Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
An interesting anecdote here is the origin of the term “grimdark” itself. Apparently, the term originates from Warhammer 40,000, itself a grimdark parody of a classic fantasy wargame universe (the original Warhammer) from the same people.
It comes from an (intentionally) cartoonishly overwrought preamble that comes at the start of every written 40k product and most games; in part, it reads as follows:
“Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned.
Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.
There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.”Let’s shorten that a bit more:
“Forget the power of technology and science…forget the promise of progress and understanding…there is only war.”
This is the distilled point being made by grimdark material everywhere; it describes the tone of most cultural products consumed by Americans today.The people who made Warhammer 40k were leftie socialists in a Britain that had just roundly rejected their ideology and that was still unable to make peace with its own collapse as a great power. Like the US, the UK faced inflation and a crime surge; unlike the US, the UK hadn’t had a bounteous postwar honeymoon; instead, it endured prolonged rationing, stagnation, and cost-disease socialism.
Since they didn’t believe a word of the Tories’ plans to fix their problems, they instead perceived a future of fascism, in which the economic malaise would continue, but now with social conservatism enforced at gunpoint. So they produced a coked-up universe in which a decaying throne-and-altar galactic empire fights for its life in a genocidal war of all against all. A minor but amusing detail is that they named the most destructive space ork “Mag Ukuk Thraka”.
It is not hard to see the similarities to modern leftists and their bitterness. While the US economy as a whole has done alright, young ppl in the left-leaning humanities have been their world destroyed. Since they’ve come to hate capitalism itself and regard nearly all business activity as evil, they’ve dismissed the main points of light–Moderna and SpaceX are evil exploiters, not the wave of a brighter future. And since they are more closely tied to the media, humanities academia, and NGOs, they are mixed up in extremely dysfunctional institutions that don’t offer inspiration any more than they do compensation.
For them, it’s all downhill from here and the only real question is whether they’ll rend themselves apart trying to help on the margin or sink into a gentle haze of childless consumer life.
What’s inescapable here is that the previous moral hierarchy had blown itself to bits in the most spectacularly awful way possible. Our moral hierarchy is also broken, although it met its fate via decades-long attrition rather than apocalyptic warfare. Lost Generation literature that I’ve read (and I *think* we can lump Nabokov in here in this respect) is marked by a split between pessimistic cynics (Hemingway is a good example here) and what may be regarded as a form of devotional literature (usually of a far right or far left persuasion) (Langston Hughes’ “Ballads of Lenin” comes to mind https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/ballads-lenin).
We see something similar today, although these sentiments are often *combined* in the same works in a bizarre fusion of the sort you’ve documented in Young Adult lit.
YIMBYs’ best advantage is that NIMBYism tends to lead to squalor and public disorder, and they are slowly convincing more of the public (both elite and non-elite) of this. Reducing the homeless population (unless you plan on engaging in truly *appalling* mass incarceration on public order offenses, like my state govt here in TN is experimenting with) is only really possible via increasing the housing supply, or via careful medium-scale institutionalization–and both of these go well together. The most reliable way to deal with long-term homeless appears to be to get them cheap or free housing in a place where they have easy, reliable, and strictly *required* contact with mental health professionals and social workers; these persons, after all, tend to have severe mental disorders or all-consuming drug addictions (or both)–they are essentially incapable of looking after themselves without an external support network.
NIMBYism both treats homeless ppl as pollutants to be shoveled out onto someone *else’s* lawn, and is generally opposed to expanding the housing supply. If YIMBYs can associate NIMBYs with the public disorder of long-term homeless, they can both cut into the social respect that NIMBYs frequently crave (and thus make them less politically active, by attaching prestige/respect costs to their views) and win over working and middle class ppl who are likelier to be exposed to chronically insane mental invalids on the street.
I’m going to say that videogames do draw a highly diverse milieu, at least at the powergamer level. I imagine it’s far from equally representative, but you see a wide range of ethnicities and backgrounds represented among ppl who take games very seriously. Poor, middle class, and rich alike definitely intermix, though the middle class dominates.
The data is bad precisely because of anonymity, but my experience in actual forums is that there is enormous viewpoint and background diversity and likely quite a lot of diversity along other metrics that are difficult to directly measure.
But I think there is in fact a broader subculture that I’m calling “tekhweebs” (I have a guest post in the works for Noah Smith on this, but I’m taking my time so it’s good), a subculture of ppl who are tech-adjacent and are unusually sincere, unironic consumers of culture in a world where the upper class and much of the middle class are expected to constantly self-deprecate regarding their cultural tastes.
It has some connection to the open-source movement (The Battle for Wesnoth is the most characteristically tekhweeb game in existence), but it is its own thing. It definitely has institutions at midbrow and highbrow cultural levels. Paradox Interactive is a midbrow tekhweeb organization par excellence. The effective altruist movement is somewhat tekhweeb (as, somewhat, is the rationalist subculture). MIRI is highbrow and tekhweeb. Bret Devereaux is a good example of someone who is *NOT* tekhweeb but who definitely interacts and influences that culture. Noah Smith and @swiftonsecurity are good examples of tekhweebs on Twitter.
In general, the tekhweeb is characterized by self-confidence in taste, technical literacy, optimism of the will (solarpunk is an extremely tekhweeb aesthetic, although it remains a niche one even among them), and a comparatively low level of social paranoia.
Also relevant is the fact that Putin has been systematically repressing religious groups he associates with the United States–Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses in particular. Repression of gays is part of a broader campaign of national ‘moral hygiene’ (I don’t recall that exact phrase, but it’s the consistent theme) against all “decadent” Western influences.
Ultimately, when Putin came to hate and fear the US and Europe, it meant the end of a stable relationship between him and the West, regardless of who was in power.
The Taiwanese military – more importantly the Taiwanese political leadership and citizen body – should learn the huge effectiveness of a protracted war strategy against an enemy facing serious logistical hurdles (which China absolutely will – although these are far from prohibitive). One of the best things the US could do for Taiwan is to get some Ukrainian military advisors to visit Taiwan after the war ends – hell, if possible, even Zelenskyy himself (the US should, bluntly, be willing to bribe Ukraine to the tune of billions to get Zelenskyy to visit Taiwan in person if he survives this war). *Ukraine* has persuasive abilities as a very successful practitioner of a protracted war strategy that the US does not – and they’ve become enough of an icon of democratic resistance to powerful tyrants that it might create the political space for Taiwan to transition to the strategy that the US and Taiwanese natsec communities have been desperately trying to get Taiwan to adopt.
As long as Ukraine endures as a viable independent state – whether by winning outright or by a negotiated peace settlement, it will be as potent a political icon for a protracted war strategy by seemingly outmatched liberal-democratic states against authoritarian or totalitarian ones as Mao’s victory over the KMT was for protracted war by seemingly outmatched communists against capitalist states.
The PLA *and* US (but especially the PLA) should realize that logistics and maintenance have to be rigorously stress-tested and trained ahead of time. Russian leadership had absolutely no clue that its entire logistics and maintenance systems were, crudely, utterly f**ked until after it was far too late to fix it.
This is also a lesson for Taiwan, whose military appears to have much the same problem. The solution may well be, as before, to leverage this newfound Ukrainian cultural cachet into getting them to get serious and clean house.
I think the US should keep going forward with the Marines’ apparent shift towards defensive and irregular warfare. Drones and portable antitank munitions are proving very, very effective in the hands of infantry fighting as irregulars, even in the unfavorable terrain of the Northern European Plain.
Everyone should take a good look at just how quickly Russia’s economy got devastated by sanctions alone. China will be harder to harm with sanctions, but sanctions plus a long-distance naval blockade are much more promising. What will China do when it can trade at any significant scale only with itself and a handful of poor, often basketcase-regime countries? Sanctions and even blockades may be very weak (if not counterproductive) at producing regime change, but for severely weakening a war economy they appear to be just as potent as when used for that purpose by the US and UK in WW2.
As a final note, I’d also say the Japanese should be learning something here, besides what I’ve written above: integrating women into the military is very important for low-fertility states. Childless women are every bit as available for service as men, and just as patriotic in an existential conflict. Naval warfare may not be as manpower-intensive as land warfare, but it’s plenty manpower-intensive enough for a low-fertility country like Japan to need to squeeze out whatever it can get.
There’s also the fact that the US and Japan can definitely retaliate to a Chinese blockade of Taiwan by blockading China. This can be further strengthened by getting the EU, non-EU NATO, and a number of Indo-Pacific countries to cooperate on sanctions (which now seems pretty feasible unless China aggressively cuts its diplomatic losses from the Russo-Ukainian War and leaves Putin to hang).
A 2nd Island Chain blockade can’t be airtight, but it can make large-scale maritime imports or exports impossible, especially with sanctions against companies and individuals who help violate the blockade. Get Europe to cooperate (a real possibility now thanks to the wake-up call from the horrors inflicted on Ukraine), and China finds itself stuck with a handful of dysfunctional and mostly poor trading partners.
China will suffer with Taiwan if it imposes a blockade. If it wants to be clearly winning (and thus able to dictate peace terms), it absolutely has to take it.
If the Russian military was halfway competent I wouldn’t even question what would happen to Kharkiv. But they keep screwing up basic meat-and-potatoes tasks of military operations – so while I think it’s *likely* Kharkiv falls, I do not consider it anywhere close to *certain*.
Also, I don’t think that the Ukrainian government will settle for a division of the country along the Dniepr. That’s basically tantamount to the end of Ukraine as an independent state (a rump state in the west would, in practice, be an EU vassal economically).
They have pretty decent prospects of winning a protracted war – Russia’s contract army can’t take these losses indefinitely without heavy reinforcement from conscripts, and Putin seems genuinely afraid of the political consequences of flooding Ukraine with the conscript manpower necessary to reduce it to a Russian colonial subject. And I don’t think foreign mercenaries or Syrian subject levies have the numbers to plug the hole here – especially given the risk that their loyalties may turn out to be fairly limited, or even negotiable!
A big unknown here is whether Russia’s munitions stockpiles will turn out to have been as shambolically maintained as its vehicles or battlefield rations stocks.
I haven’t been able to find a good answer on how easy it would be to let munitions ‘go to rot’ with poor maintenance, but given the sorry state of Russia’s munitions industry under the current sanctions regime, a modern-day analogue to the Shell Crisis seems like a real possibility – especially taking into account high attrition to supply convoys.
It might be another reason why Russia keeps hinting at using chemical or nuclear weapons – they might not actually have, or be uncertain whether they have, the munitions to actually clear Kyiv and Kharkiv without deploying them.
An old-fashioned starve-or-surrender siege of Kyiv is going to be hard to pull off deep in hostile territory with unreliable supply lines – let alone with troop numbers an order of magnitude lower than what the last ppl to lay siege to properly defended urban metropoles of this size had to work with – this isn’t Syria; Ukraine actually has an army capable of pulling off the ‘modern system’ of warfare. And frankly, a large force overcommitted to Kyiv with poor supply lines risks being itself starved to breaking point and then destroyed in a decisive engagement.
I’m giving it 30% odds Kyiv falls by June. Willing to put 60% odds on Kharkiv falling by then – Russia’s logistical situation is inherently much easier there.
Ukraine does have pretty serious demographic problems, but so does Russia. And Ukraine appears to have much better prospects of attracting foreign fighters than Russia does. Putin will attempt to repress war discontent, of course, but the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers originated in the USSR – it’s going to be a hard and politically costly task to repress mothers furious over losing their (often only-child) sons.
Just how deep can Putin tap Russia’s manpower reserves before unrest from the bereaved becomes an existential threat to him? I have no idea, but in all likelihood neither does he. If he’s forced to resort to brutalizing grieving mothers, that’s exactly the sort of thing that can cause a breakdown or revolt within the organs of state violence.
I’m Konstantin McKenna. I’ve been reading Greer’s writing for a few years now, and for the time being he’s tied with Scott Alexander as my favorite contemporary essayist.
I’m a 2nd-gen immigrant on my mother’s side, whereas my dad’s ancestors have been here for at least several generations. I live in and grew up in and around Nashville. I’ve got my BS in math last Spring, and I start UT Austin’s new online master’s program in data science in January.
Starting in Jan this year, I’ve written on occasion for Foreign Policy. My last piece was a comparative essay examining parallels between the Xinjiang genocide and the German South West Africa genocides.
My main interests are history and mathematics – much of my free time is spent digging into one or the other.
Politically, I fall into the unwoke liberal faction. My main source of news is the Bulwark – I have subzero trust in nearly all RW media and only weakly trust most of the mainstream media. My political loyalties are up for grabs: I’m on board with almost any political program, party, or candidate that I believe will increase the odds that American democracy survives this decade.
