John Cochrane on the challenges for female economists; Rod Dreher on The Defeat of the West; Keith E. Stanovich on myside bias; Rob Henderson and Jordan Peterson on luxury beliefs
1) The threat of sanctions turned out to be a lot more damaging than the use of sanctions. Russia/China combo seems to be economically self sufficient, with the rest of the BRICS being neutral to hostile.
2) Big ticket items (planes, tanks, ships) all underperformed big time. I suspect that what is happening to the Russian Black Sea Fleet could easily happen to any other nations fleet.
3) I suspect that any country that goes to fight a peer competitor is going to go through a long period of massive error correction. This isn't just a western thing I think China would have massive problems too. Ukraine war feels like the Russo-Japanese war. People should be drawing conclusions from it and yet most armies went into WWI not having fully learned the lessons.
4) The primary goal in Ukraine was for the administration to gain a political boost from a popular war. This was especially important after the Afghanistan debacle.
A secondary but also important objective is a familiar one, to make a lot of money on markup for both goods and services in the defense/natsec industry.
If those things happened to coincide with Ukranian victory, great. If not, it's not western backers that would be left holding the bag. The well being of Ukranians was at best tertiary to the above objectives, it only had correlational power not causational power.
5) There is an assumption that if NATO troops got involved it would be a cake walk. Like sanctions, this may be a case of the threat being worth more than the implementation. Leaving aside the fact that it might being about the use of nukes, who's to say a NATO formation would have any better of a time breaking the Surovikin Line. If modern AA is stronger then AirPower and tanks are deathtraps, why would westerners do much better then the Ukranians.
I suspect that NATO could win in the end, but it's not clear that NATO countries would tolerate the casualties necessary. It's one thing to wave a flag, it's another to die in the mud.
The risk of doing nothing is a humiliation, but one that can be written off. The risks of doing something and failing are everything.
I disagree that the Biden administration supported Ukraine for political reasons or to make money for the defense industry. However, I think you are correct that the well-being of Ukrainians was only a tertiary reason. A much simpler explanation in keeping with decades of U.S. foreign policy is that spending a fraction of the defense budget to have an expendable non-NATO ally kill hundreds of thousands of Russians for us and destroy much of their military hardware (something that NATO could never do itself without risking nuclear war) is very cost-effective.
People may disagree on whether that is money well spent, but the appeal of funding proxy wars has only increased over time as direct conflict between significant nation-states has become virtually non-existent. It is the same reason why the U.S. supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War and the Mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan War. More recently, it is also why Russia supplied Armenia and Turkey supplied Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh Wars and why Iran supports the Houthis while the Saudis support what remains of the government in Yemen.
I disagree that the war made Russia weaker or deterred expansion.
1) Russian losses in both manpower and material are pretty minuscule in the grand scheme of things. What they gained in return is knowledge and experience in how modern war works, which is worth a lot more. They also now know how to run an economy that is cut off from the west. Russia has been getting stronger, not weaker, since this war started. We would have been better off if they went into the next war wanting to recreate tank blitzkriegs rather then drone warfare.
2) I don't believe that Russia is inherently expansionistic. I see Russia more as provoked then aggressive, and the war as fundamentally unnecessary. I think the US would have done the same in their shoes (and in fact did via the Monroe doctrine).
In truth, nobody in the west acts like Putin it Hitler and he's about to invade Poland next. They act like Ukraine is something they would like to stop but fundamentally don't actually buy their own propaganda. They do believe he will stop with Ukraine, which is why the west has no put forward a serious effort.
If it can be done on the cheap, great. If real sacrifice and risk in involved, well this all isn't really the threat we make it out to be. Even if say the next funding bill passed, the situation would be the same in a year just with more dead. I suspect that once the November election is over even the Democrats won't give a damn anymore, they are just afraid the front may collapse this summer and it will be an embarrassment.
Ironically, Trump winning would probably be best for Ukraine, because he doesn't have to own events so far and has an incentive and temperament to negotiate a "good deal".
3) The biggest issue in Ukraine, besides all of these people dying for absolutely no good reason, is that Russia has been moved from a neutral power to an antagonistic power, which will likely provide China with all the raw materials it needs if we get in a war with them.
