As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread

This is Alastair Campbell’s diary from Ukraine, in The New World:

My weekly diary
I’m in Ukraine, a nation let down by AmericaAfter all the warnings to bring thick coats and thermals, Kyiv was reasonably dry, and the temperature a bearable one degree Celsius as we stepped off the train at 5am on Monday.
The sleeper train was something of a misnomer. Well, it was a train for sure, albeit an old and clunky one, which reminded me of those black and white movies when goodies were chasing baddies from carriage to carriage, and almost falling through the cracks. But as for the sleeper bit, during a twelve hour stop-start journey through the night from the border with Poland, I reckon I slept for about three of them, max. In general, I think being tall is an advantage in life. Sleeper trains are very much an exception to this rule.

The trip coincided with the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and I was invited to accompany the EU’s enlargement commissioner, Marta Kos, a Slovenian diplomat and former champion swimmer, who surely has one of the trickiest jobs in global politics right now.

Ukraine is one of several countries currently in the queue to join the EU, and while she wants to see the day when they all join – Montenegro, Albania, Moldova, Serbia and more – she also has to make sure the necessary political and economic conditions are met. There are times when bureaucracy and rules can get in the way of political will, however much of it there may be, and she has plenty.

Ukraine’s president Vlodymyr Zelensky is clear that he wants to join the EU by January 1 2027. Commissioner Kos has the unenviable task of telling him that is impossible, while keeping alive the hope that one day it will happen.

Kos points out that the methodology used to assess new entrants today is not that different to the process which led to Spain and Portugal coming in four decades ago. “That was peace time. This is war time. We have to find ways of speeding up the process,” she says. You sense she feels the current crisis is existential not just for Ukraine but, if they fail, for Europe.

So there may be a way of getting countries into the EU in some shape or form as part of the process rather than the conclusion of the process. There are various ways that might be done, currently the subject of intense debate. Some are calling it gradual integration, others reverse membership.

This all bodes very well for my grand vision for European enlargement – that Ukraine, the UK and Canada all sign up on the same day.

Now we’re talking. And before you dismiss that as impossible… so was Brexit, until it wasn’t.
 You might imagine hope is not an easy commodity to find in a place that has been on the receiving end of Putin’s war machine for four years, with over 100,000 Ukrainians dead and half a million injured. It may be a source of some pride that these are dwarfed by Russian losses, but they are horrific numbers nonetheless.
Add in the fact that five million Ukrainians are living elsewhere in Europe right now, mainly women and children, with little likelihood they can come back soon, and millions more displaced internally, and you understand why there is such a sense of war fatigue.

There is also among some here a feeling of shock and isolation that the world seemed to care so little when Putin decided to turn winter into a weapon of war. It has been freezing in recent weeks and in one nearby bombing strike on an energy plant the Russians deprived 350,000 people of heat in an instant. As the EU ambassador, Katarina Mathernova, put it to me: “Kyiv is a frontline city now. But it was so hard to get anyone interested. Too much is happening elsewhere in the world.”

The consequences of war are visible – and deliberately so. The carcass of a train carriage has been moved from the scene of its bombing last month to a track at the main station. It is there to shock, and to underline that Putin’s pretence not to be targeting civilian life is exactly that. Indeed even he has given up pretending.
But then, walk a couple of yards down the platform, and there is another carriage, this one turned into a viable intensive care unit, used whenever the hospitals are overwhelmed. The third carriage is a children’s recovery unit, with beds even smaller than the one I couldn’t sleep in.

We then went to a briefing with the head of Ukraine’s railways, who on the one hand explains that the rail infrastructure suffered more than a thousand Russian attacks last year, including more than fifty locomotives damaged or destroyed, but on the other hand shows me a film of Ukrainian children brought home for a week’s holiday from their current homes in the EU. Smiling kids. Singing kids. Dancing kids. Hope.

