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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27849 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Okay. But when the whole world is liberal and TFR has crashed to 1.2, what's the plan?

The TFR crashing to 1.2 is not that big an issue. Japan/SK/Singapore etc. have had this for decades now and they're still mostly fine. Yes there is economic stagnation in the case of Japan but their social structure and order still survives and will continue to do so.

The reason western culture is incompatible with a long term TFR of 1.2 (and no migration) is because their brand of atomised individualism relies on a strong welfare state to ameliorate the mistakes humans naturally make when removed from a social system that tells them what to do based on metis and a welfare state is what is incompatible with a low TFR (barring the AI singularity leading to Luxury Automated Gay Space Communism). This doesn't mean that all worldly cultures are incompatible with such a TFR and most will actually be fine.

With such a low TFR the Western welfare state will eventually have to go out with a whimper and individuals will be forced to confront the full consequences of their poor choices. The lack of family ties and bonds (promoted indirectly by Western culture itself) mean they'll have very little recourse to relief and there will unfortunately be generational scale suffering as people slowly realise the value of kith and kin and shift to a social contract more long term suited to the human psyche.

We'll probably end up going back to a nuclear or extended family model where the young earn and use the money to support their parents etc, not too different from the conservative social structure currently in place in Eastern societies. One person may end up having to support up to 2 parents each, but equally they get free childcare at home and someone always available to look after kids (with huge skin in the game) which is a huge benefit people pay tens of thousands for each year nowadays. It'll all probably even out to not be too much of an extra burden on the breadwinner. Once that happens on a societal scale things will by and large be fine around the world, and the march of technological progress should continue to make the Earth a better place to live for all of humanity long term.

I think when the inverted pyramid gets to top heavy, the West would rather open the borders than make the hard decisions and live with it. At that point, everyone I know and loved (and their few children) will likely be long gone and the populaces values so far removed from my own it might as well be a foreign country. So I guess I don’t really care.

The TFR crashing to 1.2 is not that big an issue. Japan/SK/Singapore etc. have had this for decades now and they're still mostly fine. Yes there is economic stagnation in the case of Japan but their social structure and order still survives and will continue to do so.

Unclear. Having a sub-replacement TFR presents a different sort of problem as the tendency continues. Right now Japan is old, but not catastrophically so; their largest cohort is in its 50's, and so at the peak of their earning potential. However, in 20 years those people will all be 20 years older, and given improvements in medical technology, not many of them will have died. A society where the single largest cohort is retirees is not something that has been seen before, and will stress the system in different ways.

Politics is war by other means.

Yes, this is basically how I feel after coming across leftist youtube, reddit, public behavior, twitter, or just your posts

Most of us already know what leftists are planning to do to our children, but thank you for saying it louder for the people who haven't realized it yet. I hope it inspires them to be more diligent about defending our community from threats by bad faith actors

So basically Catholics versus Protestants and the other sides views are so evil and wrong we need to kill each other.

When the war starting?

Personally I think liberalism has proven stupider and the data like rising mental health issues, obesity, drug abuse, suicides, etc strongly support a belief that human utility is improved in traditional societies. I’m down for killing the pronoun brigades.

And I don’t think modern liberals are liberal. I think their Christian’s disagreeing on who gets to play Christ

https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1606723411287605248?s=46&t=5nMr6txFQK8ZMReHs4j1zA

(Link by part affiliation on whose most oppressed today and hence societies redeemer by hanging on the cross)

We’ve already played this game. We had trads and prots and came to America to start a new country that agreed we wouldn’t kill each other over Christ. Now once again we have trads and prots (who don’t realize their prots) deciding we need to kill each other again.

Please use the correct form of they’re my friend.

I agree with your point that modern liberals don’t support liberty in the truest sense. They got so much liberty they didn’t know what to do with it.

It’s unlikely that illiberality is genetic, because its modern instantiation is new (1960s onward), the ancestors of the liberals were all at one point monarchists, and it’s correlated to where you are born.

If you believe that aggression and selfishness are partially influenced by genetics, as I do, there are more humane ways to guide the breeding of humans. In Europe’s past, they executed criminals for murder and theft over a certain amount, and the “social reinforcement propaganda” led to kind/sharing people having many children. Any breeding program would have to solve the border crisis though, or develop insular endogamy practices.

You are muddying up the waters by using labels that have loose meanings. 'Liberal' or 'Monarchist' is a placeholder. Relying on a culture relative historical definition of monarchism to pontificate on what a 'monarchist' person was like in the past is nonsensical. Our historical definitions have no relevance to what people were actually like. They tell us nothing about what stimuli it was that made someone, in whatever sense you want to interpret it, a 'monarchist'.

Every single psychological trait is heritable. You are an expression of your genetic material in an environment. There is no partial cause. It's 100% total. Your response to stimuli is not accidental. I'm sure that, through some extreme environmental control, you could pacify someone by controlling their stimuli, but in a modern society, with the stimuli as they are, the people are as they are. If your reaction to the stimuli of modern society is anything other than acceptance you have in you some form of maladaptation to modern society that is incompatible with it.

This incompatibility is an existential threat to modern society as it creates bothersome things like the paradox of tolerance. If modern society wants to survive then people who are not compatible need to disappear from the face of the earth. It has no mechanism for that type of existence.

Why omit the possibility that the environment might change? It certainly does faster than genetics.

I don't understand what you mean.

Society is Fixed, Biology is Mutable

I always disliked that essay. Society is not fixed, there are such things as revolutions and social changes. Where was 'society is fixed' when the US was introducing civil rights, abolishing slavery, mainstreaming homosexuals?

Drugs can be stamped out if you put in a lot of energy. China no longer has an opium problem, for example. If you send all the addicts to labor camps and shoot the drug dealers, the drug problem disappears. It's really not that hard to find a drug dealer and shoot them - if drug-addled losers and criminal gangs can manage it, so can billion-dollar armed bureaucracies if they deign to try.

For schools, we could simply reintroduce discipline and academic rigor.

Japan doesn't have an obesity problem. Why not copy their diet? Out with Coca Cola and McDonalds, in with sushi. Less corn and more fish.

The whole essay is like saying 'I can't get into this car, I've used 15 little plastic screwdrivers and can't see any way to unscrew the doors - I'll go find the owner and persuade them to let me in'. Well maybe you need a hammer to break the windows, maybe you need a rock, maybe you need a specialized pick for the lock, maybe you need a shaped charge...

Just because ineffective methods don't work, it does not follow that no methods work and you have to go around the inherent meaning of the task.

I agree. Outwardly signaled Political Illiberality being genetic in any reliable, context free way strikes me as absurd because it would require that George Washington and Harry Washington had completely different underlying genetic motivations, though both perceived themselves as fighting for their own freedom.

Are the left-leaning posters all riled up because it's Christmas and everything is plastered in Christian iconography or something? Or are you just a troll?

The reason they should be killed is to prevent them from harming more people, and to make sure that the bad genes that they hold that make them predisposed to bad behavior are not propagated into the next generation. Likewise, some people are born with an evil sense of morality that makes them predisposed to being fascists and reactionaries (yes, trad morality is illiberal and thus evil, it is a result of moloch) including religious ones (which is basically fascism except even worse because they scare people with made up notions about the afterlife, hence the term 'christofascist'), and other forms of anti liberal people.

So in the last 60 years has the decline in 'christofascists' been due to brave warriors like you exterminating them from the gene pool? I mean...those people are passing on their 'bad' genes at least as, if not more, frequently than secular folks. It's almost like...there's a strong environmental component!

Not to mention the hilarious lack of self-awareness behind 'My opponent's ideology is so toxic we must kill them before they can tell anyone about it or reproduce.' If anything, people like you who (if you aren't a troll of course) soberly cheer for conflict theory and ethnic cleansing are the true dangers to society.

left-leaning posters

The what now?

Zunger said it better, and like six years ago. Policy starvation's a bitch, ain't it?

What's policy starvation?

One of the observable mechanisms of social decay.

Long ago, I promised to write an effort post about this, but then I kinda lost the ability to write effort-posts. Here's the short version:

People want a thing. People clamor for the thing they want. Lots of different would-be leaders step forward offering to help organize the getting of the thing. These would-be leaders each have a different plan for how they'll get the thing. The plans tend to differ a lot their projections of how much effort and extremity will be required to get the thing.

As a rule, people don't want effort or extremity, so they tend to go with the plans that promise the easiest solutions first. When those don't work, they grudgingly accept the plans involving a little more pain and effort, and so on. Ideally, they reach a plan that gets them at least an approximation of what they want without too much pain and hardship. The people get what they want, the successful leaders are lauded for their excellent work, and everyone goes home happy.

But suppose people decide they want something that can't actually be gotten? The process above is carried out, starting with the easy plans, then the moderate plans, then the serious, hard-nosed plans. One by one, these plans are attempted, fail, and are discarded, but the people are still unsatisfied. Failed plans might be tweaked, but after a number of attempts grow discredited, and people stop backing them. If the thing people want isn't achievable by the means available, and people won't stop wanting it, you get policy starvation: people gravitate to to solutions and the leaders proposing them that under better circumstances would never be given the time of day, but now amass credibility as the only people offering solutions that haven't already obviously failed, if only because they haven't been tried yet. In the same way that physical starvation drives people to the extremity of eating spoiled food, and ultimately grass, shoe-leather or human flesh in an attempt to satiate their physical need for sustenance, starvation of policy drives people to extreme political acts: insurrection, revolution, civil war, democide.

Look around you, and you'll see it everywhere, on both sides. In this case, troll or no, Liberalism's promise was that once we adopted its norms, everyone would just sorta chill out, everything would work out, reason would carry the day, mumble mumble you get the Federation from Star Trek. It hasn't worked out like that. His generation did not, in fact, get it right, and they were, in fact, making promises, promises they were powerless to fulfill. And so they gifted us a world where people have lost confidence in the moderate Skokie solutions, and turn to Zunger's extremist zealotry instead.

What did liberalism promise that it hasn’t fulfilled though? You say people haven’t chilled out but then again we haven’t had a major war or civil unrest for decades.

Also we have done a decently good job of living together in a diverse society. It’s not perfect, but I doubt it ever was. Dissidents were just silenced in the past or didn’t make it into the history books. Now we’re letting that frustration out, which is on balance a good thing if we can figure out how to address it.

we haven’t had a major war or civil unrest for decades

Who exactly is "we"? There's a shooting war almost a year old in the middle of Europe. There's several billions of damage from riots just recently, and some cities are more dangerous than war zones. Kids are graduated from schools being illiterate and unable to do basic math. War on poverty is going so well people are living on the streets permanently in virtually every major city and seeing people shitting on sidewalks became a routine occurrence. Oh yes, and we also are doing so great that record numbers of people kill themselves with hard drugs in prime of their life. I'm not sure it's as spectacular record as we'd like it to be.

What did liberalism promise that it hasn’t fulfilled though?

The part that's being used to drive current policies is "equal outcomes for women and minorities". (It doesn't matter if liberalism didn't actually promise that, many people who believed in liberalism believed it did)

Don't mistake eloquence and verbosity for truth and just roll over and abandon your point because people posted 15 links to their extensive post histories from the last three years. There's a steelman to be had for things aren't as bad as the terminally online make them out to be, that liberalism has been remarkably successful and is worth fighting for, and that this is still the best time and place to be alive bar none.

It's easy to paint a grim picture of liberalism and the West when it's failures are trumpeted to the heavens while it's successes are the water we swim in.

Good point! I suppose I don’t see it as rolling over because my views genuinely have changed on this point recently. I agree though that the amount of doomsaying on this forum is unwarranted!

It's easy to paint a grim picture of liberalism and the West when it's failures are trumpeted to the heavens while it's successes are the water we swim in.

You have a very warped view of what "trumpeted from the heavens" means if you believe this.

Last night, I turned on NPR in the car and listened to some guy expound about how the last 20 years of Ukrainian history are entirely the West's fault as we supported neo-nazis and genocide in the Donbas. Depending on the political party in power, half the country and media ecosystem is in hysterics about FEMA death camps/alt-right neonazis/excessive taxation/insufficient taxation/so on and so forth.

This morning, I open up globaltimes.cn and read about how Actually, China's COVID response has been entirely rational, orderly and planned this way from the beginning by our hyper-competent, divinely ordained leadership.

Criticism is good, criticism and awareness of our failures is important to (try and) hold politicians accountable and identify problems to be solved. We've blown way past that to screaming from the rooftops and rending our clothes about Trump lowering the corporate tax rate/Obamacare/children in cages/whatever outrage you want to pick that we promptly forgot as the news cycle churned over. Nobody bothers to defend the West anymore; it's imperialistic, misogynistic, anti-white, anti-black, antipathic to the middle and lower classes, exploitative of labor, sclerotic, bureaucratic, autocratic, whatever you want it to be man. Someone's gotta pick up the standard - we may not be improving lives as much as we were a half-century ago, but as far as I can tell, nobody else is doing better and this is still the system to emulate for innovation and human progress.

To your other post:

Sure! As long you're upholding their principles, rather than deconstructing them in hopes of delivering something even better. But it seems we're way past that point.

Someday, I'm sure humanity will come up with something better. I'm not going to buy into the hubris of the End of History and claim that we've solved the problem guys, it's liberal democracies all the way down and all we need to care about is execution. But like I said, I don't see anything better in the marketplace of ideas at the moment.

I may have phrased my posts poorly, because funnily enough I think the first part of your comment addresses my second post better than the latter.

On messages being shouted from the rooftops:

We've blown way past that to screaming from the rooftops and rending our clothes about Trump lowering the corporate tax rate/Obamacare/children in cages/whatever outrage you want to pick that we promptly forgot as the news cycle churned over.

I disagree. You'll know a message is shouted from the rooftops when you can get in trouble for disagreeing with it. If you get fired, blacklisted in an industry, debanked, or arrested, or if alphabet agencies have taskforces dedicated to scrubbing or throttling your disagreement from the internet. If you are looking at spending tens of thousands of dollars a year to put your daughter into a private religious school for a religion you don't believe in, in the hopes of turning down the volume of the message, it's probably being shouted from the rooftops. But the things you pointed at are just background noise.

On upholding liberal principles:

Someday, I'm sure humanity will come up with something better.

Yes, yes, I'm sure of that too, but that's not what I meant. The point is that when we do come up with something new, it will be, well, new. Something different from the current liberal system. It will fly or fall on it's own, and thus have no claim to the successes of liberalism, even if it does turn out to surpass it. Likewise people who are arguing for violating liberal principles now in order improve society, even as they call themselves liberals from the other side of their mouth, shouldn't get to claim the successes of liberalism. To be clear, I don't think you're doing it, though I may have been poking you to find out if you will.

By the way, has your worldview changed somewhat recently? I might be misremembering your comments from the old place, but I've been doing some double takes reading you lately. I seem to be getting the vibe of just a bit more sympathy for the dissidents? Not that you agree with us, just that we're not insane for complaining.

Last night, I turned on NPR in the car and listened to some guy expound about how the last 20 years of Ukrainian history are entirely the West's fault as we supported neo-nazis and genocide in the Donbas.

This morning, I open up globaltimes.cn and read about how Actually, China's COVID response has been entirely rational, orderly and planned this way from the beginning by our hyper-competent, divinely ordained leadership.

That's a classic. "We're not perfect, but over here you're free to criticize the government" has been the staple of American propaganda since at least the end of WWII. I'll grant you that we're a little bit more subtle about it than authoritarian states, but as the past few years are showing, it's not that our rulers are allowing criticism as a matter of principle, they're not even allowing it pragmatically on the off chance that us plebs might have a good point every once in a while, and it would be unwise to shut us up. It's a calculated play, it's better to let crazy doomsday preachers rant on street corners, and have people completely ignore them as they walk by on their way to work, than to make a show of silencing them. Of course the moment the crazy preacher gains a following and so much as influences an election in an unsanctioned direction, the knives come out, and the show is over.

we may not be improving lives as much as we were a half-century ago, but as far as I can tell, nobody else is doing better

That's another classic. The issue here is that when you start on top, and have a long way to fall, you might be able to use "nobody else is doing better" as an excuse for a very long time, even as things are getting obviously worse. Hell, if the whole world is becoming more authoritarian, you might be able to claim you're "liberal" even after installing a dictator, simply because the other dictators are worse.

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Don't mistake eloquence and verbosity for truth and just roll over and abandon your point because people posted 15 links to their extensive post histories from the last three years.

This is extremely good advice, and I entirely endorse it.

On the other hand, would you agree that Liberalism has in fact made promises? If so, what specific promises do you recognize being made, and how do you think they've turned out? Is education a reasonable area to start with?

On the other hand, would you agree that Liberalism has in fact made promises?

Sure, although it's probably changed some over the centuries and depending who you ask.

If so, what specific promises do you recognize being made, and how do you think they've turned out? Is education a reasonable area to start with?

If you let me take credit for everything since the enlightenment and French/American revolutions, it seems like an easy answer; look at literacy rates, STEM knowledge in the populace (what fraction of 19th century mill workers could tell you the Pythagorean theorem or that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, I wonder?), and, at the risk of Goodharting myself, High school/college/doctoral diplomas. If you're slightly more stringent, you could control for general 'progress' by comparing these metrics with 'illiberal' countries, and I expect we'd outperform them over the last several hundred years. If you insist on controlling for disparities in wealth, well, aren't you conceding to some degree that liberalism has some comparative advantage?

At the risk of sounding high-school-essay-level trite, liberalism promises self-determination; the right to choose one's spouse, one's religion, one's vocation. It promises political self-determination, free speech, so on and so forth.

Much of the criticism put forth below is less about the ideals and goals of liberalism, and rather instances of failed execution. Freedom of X is important, but people didn't really believe in it. You could be handed stone tablets laying out God's flawless ideology for humanity, and if Jimbo down the street decides to covet his neighbor's wife, we're still out of luck. If you'd argue that theory is all well and good but we're consequentialists damnit, much like Winston Churchill on democracy, it still seems like western liberal democracies are getting better results.

If you let me take credit for everything since the enlightenment and French/American revolutions

Sure! As long you're upholding their principles, rather than deconstructing them in hopes of delivering something even better. But it seems we're way past that point.

I think this is probably about the best steel-man one could reasonably expect.

Are liberalism/the Enlightenment the same thing, in your view? Connected things? Entirely separate things?

Is the US a liberal democracy? Was it one prior to the civil rights act? Prior to suffrage? Prior to the abolition of slavery? If we reversed some or all of these policies tomorrow, would we still be a "liberal democracy"? Is "liberal democracy" applied based on objective criteria, or do we judge a nation relative to its contemporaries?

More to the point, do we label based on the ideological approach to policy, or do we judge based on the policies chosen and their outcomes?

I'm certainly willing to let you take credit for everything since the enlightenment and French/American revolutions, but shouldn't that credit be for the bad things that sprang from the ideology, not merely the good? And shouldn't we be rigorous in questioning whether any thing, good or bad, is actually attributable to the ideology, not merely coincident? Take Literacy, for example.

In early U.S. colonial history, teaching children to read was the responsibility of the parents for the purpose of reading the Bible. The Massachusetts law of 1642 and the Connecticut law of 1650 required that not only children but also servants and apprentices were required to learn to read.

...And of course that was only the continuation of previous policies among protestants, going back to the Reformation itself, if I'm not mistaken. Is Christianity part of the Enlightenment/Liberal Vangaurd? Does its centuries-old drive for universal literacy, valuing of education, philosophy and science get some credit for the water we swim in as well?

At the risk of sounding high-school-essay-level trite, liberalism promises self-determination; the right to choose one's spouse, one's religion, one's vocation. It promises political self-determination, free speech, so on and so forth.

The Soviets promised most of the things on that list, claimed to be motivated by Enlightenment principles while doing it, and insisted strenuously that they were delivering. Of course, we know they were "illiberal" thanks to hindsight, despite the fact that most of their unimpeachably liberal contemporaries completely failed to recognize that fact for a generation or two. Do you see the problem?

...I fear this is not cohering into a legible argument, only a series of disconnected gripes.

I think the term "liberal", by itself, doesn't actually mean much. I think the way people typically use it is as a synonym for Enlightenment ideology. The problem with this is that Enlightenment ideology has repeatedly resulted in wildly illiberal outcomes, and the most successful "liberal" societies have not actually hued very closely to Enlightenment ideology in a number of very important ways, among them a deep and abiding connection to the Christian faith. I note that societies that lacked or removed this connection in favor of pure Enlightenment ideology did very, very badly indeed, and I note that as Christian faith has passed the tipping point into serious decline, even anglosphere countries have found themselves in a protracted crisis of rising illiberalism.

I think the general argument you're sketching the outlines of papers over these realities in ways that are easy to miss if one simply goes with the cultural zeitgeist. Enlightenment ideology takes credit for outcomes it did not solely or sometimes even mainly create, and it ditches all responsibility for harms it very clearly causes. The Enlightenment is certainly one of the sources American Culture has drawn from, but it has drawn even more heavily from others; when it comes time to tally benefits and harms, all the benefits are tallied to the Enlightenment, whether it caused them or not, and all the harms are tallied to the others, whether they were responsible for them or not. Then too, one can simply ignore or define away harms in the present, and likewise for benefits in the past; history is just writing, after all, and statistics are famously malleable.

I think the above is how the liberal triumphalism you're describing is generated, and I think it's a fair start at describing why it is doomed to collapse.

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What did liberalism promise that it hasn’t fulfilled though?

Briefly? The same utopian outcome all reformers expect will happen: clear away the dead wood, take the heavy hand of the past and outmoded traditions from round the throat of present-day humanity, allow liberty to flourish and expand, and believe that humans are naturally good and it is only the existence of laws that make them criminals. Take away impediments, and we will all naturally be good, just, law-abiding, productive citizens who spend our spare time in being creative and doing works of charity.

Does that sound like modern-day humanity to you, in the mass? Many people are indeed nicer, more charitable, etc. But many more people have taken the liberties and now demand their 'rights' without feeling any corresponding sense of citizenship, duty or responsibility. I think some of the more stringent online types describe this, uncharitably, as gibs. I do think that is tarring everyone with the same brush, but on the other hand I have seen it for myself in a previous job where people looking for social benefits did parrot off a line about being denied what they felt they were entitled to as down to 'racism' (just to clarify, all parties here - the clients and the clerks administering the government schemes - were white). These young persons had clearly been taught this line of baloney in school about how if they didn't get all they wanted, well, racism sexism homophobia discrimination (fill out the rest of the bingo card yourself). That they should play their part in society as citizens and participate for the common good of all? What kind of crazy, bigoted, conservative, right-wing idea is that? Classic Liberalism, but now it's deemed wrongthink.

What did liberalism promise that it hasn’t fulfilled though?

