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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13011 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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So I read 89 books last year (details can be found in the wellness Wednesday thread). Many people here and more so in real life seem to pretty surprised, and impressed. I'm not sure if this is me being a time (or hobby) snob, but I'm a little dissapointed in this kind of reaction. In the real world this makes some sense: TV and scrolling are much more appealing than a book after a long day at work, but I was hoping to see more serious readers in a place that's as text and argument heavy as the motte.

Reading a lot of books isn't as hard as it seems. The average american spends something like 4+ hours on the internet+TV. If you take 1 of those hours and convert them into reading every day you get 365 hours a year. At 50 pages/hour, that's 15k pages a year, or about 50 300-page books. I read slightly faster and slightly more, but also a significant amount in Spanish, which is slower. So probably 2 hrs/day at an average of 50 pages/hour. That's about 30k pages. If I look at my goodreads, I read 33,885 pages total. I keep more detailed stats for Spanish. Looks like I read for a total of 227 hours for a total of 11k pages, which is about 45 pages/hour. Of course these numbers vary from person to person, and book to book. All very do-able for the average Mottzian. It just means largely giving up other forms of entertaininment, like video games or TV, and perhaps more importantly, not being a workaholic.

So are my expectations for this place off? Am I overestimating the importance of books to the average Mottzian (and in self-cultivation in general)? Underestimating people's daily time commitments?

89 books in a year is quite a few. I'm a fairly voracious reader and I don't come close to that. That's 1.7 books per week!! To make that happen, I would have to give up almost all my free time outside of work to reading. And that's simply never going to happen - I enjoy reading, but I also enjoy programming, playing music, spending time with my wife, cooking, building models, and playing video games too. Reading is fun and important, but not so fun and important that it deserves to crowd out every other use of leisure time.

I literally can not sit down and read a book after a whole day of starting at a screen with text on it. I just manage sneaking in some audiobooks when traveling between cities or rarely on a chill saturday.

I very much relate to this, and I worry about it, because back when I was a college student I’d read long-form fiction for pleasure all the time. My inclination to do so has been in steady decline since then.

One of my resolutions for 2025 is to try rebuilding my pleasure-reading habits by trying to read simpler and more addictive stuff — cheesy fantasy, military sci-fi, Black Library texts, LitRPGs, etc.. With that in mind, I’m so far a couple of thousand pages into Alexander Wales’ “Worth the Candle” series and absolutely loving it.

It just means largely giving up other forms of entertaininment, like video games or TV, and perhaps more importantly, not being a workaholic

Am I overestimating the importance of books to the average Mottzian (and in self-cultivation in general)?

This it it IMO. While I would consider myself someone who enjoys reading (I try to read a book every two weeks or so) I certainly wouldn't consider giving up everything else I enjoy doing in favor of only reading books the best use of my time. There's many more worthwhile movies, video games, internet text etc that's worth engaging with that I'll never experience in my lifetime, to speak nothing of all the pleasurable non-consumption activities I could be doing, so it really seems ludicrous on the face of it to give everything else up to max out my books/year stat.

To go on a vaguely CW tangent, and I'm only bringing this up because your post brought this to mind and not because I'm trying to say you're doing this, is that I think there's a general tendency to elevate some types of consumption as being more virtuous than others, when really they're all just intellectually gratifying activities stratified by ease of access as a proxy for wealth and perceived intellect.

For example, I don't consider the consumption of books, international travel, and live artistic performances any more or less superior than the consumption of internet blogs, local outings and tv shows, yet it's the first class of activities that are considered higher status because they better signal intelligence, disposable income and free time.

While I have no problem with the many people that really do just enjoy the first class of pleasurable things in and of themselves, I have to admit that I find myself reflexively on guard when I meet someone who makes how many books they read, how many countries they've been to or how many live shows they've seen the center of their personality.

Increasingly I find that many people in the PMC class use their hobbies as a way of bludgeoning others for their lack of virtue and to improve their own status rather than because they actually inherently enjoy doing these things (although I suppose elites have been doing this since antiquity, so I can't really point at modern PMCs in particular).

At 50 pages/hour, that's 15k pages a year,

This right here is the load-bearing part. I read in Japanese at maybe 10 pages/hour. Not only does this mean that books take (at least) 5 times longer but they aren't designed to be read at this pace. It's much harder to stay immersed in a plot when you can only read about one scene an hour and each book takes 20/30 hours i.e. more than a week of reasonably focused effort to complete. In English, on the other hand, I blaze through most books at easily 100 pages/hour with little or no perceived effort and I've always been a voracious reader.

Lee Child (a bestselling popular writer) once wrote that the most common compliment he got from ordinary people was 'I finished your book'. To get ordinary people (i.e. slow readers) through a full novel requires a level of page turning suspense that most writers can't achieve.

Personally, I would sell one of the less-important organs to double or triple my Japanese reading speed but none of the suggested tricks seem to work for long.

Has Japanese the same information density per page?

I managed 6 full books last year, and about 200 'chapters' of works I've read in the past and saw fit to revisit, and maybe 1500+ pages of articles or journals or guides. I realized my lack of completing books cover to cover mirrors my lack of completing TV shows season to season or even video games: I'm old(ish).

Not that age makes me incapable of enjoying the new. More that age makes me have a larger corpus of works to compare new consumed media against, and if a new work fails to hook me I immediately tune out and go for a Greatest Hits run to tickle the nostalgia dopamine of reading that work the first time. New works failing to capture that for me largely stinks of just old age cantankerousness, and the threshold of excitement to breach is not worth the gnawing knowledge that i've read BETTER and this work just doesn't' cut it.

The sole exception is reading new books for my kids. Little shits that they are, they hold no interest for Journey To The West or Water Margin, but for them I can power through my irritation at the archaic prose and tired tropes. Maybe one day I will finally be able to read King Lear without falling asleep, just for their sake.

I don't keep count, but I probably read a few dozen books a year. My childhood reading habit fell off some time in high school and I have not yet fully recovered. I find that while once I was able to read hundreds of pages in a single sitting, I now find myself reading a chapter or two each of five different books in a day (this takes me somewhere between 45 minutes and 2 hours depending on the day and the books). Presumably I have the internet and my cell phone to thank for ruining my attention span, but at least this way I'm still making my way through a very long backlog of ebooks, impulse purchases at thrift stores, and recommendations from friends, bloggers, and friendly mottizens.

I think around these parts you will find an interesting mix of people with reading habits like yours or mine, defenders of Richard Hanania's thesis that books are a waste of time (some of which is deeply felt and some of which is just reflexive contrarianism), and those whose revealed preference is the latter but feel bad about it.

I read a lot of books, albeit a lot of them are audiobooks. There is some debate among "serious readers" as to whether this counts as reading, but fuck em, if reading is a better use of your time than watching Netflix, listening to audiobooks is a better use of my commute than listening to music.

In my opinion1, reading refers to the act of getting meaning from lettering using your eyes. But you're certainly still consuming books.

1I resisted the urge to say 'book'.

I was a voracious reader as a child (best friends with the school librarian-type of nerd), and remained so through my early twenties. At some point in my mid-twenties, though, I consciously considered that I did not typically retain much beyond a nugget or three of wisdom from any given book. For the time invested, I felt like I could learn more about a broader number of topics by simply reading a well-curated selection of articles. Maybe it was my attention span being eroded by social media and technological overload, and this was my attempt to justify it to myself, but I do still largely believe it to be accurate.

I still read a handful of books each year, but I rarely come away feeling that it was a markedly better use of time than reading articles and journals (or even just reading The Motte). About the only major advantage I can identify is that book reading is decidedly higher-status.

What sorts of books do you read?

I read about 35-40 books last year, in my defense some of them were really long (no one ever accused david halberstam of brevity). It's kind of a tragedy that so many people stop reading when they're not forced to. There are also disturbing stats about how half of American adults can't read above a 5th grade level.

Somewhat related, remember the goldfinch, bestseller from about a decade ago? Literary critics were disturbed by how popular it was despite being 'children's literature'. Is that still a criticism people level about modern fiction?

I think books get absolutely shredded by blog posts and feature articles in these parts. I've definitely spent many hours reading SSC and TLP over the year, likewise Foreign Affairs.

I think 89 books in the current year is pretty impressive though, I only managed 48 last year and I still felt like all I did was read things.

Fires in California seem really bad - Mandate of Heaven in danger?

Let me just preface this in that I'm not American so I don't fully really appreciate what it's like over there or how systems are supposed to work. Anyway, when we have fires in Australia, it exclusively impacts rural areas right next to woodland. Rich people tend to live closer to the cities in inner suburbs, near the sea. It's unthinkable that a fire reaches them, it'd have to burn through huge swathes of suburban sprawl first. All that happens for most Australians (and especially rich Australians) is that air quality gets horrendously bad for two weeks. Of course the state still tries very hard to protect homes but it's very much a rural issue, the rural fire service goes out to volunteer and firefight.

I'm reading that in Los Angeles, it's the opposite. Rich people live on the edge of the city, right next to woodland. You've got expensive houses burning down.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg525q2ggl4o

There are pretty serious complaints about political neglect too. I hear that the mayor of LA was off in Ghana (which is frankly bizarre, this whole subnational diplomacy meme needs to be put down and buried in the backyard). I hear that the LA fire hydrants are somehow out of water in the Palisades. There have also been allegations that homeless people were lighting fires, I haven't seen any proof of this. TBH fire-lighting seems like very low-risk, high-return terrorism, it's astonishing we haven't seen it become more common in certain vulnerable countries.

Naturally the first have turned into a political issue. Anti-Trump people have started blaming climate change and arguing that Trump wanted to cut fire defence spending.

Pro Trump people have pointed out that Trump was critical of California's water infrastructure before. And it's not as though California is known for being run by legions of Trump toadies: https://x.com/greg_price11/status/1877055198604017790

There also seems to be dysfunction in insurance, a very high number of fire insurance plans were cancelled right before the fire (possibly due to regulations preventing rate rises): https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/1877128641802285064

IMO the solution is intensive backburning when it's cool. There can be no fires if you destroy the fuel beforehand.

However, it does seem like a major failure in state legitimacy if you can't even protect the rich from fires. From Chris Bakke on twitter:

The situation in Pacific Palisades is devastating, heartbreaking, and is also the most “California” thing to happen in California.

The homes burning down are $5M+ homes in neighborhoods surrounded by 1000s of other $5M+ homes.

Owning a $5M house in CA means you pay about $60,000 per year in property taxes.

So you and thousands of your neighbors all pay $60,000 or $80,000 or $120,000, or way more in property taxes every year.

And when a wildfire comes down the hill toward your neighborhood, the firefighters show up and there’s no water in the fire hydrants.

Never change, California.

Thoughts? I don't really have a thesis here.

What's the story on them apparently not doing routine controlled burns? What considerations are at play?

California passed a constitutional amendment decades ago where property taxes can only be increased on an home with the same owner by 1% a year. So some of those people bought their homes back in 1990 and only pay like $2000 a year. Made up numbers, but it's directionally true.

From what I've seen wealthy Californians spend their lives in a dreamy utopian state where the only evil is Republicans.

Their usual system of blame is to look at the various levels of government, City, State, Federal, and put the blame on the first Republican they find.

When they can't find one, they blame institutional racism or climate change.

Thus, I predict they will all blame it on climate change and nothing will happen.

Now this one is going to be particularly bad because California passed laws a few years ago restricting fire insurance premiums and most insurers left the state. So a lot of these homes are uninsured.

California has had problems with electricity for the past 20 years and has been dealing with it with things like rolling brownouts. Their wildfires are worse than they should be because environment groups sue to stop brush management to reduce fire spread. They have continual water problems because they refuse to build additional reservoirs to keep up with their growing populations.

There is not much hope of things changing. Their elections have major problems, ballots from ballot harvesters keep coming in for weeks after election day.

Now this one is going to be particularly bad because California passed laws a few years ago restricting fire insurance premiums and most insurers left the state.

This is not actually true - some companies declined to renew some policies at one point, but this was mostly a saber rattling exercise to get the government to stop being so unreasonable. To my knowledge no insurers have actually stopped issuing policies altogether.

So a lot of these homes are uninsured.

I would be shocked if more than, say, 10% of these homes are uninsured. Even if no private company will issue you a policy, the state will, and the people in Pacific Palisades are not particularly price sensitive.

California passed a constitutional amendment decades ago where property taxes can only be increased on an home with the same owner by 1% a year. So some of those people bought their homes back in 1990 and only pay like $2000 a year. Made up numbers, but it's directionally true.

Even if you steelman the above with non-made up numbers, then while true, this is irrelevant. Sure, without Prop 13, Californian municipalities would likely have more money, but so what? The actual question is, do they actually have enough money to cover services? The answer is, of course they do.

There have also been allegations that homeless people were lighting fires, I haven't seen any proof of this.

Unlikely. There were 80 mph (120 kph) winds before the fires started, but it was dry for many weeks beforehand without incident, which suggests to me that winds blew down power lines (or equivalently, branches next to power lines), and sparks from shorting cables are enough to get dry brush started.

Humans naturally have a tendency to search for intention in chance events, but here rumors of bad actors deflect blame from the likely cause: mismanagement on the part of PG&E and the local forest/parks service, so I expect those rumors to be encouraged in the media.

I also see people reaching for the Global Warming explanation, but to me this is a series of proximate systemic failures in administration and in holding individuals/companies accountable. Which just about captures half my complaints about the state of American governance: too much consensus-building, not enough action or taking accountability. Definitely a loss of Mandate of Heaven moment.

The strange thing is they had very accurate forecasts several days ago, and already said they were going to deenergize a huge portion of the LA area. But then it seems like they didn't go through with it?

Unstructured thoughts:

the insurance situation is fucked because the state government has to keep the prices artificially low to keep homeowners happy, or be voted out for someone who will. Insurance companies are not allowed to project future risks when pricing plans (they may only look at historic risks). Rate increases (for auto and home insurance) must be approved by the state. Huge correlated risks (like Pacific Palisades burning down) are, basically, uninsurable. The state cannot long protect people from higher premiums. I don't know if we'll see ""price gouging"" for people living near the wilds or some kind of scheme where people in SF cross subsidize people in Pacific Palisades.

There's a good chance that this fire is caused by PG&E fuckery. The standard redditor response is to demand nationalizing PG&E so that they would invest more in maintaining their power lines. Would that really work? I kind of doubt it. PG&E is already a quasi-state run enterprise - it has to run basically every decision by the California Public Utilities Commission, including approving company budgets and rates. The frequent counterarguments are that the governor/the cpuc are in the pockets of PG&e, and maybe that's true, but I don't see why this couldn't happen if PG&e were nationalized.

The ultimate question has to be, where is the money going? I can't really make heads or tails of their quarterly statements to figure out how much money is going to salaries vs operations but they earn 1.3B a quarter and they serve 16 million people, so they're making $30 of profit per month per person. It's not nothing, but the average customer pays $300 a month. A 10% discount would be nice, but we're not talking about major changes here. Meanwhile, burying power lines costs $2 million dollars a mile. There's 90 thousand miles of lines (I don't know how many are high voltage lines in fire prone areas). Who's going to pay for that? Well, pg&e has only one source of income, and that's the ratepayer - that's not going to change if it's nationalized.

The common theme here is that the math is simply not mathing. It seems that for a while California has been able to outrun reality by kicking the can down the road(defer maintenance to keep prices down, defer fire prevention to save costs and the environment, keep insurance prices low since fires are rare) and now the gods of the copybook headings are here for their tribute.

Fires in California seem really bad - Mandate of Heaven in danger?

California has been forsaken by God for longer than I've been alive.

Some fun word play with your title aside, it feels like at this point if you are stilling living in California, you deserve it. Once upon a time I would have looked at the devastation Democrats have wrought and felt bad for the state, which in my youth was still regarded a purplish state. The home of Ronald Reagan. Now I just can't feel anything. Everyone there voted for this for at least a decade. They voted for it again quite recently in a recall election. They are literally willing to die in a fire than vote for someone who might say something that offends a chosen minority.

I mean they literally refuse to hire white male firefighters. People voted for that. Like this isn't their first wild fire. Their priorities are unfathomable.

It's like hearing about the Heaven's Gate Cult in the 90's. What? They all dressed, talked and acted the same? Some of them chopped their dicks off?! And then they all killed themselves over a prophesy? Some people were able to feel sympathy for the cult members. Maybe they'd lost someone to a cult, or felt they had a close brush with one at a vulnerable time in their life. For most people it was entertainment. They were a laughing stock. And so California is to me now.

The suffering of a Californian is as the suffering of a Flagellate to me. A spectacle of suffering coming from a place of otherworldly confidence that it cleanses. I can't feel bad for them, because they so willfully chose it, and would actually probably hurt me if I tried to save them from themselves. It's best to just leave them to it until they kill themselves.

Everyone there voted for this for at least a decade.

In fact, not all Californians are members of your outgroup.

I mean they literally refuse to hire white male firefighters.

Are you sure there is a literal refusal to hire white male fighters? The small story from the LibsofTiktok outrage slop -- slop you chose to share -- reports on this organization which facilitates recruitment of minorities. If wildfire firefighters are primarily white, male, and have shit wages why would it not make sense to target other demographics to fill the ranks?

Maybe Californian disasters would be better managed and mitigated by voting Republican. Makes sense to me that competition has a better chance at breeding competence. They might have less damage from fires if they paid firefighters $30/hr instead of 15-20. I'm not sold it's because of bait from LibsofTikTok for one organization doing recruitment in one area targeting one demographic.

Yeah, the devil's in the details. Firefighting, like all fighting, should probably continue to be mostly male. There are a lot of ponytails on that website, suggesting they would really like more women, which seems unlikely for physical reasons. Who's the girl in the overalls and headband supposed to be? The local police force here hired a woman with beautiful long hair and her bouvier or some such animal to give presentations, such as at elementary schools. She starter out as a vet tech, and now brings the dog around and lets the children pet it while teaching them a bit about safety. That's fine, sure, but not very central.

Of course there doesn't seem to be a reason English speaking mestizo men wouldn't be firefighters. In a heavily hispanic state like California, I'm surprised they're not, and I suppose worth reaching out to?

It's anecdotal, but Seattle attempted to solve its "white male firefighter" problem by testing recruits on "memoirs of a transgender firefighter." Applying to this "fire foundry" program requires you to write a Diversity Statement just like applying to the UC system, and we already know how that process works to commit racial employment discrimination.

After so many years of the same pattern repeating over and over in "the unbearable white maleness of X" campaigns, I would need significant evidence to assume something different. And I don't trust that anyone who gleefully supports it isn't trolling.

Yep, if anything I’d expect the headline shared to work to increase the number of firefighters not decrease it?

Trying to target new demographics who typically don’t go for those jobs, sounds pretty cool.

This argument is outdated by about a decade. SocJus outreach programs are always originally justified through "we don't want to discriminate, it's just to tap in to new demographics" and they've descended into attacking straight/cis/white/males enough times, that you have at least an equal burden of proof to show that it didn't happen this time.

Has it worked that way in any other "there are too many white men" cases? At all? From air force pilot recruiting to air traffic control recruiting to electricians to engineering students to orchestra players to academic jobs?

This sneering is completely unsupported by the reality that in 2020 there were more Trump voters in California than there were in Texas.

That doesn't change the way the state is managed though. It's a one-party regime, and no number of Republicans showing up to the polls has done anything to even slow down the insanity.

The insanity has certainly slowed down but it remains to be seen if it's the start of a trend or merely a speedbump.