Sorry guys, very soon after that I got a notification from the Atlantic about the transcript of David Frum’s interview with Tim Miller of The Bulwark, which includes this question from Frum:

Now, I wanted to ask you about something that—and I don’t know how real this is, but people who keep up with this more than I do tell me that there is a mood among the young that there’s something lame about the project that you’re engaged in, and I guess I’m engaged in, too, of standing up for what they would call “resistance liberalism.” And this is somehow unfashionable, uncool. And I wonder, is this a perception of something that actually exists, or is this just chat? And if, to the extent it exists, let me ask you about two different strains that I can see for what’s motivating it.

One is—and there’s just nothing to be done about this—is real leftists who say, “Look, you’re standing up here for the Constitution, the rule of law, for international free trade, for—you don’t wanna say open borders; you just wanna say orderly police procedures without abuses and without violence. So you’re not a real leftist. You’re not smashing the system. You’re not overturning the hierarchy. You’re not socializing the means of production. You’re not globalizing the intifada. It’s just lame”. So, okay, real leftists, I get why they would have a beef.

But the other thing that seems to be going on, to the extent that this is a real phenomenon I’m describing, is a feeling that simply having beliefs is, in itself, a sign of lameness and that the cool thing is not to have any. Am I talking about anything real? You’re at the center of this business. Do you see this? Am I describing something you recognize?

Plus, there was also a lot of interesting stuff about Minneapolis.

So I reckoned there was a chance that some of you might be interested in reading about this. Apologies for monopolising the thread, I’ll go away now…..

https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/02/david-frum-show-tim-miller-counterculture/686141/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCdeJRjbNQ3nJbg9K2eprfR0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

>Real reform is going to feel dangerous to the resistance liberals
>because they profit from many of the structures that are harming the
>precariat.

alternately: if you’re threatening to take someone’s life’s savings away in the name of your revolution, yes you will get resistance. that doesn’t mean people love the status quo, it means they don’t see your ideals as being worth giving up everything they’ve worked for.

the ‘precariat’ aren’t the main characters in this story. there isn’t a main character. we’re all in it together. so we can work together, or we can work at odds with each other.

>The billionaires aren’t in it with you.

no doubt.

but nous said “resistance liberals 401(k)’s”. the implication there isn’t billionaires, it’s people with retirement savings.

I donated blood yesterday. The phlebotomist felt around the scar tissue for a whole, then asked, “Is it okay with you if I use the vein over here?” pointing about an inch away. That worked out well, since the undamaged vein stopped quickly when the needle was pulled. The vein with all the scar tissue can be reluctant to stop.

Partly because of wj’s example, I signed up to be an election judge. The county only has the one job title, but it covers positions with all sorts of part-time assignments (everything from collecting from the mail ballot drop boxes to face-to-face stuff at the vote centers to working in the counting bunker). I won’t know what they’ll need until closer to the primaries. “Job title” is intentional; they don’t use unpaid volunteers.

Earlier this afternoon California’s CAISO electricity supply was >75% renewables; Texas’ ERCOT was >65% renewables; my local power authority was nearly 100% renewables. The local PA was also running a bunch of excess coal and even natural gas. We’re having another wind event. My understanding is that excess is because someone else in the region has lost a transmission line and we’re the backup (coal for bulk power, NG for frequency control).

My question is: who are these real leftists? I don’t mean college kids, or some online rando. I mean people who have some public voice, and some IRL feasible path to creating an actual outcome, and who also want to “smash bones”.

I can think of – maybe – a handful. Thom Hartmann? Bill McKibben? Chomsky? And Hartmann primarily wants something like a restoration of republican self-governance, as opposed to oligarchy. And McKibben primarily wants us to stop burning the world up. So I’m not sure they acually qualify as folks who want to “tear down the institutions”, unless “the institutions” are grossly unregulated capital.

Which, perhaps, they actually are at this point.

But I guess I’m looking for names here. Who the hell is Frum talking about? Black bloc kids? Portland anarchists? Are they a realistic example of effective political actors – people who actually might make substantive changes to anything at all?

“Resistance liberal” sounds like, basically, people like me. I understand, and in many cases agree with, the idea that we are ineffective and not quite what is needed at the moment. And it’s definitely true that, for most of us, there is a limit to what we are willing to put at risk. It is, frankly, a lot easier to be bold and uncompromising when you have little to lose. So, there is all of that.

