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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   25050 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Part of what happened is that Ukraine did not, in fact, start it. This is not a disputed fact. Trump is just lying.

"Donald Trump today announced that Incanto was a notorious paedophile and had been taken into custody" and "Donald Trump today falsely accused Incanto of being a notorious paedophile and took him into custody" are very different stories. You should respond to them differently. If a newspaper is able to distinguish between them in its reporting, it should.

"Who started it" is in general a notoriously slippery concept and not something a journalist should be so breezily "fact-checking". They can quote the Association of Very Serious People for a contrasting view if they want.

I think there are two separate issues.

  1. Unnecessary snarkiness that establishes the journalist as an unreliable narrator.

  2. Journalists inserting inaccurate or uncharitable fact checks, or fact-checking opinion.

Both things could potentially be solved by journalists having better training and professional standards. For example, they could have said something like this:

"You should have never started it,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Ukrainian leaders who, in fact, did not start it. “You could have made a deal.” But (insert expert here) has said Trump's remarks are inaccurate, pointing out that it was Russia who invaded Ukraine in February of 2022.

It's not that hard to adopt a neutral tone if you try.

But honestly, I don't even mind. Before, far leftists were skilled at smuggling their politics into journalism under the guise of neutral reporting. Today, they reveal their power level so quickly. Within a few sentences they will say something that lets me know to stop wasting my time.

Journalists are paid to try and find the ground truth, not to act as stenographers for the two sides.

If we had a decent news media (and I agree we mostly don’t) the whole point of reading the news rather than watching the tendentious blowhards on social media is that the news media do shoe-leather journalism and get information about what is actually happening that I can’t get for myself. “Tendentious blowhard X says that black is white, pointy-headed academic Y disagrees” is low-effort slop, not journalism.

Ideally, but we were having issues with this a century ago. Look at all the journalists who were blacklisted for talking about the Holodomor, vs the ones who talked about how lovely and equitable Stalin’s Russia was.

In the absence of mechanisms to compel objectivity, I prefer ‘neutral’ journalists to do data gathering without commentary, and to get commentary from level-headed partisans on my team.

Depends on how you're defining "it"

"Russia invaded Ukraine" Is a fact.

"Russia started it" (the invasion) Is a fact.

"Russia started it" (the war) is not a fact.

The definition of starting something isn't as clearly defined and the cause of the Ukraine war is more complicated than who threw the first major blow. They were already in a frozen proxy war after the events of 2014 with occasional shelling prior to the larger invasion.

Finding the exact causes for historical conflict is always more complicated. This is why the propaganda machine keeps trying to reduce it to simplistic terms. "Mommy! Timmy punched me!!!" type child reasoning. Any unbiased adult with any experience with people is going to question what Jimmy did to piss off Timmy.

Like Incanto I find the patronizing obnoxious.

As a parallel I’d bring up other wars.

Look at any narrative about the Six Day War / Third Arab-Israeli War that isn’t written by open anti-Zionists. None of them dispute that Israel started the war, in the narrow sense of the word, with a massive surprise attack. They also mostly see it as self-evident that Israel was merely preventing an impeding war of extermination by her Arab neighbors. In other words, they agree that Israel is either blameless or at least shares only part of the blame for the entire war, even though militarily they attacked first.

Or look at Atlanticist or Atlanticist-adjacent narratives about the South Ossetian War of 2008. It’s accepted as fact that the Georgians attacked first but also had no other acceptable choice.

Russia started the war in 2014 by invading Crimea. This should be a question of little doubt.

NATO started the war in 2014 by instigating a color revolution and replacing the elected leadership of Ukraine with western puppets. This should be a question of little doubt. Round and round.

Whether one considers the pre-Crimea events in Ukraine as a coup, a revolution or something else, they were, in the main, internal events within Ukraine, not war. The Russian invasion of Crimea, on the other hand, was a clear act of aggression by one state against another (and, counter to the Russian narrative of bloodless takeover, there were several clashes between Russian and Ukrainian troops), meaning that is when fighting between the states, i.e. war, started.

No.

When we instigate a revolution, it's in support of the people, of democracy and of freedom. When we invade foreign countries, it's to topple dictators and stop warlords. When Russia instigates separatism, it's aggressive hybrid warfare. When Russia invades a country, it's imperialism.

It's not difficult.

Seriously though, given that both sides do questionable things, can't they just all be bad?

No, that’s the propaganda. No country on Earth is so virtuous and only acting in the defense of others.

We’ve been mostly a benign empire, but make no mistake, we are an empire in the same sense as most other empires. Most of the “removal of dictators” and “support for democracy” have been in defense of our global hegemony. In fact, the biggest predictor of us removing a dictator is not what they do to their own people, or how they treat their neighbors. The invasions come when a dictator goes against our hegemony. Duerte can be as brutal as he likes, we don’t care because he’s a Western aligned dictator.

I think @Southkraut is being sarcastic.

I was, and I apologize for it.

I agree with you, in any case.

Mongols started it when they invated Kievan Rus, in my opinion.

Kiev was always burning since the world was turning.

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