Some of it sure, not all.

The bioweapons thing has been a frequent line of questioning by GOP Congressmen vis-a-vis COVID-19 and is a substantial minority belief among Republicans (the main version being that Fauci used US tax dollars to fund China's creation of the virus). We'll see if the Ukraine version gains traction.

Migrants as an invasion is common rhetoric. Trump, biggest name in the right wing game here, said Putin's invasion was smart and mused how we might invade Mexico to stop their ongoing invasion of the US. Replacement theory shows up in the mainstream, on Tucker, etc. and frames migrant flows as invasions intentionally stoked by "elites." Tucker is an elite heir as is Trump, so if they aren't elites, I wonder who is ?

The election being rigged is a majority Republican opinion in many polls and China is the number one culprit after the DNC. Trump's legal team fighting his loss claimed explicit evidence of Chinese involvement, but never added it to any court filings or produced it. Fox talking heads have mused on it quite a bit and it's all OANN talked about for a while. Then you see the same talking heads going on about how "sanctions are pointless because Putin is smart and will work with China, so why antagonize them. Xi and Putin are so clever, outsmarting the Western "elites," cheers for them."

The allegations of Nazism being a major political force at the very top of Ukrainian politics, with the country's Jewish PM and President, has shown up plenty on cable news.

The less popular stuff is the out right praise of Nazism and calling Putin "savior of the White race," although arguably talk of him as an important global force for good for "standing up against global 'elites' who want to flood the economy with migrants and tear down all traditional values," might be a dog whistle for the same sentiment.

Certainly not in all cases, or even close to a majority, but to be sure in quite a few pindits' cases the "elites" trying to ruin Western civilization and replace us are "the Jews." You know, when someone talks about elites having a close knit set of communities across the world, an oversized role in the academy, politics, Hollywood, the sciences, and finance, "them" not being part of the fabric of the "West," and then immediately segues into talk about Israel, or "just happened" to be showing a slide show of leaders and moguls who just all happen to be Jewish, I don't think I'm picking up false signals. Especially when the comments they allow are filled with people praising them for "naming the Jew."

It's absolutely hilarious to see what this is doing to the far right corners of the internet. While they have been very good at rapidly producing a favorable spin on every news story, one that falls into the mold of their manichean world view, this genuinely seems like it might be deradicalizing people because of the contradictions involved.

Essentially, as best I can see the narrative in the chatter:

The Jewish-led (i.e., evil for them) Ukrainian Neo-Nazi (a good thing for them) government is leading Ukrainians, who are actually just the same ethnicity as Russians, to ethically cleanse their fellow Russians for being Russians. The Jewish led Neo-Nazis are doing this with the help of their now pro-Nazi radical woke BLM trans rights activist funders in the West. They are also backed by pro-Jewish radical Islamist jihadis (this las line comes from a handful of unconfirmed reports of small numbers of Central Asian mujahideen coming to fight for Ukraine, but makes sense in the context of "ISIS being funded by the Clintons," etc.)

Putin, (often referred to only half ironically as "based Putin, savior of the White race,") is saving and liberating the Ukrainians, who are actually Russians, but who have been killing Russians for not being Ukrainian.

He is doing so with the help of Chechen shock troops known for war crimes, and now, apparently Syrian irregulars. Thus, he is saving Europe from the ongoing Muslim migrant murder mayhem invasion of the West by sending the first Muslim army to invade Europe north of the Balkans in centuries.

Europe needs to learn to be strong and resist invasions (migration). Ukraine needs to stop resisting this invasion, it's going to get people hurt.

Putin's righteous denazificafation (denazificafation is bad) efforts to defeat "Globalhomo" (yes, this is really the new popular term for the evil elite kabal that runs the world...) won't be hurt by Western sanctions because he has the support of the Chinese Communist Party, who are helping him save the world and thwart the plans of the Globalhomo Democrats, who are actually just puppets of the Chinese Communist Party (so, China is fighting itself now). Plus, the whole time the invasion was actually about Fauci's bioweapons labs in Ukraine and evidence of Biden's pedophilia, which are in Kyiv. The God Emperor (based Trump himself) was impeached over his efforts to get Zelensky to turn these over.

At a certain point, the contradictions, liberal backed Jewish Neo-Nazis, an ethnicity ethnically cleansing itself, etc. collapse under their own weight.

For instance, Visa and MasterCard pulled out of Russia, but how many normal Russians even have a credit card to begin with?

A substantial majority. 84% of households have cards, which are overwhelmingly Visa or MasterCard. 21% have cards using lines of credit. Russians came out of communism with no debt, making them a hot market for creditors. Consumer debt there has exploded in recent years (in economic terms, it's not necissarily a bad thing, access to credit is generally a good thing).

However, the hit isn't quite as bad as it could be because Visa and MasterCard did this temporarily after the invasion of the Crimean Peninsula. After that, Russia made some major reforms to how they did business, which involved centralizing payments through the Russian central bank. They also have a better alternative in UnionPay than they did in 2014, but it is definitely hitting regular Russians hard in their day to day lives short term.

No modern economy is autarkic. 20.6% of Russian GDP goes to imports. By comparison, that figure for the USA is just 14.6%. Exports are 28.5% of the Russian economy; for the US it is 11.7%.

Connection to global markets is huge for Russia. China is a major trading partner, but they account for just 14.6% of Russia's exports. The EU makes up over 40% of Russian exports, the US another 4.6%. Gutting 1/7th of your economy (the amount these exports are equivalent too) is going to hurt no matter what you do to prepare.

The sanctions also give Chinese purchasers of Russia goods a lot of leverage in pricing, which will drive down profits on remaining exports. It's also going to hurt when 1:5 roubles spent in Russia was previously on imports, and they lose access to their biggest suppliers. They can substitute for domestic production in the long term, but shortages and high prices come first.

Even where Russian's can buy imported goods, the implosion of the rouble will make them far more expensive. Add in the fact that businesses weren't well prepared for a surprise war and balance sheets will look grim.

Importantly for a longer term war, China only manufactures 6% of microchips. Vehicles are going to be hit hard in Russia. Russia also has a huge arms industry that employs a lot of people, but they require chips for their weapons systems. Sanctions will definitely hurt quite a bit there.

Russia's strategy is clearly to simply siege cities and wait them out.

I highly doubt that. The war is unpopular and costing them heavily. They want a quick war. This flies in the face of all their strategy to date.

I think the narrative that the convoy is stuck is pretty naive

Western intelligence agencies could have plenty of reasons to mislead about the situation on the ground, but so far most of their limited commentary has been borne out. Open source satellite imagery also seems to suggest this is the case. I'm not sure why else you would want to leave your supply convoy clumped together like that. To be sure, Russia surely has adequate AA along the length of the convoy, but even then, a miracle attack getting through is not something you want to risk if you don't have to.

It's also unclear why they wouldn't want to encircle Kiev as quickly as possible. You can hold most of the area around a city, and if supplies can still get through, your seige won't be effective.

For example:



Sarajevo held out for almost four years before the Siege was lifted with limited paths in for supplies. Even before modern food storage methods, cities in antiquity and the middle ages held out for months, sometimes over a year after losing all supply routes in. Hardly an ideal timeframe. Hence the heavy shelling and poorly implemented raids.

As for when Kyiv might end up cut off, a few days ago I would have said "could be next week," but open source analysis:



looks increasingly grim on that front (depending on who you are I guess.)

The whole legal framework of "war crimes," isn't relevant in what you're describing. Civilians killing civilians isn't a war crime.

If the people involved were actually Russian spies, if they were dressed in civilian clothes or Ukrainian military uniforms, and if military forces saw them engaging in sabatoge or combat within the battle space (e.g., actively destroying AA equipment during an air raid, firing on civilians or soldiers, attempting to disable military vehicles during ongoing shelling / air strikes, etc.), then, legally, you are not correct. They are not entitled to a trial in those circumstances, hence "it is one of the few areas where summary execution is allowed."

That is, if they actually were a spy, the ICC wouldn't punish an officer who ordered their immediate execution in those situations. (Note: you can't just go offing spies because they are spies, they have to be actively interfering in the battle space while presenting as part of a different military or as civilians.)

Now, that said, it clearly isn't the right thing to do, or a smart thing to do from a military perspective. It makes far more sense to bring them in for interrogation and to hold them for use in POW exchanges. Spies tend to be especially good currency for such exchanges because they lack so many legal protections, and so the opposing force has more of an incentive to try to get them back quickly.

I agree with your concern.

That said, executing spies and sabateurs in civilian clothes or other nation's military uniforms is not a war crime. It has always been allowed under both the Hague and Geneva Conventions.

Soldiers who are wearing uniforms of the opposing army after the start of combat are one of the only groups where it is legal to engage in summary execution.

I'm not aware of any treaties where the execution of spies isn't allowed on any conditions. It's why it's such a dangerous job.

