This was sort of John Bell's problem with the information theories his work helped spawn.

What additionally does everything being information tell us? What is this information about?

He was more a fan of objective collapse and pilot wave theories.

Information ontology is sort of a reworking of logical positivism in some cases. It says simply that all you can say about a thing is all that there is to it. It helps make logical positivism no longer anti-realist by saying information is all that there is.

But it isn't just this sort of cheap reformation. There is very good reasons it became popular. It's a bit too much to set down here but if you're interested I would look into the holographic principal and information ontology. I don't know s great survey off the top of my head, but I know I didn't have to search super hard to find them.

You can fully describe DNA transcription and neurotransmitter binding in mechanical terms too (granted there is some loss of fine detail in these models).

The scare quotes, in the sense I was using them, certainly would apply to how a cell membrane "knows" things as well. None of those systems has any sort of the self-awareness of the type we typically associate with "knowing."

I think the big question here is if the higher level knowing of conciousness is essentially something totally new (type dualism at a high level of emergence), or is the result of something entirely different, something due to the special intrinsic nature of physical symbols such as letters, DNA, etc. (substance dualism).

The latter seems harder to justify because certainly things without intrinsic meaning transmit meaning to knowers. We know the paths of old riverbeds from the paths they cut in rocks. We can tell the trajectory of a plane crash from where debris ends up. My friends and I once got caught dipping out of school to go smoke blunts at a friend's house because, when we fled out the back door upon seeing his dad coming home, someone left a freshly made cup coffee on the table.

My friend's dad knew someone had been home recently because the coffee was hot, that is, it was a system that would have tended towards thermodynamic equilibrium with its enviornment, so the additional entropy in the cup was a signal of a non-equlibrium event occuring in the house recently.

My friend's dad didn't have to be a scientist to pick this up because variance from the enviornmental entropy equilibrium is something our nervous system is specifically adapted to do (hence it tends to extinguish stimuli that are persistent, because monitoring difference from the norm is often as important as monitoring difference for ideal settings for homeostasis).

But if something as simple as heat can be a signal carrying a complex meaning, then it doesn't seem like all meaning must come from the intrinsic features of symbols. So then where does the distinction occur?

The substance dualism approach also seems to run into significant issues when it claims that computer algorithms don't process meaning because they aren't "alive." This seems strange given that they are composed of and use symbols to sustain themselves, symbols that are supposedly inheritly meaningful. The same problem pops up if biological viruses are said to not be alive. Computer viruses can also be set up in such a way that they produce novel information, mutate, undergo selection, and evolve. With the advent of the internet, and their ability to spread across a huge eco system, they are also no longer dependent on intentional human action to keep them alive.

Anyways, my objection isn't as much to the concept of some sort of dualism per say; it's such dualism creating a black box that discourages additional inquiry and that such dualism makes its cut using poorly defined definitions. If some meanings can't be described in our common physical frames, we need to try to define all the meaning that can be described in current frames to define the new frame.

I'm not sure what is meant by language and mathematics violating physical laws. Obviously, they can describe things that violate physical laws, but this is inheritly going to be true of any system that can create its own axioms. It is essentially what we should expect for any such system with limited computational power and energy limits, because it has to try to represent the world using compression.

Since algorithmic entropy is non-computable due to logical contradictions inherit in an algorithm finding the shortest possible algorithm to code Y, where Y is a given set of information, we shouldn't expect to find perfect replications of the external world in self-organizing systems. We'll find internal models full or errors and violations of how the world actually works. These errors aren't going to be selected against unless they are grave enough to stop the reproduction of the system. What we will see is selection towards better representations, not a progression to an ideal a fixed point.



The dividing line for biosemiotics is a tough issue though, right? Physics has the embarrassment of having at least 8 major interpretations of its most central theory. Biology has the similar, perhaps greater problem of having no definition of what constitutes life. Here in lies the problem. If meaning is something that only appears in life, but life is going to be defined in terms of a definition of evolution based on organisms using meaning to maximize survival value, then the definition is circular, and it seems like a viscous circle. In definitions of evolution that avoid this circularity, it seems languages and computer viruses, even crystals, may be living things (as well as biological viruses). Attempts to keep synthetic entities out often have the problem of increasingly ad hoc additions to the definition. If we're talking about a unique sort of substance dualism, we should be able to find a very neat dividing line.

For an example of the problem: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/why-life-does-not-really-exist/


The other issue is, do other, non-living, self-organizing systems not undergo evolution or other processes considered unique to life? Here there is no good answer either.

Defining evolution for non-biological systems is difficult because they are more diffuse in space and do not have a specific "individual" to use as a unit of analysis. If a phenomena reguarly reappears, is it being extinguished and a new, similar phenomena shows up later, or is the continual reoccurence one system?

Evolution might be something totally unique to life, something that can define life, but it needs a better definition to show that with any rigor.

Plenty of complex phenomena, seeming miracles of life, actually end up being described by the same mathematics that can describe phenomena in diffuse inorganic systems (earthquakes and heart cells sharing the same model for synchrony).

In terms of causes, I think there might be something missing here. There are the material causes, what biology has tended to look at. The efficient causes are actually where I might put information and meaning. The physical descriptions of systems alone does not tell you how it will interact with another system. This is where the idea of synonymity would play a role. The meaning of an interaction for the complex system is what matters (this gets to interconnectivity as a defining feature of complexity).

So, if you kick semiotics down to the efficient cause, what would be the formal cause?

I think this would be the mathematics of the system. This might be a totally wrong way to think about it, but I am very intrigued by the fact that incredibly disparate self organizing phenomena operate through extremely similar functions, and how incredibly common self similarity is. A formal cause that is tied to mathematics opens the possibility of unifying different sciences.

One example of the problems of non-living evolution and applying our current frameworks to them: https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/gavia/essential-character-non-life-evolution

Edit: Another issue for the epistemic cut occuring at the fuzzy boundary of life are modified Wigner's friend experiments showing that the role of an observer in physics may emerge at incredibly small scales, well below scales for the simplest organic molecules. This seems like it would result in two epistemic cuts, one for observation, a second for biologically relevant meaning.

You also have people fiddling around with the possibility of evolution at these incredibly small scales, but they are less convincing (still neat https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-96048-6)

I don't know if anyone can say what "physics" thinks things are. There are too many perspectives, from the logical positivist influenced, Machian Copenhagen Interpretation, where only observations exist, which can verge on idealism or solipsism, to hyper-determinist, realist models like objective collapse and pilot wave theories.

Notably to your point, information based physics are quite popular, and some of these posit that information is the only thing that exists. The apparent haeccity of objects, our lived world of three dimensional space and time, are simply the effects of interactions of information.

In these systems, information plays a key ontic role, as either all that there is, or as denoting the difference between modalities (decoherence is a shift from probable states to actual ones, information transfer generates the actual).

The problem is that (almost) all of these views have some things to recommend them, but there is nothing conclusive.

Yeah. I was thinking the question of pansemiosis versus life-specific emergence of semiosis should be its own thread, but didn't have time to write it.

Plus, I'm not totally sure how to pull apart the factors that might support one or the other.

Because Nuland is not a CBRN expert either. Obviously, the Russian messaging on chemical and biological weapons resulted in some DoD analyst having to throw together a report; the type of thing you present to Congressional intel committees.

The threat of a bunch of conscripts seizing a BSL lab is pretty obvious. It's full of dangerous pathogens that require professional training to secure. You don't want military personnel blundering through it.

Since they have no evidence of CBRN threats in the area, this is probably the only bullet point outside "Russia could shell positions with anthrax, sarin, etc."

The whole exchange is likely staged, a way to tell the media "we're worried that Russian messaging about CBR might be evidence that they are planning to use CBR." Open hearings after closed ones are where Congressmen like to give themselves ego boosts by answering pointed questions about things they already know the answers to.

The conclusion about the messaging is dumb anyhow. Russia has been accusing the US of building biolabs in countries they want to influence for years. Generally it was the lab in Georgia. Apparently those secret bio weapons aren't worth invading over or something...

Here is a good example of the information - thermodynamic entropy connection that would allow for meaning in physical systems. It's an incomplete but important bridge. The paper is bloated, having been prepared for a popsci book. You can skip to the section on thermodynamics.

