This post has a number of newer users engaging, and I wanted to take a moment to note: LessWrong has some fairly subtle norms on political discussions. If your first comments on LessWrong are on political topic, moderators may be giving you a bit extra scrutiny.
In general we ask all new users to read through the sequences (aka “Rationality A-Z”). But in particular, if you’re going to comment on political topics on LessWrong, I ask you to have read through the LessWrong Political Prerequisites sequence.
Politics is a more difficult place to train your rationality. And while it is sometimes important to discuss on LW, I’m most excited to see users joining the site if they are also interested in discussing other topics.
If your first comments on LessWrong are on political topic, moderators may be giving you a bit extra scrutiny.
As a new user I registered to discuss Large Language Models, but it is very difficult for me to accept that LW is giving platforms posts like this one. It’s not at all rational, it’s shockingly biased.
I’m Ukrainian and I welcome anybody to come and validate their assumptions after the end of war. It would be a big update of world model for some
It would be neutral if there was a second part “Russia and the Crimea question”.
Or “Crimean Tatars and the Crimea question”, which I guess is more fair to the minorities.
Don’t you agree?
Those posts would do well to discuss Crimean Tatars deportation during the time of USSR, as well as NKVD / KGB / communist repressions and cleansing of intelligentsia in Ukraine during 1930 − 1960. Also the recent ones in 2015, were tatars were abducted or killed by Russians.
Executions of other intellectual leaders is the reason Bandera is so used in the current culture. With his numerous (factual) issues he represents a symbol of a military resistance at the time when civil resistance was not possible.
If you are interested in less controversial figures, I might point you to Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who tried a middle way, and was hated by officials both in Tsar and Bolshevik Russia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykhailo_Hrushevsky). His solutions didn’t work out because Russia was unwilling to compromise towards Ukraine as a state. His legacy was destroyed (his daughter died in the Gulag, his historical collections were destroyed in Kyiv after his house burned down from a weirdly specific artillery strike ordered by a Russian commander).
The reason some of the western publications feel neutral for you, is because the coverage of Ukraine was shaped by Russia for a long time before 2014. As well as multiple Ukrainian media were owned by Russian or Russia-loyal oligarchs.
I remember anti-NATO protests in Crimea being highlighted in the media at the time (2004-2008) when most of the Ukrainian population didn’t even care about the alliance.. But it is in line with Putins current rhetoric.
And to address the common questions:
yes there is corruption in Ukraine. Created by both new Ukrainian politicians and ex-Soviet, Russia loving old style oligarchs.
no there is no fascism in Ukraine. It’s a modern country with liberal values, with democratically elected presidents
yes, there are Nazis. And communists. None of them have control, the government is quite technocratic and Zelensky platform was essentially “peace, trade, EU, less bureaucracy”.
I could write a longer post, but I’m not a historian, nor a media critic. But I think a more diverse set of sources is better for the understanding of the situation.
And for the love of god, please please don’t quote RT, its current editor-in-chief is quite literally calling for a genocide on a Russian state television. (Note: I didn’t read through all the comments, please disregard if you feel like this is some kind of accusation)
The reason some of the western publications feel neutral for you, is because the coverage of Ukraine was shaped by Russia for a long time before 2014. As well as multiple Ukrainian media were owned by Russian or Russia-loyal oligarchs.
I’m not citing any Ukrainian media with the exception of the one translation (and if you think it’s a wrong translation feel free to point out how you think it should be translated). I’m citing among others people that the US sent to Ukraine to teach the Ukrainians how liberal democracy works after the fall of the Soviet Union. I’m citing the kind of people who Russia blames for causing the 2014 revolution.
And to address the common questions:
Why don’t you address the points actually made in my article when you comment on it instead of questions people ask elsewhere? Do you feel like the topic of the street militias is too uncomfortable to address?
some kind of them existed in 2013 − 2014, as an aftermath of the revolution
you would be hard pressed to find any right now, especially armed
local level politicians typically ask different military veteran groups to support their cause & protest, that is always peaceful and is done because of the elevated status of the military in the society.
the ones that used to attack pro-LGBT rallies or Romani people are markedly different groups. These are following in the steps of other European neo-nazi movements and don’t have representation in Verkhovna rada or political influence. Many of those groups are less than 100 − 500 people and are disconnected with each other because of major differences.
I don’t think anybody approves of them, but they are defending the country and are getting killed trying to stop the invasion.
there are ultras who are a different radical group altogether and don’t belong in your definition of “street militia”
in Zakarpattya region you could find local “lords” trying to force their power in 2015. I don’t remember if their gangs were armed or not, but there were major standoffs with police. Being a major contraband path + having a large influence from Hungary (to the point of people having both Hungarian and Ukrainian citizenships), and Russia (through Medvedchuk and his colleagues), it’s always has been a bit of difficult region.
Part of the 2022 war, is certainly that anybody who can fight is on the front lines and not engaging in street milita activities. It makes more sense to look at the pre-invasion state of affairs. After the war, there will also going to be a bunch of armed people who need to find other activities to spend their time.
You can measure the political influence of those groups by the amount of government persecution they get when they commit crimes. Being able to attack an ex-president and afterward getting honored by getting given citizenship suggests massive political influence.
Part of what the EU wants from Ukraine as precondition for membership is to pass a law protecting minority rights. If a president campaigns on being pro-EU and is not able to pass such a law that suggests pretty strong opposition to those. What laws get passed matters more than campaign promises.
Yes I understand your point. I do think your post is formulated to support your confirmation bias.
Like the issues of Crimea and Nazis are different issues, it’s not clear to me why they are clumped together if you’re not using one of them in your conclusions.
Those have lower correlation than say “rise of Ukraine as independent successful country” and “Russia feels compelled to invade”. And to take it from Putins mouth, he said multiple times that Ukraine is not real country, and that thesis survived multiple iterations of his speeches over this year
When I read your post, to me it’s:
“Ukraine always had Nazis → therefore it’s was OK for Russia to save its minorities → they will hate being in Ukraine again, according to independent pollsters”
While my view is:
“Ukraine always had Nazis → what does it have to do with Russia invading the neighbor country multiple times without any provocation” and “are we sure that polls in the occupied and resettled territory are trustworthy?” and “referendums with a gun to a persons head are incredibly untrustworthy”
The question is not so much about “what’s okay” but why did they do what they did. How does the situation likely look from the Crimean perspective?
This is the kind of thing where hostile media bias comes into play. Given your involvement in the conflict for you “what’s okay” is very central. If you start by focusing on judging things as okay or not you will have a very hard time actually understanding the motivations of the involved stakeholders.
“Ukraine always had Nazis → what does it have to do with Russia invading the neighbor country multiple times without any provocation
“Ukraine always had Nazis” if you read my article, you would find that it points to things that actually changed. Nazis in Ukraine didn’t use to be powerful enough to get the people they look up to who did ethnic cleaning to be declared as folk heroes but that changed in 2015.
People didn’t prevent laws from being passed by injuring 100 people with a grenade in front of parliament pre-2015. Particularly laws about minority protection.
You aren’t engaging with the actual arguments I made.
On the topic of monuments, there is an argument to be made about moral equivalence of Russian Communism (and by extension Russian Nazism) and German Nazism, and why the world at large prohibited one but not another. I have no answers to that one though
LessWrong never had a strict no-politics rule. It has a norm of “if you speak about politics put in the effort”. In this case, I did this by searching for a lot of sources and limiting myself to Western sources for my main post.
When I was speaking about non-Western sources in the comments I did it with the appropriate disclaimers of “I’m not certain that this is true, but this is a claim out there”. This kind of distinguishing of the epistemic status is also something that comes out of putting effort into it.
This post has a number of newer users engaging, and I wanted to take a moment to note: LessWrong has some fairly subtle norms on political discussions. If your first comments on LessWrong are on political topic, moderators may be giving you a bit extra scrutiny.
In general we ask all new users to read through the sequences (aka “Rationality A-Z”). But in particular, if you’re going to comment on political topics on LessWrong, I ask you to have read through the LessWrong Political Prerequisites sequence.
Politics is a more difficult place to train your rationality. And while it is sometimes important to discuss on LW, I’m most excited to see users joining the site if they are also interested in discussing other topics.
As a new user I registered to discuss Large Language Models, but it is very difficult for me to accept that LW is giving platforms posts like this one. It’s not at all rational, it’s shockingly biased.
I’m Ukrainian and I welcome anybody to come and validate their assumptions after the end of war. It would be a big update of world model for some
There’s a phenomenon called hostile media bias, that makes it very hard to know what’s biased when you are invested in one side of a war.
From the outside view, you can easily make the prediction that a neutral post on Ukraine would feel biased for you.
It would be neutral if there was a second part “Russia and the Crimea question”. Or “Crimean Tatars and the Crimea question”, which I guess is more fair to the minorities. Don’t you agree? Those posts would do well to discuss Crimean Tatars deportation during the time of USSR, as well as NKVD / KGB / communist repressions and cleansing of intelligentsia in Ukraine during 1930 − 1960. Also the recent ones in 2015, were tatars were abducted or killed by Russians.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executed_Renaissance
Executions of other intellectual leaders is the reason Bandera is so used in the current culture. With his numerous (factual) issues he represents a symbol of a military resistance at the time when civil resistance was not possible.
If you are interested in less controversial figures, I might point you to Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who tried a middle way, and was hated by officials both in Tsar and Bolshevik Russia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykhailo_Hrushevsky). His solutions didn’t work out because Russia was unwilling to compromise towards Ukraine as a state. His legacy was destroyed (his daughter died in the Gulag, his historical collections were destroyed in Kyiv after his house burned down from a weirdly specific artillery strike ordered by a Russian commander).
The reason some of the western publications feel neutral for you, is because the coverage of Ukraine was shaped by Russia for a long time before 2014. As well as multiple Ukrainian media were owned by Russian or Russia-loyal oligarchs.
I remember anti-NATO protests in Crimea being highlighted in the media at the time (2004-2008) when most of the Ukrainian population didn’t even care about the alliance.. But it is in line with Putins current rhetoric.
