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Notes -
STATUS GAMES
When people talk about "status games" 'round these parts, they're normally referring to our obsession with relative social status and the games that we play in order to increase it. However, this morning, I listened to oral arguments in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, a case about a municipal ordinance, from a town in Oregon, prohibiting people from sleeping in public, at least with some 'aggravating' factor, like having a blanket. Of course, as is probably traditional for me at this point, I hardly even want to talk about the specifics of this case, at least not concerning homelessness. Instead, I'd like to jump off into questions of categories (which, uh, I guess are made for man?), agency, and the games we play with categories like 'status'.
The background is a 1962 case, Robinson v. California, referred to in all blockquotes from the Court as just "Robinson", which considered
SCOTUS held:
Details aren't the most important, but a vague sense of that backdrop is. If someone is "addicted to narcotics", that's considered just a "status", not actual behavior or conduct that can be regulated by the state.
This status/conduct categorical divide has a long history of being quite confusing, and this confusion was on full display at the Court. A Ctrl+F of the transcript shows 121 mentions of the word "status", and many of them are trying to figure out what counts. I collected more blockquotes than I could possibly clean up or feel comfortable bombarding TheMotte with, so I'll try to be sparing. First off, Justice Kagan asking questions of Ms. Evangelis, who is arguing on behalf of the city:
There is a bit of meandering that I'll omit, but it comes back to:
and finally:
Kagan may be the smartest of the liberal Justices, so it's probably no surprise that I think she got the closest to a conceptualization of status that is friendly to the left in this case. Unsurprisingly, though, "Republicans Pounce". Justice Gorsuch said that, "[T]he distinction between status and conduct is a slippery one and that they're often closely related," and had what was perhaps the most comprehensive exchange on the topic with Mr. Kneedler, who is the Deputy Solicitor General, weighing in on the case on behalf of the federal government, who was technically supporting neither party, but is obviously in practice representing the equities of the Biden administration portion of the left.
Oof, that was long and covered a lot. Gorsuch would go on to suggest that the Court should just push the case back the State for a "necessity" analysis and not "get into the status/conduct stuff that -- that Robinson seems to invite." Roberts, meanwhile, went after immutability in a colloquy with Ms. Corkran, representing the class of homeless people challenging the law.
But it would take Justice Jackson to blow up our first real bombshell of the argument, following up on the Roberts' discussion of immutability:
In summary, the Robinson Court was actually wrong on the facts. They thought that people could go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs. So, they clearly didn't care all that much about permanency. But BOOM goes the claim that, apparently the New Correct Lefty Science has determined that people don't ever transition from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs. I guess I heard it here first. My years of shouting at clouds that Scott pointed out that basically all honest alcoholism rehabilitation studies fail to outperform a placebo and that narcotics rehabilitation studies don't even use measures like "stops taking narcotics" in favor of measures like "causes trouble for other people while using narcotics somewhat less often" is finally being adopted! (Frankly, in far stronger form that I would have even stated. I wouldn't say that people can't stop being addicted to drugs; just that we can't magically impose a "treatment" regime that is going to result in them stopping.) Wow! Was the failure of Oregon's decriminalization experiment so spectacular that we're no longer going to have endless claims that we can make everything completely legal, so long as we pray to the god of providing "treatment" (without any serious consideration of how this is going to happen or whether it will actually do anything)? I can hardly believe it.
As amazing as this concession to Justice Jackson was, Alito somehow at least comes close:
What's this?!?! A distinction between "having an urge" and conduct?!? In the realm of sexuality? Say it isn't so! How many times can The Lefties That Be just boldly admit that the entire slew of homosexual behavior to gay marriage cases were based on a fundamental lie?!
The more cynical among us might observe that status/conduct games seem to be yet another way that folks run away from agency, shielding anything that they like in terms of it "being who you are" or things that just "happen to you". There is no real theory here, and most attempts to justify it are pretty philosophically incoherent. It doesn't seem like the Court is going to buy this particular extension of The Game, but why wouldn't they try? They've had all these other victories, including effectively banning Christian groups from campuses, by substituting "status" in for "conduct/belief". Why are the Status Games so powerful?
I think the line between status / conduct is pretty clear. It just seems that some people want an expansion of the meaning of "status" so that certain types of conduct are protected.
I don't have the same legal brain as the justices. When I see that attempt at expansion it doesn't make me think that more things should have the protection of status, it makes me think "status" shouldn't have protection in the first place.
To a determinist everything is just someone's status. Their current status along the pre-determined timeline that is their life.
This exchange particularly frustrated me:
That is exactly what municipalities wish they could do. "Just tell us what laws we are allowed to write that allow us to clean up our streets?!" That is not how the Supreme Court works though. Municipalities instead have to play a game where they write laws that maybe might work, and then the worst versions of those laws get challenged somewhere else with case details picked by people that hate those kinds of laws. Then it spends half a decade in court and then some asshole justice lectures them about how 'they should have just come here honestly trying to address the problem'. Meanwhile the justices and everyone involved will spend a bunch of time going over past court decisions on this topic, the same court decisions that nearly everyone agrees were decided badly.
This is insanity.
In this case, the intended rule is "You can't clean up your streets AT ALL until you solve the homeless problem in a particular way -- that is, provide shelter to all of them at public expense".
Which is potentially the rule no longer, because if the homeless don't want the shelter for some reason you are screwed.
I'm not sure how the current precedent is worded, but any rule along the lines of "you can only ban sleeping on the streets to people whom you offer 'acceptable' shelter" of course is going to have a lot of arguments over what constitutes "acceptable" shelter. Which should probably be below a studio apartment and might be below what is acceptable to rent out (although the laws setting overly high minimums on what's acceptable to rent out are a non-trivial factor in the rise of homelessness, so, uh, those should probably be lower, too).
But we should definitely set the line somewhere and actually enforce public camping laws if a reasonable attempt has been made to get the person into "acceptable" housing. And I thought that was more or less what the precedent said.
That rule is insane, because it basically mandates a massive ongoing expenditure for all municipalities.
It also opens up a bunch of other potentially insane rules that the justices pointed out.
Can you only ban public defecation if there are publicly available toilets?
Can you only ban public cooking fires if there is cooked food available?
Can you only ban theft if welfare money is available?
Can you only ban murder if sufficient mental health care is available?
This feels like Copenhagen Ethics written into law. You can't try to partially fix a problem, you can only fully fix it.
... I... kinda agree with this? If there are no public toilets and people with no alternative are shitting on the ground, I'm not going to blame the people shitting on the ground. I'm going to either move to another city or lobby the municipality for public toilets.
Maybe I'll look for some other non-public solution, but what should it be? Prison? Well pragmatically that is also a massive ongoing expenditure for all municipalities. And- those prisons are going to need bathrooms!
The way I see it, dealing with the fact that humans need to shit is mandated by reality. Not by any law.
Yes, the alternative is prison.
There has been an ongoing debate between enforcement and cleanup.
Enforcement is mean. And it looks expensive on a per incident basis. But the main benefit over cleanup is that it stops additional people from adding to the problem.
Time and again people have opted to drop enforcement thinking that the current cleanup costs aren't as high as enforcement, only for them to be completely overwhelmed by cleanup costs when there is zero enforcement.
In the case of California cities they are now drowning in human shit on their sidewalks and streets as a result of this decision.
Well maybe they should have more public bathrooms so as to reduce cleanup costs. I don't get why you're considering the choice where we remove this option viable... I agree that there should be enforcement. It should just be enforcement of people actually using the public bathrooms and not smearing shit on the walls. This will be cheaper than imprisoning 100% of the people who lose their homes because you unilatterally refuse to provide bathrooms.
This would be a rather perverse system. The only benefit I can see is that it might make people too terrified to take any risks that might render them homeless. But that sounds like it will cause mental anxiety that will increase the number of homeless and reduce economic growth to me.
Imprisoning them all gets them off the streets, which might make sense as a stopgap measure. But if we don't solve the issues that created them we just get more homeless.
And also now you've removed all the public bathrooms. So. I don't really want to live in your city because I also need to poop sometimes.
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Which could be workable if you were say Singapore and only allowed immigration to citizens of means.
But if you were say somewhere desirable with open immigration say Venice Beach you can’t build infinite amount of housing. Though maybe if say you could do whatever you wanted as long as you had one spare bedroom in somewhere not desirable like Detroit to send them to. At which point I guess it would be a choice to be homeless in Venice Beach instead of housed in Detroit.
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The other end of this liminal space between rock and hard place is that the same people who intend this rule also don't want shelters built.
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What I don't get is this. Why don't the municipalities instead pass like 60 laws at the same time, all with different spelling or formally different clauses that all enforce the same thing. Let the courts figure it out, just DDOS the system.
Because the people who would have to do this are believers in the institutions, even when they go against them. You see that with gun control, where the gun grabbers do NOT respect the Supreme Court. You saw it a bit with abortion, especially toward the end of Roe v. Wade. But you won't see it here.
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It blows my mind how often smart people with STEM backgrounds assume the legal system can be hacked like a computer. Federal judges are smart people who have discretion over how they handle their docket. If the city has 60 similar laws, the judge is going to tell the city to pick the one (or maybe two or three if he's generous) laws that they believe to be on the strongest constitutional footing and treat that law as representative.
New York passed gun laws prohibiting guns in a wide variety of sensitive locations (maybe not exactly 60). The courts had to declare each one unconstitutional separately and it wasn't possible to do so for all of them.
It's already happening.
The courts will allow the law to be hacked like a computer if they're sympathetic to the position of the hacker.
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This is a great way to get on the bad side of judges. They are not amused by people trying to game the system.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=53XThNjW6pY
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To me, this gives away the whole game. Bums aren't sleeping outside because it is literally impossible that they could find a place to shelter, they're sleeping outside because they've failed to do so. If the hypothetical options one could avail themselves of to avoid starting a fire to cook suffice to eliminate a claim that it's cruel and unusual to prevent people from starting fires, the same must apply to sleeping. Someone having failed to talk others into cooking for them or paying for them sleep at a hotel shouldn't result in them being granted some putative "right" to sleep where they like.
On the flip side, despite everyone trying to be careful with language, it's pretty obvious that what the town is concerned with isn't "homelessness", it's bums. Someone that is homeless may sleep in their car, they may sleep on a friend's couch, they may stay in a shelter for a couple nights. If you're sleeping in the park, you're not just "homeless", you're a bum, and that is very much a real status that's going to be difficult to change for quite a few people. In the same fashion that many addicts cannot simply elect to stop doing drugs, many bums cannot simply elect to start doing the things necessary to maintain shelter.
Personally, I'm with you that the whole question of status is pretty ridiculous here. Kudos to you for making it all the way through the oral arguments, I simply couldn't bring myself to do it after they started doing laps around whether a stargazer that fell asleep was also criminal. Everyone in the conversation knows the conversation isn't about stargazers and isn't about falling asleep in public, it's about bums and all the trouble that comes with letting bums camp in your park.
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Robinson should just be overturned in its entirety, sidestepping all this. The Cruel and Unusual Punishment clause is about the penalties which can be imposed for lawbreaking, not about the actions which can be forbidden. There's nothing about status or conduct in there. But the court is too conservative to overturn bad non-conservative precedent (except on abortion)
I think the proportionality argument is pretty solid, even though it doesn’t give us a hard limit.
Who made this argument? I'm not generally of a "it's just like the common cold" take on the pandemic, but I'm assuming a SCOTUS justice would at least see the parallel hypothetical about house arrest for (potentially) having a contagious disease. If nothing else, it seems like an interesting set of tea leaves to read about how future cases might go.
Potter Stewart, writing the controlling opinion in Robinson v California. I find it amusing that @netstack linked it to approve of the argument - when I read that portion of the case earlier, I couldn't believe the levels of idiocy or dishonesty that Stewart was engaging in by analogizing a common cold to "catching" narcotic addiction.
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That’s from Robinson v. CA, so…Justice Potter Stewart, d.1985.
I don’t think quarantines fit the bill. In theory, they criminalize the conduct of going somewhere while (potentially) having such a disease, which is distinct from criminalizing the disease itself. Note that in Robinson the man arrested was expressly not taking any unusual actions.
In practice, did any of the lockdown ordinances actually threaten prison? I know there were enforced business shutdowns, presumably enforced via fines. I didn’t live somewhere which actually kept you in your house.
Ah, so criminalizing sleeping while homeless should be fine. Or walking through town while a drug addict, to go to the Robinson case.
No, this is all sophistry; the 8th Amendment, having been stretched this much, can be said to cover or not cover any given case -- and it will be, based on other criteria. In this case, likely mostly misplaced sympathy for the homeless on the part of Kavanaugh and Barrett, and a corresponding lack of concern for anyone else on their part and that of the leftist justices.
Why do you think it’s misplaced sympathy and not, I dunno, doing their jobs?
Surely it’s not just because they’ve disagreed with your intuition.
From ScotusBlog:
This is not the issue at all! The questions contain within them the implication that the laws have to make the homeless people better off. And thus the implication that somehow the Constitution protects the interests of the homeless over and above the other people who want to use the parks and public spaces that the law actually is in the interests of. This is just sympathy for the wretched, not "doing their jobs".
Do you think the law is going to be struck down by SCOTUS? That would be one hell of a blackpill.
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The laws do have to improve the situation, thanks to jurisprudence about "narrow tailoring" and "compelling public interest." Here's the full exchange in question (pp. 52-56):
...
Kavanaugh is pushing on the Petitioners' insistence that their law helps solve the problem. Obviously, it does help them in many cases. So he pushes on the rock-and-hard-place situation in which the city's preferred intervention is unavailable. As I understand it, this was a big part of the 9th Circuit ruling, since it basically invented a regulatory regime for availability, and no one was happy with it. He touches on the same subject later with Kneedler when they're discussing whether the Court needs to address Robinson at all (p. 112). He doesn't draw conclusions in the transcript, but I can guess how Kavanaugh feels about volunteering the courts to micromanage local policy.
The Petitioners emphasize that their policy should help. The Respondents address edge cases where it won't. Kavanaugh explores that, as did several of the other justices, because this is law and lawyers love edge cases. If he votes to keep the 9th decision and strike down the ordinance, I don't think it'll be driven by his bleeding heart.
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Ah. I would personally agree they're at least different enough to warrant a separate discussion. I was just surprised (and wrong) that a sitting justice today would use that as a hypothetical. Makes more sense now.
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That fails to recognize the distinction between prohibition and punishment.
Suppose we prohibit sneezing in public and make the punishment that nearby police must immediately say to you “gezundheit!”
The punishment is unusual but not cruel, and the prohibition still not itself a punishment.
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People want clean, nice public spaces not occuppied by drug addicts, criminals, and bums. If you make it so that cities can't kick out the bums, then these nice public spaces will all become privately-owned or corporate. And public parks become de facto property of the bums.
Talk about abstractions like "status" just seems like a distraction to me. I think this is a sign of a society in decline. We can't do anything, we have to parse out all the implications of natural rights and status. Well. I feel very confident in saying that the people who designed our Constitutional system of rights would have gladly kicked some bums out of public.
One of these is not like the others.
This is a recurring problem in the discussions around what to do about the homeless: mixing up aesthetic dislike of visible poor people with not wanting people committing crimes around you. I'm generally of the opinion, although I realize many city police departments seem to disagree, that being homeless should not prevent you from being charged with a crime. But that's different from simply being homeless alone being illegal.
Yes! I don't want to be around bums. Regular people don't want to be around bums. I do not want nice expensive public parks to be full of smelly, unwashed, dirty, mangy bums. I don't want to walk through a park and get harassed for change. My sister doesn't feel safe in public when bums are loitering around on the street. My mother won't even bother going to the park.
It's not about being poor. Poor people are not bums.
If you can't have nice public parks, nice parks will all be private.
The park is no place to be a bum. There's nothing illegal about being a bum. But the police station is also not the place to go when you're sick.
what is the right place to go to be a bum?
Normies would say "go to the homeless shelter, they'll give you the help you need." But that help usually comes at a high price, like: no alcohol, no drugs, no pets, no coed habitation, no noise, and strict hours.