It is not. Russian officials and propagandists like to tell this story in speeches on TV, but if one follows Russian business press, one quickly learns that it is false. Direct financial connections and direct air routes were severed by sanctions, it is true, but Russia still imports very large amounts from the West, especially critical producer goods (machine tools and consumables, chips, seeds, purebred farm animal sperm, medicine precursors, ...) except now it usually has to do so via third parties: Turkey, post-Soviet countries, Hong Kong, even the Baltics (!) The added layers of intermediaries significantly increase costs and introduce serious logistics delays, and there is a bit of a game of whack-a-mole going on between intermediaries and US Treasury sanctions department, but intermediaries work. Successful examples of import substitution _at scale_ are few and far between. Financial links operate via Dubai and Hong Kong, and air travel to Europe and US via Gulf states and Turkey. Russia also keeps exporting goods directly to the West. Europe did mostly stop buying Russian piped hydrocarbons, but if memory serves it is still buying Russian LNG, which was exempted from restrictions because reasons. Natural gas deliveries to Hungary and Austria via the Druzhba pipeline which runs through Ukraine have not been interrupted for a single day (the transit contract between Gazprom and Ukrtransgaz expires only in 2025). Airbus keeps buying Russian nickel, titanium and other rare metals. Japan has kept its share in the Sakhalin oil projects. The recent brouhaha in Poland over cheap Ukrainian agricultural products imports/transit has uncovered the awkward fact that cheap grain imports from Russia into the EU market have been ongoing via Belarus etc. If there is a lesson to learn from all this, it is that it is extremely difficult to cut off a country with lots of valuable raw materials from business with the developed world. Even at the height of the Cold War USSR was able to buy critical machine tools for its MIRVed ICBM production from the US and Japan.
Napoleons army famously marched into Russia wearing boots supplied by British merchants. Half his own Marshals were cheating the continental system.
WWI Germany was able to smuggle a lot through neutral countries until the US joined the war (and the blockade got much stricter). The turnip winter was in many ways simply their own mismanagement.
1) Chinese manufacturing + Russian raw materials + neutrals willing to cut a deal is fairly robust. Most of these players are connected by land routes so it would be difficult to intercept.
2) None of the players in this conflict are taking it as seriously as their rhetoric. Not only will people not die in the mud to stop Putler, they won't pass up a good deal.
It's Chinese manufacturing in the consumer goods sector and cars, but not in military industry. Kamil Galeev has just published his group's report on Russian missile production. https://assets-global.website-files.com/65ca33870401867f9de42990/65d85b88de8fba03ae83ea46_Rhodus.%20How%20Russia%20makes%20missiles.pdf Spoiler: all important tooling and consumables for it is imported from OECD. No serious attempt has been made so far to stop supplies, not even so much from malevolence as from ignorance. Machinery is not cool or sexy (unlike chips, never mind 'climate change', 'diversity', 'the pay gap' and so on) and it's hard to get journalists or bureaucrats to talk about it.
"I don't believe that Russia is inherently expansionistic. I see Russia more as provoked then aggressive"
Some times that is a distinction without a difference. Since the old Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were basically run by Russians, Russians were scattered all over the old Empire, including non-contiguous places like Moldova and Kaliningrad. If Putin sees part of his duty as protecting Russians, anything that affects them is potentially provocative. That was certainly part of his rationale for invading Ukraine.
And his talk in the early days of the war about how Ukraine was really part of historic Russia suggests at least a nostalgia for the Russia that had expanded to its pre-WW I borders.
You don't think suppressing Russian expansionism is a good reason? Really?
You don't think the economic damage, if not battlefield losses too, might make China think twice about their expansionism, especially regarding Taiwan?
US expansionism needs to be suppressed too. We simply can't afford it. We have to realize that we're in the position of Britain in 1900 or Rome in the time of Hadrian (whose speech about the end of expansion deserves rereading).
I don't know what I said that makes you think I disagree with those arguments. Supplying the Ukrainian war effort to kill Russians is a way of suppressing Russian expansionism. On the whole, that is a good idea, but General Milley was right in late 2022 when he said that Ukraine's early victories in the war created a good opportunity for negotiating. Nobody on Earth besides Zelenskyy thinks Ukraine can ever take back Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk. Those are Russian-speaking regions that Kyiv (Grammarly doesn't want me typing Kiev) has not controlled for ten years, and the latter two broke away from Ukraine independently of Russian military involvement. Realistically, Ukraine will probably never retake the territory south of Zaporizhzhia, which it has lost, which is why the Dnipro River has effectively been the frontline on the southern front for the last two years. So yes, the U.S. should continue funding Ukraine if only because it is marginally less wasteful than most other federal spending. I also think Ukraine is making a mistake for itself by letting the war drag on (assuming the Russians would negotiate) because of the changing political climate in the West and the fact that NATO can give them weapons and technology but not young conscription-age men to use them.
