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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29777 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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Elon Musk's Shadow Rule

tl;dr After initially donating Starlink terminals and providing free internet at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Musk realized that it's actually pretty expensive to keep it on in a warzone, and asked the Pentagon to help pay for it, or he would turn it off. Eventually they hammered out a contract. Also, he proposed a peace plan involving Russia keeping some territory, which was roundly booed.

By all accounts Starlink has been a massive boon to the Ukrainians, since their ability to communicate basically hinges on starlink. But because he wasn't willing to keep providing it for free, he's a pro putin shill and a traitor to the US, and the service should be nationalized. It's not like the US and other governments haven't dragged their feet on providing the best firepower (ATACMS, for example).

Perhaps the counteroffensive grinding to a halt means a new scapegoat is needed.

You're underselling this a bit, some quotes:

By then, Musk’s sympathies appeared to be manifesting on the battlefield. One day, Ukrainian forces advancing into contested areas in the south found themselves suddenly unable to communicate. “We were very close to the front line,” Mykola, the signal-corps soldier, told me. “**We crossed this border and the Starlink stopped working.**” The consequences were immediate. “Communications became dead, units were isolated. When you’re on offense, especially for commanders, you need a constant stream of information from battalions. Commanders had to drive to the battlefield to be in radio range, risking themselves,” Mykola said. “It was chaos.” Ukrainian expats who had raised funds for the Starlink units began receiving frantic calls. The tech executive recalls a Ukrainian military official telling him, “We need Elon now.” “How now?” he replied. “Like fucking now,” the official said. “People are dying.” Another Ukrainian involved told me that he was “awoken by a dozen calls saying they’d lost connectivity and had to retreat.” The Financial Times reported that outages affected units in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk. American and Ukrainian officials told me they believed that SpaceX had cut the connectivity via geofencing, cordoning off areas of access.

To the dismay of Pentagon officials, Musk volunteered that he had spoken with Putin personally. Another individual told me that Musk had made the same assertion in the weeks before he tweeted his pro-Russia peace plan, and had said that his consultations with the Kremlin were regular. (Musk later denied having spoken with Putin about Ukraine.) On the phone, Musk said that he was looking at his laptop and could see “the entire war unfolding” through a map of Starlink activity. “This was, like, three minutes before he said, ‘Well, I had this great conversation with Putin,’ ” the senior defense official told me. “And we were, like, ‘Oh, dear, this is not good.’”

Note the second paragraph appears to be written in a confusing way - some read it as saying that he mentioned seeing "the entire war unfolding" to putin, but that's something he mentioned to the defense official.

Elon really can't win, can he? If he geofences off Russian-controlled areas, he's accused of undermining offensive operations. If he doesn't, then he'd be accused of helping the Russian military.

Note the second paragraph appears to be written in a confusing way

Yes, it's on purpose. Likely, details are being left out to support the preferred narrative.

IMO didn’t he violate the Logan Act by tweeting about diplomacy? Along with a million other people floating diplomatic plans. Going after Flynn on Logan Act violations always seemed like the most obvious lawfare simply because it’s never really been used and it’s broad enough I think you could construe Musks and many many others as in violation.

And it’s an issue I see with a lot of the novel legal theories. You can stretch a lot of laws so it matters that you have precedence using something a certain way.

there's a first time for everything, but the logan act has existed for 2 centuries and no one has ever been convicted.

Do you genuinely think that encouraging diplomatic solutions via tweet genuinely constitutes negotiating on behalf of the US government? What did he offer in these supposed negotiations?

Here’s the text

“Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.“

I believe a tweet can count as indirectly. You could actually have very engaged conversations online without ever directly talking. Musks tweets his thoughts. Putin blogs or tweets his thoughts. Then you give your thoughts on Putin thoughts. And then Musks controls the communication channels in the war via Starlink. So he can give Russia a real advantage on the battlefield. I think there’s a clear attempt to influence Russia - “a lot of us Americans are interested in this deal”. There is obviously a dispute since there’s war.

The statute doesn’t say anything about “negotiating on behalf of the US government”. It only says “intent to influence a foreign government”.

So yes as that statute is written I think he’s guilty and it’s not even that “novel” of a legal theory. Though it’s likely he would win later by challenging the law on first amendment grounds but that’s later so maybe 3 years in jail before the law is overturned. So still punished.

I think that a motivated lawyer can make the case that it does, and that a partisan judge will convict.

What's objectively reasonable don't come into it.

Empirically, it does. Unless you can point me to such a sham Logan Act conviction?

If Musk had simply gone to the DoD and told them that his company couldn't afford to keep providing this service free of charge, he probably could have reached a deal similar to the one he got much earlier. Instead, he started messing around with the service itself, and if that wasn't bad enough, he is alleged to have engaged in a little amateur diplomacy that resulted in his publicly proposing a settlement to the war that he had to have known the people he was ostensibly helping would find unacceptable.