This set of ideas needs to be merged with the concept of algorithmic entropy better, and the mechanics of computation observed at the molecular level to be developed into the model.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/deacon/Biosemiotics_Science.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjr1rTRgcb2AhUEmmoFHQCCAacQFnoECAsQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3RL3FObsO3O0_jLVImLlJb

My own personal inclination is that a new concept based on the relative synonymity of different physical interactions within a system is needed to explain complexity.

Gas dynamics are emergent, high entropy systems that are nonetheless easy to model due to the almost exact synonymity of all interactions. The more complex a system is, the less synonymous interactions become. At a basic level, this has to do with chemical reactivity. Any interaction between two elements thrown together at low temperatures generally can be predicted based on mass and velocity. Different elements are close synonyms in this case. For example, a bunch of ice smashing into a bunch of most metals can be represented quite easily using similar parameters. Not so the combination of two highly reactive elements. The chemical properties of given parts of a system can be synonymous for any other part, or in some cases, carry a much different meaning (mixing salt, sand, iron filings, concrete, flour, insert most powders here with vinegar, versus baking soda).

So, some chemicals passing through the blood brain barrier don't do much. They bounce around and act as close synonyms. Those shaped in such a way that they mimic neurotransmitters at binding sites however have a different meaning for the system. That is, meaning can have a direct relationship with chemical properties, or velocity, or mass, depending on the system in question.

The paper itself can be found here.

The paper lays out and important area of research, but unfortunately it's not what I was hoping for, which is an explanation of why meaning can't be physical. Obviously, certain types of information can be explained in fully physical ways. A gas nozzle "knows" to shut off when the tank is full because an increase in air pressure due to the tank being full is a signal about the gas level in the tank. This interaction only makes sense in the context of a (relatively) complex mechanical system. You get significantly more complex transfers (dynamic modulation) of information in other parts of a car (e.g., timing belt/crankshaft/camshaft interactions, master/slave cylinders), and these are still, in the grand scale of things, extremely simple.

The point about a Beethoven symphony not being the same thing when represented as a sound wave graph is off the mark. First, this is a common example used for predicate dualism, but he appears to be arguing for some sort of type/substance dualism vis-á-vis information. Second, as I'm pretty sure he would agree from other papers of his I've read, the symphony as observed by a mind is the result of multiple levels of communication and interpretation by different components of the human body, not just the sound wave. The sound wave works as storage for the symphony because the human brain is packed with all sorts of analysis "software" and error correcting functions that turn it into perception.


So, the paper seems to fall prey to the same dogmatic views I've seen pop up quite a bit in the biosemiotics literature where meaning just has to be something totally different. This is perhaps the case, but given the rapid accumulation of knowledge about how information can be explained in physical terms, it needs much stronger evidence than assertion of dogma.

The physics of information compression is well understood from advances in computer science. The fact that a protein can be coded for in something totally unlike a protein is not evidence of any sort of ontological difference vis-á-vis information. The fact that something can be coded in a format where it has lower entropy than the thing it is meant to represent is a necissary outcome of the differences between Kolmogorov complexity versus Shannon Entropy.


Terrance Deacon has some good work on the relationship between Shannon Entropy and Boltzmann Entropy that presents a decent framework for how information can be physical, even at high levels of abstraction. This would seem to run counter to the assertion here.

Algorithmic entropy can obviously exceed physical limits on information entropy vis-á-vis energy, and a combination of compression and error would allow information to code for the physically impossible. My guess is that there is a correlation between the incomputability of Kolmogorov complexity and the fact that computational systems can and often do represent violations of physical laws.

This is a discussion for another thread though.

Biosemiotics is an interesting field, but one with some major problems. When I read papers telling me that the enviornment is the interpretant of a genome, then rebuttals saying no, a genetic lineage is, with the current population of an organism acting variously as object, symbol, or interpretant, it seems like the theory has a problem. How is it supposed to explain things when every subject of analysis maps to every possible part of the model? I've seen a fossil represented as an interpretant of a bone, but then this being rejected because an interpretant must be extracting value from information.

The introduction of value maximization, from economics, seems like a major misstep. Also an ad hoc introduction to keep life special, and semiotics specially about life. The problem here is that such maximization doesn't even show up in economic data, and evolution certainly doesn't progress towards ideal solutions. An organism will extract information from the enviornment as long as said information extraction doesn't cause it to fail to reproduce at high enough rates that is disappears. Models from biology suggest it will extract valueless information as a rule, so long as the costs aren't too high, as a method of searching for information that increases survival.

The relatively recent mathematics of self organizing systems also suggest we might get a better answer for how meaning emerges for systems, an answer that doesn't rely on what is essentially a black box cut.

Fire flys blinking in unison were once thought to show the magic of information, or likewise, to be a violation of physical laws. As it turned out, pulse coupled oscillators with a positive parabolic curve towards thresholds (diminishing returns as the threshold value is approached) always result in synchronization. This finding explained phenomena from earthquakes, to chemistry, to heart cells, to fire flies. Given how often self similarity pops up in nature, it would be suprising if meaning only began to show up at relatively large scales. The mathematics of self-organizing systems only appeared 20 years ago, and already a lot of mysteries are falling away.

The other issue with meaning starting with life is what this means for self-replicating silicon crystals or strands of RNA in a petri dish that undergo replication, mutation, and selection. Do these represent meaning? Plenty of other physical systems self organize and undergo selection, we just don't see them as such because subjectively they are far different. However, it turns out that the mathematics describing them are quite similar to those involved in biology.

The only organisms useful as bioweapons are spore formers that will survive without extreme cold and isolation from the enviornment outside tissue, for example: anthrax.

Weaponizing those spores isn't about editing genes related to infection. It's about making the spores hold together in a super light powder that will spread through the air and get into people's lungs. Anthrax spores themselves aren't terribly dangerous because the risk of them getting into your lungs is quite low.

It'd be terribly effective in a large buildings' ventilation system. It's fairly shit fired in a shell because VX would kill people much quicker, as would conventional shells.

Aside from that, you have organisms that produce toxins, botulism for example. These just aren't as good as available nerve agents as weapons. The risk here is only that they are easier to make, so non-state actors could use them.

Communicable diseases are hard to deliver and it is impossible to ensure they won't spread in your population. I think we just saw great evidence of why they would be a terrible idea as weapons with COVID. Anything contagious enough to be sure to do a lot of damage is also going to infect your population and military.

Communicable diseases make more sense if you attack livestock.

Using communicable diseases on people or livestock is a strategic level, nuclear tier response in every sense, a thing other countries with nukes have stated would be conditions for a nuclear retaliation, so that's were they become fairly useless. Nuclear weapons deliver faster, act faster, are plenty effective, and are essentially means of intercontinental counter battery fire to destroy your opponents weapons. Thus, you would always use those first in escalation, since destroying the enemy's nuclear capability is the #1 means of security.

The Soviets always looked at communicable diseases as something you use with nukes. A way to hit the surviving rural population. It turns out to be incredibly difficult, impossible with current technology, to launch a relatively delicate virus into space, fire it down into a population center, and somehow get the organism to disperse in a way it has any chance of infecting people.

You're talking about organisms that are destroyed by sunlight in most cases and cannot survive long outside tissue. Not the ideal fragility for a deterrent. At least nuclear warheads take a decade or more to stop working. ICBMs are already hideously expensive to maintain in readiness, so you're not going to waste them on less effective weapons. The cost to modernize a vastly reduced US deterrent from today to 2029 is almost $600 billion (Russia's total defense spending for a decade).

We know from Obama era reports that the US nuclear arsenal was a neglected shit show. The arsenals that exist on paper are many times the number that exist in a state of readiness. This is almost certainly more true for Russia. When you can't afford to maintain current strategic deterrents, why would you spend on worse, more theoretical ones?

For strategic investments, the US is all about its Interceptors. These are even more expensive than ICBMs, and have an unencouraging 57% chance to bring an ICBM down meaning many have to be used for each target. Publicly, I think there is around 40, with a bunch more in production and the program has already cost like $130 billion. Any money for MAD related projects is going to get sucked up into the missile defense budget because now that they've successfully shot down ICBMs they've unfortunately made their case for spending even more ridiculous sums on a program that will always be too risky to test.

Whole point being, it makes no sense, especially in Ukraine.States don't stockpile huge amounts of samples and even if they did, said samples would be fairly useless as weapons outside of infecting spies and having them cough on people.

If you think that's bad, you'll be shocked to learn the US government "stockpiles" dangerous pathogens all over the United States, including the last surviving smallpox viruses outside Russia. Not only that, but it partners with the Canadian government to do so in Canada. The UK, Germany, and France all do this to, as does Russia.

Wealthy countries tend to fund labs in poorer ones. France operates a lab in Gabon. Russia helps fund one in Belarus, and is helping with the opening of one in Kazakhstan. It previously contributed to the lab in question.

What possible excuse could they all have for this?

Well, the claim is that emerging new biological threats, such as tuberculosis that is extremely resistant to antibiotics, need to be collected and safely stores. The reason is twofold.

A. So you can test cures (e.g., experimental antibiotics) on them, and;

B. So you can track changes in pathogens, build out a database on lineages, and try to track down the origins of new diseases of note.

Now, B does not necissarily require keeping the pathogen alive, but A does. They do other stuff with live cultures too. You can edit their genome to try to see how potential mutations will effect the virus, you can test out what will make the virus more virulent, so that you can spot dangerous mutations when you see them, and you can also figure out ways to make them less dangerous (which has obvious uses). Note, the point here isn't here isn't to develop a super bug. We don't know enough about pathogens to accurately predict how a change will effect the disease caused by a pathogen. Gain and loss of function tests are used to find out more about what mutations might do to a disease.

These experiments entail growing more of the pathogens and infecting human tissue or animals with them. This is a prerequisite for developing cures. Our current modeling technology is not at a point where you can just get the genome and preform accurate experiments for treatment using a computer simulation.

For obvious reasons, research on the most dangerous pathogens is only done at the very highest security labs. This would not be the Ukraine lab.

These facilities are how new variants of COVID-19 have been identified and vetted so quickly. COVID is very contagious and endemic, so we get tons of data on how new strains effect people from public health systems, but for rarer diseases, growing the pathogen is the only option for learning about it.

The alternative is to know nothing about extremely dangerous diseases, such as Ebola, until there is a major outbreak. I think the last 2 years is a very good case for doing more of this type of research.

Lineage tracking helps determine where an outbreak started, which can aid contact tracing and stopping a pandemic (see MERS and SARS).

There really isn't any reason for the US and USSR to keep smallpox samples. Canadian scientists rebuilt a similar virus, so smallpox could likely be ressurected if necissary for anything.

Weapons samples have generally been destroyed, but some do still exist. The weapons, as I've pointed out, just aren't very useful outside of terrorism.

The reason samples are kept is to be able to trace methods for their production, and in theory, to test countermeasures for them, although I don't think anyone is publicly doing this due to the risks. Having samples of anthrax weaponized in Iraq allowed the US to conclusively show that the anthrax attacks after 9/11 were not from Iraq (or were at least made very differently).

Of course, who the fuck knows what goes on in secret. The Soviets and later the Russians were trying to combine smallpox with other virulent diseases, which caused a scientist to defect, and they also had a few major leaks that killed people, so we know of those ones. The US declassified older projects, so we know of some of those too.

These projects are generally dumb ideas because obviously any super disease will end up in your country too, making them a bad weapon, and they don't make for nearly as good deterrents as nuclear weapons. Mostly, they were created due to too much funding going into defense budgets and people wanting sci-fi weapons. As far as public documentation is concerned, funding stopped less out of moral concerns, than the fact that it wasn't money well spent in terms of effective military weapons.

It would not totally shock me to know that the US makes bioweapons, although if they do it'd probably be in small quantities for research, since there is no use case for them. I'd put to odds fairly low though. There is way more other shit the generals want.

It makes no sense that they would do it in a low security lab in a foreign country with foreign scientists (including Russian ones) though. They have top end biosecurity facilities on a US military bases for that.

These figures look even worse I'd you include Belarus and Moldova.



The program was mentioned in public documents, numerous times. Hence all the super sleuths "confirming" the story by "uncovering" public documents on the lab. In 2010, US financed a nefarious upgrade to a BSL-3 facility, which they ingeniously hid from the public with a press release and ribbon cutting ceremony to make it look like they weren't hiding anything.

Obviously, the West was already planning its anti-Russian coup of Yanukovych, who, of course, was totally independent and not beholden to Russia at all, just like Lukashanko, but whose ouster by fake NATO-funded nationwide protests was an attack on Russia. Why else would the US start building the bioweapons lab before they ousted the Russian backed leadership? So you see, this just proves they were planning on attacking Russia even back then!

They further covered their tracks by letting journalists tour the facility, and, most diabolical of all, had Russian scientists working there to diffuse suspicion.

Unfortunately, Nuland had to mention the top secret military program (the type of thing diplomats are always told about) because otherwise she could get in trouble for perjury. Now, you might say, "you can't get charged for perjury about classified information in public hearings," but they probably didn't classify it to keep it secret. Very suspicious.

Because that's how Schrodinger's Equation works. You don't get multiple waves interacting, you get a single wave function describing the system.

Objective collapse theories have certainly been useful in clarifying many things about QM, but there are a number of things that do not particularly recommend them.

They don't work with relativity, they don't conserve energy, and they don't do one of the jobs their creators had in mind for them, describing "what is really happening," when we get information about quantum states.

Another difficulty is determining when spontaneous collapse should be occuring. Macroscopic drumheads have been entangled, a molocule of over 2,000 atoms has been entangled, a cloud of 15 trillion atoms has been entangled. This seems like it could be a death blow to GRW (TEQ in Europe is testing similar things so more information should be coming). The question becomes, "where is the demarcation where objective collapse should be occuring?" Current objective answers don't seem to be holding up. As technology improves, it seems more and more like the size at which we can detect quantum activity will keep increasing.How is the amplification mechanism supposed to account for these macroscopic quantum states though?


Second, I'm not totally sure how it is supposed to deal with decoherence. If the wave function is a measure of a particle's mass, smeared out across infinite space, how does this mass become more local on a gradient? This seems to assume the mass is relocating faster than light, or non-locally, but perhaps I misunderstand it. This shift also means energy is increasing, which is why it violates conservation.

More problematic, experiments on consecutive quantum measurements of a system don't give us a view of collapse as representative of a Markov chain. That is, information about prior states isn't vanishing as in conventional collapse. So, for objective collapse versions following to old model, this seems to be another blow (more so for Copenhagen).

Diosi-Penrose objective collapse was recently falsified by experiment, so at least that form of a gravity dependent mechanism seems out.

See, I always thought the Many Worlds Interpretation sounded bonkers, but have come around on it. I didn't understand the formalism of the Schrodinger equation, (I still don't lol), but I recently read a book on quantum foundations, which led me to a bunch of journal articles and eventuality to actually opening this textbook I bought a long time ago, and feel like I sort of get it now. This is turn made me appreciate it a lot more.

There doesn't seem to be as much in the way of good reasons, aside from intuition, to be assuming wave function collapse. When we open Schrodinger's box, we should be getting entangled with the simultaneously dead and alive cat. In this view, decoherence would represent extremely high levels of correlation that make apparent quantum behavior at larger scales essentially nearly infinitely unlikely.

The problems I still see are:

1. If we're part of a universal wave function, why do we still observe quantum entanglement? This is probably a lack of understanding on my part but it seems like a regress of wave functions within wave functions.

2. This interpretation seems to create all sorts of problems for objectivity too. Other "worlds" are real, physical entities, but we can observe then or measure them, and they don't have causal relationships "for us." They can only be modeled. I know there are some proposed ways to test MWI but I don't fully understand them. It seems like much of reality would then be inaccessible however.

I think that's arguable.

Sanctions on forces commiting genocide in the former Yugoslavia (which did escalate to an air war) weren't really about US security directly. Neither were sanctions against the Taliban in the 1990s implemented before Osama Bin Laden began his attacks against the US. Same goes for sanctions against Sudan over Darfur. These largely were responses to humanitarian crises there.

Minor sanctions against various nations over anti-homosexual laws obviously aren't about security in any meaningful way.

Sanctions against poor countries often work better because the US and EU are often able to sanction the central government, block arms sales, etc. while still supplying humanitarian aid (as opposed to nations with more control over their borders, such as North Korea, who can block aid).

The 1990s were the peak of more "genuinely" humanitarian sanctions and peace keeping efforts. The apogee of American power was so absolute, American military power so dominant in Iraq and the Balkans, that you had interventions that wouldn't make sense through a realist international relations lens (e.g., peace keeping in Somalia, which Bush I chose to embark on after watching CNN footage of refugees).

