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For what it's worth I feel like there's a common thread in @xablor's post on voting and some of the replies to @zataomm's post on WWI that really ought to be broken out and examined on its own that being how exactly do we ascribe agency and responsibility.
It's trivially true that the current war in Ukraine could've been avoided had the Kievan Russ welcomed Moscow as liberators and acquiesced to their rule instead of choosing to fight. It's trivially true that World War 2 may have avoided or postponed if the Poles had acquiesced to being partitioned between the Bolsheviks and the Nazis instead of choosing to fight, or if the British Empire had valued Germanic notions of racial brotherhood over their own self-conception as World Hegemon/police or desire to adhere to previously made agreements.
But that's just the thing, they didn't, and the arguments that they ought to have seem to be relying on a lot of legwork that is not in evidence.
I recently read a book of CS Lewis' letters and essays including the full version of The Abolition of Man over the course of a cross-country flight, and it struck me as surprisingly relevant/contemporary for something that was written over 80 years ago now. It also reminded me of an argument between Habryka (or maybe Hlinka?) and some long-standing DR aligned poster from back in the day. I don't recall whether it was on LessWrong or in the CW thread on SlateStar codex but it was prior to the move to reddit and in anycase I can't seem to find it now. The jist of it was that it was impossible for an actor to be both moral and rational because having "moral principals" was effectively a precommitment to behave irrationally in specific circumstances. IE While I know that I could easily get away with lying, cheating, stealing, or otherwise "hitting the defect button" and that it might even be in my personal interest do so, I won't do that because to do so would be wrong and right/wrong is something that trancends rational self interest.
For example I'd like to think we could all recognize that killing 77 men over a puppy and a car is wholy disproportionate and perhapse even a bit extreme but at the same time I would also like to believe that all but the most autistic of contrarians would agree that a world of men like Neo is preferable to one of men like Theon Greyjoy
I feel like this is something that Lewis saw clearly that a lot of otherwise intelligent commentators today do not. Namely, that it is easy to argue with the benefit of hindsight that the British were idiots to abide by this agreement or that, but this must be whieghed against the question of what value does any agreement with the empire have once you've set the precident of reneging on any agreement the moment it looks like the bill might come due? After all, the thing that makes a debt a debt is the obligation to pay.
I feel like we see something similar in a lot of the rhetoric around voting and other forms civic duties. There seems to be this widely held belief that voting doesn't matter unless your specific vote gets to be the deciding vote but how dumb is that? how many elections are decided by one vote? and how do you decide which specific vote for candidate A or policy B out of however many is the deciding vote. It seems to me that the sanest, if not neccesarily most rational, approach is to stop asking dumb questions. Voting, even when your vote isn't neccesarily the deciding vote, has value for the same reason honoring your agreements has value. Doing so (or otherwise not doing so) tells the rest of the world something true about you.
It absolutely is not trivially true, in fact it is trivial to prove the opposite. People in Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea welcomed their Moscow liberators in 2014 and ended up being conscripted as cannon fodder for Moscow's new war with Ukraine in 2022. If Ukraine welcomed their liberators in 2022 then who knows, maybe Ukrainians would end up in meat wave assaults against Poland or Baltics in 2025.
Recently there was an article in Czech media loosely titled Russian Border Ends Where it Recieves a Beating. There is large grain of truth in that, not only for Russia but also for other expansive empires.
As far as I can tell, observations so far are inconsistent with that model of reality. Why did Russia not attempt to absorb (at least some part of) Georgia when it was lying flat and defeated in 2008, and could have been easily cut off any prospective allied supplies? Why did they wait until 2022 to attack the rest of Ukraine, giving them time to sort out their political turmoil and overhaul their army? There is little there to suggest that they have the cupidity or ambition to pay the blood toll to make their geopolitical situation better; even the war we are seeing now only suggests that they are paying just barely enough to not let it become much worse (as starting a war only to lose it would inevitably do), that is, they are driven by fear/desperation. (No mobilization, no assassination of leadership, barely even any escalation apart from the power plant bombing that they only did briefly during their "darkest hour")
The leadership of the Baltics asserting that they are afraid of being attacked by Russia is not even a signal of them actually believing this (let alone of it actually being likely), because it would be advantageous for them to claim that and fan the Ukraine war even if they were privately assured that it would never happen. Before 2022 the general dynamics of EU politics was such that the smaller countries of the Eastern periphery were constantly being shoved around by Germany on account of its economic might, which as we now have found out was hanging by the thread of cheap Russian hydrocarbons. Being Ukraine's main supporters and playing up the threat to themselves put them at the top of the list for receiving American military aid (or at least newer gear from countries further west in "ring exchange" schemes). It also no doubt plays well with their populations, many of whom still embrace revenge fantasies against Russia for 45 years of communism (not to mention the leaders themselves, who often are old men who were already politics-adjacent back then and thus personally faced the business end of the red boot).
You have interesting observations, but I think they are far from trivial. A lot of arguments from incredulity and building up some intricate narratives about which country really thinks what.
While on my side I have facts: Russia annexed Crimea and Luhansk and Donetsk. And they definitely are using LDR and DPR troops as cannon fodder in their latest war, so in fact welcoming Russians did not bring them peace.
Nah, those reconstituted forces are mostly filled with contract soldiers from Russia now. By summer of 2022, they had been destroyed and the cannon fodder spent. The DPR itself announced over 50% casualties in 2022, after they'd already conscripted almost (3/4) every male 18-65. They literally closed down mines and factories, conscripting their entire workforces. 2 years after, no one is left.
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They are mostly facts (except for the "cannon fodder" part, which by its standard definition also imputes a particular speculative motivation), but I don't understand how these facts are evidence either against the point you were addressing originally (that if all of Ukraine had capitulated immediately, they would have had peace) or the additional hypotheses that you added (which are no less of an intricate narrative) that Russia would have assaulted Poland or the Baltics because they supposedly really think that they can expand their borders up to the point where they receive a beating. That Georgia essentially capitulated to Russian demands, was not annexed even though an annexation would have been well within Russian capabilities, and is now at peace, and no Abkhazians or South Ossetians are being sent to fight against Georgia, is also a fact.
I am honestly a bit baffled by the reasoning in your post. Abstracting over the identities of the participants, it seems to amount to something like: A is fighting against B and C over something, and tells B and C that if they just stop resisting, they will no longer have to fight. B joins A, so now it's A and B against C. You come along and observe that B is still fighting (with A against C). Therefore, you conclude that A's initial claim that if B and C both capitulated there would be no fight is false. After all, B capitulated and is still fighting, and perhaps even if C capitulated D would have come along and have had a fight against A, B and C together.
Sure, let me help. This was my original post as a response to quoted part. What are you baffled about exactly?
It absolutely is not trivially true, in fact it is trivial to prove the opposite. People in Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea welcomed their Moscow liberators in 2014 and ended up being conscripted as cannon fodder for Moscow's new war with Ukraine in 2022.
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So Russia has recent history of using conquered peoples to wage future expansionist wars. What is the bafflement again?
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