site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   33494 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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.

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

In Ukraine news: Russia to withdraw from city of Kherson

As said in the article, this seems like big news, since Kherson was the only "big city" Russia has conquered in this period of war. Even the pro-Russian sources I follow on Twitter aren't trying to spin this ("Feint! Planned withdrawal! Actually good for Russia!") any more.

Of course this means that the new defensive line is harder to crack, but really, at some point, you'd imagine sheer morale questions would make it hard for Russians to proceed, at least. Where will the Ukrainians push next?

I've heard some ambiguous reports of Ukraine having moderate successes pushing against the line of contact near Lisichansk, but otherwise it seems that the holy grail for them would be to push downward to cut the land connection to Crimea around Melitopol.

I find it curious to see the contrast between how every city Russia captured from Ukraine was a month-long slog and massive drain on manpower and operational resources (consider Mariupol, where between logistics and the alignment of the local population the situation was very close to as good as they could hope for, and the struggles for Severodonetsk/Lisichansk and Liman later, not to mention that they still haven't cracked Avdeevka which is basically a suburb of Donetsk), and every city they surrendered so far was given up with barely a fight. What stopped them from digging in somewhere in Kherson and giving Ukraine its own Mariupol? Do they simply not have any sufficiently capable or fanatical troops willing to fight to the death under miserable conditions like Azov did, are they still thinking of saving them for some hypothetical more important future engagement, or do they figure Ukraine would have an easier time smoking them out for one reason or another? (I did already wonder why Russia struggled so much in Mariupol; do they just not have adequate bunker-buster bombs, or did they not want to use them because of the civilians sheltered with the Azovites? My read of the Russian public sphere was that sympathy for those civilians, most of whom were probably spouses/children of Azov fighters, was rather low, so in that case it really would have had to be about Western PR or "red lines".)

In related weird news, the Russian-appointed deputy governor of Kherson region, Kirill Stremousov, was reported to have died "in a traffic accident" today. I mean, who knows, maybe he really did just run a red light in front of a tank trying to get to the other shore faster, but given the timing and scarcity of information this seems like a likely cover story; more likely in my eyes that it was an assassination or that he even committed suicide in light of the situation. (edit, some relevant telegrams just now started circulating a picture of a thoroughly wrecked car on a road near Novaya Kakhovka (the city with the dam across the Dnepr northeast of Kherson) claiming it to be his.)

I think a mistake that a lot of commentators (both in Russia and the West) have made is conflating Yanukovych's "Party of Regions" Ukraine with Euromaidan Ukraine. Back in 2019 I was in Poland for a few months, helping set up local training/maintenance pipelines for the Polish DoD, and had the opportunity to talk to a few UAF guys who were cross-training with them.

According to them Ukraine had been trying very hard since 2014 to crackdown on corruption and rebuild their military and economy along more western lines. They described the war in Donbas as "a wake-up call" and were quite adamant about having no desire to be soviets again. Granted, guys being sent to cross-train are almost certainly going to be the cream of the crop/those already flagged for promotion but still... Reading about the alleged persecution of Russian speakers in Ukraine I found myself wondering just how much of it was "racial animus" vs "genuine attempts to fight corruption". It's probably impossible to ever know for sure, but my impression at the time was that the Euromaidan government enjoyed a much broader base of support than many were giving it credit for that the UAF was quite serious about getting it's act together. Accordingly my prediction back when this all kicked of was that any attempt by Russia to push into western Ukraine was likely to end in a blood-soaked clusterfuck. Id say that prediction has been borne out.

My suspicion now is much the same as it was in April, that this will play out similarly to the Russo-Finish war, with Russia ultimately "winning" on paper by gaining some minor territorial concession but loosing in most of the ways that actually matter. IE suffering outsize casualties and utterly destroying any future chance of bringing Helsinki Kiev back into the empire.

While conviction certainly plays a part, it's not particularly confusing if you look at the geography. To turn Kherson into a grinding urban conflict like Mariupol would mean Ukrainian forces entering the city. This would mean Ukraine separating Kherson from the Antonivka Road Bridge that is the only point of supply or evacuation. Any notional preparations to fight a siege in Kherson would therefore only be relevant if Russians had reached the point where they had lost this key bridgehead. Any Russian forces staying in Kherson would be doing so with the knowledge that they would either die or be captured there, once Ukraine closed in.

The timing also makes sense. Given recent Ukrainian advances, there was only about 5km left until Ukraine could comfortably saturate the sole escape route with M777 or 155mm equivalents, after which withdrawal would become much more dicey.

My personal copium is that Russia is focused on debilitating Ukraine’s economy, then killing their troops at a higher rate than they kill Russian troops, while implementing cheap drones in combat. This is the most cost effective way to win the war. Russia has to pay for a few hundred thousand troops next door, while NATO has to pay for all of Ukraine’s military plus some significant part of twenty million citizens still in Ukraine. Russia gets to knock the electricity in Kyiv and elsewhere to prevent a semblance of a modern economy, and harass in other costly ways. For every dollar Russia spends, NATO will have to pay 10 to 30. The limiting factor of Ukraine is the economy and men. In this sense it’s in Russia’s interests to make Ukraine disperse their soldiers across the whole territory.

