I want to keep challenging my biases by reading posts I disagree with.
But I also don’t want to waste my time on nonsense or propaganda.
This week, one of my social-media friends posted a link from a blog I’d never heard of. This particular article claimed Russia is winning its war against Ukraine, and criticized a Western leader for claiming that Russia would lose a war against all of NATO. These observations seemed unlikely to me, but I try not to write blogs off just because I disagree with them. (That’s a good way to trap yourself in an ideological silo.) So I asked myself: What is this blog? Is it a reliable source?
These questions come up all the time, and by now I have a fairly standard technique for answering them. After I finished my assessment — I eventually decided it wasn’t a reliable source — I realized I’d never described the technique to Sift readers. Arguably, the technique is more valuable than the conclusions I draw with it.
The first step is obvious: Read the article in question. If, in addition to the parts I initially disagreed with, it references long-debunked claims and conspiracy theories without acknowledging the arguments that have been made against them, I feel comfortable trashing the article without wasting any more of my time. For example, if you say that voting machines stole the 2020 election from Trump, you need to explain all the states where hand recounts came to the same totals, within the usual error bands of recounts. If you have a believable explanation of that — I can’t imagine what it could be right now, but never mind — I might pay attention.
But suppose the article isn’t that obviously bad. This particular one wasn’t: Its assessment of the Ukraine War was attributed to Polish generals I didn’t recognize. So maybe the author is plugged in to sources I don’t know about, and maybe those sources know something.
So the next step is to look at the front page of the blog or news source. A Japanese proverb says: “When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.” The other articles the source is promoting are the “friends” of the article I’m evaluating. If a bunch of them are obviously nonsense, it’s not a big leap to assume the article I’m assessing is nonsense too.
The day I was looking at it, this blog was still just barely making the cut. (Today it might not. It’s full of glowing assessments of the Durham report, buying into the idea that the whole Trump/Russia thing was a hoax. More about that topic in today’s other featured post.) It had a bunch of other articles about Ukraine being in trouble, which could be legit if the article I was assessing was legit.
The final step is to look back in time. In general, well-constructed propaganda can look pretty good in the moment, but it usually doesn’t age well. The same is true of delusional points of view. In the moment, people can convince themselves of all kinds of things and be pretty persuasive about it.
The Iraq invasion is a good example. Back in 2002-2003, it was far from obvious what a stupid idea this was. Maybe Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction. Maybe the Bush administration really did know things we didn’t. Maybe Iraq was eager for democracy, and even if not, Saddam was such an awful ruler that getting rid of him would create a lot of room for improvement. When Saddam’s army collapsed so quickly, a lot of people wondered why we hadn’t invaded a long time ago. Sure, some contemporary observers saw the folly from the beginning, but a lot didn’t, and not all of them were stupid or crazy.
With twenty years of hindsight, though, hardly anybody defends the invasion any more. Time tends to clear the fog that blinds us to contemporary events.
A simpler and more recent example: A lot of pundits predicted last year (after the Dobbs decision) that voters would forget about abortion by the time the fall elections rolled around. At the time, that claim was hard to assess, but now we can clearly see that it was wrong.
So anyway, if today’s front page is hard to assess, look back six months or a year. That might be easier.
But when you do that, be careful. Because simply finding something the source got wrong isn’t discrediting in itself. We all get stuff wrong, so you will find an excuse to write the source off, if that’s what you’re looking for. If you’re trying to make an honest assessment, though, the process is a little more complicated. Finding a mistake is just the first step.
The point isn’t just to find things the source got wrong, but to see how they responded as events went some other way. What I hope to find is a reaction like Paul Krugman’s: In 2021, Krugman was wrong about the risks of inflation, and then he was slow to recognize how big a problem inflation was becoming. (If you’re looking for an excuse to write Paul off, there it is.) But that mistake bothered him as much as it bothered anyone else. He has written several columns since trying to figure out what led him astray.
In early 2021 there was an intense debate among economists about the likely consequences of the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion package enacted by a new Democratic president and a (barely) Democratic Congress. Some warned that the package would be dangerously inflationary; others were fairly relaxed. I was Team Relaxed. As it turned out, of course, that was a very bad call.
But what, exactly, did I get wrong?
The Ukraine War itself is a good topic to examine, because at the beginning, just about everybody expected Ukraine’s defenses to collapse in a few weeks. A credible military blog might have made that mistake, but then they should have spent the summer reevaluating. It’s possible that by now they might have come back around to the idea that Ukraine will lose (or not). But if they’ve been holding steady on the Ukraine-is-about-to-collapse narrative all year, they’re not credible.
So Krugman is the gold standard, but I’ll give a silver medal to anybody whose mistake made them realize they don’t understand the subject they got wrong, and who subsequently shifted their attention elsewhere. Or maybe they reevaluated and downgraded the sources they got their wrong opinion from.
So, for example, picture a Republican who took Trump’s claims of election fraud seriously at first, but then stopped repeating them when no supporting evidence emerged. They may not ever have acknowledged their mistake in so many words, but they’ve taken steps not to keep doing it, i.e., not just blindly repeating whatever Trump says any more. I’m not going to write that source off forever. On the other hand, if they’re still pushing that stolen-election nonsense today, they’re not worth my time.
So anyway, when I looked back on the past record of the blog in question, I found claims that Trump was framed in both his impeachments, the FBI framed Michael Flynn, the Russians didn’t interfere in the 2016 election, Covid was exaggerated by the Deep State, Dominion voting machines stole the 2020 election from Trump, it was Seth Rich (and not the Russians) who leaked the Clinton campaign emails, Russia has been winning the Ukraine War from the very beginning, and many others.
In short, it was down-the-line pro-Russia pro-Trump stuff, with no acknowledgment that any of those claims hadn’t panned out. So I’m not taking the new claims seriously either.
So that’s the technique: Read the article, then look at the front page, then look back until you find a mistake and see how they handled it.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
Sadly Winston Churchill was correct saying history is always written by the victors – in essence we all have been lied to for 2,500 years, ever since we were told that human history was 6,000 years old, to justify bringing religion to the heathens to conquer the world and it’s indigenous population and their resources.
The past 50 years are no exception and we still don’t know who killed JFK
Winston Churchill never said history is written by the victors.
The rest of us know who killed JFK.
That’s such an ironic comment to add to a post about evaluating online sources.
Well if you know and have proof by all means educate me who killed JFK and RFK as RFK Jr says he “knows” it was CIA? Plausible yes but a little boy Jr certainly no first hand knowledge. Like Bible written by people never at crucifixion.
As to Churchill there are similar quotes both in Italian and French much before Churchill and it’s debated to this day if he did say or not – but I picked these as examples of that truth is not absolute unless proven in a court of law and even then on occasion can later be shown not to have been true.
That’s why science is never settled as science is a journey not a destination.
Schopenhauer said truth comes in three steps first ridiculed then violently attacked and finally self-evident.
We do know who killed JFK. Lee Harvey Oswald killed him, and acted alone. There are over 50 separate pieces of evidence linking Oswald to the crime, and no credible evidence that anyone else was involved.
But with 60 years of contradictory conspiracy theories, along with the outright lies of Oliver Stone’s film “JFK” (which Stone has admitted was a fabrication and a glorification of a theory even other conspiracy theorists find embarrassing), more people are aware of the grassy knoll than the Texas School Book Depository. And today, more people think there was a conspiracy than accept the truth.
