This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I’ll just come out and say it: I don’t see a good reason for why Ukraine shouldn’t simply be annexed by Russia (or at least, brought into the Russian sphere of influence with a pro-Russian government).
Zelensky is right. Without security guarantees from the US, there’s a high chance that Russia will keep coming back every 5-10 years and taking another bite out of the country until they’ve either taken the whole thing or installed a proxy government. I don’t think it’s in the US’s best interests to provide security guarantees to Ukraine (and it seems that multiple US administrations have agreed with me, otherwise Obama would have sent in troops in 2014 and Biden would have sent in troops in 2022). So why don’t we simply get it over with and let Russia have it? That’s the long-term stable equilibrium.
I imagine that’s the position that the “it’s for their own good” camp is gesturing towards but doesn’t articulate.
Because it's not a stable long-term equilibrium, especially with pro-Russian US leadership rather strongly indicating they won't actually follow through on US defense commitments.
I’d argue that this shows just how much Western “help” has been propping up an Ukraine too weak to exist. And like most other instances of the west maintaining these life support situations (whether by supplying weapons, by forcing or shaming the stronger party into not winning the war, or by invading on behalf of these states) we create more conflict. Israel/Palestine will continue to be fought to the last Jew or Arab. They’ve been at it for 3/4 of a century more or less, and they’ll keep fighting for the next century unless one party is driven to capitulation by the other. The complete destruction of Gaza is probably an unfortunate but necessary step in this as it demonstrates that under no circumstances can they actually get the state they want. Ukraine should probably face a similar “you can’t get what you want” moment. In both cases, the result is a lasting peace in which the ethnic groups in question still exist, and they can even live in their own region, they just have to accept that they aren’t actually strong enough to take control. It’s certainly more stable than having major cities reduced to rubble once a decade in a bloody war they can’t hope to win.
That’s how I see these conflicts— intervention doesn’t mean peace, it just means reloading and digging in for the next round.
Yeah, I don't buy this at all. A policy of acquiescing to aggression encourages aggression and the idea of nations being 'too weak' to exist presumes there is some sort of natural arrangement that is being violated. International relations is 100% artifice. Nations don't stand or fall on their own, and Ukraine being too weak to be independent of Russia without Western support is another way of saying Russia is too weak to dominate Ukraine with Western opposition.
The Russo-Ukrainian War is fundamentally a product of western ambivalence (or, less charitably, cowardice) towards Russian aggression. It certainly didn't have to be this way. The people saying "that's just how it is" are creating the world they purport to describe.
A major problem with this theory is that this has been apparent for literally decades. It hasn't brought peace.
It’s also a question of choosing your battles and making sure that the good is actually good. Ukraine isn’t and has never been in a position where they can be completely politically independent. It’s not been true historically, and as far as the rest goes, I don’t see it changing anytime soon. I’d say the same about Palestine. They simply don’t have the wherewithal to hold their ground let alone carve out a state. In both cases, us choosing to ignore that and propping up a situation in which a war is frozen in place by outside actions and sanctions and court orders does no one any good. If the state in question cannot hold its independence, I don’t see it as a question of “ignoring Russian (or Israeli) aggression.” I see it as asking whether giving more and more aggressive, invasive and expensive medicine to a 90 year old dying of cancer is doing anyone, including the patient any good. The minute we drop the aid to these people both in Palestine and in Ukraine, they get steam rolled. That could be today, it could be 100 years from now. Either way, it’s life support on a comatose patient that we can keep alive as long as we keep them plugged in to the life support.
I’m also not sure the old way of handling borders and nations was so bad. Is it really such a crime against humanity that not every ethnic group gets its own flag and Olympic team? The bad old world was not prone to getting into huge conflicts over such things. In 1830, Gaza would have been Israeli within ten years of independence, and the Arabs would be either willing to accept that, or would have left. In the case of Ukraine, much like the vast majority of its history, Ukraine would be an outpost of the Russian Empire.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This explanation has always seemed the most reasonable to me. Plenty of nations (in the ~tribal sense) don't control their own sovereign states, and many live subject to much more culturally different nations (Kurds, Uyghurs, etc). This is how Ukranians lived in the past as well, as I understand it. It seems to me better to face the fact that "you can't get what you want" and bide your time than to fight a doomed cause at such great cost that your homeland is destitute, most of your men are killed in war or flee, and your women emigrate are absorbed into foreign nations. One leads to subordination but survival, while the other leads to the destruction of one's nation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Moving borders through war comes at a tremendous humanitarian cost and is rarely justified from a utilitarian point of view.