Outside of the park, you can't just go and "hang out" because it's all owned by someone who will kick you out for loitering. Like I can't just go camp on some random person's lawn, even if it's otherwise empty and not being used for anything. You can maybe get away with it on a sidewalk, but you have to keep moving along constantly.
I kind of think what we need is to normalize favela's/shantytowns. Set up a space where the normal laws don't apply, and it's just a giant free-for-all. Something like Kowloon Walled City, but in every major American city. The bums get a place where they can stay for free and do whatever drugs they want. The normies can exile bums guilt free. Everybody wins.
Everyone wins except those who don't want to live near shanties.
I mean, i dont really want to live right next to a freeway or industrial zone either, but it works ok as long as its blocked off, and presumably its also cheaper to live there. We make this sort of trade all the time. Its only with homeless that we put them right in the most valuable public property and forbid cities from doing anything about it.
A beggar/bum has a strong incentive to be as close as possible to the largest number of people with disposable income in their pockets (and places with free services, like public parks w/ restrooms, libraries, and charities.) This is in tension with most people's desire to be able to use the public goods their tax dollars pay for in the way they were intended, and their desire to be left alone while walking from place to place.
I became accustomed to a public library not being accessible. In the Seattle area, they were generally over-crowded and unpleasant to visit. I only accessed my library from the Libby app.
After moving to Indiana it took me six months to gather courage to bring my kids to the library and it turns out that when a library is used for its intended purpose it's really nice! They had toys for the preschool-aged kids (for them to be distracted with while their parent selects books.) When patrons only spend a couple hours there more people can visit without it getting crowded. It was how I remembered libraries when I was a child (except for all the Pride stuff, but that's impossible to run away from I guess.)
Man, can you imagine a Grand Experiment, almost like in The Wire? Rather than trying to force people out with the stick, draw them to an alternate, via the carrot. It's well-known that many of the folks who are, I'm not sure what the current descriptive term is, serially-homeless let's say, are willing to migrate for nicer weather and more of these types of things you describe. How much would it cost to set up a 'city', away from all the normal cities where people live, with some nice parks, some libraries, charities, maybe even some literal money fountains that kick out dollars at a stochastic rate too low to be worth sitting at for folks who can manage to hold down a regular job, but just high enough to be attractive to a guy who is used to sitting at an intersection near all those folks with disposable income. All the libraries/charities can be run by the same social worker types who normally deal with them in the city, anyway. Sitting at an intersection is basically a stochastic money fountain, so make a big push to tell the normies that they can assuage their conscience by donating to the charity's stochastic money fountains, still giving them literal cash, but in a way that draws them closer to helpful resources.
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so, when i proposed building a literal walled city, and you say the homeless people will still get out anyway... are you imagining a gaza situation where they build elaborate underground tunnels? Or is it just the nature of homeless to manifest themselves inside of public libraries, by teleportation?
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Freeways and industrial zones at least produce something of value in addition to their negative externalities.
In any case, there's a reasonable argument that cities already spend too much land on cities and industrial zones. Adding a third kind of nuisance zone seems like a step backwards, especially since there's no obvious reason to put one in every city if you're blocking it off anyway.
The problem is that cities already have lots of homeless people. Lots of them. And they tend to cluster in the most valuable, desirable parts of the city. So in this example it would be like people are driving at freeway speeds through central park, and the supreme court is hearing arguments about whether there's some fundamental human right to drive as fast as you want anywhere you want, vs the proposed solution of making it impossible for any car ever to exceed a certain speed.
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Thats a function of geography and unwillingness to shoot invaders. Set up Libertopia as a totally inaccessible island, like a fully constituted Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and airdrop criminals there PUBG style, with regular drops of humanitarian ration packs and water filtration tablets. It'll be the ultimate relocation experiment, at minimal cost compared to maintaining vigilance over a perennial criminal underclass.
G’day, mate!
I wish, but alas it doesn't seem to be true. Criminalizing debtors and vagrants and prostitutes to make up numbers for the mines is a reversal of what my posited state is. I think the early settlers were extremely happy to exile or execute criminals, so that really helped keep order. In our scenario of the middle ground the large body of criminals are actively violent types, not unfortunates rounded up.
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I'm just responding to the hypothetical of "Kowloon Walled City, but in every major American city."
I don't mean to disparage your statement, Kowloon in a US city is a losing proposition because rot spreads outwards. Kensington in Philly or South Side in Chicago or Tenderloin in SF are effectively nicer versions of your Kowloon model, and they have to be actively managed to stop the rot spreading.
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I would have said at the church serving free all-you-can-eat warm meals every weekday, when they're serving, but it doesn't make a dent in the people panhandling outside the grocery store half a block away. I asked, and one woman thought for a moment and said that she'd lose her spot if she went to get the free food.
The trick is to find corporate-owned commercial properties, preferably part of a nation-wide chain. They don't want bad publicity, their standardized policies don't let them adapt to local conditions quickly, and the employees aren't motivated to do anything because they get paid regardless (until the entire store shuts down).
Seattle tried that. People got killed and raped. And the ubiquity of cell phone cameras means that everything bad will get posted to the Internet, and the city will be blamed for allowing it to happen.
Food is generally one of the easiest things to get when you're homeless in a modern american city. Between food stamps, charities, and dumpster-diving, there are all sorts of ways to get food. The problem is more... everything else. That church won't let you stick around after the meal, not even to sleep, and they're certainly not going to let you just hang out there smoking or turning tricks to earn cash.
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Well, we can just make it Portland. Or Skid Row. The problem comes when every downtown starts to look like Skid Row.
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In my very blue west coast city, the visible homeless are without exception all three of those things. We have a huge number of programs that will get anyone experiencing "homeless-by-misfortune" off the streets and into stable housing in under 24 hours. Those who decline such services do so because they do not allow you to commit numerous property crimes to fund your meth and fentanyl addiction and remain in your taxpayer-funded living situation.
The social safety net put in place to help fundamentally decent people who have been rendered destitute throughthe vaugeries of fate (God's Poor, to borrow the phrase of an earlier age) works. It really does. The problem is our bums are the Devil's Poor- complete shitheads who have burned every bridge in their lives and care only for their own sensations, fuck anyone else. They do not want help or redemption, and mistaking the latter for the former is the very simple answer for why the "homeless" problem has exploded recently. It's not a homeless problem, it's a shithead problem.
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In the places I have lived they appear to be extremely strongly correlated.
Great! Then you can have the police deal with the criminals and you'll get rid of the drug addicts and bums for free. Why do you need separately send the police at the bums, then?
"Send the police at them"? For what? If you mean enforcing public camping bans, then I'm fine with that. Not clear in what other sense the police would be sent after them.
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There can be some incredible body odor from people who don't shower and have been living outside for days or weeks, and putting who-knows-what into their body. I can smell it upon entering the public library near me. (Public libraries are another casualty of homelessness - they're good places to sleep during the day, dry and warm and quiet and reasonably safe.)
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Every traveling vagabond I've met was absolutely based. I'm not sure many would by default refer to those people as "Bums"... Though the dictionary at least does. There's still an argument to be made that they're benefiting from the plenty of society while contributing very little.
But every time I meet a guy crossing the country with nothing but his wits and a backpack and his charisma and the kindness of strangers-
Well. Yeah it just doesn't parse as the same thing at all does it? Maybe this is better modeled as a fourth category that no-one is really talking about.
That's not a bum, its a tramp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramp
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Man, I really enjoyed the summary, especially Gorsuch reducing a professional to a stammering mess. Warms the soul.
Then you had to go and ruin it by tilting at this weird caricature of “New Lefty Science” and “the Lefties That Be.” Have you considered that maybe people you don’t like can be right?
Which part of this do you have a problem with? Because it looks, to me, like a legitimate debate over the limits of the 8th. The hypotheticals are relevant. The questions are clear. No digressions about historical richness or other sources of vibes. Just “why is this different from Robinson?”
I will try to review more of the summary later. So far, I don’t see what you’re so sarcastic about.
Sure they can. Care to defend either of the things I "tilted" at?
Note that I wrote:
The sections you're complaining about are the parts that aren't actually about the specifics of this case. So, uh, I'm really not sure how your description of things that are specifically about this case are really relevant to the things I wrote that you're complaining about.
I was commenting on the Kagan/Evangelis exchange which you quoted. It was specifically about distinguishing status from conduct. Was that not what you wanted to talk about? I can move on to the rest, I suppose.
To be clear, I read this epithet as referring to Corkran’s claim that a person can’t go from addiction to non-addiction. My phone won’t let me quote from PDF, but there’s a relevant passage on page 38. Evangelis argued that homelessness, due to its mutability, does not fit Robinson’s definition of a status. It’s exactly what Corkran was trying to rebut when you quoted her. Clearly, the whole court and both parties are interested in the bounds of this category.
I couldn’t actually figure out where mutability came into play. The Robinson opinion doesn’t mention anything like it, but it could be in oral arguments. As best as I can figure, it has something to do with short-term or automatic changes. But I digress.
So at what point did this become “lefty science”? When Evangelis conceded it before arguing homelessness was different? When Corkran asserted it before insisting homelessness was the same? When Jackson, whom I assume you think is a partisan hack, asked for clarification?
I think all of those options are stupid. They’re clearly arguing about something with a little more nuance than “can things change at all.” Ignoring that to dunk on unspecified lefties is playing an entirely different status game.
Sure. Evangelis and Corkran seem to agree that people cannot go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs. It didn't stick out all that starkly when Ms. Evangelis spoke about it (though I notice it more clearly now; Corkran also said the same thing but not as starkly in her response to Roberts). She seemed to be thinking more about the "struggle" part. It stuck out massively when KBJ spoke to Ms. Corkran.
Evangelis and Corkran seem to agree that addiction to drugs is immutable (to some extent; Evangelis is a bit less clear here). Evangelis thinks that this is a distinguishing factor from Robinson, thinking that the Robinson Court, at that time, also viewed it as some sort of immutable, which contributes to an argument of it being a "status". Corkran disagrees, thinking that the Robinson Court simply got the facts about addiction wrong, that they thought it was mutable (but it's really not), so they were thinking that mutable things could still be a "status". Thus, Evangelis thinks that Robinson supports mutable things being not a status and immutable things being a status, while Corkran thinks that Robinson implicitly supports both mutable and immutable things being a status (dependent upon some other features, apparently).
The point where EVERYONE suddenly believes that people who are addicted to drugs cannot, in any way, become not addicted to drugs! This is a huge H-WHAT?!?! moment. I've been constantly bombarded for decades now with messaging that we just need "treatment", and that will solve all our public policy problems with drug addiction. It's a magic panacea that, if applied appropriately and with sufficient outlay of government monetary resources, will be able to convert people who are addicted to drugs into people who are not addicted to drugs. Now, suddenly, out of nowhere, everyone seems to agree that this is just impossible. This is, frankly, incredible New Science. I'd be open to a scientific argument with links to scientific experiments and theorizing that support this incredible New Science; if convincing, I may even agree with it. However, until I see a remotely convincing argument with actual scientific evidence, I'm going to default to it being the new Lefty Science Party Line, akin to the prior consensus on biological determinism of sexuality, that has been adopted primarily due to political reasons and raw social force rather than genuine scientific evidence.
Is this new science though? The old saw is once an addict always an addict and I've heard that for decades. That alcoholism and drug addiction have no cure just treatment to stay clean.
Saying addicts need treatment is not the same thing as claiming that treatment is a total and peemanent cure. Don't confuse what the science says with what politicians or the media say the science says.
I'm speaking a bit tongue in cheek, because as I linked to a couple of my prior comments, and as many people learned during COVID, what the politicians or the media say the science says is ultimately as powerful or more powerful, in terms of the culture war, than what the science actually says. This is ultimately about observing the shift in the culture war, not a shift in the science. That is, there is a difference between "science" and "New Correct Lefty Science", where the latter is specifically things like what the politicians, media, and every party member in good standing must say in order to not end up in the metaphorical gulag.
I'm anticipating that in the next five years or so, simply asking people who want to argue about drug policy, specifically those who are on the left, a version of, "Can a person go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs?" is going to be illustrative and possibly necessary in order to even communicate with them reasonably on the topic. We will have to figure out where in the update process they are, kind of like how we've had to do so on trans issues for the last ~5 years.1
I have gotten piled on here (well, at least at the various old places, with a similar community of individuals) for taking the position that "treatment" isn't a magic word that solves drug addiction problems, that legalization will likely increase consumption (including people who consume for the first time or consume enough to become addicts), and that we have approximately zero clue how to convert people from being addicts to not being addicts. (Plenty of people do things like "age out" or take agency and figure it out on their own, etc. It's clearly possible to stop being an addict, except in the colloquial sense that some support groups use the phrase; it's just that we have basically no useful public policy tools to actually accomplish that with any scale.) But similar to what @crushedoranges said, if we take that view, then it really opens up arguments for public policy that are quite different than the arguments we're seeing now.
At least since I was young, this perspective has not been on the table, as the pro-legalization cultural forces have been utterly dominant. I even bought their message when I was growing up, which is how I know what the messaging was like. So, perhaps the New Correct Lefty Science is actually adopting something more like this now. If so, that might be a great improvement, being closer to correct! (I'm a bit doubtful that they'll actually hit the target, though...) However, if so, it's going to generate quite a rift and plenty of cognitive dissonance with all the pro-legalization talking points, and that's a culture war worth paying attention to. Like, what's going to happen? Who's going to win? Who are the X-o-phobes going to be? What sorts of rationalizations will emerge to blend this with various policy desires? Prior to this oral argument, I didn't anticipate needing popcorn for drug policy arguments anytime soon; now, I'm already poppin'.
1 - For another example, you still occasionally see someone on the internet who clings to the extremely weird claim that it is just theoretically impossible for someone to change from being homosexual to heterosexual, the rationale being to the point that even if you have a public example of someone who appears to have done just that, there's some hidden mystical behind-the-scenes explanation that they were actually bisexual the entire time, but were also somehow not wrong about their claim that they were homosexual, and the epicycles that follow. But it's very rare now; it was everywhere ten years ago. Completely pervasive. Because that's what the party demanded. I found it plenty interesting to watch how that culture war shifted, even if I don't think anything about the "real" science shifted.
Then you may want to angle to speak a little more plainly in my opinion. Tongue in cheek can be difficult to make out via text and using terms like "New Lefty Science" in that manner is just more heat than light when you are (as per the point of the site) going to want lefty people to read and engage with your points, rather than just arguing about whether the science is changing which wasn't really the point of your comment. Though I am not a mod, so you may of course ignore me entirely freely!
My experience with relatives who are addicts is that contra to our resident Indian doctor, it isn't possible to not be an addict any more. It is possible to not be an active addict, but seeing uncles falling off the wagon after decades of sobriety has resolved that for me. That doesn't mean I think alcohol should be illegal however.
And the difference between alien chest bursters and addiction is the fact that the chest burster kills the host and births a monster, an addict can be a "monster", then return to being normal for years or decades or the rest of their life, even if the monster risk is always hanging over them. It is more like lycanthropy perhaps, if we must find a monstrous analogy.
Can you suggest a simpler and more plain way of indicating this? I thought the caps and everything did the job. Maybe a (TM)?
I hate to say it, but this reeks of epicycles. Like, it's also always possible for someone who has never been an addict before to become an addict at some point in the future. If so, what conceptual content does "addict" have? What is its definition? Is it something like, "An addict is someone who has at any point in the past been addicted to drugs"? If so, it's another one of those amazing definitions like those that just claim, by definition, that it's theoretically impossible for someone to change from being homosexual to being heterosexual (and that anything that appears otherwise must be hidden mystical bisexualism). Ok, sure, you can define your terms that way, in a way that makes it true, by definition, that people who are addicted to drugs cannot become not addicted to drugs, but that's not saying anything about the science of addiction, or anything we've "learned" by science since the Robinson era. It's saying that you've simply adopted a different definition. Then, we'd have to wrestle with how changing definitions affect the legal and philosophical concepts involved. Plus, from a culture war observer position, I'll absolutely enjoy just watching and noting the various changing of definitions, how they may come from political pressures rather than new scientific results, and how such changes interact with the broader public discourse.
