Comment by igorkraw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by igorkraw | Hacker News Reader

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Okay, so what is your take on the issues GP identified? Or is the only conclusion you can arrive at "it's complicated"?

GP made the very salient point that some things are clearly bad. Blind clinging to the idea that everything has two sides is just as simplistic as thinking everything can be viewed from a perspective which is just as moral as every other. Except maybe even more so, because at least the moral simplicity of black and white forces us to show flag instead of hiding in "neutrality".

Nihilism, strong moral relativism and contrarianism without a constructive goal are lazy pseudo intellectual positions that do not serve any constructive purpose (be it insight or improvement of the material world) and serve only as deflections and comfort arguments.

And for those that disagree with me: I'd love to hear where and why I'm wrong about thinking "Putin and other authoritarian strong men are worse than democratically elected politician" and "there are degrees of corruption, and the west is less corrupt than Russia". Because I've got evidence for these beliefs (the industrial output of Russia and Putin's palace being only two data points). What's yours?

"The west probably could have avoided (or maybe just delayed) this war if they had taken steps X" is some the nuance you could add to your statements.

Simple example of X would be stating Ukraine was never going to be part of NATO.

More complicated example would be if Europe prioritized energy independence from Russia putting in a weaker position. An example that loops in nuclear power debate, one which likely could have been manipulated (see other threads around Reddit bots in addition to twitter bots) by the Russians themselves to achieve that end.

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Russian being the bad guy doesn't make conflict inevitable. And if it does, then we're probably just buying time until full scale nuclear war within the next century and none of this actually matters.

> Simple example of X would be stating Ukraine was never going to be part of NATO

What makes you certain that this was going to prevent the invasion? Russia gave a number of pretexts for the invasion, some unrelated to NATO: De-nazification of Ukraine, protecting Russian-speakers within Ukraine, among many others.

> Russian being the bad guy doesn't make conflict inevitable.

Oh, so you prefer the Chamberlain-style "Peace in our time" appeasement. What next, cede Finland or Poland to Russia when Putin demands it?

I mean the real question here is why all the central European states wanted to join NATO. Given how peace loving the Russians have been, it seems to be a mystery.

And let's be clear, the Russian Ukraine war started in 2014, not in 2022. I personally would be looking for allies if another country had already invaded part of my territory.

> What makes you certain that this was going to prevent the invasion?

It's not certain but assuming the worst is just an extension of the same moral pure-good and pure-evil that this thread is about. My point is that if your view of the world is that Russia is an pure-evil actor that will keep invading more and more countries no matter what the west does then it'll eventually lead to nuclear war. In which case none of this discussion matters. The reason Finland (or any country) is joining NATO is because it makes that point explicit.

> It's not certain but assuming the worst is just an extension of the same moral pure-good and pure-evil that this thread is about.

One doesn't need to delve morality to figure this out: empirical evidence alone is sufficient to come to the same conclusion. Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine was in 2014, and it still wants more than the Donbas.

Assuming the best goes against existing evidence. Russia has not explicitly said what the limits to its aggression are. Without invoking morality, why would you assume Ukraine is the limit?

If we don't want to believe anything they say then why bother having any diplomatic ties at all? Do you think we'd be in the same or better place if we just cut all communication with Russia?

You only know what they tell you and what your intelligence agencies can uncover. Russia said Ukraine joining NATO was a red line in diplomatic discourse and then they acted on it. Same way the USA told China that aiding Russia in this war would be a red line and China has refrained from providing direct aid even after what happened in Taiwan recently. I don't have any access to classified information so no idea what information is in there but hopefully it's a lot more accurate then what we can read on twitter and Reddit.

> Russia said Ukraine joining NATO was a red line in diplomatic discourse and then they acted on it.

They acted on what exactly, considering that - as far as I know - Ukraine is not a NATO member?

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/biden-didnt-accept-putins-re...

I don't understand why you're still pursuing this argument when Kremlin has dropped the NATO pretext quite a long time ago. According to Putin[1], now it's a special operation to liberate Donbas from their Ukro-Nazi overlords. The Russian PR machine has recently been struggling to find better justifications to this pointless carbon copy of a 19th century colonial war.

As a result of this war, Finland and Sweden joined NATO, turning the Baltic Sea into NATO's internal waters, which isolates Kaliningrad and St Petersburg. Ukraine will sooner or later join it too. The whole western border from Sochi to Murmansk (except puppet state Belarus) will soon be in a mutual defence pact against further Russian aggression. So in this dimension, it's been a spectacular failure for Russia.

The argument of protecting Russians in Ukraine has become morbid at best, after Russia razed to the ground several major cities with large Russian populations, many of whom now lie in nameless mass graves. Daily missile attacks on civilians in eastern Ukraine, where disproportional number of Russians live, doesn't help the case either. After the spectacular counteroffensive, which expelled Russians from Kharkiv region, they have nothing left but threats of widening the war against civilians in pursuit of scorched-earth policy.

So what justifications of this war remain? What halftones are there to discuss? That maybe there still remain some undiscovered arguments in support of blowing up hospitals and power stations?

[1] https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1570808500053475331

Why do you believe the diplomatic situation is the same pre war as post war?

> Russia gave a number of pretexts for the invasion

Why would you pay attention to these, except as an exercise in PR strategy analysis?

