A Western rationale for supporting the Ukraine war

A deeply troubling article the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft published gets right to the point: 

Ukraine’s tragedies: A ‘good deal’ for some war supporters

It’s a cynical calculus for many in the West: Keep pumping money into the conflict as long as Ukrainians are the ones dying

For a conflict discussed in starkly moralistic terms, the ways the Ukraine war is talked about by its most enthusiastic Western supporters can be remarkably cynical about the human carnage involved.

“Aiding Ukraine, giving the money to Ukraine is the cheapest possible way for the U.S. to enhance its security,” Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of the Economist, recently told the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. “The fighting is being done by the Ukrainians, they’re the people who are being killed.”

This view is not unique to Beddoes. It’s been widely expressed by those most in favor of an open-ended, prolonged war and most against the kind of peace negotiations that would shorten it.

“Four months into this thing, I like the structural path we're on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) early into the war, accidentally voicing what the war’s critics have often said about the war — that the U.S. will fight it “to the last Ukrainian.” Later, Graham called it the “best money we’ve ever spent.”

“It is a relatively modest amount that we are contributing without being asked to risk life and limb,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the Associated Press last year. “The Ukrainians are willing to fight the fight for us if the West will give them the provisions. It’s a pretty good deal.”

“I call that a bargain,” North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum has said about the war funding, pointing to the damage Ukrainian forces had inflicted on the Russian military.

“No Americans are getting killed in Ukraine. We’re rebuilding our industrial base. The Ukrainians are destroying the army of one of our biggest rivals. I have a hard time finding anything wrong with that,” U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) remarked.

Americans “should be satisfied that we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment,” wrote Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), because “for less than 3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military strength by half,” and “all without a single American service woman or man injured or lost.”

But politicians aren’t the only armchair warriors who look at the enormous death and destruction suffered by Ukraine by prolonging the war as akin to a brilliant business decision. Hawkish think tanks have made similar arguments.

“When viewed from a bang-per-buck perspective, U.S. and Western support for Ukraine is an incredibly cost-effective investment,” Timothy Garten Ashe wrote for the weapons maker-funded Center for European Policy Analysis. “Support for Ukraine remains a bargain for American national security,” wrote Hudson Institute Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Europe and Eurasia Peter Rough. “For about 5 percent of total U.S. defense spending over the past 20 months, Ukraine has badly degraded Russia, one of the United States’ top adversaries, without shedding a single drop of American blood.”  

And major U.S. newspapers have likewise published similar perspectives. “We have a determined partner in Ukraine that is willing to bear the consequences of war so that we do not have to do so ourselves in the future,” former top George W. Bush officials Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates celebrated in the pages of the Washington Post.

“For all the aid we’ve given Ukraine, we are the true beneficiaries in the relationship, and they the true benefactors,” wrote Bret Stephens at the New York Times, pointing to the fact that NATO is paying in only money, while “Ukrainians are counting their costs in lives and limbs lost.”

Q: Are the assessments by elites that the war is a good deal for us because Russia weakens, Ukrainians die and we don’t the mark of responsible statecraft, brutal cynicism, or something else? 

News bits: USSC & DJT's immunity case; Powerful demagogue defends demagoguery; Gaza’s misery

Most or all major sources are reporting that the USSC has agreed to hear DJT’s ridiculous arguments that he is immune from prosecution. He is not. This is a win for DJT because it further delays his prosecutions and that further increases his chances of getting out of everything. Maddow on MSNBC commented:

“This is B.S.—you were doing this as a dilatory tactic to help your political friend,” says Rachel Maddow on the Supreme Court agreeing to hear the Trump immunity argument, delaying his coup trial. “And for you to say that this is something that the Court needs to decide because it’s something that’s unclear in the law is just flagrant, flagrant bullpucky.”

I expect the USSC to decide that DJT can be prosecuted for all crimes before (~80% confident), during and after his time in office. But the delay nonetheless significantly strengthens his legal and political positions. It gives the radical right authoritarian propagandists time to demagogue the issue into something it is not.

I interpret this move by the USSC as an intentional overt, political act made in bad faith to protect DJT as much as possible. Even if the USSC decides as I believe they should, that does not wipe away or in any way negate the deep moral rot of political partisanship that gave rise to this unjustifiable move in the first place. 

The court waited almost two weeks to issue its ruling on how it would proceed. That suggests there is some support for protecting DJT. The USSC says it will expedite the case. They do that by holding oral arguments on April 22. That fits my conception of delaying, not expediting. 

To make this clear, if the USSC had decided not to hear that case, it would have been a precedential decision that upholds the appeals court decision that DJT is not immune. Current prosecutions could then proceed without further delay. By taking up the case, the USSC could signal that there is something wrong with the appeals court holdings that needs to be corrected. Hence my 20% level of uncertainty about the outcome of this lawsuit.