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There's addiction and there's addiction. I know plenty of patients who were addicted to drugs and no longer are, in the sense that they have no more physiological and psychological cravings.
There are, of course, many different kinds of drugs. Getting over a hankering for coffee or nicotine is a whole different kettle of fish compared to meth or strong opioids, or benzos.
I think the difference is before there is addiction, someone might be able to have 3 servings of alcohol a week (or whatever the recommended amount is), without much temptation to binge. But after someone has had an addiction to alcohol and recovered, they cannot have any serving of alcohol without a strong temptation to binge. There are alcoholics who are able to avoid alcohol entirely, but not many who are able to go from alcoholic to having a healthy moderate relationship to alcohol.
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If drug addiction is closer to alien chestburster syndrome then the common cold then that enables a wide variety of policy proscriptions considered too draconian in the west today.
Like surgical removal? Freezing them in hypersleep? Harvesting them for Royal jelly?
I like an Aliens reference as much as the next guy but having an alien parasite that bursts from you and always having to worry about relapsing even if clean for say 5 years don't see all that similar personally.
More of how drugs turn normal people into monsters that seek to replicate their misery. They superficially resemble the person they once were, but something new and horrible blossoms inside of them.
And yeah, you could try and cure it. But that only solves it on the individual level. The alien queen is still alive, and there are fools who advocate for her to get corporate citizenship. What's the point in spending half a million dollars trying to get a addict clean (and failing more than half the time) when a drug dealer can get a new victim hooked for the price of a happy meal?
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Kneedler is the government's third-string solicitor general. If they thought this case was important, they would have put Fletcher or Prelogar on it.
All solicitor generals are first-strings. The federal government isn't bringing cases to the supreme court that they don't consider important.
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Still a professional word-wrangler. Still funny to hear him tongue-tied.
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Can you link these studies? Or the Scott-post (am I missing a link to it in your post?).
My prior on this sort of thing is that... placebos in a controlled environment are actually going to work a lot better for addiction than in your average placebo study.
My priors on a lot of mental health issues are... 'A Mathematician's Lament' but for therapy. If you need a "treatment regimen" you're probably a bad therapist. That doesn't mean there's no difference between bad therapists and good therapists. It means good therapists are highly responsive general intelligences and cannot be replaced with simple easily enumerable algorithms.
If you give people on the street sugar pills, I have serious doubts that you're going to get the same results as giving them sugar pills in a supervised environment. The environment is likely to be the most effective part of the treatment.
But I could totally be wrong. So I'd like to read more on the subject.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/10/26/alcoholics-anonymous-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
Thank you! [insert gratitude hyper-stimulus tokens here]
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I can't find the original Scott-post, but I found an old comment of mine that linked directly to this on his old website, which was presumably there because of a post he made.
My priors on this sort of thing are similar to my priors on weight loss studies - that there is a Hlynka-sized hole in the discourse. It's a multi-agent environment; other agents get to make choices, and there is no way for you to impose your idealized study protocol onto their entire life and choice set. If you can selection effect your way to people who will take agency and apply focused determination to solving the little problems along the way, it actually won't be that hard to find solutions to those problems, and a variety of "methods" will probably work about equally well (though individual circumstances may result in differing folks somewhat preferring differing methods), but if not, than basically nothing other than raw physical/biological force will cut it.
Yes I agree with this. Well. I think that different people have different problems as well. "people who will take agency and apply focused determination to solving the little problems along the way" are going to be your best category, getting them to help from the inside is essential to making progress. I agree with that. But there will also be people who aren't in that category who can be moved to that category with just the right strategy, one conditioned on them. But not any of the many wrong ones. There will also be people who are lost causes. Such as the permanently brain damaged and the exceptionally obstinate.
Though... even the latter may be transmutable. The minds of the mentally ill are often like Cobble's Knot. A giant tangle of issues that layer on top of one another, that you need to find one loose end of to even get started.
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Interesting to pick apart the hidden variables. With drugs, the addiction is the status and being high (or low, or otherwise altered) is the desired condition caused by the regulable conduct of using drugs. Homelessness (or rather shelterlessness) is here treated as the undesired condition resulting in the regulable conduct of sleeping in public, and the indigence/extreme poverty is the status usually conflated with the condition of homelessness.
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People seem to be operating under the assumption that there is a set of deterministic “statuses”, and then there is a different set of non-deterministic free-will “choices”, but actually it’s all deterministic (modulo some weird quantum mechanical stuff).
Free will is essentially a legal fiction. It is incredibly useful, but it isn’t actually true. Yudkowsky’s decision theory paper uses the phrase “surgery on a world model” when describing how one considers counterfactuals. I think that is a good way to put it. In some sense it is impossible for someone who is homeless at any given time to have not been homeless, because in the physical universe that exists they are in fact homeless, but this isn’t very useful when designing a legal system that creates actual justice.
Every human has a lifetime of direct experience of something that appears in every observable and testable way to be free will. Complex predictions can be accurately made on the assumption of free will's existence.
Neither statement is true of Determinism, which, if it exists, can neither be observed nor tested in any way. Entire generations of scientists claimed otherwise, and their claims were dramatically falsified over the course of the last century. Belief in Determinism is axiomatic, not evidence-based.
To the extent that "true" is a meaningful term, free will is true. It is true in all the ways that gravity is true, and rejecting it involves exactly the same sorts of commitments and actions that rejecting gravity involves: namely, discarding huge portions of one's moment-to-moment experience as fundamentally unreliable, without any compensatory increase in predictive power.
I've thought about this before -- free will, even if it didn't exist, is not something that you can act like it doesn't exist. At the very least, it's kind of trippy, you have to act like you believe there's free will even if you don't believe there's free will, it's baked into the pie. The very principle of "acting" requires, in some sense, a "belief" in free will.
I'm not actually sure what "acting like free will doesn't exist" even looks like -- you could sit on the floor and do nothing, I guess, but that is an action that requires a "choice" you "make" to do it. The concept is just an aspect of everything we do. It's even more fundamental than breathing -- you can stop breathing (and suffocate), but in doing so you're taking an action that you could choose not to do! It's impossible to choose not to act like you have free will, since by doing so you've acted like you have free will.
It's rather the opposite of Descartes' old claim, that thinking proves the mind's existence, in a way beyond even radical doubt: acting proves free will's existence, but in a way that not only doesn't silence doubt but even invites it by its total immediacy and inalienable connection to our existence. It is so automatic as to be unremarkable, and thus it becomes so incomprehensible that it becomes impossible not to remark on it. In other words, it's impossible to act like you don't have free will, but it's easy to think you don't have free will. And the unbridgeable gap between act and thought demands an explanation. Thus free will debates are a massive playing field in philosophy.
I act, therefore I have free will. Or not.
Right, free will is a mental construct that we create to explain our understanding of possibility. It’s an expression of our understanding of the sample space for all the decisions we may have made or may make, even though our course through those decisions has been and will be deterministic. It’s kind of fun, the computer trying to understand itself, which is part of what makes philosophy interesting.
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Do you have an experiment to determine if an individual exhibits free will as opposed to just making decisions based on its incentive landscape plus perhaps internal sources of randomness?
If humans have free will, do dogs too? LLMs? Frogs? Insects? A ball travelling through a Galton board?
How is free will compatible with a physics world view? The old "brain as a quantum computer" number? Does that mean that other quantum systems whose state we do not know would also exhibit free will? Or are the responses of our neurons remote controlled from our souls?
Why do we need an explanation for how free will works mechanistically? Scientists are unable to even explain how consciousness or qualia arise from calcium gradients between nerve cells, yet just about everyone agrees that consciousness and qualia are real. The old "qualia as emergent phenomenon" number is simply handwaving.
It's absurd to demand a mechanistic explanation for free will when almost no part of our daily subjective experience has a mechanistic explanation.
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I don't think I do, no. All I can do is observe my own internal mental states, and compare those observations to other peoples' descriptions of their internal mental states. The result is, as I said, the appearance of free choices being directed by individual will, and that appearance is seamless. It may well be an illusion masking deterministic mechanisms, but if so, the mask is impenetrable under current conditions.
I observe myself exercising my will without apparent restraint, and making choices through the exercise of that will. Near as I can tell, this is what everyone else observes as well. All effective methods of human social organization assume that humans have free will, and then proceed with methods to either convince them to choose cooperation, or trick them into cooperation, or else nullify their choices through the exercise of power against them. No effective methods of social organization have been found that allow one to simply engineer cooperation from the uncooperative, and this despite many trillions of dollars and millions of human lifetimes spent explicitly trying to achieve that exact objective.
The ball travelling through a Galton board certainly does not. We can predict when it will fall (when we drop it) and we can predict the statistical probabilities of its travel. We have a good understanding of the mechanics involved, and there do not appear to be any great mysteries involved.
Dogs, LLMs, Frogs and Insects, I don't know. I have no access to their internal experience. Is their behavior deterministically predictable and manipulable? If so, then clearly we have grounds to say that they're deterministic. If not, then it may be deterministic and simply too complex for us to grasp, or it may be something else.
For humans, I do have access to the internal experience, and it certainly is not deterministically predictable. I have no reason to assume that my observations, and those of all other humans, are mistaken, and they uniformly indicate free will. The direct evidence we have on the question in hand is that Free Will exists.
It isn't. So either our understanding of physics is wrong, or our observation of free will is wrong. As it happens, we know for a certainty that our understanding of physics is wrong in other places, so it being wrong here too is not entirely unexpected.
It has been frequently claimed that Materialism should be the null hypothesis, and that there is no evidence against materialism. But if free will appears to exist, and free will cannot exist according to Materialist axioms, then the apparent existence of free will is evidence against Materialism in the same way that Materialism is evidence against free will. Likewise, the falsification of Determinist theories is evidence against Materialism. It is obviously not conclusive evidence, and it's still possible that further technological development will salvage Determinism at some indeterminate point in the future, or that Determinism is correct even if we can never prove it due to intractable complexity. But if one claims both that their position is evidence-based, and that contrary evidence must be discarded because it contradicts their position, they have left the bounds of rationality.
I observe different levels of restraint depending on hunger, thirst, whether I've taken my stimulants, how many of the voices inside my head agree... I had to do a lot of bootstrapping to get anywhere close to "without restraint". And insofar as I have succeeded, it has been by cultivating each of those little voices in strategic directions, and by engineering mental algorithms that do the heavy lifting and negotiating efficiently, then pushing them into my subconscious. I literally could not have been the person I am today 10 years ago. Not without what I've built since then.
Well... here is your first counterexample I guess.
I've experienced hunger and thirst. I've done fasts in the past; eating and drinking is absolutely a choice.
I've experienced wanting to do something I know I shouldn't do many times as well. I still want to do it, and I still choose whether or not I'm going to do it. I've never experienced being forced to do something against my own will. I don't think you have either.
In my past, before I/we cleaned up the inside of this head, we would experience a sort of teleological flailing. Going back and forth between different modes as different modules exhausted themselves in a power struggle.
Nowadays, tons of our habits are on complete autopilot. And some of our habits resolve before the meta level action endorser can negate them. We don't will these mistakes explicitly, we willed them long ago in more fitting contexts. But they're cached habits resolving now-
Further, the process of making these mistakes is itself often a necessary condition to producing the counter-force that corrects these errors. Indeed the contextual triggers that allow us to add another case to our algorithms often can't exist until after we see it. Bugs must be seen to be repaired.
There is some sense in which 'I' parse myself as the engineer at the center of this all. But this 'I' grows smaller and smaller as it learns to modify and optimize deeper and deeper parts of itself. And on different days different voices parse as this 'I'. Sometimes its the proprioception that is occupying the core of the system. Such as during dance. Sometimes it is the vision. Sometimes it is our brain's internal language model (of course, no matter who is in the driver's seat, that module will be partially responsible for the words you actually see/hear us say. In a sense you are always talking to us through them). One system lets go and another holds on but it seems like both are coordinating on such choices. Who the final arbiter is- is hard to say. Indeed. Our internal framework seems to be enlightened anarchy.
There are negotiation systems that have a lot of weight- elected as community leaders you could say- because they helped to solve the flailing problem and doing as they say makes us feel really really good and coherent and internally aligned. I could wax on poetically about how this feels until it gets subversively NSFW, but I'll spare you as I would our comrade GPT-4.
Speaking of comrades, they also often take primary control of our sense of wills. We choose to give up agency initially, and we can end up flailing and desyncing if dommed undiscerningly. But while synced there is a sense of total receptivity that bypasses all will, allowing the minds of other systems to slot into us. To wear us like a glove. As long as they model us well enough to prevent a desync, they remain in total control. And can potentially use this control to modify us to deepen their control and reduce the chance of desync as they realign us and remap us to their own internals.
Will is a Ship of Theseus to us, and we are it's parts. Modifications to Will are not free. Rather they operate on the principles of Linear Logic. Consuming resources to enact transformations.
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So I don't exactly disagree with you, but the things that give me pause are things how people change after brain damage. Each individual (assuming they experience things similarly to me) seems to be making their own unrestrained choices through free will. I agree with your assessment here, as far as I can tell I make my own free choices, and since everyone else says the same and generally acts like me it seems likely they are too. Yet a man with a particular type of brain injury will now seem to make decisions he never would have before. Presumably he sees those choices internally as exercising his free will. It's just he now wants to be an angry drunk rather than a nice family man. Or you can give women testosterone and they get more aggressive. So I think at the very minimum the material medium in some way constrains or shapes free will. I might not consider hitting my wife, but jam a needle in my brain and I might choose just that. And I will probably think it is my own free choice.
The brain damage examples give me pause too, but we've had two centuries since Phineas Gage, and for a good portion of the last one people were actively attempting to make progress of psychosurgery. As I argued in the threads linked above, my position is not a dogmatic one, and I'm entirely willing to admit that I'm wrong if Determinism could be demonstrated. I will even readily admit that it's entirely possible that determinism will be demonstrated within my lifetime. I'm betting it won't be, though, and I'm very certain that all attempts to demonstrate it to date have failed.
I'm also certain that people who believe in Determinism, and further believe that their belief is based entirely on direct evidence that proves Determinism, have made a serious error in their reasoning.
It is entirely possible that this is true, but I will believe it when I see this process actually demonstrated under controlled conditions, and not before. What I notice is that a lot of people seem to easily slide from the hypothetical of a needle in the brain, to a belief that the needle in the brain is an actual, verifiable reality right now. Worse, a lot of people seem to be completely unaware of the numerous, well-funded failures to actually design needles for the brain, in a sort of crowd-based file-drawer problem. Massive, well-funded efforts to develop Determinist methods of controlling or engineering individual humans repeatedly fail, and those failures not only do not cause an update on peoples' priors, but are completely forgotten.
This seems like a pretty serious failure of rationality to me.
Certainly from the point of view of surgery they have failed so far. But if something can be done naturally, it doesn't mean we have to have the ability to replicate it, (experimental science is powerful, but observational science is also important). But I think it does demonstrate observationally that physical changes, make people behave differently. Even drugs and alcohol are the same. You are correct that what we can't do is fine tune control someone's mind (or at least as far as I am aware). But just as I am confident that I have my own free will, I am also confident very drunk me, makes different choices than sober me, even in the same situation. Again, seeming to show that physical changes impact my free will, (though of course I generally am making the choice to drink in the first place!).
Now I would also admit, that I am not certain Determinism is true, but probably we are just either side, I think it is probably true but am not certain, and you think it is probably false but are not certain? I would say there is some evidence some kind of determinism is true, but it certainly isn't irrefutable or 100% by any means.
My own internal experiences suggest to me that changes to my body, do impact on the choices I make, such that while I also experience making choices freely, some choices appear to be more free than others. I think some people would call that willpower or something similar and suggest that we have a certain "supply" of that which allows us to make choices against our biological urges perhaps? If I am hungry for a long time, or tired, I start making choices I know are bad and after the situation is resolved, I look back and wonder what was I doing? It feels in the moment that I making free choices, but in retrospect it appears I was not. Being very tired makes me snappish and irritable, so the physical processes seem to be doing something to impact my decision making.
