Monthly Archives: November 2024

Purge

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Trump made a big strategic mistake after he won the election.

He publicly stated he is going to implement a deep purge of the state apparatus – people who squander and embezzle tax money, people who used state power to go after him, people who implement the woke agenda, people who censored media etc.

Basically, he gave those people, while they are still in power, all the reasons to make sure he never takes power. That’s a political equivalent of the Osborne effect; basically, one of the early computer companies that advertised their next model before the current model stockpiles have been depleted, causing it to stop selling and the company to go bankrupt, and the case is now taught in schools as an example of how not to run your mouth. Essentially, if you’re going to perform a purge, first take their power away, and absolutely never announce it. That man is an absolute amateur in matters of politics.

Deterrence

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The question that’s currently asked everywhere is whether Russia will now escalate to use of tactical nuclear weapons after Biden’s regime deliberately crossed their red line of using long-range missiles to strike Russia proper.

It’s a complicated matter, because the Americans are applying their way of thinking to the Russians, and the Russians run a different algorithm. Basically, they are playing poker, and the Russians are playing chess. In poker, there is a concept of bluffing, and at some discrete point the cards are revealed, and the Schroedinger’s cat box is opened; basically, probabilistic uncertainty collapses into certainty and you have a binary outcome. The Russians are developing a multi-dimensional self-serving strategy; essentially, they want to ensure a long-term positive outcome for themselves, and they don’t believe in a zero-sum game thing, where others have to lose in order for them to win. From a Russian perspective, others have to lose only if they decide to play such a game that positive outcome for Russia isn’t possible while they exist. This means that Russia has no problem with multiple powerful actors on a world stage that each play their own game and try to be successful in their own way, as long as that allows Russia to mind its own business and prosper – basically, trade freely with others, cooperate with others in science, technology, sports, art etc., and not have implacable foes accumulate weapons and armies at their borders.

Russian self-serving strategy means they would very much like to avoid any outcome where Russia enters a mutual-destruction pact with America. Russia would prefer it if America blew off steam and made their arrogant posturing, while Russia creates the alternative UN with BRICS, basically excluding America and their vassals but keeping everything else that’s useful in the international relations, so that they can all trade and cooperate freely while America sanctions itself out of existence and their economy implodes. Basically, the Russians are buying time, because they understand economics well enough to know that America is hollowed out, unsustainable and in too much debt to be able to continue as it is now; why have a nuclear war where everybody dies, when they can just wait for America to go bankrupt and thus solve the problem peacefully, and they end up winning by default?

The problem is, the guys who are running America knew this much before the Russians figured it out, and I don’t think they will allow this. If I could plot out this scenario, it’s quite obvious that the American analysts plotted it out as well. The problem with every strategy is that the opponent will actively resist outcomes that are highly unfavorable to them.

Also, this makes Russia very averse to any kind of radical moves, which makes them susceptible to “salami tactics” – basically, if the opponents slices up aggressive strategy into small chunks, each of which is too small to warrant extreme reaction, you end up with an entire salami up your ass before you know it. It’s a game theory thing – and the Americans invented game theory. Basically, they count on the fact that a self-serving actor will respond to a small provocation with conciliatory moves rather than resort to mutually destructive action, and even if some moves will then have to be reversed, it will be just the last salami slice, not the whole damn thing; essentially, you will be in a position to revoke the last centimeter of a kilometer-long encroachment, and even appear to be a reasonable peacemaker when your victim eventually turns aggressive.

The additional problem is that Putin sees himself as a savior of Russia, and you can’t be a savior of Russia if you react in such ways as to start a nuclear war. Also, he likes to see himself as a Christian, so he would rather try turning the other cheek, and giving you his shirt after you’ve stolen his coat. He is very much inclined to try all kinds of peaceful and diplomatic solutions before resorting to war, and in war he will try to use the minimum force necessary to accomplish goals.

