w0de0

You’re right that this is a form of escalation. You’re right to see danger in such further provocation of a nuclear rival - of an autocrat lost in historical delusion and bloody revanchism.

I believe you’re wrong to think the escalation is inherently a mistake, or never a path out of conflict. It is common wisdom to observe that bullies may only be stopped with escalatory tactics.

So it seems to me that the West must find some way to show a spine and push back, short of open war. The alternative cedes European hegemony, and the fate of those democracies, to Moscow’s cold hands.

Statistically? Statistically Russia has killed more Slavs than any other nation and is presently running up the score.

> you forget about the balkan wars in the 1990s

I mentioned no wars specifically, and so could have forgotten none.

Specifically in this war, in the Balkans:

Which territories did America conquer and annex?

Who, specifically, did Nato defeat? What were they doing, and planning?

Would you democracy exist if not for the West's intervention? Would your nation? Your people?

I haven't the least idea what your OP comment was, and was not speaking to it. I do hope you weren't arguing Russia's war is just, or America should let the nukes fly, or some similar poison!

I was simply responding to your interlocutor because I wanted to share a ramble in response to his comment. I am sorry to have offended.

You may choose to believe that America's empire, its history, and its reasons for existing, are identical with Putin and Russia's reasons, means, and goal in this war.

If you believe this - if you believe all morality is so relative - I recommend you move to Russia and take your despotism pure, without the base alloy of hypocrisy that seems to frustrate you so much.

> I don't know that NATO has the guts to give Putin that bloody nose.

Your analysis seems rational in this moment. But: the policy and personality of a democracy is liable change rapidly and radically in a way no single actor ever would or could. Autocrats often do not understand this, and make the same assumptions you have.

The scenario you describe would raise such apocalyptic outrage in America and Europe that war without thought of consequence would likely ensue.

You simply cannot extrapolate future behavior of complex democracies from current behavior as you would an individual. The concern you laid out in your post is relevant: once enough citizens arrive at a similar opinion, policy can rapidly shift.

  chernobyl to me personally just represents the corruption and total failure of communism

Thank you for sharing this. It gives some weight and reality to what I claimed above: 'in the Slavic societies of post-Soviet eastern Europe - including Russians themselves - Chernobyl connotes the corruption and failure of the USSR.'

  I really cannot comprehend all the outrage at putin, when all the outraged countries literally have soldiers occupying some other foreign countries right this moment.

With respect, sir, you are being foolish here - in three ways:

First, in thinking that all military occupation - all war - is equally evil. In thinking that America's wars, or American's bases in Germany, can possibly justify this invasion.

Russia's crusade to defeat Hitler was justified (and saved the world). That's true even though they helped with the evil partition of Poland in '39. It's true no matter what.

Second, in thinking that this is a conflict between America and Russia. Russian propaganda is happy to say it is. But the hard facts: Russia has invaded and seeks to annex another Slavic power. America could simply go home and the war would not stop. In fact it probably wouldn't stop until the entire Tsarist-Slavic world had been reconquered, including your Balkan people.

Third, in not being outraged. In fact, I'm angry at you for not being angry!

You sit there, Balkan Slav, in your new democracy, under the EU's economic umbrella, free of the Balkan's once endemic ethnic wars, posting your opinions on the internet with the careless ease of one confidant in their right of free speech, confidant in their democracy.

You haughtily justify Russian invasion with the mention of the Americans wars, which have ended and from which we gained little or nothing - and which were not territorial conquests, as this is.

You don't even imagine that Russia, unresisted, would very soon become interested in the brother Slavs of the Balkans. In you. In your fragile new democracy. Where is your solidarity with the citizens of your fellow democracies? We're in this together.

I'm not quite making any argument, to be honest - definitely not that HN is immune. Just idle observation - conversation :).

I do see the spam propaganda, the obvious paid trolls, &tc. We both ignore them, I'm sure, and I ignored them in my comment.

I was speaking more specifically of two types I encounter:

- The fairly well spoken internet ideologues squirreling away strange rational arguments deep in esoteric threads.

