#how does ukraine sound

[petiplacha]

What Ukraine sounds like is a completely new format, a musical  journey. Musician and composer Yevhen Filatov (The Maneken, Onuka)  collects the sounds of Ukrainian cities and creates a melody from them.  And you are watching it.  

Melody of Lviv - forth city 

[unopenablebox]

i admit that i find it a little bit frustrating how Wildly Astonished other antizionist jews act when i tell them my israeli jewish family have lived in the region since [some unknown length of time before 1800 when there start being records about it]

[gurorori]

haha oh no im definitely not at all disturbed by the prevalence of leftists on all platforms who are loudly 'anti-genocide' when it comes to the palestinian cause (and a couple others at best :3c) yet the only time ukraine [ʊkrɐˈjinɐ] leaves their mouths is in critique, in stark comparison to the former or in complaint about their (american) government sending aid.

at first what i saw often was pointing out the differences in western media framing [ukraine vs palestine], and that's fair (until the words and the agenda of western journalists are used to paint, as a whole, ukrainians who have been actively going through genocide as some kind of white supremacists hogging the blanket of global attention when they kinda just want to live and have the rights to their own land, culture, names and families)

but no one is even caring to do that anymore, today bitches just invent metaphorical scenarios and people to get mad at and to throw an entire ethnos away because wahhhh i decided that you care for X but not for Y!!!.... all while doing the exact thing they are condemning. the exact absolute same and they don't even hide it but do lack the self-awareness to realise

[mariesoliver]

I feel like the icj ruling specifically undermines the credibility of international law and its intitutions. The icj stated out loud that south africa's case accusing israel of genocide was legally sound (with overwhelming evidence) yet their measures are so weak... not even a call for a ceasefire... by their own standards they can't deny genocidal acts are happening but they do not have the political will or care to actually do something about it

[amerasdreams]

researching about russia does make you paranoid because they do go to such extreme lengths sometimes to persecute people who do barely anything against the regime.

like, i know they're not trying to poison ME for just some social media posts, i'm not russian or near russia, but that comes to mind when i feel sick (when I haven't been sick since covid in 2022), or if I get some sort of scam online, I think they're targeting me specifically

It's almost 99% unlikely... but you can't put anything past them at this point.

i mean, if i were actually being effective, which would be more likely if i had a wide audience, i can see they might -- might-- try something. but i'm a nobody.

plus i'm really tired rn which makes me irrational (I'm sooo tired that I think i might be sick, which triggered all this. More than even the normal tiredness after running around all weekend - just 4 visits 4 miles away.... but also with some paranoia about them bc I HAVE had incidents before. when you've had something happen it does appear more prominently in your mind)

I do comment and share things I can't help but share... because I can't stay silent. when people are so immune to seeing evil in front of their face

and I don't look at replies to comments on youtube or instagram bc I know a lot are probably negative, perhaps trolls (i've seen some and I don't need that negativity)

[solarmorrigan]

The Ass of Legend

For the @steddie-spooktober day 20 prompt: Cryptid Rated: T | Words: 776 | CW: None | Tags: established relationship, modern AU, Robin Buckley and Steve Harrington are best friends, Eddie doesn't get paid enough to deal with them Divider credit: @saradika

Eddie swears, fumbling and nearly dropping the soapy pan in his hands as Steve’s voice calling from the living room pulls him from his dishwashing fugue state.

He doesn’t sound hurt or alarmed, nothing that would be any cause for concern, but his tone does have that petulant lilt to it that says he wants Eddie’s attention and he won’t give up until he gets it – not that he normally has to fight for it, but Eddie is busy.

“They complain that I don’t do the dishes, then they distract me while I’m trying to do the dishes,” Eddie grumbles as he snaps off the water and strips his dish gloves off. “Need to make up their damn minds.” He stomps out into the living room (as well as he can stomp with just socks on his feet) and finds Steve and Robin sitting on the couch, both staring at Robin’s laptop. “What.” he asks flatly.

Steve looks up, jabbing a finger in Robin’s direction. “Tell Robin I have a better ass than Mothman.”

“No,” Robin says, shooting a narrow-eyed look at Steve, “tell Steve that Mothman has a better ass than him.”

Eddie stares at the both of them for a moment. “What.”

