VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
No bio...
User ID: 373
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
Certainly NATO was stronger before Trump's election in 2024 than it was in 2020. That's really not a very high bar since Trump was trashing NATO in his first term too. The fact you can't even begin to see how this could be possible is indicative that you're either using some weird scorecard in terms of "stronger", or something else similarly strange is going on. I don't think I've seen any serious piece of analysis claim NATO got weaker from Trump --> Biden.
Further, if you don't think negative partisanship is the absolute most critical factor driving basically every voter in the US for the past decade, you're quite wrong. This applies to both sides for what it's worth. There are a few principled ideologues out there, but the id of both sides' voterbase looks a lot closer to Catturd's twitter feed than it does to a coherent list of policy positions.
You're right that it seems we're probably too far apart to have a productive discussion.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
An alliance with Russia would be basically impossible if they were gobbling up democratic European states, and even if the US ignored what they were doing I don't see why they wouldn't just become hostile to the US again once they reassembled the borders of the USSR. Putin's Russia is stilly highly ideologically opposed to the US just like the USSR was, but instead of Communism it has negativity towards democracy and hallucinating that the CIA has a 100% effective anti-Russian brainwashing technique in the form of "color revolutions".
Even just having Poland on the US's side is a great deal because they're a fantastic foil for tinpot dictators. It's not inaccurate to think that Ukrainians looked at how Poland was doing, and how Belarus was doing, and said "I think I'll take some of the former, thanks".
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
NATO was stronger because of the Ukraine war, but now its weaker because Trump is trashing both the organization and US allies. Simple.
A larger NATO spreads the cost of defense over more countries. It also gives the US the diplomatic leverage to do stuff like enact the chips ban on China, for which critical machine tools were manufactured only in Europe.
Sending weapons to Ukraine has give the US some ability to rebuild its shattered defense-industrial base, trading out old stock leftover from the Cold War for more modern kit. The notion that the US has "emptied its armory" is egregiously wrong. The US apparently never had the political will to part with enough stuff for Ukraine to get a decisive advantage. The notion that the US doesn't have any tanks or planes or ships because they were all sent to Ukraine is just goofy.
On the money aspect, the US has sent about $110 billion to Ukraine over 3 years, although even that number is probably too high since much of the value "lost" was due for disposal anyways and is being replaced by more modern kit as I said above. Even taking the $110 billion number at face value, it's still tiny in comparison to America's other priorities. It's like a week's worth of spending on SS + Medicare, the two largest welfare programs for old people. The Afghan war wasted $2,300 billion on a war that was genuinely unwinnable (and that Trump was more than happy to can-kick on for the 4 years of his first term) since we were never going to be up for the ethnic cleansings required to bring long-term stability.
american conservatives don't "hate" Ukraine and NATO because of liberals, they want US wealth to be focused on the US
This makes me wonder if you genuinely interact with American conservatives. Maybe some small fraction are genuinely principled, hardcore isolationists, but I highly doubt that's the genuine plurality position. As always, Catturd serves as a good barometer of the modern US conservative movement. He uses the monetary cost as an argument, sure, but he goes much further in seeming to genuinely hate Zelensky. There's also this weird quirk where the monetary cost only matters in relation to Ukraine, but it mattered a lot less when it came to getting out of Afghanistan early, or for aid to Israel, etc.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
To the common layperson, LLMs haven't really advanced that much since 2022 or 2023. Sure, each new model might have fancy graphs that show it's better than ever before, but it always feels disappointingly iterative when normal people get their hands on it. The only few big leaps have come from infrastructure surrounding it that lets us use it in novel ways, e.g. Deep Research is pretty good from what I've heard. DR isn't revolutionary or anything, it just takes what we already had, gives it more processor cycles, and has it produce something with lots of citations which is genuinely useful for some things. I expect further developments will be like that. It's like how electricity was sort of a flop in industry until we figured out things like the assembly line.
