"He says that Putin has nothing to gain by using a nuke, and we have everything to lose by caving into nuclear blackmail."
The situation is asymmetric- and always was. We, the West, have far more to lose than do the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans, etc. Play it out- Putin begins to lose in a rout and nukes Kiev, and promises to nuke Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, London, and Rome. What would we do in response? Would we really start a tit for tat nuclear exchange? What I find fascinating is this- people who whole-heartedly want to support Ukraine with weapons and air support are far more likely to describe Putin as a madman bent of reestablishing the USSR than not, but when critics of the present policy point out how all of this brings us closer to Armageddon, the war supporters suddenly revert to saying Putin isn't a madman at all and would never use a nuclear weapon- so, which is it, madman or not?
The two sides should have been brought to the table for a cease fire 6 months ago. That there have been no efforts to reach a cease fire is a moral indictment of our leadership in the West.
I think it unlikely that Putin will use nukes, but as you note there is no plan if he does.
Some people say "well, we will just bomb Russian military with conventional weapons". Ok, this has the same problem as the no-fly zone did. If a plane takes off from a base in Poland to bomb Russia troops, and Russia nukes that base in Poland, what response are you prepared to offer?
The whole thing seems to be based on the idea that a particular outcome in Ukraine is a lot more important to us than it actually would be if push comes to shove.
As for the public schools- there is no hope at improving them. Yes, intensive tutoring is the way to go, but it will never happen in the public school realm- they are beyond repair and reform. To institute it at the public school level, the schools would request vast increases in budget and employment (see Hutcheson below for the flavor), and then the money would be spent hiring another layer of incompetent teachers and admin with even higher salaries and benefits to only end up in exactly the same place.
The only way forward is for the parents to continue removing their children from these schools and placing them in private schools, or homeschooling them.
Correct, Yancey. Public education in its current state is a spectacular failure. There is no legitimate role for government in education at any level.
The “government“ could send a check to the parents of each kid and let the parents take it from there. private tutoring or homeschooling would be the result.
Good teachers would rise and be in demand, commanding salaries commensurate with their demonstrated ability; the mediocre ones would rightly be sidelined.
This is how education has been delivered for most of human history.  As for parents who don’t value educating their kids, well, that’s why we have jails.
To build on your last point more seriously, it has been noted before in education research that good schools are primarily a function of having good students in them, and good students are primarily caused by good parents. Good parents are defined as "parents who care about education", e.g. make sure the kids do their homework, show up to school ready or at all, demand good grades, read to their kids when young, etc.
So while saying "As for parents who don’t value educating their kids, well, that’s why we have jails," sounds very flippant, it is still rather true. Some kids turn out to be good students despite having parents who don't value education, and one should probably shape policy such that it keeps those kids in school. For the vast majority of kids whose parents don't value education, it doesn't much matter how much time they spend in school, if any at all. They will either work in fields or industry roles that don't require much education, or they will wind up in jail. I am all for trying to get them set up for the former, of course, but the point is that whether they money is given to the school directly or to the parents and then the school, if the parents don't care you aren't losing much of anything one way or the other, so better to give money to the parents so the parents who DO care can get better outcomes. Not to mention the fact that parents who care getting better outcomes is likely to help the indifferent parents as well, since the level of schools will tend towards the preferences of the more involved parents.
The main argument for supporting Ukraine is that it’s a nice way for a commentator/journalist/twitter head to signal their false moral superiority.
We live in a world where signalling a popular but deeply wrong moral theory that “Democracy” == “Good” and Autocracy” == “Bad”, is more appealing than truthfully acknowledging that ending our progress, and the progress of all known sentient life in the universe, should be avoided at all costs.
A difficult irony about Ukraine is Zelensky has embraced his inner autocratic identity to root out anything Russian - not just Putin and the Russian military - from Ukraine.
It is mind-boggling to me that Cummings still lives in a world where his preferred pandemic response was a success, and cites it as if others will agree.
We need to call Putin's bluff even if there is a measurable risk of him using nukes because we have to signal to North Korea and Iran that we will not tolerate the use by either of nuclear weapons. Restated, whatever the risk that Putin won't back down, the risk of either or both of Iran and North Korea using nuclear weapons if we don't hold steady against Putin wanders into the realm of plausible, if not likely.
Tutoring schoolchildren in groups of 6 sound great, but would it not require a huge increase in the number of teachers? To increase the number w/o a decline in quality (already a problem) would also require a huge increase in salaries. This will not be popular with public school skeptics.