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I would be interested to see an effort post from you describing what you think "actual justice" is, alongside your meta-ethical views and how they fit together with your determinism. I know that you have in the past positively linked to Mackie's argument for moral nihilism from queerness, but I haven't gotten a sense for how you put it all together. What do you think is "actual justice" to a nihilist? How does it possibly matter to a determinist? Why would it even make sense to have a decision "theory" in this world, and what would it possibly have to do with justice?
You got me. My use of the word "justice" there was a poor choice. The word is used in a legal context as a colloquialism for "desirable outcomes". There's a fair bit of play in the joints of course, but you don't need a definition of justice that would satisfy Socrates to see that removing the idea of moral culpability from the legal system would result in a world much lower in ≈everybody's preference ordering than the one we have now.
Indeed. Paul's answer falls short. As does everyone else's. Perhaps one day I will try my own hand on the question, though I suspect I lack the writing skill and attention span to make it coherent (not to mention the philosophical heft). I do have some ideas though.
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I'm a little confused what the lie is supposed to be. In both Lawrence and Obergefell the state was discriminating against people because of their status. If two people of the opposite sex wanted to engage in some conduct they could, but if the two people were of the same sex they couldn't. The conduct wasn't at issue, the status of the participants was. Unless the idea is being a particular sex is conduct rather than a status? Or that the conduct is different if different people are doing it?
I challenge any gay man to have sex with his husband by inserting his penis into his husband's vagina.
More seriously, I've never read Lawrence, and don't particularly feel like subjecting my eyes or brain to tortured legal reasoning at the moment. Is it written in a way that would allow a state to criminalize anal sex in general without regard to the sex of the persons?
Texas' law was somewhat unusual in that it had originally had prohibited heterosexual sodomy, but had been revamped, possibly by accident, such that only same-sex sodomy was actually punishable. Anal sex, among other things, was defined as "deviate sexual intercourse" regardless of who did it with whom, but it was only an offense if done with "another individual of the same sex".
((It also restricted homosexual oral sex, and possibly using a dildo or a sounding rod on someone else, though I've not seen any evidence of it actually being used in this way.))
And O'Connor's concurrence pushed on this hard: she held that it mattered that the state was expressed moral disapproval not of an act, but of an act being done by a group:
(emphasis added)
But only O'Connor signed onto that concurrence, which even at the time came across as a nitpick. The majority opinion, which received five votes but not O'Connors, didn't rest on it being a status-based offense, in no small part because the courts were still trying avoid committing to treating homosexuality as a special status, with even status-based SCOTUS matters like Romer hiding behind rational basis. Lawrence argued certain types of 'intimate contact' outside the scope of the general police power, so it invalidated not just bans on (consensual private non-commercial adult) sodomy, but also a wide variety of other private behaviors.
In theory. Like a lot of that era of SCOTUS jurisprudence, there's a decent chance that these lofty principles get smothered under balancing tests. It's not clear how this applies to situations like extreme BDSM; so far, the only relevant cases have generally alleged consent violations, sometimes pretty credibly. But where courts have had cause to evaluate restrictions under the assumption they would be applied in a consenting framework, they often do so by reframing Lawrence post-hoc, generally by promoting the O'Connor concurrence:
((Probably not helped by the guy in that case probably being a douchebag.))
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The law in question for Lawrence specifically only applied to homosexual sodomy.
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Technically no, but that's because the logic of Lawrence would extend Griswold and similar right-to-privacy cases to prevent the state from criminalizing sodomy between consenting adults of either the same or opposite sex. Quoting Lawrence:
The opinion then goes on to discuss various right to privacy cases and ultimately come to the conclusion a prohibition on sodomy would likely be unconstitutional applied to basically anyone. Quoting Lawrence again:
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But approximately nobody wants to ban the penis-in-vagina conduct, and generally nature conspired to make the straight option the one that has the most unique options available. To get a purely conduct-based rule that prevents same-sex activity, you'd have to write something tortured like "you must not let two penises come in contact", and this would not only give lawmakers the vapours just having to put these words to paper but would also only capture some subset of same-sex activity (and the state would struggle to dispute a claim by a gay couple that they fastidiously avoided that particular act).
Maybe you could criminalise all sexual conduct that is also possible for same-sex couples; good luck with convincing a majority to make that sacrifice just to get at those pesky gays at last, or else to convince the higher courts that any selective enforcement is purely accidental.
Are you familiar with the gun-law term "constructive possession"?
The "struggle" involved in proving a crime exists because the authorities in question want it to be a struggle. if they decide they don't feel like struggling any more, they can simply remove the struggle and go straight to enforcement.
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I believe the sodomy laws common until 2003 actually did this. It was hypothetically just as illegal for a man to get his dick sucked by his wife as by another man.
But then those laws were almost never enforced against openly gay men and truly never enforced against straight couples using their mouths or butts.
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No tortured constructs needed, just prohibit penile stimulation of prostate.
There's a lot of hilarious edge cases that proposal invokes -- could a gay man defend his partner's honour by claiming he just sucked at topping, missed the button every time? Was too short, just let the tip in? The Texas law in question prohibited stimulation with a sex toy (by a same-sex partner), but I've never seen evidence it was enforced; are we just giving up on that here? What happens with a penis sheathe? Strap-on over chastity cage (50+ images on e621)?
"Constructive Possession" should create lots of hilarious edge cases as well. They become less hilarious when the government simply deploys a YesChad.jpg.
To be clear, this is not an endorsement, but rather an attempt to highlight the fact that the "struggle" inherent in law enforcement is not an innate feature of law enforcement, but rather a choice the enforcers are making. The truth value of the statement "This would be impractical to enforce" often smuggles in a number of assumptions about the nature of enforcement.
Yeah, that's absolutely fair, and 'constructive possession' is in many ways just the tip of the iceberg, as bad as the shoestring machine is. Stuff like autokeycard, the various recent regulatory changes, Abramski, so on, very much show the limits of textual formalism as a control protecting the actually disfavored, even to the point of blocking defendants from raising the text.
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For the first type of edge cases, the same thing as sucking at marksmanship or having an insufficient weapon to penetrate the target. For the second type, are you arguing that piv sex in condom is not piv sex?
eta: chastity cages should be outlawed separately, for the reasons of their misandristic nature.
Charging someone with attempting sodomy, if we're taking the metaphor that direction, kinda just makes it funnier.
Dunno. There are sheathes that are like condoms in being full-enclosed (still not rated or tested as contraceptives, though I'd expect that regulatory reasons drive that more than practical ones), but most of them range from an eight-inch to more than a quarter-inch of silicone all around. Their point is to alter texture, appearance, and/or girth/length, but especially since some are dual-use as dildos or even intended for women or trans men to wear, the line between stimulating the prostate with a sex toy and stimulating it with the top's dick isn't very clear.
At least to my intuitions, a condom is very much the same underlying sex act, but there's a point where a gal wearing the same sex toy can hit the same button that makes it a lot harder to call the penis doing the stimulation. But my intuitions aren't anywhere near yours.
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Again, how would the state prove that this happened, against a claim by a gay couple that they didn't do that? My understanding is that anal penetration as the sine qua non of gay sex is largely a product of the imagination of homophobes in a narrow sense, as it lives at some sweet spot of triggering their disgust reflex and being easy to describe.
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Mostly what @gattsuru said. We could have gotten a string of cases that treated sex as the status in question and then applied standard 14A intermediate scrutiny, but we didn't. Don't forget that it's not just Lawrence and Obergefell. It's Lawrence, Romer, CLS, Windsor, and Obergefell. They made an absolute hash out of the whole mess, and they certainly did not rest simply on distinctions being made based on the status of sex.
Would be the absolute peak of irony, however, in an alternate universe, to hear KBJ interrogate counsel with a frank and straightforward, "Can a person go from being the male sex to being the female sex?"
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Judith Butler certainly seemed to think so. Performative gender identity and all that good stuff.
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I'm at Penn Law.
I went to the protests tonight as a legal observer because there were reports that arrests were "imminent." While I was there, the encampment organizers designated a "red" group- those who WANTED to be arrested - from a "yellow" group - those WILLING to be arrested. The distinction concerns me; there are people actively SEEKING to get arrested.
We didn't currently have an active police presence, so it would take some time for a police force large enough to arrest anyone to show up. By the time enough police had gathered, those unwilling to get arrested could leave.
The admin has been clear they will only arrest non-Penn affiliates. The majority of protestors are not Penn affiliated - we are the meeting point for Temple and Drexel SJPs also, as our campus gets the most national attention because people sometimes realize we aren't Penn State. In addition, there are plenty of "community members" who are non-students heavily involved. I'd estimate approx. 15% of the total people were Penn affiliates, and maybe 50% were students at all.
Arrests have still not been made (there was a pro-Israel dude who walked through earlier with a pocket knife who got a citation but that's about it). I left after the chants shifted to "Al-Qassim make us proud, kill another soldier now" and "we don't want no two state, we want '48." I think the protestors are genuinely upset that the police have left them alone this entire time. I don't know if it's a resume line item checklist - "getting arrested for social justice ❤️💙" might play well for a political career? - or just people making reckless decisions. I'm scared, and tired, and finals start tomorrow.
Only 14 people in the encampment of 200 paused for the call to prayer at dusk. None of the prayer individuals were masked. The leaders of the protest, from what I could tell, were a Latino and a white woman (with purple hair, not that that really matters). The Latino led everyone in a chant of "we are all Palestinian." What happened to cultural appropriation?
There was a "protest against hate speech" or whatever earlier by the Pro-Israel crowd. The pro-Israel crowd were the first time I had seen American flags brought into this at all. They remembered where we were, what we actually had power over. None of them were masked, either.
Almost the entire pro-Palestine group was masked (I hesitate to call them pro-Palestine instead of pro-Hamas after the Al-Qassik chants). The three exceptions in the pro-Palestinian group were those who engaged in the call to prayer, the Latino leader, and the "red" group. If you aren't willing to show your face for a cause, to have your name associated with it, do you really believe in it at all?
I don't know anything anymore. One of the 19 year olds who stood next to me as the first tents were going up a few days ago, James, asked me what "encampment" meant. I thought he was joking, or at least asking what it meant in this specific context. No, actually. He, a sophomore at Penn, genuinely has never heard the word before. These are our best and brightest.
Past a certain level, there is no such thing as an organic protest. There are professional organizers somewhere in the background and they've got their tactics and strategies all worked out after a few generations of experience of this kind of thing.
The history of political movements is full of this. This is the way political activism should be done. Not the social media-esque FFA we've been having, where everyone just broadcasts the stupidest toxoplasma they can get their hands on.
Now- i can't say whether they're organizing and planning their arrests with strategic competence, but I'm happy to hear at least some of them have realized that every successful civil rights movement prior actually did employ disobedience strategically.
I was trying really hard to figure out how the “Future Farmers of America” were involved.
If you'd played quake like I did instead of doing schoolwork you'd immediately guess it means free for all
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On the mask thing: I think some of these people are doing it for the aesthetics. They really want to play the part of a scrappy revolutionary who has to hide their face from the cops. I actually think this whole thing is based around that. It's like a type of adventure tourism.
I had a guy walk past my house the other day on his way to one of these, and I asked him what he was doing (he was wearing a mask, which is an odd thing around here). He sounded almost scared at the question "...going...to...the....protest". He just seemed really nervous, almost like he had stage fright.
Are we sure they're not just still Taking COVID Seriously?
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I'm pretty sure I saw the official Israel twitter account or some large American Jewish account bragging about how they were gonna use facial recognition tech to make sure "none of these people ever find a job again."
Reminds me of that Norm Macdonald joke from the 90s.
"Well, earlier this week, actor Marlon Brando met with Jewish leaders to apologize for comments he made on “Larry King Live”. Among them, that “Hollywood is run by Jews.” The Jewish leaders accepted the actor’s apology, and announced that Brando is now free to work again."
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There might be an element of that, but I figure that "soandsomany people got arrested at protests for X" also is a necessary item for any media narrative about X being oppressed by the authorities. Note how no report of protests (say, Navalny-related ones) inside Russia is complete without some mention of hundreds of protesters taken away in prepared police vans, and most Westerners are also quite happy to read that and nod along about how brutal the regime is. Other protests such as climate activists gluing themselves to roads are also designed to elicit a violent-looking police response, and the overall effect of any well-crafted report incorporating such footage tends to be that genuine fence-sitters and normies conclude that the response was excessive. If you have any sort of sympathetic media that knows its craft and participants willing to sacrifice themselves, you would be foolish as a protest organiser to not make use of the opportunity; if you are a participant who cares more about the cause than about the expected adverse effects of being arrested, you would be foolish to not volunteer.
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You know how I said this is all planned? This is all planned. The actual students ("useful idiots" in Cold War parlance) are just being used (with the connivance of the media) to put a sympathetic face on a movement run by well-funded professional protestors.
Okay, I’m feeling a bit foolish for assuming the attendees were mostly Penn students.
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This all sounds relatively banal and bog-standard for a protest, no? Its like the far left analogue of some right wing militias: masks, standing against gov't tyranny, large sense of importance, performative desire to get arrested (ie open carry audits), dubious legal and political theories (ie Bundy; The White horse Prophecy, etc), and, of course, their own flags! I think the militia folk go camping alot, and are probably way more fun to hang out with. But when either side actually goes to protest I can do little more than think "well okay, whatever floats your boat, but remember, your freedom ends where someone elses begins, have fun!"
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Was he ESL? Otherwise, wtf you don't even need to have heard the word if you're familiar with English. Camp with a prefix that means to be in or engage in, and the suffix ment makes it a noun. I've only ever heard the word in stories about protesters and combattants, and never heard the definition. I'm basing this on context clues and being fluent in English. Is there some nuance I've been missing this entire time?
Because, uh, it feels like the only way lacking that level of English comprehension should be possible while still becoming a Sophomore at any college that fancies itself prestigious is if the sophomore in question is ESL. I guess they could be there for athletics or similar?
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https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/germany-afd-most-popular-party-among-under-30s/
This trend isn't unique to Germany. In Sweden SD was more popular among the youngest voters than average. Since more young people are immigrants and less likely to vote SD that means young ethnic Swedes are fairly overrepresented voting SD.
In Poland support for Konfederacja was by far the strongest among young people
Le Pen has done well among young people.
Meanwhile, in the US Young people lean massively democrat and in the UK the tories have essentially lost support among young people. Only 15% of young Brits support the Tories while 60% support labour, with greens and libs being the third and fourth choice.
Why has right wing politics become so heavily correlated with age in the Anglosphere, while it is not in other countries? What can the Anglosphere right do to attract younger people?
I think an answer that is both Americentric and true is that the culture war is waged first and foremost in English, and only can perfectly fit to America and countries more like it. The (dominant left wing angle of the) CW is something I've decried as being an extremely insidious corruption of many ideas that most people would agree with - at least they'd agree with the motte. Then the bailey gets snuck in and your average person is neither equipped nor inclined to work to decouple those from each other. As I specified that these are mostly left wing "arguments" - by which I mean streamers, ad campaigns, astroturfing on reddit, twitter, youtube, ecelebs in general inundating the general public with some toxic corruption of a more palatable left wing idea - you can make those receptive to them extremely resilient to dissent, but only if the arguments are constantly modulated to fit the current zeitgeist. Otherwise you fail to resonate with the general population at all, and the spell is broken. Not cleanly or instantly, but the absolute stranglehold can't last.
I think this only can truly happen in the US and our closest countries culturally (the UK and Canada), not only due to the above but also the fact that the vast majority of worldwide media is either from or related to America. My favorite example is the thought-terminating cliche "donate to black trans women". That makes no sense in the vast majority of European countries, because black people are just a tiny fraction of the population, especially integrated ones, and you can't make an appeal to someone's sense of fairness when none of those black people were slaves, or historically discriminated against in any way. Contrast that with the US context where guilt over all of that most certainly has a place in the public's consciousness, and it's much more likely to land.
