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PaperclipPerfector  16hr ago (text post)   2364 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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Diversity is our Strength. Us being whites

At the top of Marginal Revolution today: "How Cultural Diversity Drives Innovation"

I'm a tech development and "innovation" nerd. There's a small, but growing, especially in recent years, online commmunity of people who read organizational histories of places like Bell Labs and the original Lockheed Skunkwords to try and figure out the best ways to do real tech development. Not academic science projects and not VC backed bullshit which is mostly business model innovation (that even more often fails).

You don't have to read the whole study. The abstract itself is either a hilarious self-own or and even more hilarious playing-dumb post.

We show that innovation in U.S. counties from 1850 to 1940 was propelled by shifts in the local social structure, as captured using the diversity of surnames. Leveraging quasi-random variation in counties’ surnames—stemming from the interplay between historical fluctuations in immigration and local factors that attract immigrants—we find that more diverse social structures increased both the quantity and quality of patents, likely because they spurred interactions among individuals with different skills and perspectives. The results suggest that the free flow of information between diverse minds drives innovation and contributed to the emergence of the U.S. as a global innovation hub.

1850 to 1940. Bruh.

This paper shows that having big time diversity - you know, mixing all those crazy Poles, Irish, French, Germans, English, Welsh, Czech, Slovak, Greek, hell even a few Italians and Spanish in there - was a massive reason the USA was such a technologically innovative place!

The HBDers are going to love this one.

Side note on the hard tech angle: patent issuance used to be a decent enough and standardized enough measure for "innovation." Since the rise of legalism post WW2, however, it's so much more noisy now that it's questionable if it remains a valid "fungible currency" for studying innovation and tech development.

The causality here is tricky to figure out. Immigrants from ethnic backgrounds that are outside of the US mainstream have always, I think, tended to settle predominantly in urban areas, and urban areas are where most innovation happens.

This was my immediate thought.

Are more diverse areas innovating more due to their diversity?

Or do innovative areas rock in general (hard to be innovative if you're malnourished, etc) and that attracts immigrants and innovation simultaneously?

Cities are always more innovative than the countryside. Cities have lots of people. Institutions are in cities, education is to be found in cities. People who want education will come to the city to get it, they then stay there, jobs that require education are in cities. So the educated people are in cities, where they are in contact with the other educated people. Wealth concentrates in cities, so the capital you need is also in the city, probably generated by the previous innovators.

And all of this used to be even more so when travel and communication were a lot harder than they are nowadays. Nowadays you can learn from the Internet. A hundred years ago people in the countryside wouldn't have had access to libraries. You'd have to move to a city first.

Not all immigrants went to the cities. The Germans mostly settled the Midwest to become farmers, and didn't invent much of anything, except the ones who did go to the cities.

Rather than HBD (which might be part of it but I think tends to be overhyped as an explanation around here), I wonder how much of this is based on integration. Which is partly downstream from HBD, but more from culture and perception.

That is, "white" people are more likely to integrate with and interact with white people and value stereotypical white people things like "get good grades", "get married", "get a job". While people who are visually distinctive and identify as "ethnic minorities" are more likely to learn things like "white people are powerful and steal from you, so steal back". Most of those European ethnicities used to be poor and underperforming, and weren't considered "white" until they gradually integrated into the melting pot culturally, which also brought them up economically. I wonder if having an obviously different skin-tone provides significant friction against this integration because it makes people perceive them (and more importantly, makes them perceive themselves) as distinct and special, and thus fail to integrate properly.

That is, if we took a million Polish people in 1900 and modified their genes to have blue hair or skin, without changing any of their other genes (so they have the same IQ and personalities), would that have caused them to become a permanent ethnic minority who doesn't get along with or act like all of the white people?

That is, if we took a million Polish people in 1900 and modified their genes to have blue hair or skin, without changing any of their other genes (so they have the same IQ and personalities), would that have caused them to become a permanent ethnic minority who doesn't get along with or act like all of the white people?

Chinese immigrants looked different, had a native language no one else knew, and were about as culturally alien to the US as anyone you were going to find in real life. They worked out fine.

Chinese immigrants looked different, had a native language no one else knew, and were about as culturally alien to the US as anyone you were going to find in real life. They worked out fine.

They mostly died out in a generation.

Is that satire? Nothing on that page makes any sense. Many surnames come from occupations, so of course there's a relationship to diversity of labour. The reason "diversity" used to correlate with innovation was that skilled migrants from many countries in the world would go to places with opportunities. The diversity was more of a result than a cause. The phrase "Diversity is our strength" is made to imply that diversity of races is good in itself, which is an entirely different topic. It also implies that there's no difference between races, which is trivially false. To begin with, culture is something shared between people, the concept "cultural diversity" contradicts itself. Also, people who advocate diversity of race do not value diversity of political opinion, thought, values or morality. Plus, by the second law of thermodynamics, diversity necessarily destroys itself. Countries are more similar than they were in the past because of globalism, the only way to slow down the trend towards homogeneity is separation (borders for instance). I'd go as far as to disagree that innovation is necessarily good (it conflicts with stability).

And what's a patent? It's something which forbids others from using your ideas.

Lets look at the Abstract in the linked paper. What does it say? "Fostering the diverse social interactions that faciliate idea sharing"

Am I being too pedantic? Do these people even realize that they're being dishonest?

Many surnames come from occupations

By the mid-19th century, occupational surnames had long been divorced from their associated professions. John Smith wasn't a smith, Geoffrey Chaucer didn't make pants, Benjamin Franklin was pretty much everything but an independent farmer, etc... Beyond which, the point of interest is national origin of surnames. Unless your thesis is the Germans and Poles were bringing in some special occupational knowledge that the various British peoples who initially colonized the Eastern seaboard lacked, but that begs for additional detail.

To begin with, culture is something shared between people, the concept "cultural diversity" contradicts itself

Shared identity and sharing all the particulars of culture are not the same thing. Leaving aside immigrants for the moment, the US has a fair amount cultural diversity within itself - there are marked cultural differences between North Easterners, Midwesterners, Southerns, West Coasters, as well as racial, religious, state, and rural/urban values divisions. None of that contradicts the existence of the US or of American culture.

people who advocate diversity of race do not value diversity of political opinion, thought, values or morality

That is an argument that they are hypocrites, not that they are wrong.

Plus, by the second law of thermodynamics, diversity necessarily destroys itself

You're going to need to elaborate on this metaphor.

Occupational surnames may have happened sufficiently long ago that any correlation has been drowned in noise.

You're going to need to elaborate on this metaphor.

It's not a metaphor. You can "race mix" but the opposite operation does not exist. When things interact, they tend towards the average of the two. If you mix cold and hot water, you get lukewarm water. If you mix eastern philosophy and western philosophy, you get something which borrows ideas from both (and the mixture is not necessarily better than either of its components)

The reason Easterns and southerns are different is because there's distance between them. Higher distances means fewer interactions. Long physical distances are similar to physical borders. Any other kind of mechanism which prevent interactions will protect differences - including age gaps and language barriers. But what that article calls for is local diversity, so mixing things. You can do this, but people won't remain diverse for very long. To make matters worse, there will be conflict until people are in alignment, and the definition of alignment is establishing something which is common to all (and therefore not diverse)

In America, some aspects are local, and some aspects are global. A global aspect (e.g. the tendency to have guns) lacks diversity, and local aspects (something which is specific to a single area) does not mix with the rest. Of course, different areas can benefit from trade with eachother, but the more they trade the less they benefit (an equilibrium will be reached).

There's a natural tendency for people to create bubbles of similar-minded people (friend groups, echo-chambers, religious gatherings, ghettos, etc), but the lobal political concensus is (increasingly - as America is exporting this value system) that all people are equal and that all things must be openly accessible to everyone (no gatekeeping, no mens-only spaces, no right-wing spaces, no privacy, no elitism, etc) so the world will rapidly tend towards homogeneity

This paper shows that having big time diversity - you know, mixing all those crazy Poles, Irish, French, Germans, English, Welsh, Czech, Slovak, Greek, hell even a few Italians and Spanish in there - was a massive reason the USA was such a technologically innovative place!

The HBDers are going to love this one.

I see and grant your point. However, what I think this actually shows is a remarkable social technology for taking small cultural differences which, in many other contexts would actively hinder cooperation and productivity, and sanding down the sharp edges enough to allow the positive aspects of cream-skimming and viewpoint diversity to take hold.

Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Bosniaks are extremely closely related from an HBD perspective. But you can't just shove them all together in a lab in Belgrade and expect them to get along - interethnic/intercommunal rivalries would instantly doom that. You can tell the same story with closely-related-but-highly-rivalrous subgroups in many other regions of the world as well.

The fact that the U.S was able to suppress those intercommunal rivalries and, yes, assimilate and to a certain extent dissolve those communities into a broader "Americanness" (or, to put the racial spin on it that both the far left and far right like these days - "whiteness"), is a wonderful thing that I think does deserve celebration despite all the buzzwords and cant that surround it these days.

The fact that the U.S was able to suppress those intercommunal rivalries and, yes, assimilate and to a certain extent dissolve those communities into a broader "Americanness" (or, to put the racial spin on it that both the far left and far right like these days - "whiteness"), is a wonderful thing that I think does deserve celebration despite all the buzzwords and cant that surround it these days.

The reason for this is quite obvious. Some cultures share more in common with each other than others do. The early French and English inhabitants of the US were very culturally digestible into each other, with one another and when coupled with the geographic distance and detachment with their country of origin, there’s great opportunity for your differences to erode and dissolve over time.

The other question is to what degree already being homogeneous raises your standards.

The common argument is that nativism is just a standard reflexive response that you have to power through and people react the same way to visible Muslims and visible Irishmen.

You have to wonder if what are now considered irrelevant differences mattered more because people were more similar. Which would mean that you can't really safely assume it'd apply to Pakistani Muslims.

(That said, America is doing much better than, for example, Britain here anyway because the filter for such groups that were barred from immigrating before is still relatively strong)

Not sure what you mean by “raises your standards,” maybe you can elaborate. It’s widely known that homogeneity enables large scale cooperation and fosters a high trust society between individuals.

But there are multiple ways in which the US has benefitted in certain areas through diversity. One obvious example was the massive brain drain that took place due to the Nazis persecution of Jews in Europe. It was one thing that actually weakened Germany during the war and later played into the US hands in the development of the atomic bomb. Or take another example. One major reason the computer hacker culture took root in the US and not Scandinavia for instance wasn’t just because the digital revolution happened here. It specifically happened because the US was a low trust society coupled with an increasingly individualist culture. If I think you’re not going to pay your fair share of taxes for instance, I’m more inclined to go and look for loopholes for myself.

The important thing to keep in mind with all these arguments is that the cases go in both direction. You can find relevant empirical examples on both sides. The local culture I grew up in was socially and racially exogamous. We were a very colorblind community and really didn’t care about each others race. We could say “the black dude that lives over there,” or, “the white kid across the street” casually without it even dawning on any of us that we had to worry about offending someone. We never even thought twice about it. We were ‘very’ culturally homogenous though. Strict and rigid though as far as norms and standards of behavior went. This cut all across ethnic lines. I grew up in an ethnic composition largely of whites and Hispanics with a minority of Cambodians, Assyrians and blacks. We had a common culture. Played outside with each other. Went to the same schools. Engaged in church functions. You name it. Many of them are still good friends to this day. So it’s ‘possible’ for people to do more than just tolerate each other and live in largely parallel societies like they do in the UK and Sweden, although both of them shouldn’t have adopted the immigration policies they have in the first place.

You can get innovation out of both collaboration and competition. Sometimes you get it through a mix and balance of both. But it’s not an either/or with one winning out to the exclusion of the other.

Yes, Germans make good Americans when you keep them from speaking German, or giving their children German first names, or identifying as German at all. If only we could learn this lesson and apply it everywhere, like to Muslims, and Indians.

I'll give the Chinese and other East Asians credit, though. They're much more likely to give their children American first names. The Africans and Muslims and Indians are particularly offensive about this, and tend to keep trying to be African or Muslim or Indian instead of American.

T. Roosevelt spoke of this.

T. Roosevelt spoke of this.

As did his arch-rival Woodrow Wilson, who famously said: “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets the chance.”

