…and then the article behind the headline went on to equate Roman infanticide with modern medical abortion practices. Went on to equate the Jewish tradition of life beginning with the first breath with the Christianist demand that we treat every fertilized egg as equivalent to a fully grown human being. Worse than equating apples and oranges, this is more like equating fruit and fish.
These delusional people simply cannot grasp the fact that there is no good reason to believe that a clump of cells inside another person is itself a person that is more important than the person it is inside of.
Rather than being an extreme belief any other opinion aside from deciding for herself on a woman’s right choose represents the denial to women of the same rights that men possess. It really is that simple. If women are people equal to men, abortion is their choice to make.
If there are other, greater, concerns that should take precedence over the woman’s rights, it falls to the believer to prove that these concerns actually exist. Every attempt to prove that these concerns are real have historically failed.
Which is why Alito was forced to fall back on his false history of abortion always being illegal as a basis for overturning Roe. Make no mistake here, Alito lied throughout that opinion. Nearly every conclusion he reaches is false because it is based on that lie.
Women, through the tireless work of midwives down through the centuries, have managed the knotty problem of unwanted pregnancy all on their own. That is the real tradition here, not the illegality of abortion (or the delusion of Roman infanticide conducted by the men of their time being the same as abortion, the laughable comparison made in the Hill opinion piece. -ed.)
The extreme position is the one that Christianists have forced on American women with the reversal of Roe. Women will continue to do what they have always done; decide for themselves whether they will have a child or not. The extremity will be measured in how many women’s lives will be lost because of the delusional beliefs about life in the uterus.
The author of that Hill opinion piece is accusing everyone who doesn’t think life begins at conception of murder. That is the unstated subtext of the article. This is demonization. The author is setting up the readers that agree with him to see their opponents as less than human. Is trying to make it easier to kill US when the violent insurrection that they are fomenting comes into being. This isn’t about the sacredness of human life, this is about the rightness of their beliefs and their willingness to kill for them.
No, if we truly value LIFE, if we truly believe it to be SACRED, then before it even begins we as a people and as a nation must bend every effort to ensure not only its survival, but that it thrives to reach its full potential.
I observed that “the dog didn’t want to catch the car” in A Vaginal Dred Scott, noting that overturning Roe was going to cost the Republican party dearly in coming elections. This has proven to be truer than the equally observable fact that Donald Trump is a loser as a businessman, a politician and a television star. Trump actually picked a few winners in key races to endorse in the 2022 midterms, even as it became clear in the election returns that election deniers were almost universally being rejected.
Trump and his big lie are out of favor; but the more vividly illustrated truth of the election was that women want the right to determine their own futures independent of government supervision. Abortion will be made available again across the expanse of the United States. That was the result that was clearly illustrated in states where abortion was on the ballot. This battle will cost lives; but it will be won by women, eventually.
The Roe in our culture is not the Roe of 1973 Supreme Court decision or the 1992 Supreme Court decision. So if the Supreme Court is telling you, “Hey, guys, this is over, you can go home now, we’re not going to talk about abortion in the Constitution anymore.” History tells us that that’s not going to work.
The mindless stupidity of his supporters is what I find most depressing. Mindless stupidity that takes McCarthy’s statements at face value. How would you prove any of his claims? Why would today be any different no matter who the President was?
I can tell you the answer; it wouldn’t be better, it would be worse. Why? Because Trump didn’t even have a plan to roll out vaccinations. Trump has no knowledge of economics. No knowledge of science. He has nothing beyond bluster and charisma to draw on.
What might have made things better is if more people had voted Democratic down ballot in 2020 and put a solid Democratic majority in the Senate. That would have at least made a difference.
As it is now, in 2022, we are still bargaining with traitors in the form of Joe Manchin and the entire Republican caucus; a traitor because he holds the country hostage for his own personal benefits. He’s not a Democrat, he’s a Trumpist sympathizer. He’s a benefactor of 40 years of Reaganism. He’s wealthy from the dirtiest of power sources and wants to continue to profit from them. His backers in West Virginia are marginal Trumpists themselves and still solidly lovers of Reagan. They still think their god is going to save them. They still think their god wants them to have lots of money so they can get into heaven and they are planning to herald his second coming, soon. They are the stupid people, just like the people who still support Trump.
Oh, sure. Joe Manchin’s changed his tune now because he can see the writing on the wall. Anyone who’s paying attention can. This murderous world-wide heatwave is impossible to ignore unless you are a complete idiot. Now he wants to get onboard. Now he wants to be a Democrat like his President is. It may be too late though. It should be too late for him to change sides and be accepted as one of us, one of the people who aren’t blinded by greed and politics.
Trump can’t fix this. Republicans are incapable of fixing this. They have denied science for so long that they can’t even tell the difference between rain and being pissed on by their own political leaders. The economy is improving from Trump’s unprecedented failure at stopping a pandemic and two-time impeached catastrophic failure as a President. The Democrats are demonstrating the criminal nature of Trumpismo and the current Republican party with facts, live testimony under oath and recorded video footage and the leader of the party in the House is telling us “who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?”
