Mopologist William Schryver Continues His Descent Into Madness

[honorentheos]

It may be good to be careful when arguing that others are engaging in ad hominem dismissals when also making points only a few posts up essentially saying that ones point is simple yet apparently, "too difficult to grasp, no doubt because it doesn't flatter one's sense of justice," and go on to essentially dismiss every comment made as a failure of the poster to follow what you were saying.

Anyone who has followed what I have said can see that I have been consistent for a couple of weeks now. Nearly every single reply has been some variation on "the Russians are to blame—what kind of Ukraine-genocider are you? You're duped by Russian propaganda." I didn't realize that people actually did grasp what I was saying and just made a conscious choice to ignore it. In any case, "I'm not saying that; I'm saying this" ten times and then concluding that people just aren't getting it because they keep turning it into a question of whether Russians are right/good vs. wrong/bad isn't an ad hominem argument. It is an exasperated description of what is happening.

While I agree many posters here have likely read your comments as echoing Russian propoganda for reasons other than the ones you propose, I think it is possible to be more clear. For example, I read your position as there being little difference between the use of propoganda by the West and by the Putin regime as everyone is using propoganda with some kernel of truth at their heart to manipulate their populations into supporting causing harm in the name of doing good. Your statements early in the thread posited that the equivalency between them would be more obvious to someone who could read Russian and Ukrainian, and was seeking out those sources directly. The result being it likely matters little what our policies or intentions are, we are likely to repeat the mistakes of the past by doing more harm than good. With Russia being a nuclear power, the risk involved in a misstep is greater. The US would probably do the most good by sitting this out and letting what's going to happen otherwise just happen as it will likely resolve itself in ways at least no more harmful than if we continued to support a prolonged war.

Regardless, there are a few points I made that you may or may not dismiss for whatever cause, but are hardly based on attacking your person so much as the issues the dismissal on your part left unresolved.

What I have said: our Ukraine policy seems confused and keeps escalating with no clear goal, and the people who are running it and advising on it in the government and media have a poor record which has resulted in major screw-ups with tiny countries—is it wise to continue this when a nuclear power is involved? I don't think that means that I have to come up with a new theory for how the international system needs to operate before I can discuss my concerns.

That's basically what I have been arguing. In asking for what people think our policy is and so on, I have largely been offered explanations about how bad Russia is until the most recent couple of posts (a new day dawns and fresh light bursts forth). No matter how compelling or what truth they contain, they are part of propaganda war to win public support for involvement in Ukraine.

Sym, the propoganda supports the policy. The propoganda may be manipulative (by definition it IS manipulative), but the policies aren't part of the propoganda. The statements of purpose given publicly may be. But policy-making, that is not. </end record screech moment>

I don't think that this kind of thinking should be the basis for our policy there.

Bro. Yeah. This just put you in bro territory.

So in other words, if you've been following (and maybe you haven't, because I'm responding to three or four people at a time), I am not equating propaganda and the policy. I have been trying, with great difficulty but as gently as I can, to get my interlocutors to disentangle them. You and I seem to agree on this.

We have left the question on the table as to what you imagine to be the world order you prefer over the one being sought though current US support of Ukraine. And that remains either ignored or dismissed as unnecessary.

I decided to ignore your interest in turning this into a discussion of the proper international system the minute you used the 19th century as the evil bad time of nationalism that was just so horrible. I don't think we should go back to that world system, it is not at risk of happening any time soon anyway, and it is not even possible, because the material circumstances are so vastly different. But since you think it was such an evil time and so unworthy of respect, tell me, how many wars were fought among the nationalist states after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 until 1910? Which was the worst of them? It was hardly century of great power conflict. After Napoleon, the practice of states being open and clear about their interests and aims led to a much more stable world with smaller scale wars than the century after that where state competition was embedded into larger moral conflicts. You tell me which century you think was better on the atrocity front. I see in an upcoming Foreign Affairs that this is a war between "democracy and nihilism," so I guess we in the US are sticking with the plan of the last century. Anyway, the 19th century system became very dangerous when the material circumstances changed, especially the economic and technological circumstances, which had put too much a strain on it by 1914. But I don't think at all that it was because nations had interests and pursued them—they still do!

I wonder—and I say that sincerely, meaning I'm just not sure—whether the system from the 1990s onward, where the US was the default hegemon and sole superpower, can also survive the economic and technological transformations of the past decades and the strains it is imposing on the post Cold War arrangement; and I think we should be conscious about the serious dangers that could result from trying to maintain a 1992 world in 2022. North Korea is tiny country and economically insignificant, and by all measures its nuclear program, while shocking to exist in the first place, really should be beyond the power of the North Koreans to maintain, given their zombie economy. But I learned from listening to a panel at the Billington Cyber Security Conference the other day that they are able to bring in more the $2 billion annually from cyber attacks, and that that their nuclear program only costs about $700 million per year, which means that they can fund it through Cyber theft alone and still have a lot left over. Now, that's North Korea. We are approaching Russia like they're the Balkans from 1994: sanctions and NATO support (if not yet troops). And that was a tough one for NATO to coordinate. I just don't see the alignment of tactic to task because these tactics probably just don't work like they used to. I don't know what the world system should be like, but we should consider the very real possible that the 1990s were a fluke at the moment and not guidebook for the future.

Setting aside the convenience of excluding the Napoleanic Wars and WWI to create a century of choice, I think it gets at an underlying issue here which is the lack of understanding of what the 19th century nationalism includes? Your comment focuses on two main points in favor of the 19th century being less bloody than the century before or after. The relevant comparison is in how nationalist sentiment lead to a period of national expansion of a different order than the conflicts between traditional enemies such as between Spain/England/France/the Dutch, etc. The middle of the 19th century was a period of revolution and reordering that saw the formation of a unified Germany, conflicts over disputed lands in the old world and the new, and the seeds sown that not only lead to WWI but the Bolshevik revolution and WWII as well. You describe the wars of the 20th century as being about ideals, but the wars of the 19th century were about identity and pride which are sources of conflict with dominance as their aim, inherently. WWI and WWII were not started over ideals but over 19th century beliefs about national identity. They were resisted over ideals rather than competing claims of a different national identity and rights of ownership. The Cold War was a conflict over ideals, but never resulted in direct West vs. Soviet or China warfare. If war breaks out of Ukraine, it won't be due to Russian idealism over the right way to run an economy but over Russian national identity and the belief they have the right to certain lands and privileges. That's 19th century nationalism, only now with nuclear weapons. I'd argue we had a solid 70 years without major national conflict between 1945 and today due largely to the conflict being between ideals and not assumed rights or national identity.

Understanding how the Fourth Geneva Convention pertains to matter of civilian populations and infrastructure support is entirely essential to properly framing the matter of the Ukraine having shut down the canal used as an example of Ukrainian animosity towards ethnic Russian. If that appears the epitome of cynicism to you, the issue appears to be with what you believe "ought not to be" compared to how they are out of necessity.

What is cynical is that you don't distinguish between the legality of something and the morality of something but treat the satisfaction of the former as an instance of the latter.

You said this was an example of the Ukraine engaging in attacks on ethnic Russians. It wasn't. I don't care how you might spin it, it wasn't what you introduced it as being. What it is may not be nice and neat and the kind of action you'd invite to dinner, but it's reality. Cynical? No, that's realism. If you are more of a student of Kotkin and not just reading him to find points of agreement you'd see policy making is like that. You aren't seeking for the pure white needle in the mud. You are often trying to find the least bad option among many where some of the worst can be catastrophic. Shutting off a utility as the canal effective is makes as much a sense as a matter of resolving dispute over territory as any other action. Were there legitimate humanitarian concerns involved, there are avenues for raising those and resolving them. They normally involve agreements between the occupying force and nation supplying the utility. Again, it's not something you can moralize without taking a side in the moral balance of actions. You don't like being accused of shilling for Putin, but this is a clear example where, even if unintended, you are very much taking a side over what you seem to think is a neutral moral issue. That would make you what some call a useful idiot if that is in fact how you think.

I am just not convinced that Russia has 19th century nationalistic ambitions, and think that there are security concerns, some genuine and some opportunistic, tied to the imperfect security architecture in eastern Europe and central Asia after 1992. But forgive me if I don't see the goal here.

These actions were all part of an evolving policy regarding Putin's leadership that has to be dynamic to be relevant. The US under Obama failed to confront Russia over the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas which Putin claimed were part of Russia and the people were being forced to be part of a nation they did not want to be part of which since left both in conflict since 2014. The US decided that the intel on Russian mobilizing to invade Ukraine should be treated differently since it was clear Putin viewed the West as unwilling to respond to his expansionist behavior, and made the intentional decision to share intelligence on Russian intentions broadly beginning back in Fall 2021. Russia denied repeatedly that the US was telling the truth, and vacillated between claims this was all lies and that the US was going to provoke them into actually needing to act to protect themselves. The Ukraine publicly tried to downplay the concern of an actual invasion. Once the invasion began, the West largely expected it to be over quickly and focused on expressing outrage. When the Russian military proved inept and Ukraine both motivated and competent, the dynamic shifted again. And it will shift multiple times in the future. China will shift their positions, other nations will recalibrate, and the US will likely change our engagement as the dynamic shifts as well.

For decades the US policy makers imagined economic access would create economic opportunity that would lead to democratization for nations such as Russia and China. This proved wrong. You often quote Kotkin so I'm assuming if you've read him sufficiently you'd be familiar with his views on policy making regarding the authoritarian regimes whose approaches to market access have differed so widely yet their hold over their populations remains similarly tight if different in appearance. Yet you seem to argue for a naïve policy making approach.

