This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
We're sitting on a > 48 hour interval with no top level posts which might be some kind of record. It's been awhile since we talked about Ukraine, so here we go..
It would seem that Ukraine is still slowly losing a war of attrition. Of course, the big news is Ukraine's incursion into Kursk, in which they managed to capture some Russian territory after catching the Russians with their pants down. Coupled with that, Ukraine has also been mounting more long-range attacks against Russian oil infrastructure. Neither of these actions is really what Ukraine's western allies want to see, but what can they do? Ukraine's best bet may to escalate in order to draw in more Western support without which they will collapse. But it's looking quite grim. Germany has vowed to stop new aid.
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-halt-new-ukraine-military-aid-report-war-russia/
In response to Kursk and the oil infrastructure attacks, Russia has attacked Ukraine's energy grid.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-strikes-ukraines-power-grid-in-most-massive-attack-of-war/ar-AA1pt39P
What many people don't realize is that the Ukraine/Russia conflict has been in many ways quite limited. Life goes on in the cities. Casualties have largely been limited to combatants. The longer things go on, the more this might change. People in Kiev are now facing the real possibility of a winter without heat and electricity.
Here in the West, people's enthusiasm for the war seems to be waning as the news cycle covers newer, shinier topics. But the war grinds on and every day men die at the front.
Edit: As usual, the cure to a stale front page is to post about Ukraine which inspires another post on a different topic moments later.
So, anyone have a read on what a realistic ceasefire deal looks like? Does one exist? Is anyone serious mooting one around in the world of think tanks?
Ukraine's winning scenarios have run out at this point. The abortive and telegraphed offensive ate up too much time and material for them to win in any conventional sense. Prigozhin might have been the Black Swan they needed, but he pussied out. The Russian economy is showing no signs of collapse. Some point to a Wunderwaffen or to some chart that shows NATO production coming online at a faster pace from 2025 onward, but I doubt that will make a material difference. Ukraine is basically hoping for a Russian collapse as a result of some as-yet-unknown cause, which is not impossible, but not much of a strategy.
Russia's odds of winning much more than what they have so far seem longer still. They're hoping Ukraine just gives up, but that might be longer odds than a Russian collapse, as Ukrainian psychopathic nationalism seems more systemic rather than oriented around a single individual.
Neither side is going to win the kind of victory that will make good their losses. So how is a ceasefire outlined that will deliver a lasting peace?
I still haven't come up with a better idea than putting Harry and Meghhan on the throne in Kiev.
'Realistic' by who's standard?
One of the many issues of a ceasefire is that it hinges on people making realistic demands to people who can deliver on them. To date, the Russians haven't indicated either, creating a tangle of un-deliverable expectations to people who can't deliver them.
As a result, non-Russian ceasefire chatter inevitably requires assuming the Russians will selectively drop various declared conditions, with which conditions the Russians will drop changing based on the biases of the speculator.
That's certainly a take. Alternatively, Ukraine is no more on the edge of collapse than it has been constantly claimed to be since 2022 and in some respects considerably further away, 2024 has been generally unsurprising and consistent with forecasts made in 2023 bar a far greater expansion in Western comfort in Ukrainian weapon use against the Russians, no one who was unsurprised at Russia not collapsing in 2022-2023 was expecting it to collapse in 2024-2025 either, and the Russian manpower strategy is showing its limits even under the 'just pay more' paradigm.
As a result, absent some collapse of the Ukrainian nation-state (possibly some sort of mass exodus from a power grid collapse, as seems to be a reoccuring Russian point in the witners), the Ukrainians remain on track to continue the many-year process of attriting the Russian's Soviet Inheritance that serves as the military-economic center of gravity of Russia's ability to field larger armies and pose a strategic offensive threat.
Russia's strategy is not that Ukraine gives up, it is that the Americans stop supporting the Ukrainians and push the Europeans to stop supporting the Ukrainians until the Ukrainian state lacks the economic and military capacity to resist.
Calling Ukrainian nationalism pschopathic seems rather shallow as a pejorative goes, particularly given the lack of equivalent for Russia despite Russia' various policies in the war to date.