I sit on the board of a nonprofit that relies heavily on volunteers. While I don't expect these volunteers to have the kind of dedication an employee would, nothing irritates me more than when someone volunteers to do something and then doesn't do it. No, you're under no obligation to help me. But keep in mind that if you tell me you're going to come and then don't show up it complicates things because now I have to rearrange my plans on the fly, and your absence may be the difference between finishing the job in one day and having to dedicate more time. If I know this in advance I can work around it, but I don't like surprises. Even worse is when a vendor reneges on a deal. Yes, I'm grateful that you're providing goods or services for free or at a reduced price, but when you change the terms a week before the event I either have to come up with money that's not in the budget or find someone else on short notice. It's probably not the best analogy, but the point is that just because you're doing something nice at your own expense doesn't mean people don't have a legitimate reason to be pissed if they get cut off before they've accomplished the goal you're ostensibly helping them with.

he is alleged to have engaged in a little amateur diplomacy that resulted in his publicly proposing a settlement to the war that he had to have known the people he was ostensibly helping would find unacceptable.

Even NATO officials have proposed deals where the Ukrainians don't get all of what they want, to furious condemnation from Kiev: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/ukraine-rejects-nato-suggestion-giving-up-land-membership

Everything short of 1991 borders is unacceptable to Kiev. This is not a very realistic war-aim. It's beyond Kiev's means, as Musk recognizes. Even so, his company has contributed about $100 million and an irreplaceable service. There is no alternative to SpaceX's tech, it's unique.

Instead, he started messing around with the service itself

No he didn't.

By then, Musk’s sympathies appeared to be manifesting on the battlefield. One day, Ukrainian forces advancing into contested areas in the south found themselves suddenly unable to communicate. “We were very close to the front line,” Mykola, the signal-corps soldier, told me. “We crossed this border and the Starlink stopped working.”

They are geofenced to not work in Russian-controlled areas so that Russia can't use them. Starlink continually updates this to match the situation on the ground, presumably with some allowance for contested areas. Occasionally Ukrainian advances have outpaced Starlink employees knowing about the situation and updating the geofence, particularly during the period being referred to when they made rapid advances. "Appeared to be" is the giveaway to be maximally skeptical even if you don't already know about the incident in question. "The media very rarely lies" but "appeared to be" here functions as journalist-speak for reporting Twitter rumors without bothering to mention whether those rumors were true. The New Yorker doesn't feel the need to verify the factual accuracy of the claim because he's not saying that appearance was true, just referring to the fact that it seemed true to thousands of people on Twitter who already hated Musk for his politics and jumped to conclusions after hearing about some rapid Ukrainian advances having their Starlink service cut out. The only plausible story of political interference (aside from sending the Starlink terminals at all) has been the claim he refused to disable Starlink geofencing for proposed Starlink-piloted suicide drones striking Crimea, out of fears of escalation.

alleged to have engaged in a little amateur diplomacy that resulted in his publicly proposing a settlement to the war that he had to have known the people he was ostensibly helping would find unacceptable

The article doesn't mention it but of course he has said exactly why he wants a settlement: he is concerned about a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia escalating into nuclear war and posing a major risk to humanity. His way of thinking here should be more understandable to this forum than most, since he has taken considerable inspiration from the same intellectual environment as LessWrong/Effective Altruism/Scott Alexander. His underlying motive is the same as his motive for Tesla/SolarCity (global warming), SpaceX (mitigate existential risk by making humanity a two-planet species), OpenAI (mitigate AI risk by having the developers take the risk seriously), NeuraLink (mitigate AI risk through interfaces between AI and the human brain), and Twitter (mitigate political censorship and the risks that enables). Not to mention sending the Starlink terminals to Ukraine in the first place, though that was more small-scale than his usual concerns.

He didn't try to personally negotiate a settlement because he sent the Starlink terminals and felt that gave him the right to, he would have done it anyway. He did it because, having made more money than he could ever personally use, he has been working to defeat what he perceives as threats to humanity. You might criticize his arrogance in believing he is capable of doing so, but Tesla and (especially) SpaceX have accomplished things that conventional wisdom considered impossible so it is perhaps understandable that he thought it was worth trying. There is obviously nothing wrong with criticizing him, I think he has made plenty of mistakes, but I wish people actually engaged with his reasoning rather than being like this article and rounding him off as Putin sympathizer or whatever.

During the pandemic, Musk seemed to embrace covid denialism, and for a while he changed his Twitter profile picture to an image of the [Deus Ex protagonist], which turns on a manufactured plague designed to control the masses. But Deus Ex, like “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a fundamentally anti-capitalist text, in which the plague is the culmination of unrestrained corporate power, and the villain is the world’s richest man, a media-darling tech entrepreneur with global aspirations and political leaders under his control.

I just skimmed the latter part of the article but this bit stood out. We get a "seemed to" and it's implied he...believes in a specific conspiracy theory because he once changed his Twitter avatar to the protagonist of an iconic videogame in which a bunch of conspiracy theories are true? But at the same time trying to claim Deus Ex as an anti-capitalist game that he is implied to be missing the point of? If Deus Ex is so leftist why does using it as a Twitter avatar signal a specific conspiracy theory rather than signaling leftism, not to mention signaling neither?

