From wikipedia:<p>Bulverism is a term for a rhetorical fallacy that combines circular reasoning and the Genetic fallacy with presumption or condescension. The method of Bulverism is to "assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error." The Bulverist assumes a speaker's argument is invalid or false and then explains why the speaker came to make that mistake (even if the opponent's claim is actually right) by attacking the speaker or the speaker's motive. The term Bulverism was coined by C. S. Lewis[1] to poke fun at a very serious error in thinking that, he alleged, recurs often in a variety of religious, political, and philosophical debates.<p>Similar to Antony Flew's "subject/motive shift", Bulverism is a fallacy of irrelevance. One accuses an argument of being wrong on the basis of the arguer's identity or motive, but these are strictly speaking irrelevant to the argument's validity or truth.
John Mearsheimer has a really great video from 6 years ago about Ukraine that I found fascinating: <a href="https://youtu.be/JrMiSQAGOS4" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/JrMiSQAGOS4</a><p>Basically, he thinks the west precipitated the crisis by pushing to have Ukraine join NATO, and he thinks it should remain a buffer state between NATO and Russia
"Elites have hijacked Russia and conflated the country's interests with their own"<p>Um... Replace "Russia" with the name of any nation on earth, and the sentence remains true.<p>As an individual with an Economics graduate degree, The Economist strikes me as such a flimsy propaganda rag, it's sad and pathetic it has any attention at all.
See also Anne Applebaum:<p>> <i>Putin is preparing to invade Ukraine again—or pretending he will invade Ukraine again—for the same reason. He wants to destabilize Ukraine, frighten Ukraine. He wants Ukrainian democracy to fail. He wants the Ukrainian economy to collapse. He wants foreign investors to flee. He wants his neighbors—in Belarus, Kazakhstan, even Poland and Hungary—to doubt whether democracy will ever be viable, in the longer term, in their countries too. Farther abroad, he wants to put so much strain on Western and democratic institutions, especially the European Union and NATO, that they break up. He wants to keep dictators in power wherever he can, in Syria, Venezuela, and Iran. He wants to undermine America, to shrink American influence, to remove the power of the democracy rhetoric that so many people in his part of the world still associate with America. He wants America itself to fail.</i><p>> <i>These are big goals, and they might not be achievable. But Putin’s beloved Soviet Union also had big, unachievable goals. Lenin, Stalin, and their successors wanted to create an international revolution, to subjugate the entire world to the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat. Ultimately, they failed—but they did a lot of damage while trying. Putin will also fail, but he too can do a lot of damage while trying. And not only in Ukraine.</i><p>* <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/putin-ukraine-democracy/621465/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/putin-ukra...</a><p>* <a href="https://archive.fo/bmQmO" rel="nofollow">https://archive.fo/bmQmO</a><p>It would also explain the Russian operations with regards to Brexit and the 2016 US election: the more chaos the West has, the better it is for Russia.<p>See also funding of more extreme political parties in the EU, with a focus on the far-right in recent years:<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia–European_Union_relations#Russian_political_influence_and_financial_links" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia–European_Union_relation...</a>
The Economist has traditionally the worst coverage of Russia amongst Western media. To the point where it starts looking like it is something personal for the editors: always the same narrative, facts and opinions that not fit in the picture are conveniently ignored etc.<p>This article has a lot of pure speculations, that oversimplify the internal politics and decision making process in Russia. Yes, there’s a relatively small inner circle of people loyal to Putin and sharing his views. Yes, those views are conservative and nationalist. Are those people committed to a war and occupation of Ukraine? Unless you are reading minds you cannot be sure, and for the same reason we do not believe in the world government, it does not make sense to believe in this war conspiracy, when there are explanations of Russian strategy that do not rely on insanity.
I like this daily "What's in the Putin's head" guessing in the West media. The man himself stated everything 15 years ago in his Munich speech. The core problem - European security is build at the expense and against Russia. NATO expansion after USSR dissolution(which was voluntary act) is seen as proof of its hostility and having military bases of the hostile military alliance right at your borders is existential threat. It is this simple.
53 points from 2 hours ago but already off the front page<p>This piece is clearly war mongering propaganda, but the discussion in the comments here is somewhat decent. It’s too bad HN immediately kills any concrete discussion about world events like this.
I personally think the most concrete outcome of the current situation is that no future nation will ever give up any nuclear weapons they come into possession of without considering what appears to be the shabby precedent set by the Budapest Memorandum. As far as I can tell as a layperson, for all practical purposes NPT is dead, and smaller nations with the means and willpower shall develop their own within 2-3 generations.
The information war on this is already very hot. Diametrically opposed viewpoints coming from each side.<p>US: The russians are about to invade.<p>Russia: No we aren't.<p>Honestly, as someone on the outside of this I really have no idea what to believe. Is Putin just putting up a show of force but not actually going to pull the trigger, or is this the real deal preps for imminent invasion?
The scare of the attack is a great revenue generator for media companies. People in those parts are quite baffled why all of the sudden American media started caring about Ukraine. It’s not bad that they do, but it’s almost like they are goading Putin to attack.<p>Bloomberg even had a headline prepared that the attack already happened. Then they “accidentally” released it, and then of course, apologized. But they still got everyone’s attention.<p>The scare of the attack is also beneficial for the Biden administration. If Putin doesn’t attack, he will claim he saved the word from WWIII. If Putin attacks, he will say, of course he did, we told you so. But will he send American soldiers to defend Ukranians? I am guessing not. Just send few blankets and MREs.
This article strikes me as rather uninformed<p>> The problem is that the same logic was just as true eight years ago when the fateful decisions were made to annex Crimea and to stir conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region.<p>Crimea is the location of Russia's Black Sea navy fleet, and the population there is majority Russian speaking and sided with the pro Russian government during the Euromaidan protests.<p>The other day the US envoy to the UN, warned in an official speech that Russia might make the discovery of a mass grave as a casus belli for invading Ukraine, a few hours later Russia Today reported on having found a mass grave of native Russians.<p>This is not counter espionage, it is counter trolling, watch these joke by Putin how these scary KGB people think: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0oic-ix9bM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0oic-ix9bM</a>
So to begin with, fact, Putin is a better chess player than Biden.<p>You might think, oh it's just a board game, computers are better at it. You could say that.<p>Apparently the strategy right now is get right next to the border of Ukraine and do military exercises, then watch as NATO loses its shit with every passing second.
my favorite hot take from the economist about this war was that one article that considered if Russia might lose because the roads in Ukraine during spring are just dirty and bad<p>from one of the worst publications to get one’s opinions from this graduated into comedy<p>edit: for some people it was a serious enough proposition to entertain that i had to check and indicate that no, the analysis shows that russia won’t lose because of dirty roads
I read crazy theory conspiracy this is about destabilising EU and our energy policy. US can not put sanctions on closest allies directly (NS2), so there has to be war. Just crazy conspiracy theory though...
For some alternative perspective - here is an analysis from Chinese government outlet Global Times:<p><a href="https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202202/1252149.shtml" rel="nofollow">https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202202/1252149.shtml</a><p>US needs Ukraine crisis to harm European economy, and legitimize its military presence<p>...<p>Chinese analysts said Sunday that keeping the crisis intense will benefit the US in several fields: legitimizing its military presence in Europe by demonizing Russia and poisoning Russia-EU ties, increasing uncertainties and concerns to harm the eurozone economy so there will be more capital flight from the continent to the US and thus easing the US inflation pressure, and using the tension to stir up trouble for China-Russia ties.<p>...