Weekly links 2022-02-28: Ukraine Invasion Edition
This is the first edition of my weekly curated links. It’s inspired by Tom Scott’s newsletter.
Because we’re on the 5th day of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, this week’s links will have a certain theme.
The institute for the study of war (ISW) is the best place to keep up to date on the military situation. They keep to the facts and credible information from the intelligence community.
To understand the strategic situation, the best explainer remains Bret Deveraux’s. This was written on the 25th, but still gives the best context. You should really read Bret’s entire blog at your leisure - he’s a military historian and a very good explainer.
If you told me “a urban planning youtuber made a video about Ukraine”, I would scoff at you. But somehow, youtuber Adam Something wrote “Here’s what will happen in Ukraine” on Feb 22nd (!!) and has predicted everything correctly. His videos on urban planning, and other videos on Ukraine are also worth watching.
If you’re looking for podcasts on the situation, Pod Save the World is run by the Obama administration’s ex national security advisor and communications director. Another good pick is Intelligence Matters run by an ex acting director of the CIA. This one is not as up-to-the-minute, but it gives you better insight into what the intelligence community thinks.
The subreddit r/credibledefense is a “war nerd” community. It’s one of the higher signal-to-noise communities on the matter.
For more lighthearted, the subreddit r/noncredibledefense is “war nerds making fun of war nerds”. There’s a long history of subreddits developping to make fun of other subreddits (eg. r/programmingcirclejerk pokes fun at r/programming). This is part of that tradition.
I know there’s an automatic Patreon link at the bottom of each of my post. Don’t click this one.
Please donate money to Razom Ukraine instead. My readership tends to be well off tech types - the single best thing you can do to actually help is leverage your economic position by donating to people on the ground over there.