I don't know how it will affect China's machinations for Taiwan. From watching/reading Peter Zeihan, my understanding is that Xi has almost 100% complete decision-making power in China, and the country's once competent technocracy is completely paralyzed in making complex decisions. So, a war over Taiwan might hinge entirely on how Xi feels at a given point in time.
I'm not at all familiar with the geography of Eastern Ukraine but Mariupol isn't primarily Russian and was controlled by Ukraine before 2022. Separatist attacks and varying separatist control doesn't mean they want to be part of Russia.
Wapo found people in those regions generally don't want to be part of Russia, though the results are more mixed in areas currently controlled by Russia.
#1 Don't even try to fight a colonial war of aggression that depends on a long, precarious supply line that runs by or through multiple uncommitted countries. And for the US, Ukraine, Georgia, and Taiwan all fit that description to a T.
Even if we don't worsen it by doubling down now, the Ukraine war will go down in history as comparable to 19th-century Paraguay taking on bigger neighbors Argentina, Brazil, and Chile at the same time! It's only dumb luck that they are still a country!
The dynamic of trench warfare, machine guns, and artillery was already very apparent in that conflict. The ideas of maneuver warfare, cavalry, and elan carrying the day should have died in 1905.
The French went into the war with colorful trousers, officers in white gloves standing up in machine gun fire, and no metal helmets.
> The third factor in the West’s defeat is the rest of the world's preference for Russia. It has discovered discreet economic allies everywhere. A new conservative (anti-LGBT) Russian soft power was in full swing
Is this pulled out of his re.. thin air?
"Despite deteriorating relations with most of the international community since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia still maintains support and strong relations with certain countries, such as China, Belarus, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Syria, North Korea, Myanmar, Eritrea, Mali, Zimbabwe, Central African Republic, Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, and Niger.
Russia also maintains positive relations with countries that have been described as "Russia-leaning" according to The Economist. These countries include Algeria, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Uganda."
The "new conservative (anti-LGBT) soft power" has some fine company indeed.
The young/striving/entrepreneurial around the world flock to American Embassies at the crack of dawn for a chance at a student/work/etc. visa. It is a magnet for talent, and American television and cinema are popular the world over, notwithstanding this bizarre claim of its "modernity seeming quite insane". Its progress in Civil Rights, LGBT rights, protection of individual freedoms, are examples worldwide. Close to 20 countries have liberalized laws in this regard just since Obergefell (not the only causal factor obviously).
Todd is using the developing world's apprehension about condemning Russia at the UN to argue that there is some kind of Cold War-style alliance system developing between them. In reality, those countries gain nothing by picking a side in a war where they have no dog in the fight. Nobody in Nicaragua, Tajikistan, or Laos cares if gay people in the West have rights or not.
I don't understand why Todd would expect Americans to be doing "more" of whatever he pinpoints in the past. America is shrinking. It would be like saying, in 2050, or 2100 - France is producing or consuming less wine than it used to, less fancy soft cheese - why is this?
I dislike the borrowing of "predator and prey" whether in this novel sense or, tediously, in criminal narratives. Animal predators do nothing wrong. It's all very misleading, whether it's the nature of animals that is being referenced, or the nature of people.
Somebody may have missed the point, true. There is enough hostility to nature, in the modern mind, that I don't think we need to borrow the terms predator and prey to describe something completely unrelated. It's especially annoying when used of rape. Cringey.
I have no idea why you think it is "completely unrelated." We most effectively explain through analogies and other stories. In that sense it is perfectly related.
An animal taking up energy to live its life, and somebody raping or murdering someone. Somebody ordering a hamburger would be an equally good analogy in this view. It's weird and silly and explains nothing.
Fine links, including the Nov review of Todd on sex differences -- where you list many examples with an intellectually cowardly disclaimer that you "disagree with many of them" -- a disclaimer I thought weak when I first read it. An A or D, or a + or -, would have been far far better.
One of the wild punches (should be -) is "The standard of living is falling, free trade has destroyed our factories… " The OECD avg, standard of living continues to rise, tho there are many individuals unhappy, and committing suicide or drug/ alcohol addiction.
The reality of slower middle class econ growth in OECD countries is not really a defeat, tho it's also a reason for less contentment and more questioning of whether being a wage slave was really worth it.
Rod's linked post links to an important post of last month, where he notes that he:
"wrote here about our complete inability to talk about the potential causes of the dismally chaotic lives of many black Americans — the terrible educational performance, the failure of family formation, the endemic crime that makes stable life difficult, and so forth. We can only talk about possible causes that remove moral agency from black people. I think this is actually … racist."
The inability to talk about Truth comes from the unwillingness to accept the truth that Black IQs are quite a bit lower, on avg., than whites or Asians. We need to be able to speak true things, to avoid "Defeat".
