Practical Homicide Investigation
Ukraine's counterfactual scad
Dialogical hooey — nodal points of history and contrastive explanations — is an annoying feature of Russia’s botched invasion of Ukraine. Thoughts about how this bloody mess might have turned out differently are known to psychologists as counterfactual thinking, or un-thinking, as it were.
An example:
Today the ISW team, along with the UK’s Ministry of Defence, churn out daily briefs about the event they told us was “highly unlikely” to happen. Ukraine invasion updates are the bread and butter of Fredrick W. Kagan, who argues that negotiations with Russia are futile.
I attempted to read Fred’s 1,400-word analysis, titled “The Case Against Negotiations with Russia,” without much success.
But this passage jumped out at me.