flailingace
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User ID: 1084
flailingace
23d ago
Definitely an interesting philosophical framing. The moral framework for me is something of a practical one - how can different nations live in the world with a minimum of morally despicable things taking place. Things like: war, slavery, poverty, oppression.
The goal of the 'rules-based international order' was to create rules for the game of international competition and cooperation where the morally worst actions are taken off the table. We don't go to war to settle disputes over who gets to control land and peoples (especially nuclear war) because it's something everyone wants to avoid. It's morally bad and it's practically bad, especially for those lands and peoples.
Russia is the clear bad actor in this framing. They are signed on to a ton of agreements that say 'we will not invade other countries to take their land' - the most fundamental being the UN charter, which says any UN member will respect the borders of the existing countries. This may seem arbitrary under your system, but it serves the very basic purpose of preventing war. It's not a complicated moral stance. If Russia hadn't invaded another country, there wouldn't be a war.
Hell, if Russian troops weren't blatantly and constantly committing war crimes, targeting civilians, indoctrinating the people of territories they've conquered... then maybe we in the West could ignore this as just another border dispute, like the other times in the 21st century Russia has invaded its neighbors. But, Russia is doing all these morally despicable things. They are the clear moral bad agent in almost every way, and are simply flaunting the fact that they can break international rules and norms, essentially do whatever the hell they please, because they have nuclear weapons so nobody will stop them. But whether this deserves punishment from the international community on a moral level is beside the point. This needs to be punished so that every other aggressive authoritarian government with delusions of grandeur doesn't do the same thing, and the whole world devolve back into war.
flailingace
24d ago
This is the sort of perspective I've heard from some of the 'end the war now' people in e.g. Trump's entourage, and I find it incredibly annoying, because it treats Ukraine as just some pawn instead of an independent country. It's the same perspective Putin has.
Simply look at what Ukrainian leaders are saying. They are the ones who will not accept a cease-fire without security guarantees, who have been pushing to take back their land and insisting on an eventual return to their internationally recognized borders. Do you honestly think they're just saying these things because Biden told them to? It's so demeaning to the Ukrainian people who are fighting for the independence of their country.
I hear people like Vivek Ramaswamy say things like "we need to come to a peace agreement that's good for both Russia and the United States" and I get so frustrated - the parties to the war are Russia and Ukraine! Ukrainians are the ones who will determine how far they are willing to go to protect their homeland and their people. If Western countries decide to withdraw support, that will affect the calculus of the Ukrainians as to what they can accomplish, but the decision is still theirs whether to keep fighting.
flailingace
24d ago
The USSR died a very slow death and the 'balkanization' that took place was primarily revolutionary independence movements. There were no radical idealogues seizing power, rather the people essentially rose up to throw off Russian rule. This would not be the case if Russia collapsed into civil war. Some regions (see Chechnya) are essentially run by warlords who are kept in check by Moscow giving them money. And Putin's cronies include many who have called for offensive use of tactical nuclear weapons, and in a civil war scenario they could easily come out on top.
The question, if you're the West, is to what extent you want to risk the literal end of humanity. At least that's how some people see it.
flailingace
24d ago
Good question. Basically Russia has a war economy right now, and all the military production counts as GDP, which gives the impression of growth. This hides the issues in the economy.
Russia is facing down stagflation. Wages have been artificially inflated because military industries are being propped up, with the consequence that other industries have to match those salaries in order to find workers. This has led to acute labor shortages in many industries. Meanwhile the Ruble is facing serious inflation. The central bank has raised the key rate to 21%, the highest in modern history, but nominal inflation remains at 8-9%. Russia's trading partners are no longer as willing to accept payments in Rubles, for a while now the majority of trade with China has been in the Yuan and it's getting worse. Nobody wants to hold Rubles.
Though, I'm not an expert on the economic side of this problem. One of the sources I trust most on Russia-Ukraine is Anders Puck Nielsen, and he has a good breakdown here: https://www.logicofwar.com/russias-war-economy-is-unsustainable/
flailingace
24d ago
It's not about maximizing harm to Russia. It's about harming Russia in a way that doesn't destabilize it. Western intelligence is terrified of the balkanization of Russia, because it has nuclear weapons stored all over the place, and even one ending up under the control of a lunatic would be enough to end the world. See also my comment one level up for my fuller thoughts.
flailingace
24d ago
Okay, the answer to this is actually pretty simple.