They are geofenced to not work in Russian-controlled areas so that Russia can't use them

That's possible, but all i have here is the New Yorker's assertion vs your assertion. Do you have a source or something?

My guess would've been that access would've been controlled by some method of authentication, so that the Ukrainian terminals would work anywhere but anything held by Russians wouldn't work at all, making such a geofence unnecessary.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-elon-musk-spacex-technology-business-c79c81ff4e6a09f4a185e627dad858fa

About the same time, Starlink terminals stopped working in newly liberated territories at the Ukraine-Russia front lines in the Kherson region. Ukrainian officials later said that was because the speed of their reconquest had pushed forces into areas Starlink that had “geo-fenced” to prevent Russia from using the service.

It was remarkably difficult to find this. Most of the news coverage, especially more recent news coverage, presents it as implicitly nefarious and either doesn't know or doesn't bother to mention that Ukrainian officials have stated what the issue was. Other than this Associated Press article the only other one I saw mentioning the actual reason was this Financial Times article quoting a third party.

My guess would've been that access would've been controlled by some method of authentication, so that the Ukrainian terminals would work anywhere but anything held by Russians wouldn't work at all, making such a geofence unnecessary.

Starlink was made free throughout Ukraine so I think it just works if you have a terminal without needing an account. Doing authentication separate from owning the device seems impractical, for many military purposes you want it running continuously and it's not like you want it to start demanding a password (that soldiers have to memorize) any time it loses power. By comparison apparently Ukraine has been supplied with some SINCGARS encrypted radios, they work like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SINCGARS

When hailing a network, a user outside the network contacts the network control station (NCS) on the cue frequency. In the active FH mode, the SINCGARS radio gives audible and visual signals to the operator that an external subscriber wants to communicate with the FH network. The SINCGARS operator must change to the cue frequency to communicate with the outside radio system. The network can be set to a manual frequency for initial network activation. The manual frequency provides a common frequency for all members of the network to verify that the equipment is operational.

But something like that doesn't work for Starlink, you can't have someone at SpaceX talk to the user and confirm he's Ukrainian every time a Starlink terminal is turned on.

Thanks! That's interesting, and is enough to make one doubt the original story.

Although, at the top of that article is the following:

Onstage at a conference in Washington, D.C., Shotwell [SpaceX President] said: “We were really pleased to be able to provide Ukraine connectivity and help them in their fight for freedom. It was never intended to be weaponized. However, Ukrainians have leveraged it in ways that were unintentional and not part of any agreement.”

Speaking separately to reporters from The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations afterward, Shotwell said SpaceX has worked to restrict Ukraine’s use of Starlink for military purposes.

“There are things that we can do to limit their ability to do that,” they quoted her as saying without offering details. “There are things that we can do, and have done.”

That drew the ire of a top aide to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In a tweet, Mykhailo Podolyak said SpaceX needs to decide whether it is on the side of Ukraine’s right to freedom or Russia’s “‘right’ to kill & seize territories.”

Which is also odd.

... It's very weird, in a grand sense, that we're trying to draw all of these conclusions from a few paragraphs of text scattered across a few small news articles, right? It seems easy for misunderstandings, intentional or not, to emerge from that. And that's not just a problem for this, but the whole project of 'understanding politics and the world via news'.

Speaking separately to reporters from The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations afterward, Shotwell said SpaceX has worked to restrict Ukraine’s use of Starlink for military purposes.

“There are things that we can do to limit their ability to do that,” they quoted her as saying without offering details. “There are things that we can do, and have done.”

That quote was specifically about not allowing them to directly control drones via Starlink, not "use of Starlink for military purposes" in general. They're fine with allowing them to be used for military communication but apparently not with drones carrying Starlink terminals so that they can be controlled by satellite without worrying about range and with less concern about jamming.

Reuters: SpaceX curbed Ukraine's use of Starlink internet for drones -company president

Speaking later with reporters, Shotwell referred to reports that the Ukrainian military had used the Starlink service to control drones.

Ukraine has made effective use of unmanned aircraft for spotting enemy positions, targeting long-range fires and dropping bombs.

"There are things that we can do to limit their ability to do that," she said, referring to Starlink's use with drones. "There are things that we can do, and have done."

Shotwell declined to say what measures SpaceX had taken.

Using Starlink with drones went beyond the scope of an agreement SpaceX has with the Ukrainian government, Shotwell said, adding the contract was intended for humanitarian purposes such as providing broadband internet to hospitals, banks and families affected by Russia's invasion.

"We know the military is using them for comms, and that's ok," she said. "But our intent was never to have them use it for offensive purposes."

Asked if SpaceX had anticipated Starlink's use for offensive purposes in Ukraine when deciding to ship terminals into conflict zones, Shotwell said: "We didn't think about it. I didn't think about it. Our starlink team may have, I don't know. But we learned pretty quickly."