What is the truth about Ukraine? We don't know, can't know, and even after there is some resolution there will be many important aspects of truth that won't be provably known.
Trump wants an immediate peace deal -- he's mostly wrong. So many Ukrainians are willing to fight against Russian invaders, those willing to fight are unwilling to lose, and there won't be peace until at least one side prefers losing and peace.
All sides, including me, are certainly looking at Ukraine thru extensive Stanovich myside bias -- which seems a bit different than confirmation bias, but it's not clear what. Both sides are paying a high price. And all the world is seeing the increasing power of drones, tho not yet ai controlled drone swarms. I haven't heard of big new US drone factories, nor France. At 71, waiting for Putin to get too old seems unlikely to be a good long or medium term strategy for Ukraine.
The US, NATO, and the West should be supporting Ukraine with more ammo, and more defensive weapons & anti-ship missiles, but not cash -- as long as they're willing to kill invasive Russians. A peaceful world requires that borders be respected. And yes, it's likely the cheapest way for the US to stop China from invading Taiwan -- tho the US should also be building more ships.
I would like to hear what Todd means by "the recent collapse of Protestantism." If he is referring to churches that have been taken over by wokism, (1) not all of them have, and (2) the Argentine Pope is woke too, creating a problematic contradiction for traditional Catholics worldwide.
I wonder if some sort of anti-woke umbrella organization could be helpful, and how it could be designed to protect both itself and other anti-woke organizations from infiltration and takeover. Certainly if the woke side can have the likes of ADL and SPLC, we can have some too.
"H.R.9567 - An Act to strengthen the educational resources of our colleges and universities and to provide financial assistance for students in post-secondary and higher education"?
"H.R.14644 - An Act to amend the Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963 to extend it for 3 years, and for other purposes and to authorize assistance to developing institutions for an additional year"?
"H.R.2580 - An Act to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act, and for other purposes"?
"S.1564 - An Act to enforce the 15th amendment to the Constitution of the United States"?
Am I missing something major?
Even if you don't like Federal dollars spent on Education, or Immigration, or Voting Rights, whats the causal chain to "decline of the level of education"??
"Academic careers in general now come with a much longer on-ramp. This selects against people who want to have children. Women especially.“
I'm kind of curious why you used the word "normies" in the sentence that followed the quote. Either way, there is certainly some truth to what you say about longer tracks but I don't think it's as true as you make it sound. As I see it, there are basically three groups: (1) the ones who can write proposals good enough to get the NSF scholarships, other scholarships/fellowships, and research funding. They then do adequate work and write papers to meet requirements. They are on the fast track mentioned. Plenty do it. (2) People who struggle to write adequate proposals but they do good work. They struggle to get tenure but, depending on demand in their field, eventually get enough funding, research, and papers to get there. (3) People who are either not able to find a specialty, can't write well enough, don't put in the effort or otherwise just don't make the cut.
For the ones in the middle and bottom, I have no idea to what extent there is an oversupply vs they just don't have what it takes (or there was an under supply in the past that meant marginal candidates got tenure). Some are hoping for tier 1 success and more often than not eventually settle for something else, academic or not.
FYI - I know lots of people who did the fast track and one woman in particular who was advised to have her children in grad school and did so.
I wonder how much the long off ramp to academic careers (which is definitely a thing) also affects' marriages for the relevant people. I think part of the problem of moving every 1-2 years is what it does to your spouses' career. In my case my wife traveled or worked remotely anyway so it didn't much matter, but if she had a job tied to one location I might never have gone to grad school in the first place if she had to leave it to find a new one, and asking her to change jobs every few years would be a big problem. Especially if people marry like people, or women who are career driven tend to marry men who are career driven, you have a big problem until either the academic gets a permanent job or the spouse gets one where they needn't work in a particular spot.
It probably also doesn't help that the income from the academic on-ramp isn't great, so it isn't like the young academic can support a family while the other finds a new job. Plus all that moving means you are going to be away from family support most likely.
Lessons of Ukraine:
1) The threat of sanctions turned out to be a lot more damaging than the use of sanctions. Russia/China combo seems to be economically self sufficient, with the rest of the BRICS being neutral to hostile.
2) Big ticket items (planes, tanks, ships) all underperformed big time. I suspect that what is happening to the Russian Black Sea Fleet could easily happen to any other nations fleet.
3) I suspect that any country that goes to fight a peer competitor is going to go through a long period of massive error correction. This isn't just a western thing I think China would have massive problems too. Ukraine war feels like the Russo-Japanese war. People should be drawing conclusions from it and yet most armies went into WWI not having fully learned the lessons.