- The charismatic celebrity ideologue shouting evil, stillborn, emotional arguments out of a screen.

I think it's likely that most of the former folks are inspired by the celebrities: basically just innocent fools being fooled. I think the public personalities have vastly varying complicity, awareness, motivations.

Russian external security services have, perhaps, made long and serious study of American mass media.

> well-executed propaganda == organic

Seems to me that propaganda which appears to most of its targets as entirely native political discourse has by definition been well-executed. But I know very little about information war, semiotics, or mass psychology: maybe obvious, repetitive, & transparently foreign propaganda is more effective for some purposes.

It is wise to acknowledge that we do not know at the specific goal(s) of Russia's information operations in America. Gauging their effectiveness is difficult when one knows not the precise effects intended!

> In fact, there are several factors that make high-quality, lower-volume propaganda efforts worthwhile here

Such suspicion I've sometimes shared.

But HN does probably have some immunity. The average intelligence of the community is probably lower than any one member would suppose. But there is endemic recurrence of obstinate and well-argued refusal to believe anyone else on the internet could possibly be right. (And to forget one's interlocutors are v. likely humans.) Depending on their goals, that seems a tough place for even the cleverest propagandists. Propaganda is emotional, and HN hosts a mild rationality cult.

But: perhaps there's a difference to be elucidated between propaganda and information war. The latter - specifically the tactic of attacking the very possibility of rational dialogue by obscuring facts under incessant bullshit and so imposing a general unknowability of facts - has already riven HN here and there.

Moreover, it seems unwise to trust any analysis that conveniently grants me my own special place in world events. I'm uncomfortable concluding a website I frequent is influential enough to be specially targeted. Occam and Hanlon should be consulted first.

And - it costs me little to assume there is no malice afoot at all. Having long since disdained getting angry at stranger's stupidity on the internet as a fool's pastime, I endeavor to react to all obstinately disagreeable opinions with the same equanimity - I imagine you do, too. I do not harbor any illusions about my ability to generate counter-propaganda. I'm just a guy typing (mostly to himself, as with all para-sociality) on the internet.

All this considered, I'm left wondering: for both myself, you, and the Russian propagandists, what profit is there in posting on HN? What likelihood that any of us will convince any other over even the most inoffensive difference of opinion?

Russian propaganda of the past ~decade has become extremely skilled at sounding reasonable to contrarian thinkers, and at fitting in to the broader Western zeitgeist.

RT, less official media - perhaps the FSB itself - now cultivate native intellectuals (hard not to scare-quote that...) with opinions variously: genuinely pro-Putin, generally anti-liberal-world-order, chaotically damaging to the US polity in their demagoguery, or simply convenient for Russia's current goals. Folks like Tucker Carlson and Rep. Steve King.

I mention this because I suspect most of your and mine (I see this too) encounters with Putin's latest obsequious bullshit on American internet fora are not actual progandists, or even consciously anti-democratic folks. They are simply ideological fellow travellers, perhaps devotees of one of Russia's special friends.

In any case, I find this more likely than a secret American underground of RIA Novosti fans, or a vast human farm of cheap enough, yet still impeccably Englished, trolls.

Ah, no, I believe it's primarily a purely tactical advance. Chernobyl is directly in the Russian army's shortest path of advance on Kyiv.

If it turns out they don't try to take Kyiv, I stand corrected.

But practical necessity has certainly not stopped the Russians from also trying an infowar attack based on Chernobyl's totemic power, as you say.

I agree our nations have done less than everything that could be done. I do think we've done quite better than could have been hoped around 2016.

I believe your moral certainty is quite flawed:

1. It rests entirely on hindsight.

These events only started seeming inevitable about 24 hours ago.

Now we've found them to be true, we trust and are even impressed by the Americans' warnings. But these last weeks I little doubt the Bundestag's halls, and European couches everywhere, heard many recollections of Iraq's supposed WMD program.

