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 -
The way the Russian government is handling the war in Ukraine strongly reminds me of the Kursk incident.
As a brief reminder, the incident featured a Russian nuclear submarine that experienced a fatal malfunction: the explosion of a torpedo that then triggered more of its torpedoes to explode. The blasts killed most of the crew and the few that remained alive sheltered in the tail end of the submarine, which dropped to the bottom of the Barents Sea. The incident received international attention in August 2000 because of a seemingly endless series of mishaps during the rescue operation:
the Russian Navy was accustomed to frequent comm equipment failure so it didn't take any action when the Kursk failed to check in.
the Navy's rescue ship was a former lumber ship and could only operate in calm seas.
the admiral in charge of the military exercise that Kursk was part of informed the Kremlin of the incident about 12 hours after it it took place.
the next day, the same admiral informed the Russian press that the exercise had been a resounding success.
one of two Russian submersibles used for the rescue operation collided with the Kursk and required repairs.
the second submersible was used but failed to locate the Kursk.
the next day, the first submersible was fit for action and sent to attach itself to the Kursk, but it took too long and it ran out of batteries. There were no spares, so the rescue operation had to be put on hold until the batteries was recharged. Meanwhile, the weather got worse and the operation had to be held off until the next day.
the first official report of the incident to the Russian media stated that the Kursk had experience a minor technical difficulty.
Russian officials first stated that the problem was a result of a collision, most likely with a WWII mine.
the second submersible was damaged again while being it was being prepared to be lowered for another mission.
the second submersible was repaired and made two attempts to attach itself to the Kursk, but both failed. As it was being picked up by its ship, it was seriously damaged.
a few days into the operation, the Navy was reporting that from the evidence it had obtained there had been no explosions on the Kursk. (This despite the first two explosions being serious enough to be heard by other vessels taking part in the training as well as seismograph sensors operated by multiple other countries.)
initial offers of international assistance were denied. Only 5 days later were they accepted.
another admiral of the Russian Navy stated that the incident occurred because of a collision with a NATO submarine. Other officers backed up this report, although no evidence was produced. They kept to this line for nearly two years after the incident.
after the wreck was lifted from the sea floor and transported to Russia, an investigation found the incident to have been caused by (get ready) torpedo explosions. It is suspected the root cause was a faulty weld. Also, the automated recording system was disabled along with the rescue bouy.
(For others like me who accidents fascinating I recommend reading the full wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_submarine_disaster. Spoiler alert: the remaining Kursk sailors died within a few hours of the accident. The wikipedia entry contains some quite disturbing details of how they died, eg. "(..) abdomen was burned by acid, exposing the internal organs, and the flesh on his head and neck was removed by the explosion.")
What stands out to me here, just from the perspective of incident response is:
ineffective incident management. Awful communications. General lack of understanding of the problem at hand, what to do, etc.
ineffective rescue equipment. Outdated, unmaintained.
numerous human errors: the rescue submersibles were damaged multiple times by their operators!
lack of transparency with public. Numerous false statements eg. calling the incident a "minor malfunction."
blameful-postmortem. Blaming WW2 mine, at first, then trying to sell a completely made up story about a collision with a NATO vessel.
From where I stand, I see all of these patterns replaying themselves in the current war in Ukraine.
Frequent painful logistics problems. Problems with supplying front-line troops with food, water, even adequate clothing.
Ineffective, outdated, unmaintained weapons and vehicles. No air superiority. Foreign-made drones that don't work well in cold weather. Not being able to defend bases hundreds of kilometers inside the motherland from a suicide drone strike. The infamous analysis of truck tires from the beginning of the conflict showing that regular maintenance was not done.
Bad management. Awful communications. Changes in leadership. Risking and losing high-value equipment like the Moskva.
Lack of transparency. 3 day "special operation" that has been going on for 300+ days. The need to mobilize 300k civilian men to fight what was supposed to be a simple little conflict.
Lies. Painting the conflict as fight against nazism, Satan, or NATO (ironic to pull the NATO card again after the "collision with NATO submarine" during the Kursk incident). Even starting the conflict by staging a military exercise that, allegedly, even the participants didn't know was the first step in the war. Reassuring the Russian public that Russia will bear no economic pain from being cut off from various trade systems. Repeated threats of using nuclear weapons. Threatening Finland and Sweden.
Note that I'm not touching on the moral aspects of the war, just on the operational ones. In both of these stories, the salient patterns appear to be corruption, inadequate training, lack of management, and constant lying and bluffing that serves to create internal confusion.
