site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

And yet you didn't articulate it directly.

Because it was historically illiterate for missing key relevant context that contradicts the desired framing. For example, this was additional historical context that you neglected-

Setting aside that the Minsk agreement did not actually propose to restore Ukrainian's sovereignty due Russian-demanded poison pill provisions that would give its proxies vetoes over Ukrainian national institutions, which would lose the ability to govern the country as a whole even as the Russian-separatist regions could engage in diplomatic agreement with Russia (thus giving the Russian-supported proxy groups more foreign power sovereignty than the government) while proposing elective systems that did not require Russia give up proxy control (which they did not relinquish)-

-and this was your evasion of that context.

In 2019 Zelensky got elected on a peace platform to resolve the conflict between Eastern Ukraine and Russia. He began to move forward on it and tried to go to the Donbass. What it would have meant was a kind of federalization of Ukraine that gave a degree of autonomy for the Donbass, which is exactly what they wanted. Something like Switzerland or Belgium, but he was blocked by right-wing militias which threatened to murder him if he persisted with his effort. If you're essentially telling me that the inhabitants of that part of Eastern Ukraine don't have a right to their own freedom and self-determination because it would mean their interests would play into the hands and service the objectives of Russia, that exposes the prejudice of your personal political views on the matter; but does little to address what the source of the conflict was actually about.

Note, audience, that he does not actually challenge the existence of the sovereignty-sabotaging clauses, or that it would give the autonomous region more autonomy than the central government as a whole. It does try to claim a new equivalence instead with other countries- but does not acknowledge that neither government has the sort of diplomatic veto and autonomy to enter into its own agreements that the Russian interpretation of Minsk insisted. Nor has he addressed the role of Russian military proxies as the in place, and to be still in place in the system due to the autonomy protections preventing the central government to allow free and fair elections that would empose on the 'self-determination' of the Russian supplied, and Russian-manned, proxies.

You're actually thinking Japan has this much autonomy and independence in its foreign policy establishment? It's widely accepted in most foreign policy circles that its own foreign policy conduct is ultimately subordinated and dependent upon continued American economic and military support.

You also widely deride the foreign policy establishment as inaccurate and untrue, yet now you appeal to them even as you'd be wiser not to. People who are unable to understand the difference between a choice of alignment and an inability to choose otherwise are poor foreign policy experts, and believing that the current warm US-Japanese relationship is a direct continuation of the American occupation-state is negligent of several decades of intervening history that saw the US and Japan reconsider their relationship multiple times.

The ultimate Russian justification against Ukraine is NATO's military expansion up to the borders of Russia.

This is not a justification against Ukraine, as Ukraine is not a part of NATO, was not close to becoming a part of NATO, and multiple NATO members had for nearly a decade been actively blocking Ukraine's ability to formally become a part of NATO. A successful conquest of Ukraine doesn't even reduce the NATO borders to Russia- it expands the NATO - de-facto-Russian border.

It is also completely unrelated to the reason for Japan's subjugation to American reconstruction, which was not planned to deny or destroy Japanese national identity.

You can appeal to undetectable, subliminal and nefarious ulterior motives all day, but short of having direct access to his mind, all you're left with in the end are Putin's own statements on the matter. And that fundamentally hasn't changed since he began talking about it.

Sure they have. Putin's Russia's position on NATO and Ukraine has evolved numerous times over the years, including when he wanted to be a part of NATO and when he explicitly avowed that he had no territorial designs on Ukraine.

Putin's posture on NATO shifts with the narrative wind. There's a reason that there was a multi-month pre-invasion buildup focusing on non-immeninet prospects of Ukraine in NATO, and virtually no significant reaction to the largest expansion of Russia-NATO borders as a third of Russia's naval forces found themselves in a NATO lake. In one context Russia was building a pretext for war that was already determined over a notional threat that wasn't a threat, and in the other it was also not a threat.