Putin's system of government (with oligarch allies controlling key national industries) is much less conductive to human thriving than liberal democracy.
Nobody in NATO wants to risk WW3 over Ukraine. Sending in US troops after Putin had attacked in 2022 would predictably have let to NATO troops shooting at Russian troops, which would have carried a high risk of turning into WW3. To the degree that NATO can make security guarantees to Ukraine (e.g. in the form of membership) without immediately starting WW3, I think it is prudent that we should -- given that our defensive alliance has become a lot less obsolete than previously thought, we obviously would want the one country whose military has experience fighting the aggressor in it.
Perhaps, but perhaps not. It could also be that the outcome of an occupation would be akin to The Troubles, or the resistance to Putin might turn to asymmetric warfare instead. Putin is not going to win the hearts and minds of the current generations of Ukrainians, and it is in the geostrategic interest of Europe to bind as many of his troops within Ukraine as we can, so we would likely support separatists with explosives and the like.
Hmm. I think I agree directionally, but I am not sure the gap between Russia and a sort of Average Homogenized Liberal Democracy (if you will) is staggeringly vast.
A look at a few indices, just by Googling around (so buyer beware, you place your mental model in the world in the hands of the Google algo here!)
In short, it seems to me that Russia is behind, say, the United States in GDP per capita, but it seems fairly competitive with post-Soviet liberal democracies in GDP. It severely lags in happiness (although again perhaps that is a non-objective measure, but the suicides are not). Over the long term, however, their outlook is better than many (although perhaps not all) of their liberal democratic peers, with competitive birth rates, manageable debt, and at least some of their populace willing to engage in violence on behalf of their country. This data also suggests that liberal democracies can have a horrific failure mode in South Korea, where Happiness Index scores are nearly as low and suicides nearly as high as Russia, but the debt is higher and the TFR is cripplingly low.
I think, as an American, I would probably rather live in most any of these liberal democracies I've mentioned than Russia. If I had to choose where to be reincarnated a native, I might rank Russia above South Korea.
I would argue that liberal democracies also have a big advantage in R&D, and that in general technological progress is required for human thriving. In my world model, slavery and feudalism did not stop because people saw the light and decided that they were immoral, but because technological progress moved the equilibrium solution away from them.
While the USSR certainly made significant contributions to science, my general feeling is that Putin's Russia does not focus on selling high tech to the world, but rather natural resources. Basically, you can make your buddies boss of the natural oil companies, and they will extract revenue and have your back. However, if you were to put your buddies in charge of Google, that would likely result in smaller companies eating their lunch. It takes a special kind of person to run a successful tech company, not just some goon. This in turn makes innovative companies a power base which can not be easily controlled, so most autocrats do without them.
I realize that China is a counter-example: a country which performs cutting-edge research while also being totalitarian. But at least as far as tech companies go, they do have a problem with billionaire tech bros and strip them of their companies sometimes when they become to powerful for the CCP to tolerate.
I would say that Russian tech is quite successful for their position. It's obviously hampered by lawlessness, economic isolation and brain drain, but it did win the competition with American analogues in their own country, which you can't say of any other European IT sector. And it happened before government bans.
More options
Context Copy link
Not as big an advantage as you'd think, hearing Westerners talk about how backwards the USSR was during the Cold War (while in real life the Soviets, while behind in many areas, still repeatedly lapped the West in important defense technology).
This suggests that an optimal amount of technological progress is required for [greater] human thriving, not that continuing technological progress necessarily correlates to greater human thriving. It seems possible that, say, vaccines, clean water, electricity, fission power, fertilizer are all massive wins for human flourishing and that things we have discovered since either have diminishing or negative returns. And of course this would track what I believe we see in the West (or at least in the States), that happiness has leveled off or even decreased over the past fifty years.
I'm not sure this is true (if I had to guess, there is something of a pendulum effect overall, as we develop the means to mitigate the prior mistakes we made) but I don't think it's right that there is inevitably a direct and linear progression between human flourishing and access to technology.
Russia's military equipment, which they export relatively successfully, counts as high tech, I think.
Perhaps, but the Soviets seemed fairly good at recognizing talent (see a guy named Mikhail Kalashnikov) and channeling it in productive directions. I have no strong opinions about if Putin's Russia does this or if they are handicapped by the dynamics you mention. However, you seem to miss that, if you're an oligarch, you have no objections to a special kind of person running the tech company, you just want the profits. Which is really the same dynamic that happens in American capitalism (tech founders or leaders do not necessarily reap most of the profit from their own companies).