In short, the fear of all the Western players is nuclear escalation. There are three ways this likely happens. One: Ukraine starts winning the war, and Putin is pushed into a corner. Two: Russia starts winning the war and gets too close to NATO countries, which leads to direct conflict with NATO, which Russia cannot hope to win without relying on nuclear weapons. Three: regime change in Russia. Putin is a known entity, but anyone who takes his place, especially in the context of a coup, would likely be more radical. Putin already keeps a lot of radicals around who are openly calling to use tactical nuclear weapons, and in a regime change scenario we have no idea who would end up on top.
Once you have this framework, everything NATO and the Biden admin has done is obvious. They can't let Russia win the war, but they also can't let Ukraine win the war. So what's the solution? Slowly degrade Russia's capacity in a way that doesn't destabilize the country, until eventually their economic and domestic issues become so serious that Putin thinks it's better to come to the negotiating table.
What are the problems with this? We're seeing them right now. Firstly, Russia is not as alone on the world stage as Western leaders thought. Putin has in fact built a coalition of autocratic states that are backing his play. North Korean arms and troops are now directly participating to cover the manpower losses in the Russian army. Iran likewise has fully aligned with Russia. This threatens to make the Ukraine war into a world war without the West changing their policies.
Second, the West does not understand the Russian people. Russia is perhaps the most fatalistic country in the world, and also one of the most resilient. The Russian people can handle a lot of suffering and punishment. Poorer Russians are quite happy to roll the dice as assault soldiers in a war where they will very likely die. For Westerners, a mortality rate of 5% in our military would be shocking - nobody would sign on. But a poor Russian with no other path to prosperity (many of them actual criminals freed from prison for this chance) will sign on to a 50% chance of death, shrug his soldiers and say "maybe I'll get lucky". Russians are also quite patriotic, and willing to suffer to see their country succeed. Combine this with the increasing levels of information control (it is, for instance, illegal in Russia to speak poorly of either the government or the military) and you'll see why there is no public outcry against the war - Putin's popularity has actually increased as the war drags on, despite signs that the Russian economy could well collapse within a year. In other words, there is no pressure on Putin to change. Quite the contrary, things really seem to be going his way.
Western countries, if they were able to continue the current levels of support, might have been able to continue the war at the current level for another year, at which point there's a real chance the Russian economy would fall apart. This was essentially the Biden strategy. However, Ukraine is almost at the end of it's rope. They cannot recruit enough to sustain the fight, as anyone who was going to volunteer did so two years ago. And many Western publics have gotten tired of spending boatloads of money on a strategy that has not been explained to them, that in fact looks like a black hole of taxpayer funds with no end in sight.
And so, I'm somewhat hopeful about Trump coming in. I think he can credibly threaten to change the status quo. The way I imagine it is: he proposes a cease-fire deal, which both Russia and Ukraine must refuse based on their geopolitical needs. Then, because Russia turned it down, this gives Trump carte blanche to increase support, not just in materiel but in the permission to strike into Russia that Biden has been refusing for the past two years. In other words, Trump may have the freedom to actually apply pressure to Putin in a way that the Biden alliance has steadfastly refused to do out of fear of escalation. I may be wrong, and Trump will swing the other way and force Ukraine to roll over and surrender. But I personally doubt it. I don't think he wants to go down as a deal-maker who lost a negotiation with Putin. I think he's fundamentally a bully, and will effectively use the power of the US to force Putin into a negotiation where Trump comes out looking like the winner. As far as I can tell, that's what the MAGA people mean by peace through strength.
flailingace
27d ago
I think that kind of media is essentially fan-fiction though. Unless they're actually selling all their possessions and going to lie in a field I don't think they -actually believe- that stuff. It's red meat, just like you see in political bubbles. Some radicals may actually believe it, but it's in the same way some radical left-wingers think Trump is an actual Nazi or right-wingers think Democrats actually want to destroy the US. It's a bailey belief.