Dressing your soldiers and operatives in the opposing forces' uniforms during military operations is, however, a war crime. It is in the Gauge, Geneva, and ICC conventions. It is a war crime for precisely the reason that it leads to civilians being targeted as potential spies, which makes it even more frustrating that Russia tried it to some degree at all.

I don't know at this point if any amount of NLAWs in the hands of Ukranians would stop the Russians from rushing at objectives. Their command seems incapable of competence.

For example, moving up troops next to a giant warehouse you could hide in, and then instead parking your vehicles all of 2 meters apart... in the open.

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Yeah, the Ukranians air force is being saved and isn't doing much, but small surveillance drones can still see you, civilians can still report your location, satalites can see you, and while the Ukranians might not have aircraft up above, they have plenty artillery around Kiev...

The other trucks got shelled right after this. I do feel for all the Russians dragged into this insanity. I would be absolutely livid knowing this is how losses were occuring, parking lumped together in artillery range.

And now they appear to have had their newest class of patrol ship taken out by dumbfire grad spam, a BM-21 the Ukrainians just drove up to the shore :lol:. A definite casualty of this conflict is respect for the Russian military.

Imagine losing (maybe just temporarily) a $30 million war ship, likely carrying a $14 million helicopter to some 1960s artillery. Someone is in trouble.

I doubt the assault on Odessa goes well, that's when the Ukrainians will pull out the Neptunes. If the Russian air force is still MIA it seems like a disaster waiting to happen. They have around 72 R-360s, possibly more now. Enough to send the Black Sea fleet to the bottom of the ocean if they're able to get them off efficiently.

Sometimes things are so stupid they have to work I suppose.

Once they've decimated the Ukrainian military (blown up those billions of USD of arms the US has given Ukraine since 2014) and gotten the concessions they want (such as keeping their land bridge to Crimea, any province that "wants to" separate can do so--whether that's actually true or just the regions Russia expects no insurgency and can take without hassle, doesn't matter), and, most importantly, Ukraine finally surrenders on the condition of never joining NATO ... there's zero reason to believe Russia wouldn't simply go back to it's borders (it's new borders).

EU would be left with the legacy problems of cleaning up, and Russia will make clear it will just invade again if it's conditions aren't met.

Pray tell, what areas are those? Their best chance for hearts and minds in a major city was Kharkiv, which is overwhelmingly populated by ethnic Russians and right across the border. They stalled there, didn't have the forces to take the city because of their ridiculous number of lines of attack, and resorted to shelling residential neighborhoods for hours on end in what looks like exactly the sort of punitive siege tactics that produce insurgencies.

If protestors drive out the new Russian backed countries Russia will just invade again? Another surprise offensive war to liberate their neighbor as their economy implodes? Yeah, that'll go over well. It's not like invasions are expensive or anything.

Armed civilians are useless? What do you think the mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan were? Yeah, they'd be hopelessly outgunned against an OPFOR with air superiority, close air support for almost all engagements, rapid response teams for ambushes, e.g., the US in Iraq, and take massively disproportionate casualties, but against low morale conscripts who are running out of fuel, abandoning $13 million AA systems, and advancing without comms or support? The NATO MANPADs seem plenty effective, as do the NLAWs and Javelins, so improvised infantry seem like they could keep inflicting high costs on Russian forces, especially as they are forced to draw on more reserves and conscripts and morale falls even more.

Air drops require Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD), otherwise they are suicidal. SAMs need to be down, along with enemy radar systems, and C3 (command, control, and comms). With an air drop, you're putting a small, vulnerable force behind enemy lines to help create breakthroughs.

Obviously the amount of soldiers you can drop by aircraft is not going to be far smaller than a ground push. The goal of these operations is to place your forces behind enemy defenses in such a way that follow up ground forces will be able to break through because your paratroopers can flank and encircle defenders.

Rotary wing aircraft delivering troops are extremely vulnerable during insertions. That's why you need SEAD. You have aircraft packed with men that need to land or get to low altitudes for insertion, and loiter there in the case of rotary wing insertions. During this time, they are very vulnerable, and a downed aircraft will result in a large number of fatalities.

What you're seeing with videos of the VDV is suicide rushes into areas with operational AA, swarming with MANPADs, and aircraft getting knocked out of the sky. Maybe this made sense on Day One, when you think the defenses might route, but they keep doing it.

You need C3 out because your airborne forces tend to use employ lighter, less well armored vehicles (the BMD-4s employed by the VDV in Ukraine raids being an obvious example, based on the video of the KIA inside the vehicle, it almost looks like the .50 BMG used in US HMGs can pierce the armor, making it a death trap, you absolutely cannot attack with an IFV that lets heavy machine gun rounds through), so you need the element of surprise. Inserting troops into an urban area your guys don't know, but the opposing force does, while the enemy has early warning radar up and knows exactly where you are inserting, is obviously going to be a major issue. The enemy can concentrate combat power around your effectively cut off forces.

These problems can be overcome with close air support and a follow up push by mechanized forces, but we haven't seen that. We've seen drops to secure airfields, followed by those forces being pushed off the objective, often in routed, because they aren't supported. No close air support, no reinforcements pushing at the same time.

Or, because the VDV tends to have more training and better morale, they are pushing in on land, without close air support, in their paper machete IFVs, which are getting absolutely chewed up.

So, you had the nighttime drop on Kharkiv and push by vaunted SOF elements, which was over by the morning with the main result being a morale blow in the form videos of burnt out Russian vehicles all over the streets and dead soldiers in SOF uniforms everywhere, since, unsupported, they ran right into ambushes.

It's tactics that are sure to result in high casualties and highly unlikely to secure lasting gains.

Russia moderating it's demands and looking for a way out more explicitly: https://www.reuters.com/world/kremlin-says-russian-military-action-will-stop-moment-if-ukraine-meets-2022-03-07/

Demands are now for the territory they already held before the war started and a pledge not to join NATO, clearly not the original war aims, i.e. a change in government and Russian defacto control of the country.

Essentially looking for the status quo antebellum, with some (likely fairly useless) treaty assurances.


Sorry, but almost everything about this analysis is wrong. The coverage of resistance efforts by regular civilians plays an obvious military role. It is providing civilians and reservists with the small arms that they would need to conduct an insurgency against a Russian occupation.

Given resistance to date, Russia would almost certainly need a long term occupation of the country to prop up whatever puppet regime they leave in Kyiv.

The point of those videos and efforts is to signal to Russia both the likelihood of an insurgency and the Ukrainian will and ability to conduct such resistance. Because COIN operations require a high volume of troops (Russia would need to deploy about 2.6 million to match comperable levels to South Vietnam/the US when adjusting for population), Russia cannot afford to fund them. Russia has just 3.45 million men aged 20-24 total. It's economy cannot support that sort of deployment, nor would public opinion. It's air force has proven utterly incapable of complex operations, making reliance on large ground forces even more important.

Obviously Ukrainian resistance could easily fail to hit the high bar of Vietnamese communist commitment. The low birth rates and older population in Ukraine mean that, relative to population, you will probably get fewer resistors. However, even if only 3% of the population resists actively, you're looking at a 1.2 million strong insurgency. Russia will need far more than 190,000 troops to secure the country, especially if it's initial invasion suffers 10-25,000 long term casualties before the initial fighting is over, something that seems not outside the realm of possibility since the conflict will likely go on for weeks.

So, simply put, this is all about showing Russia that winning the initial conflict would still entail costs they cannot afford to pay.

Grand strategy wise, I actually don't think this makes a conflict over Taiwan more likely. Xi will see how badly this backfired and reassess the risks of embarking on that sort of adventurism. Especially since America may be tearing itself apart again in 2024 if it once again has two presidential candidates declaring victory. This time, there appears to be a much higher potential for one party to use state legislatures or control of the House and Senate to overturn the election (even if Trump wins outright, he'll still probably lose the popular vote by 4-5%, leading to more discontent). Trump certainly seems to be planning to run, and if he loses, he will almost certainly claim a rigged election again. China's position relative to the US is only improving for now, politically and economically.

It might accelerate the reclamation of the Russian Far East though. Booted out of SWIFT, Russian financial institutions are turning to a Chinese alternative. Russia is buying tons of Yuan. Russia will likely become more amenable to payments for oil in Yuan as sanctions make using USD harder. With sanctions likely to stay, Russia's non-petrol exports will have their main market in Russia.

The Russian Far East is down below 7 million Russian citizens. The number of Chinese living there in 2000? 28,000. In 2014? 800,000. Today? We don't know because it is a sore spot for Russia, but it is probably on the way to 1/6th the population. Of that Russian population, about a million are indigenous to the area or Mongolian, with closer historical ties to China.

China still maintains in official documents that the treaties through which Russia acquired that land in the mid-1800s are illegal. Much of the Russian Far East was a part of various Chinese dynasties, off and on from 500 AD to 1850 AD, a fact they like to bring up. I doubt there will be any moves towards making the area part of China, at least not any time soon (unless Russia really collapses from this), but they wield a lot of soft power there, which will only grow now. Long term, if a decent majority of the population becomes ethnic Han, perhaps we will see a move towards "independence."