"AGI" is basically a meme at this point. Nobody can agree on a definition, so we might have had it back in 2022... or we might never have it, based on whatever definition you use. It's a silly point of reference.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
This war was great for NATO no matter what. Whether Trump destroys NATO himself is a different matter that's more related to domestic negative partisanship. The war has:
- Added Finland and Sweden to the alliance.
- Shown the world Russia's true colors, that it was always interested in dominating Eastern Europe.
- Driven a likely permanent cultural wedge between Russia and Ukraine, regardless of the ultimate outcome.
- Given the West a chance to rebuild their shattered defense-industrial base for likely future conflicts.
- Gave the opportunity for NATO to be rallied around the US (at least when Biden was president), and direct more ire towards China.
etc.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
Did you read Kulak's post? His general idea is that allowing for discussion just legitimizes evil people who think things like that it's OK for people to rape white girls.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
Kulak is a particularly blatant example but plenty of people here are working off the same template.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
NATO's decline is almost entirely unrelated to Ukraine, and if anything Ukraine helped to rally + expand NATO. It got Sweden and Finland to join, remember?
NATO's decline, or really America's waning interest, is mostly caused by a combination of China's rise and negative partisanship where modern US conservatives hate Ukraine mostly just because US liberals like it.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
Adjust those spending figures to PPP and they become quite a bit closer. Europe is spending lots of nominal dollars (or Euros), but those dollars don't go nearly as far in Europe as they would in Russia.
The problem is that European spending is being allocated wastefully and that European strategy is muddled. Raising defence spending won't fix anything, what's needed is a plan to achieve specific capabilities and integrate them into a broader political strategy.
This is certainly another piece of the puzzle. If we could wave a magic wand and make Europe a single country like the USA, then a lot of these issues would be fixed. Reducing duplication and having a clear strategy would be great force-multipliers, but in absence of someone having that magic wand, increasing spending is a much more plausible solution in the short and medium term.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
There were attempts to build better relations between Russia and the West during the 90s, then briefly during Obama's first term. They never came to much because Russia never gave up the dream of dominating Eastern Europe.
Refusing to grant NATO entry to countries east of Berlin would have just made them easy targets when Russia regained its strength. The Baltics would almost certainly have been either invaded, or pressured into becoming defacto Russian client states by this point.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
It's a good primer on why Russia is so obsessed with pushing as far west as possible, and therefore why friendly relations are unlikely with any nations holding power in Eastern Europe.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
There was little chance reproachment would have ever worked. Russia has always really, really wanted to dominate Eastern Europe.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
This assumes Russia wouldn't have just invaded those countries anyways, which was almost guaranteed to happen. Russia right now is like Germany after WW1: a revanchist power that's seething in resentment. It hasn't had its face smashed against the concrete like WW2 Germany or Japan did in a way that would convince the populace that war wasn't the answer. The only options were to actually do the smashing, which would be very problematic given its nuclear stockpiles, or to contain it. For the containment strategy, abandoning Eastern Europe would have just drawn the line in a less advantageous position.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
NATO expansion to the east was a great move in hindsight.
Russia was always going to be hostile to any nation that tried to project power east of Berlin, so the only options were to either kick Russia while it was down or stand by and let it reassemble the borders of the USSR, then fight it on much more equal terms.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
Why is everyone so obsessed with military spending, especially as a % of GDP?
This is a joke, right?
Dollars spent isn't the only determinant of a nation's fighting power, but it's the ground-truth for a lot of important factors. How do you think the Allies won WW2? It was by having more tanks + planes + ships (and also oil).
The problem with Europe's defending against Russia is that the countries don't really want to raise defense spending at all, which limits their political appetite for defending their neighbors. Russia wouldn't need to invade the entirety of Europe all at once, they'd just salami-slice e.g. the Baltics and hope other European countries don't get their act together to oppose them. Each European country basically treats all the other countries to their east as buffer states.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
Nah, they have the fourth largest economy in PPP terms, which is the only comparison that really matters for most international comparisons.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
America sabotaging its alliances is a horrendous own-goal. China has a larger economy than the US in PPP terms (the only terms that matter), and its manufacturing base is like 4-5x ahead. The only way the US can compete at this point is through alliances. It's how we managed to get the chip embargo together, which IIRC was mostly enabled through a Dutch company that manufactures some important machine tools.
