The “dark arts” construct beautiful traps: if you try to address any individual argument, counter any particular bit of evidence, you’ve already lost. The lies are mere scaffolding, and the narrative they’ve built stands without them. And to those who pride themselves on being able to spot fallacious reasoning, these traps are basically irresistible. It’s fun to point out specific mistakes. It feels like winning. It looks like winning to anyone watching. Sidestepping the trap offers no such satisfaction.
This entire post is precisely such a trap (and an exquisitely meta one): one can address all the specific flaws in the Ukraine argument, but the actual problem is the bigger picture. This defense strategy does not work. Going straight to original sources, discerning credible news, etc. are good for rebutting individual arguments, but not in figuring out the entire narrative is a lie.
I think the Dark Side has won. Here’s a personal confession: I believed the the lie of Snake Island massacre. Even after all the lies about the “deadly global pandemic,” even after years of quoting the “truth is the first casualty of war” line ad nauseum, even knowing the lies preceding the Iraq invasion (and so many before it in the 20th century), I fell for it. The idea that the entire garrison was killed after they responded to an offer to accept their surrender with the now-famous “Russian warship, go fuck yourself” line (which I heard the audio of, distributed by sources I trusted not to have fabricated it) was … plausible. Reasonable. I did not think to doubt it.
But I recovered fairly quickly, and did not fall for the many, many, subsequent lies about Russia. If I had followed the advice presented here about knowing my limits and trusting the experts, I’d have fallen for every single one of them.
Is there a Defense Against the Dark Arts? If there is, I don’t know it. But this is not it.
The temptation is hard to resist, so here’s just one hole in the argument presented: the island of Taiwan is as much a part of China as Crimea is of Ukraine. No principled stance about the “rules-based international order” would let you side with both Ukraine and Taiwan.
This is spot on, as is your subsequent point that the real defense is to simply be right and not let counterarguments change your mind. The fact that you are getting downvoted is a rather sad commentary on the state LessWrong has reached. What you are preaching is the twelfth rationalist virtue, which is really the culmination of all the others.
Hm… yes, the central narrative is always hard to rebut. But since no argument exists independently of the facts, I thought I would focus on verification of factual information. I found the methods I used helpful in that regard. I’m sorry it didn’t work for you, but then, I’m not claiming that it would work for everyone in all situations. These are the methods I personally found helpful. The algorithmic solution (ie: actually learning about the topic yourself) has been what I consider the only reliable defense. Even if you turn out to be wrong, you have still taken all the information into account and arrived at an actual conclusion that is your own.
I might use the example of traditional Chinese medicine. As compared to Western medicine, both have very long histories and coherent (at least internally) understandings of the human body and what treats diseases. As an outsider looking in, divorced from the real world, you would likely not be able to tell which side is ‘right’. But at the end of the day, we can observe that much of Western medicine does actually work and much of the traditional treatments are bogus (or can otherwise be explained scientifically with the placebo effect). I do believe rebutting narratives through analysis of individual facts is possible, because it has happened before. (not to say it’s perfect, 1000 years ago if you were born in China you might reach the conclusion medicine has a overall weak correlation with health outcomes)
So now I’m curious. What’s your model for defense against the dark arts? When I try to rebut a central narrative, I usually go to the specific facts pertaining to that narrative. If the debate is student loans, I’ll likely have to explore the Benett hypothesis. If the debate is Ukraine, I’ll likely have to review regular and military history. The truthful narrative, in my view, does not exist in the abstract, but rather as a combination of evidence chains, which combine into a coherent model. Do you see it differently?
Now, on this point more specifically.
I believed the the lie of Snake Island massacre.
Are you sure this was a lie? To the best of my understanding, the audio was legitimate, the soldiers really did tell that to the Russians. When the Ukranian military lost contact with them after the fact, they assumed the worst (as militaries typically do), and they were thought of as dead. Turns out they were captured alive. The Ukrainian government has not denied that fact. Instead, they dispute the circumstances of how the soldiers ended up in Russian custody (ie: did they surrender or were they captured after a fight?).