I'll give the Chinese and other East Asians credit, though. They're much more likely to give their children American first names

Actually they still give their children Chinese names, the western name is just an extra. It'd be like if a German immigrant named their child Fritz and then gave him an "American name" of Fred.

Oh, I know. Still, I like that "Tom" Nguyen puts his American name on the flyer he sends me for his landscaping service. It means something.

I'm thinking of all the asian classmates I had who were named Michelle or Emily or Christopher. It really matters, and if they went by their Chinese names, I would have considered them much more foreign, at a much younger age. But Christopher Wing and Emily Lee and Michelle Chan are acceptable in a way that the Mei Lee simply isn't.

Modern society as a whole could never stand treating Indians and Muslims the way Germans were treated before and during WW1.

Then again, when you start looking at ancestry, there's a solid argument to be made that America is more German than English. (English comes in third, with Irish in second.) History is weird.

The Germans were doing fine in the US even when they spoke German (common up to WWI, I believe).

Teddy was wise in this. GK Chesterton wrote similarly...

I tire of these posts often and the kind of comments they enjoin from others. The key word and phrase they’re often looking for is “individualism” and the importance of initial conditions.

I’d be curious to know how much innovation is spontaneous in comparison with how much was planned. When William Shockley invented the first transistor, he probably didn’t have the modern computer in mind. Or the digitalization of the world for that matter. A lot of these ideas are germs and some get built on and others don’t. Of those that receive work on them some fail and some succeed due to timing effects, wrong approaches, lack of funding, all manner of different things. New developments to some extent always require the free play of ideas, but there’s no reason why it specifically ‘has’ to appear in one place or the other. China first cast iron a thousand years before the Europeans did and for centuries Europe was the technological underdeveloped backwater of the rest of the world. There’s no reason why it ‘had’ to be that way. The Soviets originally had their own competition to the ARPANET that ultimately went sideways to due to their own ideological commitments. You could argue there wasn’t enough independence of thought. Or perhaps they had the wrong ideological perspective.

Diversity isn’t a good for its own sake. It has both its upsides and downsides and whatever else your opinion of it, you still have to figure out a way to live with it.

Also as a side note to your side note(!) there was a book recently recommended to me by a friend who is eager to get me a copy and read it so I can give thoughts on it. In it, he said the author specifically mentions the patent system as one of the markers of a society’s relative decline in cultural and technological achievement. It’s an interesting barometer and one I hadn’t thought of originally. It probably does yield useful insights.

When William Shockley invented the first transistor, he probably didn’t have the modern computer in mind.

As an aside it's a bit inaccurate, or at least incomplete to say Shockley invented the first transistor. Probably more accurate to say "contributed to the invention of" or "developed the bipolar junction transistor."

From the 1956 Nobel citation:

In 1947 John Bardeen and Walter Brattain produced a semiconductor amplifier, which was further developed by William Shockley. The component was named a “transistor”.

Shockley's main contribution to the first transistor was suggesting using field-effect to control a junction, but this had already been proposed by Julius Lilienfeld. He probably does deserve much of the credit for the bipolar junction transistor.

This does emphasis the point that a given invention is confluence of a variety of circumstances such that, as you say:

some fail and some succeed

It is quite a testament to Bell Labs that they not only were able to recruit such a large stable of geniuses, but were able to harness that power in a synthesis of cooperation and competition. It can't have been easy to manage so many (justifiably) huge egos.

I’d be curious to know how much innovation is spontaneous in comparison with how much was planned.

It's quite close to 0% planned and 100% spontaneous.

Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is probably still the best framework for how human knowledge (science and so, downstream, technology) develops. The long and short of it is that lots of happy accidents often build upon each other. Planning innovation is almost an oxymoron.

The problem then becomes, how do we 'cultivate the garden', so to speak, to make happy accidents more commonplace? Or to shorten the distance between related but unknown nodes that are working on the same problems? The University System and the various Bell Labs / PARC / DARPA orgs of the mid 20th century seem to have done this well. Both had different failure modes which roughly follow red and blue tribe cleavages.

The University System lost to ideological capture but also, more generally, a total remove from practical problems. Instead of a bunch of really smart professors working with Corporations, the Navy, or whomever or an actual problem, "pure" research began to win out. You'd get esoteric improvements in something like photonics that was utterly untenable in a production setting because the supply chain for the super rare materials didn't exist or the apparatus involved couldn't function outside of a clean lab.

The Bell Labs etc. failed because corporations stopped funding them. There's a debate as to why. Some simply gesture at "grrr greedy capitalists" which has never been a satisfying answer for me. The better answer, though still not "a-ha!" level in my mind is that actually novel and meaningful research is getting harder and taking longer. So, while a corporation may not need its R&D department to come up with something new every quarter, it's harder to not want to cut their budget after 10 or 20 years of nothing new. Furthermore, there's a pretty good argument to be made that corporations shouldn't be trying to shoot-the-moon with totally novel ideas but, rather, really be solving the "last mile" problem of new technology - how to sustain it, scale it, and then make it by degrees cheaper and cheaper. The middle ground that's evolving is something like Focus Research Organizations.

The final players - DARPA and other FFRDCs (Federally Funded Research and Development) kind of kept the spirit alive longer. DARPA has a very specific operating model that nowhere else in government replicates. But they fell victim to GWOT funding strategy - let's make everything about terrorists instead of focusing on, I don't know, time travel and teleportation. The FFRDCs became some of the most egregious leeches of Federal R&D welfare dollars. MITRE is quite literally make work jobs for PhDs. If you can endure living in a Kafka novel every day, you can make $200k per year and enjoy Tysons Corner traffic for your commute.

The real "oh, we fucking suck" moment was GPT-2 in late 2022. Almost every other major American technology development since WW2 could be traced back to some sort of federal, academic, or corporate R&D lab. That the Attention Is All You Need paper came out from a some ML engineers at google fucking around was, in my mind, kind of the tombstone on the "trad" R&D ecosystem.

The Bell Labs etc. failed because corporations stopped funding them. There's a debate as to why. Some simply gesture at "grrr greedy capitalists" which has never been a satisfying answer for me.

In general "grrr greedy capitalists" is only ever a satisfying answer in the same sense that "grrr Schrodinger equation" is. Technically both ideas explain a whole lot, but if you're ever looking for an explanation for why something changed, say, between 1980 and 1990, you can't solely check in the laws of economics or physics.

In this case, ironically, "Some simply gesture at "grrr greedy capitalists"" might be the explanation. Ma Bell was an enormous company with a quasi-governmental monopoly, so they could expect to be able to capture most of the value of even relatively pure and fundamental research ... and then anti-trust action broke them up into a bunch of Baby Bell companies who could only capture the value of research that was sufficiently applied and peripheral to turn a profit before its patent(s) would expire. By what may have been a wacky coincidence, but of course wasn't, Bell Labs got a ton of funding before the breakup and not so much after.

Despite my snark, I believe it's possible that the loss to research was exceeded by the gains of breaking up the quasi-monopoly. I'm old enough to remember land lines, and adding a second phone to the same line by just adding a splitter and running one cable to another room; a little further back in time, this would have required a call to The phone company to get permission and a technician and an extra monthly surcharge. It's easy to imagine that an indefinite continuation of this state of affairs in the USA could have crippled the nascent internet, which for years was only accessible to most residences via modems piggy-backing data over phone lines.

Ideally, handling the collective action problems of research without a giant monopoly (or, at least, with a giant monopoly we all get to control on election day) is what University research is supposed to be for; we try to give University researchers the proper incentives to try to come up with ideas that will be useful decades down the road, not just years. If we did that right, we should have been able to cut up the fabled goose here without losing out on all the golden eggs. To a great extent, University research works, even! I agree with your suspicions that we didn't entirely do that right, and with your explanations for why it doesn't work as well as it should, but I wouldn't want to come to any strong conclusions without trying to quantify those magnitudes somehow.

I don’t think it’s anywhere as lopsided as you might think. I don’t have access to my copy of the book at the moment, but the last I read indicated a more more complex picture than that. A ‘lot’ of innovation actually comes out of big business. The pharmaceutical industry alone is proof enough of that.

When I say “planned innovation” I don’t mean innovation by committee. What I’m saying is the idea may not have originated with them, but they were the ones who did something with it. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the transistor. He had a vision for the early uses of new technology. He had his plans for the tech that made him who he was.

If you want to remain focused on DARPA or Bell Labs for example, that used to be one of the favorite examples anarchists brought up in support of their philosophical aims. The boundary and restrictions were somewhat wide, but while it’s true that many of the pioneers and innovators within those organizations didn’t invent things through top down directive, they still had to meet certain qualifications that their free exchange of ideas had to be valuable serve the mission statement of the institution. Meaning your work still had to be found useful to the bureaucrats. Otherwise you were out.

Even very politically top heavy countries like China are producing an enormous amount of innovation.

I'm a tech development and "innovation" nerd. There's a small, but growing, especially in recent years, online commmunity of people who read organizational histories of places like Bell Labs and the original Lockheed Skunkwords to try and figure out the best ways to do real tech development. Not academic science projects and not VC backed bullshit which is mostly business model innovation (that even more often fails).

Can you point me towards the community you're referring to? Is this related to roots of progress? I've been a bit underwhelmed by them, but also haven't checked in for a while.

Side note on the hard tech angle: patent issuance used to be a decent enough and standardized enough measure for "innovation." Since the rise of legalism post WW2, however, it's so much more noisy now that it's questionable if it remains a valid "fungible currency" for studying innovation and tech development.

What do you think is a robust measure, then?

As I mentioned back in July, every month in our office canteen, a member of the HR team hangs up posters on the noticeboard of notable days or commemorations which fall within that calendar month. A lot of these are harmless days and observations that no one could take exception to (World Friendship Day, World Chocolate Day etc.), but a significant number this month were of a more... strident nature. In descending order from the top of the notice board:

  1. Movember
  2. Time to Talk About Mental Health
  3. Transgender Awareness Week (November 13th-19th)
  4. International Men's Day (November 19th)
  5. International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (November 25th)
  6. International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (November 29th)

Numbers 1, 2, 4 and 5 are unobjectionable (curious if I'll hear the "ugh, every day is International Men's Day!" joke two weeks from today). With regard to #3, my immediate thought was "for God's sake, how many days do you people need?" But my primary reaction was a feeling that 3, 5 and 6 are all in tension with one another, and that anyone who thinks about this for long enough would realise how unstable the coalition is.

  1. Trans — Palestine: The absurdity of the "Queers for Palestine" slogan (and facetious comparisons to "Turkeys for Christmas") has been well-enumerated and I'm not going to relitigate the whole argument. Suffice it to say that a given LGBT person is much safer in Israel than they are in either Gaza or the West Bank, and leave it at that. Accuse me of pinkwashing if you must, it doesn't make me wrong.
  2. Trans — violence against women: My opposition to violence against women is precisely why I am opposed to housing convicted male rapists with intact genitalia in women's prisons, or allowing male sportspeople to compete in women's contact sports.
  3. Violence against women — Palestine: As a rule, the woke coalition adopts a maximally credulous approach to women's claims to have been sexually assaulted — unless the women in question are Israelis who claim to have been raped by Hamas squaddies on 07/10/2023. (As one commentator ruefully put it, it's "#MeToo — unless you're a Jew".) The entire reason I'm uncomfortable about the idea of solidarity with the Palestinian people is that the activists are constantly muddying the waters about whether they support solidarity with the Palestinian people or solidarity with the Palestinian cause; if the latter, there's another layer of intentional ambiguity about whether it's support for a Palestinian state via peaceful activism or via armed resistance. If the latter, this logically implies that adherents support Hamas squaddies gunning down unarmed women at a music festival. And even if you have zero sympathy for Israeli women, even within Palestine, women are treated spectacularly poorly relative to their Israeli peers.

More than anything I'm reminded of Scott's evergreen post "Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle":

In the hospital where I work, there’s a RESIST TRUMP poster on the bulletin board in our break room. I don’t know who put it there, but I know that anybody who demanded that it be taken down would be tarred as a troublemaker, and anyone who tried to put a SUPPORT TRUMP poster up next to it would be lectured about how politics are inappropriate at work. This is true even though I think at least a third of my colleagues are Trump supporters.