Steve sighs. “I said, tell Robin–”

“No, I heard you,” Eddie cuts in, holding a hand up. “I just– Why are you even– How the fuck am I supposed to know what Mothman’s ass looks like?”

Giving him a look that says this should be entirely obvious, Robin flips her laptop around, the screen of which is covered with– ah. The Point Pleasant Mothman statue. Rather, a closeup of the Point Pleasant Mothman statue’s ass, which is, admittedly, bizarrely well-sculpted.

Eddie glances from the screen, up to Robin, over to Steve, and back again. “I’m… not sure I want to weigh in on this.”

“Ha!” Robin crows. “He didn’t immediately take your side, that means he thinks Mothman’s ass is better!”

“No! No, no,” Eddie says, pointing a finger at Robin. “I didn’t say that, don’t put words in my mouth.”

“Then why don’t you just tell Steve you agree with him?” Robin asks smugly.

“Yeah, Eddie, why don’t you just tell me you agree with me?” Steve chimes in, and Eddie wonders how he suddenly became the center of their argument.

“It’s just that Mothman is a known harbinger of death and disaster.” Eddie holds up his hands in surrender. “I feel like claiming you have a better ass than him is the kind of hubris that precedes getting cursed by the gods.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “Okay, Mothman isn’t a god–”

“Still.” Eddie shrugs.

“–and he also isn’t here right now, so I’m pretty sure you can tell me my ass is nicer without fear of getting cursed.”

“I dunno, Steve,” Robin hums. “There’ve been sightings of Mothman in Germany, Japan, Ukraine – all over the world. Who’s to say he’s not in Indiana?”

“All the shit that’s gone down here? I’m pretty sure if Mothman was going to show, he would have by now,” Steve deadpans, and Robin tilts her head with a roll of her eyes that says she reluctantly concedes his point.

“Unless we’re drawing his attention since we’ve said his name so many times,” Eddie says.

“No, I think that might be Bloody Mary,” Robin replies, and Steve huffs.

“Okay, regardless – look at it this way:” he says, turning to Eddie, “if you think Mothman has a better ass, you can drag yours all the way down to Virginia–”

“West Virginia,” Robin corrects.

“Whatever. You can go all the way down there and touch the statue’s ass, because you’re not gonna be touching mine,” Steve concludes.

And that’s just cruel. That’s fighting dirty. Steve knows Eddie will do anything for continued ass-touching privileges.

“Welp.” Eddie claps his hands together. “You heard it here first: Steve’s ass is better than Mothman’s.”

“Ha!” Steve exclaims, practically bouncing on the couch in excitement. “Told you!”

Robin groans, snapping her laptop shut. “That doesn’t count. Eddie’s biased and you cheated.”

“I did not cheat,” Steve sniffs, crossing his arms over his chest.

“He’s right, it’s not cheating,” Eddie agrees. “He just used his assets.”

Robin and Steve stare at him.

“Get it?” Eddie asks with a grin. “Ass–”

“Boo,” Robin calls out, pulling a tissue from the nearby box with express purpose of balling it up to throw at him. It unballs and lands sadly on the coffee table two feet in front of her. “Go finish the dishes, you absolute goon.”

Eddie sighs, turning back to the kitchen. His contributions are woefully underappreciated around here.

[al-norton]

Yesterday I was hanging out with a couple of friends on discord - one of them from my city, one of them from a little village in the north of Ukraine. We're talking about dnd, because meeting for a game 3 times a week is not enough for us, apparently. At some point one of my friends interrupts the conversation with a little remark - "damn, the shooting is louder then usual today'. I suggest "cellar time" for his safety. We laugh. All 3 of us joke about how none of us have appropriate shelter nearby and how annoying it is when the sirens start blasting as you're walking your dog. Conversation moves on.

Some 10 minutes later the same friend interrupts the conversation again, audibly startled. "Fuck, guys, I gotta go" - and mutes himself.

That is harder to ignore. We stay silent for a minute.

Still, he is muted and not out - so his house probably isn't blown up. He took the time to warn us, so he personally is probably fine. And we know that discord does pick up the sound of explosion if it's happening close enough, and we haven't heard anything, so his immediate family is probably safe.

Further than that, there's no use to speculate. We won't know until - if - he comes back.

