Meanwhile in Ukraine

by wj

For this weekend’s Open Thread, we step away from the chaos in the US and return to a familiar subject: Ukraine.  (Bearing in mind that I’m nothing like an expert on the subject.)

Everyone has been talking for months about the coming Spring Offensive by Ukraine.  So far, nothing has happened.  Why not?   

Well, first off, Ukraine has to wait for the ground to dry enough to support its equipment.  Last year, Russia demonstrated the hazards of getting stuck on roads where you can be trapped.  Second, Ukraine knows when they are going to start; the Russians do not.  Which means that the Russians have to be on alert constantly – which can be exhausting.  So another reason for Ukraine not to rush forward immediately.

On top of that, the Russian forces seem to be increasingly in disarray.  Even compared to last year.  Two weeks ago, Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group, was complaining that Russia was only providing his forces with 10% of the ammunition that they needed.  (And was threatening to pull his troops out.)  What does that mean?  Several possibilities:

• Russian ammunition stores are in far worse shape than anyone had quite realized. Which would be a serious problem, even if they are fighting a defensive battle.
• Russian military commanders are hording their ammunition, even from the unit which has been the most successful on their side. And the one which has been taking the lead in the fighting around Bakhmut – which, whatever its lack of real strategic importance, has acquired some serious symbolic significance.  
• Prigozhin is engaged in a CYA effort, talking ammunition shortages in order to try to conceal the fact that he is running out of the Russian convicts that he has been using for cannon fodder.  And/or that he is bogged down in Bakhmut, without making much progress.  If the Wagner Group, for whatever reasons, implodes, the Russian position will be seriously hurt.

Then last week, it developed that Prigozhin was in communication, repeated communications, with Ukrainian intelligence.  Offering to give information on Russian troop positions, and perhaps more, apparently in exchange for a partial Ukrainian pullback.  It doesn't appear that the Ukrainians are buying that bridge.  But still, not the behavior one expects from a commander who thinks he is on the winning side.  

And finally, the internal feuding between Prigozhin and the Russian general staff is no longer a two way fight.  It seems that the Chechens are unhappy with their situation in the war, too.  Their “volunteers” have been taking heavy casualties.  And for what?

All in all, it looks to me like Ukraine’s prospects may be rather better than advertised.  Sure, the Ukrainians have been trying to keep expectations low, for obvious reasons.  But still, something like what they pulled off last fall may not be out of the question.  And if the fighting season starts with that kind a blitz, it’s hard to see how Russia gets its feet back under it before the end of the year. 

Comments

[CaseyL]

"And if the fighting season starts with that kind a blitz, it’s hard to see how Russia gets its feet back under it before the end of the year."

From your mouth to the ear of any deities listening!

I have very little idea of what's going on, other than the very obvious actions that make it onto the news. So much analysis seems to rely on unreliable sources (unreliable on Ukraine's part for very good reasons!).

I began to worry about this some months ago, when we were hearing a lot about Russian casualty figures but very little about Ukraine's military casualty count. It turns out, no surprise, that Ukraine's forces have endured a staggering casualty rate.

On a brighter note, I suspect that the US and allies have been giving Ukraine more, and better, stuff than publicly acknowledged. This impression got a lot stronger when I heard about some nifty creative accounting that will allow the US to give Ukraine an additional $3 billion in aid without breaching the amount set in the Omnibus Bill.

[Hartmut]

In the newspaper I read there was this morning a lengthy interview with a German military historian. He's quite sceptical and sees a major problem for Ukraine looming: running out of experienced officers and sergeants. From his estimate most of the guys the US trained since 2008 are by now dead or wounded and thus no longer available. Ukraine depends on them far more than Russia since the latter has more cannon fodder. I a pure war of attrition the cards are stacked against the former. He expects the war to not end soon but drag on with Western support being the critical factor. The moment that falters Putin has won.

[Girl from the North Country]

From your mouth to the ear of any deities listening!

Amen. The recent indications that Prigozhin may have been openly (at least by Russian standards) dissing Putin were interesting too.

The moment that falters Putin has won.

True, alas. And (also alas) I don't know anybody who really expects Ukraine to get Crimea back, even in a best-case scenario.

Meanwhile, on the question of BRICS support for the Russian narrative, which we have discussed elsewhere, we now see South African commentators getting more exercised on the possibility (probability?) that if SA continues to favour Russia, it may lose its favoured, tariff-free trade status with the US which was conferred by AGOA (the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act). This calculation won't, of course, alter the ideological prejudices of the BRICS nations, but it may well result in practical consequences.

[wj]

He expects the war to not end soon but drag on with Western support being the critical factor. The moment that falters Putin has won.

I expect that Putin will try to hold on until the US election in November next year. In the hopes that Trump will win, and hand him Ukraine on a platter. But whether he will be able to, especially in the face of further significant losses of ground, is debatable.

Of possible relevance is this, from the Washington Post:
I’ve never seen the Kremlin so rattled
on the mood in Moscow.

A few of the oligarchs and others whose support Putin depends on may be true-believers in his Greater Russia crusade. But a lot of others may find their enthusiasm waning. Not only are sanctions hitting their wealth, but it is becoming clear that physical attacks on them personally are far from impossible. Even far from the front.

[ral]

I too am far from an expert, but I can offer two sources of useful information.

1. Adam Silverman posts a daily update on Ukraine on Balloon Juice, including Zelenskyy's daily address. He (Adam) is an expert and both his writing and the comments are illuminating.

2. Following a link in the comments led me to podcasts by Perun, an Australian analyst who also seems knowledgeable. The first one I viewed was on the subject of враньё ("vranyo"). I recommend it highly.

[wj]

I was particularly taken by the story of Ukrainian small attacks across the Dneiper River. It still looks like a poor choice for the main assault. But just the fact that the Ukrainians are making gestures like they might forces the Russians to devote resources here that therefore aren't available elsewhere.