If these patterns reflect reality, then the future doesn't look good for the Russian government. I can see two probable ways this can end: a long, drawn burn that ends in the eventual "suffocation"--lack of basic resources to continue the conflict--or a quick, short ending meant to stop the hemorrhaging of resources on a futile conflict. Either is catastrophic or nearly catastrophic for the Federation.
All true, but Russia always looks like this, and it didn't stop them being a global superpower.
As Napoleon used to say "quantity has a quality all its own". Russia is the national avatar of that sentiment.
Yeah, but these aren't the days where survival for a political entity means throwing literal bodies into a figurative meat grinder in order to beat off the Germans. Being a power of any note means having and spending a lot of resources that don't necessarily draw breath or need to take bathroom breaks. This is harder when, as outlined above, your society is a low-trust omnishambles that not only chronically fucks up, but keeps doing so because it refuses to acknowledge that there are problems and instead chooses to deflect the blame on its outgroups.
I think we've all seen that video.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's heuristics that almost always work all over again. If you're an officer in the armed forces, the chance that your unit or formation will see actual combat is small and gets vanishingly tiny if you're in one of the branches that is useless for changing or supporting the regime in poor and sunny countries. So what if your rescue craft is half disassembled and the crew is incomplete? It's not like it will be required today, or tomorrow, or this week.
When left to its own devices, the armed forces degrade into a bunch of lazy fucks that don't do anything until it's time to play cover your ass, musical chairs edition. You need to create a culture in which hardasses can thrive without being singled out as assholes, and this happens either via attrition during wartime (a very expensive lesson) or via a very deliberate top-down enforcement: never punish the man who reports a fuckup, always punish the man who tries to cover one up, promote men who discover and fix other men's fuckups.
More options
Context Copy link
Why single out the Kursk incident specifically? The Soviet/Russian way of handling of any problem is always the same: lie, hide it as long as possible, until it becomes so bad it can not be hidden anymore, sacrifice lives in heroic efforts to un-bungle the mess they made, fail at it due to the inadequacy of means and inability to organize anything in time, lie again about how it is going, blame the victims, bury the evidence, lie a bit more, then promote and award medals to people that presided over the whole mess and blame the West for everything.
It just came up in a talk I was having with a friend. It was a major News Thing back in the day and I realized I didn't really know the whole story. When I did some reading, it just struck me as tragicomic in how history just repeats itself.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You do not have to even recall the Kursk incident, you could do similarly well investigating sinking of the Moskva cruiser and Black Sea fleet flagship. There are some reports of very poor results from last maintenance report regarding the overall readiness of the cruiser. We are talking about basic things like only 10% of fire extinguishers being functional during the day of the sinking, not to even speak about faults with internal communication, problems with steering and power plant, problems with radars as well as certain anti-missile defence systems that were canibalized to maintain the other ones on the ship.
Even under the best circumstances the Russian military budget is insufficient to maintain one of the largest nuclear arsenals in conjunction with large navy in conjunction with large conscript army with aviation and all the rest. And Russia is far from ideal with huge amount of corruption, nepotism and plain incompetence getting in the way of this already challenging task of maintaining their forces. The result is what we see now.
not entirely sure how well Moskva report is confirmed and checked, while Kursk situation is 100% clear.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It is noteworthy that a private military company (Wagner) is doing a lot of the difficult front fighting, and the normal Russian army is just following later.
https://twitter.com/MihajlovicMike/status/1612936331587649537
Is the private sector also in war more efficient than state bureaucratic militaries?
Executive Outcomes was a lot better at fighting than the state militaries of Angola or Sierra Leone. That said, state armed forces usually make up for being inefficient by being able to marshal vastly more resources than any company could dream of and it's rare that a PMC/political paramilitary is bestowed enough resources to really compete on a major battlefield (the Waffen SS is the example of this).
Also, it could be the case that both Executive Outcomes and Wagner derive much of their effectiveness from being able to pick from manpower/leadership pools that are either elite (veterans, often of special forces), motivated (Right Sector militants like the Azov Battalion or their copycats on the Russian side like the Sparta Battalion) or expendable (Wagner's convicts) instead of having to start with average raw civilians.
It'll be interesting to see if Wagner can leverage its competencies (I'd caution that PR may be one of these. Prigozhin seems to at least know the value of a photo shoot.) into getting a bigger share of the Russian military resource pie and what they can do with it.
