domain:asteriskmag.com
Dean
10m ago
No, Russia did not aim to conquer all of Ukraine with the thunder run to Kiev, fielding maybe 200-300,000 men in all theatres. They hoped the Ukrainian state would disintegrate and that they could install a new government.
Yes. This is the retreat to the semantic bailey that I noted before.
That the Russians thought they only needed 200-300,000 men in all theaters to overthrow the Ukrainian government, rearrange borders, and establish a compliant state that would implement the Russian kill-lists on pro-western influencer persons was incompetent, but that is what they thought they needed for what they tried to do. That the Russians were incompetent does not negate the intent, which is why the semantic retreat simultaneously tries to ignore intent and then quibble on the back end what conquest entails if it does succeed.
That's an interesting choice of words. The US has, in marked contrast to Mearsheimer's proposals, created a coalition of Russia, China and Iran!
This goes back to the point that it's not a contrast, but simply a non-falsifiable assertion that can politely ignore that Mearsheimer's proposals also created a basis for a coalition of Russia, China, and Iran.
It's also another example of Mearsheimer's tendency to slide into hyperagent / hypoagent faming bias, which is another of Mearsheimer's common failings in international affairs. The US creates conditions, other actors have conditions imposed by the US, their own leader's, and so on.
Wilhelm was a strategic genius compared to what passes for American leadership.
This is another one of those claims where it's evident you aren't really party to the cultural touchpoint for the reference, and miss the metaphor.
I'll skip forward a bit because this is all old hat at this point that's been hashed a dozen hundred times at this point, just to point to a thing I think makes the general point better for the audience.
If you use some niche definition of air superiority like 'controlling the airspace directly above the grey zone so much that your aircraft can fly at all altitudes unmolested by AA' then sure, I guess the Russians don't have air superiority. Though that definition sounds rather more like air dominance. In practical terms if you're being bombed by enemy aircraft much more than your aircraft are bombing the enemy, then you don't have air superiority. In practical terms, why would the Russians fly any closer than needed to an enemy with plentiful SAMs, Manpads and so on? Do they need to be firing their cannons before they have air superiority? The practical definition is the superior definition because it actually matters and is relevant to the substance on the ground. The Russians can use air power to bomb/ATGM the Ukrainians, not with impunity but with considerable effect. That's why normal people and even such revered institutions as the Atlantic Council agreed that Russia had air superiority.
What is the point of these perverse language games?
The point of perverse languages games is as you just demonstrated: to claim the connotations of a state of affairs described by a descriptive doctrinal ('niche') definition, when the conditions to meet that state aren't being met, by substituting a watered down ('practical') definition that can be retreated to if challenged but otherwise can be used to claim the authority / argumentative advantage of the stronger descriptive definition.
In other words, a banal motte-and-bailey argument.
The motte is that a Ukrainian offensive was obviously a non-starter idea because the Russians were [controlling the airspace directly above the grey zone so much that their aircraft can fly at all altitudes unmolested by AA], the bailey is that Russians could apply enough air power from a distance and didn't need to be closer to have effects, and the discrepancy is that the conditions implied by being able to fly over the enemy unmolested are not the same conditions if you refuse to fly over the enemy because they still have plentiful SAMs, MANPADs, and so on.
This discrepancy matters, because the difference between those two states is what determines the viability of limited offensives. After all, it's not like Russia suddenly or just recently in 2023 gained the superior air position- there had been two separate major Ukrainian successes that occurred regardless.
I'm lost for words. Europe, which contains two nuclear powers, is weaker than Ukraine with European support? Europe, with thousands of aircraft, is weaker than Ukraine which might get a few F-16s to supplement a handful of remaining Soviet aircraft?
Your loss of words is forgivable, given your evident lack of familiarity with the European capabilities and force generation issues, or the degree of European military support to Ukraine.