Samantha Power is a great read if you want to understand the optimistic, internationalist, rights focused policy lens of the Clinton years.

What made Bush II so damaging was that he rejected this sort of framework for a unilateral, America-centric one. He squandered post-war good will, and developed a more aggressive NSS with counter-terrorism as a new pillar of US defense policy. He jettisoned the internationalist, norms based approach to IR used in the 90s, which his administration argued "tied America's hands."

It's naive to think policy makers aren't naive. A lot of them really do believe in optimistic, humanitarian focused defense policy, sometimes to their own detriment. For example: the US could have likely brought an end to the war in Afghanistan in 1/10th the time by supporting a Tajik and Hazara government there. As a minority, they would be reliant on US arms to keep power. US leverage could have been used to tamp down on rights abuses, enforce some secular Pashtun representation in government, and protect women's rights. Ideal? No. Democratic? No. But a hell of a lot more stable. You'd have a well funded indigenous security force that had nothing to gain by undermining itself since it would be at a disadvantage in future ethnic struggles.

Notably for that sort of realist approach, South Korea and Taiwan were brutal, corrupt military dictatorships for a long time. US leverage did help them liberalize however, and in the long run they became wealthy states with a high degree of personal freedom. Obviously, this doesn't always work (see Egypt, Iran under the Shah).

This is the big contradiction in US policy to my mind. Sometimes more idealistic policy actually leads to more violence and repression. Goals like setting up liberal democracies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't realistic, and faliure is worse than other alternatives.

BTW, if you want to understand how the US envisages the use of different tools, the National Security Strategy is the document to read. You can see how it shifts over time, although it's largely had the same focus since Bush I.

Whoops, posted in the wrong thread.

If economic sanctions can prevent a(n) (erstwhile) superpower (Russia) from aggressive behavior, surely it's gotta work for smaller, less powerful countries, but the catch is it's never used on smaller countries - they're free to do as they please, wage war, commit atrocities, go ahead seems to be the message the US and Europe seems to be sending to them.

Not sure how you got this. Smaller countries are often under much stricter sanctions, or a full embargo by the US and EU. Think Libya under Qaddafi, Syrian under Assad, Iran for decades, North Korea, Iraq under Saddam, Chile under Pinochet, Sudan for long periods, Cuba, etc.

I'd say no. If you define "terrorism" as every act of aggression or coercion that "doesn't differentiate between civilians and military personnel," you make the term so broad as to be useless.

Defining terrorism is a recurring problem in terrorism studies, but a good place to start is with START, since the GTD is ubiquitous in the research.

For the GTD, terrorism is:

“The threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation.”

It's a useful definition in that non-state actors tend to behave fairly differently from state ones, and it breaks out the field from other areas of conflict studies.

People get hung up on the term because they tend to ascribe some moral weight to it. It's similar to the word "racism," in this way. I don't think adding extra moral weight to the word is particularly helpful though. Do you have to call every evil act terrorism? Is slavery or the Holocaust somehow less evil if they aren't terrorism?

Second, sanctions can be targeted. For example, some of the sanctions recently implemented against Russia are very targeted. They are blanket restrictions on visas for specific individuals, the freezing of the assets of specific oligarchs and Putin himself in foreign bank accounts (Switzerland notably allowed the freezing of assets), restrictions on specific individuals accessing banking services or lines of credit, etc. In the case of Russian hacking efforts against some nations, grand juries were held and warrants were issued for the arrest of individuals involved (essentially making it so that they can't travel to countries with an extradition treaty with the issuing nation).

A level up for specific individuals, you can target just specific items. For example, just weapons, or certain types of weapons.

The problem with targeted sanctions is that they are easy for people to get around, and so aren't always very effective. However, since Russia has a history of seizing oligarchs' wealth when they anger the state, they do tend to have a lot of foreign assets. Thus these tools can have a large impact.

Broad based sanctions hurt everyone. Often they hurt the poor the most. They do not have a very good track record at getting states to change their policies either, although there are some notable examples of effective sanction efforts (South African companies lobbied for an end to apartheid in earnest after sanctions cut deep enough).

Sanctions make the most sense when you're trying to erode a state's ability to wage war against another state (e.g., Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait; regime change was a goal, but the chief aim was to ensure Saddam couldn't rebuild his military). While they aren't great at forcing policy changes, particularly as respects autocratic regimes, sanctions can significantly curtail a state's ability to buy arms.

...yet Christians sit here and preach that we must do what the Bible tells us word for word

Most denominations do not insist on a fully literalist interpretation of scripture. Many Christians interpret the Bible allegorically or even as containing an esoteric message.

A warning like Noah. Noah was created to warn the people of the flood, and no one listened

I would reread Genesis 6-9. Noah is not sent out to warn people about the flood, he is the one warned about it. You might be thinking of Jonah, who is sent out to warn the people of Nineveh of God's anger and to call them to repentance.

Every person mentioned in the Bible died, yet God promised they would live forever if they relied on Him

Christ doesn't promise that "you will never die." He promises a ressurection from death. This promise wasn't made before Christ, i.e., in the Old Testament of the Bible.

They turned God into an idol

Worship of God can't be idol worship. Idol worship bis forbidden specifically because it is 'worshipping the product of man's hands," rather than the creator of the universe. Idolatry is definitionally the worship of something that is not God.

Aren't there at least implied dualisms in biosemiotics? Between symbol and matter, between self and other?

I'm not sure I see why this would be the case. DNA is a code, it contains symbols that refer to proteins. The interpretant is the transcription RNA during cellular replication. The DNA does not contain the proteins it refers to, it passes along instructions (meaning/information) that are interpreted by another system. Similarly, in computers, APIs form a full semiotic triangle, with one program being the referent of a string of symbolic code, and a another program acting as the interpretant.

AAt the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of these same laws.

Now this quote seems to be implying some sort of dualism, but I have no clue what phenomena it could be referring to. Does he have examples?

If you want a rough distinction, life is an organism's model of its body - its metabolic existence - and mind is an organism's model of the environment within which that body must persist.

How is life a "model of an organism's body?" That sounds interesting, but it's getting by me.

I've generally seen "the body" framed in terms more similar to the nervous system, i.e., as storing information about the environment.

Physical complexity, a measure based on automata theory and information theory, is a simple and intuitive measure of the amount of information that an organism stores, in its genome, about the environment in which it evolves...

Darwinian evolution is often described as a mechanism that increases the fitness of a population. Such a portrayal is problematic because the fitness of a population can depend on many parameters and is difficult to measure. It is probably more appropriate to say that evolution increases the amount of
information a population harbors about its niche (and therefore, its physical complexity). The only mechanism necessary to guarantee such an increase is natural selection, acting in a single niche, on asexual organisms adapting to a constant unchanging world.

As we saw above, information is revealed, in an ensemble of adapted sequences, as those symbols that are conserved (fixed) under mutational pressure. Imagine then that a beneficial mutation occurs at variable position. If the selective advantage that it bestows on the organism is sufficient to fix the
mutation within the population,(24) the amount of information (and hence the complexity) has increased.

A beneficial mutation that is lost before fixation does not decrease the amount of information, nor does this happen if a neutral mutation drifts to fixation. A deleterious mutation that occurs at a fixed site could lead to an information decrease, but such a mutation can only drift to fixation in very small populations (Muller’s ratchet) or if the mutation rate is so high that the population undergoes a mutational meltdown.

Thus, natural selection can be viewed as a filter, a kind of semipermeable membrane that lets information flow into the genome, but prevents it from flowing out. In this respect, the action of natural selection is very much akin to a device known as a Maxwell Demon in physics, which implies that natural selection can be perfectly well understood from a thermodynamics perspective as we

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bies.10192

And in biosemiotic, what is being stressed is that switches are where the action happens as they mediate (as signs) between the informational and material aspects of the system.

Does biosemiotics posit that information is non-physical? If so, that seems like it would be a violation of Landauer's principle, which would be tough to get around.

Most of us, myself included, I imagine are not professional philosophers. Ontology is the thing you're going to think of when you start thinking of metaphysics. For me, modality, universals, parts and wholes, propositions, etc. were all less apparent issues than "what is," at first. Later, I started to realize those other questions are sort of essential for answering the former question.