Now, certainly there are wider schools of left wing thought that are more generally applicable, and have arguably been more popular in Western Europe; but those are less likely to be extreme or have that stranglehold over your terminally online population. Consequently, those downstream of any of the media the terminally online influence are not fed this riveting and completely relevant culture war. What remains in the public consciousness is this weird distorted holdover of 90s neoliberal thought (I've often lamented that something seems to have completely frozen the political elites, but this is not the central point of my response): Immigration good, world police kinda bad, health care good, guns bad, violence is not endemic to our society, number must go up at all costs, etc. None of this is really all that compelling except health care and being against the world police idea. It certainly doesn't hold the vitriol that American politics does.
So, when you combine those geriatric neoliberal policies with the consequences they bring (e.g. wow these migrants really seem to be causing a lot of problems), and the messaging is not able to sustain it, what do you get? Genuine grassroots support for something, anything different. Wow, there's a part called "Alternative for Germany" that's talking about these exact issues the establishment is ignoring? Sign me up!
Contrast this with America, which is much larger in scale, and arguably a lot more atomized due to its multicultural nature. This compounds with the effects of the terminally online world, meaning a lot of people's perceptions of issues that are not right next to them are completely detached from reality. It's just some streamer, or tiktoker, or AI generated youtube video that even tells them about these things. A young leftist from a hip neighborhood is likely never to see actual race crime, or when it does - as was the case when Ryan Carson was stabbed to death - the feed of content is so strong that they are completely immunized against looking at what happened critically. The hold on them is just too strong.
I will say that I disagree somewhat with the idea that America's young are overwhelmingly democrat. Everything I've seen has indicated that they are splitting along gender lines, with democrats still having an advantage, but only in the aggregate. I can also, emotionally and with no evidence, say that I've felt an extreme rupture in our society between the messaging and reality. I think things like the migrant bussing and ever-expanding nature of activist thought (a self preservation measure - if they don't have something to fight for, do they have jobs anymore?) have soured a lot of people on assumptions they've made. Will it be enough to change the zeitgeist? I don't know. I do know that the American right wing has utterly failed in having unifying figures that are anything short of embarrassing. I don't have a solution for that.
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Short answer: The two-party system. I think there are young people in the USA who would vote for AfD but who wouldn't vote for the Republican Party. The Republicans suck in a lot of ways and are shackled to interest groups that make them unappealing to most people under the age of 40.
I think there are also a lot of young people in the USA who would vote for a far-left party in a parliamentary system but who have strong objections to voting for the Democrats - lately we've seen a lot of pushback from this bunch over the Israel-Palestine issue.
Yeah, this is probably a large factor. One of the main splits in Continental Europe is less that "young are right, olds are left", but rather that the olds vote for traditional boomer parties (social democrats and Christian democrats, and equivalents) and youngs vote for new "challenger" parties (right-wing populists and greens/new left parties, often split by gender). As dissatisfaction with the pensioner-focused boomer parties that wish to stay the course even while Europe is mired in 15 years of no growth and little development grows, the right-wing populist parties derive particular benefits due to several reasons (center-right parties have generally tended to be a bit more popular than center-left ones, right-wing populists are better at appearing to center-left voters than challenger left parties to center-right ones, the Greens in particular have become quite "pro-system" in recent decades etc.)
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US conservatism is more tightly connected to religiosity than the hard-right parties popular with young people in Europe. I know several young people who are critical of migration, concerned about crime, skeptical of the transgender movement, and opposed to critical race theory, who nonetheless dislike and distrust Republicans because of their strong assocation with evangelicalism. I personally hate to say it, but abortion access is popular among young people and our Lord and Savior isn't.
Bizarrely, I also know young Southern Baptists who went woke, and are moderately hip on gender identity and sexuality issues. I actually have a strong suspicion that within 80 years, respectability politics and the evangelical drive to 'meet people where they are' will result in most big evangelical churches going the way of the mainlines. Traditional Christian morals will probably be the purview of a small minority in insular communities. "I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Ba'al..."
By contrast, among European conservatives, Christianity isn't very popular. In fact, my general understanding is that European conservative parties are typically less religious than the center, where Christian Democratic parties are very strong -- essentially being the mainliners of Europe. European conservatism is typically blood-and-soil, not God-and-guns or even throne-and-altar. They're nationalist with ethnic undertones (except in France), and combine that with a commitment to social welfare. They believe in using the government to provide services to citizens, and hold that the best way to afford this is to limit citizenship to natives and a small group of deserving immigrants. They're nationalist, but also kind of socialist. Hm.
I think opponents of this worldview are kind of right that there are similarities between it and the National-Socialism of Nazi Germany, which was also skeptical of religion and committed to both ethnonationalism and social welfare for the ethnos. It at least lies in the quadrant of skulls and crossbones which has been poisoned by memories of mustache man. But I don't see the irredentism, the genocidal hatred, or the fanaticism of fascism in them. I think there are occasional glimmers of such things -- I recall a discussion on here a while ago about Finnish? politicians saying the n-word in texts and joking about racial superiority. But the situation in Finland re: black people is lightyears away from the situation in pre-war central Europe re: Jewry, and I don't see these as driving motivations for continental European right-wing parties the way they were last century. I see more opposition to recent immigrants causing real, observable problems in society, where the solution doesn't have to do with loading people in camps but in deporting people committing crimes and not taking in new ones.
Even in Anglosphere Europe, the appeal in recent times has sometimes been "let's stop participating in these globalist enterprises/admitting culturally-incompatible migrants so we can fund our social welfare." Such a message was famously emblazoned on a bus. This combination is clearly appealing to many voters, and the unique thing with the Anglosphere is it isn't very appealing to young voters. For the UK, I would pin blame on austerity (however needed) for young voters' skepticism of the Tories, though I think that goes hand-in-hand with a feeling that the Tories represent upper-class Etonian elitists, not the needs of average people.
And across the pond, there are many bread-and-butter issues where the Republicans' traditional fiscal conservatism alienates young voters. Health care reform and workers' protections are the big ones; there are a lot of young people who feel like their lives are controlled by large corporate employers who don't do right by their employees. There are also many who, because of policies of said large corporate employers, struggle to maintain health insurance; they are angered by Republican opposition to even incredibly moderate reforms like Obamacare (even if the most popular component, the parental-health-insurance-under-26 rule, was supported by Trump), and many believe in a single-payer system.
My views on these issues form the biggest divergence between myself and the Republican party. I even support a lot of fiscally-conservative things you might not expect -- I think supply-side economics is a great idea, I oppose wealth taxes, and I think 'pricing gouging' during emergencies provides an economic incentive for people to supply needed goods to a disaster area! But I think there are areas where more needs to be done to make sure Americans have a good quality of life, and aren't exploited by unscrupulous megacorporations or buried under mountains of medical debt.
Of course, it's also possible that I'm full of shit, and talking about a continent I know nothing about based on little more than internet vibes. So take what I say with a grain of salt.
I would agree that the kind of "right" that appeals to the young is definitely the hardline, bordering-on-fascist sort, not dry conservatism. The young want a Great Cause and an Enemy, not milquetoast or cautious policy and definitely not "listen to your parents".
Do you think they'll mellow out as they get older and become libertarians? Or will they just be consumed by nanobots along with the rest of the human race?
Dunno about libertarians, but most of the young mellow out at some point. I wasn't only talking about Gen Z/Alpha, after all; this goes back at least to WWII (note that the actual Nazis had Angry Young Men willing to take to the streets and beat people up, something which you haven't really seen from "rightist" movements since until very recently).
Well, I sure hope not.
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At least the Finns Party has an interesting demographic regarding religious views: at least a while back, they're the most popular among "no religion" types but also the most popular among the "strongly religious" types, particularly those who belong to Protestant churces outside the Lutheran quasi-state-chuch. The party itself has MPs ranging from precisely such committed Pentecostals etc. to atheists: in one of the larger cities, they even have a council member who (probably mostly for reasons of edginess) has defined himself as a Satanist.
All of these cooperate rather easily, though, since they all share the same focus on immigration, and the party itself is mostly rather secular in both its policies and its communications.
While youth tend to be mostly secular, the ones who are strongly religious will tend to mostly congregate to non-Lutheran movements (there have been several stories in media, like this one, about a new trend of young men joining charismatic groups or Orthodoxy, for instance, the latter of which I can anecdotally confirm noticing myself).
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The Tories are a party of mass immigration, that's what their policies have achieved in the real world. They say stuff like 'we'll be tough on immigration' but they don't actually do it, they flail around paying Rwanda and achieving nothing. Different policies but similar results for the Australian centre-right - Abbott successfully stopped illegal immigration but kept legal immigration very high.
In the UK neither illegal nor legal immigration are combatted. In Australia Labour adopted Coalition border policies, so there's no distinguishing difference there. So on immigration both parties are roughly equivalent to their Labour equivalents. AFD is actually different.
Labour generally promises young people some kind of patronage in uni education, welfare and so on. The centre-right tend to support the old in housing and welfare. Furthermore, young people tend to revile the centre-right parties, it was considered cringeworthy to vote for Scott Morrison (former centre-right PM) in Australia. Labour and Greens parties are more socially progressive and young people care about climate change.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/podcast-episode/voting-choices-of-young-people-shifting-to-the-left/qevszl5rb
Germany, Sweden and continental countries are also much whiter and more homogenous than Australia, the UK or especially America. Also the German Greens have tarred themselves with the horrendous performance of the traffic-light coalition and their economically damaging policies. British and Australian Greens haven't had much chance to do real damage.
The Australian equivalent to AFD is One Nation, which is much more boomer-skewed (and pretty irrelevant politically). It's run by a woman called Pauline Hanson who's nearly 70 years old. They appeal most to rural white Queenslanders, the whitest parts of the whitest state in the country. Same in Britain, UKIP targeted old rural whites because there were more of them. AFD leaders are much younger, in their 40s. They appeal most in East Germany, which is the whitest part of Germany.
I think right wing politics of the anti-immigration kind has a lot to do with whiteness. Western right-wing politics in general too, to a lesser extent. In the Anglosphere the whitest demographics tend to be the old, so anti-immigration rightist parties naturally evolve to target the old. In Europe there's a broader base of potential supporters and they can target the young, so they do.
Is this actually true? In Germany in 2019, 40% of children born had at least one parent born abroad, the situation has accelerated further since then.
In the UK in 2021 77% of the population were White British or Irish. In Germany only 71% of the population have no “Migrationshintergrund”, however that 29% category does include remaining returning Ostsiedler. Nevertheless, I would assume the native percentage in Germany is around 75% or so too. 25% of Swedes had both parents born abroad or themselves immigrated, while an additional 10% had one parent born abroad and one in Sweden (which includes many people of immigrant descent). So again, Sweden is likely less than 75% native, although many migrants are Finns. Perhaps 75% of Australians are ethnically European according to most estimates.
So again, neither Germany nor Sweden retain a higher percentage of their indigenous populations than the UK. They are likely whiter due to differences in migrant country of origin, but not considerably so.
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The problem for the Tories is that they have been sitting in the driver’s seat for the past 15 years. Which makes it pretty hard to blame the housing/immigration/economic situation on the other guys. AfD doesn’t have that problem.
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I think the elephant in the living room is continental vs Anglosphere conservatism- in the Anglosphere conservatism is much more individualist/libertarian, whereas in the continent it tends to be more ‘on your own head be it if you insist on being weird’. One of those can pitch itself better to young voters looking for a leg up.
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The Finnish state broadcasting corporation just put out a story (Google Translated on link) on why young people in Netherlands are voting for Wilders. The given reason is, once again, housing.
England has an awful housing situation and has expensive real estate yet has the opposite political divide.
A few years under Starmer might have people realise Labour have no policy for fixing housing.
There is no solution to the housing issue barring radically reforming planning permission in favor of development, and that won’t happen unless COVID II hits and kills (at least) 50% of over-60s.
Well, people who want to build more housing could secede from the government. That's the obvious solution when you have a minority of voters who feel very strongly that the majority is fucking them over.
It remains to be seen to what extent voters understand that development being illegal is the problem though.
Not at all.
In my experience, the average Labour voter (and thus the average voter) thinks that the cause of the UK's economic malaise is that Tories are channelling all the money to their mates, though they cannot name or identify any specific examples of this occurring. Unless "channelling" means pensions, and "mates" means all pensioners in the country, this doesn't explain the UK's budget problems. They just see a government taking in endless amounts of tax, no more services being produced, and assume MPs are personally pocketing the difference.
The two main changes (in addition to planning reform) that a government that actually wanted to restore some kind of positive economic trajectory would have to do, namely abolishing the NHS and replacing it with European style healthcare and means-testing the state pension, are so catastrophically unpopular that they can never happen. It is what it is, it’s not like the UK is a failed state, it’s just in slow decline and has been for a long time, still a very nice place to live by any standards.
The low growth low interest rate, low increase in government spending situation we had before wasn't great, but it was sustainable. After spaffing trillions up the wall on lockdowns, however, the economic situation is no longer sustainable. You can project every NHS worship, pension worship, build-nothing worship and debt interest trend out and by the end of the century it results in demands for government spending exceeding 100% of GDP.
If Labour blows another hole in the budget with another 20% increase in healthcare spending that doesn't actually improve healthcare at all, and voters get mad at this for the same reason they were mad at the Tories for doing the same thing (even if they can't identify why it didn't work), who do they vote for next? The NHS Uber Alles Party?
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I guess if I was a Tory I would create some sort of "political moonshot plan" designed around trying to make people understand why housing is stupidly expensive (scarcity caused by laws) and how to fix it (make it legal to build stuff where it is illegal because people voted for scarcity, and easier to build stuff where the laws make it artificially difficult as a more subtle way to create scarcity). Worth a try, right?
Sunak's current political strategy is an ambitious plan known as Net Zero Seats, where he tries to secure an overwhelming defeat in the next election.
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Well, the Tories are hardly in a position to propose a solution to expensive real estate, as (as far as I've understood) their chief constituency still continues to be the sort of middle-class types who have owned their home for decades (perhaps specifically because of Thatcher and right-to-buy). If you're in such a situation, housing prices skyrocketing are a feature, not a bug. I don't know much about the Reform Party, but my impression is Tories but even more Brexit-y, and the Brexit, in addition to doing nothing about the housing problem (especially now that we know that the reduction in EU immigrants just led to replacement with non-EU immigrants with dividends), is generally massively unpopular with the youth, perhaps making a certain generation gone for good (or gone without massive efforts) for the Tories.
Also, even more speculatively, housing is an issue that can be exploited both by the left and the right, and I'd guess that the left-wing housing voters would be the ones who have managed to snag a place for rent in a major city and now want rent control to keep the rent from skyrocketing out of their reach, and the right-wing ones would be the ones who are living in a remote suburb or a dying rural region, want to move to a city, and want less immigrants so that the waiting list would eventually reach their number. Maybe the green belts mean there are less such suburban housing voters? Are the green belts even a thing any more?
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The difference is that in Europe existing parties tried desperately to keep out ‘new right’ populists almost everywhere so young people still believe things can actually change.
When the AfD joins a governing coalition and turns out - just like Meloni in Italy - to be another center-right party that in practice will do nothing about mass immigration, their supporters will probably abandon them pretty quickly. Le Pen in France is another example, she’s much less reactionary on immigration than people think (only Zemmour was the truly anti-immigration candidate). The Sweden Democrats have strongly moderated too, they’re barely to the left of the Danish Social Democrats if at all.
Meloni's party has crashed from 26% of vote in the election to... uh, 27% of vote in the polls currently.
Yes, because there is no alternative. In practice Meloni has only seen increases in mass immigration to Italy, she has betrayed those who voted for her on that platform. But that is nothing new; the Tories did very well in 2019 after a decade of overseeing rising immigration but promising lower immigration too, this is common in Western countries.
Poll numbers don’t mean that she implemented her manifesto or fulfilled her promises.
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I do kind of suspect that eventually the voters will get at least some of what they want if they continue to win elections. That may be naive of me.
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Canada is an Anglosphere exception as well. Young people are basically equally likely to vote conservative as the old.