2. You advocate a purely moral policy.

There's a quiet part in every happy Westerner's mind that believes, without examination, in the ultimate and inevitable triumph of good over evil. To be fair, the past few generations experienced reassuring evidence for this assumption - and Hollywood keeps the reassurance alive.

Unfortunately, the good guys do not always win; moral will cannot overcome geopolitical reality. Neither Realpolitik nor MAD were made defunct by 20 years of Pax Americana. History may have had a near-death experience, but she's apparently now quite recovered.

Ukraine is Russia's neighbor. Ukraine is very much Russia's family: brothers who long cohabited. Ukraine's attitude towards Russia is legitimately a vital interest of Russia. Russia has, by right of force (Realpolitik!), complete dominance to act in Ukraine. Deterrence was always the only realistic option.

500,000 Western soldiers <500m from Moscow would be both target for, and, perhaps, sufficient justification in Russians citizens' eyes for the use of, tactical nukes.

3. It is unrealistic about how democracies work. Only the aggression your proposed policy is meant to prevent would be sufficient to convince democracies to implement it: an unfortunate catch-22.

Democracies are extremely reluctant to go to war, which is good. The price paid is inevitably foolishness in global power politics. Roosevelt could not have started a pre-emptive war with Japan, though perhaps this would have been the optimal move.

Similarly, there is no chance that, in the context of 20 years of unbroken peace, any Nato member would be interested in such a massive deployment directly next to Moscow. No scenario would have allowed this risk.

If it did somehow happen, Russia's aggressive response could easily divide the alliance in recrimination for implementing such a reckless policy.

  Is the subtext that Putin plans to blow it up, or what?

Information war does not need a rational subtext - I suspect it is more effective when it hasn't any. Even better if multiple rationalities are all slightly plausible yet all slightly absurd.

The fundamental tactic is to obscure truth with a flood of bullshit. One thus removes the surety of known & agreed facts from both the politics of enemy's polity and the planning of the enemy's military.

With its rapidity, and its dynamic reaction the the enemy's information disposition, Russia's approach is to conventional propaganda what blitzkrieg was to trench warfare - largely the same tools, but radically different tactics. To stretch the analogy, the internet takes the tank's place as the key disruptive technology which both inspires and requires new tactics.

  I'm pretty sure that attacking central Europe with a dirty bomb would make it very difficult for NATO to avoid invoking Article 5.

This threat is, I'm pretty sure, not intended. Russia already has enough nukes and Putin has already rather clearly threatened nuclear escalation if any nation "interferes." There is perhaps an implicit threat intended - "nice continent you got here - and, oh, look, Russia is now in charge of protecting its on-going habitability!"

Think of it like this:

Russia wants to be a respected great power. Putin's revisionist fantasy casts Russia as the primary arbiter of Europe's political order.

Chernobyl is an on-going danger to the entire peninsula's safety. It must have a robust institutional custodian - perhaps for centuries to come. It may not be as dangerous, but that cannot be assumed, it must be proven conclusively (and even then concern will linger: democracies are quite skilled at turning society's vague, broadly-held fears into irrational policy).

Therefore Europe cannot ostracize any polity controlling the exclusion zone indefinitely. The EU paid for the current sarcophagus: managing this risk is a vital interest of the entire Union.

More broadly: fear need not be (and usually is not) rational in order to be acted upon - especially in democracies.

  Pripyat and its immediate vicinity is just an unpopulated area with a decomissioned nuclear power station in it.

You are rational and informed, and perhaps correct (I don't know). As far as facts actually matter here, however, your analysis is incomplete.

The exclusion zone is an unpopulated area with a decommissioned nuclear power plant *which happens to be directly between the Russian army and their objective*. Any conventional attack on Kyiv from Belarus must include this area - even if it was truly unexceptional.

But the facts don't matter. "Chernobyl" is a totem in American and European minds. The very fact of this HN post's popularity attests such.

Russian strategists hope, I think, that they can gain an edge by capturing the totem. They think to turn its symbolic meanings to their own ends.