Yes, the Europeans, with their thousands of planes, lack the land force to match what Ukraine has fielded in a context which has demonstrated there is no substitute for land force volume. Much like Russia, the investment in their aircraft and nuclear weapons do not, in fact, automatically translate to land force capability, and unlike the Russians the Europeans have not been investing for many years to generate a large standing ground army.
As such, the Europeans could try to prioritize all resources into generating a large, cohesive, land force by the time the Russians finish the Ukraine War, or they could funnel resources to empower the already large, cohesive land force so the Russians can't finish the Ukraine War.
It doesn't matter whether E > U or U >E, but rather if E < R, and U < R, but E + U > R.
Didn't you just say the Russians were a worn-out husk?
I think we could both CTRL-F the previous arguments to find out if I did, or if you just attempted a perverse language game for a strawman that reverses a position in the previous post.
fauji
22m ago
I think its more like a gamble. They are betting that the economy will improve and that would carry them over. Since the inflation eased off a bit I think they have a fair chance, but the odds are still not in their favor.
I really don't get why people go straight to ethnic cleansing. It's a political non-starter for one unless we're on the brink of collapse, and there is several steps in-between here and there that are much more reasonable. Every single larger european country used to be multiple regions & ethnicities that didn't really identify as one, and there are quite a few accidents of history which would have led to a very different structure; Burgundy as an independent entity, or a much larger (or smaller, or integrated) Austria, or a mostly-unified Scandinavia, and so on. That the current shape feels so "solid" was the result of a deliberate process of propaganda and suppression of minority identities. The only reason why we nowadays can be so laizze-faire with european minority identification is precisely because of this process. My mom didn't speak high german for example, only low german, but was bullied in school even by the teachers until she could speak "proper" german. My parents only taught high german to me. And this obviously was toward the far end, both in time and in tameness, of the process.
There is so much we can change; We can tie welfare to much more stringent requirements, enforce a common language, or for a more extreme option we can require extensive civil/military service with explicit statements of loyalty. And there's even some "positive" actions still lacking; For example, I personally know an arabic guy who fell into alcoholism bc he was literally not allowed to work for multiple years due to his legal status, and he wasn't willing to engage in illegal work (in itself a laudable quality, even if it arguably was wrong in this case!). Many of the more extreme options will probably result in some levels of emigration, but that's still very different than forcibly removing people of which a decent percentage would likely have been willing to adjust.
SteveKirk
27m ago
Do they think it's only going to get worse for them the longer they delay it?
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
41m ago
You're just talking about upper middle class college educated women.
Redneck white women don't do that. Rich Black or Asian girls do.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
51m ago
Does Labour have a chance?
2D3D
1hr ago
maybe using speed
Fucking idiots think womens small frame is -1 STR -1 CON +2 DEX. Speed and nimbleness is not natural to humans and women dont get some balance to the physical meta. Except for making more humans, but thats a 14 year process before they're useful.
And they're off. Rishi Sunak has called a (technically early) General Election in the UK, Polling Day is 4th July. Effortpost to follow. Feel free to post questions you want me to cover.
Harlequin5942
1hr ago
Now, whether they will be competent remains to be seen.
Stranger things have happened, I suppose. Even Incitatus made some good calls, when the right answer was "Nay."
DimitriRascalov
2hr ago
The architectural preferences also suggest an aversion to experimentation which, while it can produce a lot of short term ugliness, is necessary in the long run to avoid boring homogeneity and settling for not-so-great local optima.
I realize that a lot of this is down to personal views on what constitutes short-term and local optima, but I don't buy that there is significant experimentation or perceivable progress going on. AFAICT, humanity has been stuck in glass, steel and concrete + mildly-to-weirdly-deformed geometric shape architecture for prestige buildings since roundabout the end of WWII. How many more of these are needed before we can move on? For more practical housing we went from stuff like this to this in the suburbs or from this to this in the urban core.