As last fall, success is partly a matter of getting the enemy to focus his attention (and resources) in the wrong places.

[nous]

I wish Ukraine well in their efforts to resist Russian efforts to dominate and assimilate them. It would be good to see Ukraine force a withdrawal and a scaling back of the violence.

I worry for the long term future.

Ukraine has been severely depleted and damaged. I'm seeing reports that it will take 20 years for them to recover, and the human cost is going to ripple through generations.

I don't know where Russia is headed with this long term. If Ukraine were to win a peace of some sort, I don't know if the peace will last more than the time it takes to recover. And Ukraine remains prime ground for farming in a climate-altered future that the current Russian regime hopes to dominate.

How long will Putin continue as leader? What comes after him? How does the cost of this conflict alter the cost/benefit calculus of future conflict against a weakened Ukraine in the next decade (assuming there is a cessation of open, official hostilities in the nearer future - I don't see that either side has the resources to sustain this for a whole lot longer)?

All of this makes me sad. And it all seems like a preview of a wider future I'd prefer to avoid.

[wj]

How long will Putin continue as leader? What comes after him?

Who might succeed Putin, and in what fashion, has long been mysterious.

Occasionally someone emerges as a frontrunner. But typically very temporarily. Not least because there are so few people Putin actually trusts.

And should Putin die in office, it's equally uncertain who would succeed him. And, critically, for how long. The only difference in the two groups of scenarios is that, with Putin off the scene, the elites' dislike of the whole Ukrainian misadventure would be more likely to color results.

[wj]

My family is chuckling over this.
https://xkcd.com/2778/

It does occur to me that, while I expect everybody here will get the joke, there is probably a big chunk of the population which totally wouldn't. A different take on "two cultures."

[bobbyp]

Who might succeed Putin, and in what fashion, has long been mysterious.

Didn't you watch the May Day parade to see who was standing next to Putin on Lenin's tomb? That's how it was divined in the good old days.

[wj]

who was standing next to Putin on Lenin's tomb? That's how it was divined in the good old days.

Then, as now, that indicates nothing more than who the incumbent favors. At the moment. You need to look across several years to figure out if it means something. And you probably have to subtract out all the guys in uniform (a big group this time**), unless you want to predict Russia's first ever military coup....

** My recollection is that Soviet events featured more Central Committee members (i.e. civilians), and fewer military.

[JanieM]

who the incumbent favors

I don't think this incumbent favors anyone. Too much danger that the incumbent would get impatient.

"Après moi, le déluge"

[Girl from the North Country]

"Après moi, le déluge"

These very words have been occurring to me almost every day.

[wj]

"Après moi, le déluge"

AKA January 6, 2021.
Turned out to be a local cloudburst, rather than a storm. This time.

[JanieM]

That's not what the saying is about.

From wikipedia, cleaned up a bit for readability:

"Après moi, le déluge" (... lit. 'After me, the flood') is a French expression attributed to King Louis XV of France... It is generally regarded as a nihilistic expression of indifference to whatever happens after one is gone, though it may also express a more literal forecasting of ruination. Its meaning is translated by Brewer in the forms "When I am dead the deluge may come for aught I care", and "Ruin, if you like, when we are dead and gone."

Clickbait was most definitely not thinking that what came after January 6 would involve him being gone.

[wj]

Just for the record, I was aware of the origin of the quote.

[JanieM]

wj -- sorry, after I wrote my comment I wondered if I was misinterpreting what you meant. The urge to pedant is strong.

I still don't see that it applies, but ... opinions vary. ;-)

[Priest]

In addition to Adam Silverman's posts on Balloon Juice, there are regular Ukraine updates on Daily Kos, usually by Mark Sumner and occasionally by Kos - for example when he would provide first hand experience of the logistical train of some specific weapons being provided (or others were suggesting be provided) by the U.S. There's frequently a fair amount of overlap in the information from those two sources, but usually worth looking at both; the comments at BJ can provide additional info, as noted above, at Kos not so much.

[Girl from the North Country]

Martin Amis has died of the same cancer that killed his best friend, Christopher Hitchens. It feels significant. I was not a wholehearted admirer of his novels (with the exception of Money), but the memoir Experience was terrific. Of course, he was what they now call a nepo baby, but nobody could ever accuse him of a lack of self insight. His piece after Hitch's death had some wonderful stuff in it, which my friends and I still quote at each other at relevant times. RIP.

[GftNC]

Clarification: the death feels significant, not the cause of death.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/20/books/martin-amis-dead.html

[novakant]

I only read "The Rachel Papers" which I enjoyed quite a bit, it seemed truthful, but then I was more interested in to Julian Barnes, David Lodge and Alisdair Gray .

Funny quote about himself vs. Barnes here

I find that people take my writing rather personally. It’s interesting when you’re doing signing sessions with other writers and you look at the queues at each table and you can see definite human types gathering there … With Julian Barnes, his queue seemed to be peopled by rather comfortable, professional types. My queue is always full of, you know, wild-eyed sleazebags and people who stare at me very intensely, as if I have some particular message for them.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/20/martin-amis-a-life-in-quotes

While I haven't read his later work, it's a pity that after 9/11 he turned into the annoying uncle who says racist things at family gatherings.

All this macho contrarianism (he's bested of course by Hitchens) was rather unpleasant to put it mildly and of course not very constructive.

[ral]

The urge to pedant is strong.

Ah yes, in English you can verb any noun. :-)

[novakant]

Since this is an open thread - if you're puzzled by the result of the Turkish elections, or Turkish politics in general, here is a very illuminating interview:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-erdogan-prevailed-in-a-battle-of-competing-turkish-nationalisms

[wj]

Some interesting bit on the OT from Max Boot.
I was just in Kyiv under fire. I saw why Ukraine can win.
He notes that the Ukrainians are taking care to keep expectations down. But there are reasons for optimism; for why they don't say "After the war", but "After the victory."