I used to do things similarly, but the volume of garbage that flows through social media has made it unsustainable to read that much. Mike Caulfield’s SIFT method, where slowing down and deciding if the source is even trying to be accurate before reading, is closer to my current method. https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/
The risk with this method is that DaVinci would never have been able to convince we live in a solar centric world as all “experts” were on payroll of Catholic Church.
Instead start with common sense like in ideation process. Take discussion about climate change.
Something caused Fleuve Manche floods 13,000 years ago and it was not humans then what caused such CO2 impact on Guif stream.
Before 2023 most of us never heard about glaciers melting from underneath and that 20-70,000 seafloor volcanoes exist many of them near tectonic rifts.
Why did we not hear? Because those with invested interest in human-only caused climate change said debate was over and others were deniers.
Yes human causes is one big component today but was not 13,000 years ago, so why not quantify how big part is caused by seafloor volcanoes.
After all we have no warning system for another major fleuve manche
Ah, there it is … the tell. You had to blame believers in climate change for our collective ignorance about the geologic history of our planet. Could it also be that we simply didn’t have reason to care about the Fleuve Manche floods or volcanoes on the ocean floor until our forests were aflame and affecting our ability to breathe clean air. The science of probability is still science, even if we don’t want to accept its conclusions. The oceans ARE acidifying and the rate of glacial retreat far exceeds anything in the geologic record so far. And these human-influenced changes are changing weather drivers. That has nothing to do with who does or doesn’t believe in human causation of climate changes. It’s entirely believable, based on scientific research, that human activity is amplifying the impact of naturally evolving geological processes. Politics has zero to add to this knowledge base.
Thanks for your enlightening advice on how to sift (pun intended) through the miasma of deception that pollutes our online information environment.
Interesting article, thanks! It reminds me very much of how I evaluate articles sent to me by (sometimes crazy) friends in online political discussions. The best test for me is the who-are-the-article’s-friends approach that you mention, i.e. checking to see what publication the article comes from. Even if the magazine/website/whatever isn’t mentioned, a quick search on representative text can frequently find the article in its originally published context. Often it’s from some hilariously (or tragically) insane right-wing conspiracy-obsessed site, at which point, of course, the wise thing is to be a bit more skeptical.
How can we punish these liars who keep spreading obvious Russian-Republican propaganda? Let’s start by disbarring and jailing the crooked lawyers that bring frivolous suits. Refusing to take cases and appeals that delay justice might also help. Let’s hope that other violent means, while well deserved, can be avoided. Does anyone else see the irony in the country that tracked down BinLadin but is paying to protect the man responsible for the deaths of many thousands of Americans and led a coup in plain view!
how many pundits are so often wrong! why is that ?
also – it was widely known at the time there were no WMD’s in iraq, they had been looking for a decade, those who voted for the war knew they were lying and that the war was illegal- very similar to what Putin is doing in Ukraine
Wasn’t it obvious W saw an opportunity to “finish Daddy’s job” to prove himself to daddy being better than his brother in Florida.
Saudi terrorists funded by Afghanistan common sense not Iraq. Even Hillary voted for it.
Power corrupts all of them.
Obama drew line in Syrian sand against chemical weapons then backed off when had no support. Putin offered to stop these weapons and instead was allowed to take Crimea which is why he felt comfortable going in after Biden was elected but got surprised by influence of Defense and State working together.
When approval of both houses around 30% and incumbents 80 isn’t it clear we are all fooled?
Some of the Democrats who voted for the Iraq War, including Hillary, have stated that they did so in the belief that Bush wasn’t going to actually invade.
Isn’t that nice – we vote to invade when country is in patriotic fury then when it serves better to find excuse “we did not…”
You can’t be half pregnant if you are in power – you are or you are not – this goes for both sides and independent too – it’s called spine or character
I went to the link and sort of worked through the post there along with you as I read your post.
The first thing *I* noticed about the venue was the page banner, with the Punisher skull/American Flag mashup as a sort of logo. Here we see the old saw, “a picture is worth 1,000 words,” in action. By choosing this image, the writer is telling us who he is, and we should not ignore that. The content of this image is glorification of deadly vigilante violence, wrapping itself in the flag and calling itself “patriotism.”
Looking over to the right sidebar, I see that the writer has provided a capsule explanation of why I should care about his views: his purebred ancestry of Revolutionary-era immigrants is what he sees as his main qualification for having opinions that other people might want to know.
Moving on to the content of the post itself, and just reading the text without bothering to check the video it’s supposedly talking about, I see a description of the Polish officer giving a completely uncontroversial description of the state of affairs: Russia is not close to collapse and has the wherewithal to continue the struggle almost indefinitely (with the right management, the Polish general does not add). Ukraine, on the other hand, is in rather dire straits and is dependent on outside help to continue the fight.
That is the alleged blockbuster revelation. There is some kind of implied strawman being burnt here, I suppose, but that does not constitute a “claim that Russia is winning,” nor can it be taken as evidence of such a claim. It probably would be possible to dissect a number of classical fallacies out of the “reasoning” that follows the leap at the beginning of the 4th paragraph, which characterizes the conflict as “NATO’s proxy war against Russia.” It is safe to stop reading right there: the most charitable interpretation of the writer’s stance at that point is that they are a useful idiot for Russian propagandists. I will not rehearse all of the ways that it is incorrect to call the Ukraine War a “proxy fight” between NATO and Russia, but will insist that anyone who tries to make this a NATO/Russia fight is either too ignorant and/or delusional to have an opinion worth respecting, or an agent knowingly propagating disinformation.
In this case, that was a more efficient way to get the same result.
Wade, I’d really appreciate if you could explain how you can tell it’s incorrect to say the Ukraine War is a proxy fight between NATO and Russia. I mean that sincerely.
I read many writers who take the mainstream stance that we’re engaged in a necessary response to Putin’s unprovoked aggression, but I also keep seeing people taking the stance that the US provoked this war intentionally, starting with supporting a coup in Ukraine in 2014 after the then-President of Ukraine, Yanukovych, pulled out of the NATO-friendly “EU Association” agreement. I genuinely don’t know how to determine if one of these narratives is somehow implausible. They both seem internally consistent, so which you believe seems to me depend entirely on which authors you’re predisposed to trust.
Some, like the post Doug analyzed, seem to be amateur puffery, though that post was apparently written by one Mike Crupa, not the purebred guy described in the sidebar, but some seem harder to dismiss.
There seem to be a whole group of relatively well known but no-longer-mainstream writers who subscribe to a very different narrative, in which our support for Ukraine against Russia is a way to drum up business for defense contractors and achieve various geopolitical goals, and the Biden administration sabotaged the NordStream pipeline to keep Germany aligned against Russia (as reported in February by former New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh).
One example is https://denniskucinich.substack.com/p/from-iraq-into-the-abyss in which Dennis Kucinich (who admittedly seems to have taken some bizarre pro-Trump stances since he retired from Congress) compares the folly of our invasion of Iraq after 9/11 (which as Doug points out is much plainer to see now than it was at the time) to our support for Ukraine against Russia now (which has unanimous mainstream support now just like Iraq did in 2003).
Do you believe that Kucinich, Hersh, Chris Hedges, and all the other writers taking the alternative stance must either be Russian agents or have been duped by Russian propaganda? If so, how did you know you’re right?
Unfortunately it’s hard to apply Doug’s evaluation process to Kucinich’s post because his substack only goes back to February, so there’s not much history to refer back to.