4) The primary goal in Ukraine was for the administration to gain a political boost from a popular war. This was especially important after the Afghanistan debacle.
A secondary but also important objective is a familiar one, to make a lot of money on markup for both goods and services in the defense/natsec industry.
If those things happened to coincide with Ukranian victory, great. If not, it's not western backers that would be left holding the bag. The well being of Ukranians was at best tertiary to the above objectives, it only had correlational power not causational power.
5) There is an assumption that if NATO troops got involved it would be a cake walk. Like sanctions, this may be a case of the threat being worth more than the implementation. Leaving aside the fact that it might being about the use of nukes, who's to say a NATO formation would have any better of a time breaking the Surovikin Line. If modern AA is stronger then AirPower and tanks are deathtraps, why would westerners do much better then the Ukranians.
I suspect that NATO could win in the end, but it's not clear that NATO countries would tolerate the casualties necessary. It's one thing to wave a flag, it's another to die in the mud.
The risk of doing nothing is a humiliation, but one that can be written off. The risks of doing something and failing are everything.
I disagree that the Biden administration supported Ukraine for political reasons or to make money for the defense industry. However, I think you are correct that the well-being of Ukrainians was only a tertiary reason. A much simpler explanation in keeping with decades of U.S. foreign policy is that spending a fraction of the defense budget to have an expendable non-NATO ally kill hundreds of thousands of Russians for us and destroy much of their military hardware (something that NATO could never do itself without risking nuclear war) is very cost-effective.
People may disagree on whether that is money well spent, but the appeal of funding proxy wars has only increased over time as direct conflict between significant nation-states has become virtually non-existent. It is the same reason why the U.S. supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War and the Mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan War. More recently, it is also why Russia supplied Armenia and Turkey supplied Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh Wars and why Iran supports the Houthis while the Saudis support what remains of the government in Yemen.
I disagree that the war made Russia weaker or deterred expansion.
1) Russian losses in both manpower and material are pretty minuscule in the grand scheme of things. What they gained in return is knowledge and experience in how modern war works, which is worth a lot more. They also now know how to run an economy that is cut off from the west. Russia has been getting stronger, not weaker, since this war started. We would have been better off if they went into the next war wanting to recreate tank blitzkriegs rather then drone warfare.
2) I don't believe that Russia is inherently expansionistic. I see Russia more as provoked then aggressive, and the war as fundamentally unnecessary. I think the US would have done the same in their shoes (and in fact did via the Monroe doctrine).
In truth, nobody in the west acts like Putin it Hitler and he's about to invade Poland next. They act like Ukraine is something they would like to stop but fundamentally don't actually buy their own propaganda. They do believe he will stop with Ukraine, which is why the west has no put forward a serious effort.
If it can be done on the cheap, great. If real sacrifice and risk in involved, well this all isn't really the threat we make it out to be. Even if say the next funding bill passed, the situation would be the same in a year just with more dead. I suspect that once the November election is over even the Democrats won't give a damn anymore, they are just afraid the front may collapse this summer and it will be an embarrassment.
Ironically, Trump winning would probably be best for Ukraine, because he doesn't have to own events so far and has an incentive and temperament to negotiate a "good deal".
3) The biggest issue in Ukraine, besides all of these people dying for absolutely no good reason, is that Russia has been moved from a neutral power to an antagonistic power, which will likely provide China with all the raw materials it needs if we get in a war with them.
> an economy that is cut off from the west
It is not. Russian officials and propagandists like to tell this story in speeches on TV, but if one follows Russian business press, one quickly learns that it is false. Direct financial connections and direct air routes were severed by sanctions, it is true, but Russia still imports very large amounts from the West, especially critical producer goods (machine tools and consumables, chips, seeds, purebred farm animal sperm, medicine precursors, ...) except now it usually has to do so via third parties: Turkey, post-Soviet countries, Hong Kong, even the Baltics (!) The added layers of intermediaries significantly increase costs and introduce serious logistics delays, and there is a bit of a game of whack-a-mole going on between intermediaries and US Treasury sanctions department, but intermediaries work. Successful examples of import substitution _at scale_ are few and far between. Financial links operate via Dubai and Hong Kong, and air travel to Europe and US via Gulf states and Turkey. Russia also keeps exporting goods directly to the West. Europe did mostly stop buying Russian piped hydrocarbons, but if memory serves it is still buying Russian LNG, which was exempted from restrictions because reasons. Natural gas deliveries to Hungary and Austria via the Druzhba pipeline which runs through Ukraine have not been interrupted for a single day (the transit contract between Gazprom and Ukrtransgaz expires only in 2025). Airbus keeps buying Russian nickel, titanium and other rare metals. Japan has kept its share in the Sakhalin oil projects. The recent brouhaha in Poland over cheap Ukrainian agricultural products imports/transit has uncovered the awkward fact that cheap grain imports from Russia into the EU market have been ongoing via Belarus etc. If there is a lesson to learn from all this, it is that it is extremely difficult to cut off a country with lots of valuable raw materials from business with the developed world. Even at the height of the Cold War USSR was able to buy critical machine tools for its MIRVed ICBM production from the US and Japan.