Were I to argue that male rapists with intact penises don't belong in women's prisons, I'd doubtless be accused of bringing politics into the workplace, but observing Trans Awareness Week is just being a decent person. Were I to point out the shockingly brutal acts of violence against women Hamas committed on October 7th, I'd doubtless be accused of bringing politics into the workplace*; but announcing that you "stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people" is just being a decent person.

I don't know. I'm frustrated. I'd have no problem with a "don't talk about politics in work" rule, provided it was applied consistently.

*Even if I prefaced it by saying that Israel's response was disproportionate, and acknowledging that Israel has also committed crimes against humanity.

Have you considered that you're not really supposed to think about these things? Yes HR has picked a side but banging on and on about the israeli genocide is more than they're asking for.

Maybe I am typical minding too much but I think if you tried describing these "tensions" to people who support both the things you identify as in tension they would come off as non-sequiturs.

Trans — Palestine

Violence against women — Palestine

My impression is that most of the people celebrating something like "International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People" likely believe there is an ethnic cleansing, if not genocide, going on in the West Bank and Gaza. Carried out by some combination of the Israeli government and private settlers. I would be surprised if their objections to this state of affairs evaporated on learning that Palestinians were anti-trans or misogynistic. The two things do not seem connected to each other. I don't think people's objection to Israel's treatment of Palestinians is premised on those Palestinians having progressive politics, though I am open to being wrong about this.

Trans — violence against women

When people are thinking of something like "Transgender Awareness Week" they are thinking about struggles trans people have accessing healthcare. Or discrimination they might face in employment in housing. Similarly when people are thinking of "International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women" they are probably thinking of the elimination of, like, intimate partner violence. Assault by strangers. "Male rapists claiming to be trans to access women in prison" are just not salient to either groups conception of what the events are about.

I would be surprised if their objections to this state of affairs evaporated on learning that Palestinians were anti-trans or misogynistic.

Why? Tens of thousands of people have been crowing for weeks that Charlie Kirk deserved to be murdered because of his "transphobic rhetoric" and/or his opposition to abortion. It's probably a safe bet that Kirk was less misogynistic and anti-LGBT than the modal Palestinian.

When people are thinking of something like "Transgender Awareness Week" they are thinking about struggles trans people have accessing healthcare. Or discrimination they might face in employment in housing.

I don't think they are. I think they're primarily thinking about the main culture war flashpoints, almost all of which involve male people in women's spaces.

"Male rapists claiming to be trans to access women in prison" are just not salient to either groups conception of what the events are about.

I agree that they aren't salient. My argument is that they should be. My argument is that it's incoherent to claim to oppose violence against women and yet support policies that put women at greater risk of physical harm for the benefit of men.

Why? Tens of thousands of people have been crowing for weeks that Charlie Kirk deserved to be murdered because of his "transphobic rhetoric" and/or his opposition to abortion.

First, I think that you are exaggerating what the response was to Kirk's death amongst normies (I agree that there were terminally online people who actively celebrated it, but I am talking about "irl" woke people)

The leftists at my workplace (the kind of place where "Trump is [generally] bad" is just in the groundwater) were very unsympathetic to Kirk. But none of them actually celebrated his death, they (quietly) discussed how he was a bad person, and that he had sort of brought it upon himself (I'm given to understand this is because he was pro-guns) To cherrypick the very worst things said (I'm paraphrasing):

  • Someone said it was a truly "poetic" death
  • Someone questioned how far one is willing to take the principle "we should never commit political violence" - is it okay to assassinate Hitler? (but they didn't explicitly say Kirk was like Hitler, and if if they had, that wouldn't quite be celebrating his death)

But everyone to my recollection affirmed that it is bad that a human being died. And this general direction of discussion was lightly shut down by another progressive.

It's probably a safe bet that Kirk was less misogynistic and anti-LGBT than the modal Palestinian. [therefore if we Kirk is a bad person who deserves to die for his wrongthing, then certainly so are the Palestinians]

But Charlie Kirk was an individual, who personally held the "misogynistic" and anti-LGBT beliefs of a "modal Charlie Kirk" - not all Palestinians share the sentiments (or crimes) of the mode. I'm not saying group punishment is axiomatically immoral, but it is clearly a gray area because it involves punishing innocents. I think it is much more straightforward morally to support punishing a bad person for personally doing a bad thing (I'm not saying Kirk / Muslims do a "bad thing" by holding these views, just addressing this particular line of inference you drew)

But the above is my own disagreement to your logic. If we are looking at the world through a progressive lens:

  • Kirk is privileged (as a White cisgender heterosexual middle class able-bodied male, a citizen of a developed country, etc etc) - so unlike the Palestinians he has no excuse for his regressive worldview. He never had to worry about starving, getting shot, etc - he had the luxury to educate himself and be a force for good.
  • Unlike the Palestinians, people actually listen to Kirk's views on LGBT, etc. He actually causes harm to the LGBT community in the West, in a way the Palestinians don't.

I don't think they are. I think they're primarily thinking about the main culture war flashpoints, almost all of which involve male people in women's spaces.

The bathroom stuff is only one of the flashpoints. Respecting pronouns, concerns about the growing anti-trans (or "transphobic", if we are pathologising it) sentiment, access to hormones, trans children, trans men, non-binary individuals - these are all pretty clearly "flashpoints", and none involve males in female spaces.

My argument is that it's incoherent to claim to oppose violence against women and yet support policies that put women at greater risk of physical harm for the benefit of men.

As I suspect you are aware, progressives assign a different meaning to the word "woman" and "man" than you do. It is a reference to one's gender identity, and can be unrelated to their chromosomes, sex organs, appearance, etc (i.e. "transgender")

None of these policies benefit men - they benefit (trans) women (at the expense of cis women) One can argue that this is a bad definition, but it is the definition used by progressives - it is what they mean when they say "man" and "woman". So there is absolutely nothing "incoherent" about being feminist and pro trans rights.

Also, on top of that, it's not even incoherent to oppose violence against AFABs and support trans rights. It is possible to have multiple moral goals, for those goals to come into conflict, and to have to choose one over the other:

  • Is it contradictory to want gay rights, but also to be anti-racist, given that POC tend to be more homophobic than Whites?
  • To value women's bodily autonomy, but also be opposed to abortion, if you believe that fetuses are humans too?
  • To value people having freedom and pursuing happiness, but also supporting the incarceration / execution of a criminal who finds his bliss via serial rape, robbery and assault?
  • To oppose male violence against women, but also oppose the mass extermination of the entire male sex?

Half the population of Gaza are children, I don't think most woke people advocate for mass murdering people in non woke countries.

Also Israel's goal is to create a massive refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep. In other words, Israel is trying to export Palestine to the west.

Why?

If nothing else, the heartstrings-tugging about Palestinians has heavily focused on the plight of Palestinian children, who cannot be held responsible for the beliefs of their parents.

I don't know. I'm frustrated. I'd have no problem with a "don't talk about politics in work" rule, provided it was applied consistently.

I think this ties into the argument from that Helen Andrews essay about how American society is becoming more feminized. And the office/workplace culture is maybe the biggest shift. All of the political views that are allowed to be expressed are the feminist positions, all the ones banned are the anti-feminist ones.

To be fair, you'd have a very different experience in other places. If you put up those posters in, like, an army barracks, or a gaming discord, or uh... here... most people would make fun of them and maybe attack you personally. You'd have a lot more slack to put up the opposite views.

Bottom line: people are political animals, we're not neutral, everyone just favors their own side.

Working remotely has made the politicization of work much less salient, at least for me.

I forget exactly where I read it, but I believe it was in Ed Dutton’s book on the conservative demographic revolution where he pointed out in Islamic medieval society (this was back when the Mongols were rampaging throughout the continent), women had an increasingly considerable influence in political society. You had female imam’s, elites and you even had them influencing military affairs; but his point was that on some level, all of these ended up getting turned in pet projects of sorts and ceased to serve the original function for which they were intended. That was one of the reasons they became so internally weak and were later pushed over by Genghis Khan so easily. There definitely are consequences to an overly feminized or masculinized society.

All of the political views that are allowed to be expressed are the feminist positions, all the ones banned are the anti-feminist ones.

But this is my point: I don't think there's anything feminist about housing male rapists in women's prisons. I think gender ideology is a profoundly misogynistic worldview, in practice if not necessarily in theory. I likewise don't think there's anything feminist about the Palestinian resistance, and at best they have nothing to do with each other.

And in any case, our company's HR department is made up of two men and one woman, the latter of whom has been on sick leave for well over a month. I don't think this trend can be attributed to feminisation (or if it can, not in a fashion which is synonymous with "feminism").

I attempted to have a gentler and simpler version of the "trans ideology is actually misogynistic" conversation with a woman I know recently. (Results inconclusive - at least she hasn't dropped me as a friend.) As best as I can tell, this is one of those issues where my pro-trans feminist mom friends are genuinely unaware there's a conflict of interest because the problems are simply not reported on by mainstream outlets, and most people aren't inclined to sit down and think through the full implications of, e.g. what happens when you abolish psychiatric gatekeeping and let anyone who says the magic words, "I identify as a woman" have full access to all women's facilities.

If your HR department only has two active employees, unless your company has well under 50 total I doubt that either of them are scouring internet calendars looking for interesting fake holidays. They're probably pulling these from a third party service and distributing them without looking too hard.

But this is my point: I don't think there's anything feminist about housing male rapists in women's prisons. I think gender ideology is a profoundly misogynistic worldview, in practice if not necessarily in theory. I likewise don't think there's anything feminist about the Palestinian resistance, and at best they have nothing to do with each other.

Ah, you might think so, and I think so too. But in practice those are both positions split along gender linees, with women being far more likely to support Palestinian resistance, light prison sentences, and putting trans women into women's prisons even if they committed rape. The feminist position isn't "what's good for women," it's simply "what do feminists support," which cn sometimes be very different. One could even argue that it's good for feminist leaders when bad things happen to women, because that strengthens the political support for feminism. But it's not up to you and I to figure it out, all we can do is signal which team we're on, and you're trying to signal the anti-feminist team which they're obviously not going to like.

And in any case, our company's HR department is made up of two men and one woman, the latter of whom has been on sick leave for well over a month

Yeah and what are the political opininons of those two men in HR? Are either of them even slightly conservative? Probably not.

Besides it's not just about the HR department. It's all of corporate culture, generally, becoming a feminist safe space. Eveny manager with any sort of political savvy will instinctively know this.

The internet is quite saturated with Israel/Palestine arguments that selectively ignore everything bad that one side has been doing, graphically describes everything bad the other side has been doing, and then presents it as some sort of novel insight into the bottomless hypocrisy and evil of the former side like nobody has considered it from that angle before. I would hope we can do better here.

That being said, maybe the set of pro-Palestinians I am exposed to is non-representative, but my sense is that unlike the pro-Israelis they at least don't generally outright gaslight away half of what is happening. Instead, they treat Oct 7 rather like the public treats the violence against the civilian population of the losing nations of WWII - "not strictly good, but they honestly had it coming". (Red Army on German civilians is getting reevaluated due to modern political shifts, but from what I understand the fate of the Japanese settlers and their descendants on Chinese territory still is squarely in that category.)

That being said, maybe the set of pro-Palestinians I am exposed to is non-representative, but my sense is that unlike the pro-Israelis they at least don't generally outright gaslight away half of what is happening.

That certainly has not been my experience of the pro-Palestine faction. I've encountered plenty of outright denial of any sexual assaults on October 7th, lots of allusions to the Hannibal doctrine, and at least one guy who outright claimed that Hamas killed zero civilians on October 7th and that all of the footage of them doing so was deepfakes created from whole cloth by Shin Bet. "That isn't happening, and it's good that it is" seems to be the order of the day.

I think those are in fact ALL objectionable with the possible exception of #2, and HR should stick with World Chocolate Day.

Movember (which is about men's health) and International Men's Day are obviously going to piss off feminists, who can't stand the focus to be on men (except when it's bad). The "International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women" will piss off men tired of being blamed for bad things, and tired of the relentless focus on women's problems. (These men are culture warriors, surely, but many have been drafted over the past decade). And even mental health is kinda risky due to being female-and-left coded.

Numbers 1, 2, 4 and 5 are unobjectionable (curious if I'll hear the "ugh, every day is International Men's Day!" joke two weeks from today).