One could probably fire a few dozen administrators to come up with more money, and remove other extraneous aspects of the school budget that do not focus on student education. Public schools are really expensive on a per student basis.
But this are talking about dropping class size to 1/5 of what it is now so roughly 5 times a many teachers. And if it is so obviously a cost effective idea, why aren't private schools already doing it?
I didn't read that as class size, but rather time spent in small group tutoring. Even if you did drop class size, which would probably be good in its own right and help the tutoring process, you could likely drop to 1:18 teacher:student ratios by cutting a lot of the administrating overhead. With 18 kids per class, you could break lessons in to say 30 minutes of general discussion, then 30 minutes of 1:6 tutoring for every 2 hour block of lessons, the hour the students are not directly tutored being practice work or whatever handled by an in class aid for younger students or whatever makes sense.
And last I saw, lots of private schools did have lower administrative overhead, despite having the same requirements as public schools (that probably varies by state). Private schools also tend (certainly not always, though) to have a more affluent clientele who are less price adverse. Overall, though, public schools having piles of overpaid administration at the district and state levels is a well documented phenomenon. Not to mention the fact that private schools can pay teachers less because they don't have all the obnoxious administrative crap that public schools have that make teachers miserable. Cutting out administrative misery improves the quality of life for teachers at the same time it saves money.
If you look at your school, you might find out there are already enough people to tutor if that were the goal. I looked at one local school that had 15 classroom teachers. There were 3 administrative position and 10 support position that seemed reasonable (e.g. art, PE, music, speech, library assistant, janitor, cook)
There were 21 position that did not exist when I was a kid - Mental Health Specialist, Special Ed, Skills trainer, Family advocate, 2 Behavior Coaches, Counselor, RTI Specialist, Campus Steward and 12 Inclusion Assistants.
I believe that some of these are part time but that a lot of adults who could tutor
My high school sat us at several small group circular desks in a classroom with I think four or five kids. The teacher gave a lesson to everyone for about twenty minutes, then we had forty minutes to work alone and help each other with the material. The teacher would walk throughout the room answer inquiries from individuals or groups.
We were a selected group of students capable to self directed learning, so maybe that doesn't scale, but it worked for us. We did not have one teacher for every six kids.
According to Fryer the tutors were the most expensive part of the programme, but the overall cost was still fairly modest, $1800 per kid IIRC.
The tutoring is meant to be "high dose" but even that is probably only a few hours per week. So each tutor is probably spread over more students than the normal teachers, even though they need to be paid less.
We should not care whether there is regime change or not so long as RF returns to its 2014 frontiers. It true that if Putin were a Liberal Democrat he would not have invaded Ukraine, but that's water under the bridge.
We should not care about Ukraine or Russia at all. And we should certainly not risk nuclear war to determine whether the failed state in Kiev or the failed state in Moscow controls from depopulated villages in the Donbass.
>We should not care about Ukraine or Russia at all.
What about the NATO obligation of the US to defend Europe?
Seems to me if you maximally care about keeping US troops out of a war then you would very much like Ukrainians to die for that cause? The more the war can be contained well away from NATO borders the better for everyone?
I don't think the US should be in NATO. I favor ending all US involvement abroad and cutting the defense budget at least in half.
I think Europe is perfectly capable of defending itself. If it can't defeat Russia with a 20:1 GDP advantage (or whatever it is) then the EU doesn't deserve to survive.
Without US involvement I think it likely that either the war never would never have happened or that it already would be over by now.
I don't consider any outcome of the war to be of any importance to our national interests. The only outcome that would matter is nuclear war.
I believe we are fighting this war for domestic political reasons, and that people go along with it because they find it largely costless. If we don't die in a nuclear fire, I think the only long term effect will be that we lost on of our best opportunities to transform the nature of our military.
You mean would I have surrendered to the Japanese on Dec 7th 1941?
No
Let's stop being silly. Not every single aspect of international relations in Munich 1938 with perfect hindsight.
I don't think the US should have gotten involved in WWI. I would have cut off arms shipments to the Entente. America was wary of involvement in WWII because the consensus was that we were tricked into WWI in order to bail out imperialists and bankers.
No, no -- sorry. The logic runs that if the US hadn't imposed the embargoes on Japan, there would have been no Pearl Harbor attack. Not looking to re-litigate that history, but I ask because when I first encountered that argument I considered it "fringe" (it was at a lecture delivered by Robert Higgs, incidentally). It seems to have moved much closer to 'mainstream' since that time.
I encountered no evidence before the war that would lead me believe Ukraine had much potential.