Freedom of thought, religion, speech, and association? Equality between races and sexes, and lowering of class differences?

Also we have done a decently good job of living together in a diverse society. It’s not perfect, but I doubt it ever was.

Yes, and it only requires a level of surveillance and propaganda, that was the subject of tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories a mere two decades ago.

Now we’re letting that frustration out

No. The levels of social , economic, and political pressure preventing letting frustrations out has gone up exponentially even within the last decade. You are trying to use the fact that it's not completely stamped out to claim that it's allowed beyond what it used to be.

Other people have offered replies, and @gattsuru in particular brings the receipts as usual, but I wonder if this is something one really needs to see for themselves to appreciate. If you want to see it, you need to go back and really look at the things people were saying decades ago, the pictures they were painting about what the future world was supposed to look like, the promises they were selling to people about the concrete things their ideological proposals would achieve.

You also, probably, need to understand that your own experience doesn't generalize. I'd imagine just on general demographics that you're probably doing pretty okay, and so is most of your social circle. You have far less reason to notice or care that, say, every political speech on education in the last fifty years has effectively been the same speech on repeat, explaining how the things that never ever change are totally going to change this time. For you, I'd imagine, that lack of change isn't too bad. Other people's experience is different.

For a longer if not terribly adequate treatment of the issues, try this multipart comment, especially starting in the last paragraph of the first part. The problem your argument faces is that it doesn't convince the people it needs to convince, because it doesn't actually address their concerns. Hence BLM, hence Trump.

You are correct that dissidents have always been silenced. What you're missing is that a lot of our current society was built on the promise that there was a better way, that silencing dissidents wasn't necessary. That promise is now load-bearing, with the increasingly tenuous peace we enjoy depending on its maintenance: it allowed a great increase in the values-diversity of our society, to the point where it's no longer possible to get a workable agreement on who the dissidents are and how to suppress them. Consequently, censorship no longer functions to maintain social cohesion, but further erodes it.

Yeah, this comment was pretty out of touch, not gonna lie.

I dunno, it's the sort of reply I get pretty frequently on this point, actually. The social consensus slides freely between "change is long overdue, no more waiting, it's time to force the issue" when it's a change the consensus favors, and "what's the problem, everything's fine" when a change opposed to that consensus is proposed. Once you see this tendency once, you see it everywhere. it's completely endemic.

In my defense I was pretty drunk when I made this comment. As much as that's a defense.

I've personally shifted in the last couple of years from the 'everything is fine' camp to the 'change' camp, so perhaps it's just vestigial thought patterns rearing their head.

I will say that I was curious to see what the promises people came up with were, but probably shouldn't have defended liberalism so hard.

Rather famously, we spent and continue to spend a ton of money on the liberal promise of education for everyone, and it turns out that they can't do that; FCFromSSC had a pretty entertaining post on CultureWarRoundup about it when DeBoer finally admitted to the writing on the wall, though given he got modhatted for linking it contemporaneously I'm a little hesitant to link it now.

More broadly, though, there was a short time where people said "live and let live", and even if you couldn't exactly believe they meant it, they at least were willing to put more than a little lip service to the concept. And then theory encountered practice, and it was easier to believe in Santa Claus.

Firing people for their bad speech or associations was so beyond the pale that we built entire structures and train every teenager with stories of how important it is to resist, until it turns out that this was a useful power to have, and then an entire administrative infrastructure was developed to provide corporate liability should sufficiently large businesses not do it fast enough. We've found that protest is the voice of the unheard, until the wrong unheard do it, and then when countries declare martial law and confiscate bank account there's just a bit of a shrug. We've found that political abuses of law enforcement powers were so unacceptable to earn consent decree after consent decree, until it could happen to someone who 'deserved' it. We've found that government pressures to restrict free speech were awful, until they happened in ways people liked and then became a nothingburger. Freedom of religious belief was absolutely vital for two decades, then turned into lacite, and then every so often even the mention of those beliefs becomes its own violation.

And this goes on for even the small stuff, in a thousand different ways, on a thousand different topics. Anything that could be remotely read as celebrating violence was so unacceptable as to result in new reddit rules... and people who should have noticed patterns just keep missing these certain occassions. Taking kids from their own flesh and blood was to be a last-resort, even under violations of some criminal law, the sort of atrocity that left people walked in dazed horror, and also perfectly acceptable as an administratively-designed ad-hoc threat against someone using their constitutional rights. There's been a few places like EFF that at least drop a mention to their principles against their politics every few years, but the fall of the ACLU and other core institutions has been legendary; where they could once at least use a fig leaf and pretend they merely ignored rights that they didn't like because other groups focused on them, they now highlight individual people they don't like.

You're right that dissidents were silenced in the past, but the liberal movement was built, in no small part, about protecting the rights of those dissidents to speak more publicly! And then it turned out, no matter how much we avowed generalized principles that would protect everyone, the people actually making decisions and a worrying number of hangers-on either (charitably) designed their reference classes in such specific ways as to carefully exclude everyone not on their side or (less charitably) just wanted their dissidents freed.

This may not be especially severe by some historic standards -- and I agree we're pretty far from the KKK-era South, at least -- but if you wanted to do a hard comparison to the McCarthy era it's at least within an order of magnitude, and the McCarthy era is far from what the liberal movement considered a best alternative to negotiated agreement.

Rather famously, we spent and continue to spend a ton of money on the liberal promise of education for everyone, and it turns out that they can't do that; FCFromSSC had a pretty entertaining post on CultureWarRoundup about it when DeBoer finally admitted to the writing on the wall, though given he got modhatted for linking it contemporaneously I'm a little hesitant to link it now.

I'm not. @FCfromSSC's comment was amazing and deserves to be spread. Context.

FCFromSSC had a pretty entertaining post on CultureWarRoundup about it when DeBoer finally admitted to the writing on the wall

Though I disagree with Freddie on a ton of stuff, I do respect him for things like this: he sees and has seen the reality on the ground, and pushes back against the idea that all that is needed for every kid to go to Harvard is moar money. He acknowledges that - gasp! cover your ears from the horrid notion! - there is indeed a range of intellect and intelligence, and not every kid is as bright as the others. That you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

This does not mean ignoring the less academically able kids, but it does mean facing up to the truth: some kids are never going to go to any sort of college at all. That is a truth that can't be accepted, however, because we've constructed society (or are being swept along by the whirlwind of technological progress) where in order to get any kind of decent life you need that degree. Permanent, pensionable jobs have pretty much gone by the wayside as what you expect to do: get a good job, stay with one company for most of your career, retire from there. The world of work is much more fragile, transient, and vulnerable to shocks and upheaval now, and you have to be constantly re-inventing yourself, upskilling, keeping on top of new tech, jumping from company to company to get promotions, and so on. Even the white collar world is not immune to this, and unless you have a good education in the desirable skills that will land you a decent job where you can be fairly sure you can sell your skills for good salaries and have a career, then you are looking at the uncertain world of the gig economy, the temporary contract, the freelancer, and now the threat of being replaced by AI.

So to get on the career ladder, you need a college degree (let's put aside all the Caplan stuff about signalling for the moment). In order to do that, there is the idealistic notion of "everyone can go to college" and the practical realisation that if you admit that not all can or should go, and that merely having a degree is no longer in itself the guarantee of upward mobility and security that once it was, then you are saying "a lot of kids are going to be, for all intents and purposes, on the scrapheap once they are adults, unwanted by society since they can't contribute anything useful to the new knowledge economy".

That last is political suicide and also possibly setting the scene for widespread social upheaval and unrest. So you put pressure on the schools and the education system to pass everybody, to put them all on the college (any kind of college) track and you ignore or bury any evidence to the contrary that yeah, you do need streaming in schools because not everyone is equally able for the subjects and yeah, not everyone is fit for college so how about we tailor their education to what they can do?

That blue-collar work (unless you're a tradesman, and even that is hard work and no guarantee that everyone is going to be an independent small businessman) is diminishing, that we've outsourced it overseas for cheaper labour, and that there aren't the traditional manufacturing industries to soak up labour around anymore means that a lot of people in the lower half of the population are facing a future that is grim; possibly go into service work, which is low-paid, low-status, and biased towards shift work and cutting down hours so that employees don't hit the limits at which legal entitlements kick in. For a section of the upper half of the population, in certain white collar jobs, that future is already there (journalism) or looming with the threat/promise of AI.

Freddie sees this because he's been at the coalface. But there are a lot of people in power in the existing system for whom it is imperative that they turn a blind eye to all that, hence "all kids are equally smart and capable, it's down to grit and growth mindset, and if that doesn't work then it's the fault of systemic racism, and all must have prizes".

Thanks for the explanation!

What does "Skokie" mean, though?

Presumably it’s a reference to the KKK’s demonstration in Skokie, IL in the 1970s. The ACLU defended the KKK’s right to peacefully march.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_America_v._Village_of_Skokie

A famous court case from the 1970s - neo-Nazis wanted to march through a Jewish neighbourhood, and the ACLU controversially defended the neo-Nazis, on free speech grounds. It's one of the most famous examples of publicly fighting for a "I may disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it" position.

This incident, one of the iconic incidents on which 90s liberalism was founded. Shorthand for the dominant social consensus in favor of expansive freedom of expression, which used the case as a common-knowledge touchstone.

Your satire needs work.

This post is not really that funny, and it's not really fooling anyone either.

Can we have a rule where people who post long walls of texts like this get banned/warned? Paragraphing is an important skill.

Also, people need to go and spend some time on less classy internet forums so they learn how to avoid getting baited like this. There's a ridiculous number of comments for a post that explicitly calls for this very forum to be banned.

I see wokism as a first step into this plan, if you think wokism is trying to brainwash you, your right, and its a good thing that they are, because the alternative is being brainwashed by default oppression. This is why I support woke nonsense, as a pragmatic measure.

I understand that this is a low effort troll but this line of reasoning is so feable. If it's nonsense and you are creating systems founded on it then it's going to fall apart or turn on you. If you think this is some kind of clever turning our beliefs back in on themselves you are not as smart as you think you are because this whole thing is painfully incoherent.

Why stop there? The only way to be sure is to kill everyone. Can't have war and suffering if nobody is alive to experience those! Maximise those paperclips!

Thomas Aquinas said that the saints in heaven will rejoice over the suffering of the damned in hell, this is the telos of their existence.

I have a feeling you misunderstand the meaning there. The contemplation of the perfect justice of God is what is part of the joy of the blessed, not the suffering in itself. To quote from Canto IX of the "Paradiso":

'Yet here we don't repent, but smile instead,

not at our fault, which comes not back to mind,

but for that Power which ordered and foresaw.

'Here we contemplate the craft that beautifies

such love, and here discern the good

with which the world above informs the one below.

You can just say you believe in exterminationist revolutionary terror against your class enemies and enemy ethnicities...

You don't have to pretend this somehow has something to do with the ideology of John Stuart Mill.

You can just say "Indifferent universe I've seen what you've done for Mao and the Khmer Rouge, and I want that for America."

.

Like what parts of liberalism do you even think you believe in? Clearly not freedom of concience, association, speech, contract, travel... nor the right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.

Wow, few things:

  1. Paragraphs help most writing by breaking it up into readable chunks. I'm not saying this will help here, but it does seem like the most easily addressable aspect of this ... thing?

  2. I'm not sure why you think you are liberal. Do you just like the way the word sounds? I can't figure it out. You are at most a "progressive" but I don't want to insult all progressives by lumping them in with you. I think you fit in best with communists / maoists / stalinists / etc. They share your belief in "everything will be great once I kill all the people on the right that disagree with me".

  3. Its always possible that you are a troll, and that is what some people will think here. I've become a big believer in a variant of Poe's law: doesn't matter how crazy it sounds there is someone out there that believes it. I'll treat the views you espouse seriously, even if the actual person writing them doesn't see them as serious.

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Most of the arguments I’ve read against transhumanism seem to boil down to some variant of:

I find that distasteful on a gut level.

I don’t find this convincing? If your best argument is “I don’t like it,” you may want to reassess your position.

I don’t find this convincing?

Was he trying to convince you, or just describe his reactions?

If your best argument is “I don’t like it,” you may want to reassess your position.

Quite the opposite, always beware anyone that tells you to ignore your gut.

Feeling your way around an issue beats reason and knowledge any day. The illiberal trads and woke can agree on that.

Not just wokes and trads, everyone. Never met a centrist that was guided by reason over emotion.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that my gut instincts have evolved over millions of years of pressure, and wouldn't have done so for no reason. When I'm disgusted by the smell of shit, it's because it's unclean and I'm being warned to stay away. When I get an "off" feeling about someone, it's some long-buried threat detection instinct briefly flaring to life again.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that my gut instincts have evolved over millions of years of pressure, and wouldn't have done so for no reason.

Check what were instinctive "gut reactions" of "the people" to wearing glasses, autopsy of the dead, vaccination, anesthesia, open body surgery, blood transfusion, organ transplants and other medical treatments we now take for granted when they were first introduced.

ANCESTOR: Grandson? Are you mad? You let a Jew to poison you till you are unconscious, cut you open with knife, and then suck blood from someone else and pump it into your body? And you even pay the Christkiller for this satanic black magic? Are you even good Christian?

Pointing out the lack of limiting principles is always fun, and the best part about it is that it can be done both ways.

DESCENDANT: Happy birthday Grandpa! Go ahead open it! It's a gift card for the local CRISPR clinic, they have a new treatment for making penises grow out of your forehead, the first 5 are free! What do you mean you don't want it? Why do you always have to stand in the way of progress, grandpa?

Comparing my gut reaction to getting a dick on my forehead somewhere in old age to my gut reaction of succumbing to dementia and osteoporosis in old age... I'll take the dicks, thanks.

Sure. If there weren't obvious temptations to transhumanism, I wouldn't find it half as dangerous as I do.

That said, are you going to stop at dicks, gramps?

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Check what were instinctive "gut reactions" of "the people" to wearing glasses, autopsy of the dead, vaccination, anesthesia, open body surgery, blood transfusion, organ transplants and other medical treatments we now take for granted when they were first introduced.

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

You're using cherry-picked examples. I'm sure you can think of plenty of other things that people's gut reactions told them to laugh at and which turned out to be laughable.

And even your cherrypicked list includes things that didn't work well when they were introduced (operations before sterile conditions were understood, blood transfusions before blood types were known.) And I know of no evidence that glasses were ever rejected using gut feelings.

If your best argument is “I don’t like it,” you may want to reassess your position.

"I don't like it" is the only argument ever uttered against any political position by the nature of political positions.

Any political statement is ultimately a moral statement about what ought to transpire which is ultimately an aesthetic statement about what good circumstances and good lives look like.

All of the arguments that could possibly exist for trans-humanism boil down to "I like it" and vice versa.

Wars have been fought over lesser sentiments than disgust.

All of the arguments that could possibly exist for trans-humanism boil down to "I like it" and vice versa.

Ah, but you forget the «otherwise you're getting made obsolete and reduced to praying for generosity of your superhuman overlords» argument, which is a pragmatic appeal to values of self-determination and self-preservation the other party plausibly (and in most cases, including this one, obviously) shares.

Transhumanism proper isn't about fetishistic bullshit like embedding chips into the skin, nor is it analogous to casual sex. It's not merely a moral hazard to conservatives, and doesn't really allow for smug prudish attitude.

It doesn't really matter that little people find transhumanism icky, except for those unfortunate enough to depend on their goodwill. The class that holds power will be augmented, by more or less icky technical means. One can argue it already has been.

The idea that normative beliefs are ultimately founded on aesthetic instincts is a strangely exuberant and infantile one to be proposed by a conservative. Maybe that's a stage preceding acknowledgement that your worldview has been deboonked in your own mind and only hinges on obstinacy. Generally, people think their oughts are derived from what is, and I'd charitably assume they are informed at least by what these people believe is factual truth.

a pragmatic appeal to values of self-determination and self-preservation the other party plausibly

Ah yes, "Gott mit uns".

If we grant the transitive argument, this still rests upon the axiom that living the life that is being proposed is better than death, which, again, relies on an aesthetic framework which is non obvious. And I think it's obviously anathema to my own. "Live free or die" and so forth.

Consider the supposed irrelevance of John the Savage v. The World Controllers. Now which is the good man?

Transhumanism proper isn't about fetishistic bullshit

I hear you, it is about something much more sacrilegious, which is transcending the human condition to become something else. It's about bringing heaven on earth and other such utopianism. You will find nothing more opposed to the goals of conservatism and traditionalism, which hold our nature to be immutable and that one should refrain from immanentizing the eschaton.

The idea that normative beliefs are ultimately founded on aesthetic instincts is a strangely exuberant and infantile one to be proposed by a conservative.

I'd refrain from calling Aristostle a child if I were you.

Now how exactly do you propose to "deboonk" unfalsifiable metaphysics? I mean seriously, when someone claims to have solved the problem that has stumped all occidental philosophers since the modern period you'd think they would bring some receipts.

What's it going to be this time, logical positivism?

Generally, people think their oughts are derived from what is, and I'd charitably assume they are informed at least by what these people believe is factual truth.

That people delude themselves into thinking that their moral tastes are dictated by reality does not make them right about such things. For surely if they were right, they would all agree or be able to debate themselves to agreement. And yet that is not the case. Even among especially reasonable people.

The existence of the is-ought gap should be enough to convince anyone of the vacuity of this idea, but we now have studied moral impulses enough that we can model how people react to dilemmas. And it has basically nothing to do with reason, facts or truth.

People do not reason themselves into morality, they create rationalizations for their preexisting moral jugements.

This still rests upon the axiom that living the life that is being proposed is better than death, which, again, relies on an aesthetic framework which is non obvious.

Hey, I totally dig the aesthetic of suicidal resistance.

But the point is, there's a great deal of difference between mere dislike and maximally committed antagonism. For most people, their life (and related issues, such as avoidance of suffering, enslavement and mental decline, which I'll omit for simplicity) ranks very highly in the hierarchy of values, so when facing the choice between certainly losing their life and embracing some disliked proposition, they don't hesitate long (this is why mugging works). Indeed, they may fold even over minor discomfort, seeing as they routinely hand over chunks of their autonomy and privacy and ability to shape future to save a bit of time or mental energy, to get a nugget of entertainment or stick it to the outgroup.

Thus for them this is a pragmatic, not aesthetic argument: a factual claim about ways towards realizing their own genuine desires; their aesthetics are compatible with transhumanism by default.

And many arguments are pragmatic in this sense. Outside the context of soapboxing, people rarely deal in absolutes, and live lives full of contingent compromises. On this topic, too, we know the score. Had OG Luddites known what fate awaits them, I'm sure most of them would have made peace with machines; just like most other workers have.

You will find nothing more opposed to the goals of conservatism and traditionalism

Eh, I may be able to think of a few competitive options. What's the trad opinion on subhumanism? It's my invention, fresh outta the oven. The gist is that, forget immanentizing eschatons, being a baseline human is a chore, and most reasons to be one have been diminished by progress, so we should accept being less than that. We should return to monke, to a masturbating animal with shriveled neocortex, an irrelevant and fungible load-balancing appendix to corporate economics, and burn out in sedated contentment.

(This is plausibly the sort of shape your descendants will assume, should they inherit your obstinacy. Seeing as transhumanism is the worst thing possible, would this alternative make you happier?)

For surely if they were right, they would all agree or be able to debate themselves to agreement.

And I wouldn't be so sure about that: people are very good at motivated reasoning, to which they owe their prowess at denying reality.

there's a great deal of difference between mere dislike and maximally committed antagonism

One of intensity, not of nature.

Start turning people's children against them, see how much they value their lives over your doom.

You can boil the frog because people don't like to think much about where things are going or don't have the ability to see very far. But when things are clear the moral calculi can become quicker than even conscious thought.

Thus for them this is a pragmatic, not aesthetic argument: a factual claim about ways towards realizing their own genuine desires

And pray tell, what are those "genuine desires" and how are they decided?

I'm sorry but you're just repeating the same objection and it doesn't work. Just because one can make instrumental arguments about what works doesn't answer the underlying question of "works in the service of what?".

We should return to monke

No. Nor are we able. Nor are we able to advance to krab either.

We're not Australopithecus and we're not something beyond either, we're Homo Sapiens, and that's what we must deal with instead of dreaming of reforming humanity in the image of modernism.

That said I'm not against adopting new useful technology. I'm against the idea of pretending that compromising our humanity over it is useful or even possible.

My view of the far future is far closer to Dune than it is Eclipse Phase. We may get more sophisticated or different gizmoes, but for all intents and purposes we'll still be the same great apes and given all attempts at turning us into something different have ended in massive fucking disaster, I'll hold that it is the inevitable consequence until proven wrong.

But as I've often mentioned in this place, if it comes to my descendants having to be space north korea to remain humans, so be it. That's still the preferable option in my opinion.

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I think IGI would say: What exactly is wrong with being "made obsolete and reduced to praying for generosity of your superhuman overlords", other than us not liking it?

For what it's worth, I agree with you that this is the likely consequence of avoiding transhumanism, but I think IGI is saying that both sides of the argument are simply pointing to consequences and pointing out how undesirable they are.

Ah, but you forget the «otherwise you're getting made obsolete and reduced to praying for generosity of your superhuman overlords» argument.

The thing about ought and is, is: it's as much a compelling argument to join the Borg, as it is a compelling argument to declare the Butlerian Jihad now, rather than later.

Upvoted for cogent analysis, though I'll add that as a staunch transhumanist myself it felt a bit like pulling teeth.

Go away. This is either another adequacy.org style troll, or a strawman.

And people, please stop responding seriously to it. The chance that he actually believes this is just about zero. The rhetoric is written to be maximally inflammatory, rather than to express a position. Anyone who actually thought evil needed to be destroyed wouldn't use negatively emotionally charged words like "genocide", "cancer", and destroying "heresy" to describe what he wants done.

It's like having someone argue in favor of abortion by saying "we should commence baby killing". Real abortion supporters wouldn't call it that.

It's not believable enough to be inflammatory.

It's like having someone argue in favor of abortion by saying "we should commence baby killing". Real abortion supporters wouldn't call it that.

Not precisely, Jiro. The scholarly and academic papers that I've looked up online (insofar as I can since you have to log in as part of an academic institution to get the full articles) refer to the "fetus" (American spelling) if they ever tip-toe up to mentioning "killing".