+1
Smuggling by neutrals is common in all conflicts.
Napoleons army famously marched into Russia wearing boots supplied by British merchants. Half his own Marshals were cheating the continental system.
WWI Germany was able to smuggle a lot through neutral countries until the US joined the war (and the blockade got much stricter). The turnip winter was in many ways simply their own mismanagement.
1) Chinese manufacturing + Russian raw materials + neutrals willing to cut a deal is fairly robust. Most of these players are connected by land routes so it would be difficult to intercept.
2) None of the players in this conflict are taking it as seriously as their rhetoric. Not only will people not die in the mud to stop Putler, they won't pass up a good deal.
It's Chinese manufacturing in the consumer goods sector and cars, but not in military industry. Kamil Galeev has just published his group's report on Russian missile production. https://assets-global.website-files.com/65ca33870401867f9de42990/65d85b88de8fba03ae83ea46_Rhodus.%20How%20Russia%20makes%20missiles.pdf Spoiler: all important tooling and consumables for it is imported from OECD. No serious attempt has been made so far to stop supplies, not even so much from malevolence as from ignorance. Machinery is not cool or sexy (unlike chips, never mind 'climate change', 'diversity', 'the pay gap' and so on) and it's hard to get journalists or bureaucrats to talk about it.
"I don't believe that Russia is inherently expansionistic. I see Russia more as provoked then aggressive"
Some times that is a distinction without a difference. Since the old Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were basically run by Russians, Russians were scattered all over the old Empire, including non-contiguous places like Moldova and Kaliningrad. If Putin sees part of his duty as protecting Russians, anything that affects them is potentially provocative. That was certainly part of his rationale for invading Ukraine.
And his talk in the early days of the war about how Ukraine was really part of historic Russia suggests at least a nostalgia for the Russia that had expanded to its pre-WW I borders.
You don't think suppressing Russian expansionism is a good reason? Really?
You don't think the economic damage, if not battlefield losses too, might make China think twice about their expansionism, especially regarding Taiwan?
US expansionism needs to be suppressed too. We simply can't afford it. We have to realize that we're in the position of Britain in 1900 or Rome in the time of Hadrian (whose speech about the end of expansion deserves rereading).
What expansionism are you referring to?
Afghanistan? Where we no longer have troops?
Iraq? Where there's maybe a thousand mostly advising?
Syria?
Straits of Hormuz?
Taiwan?
Something else?
Is any of this like what Russia is doing in Ukraine?
I don't know what I said that makes you think I disagree with those arguments. Supplying the Ukrainian war effort to kill Russians is a way of suppressing Russian expansionism. On the whole, that is a good idea, but General Milley was right in late 2022 when he said that Ukraine's early victories in the war created a good opportunity for negotiating. Nobody on Earth besides Zelenskyy thinks Ukraine can ever take back Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk. Those are Russian-speaking regions that Kyiv (Grammarly doesn't want me typing Kiev) has not controlled for ten years, and the latter two broke away from Ukraine independently of Russian military involvement. Realistically, Ukraine will probably never retake the territory south of Zaporizhzhia, which it has lost, which is why the Dnipro River has effectively been the frontline on the southern front for the last two years. So yes, the U.S. should continue funding Ukraine if only because it is marginally less wasteful than most other federal spending. I also think Ukraine is making a mistake for itself by letting the war drag on (assuming the Russians would negotiate) because of the changing political climate in the West and the fact that NATO can give them weapons and technology but not young conscription-age men to use them.
I don't know how it will affect China's machinations for Taiwan. From watching/reading Peter Zeihan, my understanding is that Xi has almost 100% complete decision-making power in China, and the country's once competent technocracy is completely paralyzed in making complex decisions. So, a war over Taiwan might hinge entirely on how Xi feels at a given point in time.
I'm not at all familiar with the geography of Eastern Ukraine but Mariupol isn't primarily Russian and was controlled by Ukraine before 2022. Separatist attacks and varying separatist control doesn't mean they want to be part of Russia.
