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 -
Presumably you don't want to involve our own military because of escalation concerns, correct?
What happens if Ukraine starts losing, either because the intel, weapons and economic aid were insufficient, or because Russia starts getting their shit together, or because Ukraine's forces are bled white? Do you accept their loss and call it a day, or do you escalate? If you escalate, what with?
This strategy seems likely to maximize Ukrainian casualties, and it seems at least possible that Ukraine simply runs out of soldiers before Russia becomes exhausted enough to have to go home. If that happens, the choice becomes whether to accept a Russian victory, or to escalate. From your description, it seems to me that you are inclined to escalate. What with?
In 1991, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. We deployed our military to destroy his, forced the survivors back over the border into Iraq, and fomented an uprising against him. The uprising failed. We put in place ruinous sanctions and a no-fly zone, and leaned on him with all the pressure we could bring to bear. He stubbornly clung to power, and continued existing as a thorn in our side. So after 9/11 we invaded, toppled his government, hunted him down and hung him, kicked everyone associated with him and his Ba'ath party out of power, and tried to rebuild the country as a democracy. We tried for eight years, and the results were fairly disastrous. It does not seem to me that the "rules based order" was enhanced by this chain of events. In fact, it seems to me that the Iraq war and its knock-on effects did serious damage to America's internal cohesion and to international order as a whole. Ditto for our interventions in Libya and Syria.
You speak as though we are in control in some meaningful sense, that we have the capacity to impose our will on other nations. When I look at our history over the last few decades, I see little reason to believe that we actually possess such a capacity, and many examples of how a belief in such a capacity lead directly to disaster.
We spent twenty years and trillions of dollars occupying Afghanistan. We now know that the people running the occupation were systematically lying to the public about the occupation's prospects and achievements for most and perhaps all of those twenty years, because in fact the occupation was achieving nothing of identifiable value. You describe withdrawing after twenty years of occupation as "growing bored". How long, in your view, should we have stayed? Another twenty years? Another forty? What goal would staying longer have achieved?
I am opposed to supporting Ukraine because I do not want to go to war with Russia, and because I am extremely skeptical that "limited" aid will in fact stay limited. I think what will happen with Ukraine is what happened with Afghanistan and Iraq: the next six months will always be crucial, the next surge will always be the one to win it all, the next escalation will always be the one that's going to turn things around. This does in fact appear to me to be how Ukraine is going already, and I think conducting war in this fashion is obscene.
We didn't defend Armenia from Azerbaijan. We didn't defend Georgia from Russia. We didn't defend Ukraine when all this kicked off a decade ago. Did that make the world more volatile than a steadily-escalating European land war?
You are arguing for a limited war. What I am looking for is some indication that the war you are advocating does, in fact, have meaningful limits. What I suspect is that your support for Ukraine is "limited" in the sense that "just one more step forward" is "limited"; after all, it could be two steps, or five, or a hundred. But in fact no matter how close to the precipice we are, I suspect you will always be in favor of "just one more step forward". Your flippant disdain for ending the Afghanistan occupation certainly lends weight to this impression.
Not dr_analog, but an obvious answer - not necessarily mine, but obvious - would be "the same goal as keeping a dangerous terrorist in prison even if the rehab program he's supposedly signed up for has a snowball's chance in hell of reforming him". The people in charge lying about how well the turn-it-into-an-enlightened-democracy project was going looks like a grievous blow to the entire enterprise if you think westernizing Aghanistan was actually the point, but not if you think that "we're just staying as long as it takes to turn them into a peaceful democracy" was always just a fig leaf to make the bitter pill of "we're indefinitely occupying this colonized territory to keep the barbarians suppressed" go down.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link