Ukraine Crisis

[iambiguous]

From NYT:

'Russia Signals It May Be Narrowing War Aims'

Is this that first ray of hope?

Putin's own rendition of Nixon's "peace with honor"? The Viet Cong and the NVA whooped our ass...but not really? It was never our intention to actually win the war. We got what we came for [sort of] and those 58,220 American soldiers did not die in vain.

After all, in the end, the Commies did tear down the walls and become cutthroat capitalists just like we are.

The rest of us then basically being just pawns in their war games.

[iambiguous]

From ILP:

This is a capitalist war, in which the US is making lots of money.
This is the best analysis I've yet heard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCRYG7Z48Vk

No doubt that crony capitalism here and state capitalism there play a crucial role in what unfolds behind the curtains.

Putin and Russia have their own rendition of the "military industrial complex": https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/ ... l-behemoth

On the other hand, suppose Putin is intent on following through with this rendition of "what is really going on in Ukraine"...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/opin ... anism.html

The piece I posted above. The "theory of Eurasian empire" narrative.

But if it ultimately does come down to "show me the money", that might be the good news. After all, of what good is money if, in the event of an all out nuclear war, there are no economies left?

[promethean75]

Sleepy Joe is up there quoting kierkegaard and thrasymachus y'all. I ain't never heard Trump quote a philosopher b'fore.

[iambiguous]

Sleepy Joe is up there quoting kierkegaard and thrasymachus y'all. I ain't never heard Trump quote a philosopher b'fore.

Sleepy Joe also just quoted himself:

Latest Big Bold Headline in the NYT:

Biden Condemns Putin, Saying He ‘Cannot Remain in Power’

That's just what we need, Sleepy Joe telling a man who has access to thousands of nuclear bombs that regime change in Russia is something that he advocates.

Hell, if Putin had a beard, he could send CIA operatives to Moscow to sprinkle poison in it.

[Belinda]

Sleepy Joe is up there quoting kierkegaard and thrasymachus y'all. I ain't never heard Trump quote a philosopher b'fore.

Sleepy Joe also just quoted himself:

Latest Big Bold Headline in the NYT:

Biden Condemns Putin, Saying He ‘Cannot Remain in Power’

That's just what we need, Sleepy Joe telling a man who has access to thousands of nuclear bombs that regime change in Russia is something that he advocates.

Hell, if Putin had a beard, he could send CIA operatives to Moscow to sprinkle poison in it.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ents-putin

Putin is psychologically Macbeth in Dunsinane. There is however an important tactical difference: Macbeth did not have nuclear bombs.

[reasonvemotion]

All this is a little hard to swallow.....literally thousands of Russian troops have been killed thus far and this mighty war machine (Russia) cannot crush this little country in a few days.....very strange scenario.

Whether the media is telling us the truth, well that is another story.

[Walker]

Commentary on the Slaughter:

Where there is war, there are war profiteers.
First comes the war. Then comes the profiteers. Cause and effect.
Capitalism is not driving this war. No sir, no ma'am.

- This war is not about money. Maniacs who wipe cities off the face of the earth, are not driven by money.
- Only ideology can inspire such evil.
- Only ideology and savagery can turn such a blind eye to what ideology does, for the sake of ideology.
- This is how admirers of Marxism can give a casual dismissal to the wholesale slaughter of the 20th century.
- The current war is simply the continuity of Evil Marxism, which is an ideology.
- Is Good Marxism an ideology? Has it ever existed?

*

Could someone please fact-check this?

Fleeing ‘racially pure’ Ukrainians welcomed in Ireland
https://freewestmedia.com/2022/03/17/fl ... n-ireland/

[iambiguous]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... me-change/

WP headline:

'How Biden sparked a global uproar with nine ad-libbed words about Putin'

'WARSAW — During his presidential campaign, President Biden often reminded his audience about the heavy weight that the words of a president can carry.