FWIW, my wife and I had a conversation a few years ago about the whole carbon economy thing. We both have – and at this point to a large extent live off of – our 401k’s. I’m sure we have some holdings in carbon-based energy – oil companies or similar.

A huge amount of the book value of those companies is oil that is still in the ground. Were there to be any public action to prevent that oil (or similar) from being extracted, the value of those companies would probably collapse. At the time I did a sort of very rough back of envelope calculation and figured that, were that to actually happen, we – my wife and I – would take a significant haircut. I forget what the actual seat-of-the-pants number was, but it was a lot. Enough to make a difference in our daily lives, for the rest of our lives.

And we both agreed we’d take the hit if it was on offer.

Maybe we are extraordinarily exceptional, but I find that unlikely. I’m not seeing us as the root of the problem(s). And I really and truly do understand and appreciate that young people coming up now face challenges we did not, but the fact that we have a house and 401k’s is not the root cause of all of that.

It is, frankly, not that big of a house. And we only have one.

The regulatory arms of the government have basically been crippled under Trump. The folks who are in a position to do something about that – primarily Congress, but also the freaking SCOTUS – have been captured and are beholden, not to me and people like me, but to the great big bags of money that keep them in office. And, FWIW, line their pockets, personally.

Maybe that’s the problem, right there.

I’ve stood toe to toe with cops to exercise my “resistance liberalism”. I didn’t see Frum there that day. Maybe he could try it on before he dismisses it.

Anyone have thoughts on this Anthropic thing? It’s a topsy-turvy world when the tech bros have more restraint than the federal government.

Anyone have thoughts on this Anthropic thing? It’s a topsy-turvy world when the tech bros have more restraint than the federal government.

“Tech bros” are not a monolith. The high profile obnoxious (or worse) ones get a lot of press. But mostly the good ones get ignored.

As for Anthropic specifically, I’m not up on the details, either of Anthropic’s history or this specific spat. But if Hegseth is upset, that strongly suggests that Anthropic is on the side of the angels, at least on this one.

But if Hegseth is upset, that strongly suggests that Anthropic is on the side of the angels, at least on this one.

Leaving aside that they built and trained their LLM using texts that they knew were taken without permission…

They owe my wife and a lot of other authors a whole lot of money for that one and are busy trying to wriggle out of that, or to get a big enough deal that paying for the settlement won’t put them under.

I don’t think anyone with an LLM is on the side of the angels. They were all built on theft and built to steal more jobs. And now they are trying to bury us in carbon on top of that by consuming as much energy as a small city.

But hey, at least Anthropic has found a few scruples…

Come AI winter I’m gonna open a bottle of the good stuff and drink to their demise. It will be an economic blow like the pandemic, but an environmental boon like the pandemic as well. I won’t celebrate the suffering it causes, but I will celebrate the suffering that their fall will prevent.

And now they are trying to bury us in carbon on top of that by consuming as much energy as a small city.

I would have said medium-sized. The four cities served by my local power authority have a combined population of 354000. If we were one city, that would put us at 55th on the US list. During peak summer usage, the four cities occasionally draw 600 MW. The new data center complex being built up the road from us in Cheyenne, WY will draw 1,200 MW almost continuously when finished.

They are striking “targets” in the north of Tehran. These are busy residential neighbourhoods with schools, nurseries and restaurants. The residential palace and museums are located there. Wtf is wrong with these people?

The rationale is of course ridiculous. At least Bush tried to make a case in front of Congress and the UN (I never thought I would say anything positive about Bush but here we are …)

That has become the norm. ‘Negotiations’ are a diversion to make the attack a surprise when it hits. Ideally it gives the location of the high level negotiators, so they can be targeted themselves (as happened the last time where it only failed because the attack hit the house before the guys arrived). First rule: His Orangeness and the Yahoo from Netanja NEVER act in good faith.

And the European reaction is to condemn Iran for answering in kind.
The general problem of a conflict where all parties are despicable* and politicians feel obliged to throw in their lot with one of them.

*the Yahoo from Netanja, His Orangeness and Chamenei all lack any conscience or empathy. They should all be (very) slowly fed to some less than fussy carnivores on life TV.