It's happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_firestorm_of_1991

People like living around trees.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Dcgikq73isVL9x1Q9 good view of some of the houses in question. You can see how much money there is in Beverly Hills, and how impossible it is to clear the forest away from the houses. As far as I'm aware there's really no option but evac and rebuild every so often if you want to live there, because prevention and fighting are both a lost cause in that environment.

That doesn't look egregious. Build a fire-resistant concrete home, controlled burn the forest behind the house yearly, keep a few cisterns of rainwater in the attic to wet the ground near the home before the next fire, a generator to pump water from the pool when the power goes out, and keep a go bag ready for evac. These are relatively expensive engineering problems, but not intractable if you have the money.

fire-lighting seems like very low-risk, high-return terrorism, it's astonishing we haven't seen it become more common

Used to great effect during BLM riots. Caused billions in property damage. Arson works, in that sense.

Why do all these outbreaks of mass arson seem to occur exactly when there is historically extreme fire weather conditions?

https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10279345

Are they that competent to plan exactly when the conditions on the fire triangle are perfect and then go out to set fires together?

Same thing with the Canadian fires in 2023. Apparently there was this historically unique epidemic of arsonists setting fires all through the boreal forest even deep into the north country exactly when the climate conditions were extraordinarily prone to wildfire.

There were clear arsons during BLM riots. Buildings burning in major cities that have nothing to do with wildfires in other parts of the US.

There's a video of a burning building in an urban center and an urban youth cutting a fire hose to prevent it from being put out. Crystal clear unambiguous arson.

Yes? Because that's exactly when all the news is going "be careful this weekend, because one match could send the entire state up in flames! Anyone could just go out there with a can of gasoline and choose from this extensive list of high risk areas to incinerate! Smokey the bear says: only you have the sweet sweet power of life or death over thousands!"

Maybe arsons in less-flammable times don't result in newsworthy conflagrations. Nobody cares about the fires that remain small and burn themselves out quickly. During fire-prone times, any arson is liable to become a big deal.

I agree, but this negates what is often used as a point to discredit the claim that climate change plays some role in recent extreme wildfires.

I often point to figure D from the paper I linked, showing that there’s an incredibly tight relationship between annual area burned and atmospheric aridity (measured as vapor pressure deficit).

And in fact, we know very well that increasing continental vapor pressure deficit extremes is a key aspect of climate change.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-51305-w

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016JD025855

I’ve seen a lot of the back and forth rhetoric about the conditions in California right now. One side, it’s climate change! The other, it’s homeless camps who are lighting fires!

All I know is that Southern California is currently experiencing their second lowest winter (wet season) rainfall totals in 150 years of record keeping and then the Santa Ana winds arrived.

https://calmatters.org/environment/water/2025/01/california-rain-drought-north-south/

That drought may or may not be related to climate change, but these type of scenarios almost always have an angle where the climate is playing a primary role, for one reason or another.

Small potatoes compared to what’s possible. It’s like bombing a plane vs flying it into a skyscraper. Imagine you were a patient, clever, and well-prepared terrorist in LA yesterday, how much damage do you think you would be able to cause?

Agreed. This was sporadic and disorganized. Merely riots going a bit further than usual.

A fire just broke out in the Hollywood hills. Hellicopters are swarming. I expext the authorities to pull-out all the stops to protect Hollywood.

The West coast is a pretty unique climate and biome. We don't have fires like this in the Eastern US, even though parts of the East are incredibly overgrown.

A fire just broke out in the Hollywood hills

Oh no! Now where will I drive my 47 Lamborghinis?

The other problem with fire suppression on the West coast is that no reinvestment was made into the most effective air assets. The most common water bombers you see out West are aircraft that rolled off the production line 60-80 years ago, so they're all either constantly down for maintenance or simply being retired due to a lack of parts availability or simple airframe fatigue.

Even if the polities in those areas wanted to suppress the fires like they did back in the '70s and '80s (back when those planes were still reasonably usable, and when it was policy to suppress said fires as detailed by Dean below) they no longer have the equipment to do this, and now that it's no longer possible to buy a dozen anti-submarine prop planes for pennies on the dollar (designs that coincidentally were very adaptable to a new mission of scooping up water from nearby lakes to drop on the fires) rebuilding that capacity is going to be very expensive.

Ironically cali is far more overgrown than normal due to all the rain last year. those strong Santa anas dessicate anything even after recent rainfall, then all you need is a spark.

We don't have fires like this in the Eastern US, even though parts of the East are incredibly overgrown.

Here on the east coast, water often falls from the sky without any assistance from humans, which is rare much of the Western part of the country. When it doesn't we do get fires though a lot smaller than out west.

Pine Barrens have some potential, maybe: https://archive.is/ZdeSh

I'm just smug about Florida apparently doing it right. I get endless texts alerting me of controlled grass burns in my region, and they let me be both safer and also dunk on states with more money and less sense.

Engaging charity for a moment, maybe controlled burns in forest are harder somehow? Uglier? More expensive?

Flat, road access (and roads to use as containment features), water supply/draft sites, and to an extent fuel type. And Socal chaparral isn't really adapted to low-intensity burns the way some coniferous forests and grasslands are--if it burns, it's gonna be at a high intensity and challenging to control.

Cheers, appreciate the facts you're spreading here, rather than the standard pure political smarm. I dug into some USDA docs on firebreak engineering, it's nifty reading.

It’s easier to do in Florida because the climate there isn’t conducive to explosive out of control fires, so there’s less risk.

I live in Arizona where we do a ton of prescribed fire, it’s taken very seriously. Still though, it’s risky out west. Half of the iconic mountain here is bare of trees because a prescribed fire got out of control a few years ago.

A lot of care is taken to only burn during certain conditions. Still, it can sometimes get away from the crews who are out there burning.

Nonetheless, kudos to Florida, it is a good thing.

California as a state that is about 33 million acres of forest. That is only 1/3rd of the state, but this is where you remember that california is also about 1/3rd desert, and another third agriculture lands. In short- anything that isn't a city or farm is either a desert or a forest. As a result, if your city isn't surrounded by farms or desert, it's going to be near forests.

California in turn is a state that bought into late-20th-century environmentalism hard, including the belief that any wild fire was bad in and of itself. This is because burned forests are ugly and the pacific conservationist movement was significantly shaped by the beauty of nature. As a result, there was an extended effort to suppress and prevent wildfires and maximize forests in the name of the beauty of the environment.

This was bad ecological conservation, because nature isn't pretty and natural wildfires are needed to clear away dead brush that acts as fire tinder. As a result California has a tendency for exceptionally bad wildfires, especially in droughts, because of above-average underbrush compared to the more systemic burns practiced in the Appalachian forest regions.

The US Forest Service's policy of fire suppression wasn't related in any way to late 20th Century environmentalism. The Great Fires of 1910 happened only a few years after the Forest Service was founded and suppression followed soon after and was the policy for decades. Conversely, it was around 1970, just as the modern environmental movement was founded, that the Forest Service started to back off of this policy, though this wasn't due as much to environmentalist influence as it was to scientific research done in the 1960s that showed fire as essential to forest ecosystems, independent of the increased risk of "the big one". Controlled burns have been the preferred method of wildfire management for some time.

The problem with this burns, though, from a practical standpoint, is that there's only so much you can do. I'm on the board of a nonprofit that deals extensively with PA DCNR, and while the rangers love doing these burns, they have their limitations. In Pennsylvania, you can't burn in full leaf because it won't burn, and you can't burn in the winter when the ground is too saturated to burn, and you can't burn when it's too wet for anything to ignite, and you can't burn when it's so dry that the fire could easily get out of control, so you're basically limited to a few weeks in early April when the ground is dry, there's no foliage yet, and the spring rains have yet to start, and even that's weather permitting. And maybe you get another shot in November. And assuming you actually can burn, you can only burn as much as you have staff on hand to control it. They do several burns a year in a state park that runs about 20,000 acres, but none of them are more than a dozen or so acres at a time, and most are smaller. Things are obviously different out west where wildfire risk is greater, but they still have to work with the weather.

The 10am policy wasn't late 20th century, particularly environmentalist-aligned (the Forest Service has historically been a timber agency), or unique to California (see e.g. pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20070810191055/http://www.nifc.gov/fire_policy/docs/chp1.pdf).

I'm not going to say that it's impossible to carry out RX in steep chaparral surrounded by structures, but it's a lot more technically challenging than cleaning up long-needle litter or dead grass.

This is a good comment, I really appreciate the specific technical description coupled with the cultural insight.

There is already a thread on this, but I wanted to continue the discussion regarding the Lex/Zelenskyy interview. The other thread is mainly focused on Lex's language choice, and Lex's skills as an interviewer. I'm not very interested in this whole debate - it is pointless internet drama, and a modern form of celebrity worship. It's very disappointing that most people's takeaway "yay Lex" or "boo Lex" and not anything even slightly relevant to the actual war that is taking place.

My takeaway from the interview was that I think much less of Zelenskyy. This was his chance to explain the war from Ukraine's perspective, and the best he could come up with was a braindead "Putin = Hitler" take. People who rely on the "X = Hitler" argument are currently on a losing streak, and I am now more convinced than ever that Zelenskyy will continue that losing streak. I completely agree with Lex that if Zelenskyy believes that Putin is some mutant combination of Hitler and Stalin, yet somehow worse than both, compromise is not on the table. Zelenskyy dies or is forced into exile, or Putin dies or is forced into exile. In spite of biased media coverage in the West that only highlights Ukraine's successes and Russian setbacks, it's pretty clear at this point that if the status quo continues, Ukraine will lose a war of attrition first.

Zelenskyy could have tried to explain why Putin's narrative on the 2014 coup, or the ensuing War in Donbas, is incorrect. Instead, in 3 hours I don't remember him discussing Donbas even once. Maybe this is partially on Lex for not driving home the specifics. While Zelenskyy did not have time to address the core premise of the entire war, he did have time to engage in some psychotic rambling about how Putin would conquer all of Europe.

Maybe Zelenskyy is actually more reasonable in his private views, and he is simply running an outdated propaganda playbook that would have worked in the 1940's, or even the 2000's. But in today's age of high information availability, more subtlety is required. Even if you can convince the average person with a braindead argument like "Putin = Hitler", there will always be a subset of more intelligent people who demand a real argument. Since the more intelligent people tend to have out-sized influence, if you fail to offer them anything, they will not truly support you, or may even undermine you. If you are an intelligent person who doesn't really know much about the war, Zelenskyy offered nothing of substance. "Putin = Hitler" is not substance.

Maybe one possibility is that the two sides of the war are actually:

  1. The war is about the 2014 coup and the ensuing War in Donbas.
  2. The war is about Putin = Hitler.

If these are the options, I'm afraid I have no choice but to take Russia's side. The coup and the War in Donbas, at minimum, happened and were upsetting to Russia, and it is not even remotely outside of the historical norm for such situations to eventually escalate into a full-blown war. On the other hand, 2 is a merely deflection of 1 - not a real argument, just a poor attempt at psychologizing why Putin's motivations aren't his stated motivations, which at least described by Putin are quite logical, but actually just that he is secretly Hitler for some reason. If there is an alternative version of 2, that actually addresses 1, I am certainly open to it.

which at least described by Putin are quite logical

hahahahahahahah

This has been my experience with trying to talk to Ukraine supporters so far. It's basically how Zelenskyy talked to Lex as well. They do not seem to be able to form a coherent argument; instead they simply attempt to mock anybody who wants to hear someone address Russia's arguments directly from a pro-Ukraine perspective. Trying to shame people into supporting Ukraine, without actually addressing Russia's rationale for invading, is not going to work.

I believe that the reason Ukraine supporters refuse to address the history of the war is that the entire situation becomes more complex in a way that is unhelpful to their cause. Under certain ethical frames, even under Putin's assertions, Russia's invasion of Ukraine is still unquestionably wrong. However, to even make this observation, you admit that there is a question of ethical frame and values. Under some frames, Putin has some reasonable argument, assuming the facts are true. Some commentary has compared him to a "20th century statesman" in how he thinks about things. However, then you have a more difficult task of either refuting the facts or challenging the moral frame. Better then, to simply say "Putin = Hitler, anyone who doesn't agree with my ethical frame is a pyscho maniac murder," and avoid the conversation altogether. I understand this rationale, but I think it is the wrong approach for 2025, and it is certainly not any basis for negotiating an end to the war.

Trump wants to make peace, but it certainly appears that Zelenskyy is not open to it. He did talk about security guarantees - I think this is reasonable, depending on the specifics of the guarantees. Maybe even NATO membership. But he has to let go of the idea that he will get all of the land back. There is no universe in which the Putin regime stays and power and this happens, unless Ukraine achieves some military miracle. At an absolute minimum, the eastern Donbas is gone.

Where does this leave Trump? Obviously he is going to threaten Zelenskyy in various ways, such as threatening to completely ban the export of weapons to Ukraine, sanctions on Ukraine, sanctions on anyone who continues to support Ukraine until Zelenskyy is willing to come to the negotiating table, etc.. This is my prediction for how the war ends: Trump threatens Zelenskyy, Zelenskyy eventually gives in and negotiates, Russia gets some of the land, and Ukraine gets security guarantees backed by the US. The devil will be in the details, of course.

If you're such an expert on Russia, why don't you address XYZ...

I am not, I am merely a casually observer who spends too much time online, and I am happy to hear your takes on XYZ. I'm not pro-Russia, I am just anti-terrible discourse, and the pro-Ukrainian discourse that I have observed has been horrendously poor. Disappointingly, Zelenskyy continued this. On the other hand, Putin's speeches were highly intellectual and several levels above any speech I have ever heard a Western leader give in terms of sophistication. I am also secure enough in myself that "well if you think that, it proves you're retarded" will not change my view. In the modern information environment, this argument is in fact less effective than ever.

The other thread is mainly focused on Lex's language choice, and Lex's skills as an interviewer.

More interesting for me is Zelenskyys language skill:

https://x.com/RWApodcast/status/1876014982527434842

https://x.com/RWApodcast/status/1876016285550813559

Tweaking Zelensky is a mess. He struggles to speak Ukrainian, stumbles, switches between languages and swears profusely in Russian. Wonder what happened to the lil guy. Lex Fridman fucking DUBBED it in English, so people wouldn't notice how stupid it all sounds.

Imagine Trump sounding like this: "Hola amigos... fuuuuck.. i'm gonna whoop the cholo pendejo ass. mierda motherfucker..." Not exaggerating, not even a little bit. Crazy world we live in!

RWAPodcast are Russian shills, but they have interesting take and provide a window into Russian thinking. If their diss here is accurate (or not!) I could judge how fair they are.

I think the only thing which saves Ukraine as a generally independent political entity is a comprehensive treaty between the US and Russia dealing with all sorts of issues from trade, weapons cooperation/limitations, finance exchanges, territorial disagreements (and ones which will develop in the near future), technology exchange, and a long list of other things Putin has wanted for decades and has been unable to get thus far. In that discussion, Ukraine isn't even in the top 5 things which Russia wants. In that list, the US would be able to get some concessions in the Ukraine conflict which doesn't result in rump-state Ukraine with a puppet government.

Since the only thing I've heard so far from Trump&Co and the idiots briefing him on this conflict, is some goofball ceasefire with Euro troops enforcing a demilitarized zoned and/or NATO membership delay, we're not even in the zipcode of an agreement Russia would find palatable.

If the only topic is Ukraine, Russia will not agree to anything less than international recognition of the full territory of all oblasts it has already inducted into the Russian Federation, constitutionally guaranteed neutrality and disarmament with inspections, constitutional protections for Russian speakers, constitutional protections for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, some sort of "de-Nazification" program, and a removal of all or nearly all sanctions against Russia with some sort of guarantee going forward they won't be put back in place the moment it's convenient.

Otherwise, there isn't a strong enough reason for Russia to stop this war. They are clearly winning now and disarming Ukraine by destroying their armies (not to mention draining the armories and treasuries of Europe) on the battlefield and an alarming % of the able-bodied male population between the ages of 21-60. Their military is larger, better armed, and more capable now than they were 3 years ago. Russia has already spent the political and social capital to mobilize men and industry to seriously fight this conflict.

I've found this topic to be difficult to discuss on this forum because of the chasm between how I and others view the reality of this war on the ground. For, e.g., I would estimate there are over 600,000 Ukrainians killed with the total number of dead and seriously wounded to be over 1,000,000 men.

But in today's age of high information availability, more subtlety is required. Even if you can convince the average person with a braindead argument like "Putin = Hitler", there will always be a subset of more intelligent people who demand a real argument. Since the more intelligent people tend to have out-sized influence, if you fail to offer them anything, they will not truly support you, or may even undermine you.

This doesn't seem true to me. Political speeches have been decreasing in sophistication for nearly a century at this point, at least in Democracies where you can have the votes of every thinking person but, in the words of Adlai Stevenson, "still need a majority." If the voters demand something contradictory like "we want to give billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine but not pay more in taxes or suffer any material consequences" then all the smartest politicians will spend their days coming up with ways to trick the populace into thinking they can have their cake and eat it too, praying that they won't be the one left standing when the game of musical chairs ends.

As far as convincing the averge person in the west to support Ukraine, "Putin is like Hitler" will work a lot better than "the system of international norms that have prevented large-scale interstate conflict in Europe since 1945 are dependent on all nations renouncing territorial annexation as a means of resolving their disputes, and any violator of these norms must be swiftly and severely punished to prevent a return to the bloodshed that characterized the first half of the twentieth century", but the latter is there if you want it.

But he has to let go of the idea that he will get all of the land back.

There is no way he or anyone close to him genuinely believes this, but it would be stupid to undermine his bargaining position before ever setting foot in the negotiating room. Such concessions need to be made privately to avoid public humiliation (or potential defenestration).

Is this not a principled choice by Zelensky, though? There is a particular Western memeplex that is easily glossed as "weaponised end of history". In this narrative, it is the West that is always willing to look at the present, call out evil and fight for good; and its enemies consist of a freak show of backwards beta loser powers that always invoke historical grievances and cringey national myths, which no enlightened democratic Chad would give a rat's ass about, to rationalise their desire to do more evil. This way of thinking clearly appeals to a significant portion of the Western audience - general Western media reactions to Putin's occasional rambling history lessons seem to come from the same playbook as the Kamala campaign "weird" ad to much better reception, and a particularly common use of the "whataboutism" meme may be glossed as "don't derail our discussion about what you are doing now by talking about what I did in the past".

Zelensky doesn't obviously need the audience that is unwilling to subscribe to this worldview, because the alliance of devout history-enders and Machiavellians can easily remain at the levers in the West as long as the fence-sitters stay put. He has little to gain from bringing up historical context, because historical context on the balance would not be kind to him - between the mess that was 2014-2022, the now largely forgotten gas disputes in the decades before it (which one may summarise as Ukraine stealing gas and being like "what are you gonna do, stop using our territory for transit?" about it) and the awkwardness surrounding how inextricable the literal Nazis and collaborators are from Ukrainian national identity even while none of their modern backers are quite willing to take the plunge and officially rehabilitate them, legitimising the view that history matters at at all would only risk growing the elements of the Western public that are tired of the war and would rather see their tax money and attention tokens redirected to morally more black-and-white issues.

If I can show you examples of Ukraine supporters who can form a coherent argument, who don’t rely on shame or vibes, is there any chance you’ll be convinced?

I’m open to arguments that Maidan was going to happen regardless of western involvement. I think the evidence points to the west being heavily involved, but I can have epistemic humility here.

But how can you argue that it wasn’t deposing a man who won a fair election, and that his supporters, who happen to be geographically concentrated, are right to be angry to the point of secession?

Speaking of Maidan, can anyone who knows Ukrainian peruse the court document from this article and check if it's accurate? The author claims that many of the protestors shot during Maidan were shot by far-right pro-Maidan groups, not the special police (Berkut), and that this has been confirmed by a recent trial verdict.