The Russians had bragged that the Kinzhals [hypersonic missiles] were so fast as to be unstoppable. Yet they were stopped cold by Ukraine’s newly acquired Patriot missile defense system.
...
In a . . . search for scapegoats, Putin’s security forces just arrested on charges of treason three of the scientists who helped develop the Kinzhal.

I was also amused by this, on the missile attacks on Kviv:

The main reminders of the ongoing conflict are the frequent Russian air attacks that are announced in actor Mark Hamill’s voice on the Air Alert app that is on everyone’s cellphones. (When the all-clear sounds, Hamill tells Ukrainians, “May the Force be with you.”)

The resemblance to London during the Blitz is striking. Albeit with less successful damage occurring.

If you can laugh at your enemy, and the whole situation, the morale battle is definitely going your way.

[Tom H.]

Having spent a moderate amount of time with https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/archive/collections/aerial-photos/ / https://maps.nls.uk/os/air-photos/info.html, there may be less damage in Kiev than in London, but as much or more damage to Ukraine overall?

We recently bought a 1914 house that was leveled in the Blitz and rebuilt post-war; these photos helped us provide evidence that some apparent "changes" to the house were evident in the foundations before 1950 and so the solicitors could stop fussing about permits & construction approvals.

[GftNC]

Talking of creatives (on the other thread, novakant was, and Charles wasn't), some of the pieces on Amis are wonderful. I loved this, from a James Parker piece in the Atlantic in 2012, which was linked in one of the many pieces now being written about him. Apparently, when a newspaper (the Guardian? the Times?)put out a call to writers for pieces about him after his death, they were absolutely swamped:

In this state, it can be hazardous to read Martin Amis—to suffer the thrills of envy (I want it!), larceny (Can I steal it?), resentment (Bastard!), all leading where? Ah, you know where: into a writer’s dark night, the meat-locker chill of professional despair. The ego, inverted. I might as well give up. Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton, watching Jimi Hendrix at The Scotch of St James in London, were (according to Townshend) so harrowed with fear and wonder that they found themselves meekly holding hands. The apprentice writer reads Martin Amis, and whose hand can he hold but his own?

So many of the people writing about him acknowledge the effect he had on their style, and literary fiction in general. And his literary criticism and essays were, it is true, great. But what some have stressed was his moral seriousness, which was an inescapable aspect of his thought to anybody paying attention. I see that it was in this thread that novakant referred to (I think this was what he was referring to) Amis's regrettable remarks about Islamism, and in fact Muslims, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of the early 2000s. I say regrettable, because he openly regretted and apologised for them.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/the-amis-obsession/309110/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

[Girl from the North Country]

RIP Tina Turner. Do I love you? My oh my....

[wj]

An implicit basis for DeSantis' run against Trump is that he would do the same things, but competently. Which makes his announcement fiasco today especially damaging.
Twitter repeatedly crashes as DeSantis tries to make presidential announcement

It's gotta hurt when "technical difficulties" cause you to have to restart half an hour behind schedule. And with half the audience that was there initially.

[ral]

I am a bit surprised because I thought probably the load would not be all that high. I guess this is what happens when you fire all your competent employees.

[wj]

this is what happens when you fire all your competent employees.

Oh, I don't think he fired all of them. Some quit in disgust first.

[ral]

Back on topic, Fresh From Attack on Russian Soil, Raiders Taunt the Kremlin [gift link]

[wj]

Definitely creating pressure to beef up defenses along the border (however minimal the actual damage). Add in the Wagner Group declaring victory (at Bakhmut) and going home,** leaving the Russian military to either send in troops or accept the Ukrainians taking it right back. All while knowing that the Ukrainians are preparing at attack real soon somewhere.

The Russian Army is not exactly brimming with spare, let alone experienced or competent, troops. Leaving them with a choice: concentrate in a few places, giving them enough strength to (maybe) defend those successfully, and hope that they've guessed right about where the offensive will hit. Or try to cover everything, leaving nobody with enough troops. Rock; hard place; plus avalanche in prospect.

[wj]

The MAGAts will be horrified. But probably not surprised (this being Californis, after all).
Census: White residents are no longer Bay Area’s largest racial group

Asians became the Bay Area’s largest racial group in the last decade, growing from almost 26% of the region’s population in 2010 to just over 33% in 2020, according to the data. That surpassed White residents who comprised 32.9% of the total population, down from 40% in 2010.
...
The Latino share of the population, which had surged in past decades, stayed roughly the same at 23%.

Yet somehow, even with all those immigrants, incomes remain high and there are still more jobs going begging than workers available to fill them. Correlation is not causation, but....

[nous]

On my campus it's 16% white and the Bay Area looks like it needs a DEI initiative. ;)

Seriously, though, whenever we go to the middle of the US it all seems so very white and so very like being caught in a time warp.

[novakant]

As much as I would like to be optimistic about

As much as my heart would like Ukraine to win this, my head tells me that this won't be resolved for years to come.

I expect a US strategy shift in autumn:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/will-the-ukraine-war-become-a-frozen-conflict.html

[Snarki, child of Loki]

"Correlation is not causation, but...."
...they're correlated.

[wj]

...they're correlated.

They're correlated in this case. The obvious question being: are they correlated elsewhere. Perhaps even more critically, is there an inverse correlation: does increasing the percentage of the non-Asian population* correlate with a drop in those characteristics?**

* For lack of a better marker for the inverse. Although "immigrant population" might be interesting as well.
** Surely, it this wide country, there must be some place where that is happening?

[wj]

Because every day needs a small amusement.
https://twitter.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1661484293821198336

[JanieM]

so very like being caught in a time warp.

One of the select board candidates in my town (voting is next month) has signs that say "Local family, local values." In the candidates' meet-the-public meeting, according to a friend of mine, he said he wanted to take the town back to what it was 25 years ago. "We don't want to become like Lewiston," he is reported to have said. (I didn't log in to the zoom or go to the meeting.) You know what happened in Lewiston in the past 25 years.....

