Blimey
1yr ago
and fits what we do know pretty well.
Prigozhin was possessed. Then he was exorcized, and then he recalled his troops. Fits pretty well, doesn't it? It's like epicycles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle
when ancients astronomers wanted to explain the movement of planets using geocentric system.
Blimey
1yr ago
It's less about NATO invasion, per se, and more about the various states that border Russia that might consider a land grab if their military no longer appears up to the task of repelling invaders.
Which? Estonia? Finland? Georgia? Mongolia taking their shot at it again?
The only credible threat to Russia is China, but it's indeed some 6d chess — to attack Ukraine in order to be better prepared for a possible war in the Far East.
Blimey
1yr ago
Also some people mistakenly thought that Russian combat effectiveness degraded to such degree that the Ukrainian counter-offensive will be a repeat of Operation Faustschlag of the First World War when Germans completely obliterated Russian defenses and took most of Ukraine and Baltics in just a couple weeks. But by then Russians fought for 4 years, and two Revolutions happened. Right now, they are nowhere near this point.
Blimey
1yr ago
Another thing that would work is space colonization, which would provide a sink for the surplus population, jobs, and people to work out the logistics of managing a space colony.
If anything, space colonization is a sphere extremely amendable to automatization. Extreme temperatures, pressures, lack of gravity — robots will perform any work in those conditions better than any man in a space suit. Then all the food, amenities for colonists — they weight a lot, and take a lot of space. No, I think if mass scale space exploration will happen — it will be through Von Neumann probes.
Blimey
1yr ago
No. Let's face it — pro-Ru types want to call it a "coup" just to claim the the successor government was illegitimate and thus Ru had justification for launching their invasion. A rhetorical trick. I am not interested in rhetorical games, thank you.
Blimey
1yr ago
Generally, it aligns with what is known
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/06/25/putin-was-nowhere-to-be-found
Blimey
1yr ago
NATO wants regime change in Russia.
NATO doesn't want it (apart from hardliners from Estonia, or wherever). Why is it gets repeated?
Russia has superior manpower and production.
This simplistic thinking lead to wide assumption about Kyiv falling in first days, or Donbass army being surrounded etc.
If I had to guess, Prig was fed bad intel by NATO spies in the MoD.
And Putin has doubles.
Some say the mysterious $6.2 billion accounting error was paid to Prig.
No, triples! Why are you saying stuff that has zero relation to reality?
Blimey
1yr ago
My takeaway from the above is that forecasting something as anti-inductive as war is incredibly difficult, and that's it far too easy to fall for a cheerleader effect.
I thought, and still think, that warfare is highly mathematical. I guess it stems from my love of games like Panzer General, or Hearts of Iron. There are things like esprit de corps, or civilian morale, or troop experience that still can be modeled — e.g. through modifiers. There are political events that are difficult to simulate (like the recent putsch) — but surely you can simulate events on an operational level, like Zaporizhzhia/Western Donbas front? Wargaming is a thing, but do they utilize a huge progress in compute to quickly work through numerous scenarios to find the most optimal ones?
Blimey
1yr ago
something similar to the flat earth.
This theory is orders of magnitudes more probable than the flat earth, there is no comparison.
In fact, Putin himself said they considered to use doubles at the start of his presidency:
Blimey
1yr ago
This conspiracy theory is very popular in Russia. In fact, it posits not that there is a single double, but that there are several: "The banqueting one" ("Банкетный"), "the Udmurt", "the Talking One" ("Говорун"). It's a fun theory, but the Western intelligence services would have known (as they knew about Prigozhin preparing his putsch even though Russian services completely missed it). And they would have leaked this, I think.
Blimey
1yr ago
That literally proves his point, that Ukraine in 2014 was moving to suppress the Russian language and in 2018 they did do precisely that by repealing the law!
I wonder what happened between 2014 and 2018? Like, maybe, multiple violations of Minsk agreements by Russia, when they took Debaltseve, for example? If Russia violates every agreement it signs with you, you have to learn eventually that it doesn't work.
Do what Mearsheimer said this whole time and make it clear that Ukraine wasn't going to be part of NATO, sweep it under the carpet (like the enormous numbers of people dying in Yemen for example).
That's an absolute idiocy from him, to expect something like that to happen. Netherlands would certainly just go along with it. Again, hyperagency of the US, hypoagency of everyone else.
Accidents happen.
Iran Air Flight 655 incident was admitted by the US, and they paid the victims.
In the days immediately following the incident, President Ronald Reagan issued a written diplomatic note to the Iranian government, expressing deep regret
Nothing like that happened when it comes from Russia, they denied and deflected.
But no, they doubled down instead providing more arms
Barely any arms.
Not with troops. Putin only started intervening overseas in 2008 and there's a clear reactive tendency.
