The Russian-Ukrainian war has been another great revealer.

The Russian-Ukrainian war has been another great revealer.  From a Classical Liberal point of view, this is reasonably straight forward.  One country electively invaded another on the thinnest of pretexts.  They are the aggressor and to be condemned.

The fact that Russia has lost its Soviet empire, that globally the Classical Liberal worldview is increasingly dominant (and incompatible with the nationalist oligarchy model), that NATO is widely respected and membership sought by former Soviet dependencies, and that statist China now is dominant to its older statist cousin Russia are all relevant factors but more products of evolving history and only lightly related to explicit policies of specific administrations.

The fact that the aggressor is an oligarchy and the invaded is a messy emerging democracy with a long track record of corruption (including corruption with some of our political leaders) does not change the fundamental assessment.  Russia is in the wrong and Ukraine should be supported in its efforts to maintain its sovereignty.  

How much we support them does involve a range of considerations such as strategic interests, specific conditions and considerations of their prospects as an emerging democracy.  

Predictably, the Russian-Ukrainian war immediately has been immediately translated into domestic American politics.  Who could be blamed for not having averted it?  How can we blame Russia for our own domestic policy failures?  How can we tar our political opponents with a Russian brush?

Childish stuff but wielded as a stiletto.  

What has been interesting to me is how the fault lines have not really cracked the way one might have assumed.  There are people on the left and right apparently with some sympathies with the Russian thought process and there are many people on the left and right who are entirely sympathetic with the plight of the Ukrainians.  And there are some few on the left and right who are busy trying to brand their opponents as entirely supportive of the Russians.

These antics add little information and much distraction.  It is challenging to sort the nonsense from the useful.

There is an additional wrinkle.  Over the past two years of Covid-19, I have added numerous blogs and twitter accounts of individuals who are knowledgeable and/or critical of the unreliable mainstream narrative.  Some are routinely well-informed, some merely contrarian, but both add to the sharpening of the debate.

What has usually been missing is a partisan angle.  They are engaged with the epistemology of Covid-19, not fractious partisan point scoring.  

Now there is a new issue, Russia-Ukraine.  Some of those new accounts are remaining purely focused on Covid-19 knowledge.  Others are transitioning to include commentary about Russia-Ukraine even though their statistical-medical knowledge is far less relevant to international relations than it was for Covid-19.

For most of these new accounts and blogs, during their commentary on Covid-19, there was relatively little partisan sniping.  For many of them, you could figure out roughly where they might lie on the political spectrum but it wasn't relevant.  Now, as they turn towards Russia-Ukraine, I am seeing more partisan sniping.  But it is murky.

The immediate prompt is a post, It's as if the Russians want to make their Western apologists look as stupid as possible by Alex Berenson.  Berenson has been a been a bête noire of the establishment narrative.  He is by no means always right in his criticisms but that is still better than the stance of being usually wrong taken by the mainstream media in terms of the establishment narrative.

With Berenson, my cognitive effort has been invested in sorting the empirical and logical wheat from the chaff of his criticisms.  I had not considered his partisan affiliations because they weren't relevant and not much in sight.  That has changed.

I agree with him that the Russian apologists have embarrassed themselves and made fools of themselves by strained justifications.  However, I see apologists for Putin both on the left and the right.  Berenson seems to see them only on the right.  Or am I misreading him?

So the Russians are retreating from their attack on Kiev - leaving mass graves in their wake.

This does not look good for either Vladimir Putin or the American conservatives who have been been foolish enough to fawn over him.

Which American conservatives?  I have seen MSM pundits accusing Tucker Carlson of being a Putin apologist but Tucker Carlson eats the ratings lunch of other MSM rivals and is therefore, both commercially and ideologically, routinely subject to absurd MSM claims.  I haven't yet investigated whether these ones hold water simply because such a high volume of past accusations have all turned out to be mere twaddle.  Perhaps these bear greater weight.  At some point it may become relevant to investigate, since I don't watch his show to be able to tell or not.  For the time being, twaddle.

Other than Carlson, I haven't seen anyone accused of being a Putin apologist.

And is Berenson coming from the right or the left in his criticism?  Is he a Democratic enthusiast going after American conservatives, is he a conservative irritated by anyone acknowledging a complex situation and wanting a more pure anti-Russian messaging, or is he an iconoclastic libertarian critical of both parties?

I don't know and don't particularly want to know other than the extent that his political stridency affects the clarity of his thinking and the empiricism of his criticisms.

I am not picking on Berenson, he was the example at hand.  Just noting that some commentators who were really useful during the Covid-19 folderol are less useful as they stray out of their domain.  Additionally noting that the burden of filtering out political and partisan biases is simply annoying and reductive of overall public debate. 

One final thought.  Now that I am beginning more and more to have to infer the partisan leanings of these recently added observers (to the extent that they have partisan biases exist), it feels like there is a difference on the continuum.

If they are on the left, I just have to figure out whether they are traditional centrist Democrats or whether they are woke, socialist, critical race theory, social justice theory ideologues.  The former are the majority but the latter are the noisier and more influential in setting party policy.

My sense is that the Woke crowd disclaim Russia for its nationalism but are enthusiastic for its strong statist government.  This shows up more strongly in their admiration for China, but it is true for Russia as well.  Centrist Democrats are so quiet, it is hard to discern the direction and strength of their views.

On the right, though, it is much more complicated.  There is, of course, the distinction between conservatives and libertarians which has to be taken into account.  Classical Liberals abhor the violence and lawlessness of Russia.  Patriots can understand the national spirit of Russia but admire that of Ukraine more.  Religious conservatives seem to focus on the alleviation of suffering.  And so on.  The conservative tent is a big one and so there are plentiful interpretations of what is going on.

Or so it seems to me.