Books. Christ.
833 karma · joined October 16, 2017
Those can definitely be the same thing (in America).
Surely if it would be wiser to ponder the unethical acts you have helped such a company commit against the public, not which unethical acts it is capable of committing against you.
The several posts here which imply the Russians are choosing not to interfere grant them more military competence than they have demonstrated - and are ignorant of the war’s present geography.
Particularly egregious is the line which begins “Yes, it's welcome news…” You are ostensibly the news, Axios - why are you telling me how to feel about yourself? Axios repeats this pattern frequently - their signature bulleted snippets of supposed fact often being little more than tweets.
Also they carry obsequiously friendly reporting on Amazon frequently.
> Sanctions on Venezuela? Again, Venezuela took the unacceptable step of nationalizing their oil assets.
But is this not saying that the real issue with Cuba is [actual] communism? This requires no conspiracy, it is the root of publicly-cited reasons for US policy towards the island.
I think the reason these statements have the allure of revelation despite not being so is an unresolved dissonance in the American civic religion.
Capitalism and property have displaced most other rights of the liberal pantheon, old and new. Merely to discover the once unremarkable fact that capitalism in inherently unjust, and that neither property nor free enterprise are actually its synonyms, is lamentably revelatory.
I suppose the deliberate destruction of any rational, shared understanding of what communism actually entails, enacted by demagogues attacking Democratic politicians and policy, has also helped break the prior clarity of these embargoes' official justification.
We're not, and never really have been over the full course of the information age so far, in need of new, online public fora. (Go to your city council meetings.)
They are just neat.
A charity explicitly prefers altruism over gain from moral conviction. One can hardly expect them to optimize for financial gain, even if there exists a compelling utilitarian argument that this would allow them to perform more altruism.
Indeed, this in my view is preferable - one need only gesture towards the infamy of "the ends justify the means" to make an argument against strict utilitarian behavior.
Most economic and geopolitical boons promised by this proposal are also obtainable by dramatically increasing investment in and adoption of carbonless energy (nuclear, ‘green’).
Moreover these technologies would free future generations from geopolitical imperatives arising from control and transport of oil and gas. Over the long term, I expect North America is no less likely to suffer instability on this count than Eurasia has proven.
It’s more: starve the war machine’s economy, and be damned the consequences for ordinary Russians.
Geopolitics aside, I and many feel a simple moral repulsion at funding the aggressor in any way. Sure, one wishes many more Russians felt the same - not likely it seems.
Few wish to hear that “people aren’t to blame for their governments” while Ukrainians die for precisely their right to have such responsibility.
Moreover one may destroy a war machine by ruthlessly starving the economy which funds it. The prosperity of Russians correlates to the Russian army’s ability to make war.
It is not reasonable to seek just-so geostategic facts, or single points of leverage, that explain societies of millions and the policies of their governments.
Understanding something of German politics can elucidate origins of German policy.
"Guilt" is a lazy reduction on my part. It references a sense of special German responsibility to never cause or encourage war, especially in Europe - the zeitgeist of West Germany's post-war generation. A recent DW opinion piece summarizes the received wisdom:
"There are good reasons why Germany has adopted the stance of, on principle, not supplying weapons to war or crisis zones – especially when it concerns a region that, within living memory, has suffered the consequences of a terrible German occupation. The danger of further fueling conflicts if more and more weapons are supplied is not one that can be dismissed out of hand." [0]
Knowing so well the sins of their parents, this generation has sought a path to be proud, little-g germans - replacing nationalism and patriotism with moral vocation. Consider this recollection, from an Austrian born in 1947: https://youtu.be/Qmp--Z8pmTU?t=103.
There is so much more to consider: I haven't escaped lazy shorthand. For instance, the German arms industry is fourth largest in the world. Hypocrisy, monitoring, and debate abound [1]. Analyzing a democratic polity oft feels like a fractal fool's errand.