Here in Berlin, old buildings command significant rent premiums and the districts which feature coherent blocks of old architecture untouched by the bombs or post-war city planners are by far the most popular. I realize it would be bad and boring if we tiled the universe with brownstones or Parisian boulevards, but it doesn't seem to me like modernity has really been much more dynamic and creatively vibrant than the past in terms of architecture, instead we just have a different kind of monotony, albeit one that many people, me included, perceive as aesthetically inferior.
sun_the_second
2hr ago
The Russian government (arguably like all true loci of power) is a gang. You can't just quit.
Doesn't seem like a serious argument without an actual analysis of how many developers are employed in this and the actual value add thereof.
Especially when developers are paid fantastic sums. The company has every incentive already to prioritize human capital. We're not talking about Walmart greeters.
2D3D
2hr ago
Every russian retreat is a glorious trap about to be sprung on the unsuspecting ukrops, every Ukrainian failure is proof of their impending failure cascade, every Russian long range strike onto civilians is magically hitting a hidden HIMARs located behind a baby crib, every Russian asset lost is just proof of how resilient the Russian manufacturing machine is, every Russian field 'improvisation' is proof of superior Russian ingenuity. Bias exists in all parties/observers within this conflict, but pro Russian cope is the finest fermented diarrhea to be injected into every vatniks urethrae.
2D3D
2hr ago
San Francisco is a churning hub of naive liberals turning into centrists in their mid careers and retreating to hide in suburbs somehow free of homeless and blacks. If you want to turn San Francisco liberals away from immigration, don't send them on junkets, force them to find a replacement tenant before they can physically leave their degrading rental properties in the 'diverse' city.
2D3D
2hr ago
You can recover from immigration. Race riots are a GREAT way to let someone know they aren't welcome and should make all effort to shape up, fight, or get out. The same forces that compels police to stand aside and let masses of muslims rape white children will cause the police to stand aside as Hamlet Towers is burnt to the ground: can't arrest all of them with our small police and the prisons are full. Europeans are seen as weak pussies because 60 years of German-Franco-Anglo peace has been sustained by an incompetent enemy and football. Violent migrants thinking weak peoples will stay weak and docile in the face of islamist violence should remember that the Europeans did in fact have superior martial arms and valor to take their lands, and the Europeans can do so again with enough motivation.
fishtwanger
2hr ago
Good point. Maybe it's the same thing as with people, where the sociopaths turn the empathy on and off whenever convenient. And we happen to notice the contrasts between the pets that they love and the people that they couldn't care less about, and we don't see all the other animals that they also couldn't care less about.
Harlequin5942
2hr ago
Excellent summary.
Back then, he still had a tendency towards drama and hyping Russian progress, but the war was more dramatic and Russian progress was more worth hyping, so he was still very much worth watching. Sure, his forecasts of Russian advances were almost always wrong (for those of us who grew up reading about the Great Patriotic War, this war is amazingly static) but they provided a rare insight into pro-Russian expectations. Every time I look at his video titles now, it feels a little embarassing.
fishtwanger
2hr ago
Your questions seems to assume the current system is making some sort of effort to avoid mistakes
No, I'm being completely straightforward here, simply asking what 2rafa would prefer. (It's a shame that that's hard to get across, in text.)
Personally, I think the dominant progressive element in America is running amuck, and making changes that sound to them like good ideas, without any clue about whether those changes will be implemented effectively or have the desired results. By my own criteria, I'm much more conservative than they are, and that's not even considering that my ideal world is probably closer to 2rafa's than the woke ideal.
I'd take that deal Ina heartbeat.
So would I. I was going to originally put in something about Heinlein-style restriction of voting to veterans. I'd also be in favor of instituting Singaporean caning instead of imprisonment or fines, at least for minor crimes.
2D3D
2hr ago
Copy pasting monkey working on a dead product is not a position that needs filling. Perhaps with labor tightening there would be a focus on the new constraining variable (human capital) to determine what product should be worked on. An army of AI assistant chat app developers is creaming the fat off the top just like DEI admins, only less visibly. No one misses Google Hangouts and no one will miss Tesla Full Self Driving (do not get me started).