[Symmachus]

While I agree many posters here have likely read your comments as echoing Russian propoganda for reasons other than the ones you propose, I think it is possible to be more clear. For example, I read your position as there being little difference between the use of propoganda by the West and by the Putin regime as everyone is using propoganda with some kernel of truth at their heart to manipulate their populations into supporting causing harm in the name of doing good. Your statements early in the thread posited that the equivalency between them would be more obvious to someone who could read Russian and Ukrainian, and was seeking out those sources directly. The result being it likely matters little what our policies or intentions are, we are likely to repeat the mistakes of the past by doing more harm than good.

That's an imputation to my words that comes form attempting to fit me into a category so that people can bypass the thinking part and go straight to the judgement. It's also perversion of the overall discussion on my side, which is that our polices and intentions matter a great deal.

With Russia being a nuclear power, the risk involved in a misstep is greater. The US would probably do the most good by sitting this out and letting what's going to happen otherwise just happen as it will likely resolve itself in ways at least no more harmful than if we continued to support a prolonged war.

Once again, you look to construct the interlocutor you wish to have rather than the one in front of you. I have never said any such thing. I am asking for justifications of the open spigot and uncritical support, as well as some view of its goals, but not arguing that doing nothing is best. The burden of explanation is on the advocates of a policy.

Sym, the propoganda supports the policy. The propoganda may be manipulative (by definition it IS manipulative), but the policies aren't part of the propoganda. The statements of purpose given publicly may be. But policy-making, that is not. </end record screech moment>

I understand you're trying to zing me, but this is either a reading comprehension issue or a deliberate misreading of that line of discussion, which I clarified for you in the last post—I was not the one conflating them but trying to discuss the policy separate from these things, quite against the grain of everyone else. Bizarrely, you quote the very lines from that post.

Bro. Yeah. This just put you in bro territory.

What a childish response. We agree the propaganda isn't policy. But again, I wonder why your instinct is continually to find a way to characterize me with language like this. It suggests you rely on understanding your interlocutor as an ideological subject prior to understanding what they are saying.

Setting aside the convenience of excluding the Napoleanic Wars and WWI to create a century of choice, I think it gets at an underlying issue here which is the lack of understanding of what the 19th century nationalism includes?

See, this is precisely what I wish to avoid, not because I can't have that discussion but because it is not worth our time when one of us is more familiar with this topic than the other. The fact you don't understand why I chose those dates and see them as arbitrary markers to help me in an argument shows that you don't know the historiography on this topic. 1815 to 1914 are the standard bookends to this period. 1815 marks the inauguration of the interns system in question; Kissinger started his career with a book on the beginnings of the nineteenth century states system; the architect of the America's containment strategy, George Kennan, wrote a book about that system's collapse; A. J. P. Taylor put his name on the map for exploring how it work and began to decline with The Struggle for Mastery in Europe. Hell, even a diehard Marxist like Hobsbawm would see this way. This is just standard. That you think I made this up to score points here means that we won't be discussing it from an equal position of understanding. At the same time, you are very confident in some of the assertions you go on to make about that period that just aren't so, and anyone who has studied it in a little depth will see that.

Your comment focuses on two main points in favor of the 19th century being less bloody than the century before or after. The relevant comparison is in how nationalist sentiment lead to a period of national expansion of a different order than the conflicts between traditional enemies such as between Spain/England/France/the Dutch, etc. The middle of the 19th century was a period of revolution and reordering that saw the formation of a unified Germany, conflicts over disputed lands in the old world and the new, and the seeds sown that not only lead to WWI but the Bolshevik revolution and WWII as well, but the wars of the 19th century were about identity and pride which are sources of conflict with dominance as their aim, inherently.

Where to begin? Well, identity is always a part of ever conflict, and nationalism as an ideological mechanism for organizing social action is always operative on some level. But which wars were specifically caused by identity and pride? I mean in a specific way, and not in some general way in which every victor feels pride in the victory. The greatest and most emulated statesman of the age was not at all a "German for the Germans" nationalist. He in fact hated nationalists. His most famous lines:

The position of Prussia in Germany will not be determined by its liberalism but by its power...Prussia must concentrate its strength and hold it for the favourable moment, which has already come and gone several times. Since the treaties of Vienna (that is, 1815, that date you think I chose arbitrarily), our frontiers have been ill-designed for a healthy body politic. Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood

Note the bolded lines. This isn't about going to war over issues of pride and a common sense of nationhood.

You describe the wars of the 20th century as being about ideals

No. I described them as being couched in ideals. Not the same thing at all.

WWI and WWII were not started over ideals but over 19th century beliefs about national identity.

