War in Europe 💔

I’ve taught a little Criminology. Right Realism is a sociological and criminological theory. To summarise Right Realism to do with crime, it is stated that crime happens ‘because people can get away with it’.

This is clearly falsified by people who could easily e.g. embezzle from a more-or-less clueless/absent employer but don’t. This is also clearly falsified by the wealth of other factors that impact crime as measured in both correlations (weak evidence) and natural experiment (somewhat better evidence, although you can argue about control over variables endlessly).

It also, I think, does not agree with Lord Buddha’s assessment in the Cakkavattisutta.

This leads me to be wary about right-wing realism. The use of Thomas Hobbes, a founder of modern right-wing philosophy, is why I bring up right-wing politics – I’m not trying to politicise this discussion unfairly.

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I have the same view of Putin as I regard our leaders, they behave like bullies.

Our own bullie isnt better than theirs, and I think we love and trust our bullies because we cuturally have developed the stocholm syndrome.

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The problem I have with this argument is that it’s a false equivalency. It would be more parallel to the situation with Russia and Eastern Europe if Mexico and Canada had been conquered and occupied by a despotic American regime for a couple generations, and then that regime collapsed, and they became independent countries. Then it would be similar situation, and it would be understandable if they did seek alliances to protect themselves. The history is deep with trauma and fear in Europe because of both world wars and the fact that Stalin’s empire lived on for another 45 years before it finally fell apart. The reason the former Warsaw Pact countries have joined NATO is because they feared Russian imperial ambitions would return.

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There are degrees of behaviour though aren’t there? Putin is acting in a very extreme and malevolent way. Stating that does not mean that I love or trust the leader of my country (UK). In fact our Prime Minister is very obviously deeply flawed and his party deeply compromised. Past PM’s also have a terrible record. But even though that is the case it does not stop me seeing the evil of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or negate Putin’s responsibility.

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The point I try to make is that the powers of east and west freak each other out and reacts out of fear, fear leads to anger and violence.

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Thats your opinion which you are free to have.

Putin says Ukrain develops nuclear weapons, so they just have to do what they do …

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Weapons of mass destruction, invading Iraqi and make a bloody mess, wich leads to the arising of ISIL, another even bloodier mess, large scale of new invasions and refugee crisis all over the middle east, and so on …

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Which, unfortunately for Hobbes, it isn’t. Some anthropologists argue that pre-agricultural humans lived longer, safer lives than “civilized” folk did until quite recently. People live in all kinds of ways, many of them quite pleasant. Human nature is not too bad, all things considered.

Huh. An odd argument. As an old anarchist, it doesn’t sound like any version of anarchism I’m familiar with. Humanity requires cooperation, which requires empathy. In fact, one could make the argument that Putin’s actions right now are disproving the realist argument; none of this is helping Russia in any discernible way.

I really appreciate the background to all this. It seems Mearsheimer has become a touchstone in the culture wars, being retweeted and promoted by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I wonder what they would have thought of his support for Bernie Sanders in the 2019 election?

One of the (many) problems with such “realist” positions is that they empower assholes to behave like assholes, because “everyone does it”. It’s a problem with theories that set out to describe; once they get into the bloodstream, they turn into a prescription. (Evolution is another example; neoliberal capitalism another.)

People are arguing back from Mearsheimer’s prediction of the conflict to “therefore he was right”, but you can’t infer from isolated consequences.

War is predictable from the kind of person Putin is. People, including politicians, really are different from one another, and their choices matter. Everyone is capable of making good and bad choices, but not everyone makes the same choices.

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An illegal war in iraq does not make Putin’s invasion of Ukraine okay or justifiable.

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The devil you know than the devil you don’t kind of thing eh…

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Your last three paragraphs have put across what I was trying to say in a far more eloquent way. Thank you.

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It would be helping Russia massively if reality simply fit to Putin’s expectations. Sadly for him, many Ukrainians aren’t desperate to be a puppet state (if that’s the right term) for his benefit.

Perhaps ‘realists’ tend to draw a chalk picture on the pavement, step in it, and proclaim that’s what the world looks like. That’s why reality is often so full of surprises that don’t fit their models.

