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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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Sufficient evidence would be to see a Ukranian population chart that looks the same as pre-war.

I was considering making you one in mspaint, which sounds silly until you realise nobody else is really in a position to compile an accurate chart either, with an unknown number estimated around 4 million having left the country, and drafts and combat losses being kept secret by the government. It doesn't seem particularly fruitful to continue this discussion either way, since it seems to me that you don't want to be persuaded otherwise. (What is even the notion of "looking the same" you are using? Can you not conceive of a scenario where a country commits more atrocities than another while producing less of whatever signal you claim to see in population charts?)

Being curious doesn’t mean you can form beliefs. And in this case yes I think the evidence here is that Russia is in fact genocidal. Their war aims were in fact genocidal if you read Russian Nationalist in the fact the goal was to make Ukranians into Russians and not let them be for lack of a better word playable characters or Ukranians. Being that there war aims were to not let Ukranian culture exists and feel quite confident that the population chart would never look the same under a Russian victory.

Even minority cultures thrive under American power. Perhaps the best example is even in all our slavery and Jim Crow the black population went from 400k imported slave to close to 50 million while developing a lot of their own culture.

I would not say Ukrainians are noticeably more "playable characters" than Russians, sure Ukraine is the plucky underdog protagonist of the current story as a whole but I haven't heard of the people having much better lives on average. They do have the luxury of more compelling official narrative, so maybe that's enough.

Being a forcibly assimilated former Ukrainian would probably be objectively worse than a native Russian, though.