The fog of war is a real phenomenon. Some information is true, some is not, but not all false information is misleading with the deliberate intention of being misleading. Do either governments publish accurate casualty figures? Probably not. Are they incentivized to publish stories of heroics? Yes. Do they claim that individuals who are verifiably alive are in fact dead? Not to the best of my knowledge.
I feel your narrative is flawed, partly because I feel this piece of evidence is flawed. If someone wants to make up their mind on whether or not your narrative is accurate, looking through the evidence is likely helpful. If you want to point out the flaws in my argument feel free to do so. It will likely encourage a more accurate picture of events.
That said…
The temptation is hard to resist, so here’s just one hole in the argument presented: the island of Taiwan is as much a part of China as Crimea is of Ukraine. No principled stance about the “rules-based international order” would let you side with both Ukraine and Taiwan.
So, I think I can defend this using the principles of legitimacy. Consider the frozen conflict between North and South Korea. Both sides claim to be the sole legitimate government of Korea. So who’s legitimate? The UN seems to consider them both as independent states. I don’t find this at odds with a stance about the rules based international order. (which, by the way, I argued was in US interests, I never argued about it’s morality)
However, there is the moral dimension, which in my view is more important than the legal one. South Korea is a vibrant democracy. North Korea is a floundering dictatorship. I consider the South more morally legitimate, independent of the international stance on the matter. In much the same way, I consider Taiwan to have a much greater moral legitimacy to rule Taiwan because of it’s democratic mandate. (I would support Hong Kong autonomy on the same principle) They have never declared independence formally, but clearly the CCP does not have control over Taiwan. I thus feel justified viewing it as a state in the middle of a frozen conflict.
So, what about Crimea? There is a war going on, so there is conflict, but Russian forces are occupying and administering the region. Legally, however, few countries recognize the annexation. Then we have to consider the referendum… I think the facts speak for themselves here. The vote was held under military supervision. Basic legal procedures were ignored. Russia’s ‘little green men’ took over governmental buildings before a vote was held, not after. I don’t believe there’s any basis for calling such a ‘vote’ legitimate.
So where does that leave us? There are many points in the international order regarding the legitimacy of states that we might consider ‘awkward.’ For instance, with the Koreas and Taiwan. I contend that while both Koreas have legal legitimacy, only the south has moral legitimacy. Russian forces in Crimea have neither moral nor legal legitimacy. Thus, I can support South Korea, Taiwan, and Ukraine at the same time as morally legitimate states. Does this argument satisfy your requirements?
The glib answer to how to avoid falling victim to the Dark Arts is to just be right, and not let counterarguments change your mind. Occlumency, if you like.
One problem is the bullshit asymmetry principle, which you describe but don’t call by name: rebutting narratives through analyses of individual claims is infeasibly expensive. But far worse is answering the wrong question, letting the enemy choose the battlefield. Sticking with the war in Ukraine for an example, it’d be like answering the question of why Russia would blow up its own pipeline (Is Putin stupid? Is it like Cortés burning his ships? Is it the Wagner Group trying to undermine Putin?) instead of saying, “Wtf? No, it’s obviously the US.”
As I said, I don’t know how one can consistently recognize traps like this. It seems exceedingly difficult to me, but that’s what an actual defense would look like.
To clarify my point about the Snake Island massacre: yeah, I think the audio was legit too. No, I believe the Ukraine government knew they were alive (or at least had good reason to think so), and pretended otherwise for propaganda reasons. Can I prove this? No, I don’t in fact have access to high-level military intelligence. This is the trap I’m warning against! Getting bogged down trying to ascertain exactly what the Ukrainian military knew and when they knew it is missing the point, which is whether or not they’re incentivized to deceive you, and so whether you should trust anything they say, one way or the other.
The same goes for your ad hoc determinations of which states are “legitimate,” based on considerations of “international law,” your personal moral views regarding “democracy,” and expedients of maintaining US hegemony. You’re answering the wrong question. Happily, in this case, I’ve figured out the correct answer: there is no such thing as a morally legitimate state.
As I said, I don’t know how one can consistently recognize traps like this. It seems exceedingly difficult to me, but that’s what an actual defense would look like.