'“The words of a president matter,” he said more than once. “They can move markets. They can send our brave men and women to war. They can bring peace.”

'They can also, as Biden discovered on Saturday, spark a global uproar in the middle of a war.

'With nine ad-libbed words at the end of a 27-minute speech, Biden created an unwanted distraction to his otherwise forceful remarks by calling for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be pushed out of office.

'“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said.

'It was a remarkable statement that would reverse stated U.S. policy, directly countering claims from senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who have insisted regime change is not on the table. It went further than even U.S. presidents during the Cold War, and immediately reverberated around the world as world leaders, diplomats, and foreign policy experts sought to determine what Biden said, what it meant — and, if he didn’t mean it, why he said it.'

Truly, if Vladimir Putin is living in his own "mentally disturbed" world, capable of anything, and having access to thousands of nuclear bombs, what the fuck was Biden thinking?!

Is it both Biden and Putin here that are a few sandwiches short of a picnic, a few cards shy of a full deck, a few clowns short of a circus?

Or, again, are there actually exchanges unfolding between them "behind the curtains" that we are simply not privy to?

What the hell is really going on here?

How about this: a "reality" straight out of the Matrix!

Solipsism?

[iambiguous]

Sleepy Joe is up there quoting kierkegaard and thrasymachus y'all. I ain't never heard Trump quote a philosopher b'fore.

Sleepy Joe also just quoted himself:

Latest Big Bold Headline in the NYT:

Biden Condemns Putin, Saying He ‘Cannot Remain in Power’

That's just what we need, Sleepy Joe telling a man who has access to thousands of nuclear bombs that regime change in Russia is something that he advocates.

Hell, if Putin had a beard, he could send CIA operatives to Moscow to sprinkle poison in it.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ents-putin

Putin is psychologically Macbeth in Dunsinane. There is however an important tactical difference: Macbeth did not have nuclear bombs.

Then the part as noted above...

"We’re protected by these two big oceans over here in the United States. The war still feels far away."

Just as Europeans were fixated existentially on Hitler given that Germany was among them "over there", back then, so is Russia basically right next door as well.

However, it is beginning to dawn on more and more Americans who are not in the military or who do not have family members in the military that Putin's nuclear bombs will not leave them -- the "civilians" -- out of the devastation this time.

They may be outraged at Putin's invasion, but not outraged enough to endorse policies that might spark a nuclear holocaust.

So, basically, for each of us it comes down to how far we think Biden should go in defending Ukraine.

The part that I root in dasein.

[iambiguous]

From NYT:

'As Talks Progress, Russia Says It Will Reduce Attacks in Northern Ukraine

The gains in negotiations came as Ukrainian troops appeared to push back Russian forces around Kyiv. Russia said a meeting between President Vladimir V. Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky could occur once a draft peace agreement was ready.'

The blink heard around the world?

Could this be the start of that collective sigh of relief?

Is Putin recognizing his blunder? Is he now willing to scale back his expectations, negotiate his own "peace with honor", and pull back from the brink?

Stay tuned...

[iambiguous]

From ILP...

Is Putin recognizing his blunder? Is he now willing to scale back his expectations, negotiate his own "peace with honor", and pull back from the brink?

Why do you not think that he’s achieved what he was expecting to achieve, coz.. you know, it’s been going on for a whole now.. over a month.

Of course, one would have to be inside Putin's head to grasp this. His "Intrinsic Self" perhaps?

Me, like everyone else here, I'm just following "the news" and speculating as best I can about what the hell is going on.

Only with this conflict [unlike Iraq and Afghanistan] the threat of a nuclear war was/is considerably more palpable.

I'm hoping that this demonstrates that Putin is less the "madman" that some depict him as.

But, if nothing else, all of this has finally allowed me to explain to others what it was like living through the Cuban Missile Crises. Only back then it was more about ideology -- capitalism vs. socialism -- than it is today. In the world today the conflict revolves more around the crony capitalist West and the state capitalists that own and operate Russia and China.

