I don't know any Ukrainians and might not like them if I did; and I don't know much about history, but I occasionally read a book in an attempt to correct some area of particular ignorance. Thus I read "Bloodlands".
Nevermind how indistinguishable Russians and Ukrainians may appear: if the scholarship that produced this book is to be trusted, then supporting Russia's claim to Ukraine seems much like enthusiastically supporting a parent's custodial rights after they've beaten and starved their child.
I don't care if it's decades in the rearview mirror. Have some goddamn humility, Russia.
And all these interesting causes and "ignored warnings" to NATO don't persuade me that the whole thing isn't the fault of one guy.
So I guess I basically support bankrupting ourselves to support Ukraine. I mean, my country might as well go out in a blaze of vicarious glory. And we are going out either way.
It is a bit paradoxical that the theme of this particular Substack is that 'books are on the way out as a communications medium,' but Arnold Kling likes a comment that is based exclusively on one book. Look, I haven't read Bloodlands, but as a former member of the Soviet/Russian studies field, I know that this book is considered controversial among historians and specialists in this area, so it is debatable whether the scholarship that produced this book is to be trusted. A quick search brought up this link with a sampling of the critique: https://defendinghistory.com/30081/30081
I have to say that I have been surprised at how many of the 'scholars' in my former area of specialization have become propagandists for the official narrative on the Ukraine war. The author of Bloodlands is an extreme example. He also seems to have a particularly acute case of TDS, as well as PDS, and his views on these matters also seem to be closely intertwined with an alarmist view on Climate Change and the consequent need to end reliance on fossil fuels. I think he is a nut, though I can't help but wonder whether being an extremist on these issues is the only way someone like him (i.e. non-diverse) can get tenure at Yale these days.
Sorry to be blunt, but anybody who thinks that 'the whole thing' is the fault of one guy (presumably Putin) has a shallow understanding of Russia. Leaving aside the question of NATO's involvement, the implication would seem to be that Russia would be a non-threatening 'liberal democracy' if Putin were to be removed from power. I can see why you might get that impression by relying on Snyder and his ilk, but the truth is that Putin represents a deeply rooted and widespread belief system in Russian society. Frankly, when Western specialists talk about democrats in Russia, whether they be living in Russia or abroad, they may as well be talking about little green men on Mars as far as I'm concerned.
Finally, bankrupting ourselves to support Ukraine isn't doing Ukraine any good, except perhaps putting it out of its misery. Look, if you believe Russia is a potential threat, and I do, then you should be more concerned about what the leadership of this country is doing to destroy our military and our energy systems, among other things. How are we going to meet the challenges posed by Russia with 'green energy' and a 'woke military' that is increasingly unable to recruit able-bodied men? All the Russians have to do is sit back and watch us destroy ourselves.
Of course people in Soviet/Russian studies would consider Snyder controversial, seeing as they were overwhelmingly Russian-centered and much of their business was laundering Russian viewpoints (WWII is a prominent example) for Western audiences. From what I've heard, Soviets exercised a lot of control over the field by selective granting of entry visas, access to archives and such. As a result my prior is to consider all Western works written in the Soviet era based on Soviet archives to be completely unreliable.
> anybody who thinks that 'the whole thing' is the fault of one guy (presumably Putin)
There are indeed quite a few people like that in 'good Russian' and adjacent circles - as Kamil Galeev notes, they just want to rule Russia instead of Putin, and they very often are as imperialist as their political opponents; Navalny's remarks on Crimea are a notorious example - but to my knowledge this does not describe Snyder at all.
I plead guilty to whatever - except wanting or expecting Russia to be a liberal democracy. I don't care either way; I don't tend to think about the world in those terms. But the moment the threat to Ukraine became a war - that's clearly the will of one guy.
It would be a shallow - or shall we say, an overly nuanced? - reading of Russian history to suppose that One Guy has not had unusual possibilities open to him there.
As for "Bloodlands" I have no idea where the author gets his numbers. He often quotes people for the anecdotes, now that may be made up whole hog for all I know.
It crossed my mind as I read it that it was an unusual book in its jeremiad quality. I recall turning it over to the back to see who had blurbed it. Is he mainstream? I wondered. I would be surprised, though, if he wasn't a "nut" for other imputed reasons - namely his thematic equating of Communism and Nazism, indeed all the -isms of the period in some sense, including those at work in Asia.
It is not how we're used to people talking, even at this date, about the general madness of the 20th century.
I confess to having one little pro-American moment, as I read the book - it was telling about how some people, I forget which, Poles or Jews or kulaks - were being made to dig their own pit, and then lined up on the edge, and the Soviet soldiers shot them. (You can sub out Nazis for this anecdote, I am not good at remembering details, but I think it was in the earlier part of the book when Stalin was so far ahead in the body count.)
I recall thinking, good God, what was in these soldiers' heads? Give me any group of Americans in the 30s: I don't think they would have accepted this order. I really don't.
Oy vey. It was the Nazis who shot the Jews into pits after rounding them up, marching them outside town, and making them dig their own graves. This was the chosen method of exterminating the Jews in Lithuania, Latvia and Western Ukraine before Hitler came up with the 'final solution' (gas chambers). This would probably have been the fate of my grandparents on my mother's side had they not left their little Lithuanian shtetl (then part of the Russian Empire) long before WWII. And parts of the local populations in these areas actively collaborated with the Nazis in the mass killings of Jews. It is relatively easy to dig up photos of this type of activity on the internet. The infamous Babi Yar is located in the outskirts of Kiev.
It's true that the killing became so systematic and fast-paced - one Soviet executioner was said to kill 250 men a day - that they stacked the bodies on trucks (heads on feet) and dumped them in pits dug by backhoes in the forest.
I mean, unless you're suggesting that none of this happened.
Sorry for the interval. In the great tradition of my tribe, I went to stock up on goodies for the Christmas holiday on Monday, when most stores and restaurants are closed (except for Chinese restaurants, but that isn't my thing). I admitted that I hadn't read Bloodlands, while you acknowledged that you may have been conflating the Soviet soldiers with the Nazis, and that you weren't sure whether the victims were the Poles, Jews or kulaks. As anyone with rudimentary knowledge of the Holocaust would know, the particular execution method you described -- forcing the victims to dig a pit (mass graves) and shooting them as they stood on the edge -- was a standard Nazi method for exterminating Jews on a mass scale in certain countries (including but not necessarily limited to the Baltics and Western Ukraine) and is specifically associated with the Holocaust. That doesn't exclude the possibility that the same or similar execution method was used by the Soviets. My guess is that you are thinking about the so-called Katyn massacre, a series of mass executions of Polish military officers/war prisoners (among others) carried out by the Soviet NKVD under Stalin's orders. The victims were buried in mass graves, but the Wikipedia account I looked at doesn't mention the victims being made to dig the graves, and instead details a different and equally gruesome execution procedure. When I think about Stalin's victims, it is the Gulag that comes to mind.