You can't be serious. That is certainly the History Channel version. Read at least Fritz Fischer to see how wrong it is on WWI, and I just can't imagine how this fits into the Triple Entente, the Entente Cordiale, etc. etc. etc. These are absolutely basic for any understanding of the period, even for opponents of the Fischer Thesis, and they are explicitly about national interests and balance-of-power politics. They have nothing to do with national pride except in the most mundane ordinary way, but certainly not in a causal way.

And for WWII it is total ignorance of the ideas of 19th century nationalism to say that Hitler was a 19th century nationalist. No, the arguments of 19th century nationalists were against imperialism, whether of Britain and France or of Russia or of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: each nation should have the right to determine its own particular destiny. That was nineteenth century nationalism was about. That's where your ideas of sacred sovereignty are coming from; they are actually an inheritance of nationalism, and they are the same arguments made by Ukrainian nationalists today. Wilson was more of a 19th century nationalist than Hitler, and the international liberalism of the United States is Wilsonian in its conception of the how the world should work (with the Wilsonian addendum that the United States should be guarantor of it all). Nazis were vicious racialists and all other sorts of opprobrious things, but whereas nationalists of the 19th century from Lebanon to Turkey to Serbia to Romanian to Ukraine argued for the independence of nations and the right to a state for each nation because of its ethnic make-up, I don't think the Nazis were ever concerned with the independence of nation-states, to put it mildly. Mein Kampf wasn't "Germany for the Germans" but "the whole of Eurasia for the Germans."

Indeed, the 19th century is the period when the very idea of a "Ukrainian" nation took hold. It is a nationalist construction, so I am very puzzled by the paradox in your position that is at once opposed to "Russian nationalism" on the principle that nationalism is bad but that Ukraine should be supported on the principle that nationalism is good.

They were resisted over ideals rather than competing claims of a different national identity and rights of ownership.

Nationalism is an idealist construction. It's hard to imagine anything that could be more idealistic.

The Cold War was a conflict over ideals, but never resulted in direct West vs. Soviet or China warfare.

By accident? Was it the weather or something? Or maybe a policy combination of strategic military use wedded to principled but realistic diplomacy had something to do with that.

If war breaks out of Ukraine, it won't be due to Russian idealism over the right way to run an economy but over Russian national identity and the belief they have the right to certain lands and privileges. That's 19th century nationalism, only now with nuclear weapons....I'd argue we had a solid 70 years without major national conflict between 1945 and today due largely to the conflict being between ideals and not assumed rights or national identity.

So it wasn't because of any policy choices or diplomatic prudence or strategic military engagements—it just happened to be the correct thing to disagree about? No need to study it then. It is just luck that it turned out to be the right conflict to be in. Yet nationalism leads to war, even though the heyday of nationalism was characterized little by warfare.

What is cynical is that you don't distinguish between the legality of something and the morality of something but treat the satisfaction of the former as an instance of the latter.

You said this was an example of the Ukraine engaging in attacks on ethnic Russians. It wasn't. I don't care how you might spin it, it wasn't what you introduced it as being. What it is may not be nice and neat and the kind of action you'd invite to dinner, but it's reality. Cynical? No, that's realism.[/quote]

My point about this continues to elude you. Whether you see it as an attack on ethnic Russians is beside that point—ethnic Russians do. It is an illustration of the malleability and thus unreliability of these concepts. I can see why they make that conclusion, even if I don't accept it; you persist in not wanting to understand how the other side might see things, since you equate doing so with accepting how they see things.

If you are more of a student of Kotkin and not just reading him to find points of agreement you'd see policy making is like that

I learn from him, particularly about Russian history, which is his specialty, but I don't see why I am bound to treat any scholar, no matter how insightful in their understanding of the past, as my teacher at whose altar I am supposed to sacrifice my own independent judgment in matters of the present. I don't even see what you mean by this though.

You aren't seeking for the pure white needle in the mud. You are often trying to find the least bad option among many where some of the worst can be catastrophic. Shutting off a utility as the canal effective is makes as much a sense as a matter of resolving dispute over territory as any other action.

I wonder why it didn't work out that way? Doesn't seem like it was very effective.

You don't like being accused of shilling for Putin, but this is a clear example where, even if unintended, you are very much taking a side over what you seem to think is a neutral moral issue. That would make you what some call a useful idiot if that is in fact how you think.

I am forced once again to conclude that you are unable to see the point I have been making if you think I am even taking a side or using to argue for primacy of morality in policy, contrary to everything I have said to this point. As I just wrote above, whether you see it as an attack on ethnic Russians is beside the point—ethnic Russians do. It is an illustration of the malleability and thus unreliability of these concepts. I can see why they make that conclusion because of the obvious immorality of it, and we should be able to agree on the moral question even if we ignore it for different reasons; you persist in not wanting to understand how the other side might see things, since you equate doing so to accepting the primacy of morality.

A little reading comprehension is all I ask.

