Process thinking has goals, of course, but they’re all interpersonal. The outcomes, small-o, of Process thinking all have to do with relationships within the group. Why are there blacks in ads for camping gear, despite no black person ever having gone camping in the history of the human race? Because the set designer assumes the writer wants it, and the writer assumes that the creative director wants it, and the creative director assumes the client wants it … which he does, but only because he in turn assumes that the creative director wants it, and etc. To return it to politics, it’s all Narrative.
Combining them, consider the Ukraine Narrative as one giant ad campaign. The lack of Outcome-thinking hit all of us from the very moment it became The Current Thing. What, exactly, are we doing in Ukraine?
Note that there is a case to be made. I don’t agree with it, obviously, but I can make one, and of course it’s ruthlessly Outcome-driven: In a world where States have no friends, only interests, it is consistent with Realpolitik to weaken your rivals when it can be done at low cost and minimal risk. We’re doing to Russia what Russia (and China) did to us in Vietnam — they were quite open about aiding their fraternal socialist brothers in the struggle against Capitalism and Western Imperialism.
One can — and of course in this case would — argue that fucking around in Ukraine is neither low-cost nor low-risk, but that too is Outcome-thinking. You can persuade me, an Outcome thinker, with facts and reason. Steve Sailer is almost a caricature of an Outcome thinker at this point, and he’d be just super at demolishing my hypothetical Realpolitik argument for US aid to Ukraine.
But not only do the Process-“thinkers” in [Washington, DC] not have an Outcome in mind, it never crossed their minds to have one in the first place. This is why I keep coming back to Jaynes [Wiki]. We — normal people — keep trying to assign goals to people like Victoria Nuland. The only goals we can come up with, though, are bugfuck insane — she seems to really believe that not only can Ukraine win the current conflict, but that they’ll march all the way to Moscow, Regime-Change everyone, and invite all the Western parasites in to carve up the country …
… nothing else makes sense, but “sense” left the building with Elvis. There is no Outcome. Which is likelier:
- that she has some top secret Master Plan in a manila folder in a safe somewhere, that reads “Ukraine captures Moscow; Exxon CEO is on the first flight in”; or
- Her behavior seems purposive the way the eerily coordinated gyrations of a school of fish or a flock of birds seems purposive? It looks coordinated, but it can’t actually BE coordinated — it happens too fast for all the individual members to process the signals.
I’ve done a lot of Ukraine shit in the stoyak roundups, and I have never once seen a Victory scenario. The closest even the wildest-eyed optimist comes is very clearly Underpants Gnome shit:
- Send Wunderwaffen to Zelensky
- ???
- Victory!!!
And the third term — the crucial one, Victory — is never ever defined. Let’s assume the Wunderwaffen work and the Big Spring Counteroffensive that they’ve almost literally been advertising, Mad Men-style, goes off flawlessly. What then? At what point do we call off the dogs? Again, unless you seriously believe in Victoria Nuland’s Master Plan — a real document in a real safe, that she got Brandon’s puppeteers to forge his signature on — there simply IS no answer. Their “plan” for “victory” on the battlefield is exactly the same as Bud Light’s “plan” for “victory” with the [Dylan Mulvaney] ads.
It’s all Narrative, all Process. The only outcomes anyone involved considers are all small-o, and they’re all interpersonal. Nobody thinks about battlefield victory — the actual movement of lines on a map, let alone the reality of fighting and dying. But they obsess over being seen to believe in victory. To return to Geo. Orwell‘s commentary:
Creatives spend perhaps half their time in protracted meetings where the primary activity is herding cats, making sure everyone agrees on the current direction of things … until the direction changes, a couple of hours later.
And everyone is fine with this, because everything of importance happens interpersonally.
I’m going to reuse this quote, but this time quote it in full. Two paragraphs, and they’re long, but extremely important. Here’s the first:
The art directors and copywriters who dream up what you see in commercials tend to have a few things in common. The copywriters imagine themselves future screenwriters or novelists, the art directors imagine themselves movie directors eventually. For them, every commercial is a little self-contained movie with a plot and characters, even though no one in the real world gives fifty milliseconds of thought to the character of the TV housewife using that new dustbuster. They very seldom discuss sales, in the sense of “Will this sell more widgets?” In fact they mostly loathe “hard sell” advertising, where you emphasize price.
Emphasis mine, because the question “Will this sell more widgets?” is the definition of Outcome thinking. And if you’re trying to herd cats — as anyone who has had to endure this kind of meeting knows — measurable results are the enemy. Because I really want you to consider the answer to the following question: What’s in it for you, personally, if Acme Corp. sells a thousand more widgets?
Unless you’re a salesman on commission, the answer, for all practical purposes, is: Nothing. Maybe a small bump in your end-of-year bonus, if you get a year-end bonus, but that’s the absolute best case scenario: Another hundred bucks on a single paycheck, six months down the line.
And while I’m certainly not going to sneeze at a hundred dollars, consider what that Benjamin cost you. Half the office hates you now, because you were right. You’re smarter than them, you bastard, and now they know it. You showed them up. Oh, and you’ve also alienated the other half of the office, because what should have been a thirty minute meeting stretched for two hours because you stuck to your guns. Thanks, asshole, I got caught in rush hour and didn’t get home until 7:30. I hope you choke on your $100 bonus. (And don’t think you’re going to get any love from the people who agreed with you in the meeting from the get-go, because they’re all jealous they didn’t think of it themselves).