The broader point is that you base your opinion of the current Russia-Ukraine conflict on a book that covers the history of the region during WWII. But if you are going to use WWII to draw lessons for the current conflict, you might ask yourself the question, who won the war on the Eastern front, Hitler or Stalin? The Germany army invaded the Soviet Union (through Ukraine), made significant inroads into Soviet territory, and conducted a lengthy siege against Leningrad, but after a rocky start, it was the Red Army that prevailed. The Soviets beat the crap out of the Germans. That leads to another question. Did the geniuses who run our foreign policy, and their acolytes in academia, take that history into account when they decided to use Ukraine to rattle Putin's cage? Did they check our ammunition stockpiles, and our defense industrial capacity, to make sure we could supply Ukraine with sufficient ammunition to match Russia's capabilities in that area? Did they bother to ascertain that the defense industrial capacity built up during the Soviet period remains intact in Russia today, and one way or another is able to obtain the chips needed for large quantities of precision-guided missiles and drones? Because it looks to me like they supported Ukraine in this war with no clue as to whether or how Ukraine could win it, and that is just plain stupid.
I doubt Hitler arrived at the idea first, given the mass movement of men to their deaths under the Soviets (in a few years followed by the Nazis) but maybe you can give old Joe the innovation of the single bullet through multiple heads, to save on ammo.
A weird sort of competition but if that’s your thing, I can guarantee you will enjoy the book.
As for all that lost materiel: I’m not sure it will seem to have been more wasted if Putin wins, or he loses. We should be pretty used to losing wars by now. Maybe that is what it means to be a superpower in the 21st century.
This feels a lot like every single thing I've ever read to support every single war the United States ever gets into.
Didn't you know that there is a BAD GUY OVER THERE. We have to fight bad guy.
Don't ask questions.
Don't ask who we are supporting (defiantly don't ask if they are also bad guys).
Don't ask what the fighting actually entails.
Don't ask how it's going to turn out.
BAD GUY!!!!!!!
Saddam was a bad guy and my friend that visited at Thanksgiving couldn't hug me because the shrapnel in his back from Iraq was killing him.
I'm a bit disappointed Arnold. Didn't you start out thinking the Ukraine war was was a terrible idea that was going to chew Ukraine up. Fighting to the last Ukranian and all that.
There are a million casualties and counting (forced conscripts killed against their will) to satisfy your vicarious glory.
P.S. If Russia's actions were really the choice of one man, that one man would be out of power by now. It makes a lot more sense to see this as at least partial consensus amongst most of Russia's decision makers, with some level of support from the populace (a much larger proportion of Russia's military is volunteers, whereas the Ukranians are entirely a slave army at this point).
Casualty numbers are guarded, but the Ukranian command seems to think it needs 20,000 per month just to maintain. That's the figure provided for this call up of 500,000.
That's 240,000 a year. Over two years of war you're looking at nearly 1/2 a million.
I assume the Russians are suffering similar casualties. So throw them both together and you're close to a million.
Maybe I'm off. Maybe it's 1M +/- 250,000. Who cares? Is it less of a tragedy?
When your calling up women and old men and kidnapping them off the street something is going on with casualties.
My best estimate of Ukrainian casualty figures comes from a little noted Ukrenergo commemorative bulletin this March, which provided a fairly random sample of ~250 non-privileged working-class and LMC men (electricians) who had been called up for selective service from that company. This source indicates ~2.5% total KIA+DOW of those called up between 24/04/22 and this March. The overall numbers under arms are not known exactly either but are about 1 million, so this comes out as 25 thousand. Double this to include those permanently incapacitated. This represents a year of hard fighting. Even if you double it again to account for the remainder of this year, it does not come anywhere near to the figures you give for Ukrainian losses. I don't know exactly which "call up of 500,000" you are talking about - presumably the one which was proposed to Zelensky by military authorities a few days ago - but note that it does not jibe with your other figure of 20,000 per month (wherever that comes from) because the former represents two years' worth of the latter and that's too long a time frame for this sort of planning. Anyway. If you really want to hear what I know and think about these matters, please tell me so honestly, because I will have to break a personal rule to write about this. On the other hand, if you don't care much one way or another and/or are just looking for points to bolster your not-pro-Russian Deranged Schizo position (which I can respect because it's your taxes paying for American military hardware however one does the accounting), I won't bother.
PS: no, they aren't calling up women and old men. In fact, overage men are being discharged from the army. I know one such guy personally, he got discharged this summer. As for women, Ukrainian internal politics isn't any better than American and there are lots of knuckleheads all around trying to score political points, including by suggesting calling up women, but Zelensky is not a fool and said flat out that he won't sign any such law even if the parliament passed it.
PPS: when a homeowner resists an armed robber in his own house and the robber cuts him up and the homeowner shoots him dead, is it any less of a tragedy? The homeowner ought to have let the robber rape his wife, beat him into brain damage, take away all his valuables, and squat the house for a gang den. That would have been so much more peaceful.
I'll take any info you wish to offer on accurate casualty figures, but if it involves any personal risk on your part there isn't much upside.
I go mostly off western casualty and some non-western sources as well as other extrapolations based on facts like amputee numbers and other estimates.
Back on in Aug 18th the US said it estimate 500,000 casualties, about 200,000 Ukranian and 300,000 Russian. This does not include all arms of the armed forces (territorials, etc) or civilians.
I tend to think the western sources overestimate the Russian and underestimate the Ukranian, but that doesn't really change my projections, because I usually just assume that the total number is the same even if more balanced (say 250 vs 250 rather then 200 vs 300).
Obviously there have been more deaths between then and now.
The 20,000 number comes from the buildup of the 500,000 request. Twenty thousand new recruits a month are needed to maintain strength according to the request. In addition they want to form new units because the Russians are also forming new units. Escalation begets escalation.
Average age for enlisted in Ukraine has risen. Everyone seems to agree that recruitment has become draconian. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would be happening if nobody was dying.
First I note that "casualties" by default means both killed and wounded, and lightly wounded do return to the ranks. The standard ratio of killed to wounded of 1:3 given decent tactical medicine, so the figure I gave actually jibes with US estimates of total Ukrainian casualties you gave above. (I care for Russian casualties no more than you would care about injuring an armed robber in your own house.) The casualty estimate I gave is based on a public source. I do not have accurate casualty figures, or information about average enlisted age either for that matter, and even were I privy to such confidential information I would not share it publicly, because it would be both a breach of trust and a crime. Unlike NYT reporters, I have neither the resources nor the inclination to collect this information from public sources. If NYT reporters weren't lazy and entitled, the locations of cemeteries are public knowledge and soldiers' graves are the opposite of concealed. They could have organized counts in representative districts and come up with a good independent estimate. Instead, they chose to go the easy route and talked to people who had trouble with the selective service system and were criticizing it publicly. I don't feel they even made an effort to learn how typical the situations they described were. As you might guess, this did not increase my respect for them.
