personal thoughts are a bit different, mostly boiling down to: All Slavs (at least Eastern Slavs) should speak one language, all Romance speakers should also etc. (more cultural connections for better literature, maybe), but many states. 1000 Slavic states! (Many courts to patronize poets...) Nationalism distracts from poetry.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
1mo ago
Has there ever been a golden age of critical thinkers, schooled to think well, untainted by the technology of its era, or the character of its students?
Those growing up around 1900-1914 seemed closest, the great flower of our civilization, who died under flowering shrapnel on the French frontier.
I base this belief on reading historical (highschool/Gymnasium/lycée) exams (and submitted answers, with sample bias, of course) and cheat books (with more detail than modern academic treatments of the same... This is how I originally came to this.) They should write poetry on different topics in a certain style (movement or author), find problems in economic or business data, articulate various thinkers' contrasting beliefs about a topic etc. Transposed to modern times, have a student write a memoization macro, calculate some vector angles, write an essay on LaRoche, McKinley and and Teddy Roosevelt's views on tariffs, another on leadership (why the most popular kid's popular and what prevents the writer from taking his place, and to what extent the (chosen group/nation/state/movement) needs good leaders vs. institutions) ...written in Mandarin. The Overton window was far wider in those days, with multiple popular opinions about why x or y state was illegitimate with justifications from Renaissance, Classical and Biblical sources, advocating for paganism/atheism/state controlled religion etc. etc. Unfortunately, the war seemed to invalidate the whole framework and civilization behind this and mass education never recovered.
That's still a far cry from our ideal, but...
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
3mo ago
th" would be a separate letter altogether since it represents a unique sound. So just teach it as a sight word
You can just teach th, like ph and ch, has a special sound (actually 2, voiced and unvoiced). There's no need for something to be part of an official alphabet to teach its pattern. ough is the main blocker, today.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
3mo ago
I could swear having LGBTQ themes is now mandatory in children's publishing
I should be the change I want to see. Who would buy my half-written (in heroic couplets!) children's book about heroicism, exploration and science? I can put a fire under it.
Democrats international money laundering operations that have been further exposed via the vetting of USAID
That's still a conspiracy. At least, I've yet to see any proof or even mildly plausible concrete descriptions. Domestic webs of domestic (insert pejorative adjectives) NGOs (and in Central America) doing things we don't like, sure. But they're doing concrete work, which we oppose. If they were just laundering the money into their pockets, the culture war might look different. But in Ukraine? Ukrainian journalists and logistics organizations certainly aren't redirecting money to help people break the law in the US, they're making up for destroyed logistics systems and talking about the war... Anyway, please do point me to proof if I'm wrong!
most of what we see, believe and hear about is in fact mostly fabricated
Yes, but I'm not sure what the conspiracy theory is. It seems like a paragraph or two was lost before the edit.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
8mo ago
Amendment 3 to legalize marijuana in Florida failed with 56% (needing 60%), while prior polls showed 63% support.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
10mo ago
I'd like to point to this post about the V-22, illustrating the very same decline in engineering culture and institutional accountability which matches what we see almost everywhere else we shift our gaze. This becomes more egregious when:
Contrasting the Official Report of this Osprey crash with the NTSB Incident Report (PDF warning) of the 1991 Los Angeles runway collision makes the emphasis placed on pilot error look even worse.
The traffic controller made mistakes that directly lead to the crash and accepted responsibility for the accident. Despite this, the actions of the traffic controller are positioned as the inevitable result of a flawed system. Compared to this, the actions of a flight crew following procedures and encountering an unknown mechanical fault should barely warrant a footnote in the accident report's conclusion.
The culture war is a war between collapse and the the truths which maintain industrial civilization.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
1yr ago
What's your take on or the news on the pink mafia? Long ago, people often discussed it and but I've not heard anything in over 5 years. Googling, I found articles from 10+ years ago. Is the church full of such things? http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-pink-mafia.html
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
I grew up in LA, spending nearly 20 years there. I only learned there was a metro/subway/non-freight train 7 years after leaving.
to hold one's tongue and wait for further developments, or start talking immediately
I 100% believe waiting for further developments is better. Unless you are a direct actor, I believe there is negative value and insight following the news minute by minute. Without greater context, everything looks random and chaotic, offering no clearer understanding of the world. My own community transformed into a news feed and we've faced insight collapse, although some lovely contributors track less popular things, contextualizing them etc. illustrating the problem precisely.
Iran launched missiles 30 mins ago. The ceasefire is over or rather is between certain groups, since multiple entities share/negotiate sovereignty within Iran. Let's see what this actually means, next week.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
17d ago
if [Afghanistan] had only half their population
Afghanistan's population more than doubled during American occupation, from 20 to 42-5 million. The Gaza strip similarly went from 1 to 2.1 million, at the same time.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2mo ago
Everyone wants
Obama-era regulation makes small cars almost important to sell on the market (due to sky-high efficiency requirements, relaxed for larger vehicles). The manufacturers are only offering hatchbacks etc.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2mo ago
How do you size a (pole of) civilization/culture? Is the US the same US as 200 years ago and not a new something on the same place? At what point do they diverge? Some slice it even further e.g. Woodard's American Nations or Garreau's Nine Nations, which each have separate genesis etc. It's turtles all the way down, and we can do cluster analysis etc. So which is the most useful lens? I'm asking where to draw the line and apply morphological breaks a la Spengler.
I believe just a short jump through time brings us to alien worlds, besides across geography. The modern cannon/idea space has basically nothing in common with that of the 18th century (most of someone's reading in 1750 would not have been what we care of now from then.) I don't think I live in the same civilization as Alexander Pope or Schiller, let alone Boethius or Lucretius. Were Lomonosov and Voltaireneighbors; is Pelevin my neighbor?
