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A "whistleblower" should reveal some secret facts. Here we have a collectiol of opinions, even if by an FSB worker.
While it looks like it’s interesting, I can’t help but feel that the informational content is zero of maybe even negative. There is absolutely no way for the lay internet user to corroborate one word of it that isn’t already public information. Whether it looks or feels plausible is also meaningless: it could “feel right” because it is, or because someone took effort to design it this way. So best thing for me is to…
When the prediction doesn't pan out, the usual response is "two more weeks." Qanon is the most notorious and successful example of this phenomenon. You don't normally see these on HN, but they are common on anonymous message boards. Perhaps this is a "weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" mainstream conspiracy theory being propagated as an official narrative for war propaganda purposes?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Russia has been a accusing Ukraine of working to acquire nuclear weapons, with US assistance, for quite a while, though the specification that they intend to produce a dirty bomb may be a new twist on it.
I read about it like two weeks ago. They are desperate to find a justification for their war crimes. Given that Putin himself has been caught saying multiple lies, there is no point giving any credibility to them. Their "special operation" is not going to plan and they will be trying to use any trick to find some support for their atrocities.
1. Ukraine is run by the first Jewish Nazi president. So obviously they needed to be denazified
2. Russia does not want a NATO country on it's borders. That is why it invaded a country with four NATO borders
3. Ukraine has WMDs!
4. Ukraine is actually just a part of Russia, and the Soviet Union just messed up and drew a random border. No reason to care what the Ukrainians think
A "whistleblower" should reveal some secret facts. Here we have a collectiol of opinions, even if by an FSB worker.
Asking analyst to perform an analysis of highly unlikely scenario and punishing them for unflattering reports is a failure mode. All this story explains how this stupid war became possible: the decision was made by the very top officials, it was done in a total secret, it was based on flawed reports, which were flawed because for analysts they seemed as an unimportant nuisance.
I know that this is just a twitter-news, and I'm in doubt about it. But I struggle to find a good hypothesis explaining actions of Putin. I do not value much hypotheses like "Putin is a madman" or "Hanlon's razor": they may be valid explanations, but they do not allow us to predict future. A madman and a fool are unpredictable by their very nature, so these hypotheses sounds for me like "it is a random and unpredictable in advance process". Hypotheses like this seem to me to be a result of an intellectual laziness.
But this "whistleblower" gives some explanation. Pretty detailed explanation, allowing to predict, for example, a coming investigation for a failure of a plan. It is hard to predict where it will go then, but... It is a doubtful report, but if we assumed this text as truth, then we would get a more or less firm ground to speculate of what is going next. We can predict future. And then we can compare our predictions with our future observations. It will give us ability to assess likelihood of the hypothesis.
So the "whistleblower" had given us some secret facts. And therefore he is not a "whistleblower" but whistleblower. Though the possibility of him being an impostor was not ruled out.
Side note: if they really thought of sending "politically undesirables" to the front, they must be desperate. And in Russia, of all places! Don't they know what happened when frustrated soldiers came back from the front?
[1] non Russian news outlets, if you google you'll get many hits
It was a tense week, but Russia has lost the war. They can drag it out, but ultimately victory will go to Ukraine. The reasons for this are subtle but obvious. The Russian military machine can't operate outside of Russia. They have no way of transporting fuel, ammunition, food, and other supplies to the front lies. This means that their effective operational capabilities are limited to five days. It's been a hobby of…
It depends what you define as win. Its true that russia will find it _very_ difficult to sustain this level of effort for any level of time. Its logistic capacity has been pushed way beyond efficiency. but with that in mind, whos going to push putin out of ukraine? yes the people can pick off soldiers for the next few years, but thats not peace. It is currently within Putin's grasp to freeze the conflict as it is now…
christo grozev says it's probably not fake, according to his two fsb contacts (though they disagree with some of the author's conclusions): https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1500197460626624513 edit: missing word
Especially on a subject where every side has incentives to lie, distort or exaggerate the truth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Russia has been a accusing Ukraine of working to acquire nuclear weapons, with US assistance, for quite a while, though the specification that they intend to produce a dirty bomb may be a new twist on it.
Adding to your comment, in the Munich Security Conference on 2022-02-19, Zelenskyy said: “Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFV5nw1UUNY&t=900s That “Budapest Memorandum” is this one: “Until Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, it had the world's third-largest nuclear weapons stockpil…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Russia has been a accusing Ukraine of working to acquire nuclear weapons, with US assistance, for quite a while, though the specification that they intend to produce a dirty bomb may be a new twist on it.
Why would they need assistance? Nuclear weapons are 75 year old technology they're not difficult if you already have a nuclear industry to supply the materials.
A "whistleblower" should reveal some secret facts. Here we have a collectiol of opinions, even if by an FSB worker.
If we are going technical, then I'd say he revealed some "secret facts". I was interested to read details on inner working of FSB as a system: I'm a programmer, I look at systems made of humans as I look at software systems, I feel elated when I manage to localize a bug. Asking analyst to perform an analysis of highly unlikely scenario and punishing them for unflattering reports is a failure mode. All this story expl…
I myself try to think in terms of scientific method (although this specific text does not seem useful to me in this regard).