Republicans have made the the 2022 Midterms all about Trump and his wounded pride at being solidly trounced in the 2020 Presidential election. He has forced the Republicans to make this election about him, and so you have McCarthy talking about how Trump could make the country better as if Trump isn’t the reason the country is suffering right now, and we all know it. Whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, we know this is what Trump created as President. This thing we are living through right now.
Look in the mirror. Stare into your own eyes and admit this truth to yourself. Then go out and fix the problem that your votes created in 2016 and 2020.
The only solution to the crisis we are in now is to vote more Democrats into office, nationally. More Democrats and solid independents into office locally. Republicans will be compromised for a generation now; that is what the blind jingoism of FOX and it’s zombie Reaganisim over the last two score of years have gotten us. A functionally one-party political system incapable of governing without super majorities.
The California model can’t spread fast enough, in my estimation. We have to fix the primary systems across this country so that only smart, popular people with sane ideas can ever rise to the top of the political system. Only then can we be safe from the stupid people who threaten to burn us all to death with their off-gassing.
Because only Donald Trump loves America enough to give you a pony.
I cribbed the list from Wowhead comments here and here. Go by and upvote Sjavn and/or Hyrcyne if you found this information useful.
I would say that you can buy pets and other items with grey drops now because Blizzard is tired of people vendoring the grey (formally just trash) items. They think it is fun to mix things up a bit, haven’t you noticed? Change the colors to avoid in raids, put mobs on the roads after telling the newbs to stick to the roads, make trash useful and then have players kick themselves for auto-vendoring stuff that they pick up specifically just to vendor for it’s gold value instead of hand-sorting every single piece of trash they pick up in the game.
That number has to be in the millions of items for the average player that loots trash. I know there are a good number of players that don’t loot trash, or even all the dropped items, because I curse them out when I’m playing a toon that skins and they stop me from skinning by not looting. You can’t skin if the other player doesn’t loot.
If the game developers don’t want us just mindlessly throwing stuff away, maybe they should give us more gold directly and just cut out all the useless flavor trash. The game will be less fun that way but at least I won’t be expected to rummage through dozens of items while keeping (10k? 100k?) uncounted items and their uses in mind while doing the sorting.
Or do the reverse, sell white and blue items that seem like they should be good for something other than just vendoring, but you don’t know for sure unless you check Wowhead first. Oh, that’s just for an achievement. Okay. Like the coins in the Dalaran fountain. At least those were grey and could just be vendored without worry.
In Blizzard’s defense, these trash items are not in the current expansion of the game anyway. You would have had to keep them in your bank since classic to have had all of them and no one could or should have expected you to keep The Stoppable Force in your bank for 15 years. I know I’ve seen the Very Unlucky Rock before. That one is in Draenor. I know this because I frequently go to Wowhead to look up all kinds of useless crap. Crap like “where do I go to find the very unlucky rock that I threw away a dozen times?”
The really difficult vendor purchased pet to grind for in Keeper Ta’hult’s inventory will be the Flawless Amethyst Baubleworm. 10k pet charms? I don’t have more than 2000 pet charms across all my toons on World of Warcraft; which probably shows how little interest I’ve had in pet battling in World of Warcraft since discovering Pokémon GO more than how hard they are to get.
if the Russian leadership does not want to sit at the table with us for the sake of peace, perhaps it will sit at the table with you. Do Russians want war? I would very much like to answer this question, but the answer depends on you, the citizens of the Russian Federation.”
I’ve never been a fan of a foreign leader before. I have a fanboy crush on Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Who doesn’t these days?) I think I have to reveal my crush right up front in this article because I’m not thinking clearly right now. Or maybe I’m finally thinking clearly for the first time in years. Who knows? What I do know is that I love Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Despite all the odds, he stood up to Vladimir Putin’s aggression and has defined courage for the world in the current European crisis:
…and inspired the citizens of the world to come together in support of his country. I love the guy. If I was 20 right now I’d get on a plane and fly to Ukraine to fight beside him in defense of him and his people and their homes. His is a profile in courage.
…and that is the essential question here; should we support Ukraine or not? We being the United States in this question means that there is no easy answer. Each individual can make that choice for themselves, certainly. However, this isn’t a question that can be answered with a single word, positive or negative when it comes to the participation of outside groups in what amounts to a regional power struggle.
Modern warfare is evil incarnate and this makes it hard to justify any action that isn’t self defensive in nature. Is it in our own defense to save Ukraine from Russian aggression? That is a difficult question to answer with anything other than a regretful no or a twenty page essay explaining why it should be yes but can’t be.
What follows will probably a twenty page essay. We’ll start with a grammar lesson. It is Ukraine not the Ukraine. It is a country, not just a place, no matter what Vladimir Putin says. You don’t go around saying “we’re going to the Texas” unless you’re going visit the battleship museum. It’s Texas or Ukraine. It is the name of a country or a state.
The United States of America is a union of states or nations. That’s why it was historically referred to as a union or The Union. The United States was never supposed to be the name of the country. They argued about the name for a long time, just like they argued about what to call the office of the president until just giving up and referring to him as the President (a practice that has spread widely) they gave up on giving the collection of states or nations another name, and just used the kludge of a name that was on the Constitution itself.