There's also a matter of the difference between 'efficiency' and 'completeness.' In high-risk/high-cost endeavors, multiple measures of efficiency are meaningless if compromised by a lack of completeness to things outside the scope of the efficiency matrix. 'Efficiency' might be measured in metrics like 'ability to fire X rounds in Y time at Z range,' but completeness might be other factors as 'is there an entirely different unit capable of providing protection to allow the asset to live.' In the Moskva case, the Moskva was likely a very efficient cruise missile launcher right up until the point it sank for lack of a complete air defense concept being implemented.
This is a function of resources, but it's also the sort of resources that differentiate efficient private actors- who focus on cutting costs and unnecessary expenditures- to effective government actors, who use those resources for things other than the primary mission but which support other purposes in aggregate. Even if the governments were to chase 'efficiency' in the private-sense, there's no guarantee that the efficiency won't compromise the non-evaluated metrics and make things more-efficient-but-worse.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A well regarded amateur analyst of the war in Ukraine (Perun) posted a video talking about the Russian concept of 'Vranyo' (враньё). This is a pattern of lying where various parties are aware that the lying is taking place and for what purpose. He basically cites it as a major reason for the lack of effectiveness of the special operation. The video is worth a watch if you have time (1 hour).
No, "враньё" just means "lying". Source: am a native speaker. There is no some special esoteric concept here that would require the reader to posses a deep familiarity with Orthodox mysticism and ideology of the "Narodnaya Volya" movement, it looks like the analyst is reifying a generic pattern common to any low trust society. Reminds me of those endless "The Japanese concept of..." articles journalists produce when there's a slow news week.
More options
Context Copy link
Everybody knows and always knew that Russian state power always lies. People are fine with it. I mean, they of course object when the lies concern something personally important to them (though it almost never has any consequences) but in general everybody accepts and endorses constant and endless stream of lies. In fact, it makes them more content - without the lies, realizing the harsh picture of reality in Russia and what is happening there would be psychologically crushing for many, because most people aren't inherently evil. However, when they have the crutch of government lies, they can believe - or at least pretend to believe, they know it's lies, but they don't care - everything is going fine, Russia is a mighty empire which the rest of the world is in envy of, they are fighting nazis, and they are winning, due to overwhelming power of Russian advanced weapons and strength of its military, etc etc. Lies is what is holding Russia together and allows the war to continue. If somehow Russian government could no longer lie, there wouldn't be any war - or any Russian government as it is now, for that matter.
To be fair, the same applies to all the western governments as well. The only difference is westerners aren't as cynical.
Sometimes I think there are parts of a culture that are not communicable unless a person spends considerable time inside that culture.
This is a subjective and completely anecdotal take: the amount of lying that happens in Eastern European cultures (and others too, probably) is difficult to imagine for someone from a high-trust society. It's just hard to imagine that people could lie for almost no reason at all, I guess. It's somewhat similar in that way to corruption: many of my American friends think they live in a corrupt society. I grew up in a society where my mother, just before ejecting me from her womb, had to present a 'gift' of cognac to the doctor, the head nurse, and the receptionist. A society where lying is as common as asking "How ya doing?" or talking about the weather is in the US.
Lying about big things. Small things. And that gets you accustomed to not relying on anything anyone has said. Did an online merchant say they sent you the item you paid for? Or did the clerk at the store promise your construction materials will be delivered by eod tomorrow? Or perhaps your employee called out sick? There is no way you could know for sure. The only way to increase reliability is to increase the effects of retaliation--hit people where it hurts--meaning, their long-term social standing. So you get to know the other party's friends and family so when an occasion for renege on a promise, the cost of doing so involves shame, perhaps even some ostracism if the stakes are high enough.
In contrast, while you still have a bunch of lying going on in a high-trust society, the happens sporadically enough that it's effective to bet that the other party mostly truthful most of the time: most business concludes in a predictable way.
More options
Context Copy link
To be fair, it does not. American government could do most of its business (excluding some spy matters, etc.) without lying, and it wouldn't break anything much. Of course, it doesn't matter American government does not lie - unfortunately, especially recently, it lies a lot, but these lies are more aimed at subverting the government to use it for private or partisan needs than a foundational necessity of governing. As it exists in Russia now, the lies are foundational for the government there. If American politicians stopped lying, we'd have a bit less rich politicians, and maybe some shuffling of the names on the doors, but the government would be largely the same. If Russian politicians stopped lying, Russia would descend into chaos.
Could the federal government also just stop lying that affirmative action works, that right-wing extremists pose the largest terrorist threat, that Common Core and other programs targeting disparate racial outcomes work etc. without significant political consequences? Is that what you really believe?
Yes.
I mean, surely there would be consequences, as names on the doors change and money stops to flow in the hands of one set of grifters and inevitably starts to flow into another, and so on. Instead of Common Core, we'd have Educational Excellency, and affirmative action university attendees would go back to sportsman's scholarships or something other designed for the same purpose (of getting that sweet federal loan money without actually trying hard to educate someone). That wouldn't change the overall political system. Withdrawing governmental meddling with education - both by prescribing standards and providing a torrent of tax money - would lead to some significant changes, but that is not based on lies. Everybody knows the government meddles, and everybody (about 98% of voters at least) wants it to meddle, the only difference is how exactly it meddles and who benefits from it. The system is not a secret, there's no lie there and everybody agrees with it - the only contention is who gets the profits and who is left holding the externalities.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I really don't see how you can come to this conclusion, but on the other hand I don't see how we could resolve our dispute barring a visit to a parallel universe. Maybe I'm underestimating people's capacity for doublethink, but I find it hard to imagine that most people truly believing we live in a mostly democratic society would shrug of their government went full yes_chad.jpg at every accusation they're using their alphabet agencies against their own citizens in order to suppress dissent. Several past wars that happened in the last two decades would also be a hard sell, if all the governments would be forced to tell the truth. Same for policies that they chose to pursue in the aftermath of these wars. Or what they're doing or not doing in the name of climate change. If they even just stopped lying about the culture war issues, that would either have massive impacts on current policy, or would require shifting to a fully jack-booted fascist state.
Again, you are confusing two things. Let me give you an example. We know US government orchestrated the suppression of the Hunter laptop story. We know there was a lot of lying involved. Did it impact the policies? Hugely. Imagine they wouldn't be able to do that. What would be different? Would we have a different name on the door of the Oval Office? Sure. (yes, I know there's not the actual name, I am speaking metaphorically). Would the Federal Government look differently, US political system work differently, Congress work differently, SCOTUS work differently? Not substantially. The political decisions certainly would differ, but the system would remain mostly the same. Same about climate change. Right now we waste trillions of dollars and sacrifice quality of life and sometimes lives on the altar of the Angry Gaia cult. If we stopped to do that, would those dollars and lives be saved? Sure. Would America work differently? Not much, it'd work the same, but better. Sure, a bunch of old hippies and young idiots would be pissed off (which they are permanently even now, tbh) but it'd be the same country with the same political system, it's not a fundamental systemic change.
This statement is doing all the work for you. If you had different names on the doors of Russian offices, it would probably be on par the US, and maybe even surpass it. My entire point is that just because people in power are not allowed to lie, it doesn't mean they will be stop doing what they wanted to do, or let go of power.
That's the whole point, it wouldn't. Not in the Russia as it is today. It's not 140 millions of people under the magic spell of a single Volde-Putin. It's a country whose moral fiber is by now profoundly rotten and corrupt. That's what allows Putin and his henchmen to thrive. Changing the names wouldn't help anymore (maybe if it happened 20 years ago, it could, but not today).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Bush did it about AT&T Room 641a, and Obama did it about the Snowden revelations. They didn't even promise to stop (nor, of course, did they).
"Every" is doing some work in my statement, if it only happens now and again people can always say "well, that was an exception". But yeah, I'm not dismissing the doublethink hypothesis.
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
I had not ever seen "враньё" used as a specific term. Perhaps it is a Kremlinologist artifact?
Sounds like a pure exoticism to me, like "hygge".
Ah yes, the Finnish concept of "comfy".
"Hygge" is Danish, mind. We are never comfy.
Right. The Finnish one was "underpants-drinking", wasn't it?
Yes, that's right. If one wanted a new source for drinking-related terms, Finnish would surely provide an endless source for them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah. As evidenced by that phrase of hugging-for-strength just being a joke. I am very disappointed by this reinforcement of Finnish stereotypes.
Perhaps, in the end, it's the conscious self-maintenance of national stereotypes that will provide the last line of defence against ongoing creeping global Americanization.
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
One of the tragic parts of the Kursk incident is that Russia declined several Western offers of aid (from the US and parts of Europe) until such time as it's own efforts had completely failed several days later. In particular putting national pride above the lives of it's sailors seems like quite a tragedy for the families of those lost.
But perhaps that also speaks to attitudes toward the current situation that I have trouble understanding from a Western perspective.
I'm skeptical the Kursk was about national pride at all, although I would believe you if you told me it was corruption or officer-level CYA. Nuclear submarines, their limitations, their strengths, their uses, and their construction are highly prized national secrets, to it stands to reason that the Russian Navy would be reticent to welcome foreign aid, let alone rescue subs or divers from NATO navies, which would no doubt be beaming video direct to Langley.
To put it another way, from the perspective of Russian Naval command, the secrets of the Kursk are arguably worth more than the lives of the crew (even before accounting for corruption and CYA), as those secrets protect all the other submarine crews. But telling that to the public in so many words is a great way to ruin future crew recruiting efforts.
That explains nothing or makes it worse, as British and Norwegian assistance was in the end accepted.
More options
Context Copy link
When you mention technical secrets it does put the decision into a slightly more favorable perspective. Not the lies, though. In my opinion it should be perfectly fine telling people "those soldiers knew how confidential the subs are when they signed up, they died as heroes". It isn't citizens we recruit nuclear sub crews from (I hope). We trust those guys to start or fail to start a nuclear war, but not to protect military secrets in death? Ridiculous if true.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Question: do you think Ukraine should surrender to Russian demands immediately, or do you think that it should continue to lose its men at the front and lose its women (and therefore its next generation) to permanent refugee-vacation in glamorous Western Europe?
Because for one of those cases, you have no cause to be finger-wagging anyone else at placing national pride above human lives.
If Ukraine would surrender to Russian demands, exactly how large a share of those women do you think would return?
More options
Context Copy link
Russian demands currently include destroying Ukrainian nation, and they aren't exactly shy of proclaiming it. It's not a matter of "pride", it is a matter of survival - both national, political and for millions of Ukrainians, physical - since Russians are not exactly shy of just murdering whoever dares to oppose them or look at them in a wrong way, or just looks suspicious enough, in places which they are occupying.
Do you think the Treaty of Versailles represented the Entente's intention to destroy the German nation? Because I see no evidence that whatever outcome the Russians want to impose on Ukraine is potentially more extreme than the Treaty of Versailles was.
I do not know if there was such an intent, though the terms were decidedly punitive. But I do not see how anything that happened 100 years ago in Versailles could change anything that is happening now. There's ample evidence, provided by Russian propaganda materials, Russian officials words and Russia's effective actions, that the intent is the destruction of Ukraine existence as an independent nation. Russians have never hidden their disdain for Ukraine, considering it a "fake" nation, whose language is nothing but broken Russian, whose territories have always been the rightful part of the Russian empire, and whose national existence being nothing but a fantom, created by the West to spite Russians. They are fully intent on fixing that mistake and subsuming the "brotherly nation" back into the Great Russia's fold. I.e. perpetrating a cultural genocide - and if needed, a little of physical genocide too, as we saw in places which Russians managed to capture but turned out Ukrainians are less brotherly than they expected. Nothing that happened in Versailles can change that reality, so any references to that is nothing but word games trying to paint over the reality.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm pretty sure if Ukraine willingly gave the rest of the donbass, made public statements about becoming neutral towards the russian culture and interests, including allowing russian to be taught again in schools, russia would make peace.
The issue with the dehumanization of the orcs and with the tribal manicheanization of russian interests that the western media and people parrot is that despite having some elements of truths, overall obviously leads to a criminal utilitarian disaster of continued intense human lives and economic attrition.
Today yes. Tomorrow maybe. A few short years later no.
Giving in to salami tactics is choosing to lose one slice at a time. Russia now shows a pattern of invading Ukraine and the most recent invasion included an attempted decapitation of the Ukrainian government. It would be madness to start trading territories for extremely temporary peace now. Russia would merely grow hungrier by the eating.
So is it your belief that all Ukrainian territories pre-2014 can be recaptured through force?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No they wouldn't. Why would they if they can take the whole thing in three days (as they were sure at the start)?
Also, guess what, Ukraine did all that. Almost all.
Donbass was occupied by Russia since 2014 (so were Crimea, which somehow the Russian propagandists always ignore) and Ukraine de-facto accepted this situation, due to inability of changing it. It obviously was just a stepping stone for Russians which only encouraged their appetites and showed them Ukraine is weak and the West is indifferent, so why not finish the job?
Ukraine has never been any threat to Russian culture - majority of Ukrainians speak Russian at least as the second language, for majority in large cities, especially in the East and the South, it is the primary language at home, huge number of Ukrainians worked in Russia, etc. Before Russia started its war with Ukraine in 2014, Russian was taught in schools freely and there was no restrictions - they came after 3 years of war, in 2017.
As for "interests", given that the official position of Russia is that Ukraine should not exist as a nation and should be owned by Russia instead, since "we are the same people" and Ukraine is "an artifact of Western meddling", it is impossible for Ukraine to both exist and "become neutral towards Russian interests" - you can not be neutral in the question of your own existence.
Like 100% of those elements. When somebody fires a stream of rockets each containing a ton of explosives into a densely populated city, pretending they do it because they don't teach enough Russian in the same city, and not allow 80% of the population that speaks Russian there to speak Russian more freely, and that's why they all have to be murdered by Russian rockets - I have no trouble figuring out which side is evil here. And no fancy words like "manicheanization" will change that. Whoever fired the rockets dehumanized themselves by their own actions.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, and sign peace promising respecting remaining part of Ukraine. Maybe it should be signed in Budapest and called Budapest Memorandum II ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum )
So is your position that no peace should ever be signed with Russia at all?
More options
Context Copy link
I am well aware of this broken promise but should we be consistent and take into account other broken promises?
The Ukrainian people voted in vast majority to stay in the USSR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think sacrificing lives to defend a country's sovereignity against an invader is generally more excusable than sacrificing lives to a technical accident by not accepting aid. I'm sure the same Ukrainians that are the sacrifices in the former case would generally be more eager to sacrifice themselves in the former case than in the latter.
Indeed, I've heard quite a few opinions to the effect of "I will sacrifice my life if I have to, to defend my country/my family/my culture/kill those fuckers". I've heard "I will sacrifice my life if it means my country doesn't have to show weakness" far less often.
Why?
National sovereignty is just national pride writ large.
National sovereignty is just an extension the same game theory that insists upon the existence of private property. There's nothing irrational or arbitrary about it. Even the specifics of drawing the national lines are a fairly straightforward exercise in carving the space of people's interlocking loyalties at the joints.
Only if national sovereignty is useful in the same way as private property. But national sovereigns don't internalize the costs of their mistakes or reap the rewards of their enterprise like private proprietors do. So that seems doubtful. And the linked post only explains why entities that already have sovereignty in a given area consistently fight to defend it, on the assumption that such sovereignty is worth retaining. It does not explain the value of assigning such entities sovereignty over such areas in the first place.
Life is generally better for the head of state and leading members of government when the government is popular than when it isn't, and good stewardship of national resources and policy is generally an effective path to popularity.
Maybe it would be helpful (both here and generally in your commentary) if you made more of an effort to state your thesis directly instead of only implying it by criticizing other comments for what you view as the negative space of your unstated thesis.
That is not internalizing costs like private proprietors do. It would be ridiculous to say there’s no connection whatsoever between how political leaders’ fates and the ups and downs of their countries. But no one denies that (certainly not me). And the connections that you name, at best, float quite free of the actual state of the country. (See, e.g., The Myth of the Rational Voter.)
I’m not criticizing you for disagreeing with some thesis hidden up my sleeve. I’m criticizing your argument for the reasons that I stated. If you disagree, please be more specific about why.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Really? I can think of more cases where sovereign nation-states do "internalize the costs of their mistakes or reap the rewards of their enterprise like private proprietors do" than I can think of cases where they don't, unless by "sovereigns" you are referring to tinpot dictators who "externalize" failures by blaming their failures on foreign actors. Poor social policy can f-- up demographics, which weakens the state. Poor farming policy leads to crop failure. Poor educational policy leads to low labor productivity. Failure to safeguard the borders leads to loss of territory. Failure to balance the books leads to national default, usually by way of hyperinflation (with a singular exception in the USD, which is supported by its use in international trade). Environmental pollution can be externalized, but it's much easier for an individual land proprietor to externalize pollution. Honestly, I'm failing to see how nations are different here.
I think that you're confusing nation-states with national sovereigns. National sovereigns are the people who rule a nation-state. Nation-states are not agents in their own right and so cannot internalize costs at all. There is, at best, an extremely attenuated connection between the events that you're describing and the fortunes of the people who rule the countries that they happen to, as history amply shows.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What? No. Sovereignity is specifically about the control you have over the territory. Pride is more about keeping face.
And you would want your country to be hegemon over some clay because...?
Because they don't want to be Putin's slaves?
More options
Context Copy link
Because (and when) I can be sure that the current government will treat me better than the other guys.
The other guys marching in with tanks and artillery seems to make people less assured that they'd be better than the current government.
This sounds like remarkably similar logic to Russians wanting to rescue their own submariners than having other countries do it for them.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link