Wapo found people in those regions generally don't want to be part of Russia, though the results are more mixed in areas currently controlled by Russia.
https://wapo.st/3TmzWje
"3) ... People should be drawing conclusions from it and yet most armies went into WWI not having fully learned the lessons."
What are those conclusions/lessons that should have been learned from the Russo-Japanese War?
#1 Don't even try to fight a colonial war of aggression that depends on a long, precarious supply line that runs by or through multiple uncommitted countries. And for the US, Ukraine, Georgia, and Taiwan all fit that description to a T.
Even if we don't worsen it by doubling down now, the Ukraine war will go down in history as comparable to 19th-century Paraguay taking on bigger neighbors Argentina, Brazil, and Chile at the same time! It's only dumb luck that they are still a country!
The dynamic of trench warfare, machine guns, and artillery was already very apparent in that conflict. The ideas of maneuver warfare, cavalry, and elan carrying the day should have died in 1905.
The French went into the war with colorful trousers, officers in white gloves standing up in machine gun fire, and no metal helmets.
> The third factor in the West’s defeat is the rest of the world's preference for Russia. It has discovered discreet economic allies everywhere. A new conservative (anti-LGBT) Russian soft power was in full swing
Is this pulled out of his re.. thin air?
"Despite deteriorating relations with most of the international community since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia still maintains support and strong relations with certain countries, such as China, Belarus, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Syria, North Korea, Myanmar, Eritrea, Mali, Zimbabwe, Central African Republic, Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, and Niger.
Russia also maintains positive relations with countries that have been described as "Russia-leaning" according to The Economist. These countries include Algeria, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Uganda."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_Russia#:~:text=Despite%20deteriorating%20relations%20with%20most,%2C%20Zimbabwe%2C%20Central%20African%20Republic%2C
The "new conservative (anti-LGBT) soft power" has some fine company indeed.
The young/striving/entrepreneurial around the world flock to American Embassies at the crack of dawn for a chance at a student/work/etc. visa. It is a magnet for talent, and American television and cinema are popular the world over, notwithstanding this bizarre claim of its "modernity seeming quite insane". Its progress in Civil Rights, LGBT rights, protection of individual freedoms, are examples worldwide. Close to 20 countries have liberalized laws in this regard just since Obergefell (not the only causal factor obviously).
Thank you for saying it far better than I could have.
Todd is using the developing world's apprehension about condemning Russia at the UN to argue that there is some kind of Cold War-style alliance system developing between them. In reality, those countries gain nothing by picking a side in a war where they have no dog in the fight. Nobody in Nicaragua, Tajikistan, or Laos cares if gay people in the West have rights or not.
I don't understand why Todd would expect Americans to be doing "more" of whatever he pinpoints in the past. America is shrinking. It would be like saying, in 2050, or 2100 - France is producing or consuming less wine than it used to, less fancy soft cheese - why is this?
I dislike the borrowing of "predator and prey" whether in this novel sense or, tediously, in criminal narratives. Animal predators do nothing wrong. It's all very misleading, whether it's the nature of animals that is being referenced, or the nature of people.
Disliking it misses the point, which has nothing to do with good and bad.
Somebody may have missed the point, true. There is enough hostility to nature, in the modern mind, that I don't think we need to borrow the terms predator and prey to describe something completely unrelated. It's especially annoying when used of rape. Cringey.
I have no idea why you think it is "completely unrelated." We most effectively explain through analogies and other stories. In that sense it is perfectly related.
An animal taking up energy to live its life, and somebody raping or murdering someone. Somebody ordering a hamburger would be an equally good analogy in this view. It's weird and silly and explains nothing.
I was referring to the substack topic and your comment seemed to be referring to that too.
Fine links, including the Nov review of Todd on sex differences -- where you list many examples with an intellectually cowardly disclaimer that you "disagree with many of them" -- a disclaimer I thought weak when I first read it. An A or D, or a + or -, would have been far far better.
One of the wild punches (should be -) is "The standard of living is falling, free trade has destroyed our factories… " The OECD avg, standard of living continues to rise, tho there are many individuals unhappy, and committing suicide or drug/ alcohol addiction.
The reality of slower middle class econ growth in OECD countries is not really a defeat, tho it's also a reason for less contentment and more questioning of whether being a wage slave was really worth it.
Rod's linked post links to an important post of last month, where he notes that he:
"wrote here about our complete inability to talk about the potential causes of the dismally chaotic lives of many black Americans — the terrible educational performance, the failure of family formation, the endemic crime that makes stable life difficult, and so forth. We can only talk about possible causes that remove moral agency from black people. I think this is actually … racist."