It's only a very few feminist theoreticians who will go Abortion involves killing - and that's okay! and even they won't out-and-out mention "babies":

I agree with Nelson. There is something infantilizing about denying the fact that embryos die when we scrape them out of the bodies of which they are a part. It sentimentalizes pregnant or potentially pregnant humans as fundamentally nonviolent creatures to imply that we can’t handle the truth about what we are up to when we opt out. And it patronizes abortion-getters to insist that we are only making a health care choice, rather than (also) extinguishing a future child. In my view, recognizing that gestating manufactures a proto-person requires acknowledging that abortion kills a proto-person. A baby is completely dependent on human care in order to stay alive, but its needs could be filled by any person—whereas a fetus, a proto-person, is ineluctably dependent on specific person.

...This might seem counterintuitive in the context of an argument in favor of abortion-as-killing, but the distinction between making fetuses killable, and making it easy and stigma-free for people to take the decision to kill a fetus, is significant. The former refers to casting something (a lab rat, for example) out of the sphere the grievable, thanks to a tidy and final verdict on the permissibility of systematically sacrificing its life to a greater cause. The latter, while expanding access to the means of feticide, does not necessarily require any such sanitization of violence.

There seems to have been a fascinating case back in 1975 (the things you find when you go Googling!):

Roe and Doe also did not specifically define abortion, leaving another open question whose answer could affect Edelin's fate. If abortions presuppose the death of the fetus, as Edelin claimed, then his entire procedure was legal and immune from prosecution. But Flanagan's medical experts insisted that an abortion was nothing more than the termination of pregnancy, which could sometimes result in a live birth.

The definition of birth itself became pivotal as witnesses raised questions of fact about the procedure Edelin used and the exact moment the fetus died, Doctors testifying against him agreed that birth means the separation of the placenta from the wall of the womb, the moment at which the fetus "goes on its own systems" for nourishment and oxygen. Defense witnesses repeated the more commonly understood definition of the word as involving expulsion or removal from the mother's body. And Judge McGuire supported that understanding of the word in his charge to the jury.

The distinction was crucial, for Edelin was accused of killing the aborted fetus before removing it from inside its mother. Flanagan charged that he held it motionless inside the womb and watched a wall clock for three minutes as it struggled for air and died. Edelin, supported by testimony from two nurses and a medical student, denied the three-minute wait, and claimed that in fact there was no working wall clock for him to watch. But he did not deny that he had no intention of delivering a live baby: "It would have been contrary to the wishes of the mother."

You do get the canned responses to give to awkward questions worksheet that relies on parroting "there is no one-size-fits-all legislation". Also, seemingly, shoes are very important in making these decisions - you can't make the decision if you haven't walked in the shoes:

When people are making difficult, complicated, personal medical decisions, one-size-fits-all laws don’t work.

2. Why haven’t you taken a stand against infanticide or killing babies who survive an abortion?

What you should avoid

Don’t say "partial-birth," "late-term," or "born alive."

Murder of any person, including newborns, is already a crime, as it should be. This question is not rooted in medical care or science, but rather an intentional disinformation campaign.

Tragically, sometimes a woman gets a diagnosis of a serious health complication that threatens her life or health. Other times, a family learns later in pregnancy there is a very serious fetal diagnosis, or the baby is dying and can’t survive for long. When people are making difficult, complicated, personal medical decisions, one-size-fits-all laws don’t work. We cannot make a woman’s decisions because we haven’t walked in her shoes.

This seems like a troll to me. But if it's not a troll, then it's you wishing death on your outgroup without really engaging the argument in a plausibly serious way--for which you have already been banned once.

This is a discussion forum. If you aren't interested in engaging seriously and charitably with the thoughts of people whose views you abhor, then maybe this is not the place for you.

Banned for three days.

Banning comments like this is bad considering how rare they are. If they were more common I'd agree with a ban, but there is a genuine discourse to be had when people have put their obvious intent of destroying the outgroup into the open. Preventing people from engaging with it by banning the person who opened up leaves this space poorer for it.

If banning comments like this keeps them rare, then I'm happy with that. While the original is a troll, I don't think that there are very many genuine posters on here who do have an "obvious intent of destroying the outgroup" and if there are any, then I prefer that they realise this is not a space where "let's kill everyone we don't like and everyone we disagree with" is welcomed (it may be debated, but not that it is "welcome fellow traveller, yes indeed let us wade in blood up to the ankle!"), and if they see bans and think "Aw man, I thought these guys were dependably [whatever colour of being '-pilled' we're up to now, between redpilled, blackpilled and the rest of it] but they've just succumbed to the Woke Menace" and betake themselves elsewhere, then good.

A few comments like this that get ignored (if obvious trolls) or debated (if they seem sincere) is tolerable. A flood of them is not.

Any discourse that happens ends up happening downthread, not with the actual user. And that discourse between actual contributors ends up being about how evil outgroup is for their "obvious intent of destroying the outgroup." No one would deny people like the troll exist--imagine a viewpoint, and there's always someone, somewhere out there who believes it--but it's just burning down a strawman of those views. It generates a significantly worse ratio of heat to light.

We've got a fairly good thread going here. Do you think your assessment of the likely outcome stands?

It's better than I'd have expected. On the other hand, the original poster has in fact been banned; if he weren't, he'd be in the thread throwing shit everywhere.

A fair point.

Leaving the banned OP’s manifestopost visible and allowing us to “poke the corpse with a stick” is certainly entertaining and enlightening, on the other hand.

I think it's kind of pathetic to not let the guy have a chance to respond. Just looks like effeminate bullying.

There are community standards and legal reasons which both need to be upheld.

This comment is irrelevant to what I wrote. I'm not unaware that there are rules and preferred etiquette here. The point being made was that due to the rarity and novelty of the post you can let it slide.

On the other hand, no, there are not legal reasons at play here. The post did not break laws, which is why it was not removed and the user only got a 3 day ban. You can, in fact, make very provocative statements about what you think should have happened or what you think will happen or should happen in some undetermined legal manner in the future to some group.

To clarify, I meant that the post itself did not break laws, but allowing the user to generate and gather followers here through potential responses would put the site in jeopardy.

'Gather followers'? This is silly. Akin to calling someone responding to your comments 'harassment'.

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Just looks like effeminate bullying.

And what is wrong with effeminacy, you big burly butch man, you? 😘

The bullying part.

Verbal jousting is surely more entertaining but given the guy basically said that all his enemies should be silenced and killed, I think the irony is fitting.

This is kinda sneery but I've always wondered how the IQ realists here square the fact that high IQ is more corelated with liberalism than with any marker of social success; and that low IQ is more corelated with conservatism than with any marker of failure (other than getting charged for felonies).

I guess it just sucks to suck

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What are you basing this off of?

Given that white liberals are on average richer and better educated than white conservatives, it’s probably true that once you adjust for race there’s probably a correlation between having a higher IQ and voting D. But it’s a much stronger claim you’re making, and I’d like to see the evidence.

In elizabethan england, having a high IQ was correlated with the queen's court, probably. It's possible for smart people to be wrong! Also see how half of the first post in 'open minded progressives' is just shitting on conservatives. Conservatives are wrong too!

high IQ is more corelated with liberalism than with any marker of social success

this seems to evoke a study or poll or something. What study or poll? It'd be kinda weird if IQ is more strongly associated with being a liberal than things that are determined by standardized test scores like college admission, income, etc, although that might be explained by liberalism being continuous while 'social outcomes' being relatively binary.

Can you name some of "the IQ realists here"? If so, would you care to guess at, say, how many of them voted for George W. Bush in 2000, or Romney in 2008?

Imposing a literacy test for voting would show us dumb hicks whose boss. Just look at all those graphs reddit likes to post about how uneducated southern red states are.

Surely that policy would result in a Blue Wave, right?

Most IQ realists tend to be liberals themselves, if only because they are aware that their views are very unpopular and vulnerable to censorship. But it's worth noting that high IQ does not necessarily mean having a correct ideology. The highest-IQ Europeans of a thousand years ago spent their intelligence on elaborate proofs for the existence of God. A hundred and fifty years ago, eugenics and scientific racism were the mainstream ideology. If intelligent people nowadays spend their grey matter on writing diversity statements rather than studying astrology, that reflects simply a change in fashion and culture.

I guess it just sucks to suck

This is very sneery.

This is low effort / boo outgroup. Its also not the kind of thing for a top level comment. 3 day ban. Don't do this.

You must be new to the IQ literature. Research shows high IQ is correlated with fiscal conservativism and that republicans have higher iqs than dems.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289614001081

Indeed given the demographics involved this is hardly surprising. Sucks to suck, for sure

Don't respond to trollish, rule-breaking posts with trollish, rule-breaking posts of your own.

I’m merely correcting the record. Not sure how citing data accurately makes me trollish

This:

Indeed given the demographics involved this is hardly surprising. Sucks to suck, for sure

Specifically, IQ is positively correlated with classical liberalism. As a classical liberal, this doesn't bother me much.

Specifically, IQ is positively correlated with classical liberalism. As a classical liberal, this doesn't bother me much.

The only (self selected and unrepresentative) survey of political opinions of extremely high IQ individuals (150+IQ) is here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Nine_Society

Rather dated, but it is the only thing I could find.

http://milesresearch.com/tns/summary.htm

Summary

The TNS opinions sampled here show a clear preference for minimal government involvement in personal lifestyle matters (drugs, alcohol, tobacco, firearms, pornography, gambling) and commercial business (subsidies, genetic engineering, Internet commerce, trade with China). In addition to preferring a minimum of government regulation, TNS members wish to see an overhaul of our present tax system, support greater funding for scientific research, and do not want the military used as an 'international police force.'

It's low IQ to assume that trends studied in America extrapolate to all humans everywhere across all times, especially in the domain of politics.

But IQ is correlated with trait openness which correlates with liberal temperament. Liberal in the "more free exchange of everything, including ideas liberal" sense.

That does not imply Woke "liberals", who are quite hostile to the free exchange of new ideas.

In short, the word liberal refers to a thousand things. And if you are gonna try to gotcha people, you need to be more clear about it.

IQ is corelated with socio-economic status, which is heavily correlated with ideological compliance since they intellgently intuit what's good for their careers and social advancement (though such a motive is disproportionately the subject of self-delusion).

The high-IQ in the Soviet Union disproportionately became Party Members.

The High-IQ in Medieval europe disproportionately held non-heretical beliefs.

The High-IQ in Imperial japan disproportionately worshipped the emperor.

The High-IQ in Nazi Germany disproportionately supported the Fuher.

The High-IQ in Saudi Arabia disproportionately support Wahhabi Islam.

The High-IQ in China disproportionately support "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics".

And the High-IQ in the US disproportionately support "Liberal Democracy"...and will endorse whatever economic and political system the US has as "liberal democracy" until someone in authority tells them those aren't the words they're using for the regime anymore.

They'll support "Our democracy" and the "liberal international order" no matter if a majority of the people oppose it, and no matter if it tramples every single liberty and free market norm ever referred to as "liberal"

One, rather liberal, answer is that conservatism is based on relatively unsophisticated heuristics for minimizing risk from novelty, exposure to outsiders and attempts at independent thinking – things beneficial for navigating modern society. Smarter people tend to be confident that they're better than that, and they're kinda right (thus, left).

Another, rather illiberal, answer is that IQ is relevant because it predicts comprehensive success at navigating society, from school to retirement. One of the most important components of such a success is generally avoiding pissing off people stronger than you. IQ is required to figure out their preferences regarding your behavior and modify it accordingly. In most cases it's far too frustrating and cognitively taxing to maintain a separate personality and worldview that's grounded in selfish preferences and unbiased exploration, so the mask becomes the face and people contort themselves into the form expected of them on the inside as well. «IQ realists» tend to be disagreeable, and are either good enough to maintain appearances while saying their true beliefs on anonymous forums, or don't care about the cost, or think they can afford it.

«IQ realists» tend to be disagreeable, and are either good enough to maintain appearances while saying their true beliefs on anonymous forums, or don't care about the cost, or think they can afford it.

Would there have been a cost for you to be an IQ realist in Russia?

Not as much as in the West/US, probably – I've always been open about this aspect of my views when asked, and, being able to argue for them politely and with discretion, got decent reception in most groups worth mentioning.

It may be a transient thing, the blessing of Millenials, the only generation that knew a sliver of freedom. Among zoomers and alphas there is growing (I believe) opprobrium evoked by beliefs coded as racist and "chud", because in a sense we are all living in America; and old people are of course influenced by the Soviet Marxist dogma (even though they overwhelmingly do not identify as Marxists), which is identical to the modern American dogma with regards to population differences and expected returns to nurture vs. nature.

IQ specifically is something of a dirty word, which is often justified with a reference to an article «The very best IQ test» by mathematician Vasiliev that made fun of test items in an error-filled translation of Eysenck's popular book «Test your IQ». I gather the original was also bad.

To anyone who has discussed the issue with pro-Ukraine people.

Why do people support Ukraine fighting against Russia, with a strange militaristic fervor, instead of supporting surrendering / negotiating peace?

Anglin makes the points that:

-the war is severely impoverishing Europe due to high energy costs

-the war is destroying Ukraine ( population + territory / infrastructures / institutions)

-continuing the war increases the chances of a world war

Is it cheering for the possible destruction of Russia?

Something to do with the current leadership of Russia, anti-LGBTQ, pro-family policies?

Is it about the 1991 borders of Ukraine, issues with post-Soviet Union border disputes?

Notion that 'if we don't stop Putin now he will never stop no matter what'? Is it something about broadly standing up against aggression of one state vs another, supporting the 'underdog'?

The issue with that one which seems to be central to Alexander's March 22 post is that there isn't much that seems capable of stopping Russia.

Sending another 100k Ukrainians to the meatgrinder for that end seems a little bit harsh coming from people with very little skin in the game.

Just signaling what they are told is the correct opinion?

Is it about saving face, sunk cost at this point?

What would be the best case scenario for a Ukraine/State Department victory?

To my understanding, Putin is not the most radical or dangerous politician in Russia, and an implosion into ethnicity-based sub-regions would cause similar problems to the 'Arab Spring'. Chechens for example would not appear very West-friendly once 'liberated' from Russia.

Not only that, but economic crisis in Europe could generate additional security risks.

  • -13

That and Russia’s eat making capacity appears heavily limited (and reduced from the start of the campaign). Fear of future Russian aggression should now be lowered heavily. Therefore a negotiated settlement that provides some tangible results for both sides seems in the best interest of the world.

Ukraine may balk but if you turn off the funding spigot then Putin can wait out Ukraine and win big. So the US should exert its funding power to get Ukraine to make reasonable concessions.

Ukraine may balk but if you turn off the funding spigot then Putin can wait out Ukraine and win big. So the US should exert its funding power to get Ukraine to make reasonable concessions.

What would you consider reasonable concessions that are not "accept Russia's terms"?

Recognize crimea as Russian (ie recognize the status quo ante facts)

Agree to hold a referendum in donabass region after Russia pulls out. Third party troops there to help mitigate any pressure exerted. Both parties can send observers. Both parties live with outcome. Referendum permits losing side to migrate to losing side’s country.

That's a win for Russia. No way will Ukraine accept that now. And it also does nothing to deter Russia from rebuilding and rolling over western Ukraine in the near future.

Well, Ukraine wouldn’t accept that assuming basically a blank check from the western powers. But if the funding spigot is turned off, Ukraine’s position is weakened.

Personally, I don't find that unreasonable, though I don't think my opinion (or the West's) should outweigh Ukraine's.

My understanding is that Russia isn't currently willing to settle for that.

My house my rules. That is, sure Ukraine you can do what you want but likewise we can do what we want and turn off funding. But if you want funding to continue then you need to accept certain conditions etc

Issue is your deals not on the table. Most Americans think something along those lines are fair. But Russia hasn’t come anywhere close to offering those terms.

My understanding is there have been very little negotiating on either side. Question is why (eg is it Russia isn’t willing to come to the table, or Ukraine won’t negotiate at all regarding territory concessions).

Russian official statements have never given any indication that a cease fire would require less than recognizing any currently controlled territory (and still claim ownership of Kherson). Imo current lines are not long term defensible for a restart of the war for Ukraine.

They're fighting for different things. Ukraine wants to take back territory and is succeeding marginally with little hope of ultimate success. Russia is fighting for reputation, their initial effort to take the whole country failed and now they just want a small win to point to and a decent interval before pulling out. Like Nixon and Kissinger in Vietnam, the war is lost but they can't lose like that. Until the outcome becomes clear for one side, no negotiation is practical.

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This is one of those perspective posts on people who say the west is wasting money https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-30/elon-musk-becomes-first-person-ever-to-lose-200-billion?leadSource=uverify%20wall

The money we put into Ukraine is half of the money one of our American dudes has lost the last few months. This is one of those hot takes that just exemplifies how much richer we’ve become than Russia. And a good reason why Ukraine would want to be one ally versus Russia.

Elon didn't actually lose money. If I created a company with a billion shares, sold one for $1, I'd be a billionaire. If that company folds the next day, my net worth would plummet. But there was no actual value lost.

With Ukraine, actual cash, goods, services, missiles, are being used up. The economic impact is people actually losing money, not making productive use of their labour, or that labour being diverted elsewhere. Infrastructure and lives are being destroyed. Time is being lost.

This will be a setback for Europe. Though it'll probably be a net benefit for America.

I agree with your analysis. And these are just market values and not real losses (I’ve always thought Tesla was a great company but overvalued) but for a perspective thing I still think it makes sense.

The important thing to remember is that the vast majority of those goods, services, missiles etc... were manufactured during the Cold war with the specific intent of holding off a Soviet invasion of Europe. Rather than being a waste or "setback", every Javelin fired at a Russian AFV and every Stinger fired at a Russian aircraft is an achievement of purpose. My take is that every neo-soviet killed by NATO arms in Ukraine makes Europe safer so praise the lord and pass the ammunition.

What would be the best case scenario for a Ukraine/State Department victory?

To my understanding, Putin is not the most radical or dangerous politician in Russia, and an implosion into ethnicity-based sub-regions would cause similar problems to the 'Arab Spring'. Chechens for example would not appear very West-friendly once 'liberated' from Russia.

It depends on who the beneficiary is. The US would benefit from someone like Putin remaining in charge. Russia would still be a bogeyman for Europe but wouldn't pose a credible threat. Putin would be busy dealing with regional separatists, disgruntled vets, a growing -stani diaspora and an economy burdened by 100% reparation/import fees.

Pro-Ukrainians don’t usually grapple with the hard issues that make Ukraine a unique and complex case.

  • America meddling in Ukrainian elections. America promoted an insurrection in the Ukrainian capitol, changing the results of their presidential election, by funding fake news media that pushed debunked stories. (The irony should not be lost on us.)

  • NATO expansion onto the doorstep of Russia, the enshrining of NATO membership into the Ukrainian constitution, and joint naval drills and training for when membership became safe.

  • The cultural continuity between eastern Ukraine and Russia

  • The soft “cultural genocide” of indigenous ethnic Russians in the east of Ukraine via oppression on Russian-language small businesses and journalists, forcing them to speak Ukrainian in shops, publishing in Ukrainian on the front page whether offline or online.

  • The will of the people of Crimea to join with Russia in 2014, not just evidenced by their election but by our own government’s polling done by the the broadcast board of governors. This was unacceptable to Ukraine.

An obvious hypothetical is, what would we do if Cuba decided to host Russian nukes? How about if Canada joined a “defensive” alliance with China? We would obviously do the same thing that Russia is doing with Ukraine. When a rival superpower uses corruption and media propaganda to influence elections of your neighbor, which results in a push toward joining their military bloc, you take action. It’s that simple.

If you support America’s exclusive hegemony, this is probably a good idea (fuck Russia!). If you support Western civilization, this is probably a bad idea.

Because none of that is factual.

  • West had limited involvement in maiden. It was mostly their own decision. Probably because they look west and Poland is getting rich and they look east and there’s a bunch of poor peasants

  • nato isn’t a threat to a nuclear power. And as this was has proven Ukraine has no choice but to join nato be an independent country

  • there’s some truth to suppression of Russian culture

  • Russia has at no point offered Crimea or the Eastern regions independence. Russia at no point has had a goal of less than regaining the all of Ukraine. Those regions were used as attempts to interfere with Ukranian politics and eventually reestablish control of kyiv

  • Not all countries get to control their neighbors. If we stop with an assumption that every country gets to dictate terms of their neighbors then every country would be at war constantly trying to establish that. Russia is clearly NOT capable of projecting force outside their borders anymore.

  • looking at history theirs a huge difference between being in American sphere of influence and in Russias sphere. Russians sphere well has things like Holodomore happen to them. The American sphere even when we do bad things has limited bad things happen to the people of the country. One can look at population charts and places like Iraq/Afghanistan barely see population drops and then they boom, while places like syria or Ukraine see huge pop drops when Russia gets involved.

Also saying something is a complex case and your opponents don’t think about those things isn’t true. We do think about those things. We just don’t find those as dominating factors.

You write

Because none of that is factual.

and then almost immediately

bunch of poor peasants

Which fraction of pop of Russia involved in agriculture, what do you think? It's not a first time you throw 'peasants' just for fun.

Not referring to being farmers. But a more general being poor.

I can just use Russian own propaganda to justify my position. They literally tell us their people are

poor.

https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1604548265802096641?s=46&t=cJUMoctDB-RQWpQq-S5_qQ

looking at history theirs a huge difference between being in American sphere of influence and in Russias sphere. Russians sphere well has things like Holodomore happen to them. The American sphere even when we do bad things has limited bad things happen to the people of the country.

I don't necessarily disagree with your general point but this is just a lazy argument. There are obviously breaks in political continuity in Russian history that aren't present in American history. For better or worse, contemporary Russia isn't the USSR or the Russian Tsardom.

If I made an argument that a country being under German influence today is a bad thing because Nazis and Holocaust, people would rightfully laugh at me.

This is not to say that being under contemporary Russian influence is a good thing - it's probably not - but actually make the argument about why this is the case and don't just make lazy appeals to history. And preferably an argument that doesn't refer to the supposed 'innate barbarity' of the Russian people that I've seen crop up a lot.

I literally quoted population charts of Iraq/Afghanistan versus Syria/Ukraine. And the Holdomore. Yea I could have gone out and likely found 50 more examples but honestly some times you don’t feel like writing novels. Sure I could have quoted more bad things Stalin did. I could have quoted how serfdom in Russia became nearly indistinguishable from chattel slavery which no civilized country was doing to people of the same skin color. And I can quote the current war and the human rights abuses being committed in Ukraine and direct targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure with artillery.

Holodomor occured because of economist policy of that government. Turning Holodomor into a tribal issue is a way to make more hostility and real corpses in future.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine private ownership of land wasn't working until as recently as 2019. In many ways post-1991 Ukraine was more sovok than post-1991 Russia

What Russia isn’t responsible for causing a famine because it was just “economic” policy? What kind of logic is that? A government is not responsible for their own economic policy that led to millions dying in famine.

