site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Not at all. Gorbachev was a failed reformer. He had ideas how to improve USSR, was realist that the situation is not good, was willing to break with the ideologic doctrine for the state to survive, but he ran out of runway.

Kamala is probably the other type - if we assume that the west's dominance is doomed due to reasons, she will be the one that with steady hand will ignore any and all warning and ram the titanic in the iceberg.

She is shitty material for US president, but damn she is just fine for a member of the European Commission.

I am not sure she can even comprehend the challenges US will be faced with - the biggest allies are sliding into irrelevance - Japan hasn't grown in 3 decades, Europe in 15 years, the other big players in the world are smiling to the US and chasing their own interests, you have the incoming national debt shitstorm, wildcards with AI, changing nature of warfare, cultural split, cost disease, total lack of people that have lived experience in a multipolar world to run the US foreign policy, probably even lack of people with any idea what US interests are.

Kissinger said that USSR in the 80s was faced with many problems - not a single one of which was unsolvable, but all together overwhelmed the state. The US is in much better shape economically, the challenges faced are somewhat vaguer and there is no consensus among the elite that the US is in trouble. Polls show that the population is worried, but the elite is not. In the USSR I think it was the opposite - the elite were worried because they could travel west and compare, the population was not, it was waiting for the collapse (not that it brought much good, but many a phd-s could be written why things went so wrong everywhere in the former soviet bloc in the 90s and early 00s, we got the italian organized crime, korean birth rates, indian brain drain and japanese gdp growth all at once )

I mean Kamala does represent a faction with(to be clear, generally quite bad) ideas to reform US government- court packing is quite literally the most major change in decades. Green new deal etc.

Plus soviet-style controlled economy stuff

italian organized crime, korean birth rates, indian brain drain and japanese gdp growth

What does any of those have to do with the Soviet collapse?

He’s saying that the former Soviet Union experienced Italy-like levels of organized crime, Korea-like birth rates, etc.

That after 1991 Eastern Europe suddenly had organized crime stronger than the Mafia, birth rates collapsed way below replacement, most of the competent people moved to western europe, the economy shrink almost twice and we never had the catch up growth that the post WWII countries had - we grew sluggishly like japan in the 90s and 00s

I see, then it makes sense, thanks.

Great post and it sparks in me a question.

How inevitable was the collapse of the Soviet Union? Let's say instead of Gorbachev you get a hardliner. What happens then?

I think we often look back at history with an idea that things had to happen just the way they did. But if Gorbachev wasn't chosen, I think it's possible the USSR exists today. The Venezuelan government still stands after all.

The USSR would probably still exist without Gorbachev's efforts to reform it.

No, it wouldn't have, because the other SSRs wanted independence, and to keep them all in would have required a incredible amount of bloodshed that no Russian leader was capable or willing to do at the time. The Soviets were poor and backwards and would have fell ever further behind if they remained Communist. Think how poor Russians are now, and imagine them - even poorer - stuck with technologies from the 1970s: an international pariah from all the ethnics they'd have to messily put down with the army.

Could they have staggered along, like a North Korea or a Cuba? Maybe. But it would have destroyed the Russian people completely and utterly.

But none of this means that the USSR couldn't still exist.

Regarding the part on independence, let's be more precise. Out of all SSRs, it was the three small Baltic ones which had significant independence movements, and this happened years after Gorbachev created an atmosphere where political dissent was normalized. He wasn't willing to do any bloodshed to keep the USSR together indeed, at least not to an impactful degree, precisely because his entire political line hinged on the assumption that he needed to capture the West's goodwill in order to have his reforms implemented and secure foreign loans, and he believed this all could only work without bloodshed. Outside the Baltics, the fact was that independence movements were rather weak or nonexistent, even in Ukraine, for that matter.

The independence movements of non-USSR Warsaw pact countries was written on the walls, no hardliner could have managed those. With those revolutions kicking off its impossible for me to imagine there SSR’s not following suit.

But they in fact weren't, except for the Baltic states.

Why do you think Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania weren’t bound to happen?

I was commenting on the SSRs of the USSR, not the other Warsaw Pact / COMECON member states.

More comments

No, it wouldn't. Even if you had the proverbial 50 Stalins in charge, the Soviet Union was running into the debts it had incurred to reality - no amount of will can overcome the demographic cliff, uncompetitive industries, and the ruling elite's lack of faith in its own ideology. You might as well say that Hitler could have held along for longer if he just 'cracked down harder.

It was over. Gorbachev was merely more deluded than most, in thinking it could be reformed. The hardliners that wanted to keep the Union together had no solution for the country's problems other than continuing the stagnation.

You might as well say that Hitler could have held along for longer if he just 'cracked down harder.

Hitler was beaten by the Allies, not by domestic opposition. He absolutely could have held on longer if he hadn't declared war on the Soviet Union and United State. There was no western plan to invade the Soviet Union if it weakened to the point where an invasion might succeed.

had no solution for the country's problems other than continuing the stagnation

I'd say that has been a usual characteristics of many regimes throughout history, and yet most of them didn't crumble in spectacular fashion as the USSR did as a result of Gorby's decisions. Also, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos should have all collapsed a long time ago according to your logic, and yet they didn't. Burma and the countries of post-Soviet Central Asia aren't that different either.

demographic cliff, uncompetitive industries, and the ruling elite's lack of faith in its own ideology

Again, none of these are that uncommon anywhere.