It's possible that after the war Ukraine could become successful, but that's a maybe.
My baseline "good" scenario of Ukraine is ending up about as rich as Russia is today or perhaps as rich as Eastern Poland or Romania (again, about the same as Russia today). Like Russia I think a large portion of its economy will be beating the earth for its energy.
Of course I think it could have done that even if Russia controlled the Donbass.
Good lord. History didn't start yesterday, and certainly started before 21 January 2021.
Even if you don't accept the 'no blood for oil' or 'forever wars' lines, the U.S has invaded or executed military operations in a dozen or more countries over the last few decades, including Vietnam, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, as well as supporting proxy forces. Does that make all the U.S Presidents not 'Liberal Democrats'?
If this is a comment to me, I don't clearly see what you are disagreeing with. But yes, I d still say that if Putin were no worse than the least Liberal Democrat President of the last X years, he would not have invaded Ukraine, for what that observation is worth.
If allowing Russia to annex parts of Donetsk and Luhansk can allow for end of the war and aversion of the spectre nuclear war, it's worth considering. There's no reason we should care much who gets those regions, as they're of little strategic value, and they probably prefer to be part of Russia rather than Ukraine anyway, so the only reason I can see for insisting on total victory, no negotiation, is in order to impose such a crippling defeat on Putin that he is deposed. But even that would be a mixed blessing: who would replace Putin would likely as not be even worse, and trying to leave Russia as humiliated as possible, emotionally satisfying as it may be, makes the same mistake as at Versailles and greatly increases the likelihood of another way years from now with an even more revanchist, irredentist Russia.
Once Russian control is removed from the occupied territories and decent interval for development of political positions, electioneering, etc. Ukraine should offer elections on whether to join Russia or not. Crimea would probably go with Russia. Its the way the borders get changed that is objectionable. I agree that some one worse than Putin could arise. Hitler was worse than the Kaiser. We should be pushing for a change in policy, note necessarily personnel.
"He says that Putin has nothing to gain by using a nuke, and we have everything to lose by caving into nuclear blackmail."
The situation is asymmetric- and always was. We, the West, have far more to lose than do the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans, etc. Play it out- Putin begins to lose in a rout and nukes Kiev, and promises to nuke Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, London, and Rome. What would we do in response? Would we really start a tit for tat nuclear exchange? What I find fascinating is this- people who whole-heartedly want to support Ukraine with weapons and air support are far more likely to describe Putin as a madman bent of reestablishing the USSR than not, but when critics of the present policy point out how all of this brings us closer to Armageddon, the war supporters suddenly revert to saying Putin isn't a madman at all and would never use a nuclear weapon- so, which is it, madman or not?
The two sides should have been brought to the table for a cease fire 6 months ago. That there have been no efforts to reach a cease fire is a moral indictment of our leadership in the West.
I think it unlikely that Putin will use nukes, but as you note there is no plan if he does.
Some people say "well, we will just bomb Russian military with conventional weapons". Ok, this has the same problem as the no-fly zone did. If a plane takes off from a base in Poland to bomb Russia troops, and Russia nukes that base in Poland, what response are you prepared to offer?
The whole thing seems to be based on the idea that a particular outcome in Ukraine is a lot more important to us than it actually would be if push comes to shove.
Funny, isn't it, how "unthinkable" is now replaced with "unlikely".
As for the public schools- there is no hope at improving them. Yes, intensive tutoring is the way to go, but it will never happen in the public school realm- they are beyond repair and reform. To institute it at the public school level, the schools would request vast increases in budget and employment (see Hutcheson below for the flavor), and then the money would be spent hiring another layer of incompetent teachers and admin with even higher salaries and benefits to only end up in exactly the same place.
The only way forward is for the parents to continue removing their children from these schools and placing them in private schools, or homeschooling them.
Correct, Yancey. Public education in its current state is a spectacular failure. There is no legitimate role for government in education at any level.
The “government“ could send a check to the parents of each kid and let the parents take it from there. private tutoring or homeschooling would be the result.
Good teachers would rise and be in demand, commanding salaries commensurate with their demonstrated ability; the mediocre ones would rightly be sidelined.
This is how education has been delivered for most of human history.  As for parents who don’t value educating their kids, well, that’s why we have jails.
To build on your last point more seriously, it has been noted before in education research that good schools are primarily a function of having good students in them, and good students are primarily caused by good parents. Good parents are defined as "parents who care about education", e.g. make sure the kids do their homework, show up to school ready or at all, demand good grades, read to their kids when young, etc.