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/buried-trial-verdict-confirms-false-flag-maidan-massacre-in-ukraine-2024

A nearly one-million-word verdict from Ukraine’s Maidan massacre trial has recently confirmed that many Maidan activists were shot not by members of Ukraine’s Berkut special police force or other law enforcement personnel but by snipers in the far-right-controlled Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan-controlled locations a decade ago today. The verdict, handed down on October 18, 2023, states specifically that this hotel was controlled by Maidan activists and that an armed, far-right-linked Maidan group was in the hotel and fired from it. It also confirms that there was no Russian involvement in the massacre and that no massacre orders were issued by then President Viktor Yanukovych or his ministers. The verdict concludes that the Euromaidan was at the time of this massacre not a peaceful protest but a “rebellion” that involved the killing of Berkut and other police personnel.

The document in question: https://reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/114304164

And some sections translated with google:

https://www.academia.edu/109357708/Maidan_Massacre_Trial_Verdict_Selected_Excerpts_Confirming_False_Flag_Massacre_English_Google_Translation_

Video from a BBC reporter at the scene where he claims to have seen shooting from the Hotel Ukrainia: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zQhuD4F1yJ0

I'll pass on a million words of Ukrainian legalese and government reporting, but I can speak a bit to Ivan Katchanovski.

Ivan Katchanovski as an author probably isn't your best bet for an objective take, since he's made his theory his career niche and he gets signal boosted as part of the general propaganda wars, partly because he deliberately conflates various elements to make a more reaching case than he has. (For example- the court found that sniper shots came from Hotel Ukraina- it did not identify by who, or how many people were victims of them. In absence of identification, the perpetrator's affiliation is assigned.)

Katchanovski's core claim is that only the Maidan groups could have operated from the Hotel Ukraina because it was used by the protestors, and thus the sniper reports as a whole were a Euromaidan false flag. This... really isn't a strong link, since there was no sort of real access control / accountability in Hotel Ukraina or the Euromaidan protest zones, where if you weren't clearly government you could generally move around. You need active control and screening to credibly argue that no one trying to do a false flag could walk in, go upstairs, and take shots before leaving in the confusion of people hearing shots and thinking they might be under attack, particularly since security services can penetrate protest movements as much as any other sort of agency.

(To be explicitly clear on alternative narratives: the dispute isn't that shots came from Hotel Ukraina, but one framing is that the police never opened fire unprovoked but were merely defending themselves from far-right Euromaidan provacateurs, and another is that Ukrainian attempted a false-flag provocation to justify / prompt a Ukrainian state crackdown. Part of the basis of the later theory is that it was a tactic used by Russia elsewhere, such as in Syria at the start of the syrian civil war, and Russian advisors were present with Ukrainian security services at the time (though the Ukrainian govt. position is that the actors were Ukrainian).)

You could argue the plausibility of either chain of events, but Katchanovski dismisses that with language asserting solid control, while using insinuating language to maximize culpability to Euromaidan ('many' Euromaidan shot by far-right snipers... but no proprotional allocation or acknoweldgement of state snipers) and minimize actions by the Yanukovich government ('no massacre order given'- itself a twist of phrase to obscure the lethal force authorization that Yanukovich's government announced, which of course was not a literal order to conduct a massacre). Katchanovski is fond of these sort of semantic framings, such as calling the Russian-instigated separatists a civil war. Katchanovski tries to play to his western audience, but he's not exactly subtle with his attempts to lead the audience.

Multi-lingual word games aren't fun, and the unsatisfying answer is that in the time between Maidan and the reorganization of the internal security services, there was evidence of substantial evidence destruction (such as destruction of weapons believed used in the shootings) and key witnesses- including the internal security service leader- defected to Russia and thus were not available for Ivan's investigation to, well, investigate. Some security service people who were later recognized as being of interest were even turned over in Russian prisoner swaps.

What made the post-Maidan investigation worse/more embarassing for the post-Maidan government is that the post-Maidan government did not actually have firm control of the government aparatus for some time, and even then Ukrainian institutions- including the judiciary- were notoriously corrupt. Pro-Russian corruption was notably present even years after the revolution- such as the significant successes in the Russian invasion itself.

By noting that the secessionists were an astroturfed special operation, as demonstrated by the systemic lack of support where Russian green men were not on the ground to carry initial efforts and the Russian state relations (and even more controlled replacements) of separatist 'leaders,' and that the deposed man who won a fair election was also a man fled before he could be tried for actions that would merit deposition in civilized countries, including- but not limited to- attempting a purge of his own unity government by unilateral lethal force that made Soviet-era politicians blanche.

The NovaRussia campaign was Putin's attempt to instigate a popular uprising that he thought would sweep the country after Putin's attempt to instigate a purge of the opposition that had already been invited into a unity government backfired when he tried to treat an oligarchy as a party-dictatorship. The reason why the Russian military had to repeatedly intervene to prop up the popular revolution was because it was neither popular or a revolution.

The reason why the Russian military had to repeatedly intervene to prop up the popular revolution was because it was neither popular or a revolution.

By the same token, I don't think that the Kievan government would've spent February of 2022 distribing rifles and ammunition to anyone who asked if they expected those weapons to be turned against them.

The NovaRussia campaign was Putin's attempt to instigate a popular uprising that he thought would sweep the country

As far as I know, the war in Donbass began as the result of actions by individual Russians like Strelkov who crossed the border into Ukraine without their government's knowledge or sanction (though these individuals did believe they were instigating a popular uprising that would sweep the country), and only once their filibuster campaign was on the verge of collapse did Putin finally intervene to save them.

That's another version of events that would work against the 'eastern Ukrainians were just so upset with Euromaidan they decided to secede,' I suppose.

Since the more intelligent people tend to have out-sized influence

I wonder about this...

I’ve always been skeptical about the argumentum ad hitlerum style of Western discourse especially in the international arena. It’s really meant as a cognitive kill switch, something that is meant to completely disarm any opposition to whatever war or war aid positions that the elite are taking at the moment. And the result of this style of argument is that to put it bluntly, it takes none of our business off the table once it’s invoked.

The real impulse behind the hagiography of the White Knight Westerners defeating basically Satan incarnate is a sales pitch to unaligned countries— we’re the good guys who defeated a crazy genocidal madman. And, thus, the pitch goes, you should join our block because we’re going to protect you and other weak people or groups. The first part is true— the holocaust is obviously real and happened, and millions were killed by it. The problem is the second part. We never actually cared about tge genocide except as propaganda. The USA never expanded its immigration quotas from Europe or made it easier for European Jews to flee to our shores. And likewise we made no effort to stymie the ability of the Germans to ship people to camps. We basically didn’t care at all. Our reasons for being involved were mostly political and economic. Honestly we’d probably have gone to war with Hitler even if he’d never attempted a genocide.

The problem is obvious. Because we’ve set ourselves up as the Empire of Freedom, Theres very little to keep us from intervening in a conflict that has nothing to do with us. Often dictators exist for a reason especially in unstable countries— they don’t have enough social trust to be able to coexist with other ethnic groups, so either you get a strongman or you get lots of intertribal warfare. Removing Saddam almost certainly set back the people of Iraq even if he was a brute as the alternative turns out to be Sunni brute’s murdering Shia brutes and society coming apart as people attempt to live in the chaos. In other cases, it’s a bad idea because any war will cost millions in treasure and a good number of lives — men either killed or maimed on both sides, infrastructure destroyed leading to civilian deaths, etc. and quite often the gain we get for this is small. Not every war is worth it (unless of course you’re in the arms business), feasible, or a good idea. But because of the anti Hitler branding of NATO, there’s no easy way to make tge case that maybe there’s no good reason for us to get involved in a conflict.

The second problem is that the meme is so deep in the Western mind that in order to question the current situation, you have to “deconstruct” the hagiographic narrative of WW2. And that often ends up meaning that people blame the Jews for the narrative, and in order to create the case for the “X=Hitler, therefore bomb the crap out of X’s country either directly or indirectly,” being wrong, it’s almost necessary to rehabilitate the Axis.

I’m more or less a political realist. My thoughts on war are: it has to benefit us in some way, it has to be probable that us getting involved will mean achieving the results that benefit us. To me this is simply a saner way to think about going to war. If it’s not going to create stability in the region, it’s not going to get us a good trading position, or access to minerals or oil or things we need to build our economy, or securing vital industries away from rivals, it doesn’t make sense. Dictator = Hitler is not a reason. Bad images on TV are not a reason.

But he has to let go of the idea that he will get all of the land back. There is no universe in which the Putin regime stays and power and this happens, unless Ukraine achieves some military miracle. At an absolute minimum, the eastern Donbas is gone.

Minor note but obviously someone isn’t going to fold and throw away their entire negotiating hand in a war during a podcast.

the pro-Ukrainian discourse that I have observed has been horrendously poor. Disappointingly, Zelenskyy continued this. On the other hand, Putin's speeches were highly intellectual and several levels above any speech I have ever heard a Western leader give in terms of sophistication

The sophisticated version I’ve heard is simply that since the end of the big war, European nations have not attempted to conquer one another or to annex each other’s territory. Europe thus has a historical interest to make it as hard and consequential as possible for any nation which attempts to do this.

Meanwhile, Putin’s frame where historical claims of great civilizations and uniting the ethnicity through territorial annexation is important has historically resulted in horrific and likely unending bloodshed on the European continent.

For anyone on the western side to begin discussing the problem from within Putin’s frame is already to cede ground to his worldview.

Instead Zelensky has cast him as a naked assed barbarian who lives in a world of historical tribal claims rather than the modern world based on the principle of territorial sovereignty.

Zelensky did however lay out the historical context of Ukraine. The nation who gave up nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees which were subsequently not respected. That has significance. He also in my opinion could have painted the broader historical picture for westerners of why Ukrainians have historical reasons to resist domination under Moscow. Something about one of the largest man made famines in human history? I’m not sure how big a part of the Ukrainian psychology that event is. He probably could have done a better job here.

But in the end as @TequilaMockingbird says, conquerors of territory often operate on some great historical mythos in their own head. However even so, there still may be reason to consider them naked assed barbarians whose concept of grandeur isn’t compatible with the interests or frame of the rest of the world. Simply having a grand theory of history doesn’t correlate well with being a force for good in the world. It’s quite often the opposite.

Yeah, a podcast is 100% the place to be doing PR aimed at the people who are going to listen to it (probably not Putin), it's definitely not the place to make concessions or to commit other own-goals (not speaking Russian seemed obvious to me, although I haven't listened to the podcast.)

My takeaway from the interview was that I think much less of Zelenskyy. This was his chance to explain the war from Ukraine's perspective, and the best he could come up with was a braindead "Putin = Hitler" take.

Is it really brain dead though? Zelenskyy is to all apperances correct that Putin's position in 2024 is analogous to Hitler's in 1938, complete with appeals to anschlaus and rightful dominion over all German Russian Speaking peoples. Durring the lead up to and early stages of Russian pundits were talking openly about eliminating Ukrainian as a spoken language to dissuade any future notions of independence. Given the above I think it is reasonable for the Ukrainians to view this war as an existential one.

As @The_Golem101 observes, Putin has already made and broken treaty commitments within the context of this conflict so some sort of guarantee from the US and/or EU to ensure that Putin doesn't just come back in a year after his forces have had an opportunity to rearm and regroup is going to be the bare minimum for any agreement.

Durring the lead up to and early stages of Russian pundits were talking openly about eliminating Ukrainian as a spoken language to dissuade any future notions of independence.

I think this is a mixture of nutpicking (which is your fault) and weaponised nuts, as in the practice of keeping around extremists to send a message along the lines of "if you get rid of me you could get much worse" (which is Putin's fault). The reality seems to be that in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine Ukrainian is still offered as a first language at school at least as of last year (Russian MoE claims 43% chose it in Zaporizhia), while Ukraine started restricting books in Russian back in 2016 and has since 2023 also banned publishing in it. I would assume this entails no education in it, either (and if you speak it a friendly language inspector might just ask you if you got a loicense for that). This is not a matter of "well, it's Ukraine, so the correct percentage is 100% Ukrainian", either; many parts of modern Ukrainian territory historically never spoke the Ukrainian language. (Should India be allowed to stamp out non-Hindi speakers because the name of the language is related to the name of the country?)

I don't think there is much evidence of claimed dominion over all Russian-speaking peoples - there are large minorities in almost every country neighbouring Russia that they have not made any particular moves to claim dominion over, and conversely the Russian interest in Ukrainian alignment exists without the language/ethnicity component. Do Australian threats against the Solomon Islands to prevent a Chinese base in their backyard suggest a desire for dominion over all English-speaking peoples, because the Solomonese happen to speak English?

I think this is a mixture of nutpicking (which is your fault) and weaponised nuts, as in the practice of keeping around extremists to send a message along the lines of "if you get rid of me you could get much worse" (which is Putin's fault).

I feel like this just begs the questions; How high does someone have to be on the food chain before pointing out thier crazyness stops being "nut-picking"? and how many extremists does Putin get to endorse and support before it becomes "reasonable" to say that he supports and endorses extremism?

while Ukraine started restricting books in Russian back in 2016 and has since 2023 also banned publishing in it.

So what you're saying is that two years after Russia invaded Ukraine under the guise of "liberating Russian speakers" the Ukrainian government stopped teaching Russian in its schools, and a year after Russia invaded them for a second time under similar pretenses they banned publishing in Russian as well. Oh Dear, Anyway.

I don't think there is much evidence of claimed dominion over all Russian-speaking peoples

Putin (in his interview with Tucker Carlson), as well as several of the "weaponised nuts" he keeps around, IE Alexander Dugin, Timothy Sergetsev, and Moscow's Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church have all made claims to this effect.

Again, how far up the food chain does somone have to be before citing them changes from "nut-picking" to "evidence"

I feel like this just begs the questions; How high does someone have to be on the food chain before pointing out thier crazyness stops being "nut-picking"? and how many extremists does Putin get to endorse and support before it becomes "reasonable" to say that he supports and endorses extremism?

I haven't seen much in the way of endorsement and support presented. In terms of talking heads that can be in some sense argued to be in good standing with the Russian state, approximately an infinite amount - what matters is policy, not talk.

So what you're saying is that two years after Russia invaded Ukraine under the guise of "liberating Russian speakers" the Ukrainian government stopped teaching Russian in its schools, and a year after Russia invaded them for a second time under similar pretenses they banned publishing in Russian as well. Ok.

So what you're saying is that eliminating a language to dissuade any future notions of independence can be acceptable, and we are just haggling over the price?

Putin (in his interview with Tucker Carlson), as well as several of the "weaponised nuts" he keeps around, IE Alexander Dugin, Timothy Sergetsev, and Moscow's Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church have all made claims to this effect.

Dugin

Comparable to holding Trump accountable for things that Alex Jones says, maybe. As far as I can tell Putin-Dugin connections are on the level of "someone claimed..." and supposed dogwhistles.

Sergeytsev

Literally who? I had to google him (your misspelling of the name didn't help), and it sounds like... he is someone who wrote an inflammatory thinkpiece that was published on RIAN? I'm sure you can find some crazy editorials in Western flagship media (like the WaPo's cheerleading for invading Iraq), and for actual government media on Ukraine, here's VoA echoing Ukrainian conspiracy theories that the Russians are bombing themselves. I doubt every opinion piece they publish is ordered from the top.

Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church

Can I one-up this with Rumsfeld's creepy Bible quotes for invading Iraq? That one's even from an actual official member of government.

All in all, I think you could make a similar and stronger case that the American elites of the time endorsed and supported the actual idea of launching an honest-to-god religious crusade into Iraq. As much as I like smearing neocons, I don't think this would be accurate either.

Is it really brain dead though? Zelenskyy is to all apperances correct that Putin's position in 2024 is analogous to Hitler's in 1938, complete with appeals to anschlaus and rightful dominion over all German Russian Speaking peoples.

I think it is a completely unreasonable position to say that if there is a border war between a larger state and smaller state, and the area under question contains people who have historical connections to the larger state, then the leader of the larger state = Hitler. This must have happened a million times across history, and almost every time the leader was somebody other than Hitler.

It's not a "border war" though. It only superficially resembles one because the Ukrainians have put up stiffer resistance than anyone expected them to. @Dean correctly points out that Russia's stated war goals basically amount the elimination of Ukraine as an independent entity, and that the Ukrainians have responded accordingly.

Likewise the Hitler / Putin comparisons are not about geography or facial hair (Hitler wins on the latter front if you ask me) as much as it is about both of them being grievance-mongering dictators who take a very "everything for the state, nothing outside the state" approach to politics, while waging wars of expansion against thier nieghbors under the guise of supporting identity politics.

Is it fair to say that it’s a situation which often boils over to genocides?

Yugoslavia, Greece-Turkey, the Hutus and Tutsis, etc.

I probably lack full historical literacy of all the details but any time a country sends their military to another to protect their ethnicity as a minority there, or try to annex them into their own I feel like it tends to end up in horrible bloodshed.

I think the principle of sovereignty, respect for territorial boundaries, and relative freedom of movement has been a good salve for this recurring pattern of warfare.

Who follows that principle, though? Certainly the US (Kosovo, ...) and allies (Israel) don't.

I think a significant tension in these debates that is seldom discussed explicitly is between the position that it is going to be inevitable that the hegemon (US) gets to bend/violate the principles a little and we should feel blessed with a hegemon that has been doing it so sparingly and judiciously on one hand, and the position that after a world in which 0 parties get to violate the principle the next best one is one in which 2+ parties get to on the other. I'm firmly in the second camp for what I'd like to think is a good assortment of reasons, while the majority of nuanced political thinkers in the West tends to be in the former. (There are of course also louder, and less interesting, positions, amounting to "the US never violated any principle, NATO is a defensive alliance, go back to your bot farm" and "America fuck yeah, cry about it". There isn't really much to discuss with the latter, and the former is hard to get through to.)

The difference usually boils down to questions of how sparing and judicious US violations really are, how reassuring it is to hope that they will always remain as sparing and judicious as they are now, and whether game theory does or doesn't mean that the understanding that the US alone could go on an unrestrained spree of conquest and meddling with impunity lets them reap many of the boons of doing so without actually having to transgress, much like nuclear-armed states reap benefits without ever firing a single nuke in anger.

I also tend to think that as a lowly civilian, my rulers facing adversity and competition is almost always good - if they can stand unopposed, they don't need to do anything for me, but if they are locked in a knife's-edge struggle with a mortal enemy, they are incentivised to buy my support lest I throw my minuscule worth in for the other side and tip the balance. ("For any German politicians reading this: Do I sound like a Putin bot? Are you afraid of losing the upcoming election to Putin bot parties? We can discuss terms!")

Who follows that principle, though? Certainly the US (Kosovo, ...) and allies (Israel) don't.

Odd choice of examples if those are your examples.

Different entities may not follow the principle as you'd prefer to understand it, but that doesn't mean they don't follow it as they understand it. Being different entities naturally they would understand with their own differences, even as those entities are themselves composed of different people over time.

Kosovo is a trivial example of sovereignty-principle compliance- the American (and many others) concept of the principle sovereignty is that sovereignty is not absolute. There are decades of internal law theory and practice as to why this is not only not at odds with international law, but required by international law to not consider sovereignty absolute.

Complying with the principle of [X] as it interacts with other principles is not an abandonment of a principle just because you have your own geopolitical preferences.

Principles are only really worth anything if they meaningfully constrain behaviour, and if their application is sufficiently predictable that others can anticipate in what way behaviour will be constrained by them. As a hypothetical country opposing the US, are there behaviours I could actually confidently predict the US would or would not take, which would not be sufficiently predicted by a model in which the US always acts to maximise its own wealth and power?