You'd think there would be more than a few "unique and complex" aspects to take into account to the other direction, such as:

  • the long history of Russia/SU violently stamping down on Ukrainian national consciousness reflected in things like Czarist language bans, the Stalinist anti-Ukrainian turn etc.

  • the pre-2014 (one might even say pre-2022) process of slow death Ukrainian language in face of Russian minority's unwillingness to use Ukrainian in daily life necessitating the use of special privileges for Ukrainian language to prevent this language death

  • Russia's long history of considering the ex-Soviet states as its special playground for intervening at will right out of gate (Abkhazia/South Ossetia/Transnistria), as well by fomenting hybrid operations in eg. Baltic countries, considerably contributing to the attraction

  • Russia's specific past confirmation of Ukraine's borders including Crimea as valid, flagrantly violated in 2014 and then violated even moreso in 2022 (whatever polling of Crimea's population is immaterial when considering this violation - the German seizure of Sudetenland in 1938 was surely supported by the great majority of local population, that did not make it any more valid)

  • the general role of the seizure of Crimea in hypercharging the conflict in Eastern Ukraine and turning it into an Ukrainian/Russian one - something pro-Russians, as a rule, almost seem to treat as an individual event with no particular connection to the rest of the conflict

Even if one still would believe in the justification of the seizure of Crimea, opposition to Ukraine's NATO quest (a post-Euromaidan development BTW - NATO membership was not at a stake at any part of Euromaidan, and even the immediate post-Yanukovich govt at first eschewed NATO), opposition to Ukraine's language laws, one might still expect these things to be taken into account or noted in some way, but no, it's all just about Ukrainians hating Russia and Russian language for seemingly no reason at all and eight-years-of-bombing-Donetsk, again, for seemingly no reason at all.

As someone who has previously argued that the situation leading up to the invasion Ukraine is far more complicated that most pro-Ukrainian warhawks would like you to believe, and you do make a few valid points I still strongly disagree with your post, and more specifically your responses in this thread.

While I previously defended Russia's actions in a realist sense (and still stand by that post), that doesn't make Russia's actions moral. Make no mistake, invading another country and causing death and destruction is still an immoral act, even if one wants to argue it's the least worst option for Russia's future geopolitical prospects even when counting the risk of failure. Ukraine is of course going to defend itself and it has a right to do so, regardless of questionable geopolitical circumstances leading up to the invasion.

If you want to critique the uncritical pro-Ukrainian warhawkish-ness, you are far better of criticising American foreign policy in Eastern Europe for the last three decades. While Russia obviously bares primarily responsibility for the invasion, the US also bares responsibility for creating an extremely hostile geopolitical environment, and has pursued policy that has not at all been conducive to peace and prosperity to everyone involved (certainly not the Ukrainians), to provide dubious geopolitical benefit to themselves (and when you consider the impacts to the global economy and the US itself is probably a net loss, to say nothing of the billions of dollars spent actually funding the war). Additionally it seems that that much of the 'international community', especially the US, seems more interested in prolonging the war than actually finding a path to peace. Lip-service to peace may be given, but it seems like that there is always a more 'favourable position' to achieve before peace should be negotiated. There is also a certain subsection of ultra-warhawks who seem more motivated by wanting to completely destroy Russia, as if that would be any way moral, and of course only good things have ever come out of failed states, right?

Anyway, the point is that Russia isn't the 'good guy' in this situation, even if there are genuine criticisms to make against the US and the pro-Ukrainian warhawks. You made a few good criticisms in the original post, some of which I echoed above. You should stick to those core criticism and stop with the more blatant Russia apologia.

I don't 100% support Russia in all cases. There are many things I don't understand about Russia, and a lot of the propaganda does not resonate with me.

My main issue with this whole situation is that Ukraine is making a claim to power 'We should independently be able to control our own destiny'.

Fair and good, go and fight Russia.

But that claim is not the only claim, the following one is 'So now give us money'

Clearly Ukraine does not have the material means to follow up on its ambitions.

From what I gathered so far, most commenters here support Ukraine, but they do not mostly support Ukraine because they believe that Ukraine should be independent, to my understanding.

Some like @Dean seem to support beating down Russia out of attachment to principles like 'nuclear non-proliferation' and 'preventing annexations'. Fair enough, but that's not making a moral claim, you're supporting the ethical system enforced by the top guy that you so far have been lucky to be on the good side of.

Once Ukraine has successfully 'beat down Russia', will they be independent?

Will the 'reconstruction money' come with no strings attached?

No requirements to Westernify, Americanize, Netflix your society like the Marshall plan, the EU subsidies, the occupation of Japan and West Germany?

I doubt it.

In my opinion, from the demographic, cultural, nationalist point of view, siding with the West is a sure way to end the Ukrainian nation within the next century.

Hence the absurdity of this supposedly 'nationalist' drive.

My intuition tells me that Zelensky is to Ukrainian nationalism what Sam Bankman-Fried is to ethical altruism.

I don't 100% support Russia in all cases.

Simply put, I don't believe you.

I believe him on that. I don’t think Russian supporters in the war are real fans of Russia. They seem to be anti-neoliberal regime. I tend to see two groups that buy into the arguments - those on the left typified by NakedCapitalism

Blog and those on the right who tend to broadly classify as anti-global homo types. For both parts they basically believe the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but they’ve all realized that Russia isn’t actually good but a useful fool they hope Can knock down the American Regime.

Ukranian prosperity has always been with choosing war Russia (though they didn’t choose this war if they knew this path led to war they were smarter to choose war). The income differentials between Poland and other former Russian spheres that went NATO versus Ukraine/Belarus/most of Russia is extreme.

Forgive me, but I don't think the war devistating Ukraine and absolutely crippling their country in the hopes that maybe a couple decades from now they join the EU (who knows how the EU is doing in 10 or 20 years anyway) and hopefully get something out it economically is/was the most optimal of all possibilities.

Ukraine isn’t a real country under Russia control. It’s impoverished country that would face constant emigration.

And these aren’t “maybe you get rich” - everyone else who embraced NATO got rich.

I love how the “realists” school never looks at actual data. Russian control just means exploitation of some natural resources and rich oligarch’s while everyone else leaves or is just a poor peasant.

Russian control is a guaranteed death of Ukraine. Fighting gives them a chance.

I guess where I disagree with most people here is that I don't believe that war with Russia was a certainty and that peaceful scenarios where everyone benefits was possible (that doesn't require Ukrainian submission to Russia), had the last 30 years of foreign policy and geopolitics in Eastern Europe had been handled better. And that pursuing a road to peace asap now is ideal rather than trying to 'destroy Russia'.

I think NATO has always been false as the cause of Russian invasion and I believe Russian nationalist readily admit this. Russia wasn’t going to let Ukraine culturally and economically align with the west. That is what the war is about. And aligning with the west is necessary for Ukraine to be a real country with a vibrant economy.

Nato never even went into Ukraine. It was all culture/economy right now.

I feel like the “realist” don’t get this. Alignment with Russia long term just mean a few rich oligarchs and a mail-order bride style poverty. That was death.

Russia couldn’t maintain their sphere of influence because their culture, politics, and economics sucks. No one wants them as an ally. Which meant they were either going to lose their old allies or Russia could do what they decided to do which is basically widespread genocide to bully Ukraine into being a colony. Fortunately Russia doesn’t have the military power to enforce that position.

Longer term I feel fairly comfortable predicting that Ukraine will conquor Moscow. Maybe 30 years. Poor Russian peasants will eventually look towards a rich Ukrainian middle class and want the same thing. That’s always been the threat to the regime in Moscow.

Maybe this is my own biases speaking, but it seems to me that war with Russia was always certainty in the same way that breaking up with an abusive spouse will inevitably be a shitshow. The only people who believed otherwise were the high IQ idiots who were autistic enough to buy into all that "political realism" nonsense.

Why would the Ukrainians surrender or seek peace terms when they're winning? Typically, belligerents only seek peace when war has settled into a stalemate or when the risks of continuing the war become very large. Neither of this is true for Ukraine. In addition, Russia still controls territory the Ukrainians regard as theirs.

European politicians support the war because Eastern Europeans are still afraid of the Russian bogeyman, despite barely being able to project power on it's own front step. American politicians support the war because they're making bank off energy exports to Europe. British politicians support the war because they are stupid.

they're winning

Russia still controls territory the Ukrainians regard as theirs.

How's that win?

If they're winning, why are they still begging for money?

They are winning, not they have won. It's a process.

If they started negotiating today, they'd get some sort of a deal. If they kept up the war effort for another month then started negotiating, they'd probably get a better deal (even including a month worth of damage) because they would be in better position. That has held true from the first day of the invasion to today, and will likely continue on into the future.

They're begging for money and arms because it works.

Plus, also, even if they straight-up won tomorrow, they'd probably still need money to rebuild and to compensate families who've lost children or adults to the war.

rebuild and to compensate families who've lost children or adults to the war.

???

Dead people don't need houses. Ukrainian casualties mean they need money less, not more.

And that's before we even get to the question of why my tax money should be the money that Ukraine gets.

And that's before we even get to the question of why my tax money should be the money that Ukraine gets.

What makes you think it's your tax money that's the money that Ukraine gets, as opposed to your pro-war fellow citizenry's money?

Your money tax money could be the tax money covering the roads and services that directly and indirectly support you. There's more than enough government expenditures to go around.

Complete and utter sophistry.

Money is fungible. Tax dollars (and the future taxes on which the us government borrows) fund the entire budget. You can’t say tax dollar X funds project A and tax dollar Y funds project B. Fungibility means tax dollar X and Y funds projects A and B.

If the government budget was smaller, there would be less tax (or less inflation). Or alternatively if project B is cancelled, then project C can occur.

The initial argument was stating that the government spending on Ukraine was unjustified because it is effectively ultra vires. Responding that some citizens like the spending thereby justifying the spending means no government spending can be ultra vires as some citizens will always support some government spending (see lizardman constant).

No, I don’t think that is a winning argument, especially for a government of supposedly limited powers.

The response to “but some citizens want X and X is outside the scope of government power so we should ignore that limit” is “some citizens should form a group that funds X. This happens all of the time. Why is Ukraine unique in that regard?

If it's sophistry in one direction, it's for the same reason it's sophistry in the other. It is precisely because money is fungible that the argument that one's personal money is going to unacceptable cause X ('why should my money be going to Ukraine') is as valid as the refutation that you might as well say it's to a preferable cause Y ('no, your money is going to services you use'). Money doesn't start as fungible for government services, but stop being fungible and start being individual onus for other causes.

Nor does the American (or any other modern) taxation system work on the principle of 'figure out what the fiscal year's requirements are, then decide tax rates for the year,' so arguments that if Expenditure A was absent a person's taxes would be correspondingly doesn't hold water. No modern government works on the principle of 'only citizens who want to support X have to pay taxes to support it,' and that's a pretty basic misunderstanding of how governments works to confuse government taxation and expenditure systems with the structure of a purpose-structured non-government organization. This doesn't even touch on how much of the aid to Ukraine is actually conveyed, ie in the form of government inventories not seeing use and often slated for destruction without use.

Of course, this diversion too is all sophistry to avoid the pretty blatant and obvious answer as to why Citizen Whomever's tax money should go to Ukraine: because the representatives elected by Citizen's fellow Citizens voted so in accordance with the laws and established legitimate processes of the land, to the general support of Citizen's fellow Citizens, and Ukraine is not unique in this respect. Citizen Whomever's money is also going to water treatment, electrical infrastructure, schools, hospitals, police, tax incentives, procurement, government worker salaries, and so on. This is fundamentally the same complaint for all government expenditures for things an individual tax payer doesn't like. Not liking what the government spends taxpayer money on is not the same as taxpayer being spent unjustly.

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Dead people don't need houses.

Perhaps not, but the ones who are still alive might like to have an intact train station again, for example.

Speaking for myself: Russia and russians, present company excepted, creep me the fuck out. Something about the way they talk. It's outright alien. Call it racism if you like, but letting Russia gain more influence in Europe is no more appealing to me than letting China or wokists do it.

This is not something that I would have wanted a war to start over, but now that the war is already on I really can't see a scenario in which Russia gets its way as desirable.

What's more: Ukraine is ours now. It may not have been previously, and it's not worth much to us in practical terms, but sides have been taken. The fact of being on the same side is more strongly binding than any rational justification for war or peace.

Combine all of that with the general anomie of the West and why the hell shouldn't we want for the war to continue? Losing wealth? We still have lots to spare, and the excitement is worth it. Playing into America's hands? Maybe, but the US is NATO and NATO is golden. NATO is what kept Europe from being one big East Germany, or worse, one big Ukraine.

NATO is what kept Europe from being one big East Germany, or worse, one big Ukraine.

East Germany is still Germany.

You can't have Europe without Europeans. NATO has been turning Western Europe into one big American city, and they have a tendency to spontaneously combust.

That's not NATO, it's the people of Europe being infected by fitter memes. Look around - all the people of the world are attracted to them, including Russians.

By fitter memes do you mean American or Islam?

American in this instance.

The way I see it Islam is also fitter than European culture, but more through its demographics and politics than by outsiders wanting it.

There is some data suggesting that in the general population Islam is losing ground to beliefs and attitudes more aligned with current Western culture, e.g. irreligiosity is increasing and fertility rates are declining.

This might reverse in the long term with the rise of subgroups who are immune to Western memes and might outcompete mainstream society by way of better birthrates, but as far as a timeline of e.g. 50 years into the future is concerned I'd be pretty confident in predicting that we will see a Middle East where the societal importance of Islam greatly declines. This is entirely anecdotal and subject to selection bias, but from my dealings with Gulf Arabs I've got the impression that they're more concerned about Ronaldo and Messi than Sharia Law.

Aye, but that's the Global-American meme winning out, not the specifically European one, is it?

-the war is severely impoverishing Europe due to high energy costs

-the war is destroying Ukraine ( population + territory / infrastructures / institutions)

-continuing the war increases the chances of a world war

This phrasing of "the war" strikes me a bit like when people say, "COVID devastated the economy" as a way to avoid blaming the decision-makers whose reactions to COVID where what caused the economic damage and not the virus itself.

It looks a bit different if you rephrase these points as follows:

-Russia is severely impoverishing Europe due to high energy costs by continuing its war in Ukraine

-Russia is destroying Ukraine ( population + territory / infrastructures / institutions)

-Russia continuing the war increases the chances of a world war

If the first formulation leads one to the answer that it is for greater good to end the war, what does the second formulation suggest, and how are they different?

-the war is destroying Ukraine ( population + territory / infrastructures / institutions)

How would that reasoning not also tell you the Russians should have surrendered to the Germans in World War II?

Perhaps they should have indeed.

Anglin, being an extreme Sinophile, argued (like local American hawks who deny any data out of Communist state or Russia, amusingly enough) that the Chinese are imitating their Zero Covid measures and actually don't test or quarantine or vaccinate or care at all – they're not the NWO slaves, see, they know what's good for them, they're only fooling the stupid big-nosed barbarians. This was in late 2020; haven't been reading him since the elections. He had a lot to say of the future, should Biden and not the Lion Don become President.

He's some analyst.

That's stacking the deck against the pro-«decisive Ukraine victory at any cost» side. Could you, as an Intellectual Turing Test, stack it against your own beliefs?

I've seen a few thousand too many posts on this. In the end, here's what this is about: Putin's Russia, like Russia historically, is a challenger to the System – the Washington Consensus, the «Rules-Based International Liberal Order» or however you want to call it – explicitly, officially, and virulently so. It bitterly, if ineffectually, opposes this System's values, methods and ambitions. It, alone among such challengers, has the capacity (that's pretty costly to maintain) to annihilate or severely debilitate this system and thus steer it off the clear course towards planetary and, soon, Universe-spanning eternal triumph and ability to implement its values unperturbed on almost arbitrary scale. Russia is openly waging a large-scale war on a nation that has proclaimed alignment with the system, on the borders of the System's loyal members, even killing some of the System's citizen zealots.

This is enough to justify nearly any expense in supporting the attacked party, short of initiating a nuclear exchange while Russia is still capable of responding.

Now there are more normal strategic, politic, economic, moral, signaling considerations of course, many of which would be sufficient by themselves, and the obvious fact that Ukraine plus the System are winning, and the winning party tends not to give up mid-war (except if you're Russia in WWI, and that didn't go well). But this is the world-historical one, as I see it.

...One last thing. The problem of fascist regimes is they are irrational, pride themselves on irrational precommitments, drink their own Kool-aid, and assume that their opponents are scaredy, sovlless, too-rational-by-half merchants who can be played like a damn fiddle, by dangling incentives they'll myopically follow.

This fails every time. Their opponents have pride too. More importantly, they can reason through the pic related.

Can you?

/images/1672451791466581.webp

Anglin is not 100% right about every prediction, that's a given, but he's been pretty good about Covid.

His analysis of current events is head and shoulders above any mainstream media coverage.

As an alt-right leader he told his followers not to go to events like Charlottesville or J6.

He saw the crackdown coming.

and the obvious fact that Ukraine plus the System are winning, and the winning party tends not to give up mid-war (except if you're Russia in WWI, and that didn't go well). But this is the world-historical one, as I see it.

The System is winning but not against the Taliban. The System is 'winning' where the System says it's winning, in the eyes of the followers of the System. All of the good followers of the System like you are fleeing from Russia.

Is this weakening Russia? Are they losing out when all their atheist, gay activists, anti-family subversives are fleeing?

Are they losing when the American fast food companies are shutting down and no longer reliably and consistently poisoning their population?

More importantly, they can reason through the pic related. Can you?

Wars are not bi-dimensional problems and Moloch did not save the Romans from what happened 300 years later, with the emergence of a class of people that would align Death > Slavery > Freedom in some cases. Not that this is predictive of anything regarding the Ukraine v Russia situation.

The System is winning but not against the Taliban. The System is 'winning' where the System says it's winning, in the eyes of the followers of the System.

Do you suppose the Taliban poses any threat to the System? It's quite a threat to the population of Afghanistan, which already faces starvation due to the System's comprehensive withdrawal. But for the Washington Consensus, conclusively beating it – what with Russia, China, Iran still kicking - is not a priority at all.

All of the good followers of the System like you are fleeing from Russia. Is this weakening Russia? Are they losing out when all their atheist, gay activists, anti-family subversives are fleeing?

  1. Man, what's the point of talking to what you consider an irreconcilable enemy with no commitment to truth? Are you just soapboxing into the void? That's not healthy. As for me: I've the psychological profile of a priest (I have the assessment in print), so consider this community service.

  2. You should try getting news from someone other than Andrew Anglin, for a change. I'd concede losing gay activists etc. isn't strategically threatening, but more importantly Russia is losing money – both current assets and potential revenue – and engineers. Who's gonna make those missiles to attack Ukraine? Who's gonna design new ones once Ukrainians succeed in begging for proper anti-air defenses? Why do you think loyalists back home are mostly demented grandmas and raving lunatics speaking in semi-poetic vomit and faggoty sentimental generalities, like Anglin and other foreign fashist LARPers, while people who've been warning the MoD for years – in vain! – that we'll need semiconductor production, drones and normal encrypted comms in case of a war are now talking to me from USA, South America and Central Asia? Why do you figure Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union with all its military industry, is bombing Ukrainian cities using Iranian loitering munitions, for want of indigenous ones? Hell, I've talked even to patriotic Chechnya veterans and Airborne troopers who've noped out of the Motherland – though unlike others, these folks did so only after the «partial» mobilization was declared!

  3. As for anti-family subversives. Well, back in March, in Sheremetyevo airport, was the first time in my life I've seen so many decent-looking, middle-to-upper-class ethnic Russians with lots of kids – and lots of luggage on heavy carts, frantically saving their families from a lifetime in squalor... or worse. Were they atheists? Maybe. But ever since Stalin (some would say Pyotr or even Alexis) Moscow Patriarchate is not so much a religious organization as it is an Okhrana/FSB branch, so you'd have better luck meeting actual God-fearing Eastern Orthodox Christian Russians abroad.

Are they losing when the American fast food companies are shutting down and no longer reliably and consistently poisoning their population?

As a matter of fact, all McDonalds properties have been absorbed by Tasty.Period (yeah, pretty lame name and logo) and continue to serve the same stuff – with deteriorated quality controls, according to folks who've found roaches and the like in their burgers. Now this reminds me of something I wrote in the summer of 2021.

You don't know shit about this war, Russia, or people leaving Russia. All you can proceed from is your own political alignment and general, illiterate notions of degeneracy and virtue, and your parochial gut feelings and sensibilities of an anti-Western Russia Stan, cheerleading at a safe distance from Inferno. Indomitable Russian spirit something something, the Ukrainia pig not a country, the West has fallen, yadda yadda yadda. No matter how you try to distance yourself from your political enemies, you're still an obese consumerist with a taste for HFCS in matters of flesh and spirit alike, preferring cheap, quick and easy hit of gratification over truth and self-improvement 10 times out of 10. No wonder you're informed by The Daily Stormer, literally an unhinged tabloid.

I won't hold its Nazi roots against you. God knows there are some smart and diligent Nazis out there.

You still aren't willing to see how alone and outmatched you are. Russia won't save you.

Russia won't even save herself.

Do you suppose the Taliban poses any threat to the System?

I think it does in a way, in a cosmic justice way. What comes around goes around.

Who knows if the next big international influencer won't be some kid who saw Americans first come in and destroy his country then send blue-haired gender studies operatives to remodel it, then just shut down and disappear?

If the Taliban consistently protect their population from say, Pfizer products for the next n iterations of 'global pandemic' they might become a decisive demographic, somehow.

I don't know your reasons for leaving Russia, maybe they're really good who knows.

Perhaps your assessment of the state of the Russian military and economy are completely correct and Russia is on the verge of collapse.

I like these direct accounts much better than the overt propaganda found everywhere else.

Well, back in March, in Sheremetyevo airport, was the first time in my life I've seen so many decent-looking, middle-to-upper-class ethnic Russians with lots of kids – and lots of luggage on heavy carts, frantically saving their families from a lifetime in squalor... or worse.

I don't blame them, but where are they going?

Are they really getting a better existence for their families? Or are they just looking for things of this world?

Russia is purifying itself from the materialist type, the engineers, the thinkers, the cowards, the revolutionaries maybe... Who knows where this is all going. Worst case, return of the Golden Horde.

No matter how you try to distance yourself from your political enemies, you're still an obese consumerist with a taste for HFCS in matters of flesh and spirit alike, going for the quick and easy hit of gratification.

You still aren't willing to see how alone and outmatched you are. Russia won't save you.

I'm not looking for Russia to save me. That would be someone else.

What do you mean by alone and outmatched? From a political pov? As in the whole world is becoming globohomo it's over or something?