It’s quite possible that this was a signal of the imperial aspirations of the founders. They knew that there was a lot more land out there to conquer to their west, not to mention to the North and the South, before they ever needed to worry about the phrase of America in the name on the founding document.
Both the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the European Union (EU) were styled after the founding ideals of the United States; principally, the enrichment of the powerful inside those unions, clothed in the garb of caring for the general welfare of the masses of its residents. Neither of those Unions bothered with popular direct elections for representatives for those bodies. The powerful within the United States have come to regret including those provisions in their documents.
Providence, Rhode Island is a city, county, state and nation all at the same time. Let that understanding sink in for a minute. All fifty states are nations tied together within a federal structure, yet retaining independent laws and governing structures. The only interests of the various states that were ceded to the federal government were the issues of interstate trade and the relationships with foreign governments. Everything else was and in a general sense still is an internal issue to be settled within the state itself. This arrangement has the advantage of hiding from view most of the politics that matter for governing inside the United States.
You don’t get a view of local politics unless you dig for it; ask any resident of any decent sized town whether they care more about their local infrastructure or their federal government’s policies. Anyone with an understanding of just how precarious our system is will know that the politics that really matters is local politics. It determines the priorities of all the levels above it that can interfere with its operation.
When that power structure is reversed the result is almost certainly catastrophic. Case in point; the recurring lack of preparation or understanding on the part of the whole state of Texas has led to individual suffering on an unprecedented level all across the state. Power outages, healthcare unavailability, etcetera. The city has to be able to act to protect itself or it becomes the victim of charlatans and demagogues.
All governmental requirements radiate out from the needs of individuals that go unmet; whether those requirements are more doctors or more police officers. More housing or more jails. Federal mandates almost always miss their targets because federal mandates almost never take the needs of the suffering into consideration. That level of granularity is almost beyond grasping from the distance of the White House whether the White House is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or 1010 Colorado Street.
The problem of Ukraine being frequently referred to as the Ukraine is easily understood. I’ve done this too, refer to it as a place by putting “the” in front of it. This was a forgivable act when Ukraine and Ukrainians were inside the USSR or just a key part of the Russian empire. Ukraine was just a word in Russian meaning borderlands when the leaders in Moscow slapped that name on the area between Russia and Europe. The Soviet Union was largely a face-saving measure designed to mask the hands of Vladimir Lenin and then Joseph Stalin controlling the daily lives of millions of Russian people directly. That was their desire. The leader of the Soviet Union couldn’t call himself a Czar and get away with it. After all, the whole revolution had been fought to get rid of the Czar, hadn’t it?
So Joseph Stalin took a different title after he arranged his ascension to power, but he held pretty much the same power as the Czar; and life went on in the USSR under different management, the lot of the common people possibly worse than it had been under the Czar, but nobody being willing to say anything about it. Ukrainians no different than Poles, no different than Czechs no different than Kazakhs, Tajiks or Tatars. All suffering equally under the yoke of the new leadership.
Ukraine was a country though. The primordial Marxist state that Lenin and his Bolshevik’s created out of the ruins of the former Russian Empire engineered a compromise to maintain control of those lands. Granted them all a measure of cultural autonomy within the bounds of the Soviet Union’s authoritarian political control (Correction: Stalin did not give the Crimea to Ukraine. He died in 1953 and the transfer was in 54. I will however maintain that the USSR continued essentially on autopilot for almost forty years before expiring. –ed.) Then Stalin died and not too long after he died his empire crumbled as empires tend to do without the leaders that created them.
What the Bolsheviks and Lenin did really for the first time, they created a separate state, a separate institutions and a separate territory for Russia, which became known as the Russian Federation. Separating, at least symbolically, for the first time Russia proper from what used to be the Russian empire. Before that, there was no such separation.
Serhii Plokhii
Russia was a creation of the Bolsheviks, not Ukraine. Before there was Russia there was Kievan Rus’ and all three core nations of the former Soviet Union claim this nationality as their birthright. What is the true Russian state? That’s a good question. A better question is, can there be a true Russian state and why does it have to be just one state? Why is one of them named Russia in the first place? The country we call Russia is no more and no less than the region ruled as Muscovy immediately before the creation of the Russian Empire. They no more deserve the name than either of the two other countries who claim the heritage.
As a typically educated person in the middle of the American West I was shocked and outraged while watching all the maps I had spent so much time trying to learn and understand change overnight. So many more countries to try to keep track of. Gone were the days when the Northern half of the Eurasian continent was engulfed in a sea of red with a yellow hammer and sickle on it. What was most puzzling to me, as an outsider, was the breakup of what I had thought of as traditionally Russian countries. How could there be three Russian governments?
That is what also seems to puzzle Vladimir Putin. He has done his best to preserve as much of the historical Russian empire under some semblance of Moscow control since he took control of Russia in the 1990’s. Crushing rebellions here, subverting elections there, the kinds of things that a leader with imperial aspirations engages in.
It seems like we’ve been on tenterhooks over the subject of Ukraine forever here in the United States. I know I’ve written several articles on the subject dating back to the release of Dan Carlin’s Common Sense podcast #270 Poking the Bear in 2014. When Putin-backed insurgents shot down a civilian airliner over Ukraine later that year, I was done listening to anyone who was sympathetic to Putin’s empire re-building effort. It was Obama’s reaction to Putin’s aggression in Ukraine in 2014 (too strong or too weak? it’s hard to say) that put us on the course to where we are now in history.