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Certainly not, but one could wish for the powers that be actually started using the insides of their heads.

Now, all morons of the west joins in pushing weapons into the hands of the Ukrainians, and nobody seems to be able to see where this will/must end.

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I am a pacifist and don’t think violence solves anything ( maybe short term, but sows seeds of hate that ripen in the future). I just hope cooler heads prevail in this conflict. There are many critics of the nonviolence movement, but I just don’t know how anyone can justify violence with more violence. All beings fear the rod…

Sigh…:pensive:

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You seem incredibly reluctant to put any blame on Putin. Russia has invaded Ukraine. That is what has happened. It is Putin who is responsible for this.

Also worth noting that many are offering humanitarian aid. An end to the war and a withdrawal of the Russian army is what I imagine most in the “west” would want.

Just a reminder that this is a difficult topic for many, let alone those affected by the violence. Kindly keep the conversation in the spirit of Right Speech and kindness. There’s enough anger going around, we should aim to minimize it here :heart:

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This is a very astute observation. In my classes I stress that there is a difference between an explanation and a prescription for policy. Of course, there is a connection between an explanation for anything and how to behave towards that which is being explained. How one treats an illness depends on the explanation for why the illness occurs. If you think a fever is caused by a surfeit of blood in the body then the prescription is to attach leaches; if you think a fever is caused by a bacterial infection then the prescription is to prescribe a round of antibiotics. So it’s not as if explanation and prescription are not related.

The problem arises when it is assumed that causation is brought about because of an explanation. Which is to say, cause and effect exist independently of anyone having uncovered a cause-and-effect relationship, and an explanation specifying that cause-and-effect relationship has no bearing on that relationship. Or to put it another way, curing a fever through a round of antibiotics in no ways causes bacterial infections to cause a fever. Bacterial infections do what they do; explaining them does not cause them to happen.

What becomes really problematic is when people behave in ways that they think are consistent with an explanatory theory such that they cause the very problem they were trying to solve. To put it crudely, a medical doctor who says, “I treat bacterial infections by administering antibiotics, therefore I need to induce a bacterial infection so that I can treat it” obviously has confused theory with practice.

Such is the case with foreign policymakers who are self-aware of theories of international relations. If you think states act in accordance with the prevailing distribution of power, you might be inclined to prescribe a course of action which is designed to alter the international distribution of power. That is exactly the trap that scholars such John Mearsheimer fall into. The goal of scholars (like medical researchers) is simply to diagnose and explain why things happen. Obviously such explanations should suggest a course of action (as in prescribing antibiotics after having explained a fever as having been cause by a bacterial infection), but scholars should have no vested interest in what explanations are suggested by the facts. I sense that Prof. Mearsheimer and others like him are too invested in proving their theories correct to the extent they advocate for the very policies which bring about the so-called problems they are trying to solve.

Another very astute observation. Sadly, the realist paradigm, like many other theoretical schools of thought in the study of international relations, is notoriously tautological and non-falsifiable. I read an essay in graduate school which opined that at least three-quarters of what is published in political science journals is tautological. That essay has made an impression on me for my entire academic career.

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Indeed.

Russia has a better track record in causing stability such as in Syria and more recently Kazakhstan.

Hunter Biden was getting paid in Ukraine. I am wondering if this has anything to do with fueling this conflict.

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Yeah. We’re still getting over the Cold War. Putin represents the old guard who were young men when the USSR broke up, so they still have that mentality of being in an existential conflict. There are plenty of the same sort in America. What I often say is that extremists on both side of conflicts have a codependent relationship with each other. They say they want to destroy each other, but they actually need each other to exist forever in order to continue the conflict. It’s like that with Islamic extremists and Israeli extremists, American and Russian cold warriors, and the like. They hold everyone else hostage.

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Here is some advice I give to my students: Don’t let your personal preferences interfere with your ability to engage in an objective, neutral, detached, dispassionate, scholarly analysis. What you prefer to be the answer should not cloud your ability to arrive at an analytical assessment of the facts.

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