This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
tl;dr some quick attempts to get inside the mindset at the Kremlin concerning events in the war, in the run-up to Putin's speech expected in a few hours. Everything below could be immediately and awkwardly falsified if he announces some desperate escalation like general mobilisation or a nuclear strike against a Ukrainian military target.
Ever since the Ukrainian successes in the northeastern campaign, I've been trying to get inside the mindset of the Kremlin to figure out what their likely response is.
One thing that is almost certainly true (and easily underestimated) is that they are in their own psychological bubble, and there is no elite team of intelligence operatives whose primary job is to give Putin objective analysis. Human minds don't work that way: we easily form fenced-off epistemic communities that downplay our shameful fears and play up our pride. You can even see this reading the reports of US decision-making throughout the Cold War, when interservice rivalry ran hot and the USAF nuclear strategy advisors were giving opinions based not on what was in humanity's interests or even the USA's, but instead what would get them the most planes and status compared to the army and navy. And of course, you can see it easily on reddit, even getting a rush of ideological whiplash as you flit from one politically aligned sub to another.
(What about people like Girkin? Well, he's a doomer, and an outsider, and his criticisms are mostly quite careful. As far as I've noticed, he talks about the conduct of the war, not the wisdom in initiating it in the first place; or he says that Russia should be more committed, without once questioning whether the war is winnable even with full commitment.)
Given all the above, I think a useful and necessary starting point for understanding Russia's position is to try to imagine what your view would be if Russia's strategic situation was a lot better than you probably currently think it is (this is one reason why contrarian posters are valuable to any subreddit that takes itself intellectually seriously).
What does this involve? Maybe it means you think that Ukrainian morale is weak. Maybe you think that the EU is less united than it appears, and winter will be harder than Europeans are prepared for. Maybe you think that the United States is being opportunistic and will drop Ukraine without looking back when the conflict starts to swing back Russia's way. Above all, you're probably convinced that there won't be another breakthrough like in Kharkiv oblast: that was a one off, heads have rolled, and now discipline and morale have been restored to the troops. Reinforcements are coming in, Iran is sending useful drones, and the forthcoming referenda will encourage a surge of volunteers from the DPR and LPR.
Let's say that you, like Putin, were in the grip of this relative sunny outlook. What would follow from it for your reflections on the wider strategy of the conflict?
Above all, I think you would be aiming to take the long view of things, because the fundamentals are on your side. Forget today's battles and next week's offensives - focus on longer-term military-industrial capacity, and associated active measures in the Russian and foreign populations. You probably don't want to risk a general mobilisation - that might compromise your longer-term war fighting ability - but you want to get as many new volunteers as possible, ideally from less economically active areas of the country. And finally, nuclear weapons wouldn't be on the table; after all, you're winning this war, albeit more slowly and less gloriously than you'd hoped. Why would you risk alienating friends and allies and giving NATO a chance to intervene?
But you might ask, at what point does this Pollyanna-Putin outlook begin to crumble? When does the filter bubble burst, and Putin has his Downfall-style meltdown? When Ukraine liberates Kherson? Lysychansk? Donetsk? Sevastopol? I think the only answer we can give here is that people in general are very bad at facing up to uncomfortable realities, and can keep themselves from accepting painful truths for their entire lives if necessary. Or think of psychologist's Leon Festinger's now famous work on cognitive dissonance on doomsday cults: when the doomsday prophecy fails, people will go to great lengths to avoid accepting that they've been duped. I expect Putin to go out the same way, with his final thoughts being confidence that Russia can still be victorious, even as he has an unfortunate fall from a window.
("What about you doglatine? Why are you so sure that Putin's the one in the filter bubble rather than you?" Answer: Well, I've been trying to make clear predictions throughout this conflict both online and to my circle of geopolitics friends - this post is in that same vein - and I'd say I'm fairly well calibrated so far in terms of events on the ground. Part of the appeal of making explicit predictions is to try to break yourself out of these epistemic lagoons in the first place. All that said, I recognise that of course I'm in a filter bubble, sometimes through deliberate choice (once the novelty value wears off, it's just not fun to consume propaganda you disagree with). But even if my intentions were pure, filter bubbles are all but inescapable. Usually the best you can hope for is to get good at spotting the early signs of a bubble collapse so you can make a clean exit with your life savings and a modicum of your dignity intact. But that's far easier said than done)
In any case, I am curious what others think.