Supreme Court rulings that can be completely predicted by knowing the political alignment of the judges and valence of the possible rulings still come with a text, which you could think of as a sort of parallel construction, presenting the illusion that law is created by application of legal principles. This undoubtedly helps the peace-keeping function of national law (as the belief that procedurally impartial justice is available saps the will to take matters into your own hands), and I'm sure that the way that "decades of international law theory" tend to turn up afterwards whenever the US does what it must serve a similar function for those under its wing that wish to remain at peace with a situation they can't do anything about anyway. However, in a situation like this, at least those of us outside of the US are not actually so completely powerless that the best course of action is to believe whatever will make us the happiest. We're facing decisions that have some real impact on things like whether our country remains aligned with US goals and whether we personally help or subvert those goals every day, and for that purpose it would be useful to have a correct model of how the US would act in different situations.

As a concrete example, if I as a German voter were to vote in the AfD or BSW and they seek business with Russia, should I expect more US attacks on our infrastructure? Suppose I would not vote for them if I knew that this would happen, but I fall for the "sovereignty principle" as naively understood by me (and there's no doubt the cheerleaders are perfectly happy with me having this naive understanding!), or believe that the professed principles of European solidarity and mutual security assistance mean that if such a thing were to happen the other EU countries would help uncover and oppose it. They get elected by a narrow margin, a great MR-two-point-oh rapprochement occurs, and then the pipelines and train lines start mysteriously blowing up. I have a pretty good hunch who did it, but all the Baltics stonewall us so I can't even coordinate a protest, and our economy is once again in shambles. Will the inevitable fifty-page treatise of international law theory that explains how this is actually fully in line with all professed principles be of any solace to me, after I made a decision based on a flawed world model and reaped a catastrophic outcome?

Principles are only really worth anything if they meaningfully constrain behaviour,

Criteria met.

and if their application is sufficiently predictable that others can anticipate in what way behaviour will be constrained by them.

Criteria also met.

As a hypothetical country opposing the US, are there behaviours I could actually confidently predict the US would or would not take, which would not be sufficiently predicted by a model in which the US always acts to maximise its own wealth and power?

Yup. There are many ways to describe the US policies of the last century or so, but 'always act to maximize its own wealth and power' isn't a competent characterization of it.

Given how simple this opening premise was, and how you didn't even try to argue about Kosovo, I think we can move on from the US to what you actually care about.

As a concrete example, if I as a German voter were to vote in the AfD or BSW and they seek business with Russia, should I expect more US attacks on our infrastructure?

Nope. Not unless you want to insinuate AfD or BSW voters are morally obliged to subscribe to certain conspiracy theories.

They get voted in by a narrow margin, a great MR-two-point-oh rapprochement occurs, and then the pipelines and train lines start mysteriously blowing up. I have a pretty good hunch who did it, but all the Baltics stonewall us so I can't even coordinate a protest, and our economy is once again in shambles.

Do you? I'm pretty open that I think it was plausibly Ukraine, and I've written to that multiple times over the years, but then there are holdouts and you did insinuate 'more' US attacks, so your position is not particularly clear.

I am also not convinced you cannot coordinate a protest so much as your protest is sufficiently unsympathetic enough to garner support you feel you are owed in the way you want it. In so much that our economy is in shambles, some of that seems unavoidable to any reasonable agency and some of that is a well-earned consequence of sovereign prerogative to make bad macroeconomic decisions and take macroeconomic risks that turn bad, even against the advice of partners and allies.

Will the inevitable fifty-page treatise of international law theory that explains how this is actually fully in line with all professed principles be of any solace to me, after I made a decision based on a flawed world model and reaped a catastrophic outcome?

Does your solace or lack thereof serve any relevant form of proof or disproof to whether the professed principles were actually held and adhered to or not?

Given how simple this opening premise was, and how you didn't even try to argue about Kosovo, I think we can move on from the US to what you actually care about.

There was nothing to argue with there - you said a thing that on its own means nothing other than "the principle constrains US actions less than you think it does" (which can mean anything from "the principle means sovereignty is absolute in all cases that are not the US attacking Serbia" to "actually the principle means nothing") and pointed at "decades of international law theory", which it is hardly reasonable of you to expect me to go read up on for the sake of this thread.

I don't get the sense that you really addressed my points at all. Can you spell out exactly what are the constraints on US behaviour that you believe result from this principle of sovereignty (not absolute) that the US adheres to? I understand that you predict in concrete terms that it will not physically attack German infrastructure even in the event of German rapprochement with Russia (of course assuming no additional contingencies), but that alone could be equally predicted from self-interest (an open attack could cause enough negative sentiment to reduce German cooperation with other US endeavours). Do you think the US would...

  • ...do it if they were assured that mainstream media in all involved countries will refuse to entertain the theory that the US did it?

  • ...provide material support to non-US actors to do it?

  • ...ignore and conceal (and instruct allies to do so) evidence they obtained that non-US actors would do it? (I think this represents a minimum of what they almost certainly did for NS2; even WaPo asserted the first part )

  • ...engage in economic warfare with the purpose of preventing operation of another country's infrastructure? (They explicitly threatened this for NS2.)

  • ...do any of the above with some other country, whose support may be less important for them than Germany's?

  • ...engage in other acts that are commonly seen as violations of sovereignty: arming and equipping a coup, funding a coup, funding opposition parties?

  • ...any of the above, for countries whose support is less important and/or can be sufficiently assured by the coup or opposition election succeeding? (If you say no here, I could bring such a wall of counterexamples that the discussion wouldn't really be worth having.)

And, is there some compact representation of what the actual principle is that I could apply to generate the same predictions myself without reference to "decades of international law theory"?

People don't say Putin = Hitler because the nature of a border between a larger state and a smaller state with an ethnic dispute.

People make the Putin = Hitler comparison on the basis of historical revisionist warmongering based on fantasies of cultural identity and exaggerated grievance, plus systemic war crimes mixed with strategic incompetence born of arrogance and self-delusion.

This can still be a wrong basis for the comparison- the thing that makes Hitler historically distinct is the genocide camps rather than the warmongering or even the war crimes- but people are not making the comparison on the basis of the map.

Russia tried for much more, it's only a boarder war because Russia's military sucks.

During the American Civil War, there were a number of European military observers who came, looked around, looked at the horrific loss of bloodshed and things like elaborate trench fortifications, and came to a conclusion: the Yanks didn't know how to fight. They went home satisfied with themselves and unprepared for 1914 because they did not realize they were witnessing a revolution in military affairs, as the lethality of fires increased without a corresponding revolution in maneuver.

A lot of Ukrainians and Russians are dying and since where I am we get the privilege of sitting this round out, I really, really hope that we're able to take away something from it besides "Russia's military sucks" this time.

What are you on about? You falsely said this was a border dispute. I was informing you if you were ignorant or calling out a lie.

1870 also probably didn't help the European impression that elan beats machine guns. Shows how easy it is to draw incorrect lessons from major events

The South is a prime example of this (analogizing their situation to the Revolutionary War, which proved to be misleading) but you're going to have to fill me in or at least jog my memory on what happened in 1870.

The Franco-prussian walkover, which reinforced the European belief that elite troops and violence of action would always trump artillery and fancy guns.

"Drones suck."

I've made the point more at length before, but I view the advent of drones, as demonstrated in the Ukraine War, as both a military revolution and a revolution in military affairs. It's changed the nature of the civil-populace's relationship with war, as drones have been a democratization of airpower that almost anyone can both contribute to (via the affordability / ease of maintenance) or participate in (ease of piloting / utility).

This wouldn't have mattered as much as it has if the Russians didn't suck- there were severe and fundamental mistakes in the Russian strategy from planning assumptions to allocations of manpower- but the technological innovation of drones is the hard lesson learned.

I agree about drones.

I also agree that the Russians made very severe mistakes going in (contra some people, I tend to believe that after several years of war the Russian and Ukrainian armies are now arguably the most capable ground forces in the world man for man, simply because exposure to peer conflict tends to result in the swift development of military skill – even if it is not true, I think it is good to behave as if it were rather than making the opposite mistake I detail above. I do not believe this applies to their air or especially their naval arms, although I think the Russians in particular have learned a lot from the air war, a lot of it was lessons the US has known for twenty-forty years.)

I would add to this – personally – mines, mines mines. Not as big a revolution as drones, obviously, but it seems fairly likely to me, in hindsight, that NATO planners were unprepared for the volume of mines the Russians were prepared to field.

I also agree that the Russians made very severe mistakes going in (contra some people, I tend to believe that after several years of war the Russian and Ukrainian armies are now arguably the most capable ground forces in the world man for man, simply because exposure to peer conflict tends to result in the swift development of military skill – even if it is not true, I think it is good to behave as if it were rather than making the opposite mistake I detail above. I do not believe this applies to their air or especially their naval arms, although I think the Russians in particular have learned a lot from the air war, a lot of it was lessons the US has known for twenty-forty years.)

That would be an argument that assumes effective Darwinian processes. It really doesn't work that way in a force-generation contest like Ukraine.

While the Russian staff officer level is able to adjust and improve at a planning level, the quality of ground forces has degraded on both equipment and personnel quality levels. It started with the short-signed seed-corn strategy in 2022 when the Russians canibalized its training corps for front line forces for conscription, and the consumption of 'quality' with low-quality replacements has only increased. Russia continued to commit and recommit forces until their functional dissolution and necessary reconstitution.

Rather than build up combat-tested elite veterans, Russia has mostly expended its elites and replaced them with less and less capable replacements who are less trained, less equiped, and more prone to drugs and ill-discipline. The most capable elements of the ground forces are those that aren't exposed to fires, namely the EW, drone, and missile corps.

That would be an argument that assumes effective Darwinian processes. It really doesn't work that way in a force-generation contest like Ukraine.

The war I am most familiar with is probably the American Civil War, which was at least in part a force-generation contest. The Union followed a similarly stupid pattern of force generation – unlike the South, which backfilled depleted units with fresh troops, the Union raised entire new fresh inexperienced companies and sent them into battle. You speak with a level of sophistication about such things that indicates to me that I do not need to explain why this is a terrible idea.

Nevertheless, I think it would be a mistake, based on anything I've read, to presume the U.S. Army was less competent or equally competent in 1864 compared to 1860. In fact, my impression is that they were considerably improved by the end of the war.

This doesn't get into the other elements you mention (EW, drone, missiles) where testing their technology against frontline NATO assets is only going to enhance their capabilities.

Now, it's possible that experiences from the American Civil War don't cross-apply here, and that I'm the proverbial drunk searching for his keys under a streetlight. But I suspect they hold at least partially.

Given the above I think it is reasonable for the Ukrainians to view this war as an existential one.

Particularly given the capture/kill lists that went on in occupied territories along with the systemic torture chambers, with criteria reportedly including things like 'spoke out against Russia' or 'served in the Ukrainian military post-Maidan.' The liquidation criteria has since been met by considerably larger proportions of the Ukrainian population.

The Ukrainian perspective has consistently considered not just the implications of this war, but what the peace terms imply for the prospects and survivability for the next war.

I think you might have missed a bit of why the Lex interview focused on the question of Putin's reliability and goals - what is looming over the current game board is the upcoming negotiations for ceasefire conditions, that's why it consumed all the oxygen in the room. It does make sense in this context for Ukraine to lay out its position that Putin has made and broken treaty commitments before, and they need security guarantees to make sure that a ceasefire isn't just a way for Russia to sort out its force generation issues and have another go in a few months. That's their minimum position, and while they won't "concede" territory, they may well agree that they aren't getting all that they want there, and a deal will be thrashed out. It's very important for their security and therefore survival that they get this, and so they will raise it as a key talking point.

Meanwhile, Putin's position is crazy town, he still wants full war goals, which is a bit of a "lol, lmao" position for someone whose military position is as weak as it is currently (they are struggling to source any tanks and tubes for the first time over sections of the front, meaning that their fires superiority will have to come increasingly from an expansion of air, which seems impossible medium term) and whose country is starting to seriously suffer under the economic pressure. For example, "Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov responded to the initial reports of the Turkish peace proposal, stating that "freezing" the frontline is "a priori unacceptable" for the Kremlin and that Russian President Vladimir Putin's previously stated conditions for ending the war — which amounted to full Ukrainian capitulation — remain "fully relevant." - that includes Ukrainian disarmament and massive additional territorial transfers.

Zelensky laying out a solid but reasonable ceasefire position to Trump and make Putin seem crazy is 80% of his US facing work currently, and he's doing a reasonable job of it I would guess. Some evidence of that is that his official position is pretty close to what you predict as the end state, without throwing out all of his haggling chips before he even starts.

A better interviewer would have drawn out far more interesting quotes with far better questions of course, but we had the interviewer we had, who sadly was Lex. There have been a lot of people who have talked about the different positions on the war over the years, and Pro vs Anti Ukrainians have written books on the topic, it's certainly not under discussed. We could discuss it here if you're interested, I have some opinions - but Putin's positions on the topic are certainly curious. He genuinely believes that Ukraine is a historical fiction, there are plots everywhere to split them off from Russia and that they need to forcibly reunited and driven to a satellite status - that was his interview with Tucker (I'm less impressed by his choice to devote all his airtime to ahistorical ramblings on Vladislav the Wise than you there) and his really odd paper in 2021 (http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181). The problem of discussing his position is that... it isn't internally consistent, though it's certainly a mistake. For example, even if it was true (rather than bad historical fiction) his invasion was the perfect way to create a national identity, I literally couldn't plan anything better as a creation myth for Ukraine.

However, would you like a summary of roughly what the Ukrainian positions are vs people like Strelkov? It won't be why Russia launched the invasion (Prigożyn was pretty clear on that, and I think he was telling the truth), but it would give a steelman for both sides.

Russian imperialists (so to speak) believe the Ukrainian nation doesn't exist (well, that at least one encompassing the Crimea and Novorossia in general certainly doesn't exist) in the same way American white liberals believe the white race doesn't exist or the way Zionists everywhere believe the Palestinian people don't exist, the way Hungarian nationalists believe that there has never been a Slovakian nation etc.

We don't have to pretend that this is a worldview utterly alien to normies in NATO states.

That's certainly part of people like Strelkov's views as per "85 Days in Slavyansk" - and I agree that denying your opponent nationhood/legitimacy is a useful tactic that many groups have made use of, no disagreement there.

I just don't think it makes much sense to argue historical word games around it when the fake people in question have sunk a good chunk of your Black Sea fleet, routed Guards divisions and your economy is in real trouble as your new BRICS buddies aren't buying any exports other than gas. Ukrainians certainly now feel like a people, and you're unlikely to argue them out of it with a new paper - he has to get his economy back on track and do something to sort out his horrible attrition ratios if he's going to apply his will to them by force.

Those are genuine beliefs, not tactics.

his invasion was the perfect way to create a national identity, I literally couldn't plan anything better as a creation myth for Ukraine.

Something about a brave agrarian yeomanry defending thier land in the War of Northern Agression perhaps?

And if Ukraine had sought independence for the sole purpose of continuing to keep human beings as property (and listed that as the reason in their declarations of secession), I might concede that the Kremlin had something approaching the general neighbourhood of a point.

The wars always follow the same patterns and have since the 1800s. A long backstory is ignored, and instead the new boogeyman is launched. There is no reason why this boogeyman exists, he is just evil and wants to wreck the world. A great sense of urgency is instilled and we all have to act now or else Ho Chi Minh, Gadaffi, Castro or whoever else is going to come to your town and murder babies! They are purely evil and have no arguments whatsoever, they are just cartoon villains.

Then the war starts with a big hype, freedom fries, this next war is so high tech, cheap precise and so different from all the others! Don't ask any critical questions, a few special forces operators can take all of Afghanistan in a few weeks and win! There is complete hype, the media asks barely any critical questions, and the psyops are in overdrive.

Then the war drags on, the casualties and costs mount, the refugee crisis grows and "we will be in Berlin next week" attitude is replaced with cynicism. During this phase the debate doesn't get better because now it is a sensitive topic. The war ends and people still don't want to talk about it, hold anyone responsible and even talk about it. It becomes embarrassing for the "Saddam will nuke as all crowd" when they have to face their fiasco.

These things become public frenzies whipped up by the media that fall apart with critical questioning. This isn't too different from defunding the police in Detroit. Every linkedin user is supposed to cheer it on, and a critical question makes everyone in the room deeply uncomfortable.

The west is incredibly good at psy-ops and unfortunately the main target is western leaders. Western leaders genuinely thought Ukraine's summer 2023 offensive would be a success because they had been psy-oped into thinking Russians are orcs with WWII tech who will collapse at the sight of a modern tank. The support for Ukraine has been haphazard because western leaders have been utterly convinced Russia is going to collapse any moment and the battlefield is Legolas and Aragon turning beheading Uruk-Hai into a sport.

The fact that so many in the west were shocked when the war broke out points to the absolute lack of understanding of the situation and what a filter bubble westerners are stuck in. The reaction was to double down and isolate their filter bubble even further.

During the invasion of Iraq Baghdad Bob was on CNN and there were at least some journalists running around on the ground. Today the media is so focused on purity that we would never see a live interview with even a Ukrainian soldier.

The sad thing is people who think every previous war was a farce will join the hype for the next war.

No, they don’t. Do you know anything about American reluctance to enter the World Wars?

I’d like to see you apply any of these standards to Putin’s Russia. You have a remarkable blind spot for anything you think pisses off your domestic enemies.

Do you know anything about American reluctance to enter the World Wars?

Obviously they don't follow the pattern he lays out here (Americans didn't lose those wars) but doesn't American reluctance to enter those wars support the "psy-opping people to get them to go to war" theory? This seems particularly true in WW1 where England (in addition to stirring up a lot of anti-German propaganda) passed the Zimmerman Note (which was authentic) to the US to get them to join the war in such a way as to conceal the fact that they obtained it by tapping American diplomatic lines as part of a concerted strategy to draw the United States into the war. Wilson was reelected on his track record of not getting involved and then...

There was a similar effort by the Brits in WW2 but I can't remember any of the really striking narratives from it.

I'll say "not particularly." America got to the brink of war for several other reasons, most prominently American deaths at the hands of U-boats. The sending, interception, and release of the Zimmerman telegram all hinged on Germany's actions at sea.

In elementary school, they taught us about the Lusitania and the policy of "unrestricted submarine warfare" all as one line item. This elided all the important questions.

What exactly did Germany do?

"Unrestricted" warfare never made sense to me until I learned what restrictions they were abandoning. Dating back to the Age of Sail, noncombatant ships were entitled to significant warning before being sunk. It wasn't as if sailing ships had any chance at stealth, anyway. They would surrender to the (faster, larger) warship, provide their papers, and allow a search for contraband cargo. If they proved to be a legal target, then, the raider was required to let them abandon ship, possibly taking them onboard as prisoners, before firing a shot. Such restrictions, known as "prize" or "cruiser rules", were codified by international treaties.

This was reasonable to ask of a surface combatant, which could comfortably outgun any prey or outrun any reinforcements appearing on the horizon. To a submarine, though, it was a terrifying prospect. Lacking the armor, firepower, or speed of a surface ship, subs were extremely vulnerable while surfaced. Requiring such a boat to expose its belly for the sake of propriety was extremely unpopular amongst submarine captains--and amongst their advocates in the German chain of command.

Twice, the German Navy declared that it would suspend these rules within a specific region of sea. The first of these campaigns lasted about six months before outrage from neutral nations forced them to walk it back. The second got America into the war.

Why did they think this was a good idea?

Britain was a powerhouse keeping the Western Front stable and Germany isolated. It was also an island reliant on imported food. The Germans had no expectations of beating the Royal Navy in a straight fight, so they tried to find another way to strike at the British Isles.

Initially, they believed their undersea blockade could be justified to neutrals as tit-for-tat with the more conventional British one. The first campaign was carried out with some limitations, preferring to target unambiguously Allied vessels, in an effort to minimize the backlash. But the British blockade didn't generate American corpses. Ultimately, this first campaign solidified the American government's position against unrestricted submarine warfare.

By 1917, the Western Front had ossified again. Jutland had thrown the Royal Navy into disarray but confined the Germans to port. Civilians and soldiers alike were faced with the abysmal Turnip Winter thanks to continued blockade and manpower shortages stemming from continued conscription. Germany was getting desperate.

Its informal military junta went for one last gamble. If the U-boats could break Britain, Germany could secure its position and make American diplomacy a moot point. They sent the Zimmerman note as part of an attempt to further delay the U.S. Unfortunately for Germany, British control of the seas extended to undersea cables. The telegram was sent on Jan 16 and intercepted immediately. Between its release to the American government and our declaration of war, German submarines began hunting American vessels in earnest, sinking ten.

Did it really matter so much?

Yes, it did.

I'd be willing to assume my main source, a book I just read, was too generous--it sure is a tidy conclusion for a book about naval power. But the chapters concerning submarines and American war support are well-sourced with statistics, letters, and quotes from the countries involved, all of which speak to the importance of these sinkings. My personal standout has to be Teddy Roosevelt, never the most reserved man, in the spring of 1917:

"If [Wilson] does not go to war with Germany I shall skin him alive!"

The trickle of American deaths into the headlines brought most Americans into Teddy's camp. Meanwhile, Wilson had drawn his lines in the sand, and Germany had finally, knowingly crossed them. We were done making excuses; it was time to "make the world safe for democracy."

I would add a few things –

First, I don't disagree re: the effects of unrestricted submarine warfare. In fact, I would add that the United States has a (reasonable, imho) history of getting involved in naval warfare due to seizure of its maritime assets and to preserve free trade, so it is possible that they would have been drawn in even if Germany did not adopt unrestricted submarine warfare.

But it's also fair to say that Germany was painted as a villain in English propaganda (and Germany did commit some fairly horrific war crimes during the war, so arguably they earned it). But certainly the casting of Germans as "the Hun" speaks to an effort to psy-op Americans into the war, even if the United States would have entered anyway. (It's also worth noting that American public opinion swung strongly against entry into the war, pushing Democrats at the polls and swinging to large majorities of anti-war sentiment in the intervening years. In fact it's not clear to me that a majority of Americans actually supported entering the war when war was declared – I don't know about that one way or the other).

To me that at least superficially pattern-matches the "psyop everyone into war" pattern, but I'm seeing that you, me, and functor may all have a slightly different theory as to what is meant by that. To be clear, though, I do agree you have a point about the importance of unrestricted submarine warfare, which was not something dreamed up by British propaganda.

Secondly, what's interesting is that while things like the English blockade you mention didn't prevent the US from entering the war against Germany, Wilson did try to resist characterizing the United States as allied with England and France, preferring to frame it as being coincidentally on the same side (and of course all the war-to-end-all-wars League of Nations stuff).

Thirdly, you (and I, earlier) skipped the funniest best part of the Zimmerman note! The Germans sent it to Mexico using American undersea cables, because the British had cut theirs and the US had extended use of their cables as a diplomatic courtesy. The British could hardly acknowledge that they had tapped the American diplomatic telegraph cables, so after intercepting the message they had to run a covert operation to steal a copy from its destination in Mexico so they could present it to the United States. Absolute Get Smart stuff, I love it.

The trickle of American deaths into the headlines brought most Americans into Teddy's camp. Meanwhile, Wilson had drawn his lines in the sand, and Germany had finally, knowingly crossed them. We were done making excuses; it was time to "make the world safe for democracy."

Trying a little hard for that good quality contribution link, eh?

(But seriously- well written.)

Only if you apply the pejorative selectively in one direction but not the other, i.e. that efforts to propagandize the Americans into neutrality are not a psy-op of its own but some sort of moral normal, whereas efforts to propagandize the Americans into picking a side is illegitimate because -reasons-.

I think one can draw a legible distinction between a foreign government running an espionage operation coupled with an untruthful propaganda campaign and the normal process of domestic consensus-making, but I take your point. Particularly in This Day And Age (anything after the telegraph) you've got to presume the possibility of hostile psyops in all directions.

I wish I had your optimism, but I don't think you can make a legible distinction when there are foreign governments running espionage operations in opposite directions at the same time.

When things are hard to measure- and few things are as hard to measure as the actual effects any amount of propaganda has- it's an easy rationalization to attribute unwanted decisions to the malign influence of outsiders while your favored directions are obviously enlightened objectivity of reasonable people.

I think you can make a legible distinction between foreign psy-ops (organized campaigns conducted at the behest of foreign powers) and organic domestic consensus in principle – in other words, there is a difference between the two – which is all that I meant. You can condemn the one and think that the other is all right. I agree that you can't necessarily turn back time and rerun history without the impact of a psy-op to see what effect it might have, and I further agree that psyops run in different directions, making the measurement of impact difficult. But that does not mean that a psy-op has zero effect, or an inestimable effect. (If this was true, it would arguably follow that there was no measurable or real harm in believing psyops or allowing your policy to be shaped by them, and I don't think that's correct.)

When things are hard to measure- and few things are as hard to measure as the actual effects any amount of propaganda has- it's an easy rationalization to attribute unwanted decisions to the malign influence of outsiders while your favored directions are obviously enlightened objectivity of reasonable people.

I'm not sure that it's necessarily true that you cannot measure the impact of propaganda. In fact I'm fairly confident that it isn't true today – maybe it was in 1921. But today you can actually quantify things like the impact the Internet Research Agency had on the 2020 election, not perfectly, but enough to get a measurement on it and talk about the impact it has.

But even if you grant that it is, it doesn't follow that it is good to run propaganda campaigns (and I would say especially ones that involve untruths, especially on your own people) or that it is bad for domestic governments to resist the influence of foreign government propaganda.

For instance, to talk about something I think it even more clear-cut than the psyops surrounding the world wars, I think the Nayirah testimony was

  1. Literally false (the person giving testimony reported firsthand knowledge she did not have)
  2. Substantively false (later investigation strongly suggests that not only were the specifics false, but the type of event depicted – Iraqis looting incubators, leading to children's deaths – never happened)
  3. Substantially justified the decision of the US to enter the Gulf War (was publicly referred to by decision-makers)

And I think this was an effort to propagandize Americans into involvement that was illegitimate (from the American point of view – obviously a Kuwaiti may have a different perspective) precisely because it was based on lies. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is that the effectiveness of things like the Nayirah testimony generates callousness and suspicion towards actual atrocities.

I think you can make a legible distinction between foreign psy-ops (organized campaigns conducted at the behest of foreign powers) and organic domestic consensus in principle – in other words, there is a difference between the two – which is all that I meant. You can condemn the one and think that the other is all right.

The ability to distinguish which is which is what I am contesting. The ability to say normal is good and artificial is bad is the easy part of differentiation- the issue is actually being able to say what is 'normal' versus 'artificial.'

It's Russel conjugation all the way down. You psyop, I persuade, the people I agree with listen to reason, the people I disagree with are wrongfully misled.

I'm not sure that it's necessarily true that you cannot measure the impact of propaganda. In fact I'm fairly confident that it isn't true today – maybe it was in 1921. But today you can actually quantify things like the impact the Internet Research Agency had on the 2020 election, not perfectly, but enough to get a measurement on it and talk about the impact it has.

Quiz question- do you know how researchers into Russian propaganda outfits like the IRA judge the effectiveness of Russian propaganda efforts like the IRA?

Answer - by reading the internal documentation of propaganda agencies citing western media coverage of them as proof that they are effective when justifying their budgets to paymasters.

But even if you grant that it is, it doesn't follow that it is good to run propaganda campaigns (and I would say especially ones that involve untruths, especially on your own people) or that it is bad for domestic governments to resist the influence of foreign government propaganda.

Again, russel conjugation. You have to resist foreign government propaganda. Reasonable foreigners happen to agree with my authentic political positions.

More comments

The support for Ukraine has been haphazard because western leaders have been utterly convinced Russia is going to collapse any moment

I think also because Western leaders have (potentially-legitimate) concerns about the chain of custody of their high-tech weapons, and their massed dumb munitions production has largely wilted to the point where it's taken time to be able to manufacture large numbers of dumb artillery shells in numbers not needed in probably two generations. We spent something like a trillion dollars getting the F-35 to active service, and remember what happened when a few B-29s landed in (Allied!) Soviet airfields: the Soviets quickly fielded the Tu-4 that looked just like it.

The last few decades haven't seen a need for Lend-Lease sorts of military support rather than direct conflict with supporting allies. Maybe giving Stingers to Afghan resistance? And as far as I can tell, some of the Western concern is also as you said (or early on, the reverse: arms to Ukraine are just going to end in Russian hands when they surrender). And also financial costs.

This is my prediction for how the war ends: Trump threatens Zelenskyy, Zelenskyy eventually gives in and negotiates, Russia gets some of the land, and Ukraine gets security guarantees backed by the US. The devil will be in the details, of course

Ukraine has security guarantees backed by the US right now. If the US is not willing to bleed for a healthy country with strong patriotic movement in 2022 whose security they have guaranteed in the 90s, chances that they will be willing for battered, divided, torn, lost half of the population and probably even bigger chunk of people with ability and fight in them, and in need of reconstruction are close to nil.

The historic norm so far is that when the US abandons artificially propped up ally - the other sides takes 100%.

Any deal that Putin will be willing to accept (while he is winning) will leave Ukraine completely demilitarized as a buffer between Russia and Poland. Which is non starter for Ukraine.

The Ukraine, on the other hand, also guaranteed its neutrality. It's supposedly an article in the treaty that established the Ukraine as an independent nation in 1991. Don't quote me on that though, I've only heard it from an acquaintance who claims to have read it.

With such a strong patriotic movement, why does Ukraine have so many deserters and draft dodgers?

I don't think there's ever been a war without deserters and draft dodgers. A better question continues to be: if the idea of an Ukrainian nation is as fake as Russians and pro-Russians claim, why have there still been so many willing to fight for it? You can only get so far with "they are all forced to do so", you don't survive 2,5 years against a stronger enemy with just or even mainly a gun-in-your-backs army.

They had quite a surge in volunteers in 2022. But when the war turned into meatgrinder, it is only sane to not go to the front. Taking a serious risk for my country is one thing, going to sure death with no chance of victory is different.

If you want to see what a country without a strong patriotic movement looks like during an invasion, look at Afghanistan.

Afghanistan arguably had a pretty strong patriotic movement, it’s just that it was on the side opposing the ANA. Granted that side wanted to revert back to tribal/religious rule rather than have a strictly 20th century nation state, but it was very unified in its opposition to foreign involvement.

Correct. The Taliban were actually something like radical modernizers (compared to the status quo in Afghanistan) who wanted to replace old tribal customs with sharia law.

Because it’s a shithole in Eastern Europe.

Ukraine is no shithole! UKRAINE IS STRONG

flips over risk board

Any deal that Putin will be willing to accept (while he is winning) will leave Ukraine completely demilitarized as a buffer between Russia and Poland. Which is non starter for Ukraine.

We have no way of knowing what Putin will or won't accept until we at least try.

This is what @sulla was talking about as the destructive "Putin = Hitler" myth. If we refuse to negotiate with Russia because they are maximally evil, the war can only end with the total capitulation of either Russia or Ukraine. That will mean the destruction of the Ukrainian state and hundreds of thousands more dead men.

But they are going to try.

whose security they have guaranteed in the 90s

I assume you are referring to the Budapest Memorandum, by which Ukraine surrendered all of its nuclear weapons. That Memorandum famously did not use the term “security guarantee”, but rather the utterly toothless “security assurance”.

The political reality on the ground after the USSR's dissolution was that as long as nuclear warheads and launchers remained on Ukrainian (and, for the record, Byelorussian and Kazakh) soil, there was a high chance of corrupt local officials (that is, pretty much all of them) selling at least some of them to the first North Korean / Libyan / Iranian / Iraqi / Jihadist / Pakistani / Algerian etc. agent that secretly lands in a private jet with bags of gold and cash.

The prevention of this was the most and probably only important consideration on the minds of those who came up with the idea of the Budapest Memorandum in the first place in Washington DC. Everything else about it is just irrelevant gibberish in comparison, and frankly anyone who brings up the Budapest Memorandum and yet keeps silent about this is a liar with an agenda.

On a sidenote, it were basically the same considerations that drove the construction of the ISS, which was in effect nothing but a make-work project designed to employ those post-Soviet scientists who'd otherwise have been recruited by Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Pakistan etc. in about 5 minutes to design missiles, rocket engines, nuclear weapons etc.

It also notably was not binding on either the US or Russia (in the case of the US, such treaties have to be ratified by Congress). The concern at the time was that Ukraine didn't have the funds to even pay soldier wages let alone secure or maintain the Soviet weapons stockpiles, so this was a more of a "pat on the back, don't worry, here's some cash for your nukes" agreement.

It's also worth noting that both the US and Russia trot out this Budapest Memorandum line when convenient. Russian propaganda mentioned it several times back during the Maidan crisis in 2014 and it was just as silly then.

Russian propaganda mentioned it several times back during the Maidan crisis in 2014 and it was just as silly then.

Sillier, actually; I don't recall any noise among the Western nations about biting off any territory from Ukraine.

Nope. But there was western discussion of who would be the leader of Ukraine

by which Ukraine surrendered all of its nuclear weapons.

Ukraine never had any nuclear weapons. They were all Moscow ones. It's like saying that Turkey will surrender its nuclear arsenal if/when the US brings them back home from Incirlik

I think this makes some questionable assumptions about the "rightful" structure of the Soviet empire. As far as I know, those were Soviet weapons, paid for and made by Soviet citizens, some of whom were Ukrainian, and the other SSRs. That permanent control would belong to the (former!) capital unreasonably privileges it over the other fragmenting client states.

I don't think it would be reasonable, for example, for the British to have demanded back all their military assets from newly-independent nations as their empire fragmented. "But those ships and guns belong to London!" seems an odd rallying cry for things in many cases the colonies themselves funded.

But in realpolitik terms, I suppose it did make sense at the time to limit the number of resulting nuclear states for proliferation reasons.

They have permissive action links though, nukes are unlike other weapons in that they don't 'just work'. Only decisionmakers in Moscow could fire them (otherwise any rogue commander could go and write Dr Strangelove fanfiction in the history books).

The better analogy would be, suppose the US broke up and, say, Texas and California became independent states (in the international relations sense), with California internationally recognized as the “successor state” of the US.

Would formerly-US nuclear weapons, located in Texas for the purpose of deterring an invasion through Texas’s flat and quickly-traversible terrain, manufactured by personnel from all over the former-US (including California), but maintained and operated primarily by Texans, become rightfully Californian overnight? What about all other formerly-US military hardware/personnel in the former-US?

Anyway, back in the real world, the point remains that no signatory to the Budapest Memorandum ever provided Ukraine with any kind of “security guarantee”. Indeed, the Americans were well aware of the military obligations such wording would entail, and thus specifically insisted on the weaker “security assurance”.

In this hypothetical scenario, Texas would control the vast majority of the US nuclear arsenal due to the Pantex plant.

'Which states would have nuclear weapons if the US hypothetically balkanized' is an answered question.

The California and Texas Republics had better not cross the Kingdom of North Dakota. It has the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal.

The US NATO nuclear umbrella is maintained by US troops stationed in those countries.

In contrast both the warheads and thier fuzing elements were in the custody of the UAF making them Moscow's in name only.

As per Wikipedia, Russia maintained control over the weapons in Ukraine. The situation was probably analogous, from what I can tell without having gotten into the weeds.

Ukraine has security guarantees backed by the US right now.

My understanding is that the US position is that the Budapest memorandum is not legally binding.

Foreigners and Americans alike always seem to forget that if it isn't ratified by the Senate then it isn't legally binding. By it I mean any treaties and international agreements.

Frankly I’m not sure Putin is willing to accept any offer right now. The problem is geography. The Russians have spent three years attriting the Ukrainian army and slowly breaking through the massive network of fortifications, trench lines, and bunker complexes that were built up over ten years along the LPR/DPR border. Also most of Ukraine’s few hilly areas are in the east. Everything after Pokrovsk and Kramantorsk will likely be significantly easier. Russia has put in a large percentage of the effort, blood and money needed to conquer half of all of Ukraine, and they are being asked to walk away and leave that on the table. The time to make a deal would have been about six months into the war when the Russian army only had 180,000 men in theater and were being routed out of Kharkiv.

If he doesn't want a deal, because, as usual, since day one, total russian victory is just around the corner, that's fine. Ukraine, for its part, can accept trump's offer, gets increased aid, and continue the war. Westerners aren't exactly under pressure to end the war.

I much prefer to make the same deal (whatever it is) now rather than earlier (assuming it was even on the table). If you're going to make a deal with a mafioso, it's much better morally to have him pay for it in blood, rather than just handing it over. Losses on your side that result from this preference are par for the course & acceptable. This only seems heartless from a naively pacifistic view. The mafioso is of course far more heartless.

The mafioso isn’t the only one paying in blood thoughbeit. Even in a best case scenario Ukraine’s economy and demographics have been permanently ruined. A harsh sacrifice perhaps, but one that Reddit and the US State Department are more than willing to make.

yeah, I already said this, losses are acceptable.

I don't take the pro-russian right seriously when they say they care about ukraine, its economy and demography. For one thing, because they say they don't care about ukraine on the next argument (it's far away, strategically unimportant, we need the money for the people here, etc). For another thing, because it's an argument putin makes, a mafia-extortion argument ('pay the black hand and nothing will happen to your nice flower shop'). Like zelensky says: We never pay any-one Dane-geld, no matter how trifling the cost; for the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that plays it is lost!

Yet Kipling is unfamiliar with his own country’s history. King Alfred literally paid the Danegeld. He used the time to establish his defenses and actually grew the Saxon power.

Also most of Ukraine’s few hilly areas are in the east. Everything after Pokrovsk and Kramantorsk will likely be significantly easier.

The Russian's limiting factor for breakthrough isn't terrain, but logistics. If the Russians wanted less rough terrain, there are and always have been significantly flatter areas in the northern and southern fronts they could have taken before they cracked their mechanized forces and downgraded to cold war kit even less capable of breakthroughs.

The time to make a deal would have been about six months into the war when the Russian army only had 180,000 men in theater and were being routed out of Kharkiv.

The Russian terms before and after the Kharkiv have included conditions like the Ukrainians disarming their tankforce to fewer tanks than the Ukrainians captured in the Kharkiv offensive.

Which is to say, the Russians weren't really interested in a credible deal that didn't leave the Russians in a superior position to invade after the deal than before the invasion.

If this sounds like a bad deal-making strategy on Putin's part... yes. Putin is not a good strategist, and regularly sabotages his own strategic goals while depending on westerners to sanewash Kremlin positions into rationalizations for compromise.

Trying to steelman both sides, Ukraine's case is the opposition between two philosophies of international relations: spheres of influence vs self determination.

There is a compelling argument that Russia feels cornered, Putin has been consistently making it and is only really following from Yelstin there.

There is also a compelling argument that Ukraine is an independent country who doesn't want its destiny to be bound up in the games of Great Powers and wants to join the West because it likes its fruits better.