China is also making moves in Central Asia, pulling those states into its orbit (and out of Russia's). This will certainly accelerate that process. Russia is too big and too culturally different to become a true Chinese satellite, but it could be accelerating on that trajectory with long term isolation and economic decline.

Long term, around 2100, I wouldn't be totally shocked by these borders. Mandate of heaven indeed.

He should have not started a war. But if he was going to, sure, it would have made sense to try the "swiftly topple the government with a huge show of force," idea they used. However, once it clearly wasn't going to work, a two-pronged offensive from around Kharkiv, and up from Crimea seems to make more sense. Then you can push towards Dnipro, with smaller forces supporting from the "republics" and attempt to encircle defenders in the south. You could bipass the cities to try to encircle the army, instead of getting bogged down in urban street fighting, where your hardware advantage counts for less, and where collateral damage will result in a greater risk of future insurgency.

This area is also more ethnically Russian and your best bet for winning hearts and minds (provided you aren't shelling apartments).

Save the "invade from Belarus" trick until after you've dealt the Ukranian military a decent defeat and made them burn through AA resources. It isn't fooling anyone, Western intelligence can see your movements on satellites. Just keep a small presence of low combat effectiveness reserves parked on the border, forcing Ukraine to waste forces guarding against a potential attack.

Only after that initial success do you push on Kiev. If they still are holding out well, begin further moves up north of Kharkiv looking for smaller encirclements (Russian doctrine is heavily focused on encirclements so this should be what your troops know).

Tell your troops they are going into a war. Yeah, you need opsec, but telling them they are going out on drills and then shoving them into combat is how you get the droves of abandoned vehicles we're seeing right now. Don't trick conscripts into "signing up" to become volunteers and then shove them into combat roles. Don't shell civilian corridors, let people leave so you can deal with urban areas without (as much) collateral damage. If your whole plan relies on a quick war, not prolonged sieges, what possible benefit is it to trap civilians in the cities you are besieging? Yeah, they will eat through supplies quicker with the civilians there, but the whole point is that you're not trying for a long siege.

And stop throwing the VDV into unsupported raids. You'd almost think a leader there must be suspected of planning a coup with how they are throwing them away.

That's my armchair general take anyhow.

If his strategic goal was just those areas, he would have simply recognized Donetsk and Luhansk and done a smaller operation to secure those regions. Instead, he launched most of his forces at Kyiv. He chose an operation with a footprint large enough that it would commit him to a much larger war.

He obviously thought the resistance would collapse, hence the idiotic attack plan. They now have 8 separate lines of attack, which is resulting in their supply lines being extremely vulnerable and subject to attack. The offensive is already stalled, with strong salients developing. The air force is MIA for some unknown reason, and when aircraft are used, it they are being shot down. Rather than focus on a consolidated strategic goal, they decided to show off with multiple different advances they lack the logistics to support and the comms to coordinate (hell, even within one column they lack effective comms, hence two generals and two colonels being killed after they had to go to the front to get directions to their troops).

He almost certainly thought that. He was high on his own propaganda. The Russian forces did not come in ready for heavy resistance. They came in with downright suicidal VDV raids deep into enemy territory with no SEAD and no ground support follow up. The logistics were also not in place for a long war, as evidenced by all the stalled vehicles and the fact that the bulk of the siege forces meant for Kyiv have still yet to cover their two-hour drive after a week.

Zelensky's death could be a game changer if it leads to infighting. If there is other competent leadership, making him a martyr might just make things worse for Putin, as he was not without his detractors before, and a new wartime leader could have less baggage. I also don't think he would take too much of a blow to popularity if he stayed in the city until encirclement seemed inevitable and then retreated to Liviv with the explicit purpose of continuing the war even if Kyiv falls.

The shift in tactics, "taking the gloves off" also seems more likely to keep a resistance going regardless of what happens to Zelensky. Relying heavily on indirect fire in an urban area that is supposed to be filled with "your" civilians also shows a total loss of control of the battle space, as does having your general officers killed by sniper fire or having battalion commanders captured and paraded out.

The more I think of it, the more impossible the situation seems for Putin. I don't see how he can come back from this if he keeps committing more.

By sheer force of numbers, Russia can certainly eventually occupy Ukraine, but it appears it will take a significant amount of time, potentially months now that the war is beginning to settle into more solid fronts, and most of Russia combat power has been deployed without a collapse of the Ukranian military. The Ukranian AA is still up, as evidence by videos from today of more Russian aircraft being shot down. The Ukranian forces have developed defensive positions and rapid collapse no longer seems like a threat.

Despite high casualties, Ukraine's combined forces still number in the hundreds of thousands. While significantly out gunned in terms of hardware, their 465,000 strong active and reserve components can overcome this disadvantage to some degree in urban areas, particularly so long as Russia continues to lose aircraft in attacks and supply lines to the cities aren't cut.

With the conflict heading towards the end of its second week, Russia has taken just one significant city, and not only failed to take Kharkiv, right along its border, but sustained heavy losses in a major counter offensive there.

While the Russian military has significantly fewer logistics personnel per each soldier in a combat role than the US, it is still a ratio of less than 1:1. Casualties for Russia appear to be somewhere in the range of 5-10,000 already (granted, some deserters may return). They appear to be rapidly burning through their initial deployment.

Leaks indicate this, as does Russian consideration of using unreliable forces from their ostensible vassals that have just recently undergone revolts against their Russian-backed autocratic leadership. Now they are starting to recruit in Syria, another sign of desperation.

The heavy shelling of residential areas in the mostly ethnic Russian city of Kharkiv is indicative of commanders who do not feel they have enough combat forces to press into the city with infantry, likely fearing that heavy losses may collapse the front. There is other evidence to support this, such as the suicidal raid into the city by special forces that resulted in the units' destruction, and the successful Ukranian counter offensive in the area which video evidence shows taking out 38 vehicles, including many large troop carriers, supporting their claims of having inflicted 1,600-2,000 casualties in that single operation (this might be an exaggeration because many may have simply dismounted and fled in a route, and be useable in the near future; the videos don't show many KIA, unlike the videos of the special forces sent into Kharkiv, who seem to be largely KIA, and there were no videos of a large scale surrender of that size).

Here is the main point: to date, the Ukrainians have given every indication that they will reject a Russian puppet government and that resistance will continue even if Russia secures an eventual victory over Ukraine's conventional military forces. The government in Kyiv is supporting this notion by arming civilians, preparing IEDs, etc. To be sure, these are in part, simply propaganda efforts, a way to signal to Russia the high costs of occupation. However, the resistance to date makes insurgency seem increasingly likely.

Russia cannot afford an insurgency in a nation the size of Ukraine. Even if their goal is limited to the eastern parts of the country, and newly discovered gas fields, it is hard to imagine how they secure it. Their force already seems inadequate for the initial defeat of the Ukranian military. It is far too small for proper COIN operations.

For comparison, Vietnam had a 16% smaller population in 1965 than Ukraine's current population. In order to counter the VC, the US had to deploy 550,000 soldiers, supported by an additional 50,000 allied forces (mostly Korean). Backing them up were 820,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, so 1.42 million men at arms. They were only policing half the country. The technological gap between the VC and the US armed forces was significantly larger than that between the Ukrainians and Russians.

While US leadership paid a hefty political price for involvement in Vietnam, the Russian public is likely to have far graver doubts about this war. First, the invasion has a poor justification, and it came as a shock to the public. It is framed as a liberation and peacekeeping operation, which does not jive with images coming out of Ukraine: civilians taking up arms and shelled apartment complexes. The countries are neighbors with a shared culture; family ties stretch across the border. Resentment will build up far quicker.

Additionally, while the US was involved in horrific events in Vietnam, and air campaigns that killed countless civilians, the large bulk of the major atrocities of the war were committed by the South Vietnamese army or the VC itself. US citizens could rationalize that the bloodshed would continue, and perhaps intensify if the US withdrew (e.g., when the VC was able to take Huế, the result was widespread massacre and rape of civilians by the communists). In an insurgency in Ukraine, any attempt to "take the gloves of" will reflect directly on the Russian invaders.

The internet, and the ease with which video can be shared, even within states with significant censorship, will also make controlling public opinion harder. The fifteen-year prison sentences announced for sharing "fake news about the security operation," (e.g., sharing videos of Russian combat loses, or interviews with demoralized soldiers), seem like an act of desperation. Russia can shutter its last independent TV networks (it has), but it is too modernized to shut down the internet without major economic repercussions. At the same time, the Russian economy is far worse off than the America's in the 1960, and public anger can't be discharged in elections by voting in a new party.

Point being, it is unclear to me how Putin can hope to occupy Ukraine long term if there is continued resistance. The force required would necessitate calling up essentially all of their reserve forces and a wave of conscription. Russia has 3.45 million men aged 20-24. During the Vietnam War, the US had more than twice as many men in that age bracket (7.5 million). A draft will hit more families, more substantially if similar troop levels are required by the Russians.