I think any analysis that focuses on the internal mental states and thoughts of other people is doomed. It's a mistake I made myself just prior to this conflict, in which I could not envision what could possibly motivate Putin to invade Ukraine. Suitably chastened, I'll restrict my analysis to the best facts we have, which at current point are:
1: Ukraine has held. You can blame western weapons and aid if you want, but the point is the Ukrainian people have used that aid to hold off the Russians. All the military aid in the world didn't do shit for the Iraqis or Afghans, because they had no nationalistic impulse to bind them together. Ukraine is finding and founding their national myths for the future, if they survive.
2: With the recent offensive, the Ukrainian military has proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that they can run a competent conventional military offensive operation, which isn't nearly as simple as civilians might think. What's more, it has worked at least to some significant degree. Once again, you can blame western weapons or badly trained Russian troops, but both those things are realities.
Early on, I was fairly pessimistic about Ukrainian chances in a stand-up war with Russia, and I think the fundamentals do still favor Russia. But we are seeing the cracks in this consensus idea. Yes, Russia could mobilize fully, but will their economic and political system withstand the strain? Yes, they could nuke, but that doesn't solve their problem. They're trying to annex this territory, after all. What is becoming clear is that without committing significantly more resources to the fight, Russia is not on track to defeat Ukraine outright. We don't know if Ukraine can continue their offensive, or repeat their success, but the idea that Russia can ignore their military capability is now dead. Beyond that, speculation can take a man anywhere he wants to go.
I think the idea is to use the troops to secure the "1000 km of frontline" to prevent any more Kharkivs and then just continue the slow methodical grind in Donbass (and other parts of the four oblasts they don't yet hold?). It's not going to be a tactic for conquering entire Ukraine, but I don't think that's in the cards, unless there's some complete collapse or something else changing the picture considerably. (Though Belarus joining in or a sudden surprise attack in the Northern front areas Ukraine has retaken might change the picture considerably.)
On the topic of securing lines: any comment on Finns and Balts blocking escape for Russians who flee mobilization, Latvians allegedly even planning deportation for residence permit holders? I mean, is this just reflecting the popular desire to inflict punishment on Ruskies cost be damned, or that old chestnut that «if we force them to stay, they'll effect a regime change»?
Because I guarantee you that there will be no bottom-up regime change. They'll just get caught, drafted, trained and sent to fight in Ukraine.
Sigh. What needs to be understood about this issue that the border thing is not a new issue for Finland; it goes back to the summer, expect back then it was not about draft dodgers or regime opponents, simply about why the Finnish border was open for hordes of tourists, at least stereotypically your stolid "non-political" middle class, seeing it as their sovereign right to continue cross-border shopping or use Helsinki to go on an Italian flight despite all this war business and of course getting into very non-political fights with Ukrainian refugees in Finland while doing so.
The Finnish government indicated that it sees this as a problem and wants to end this tourism, but it can't do so, since there's a law issue, and Finnish governance is all about being sticklers about formal procedure and following laws and regulations to the letter. This thread by Finnish nationalist politician explains this tendency and its roots quite well, though I disagree with him on whether the border closure would have actually done anything to destabilize Russia ("When the Russian middle-class cannot go on holiday they'll overthrow Putin etc.").
This issue continued to build up, in large part because it has provided a good populist attack vector for Finland's right-wing opposition bent on accusing the Finnish center-left gov't of being weak on Russia and also in part because it has led to our little brother nation Estonians and other Baltics calling Finland an unreliable ally. This rose to a fever pitch just before Putin's mobilization announcement, making it all but impossible for border closure proponents even consider backing down and making it even harder for the Finnish government to maintain "b-but... the law..." position. Any arguments that now the border-crossers are going to be mobilization dodgers are just going to be met with newly-minted claims that since Putin and Shoigu implied that it's West that Russia is at war with, young Russian males crossing the border might just be destabilization agents and a danger to Finland.
