Kinophile
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Posts
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Posts posted by Kinophile
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Just now, The_Capt said:
Dan Simmons, now we are talking!
Right!? Holy crap, The Fall just blew me away. And the Crucifiorm, what an idea. The Tesla Forest! The Shrike! Kwatz!
Even his understanding of military strategic deception, by the AIs, leading to catastrophic misallocation of Human forces....wow.
3BP isn't remotely in Simmons wheelhouse, it's in the bilge playing footsie with the dock rats.
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1 minute ago, womble said:
maybe the Kremlin orter conscript some of the kleptocrats and let them pour their personal wealth into their units' log trains...
Well... Prig is already doing that with Wagner, no?
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1 hour ago, FancyCat said:
LMAO what an ironic farce
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50 minutes ago, Zeleban said:
"Wagnerites roasting, on an open fire,
HIMARS slamming their HQs...
Youtube rants uploaded by cold Mobiks
Ukrainians dressed up like EskimosEverybody knows a Tupolov hit by drones
Helps to make the evening bright
Deadly SOF with their NVGs all aglow
Will find it easy work tonight
They know that Biden's on his way
He's loaded lots of Ammo and MREs on his planes
And every Babushka's child is gonna spy
To see if T-72s really know how to fly
And so I'm offering this simple phrase
To kids from one to ninety-two
Although it's been said many times, many ways
Komrad Putler, **** you
And so I'm offering this simple phrase
To kids from one to ninety-two
Although it's been said many times, many ways
Komrad Putler, **** you!" -
45 minutes ago, danfrodo said:
good gawd what an amazing trilogy. All other sci fi seems like comic books after this. Absolute masterpiece.
Read the Hyperion series, my friend, then tell me if there's any character in 3BP as remotely intriguing, humanist or layered as Col. Kassad.
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1 hour ago, The_Capt said:
All accept one - sustainable collective Will. I argue that the Kardashev scale is incomplete - https://futurism.com/the-kardashev-scale-type-i-ii-iii-iv-v-civilization
Any collective intelligent species will need to develop unified and connected collective will before it is able to approach the K-civ requirements. If a species lacks collective will, even passive or implicit, they will never be able to leverage the required energy levels. We would need to unite human will to ever become a Type I civ for example.
Russia key missing resource is sustainable collective willpower and Putin knows this - that was what he was seeking in this stupid war, more collective willpower at his disposal. Worse, Russias collective Will is fractured and poorly constructed from it foundation - it is baked into their identity issues. My theory is that all these people are dying so Russia can hold it together for another few decades under another strongman ruler.
You're comparing some pretty extreme extremes here...on the one hand a country that covers not even 4% of its planet's surface with a civilization able to harness all incoming solar energy/radiation. Collective will is not a resource, its an idea, and even then it's on a sliding scale of effectiveness. There's plenty of civilizations that have arose with some pretty half-assed organizational principles (human sacrifice, for one) that nonetheless pushed forward into local and regional dominance. Give the Aztecs metal weapons instead of those obsidian make-dos and you've got no European conquest Central America but you do have a lot of very anxious Christian POWs.
Collective Will etc is certainly a cultural resource (as a very powerful self-organizing principle). Yet Russian elites have had ample access to knowledge of democracy, etc and obvious examples abroad to pull from but have time and again fallen into autocracy as a default.
But I don't know if Putler sought more collective willpower- he was already essentially unbound in ambition. Did he really need/sought more? He still had to negotiate with internal power structures the surround & enable him, to a degree, but this war seems to very much be his war, his ego involved, his personal perspective on history devolving to his "legacy". He drove its creation and maintains its progression. Without the West involved he very likely would be "winning", as he sees it.
For him to succeed it appears he only needs the support (partial-Collective Will) of a tiny percentage of the Russian population. Pretty efficient as a ruling mechanism, albeit inherently unstable. And yet, even though the assholes at the top can change/swap out, the Russian system of governance has almost always been autocracy, autocracy, autocracy. Brief interludes of demos which are swiftly squished under the steel-toed jackboot of yet another incoming autocracy.
I'd question weather lack Collective Will is a deficiency - its absence hasn't stopped Russia's rise to superpower status, its conquest of a significant portion of the northern hemisphere and its maintenance of local hegemony.
Fun conversation btw.