The Economist: Ukraine is betting on drones to strike deep into Russia

At an early stage the Ukrainians appeared to pin hopes for controlling drones behind Russian lines on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, which work at frequencies and in numbers that Russian systems struggle to jam. A naval-drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea fleet in October reportedly made good use of this gap. But Mr Musk, apparently worried about the escalatory effect of such moves, has stepped in where Russian technology proved unable to. Starlink now uses geofencing to block the use of its terminals—not only above Russian-occupied territory inside Ukraine, but also, according to a Ukrainian military intelligence source, over water and when the receiver is moving at speeds above 100km per hour. “You put it on a boat at sea and it will simply stop working,” he says. So Ukraine’s drone developers now use a range of other, more expensive communication systems, with multiple systems often on the same vehicle. The success of the attack on February 28th in getting so close to Moscow suggests that Ukraine may be getting close to a solution that works.

Aside from Starlink's apparent desire to not directly serve as the command and control system for drones and Musk's stated fears about escalation, I wonder if the U.S. government played some part in that decision, like how the U.S. has been reluctant to provide Ukraine with long-range missile systems capable of striking inside Russia.

Washington Post: U.S. in no hurry to provide Ukraine with long-range missiles

Since last year, the administration has cited several reasons for holding back. Refusal initially centered on concerns that Ukraine might fire the long-range missiles into Russian territory, escalating the conflict into a U.S.-Russia confrontation. Even supplying the weapons, Moscow has said publicly, would cross a red line.

Whatever Moscow’s threats, those worries seem to have abated. The Biden administration has said it is satisfied with public statements and written pledges from Kyiv not to use U.S.-supplied weapons to target Russians beyond the border. Although officials privately concede there have been some breaches, Ukraine is said to have largely complied with those promises.

You should have doubted the original story from the beginning. The fact is that it's easy for trained, intelligent journalists to create 'misunderstandings' without actually lying. Musk was never accused directly of sabotaging the Ukrainians - he was just 'appearing to'. His presumed sympathy to Russia becomes an assumed fact. The actual explanation is omitted.

Journalists are not idiots. They write exactly what they want to. Take the phrase 'Musk seemed to embrace COVID denialism'. Elon Musk is one of the most famous and public figures in the world who makes a habit of running his mouth on Twitter, but this trained journalist apparently can't figure out whether he believes that COVID exists.

I like Musk. What he’s doing for Ukraine is uniquely valuable, and the article is an obvious hit piece with a tenuous grasp on reality.

But reversed stupidity is still not intelligence. The OP could have defended Musk, even excoriated the New Yorker, without stretching the facts. It doesn’t take a partisan hack to reveal other hackery. Instead, OP reduced the story down to the parts he found most favorable. Is that really any better?

That's possible, but all i have here is the New Yorker's assertion vs your assertion. Do you have a source or something?

This just made me realize I generally trust Internet commentors on themotte more than just about any mainstream newspaper. Why would I trust a mainstream newspaper on a culture war topic?

My guess would've been that access would've been controlled by some method of authentication, so that the Ukrainian terminals would work anywhere but anything held by Russians wouldn't work at all, making such a geofence unnecessary

Maybe works, but what how do you secure that authentication?

Ukrainian equipment and personnel can both be captured and interrogated to spill their secrets.

This is one of those age old problems in information transmission.

One of the ways to make the tech useless to the Russians, even if they crack all the security is to geofence.

This just made me realize I generally trust Internet commentors on themotte more than just about any mainstream newspaper.

Probably a good heuristic, sadly. Even if it is filtered from mainstream sources, as @curious_straight_ca says, people here at least have pretty solid Bayesian filters compared to the general public.

Where else are we going to get info? There's simply far too much out there to sort though, and the only way to manage the huge sorting problem is networking with other intelligent people and hoping that a collective effort can give a better sense of true information than an individual effort.

I'm genuinely curious how others think we are supposed to get good info - do we just spend hours and hours every day sifting through the news?

My heirarchy of news trustworthiness:

Top Tier: Happened to me or someone I know that I can ask about it.

2nd Tier: A trusted public personality that does their research has commented on the thing. Scott Alexander, Zvi Mowschowitz, Glenn Greenwald. I was gonna say "etc" but no other names came to mind.

3rd Tier: Well regarded comments from communities I trust. The commenters on themotte, or scott's blog, or zvi's blog all fall in this category. Well regarded blog personalities or podcasters, who post interesting stuff, but aren't necessarily doing the verification work, like Bryan Caplan, Tyler Cowen, etc.

4th tier: The rest of the world. Yes, I put the NYT on the same level as some random 4chan troll. I don't know their motivations, I don't know their standards, I don't know what they trying to sell, etc etc. I don't discount the possibility that other people may find these sources far more trustworthy. Some people like Scott and Zvi specifically use these sources. But I don't know how to read these sources to tease out truthful information. So they are still useless to me without an investment on my part into understanding these sources. And that is an investment I feel no interest in taking, because I've already got sources that work for me. If they stop working for me then things will get shuffled around the tier list, as they have been before.