Well so far it seems like a lot of examples we have of totalitarian states were actually pretty good at scientific research. The Soviet Union held their own. Nazi Germany obviously is the ur-example (to an exaggerated degree) of a totalitarian country that was quite capable of scientific research, in many ways ahead of its peers. The Japanese lagged behind, and I think the Italians did too, but the Japanese started on the back foot and still managed some impressive accomplishments (and I do not think the Italians ever managed to be quite as totalitarian as the Nazis or of course the Soviets). You can even go back a little bit further to the Civil War and watch an agrarian confederacy with feudal characteristics out-innovate their industrial neighbor in naval warfare (despite, or perhaps because of, comparatively little inherited expertise in the matter).
You can chalk the North Koreans up as a pretty un-innovative totalitarian regime, I suppose.
I think perhaps it is worth considering if scientific gains flow from wealth and industrial or information power and that liberal democracies might have an advantage there (especially with wealth, Communists were notoriously good at literacy education but not so much at generating prosperity). You can map this pretty accurately into the past 100 years: the United States, British Empire, and Germany were probably the industrial front-runners in World War Two [with the Russians having lots of mass but not yet as much sophistication] and then with the Soviet Union and United States were the frontrunners and that's where all the progress was made and now China and the US seem to be the frontrunners because they are the wealthiest and most industrialized (and now) informationalized.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
where do you draw the line? if they can eat all their neighbours one by one they will be a threat to the rest of the world eventually
I draw the line at the borders of the United States and countries we have pre-existing security agreements with.
I don’t advocate for pulling out of NATO.
Bingo. You create credibility concerns for yourself by failing to follow through on promises, not by failing to follow through on things you never promised. The US maintains a posture of ambiguity about things like Taiwan specifically (I think) so it has the flexibility to bail without losing credibility.
Frankly, yanking Ukraine around by teasing them with NATO membership was shameful, IMHO, although I am ready to be explained to as to why that was Necessary, Actually.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Are you talking about Russia or NATO?
you cant compare the two, one is a defense pact you have to join voluntarily and can quit if you want, the other will go to war with you to take away all your autonomy
More options
Context Copy link
(One thing I really hate about Putin is how he forces me to play the role of a NATO apologist.)
NATO and Russian imperialism are very much not the same. For some reason, most of Eastern Europe (e.g. Poland) tried very hard to get into NATO and did not try at all to become part of Putin's sphere of influence. NATO is a club you can quit (de Gaulle came very close to that), but being part of Putin's empire is not something you can quit -- Ukraine tried that with the orange revolution and look how Putin reacted.
You mean the revolutionaries, who evidently couldn't win by democratic means, tried? Meanwhile, de Gaulle did not in fact quit the club, and I hear Georgescu (who was anti-NATO and ahead in polls) just got arrested in Romania. Armenia also seems to be well in the process of quitting "Putin's empire", though that's still a wait-and-see situation.
Serious question- does Armenia have another choice?
Armenia is a tiny country whose archenemy with probably-genocidal intentions is backed to the hilt by a regional hegemon which tried to exterminate their people barely outside of living memory and still denies having done it and which has an enormous degree of influence over the actions of the world hegemon in the region. Their only options for allies- and without allies they will be occupied by enemies which, again, tried to exterminate them within the memories of the grandparents and have a state ideology that it didn't happen and was a good thing anyways- are Russia and Iran. Russia might allow Nagorno-Karabakh to be conquered, but they continue to deter a crossing of the internationally-recognized borders of Armenia.
Azerbaijan has already crossed the internationally-recognized borders in some places, too.
A big story that might have gotten little play in Western media due to the Ukraine conflict is that Armenia currently has a pro-Western president, who has been gradually cutting ties with Russia in favour of French guarantees - there is even mutual finger-pointing between him and the Russians, with his allies claiming that the Russians let the Azeris take NK unopposed to spite him, while Russians and their allies in Armenia claim that he ordered the Russian peacekeepers to stand down and remain in their base.
Some more conspiracy-theory-minded Russians even think that he used Armenia's CSTO access to pass some information about Russian air defense and strategic forces disposition to the Ukrainians via France, as part of a larger deal that looks something like "Russia humiliated, Nagorno-Karabakh surrendered, Zangezur Corridor connected, but Turkey and Azerbaijan refrain from further squeezing Armenia".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link