*****

San Francisco: My family took a trip to SF in the very early nineties. My then-girlfriend and I took the kids to the museum that has dinosaur bones because my son was OBSESSED with dinosaurs. It was either a school vacation week, or free week for summer camp kids, or something, but the place was packed with school/camp groups of children, and they were almost all Asian. Coming from so-very-white Maine, it was a good reminder. If you had landed there from Mars, you wouldn't have had a clue that the country you had landed in was majority white.

[JanieM]

One of the school board candidates has a sign that says:

A Academic Excellence
B Back to Basics
C Collaborate with Parents

Besides not having a grasp of parallel structure, I am pretty sure she is dog-whistling, I need not explain in what way. I'm sure she doesn't mean *all* parents.

[JanieM]

And of course if this weren't just a blog comment thread, and I hadn't just come home from errands, I myself might have a grasp of dangling something-or-others introducing sentences.

[JanieM]

History of Somalis in Maine.

Note the description of the mayor as having been "out of state" on the day of a pair of competing demonstrations. The use of the phrase "out of state" is a pretty sure clue that the person who wrote that paragraph is a Mainer. Everywhere else I've lived, it would have been "out of town."

I probably told this story before, but I do love it so I'll tell it again: When I first moved here, I took my two tiny kids to meet their dad for lunch. In the front office of the place where he worked, the man who greeted me said, by way of chatting, that he had just come back from vacation and wasn't yet back in the swing of things in the office.

I said, "Where'd you go on vacation?"

He said, "Out of state." And stopped.

Like, there was no need to make a distinction between, let's say, Portsmouth NH and Paris or Beirut, all I needed to know was that he had crossed the sacred boundaries and made it back safely.

I do love this place.

[CharlesWT]

On the southern border, there's been about an eight-fold increase in Chinese citizens trying to enter the country.

[nous]

On the southern border, there's been about an eight-fold increase in Chinese citizens trying to enter the country.

That's a lot of backpack nukes...*

*Old White Power propaganda from the 80s-90s.

[Hartmut]

So, did it increase from 1 to 8 or from 2 to 16?

[wj]

So, did it increase from 1 to 8 or from 2 to 16?

Definitely just as cheap and easy to fly to the US directly as to Mexico City. Or, if you think you aren't convincing as a tourist entering the US, fly to Vancouver or Toronto instead -- the Canadian border is lots longer and far more open.

[CharlesWT]

Regardless of the best way to get into the US from China, the border patrol is finding groups of Chinese citizens who crossed the Mexican border. This may be their best option after paying smugglers to smuggle them out of China.

[nous]

I think what is being discussed is migration of Chinese citizens to the US using the methods and routes usually associated with asylum seekers from South and Central America:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/09/growing-numbers-of-chinese-citizens-set-their-sights-on-the-us-via-the-deadly-darien-gap

[wj]

Thanks, nous. That does answer my (implied) question: if you can afford to cross the Pacific, why go for this route?

Migrants usually fly to Istanbul and then on to Ecuador, which is one of the few Latin American countries offering visa-free entry for Chinese nationals.

And now it begins to make sense.

But the cost of a US tourist visa is only $160, and the wait time is 3 days. So why not go into the US consulate in Istanbul, claim your plans have changed, and apply for a visa? Still seems cheaper and easier that working your way north thru Central America and Mexico. "Over-staying a visa" is at least as effective as trying to sneak across the border. Not to mention it giving you 90 days to work out how you will disappear once inside the US.

[Michael Cain]

But the cost of a US tourist visa is only $160, and the wait time is 3 days. So why not go into the US consulate in Istanbul, claim your plans have changed, and apply for a visa?

Or just go to a US consulate in China and get a visa. The rules are presumably the same for a Chinese citizen with a Chinese passport either way. To get to the US consul in Turkey would require a Turkish visa. My working assumption would be that for some reason, they want to enter the US without leaving a visa trail. I have no idea what sort of advantage that might provide.

[CharlesWT]

There are probably millions of Chinese citizens who can't leave China through any official means. They have to sneak out of the country and pay someone to transport them in cargo containers or some other unofficial means of transport.

[wj]

To get to the US consul in Turkey would require a Turkish visa.

According to the article, they are going to Ecuador via Istanbul, so presumably they are getting in there somehow.

[Michael Cain]

According to the article, they are going to Ecuador via Istanbul, so presumably they are getting in there somehow.

The article says fly to Ecuador via Istanbul. Stay inside the international terminals the entire trip, no visa required. None of the people in the article seem to be the kind of people Charles mentions.

[CharlesWT]

None of the people in the article seem to be the kind of people Charles mentions.

According to one of the LLMs, these Chinese citizens would find it difficult or impossible to legally leave China.

• Businesspeople[People like Jack Ma who the government thinks are getting too big for their pants.].
• Dissidents and activists.
• People who are considered to be a national security risk.
• People who have been convicted of a crime in China.
• People who have been critical of the Chinese government or its policies.
• People with criminal records.
• People with financial debts or owe money to the government or to state-owned companies.
• Religious minorities.

I would add citizens that don't legally exist because they are the second, third, or more children who were born during the one-child policy and their births were never registered. And people who are being "held hostage" against the "good behavior" of family members already living outside the country.

[liberal japonicus]

I know you aren't going to listen Charles, but it seems that this would be a particularly problematic topic to probe an LLM, since it is confining itself to primarily English texts, thereby amplifying any biases, especially yours. For example 'people who don't legally exist' probably doesn't work in a state that has surveillance on the level of China.

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/07/1118105165/surveillance-state-explores-chinas-tech-and-social-media-control-systems

Also, in the aftermath of COVID, I find it hard to imagine that there is a huge number of citizens who 'don't legally exist', in that knowing that they are there is necessary for covid lockdowns. While the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one's mind has been lauded, it becomes problematic when you use them as a back and forth to support your own biases.

