Default Friend on pseudonymity; Richard Hanania on the weakness of Woke; Niall Ferguson on Ukraine; Anne Applebaum on Ukraine; Glenn Greenwald on Ukraine
Hanania needs to reread 1984. It doesn’t take a large majority to impose madness on a population, as the bulk of the population tends to be inert and ignore the powerful 15% or so.
Wokeism is particularly worrisome because the left as a whole does not seem to have many limiting principles which push back on it. A moderate leftist can’t seem to come up with coherent arguments against woke excesses, and so has nothing to push back with to oppose ever more radical moves. Exit from the left tribe is the only option, and that is a big ask for many I suspect.
"I wonder why that is so important. Why is it not sufficient to cut off Russia from military imports? Is it that once the West pays them for oil, they can find a way to buy military supplies?"
This seems a bit strange. While I would also like to avoid as much civilian suffering as possible, it occurs to me I don't understand what your model of what you expect exclusively military-focused sanctions to do to Russia and how they would affect the Russian regime, especially in the very short term in the context of the ongoing armed conflict. Do you think this would be as effectively pressuring or coercive or seriously undermine their military capability, or what?
Not only can Russia make nearly all its military stuff domestically, it has incredibly huge reserves of replacements, and it has been a major arms exporter for generations. To the extent they must import anything at all of military relevance from the countries which have imposed sanctions (for example, they use a US chip in one of their drones), they can almost certainly substitute for imports from the non-sanctioning countries, e.g., China, which makes pretty much everything, or, in a real pinch, just use those non-sanctioning countries as middle-men to launder the imports in.
Well, right. In the short term*, the only thing with significant "military use" is "violence", i.e., armed conflict, killing the enemy's soldiers, destroying their stuff.
Sanctions aren't aimed at military capability, they are aimed in the immediate instance at applying pressure to get politicians in charge to change their minds and their course of action, and as general deterrence as an example to encourage the others from similar actions by credible threat of such pressure.
Whether we have a good, cost-benefit justified game theory of effective application of coercive psychological pressure on regimes, and are following such a strategy in a disciplined way, are different questions to which I'm tempted to answer, "No way."
*Ok, one could quibble that it's not "no military use whatsoever" - sanctions can make it pragmatically tougher for some countries to build lots of nukes quick, but that seems a special case. One could say that making a country poorer also reduces their general capacity to afford to buy or produce the best weapons in the long run.
It takes time and effort and extra expense to bring in high-tech equipment, particularly heavy manufacturing equipment. This tweet thread by Kamil Galeev is useful: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1501360272442896388 USSR, too, was always casting about for ways to acquire high-tech equipment, even stealing units to reverse-engineer, the way they did with СМ ЭВМ if memory serves. СМ ЭВМ was a knock-off of DEC PDP-11 and it killed off almost all original computer design work in USSR, because the latter had great difficulties moving beyond laboratory prototypes and one-off production.
‘ In fact, even with state support, and practically unlimited rhetorical backing from elite institutions, it still struggles to win hearts and minds. ’
And when it is State policy - which it now is - it doesn’t need to win hearts and minds, because it is imposed by the power of the State and any who resist, are censored, censured, entrapped in legislation and the State makes their lives a misery - like Trudeau in Canada simply preventing people from living their lives through property seizures, financial restrictions, imprisonment for ‘terrorism’.
You seem to be implying (unintentionally?) that all Puritan victories in the past are "absurd and mutual contradictory beliefs" because of what Wokeism demands today: anti-slavery, civil rights, ecological justice ...
How would you separate out the worthy successes from the extreme? Is the point Wokeism, today, can not make that distinction? Or is it that all the worthy victories have been achieved?
I do not know what who said to whom before the war, but my feeling is that just giving an ironclad guarantee of the status quo would not have deterred Russia from trying to alter the status quo.
If Wokeism is just the current incarnation of Puritanism, doesn't that argue against its durability? The fact that moral crusading is a durable human pheonomen is to say that individual instances of moral crusading are durable. In fact, the instances we're pointing to are widely separate in time and belief, even though they're all instances of moral crusading.
What makes this instance of Puritanism sticky and likely to endure where, say, literal 17th century English Puritanism and the temperance movement did not?
And further, what leads such movements across lines like "let's kill the witches" or "let's outlaw alcohol altogether" and then back again to "ok, we're pretty ashamed we hanged all those people" or "turns out banning alcohol wasn't a great idea"?
"What makes this instance of Puritanism sticky and likely to endure ... "
What makes any ideological movement self-sustaining is that it manifests in collective action as a winning political formula with an explicit or implicit quid-pro-quo. "If you help the cause, we win, and if we win, you also win."
Every society short of Harrison Bergeron has some degree of inequality which generates all kinds of resentments and envy, which are universal and volcanically powerful primal human impulses which can be harnessed. Egalitarian politics always tells the outline of the same, instinctively seductive story, which is the grabbing-rationalizing narrative that this unfairness is neither natural nor justified but the consequence of 'oppression'.