But if the USSC does decide even a little in DJT’s favor, we are probably in immediate, deadly serious trouble with no way out short of a civil war or something pretty close to it. Biden is incapable of rising to the occasion here, even if he did have the power to do something meaningful. I am not sure that he has any power to do anything, alone. TTKP members in congress will defend DJT to the death, so bipartisanship on this is close to impossible and highly unlikely. We will face our corrupt Christian nationalist, plutocratic fate mostly undefended. 

TTKP: the Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party, formerly the Republican Party

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TechCrunch writes about social media platform X suing a research organization that studies online misinformation and hate speech: 

X goes to court in Elon Musk’s war against an anti-hate research org

Elon Musk’s crusade against the extremism research organization the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) will have its day in court on Thursday.

Elon Musk’s X sued the CCDH last year, accusing it of “actively working to assert false and misleading claims about X.” The nonprofit, formed in 2018, conducts research on social media platforms to track hate speech, extremism and misinformation. Its reports are regularly picked up by news organizations, TechCrunch included.

After Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the CCDH published reports about rising hate speech on X and how unbanned accounts, including neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, stood to make the company millions in ad revenue.

On Thursday, the CCDH will make a case for why X’s lawsuit is frivolous and runs afoul of the state’s anti-SLAPP law, which was created to kill litigation intended to intimidate or silence critics. X will defend the validity of its lawsuit, which also accuses the CCDH of illegally scraping data and violating its terms of service through Brandwatch, a social media monitoring tool.

This is an important case. If Musk wins, demagoguery, lies, hate and crackpottery win, while democracy, civil liberties and truth lose.

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A NYT opinion comments (not behind paywall): 

Standing over a tiny bundle wrapped in a sheet on a hospital bed, a young father drapes his hand across his face in despair. Mousa Salem, a Gaza photographer who videotaped this sad tableau and sent it to me, said the sheet swaddled 2-month-old Mohamed al-Zayegh, who died on Friday in Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza City. “Nutrition? What nutrition?” a staff member in scrubs says in the video. “The mother gave birth to him during the war.”

“The health of the mother affects the health of the baby,” he added. “This is very well known in the science of medicine and health. And all of this piled on the child and he got sick, he has a weak immune system. “

Another infant, 2-month-old Mahmoud Fattouh, died of malnutrition on Friday at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, according to Al Jazeera, which cited a news agency thought to be close to Hamas. “The baby has not been fed any milk for days,” a paramedic who took the child to the hospital said in a video verified by Al Jazeera.

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the head of the pediatric department of Kamal Adwan Hospital, said this month he was seeing a number of deaths among children, especially newborns. “Signs of weakness and paleness are apparent on newborns because the mother is malnourished,” he said.

Reports of death by starvation are difficult to verify from a distance. The hunger in Gaza is caused but also partly hidden by a pitiless war that has obliterated hospitals, flooded morgues and damaged communication networks, leaving us to cobble together what’s happening from scraps of information.

That speaks for itself. Also, the death toll in Gaza passed 30,000. That is reported to be a conservative body count. 

Sources for news

 Quick question:

My last wise and thoughtful thread

https://dispol.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-wheels-of-justice-turn-slowly.html

Linked stories to....

https://lawandcrime.com/

I also have often spoken about getting some of my news and opinions on the radio from.....

https://www.siriusxm.ca/channels/potus-politics/

AND I know some (not going to mention any names) get their news and opinions from Leftist publications like NY Times and Wapo.  

😏

That brings to mind, YOUR sources. Where do you PREFER to get your news from? WHERE out of the MSM do YOU go to get differing views? And wise and thoughtful suggestions?

Zionism

“

When we were led into the gas chamber, YOU said nothing.

When we were forcibly converted, YOU said nothing.

When we were thrown out of a country

just for being Jews, YOU said nothing.

When we now defend ourselves

all of a sudden, YOU have something to say.

How did we take our revenge

on the Germans for their Final Solution?

How did we take revenge

on the Spanish for their Inquisition?

How did we take revenge

on Islam for being Dhimmis?

How did we take revenge

on the lies of the Protocols of Zion?

We studied our Torah

We innovated in medicine

We innovated in defense systems

We innovated in technology

We innovated in agriculture

We made music

We wrote poetry

We made the desert bloom

We won Nobel prizes

We founded the movie industry

We financed democracy

We fulfilled the word of Hashem by becoming a light unto the Nations of the Earth.

So World, when you criticize us for defending our heritage and our ancestral homeland, we the Jews of the world do exactly what you did, we ignore you.

You have proven to us for the last 2,000 years that when the chips are down, you don’t care.

Now leave us alone and go sort out your own backyard whilst we continue our 5784-year-old mission, enhancing the world we share.”