So while saying "As for parents who don’t value educating their kids, well, that’s why we have jails," sounds very flippant, it is still rather true. Some kids turn out to be good students despite having parents who don't value education, and one should probably shape policy such that it keeps those kids in school. For the vast majority of kids whose parents don't value education, it doesn't much matter how much time they spend in school, if any at all. They will either work in fields or industry roles that don't require much education, or they will wind up in jail. I am all for trying to get them set up for the former, of course, but the point is that whether they money is given to the school directly or to the parents and then the school, if the parents don't care you aren't losing much of anything one way or the other, so better to give money to the parents so the parents who DO care can get better outcomes. Not to mention the fact that parents who care getting better outcomes is likely to help the indifferent parents as well, since the level of schools will tend towards the preferences of the more involved parents.
The main argument for supporting Ukraine is that it’s a nice way for a commentator/journalist/twitter head to signal their false moral superiority.
We live in a world where signalling a popular but deeply wrong moral theory that “Democracy” == “Good” and Autocracy” == “Bad”, is more appealing than truthfully acknowledging that ending our progress, and the progress of all known sentient life in the universe, should be avoided at all costs.
A difficult irony about Ukraine is Zelensky has embraced his inner autocratic identity to root out anything Russian - not just Putin and the Russian military - from Ukraine.
It is mind-boggling to me that Cummings still lives in a world where his preferred pandemic response was a success, and cites it as if others will agree.
We need to call Putin's bluff even if there is a measurable risk of him using nukes because we have to signal to North Korea and Iran that we will not tolerate the use by either of nuclear weapons. Restated, whatever the risk that Putin won't back down, the risk of either or both of Iran and North Korea using nuclear weapons if we don't hold steady against Putin wanders into the realm of plausible, if not likely.
Tutoring schoolchildren in groups of 6 sound great, but would it not require a huge increase in the number of teachers? To increase the number w/o a decline in quality (already a problem) would also require a huge increase in salaries. This will not be popular with public school skeptics.
One could probably fire a few dozen administrators to come up with more money, and remove other extraneous aspects of the school budget that do not focus on student education. Public schools are really expensive on a per student basis.
But this are talking about dropping class size to 1/5 of what it is now so roughly 5 times a many teachers. And if it is so obviously a cost effective idea, why aren't private schools already doing it?
I didn't read that as class size, but rather time spent in small group tutoring. Even if you did drop class size, which would probably be good in its own right and help the tutoring process, you could likely drop to 1:18 teacher:student ratios by cutting a lot of the administrating overhead. With 18 kids per class, you could break lessons in to say 30 minutes of general discussion, then 30 minutes of 1:6 tutoring for every 2 hour block of lessons, the hour the students are not directly tutored being practice work or whatever handled by an in class aid for younger students or whatever makes sense.
And last I saw, lots of private schools did have lower administrative overhead, despite having the same requirements as public schools (that probably varies by state). Private schools also tend (certainly not always, though) to have a more affluent clientele who are less price adverse. Overall, though, public schools having piles of overpaid administration at the district and state levels is a well documented phenomenon. Not to mention the fact that private schools can pay teachers less because they don't have all the obnoxious administrative crap that public schools have that make teachers miserable. Cutting out administrative misery improves the quality of life for teachers at the same time it saves money.
I don't much disagree with you, just that 6 person group tutoring was presented as an easy answer now that it was "OK" to think about.
If you look at your school, you might find out there are already enough people to tutor if that were the goal. I looked at one local school that had 15 classroom teachers. There were 3 administrative position and 10 support position that seemed reasonable (e.g. art, PE, music, speech, library assistant, janitor, cook)
There were 21 position that did not exist when I was a kid - Mental Health Specialist, Special Ed, Skills trainer, Family advocate, 2 Behavior Coaches, Counselor, RTI Specialist, Campus Steward and 12 Inclusion Assistants.
I believe that some of these are part time but that a lot of adults who could tutor
My high school sat us at several small group circular desks in a classroom with I think four or five kids. The teacher gave a lesson to everyone for about twenty minutes, then we had forty minutes to work alone and help each other with the material. The teacher would walk throughout the room answer inquiries from individuals or groups.
We were a selected group of students capable to self directed learning, so maybe that doesn't scale, but it worked for us. We did not have one teacher for every six kids.
According to Fryer the tutors were the most expensive part of the programme, but the overall cost was still fairly modest, $1800 per kid IIRC.
The tutoring is meant to be "high dose" but even that is probably only a few hours per week. So each tutor is probably spread over more students than the normal teachers, even though they need to be paid less.