The rejoinder to this from the Russian side would be that if self-determination is the principle being used, the Russian parts of Ukraine ought to have it too, and they don't want to be part of Ukraine, whilst the Ukrainian side would argue that this separatism is being fueled by the Russians in bad faith to destabilize the country and further their geopolitical aims.

But as soon as the guns are speaking, rethoric becomes practically useless to do anything but justify direct action.

In an instrumental sense, asking people to do anything but laugh at the proposition that the people they are at war with aren't evil is absurd.

a country with a fundamentalist religious tradition experiences a mass movement around a figure

fear of immigrants and immigration

contempt for journalists and journalism

violence

but when the people said: this is fascism

there were always those who said, no it isn't!

if it were fascism, he would be glorifying war!

he's the anti-war candidate!

now

he's been elected to deploy the military domestically

and he indicates he will expand the borders using the military

this is fascism

... duh.

  • -66

I see you're a sockpuppet. I don't know if you're a venting lefty or a trolling righty or some other kind of bait, but there's something I've never seen talked about, and it's worth talking about. This topic is endless tragedy and comedy, tragic where the real villain of the 20th century, communism, wasn't vanquished, and comic where we explore the history of the word "fascism."

Other commenters here have already observed how "fascism" and "fascist have become meaningless pejoratives, and that's what's funny: fascism has always been a meaningless pejorative. You can cite dictionaries but if you look at the original critiques by Marxists, be it Clara Zetkin or Trotsky or Georgi Dimitrov, you'd see it was meaningless when they wrote and spoke about it. It meant nothing. Well — almost nothing.

Zetkin:

Fascism is a characteristic symptom of decay in this period, an expression of the ongoing dissolution of the capitalist economy and the decomposition of the bourgeois state. Fascism is rooted above all in the impact of the imperialist war and the heightened and accelerated dislocation of the capitalist economy that it caused among broad layers of the small and middle bourgeoisie, the small peasantry, and the “intelligentsia.” This process dashed the hopes of these layers by demolishing their previous conditions of life and the degree of security they had previously enjoyed. Many in these social layers are also disillusioned regarding their vague expectations of a profound improvement in society through reformist socialism.

The reformist parties and trade-union leaders betrayed the revolution, capitulated to capitalism, and formed a coalition with the bourgeoisie in order to restore class rule and class exploitation as of old. All this they did under the banner of “democracy.” As a result, this type of “sympathizer” with the proletariat has been led to doubt socialism itself and its capacity to bring liberation and renew society. The immense majority of the proletariat outside Soviet Russia tolerated this betrayal with a weak-willed fear of struggle and submitted to their own exploitation and enslavement. Among the layers in ferment among the small and middle bourgeoisie and intellectuals, this shattered any belief in the working class as a powerful agent of radical social change. They have been joined by many proletarian forces who seek and demand action and are dissatisfied with the conduct of all the political parties. In addition fascism attracted a social layer, the former officers, who lost their careers when the war ended. Now without income, they were disillusioned, uprooted, and torn from their class roots. This is especially true in the vanquished Central Powers [Germany and Austria-Hungary], in which fascism takes on a strong antirepublican flavor.

Trotsky:

The historic function of Fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery . . . . Fascism is not merely a system of reprisals, of brutal force, and of police terror. Fascism is a particular governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society. The task of fascism lies not only in destroying the Communist vanguard but in holding the entire class in a state of forced disunity. To this end the physical annihilation of the most revolutionary section of the workers does not suffice. It is also necessary to smash all independent and voluntary organizations, to demolish all the defensive bulwarks of the proletariat, and to uproot whatever has been achieved during three-quarters of a century by the Social Democracy and the trade unions. For, in the last analysis, the Communist Party also bases itself on these achievements

Dimitrov:

Fascism is not a form of state power “standing above both classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie” . . . It is not “the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state,”. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.

I actually laughed the first time I read Trotsky's critique because it really is just "Fascism is when the fascists get in there and fascist all over the place."

When you pare away the rhetoric you see exactly what they're doing: Our righteous freedom fighters, their fanatical terrorists.

"Nuh-uh, you're the ones exploited by powerful people who hide the truth and want to take away all your rights!"

They hated their opposition because they were a proletarian revolt who wanted to fix the existing system instead of overthrowing it and implementing communism. That's it, that's literally all it has ever been, commies mad that people saw through their horseshit but recognized the power in banding together. What else would communists do but wordswordswords slander them as having dishonest motives? And dishonest motives, oh boy. Look at every communist government in the last 100 years. "Not true communism" yeah maybe, but the purpose of a system is what it does, and every communist party that has ever risen to firmly control a country has behaved in exactly the same way. Tyranny and genocide.

What's happened since Trotsky et al. is not what I would call classic leftist behavior so much as the inclination that begets leftism as a method of obtaining political power: control of language. I do feel this is an important distinction, because where I view leftism poorly is almost entirely on those people who equivocate and lie, not many of their average voters who believe they're doing good and want to out of genuine altruistic impulse. Unfortunately those who reach power from the left almost uniformly use such techniques. There are minor exceptions in parts of Europe but it's not the case in the leftist establishment in the US, the UK, France, and Germany, and they influence their comrades elsewhere. They work aggressively to define the terms of debate, they equivocate and lie, and they suppress dissent wherever they can. Like "fascism." They've had a century to define it around Nazi villainy, and then they adjust and readjust the definition so it can always be used to slander their opposition. The changing definition also serves to build continuous social inertia just in case of anyone who might stand up and say "Hey, wait a second, the original definition was what?"

It's taken on socioreligious power, it's analogous to religious conviction. For me to tell someone "That's not fascism" or especially "You don't know what fascism is" is like saying "Good is bad, bad is good." It's a fundamental difference in paradigm, so such a statement has negative weight. It's meaningless.

There are governments who called themselves fascist and that would mean a lot if the relationship between communism and fascism were discussed honestly, but it's never been honest. Fascist persists as an insult because communists persist, entrenched in power, and being masters of manipulative language, had means after obvious motive to downplay the horrors of communism and play up the horrors of nazism (both bad, the former orders of magnitude and uniquely worse). And we're humans and we can't help but calling our enemies the worst names we know. From Truman likening Dewey to fascists to generations of kids matriculating under communist professors who see fascism in everything and it repeats and repeats and repeats.

It's about to stop.

If I called one of my irreligious friends a reprobate sinner they'd laugh. They'd think I was joking, the word has no meaning for them. That's happening again. We're in the cultural singularity and culture is progressing very fast indeed. In at most 10 years, fascism and racism and sexism and every other -ism and -ist- and -phobe, having finished the sprint from "No we're not/You're the real fascists" to "If it's bad, so be it" to "u forgot the gigachad" will then moving into pure mockery, just as I would face if I went to proselytize in ratheism by condemning their lives of sin.

I'd like to believe there's value still in arguing this, and maybe things change just right in the coming years and we can have a real discussion, but that's the best case for this idea, approaching it on its angle and in good faith. I'm not approaching this idea on its angle, but I do mean this in good faith. Every last bit of power is being wrung from those words, its a score of levers about to snap off their fulcrums, and all the people who hold to these need to understand this and be prepared for when those words they use to frame their very sense of politics and the world become meaningless.

@FCfromSSC already warned you downthread, but you're still filling up the mod queue with reports on your posts, so consider this me underlining what FC said and highlighting a few more things.

Your username is suggestive and seems calculated to provoke, but that's fine - if someone was genuinely a member of the "antifa" movement or sympathetic to them, they would be as welcome to post here as anyone else (and it would be interesting to have their perspective). I don't know if you are sincere or trolling, but either way, you need to understand a couple of things: first, you're going to encounter a lot of hostility. We (mods) factor that in, so when you're being reported just for posting leftist opinions, we aren't generally swayed by that. However, you are following into an unfortunately familiar pattern that many hardcore lefties do when "arriving" here. (I put "arriving" in quotes because you created this account today, and you're clearly not new here, and I have a pretty good suspicion about who you are.) And that is being preemptively rude, condescending, and belligerent, with an attitude of "I am here to set you fascists straight."

Not only is that not going to be received well (or generate any decent discussion), it's against the rules requiring everyone to interact with charity and good faith. No matter how much you don't want to because you think of yourself as doing battle against the forces of evil fascism wokeism Jews the mods.

this is fascism

... duh.

you're afraid, aren't you? you're afraid that you missed the fascism

so your correction is that because some leftists were total psychopaths that makes it better that you failed to notice the fascism and were rude to leftists? wow

This is all condescending, belligerent, and just reads as bad faith.

I see no reason to let you continue to participate with a newly rolled alt if you are going to do so in bad faith. So if you continue in this manner, I'm going to move to go straight to permaban rather than letting you progress through the usual tedious cycle of increasingly longer bans just so you can come back every few weeks to play again.

You're a real sweetheart, you know that?

Thank you. And you're banned. Good-bye, Impassionata. And I deleted your long post which was the last straw and removed all doubt.

I wish that you would recognize the reason “leftists” come in hot “arriving” here is because, I believe, you allow a hilarious amount of boo-outgrouping from “the other side” on here without the same vigor. One of the “quality contributions” literally goes on about how leftists don’t care about raped children, and somewhere down that line someone declares proudly that prep is a drug for gay people to attend orgies. Exactly where is the charity and good faith in declaring such things? Would I really be received with such neutral attention if I said such things about other outgroups? I think the answer is no. Therefore, I hazard most leftists look at your “be charitable” rule and laugh at it because they think you seem to define “chartiable” as “don’t say bad things about conservatives at all but feel free to dunk leftists” and therefore disregard the etiquette since to them you are disregarding it as well.

prep is a drug for gay people to attend orgies

You think this is an uncharitable take? What is the PREP take wherein an incredibly expensive drug/set of drugs is spammed by a group of people when its easily replaced by safe sex practices?

It is uncharitable, because that is not what it is exclusively used for. I know this because my roommate has HIV. He got it because his boyfriend at the time has AIDS and didn’t know it because he didn’t get regularly tested and lied that he did. You can get HIV by coming into contact with the blood or sexual fluids of someone who has HIV or AIDS and isn’t taking the ART drug that arrests the development of HIV. Using a condom isn’t very safe, because it only takes a trace amount of said fluids to infect you, unless you are actively taking prep. When my roommate went for his monthly testing, he came back positive and was devastated.

Now he has to drive to the city every month to take a medication for HIV, known as ART, and if he doesn’t take it perfectly, his body can develop a resistance to ART and then he is dead. I, as his roommate who shares laundry machines and dishes with him, am sure glad that regardless of his employment status, he will still have access to those meds, so that the only thing I have to worry about is him being honest in him taking them on time.

Therefore, in practicing safe sex, any current or future sexual partner of his should also be taking PREP as a final preventative measure. I’m glad that there exists silver linings for him in that he has options for his sexual partners, but before he got his current boyfriend who agreed to take PREP, many of his potential hookups weren’t taking PREP and, like, it’s not very sexy telling a cute dude at the club that “oh by the way I have HIV so if you’re not comfortable with that we’re going to have to wait a couple of weeks for the PREP to kick in”. Kinda a boner killer.

So, my roommate practiced safe sex as best as he could, and because of the lies of someone else, he got a lifelong disease that will kill him if he doesn’t take his meds every day at exactly the same time, and thankfully doesn’t have to worry that if he loses his job his boyfriend won’t be able to afford the drugs that allow him to have a sexual life with his loved one, on top of the life saving drug he takes. Does he belong in the same camp as people who spam PREP to have orgies? I confidently state no, and therefore find statements such as “PREP is just a drug used for orgies, why don’t they practice safe sex?” uncharitable.

Edit: an additional and critical counterargument; gay people are not the only people who can contract AIDS and HIV.

In my experience, most of our moderation is chiding right-wing people for frothing about left-wingers. There are a lot more of the former.

I will admit I declined to moderate the prep comment partly because I wanted to argue with it. Perhaps that was a mistake.

In the spirit of discussion I’ll have to bite the bullet that I just am not going to say everything I want to say on my phone; I sincerely don’t believe the moderators here are intentionally letting right-wingers boo outgroup leftists and then whistling when it gets pointed out. I believe instead there is a bias problem going on and rather it’s not being recognized. I think the problem is not even specifically “right wingers are booing left winger”, it’s that in a forum trying to be a debate club, there is a lot of just bad debate happening. There is, in my opinion, way too many declarative statements about broad populations without the evidence to back it up or even visible rigorous debate. When someone says “prep is for gay orgies”, there isn’t the expected, “what is your bailey behind that motte, do you actually think all gay people demanded that drug specifically for orgies” in responses. It’s just a bunch of people also going “yes I agree, leftists can’t comprehend civilization properly” and “well, you can’t expect Democrats to know how to tell the truth”. And it happens really, really subtlety.

I swear, if there was an equally healthy population of leftists on here, you’d have the same problem. I’ve seen ya’ll mods say too many times over too many years you’re not trying to unfairly mod to believe it’s just a nothing statement.

Okay. I agree there are a lot of shitty comments, and we don't get them all.

I'll ask you the same thing I ask @SteveKirk. He never answers (except with some version of "ban people who say things I don't like") and I don't expect you to either.

What solution do you propose?

I don't say that, I say "ban people who are literally only here to disrupt discussion of any topic they consider 'problematic'."

But yes, a bunch of trolls organized by impassionata pouring out of the woodwork all at once? I suggest being liberal with the banhammer, because you're being raided.

It’s terribly frustrating that the far more rich response I had typed while at the laundromat got deleted because my stupid timer went off. I’m going to try to think out loud for a second.

I think it can sound corny, but I want to follow the lessons I learned in my high school statistics class because I think they can apply here to answer your what I think is a critical question.

Since I’m making an objective claim about a general trend, I need the data to prove it, right? Charts that don’t have data behind them are literally air. The claim is that I think the moderators on this site are unintentionally allowing debate fallacies which is driving away the spirit of debate here and therefore the leftists. Ok. One data point I have is that I think therefore I am and I’m really, really liberal (blood bleeds blue and I feel a spiritual connection to donkeys). However, literal one data point for one data pool is also the makings of a useless chart.

Therefore, I would be happy to include in my lurking routine for this site privately copying comments on my note app I believe need to be modded but aren’t being modded and how I think they should be modded but aren’t. I can do this for months so that I have an appropriately large data pool.

What to do with the data? Bear with me, but what follows is an X and Y axis yadda yadda. If my claim is that certain types of debate fallacies are not being appropriately squashed and therefore facilitating an unwelcome environment due to the large conservative majority, I should be able to a) define what those fallacies are b) sort the comments I collected into said fallacies by highlighting which parts I think demonstrate them c) count the number of fallacies and d) declare the amount to be demonstrative of an unconscious bias.

Alright, so hypothetically I’ve proven my claim with valid evidence. What’s next? From my experience on heavily moderated Discords, the most effective way to stop trends in conversations is to know what you are looking for, tell the commenter to stop, and repeat until most regulars know if you do x you’ll hear y, so that the majority of offenders are newbies unfamiliar with the vibes. If I’ve done my math correctly, I should be able to condense the data into like one or two sentences and be like “look out for that”.

After that, I can privately send you and other mods the whole thing. It is the best objective method I can think of at the moment to prove my claim, and also a way to condense a complex solution. Look it’s also hard because I think everyone’s a special snowflake and deserves unique consideration blah blah blah but also I think there’s, what, two mods? I think ya’ll don’t have enough bureaucracy to do that. The question of “how to moderate a community” is one that will never have an answer but should still be asked. All things considered, I do appreciate the effort and think there is genuine charity in the mods’ efforts.

Edit: And no I don’t think banning will work because you will drive away otherwise potentially valuable contributors who just aren’t familiar with the rules and vibes. I think what will work instead is clear, consistent and concise moderation: “please don’t do x, read the sign please”. It’s exhausting as a moderator to give a lot of chances for repeat offense before resorting to banning but I believe eventually the community will self-moderate.

Edit edit for brevity and a little humor to lighten the air: Or, you know, as a liberal, like, raise your taxes and get some more bureaucratic administration to reinforce your in-need-of-redefining environmental regulations, Orange Man Bad, yo.

I don't find either of your examples to be anywhere near the level of dunking or the vitriol that's displayed by antifa here. Wording meaningful claims about truth in a way that's meant to sound controversial isn't good, but it's a whole other world away from content-less naked loosely connected declarations that amount to booing the outgroup. Like, the question of whether or not leftists care about child rape isn't pleasant, nor is it nice, but it's a real question that can be honestly, in good faith, answered as No given the political issue being discussed (as a leftist myself, I'm perfectly okay with saying that when I was a younger, more naive leftist, I genuinely didn't care about child rape or other potential negative consequences of unmitigated immigration, such as lower wages or suicide bombings; such things were the cost I would gladly have me and my fellow citizens pay for giving more poor people the opportunity to thrive in a first world nation like the USA. My opinion on that has changed since; I think I've gained greater empathy than I used to have for certain groups of people). And characterizing a drug as for aiding gay men in going to orgies isn't nice, but IIRC that was just one off-hand line in a comment that otherwise had some meaningful thing to say about different ways different drugs are covered by insurance. There's actually meat to the bones, along with all that shit.

The comment here by antifa, and IME the occasional leftists who come in "hot" here, are basically pure shit with perhaps some bones and ligaments there. That difference matters to people who care about the meat on the bones, i.e. the actual content of the arguments, but that difference matters little to people who care primarily about getting their views lauded and their outgroup's views booed. This is one reason why, even as a leftist, I find the quality of conversation and discussion here, where it's predominantly populated by people well to the right of the most right-leaning person I might meet IRL. Who cares if they'll drop in little - or big - digs at me and my ingroup here and there or all the time? Their actual substantive criticisms are actually interesting and valuable and the wording and the digs don't affect the level of charity or quality of arguments.

I wish that you would recognize the reason “leftists” come in hot “arriving” here is because, I believe, you allow a hilarious amount of boo-outgrouping from “the other side” on here without the same vigor.

I don't know what to tell you - we mod people for "boo outgrouping" every day. Yes, this is generally not a friendly environment for those on the left (and don't I know it, as someone nominally on the left), but the exact degree to which we calibrate how much we let people badmouth their ideological opponents is never going to satisfy everyone. Too much moderation and we're suppressing basically any degree of heat or emotion; not enough and the people being talked about feel like it's open season on them. We have had these arguments (and internal mod discussions) since the reddit days, and whenever someone proposes a "solution" that will achieve perfect balance, it turns out that solution maps precisely to "moderate exactly to the degree that would make this place conform to my preferred state."

Also, bluntly, I think you are wrong about causes. Leftists who come in hot are mostly not new posters but people arriving with a grudge because we exist and haven't changed the rules to their liking. Or someone who got linked here, takes a quick gander, is shocked and appalled at what we allow to be posted, and decides some corrective mocking is necessary.

One of the “quality contributions” literally goes on about how leftists don’t care about raped children

I'm not sure exactly which post you are referring to, but I know another recent post that asserted that got modded.

and somewhere down that line someone declares proudly that prep is a drug for gay people to attend orgies

That one was borderline, and got some pushback from a mod (albeit without modhat on). My own opinion is that the claim was not entirely offbase factually (my understanding is that the only reason prep is needed is because gay men don't wish to refrain from activities that spread AIDS), but reducing it down to "gay orgies" was rather inflammatory. Was it a particularly nice thing to say? No. Was it a defensible claim to make, even if it hurts feelings? With a bit more effort, yes.

Exactly where is the charity and good faith in declaring such things? Would I really be received with such neutral attention if I said such things about other outgroups?

It depends on what you said. If you just come in calling everyone who voted for Trump a fascist, no. If you made an argument that Trump is a fascist, you'd probably be downvoted a lot, unfortunately, but you would not be modded if you were civil about it. What else is it you want to say that you think you wouldn't be allowed to say here? There is a difference between "The mods will let you say it" and "Many people will argue with you, perhaps not very nicely, and downvote you."