In this sense it’s in Russia’s interests to make Ukraine disperse their soldiers across the whole territory.

A withdrawal from Kherson would have the exact opposite effect, as falling back behind the natural boundary of the Dnieper will effectively shorten the front and enable both sides to redistribute any forces West of the Zaporizhzhia-Melitopol axis.

Well, one of the reasons might indeed be that there were considerable advantages for Ukraine for holding Mariupol: it kept Russian troops tied and away from the Donetsk front at a crucial time, and the bravery of the troops at Mariupol also served as an obvious inspiration at a dark period for Ukraine and offered propagandistic material, both internally and externally. This holding action got Ukraine through to the period in the summer when Western aid started showing up and making some difference.

More to the point, though... maybe it is true, the Russians really just don't have the sufficient spirit to do it?

Throughout the war, the pro-Russian side on the Internet has banged the drum about how Ukraine (as an entity separate from the Russian world) is FAKE FAKE FAKE, an invention of the Austrians and Poles and Germans, imagination of the exile communities, forcibly maintained by Nazi Banderites, an unsustainable made-up chimera, a "Reddit-ass country", "fighting for globohomo and Pride parades", a number of similar claims intended to bolster the idea that at any moment everything would just break and Russians would be received as liberators in the end and so on. Meanwhile, of course, Russia is a real country, the realest there is, and Russians would of course fight for it in the same way as in 1941 and would gladly just rather die in a nuclear hellfire than lose.

Well, the proof of the pudding etc., and the taste of the pudding would now seem to indicate that Ukrainians, individual cases indicating otherwise aside, are truly fighting like hell for their invented made-up Reddit Nazi globohomo country, while russians, individual cases indicating otherwise, are losing whatever spirit they might have had at some point, as indicated, for instance, the massive waves of exiles leaving the country at whatever indication there has been that they might be conscripted and have to fight.

Defending one's country is very different from participating in a bullshit war of aggression, even if one is the type to stan based $TEAM from the couch regardless of morality. And being forced by circumstance to defend your county makes this country more real in your mind. This is the issue Putin (and those loyalist commenters) have cynically and irrationally dismissed. In my opinion, Ukraine was a country of comparable «realness» with Russia before the war, but now it's a living movement. Nothing new since Machiavelli. All this pseudo-historical essentialist analysis about the origins of Ukraine, how could it persuade anyone that Ukrainians will fold? Nations are in fact imagined communities and so long as Ukrainians themselves don't imagine themselves to be meaningless Austro-Hungarian chimeras, they will act like people belonging to a nation.

That said, even back in 2013 there have been opinions stressing the fragility of Russian identity:

Washington political analyst Paul Gobl, the author of the blog Window on Eurasia, shared with the Russian service of Voice of America an analysis of the processes taking place in Russia and assessed American-Russian relations.

PG: When you observe the processes in Russia from a remote position, the unexpected growth of regionalism within the Russian Federation is striking. Revival and strengthening of Siberian identity, Eastern identity, Pomeranian - in the North, Cossack - throughout the south of Russia. This identity revolution reflects two important trends and points to a third.

First, this is a reflection of the fact that, contrary to the beliefs of most people, the Russian national identity is the weakest in Eurasia. Self-identification, for example, among Avars, Armenians or Ukrainians is much stronger than among Russians. In many ways, the Russians turned out to be the main victims of the state named after them. They were allowed to govern, but only at the cost of abandoning their own development as a nation. As a result, fragmentation occurs.

Geography and poor management are also contributing. You cannot drive by car from one end of the country to the other, because there are no normal highways, the railways are rusting, most airlines are squeezed out of business and are no longer functioning - huge parts of the country are isolated from each other. As a result, regional alliances are formed. The same type of regionalism that was brutally suppressed by Boris Yeltsin in the middle of the 1990s is being reanimated.

Combining and restraining the growth of regionalism and sub-ethnic Russian nationalism will be a serious challenge for the center. In the medium and long term, the growth of Russian sub-ethnic nationalism is a much more serious threat to Moscow’s ability to control the situation than any other “non-Russian” national movement.

(This is, of course, just wishful thinking. But in a way, it's gentle. Russians do not start to identify as «Siberians»: they just learn English and leave).

Eh, I think that read is a little too optimistic for the Ukrainian side too. Mariupol, in the end, was held by something as close to Nazi Banderites as it gets; the regulars in the city (who were holed up in the factory on its north) capitulated comparatively quickly. There's also the aspect that Ukraine seems to continue delivering unforced PR morsels to Russia (not that they make it far outside of Russian channels) with group photos of Zelenskiy's entourage or troops spearheading the recapture of territories regularly featuring someone in the background flashing swastika tattoos or SS uniform patches, which indicates to me that the neonazis are considered fairly indispensable as particularly trustworthy or otherwise "elite" units (in the case of the presidential entourage, perhaps even that the loyalty of anyone else is considered too questionable for safety). Perhaps the real lesson is that neonazis are the only ones (in this conflict, at least) who are really willing to keep up the fight "in the dark". It's not like Russia didn't try to establish their own unit of Nazi LARPers (Wagner), but the memeplex just doesn't work that well without a coherent ethnonationalist idea behind it.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats