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 get it. Putin is the bad guy. Russia is the bad guy.
But in the real world: Zelensky has no path to realistically expelling Russia from the land they want, short of dragging the rest of the world into WW3.
If you really want to game it out: Zelensky has every reason to try and escalate this conflict. His best option is to drag my children into a war so that he can take some land back from Russia. The problem is: I’m not willing to send my children to their death so that Zelensky can have a little bit more land in the northeast of Ukraine. I’m also not willing to risk an all out nuclear conflict so that Zelensky can have more land in northeastern Ukraine.
Lock Zelensky and Putin (the bad guy Russia is bad Russia invaded Ukraine Russia bad) in a room together and demand that they hammer out a peace deal. That IS going to result in Russia keeping some of the land they’ve taken. In exchange Ukraine gets to keep a couple of hundred thousand young men alive.
As far as what is a nation: The United States is a nation too. It is not in our vital national security interests to escalate a regional conflict to the point where we are sending our children to their death. If Zelensky wants to continue his national suicide then go for it, but I’m not funding it anymore, and if he succeeds in escalating it to WW3, no promises he doesn’t end up on the other side when the US has gamed out her interests.
It's astonishing the level of dishonesty that goes into writing a paragraph like this.
It's not Zelensky doing this. If Zelensky negotiated a surrender to Russia right now, the Ukrainian people would toss his ass to the curb and probably kill him for it.
Ah so he has no option to negotiate?
Have you signed yourself up for the Ukrainian foreign legion yet or no?
He can try, but he's significantly more constrained by internal Ukrainian politics than you seem to think he is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If by the "Ukrainian people" you mean the people in charge behind Biden and Zelensky. There's a surprising number of people in Biden's inner circle that seem to have ties to a certain region West of Russia.
Realistically speaking, the men getting sent to the meat-grinder at gun point are not a threat to Zelensky. Only people close to him, you know, whoever flies him around to Canada and the US etc.
No, I mean the people who threw out and would have killed another leader they were unhappy with if he hadn't gotten away less than a decade ago
Maybe they should try voting harder. These 'Ukrainians' certainly don't seem to have a good grasp of the basic system of democratic institutions that they allegedly aspire to join.
I mean, one reason they chose Zelensky in the first place was because they were 'voting harder' to prevent corruption, a platform he ran on. That seems to be pretty close to how countries with more entrenched democratic institutions do it, too: the voters vote for something and it's not always clear if they'll get it, but they try anyway.
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
Making it a financial drain is all you need. Russia only has so many tanks, planes, etc. in storage that can be re-activated. While there are efforts to step up defense production, it's not easy and Russia is a thoroughly corrupt nation whose government hemorrhages money into the pockets of whoever holds it at every step.
Zelensky, meanwhile, gets the financial, material, and ideological support not only of many different powerful nations to keep the war going, but their populations as well.
It is 100% in the US' interests to ensure the world order isn't realigned to favor Russian tactics. Every country planning on doing something similar is going to realize that going to war against the combined power of the Western order must be done with far more care.
If you only care as that your own nation isn't invaded, so be it, but much of the prosperity America enjoys stems from America's export of security to the numerous smaller players. Take that away and you've got a poorer America. Those players each contribute to that defense in their own ways as well, even if they don't spend enough directly on their own militaries.
Yes but as few tanks and guns and ammo as Russia has, Ukraine has even fewer, it's why they are entirely depending on Zelensky flying around the world in his green outfit and begging/shaming other countries into funding his war.
Look it's horseshit that Putin invaded. That sucks for the Ukrainian people that are suffering, but Zelensky is only prolonging the suffering. This is not a marvel movie where the good guys win. The guys with more artillery, more land, more calories for their troops, more money, and more ability to threaten the rest of the world win. In this case, that is Putin.
Putin is going to win, the only question at this point is how long it's going to take, and how many young Ukrainian men are going to die.
The only way that doesn't happen is if Zelensky succeeds in starting WW3. I hope that nobody is deranged enough to think that is a reasonable sacrifice for the rest of the world so that he doesn't have to go to the negotiating table.
More land is hardly directly useful.
For more money, that depends on how much other countries will help Ukraine. See size of Russian economy, it is much smaller than most people expect.
Just threatening is not useful. Right now Russia keeps pretending that Storm Shadows are S-200 as they made bluffed and made threats they cannot realise. And their threats with nuclear murder-suicide are not credible at all.
For artillery: send enough cruise missiles to Ukraine and problem will be sorted out.
For calories reaching troops: I would not be sure that Russia wins here.
More options
Context Copy link
Am I supposed to think it's a mark against him that he tries his best to get nations to support his people in a war that might very well decide the fate of Ukraine?
Absolutely not. Putin's Russia suffers from dire competence, corruption, and cowardice issues that plagued the Soviet Union just as much. People were making shallow analyses like this at the beginning of the war without any consideration for just how effective Russia's armed services actually are. You can't look at raw counts, you have to look at equipment quality, training quality, leadership quality, etc. Russia is lacking in a great many areas when it comes to what makes a good military.
Despite the numbers advantage, Russia's armies should not be presumed to be even "good enough" to make the invasion a success. It won't be easy, but the idea that Putin's effort is unstoppable is entirely counter to everything we've seen since the invasion started.
