Messages

391

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Russia/Ukraine Crisis 2022

« on: September 06, 2022, 10:50:05 PM »

I'm surprised at the number of people who seem to think Ukraine should be pushing Russia out of Kherson faster. If you have established an area where you have such a strong strategic advantage, and your enemy is struggling with troop numbers, then a brutal war of attrition in this area is exactly the right strategy.

Social media lends itself to emotions and groupthink.  In fact, its worse than that, because if you don't keep coming out with hot takes you can get dropped by the feeds.  So people who have one or two good insights, like Trent Telenko, get pushed to keep forming and sharing opinions which are not backed by years of study and experience.

I never saw the people who were sure that Ukraine would be defeated in three days, but they may have overcompensated in the other direction.

I think that many people's mental model of war is either a counterinsurgency or a NATO member against a much smaller, poorer state.  They are not prepared for something like the Ethiopian Civil War which goes on for years.


Edit: One reason why I don't like 'armchair quarterbacking' is that its easy to think of alternative approaches when you don't have the lives of thousands of soldiers, tens of thousands of civilians, and one of your country's largest cities depending on them.  Carrying them out is always the hard part.

392

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Russia/Ukraine Crisis 2022

« on: September 02, 2022, 06:34:27 PM »

One of the big challenges of mechanized warfare since 1940 is that it has too many 'moving parts.'  When infantry companies started to bristle with machine guns and mortars and rifle grenades and submachine guns by 1917, that was not such a big deal, because commanders could think "we send Bravo company to attack that position" and let the grunts work out the details.  But commanders now have to manage so many systems on land and air, and if they let any one slide a lot of people can get killed and a lot of irreplaceable equipment can be destroyed (General Sir Rupert Smith remembers that when his armoured division was ordered to the Gulf in 1991, a long list of figures in the government and the crown came to him to privately ask "and we are getting them back right?  We can't afford to replace them, you have every working tank engine we could find and Treasury is talking about a peace dividend.")  In the middle ages, just being able to use two types of troops together could win battles.

Its easy to make fun of Russian forces for publishing photos of the wrong thing and getting bombed or missiled, but there was the incident a few years ago where a jogging app was leaking where US servicemembers go for runs (which is often around the perimeter of an installation) and the US commander in Afghanistan famously thought that a shared Gmail account was a good way to communicate with his secret lover.  If NATO forces fought people with air forces and heavy weapons made after 1990, they would probably make some of the same screwups.

I think that flight trackers show massive numbers of NATO sorties along the borders of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia and the data they collect is going somewhere.

393

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Russia/Ukraine Crisis 2022

« on: September 02, 2022, 02:26:19 AM »

One good point I have seen is that since 1939, the formula for a successful ground offensive begins "get air superiority."  By spotting and striking targets deep behind the lines, the attacker pins the defenders in place, overwhelms some of them, and breaks through.  But in the Russo-Ukrainian War, neither side has air superiority: the Ukrainians don't have enough planes and the Russians have trouble using theirs.  That is one reason why so much of this war proceeds at a World War I pace, and why the Ukrainians were so desperate for weapons to counter Russian artillery (artillery is the cheap, short-ranged way to get the same effect).

394

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: History yays

« on: August 25, 2022, 06:43:39 AM »

The Museum of the Bible in the USA has returned another looted artifact: a bible from circa 1100 stolen from a monastery by Bulgarian forces in 1917 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/arts/design/museum-of-the-bible-looted-gospel.html

(as an aside; I think the early history of independent Bulgaria should be better known: they had 20 years of military power due to rigorous conscription and arms-buying at the beginning of the 20th century, kind of like Thebes in the 4th century BCE)

395

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Russia/Ukraine Crisis 2022

« on: August 19, 2022, 01:05:28 AM »

Here is one take on the (Russian language) booklet by Pavel Filatyev, a former Russian paratrooper who was sent into Ukraine from Crimea and left the military and then the country https://nitter.net/ChrisO_wiki/status/1560022545356791810#m

Kyiv Independent has a story about a section of the International Legion which seems to be run by a Polish gangster https://kyivindependent.com/investigations/suicide-missions-abuse-physical-threats-international-legion-fighters-speak-out-against-leaderships-misconduct

We will see when the Ukrainians try a major ground offensive.  But even on these days when there is nothing meaningful to report, a lot of people are dying and a lot of homes are being ruined.