Luckily a lot of the alt-right is just becoming straight-up religious extremist. Revenge of the Taliban, so to speak.

  • -10

So you want Ukraine, which was invaded and has been defending itself surprisingly well, to pre-emptively surrender because Europe has high energy prices now? After Europe spent thirty years making themselves dependent on Russian gas despite everyone with a brain telling them that it would be used against them.......

What masterful realpolitik.

If this is the best argument the pro-Russian side has, it truly is devoid of anything convincing.

Ukrainian defeats seems ineluctable to me.

My primary concern is the people getting killed because the Ukrainian nationalists and the EU and US cannot give in on this one border.

Mediterranean border is fine, Mexican border is fine, Ukrainian border is sacred.

Russian gas, Middle-Eastern gas, American gas, there is always some type of dependency to manage.

The Russians aren't that bad compared to some of the other alternatives.

Why do people support Ukraine fighting against Russia, with a strange militaristic fervor, instead of supporting surrendering / negotiating peace?

Because they have chosen to fight. They can surrender whenever they feel like it. But until they do, they ought to enjoy the full support of people who also don't like wars of aggression prosecuted upon them.

-the war is destroying Ukraine ( population + territory / infrastructures / institutions)

The traditional response to an insult is reprisal, not submission. Indeed, they've probably got very little to lose and everything to gain by continuing to fight.

continuing the war increases the chances of a world war

If Russia is able to win all conflicts by threatening a world war, they're going to spread unchecked. The hell with that, I say. Waiting for the apocalypse is exhausting.

Is it cheering for the possible destruction of Russia?

Yes

Something to do with the current leadership of Russia, anti-LGBTQ, pro-family policies?

I cannot speak for everyone supporting Ukraine but that always seemed like a distraction. The reason I want to see Russia get spanked is the arsenal of nuclear weapons they maintain trained at me. They're the guy robbing my convenience store at gunpoint; if they go down in a hail of cop gunfire after stealing a car that's just as well.

What would be the best case scenario for a Ukraine/State Department victory?

Even more of the Russian armed forces taken out of commission. Like 2x what we've seen so far. Perhaps 5x. Russia withdrawing from Ukraine. Putin replaced with someone who's more interested in increasing Russia's GDP than square miles.

To my understanding, Putin is not the most radical or dangerous politician in Russia, and an implosion into ethnicity-based sub-regions would cause similar problems to the 'Arab Spring'. Chechens for example would not appear very West-friendly once 'liberated' from Russia.

Is there a strong reason to believe that Putin is the glue holding together the federation?

But until they do, they ought to enjoy the full support of people who also don't like wars of aggression prosecuted upon them.

The irony when the support comes in the forms of billions dollars of aid and weapons from the American militaro-industrial complex.

If Russia is able to win all conflicts by threatening a world war, they're going to spread unchecked.

A reasonable border conflict, similar to the Cuban missiles crisis.

They're the guy robbing my convenience store at gunpoint; if they go down in a hail of cop gunfire after stealing a car that's just as well.

Again, there's a whole series of convenience store robberies you haven't looked at if Russia is the main perp in your eyes.

Russia withdrawing from Ukraine.

Not going to happen unless Russia is destroyed. Having a de facto NATO protectorate on your border is a matter of life or death for Russia.

Putin replaced with someone who's more interested in increasing Russia's GDP than square miles.

Russia's GDP is square miles. Square miles of resource-rich land, that Russians have been doing quite a good job at keeping under control, compared to say the West in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Is there a strong reason to believe that Putin is the glue holding together the federation?

Historical precedent. You know what you lose, you don't know what you gain.

How well did the Arab Spring go for liberal democracy in North Africa and the Middle East?

Again, there's a whole series of convenience store robberies you haven't looked at if Russia is the main perp in your eyes.

Are there other nuclear arsenals aimed at the US? China's is unimpressive compared to Russia's, but don't get me wrong, when (if?) China invades Taiwan I will have zero problem with the unholy gift basket of armaments my tax dollars will provide them with.

Having a de facto NATO protectorate on your border is a matter of life or death for Russia.

How unfortunate for them. Maybe if they didn't make NATO the only way to avoid getting invaded and instead offered a better deal they wouldn't be in this mess.

How well did the Arab Spring go for liberal democracy in North Africa and the Middle East?

Man, it's been a while. i think the fondest hope was that Iran would flip, and it didn't.

But Gaddafi got his, so there's that.

Maybe if they didn't make NATO the only way to avoid getting invaded and instead offered a better deal they wouldn't be in this mess.

NATO doesn't protect anyone from invasion, quite the opposite actually.

Without NATO wars in North Africa and the Middle-East, there would have been a lot fewer immigrants to Western Europe in the past decade, that many have characterized as 'invaders'.

But Gaddafi got his, so there's that.

Gaddafi got what? His fair trial according to the rule-based liberal world order?

NATO doesn't protect anyone from invasion, quite the opposite actually.

NATO countries invaded by RF: 0

Non-NATO countries invaded by RF: 2

Gaddafi got what? His fair trial according to the rule-based liberal world order?

Something about the consent of the governed.

NATO countries invaded by RF: 0

How about NATO countries invaded by Syria / Libya / Iraq / Afghanistan etc?

The 2015 European migrant crisis, also known internationally as the Syrian refugee crisis,[2][3] was a period of significantly increased movement of refugees and migrants into Europe in 2015, when 1.3 million people came to the continent

Something about the consent of the governed.

Which Libyans consented to a coalition of NATO countries and Qatar to come in and murder their leader?

How about NATO countries invaded by Syria / Libya / Iraq / Afghanistan etc?

Redefining invasion.

Which Libyans consented to a coalition of NATO countries and Qatar to come in and murder their leader?

The Libyans who bayoneted him and shot him dead.

So all the Russians have to do is :

capture Zelensky and other Ukrainian leaders, then deliver them to a Ukrainian (from the East) who shoots them and bayonet them to death

then have them set up a pro-Russia government

Then you would support Russia?

More comments

You and all your interlocutors seem to be talking past one another. You seem to be starting from the belief that NATO/globohomo is fundamentally intent on the genocide/replacement of white people. And because of this, nothing Russia does could be worse or less desirable for Ukraine than this.

I guess to get back to answering your initial question, I imagine most people supporting Ukraine are simply not starting with your set of beliefs regarding white genocide/globohomo. The vast gulf here in terms of assumptions makes discussion pretty pointless I think

You seem to be starting from the belief that NATO/globohomo is fundamentally intent on the genocide/replacement of white people.

I wouldn't say necessarily so. There are definitely actors within NATO or supporting NATO that have as one of their goals the replacement of white people. Not necessarily all of them.

They are the ones financing / writing articles such as 'Of course all white people are racist'. If they insist on it, I will believe what they say. Or am I being tricked if I believe that they want to take power away from white people?

The issue is that NATO policies lead to replacement of white people (in Europe), incidentally or purposely.

For example, the various NATO 'interventions' (totally not a war of aggression!!!) inj North Africa and the Middle-East led to huge waves of (non-white) immigrants in the 2010s.

And because of this, nothing Russia does could be worse or less desirable for Ukraine than this.

No, my assumption is that living under Russian rule would not be that bad for Ukraine, primarily because that was the default state of Ukraine for the last few centuries.

Secondly, I don't think Ukraine has a chance at independence, or self-rule.

Those who claim that the Ukrainian people truly want to be ruled by the current government, rather than the previous government that was Russian-friendly, have a strange understanding of democracy.

When a Russia-neighboring country is Russian-friendly, their government is clearly under the influence of the nefarious Russian propaganda.

Same thing with Western government.

A man like Trump must be Russian-controlled if he is interested in peaceful relations with Russia, or the Russians must be pulling some nefarious 'hacking' or 'blackmailing' tricks to 'hack' the elections.

On the other hand, if the government of Ukraine strongly opposes Russia, then it is completely out of their authentic, pure, democratic sovereignty.

Let's ignore the heavy hands of a few foreign players;

Biden

Victoria Nuland was born in 1961 to Sherwin B. Nuland, a surgeon born to Eastern European Jewish immigrants,[7] and a Christian British native mother, Rhona McKhann, née Goulston.[8]

Merrick Brian Garland His grandparents left the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire in the early 20th century, fleeing antisemitic pogroms and seeking a better life

Anthony Blinken His maternal grandparents were Hungarian Jews.

Would any of these people have any sort of personal interest, or say, grudge, against the Russian people?

For example, the various NATO 'interventions' (totally not a war of aggression!!!) inj North Africa and the Middle-East led to huge waves of (non-white) immigrants in the 2010s.

Well then, what you've portrayed as NATO aggression against Russia (ie. the Russian war on Ukraine) has now led to a huge wave of white immigrants to Western Europe in 2022, so it must have evened out a bit then, huh?

Well if one wants to blame the Ukraine war fully or mostly on Russia, which is what most commenters here seem to do, then Russia is responsible for a stream of mostly female white refugees to Western Europe and some to North America.

This demographic shift is sure to alleviate some of the I.N.C.E.L. problem that some leftist commenters have placed at the root of various ills such as mass shootings or increase in political extremism.

By that logic, blue-tribe people should thank Russia for helping reduce some of these issues.

For me, the problem is not restricted to the color of the immigrants, but also to the social and cultural disruption.

Most Western countries are already too far gone from a demographic point of view.

If some Germans, Brits or French can make a family out of a Ukrainian wife, the social tissue necessary to historically raise a German, Brit or French family is already gone.

That was not the case in Ukraine until the recent Western attacks on the traditionally Eastern-European/Russian culture of Ukraine, leading to the absurd latest bout of 'Ukrainian nationalism'.

Let’s just say that it could be proven that Ukraine could win against Russia and that popular will of Ukrainians genuinely preferred this. Would this matter to you? Would it change your opinion? Or would the genocide/replacement issue render these concerns irrelevant? What I am driving at is attempting to find the core of the disagreement between you and most posters here, the disagreement that actually drives the difference in opinion. Given your statements regarding invasion by immigrants I doubt any of these other things are really very relevant.

If Ukraine can win against Russia without selling its soul to the Western devil, good for them.

This is not what is happening.

Ukraine is to be the servant of either other Slavs, or Zelensky's cousins who congregate in Joe Biden's administration.

I find it odd that you've internalized the narrative that Trump was friendly with Russia, which is largely aesthetic from his left.

Trump's policies were worse for Russia than Biden, pre war.

My understanding of Trump is that he wanted to cut some of the deep state / unaccountable intelligence - paramilitary operations / foreign interference etc out of US politics. I think that would have been a good thing for Russia.

He obviously failed at that, even if he was genuinely intending to do so.

I don't know whether he felt friendly to Russia or not, but he strikes me as somebody with respect for strongmen, despite their decidedly anti-democratic tendencies, as they are people (Putin, Assad, Netanyahu...) that have effectively kept their own countries mostly stable for decades.

Trump's opposition did make the argument that Russia was influencing him.

The Western media seems to operate under the belief that the democratic process is such a fragile thing that a country as weak as Russia operated by a 'madman' like Putin can willy-nilly 'hack' it in order to get people like Trump elected, or Russian-friendly governments.

Additionally, they claim that the whole world should operate under the same extremely fragile democratic process, and the only way to tell whether or not the extremely fragile democratic process is operating as intended is that a leader that support their policies get elected.

Obviously no one ever questions the influence of that same Western media in shaping the opinions of voters in these 'real democracies', where social media workers who support at 99% one party take orders from intelligence agencies.

The irony when the support comes in the forms of billions dollars of aid and weapons from the American militaro-industrial complex.

Not particularly ironic when financial/economic military support has been the cornerstone of American international strategy since the American colonies were gleams in the British eye.

A reasonable border conflict, similar to the Cuban missiles crisis.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was not a border conflict.

Again, there's a whole series of convenience store robberies you haven't looked at if Russia is the main perp in your eyes.

I am glad you are on the position that Russia is a perpetrator.

Not going to happen unless Russia is destroyed. Having a de facto NATO protectorate on your border is a matter of life or death for Russia.

Not really. Russian nuclear deterence, and on top of that there's a general lack of interest in any of its neighbors to invade Russia. Any death of Russia will be self-inflicted.

Now, running into a wall headfirst is a way to commit suicide, but it remains self-inflicted.

Russia's GDP is square miles. Square miles of resource-rich land, that Russians have been doing quite a good job at keeping under control, compared to say the West in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Russia's GDP is 1.7 trillion dollars. Russia's land area is a bit more than 17 million square kilometers. This is an average GDP per square KM is 100,000/km2.

A few years ago, Russia's closest GDP comparisons, right above and below, were Canada and South Korea.

Canada's GDP is about 1.9 trillion dollars. Canada's land area is about 10 million square kilometers. The average land GDP would be 190,000/km2. Canada, notably, has 90% of its population within 150 miles of the US border.

South Korea GDP is about 1.8 trillion dollars. South Korea's land area is 0.1 million square kilometers. The average GDP/square KM would be about 18,000,000/km2. South Korea is, notably, a country about the size of the US state of Indiana, only without the oil.

Russia's GDP is worse if you want a land comparison.

How well did the Arab Spring go for liberal democracy in North Africa and the Middle East?

As a Chinese communist said about the French Revolution, it's still too early to tell.

The irony when the support comes in the forms of billions dollars of aid and weapons from the American militaro-industrial complex.

That's...just kinda what happens in modern war? The biggest industrial player gets to budge the needle at their whim. You might as well complain about American industry in WWI (which I wouldn't mind, necessarily! The Danish had the right idea back then, IMO).

The irony of claiming 'people who also don't like wars of aggression prosecuted upon them.' who are the very people prosecuting wars of aggression against every one else in the last few decades.

Take out Putin and you might make the Ukraine slightly safer, the rest of Russia probably not safer.

Take out the shadow cabinet of Biden, the boards of all NATO weapon manufacturers and you make the whole world a lot safer... probably.

I'm an American. The proliferation of America's military power does not threaten me. Quite the opposite. Russia's different. It makes far more sense to side with my country against the one that has a button press intended to destroy it.

This all comes off as a distraction anyway. But I think even independent of my pro-America bias, it's very hard to spin the US as being as destructive of an influence as Russia. Far harder to defend the victim's of America's "wars of aggression," at least.

If Zelensky had tried to assassinate Putin's dad and recently invaded a neighbor and had a history of using chemical weapons on his people, I probably would be far more sympathetic to Russia than I am.

Removing the US from the equation seems like a great idea if you want China and Russia to be more dominant forces for some reason. A stance that makes sense for citizens of those countries, but not many others. There are probably a lot of people in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia who would disagree that this military industrial shadow cabinet is a threat to their safety as they buy their hellfire missiles.

I'm an American. The proliferation of America's military power does not threaten me.

So you do not identify with the BLM crowd 'hands up don't shoot' or the J6 protesters 'please stop detaining me without a trial'?

What about Rittenhouse? Good boy watching his neighborhood or one of these evil gun-havers that needs to be disarmed by the military kicking down everybody's door?

This all comes off as a distraction anyway. But I think even independent of my pro-America bias, it's very hard to spin the US as being as destructive of an influence as Russia. Far harder to defend the victim's of America's "wars of aggression," at least.

Hard to argue with that. We can start with Russia never dropping nukes on 2 cities full of civilians perhaps.

So you do not identify with the BLM crowd 'hands up don't shoot' or the J6 protesters 'please stop detaining me without a trial'?

Non sequitur.

the military kicking down everybody's door?

In the US? You know they've all got guns at home right. They're not going to kick down their own doors.

We can start with Russia never dropping nukes on 2 cities full of civilians perhaps.

Russia practiced total war same as everyone else. You really think they wouldn't have used nukes if they had them?

All I'm saying is that they are a lot of Americans that believe that the militarization of American police is a bad thing.

Joe Biden for example:

"Surplus military equipment for law enforcement? They don't need that," Biden continued. "The last thing you need is an up-armored Humvee coming into the neighborhood, it is like the military invading, they don't know anybody, they become the enemy. They're supposed to be protecting these people."

According to many people, the proliferation of America's military power is directly harming them.

Another aspect is the mental health crisis for veterans, who make up a significant share of the homeless on American streets.

Russia practiced total war same as everyone else. You really think they wouldn't have used nukes if they had them?

They've had them and not used them. Their track record is much better than America's.

More comments

Not going to happen unless Russia is destroyed. Having a de facto NATO protectorate on your border is a matter of life or death for Russia.

They already had Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland. How is adding Ukraine to the mix "a matter of life or death"?

Supposedly Ukraine is a key area that leads straight to the sensitive parts of Russia (Caucasus) with a lot of oil + access to the Black Sea, according to John Mearshmeier I think.

Your question is worded as if nobody on The Motte is pro-Ukraine and we have only perhaps talked to such people. Also you seem to fail to consider genuine belief that Russia is in the wrong here. Just a bizarre lack of comprehension of a very normal, widespread opinion

To anyone who has discussed the issue with pro-Ukraine people.

Why do people support Ukraine fighting against Russia, with a strange militaristic fervor, instead of supporting surrendering / negotiating peace?

There's nothing strange about nations resisting invasion to anyone with a passing familiarity with history, and nothing odd about people supporting a victim of unjust aggression to anyone with a familiarity of social dynamics.

Anglin makes the points that:

-the war is severely impoverishing Europe due to high energy costs

Anglin is anticipating, not describing. Europe is not impoverished, and the past year has demonstrated that the energy doomers on both sides were significantly over-estimating the near-terms impacts of energy disruptions.

Germany is not going to have a great time, but that's because Germany's economic model relied on a number of assumptions of below-norm energy prices and globalism dynamics that increasingly no longer apply. However, Germany was also on the course for a major economic fundamentals shift this decade anyway due to German demographic shifts resulting from their top-heavy age distributed work force exiting the work force.

-the war is destroying Ukraine ( population + territory / infrastructures / institutions)

Anglin is failing to attribute agency. 'The war' is a consequence, not the actor. The Russians are destroying Ukraine, and have demonstrated they will continue to do so even even in areas not part of the front in ways that do qualify as genocide under post-WW2 international law. Since a lot of people don't view the cultural genocide clauses and mass abduction of children to destroy ethnic groups as 'really' genocide, we can just go for 'crimes against humanity.'

-continuing the war increases the chances of a world war

Anglin is being amusing, and does not make a credible argument for who else in the world would be a meaningful participant on Russia's side, considering how limited (and mercurial) the support of even Russia's closest international allies has been.

Is it cheering for the possible destruction of Russia?

It probably would be cheered, but that's generally because of the recent invasion and crimes against humanity.

Something to do with the current leadership of Russia, anti-LGBTQ, pro-family policies?

The invasion and crimes against humanity are problems with the current leadership, yes, but not particularly pro-family.

Is it about the 1991 borders of Ukraine, issues with post-Soviet Union border disputes?

The invasion and crimes against humanity are problems since 1991, yes.

Notion that 'if we don't stop Putin now he will never stop no matter what'? Is it something about broadly standing up against aggression of one state vs another, supporting the 'underdog'?

The invasion and crimes against humanity have been self-justified by the Russians by historical revaunchism ideology in terms that applies to several other regional states, meaning no relevant ideological self-limiting factor to just Ukraine, yes.

The issue with that one which seems to be central to Alexander's March 22 post is that there isn't much that seems capable of stopping Russia.

This seems curious to raise now, since one of the obvious trends of the conflict has been the Russians were quite literally stopped in multiple respects in multiple axis, including an infamous 40-mile traffic jam that preceeded a total retreat from the most important front of the war's opening in under a month. Not only did the Russians strategically culminate in most fronts by the summer, but the consistent trend of the last 6 months has been the Russians not only being stopped, but actively reversed and losing territory.

Sending another 100k Ukrainians to the meatgrinder for that end seems a little bit harsh coming from people with very little skin in the game.

The West has sent 0 Ukrainians to the meat-grinder, and has no ability to send any more, because the West does not control the Ukrainian state, both of whose constituency maintains extremely high support to resist to the state whose maximalist goals would result in even more rampant crimes against humanity against the Ukrainian nation.

Just signaling what they are told is the correct opinion?

It's strange that the greatest Russian military catastrophe since 1941, surpassing even the Chechnya and Afghanistan embarrassments to the point that the Russians are turning to North Korea of all places for military procurement, would be confused for 'just signalling.'

Is it about saving face, sunk cost at this point?

Sunk cost implies that significant costs have been incurred for no meaningful gain, which assumes a conclusion.

Western military support for Ukraine has not been a significant cost to the states providing, and has directly resulted in clear effects on Russia's intended military-political goals in the conflict. Western economic costs have been higher than the military costs, but neither impoverishing or obviously not worth opposing an attempt to fundamentally change European security politics to re-introduce wars of conquest.

What would be the best case scenario for a Ukraine/State Department victory?

Russia immediately leaving Urkainian territory, returning the kidnapped Ukrainian children and other forcibly relocated persons, paying reparations to the victims corresponding to the costs of the war including the forced conscription in occupied territories, and begin a long series of internal accountability efforts bringing war criminals to justice in international forums, hopefully accompanied by internal political reforms dismantling the security state responsible for planning and executing the war.

To my understanding, Putin is not the most radical or dangerous politician in Russia, and an implosion into ethnicity-based sub-regions would cause similar problems to the 'Arab Spring'. Chechens for example would not appear very West-friendly once 'liberated' from Russia.

The Chechens, however, would not be capable of invading European states or attempting ethnic cleansing on the scale that the Russians are attempting to.

The problem of a Russian break out isn't that various successor states wouldn't be western friendly- this is functionally no change from the current macro state- but rather the issue of nuclear proliferation. Which is why the west isn't making efforts to destroy the Russian Federation as a polity, which would be reflected in efforts to target the internal security state aparatus.

Not only that, but economic crisis in Europe could generate additional security risks.

Security risks from economic crisis in Europe are considerably less concerning than the security risks of a revaunchist invader willing to attempt wars of national eradication when he thinks he can win it during a window of opportunity, but the poor sense to not know when that is not possible.

There's nothing strange about nations resisting invasion to anyone with a passing familiarity with history

Well, yes there is something strange about it. A person is far more likely to die if he's at war than if he's under occupation; a person is far more likely to have all his infrastructure smashed if he's at war than if he's at occupation.

So why do people keep not surrendering?

It's not historically unusual for people to keep dying for abstract concepts like "statehood", but it certainly is strange from a cost-benefit analysis. History is unreasonable.

nothing odd about people supporting a victim of unjust aggression to anyone with a familiarity of social dynamics.

Anyone having empathy for any actors in wars a thousand miles away is extremely historically unusual and strange. For all of human history up until about T-100, what the Cossacks were doing in Zaporizhia would have elicited a shrug from anyone outside of Tartary. Why's anyone mad now?