Ukrainians also hope to use Chernobyl's various meanings in the minds of their allies to their advantage, as a warning and an impetus for solidarity.

Semiotic warfare, if you will!

This development is a tactical prerequisite for besieging or attacking Kyiv. The exclusion zone covers the shortest route to the city from Belarus - the shortest route available to Russian forces.

It’s also perhaps a strategic coup for Russia in two ways - but it could also be a boon to Ukraine. The coming days will elucidate which party most profits - probably Russia.

Russia’s first strategic gain is simply one of properly executed rapid maneuver armored warfare. They now hold a redoubt that is difficult to safely attack, threatens Kyiv and the entire Dnipro plain, and preemptively protects their politically weakest supply line, Belarus.

Russia’s second potential strategic boon here is more modern - they have seized an infowar high ground.

The Financial Times this morning quotes an anonymous Russian security official claiming Chernobyl’s occupation creates a potent psychological deterrent against both strategic escalation and subtle tactical interference from the West.

The disaster of 86 looms large in the minds of European polities, especially the Nordics. Placing the radioactive zone in the battle space may chill European feet.

And in American minds, Chernobyl is unavoidably associated with the USSR and memories of a more dangerous iteration of Russia. (I expect many on this side of the Atlantic think the plant is in Russia.) Occupying it elevates the danger and the power associated with Russia nearer to Cold War levels of respect, which is a fundamental goal of Putin’s revanchism.

However, in the Slavic societies of post-Soviet eastern Europe - including Russians themselves - Chernobyl connotes the corruption and failure of the USSR. Gorbachev himself blamed the Union’s destruction entirely on the loss of scientific and nuclear prestige, and national confidence, engendered by the disaster.

So Russia risks reminding all their former satellite peoples of the last empire’s outcome. Ukraine’s morale and propaganda may turn the loss into a victory - especially if the Nordics polities, and German citizenry, favor outrage over trepidation. In this pursuit, Zelensky spoke several hours ago with Sweden’s PM about specifically the Chernobyl battle - and Ukraine’s FM called it an “attack on Europe.”

I hope desperately that Ukraine gains greater European unity, and Russia gets further opprobrium among those Europeans who yet still take an understanding view of Putin’s new imperialism.

But I suspect the affair will on the whole benefit Russia. All else aside, it’s clear they are fighting a conventional ground war. They need the hard tactical advantage of occupying this particular 1,000 square miles to win; even if they lose the information battle they have advanced their cause.

Your moral certainty is laudable and impossible to dispute without sullying one’s own ethics with hypocrisy, and inviting charges of moral and literal cowardice.

But. Nuclear weapons are far beyond the ken and capability of humans’ intuitive game theory, the hueristics we apply in escalatory conflicts of all scales. Applying such intuition risks thoughtless apocalypse; MAD is a novel idea because such weapons required either an entirely new paradigm in power politics, or humanity’s rapid suicide.

Nuclear weapons are a deus, or devil, sprung from the machine of human civilization.

The possibility of their use, even by a bully who wields them especially to intimidate us, must inspire some cowardice in any soul who cherishes humanity’s potential.

The west must find its moral courage within the contraints of antiquarian post-Congress of Vienna style Realpolitik, as others have stated. Partition of Ukraine and many decades applying a new strategy of containment is the most realistic ‘victory’ that can be sought.

We might hope that Russia’s once promising liberal civil society will revolt and save this decade for peace - in vain, I expect.

The exclusion zone occupies the shortest route from Belarus to Kyiv.

Our hueristic for acceptable risk does not properly account for low-probability but extreme consequence circumstance - proverbial black swan events.

Against instinct, we should find unacceptable even an absurdly minuscule chance of (for instance) irradiating the European peninsula for 10,000 years.

An argument for safety with an attached “even Chernobyl was [mostly safe]” corollary should be suspected of unsupportable optimism.

Your point is most starkly clear in the case of any open source malware.

No, the poster is entirely correct - for traditional currencies. Given enough cash, one could light a decent bonfire.