396

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: History yays

« on: August 15, 2022, 01:08:45 AM »

A British-Lebanese artist is translating and publishing Arabic treatises on painting and inkmaking from the Abbasid period (750-1258) https://majnouna.com/

397

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: US Politics 2022

« on: August 04, 2022, 03:27:12 AM »

One of the many dangers of the minoritarian elements in the current US federal government is that it makes it hard for people to see whether their side really has a majority of force behind it.  As a friend says, Richard III might have kept his throne if he just paid more attention to votes in Parliament.  But there are not many ways to get rid of the current radical Supreme Court in the USA within the law.  The court can be expanded, but under US law those radical justices sit until they die, resign, or are impeached.  And that is a very dangerous situation, because the radical justices will be tempted to keep doing things the rest of the country does not support, and the rest of the country will be looking for ways to get rid of them.

398

General Chatter - The Boozer / Re: Pub: Thurs 28th July?

« on: July 22, 2022, 12:12:11 AM »

My talk on Summer School is that day so it may not work for me https://summerschool.scholar.social/2022/participants-signup/  Too bad!

399

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2022

« on: July 14, 2022, 11:37:43 PM »

Tamara Lich, one of the organizers of the Ottawa convoy protest, is back in jail after a judge decided that she violated her bail by attending a celebration to receive an award.

The inquiry will not allow the victims' lawyers to cross-examine the Portapique shooter's common-law partner on the ground that she was a victim of domestic violence.  Several aspects of her story are unconfirmed or hard to believe and prop up questionable stories which the RCMP is trying to tell (especially her claim that she spend all night in the freezing woods barefoot in a T-shirt and yoga pants, and only emerged on the morning to tell the police her story).  We know that the RCMP lied about only learning that the shooter was disguised as a police officer on the morning after (recordings show several people telling the RCMP on the night before that a man in a police car with a police uniform is shooting people) and its possible that they leaned on her to support their timeline or she was more involved in the preparations than she wants to admit.  Its obviously a difficult situation and many people who knew the couple say that she was physically abused by him.

Edit: Also, Canada accepted Germany's urgent request to return a Siemens tubine belonging to Gazprom which was being repaired in Canada by Monday 11 July.  That sentence embodies a lot of things about the Russian economy, Germany's post-1989 relationship with Russia, and the gap between the Trudeau government's rhetoric and its policies. Gazprom seemed so surprised that on Wednesday they made up an excuse why they can't accept the turbine and resume supplying natural gas to Germany at the full contracted rate.

400

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Russia/Ukraine Crisis 2022

« on: July 12, 2022, 02:30:29 AM »

Hi Bagatur,

  I am not good at talking about these things.  One of the utterly predictable results of Putin's war has been a wave of nationalism and xenophobia and binary thinking.  There has not been a lot of help for the Russians who fled to Georgia or Turkey or Kazakhstan and found that their credit cards did not work any more.  Many of the Russians who are dying are just poor boys from rural districts whose parents did not have money or connections to keep them out of the army, and Russians in Russia have to make hard choices.  There are too many soft people making hard talk on social media who will never face any consequences for their talk.

  I am analyzing the war as a war because that is an area of my expertise.  I can't moralize any better than anyone else, and I can't comment on the background to the war any better than anyone who reads newspapers.
...
Aside from attacking Kherson, I think the Ukrainian army may well strike south between the Dniepr and the Don to try and liberate the areas which have very little Russian military presence and threaten or break the land route from the Don to Crimea.  I think there are rivers between Kharkiv and the first railroad in Russian-occupied territory, and crossing a river against someone with artillery, tanks, and aircraft is hard.

401

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Russia/Ukraine Crisis 2022

« on: July 07, 2022, 07:46:32 PM »

Its been hard to follow the Russia-Ukraine war since fighting focused on the eastern front.  Now that most of the fighting is artillery exchanges and attacks on Ukrainian fortifications, not so many photos and videos come in to the public domain to let us test UA and RU statements.  I am skeptical of Ukrainian claims about how many of their soldiers are dying or how much more artillery the Russians have given that its in their interest to look like they need help.  Three general observations:

- Russia is engaging in WW I style offensives against prepared positions and can't cut off a 30 km wide salient.  Nathan Russer has stopped providing daily maps because the lines hardly move.  'Success' in operations like this is inflicting more damage than you suffer and I don't know who is doing better in that respect.
- Ukraine has mobilized its population, Russia still relies on volunteers and peacetime levels of conscription.  Among other things, Russian soldiers have many procedural ways to avoid the war as long as they are under peacetime law.
- Ukraine is receiving a flood of arms and supplies, Russia is isolated and had an economy which heavily depended upon imported goods

So just like in March, Ukraine's long-term prospects are much better than Russia's.  The next important event will probably be a big Ukrainian offensive in August or September.  If I had to guess I would predict it will be in the south where Russian forces are spread thin, farther from their supplies, and have not entrenched for eight years.