Hi, I didn’t mean to blow you off here, but I got separated from the ability to reply for a while.
Your questions betray an ignorance of the events you cite. For example
> but I also keep seeing people taking the stance that the US provoked this war intentionally, starting with supporting a coup in Ukraine in 2014 after the then-President of Ukraine, Yanukovych, pulled out of the NATO-friendly “EU Association” agreement.
What happened in 2014 in Ukraine is known there as “The Revolution of Dignity:” 100,000s of Ukrainians took to the streets to protest the attempt by a Russian puppet to derail the process, then under way for 9 years under multiple legitimate Ukrainian governments, to align more closely with the West.
Now, you *could* call this a “coup,” if you wanted to insist on irrelevancies. Because, according to the dictionary I just looked at, a “coup” is “a sudden, violent, and unlawful seizure of power from a government.”
But in practice, leadership changes of the sort that happened in Ukraine in 2014 are never referred to as “coups.” A “coup,” in common parlance, is the seizure of power by a conspiratorial group. What happened in 2014 was a *popular revolt* by damned nearly the whole people of the country against a person who had revealed himself to be a crook. As an American, what I see in 2014 is the *restoration* of a legitimate government, not an illegal overthrow.
Now I have responded at length to a single sentence of your query. Basically all of the critiques of the moral case for the Western involvement on the Ukrainian side are exactly like this: they are dishonest misrepresentations intended to fool the ignorant. This is the very illustration of the principle, that a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots laced up. There is a kind of bad-faith “participation” in public discourse that consists of spewing dishonest claims so fast that fact-checking is hopeless, and the arguments you are citing are examples of exactly that.
As to whether arms manufacturers will make money from this, that’s a distraction. Of course they will. Arms manufacturers will always make money. The question is not whether it is OK for arms manufacturers to make money from US support of Ukraine, and suggesting that it is, reveals a profound incapacity for moral judgement on the part of the person doing the suggesting.
All post Soviet occupied countries needed time to transition from corrupt Soviet regime to a form of democracy. Ukraine was of highest interest to Putin’s gang, thus took longer.
We were 20 years in Iraq for no reason and in Afghanistan fighting with one hand behind our back supporting a corrupt regime dying for it.
Here their president said “I don’t need a ride I need guns” – we are ready to for our right to join the western civilization.
What else can we ask of them ?
My native Finland 11/30/39 faced exactly the same situation. Mainila fake shots into Russia by stooges of Stalin justifying bombing with fire bombs civilian targets.
First bomb fell on building where my mom – born 1922 – lived with her parents.
Democrat Roosevelt aligned with our attacker – at Yalta he gave away Eastern Europe into slavery until 1991 – only our own Sisu with very few arms killed 250,000 Soviets and we stayed Free.
Patton wanted to end the war by taking Moscow , others after nuking Japan wanted to take out Beijing – as we only had nukes then. Truman said no.
There would be no Xi no Kim no Putin today and Tehran would not be a threat.
Thanks for the response. It seems grounded in “Understanding A” in which the West is striving to oppose unprovoked aggression and reverse illegal occupations by the rogue state of Russia.
There seems to be a whole separate “Understanding B” in which the US is seen as a rogue state that projects its military power in illegal ways all around the world, in which its actions are mainly designed to maintain low-cost access to resources like oil throughout the world and to enrich defense contractors, in which Russia is quite naturally nervous about having opposing military forces close to its borders (as we would be if there were Russian bases in Cuba and Mexico), in which it’s correct of Russia to see the West supporting Ukraine in forming ties with NATO as a form of Western aggression, so Russia is justified in trying to defend itself from that, just as we would likely feel justified in violating the sovereignty of Cuba to expel (hypothetical) Russian forces there.
You’ve probably taken in hundreds of articles/books from mainstream sources like the NY Times, and you’ve come to take Understanding A (U-A) for granted and believe that anyone who doesn’t is just ignorant, and confirmation bias can keep you there: if you see a Ukrainian report that supports U-A, your belief is reinforced; if you see another Ukrainian report that supports U-B, you dismiss it as an outlier or Russian propaganda.
But someone else who mistrusts mainstream sources like the NYT (because of, say, its part in the pro-war-in-Iraq chorus in 2003, which even U-A believers now believe turned out to be based on lies) may have taken in hundreds of articles/books grounded in U-B, and that person would tell you that your comments betray an ignorance of the events you cite, and their confirmation bias would keep them there too.
You essentially answered the question “what does U-A say about U-B?” But you haven’t been in the US and NATO and Ukrainian and Russian war rooms, and you don’t have perfect knowledge of Ukrainian public opinion.
So imagine someone who doesn’t already believe either U-A or U-B but who’s smart and has plenty of time to read both universes of sources. What I want to understand is whether there’s a way for that person to peruse those universes and somehow reasonably deduce that U-A is more or less right and U-B is ignorant/implausible?
Doug’s heuristic of “do they persist in predicting things that don’t happen (without admitting that and then adjusting their understanding)?” is a great start, but while that might permit the dismissal of some writers, I’m not sure if it’s enough to dismiss U-B as a whole.
Some specific questions: have you read Hersh’s allegations (https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream)? If not, do you think it’s reasonable that your sources didn’t even tell you about them? Having read them now, do you believe they’re inaccurate/invented/wrong? If so, how did you conclude that? Or if not, how do they fit in with U-A?
The fact remains that even if you believe the US provoked Russia, the decision to invade was Putin’s alone. Saying otherwise is like the man beating his wife while yelling “look what you make me do!”
Prighozin said what many of us were thinking. Putin’s generals misled him into thinking the invasion would be a cakewalk. The reasons the Russians have given for the war – Ukraine on the verge of joining NATO, “Nazis” killing Russian speakers in the east – were all lies. And now we’re at a stalemate where it’s clear Russia can’t conquer the country, but the Ukrainians can’t push them out, either.
We’ll never know all the details, but the Wagner Group was a major part of Russia’s forces, and if they’re out of the picture, the calculus will change. Of course, pointing this out makes me “deep state.”
You draw a dichotomy between “Understanding A” and “Understanding B” which reveals that you do not understand the world around you. I do not know how to help with that, if you are going to claim that the NYT is untrustworthy because they supported the Ira
I’ll try this again.
You draw a dichotomy between “Understanding A” and “Understanding B” which reveals that you do not understand the world around you. I do not know how to help with that, if you are going to claim that the NYT is “untrustworthy” because they supported the invasion of Iraq. By which you seem to mean that everything the NYT prints is presumptively untrue. You seem to think there is a class of trustworthy complete evidence that is not actually available in the real world. You do have to know some stuff about the world, and you have to develop judgement. Which you seem to have missed somehow.
Your description of “Understanding A” (“in which the West is striving to oppose unprovoked aggression and reverse illegal occupations by the rogue state of Russia”) is in fact a (notice the choice of article: it is a, and not the) basically correct view of the situation. Doubtless there are people involved whose motives involve short-term self-interest of other kinds. But Russia did in fact undeniably (see my previous to you) illegally invade Ukraine and illegally seize territory from Ukraine. The Western response is appropriate for that, for a change.
Now, these facts do not exclude certain truths about “Understanding B.” The US does indeed try to “project military power all over the world,” and sometimes in illegal ways: the whole Administration of GW Bush are basically a gang of war criminals whose actions in Iraq were no more defensible than Putin’s attack on Ukraine. And the US’s projection of military power often has to do with attempting to ensure low-cost access to resources: this in my view was a key reason for the 2003 Iraq invasion.
