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 -
Russia is putting all its abilities into winning, the US considers the Ukraine war an afterthought. And yet, despite being an afterthought they/them are able to check the entire might of the great "masculine" Russian bear.
No, the military and government and people of Ukraine did that. It was the fact that none of those 3 crumpled that stopped Ukraine being overrun in weeks like Russia expected, not that the U.S. had sent them some Javelins/small-arms/intelligence. The more substantial supply of equipment came later, and has made it more difficult for Russia to grind down Ukraine with the sheer size difference, but even then it is nonsense to pretend that donating some spare equipment (without even dramatically ramping up production) means Ukrainian performance can be attributed to the U.S. military. If you want to see how "afterthought" support from the U.S. military does when it is backing a people without a sense of patriotism for their country and a military that isn't already competent, look at post-withdrawal Afghanistan.
More options
Context Copy link
This is pure ideology trying to analyze pure ideology.
Join me in the real world, where Russia has successfully attained its stated military goals at decent but significant costs and NATO has made it difficult for them but not difficult enough that they failed or destroyed their economy.
Russia is poised to successfully prevent a NATO Ukraine with any significant fighting power at the price of becoming a junior partner to China. And traded a limited amount of manpower for a now booming arms industry.
Nobody but NATO's proxy is fighting with all they got, sexual minorities are so insignificant in their population as to have no influence except as fodder for online flamewars and regular plain old white men of all ages are catching shrapnel in the mud the same way they have for centuries.
So at the end Ukraine has lost, Russia has won a meager victory that, at best - and at extraordinary cost - gets them back to the level of influence over (half) of Ukraine that they had in the halcyon days of...2013 (truly an extraordinary, Catherine-the-Great esque imperial victory), and the US bled one of its two main geopolitical opponents at negligible cost for several years. What's the problem?
Ironically, pro-Russian activists appear to value hypothetical Ukrainian lives more than Ukrainians. From what I can tell, they wanted to fight, and now they are. They may suffer for it, but it was not forced upon them by the Americans, who did after all expect them to surrender.
Military action is not judged in the absolute but relative to the available alternatives. Orderly retreat is a success.
Russia is certainly not doing great, but they've successfully avoided having a knife to their throat. Which was their stated goal. And it didn't cost them total war.
I think they're correctly allocating their ressources. The biggest risk was that the Western economic sanctions would actually have some bite, and they did not.
It's sad, but indeed nobody actually seems to care about Ukrainians lives. Not even Ukrainians.
I won't pretend I do. I hate this senseless waste, but ultimately the fate of some far away people is not my problem.
From America's point of view? I think this whole endeavor was a long term blunder. Antagonizing Russia, which was never really a threat, as should be all too evident now, does not serve long term American interests. It just pushes them and China closer together, when the opposite is desirable and would likely have been achievable were the State department not made up of moralist morons and cold war relics.
If there is a large scale China-US conflict, the full extent of the mistake of further aligning China with a country that has large amounts of natural ressources, loads of nuclear weapons and engineers that know how to make aircraft engines will be felt pretty hard.
Don't get me wrong, this whole affair is still a great coup for the US, but it has nothing to do with undermining Russia and everything to do with kneecapping Europe.
Still, spending 75B to make sure your allies never get uppity just seems petty. And that's yet more people that won't come to your help in any significance if there is a big war. Hell, they're already declining to help put down a handful of Iran backed irregulars.
And there lies russia’s error. On the strength of their stalingrad cred, all the old american cold war warriors bought the myth of the unbeatable red army, russia could have stolen pots indefinitely. Their assumed strength was way higher than their actual strength, so they never should have let it come to a showdown. They’re never getting the baltic russians now that everybody knows they could never in a million years get past the bug and the vistula.
I was never fooled – gdp is destiny – but the suckers at the table, americans who never updated their fulda gap division calculations, and german pacifists, would have let putin bluff them indefinitely.
More options
Context Copy link
They traded the distant possibility that a future Ukrainian state might join NATO for the certainty that Sweden and Finland did, I suppose.
I don’t think we’re likely to see the Russians allying with the US in a US-China conflict. They’ve had their differences but unless it seemed overwhelmingly likely the Chinese would completely wipeout US global hegemony forever (unlikely I’d say) Russia would have nothing to gain by helping the US.
Not having a large military alliance against you and access to the western economic sphere is not "nothing".
Making enemies of them is a choice. Hell you could have satellited them the same way you did the rest of Europe after the wall fell. You just decided not to.
If they decided to, how would they accomplish it?
Russia was completely destroyed in the 90s and the US was a unipolar hyper power. Economic investment was one way to buy their loyalty. After all that is how they aligned Germany, and Japan.
They did make gestures towards that during the Yeltsin era but only spend about a billion in economic aid (about 2B inflation adjusted). This war alone cost 40 times that.
These were defeated by military means, and still there are American armies in both of these countries. Would just economic investment work without boots on ground? (more data points: Iraq, Afghanistan)
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
If you're referring to the Ukrainian people valuing their lives less, that seems to be contradicted by the ban on fighting-age men leaving the country, and forced conscription.
If you're referring to the Ukrainian government, that seems to be contradicted by the reports on them wanting to negotiate with the Russians and being pushed to war by the West.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link