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Am I wrong and maybe sort of paranoid, or is there a concentrated and obvious effort in the Western public discourse by Zelensky's foreign supporters to retcon (if that's the correct expression) their own past narrative about the Russian military and Ukraine's prospects? My memory isn't that great and I can't be arsed to start digging up social media rubbish from months ago, but I distinctly remember the narrative of Atlanticist culture warriors, which was practically flooding both legacy media and social media for months, especially after the much-publicised counteroffensives in the Kharkov and Kherson regions. It was basically all the same: the orcs are looting local stores because they have no food, they have no vests and other basic infantry equipment, they have no ammunition nor warm uniforms for the winter, abandoning their vehicles and fleeing en masse, freezing to death, Putler has run out of guided missiles, tanks, artillery shells, aircraft etc., the Moskal never had an effective military antd their shitty state was always a paper tiger etc. To reiterate, I distinctly remember countless Twitter/Facebook/Substack posts, YT videos etc. pushing this.
And then, in the last few months, when, according to this narrative, the glorious great counteroffensive should have already brought about a decisive victory, these same people are stating, as if they were all seasoned military historians, with a straight face that duh, of course it's terribly difficult to break through prepared defensive lines and fortifications (even those put together by the fucking orcs, it seems), of course it'd be vitally important to have air superiority (even agains dumbass orcs, I guess, that are even capable of losing a cruiser against people without a navy), of course combat drones have, like, completely revolutionised modern warfare (as if that weren't clear as day to anyone involvind in planning the counteroffensive), of course it's just all so damn hard!
As a dissident rightist, my view is that all this gaslighting has the obvious purpose of preparing the masses for the next narrative down the line, namely that it all could have actually worked out well, if not for the evil appeasers, wreckers, saboteurs, demagogues, opportunists, deplorables and toxic shitheads who've sadly infiltrated important positions in the political affairs of NATO member nations, and prevented all efforts to give all the resources and equipment necessary for the final and total Ukrainian victory. And this is just a variant of the narrative pushed by the Kiev government to their people, namely that, in a nutshell, "NATO promised to help/intervene, but betrayed us, especially in the end".
So I think I understand why this narrative is being pushed, and how it makes sense, from their own point of view. But still, the brazenness of it all is still a bit surprising. Is my observation correct, or should I not believe my own eyes and ears?
I don't think this retconning is something new. Even before the counteroffensives you had pundits that switched from "of course Ukraine is going to collapse" to "of course Ukraine wasn't going to collapse" without missing a beat. Before that you had "of course masking is useless, we shouldn't shun Asians" and "of course masking is essential, we should shelter in place", "of course Trump will never win" and "of course Trump was going to win" and so on all the way to the beginning of written history.
Richard Hanania and Anatoly Karlin were two prominent people on the dissident right who switched from "of course Ukraine is going to collapse" to "of course Ukraine wasn't going to collapse". As far as I know (I largely stopped following them after that) they still think that Ukraine, NATO, and the GAE have a bright future.
GAE?
Globalist American Empire https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=GAE - pronounced exactly as it looks. Globohomo (for global homogenization) is a related epithet.
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Whenever I read the "20xx predictions: Calibration results" that Scott Alexander publishes, I'm always struck by how hard it would be to fairly compare differing pundits' prediction results, when any two people are naturally interested in two different sets of questions and yet some questions are much harder than others.
Then I remember that the status quo is not "pundits' predictions are published along with epistemic uncertainty levels but their annual calibration records aren't easy to compare", it's "the 'best' pundits express uncertainty qualitatively and clam up when they're proven wrong, the worst pundits make binary predictions and don't always even change their minds when they're proven wrong".
It's a shame that nobody's publishing calibration records for them. I guess that would be a public good in both the "good for the public" and "economically undersupplied" senses of the phrase. We can't even make it into a club good, since facts aren't copyrightable. Maybe this sort of thing could be supplied by harnessing culture-war-hatred? I'm imagining each pundit's supporters/detractors assiduously adding successful/failed predictions to a shared database, incentivized because they don't want that pundit's evil detractors/supporters to bias the score by only adding the opposite.
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