Now consider the second paragraph, that gets to the heart of Process thinking:
They [“creatives”] favor “conceptual” advertising, where instead of telling you why this cellphone is superior to another, they show you an ironic or cute story involving the cellphone, or maybe you merely show exciting, vibrant people dancing with the thing, with bright colors and music video tropes. This goes back to the recent discussion here of cultural conformity and “mood boards”. Mood boards have been a very big thing in advertising, even more so than twenty years ago. “Look and feel” takes precedence over most things, especially in corporate, nationwide campaigns. For example, you will see Lexus nationwide commercials where the car drives heroically through some surreal industrial or desert landscape, with extreme lighting and lots of flashy cinematography. Local dealer ads for Lexus will concentrate on terms and pricing, and art directors hate doing local dealer car ads. Not artsy enough.
“Conceptual” ads are collaborative ads. With Outcomes, you’re either right or wrong; it either sells more widgets or it doesn’t, but everyone contributes to “mood”. No one can be proven right via sales figures, but no one can be proven wrong, either. Jane sucks at Outcome-driven advertising, because none of her ads moved the sales needle. But Jane is great at “mood boards”; Jane’s a real team player; Jane makes everyone in the meeting feel special. When Jane runs the meeting, we achieve consensus in thirty minutes. When you run the meeting, Mr. Will This Sell More Widgets, it goes on for hours, and we never get the answer — IF we get the answer — until the next quarter’s sales figures come in.
Apply that to the Ukraine Narrative, and test it against Nehushtan‘s heuristics:
“We have always been at war with Eurasia”: what you have to support turns on a dime and doesn’t have to be consistent with anything that went before.
Check. What you “believe” changes as the “mood board” changes, and the “mood board” changes as the group consensus changes in the pitch meeting. We’re all susceptible to this to some degree — someone with stronger Google-fu than mine can no doubt find that old psych experiment from the Fifties, with something like Müller-Lyer lines. No doubt you recall hearing about it: They planted some kids in the crowd who insisted that the shorter lines were really longer, and since these kids were absolutely adamant in their “belief”, eventually most of the class “agreed” that the shorter lines were actually longer.
That’s all consensus stuff, Process stuff. What does it really cost me to say that the shorter line is actually the longer? If it’ll get Jane to finally shut the fuck up, ok. If Jane happens to be really popular, and especially if I think agreeing with her will get me closer to her panties, then the faster I’m going to agree. And if Jane happens to hold my entire career in her hands, and can get me kicked out of the Cloud, to wander the Cursed Earth among the Dirt People …
“Two Minutes Hate”: doesn’t matter who or what the target person is, they are always slotted into the same role, given the same attributes, and the same criticisms are made of them.
Severian, “What is Leftism? (and what to call it?)”, Founding Questions, 2023-05-30.
September 1, 2023
QotD: Process thinking about the Russo-Ukraine war
August 30, 2023
The endless search for the “Easy mode” in military conflict
CDR Salamander on the search for shortcuts to military excellence, despite literal millennia of evidence that there are no such shortcuts:
As the Russo-Ukrainian War reaches its 20th month, I hope everyone has been sufficiently sobered up to stand firmly against those promoting the “72-hour War” or spin an attractive story about some transformational secret sauce that provides an “easy button” for those tasked to do the very hard work of preparing a nation for war should, and if, it were to come.
See the Battle of Hostomel if you need a recent example of where buying this wishcasting can get you.
There is a reason we have continually railed against this Potomac Flotilla mindset for the better part of two decades here — it is the self-delusion of faculty lounge theories running up against the Gods of the Military Copybook Headings reality what we have thousands of years of experience to reference.
We are not smarter than previous generations. There is no secret weapon or war winning technology — or magic beans — that will allow us to skip past the hard work of a viable strategy backed up by a properly resourced industrial capacity to build, maintain, deploy, and sustain a fighting force on the other side of the Pacific for years if needed.
Not 24-hours. Not 72-hours. Think 72-weeks to 72-months and you have your mind right.
[…]
We do no one any good allowing free run towards the national security version of the prosperity gospel, a branch of the transformationalist cult, and their “name it and claim it” attitude towards solving hard problems.
From LCS to DDG-1000, to optimal manning, to six-sigma supply nightmares, to 100-hour workweeks, to 72-hour war CONOPS, to the “Deter by Punishment,” to “1,000 ship navy,” to the offset of this POM cycle, to counter-historical excuses for … again … not doing the hard work that takes so long to bear fruit that someone else will get credit for it.
Every time we have our top leaders — smart hard working professionals with the best intentions — step up to sound more like this guy — the worse we will all be.
It degrades them and endangers everyone.
We don’t need to sell the utility of small drones being used down to the lowest levels of responsibility — it is demonstrated every day.
What we do need sold is Congress’s need to fund a revitalization of our defense industrial capacity and a focus on the naval and aerospace forces that will do most of the fighting in any expected war west of the International Dateline.
Supported by swarms of drones of all shapes and sizes.
August 21, 2023
Some good reasons why the Russo-Ukraine war is misunderstood in the West
A few days back, Bruce Gudmundsson outlined a few of the reasons the Western — particularly the English-language — reporting on the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine gets it wrong:
Railways have played a significant role in warfare since at least the Crimean War.
Navvies working on the Grand Crimean Central Railway, 1854. From Thomas Brassey, Railway Builder (1969).
