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 -
This has nothing to do with state capacity and everything to do with states not placing longterm orders for 155 shells. Expansions in capacity won't magically appear unless customers place orders. The industry has communicated that it stands ready to expand and that the states only have to say the word, the states aren't and not because they lack the financial capacity.
The problem isn't state capacity, it's political will.
During WW1 shell crisis in Britain, the government was able to ramp up production from 500,000 shells in first few months of the War (since August-December) to 16 million shells in 1915.
During shell crisis the reasons were similar - UK was missing some key chemicals like acetone, now Europe and to some extent US have shortages of guncotton and other basic materials. By the way during WW1 Dupont was able to produce 500 tons of guncotton a day. We are now two years into a conflict where Western powers know they are draining their munition reserves and they still cannot produce near the volume of munitions that countries were able to produce 100 years ago. In fact US and EU is reliant on guncotton production from China
You may say that it is problem of state orders, but that itself is a problem of state capacity or to better say incapacity. No decision can be straigthtforward and is mired in endless internal battles due to incompetence and other reasons.
That may hold true for America but not Europe. The issue isn't internal battles but internal indecision or naive hope. The governments have in general not been split and it has been 100% up to the current rulers which investments to make. They have chosen not to invest.
For America, I agree that polarisation seems fairly directly decrease effective state capacity because of how the government functions, but even then I think it's important to delineate between lack of action due to political deadlock and an actual material lack of capacity.
Why are we not sending more military aid to Ukraine? Is it because we can't or because we don't want to? Its because we don't/didn't want to.
There's a federal/state distinction, so the test would be to check states with one sided partisan control- they should have more state capacity. Both Texas and California have been in the news for doing things no one really expected them to get away with doing unilaterally, so it passes a vibe check.
More options
Context Copy link
I'll note that 'want' also obscures factors of strategy and consideration of other factors.
If, for example, the US has sent categories of aid in advance of it's allies willingness to do the same, then there was a risk that the countries that felt their concerns were bypassed would refuse to send similar aid. The example that comes to mind is tanks- before the Germans objected to sending tanks on grounds that the US hadn't sent any, there was a more general German consensus that tanks were too escalatory. It wasn't until internal german political dynamics had changed that 'we won't send tanks before the US' replaced 'no one should send tanks because tanks are too escalatory, and if you do we won't.' Given the risk was that doing so would prompt the Germans to not do the same, and the German military aid value substantially outweighs the value of individual systems sent without German assent (in the case of Germany-derived tanks) or over German objections (US-derived tanks), and this creates a circumstance of actors wanting to send aid but not wanting to send aid because they want to send more aid overall but doing what they want gets in the way of what they want for what they want.
Which is a heck of a mess of wants, and complicates an over-simplified analysis.
When it comes to the pro-Ukraine coalition in general, I sincerely believe an underappreciated part of the Western war strategy is how the strategy has prioritized building and maintaining the coalition of donors, particularly Germany, over immediate deliveries of on-hand assets. This has been apparent since 2022, but rarely remarked upon, even though the difference of approaching something as a short-term versus long-term problem have considerably different implications. For example, how one views this year's Russian advances in the Donbass; the implications change considerably depending on whether you believe the war ends if the Russians take all the administrative boundaries of the Donbas (a short term paradigm), despite the Donbas not being particularly important to Ukraine's ability to continue fighting (a long-term paradigm).
But to bring this back to political capacity- this sort of perspective does challenge the state capacity in a different way, since the capacity of individual states is being subordinated to the capacity of a coalition as a whole, which makes this a coordination-issue rather than a matter of just beuracratic capacity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link