It was obvious to me then, just as it remains obvious to me now, that if the United States is a free country then its citizens can and should go where they like and agitate for change that some governments may or may not approve of. Even take up arms against governments against the sincerely expressed wishes of the United States government. If we are free, then we are free to do these things, too.
It is virtually impossible to discern the difference between a non-government organization (NGO) working for democracy and economic reform for its own unique purposes, and NGO’s that have been infiltrated by the CIA or any other nation’s intelligence service. If the intelligence services are doing their jobs properly, ALL OF THEM have been infiltrated by all of the intelligence services, and the various NGO’s should take this fact into account when they go about doing the business they are doing.
However, there remains a difference between acting in accordance with your government’s wishes, and acting on the orders of your government’s officers (where Buchanan’s predictions fail) Putin has had NGO’s working in the United States for every bit as long as any American NGO has been working in Ukraine, and it never started American’s thinking that Russia was trying to control its citizenry. We let Russia Today (RT) run unfettered promotions of Donald Trump for a year and never even thought to ask why RT loved Donald Trump so much.
The results of the NGO’s and the US government’s combined campaigns in Ukraine, stamping out corruption, un-rigging the electoral process, were that Viktor Yanukovych lost the Ukrainian Presidential elections that were called in 2014 after he acted against the expressed wishes of the Ukrainian people. In a huff, Vlad the Corrupter invaded and annexed Crimea, his preferred summer vacation spot. Queue the outrage from everyone who thought that Ukraine was Russian all along. Add to it the fearful outrage of people who will do anything to avoid a confrontation with Vladimir Putin on the international stage. Queue my exodus from Dan Carlin’s listening circle due to his clueless insistence that Pat Buchanan was some kind of a reputable psychic, as if that phrase isn’t an oxymoron in and of itself.
The Russian interference in the the 2016 election that put Donald Trump into the White House was one of the responses to the sanctions that President Obama imposed in 2014 after Putin annexed Crimea. We know this because Trump promised to get the sanctions lifted and then had to backtrack on the promise when it became public (the idiot never could figure out how not to say the quiet parts out loud) Fast forward to 2018 and Donald Trump’s attempt to blackmail Ukraine into playing dirty tricks in the 2020 elections lead to his first impeachment.
Ukraine just can’t seem to leave the front page. I’m sure they’d like to. Fast forward again to 2022. Putin continues his aborted invasion from 2014. He was always going to do this just like the United States was always going to invade Iraq under a Republican president. It was always the plan. Invading Ukraine was what he planned when his puppet (Paul Manafort’s buddy, Viktor Yanukovych. You remember Paul Manafort, right? Trump’s campaign chairman?) lost his election.
It is a sad historical truth that Ukraine was stupid enough to give up its nukes. The preservation of Ukraine’s independence that all concerned parties signed onto (including Vlad himself) in exchange for Ukraine giving up the nukes stored inside of its national borders was just the initial move in an undeclared war. If Ukraine still had nuclear weapons we would not be seeing this invasion live on screens today. Is it really any wonder why Iran wants nuclear weapons? It should be obvious by now. If you have the ability to destroy life as we know it at your fingertips, people take you seriously. Weird how that works, isn’t it?
Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994, Zelensky said, in return for a security guarantee signed by the U.S., the U.K., and Russia. What happened to those guarantees? Ukraine had been told that the doors to NATO membership remained open, but Ukraine had never been invited inside. Because the Ukrainians are not members of NATO, they know they cannot count on allied forces to come to their support. And as for those “lessons of history” that Baerbock and other German politicians have referred to in recent days, Zelensky wondered aloud whether they had been learned: “I just want to make sure you and I read the same books.” And then, in defiance of everything that everybody else had said, he used the word appeasement, to describe not Munich in 1938, but Munich in 2022.
Anne Applebaum – theatlantic.com (gift subscription for the blog author still greatly desired)
At the end of the day, it’s going to be the Ukrainians and their bravery and their dedication to this very old idea, the idea of sovereignty, the idea of freedom. It will be their dedication to that that determines what happens.
That is what it looks like from the UK, it’s what it looks like from France and Germany and from the Balkan states that are right now very, very thankful that they joined NATO. Putin being a twenty-first century Hitler is what it looks like when you see any Ukrainian being interviewed; whether they are in the UK worried about relatives or in Kyiv worried about what’s going to happen next. If they are being interviewed on the BBC, maybe the BBC has an agenda, maybe they don’t, but they’re interviewing ordinary, regular people; people who probably would be sitting at home watching TV at that precise moment and would prefer to not be interviewed by anybody except that a lot of shit is happening right now. Shit that has forced two million Ukrainians to leave their homes in fear.
(h/t to Stuart Surridge)
Ukraine was recognized as an independent state by Russia more than 30 years ago. The Charter of Paris, signed in November 1990 by the United States, Russia and 30 European countries, established essential principles for a post-Cold War era based on international law and global norms. Subsequently, Russia, the United States and Great Britain guaranteed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine in 1995 in the Budapest Memorandum.