Anyway, one more proper argument that I'd say might have weight is that if the intent is mobilizing 300 000 soldiers and the task has been delegated down to regions with quotas, any potential mobilization avoiders fleeing abroad might just mean that the positions they might have filled in the quota would just be filled by some poor schlubs who don't have the money to utilize this option.
There's a further issue, which I didn't see mentioned here, of being a long-term casus belli by Putin or similar russian nationalists.
Putin has repeatedly used ethnic russians as pretexts to intervene, or threaten intervention, around the region. Much of the pre-February rhetoric from Moscow on multiple fronts could be leveraged against Russia's more northern neighbors, which was one of the reasons Europe reacted as strongly as it did when Putin followed through with his threats with actual invasion. Just from this angle, significantly increasing the Russian national population in the border states- who are almost certainly going to locate themselves to the ethnic russian enclaves- strengthens an ethnic-based framing of a future pre-conflict narrative.
Further, there's also a point about what sort of Russians would be coming to reside in Finland/border states. Before this week, you could at least make an argument that these people were the minority of Russians who actively opposed the war, and were signalling their sincerity by leaving at cost to themselves. But these were the exceptions for a reason- among which being that most Russians, apolitical nationalist as they were, maintained high approval polling of Russian nationalist incursions in the region without issue, ie the potential threat against Finland or others... up unto the moment it potentially involved them.
If you work from the general assessment that Putin's approval numbers are genuinely high and representative of Russian people, and that these new would-be migrants are representative, they're drawing from the same overlapping ven diagram. These are not anti-imperialists who were committing to not associating with imperialism at personal cost, these are drawing from passively supportive imperialists who are only not associating with imperialism because it risks a personal cost... and who, if safe from that cost, have no history/credibility that they won't just go right back to vaguely supporting russian imperialism, only from inside the border territories where they could serve as a casus belli.
Is it a generalization? Sure. But it nests on real security threats (Putin using Russian ethnic ties as a basis for unprovoked war), and with a presumed- and at least not disproven- demographic overlap of the very target audience who have been passively supporting such revaunchism through political support so long as the nationalist element didn't harm them.
Now, one could make an argument that this compliant and low-pain tolerance is why they should be accepted- that they wouldn't be willing to tolerate social pressure opposing their nationalism- but this is where we go back to where they would likely go (existing or new Russian enclaves), what they could do wittingly or unwittingly (be sanctuary/support for Russian destabilization efforts), and whether they'd default back to Russian nationalism if social pressure from non-Russian social pressure targetted them.
This looks like another serving of your isolated rigor. Not so long ago you jeered about Russian incapability to respond to possible blockade of Kaliningrad due to exhaustion of troops and materiel, especially in the region; now you mention the threat of draft dodgers (drafted, to begin with, due to further exhaustion) becoming an «oppressed minority» pretext for invasion (of a soon to be NATO country). Which army will be doing that? And army of which state, seeing as Russia isn't likely to survive this?
"loading Dean model"
So how exactly do they change incentives for another invasion? Will this framing be recognized as legitimate by any party of interest, after Ukraine? Certainly not, unless long COVID makes us all unable to form long-term memories.
Is an invasion likely to be assisted from within by those who noped out of the current round of imperialist adventurism? I don't think so.
Will this pretext be recognized as less far-fetched than one relying on already-present Russian minorities who are clear civilians and not draft-dodgers? That's 1/4th of Latvian population, by the way. It will not. (From what I can tell, many of those Latvian Russians are USSR nostalgists, despise their host country and their disenfranchisement/deportation would be prudent, and same for their ilk in other countries; but this is another issue, and their genesis is different too)
Anyway, I have one idea about precluding this scenario: don't give them citizenship or long-term permits. (Nobody intended to, of course.) And needless to say they could be kicked out once the war is over.
