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Jim's avatar

One thing you didn’t predict, understandably, is the “Twitterization” of the conflict.

Suppose that you set out in 2019 to predict how governments would respond to the next pandemic. How would you do this? Presumably you’d look at their responses to past pandemics, estimate the probable severity of a virus, follow the latest public health discussions and the latest vaccine technology, etc. Would that exercise lead you to predict what happened over the last two years? No, not even close.

What happened was that people in early 2020 scrolled and tweeted their way into a frenzy. This deeply affected those in leadership roles, partly because they were responding to their constituents and partly because they themselves spend a lot of time scrolling and tweeting. As a result, the pandemic response was far more extreme and far different than someone in 2019 would have predicted.

Just as COVID-19 is the first pandemic in the Age of Twitter, so the Ukraine invasion is, in some sense, the first war in the Age of Twitter. As it unfolds, we are seeing many disturbing parallels to the events of early 2020. People are rapidly normalizing once-fringe ideas like a NATO-enforced no-fly zone, direct US conflict with Russia, regime change in Moscow, and even, incredibly, the use of nuclear weapons. Just as with COVID, we’re seeing the rapid abandonment of longstanding Western policies. The overnight flips on German defense spending and SWIFT are like the overturning of conventional public health policies on masking, lockdowns, and so on.

The emotionalism and recklessness we see in the Western professional class right now are producing an extremely dangerous situation. Let’s hope that it can be de-escalated before we get into a world war. And in making future predictions, we should acknowledge that the hyperconnected world brings with it new tail risks produced by rapid online escalation.

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Sasha Rozenberg's avatar

NATO expansion is a pretext for the deranged emperor to extend the reach of his mafia state. Historically, Ukraine was not a country, but Putin forged it. If Russia were attractive as a partner, many Ukrainians would support getting closer and perhaps establishing a confederation. But this is over now. The hatred against Russia is at the level not seen since the war against Nazis. If you could understand the pull of freedom and the disgust with Russia among the Ukrainians before the invasion, you’d have made a much better prediction about how strong they’d resist the invaders. Ukraine has already won since the now have a leader who, dead or alive, is a powerful symbol of resistance against the ugly force and the catalyst of national unity and readiness to sacrifice to keep national freedom. And plz stop talking about NATO expansion as the reason for this invasion and stop pushing for appeasement of the mafia state.

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