Harlequin5942
2hr ago
I think the parallels are better:
(1) The more powerful and invading force is Russia/the USSR in both cases. Putin's view of the world was formed in the latter days of the USSR, during the Soviet-Afghan War. The US intervention in Vietnam was led by a very different generation of leaders from the US today, with an overarching view of the world (early Cold War anticommunism) that has no applicability in the Russia-Ukraine war.
(2) Afghanistan did not have a clear political, cultural, and geographic division akin to Vietnam, with a narrow border between them. The same is true of the parts of Ukraine that the Russians have been invading since 2022, though not the parts where they intervened in 2014-2022.
(3) North Vietnam is not analogous with Russia, obviously. The US is not going to start bombing missions over Moscow because of Ukraine. The same was true in the Soviet-Afghan War: the US was never going to attack the Soviet Union because of Afghanistan, let alone a land intervention analogous to North Vietnam.
(4) As with the Afghan War, Russia has local allies that have popularity and legitimacy over a certain area (the Donbas + Crimea / Kabul) but lack an insurgency over the area of their enemy. In contrast, the Viet Cong provided both a powerful insurgency in South Vietnam AND a useful device to prevent escalation ("We North Vietnamese aren't invading you, oh no, so it would be escalation for you to invade us!").
(5) In Afghanistan, the US was in a position of funding people fighting its major enemy. In the Vietnam War, in the early phases, the US was funding the South Vietnam government against an insurgency supported by the North Vietnamese supported by the Soviets. So the link between US actions and frustrating Soviet interests was much stronger in the case of Afghanistan. It is obvious that the Russia-Ukraine War is more similar to the Soviet-Afghan War in this important respect.
(6) In Afghanistan, the US had extremely useful support from Pakistan, while Iran was neutral and successful in remaining neutral. In the Vietnam War, Cambodia was theoretically neutral but unable to be useful for the US, for a variety of reasons. South Vietnam had to worry about both its border with North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, with no adjacent land allies. In the Russia-Ukraine War, the US has a chain of adjacent allies from Romania/Hungary/Poland/Slovakia/Poland to the Atlantic.
(7) In Western opinion, the South Vietnamese were a colonial remnant. The North Vietnamese were commies, but they were anti-colonial commies, and as anti-communism faded, support for the Vietnam War faded. In the Soviet-Afghan War, this was reversed. In Western opinion, the Russia-Ukraine War is seen as closer to the Soviet-Afghan War. You might disagree, but I'm talking about opinion, not truth.
(8) The Ukrainians were expected to do much worse than they have, just like the Soviets were expected to swallow up Afghanistan - maybe even make it an SSR. I don't know of any parallel with the Vietnam War, where the best case scenario for the US was always a frozen conflict akin to Korea.
The most important points here are (3-5). The US is not going to attack Russia over Ukraine, it is in a position of hurting Russia across multiple dimensions of power without losing a single US soldier, and there is no parallel to the Viet Cong insurgency.
The most important disanalogy is that the Russia-Ukraine War is not a guerilla conflict. However, this is a disanalogy with both the Vietnam War and the Soviet-Afghan War. Instead, we have a position were Russia - due to a mix of lack of public support, economic weakness, and military incompetence - is making slow progress at best against a conventional enemy.
Not that I'm not predicting the outcome, except that whatever happens it will be far less costly to US power and prestige than the Vietnam War.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
3hr ago
Maybe go on a mostly-chaste date or three, just for fun, if she's on the same page? Have fun, get some practice, go to a show, overact romantic with a twinkle in your eye, be more frank about your life and situation than you might otherwise be, try out some conversational gambits that you might hesitate to use if you thought more was on the line. Whatever mask you wear, drop it a bit.