The inability to talk about Truth comes from the unwillingness to accept the truth that Black IQs are quite a bit lower, on avg., than whites or Asians. We need to be able to speak true things, to avoid "Defeat".
What is the truth about Ukraine? We don't know, can't know, and even after there is some resolution there will be many important aspects of truth that won't be provably known.
Trump wants an immediate peace deal -- he's mostly wrong. So many Ukrainians are willing to fight against Russian invaders, those willing to fight are unwilling to lose, and there won't be peace until at least one side prefers losing and peace.
All sides, including me, are certainly looking at Ukraine thru extensive Stanovich myside bias -- which seems a bit different than confirmation bias, but it's not clear what. Both sides are paying a high price. And all the world is seeing the increasing power of drones, tho not yet ai controlled drone swarms. I haven't heard of big new US drone factories, nor France. At 71, waiting for Putin to get too old seems unlikely to be a good long or medium term strategy for Ukraine.
The US, NATO, and the West should be supporting Ukraine with more ammo, and more defensive weapons & anti-ship missiles, but not cash -- as long as they're willing to kill invasive Russians. A peaceful world requires that borders be respected. And yes, it's likely the cheapest way for the US to stop China from invading Taiwan -- tho the US should also be building more ships.
I would like to hear what Todd means by "the recent collapse of Protestantism." If he is referring to churches that have been taken over by wokism, (1) not all of them have, and (2) the Argentine Pope is woke too, creating a problematic contradiction for traditional Catholics worldwide.
I wonder if some sort of anti-woke umbrella organization could be helpful, and how it could be designed to protect both itself and other anti-woke organizations from infiltration and takeover. Certainly if the woke side can have the likes of ADL and SPLC, we can have some too.
Whoa, and also
> the inadequacy of engineering training and, more generally the decline of the level of education, which began in 1965 in the United States.
There appear to be 809 public laws passed by the 89th Congress. https://www.congress.gov/browse/89th-congress
What does the comment refer to?
"H.R.9567 - An Act to strengthen the educational resources of our colleges and universities and to provide financial assistance for students in post-secondary and higher education"?
"H.R.14644 - An Act to amend the Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963 to extend it for 3 years, and for other purposes and to authorize assistance to developing institutions for an additional year"?
"H.R.2580 - An Act to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act, and for other purposes"?
"S.1564 - An Act to enforce the 15th amendment to the Constitution of the United States"?
Am I missing something major?
Even if you don't like Federal dollars spent on Education, or Immigration, or Voting Rights, whats the causal chain to "decline of the level of education"??
The ecological analogy with predators and prey and complex interdependences works fairly well for describing societies and economies.
I don't accept as true any of the three factors you quote from Todd.
"Academic careers in general now come with a much longer on-ramp. This selects against people who want to have children. Women especially.“
I'm kind of curious why you used the word "normies" in the sentence that followed the quote. Either way, there is certainly some truth to what you say about longer tracks but I don't think it's as true as you make it sound. As I see it, there are basically three groups: (1) the ones who can write proposals good enough to get the NSF scholarships, other scholarships/fellowships, and research funding. They then do adequate work and write papers to meet requirements. They are on the fast track mentioned. Plenty do it. (2) People who struggle to write adequate proposals but they do good work. They struggle to get tenure but, depending on demand in their field, eventually get enough funding, research, and papers to get there. (3) People who are either not able to find a specialty, can't write well enough, don't put in the effort or otherwise just don't make the cut.
For the ones in the middle and bottom, I have no idea to what extent there is an oversupply vs they just don't have what it takes (or there was an under supply in the past that meant marginal candidates got tenure). Some are hoping for tier 1 success and more often than not eventually settle for something else, academic or not.
FYI - I know lots of people who did the fast track and one woman in particular who was advised to have her children in grad school and did so.
I wonder how much the long off ramp to academic careers (which is definitely a thing) also affects' marriages for the relevant people. I think part of the problem of moving every 1-2 years is what it does to your spouses' career. In my case my wife traveled or worked remotely anyway so it didn't much matter, but if she had a job tied to one location I might never have gone to grad school in the first place if she had to leave it to find a new one, and asking her to change jobs every few years would be a big problem. Especially if people marry like people, or women who are career driven tend to marry men who are career driven, you have a big problem until either the academic gets a permanent job or the spouse gets one where they needn't work in a particular spot.
It probably also doesn't help that the income from the academic on-ramp isn't great, so it isn't like the young academic can support a family while the other finds a new job. Plus all that moving means you are going to be away from family support most likely.