[throwaway894345]

1. The article talks about the "used for fertilizer" hypothesis (including why it may not be a closed case).

2. "not much different than today"? Is this just some wild rhetoric or do you actually postulate that armies today are using the bodies of their dead for fertilizer/etc?

[pvaldes]

Not much different than today, if the news about Russia mobile crematoriums are eventually verified

[trhway]

The crematoriums have been brought for civilians after Bucha. The sheer number of the civilians killed in Mariupol though forced to use traditional approaches - the ruined buildings are demolished without pulling the bodies out, and for the rest - there are huge swaths of fields near Mariupol covered with fresh graves marked only with numbers. The crematoriums are used in other places where FSB and Russian SS "Russian Guard" need to disappear the bodies of killed political activists/etc without leaving evidence like the mass grave in Bucha and there no mass casualties like in Mariupol.

The soldiers have been either abandoned (a lot in Kiev fighting) or put into number-only graves in Belarus and near Rostov. A few are sent home to have those public funerals.

[marginalia_nu]

Seems at least implausible. Cremation is a fairly slow and energy intense process. If you wanted to dispose of bodies, there are easier ways.

Also sure sounds a lot like the rumors back during Covid about secret mass cremations to hide how many were dying.

[Veen]

The Russians have an obvious motivation to hide how many soldiers are dying. That doesn't make it true but "it sounds a bit like something else that was nonsense" isn't a very strong refutation.

[marginalia_nu]

> That doesn't make it true but "it sounds a bit like something else that was nonsense" isn't a very strong refutation.

It's improbable for the same reasons it was improbable the last time it wasn't true. Secret mass cremations just aren't practical from a logistical standpoint.

[varjag]

Mobile military crematories do exist in Russian military, there are public pre-war videos of them. Apparently the command seen enough need for them to manufacture the hardware. With a prior like that, it's entirely probable.

[paisawalla]

Anyone who has had a relative cremated knows that it takes 2+ hours for the body to be fully reduced to ashes and bone fragments. Two hours, for a single body, in a facility the size of a large garage. Just do some napkin math for what that means for the prospect of cremating a single body in something the size of a cement mixer.

Running non-stop with no breaks, bodies ready to go, matching the efficiency of the most optimal stationary crematories, working around the clock, a single truck could burn 12 bodies using 336 gallons of fuel (per https://www.lng2019.com/how-much-natural-gas-is-used-to-crem...) and generating 6.6 metric tons of CO2. For this to even make sense politically, there would have to be a number of bodies so large that burning it made more sense than anything else, even with how costly and obvious it would be to observers.

I'm open to your guesses, but I'm going to say one thousand innocents in a single place would be sufficiently atrocious. I say this because numbers like 100-200 are thrown around fairly casually when reporting on Ukraine and other locations, so I'm going up one magnitude from that. So 84 trucks working as described could finish this job in one day, releasing 5,500 metric tons of CO2 and consuming 2300+ gallons of fuel to do so. I leave it to the reader to determine whether it's plausible for a military in the midst of a very difficult war to dedicate the human and supply resources necessary to conduct such an operation (at peak efficiency, as described).

At the very least, the movement and fueling of 84 such trucks (or even 30 if we're spending a week doing this) should be observable. We shouldn't have to rely on video from 2013 to make these claims. The video most often shown as proof of Russia's mobile crematories is one of a mobile incinerator, e.g. for trash which can fully combust in minutes.

[arinlen]

> It's improbable for the same reasons it was improbable the last time it wasn't true. Secret mass cremations just aren't practical from a logistical standpoint.

Your personal assertion doesn't really hold any water. Mobile crematoriums, or hiding evidence of crimes in general, are not used because they are practical. They are used because it's a possible solution for a pressing problem.

And the "mass" blurb is a misrepresentation of their mission. The purpose of mass crematoriums is not to hide the mass of battlefield casualties, but relative low volume of politically damaging killings, such as quietly disappearing civil and military leadership without trace in a post-invasion/occupation scenario.

In the case of Russia's invasion of the Ukraine, it just so happened that the planned 3-day war followed by occupation never materialized, and somehow that is evidence that Russia's usage of mobile crematoriums is improbable?

[lostlogin]

The accusation isn’t that the Russians are hiding their dead, it’s that they are covering up their treatment of civilians.

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/International/russia-accused-mobi...

[nomel]

> mobile crematoriums

The existence of a portable system to "respectfully" dispose of the bodies is very different from profiting from the crushed bones of the deceased.

[pvaldes]

There is a strong component of looting and ravaging in all the entire "special operation", so they are profiting of the properties of the murdered, for sure.

[nomel]

Sorry, I don't follow how that's related to the comment I replied to.

[paisawalla]

I was told that the age of multimedia would deliver radical transparency, where rumors would be dispelled before they had a chance to propagate, and superstitious beliefs would become untenable.

[joebob42]

By who? And so what if someone told you that?

[nonrandomstring]

I guess the "so what" is the implication that we have not reached the promises or potential of civilian digital communication systems. I agree, and think what we have has instead made many areas of information worse, fragmented and unreliable.

As for "who?", if you grew up the 80s of 90s you will remember the daily, breathless grandiose proclamations of various government digital literacy programmes. Selling the World Wide Web, the Information Superhighway, Ubiquity and Universal Access was a decade-long propaganda drive that laid the foundations for what it now the "tech industry".

Of course there is much in the world that is over-promised, and over-reaches. At some point people usually reconcile the reality with the hype. With "tech" I think that has still not happened, and many remain in a dream world, high on the fantasies they grew up with.

[paisawalla]

Hi joebob,

This is a rhetorical or satirical commentary on the fact that media technology, while having the superficial capacity for increasing access to and quality of information, often has the opposite effect of what one might expect despite that capacity. That is, it just as frequently and even more adeptly appears to embed and reinforce deeply pre-existing biases towards false -- even obviously so -- narratives which are comforting or reaffirm the believer's sense that they see through the confusion of world events.

The answers to "by whom", and "so what" questions are not going to be literal answers, just like "at what precise moment did you stop sleeping and become awake this morning" has no true answer, but would only invite a debate over the definitions of sleeping and waking. It's not meant to literally be a story about a time I was told something. I was told many things, by many people, in various forms, over a long period of time.

The comment is meant to provoke the reader to consider that technology -- far from giving man the ability to conquer his nature -- emanates from man's nature, is a servant to it, and can easily serve to reinforce and entrench it. Therefore, one ought to treat technological progress carefully, and not assume that it is equivalent to human progress.