And it probably will take a "madman" to start WWIII. After all, the thug regimes are no less controlled by men who recognize that a nuclear war will almost certainly bring to an end their own power and privilege.

The same with those who own and operate the military industrial complex. They run with the wars all the way to the banks. But what of the banks in an all out nuclear war? The world economies themselves will be devastated...maybe even destroyed.

Nope, that's still the beauty of nuclear bombs. Mutually assured destruction.

_
..or perhaps, he has met/is meeting, his objectives.

Sure, maybe.

But most of the world seems to think he got his ass kicked in Ukraine. At least so far. That and the fact that he is now construed by many to be nothing less than a despicable and brutal thug.

[iambiguous]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/opin ... tions.html

ROSS DOUTHAT

'In 1996 the political scientist Samuel Huntington offered several strong claims about the post-Cold War world.

'Global politics was becoming not just “multipolar” but “multicivilizational,” he argued, with competing powers modernizing along different cultural lines, not simply converging with the liberal West. “The balance of power among civilizations” was shifting, and the West was entering a period of relative decline. A “civilization-based world order” was emerging, in which societies “sharing cultural affinities” were more likely to group themselves into alliances or blocs. And the would-be universalism of the West was setting the stage for sustained conflict with rival civilizations, most notably with China and the Islamic world.

'These claims were the backbone of Huntington’s book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” which was seen as a sweeping interpretive alternative to Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, with its vision of liberal democracy as the horizon toward which post-Cold War societies were likely to converge.

'The Huntington thesis would seem ripe for new attention in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the surprisingly unified Western response, the more uncertain reactions from China and India. But more often lately Huntington has been invoked either warily, on the grounds that Putin wants a clash of civilizations and we shouldn’t give it to him, or in dismissal or critique, with the idea being that his theory of world politics has actually been disproved by Putin’s attempt to restore a Greater Russia.'

Big Arguments like this in which the Human Condition itself is grappled with almost always go up and down [in and out of favor] depending on what is actually unfolding in the world as we experience it ourselves here and now.

What is the Ukraine conflict telling us about the Human Condition? What overarching direction will all of us be heading in...depending on out it finally plays out?

Unless of course it plays out in the direction of a nuclear war that for all practical purposes renders all of this basically moot.

And yet the conflict between liberal democracy anchored to one or another rendition of crony capitalism vs. the "civilization" model will almost always be around in one form of another.

Here, "civilization" can revolve around such things as ethnicity and race and culture and politically correct social policies.

The Trumps and the Putins wanting the world around them to sustain their own narcissistic preferences.

Assuming of course that this is actually what they are concerned about...and not just dividing up the world so that they acquire more power and privilege. A world in which "the people" are only so many pawns in their Realpolitik games.

Me, I still root this all largely in dasein. And in a No God world where people struggle to find something -- anything -- that they can anchor the Real Me to.

When, in the end, no one "universal" or "civilized" agenda is inherently or necessarily any more rational and virtuous than any other. It just comes down to who happens to acquire the power "here and now" to enforce their own subjective preferences.

[promethean75]

I actually feel kinda let down because I had this fantasy that Russia would take Ukraine and make a pact with China, forming a new state capitalist fascism that would control everything east of Europe. The west would maintain its NATO alliance and function as a giant open, mixed economy capitalism. Like a new cold war 2.0 version.... where we have two capitalism contingencies battling over economic dominance. Each eventually implodes as marx prophesized, and the working classes are forced to rise up! Then they tear down the wall and reintegrate the whole world into a global proletarian dictatorship that absolves all national borders and places all productive assets and public utilities into the hands of a truly democratic governing body for the first time in history. The peoples.

And now that Putin is getting his ass kicked, I'm not sure any of this will ever happen. There's always next year, but really, what could Putin do next year that he can't do today?

