https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=c6sQBAUiJeE

So here we are. We’re going to talk about something vaguely political. Ukraine. Now I’m not a Ukraine expert. I’ve talked to a bunch of Ukraine experts. That doesn’t make me a Ukraine expert. But I’m not really going to go into what’s going on on the ground or what I think is gonna happen or what I think has happened. Right? That’s not my purpose. My purpose in making this video is to talk about framing and the different frames. And I thought Ukraine was a good example. I’ve been trying to work on this video for a year, actually. I’ve been trying to think of a way to talk about frames and exemplify framing so that you understand what it is, right, and why that’s important, right, how that manipulates you. So the Ukraine situation seems to be a good time to do this. And I can talk about frames in Ukraine without knowing anything about or much about Ukraine and just having absorbed a bunch of information and seen how things have unfolded, right? So this is part of sense making and cultural cognitive grammar and thinking things through and figuring out when you’re maybe being toyed with, right, or when there’s manipulation happening. And maybe it’s not deliberate manipulation, but doesn’t matter. I’m a pragmatist. Don’t care if you mean it or not. Care if you’re doing it. And so all these things sort of come into play. So let’s dive in to framing in the, you know, circling around the situation in Ukraine. There’s different ways to think about what’s going on in Ukraine. And one way I hear is political, right? There’s a political frame for Ukraine. You can say, oh, well, Putin wants more power in his country and he’s going to take over Ukraine to gain more political power. And one thing you’ll notice is that the political frame overlaps with a lot of other frames. Frames sometimes overlap. That’s okay, right? But it is indicative that, you know, maybe that’s not the best frame, right? Because there’s other frames that overlap. And the political frame can’t account for everything. You can couch this in terms of East versus West politically, right? The Eastern power of Russia wants more influence and control over its side of the world, right? And it wants more access to warm water ports. You know, it wants more access to people, right? Because Russia has a population problem like many countries do. It wants more buffer zones, right? So that it can’t be attacked. All of these are valid ways of thinking about the problem. But I don’t think they’re complete. Another way that overlaps another frame is the economic frame. Again, Russia’s sort of in trouble economically because of their population decline and they need a vibrant population to come in and boost their economy, right? And maybe you get that by taking over an area with a more vibrant economy or with more people that can emigrate back into Russia, maybe, that are already compatible because they already speak Russian. So that’s another way to sort of think about it. And there’s two aspects to the economic, right? You could say, oh, well, they want more wheat and more natural gas and more coal and more manganese and rare earth minerals and things like that. But the other way to think about it is maybe they just want to control that, so that they have leverage in the future over other countries, right? So that’s a good economic lever, right? There’s more resources. And then there’s another way to look at this too. You could look at it as a cultural historical frame, right? You could say, all right, well, who are most of the people in Ukraine culturally? And it’s interesting because this was, I pointed this out, so in 2014, Crimea got invaded, right? And I asked some Ukrainians, like, well, what was with that? Like, why wasn’t Ukraine a little bit more on top of things if Russia invaded Crimea? And the responses, you know, all the ones I’ve talked to has been, ah, it’s 90% Russia anyway. And I just found that shocking. Like, well, it’s 90% Russian. Like, what’s the percentage of Russian before you’re part of Russia then? You know, again, I’m not an expert. I’m not trying to answer these questions. To some extent, I don’t care. It’s the other part of the world and shouldn’t hopefully ever involve me to some extent. So what does that mean? Like, what does it mean that they’re, they were Russian anyway? And so we let that go. You know, is there, you know, is there a way to think about this in terms of culture? Well, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, right, for a long, long time. And it seems like almost all of their people are able to speak Russian or exposed to Russian. And a bunch of them are Russian native speakers. So that’s their primary language, which is interesting. I don’t know what to think of that. A lot of people I know who are Ukrainian used to identify as Russian. They’d just say, Oh, no, I’m Russian. It’s like, okay. And now I find out they’re Ukrainian. I’m like, that’s, that’s, that’s interesting. Like, what does that mean culturally? Is it one culture split apart? Or is it two different cultures? Like, what’s the difference between Ukrainian culture and Russian culture? What are, what values are different? Right? Because they have very similar, if not the same language. So that’s kind of interesting. And again, I like, I don’t know what to make of that. It’s just an observation. So there are three interesting frames, and maybe I’ll try to give you a