Moscow has no more legal basis to insist on any portion of the territory of Ukraine than Germany has the right to demand the return of Alsace and Lorraine from France. If the West accepts such Russian claims, it will not only undermine the sovereignty of all countries but also invite other nations to seek territory through military force.
I would prefer that there was never another war but that has no bearing on whether Putin is an aggressor or that Volodymyr Zelenskyy was heroic when he chose to stay with his people and fight to the bitter end. If the US had supported a real leader during our fiasco in Afghanistan the Taliban would not be in power there now. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a real leader.
Ukraine has been an independent state for thirty years. It’s President will likely give his life for his country as will many thousands of it’s men, women and children. It is time and long past time to start treating it the way we do every other country; and with Ukraine, Belarus and Russia now being separate governments today, separate governments and distinctly unique peoples, it is long past time to admit that there is no longer a Russian empire. There are just the three countries who were once the core of the empire, two of which are lead by the same cruel little spider, Vlad the Corrupter in Moscow.
All of this is aside from the fact that we, the United States government, cannot be allowed to be seen as starting a war in Europe, which is what it will look like if we were to interfere in Ukraine directly now or in the near future. What is going on in Europe is a Russian or Eastern Slavic Civil War, no different than all the other uprisings that Vlad the Corrupter has put down in the former Soviet Republics. He saw all of them as the unwanted intervention of the United States and its allies and accomplices in strictly Russian affairs. Up to this point, he has been allowed to do what he wants with these places.
I don’t like any of this in terms of how it worked out because I don’t want a more militarized Europe, I don’t want another cold war, I don’t want the massive defense spending, I don’t want everything that this is going to entail; but I’m not the one that invaded Ukraine. Sometimes it’s not up to us what we want.
If you grew up during the Cold War you can understand why most people don’t want to return to those years, and resuming hostilities with Russia because of Vlad the Corrupter’s actions feels a lot like the cold war is starting back up again. However, this isn’t a return to the cold war if we can keep Ukraine independent and opposed to Russian control.
…And we want to avoid a return to the cold war almost as much as we want to avoid a nuclear Armageddon. That outcome would be a setback for world peace and our need for mutual cooperation on limiting climate change. The world-wide antagonism that comes with a return to a cold war footing that might as well be read as the end of life as we know it on this planet, much the same as an all-out nuclear war will spell the end of life.
It isn’t a nuclear exchange that I fear. We are already in WW3 as far as I can tell and it may well end in a nuclear exchange for all that any of us can tell. What I fear is capitulation to Russia on the one hand and the resulting rise of authoritarianism around the world that would follow; as opposed to the standard American military response that will end in a nuclear exchange at some point.
On the other end of the spectrum from Dan Carlin’s handwringing about potentially starting a nuclear war we have this:
We must not only stop what’s happening in Ukraine, we must stop it before it happens here.
Stonekettle (answering his own question before I can)
We cannot go into Ukraine and fight Russians directly. That is the conflict that every nationalist everywhere has been primed to fight to the death over. Being in the war should not equate to “running the war.” We must avoid that impression at all costs if we want any chance of victory for democracy and Ukraine. This has to be, first and foremost, Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression. Against Putin’s aggression, his denial of their own separate personhood as a nation. As individuals who don’t want to bow down to his criminal organization.
The United States needs to figure out how to assist Ukraine and the wider European theater of operation without making the conflict all about us. It ain’t about us. It’s about Ukrainians not wanting to belong to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. IF WE RUN THIS WAR we will lose this war. There is nothing that Russians want more than to make the United States suffer after all the suffering they’ve been through, suffering they’ve been told is at our hands for more than seventy years now.
We can not be the center. Ukraine has to be the center.
We should make Russia pay for all this destruction. This is what didn’t happen in Syria. This is what didn’t happen in other countries. Russia is saying, I will destroy, you will pay. And this is incredibly wrong.
One of the light motifs of Russian culture, by the way, is the motif of “Crime and Punishment,” as we all know. The novel of Dostoyevsky. But actually, what we have in Russian political culture, in Stalinism, for example, is crime without punishment and punishment without crime. All those people who were sent to gulags without any trials or were exterminated, killed, they were punished without a crime.
And I think this is the most dangerous thing when we’re looking for — when somebody is looking for compromises with Putin, something that we need to avoid. Because if Russia is not punished, is not kept responsible for its crimes, obviously it will continue them.
We as a country have to stand on the sidelines and do the equivalent of provide resources to the defenders of democracy and independence. Ukraine has to dictate what its victory conditions or cease fire conditions are. Ukraine has to meet at the table with the Muscovy-Russians as equals. If that is what come to the aid of means in the question that started this article, then the answer is yes. If anything more than that is what it means, then the answer is no. No, because we can’t destroy all life on the face of the planet in the name of protecting it. Anything short of that should remain on the table. How to successfully draw that line is where we are in this war, six months later.
So much for Vlad’s promises of a short war and a glad reunion of brothers. The Ukrainian regions he lays claim to now lie in ruins. The regions that Ukraine still controls are actively being rebuilt and returning to whatever passes for normal in the middle of a war. Vladimir Putin will pay, eventually. His own people may well make him pay before this is over.