The future looks bleak man. Right when there's the possibility of some real revolution - or at least the creation of circumstances that would very quickly demand one - the muhfucka who started the war wusses out a month later.

That about a false start.

[iambiguous]

And now that Putin is getting his ass kicked, I'm not sure any of this will ever happen. There's always next year, but really, what could Putin do next year that he can't do today?

On the other hand...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/opin ... putin.html

'The conventional wisdom is that Vladimir Putin catastrophically miscalculated.

'He thought Russian-speaking Ukrainians would welcome his troops. They didn’t. He thought he’d swiftly depose Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. He hasn’t. He thought he’d divide NATO. He’s united it. He thought he had sanction-proofed his economy. He’s wrecked it. He thought the Chinese would help him out. They’re hedging their bets. He thought his modernized military would make mincemeat of Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians are making mincemeat of his, at least on some fronts.

'Putin’s miscalculations raise questions about his strategic judgment and mental state. Who, if anyone, is advising him? Has he lost contact with reality? Is he physically unwell? Mentally? Condoleezza Rice warns: “He’s not in control of his emotions. Something is wrong.” Russia’s sieges of Mariupol and Kharkiv — two heavily Russian-speaking cities that Putin claims to be “liberating” from Ukrainian oppression — resemble what the Nazis did to Warsaw, and what Putin himself did to Grozny.

'Several analysts have compared Putin to a cornered rat, more dangerous now that he’s no longer in control of events. They want to give him a safe way out of the predicament he allegedly created for himself. Hence the almost universal scorn poured on Joe Biden for saying in Poland, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

'The conventional wisdom is entirely plausible. It has the benefit of vindicating the West’s strategy of supporting Ukraine defensively. And it tends toward the conclusion that the best outcome is one in which Putin finds some face-saving exit: additional Ukrainian territory, a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality, a lifting of some of the sanctions.

'But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the West is only playing into Putin’s hands once again?

The possibility is suggested in a powerful reminiscence from The Times’s Carlotta Gall of her experience covering Russia’s siege of Grozny, during the first Chechen war in the mid-1990s. In the early phases of the war, motivated Chechen fighters wiped out a Russian armored brigade, stunning Moscow. The Russians regrouped and wiped out Grozny from afar, using artillery and air power.

'Russia’s operating from the same playbook today. When Western military analysts argue that Putin can’t win militarily in Ukraine, what they really mean is that he can’t win clean. Since when has Putin ever played clean?

'“There is a whole next stage to the Putin playbook, which is well known to the Chechens,” Gall writes. “As Russian troops gained control on the ground in Chechnya, they crushed any further dissent with arrests and filtration camps and by turning and empowering local protégés and collaborators.”

'Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

“Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors.

If this analysis is right, then Putin doesn’t seem like the miscalculating loser his critics make him out to be.

It also makes sense of his strategy of targeting civilians. More than simply a way of compensating for the incompetence of Russian troops, the mass killing of civilians puts immense pressure on Zelensky to agree to the very things Putin has demanded all along: territorial concessions and Ukrainian neutrality. The West will also look for any opportunity to de-escalate, especially as we convince ourselves that a mentally unstable Putin is prepared to use nuclear weapons.

Within Russia, the war has already served Putin’s political purposes. Many in the professional middle class — the people most sympathetic to dissidents like Aleksei Navalny — have gone into self-imposed exile. The remnants of a free press have been shuttered, probably for good. To the extent that Russia’s military has embarrassed itself, it is more likely to lead to a well-aimed purge from above than a broad revolution from below. Russia’s new energy riches could eventually help it shake loose the grip of sanctions.

This alternative analysis of Putin’s performance could be wrong. Then again, in war, politics and life, it’s always wiser to treat your adversary as a canny fox, not a crazy fool.'

It's all about the bucks that will flow from the "heist". It's all about shifting the global economy in a world still utterly addicted to the burning of fossil fuels towards the advantages Putin and Russia will have if down the road his objective -- the heist -- are met.