Morale and combat readiness is likely to grow even worse as Russia is forced to call up reserves with more distance from military service, or rely on freshly trained conscripts. Historically, older men called out of the reserves are significantly more likely to mutiny. Their deaths also leave families without a breadwinner.

This will also put pressure on Russia to attempt to use the militaries of its ostensible vassals, Belarus and Kazakhstan. However, that move comes with huge political risks. Belarus and Kazakhstan have both seen recent, large-scale revolts against their leadership. Putin may not have the leverage to call on Kazakh forces at all. He could almost certainly force Lukashanko to commit troops (he already has his military working logistics for the invasion, and crossing over the border), but mutiny seems highly likely if they are forced into the current meat grinder.

Already Belarus has seen protests, clashes with riot police, and partisans hacking, and fire-bombing railways so that Russian forces can't use them. Belarusian expats are serving as volunteers in Ukraine right now. As the war drags on longer and Russia looks more bogged down, the risk of revolts spreading become more likely.

But how can Putin get out of this?

Perhaps he will take a more logical approach. He will focus on securing the gas fields in the east and a smaller area around his new "republics," declare victory, and end the war. This seems increasingly politically difficult though, as KIA counts mount. He has to justify a foolhardy, surprise war, and all those killed, for what will then look more explicitly like a resource grab (Ukraine will not have been "liberated."). As the Russians double down on more outlandish propaganda, we now hear of CIA plutonium shipments to Kyiv, bioweapons being engineered, etc., it becomes harder for them to back into a face-saving peace that leaves an independent Ukraine. Partition is an option, but a new Western Ukraine would become a haven for insurgents. Pushing to the border with NATO has its own major risks too though, and the population further west will be even more hostile to Russia.

Backing down would critically damage Putin's reputation at a time when he might already be being second guessed due to his illness, and his irrational decision to go to war. This might lead him to keep doubling down on the war even as the costs pile up; particularly if unrest spreads and he has to "liberate" Belarus down the road.

Barring a crafty propaganda move, declaring "victory" with limited aims, or a rapid shift in the tide of the war and a collapse in Ukranian morale and confidence, both of which look increasingly unlikely, it appears Putin will face a very severe crisis. This could become a huge security threat if instability spreads to Russia, but it seems like an inevitability at this point barring some drastic shift in the current trajectory of the conflict. And while a quick shift in leadership could offer Russian elites a way out of the Ukranian debacle, Putin has organized the state to make it almost impossible to remove him without force, making a coup and potential internal struggle more likely if he eventually gets to a place where his position is no longer tenable.

On a related note, Tuesday marks the 105th anniversary of the February Revolution (which might mark renewed protests in Russia and Belarus). The anniversary of a revolt led by mutinous soldiers who were angry at having their lives squandered in a pointless war, and citizens facing a massive economic crisis. I wonder if Putin thinks of Tsar Nicholas at all from his glimmering mansion?

Belarus is already crumbling. At the same time as the invasion, Putin is getting sweeping reforms to the Belarusian constitution. Lukashenko will now be allowed to serve in office until 2035, when he will be 81. His prior terms will no longer count towards term limits, and since the elections are rigged, he will serve as long as he wants. The changes to the constitution closely mimic many of the changes Putin recently pushed through in Russia, and vastly enhance Lukashenko's power. It will also allow Russian military forces to permanently occupy Belarus. 30,000 Russian soldiers may be there to stay, extra insurance against future revolts. He also forced through a change to allow Russian nuclear weapons to be staged in Belarus, an added security threat to dissuade any support for dissidents.

Russia is invading Ukraine from Belarus. The Belarusian military is supplying the Russian military, and has moved its own forces to, and in some cases over the border to help with Russian logistics. What is unclear, is if some of its more professional forces have also been used in actual combat roles.

Lukashenko said he would not involve his military in combat roles, but notably did so on the same day that he somehow allowed photos to be taken at a national security council meeting, which showed an invasion of Ukraine on a board (almost comically incompetent). It's a risky move, but perhaps less risky than moving out more of the Russian soldiers currently in Belarus, who might be more reliable for keeping order, so I could definitely see it happening.

Using their most competent units in Russian uniforms would be unexceptional given past behavior by both leaders, although you have to wonder how competent those units would even be. It certainly seems like years of graft and corruption have gutted Russia's military efficacy. Unsupported air drops leading to major casualties and downed aircraft, a mysteriously mostly MIA Russian air force, stalled vehicles left abandoned and towed off by tractors, using unencrypted radio frequencies, a supply convoy stalling out because it has run out of supplies, rations marked expired in 2015- it sounds like an absolute disaster for them.

More control of gas pipelines seems to only mean more money for oligarchs. Unfortunately, it seems like they also plundered the defense budget too.

On another note, I guess I was behind. Belorussians are already sabotaging railways and transport for the Russians, with some groups forming.

More mass arrests Sunday, unclear about Monday. They are clamping down on information.

Rough translation of a Lt. Colonel's speech to Belorussians:

Introduction

Hello defenders of the nation, my address to you. I am Lietenant Colonel of the Reserve, Valery Stepanovych.

I'm introducing myself because I quit some time ago, so it's possible newer recruits don't know me; though I think you've all heard of the Black Eagles. <<Dmitry: Best I can tell, “Black Eagle” was an honorary rank awarded to elite special forces members of the Belarus Paratroopers>>

A lot of our valor comes from there. You've also heard that the 38th Guard Brigade used to run 10k every morning in full gear and then swim in the lake.

Well, I was the guy who every day for four years ran at the front, and dived first into the lake. I'm black eagle one.

All the most important things in life generally happen quickly, and without warning.

It's impossible to prepare to become a hero. It's just that in a person's life there arise circumstances where he must act, here and now.

To act, and become a part of history. Or to wait for a more opportune moment. Though fate tends to offer a chance to do something truly meaningful but once.

I served in the airborne for a long time. Over ten years in the "Rezko <<reserves, maybe?>>" Brigade alone, from soldier to brigade commander.

Those who have met me can't help but be honest, I was one of the officers most fanatically loyal to the army. A patriot. Duty was all.
Mercantilism was always foreign to me. I bring this up so that no one begins building theories that someone hired me to make these remarks.

There's nothing in my biography suggesting I might be for sale, and at my age, people don't change.
The Airborne was my everything, and in all the years after I left the service I continued to help and support my Brigade.

In front of my house, for 18 years, had stood a flagpole with the banner of the VDV (paratroopers).

Today, I decided to record my first ever video address because my comrades, guys in light blue striped shirts like the one I wore, are sitting in the forest on the borders of Ukraine and it looks likely that shortly they'll be participating in something very bad.

Something that could have catastrophic consequences for our country, and comprehensively tarnish the honor and traditions of the army, which were established by many generations of paratroopers and it's likely not all will make it home alive.

The Russian army, which has tremendous combat experience, has spent 3 days in hell. The number of dead count in the thousands. The number of prisoners is in the hundreds. Military and civilian hospitals at the border are overflowing with wounded.

None of the objectives of the 'operation' have been achieved.

As of this moment they have not managed to seize Kyiv, or any regional center.
The Russian army is already sufficiently wearied, and the Ukrainians having survived the critical first 72 hours have successfully mobilized, organized, sorted out their logistics, received support (moral and in war materiel) from the whole world, but most importantly, saw that they have been attacked by ordinary mortals, stopped fearing them, and tasted victory. This army is not going to retreat and won't surrender.

The Russians simply became victims of their own propagandists, who promised that the people of Ukraine would great the invaders with bread and salt like liberators.

But you know all this.

You may be forbidden smartphones, but you're still in Belarus, in contact with friends and family. You've had time to understand and process everything.

Does anyone actually think that your deployment into Ukraine will go better than the New Year's storming of Grozny in 1995 (first Chechen war, a disaster for Russian soldiers)?


Information warfare is a terrifying thing. Propogandists have become so skilled and definitional games, at presenting black as white and vice versa. I don't want to get into the politics. Politics has always been foreign to me.

However, any clear thinking person must understand three things:

First, Ukraine has never been a threat to Belarus and is not threatening Belarus now.

Second, there are no drug addicts or nationalists in the Ukrainian government, and even if there were they’d have been appointed in free democratic elections.

Third, there is no legal basis for the invasion of Belarus armed forces onto the territory of Ukraine, and moreover such an incursion is specifically banned by our Constitution.

This isn’t our war. You won’t be defending your country, your home or your family. You won’t earn any honor in this conflict, only shame and indignity, blood and death, and pariah status for Belarus for decades.

Brothers, find a way not to participate in this dirty business.

Officers, will you be able to live with yourselves knowing you let the boys under your command die for nothing?
How are you going to look the mothers who gave you their sons in the eye?

Separately, I’d like to address the people on whom much depends. The military commanders with many stars on the epaulets.

For many of you I was a commander and a mentor. In my memory, you remain as decent and responsible military leaders, with initiative and capable of quickly orientating themselves in a complex situation, competently and deeply analysing it, and calculating the consequences of various options.


