by liberal japonicus
What say you?
"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
by liberal japonicus
What say you?
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.
And, as part of my continuing mission to bring various diverse but interesting voices to ObWi, including those of Never Trump Republicans, this is David Frum on last night’s SOTU (which I actually watched, for my sins). It was a) embarrassing, and b) the ultimate illustration of what it looks like to be in a completely post-truth world:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/trumps-childish-state-of-the-union/686133/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCatXRzFLbHu8MkuaA3ijO-A&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
I have not yet watched the Dem rebuttal, that treat awaits.
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
Never let Frum and Miller be your translators for what the cool leftist kids are saying.
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.
It’s not that The Activist Kids (which, again, seems to include Millennials who are in their 40s) have no beliefs and think that Resistance Liberals are cringe. What they really feel is that they are not being seen or listened to by the politicians, the donors, and the media. They have plenty of beliefs, they just don’t see that a return to the politics of the Clinton, or Obama, or Reagan years (since this is Frum trying to square the kid’s circle) is going to fix any of the specifics of their lives that keep them trapped in the precariat.
The “bonesmashers” are not nihilists or deluded Marxist idealists; what the “bonesmashers” are actually feeling and thinking is something more like what Spanish Civil War anarchist Buenaventura Durruti was talking about when he told The Toronto Daily Star:
The heart of this clash of worldviews is not so much about whether or not the status quo should be obliterated, but about whether or not the institutions who are trying to guide the resistance are willing to give up their own privilege and comfort in order to build a more just future for those who have been harmed by the institutions that the resistance liberals are trying to preserve.
The resistance liberals 401(k)’s are built on the bones that keep the bonesmashers paying off predatory student loans, and that keep a runaway carbon cycle heading for collapse within the bonebreakers’ lifetimes.
The sort of institutional reform they need is going to take more than just making ICE go through more training. Real reform is going to feel dangerous to the resistance liberals because they profit from many of the structures that are harming the precariat.
>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.
Ha, nous, I was hoping you’d be our informant on the cool leftist kids! I considered directly asking you. Hugely reducing (or eliminating) the existence of the precariat and the policies which produced them is necessary, and fairly fast. “Making ICE do more training” is nothing near what is necessary.
Also, cleek and I cross posted. You’re not all in it together, cleek. The billionaires aren’t in it with you. They’re building their compounds in order to be self-sufficient in New Zealand while the world burns. Reversing the policies which have made them richer and richer while making working people’s salaries stagnant does not have to threaten the life savings of the lower X%. (X% because obviously the calculation will be difficult – 80%? 90%?)
>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.
Isn’t curious, though, that the likes of Elon Musk, currently the richest person in the world – which I have to think makes him the richest person in all of human history – seems intent on upending the system of institutions in which he became so obscenely rich. (Or at least that’s how it looked to me when he was out DOGEing for Dear Leader.)
I guess in his mind the system was holding him back. Ketamine, anyone?
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).