Certainly, all this is not to say Russia has not influenced Germany's foreign, security, and arms exports policies. The described German sense of responsibility includes a particular sensitivity with regard to criticism of Russia, and an eagerness for economic engagement. Russia sacrificed far more to defeat the Nazis than all other allies combined, and Germans know this well, especially Ossies (not so the rest of the West - often a particular grievance of ordinary Russians).
The LNG vulnerability is doubtless a salient consideration in German policy decisions. But they've conclusively demonstrated the other factors have more weight, and they are willing to pay a price for principle. Indeed, previous to the policy change they were paying a different price - the opprobrium and frustration of allies and America - on the grounds on principle.
0 - https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-ukraine-crisis-germany-needs-a...
1 - https://www.swp-berlin.org/publications/products/comments/20...
Not least Moscow's elite. German relations with Russia were once much better than most of the rest of Europe's - Russia does not view Germany as simple US puppet.
The west is doing much more, at significant risk of escalation, than could have been reasonably hoped.
I would not have dared hope that all Europe would brave openly shipping weapons to kill Russian soldiers. But even Germany has found this courage.
Granted: American has used it for basically every war since 1945, most connotation now stems from this.
I caution you - without in any way trying to argue about ideology or civilizations or historical justice! - that American political discourse is not autocratic or controlled, not even secretly. The New York Times and the CIA are both independent actors, and each is itself not a perfect information autocracy.
No oligarch has the power to exile you, and no government the power to imprison you - even informal censorship is impossible. There's no central node able censor all others in order speak without contradiction. There are not literal state propagandists, or at least not many and none effective.
Any analysis of American propaganda, or indeed of America holistically, is flawed if it refuses to accept this reality. Any analysis which seeks to expose lies must start by not lying to itself.
Chomsky writes that free speech as such does not stop Americans from lying effectively and with minimized dissonance to both ourselves and the world. I don't dispute him (couldn't competently in any case).
But there's never been an American Pravda. Blue jeans broke the USSR all on their own: the CIA doesn't know how actually to make something cool. America doesn't possess a fantastical ability to will rock 'n' roll, or color revolutions, into existence.
0 - https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/interventionnisme
ps I find "special military operation" to be much more objectionable than "intervention."
> Why doesn't this scare people to death?
The human hierarchy of fear seems sorted by proximity and tractability, not a rational calculus of risk and probability. Abstract threats, or those percieved unavoidable, might inspire only apathy.
And indeed, what can I possibly do about rumors of Russia considering nuclear war? I've kept Potassium Iodide stocked since 2014, which seemed practical and easy.
There are humans, existing in a complex society. All meaning is negotiated all the time. All the expectations of behaviour from which your confidant hueristic analysis springs are at all times liable to be contradicted. For instance, few would have thought that the "powers that be" would permit massive conventional war in Europe at this late date.
There is no platonic, eternal, divine legal system in which we encode what is and isn't actually war or which escalations are permissible in discrete scenarios.
No matter, happens to all of us. Have some relevant comedy as a salve: https://youtu.be/5muY64Oyp10
This trend of imprecision has been nurtured by the moral cognitive dissonance that was inherent to American reporting on our two recent Eurasian wars.
At pains to make a distinction between classical nation-state war and our adventurism, we merely achieved a degradation in the shared meaning of “war,” “invasion,” etc.
This is very much the crux of the vulnerability Russian innovation in information war seeks to exploit.
Through these years humanity learned to expect perpetual and cold stalemate as an inevitable paradigm between Russia and the West.
Over these generations, humanity has on average become wealthier and more educated and more democratic - all correlates of robust peace between nations.
You’re not the only one surprised. I have little doubt that everyone, even the CIA analysts generating grim predictions before the invasion, was at some level unable to believe something like this was possible in 2022.
We can still hope to prove it was the absurd strategic mistake our intuition had hoped it was.
China’s reaction to this crisis has elucidated for me the fact that its government is a complex institution with separate power bases (cf. Putin’s lonely autocracy).
It’s clear that at least some of those nodes earnestly hold the principle of always-sacrosanct sovereignty which is a cornerstone of China’s foreign policy (and of its criticism of the West), and are not pleased with the hypocrisy now inherent in their alliance.