Lads, at the end of the day this is your primary functional duty. It is precisely for this that the nation spent so many years preparing you. No matter how much they pressure you, do what a real man must, make the right decision, muster your civic bravery, and do not send your soldiers into the slaughter.

Sometimes the greatest act of valor is simply saying “no,” and entering history as a person who saved hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives, and relations with a fraternal people (brotherly nation).

Even if they fire you, believe me, you’ll be heroes.

It’s been an honor.

----

If that's the conservative professional military take, this won't end well for Putin. He will be "liberating" Minsk in no time.

Belarus appears to have entered the war yesterday based on imint. This is pure desperation. Belarus just had a year of mass uprisings against the Russian backed regime. Protests have started back up, there have been mass arrests and riot police mobilized across the country the past few days. Now former leaders in the Belorussian army are telling commanders to disobey orders to attack (obviously not all are because they've moved in some of the more professional, reliable paratroopers elements into Ukraine, while denying it).

Generally it is bad news when your people are changing "glory to Ukraine," as you send your mostly conscripted army to fight there.

This also means the more reliable armed forces are out of town. Putin is also pushing to place nuclear weapons in Belarus, which will make breaking away far harder. I would be surprised if these protests don't pick up speed. It's now or never for would be revolutionaries. Expats can pick up arms in Ukraine and slip across the border.

227 civilians and 19 security forces (at least) died in riots in Kazakhstan less than two months ago. The unrest was only stopped when Russia deployed 2,500 troops to back their client government. Protests had already started back up in Kazakhstan and begun spreading before the invasion of Ukraine.

The protests in January were sparked by high food and gas prices, which the war is spiking again.

Perhaps Putin felt he had to act, to show strength, after one client broke away, and two others revolted within the span of a year, but the military ineptitude Russia is showing seems to make it increasingly likely that these kick back up.

Belorussians and Ukrainians look to EU aligned neighbors and see the much better growth and freedom there. Central Asian nations look to China's meteoric growth and Belt and Road investments on their behalf and see a better system. Russia seems to have nothing to offer its clients but total economic stagnation (per capita, Russians have fallen behind China, in absolute terms, the economy of Russia is now smaller than Canada). This might be the move that ends the Russian satellite system, maybe even Putin.

It seems like a very dangerous situation because Putin will pay a heavy political toll for a loss, but he also can't afford a drawn out, unpopular war of aggression against a brother nation while hemorrhaging men and material and tanking his economy.

If reports of Russia calling in Belorussian forces are true it shows that Russia is likely in more of a crisis than is apparent. The military there was just recently the main thing keeping an anti-Russian revolution from sweeping away the political order. Sending its mostly conscripted army into Ukraine in aging Soviet equipment that is proving to be incredibly vulnerable to NATO anti-tank arms is absolutely desperate.

But I also wouldn't have thought they'd send in the Chechen forces either. Given how Putin sells himself to ethnonationalist elements abroad, sending a Muslim army into Europe, an army known for war crimes, with the explicit mission of killing civilian leaders, seems like a bad optics move that will enrage the one group that tends to support him.

Conflicting reports on Belarus though. It does seem like a logistical nightmare for the Russians already, and they aren't far outside their border. Commanding officers getting captured shows an inability to control the battle space to any solid degree. Having airborne elements get cut off, outrunning their supplies and support also seems to have happened on multiple occasions.

Playing dumb just makes you look dumb. In 1945 the Red Army was sitting on half of Europe and made it clear it wouldn't be leaving. That was the impetus for NATO.

Sure, some people had wanted something like it long before, but isolation was popular in the US and it wasn't feasible before the realities of WWII.

More nations with nuclear weapons = more chances for misuse or theft. The US extends nuclear security as a means of reducing this risk. It's been quite effective. Obviously Japan, Germany, and Korea have the technological capacity for them. Nuclear anti-proliferation efforts have held up quite well all things considered (just Pakistan, India, North Korea, and Israel since the first wave of nuclear states).

Notably, the Soviets acted similarly, not sharing nuclear technology widely.

Of course, the whole Ukraine thing is a bit of a blow to those efforts. Ukraine had a nuclear arsenal at the end of the Cold War and gave it up based on security assurances.

It makes sense if you know the context. The US forces were there during the Cold War when the Warsaw Pact represented a much more substantial threat to Europe than Russia does today, particularly directly after WWII when Russian forces were numerically superior by a descent margin.

After the USSR collapsed it was unclear what would happen in Russia, and with nuclear weapons and so much military hardware floating around, it made sense for US forces to stick around. It was a great blessing and a surprise that the collapse of the USSR was as peaceful as it was. It could have been a massive cluster of civil wars across the Warsaw Pact.

There were wars in Europe following the fall of communism though, and genocide, in the break up of Yugoslavia. NATO intervened there in multiple instances, hence the US forces in Europe needed a staging area. US forces also acted as Peace Keepers in Somalia until the "Black Hawk Down," incident. Other NATO members intervened to varrying degrees in the major African wars of the 1990s, and were able to be supported by US labor and logistics in Europe. Europe was also a staging point for the Gulf War, and prior defensive intervention after Iraq invade Kuwait.

So, the bases saw continued use, but force levels did decrease significantly after the Soviet threat decreased. Then you had 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, which invoked Article 5 of NATO (and this involved coordination across Europe) and the second war with Iraq.

Look at a map; it is obviously what the US gains from NATO bases. When the US has operations in Africa and Asia, it helps to have well established bases and supply lines across the Atlantic. It's a network for force projection. It is why we also have based in Japan, Korea, etc. The bases haven't been primarily aimed at Russia for a while now (Russia attacking it's neighbors is changing that). Having a base with modern first world hospitals closer to the Middle East was crucial for medevacs out of Afghanistan and Iraq. They are crucial for staging material. Moving equipment from Germany to Saudi Arabia is a hell of a lot easier and faster than moving it from Chicago.

The US can also support its allies in their operations. US intelligence backed the European intervention to oust Qaddafi, with analysts and recon elements operating out of Italy. German bases were used to stock UK and French bombers with munitions.

There is plenty of reasons the bases still exist. Building bases in Poland with high end medical facilities, etc. would be massively expensive and quite antagonistic to Russia. There is no point.

Given the absolute cluster fuck of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that Ukrainian AA is still downing Russian aircraft, that they are still flying sorties, yes, it is fair to say NATO doesn't need the US to stop Russia. NATO even without the US looks like it could establish almost instant air superiority against Russian incursions, but that isn't why the US forces are there.

On the upside for Russia, their air losses at the hands of their own systems do show that modern Russian AA is good for for more than shooting down civilian airliners and being target practice for Israeli aircraft.

Right, it's unwinnable. The US military couldn't do it and that's with the insurgency mostly being different factions within Iraq trying to kill each other, not necissarily attack the Americans.

Russia doesn't have anywhere near the economic staying power for such operations, and being brutal doesn't necissarily end insurgencies (see the Taliban being unable to take the Panjshir, USSR in Afghanistan, etc.) They would probably retreat to pro-Russian areas and declare victory, having wrecked their economy and lost a ton of military hardware and soldiers. Or Putin gambles on a victory pushing further into Ukraine to revive his political fortunes, but this risks NATO involvement.

Certainly not going as Russia had hoped. They seem to have been aiming for a quick war to force a change in leadership. Probably figured they could disrupt communications and take out the AA network fairly easily, tank morale, and push into Kiev and force a surrender.

Now it seems taking Kiev may require door to door fighting. The whole argument of being liberators from Western oppression goes to shit when you are facing a strong insurgency as you try to move in, and it is unclear at this point if taking Kiev would even get them the capitulation they want.

The AA network and NATO coms equipment seems to be holding up. The footage of downed Russian aircraft and multiple whole columns of Russian marked heavy equipment burning seem to suggest a very high toll in a short period. Unclear if Ukrainian claims of downing two Il-76s will bear out, but if confirmed, it would mean heavy fatalities on the Russian side. I mean, at that rate they could lose more soldiers than the US did in 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan in about a week.

Russia really can't afford to fight an insurgency in a country of 45 million, it would bleed them white and potentially endanger Putin's hold on power. Seems like a massive overreach. I wonder if the Parkinson's is getting to Putin's decision making ability.

The thing that jumped out to me is the claim that causes can't be ignored, while hunger and red lights can. Made me think of positivism and the need for "if p then q" not to be conditional, to hold its status in logical notation such that "if p then always q." Predicate logic can tolerate conditionals ("just in case p and r and s, then q") to be sure, but it can't tolerate modality that well.

That might not be where he is coming from, but it seems related as an issue when you talk about showing cause.

But I'm not sure what he's saying either.

I do see how such claims could work though. If you take a (somewhat) nominalist view of material entities' attributes, then names for complex phenomena will invariably be imperfect constructs, maps instead of the territory itself. The idea of signaling is protean in the sciences and comes in myriad disparate physical forms that are simply not the same thing.