Goes a bit further back than that as just an interesting sidenote. Lajos Kossuth toured the US and was hailed as perhaps the greatest living hero in the world in 1850 (with Russia also playing the villain here as well). We even named towns after the guy! We don’t have a Zelensky Iowa yet.

Well, yes there is something strange about it. A person is far more likely to die if he's at war than if he's under occupation; a person is far more likely to have all his infrastructure smashed if he's at war than if he's at occupation.

So why do people keep not surrendering?

It's not historically unusual for people to keep dying for abstract concepts like "statehood", but it certainly is strange from a cost-benefit analysis. History is unreasonable.

Is it perhaps the cost-benefit analysis that is unreasonable, and not the dedication to abstractions? As Dean notes below, cost-benefit utilitarianism is itself an abstraction, and even if nationalism is irrational (which it certainly can be), there are nonetheless people who consider the spiritual death of their nation to be worse than the actual material death of their individual selves. An occupation is not merely a change in what flag flies on top, who sits in the big chair, or where the taxes go: it's a form of colonization, where you try to replace the occupied's memes with your own, and where you have to shoot all who resist.

Well, yes there is something strange about it. A person is far more likely to die if he's at war than if he's under occupation; a person is far more likely to have all his infrastructure smashed if he's at war than if he's at occupation.

So why do people keep not surrendering?

It's not historically unusual for people to keep dying for abstract concepts like "statehood", but it certainly is strange from a cost-benefit analysis. History is unreasonable.

If the model fails to match reality, the failure is in the model, not the reality. People sacrifice for abstract concepts all the time because they place value in these abstract concepts over other abstractions like 'infrastructure', and whatever model of darwinian evolution you prefer has consistently upheld this as not just a reasonable group dynamic, but a dominant one. History is not unreasonable- it's unreasonable to suddenly expect people to diverge from their norms.

...which is, of course, a common theme in history, as various groups who think themselves above such baser thinking regularly fall victim to the same when they're the ones in such contexts, and their abstractions of what's reasonable give way to impulses much more real. States do not fight for their infrastructure- nations fight for their homes. Failing to understand the distinction is failing to reason with the known reality.

nothing odd about people supporting a victim of unjust aggression to anyone with a familiarity of social dynamics.

Anyone having empathy for any actors in wars a thousand miles away is extremely historically unusual and strange. For all of human history up until about T-100, what the Cossacks were doing in Zaporizhia would have elicited a shrug from anyone outside of Tartary. Why's anyone mad now?

Because people outside of Tartary are now able to be aware of it, of course, and with that awareness comes political pressure and expectations to do something about it.

For most of human history until about T-100, the technology did not exist for people to know about happened further away. Within a century of the telegraph, most of the traditional empires present at the time were dead or on their way out the door. Within a century of the radio, all of the traditional empires were. The information revolutions brought the far-away places no one could know or care much about into closer awareness, and as the technology spread, so did the pressures to care.

What changed was not human nature, but the technological revolution of communications that allowed human nature to extend it's range of awareness.

Anyone having empathy for any actors in wars a thousand miles away is extremely historically unusual and strange. For all of human history up until about T-100, what the Cossacks were doing in Zaporizhia would have elicited a shrug from anyone outside of Tartary. Why's anyone mad now?

Strange? Yes, it was strange when, for example ... inhabitants of Western and Northern Europe deeply cared about some stones in the Middle East they never saw, thousands of miles away, cared enough that they not only sent money, but went in hundreds of thousands to near certain death in order to liberate them.

Unusual? Not, even in pre modern times without internet, TV, radio and newspapers.

For all of human history up until about T-100, what the Cossacks were doing in Zaporizhia would have elicited a shrug from anyone outside of Tartary.

Au contraire:

"It was Ivan Mazepa, the leader of the autonomous Cossack state in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and not Peter I, the victor of the Battle of Poltava, or Charles XII, the defeated king of Sweden, who captured the imagination of French artists and literary figures from the Enlightenment well into the nineteenth century. The legend of Mazepa's ride on the back of a wild horse into the steppes of Ukraine, in particular, and details about his subsequent ascent to the Hetmanate fueled a veritable creative fervor in Europe that resulted in the creation of over 300 works of art, literature, and music on the subject. The epicenter of this artistic output was France, beginning with the romantic generation, whose influence continued with the help of numerous French publishers and lithographers: of the forty-four publishers in Europe printing lithographs with a Mazepa theme, twenty-nine were located in Paris and five elsewhere in France. (4) The wide diffusion of this imagery, especially mid-century (when the introduction of the steam-powered mechanical press allowed for the printing of 1,000 sheets per hour), was such that in 1892 a reviewer of the French opera Mazeppa, by the composer Marie de Grandval, remarked--in an "art-imitating-art-imitating-life" way--that there was a time when "one could not enter into the slightest village cabaret without finding, on the walls, Mazeppa tied to his horse." (5) By contrast, only a handful of plays, short stories, or novels were published on the subject of Peter I or Charles XII during the nineteenth century, with only one work tangentially on the Battle of Poltava itself. (6)"

Fairly sure this was not an uncommon topic in the Less Wrong of 10 years ago. How do you have a functional military in your rationalist utopia when it is always rational for the individual to flee and/or surrender? Except if everyone does that, your utopia gets conquered by the nearest group of marginally less 'rational' barbarians.

There's nothing strange or unreasonable about history being full of groups of people willing to risk their lives for the abstract concepts of their group. Because groups without such memes generally don't last long enough to leave a mark on history.

And from a game theory perspective, the credible pre-commitments of MAD are how all military defense functions, really. If you attack us, we commit to fighting a bloody war instead of rolling over. Even though the cost for the defender will be greater, the cost for the attacker will be much greater. And the only way to make that pre-commitment credible is to follow through even after the deterrence has failed. Because it is an iterated game, both from the defenders perspective, assuming they survive, and evolutionarily - "fuck with me and we'll both end up worse" is credible coming from humans because humans have evolved to follow through often enough.

Since when is it rational to flee? The evolutionary imperative is to spread your dna (your algorithm or code). If you die but a million people who share significant parts of your code survive then it is rational to die.

Humans already live forever. When you reproduce your reproduction shares a percentage of you. Reproduce enough and you not only survive but multiples of you survive.

The rationalist model here is just wrong. It’s rational to die.

How about fleeing to another [more affluent] country, taking the necessary steps to have your descendants take control of that country and then exact revenge on the initial threat?

Would that be a successful strategy?

I can’t tell if your just trolling with AI.

Do you have a specific example in mind? I suppose I could uncharitably assume you are talking about Jews, since you are fond of Darkly Hinting about them, but in that case you should speak plainly and also explain which country they have taken control of.

Otherwise this seems like a low-effort hypothetical just for the sake of being argumentative.

That's not how it works. See "The Tragedy of Group Selectionism" by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Because Eliezer wrote something it’s not a fact?

Also one of the arguments used is that foxes don’t limit their breeding. Which doesn’t apply to humans since we often do the discussed behavior of fighting and personal sacrifice for their tribe.

I'm replying to a post that's wondering why people don't just surrender to save their lives. And the very point of those discussions on LW was that any model of rationality that easily destroyed can't be all that rational. Which is why the last paragraph of my post gives a game-theoretic reason to fight.

But humans very much do not live forever. You are not your genes, your consciousness is their byproduct and will die with your physical body. And your desires are only indirectly linked with genetic success (adaptation executors vs fitness maximizers and all that). Plus, for genetic success it's much better to get other people to die for you instead.

Yea and I disagree with your game theoretic analysis.

I think it’s just genes. And we do live forever. And my model really explains behavior that seems irrational to you.

Fairly sure this was not an uncommon topic in the Less Wrong of 10 years ago. How do you have a functional military in your rationalist utopia when it is always rational for the individual to flee and/or surrender? Except if everyone does that, your utopia gets conquered by the nearest group of marginally less 'rational' barbarians.

As smart people as Less Wrong crowd thought about this problem before, Future Rational Utopia just needs to learn from their experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrier_troops#Red_Army

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B0%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%BE%D1%82%D1%80%D1%8F%D0%B4

There’s no peace deal on the table. It feels like your just building a strawman. You don’t end a war just to leave military positions that can turn into a hot war whenever Russia decides to.

If Russia put together a peace deal that is viable and would end hostilities for a generation then Ukraine should consider it. They haven’t. The only offer Ukraine has received is a ceasefire until Russia is ready to start the war again. From Ukraines perspective it’s better to win or lose now. Not have purgatory and new war in a year.

I think Russia made an ultimatum based on the Minsk agreement right before the war, telling Ukraine to stop their little game of seeking favors with the West or else.

Ukraine also had the option of not bombing civilians for years in Eastern Ukraine and they chose not to. From the perspective of civilians in the Eastern Ukraine, Russia has only joined a war that Ukraine was waging against them for years.

There is no realistic path for an independent Ukraine victory in my opinion, it's a matter of Americans and Europeans deciding that tanking their own economy is not worth preserving the borders of some random post-soviet state.

From Ukraines perspective it’s better to win or lose now.

From the Ukrainian man's perspective, it's better to see their leadership surrender than to get sent to the die in a war that they have nothing to gain from.

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From the Ukrainian man's perspective, it's better to see their leadership surrender than to get sent to the die in a war that they have nothing to gain from.

I think you have the Ukrainian man's perspective wrong. The Ukrainian man doesn't necessarily love Zelenskyy to the point of laying down his own life for his leader, but he does value telling the Russians to fuck off enough.

This sort of argument has been brought up many a time this year, and it's pointless for many of the same reasons that utilitarian or "realist"/"rationalist" arguments tend to fall flat: for many people, there are things that matter more than GDP or trade agreements. You may think it irrational for Ukraine to not lay down and take their annexation, or for the West to refuse the Rusgeld, but you simply don't see this from the perspective of others.

You mention Ukrainian aggression towards their seccessionists and trying to make friends with the West, and I will simply note that that is just Cold War-era tensions mixed with a good old fashioned culture war. Russia launched this invasion in the first place because they (or, rather, the idea/memeplex of Russia) have lost the culture war in Ukraine.

I think you have the Ukrainian man's perspective wrong.

I probably do.

Russia launched this invasion in the first place because they (or, rather, the idea/memeplex of Russia) have lost the culture war in Ukraine.

Maybe they did, but that should not translate into bombing civilians with strong ties to your much bigger and stronger next door neighbor.

Wars still need to be fought. It's very impressive that the comedy actor Zelensky was able to parlay billions of dollars from the EU and US, but all it takes is for the general sentiment to turn in either or both for 'his' country to go down the drain.

Furthermore, if the average Ukrainian man is a strong nationalist willing to die for Ukraine (whatever that is), that he considered very very different than the next door Russian neighbor his ancestors shared hundreds of years of destiny with, he's in for a big surprise when he finds out what kind of people the EU and NATO have been importing on their side.

Nationalism is not really a strong value for the NATO camp, and aside from the Reddit brigade, there aren't that many people that care enough about the personal, individual fate of any Ukrainian to put their life on the line for them.

Any other year, they would have assumed the man to be some kind of patriarchal racist/xenophobe, and to an extent probably correctly.

Maybe they did, but that should not translate into bombing civilians with strong ties to your much bigger and stronger next door neighbor.

Russia is much bigger, but not much stronger, as demonstrated by their offensive culmination in the first three months, before major land combat systems began being shipped to Ukraine in earnest.

The Soviet Union was much stronger- hence the access to Soviet economic stockpiles fueling the contemporary Russian military- but this outside-actor advantage has been countered by the Western economic stockpiles fueling the contemporary Ukrainian military. Given that the Soviet stockpiles are increasingly finite, while the western economic production is forecasted to remain overwhelming even with the economic difficulties forecasted,

Wars still need to be fought. It's very impressive that the comedy actor Zelensky was able to parlay billions of dollars from the EU and US, but all it takes is for the general sentiment to turn in either or both for 'his' country to go down the drain.

Fortunately for Ukraine, the Russians have been very effective at fortifying general sentiment of the western alliance network to maintain support, which has in turn allowed western supporters to develop the internal political-interest coalitions to continue support for reasons beyond sentiment.

It turns out, when the patrons of influential interest groups becomes a pariah, domestic political actors will take the opportunity to tear said groups down and apart as part of the churn of internal politics.

Furthermore, if the average Ukrainian man is a strong nationalist willing to die for Ukraine (whatever that is), that he considered very very different than the next door Russian neighbor his ancestors shared hundreds of years of destiny with, he's in for a big surprise when he finds out what kind of people the EU and NATO have been importing on their side.

Citation needed for existence of 'years of destiny', but also irrelevant- if he's in a position to be surprised, he will have already beat the Russians decisively enough to have the time and space to turn attention to western europe and care about something like that.

Nationalism is not really a strong value for the NATO camp, and aside from the Reddit brigade, there aren't that many people that care enough about the personal, individual fate of any Ukrainian to put their life on the line for them.

That's the neat point- there don't need to be. The Ukrainians don't need foreign manpower on the front line.

Any other year, they would have assumed the man to be some kind of patriarchal racist/xenophobe, and to an extent probably correctly.

Fortunately, Russia has a way of helping other people come together in a more inclusive way.

Fortunately for Ukraine, the Russians have been very effective at fortifying general sentiment of the western alliance network to maintain support, which has in turn allowed western supporters to develop the internal political-interest coalitions to continue support for reasons beyond sentiment.

If democracy is still a thing, I expect some (limited) turnover in Western Europe to the tune of 'why should we keep paying for Ukraine', and in the US, 'what happened to BLM, it's all about Ukraine'.

Most people don't really care about preventing far away countries from encroaching into other far away countries' borders.

It's hard to simultaneously say that Russia is weak and cannot sustain the war and that we need to give billions to defend against Russia, or else Russia will keep fighting these wars that they are too weak to fight.

If democracy is still a thing, I expect some (limited) turnover in Western Europe to the tune of 'why should we keep paying for Ukraine', and in the US, 'what happened to BLM, it's all about Ukraine'.

The Italians had an election pretty recently, and haven't blinked. The US midterms weren't a hotbed of anti-establishment or anti-Ukraine sentiment either. None of these things are big secrets. I think it's pretty safe to say you're still wrong.

The realist/rationalist should support the Ukraine war. I take those labels and support the war.

Poland right now is on pace to have higher per capita income than england in 10 years. That could be Ukraines future in NATO. You get rich. Now their some shithole peasant people useful to the west as 23 year old wives for 50 year olds.

"Ukraine also had the option of not bombing civilians for years in Eastern Ukraine and they chose not to."

Do you think they "bombed civilians for years in Eastern Ukraine" just for the evulz?

Ukraine fought back in a war initiated by separatists and instigated, indirectly or directly, by Russia. If Ukraine hadn't fought back, the separatists would have kept pushing and pushing, beyond the January 2022 frontline already in 2014 or 2015

Kind of the opposite of pushing, really. The Donetsk and Luhansk separists, who started their uprising in April 2014, were only spared a quick defeat in 2014 due to the direct intervention of conventional Russian forces in August, about five months later. Before they did so, the separatists were basically being blockaded in the cities they controlled, as the broader pro-Russian/anti-maidan uprising the Russians were expecting fell flat.

Eastern Ukraine since 2014 is absolutely one of those contexts where the war only lasted as a long as it did due to external life-support and regular intervention. Donetsk and Luhansk had more in common with Kabul than Ukraine vis-a-vis Russia, right down to the tepid-at-best local support making local fighters dependent on external military forces.

If the goal was to protect ethnic Russians, the best course of action would have been to let the separatist states fall. Not only would there have been no war around the two cities, but they would have been quickly re-integrated into the post-Maidan political system, which actually would have allowed pro-Russian interest groups a chance to affect internal Ukrainian politics, rather than Russia's attempt to force the Minsk II constitution order change as peace terms. That method had the effect of taking all the pro-Russian influence groups out of Ukraine's politics, a mistake that was noted at the time as a gamble.

Kind of the opposite of pushing, really. The Donetsk and Luhansk separists, who started their uprising in April 2014, were only spared a quick defeat in 2014 due to the direct intervention of conventional Russian forces in August, about five months later. Before they did so, the separatists were basically being blockaded in the cities they controlled, as the broader pro-Russian/anti-maidan uprising the Russians were expecting fell flat.

Well, yes, that's exactly because Ukraine - or perhaps, one might say, Ukrainian nationalists - fought back. What I meant was that the separatists certainly intended to expand to a vastly larger area than what they controlled in Jan 2022, as indicated by the early attempts to establish DPR/LPR like entities in Herson, Kharkiv etc.

To summarize - you think Ukraine is a non playable character. No ability to create their own destiny.

Second Poland has very real strategic issues here. Their not letting Russia militiarize Ukraine on their border. If the US and most of Western Europe left Ukraine right now Poland would have to make a serious decision of going 100% all-in on Ukraine. Poland cares about these borders. And a bunch of other smaller post Soviet countries in NATO all of which would have to decide on going to full hot war with Russia. Whether the US joins or not half of nato would likely end up in a hot war with Russia.

Minsk’s agreement guaranteed Ukraine sovereignty. They were guaranteed by Russia independence in their economic concerns.

Economic issues for Europe have been muted. Oil/natty prices back down.

Russia rapidly becoming a non-country.

Ukranian men can make their own decisions. They prefer freedom and dead Russians. Victory at this point is basically guaranteed and it’s Russia that’s going to be worried about their borders not Ukraine.

Honestly don’t get why westerners object to US in Ukraine. It’s pocket change. I get it that Russia isn’t globo homo. But I’m also not globohomo. And Russia isn’t the ally I want against globohomo.

To summarize - you think Ukraine is a non playable character. No ability to create their own destiny.

In my opinion Ukraine is not a character. Proof of it is that the main leader of that 'nationalist' country is Jewish, thus not sharing the same ethnicity as most people in Ukraine and Russia (slavic), and was even sued a couple years ago for not using the official language (Ukrainian, a regional dialect of Russian that he learned as an adult) in official settings, Most people in that country speak Russian but the government has been playing a game of forcing Ukrainian as the official 'language', similarly to French in Quebec.

Aside from that, they cannot possibly win against Russia on their own, and they've been struggling with intelligence, spec ops and billions dollars in support from the richest country in the world.

Ukraine also had the ability to create their own destiny when they had pro-Russia leaders until that color revolution that brought in actors like Zelensky in charge.

I guess that was not the right type of democracy back then.

Poland cares about these borders. And a bunch of other smaller post Soviet countries in NATO all of which would have to decide on going to full hot war with Russia. Whether the US joins or not half of nato would likely end up in a hot war with Russia.

I don't think that's in question at this point.

One can also question why Poland would decide to strengthen ties to EU/NATO when they already put themselves on the bad side of the EU before for their treatment of LGBTQ+ minorities.

They may have ultimately more in common with the Russian block than the Western block, but that's up to them to figure out.

And Russia isn’t the ally I want against globohomo.

Which one is it then? Let's have globohomo fully destroy Western Europe because Russia bad?

Insofar as "globohomo" exists, surely Russians are as "globo" as the West, considering that they have no compunction about there being, generally, global organizations, global treaties, global frameworks etc. that nations are supposed to obey - they simply want the whole constellation and governance of the system to happen on a different basis than now (ie. one that would favor Russia more).

Thus, it all would boil down to "homo", which I'm choosing to interpret as meaning, obviously, homosexuality (I'm aware there's an explanation of the term where it means "global homogeneity" or whatever - this has always sounded, to me, as credible as "No, officer, don't ya know that ACAB means All Cats Are Beautiful?")m, and that would then boil down to it being OK for Russia to bomb Ukraine's infrastructure to smithereens, occupy vast stretches of land, kill untold numbers of Ukrainians etc... just to prevent there being a Pride parades in Donetsk and Sevastopol. Forgive me for not considering that enough of a reason for, well, anything resembling Russia's current actions, really.

Let's have globohomo fully destroy Western Europe because Russia bad?

Globohomo will sterilize itself into extinction in fairly short order, don't worry.

Globohomo might actually be demographically stable as long as it manages to recruit from outsider populations faster than it kills or sterilizes its members.

And demographically-stable outsider populations are developing immune responses rapidly.

Poland is on pace to have higher per capita income than England.

But your opinion is quickly given - you don’t believe Ukranians exists. It’s like stepping on a cockroach.

This is horrible logic - “Ukraine had the chance to create their own identified when they had Russian leaders” - like wtf - that’s akin to Henry Ford saying you can buy a car any color you want as long as it’s black. You saying Ukraine could have any destiny they wanted as long as their a Russian colony.

Poland is on pace to have higher per capita income than England.

I wonder if this has to do with the quality of people that reside respectively in Poland and England.

I wonder if building stronger ties to NATO and EU is going to lead Poland toward increasing or decreasing the quality of the people that live there.

Let's not forget the assumption that higher per capita income should be used as an important metrics.

But your opinion is quickly given - you don’t believe Ukranians exists.

What do you care if Ukrainians exist? If the proportion of Ukrainian in Ukraine decreased by 10% but the per capita income increased by 10%, wouldn't that be positive for you?

This is horrible logic - “Ukraine had the chance to create their own identified when they had Russian leaders”

Ukraine had an identity for the hundreds of years that it was practically a part of Russia.

You do not seem to like that identity and you seem to believe that the 1991 to 2022 or 2014 to 2022 period is the 'real' Ukrainian identity. Arbitrary.

You saying Ukraine could have any destiny they wanted as long as their a Russian colony.

Oh now they are finally free from the Russian empire! They only have to come grovel to the American congress and take orders from American politicians. Surely this will improve their lot.

We’ll disagree with most of that.

But no I don’t let globohomo win because Russia bad. I just don’t partner with Russia. I fight globohomo in other avenues (which does include allying with Ukraine after the war as a non globo homo country).

I speak truth to power against globohomo.

which does include allying with Ukraine after the war as a non globo homo country

Ukraine as a non globo homo country?

They’ve always been non globo homo.

You think the globo homo types would ever man trenches in 0 degree weather?

This the President

types would ever man trenches in 0 degree weather?

Them the ones getting eliminated by the President

Let's see what the 'New Ukrainians' look like once Zelensky is done with Ukraine.

More comments

Proof of it is that the main leader of that 'nationalist' country is Jewish

Wild stuff.

No nation with a jewish president can be a sovereign country? Jewish people can't be nationalistic? This is "proof" that Ukraine is not sovereign, or has no agency in its own affairs?

Jewish nationalism is called zionism.

My evidence for Zelensky not being a Ukrainian nationalist is that :

-he is an actor. Not exactly where you expect to find nationalists, but it is a career where duplicity is an important skill

-he learned the Ukrainian dialect as an adult and was sued for not using it in official setting while it was a requirement of his job

It seems that Ukrainian nationalists are very concerned about usage of Ukrainian, why would an authentic nationalist not know that?