I would say that such a person is in fact deeply ignorant. Starting with the desire to make that dichotomy between the two understandings.
I am having a hard time finding a way to express just how deeply offensive I find this characterization of my understanding and how I came to it.
I think you have a problem with knowing how to know things, and I am not the person to help you with that. I will not be engaging further.
Well, I really appreciate this. I’m sorry that what I said was offensive. Of course I don’t know you and I was just imagining how it might be that people come to different views. It’s quite true that I don’t know how to know things, and that’s probably the single thing I’d most like to learn.
I mean, I know how to solve a math problem, do a physics experiment, or cook an egg, and how to know when I’ve reached a good understanding of those processes, but when I read divergent views about events where I can’t know all the people involved, I totally don’t know how to know what to believe or trust, and from my perspective (which may well be ignorant compared to yours), I don’t know how to tell who’s right between you saying U-B is based on ignorance and some U-B person saying something dismissive about U-A.
I certainly think most of what the Times prints is accurate, but when it comes to opinion pieces like what it means when Russia invades Ukraine or Biden seems to have bombed the Nordstream, that’s not about accuracy. And unfortunately, when it comes to hot political questions like whether to invade Iraq, it’s clearly not beneath the Times to represent things like US statements about who has what weapons as if they were established facts when, in fact, they’re incorrect.
Doug seems to have a good handle on how to know things, and in this post he articulated some of how he does it, which I greatly admire and learned from. You sound like you know how to know things too, a skill that I think may be much more rare than you seem to think. (I.e., maybe it’s not so much that I’m unusually ignorant as that you have an unusually comprehensive understanding.)
I wonder if it’s a matter of holes in my education. E.g., over the decades I’ve read lots of articles about various bits of history, but I haven’t formally studied history. But from things like David Graeber’s books Debt and The Dawn of Everything, it seems like major aspects of the narratives (as opposed to the facts) that people learn in history and economics are misleading.
So if you’re willing, I’d love if you could say something about how you came to your understanding and how you know that people who seem to have conflicting views are wrong. Are they just more ignorant than you? If so, can someone like me hope to become better informed than someone like Chris Hedges? Are there books or courses you’d recommend to get a better grounded understanding of the political/social world?
I started writing a response from here, and then put it aside, and then picked it up again, and when it got to be 5 pages and 2600 words I threw most of it away, beginning with my reply to that. Which maybe I can take another look at, but for now let’s focus on the question about views on US aid to Ukraine, specifically.
You seem to maybe be a STEM person. Have you really internalized that all scientific knowledge is provisional and tentative? That the models are just models? I mean, really, it’s hard to imagine what evidence would falsify the assertion “the Earth is shaped approximately like a sphere,” but do you really get that theories are the end product of science, and that facts are not part of that universe?
And from there, realize that we really are overclocked apes, whatever else we might be in addition. Our minds are natural phenomena, created ad-hoc by natural selection out of what worked well enough. They are absolutely not instruments designed to detect or produce Truth. The world is under no obligation to make sense to us, and even if it were we do not have infinite time to gather perfect information. We are always working with approximations and models and incomplete information. Yes, we have to use categories and stereotypes to organize what we know and can see, by using categories we create “facts,” but sometimes we choose the wrong categories.
So it is with your “U-A” and “U-B.” The US (or at least some US institutions) absolutely does have hegemonic impulses, if not actual hegemonic ambitions. And the working out of those impulses over the decades has resulted in some considerable hegemony getting created. And yet some of that hegemonic growth has also dovetailed with the interests of the places where it has happened. NATO was very much a US creation, or rather probably nothing like it would have existed were it not for the internationalist tendencies of the US ruling elite at the critical juncture. But it was internationalism, and not hegemonic supremacy, that was the intention of that group.
Now, it is a true statement that in the realm of foreign policy, the United States has never, ever done a single good thing for the outside world without the acquiescence of our owner class. Generally the acquiescence is bought at the price of allowing them to turn a profit somehow. But is it necessary, for an act to be a good one, that the intentions of everyone involved must have been absolutely pure? I think confusion on this point might be at the root of a lot of bad reasoning by people who like to read Graeber.
Let’s rewind a bit:
First, look at “Understanding A.” Is it true, or is it not true, that there are Russian military personnel conducting combat operations on Ukrainian national territory, in the absence of any authorization for such operations under international law?
I submit that it is absolutely a true statement, that there are currently Russian military personnel conducting combat operations on Ukrainian national territory, in the absence of any authorization under international law. And because this is absolutely a true statement, referring to the illegal occupation by Russia of Ukrainian territory as an “understanding” is to attempt to be deceptive. Describing the true state of affairs in this way is an attempt to demote the fact to an opinion. It is, not to put too fine an edge on things, a lie.
Already, “Understanding B” should be highly suspect: why set up the truth as a lie, unless you plan to try to swap a lie for the truth? Or, IDK, maybe attempt some kind of “two wrongs make a right” moral false equivalency? But let’s look at it:
Is the US a “rogue state that projects its military power in illegal ways all around the world?” Well, yes. In my lifetime, US Presidents have lied the country into foreign wars twice. The whole gang of the GW Bush Administration are absolutely war criminals. And the US Government will never, ever admit that. The US has established garrisons from one side of the world to the other, sometimes with the gratitude of the garrisoned but more often there has been friction over that. I suppose we need to look at that run-on list after all.
…in which its actions are mainly designed to maintain low-cost access to resources like oil throughout the world and to enrich defense contractors,
Low-cost access to oil was absolutely a consideration in the decision to illegally invade Iraq, in my view. Though rather than some crude theft of oil, I picture it more as an attempt to have a client State on top of an oil supply that could defang OPEC by always just pumping oil 24/7 at max capacity and dumping it on the market no matter what the price.
…in which Russia is quite naturally nervous about having opposing military forces close to its borders (as we would be if there were Russian bases in Cuba and Mexico), in which it’s correct of Russia to see the West supporting Ukraine in forming ties with NATO as a form of Western aggression,
Whoa, whoa, whoa there! That’s quite a huge leap! If joining NATO is a form of aggression, peaceful existence is simply not possible! All behavior (other than pre-emptory surrender) is aggressive, if you insist on that. You have just written a license for unrestrained war of all against all, always! Also, bullshit! “Joining NATO” is absolutely not the equivalent of the US building bases in Ukraine. There are US bases in some NATO countries, and US forces based at own country bases in others, but alliance membership is not the same as basing US garrisons. And also, notice how that “hostile” characterization got slipped in there? NATO is only “hostile” if you attack it.
… so Russia is justified in trying to defend itself from that, just as we would likely feel justified in violating the sovereignty of Cuba to expel (hypothetical) Russian forces there.
And with this you reach actual “What the fuck are you going on about?” levels of ranting. I mean, what the actual fuck?
When the Russians first illegally invaded Ukraine, in 2014, there were no foreign troops in Ukraine. Ukraine was not imminently about to join NATO. They had asked to join NATO earlier and were told, not just “no,” but “HELL no!” And when the Russians doubled down on their illegal invasion in 2022, there were still no foreign troops in Ukraine, and if Ukraine was closer to NATO than in 2013, the Russians had no one to blame for that but themselves. So you must admit, this accusation is completely off the rails. Bugfuck crazy. You could only say something like this if you were counting on your listeners to not be really listening.