fourth. And that frame is the idea. It’s very materialistic that you can draw lines on a map, give people a common government, maybe a common story or language, and call them a country. And they can self-determine. They can say, all right, we’re going to be this thing apart from what we were before, which is part of the Soviet Union, right? With deep ties to Russia. Now we’re not right. We’re untethered from that. So if that’s something you think that can happen, like a self-determination through a materialist frame where you’re drawing lines on a map and maybe allocating resources or using an arbitrary way of saying, well, these people are mostly like these people. These people are mostly like these people, and therefore we’ll give them a common government and everything will be fine. That’s a mode of self-determination, right? It’s an individuation from where it was before, which was part of the Soviet Union. And the reason why this might be upsetting to people is if you want self-determination to work, if you want individuation to work, and you try it at a scale like a country, and it seems not to work because maybe there’s conflict. And it looks like there’s been constant conflict with two regions of Ukraine, with the rest of Ukraine, which is, you know, most countries don’t seem to have rockets being flown from parts of the countries into other parts of the countries. We can argue about where the rockets came from and who’s really firing them and silly things like that, but there’s lots of reasons for other countries to have that problem and they don’t. So it’s interesting to note, I don’t know what to make of it. I’m not making any claims. It’s weird, right? It’s not the norm for most countries. So if you’re looking at a country as an ideal or an example of self-determination, of individuation as such, and it’s not working, then maybe that means you can’t self-determine and you can’t individuate yourself in the way that you want, right? So sure, you’re an individual to some extent, but you can’t just arbitrarily declare yourself what you want to be and expect the rest of the world to go along with it, right? In the same way, maybe, maybe you can’t just draw arbitrary lines on a map, and we’ve done this many times, like this is the case with the United States, we’ve done this many times, like this is the problem with the Middle East, too, draw arbitrary lines on a map and say, well, these people are going to be under one government and they have roughly the same language and then they’re just going to be a country and they’re all going to get along and that doesn’t seem to work. It doesn’t work in the Middle East, right? It didn’t work in parts of Europe in history, right? It just doesn’t seem to work very well. So there’s a way in which maybe that doesn’t work and then if you want that to work because you want to be able to have power over people and tell them how to use their language, the language when you’re not around, right? Or tell them how they should treat you, what things you’re entitled to as a result of your gender, your race, your preference, whatever, and then you see this ideal, this country, Ukraine, and it can’t self-determine, it can’t individuate, maybe you get scared that you can’t either. That’s an interesting frame to look at this from, which would explain why everyone’s all upset about Ukraine and not Crimea. When Crimea happened, barely a tear was shed. Also, this isn’t the only war going on of this nature. It’s not the only war that has gone on of this nature. We seem to be selectively caring about these things. So why Ukraine? Look, what’s going on in Ukraine is a tragedy. I don’t support any of it on either side, by the way, because I don’t have a dog in that fight and I don’t think that demonizing Russia or demonizing Ukraine is going to do any good. I recognize the CIA has had meddling in Ukraine. The KGB has had meddling in Ukraine long before this. Ukraine seems to be a bit of a football for something bigger than, we’ll say, the US or Russia, which is an interesting concept. So the fact that the corruption hasn’t gone away and the corruption prosecutor A is corrupt and the next one is corrupt but in the opposite way or in contrary to this other view, it just seems like there isn’t a good way to get to no corruption. So that’s kind of weird. And some of these frames are really weird, right? Because what happens in the political frame or in the economic frame, the same people are claiming, oh, well, Russia can’t maintain Ukraine, but we’re worried that if they got Ukraine, they’d move on to another country. Okay, those are conflicting, contradictory ideas and they’re said by the same people. So I don’t believe them. I think that they’re confused and that can’t possibly happen, which is good. This is good news. If Putin can barely grab Ukraine, then if he had Ukraine, he probably couldn’t grab anything else because he’ll be overburdened with Ukraine. I think that’s a valid way to think about it and there’s no reason to escalate to total war. I know some people are casting this as something even bigger that they maybe don’t understand. And if you want an expert on this, my buddy Vlad Vexler has a YouTube channel. He’s a Ukrainian expert to some extent, or at least he claims to be and I believe him. Very smart guy in either case, very bright. But I disagree with Vlad and I love Vlad, but I disagree with him. I don’t think that things have to escalate the way he thinks. I