All of Sausage Vector Machine's Comments + Replies

If you mean the massive strikes on civilian infrastructure, then no, even the complete destruction of said Ukrainian infrastructure will not significantly improve Russia's chances in this war. This only creates hardship for the civilian population and increases the overall cost of aid to Ukraine for Western countries.

The Russian army has proven time and time again that it is incapable of attacking. Even in June, when the Russian army greatly outnumbered the Ukrainian army in artillery, and Ukraine was losing 300–500 soldiers a day, Russian troops advanced ... (read more)

2CraigMichael
Even with massive air strikes? Couldn’t they just carpet bomb any Ukrainian military position?

You are absolutely right. I missed this point in Max's post.

If Putin is lucky and the winter in Germany turns out to be especially cold, or if some of their gas storage facilities suddenly explode for some strange reason (I really hope they guard them better than their railways), Germany might have to make serious concessions and lift some of the sanctions in order to start using NS2. Putin will announce this as a huge victory, since launching NS2 was doubtful even before the war.

That is exactly why Putin destroyed the other 3 pipelines. A simple resumptio... (read more)

I don't think their bombing of civilian infrastructure can be considered a military escalation.

An official declaration of war and martial law in Russia would be an escalation (albeit not scary).

Nuclear weapons testing would be an escalation (slightly scary, but still very far from an actual attack).

Ordinary terrorism, by contrast, is just the default response, exactly the type of revenge for his favorite bridge that everyone expected from this particular dictator.

4Viktor Rehnberg
Lol. Somehow 1:100000000 made it more clear that it was meant as a hyperbole than 1:∞ did.

This is correct. They will always downplay Ukraine's successes, explaining them as either terrorist attacks or "smoking accidents". And yes, as Viliam says, Russia is now officially losing territory every day and nobody cares. They prefer to have ambiguous borders.

To understand Putin, you have to imagine a petty crime boss who accidentally got big. He's just a thug. "It's not a bluff" is the telltale sign that his threat is a 1̶0̶0̶%̶  99.999999% bluff. When he plans to do something, he and his minions always deny it first. He will go to great lengths... (read more)

6CraigMichael
Have you “mentally wargamed” the CIA/MI6 option? Who would replace him? Would they be better or worse? How would Russian citizens respond? Is there anything like an automated event that is suppressed daily by Putin while he is alive but that would be triggered if he dies? Since you seem to have thought a lot of this through: Do you have thoughts on the possibility of pre-existing weapons caches in the US or Europe that could be activated remotely by Russia? (Nuclear, chemical, biological, etc)? Similarly, it seems that every few years we discover Russians spies in the US, so the probability is high there’s some in the US active now. In the event of a war, would they act like a sleeper cell? Would kinds of things might they do?
2CraigMichael
Careful about assigning anything a 100% probability.
Nazarii2612

Russian Way is imperceptible to most Western experts because they never lived in USSR. They don't know how corrupt & in shambles the system actually was.  As a result "Russia is very strong and powerful" is a stereotype that just refuses to die.

A look at the battlefield:

  • Russian army is undertrained, attacking civilians for shock & terror
  • Gains at the start of the war were made by using large quantity of weapons & people, but those were lacking in quality.  And now the quantity is also lacking
  • Crimean bridge and air base attacks are a ca
... (read more)

Awesome writeup!

To further explore the interplay between style and content, how about trying something not very specific that could gain specificity from the style context?

For example "Aliens are conducting experiments on human subjects":

  • as a screenshot from South Park (will these mostly feature the anal probe?)
  • as a medieval painting (will these be mostly dissection?)
  • as a screenshot from the movie Prometheus (will these be too scary to look at?)
3Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
"Aliens are conducting experiments on human subjects, as a screenshot from the movie Prometheus" came out weirdly video-game-esque? 
3Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
"Aliens are conducting experiments on human subjects, as a medieval painting" And this didn't come out all that medieval-style, so I tried again with "Aliens are conducting experiments on human subjects, as a medieval illuminated manuscript"
3Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
"Aliens are conducting experiments on human subjects, as a screenshot from South Park"