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 -
Last week there was a conversation on here about a potential peace deal in Ukraine. I claimed that the peace deal seemed fake since if you knew the background on peace efforts, you'd know that both Putin and Zelenskyy were playing a goofy game trying to pin the other one as the one who "doesn't want peace" in the eyes of Trump to try to direct Trump's ire in the other direction.
We now have pretty good confirmation that no peace deal will be forthcoming in the near term. JD Vance has said that the war won't end anytime soon. This backs up further reporting following the mineral deal that Trump's team was looking for ways to compel Russia to come to the table, and didn't really find any options that they liked.
The bull case for a Trump-brokered peace deal was the idea that the US could use its power to demand that both sides come to the table, and if either side tried to walk away then the US could force them back. This worked halfway, as the US has a lot of leverage over Ukraine for things like intelligence gathering, air defense, and to some extent other military deliveries. Much of MAGA hates Zelenskyy personally, and Trump was more than willing to exercise that leverage when Zelenskyy snubbed him at the WH meeting. The problem was that the other half of the puzzle was missing. Some claimed that the US could threaten Russia by promising to "drown Ukraine in weapons" if Russia didn't come to terms. However, Trump has been unable or unwilling to do this, so we had the situation where Trump could compel one side quite effectively, but when the other side did something Trump didn't like all he could do was tweet "Vladimir, STOP".
Peace is good as a general rule, and it would have been good if Trump could have gotten a peace deal along the lines of "ceasefire at current lines of control, Ukrainian defense guaranteed by Europe" so it was worth a shot. But alas, it seems like the war will continue.
...
These are problems which could, in principle, be solved by spending US taxpayer money.
Naturally, you can't get a factory ready for production in a month, but possibly in less than a year.
This presumption is based on the fact that it is common knowledge that in modern warfare, whoever can field more weapon systems will have an advantage. So a state (e.g. the US) which is working under a strong presumption of not having to switch to wartime economy might never the less invest to shorten the critical path to start mass-producing weapon systems in earnest.
Arguably, developing new weapon systems is part of this. For peacetime capabilities, developing a new weapon system and then building a few of them is likely worse than just using that budget for building the previous generation of weapons. But when you enter a big war and your defense budget increases by a factor of 20, R&D will be obviously a critical path, and not having done it beforehand will greatly diminish your capabilities.
Likewise for production. Keeping enough machines around so that half your working population can manufacture munitions is not effective when in all likelihood, these machines will just gather dust. But hopefully, there is someone whose job it is to worry about how quickly one can scale up production quickly. Perhaps this means keeping a lot of machines which build machines which build missiles around, or subsidizing certain key dual-use industries to keep them on-shore.
Of course, the US would face certain hurdles when trying to spend more money on manufacturing without being themselves in a shooting war, all the rules about having bidding processes, NIMBY/environmental lawsuits et cetera might still delay things. But compared to civilian manufacturing (i.e. the US on a whim deciding to invest 10% of the GDP into manufacturing hard disks onshore), I would still expect that military manufacturing -- especially of single-use items like missiles -- could be scaled up very quickly.
...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is this such a far-fetched wunderwaffe to be holding out for at this point? Between the ChatGPT-plays-geoguessr posts, the circumstance that Ukraine already gets the vast majority of its kills with superior FPV tech (currently still using human operators), and them having access to much more infrastructure that would enable the technology's deployment once it is created (unsanctioned supply chains, Starlink), the bet that these will happen in the next 2 years and will be a significant game-changer seems at least as good to me as the "Russia will run out of missiles any moment now" cope of the early months of the war.
...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think I disagree with the idea that thousands of armoured vehicles are useless and I suspect that Ukraine would agree with me, I can think of at least a few good uses for a large quantity of Bradleys and Abrams, hell even the M113 could be put to use. The Russians seem to be pretty close to burning through their soviet inheritance of armoured vehicles, hence the increasing presence of things like Mad Maxified Ladas and golf cart riding stormtruppen, so armoured vehicles that are donated from now on should produce a greater impact on the battlefield as the Russians become increasingly resource constrained.
It probably is worth mentioning here that Putin was confident that the "special military operation" would have been over in days and that he also has a tendency towards "missing the bus" when it comes to strategic decisions, procrastinating and making decisions weeks and months after they would have had the most effect. Putin is quite lucky that the western world lives in abject terror of actually winning a war for change (Defeating your enemies? Sounds awfully escalatory that) and that we are instead treated to this tragic comedy of errors.
...
More options
Context Copy link
I mean weapons do not fire themselves. You can arm Ukraine all you want — they are still toast more or less. And Ukraine is rapidly running out of people. If you’re resorting to abducting senior citizens off the street to fuel your army, you are in no position to defend much. And this is the calculation that NATO missed — Ukraine didn’t have the population to sustain this effort, and so any weapons given were useless because eventually you’d have no one left capable of firing them.
Ukraine lost about a half million in casualties in three years of combat, in a country with a population of about 38 million. In World War I, Germany lost about 6.3 million out of 65 million total before calling it quits, and even then it was controversial. At a consistent rate of attrition, it would take Ukraine another 20 years to hit those kind of numbers. While you can argue about the population pyramid being more favorable to Germany, this is balanced by the fact that the relatively slow rate of attrition gives Ukraine a much bigger pool to draw from, including people not yet born. After all, Germany started another war 20 years after than one ended and managed to double their casualty numbers. Those of us who have never lived through a serious war don't understand how huge casualty numbers can get before they become unsustainable.
It’s not just the men literally killed, it’s also people fleeing the country. And a lot of people have fled already.
True, but most of the Ukrainian refugees left at the beginning of the war. It's not like war casualties where there's a continual drip drip for years. In 2023 and 2024, Ukraine had one of the highest rates of in-migration of any country, almost all of whom were returning refugees.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Also just prosaic stuff like small arms, bullets, vehicle replacement parts, tires and gasoline. A big part of the reason for the complete collapse of the German Army in 1945 was that you had entire surviving units going combat ineffective because they couldn’t operate their vehicles and had no guns or bullets to shoot them with.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link