flailingace
27d ago
The point of talking constantly about election integrity (not just here but in the media space generally) was to motivate election watchers. Despite the inherent issues with our election system, which make it arguably the least secure of any Western democracy, the amount of Trump supporters who have prepared to ensure the integrity of this election through proper channels essentially ensured that rigging could not occur. That's regardless of whether you think rigging would have occurred in the absence of this strategy.
flailingace
1mo ago
My objection to AI creative work generally is that AI is not an individual with particular tastes and intentions. It's a conglomerative average. Even if you're running the end process on your GPU using prompts you created, the training was done in a data center the size of a small town over the course of billions of billions of operations over more training data than it would be possible for one person to view in a lifetime. Conceptually it would be like taking all the artists New York City and glomming them together into one giant flesh blob monster that you then chain up in a basement attached to a printer that churns out derivative work. That's how it feels to me, aesthetically. The end product may look fine, but it isn't intentional the way art made by an individual is intentional. The details are chosen by averaging training data details, not because they matter.
flailingace
1mo ago
This argument is just the diversity boogeyman in a different form. I.e. how can Congress pass laws that are good for all Americans when it's full of white men?
Now, obviously hydroacetylene's suggestion wouldn't be practical to suggest in a modern Western country (even though it's how the US system was originally designed). But your objection that it leads to political violence is belied by the levels of political violence we have today.
The point of limiting the vote to a cohort like the suggested one is to make sure all those voting are people of good character, invested in their community, and care about people other than themselves (i.e. their family). The idea that male heads of households would vote against the interests of their wives is pretty cynical, for instance, and in the type of society that is being suggested here I would expect these voters to be more concerned with the well-being of their whole family than, say, current voters who are often single-voter issues on purely self-interested things that affect them, like student loan forgiveness or even abortion. It also incentivizes people to get married, have children, and buy a house, all things that we want. For these reasons it seems like a pro-social and useful suggestion, and I think your objections to it are surface level and apply even more strongly to the current system.
flailingace
1mo ago
Just for your understanding, this is exactly the danger of the Russian style of disinformation. It is decentralized and not tied to any particular narrative or to truth in general. The agents will amplify both true and false stories with impunity. This is because the stated goal of the Russian propaganda machine in the West is not, for example, 'make Russia look good' or 'show hypocrisy in Western countries'. The essential goal is to create division in Western societies over the long term by degrading trust in institutions, information sources, and each other.
So yes, in this case Russian disinformation may be amplifying actual government failures. In other cases it may be making things up wholesale. The point is to be aware that there are malign agents (and not just Russians) whose purpose is to turn this into a political or cultural battle rather than giving a clear picture of reality, and then factor that in to our assessment of the situation.
flailingace
2yr ago
I think the reason for the 'religion' is that typical human relationships have in many ways broken down, especially male-female ones. When I hear descriptions of therapy they sound to me a lot like talking to my wife about something important, except that in my case we know each other and what we need far better than any therapist could.
flailingace
2yr ago
Yeah I don't really like reading either, that other stuff is definitely more entertaining, but it's ultimately useless and a waste of my time. If I want to be of any use thinking about or talking about a topic I need the depth that comes from reading. It forces you to think about it. Audiobooks don't usually work as well, because I can hear what they're saying without thinking about it, plus with reading I can spend the time I want on a thought or a piece of the text where audiobooks/videos just move on.
You're just clearly factually wrong about this. The fact is that there have been no major wars in Europe since the creation of the rules-based order. In other words, when those countries played by the rules they've seen exactly the results they wanted: reduction in war, economic prosperity, global trade.
This to me is proof that you're not arguing in good faith. Anyone who's given even a cursory look at the war crimes committed by Russia could never say something so ridiculous. It's just cynicism for cynicism's sake, untethered to reality.
This is also obviously not true. International relations is not a zero-sum game. The global international order has decreased global poverty from 50% to about 10% in the last century. Who did they steal that prosperity from? Western countries, despite not going to war with each other, have grown wealth exponentially and raised the standard of living to the point where we no longer have extreme poverty at all. This myth of resource scarcity is not only foolish, it's dangerous, because it leads to bad ideas about policy.
I think you're just fundamentally incorrect about all these issues. Not meant as an attack, but you don't happen to be a communist do you?
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