Let me step back from this for a moment and confess my own thinking about Ukraine in the years 1994-2022: They were right in the beginning to turn the nukes back over to Russia, because trying to keep them would have been a poisoned chalice. The nukes were useless as nukes to Ukraine: they could have been mined for fissionable material to make new, Ukrainian-built nukes, but that path would have been long and expensive, and going that way would have forfeited them any goodwill from the West. Likely they would already have been resorbed by Russia long since, had they tried that.
In the ‘90s I mostly opposed NATO expansion, because I did not see the West as really being willing to use Article V for the easternmost former Warsaw Pact countries. Poland and Czechoslovakia (as it still was in those days) seemed defensible enough, but the Baltics? And Ukraine wasn’t even a Warsaw Pact State, it was a former Russian Province. I mean, yes, there was Ukrainian nationalism, and they tried for independence after WWI, and they got punished really hard for that under Stalin. But I had a hard time seeing the West really banding together to defend it against Russia. I expected eventually Russia would get its shit together under a competent revanchist leader and eventually reoccupy the less-defensible (from the West) parts of its former Empire. And the 2014 invasion seemed to mostly bear out the wisdom of that.
But we are talking real-world events, to which Realpolitik must adjust if it is to remain Real. What happened in 2022 is that the Russians fucked up. They expected the Ukrainian armed forces to be completely ineffective, and so they sent an ineffective attack of their own, committed most of their Army, and showed their ass in the worst way. They not only illegally invaded, they didn’t finish the job. If the Russians had either not invaded Ukraine further in 2022, or if they had done so with a force three times the size with adequate logistic support so that they could have won, we would not be talking about Ukraine anymore at all, probably.
In the real world the Russians committed the unforgivable faux pas of an unsuccessful illegal attack on a neighbor, and in so doing have kicked over a whole beekeeper’s yard full of beehives. They have gotten all of Western Europe so agitated at them that Sweden sent lethal offensive weapons to Ukraine. FFS Sweden has abandoned its neutrality to join NATO. Germany is retooling its national energy supply away from Russian supplies, as is everybody else to points West of them. Reluctance of the allies to come to Ukrainian aid suddenly is not a problem, or a far smaller one than anyone would have anticipated even two years ago.
So, the right thing to do is, not to try to come to some cosmic moral judgment, but to project what kind of world do you want to see after the fighting is done: one where Russia got away with an illegal annexation of a neighbor, or one where they tried that, it failed, and they got punished for it, in a way that both prevents them from attempting similar tricks again soon and also serves as a warning to other potential aggressors (we’re looking at you, China). A world where defense contractors didn’t make any money off the events is not on the table, sorry.
I hope I have made it obvious that arguments opposed to support for Ukraine are morally imbecilic, though I haven’t responded to questions about Hedges &c, and had to drop a longish bit on Graeber.
That’s one of the best summaries I’ve seen so far. The Russia apologists seem to have forgotten the rhetoric at the beginning of the invasion – Russia was going to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, it was going to get rid of Zelensky, Ukrainian children would be forced to speak only Russian for a generation until Ukraine no longer existed as a culture, let alone a country. Now, Russia more or less has control of the Donbas, and lo and behold, that was their objective all along. Everything else is down the memory hole.
We need to keep the focus on the facts – that the invasion is illegal under international law. If Putin was concerned about the mistreatment of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, he should have gone to the U.N. first and asked for an international coalition to address this claimed injustice.
People of Mexican descent, especially recent immigrants and Spanish speakers in the southwest U.S. often suffer discrimination. And that part of the country used to be part of Mexico. I wonder how these Russia apologists would react if Mexico invaded Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas on the same pretext Russia used to justify its invasion of Ukraine.
FDR at Yalta allowed 60 million people into a Soviet slavery and in Finland they knew and killed 250,000 commies – Empire builder Fascist russian Stalin Putin same bastards
Nordstream funded the war
Are you suggesting that at the end of World War Two, we should have declared war on the USSR? Your understanding of Yalta is as deficient as your understanding of the Winter War and the current Ukraine conflict.
Chamberlain was naive thinking giving the beast the Sudetenland to ravish would stop this monster as we saw when Poland and Finland were attacked by Stalin and Hitier 1939.
FDR was likewise naive in partnering with Stalin supplying war machinery instead of strategically seeing Stalin as a bigger enemy like Communist China Xi is now is bigger enemy than Putin.
After Truman Nuked Japan, we were only one with an advantage over both Communist China / North Korea and USSR, who relied on our military material supply.
Patton and McArthur both advocating completing the job while we had troops on the ground and these advantages.
Instead at Yalta against Churchill’s recommendations, the Iron Curtain drafted by FDR and Stalin put 60 million people into slavery – one of them the mother of my children born in Latvia.
Today both Xi and Putin have nukes – are we better off?
Great Britain was not prepared to take on Hitler in 1939. His acquiescence to Hitler’s demands was the best he could do to buy time for Great Britain to re-arm.
There was no appetite for a land invasion of the USSR by the U.S. in 1946, and nuking a country that had been an ally up to that time would have been a war crime. Nuking China would have been unthinkable. Hindsight is 20/20, but there was no way to prevent Russia or China from developing nukes. The fact that we didn’t use them indiscriminately after they had been used to end the war set the stage for nuclear weapons to be viewed as a last resort. This undoubtedly contributed to them not being used offensively since their first use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Great Britain was not prepared to take on Hitler in 1939. His acquiescence to Hitler’s demands was the best he could do to buy time for Great Britain to re-arm.
WHY HAD HE NOT MADE SURE LONG BEFORE 1938 AFTER FIRST HITLER ACTION TO BUILD UP DEFENSE?
There was no appetite for a land invasion of the USSR by the U.S. in 1946, and nuking a country that had been an ally up to that time would have been a war crime.
AN APPETITE ? A LEADER LEADS NOT FOLLOW POLLS AS COUNTRY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN GETTING RE-ELECTED!
Nuking China would have been unthinkable.
A VISIONARY LEADER WOULD HAVE DISARMED UNDER THREAT OF NUKING AND NOW WE FACE NUCLEAR WAR INSTEAD OF JAPAN TYPE CIVILIZED CHINA AND RUSSIA!
Hindsight is 20/20, but there was no way to prevent Russia or China from developing nukes. OH YES SEE JAPAN NO NUKES!
The fact that we didn’t use them indiscriminately after they had been used to end the war set the stage for nuclear weapons to be viewed as a last resort.
YOU ARE RATIONALIZING – MUST BE LESS WORRIED ABOUT THE TACTICAL RUSSIAN NUKES STARTING ESCALATION.
This undoubtedly contributed to them not being used offensively since their first use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
AGAIN RATIONALIZING – ECONOMY OF RUSSIA OR CHINA WE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN WITHOUT DEMANDING DEMOCRATIC ELECTIONS, ONLY ENABLED THEM TO BUILD UP STRENGTH TO CHALLENGE 10 YEARS AGO
Yeah, too bad Chamberlain hadn’t thought ahead that far. Is it possible the UK had other priorities in the 1930s besides building up its military? People still remembered the First World War as a meat grinder and weren’t eager to prepare for another one.
FDR wasn’t concerned about re-election. He was concerned about what was best for the country. Americans were ready to settle down and rebuild their lives, not enter into a new war with the USSR. Also, he wasn’t a dictator. Congress wouldn’t have gone along with a new war to end communism, at least not in 1946.