That does sound lovely, but while what I'm about to say definitely sounds like a humble brag, it really isn't meant to be one. I don't want her to get attached, or to end up attached myself. It's only a few short months till I'm gone, likely for good, and I don't want to make things more painful than they absolutely have to be.
She's a very sheltered girl, and if I'm my usual flirtatious self, that means they have a distressing tendency to fall for me. I'm not an asshole, everyone I've seen after my breakup, I made it clear that I'm going to flee India for good eventually, and when the news of my match came in, rather soon. This hasn't stopped a few people from clinging onto me more than they should. I don't blame them, the average guy they encounter is shit, I've seen men hotter, richer or more muscular than me fuck things up, their sheer negative rizz causing atrophic vaginitis from a block away. So if I do go out on a date, no matter how chaste, I'd rather not leave her missing me. I'm not so full of myself as to claim it's a guaranteed thing, far from it, but it would make things very awkward.
I already know that I can be charming when I care to be, and that I'm not rusty. She's better off not being the subject of further experimentation, especially when I really don't expect either of us to hold a candle for that long.
If she's that closely connected, she might wind up being a family friend in the long run, and this would make a good story for when your own respective kids meet on a dating app.
🤨
More seriously, she's doing just fine, and when we do talk, I make it a point to be both mildly flirty and also walk their through any stress or concerns she has about med school. I do genuinely like helping people, and unlike my own brother, she takes it seriously and is thus stressed out over how it's going, despite being more talented and harder working than the two of us put together. So at least I know I'm a mildly positive experience and someone she can talk to.
My future kids? They can fend for themselves.
And if you hit it off, well, you might be needing a new shrink soon, what with the move and all, right?
It helps that I'm going to be surrounded by them, more than I can shake a stick at. Worry not, that's one of the perks of being a psych trainee, they know how shit my salary is and might take pity and waive some of their consultation fees.
All I really need a psych for is refills of my ADHD meds, sadly the wait list in the NHS for a formal evaluation is 2 years long, though I'd hope my existing diagnosis suffices. At any rate, I want to switch off Ritalin, it works but it also happens to suck.
So it won't be the ideal situation, but if she's close enough to the ideal girl for you, then don't let her get away. Don't make the modern mistake of having an image in your head of what your life should be like, and then waiting for it to fulfill itself. If she's got brains and integrity and a sense of humor, and you find yourself falling for her, seize the opportunity when it presents itself. (Finding out if someone has integrity, in the time you have available, there's the rub...)
Who knew the Motte was filled with so many hopeless romantics? The prognosis is always terminal.
I think she's fun and very sweet. She certainly did a good job calming me down after a nurse behaved so abominably with me I blew my top and vented about it later. But I don't know her well enough to put down a definitive diagnosis of "wife material". She's young, she's got a long road ahead of her, and even I'm just halfway done. And I'm sure you see why I have my reasons for keeping a modest distance, all the good I can do for her, it's from afar, and if I get closer, chances are it'll just hurt the two of us.
(I'm a terminal romantic myself. It sucks.)
I suspect with ZIRP on the way out we'll see more tech companies tightening their belts. The reality of it is that most tech companies are horribly over staffed (look at Twitter, where allegedly 80% of the employees were let go, with no ensuing technical disaster that was, nonetheless, oft predicted.) There have always been theories floating around as to why these companies become so bloated with dead weight employees: FAANG hires anyone remotely competent and gives them make-work to keep them from their competitors, was a common belief.
I think the reality is a bit more nuanced than that and less strategic: headcounts bloat because when you're already making good money, the easiest way to increase your status is to increase the number of people "working under you". So projects which could reasonably be handled by one "10x developer" get spun out into entire teams to make the lead look better. And his boss is happier because now he is responsible for more people, which makes him look even more important, and so on. With fat enough margins (and/or a zero interest rate environment) this process can continue for a very long time. It's how a firm like Dropbox winds up with over 3000 employees.
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