Physicalism is the dominant ontology of our day. Everyone had science in school, so it's sort of a default understanding of "how the world works." To be sure, there are plenty of scientists who don't embrace physicalism, but by far the most common view you see in the sciences is physicalism.

I think part of why it is such a big topic is that physicalism is a very successful idea, and explains a lot of things. I think the other, more problematic issue, is that it's easy to think a lot of philosophical questions have been "solved" by physical sciences, because an answer can be formulated to many "big questions," in terms of "well, X is actually just Y scientific phenomena." However, often, on closer analysis, Y turns out to be rather undefined. It's also easy to mistake complexity for correctness; I certainly make that mistake.

From Kherson to Zhytomyr (town West of Kiev) is 8 and half hour drive according to g-maps.

You really shouldn't estimate the time needed for large military advances through contested territory based on estimates for a car trip without any traffic. You can also make it from Berlin to Moscow in a day according to Google Maps.

For example, the start of the southern "pincer" began trying to move northwest on March 2. It is currently fighting south of Voznesensk, which, if you use Google Maps, is two hours, not 216 (and counting) away. If their goal was Kyiv, they'd reach it around mid-April at their current rate.

That force is much smaller than what you appear to be describing. Part of the reason it isn't larger is because larger advances are harder to supply. A "flood of tanks" might be possible if military operations didn't require supplies, and if all of the Russian tanks that exist on paper are in working order, with soldiers ready to operate them.

Moving a "flood" of tanks across a large country isn't at all like a road trip calculated by Google. You generally won't find gas, you need to bring supplies with you. A modern tank division can burn through 500,000 gallons of a fuel in a day. While Russian hardware is generally not as awful about fuel economy as the Abrams, you're still talking about vehicles that use more than a gallon of fuel per mile under ideal conditions.

Filling a 470-gallon fuel tank is not quick, even under ideal drill conditions, using specialized equipment. ROM operations also represent excellent targets for ambushes or airstrikes. Under ideal drill conditions, a well-trained team using the newest US fuel delivery equipment takes 30 minutes to refuel a tank platoon of four tanks.

Obviously, the situations for ROM would be far from ideal, and based on everything we've seen, neither will the crews.

You also need to protect millions of gallons of fuel, hundreds of trucks going each way. You can't just push in one direction. You need an open supply line. If you lose that line, you risk your flood of tanks becoming a stagnant lake of targets.

And indeed, this is a problem Russia has had with an 80 mile advance under their main effort, with a supply line fed by a railhead. You're talking about a 350 mile advance that is then also, for some reason, reliant on sea transport, (Note: there is a bridge to Crimea that you can use to transport fuel. The bridge has the added advantage of not being prone to being sunk by Neptunes).

You also can't drive until you're out of gas, like on a road trip, because running out of fuel makes the tank a death trap.

Ideally, you'd use your tanks dug into scrapes, so they are only moving a bit to fire, or to relocate. But this advance is aimed at supporting urban combat, which means using much more fuel.

Also, tanks are fucking slow. They are ponderous to drive behind.

Also, just lol @ the idea of using a weapons platform that can be effectively countered by a paper mask and washing your hands at this exact moment in time.

The bioweapons thing is comical. The public profoundly misunderstands CBRN, what weapons actually exist, why and under what circumstances they would be useful in military operations, and existing mechanism for deploying said weapons. The whole plot idea makes no sense.

First, if you want to stage biological weapons somewhere, you don't need a lab there. The whole advantage of CBRN is that you can inflict a lot of death with a small amount of material. That is, you have a more portable weapon than a conventional weapon with a comperable ability to cause mass destruction. The US has been shipping a ton of arms into Ukraine. If they wanted to give them VX or anthrax, they'd just move completed weapons systems there.

Second, if the goal is to threaten Russia and put a scary deterrent on their border, why the fuck would they put it in the country Russia plans to invade? The Baltics and Turkey are right there?

Third, chemical and biological weapons are pretty shitty weapons for most military use cases. The main threat from them is that they can kill a lot of civilians without a lot of material. This makes them ideal for terrorism (easy to smuggle into population centers, easy to disperse) or as a MAD deterrent. Barring the US having been planning some sort of false flag mass casualty terrorist attack in Russia, the only use of such weapons would be as a deterrent. The issue with the logic here is that:

A. The US already posseses a much more effective nuclear detterent.

B. A deterrent only works if you let your adversary know about it. Hiding a deterrent makes no sense.

Chemical and biological weapons are easier to defend against than conventional weapons. Very cheap equipment, respirators, atropine injectors, etc., can keep your combat forces relatively safe from CB attacks. There isn't much you can do for high explosives though.

They are weapons that will get you all sorts international blow back for relatively little military advantage. The countermeasures for these weapons are well known and inexpensive. Biological weapons in particular have simply never been good investments. They require specialized training to create, are very expensive compared to conventional weapons, and aren't very effective.

At least with chemical attacks you can make a major breakthrough into an area if you enemy isn't prepared for an attack. They are effective area denial weapons.

While even poor militaries have CBRN countermeasures, training to use them, and even the provision of the relevant equipment is generally neglected. So a nerve gas attack could definitely be effective at clearing the way for an assault. They also have the benefit of persisting for a while, so they can be useful for defensive operations since they can deny access to an area to an enemy for a decent period of time.

However, once chemical weapons start being used, militaries will start employing countermeasures. Gas attacks allowed for big breakthroughs early in WWI. Later, both sides were pounding each other with gas shells incessantly and it didn't move the needle on the fronts. Even Iran's poorly supplied conscript army was able to get fairly effective counter measures in hand during the war with Iraq.

Chemical weapons are good generally to the extent your enemy isn't expecting them, or if they are irregulars without proper equipment. Aside from that, what they're actually useful for is killing a lot of civilians and terrorizing then, which Russia has enough artillery to do plenty well already.

Biological weapons are the same as chemical weapons except significantly less effective while being significantly more expensive. Whereas countries still stockpile chemical weapons because they could be useful against an existential threat and represent a deterrent vis-á-vis their use on an adversary's civilians, they generally don't pursue bioweapons, because essentially, they suck.

You spend years, talent, and money weaponizing anthrax or some other spore. Congrats, you have super expensive shells that can take over a weak to disable your targets, with the added benefit of contaminating land you likely want to control long term. The stuff is great if you want to sneak it into a big subway station and disperse it in the ventilation system to kill a ton of civilians. It's pretty shit fired out of artillery as an alternative to using nerve gas or explosives.

The public tends to think bioweapons would be useful because infected soldiers would spread the pathogen among their ranks. This is not how most of the bioweapons designed work. They are generally spores, or toxins produced by organisms. They aren't going to be communicable. The toxins function like chemical weapons, except they tend to be worse at doing their job. The spores work somewhat similarly, but have the disadvantages of taking a long time to disable soldiers, being more expensive to weaponize, and contaminating areas for too long. Volitility is a perk, not a draw back of chemicals. You can gas a target, drive out your enemy, and then take the position yourself. Spores that sit around for potentially years will persist as a threat to your own forces.

Infectious diseases as weapons have been considered, and in a few cases used (Japan in WW2, American settlers giving small pox blankets to Native Americans, etc.). They make shitty weapons for military uses though.

1. You can't target how an infection will spread.
2. In a modern context, you will infect your own people, and everyone else.
3. It won't cause immediate or predictable effects and could hurt you more than the enemy
4. With these points in mind, such weapons only seem useful in an existential war akin to the Second World War, but nuclear weapons already exist, where as the technology to engineer super diseases easily and predictably does not. Nukes are cheaper and have the added benefit of taking out targets instantly.

Communicable disease attacks against livestock at least make more sense in terms of not killing your own people, but by the time you've moved to trying to cut the food supply to an adversary's entire population you probably would be escalating towards nuclear weapons anyhow. These sort of strategic scale bioweapons make more sense to use in concert with nukes if you did use them anyhow (which indeed is how the Soviets thought of them).

Plus the quote driving all this is dumb. Why would Nuland mention a secret bioweapons program in an open hearing? Why would she know about a secret bioweapons program? Sounds like the type of thing to keep under wraps, no? Why would the US government publicly announce a secret bioweapons program in public documents for years?