Number 1 is at least somewhat questionable, though I suppose not quite rising to "objectionable" given the low standards of such charities.

Ukraine.

By now, wise people, people who avoid reading the newspapers (newspaper generally lie) have noticed that the news out of Ukraine is bad. After years of relentless and very stupid propaganda, even 'The Sun' ran an article which was basically fine. Torygraph ditto. A bit of lying around the end, some lies by omission but generally thoughtful and not grossly incorrect.

That's means something. Not at all clear what. Obsessive observers of the war believe Ukraine is likely to hold out until end of '26, early '27. However:

1- There's a financing issue, sure - Americans, unwilling since Trump inauguration to keep paying for what they started now only want to deliver weapons if Europeans, who were against it initially, pay for them.

Europe, as everyone knows, is mostly broke, with the exception of Germany, which isn't only because it typically doesn't shower money around. Paying through the nose for overpriced weaponry like e.g. Patriot or Aster 30 missiles ($ 2mil per unit) which then are going to be fired, best case, at cruise missiles of equal worth doesn't seem like a winning strategy, especially with the Geran spam being able to destroy anything that doesn't have a rare cannon SPAA sitting on top of it. If there's 50 of them in Ukraine, that's probably too much.

There was a plan of 'magicking' up money by making a loan to buy more weapons, covered by the frozen Russian assets, thus 'risk-free' because 'Russia is going to release those assets as war reparations'. Belgium, which would have ended up having jurisdiction over it refused to go along..

2- Materially, it's bad. We know the gist of the situation: Ukraine has too few men -line infantry is at 20-30% staffing , is outmatched in drones, artillery and air attacks. Russia, being larger, is able to mobilize troops and sustain operations. There is shortage of everything on the Ukrainian side. Civilian cars, drones, men. -save perhaps small-calibre ammunition which is barely used in this war. (allegedly <5% of wounds are from gunshot). Why there is a shortage of cars seems.. mysterious. Germany surely should be able to keep Ukrainians knee deep in cheap trucks. E.g. Dacia Duster cost €20k and there's 100k made per year. A mere 2 billion € a year could give Ukraine 1 4x4 car for every 5 servicemen. What gives?

Ukraine drops some bombs using their few planes, possibly even daily , but Russians sometimes delivers up to 300 a day, although the mean is 160 in 2025. Any bunker, HQ, supply dump close behind the front can be hit. That's pretty modest- just 40 sorties in an Su-34. Ukraine doesn't have what to use - France supplied 800 glide bombs... for the whole of 2024. Promised 1200 for 2025. 4 a day. If Americans have given more, we'd have heard about it. If GDP so high, why so few bombs? Where's the American UMPK? Does US have no huge pile of old bombs you can stick sheet metal & gps modules to? Are cheap, effective, good enough weapons only something despotic alcoholic nations can make ?

The true rate of attrition is unknown. Ukraine armed forces, internally seem to believe it's 8 Ukrainians for 10 Russians or something along those lines, if we go by the testimony of this International Legion guy who deserted earlier this year after being allocated to an especially dire 1st rifleman battalion with 50% odds of surviving one rotation. (or so he says). In any case, as Europeans and Americans have shown themselves unwilling to go and risk death, the required rate needed to have been something like 2:10 just to break even, demographics wise.

3- the front. right now, a some amount of troops is encircled at Pokrovsk. Supposedly very few (AMK_mapping, an autist who follows the war hourly says Ukrainians mostly withdrew), but then, it's unclear how dire the situation is, however GUR fed their spec-ops team to the front near Pokrovsk, in an effort to make evacuation easier, to probably little avail (there is an FPV montage of these guys getting blown up already). They operate 3 Blackhawk helos, one of them was apparently downed.

Overall, as you probably know, the situation on the front is bad. Ukraine cannot hold territory, cannot counterattack effectively. Previously, Russia was only being able to push one place at a time, now it's multiples. If you want an overview, here's an interview of AMK_Mapping, a rare pro Ukrainian OSINT account respected by people on both sides. Honestly he seems autistic. The 'mapping' means he's one of the people keeping track of the war online by obsessively reading Telegram channels, geolocating etc. The interviewer is pro-Russian, somewhat overly optimistic I think.

Going by the aphorism 'If you're reading this, it's for you', it looks like the American press is preparing the public for a closing act of the majestic capeshit arc that started with the Maidan massacre. Ukrainians are generally eager to negotiate, nobody believes in winning anymore, though the demands Russia has are not viewed as acceptable. I wonder what the frontline troops and officers would say in private.

Americans, unwilling since Trump inauguration to keep paying for what they started

I must have hallucinated the Russian Tanks rolling into Ukraine originally, were those a CIA op? These types of posts would be more convincing if you could resist falling into even the most absurd Russian propaganda positions.

Europe, as everyone knows, is mostly broke, with the exception of Germany, which isn't only because it typically doesn't shower money around. Paying through the nose for overpriced weaponry like e.g. Patriot or Aster 30 missiles ($ 2mil per unit) which then are going to be fired, best case, at cruise missiles of equal worth doesn't seem like a winning strategy, especially with the Geran spam being able to destroy anything that doesn't have a rare cannon SPAA sitting on top of it. If there's 50 of them in Ukraine, that's probably too much.

Is the implication here that you believe Russia is richer than Europe? Because that's uh... and interesting take on relative world economies. A sanity check through claude and grok both come up with Russia having about 10-12% the economy size of the EU. If you insist on PPP then at best 20%.

We've been hearing a steady beat of these triumphant "the ukrainians are definitely beaten now, they'll submit any day now" on the motte for years at this point. It's not happened yet. Would you be willing to make a bet?

There are a lot of links here, but at least the helicopter one seems to be a Russian psyop - Ukraine used helicopters close enough to the front for Russia to film, with footage released of their landing, this then became claims of helicopters lost in the comments with no footage, instead all I saw was grainy footage of FPV attacks on individual soldiers from another location? Have you got any footage of an actual blackhawk being downed or a clear continuity? Ukraine certainly loves to publish their helicopter kills.

Pokrovsk itself has been fought over for 1 year 3 months now - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokrovsk_offensive (I hate Wikipedia too, but that start date seems pretty fair, surely?), and while pressure is mounting along the line there's hardly crazy breakthroughs considering Russia is still outside of Bakhmut (which was hoped to open up new offensive options), and the Donbass is ~10% Ukrainian? It seems like Ukraine is launching a limited counterattack, like with the 47th at Andriivka, where they use fresh elites to push up and hold a pocket open, and get the last men out before withdrawing - a pocket it should be stressed that is hardly Stalingrad.

I think it is still unclear how this will end as a war, Ukraine is under a lot of pressure but Russia is seriously underperforming and taking a lot of strategic hits with a base that might come apart over years more fighting (have you seen the refineries campaign? How many haven't been hit at this point?). However, you seem certain that this was all folly, and Ukraine will crumble with a situation worse than surrendering at letting Russia do what they will? This time next year, do you think there's going to be a lasting peace agreement? What broadly would be its terms - unconditional Russian wargoals from day 1?

I think it is still unclear how this will end as a war

Total collapse of the front and Russian annexation all the way to Lyviv. The 2014 fortifications are about to fall, after that it’s going to be very hard to prevent major collapses of the undermanned front line. Ukraine has no leverage left for a settlement. Insurgency is unlikely given the amount of casualties.

Why do you believe the EU is broke? It is the second largest economy in the world, containing multiple countries with very high GDP's. It seems more likely that it was not a lack of money that caused the hesitancy to spend more on military equipment, but rather that they did not want to divert money from social services, schools, hospitals, and other government expenditures. It is worth remembering that the EU countries generally care a lot more about welfare, pensions and so on than the US. Making these services worse present a huge election risk for the leaders, even if the countries at large could technically afford it.

Furthermore, the EU struggles with making big decisions due to needing a majority of member countries to agree, with some decisions requiring unanimous agreement. As long as a sizeable amount of members don't view the war as a territorial threat, action will necessarily be limited to individual member countries.

Even so, the EU members have largely picked up the slack from the US in monetary terms. The real issue is with actually getting their hands on equipment in a timely manner. As everyone is rearming at the same time, there is preciously little materiel available to actually send. No amount of money can magick guns out of nowhere. Production takes time.

Generally you paint a very dire picture. So in addition to questioning your narrative of "EU poor", I also wonder if any of what you are writing here is correct? You write that newspaper's generally lie, then immediately quote a tabloid without establishing why this one speaks the truth. The rest of your sources are a mixture of newspapers (which you have yourself said are untrustworthy), chatbot conversations (probably trained on social media and newspapers, and known to be politically biased by their training data), and random tweets ("seal of the apocalypse" doesn't exactly sound like a trustworthy source). Without you establishing the credibility of what you cite, why should I believe anything you have to say?

Are cheap, effective, good enough weapons only something despotic alcoholic nations can make ?

Maybe yes? Or more specifically a middle-income thing- you need a workforce with some amount of training, tools, and quality control so that they can make the things work, but not too much or they'll expect better jobs. Working in a munitions factory seems like a terrible job- all the brutal, physical pain of working in a factory, plus the chance that it might blow up. 1st world nations can sort of solve that by using elaborate mechanization and safety controls, but that skyrockets the price.

Something that always shocks me is reading about artillery shell production in WW1. Britain was producing something like 100,000 a month at the start of the war, and that was insufficient, leading to the Shell crisis of 1915. They were able to masively ramp up production by recuiting a million women to work in munitions plants and crank out shells like crazy- more than 1 million a month by the end of 1915. France and Germany did similar things.

So today, after a century of technological advance and 4 years of the war in Ukraine, you'd expec their shell output to be even higher right? Well... not so much. It's like 500,000 for the UK and 1 million from Germany per year. People in 1st world countries really don't want to go to work mass-manufacturing explosives.

Automating making 155mm shells is really rather easy. In comparison to cars, it's a very, very simple product.

E.g. I know that French plants for that are basically automated (saw some video), just low throughput.

There's no shortage of middle income countries in the US orbit, though.

People in 1st world countries really don't want to go to work mass-manufacturing explosives.

Is it this, or that there hasn't been much demand for capital production of mass munitions in decades? The last war that used them in bulk was what, Vietnam? Every Western war since has been dominated my high-complexity munitions that often seem designed to separate the explosives from the fiddly bits. You can presumably build JDAM kits on any electronic assembly line.

I don't know much about the explosives side of things, but my understanding of history is that the shells are made in one process that isn't special, and then filled. There are some dangerous parts there, but I suspect it's similar to videos I've watched of amateurs making high power solid rocket motors: you want to be smart about safety and choose a remote site, but it isn't necessarily messy or dangerous if you're smart about it --- but those guys aren't worried about enemy action. Also the chemistry is presumably a bit different.

ETA: The HPR and explosive folks presumably both have similar linear-ish scaling concerns: if you want 10x production, you really don't just want to buy a 10x bigger mixer. Past a fairly small scale, it means duplicating lots of equipment and space because you want to bound the size of the boom if something goes wrong.

"the last ware that used them in bulk" is the one currently going on, where both sides have been chonrically short on shells for years now.

But I'd argue it was always an issue during the cold war too, where both sides were very much preparing for war, but the Soviet side prepared with far, far more shells than the NATO side did. It's a good thing we never had to fight them a conventional war. Good thing we've got most of the old Warsaw-pact countries on our side now.

Is it this, or that there hasn't been much demand for capital production of mass munitions in decades? The last war that used them in bulk was what, Vietnam? Every Western war since has been dominated my high-complexity munitions that often seem designed to separate the explosives from the fiddly bits. You can presumably build JDAM kits on any electronic assembly line.

I suppose one could quibble about what "in bulk" means, but there was plenty of use of artillery by western forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was the operational point of establishing firebases, outposts, and forward operating bases out in the hot areas: that's where you site your artillery, and then everything within a 30 km ring of that can be shelled within minutes.

I just don’t understand why there was such an intense effort to keep people in a state of delusion regarding the progress of the war. Wouldn’t people have been more willing to give aid if they had known this was a difficult uphill battle? That technique worked every well when the UK was trying to play on American sympathies during the early parts of WWII.

This is framing the state of the war as a difficult uphill battle, as opposed to a doomed downhill battle.

