June 9, 2022

Callibrated Coercion

The We-Are-The-Prodigy stage (Phases 1 and 2) ended weeks ago, leaving U.S. officials confused about Ukraine, which itself is confused. That’s not good for the war effort1.

Déjà vu. I thought we discussed this problem on Day 3, Phase 3, when we concluded the following:2

When it comes to intelligence about Ukraine, we should be relying more on inductive reasoning, the system of inference describing the relation between propositions on intelligence, and propositions that extend beyond the intelligence, such as predictions over future intelligence, and general conclusions on all possible intelligence.

The Tripping-on-Hallucinogenics part of fascist Russia’s genocidal campaign — the stage we are in now — will last at least through the end of the summer. Attempts to romanticize trench warfare in eastern Ukraine are doomed. No one knows when Phase 4 will start, but we already know what it will sound like:

And if you love me, love me, but you never let me go
When the roof was on fire, you never let me know
Say you're sorry honey, but you never really show
And I could leave the party without ever letting you know
Without ever letting you know3

Beth Sanner, predata advisor, National Security Analyst and former Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration [she’s the one who gave drumpy his daily intelligence briefings], tells Julian in the aforementioned NYT article that Team USA feels “we are setting ourselves up for another intel failure…”

I have bad news for Beth. The intelligence failure already occurred, under her watch and in Z’s head. It’s just now being compounded daily by an army of Freds and his friends, romantic ex-marines, Deta-A wannabes, et cetera. Non-predictive intelligence floppery is a feature — not a bug — of this war4.

Recall our key points from Day 11 of this bloody mess5.

The reason Tiger Team may have less information than they would like about Ukraine’s operations is because it’s not very flattering. And it’s the only job of a platoon of doucherockets not to make it public and to whine about the West not doing enough.

Ukraine remains sham democracy, a primitive post-soviet feudal autocracy not underpinned by elections or coordinated work of institutions, but by popular uprisings. Absent them, even the illusion of tolerance, much less competency, would not exist.

Looking on the positive side, Bridget is now resident in Kyiv and tweeting robustly about how much money U.S. taxpayers are going to spend propping up Ukraine’s obliterated economy.