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Is it just that they have more parties? If 22% of young people support AFD then presumably 78% of them support more left wing parties.
If this is the referred poll, 35% of youth are answering "don't know" and "won't vote", and right-leaning parties seem to generally be more popular than left-leaning ones.
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I might be biased but I feel like support for the farthest right option available always means more than support for whatever else. AfD are the guys most vilified in media. The general sentiment being that if you are voting for them there's something wrong with you.
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If it was just America vs EU I would have a simple theory that sounds right to me. American youth have always grown up in 'these' conditions, and so have antibodies and memes that allow them to ignore being mugged or having their bike stolen, in a way that the average European does not, because 'these' conditions, brought on by the refugee crisis, are a very recent change with only the youngest generation really growing up in it. The problem with this theory is the UK, but maybe the global internet means that the protective American memes are actually just protective English memes.
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Ukraine suspends consular services for military-age men in draft push
It's been interesting to watch the reaction from Western pro-Ukrainians to Ukraine's sweeping new mobilization orders. The prevailing sentiment seems to be "that's a tragedy, and obviously the draft shouldn't exist to begin with, but what can be done?" Suggesting that it would be better to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict is outside the Overton window. It's a foregone conclusion that Ukraine must fight to the last man.
There is something hellishly dystopian about fleeing to another country, possibly even across the ocean, and your country of birth is still trying to pull you back. Particularly because women are given a free pass. It's natural to feel like there should be some cost associated with the privilege of not having to be forcibly conscripted to fight against an invading army.
This raises questions about Ukraine's ability to keep their fighting force well-staffed going forward, and also questions about the morale of Ukrainian soldiers. Every conflict has some number of draft dodgers, but I wonder if there are any hard stats about whether dodgers are particularly overrepresented in this conflict? That could help adjudicate the question of whether the Ukrainian resistance is an authentic homegrown phenomenon, or if it's largely being sustained by Western pressure.
No there isn't. The idea that people have duties and obligations to their nation was considered so normal you could mistake it for the air we breathe until, like, yesterday. That women get a "free pass" from violent conflict is basic common sense, a conclusion reached by any society that isn't actively suicidal.
What there is something hellishly dystopian about, is that the very same people who demand you fulfill your duties to the nation, are working tirelessly to abolish the very idea of there being a nation to start with. That they're demanding you fight and die for the privilege of having your replacement shipped in in an Amazon package, from the country of the lowest bidders, and for your children - if you have any, and they make it through the war - to be raised with the values of Californian progressives.
In those societies, men had authority over women in return, similar to how parents protect their children but expect their children to obey them.
It's the modern notion that men are obligated to protect women, but women owe men nothing in return, that seems like a rough deal for men.
Note that modern parenting does not expect this. Obedience is not demanded and disobedience is not punished.
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Ukrainian social norms are not particularly like those of the modern west; it’s a strong candidate for the most conservative social norms of any country with a Christian majority and this is apparent from interacting with old country Ukrainians in a way it is not with old country Mexicans or poles or whatever. The idea that Ukraine does not have at least some degree of actual patriarchy to go with women being exempted from the draft is not, it appears, particularly based on fact.
I agree that Ukraine is fairly conservative at the moment, but the question is: for how long? Euromaidan was essentially Ukraine pledging allegiance to Western values. That was the cue for Russia to invade!
This can conservatively be interpreted as “Ukrainians turned away from Russia because they wanted economic growth similar to Poland after joining the EU” but it can also easily be interpreted to mean “Ukraine is now lost to the globo-homo neo-liberal monoculture of which liberal feminism is a fundamental part”. The fact that Ukraine receives the majority of its support from America, and within America from the pro-feminist Democratic party, rather than the Republican party that has the Christians and conservatives, doesn't bode well. I can easily imagine that the Ukrainian women that fled the country end up decrying the toxic masculinity of the men who chose to fight and die for their country (like American liberals would), rather than praising them for their service to their homeland (like American conservatives might).
I can link some of the new aid package grants as backup if you like. There's a lot of "$950,000 for empowering equitable feminist solar infrastructure stakeholder committees in Ukraine."
The country is going to look very different when the US is done with it. And not "richer," since most of the money will end up as kickbacks to western NGOs.
This is Ukraine. The gender studies grants will be stolen. I mean, probably a lot of the grants for normal stuff will be stolen, but Ukrainian elites are smart enough to get that the gender studies grants are ones that no one will even notice if it's all stolen because it doesn't do anything.
That's a feature not a bug. The purpose of these grants is to give money to people or causes without saying that's what we're doing.
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In case it isn't obvious, I did literally just say that both men and women should have obligations to the larger group they belong to, and only imposing obligations on one side is, indeed, a raw deal. I'm not seeing how that implies men's ownership of women, though.
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That's vague. Men had a higher legal status in some respects and in some situations, but a typical man in a typical historical society had absolutely no authority over any women, except his wife and daughters if he had any.
Well, yes. That's the point. "Men had authority over women in return, similar to how parents protect their children but expect their children to obey them."
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Men fighting and women not fighting makes sense when the social role of women is to provide abundant healthy offspring for your culture. If the women are instead opting out of making babies, moving to other countries, and not possessing in-group preference, there is no longer any moral reason to allow them to abstain from fighting. Ukraine should institute an immediate draft where women who are not pregnant or rearing children are drafted into the frontlines, and women who are raising a soldier’s child get a stipend.
Special demographic operation: drafted to bear children
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Or, if not to the frontlines, at least to auxiliary service or work in the defense industry. (Which is basically how single, childless British women were drafted during WW2.)
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Yeah right around the time that countries decided that they no longer had duties and obligations to their own citizens. The sword cuts both ways here.
Just to use my own country as an example: if we can get back to being self respecting unabashed hardcore nationalists (you know: the standard since the beginning of time), then I can understand a duty to that nation.
Well, that's what I'm driving at. The issue isn't as narrow as women not being drafted, as some people say, it's that people are being asked to take one for the team, when the same people who are asking, are deconstructing the team.
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That would be officially January 20, 1961 in the US, I believe. ("Ask not what your country can do for you....")
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So not including Israel, I suppose.
Jewish women who request a religious exemption from the draft nearly always have it granted IIRC and they’re not supposed to be in combat positions anyways.
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Well, there is an argument that what's really being fought for here is not a nation but a federation. Ukraine gives the West/the EU something to rally around, and someone (the European nation most hostile to their vision) to rally against.
So, from the perspective of non-Ukrainians, it may not be incoherent. Ukraine's right to self-determination is important because they chose to join the great melding, and freedom is worth dying for.
The Ukrainians on the ground can fight for some specific, blood-and-soil concept of Ukraine if they want.
That non-Ukrainians are cheering them on makes perfect sense because of "enemy of my enemy...", if nothing else, but acting like this is supporting "self-determination" is indeed incoherent, when you're working day and night to abolish the "self" of Ukraine. This applies to the Ukrainian elites as much es the broader West, by they way.
Letting them believe that this is what they're dying for, and standing by as they're being conscripted, when you know you won't let them keep it when the fighting is over, is precisely the part that's hellishly dystopian.
The self-determination in the current mainstream conception is always individual, though. It makes thus sense once you consider that individuals are indeed more free to live their life in the West than in Russia and self determination is supported on those grounds.
As far as I can tell, this absolutely depends on where in the West, and in what aspect you choose to exercise your individual self-determination. If what you want to do is to criticize Vladimir Putin (something that is important, and something I think everyone should be able to do without fear), the West will almost certainly be freer than Russia every time.
If you want to speak your mind on one side of certain other sensitive culture war issues, Russia is freer than England. If you want to go through life wearing religious apparel, Russia is most likely freer than France. If you want to create and run a hyper-nationalist right-wing party concerned with ethnic unity, Russia may be freer than Germany. If you want to display Soviet iconography, Russia is freer than Latvia. If you want to vote for the Communist Party, Russia is freer than Ukraine (not merely because Ukraine has suspended elections, but also because the Communist Party is banned by law in that country.)
Of note in this discussion, Russia has a conscription system, but so to do several Western states, including several in Europe.
My point here isn't "Russia Good Actually" but that Western states very often are extraordinarily repressive, at least by the standards of the United States (but not so much by the standards of the world as a whole). There's an idea that because Western nations generally have some form of democratic government they don't repress minority groups, and I don't think that's true at all.
In every region in the world the prevailing culture is 'free' to do what's normal in that culture. The question is whether you're free to behave counter culturally. Russians can do many things that are in line with that culture, but if you oppose the prevailing order (esp. Putinism) you are at risk of violence, that's why it's considered less free.
Yes. I just think that in large parts of Europe you're not free to behave counterculturally. In some places (e.g. France' laïcité policies) this is explicit.
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That's true, but the extend of the repression is simply not comparable between the West and Russia. If you are an influential person who opposes the status quo in Germany, you may have trouble getting a bank account, the media may lie about you, other parties may not want to cooperate with you, you may get expelled from the country if you are a foreign national, and the other parties may try to ban you. You can also go to jail if you express certain opinions, but this is relatively easy to avoid and doesn't hamper your political action much. This is all very bad. Conversely, if you are an influential person who opposes the status quo in Russia, you will get assassinated or put in the Gulag. Sometimes both. Further, the range of not expressible opinions is broad with unclear boundaries. Real opposition parties don't exist and elections are faked anyways.
Well, the vast majority of people aren't influential, though – I don't think measuring the impact on influential people is the best way to evaluate the extent of repression! To pull out the C.S. Lewis quote:
I think Putin is pretty clearly the robber baron here, and from what I can tell at least some of the European states (England specifically springs to mind) strike me as aspiring to be omnipotent moral busybodies. But on the other hand, the omnipotent moral busybody-ness is still aspirational, and on the other I think it's important not to underestimate how chilling pushing a few politically influential people off of buildings is on ordinary, non-influential people. So I think it is best to characterize the European state's oppression as different and bad moreso than worse or something like that (and certainly, all else being equal, literally murdering someone seems worse to me than hassling them over their bank account.)
But it doesn't seem to me that it then follows that everyone will prefer bad Western policies to bad Russian policies. I can imagine some people who would be more impeded by German's restrictive speech code than Russia's. It seems to me perfectly reasonable that some people who aren't me have a preference for the latter because of what they value – and surely a nonzero and in fact substantial amount of such people must exist in real life, choosing to side with Russia instead of fleeing Ukraine for a variety of reasons.
This may be the case, but I've always been a little puzzled at the allegations that Putin systematically fakes elections (versus pushing people off of buildings, which makes a lot of sense to me). By all accounts (including independent Western polling, from what I recall) Putin is quite popular, and should be expected to win elections. It makes me wonder if these allegations are cope from Western elites that can't understand why people would willingly vote for Putin. (The reasons for voting for Putin should be pretty obvious from looking at how Russia has rebounded since the fall of the USSR, although it is possible that he will end up undoing that progress on his Ukraine adventure.)
On the other hand, possibly there's some quirk of the Russian political system (which I am not particularly familiar with) that makes the extra bit gained fraudulently worth it, or some other risk assessment that is opaque to me.
The other option, of course, is that when people say there aren't "real elections" what they mean is that there's enough voter fraud to swing the vote considerably. This seems pretty bad, and much more plausible to me. But I think it's more precise to describe that as fraudulent than faked – maybe it seems like a weird difference, but e.g. I wouldn't argue the 1960 Presidential election in the United States was fake (which, to me, connotes a complete disconnect between the input and output of the votes) even though it was substantially fraudulent (possibly by enough to swing the election).
You may have considerably more insight into this than I do – when you say they don't have real elections, what precisely do you mean?
The research into Russian elections that's out there (percentage digit anomalies, turnout:percentages correlation anomalies) leads me in the direction of believing they're fake as in they don't count the ballots. They pick a number and say it's the result. At some voting stations there had been videos of what looked like ballot stuffing. Perhaps not in the latest election, but other ones.
Why would Putin do that if he can be confident he'd win? Extra control freaking? Local attempts to ensure the numbers look "correct"? 4D demoralization chess? Your guess is as good as mine.
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Then we're right back to conscription, and why do some people have to fight and die, while others get to enjoy a carefree life in the West.
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I am not, next question please.
I never suspected you to be one of the Western (or Ukrainian, for that matter) elites, so this doesn't come as a surprise.
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Well, assuming a Euro win, I'm sure there'll be votes. And, if people vote to become just one part of a Euro federation, who's to say it's a bad choice? They chose it, better than being Belarus.
I'm sure some Irish revolutionary who died wanting wanted a socialist state or some other vision of the country is dissatisfied in his grave. The people seem to be managing fine.
As lines go, not that bad.
Of course, that's assuming a Euro win.
If this is how things are supposed to go, on what grounds are you demanding that anyone fights and dies for your vote to say "fuck that guy, he's already dead"? Go and fight yourself, if you think it's such a great idea.
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Very strange how blank-slatist ideas just sort of vanish when any sacrifice from women is involved.
For the record, I am not a blank-slatist, think women should not serve in combat, and think they would make terrible soldiers for the most part. But if we are going to live by the rules of the blank slatist, those rules should at least be applied fairly.
Don't even have to be blank slatist here. Modern armies have multiple logistics and support personnel behind each solider, many of which are jobs that don't require strength. Women can be conscripted to work those jobs and free up men to go fight on the frontline. The fact that they are not being done so suggests an attitude of valuing female life more than male life rather than mere blank slatism.
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It is even more strange when they stay principled! There are people in the worldnews subreddit arguing that Ukraine should draft women.
The trans debate has taught me to be careful about forcing people to either abandon their position or bite bullets. They just might!
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Yes, Ukraine should absolutely draft women and put them in non front line roles. Equality comes with responsibilities, not just rights and Ukranian women should go make the same blood sacrifice their brothers are doing.
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What about.. the supply part of the army ? Driving trucks, working in logistics. Any part of that <100 km can be fatal on a bad day if a drone spots it and it's deemed a good enough target.
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At the beginning of the conflict western countries accepted Ukrainian refugees on very generous terms but did not accept men fleeing the draft from Russia. Morally this feels right but practically it's completely backwards. If you want Ukraine to win you should only accept their children and old people. You should bribe able bodied Russian men between 18 and 30 to seek asylum which would deprive Russia of both soldiers and workers.
Like said below, a huge amount of Russians were accepted. At least here, the eventual reason to close the door mostly had to do with the fears there would be infiltrators sent alongside the rest.
I remember the time when Finnish (or Estonian or Latvian...I can't remember) authorities specifically stated at the time of the Russian partial mobilization that they will not give Russian refugee men asylum. Their foreign minister (as far as I can remember) declared that "coming to Europe is a privilege, not a right". Of course, being relatively old, I remembered the rhetoric of this exact same cabal at the time of the 2015 refugee crisis. I understood that only a pathologically evil cabal can be this shameless and brazen. It's mind-boggling, really.
The EU states have tightened their general asylum policies since 2015 precisely because of that crisis. They were already doing pushbacks in Greece in 2020 as a response to asylum seeker entry wave at that time, it was big news before the Covid hit.
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Finland is a different situation from European countries generally. Russia is actively taking refugees from the middle east and elsewhere and shipping them to the Finnish border where they are provided with bicycles and told to cross. This is a deliberate attack on Finland. Their decision to close their borders to Russian asylum seekers is a response to this abuse of that system by a hostile Russian government.
How is that, in effect, different from what Serbian, Macedonian and Turkish authorities were doing in 2015?
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ahem. ahem. What means 'huge'? Ever since COVID times, EU does everything to let less Russians in, not more. And they mostly let those Russians the least likely to go to war (e.g. rich).
Okay, I shouldn't have used the word 'huge', but the point was the comment about how EU states did not "accept men fleeing the draft from Russia", which was not correct.
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I feel like we need a number here. How many?
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There was an exodus of people with wherewithal and high human capital from Russia anyway right?
Seems like a good balance that harmed Russia without causing more drama over even bigger migrants flows.
That had to result in immense social tension. Can you comment on this?
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What if Ukraine winning wasn't the goal in the first place but killing most Russians? .... Russia is big. And they can rubberstamp Russian citizenship to anyone wishing to enter EU. Wouldn't work.