Now it is, up until 2025 it was always delusional copium about total Ukrainian victory and 14:1 kill ratios.

Not wrong. Propaganda was pushing the insane efficacy of Ukrainian troops vs. the broad incompetence of RU troops for at least a year into the war.

And this was back when Twitter might actually ban you if you tried to point out facts about Russian capabilities that read as too 'Pro Russian."

And what’s so odd about it is that I think the opposite tack would have played much much better with the American public, who never met an underdog they didn’t like.

I've banged this drum for a while, so excuse me for repeating myself, but...

What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia? I mean I understand the process of being conquered is violent and deadly, but post surrender, what are they afraid of? Their government is already among the most corrupt governments in the world, and their "Democracy" was already a proxy battle between Russian and USA color revolutions for most of their lifetimes. If they stuck with Western Europe their Jewish President will just adopt a program of flooding them with 3rd worlders as "Replacement Migration" and they'd be ethnically cleansed inside 50 years anyways. The only hope the Ukrainian people have of surviving as a people as opposed to a label on a map is with Russia.

It, frankly, blows my damned mind that European leaders will let virtually every nation on Earth walk all over them, colonize their lands, commit mass rapes, murders, terrorism and ethnic cleansing, but somehow Russia's action are a step too far. There are nearly less English left in London than their are Ukrainians left in Kiev. What's been the greater crime?

What if world leaders just put on blinders, and let Russian people drive all the way to Kiev without firing a shot? What if they told fictions about how they are just immigrants looking for a better life? How dare you accuse them of having dual loyalties? They're perfectly capable of it. It's what they've been doing the last 50 years.

It blows your mind because you’re looking at a strawman. The Europeans who elected these leaders don’t see it this way. As for the Ukrainian response…

Imagine that your county government gets taken over by—gosh, I know this sounds farfetched—roving gangs of immigrants. Then some keyboard warrior across the pond tells you: “don’t worry! They’re just protecting you from the other scary minorities, the ones who look even less like you. It’s the only way you’ll avoid ethnic cleansing.”

Would you believe them?

Ukrainians aren’t choosing the hard route because they just love the EU. They’re doing it because they hate Russia more. Better to die on one’s feet.

I mean I understand the process of being conquered is violent and deadly, but post surrender, what are they afraid of?

Being dead, some of them. Being subject to the same treatment as inhabitants of medieval city would be after being conquered by a foreign army (pillage, rape, all that stuff). Of course, we're in civilized time, so most pillage would not be in the form of literally Russian soldiers going door to door and taking all valuable stuff. I mean, that happened too, many times, but there's just too many doors. The main pillage would be that Russians would own everything and you would have to pay them for being their bitch. And Russia has a flourishing prison culture - in fact, most of Russian culture by now is quasi-prison-culture or heavily influenced by it - so they know very well how to make somebody their bitch and how to extract maximum value from that. If you read the history of the 90s in Russia, it happened all over - until Putin took over. In fact, one of the reasons why it was so easy for Putin to take over was because the shit that's was going on was so bad, people were thinking anything that is going to stop it would be better. So, that's what would happen to Ukraine - and since its the conquered land, it won't stop for a long while. Plus, of course, anybody who has any genuinely Ukrainian nationalist sentiment, would be ruthlessly eliminated.

The only hope the Ukrainian people have of surviving as a people

There's no chance of Ukrainians surviving as "people" - collectively - as opposed to just collection of humans with no common identity, if Russia wins this war (by wins I mean full victory, capturing Kiev, overthrowing the government, etc). The whole premise of the war is that there's no such thing as Ukrainian people - it's just some Russians that are stupid enough to speak in weird broken Russian and sell out to the West, and it's time to put a stop to it. And if Russians win, they definitely will put a full stop to it. I mean, they won't murder everyone, it's not Africa, and they may allow people to call themselves "Ukrainians" if they behave, but no idea of having anything like a nation with independent identity would not be tolerated. Some Ukrainians find it unacceptable. If you want to understand why Ukrainians fight, you need to understand them, as they are, and not some weird caricature existing only in your mind.

If they stuck with Western Europe their Jewish President will just adopt a program of flooding them with 3rd worlders as "Replacement Migration" and they'd be ethnically cleansed inside 50 years anyways

That's complete nonsense. I mean, if you know only about problems in a handful of Western European countries, you could conclude every country is like that, but it's not. Ukraine has completely different problems and Zelensky has no intention and no inclination to do any of that, neither did any Ukrainian politicians. I realize how you want to present it as another case of evil Joos doing evil Joo stuff, but that's just ignorant nonsense, not discussing real facts on the ground.

The main pillage would be that Russians would own everything and you would have to pay them for being their bitch. And Russia has a flourishing prison culture - in fact, most of Russian culture by now is quasi-prison-culture or heavily influenced by it - so they know very well how to make somebody their bitch and how to extract maximum value from that. If you read the history of the 90s in Russia, it happened all over - until Putin took over.

At this specific level, there simply isn't that much difference between the two countries. "Until Putin took over" the trajectories of them were quite similar.

"Until Putin took over" the trajectories of them were quite similar.

Well, yes and no. You need to look at it in dynamics, not at one moment, but over the time. In early 90s, yes, things were pretty similar, except more money in Russia, but Ukraine had its share too. Then the paths diverged. Russia essentially rejected the "Western" way - in part because people implementing it were also grotesquely corrupt, though Putin's gang (which weren't strictly speaking his yet, just the one he belonged to) were about as corrupt, but not obviously so. There were also other factors, including the Chechen war, terrorism, etc. - and, of course, the conscious choice by Putin to set up Russia in opposition to the West.

Ukraine, while being close beside in corruption, has had also strong independence/nationalist vibes - which at times had been anti-Russian but not necessarily so. There had been a lot of fractions, and most of them were for at least keeping decent relations with Russia, while staying independent. Ukraine leaned towards integrating with Europe (remember, the explosive wokification by that time hadn't happen yet and "Europe" didn't mean "import Syrians, introduce censorship and trans your kids" yet). That said, for a while they hadn't been that far apart - in fact, at one time the most popular politician, among all alive, in Ukraine had been none other but Vladimir Putin. Putin overplayed his hand though, and helped to install Yanukovich, who had proven too much even for Ukrainians that were used to corruption.

And when it went sour, instead of taking a step back and trying to play the same long game he played before - after all, there were a lot of corrupt politicians in Ukraine, and Putin probably could choose another one to puppet and keep manipulating Ukraine while seemingly staying out of the fray openly - he decided to put the boot down. In Russia, putting the boot down worked spectacularly well - billions of dollars invested in Russian opposition led to it having absolutely zero power very soon and Putin eliminating any trace of dissent. Not only that, but the "moral power" that the dissidents held in the USSR, is mostly gone too - except for rare personalities like Nemtsov or Navalny, who Putin just openly murdered with nobody being able to object, there's not ever any influential opposition figures. In Ukraine, however, it did not work at all. That's about where the trajectories, previously following if not the same then adjacent paths, split drastically. Putin chose to build his new Russian Empire, Ukraine preferred to stay out of it.

So yes, the genesis is common, and a lot of common themes, but there are very important differences.

That's complete nonsense. I mean, if you know only about problems in a handful of Western European countries, you could conclude every country is like that, but it's not. Ukraine has completely different problems and Zelensky has no intention and no inclination to do any of that, neither did any Ukrainian politicians. I realize how you want to present it as another case of evil Joos doing evil Joo stuff, but that's just ignorant nonsense, not discussing real facts on the ground.

I'll accept the rest of your post at face value, but this...

Nobody has wanted that anywhere. And yet it's happened regardless. I refuse to accept "That won't happen because nobody wants it" as an adequate rebuttal.

There are many people who do not live in France, Germany, and the Anglosphere countries, but who would like to. On the other hand, Ukraine is a postcommunist balkans country; even the majority of its own population doesn't want to live there, because it sucks. 'Mass immigration to Ukraine' is not a realistic scenario because even the migrants don't want it. Seriously, nobody wants to live in a burnt out rubble heap with a GDP per capita on par with India.

Nobody has wanted that anywhere. And yet it's happened regardless. I refuse to accept "That won't happen because nobody wants it" as an adequate rebuttal.

In fact, not only did they not want it, but they were told by Representatives, Senators, and Presidents, that it would never happen. Just another click on the ratchet.

Nobody has wanted that anywhere.

That's not true of course. The whole woke blue tribe wanted it and still wants it. We could have a long discussion as to why they want it, but for the purposes of now, it's enough to notice they exist and are politically active and influential - in fact, in the West, they own the majority of the media, the academia and significant part of government apparatus. It is not the case in Ukraine. Yes, there are some voices in Ukraine aping the woke slogans, but they are mostly doing it because they want their European friends to like them, and neither them themselves are not truly woke nor there are any significant woke tribes in Ukrainian politics. Ukrainian politics is a tangled and ugly mess, but woke is not a significant part of it. The situation if very different there, so trying to apply what you see in, say, Germany or Holland, to Ukraine is completely useless.

It is instructive to watch/read/listen to Ukrainian internal propaganda. Machine translation is fine. Very much not about freedom, democracy, and minority rights. A lot about how russians are dirty mongolians that need to be kept out of the White continent.

On the first days Russians fired into random civilian cars, with the BMP engaging pensioners who didn't know they were at war right at the start pretty famous now. This was at the point where it was going to be a 3 day special operation, and at least their command was sure that Ukraine would just fold - then there was Bucha where soldiers ran riot. That was all Feb-March 2022, and things did not get better from there.

There's quite the list of warcrimes now (you may not agree all of these happened, but most Ukrainians would if you're trying to understand their theory of mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_attacks_on_civilians_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war_(2022%E2%80%93present)). In addition, it seems that capture/kill/torture lists were common for the advancing troops. Remember, early on Russia was super confident, and sent in various paramilitaries to remove sections of civil society and kill chunks of them - it seems like they wanted a literal decapitation of civil society so that the puppet regime they installed would last and be able to become another Belarus - (RUSI has a report here: https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/special-resources/preliminary-lessons-russias-unconventional-operations-during-russo-ukrainian-war-february-2022 - in particular there were standardized torture equipment found in trucks, which is brutal as fuck, these are not people who anyone should be indifferent to ruling over them).

Imagine you believe that, like many Ukrainians do - and there is a solid argument that their resistance prevented Buchas across most of the country. Put yourself into that frame, imagine you believed the above. What would you do if that was your country, your home, and you knew people who were killed or tortured? People here reasonably say that one of the key lessons of the 20th century is do not be ruled over by people who hate you - if its true for the red tribe USA than the Ukrainians should be celebrated surely?

I would fight, and I think the situation is far less bleak than @No_one paints it, both now and over all the past times we've seen this argument (we're almost on year 4 of the special operation to de-nazify Ukraine, and with a few more years of this pace Russia will at last have all the Donbas, is this really a situation where Russia is going to occupy the country soon?). For example, I do note that Russia is taking a lot more long range hits this year, to very difficult to replace refining (only one (1) refinery has not been hit, and those cracking towers are not easy to patch) and strategic air assets no less. We're still in the hard pounding, Ukraine might break but it isn't over yet. It's a very interesting war.

sent in various paramilitaries to remove sections of civil society and kill chunks of them - it seems like they wanted a literal decapitation of civil society so that the puppet regime they installed would last and be able to become another Belarus

[citation required]

Arresting foreign funded activists is obviously the right thing to do, but it's rather easy to expel them and massively less problematic. That said, I've never seen a single indication they had a naughty list. Although it'd make sense for them to have one, after all that has happened in Ukraine.

There is a citation in my post - RUSI's paper right there. It's open source, and they list where they got the information from where possible. You can disagree (especially where it's author interviews or him with a clearance seeing multiple copies of captured Russian equipment or the same documented instructions), but here you go if you cannot open the link for some reason, it's footnote 70: In Kherson, see BBC News, ‘Inside Russian “Torture Chambers” in Ukrainian City of Kherson – BBC News’, Youtube, https://youtube.com/watchv=AE_45TrZqU8, accessed 18 March 2023; in Kharkiv oblast, see John Ray, ‘Ukrainian Retraces Steps to Torture Chamber where he was “Electrocuted and Beaten for Six Days”’, 22 September 2022, < https://www.itv.com/news/2022-09-22/ukrainian-retraces-steps-to-torture-chamber-where-he-was-beaten-for-six-days>, accessed 18 March 2023; in Kyiv oblast, see Erika Kinetz et al., ‘“Method to the Violence”: Dogged Investigation and Groundbreaking Visuals Document Bucha “Cleansing”’, AP News, 11 November 2022; author observations around Bucha, June 2022 and Kharkiv oblast, October 2022.