I did not mean personal risk. Ukrainian law on selective service exempts a number of categories of citizens from draft for reasons of family (e.g. fathers of three minors, sole caretakers of disabled close relatives), health (e.g. mild to severe disability, having had a heart attack), or occupation (e.g. full-time teachers). I happen to fall into one of these categories, and as such I as a rule recuse myself from discussing or expressing opinions on the selective service system. All I will venture to say for now is that recruitment has tightened because the whole selective service system atrophied for years before the Russian invasion. Few people bothered to keep their selective service registrations up to date (I have been remiss myself after I was discharged in 2016) and as a result the state cannot find where most anybody is. Hundreds of thousands volunteered to fight, even coming back from abroad, but on the other hand very many people live and work where they like without notifying authorities. The huge amount of internally displaced people squares this problem. This is the reason for the street checks. Checks are somewhat paradoxically more severe in western parts of Ukraine because a much larger fraction of able-bodied men there work as gastarbeiters in Europe. Not all of them came back - perhaps a third did - and this puts pressure on local authorities whose recruitment targets are apparently fixed without regard for this factor. Legislation has been moving forward to remedy all this mess, but it is tough going.
It is an American-centric view that the Ukrainians should have just rolled over at Biden's command. I don't think we have that kind of power. I hope we don't. Whether we should have supplied them with weapons is another matter, I will leave to wiser heads to decide whether attempting to arrest the threat of Putin's expansion, such as towards Poland other neighboring countries, had any validity, or should have been a little show quickly concluded.
I expect not as most commenters here seem to feel the threat went entirely in the other direction, from NATO.
Geez, the US funds Ukraine's government, both directly (i.e. we pay the salaries of government officials and employees) and indirectly (through the IMF), so we do have that kind of power over Ukraine, and Zelensky did roll over at Biden's command when he withdrew from the negotiations with Russia that might have ended the conflict back in early 2022. Conversely, so far Netanyahu has resisted pressure from Biden to 'roll over' and 'wind down' the Gaza operation, but Israel is not anywhere near as dependent on America as Ukraine is, and if they have any sense, they will reduce their dependence on America for military equipment and other items in the future. As for the threat of Putin's expansion towards Poland (or Moldova, etc.), if there is indeed such a threat, why aren't Poland and other neighboring countries laying land mines and digging trenches to defend against such a threat? How come they aren't acting as if such a threat is real? If President Orban isn't worried about Russia invading Hungary (which was invaded by the USSR in the 1950s), how come you are? How many times can US politicians try to scare us with the 'domino theory' before we wise up? If the threat of Putin's expansion towards Eastern Europe is real, they had better learn to defend themselves, because it is absurd to think there is much we could do about it from here.
1) Poland, Baltic states and others actually see this threat acutely. They have supported Ukraine militarily and financially, per capita basis more than Us. Ramped up their military spending. Raised taxes to finance all this. Finland has joined Nato, Latvia has established conscription, Poland has decided to double the size of its army, have already bought thousand new tanks, 500 Himars systems etc. So, you are wrong. Eastern European countries take Russian threat seriously.
2) Ukraine has become dependent during the war, but at the start of the war US had very little leverage over Ukraine - US military aid before the war was almost non existent.
>... if there is indeed such a threat, why aren't Poland and other neighboring countries laying land mines and digging trenches to defend against such a threat?
Maybe because there was no analog of the postwar American surplus to help them get back on their feet whilst guaranteeing their security after the breakup of the Soviet Union?
Obviously if Trump was still president the Ukraine War would not have happened. Precisely because he doesn't care about NATO or its obligations or its notional expansion.
If it helps to bring you down off the ledge, my partner here on the couch is entirely of your opinion. He doesn't want us to help Ukraine because he doesn't care about Ukraine. He believes what will happen is two irritating countries will bleed their militaries dry and then when that's finished, the vastly much larger country will by virtue of being vastly much larger, be the victor.
And he doesn't think that all this will embolden Putin to greater acts of destabilization in the 3rd world. At least he doesn't think they are closely connected.
I obviously view this as a shift of the gear, as America winds down. In a way, he does too of course - only in his view, the West deserves no influence anywhere at this point.
The Ukranian's wanted peace and we told them not to sign it. We promised them that our wonder weapons and sanctions would destroy Russia without getting into a war of attrition, but we overestimated our hand (or more cynically, the people making the promise wouldn't be doing the dying if it didn't work out).
It's possible that Ukraine would have been able to preserve itself without our help at the beginning. When this was still a cabinet war with massive advantages to the defender. Using conscription to achieve "success" at retaking ethnic Russian parts of Ukraine caused Russia to hit the mobilization button and now we are in am attritional people's war.
As to Poland, they see grain prices are more important then Ukraine.
For what it's worth, if I believed this Domino Theory bullshit I would support fighting Russia in Ukraine. And if I'm proven wrong and Russia invades Poland in 2025 I support fighting it. I just don't believe any of that. I don't see how anyone could. It feels like rank ideological nonsense to me.
It felt like rank ideological nonsense to me that Russia would really invade Ukraine. I was worried but I didn't believe that until at 4am on 24/02/22 I listened to Putin's speech and then heard the cruise missiles exploding outside my windows.
"The Ukranian's wanted peace and we told them not to sign it."
Really? I was under the impression that Zelensky wanted to resist as soon as Russian troops attacked. He certainly has been a "no peace till we retake all of Ukraine" guy recently.
I hope that's actually a negotiating ploy because things aren't going to get any better for Ukraine. It's December, 1915 (The first time as tragedy, the second time as a different kind of tragedy).
Everyone seems to agree that a deal was signed by both parties in Turkey a month into the war to return to the status quo ante bellum, but the US and UK convinced Zelensky to pull out of it by making a bunch of promises to him. Either through lack or will and/or lack of ability they have not been able to keep those promises.
Some kind of deal was certainly talked about at what is called "technical level" - from Russia there wasn't even a single ministerial level negotiator in Istanbul - and this was what Putin was waving around at that press conference, but he did not show signatures because there weren't any. As for "return to status quo ante bellum", there is no way Russia would have agreed to that. It had spent vast political capital on the invasion and it would have just walked off with nothing? Laughable. Also if you know a bit about the Chechen wars, as everybody who matters in Russian and Ukrainian politics and foreign affairs does, this would have been an exact parallel to the Khasavyurt peace agreements that ended the first Chechen war and gave Russia a breather to come back and crush Chechnya in the second war a couple years later.
Arnold refers to Lorenzo Warby's work as "florid," which according to the Cambridge English Dictionary means too much decoration or detail. The term also has a negative connotation from its usage in medicine to describe an unhealthy complexion. I don't think any of that is what Arnold meant, but rather that Warby's series of essays is a comprehensive analysis of the social psychology of the ideology of the transformational future, or what most people call woke. Helen Dale who is a great fan of Warby, as I am, courteously thanks Arnold in the comments for the reference. Nobody should be put off by the term florid; Warby's work is a superb deep analysis of our sick culture. He intends to put the essay series in book form when finished, which I am eager to see.