Slowly, we pick the conversation back up.

He comes back some 15 minutes later: "Guys, our hayloft is on fire". "How on fire?" - I ask. "Fully on fire". The cracking of the wood was loud enough to mistake it for the shooting, so it took awhile to notice anything out of the ordinary.

It's no big deal, apparently - no one was in the hayloft, not even the cat that likes to sleep there. The firefighters arrived 20 minutes later and even managed to save some of the hay. We chatted about dnd and the first season of arcane for 2 more hours.

It's a fun story, a cute one, even. But it takes it's place among others: the fact that every time I go to a bus stop I have to walk by my school currently constructing an underground facility so children don't have to stop classes with every air raid alarm that goes off. The fact that I celebrated my joint birthday with my uncle in candle light because of another attack on our power system. The fact that every explosion that i can faintly hear on discord as I talk to my friends, or that shakes the ground as I do groceries, or wakes me up at 2 am - carries real people with it being killed and injured. The fact that hearing the sound of shooting is enough for us to assume that "things are normal".

The normalcy of war is a terrifying and infectious thing - even for us, people living under under occupation and constant attacks. I can imagine it only gets worse as you get farther from the action. As we slowly approach the end of the 3rd year of this war going on, please, don't let yourself believe this is okay.

If you're able to, advocate with your officials for more help being sent to Ukraine. Donate to Come Back Alive, if you're able to. If you're able to, enjoy the peace.

[mariacallous]

When most Americans think of fascism, they picture a Hitlerian hellscape of dramatic action: police raids, violent coups, mass executions. Indeed, such was the savagery of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Vichy France. But what many people don’t appreciate about tyranny is its “banality,” Timothy Snyder tells me. “We don’t imagine how a regime change is going to be at the dinner table. The regime change is going to be on the sidewalk. It’s going to be in your whole life.”

Snyder, a Yale history professor and leading scholar of Soviet Russia, was patching into Zoom from a hotel room in Kyiv, where the specter of authoritarianism looms large as Ukraine remains steeped in a yearslong military siege by Vladimir Putin. It was late at night and he was still winding down from, and gearing up for, a packed schedule—from launching an institution dedicated to the documentation of the war, to fundraising for robotic-demining development, to organizing a conference for a new Ukrainian history project. “I’ve had kind of a long day and a long week, and if this were going to be my sartorial first appearance in Vanity Fair, I would really want it to go otherwise,” he joked.

But the rest of our conversation was no laughing matter. It largely centered, to little surprise, on Donald Trump and how the former president has put America on a glide path to fascism. Too many commentators were late to realize this. Snyder, however, has been sounding the alarm since the dawn of Trumpism itself, invoking the cautionary tales of fascist history in his 2017 book, On Tyranny, and in The Road to Unfreedom the year after. It’s been six years since the latter, and Snyder is now out with a new book, On Freedom, a personal and philosophical attempt to flip the valence of America’s most lauded—and loaded—word. “We Americans tend to think that freedom is a matter of things being cleared away, and that capitalism does that work for us. It is a trap to believe in this,” he writes. “Freedom is not an absence but a presence, a life in which we choose multiple commitments and realize combinations of them in the world.”

In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Snyder unpacks America’s “strongman fantasy,” encourages Democrats to reclaim the concept of freedom, and critiques journalists for pushing a “war fatigue” narrative about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “There’s just something so odd about Americans being tired of this war. We can get bored of it or whatever, but how can we be tired?” he asks. “We’re not doing a damn thing.”

Vanity Fair: The things we associate with freedom—free speech, religious liberty—have been co-opted by the Republican Party. Do you think you could walk me through how that happened historically and how Democrats could take that word back?

Timothy Snyder: Yeah. I think the way it happened historically is actually quite dark there. There’s an innocent way of talking about this, which is to say, “Oh, some people believe in negative freedom and some people believe in positive freedom—and negative freedom just means less government and positive freedom means more government.” And when you say it like that, it just sounds like a question of taste. And who knows who’s right?