I am just not convinced that Russia has 19th century nationalistic ambitions, and think that there are security concerns, some genuine and some opportunistic, tied to the imperfect security architecture in eastern Europe and central Asia after 1992. But forgive me if I don't see the goal here.

These actions were all part of an evolving policy regarding Putin's leadership that has to be dynamic to be relevant. The US under Obama failed to confront Russia over the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas which Putin claimed were part of Russia and the people were being forced to be part of a nation they did not want to be part of which since left both in conflict since 2014. The US decided that the intel on Russian mobilizing to invade Ukraine should be treated differently since it was clear Putin viewed the West as unwilling to respond to his expansionist behavior, and made the intentional decision to share intelligence on Russian intentions broadly beginning back in Fall 2021. Russia denied repeatedly that the US was telling the truth, and vacillated between claims this was all lies and that the US was going to provoke them into actually needing to act to protect themselves. The Ukraine publicly tried to downplay the concern of an actual invasion. Once the invasion began, the West largely expected it to be over quickly and focused on expressing outrage. When the Russian military proved inept and Ukraine both motivated and competent, the dynamic shifted again. And it will shift multiple times in the future. China will shift their positions, other nations will recalibrate, and the US will likely change our engagement as the dynamic shifts as well.

Yes, I'm familiar. Notice I am wondering what you think the goal is in the lines you quote. Where in this paragraph do you state the goal?

For decades the US policy makers imagined economic access would create economic opportunity that would lead to democratization for nations such as Russia and China. This proved wrong.

Makes you wonder whether those people were really all that good at their jobs when they could imagine (i.e. ideologically invent) something that proved so wrong.

You often quote Kotkin so I'm assuming if you've read him sufficiently you'd be familiar with his views on policy making regarding the authoritarian regimes whose approaches to market access have differed so widely yet their hold over their populations remains similarly tight if different in appearance.

I'm not sure what point you are making. Is this supposed to be a gotcha? I have read every one of Kotkin's books, none of which are directly about this or about contemporary issues but about 20th century Russian history. I don't know what you think he has written in any op-eds that contradicts what I have said here or forecloses any of my skepticism about the current policy.

Yet you seem to argue for a naïve policy making approach.

I am not a policy maker nor do I publish in that field; I am asking what our policy is and whether it is sound. That is a sign of naïvété? I wonder why it deviates so much from the principled realism of the past (the Cold War), why our leaders are so cavalier and contradictory in their public statements, why we are so prodigal towards a country like Ukraine, and so blithe about all these risks, all without a clear vision of what benefits we want. You obviously support this policy, for example, but have yet to actually tell me what the end goal is without recourse to vague metaphor. I admit that I am skeptical, though for good reason, of many of the people involved at the highest level; they have a bad track record. Because you are often discuss ing not what I write but are instead constantly trying to argue with the ideology you think exists behind the words, you take this all to mean that I advocate for an isolationist do-nothing-ism. If you would stop trying to argue with the caricature you keep trying create, you might notice that I haven't ever said we should not support Ukraine militarily. I just think it is a question of scale and balance, that there should multiple avenues of pressure, that some of our resources might better be used in diplomatic efforts with countries that Putin relies, etc. Your responses to me I have engaged in, but they are full of so much contradiction (the deterrence issue, or your views of nationalism), vague language ("held hostage"). The "give these heroes what they need" strikes me as incredibly naïve, but you present it as if it is somehow realist, only to admit that it's about bad and worse alternatives, not realism. Fine. But you only see two possibilities: whatever we're doing now, and doing nothing. And it all seems to be based on a resistance narrative derived from nationalist ideas, which you simultaneously attack, and History Channel-level understanding of some of the back issues.

I know that sounds harsh, and I am sorry for it, but I also feel exasperated at having to explain things that are absolutely basic because I've been accused of not taking up the issues you raise, only to have about 80% of what I write caricatured, misunderstood, or ignored (e.g. the grain issue, the question of whether you think we can continue to use Ukraine against even against their will, etc.).

At this point, I prefer to let readers (if there be any) of these exchanges determines who is being naïve. I am also content to let you have the last word on all of this.

[MsJack]

I dropped by to ask Will why he's calling it a war when Putin says it's a special operation, and he banned me within a minute. LOL! I think he broke DCP's record. What a snowflake eh?

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

A total blackout in the Kharkiv & Donetsk regions, a partial one in the Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk & Sumy regions. RF terrorists remain terrorists & attack critical infrastructure. No military facilities, the goal is to deprive people of light & heat. #RussiaIsATerroristState

- Doc

[honorentheos]

At this point, I prefer to let readers (if there be any) of these exchanges determines who is being naïve. I am also content to let you have the last word on all of this.

You’re too kind, and perhaps this is apparently necessary. When dealing with a mouthamagician for whom verbosity serves better than clarity, clarity is necessary. So I’ll attempt to be as brief as possible and return to the original point.