[CharlesWT]

For example 'people who don't legally exist' probably doesn't work in a state that has surveillance on the level of China.

The LLM didn't make any reference to this group. But the group does exist though there's been a drive in recent years to register them.

"The 14.35 million were registered over the past four years. Without official IDs, these citizens would have been previously denied access to education and healthcare benefits, Xinhua reports.

As for why so many went unregistered, one big factor to blame was the country's one-child policy, which it held for nearly 40 years until this was relaxed in 2015, to allow couples to have two children."
China just registered 14 million people that never officially existed before: Many of these are women and children.

Unregistered citizens also include children born out of wedlock.

"The consequences of this system are dire. If the child isn’t registered, parents can’t receive insurance coverage for birth-related medical costs or qualify for maternity leave. Unregistered children aren’t allowed to go to public schools or access medical insurance. In adulthood they’re cast to the fringes of society, unable to open a bank account or get married, much less register their own children. In 2021, the Chinese authorities acknowledged that at least 11.6 million more children were born between 2000 and 2010 than previously reported."
China Will Benefit From Finally ‘Finding’ Its Lost Children: Millions of Chinese are ostracized because they were born out of wedlock. Giving them official recognition will help solve the nation’s birthrate crisis.

[liberal japonicus]

The LLM didn't make any reference to this group.

[eyeroll]

You are talking about the 黑孩子 who don't get registered on the household register. Because the one child policy was rescinded, they now can register (the law was rescinded in 2016). It's an interesting question of how this all works, but the oscillation between 'Chinese are invading from Mexico' and [ed. to add] 'the Chinese are heartless cause they don't know how many of them there are' is neckbreaking [end ed.] , but given that your questions to the LLM are probably biased, you are probably going to get problematic responses. It's GIGO all the way down.

[wj]

It's GIGO all the way down.

Great line, lj!

[nous]

Most of the people in the Guardian article who were seeking asylum in the US through the southern border were people who were fed up with China's Zero Covid policy. China has many other policies that commit serious violations of human rights, but it's an opportunistic flex to try to lump them all together in this particular story. That's the same basic move as pivoting from mention of China's human rights violations to starting to list the problematic policies enacted by the US. It's true, but it distracts from efforts to try to understand the thing that started the conversation. IOW, it's a form of threadjacking.

LLMs don't have any ability to notice a threadjack. They just see the pattern and note the prevalence, and adopt it as a convention of the genre.

[liberal japonicus]

I don't mind people bringing up topics they want to discuss, every thread here is basically an open thread. I suppose Charles wants to talk about China, and has been patiently waiting for the topic to move to somewhere, anywhere closer to China so he could talk about the Chinese invasion. And I appreciate that he's interested in China. What I don't appreciate is the obvious lack of thought when tossing this up, cause it looks like he's only interested in China to confirm his own biases. As nous points out, this is where LLM is going to screw us, cause it will answer the question with no understanding of the biases of the questioner.

[Donald]

The reference to US “inaction” in Yemen is dishonest and contemptible — our actions were precisely the problem—but that aside, Fiona Hill apparently sees the world’s reaction to the Ukraine War just as Robert Wright did in my link last week. They don’t like the invasion and they see the US as hypocritical.

https://lmc.icds.ee/lennart-meri-lecture-by-fiona-hill/

[wj]

They don’t like the invasion and they see the US as hypocritical.

If someone reacts differently, depending on who is acting, sure that's hypocritical.

On the other hand, does the fact that they reacted otherwise in other cases irretrievably taint their efforts when they do the right thing? To the point that their help should be rejected, or even that others should refuse to do the right thing, just because of their support?

Perhaps I have been misreading you. But the latter seems to be where you come down rather regularly.

[wj]

Todays reading on the American political scene:
https://digbysblog.net/2023/05/30/germane-to-our-times/

Things which are old enough become new again.

[nous]

Donald - the Fiona Hill piece says a lot about attitudes and narratives, and explains people's willingness to write off the conflict in Ukraine as another Cold War proxy conflict. What I don't see from her or from the other experts who are analyzing the global political climate is any forward-looking suggestion of what can, feasibly, be done to change our trajectory towards collapse.

I don't think that Russia *is* entirely seeing this as a resumption of the old imperial order and the 20th C. Great Powers struggles. I think they are very much looking at this as the opening of the post-climate-tipping-point international order and seeing an opportunity to get the jump on the fickle and short-sighted liberal democracies.

I do think that Russia is correct to see the US as a fragile and breakable superpower. I don't see the US being able to hold on to its influence once climate change really comes home to roost. The fracture lines are too visible already to have any faith in a non-authoritarian future for us, and any authoritarian future for us will be built out of the socially conservative groups. Same may be true of collective Europe.

But again, I don't see much of any framework emerging from any of the think tanks and foreign policy people that takes us from where we are to a future global order that avoids the chaos of a New Migration Era redo of the political maps.

I really would love to see a framework, though, and would be happy to support any criticism that gets beyond scolding and recrimination to an actual path forward.

[liberal japonicus]

I mentione that I've really gone off watching sports, particularly football/soccer. ISTM that all the emphasis on sportswashing, with the Saudis and UAE investment in the game, is linked to Yemen. I realize this may sound like a 4 rail bank shot, but I'll put this down as a marker and maybe try and develop a post later.

A lot of discussion centers around efforts to control those Red Sea waterways that lie next to Yemen and the Bab al-Mandab strait. The US disengagement with the region, along with the general move to get away from fossil fuels, is imo what led the Saudis and UAE moves in the area, which was more likely to be influenced by Iran. Furthermore, the Chinese Belt and Road initiative is focussed on precisely this area, which is why you see Chinese attempts to broker a peace deal.

