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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15332 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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Insofar as I've understood, while Ukrainian has always been widely spoken in the countryside, Russian has been a prestige language, which is one of the reasons why it has had a strong stature in the cities (other reasons include internal immigration inside Russian empire etc., of course). The Ukrainian national project is not just about making Ukrainian acceptable but making it the prestige language inside Ukrainian; Zelensky speaking Russian in an interview like this would obviously go against that project.

And to steel man the point: the people Zelensky really needs to convince are the citizens of the LNR and DNR; those people consider themselves Russian, they speak Russian, and they want to be a part of Russia, not Ukraine.

If the starting assumption is that Zelensky and the Ukrainian govt has already tacitly accepted that (the occupied areas) of Donbass are not going to be within Ukrainian suzerainty for the time being, it also means that the people currently residing in those areas are not really the ones to convince about anything any more.

Insofar as I've understood, while Ukrainian has always been widely spoken in the countryside,

This certainly has been true in the western Ukraine, but I don’t think it has been true in the East. Pre-war, less than 20% of population of Donetsk Oblast spoke Ukrainian at all. Given that pretty much all Ukrainian speakers spoke Russian too, probably less than 10% of all conversations happened in Ukrainian.

If your definition of "East" is mostly just the specific areas that were taken by separatists/Russia in 2014 then sure - if you go by a map like this, the areas where Russian was given as the main language in the census outside of the cities pretty much cover those areas, with an additional zone in the Zaporozhye oblast.

Presumably many of those answering that they're Ukrainian-speaking would have indeed used mostly Russian in their daily lives, but that's precisely the difference between a prestige language and a non-prestige language. If Ukrainian-speakers have to become fluent in Russian to get by in life but the Russian-speakers feel it's not their duty to tarnish their mouths with what they see as a peasant dialect, it's Russian that gets spoken, and increasingly so as the years pass by, unless there's a concrete intervention to this matter.

This reminded me of a question I had: how well did Mannerheim speak Finnish?

Apparently he started seriously studying it quite late in life (i.e. at 50, when he returned to Finland from Russian active service), but most sources I've seen say that by WW2 he knew if quite well. He retained a notable Swedish accent (it's obvious to me from a clip like this), but it's generally these days just seen as a part of his mythos as the last true aristocrat in Finland.

If Zelensky will give up the disputed territories the war ends today, and young Ukrainian men stop dying.

If these Ukrainian people are so intent on fighting to keep control of the Donbas and Crimea, then why the need for conscription?

If Zelensky will give up the disputed territories the war ends today, and young Ukrainian men stop dying.

Since 2022, Putin has been pushing for a regime change in Kiev. What he is trying to do should be familiar to any player of Paradox games, it is building an empire. If you simply appease such people, you might get a few years of peace. But sooner or later, they will come for the next slice of territory, and then people will again argue "just give them what they want to stop the fighting".

I don't give much of a damn about Donbas and certainly none about Crimea. A peace deal where Putin gets them and in return Ukraine joins NATO (so that he can't come for the next Oblast in a year) would seem preferable -- but will not happen because Putin is not willing to let Ukraine move outside his sphere of influence.

And if Putin gave them up the war would end as well. Why is the onus only on Zelensky here? You talk about Ukraine using conscripts but Putin doesn't even have the political capital for that. His first draft was limited to outlying areas and provoked a mass exodus, and he won't even consider drafting out of Moscow or other major cities. He's resorted to using North Korean mercenaries to retake occupied areas inside Russia. Doesn't Putin have an obligation to prevent the deaths of young Russian men?

And if Putin gave them up the war would end as well. Why is the onus only on Zelensky here?

Because he demands the west to spend money on him.

And why shouldn't he? His country is at stake. That's more a question to be leveled at the people who he's asking for money and not at Zelensky.

If Zelensky will give up the disputed territories the war ends today, and young Ukrainian men stop dying.

In such a scenario, what makes you think Putin would either respect the ceasefire (see point 7 in the OP) or not just use the time to prepare and re-arm for another invasion?

Where does this logic lead you other than genocide of the Russian people and complete destruction of Russia as a nation?