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23 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Xixin had to effectively push the whole collision central to the plot when in reality two Type I civilizations have no fundamental resources based reasons to pre-emptively destroy each other and neither do higher level civilizations
Yes, he created the Deus Ex Machina of the destruction of the TriSolarian system to artificially push the "aliens" out of their environment, with Sol being the closest & best option for them. Essentially they force a war of extermination as a means of civilizational survival, when cooperation would have lead to mutual benefit (and indeed does, in his books, after the first war). The TriSolarian autocratic regime(s) constantly view civilizational advancement in zero-sum frameworks, whereas Earth is a more cooperative/diplomatic and "honest" culture.
Interestingly, and as per your note about reading your opponent's literature, I've read regularly of how Chinese society views Americans/Westerners as extremely aggressive and self-destructive, destroying as we absorb and so always wanting more, which is what "truly" drives the tension between East & West. Supposedly. So then viewed through that fractured lens then the West is TriSolaris.
To come back to the topic at hand (no, really) there is a strong apocalyptic thread in the modern Russian narrative about Ukraine, that it must be absorbed and subsumed to ensure the survival of Russia as a social construct because...Jewish Nazis? EH, ok... anyhow...
Fundamentally Russia has every resource it needs to survive and thrive, so it is the politically created perception of vulnerability and external threat that drives the aggressive push to subjugate the near abroad. An ideology constructed, maintained and expanded by a fascist/imperialist ideology whose true benefactors are the elite at the top (as with all fascist states).
I'm curious what non-propaganda literature is coming out of Russia these days...
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33 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
True but I think we may be the only species capable of creating an entirely artificial environment that then creates pressures. War is very much an environment, and it is very much human-made. Not sure any other animals do it to this scale - ants maybe. We create our own pressures to the point we could extinct ourselves. I can’t tell if this is a natural filter to scrub out dangerous higher life forms or a way to propel a species to become more dangerous higher life forms - see Three Body Problem series.
Chimps raid, and it's horrifically barbaric. Like, pile-on and rip their jaws off is a standard tactic, I was once told. But that's more raw opportunistic violence than a structured approach to conquest.
I...did not care for that book series. The basic logic was brutally sound - treat the universe as a jungle that will kill you, so kill anything you meet because it is impossible to tell who is truly friend or foe and the penalty for not being zero-sum is the destruction of your entire civilization. Some scenes/set ups were interesting. But holy crap was he unutterably bad at characterizations (especially women), had no clue about human society under pressure and ridiculously, RIDICULOUSLY chauvinistic and paternalistic.
Aside from that basic concept, T3BP read like an old sci fi book from the 50s. And not a great one.
Give me Simmons, Asher, Greg Bear (RIP) any day.
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2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
It's worse than that... it makes Putin and the military look weak. Ukrainian strikes deep within Russia definitely don't inspire confidence that this war is going well. The Russian capacity to come up with excuses for everything bad that happens to them is not infinite.
Tsk tsk O ye of little faith
Hast thou forgotten these past many months of Igor Yevgenyevich Konashenkov and his baldy-faced gibberish?
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Humans stay the same, the tech evolves.
Until we develop true biotech that affects us on a genetic level, generation to generation (a la Dan Simmons' Ousters) we'll always bash each other with the latest in stone clubs / HIMARS for the same selfish short-sighted reasons.
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1 hour ago, BlackMoria said:
So, warfare will be launching swarms of these drones at another countries military infrastructure and critical civilian infrastructure.
What's scarier than that is that you conceivably, in large country like the US, launch drone attacks from within your opponents territory. You don't even need to be there, just containerize a few hundred drones, activate and target remotely.
Gawd WW3 will be just awful, everywhere.
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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:
Here's a tidbit that might mean something or might mean nothing. Tula Russia is printing 600,000 food ration cards:
Steve
They cant be in that dire straits that food rationing is a potential future thing...can they? I mean sure, sanctions are grinding in like dog **** into a white carpet, but Russia can feed itself.
I think?
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5 minutes ago, Haiduk said:
VERY lucky UKR battalion of S-300 under attack of two Lancets. No direct hits. Probably because of strong wind operator couldn't keep the course at the last moment
Jesus.
Spare knickers time!
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1 hour ago, Der Zeitgeist said:
Hmmmm....
ALT POV:
Engels has nukes stored, no?
So... Wot Air Def doin', boychik?
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RUS pulling back from the bank to towns south just invites UKR light forces to cross and roam? Everytime the Ivan falls back the Ukrs follow close behind, staying right on their ***.
When they thin out a line and repo forces back/away the ZSU infiltrate with light/SOF forces, penetrate and constantly degrade LOCs using LRFs and tactical superiority, until the defence is Swiss cheesed.