That's like being an American progressive who doesn't care to learn the pronouns.

Usually nationalists of a given country follow people that actually represent the majority of the nation.

For example American nationalists usually elect white people because that's who they think the nation should be represented by.

All I'm saying is that it's pretty odd for nationalists to elect a minority actor who does not even follow the basic codes (even law) of being an elected official for that country.

The fact that the guy immediately throws the country into a war that pretty much guarantees that Ukraine will not exist as a nation in any meaningful way in the future kind of support this further.

Sending all your womenfolk overseas for the next generation pretty much guarantees that you will not have fresh blood in the future, unless imported EU-style, but by my definition of nationalism, that is not really the same nation.

-he learned the Ukrainian dialect as an adult and was sued for not using it in official setting while it was a requirement of his job

If an IRA member grows ups using English and learns Gaelic only as an adult and cannot use it very well, does that ipso facto mean they're not an Irish nationalist?

Honestly don’t get why westerners object to US in Ukraine.

World War 3 will last half an hour.

US soldiers are on the ground demonstrating weapons systems to Ukrainians. The first American serviceman to lose his life will be a cause celebre and a causus belli.

Come on this isn’t serious. US isn’t launching nukes because a military contractor lost a life. You using an assumption that we are dumb and lack self control.

America could lose 50k soldiers and still refuse escalation to nuclear war.

You using an assumption that we are dumb and lack self control.

Would that this were a convincing counter-argument...

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And if you always surrender to nukes then a shithole country and culture like Russia would rule the world.

Scott dealt with this in a long think piece before.

Russian pilots flew missions in the Korean War, no? That didn't escalate, despite that falling under the same conditions in this frame.

Is it that likely that a ceasefire would just lead to another war? And on your other point, what kind of peace deal would prevent war for another generation? Like, do you expect Russia to totally disarm or something?

If Ukraine fights this out I would estimate a 20-30% chance of complete Russian disarmament. That’s a scenerio where losing the war costs Moscow legitimacy for their colonial possessions and the splintering of the Russian empire into unit sizes without an ability to project force.

Current lines are not defensible for Ukraine. Old 2014 lines would be defensible for Ukraine right now especially with added western tech transfer and a degraded Russian military.

Any thing I’ve seen from Russia right now in terms of ceasefire seems to be to buy time to rebuild combat effectiveness. Also for the broader west a ceasefire isn’t good because it means we need to spend more money keeping the lights on in Ukraine before rebuilding for real.

Is it that likely that a ceasefire would just lead to another war?

Depending on how you want to categorize the intervention, last February was the second, third, fourth or even fifth incursion by Russia against Ukraine in the last decade. First being Crimea, second being the NovaRussia 'uprising', third being the 2014 direct military intervention to save the NovaRussia uprising into what remained of the separatist micro-states which saw a major defeat of the 2014 Ukrainian army, the fourth being the various escalation-spikes in the not-so-frozen conflict, and fifth being the most recent.

The Russian Federation as an institution has set out goals that a cease fire on current terms would not meet, with very heavy-handed measures intended to ensure no major Russian political figure of significance could backtrack (the annexation of not-occupied territories, the early-war 'we all support Putin' public statements, the various filtration measures including systemic torture and executions that no figure has repudiated, the abduction of Ukrainian children and systemic adoption by Russians), while Putin in particular has demonstrated a pretty consistent and unchanging view on an end-state that doesn't exactly accept the status quo.

While there could be an argument that Putin could be indefinitely persuaded until his death that he isn't ready to attack Ukraine yet again, this is undermined by the fact that- by the public reports of those world leads who've met with him- Putin seems to really believe he can still win this current war, even as the strategic tools Putin had been counting on this war (specifically European gas dependence) will not apply in the medium-term future. In this context, Putin's use of a cease fire would be operational so that he could still operate before full European gas dependence, not indefinite like the Korean War.

Sure, if you want to count the events of 2014 as being three separate wars. But what matters is not how long the battle has gone on for, but how it's going now, and it's going really badly for the Russians.

In this context, Putin's use of a cease fire would be operational so that he could still operate before full European gas dependence, not indefinite like the Korean War.

The same claim is always made by hawks against ceasefires. The North and South Koreans at the time opposed ceasefire - it was only due to pressure from their great power patrons that they accepted the armistice. They would gladly have continued fighting. Hawks, at the time, warned against it, saying that the dastardly North Koreans would attack again once they saw a chance. In that time an entire generation of Koreans has grown up and become old. You think Putin has another fifty years of life in him?

The same claim is always made by hawks against ceasefires. The North and South Koreans at the time opposed ceasefire - it was only due to pressure from their great power patrons that they accepted the armistice. They would gladly have continued fighting. Hawks, at the time, warned against it, saying that the dastardly North Koreans would attack again once they saw a chance. In that time an entire generation of Koreans has grown up and become old. You think Putin has another fifty years of life in him?

This, uh, is an awkward choice of historical comparison, considering North Korea absolutely did attempt on multiple times to attack South Korea in ways intended to topple the government, ranging from decapitation strike on a Blue House to attempted insurgencies to a provocation campaign intended to drive the Americans to withdraw so that the North Korean buildup could go against the relatively less built-up South.

The 'hawks' were absolutely correct that North Korea would attack again once they saw a chance, as demonstrated by them doing so, and so the hawk-influence on an armistice as opposed to a treaty was vindicated.

I don't even really understand the question. People, at least in wester democratic countries, believe that the legitimacy of rule comes from the consent of the governed. This isn't a perfectly consistent belief as few beliefs are shown in a kind of status quo bias that has them opposing forcible annexation but also opposing many secessions. But the underlying belief is quite simple. It is axiomatically evil to use force to make people join compacts that they do not want to join, Russia is doing this with their invasion and allowing Russia to be reward for breaking this rule sets an unacceptable precedent.

You seem to think they should be operating on some crude non-iterative maximization of total utility in the near term like unthinking animals. But they learned from the Nazi days that appeasement doesn't work and expansionist tyrants can only be adequately answered with absolutely no tolerance.

Ukraine has been bombing civilians in the Eastern parts of the country, and is forcing men within its borders to join its armies, it's not exactly a model of 'consent to be governed'.

Russia is doing this with their invasion and allowing Russia to be reward for breaking this rule sets an unacceptable precedent.

Here is on the other hand John Bolton bragging about overtaking other countries' governments.

Why do I somehow doubt the people on the side of John Bolton when they tell me that Russia has no good reason to be wary of their next-door neighbor inviting John Bolton and his buddies to build up military installations on their border?

But they learned from the Nazi days that appeasement doesn't work and expansionist tyrants can only be adequately answered with absolutely no tolerance.

Expansionist tyrants like the ones attacking North Africa, the Middle-East, setting up puppet regimes in South America for decades...?

Ukraine has been bombing civilians in the Eastern parts of the country, and is forcing men within its borders to join its armies, it's not exactly a model of 'consent to be governed'.

Sure it is. Ukraine has been bombing the eastern parts of the country because the Russians militarily intervened and have been occupying it for several years, a counter-intervention effort that remains extremely popular within the Ukrainian demos-politic with access to the Ukrainian electoral processes, which consists of non-Russian disrupted parts of Ukraine. Conscription is not controversial.

Russia is doing this with their invasion and allowing Russia to be reward for breaking this rule sets an unacceptable precedent.

Here is on the other hand John Bolton bragging about overtaking other countries' governments.

As John Bolton is not a Russian, and also did not lead wars of conquest, it's not really relevant to perception of Russia being rewarded.

Why do I somehow doubt the people on the side of John Bolton when they tell me that Russia has no good reason to be wary of their next-door neighbor inviting John Bolton and his buddies to build up military installations on their border?

Possibly because of your skill level at understanding the implications of Russian nukes on neighbors desire to invade Russia.

Expansionist tyrants like the ones attacking North Africa, the Middle-East, setting up puppet regimes in South America for decades...?

Since no one has been conquering nations for their territory in North Africa, the Middle-East, or South America for decades, apparently not, since those were neither expansion-wars or recent.

Kind of an own-goal on that one, not going to lie. If you're going to do false equivalence, at least drop the qualifier for what kind of war.

Since no one has been conquering nations for their territory in North Africa, the Middle-East, or South America for decades, apparently not, since those were neither expansion-wars or recent.

Kind of an own-goal on that one, not going to lie. If you're going to do false equivalence, at least drop the qualifier for what kind of war.

The US-led 'rule-based international order' defines 'bad wars' as 'wars of conquest' where one country takes some territory from another country.

Of course they do not include in that definition setting up military bases and secret prisons in foreign countries, murdering and replacing foreign countries' government with vassal governments, corporations taking control of large swaths of territories with underlying support from intelligence assets... Expanding power and control does not necessarily require expanding territory, which the US still do anyway with their military/intelligence bases.

Within that context, the US can more or less claim that they are following the rules, most of the time.

Why should we expect America's adversaries to play by the same rule-book?

I'm not super interested in debating the specifics of who has shader allies, I'm simply explaining that it is very hard to invade a country explicitly to conquer it and not look like an aggressor. If putin got backed into it by Bolton out playing him at 8 dimensional 52 card pickup then putin really really sucks at 8 dimensional 52 card pickup.

History is written by the victors, that's true. Russia looks like an aggressor to you but everyone else sees their behavior as restrained compared to US hegemony.

US might win that game, at the cost of destroying all their Western European allies.

Nobody else cares about Putin invading his neighbor.

If anything else, every other country is going to be even more distrustful of the US, as they can just break all rules of international trade and blockade you for minor border disputes.

History is written by the victors, that's true.

Not really. Enduring histories have frequently been by the losers with more time to grouse than the winners too busy with leading to focus on their memoirs.

But, if we do take what you say as true, then Russia' strategic defeat will be appropriately recorded by the victors.

Russia looks like an aggressor to you but everyone else sees their behavior as restrained compared to US hegemony.

*Citation needed on everyone.

US might win that game, at the cost of destroying all their Western European allies.

There is no credible scenario in which all of the US's Western European allies are destroyed. Or any of them, really.

Germany is a central-European state, and while the disruption to their economic model will truly be difficult for them, it was the predictable consequence of decades of German industrial policy that they were warned about by other partners.

Nobody else cares about Putin invading his neighbor.

This is, of course, why majorities in the UN condemned the Russian invasion, and the Russian annexation, and why Russia's closest allies have been so generous with their economic and military support, to the extent that CSTO is not at all floundering.

If anything else, every other country is going to be even more distrustful of the US, as they can just break all rules of international trade and blockade you for minor border disputes.

*Citation needed on every other country

US might win that game, at the cost of destroying all their Western European allies.

The alternative to expensive heating is maintaining a substantial military that occasionally kills an appreciable portion of your workforce. Europeans of the future will count this as an unmitigated win.

If anything else, every other country is going to be even more distrustful of the US, as they can just break all rules of international trade and blockade you for minor border disputes.

This is incredibly naïve. In what universe does successfully defeating your rivals and preserving the sovereignty of not even allies harm one's credibility? Are you actually able to look at the Russia Ukraine conflict and conclude that nations should strive to be on the Russian side of the equation? If you're an Eastern European country watching this go down you'd trade just about anything to be in the good graces of uncle Sam. I bet you can find that "America, world police" song on juke boxes in Poland.

The alternative to expensive heating is maintaining a substantial military that occasionally kills an appreciable portion of your workforce. Europeans of the future will count this as an unmitigated win.

Expensive heating and expensive power. The kind of stuff you need to run factories that would help you equip an army when you inevitably come to need one.

In what universe does successfully defeating your rivals and preserving the sovereignty of not even allies harm one's credibility?

Successfully defeating your rivals? First they could start by successfully defeating the Taliban.

Guess what, they celebrate the coincidence of getting out of Afghanistan in time to have the resources to tackle Ukraine.

Are you actually able to look at the Russia Ukraine conflict and conclude that nations should strive to be on the Russian side of the equation?

At least the Russians have the balls to resist American commands. I imagine a number of Eastern-Europeans would understand that.

If you're an Eastern European country watching this go down you'd trade just about anything to be in the good graces of uncle Sam.

Yes just like the Poles strove to be on the good side of Britain and France, how'd that work out for them at the time?

Maybe they should remember that the Soviet conquest of Poland was possible thanks to the American lend-lease?

I bet you can find that "America, world police" song on juke boxes in Poland.

Yep and that should be incredibly shameful.

Here's Germany 40 years under America vs 40 years under Soviet Union.

Here's Germany 40 years under America vs 40 years under Soviet Union.

Great job, russia! Fucked up East Germany so badly that not even muslim immigrants want to live there.

How many muslims live in Russia, again?

Plenty of muslims living in Russians but they are not purposefully importing them afaik.

Russia is arguably better at managing multiculturalism than NATO.

Fucked up East Germany so badly that not even muslim immigrants want to live there.

That's one way of looking at it. Another way to look at it is that an atheistic or muslim Germany would not be very much German at all.

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I find it hard to believe you're arguing in good faith when you so carelessly whistle while ignoring Russian conscription. I guess those Mobiks mean as little to you as they do to Putin eh?

Isn't it worth it to start conscription when the US are attacking you in a proxy war?

My understanding of the Russian situation is that Russians as a people have a very high level of resilience.

Life in Russia generally sucks, it sucking a little bit more than usual is a common, accepted occurrence.

On the other hand the EU are made up of a bunch of individuals looking to increase their own personal comfort and who are really inconvenienced by energy prices going up.

Russia can still cut its fertilizer exports if they decide that they really want to go all out against the rest of the world.

It's possible that Russia will suddenly collapse in a hundred internal revolutions or something, but that does not strike me as a good outcome for somebody that values the overall safety of the world.

  • -10

Isn't it worth it to start conscription when the US are attacking you in a proxy war?

If you're stupid, sure.

Setting aside that the US is not attacking Russia in a proxy war, resorting to conscription in the face of a proxy war is missing the point of asymmetry in proxy wars. In strategy terms the worth/cost/value-analysis of a proxy war is not for the proxy to win at any cost, but for the cost of aid given to the proxies to increase the costs incurred by the parties fighting the proxy. Mass conscription is an exceptionally expensive way to fight a conflict, as it generally combines increasing military costs and inflicting political costs and economic opportunity-loss costs of robbing the civilian economy, and often does so for marginal military utility. Directly fighting the proxies is the proxy-fighter win state, and thus the worth/value state to be avoided by the person fighting the proxies.

For a power facing proxy war, value-strategies of worth are cost-mitigation strategies. You either interdict the proxies with cost-efficient interventions, you bypass/ignore the proxies to the best of your ability in order to complete your objective and minimize the wasted time/resources spent dealing with proxies, or you cut losses and no longer engage, withdrawing as needed.

The Russians are unable to interdict western aid to Ukraine, and cannot bypass/ignore the Ukrainians who have received western aid. From the worth/value model, the best worth response remaining is to cut losses, which in the context of Ukraine would mean withdrawing from Ukrainian territory.

My understanding of the Russian situation is that Russians as a people have a very high level of resilience.

The average lifespan, suicide, and emmigration statistics indicate otherwise.

Russia can still cut its fertilizer exports if they decide that they really want to go all out against the rest of the world.

Not really relevant, since it's as credible and helpful to the Russians as saying they could nuke random countries. Less credible, actually, since famine is a self-resolving problem that, while terrible, is rarely state destroying, and wouldn't be benefiting Russia much in the interim.

It's possible that Russia will suddenly collapse in a hundred internal revolutions or something, but that does not strike me as a good outcome for somebody that values the overall safety of the world.

Accepting the gains of a nuclear armed power conducting a war of territorial conquest against one of the few countries in the world to have actually given up nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees by said power is considerably worse. Libya was bad enough, but Gaddafi didn't actually have nukes, just the program. In Ukraine, Russia created direct nuclear proliferation justification for any power with either territorial designs or fear of territorial designs from nuclear weapons, and only a comprehensive Russian defeat will demonstrate on a world-level that both sides of the paradigm (that nuclear weapons enable territorial conquest / that nuclear weapons are required to resist conquest by larger powers) are false. Minimizing / delaying proliferation requires that both aggressors and defenders not feel that nukes are decisive/critical enablers.

A Russian collapse is bad from a nuclear proliferation perspective in the sense of nuclear terrorism from loose nukes, and some countries aquiring a nuclear deterrent without the production capability. A Russian victory is terrible from a nuclear proliferation perspective in the sense of mass production capability proliferation corresponding with territorial wars of conquest, which will also provide loose nuke risk.

While the preferable option is a comprehensive Russian defeat without a crack-up, there are bad problems and there are worse problems.

From the worth/value model, the best worth response remaining is to cut losses, which in the context of Ukraine would mean withdrawing from Ukrainian territory.

Withdrawing from Ukraine would mean that Russia is essentially allowing NATO to forever expand and threaten its borders, and also that genociding Russian minorities on Russia's borders is not a big deal.

That's not cutting losses.

Accepting the gains of a nuclear armed power conducting a war of territorial conquest against one of the few countries in the world to have actually given up nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees by said power is considerably worse.

Sounds like head cannon from the same people that came up with WMD in Iraq for what? To a lot of countries the problem of nuclear proliferation is probably not whether or not it's happening but who is holding the nukes above their head.

Western intelligence unilaterally deciding that such or such 'aggression' is worth 'sanctioning' or not a given country does not make it an absolute moral rule.

Go tell the Donbass civilans they gotta keep taking the bombs because otherwise nuclear proliferation bad.

Withdrawing from Ukraine would mean that Russia is essentially allowing NATO to forever expand and threaten its borders,

Russia has neither the authority to allow or not allow other countries to have their own relations. Russia does, however, have a nuclear deterrent if faced with invasion.

and also that genociding Russian minorities on Russia's borders is not a big deal.

The Russian minorities on Russia's borders are not being genocided.

Per the standing international law defining genocide, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide-

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with

intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as

such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its

physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The Russian state's claims of genocide of Russian ethnic groups tends to rely on language policies, such as whether Russian is taught in schools or as a language of governance. Language policies of these sort do not constitute genocide. While the Russian intervention in the Donbas has been used to claim the Ukrainians are targeting the citizens there, this has not been reflected in areas under Ukrainian control, indicating a lack of deliberate targetting.

By contrast, the Russian policies in Ukraine, ranging from filtration camps, torture centers, artillery campaigns on civilian infrastructure, targeting of essential power infrastructure during the winter, and the population relocations of Ukrainian civilians into Russia would qualify.

That's not cutting losses.

Accepting an undesirable state is precisely what cutting losses entails. Even if what you claimed were all true, it would still be a lower cost than suffering the Ukraine disaster AND having all of the other items still occur.

Sounds like head cannon from the same people that came up with WMD in Iraq for what?

Your hearing and/or memory is off.

To a lot of countries the problem of nuclear proliferation is probably not whether or not it's happening but who is holding the nukes above their head.

You framed in a global perspective, you get a global perspective response. The regional/local perspective will, of course, be based on observation of what other nuclear users are able to get away with in the multi-polar order that Russia pre-emptively claimed success in creating.

Go tell the Donbass civilans they gotta keep taking the bombs because otherwise nuclear proliferation bad.

The Donbass civilians are being bombed because of a multi-year Russian intervention in the Donbass following the failed NovaRussia campaign intended to spark an anti-maiden counter-uprising, not because nuclear proliferation is bad. The Russians turning the Donbass into a warzone was a policy choice.

A Russian collapse is bad from a nuclear proliferation perspective in the sense of nuclear terrorism from loose nukes, and some countries aquiring a nuclear deterrent without the production capability. A Russian victory is terrible from a nuclear proliferation perspective in the sense of mass production capability proliferation corresponding with territorial wars of conquest, which will also provide loose nuke risk.

This.

If, as OP proposes, US currently changes course by 180 degrees and abandons Ukraine (similar shifts happened previously, many such cases), Central and Eastern European countries (and others) will know they can rely only on themselves.

If you want world with Finnish, Swedish, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Turkish etc.. nuclear weapons on hair trigger, this is the way you would get it.

when the US are attacking you in a proxy war?

That's one way of describing Russia launching an invasion of a neighbor, and the US selling them guns to shoot back.

Perhaps Putin could have avoided this "attack" by cunningly not sending his army into someone else's country.

So if Saddam Hussein is gassing civilians and the US invades to protect the civilians, then it's alright if Russia starts supplying weapons to Saddam?

You could decline this a hundred times really.

Ukraine was gassing civilians now?

IIRC, there was one amusing point in the Minsk negotiations where Russia was demanding the Ukrainians pay for the gas bills of the separatist states. So there was that point where they were NOT gassing.

They sold them the Patriot missile system, and F-16s allegedly on the way.

Your questions seem predicated on the assumption that no one actually believes Russia is in the wrong here, but that it's all signaling and anti-Russian culture war. I think people genuinely believe Russia is in the wrong here and should not be rewarded for invading other countries.

Why do people support Ukraine fighting against Russia, with a strange militaristic fervor, instead of supporting surrendering / negotiating peace?

Why would anyone be arguing that Ukraine should surrender?

So far, the only peace proposal on offer from Russia seems to be "Let us keep everything we've taken so far, with no promise that we won't try to finish the job once we've had time to regroup."

You make some arguments for why it would be better for the rest of Europe if Ukraine just rolled over and accepted whatever shitty terms Russia gives them, but no arguments for why Ukraine would want to do that.

Why would anyone be arguing that Ukraine should surrender?

To preserve Ukrainian lives.

So far, the only peace proposal on offer from Russia seems to be "Let us keep everything we've taken so far, with no promise that we won't try to finish the job once we've had time to regroup."

I think Putin announced the objectives of the operation, to neutralize the threat that Ukraine created by attacking civilians in its Eastern regions and so on. As long as Russia is willing to fight that war and complete these objectives, they have no reason to stop doing so as they have more capacity than Ukraine does.

The EU and US are unable to stop the conflict as they are unwilling to directly send in their own troops against Russia, so all they can do is escalate it by fueling it with weapons and other support.

It seems that Americans and Europeans are more than willing to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.

To preserve Ukrainian lives.

I do not believe anyone who suggests Ukraine should surrender is honestly concerned about Ukrainian lives. And if they are, then I would expect them to let the Ukrainians make that decision.

I think Putin announced the objectives of the operation, to neutralize the threat that Ukraine created by attacking civilians in its Eastern regions and so on.

Yes, we know what Putin said was the reasoning behind the "special operation."

No one outside of Russia believes him.

I do not believe anyone who suggests Ukraine should surrender is honestly concerned about Ukrainian lives. And if they are, then I would expect them to let the Ukrainians make that decision.

