No Avail | Nuclear Agents With Binary Takes @No_Avail | Uploaded October 2022 | Updated October 2024, 10 hours ago.
Putin’s essay: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181
I call it “The Horse’s Mouth” essay.
Budapest Outline: treaties.un.org/Pages/showDetails.aspx?objid=0800000280401fbb
Full Memorandum: treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/Part/volume-3007-I-52241.pdf
Why care about the memorandum: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/12/05/why-care-about-ukraine-and-the-budapest-memorandum/
Minsk: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements
So many treaties: treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/v3007.pdf
When I say the epistemically cautious observer will take his cues from IR theorists and committed FP wonks, I’m thinking about this last link and the sheer volume of these documents. I’ve not read through it. I’d wager that 99.99% of the people spouting strong views and binary takes on which side is worse overall haven’t read it either. The few people who store so much of this in their heads truly are in a better position to tally treaty violations and other legal breaches. But they know not to waste time arguing with ghouls on twitter and the like. And that’s not to say that the Violation Tally is the most important thing here. It never was, which partly explains why I’m not slavishly devoted to reading and memorizing the contents of these mountainous texts and signed commitments. They’re important, but the fact that anti-Western actors play negative sum games more frequently (and always remorselessly) is more important!
Legal positivism is another problem I should’ve named and targeted in the video. Technically, legal doctrines like positivism are meant to implicate each nation’s internal legal affairs only, but that’s no reason to ignore their (unspoken) distortions of how people think about interstate conflict abroad. In my experience arguers under the grip of legal positivism don’t realize they’re influenced by it. Nothing else explains the common resort to “West ignores laws all the time” mouthed as a checkmate, or as a plea for non-instrumental blame equivalence (or worse). When you encounter this, you must explain that the speaker is implicitly sold on a very odd and, I think, indefensible view of the law’s role in human life. A legal constructivist, for example, easily dispenses with such claims. Obviously getting the normative underpinnings of law right carries massive implications on “The West vs. The Rest” and how that debate is best approached. Arguers don’t appreciate how fine-grained this pre-factual part of the debate is.
This doesn’t mean legal constructivists are necessarily forward-looking in terms of how they view law’s relation to moral and other types of normative force. Constructivists may differ on all that, just as any of us can believe in Cosmic Justice (read: recognition of Just World Fallacies) and still differ on the question of Cosmic Justice being necessarily forward-looking, backward-looking, or a blend of both (i.e. telic/deontic particularism). Arguably legal formalists can use their own theories to nip positivist distortions in the bud in ways that differ from how I as a constructivist would. We might rename legal positivism “Legal Totalism”, adding some rhetorical bite to its much needed critique. A number of other non-positivistic schools can offer their own sturdy bulwarks against equivalence talk. But it’s hard to be convincing here unless people realize that competing legal frameworks exist, exert pressure on their pre-factual judgment, and can be named and debunked. Most importantly, the more reliable ones are not just applicable at home but abroad (critically now, given the world we’ve inherited). I should’ve said all of this in the video, but there was too much other ammo I had to fire. I’m broaching all this in the low-bar because I don’t want to tack on additional recordings to include yet another piece of the puzzle as that makes the video ever-longer and it’s already one hour longer than I had intended before pressing rec. Shrug.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_positivism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(international_relations)
Arguments for constructivism: journals.openedition.org/revus/5897
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_formalism
I’ll run out of space if I keep adding links here, but this is less than half of everything I planned on glossing and linking. So I’ll just say: Go to Anne Applebaum’s twitter feed to see the antithesis of a “70/30” approach by someone who by all accounts should know better. Or read anything she has written elsewhere over the last few years. She’s still not a net-negative force in this debate, but she can do better in terms of proportionality, impartiality, goodwill and not assuming things about 70/30 commentators.
Putin’s essay: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181
I call it “The Horse’s Mouth” essay.
Budapest Outline: treaties.un.org/Pages/showDetails.aspx?objid=0800000280401fbb
Full Memorandum: treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/Part/volume-3007-I-52241.pdf
Why care about the memorandum: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/12/05/why-care-about-ukraine-and-the-budapest-memorandum/
Minsk: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements
So many treaties: treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/v3007.pdf
When I say the epistemically cautious observer will take his cues from IR theorists and committed FP wonks, I’m thinking about this last link and the sheer volume of these documents. I’ve not read through it. I’d wager that 99.99% of the people spouting strong views and binary takes on which side is worse overall haven’t read it either. The few people who store so much of this in their heads truly are in a better position to tally treaty violations and other legal breaches. But they know not to waste time arguing with ghouls on twitter and the like. And that’s not to say that the Violation Tally is the most important thing here. It never was, which partly explains why I’m not slavishly devoted to reading and memorizing the contents of these mountainous texts and signed commitments. They’re important, but the fact that anti-Western actors play negative sum games more frequently (and always remorselessly) is more important!
Legal positivism is another problem I should’ve named and targeted in the video. Technically, legal doctrines like positivism are meant to implicate each nation’s internal legal affairs only, but that’s no reason to ignore their (unspoken) distortions of how people think about interstate conflict abroad. In my experience arguers under the grip of legal positivism don’t realize they’re influenced by it. Nothing else explains the common resort to “West ignores laws all the time” mouthed as a checkmate, or as a plea for non-instrumental blame equivalence (or worse). When you encounter this, you must explain that the speaker is implicitly sold on a very odd and, I think, indefensible view of the law’s role in human life. A legal constructivist, for example, easily dispenses with such claims. Obviously getting the normative underpinnings of law right carries massive implications on “The West vs. The Rest” and how that debate is best approached. Arguers don’t appreciate how fine-grained this pre-factual part of the debate is.
This doesn’t mean legal constructivists are necessarily forward-looking in terms of how they view law’s relation to moral and other types of normative force. Constructivists may differ on all that, just as any of us can believe in Cosmic Justice (read: recognition of Just World Fallacies) and still differ on the question of Cosmic Justice being necessarily forward-looking, backward-looking, or a blend of both (i.e. telic/deontic particularism). Arguably legal formalists can use their own theories to nip positivist distortions in the bud in ways that differ from how I as a constructivist would. We might rename legal positivism “Legal Totalism”, adding some rhetorical bite to its much needed critique. A number of other non-positivistic schools can offer their own sturdy bulwarks against equivalence talk. But it’s hard to be convincing here unless people realize that competing legal frameworks exist, exert pressure on their pre-factual judgment, and can be named and debunked. Most importantly, the more reliable ones are not just applicable at home but abroad (critically now, given the world we’ve inherited). I should’ve said all of this in the video, but there was too much other ammo I had to fire. I’m broaching all this in the low-bar because I don’t want to tack on additional recordings to include yet another piece of the puzzle as that makes the video ever-longer and it’s already one hour longer than I had intended before pressing rec. Shrug.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_positivism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(international_relations)
Arguments for constructivism: journals.openedition.org/revus/5897
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_formalism
I’ll run out of space if I keep adding links here, but this is less than half of everything I planned on glossing and linking. So I’ll just say: Go to Anne Applebaum’s twitter feed to see the antithesis of a “70/30” approach by someone who by all accounts should know better. Or read anything she has written elsewhere over the last few years. She’s still not a net-negative force in this debate, but she can do better in terms of proportionality, impartiality, goodwill and not assuming things about 70/30 commentators.