It is exceedingly difficult, but it can be learned. Unfortunately libertarianism (I get anarcho-capitalist vibes from you but I could be wrong) is itself captured by one of these traps, being basically a way of subverting leftism and turning it against itself. If you’re curious, the Austrian school was “pure” in a sense up to and including Mises, but then Ayn Rand was heavily inspired by Mises and wrote Atlas Shrugged, which is a brilliant book but also profoundly flawed, in no small part because its sociology is basically Marxian. Rothbard, heavily influenced by Ayn Rand, then made Austrolibertarianism into a revolutionary ideology rather than a reactionary one. That is a trap.
I’ve figured out the correct answer: there is no such thing as a morally legitimate state.
Non-aggression principle? My own principle is best formulated by Alexander Pope: For forms of government let fools contest, whichever governs best is best (slightly paraphrased), or alternatively, the old Catholic doctrine: error non habet ius. There are correct and incorrect principles of government; correct governance is always legitimate; incorrect governance never is.
Embrace the light side. The liberal establishment is not an establishment at all; it is an interregnum by edgy rebels who are against the establishment, ie. the ancien régime. Revolution, like Protestantism[1], is a disease of the soul.
It seems exceedingly difficult to me, but that’s what an actual defense would look like.
I can now return to this. The way to resist these artificial narratives is to simply learn to recognise archetypes in general. Archetypes of revolution, of patriarchy, of dark side epistemology, and so on. You will be able to see all the false narratives from the outside, as part of a larger worldview that subsumes them all.
I would love to do a quick rebuttal of libertarianism from a Carlylean standpoint, but unfortunately this is one of those issues where bullshit asymmetry applies. I can give a few pointers, however: libertarian theory is basically correct in its refutations of progressive economic policies, but there is a case to be made for political economy where the goal is something other than the maximisation of current GDP — averting the problem of the zero marginal product of labour, for example, by making labour artificially scarce. Yes, that is a tax and diminishes the productivity of the economy in the GDP sense, but it will nevertheless be conducive to general flourishing because productivity and flourishing, though aligned, are not the same. Mises understood this distinction, hence his insistence on keeping his economic theory descriptive only. Rothbard did not understand, being not quite on par with Mises. If you doubt this, just look at their faces to see which one was the greater man. As your name seems Indian to me, I would also recommend Late Victorian Holocausts as a helpful refutation of libertarianism.
I realise that various aspects of this comment are likely to be irritating. It is somewhat patronising and consists of various pointers and hints but not any actual arguments. I am making it because you stand out to me as someone who is a lot smarter than a typical member of this community, and you deserve the chance to take it to the next level by discovering the world entirely outside of the revolutionary bubble, rather than merely the ideologies at its periphery. It is presumably clear to you that OP is stuck inside a bubble like in the Matrix which you have broken out of. Problem is that it’s a Matrix within a Matrix.
How to recognise traps? Break through all the layers of the bubble and all the traps will be as overtly parochial as OP’s post is.
Not intended as an endorsement of Catholicism, but Catholicism is merely incorrect. It is not a psychic illness that distorts its believers’ views of absolutely everything, including secular matters, the way that Protestantism does. Anarchism, incidentally, is a culturally Protestant ideology.
The glib answer to how to avoid falling victim to the Dark Arts is to just be right, and not let counterarguments change your mind. Occlumency, if you like.
Well, yes, but I’m unsure if this is too helpful. Part of the intention behind my post was to distill what I viewed as potentially useful advice. Do you have any? If not, that’s fine, but I’m unsure if it’s too valuable for the readership.
One problem is the bullshit asymmetry principle, which you describe but don’t call by name: rebutting narratives through analyses of individual claims is infeasibly expensive. But far worse is answering the wrong question, letting the enemy choose the battlefield. Sticking with the war in Ukraine for an example, it’d be like answering the question of why Russia would blow up its own pipeline (Is Putin stupid? Is it like Cortés burning his ships? Is it the Wagner Group trying to undermine Putin?) instead of saying, “Wtf? No, it’s obviously the US.”
I think I can take issue with this logic. Ukraine can benefit from German economic ties being severed from Russia. Russia can benefit with Germany hydrocarbons being depleted further (part of Russian strategy was restriction of gas exports to drive up energy prices), and of course the US benefits from there being less Russian trade flows. Analysis of the relevant actors would likely lead to convergence on a more informed judgement.
By your logic, wouldn’t I find myself drawing outlandish conclusions? Why would the Ukraine invasion ever happen? Why would Russia compromise it’s geopolitical position and encourage Finland to join the alliance, European remilitarization, and increased reliance on America for security partnerships? Is Putin stupid? Is it like Cortes burning his ships? Is it the Wagner Group trying to undermine Putin? Wtf, no!! It’s obviously the US. The white house actively encouraged the invasion of Ukraine! Just look at what their German minions did with Ostpolitik!
I could go on, but I don’t think I need to. Saying that ‘X is obviously true’ in absence of compelling evidence while refusing to analyze the requisite evidence seems like weak intellectual work at best. It tends to result in conspiracy theories. Of course I can’t have complete confidence in my story, but I can claim to have done the proper analytical work and arrived at the most reasonable conclusion.
To clarify my point about the Snake Island massacre: yeah, I think the audio was legit too. No, I believe the Ukraine government knew they were alive (or at least had good reason to think so), and pretended otherwise for propaganda reasons. Can I prove this? No, I don’t in fact have access to high-level military intelligence. This is the trap I’m warning against! Getting bogged down trying to ascertain exactly what the Ukrainian military knew and when they knew it is missing the point, which is whether or not they’re incentivized to deceive you, and so whether you should trust anything they say, one way or the other.
Isn’t this just a false dichotomy? Either we can trust them or we cannot. I find this misleading. Suppose a salesman is trying to sell me a particular canned food product. He may explain that it’s nutritious, affordable, and has significant dietary effects that might make me popular with the ladies. (don’t you want lean muscles?) I know he is a motivated reasoner, but that’s not to say I can’t glean useful information or distinguish between ‘likely true’ and ‘likely false’ statements. I can reason that the salesman is being honest about the price (because he’s making the sale). Regardless of whether this price is worth it. I can reason that the nutritional values listed on the can are probably accurate (as otherwise the FDA would come down on his head). I can conclude that there are likely some dietary effects, but their extent would depend on research I would want to do myself, rather than taking his word for it. There are probably legitimately good things about the product, regardless of the salesman’s presence.
In much the same way, we can trust some things the Ukranian government says, and their reports usually provide useful information as to what’s happening in the war, even though we would be idiots to trust them completely. They are a ‘noisy’ version of reality we need to filter through. Not reality. That doesn’t mean they aren’t useful as an information source, however, or that we should automatically assume them to be liars.
The same goes for your ad hoc determinations of which states are “legitimate,” based on considerations of “international law,” your personal moral views regarding “democracy,” and expedients of maintaining US hegemony. You’re answering the wrong question. Happily, in this case, I’ve figured out the correct answer: there is no such thing as a morally legitimate state.
So… Russia has no right to exist, Ukraine has no right to exist, the US has no right to exist, all of this is pointless? I’m not too sure what you’re implying here, but I’m unsure if I like the direction of this conversation either. I think I’ll stop here, I don’t imagine further discourse will be helpful.
The “dark arts” construct beautiful traps: if you try to address any individual argument, counter any particular bit of evidence, you’ve already lost. The lies are mere scaffolding, and the narrative they’ve built stands without them. And to those who pride themselves on being able to spot fallacious reasoning, these traps are basically irresistible. It’s fun to point out specific mistakes. It feels like winning. It looks like winning to anyone watching. Sidestepping the trap offers no such satisfaction.
This entire post is precisely such a trap (and an exquisitely meta one): one can address all the specific flaws in the Ukraine argument, but the actual problem is the bigger picture. This defense strategy does not work. Going straight to original sources, discerning credible news, etc. are good for rebutting individual arguments, but not in figuring out the entire narrative is a lie.
I think the Dark Side has won. Here’s a personal confession: I believed the the lie of Snake Island massacre. Even after all the lies about the “deadly global pandemic,” even after years of quoting the “truth is the first casualty of war” line ad nauseum, even knowing the lies preceding the Iraq invasion (and so many before it in the 20th century), I fell for it. The idea that the entire garrison was killed after they responded to an offer to accept their surrender with the now-famous “Russian warship, go fuck yourself” line (which I heard the audio of, distributed by sources I trusted not to have fabricated it) was … plausible. Reasonable. I did not think to doubt it.
But I recovered fairly quickly, and did not fall for the many, many, subsequent lies about Russia. If I had followed the advice presented here about knowing my limits and trusting the experts, I’d have fallen for every single one of them.
Is there a Defense Against the Dark Arts? If there is, I don’t know it. But this is not it.
The temptation is hard to resist, so here’s just one hole in the argument presented: the island of Taiwan is as much a part of China as Crimea is of Ukraine. No principled stance about the “rules-based international order” would let you side with both Ukraine and Taiwan.
This is spot on, as is your subsequent point that the real defense is to simply be right and not let counterarguments change your mind. The fact that you are getting downvoted is a rather sad commentary on the state LessWrong has reached. What you are preaching is the twelfth rationalist virtue, which is really the culmination of all the others.
Hello, and thanks for the comment!
Hm… yes, the central narrative is always hard to rebut. But since no argument exists independently of the facts, I thought I would focus on verification of factual information. I found the methods I used helpful in that regard. I’m sorry it didn’t work for you, but then, I’m not claiming that it would work for everyone in all situations. These are the methods I personally found helpful. The algorithmic solution (ie: actually learning about the topic yourself) has been what I consider the only reliable defense. Even if you turn out to be wrong, you have still taken all the information into account and arrived at an actual conclusion that is your own.
I might use the example of traditional Chinese medicine. As compared to Western medicine, both have very long histories and coherent (at least internally) understandings of the human body and what treats diseases. As an outsider looking in, divorced from the real world, you would likely not be able to tell which side is ‘right’. But at the end of the day, we can observe that much of Western medicine does actually work and much of the traditional treatments are bogus (or can otherwise be explained scientifically with the placebo effect). I do believe rebutting narratives through analysis of individual facts is possible, because it has happened before. (not to say it’s perfect, 1000 years ago if you were born in China you might reach the conclusion medicine has a overall weak correlation with health outcomes)
So now I’m curious. What’s your model for defense against the dark arts? When I try to rebut a central narrative, I usually go to the specific facts pertaining to that narrative. If the debate is student loans, I’ll likely have to explore the Benett hypothesis. If the debate is Ukraine, I’ll likely have to review regular and military history. The truthful narrative, in my view, does not exist in the abstract, but rather as a combination of evidence chains, which combine into a coherent model. Do you see it differently?
Now, on this point more specifically.
Are you sure this was a lie? To the best of my understanding, the audio was legitimate, the soldiers really did tell that to the Russians. When the Ukranian military lost contact with them after the fact, they assumed the worst (as militaries typically do), and they were thought of as dead. Turns out they were captured alive. The Ukrainian government has not denied that fact. Instead, they dispute the circumstances of how the soldiers ended up in Russian custody (ie: did they surrender or were they captured after a fight?).
The fog of war is a real phenomenon. Some information is true, some is not, but not all false information is misleading with the deliberate intention of being misleading. Do either governments publish accurate casualty figures? Probably not. Are they incentivized to publish stories of heroics? Yes. Do they claim that individuals who are verifiably alive are in fact dead? Not to the best of my knowledge.
I feel your narrative is flawed, partly because I feel this piece of evidence is flawed. If someone wants to make up their mind on whether or not your narrative is accurate, looking through the evidence is likely helpful. If you want to point out the flaws in my argument feel free to do so. It will likely encourage a more accurate picture of events.
That said…
So, I think I can defend this using the principles of legitimacy. Consider the frozen conflict between North and South Korea. Both sides claim to be the sole legitimate government of Korea. So who’s legitimate? The UN seems to consider them both as independent states. I don’t find this at odds with a stance about the rules based international order. (which, by the way, I argued was in US interests, I never argued about it’s morality)
However, there is the moral dimension, which in my view is more important than the legal one. South Korea is a vibrant democracy. North Korea is a floundering dictatorship. I consider the South more morally legitimate, independent of the international stance on the matter. In much the same way, I consider Taiwan to have a much greater moral legitimacy to rule Taiwan because of it’s democratic mandate. (I would support Hong Kong autonomy on the same principle) They have never declared independence formally, but clearly the CCP does not have control over Taiwan. I thus feel justified viewing it as a state in the middle of a frozen conflict.