The first anniversary of Putin’s war has come and gone. Here’s an hour-long retrospective from NPR:
I get most of my news from NPR even though I don’t link any of their podcasts in this article. Most of what they broadcast is transitory. The feeds mount up and the information becomes stale and the attempt to narrativize the information becomes unwieldy very quickly. The anniversary hour-long episode is an entirely different bit of business.
Some were surprised that Ukraine has held out for an entire year. Once I had seen the kind of leader that Volodymyr Zelenskyy was, I knew that Ukraine would hold out as long as there were people willing to follow him and materials to carry on the war. Putin may have the nukes but Ukraine has leadership and the arc of history on its side. Here’s hoping that there is still a world with humans in it this time next year because Putin keeps threatening nuclear war if he doesn’t get his way. Will he kill humanity in order to get his way? Stay tuned.
These idiots saying “I told you so” right now act like COVID’s no worse than the flu. They still say this more than a year later. This is simply not true by any measure that you care to apply. There is Long Haul COVID:
Covid-19 appears to be one of many infections, from Ebola to strep throat, that can give rise to stubborn symptoms in an unlucky subset of patients. “It is more typical than not that a virus infection leads to long-lasting symptoms in some fraction of individuals,” Iwasaki said.
In this week’s episode of Unexplainable, we dive into what we know about long Covid and what other viruses can teach us about the condition, including the leading hypotheses for what might be driving symptoms in Covid long-haulers.
50% of the people who catch COVID-19 have symptoms six months later. The flu doesn’t produce a chronic Illness but COVID does. We won’t know if the Omicron variant produces a chronic Illness for at least six more months. It’s possible that it will not. That would be a blessing. But people still die from it at rates that surpass the flu.
Right. Children are just “dying” to go to the hospital voluntarily during Xmas. No. Only emergency surgery being done. Hence, typical medical occupancy is 40%; some are at 90% and more – due to COVID. U R being misled by number games. pic.twitter.com/aa9gvw2ZfL
…and we shouldn’t be tolerating passing the flu around like it’s a pair of comfortable old jeans either. We don’t have to do that. Just wearing a mask and getting vaccinated will break that cycle too.
By Jan. 31, there had been only six cases of flu diagnosed this season at Johns Hopkins hospitals, including The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, Howard County General Hospital, Sibley Memorial Hospital, Suburban Hospital and Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital. Those hospitals saw 4,805 cases in the 2019–20 season, and 2,846 in the 2018–19 season.
Vaccinations have also helped prevent infection. More Americans received the flu vaccine this season than in the previous four flu seasons, according to the CDC. By the end of January 2021, 193.2 million people had been vaccinated, compared with 173.3 million at that time last year.
I get banned from forums pretty frequently. A username of mine has a lifespan that is generally numbered in weeks, not years, on any given forum on the internet. And since I historically have only used my real name on forums (belief in anonymity on the internet is a common delusion) that means that my time on a forum is strictly limited to how long I can manage to stay in the moderator’s good graces.
The one forum in history that I managed to not get kicked off of was Dan Carlin’s forum for his podcasts. There are other forums I participated in that expired before I managed to offend a moderator, but that offense would have occurred given enough time and interest in the forum. Dan had his own problems when it came to hosting a forum full of hate speech and bullying and confusing that thundering noise with a dedication to free speech, but the fact was that you couldn’t get kicked off of his forums. Consequently I was a member on that forum when it too expired, even though I had long since fallen out of Dan Carlin’s good graces. Weirdly, I miss that dysfunctional place. I reminds me of my dysfunctional family.
Not only do I routinely get kicked off of forums that I join, I have even been asked to leave forums that someone has been silly enough to ask me to moderate. Perhaps one of my few saving graces is an unwillingness to linger where I’m not wanted, to the point of setting out on foot facing a walk of many miles just to get out of an uncomfortable situation that will only become comfortable if I leave. The latest place to reach that uncomfortable stage is the purported Front Page of the Internet, Reddit.
The biggest problem with Reddit is that it isn’t really one place. It is one system with a near-infinite number of sub-forums (subreddits) a confusing hodge-podge of purportedly different forums with completely different rules and readerships, each managed by it’s own little group of absolute rulers who enforce rules (or not) completely at their own whim.
Back when news aggregators first started showing up on the internet, there were several sites like Reddit that sprang up that allowed subscribers to recommend articles to other visitors to the website. Most of them have since closed their doors or been bought out and turned into spamming e-mailers, but Reddit remains pretty much as it was in the beginning, very nearly the sole survivor of an earlier internet age.
If you go back through my blog archive, as I have been doing since I started writing this blog (this is how you teach yourself to write. You try to figure out why your previous attempts to communicate failed to communicate even with later versions of yourself. A free writing tip for the newbs) you’ll notice links that say digg story (at least, you will until I manage to edit them all out. -ed.) Digg was one of Reddits early competitors; one that allowed, even encouraged, self-promotion. While Digg still exists, it was bought ages ago by another corporation that uses it to spam former contributors like your’s truly with articles upvoted somewhere as being popular for whatever reason. I liked digg back in the day. I liked the fact that it catered to various media types and allowed for a free-form interrelation of text and video and audio all mashed together in one location. But the fickle finger of fate choose it to fail and so it failed.