Because the only reason people would even consider that the invasion would have been avoidable if only Ukraine had ruled out joining NATO is because Russia launched a PR campaign in advance of the invasion insisting that all it wanted was for Ukraine not to join NATO (its most effective PR strategy of the whole war)

In which case it's also worth taking into account that Russia was very loudly coming up with a bunch of other rationales for why it needed to go to war for domestic consumption, none of which would have gone away if Ukraine had ruled out joining NATO, making it even less likely that all Putin cared about was the remote possibility that it might join NATO at some unspecified time in future

I still see zero reason for Russia to start a war against a sovereign country with a democratically elected leader. It’s like saying that the other classmates didn’t let the bully copy their homework so he is right in beating the everliving shit out of a completely different kid.

> It’s like saying that the other classmates didn’t let the bully copy their homework so he is right in beating the everliving shit out of a completely different kid.

Is this the only way that situation gets resolve or are there any alternatives? Why is the kid a bully? Why does he feel the need to copy homework? Maybe the classmates should group together and seriously injury the bully first, would they be in the right if they did so? How do you know the bully will actually harm the kid and doesn't just want to scare him?

You can make any situation a simple good-evil answer by drawing arbitrary boundaries around the situation. The propaganda this thread is mentioning enforces those boundaries and potentially prevents people from discussing the real underlying problems. Doesn't mean the outcome or conclusion is any different.

The point is it does not matter that the kid has a horrible life. It's still bullying and attacking people and needs to stop. The first rule of helping a family member with depression or a friend lashing out in pain is protect yourself, otherwise you can't help anyone.

The situation would be different if e.g. Ukraine had invaded Russian territory after the invasion of Crimea, or had done broken armistices beforehand, or there had been a mass killing of ethinic Russians in Ukraine. There has not been. This means long before we can talk about Russia maybe feeling threatened by NATO expansion they need to stop the war they started.

There is no nuance here. Russia felt that for whatever reason an attack-war was warranted and couldn't even be bothered to come up with a believable justification. The fact that other countries have done the same thing (e.g. over allegations of WMD) changes nothing here.

I'm confused from how we got to "USA potentially had the ability to prevent the war if they had..." to "This means long before we can talk about Russia maybe feeling threatened by NATO expansion they need to stop the war they started."

USA/west could have made concessions that weren't really concessions (taking Ukraine NATO off the table) before the 2022 invasion. Those concessions may or may not have worked. We're now just supposed to ignore that fact and pretend that it never happened until some point in the future that may never take place?

> Russian being the bad guy doesn't make conflict inevitable. And if it does, then we're probably just buying time until full scale nuclear war within the next century and none of this actually matters.

One of the things that are crystal clear thanks to this war is that Russian army is in a deplorable state and while a few of their nuclear warheads still probably work, Russia can not be considered a threat in a conventional war except against a state like Azerbaijan.

What is the point of talking about previous actions or non-actions today? What will change if we spend our time and energy talking about past?

I agree with all of this. The US and EU kept discussing inviting Ukraine to NATO or even the EU, and the US was pushing towards a military alliance with Ukraine. This would've caused tension even if Russia was a democratic country not run by Putin. With Putin it led to near certainty of a conflict with Ukraine.

But while it's worth looking backward at that to try to get our leaders to not pull political moves like that in the future, it in no way changes the Ukrainians being on the right side of this war, and Russia being on the wrong side. Yes, the US's actions were likely to cause a war, no, Russia is not justified in starting that war. In the same way that European appeasement of Hitler and USSR's neutrality deal clearly led to the Nazis invading Europe, but do not in any way justify the Nazis invading Europe, or the Nazis being the right side.

> USSR's neutrality deal clearly led to the Nazis invading Europe

Hitler (Nazis) and Stalin (USSR) were allies and jointly invaded Poland.

> so what is your take on the issues GP identified

I refuse to discuss it here, because much of the site's userbase seems incapable of having an even slightly nuanced political discussion, and I will possibly get a nasty comment from moderation accusing me of flame-baiting or something.

The best I can do it argue for epistemic humility, because at least people generally find that abstractly palatable.

> "Putin and other authoritarian strong men are worse than democratically elected politician ... the industrial output of Russia"

If your benchmark of how good a political system is is just its industrial output, China's anti-democratic system is better than Western systems. I can't even disagree with your argument, because it's not internally consistent.

So basically all you are doing is claiming to have a nuanced take, but you aren't capable of expressing it in a way that won't get caught by HN moderation who despite me being an eccentric hothead that can't always resist some snark manages to no accuse me of bad faith, and rarely if ever seems to censor interesting debates. Forgive me if I take this as evidence that your arguments and thought might be less nuanced and well developed than you claim.

And regarding the point of China, aside from being a very naive read of Chinese economic history (see PolyMatters series on China for evidence) this is a non-sequitur, the output of a completely different culture and system has nothing to do with the output of Russia, nor did I claim this was the completeness of my argument.

I observe again that all you seem to do is exclaim you cannot believe how stupid peoples arguments are for not being nuanced or developed enough, without stating your own take. For anyone reading this thread, pay note to this pattern, it's basically debate smell for someone not engaging in good faith.

> won't get caught by HN moderation who despite me being an eccentric hothead that can't always resist some snark manages to no accuse me of bad faith, and rarely if ever seems to censor interesting debates.

Have you considered that this may be because your comments are insufficiently original to ever fall outside of the overton window of the site?

> the output of a completely different culture and system has nothing to do with the output of Russia

My friend, you are the one who claimed that industrial output was the criteria by which we could judge the russian system is worse than the western one.

I agree this argument is nonsense.

> without stating your own take

I already explained why I can't do this on this site.

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