The reader may have long forgotten, or more likely become distracted from, the origin of the line of discussion.

Perceived atrocities committed against ethnic Russians by the Ukrainian government are the core of Russian propaganda, after all, even though many of the elements of that propaganda campaign happen also to be true.

Genuinely curious which propaganda elements specific to atrocities committed against ethnic Russians happen to also be true?

The response (recalling the more recent calls for avoiding emotionalism), was lengthy but we eventually arrived:

I was thinking of many instances before the invasion of this year, most obviously the frequent shelling of the (very pro-Russian) population of Donetsk from 2014 onward (I have read/seen/heard discussion about many over the years, but see Amnesty International here for an example).

The link is broken, which then becomes another subject added to the same post. We do eventually get a viable link and a rather concerning accusation sandwiched between accusations of Amnesty International vilifying Russia and mistreatment or Russian military POWs:

Of course the most egregious example is the attempt to cut off water to the (again, very pro-Russian) population of Crimea. That serves no military purpose and is obviously an attempt to punish civilians, most of whom think of themselves as ethnically Russian. Its effects have really quite devastating, and it is instructive to think of how this would be portrayed had it been Russians doing it to the Ukraine.

On reading the details, it’s applicability to the claim that started this thread of multiplying obfuscations was called into question:

Of the issues you identified, the one that jumped out at me as most concerning was this one: "Of course the most egregious example is the attempt to cut off water to the (again, very pro-Russian) population of Crimea." Then the story turned out to be the Ukraine dammed a man-made canal that fed the Crimean peninsula's agricultural lands as infrastructure. At which point it gets pretty murky as well. Is that anti-ethnic Russians? Or leverage against an occupying force? It's hard to see the directed malice at a population.

Thanks for your reply, Honorentheos. Civilians living in Crimea are not an occupying force; they just live there. And it's not just that some farmers can't irrigate their fields. There is water-rationing, sanitation problems, the downstream effect of agricultural depletion on the local food supply, which stresses the food supply of the surrounding regions, and so on (see here, from before the invasion). It has made life pretty miserable. If it is not malice directed at the population, then it is using the civilian population to get at the Russian government. Maybe that's justified on a moral level, maybe not, but my point was that tabulating wrongdoings/atrocities just becomes a semantic task to justify preconceptions or justify something else. I'm asking: what is that something else? Anyway…

The civilians are not an occupying force, the cutting off of water has no military purpose, the question is if tabulating wrongdoings is just a “semantic task” to justify perceptions or something else? The mouthamagician offers he is only here to help resolve the perplexity he raised, what IS that something else that justifies shut off the canal water to get at the Russian government. Then pivots to an “Anyway”. Of course.

An attempt at clarity on the original point is made:

Perhaps the question remains unanswered if the Ukraine shutting down a canal that supplies agricultural lands after Russia occupied Crimea is really an example of malice towards ethnic Russians? And if so, what ethnic malice is behind Russia shutting down pipeline infrastructure that affects people's lives? The original request was to understand what supported the claim Ukraine was, "Perceived atrocities committed against ethnic Russians by the Ukrainian government are the core of Russian propaganda, after all, even though many of the elements of that propaganda campaign happen also to be true." Perhaps I misread the extent of the comment, and all that was implied is there is some actual event that feeds the perception that the Ukrainians are committing atrocities against ethnic Russians? Difficult to say that a claim of that degree of ambiguity could be disproven, but also so universally applicable to how propaganda generally works the point it makes is blunted even as it is made.

And this wonder is pulled from a sleeve:

Honorentheos understands it rightly but is only partially correct to say “the point it makes is blunted even as it is made” because he errs in taking it as the point. No, it is merely an observation that is, as he put it quite rightly, “universally applicable to how propaganda generally works.” It is an observation in service of the argument that continues to be ignored: because this is how propaganda works, stirring up emotions through the consumption of atrocity news is a very poor basis for policy,

“Because this is how propaganda works, stirring up emotions through the consumption of atrocity news is poor basis for policy.”

Sym, the propaganda supports the policy. The propaganda may be manipulative (by definition it IS manipulative), but the policies aren't part of the propaganda. The statements of purpose given publicly may be. But policy-making, that is not. </end record screech moment>

I understand you're trying to zing me, but this is either a reading comprehension issue or a deliberate misreading of that line of discussion, which I clarified for you in the last post—I was not the one conflating them but trying to discuss the policy separate from these things, quite against the grain of everyone else. Bizarrely, you quote the very lines from that post.

Bizarrely, indeed.

I leave the reader with this to contemplate.