This just made me realize I generally trust Internet commentors on themotte more than just about any mainstream newspaper. Why would I trust a mainstream newspaper on a culture war topic?

At least half of the information we discuss here comes directly from mainstream newspapers, and much of the rest is filtered through them. And the information that comes from newspapers is disproportionately about 'real things' like politics, business, and war, while the thing that come from internet journalists are more often weird internet or culture war drama.

Also, motteposters are wrong a lot, as demonstrated by how often we disagree.

Maybe works, but what how do you secure that authentication? Ukrainian equipment and personnel can both be captured and interrogated to spill their secrets.

The same way you solved that problem for every other network-connected piece of military equipment, of which there are a lot? That was just a "guess" on my part though, I don't have any particular knowledge about this area.

Preventing the other guy from using your stuff is a pretty common problem in procurement. You’d have systems engineers writing specialized anti-tamper plans.

At least half of the information we discuss here comes directly from mainstream newspapers, and much of the rest is filtered through them. And the information that comes from newspapers is disproportionately about 'real things' like politics, business, and war, while the thing that come from internet journalists are more often weird internet or culture war drama.

I'd say plenty comes from Twitter, blogs and real life experiences. And a bunch of the references to newspapers are because they are wrong and sharing stories we strongly disagree with.

And disagreements don't necessarily mean someone is wrong. There are a wide range of values here, and people with different values and the exact same information can easily disagree.

If I had to put my finger on why I distrust mainstream newspapers, it's that I'm not sure they place any value on real truth. They instead have a proxy measurement of "journalistic integrity" which means keeping your lies and misdirections within certain bounds. And those bounds seem to grow every year.

The same way you solved that problem for every other network-connected piece of military equipment, of which there are a lot? That was just a "guess" on my part though, I don't have any particular knowledge about this area.

There is usually a tradeoff between ease of access for the people you want, and security against those you want to keep out.

At least half of the information we discuss here comes directly from mainstream newspapers, and much of the rest is filtered through them. And the information that comes from newspapers is disproportionately about 'real things' like politics, business, and war, while the thing that come from internet journalists are more often weird internet or culture war drama.

How is that an argument for trusting mainstream newspapers on a culture war topic? Literally nothing here makes the argument that they aren't manipulating the information they pass on to the public.

Also, motteposters are wrong a lot, as demonstrated by how often we disagree.

Newspapers can be wrong all they want, it's their dishonesty that's the problem. Also, likelihood of falling for obvious hoaxes.

How is that an argument for trusting mainstream newspapers on a culture war topic

It isn't, it's an argument that we do already trust mainstream newspapers as much as we trust random internet commenters in many areas.

Newspapers can be wrong all they want, it's their dishonesty that's the problem

I think most instances of newspaper 'dishonesty' that we identify are more unintentional mistakes or poor socially influenced reasoning that's amplified due to other social dynamics, rather than the kind of thing you're (presumably) imagining where someone says or thinks 'wow, we better not post this because it proves our enemies right!'. The reason I think this is you can watch that happen organically in internet communities of both left and right wingers, and the information they produce is less reliable than that of the media. Not that explicit intentional dishonesty doesn't exist, it's just much less common - and it's also not obvious it's more frequent in the mainstream media than random internet people.

I think most instances of newspaper 'dishonesty' that we identify are more unintentional mistakes or poor socially influenced reasoning that's amplified due to other social dynamics, rather than the kind of thing you're (presumably) imagining where someone says or thinks 'wow, we better not post this because it proves our enemies right!'.

I've seen people make this kind of distinction when talking about honesty in general as well as honesty by journalists specifically, and I don't really see how there is a distinction. Making unintentional mistakes or using poor socially influenced reasoning is how a motivated person acts on their belief of "wow, we better not post this because it proves our enemies right!" Almost nobody likes to think of herself as a Machiavellian amoral manipulator and so most people's brains have mechanisms to protect them from such a belief while still enjoying all the advantages of getting to act like one. Making unintentional mistakes (that inevitably follow a pattern of bias in some direction) or not activating one's skepticism towards and protection from the social dynamics that influence one's reasoning is one such mechanism that allows someone to (honestly convince themselves that they) have the cake and eat it too.

For the layman, one might be able to generously extend them enough charity to acknowledge that they're just not to be expected to understand their own biases and how to properly account for them. I don't think we can extend such charity to self-proclaimed journalists. Such people have an active responsibility to convey the truth that they themselves volunteered to take on, and step one of that must be accounting for unconscious mistakes one will inevitably make in a way that confirms their own biases and flatters themselves and their in-group while denigrating their out group. If they haven't taken steps to proactively counter this bias within themselves, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that they are being dishonest, just in a clever way that allows them to honestly convince themselves that they aren't being dishonest.

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I think most instances of newspaper 'dishonesty' that we identify are more unintentional mistakes

I don't believe for a moment that the anti-Musk article that started this thread was an honest mistake, any more than Cade Metz' article attacking Scott was.