Putin was only several years in power, and he already demonstrated his belligerence in Tuzla incident, meddling in internal Ukrainian affairs, like poisoning of Yuschenko, Chechnya, continuous occupation of Transnistria, Estonia cyberattacks and so on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia
You have Saddam, who invaded Iran the year after he came to power, but then you have Hitler who started his land grabs only several years later. Though then you have the Second Chechen War, when Putin was the PM in prosecuting which he was very interested.
right after the emboldened Georgians go in on South Ossetia.
That's not what happened in reality (maybe in the alternative reality of Russian propaganda). Russia was encroaching there for years by now, placing their troops and giving away Russian passports. And then shelling Georgian villages, which, obviously, provoked Georgian response.
You didn't grasp the distinction in what Mearsheimer is saying, the difference between invasion and conquest.
Yes, attack on Kyiv, Sumy, or Chernihiv was just a faint, not an attempt at conquest. And occupying Zaporizhzhia and Kherson is totally not a conquest (as it was stated by your Mearsheimer in his debate with Sykorsky). My advice: read less grand narrative stuff that likens International affairs to the game of chess or Risk, and more about particular histories and cultures of countries you are trying to discuss. Cheers.
Blimey
1yr ago
But OK, I'll push back on a more object-level, without sneering. On forefront of which revolutions was he? Velvet revolution? Singing Revolution in Baltic countries? Orange Revolution? Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan? Euromaidan? Rose Revolution in Georgia? Because it's a nice narrative concocted by Russian propaganda, Orban and pro-Ru types, about CIA or Soros, but it just doesn't hold and betrays both ignorance and conspiratorial thinking.
Blimey
1yr ago
Soros, whose institutes have been at the forefront of funding revolutions since..
Good for him for developing democracy in those countries by funding libraries, scientists and free media. Unfortunately, despite all efforts Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria slide back into corruption and their elites keep pocketing EU money, of course Soros is a good scapegoat for their failures. Gullible people there love this Soros shit, makes them feel smart.
Blimey
1yr ago
Sure! In Eastern Europe and former Soviet countries people are familiar with Kant a bit better, as he influenced Hegel, which had a great influence on communism and dialectic materialism. In comparison, Locke, I feel, is much more influential in the anglo world (him being English and contributing to the early liberalism), so I'd like to read about his philosophy.
Mearsheimer knows things that youtubers do not
Mearsheimer has demonstrated that he doesn't have expertise on Eastern Europe many times in his speeches and debates, there is no need to read all the corpus of a crank, it is enough just to listen to his speeches.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
Like here he is denying that "Putin is bent on creating a greater Russia" (29 minute slide). Demonstrably false.
33 minute slide: he claims that the west's response "so far" is "doubling down". Now, it was 7 years ago. The US started to provide significant assistance to Ukraine, and sanctioned some Russians only after Malaysia airliner was being shot down by Russians (as confirmed by the International Court). How the West should have reacted? Especially, when Russia denied any involvement?
39 minute slide: he claims that Ukraine should guarantee language rights for minorities. Well, if Mearsheimer knew anything about Ukraine, he would have known about
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/the-truth-behind-ukraine-s-language-policy/
Kivalov-Kolesnichenko language law. Just a bunch of nonsense from an old crank.
If this was the case, then Putin would've done something about it earlier and people would've written about it pre-2014.
No, why do you think that? He tried to pull Belarus and Ukraine into "Union State". It's a well-known fact, maybe not to you, or Mearsheimer.
How convenient that Putin becomes a Russian pan-nationalist precisely when NATO enlargement gets closest to Russia.
As suspicious as when a robber tries to rob a bank the day before a new security measures are introduced. The bank security must have provoked him! Russia didn't wait 2008 to try to encroach on Crimea when Ukraine was under pro-Ru president:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Tuzla_Island_conflict
And he did say in his lecture:
If you really want to wreck Russia, what you should do is to encourage it to try to conquer Ukraine. Putin is much too smart to try that
So, I guess, a win for the US? As that's exactly what happened, that is true.
Blimey
1yr ago
Maybe if the God descended from Heavens on Dec 1 2013 before protesters and opposition politicians in Kyiv and said to them: "Go home, victory of your protest will lead to great human suffering and hundreds of thousand deaths", nothing of that would have happened. Ukraine would be just a shittier version of Belarus for perpetuity, all smart people would have left either way, even if there was no war.
But it doesn't work like that. Ukrainians wanted into the EU. EU members supported those aspirations — some more enthusiastically (like Lithuania, or Poland), some less (like France, or Germany). On the other hand Putin and his close circle have more agency than amorphous blobs like pro-Western Ukrainian population, or European bureaucracy. The onus should be on them.