As I live within a bowshot of a railroad crossing, the screech of metal wheels on metal rails frequently reminds me of one of the many things that so many Anglophone commentators get wrong about the war in Ukraine. Coming from places afflicted with (hat tip to Arlo Guthrie [NR: I’d give the credit to Steve Goodman, personally]) “the disappearing railroad blues”, these writers find it hard to imagine the degree to which Russian soldiers exploit the ability of the iron horse to move vast numbers of hundred-pound artillery shells. This blindspot, in turn, causes them to place far too much importance on means of movement, such as ships and trucks, that play second fiddle in the logistical symphony that supplies Russian forces in the field.
Tales of soldiers stealing pickles from convenience stores spark thoughts of another mistake that English-speaking critics have made with respect to the Russian supply system. Wise generals, from Alexander the Great to Francisco Franco, have long deployed vast quantities of food along with their armies. Nonetheless, the enduring fondness of English-speaking soldiers for bully beef, tinned biscuits, and other meals-ready-to-eat sets them apart from most other fighting men, past or present. To put things another way, we should not have been surprised that, when organizing an invasion of one of the great food-producing countries of our planet, Russian logisticians preferred the dispatch of fuel and ammunition to the delivery of items that could have been found in every bodega along the line of march.
Anglophone analysts also drew the wrong conclusions from reports of the loss, in battle, of Russian general officers. Such casualties, they argued, stemmed from an absence of trust. That is, Russian generals were killed because, lacking confidence in the competence of colonels, captains, and corporals, they felt obliged to exercise close supervision over forces engaged in combat.
The participation of generals in firefights, however, need not reflect an absence of faith in the fidelity and abilities of subordinates. Indeed, the original gangsters of “trust tactics” often recommended that the general officers commanding formations lead from the front. I suspect, moreover, that Russian leaders also understood that seeing a general die a soldier’s death usually exercises a positive influence on the morale of his subordinates. (“Say what you will about old General Strelkov, but he never asked us to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself.”)
Finally, few who made much of the battle deaths of Russian general officers seem to have been aware that the Russian forces that crossed into Ukraine on 24 February 2022 were organized in a way that provided them with an extraordinarily high proportion of fighting generals. That is, when a peacetime formation formed a battalion tactical group, the general in charge of that organization usually took command of the unit it spawned. Thus, rather than having one general for every four or five battalions, the Russian forces of the first few months of the “special military operation” had five or six flag-rank officers for every four or five battalions.
July 28, 2023
Progressive objections to Oppenheimer
Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the movie, and have no immediate plans to do so. That said, there’s a lot of discussion about the movie, its successes and its failures and how it relates to today’s issues. Over at Founding Questions, Severian felt the need to do a proper fisking of one particularly irritating take:
This is one of two Oppenheimer stories that popped up this morning. I don’t watch tv and haven’t seen a movie in the theater in decades; I doubt I’ve seen more than a handful of “new” movies in the last ten years. So I really am not the target audience for this kind of thing, but … I don’t get it. Why is this movie such a big deal? Have they decided to simply create The One Pop Culture Thing out of whole cloth?
Anyway, let’s see what they have to say:
There’s a cabal online, and even in some professional circles, arguing that Nolan has made the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a sideshow: that Oppenheimer looks away from the devastating effects of what happened on August 6 and 9 1945.
I guess this is where the Historian in me will forever override the pop culture critic. Obviously Robert Oppenheimer knew he was developing a weapon. The difference between a nuclear bomb and a regular bomb is one of degree, not kind. American firebombing had already done to dozens of Japanese cities what Oppenheimer’s nuke did to Hiroshima. Curtis LeMay knew it, too — after the war, he said that he’d have been rightfully tried for war crimes had the outcome gone the other way. I simply cannot see how this man is uniquely culpable for anything … or if he is, then Rosie the Riveter should be held accountable for every bomber that rolled off the assembly line.
Anti-nuclear groups have been similarly disappointed, with Carol Turner from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament telling The Guardian that “the effect of the [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] blasts was to remove the skin in a much more gory and horrible way – in [Oppenheimer] it was tastefully, artfully presented.”
That‘s your objection? That people weren’t shown getting killed in a realistic-enough manner? Jesus Christ, do you people ever listen to yourselves? That’s fucking sick. You are a loathsome excuse for a human being, Carol Turner.
Although it says much about the morals and mechanics of war, Oppenheimer isn’t a war film: it’s ultimately about the internal conflict and persecution of one individual. To painstakingly focus on the Japanese victims would have made it an entirely different film, and one at odds with the rest of Nolan’s vision. (His fellow director James Cameron, meanwhile, is said to be planning a film on the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)
“Victims”. You keep using that word.
There is currently a trend for great cultural works, such as Oppenheimer, to be denigrated if they don’t tick certain boxes, and such complaints often come from the Left. A lack of focus on victims has been a frequent criticism: it’s an argument that gets wheeled out, for example, whenever a drama is being made about serial killers. Yet I don’t think artists are obliged to do this if it doesn’t fit into their own authorial vision.
I have to admit, I’m getting that old College Town feeling right now. The one where it feels like someone dropped some low-grade acid in my coffee, and I’m hallucinating. I know what all those words mean, but put together like that they don’t make any sense at all. On the most basic level, the objection here seems to be that movies require plots. A “drama about a serial killer”, for example (“drama” … what an odd word choice), requires murders. You know, mechanically speaking. But what does “focusing” on them add? Is it any more or less awful, learning that the dead guy killed at random by a lunatic was really into soccer and had a dog and liked classic rock?