So, what about Crimea? There is a war going on, so there is conflict, but Russian forces are occupying and administering the region. Legally, however, few countries recognize the annexation. Then we have to consider the referendum… I think the facts speak for themselves here. The vote was held under military supervision. Basic legal procedures were ignored. Russia’s ‘little green men’ took over governmental buildings before a vote was held, not after. I don’t believe there’s any basis for calling such a ‘vote’ legitimate.
So where does that leave us? There are many points in the international order regarding the legitimacy of states that we might consider ‘awkward.’ For instance, with the Koreas and Taiwan. I contend that while both Koreas have legal legitimacy, only the south has moral legitimacy. Russian forces in Crimea have neither moral nor legal legitimacy. Thus, I can support South Korea, Taiwan, and Ukraine at the same time as morally legitimate states. Does this argument satisfy your requirements?
The glib answer to how to avoid falling victim to the Dark Arts is to just be right, and not let counterarguments change your mind. Occlumency, if you like.
One problem is the bullshit asymmetry principle, which you describe but don’t call by name: rebutting narratives through analyses of individual claims is infeasibly expensive. But far worse is answering the wrong question, letting the enemy choose the battlefield. Sticking with the war in Ukraine for an example, it’d be like answering the question of why Russia would blow up its own pipeline (Is Putin stupid? Is it like Cortés burning his ships? Is it the Wagner Group trying to undermine Putin?) instead of saying, “Wtf? No, it’s obviously the US.”
As I said, I don’t know how one can consistently recognize traps like this. It seems exceedingly difficult to me, but that’s what an actual defense would look like.
To clarify my point about the Snake Island massacre: yeah, I think the audio was legit too. No, I believe the Ukraine government knew they were alive (or at least had good reason to think so), and pretended otherwise for propaganda reasons. Can I prove this? No, I don’t in fact have access to high-level military intelligence. This is the trap I’m warning against! Getting bogged down trying to ascertain exactly what the Ukrainian military knew and when they knew it is missing the point, which is whether or not they’re incentivized to deceive you, and so whether you should trust anything they say, one way or the other.
The same goes for your ad hoc determinations of which states are “legitimate,” based on considerations of “international law,” your personal moral views regarding “democracy,” and expedients of maintaining US hegemony. You’re answering the wrong question. Happily, in this case, I’ve figured out the correct answer: there is no such thing as a morally legitimate state.
It is exceedingly difficult, but it can be learned. Unfortunately libertarianism (I get anarcho-capitalist vibes from you but I could be wrong) is itself captured by one of these traps, being basically a way of subverting leftism and turning it against itself. If you’re curious, the Austrian school was “pure” in a sense up to and including Mises, but then Ayn Rand was heavily inspired by Mises and wrote Atlas Shrugged, which is a brilliant book but also profoundly flawed, in no small part because its sociology is basically Marxian. Rothbard, heavily influenced by Ayn Rand, then made Austrolibertarianism into a revolutionary ideology rather than a reactionary one. That is a trap.
Non-aggression principle? My own principle is best formulated by Alexander Pope: For forms of government let fools contest, whichever governs best is best (slightly paraphrased), or alternatively, the old Catholic doctrine: error non habet ius. There are correct and incorrect principles of government; correct governance is always legitimate; incorrect governance never is.
Embrace the light side. The liberal establishment is not an establishment at all; it is an interregnum by edgy rebels who are against the establishment, ie. the ancien régime. Revolution, like Protestantism[1], is a disease of the soul.
I can now return to this. The way to resist these artificial narratives is to simply learn to recognise archetypes in general. Archetypes of revolution, of patriarchy, of dark side epistemology, and so on. You will be able to see all the false narratives from the outside, as part of a larger worldview that subsumes them all.