Adjudicating their morality and stance on the war can be done on a more or less effortful case-by-case basis. Few of them will be ideological peaceniks willing to emigrate at personal cost just to protest etc., but few people ever deviate from vague my-country-right-or-wrong and my-family-comes-first mentality. Hopefully Europeans can tell a gopnik who pissed his imperial pants once asked to walk the walk from an autistic guy who's been learning Portuguese and Leetcoding the last six months (such as a few of my pals left behind); a 15-minute pen and paper test could suffice.
More importantly, this isn't only about them and their would-be hosts. All of them are non-combatants for now. In case of Europeans proceeding to assist the mobilization, they are getting drafted and sent down South as reinforcements.
I don't buy your long-term explanation. What's being done is pure unstrategic pettiness and moral grandstanding.
And if this is grand strategy, it's one you tactfully decided not to bring up: safer for Finns and Balts to have them die killing Ukrainians.
Could you give me an example of what "Russia doesn't survive this" as a scenario looks like, both in terms of how that phrase cashes out and how we get from here to there?
I can, but it deserves an effortpost. Basically, it's not so different from late stage Russian Empire and USSR, only more dystopian, and it'll be scripted on the basis of Kamil Galeev's wet dreams.
It starts with war exhaustion in the ethnic provinces and far periphery (Saha, Dagestan...), provoking sabotage and conspiring in draft avoidance, which then grows into collective scorn for Moscow loyalists who fight against it, and general insubordination to the federal center. This provokes relocating additional police and, soon after, interior troops there, which exposes economically precarious Russian provinces to organized crime, that has been symbiotically coexisting with local administration.
Economy keeps tumbling down; military expenses grow; infrastructure and social services decay, perhaps evoking petty crime and protests of feeble desperate pensioners that need to be put down; everyone with half a brain tries to flee, increasing the load on border patrols and such; Ukraine/NATO keep crossing «red lines» without nuclear response, eroding the credibility of threats; manpower wanes, and less prestigious interior troops too are getting consumed by the war effort – when they fail to provide a quota of conscripts from a province. At some point, state capacity is overextended so much that there's no effective control over a region with a particularly capable criminal or ethnic leadership, nor political will to subjugate it, and it gets ignored by propaganda, like the Ukrainian bombing of Belgorod is mostly ignored now. And those new local elites decide that they needn't be burdened by the toxic Muscovite brand, nor bear the cost of sanctions. They either declare independence outright, or stop paying taxes and begin to surreptitiously trade with international actors cutting out Moscow middlemen. When it becomes clear that Moscow cannot put this down, it sets off a chain reaction and economically, logistically, demographically handicaps Moscow even more.
Soon, the breakdown of order in the interior army begins as local regimens decide that they can be paid as well by breakaway provinces and risks do not justify benefits. At some point Putin's regime either collapses, or its domain is reduced to an impoverished, desperately coping rump state; maybe Zolotov/Kadyrov/Prigozhin/Dyomin/janitor uses the snuffbox at last and pleads for mercy at the condition of accepting American General Governor to sort things out, dismantling Russian nuclear arsenal and personal safety.
This is one relatively optimistic scenario of how Russia might end, with combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties in the low tens of millions over 15 years.
Nuclear use would make it worse but not very different.
Putin's success at maintaining order, coupled with proliferation of the attitude Dean ascribes to Baltics and Finns, could make it substantially worse.
Some of that is already happening.
Galeev in his Russian channel, with more of the mask off than on Twitter:
The positive scenario is to walk around like a fucked bitch of a douche bag, under sanctions and paying reparations for decades. We could say that our grandchildren will make it, but let's be realistic. Given the demographic dynamics – they won't be your grandchildren.
Negative – a candidate for nuclear bombing. After that, see point 1.
The common denominator in both scenarios is the «fucked bitch of a douche bag».
At the same time it is possible to cast off the seal of scum: if you change the brand. Look at the Austrians, for example – they made it work very cleverly after World War II.
If you value the future of your children and your region, start thinking about a new brand right now. Just like Austria isn't getting called out for Hitler (although it would seem...), neither will independent Siberia/Urals/Pomorye get [called out for Russia].
And everything associated with Russia will be banned for generations and to a greater extent than it was with Germany. Because no one will be able to explain why those fuckers couldn't sit at home.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link