And all this is before you consider that the most vocal critics of Oppenheimer are Leftists … the very same Leftists who are determined to fight to the very last drop of Ukrainian blood, and who seem to think that giving Zelensky tactical nukes is a super idea. Reading the Left’s pronouncements on Vladimir Putin, you’d be forgiven for thinking they’d like to nuke him twice, just to be sure.
Your concern for the “victims” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki rings a little hollow, gang, when you’ve been howling for blood 24/7 on Twitter for a year and a half.
July 19, 2023
QotD: If they were serious …
I suppose this should be a post unto itself, but very briefly, If They Were Serious about war with China, you’d expect a few very basic things. Massively stepped-up armaments production, if nothing else, and if you wanted to be really slick about it, you’d do it under the guise of replenishing all the stocks we sent to our plucky allies in Ukraine — purchase orders for 100x the total amount shipped to Keeeeeve, that kind of thing. But that’s the kind of retooling that’s hard to hide, because it would also involved massively stepped-up mining, refining, and so on, not to mention upgrading the transportation infrastructure and so on.
None of those things appear to be happening. And since even an all hands on deck, Nazi-style crash rearmament program has a lag time of a few years, If They Were Serious about premiering Showdown in the Taiwan Strait anytime in the next decade, they’d be jamming that shit out NOW. Right now. Afterburners full.
You also need soldiers to use all that stuff, so you’d expect massively stepped-up military recruiting. Which would entail, at minimum, a push to get American boys into some kind of fighting shape. Which not only isn’t happening, but the exact opposite is happening. Unless you want Uncle Sugar to pay for your “top surgery” or your addadicktome, why would anyone enlist? When you further consider that the same TLAs who are so smoothly rolling out their Hate the Han™ campaign could easily order up some ultra-jingoistic remakes of Stallone movies from the 1980s, it seems as if They are not, in fact, Serious …
… but some of the nodes are, because failure is a distributed system. I love playing If They Were Serious — it’s my favorite drinking game — but alas for me, it relies on the Assumed Internal Consistency Fallacy. Like the Japanese Navy, or the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, or even poor Adm. Kimmel, you’ve got certain nodes of the Apparat performing competently to brilliantly in the service of skull-fuckingly stupid objectives, or NO objectives. The Flying TIGRs are even dumber than [Hitler], who at least called a meeting to say “Hey, how’s about we invade Russia in the winter?” While it’s clear to everyone who matters that the TIGRs really really really really really want their war, nobody’s in charge, so everyone is left to figure it out as best they can, on their own initiative, with the resources they have to hand.
And again, much like the Wehrmacht etc., the better the competent nodes perform, the harder and faster the overall system failure. We’re going to end up charging headlong into a war with China because the TLAs at Twitter etc. are doing such a great job making Hate the Han™ the Current Thing. Meanwhile, one imagines Brandon’s handlers telling their Chinese paymasters that no no, that won’t be happening, please don’t cut off our paychecks. And since they’re pretty good at their job, too — their job being “telling Beijing what they want to hear while lugging away huge sacks of cash” — it’s gotta fuck with the People’s Liberation Army command staff.
Consider further that the Army (etc.) are, Kimmel-style, doing a pretty decent job of carrying out their on-paper objectives. Kimmel was told “Get the Fleet ready for a likely confrontation with Japan a few years down the line”, and he did it. The Fistagon has told all its commanders to get ready for a war with China, yeah, sometime down the line … but right now, the important thing is to get as many gays, girls, and trannies as possible into uniform while promoting the Diversity that’s already in uniform as far up the chain of command as possible. General Sasqueetchia, in command of the Fightin’ 45th Mechanized Hairdresser Battalion, says thanks for a job well done … and it IS a job well done, according to the only actual orders anyone has received.
Fun times, right?
Severian, “Failure Nodes”, Founding Questions, 2023-04-18.
July 16, 2023
Mass Suicide on Saipan – WW2 – Week 255 – July 15, 1944
World War Two
Published 15 Jul 2023Japanese troops and civilians commit mass suicide rather than surrender to the Americans in the Marianas; in Normandy, Caen has finally fallen to the Allies though the fight for St. Lo is not over; the Soviet offensives in the north take Vilnius and the fighting continues up in Finland, but the big eastern front news is the mighty new Soviet offensive in Western Ukraine. (more…)
July 13, 2023
“… if Ukraine were to join NATO in the middle of a war, then congrats – most of Europe and North America are at war”
As I’ve said several times, I have great sympathy for ordinary Ukrainians caught up in a war not of their making, but I’m not a fan of the awesomely corrupt Ukrainian government. NATO nations providing weapons, ammunition, and training is fine, but in no way is Ukraine ready to become a member of the alliance and will not be until after this war is over and they conduct a very significant set of anti-corruption reforms in their national government. CDR Salamander points out the insanity of western pundits demanding that NATO add Ukraine to the alliance in the middle of a major war:
I understand the desire for Ukraine — and others for that matter — to be part of NATO. I also understand why the frontline states in Central Europe such as the Baltics republics and Visegrad Group would like Ukraine in as well. Defense in depth and long fronts are a thing.
As much as I can sympathize with the above, I also understand the reasons that Ukraine and other nations may never be right for NATO membership, or at best be a decade or two out. Single points of failure triggers to another world war — where every new member state increases the aggregate risk to all members — is not a minor thing to consider.