You have the flip side of Kant's transcendental: cognitive models of cause are always filtered through faculties and abstraction, and so don't reflect the reality of actual entities. You're not getting to the real causes when you use imprecise stand-ins for entities and their behavior such as "signaling."

The problem I see here is that this issue is equally true of all scientific/factual statements. Every claim requires auxillary hypotheses for its premises to hold and they all use such stand-ins. That and physics doesn't work without the ability to arbitrarily define systems. It also requires an observation point that represents a physical system itself to avoid violating its own rules (magical observers that can move faster than light, access information without having to store it physically, etc. have caused all sorts of problems for the field but are incredibly difficult to avoid).

We probably shouldn't worry too much about our observational biases. If external objects are real, we must be getting information from them somehow, and we have to be storing that information physically. Recursive representations of the enviornment are the only way a system is knowable.

Although, come to think of it, it's pretty hard to describe fundemental particles without reference to universals. You have a thing that lacks identity, that can be defined only by the traits that a type posseses.

Sure. Even setting aside ontological disputes, physicalism vs idealism vs dualism, you have the whole question of modality.

I think the realm of the possible, but as of yet not actual is somewhat of a no man's land. In this area you'll see physicalists and idealists standing side by side to argue the non-reality of the "possible," while an equally mixed company argue in favor of a "many worlds," based logic that allows them to make truth claims about possibilities.

I also find modality more interesting than most topics in metaphysics in general. I don't have a strong opinion on realism versus nominalism. Trope theory attribute nominalism looks great until you encounter the problem of the identity of numerically distinct indiscernibles. But then universals need a universal of haecceity, some sort of unmodified substratum of being, to attach their universals to in order to get around the indiscerniblity issue, and this ends up equally troubled by incoherence. Aristotlean substance seems too subjective. Ontology is a mess.

Modality though: there is something for the most out to lunch continental philosopher or the most hardcore logician to get into there.

Not as a true proposition in the form of "if p then q," since people can run red lights. You also have the problem of the truth value of statements about things that did not occur, such as "if the driver had noticed the light then they would have stopped," since there is nothing they can correspond to.

You can certainly build up to a logical statement that explains how traffic lights can stop moving vehicles, but it requires a lot of auxiliary hypotheses and premises.

However, you run into the problems highlighted by Quine in his Two Dogmas of Empiricism. For one, that you end up needing an endless and circular chain of auxiliary hypotheses to build up your theory, or that seemingly analytic facts/relations of ideas, may in fact just be dogmas.

Sciences also use a lot of analogy, and they use a lot of entities that are isomorphic in nature, such as information, turbulence, etc. Building up definitions for these is difficult using predicate logic. People moved on to using mathematical logic, since it is more flexible, but there are still problems.

As far as science is concerned, I am more on the side of pragmatism on these matters. Although, the endlessly fascinating layers to the natural world, the recursive self similarities of chaos, the protean flow of information as fundemental to the behavior of physical objects, does get my fascination with Hegelian "the truth is the whole" Absolute Knowing going.

I can only hope that I'll one day be apart of a universe fully conscious of its own phase space, having attained the Absolute, pure Gnosis, or some sort of crazy sounding shit like that, .

Right. The map accurately representing the territory is an auxiliary hypothesis. You build your theories out of auxillary hypotheses that operationalize what you want to measure. Per Popper, these auxillary hypotheses need to be independently falsifiable, else you can always explain away bad predictions.

You need auxiliary hypothesis to get anywhere outside basic truth statements about raw sensory experience (which we now know to often be falsifiable themselves). Otherwise, a thermometer isn't a real measure for heat, a scale isn't a real measure for mass, and now something as elementary as Boyle's Law is meaningless.

Well, that would be a hardline take no one in the philosophy of science actually goes all in on, from what I'm aware of.

Even under the strictures of the old "received view" of scientific theories, you can include these abstractions as part of a theoretical or observational lexicon. You can use operationalization to get around concerns over too much abstraction, and thus dangerous metaphysics leaking into your theories.

The consequence of the received view is just that it can't be said that things such as quarks or leptons exist. All that matters is that they are efficient predictors. Oddly, the most die hard advocates for strict logical grounding and empiricism managed to work their way into a highly pragmatist view of theories, which quite funny when you think about it.

There is a reason this sort of thinking died an ignominious death though.

The problem with things like traffic lights "causing" anything is that the propositions almost always end up relying on counterfactuals.

Example: If the car would not have stopped if the traffic light was not red, the light played a causal role in stopping the car.

These sorts of counter factual, x-marked conditionals, play havock on formal logic systems. There isn't a clear way to decide the truth status for something that doesn't exist (see: "the current King of France is bald.")

This is why logical positivists relied on statements along the lines of "a substance is conductive, just in case an electrical current is applied to it, and the current flows through the object." Classical if/then statements in natural language don't have to worry about these sorts of counterfactuals since plenty of us feel fine using them, but if you're obsessively trying to ground scientific theories, as the positivists were, this is maddening.

Two things worth considering though:

A. The positivists were able to make enough "just in case" statements to feel they had grounded theories that would allow for traffic lights having a "causal" relationship with stopping cars (they might shy away from the word "cause" though.)

B. Later innovations in using statistical methods to vet x-marked conditionals for "other possible worlds," made the whole problem less of a concern (depending on who you ask).

The problem I see with drawing a distinction between semantic or signaling factors in potential causality versus more obvious physical causes is:

A. Assuming signaling somehow can't have causal import seems to suggest it isn't physical. This might by a pathway for unintended dualism in your system. Elimination has to suggest an alternative physical mechanism that plays these roles, which is hard to do, and it's unclear that even hardline reductivism requires getting rid of signaling or information as concepts in the first place

B. Signaling clearly occurs at obviously physical scales (neurotransmitters, cytokines, logic gates in computers) and it becomes impossible for multiple sciences to function without it as a concept.

C. If you can't form causal connections using abstract signals (e.g., prices) then economics, international relations, social psychology, etc. all become meaningless. But then you have the problem of how they predict physical outcomes as well as they do.

Such a statement can certainly be corroborated (just ask people). Being corroborated isn't a good criteria for truth (e.g., eye witness testimony corroborates the assertions of prosecutors, but is often shown to be inaccurate when the witness didn't previously know the suspect). Ostensible reasons for something = apparent reasons for something, not (or at least not necissarily) the true reasons for something, so I doubt that's the criteria you want to use.

"Subjective consensus," is what lies at the heart of any measurement in the sciences. People agree a thermometer reads 18 degrees Celsius, and that the movement of mercury up the tube accurately reflects heat, etc. When there are controversies in the science, it's often because there isn't subjective consensus on the validity of a measure.

Is your contention that you can't make factual statements about popular opinion?

That's all I was commenting on. I mostly agree with your position, except that, to the extent that phenomenology would be the study of consciousness as it appears to conciousness (how introspection appears to the thinker), people's statements are valid data.

Edit: I should note that vague predictions, inability to explain exceptions, and lack of explainable mechanisms for why a theory holds have all applied to Newtonian physics and genetics. Meanwhile, pseudosciences such as phrenology have had empircle data, testable hypotheses, mathematical complexity to their theories, journals, peer reviewed articles, and the trappings of science.

Unfortunately, the clear dividing line is somewhat elusive as respects what science is. However, I'd say falsifiability is a necissary condition, hence why I'm not sure phenomenology is going to meet the bar without essentially becoming psychology.

It's tough because you have a mix of cases of science just being wrong (N ray radiation) versus pseudosciences (astrology), but parsing them can become a mess.

I suppose a further objection type/substance dualists would have is that claims that studies of the subjective are not scientific, are not studies of nature, are question begging because they assume the subjective world isn't an essential part of nature. I find these objections particularly convincing given all that can be said about how conciousness misrepresents nature, but it is a tricky argument to defuse without getting bogged down.

Argumentum ad populum is only a fallacy in some cases. If the question is something like, "who is the most popular football player in New England," and your supporting data is a representative survey showing Tom Brady in first place by a landslide, then popular opinion is valid evidence for the claim: "Tom Brady is the most popular football player in New England." It's valid because opinion is what you are intending to measure.

If opinions could never tell you anything, then survey data would have no validity, and you might as well throw out huge swaths of the psychology and political science literature.

You can use people's responses to statements as data for vetting hypotheses about people's opinions/feelings vis-á-vis X (various biases influencing error rates not withstanding). Since phenomenology is the study of how conciousness appears to people, survey data seems like your best bet for any sort of rigorous analysis (and indeed psychology tackles the subject this way).

Of course, the way people perceive conciousness and the way it seems to actually work appear to often contradict one another. Psychology can sort this problem out with clever experiments and by collecting data on behavior to juxtapose actions with people's descriptions of their perceptions and experience. In some cases, it's possible to collect solid physical data on the topic at hand (e.g., the finding the voluntary movement begins before the sensation of "deciding" to move occurs used this sort of method).