Therefore, I hazard most leftists look at your “be charitable” rule and laugh at it because they think you seem to define “chartiable” as “don’t say bad things about conservatives at all but feel free to dunk leftists”

Then they are wrong and they don't actually look at our mod log.

and therefore disregard the etiquette since to them you are disregarding it as well.

This is incorrect. Every week I mod multiple people for "dunking on leftists" (and predictably get bitching and downvotes for it).

The really funny part is banning people for describing the exact perspective of this user in terms he would agree with himself, re.

It is the common good for everyone that social conservatism, much like institutional Civil War era slavery, is no longer tolerated by civilized societies, and is socially ostracized. Such as, for example, Turning Point. I do not believe that organization has anything useful to say, and so I find the motivations for why someone would want to listen to useless things dubious, unless they found it useful.
progressivism cannot exist alongside conservatism, because all of the progress done by the former will always be challenged by the latter.
the value of a forum like this is that it allows progressives, at least such as myself, to observe a rich diversity of right-winged thinking to identify the more insidious and subtle dogwhistles indicating the traits of a conservative, so one may steer clear of them in IRL interactions.

There needs to be some discussion about this. I'd be happy with a rule requiring all claims of "this is what leftists believe" to be backed up by quotes. But there needs to be some way to say "look, they openly say they have no intention of communicating with you, let alone coexisting with you" without breaking the rules, especially when literally everyone involved on all sides agrees it's true.

I’m at the laundromat for context as to why I haven’t responded to other comments yet, since my main mode of using this site is lurking on my phone in-between things. Anyway, just to clarify, I am verily not a man. I’m just a woman.

Additionally, I try to be clear about putting subjective opinions as “I think” or “I believe” in the spirit of debate. Yes, I still believe not only subjectively but objectively social conservatism should be rejected by civilized society. But since I don’t have nor want to find the evidence suitable for making such a claim that “it’s not just my opinion, objectively social conservatism is social cancer and everyone here who believes it has drunk the Koolaid” here, and therefore can’t, I try to keep everything within the realm of what I personally think. It is just my opinion.

That is to say, a long winded way of saying I can’t represent all of leftism, anymore than I think you represent all of, uh, I dunno. Everything else? I don’t know you sincerely. I’ve lurked on here for years since reddit times and I only remember Walterodim because of the cheeky Witcher reference and Amadan because of the big red color on their name.

If you want to have a good faith discussion of this, I will be happy to discuss it with you. I just have low expectations because all previous attempts have resulted in you accusing us of running cover for leftists, being hypocrites, etc.

The key point you are missing is that what one person says is not representative of an entire group, and that's why we have an entire paragraph in the rules about being specific about who you're talking about:

Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.

So when you say "look, they openly say they have no intention of communicating with you, let alone coexisting with you" - who is they? Because it's certainly not "leftists." It is definitely some leftists. Every bad thing you have ever said about leftists - everything you've ever been modded for for saying about leftists - if you said "There exist leftists who say and think this," I would agree with you. And if you said "That person who's posting is openly saying he has no intention of communicating with us," you would not be modded for that.

But when you take that person as an example and say "He's a leftist, therefore he proves that leftists are blahblahblah..." I mean, do you even see the distinction I am making here, or am I talking to air? You think we're ignoring the behavior of individual bad actors, when those bad actors usually get modded. But because those bad actors exist, you want us to treat every leftist as being the same, and then get mad that we don't ban leftists on sight.

And if someone comes rolling in with "Right-wingers are a bunch of racist, sexist, anti-semitic homophobes" - well, some people in this forum wear all those labels proudly! And yet it is clearly not true of all rightists, such generalizations are clearly intended to be derogatory, and we would mod someone who said that. And you'd be angry at us if we didn't mod someone for saying that.

I don't know why it is so hard for you to distinguish between "What this jerk says" and "This jerk is speaking for everyone who votes like him and thus they can all be treated as interchangeable."

We have had these arguments (and internal mod discussions) since the reddit days, and whenever someone proposes a "solution" that will achieve perfect balance, it turns out that solution maps precisely to "moderate exactly to the degree that would make this place conform to my preferred state."

"User driven moderation" or whatever you call it was a bad idea and a very good way to overmoderate any users in the minority. The only thing that makes sense is rules-based moderation...

Perhaps. But here's my take: first of all, we mostly do use rules-based moderation, but it mostly doesn't satisfy the complainers (because they think we are applying the rules unequally). To the degree that "Moderation is very much driven by user sentiment, I think you are taking that too literally. It does not mean that we moderate according to who gets upvoted or downvoted, nor does it mean anyone who gets reported gets modded. It's right there in that section in that part of the rules:

Note that "driven by" does not mean "controlled by" or "dictated by". We override more than 90% of all reports, and we will sometimes go against the will of the community. This is not a democracy and does not pretend to be one. However, the stronger that will is, the better a justification we'll need to do so.

Now, it is a known problem we've commented on before that someone who's really unpopular (or just posting unpopular opinions) gets reported a lot, and even though we are aware of this and try to factor it in, anyone who's both unpopular and getting reported a lot is probably having lots of arguments and thus sooner or later is probably going to say something uncivil and is more likely to be noticed doing it. Other than using our best judgment and talking amongst ourselves when we see this kind of thing happening, I do not know what a better alternative would be, because inherently we rely mostly on user reports to draw our attention to bad behavior. We don't get paid enough to be responsible for reading every single post and not letting anything slip our notice.

I'm not saying you're not trying, but honestly it's not just a minor problem. If the goal was really to engage with people you don't agree with, this website is a failure. I only come here when I want to know what a specific part of the right thinks.

A good starting point would be to drastically improve the quality of the so-called quality contributions. They should be held to the highest standard, so people can go there and see what's expected of them. What I got from doing that is that your message should be long, written in good english and be right wing. That will garantee you a place there with a 50% probability. Following the rules in their letter and spirit is obviously optionnal.

Leftists who come in hot are mostly not new posters but people arriving with a grudge because we exist and haven't changed the rules to their liking. Or someone who got linked here, takes a quick gander, is shocked and appalled at what we allow to be posted, and decides some corrective mocking is necessary.

I think you missed the other possibility: that many people who come out hot are trolls deliberately trying to rile people up. I’ve seen people clearly trying to do this with both left and right wing personae. We have a strange overlap with rdrama, after all. I don’t get it, but some people love that kind of thing.

I don’t doubt some are sincere, but I doubt most ever intend to engage on any level other than useless mockery and I would argue that engaging with them as though they have pro social intentions is a waste of everyone’s time and feeds the trolls, like trying to deter violent assaults with a counseling session. There are new posters who have the ability to make a good argument but just need a little guidance in following the rules, but posters like OP clearly aren’t that.

So, if all the really bad things about fascism are not the ones that we are doing, what exactly is bad about fascism?

Ah expanding borders by invading foreign countries is not bad?

That depends a lot on who is doing the invading and who is being invaded, doesn't it?

I thought the context was pretty clear though.

This kind of context swapping is done by bad faith people who might actually be fascists.

Not particularly, no. Every human group in existence today owes its continued existence to the fact that its predecessors took land and resources from other groups. It’s by far the best and most morally and pragmatically legitimate reason to wage war.

Now, I’m perfectly happy to discuss whether or not other, more recently-emergent models of geopolitical coexistence have effectively obviated the underlying logic of wars of expansion. Maybe it’s genuinely no longer necessary to do so in order to secure prosperity and security for one’s people! Maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. But clearly many very intelligent people are still dubious of that assertion, and see it as mere self-serving posturing by the victors of the last great territory-redistributing war(s).

It’s very easy to say “fighting wars to obtain territory is wrong” when you’re the United States, surrounded on both coasts by massive oceans, who defeated the last worthy competitor to any of its contiguous territory 150 years ago. When you’re one of the countries who lost a very substantial amount of territory and resources, though, it’s pretty understandable to be affronted by the assertion that it’s no longer acceptable to try and get any of that territory back.

Now, I’m perfectly happy to discuss whether or not other, more recently-emergent models of geopolitical coexistence have effectively obviated the underlying logic of wars of expansion. Maybe it’s genuinely no longer necessary to do so in order to secure prosperity and security for one’s people! Maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. But clearly many very intelligent people are still dubious of that assertion, and see it as mere self-serving posturing by the victors of the last great territory-redistributing war(s).

It’s also true that almost all groups have at one point or another enslaved other peoples to our own benefit at some point historically.

But now in the modern world, we ideally don’t accept that behavior anymore, and we celebrate when slavers get their teeth kicked in. (You might be able to point to some modern slavers who seem to be getting a free pass, but I think it’s hard to doubt that modern people generally would celebrate to see them get their comeuppance and their enterprise dismantled).

Similarly, people who wage wars of conquest in the modern world, they often get ganged up on and it’s a modern value to celebrate at them getting their teeth kicked in.

Sometimes it’s hard, e.g. they have nuclear weapons or something. But boy, modern people often love to slap people who wage wars of conquest and that’s a pretty cool and adaptive recent novelty in human geopolitical behavior.

Every human group in existence today owes its continued existence to the fact that its predecessors took land and resources from other groups

Just like you have rapists, thiefs and/or murderers among your ancestors (because everybody does), however murder and rape are still evil.

Now, I’m perfectly happy to discuss whether or not other, more recently-emergent models of geopolitical coexistence have effectively obviated the underlying logic of wars of expansion.

It's not about models of geopolitical co existence, they are just a result of modern democracy and the abolition of slavery. It makes no sense for the US to invade Canada, because what do you do with Canadian citizens? You can give them voting rights, but then it would be a merge more than an invasion; you can give them no rights, but then it creates a class of sub-citizens (it looks pretty unconstitutionnal); you can kill them all, but if you don't think it's bad then I don't know what will be (don't bother me with "we do none of the bad things the fascists did" if you don't believe there are bad things).

It’s very easy to say “fighting wars to obtain terriorItory is wrong” when you’re the United States, surrounded on both coasts by massive oceans, who defeated the last worthy competitor to any of its contiguous territory 150 years ago.

That is a good thing that we were speaking about the US invading territories, then...

The question is very concrete and clear: is it bad for Donald Trump and Elon Musk to threaten to invade several countries which until now considered themselves as US allies?

The question is very concrete and clear: is it bad for Donald Trump and Elon Musk to threaten to invade several countries which until now considered themselves as US allies?

I reject the premise: neither Trump nor Musk is seriously proposing a full-scale military takeover of any U.S. neighbors. Contingent on them actually doing so, I would judge it to be a bad idea for reasons completely unrelated to fascism.

Oh I don't think they do it seriously either, but the discussion started on the premise that it did.

Donald J. Trump is incontestably not a Palingenetic Ultra-Nationalist.

If your definition of Fascism can't distinguish Franco from Falangists, it's fundamentally unserious. If it can't even explain the Spanish Civil War, how isn't it just an empty smear?

It is as silly as calling FDR a communist because he nationalized industries and seized private property.

Of course he's an ultra-nationalist. Don't be a moron.

Of course he's a 'revolutionary' the whole point is that his supporters want him to rebirth the federal government.

You're a moron and it should be permissible to say so or we're wasting the gift of honest discussion on the Internet under assumed names.

Palingenesis implies a much more specific view of history than the mere belief in renewal. Trump may actually believe that he can bring back good days through the power of will, that also wouldn't be enough since it's also true of most progressives. Though I don't think

And Trump is a nationalist, not an ultranationalist. He hasn't advocated dissolving all sphères of life into a total incarnation of the nation.

We can say things, I just think it's boring to rehash Eco's lame attempt as polsci for the millionth time when anybody who actually takes the matter seriously knows it's vague nonsense with no explanatory power over even straightforward examples of military dictatorship.

Are we to believe Turkey has been a Fascist state for all of the modern period and none of its contemporaries noticed? Was Charles de Gaulle a fascist? Was Cromwell? Maybe even Washington? They all fit broad enough a definition.

Palingenetic Ultra-Nationalist

Can you elaborate on this?

For clarity I don’t think Trump is actually a fascist but below I say he often rhymes with one.

I’m looking up this terminology and I think it still fits.

Roger Griffin argues that fascism uses the "palingenetic myth" to attract large masses of voters who have lost their faith in traditional politics and religion by promising them a brighter future under fascist rule.[1][2]

More radical movements often want to overthrow the old order, which has become decadent and alien to the common man.[1][2]

The palingenetic myth can also possibly stand for a return to a golden age in the country's history so that the past can be a guidebook to a better tomorrow, with an associated regime that superficially resembles a reactionary one.[1][2]

Palingenesis being a word meaning rebirth. The palingenetic myth as I understand it seems to be about a rebirth of strength, vitality, and greatness from a society which is seen as decadent.

That all sounds like classic MAGA to me.

Again I don’t think Trump is a true fascist so I’m just curious how you use the palingenetic ultranationalist definition to disqualify him.

Not attacking your position just trying to understand it. But this definition makes me more concerned about Donald Trump, not less.

He's not "ultra" because he's not a totalitarian, and he doesn't structure his political action according to cyclical history that can be forced to happen through will.

He stops short of it so you can say things directionally, but that's true of literally every single effective politician. Fascism is a specific thing, it's not when people with nostalgia do thongs

You can be a totalitarian without being a fascist (Stalin who believed in linear history) and you can be a palingenetic nationalist without being a fascist (Evola who did not believe in mass politics).

Trump is a nationalist businessman with mild autocratic tendencies. A common archetype of US ruler. The biggest myth surrounding him is actually that he's anything special or novel (relatively speaking) when you can throw a stone in US history and hit ten guys like that.

I think one might put it like "Trump isn't Hitler, but if there was an American Hitler, he'd probably look like a more racist and fascist Trump". Trump's not a palingenetic ultranationalist, but he's a somewhat palingenetic nationalist ("somewhat" mostly meaning that there's less need for palingenesis in America, which is arguably still in the height of its national power). Just crank his various attributes up to eleven, and you get an American variation of fascism - naturally different from German and Italian versions due to the considerable national peculiarities of base American nationalism, just as Italian and German fascisms differed from each other due to the national pecularities of base German/Italian nationalisms.

Trump's not a palingenetic ultranationalist, but he's a somewhat palingenetic nationalist ("somewhat" mostly meaning that there's less need for palingenesis in America, which is arguably still in the height of its national power).

I agree with you overall, but I think it’s pretty central to the American right’s worldview that the nation is currently deeply decadent and that a palingenetic movement is sorely needed.

I’m not a fan of palingenetic nationalism as a definition of fascism because the American right are nearly all palingenetic nationalists and I don’t think that they’re all fascists.

Maybe the difference is that they’d need to be palingenetic extremists who value the rebirth over the tradition of democracy. That’s a good definition perhaps.

American right are nearly all palingenetic nationalists and I don’t think that they’re all fascists.

Fascism is palingenetic ultranationalism plus totalitarianism. One of the things that has a lot of Trump critics sweating is that Trumpism is exactly that sort of reactionary populist movement and Trump personally makes lots of authoritarian noises. Combine that with Trump's lack of inhibition or scruples and the uncritical devotion of many of his followers and it's easy to see why someone might start throwing around the f-word. Is it fascist? No. Is it fascish? Yeah, kinda.

Should be noted that the Trump movement is currently at a new situation with the strong influx of Musk and other tech right types, who are really not palingenetic at all in their thought, and are strongly future-oriented.

“We have to destroy the woke mind virus so we can save western civilization and eventually get to the stars”

The American right is not consistently palingenetic- lots of American right wingers want to go back to the fifties, sure, but the libertarian right definitely doesn’t and there are plenty of hardcore isolationists and secessionists on the actually far right, and there’s always been an ‘America is awesome right now’ current.

That’s fair, but similar to socialists, I honestly rarely see actual libertarians outside of Internet forums. They just don’t seem to have much voice in American politics.

Maybe America will have a Milei figure to come along to shake things up at some point.

Edit: like the right often wants to reduce government spending, sure. But for example, it gets done in a DOGE fashion where figures such as Elon and Vivek are both very rhetorically palingenetic. The mind virus is destroying western civilization and we need to save it so we can go to the stars! In fact the more I think about it, an expansionist United States with Elon style techno-saviorism at the helm is a pretty credible model for the emergence of a 21st century American fascism. We’re gonna be great, we just need to destroy the woke mind virus, secure Greenland and the canal, master AGI, make a few cryptos go to the moon so that the peons are happy, and then get to the stars ourselves. The woke will try to interfere, but at a certain point might makes right and it’s our destiny and mission to shut them out of the political process.

Honestly this wouldn’t surprise me to see, lol.

Yes, actual libertarians are underrepresented among the republican base. Your median conservative hardliner is some kind of fifties revivalist, at least for a generous definition of fifties revivalist.

But there's plenty of far right wingers who are not that. The secessionists and hardcore isolationists aren't. The 'Murica, fuck yeah' ultra-patriots aren't- they think America is already awesome, democrats just need to stop harshing the vibe.

Fascism has an actual definition- a militaristic totalitarian state based around palingenetic ultra nationalism. This is not maga; there’s no deep history lore to justify blood and soil. There’s no actual totalitarianism, either, and Trump’s supporters mostly have attachment to institutions which would be disempowered or repressed by totalitarianism.

we’re a nation built on hard work and puritan ethic

The slave trade didn't hurt either

On balance I think it did

"Make America Great Again" sounds pretty palingenetic and nationalist to be fair. And threatening to invade foreign countries is quite militaristic and nationalistic, I'd say.

I agree, however, that there is no totalitarianism in the US right now.

There are broader arguments here, but I want to pick at a couple of the smaller bits:

a country with a fundamentalist religious tradition

This condition is neither necessary nor sufficient for something to be referred to as "fascism" in any meaningful sense. Nazism was more occult than religious, Pinochetism doesn't have much relation to religion, Oswald Mosley wasn't interested in Anglican authoritarianism.

To be more direct, the United States doesn't really have much of a fundamentalist religious tradition - it's a religiously pluralist country where the largest single religion is Catholicism, and it's a squishy strain at that.

violence

The American right broadly and Trumpists more narrowly are just not very violent at all. The central example of right-wing violence during the Trump era is a single riot where the only deaths were one of the rioters and a couple geezers that got too excited and had heart attacks. This wasn't nothing, I didn't like it because I don't like riots, but the political violence in the United States has been primarily racialized (BLM riots and associated violence) or Islamist (various acts of terrorism) for decades.

The American right broadly and Trumpists more narrowly are just not very violent at all.

Incorrect.

A primary motivation of January 6th protesters was the belief that the election was stolen by the other party, which is a decidedly anti-fascist motivation. Many of them were interested in more safeguards for the democratic process, like voter ID and a ban on election machines. This is in stark contrast to BLM, where the whole idea of American democracy and rule of law was thrown out in favor of an emotional narrative centered on an oppressed people — a textbook example of how fascists get into power. You may argue that Trump was being fascistic when he accused his opponents of election manipulation, but then the very fact he had to cloak his intention in the language of democracy is a testament to the absence of a fascistic undercurrent in the American Right. Which, in my opinion, is unfortunate, because there are a lot of good arguments for the introduction of fascistic aesthetics, prosocial values, and meritocracy to America. Isn’t China being fascist when they make the State beautiful and promote Han civic values and ban immoral entertainment and curtail the power of billionaires? How about El Salvador? Okay, it’s not exactly going poorly for them.

Were people riled up because of the sanctity of democracy?

I’m not sure that was the core motivation.

I think the modern new American right is one of the movements which is developing an anti-democratic undercurrent.

It’s not mainstream, but you start to see it pop up more and more. Your comment itself is bordering on being a testament to that.