- Howard Klineberg

News chunk 'n bits: Christian nationalist theology, popularity & propaganda

NPR reports about the Alabama Supreme court judge who apparently adheres to an extreme Christian theology called the Seven Mountains Mandate. Seven Mountains used to be considered extremist but has become more common in the theocratic Christian nationalist wealth and power movement. NPR writes: 

Tom Parker, a Republican who joined the court in 2005, wrote a concurring opinion that quoted at length from sources such as the Book of Genesis, the Ten Commandments and Christian thinkers of centuries ago, such as Thomas Aquinas. But comments he has made in other media have raised questions about his seeming espousal of “Seven Mountains” theology, a concept that some experts consider to be Christian extremism.

“God created government. And the fact that we have let it go into the possession of others, it's heartbreaking for those of us who understand. And we know it is for Him,” Parker said on a recent podcast hosted by Christian activist Johnny Enlow. “And that's why He is calling and equipping people to step back into these mountains right now.”

Parker’s remarks on the podcast were released the same day that the Alabama Supreme Court issued its ruling on IVF embryos. His appearance on the show was first reported by Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog organization.

The Seven Mountains Mandate urges adherents to establish what they consider to be God’s kingdom on Earth by taking control of seven areas of society: family, religion, government, education, arts and entertainment, commerce and media. Once relegated to a fringe of the Christian conservative movement, it has gained followers in recent years as the ranks of nondenominational, neo-charismatic Christians have grown in the U.S. It also has earned greater media attention since House Speaker Mike Johnson assumed his elevated role, due to his connections with leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement that espouses Seven Mountain theology.

“The Seven Mountains is a structured outline for Christian supremacy,” said Matthew Taylor, senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. “The idea is that Christians are supposed to take power over society and that influence flows down from the top of each mountain.” 

“It is a real Christian Nationalist threat to our judicial system to have Supreme Court justices who understand theologically and think of themselves theologically as above precedent and the rule of law,” said Taylor. “If they think that their allegiance is to a higher power and their allegiance is to the Bible primarily before the Constitution, if they are invoking modern prophecies as the rationale for the work that they do, that should really raise questions about the separation of religion and state and the ways that Christianity and Christian nationalism is getting infused into the very structures of how our legal system is working.”

It is hard to know how many churches and congregations this movement consists of. Wikipedia suggests that many in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement are reluctant to admit to being part of Seven Mountains theology (also known as Dominionism). That theology grew mostly out of Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. Data from Pew Research in 2011 suggests the NAR could constitute a significant minority of Christians in the Americas. 

I did not think it would ever be important to know more about Christian theology, especially fringe extremism. Talk about a false sense of security. Well, Christian nationalist elites did a fine job of scaring the bejesus out of me -- false sense of security is all gone.

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Religion News Service recently reported on support for Christian nationalism among Americans:

A new survey finds that fewer than a third of Americans, or 29%, qualify as Christian nationalists, and of those, two-thirds define themselves as white evangelicals.

The survey of 6,212 Americans by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution is the largest yet to gauge the size and scope of Christian nationalist beliefs.

It finds that 10% of Americans are avowed Christian nationalists, what the survey calls “adherents,” while an additional 19% are sympathetic to Christian nationalist ideals.  

The vast majority of Americans (70%) do not think the government should declare America a Christian nation. And nearly 60% do not think its laws should be based on Christian values.

Most Americans (73%) said they preferred a country made up of a diversity of faiths and not just Christianity.  

More than half of Republicans now identify as Christian nationalist or sympathizers, the survey concludes. Some members of Congress, notably Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, proudly endorse the label. Former President Donald Trump called himself a nationalist, and the survey finds Christian nationalists have far more favorable views of Trump than the general population.

That makes the political power of Christian nationalists far greater than their actual numbers in the population.

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Christian nationalist propaganda and slanders by faux Christian Franklin Graham: 

Graham cited Faux News. That alone undermines the credibility of what Graham and his crackpot reasoning asserts. The data is probably not real, because what Faux cited came from something the ultra-radical, Christian nationalist Family Research Council posted online. If the asserted increase in attacks on churches is real, one has to wonder how many of those attacks are by enraged Christian nationalists on churches that support the LGBQT community, immigrants and women's rights. Those attacks probably would not be attributed to radical faux Christians attacking normal, real Christians. Here is what MB | FC says about the FRC:

FRC is designated to be a hate group!

In addition to blatant lying and crackpot reasoning, DJT and radical right authoritarians perfected the dark free speech arts of falsely claiming victimhood and projecting onto critics and opponents what one does ones-self. It appears that all of those propaganda and slander tactics are being adopted by the Christian nationalist movement. The constant appeal of dark free speech to authoritarians, grifters, kleptocrats, ideological zealots and radical extremists comes from its dark power. It has great power to poison minds with lies, hate, slanders and a sense of infallible, arrogant self-righteousness. 