I will do the politeness of responding, as recompense for the passion of my dismissal. If you be so kind, see my response in another subthread. I promise there is no shortage of pretense!

I will do the politeness of responding, as recompense for the passion of my dismissal.

> I want to ask, what about the book was so offensive?

I would be dishonest not to admit my dislike's passion was conceived in frustration with the book's fans. "Offense," though I don't affirm the label, arises on interaction with Objectivists.

Atlas Shrugged eloquently explicates Objectivism's fundamental lack of empathy - its denial of carnality, passion, humanity, animism, pleasure, pain, misfortune, fate: all sense, no sensibility. The plot, finding its villain in democratic government and indeed all society, and for its heroes a set of selfish, sexless, and statuesque Scrooges, is the denial. So is merely the style: the stodginess of conversation and thought, the relentless rationality of the action. It has no scene containing a believably real corner of society, be it a family, a friendship, or civil society. All argument is intellectual, all triumphs transparently ideological.

It is a badly-written novel for precisely the same reasons Objectivism is a poor philosophy. To see someone read it and embrace it as wisdom maddens.

And such someones abound in America! One might conclude every man (indeed, this is man's ideology) fancies himself a temporarily embarrassed John Galt. Rich Americans too love Rand's ideas - and are surely delighted so many of the citizenry affirm their own superiority. Rich objectivists mock openly their noblesse oblige, and have no qualms in setting the Republic against itself in pursuit of continually lower taxation.

Human social projects are not clockwork systems, but each, since the time we first surpassed the society of apes, is an idiosyncratic novelty. Humanity itself is a singular species, exceptional in our power of rational understanding but roundly unable to apply the talent when considering our own teleology. We overestimate the utility of our pattern-matching and are easily seduced by just-so reductionism.

Not incidentally, Marxism shares Objectivism's flawed empathy; the two philosophies are fastidiously symmetrical. That Rand's intellectual rebellion would reject her oppressor's dogma, but not its mode of analysis, seems unsurprising. We all struggle to escape the modes of critical thought we first learned, even as our conclusions mutate.

Rand might have been hoped to see this in herself, but then again, such self-awareness she implicitly rejected.

In America, the train hasn't been that vital to infrastructure since the era that inspired the trope. Trucks move 7 times more value annually [https://www.bts.gov/newsroom/2017-north-american-freight-num...].

A manifesto pretending (lazily) to be a novel, Atlas Shrugged is a sophomoric work of prescriptive pretension, not the type which observes and reports in verisimilitude a plausible description of human affairs.

In short your comment is an insight to you, and only an insight to California in as much as one accepts Objectivism as a thoughtful (haha! is my opinion) framework for grokking reality.

Indeed. It's probably the dastardly, competent CIA using innocent people's grievances to keep the Russian nation down. I mean, connect the dots! Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, now Kazakhstan? All suspiciously close to Russia. The CIA's sinister color revolution plot advances even as the Americans deny it!

Of course, it's an entirely unrelated fact that the collapse of the most recent Russian autocratic empire generated a crop of ethno-national, authoritarian kleptocracies in each polity that failed (...wonder why?) to join the Western alliance yet escaped complete vassalage to Moscow.

Unrelated I tell you! All nations have people who have grievances! If the FSB were as evil as the CIA, Canada would be rioting right now!

...Sure, I guess, the CIA could have "instigated" these riots, or acted to exacerbate factionalism within the oligarchy. I doubt it, but I can't deny that a competent intelligence agency could do so. Could do so because the people who "have grievances" are genuinely oppressed: they want freedom, they envy the wealth and liberation of the West. And "they" means a huge majority - not an interest group with a petty grievance, but a _generation_ with a despair of the future.

Shitty oppressive evil kingdoms are doomed to fail (one hopes: god help humanity if they figure out how to be stable in perpetuity - none have yet). If the CIA gives them a shove, good for them, means the USA is still the true vanguard of the people's revolution. When the mob brays for regicide the Kazakh kings may only blame themselves.