The obvious interpretation of her words would be that she, like most people, doesn't understand how infectious disease research works. A CBRN was almost certainly written up after the Russian bioweapons accusations started. Russians taking the lab is going to show up as a threat. This makes sense, no good can come from a bunch of conscripts walking around a BSL lab full of samples of antibiotics resistant tuberculosis, etc. and accidentally infecting themselves, or a building like that being shelled. This is Rubio doing leading questions on materials they've both probably read at Intel Committee meetings. Washington loves to get information out in this way, the staged question, instead of just releasing a memo for public consumption. Guess it makes the Congressmen feel good.

The "pincer" from the south is two battalions; it's not going to cross hundreds of miles without a significantly larger force/logistic elements moving up to supply it. They are moving a battalion tactical group up behind it, likely due to the stalled movement. It's been trying to force crossings on the Southern Bug to move west, not driving towards Kyiv. Odessa is the likely target, and based on the size of the advance, it is intended as a supporting element for an amphibious assault since it's inadequate to take Mykolayiv, let alone Odessa.

There are some versions where conciousness does cause wave function collapse, or there is Quantum Bayesianism, which shifts the ground to conciousness, but in general you are correct.

However, the relevance of conciousness is not the part that makes objective measurements impossible. If you attempt to set up clever experiments to measure the same thing from different places, and the measurement of the same physical entity changes by observation point in ways not related to the effects of your measurements on the entity (Bell inequalities and variants are normally used to test this sort of thing), you can show mathematically that:

1. No hidden variables can account for the correlations of entangled entities unless those hidden variables are non-local (e.g., Bohm, Pilot Wave Theories, etc., but these theories imply hyper determinism and no free choice in what is measured to begin with). Only recently have experiments shown that non-locality cannot be simply faster than light, its speed must be infinite, something that shows up in the formalism; or

2. The theory can be local if you follow Everett and don't assume wave function collapse (or decoherence in normal terms). This actually is the straight forward interpretation of Schrodinger's Equation. The wave function should persist. The introduction of collapse was always ad-hoc, essentially a philosophical addition that was a common sense take on what "must happen," to have observations "make sense." It's an addition highly influenced by Mach and the birth of logical positivism around the time, and so is also a theory where subjectivity is absolutely essential. That is, in Bohr's interpretations, it is meaningless to even talk of things not observed by an observer.

But if you assume this may be dogma, and that there is no arbitrary split between macro and micro scales, then observers, be they photoreceptors or conciousness, should just get entangled with what they observer. So all events happen. The main argument against this line isn't based on the formalism, but that "we don't split, we don't observe two outcomes."

That is exactly what the equation and formalism predicts though. Many Worlds variants are seen as the "cooky ones," but actually are removing ad hoc additions based on classical bias, retain locality, and remain realist.

Arguments against Many Worlds from common sense were countered by Everett by comparisons to the claim that "the Earth was once thought to be the center of the universe because we didn't "feel" it move," but this was dogma. And indeed, for a long time, Ptolemaic astronomy continued to predict many events better than Copernican astronomy, but sticking with the former and attempting to prove it eventually proved it to be the better theory, so lack of observation to fully support these variants today doesn't necissarily mean they are wrong. Indeed, the same sorts of issues show up in all interpretations, but with more ad hoc explanation to fit human preconceptions of what "must be the case "

However, in more recent experiments, it begins to appear that different observers will see an "objectively" different in ways that ditching locality and free choice won't explain. Ironically, Everett's universal wave function still gets around this issue, maintaining realism and locality, but at the cost of things that don't happen, happening in other worlds.

Aside from this issue, modal interpretations introduce things that "may happen," as physical entities. However, I don't know if these dynamical entities are likely to hit your bar for being causal, although obviously they can be modeled.

The whole concept of causality, as commonly conceived, also needs a twist when there is non-local, infinite speed causality that does not, to my knowledge, suppose a gauge field or any "entanglement boson."

Information centric theories deal with this causal issue neatly and we get decoherence instead of the ad hoc collapse, but at the cost of making reality essentially informational. While this has the benefit of possibly explaining conciousness and subjectivity emerging, it comes at the cost of objective frames being nonsense, information is always relational between systems.

What is the definition of a causal relationship in these definitions?

Nonsubjectivity as a criteria would appear to make many theories in quantum foundations non-physical. But it certainly seems the physical can't be both local and objective due to expirments in Bell Inequalities. For example: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw9832

Wheeler coined the term, but it's deeply influenced by Shannon. Landauer bridged the gap between Shannon Entropy as solely a mathematical abstraction and information as an element of the physical world.

I see the connection of Shannon to physics come up more often in stuff on gas equilibrium, phase space, but information ontology is the more interesting connection to my mind.



The zeros and ones come in because there are a finite number of things you can measure about a particle. That is, there is only so much information you can gather about it.

The proposed existence of this information imposes some fundamental questions about it: “Why is there information stored in the universe and where is it?” and “How much information is stored in the universe?” Let us deal with these questions in detail.
To answer the first question, let us imagine an observer tracking and analyzing a random elementary particle. Let us assume that this particle is a free electron moving in the vacuum of space, but the observer has no prior knowledge of the particle and its properties. Upon tracking the particle and commencing the studies, the observer will determine, via meticulous measurements, that the particle has a mass of 9.109 × 10–31 kg, charge of −1.602 × 10–19 C, and a spin of 1/2. If the examined particle was already known or theoretically predicted, then the observer would be able to match its properties to an electron, in this case, and to confirm that what was observed/detected was indeed an electron. The key aspect here is the fact that by undertaking the observations and performing the measurements, the observer did not create any information. The three degrees of freedom that describe the electron, any electron anywhere in the universe, or any elementary particle, were already embedded somewhere, most likely in the particle itself. This is equivalent to saying that particles and elementary particles store information about themselves, or by extrapolation, there is an information content stored in the matter of the universe. Due to the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, we postulate that information can only be stored in particles that are stable and have a non-zero rest mass, while interaction/force carrier bosons can only transfer information via waveform. Hence, in this work, we are only examining the information content stored in the matter particles that make up the observable universe, but it is important to mention that information could also be stored in other forms, including on the surface of the space–time fabric itself, according to the holographic principle.

This ties into decoherence since the amount of decoherence is dependant on the amount of information exchanged between systems. https://www.nist.gov/customcf/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=919863

Really appreciate his ideas. They work on so many levels.


I particularly like information ontology, "it from bit." It is one of the more coherent interpretations of quantum physics to my mind.

What makes it so appealing is that information ontology, when paired with the concepts of chaos/emergence, self-similarity/reoccurence, and feedback loops/self-replication/natural selection (all related to fractal geometry) is an ontology that seems like it may be able to explain conciousness.

Conciousness would be the fractal reoccurence of the universe encoding information about itself within itself. Rerepresentation essentially, accumulating local self knowledge. So, DNA is often thought of as storing information about the enviornment. Nervous systems are a higher level reoccurence of this representation and storage. Language and the information stored by organizations would again be another level. Each increases in complexity and is able to better represent more of the world outside its own physical system. The laws of the universe have tended to introduce greater and greater levels of complexity and new levels of this recursive self knowledge over time.

A world of information coming to know itself as its self. Very Hegelian.

Related to that thought, there is Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.

Penrose was inspired by an interesting mathematical connection between a very hot, dense, small state of the universe – as it was at the Big Bang – and an extremely cold, empty, expanded state of the universe – as it will be in the far future. His radical theory to explain this correspondence is that those states become mathematically identical when taken to their limits. Paradoxical though it might seem, a total absence of matter might have managed to give rise to all the matter we see around us in our universe.

Under an information ontological approach, this, extreme heat or cold would be a zero entropy universe due to lack of differentiation. All ones or all zeros contains the same amount of entropy, zero. Or, to think about it in plain terms "without anything by which a thing can be defined, it cannot exist."

What's interesting to me is this is essentially Behemism, and Hegel's argument for for becoming.

You are misreading. Sure, you are quoting, but you are quoting just part of a paragraph and splitting a sentence. I was referring to your credulity regarding Russian public facing statements, not commenting on Ukraine's diplomatic position.

Sure, that's exactly what I was saying... :roll:

Now, I'm not saying this was the plan from the start, but seems to me the plan now (and definitely I'm not the only one to point it out, but the Western media seems to keep saying Russia is bogged down due to lack of advance in the East ... and then just casually mentions at the end that ok, south is doing better--maybe the strategy).

The push south from the Kharkiv axis and North from the Kherson axis, to "cut off the eastern half," as you say, did appear to be the plan until a few days ago.