There is also the very real fact that Ukraine is in a war right now, for her an existential war with Russia. This CNN article is a perfect example of some of the absolutely foolish questions people are even considering right now. I’m not even going to quote from it as there are dozens like it out as the NATO summit is going on. It is a waste of your time.
You don’t need to be an international lawyer to understand that if Ukraine were to join NATO in the middle of a war, then congrats — most of Europe and North America are at war. As history tells us, when Europe and North America goes to war, eventually the world joins in.
For today’s post, I’d like to pull some quotes from a superb Financial Times article, NATO’s dilemma: what to do about Ukraine’s bid to join?
Membership represents the long-term security that Kyiv wants and was promised 15 years ago. But Russia’s war has complicated things
When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy strides into Nato’s annual summit in Vilnius on Wednesday, his country will have been fighting a full-scale war of survival against Russia for 503 days.
2008, in the last year of the Bush-43 administration. The year it looked like we had Iraq stabilized yet were already planning to take the keys in Afghanistan back from NATO after the alliance culminated in the summer of 2007.
The year of imperial overreach in denial;
It was over breakfast in Bucharest in 2008 that the seeds of Nato’s current dilemma were sown.
At an early morning meeting on the second day of the alliance’s summit that year, then secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer met with US president George W Bush and his French and German counterparts Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel.
The outcome of that breakfast, and a result of Merkel softening her opposition to Bush’s proposal to offer membership to Ukraine and Georgia, was a statement by the entire Nato alliance.
Both countries “will become members of Nato”, it said, without providing a timeline. That declaration, at the same time both unequivocal and non-committal, was hailed as a major achievement. It has since sunk into infamy.
Amazing how people forget that other nations get a vote. Your actions will cause reactions by those who either think they will benefit from or be endangered by them. Roll that simple context in to the 1,000 year record of people west of the Vistula misreading Russia and you have this;
Four months later Putin’s tanks rolled into northern Georgia. In 2014 his special forces annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Nato, as Putin knew well, refuses to accept new members with “frozen conflict” on their territory. Aside from condemnatory rhetoric, Nato did little to punish Moscow. Putin, who had been present at the Bucharest summit as a guest, had called Nato’s bluff.
Putin was right. No one will join NATO who has border disputes or are best known for their globe-spanning corruption.
NATO and the USA’s natsec “blob” was, again, wrong. Being wrong isn’t the problem. It is an imperfect business where mistakes are going to be made. The important thing is to learn from them and if the same people and institutions are perpetually wrong, you get new people and institutions to help you make decisions. That is the danger. It isn’t that we “remember everything but learn nothing” it is more that we “remember only what confirms our priors and only learn to try harder next time.”
July 12, 2023
QotD: Media gullibility on military issues
The Media, of course, does not do this. They’d be happy to write up a whole big feature story about how the Russians’ Q-35 matter modulator wasn’t nearly what Vlad Putin, that lying bastard, bragged it up to be. And with the new Lepage gun gluing all those Russian planes together, the brave Ukrainians will be in Moscow for Easter!
Are they lying? Not really. Some very serious-looking persyn in a snazzy uniform with a lot of very colorful ribbons told them that the Q-35 matter modulator isn’t all that, and why would some brave freedom fighter lie to them? And besides — this is crucial — “fact checking” the stats on the Q-35 matter modulator would entail that you’ve never heard of it before …
… which is anathema to our intrepid reporterette’s sense of xzhyrself as a hard-hitting newshound who is very very Smart. After all, she scored a 35,000 on her SATs and graduated from the Assjammer School of Journalism with a 9.98 GPA. She’s got fellowships and awards and whatnot out the yingyang, plus 1.2 million Twitter followers. And it says “war correspondent” right there on her Facebook page. If the Q-35 matter modulator weren’t actually a thing, surely she would know.
Severian, “The Becky Cycle”, Founding Questions, 2023-02-27.
July 2, 2023
Of course they’re lying – the interesting thing is how they sell the lies
In his Friday Mailbag, Severian answers a reader question about the reports coming out of Ukraine about casualties in the recent fighting:
Back in the worst of the covid days (so far), I often said that we’re stewing in so many obvious lies, I’m starting to question the very existence of a country called “China”. Not to mention the germ theory of disease. Is there actually a war at all in Ukraine? How do we sift and weight sources?
My rules of thumb (two thumbs, two rules) for judging the underlying truthiness of a Media story are what I’ll call “the Goebbels factor” and “admission against interest”.
The “Goebbels factor” is that fellow’s well-known dictum that the best propaganda is mostly true. Outright lies — straight up, 100% false-to-facts whoppers — are actually extremely rare, even in the AINO Media. This is because out-and-out lies take a tremendous amount of effort to maintain. Not only that, their opportunity cost is off the charts, because once you’ve peddled the lie, you’re stuck with that specific lie forever. You have to keep investing in the lie, and you must also keep investing in what I guess we’ll call the “information infrastructure” surrounding that lie. It’s just not cost-effective.
The second factor — “admission against interest” — is, of course, just the second step in everyone’s favorite dance, the Media Shuffle. The first step is “That’s not happening!” The second step is “… and here’s why it’s good that it is.” Think of it as the retooling of the previous “information infrastructure.” Lies have to be supported, one way or the other. If the lie is “there’s no inflation!”, then the “information infrastructure” consists of semi-plausible (for Juggalo values of “plausible”) “explanations” of all the very obvious inflation that’s very obviously happening. You know the drill: Putin’s price hikes! Global Warming!! Systemic Racism!!!