I've listened to every podcast wright has put out since the Ukraine invasion, and I don't think at any point he's tried to justify it. He frequently points out that it violates international law, which is his whole schtick.
Coincidentally to the theme of post, this would earn you points in a fantasy intellectual league. Thank you for reminding me that not all writers on the Internet are unreasonable.
I’m optimistic that the future of reading will remain very strong with books. Nothing compares to the experience of holding, reading, sharing and marking up a book. Nothing compares to a library; the smell; the quiet; the tranquility.
With a book, everything is there in front of you. It can all be seen, held, shown, and touched. With a book one can say “This is mine.” Books are finite; the experience is finite, even if read multiple times.
LLMs on the other hand are black boxes. We can’t see them. Nor are their contents laid out in front of us all at once. Where does it begin and end? “I finished reading that black box” has a long way to go until it obtains the status of, “I finished reading that book.”
Further...
We can trust a book.
A book doesn’t change.
A book is everything the author wrote in a particular ordering of words.
Books have a slowness and permanence that are hard to compete with.
The beauty of light scattering from dried ink and paper is not something that LLMs can replicate or improve upon.
With that said, LLMs are going to be really useful and really neat.
You’re not seeing the millions of children joyfully reading books like The Indian in the Cupboard and Pinnochio in their classrooms following along with their teacher and discussing the consequences of the protagonists decisions.
Here is a very short list of books that kids love.
I do not think it is accurate (or charitable) to say that Robert Wright "wants us to believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is justified." What I think he is saying is that the United Sates government did a number of things it should have known would frighten the Russian government, sometimes things that the Russian government had specifically warned would be considered very bad. And that if the US government had acted differently, going back a decade, there probably wouldn't have been an invasion.
Wright seems okay with the almost surety that this would have involved Ukraine being within the Russian "sphere of influence"--though nowhere near as subservient as Belarus--instead of "part of Europe".
While what you said about Wright may have misrepresented his views (I rarely listen to his podcasts), it is fair to say that most of those who blame Russia's invasion of Ukraine on NATO enlargement were quick to condemn Israel for its response to the atrocities of October 7th. While I have made it clear that I am sympathetic to the view that the US and its allies have deliberately used Ukraine to challenge Russia (as outlined in the 2019 RAND report titled "Extending Russia,"), the fact remains that Russia was not directly attacked before it intervened in Ukraine, whereas Israel was attacked by Hamas on October 7th. That is the critical difference. It irks and sickens me that those who complained about the US ignoring Russia's legitimate security interests turned on a dime in the aftermath of October 7th and starting clucking about Israel's 'war crimes' before it had done anything in response. For that reason, even though I agree with some of their points, I've had it with those who espouse the alternative narrative on Ukraine (eg. Sachs). In my mind, they lost their credibility with their take on Israel's response to the Hamas atrocities.
Trying to use a justification metric for the two wars presently going on is going to lead one into some very silly places, and into making some very silly decisions. Justification from who's point of view? I understand Russia's point of view with regards to NATO expansion right up to its border, but apparently no one making NATO policy for the last 32 years bothered to try to do so.
If you believe the recent story in the NYTimes about the Ukrainian press gangs, and I do since it is a statement against interest for the NYTimes to print it, then the Ukrainians who have to do the actual fighting and dying don't think the war is worth fighting any longer. Is it moral for us to encourage and enable the Ukrainian government to continue to fight when they have to resort such egregious immoral actions like conscription- literally enslaving young men and sending them to die on the front lines?
In the case of Israel and Gaza, I am sympathetic to the Israelis overall (from my point of view), and if their decision about what is justified from their point of view is to push the Gazans into the Mediterranean Sea or into Sinai, and to push all the West Bank Palestinians into Jordan, then so be it- it is exactly what the U.S. government would do if Gaza were on the California coast. However, I would not offer one bit of additional aid to help the Israelis do this- it is their fight and it should be fought with their own capacity for carrying out whatever policy they choose to implement here.
'All that said, I would not say that the future of writing is substack. Large Language Models change everything. Most readers would love to have one-on-one face time with their favorite writers. That does not work for popular writers, but something close to it becomes possible with LLMs. With these, as an author you can have one-on-one conversations with your readers, at scale. Tyler Cowen’s EconGOAT project provides a glimpse'
Ok, so how does the next generation find their favorite authors? If you understand an author you can usually hit 'what would Cowen think about this' with high accuracy anyway. Having a conversation with him is mostly mood affiliation, and a future world where everything is AI generated responses based on character representations of writers would be not very novel or interesting. It would be like reading the 37th installment of Harry Potter which is actually only enjoyable for a small portion of the fanbase, while what made it popular was its relative novelty and originality.
"Robert Wright, who wants us to believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is justified" – that's so obviously untrue it's worthy of a retraction. He's not only never said that, but goes to great pains to say the opposite (while analysing all the back story in a way that's been both valuable and prescient).
I think books can still be useful. If you are setting out to make a big change in the way people view the world and you need to put forward a lot of evidence, then a book can be the way to go. As an example, I recommend Joyce Benenson's Warriors and Worriers, which tries to convince you that men and women are actually different in ways that matter (e.g., women more concerned with safety and "getting along").
I really liked Tim Urban's book "What's Our Problem?" Never mind that last I knew it wasn't available on paper. His thinking ladder is really good and the chapter(s) raking progressives over the coals for cancel culture, identity politics, and a few other things is good too. It's kind of a harsher, more detailed version of Haidt.
Despite being an avowed liberal, Monica Guzman's book "I Never Thought of It That Way" present a better way to approach the political divide. I really wish Brighter Angels would become big. Regardless, I captured a couple pages of short quotes and ideas useful in how I approach people on either side.
Emil Kirkegard had this post asking for which combination of Israel/Palestine & Russia/Ukraine you supported. I didn't think "third world enthusiast" (Russia and Palestine) had any supporters, and while its only 14.7% of responders its someone out there. I've never seen someone make the case in argument though.
Cold war boomer (Israel & Ukraine): 47.4%
Derange schizo (Russia & Israel): 28%
Third world enthusiast (Russia and Palestine): 14.7%
Twitter libtard (Ukraine and Palestine): 9.9%
I'm comfortable calling myself a Deranged Schizo, though I'd say I'm more "not be involved in Ukraine" than Russia supporting per se. I support Israel, but I also think they could basically handle it on their own and just think we need to get out of their way.
I don't know any Ukrainians and might not like them if I did; and I don't know much about history, but I occasionally read a book in an attempt to correct some area of particular ignorance. Thus I read "Bloodlands".
Nevermind how indistinguishable Russians and Ukrainians may appear: if the scholarship that produced this book is to be trusted, then supporting Russia's claim to Ukraine seems much like enthusiastically supporting a parent's custodial rights after they've beaten and starved their child.
I don't care if it's decades in the rearview mirror. Have some goddamn humility, Russia.
And all these interesting causes and "ignored warnings" to NATO don't persuade me that the whole thing isn't the fault of one guy.