And to address the common questions:
yes there is corruption in Ukraine. Created by both new Ukrainian politicians and ex-Soviet, Russia loving old style oligarchs.
no there is no fascism in Ukraine. It’s a modern country with liberal values, with democratically elected presidents
yes, there are Nazis. And communists. None of them have control, the government is quite technocratic and Zelensky platform was essentially “peace, trade, EU, less bureaucracy”.
I could write a longer post, but I’m not a historian, nor a media critic. But I think a more diverse set of sources is better for the understanding of the situation.
And for the love of god, please please don’t quote RT, its current editor-in-chief is quite literally calling for a genocide on a Russian state television. (Note: I didn’t read through all the comments, please disregard if you feel like this is some kind of accusation)
I’m not citing any Ukrainian media with the exception of the one translation (and if you think it’s a wrong translation feel free to point out how you think it should be translated). I’m citing among others people that the US sent to Ukraine to teach the Ukrainians how liberal democracy works after the fall of the Soviet Union. I’m citing the kind of people who Russia blames for causing the 2014 revolution.
Why don’t you address the points actually made in my article when you comment on it instead of questions people ask elsewhere? Do you feel like the topic of the street militias is too uncomfortable to address?
I can address the topic of street militias:
some kind of them existed in 2013 − 2014, as an aftermath of the revolution
you would be hard pressed to find any right now, especially armed
local level politicians typically ask different military veteran groups to support their cause & protest, that is always peaceful and is done because of the elevated status of the military in the society.
the ones that used to attack pro-LGBT rallies or Romani people are markedly different groups. These are following in the steps of other European neo-nazi movements and don’t have representation in Verkhovna rada or political influence. Many of those groups are less than 100 − 500 people and are disconnected with each other because of major differences. I don’t think anybody approves of them, but they are defending the country and are getting killed trying to stop the invasion.
there are ultras who are a different radical group altogether and don’t belong in your definition of “street militia”
in Zakarpattya region you could find local “lords” trying to force their power in 2015. I don’t remember if their gangs were armed or not, but there were major standoffs with police. Being a major contraband path + having a large influence from Hungary (to the point of people having both Hungarian and Ukrainian citizenships), and Russia (through Medvedchuk and his colleagues), it’s always has been a bit of difficult region.
Part of the 2022 war, is certainly that anybody who can fight is on the front lines and not engaging in street milita activities. It makes more sense to look at the pre-invasion state of affairs. After the war, there will also going to be a bunch of armed people who need to find other activities to spend their time.
You can measure the political influence of those groups by the amount of government persecution they get when they commit crimes. Being able to attack an ex-president and afterward getting honored by getting given citizenship suggests massive political influence.
Part of what the EU wants from Ukraine as precondition for membership is to pass a law protecting minority rights. If a president campaigns on being pro-EU and is not able to pass such a law that suggests pretty strong opposition to those. What laws get passed matters more than campaign promises.
Do you understand what hostile media bias happens to be?
Yes I understand your point. I do think your post is formulated to support your confirmation bias. Like the issues of Crimea and Nazis are different issues, it’s not clear to me why they are clumped together if you’re not using one of them in your conclusions.
Those have lower correlation than say “rise of Ukraine as independent successful country” and “Russia feels compelled to invade”. And to take it from Putins mouth, he said multiple times that Ukraine is not real country, and that thesis survived multiple iterations of his speeches over this year
When I read your post, to me it’s: “Ukraine always had Nazis → therefore it’s was OK for Russia to save its minorities → they will hate being in Ukraine again, according to independent pollsters”
While my view is: “Ukraine always had Nazis → what does it have to do with Russia invading the neighbor country multiple times without any provocation” and “are we sure that polls in the occupied and resettled territory are trustworthy?” and “referendums with a gun to a persons head are incredibly untrustworthy”
The question is not so much about “what’s okay” but why did they do what they did. How does the situation likely look from the Crimean perspective?
This is the kind of thing where hostile media bias comes into play. Given your involvement in the conflict for you “what’s okay” is very central. If you start by focusing on judging things as okay or not you will have a very hard time actually understanding the motivations of the involved stakeholders.
“Ukraine always had Nazis” if you read my article, you would find that it points to things that actually changed. Nazis in Ukraine didn’t use to be powerful enough to get the people they look up to who did ethnic cleaning to be declared as folk heroes but that changed in 2015.
People didn’t prevent laws from being passed by injuring 100 people with a grenade in front of parliament pre-2015. Particularly laws about minority protection.
You aren’t engaging with the actual arguments I made.
On the topic of monuments, there is an argument to be made about moral equivalence of Russian Communism (and by extension Russian Nazism) and German Nazism, and why the world at large prohibited one but not another. I have no answers to that one though
It would help if the no politics rule was real and consistently enforced.
LessWrong never had a strict no-politics rule. It has a norm of “if you speak about politics put in the effort”. In this case, I did this by searching for a lot of sources and limiting myself to Western sources for my main post.
When I was speaking about non-Western sources in the comments I did it with the appropriate disclaimers of “I’m not certain that this is true, but this is a claim out there”. This kind of distinguishing of the epistemic status is also something that comes out of putting effort into it.