Good. I'm not against trying it, just felt it was being put forward as a no-brainer.
We should not care whether there is regime change or not so long as RF returns to its 2014 frontiers. It true that if Putin were a Liberal Democrat he would not have invaded Ukraine, but that's water under the bridge.
We should not care about Ukraine or Russia at all. And we should certainly not risk nuclear war to determine whether the failed state in Kiev or the failed state in Moscow controls from depopulated villages in the Donbass.
>We should not care about Ukraine or Russia at all.
What about the NATO obligation of the US to defend Europe?
Seems to me if you maximally care about keeping US troops out of a war then you would very much like Ukrainians to die for that cause? The more the war can be contained well away from NATO borders the better for everyone?
I don't think the US should be in NATO. I favor ending all US involvement abroad and cutting the defense budget at least in half.
I think Europe is perfectly capable of defending itself. If it can't defeat Russia with a 20:1 GDP advantage (or whatever it is) then the EU doesn't deserve to survive.
Without US involvement I think it likely that either the war never would never have happened or that it already would be over by now.
I don't consider any outcome of the war to be of any importance to our national interests. The only outcome that would matter is nuclear war.
I believe we are fighting this war for domestic political reasons, and that people go along with it because they find it largely costless. If we don't die in a nuclear fire, I think the only long term effect will be that we lost on of our best opportunities to transform the nature of our military.
Would you have kept the US out of WWII as well?
You mean would I have surrendered to the Japanese on Dec 7th 1941?
No
Let's stop being silly. Not every single aspect of international relations in Munich 1938 with perfect hindsight.
I don't think the US should have gotten involved in WWI. I would have cut off arms shipments to the Entente. America was wary of involvement in WWII because the consensus was that we were tricked into WWI in order to bail out imperialists and bankers.
No, no -- sorry. The logic runs that if the US hadn't imposed the embargoes on Japan, there would have been no Pearl Harbor attack. Not looking to re-litigate that history, but I ask because when I first encountered that argument I considered it "fringe" (it was at a lecture delivered by Robert Higgs, incidentally). It seems to have moved much closer to 'mainstream' since that time.
Out of curiosity, what would be required to convince you that Kiev is not -- or is no longer -- a failed state?
How about not being ranked in the bottom quartile globally for corruption for every year in the past decade?
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2012/index/ukr
One wishes Russia invaded the great democracy of the DRC instead, to marvel at the cognitive dissonance present in the Western psyche…
So you see no chance of reform, then?
Show me a single example of a government becoming less corrupt?
I encountered no evidence before the war that would lead me believe Ukraine had much potential.
It's possible that after the war Ukraine could become successful, but that's a maybe.
My baseline "good" scenario of Ukraine is ending up about as rich as Russia is today or perhaps as rich as Eastern Poland or Romania (again, about the same as Russia today). Like Russia I think a large portion of its economy will be beating the earth for its energy.
Of course I think it could have done that even if Russia controlled the Donbass.
Good lord. History didn't start yesterday, and certainly started before 21 January 2021.
Even if you don't accept the 'no blood for oil' or 'forever wars' lines, the U.S has invaded or executed military operations in a dozen or more countries over the last few decades, including Vietnam, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, as well as supporting proxy forces. Does that make all the U.S Presidents not 'Liberal Democrats'?
If this is a comment to me, I don't clearly see what you are disagreeing with. But yes, I d still say that if Putin were no worse than the least Liberal Democrat President of the last X years, he would not have invaded Ukraine, for what that observation is worth.
If allowing Russia to annex parts of Donetsk and Luhansk can allow for end of the war and aversion of the spectre nuclear war, it's worth considering. There's no reason we should care much who gets those regions, as they're of little strategic value, and they probably prefer to be part of Russia rather than Ukraine anyway, so the only reason I can see for insisting on total victory, no negotiation, is in order to impose such a crippling defeat on Putin that he is deposed. But even that would be a mixed blessing: who would replace Putin would likely as not be even worse, and trying to leave Russia as humiliated as possible, emotionally satisfying as it may be, makes the same mistake as at Versailles and greatly increases the likelihood of another way years from now with an even more revanchist, irredentist Russia.
Once Russian control is removed from the occupied territories and decent interval for development of political positions, electioneering, etc. Ukraine should offer elections on whether to join Russia or not. Crimea would probably go with Russia. Its the way the borders get changed that is objectionable. I agree that some one worse than Putin could arise. Hitler was worse than the Kaiser. We should be pushing for a change in policy, note necessarily personnel.