I would love to do a quick rebuttal of libertarianism from a Carlylean standpoint, but unfortunately this is one of those issues where bullshit asymmetry applies. I can give a few pointers, however: libertarian theory is basically correct in its refutations of progressive economic policies, but there is a case to be made for political economy where the goal is something other than the maximisation of current GDP — averting the problem of the zero marginal product of labour, for example, by making labour artificially scarce. Yes, that is a tax and diminishes the productivity of the economy in the GDP sense, but it will nevertheless be conducive to general flourishing because productivity and flourishing, though aligned, are not the same. Mises understood this distinction, hence his insistence on keeping his economic theory descriptive only. Rothbard did not understand, being not quite on par with Mises. If you doubt this, just look at their faces to see which one was the greater man. As your name seems Indian to me, I would also recommend Late Victorian Holocausts as a helpful refutation of libertarianism.
I realise that various aspects of this comment are likely to be irritating. It is somewhat patronising and consists of various pointers and hints but not any actual arguments. I am making it because you stand out to me as someone who is a lot smarter than a typical member of this community, and you deserve the chance to take it to the next level by discovering the world entirely outside of the revolutionary bubble, rather than merely the ideologies at its periphery. It is presumably clear to you that OP is stuck inside a bubble like in the Matrix which you have broken out of. Problem is that it’s a Matrix within a Matrix.
How to recognise traps? Break through all the layers of the bubble and all the traps will be as overtly parochial as OP’s post is.
Not intended as an endorsement of Catholicism, but Catholicism is merely incorrect. It is not a psychic illness that distorts its believers’ views of absolutely everything, including secular matters, the way that Protestantism does. Anarchism, incidentally, is a culturally Protestant ideology.
Well, yes, but I’m unsure if this is too helpful. Part of the intention behind my post was to distill what I viewed as potentially useful advice. Do you have any? If not, that’s fine, but I’m unsure if it’s too valuable for the readership.
I think I can take issue with this logic. Ukraine can benefit from German economic ties being severed from Russia. Russia can benefit with Germany hydrocarbons being depleted further (part of Russian strategy was restriction of gas exports to drive up energy prices), and of course the US benefits from there being less Russian trade flows. Analysis of the relevant actors would likely lead to convergence on a more informed judgement.
By your logic, wouldn’t I find myself drawing outlandish conclusions? Why would the Ukraine invasion ever happen? Why would Russia compromise it’s geopolitical position and encourage Finland to join the alliance, European remilitarization, and increased reliance on America for security partnerships? Is Putin stupid? Is it like Cortes burning his ships? Is it the Wagner Group trying to undermine Putin? Wtf, no!! It’s obviously the US. The white house actively encouraged the invasion of Ukraine! Just look at what their German minions did with Ostpolitik!
I could go on, but I don’t think I need to. Saying that ‘X is obviously true’ in absence of compelling evidence while refusing to analyze the requisite evidence seems like weak intellectual work at best. It tends to result in conspiracy theories. Of course I can’t have complete confidence in my story, but I can claim to have done the proper analytical work and arrived at the most reasonable conclusion.
Isn’t this just a false dichotomy? Either we can trust them or we cannot. I find this misleading. Suppose a salesman is trying to sell me a particular canned food product. He may explain that it’s nutritious, affordable, and has significant dietary effects that might make me popular with the ladies. (don’t you want lean muscles?) I know he is a motivated reasoner, but that’s not to say I can’t glean useful information or distinguish between ‘likely true’ and ‘likely false’ statements. I can reason that the salesman is being honest about the price (because he’s making the sale). Regardless of whether this price is worth it. I can reason that the nutritional values listed on the can are probably accurate (as otherwise the FDA would come down on his head). I can conclude that there are likely some dietary effects, but their extent would depend on research I would want to do myself, rather than taking his word for it. There are probably legitimately good things about the product, regardless of the salesman’s presence.
In much the same way, we can trust some things the Ukranian government says, and their reports usually provide useful information as to what’s happening in the war, even though we would be idiots to trust them completely. They are a ‘noisy’ version of reality we need to filter through. Not reality. That doesn’t mean they aren’t useful as an information source, however, or that we should automatically assume them to be liars.
So… Russia has no right to exist, Ukraine has no right to exist, the US has no right to exist, all of this is pointless? I’m not too sure what you’re implying here, but I’m unsure if I like the direction of this conversation either. I think I’ll stop here, I don’t imagine further discourse will be helpful.