Re China, this is a good piece from 2018, pre pandemic
https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep20161?seq=4

And here are two pieces about Chinese recent attempts, which also include Iran-Saudi rapproachment

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/yemen-looms-key-test-chinas-new-gulf-diplomacy

https://theconversation.com/can-china-broker-peace-in-yemen-and-further-beijings-middle-east-strategy-in-the-process-204724

I think all of this underlines American irrelevance and places US actions as outgrowths of a desire to try and prevent China to become a power broker.

The newest wildcard in all this is the elections in Turkey. There was a lot of publicity for the use of Turkish drones by the Ukraine, but after Erdogan met with Putin for a gas deal, they disappeared. In addition, Erdogan has to deal with Syrian refugees and has played up Islamist credentials, and I think Iran was the first to congratulate Erdogan on reelection. Erdogan's reelection was by a thin margin, so I wonder what he will do to keep power.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Turkey-elections/Erdogan-leaned-into-defense-religion-to-win-tight-Turkish-election

Thinking about it this way has me think that the issue for me (at least in discussions here) is in thinking of the US place in the world. It is a bit like the metaphor of the coconut shell monkey trap, where the monkey reaches in an hollowed out coconut shell to grab a handful of rice and when it makes a fist, it can't escape. As long as the first principle of the US is that we can't let the Chinese get ahead of us, we can't really do anything. The poor reporting on the Yemen conflict is based on an idea of the centrality of the US to global politics. As long as that is there, everything else is going to be subservient to that.

This also is in line with my comments about how people are going to talk about what they want to talk about, which includes me.

[nous]

I tend to think of climate change as likely to prompt a period of punctuated equilibrium - both for species evolution (a la Stephen Jay Gould) and for political evolution (which I have mentioned before when thinking about what might come after liberal democracy if the liberal democracies fail force a consensus on climate issues).

I was getting all set to try to see if anyone was predicting that climate change would have a greater political consequence than the nuclear arms race, but then realized that this is a both/and situation. Climate change has been described as a "vulnerability multiplier" and that goes for the risk of nuclear war just as much as it does for other sorts of vulnerability.

Oy.

[wj]

As long as the first principle of the US is that we can't let the Chinese get ahead of us, we can't really do anything.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. Pretty much the entire (political) rationale for the US space program* was to get back ahead of the Russians post Sputnik.**

Staying ahead of China wouldn't be a simple matter of technology, of course. (Although if China succeeds in its plan to put men on the moon by 2030, that may result in another technology-boosting space race.) But it will be interesting to see how it plays out in other areas.

I'm guessing that the isolationist tendency in some circles on the right will suffer the same hammering politically as a similar tendency on the left did half a century ago. To my mind, it is simply a recognition of reality in today's world. Which may be why the far right resists it.

* All the technology that flowed from that, from velcro to bigger and faster computers, was an unintended bonus. Unintended by the politicians anyway.
** Am I the only one here who can remember going out one evening to watch Sputnik 1 pass overhead?

[wj]

I was getting all set to try to see if anyone was predicting that climate change would have a greater political consequence than the nuclear arms race, but then realized that this is a both/and situation.

I suspect not. Simply because there isn't another nation visibly competing with us, nor an obvious threat it they beat us (at any particular facet of dealing with it). That is, there's no race against a human opponent, just against nature.

The political consequences are more likely to result from, for example, Florida losing population, and thus national political clout, due to severely reduced land area. That and, in the states in the South East which are expected to lose the most (Florida being only the most extreme example), how well or badly the state governments deal with it.

[liberal japonicus]

'We can't do anything' was in the context of Yemen. We could do a lot, renewable energy, climate mitigation, etc etc. Though 'we can't' might be better said as 'what we do won't really matter.'

[CharlesWT]

Am I the only one here who can remember going out one evening to watch Sputnik 1 pass overhead?

I was up and about with food poisoning. So I spent some time between bouts watching Sputnik.

[nous]

I suspect not. Simply because there isn't another nation visibly competing with us, nor an obvious threat it they beat us (at any particular facet of dealing with it). That is, there's no race against a human opponent, just against nature.

Sorry, let me say more of what I was thinking. I may not have explained enough.

I was thinking about the way that political institutions have to evolve under the pressure of intense social change, and thinking about how climate change was going to usher in a huge wave of human migration that is going to challenge all our political institutions. The US is already freaking out about 200,000 migrants at our southern border, but that could rise into the millions as Central America becomes less habitable. That's going to be a lot more difficult to deal with than just some Floridians seeking to move.

We are talking Migration Era sorts of population shifts. Millions on the move. The Syrian crisis is barely a blip in comparison.

This combined with a domestic relocation that is going to rival the Dust Bowl.

The US is not going to do well with this sort of pressure. We are barely hanging on right now. We've talked here at length about whether we will partition, but we could as well succumb to authoritarianism, or some combination of both.

There is no telling, either, how these same pressures are going to transform Europe, but Russia is sitting on land that will be more productive, and has vast energy reserves, and they are already an authoritarian state. With nukes.

That's what I'm thinking.

Liberal democratic nation states are going to be hard pressed to deal with this level of crisis without resorting to martial law, and holding it together is going to take a lot of attention and resources.

We're going to need a lot of new maps, I think.

[Priest]

I would think China is at risk for dislocations that would put a crimp in external ambitions, but haven't looked at specifics on coastal effects there.

[wj]

There is no telling, either, how these same pressures are going to transform Europe, but Russia is sitting on land that will be more productive, and has vast energy reserves, and they are already an authoritarian state. With nukes.

Russia is going to get a vast amount of more habitable land. And they are close to places like South Asia** which have huge populations compared to Latin America. And which are going to be losing a whole lot of habitable land. Bangladesh is far the worse case, but not the only one. So they're looking at tens of millions to our millions -- with lots less experience at dealing with immigrants than we have.