And the 'deal' it offers to whatever lower fraction is large enough to take over is, "Help us get power, and we'll use it to redistribute X to you", and X is wealth, jobs, social status, the satisfaction of terrifying and lording over your opponents, and so forth. The high will be made low, the low made high.
This formula works like a charm. Like any living creature it gradually evolves and adapts in the specifics because it is in constant feedback with changes in reality, countervailing interest, social context, demographics, etc. The problem is that like the shark that must keep swimming to stay alive, this kind of political movement must constantly feed on agitation and change to sustain its energy, cohesion, and solidarity - like an army that must keep conquering new lands or end up breaking apart into factions that fight each other. And this progression admits no limiting principle that stands in the way of the road to nightmarish tyranny.
What we are calling 'woke' is merely the latest version of a very long-running phenomenon, and indeed just like 'PC' and 'Social Justice' before it, it is just a phase that will give way to even more awful and maliciously persecutorial perspectives for which we do not yet even have good epithets, and by the time we do, we will be too terrified to utter them aloud.
But this is a description of how these things operate (which I don't disagree with), not a description of whether and why this particular instance will be successful.
It's simply not the case that all, or even most of these moralistic crusading political movements end up taking everything over. Most of the time because these groups don't actually do a very good job of providing X.
Wokeism has a robust history of surviving without legal support. It began in online fandom, Tumblr communities and book publishing, where it's still at its strongest. The wokest profession in the world is young adult author. Anti discrimination law and Title IX don't apply to that profession, which is entirely freelance.
If I may disagree slightly about your take on Hanania, though I didn't go back and read the NS Lyons piece you both reference. I think to a degree you are talking about two different things. I agree with you that Woke is the latest guise of Puritanism but Hanania seems to be talking less about the core aspects of Puritanism and more about specifically Woke ideology. You even point out that while Puritanism is frequently revived in the US it takes on different projects, in some cases even beneficial ones such as abolition or civil rights. I think a more fundamental problem with the current Woke revival of Puritanism (and maybe Lyons touches on this) is that it offers no absolution for the sins of the various -isms. You can get away with demanding a lot of sacrifice and penance in this life if you can offer positive reinforcement that the next life will be better. If Woke fails it's likely because people just plain get tired of doing penance for their 'sins' with no hope of either immanentizing the eschaton or experiencing it on another plane.
It is all going to be fun and games until a small nuclear weapon vaporizes a NATO base in retaliation. Greenwald is correct- literally nothing was done to try to avoid this. This is especially galling given that, for once, the US intelligence agencies were correct in predicting it happening.
Hanania needs to reread 1984. It doesn’t take a large majority to impose madness on a population, as the bulk of the population tends to be inert and ignore the powerful 15% or so.
Wokeism is particularly worrisome because the left as a whole does not seem to have many limiting principles which push back on it. A moderate leftist can’t seem to come up with coherent arguments against woke excesses, and so has nothing to push back with to oppose ever more radical moves. Exit from the left tribe is the only option, and that is a big ask for many I suspect.
Precisely correct. Hanania is whistling past the grave yard.
"I wonder why that is so important. Why is it not sufficient to cut off Russia from military imports? Is it that once the West pays them for oil, they can find a way to buy military supplies?"
This seems a bit strange. While I would also like to avoid as much civilian suffering as possible, it occurs to me I don't understand what your model of what you expect exclusively military-focused sanctions to do to Russia and how they would affect the Russian regime, especially in the very short term in the context of the ongoing armed conflict. Do you think this would be as effectively pressuring or coercive or seriously undermine their military capability, or what?
Not only can Russia make nearly all its military stuff domestically, it has incredibly huge reserves of replacements, and it has been a major arms exporter for generations. To the extent they must import anything at all of military relevance from the countries which have imposed sanctions (for example, they use a US chip in one of their drones), they can almost certainly substitute for imports from the non-sanctioning countries, e.g., China, which makes pretty much everything, or, in a real pinch, just use those non-sanctioning countries as middle-men to launder the imports in.
I read this is saying that sanctions have no military use whatsoever.
Well, right. In the short term*, the only thing with significant "military use" is "violence", i.e., armed conflict, killing the enemy's soldiers, destroying their stuff.
Sanctions aren't aimed at military capability, they are aimed in the immediate instance at applying pressure to get politicians in charge to change their minds and their course of action, and as general deterrence as an example to encourage the others from similar actions by credible threat of such pressure.
Whether we have a good, cost-benefit justified game theory of effective application of coercive psychological pressure on regimes, and are following such a strategy in a disciplined way, are different questions to which I'm tempted to answer, "No way."
*Ok, one could quibble that it's not "no military use whatsoever" - sanctions can make it pragmatically tougher for some countries to build lots of nukes quick, but that seems a special case. One could say that making a country poorer also reduces their general capacity to afford to buy or produce the best weapons in the long run.