If RUS does fall back from the bank then a localized UKR "offensive" could steadily develop over a couple of months, looking to isolate and destroy individual RUS garrisons. Defeat in detail, etc.
It's a dangerous area to let any UKR presence develop.There's already a decent partisan movement in the region, albeit probably somewhat suppressed right now, but obviously latent.
A UKR force across the Dniper south of Enerhodar is a stumbling block in the Spring that the AFRF cannot ignore.
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Dimitri is still tracking RUS supposed withdrawal from ZNPP.
Im curious... Should not Russia fortify/at least fight to hold the left Bank? Falling back from the Dniper is a binary decision, no? Once you let the Ukrs across then you're fighting on the defense in a topographical plain, in winter, against a mobile enemy, and your lines are still not usefully shortened. Also RUS's throttled logistics would be now made far worse by letting HIMARS across the river.
Of all the decisions RUS could do right now, pulling back from the Dniper seems like an extremely bad one.
Unless the intention is to pull all the way back to Crimea and to West of DLPRs, ie deliberately splitting the front. This could help with concentrating RUS forces in the Donbass while turning Crimea into a fortress.
Avoiding inflicted defeat and destruction in the open country from Melitopol to the Crimea could be a good operational move.
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4 hours ago, acrashb said:
Don't know if "GENERALL SVR" is credible, but if so, bad day for Putin:
Telegram: Contact @generallsvr
Interesting gossip but... I'm always highly ware of anyone who paints supposed emotions onto world figures. Eg "Putin was upset". Sure. Just one adjective and an exclamation point away from raw, below the fold clickbait. If an author is willing to embellish with that then....
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Including our friends Zeleban et al.
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1 minute ago, Zeleban said:
Definitely I would like to be in a place like this
****ing Putin.
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11 minutes ago, Zeleban said:
The electricity situation in Irpen has become very difficult. For example, yesterday there was no light for a whole day. Therefore, in order to continue working (I work remotely), I decided to move for a while to my parents' apartment in Kriviy Rig. Here the situation with light is much better. On the way, I saw a column of FH70 howitzers being towed by Iveco trucks. It looked impressive.
My sympatheties. Last winter in Toronto /Ontario we had a 3-5 day run of no power mid winter. Thank God for gas heating, plus we have a fireplace. Having a working chimney as Back up for winter outages was a deliberate factor in taking this place. Which is nuts, when you think of it. A modern, well run city with no extreme events to really worry about ( quakes, etc) yet having a functional fire pit was on my mind. And I'm in Forest Hill north! Fancy white person hood.
The absence of power was unnerving, esp. by D3
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Following from his/her note, via Ukrainian Volunteer blog:
QuoteIf they are getting the best satellite data the US has to offer (they likely are), and it is very good indeed when you are talking (mil) size units, then they know by movements, pre-positioning and transport hub activities not only what the Russians are doing, but when combined with other intel, what they are going to do. If you have the forces to action that,pl it is almost unbeatable.
When I say the “best sat data the US has to offer,” that is likely top tier 1 but washed data. Tier 2 they are likely getting mostly raw.
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Mendacity is the perfect word. Nice.
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Re editing rat brains, you guys are playing with fire!
Just gonna future proof myself for after the inevitable Man/Machine Apocalypse and state for any Rodent Researcher reading this forum that I, FOR ONE, WELCOME OUR FUTURE CYBERNETIC RODENT OVERLORDS.
TAKE THE OTHERS, THEY'RE ALL ANTI-RODENTISTS!
Call me Quisling, I dont care. When all you numbskulls are chewing on each other's diseased toes I'll be warm and dry at the feet of the Digital Rat God, happily nibbling my Grade A Soylent Green, 700 feet under ground.
Yep, yep, yep we'll see who's laughing then!
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted · Edited by Kinophile
Interestingly, I read many years ago that large wars often lead to extreme winters, Esp if campaigning began early and finished late, throwing a lot of particles, debris and aerosols into the atmosphere.
WW2 had some unprecedented winters, as did WW1. Shorter wars like 1870 not so much. I don't know what the threshold is but I'd say the correlation is statistically significant.
So it's possible this winter in UKR could be heavier than expected but, with climate change, shorter. Then a very heavy rasputitsa from the excessive snow melt.
A UKR winter offensive might be crucial to achieve more gains before a really bad spring shuts everything down for longer than usual.