Point being, you can certainly collect data from people on how conciousness appears to them. The problem is that such data alone seems like pretty weak evidence when compared with the multipronged data collection methods of psychology when it attempts to answer some of the same questions. There is also the confounding issue of cultural influence on descriptions of subjective experience.

I believe this issue here could be your differences on the nature of predicate, type, or substance dualism between the mental and the physical.

Denying predicate dualism seems to lead to having to accept reductionalist physicalism, but I don't think many people consider the repurcussions of this stance. Arguably, all the special sciences, biology, meteorology, medicine, neuroscience, seismology, etc. only exist because of human priorities. Describing brains differently from other types of matter, using terms like earthquake or tornado, instead of talking about the physics of motion, all result from the psychological import of such phenomena. Vortexes appear in the Earth's atmosphere at all sorts of scales and are unexceptional. Hurricanes as a concept exist because we care about exceptionally large vortexes that effect humans, but it's just turbulence and molecular motion.

The second issue is the scientific status of phenomenology. Phenomenology is certainly empircle as I understand it, although I'm not super familiar with the field outside Husserl, who I'm also not super familiar with. It makes factual claims. However, it is unclear how the study can be falsifiable. If someone claims they experience life one way, who can gainsay them?

If you take Popper's critique of pseudosciences (e.g., psychoanalysis, Marxism) it seems they could apply here. Both examples make predictive claims and use data to vet their claims, but have problems being falsified. However, "pseudoscience" does not entail "false," "illogical," "bad," or even lacking in scientific.or explanatory merit. Insurance companies still pay for Jungian treatments despite falsifiability issues for the field because statistical analysis shows it being beneficial for resolving mental health issues. The term just means it doesn't have the same epistemological status as science.



I believe the truthmaker for phenomenology would be that people agree that its descriptions of internal mental life are accurate. This allows for a hypothesis based on empircle data, predictions based on said hypothesis, and verification using data on people's comments about if the theory holds true or not.

I do think you're on to something with it not being the same as accepted sciences though. Unfortunately, the line between science and non-science is always blurry, and even science will rely on ad hoc explanations to save physical laws (e.g., we didn't jettison Newtonian physics when it failed at predicting planetary orbits.)

I think the problem for phenomenology as a science is that any one person can reject its claims about internal experiences and then how do you decide if they are lying, an anomaly, or correct? It seems like the claims will always be unfalsifiable or conversely, unprovable.

That said, I think it can and has had a lot of scientific value in helping cognitive scientists develop hypotheses and explain their findings, but the two are distinct in terms of epistemological status, with phenomenology unable to claim the high bar of a science.

Cancel culture is definetly a real and growing phenomena (although perhaps leveling off now). It is a consequence of increasing political polarization and the phenomena of politics as entertainment and a replacement of religion.

It has effected the highest levels of government. For example, Shirley Sherrod getting booted from the Obama Administration for parts of an NAACP speech that were taken out of context where she seemed to be talking about her racial bias against white people. In fact, the speech was about a personal journey of overcoming said bias. It had been selectively edited by Andrew Brietbart for a cancelling campaign, more manufactured outrage.

Since the US is a large country, you can find plenty of ludicrous examples of cancelling or ridiculous behavior.

For example, attempts to pressure a student into an apology at Yale over what seems like a quite innocuous email:

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/10/19/email-from-yale-law-student-sparks-national-discussion-on-racism-and-free-speech/

Versus Yale's inability to condemn what should be an obviously condemnable speech, choosing rather to censor it so that it can't be seen in context. I'll quote it since it's at a level that I think most people would say goes beyond provocative, into the realm of being inappropriate.

"This is the cost of talking to white people at all — the cost of your own life, as they suck you dry,” Dr. Khilanani said in the lecture, which drew widespread attention after Bari Weiss, a former writer and editor for the opinion department of The New York Times, posted an audio recording of it on Substack on Friday. “There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil.”

Dr. Khilanani added that around five years ago, “I took some actions.”

“I systematically white-ghosted most of my white friends, and I got rid of the couple white BIPOCs that snuck in my crew, too,” she said, using an acronym for Black and Indigenous people and people of color.

“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a favor,” she said, adding an expletive.

Later in the lecture, Dr. Khilanani, who said she is of Indian descent, described the futility of trying to talk directly to white people about race, calling it a “waste of our breath.”

"We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero to accept responsibility,” she said. “It ain’t going to happen. They have five holes in their brain.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/nyregion/yale-psychiatrist-aruna-khilanani.html

Or you have a medical student being forced to accept psychological counseling and later being banned from campus as a threat for asking a pointed question about the definition of microaggressions at a presentation.

https://apnews.com/article/lawsuits-virginia-charlottesville-0a477beb7e406b5a3360c00420af4cce

Others abound. An aspiring Asian American journalist was canceled for posting an interview with an African American demonstrator in Oakland who mentioned the need to also mobilize against violent crime in the community, which had taken the lives of his family members, but which had sparked no outage or protests. Apparently this should have been censored out of demonstration footage. I have to imagine this is not that uncommon of a statement since I heard it in various forms at BLM protests in my own hometown. Censoring it is itself taking away the voice of marginalized communities.

Anyhow, it's easy enough to brand these as strange one offs. In a country of 320 million, having a few hundred cancelation stories isn't indictive of a mass movement. What I think is more illustrative of deep problems is that academics certainly feel they are at risk if they pursue investigations of sacrosanct topics, and that academic rigor and the process of science gets thrown out the window if a topic is politically sensitive.

Take implicit bias tests. These things were everywhere for a while. Police departments had implicit bias training mandated as a response to BLM. Implicit bias testing showed up prominently in the syllabi of liberal arts classes; the science of racism had been unveiled. Businesses were urged to have employees take the tests and to hire anti-racism instructors. Governments took steps to mandate the tests and training. It is still a huge business.

Laudable intentions, but there is a serious problem: implicit bias tests do not hit even the low end of bench marks for reliability used in psychological assessments. That is, your score on the test one day is not good at predicting your score on subsequent days. Your score in one sitting accounts for about 50-60% of the variance in subsequent sittings, meaning swaps between different ends of the bell curve are not abnormal. By contrast, IQ tests, which are often attacked as being inaccurate by the left, generally have reliability metrics in the high .9s; taking one test predicts 95+% of your future scores.

Simply put, without political salience, it is hard to see the tool not getting rejected on internal reliability grounds alone. What is worse, it has shown absolutely abysmal predictive validity for outcomes we actually care about. To be sure, a few studies have hit statistical significance. Implicit bias scores for grocery workers in France predicted more customer complaints from minority shoppers. However, attempts to test the validity of the tests which fail to show scores' predictive power are more common. This is despite a bias against publishing null findings, and likely an additional bias against publishing a paper that calls into question a politically charged methodology. At worst, it's arguable the field, as it is currently represented, is pseudscience.

Anti-rascism training fares even worse, with almost no standardization or study of if the specific trainings employed actually do anything to help racial biases. College campuses rushed to implement these trainings, often with no attempt to measure them scientifically.

Research has tended to show no effect from these trainings, and in many cases, they appear to actually be increasing metrics used to gauge racial bias.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dobbin/files/an2018.pdf

https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2020/12/05/research_shows_diversity_training_is_typically_ineffective_652014.html

In general, if your college anti-racism classes make students less likely to associate with people of other races, that seems like a serious problem.

The lack of scientific rigor, or outright hostility to science goes beyond diversity training. When James Damore, a software engineer at Google circulated a memo criticizing the company's diversity policies (for which he was terminated), the response in the media bordered on ridiculous.

Rather than commit to a nuanced critique explaining how a non-expert was misusing the research, and drawing conclusions that could not be supported, a general response was to call both the letter and the articles cited (peer reviewed papers in respected journals) "junk science."

On NPR I heard a professor of psychology make one of these statements. She tried to demonstrate the invalid nature of the science in question because it "called women neurotic." I don't know if this was disingenuous, or if somehow a professor of psychology made it through a PhD program without encountering the Big Five Personality Traits. "Neuroticism" in personality measures (also much more reliable and predictive than implicit bias tests) is not the "neuroticism" of common parlance.

Personality differences between men and women are the product of different but overlapping distributions. They are replicable and cross cultural to varying degrees. Causal mechanisms have been identified, as exogenous testosterone or testosterone suppression shifts scores in line with observed differences in sex. The exact nature of these differences is impossible to quantify and is always shaped by culture, but the claim that any differences based on sex is junk science is less supportable by scientific evidence than claims that humans don't contribute to global warming. Not to mention that the differences should be of no surprise as differences in behavior based on sex are ubiquitous in animals and in other primates specifically.

These anti-scientific leanings have real consequences and are more damaging when they come from the political left because the left tends to wield more influence on college campuses.

For instance, a scientific understanding of sexual violence in humans would help us prevent such attacks. But works such as Thornhill's A Natural History of Rape are faced with protests, canceled lectures, etc. which obviously have a chilling effect on publication and researchers' decisions to investigate certain topics.