Russia is already an authoritarian state. But an incompetently run one, which means their chances of doing anything like effectively closing their border are tiny. So they are going to see far, far greater immigration than we are. Even extreme measures, say nuking Bangladesh to try to eliminate the source, aren't going to stop the flood. After all, there's also India and Pakistan.

** Not to mention the exodus from Africa which is already underway. All things considered, it's probably easier to get to, and into, Russia than Western Europe.

[JanieM]

** Am I the only one here who can remember going out one evening to watch Sputnik 1 pass overhead?

I can. My dad had a huge pair of binoculars on a stand, that had once been on a ship. The neighbors came over to look through them too. One of the neighbors was all excited over something that turned out to be an airplane, and in my memory, at least, we were all a little deflated by how unspectacular the sight of Sputnik actually was.

There came a point in, I think, the mid-eighties when I was camping out with some friends on Washington Island in Door County, Wisconsin, and we saw lots of those tiny moving dots, and we spent some time stargazing before going to sleep. One of the friends I was with had a degree in aero and astro, and she said that there were probably a couple thousand satellites up there by then. That seemed like a lot at the time...

This site has some info about the numbers today.

[liberal japonicus]

Speaking of satellites, for some reason, this seems like an idea only Japanese might come up with.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55463366

The Asahi Shimbun lists the possible woods as
Japanese big-leaf magnolia, mountain cherry and Erman’s birch

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14439277

And a paywalled article says that magnolia will get the nod.

[JanieM]

lj, thanks, that's a fun story -- the satellites made of wood.

[wj]

the satellites made of wood.

I can see how this would make them more likely to burn up in the atmosphere on reentry. Which at least reduces the chances of damage if and when they hit the ground.

What I cannot see is how this would achieve the stated purpose of dealing with the problem of "releasing harmful substances into the atmosphere." The shells of the satellites aren't the source of those harmful substances. It's the electronics, etc. inside. And those will not be, cannot be, made of wood.

I'm also not quite seeing how making the satellites of wood would reduce the accumulation of junk in orbit. Steel, aluminum, or wood -- it still takes something to reduce the velocity below orbital velocity in order to get it out of orbit.

[JanieM]

From the article:

Wooden satellites would burn up without releasing harmful substances into the atmosphere or raining debris on the ground when they plunge back to Earth.

"We are very concerned with the fact that all the satellites which re-enter the Earth's atmosphere burn and create tiny alumina particles which will float in the upper atmosphere for many years," Takao Doi, a professor at Kyoto University and Japanese astronaut, told the BBC.

I know nothing about satellites, but the implication, to me, is that at least some of the materials that might otherwise linger or crash into the earth will burn up instead, with less harmful substances released. The article doesn't clarify the partialness of it, though.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Getting hit in orbit by a chunk of metal or a chunk of wood isn't very different, when that chunk is moving at 10km/s, so the space-junk issue isn't really solved.

BUT, imagine a far-future civilization coming across a wooden satellite, and wondering who put it there.

Loki approves.

[Michael Cain]

I can see how this would make them more likely to burn up in the atmosphere on reentry. Which at least reduces the chances of damage if and when they hit the ground.

When I put on my old systems analyst hat, they seem to have focused on the problems that occur after the satellite is in orbit. I would have started with the problems that might occur before the satellite reaches orbit: 3G or more acceleration, lots of vibration, has to meet the physical constraints of the satellite separation and deployment systems.

[Hartmut]

Meanwhile closer to home (to most here) than Ukraine:
The first legal step towards corporate suffrage has been made:
https://jensorensen.com/2023/05/31/corporations-voting-elections-cartoon/

[JanieM]

Hartmut -- one of the things I find most interesting about this (if the link's info is all accurate) is that it implies that people who own property in the town but do not live there, and who are NOT incorporated, aren't part of this proposal.

As someone who lives in (reportedly) the state with the highest percentage of vacation homes of any state in the US, I have often thought that non-resident property owners have some reason to wish they could have a say in town business. I don't think they *should," but it's a complicated topic. I've also known people who, because of residency and citizenship complexities, were eligible to vote in two countries. This doesn't really seem "fair" to me either.

We have a local election coming up (annual town meeting is July 13), and one of the select board candidates has signs that say "Local family, local values." I think I've already mentioned this here, but IMHO these are dogwhistles. By definition, if you are eligible to vote you are "local" -- whether you have lived here for a day or two or your family has been here for generations. And wtf are "local values"? I know something about this guy, and his values are not mine.

But I think his "local" emphasis has to do in part with a fear and dislike of newcomers, and that's not a simple topic either.

If my town had been invaded by incomers hoping to make it the beginning of a libertarian paradise, I would be upset that they had the right to vote to reshape the town to their imaginings.....

Nevertheless, I will be voting for the other guy.

[wj]

If my town had been invaded by incomers hoping to make it the beginning of a libertarian paradise, I would be upset that they had the right to vote to reshape the town to their imaginings...

I keep thinking that it would be feasible, especially with the increased availability of remote work, to relocate to Wyoming the (relatively) small number of people necessary to radically change its political profile.

Need to keep the plan quiet, of course, to avoid countermeasures like zoning restrictions to block housing for them. But still, not as difficult as, for example, trying to turn Texas purple.

[Priest]

Fun times:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjvk97/eating-disorder-helpline-disables-chatbot-for-harmful-responses-after-firing-human-staff

[Pro Bono]

In England it's legal to register in two different places, and to vote in local elections in both of them.

[JanieM]

Pro Bono: but not more than two?

[Michael Cain]

Need to keep the plan quiet, of course, to avoid countermeasures like zoning restrictions to block housing for them.

Such plans are going to trip up on the logistics problems. Say you need 100,000 households to move into the state. Cheyenne, the capital and largest city, is currently 27,000 households. This is not something you can hide. Where are they going to live? How long will it take to build the housing there? Infrastructure like sewer and water treatment? Remote work is all well and good if you have high-speed data and access to a large airport. Jackson Hole is the largest airport in the state, handles 500,000 enplanements per year, a large part of which are seasonal tourists. Casper is the second largest, with 70,000. You can fly commercially from Casper to either Denver or Salt Lake City.