It’s much easier to flip those around, to “explain” why all those are actually good for you, than it is to keep investing in the original lie. It’s important to note — as if y’all need the reminder! — that the “admission against interest” is ALSO chock full of lies; you have to cross check the new lies against the old lies to reach an approximation of the truth (the discipline known as FNG-ology; the practitioners of which are stoyakniks).
Given all that: Yeah, the war in Ukraine is real, and the Ukrainians really are getting keestered. My heart goes out to the Ukrainian people, who did nothing to deserve it, and I only ask that you remember who did this to you: Brandon and the Juggalos. It’s ALL on them. Putin really had no choice.
June 27, 2023
“No one seems to understand what the hell just happened in Russia”
Discussing anything to do with the Russo-Ukraine war is difficult enough due to the signal-to-noise ratio in the information we get from both sides and (theoretically) disinterested observers. Trying to read the tea leaves in the events over the weekend was just an utter waste of time, despite the potentially earth-shaking possibilities being thrown up. The weekend dispatch from The Line doesn’t pretend to have any deep analysis to offer, which I think is by far the wisest approach:
“Sir Humphrey Appleby” tweeted this, saying it was “the intelligence update slide every DI analyst secretly dreams of producing …
As we write this, roughly a day has passed since the sudden end of what briefly looked like a massive event with the potential to reshape global politics for a generation … before it fizzled. The rebellion of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group and its bolt toward Moscow was a stunning story, until it wasn’t. And that itself is a stunning story. Yevgeny Prigozhin, former chef and now Wagner leader, suddenly called off his mutiny, and it just … ended.
Really?
When the mutiny began on Friday, and especially when Wagner seized the southern city of Rostov, home to a major Russian military headquarters overseeing the invasion of Ukraine as well as a million other people, we were surprised, but the more we thought about it, we weren’t particularly shocked. There had been obvious signs of an imminent rupture of some kind in recent months; Line editor Gurney had wondered on Twitter how long it could last before something snapped. That was about three hours before the entire country seemed to snap and Prigozhin marched into Rostov and began moving north.
Events proceeded at a fairly frantic pace after that, with Wagner troops advancing almost all the way to Moscow while Russian security forces fortified the city and tore up roads along the route. It wasn’t clear to us that Wagner had enough men to actually take the city and potentially capture key members of the government. But it wasn’t clear that he didn’t: there are two sides of that equation — the troops Prigozhin had and the troops Putin could count on to oppose Wagner. It was the latter group that captured our interest.
Wagner encountered some resistance along the way, but not much. Most of Russia’s army is deployed in Ukraine, of course, and much of what’s left is now of famously poor quality and morale. But even those military and security forces that were able to block Wagner’s advance didn’t seem that interested in the job. There are reports that some units went over to Prigozhin’s side, but it seems that most of them just did … nothing in particular. And waited to see what happened. For a few hours, we wondered if Prigozhin’s small force would be just large enough in the face of a Russian military that seemed to have no appetite for battle on its own soil.
We can’t pretend to explain the bizarre conclusion to this chaotic day and a half, with an apparent deal brokered by Belarus seeing Wagner’s advance on Moscow called off, a broad amnesty granted to all participants and Prigozhin apparently set to continue to oversee Wagner’s global operations from Belarus in some kind of exile. This is all just wildly unrealistic. Prigozhin cannot be the last person around to realize that he’s put a target on his back and that he’ll soon experience some kind of fatal medical emergency or tragic tumble out of an open window. The moment his mercenaries took Rostov, he had only one path forward: all the way to the Kremlin. What the hell he’s thinking is frankly beyond our ability to guess, and we have fairly vivid imaginations. It’s baffling.
Nor will we try to guess what this will mean for Russia. In a situation like this, your Line editors would normally simply confess that we don’t have the deep knowledge of Russian domestic politics to turn ourselves into credible instant-experts on this. We’d seek out someone with that knowledge. We could interview them, solicit a column from them, or even — as we’ve done in the past — allow someone with deep expertise but who isn’t permitted to speak on the record in public to provide a blurb for one of these dispatches, to run under our shared byline. But in this case, we had to reject all those options, because at least for right now, all the experts seem as baffled as we are. No one seems to understand what the hell just happened in Russia.
We can say with at least reasonable confidence that if you happen to be named Vladimir Putin, it isn’t good. When Prigozhin announced that he was ending his mutiny and began withdrawing his forces from Rostov, the locals cheered them like some kind of conquering heroes. That’s gotta be on Putin’s mind. Also on his mind: the apparent, ahem, reluctance of much of his military and domestic security force to rally to his side during the crisis. This has wounded Putin. Time will tell how badly. Time will also tell how many other people in Russia today have carefully watched recent events, have adjusted their understanding of the facts on the ground there, and are now pondering a variety of intriguing options accordingly.
And the last thing time will tell is what Putin feels he must now do to assert his authority, such as it is. We must recall that whatever Putin’s domestic troubles, he has problems on the battlefield, too. While we haven’t yet seen major breakthroughs by Ukrainian forces, they are not yet fully committed, and their counteroffensive does seem to be making gradual progress in multiple sectors. Events of recent days can only hurt Russia’s combat performance and morale.
