Hey @VoluntaryKeith regarding your recent debate:

The biggest problems with Jonathan’s angle are:

1. He dismisses political self-determination as a concept at first, thereby baking into his argument a presupposition that requires war. This is a fallacious type of begging the question. Interestingly he later backs away from this and says plebiscite would be a good way to resolve it if only the UN did it. Is this inconsistency in his argument to be attributed to keen sophistry or just an honest intellectual error? In either case we see an example of a mind that hasn’t thought through all of his ideas and made them internally consistent: to some extent he’s throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks, using motivated reasoning. That’s not ideal behavior for a meritorious intellectual debate. My best guess is that he genuinely believes the secessionist regions didn’t want to secede. I think he’s just poorly informed, though I can’t rule out worse explanations.
https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/5300399/john-mearsheimer-ukraine-was-according-to-its-constitution-and-its-declaration-of-sovereig

2. He dismisses the Crimea/Donbas secessionist referendums AND he claims none of the polling saying the same thing was legit. Though I note NED-funded polling said otherwise. Since it’s so clearly against interest for that polling result we have to at least consider it seriously. He dismisses it out of hand merely because it violates his preconception: he doesn’t have an argument here. Note that by Ukraine’s own census in 2001 some 58.3% of Crimea was ethnic Russians. Are we really to look at demographics like that (and take note that large quantities of people working in Crimea were working in factories mostly serving Russia, or were part of the Russian military bases in some way) and dismiss the possibility of strong majority support for Russia in this region? “Polling in 2008 by the Ukrainian Centre for Economic and Political Studies found that a majority of Crimeans simultaneously approved the idea of joining Russia (63.8%), while also supporting the idea of remaining within Ukraine if Crimea was given greater autonomy (53.8%).” United Nations Development Programme found the same or more support for being annexed by Russia in annual polling from 2008-2011 too. This isn’t shocking to begin with, and it’s inappropriate for Jonathan to treat it like a wild conspiracy theory that Crimean citizens would actually vote for being annexed by Russia. There are many more data points backing up what I just cited. The empirical record does not support the notion that Crimea was tricked into being annexed. It’s only believed by people who haven’t seriously studied the facts or are being dishonest.

3. He oversimplifies how the Bandera movement, though numerically small, have had very large impact relative to their size in the same way Antifa is only a tiny % of our population…of violent shock troops, with Asov et al trained by the CIA and MI6 on how to succeed asymmetrically through subversion and violence. The asov people said themselves about the 2014 coup roughly “if not for them, the protests would have just been a gay pride parade.” Which is basically true: it was asov et al who did all the violence: goons propped up by our spooks the same way we funded and armed and trained “moderate rebels” who founded ISIS, Operation Timber Sycamore, and mujahideen via Operation Cylone before them.

4. He adopts an ahistorical view of NATO as purely defensive, ignoring or not knowing about Kosovo. Ukraine itself has demonstrated de facto NATO membership to a high degree. The top NATO officials have said NATO’s credibility is shot if Ukraine doesn’t win. All NATO countries have played a role arming Ukraine, training their soldiers, giving money, etc. Yet Ukraine isn’t a NATO member and we’re supposed to pretend NATO is just defensive? That’s ridiculous.

5. More fundamentally: he dismisses as mere propaganda and irrelevant the mountain of evidence we have for Russia really badly wanting Ukraine to not be in NATO, and NATO to not be in Ukraine, for Russias own security, going back decades with great consistency publicly and through diplomatic channels. He insists without evidence that this can’t be right and Putin is a territorial expansionist. This framing is standard fare for pro war hawks and it’s totally detached from reality. We can disprove this in a dozen ways, here’s one:
https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/5358439/ted-snider-putin-s-draft-treaty-between-russia-and-ukraine-did-exist

6. He asserts that without Russian involvement the Donbas et al breakaway province issue could have been resolved peacefully. The empirical record says otherwise and the western leaders who signed the Minsk agreements (Merkel of Germany, Hollande of France) along with the Ukrainian leader in charge, Poroshenko, have all subsequently admitted in public that they lied about it and just wanted to buy time for Ukraine. Here’s what was actually happening on the ground in those places almost a year before the war started:
https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/2080374/reminder-from-march-2021-seven-years-after-maidan-divided-country-ukraine-intensifies-shelling-of

His spin of how a peaceful internal resolution was possible is contradicted by perpetually firmer stances being taken by Kiev with direct western support for taking those firmer stances and direct US opposition to negotiating an internal peace to their civil war.
https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/5565265/reminder-from-march-2021-ukraine-president-zelensky-signs-decree-declaring-intent-to-re-take-crime

