With all the news about Ukraine, it’s possible to talk more specifically about what the reversal of America’s World War II gains will look like.

Some months back, I asked whether the loss of Crimea constituted America’s Suez moment — a strategic loss that international diplomacy prevented the imperial power from stopping. The war has only gone worse for America’s ally as the months have gone by.

The two major US allies swinging in the Russian direction are Germany and China. It seems that almost no one in the American think tanks or the government proper fully understand what is at risk. One does, but the general opinion is more aligned towards the nonsensical American war narrative that calls for greater armaments for Ukraine, something that NATO military authorities and Merkel besides have undermined with their own rhetoric.

It’s not entirely clear what sort of rational justification that this war might have had, but the haphazard moral justification was that it was in favor of true democratic self-determination for Ukraine. None of you probably buy that justification, but it is something that both the mainstream left and right tend to believe in fervently. German intelligence leaked that it estimates that 50,000 people have died in the conflict already, but the US press continues to report false numbers.

The US is in a difficult situation: financially, morally, militarily, and diplomatically. The reckless wars, the international spying scandal, and more have made the US a more unreliable international partner. After World War II, Europe embraced the US as a necessary counterweight to the USSR. After 1991, the US tried to dominate both Eastern Europe and Russia in the same way that it had done further west. That policy is unraveling quickly due to over-reach, and forgetting that diplomacy has to go both ways.

The additionally silly thing is that the US is not even behaving like a rational power, in that most of its interventions do not serve any reasonable definition of the ‘American national interest.’ This is because the US has a corrupt government which alternately panders to factions of oligarchs and the masses of hungry people, while mollifying the productive minority with television and other forms of trash media.

This can’t last for much longer. What will give it the extra several pushes are the increasingly open repudiations by America’s former postwar allies.

There’s been some concern over the last months about the potential for greater censorship policies, like those that exist in the UK, Germany, Canada, and other European countries to come to the US. Typically this has been more challenging to enact in the US because of the stronger constitutional protections for free speech, although those protections have been traditionally suspended during times of major war.

Because there is no real war going on, there are not all that many strong precedents for suppressing political speech directly, rather than through the usual indirect methods.

A lot of people in the alt-right have expressed their fear about this. I don’t think it’s something to be too nervous about, even if it goes into effect.

First of all, censorship is an admission that the official ideas are weak, and unable to survive scrutiny and opposition.

Second, it radicalizes moderates.

Third, it makes the official opinion organs less trustworthy, and less able to get accurate information about public opinion (because the information gathering methods are then impeded).

Fourth, it adds more risk and more reward to routing around the censorship.

Fifth, it creates an appearance of hypocrisy among liberals who have argued for untrammeled free speech for centuries.

Sixth, it creates a black market in samizdata, even for ordinary information.

A big part of the legitimacy of the modern arrangement is the claim that it provides both economic and political liberty to its citizens. Neither of those things are really true for any sensible understanding of the word ‘liberty,’ but whenever the state makes a decision that undermines that claim, it loses the loyalty of a large portion of its followers. We’ve seen this dynamic with the news about the NSA in the last couple years. It makes it very difficult for these states to make claims to moral authority. It has had politically significant impacts, especially, in Germany, as PEGIDA gains a lot of its moral force from the failings of the German state and its subordination to the US.

Further, the rising tide of anti-US opinion in Germany is one of the reasons why NATO has been incapable of supporting Ukraine effectively in its war with Russia. So these sorts of shifts in public opinion have major downstream political impacts.

So, my general response to calls for censorship, whether performed by the goverinnment or by private companies, is to encourage them to pull the trigger.

How lucky do they feel?

This is entirely different in countries with no tradition of freedom of thought and inquiry, in which the people have no expectation of enjoying those things. In the West, increasingly, you have freedom of thought if you are a leftist, but not if you are not. A path towards greater formalization of the existing lines is to be applauded rather than decried.

So, when an enemy is about to make a mistake, get out of the way, or otherwise cheer them on as they stumble into a pit.

In political rhetoric, it’s common to coalesce a group based on shared dislike; defining the group by what the group is not. On the pseudonymous internet, it’s particularly easy to create a persona that is more like a missile launcher than a person. The persona spends all day attacking some group of people which is not part of the group, using some mixture of mockery, criticism, and scorn for the general entertainment of all who read it.

This behavior is not particularly limited to the political left or right. It seems to be a human universal which hardens group sentiments, informing members where the lines are drawn, and passing the time besides.

The difficulty for such groups comes when the time comes to actually try to form something positive. A group unified by shared criticism is rarely on good footing to actually construct anything. Critics are like bandits in that they always need to be on the offensive. The second that they create something that needs to be defended, they stop being bandits. Most groups don’t make that transition successfully to stationary banditry, because managing the complexity is too hard, and it requires a different sort of mentality than the purely negative one.

Not everyone can shift away from the mindset of taking constant pot-shots at the hated enemy, especially when you’re in the political opposition, and have no territory to protect, no policies that can be criticized, and no weighty decisions of your own that you have had to make. Uncrowned heads are not burdened by the responsibilities that comes with power.

This tendency becomes more acute under universal suffrage, because everyone is encouraged to have passionate political opinions, whether or not those opinions are informed. Most people in the US don’t bother with this, but some large fraction do. The ideological content of those opinions is often non-existent or vestigial, in that few know much of their origins, or have integrated it into some system of thinking. It is instead more like being a fan of a sports team.

To go back to the title, the negative pose in a critic creates an impression in the observer that there is nothing there. The critic is a disembodied voice (even if you can see him speak) which represents nothing but an attack on the existing order. Whether or not the attack is justified, he keeps the focus of the observer on the target, rather than the person doing the attacking.

All human groups are political, and successful political groups have some mixture of builders and fighters. Critics are like homeless fighters, mobile bandits, generally because they have lost some sort of previous political struggle, or have otherwise inherited defeat, and are either unwilling or unable to join the dominant order. Different groups employ ideology as tools to meet their ends; and those ends may have reasons behind them, but those reasons are not necessarily rational — revenge or chips-on-shoulders is sufficient motive, or greed, or envy, or a sense of justice, or pure spite.

Thinking about ideology in this way helps to expose the men behind the voices, lays out the strategic map, and gives us a better sense of who is opposing whom and for what reasons. Ideology ought to be evaluated on a similar basis to a tool, like a rifle or a shovel. Is the tool an effective implement for achieving the given end? Is it the right tool? Are the people seeking to use it qualified to use it?