In particular, I would also highlight this from right at the start of the war: "The population was divided into five core categories:

  1. Those deemed leaders of Ukrainian nationalism who were specified for physical liquidation on a high-priority target list, or for capture to enable show trials.
  2. Those suspected of intending to support acts of resistance who needed to be recruited or suppressed including anyone associated with Ukrainian law enforcement, local government, the military or related to officials that were not actively collaborating.
  3. Those who were deemed apathetic.
  4. Those actively collaborating with Russian forces.
  5. Individuals who were necessary for running critical national infrastructure and had to be controlled.69"

Source 69 above, is: The methodology was set out in an instruction issued by the Russian Presidential Administration and obtained by the Intelligence Community of Ukraine. Author interview with Q (Senior Field Counterintelligence Officer in Ukrainian Agency 4), Ukraine, February 2022; author interview with G; author interviews with R (former head of Ukrainian agency 2), Ukraine, February 2022; author interviews with J (deputy head of Ukrainian agency 5), Ukraine, August and October 2022; see also Erika Kinetz, ‘“We Will Find You:” Russians Hunt Down Ukrainians on Lists’, AP News, 21 December 2022.

I am confused how you missed it? I dug through your AI and the links weren't easy to find - or were not there - but this one was directly next to the text.

*edit: Oh, for others of a paranoid persuasion, that RUSI link is also a good overview of what an occupying force of high levels of brutality but using dumb troops of not high numbers and limited time might do to you and your family if you were ever occupied - and its very readable.

It bears repeating that Western Ukraine(Galicia) is culturally distinct and wants to be a central European country like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary etc, and Russia will not allow them to do so. Russia persecutes the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church, wants to suppress the Ukrainian language, indoctrinate their children into Russian culture with its own historical narratives, etc.

To an outsider it's probably hard to tell the difference. But it's also hard for slavs to tell the difference between the blue and red tribes; why there's so much fighting about the narrative in public schools is likely tricky political analysis for the FSB. It's also vanishingly unlikely that Ukraine will see replacement migration, even Ukrainians don't want to live there, much less non-Ukrainians.

To an outsider it's probably hard to tell the difference.

The best explanation I've seen is that Putin wants Ukraine to be like Bavaria. They are free to yodel and walk around in leather pants and speak their unintelligible dialect among themselves, but they are still an integral part of the German nation and the German state. While Ukrainians want to be like the Netherlands. Who mention the German blood of their ruler in the anthem, used to be in the HRE, but are free to polder and walk around in wooden clogs and speak their unintelligible dialect among themselves in their own country.

, wants to suppress the Ukrainian language, indoctrinate their children into Russian culture with its own historical narratives

Unlike the western globalists who would never ever do something to dismantle a country's ethnic and cultural heritage...

If they want ethnic Ukrainian culture Macron and Keir Starmer are their worst nightmare.

Wrong. If they want ethnic Ukrainian culture, Russia is their worst nightmare. On account of actually having an explicit policy to destroy them as an ethnicity and fold them into Russia, as opposed to whatever it is you're insinuating Macron and Keir Starmer are doing.

Not even close.

While London is 50+% non British? Ukrainian culture will be as deconstructed as western culture and replaced by bland American consumerism while their population will be replaced by Bangladeshis extracting resources owned by western financial institutes. Ukraine's demographics rival South Korea's as the most catastrophic on Earth while they are allying with people who want mass migration with incredible fervor.

Don't think the Black rock owned plantation is going to have an HR department that cares about traditional Ukrainian culture or that the Nigerians working there have any interest in it.

Why would any Ukrainian who cares about his ethnicity care about that, when Russia promises to actively cancel the entire concept of Ukraine and paint it as wrongheaded Malorossian nazi sympathizers as soon as it's done?

It's clearly been too long since you've had an actual existential war if your concept of being replaced is limited to "London is less than 50% British". Try zero percent. Ethnicity null can't take up any percentage of the former country, after all.

It bears repeating that Western Ukraine(Galicia) is culturally distinct and wants to be a central European country like Poland

Weren't many of these areas historically, uh -- Poland?

Give those parts back to the Poles, Crimea + Donbas etc. back to the Russians, and what's really left?

There's no such thing as "historically Poland" and these areas had been everything. These lands were conquered and re-conquered by a variety of states, which bore variety of names, many of them sounding like modern states (e.g. Grand Duchy of Lithuania) but being very different from them. Taking a random moment out of 1000 years of chaotic warfare and conquest, fixating on it as "historical" and claiming that's the "true" state of things is just nonsense. Russian official propaganda does it all the time - if any particular piece of land had been conquered by Russians even for a day over the centuries, it's "historically Russian land", from the time of Creation till the end of the Universe. Of course, if you believe silly stuff like that you may as well start doing land acknowledgments and move back to Africa since that's where "historically" humans lived.

What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia?

Let's first imagine the wild success of the SMO. That is, Russian tanks drive all the way to the center of Kiev in 2022, Zelensky escapes in a dress, Poland props up LNR and VNR. That's where ideologically motivated SBU and military officers escape to along with hardcore nationalists, everyone else shrugs and goes on with their lives.

Well, in 2022 Ukraine was a better country to live in than Russia. Not a perfect one, of course, but Russia is a very top-down country where the very bottom of the pyramid is adept at avoiding the attention of the rest of it. Ukraine has a very different ethos of resisting the top layers, and the 2014 revolution legitimized this resistance. Poroshenko's reforms made municipal governments responsible for a much larger chunk of the taxes, further reinforcing the idea that people were in charge of their lives, and this change worked.

Maybe in February 2022 the average Ukrainian could've calculated the QALY drop caused by a prolonged armed resistance and decided to give up, but vibes beat math, and the vibes said, "we're finally doing some cool nation building and we'll lose all this if we don't resist".

in 2022 Ukraine was a better country to live in than Russia

Before the invasion Ukraine's GDP per capita was 2-3 times lower than Russia's. Obviously now it's even worse. "Nation-building" aside, is there any particular reason I should believe it's better to be Ukrainian than Russian?

All I see is one corrupt oligarchy feeding its population into a meat grinder to avoid having their power taken away by another corrupt oligarchy.

Russia has South Africa and Mexico tier income inequality with a mostly state controlled economy. I somehow doubt the average Russian was doing better than the average Ukrainian.

The numbers are as Sunshine says. Better in PPP, worse by exchange rates.

Setting aside the possibility of skew, since I had a surprisingly hard time finding median data…Is this the right question?

Maybe I’d prefer being a Russian to being a Ukrainian. But I think I’d prefer either to being a former-Ukrainian. Even if Russia wasn’t at all interested in cleansing language or religion, would Russian wealth somehow trickle down? There’s not much reason to think former-Ukrainians would see any benefits under Russian colonization.

All else being equal I assume that both countries are equally exploitative towards their people. Ergo, all else being equal, the population of the richer country will be richer and the population of the poorer country will be poorer.

I would expect Russian elites to siphon more from annexed Ukrainians than from their own lower class.

I don't think Ukrainians, outside of the max. 3% or so actual nazis (effective as they may be as a fighting force), care for "surviving as a people". The only thing they are fighting, and willingly taking a 50% chance to die, for is the hope of "becoming part of the West", either by uplift like Poland or Estonia, or by emigration once the borders open. Generally, it may be hard for a Westerner who spends all day every day seething about the state of their country to understand just to what extent post-Soviet people, especially relatively poor ones, idolize life in the West. (Maybe take in this prophetic music video for vibes.)

My experience with actual Ukrainians(and this is a biased sample but it is mostly the equivalent of normies, not actual Nazis) is that they do care about surviving as a people, and that that people is, to their mind at least, very different from Russia. Whether there's actually much of a difference or not probably depends on where exactly in Ukraine; Galicia at least is a lot more central European and less east Slavic in comparison.

What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia? I mean I understand the process of being conquered is violent and deadly, but post surrender, what are they afraid of?

4 years ago they probably didn't had too much to be afraid of. Right now ...

Compare the state of the Russian POW that Ukrainians return with the Ukrainian that Russia returns. A full blown conquest has a good chance to devolve Ukraine into the biggest concentration camp on earth.

Thankfully Putin doesn't seem too keen on that. Mostly because oppression is expensive. And economic sanctions on Russia do hurt. So Europe can actually negotiate a peace that is not terrible.

I am not sure if you can comprehend how cruel and ruthless us eastern europeans can be.

In a word, The Holodomor.

Now, don't worry, I'm not some Ukraine agent apologist here. I'm just trying to directly answer the question of "What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia?" You can absolutely boil Ukraine v Russia down to Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe. The Ukrainians aren't thinking about the future, they're constantly enraged by the past. The "Politics of Resentment" isn't an invention of 21st American politics - it's the de facto arrangement of most human conflict. To many in Ukraine, allowing a Russian takeover is the equivalent of letting all of the people who killed all of your family members move in to your house. It's pretty easy to get fatalist and irrational to prevent that. "I would rather die than ...." Yeah, well.

You can absolutely boil Ukraine v Russia down to Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe.

My thoughts exactly. It's vexing how every Red Triber on this forum knows exactly how much they hate their enemy and would not submit to them because the enemy has repeatedly let them know how much they hate the red triber and want their legacy erased... yet all that understanding goes out the window when they look at Ukraine vs. Russia.

Except that whatever things Blue Tribe did, they still did not graduate - at least in the US - to actually engineering a nationwide famine that cost millions of lives, with the explicit purpose of subjugating Red Tribe. Shit like that tends to be remembered.

Yeah, that actually makes perfect sense when you put it like that.

A shame there won't be a Ukrainian people in 50 years.

They survived Russian Empire at the peak of its might, and the USSR - twice. And USSR is not known for its gentle approach to conquering people. By Lindy's law, I estimate their chance on surviving Putin as pretty decent.

There isn't a singular 'Ukrainian people' now, there's a collection of different 'Ukrainian people'- and one of them(galicians) might have an above replacement fertility rate(although it's probably just below), one of the major undercurrents of the present conflict is Ukraine's attempts at turning its collection of different ethnic groups into a single ethnic group that's mostly galician aping. That's what started the donbas war.

My prediction on their demise is more favorable than on the Western Red Tribe - they've actually got around to fighting.

Russia's native birthrate is largely in the same crater as other European nations, and it also has both Muslim immigration (from its neighbouring -stans as opposed to Middle Eastern, but same difference if you're not into that) and a sizeable resident diaspora. Regarding "surviving as a people" Russia has nothing to offer Ukrainians, especially given that Russia's explicit rhetoric is disintegrating Ukrainians as an ethnicity.

(allegedly <5% of wounds are from gunshot)

Jesus Christ what a horrifying implication. I mean, being wounded by a a bullet is surely bad enough. But at least you can generally shoot back at the guy trying to kill you with a gun.

I'd guess, then, the bulk of wounds are from drones, bombs/artillery, maybe landmines, and armored vehicles? Or maybe wounds sustained when your armored vehicle gets blasted?

And this leads me to wonder about that phenomenon we saw way towards the beginning of the war: Western Volunteers who joined up for a chance to fight fascism. Ukraine created a foreign legion for those guys.

As of a year and a half ago it apparently wasn't going well. I daresay the early /r/volunteersForUkraine days where they hyped each other up to grab a rifle and go may have gotten numerous people killed for no major benefit.

Some deeper questions there. Is there any possible rational benefit for a Non-Ukrainian to join up in an actual combat role? If not... what's the remaining rational benefit of Non-Ukrainians continuing to fund the war effort?

I'm sure there's an object-level argument for it, still, but it probably relies on a black-swan type event that utterly breaks Russia's resolve all in one go, similar to that aborted Prigozhin coup.

Is there any possible rational benefit for a Non-Ukrainian to join up in an actual combat role?

Easy access to Canadian healthcare.

what's the remaining rational benefit of Non-Ukrainians continuing to fund the war effort?

The US wants to break Russia up into multiple pieces in order to gain easy access to the natural resources, wealth, etc that a strong Russia prevents them from acquiring. At the same time, they want to make sure that Russia isn't capable of assisting China in any real way, to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world and retain their position as global hegemon. Because most western nations are effectively just client states of the US, they have no choice but to assist no matter how badly it harms their national interest (like Germany destroying their industrial base and economy by not buying Russian fossil fuels).

The US' attempt is absolutely doomed to fail, and Ukraine has no viable path to victory whatsoever - the only way the war doesn't end in a Russian victory is if it goes nuclear and the entire world loses. But to go back to your question, the remaining rational benefit of continuing to fund the war effort is that you are allowed to be elected instead of simply removed from the electoral process (see Romania, Moldova etc). In the long term, this is bad for the nations involved. Hell, it is likely bad in the short term for the people and nations involved... but less bad for the politicians.

Jesus Christ what a horrifying implication. I mean, being wounded by a a bullet is surely bad enough. But at least you can generally shoot back at the guy trying to kill you with a gun.

This has essentially been the case since WW1, and only getting worse since. In WW2 something like 70% of all casualties were from artillery, not small arms fire. This is for conventional war, I'm sure insurgencies have much different ratios.

Right, the two world wars basically squeezed all the remaining romanticism out of warfighting. Vietnam crapped on whatever was left. There hasn't been a single piece of media anywhere that I'm aware of that made the fighting in Vietnam look 'honorable' or 'cool.' (note, I ascribe at least part of that to Western Cultural institutions moving left, but even nonfiction accounts make it sound horrible).

Even the video games about the Vietnam war don't try to romanticize it. WWII games do put some emphasis on heroics but don't undercut how horrible e.g. Storming the Beach at Normandy was.

A tiny bit got injected back in with the GWOT and rise of modern special forces doing surgical strikes with high-tech equipment against relatively inferior opponents. The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Franchise is still a best-seller, at least.

But the Ukraine conflict is NOT THAT. Fair to say that the thought of this precise kind of warfare: long battle lines, grinding attrition to occasionally advance a few hundred yards at a time, and almost all the actual fighting done via 'indirect' means, you'll rarely see the thing that kills you coming... it makes me sick. Inflicting this on your fellow human is probably, dare I say, irredeemable.

Now, I don't think medieval warfare was 'better'. Dying of sepsis or bleeding out face-down in a muddy field after you got gut-stuck with a polearm is not any more appealing. But at least many conflicts of that era got settled with a basic handful of battles and the occasional siege.

Industrialization of the affair just means its an unceasing nightmare.

(note, I ascribe at least part of that to Western Cultural institutions moving left, but even nonfiction accounts make it sound horrible).

Anti-war media generally makes war look cooler and less horrible than nonfiction accounts of war. I've never seen anything to suggest that the Vietnam War was particularly horrible by the standards of war; it suffers primarily from the way it is seen as a bad war (in much the same way as WW1 is seen as far worse than WW2).

But at least many conflicts of that era got settled with a basic handful of battles and the occasional siege.

Medieval wars, due to their seasonal nature, could easily go on for years or decades (or, in one famous case, for a century). The short campaign season limited the severity of individual campaigns but also meant that it was incredibly hard to deliver a decisive blow before your opponent got winter and spring to recover. They were also plagued by disease that killed far more soldiers than battle.

I've never seen anything to suggest that the Vietnam War was particularly horrible by the standards of war; it suffers primarily from the way it is seen as a bad war (in much the same way as WW1 is seen as far worse than WW2).

I think fighting wars in humid Tropical Jungles so thick you have to use toxic chemicals and Napalm just to clear some space just sucks in a way that fighting in deciduous forest or even straight desert just doesn't. Maybe edged out by fighting in Russia during Winter.

The short campaign season limited the severity of individual campaigns but also meant that it was incredibly hard to deliver a decisive blow before your opponent got winter and spring to recover. They were also plagued by disease that killed far more soldiers than battle.

Yep, but that's arguably just a feature of the times, not specific to the warfare. Hell, the fact that the fighting WOULD have to pause for the seasons probably made it a little more bearable for the individual soldiers, as it placed a natural limit on how long they'd be deployed.

Now, of course, we have the capacity to engineer our own diseases to use as weapons... but we just kinda agree not to (or maybe we do anyway depending on which conspiracies you believe).

But at least many conflicts of that era got settled with a basic handful of battles and the occasional siege.

The horror of medieval sieges is not to be underestimated. Plenty of death to be had there as well, between starvation, disease, rudimentary artillery, disease, undermining attempts, starvation, wall-defenses (pouring boiling oil down on attackers, etc.), disease, and, of course, night-time sallies/raids.

Also, look up the word "chevauchee" sometime if you want to have your stomach turned.

Yep.

All the worse because it inflicts pain on civilian population.

That said, it would also depend on the nature of the attacker, and whether you could expect decent treatment upon surrender.

The factor that really weighs against joining Medieval armies is the tortures one could end up in if captured by the other side. Although there's certainly evidence that we as humans haven't improved much in that regard.

I just watched a video on Vlad the Impaler and I can say that his existence ALONE is enough for me to not want to enlist to fight on EITHER side of the war with the Ottoman Turks in the mid to late 1400's.

I would not be particularly worried about torture as a medieval soldier (nobles, of course, would get three squares and a cot while they waited to be ransomed) - in times of war it was a rare occurrence limited to some instances of intimidation, like difficult sieges, a few religious conflicts, and, of course, rebels or traitors. You would be much more likely to get a quick death than tortured, but at the luckiest you'd be stripped and let go or, for professionals, offered a place in the other duke's army. Somewhere in the middle would be impressment for war labour or, if the captors weren't Christian, relocation or lifetime slavery. At worst, worse than almost any transient torture, you could be impressed as a galley slave. Harsh or torturous punishments such as blinding were considered shocking enough to Western medieval chroniclers to be specifically noted when they occurred (e.g. Henry I blinding a man who sang insulting songs about him). I'm not saying there was anything pleasant at all about being taken prisoner in the Middle Ages, just that to my knowledge torture is relatively rare in the sources compared to ransom/execution/release/enslavement, all of which are easier and generally more beneficial to the captors. The exceptions, outside of a minority of inter-faith wars, would be rebellions - unfortunately, you probably don't get much of a choice as to whether your war is considered a legitimate conflict or a rebellion...

I think in my book, a 1% chance of being tortured using the most advanced methods a postclassical civilization can devise is intolerably high.

And there are a lot of slave or indentured servant jobs that were also pretty tortuous if only because they were indefinite in length. I wouldn't necessarily be unhappy with being forced to compete in Gladiatorial games, though.

To say nothing of being a Castrato or Eunuch. Not torture per se, but... ugh.

Although another 'fun' debate is how medieval torture compares to stuff the Drug Cartels do in modern day.

Anyway, I just want to stay far away from any battlefield where inflicting excess suffering on enemies is not tabooed harshly.

Castration was done to prepubescent boys(that is, not soldiers).

Very understandable position! I would say even 1% is a significant overstatement of how likely a captured medieval footsoldier was to be tortured, but we'll never know for sure, and captivity would have been unpleasant enough to count as "cruel or unusual" today, besides a nontrivial chance of losing your head and a far higher chance of dying of disease.

We're probably in an intermediate period when combat drones are an almighty game changer. No one has come up with an effective countermeasure to them so far. I'm sure this 'll soon change though.

I still expect someone to field a miniature CIWS that can be mounted to anything larger than a pickup. Some combination of passive IR search and short-range phased array radar could probably counter the drone tactics I've seen so far. You wouldn't need a round larger than 22LR to take down the drones I've seen, as long as a computer is aiming it and you get enough rounds downrange.

Forgive me for the "akshually" style comment, but this isn't entirely true.

No one has come up with a VERY CHEAP effective countermeasure yet. The ones that do work are 1) expensive and 2) Horded by the US/ISR/China and (maybe) a few other countries because nobody wants to show off their cool-new-shit in Ukraine. We want to save it for when it - yikes - actually matters.

Much like the human element of the Ukraine war, the drone element is mostly one of attrition and competing supply lines. At one point, 10,000 drones were falling out of the skies over Ukraine per month because of effective and cheap countermeasures. The tactical wheel turns, however, and both sides elevated their drone-counterdrone game.

There's a possible one I saw recently.

Surprise! Its just a more advanced artillery round.

Less a 'countermeasure' to drones and more a way to delete any locations it might be possible to launch or pilot drones from.

But at least many conflicts of that era got settled with a basic handful of battles and the occasional siege.

And many didn't, as the names "Hundred Years War" and "Thirty Years War" tell you.

It's not industrialization which makes war an unceasing nightmare; there have been long non-industrialized wars and short industrialized wars. WWI, for all its horror, was only 4 years.

Hundred Years War

Funny enough interspersed with truce periods.

And the black death, which wiped far more than the actual war itself could ever hope to.

And yeah there were also long-ass crusades with similar death counts. BUT.

Are there any pre-modern wars where a soldier could be sent out to the front line, and then 2-3 years later in the war, find himself in almost the exact same spot, despite regular bursts of fighting?

This might actually be a decent Friday Fun thread topic. "Assume you're drafted into a 5 year stint in the military, and will be spending the duration on the front line, which you cannot desert but can be KIA. which long war in history would you prefer to end up fighting in?

Are there any pre-modern wars where a soldier could be sent out to the front line, and then 2-3 years later in the war, find himself in almost the exact same spot, despite regular bursts of fighting?

Frontlines are a modern invention, enabled by the existence of railroads. Without them the soldiers would just starve to death.

Are there any pre-modern wars where a soldier could be sent out to the front line, and then 2-3 years later in the war, find himself in almost the exact same spot, despite regular bursts of fighting?

Nothing like trench warfare in the sense of two opposing armies in open country, but medieval sieges could last a long time. The song Men of Harlech is about a seven-year siege, and the Crusaders took seven years to siege Tripoli. Three years definitely on the long end, though.

Yes, sieges are a particularly grueling point of warfare back in the day. Seems to inherently suck worse for the defending side, though.

They probably don't come with the sense of futility that arises when you sacrifice dozens of men at a time in numerous infantry charges all to gain a couple hundred yards at a time, which could then be lost, at the same cost.

Are there any pre-modern wars where a soldier could be sent out to the front line, and then 2-3 years later in the war, find himself in almost the exact same spot, despite regular bursts of fighting?

The pyrrhic and second punic wars would seem to qualify, given they consisted of the armies chasing each other all over Italy.

You'd have to define what counts as 'front line', however.

Or else you'd just have people(like me) who'd play with the definition. Do defensive emplacements count? Cause I can think of places in the civil war that were both tactically critical, staffed the entire length of the war, yet saw very little combat.

The question as I intended it is approximately "manning a post in the physical location closest to the enemy and involved in combat such that the enemy does make occasional attempts to kill you."

And being fair, you also have to pick the war without being sure where you'd be stationed, precisely. WWII had so many theaters of operations you'd have to consider the pros and cons of each one before committing to signing papers and stepping in the time machine, as it could be anywhere.

My ultimate point is I think almost NOBODY would pick WWI as the one they'd suffer through if given the choice.

The question is can you pick a side. The Pacific was no picnic for the Marines, but it was much worse for the Japs.

Did you recently listen to the new MartyrMade podcast episode on WWI? He makes this point at length, mostly summarizing Junger et al on the topic.

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Are there any pre-modern wars where a soldier could be sent out to the front line, and then 2-3 years later in the war, find himself in almost the exact same spot, despite regular bursts of fighting?

Apparently yes, according to this guy: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XQQy5V0jOkQ

The siege of Candia lasted 21 years. Enough time for someone to be born inside the walls, grow up, and start having children of his own. Turns out, medieval castles were very hard to take.

Are there any pre-modern wars where a soldier could be sent out to the front line, and then 2-3 years later in the war, find himself in almost the exact same spot, despite regular bursts of fighting?

The Peloponnesian War featured multiple Spartan invasions of Attica. So, probably not the exact same spot in a trench warfare sense, but certainly seeing the same area over and over again.

Can imagine that getting frustrating for a bunch of guys who really just wanted to stab the enemy.