This is the exact logic that the US has used for every ridiculous war we've gotten into for the last 70 years.

A whole range of possibilities. There are choices between "give them what they want" and "we have to exterminate them all".

It's worth pointing out that the breaking of the Nazi and Imperial Japanese war machines did not require the genocide of thier respective peoples.

Ummm... Maybe not the complete genocide of their peoples. But certainly the destruction of millions upon millions of civilians, the castration of their independence and self respect as nations, and a permanent pall of suspicion cast over any effort to emerge.

I think it's true that the Axis war machine was broken without genocide, but after the war both nations had their borders redrawn at bayonet-point, with Germany being split in two and millions of Germans forcibly relocated. Hundreds of thousands of them died and others (including civilians) were sent to forced labor camps. This policy was (in part, at least) approved by the "big three" (UK, US, USSR) during the Potsdam Conference and wasn't just something the Russians "got away with" after the Iron Curtain came down, and Western countries, including the US, UK, and France used POWs as forced labor until the late 1940s. Similarly in Japan, the Kurils were occupied by Russia with American assent and the Japanese inhabitants removed. It seems fair to say that no genocide was committed, but it might be worth remembering that what we would today call ethnic cleansing was a part of the Allied postwar strategy.

Similarly in Japan, the Kurils were occupied by Russia with American assent and the Japanese inhabitants removed.

Even bigger than that was the removal of ethnic Japanese from Manchukuo, as well as from China proper

Oh interesting, although I can't say I am surprised. Do you have numbers on the removals there? I think there's an intuition to look at what happened in Manchukuo or Poland and say "well [some of] those people wouldn't have been there if it wasn't for [Axis actions] so it only makes sense to kick them out." But that's not true of what happened in Kaliningrad, or the Kurils.

You can stop a nation from invading its neighbors without committing genocide and destroying the nation. The US has also done this, for more than 70 years.

Do you sincerely believe Putin would just stop at Donbas and the Crimea, with no further designs on Ukraine or any other neighbors?

How many other countries has he invaded since the Ukraine war began? If he had any interest in other territories, why hasn’t he tried to take them?

If you made this comment in 2016 you'd be asking why he hasn't tried to take Kyiv yet.

Regardless of that Russia is not in a good position even if it desired to do so. Russia failed it's security commitments to Armenia in 2022 and Syria in 2024 in all likelihood due to funneling the vast majority of its military resources into Ukraine, starting a second invasion would severely diminish its ability to prosecute the war effectively in Ukraine. Even if fighting in Ukraine ceased tomorrow Russia would still want to let its economy cool, and rest and rearm before attempting even a fairly modest invasion.

Well, the current special military operation has been going less well than expected, and the West has already shown willingness to bleed Russia through Ukraine. Opening another front immediately would seem unwise.

Why do you think Putin just wants a piece of Ukraine and then he'll be satisfied?

let's see

If Zelensky will give up the disputed territories the war ends today, and young Ukrainian men stop dying.

Why believe that, when the disputed territories are disputed on the basis of Russian fiat beyond any sort of linguistic borderline and an ethnic dispute that resolved to 'we deny the existence of a Ukrainian nation, you are misled russians'?

And previous claims that Russia had no territorial disputes were later reversed?

And that war-start propaganda- including the pre-emptive victory lap way- identified Kiev itself in the realm of disputed/contested (vis-a-vis the weath) and mocked anyone for thinking Kiev wasn't part of the Russian claim?

The war did not start over a dispute over border territories. The war started as an attempt to take over the country in it's entirely. All of Ukraine is 'disputed territory,' it's just that much of the disputed territory is beyond Russia's military-industrial capacity to take.

Why believe that, when the disputed territories are disputed on the basis of Russian fiat beyond any sort of linguistic borderline and an ethnic dispute that resolved to 'we deny the existence of a Ukrainian nation, you are misled russians'?

This raises a more interesting question: is it better to die as a Ukrainian or to live as a Russian? Suppose Zelensky decided to capitulate unconditionally on the 25th of February. How many people would Russian occupying forces have killed? Right now the documented deaths stand at 68+ thousand.

