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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   32461 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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It's a cynical use of Ukraine to allow us to hurt Russia without declaring war. The well-being of Ukraine was never per se pertinent.

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.

The choice is 100% up to Ukraine. It's a shit choice, since it's one of these Copenhagen interpretation of ethics choices, but it's still up to them:

  • you can refuse our help and lose to Russia quickly
  • you can accept our help and lose to Russia excruciatingly slowly and painfully. Maybe Russia will stop after a few years, who knows?

Is it moral to help someone a little if you can easily help them more? Well, states are amoral golems, so it's a moot question.

it treats Ukraine as just some pawn instead of an independent country

Well, you know, that doesn't bother me. I don't believe in countries (states). Literally, I don't believe that they exist. They're fictions, like corporations. Really it's a sort of theological idea.

I do believe in nations and to be charitable I can sub that word in. But in that case, from a secular perspective, it's not clear to me why one nation has a right to a piece of land and another doesn't. Where would such a right come from, if not the test of societal virtue that is war? And how sure are we that the ruling class of a nation actually represents that nation, rather than having parasitized it?

It's so demeaning to the Ukrainian people who are fighting for the independence of their country.

If they don't want to fight they can stop. Or, if the people want to stop but can't -- as is evidenced by their enslavement and sacrifice by the men calling themselves their leaders -- we should ask if perhaps that's the real problem!

Ukrainians are the ones who will determine how far they are willing to go to protect their homeland and their people.

It's not clear to me that the ruling society of Russia intends to harm either the land or the people. Actually I think it would be happiest keeping both wholly preserved (but under its own control).

Seems to me that what's going on here is that the land and peoples (the people living there are hardly homogeneous) exist and two competing ruling classes are vying for control over them. One is willing to enslave them and spend their lives to stay in power. The other is basically willing to do the same. It's not clear why either of those is 'right'.

I just don't know where everyone seems to be getting their sense of clear-cut moral stances from.

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.

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.

Right, well, they can't. The incentives don't align that way and never will. It can be more or less overt, and more or less local, but it's going on somewhere. This is due to resource scarcity. Someone has to lose, and usually many people. Those with the ability to change this are better-served by winning, and arguably should. And even they can't change it much.

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.

No, that's just what the most-powerful cabals at the time said to justify the cementing of their power into the foreseeable future. In fact they're plenty willing to do abhorrent things when it suits them.

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.

Only the power of the hegemon prevents war. This is a symptom of that power failing, not a de novo source of evil.

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.

I think you'll find that we and our allies do all that stuff in spades. Who, whom.

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.

From the perspective of the hegemon, it needs to be punished to preserve the hegemony. The question is whether that's possible any longer.

War simply is. There are ways to sort of move it from one column into another on the ledger book but basically, given resource scarcity, this is just how things work. There is no other way. And a bad peace is worse than war.

and yet when people say that we shouldn't be doing it, the argument is that we've got to protect the poor Ukrainians. There's this maddening bullshit arbitrage between "protect the Ukrainians from the evil Russian Orcs", and "We should harm the Russians as much as possible, who cares what it costs the Ukranians."

Almost like some kind of motte and bailey?

Or that it's debates between large numbers of different people with different positions, even the people within the same coalition.

Just as governments aren't hive minds, neither are 'pro' or 'anti' camps. It's not a motte and bailey if person A takes position A and person B takes position B, even if B is better at some arguments than A (and often vice versa).

This has come up a few times, and the best anyone could come up with is "distributed motte and bailey". Calling it that is obviously unfair to a person being held to account for an argument they may not have made, but on the other hand, it's pretty goddamn frustrating to get mutually contradictory arguments from people sharing a coalition.

There's probably no solution but to recognize that the discourse is fucked.

You know when you’re watching a movie and a line of dialogue includes the title of the movie?

Same energy as this comment.

There's another level, which is that actually the thing I just said is the bailey and the real motte is spending money for the sake of it (for those who become enriched).

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