As a result, there is now a widespread understanding in Russia that the concept of deterrence is broken, and the enemies of Russia feel that they can do whatever they want with impunity, because nuclear war is off the table as long as they don’t use nukes first. They feel this to be unacceptable and harmful to their long term goals, because if their enemies are not deterred from messing with them, all kinds of mischief will continue in perpetuity, and they are pretty much tired of it now. This means that various powerful and influential actors within Russia are mounting pressure on Putin to put nuclear weapons back on the table, and this has been going on for quite a while, and the most recent concession Putin had to make is the change of the official doctrine for use of nuclear weapons.

The problem with this doctrine is that in itself it does nothing to establish deterrence – there are too many scalars and not enough Booleans. It’s all “if an attack is estimated to be large enough, we might…”, and no “if any violation of this principle is observed, use of nuclear weapons in response is obligatory”. Also, the reason why American deterrence works is not the fact that America has nuclear weapons, it’s the fact that they used nuclear weapons on two cities, so everybody knows they are crazy enough to actually do it. Russia never used nukes against an enemy, so there is doubt if they are actually willing to use them at all, and Putin did absolutely nothing to eliminate this uncertainty; in fact, he contributed to the problem. In order for deterrence to work, your adversaries must think you’re reasonable enough to deal with normally, but crazy enough to kill everybody if you’re fucked with enough.

That’s why there were calls in Russia to perform a nuclear test and show that nukes are on the table, but that obviously won’t work, because it doesn’t show you’re willing to use them against your opponent if encroached upon; it shows you’re willing to detonate them in some wasteland.

In order for Russia to be taken seriously, they will have to use a thermonuclear weapon against a densely populated military installation of their opponent upon encroachment. This makes the present situation very serious, because if Russia doesn’t make the Bryansk attack a point where they respond with nuclear weapons against American military installations in the first ring of support around Ukraine, further encroachments will follow and there will be no deterrence whatsoever to inhibit them, eventually causing a full nuclear exchange. On the other hand, the Americans are just waiting for use of nuclear weapons from Russia to justify their own nuclear attack, which will lead to a full nuclear exchange. So it’s a tree of options where every branch eventually leads to the same outcome, which is why Putin would prefer to avoid the whole thing and just wait for America to go bankrupt and have a civil war across the damn ocean and leave the rest of the world alone finally; however, he won’t be allowed that option. This has to be dawning to the Russian analysts as well, which is why the pressure is mounting on Putin to create a psychological wall of credible deterrence that was lost after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The entire situation is an explosive mixture, and I’m taking it quite seriously.

Prepping mistakes

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I’ve been looking at some YouTube videos about prepping, and oh boy, is there some super stupid stuff out there. It’s no wonder people think of the whole thing with disdain. But let me share some of my impressions.

The actual “preppers” seem to be the ones offering the most impractical, immoderate and outright foolish advice out there. Basically, it’s the guys with a huge house, multiple acres of land around it, who are living out the fantasy of surviving apocalypse by returning to a combination of 18th century technology and Robinson Crusoe-esque approach. Their advice on how to prepare for a power outage is to store a year’s worth supply of gas canisters, gasoline and all sorts of gadgets, plus solar panels, generators etc. My reaction to this is a facepalm, thinking about how useless this advice is to an average urban person with a two bedroom flat, no particular storage space available and with only a parking place in front of the building, without a garage. Mind you, that’s how most of the world actually lives. No, you can’t have livestock, chickens or grow crops there. You also can’t store much of redundant supplies. You don’t have a secondary location to bug out to, because if you did, you’d probably be there already.

The second group are the people who regularly have hurricanes, tornadoes or similar natural disasters in their area, and who already have regular experience with conditions that require them to be able to ride it out on their own. They usually also have a large house with land, but they aren’t preparing for an imaginary scenario, they are preparing for a realistic scenario they already experienced, sometimes regularly, and so they know exactly what they are talking about and you should pay attention. Unfortunately, their advice usually assumes you also have a large house, a garage, plentiful storage space and a piece of land. That makes some of their recommendations inapplicable to average urban people.