Russia is on the defensive in this war at this moment against a smaller nation that it chose to invade. More Western aid is only going to help.
My interpretation of this was that if you are going on a publicity tour begging for people to help your nation, you are probably not drowning in materiel! Does Joe Biden have to travel the world begging for other nations to give the US weapons so they can help bomb Yemen or whatever? The key point is that this behaviour indicates that Ukraine doesn't actually have what they need to win, because otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.
Except the person I was responding to literally used the word "shaming" as well. We don't typically speak of "shaming" in a positive light, especially not here. That's what I'm pushing back on.
Regardless, that person also said that Russia was just destined to win in the end due to material advantages. I reject that idea entirely, and it can be rendered false even further by Zelensky doing what he's doing.
There are quite a few people on this site who seem to have heard "amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics" or some variant of that and concluded that since Russia has BIG NUMBERS that it's going to win. A lot more goes into winning a war than one's military hardware count.
Who cares?
It doesn't matter if we speak of shaming in a positive light or not on here. What matters is if he was actually trying to shame countries into supporting him, and my reading of his actions and words (especially if you include the comments he's been making before this current tour) absolutely support that claim. You can say that it isn't a problem that he's trying to shame people into supporting him, and given his circumstances I'm not even going to say that it makes him a bad person - hell, if I was in his position, I would be busting out as much shaming as I possibly could if I thought it'd get me more tanks.
What ultimately matters here is that he is out begging for materiel and openly stating that they will lose the war if the flow of treasure (and presumably blood, albeit surreptitiously) doesn't get ramped up. That's not something you go out and say if you're winning!
I agree! That said, I believe we're on opposite sides in this particular disagreement, because I do believe that Russia will ultimately emerge "victorious" (I use the quotation marks here because I think Russia's best outcome would have been for no war to take place at all) - just not for the sophomoric reasons that you've outlined. If you're interested in learning more about my perspective and getting a more elaborate understanding of the thinking of the people you disagree with, I highly recommend this article https://www.ecosophia.net/notes-on-stormtrooper-syndrome/
Okay, fine. Material limits would prevent Ukraine from winning with what it already has.
That may have been more reasonable in Feb 22, it's much less so now. Russia's military performance has greatly lacked in comparison to what it was thought to be and the Ukrainians have demonstrated they can fight and even reverse the gains Russia has been making. Russia's efforts at building more stuff are not going to drastically take off in the near future, they're relying on reactivating older stuff for the time being.
Linked article is completely irrelevant due to the previous point.
Edit: Ignoring the cultural and political analysis in that article, it just doesn't fit what we know about Russia's military production and the difficulty of Ukraine's counter-offensive. These things take time and Russia doesn't have my confidence in its ability to get things going at the rate it needs.
Did you check the date on when that article was written? That post didn't come from Feb 22.
I'm sorry, but a totally evidence free assertion like this isn't going to actually convince me. That article laid out a fairly clear and well explained argument as to what's going on in Ukraine, one that deserves more than "it is irrelevant because I think it is wrong". I've seen multiple news stories talking about ammunition and military supply-chain issues on the west, and the same claim you're making (Russia is going to run out of ammo/have serious supply difficulties) has been made repeatedly over the course of the entire conflict and has been wrong every single time a definitive date was given.
I'm entirely amenable to changing my mind - if you can summon up some good statistics showing that Western supply chains are capable of providing ammunition and materiel to Ukraine at a rate that can exceed what Russia and their allies are putting out I will absolutely change my mind (though with the obvious proviso that the statistics are good and the argument sound). From where I'm standing now, it really does seem like Russia has a better manufacturing supply chain for the kind of munitions that are being used in this conflict.
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
No. You're supposed to see it as a mark against him that he is prolonging a pointless war.
Surprisingly enough, I don't condemn people for exercising their full preservation instinct.
Do you apply this to Putin as well?
I do. I would just condemn him for all the other awful things he's done, like invading Ukraine.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Or shortening it. You comment like it is certain that Russia will win.
What constitutes 'winning' for Russia is up for debate at this point, but Zelensky has said that his victory condition is pre-2014 borders, so I feel very comfortable saying that there is no way at all for Ukraine to win.
Which doesn't necessarily make the exercise pointless for them, but one does need to know when to draw the line.
Well, Russia was going for destruction of Ukraine as a state (=demilitarization). This is also not going well. It seems entirely possible that neither side will achieve maximalist goals.
This does not mean that Russia wins.
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
It’s not about a little bit of land in the northeast of Ukraine. It’s the entire country. They would cease to be a people. It would be a choice between mass emigration and living under an Iron curtain.
It’s like the supposedly realist don’t know anything about how Russia has treated them historically.
I thought they wanted half, and that they periodically send messages through unofficial channels that they'd be ok with NATO rolling into the other half?
Why exactly we would believe their claims?
Funny, I was expecting people to question where the hell I got it from, rather than why we should believe the evil orcs.
Simple, if they're offering you to move into the other half, trust is irrelevant. They're letting you make future warfare prohibitively costly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It’s tough to know there exact plans without being inside Putins circle.
That being said even if it was “half” that would be putting Kiev in artillery range. And Putins shown in the past that he will take the easy gain today and just reinvade at a more opportune time.
Putin had Crimea and the breakaway Republics since 2014. That is what he wanted then. He invaded again when he thought they were better prepared.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link