Edit: the other significant event would be action by non-belligerent powers to allow Ukraine to export grain from Odessa before people who need it starve

Edit: on 7 July, Russian forces announced an operational pause to rest and recuperate.  So Russia now states that it is unable to continue its last offensive in Ukraine https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-7 

Edit: also, for the past several months shell-dumps in occupied Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia have been exploding.  A lot of Russians and Donbas 'volunteers' will have died in those blasts, and equipment will have been destroyed.  So its hard to tell who is losing soldiers and equipment faster, just that Ukraine is almost certainly getting new equipment and recruits faster.

402

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2022

« on: June 28, 2022, 04:19:12 PM »

The Mass Casualty Commission found that the RCMP failed to send them some pages of notes from a conference call with the RCMP Commissioner and a RCMP officer in Nova Scotia.  These pages state that the Commissioner told them that their failure to release information about the weapons used by the mass shooter was harming the Trudeau government's plans for harsher gun control measures.  The government denies the allegations that they interfered politically but one of the people who was on the conference call says that the notes are correct.

In my view, police should always release precise information about firearms used in crimes.  This is important for public understanding of what happened, and for deciding what policy would be wise.  If most handguns used to shoot strangers in Canada are smuggled from the USA (as most experts suspect), then policy to reduce shootings should probably focus on discouraging criminals from doing that rather than say further restricting handgun ownership.  Police forces in Canada are currently very ineffective at finding the origin of firearms used in crimes and sharing it.

So its very very unfortunate that we have to squeeze this information out of public institutions with FOIPOP requests or (in this case) political interference.  And this story reinforces the suspicions of many gun owners in Canada that firearms policy is not being based on evidence and harm-reduction, but on pleasing ignorant people in big cities.

This is also a second way in which the RCMP appear to have mislead the public about the mass shooting in Portapique NS.

Edit: Meanwhile the NDP Premier of BC is resigning due to cancer, and the federal Green leadership contest has begun

403

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: US Politics 2022

« on: June 27, 2022, 05:42:37 PM »

Yes - I mean, the Supreme Court can very much be held accountable under the US constitution, but only by the aforementioned paralysed congress which isn't going to do it.

The only way which comes to mind is article 2, section 4 "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."  Maybe the justice whose wife was playing Robertspierre on 6 January and did not recuse himself from a case which turned out to involve her could be impeached, but for the rest being an authoritarian and/or misogynist is not a crime.  Kavanaugh seems to have a mysterious benefactor who helps with financial problems, but I doubt you could turn that into a bribery charge.  And it takes a majority vote among the Representatives and then among the Senators.

Not sure who would have to give their OK for expanding the court, but it would take a solid majority in the Senate to fill those appointments.

404

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: US Politics 2022

« on: June 25, 2022, 06:41:43 PM »

Its unfortunate that since congress became paralyzed (maaybe one big new law per two years), and anything one president decrees the next president can undo, the Supreme Court has become the part of the US federal government which can most effectively make broad, lasting changes in policy.  Because its not really accountable to anything outside itself, either democratically or logically (the US constitution is rooted in 18th century thinking before the administrative state, truly universal human rights, etc. so constitutional law is either barbarous or intellectually shoddy). 

My understanding is that before the late 19th century, it was never a crime in Britain to end a pregnancy before the fetus started to move (the quickening).  So these state laws outlawing all abortion (and drafted federal laws sitting in desk drawers) are barbarous even by 18th century standards.

Edit: many US states are now more restrictive of abortion than the Islamic Republic of Iran and most Arab states.  Enuf said.

405

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK Politics 2022

« on: June 20, 2022, 09:12:35 PM »

So the Times of London published a story that Boris Johnson tried to appoint his mistress Chief of Staff on a public salary in 2018, then called the papers back and re-issued them with a filler story about Priti Patel on that page. This story previously appeared in the Daily Mail in Feb 2022 but the reporter at the Times got more testimony from MPs.

Have you ever heard anything like that before?  If the Times was not confident of their right to publish, they would not have prepared the story.

Edit: and per the Guardian, the original source was a biography of Carrie Johnson by a senior Tory ... so if you wanted to suppress it, why not go after him?  It sounds like many 2018 Conservatives agree that Johnson tried to appoint her Chief of Staff while she was his mistress.

Edit: The PMO has confirmed that people at Downing St. asked The Times to pull the story https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-carriegate-times-story-b2105025.html