That said, I unfortunately disagree with Yoda's perspective. It's not actually an outside, unrelated thing. Everything is collective, everything is produced and enabled by cultural currents, by mankind, by people.
All of which is true, but none of which really disagrees with what I'm saying, and to be honest almost feels like a willful misunderstanding of it.
That "everything is produced and enabled by cultural currents" is technically true, but not a contradiction. Saying you can trace everything back to culture does not imply that you can trace everything back to
our culture, let alone a particular sliver of it. And even if you
could, it would still not follow that we have that influence
now, at this point in the conflict, so at most the venting and arguing about the situation now could be said to maybe possibly indirectly contribute to some future conflict. So yes, it is clearly on the outside; the advocacy to freely argue about barn doors doesn't retrieve the last horse.
It's what defines the thinkable and the do-able. Putin -or more exactly Putin's power- is sustained by the values he incarnates and their popular support, which nowadays goes through global validation. It's a slow process, it's a very high inertia process, it's a complex, chaotic process (like various streams of diverse colors and temperatures colliding in a fluid), but we're all its constituting molecules. We all exert pressures on ideas, closely, remotely, directly, indirectly, on a vast continuum.
"Goes through global validation" sounds like rhetorical laundering, some process our opinions pass through that render them more meaningful. We're part of the globe, there is some global opinion which exerts some influence, ergo we influence the war, ergo why can't I lay into this stupid guy I hate on this movie forum.
Here's my question: what
doesn't this apply to? If everything is downstream of culture, doesn't that mean every topic can be defended this way? Once we discard distinctions based on both size of influence and direct/indirect, I see no limiting principle. Why can't I say, using the same logic, that a bitter argument about Liz Phair's
Exile in Guyville is part of achieving gender parity in the Middle East, and if someone won't let me they're not taking that issue seriously enough?
And the admiration that Putin benefited from, worldwide, fed itself. His national support was also international, comforted by remote interactions, feedback, praises - heck, even the elections of leaders considering him a model. As for many things (such as global ecology), individual responsibilities are impalpable, too diffuse, but they are what, together, shape concrete realities on all scales.
True, but individual responsibilities have chokepoints around things like elections, and between those chokepoints many of them are swamped.
Dismissing the infinitesimal factors is like dismissing an individual vote in an election because it changes nothing by itself.
This is exactly the analogy I was going to use, actually. But it's not like dismissing one vote, it's like dismissing the value of
arguing about one vote, on the internet, after the polls have closed.
But it's convenient. For oneself (the freedom of not feeling co-responsible for the world) and for communities (let's not endanger our nice valued cohesion over such petty details). So of course, a forum's very existence depends on this perspective.
It also depends on the members not despising each other and carrying grudges from thread to thread.
If you think I have some delusion (or even eventual expectation of) "cohesion," then we're not on the same page at all. The people constantly bristling at the rules they don't like sees to that all by itself. Nor have I advocated people simply stop caring about the state of the world. In fact, I went out of my way to preemptively nod to some of the relationships you're talking about
:
please do not confuse the importance of the news with the importance of a thread about the news. This thread has no effect on the conflict, and whether it remains open or closed has no effect on your individual abilities to follow the news or express your opinion about it on a million other sites, most of which are more appropriate for that expression anyway.
Self-governing societies probably benefit from their citizens being moderately knowledgeable, but I think that relationship is tenuous and mixed, and I doubt compulsively doomscrolling things half a world away is at the optimal point in that curve.
maintain distance and perspective as to what our role our observation and discussion actually play here
Nothing we say here will change or even improve this event as it unfolds. We are following history together, not making it.
Note the phrasing: no effect on "the conflict." "This event." Noting a relationship in self-governing societies even though it is "tenuous and mixed." Noting there is some optimal point in the curve (which, by itself, is obviously a rebuke of either extreme). Nothing here implies that culture has no relationship to world events, and for a very good reason: because I don't believe that.
But it's a fallacy. One of the many fallacies that we're forced to sustain in order to function in everyday life. That forgiving veil covers a much uglier and awkward reality.
The fallacy is that we would change that ugly and awkward reality if only we could confront it on your forum, etc. Let's forget the layers and filters between our trickles of culture and world events. Let's concede their importance totally: even then, there is still the assumption that arguing about something here will produce better "culture" in any particular instance. I'd have thought the last few years would have obliterated that notion. It certainly isn't something that can be assumed.
Or, put another way: have you ever decided a given argument was not worthwhile? If so, why, in light of all these downstream effects? Whatever your answer is, you'll probably find it similar to my answer as to why any particular thread should be closed. You'll probably find a subjective difference (or maybe one in degree), and not a total one.
Closed Thread
