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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.
This has been a popular talking point in media, but it appears to be based on exactly nothing. There is nothing anywhere within Russian rhetoric to suggest that they have the slightest interest in Poland. Even the archetype of launching a surprise attack on Poland, Hitler, spent years talking about the Danzig issue before invading. While it was a surprise attack, Germany's motivation was not a surprise. Russian would need to not only launch a surprise attack, but would need a surprise motivation. Likewise, Russia's invasion of Ukraine did not have a "surprise motivation," but rather a motivation that was well-known and is consistent with Russian thought. The same would not be true of a hypothetical Poland invasion.
You are saying that Russians do not consider Poland to be within the rightful Russian sphere of influence?
I think it barely matters. Even if article five isn’t invoked for some inexplicable reason, the resemblance to the interwar years is mostly superficial.
There’s a key difference; Poland would absolutely fucking shred a Russian invasion on a military level. Russia since the war began wasn’t even guaranteed on any given day to be the most powerful military in Ukraine.
Poland’s military spending and might is nowhere near the disparity that existed in the 30s when the Soviet Union was an emerging superpower.
If anything this war has revealed that the Russian military is a paper tiger riddled with incompetence and corruption. They’re laughable compared to the past, and demographics get worse for them each passing day.
They really are a third rate power at this point. If Ukraine, one of the poorest and most corrupt European nations, is giving them trouble even this deep into the third continuation war, then they don’t have a ghost of a chance at winning a war against Poland, or the Baltics, or Finland.
I’m very sympathetic to the DR in general but the Russia cope is absolutely bonkers, almost a perfect mirror image of the twitchy-eyed Ukraine boosters. That country is completely pozzed on almost every level.
It's funny how differently people see this war! I look at it and see the opposite- even with every single US-aligned nation around the world is sending Ukraine all the weapons they can spare, Ukraine is still steadily losing this war.
They've drafted basically every man they could find, sparing only the ones necessary to work the farms and keep their economy running, with patrols on the border stopping any man from leaving (but women are fleeing the country). Meanwhile, Russia has still not needed to send in the conscripts who make up the bulk of its army- it's still able to coast on just volunteers, prisoners, and foreign mercenaries, so the average Russian citizen isn't affected.
We laughed at how mighty the western GDP was- turns out GDP does not magically turn into real weapons. Instead, Russia and its allies continue to massively outproduce all the rest of us in artillery, which is what counts the most. The US makes something like 25,000 a month while Russia makes 250,000. Instead, Ukraine has to rely on what they can scavange from old Soviet nations- the big news lately was that Armenia has agreed to send them some stuff. Armenia, the arsenal of democracy! (meanwhile, North Korea is sending literally millions of shells to Russia)
We boasted about our high-tech superweapons that would make the old Soviet stuff look like a joke. It turns out that GPD-guided munitions are easy to electronically jam, long-range missiles are too expensive and few, and the wiz-bang F35 that's supposed to do everything is too precious to be risked in Ukraine. Instead, the most practical weapon seems to be cheap, simple drones manufactured in Iran.
It's not a quick, flashy war of maneuver, sure. It's a slow, grinding, war of attrition. But they're winning. It boggles my mind that people still seem to think that Ukraine is doing great and will be marching into Moscow any day now. We need to see the reality and adapt- either cut a deal that gifts Russia the donbass region, or massively increase the amount of aid going to Ukraine, and restructure the current arms industry to be suited for a serious war.
You’ve missed my point entirely and in a hilarious way sort of made my point about the discourse surrounding Russia for me.
I never said Ukraine was winning, I never even implied it. I was really talking about the supposed other targets of Russia; Poland & The Baltics. I have no doubt that Russia could win this war given enough time and bloodshed, time and numbers are on their side.
The crux of my point was that Ukraine was an embarrassingly easy target and Russia still can’t manage it without enormous difficulty. They might win, they might not. If I had to bet money I’d bet money on Russia winning.
I have basically no dog in this fight but seeing Russia get its nose bloodied by Ukraine is like seeing a tatted up security guard getting their teeth knocked out by a 90lb twink; Turns out the muscleman was hopped up on bullshido and an inflated ego. Even with material support from the west, the arc of the war reveals a lot about the state capacity; all it took was a couple thousand mercenaries to turn around to legitimately threaten the regime. You’d expect that from some tinpot African authoritarian regime, but it was shocking to see that happen in Russia.
All your points on the desiccation of the western arms capability I fully agree with. But that has precedent; nothing reveals what technology is cost effective and practical like field testing in combat. And military spending in Poland and the Baltics are ramping up and have been for a while. Russia’s military capability or lack thereof has been largely revealed, and countries other than the USA and its satrapies and Russia have agency as well.
I think Russia winning the war might not actually improve the Russian position all that much. It’s not cope, I couldn’t give a fuck about the GAE. But every other country on Russia’s border are hardening against them, both politically and militarily. Aside from maybe Moldova, there are no easy targets left. Every other country that Russia wants to fuck with is much more dangerous than Ukraine.
Pre-war, I assumed this would be true because of the EXTREMELY mediocre showing of Ukraine during the Russian invasion of Crimea. But (pretty obviously) the Ukrainians did a lot of work between then and the second Russian invasion.
And if you set aside the question of Ukrainian morale, I don't think they are an embarrassingly easy target at all, on paper. They had a very large inherited ground army, and a large population pool. They're more on the level of Poland, not a softer target (say) Estonia or Latvia or even a medium-hard target like Finland. It's true from what I can tell that their weapon modernization was fairly meh and that their air force in particular was probably lackluster (but see also Poland, which is still flying Su-17s!) but the fundamentals (lots of tanks, artillery, warm bodies) go a long way with proper morale. I think that, e.g. non-US NATO would have struggled to invade Ukraine the same way Russia did.
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