There is indeed something about drawn-out trench warfare that I find particularly distressing. Probably has something to do with one's fate feeling completely out of your own hands. Regardless of your skills as a warrior you're not really enhancing your own odds of survival since the thing that gets you won't be another dude, specifically, but something you never even saw coming.

Kinda like the Longbow hard-countering the armored knight. Now some illiterate peasant with overdeveloped back muscles can one-shot you after a couple days instruction.

Without that issue, I can sort of conceive of a war as banding together with your bros for an adventure and your odds of survival turning much more on your individual skills AND your ability to plan and effectively coordinate rather than luck of the draw.

Without that issue, I can sort of conceive of a war as banding together with your bros for an adventure and your odds of survival turning much more on your individual skills AND your ability to plan and effectively coordinate rather than luck of the draw.

I'm not going to get into the longbow countering the knight thing as others have already, but it's hard to overstate how much of an advantage noble knights had in battle. You were not going to be given a role in battle that would amount to cannon-fodder/bait, you had presumably access to the best training, a horse, the best armor. It was pretty unlikely you'd be killed or seriously wounded on your feet and most importantly, no one was really incentivized in finishing you off if you found yourself surrounded or knocked down/out, as ransoming you was much more lucrative.

Kinda like the Longbow hard-countering the armored knight.

It really didn't. It meant "charging straight at the enemy's prepared across a muddy field and relying on your glittering form to terrify them into running away" was even MORE stupid than it might otherwise have been, but that kind of thing also failed against armies without longbows.

It just meant that the knights had to get a bit more sophisticated with their tactics. Speed and aggression, as at the battle of Patay, or use of pinning and flanking maneuvers, such as at Formigny, saw thousands of English longbowmen cut down by French chivalry.

Now some illiterate peasant with overdeveloped back muscles can one-shot you after a couple days instruction.

Other people have covered how the longbow takes a lifetime to master - and English Longbowmen were capable melee fighters themselves, with coats of brigandine and rondel daggers specifically designed to get at the weak joints of plate armor.

But also, the Longbow did not "one-shot" a man in armor. The advantage of the longbow came from (1) its ability to loose arrows in a ballistic arc instead of just the flat trajectory of crossbow bolts, (2) the incredible rate of fire that seasoned longbowmen could muster for brief periods of time, and (3) the longbow's effective range.

Individual longbow arrows were nuisances to a man in full-plate. But shoot 150 arrows at him and one will likely find a joint or seam, or just ring his bell hard enough that he'll fall down (and in plate, a man on the ground is essentially dead, either to a swarming enemy or to getting trampled by his own side). Also, those arrows were murder on enemy horses.

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Kinda like the Longbow hard-countering the armored knight. Now some illiterate peasant with overdeveloped back muscles can one-shot you after a couple days instruction.

It has been a while since I did a deep dive on the literature, but I believe that a traditional longbowman was a skilled fighter that required a significant training investment. It didn't require the capital investment of a knight, but you couldn't grab Any Random Asshole out of the fields and expect him to be effective.

It wasn't until crossbows and firearms that we saw the terrifying power of Armed Masses of Random Assholes.

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Are there any pre-modern wars where a soldier could be sent out to the front line, and then 2-3 years later in the war, find himself in almost the exact same spot, despite regular bursts of fighting?

No, but this has more to do with feeding and supplying an army than anything else. The modal soldier in pre-modern warfare might spent 2 - 3 years more or less walking in a giant, slow circle, almost starving to death every day. And then actually starving to death.

I have read of that, and hence why it was valid strategy to burn your own fields while retreating.

I also read about, e.g. Alexander the Great's wars of conquest and the distances traveled and I gather that the greatest asset a soldier could have in those days was the ability to briskly walk for days on end and still be combat-effective after a bit of rest.

Are there any movies or T.V. shows that focus on depicting what it was like to just walk, walk, walk through slowly changing landscape on the way to a future battle?

Are there any movies or T.V. shows that focus on depicting what it was like to just walk, walk, walk through slowly changing landscape on the way to a future battle?

Lord of the rings is kinda an allegory for that... the "war" for Frodo and Sam is mostly just them walking a lot, being very tired and very hungry and very scared for some hypothetical future battle.

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To rephrase/edit a comment I posted here 3 months ago: I think this whole sh*tshow is yet another consequence of Western Europeans generally lacking a perspective on their own continent’s history and acting accordingly. It has been true in almost all cases that the Russian army blunders and stumbles during the initial phase of any war, even regardless of it aggressing or defending, but then shows itself to be capable of gradually learning and adapting even if the final outcome is defeat, as in WW1 for example. See the Brusilov offensive of 1916 in that case, characterized by John Keegan as “the greatest victory seen on any front [of WW1] since the trench lines had been dug on the Aisne two years before” (as quoted in Wikipedia). And there are cases when the important lessons are only learned after the war, such as the war against the Japanese in 1904-5 (which, by the way, wasn’t a cakewalk for the Japanese army by any means). I assume this is the consequence of the intellectual sloth and naïve romanticism that generally characterize the Russian people, the legacy of languishing as slaves for centuries etc., probably the Mongol yoke also has something to do with it, but this is largely beside the point. There are also a few cases when that initial period of incompetence is rather short, like during the naval war against the Ottomans in 1788-91, whom were soundly beaten.

In the case of WW2, the Red Army clearly demonstrated an ability to gradually gain competence, although the results generally appeared only in the final phase of the war. The offensives in the territory of present-day Belarus, Moldova, Romania and Poland in the summer of 1944 or the invasion of Manchuria in 1945 were impressive by anyone’s standards. The Russians are slow to learn maybe, but they do learn. Even the Afghanistan war wasn’t just a series of one blunder after another, just look at the battle for ‘Hill’ 3234 for example.

It seems that Western Europeans apparently have this usual tendency to concentrate on Russian blunders while ignoring every other factor and then assume that winning against them will be easy, and also have a way of convincing their big American brother of this.

Was there a serious core of people who believed in a Ukraine victory though? And by serious, I mean people who don't solely read or work for the likes of NYT or BBC. Mottizens or similar. Outside of a hope that sanctions might eventually force Russia to the table, I would be surprised if anyone believed in a Ukraine military victory.

If by "Western Europeans" you're referring more to the governments than the people, I think the answer is less learning from history and rather the same as for every modern crisis: a large number of incompetent and completely bubbled officials, unable to deal with the complexity of modern life

Was there a serious core of people who believed in a Ukraine victory though?

Back when we were on reddit, I offered multiple times for people to bet that Ukraine would win the conflict and I got no takers whatsoever. If there were people on here that believed Ukraine would win, none of them were willing to put money on it.

I would say it is a result of hyper moralism, a view of history that reads francis fukuyama as a prophet and the dumbing down of politics. The way Russians are being treated is similar to how transphobes were treated during peak wokeness. They can't be acknowledged to have any legitimate concerns, they are motivated by evil and we all have to performatively show our disgust on social media. It becomes impossible to have a sane, rational and calm debate regarding topics when they go BLM 2020.

We can't have a debate regarding war aims, what the security architecture of Europe should look like, whether pax Americana is feasible in a world in which the US is 17% of global GDP or whether Ukraine in NATO even makes sense. Just like we couldn't have a calm, rational debate about what defund the police will actually look like. There is just people performatively screeching slogans.

This has some roots back to the Afghanistan war. We could never have a debate or calm discussion. It couldn't be treated like a normal war because we were fighting "terrorists" and that apparently justified anything. Nobody could explain a path to victory, just slogans. It is amazing that it took five months from 20 years of Afghanistan fiasco to the start of the next forever war. At least after Vietnam there was a long cool down period.

Also it took years for the true scale of lying and issues in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq to be revealed by whistle blowers. During those wars the media was far more critical than they are now. Sooner or later there will be a Daniel Ellsberg of Ukraine and most likely we will find out the lies and propaganda for this war were at least as spectacular as they were in the previous wars.

There’s no need for moralism when we’ve got tribalism.

The average Ukraine sympathizer sees something like this or this and turns into the staunchest of partisans. No philosophy required.

Honestly, after years of your doomsaying, I still don’t know what you expect to find out. There’s no real equivalent to “saddam has WMDs.” No real wargoal, seeing as we aren’t at war. No American casualties to cover up. So what’s the big reveal? What undermines the premise of “we’ll pay you not to give that guy what he wants?”

The way Russians are being treated is similar to how transphobes were treated during peak wokeness

Thermostatically relevant moral cause offers avenue for posturing. Its proximate to "demand for racism outstripping supply" and thus every small incident needs to be emphasized as maximally as possible within the attention window before people stop caring.

No one (in general, not the poster specifically but I won't care either way) cared about Maidan or whateverfuck other than its relevance as an anti-CIA USA bad bulletpoint. The relevance of Russia in 2022 due to the invasion is probably the biggest shot of adrenaline to the Russian national psyche because they are now a feared invading monster in the eyes of the west, not a dying gas station surrounded by rotting tank graveyards. Unlike (most) transphobes, Russians revel in being treated as scary enemies of the west, because they correctly calculate that the west is not interested enough in ruining their comfy lives by pocketbook or nuclear hellfire. Playing up the big bad unstoppable enemy is great especially if the only cost is a bunch of Buryats and Dagestanis that you were hoping to get rid off anyways.

The specific tactical strategic macro historical whateverfuck navelgazing about immutable historical characteristics or other personal pet explanatory theories are just fitting a messy situation onto personal prior beliefs. Russia Ukraine offers a delicious discussion ground for Grand Theory on (military/history/racial character/jews) without consequence, because Ukraine and Russia are irrelevant just as Sudan is irrelevant. A choice is being made to pay attention, and a choice can be made to ignore. Can't do that for Israel because of retarded domestic US politics, can't ignore China because Altman needs to justify his ascension to AI Godhood.

I think it's more people just not really being able to handle getting live footage of any bad thing happening in the world without wanting to intervene and completely disregarding any sort of a cost-benefit analysis or nuanced view of human conflict. Ukraine and Palestine are both dragging out beyond any sane historical need since there's an overwhelming need to keep rehashing them in the court of public opinion.

If live footage of atrocities motivated anyone at all there would have been a scorched earth campaign to clease Brazil and Mexico of gangs, followed by seperatists in Ethiopia and Sudan. Funkytown remains one of the most gruesome videos out there of human suffering being gleefully meted out by enthusiastic participants fully aware of what they were doing, and there are countless amputated corpses scattered in the vast Brazillian forests where the flayings and murders were filmed specifically to be shared with the families of the deceased. Ukraine and Palestine are relevant for retarded domestic political reasons in any country that professes to care, and for that reason livestreamed mass murders in Sudan are just dismissrd as sandshit.

It’s funny you should mention that. I vaguely remember the bygone days when ISIS captured the attention of the Western media for a relatively short period of time, and the antics of the ISIS executioner ‘Jihadi John’ were getting plastered all over television and online news. There was one TV report after another, segments, outrage, basically just an insane amount of attention, at least for a short time and I was like…really?! Not even 50 or 100 miles away from some of these TV studios, Mexican cartels were torturing, beheading, dismembering and flaying their victims on camera like it was just another Tuesday, and still pretty much nobody in the West cared besides the regulars of a few gore websites. I get it that their victims weren’t white but the imbalance was still sort of crazy.

The unspoken gentlemans agreement of western inviolability actually does hold some weight: do whatever you want to your own people just dont attack whites. ISIS hung up dozens of men on meat hooks and then slit their throats so that their blood ran in rivers down the drain, but its Kayla whateverherface that captured global attention because some white do gooder didn't enjoy the normal aura protection they had during the hippie traip era. Mexican cartels just slaughter paisas in villages so urban fresas (white girls) don't even pay attention. Ukrainians and Russians and that entire warsaw pact area aren't thought as White, they're slavs doing slavshit, so they're unimportant.

Jihadi John and ISIS mistake was to openly declare war on the west and encourage actual action domestically to kill whites. If they stuck with killing Sunnis and Kurds they'd be dismissed as sandshit barbarians unimportant to the west. Kill your own and don't kill the westerner and no media will pay attention. This obviously means Taiwans only line of defense is encouraging as many whites to migrate there as possible, and so their courting of MAGA influencers is to raise the hostage value of white sexpats.

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