Humans are by an OOM or more the most complex creatures to arise from raw natural selection; about us we have constructed a fractal diversity of society and culture.

Humans are animals, yes, but they have long transcended the ordinary pressures of environment and selection. In a stupor, trying to comprehend our exceptionalism, we intuitively and nonsensically describe much human behavior as "unnatural."

Your crude reduction of human reproductive choice denies myriad past choices made in free will, subsuming both the terror of power and the rare true love to biochemical animism. Go far enough down this path and you will assign to animal spirits the abstract free will you deny, accidentally recreating primitive religion & symbolic thought, thus elaborately disproving yourself.

We're obviously animals. That's a place to start, but not an insight. Contending otherwise is insight to the soul and pain of the speaker, not their society.

The end, the ur-insight: a universal theory which succinctly predicts homosexuality, Dennis Kuchinich's marriage, the Ptolemaic family tree, the fate of the Sabine women, and Kate Upton's romance.

How does one "instigate riots"?

> archeological record or even fossil record

The Earth may (I think it likely) have been tectonically active for long enough to destroy any such traces of an advanced civilization arising during its first couple eons (oldest macro-fossil: 800m years; Earth: 4.5b years).

Better disproof is perhaps the absence of evidence in the geologic/atmospheric record. One imagines that a geologist in the deep future could detect a long-forgotten humanity via the record's abrupt spike in CO2 output, just as present geologists know of the Great Oxidation Event.

You have described, accurately if glibly, the situation in the West prior to the Industrial Revolution and globalization, which have brought world-historical growth in economic, educational, and spiritual quality-of-life for non-elites.

Over the past ~150 years, our society has been remade; higher education is hardly the esoteric province of the aristocracy and clergy it was ~700 years ago in Europe, and as you imagine it will "obviously" soon again be.

There's no doubt the elite retain advantages of birth. Perfect meritocracy seems at odds with humans' intuitive creation of entrenched hierarchy and autonomic drive to empower and extend one's specific genetic legacy. But even when beset by imperfection, corruption, hypocrisy, etc, a Western non-elite human's life is not likely to turn out "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," as is it would have in almost any other age. A peasant in Lancashire c. 1350 could reasonably bet many of his children would die, and those that did not would live almost entirely the same life as his own. A working-class American can make the opposite bets just as reasonably.

All this to say: I'm no Whig historian, but it is impossible to deny tangible and massive improvements in the average human's access to education and general quality of life over the past several generations. It is therefore absurd to make "obvious" predictions such as you have, contrary to a pervasive, macro trend, without providing some insightful analysis. (William Gibson's Cassandra cries should not be used as primary evidence...)

We rich, lucky ones, likely as not great-grandchildren of semi-literate factory peons, seem, generally, to exist in a cynical milieu which thoughtlessly assumes inevitable dystopia (an anti-Whig history!). But recent negative trends in, for instance, the Gini co-efficient, are minuscule vibrations within a relentlessly positive curve [https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality].

Good point. Not sure why they invented the EU in the first place. Bunch of unnecessary bother, really.

Indeed, the tale took a grim turn with this detail. I had hoped for some good clean macabre irony when I saw “Irish” in a coming sentence.

Luckily, “See Also” has a link to Dublin Whiskey Flood - 13 fatalities - all alcohol poisoning!

Of course you're right - but drugs usually do deliver the benefits espoused (if often at a Faustian price). Your two statements are a shade oxymoronic.

Addictive habits form suddenly, but not immediately. Every drug requires a period of optional, regular, and increasing use before dependency develops. (Some, like nicotine, can have rapid dependency onset. Others take 6 or more months of intermittent use before withdrawal threatens).

This non-dependent yet regular use is usually driven by genuine (subjective) benefit to the user - euphoria or focus, amnesia or nescience, etc.

This is the essence of the word "drug": if inactive we say supplement, snake oil, homeopathic, etc.

Pharmacology _is_ somewhat magic - absurdly improbable in a way reality, and human endeavor, often is (see: organ transplants, the bioengineered mutant grass known as maize/corn).