tkt
7d ago
My pet lowbrow armchair sociological theory is: there is no drift apart, there is instead an incredibly high level of cultural, ideological, whatever coupling. When any bigger US issue du jour appears on an US-centric forum like this, it shows up here in Europe a bit later, usually as a malformed parody version of itself, often on high levels of public life and politics. As a prime exhibit, see our Finnish center-left party head doing an over the top cringy imitation after Obama got elected. Or in the pandemic times, in quick succession, we first got a condemnation of local antivaxxers protesting when the act of gathering in a crowd might spread the disease, followed by it being excellent to gather up in a crowd to protest in solidarity of BLM. Likewise the local anti-immigration right parties run very much on American import anti-woke memes. The US cultural influence somehow inflicts on us the animal spirits of whatever is going on over the Atlantic, no matter how out of place in the local circumstances or logically inconsistent with itself the result is, and we go helplessly along.
Because of this this coupling, we won't sound very friendly and grateful toward the US no matter what -- we run too much on material copied from the US, and the content of it is all wrong for that. The local population more influenced by US progressive thinking will have a lot of imported self-flagellating anti-American memes to chew on (sometimes weirdly idolizing Scandinavia so at least we're getting a healthy boost in national self-esteem out of it). The folks inspired by current Trumpish thinking from the US right maybe aren't that flavor of anti-American, but will also not be America First, but of course rather rah-rah Finland First or Portugal First or Poland First.
If America someday feels like really warming up the transatlantic relationship, it just needs to develop a mainstream cultural worldview by whose standards America is just fine, and which is universalist enough that if you make a garbled copy and search-replace the word 'America' with 'Belgium' it doesn't turn into 'Belgium is the greatest country in the world, every other country (such as America) is run by little girls'. We'll lap it up instantly. It doesn't have to be all the way universalist -- Biden's 'let's own the Russkies together' seemed to me to work to this purpose just fine while it lasted. Sadly it was also very easy for the US right to see that as a project of a self-interested Europe to fleece the US, I guess.
tkt
6mo ago
is this, like... actually a defensible salient? It doesn't really look like it
It sort of maybe does to me? There is some sort of a river going through Sudzha, which sounds by default nicer to defend than the original state border. I was pessimistic at the start, thinking there was no way UA wouldn’t stall out before reaching the river bank, and now optimistic again since they did. (Well, in Google street view the river looks very puny so this might be wishful thinking)
Also they have the data point that the pro-Russian breakaway regions of Luhansk and Donetsk ended up being AFAICT horribly, cartoonishly bad places to live vs. usual post-Soviet oligarchy. If they threw in the towel, sure, they might end up a Belarus, much better off in hedonic terms than being current Ukraine in war. But they might also end up a DPR/LPR, a way worse place to be. A principle of being cautious and not gambling with bad outcomes doesn’t really point at capitulation then.
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