So I guess I basically support bankrupting ourselves to support Ukraine. I mean, my country might as well go out in a blaze of vicarious glory. And we are going out either way.
It is a bit paradoxical that the theme of this particular Substack is that 'books are on the way out as a communications medium,' but Arnold Kling likes a comment that is based exclusively on one book. Look, I haven't read Bloodlands, but as a former member of the Soviet/Russian studies field, I know that this book is considered controversial among historians and specialists in this area, so it is debatable whether the scholarship that produced this book is to be trusted. A quick search brought up this link with a sampling of the critique: https://defendinghistory.com/30081/30081
I have to say that I have been surprised at how many of the 'scholars' in my former area of specialization have become propagandists for the official narrative on the Ukraine war. The author of Bloodlands is an extreme example. He also seems to have a particularly acute case of TDS, as well as PDS, and his views on these matters also seem to be closely intertwined with an alarmist view on Climate Change and the consequent need to end reliance on fossil fuels. I think he is a nut, though I can't help but wonder whether being an extremist on these issues is the only way someone like him (i.e. non-diverse) can get tenure at Yale these days.
Sorry to be blunt, but anybody who thinks that 'the whole thing' is the fault of one guy (presumably Putin) has a shallow understanding of Russia. Leaving aside the question of NATO's involvement, the implication would seem to be that Russia would be a non-threatening 'liberal democracy' if Putin were to be removed from power. I can see why you might get that impression by relying on Snyder and his ilk, but the truth is that Putin represents a deeply rooted and widespread belief system in Russian society. Frankly, when Western specialists talk about democrats in Russia, whether they be living in Russia or abroad, they may as well be talking about little green men on Mars as far as I'm concerned.
Finally, bankrupting ourselves to support Ukraine isn't doing Ukraine any good, except perhaps putting it out of its misery. Look, if you believe Russia is a potential threat, and I do, then you should be more concerned about what the leadership of this country is doing to destroy our military and our energy systems, among other things. How are we going to meet the challenges posed by Russia with 'green energy' and a 'woke military' that is increasingly unable to recruit able-bodied men? All the Russians have to do is sit back and watch us destroy ourselves.
Of course people in Soviet/Russian studies would consider Snyder controversial, seeing as they were overwhelmingly Russian-centered and much of their business was laundering Russian viewpoints (WWII is a prominent example) for Western audiences. From what I've heard, Soviets exercised a lot of control over the field by selective granting of entry visas, access to archives and such. As a result my prior is to consider all Western works written in the Soviet era based on Soviet archives to be completely unreliable.
> anybody who thinks that 'the whole thing' is the fault of one guy (presumably Putin)
There are indeed quite a few people like that in 'good Russian' and adjacent circles - as Kamil Galeev notes, they just want to rule Russia instead of Putin, and they very often are as imperialist as their political opponents; Navalny's remarks on Crimea are a notorious example - but to my knowledge this does not describe Snyder at all.
I plead guilty to whatever - except wanting or expecting Russia to be a liberal democracy. I don't care either way; I don't tend to think about the world in those terms. But the moment the threat to Ukraine became a war - that's clearly the will of one guy.
It would be a shallow - or shall we say, an overly nuanced? - reading of Russian history to suppose that One Guy has not had unusual possibilities open to him there.
As for "Bloodlands" I have no idea where the author gets his numbers. He often quotes people for the anecdotes, now that may be made up whole hog for all I know.
It crossed my mind as I read it that it was an unusual book in its jeremiad quality. I recall turning it over to the back to see who had blurbed it. Is he mainstream? I wondered. I would be surprised, though, if he wasn't a "nut" for other imputed reasons - namely his thematic equating of Communism and Nazism, indeed all the -isms of the period in some sense, including those at work in Asia.
It is not how we're used to people talking, even at this date, about the general madness of the 20th century.
I confess to having one little pro-American moment, as I read the book - it was telling about how some people, I forget which, Poles or Jews or kulaks - were being made to dig their own pit, and then lined up on the edge, and the Soviet soldiers shot them. (You can sub out Nazis for this anecdote, I am not good at remembering details, but I think it was in the earlier part of the book when Stalin was so far ahead in the body count.)
I recall thinking, good God, what was in these soldiers' heads? Give me any group of Americans in the 30s: I don't think they would have accepted this order. I really don't.
Oy vey. It was the Nazis who shot the Jews into pits after rounding them up, marching them outside town, and making them dig their own graves. This was the chosen method of exterminating the Jews in Lithuania, Latvia and Western Ukraine before Hitler came up with the 'final solution' (gas chambers). This would probably have been the fate of my grandparents on my mother's side had they not left their little Lithuanian shtetl (then part of the Russian Empire) long before WWII. And parts of the local populations in these areas actively collaborated with the Nazis in the mass killings of Jews. It is relatively easy to dig up photos of this type of activity on the internet. The infamous Babi Yar is located in the outskirts of Kiev.
Ah - I see you haven't read "Bloodlands" then ...
It's true that the killing became so systematic and fast-paced - one Soviet executioner was said to kill 250 men a day - that they stacked the bodies on trucks (heads on feet) and dumped them in pits dug by backhoes in the forest.
I mean, unless you're suggesting that none of this happened.
Sorry for the interval. In the great tradition of my tribe, I went to stock up on goodies for the Christmas holiday on Monday, when most stores and restaurants are closed (except for Chinese restaurants, but that isn't my thing). I admitted that I hadn't read Bloodlands, while you acknowledged that you may have been conflating the Soviet soldiers with the Nazis, and that you weren't sure whether the victims were the Poles, Jews or kulaks. As anyone with rudimentary knowledge of the Holocaust would know, the particular execution method you described -- forcing the victims to dig a pit (mass graves) and shooting them as they stood on the edge -- was a standard Nazi method for exterminating Jews on a mass scale in certain countries (including but not necessarily limited to the Baltics and Western Ukraine) and is specifically associated with the Holocaust. That doesn't exclude the possibility that the same or similar execution method was used by the Soviets. My guess is that you are thinking about the so-called Katyn massacre, a series of mass executions of Polish military officers/war prisoners (among others) carried out by the Soviet NKVD under Stalin's orders. The victims were buried in mass graves, but the Wikipedia account I looked at doesn't mention the victims being made to dig the graves, and instead details a different and equally gruesome execution procedure. When I think about Stalin's victims, it is the Gulag that comes to mind.
The broader point is that you base your opinion of the current Russia-Ukraine conflict on a book that covers the history of the region during WWII. But if you are going to use WWII to draw lessons for the current conflict, you might ask yourself the question, who won the war on the Eastern front, Hitler or Stalin? The Germany army invaded the Soviet Union (through Ukraine), made significant inroads into Soviet territory, and conducted a lengthy siege against Leningrad, but after a rocky start, it was the Red Army that prevailed. The Soviets beat the crap out of the Germans. That leads to another question. Did the geniuses who run our foreign policy, and their acolytes in academia, take that history into account when they decided to use Ukraine to rattle Putin's cage? Did they check our ammunition stockpiles, and our defense industrial capacity, to make sure we could supply Ukraine with sufficient ammunition to match Russia's capabilities in that area? Did they bother to ascertain that the defense industrial capacity built up during the Soviet period remains intact in Russia today, and one way or another is able to obtain the chips needed for large quantities of precision-guided missiles and drones? Because it looks to me like they supported Ukraine in this war with no clue as to whether or how Ukraine could win it, and that is just plain stupid.
