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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.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the original Kievan Russ community founded Moscow and then stationed there when the Mongols utterly destroyed Kyiv. They then re-colonized their old territory centuries later. From Wikipedia —
What happened to Kievan Russ is actually relevant to the topic. Kyiv decided to fight against the Mongols, which led to the total desolation of Kyiv and the destruction of the original Kievan Russ culture. Something similar happened to Baghdad. But the Slavs in Moscow decided to acquiesce to Mongol rule, which allowed for the salvation of Kievan Russ culture and the continuation of Russian Orthodoxy. So there are two important things to consider here: Moscow and Kievan Russ are historically the same culture / people, and history shows how delusional concepts of self-determination have destroyed Kyiv before — until, of course, Moscow liberated its former territories, because they chose to submit to the Mongol’s greater strength. (nota bene: being zero percent Slav, I don’t care about anything happening east of Poland, and having the Slavs destroy each other is as beneficial to the West as having the East Asians destroy each other or the Semites destroy each other. But I genuinely feel that there is something deeply wrong with the waste of life in the Russian-Ukraine war especially with Ukraine’s low TFR.)
Whether you're right or wrong is irrelevant.
What is rellevant is that Moscow thinks Kiev is Russian and Kiev disagreed stongly enough to go to war over the matter.
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