don’t think that things are out of control. I understand that when you start a conflict, things don’t go the way you expect. You’ve got a plan and your plan gets destroyed the minute boots are on the ground. That’s a well-known saying in war. So that seems to be what happened. Is there more to it? Maybe a little more, but probably not a lot more. So another frame I want to give you for this. And you know, this is an interesting way to think about it. I talked before about the three great modern religions, a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but not really because they’re real. And one of them is the safety religion. And Father Eric on BOM talked about this with me. And this morning he messaged me about this in one of the forums on the Discord server there. And yeah, I mean, one way to see this is as a morphing of the safety religion. So if the safety religion is all about a virus and a pandemic, I think the pandemic is of fear, uncertainty, irrationality, and tyranny. That’s the pandemic. The pandemic is not this virus of unknown origin. Unspecified virus of unknown origin is Critical Drinker likes to call it. If you’re not watching Critical Drinker’s YouTube channel, please watch Critical Drinker’s YouTube channel. He’s excellent. That seems to be an interesting frame too, because instead of say pandemic 1.0, which was this new virus and pandemic 2.0, which was the mutation of the virus and the, oh no, masks and flu shots don’t work. Now we have number three, which is war, which is a lot more material. War is a material thing. You can see tanks, you can see soldiers, people are dying. It’s terrible. Pray for the Ukrainian people. Pray for the Russians involved in the war, please. This is a horrible situation. This is still a pandemic of fear, uncertainty, irrationality, and tyranny, any way you slice it. It’s just the form is war instead of something ethereal like a virus that you can’t see, I can’t see. We can sort of take experts’ words for it and maybe they’re wrong or maybe they’re confused or maybe they fooled themselves as to whether or not and how bad something is that you can’t see and it’s hard to measure. So that’s another frame. And I would argue that the frame of the lack of self-determination and pandemic 3.0, which there’s some crossover there, may be better frames to look at things in. Now I realize at some point I’m going to have to do a video on frames and framing to explain how I pick frames because hopefully I’ve exemplified four or five different frames you could think of this in and their differences and how they do. They do overlap, but a couple of them encompass the others. And maybe one frame is never enough. That’s another thing to think about. And maybe experts, say political experts, have a very narrow way of thinking about things. And so it’s very deep. That’s what an expert does, goes deep. But maybe their projections are wrong because it’s too narrow a frame. Economic too, maybe the economic frame is too narrow to really come up with good predictions because you’re just looking out through this narrow slit, roughly speaking. And maybe when they’re right, it’s an accident. It’s just though they happen to be pointing in the right direction, but normally they’re not. So having a larger frame that encompasses the political and the economic and the cultural slash historical, is maybe a better, easier way to think about it that doesn’t require experts. So maybe that’s important. Fewer experts, people are driven by many of the same things. Maybe if you want to leave a historical legacy, you want to take over Ukraine because you’ve reunited the Soviet Union once again and the old glory. That’s one way to look at it. It’s certainly a factor. I mean, it can’t be ignored. It’s not wrong, but maybe it’s not complete. And so looking at it in these larger frames of self-determination, pandemic 3.0, where it’s this whole fear, uncertainty, irrationality, and tyranny thing all over again that we’re casting into the world, is probably positive. Now, I don’t think that World War 3 is on the table here, unless we all think that. So you can make World War 3 happen. It’s not hard. Just launch a missile through the wrong country. Problem solved. World War 3 is done. But you don’t have to. That’s important. You can opt not to do that. And maybe sanctions are a declaration of war in this case, or would be viewed as such. And fair enough, maybe they should be viewed as such. I don’t know. I’m not making a claim. But maybe you don’t have to do that. And maybe if you think the threat of World War 3 is on the table, you take any offer you can get to avoid the war. Because I happen to think, and maybe I’m totally wrong about this, that the answer to war in Ukraine is not more war, like war against Russia, fighting in Ukraine against Russia. That just sounds like more death and more killing and more war. And I don’t think reducing war involves more of it. It sounds like a contradiction to me. If you’re worried that Putin’s going to continue, that’s a different issue. If you can delay World War 3 a little bit, that might be a better idea. Maybe being on the defensive is better than being on the offensive. And it’d be hard to argue that since there are tanks in Ukraine, that Putin’s not ready to be on the defensive if other countries go into Ukraine. I’m just pointing this stuff out. I don’t know. I’m not a military expert. Strategically though, in general, defense is easier than offense. And it seems like we’ve got a bunch of NATO countries right around them. So if you wanted to contain the situation, you might want to negotiate and at least buy yourself some time to shore up your NATO defenses. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. Take any deal on the table. That would be good too. One way to stop war is to negotiate. And if you don’t like the deal, that’s your fault at that point. Like maybe any deal is better than World War 3. Just something to think about. I’m not making any claims. I’m just trying to get people to think about these things. Maybe there’s no reason for World War 3. There’s an easy way out and maybe it won’t reduce the suffering in Ukraine because maybe there’s no way to reduce the suffering in Ukraine because more war is not going to reduce the suffering in Ukraine. And we need to pray for the Ukrainian people. We need to get people out of there. We need to pray for the Russian people who are affected by this for whatever reason. Like if they’re soldiers and they’re dying because they’re in a conflict in another country, I don’t care. There’s still people who are dying. It sounds terrible. I wouldn’t want to be in that situation. And once conflict starts, it spreads real easy. So if you don’t nip it in the bud, that’s not good. And maybe Crimea was a message that we missed. It was a big signal that people weren’t paying attention to. And we can whine about missing it and we can be upset about the people who told us about it, like maybe a presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, back in the day, who seems to have been right. And that may upset you because of your political lens or framing, but maybe your political framing is bad. Like maybe irrespective of your politics, people who are right should be listened to. I don’t care what side of the aisle they’re on because I don’t believe in political framing. I think it’s bad framing. It’s something to think about. Not saying anything should have been different from what it was, but it’s worth noting. And that I think is what’s important. So again, let’s not pause in a world where more war is the solution to war because I don’t believe that could possibly be true. It sort of sounds definitionally false. Where the risk of World War III is worth any negotiation. I don’t think that’s true. I think that I’d rather negotiate and at least buy time. If all we do is buy time for World War III to happen, I’m okay with that. I think that’s good. Let’s do that. Because maybe the more time we buy, the more opportunity we have to avoid it. That’s possible. Or we could start World War II, World War III tomorrow. I just don’t think that’s a good answer. I don’t prefer that answer. So just a preference there. Still not making any claims. So these are the things that I think about. These are the things maybe everybody should think about while we’re praying for the people of Ukraine and Russia in this conflict. And I hope you found this helpful. I realize I am going to have to do a video on how to pick better frames and framing and things like that. Maybe two, maybe three. We’ll see where it takes us. If you have any comments, leave them below. Like, subscribe, do the thing, tell your friends. I’ve got a bunch of videos here. I’m probably going to be transitioning into more commentary and critique because I’ve laid out a bunch of tools that I hope are helpful. And then I can refer to those when I’m critiquing because I don’t want to give you critiques without answers. Without solutions, without possibilities, without potential because I don’t think that’s fair. So that’s why the channel has unfolded the way it has. Watching it in order is not necessarily a bad idea. A lot of the ordering is deliberate on my part to try to help you and everybody else and help you to help everybody else. It’s not just for you. It’s for you to help other people. Maybe realize where they’re blind, realize there’s better ways to think of the world, etc. And I really appreciate that you’ve watched. I hope that we can all calm down because if everybody’s too excited or too alert, that’s not helping the situation. It’s making things worse. And I hope that we can be more thoughtful and circumspect about what’s going on and what we need to do. Like our role, we’re tiny people. I’m not in the Ukraine. I’m not going to fly to the Ukraine. I can’t do that much to help the Ukrainian people. I realize that. It doesn’t make me happy, but there’s lots of people in the world I can’t help. There’s people in Africa. There’s people in Afghanistan. There’s people in what should be Kurdistan maybe. There’s people in Turkey. There’s people in Syria. There’s people in Israel. There’s people all over the world I can’t help. And that sucks. And I don’t like it. But I can help the people that I can. And that’s what I’m focused on. And I hope you’ll focus on that too. And it’s really important to give those people as much help as you can. Because if everyone’s better, then everyone has more agency to do more in the world to help everybody else. And maybe that’s the best we can do. And maybe that’s all we have to do. And I hope this is helpful to you and that you can use it to help others, especially to calm them down and get this World War III talk kind of off the table. And I just wanted to give you a thanks for watching my material and for sticking through the video this long. And I’m really appreciative for all of your time and attention.