This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Short version is that Perun is both an actual subject-matter expert in how states plan/design/program military capabilities to meet their strategies, and he was able to succinctly cut through both a significant amount of early-war propaganda by looking at publicly available information and made a number of predictions extremely early in the war- particularly that the Russian military wasn't built to be as much as an overmatch as the early-war consensus was- that were vindicated with time. These created an early credibility bonus that over time allowed his military-industrial-policy expertise to show through.
More to the point, he was able to do so by distilling extremely complex subjects to more understandable points, and do so in a way that is explicit in acknowledging information limitations and yet still able to do so with strong references, both relatively undisputed (drawing implications from visual loss data) and from the utility of using extremely biased sources' own positions (using official Russian positions as a means of establishing numeric floors / ceilings for the purpose of establishing contexts of scale).
As Perun doesn't try to analyze the war as a horse race, but to use observed tactical/system evolutions as examples for a broader point on the capability/theme of the video which is often not strictly Ukraine-centric, he tends to avoid day-by-day catastrophizing of positions that retain relevance months or even years later. In so much that he does do 'state of the war' reviews, they tend to be retrospective, not contemporary, mitigating current-time bias, and when they are contemporary they tend to be very measured.
Perun is partisan. He's fairly decent and but he is, nevertheless, partisan, perhaps to the same degree as say, RWA Podcast is. Might be worth revisiting their respective predictions.
For example, here's Perun in 2022 talking about the perspective of Russian economy.
You can give it a listen to check how it has aged.
ISW is very bad. It's Douglas MacGregor tier. They're just bad.
Pretty well, given the generally consistent validation of his arguments.
As long as you don't extend them beyond the points he's actually making, they're pretty banal and uncontroversial, unless you consider things like 'major economic interventions come with a cost' controversial. If anything, it's critiqueable for being non-falsifiable by predicting long-term consequences that wouldn't be expected yet.
Just to go by its own TL;DR, the video is making a constrained set of points, with some topic-adjacent topics explicitly in other videos including an entire video later on how war economies don't suddenly collapse, that Russia has tools to patch short-term damage to the economy, but that Russia is likely to receive longer-term harms due to the tradeoffs it will have to do to continue fighting. He calls the pro-Ukrainian view that sanctions would grind the Russian war effort to a stop a dream, but also that they do harm, which has been generally observed in how the Russian economy's growth and metrics have changed over the years since 2022. He makes clear that the economic competition is dependent on how willing the West is to support Ukraine- and that he has questions on how the West would be willing to provide the significant levels of support needed, which is downright preescient given how the 2022 situation evolved before the Nord Stream explosion led to the general German shift on permitting major categories of support that were within the west's economic capacity to do.
From various other sections on the Russian economy- feel free to register what you think aged poorly-
-The war is not a closed-system war of just Russia vs Ukraine.
-The Russian economy will not have a near term collapse, and that Russia built up substantial pre-war preparations to mitigating economic disruption to the war production economy (and that he would talk more about that in a following video).
-The Russian indicators of economic health in the first months of the war relied on interventions that can provide short-term metric success but which disguise (and cause) longer-term issues. That Russia has resorted to more, not fewer, distortionary techniques- as well as obscuring data that could verify health if the economy were healthy- would also seem to validate.
-The Foreign Trade Reserves, despite the immediate drop in the early war, were a concern but that he specifically disagreed with a lot of the then-contemporary views and did NOT view it as a short or medium-term threat to Russia's ability to wage war due to options available to stabilize it. *For those less familiar with western government planning time frames, which is his background as a procurement specialist, 'short term' is often 0-to-2 years, and medium-term is often 2-to-10.
-On Russian energy exports, he makes the point that Europe was/is undergoing an expensive economic shift away from dependence to limit Russian ability to blackmail, which occurred, and that the Russians would progressively lose the Europeans as a dependent market, which has also been seen as Russian gas exports by pipelines have decreased far more than LNG gas exports have risen At no point does he argue that this means Russia is going to lose all their income and ability to sustain war in the coming years, and this is well before the European sanctions model (which was designed to let sea-based hydrocarbons continue onto global markets, but reduce Russian profits) was outlined, which itself is reflective of the Western political will.
Skipping ahead past the NATO economic figures to Russia on, the 'What Next' section is more predictive-
'What Can Russia Do?' Perun identifies a number of potential options Russia could do to maintain the war economy, with the general theme of longer term costs, but continued ability to wage war into the medium term. A number of the options have been seen, including appropriations, interventions, inflation, and Chinese import substitution.
'What Can the West Do?' Perun identifies a number of potential options the West could do to leverage their economic advantages. Many of these were not utilized in 2022, and we're seeing the implications of some of these delays this year with the current artillery ammo disparity- which is a validation of the analysis that the economic advantages depended on will and longer-term planning, which there was a lack of support for in 2022 and into 2023 is causing consequences in 2024, which remains well within his window of Russia's ability to continue fighting.
And so on and so on. As an analysis video, it continues to hold up- not because the facts are the same in May 2024 as they were in Apr 2022, but because they were true in 2022 and resulted in the sort of actions he predicted Russia could do to continue fighting the war over the period of time that has passed since the video. Russia has repeatedly intervened in its markets and taken more and more steps to sustain the economy, and these are the sort of interventions normally considered to cause longer-term damages and costs, and the need for such relatively drastic interventions is indicative of the economic mismatch at the heart of the comparison argument.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link