It takes time and effort and extra expense to bring in high-tech equipment, particularly heavy manufacturing equipment. This tweet thread by Kamil Galeev is useful: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1501360272442896388 USSR, too, was always casting about for ways to acquire high-tech equipment, even stealing units to reverse-engineer, the way they did with СМ ЭВМ if memory serves. СМ ЭВМ was a knock-off of DEC PDP-11 and it killed off almost all original computer design work in USSR, because the latter had great difficulties moving beyond laboratory prototypes and one-off production.
‘ In fact, even with state support, and practically unlimited rhetorical backing from elite institutions, it still struggles to win hearts and minds. ’
And when it is State policy - which it now is - it doesn’t need to win hearts and minds, because it is imposed by the power of the State and any who resist, are censored, censured, entrapped in legislation and the State makes their lives a misery - like Trudeau in Canada simply preventing people from living their lives through property seizures, financial restrictions, imprisonment for ‘terrorism’.
You seem to be implying (unintentionally?) that all Puritan victories in the past are "absurd and mutual contradictory beliefs" because of what Wokeism demands today: anti-slavery, civil rights, ecological justice ...
How would you separate out the worthy successes from the extreme? Is the point Wokeism, today, can not make that distinction? Or is it that all the worthy victories have been achieved?
I do not know what who said to whom before the war, but my feeling is that just giving an ironclad guarantee of the status quo would not have deterred Russia from trying to alter the status quo.
If Wokeism is just the current incarnation of Puritanism, doesn't that argue against its durability? The fact that moral crusading is a durable human pheonomen is to say that individual instances of moral crusading are durable. In fact, the instances we're pointing to are widely separate in time and belief, even though they're all instances of moral crusading.
What makes this instance of Puritanism sticky and likely to endure where, say, literal 17th century English Puritanism and the temperance movement did not?
And further, what leads such movements across lines like "let's kill the witches" or "let's outlaw alcohol altogether" and then back again to "ok, we're pretty ashamed we hanged all those people" or "turns out banning alcohol wasn't a great idea"?
"What makes this instance of Puritanism sticky and likely to endure ... "
What makes any ideological movement self-sustaining is that it manifests in collective action as a winning political formula with an explicit or implicit quid-pro-quo. "If you help the cause, we win, and if we win, you also win."
Every society short of Harrison Bergeron has some degree of inequality which generates all kinds of resentments and envy, which are universal and volcanically powerful primal human impulses which can be harnessed. Egalitarian politics always tells the outline of the same, instinctively seductive story, which is the grabbing-rationalizing narrative that this unfairness is neither natural nor justified but the consequence of 'oppression'.
And the 'deal' it offers to whatever lower fraction is large enough to take over is, "Help us get power, and we'll use it to redistribute X to you", and X is wealth, jobs, social status, the satisfaction of terrifying and lording over your opponents, and so forth. The high will be made low, the low made high.
This formula works like a charm. Like any living creature it gradually evolves and adapts in the specifics because it is in constant feedback with changes in reality, countervailing interest, social context, demographics, etc. The problem is that like the shark that must keep swimming to stay alive, this kind of political movement must constantly feed on agitation and change to sustain its energy, cohesion, and solidarity - like an army that must keep conquering new lands or end up breaking apart into factions that fight each other. And this progression admits no limiting principle that stands in the way of the road to nightmarish tyranny.
What we are calling 'woke' is merely the latest version of a very long-running phenomenon, and indeed just like 'PC' and 'Social Justice' before it, it is just a phase that will give way to even more awful and maliciously persecutorial perspectives for which we do not yet even have good epithets, and by the time we do, we will be too terrified to utter them aloud.
But this is a description of how these things operate (which I don't disagree with), not a description of whether and why this particular instance will be successful.
It's simply not the case that all, or even most of these moralistic crusading political movements end up taking everything over. Most of the time because these groups don't actually do a very good job of providing X.
Wokeism has a robust history of surviving without legal support. It began in online fandom, Tumblr communities and book publishing, where it's still at its strongest. The wokest profession in the world is young adult author. Anti discrimination law and Title IX don't apply to that profession, which is entirely freelance.
Hanania's story simply doesn't fit the data.
If I may disagree slightly about your take on Hanania, though I didn't go back and read the NS Lyons piece you both reference. I think to a degree you are talking about two different things. I agree with you that Woke is the latest guise of Puritanism but Hanania seems to be talking less about the core aspects of Puritanism and more about specifically Woke ideology. You even point out that while Puritanism is frequently revived in the US it takes on different projects, in some cases even beneficial ones such as abolition or civil rights. I think a more fundamental problem with the current Woke revival of Puritanism (and maybe Lyons touches on this) is that it offers no absolution for the sins of the various -isms. You can get away with demanding a lot of sacrifice and penance in this life if you can offer positive reinforcement that the next life will be better. If Woke fails it's likely because people just plain get tired of doing penance for their 'sins' with no hope of either immanentizing the eschaton or experiencing it on another plane.
It is all going to be fun and games until a small nuclear weapon vaporizes a NATO base in retaliation. Greenwald is correct- literally nothing was done to try to avoid this. This is especially galling given that, for once, the US intelligence agencies were correct in predicting it happening.