The third group are the people who are already choosing or are forced to rough it out on a daily basis. This includes hikers, mountaineers, hunters and homeless people (for instance, someone living in a camper van or a trailer). They are forced to be space and weight efficient, either because they have to carry the stuff on their back, or because they live in an extremely confined space where storage space is at even more of a premium than it is to an average person. Also, their life depends on not screwing it up – take too much, you’re screwed, don’t take enough, you’re screwed. Insulate too much and you suffocate, don’t insulate enough and you freeze. They are forced to be extremely practical, and they will use the most modern gear available if it increases their odds, and they will also use the most generic stuff available if it does the job.

The fourth group are the survivalists and bushcrafters. They will try to approximate stone age conditions, use mostly the tools and materials that can be scavenged or harvested from the environment, and they will light a fire with almost nothing, just to show off. While this is definitely something to be aware of as a possibility, because you can never guarantee to be able to access everything you need and it’s good to have some ideas on how to improvise solutions, this bushcrafting/survivalist approach is something you adopt when you’re about to die, and then you do in fact die. This makes it something to avoid resorting to at all cost if any other solution is available.

The fifth group is something I actually haven’t watched on YouTube – it’s the experience of people who actually survived wars, regular power outages and all kinds of shit. It’s the people who know what a kerosene lamp smells like and what kind of light it produces and what a pain in the ass it is to read under it, as you try to reduce boredom in a shelter while your back yard is under a combined sniper/mortar fire.

While all of the above is informative in some way, I would recommend absolutely not taking seriously any advice outside of groups that actually had real life experience with adverse conditions. This means you want to listen to the homeless guy who lives in a camper van, the family who has to improvise their way through a hurricane season each year, a hiker/hunter who has to figure out how to make it on a multiple day trip in adverse weather/terrain conditions, and someone who survived the siege of Sarajevo or Vukovar. Everybody else is full of shit.

Avoid stupid ideas, such as improvised fire making, cooking solutions that will get you killed indoors, or things that would require you to do them in an open unheated space during the winter. Avoid things that have unrealistic or unsurvivable implications. Learn from the experience of people who actually had to figure it out and who had to find something that’s practical, convenient, cheap, and just works, and you can pull it off in a camper van. Also, the war/siege survivors; what they wished they had, what they had that was super useful, and what got people killed.

Your most likely scenario to prepare for is a week-long lockdown with power outages that can last a day, maybe two. Also, scenarios where the gas grid is out, gas stations are overcrowded and there are limitations and curfews imposed, there are power reductions, and the water is occasionally cut off for up to half a day. This is realistic and believe it or not I already had all of that at some point or another. It was very rarely or never all at the same time – basically, you have water, but no electricity, or you have water and electricity but the stores are empty and the fuel is rationed, or you have everything but there’s a lockdown and you can’t access anything outside of your home, or everything basically works but there’s a mass panic that brought the communications down and people are out in the streets, freaked out and sometimes violent. I personally survived hyperinflation, failed economy/country, war, earthquake and two pandemic scares (one was a smallpox scare in Yugoslavia, the other was recent). If you think that stuff doesn’t happen or doesn’t concern you, good for you I guess, but where I live power outages that last half a day are something that happens quite regularly, and last year we had water outages that lasted half a day too, because the water grid was being worked on. In my previous place, I survived a pretty major earthquake, but the building was structurally damaged and we eventually had to evacuate. The kind of prepping I’m talking about is not about doomsday, it’s about survivable inconveniences that can turn quite bad if you’re completely unprepared for them, or you mishandle things in stupid ways. The biggest boon I had from prepping was that I already went through scenarios ahead of time and when shit happened, I was calm when neighbours were in shock and panicking. This psychological effect can’t be overstated. Overreacting or underreacting to a situation can create serious trouble from something that could have been a minor inconvenience. For instance, overreacting to a power outage by making a charcoal fire indoors can get you killed or set your place on fire, when you could have had a butane camping stove and a cartridge at the ready, made some tea by the battery light and had fun times with your family. The attitude that shit just happens and it’s normal can be one of your major assets, while people who expect everything to be fine will freak themselves out.