Ukrainians can't really control whether America is going to dump boatloads of weapons to their leader who is pushing them to the frontline with a gun to their back, can they?

Or since they're not revolting and murdering Zelensky and his Azov buddies then we must assume that they consent to taking part in the CIA's proxy wars?

  • -11

You make some arguments for why it would be better for the rest of Europe if Ukraine just rolled over and accepted whatever shitty terms Russia gives them, but no arguments for why Ukraine would want to do that.

There seems to be a general presumption that a withdrawal of European support would result in Ukraine only having the choice between surrender on better terms sooner or more comprehensive defeat later, so just arguing European self-interest in this matter is sufficient. (I don't think that this is actually quite clear - the US probably would be perfectly capable of picking up arbitrarily much more of the slack if it had to, and Europe would not go as far as actively preventing US access (overflight and basing) needed to do it even if they cooled on the idea themselves.)

There seems to be a general presumption that a withdrawal of European support would result in Ukraine only having the choice between surrender on better terms sooner or more comprehensive defeat later, so just arguing European self-interest in this matter is sufficient.

Yes, that is the presumption, that Ukraine has no agency and that Europe and/or the US will decide when to end the war.

Obviously Ukraine depends on European and American support and might be strong-armed into accepting an unfavorable treaty, but I'm not sure it would be easy as all that for us to simply tell them to surrender, or that the US would be willing to do that. (Europe probably would.)

If EU and US drop their support, the war will end as Ukraine's leadership get captured.

This will prevent Ukraine's leadership from rounding up and forcing more men to die in the war, and if the sanctions are loosened, Europeans will afford cheaper heating and power, and possibly still keep some industry in the future.

The only winner if the war keeps going on and on is the American military-industrial complex and its deep state affiliates.

If you have a lot of shares of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman or LNG companies then you will definitely profit.

Perhaps if like Andrew Tate you're invested in the adult entertainment industry then access to cheap Ukrainian / Russian workforce would also interest you.

Or perhaps you are involved in the international child adoption business, and would really like to see Russia reopen its orphanages to international customers... Who knows?

  • -11

You are acting like the economics of Western Europe are fixed. The thing about capitalist systems is in the medium term they figure out new supply lines/routes. 2008 US had high oil prices. Then the next decade they figured out shale and became an exporter.

Europes biggest issue might not even be energy right now. Germany exported basically everything russia needed for their industry and all their machine tools. Eventually Germany will figure out new countries to export too but that does hurt short term. But the west will figure out how to stay rich. Russia probably won’t figure out how to get the machine tools they need.

Perhaps if like Andrew Tate you're invested in the adult entertainment industry then access to cheap Ukrainian / Russian workforce would also interest you.

Or perhaps you are involved in the international child adoption business, and would really like to see Russia reopen its orphanages to international customers... Who knows?

Just so you know, I saw this in the mod queue (someone else reported it) and was about to issue a warning before I saw it was a response to me.

I'm still going to issue a warning, because throwing accusations of bad faith like this is not kind, courteous, or charitable.

If you really believe someone supports Ukraine because they have shares in Lockheed Martin or because they want to traffic in Ukrainian and Russian prostitutes or children, then you had better provide very strong evidence.

Otherwise, do not engage in ad hominem attacks like this.

If you really believe someone supports Ukraine because they have shares in Lockheed Martin

Is that really such an outlandish claim?

This is pretty common stuff on alt-left outlets isn't it? Talking Jimmy Dore for ex

Here's a list of US representatives with money officially invested in defense stocks

Here's a list of the Rep Congressmen that did not vote for Ukraine aid (they're not on the previous list afaik)

they want to traffic in Ukrainian and Russian prostitutes or children

Hard to prove that one, human traffickers are a little bit more shy on their political affiliations.

It would make sense for a human trafficker to want a war to go as long as possible.

This seems low quality to me if I’m reading it correctly. 50 congressman own a combined maximum of $5 million in defense stocks. $100k a congressman isn’t a lot of money. And the combined $5 million is about the size of a trade Nancy pelosis husband does because he’s bored and needs to bet on something.

There’s always a what about this argument; but the data here seems trivial. I’m not this rich now but at one point I had the equivalent of 5 million and I’m just some bloke.

Well this is the exposed part of the iceberg. If Russiagate has taught me anything is that all of these deep state agents work in family networks.

For example FusionGPS hired Nellie Ohr to work on the infamous Dossier.

Her husband Bruce Ohr at the DOJ was involved in the FISA approval saying that the Dossier was totally legit and the Trump campaign needed to be surveilled for terrorism / espionage.

Likewise, one could be Vice President and appear to have no ties to any foreign government, but have one of their sons sit on the board of foreign companies.

Another venue of profiting from government activities is through past / future careers.

One could work for decades at the CIA or the FBI and then find very profitable work at a major Silicon Valley company that suddenly has a great need to hire people with intimate knowledge of alphabet agencies.

Or one could work for decades for a healthcare-related government agency like the FDA or the CDC, and end up finding a nice position in a pharmaceutical firm...

Some even manage to go back and forth several times.

More comments

not sure it would be easy as all that for us to simply tell them to surrender

Not easy as in you figure they would be able to continue the fight and bring it to a favourable conclusion for themselves even without continuing Western support, or as in you figure Western governments would have a hard time withdrawing support for some reason or another? (Civil society pressure? Institutional inertia? US pressure, for countries other than the US?)

I don't think Ukraine would be able to continue to fight effectively if we unilaterally withdrew support, but I think they would keep fighting. I also think simply demanding that Ukraine accept Russia's terms would be unpopular enough that Western governments (especially the US) would find that a hard sell.

People have been elucidating the reason why Americans and Europeans, in general, keep supporting Ukraine in many individual posts; one of the main pillars of the global international order is countries not altering their borders unilaterally through invasion and annexation, and whatever other violations to this principle there have been, none have been as flagrant as what Russia is doing now.

However, beyond that, is there any wonder why I, as a Finn, would have a special reason for hoping Russia loses, and loses badly? It's not just an abstraction when one lives in a country next to Russia, which used to be a part of the Russian Empire, which was for a long time in Russia/SU's claimed sphere of influence, which went through another "border adjustment" by Russia in 1939/1940. The said border adjustment, incidentally, meant my father had to leave his home while two years old, an event he would still recount on the phone while drunk and crying to his adult children decades after it happened. The said border adjustment removing my native Eastern Finland of what would have been its natural biggest city and a potential hometown for me, Viipuri, and turning it into a peripheral Russian wreck of a town. And a hundred other similar reasons.

What is crucial for Finland's future is one thing: Russia finally learning that it is not a special country. It does not have a sovereign right to adjust its own borders on a whim. Not for the "protection of Russian minorities", not for "russkiy mir", not for its ephemeral "security", certainly not because - as one tends to hear from countless Russian patriots when discussing this - because Russia's bordering countries just are puny and useless and will be dominated by one country or another anyway, so might as well be Russia. And there really seems to be no other potential way for Russia to learn this lesson than getting drubbed in Ukraine, and drubbed badly.

People have been elucidating the reason why Americans and Europeans, in general, keep supporting Ukraine in many individual posts; one of the main pillars of the global international order is countries not altering their borders unilaterally through invasion and annexation, and whatever other violations to this principle there have been, none have been as flagrant as what Russia is doing now.

This line of reasoning is thoroughly unconvincing as long as Lincoln remains a beloved historical figure.

Having briefly spent some time on confederate twitter, I noticed the typical progressive low-effort culture war snipe is some variation of "we Sherman'd you once, and we'll do it again."

The threat here is quite explicit: You belong to the empire, independence and self governance -even democratically enacted- are a form treason, which is so heinous as to justify killing civilians and burning their houses down. (bonus points for Ukrainian flag in username)

This isn't limited to the worst elements on twitter or the left. Tom Cotton claims the confederate flag is a terrorist symbol while helping to spearhead efforts to aid Ukraine.

It's a very common strategy in the leftwing/neocon playbook to trot out Libertarian principles when it suits them and abandon them when it doesn't, that is almost certainly what is happening here. Scott, for example, noticed the CSA/Ukrainian dissonance and just decided to ignore it in typical Scott fashion (IIRC).

It does not have a sovereign right to adjust its own borders on a whim. Not for the "protection of Russian minorities"

Yes, indeed, it would seem only the United States is to morally grounded enough to forcibly annex independent states on behalf of minorities, according to Americans anyway.

It was not Lincoln trying to adjust the borders of the United States unilaterally. It was the Confederacy that tried to do that. Lincoln was all about preventing that happening. If there's some equivalent to Confederates here, it would be the DPR/LPR separatists (though of course they're not equivalent, there's multiple differences there, too).

Yes, indeed, it would seem only the United States is to morally grounded enough to forcibly annex independent states on behalf of minorities, according to Americans anyway.

It was after WW2, and due to WW2, that the current international system, along with its respect for existing borders, was born. To my knowledge America has not annexed new territories since WW2.

It was not Lincoln trying to adjust the borders of the United States unilaterally. It was the Confederacy that tried to do that.

Huh? By democratically seceding? Why do Ukrainians have a God given right to an independent polity but the southern states do not? Do you imagine that if the South had not fired on Fort Sumpter, Lincoln would have moved the troops out eventually and respected the will of the Confederate peoples?

It was after WW2, and due to WW2, that the current international system, along with its respect for existing borders, was born. To my knowledge America has not annexed new territories since WW2.

Yet our historical mythos remains unaltered in a post WWII order (despite many other historical events getting revamped to match modern morality). Actually its much worse, confederate statues and flags were far more tolerated prior to WWII than they are now, we have gone in the opposite direction. It's all "who whom".

By democratically seceding?

The war of course started not with the secession itself but with confederates attacking federal assets (Fort Sumter.)

I'm pretty sure holding military assets in a foreign country against their wishes is an act of war itself, so it started before that.

Why do Ukrainians have a God given right to an independent polity but the southern states do not?

Ukraine's independence has been formally recognized - by the global community, and most crucially by the Russian Federation, in its role as the continuation of the centuries of Russian statehood and as the state that de jure assumed the role of continuing the Soviet Union's role in the said global community. Indeed - again, de jure - Russia and Ukraine have been separate subjects for 100 years now, first within the Soviet Union and then, after the said state stopped existing, as independent countries, even if de facto Soviet Union might have been just Russia by another name. When Russia is violating Ukraine's sovereignty, it is doing so in explicit violation of treaties and structures it has formerly recognized as valid. Indeed, even now, Russia recognized Ukraine as an independent country, even if it claiming large parts of it as a part of RF.

Confederacy, on the other hand, was never recognized as independent, either by US or any other country. That's the crucial difference.

The actions of the North, to be clear, were "in explicit violation of treaties and structures it has formerly recognized as valid". The constitution does not give the president the right to send troops to forcibly abolish the existing democratically elected government in the case that they choose to secede, and my ancestors would not have signed it if it did. It was originally a free association of states, not unlike the EU (and my state has an almost identical population to your country).

Typically, when you send troops into a place to depose the existing government and install your own puppet government, we call that "invasion". You can characterize it differently, if you wish, such as "quelling a rebellion", but this your original point was that Russia was violating a modern guiding principle for the international order, which was "Don't invade and annex other countries". That you are willing to split hairs over exactly what counts as an invasion instead of leaning in on the more general principle of "People ought to be able to self-govern, if they so choose, and attempting to force them into your polity is wrong" further reinforces to me the idea that no such principle actually exists in the modern world.

No matter how you characterize the American Civil War, it did not happen during the current post-WW2 world order, which is what I'm talking about here - the world order characterized by an international opposition to invasion for annexation, that opposition being the result of preceeding history.

My point is that we didn't end up in a world that was opposed to boat tipping on principle, but rather other effects came into play that made tipping the boat a generally undesirable activity. In other words, I think you are mistaking description for prescription.

The evidence for this is that modern society venerates people who conquered and annexed their outgroup using very similar rhetoric to Putin, and I believe they would very likely do it again if the situation allowed for it.

At that time the supremacy of the federal government over states hadn’t been established. It was much more like the European Union today. The civil war would be akin to Brexit happening and the EU declaring war on the UK. The notion of federal borders versus state borders was in question.

The US of this era was obviously already more federal a country than EU of the current era for the simple virtue of having a federal army, including the possession of forts like Ft. Sumter.

Even the specific interpretation of US constitutional arrangements before and leading up to the American Civil War - a topic where there are and have been multiple legal interpretations, then and now - is immaterial here, though. The 1800s was an era when countries, including the US, generally considered annexation by force to be a valid method of expanding their power. This led to a considerable amount of warfare and suffering, culminating in the World Wars. This is justifiably considered to be very bad, and the international norm of not considering annexation by force to be valid is a vast improvement. The precise threat of Russian invasion of Ukraine is taking a considerable step towards a return to the Bad Old Times, should it be approved by other countries.

If we agree annexation by force to be bad, how do we feel about annexation by secession? By treaty? By demographic shifts due to birth rates and/or migration? By cultural invasion?

Once all the borders on Earth are set in stone as far as war is concerned, Power will find another way to get the territory it wants. It skirts legibility if all methods legible to the law are blocked. It fights unseen wars through peacemongering. It still consumes all as fuel, as rust is slow fire.

Getting countries to utilize their quest for power through means other than open warfare and annexation is a feature, not a bug.

Well I’m specifically referring to your point that it was the confederacy trying to adjust borders and not the states.

While I agree that the EU today is weaker than the Feds then; States Rights were still a thing then and wasn’t a settled issue. The constitution itself only about 80 years old would have been geared more towards the borders being the states properties.

I do agree no changing borders has been a mostly a good thing atleast by force. Though it is different with breakaway republics doing it democratically.

It just feels like an incorrect interpretation of history that a states land at the time was the property of the states and not the Feds. That was very much in debate at that time.

Even today I am not convinced that a right to secession does not exists in the Constitution. And it really just comes down to who has more powerful ability to project force.

Yes, indeed, it would seem only the United States is to morally grounded enough to forcibly annex independent states on behalf of minorities, according to Americans anyway.

The Confederacy was not annexed. There was no disagreement before the war that the South was part of the United States. The disagreement was over whether the South had the right to secede.

Russia may claim that Ukraine is and always has been part of Russia, but the Ukrainians obviously do not agree, and neither does the rest of the world.

I agree that prior to secession it is clear the South was part of the United States.

But immediately after secession but before the war is ended is this sort of fuzzy area where the winner gets to declare the legal state after the fact. It turns out that the secession was illegal and the South was always part of the US, but only in retrospect after they lost. Had they won, then the moment secession was declared would have been the moment an independent nation was legally formed which would have meant that Lincoln's actions would have been an invasion by any reasonable definition.

This puts your second paragraph in context.

Russia may claim that Ukraine is and always has been part of Russia, but the Ukrainians obviously do not agree, and neither does the rest of the world.

Whether the Ukrainians agree or not is no more relevant than whether the Southerners agreed or not. What actually matters is what force Russia/The Union are capable of projecting onto their reluctant citizens.

The only guiding principle here is "It's okay when we do it, it's bad when they do it." just as it always has been throughout human history.

It turns out that the secession was illegal and the South was always part of the US, but only in retrospect after they lost.

This view is not consistent with the requirement that the states be re-admitted to the Union. Of course, what actually happened is the North, being the victors, did what they wanted, consistency be damned.

Ukraine had UN membership from founding of UN...

The CSA was not recognized by as a country by others, even by UK. Post-1991 Ukraine has decades of peaceful life and got recognition by everyone.

Sure, that's a valid point, but in practice recognition is largely enforced through whatever borders a polity is capable of maintaining militarily (or having another nation maintain on their behalf). South Vietnam and South Korea are good examples of this playing out post WWII, their differing outcomes being a result of how their respective wars played out. Had Russia enough power to project their will, it's not clear to me that the rest of the world wouldn't just quietly drop recognition of Ukraine, since it wouldn't serve any benefit to them. (Thankfully for Eastern Europe, this doesn't seem to be the case.)

For the CSA's part, every other country remained neutral. CSA had powerful trading partners in Britain and France and they opted to wait to see how it played out, not wanting to upset trade deals with an emerging nation in the event of a CSA victory, or hurting relations with the Union by backing a rebellion in the event of a CSA loss. This is a similar diplomatic stance that the US held towards Europe as well, attempting to remain neutral as possible in 19th century European wars.

That's a very bad argument. If, for example, Kurds can carve out and keep a Kurdistan for themselves, it's theirs. If the UN doesn't recognize it, that's an argument against the UN, not Kurdistan.

...but it seems to me how it works in practice.

I agree that prior to secession it is clear the South was part of the United States.

Then you've conceded the point. Russia is making ahistorical claims; "Putin claims Ukraine belongs to them" is not some ambiguous claim that only becomes true or false depending on whether or not Russia wins. We know Ukraine does not legitimately "belong" to Russia, regardless of whether Russia succeeds in taking it. Obviously if they take it then they win, ownership being 9/10 of the law and all that. But we disagree on the universal legitimacy of "might makes right."

Whether the Ukrainians agree or not is no more relevant than whether the Southerners agreed or not.

It's entirely relevant when you are making an apples-to-oranges comparison like this.

The question of whether a population is allowed to secede is not the same as the question of whether a population is allowed to resist being annexed.

Casting the Union in the same role as Russia and Lincoln as a direct equivalent to Putin is understandably an attractive proposition for Confederate apologists, but the Confederacy was not in anything like the same role as Ukraine.

The only guiding principle here is "It's okay when we do it, it's bad when they do it."

No, that is not the only guiding principle here.

"Putin claims Ukraine belongs to them" is not some ambiguous claim that only becomes true or false depending on whether or not Russia wins. We know Ukraine does not legitimately "belong" to Russia, regardless of whether Russia succeeds in taking it. Obviously if they take it then they win, ownership being 9/10 of the law and all that. But we disagree on the universal legitimacy of "might makes right."

I may not have been clear, I do not believe "might makes right" is morally correct. I think we are in agreement here. If you are making a narrower Sovereign Citizen adjacent argument then I would love it if you would expound on that because I don't think I've ever read anyone on the motte argue that before. If it's some third thing then I don't understand your post. Ownership is 9/10s of the law if the guy with the most guns says it is. I don't endorse this point of coarse, I would prefer if I could avoid federal taxes by claiming status as CSA citizen, but the guys with the guns say otherwise.

The question of whether a population is allowed to secede is not the same as the question of whether a population is allowed to resist being annexed.

I don't understand your point here. (Sorry, I may be a little slow). This seems closer to the sovereign citizen thing.

Has claiming "You do not have the right to invade and annex me" ever prevented anyone from getting invaded and annexed? What does it mean to be "allowed" to resist being invaded an annexed? Who is doing the allowing?

I'll repeat here what I posted further downthread to Steffari:

Typically, when you send troops into a place to depose the existing government and install your own puppet government, we call that "invasion". You can characterize it differently, if you wish, such as "quelling a rebellion", but this your original point was that Russia was violating a modern guiding principle for the international order, which was "Don't invade and annex other countries". That you are willing to split hairs over exactly what counts as an invasion instead of leaning in on the more general principle of "People ought to be able to self-govern, if they so choose, and attempting to force them into your polity is wrong" further reinforces to me the idea that no such principle actually exists in the modern world.

...

Casting the Union in the same role as Russia and Lincoln as a direct equivalent to Putin is understandably an attractive proposition for Confederate apologists, but the Confederacy was not in anything like the same role as Ukraine.

Hmm, I never really considered myself a "confederate apologist". I think most of the modern criticisms are largely accurate, they just pale in comparison to the deeds of the yankees, who subverted the will of a democratically enacted government, deposed them and installed their own, then proceeded to spend the next thirty years culling the native population. That you consider these to be beloved heroes and good people on the right side of history is the point I was attempting to make to Steffari about the principles held by westerners.

I am not sure where you're getting Sovereign Citizen from.

Obviously, countries can and do invade other countries without "permission." We generally consider that a bad thing.

Our point of disagreement is that you think people being forcibly prevented from seceding is the same thing as being invaded and conquered, and while I realize Confederate apologists think this is true, I think there are convincing moral, legal, and historical arguments to the contrary.

That you consider these to be beloved heroes and good people on the right side of history

This kind of hyberbolic straw man is a very annoying and disingenuous rhetorical gambit. I am not very sympathetic to the CSA, but no armed conflict is ever that black and white, and I would not agree with anything as simplistic as "the Union were all beloved heroes and good people on the right side of history." Do I think the Union was, for the most part, in the right? Yes, just like I think Ukraine is in the right today for resisting a Russian invasion, but that doesn't mean I think Ukrainians are all good-hearted heroes and innocent victims or that I'm unaware that Ukraine was and is an extremely corrupt and by many measures oppressive country itself.

Don't project lack of principles onto other people with this sort of flat characterization.

The point can be made without bringing Lincoln into it. If you were to poll liberals and ask "Nation A finds out their neighbor Nation B is has been raiding and enlsaving members of a foreign nation. Do you think it is morally acceptable for Nation A to invade and annex B in order to prevent this from occuring?" My priors here are that you'd get an overwhelming yes, in direct contradiction to the claim Steffari made.

Don't project lack of principles onto other people with this sort of flat characterization.

Sorry, I meant the general you, since you are arguing on behalf of a society that does think those things. I don't doubt that your personal views are more nuanced. What I don't understand about your point of view is whether you believe secession was simply the incorrect mechanism for the Southerners to use or if you hold a more general stance that the Southerners should not be allowed to self govern (but the Ukranians can).

More comments

To anyone who has discussed the issue with pro-Putin people.

Why do people support Russia fighting against Ukraine, with a strange militaristic fervor, instead of supporting ending the war by bringing the troops home?

Some points:

-the war is severely impoverishing Russia due to sanctions

-the war is destroying Russia ( population + infrastructures / institutions)

-continuing the war increases the chances of a world war

Is it cheering for the possible destruction of Ukraine?

Something to do with the current leadership of Ukraine, pro-LGBTQ, "western values"?

Notion that 'if we don't stop NATO expansion now they will never stop no matter what'? Is it something about broadly standing up against NATO expansion of one state vs another, supporting the 'underdog'?

The issue with that one is that Russia has nuclear weapons and NATO expansions doesn't change the MAD calculus.

Sending another 100k Russians to the meatgrinder for that end seems a little bit harsh coming from people with very little skin in the game.

Just signaling what they are told is the correct opinion?

Is it about saving face, sunk cost at this point?

What would be the best case scenario for a Russia/Alt-right victory?

To my understanding, Zelensky is not the most radical or dangerous politician in Ukraine, and an Russian occupation of Ukraine would cause similar problems to the US occupation of Iraq. Ukrainians for example would not appear very Russia-friendly once 'liberated' by Russia.

Not only that, but economic crisis in Russia could generate additional security risks.


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