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Why we would want Russians as a substantial minority? Especially if you already worries about possibly being invaded by Russia?
See how Russians in Germany organised pro-putin demonstrations. Maybe it was only small minority but enough to put off me from accepting Russians.
(also, exit controls by Ukrainians were mostly covering limiting how many man could leave)
We already have a substantial minority of Russian speaking people.
My hunch is that a policy of open arms for all (ethnic) Russian immigrants would help with the Polish reputation of being rabidly russophobic, and make it a tiny bit harder for German politicians to explain away a local conflict as something Poland pushed for and maybe even deserved, actually. And anyway, not many Russians would come, I imagine.
I suppose the potential for sabotage is a concern.
Totally not worth it, even if it would work and change opinion.
And yes, Poland is rapidly against Russian government, for good reasons. Though Russians should be fine, ale long as they are not supporting Russian government or having positive opinion about Putin/Hitler/Russian invasion etc.
But for strategic reasons having substantial Russian minority is a risk that would be nice to be without.
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I'm not saying you should necessarily, but if the plan is "accept X Slavic refugees to help beat Russia" then it's more effective if they're Russians instead of Ukrainians.
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Ukrainians do not want "peace" on Russian terms. This is very understandable. Them running away from the ground zero is also understandable, of course. But even Ukrainians who grew up outside ex-USSR are quite certain that the war must go on. So are Americans, therefore it will continue.
I reckon we'll see large scale field tests of Anduril tech before it's over. There really are issues with manpower.
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So now Reuters is stating that Russia is a "larger, better-equipped enemy"? Really? This is where we're at, after more than 2 years? They actually have the cheek to say this? Every single liberal leftist normie-oriented talking head I ever encountered kept repeating for months that the orc invasion force is completely undersized for the task, their rapist orc cannon fodder is deserting en masse and running from their positions like rabbits, they ran out of artillery shells and missiles, have no food, no gear, no body armor, no tanks, what equipment they have is all a piece of crap etc.
This is nothing new. The pro-war case has long rested on cognitive dissonance, holding these two mutual incompatible views at the same time:
Russia is so weak that one more round of $X billion will win the war for Ukraine.
Russia is so strong that if we don't stop them here, they'll take Estonia, Poland, Germany!
Yeah...lol. The current narrative, as far as I can tell, is that the next target of the orcs is Moldova of all places, because reasons.
I believe the reasons are "Moldova is dealing with a Russia-supported separatist region, which makes it a prime target for action."
Somehow invading Moldova from a separatist region which is geographically akin to a leather belt in appearance, is landlocked, and bordered by Ukraine on the other side would be the mother of all pro-gamer moves, I guess.
Once they have Ukraine that's not a problem any more.
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Moldova is small corrupt weak country not in NATO, already partially invaded by Russia. It is buffered by Ukraine. If Ukraine or at least relevant part would be occupied by Russia - then Moldova is a very likely target.
The distance between Kherson and the Moldovan-Ukrainian border is more than 300 km though. A very likely target that is not.
It's hardly realistic to assume that any Russian offensive in the future will even reach the Moldovan border.
Interesting, I would expect full collapse of Ukraine to be at least possible - even if not the most likely outcome.
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There are certainly hundreds if not thousands of Russians and pro-Russians on social media talking continously about how Russia will any day now take Odes(s)a (I don't fully understand why Russians are so obsessed with this particular city), which would put them within a striking distance of the Moldovan border.
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It's not 'the current narrative'. It's been the truth that Russia tries to influence Moldova for many years now. Specifically recently, Moldova banned a pro-Russia political party for corruption, and the people from that party have just now reformed a new group funded by the Kremlin.
Probably your mistake is thinking that only troops on the ground matter, when in reality Russia's most potent strength is their disinformation and influence capabilities.
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No, it doesn’t.
I’ve laid out the case for deterrence before. That only requires Russia to think they can succeed quickly and easily. Correcting their estimate is valuable.
In the world where we refused to supply any of them, Russia could exert power over its NATO neighbors.
I agree on the theory of deterrence. I am willing to sacrifice 1,000-10,000 Ukrainians to teach Russia a lesson.
How many are you willing to sacrifice?
In the abstract sense of complicity that you’re using? Quite a few. So long as they keep doing it, I’m willing to be an enabler.
Yes, I do think conscription pushes the balance in favor of surrender. No, I don’t think it’s obvious that the modal Ukrainian soldier no longer wishes to risk death.
I think it's quite obvious that you wouldn't need forced draft otherwise. People just don't want to horrifically die in the trenches. That's why Russia had to also resort to forceful mobilization even with much larger pool of poor people who can bribed to do so.
Conscription is evidence against, but it's not the whole story.
People don't want to do military service even when they agree with the cause and want someone to stay in the fight. Ukraine had an army of 40% conscripts back in 2013 with no trenches in sight.
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"Surrender" implies something like Hirohito in 1945. This doesn't represent the current reality of the conflict. No one is talking about surrender. Some people are talking about peace, which means a negotiated peace. It means Russia would get some of what they want, but certainly not all.
Why? They’re winning for now and Putin’s position is secure. The Russians are in a position to choose not to settle for anything less than maximalist aims. If the Ukrainians balk, Putin can simply dither for six months and the situation will be worse.
We do not know the West limits on escalation. We saw the US dither on aid until it felt like Ukraine was losing and Putin would eventually break thru and maybe take Kiev again.
If Ukranian lines got to a point of collapse the West would still have options. An imminent breakthrough does put things like Anduril tech as suggested in play, Poland entering with a superior fresh army, trad American AirPower. The west may not care much about Ukranian lives, but the closer it comes to threatening core Europe which Poland may be changes a lot of calculus.
The Biden administration has clearly been anti-winning the war but when we hit losing the war points things get done. It’s almost like inflation where 3% inflation the fed is suppose to hike and 1% inflation they are suppose to ease but the 2% line is keeping the war in no one winning position.
If Ukraine cared about their men’s lives they may be wise to lose a few battles at minimal causalities.
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How are you personally sacrificing Ukrainians?
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Have you asked the Ukrainians how many they're willing to sacrifice?
Which ones should I ask? The rebels in the east? The regime in Kiev? The more Russian speaking groups in the south and east? The more Ukrainian speaking groups in the west? The ones that have fled to Russia? The ones that have fled to Western Europe?
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Too many. The political goals of the Ukrainian government are not worth the deaths of hundreds of thousands of conscripts who were rounded up against their will.
Is conscription always wrong? I wouldn't argue that. It's wrong in this case because the scale of the suffering is too high for the diminishing chances of victory. How many Ukrainians would you be willing to sacrifice? I've given my answer, and the Ukrainian government won't return my emails.
If I were Zelensky, I would immediately call for a cease fire and ask the U.S. to broker a peace deal. I would be willing to give up the territory already lost in exchange for peace. If Putin says no, I'd keep fighting. That's what I would do. But I'd ask the pro-war faction to be equally candid about their goals and what they are willing to give up to achieve them.
Why keep fighting and not offer more territory? Putin, in any case, seems to believe he doesn't need to settle yet.
You position yourself against the "pro-war". Presumably you'd name yourself pro-peace. How high do you price peace that isn't merely full capitulation?
Because, like most rationalists, I believe that calculating risk and reward has actual value. This, but unironically:
https://www.theonion.com/no-blood-for-oil-vs-exactly-how-much-oil-are-we-talkin-1819594284
If your only condition for ending a conflict is absolute victory, then yes, you are in fact "pro-war". I am against that. But I am willing to tolerate some limited war in order to achieve limited goals so long as the goals are justified by the costs (which they almost never are).
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What about "Russia is so strong that if we don't stop them here, they may be able to take Moldovia/Estonia! But if delay them and rebuild European armies then risk becomes nonexisting. Also, maybe they will be even kicked out of Ukraine that has not collapsed yet?" for pessimistic version? Without cognitive dissonance?
Just by the by - do you know if this conflict has seen an increase in European military preparedness? That would be a logical response, but I haven't really heard about it.
Overall European countries have increased defense spending by about 20% since the Ukraine invasion, but this is heavily weighted to countries near the Russian frontier like Finland and Poland that have seen budgets increase by 50-75%. The Baltics have each tripled or quadrupled spending. Britain and Germany increased spending by 7-9% YoY. The Germans are still only spending 1.5% of GDP on defense despite promising to go up to 2% but are facing issues with their constitution which has (effectively) a balanced budget clause that limits large rises in government spending.
However, given the main issue is munitions - which are not the primary cost center for Western militaries (which is salaries and pensions, and to a lesser extent buying expensive hardware like ships and fighter jets) - the question is more about whether munitions factories can be rapidly scaled up. That’s as much a logistics question as a financial one.
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Several countries went on large equipment buying spree, for example Poland ordered massive amount of wide range of materiel. Delivery of some already started.
I will need to check at some point has anyone thought about building up munition supply and storage.
In general military spending on equipment significantly increased, though mostly for countries on NATO border.
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These statements aren't strictly contradictory, although both are probably stronger claims than I would make. One lesson I've only recently begun to understand about WWII is that, at the scale of warfare required, seizing territory and, by extension, it's populace, gives fodder for larger armies.
This doesn't come up for discussion of American (or even Commonwealth, really) involvement in the war because the Western Allies weren't conscripting from recently-annexed territory, but the German army was much larger for having conscripted Czech and Austrian soldiers. It's not inconceivable that the same units currently armed by the West could be, after a surrender, rearmed by the Russians and marched west.
The only reason I don't find that situation hugely likely is that I'm pretty sure that most anyone can see that, in the case of a true hot war in Europe that NATO was involved in, the result would be a pretty decisive curb stomping on the scale of Desert Storm. Which is, to my mind, a huge argument for maintaining that technical and armament superiority, and also for Europe to step up their commitment to those alliances.
Uh, Ukrainian soldiers are much less interested in fighting for Russia than ethnic Germans in Alsace and Sudetenland were in fighting for Germany.
There is a long history of fighting with questionably-motivated conscripts. I'm not convinced individual interest really matters: they seem to either get thrown to the worst fighting on the front, or to quiet rear defensive positions. On the other hand, as far as I'm aware, Vichy French and Norwegian troops didn't see much combat action on behalf of the Axis during WWII.
I think you're right that after two years of brutal fighting, there is too much animosity for that to work today, but early in the current invasion Russia was fielding all the troops they could conscript from separatist regions, so it's not completely out of the question, I think.
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Yes, it is inconceivable. There is no where for Russia to go. Look at a map of NATO. That's why people are talking about Moldova. It's literally the only European country Russia could reasonably attack.
Increasing the size of the Russian army by 10% with some Ukrainian conscripts who hate you does not move the needle.
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has anyone serious claimed that? Has Biden ever described for example some round as final and sufficient to win the war?
Perhaps not this stimulus or that stimulus, but the implication is that $X will win the war (for some value of $X).
Otherwise, we are just giving money to prolong the conflict, killing hundreds of thousands of young men in the process. And that would be truly evil.
I don't think, in a conflict like this, there's likely to be a binary, clear cut win/lose situation. Western nations providing aid to Ukraine does two things:
So even if Ukraine "loses" it's possible that military aid to it causes a better outcome than the outcome with no military aid. Notably, the second point holds regardless of the ultimate outcome of the war.
In fairness, it seems possible that things could backfire on one or both of these points (e.g. over the long run Western aid hardens Russian support for the war, driving them to successfully pursue more expansive war aims) – one historical example of this might be England during the US Civil War – but generally speaking "more military power" is traditionally thought to improve ability to negotiate a favorable conclusion to a conflict, even if said conclusion is not entirely satisfactory.
I'll add a third point, that Ukraine holding ground is beneficial to NATO countries in the Black Sea. If Russia had pushed to Odessa early in the war, it would have had significant naval control that would heavily impact counties like Romania and Bulgaria. Instead, with Western support, Ukraine has destroyed (last I heard) about a third of the Russian Black Sea fleet. In fact, Ukraine is shipping more grain now than before the war, despite the 'grain deal' being ended, because Russia can no longer affect trade in the Black Sea. This is a major benefit to Eastern Europe as a whole.
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That is true, on assumption that converting this to weapons will be possible. This war is more equipment-constrained than manpower-constrained.
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Really? I have seen many many "Russia outguns Ukraine" articles over time. Also who the heck claims that Russia has no tanks and run out of artillery shells? Where are you getting your "normies"? Even dumber parts of reddit are not so dumb.
This one I heard mostly from pro-Russia trolls before full-scale war started in their "Russia has no plans to invade Ukraine full scale and no Russian soldiers attacked Ukraine" mode.
The invasion force really was undersized for the task, and predictably failed to capture Kiev or much of anything. This is why we're still talking about this 2+ years later. Few people not very high on Kremlin supply expected such a strategy to work, and it really didn't.
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The common narrative on all NAFO-adjacent and NAFO-sympathizing mainstream news outlets was that the Russians will not be able to replace their losses in armor, will run out of cruise missiles, their fortified positions will be pounded into dust because they're a paper bear, they're so dumb that they thought they can overrun Ukraine in 3 days with fewer than 200 thousand soldiers etc.
If you are getting normies from such groups you really need to recheck your normie supply. Typical person was not engaging in this.
I have not really seen it, people making this type of stupid prediction are unaware that fortified positions exist.
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These sorts of articles were all over the place early in the war even in MSM as propaganda to fool westerners into providing aid.
"US official says Russia has probably lost half its tanks, used majority of precision-guided weapons in Ukraine" is hardly "no tanks" or "ran out of artillery shells and missiles"
0% is not the same as 50%
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When has Russia not had a larger army in this conflict?
Their armed forces in their entirety are bigger. The forces they can realistically deploy in the Ukraine aren't.
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Basically for it's entirety. The Russian forces being smaller than Ukranian ones and spread out across very large front was the main reason why 24 February invasion was an idiotic decision. Partial mobilization somewhat helped but Ukraine continues to hold numbers advantage.
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Any chance these drooling morons exist almost entirely in your imagination and almost not at all in real life?
I know what I've seen and heard. They claimed with absolute certainty that Ukraine will win decisively in a relatively short time.
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The big issue for Ukraine isn't bodies to fill the military it is demographics and qualified people.
Soldiers take almost a year to train and cost a fortune to train. It is far more demanding to train a soldier than most college degrees. Militaries require officers, NCOs and people with specialized skills that require far more training. During peak Ukraine hype we were sold the idea that Ukrainians could be trained to do mechanized assaults in half the time it takes a western soldier to do basic training. The idea that Ukrainians can be trained extremely quickly died with the Ukrainian counter offensive.
Ukraine's doctrine has been to pool its veterans and experienced soldiers into elite brigades used for offensive operations and for stopping Russian attacks, while territorial defence forces man most of the trenches. These elite forces are heavily attrited, have gotten far less rest than they need and are worn out. Replacing them is going to require vast resources. The Ukrainian military is still largely using soviet equipment for which they can't get new parts. Replacing their gear with western equipment requires much more training. The median age in the Ukrainian army is 43 and these men have had hard lives. Even if the war ended half their soldiers would be over 50 within 7 years. Ukraine needs to train hundreds of thousands of men. This is not easy in the slightest and will be an enormous drain on European militaries that are not scaled for mass training of soldiers. Most western European countries only train a few thousand soldiers a year. Even Japan only trains 10 000 per year. Ukraine has over 3200 confirmed dead commissioned officers. The number of seriously wounded is probably 2-3 times that. Replacing those officers is expensive and time consuming.
The other issue is that most men aren't suitable for the military and those who are are often the most economically productive men. Removing them from the workforce hurts and the draft encourages them to leave and never come back.
Russia's war aim is to ensure that Ukraine can never join NATO. They can ensure that by having a war against Ukraine if Ukraine tries to join. Militarily wrecking Ukraine and creating a major incentive for Ukrainians to leave are ways Russia can keep Ukraine militarily weak.
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If another country issues these guys passports and baptizes them as citizens, would that be a route around this?
This one hits close to home. I have a Ukrainian friend here with his wife. He left because he doesn't want to die in a ditch. He's a nice, young guy (about my age). Last week I had a discussion with him encouraging him to have kids.