These days the dominant stream of information on the internet is Facebook, not Reddit. Facebook is not a news source no matter how many people treat it like it is. Reddit can be a news source, but the subreddits allow the kind of balkanization of information that you get on Facebook, potentially leading to as much disinformation as you will find on Facebook.
If you have the right sources on your twitter feed, Twitter can serve as a reasonable approximation of a news feed, and it does this by its very brevity, it’s cramped confines of 140 and the now expanded 280 characters. But the nature of Twitter, the fact that it is a glorified headline writing contest, also limits the time you spend on the platform. Time spent on the platform or engagement is how internet businesses are rated these days, and the way to increase engagement is to force the users of the platform to create their work on that platform directly.
Which brings me back to Reddit and my ongoing fights with the petty little dictators that run the various flavors of subreddits which you are required to post to in order to get content onto Reddit. I write political pieces reasonably frequently. One would think that /r/politics/ would be the place to post links to original political opinion pieces. One would be wrong to think that.
[–]from TheRedditPope[M] via /r/politics/ sent You really aren’t supposed to submit your own content. If you have content that is on topic for this subreddit someone will come along and submit it themselves.
[–]from hoosakiwi[M] via /r/politics/ sent Blogspot is a filtered domain in /r/politics. We do not allow personal blogs, so your submissions from your blog will not be approved here. If you want to promote your blog, take out an ad with reddit.
Well, that was news. Looking at the rules over at Reddit.com it doesn’t say anything about not being able to post your own material. In fact, it encourages you to post your own material as well as material from other people. How, precisely, is anyone supposed to find content if links to it are routinely autodeleted or treated as spam? When I posed this question to the moderators of the subreddits that I posted to, I was told to take out an advertisement on Reddit if I wanted to promote my blog.
…no seriously. A lot of bloggers have commented on the death of blogging and I think I’ve found one of the culprits. It is Reddit and Facebook and the advertising funding model that has been rejiggered to fund the internet, as if the internet was just one more entertainment source like TV or radio is. Were turned into, by advertising. If I had the readership that afforded me the ability to advertise on Reddit, I wouldn’t need to advertise on Reddit.
I think you can see the problem here, denying attention to bloggers which in turn squelches the blogosphere and promotes mass media and other commercial ventures which can afford to purchase advertising. I begin to realize why I’ve never taken the time to build a rep on Reddit. I’m simply not consumerist enough to buy into the capitalist charade going on there and on places like Facebook.
I’ve been banned from several of the subreddits now because I refuse to write my content on Reddit directly and instead link to it here on the blog. I won’t create content for Reddit to use to make money directly. I really don’t give two shits if they make money, anymore than they care if I can get readers for the blog or not. But they care if they make money, and they make money by keeping me on their platform creating there, clicking on ads there, getting people to read my work written there. It’s the same way that Facebook makes money, and that is also the reason I don’t invest my time creating work on Facebook, either.
All authority based systems will fail when tested in this fashion. This is the reason why I consistently agitate for democratic approaches to policing and policies. Authority for authorities sake will always succumb to mob mentality. Always.
I noticed, after being kicked off yet another subreddit again today, that Reddit now allows me to self-publish links and full articles from the blog directly to my user profile, bypassing the requirement that I submit to the vagaries of the petty little modos that run most forums, including the majority of subreddits on Reddit.com. So I guess I’ll try posting links and shortened blurbs for some of my better articles straight to my user profile and see if I get any traffic from Reddit. Worth a try, guess. Can’t get any worse than the headaches I get trying to deal with moderators of any stripe.
I would like to thank the moderators and residents of /r/atheism for reminding me exactly why I don’t identify as atheist anymore even though I am one. Their harassment and then banning of me for daring to post on the sub and subsequently defend myself from attack has once again confirmed for me my firmly held belief that moderators and forum dwellers really don’t like conversation. Moderators especially hate posts and conversations because posts and conversations make them have to do the thankless job of moderating. A dead forum means that there is a happy moderator enjoying his porn videos on another tab, somewhere else on the internet.
When told “you have to write your material here, not link it” the only logical response after the way I was treated there is to say “why would I write for you assholes? I don’t even know why I thought a conversation with you would be interesting in the first place. Have a nice life.”
It is easy to say “break up big tech”, But how do you do it? We don’t want a bunch of balkanized Facebooks that don’t share a common user base. What would be the point of that? Should Whatsapp and Instagram be peeled off of Facebook? Without a doubt. Those purchases should never have been allowed in the first place, and Facebook should be required to open up its API so that outside contributors can get access to Facebook’s user base. But is that breaking up Facebook?
The same is true of Amazon. You could break storage and delivery services up, but then you increase the cost to the purchaser. Is Amazon proving its worth during the crisis? Without a doubt. What people who talk about Bezos’ wealth always leave out is how much he pays himself for his time. $81,840 is his actual salary (h/t to BusinessInsider.com) There are far, far worse CEOs in the world. Truly deplorable people who not only shouldn’t be wealthy, but should also probably be in prison (yes, I am looking at you Donald Trump and all you little Trumps and Kushners, too) The fact that Amazon has increased in value during the pandemic is an economic affirmation of Amazon’s real worth, as opposed to the imaginary value of stocks on the stock market as a whole.