Now, there are different frameworks for this, Spengler e.g. excludes succession, while Toynbeee considers parental links, but...
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
3mo ago
1/3 of Guatemalans live like Americans in the 90s (in a good way, better than modern America). 2/3 live like rural Appalachia. Prices are very high, 3-5x more than in Central Mexico (central Mexico is about 1/2 old America, 1/2 Texas truck stop) (indeed, higher than LCOL US.) Surprisingly to me, it's rather rainy and cold.
anti-Trump
Most seem to be regular contributors whose red line Trump already passed (they don't trust Trump to fix demographics enough to overlook the rest.)
leftist
"More than two sides", political compass blabla. What does leftist mean to you? It's easy to object to them from the right (or wherever) e.g. Vance for not raising his children Christian/Catholic (his wife hasn't converted) (cf. him saying "my wife's children" and saying he feels terrible for dragging her to church.)
Personally, I criticize Trump from the industrial and commodity lobby, where he was bad for mining and energy in his first term (Biden was good for O&G, bad for nuclear and mining), wants to increase production (although crude's already around break even for many producers and the last booms and busts ravaged the industry) and ban exports. Lately, I oppose insane rhetoric about Ukraine and may appear to be a fierce defender of Ukraine; but I have 10 year old pro-Crimea comments, prefer Russian culture to American and Ukrainian etc. but I respect the truth and don't lie for position advantages in some great metapolitical crusade.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
4mo ago
as Obama stated
For fuller context:
As regards the two-year-old conflict between Ukraine and Russia, the president said Ukraine is a core interest for Moscow, in a way that it is not for the United States. He noted that, since Ukraine does not belong to NATO, it is vulnerable to Russian military domination, and that “we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.”
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
5mo ago
The Colombian government wasn't rejecting deportations outright, but the specific way, wanting the US to charter seats or such (which is generally cheaper, too) hence the president offering to fly them with his own plane.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
7mo ago
there is zero corruption here, no scope for dishonest people to survive, those at the very edge are people who are not only competent but just better people
This is the most shocking thing I've read in months. No wonder I didn't understand what the conspiracy was. Surely you did school projects and saw people do little getting a lot of credit, surely you've heard of Enron, Theranos and thousands of other companies...? How could you suspend such a thought for so long? How did this Bolt guy of all things break the glass?
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
2yr ago
That bill (Restrict) doesn't even have the support of the ones who proposed it. Then you have the Data act.
But there are multiple anti-tiktok bills and the one with actual support would ban it under the purview of existing laws.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
1mo ago
you could easily reduce spending by 10% and not to pay this interest payment and be in the same situation
What?
That's the wrong framing. "Realist" defense concerns play little role in Russia, otherwise it wouldn't have emptied its borders with NATO to feed the grinder in Ukraine. There've been a gish-gallop of contradictory reasons how x or y impact and threaten Russia's security posture, but they are trivially rejected when looking at Russia's actions and the arguments in totality. Rather, for both Russia, this is a question of self identity:
The standard Russian self-image includes Ukraine, where the reformers (1654) and leaders of the church for most recent history, where the first educators, language reformers, where your ancestors (1000 years ago and 80 years ago) came from, where the very fairy tales happened! At the same time, most of Ukraine was not Slavic until the Russians came and took the South, letting the central planes populate, now safe from Turkic slavers. Over time, Russia developed into a great, welcoming multiethnic empire, a true melting pot for its peoples with the sternest nationalist smiling on his Muslim Tatar friends and the president kissing the Quran, brought man into space and brought the arts and mathematics to great heights (otherwise abandoned in most of the West, today). Yes, this great project has had many struggles, but... How can you believe your brothers spit on this, abandon your shared history, authors, everything and move out? (Think of your wife showing you divorce papers...) Love turns to hate, spite, evil, post facto justifying the split.
Translated to American sensibilities, imagine Philadelphia succeeding, the great colonial cities, home of the liberty bell, the continental congress etc. and insisting you have nothing in common, you New Yorkers and Georgians just oppressed them and they don't even want to speak English anymore, but create some new literary tradition etc. etc.
The same process happened in Yugoslavia (which one common Russian narrative holds, broke hope of Russia-West integration.) China is not identical (Taiwan being far smaller and weaker, today and lacking historic relevance), with explicit reunification rather being an important political point. But most importantly, China has already won, as it races past the West in wealth, cultural power and future shaping vibrancy, the growing support for reunification will see Taiwan (even if only by creative interpretation) in the PRC's sphere.
The worst part about Russia in this is that, had they just gone in in 2014 or integrated the Donbas, instead of turning it into a mafia run hell hole, Ukraine wouldn't really have resisted now - indeed, had Putin not invaded, but worked with Zelensky who won on a pro-Russia platform, none of this would have happened. This is a self-own the US is now copying. (For lack of time, I will not go into polyphonic government, where seeing your neighbors thrive might inspire you that there's a better way. Squashing this threat by incorporating or forcing Ukrainians out helped regime stability.)
I'd like to dunk on Mearsheimer as a broken clock which looks right twice a day, but actually that's a stain and it's missing hands entirely. For one thing, he repeatedly stated that Russia would not invade Ukraine (as I too believed) and after it started began “There is no evidence that Putin wanted to take over the whole of Ukraine” yet somehow people claim he predicted everything? Baffling! He constantly praises Russia on the field, claims victory's just on the horizon, that Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk and and and will soon fall, while the lines haven't shifted a day's walk since the end of 2022.
It's only consistent, as the US rather aggressively applies citizenship. There's a basket industry for "accidental citizens" who first discover they're American upon receiving a 6-7 figure bill for back taxes and renouncing citizenship incurs a tax on all assets. Further, because of FATCA, they suddenly get debanked.
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