7. He provides apologia for no elections during war, which is mighty convenient for a war hawk given how devastatingly unpopular Zelensky is and how Ukrainian public support for the war has cratered and there are members of their parliament and other political figures talking openly about a need to negotiate. In parallel we have what appear to be one or two serious coup plots ongoing against Zelensky by big power factions inside Ukraine. At this point only people who want more dead Ukrainians and less Ukraine territory are can still be advocating for supporting the war, or supporting Zelensky staying in power. He’s an arrogant corrupt moron comedian puppet: he has none of the skills to win a war if that was even possible, and in this case it wouldn’t matter who the leader is it’s not winnable for them. The fact that Jonathan defends Zelesnky not having elections reveals he’s either very poorly informed about public sentiment in Ukraine about Zelensky and the war or he doesn’t care and this is all just apologia / motivated reasoning to defend extending the war. Given the very high degree of British involvement in and hawkishness toward Russia I’m now starting to seriously consider the possibility Jonathan is an MI6 or FCO guy or asset of them.
https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/2373942/reminder-from-2021-at-the-grayzone-reuters-bbc-and-bellingcat-participated-in-covert-uk-foreign

8. He uses the “that’s Russian propaganda” trope to dismiss legitimate empirical fact claims, without an actual empirical or logical counterpoint. This is sophistry, not an argument.

9. He advocates the most hawkish view of mobilizing Ukrainians ever discussed inside Ukraine, one so hawkish Zelensky backed away from it and did much less because public support does not exist for it at all and he feared riots beyond his ability to control even with his vast SBU goon army (that killed Gonzalo Lira for speaking the truth). Conscripting 500k old men as he’s advocating (current average age of conscript is 43, trained typically for 3 weeks) to die losing ground is unconscionable. Russia is at its peak of tactical effectiveness and still ramping up in their scale of operations: they have great, experienced, fully trained young soldiers getting rotated out every few months to to avoid burnout / keep the troops fresh. They’ve optimized their command and control for this type of war and fixed their earlier problems: they’re undeniably the most experienced and skilled military in the world right now in land warfare in an era of drones: they’re the only ones who have fought a real land war and they’re winning bigly by learning from their failures to improve in tactics and strategy. In strategy they’re following roughly the Constrictor strategy that won the US civil war for the Union side. Push along the whole front line and anywhere the enemy steps back: push harder there. Use long-range cheap weapons to engage in continuous shock and awe on a scale 10:1 or more in Russia’s favor. What do you do if you’re outgunned 10:1 and they have helicopter gunships and ground attack aircraft and huge precision glide bombs and a huge array of artillery and an endless fleet of drones: and your side has 1/10th the manpower, no air defense, 6 artillery shells per day, inconsistent supply lines, etc. what do you do? You die. You retreat, surrender, or die. It’s called a meat grinder publicly by both sides. There have been two separate groups of Ukraine soldiers numbered in hundreds that surrendered in the last two weeks. Asov people ordered to go defend these places where the surrenders happened have disobeyed orders (because they knew it was obviously already a fire bag fully controlled by Russia where they’d all die) and now and all their commanders got fired, and some Asov units are getting moved to other commands so they’re forced to go into a high risk low reward battle zone by their new commands. Russia is a healthy and fast-growing highly trained well-equipped military. Ukraine is sending old conscripts to die losing ground with barely anything more than rifles and a few FPV suicide drones that get jammed the majority of the time. There are so few defensive fortifications built by Ukraine still left the Ukrainians have to retreat even faster and die even faster. They made terrible choices to not create fallback lines last year when they had a chance to. Ukraine is taking soldiers traded in POW exchanges and ordering them back into the conflict. That’s unheard of! They get 3 months vacation before they get redeployed. 3 months to dread your future of almost certain death in 3 months time defending every inch with no strategy: dying just to lose more ground and bring the war closer to an even worse end for Ukraine. So POWs get psychologically tortured for 3 months before being sent to a firing squad, basically. Outgunned 10:1 isn’t a war, it’s a slaughter. This is what Jonathan is advocating for. Given this degree of hawkishness I now consider it even more likely he’s an FCO asset: that’s an extreme hardline position only voiced by the neocon class. It’s still possible he’s just very poorly informed though he claims to be a bit of an expert so there’s a tension there which I interpret as evidence of deceptive intent: he’s claiming expert authority to make spurious / poorly informed arguments.

He also claims Russia wants to disrupt global trade though the empirical record is very clear that it was the west who sanctioned them hugely and engaged in various economic warfare tactics, froze their assets, stole others, etc. The west disconnected them from SWIFT. Russia didn’t blow up Nord Stream either. Russia has expressed great willing to trade and the west has gone to great lengths to try and stop that. Jonathan has to know this. I straight up accuse him of acting in bad faith and being dishonest. He can’t be a person who claims expertise and argues for these issues and doesn’t know at least the basic reality of what I just outlined. He’s victim blaming in an absurd propagandist way. That’s dishonest. He’s just a hawk making excuses at this point.