How many CEOs get paid hundreds of millions to run companies that haven’t increased in value by billions of dollars? Maybe we should be looking at taking away their lavish compensation packages. Clearly they don’t deserve the kind of money that they are being paid.
In the same vein with Amazon and are the co-owners of Google. They too don’t get paid lavish salaries. Like Facebook, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, should have its investments put under a microscope, and some of their shadier advertising practices should be subject to fines, because they are already illegal. But how do you break up a search engine and not render it useless for conducting searches?
Breaking up monopolies only works if those monopolies are artificial monopolies. We established this with the breakups that were forced on Standard Oil and AT&T in previous decades. Rockefeller still made out just fine after Standard Oil was broken up, and most of those companies have merged again into the behemoth known as Exxonmobil. Why aren’t they charging usurious prices now that they’ve re-established their near-monopoly status? Because they aren’t the only players on the block when it comes to energy production, and they know they could be broken up again.
AT&T also reformed itself, and few people seem to care or even notice that it happened. Why? Because the problem, the cost of long-distance phone calls, went away with the creation of mobile phone technology.
So what is the solution? Regulation. We need to be writing regulations to guide these internet companies going forward. That means we need a government that functions at the legislative level, and we need a government that can’t be bribed by industry. In short, the average American needs to stand up and make government pay attention to them and not pay attention to the companies waving dollars in their faces. Replace the representatives that have been shown to be too easy on businesses, that can be shown to be too comfortable taking large sums of money from corporate donors.
We need to institute a standard of employee ownership of every publicly held corporation, ensuring that workers in any company will be paid what the workers think is a fair wage. Completely change the nature of worker/employer relations by giving the employees a seat at the management table. That will help address the problems of homeless working poor.
But we need more than that, too. Rental costs in cities are too high. Property valuations are completely out of whack. As I’ve heard a number of times in my podcasts this week, macroeconomics is broken. We can’t explain what it is we are experiencing as we go through this pandemic, from an economic perspective.
We need to focus on the here and now. How do we keep people in their homes when they have no income and no job prospects on the horizon? How do we keep people fed? Those are the most important questions right now. We’ll get to Bezos and his billions later, he can be assured of that. Let’s deal with the crisis in front of us first. We might need his help with that.
No, if we truly value LIFE, if we truly believe it to be SACRED, then before it even begins we as a people and as a nation must bend every effort to ensure not only its survival, but that it thrives to reach its full potential.
I planned to add this quote to the end of Roe-v-Wade Was a Conservative Decision If I hadn’t broken the blog (05/16/2020) Now that it’s back up, I think I will add it to something even better than that post.
"The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them," writes @adamserwer. "This is the COVID contract." https://t.co/718ZitjWwR
It is the poor who suffer. The majority of the poor are black and brown, yes. But it is the poor as a group who suffer and it is the poor, the majority of Americans, who must seize control of this country from the wealthy who seek to divide us into digestible chunks.
Poverty is a big part of it, but race is the beating heart of American injustice. Serwer makes this abundantly clear. Racism justifies and perpetuates class inequality, not the other way around.
You are also playing into their hands. They want you to talk about race, don’t you understand what justification means? They point to the results of poverty as their proof that their racism is correct. Fix the root cause, poverty, and the rest of the problems will work themselves out. With no proof for the xenophobes to point to, there will be no hiding their xenophobia from scrutiny.
Yes. Mark Zuckerberg is a yellow journalist. This is crucial information to understand. Mark Zuckerberg is not Facebook though, and Facebook is a valuable information resource.
Twitter on the other hand is a mud wrestling free-for-all. Twitter should just ban political accounts. More specifically, Twitter should be reserved for journalists. Bloggers. People who are reporting the news, which is theoretically anyone who has a cell phone and is present at a newsworthy event. People who hold political office should simply not be allowed to have a Twitter account. They could have a managed Twitter presence without one anyway.
Facebook should be tasked with verifying ad content. Just like any other intermediary, they should be worried about their own status and reputation enough to make sure that what happens on their platform reflects well on their reputation. If they won’t do their due diligence, then the corporation should be nationalized and/or closely regulated. They have billions to spend. They should spend it on maintaining their reputation. Otherwise, why are they allowed to exist in the first place, and why are we spending so much time on their platform?
…But breaking up a communications network is a joke. Ma Bell was broken up and that did permanently cut the cost of long distance calling. But the network reassembled itself because that is the nature of a communications network, that everyone be on the network somewhere or somehow.
You break up Twitter and then what? We already have that, it’s called Mastodon. The behavior will just go there and we still have the problem of spreading misinformation. You break up Facebook and then what? We already have dozens of variations of alternative Facebooks; and again, the behavior will just go there and still be spread. The behavior is there already, and is being spread there in a more limited capacity.
What is needed is regulation. Law. Law that holds these platforms accountable for the misdeeds conducted with their information services. Otherwise the behavior of the users will just get transferred to another platform. Fix the problem, not make it move somewhere else. Make the platforms police their own user base, or create a regulating entity that does it for them. Fine them when they fail to protect the weak from the strong. It’s either that or we let Western civilization spiral down the drain. Pick one.
