There’s an aspect of the current Russia/Ukraine war that is seldom addressed.
I’ve seen analysts wondering why Ukraine isn’t tactically retreating and regrouping their forces, instead giving them the suicidal orders to stand and fight until they are destroyed or forced to surrender. One argument was that they are buying time for some kind of reinforcement army to arrive from the west and turn the tide of war, but that’s nonsense, because there isn’t any army in the West that will save them. That’s obvious from the fact that all the new weapons and reinforcements are immediately sent to the Donbass front line.
The actual reason is that their positions in Donbass have been heavily fortified over the years, and those fortifications are their greatest assets. The second greatest asset that they have is Putin’s reluctance to hit civilian targets, which they are abusing by hiding in populated areas which greatly limits Russian ability to use heavy weaponry to dig them out. Basically, it’s not really a war of equal parties; it’s a situation similar to a fox or an eagle trying to dig out a small animal that is hiding in a hole in the ground. Of course the small animal is not “tactically retreating”, because the moment it leaves the hole in the ground, it’s dead. The only place the Russians are having a problem with them is a reinforced concrete hole in the ground surrounded by apartment buildings full of innocent people. The only “tactical maneuver” Ukraine has at their disposal is to fire at Russian positions from a civilian building, and if the Russians fire back, they make a video with dead civilians and upload it to the Internet, and they wait for something to change geopolitically with the passage of time, for instance a new front opening in Lithuania or Moldova, NATO entering direct hot war with Russia and so on. Basically, they are a groundhog or a meerkat hiding in the underground tunnels, while an eagle is camping at the exit, ready to eat them if they try to make a run for it, and they are counting on something changing if they wait long enough, because it’s not like they can do much about it in any case. There have been attempts by both Ukraine and America to distract the Russians and try to force them to change the winning strategy – bomb civilians in Donbass, attack that tiny island outpost in the middle of nowhere, cook up trouble in Moldova and Lithuania, and so on; it’s not working, because the Russians actually know how to wage wars, apparently. They are very unlikely to change their pattern of action before they retake the entirety of Donbass, and before they completely destroy all the Ukrainian fortifications and troops there. Only then would I expect them to say that “phase 2” is complete, and it’s anybody’s guess what they would do next. It’s very obvious what they are doing now – they are taking their sweet time digging the groundhog from a hole in the ground, because they have all the time in the world, they don’t want to do risky things that would have them lose men and equipment, they don’t want to endanger the civilians more than absolutely necessary, and the enemy is doomed anyway so they might as well win at the smallest possible cost to themselves. It’s not like they have long supply lines that cost them money; for them, it’s basically home turf, and they have endless supplies of fuel, food and equipment. Basically, the longer this takes, the more troops they get to rotate through the war and have them gather experience, and NATO is seriously bleeding assets on the other side, in a situation where they can’t afford it.
Youtube and Twitter is full of videos of Russian missiles hitting civilian targets. “Reluctance”? lmao. A quick search will yield an endless stream of information that will contradict you. If you’re wrong once, then you likely wrong about most things. Which renders your entire blog pointless.
I verified the first ten or so such instances and they literally all turned out to be fakes, produced by intelligence services. Usually a combination of mislabelling and outright lies. The rule of the thumb is, everything pro-Ukrainian falls apart after a few days when the debunking appears online, and I put a total personal embargo on everything that comes from that direction – I deny them the right to influence my thinking with their lies. So, yes, there is lots that contradicts me, and it is all worthless. There is a side in this war that is profoundly criminal, and it ain’t Russia.
When you eliminate the outright lies, the fact remains that Russia always chooses the military method that will take longer if it will spare the civilians, which is sufficient for making conclusions.
Interesting logic.
Endless stream of information has also been proven wrong many times so far, but that does not make all this information sources pointless?
Interesting logic.
Endless stream of information has also been proven wrong many times so far, but that does not make all this information sources pointless?
The real issue that I see here is the fallacy of the middle ground – one side says A, the other side says B, and in order to appear objective my position should be at the midpoint, somewhere at (A+B)/2. That’s not how I do analysis – I observe patterns and give sources a Bayesian weighing, like we do with spam filters, and if something has significant enough negative weight, indicating a source that creates false reports and serves as an outlet for intelligence agencies, I simply dismiss it outright and in entirety; not only that, but I then dismiss all other sources that have a pattern-overlap with that, and this helps me improve the signal/noise ratio significantly, and I continue analysing the situation based on the sources that have a significant positive Bayesian weight. The result is that people who listen to the contaminated datafeed have a paradoxical situation where they always think I’m arguing for a position that’s completely crazy, and yet has a very high predictive value. The answer is simple: I mercilessly discard garbage and I know how to think analytically.
