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That’s a good point.
But what about the fact that men of fighting age were prevented to stay? (If I understood correctly).
What about the fact that quite a few of them have military training (given the Donbas situation)?Macron and Putin’s phone call seems to make clear that option 1 will never happen. So we are left with option 2 and 3. Considering the way things are right now, I don’t see any one backing off, neither Russia nor Ukraine. So I fear we are going to see an insurgency and a guerilla war.
“What I would like to see more thought on, but have seen precious little thus far, is the end game. What outcomes could we accept in exchange for ending sanctions? What does war termination look like?”
The end of the war will be a balancing act between the pride and security concerns of Russia and Ukrain, as well as the moralistic and righteous tendencies of the West.
I think I mostly agree with your Twitter take, but I would add a third option.
1) Because of Ukr resistance, the Russians have to come to the table.
I think the most desirable outcome in the option, would be to recognize the Crimea and parts of eastern Ukr either as independent states or as parts of Russia. Seems the only way to appease the Russian without moving too far back from the antebellum status quo.
We can’t commit to giving Ukr, UE membership as that would further inflame the Russians, but we could maybe offer economic assistance, but, as Mearsheimer suggested, ask for guarantees that they protect Russian minorities as a condition for this economic assistance.
In that option, we lift all sanctions.2) Russians “win” the war. A new Iron curtain falls.
I fear that this will push Russia even more into China’s hands, and post WW2 international institutions become close to irrelevant.
Sanctions stay in place. And the world becomes a very bleak place.3) Russian can’t actually win the war because the Ukr go the insurgency way. The west gives Ukr arms and ammunition to fight a guerilla war. Ukr becomes another Vietnam or Afghanistan. No idea what could happen then, but it doesn’t feel that different from option 2, just more bloody.
It’s early, but based on what I’ve been seeing so far, here’s what I think. These are just discussion points. I may be wrong, but so far here’s what I’ve come to believe :
– Putin underestimated the resistance Russian forces would encounter.
1) The way the attacks were setup, seems to indicate, Russians were trying to go as fast as possible.
2) They didn’t plan on a lot of casualties (see doc from Health ministry that was shared earlier)
3) We have reports of russian soldiers not mowing they were invading Ukraine, or things similar.– I also think he overestimated the support for a war in the Russian population, or more probably he just didn’t care about the support.
1) As Sam Green said, most russian domestic analysis thought Putin would not invade based on the risks of such a war.
2) There seems to bit a lot more spontaneous protest in Russia than I would have believed so early in the war.His threat toward Sweden and Finland regarding their willingness to join NATO seems to me to indicate that he felt the invasion of Ukraine and the set up of a puppet regime was the first step in a strategy to destabilize the west.
For now European seem to still live in a rosy world where they think Putin can be talked to. I wonder how long it will last.
But the longer the war lasts, the more likely, I believe we will see violence happening in Russia, and the more likely the European will get there shit together because the madness of Putin will become more apparent.There we are. It has happened. Does anybody have any idea what Putin’s endgame could be? Coz I can’t make heads or tails what he is trying to achieve now.
Pretty sure that this will push Europe toward greater military integration, whether with NATO or with a European military force (or both).
Wouldn’t be surprised if it isolated China, made countries in Africa suspicious of it.But I would love to hear your perspective as most of you are way more knowledgeable on this matters.
For what it’s worth here are the metaculus threads I found (they all show it to be unlikely) :
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/8898/russian-invasion-of-ukraine-before-2023/https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9462/will-russia-invade-ukraine-this-month/
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6981/russian-annexation-of-ukrainian-territory/
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9459/russian-troops-enter-kiev/
This book will soon be released and I think it should be interesting in the context of your question : https://www.amazon.com/Ritual-Animal-Imitation-Evolution-Complexity-ebook/dp/B09LHX2TL7/ref=sr_1_1
Maybe i’m too quick, but it seems that what you are saying is something like LotR is tragic and R3K isn’t.
I’ve been thinking about this argument for the past week and tho i generally agree with it, there are 2 points with which i have issues. (1) I think Scheffler understates our ability to move thru time. (2) I’m not convince by his conception of home.
(1) It is quite evident that our ability to move thru time is constrained, but I think there are a couple of ways other than pure memory we can do it. Arendt is right to say that promise and forgiveness are ways to act in time. When I promise, i bind my futur self to something I say now. When I forgive, i act in the past to right a past wrong. I think on top of that, something in the present can modify the past. Take for instance something akin to The Truman Show. When he discovers his life is a TV Show, it doesn’t just change his present, it changes his past as well, everything that he experienced has to be rediscovered.
(2) Scheffler reduces a home to a place we can come back to. But a home is much more than that and it can’t be reduced to juste a place. It’s something that feels relevant in the right kind of way. I can feel at home in lots of different places because those places are relevant to me in the right kind of way. Making a home in space is about making a place become relevant. And it’s the same with a home in time, it’s about making it relevant.
(3) I think this is where I can answer your question. This yearning can be explained by our desire to make things become relevant, that is to create a narrative that allows us to understand them and be able to act upon them. We have a few cognitive gadgets one of the is about mind reading. As Boyer explains in his book on religion, we are good at mind reading, but bad at understanding how social relations work. We create narratives based on reasons about most everything. And those narratives are there to allow us to act upon the world. To have a spatial home it to have a place that feels relevant, a place that has a narrative and allows us to do stuff. To have a temporal home is the same. Unless we have that, we are lost in the world because we can’t act upon it as it doesn’t make sense. We just don’t have to psychological apparatus to make sense of the world and act upon it outside of the narrative we construct. (This whole thing is based on my reading of Boyer, Sperber, Mercier etc.)
Two things come to mind when reading this. But before i go back to reading them, or before i forget to come back to it, i’d rather put them down right now.
Ideas similar to this one are explored in Arendt’s The Human Condition, specially the 5th chapter on Action. She talks about forgiveness and promise (maybe the words are not exactly those one, as i only have my french translation on hand), as a way to act upon the future and the past.
The other book, is Mircea Eliade, Myth of the eternal return. He talks (if i remember correctly) about how cyclical time gives us a way to give meaning to time.
I will try to come back to the argument later during the week, as it is something that also rings true to me.Hi Jaycel.
Yes, i had heard of them, but didn’t know the electronic copies were open access. Their translation kept poping up when i was looking for chinese poets, but the books were too expansive. They seem to have a good reputation.
One question about Sima Qian : what was the translation you used ?
Funny that you are now switching to Indian works, because this also what i’ve been doing. After i small arabic interlude, during which i read Ibn Tufayl : Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, and Saadi’s Gulistan. I’ve now started the Ramayana (Bibek Debroy’s translation), and should be starting Tagore soon.
Tufayl was a bit tedious at the beginning, but ended up being a great fun to read. (It’s apparently the third most translated arab text after the Koran and the Arabian Night.) Once you pass the whole discussion on the existence of God, and he starts explaining the ethical and mystical way of life, it’s a very pleasant text, full of food for thought.
Saadi, is super funny. I’m not a big fan of Thackston’s translation. Not that it isn’t good, but he clearly decided no to add any of the poetical aspect of the original text. I now have to learn persian !
When I started the project, almost a year ago, Debroy’s translation was the only unabridged translation of the Ramayana available (that wasn’t excessively expensive). But Princeton will be releasing it’s full translation in a single volume in January ( https://www.amazon.com/R%C4%81m%C4%81ya%E1%B9%87a-V%C4%81lm%C4%ABki-Translation-Princeton-Translations/dp/0691206864 ) with a full intro.
I finally finished the David Young translation of Su Dongpo’s poems. It’s a great collection, but somewhat limited as Young decided to translate no ci or prose poems. So i’m glad I found the french anthology that not only has some poems, but also essays which are organized in 4 sections : politics, art, history and a more miscellaneous one. If you can read french, i would really recommend you go for this book instead of an anthology that only has poems. I remember reading once, somewhere, that Cicero had said that Aristotle prose (that is unfortunately lost to us) was a flowing river of gold. And somehow, reading Su Dongpo made me think of that. I can imagine Aristotle writing that way. I that river idea seems “very su dongpo”. There is a tranquility, a liquidity, a flowing aspect to what he writes, that is very pleasant, and yet, underneath that first impressions, his texts are overflowing with ideas. Some texts are still very “modern” (not sure this is precisely what i want to say). One in particular, title of which is Sur les obstacles (on obstacles), in french, seems to defend something akin to republicanism (as understood by Skinner and Pettit).
On another topic. Back to Dream of the red chamber (which i will finish next week). As a companion reading, i’ve been reading Reflection on Dream of the Red Chamber, by Zaifu Liu. It’s an amazing books, and it helped me understand tons of things better. And i wanted also to mention, that a sort of a reading guide to Dream, had just been published in english : A companion to The story of the Stone, by Susan Chan Egan and Pai Hsien Yung. It’s a chapter by chapter analysis of Cao Xueqin’s book. Should make for a boring read, but it might help those, like me, not familiar with chinese culture.
@jaycel : could you say a bit more about what you mean by “a sense of shame in a positive way” ? Does that just mean keeping face ?
@Tanner. Ok, I see. The Gay Genius offers excerpts of some of Su Shi’s Essays.
I could only find 2 anthologies of his prose works in french. First one is called Commemorations, the translation received bad reviews. The second one, which I order, is called Sur moi-même (about me), only has good reviews, but i couldn’t find info on the content. I will write a longer review when i’ve read it.