It’s easy to criticize past leaders when you’re tendentiously simplfying the situations they faced. How would we have prevented the USSR and China from getting nukes? Conquering and occupying them – forever? And how do we demand “democratic elections?” We haven’t accomplished that in North Korea, Vietnam, or Afghanistan, despite being bogged down in those countries for years. Saying we should have forced that in the much larger USSR and China is mind-boggling in its ignorance.
That was completely nonresponsive. You got asked a question that could have been answered “yes” or “no,” and instead you typed 149 words of screed. And answered with an irrelevant question of your own. Why would anyone treat you as anything but a crank?
Attacking as crank only shows you were out of arguments and it was uncalled for. Fine to agree to disagree.
Here’s a recent article by Chris Hedges that lays out the “Understanding B” view on Ukraine pretty concisely with lots of links:
It even includes a part where Hedges seems to be applying Doug’s heuristic: if people keep making predictions that don’t come true and don’t explain how their thinking was wrong, you should question their seriousness:
“Wasn’t the Russian military — because of poor morale, poor generalship, outdated weapons, desertions, a lack of ammunition that supposedly forced soldiers to fight with shovels, and severe supply shortages — supposed to collapse months ago? Wasn’t Putin supposed to be driven from power? Weren’t the sanctions supposed to plunge the ruble into a death spiral? Wasn’t the severing of the Russian banking system from SWIFT, the international money transfer system, supposed to cripple the Russian economy? How is it that inflation rates in Europe and the United States are higher than in Russia despite these attacks on the Russian economy?”
Does he make any factual misstatements, or is there some other way to show that his views are mistaken or unreasonable?
I also read “Understanding A” articles like:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-7-2023
suggesting that Russia is “bound to be defeated” and they also seem reasonable. It’s like there are two separate universes where people can have completely different seemingly well-founded understandings of the same events.
This is so confusing! And when I try to talk with people on either side about how they know that the other side is mistaken, they dismiss me as naive for even asking. At least Hedges pointed out some of the predictions from Understanding A people that didn’t pan out. The U-A people often don’t seem to know the U-B view even exists.
Here’s a recent article by Chris Hedges that lays out the “Understanding B” view on Ukraine pretty concisely with lots of links:
It even includes a part where Hedges seems to be applying Doug’s heuristic: if people keep making predictions that don’t come true and don’t explain how their thinking was wrong, you should question their seriousness:
“Wasn’t the Russian military — because of poor morale, poor generalship, outdated weapons, desertions, a lack of ammunition that supposedly forced soldiers to fight with shovels, and severe supply shortages — supposed to collapse months ago? Wasn’t Putin supposed to be driven from power? Weren’t the sanctions supposed to plunge the ruble into a death spiral? Wasn’t the severing of the Russian banking system from SWIFT, the international money transfer system, supposed to cripple the Russian economy? How is it that inflation rates in Europe and the United States are higher than in Russia despite these attacks on the Russian economy?”
Does he make any factual misstatements, or is there some other way to show that his views are mistaken or unreasonable?
I also read “Understanding A” articles, such as Heather Cox Richardson’s August 7, 2023 post suggesting that Russia is “bound to be defeated” and they also seem reasonable. It’s like there are two separate universes where people can have completely different seemingly well-founded understandings of the same events.
This is so confusing! And when I try to talk with people on either side about how they know that the other side is mistaken, they dismiss me as naive for even asking. At least Hedges pointed out some of the predictions from Understanding A people that didn’t pan out. The U-A people often don’t seem to know the U-B view even exists.
He’s right. Most US media got it wrong at the beginning of the war. But Putin got it wrong, too. Weren’t Russian tanks supposed to be in the streets of Kyiv after 3 days? It’s easy to tell your boss that everything is working perfectly if you aren’t actually testing anything. Biden probably had better intel on the Russian military than Putin did.
Shoigu recently admitted that the invasion was a mistake. But Putin can’t back down, at least not yet. He may be waiting to see if a Republican is elected president next year and our military aid to Ukraine stops. And for whatever reason, despite the fact that the main thing keeping Ukraine going is US military aid, Putin is willing to pretend that this isn’t a proxy war. The alternative would be to admit that Russia is at war with the US, which he clearly doesn’t want to do.
We could go back and forth forever on this. I clicked on that link that you pointed at, saw
and noped right out. Anything that purports to be an analysis of defense or foreign policy issues that starts out with that kind of verbiage is just guaranteed to be a time-waster. This is a composition by someone who does not want you using your head.
Don’t read polemics by people who don’t want you to use your head, for starters.
Also,
I don’t know of anybody except ignorant loudmouths who though that any of those outcomes were plausible. The smart money has always been on “Russia can crush Ukraine if they really want to, and can stop stepping on their own dick.” It’s the fact that they literally seem incapable of that last that leaves any hope at all for independent Ukraine, that and the entirely unexpected unanimity of the Western European allies.
Thanks again, Wade. I completely get your first whole section about science and the nature of theories. No, of course it’s not necessary for intentions to be pure in order for an act to be good.
But it’s also not necessary for an action to be legal for it to be reasonable. International law is based on a division of the world into nations that was established in ways not everyone agreed with. I don’t know much about Crimea, but if it’s true, as some seem to think, that many of the people in Crimea consider themselves Russians, why should Russia accept a national boundary separating them from part of their people? We’re part of a strong set of global alliances, so international law largely serves us, but countries in a more tenuous position, such as Russia, may see those laws as illegitimate. In general, I prefer attempts to find solutions that account for everyone’s perspectives and interests rather than relying on laws that create somewhat arbitrary losers.
So yes, of course it’s true that Russia is attacking Ukraine in violation of international law. I don’t think what I’m calling U-B people would dispute that.
They’d just say that regardless of that, Russia’s actions are understandable and reasonable and were intentionally provoked by US moves to foster Ukraine’s ties with NATO.
By referring to the illegal occupation of Ukraine by Russia as an “understanding” I don’t mean to suggest that it’s not really illegal. I just mean that the judgement implied in that wording (“illegal occupation”), namely that this is appalling and unacceptable, is based in a wider understanding of world events, and that there exist a lot of U-B people who don’t seem to share that wider understanding.
And I think that wider understanding largely comes from differing interpretations of motives rather than differing ideas about facts (though probably the latter comes into it too, e.g., it may be that most U-A people are ignorant or dismissive of Hersh’s Nordstream allegations).
You make good points that NATO’s existence doesn’t equate to aggression, and we haven’t put a base in Ukraine, so it’s not equivalent to a Russian base in Cuba. I’m sorry, there, I was trying to paraphrase my impression of what I’ve seen U-B people say. I’m not sure whether they would really make that equivalence, and if they do, that would be a point against them. And I appreciate your point that there are elements of what motivates U-B people (e.g., knowing that the US has led a lot of inappropriate military adventures too) that are true but quite compatible with U-A.
Great thanks for the whole latter section with your analysis of Ukraine’s history. It largely makes sense and helps me understand what’s going on. The problem with the news is they only tell you what’s new and don’t often provide this kind of context.
So may I quote what I’d define as an actual U-B person and ask for your perspective? Your story of Ukraine here (besides the history of their nukes) starts in 2014 with “when the Russians first illegally invaded Ukraine…” and you claim that Ukraine was not imminently about to join NATO.
I’m worried you’ll think I’m being dumb or something, but it’s hard for me to know what to think of that when that article I linked to earlier by Dennis Kucinich says:
“It is critical to remember that in 2013, then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a NATO-inspired military agreement, in the guise of economic reform and EU association, that was aimed at severing Ukraine’s connections with Russia, and advancing a western geo-political agenda.