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It isn't, it's an argument that we do already trust mainstream newspapers as much as we trust random internet commenters in many areas.

Or, in fact, a little bit less, as cjet was pointing out.

I think most instances of newspaper 'dishonesty' that we identify are more unintentional mistakes or poor socially influenced reasoning that's amplified due to other social dynamics,

The difference between these two is illustrated by this meme. Even if newspapers' dishonesty is not a result of Machiavellian power games but social dynamics, the fact is they know the negative social dynamics are there, and are doing absolutely nothing to stop them, and are in fact looking for ways to promote them even more.

rather than the kind of thing you're (presumably) imagining where someone says or thinks 'wow, we better not post this because it proves our enemies right!'.

Given the popularity of "don't give ammo to the rightoids" argument on progressive forums, I'm pretty sure that this is also happening quite often. We would of course need access to journalist's private communications to prove it either way, but that just means your denial of it happening is completely irrelevant.

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That's BS. What he messed around with was disabling starlink use for drone guidance.

The deal was comms for units, not that they're going to use these starlinks to operate drones remotely.

That feels like quite the arbitrary distinction, why would someone be ok with providing the infrastructure to coordinate more effectively and call in artillery, but not be ok with using it to guide drones?

Maybe there's something I'm missing, but this sounds like a restriction put in place by someone who doesn't really understand warfare.

It's the condition SpaceX set at the outset. And I doubt it's critical in calling in artillery, you only need ~30 km range there. Odds are whoever's flying drones is using spread spectrum radio to contact the battery, which is necessarily close to the observed area.

It's possible it's related to some bullshit in 'laws of war' which e.g. make it okay to shoot a civilian in the act of snitching on you to the enemy, but make it illegal to execute him after the act.

I was ready to agree that public opinion is dumb and people have unrealistic expectations. Then I read the article.

I still think people are being hyperbolic, but now I’m inclined to think the same of your summary. Leave the whataboutism and the hysterics about “nationalizing” Starlink to Twitter.

They’re calling Musk a shill because he brags about friendly chats with Putin. And he didn’t just decide to cut service out of his shrewd financial obligations; he had one of those chats and then (allegedly) chained Starlink to the Ukrainian side of the front. Those are pretty central examples to gloss over, don’t you think?

To be clear, I’m not sympathetic to the detractors. They dodged the entire procurement, contracting, etc. process out of urgency, and now it’s bitten them in the ass. The correct thing would have been to treat Musk as a vender (sic) and get him under contract before he went on another flight of fancy. The New Yorker isn’t going to win any awards for its performative surprise. I’m pretty sure they just hate and fear the guy.

But come on, your summary is just shilling in the other direction.

Most of this article is just a biography of Musk. While it's somewhat interesting, I would have liked to hear more about how he's become embedded in the world of national security.

But because he wasn't willing to keep providing it for free, he's a pro putin shill and a traitor to the US, and the service should be nationalized

He had a really bad PR oopsie a while back where he was indeed parroting Putin's propaganda, and he basically called for Ukraine to unilaterally surrender and run "referenda" in areas that the Russians have been aggressively ethnically cleansing. He rightfully received pushback for that. The bit about him being a "traitor to the US" is just you bashing a strawman.

how long will it take ukraine to take back those disputed regions, if ever? at some point concessions will probably have to be made on both sides. even if you disagree, these questions are legitimate

While the current counteroffensive is certainly very lackluster, it's silly to just extrapolate a straight line on the rate of progress and thereafter assume nothing will change.

Also, sliders is correct: Putin has not offered peace on the current lines. Any ceasefire would essentially necessitate Ukraine's unilateral surrender, which would mean giving up lots of territory they currently control.

A ceasefire doesn't involve giving up anything. It's simply a cessation of hostilities, usually for both sides to hammer out a more permanent agreement. The issue is that Ukraine doesn't want to give Russia more time to get their shit together, and thinks they can continue to make gains.

While the current counteroffensive is certainly very lackluster, it's silly to just extrapolate a straight line on the rate of progress and thereafter assume nothing will change.

You're right that it would be silly to just find the angle of the line on the chart and zoom off into infinity - but luckily we don't actually have to do that. Serious people who are interested in these kinds of conflicts can actually take the historical context and modern situation into account when doing their extrapolations... it's just that when you do that you tend to arrive at conclusions unpopular with the PMC. Conclusions like "Ukraine has zero chance of winning this war", "The counteroffensive was a massive failure that wasted lots of Ukrainian lives" and "Putin's propaganda is substantially less effective at influencing popular opinion in the west than western propaganda". People have been advocating for peace and negotiation rather than continued conflict because they (correctly) view the continuing bloodshed as futile, and throwing more Ukrainian lives into the blender is just going to make things worse when the fighting comes to an end. If I actually hated Ukrainians, I'd encourage the US military to send them more fancy toys to encourage them to fight to the death in a suicidally quixotic quest to maximise shareholder returns in the US military industrial complex and degrade Russian military capability.