Lasting ceasefires hinge on some combination of a belief in the other party's intentions, and an evaluation of their capabilities. Due to Putin's lack of credibility, a ceasefire acceptable to the Ukrainians and Europeans will be built on Russia's loss of long-term capabilities vis-a-vis the Europeans, who both want Russia to lose the Soviet inheritance and to build their own military production capability so that post-war Russia can't out-arm them.
This is not the structure Putin has in mind at this time, however- Putin almost certainly believes the Americans are the hyperagent whose decision will be decisive, that the Soviet stocks are so indefinite that they are functionally infinite, that if he can de facto control the de jure territory of the separatists oblasts then he can compel western parties to accept the Russian annexation of those regions, and that as part of a peace deal Russia can economically re-connect with Europe and end the various sanction regimes / get back the frozen war chest assets.
This is unlikely to happen, but Putin is also a strategic procrastinator, and absent a critical disaster is likely to keep delaying any decision on EU-acceptable concessions in hopes that one more election cycle in the US / Germany / EU may do the trick.
As a result, the war will likely continue for years more, easily beyond 2026. Putin is likely to try for some sort of negotiations in 2025 with the new US president regardless who wins. It will probably fail due to the difference in the politically acceptable positions between what Putin is willing to offer and what the US/west would be able to legislatively deliver, but he will then hold out hope that the 2026 mid-terms might shape the US president's position. It would be the end of the 2026 campaign season before the results were realized, and by 2027 the prospects of the next cycles will offer the next excuse to procrastinate.
The problem here is the Russian progress in the east. Once Kramantorsk falls, the line gets much harder to defend, and the chances of a rapid collapse of everything east of the Dnieper gets a lot higher. Also, this is an industrial war, not a low intensity police action like the two Afghanistan wars. Barring a Korean War-style partial armistice, one of the sides is going to get too heemed to continue, sooner rather than later.
Rapid as in, what, another century?
This is a funny misreading of the map and the progression of the last year of the war, but still a misreading. Setting aside that the Ukrainian collapse cascade trope has been trotted out for every significant urban area since the start of the war, the fundamentals of why Russian progress has been limited to marginal advances in very narrow parts of the east remain. Marginal advances over time add up, but there's a reason you need regional zoom-in maps rather than the early-war whole-of-country maps of the frontline to see an appreciable difference between the end of 2022 and current 2024. It's the same reason the Russians characterize their advances as 'significant' or 'consistent' more often than 'large'- large implies a lot of territory, when what has actually changed hands in 2024 is very small compared to metrics like, say, what the Russians achieved in early 2022, or the even larger breakthroughs that would be needed to reach the Dnieper. The 2022 meme of Russia's imminent encirclement of Ukraine's eastern forces comes to mind- and note how many of the main cities you've heard about in the last year or two are in that snapshot.
And these Russian fundamentals rely on things that are limitations as well. The Russians have been relying on overwhelming artillery overmatch since mid-2022, but don't have the logistics or mobility means to push that artillery fast. The Russians have made a policy-level decision to rely on volunteer/contract soldiers rather than mass mobilization to carry on the offense, but the ever-increasing signing bonuses are indicative of a military not meeting its recruitment goals for what it thinks it needs, and it's highly doubtful they could continue this sort of personnel expenditure for years more. The level of equipment for the units the Russians do have are indicative that the limiting factor of the Russians now is their equipment rather than manpower to fit the kit, which mitigates much of the utility of a mass conscription for numbers alone but also demonstrates a retrograde from mobility warfare given that the equipment is more and more earlier cold-war standard.
These limiting factors do not mean 'Russia will be unable to fight,' but rather that even as Russia chooses to fight, that doesn't mean it has the capabilities- militarily, politically, structurally, manpower- to do any sort of 'everything to the east bank of the Dnieper' breakthrough.
Later rather than sooner, given what both sides have demonstrated their ability / willingness to mobilize, and at current industrial trajectories the Russians at maximum relative advantage have been unable to threaten the sort of gains made in the opening months of 2022, let alone destroy the Ukraine coalition's industrial base.
As an industrial base argument, Russia isn't against Ukraine, it's against Ukraine and the West, and there is a large difference between 'Russia's economy is not failing and will not for years' and 'Russia's economy is doing well and doing better at sustaining the war indefinitely than the west.'
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link