“The West exploited the desperation of Ukrainians whose average monthly minimum wage was then about $150, violently propelled protests with the help of Right Sector and Svoboda parties, and ousted Yanukovych in a pro-western coup. Ukrainians thus became pawns in an international power struggle catalyzed with the help of Biden, Blinken, Nuland and Sullivan.
“Now, in the White House and suspected of colluding to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines, President Biden, National Security Adviser Sullivan, Secretary of State Blinken and Undersecretary of State Nuland are positioning the U.S. to pivot from the proxy war with Russia.
“Ukraine will be abandoned so the U.S. can prepare for war with China by 2025.”
(I don’t know where he gets the idea that our next move would be war with China, but it’s an idea I’ve also seen other U-B people, including Daniel Ellsberg, talk about as if it’s plain to them.)
I’m not sure how much Kucinich’s claims could be refuted factually. How many Ukranians were happy to see Yanukovych go? How much influence did the West have in Yanukovych’s ouster? What was the West’s game plan Re: Ukraine’s future with NATO, and was it reasonable of Russia to fear for its well-being if Ukraine was allowed to form closer ties with NATO? Would Russia have been content staying completely out of Ukraine if Yanukovych had stayed in power?
Can these things be objectively established in a way no one could reasonably dispute? If you have one set of answers to these questions and could cite references to back them up, do you think someone like Kucinich would accept those sources and rethink his ideas, or would he be able to cite other sources backing his narrative? If the latter, how can I tell if he’s somehow being blind to the truth vs. just having different assumptions about what’s going on in the minds of people none of us know? It sounds like you know a lot more about this than me, so if you have further insights on these questions, I’m all ears.
Finally, please do share your thoughts on Graeber some time!
The universal acceptance of Russia’s invasion of Crimea may have sent the signal that the wholesale invasion of Ukraine would be greeted with the same indifference. You are correct that Putin apologists may admit that the invasion was illegal, while attempting to justify it on other grounds. However, I haven’t seen any justification that wouldn’t also apply to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the second Gulf War, which most people (former supporters included) are calling a mistake today.
As for Russia wanting a land connection to Ukraine, Kaliningrad is already a Russian enclave, and I’m not aware of any demands on Russia’s part for Poland or Lithuania to provide a land connection to it. If they can live without one there, they can live without one to Crimea, which has a bridge linking it to Russia, unlike Kaliningrad.
I started a response to this and left it for a longish while. I’m not going to promise that it is completely coherent. In my defense, I have not decided that I really believe you to be a seeker for insight and not some kind of troll. For what it’s worth:
I would prefer to avoid any discussion of Crimea. My stance, if that is not clear, is that of Realpolitik tempered with some ethics, where it is possible to have those under Realpolitik. The fate of Crimea is currently being kept extremely vague, among Western allies, for very good reasons. My personal opinion is that I would be somewhat surprised to see Ukraine wind up with possession of it. But OTOH the Russian claim is based on pure lapsed Imperial right of force, so it’s murky.
Be that as it may, the case we have been discussing up to this point completely ignores the status of Crimea in its focus on the historical core parts of Ukraine on the European mainland.
The aid the Ukrainians are currently getting from the West is aimed at driving Russians off from the parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson that they currently occupy. If Ukraine succeeds at that (a really, really big “if”), then they will be holding a knife to Crimea’s throat, and it is a good question whether they will have Western backing if they try to use it. I will call out further mentions of Crimea as off-topic, possible attempts to change the subject to avoid engaging the argument.
With respect to the remainder of that paragraph, from “why should Russia accept…” onwards, Russia would accept it at gunpoint. That’s how these things work. You might prefer to find solutions that leave nobody pissed off, but sometimes that’s not on the table. The system of laws that’s being objected to here is just that you should not make unprovoked war on your neighbors and try to annex their territory like you were some medieval King enlarging your Kingdom. The fact that it is honored more in the breach than in the observance does not make it wrong or worthless to try enforcing it, when the opportunity arises.
Then there are a few paragraphs from you, about “Understanding B people” and how, well, they just don’t agree with that.
I cannot look into the souls of those people and uncover their reasons for talking like that. But the whole previous missive from me was a demonstration that their talk on this subject is just comprehensively wrong. It has no more force or significance than the barking of a dog, when it comes to understanding whether or not it is morally and politically right for the Western allies to support Ukraine against Russia. You can stop worrying about it now. Unless there was some part of the demonstration that you did not understand. Remember, you will never have perfect information, and you have only finite minutes in your life to understand this one thing and all the other things you will ever understand.
Let me try this one more time. You are using “Understanding A” and “Understanding B” as shorthand values for some variables, basically. Let us expand the values of those variables and use them in some of your sentences.
“Understanding A” means “people who acknowledge the fact that Russia is currently engaging in an unprovoked invasion and occupation of Ukraine.” “Understanding B” means “people who refuse to acknowledge that the Russian actions in Ukraine are unprovoked aggression.”
People who refuse to acknowledge that the Russian actions in Ukraine are unprovoked aggression of course will argue special pleading that it’s OK for them to have done that, and that other powers ought not to interfere. But there were no US moves to foster US ties with NATO. Ukraine was attempting to move politically and economically into the orbit of the EU, and they wanted NATO membership. But none of that is an argument that it was OK for Russia to invade, or that others should stand back and let that happen without consequence.
You keep bringing up these quibbles about things that are attempts at distraction from the basic question, was it OK for Russia to invade Ukraine and should the US and NATO allies refrain from opposing Russia in this. If it was OK for Russia to invade Ukraine, in particular if it was OK for them to continue the attack in 2022, then it is OK for Russia to attack anybody, anywhere, anytime. Because the supposed extenuating reasons are not actually extenuating reasons.
I mentioned Realpolitik above. What does Realpolitik suggest about Russian intentions and motivations? Basically, that the foreign policy of Russia can be expected to have considerable continuity with that of the USSR and the Russian Empire before that. In particular we should expect there to be factions that advocate for restoration of Russian sovereignty over all of the former lands of the Empire. This is what is called “revanchism.” That is to say, the chief Russian motivation in this case is so common that there is actually a generic name for it in the language of diplomacy. Sore-loser syndrome, in other words.
“Continuity with the policies of the USSR and the Empire” also implies some things about how the Russians approach relations with peer Powers, though in truth they are no longer that powerful related to the West. For a basic treatment of that topic, I refer you to the memoirs of George F. Kennan. The short version is, you should not expect Russian spokespeople to have even the most basic respect for the truth, if they think it’s their mission to present things otherwise.
As for why people like Hersh and Kucinich and Hedges take the lines they do, I’m in no position to explain that. There is a well-documented human tendency, that when people become disillusioned with something they strongly believed in, they attempt to compensate by basically assuming the opposite of everything they used to believe. I have not paid close enough attention to any of the things any of them have been saying to respond in more detail. Because the whole argument is basically already answered by picking apart the the supposed “Understanding A” and “Understanding B,” namely that the former is the plain statement of the reality of the situation and the latter is various kinds of special pleading and distraction. Just knowing the basic facts about the history of the situation is enough to dismiss them.
I mean, basic facts about the history: Is Britannica a trustworthy source for you? Do take a look at their article on the Maidan Protest movement for a basic outline of the events that preceded the first Russian invasion. The whole characterization of events in Ukraine that you keep talking about is pure fabrication. What actually happened is that Russia successfully interfered in Ukrainian politics to turn a Ukrainian President into a puppet, the puppet took actions contrary to Ukrainian interests, as broadly understood by the Ukrainian people, and in favor of Russia, in contravention to the actions of successive legitimate Ukrainian Governments, and the whole people revolted in response to throw him out and reverse his deeds. This narrative is not subject to dispute based on good faith differences of opinion between well-informed people. You really should ask yourself questions about the motives of people who insist on talking about these events as a “coup.” I think that answers your question toward the end about Kucinich.
I guess if I have one suggestion on how to figure this out, it’s “educate yourself on the history of the situation” and by that I don’t mean read Wikipedia articles. Go find out what the syllabus for a 300-level college history course on the topic would look like, and read that. Go read Conquest’s “The Great Terror” and Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” for some background on how Ukraine was treated under Stalin, and read about how World War One ended on the Eastern front, and how the USSR came to be in control of the territories that were internationally recognized by 1930, for some insight about Ukrainian nationalism before Communism, and maybe check up on internal tensions among components of the Russian Empire in the late 19th century.
You can’t do this for every single controversy that comes along, but hopefully it’s not an exercise you have to repeat a lot of times before you are able to recognize right away that there are some arguments that you don’t need to waste your time looking at, because you recognize the smell.
Oh, and with respect to Hersh and Nordstream, that did make enough of a splash that I saw it, and it just seemed kooky. My own thinking at the time was “It sure is the sort of thing where you’d expect the perp to be somebody who really wants to make sure the Germans don’t buy any more gas from Russia after all,” (this was after the Germans announce a boycott) and the obvious suspect was Ukraine, but nobody thought they had the technical chops to pull it off. Well, it turns out that part was wrong, as we find out from the Discord Leaker. The Ukrainians did in fact have the chops to pull it off, and presumably there will be some kind of accounting someday.
I happen to be reading a paper right now about the ways that think tanks and research centers establish and signal credibility. The authors describe the ways each reader arrives at their own “credibility judgment” using a combination of “systematic processing” (evaluating the message and the source, as you are describing, which takes more time and mental effort) and “heuristic processing” (the mental shortcuts we depend on to do most of our evaluative work). It’s “De-Constructing Credibility” by Andrea Baertl Helguero, On Think Tanks Working Paper 4, https://medium.com/@info_92670/de-constructing-credibility-722ade1f731b
There’s another reason those such as Krugman get a mile of consideration and deferment whereas some anonymous, breathless conspiracy nut who manages to figure out how to post somewhere on the Internet gets nothing: he’s not only won the Nobel in economics, but the even more prestigious John Bates Clark Medal as well.
That doesn’t automatically make him right about any given opinion or forecast he might have, of course. But it does signal that his body of professional work is considered to have achieved the highest standards over time, so we best pay attention to what he has to say, even if down the road a specific correction is in order or, after careful review of accumulated FACTUAL evidence we arrive at a differing opinion.
The problem with contemporary media is that the ability for anyone to instantaneously publish, including non-humans, has destroyed the gatekeeping function of expertise and opened the floodgates of lies, propaganda, and nonsense, making it far more challenging to extract signal from overwhelming, suffocating noise. I, for one, appreciate your efforts and contributions toward improving that ratio.
Alfred Nobel’s father was called by the French press “merchant of death” because he had arms factories in St Petersburg Russia supporting the Dictator Tsar who had slavery laws until 1853 and sold slaves to Iran and Turkey. Alfred invented dynamite and continued in his fathers footsteps and after that article he white washed the Nobel name and assigned it to Norway to rule as his own country that had lost Finland to Russia did not like him continuing trading with the enemy.
Like an old version of Putin and his supporters.
I guess if your ancestor was 1727 colonized and then enslaved the “Nobel Blood Price” of Krugman does not make him as glorious as others seem to think.
Common sense says if current law of federal debt limit is not increased 13-14% must be allocated of budget to service that debt obligation. Then entitlements like SS must be covered and there will be less money to spend for other things President wants to do. It does not mean automatically US fails on its debt obligations only if President refuses to pay.
Ask Krugman and he will reluctantly agree as that’s how the numbers prove regardless of if the “expert” has Nobel blood price or not.
Clearly this current or future presidents do not want a balanced budget limiting them politically but that’s what economically is sound in an economic sense.
Yes, let’s ask Paul Krugman. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/opinion/government-debt-deficit.html
“The point is that in the early 2010s, the last time we faced a potential crisis over the debt ceiling, there was an elite consensus that budget deficits were a severe, even existential threat. This consensus was, in retrospect, completely wrong.”
Between your appalling level of ignorance regarding fiscal policy and the fact that federal spending is nothing like a family’s personal budget and all the other blather you’ve swamped the replies to this blog with that call into question your attachment to reality, you’re exactly the noise drowning out the signal I’m talking about. And it needs to stop. This is not the place for whatever your agenda is.
Deficits ARE indeed threats – no matter how much you try to deflect implying they are not by attacking me personally.
France is a great example. Any country can’t default on paying its debt nor default on paying its retirement obligations. Moody and other services effectively set the price any government has on borrowing and the weaker the economy the higher the risk and cost of borrowing. This reality resulted in France in changing the rules of retirement and resulted in riots and some people dying.
Canada some years ago showed how maximum point of taxing people was reached by increased % reducing net receipt of government income from taxes as more payers shifted over to being receivers of benefits.
Effective use of limited resources for best results is law of economics – how then to share into the results is a political decision.
Confusing these two is why inflation appears and central banks use interest rates to reduce them – always hurting most the poorest living from paycheck to paycheck.
Politically maybe attractive to have more people depend on government but economically its better with more payers and less users.
Deficits are a threat to entities that borrow and promise repayment in currencies they do not create. Households, corporations, state and local governments, Eurozone governments, and governments that want or need things that are not available in the local economy do that. The US Government does not. Absent sabotage by ignoramuses and ideologues in Congress, there is no threat, to us or to our children and grandchildren.
The president cannot unilaterally decide what congressional budget appropriations to fund and which ones to ignore, except in extremely limited circumstances such as Trump diverting military housing construction funds to the wall. Biden can’t just say he will stop funding one department just to keep Social Security going. The debt ceiling sets up a constitutional crisis, where on one hand, the government is obligated to spend money that Congress appropriated, while not borrowing above the arbitrary debt limit. To comply with the 14th Amendment, Biden must violate either one of those laws, or the other. Or, he can mint a trillion dollar coin and deposit it in the Treasury, or issue consol bonds, or perform some other accounting trick.
I hope he’s made this clear to McCarthy that he’s willing to do one of these to avoid default if McCarthy refuses to negotiate. In the end, I don’t think McCarthy wants a default on his watch, either. But it does benefit him to say “we tried to work with Biden, but he decided to break the law instead” as that will go over well with his low-information base. They can then have a performative impeachment and everyone’s happy.
Yes of course I said Biden referring to total administration .
Every politician makes decisions not on altruism but on desire to be liked enough to be elected or cheered – another reason for term limits as running for posterity brings out more truth
14th only triggers courts involvement and nobody benefits
Small increase but balancing after ten years and give and take between them should do it and more important put on track towards reduction in spending and balanced budget
I sincerely think getting to center point support by 65% of Americans through compromise better than this
By the way, I was responding to Wade there, not to Pt.
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