We wish we could offer you all a more firm and decisive statement to wrap all this up. But the best we can honestly promise you is that we’ll keep pondering this, trying to figure out what the hell happened, and we’ll certainly be watching this. It’s been a strange war. And we suspect it might get stranger still before it finally ends.
The most recent Defence Intelligence update map from the British Ministry of Defence shows what is thought to be a reasonably accurate representation of the battlefront in eastern Ukraine:
June 22, 2023
QotD: Nuclear non-proliferation and the Russo-Ukraine war
As one of Shute’s characters, a scientist, explained, “The trouble is, the damn things got too cheap. The original uranium bomb cost about fifty thousand quid towards the end. Every little pipsqueak country like Albania had a stockpile of them, and every little country that had that, thought it could defeat the major countries in a surprise attack”. Significantly, Shute’s future war, set in 1963, wasn’t triggered by the usual NATO-Warsaw Pact arsenals of nuclear weapons, but the proliferation of them elsewhere. Then, as now, it is not Russian or Chinese aggression that should worry those with nightmares of nuclear cataclysm, but that of other countries. Thanks to the NPT, IAEA and the UN, these possibilities are contained. Today, the world’s weapons of mass destruction stand at one tenth of their number during the Cold War.
Indeed, the very origins of the current Ukraine crisis illustrate how the international order has managed to contain potential proliferation. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, Ukraine possessed the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, greater than those of Britain, France and China combined. Kyiv soon realised it couldn’t afford to maintain the warheads and remain a credible nuclear military power. A solution was found, whereby the weapons would be destroyed, but only in exchange for security assurances that the United States and Russia would respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.
What Ukraine signed on 5 December 1994 was the Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances, in which Bill Clinton for the United States, Boris Yeltsin for Russia and John Major for Great Britain promised to protect Ukraine and its territorial integrity in recognition of Kyiv surrendering the protection of its nuclear arsenal. There was no mention of military guarantees, which Ukraine assumed were implied. Additionally, Kyiv promised to adhere to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
After the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, the G7 nations complained that Russia had breached the Budapest Memorandum. Vladimir Putin replied evasively that since, in his view, a new regime had seized power from Ukraine’s previously pro-Moscow premier Viktor Yanukovych, “Russia has not signed any obligatory documents with this new state”. Since then, Russia has lied and prevaricated over its betrayal of Budapest. In 2016, Sergey Lavrov went so far as to claim, “Russia never violated Budapest memorandum. It contained only one obligation, not to attack Ukraine with nukes” — a gross distortion of the Memorandum’s many obligations.
However, the West responded in 2014 only with mild economic sanctions. Arguably, the apathy of the anti-interventionist Barack Obama and David Cameron, influenced by a London awash with Russian money, emboldened Vladimir Putin. Few experts disagree that had the West responded in 2014 as they did in 2022, Russia’s expansionist ambitions into Ukraine would have ended long ago. Yet, there is plenty of room for optimism. The Russo-Ukraine conflict has not spread because of the international order and its treaties. Apart from North Korea and Iran, neither of whom have quite perfected their devilish devices, nuclear proliferation of third parties has been held in check.
The Kremlin shows no sign of taking steps to escalate to a nuclear level. It is not in its interests, or those of its allies, to do so. None of the 32 nations who recently abstained from condemning Russia in the 24 February UN vote would welcome Vladimir Putin and his cronies flinging nukes around. The qualified support of major powers like China, India and Pakistan is attached to the cheap oil and arms procurements they have negotiated with Moscow. Any hint of Tsar Vladimir “going nuclear” would see their abstentions morph into support for the West. Putin, for all his rhetoric, cannot afford to go it alone with just the six who voted with him at the UN. In military terms, they offer nothing.
The world’s various international arms treaties provide plenty of optimism that this will remain a regional war. So far, Putin’s threats have melted away as the morning mist. The scenario he implies, akin that in On the Beach and other nuclear-war-scare novels and films, is so unlikely as to be discounted. They and all the rest of the post-apocalyptic genre are written as nail-biting entertainment, not history or current affairs.
Peter Caddick-Adams, “Putin, Shute and nukes”, The Critic, 2023-03-09.
April 19, 2023
Time to remove US nuclear weapons from Europe?
CDR Salamander has long advocated getting the final few American “tactical” nuclear weapons off European soil and makes the case for doing it now:
It may seem like a strange thing to propose while there is the largest land war in Europe since 1945 going on, but as it is something I’ve been a supporter of for a few decades I might as well be consistent: we are long overdue to remove American nuclear weapons from Europe.
It is 2023. Just look at this map.
[…]
The Soviet Union stopped existing over three decades ago.
Even though we’ve decreased from 7,000 warheads down to 100 … there really is no reason to keep what remains in Europe.
- Gravity bombs on continental Europe – that require tactical aircraft to deliver them – are the least survivable, reliable, or timely way to deliver a nuclear weapon.
- There is no such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. I don’t care what some theorist proposes to defend their pet theories, you lob one nuke an order of magnitude larger than the Hiroshima bomb and only a foolish nation would let their strategic nuclear forces stay unused and in danger.
- Gravity bombs are not a first strike weapon and are a poor second strike weapon. As such, you have to consider that the the time gap from approval to flash-boom would be so long the war would be over before your F-XX pickled their nuke over their target – even if the aircraft made it off the ground.