And just to show that I'm serious about these claims, I'll throw 200 USD in monero into escrow with the bet that Ukraine does not regain Crimea and the breakaway republics by the end of hostilities. If I'm just swallowing Putin's propaganda then this is free money sitting on the table, just waiting for you to pick it up and take it. But I will note that I haven't encountered a single person who believes the western propaganda enough to actually put any money on the line - to me it feels remarkably similar to people talking about how awful racism is then moving their children into 90% white suburbs.

"Ukraine has zero chance of winning this war"

Anyone who thinks they can say with absolute 100% certainty which way this war will end isn't doing serious analysis. After Putin's thunder-run towards Kiev sputtered, the war has come down to the question of "who has the advantage in a drawn out conflict?" This is something that nobody has answered convincingly, despite claims of doing so from both sides. Russia has the benefits of a larger population and the political cohesion of a single dictatorship, while the West has a far larger economic base and Ukraine has motivation. Put another way, the outcome of this war will be almost totally decided by the West's political willingness to send equipment. The concern-trolling argument of "Western equipment does nothing but kill more Ukrainians as they faceplant against the invincible Russian Bear" was trotted out before Kharkov and Kherson as well, and it was just as silly then as it is today.

At this point, I personally judge the outcomes as something like the following:

  • 10% chance that Russia wins big and takes far more than what it currently occupies.

  • 40% chance that things stalemate with only minor additional changes to occupation lines (say, Russia gains or loses less than +/-50% of what it already controls), with an eventual Korea-style cease-fire.

  • 30% chance that Ukraine eventually cuts the land bridge, possibly leading to a "Russia gets to keep Crimea in exchange for leaving" style peace.

  • 20% chance that Ukraine wins big and retakes everything up to its 1991 borders.

Your bet seems like even-money to me, mostly because you list the breakaway republics in there as well. Crimea seems to hold a significant place in Russian thinking, so I wouldn't bet against you there. But Donetsk and Luhansk were never really essential to Russia other than as a way to leverage influence in Ukraine. I could see them being traded away for peace if Russia thought its hold on Crimea was seriously threatened and the land bridge had already been cut. Of course, Putin doesn't want to give away anything at the moment, so resolution is likely still more than a year away.

Anyone who thinks they can say with absolute 100% certainty which way this war will end isn't doing serious analysis.

I don't claim to know exactly how the war will end - there's all sorts of potential black swan events that could change how things play out. If I see a barn on fire, I don't know exactly how it will end either - maybe it'll collapse, maybe it will simply burn to ash, maybe some rain will put it out. But I don't have to know exactly how it will end to rule out any options that leave it standing perfectly unharmed. Ukraine does not have the blood, treasure or military force to achieve their stated goals. Casualties are too high and the West is already making noises about cutting off the flow of treasure - don't forget that Trump is waiting in the wings too(ignoring fantasies or delusions about him being a Russian stooge, he has actually said that he wants to stop arming Ukraine). Even then, the sheer number of Ukrainian casualties and war dead is too high a number for even more US weaponry to overcome, given that Russia views this conflict as existential in nature(and have said so repeatedly wrt a NATO aligned Ukraine) to the point that they really can't back down.

I disagree with your proposals but at the same time I don't think there's any real way to settle the debate in the present moment. The fog of war is too thick and accurate information about what's happening on the battlefield is hard to come by. But I simply do not believe that Russia is willing to accept any kind of NATO-aligned regime on their doorstep, and they have no motivation whatsoever to pull back or retreat. At the same time Ukraine does not have the human or military capital required to achieve their stated goals. Of course, the bet is still on the table if you want to pick it up...

I don't claim to know exactly how the war will end - there's all sorts of potential black swan events that could change how things play out. If I see a barn on fire, I don't know exactly how it will end either - maybe it'll collapse, maybe it will simply burn to ash, maybe some rain will put it out. But I don't have to know exactly how it will end to rule out any options that leave it standing perfectly unharmed.

What? Nobody has said that Ukraine will leave this conflict "unharmed", i.e. without a lot of pain and suffering, which is obvious because that's already happened and will continue happening.

On the other hand, if you're trying to make a point about the certainty of your conclusions then this analogy doesn't make sense to me.

the sheer number of Ukrainian casualties and war dead is too high a number for even more US weaponry to overcome

If the West opened the floodgates of weapons to Ukraine, Russia would almost certainly be toast in the medium term. Their only realistic options would be defeat or nuclear escalation. Modern conventional weapons are just spectacularly lethal, and the West's combined economic might completely dwarf that of Russia's.

Running out of manpower won't be a concern for either side for a long time yet. There might be concerns about manpower quality as they conscript more and more, but Ukraine and Russia are both far, far away from running out of people in a general sense.

Russia views this conflict as existential

They have every incentive to say this, since it's basically just akin to "we're really committed to the war". The conflict might be existential for Putin, but Ukraine doesn't have mass territorial ambitions on Russian land, so it's hard to see how this would be existential in any meaningful capacity. The most plausible way for it to become existential would be if a civil war happens as a result of defeat, but if that's the primary fear then Russia would be better served by withdrawing and focus on averting that instead.