I doubt Hitler arrived at the idea first, given the mass movement of men to their deaths under the Soviets (in a few years followed by the Nazis) but maybe you can give old Joe the innovation of the single bullet through multiple heads, to save on ammo.
A weird sort of competition but if that’s your thing, I can guarantee you will enjoy the book.
As for all that lost materiel: I’m not sure it will seem to have been more wasted if Putin wins, or he loses. We should be pretty used to losing wars by now. Maybe that is what it means to be a superpower in the 21st century.
This feels a lot like every single thing I've ever read to support every single war the United States ever gets into.
Didn't you know that there is a BAD GUY OVER THERE. We have to fight bad guy.
Don't ask questions.
Don't ask who we are supporting (defiantly don't ask if they are also bad guys).
Don't ask what the fighting actually entails.
Don't ask how it's going to turn out.
BAD GUY!!!!!!!
Saddam was a bad guy and my friend that visited at Thanksgiving couldn't hug me because the shrapnel in his back from Iraq was killing him.
I'm a bit disappointed Arnold. Didn't you start out thinking the Ukraine war was was a terrible idea that was going to chew Ukraine up. Fighting to the last Ukranian and all that.
There are a million casualties and counting (forced conscripts killed against their will) to satisfy your vicarious glory.
P.S. If Russia's actions were really the choice of one man, that one man would be out of power by now. It makes a lot more sense to see this as at least partial consensus amongst most of Russia's decision makers, with some level of support from the populace (a much larger proportion of Russia's military is volunteers, whereas the Ukranians are entirely a slave army at this point).
> There are a million casualties and counting
Bullshit.
Casualty numbers are guarded, but the Ukranian command seems to think it needs 20,000 per month just to maintain. That's the figure provided for this call up of 500,000.
That's 240,000 a year. Over two years of war you're looking at nearly 1/2 a million.
I assume the Russians are suffering similar casualties. So throw them both together and you're close to a million.
Maybe I'm off. Maybe it's 1M +/- 250,000. Who cares? Is it less of a tragedy?
When your calling up women and old men and kidnapping them off the street something is going on with casualties.
My best estimate of Ukrainian casualty figures comes from a little noted Ukrenergo commemorative bulletin this March, which provided a fairly random sample of ~250 non-privileged working-class and LMC men (electricians) who had been called up for selective service from that company. This source indicates ~2.5% total KIA+DOW of those called up between 24/04/22 and this March. The overall numbers under arms are not known exactly either but are about 1 million, so this comes out as 25 thousand. Double this to include those permanently incapacitated. This represents a year of hard fighting. Even if you double it again to account for the remainder of this year, it does not come anywhere near to the figures you give for Ukrainian losses. I don't know exactly which "call up of 500,000" you are talking about - presumably the one which was proposed to Zelensky by military authorities a few days ago - but note that it does not jibe with your other figure of 20,000 per month (wherever that comes from) because the former represents two years' worth of the latter and that's too long a time frame for this sort of planning. Anyway. If you really want to hear what I know and think about these matters, please tell me so honestly, because I will have to break a personal rule to write about this. On the other hand, if you don't care much one way or another and/or are just looking for points to bolster your not-pro-Russian Deranged Schizo position (which I can respect because it's your taxes paying for American military hardware however one does the accounting), I won't bother.
PS: no, they aren't calling up women and old men. In fact, overage men are being discharged from the army. I know one such guy personally, he got discharged this summer. As for women, Ukrainian internal politics isn't any better than American and there are lots of knuckleheads all around trying to score political points, including by suggesting calling up women, but Zelensky is not a fool and said flat out that he won't sign any such law even if the parliament passed it.
PPS: when a homeowner resists an armed robber in his own house and the robber cuts him up and the homeowner shoots him dead, is it any less of a tragedy? The homeowner ought to have let the robber rape his wife, beat him into brain damage, take away all his valuables, and squat the house for a gang den. That would have been so much more peaceful.
I'll take any info you wish to offer on accurate casualty figures, but if it involves any personal risk on your part there isn't much upside.
I go mostly off western casualty and some non-western sources as well as other extrapolations based on facts like amputee numbers and other estimates.
Back on in Aug 18th the US said it estimate 500,000 casualties, about 200,000 Ukranian and 300,000 Russian. This does not include all arms of the armed forces (territorials, etc) or civilians.
I tend to think the western sources overestimate the Russian and underestimate the Ukranian, but that doesn't really change my projections, because I usually just assume that the total number is the same even if more balanced (say 250 vs 250 rather then 200 vs 300).
Obviously there have been more deaths between then and now.
The 20,000 number comes from the buildup of the 500,000 request. Twenty thousand new recruits a month are needed to maintain strength according to the request. In addition they want to form new units because the Russians are also forming new units. Escalation begets escalation.
Average age for enlisted in Ukraine has risen. Everyone seems to agree that recruitment has become draconian. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would be happening if nobody was dying.
First I note that "casualties" by default means both killed and wounded, and lightly wounded do return to the ranks. The standard ratio of killed to wounded of 1:3 given decent tactical medicine, so the figure I gave actually jibes with US estimates of total Ukrainian casualties you gave above. (I care for Russian casualties no more than you would care about injuring an armed robber in your own house.) The casualty estimate I gave is based on a public source. I do not have accurate casualty figures, or information about average enlisted age either for that matter, and even were I privy to such confidential information I would not share it publicly, because it would be both a breach of trust and a crime. Unlike NYT reporters, I have neither the resources nor the inclination to collect this information from public sources. If NYT reporters weren't lazy and entitled, the locations of cemeteries are public knowledge and soldiers' graves are the opposite of concealed. They could have organized counts in representative districts and come up with a good independent estimate. Instead, they chose to go the easy route and talked to people who had trouble with the selective service system and were criticizing it publicly. I don't feel they even made an effort to learn how typical the situations they described were. As you might guess, this did not increase my respect for them.
I did not mean personal risk. Ukrainian law on selective service exempts a number of categories of citizens from draft for reasons of family (e.g. fathers of three minors, sole caretakers of disabled close relatives), health (e.g. mild to severe disability, having had a heart attack), or occupation (e.g. full-time teachers). I happen to fall into one of these categories, and as such I as a rule recuse myself from discussing or expressing opinions on the selective service system. All I will venture to say for now is that recruitment has tightened because the whole selective service system atrophied for years before the Russian invasion. Few people bothered to keep their selective service registrations up to date (I have been remiss myself after I was discharged in 2016) and as a result the state cannot find where most anybody is. Hundreds of thousands volunteered to fight, even coming back from abroad, but on the other hand very many people live and work where they like without notifying authorities. The huge amount of internally displaced people squares this problem. This is the reason for the street checks. Checks are somewhat paradoxically more severe in western parts of Ukraine because a much larger fraction of able-bodied men there work as gastarbeiters in Europe. Not all of them came back - perhaps a third did - and this puts pressure on local authorities whose recruitment targets are apparently fixed without regard for this factor. Legislation has been moving forward to remedy all this mess, but it is tough going.
