Putin was Cancelled

I mean, it’s a good thing, obviously.

But still, the response to his speech was widespread mockery that what happened to him was at all similar to the cancel culture wars in the West, a mockery that often delegitimized both Putin and his analogues for how silly it is.

But there’s nothing about “whether a certain tool was used” that depends on whether the target was righteous or not.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the “cancel culture” critique can be summarized as “using cultural soft power to punish someone, when neither the justice system nor personal conflict will solve your problem.” You may think what the person did wasn’t yet a crime, or the courts won’t properly punish what it should. And you may not want to go toe-to-toe with that person directly given power differences. But you can get the networks and influencers and twitter mobs to enact unofficial but widespread punishment on them, effectively driving them out of public life.

The above has many problems - due process exists for a reason, mobs suffer from a lot of communication failures, proportionality doesn’t exist on the internet - but it’s a response to some very real problems, and it’s certainly possible for it to be a solution in some cases. (Does anyone really object to what befell Harvey Weinstein? Well some legalists, I’m sure. But relatively few other people.)

Russia invaded another country. Russia has in the past century, invaded a lot of countries. And within the past century these are the predictable responses to an unprovoked attack:

The above is understandably what a dictator surveying the international order can expect. And Russia is pretty immune from caring what international courts say. And it expected to succeed militarily, given the use of nuclear threats to keep out other great powers.

What it did not expect was option 3 becoming a coordinated, widespread, overwhelming campaign. It did not expect almost every country and every company in those countries lining up to deny them. Companies aren’t withdrawing from Russia just because new laws tell them they have to, they’re doing it because they think regulators will eventually tell them to and it’s better to get on the right side now. This is actually pretty new in the course of world affairs! It does not look like military history! But it looks a lot like the Western version of canceling.

And it’s actually really surprising to feel all at once? In Putin’s case it’s a wonderful thing if it stops him from bombing the hell out of a civilian population (though even then there is a great deal of collateral damage in how many people are being also isolated just for looking and sounding Russian.) But the terror of the guilty doesn’t feel that much different than the terror of the innocent. He’s still really shocked at this new method of justice.

And honestly, team progressive should take the win. “Yes, this is what it looks like when soft power accomplishes when legal systems won’t and targets of injustice can’t on their own.” Lord knows they have a large number of embarrassing L’s to make up for.

Hm, this is both interesting and isolates a way I think a lot of people have been talking past each other.

To the extent I use the word "cancellation" (which I try not to outside of manipulating equations, because it seems to give more heat than light), I think of it as defined by the justification. It's cancellation when you do it in retaliation for certain types of speech acts. I'd argue even that it only counts as cancellation when it's done by SJWs to certain types of cultural conservatives (and any other form of retaliation for speech is just sparkling illiberalism).

Whereas this post is treating it as entirely about the mechanics of the consequences, and not about the justifications at all. And that's 100% not how I'd have thought.

I feel like this Tom Pepinsky essay (hat tip Dan Drezner) really articulates the problem with the Mearsheimer position.

If you look at this from a perspective of, like, law or rights, then Russia shouldn't invade Ukraine because invading other countries is bad. Ukraine gets to ally with Europe if it wants to, and Russia doesn't get to tell them no.

If everything is amoral demands-of-power, then maybe Russia was inevitably going to attack Ukraine or something, but you have to turn that around and apply the same logic to the US power bloc expanding. The US and allies can expand into Russia's frontier because it can; Russia will endure it because it doesn't have the power to resist.

Like, what the episode has shown is that Russia isn't really a great power, and it can't keep NATO out of its backyard. And if you're going to defend your position with Melian dialogue bullshit, you have to expect your adversaries to take the same sort of position.

The "realist case" is basically treating Russia like a bound-by-physics realist actor, while idealizing the US and NATO as states that "should" not follow the same imperatives. That doesn't make sense.

it literally says 4 is poland in the screenshot

I feel like the most explanatory thing I've read here is that Americans have a specific difficulty with Ukraine.

That difficulty is that we've all interacted with a map of Europe and Russia that has Ukraine labeled. And that map looks like this: