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 -
NATO will inherit the rump state of what is left of Ukraine which is the part without the mines and the good agricultural land.
Assuming Russia breaks with all previous tradition and manages to fight somewhat competently, sure, but what part is supposed to make nation building in Afghanistan look like a cake walk?
They have effectively beaten NATO in a conventional land war. They are fighting an enemy in which every operation is run by NATO, the equptment is NATO, thousands of NATO mercs are running things on the ground.
While Israel and the US can't take an area the size of a municipality in Gaza against enemies with no resources Russia took the area the size of Denmark in a week against an enemy with 3x larger force.
“The world” is shrieking about modest civilian casualties in Gaza’s dense urban landscape, if the gloves were off the Star of David could be flying off (the remains) of every building in Gaza in a month. The key to that would be a more ‘biblical’ kind of warfare where you go in and kill every single male above the age of 12, which Israel and the US are clearly militarily capable of doing. That they aren’t doing it isn’t a question of capability. (Note, of course, that I am certainly not advocating this.)
Ukrainians in the occupied territories are, as pro-Russians often remind us, just unwilling to resist Russia to the degree that Gazans are Israel.
I do not think the IDF would expose its soldiers to nuclear fallout just to put flags up on ruined buildings. Just to be clear what "gloves off" means when the full panoply of modern weapons are available.
One of the things you need to know to understand the current Israel-Palestine conflict is that if Israel were as evil as Hamas, or Hamas as powerful as Israel, this would already have happened.
Israel would not need to nuke Gaza to engage in successful total warfare. Nor would they want to; it's too damned close and anyway an Israel willing to make such total war would want Gaza's land for itself (or at least to lease to Trump for his resort)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Israel killed as many civilians in two months as Russians killed in 3.5 years of fighting against a far more competent opponent.
Ukraine is vastly larger than Gaza and civilians were easily and quickly (and still are) evacuated well behind the front lines where the intense conflict occurs. In Gaza, neighboring countries refused to accept evacuations, and Hamas - unlike either army in Ukraine - is an insurgent force that doesn’t wear uniforms, doesn’t observe any rules of war, and hides in the civilian population.
If the Ukrainian military had melted into the civilian population in the occupied cities where they emerged, daily, from schools, residential homes, hospitals and so on to attack Russians, the Ukrainian civilian casualty rate would be much higher. As it happened, the sides are fighting a conventional war (one Hamas cannot afford to fight, and doesn’t wish to).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The omnipresent slur (is this even a proper context for the word "slur"?) "mercs" in situations like this interests me. If they're mercenaries, does this mean that they'd instantly switch on the Russian side if they received a better offer?
Otherwise, it should go without saying that they haven't effectively beaten NATO in a conventional land war, since they haven't even beaten Ukraine (=forced it into an unadvantageous peace treaty or even an unadvantagenous frozen conflict situation), and they certainly aren't fighting the full force of NATO.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So the Russian army never actually managed to fight somewhat competently any time in history? Really?
It has been true in almost all cases that the Russian army blunders and stumbles during the initial phase of the war but then shows itself to be capable of gradually learning and adapting even if the final outcome is defeat, as in WW1 for example. See the Brusilov offensive of 1916 in that case, characterized by John Keegan as “the greatest victory seen on any front [of WW1] since the trench lines had been dug on the Aisne two years before” (as quoted in Wikipedia). And there are cases when the important lessons are only learned after the war, such as the war against the Japanese in 1904-5 (which, by the way, wasn’t a cakewalk for the Japanese army by any means). I assume this is the consequence of the intellectual sloth and naïve romanticism that generally characterize the Russian people, the legacy of languishing as slaves for centuries etc., probably the Mongol yoke also has something to do with it, but this is largely beside the point. There are also a few cases when that initial period of incompetence is rather short, like during the naval war against the Ottomans in 1788-91, whom were soundly beaten.
In the case of WW2, the Red Army clearly demonstrated an ability to gradually gain competence, although the results generally appeared only in the final phase of the war. The offensives in the territory of present-day Belarus, Moldova, Romania and Poland in the summer of 1944 or the invasion of Manchuria in 1945 were impressive by anyone’s standards. The Russians are slow to learn maybe, but they do learn. Even the Afghanistan war wasn’t just a series of one blunder after another, just look at the battle for ‘Hill’ 3234 for example.
Westerners apparently have this usual tendency to concentrate on Russian blunders while ignoring every other factor and then assume that winning against them will always be easy. (Hence the recent proliferation of militarist neocon feminist girlboss politicians all around the EU, for example.) It never turns out great.
I'm not sure what this refers to. The two examples that come to mind, Sanna Marin and Kaja Kallas, were mostly elected for non-Russia-related reasons. Marin got his job due to internal Social Democratic party machinations, did this before the Russian invasion, and is not particularly militaristic for a Finnish politician. The biggest reason Kaja Kallas is in office is that her party, Reform, is Estonia's natural ruling party, and her father Siim Kallas was previously the PM (and Siim Kallas, in turn, got his job in the typical Eastern European way of having been a ranking CPSU member and making an advantageous switch to the capitalist side when the time was proper for that).
You're absolutely right in that they didn't particularly start out that way, instead they only took on that image afterwards.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It would shock me if Galicia didn’t have mines and good land, and Russia doesn’t want that part.
It has neither actually.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link