Exhaustion

Russia is throwing everything they have into the war with Ukraine. The Russian army is severely decimated, with units only half populated. Personnel is being reassigned from depleted units, and what little reinforcements are being deployed are untrained reserves. Ammunition is spent like it's their last stand, and Russian lives are lost in droves. While Russia can still rely on their advantage in numbers to overwhelm the Ukrainian forces, it is a losing game for them. Putin is unwilling to formally declare war and mobilise his conscript army, and with his contract soldiers now being used as cannon fodder, he is on his last legs in the fight.

Taking Sievjerodonetsk, a city of limited strategic value but symbolic importance to taking all of the Luhansk region, took a ridiculously disproportionate amount of time, effort and resources for Russia, and they are unlikely to make any significant further territorial gains. Ukraine, on the other hand, is ramping up their resistance with new weapons, and are successfully pushing back on every other front. Russia simply lacks the numbers to defend and keep the territory they have occupied, and they are vulnerable.

It will take a lot of suffering yet before he is forced to admit it, but Putin is finished.

Unintended Legacy

Although his ambitions were probably very different, the actions of Vladimir Putin have had repercussions on the world that are actually not that bad.

In the aftermath of his machinations to install an inept buffoon as the president of the United States, the US population seems to have awakened to the fact that democracy needs to be defended against fascists plotting to overthrow the legally elected government, that more people need to vote for their system to be less vulnerable to manipulation, and that their age-old system, designed in the 18th century, just might not be optimal for a modern democracy.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine has made the world come together against Russia. The EU has sent loads of weapons to aid Ukraine, and imposed sanctions on Russia despite the negative effects it will have on many EU countries as well. The UN has made multiple statements against Russia, even though their Security Council is paralyzed by Russia somehow having inherited the veto power that was once granted to the USSR. And, last but not least, NATO has been strengthened a lot by the renewed threat of a common enemy.

All in all, this would count as a huge loss for Putin and a win for democracy and peace. It came at the cost of Russia losing whatever trust it had managed to build internationally since the fall of the Soviet Union, but the Russian people are not blameless in this. They need to be yanked out of their dream of returning to former glory and start electing leaders that can show some humility and play by the same rules as others in the international arena. Yes, they have been lied to, but they swallowed the lies much too eagerly, and continue to do so. Perhaps reality will now finally knock on their door hard enough for them to notice.

 

Bibliophobia

Bibliophobia (n.)

A fear of reading and/or writing, esp. pertaining to "longer" texts (more than one short paragraph).

I just did a Google search for instructions on how to connect one device to another using two wires. The information would have been adequately conveyed by one still image accompanied by a couple of sentences of text. Sadly, no such document turned up in the search.

Instead, I found several competing video "tutorials" on YouTube, each taking several minutes of slow exposition to "show and tell" the process of wiring up the connection as they did it in real time. Some were unable to speak intelligibly, or showed video footage of schematics that were too blurred to be legible. Others spoke a language I did not understand, and some were either doing it wrong, using different hardware than mine, or explaining something else entirely.

What the flying fuck is happening to people? Do they no longer know how to read and write? And do they no longer look for existing documentation before they make their own bad version of it?

Instead of taking one glance at written and illustrated documentation from a reliable source, and then doing the work myself in seconds, I am expected to hope for a random person on YouTube to know how to do it right, spend fifteen minutes watching that person do it slowly, taking notes or screenshots from key moments in the video, and then do it myself? This is a waste of my time and an insult to my intelligence. If this is the way we are heading with the "information society", we are in for a dark age. Functional illiteracy breeds ignorance, stifles creativity and puts a strong damper on dissemination of ideas.

Learn to read. Write things down. Yes, some things are better explained by a video, but please, please, keep in mind that an "old school" document (with schematic illustrations and/or photos) is faster to produce, faster to consume, much less data intensive, indexable and in most respects more accessible than a video.

This goes not only for instructions on how to build things IRL, but for programming and other computer related tasks. Yes, people try to explain programming, or editing a single line in a text file, by posting a blurry video of a screen capture instead of just writing the information down.

The written word is the foundation of our civilization. If we abandon it, our civilization goes out the window with it, and we are in for an era with millions of ignorant me-too vloggers who never rise above the level of beginners but proudly publish nearly identical, badly produced videos to display their ability to copy someone else's work.

Sigh.

Teetotalitarian

Vladimir Putin just openly compared himself to Czar Peter the Great of the old time Russian Empire, as if that was an ideal to strive for. Anyone aspiring to emulate a totalitarian, brutal emperor from centuries ago has no place in modern society. Russia is a sick country that still yearns for a strong man to lead them to glory. The fact that Putin is leading them into isolation, poverty and disrespect seems to be totally lost on them.

The population of Russia has had plenty of chances to come to terms with the modern politics, where countries can't just murder and steal from their neighbors to improve their standing and wealth. Unfortunately for them and for Ukraine, they still fail to play by the rules, and they deserve to be punished for it.

This is no longer a problem with Putin. It is a problem with Russia, and they need to get their heads into the 21st century before their economy is thrown back to the 19th century.

Trade-off

Russian attacks against the small region of Luhansk that remains under Ukrainian control appear to be "successful", in some twisted meaning of that word. What Russia is doing is nothing less than a total demolition of the city of Sievjerodonetsk. Russian invasion forces are now in control of most of the city, but the city has no water or electricity, and ninety percent of the buildings are destroyed. Russia is not getting anything of any value - they are just mowing down the opposition by using insane amounts of artillery before moving in and claiming the city as "liberated".

The focus on Donbass is costing Russia on other fronts. They are losing ground near Cherson, a still functioning city with considerable strategic and economic value. The Russian grasp of the local government and the citizens of Cherson is tenuous and slipping, and Ukraine might actually be able to reclaim the city within the next few weeks.

Trade a major city for a pile of rubble with nothing but symbolic value, at the cost of thousands of casualties. Nice move, President Putin.