It appears to have been abandoned, likely due to the perceived inability to secure such long lines of communications.

The 42nd around Kherson is now striking west from Kherson, by passing Mykolaiv, which was assaulted by a small number of forces a few days ago, most likely recon. They appear headed to a crossing in the Southern Bug.

The obvious destination would be Odessa. Satalite images show a large Russian naval force and landing forces arranged for what would almost certainly be an attempt to take Odessa. They haven't been moving though, which is likely because they're waiting on the 42nd to get round the other side of the Southern Bug so it can support.

Then the northern forces projected to go south have instead turned west toward Sumy. Forces have also been withdrawn from Kharkiv back to Russia, probably to support this and because a success counter offensive split the 1st Tank Army, at least temporarily, up to the border.

"Punitive" attacks have not been limited to areas where Azov is operating. Similar attacks were made on Kharkiv, they've just fallen off due to a counter offensive drinking forces west of the city across the border, and other forces being withdrawn (likely for a push on Sumy to Kiev).

The southern forces probably do have better morale. Fewer losses, they did take a city successfully. However, it looks like the most effective units were thrown at Kiev, and to a lesser extent Kharkiv. That's were most of the VDV and Spetsnaz have been.

The difficulty of counter attacks will depend largely on how well Russia is preparing for them.

You're assuming there is a deal offered. Lavrov and the Russian state just spent months telling bald faced lie after bald faced lie to journalists, diplomats, military attaches, etc., and now they say "here are our generous terms, all they'd have to do is say yes!" and you buy it 100%?

Ukraine denied such terms have be offered. It's propaganda.

They've released no plan. No map demarcating which Ukranian land they are taking, nothing about combat cessation, etc.

If the terms require unlilateral disarment by the Ukrainians to cease hostiles, then it's not a real offer. Obviously, they can't trust that Russia will follow through on its commitments, and so any terms that force them to cede military advantage are ridiculous.

I said the situation in Ukraine is dire, not that they have no chance of winning. The conflict appears to be losing intensity on some fronts, with stalled Russian advances. However, if the Russians keep throwing low effectiveness units into frontal assaults then Ukraine could win.

Sure, Russia can mobilize additional forces long term, but not instantly. If you take mid-high end estimates of Russian losses, 8,000-13,000 KIA, likely 2-3 times that wounded, now over 1,000 vehicle losses, and project that out (i.e., assume they continue to use the same garbage tactics) for another 2-3 weeks, you're looking at the invasion force having lost more than half its combat personnel. If that were to occur, depending on Ukraine's own losses and the strength of its mechanized divisions, I think you could see major counter attacks finally emerging, instead of the defense in depth strategy.

Optimistic, but not impossible.

At that point Putin would have to totally double down, implement a war economy, implement mass conscription, etc. or employ nuclear weapons. I don't see him politically surviving that (hell, I don't see him physically surviving ordering a nuclear strike over this, he'd probably "have an accident and hit his head.")

Myers's The New Tsar is a good biography too.

I explained those points in detail. You seem to want to reduce my answers to binary 100% yes, 100% no answers. That isn't the case in any complex phenomenon.

As to hiding the war, Putin has to do that to avoid backlash from the public. Currently, many are convinced still that there is no war, no major combat operations: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/world/europe/ukraine-russia-families.html

No autocrat is fully immune to public opinion, even one that whose authority is legally absolute. This is apparent in the collapse of the Tsardom.

The best way forward for Ukraine is to win this war on the battlefield.

100% correct. Sanctions only support defense to the varying degrees in which they erode public support for a war (sometimes this backfires by closing an economy and a public's access to information off) and erode the economic ability of combatants' to wage war (Russian access to microchips and are hugely relevant in this scenario).

In the event of an insurgency, the sanctions will have a multiplicative effect on Ukrainian resistance efforts because COIN required high force levels, which Russia will struggle to pay for.

Obviously though, military aid is, and will continue to remain more important.

As for the long term effects on Europe, this may be a net positive if it helps a drive towards lower emissions nuclear energy, increased cooperation and appreciation of the EU and NATO structures, and higher defense spending. Germany is already expanding defense spending tremendously in response to Putin's actions, to over $100 billion.

This would make it the third largest spender by a wide margin, except that Japan is also doing a huge surge in force build up in response to Chinese aggression. Both countries get more bang for their buck by benefiting from US hardware, which has had almost a century of massive investment as well.

This is a good suring up of the deterrent forces of China's neighbors, as combined Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Australian defense spending will be almost equal to China's, potentially ahead of it if Vietnam and the Philippines are included.

By bankruptcy I meant defaulting on their debt, the sovereign equivalent of bankruptcy in that creditors can legally seize your assets and are unlikely to lend to you in the future. Not that they would have some sort of total economic collapse.

Obviously they can maintain a war effort long term (look at the USSR during the German invasion, which, incidentally was also a series of crushing, incompetence-aided defeats that was later offset by longer term strategic advantages).

Sanctions won't stop an invasion. You can't fire sanctions at a helicopter and knock it out of the sky. I was in no way implying sanctions were causing Russia the most damage. They are causing significant additional damage to Putin's grip on power and reducing Russian incentives for continuing the war, but the main hit politically was is the surprise nature of the war for the Russian public, the attempts to hide the war, which will eventually fail, the high number of Russians killed and wounded, images of Russian attacks on civilians getting out, especially large scale attacks on residential areas populated overwhelmingly by ethnic Russians, and Russian citizens learning that friends and family in Ukraine have been killed, etc.

11 million Russians have family members in Ukraine, so efforts to hide the war seen particularly foolish because it's going to put moderates and even supporters in a position of facing prison sentences just for speaking the obvious truth about the "special operation."

There is nothing contradictory about it. Russia is obviously in a stronger strategic position, with its developed arms industry, much larger population, much larger military, much larger reserves, much larger economy, the fact that its infrastructure isn't being destroyed, etc.

It's humiliating at the operational level because they went at lengths to present themselves as a peer rival to NATO and have had abysmal performance in some areas. $15 million AA systems turned on and functional left for the enemy (twice!). Dozens of abandoned vehicles within their claimed zone of control left for civilians to tow off (or sometimes they are driven off right to the Ukrainians because they were left undisabled, with fuel). Running out of fuel almost immediately, which would happen to any military, but not on such a huge scale. Suicidal air assaults with no SEAD happening not a few times, but over and over with the same result. Looting, including from private residences by soldiers. Expired rations for the soldiers. Bodies of your fallen soldiers in areas of your control left for days for civilians to document. Parking in tight squares in range of enemy artillery. Losing tanks and men in horrific deaths due to not vetting the load bearing capacity of bridges. Sending police in police gear into combat. Using mercenaries as front line assault units. Losing two generals and two colonels because they have to move to the front due to bad comms. Using unencrypted comms and getting trolled by civilians.

That's the humiliating part. Also shows terrible training if their doctrine focused on NATO. I can't imagine their losses with those huge convoys and massed tanks if A-10s were in the sky. Whole tank divisions would be wrecked.

You can note that I in no way claimed Russia was on the verge of "defeat." I said they were rapidly losing combat effectiveness and have lacked the ability to carry out an effective push on the outskirts of Kyiv, let alone an assault into the city. This is the opinion of professional analysts. I said it looked particularly dire for Russia if the Ukrainian General Staff's last report was accurate. It may not be. There is evidence of the engagement in open sources but not enough to vet OPFOR numbers so it is unclear if they actually repulsed a reinforced regiment, or a smaller unit.

This may be proven wrong. Recent assaults have been with reorganized formations, up to the regiment level. The Russian pause near Kyiv was likely to allow time to reorganize units at reduced strength into new, combined full strength units, as well as to bring supplies up. However, this appears to have been completed days ago and no meaningful push has appeared.

They may be waiting for troops moving from points east. The assault on Kharkiv seems to have been abandoned and it appears most resources from the Sumy axis are moving towards Kyiv rather than attempting the earlier link up with forces south, with Dinipro as a central objective.

The Sumy axis has been fairly successful, so perhaps the infusion of resources and higher morale troops will change conditions around Kyiv. However, the push west for them is going slow and costing them. If they take their previous approach, sticking to main roads and bypassing large areas of the countryside, it seems likely that they might run into further issues with long lines of communications that are far from secure. This risks turning an effective component of the invasion into an ineffective one.