Book review & commentary: White Rural Rage

An interesting NYT opinion by Paul Krugman ponders the information and analysis from the 2024 book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, by Tom Schaller (political science professor) and Paul Waldman (op-ed columnist). The book argues that rural white rage poses an existential threat to American democracy because those voters are increasingly inclined to embrace extremist ideologies, racist beliefs, conspiracy theories, and anti-democratic belief and behavior. Krugman writes (opinion not behind paywall): 

This process [creative destruction in rural areas] and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. I say “devastating” because the hardship of rural Americans is real, “terrifying” because the political backlash to this hardship poses a clear and present danger to our democracy and “baffling” because at some level I still don’t get the politics.

Technology is the main driver of rural decline, Schaller and Waldman argue. Indeed, American farms produce more than five times as much as they did 75 years ago, but the agricultural work force declined by about two-thirds over the same period, thanks to machinery, improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. Coal production has been falling recently, but thanks partly to technologies like mountaintop removal, coal mining as a way of life largely disappeared long ago, with the number of miners falling 80 percent even as production roughly doubled.

The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers.

Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are? Some have. But some cities have become unaffordable, in part because of restrictive zoning — one thing blue states get wrong — and many workers are reluctant to leave their families and communities.

So shouldn’t we aid these communities? We do. Federal programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more — are available to all Americans but are disproportionately financed from taxes paid by affluent urban areas. As a result, there are huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia. 

While these transfers somewhat mitigate the hardship facing rural America, they don’t restore the sense of dignity that has been lost along with rural jobs. And maybe that loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected — why it’s pretty clear that this November a majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Joe Biden, who as president has been trying to bring jobs to their communities, and for Donald Trump, a huckster from Queens who offers little other than validation for their resentment.

This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic and maybe even morally superior to the denizens of big cities — an attitude still expressed in cultural artifacts like Jason Aldean’s hit song “Try That in a Small Town.”

In the crudest sense, rural and small-town America is supposed to be filled with hard-working people who adhere to traditional values, not like those degenerate urbanites on welfare, but the economic and social reality doesn’t match this self-image.

Prime-working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their metropolitan counterparts to be employed — not because they’re lazy but because the jobs just aren’t there. (The gap is much smaller for women, perhaps because the jobs supported by federal aid tend to be female-coded, such as those in health care.)  

Quite a few rural states also have high rates of homicide, suicide and births to single mothers — again, not because rural Americans are bad people but because social disorder is, as the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago about urban problems, what happens when work disappears.  

Draw attention to some of these realities, and you’ll be accused of being a snooty urban elitist. I’m sure responses to this column will be … interesting.

The result — which at some level I still find hard to understand — is that many white rural voters support politicians who tell them lies they want to hear. It helps explain why the MAGA narrative casts relatively safe cities like New York as crime-ridden hellscapes and rural America as the victim not of technology but of illegal immigrants, wokeness and the deep state.

At this point you’re probably expecting a solution to this ugly political situation. Schaller and Waldman do offer some suggestions. But the truth is that while white rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it.

If that analysis is mostly accurate, it accords with other research that indicates that rural dissatisfaction and a sense of threat from minorities and non-heterosexuals, and urban disrespect were significant factors in support for DJT in 2016 and 2020. 

 

One commenter commented: 

All those gadgets, devices, things that we have, large and small, in vast numbers, more than ever [....] still have to be manufactured! And they are ……. in factories offshored by big business in ever country in Asia, and across the border in Mexico. And aided and abetted by the US Government. Wonder where the jobs are? The jobs are there, the tradesmen, the supervisor, the manager, the services………..all there for example, on the eastern seaboard of Thailand - the Detroit of Asia. Cheaper, lower labor and environmental standards, protective barriers, low taxes…. That’s globalism. And that is the decline hollowing out of America and Japan too.

Krugman responded:

I actually did acknowledge the role of imports. But I’ve actually done the math: even if we completely eliminated our trade deficits, manufacturing would still be a much smaller employer than it used to be, and agriculture wouldn’t gain at all. We can’t recreate the economy of the 1960s, no matter how hard we try.

Another commenter commented (incoherently, IMO): 

If you need to grow up in poverty and ignorance to see the problem, then maybe I can help. The democratic party assures these people and other people that they will ameliorate their plight. Their pitch is that it could get a whole lot worse but they are here to take care of you. Trump tells them it could get a whole lot better. He's right it can be a whole lot better and it is time to for the democratic party to say the same. People want to thrive and not just survive. Communities can and should be nurturing. [what does nurturing mean, insulting and slandering urban people, while voting for DJT?]

Krugman responded:

But the reality is that Biden is making a serious effort to revitalize rural communities with his industrial policies, but gets no credit, while Trump did nothing for them and will get something like 80 percent of their votes.