Just reform the industries? It really isn't that hard, China did it and they were coming off a poorer base. The Soviets could've cut the astonishing amount of military spending to free up resources for the civilian sector and waited for oil prices to rise again. That alone would've been enough to get out of the danger zone.

Gorbachev was a world-historical blunderer, he had no idea how the Soviet system actually worked and lacked the power to effectively implement his insane reforms. People don't actually know how shambolic he was, they have this vague notion of glasnoist and perestroika but no concrete facts of what specifically he did:

https://x.com/haravayin_hogh/status/1790224622694387726

With what capital, exactly? With what technologies, from the West?

China bootstrapped their industry with technology transfers and capital investment - from Americans. 'Just reform the industries', like it's easy. Reduce the military budget, as if the military was not its own fiefdom hostile to its own diminishment.

As far as I know, the foreign investments that accompanied Deng's economic reforms mostly came from enterprises in Taiwan, Hongkong, Indonesia etc. that were owned by local Chinese. American investments started happening much later. It's not like nobody was going to invest in the USSR.

The Soviet Union had plenty of capital and technology, they produced their own working space shuttle in the late 1980s. Their capital was just misallocated and inefficiently used due to the socialist system and expansive military posture. If they began proper market reforms conducted in a mature and sensible way, then they could've developed the necessary industries internally, regardless of foreign investment.

There was no voice that came down from the sky that said 'you must let any well-connected official steal directly from your country's capital base', that wasn't inevitable. It was a policy choice.

Gorbachev didn't understand politics, he was dreaming. You have to bring stakeholders onboard if you want to reform the system. He needed to control the military to secure his position before doing anything. Khrushchev was able to reduce the size of the Soviet military by about 1/3 because he had the necessary skills, Gorby did not.

More comments

I’m not absolutely sure about this, and I could be proven wrong, but I think people misunderstand China. I think China is a genuinely Marxist state that looked at the Soviet Union, and decided that they hadn’t properly done the first Bourgeois revolution. So they decided to go back, do the first Bourgeois revolution, and then have the second revolution later. I think that second revolution is about to happen soon.

Yeah Orthodox Marxist economics says that the revolution can only happen in the most advanced capitalist economies, you can't skip stages with this heretical Leninist Vanguard Party nonsense. They were looking to Britain and Germany, not Russia for revolution.

China is unclear. They might be trying that. Or maybe Marx comes second to nationalism and development for the sake of national strength. I highly doubt that they want to do away with the state though.

Even if you had the proverbial 50 Stalins in charge

Did you know that in your grandfather's time a single Stalin was enough to genocide 5 million Ukrainians? Today 50 Stalins is barely enough to make a cutesy point in an Internet argument, this is known as Stalinflation.

Vote comrade Roman Pavlik for First Secretary to bring us back on the Steel Standard, and restore the value of our nation's Stalins. Make the capitalist pigs pay the Iron Price!

This is my take too. Every time that the ruling class is sufficiently cruel, they win. If the tanks rolled into Tallinn like they did in Prague and Budapest, then any resistance movements would have been crushed.

Venezuela today is a mess compared to the USSR in 1990, but Maduro is still in power. So are the Kims in North Korea for that matter.

Contrary to the idea of "the harder you squeeze, the more of us will slip through your fingers", ruling with an iron fist is a sure way to a long reign, provided that you can't be toppled by an outside power.

But if you get soft, and can be shamed, then a million revolts will grow.

ruling with an iron fist is a sure way to a long reign,

You can still be crushed by your own iron fist if it mutinies. This normally looks like a military coup (see Roman Emperors passim ad nauseam) but the Russian Revolution (February and October) is also an example.

Maintaining political control of the military is a hard problem. The reason why democracy overperformed in the 19th century and dramatically won the 20th century is that maintaining political control of the type of military needed for industrial age warfare without neutering it turns out to be easier under democracy that other forms of government. This is also the tl;dr of Why Arabs Lose Wars - Arab armies are designed to be incapable of staging military coups, not to be capable of defeating Israel.

Bangladesh just now is a good example, the military didn’t want to fight a civil war and so told the Prime Minister they’d be switching sides, then she fled. They were of the opinion (likely accurate) that the new regime could be made amenable enough to them. You need the military to be scared to really put up a fight, and often civilian leaders can’t manage that.

For the Soviet example, it’s questionable whether the red army was willing to roll back through to Berlin in 1989 to put down the whole thing, country by country. Honecker wanted them to, but that doesn’t mean it would have been easy, even if a hardliner had been in charge. In addition, at least some of the KGB elite did well out of the collapse, so the incentives were muddled there too.

You can be assured that there was not one higher-level officer anywhere in the Soviet armed forces willing to start shooting in order to keep the Warsaw Pact / COMECON together in 1989.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats