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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   26620 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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How is it more advantageous to fight the powerful and risk losing more?

If I'm being mugged, I can hand over my wallet or I can fight. If I fight I might get beaten up and still lose my wallet. If the mugger is some 150 kg, tattooed musclebound thug known for his huge gun collection (while I am unarmed and substantially smaller), then it's very likely I'll lose. Getting helpful advice and some second-hand brass knuckles from onlookers isn't likely to change the outcome. It's likely to end with me bleeding out, unconscious on the ground.

Nothing about what's happening should be surprising. It is very rare for small states to defeat big states in industrial wars where both sides are determined to win. Observe that the conclusion of the Winter War was Finland losing all the land that the Russians demanded and more. Size matters.

Bless you for actually reading past the part where the badass Finnish sniper shot hundreds of hapless Russian mooks!

This was an extremely common argument on this board just before and during the early stages of the Ukraine war.

It would have resulted in fewer overall deaths but has plainly been disproven by what actually happened.

The longer the war drags on the worse it gets for Ukraine, but with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight they made the right call to fight.

That remains to be seen, it depends on the peace deal they get and the real casualty figures, which we don't know.

'What actually happened' is still in a state of flux from the point of view of us observers who aren't privy to the secrets of the universe. It may be that the media is broadly accurate arguing that Ukraine enjoyed favourable casualty ratios due to high-tech western weapons and clever tactics. Or it may be that they were drafting men, shoving them into a trench and basically feeding them to Grad, Mista and Kalibr to buy time, that they suffer unfavourable exchange ratios. My suspicion is that the latter is more accurate, considering the preponderance of firepower on the Russian side and strong incentives for the media to lie in favour of Ukraine. If that is the case then Russia has a winning hand, they have suffered non-trivial losses and will be inclined to impose much harsher terms given the costs endured.

You're correct that we don't know, and I suspect the value of the war to Ukraine reached its apex earlier than today. Unfortunately I also agree with the rest of your post as well.

I suppose as a baseline though I still believe the value of Ukraine standing up for itself made it a net positive at some point in the past few years.

with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight they made the right call to fight.

How do you mean? I think they could have gotten out early giving up just the disputed Donbass areas plus land access to Crimea -- it's not great, but now they are in a situation where Russia has little reason to stop nibbling away so 'current lines of control' seems like the most they can get. That + a bunch of dead people and 2 years lost rebuilding time doesn't seem worth the squeeze to me.

I think giving up that early would have emboldened Russia or required enough compromises to make it effectively a vassal state. Not a foreign policy expert, just my impression.

I don't have an opinion either way on that -- seems to me to require advanced Kremlinology at best, literal mindreading at worst.

At this point on the other hand, I don't see any reason for Russia to want to stop what they are doing -- all the international capital has been burnt already, and direct war losses seem pretty sustainable for them. So they will need to either be offered something significant over and above what they've already taken (Zelensky seems reluctant) or threatened -- which Trump will probably try and might work, but there's a hard cap on how much they can be threatened for MAD reasons.

Obviously whether or not they made the right call to fight is actually a values question and I am not going to second-guess Ukraine if they think it was worth it.

But just from an economic perspective I think Ukraine would probably have walked away in vastly better shape if they had made a peace deal.

It appears that for all the blood and treasure spent since the early war peace deal was derailed, they're probably getting the terms of the early war peace deal.

That model is missing crucial components that make it inaccurate:

  • R's not a random mugger, but more like a neighbouring family / household. R has a history of forcefully occupying rooms that "belong" to others. R's also likely to come knocking at U's door (and at some other "owners'") later if U just gives away the current room that R's trying to snatch.
  • if R does manage to snatch away the current room, it'll become easier for it to snatch even more rooms from others later on.
  • if R does manage to snatch away the current room, others will become more likely to adopt a similar strategy too.
  • to U, it may be more preferable to keep fighting now and lose some family members, rather than for them to become trapped in the captured room and be slowly tortured / killed there under the guise of "peace".
  • apartment building "owners" have had kinda previously agreed on a "code of conduct" of sorts. There was a chance it would protect U from R, so U's decision to keep fighting was not entirely uncalculated.
  • the whole building is booby-trapped, and R, USA, and some others each hold a button that can blow it all up. So just stepping in and using direct force against R isn't viable.
  • USA and many others have bipolar disorder.

There are probably some more that this list is missing in turn.

"Don't resist oppression because you'll lose anyway" is a tactical argument which may or may not be correct depending on circumstances; "it's your fault for trying to resist" is a moral argument. Most people would not say that if the mugger tries to move into your house, it's your fault for trying to kick him out instead of giving him the living room and kitchen in the hopes he doesn't ask for more.

Faced with a rational adversary, you should only resist if you can make it more costly to take from you than the value of what's being taken. In this Zaluzhnyi's long war strategy at least made some sense, but Ukraine is no Finland, the geography simply doesn't permit it to have the same sort of politics.

Most people don't live in anarchy, and have thus no good sense of how to behave correctly under such circumstances. Criminals are about the closest anybody can get to the condition of a Nation, and they bloody know that if you don't offer respect to the man who is more powerful than you, you get what you deserve.

I think this perspective misses the concept that the criminal might just rob, rape, and kill you anyways, regardless of how much resistance/obedience one puts up. How does one determine if an adversary is an Anton Chigurh versus a Viktor Sayenko?

Well there is a caveat at the beginning. Faced with an irrational adversary you should instead fight as hard and as viciously as possible. But I don't think this is relevant dealing with Russia in this case.

Observe that the conclusion of the Winter War was Finland losing all the land that the Russians demanded and more.

The result of the Winter War was that Finland did not become a Soviet puppet state and suffer under communism for half a century. I consider that a victory and worth the blood that was shed, and I am guessing most Finns would as well, even if from a tactical point of view it was a guaranteed defeat.

Why are starting from the assumption that the Soviet intent was to annex the whole of Finland?

I was not. My assumption was that Finland would have become a Warsaw Pact member under a nominally independent communist government if they had lost the war more completely.

Of course retaining independence is valuable but if you're giving up significant amounts of territory where much of the population lived, then it has to be considered a defeat. Finland was probably wise to fight and lose. But they still lost. That should be the expected outcome.

There is a possibility of an unarmed man inflicting significant harm on a big, strong attacker.

But this is not a general rule, it's a special exception.

Many, many, many Ukrainians would be alive if this principle was fully understood by leading figures in their government. Russia is not a totalitarian communist regime. It's not significantly more corrupt than Ukraine.

Finland was probably wise to fight and lose.

This is an interesting perspective, particularly when contrasted with Ukraine's repeated statements that Crimea needs to be returned (which to be fair could be part of a bargaining maneuver but it's...not very persuasive.)

Of course it's significantly more corrupt than Ukraine. Just look at the openness of Ukrainian elections versus Putin murdering his rivals.

They’ve had precisely two elections since the revolution in 2014, and the winner of the latter election has suspended elections until further notice. At this point it is impossible to tell the difference between ‘Ukraine is less corrupt than Russia’ and ‘the only other post-revolution president didn’t have enough of a power-base to pull it off’.

Yeltsin didn’t murder his rivals either.

‘the only other post-revolution president didn’t have enough of a power-base to pull it off‘

Or, you know, a war of conquest being waged on his country and half of it being occupied territory at the moment of supposed elections.

Sure, that’s what I’m saying. It’s too early to tell.

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