It is an American-centric view that the Ukrainians should have just rolled over at Biden's command. I don't think we have that kind of power. I hope we don't. Whether we should have supplied them with weapons is another matter, I will leave to wiser heads to decide whether attempting to arrest the threat of Putin's expansion, such as towards Poland other neighboring countries, had any validity, or should have been a little show quickly concluded.
I expect not as most commenters here seem to feel the threat went entirely in the other direction, from NATO.
Geez, the US funds Ukraine's government, both directly (i.e. we pay the salaries of government officials and employees) and indirectly (through the IMF), so we do have that kind of power over Ukraine, and Zelensky did roll over at Biden's command when he withdrew from the negotiations with Russia that might have ended the conflict back in early 2022. Conversely, so far Netanyahu has resisted pressure from Biden to 'roll over' and 'wind down' the Gaza operation, but Israel is not anywhere near as dependent on America as Ukraine is, and if they have any sense, they will reduce their dependence on America for military equipment and other items in the future. As for the threat of Putin's expansion towards Poland (or Moldova, etc.), if there is indeed such a threat, why aren't Poland and other neighboring countries laying land mines and digging trenches to defend against such a threat? How come they aren't acting as if such a threat is real? If President Orban isn't worried about Russia invading Hungary (which was invaded by the USSR in the 1950s), how come you are? How many times can US politicians try to scare us with the 'domino theory' before we wise up? If the threat of Putin's expansion towards Eastern Europe is real, they had better learn to defend themselves, because it is absurd to think there is much we could do about it from here.
1) Poland, Baltic states and others actually see this threat acutely. They have supported Ukraine militarily and financially, per capita basis more than Us. Ramped up their military spending. Raised taxes to finance all this. Finland has joined Nato, Latvia has established conscription, Poland has decided to double the size of its army, have already bought thousand new tanks, 500 Himars systems etc. So, you are wrong. Eastern European countries take Russian threat seriously.
2) Ukraine has become dependent during the war, but at the start of the war US had very little leverage over Ukraine - US military aid before the war was almost non existent.
>... if there is indeed such a threat, why aren't Poland and other neighboring countries laying land mines and digging trenches to defend against such a threat?
Maybe because there was no analog of the postwar American surplus to help them get back on their feet whilst guaranteeing their security after the breakup of the Soviet Union?
Obviously if Trump was still president the Ukraine War would not have happened. Precisely because he doesn't care about NATO or its obligations or its notional expansion.
If it helps to bring you down off the ledge, my partner here on the couch is entirely of your opinion. He doesn't want us to help Ukraine because he doesn't care about Ukraine. He believes what will happen is two irritating countries will bleed their militaries dry and then when that's finished, the vastly much larger country will by virtue of being vastly much larger, be the victor.
And he doesn't think that all this will embolden Putin to greater acts of destabilization in the 3rd world. At least he doesn't think they are closely connected.
I obviously view this as a shift of the gear, as America winds down. In a way, he does too of course - only in his view, the West deserves no influence anywhere at this point.
The Ukranian's wanted peace and we told them not to sign it. We promised them that our wonder weapons and sanctions would destroy Russia without getting into a war of attrition, but we overestimated our hand (or more cynically, the people making the promise wouldn't be doing the dying if it didn't work out).
It's possible that Ukraine would have been able to preserve itself without our help at the beginning. When this was still a cabinet war with massive advantages to the defender. Using conscription to achieve "success" at retaking ethnic Russian parts of Ukraine caused Russia to hit the mobilization button and now we are in am attritional people's war.
As to Poland, they see grain prices are more important then Ukraine.
https://www.politico.eu/article/poland-government-ban-ukrainian-grain-imports-war/
For what it's worth, if I believed this Domino Theory bullshit I would support fighting Russia in Ukraine. And if I'm proven wrong and Russia invades Poland in 2025 I support fighting it. I just don't believe any of that. I don't see how anyone could. It feels like rank ideological nonsense to me.
It felt like rank ideological nonsense to me that Russia would really invade Ukraine. I was worried but I didn't believe that until at 4am on 24/02/22 I listened to Putin's speech and then heard the cruise missiles exploding outside my windows.
"The Ukranian's wanted peace and we told them not to sign it."
Really? I was under the impression that Zelensky wanted to resist as soon as Russian troops attacked. He certainly has been a "no peace till we retake all of Ukraine" guy recently.
I hope that's actually a negotiating ploy because things aren't going to get any better for Ukraine. It's December, 1915 (The first time as tragedy, the second time as a different kind of tragedy).
Everyone seems to agree that a deal was signed by both parties in Turkey a month into the war to return to the status quo ante bellum, but the US and UK convinced Zelensky to pull out of it by making a bunch of promises to him. Either through lack or will and/or lack of ability they have not been able to keep those promises.
Some kind of deal was certainly talked about at what is called "technical level" - from Russia there wasn't even a single ministerial level negotiator in Istanbul - and this was what Putin was waving around at that press conference, but he did not show signatures because there weren't any. As for "return to status quo ante bellum", there is no way Russia would have agreed to that. It had spent vast political capital on the invasion and it would have just walked off with nothing? Laughable. Also if you know a bit about the Chechen wars, as everybody who matters in Russian and Ukrainian politics and foreign affairs does, this would have been an exact parallel to the Khasavyurt peace agreements that ended the first Chechen war and gave Russia a breather to come back and crush Chechnya in the second war a couple years later.
"Everyone seems to agree ..."
Well, my wife tells me I don't get out much.
What kind of deal was it?
Arnold refers to Lorenzo Warby's work as "florid," which according to the Cambridge English Dictionary means too much decoration or detail. The term also has a negative connotation from its usage in medicine to describe an unhealthy complexion. I don't think any of that is what Arnold meant, but rather that Warby's series of essays is a comprehensive analysis of the social psychology of the ideology of the transformational future, or what most people call woke. Helen Dale who is a great fan of Warby, as I am, courteously thanks Arnold in the comments for the reference. Nobody should be put off by the term florid; Warby's work is a superb deep analysis of our sick culture. He intends to put the essay series in book form when finished, which I am eager to see.
I've listened to every podcast wright has put out since the Ukraine invasion, and I don't think at any point he's tried to justify it. He frequently points out that it violates international law, which is his whole schtick.
I updated the post to include an apology
Coincidentally to the theme of post, this would earn you points in a fantasy intellectual league. Thank you for reminding me that not all writers on the Internet are unreasonable.