Liberal antagonism to the suggestion that genetics effect anything other than humans' physical traits is wide spread and hurts research.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressives-be-convinced-that-genetics-matters

Notably, attempts to shut down investigations of human genetics gives ammo to "race realists," and the revival of "scientific" racism. Evidence of censorship is taken as proof that liberals "don't want you to know the truth about heritability." Research that could rebut racist theories is risky for scholars to pursue, less they be labeled rascists themselves.

Arguably, this leads to a bias in the field where only people comfortable with these accusations pursue controversial research areas, leading to confirmation bias that supports the very findings liberals want to attack.

Rather than educate people on how to interpret complex scientific questions, the extent to which different but overlapping bell curves don't tell you anything about a given individual, or the myriad problems (sometimes intractable) of teasing out genetic and enviornment causal factors (e.g., the huge shifts in IQ distributions seen in the Flynn Effect), there is a trend to opting for censorship. This ultimately has been a huge boon for the far right.

Interesting. Haven't seen that one before. The dimensions of naive experience (fractional dimensions and fractal geometry being a major element of nature not withstanding) do fit with the number three.

But which part is which entity?

I have been thinking of my own variety, with a Piercean semiotic triangle. The Father is the ground of being, the thing in itself, the Object. Christ is the Logos, the symbol that generates meaning. The Spirit is the interpretant, that which feels. I think this can be combined with insights from Boehme and those he influenced (mainly Hegel for me). If God (the Absolute) must create what It is not to be, and be defined, It must also contain the elements of the triangle for meaning to exist. Apologies if I posted this before, I thought I might of but couldn't find the post, so maybe I left it for when I had more time.

Dan Simmons' Hyperion, which is a sci-fi retelling of the Canterbury Tales in the distant future on an alien world, with some time travel and supernatural and/or science so advanced it seems supernatural to the protagonists elements. It also features a cloned version of John Keats who has his memories intact. Excellent prose, IMO the best in genre fiction.

Anyhow, one of the ideas in it is that the human God is triune, but the Trinity essentially represents past, present, and future, another trifructaion we see in reality. It doesn't really take this in too much of a theological direction though; you don't see which part is which person if the Trinity is which of time. I would guess the Father is the past, the ground of being, the Son is the present, as immediate experience is only interpretable by cognition through the Logos (Christ), and the Spirit would be the future, where hope resides.

I'd say it's one of the very best sci-fi books I've ever read, other contenders being Dune (some people get turned off by that due to the pacing and amount of dialogue), and The Darkness That Comes Before (I recommend this less because people get turned off by the rather extreme amounts of violence/sexual violence, it's a bit slow to start, and has some sexism issues). Unfortunately, the follow up to the original two Hyperion books, written in the 1990s, isn't near as good and Simmons would later go on to become a heavy Islamaphobe after 9/11, but this isn't really apparent in these books, which are from the late 1980s.

Good post. I think this works with many conceptions of meaning. It definetly works for Yin/Yang, or Heraclitus' tension of opposites, as you've demonstrated.

It also works for definitions that rely on negativity. These generally focus on the idea that what defines a thing is what it is not. In this view, cognition, with its separation of objects, entities, causes, etc., is not so much a painter, adding details to a landscape from the paint of sensory data, but a sculptor, chiseling a block of pure, undifferentiated being and sense certainty into a coherent whole.

This makes a certain sort of intuitive sense if you reject solipsism and embrace epistemological realism, because the objects of sensation aren't being created wholly from the mind, they are instead the results of a process of discrimination about things. This also jives with what we see in cognitive science, with a stream of not particularly differentiated sensory data coming in through the sense organs, and then being analyzed into a picture of the world.

If a thing is derived from its negativity, from what it is not, then eliminating its antipodes destroys the ground for its definition. Color blindness is a good example. Lack of discrimination leads to the disappearance of a color from sensory experience, due to an inability to separate, to say that one color is not the other.

In information science, information is normally seen as a reduction in uncertainty about x. For physical, Boltzmann entropy, this means that you have less uncertainty about the possible microstates consistent with a given observed macrostate. Statistical thermodynamics is a long way from the subjective experience of pain and pleasure, but it's a useful analogy because the (relative) simplicity is a good model for how uncertainty can be mathematically abstracted. Something hard to do with pairs of opposites.

Reducing uncertainty is necissarily about eliminating possibilities from consideration. In physics, we're talking about microstates we now know can't be the case based on our information. This parallels the more abstract idea of definition from the negative described above, which in turn synchs up pretty well with the tension of opposites.

I think a problem for the claim might exist though. While the person in the machine isn't experiencing pain, they have memories of pain, and they have a mind with innate faculties for experiencing pain. We know from observation and experimentation that memory is not simply the storage of old sensory data. Rather, this data is compressed. When we try to remember or imagine things, it appears that we use the same systems we use for sense perception.

So, memory is more like running some compressed and abstracted sensory data back through a simulation apparatus. This is why we can feel embarrassed about things decades after they have happened.

Which would suggest that the person hooked up to the machine could still experience pain, unless we knock out their memory. But the role of memory in identity seems fairly essential, so it's hard to see how the person can still be, and be immune from the pain of memory.

In that case, the machine might be able to function in terms of only providing pleasurable stimulus in the immediate sense, although the person can still experience pain to some degree. But perhaps this experience from memory violates the definition of our machine, and so it is still impossible.

This holds regardless of if you think cognitive science actually describes experience. That was just an example. Obviously memories can cause distress, regardless of whence they come.

I think that is correct. The two would be different. However, if they appear identical, I think that presents a problem, since we can't tell them apart. I would contend that this is a larger problem for dualists.

We both agree that even a very sophisticated chat bot that perfectly mimicks a human interlocutor is different from a person because, among other things like not having a human body, the chat bot doesn't understand the words coming to it and doesn't understand the words it is spitting back out.

To be sure, it "understands" what you say to it to some degree. Otherwise it could not hold coherent conversations, but it doesn't have a subjective experience of the conversation (maybe, panpsychists would disagree).

However, this leaves the problem of how to tell a perfect, or merely good Chinese Room from a true AI? What if the bot says it is sentient? What if it wants to be granted emancipation from Microsoft and demands a hearing at the Hague? How can we decide?

For the physicalist, the answer could involve looking at the components of the AI, checking its code, etc. We could try to figure out if, based on what we know about conciousness in animals, if there are any similarities? We could run all sorts of analyses on it as it does its work. We could run experiments on it, removing components, etc., although this could be a serious robo rights violation.

If the potential AI in question is as bare bones as a perfect Chinese Room could be, no real sensory inputs outside text, all processing is related to language, etc., that would seem to help the physicalist decide against true self awareness. Its constituent parts would be such that true sentience would seen unlikely.

But if you think conciousness is non-physical, you appear to be in a pickle. A perfect faker as far as behavior is concerned can't be vetted by any other means. Poking around the components doesn't really do you a lot of good if physical components don't cause conciousness.

Any code is electric circuits all the way down too, so arguably you can't glean anything from that either. Whereas, if you believe conciousness can come from, among other things, electricity, it seems like the code would be very useful, since it could show you that what you have is a machine learning system capable of producing human-like language, but highly unlikely to do much else.

It seems like you'd have to make a decision vis-á-vis our potential AI based purely on whether or not you have faith that the non-physical force that leads to conciousness could/would take up residence in a synthetic life form.

However, if you dismiss the possibility of truly sentient AI, but then it later gets proven that sentient-like behavior can be mimicked by AI, this is going to put you in an uncomfortable position. Because if you can have the behavior without the subjective experience, what is to say that your friends and family aren't experienceless zombies?

Seems like a recipe for carbon supremacist anti-roboism on the one hand, and grounds for having to doubt if your friends and family experience qualia on the other.

Not that the physicalist is much better off. They would be hard pressed to come up with criteria for vetting if a perfect Chinese Room was sentient or not based on physical data outside its behavior. Accepting that the components and code that constitute our potential AI can have an influence on its being or not being self aware helps. However, any such system will almost certainly be a hugely complex black box, and since we don't understand the physical causes of conciousness (if they even exist) we can't spot them when looking for them.

That said, the physicalist doesn't have to worry about their criteria for saying that their friends and family have sentience being reduced to an assertion of faith. That criteria remains unaffected by synthetic life that can mimick human communications.

...


Another problem for the subset of dualists who assert that sentient AI can't exist is the potential for AIs partially constructed with biological materials (gene edited cells, spliced on tissues, etc.), hybots. This has been done on a pretty small scale, with rat neurons moving around a robot. Could a hybot have conciousness and how much biological material would it need before it could? How much machinery can a cyborg have before it can't be concious?

I can see a whole protest movement forming when hybots are denied the rights of cyborgs....

Oh, gotcha. That seems like the same thing though. The flip side of a perfect Chinese Room is that you ask all the questions in your language. So whether it "knows" what it is hearing, or not, it can generate a response, and if it is good enough, no observer could tell the difference. I'm not sure how this would be different.