Symmachus: Whether you see it as an attack on ethnic Russians is beside that point—ethnic Russians do. It is an illustration of the malleability and thus unreliability of these concepts. I can see why they make that conclusion, even if I don't accept it; you persist in not wanting to understand how the other side might see things, since you equate doing so with accepting how they see things

Also Symmachus: Perceived atrocities committed against ethnic Russians by the Ukrainian government are the core of Russian propaganda, after all, even though many of the elements of that propaganda campaign happen also to be true.

Does it matter if they actually ARE true? Depends on who is speaking to whom I suppose. Like all good propaganda.

[honorentheos]

A coda.

What I have said: our Ukraine policy seems confused and keeps escalating with no clear goal, and the people who are running it and advising on it in the government and media have a poor record which has resulted in major screw-ups with tiny countries—is it wise to continue this when a nuclear power is involved? I don't think that means that I have to come up with a new theory for how the international system needs to operate before I can discuss my concerns

...this war is not a personal pet project for Putin designed to make the comparison with Peter the Great more real in his deluded mind or whatever half-wit American commentators go on about—it has a lot of support in Russia, and it is better to understand why and grapple with that rather than boxing the shadows of an evil dictator caricature. If it's not him, it'll be another Russian leader in ten or twenty years.

So I think it really does matter how we got here. This has every mark of being about Russia's traditional concern over its ever precarious security. We have given them reason to feel it keenly, so any policy that includes the spread of US and European liberal democracy as its goal will get us more of the same. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has had a policy in Eastern Europe that is as imperial a project as any, and we should either assume the burden of empire properly or surrender our pretensions to the principled realism of the past, a realism that recognized real constraints but was motivated and conditioned by a set of ideals that Americans largely shared (one of the great ironies of this for me is that the people most passionately flying Ukrainian flags tend to be the people most open to the idea that America is evil racist country laced with white supremacy through and through—if that's so true, let's get the beam out of our own eye before attempting to extract the mote from our Russian brother's).

Russia at any rate is not going to be deterred in the slightest by the empire-LARPing that constitutes US foreign policy. It's concerns can be apprehended and addressed, and that makes them real and concrete, whereas Bush-style fantasies about the spread of liberal democracy as an inevitability and thus a duty are airy fantasies with a very bloody track record in their attempts to make them real...
that weakness is exploited by opposing powers, and then those security concerns come roaring violently back when Russia recovers. This is just a fact of the Eastern European situation that needs to be dealt with, and I find dismissal of all of these causes to be dangerous because they are the heart of the issue. Call it Russian propaganda all you want; it is a fact one will have to reckon with.
...
They (Russia) certainly have a moral right to security, which we have failed to respect and which will have to respected if this is to end rather than escalate, but that is not the same as morally justifying their invasion. I don't think justification matters: it has happened, but it has happened for understandable reasons, and we do ourselves and Ukrainians no favors by ignoring them and retreating into the same species of pseudo-democracy promotion that has been so disastrous elsewhere for so long.

My complaint is that our conversation in the United States and our policy are currently dominated by demonstrably incompetent people who do hold views rejected not just by me or Shryver but probably most Americans when those views are presented on their own and not embedded in atrocity porn: namely, the view that the United States can and should be the world hegemon. collectively, with guns upscaled to divisions.

The problem of how countries and groups with above stone-age level technology will frequently disagree, and project and defend their interests hasn't been solved? Probably never will. If you want to come out and argue for a liberal-democratic Imperium Americanum, with European junior partners as administrators of the empire in the Easter European Sector, come out and do so. Many will not want it (the "barbaric morons" as you call them), so you will have to assume a "[racially progressive and ungendered person's] burden" and civilize them, which will require introducing these barbaric morons to our more enlightened gun barrels.
...
I don't think there is a "truth" about Ukraine that one can attain by a process of reasoned dialogue. Put simply, I am skeptical that we can understand the details of the war on the ground on a day-to-day basis. These "daily updates" from ISW are very suspicious to me because I suspect they are based on media reports mostly. I have very little faith that such reports would be any more reliable or any less propagandistic than what comes out of Russia. ISW podcasts were saying back in February "it's all over now and Kiev will be taken in a day" which was a total speculation, and now it's "Ukraine can win this thing, just look at the maps: it's September and Russia only controls the coasts." All of this suggests to me that they have no idea what Russia is trying to do with its invasion. Maybe Putin isn't Hitler trying to take over Poland? My skepticism approaches something closer to worry when I see that this idea percolates into the heads of policy makers so that we get policies like handing over tens of billions of dollars no-questions-asked because the policy maker believes that "Ukraine can win this thing."

The problem I'm highlighting is that we lack any policy that has a principled realism of the sort that the United States once excelled in.
...
So I am sure the "democracy" promoters will once again win the day, and this will just keep getting worse. I have always preferred Russian-style optimism to American-style optimism, and so I end with it here: "However bad things are now, don't worry, and look forward to the future—because they are going to get worse!"