Most people in the US hate Putin. He has like a 10% approval rating here. Some on the DR like him, but they're goofballs that fall for the "based and trad Russia" meme/psyop. Most of the Ukraine-bashing is done out of reflexive negative partisanship, i.e. people on the left like Ukraine, and it would be great to see the left suffer, so let's hate Ukraine by proxy. Trump dislikes Ukraine partially out of them not carrying water for him in 2020, and partially because he's desperate for some sort of "deal", and since the Russians aren't budging he knows he has more leverage over Ukraine, so he's going after them instead.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
Yes, they're fully in the tank for conflict theory. Look at a post like this and try to disagree.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8d ago
Indeed, it's quite disappointing what this place has become. Good posters like TracingWoodgrains have been banned or moved on. Shitposters from CultureWarRoundup have moved back in, telling us constantly how we have to hate the outgroup with every fiber of our being, and any notion that we should try understanding them is akin to betrayal. The mods are apparently asleep at the wheel. Zorba, the original creator of the site, hasn't posted in 3 months, and hasn't really participated that much in nearly a year.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
Musk is a pretty good example here. He claimed to be a "free speech absolutist", but then he started censoring a bunch of things he didn't like once he took over Twitter.
Looking for old articles is pretty hard on blogs, but I found several from Noah going back to 2021, e.g. him arguing against woke, arguing against motivated leftist science, and this one arguing against decolonization narratives.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
The dissident right does not pretend to be liberal.
They absolutely did, pretty constantly too. They argued in favor of free speech and against things like top-down enforcement of morality.
Now the mask is coming off since Trump is in power again.
This is ridiculous. Liberalism was the rebellion 10 years ago, and Noah Smith dutifully contributed to crushing it.
Not sure what you're referring to here. Care to link an article or two? I vaguely recall Noah being somewhat woke previously, but it was mostly halfhearted, and he's been calling for its elimination for over half a decade at this point.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
Yes, (classical) liberalism is certainly on the downswing now. Noah Smith has written about that here and here. Liberalism is the rebellion now. Wokism was obviously authoritarian. The dissident right, while they liked to pretend they were liberal in order to criticize the left, were mostly liars whose real issue with the woke was that it was the wrong type of authoritarianism for their tastes. It's like how early Atheism dunked on Christianity almost exclusively, but principled people like Dawkins said something to the effect of "obviously my critiques apply to Islam as well" and was punished for it because most people in the movement were never really about principles, they just wanted to sneer at their outgroup.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
It's his declining ability to make a coherent point. Age-related declines often exacerbate existing deficiencies, like what we've seen with Biden. Trump has always rambled and gone off script, but he used to at least be understandable without reading the tea leaves to understand what he means by "the Biden circles".
For further evidence, watch his debate performances in the 2016 primary, then watch his debate against Harris in 2024 right after. The dude has lost more than a decent step.
VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
CIA money flowed to IS
Sure I can believe this one link in the chain well enough, it's all the other links surrounding it that make it sound like a conspiratorial word-salad. CIA money made it to ISIS... but for "decolonization"? And this is linked to migrant caravans?
In realpolitik terms, there was no realistic scenario where better relations with Russia would make much of a difference in a US-China conflict. Such a war would be dominated by sea + air power, which Russia is anemic in. Russia would be helpful in terms of sending raw materials to China, so having them embargo China during a conflict would indeed be useful for the US, but there was never a realistic chance for US-Russia relations to be good enough to where Russia would consider that rather than simply profiting and staying neutral while continuing to trade. Even if Russia joins China relatively explicitly, how much of a difference would that make? It might help China with marginal things like initial missile stockpiles and intelligence gathering. Those aren't nothing, but they'd be highly unlikely to turn the tables. And they'd be well worth the trouble if it meant the US had a stronger European contingent of allies to call on, even if they're mostly limited to just economic sanctions against China.
More options
Context Copy link