Issue here is that people, like Manet, use emotions (oh feels good, part of herd, so must be true, feels bad, must be false) and not brains to decide which sources are reliable and which are not and then fall into logical traps since emotions are devoid of logic by default.
So, it uses “argument” that you are wrong because there are endless stream of information that contradict you on that one thing and since you are wrong on one thing, you must be wrong on many things and hence – your entire blog is pointless – even though sources of “endless stream of information” have been proven wrong on many occasions and by same logic, all those source are also rendered pointless – completely negating initial argument 🙂
This line of “thinking” is perfectly in tune with west ideological madness and until recently was confined to lunatic asylums only …
My advantage is that I don’t care about such people. I’m not interested in swaying their opinion – it’s not my job, or my responsibility. I just write it how I see it.
It’s interesting that on first look, such position looks like an easy thing – just don’t care.
However, in practice, such position requires complete detachment from any emotions and is actually extremely hard to achieve from a perspective of emotional being.
I made significant progress in that area, but I still lead “opinion swaying” conversations with people in my head from time to time 🙂
My advantage here is that I always had extremely heightened empathy. to the point where I would completely lose my own individual identity when surrounded by people, and I had to work extra hard to overcome this handicap. I’m still nowhere near as resistant as some of the “sociopaths” who don’t perceive anything and can just plough through people without caring about them at all, but I’m “hardened” enough to be able to resist changing my opinion under any amount of external emotional pressure, and I don’t re-evaluate my position unless I personally find something that’s wrong with it. Also, I had the “2+3*5=” moment when I was 18; a 30 or so people tried to convince me it’s 25, and they even brought out a cheap calculator to prove it, and they all looked at me as if I were a stubborn idiot for consistently stating it’s 17. However, I knew mathematics and they didn’t, which is why I was right and any number of them would be wrong. You can literally take seven billion of them and have them argue against me and I would still see them as one singular fallacy. I am completely resistant to all kinds of “everybody knows” and “I don’t accept your evidence” arguments, because they are all based on the appeal to the social animal – you want to belong, and you want to accept and be accepted by the other person. If you don’t want to belong to the herd, you don’t care about it, and if you don’t need acceptance, you become resistant to all kinds of fallacies. For me, the intuitive answer to “I don’t accept your evidence” is “then you will remain ignorant”, and to “we all know it’s X” is “that’s because you are all fools in the same way”.
It’s not directly on topic, but it does relate quite nicely to the situation.
I have never seen eagle hunt rats, but I have seen owl hunting mice and because it always happens in the dark, it is even more impressive.
Since I can see both mouse and owl on thermal spotter, it makes entire thing even more interesting.
First of all, there is huge difference in thermal detection between mouse which glows bright and owl which is barely visible because of thick feather which makes owl fantastic predator even in thermal spectrum.
Owl usually starts a hunt by flying over terrain and then taking a high ground where it waits.
When mouse leaves ground cover, it’s spotted by owl in seconds, which takes off and glides without wing flapping in utter silence and then abruptly stops over mouse and just drops right onto it.
I have also seen a situation where owl passes mouse in glide mode and does a loop stunt to turn back and land directly on mouse.
Utter silence and superb execution precision in total darkness makes owl probably most underrated predator.
Just like Russia 🙂
Oh and it likes to attack a hunter (which is usually shit scary because it comes fast in complete silence and just pops out of darkness with wings spread and claws aimed right at you) if it takes it’s favourite spotting place or if it is using infrared lamp – they really do not like infrared lamps, almost like it offends them somehow 🙂
Interesting; it seems that the owls see near-infrared, and they probably interpret it as “edible warm-blooded critter”.
They definitely see infrared (lamps are either 840nm or 950nm).
And since night vision infrared lamps are quite powerful (they illuminate distances 200-600m, depending on model, with enough light that CMOS sensor can actually see stuff) it could also be that infrared lamp floods owl vision in a way a bright light would flood our vision (imagine car headlights in night) and it might defensively try to remove the flood source because it can not see stuff it wants to see.
Just a theory based on attack pattern which is different than attack on edible critter.