- If they are NATO weapons, you not only have to get NATO to approve their use, but host nation to as well … in addition to the USA. Do you really think the Russians would not leverage their influence with the useful idiots in the Euro-Green parties, former communists, and general black-block anti-nuke activists to politically of physically stop the use of the nukes, especially in BEL, NLD, DEU, and ITA? Add that to point 3 above.
- Especially with the weapons in Turkey – the risk of these bombs having a bad day due to human or natural causes is non-zero. In the days of mutually assured destruction, those non-zero odds were manageable, but there is no reasonable person in the third decade of the 21st Century who can with a straight face explain to you why any tactical, operational, or strategic use justify their presence. They deter no enemy, but puts every friend in danger.
- Look again at the map above. Exactly what target set are you going to “service” at that range (non-refueled)?
- If things go nuclear in Europe then the right weapons are either British, French, and if they must be American are sitting in a silo in CONUS, a SSBN in the Atlantic, or a B-2 in Missouri.
April 16, 2023
4,000 German teens trapped in Tarnopol – WW2 – Week 242 – April 15, 1944
World War Two
Published 15 Apr 2023Thousands of German soldiers, mostly new teenage recruits, are obeying Hitler’s “Fortress Directive” and are surrounded in Tarnopol; it does not go well for them. German forces in Ukraine manage to all pull back across the Dniester, but they are under serious pressure in the Crimea. Meanwhile, in India, the Japanese siege of Kohima continues, and in China they are poised to launch a gigantic offensive.
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April 10, 2023
It’s totally normal for a country to send troops overseas and neglect paying to feed them, right?
This week’s Dispatch post from The Line includes some commentary on the story I linked to last week from the Ottawa Citizen, reporting that Canadian soldiers sent to Poland to train Ukrainian troops are being stiffed by the Department of National Defence on their food bills:
Operation Unifier shoulder patch for Canadian troops in Ukraine.
Detail from a photo in the Operation Unifier image gallery
Here’s a totally normal story from a well-functioning country that isn’t at all broken: it turns out that processing per diems for a hundred or so folks is now beyond the capability of the federal government.
This story came to us courtesy the Ottawa Citizen, where David Pugliese reported that the company sized unit of Canadian military personnel operating in Poland has seen months worth of expense filings go unpaid. In some situations, a military unit sent abroad would include its own logistical support team, including cooks. In other situations, a relatively small unit sent to a place with functioning civilian infrastructure is told to feed themselves and keep the receipts for reimbursement. For our troops in Poland, there to provide logistical and training support to Ukrainian forces since October, the government went the latter route.
And that’s fine. Really. Frankly, we’re sure the troops are happier eating out at local places and enjoying delicious Polish food — really, it’s amazing — than getting three servings of military slop a day. The problem, though, as these poor troops discovered, is that the military and national defence bureaucracy no longer has the ability to process the expense payments. So these balances are just sitting on their personal credit cards. For months.
[…]
The mission began in October.
It seems almost pointless to add much actual insight and analysis here. This kind of dysfunction speaks for itself. We’ll limit ourselves to two comments: operational deployments are incredible stressful on military personnel and their families on the homefront. That’s uncontroversial, and unavoidable. That’s why military service is recognized as a sacrifice even during peacetime deployments. The basic bargain we make with our servicemembers is while they are serving their country abroad, their country will take care of their families at home. Leaving these families with high-interest credit-card balances they can’t pay off because the Canadian government is too broken to reimburse soldiers for expenses they were told to incur is an on-the-nose failure of Canada to honour its debt to the the military parents, spouses and children who have been, in effect, ordered to advance the Canadian government money to subsidize military deployments.
The second comment we’ll make, is that this isn’t just further evidence in support of the Canada-is-broken thesis — it’s a very specific kind of break. We’ve all known that Canadian governments, at all levels, have struggled to turn new policies into new programs. That’s not new. But even granting that failure, we’ve generally been able to keep doing the things we already do. There seemed to be enough residual muscle memory in our governments. Can we do new things? No, not really. But we’ll keep doing the stuff we already do.
This military fiasco is alarming because it’s a sign that our state-capacity issues are now extending into areas that previously worked. Not only are we struggling to do new things, we’re forgetting how to do things we used to be able to do. This goes beyond what our typical gripes about state capacity. This is something else. This is state atrophy, or rot.
Now that the public is paying attention, we suspect we’ll see some reasonably rapid progress. The government will throw bureaucrats and maybe consultants at the problem until it goes away. This is how they have reacted to similar issues: we hurled ground staff at airport delays until they cleared, and bureaucrats at passport offices until the backlogs eased.
But we have to ask why we now require exceptional redeployments of staff to maintain typical levels of service. And we don’t like the answers we can come up with. Ottawa has added tens of thousands of civil servants, at an annual cost of tens of billions, in recent years. During that time Ottawa has also sharply ramped up spending on consultants; the annual cost now surpasses $20 billion.
And yet.
What the hell is going on?
I’ve been saying for literally years now, the more the government tries to do the less well it does everything, and this fiasco is a perfect example of that sclerosis spreading further.
April 9, 2023
New Offensive in the Crimea – WW2 – Week 241 – April 8, 1944
World War Two
Published 8 Apr 2023The Soviets are finally going to try and push the Axis out of Sevastopol and the Crimea. They also continue to drive the Axis back in Transnistria. Over in Burma and Northeastern India, the Japanese have the Allies under siege at not one, but two towns, and are also attacking Imphal from several points, but the Japanese have way bigger future plans up their sleeves in China.
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