This is a decade-long project, quite possibly longer.

[nous]

Yeah, and Jackson is not going to be feasible because the super rich have put conservation easements on all the developable land. The working class people that keep the lights on there have to commute in from West Yellowstone or from the next county over.

You'd have to pick somewhere along I-80 (Rock Springs, Laramie, Cheyenne), I think, and it would be a long term project. I-25 only has Cheyenne/Casper. Sheraton is small and isn't a waypoint to anywhere other than Billings.

It might be easier to leverage Montana than Wyoming. It would take more people, but there are bigger cities to work with and more universities to draw from.

[JanieM]

I have never thought this notion made any sense. Whether it's marginally more or less feasible than changing how the Senate and the Electoral College work is a tempting question, but useless, because I don't think any of them are going to happen.

Still, it sure seems like Californians should be up in arms about the relative weight of their votes vs Wyoming's in relation to the Senate (68 to 1) and Congress overall (3.72 to 1 when last I checked).

[Pro Bono]

but not more than two?

There's no limit as such. You're supposed to spend a significant amount of time where you register.

[novakant]

I always felt that (Observer Columnist) Nick Cohen had some serious issues (all that relentless vitriol) and this explains a lot:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/world/europe/financial-times-nick-cohen-guardian.html

But what's worse is, how the Guardian Group turned a blind eye all those years, the FT buried it and most of the UK press now ignores it - so much so that it has to be published in the NYT.

[JanieM]

From novakant's link:

One said Mr. Cohen had pressed his erection against her thigh and kissed her uninvited when they met to discuss her career. A seventh said Mr. Cohen had repeatedly offered to send her explicit photographs in 2018 while she worked as an unpaid copy editor for him.

There's a lot more like that. It's amazing that so many men never doubt that women are as obsessed with their penises as they are.

[wj]

It's amazing that so many men never doubt that women are as obsessed with their penises as they are.

When I read about men behaving like this it's like it's another world.

I can't imagine any of the men I'm acquainted with acting like this. And, if one did, I can't believe anyone I know would know and remain silent. Perhaps I am just oblivious, but....

I have known a couple of what I would consider real scumbags. But this kind of stuff is just alien.

[JanieM]

wj -- On the one hand and despite everything the news throws at us, I still think most people are decent and try to be more or less decent to other people. (Making allowances for lack of imagination on all our parts about what other people are experiencing.)

On the other hand, hypocrisy is as common a human failing as there is.

The saga of Eliot Cutler in Maine is a case in point (sorry about the bare links):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Cutler

https://wgme.com/news/local/eliot-cutler-to-begin-jail-sentence-for-child-porn-charges-9-months-pleading-guilty-child-pornography-videos-sexually-abused-maine-state-police-cyber-crime

First of all, I can't imagine (to quote you! but I mean it for myself as well!) this particular sick twisting of sexuality, if you can even call it that. Lusting after another adult and getting a little lost in it, okay. But children?

Secondly, how on earth could Cutler imagine he wasn't going to get caught! Arrogance accounts for a lot of both the crime and the belief that he was untouchable, I suppose. Also...lack of imagination on the part of a wealthy, powerful, well-known guy -- arrogant enough to run for governor a second time after being widely seen as a spoiler the first time...

[wj]

Secondly, how on earth could Cutler imagine he wasn't going to get caught!

I can see how he might not be found to merely possess pornography. At least during his lifetime.

Since he wss apparently caught due to his downloading it, I would hazard a guess that he was simply clueless about the ability of someone else to determine who had downloaded something. I suspect that it is not uncommon for those not in IT (specifically Baby Boomers like Carter) to imagine downloads as something like broadcast TV: nobody knows what channel you were turned in to.

[nous]

I always find it helpful to remind myself that this is not so much a sex thing driving it as it is a power thing. Or, rather, that somewhere in the ol' lizard brain we have a tangle of sex and power stuff bumping into each other in complex and irrational ways.

Damn, now I'm back meditating upon Plato's Phaedrus, and the myth of the chariot.

[wj]

I always find it helpful to remind myself that this is not so much a sex thing driving it as it is a power thing.

I see it as a power plus immunity thing. (Or, I suppose, an immunity because of power thing. But the immunity part is critical.) See TFG's "They'll let you" comment . . . while being recorded. The recording doesn't matter because, he believes, even those he doesn't have power over directly don't have the ability to do anything about it.

[JanieM]

I always find it helpful to remind myself that this is not so much a sex thing driving it as it is a power thing. Or, rather, that somewhere in the ol' lizard brain we have a tangle of sex and power stuff bumping into each other in complex and irrational ways.

Absolutely.

Sex can get entangled in a lot of other things. Maybe all of them. I have been one degree of separation away from a story involving the entwinement of sex with violence -- scary stuff.

[Girl from the North Country]

It's amazing that so many men never doubt that women are as obsessed with their penises as they are.

Every young woman I know (and I've asked several) has received at least one and usually more than one dick pics from either complete strangers or mere acquaintances. And nobody I know says they are anything other than grossed out by them. If men think they are a turn-on for women, it is a truly gigantic narcissistic delusion. But maybe it is also something like the gratification obtained by flashers: the ability to impose yourself on women whether willing or unwilling. Which of course takes us back to the entanglement with power.

[Girl from the North Country]

Judge Robert Murray said at Cutler’s sentencing that the average sentence for possession of child pornography is six months

This, from Janie's second link, shocked me rather. Cutler had 80,000 images of child pornography. Our maxiumum sentence for possession (as opposed to possession and distribution) is maximum 5 years, and I would be quite surprised to find the average sentence (which I cannot discover) was less than a matter of years, rather than months.