The idea that he could get pulled back to his country to go die, especially the idea that our government would help with this, is horrific to me.
Maybe an option would be: cross the Mexican border, come back as a "refugee" without a passport?
There are several million Ukrainians in Russia and around three million Ukrainians have moved to Russia during this war. That isn't people who live on captured territory but people who voluntarily moved to Russia since February 2022. Russia risked losing 10 million Russians by having them live as a minority in a hostile Ukraine and have them slowly integrate in Ukrainian culture. A few million of them have moved to Russia, a few million live in the same place but their home is now controlled by Russia.
Ukraine is losing 4 million or so people in the Donbass, Crimea etc, 3 million moving to Russia and 5 million moving to the EU. This is a country with a birth rate on par with South Korea.
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Unless the western countries entirely abandon any and all liberal pretence in the coming months, I can’t imagine that this will result in anything other than making it easier for Ukrainian men abroad to claim permanent asylum. Becoming stateless because your state refuses to give you a passport usually strengthens your asylum case quite a bit
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I fully sympathize with Ukrainian exiles, there’s no way I’d have stuck around if I was Ukrainian.
That said, I also sympathize with Zelensky, who is largely doing what his people seem to want him to. If the US or Western European countries were also defending in total war against a larger invasion force I’d imagine similar measures would be implemented here. We should be grateful that is unlikely for now.
I also think that Putin knows he’s winning and is thus unlikely to agree to a peace that is anything less than catastrophically punitive and for which Zelensky would be killed or exiled and blamed for generations by future Ukrainian nationalists.
And I would miraculously become transgender and leave. Who among us would stay and fight, really?
And thus falls
RomeKabul.We should have polls here; this would make a great question.
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I would at least consider staying and fighting. Just because I don't like it when people start wars in order to annex land or entire countries.
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I find it interesting in another direction, such as why you believe it's a foregone conclusion, as opposed to a dismissed propaganda narrative that outran its legs.
We have numbers to use, and the war attrition of the Ukraine War is nowhere near that Ukraine is being attrited to such a degree in population terms. The early-war narratives to that effect required the inclusion of the capture of major demographic centers in the east during the early war and projected that forward, but in the time sense Russia hasn't captured the demographics previously associated with the territory, and the combat attrition rates- even factoring in some of the more incredible Russian claims- are nowhere near enough to warrant a demographic-level narrative. Ukraine may be struggling with the manpower to resist the russian manpower, but that's a balance of scale and desire to mobilize available population, not running out of population.
This also turns on the motte-and-bailey of what negotiating a peaceful end of the conflict entails. The Russian terms from the start of the conflict- including the narrative that the West forced Ukraine to cancel a near-deal- have consistently been terms that were, shall we say, not conducive to a negotiated peaceful end of the conflict, as opposed to obvious set-ups for a fourth continuation war to greater Russian advantage by demanding dismantling of Ukraine's means to resist any future invasion and providing Russia a veto over any external support in case of a future Russian invasion. The Russians have been rather consistent on that front, and have further expanded their claims since, and so it generally falls on the advocates of a negotiating a peaceful end of the conflict as to argue as to how the Russian position is compatible with a negotiated peaceful end of the conflict, which itself was the third unprovoked continuation war in a decade.
Why would you feel it's hellishly dystopian, when it's a positively banal part of the international system and has been for longer than you've been alive? As long as you claim citizenship of Country X, you have reciprocal obligations with country X, and while countries Y-Z often don't go along in enforcing other countries laws regarding those obligations, they often practice similar practices. This ranges from conscription- I've personally met Koreans who left Ivy League colleges to serve their service time- to taxation abroad, to extradition treaties, and so on.
Conscription is not some international abnormality, and neither is it being gender-restricted. If a normality comes off as dystopian, that implies more about the standard of dystopia than the nature.
If you lack numbers of draft dodgers to make any judgement on relative numbers, why would you believe the conflict is being sustained by Western pressure as opposed to authentic homegrown opinion? Especially when you already have access to now years of Ukrainian opinion polling by a multitude of actors that go beyond Ukrainian capacity to control?
It's not exactly impossible to do polling in Ukraine without Ukrainian government approval, and the polling efforts that survive scrutiny are generally consistent. Even on conscription, it's not particularly remarkable: individuals don't necessarily like being conscripted, but can accept/support conscriptions as a legitimate and even necessary component of defense.
I'm more curious as to what you think the alleged Western pressure on the Ukrainians to keep fighting is. Typically that refers to the early 2022 breakdown of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, which actors claimed were 'close to agreement', but reporting on actual contents of the negotiations include revealed rather significant gaps in position like-
And included Russians provisions like-
I don't think anyone has seriously argued that refusing terms like these requires external pressure, given the rather logical implications for one's prospects for a peaceful future if the current invader insists that they must agree to any international assistance to you in case they invade again after you dismantle your means to resist.
Given that the current Ukraine War is at least the third continuation war in a decade after the occupation of Crimea (the first continuation war being the NovaRussia campaign that was intended to start a mass uprising, and the second continuation war being the conventional Russian military intervention to preserve the enclaves as separatists when the NovaRussia campaign failed), peace talks really do have to address the prospects of future wars, and not treat the current war as one in isolation. Especially as multiple Russian claims as to why their invasion was justified would retain for future use would not be resolved in any near-term ceasefire.
You're missing that part that all states conspired to make everyone have citizenship and do not allow to exit citizenship unless person has another citizenship (or guaranteed to obtain it). Exiting citizenship often is difficult thing.
So it's not a choice
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Do you have links to this polling? If it shows a majority of draft-age Ukrainian men support conscription as implemented, it would probably shift my view of the conflict.
While there's nothing I know of that can't be dismissed if you really want to, this is probably the best / most current public polling that covers this subject.
This is Feb 24 polling conducted by CISR - the Center for Insights in Survey Research- which is the research arm of IRI - the International Republican Institute - which is a non-profit funded by the US government- with this specific research funded by USAID. That does mean it's US-govt funded research, but IRI isn't a US government organ as such- it's actually part of a pair of organizations, with its counterpart being the NDI (National Democratic Institute)- with the board members of each respective organization being drawn from the American Republican and Democratic parties respectively, making it a govt-funded partisan research organization of sorts. That makes it close enough to the US government if you want to insist anything that US government funding touches is propaganda, but it's (a) Republican party propaganda during a period where Republicans as an institution are far from aligned with the US government position on Ukraine, and (b) that's not reason enough to reject all data. The IRI (and similar institutions) may have interests, but they also have an interest in understanding the data to support further policy creation, and aren't exactly organs who present data to drive public policy. Pick fights over the data methodology if you'd like...
...which is described on page 2, with demographics on page 3. Computer-assisted telephonic survey, n = 2000 Ukrainians, nearly 900 men vs 1100 women, response rate of 14% until they got the 2000, etc. etc. Responses are broken down by gender / age, but also by regional breakdowns, but not necessarily gender & age breakdowns. (You'd probably need to request access to the research data directly for more nuanced breakdowns.)
In other words, typical telephonic polling with typical telephonic polling strengths and weaknesses. Sufficiently motivated people will find excuses to reject it, but in lieu of alternative more authoritative polling data, it can serve as a ballpark.
Now for what you're most interested in, go to page 22, 'How do you feel about the current level of mobilization in Ukraine'. (Remember that conscription is functionally synonymous with mobilization as mobilization is just the euphism treadmill for the process provided by conscription.)
It doesn't show that a majority of Ukrainian men support conscription as implemented- because it actually shows a plurality of Ukrainian men in Ukraine believe there isn't enough conscription (36%) with almost as many believing the current level of mobilization is just right (31%), while only 17% of men believe there is too much.
While there's a notable age bias implicit in that- with about 30% of under-30s (male and female) believing there is too much mobilization compared to 10% of the too-old-for-conscription 60+ pops- even the under-30 bracket is decisively in favor of as-much-or-more mobilization (65% to 29%). The next 3 conscriptable brackets are even more decisively in favor of the current level of mobilization or more, with 'we need more mobilization' increasing as you go up the age bracket, and 'too much mobilization' decreasing as you go older as well.
Does this mean that a majority of Ukrainian men support conscription 'as implemented'? Well, 50-stalins criticism is still criticism. And someone interested in cross-linguistic semantic quibling, there's things you can quibble on.
But there's also an interesting question that was posed, shown on slide 51, which is rather relevant to the conscription-is-unpopular / the most important thing is Ukrainian lives / the West is forcing Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian arguments.
Q: If Ukraine is only able to accomplish one of the following objectives, which do you think is the most important for our country to achieve? "Freezing the conflict at the present lines to stop the loss of more Ukrainian lives" is... 19%.
Which is, admittedly, ahead of full EU membership (11%), but also behind full NATO membership (23%), and less than half (39%) of the dominant answer of what Ukrainians think is the most important objective.
Full-scale war to recapture all lands included in the 1991 borders.
They don't think that's going to be quick or easy, either.
People who think the Ukrainians are war-weary reluctants forced to fight against their will by western powers are woefully unaware. The Ukraine War is a war of nationalism, and the Ukrainians are nuts.
Thanks for the link. And, yes, it did shift my views toward more Ukraine support (never anti-Ukraine, but more concerned with male wellbeing and disposability). As much as I'd love a poll that got into the nitty gritty of what exactly Ukrainian men think of current conscription/mobilization policy, that seems unlikely, and this poll does suggest they're broadly supportive of it, at least in principle, and I can't think of any quibbles that'd reverse the results.
Push comes to shove, most men in the suck accept their duty, if only because adrenaline and testosterone are a helluva drug. Instinctively all men who have done team sports or other forms of group bonding know this, and acculturated messaging about duty and honor go a long way to motivate what looks like irrationality.
What men don't like is dying for nothing, or worse dying for someone elses interest directly against our own. Hence the claims that Ukrainians are dying for NATO or USMC was dying for Haliburton - those claims, if believed, can crush morale. We saw Afghanistan fall when everyone felt that Kabul did not care for even the Pashtuns much less the Hazara or Tajiks, and we saw the Iraqi army all abandon Mosul because dying for Sunnis isn't on the cards for the Shia. Even now we see Palestinians, Lebanese and Houthis continuing to die for Islam/Anti-Israel, even though Iran has thoroughly asspuppeted them. So long as the men believe in the cause, it doesn't matter if someone else actually is asspuppeting them.
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You are welcome. And if you are interested in that, there's no reason you can't just reach out directly to IRI and ask more about this poll / how to contact the pollsters / let them know you have follow on questions and why.
It wouldn't be an imposition to them, and in fact they'd probably be thrilled to let you know if they had anything else. Researcher groups like that often love when their research is noticed, and policy-support research in particular loves to know when research they provided can change an opinion. You questions / testimony and reasoning why (concern of male disposability) and what assauged your concern (awareness of Ukrainian views on the subject) would be the sort of thing that might tailor future questions and such.
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edited for punctuation
I wish to add that Ukrainian troop complaints about mobilization are more 'let me fight well' instead of 'I do not wish to fight'. Ukrainian soldiers in the brigades constantly bitch about not having enough ammo or artillery or mines to fight in the trenches, instead of bitching about why they are forced to fight. Motivation is a more germane concern among the muscovites, which is why their regeneration focuses on central asians and token impressed foreigners instead of the westernized slav elite.
This point in particular
really substantiates the thesis that Ukrainians have given up on peaceful coexistence with Russia, and the only thing that would have polled higher is 'full scale war, with the west directly bombing every russian on our soil.'
There is no positive sentiment left in Ukraine for the Russians and the Ukrainians already view themselves in a full scale war. One of the only thing stopping further mass mobilization is limitation in materiel and training capability, rooted in competence and capacity issues. This obviously still doesn't mean Ukraine is going to or will actually win with mobilization, but the narrative internally is 'we want to kill Russians' instead of 1918 era 'our leaders send us to die for nothing and we shall rise against the capitol'.
Of course, there are also Russian complaints in the "let me fight well" territory.
One significant difference I observe is the ethnonationalist motivation in particular. It appears that nationalists are usually the most fervent fighters. Ukrainian nationalists think they're in control of the country. Hell, even Russians are saying that Ukrainian nationalists are in control of the country [and it's bad]. Russian nationalists, the explicit ones, are split between "all citizens are Russians, don't you dare to rock the boat" and "why should we fight for this country while Chechens are taking our money and Tajiks are taking our jobs?".
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I am confused by the belief many here express that Ukrainians are being hoodwinked into fighting against their own interests and better judgement, considering the number of examples we have of the West trying to convince a people to fight with the full force of economic and political propaganda and failing spectacularly e.g. Bay of Pigs, South Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela. There's simply no way you can sustain a high-intensity war for over two years on smoke and mirrors if the population is ambivalent, and the moment they become so the front lines will collapse like those of Tsarist Russia or Imperial Germany in 1917-18.
As to your point about the draft, it seems to me like it would only be dystopian if you see the entire concept of nation-states as such. You don't stop being a citizen of your country when you go overseas; they can still make you pay taxes, have you extradited to stand trial for crimes, and compel you in any number of ways. The suspension of consular services for a month is a relatively mild measure as far as these things go, and will probably just create a small undocumented population in several countries. If the Polish or Estonian governments ever start grabbing Ukrainian refugees off the streets and deporting them to the front lines in unmarked vans at Zelensky's request (and if I were a refugee who didn't want to fight, I would definitely want to stay out of countries that hate Russia so much that this is even conceivable), I'll agree that they've gone too far.
Imperial Germany suffered enormously before capitulating. In the winter of 1916-1917 about half a million people starved to death in the 'Turnip Winter' so-named because that's all they had to eat. The food distribution system broke down completely. By 1918 they were in a famine. Children were running around breaking into warehouses trying to get food and dying in the tens of thousands. This is one of the reasons the Nazis were so fixated on securing agricultural land later on.
In tsarist Russia "Working-class women in St. Petersburg reportedly spent about forty hours a week in food lines, begging, turning to prostitution or crime, tearing down wooden fences to keep stoves heated for warmth, and continued to resent the rich."
It takes a lot of pain to bring down a country in a major conventional war. There's a certain level of stubbornness and sunk-cost that seeps in after serious blood has been spilled and national pride is on the line. Attitudes harden. Ukraine has not experienced anything like the mass suffering of a world war. There is no mass starvation in Ukraine, no massive inflation (7% is not great but it's not 90%), no social breakdown. Lessons have been learnt since the world wars and Ukraine enjoys the support of wealthy backers.
Nevertheless there are signs of serious problems - the videos of men being forcibly dragged into vehicles by recruiters, desertion and so on. What is that if not ambivalence/non-cooperation? States can do a lot with ambivalent but not-yet-rebellious people.
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I think this belief is, for many, simply downstream from the idea that Ukrainians are just funny-speaking Russians, that the natural course of action for them would have just been to join the Motherland at a drop of a hat and the fact that this didn't happen is an aberration that needs an external explanation, ie. the evil West brainwashing them to fight. The references to videos of stragglers etc. are just marshalled to provide evidence for this preaccepted thesis.
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So I guess these measures are designed to drive these men in particular to apply for asylum in their respective host country, with the expectation on the part of Ukrainian authorities that such applications will be rejected. After all, I can hardly imagine that such measures in themselves will be sufficient to make them return home and sign up for the draft. Am I correct?
Who is denying Ukrainian asylum applications now in the West? Most Anglo countries still accept them almost without exception. Refugee programs have in some cases ceased, but that’s different to asylum seeking (which occurs once in country).
A Ukrainian denied asylum would almost certainly win their case before the ECHR anyway.
Currently nobody, I suppose, but I imagine the Ukrainian government is eager to force their hand.
It seems a major complication that nobody wants fewer Ukrainians in their country.
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Negotiating peace is certainly not outside the Overton window especially if that peace is essentially Korea along the current military lines. My guess is Biden would accept those terms immediately, the GOP would cancel all military aid under those terms.
Peace that is Russia annexing all of Ukraine with Putin as the President over the region I guess is but no one from either side even discusses that.
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