Lex Fridman has relatives from both the Ukraine and Russia. IIRC correctly his father used to work at Chernobyl.
I’m not sure which of his 750 videos Esteban was referring to, but in the first one I clicked on he said “Russia is an authoritarian regime trying to present itself as a democracy”, with which I can’t disagree. Perhaps he expresses other opinions in other videos? Many are 4 hours long which is more than I have time for.
Personal attacks removed, again… Any personal attack, whole post goes.
I was a bit slow there. In the gym 
The video posted was BS. Internet is full of that stuff. Not relevant too.
There is a good reason why the general consensus has always been ‘no arms deliveries to active conflicts’. It tends to aggravate the situation, not solve it.
That simply isn’t true and that approach costed my home country (Bosnia) some 100.000 casualties; the majority were civilians. The war ended when the balance of arms was achieved and when the aggressor started to lose the battles.
Indeed; it guarantees that the aggressor wins every time – because it is impossible to have a peacetime stockpile big enough for a prolonged war. Even the US can’t do it. And neither can Russia; they are just sitting on a vast pile of hardware with date codes going back to 1946
Also witness the destruction of the Swiss arms industry.
Russia understands only one thing: muscle. It’s the culture…
Another good analysis video
Peter, I am sorry, but I really have problem calibrating what you consider a personal attack. Perhaps post me a PM with the offending sentences. I though that I was attacking ideas and opinions … there obviously must be cultural misunderstanding.
The video posted referenced this: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/16/hostile-authoritarian-uk-downgraded-in-civic-freedoms-index from the Indian point of view, showing the position the global south takes (and that was my point). To quote from the very end:
“Most such reports are used to pressure the governments. They are prepared by people with at best a peripheral understanding of a society, and they must be taken with a sack of salt. But in this case, we discussed in detail because London loves to do the same. Western governments and western media use such findings to point fingers at other governments. We would like to see how they take this one.”
I regret you dismiss it as BS without supporting argumentation, that was a cheap cop-out. But I guess it is a good indication of how ‘they take this one’.
Regarding Lex Friedman: Yes, he is half Ukrainian, half Russian. Can be viewed as more intellectual, more emphatic and less controversial/combative Joe Rogan. He speaks with wide range of people from all sides (e.g. on Russia/Ukraine he had Fiona Hill, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Kotkin, Oliver Stone) and over long-form tries to really understand their ideas. Unlike more typical shows that are more combative/adversarial, often trying cheap debating tactics to prove the other side wrong, his standard approach is empathy, and to steel man the guest’s argument https://constantrenewal.com/steel-man
Not so good for quick and witty sound bytes, but if you have time, quite worth if for the deep dive. Depending on what your interests and positions are, it is quite likely you will find something interesting. I found
quite relevant for today’s divided world, but there are many, many other excellent ones (well, if the long-form format suits you, but, frankly, one of the problems of the modern times is the short attention span and the resulting shallowness).
I really have problem calibrating what you consider a personal attack.
Getting back to basics, and the topic of Russian invasion of Ukraine: do you want Putin to keep his land-grab, or do you (or somebody) have better ideas which are credible?
One thing is for certain, there are no easy diplomatic solutions or the war would long be over by now.
Regardig the Ukrainian population in the occupied parts of the country, I see many parallels to Germany in ca. 1938/1939. The ethnic German population in e.g. the Sudetenland (Czech Republic), Danzig (Poland) or Memel (Lithuania) all had an understandable and also somewhat legitimate desire to want to be part of Germany. But there were significant minorities or even majorities of ethnic natives of the mentioned states living in the very same area as them. Just like today there are people in East Ukraine with allegiance to Russia and those with allegiance to Ukraine, many of these ethnic Germans were actually quite content with being citizens of Czechia/Poland/Lithuania and a sizeable part of them wanted nothing to do with the political party then dominant in Germany proper.
Again, same as today in Ukraine, because even if you might be living in East Ukraine, speak Russian as mother tongue and feel an emotional connection to “mother Russia”, you might not want to be politically affiliated with today’s Russia in the slightest. Especially after what happened since February 24, 2022.
National identities are complicated and generally run deeper than just current politics, or Germany would have ceased to exist in 1945. But comparing and contrasting the history of German populations on Eastern Europe ca. 1918 to 1945 with that of Russians in Ukraine after 1991 (or at least after 2014) shows the dangerous slippery slopes on gets onto once declaring the supposed allegiance of Eastern Ukrainians to Russia as fully legitimate and universal.
I used to know some Slovaks who would have preferred their regions of Slovakia to have become Hungarian. To an outsider I don’t really see that their justifications were much less than those of ethnic Russians living in the Ukraine who might have wished for their towns to become Russian. And yet there is no war between Hungary and Slovakia. Despite all Europe’s travails, many (most?) countries have regions where the majority of people are ethnically closer to populations living in other countries, and the default in recent decades is that we don’t go to war over it.
I have watched a few of Lex Fridman’s interviews with computer scientists and agree that they can be interesting, though they often lack efficiency. What annoys me is the tactic of posting videos or other media without at least summarising what the point that is made in the videos or papers that the poster wants his or her audience to take from them.
esteban wrote:
My whole point here is not that Russia is a great country where I want to live (it is not, and I truly feel sorry for the Russians there; btw USA has also its problems and I don’t want to live there either – although I freely admit there is less reason to feel sorry for Americans), but that the West (with overwhelming contribution of USA, honorable mention to UK as well) has its fair share in creating and propagating this mess, and unless it changes its ways, thing will only get worse (just wait for the China episode…).Overly simplified analogy:
1) you see your buddy is going to be beaten up by BigBadUglyGuy (let’s ignore for now why, that is another long story)
so you give him a knife to defend himself (and hoping he draws blood of the BBUG)
2) of course, BBUG has a machette, so now both of them are bleeding (guess who’s wound is more grave…)
What’s next?
3) do you give your friend a pistol? (and hoping BBUG won’t draw a Kalasnikov a finish him off, as well as all the bystanders…)There is a good reason why the general consensus has always been ‘no arms deliveries to active conflicts’. It tends to aggravate the situation, not solve it.
I agree with your analysis except for one – crucial – point. The BBUG won’t stop with your friend. If your friend is beaten up, then the BBUG will go for other friends of yours and possibly after yourself. For many reasons – some maybe not so noble – it is seen as better to help your friend to deal with the BBUG rather than going for the BBUG yourself.
Russia has for a long time made its imperial desires clear but most parties have not taken it seriously. With the attack on Ukraine all of that changed, Or to put it another way, we finally have learned something from history – the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in particular.
I’m sure that if the rest of Europe believed that Russia’s ambitions would stop with Ukraine, the situation would have been quite different.
Peter wrote:
GuidelinesGetting back to basics, and the topic of Russian invasion of Ukraine: do you want Putin to keep his land-grab, or do you (or somebody) have better ideas which are credible?
Peter, I have read guidelines. That is not really helpful. After you delete my post, I can’t go back, re-read it and see ‘Aha! This throw-away sentence (that due to my frustration from not being able to get my point across) slipped into my post can indeed be seen as personal attack.’
The problem with credible ideas is that different parties see different ideas as credible. At the end, the situation has devolved so much, that the things will be decided militarily on the ground. Again – different people have different ideas what is likely/feasible. The point of discussion like this is to challenge one’s ideas to hopefully arrive at ones that better match reality. Therefore, outright dismissal on ideological grounds is really not helpful.