In time, Russia can reinforce units around Kyiv, bring in additional assets, bring in more competent leadership, etc. This is why I said Ukraine likely feels decently about their odds "in the medium term." This is not in contradiction with the military situation being "dire" in the long term. Their hope is that political and economic factors will intervene within that time frame to force a settlement.

I also think the Ukrainians have growing confidence in their ability to hold out in the medium term and get better terms for long term security.

Russian combat effectiveness seems to have plunged. They're using reconstituted regiments now, forming new units out of ones cut down far from dull strength. Conservative US estimates are 5-6,000 KIA, which would mean an additional 10,000-15,000+ wounded.

This is borne out by the recruitment drive in Syria, consideration of using unreliable Belarusian forces, and use of Chechen irregulars and mercenaries like the Wagner Group as frontal assault units for their main effort on Kyiv. Also the abandonment of Kharkiv.

(Incidentally, a leader for part of Russia's amorphous mercenary Wagner Group is a Nazi with SS tattoos. Gotta send the Nazis to take out the Jewish-Nazis in Kyiv!)

If their last General Staff report is borne out and not based on bad estimates, they repelled a major assault by a regiment sized battle group yesterday with relatively little forces or losses. This would go along with analysis suggesting low morale and very high losses in their most well trained units had led to a rapid decay in combat effectiveness. Russia has, aside from yesterday's loss, been unable to mobilize any sort of offensive above the battalion level for weeks.

Doctrine and leadership are falling apart. For example:

https://mobile.twitter.com/armedforcesukr/status/1501834943051280386?s=21

Here we see a large tank column, looks like a battalion, that should be capable of pushing past serious resistance. It is ambushed with minor losses. It retreats to regroup, which makes sense. It does so in a hotzone, which does not. Predictably, it gets blasted with artillery, inflicting more losses and likely crashing morale, then beats a full retreat, having gained no ground.

This is not a combat effective unit.

I wouldn't necissarily take public diplomatic statements by Lavrov and company at face value. This is the same guy who spent months saying Russia wouldn't invade Ukraine.

What they're publicly offering is the status quo antebellum, and it's hard to see how Putin survived that politically. Granted, if he keeps the blockade of outside information up, perhaps it can be spun as a victory.

To me, it seems like having your military humiliated, having 5,000-12,000 KIA in two weeks, leveling large areas of cities, losing billions, crashing your currency, (likely) going into bankruptcy (according to the ratings agencies), etc. all to pull out and leave the same "drug addicted Neo-Nazis in power," would be untenable politically if Putin is to remain as leader, even in a state as autocratic as Russia.

The problem of securing peace might hinge on which "Neo-Nazis," have to be removed from power. Obviously demands that Ukraine shift military units over to disarming Nazi sympathizing paramilitary units that are currently holding down Russian invasion forces aren't going to be tenable because there is no physical way to make it happen. The "Neo-Nazis" could also include a bunch of moderates, and be a poison pill designed to split Ukrainian ranks? It's unclear because I haven't seen the demand fleshed out.

The other issue is NATO and the EU. Moldova is moving towards joining the EU. The EU provides security assistance for member states, but nothing like NATO (for one, it lacks US military intervention). Ukraine would benefit more long term from being in the EU than NATO in terms of technical support and economic aid, but NATO is the bigger goal now.

Obviously, they have a very good reason to want to join NATO. They were just invaded by a country claiming publicly that they would not invade. Russian decision-making for the invasion is extremely opaque and centralized, so any security assurances Russia gives appear like they are going to be able to be overturned based on the will of Russia's leadership at any time.

My guess, given Russia's previous demands, is that the demands are such that Ukraine can not only not join NATO, but cannot receive military aid and training from NATO. It should be clear why this is untenable. Ukraine is quite poor and lacks the ability to sustain the defense posture it has now. If they give up outside military aid, Russia will inevitably be able to grow stronger relative to them. Given the current situation, what is to stop Russia from deciding that the Ukrainian state has become "too Nazified," in five years, and launching another invasion?

NATO membership also let's the Ukrainians get out of investing so much in defense. They have a huge rebuilding project going forwards. They're already a poor country. Having to maintain a large military is a major burden. That, for everyone asking what possible good NATO does, is a major benefit of the alliance for Europeans. Defense spending can remain very low while still funding an adequate deterrent force. It also appears to have reduced the risk of interstate conflict.

Tangentially related, Moldova is moving towards EU membership. Russian troops have been occupying parts of Moldova since 1992 for "peace keeping purposes." There has been no conflict in 30 years. It signed treaties to vacate Moldova's land but reneged on them. Laws against the public advocating for the military's removal are draconian by even Russian standards, with seven year prison sentences for even digital protests. So, while the public in the region initially supported a split from Moldova, it is somewhat unclear if they still do, although the military is a huge part of the economy and it's unclear what an unwinding would look like.

The region is strategically relevant as an area from which to launch attacks on Ukraine, as we are seeing now. It's actually probably hurting Russia right now as it has encouraged them to launch more lines of attack than they can secure, and their lines of communications are being effectively harassed on every effort, often up to the Russian border.

Could very well be true. A retired Lt. Colonel went on record against the war. Solid outlets are reporting conscripts fleeing across the borders, officers too. Apparently they have started making men register and when they do their passports are taken.

News of many Russian reserves being called up too. Makes sense, they clearly have a manpower problem.

Chechen units and mercenaries have been spotted all around the Kyiv front, which means they are trying to conduct a major operation with irregulars in an area that has had reported friendly fire incidents. Not generally something you'd do if you could avoid it.

The recruitment of Syrian fighters shows desperation and that was verified by US intelligence officials. I think they will eventually push the Belarusian military in, and that could blow up bad.

Allegedly they are already using their few professional forces, flagged as Russians, so they're losing the folks that could keep discipline and the Russians gaurding the coop back in Belarus are mostly logistics (some VDV). Based on the dumbass map segment that somehow got on the air, it does sound like Belarusian long range assets may have been employed across the border too, early on.

They've also been using their police, which is downright embarrassing. Their use early on at least made some sense. They were expecting a quick military victory followed by protests and riots, but using them once it became a war? That or using police equipment to gear your soldiers... either way, a fucking disaster.

Kharkiv Oblast governor stated that Ukrainian defenders repelled an unsupported Russian air assault against Vovchansky, a town roughly 60 kilometers northeast of Kharkiv, on March 8.

Again!? It's like he wants to purge the VDV, particularly the 76th Guards.

Was this verified? I had trouble finding good sources.

Which, on a related note, if you're interested in how the conflict is going and want detailed analysis, ISW is fantastic open source material. I did some work with them a while back. They had very good coverage of Syria.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-8

The Center for Information Resilience has a very good map up and decent vetting for how it is being done if you want to get into the details.

https://maphub.net/Cen4infoRes/russian-ukraine-monitor


Or there is:

https://liveuamap.com/

Take it with a grain of salt. CIR are pretty good about verifying these types of reports, vetting and placing images and videos using satalite and aerial photography, checking metadata, checking for edits, looking up insignia and hardware models, etc. IDK about this.



For a grand strategy IR lens there is IISS:

https://www.iiss.org/regions/russia-and-eurasia/ukraine

Or for wider looking stuff from scholars there is CSIS.

I'd say definitely don't just look up random "OSINT" Twitter. Super unreliable, tons of misrepresentations. Also a lot of bias. You can't even tell what might be going on based on the weight of posts because Russians have been booted off, so it's going to be pretty one sided.

Someone was uploading maps from the Turkish General Staff that appeared to be spot on, but it's all been wiped.

Also, bear in mind that based on Russian planning, I wouldn't 100% buy into estimates based on Russian divisions starting at full strength, the organization seems pretty messy.

But for reference, each tank division is three tank regiments and a regiment of motor rifle troops. Motor rifle divisions are flipped, three motor rifle regiments and one tank regiment.

Each tank regiment is 3 battalions, 30 tanks and a command tank. There are also regimental command tanks, so roughly 90 tanks on average. Motor rifle tank regiments are 40 tanks.

Useful reference for knowing how platoons, companies, battalions, etc. are formed.

https://www.battleorder.org/military-organization

There are some translation issues though. So at first you hear "the counter offensive around Kharkiv destroyed an entire Russian regiment," and it's "oh shit," but it was a company that was routed. Still, a big win.

Has some decent info down to the squad level, even if it is dated. If you know the organization and doctrine, the scraps of OSINT can paint something of a picture.