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

A total blackout in the Kharkiv & Donetsk regions, a partial one in the Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk & Sumy regions. RF terrorists remain terrorists & attack critical infrastructure. No military facilities, the goal is to deprive people of light & heat. #RussiaIsATerroristState

- Doc

yOu MiSuNdErStAnD mY aRgUmEnTs!!



- Doc

[honorentheos]

Some bros may view it as moral equivocation but there is a meaningful difference between a nation shutting off infrastructure originating in their country so the services do not continue past the border and making civilian infrastructure in another country a military target as an act of aggression.

[Symmachus]

I am still waiting for the last word, Honorentheos, about our Ukraine policy; I was hoping you would explain the metaphors you were using, since they were unclear. I am done talking about that, and give you the last word on all that. Come out to make that last word, and I am eager to read your reposes to the substantive issues I raised.

What you posted though is not a last word to that. I don't know what it is. You appear to be trying, and failing, to reconstruct the argument and to raise a final take-down of it, which I guess is easier for you than addressing the issues raised by your historical illiteracy or correcting my "naïve" "cynicism" with your "realist" master explanation of our Ukraine involvement in anything beyond a Bush-level metaphor ("we won't be held hostage" is our goal?).

Some of your sentences put a severe strain on grammar:

The mouthamagician offers he is only here to help resolve the perplexity he raised, what IS that something else that justifies shut off the canal water to get at the Russian government.

This sentence is no match for me. I confess I don't understand it fully, and I regret that even my mouth-magic couldn't perform the alchemy necessary to transmute this into something graspable by an ordinary human mind like mine.

The general quality of your attempted take-down is well illustrated here:

Symmachus: Whether you see it as an attack on ethnic Russians is beside that point—ethnic Russians do. It is an illustration of the malleability and thus unreliability of these concepts. I can see why they make that conclusion, even if I don't accept it; you persist in not wanting to understand how the other side might see things, since you equate doing so with accepting how they see things

Also Symmachus: Perceived atrocities committed against ethnic Russians by the Ukrainian government are the core of Russian propaganda, after all, even though many of the elements of that propaganda campaign happen also to be true

Do you read these as contradictions? I am making the exact same point in each one. You have to read all of the words though to see that (I know that can be hard). I think I could have saved you the unpleasantness of my conversation by respecting your intelligence a little less and earlier on (if only we had had that "19th century nationalism" discussion up front): look up the word "perceived" in a dictionary.

Some bros may view it as moral equivocation but there is a meaningful difference between a nation shutting off infrastructure originating in their country so the services do not continue past the border and making civilian infrastructure in another country a military target as an act of aggression.

Hey, where'd the realist go?

I'm sure you mean "equivalence" and not "equivocation" here. But I wonder if you could quote back to me where I argue that there is no "meaningful difference between a nation shutting off infrastructure originating in their country so the services do not continue past the border and making civilian infrastructure in another country a military target as an act of aggression." That is a moral question that I view as basically academic at this point; the argument has been about whether our responses to the morality of it should be the basis for the kind of policy we have. Your own position on that is apparently equivocal.

[honorentheos]

Symmachus: Whether you see it as an attack on ethnic Russians is beside that point—ethnic Russians do. It is an illustration of the malleability and thus unreliability of these concepts. I can see why they make that conclusion, even if I don't accept it; you persist in not wanting to understand how the other side might see things, since you equate doing so with accepting how they see things

Also Symmachus: Perceived atrocities committed against ethnic Russians by the Ukrainian government are the core of Russian propaganda, after all, even though many of the elements of that propaganda campaign happen also to be true

Do you read these as contradictions? I am making the exact same point in each one. You have to read all of the words though to see that (I know that can be hard). I think I could have saved you the unpleasantness of my conversation by respecting your intelligence a little less and earlier on (if only we had had that "19th century nationalism" discussion up front): look up the word "perceived" in a dictionary.

Ah, the mouthamagician returns, having put on his robe and wizards hat.

The issue isn't with failing to comprehend what you say. It's that what you say shifts around on the points you wish to make the most heat out of while avoiding obvious issues with your comments. Is the issue not understanding how ethnic Russians have swallowed the propaganda claims? Or that the truth is being manipulated by Western media outlets to inform bad policy that is simply neocon imperialism writ small? Are the issues with US policy that they are unclear? Or that you believe them to be warmed over attempts at reasserting US hegemony on the world? Are Putin's claims of a Russian sphere of influence that has seen former Soviet states pulled or forced back into the RF based on nationalism? Is that different from a return to the Alexander I, Nicholas I, and Nicholas II expansions and claims over the same regions where the Russian put them under pressure to return to where they rightfully belong anyway? Are these justified, but not justified by you, assertions of national security interests against Western aggression simply what happened? Or just what Russians believe happened?

Such matters are sadly complicated to express in terms that do not wander over verbal flourishes and dance with sequined sidebars.