I simply do not believe that Russia is willing to accept any kind of NATO-aligned regime on their doorstep

There are already several of these, and indeed Finland got added to that camp because of this war.

On the other hand, if you're trying to make a point about the certainty of your conclusions then this analogy doesn't make sense to me.

From my perspective and understanding of the situation the idea that Ukraine will take back Crimea is on the same level as a burning barn deciding to put itself out. There's no path from the current situation to them achieving their goals - any kind of nuclear exchange just immediately ends the world, and Ukraine does not have the manpower or resources to take back the contested territories without mushroom clouds.

Running out of manpower won't be a concern for either side for a long time yet. There might be concerns about manpower quality as they conscript more and more, but Ukraine and Russia are both far, far away from running out of people in a general sense.

The lack of quality in terms of troops is exactly what you would expect to happen when they start running out of actually fit recruits. Though I don't think this argument can actually be settled because the precise numbers are closely guarded military secrets. My interpretation of the information around recruiting efforts and the relative "success" of the counter-offensive is that Ukraine is having manpower problems and is unable to provide quality soldiers in enough numbers to make a difference despite incredibly heavy-handed and corrupt conscription efforts. But again there's no real way to settle this without access to that red hot information.

The conflict might be existential for Putin, but Ukraine doesn't have mass territorial ambitions on Russian land, so it's hard to see how this would be existential in any meaningful capacity.

I don't understand how the conflict could be existential for Putin given that he's reportedly a strongman dictator who doesn't have to care about his public reputation, but Ukraine absolutely does have important territorial ambitions for Russian land. Crimea is a vitally important base for Russia, and if they don't have control over that area someone could just go and bomb the gas transit pipelines they spent so long setting up. I think it is fair to say that the US certainly viewed the Cuban missile crisis as an existential threat, and I think there's a very direct equivalence to the idea of Ukraine becoming a NATO outpost. To the best of my knowledge, the reason they view it as an existential threat is that they think NATO missile interdiction systems would give US authorities the false belief that they'd be able to win a nuclear exchange.

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I would not take Russian public insinuations at what is or isn't existential to them at face value.

This isn't an insinuation but a direct positive statement about what a NATO-aligned Ukraine sitting on their border would mean, and I don't see any convincing argument against the idea that allowing the US military to set up a large base and fortified position directly adjacent to their border and with the ability to cut off access to important infrastructure isn't actually an existential threat to Russia. Do you think that the US would just sit there and do nothing if a coup took place in Mexico and the new government went on to join the BRICS and start hosting large numbers of Russian and Chinese military equipment/forces?

People who are not weird Internet guys don't take bets. Betting because you believe something is going to happen is not a normie thing outside a few restricted cases like sports bets, and even then, that's done more out of the hope that one's team will win rather than the belief that they will.

People who are not weird Internet guys don't take bets.

I don't disagree at all, but I am a weird internet guy and I assumed that this rationalist website would also have other weird internet guys on it.

that's done more out of the hope that one's team will win rather than the belief that they will.

To be fair, not sure this is true, especially in things like horse racing.

People who are not weird Internet guys don't take bets.

This is like saying "normal people don't run around in animal costumes" at a furry convention.

Betting because you believe something is going to happen is not a normie thing outside a few restricted cases like sports bets, and even then, that'sdone more out of the hope that one's team will win rather than the belief that they will.

It's done for fun, the thrill of the risk. And lots of people make bets to resolve a dispute.

This is like saying "normal people don't run around in animal costumes" at a furry convention.

Furries claim to be expressing personal preferences, not universal beliefs that apply to everyone.

And lots of people make bets to resolve a dispute.

Maybe if "lots" means "at least 2", but pretty much everyone outside the rationalist bubble would refuse to do so.

Furries claim to be expressing personal preferences, not universal beliefs that apply to everyone.

Well, he was offering a specific bet to a specific person right here, so it seems fair to point out we're in weird internet people central.

Maybe if "lots" means "at least 2", but pretty much everyone outside the rationalist bubble would refuse to do so.

I don't know what to tell you. "At least 2" would be the amount of normies I've personally run into who claim to have made money off of Trump's election. Beyond that "wanna bet?" was the quickest way to resolve a dispute since I was like 10. Granted, people quickly learn not to take such bets unless we were damn sure about the result, but this is exactly what bets are supposed to do in rat-discourse. If you really want to take a jab at rationalists, make fun of them for reinventing something children come up with on their own, and acting like that makes them smart.

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They have never been offered peace. I played around with Russian nationalist views in the beginning. They were always maximalist. Land for peace has never been offered. And more broadly they would need peace on terms that mean peace and not what happened to Chechnya where it was peace until Russia was strategically stronger.

I wouldn’t be shocked if places like Mariupol are never populated again. Neither country has the population. Though supposedly Russia had plans to move 300k people there but Russia isn’t a state that’s overpopulated.

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