I think people were riled up because they felt their voice within a democracy was being suppressed via extra-judicial means (e.g. Twitter files and similar machinations within its orbit; aggressive legal persecution of Trump; debanking and deplatforming of voices or platforms that served their ends)

Whether this is a truly accurate representation of reality may beg whether the movement is truly democratic or not, but the motivation to have a political movement fairly represented within a democracy is unquestionably pro-democracy, no?

the motivation to have a political movement fairly represented within a democracy is unquestionably pro-democracy, no?

Depends on the political movement.

Fascism is pretty often born out of democracy.

I’m not at all saying that this is Trump/MAGA.

But objectively, an anti-democratic movement could easily come to power on claims of shenanigans in an election, whether valid or not.

Alternatively, a simpler explanation is that Trump/MAGA doesn't care about the reality of the election and attempted to take power on January 6th anyway.

We definitely have a tradition of fundamentalist religions, even though no single fundamentalist tradition holds sway. The theological differences between Baptists and Pentecostals and Methodists haven’t kept them from converging on various policy positions. They get the Catholics on board surprisingly often, too.

Other than that, you’re correct. The MAGA wing is positively gentlemanly compared to the kind of mass protests we had over Civil Rights policy, let alone the labor battles of the early 20th century.

Yeah, this is a good and correct point. I waffled a bit about how I wanted to phrase it, because we certainly do have fundamentalists and not just a few of them. My objection is that phrasing it as "a fundamentalist religious tradition" suggests to me that this is a uniting force that is a key element of the current Trumpist movement. While some fundamentalists are part of that movement, they aren't exactly steering the ship - JD Vance is Catholic, Musk isn't religious, Vivek is (I think) Hindu, and the Cabinet nominees are a mishmash of different religions and constituencies. So, what I mean to say is not that the United States lacks fundamentalist religions, but that it isn't a fundamentalist nation and the Trump coalition does not emphasize fundamentalism. I unironically think integralist Catholics have more political sway with this administration than young Earth creationists.

I unironically think integralist Catholics have more political sway with this administration than young Earth creationists.

Integralist Catholics are creationists, albeit often old earth.

Trump and Tom Cotton performed hypothetical violence by suggesting sending in troops/national guard, quite fascist. Direct and tacit support for lawlessness and chaos on the streets though? Nope.

The central example of right-wing violence during the Trump era is a single riot where the only deaths were one of the rioters and a couple geezers that got too excited and had heart attacks.

Are you referring to the Diet-Coke Hall Putsch?

There was also the Charlottesville Massacre. (Kind of book-ends it....)

Is "Charlottesville Massacre" meant sincerely?

I’d have gone with “PBR Hall Putsch,” personally.

Beer Hall Pudge

He was already president for 4 years and nothing happened.

I do not agree that Trump is a fascist, but I always found the argument of "nothing happened last time" to be super weak. Trump himself repeats that he had people in his administration constantly get in his way and prevent him from doing what he wanted to do. This is something both Trump loyalists and #resist people both agree on.

Not that I disagree, but I think the argument is more like "last time you all screamed he was orange Hitler, and nothing happened. Why should we believe you this time?"

There's a current amongst the left that makes the most recent right wing candidate out to be literally the biggest threat to democracy ever. After a while, it becomes obvious that there isn't any information value from these statements.

You military recruiters have gotten really clever, but we're still not going to join.
We all know how this works now: you sign up because of the recruiting video about jumping out of a helicopter with a flaming sword to deport giant Mexican dragons, and then you end up marooned in some desert for two years jerking off under a Humvee for $9.50/hr

it will always be surprising to me that the people on the Internet who experienced the New Atheism movement, which is to say, they had firsthand experience with the dangers of authoritarian religion, were so consistently and persistently blind to the fascism.

I think there was something in their genes that made them unable to perceive social cues.

and they distrusted the people who warned of the fascism because those people were rude

and they didn't like hearing the things they said because they were weak

they retreated to holes online where they could ignore the rude people and perform their own rudeness

truly, a tragedy

  • -42

it will always be surprising to me that the people on the Internet who experienced the New Atheism movement, which is to say, they had firsthand experience with the dangers of authoritarian religion, were so consistently and persistently blind to the fascism

You are, of course, referring to how they they turned on their heel and started mocking the very idea of freedom of speech, organizing campaigns to get people fired from their jobs for wrongthink, and collaborating with the corporate surveillance state, right? Right??

But if for some reason you're referring to the sentiment against immigrants turning sour, it's a simple question of getting mugged by reality. When the big wave of Syrian refugees first hit in 2015, I was cheering for them. Even when cars started driving into crowds, and things were going boom, I figured it's just a tiny minority of assholes. It wasn't until Cologne happened that I had the sinking feeling that people who were talking about incompatible cultures may have had a point.

Cool.

This is a discussion forum. So far you've made two posts back to back of short, declarative sentences. Declarations are not discussion. If you'd like to discuss something, it would help if you would put some effort into presenting the topic you would like to discuss, ideally by framing a question and elaborating a bit on why you think it's salient.

Alternatively, if you are not really interested in discussion but are only here to preach to an audience, then I'm afraid this is not the place for you. This presumes of course that we have not already seen above all the engagement you intended, in which case... problem solved, I suppose?

Here's a discussion question for you: how is it that the people here were so resistant to the idea that Trumpism was fascist?

And that's an entirely reasonable question. The answer I'd give is because most of us have spent several years discussing the "Trump is a fascist" thesis, and have concluded that it is garbage. A big part of that is that we used to have a lot more people who were willing to make the "Trump is a fascist" argument on specific grounds and under specific predictions, had their predictions falsified by subsequent events and subsequently went away. I've personally been considering a retrospective about the debates I had on Jan 6th-7th 2020 and the surrounding months, based on the grind of subsequent revelations.

Many of us, myself included, have a high tolerance for repetition and are more than happy for another round of the debate, if that's actually a debate you're interested in. I'm confident the facts are on my side, as they were the last several times I went round on it. Certainly your abbreviated position statements do not seem terribly revelatory. Just for starters, I'm greatly amused by

violence

given the facts readily available.

Likewise,

contempt for journalists and journalism

is most amusing. When humans act contemptibly, contempt is the appropriate response. the title of "journalist" is not a magic talisman against this obvious reality, and the modern journalist class is a trash disaster that beggars the concept of satire. Not all Journalists, of course. Just most of them.

And likewise

he's been elected to deploy the military domestically

but, shit, not like this or this, right? presumably this time it's a bad deployment of the military domestically? ...To speak plainly, the US Military has been "deployed domestically" for a variety of purposes, legitimate and not. Using the US military to assist with a large-scale breakdown in law enforcement is an entirely legitimate action of the President, has numerous examples in the past, and would not be necessary were it not for the chronic, lawless intransigence of the progressive coalition.

and he indicates he will expand the borders using the military

I'm confident that the US military won't be used by Trump to expand the borders of the United States of America, and that people worrying about it are wasting their time. I mean, just for starters, integrating Canada into the US would vastly increase the odds that Trump dies in prison, so he personally has every reason to avoid such an eventuality. It seems to me that he's running his mouth in a deliberate attempt to humiliate the Canadian government, which seems to me to be a reasonable action given the shit they've been pulling lately. Ditto for the UK, and Europe generally. Live by the multinational globalist coalition, die by the multinational globalist coalition; the Canadian, UK and European governments have taken an interest in the political process of my country, so I think we're justified in taking an interest right back.

First reddit link is a nice hat, was it supposed to be the 101st airborne bayoneting southerners?

Hey @antifa, Did you forget to switch to your sock-puppet account before replying to yourself?

no I just had another thought obviously

Did you, though?

and they distrusted the people who warned of the fascism because those people were rude

“Rude” is a funny euphemism for totally psychopathic here

so your correction is that because some leftists were total psychopaths that makes it better that you failed to notice the fascism and were rude to leftists? wow

  • -12

Are mods on vacation? Who is this 4 comment troll

They've already been warned. I suspect they've self-deported in any case.

Fascism is a word that has an actual meaning. I understand that outside the motte it has become a snarl word which basically just means "political ideology I don't like" but I was under the impression that people here actually try to use the word properly. Donald Trump isn't a fascist - though I have no doubt that if he fails to do what his base want him to do his replacement most likely will be. He's already had four years to be in power, and none of the calamities that your crowd promised were on the way ever actually showed up. If you want to look at the actual actions committed by people in government Trump represents the only break from the Beltway consensus in living memory, and that consensus is responsible for so much more evil and destruction than anything Trump has done. Can you actually look at the long history of military interventions undertaken by the US since the defeat of Hitler and tell me that Trump represents some brand new evil that deserves a revolution to overthrow? How exactly is building a wall with Mexico some grand act of fascism but dropping agent orange on Vietnam or using depleted uranium rounds in Iraq to help establish a hardline Islamic theocracy is just business as usual?

But on top of that, if you're actually serious about opposing people using the military to expand their borders and impose second-class citizen status on a bunch of poor people of the wrong ethnicity, why aren't you talking about Israel? They build walls, they set up apartheid, they kill children in terror attacks, invade foreign states, ask the US to invade others and supplied military equipment to all sorts of distasteful regimes. You still get to attack Donald Trump when you do to boot!

Leftists do talk plenty about Israel, I observe, when they're not in "those devious jews amirite" company (for obvious reasons). Themotte is closer to being such company than not.

In order to have a discussion on why Israel is wrong from the leftist world model (questions of universal human rights), you first have to have an agreement on the idea that human rights are universal (as opposed to only your ingroup's).

Fascism is a word that has an actual meaning.

It has a meaning which does at times resonate quite a bit with Trump though, I’d argue that although he doesn’t fully meet the definition there is a reason it keeps getting applied to him specifically. For example,

Fascists often:

Dismantle the systems of democracy. Trump didn’t do this, I don’t think you can call him a full fascist at this point, but he has tendencies on this point. For many people, including his former vice president, he’s the first US president to try to break the system of transfer of power. Whatever you believe about that situation, he said from the beginning that he’ll consider the electoral process rigged if he loses. And once he did, he loudly and consistently employed a whole host of means to try break the system, trying to get governors to “find votes”, to put up alternative electors, to halt the system of certification, etc. He got his followers so riled up about this that they formed a mob and broke into the US capitol building. These are all definitely tendencies toward the dismantle democracy aspect of fascism, and if you were in a country where someone did try these things, you might pre-emptively call that person a fascist.

Promote ethnonationalism and typically delineate a group of people as an enemy. Trump often takes steps in this directions and then pulls back. Actual ethnonationalists often have a love hate relationship with the guy because he’ll use promising rhetoric and then say something else which is pro x or y ethnicity and which pisses those guys off. But in the end he was elected on the central promise to conduct the greatest mass deportations in American history, and those vibes certainly match what would be expected for historical fascists to say as well.

Use authoritarian state force on internal minority groups. I don’t think he’s done this, kudos. Other people often think he has, “children in cages”, etc. But fascism tends to be crueler than this and less within previously established norms. There are obviously fears around this happening during the mass deportations, but that remains to be seen.

Crush dissent violently. This is often part of the dismantle democracy thing. I don’t think Trump has done this and this would be the biggest American norm to violate in order for a fascist to emerge. I do believe that Trump the man himself has these tendencies that could have emerged in a different context (consider his rhetoric in quotes such as his praise of China’s strength during the Tiananmen massacre, and lamenting that were not strong like that). There are many similar quotes that could be mined to paint a case that he sometimes has somewhat of a fixation on this type of “strength”.

Idealize the military and often use military force in expansionist ways. Trump has sometimes idealized the military in ways that previous American norms have not, e.g. calling for the US to begin doing military parades in the style of China or N Korea. But up until this point he has not shown much tendency to launch any sort of military adventure, much to his credit. (And of course to your point about previous presidents, much to their demerit). Recently he’s been making people edgy on this point, yesterday saying that he would use economic and perhaps military force to annex various territories around the world. Knowing Trump, this is likely his typical “start with the most extreme statement” bluster. But I think it can be pretty clear to understand why for people who think he does have certain fascist tendencies to become concerned when he suddenly starts talking about expansion or annexing territories. We’ll see if he actually is serious about using economic force to try and annex other territories. If so he fits the point about territorial expansionism. If he broke with norms so extremely to threaten Panama with the military in order to take territory from them that would obviously be extremely fascist coded behavior. The whole thing, in the end, shows hints of him breaking with norms that liberal democracies have had in the postwar era. Like in the Helsinki accords, to which the US is signatory; they respect each others sovereignty, they respect territorial boundaries, they do not threaten one another for territory, etc. Breaking these norms is definitely fascist coded, and we’ll see if he continues down that path or if it’s just another passing Trumpism to sit back and enjoy.

Fascists often:

Drink water.

Which is to say, that characterizing something that fascists do, even correctly, does that make thing a distinguisher of fascism.

Well there’s not a great definition of fascism, but I do think it’s a valid category that we shouldn’t do away with, nonetheless.

Me too. It should be reserved for believers of "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".

It should be permissible to use it to say "this movement will lead to a totalitarian state being imposed in which minorities are exterminated in camps."

You, and other leftists, are allowed to make the argument that Trump will impose a totalitarian state in which minorities are exterminated in camps.

You haven't.

That’s fair.

And do note, I never said Trump was a fascist.

But I get why he gets pattern matched as one.

You might look at what the commenter I responded to said.. “trumps replacement very well could be a fascist.”

You could look at breaking norms in a somewhat fascist coded way while having a cult of personality associated with you as a danger even if the subject himself isn’t likely to declare himself generalissimo.

But to talk about why that might represent a sort of danger you’d need to invoke fascism.

Fascists often

Do things that have been done in every other system including liberal democracy?

Liberal democracies tend not to do things like for example:

Crush a protest against the leader with authoritarian force, dismantle the system of democratic choice.

If you read my statement, I said that Trump didn’t do either of these things.

But he often does show tendencies toward these things, causing people to pattern match him to them.

Of course, if you are someone who is concerned about fascism, it’s important to pattern match potential fascists before they become actual fascists, so for those people it can be considered a worthwhile exercise.

Liberal democracies tend not to do things like for example:

Crush a protest against the leader with authoritarian force, dismantle the system of democratic choice.

Point of order: Trudeau and others pretty clearly did the first (crushing the trucker protests) albeit with financial force not physically. I can’t remember if other European countries used water cannons etc.

And moves like Germany constantly flirting with banning the AfD and France’s cordon sanitaire seem like moving in the direction of dismantling democracy, along with the attempted jailing of Trump and the general tendency of lock policy away behind non-democratic quangos, rights and treaties feel quite a lot like dismantling the system of democratic choice.

Growing up, everyone was making a lot of pro-liberalism arguments that basically boil down to the double-edged sword. “If you impinge the liberties of others, what happens when they get into power?” And it feels like in the past decade people have been increasingly willing to test that.

Point of order: Trudeau and others pretty clearly did the first (crushing the trucker protests) albeit with financial force not physically.

Financial force first, then physical force (trampling them with horses, how Canadian).

using depleted uranium rounds

My understanding is that the impact of that has been vastly overstated, usually by the same sorts of people who think the radiation from being near a nuclear power plant is worse than the radiation from being near a coal plant.

I think the acceptable number of birth defects caused by the use of your weapon systems in an unprovoked war of aggression against another state is zero, and the depleted uranium rounds used in Iraq have handily surpassed this number.

I think the acceptable number of birth defects caused by the use of your weapon systems in an unprovoked war of aggression against another state is zero

Uncleared minefields (and UXO in general, though to a much smaller degree) tend to produce injuries similar to congenital birth defects, up to and including the sorts of defects incompatible with life, like missing limbs or heads. They can be found wherever wars are fought.

DU by contrast is merely toxic, much like lead and TNT are.

I believe there are international efforts to ban the use of minefields that linger and cause problems after the war, and cluster munitions frequently cause similar issues.

This does not change my position that the acceptable number of mutilated and dead children caused by your advanced weapon systems is zero. I'm opposed to minefields, depleted uranium, the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas, the use of chemical/biological weapons etc.

I believe there are international efforts to ban the use of minefields that linger and cause problems after the war

Call me when a country whose military actually fights wars commits to that in any meaningful way. They haven't (and won't) for obvious reasons; the ultimate problem with mines is that they're both extremely useful, and extremely cost-effective. You can make them on 3D printers, and the Ukrainians are doing exactly that. That treaty did them a whole lot of good, clearly.

Cluster munitions are the same way (and again, relevant military powers all retain them for that reason)- they're great for exploding the slightly-older-children when they come out to repair the areas (typically runways) we drop them on. Of course, they're not as cute, so they're fair game, naturally.

If you're not willing to shell your own position and kill your own soldiers [that haven't even been born yet, in this case], you are not willing to win. Hamas is willing to win (that's why they position their forces in schools). The Ukrainians and Russians are also willing to win (that's why the Ukrainians are mining their own territory even though they pinky-swore not to do that).

The radiological hazard of depleted uranium is overstated; U-238 decays very slowly, and is sometimes (due to its density) used as shielding for more rapidly-decaying nuclides.

However, it poses a chemical hazard, as uranium is chemically toxic in a similar way to other heavy metals.

He's already had four years to be in power, and none of the calamities that your crowd promised were on the way ever actually showed up.

this is factually incorrect, but more importantly, it's stupid

But on top of that, if you're actually serious about opposing people using the military to expand their borders and impose second-class citizen status on a bunch of poor people of the wrong ethnicity, why aren't you talking about Israel?

this is obviously a deflection

you're afraid, aren't you? you're afraid that you missed the fascism

  • -25

this is factually incorrect, but more importantly, it's stupid

Factually incorrect? News to me. I was told there'd be a wall, mass deportations, crackdowns on civil liberties and the manifestation of Gilead into reality. I guess I actually did miss the fascism, because I didn't see any of that shit - have you got a source for any of this that's more rigorous than your arse?

this is obviously a deflection

I'm pointing out that every single thing you're threatening is on the way due to Trump IS ALREADY HERE. Why should I believe your stated motivations when you're supporting and condoning people who are far worse according to your own standards?

Nobody is afraid that they "missed the fascism", except possibly you because your brain is fried from huffing too much politics. Any "fascism" that is so subtle that you can fail to notice it while it's taking place in the cultural center of the world in the midst of a global political media circus (i.e. the election) is no fascism at all.

Fascism is not a mystic totem which once invoked will trigger Armageddon. If it's too subtle to notice, it's also too subtle to affect anyone's life in any way. If it's too subtle to affect anyone's life then it doesn't matter, no matter what scary words you use to describe it. If we can live in a fascist dystopia without noticing or being affected by it, then maybe the problem is that the word "fascist" is being used too lightly.

Nobody is afraid that they "missed the fascism", except possibly you because your brain is fried from huffing too much politics

His comment was bad, but please don't respond in kind.

Just a quick tip. The mods very literally and explicitly police on tone here. It’s an intentional, foundational part of the rules.

You can argue for virtually any viewpoint that you want, as long as you’re polite and charitable about it.

I’d really like you to stay because we have a shortage of leftists here, but if you don’t moderate your tone, you’re likely to get banned in short order. So please try to be a bit more level-headed in your posts. (Accusing someone of “being afraid they missed the fascism”, being seen as a generally impolite and uncharitable thing to accuse someone of, must be supported with substantial argumentation, rather than simply offered as a one-liner).

This. I want more leftists here but please don't do the "it's fascism and I don't need to explain why" thing antifa. If you want to argue Trump is a fascist, You DO need to explain in detail how you think Trump is a fascist because I and many others here don't see it, but I also DO see that ACTUAL fascism is growing as you normalize calling people "fascists" (and also fail to solve common people's troubles while doubling-down on identitarianism).


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