Any regime installed by Putin would work pretty much like the current Russian system: a few oligarchs (picked for personal loyalty, not competence) own monopolies on most resource extraction.

Generally, those states favor rather simple production processes for most of their revenue where some goon can be put in charge, not complicated ones where they depend on some nerds with questionable loyalty. Competitive private enterprise is only tolerated while it is too small to form a power base.

Now, I will grant you that Ukraine certainly had its share of oligarchs as well, but they were at least in the process of transitioning out of a kleptocratic regime. If they become a puppet state of Putin in the way Belarus is, they will be stuck in that state for the foreseeable future, which will leave most of the population poor. This has some QALY costs.

All of them, since they'd die as russian also because everyone dies regardless. Same as how every Ukrainian would have still died if Russia didn't invade at all. Since net death over time is the same, you can either quibble on the timeliness or you can quibble on the nature, but trying to do both is often smuggling a conclusion. 'Is it better to die a Russian or die a Ukrainian' would be a more like-to-like framing, let alone 'Is it better to die killing for Russia or die killing a Russian.'

As far as nature goes, the Tyrant's Peace dilemma has always been a false dilemma, because submission doesn't escape the fate supposedly avoided (death), and the submission to the tyrant entails the consequence and the usual depravities of being used by the tyrant to fight the next war, which repeats the same dilemma except the conscript is on the other side fighting for rather than against the warmonger.

LNR and DNR were being bled white even before the war, and Putin's revanchist ambitions went well beyond Ukraine. It's not like Ukrainian human dignity mattered any more than the Russians Putin has pushed into his sunk cost fallacy meat grinder. Putin's stupidity was always going to end up getting a lot of people killed, and would only grow in scale of risk if Ukraine had validated his myopia. If he had the ability to invoke the Ukrainians as his canon fodder before the Russians of Saint Petersburg and Moscow regions, he would, and we know because he did just that when he had the means.

Your stance also explains why Palestinians keep losing to Israel, but keep rejecting its (steadily worsening) peace terms.

Sure, though also in ways contrary to what you probably meant. The crux of the stance, after all, is recognizing the nature of the dilemma.

The Tyrant's Dilemma, to reiterate, is the decision to resist conquest or join the expansionist conquering empire. Unlike the Tyrant Dilemma, the Israeli-Tyrant did not want them to join the empire. The Palestinians of yester-years ago were not facing conquest. The lands they wanted were already conquered, and where the final borders might be was in dispute, but one of the major basis for conflict was the Tyrant not taking and incorporating the people for its own purposes (i.e. absorbing as Israeli citizens for use in further wars of expansion).

The dilemma facing the Palestinians was not 'do or do not resist the Tyrant's claim on you.' In some aspects, the Tyrant willingly released them from the Empire, and tried another form of co-existence, which in turn could have led to another. This is certainly un-Tyrang behavior, and while there is plenty of behavior- many may even say tyrannical- to condemn, it is not the Tyrant of metaphor.

There are certainly dilemma to be found, but it isn't the Tyrant's Dilemma. Choosing to frame it as a Tyrant's Dielmma is itself a false dilemma, which does indeed explain why the Palestinians keep losing to Israel.

If he gives them up for nothing, the likelihood is he’ll be overthrown and killed.

So what's the plan? Just keep the war going until there's nobody left to kill him?

Give them up for something. EU membership and sufficient security guarantees, and put the contested territories in legal limbo so the god Terminus doesn't set down his lines.

The positive path forward for Ukraine goes through the EU, a Poland type trajectory economically, and perhaps using their vast store of veterans in those Cossack fantasies they have sometimes for cash and political capital.

If in 20 years Ukraine looks like Poland and Russia looks like Russia, contested provinces and people will be trying to join Ukraine.

(1) Fight until the army collapses

(2) Cultivate stab-in-the-back myth that the war was eminently winnable if Ukraine had gotten just gotten more aid and gotten it faster

(3) Flee to a friendly country

I mean I don’t blame the guy, if he didn’t do it the hardliners would shoot him in the head and get someone who would.

If I am in his position, the plan will be to keep the war going, stay in power as long as posible using the war til I die

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