I’m optimistic that the future of reading will remain very strong with books. Nothing compares to the experience of holding, reading, sharing and marking up a book. Nothing compares to a library; the smell; the quiet; the tranquility.
With a book, everything is there in front of you. It can all be seen, held, shown, and touched. With a book one can say “This is mine.” Books are finite; the experience is finite, even if read multiple times.
LLMs on the other hand are black boxes. We can’t see them. Nor are their contents laid out in front of us all at once. Where does it begin and end? “I finished reading that black box” has a long way to go until it obtains the status of, “I finished reading that book.”
Further...
We can trust a book.
A book doesn’t change.
A book is everything the author wrote in a particular ordering of words.
Books have a slowness and permanence that are hard to compete with.
The beauty of light scattering from dried ink and paper is not something that LLMs can replicate or improve upon.
With that said, LLMs are going to be really useful and really neat.
I still like reading books, also, which is a sure sign they're on their way out.
You’re not seeing the millions of children joyfully reading books like The Indian in the Cupboard and Pinnochio in their classrooms following along with their teacher and discussing the consequences of the protagonists decisions.
Here is a very short list of books that kids love.
The Girl Who Owned a City
Among the Hidden
Little House on the Prairie
Doctor Dolittle
The Chocolate Touch
Wings of Fire
Holes
Yeah, that's possible. My comment was only ~10% serious. I was mainly just poking fun at my own unfashionable tastes and interests.
I do not think it is accurate (or charitable) to say that Robert Wright "wants us to believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is justified." What I think he is saying is that the United Sates government did a number of things it should have known would frighten the Russian government, sometimes things that the Russian government had specifically warned would be considered very bad. And that if the US government had acted differently, going back a decade, there probably wouldn't have been an invasion.
Wright seems okay with the almost surety that this would have involved Ukraine being within the Russian "sphere of influence"--though nowhere near as subservient as Belarus--instead of "part of Europe".
I updated the post to include an apology
Wow. If only more people were like you.
While what you said about Wright may have misrepresented his views (I rarely listen to his podcasts), it is fair to say that most of those who blame Russia's invasion of Ukraine on NATO enlargement were quick to condemn Israel for its response to the atrocities of October 7th. While I have made it clear that I am sympathetic to the view that the US and its allies have deliberately used Ukraine to challenge Russia (as outlined in the 2019 RAND report titled "Extending Russia,"), the fact remains that Russia was not directly attacked before it intervened in Ukraine, whereas Israel was attacked by Hamas on October 7th. That is the critical difference. It irks and sickens me that those who complained about the US ignoring Russia's legitimate security interests turned on a dime in the aftermath of October 7th and starting clucking about Israel's 'war crimes' before it had done anything in response. For that reason, even though I agree with some of their points, I've had it with those who espouse the alternative narrative on Ukraine (eg. Sachs). In my mind, they lost their credibility with their take on Israel's response to the Hamas atrocities.
Thank-you very kindly, Arnold.
Trying to use a justification metric for the two wars presently going on is going to lead one into some very silly places, and into making some very silly decisions. Justification from who's point of view? I understand Russia's point of view with regards to NATO expansion right up to its border, but apparently no one making NATO policy for the last 32 years bothered to try to do so.
If you believe the recent story in the NYTimes about the Ukrainian press gangs, and I do since it is a statement against interest for the NYTimes to print it, then the Ukrainians who have to do the actual fighting and dying don't think the war is worth fighting any longer. Is it moral for us to encourage and enable the Ukrainian government to continue to fight when they have to resort such egregious immoral actions like conscription- literally enslaving young men and sending them to die on the front lines?
In the case of Israel and Gaza, I am sympathetic to the Israelis overall (from my point of view), and if their decision about what is justified from their point of view is to push the Gazans into the Mediterranean Sea or into Sinai, and to push all the West Bank Palestinians into Jordan, then so be it- it is exactly what the U.S. government would do if Gaza were on the California coast. However, I would not offer one bit of additional aid to help the Israelis do this- it is their fight and it should be fought with their own capacity for carrying out whatever policy they choose to implement here.
'All that said, I would not say that the future of writing is substack. Large Language Models change everything. Most readers would love to have one-on-one face time with their favorite writers. That does not work for popular writers, but something close to it becomes possible with LLMs. With these, as an author you can have one-on-one conversations with your readers, at scale. Tyler Cowen’s EconGOAT project provides a glimpse'
Ok, so how does the next generation find their favorite authors? If you understand an author you can usually hit 'what would Cowen think about this' with high accuracy anyway. Having a conversation with him is mostly mood affiliation, and a future world where everything is AI generated responses based on character representations of writers would be not very novel or interesting. It would be like reading the 37th installment of Harry Potter which is actually only enjoyable for a small portion of the fanbase, while what made it popular was its relative novelty and originality.
"Robert Wright, who wants us to believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is justified" – that's so obviously untrue it's worthy of a retraction. He's not only never said that, but goes to great pains to say the opposite (while analysing all the back story in a way that's been both valuable and prescient).
I updated the post to include an apology
👍 Good to see, did seem uncharacteristically off the mark
I think books can still be useful. If you are setting out to make a big change in the way people view the world and you need to put forward a lot of evidence, then a book can be the way to go. As an example, I recommend Joyce Benenson's Warriors and Worriers, which tries to convince you that men and women are actually different in ways that matter (e.g., women more concerned with safety and "getting along").
I really liked Tim Urban's book "What's Our Problem?" Never mind that last I knew it wasn't available on paper. His thinking ladder is really good and the chapter(s) raking progressives over the coals for cancel culture, identity politics, and a few other things is good too. It's kind of a harsher, more detailed version of Haidt.
Despite being an avowed liberal, Monica Guzman's book "I Never Thought of It That Way" present a better way to approach the political divide. I really wish Brighter Angels would become big. Regardless, I captured a couple pages of short quotes and ideas useful in how I approach people on either side.
How do you discover new substacks? I learned about different subs from your posts. That's how I found Helen Dale.
Someone should train a GPT to recommend new Substacks based on your current subscriptions, just to bring the whole thing full circle.
https://twitter.com/KirkegaardEmil/status/1735090151355802011
Emil Kirkegard had this post asking for which combination of Israel/Palestine & Russia/Ukraine you supported. I didn't think "third world enthusiast" (Russia and Palestine) had any supporters, and while its only 14.7% of responders its someone out there. I've never seen someone make the case in argument though.
Cold war boomer (Israel & Ukraine): 47.4%
Derange schizo (Russia & Israel): 28%
Third world enthusiast (Russia and Palestine): 14.7%
Twitter libtard (Ukraine and Palestine): 9.9%
I'm comfortable calling myself a Deranged Schizo, though I'd say I'm more "not be involved in Ukraine" than Russia supporting per se. I support Israel, but I also think they could basically handle it on their own and just think we need to get out of their way.
I dunno, I think ChatGPT has a "Key to All Mysteries" vibe that Casaubon would like.
In any case, the shelves of books are the (only) antidote in case it's not as great as advertised.