Blimey
1yr ago
There's no debate about this, it's black and white. Read the very link you posted.
Yep, page 7: Меморандум о гарантиях
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/гарантия
Now, in the articles it is not said that the US will intervene on behalf of Ukraine if it is attacked. It’s says about assistance. Which the US provided so far.
While Mearsheimer talks about NATO being a threat to Russia, I can't take him seriously. Here, read this, maybe you are unfamiliar with this concept:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
He correctly predicted that Russia is a threat to Ukraine, but he incorrectly identified the reason for why it is, and thus his arguments do not hold. They are a threat because Putin, and a large part of Russian political class, views Russians and Ukrainians one people that should be reunited, Anschluss-style. NATO has no place in this picture, aside from being a potential deterrent.
Mearsheimer predicted exactly what happened
No, he said "Putin is too smart to try that".
You didn't refute his point, you just said it was "garbage", and that people's motivations are complex. Sure.
Situation 1: An incel writes a manifesto, where he declares women evil, demands them to be redistributed among all men, cries about Asian men not being popular. Then he drives through a crowd, killing several people.
Crying wojak: "No, we must understand his motivations, men are expendable, sexlesness is as high as ever!!!"
Chad: "This guy is a monster"
Situation 2: A dude writes a book in prison about Jews being a scourge, and that his country needs to conquer a lot of land. Then he becomes a dictator of said country, declares a war on his neighbors, kills millions in the process.
Crying wojak: "No, we must understand his motivations, Versailles was too harsh, American Jewish plutocracy and that guy in a wheelchair provoked him to attack Poland!!! What about autobahns?"
Chad: "This guy is a monster"
Situation 3: An autocrat writes a manifesto about his country having a rightful claim on the territory of a neighboring country because history, makes speeches about how he was betrayed by the West, that the West is degenerate, how a nation that is above his own country in terms of human rights and media freedoms is Nazi. Then he declares war on this neighbor (sorry, declares a Special Military Operation), kills more than 100k people in the process.
Crying wojak: "No, we must understand his motivations, Ukraine is historically Russia's territory, did you read Mearsheimer, he is a genius, it's all West fault!"
Chad: "This guy is a monster"
Blimey
1yr ago
In case of India there is a share of direct responsibility — but the West couldn't significantly influence China's policies, not during Mao's rule, not after that. Aside from infecting Chinese leadership with harmful memes, of course, which then were turned to 11 due to totalitarian nature of China. But we don't blame Germany for being a place of origin of Marx, whose ideas caused death of millions.
Blimey
1yr ago
I wish I knew more about leadership of those state-like formations. LDNR was lead by people directly affiliated with Kremlin, or unruly warlords who were eventually killed. More than half population there saw their future in Ukraine. But South Ossetia, and especially Abkhazia look much more autonomous. Of course, it doesn't cancel the fact, that a lot of ethnic Georgians were murdered or driven out, just like in LDNR — thus changing the general attitude of people there, and the ethnic composition. And Transnistria is probably somewhere in between LDNR and Abkhazia in terms of agency.
Blimey
1yr ago
Provide it then. I provided the links, you didn't provide those masterful refutations from TruthSocial.
Blimey
1yr ago
There is a good breakdown of his arguments
Blimey
1yr ago
The key word is generally.
You get your arguments from youtubers like 'Spaghetti Kozak Media & Heavy Industries LLC', I get mine from published authors
Argument from Authority. I thought academics can be trusted, see where they lead us with lockdowns!
But Spaghetti Kozak Media demonstrated much closer knowledge of Ukrainian affairs than Mearsheimer did — as someone who comes from this part of the world I can attest to this. I watched Mearsheimer's debate with Sykorsky — the dude is just ignorant. He did not predict anything — in fact, he said Putin won't attack, because he would be too stupid otherwise.
Ukraine was not given any security guarantee
I don't remember when the US intervened into the war directly? They follow the spirit and the letter of the Memorandum by "providing assistance to Ukraine", and Russia broke the memorandum.
In Russian and Ukrainian versions of the documents, it is not "assurances", but "guarantees":
page 7: Меморандум о гарантиях. Signed by American and British representatives as well. So please, study the matter a bit more, before opining. And do not trust some academics, they spew garbage, be it Fauci or Mearsheimer.
Right, but people like Rommel have just bigger phase space of possible decisions which stems from their better intuition and greater experience. I had in mind simulations like what they do e.g. in astronomy when they try to simulate formation of star systems, galaxies, and such. It is also highly probabilistic — they'll say something like "with the probability of 60% the planet with Jupiter mass will form at the distance of 1 au away from the central star" based on thousands of simulations they run; unlike wargaming where you have only a specific scenario you run several times with imperfect humans.
I read somewhere that US DoD has some precise models for logistics — I'll try to research.
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