Sure, that's possible. All we can do is to wait and see what does unfold.

[promethean75]

That's exactly right. If the benefits outweigh the costs; gaining the landmass of resources called Ukraine is a greater potential financial and economic gain (at the cost of bad diplomatic relationships and economic sanctions with/by most other countries) than losing or not obtaining the landmass of resources (at the reward of having good diplomatic and economic relationships with most other countries). That's the formula.

Say Russia loses a strong trading partner such as the U.S. - and I don't pretend to know what, other than gasoline, is of economic U.S. interests... what exactly they offer us, and vice-versa, what the U.S. necessarily provides as a supplier and consumer that Russia would so critically need - but what they gain in taking control of the country Ukraine, calculates to be more of a material gain than otherwise.

Somewhere in the back of.the Kremlin in a darkly kit large room with black walnut wainscotting, Russian economists are saying 'actually yeah, by our calculations, owning Ukraine would be a bigger asset than what would be a good trading relationship with set of countries x. Go a'head and try to take it.'

You always listen to your economists first, not your priests or your philosophers. In that respect you are right; it's all about da money.

Values are inductively built around that initial stimulus and everything becomes 'seen in light of' that end, for and toward that goal. What's called the 'ideological war' between countries is incidental to this MO. Some philosopher, forget who said it but I'm thinking Herbert Spencer, said something along the lines of economic competition is the most evolutionarily stable process of overall refinement of the species.. but it can be a brutal thing, as a meritorious aristocracy of the fittest.

The advancement of classes of people of a general species, at the expense of the disadvantagement of a majority of people of a general species, is thought to be entirely natural and a phenomena that best sublimates that drive in man to dominant, own and control the environment. An exploited lower class majority is a small price to pay for the kinds of improvement that such a system would enable as it developed. Freud said something similar in 'society and its discontent' I might recall. A necessary evil - free market and all the woes it creates - to give the worst in man some direction and organization so that this finds no expression surreptitiously. A kind of channeling of a violent and possessive atavistic quality of man, to keep it under control and, to the extent that it could be done, make something useful and productive with that energy.

In theory it's beautiful. in practice it worked out to be not so great that the worst of it was justified as long as the best parts of the theory were attained. In other words, all the John Galts ended up being... meh. Not so impressive as to justify a society in which, to make possible the amassment nof such wealth, seventy five percent of the citizens in that society will live their lives over-obligated by debt and with very little property... hardly even a house or a condo. And they will work almost half of their waking day at some monotonous job.

I say this because this has to happen like this in a mixed economy such as ours. It is a necessary part of its end state, and without it, a bezos wouldn't be possible. I don't say bezos is responsible for it, tho. There is no 'bezos'. The system is responsible for it, not any one individual who utilizes opportunities that it provides for self improvement. Remember as a quasi-stirnerite, I fully endorse a rational individual egoism, one which I'd base from a nihilistic epistemology, ontology and metaphysics. It'd be more or less indestructible. I could argue that there isn't one iota of malcontent in the deeds of a bezos (because I'm an econo-determinist). All men do what they believe is the right thing to do, and with plato I agree here.

I'm sayin there can be a radically new system that doesn't lose any of the novelty of conflict and competition that produces such refinement of the individual and the improvement thereof. I'm sayin there will be new conflicts, oppositions, problems and obstacles the people would face individually, as well as socially, politically, economically. But with that would come the general improvement of quality of life of the typical citizen.

Like you can't just raise wages to such an extent that no citizen needs to ever again take something on credit, get a loan for, outright buy in a single transaction, or insure as some already owned piece of property.

And you can't raise a wage so much that your worker duddint need to work as much because he's making more money. That's principle two. Of course profit is always the endgame, but how to do that most effectively without destroying your workers in the process, is the science of it. Maximize profit at any expense that can be tolerated by the workers exploited to do so, and not a penny less than that.