Whereas historically speaking, to answer your question, the reason why people believe in negative freedom is that they’re enslaving other people, or they are oppressing women, or both. The reason why you say freedom is just keeping the government off my back is that the central government is the only force that’s ever going to enfranchise those slaves. It’s the only force which is ever going to give votes to those women. And so that’s where negative freedom comes from. I’m not saying that everybody who believes in negative freedom now owns slaves or oppresses women, but that’s the tradition. That’s the reason why you would think freedom is negative, which on its face is a totally implausible idea. I mean, the notion that you can just be free because there’s no government makes no sense, unless you’re a heavily drugged anarchist.

And so, as the Republican Party has also become the party of race in our country, it’s become the party of small government. Unfortunately, this idea of freedom then goes along for the ride, because freedom becomes freedom from government. And then the next step is freedom becomes freedom for the market. That seems like a small step, but it’s a huge step because if we believe in free markets, that means that we actually have duties to the market. And Americans have by and large accepted that, even pretty far into the center or into the left. If you say that term, “free market,” Americans pretty generally won’t stop you and say, “Oh, there’s something problematic about that.” But there really is: If the market is free, that means that you have a duty to the market, and the duty is to make sure the government doesn’t intervene in it. And once you make that step, you suddenly find yourself willing to accept that, well, everybody of course has a right to advertise, and I don’t have a right to be free of it. Or freedom of speech isn’t really for me; freedom of speech is for the internet.

And that’s, to a large measure, the world we live in.

You have a quote in the book about this that distills it well: “The countries where people tend to think of freedom as freedom to are doing better by our own measures, which tend to focus on freedom from.”

Yeah, thanks for pulling that out. Even I was a little bit struck by that one. Because if you’re American and you talk about freedom all the time and you also spend all your time judging other countries on freedom, and you decide what the measures are, then you should be close to the top of the list—but you’re not. And then you ask, “Why is that?” When you look at countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, or Ireland—that are way ahead of us—they’re having a different conversation about freedom. They don’t seem to talk about freedom as much as we do, but then when they do, they talk about it in terms of enabling people to do things.

And then you realize that an enabled population, a population that has health care and retirement and reliable schools, may be better at defending things like the right to vote and the right to freedom of religion and the right to freedom of speech—the things that we think are essential to freedom. And then you realize, Oh, wait, there can be a positive loop between freedom to and freedom from. And this is the big thing that Americans get a hundred percent wrong. We think there’s a tragic choice between freedom from and freedom to—that you’ve got to choose between negative freedom and positive freedom. And that’s entirely wrong.

What do you make of Kamala Harris’s attempt to redeem the word?

It makes me happy if it’s at the center of a political discussion. And by the way, going back to your first question, it’s interesting how the American right has actually retreated from freedom. It has been central for them for half a century, but they are now actually retreating from it, and they’ve left the ground open for the Democrats. So, politically, I’m glad they’re seizing it—not just because I want them to win, but also because I think on the center left or wherever she is, there’s more of a chance for the word to take on a fuller meaning. Because so long as the Republicans can control the word, it’s always going to mean negative freedom.

I can’t judge the politics that well, but I think it’s philosophically correct and I think we end up being truer to ourselves. Because my big underlying concern as an American is that we have this word which we’ve boxed into a corner and then beaten the pulp out of, and it really doesn’t mean anything anymore. And yet it’s the only imaginable central concept I can think of for American political theory or American political life.

Yeah, it’s conducive to the joy-and-optimism approach that the Democrats are taking to the campaign. Freedom to is about enfranchisement; it’s about empowerment; it’s about mobility.

Totally. Can I jump in there with another thought?

Of course.

I think JD Vance is the logical extension of where freedom as freedom from gets you. Because one of the things you say when freedom is negative—when it’s just freedom from—is that the government is bad, right? You say the government is bad because it’s suppressive. But then you also say government is bad because it can’t do anything. It’s incompetent and it’s dysfunctional. And it’s a small step from there to a JD Vance–type figure who is a doomer, right? He’s a doomer about everything. His politics is a politics of impotence. His whole idea is that government will fail at everything—that there’s no point using government, and in fact, life is just sort of terrible in general. And the only way to lead in life is to kind of be snarky about other people. That’s the whole JD Vance political philosophy. It’s like, “I’m impotent. You’re impotent. We’re all impotent. And therefore let’s be angry.”

Did you watch the debate?

No, I’m afraid I didn’t. I’m in the wrong time zone.

There was a moment that struck me, and I think it would strike you too: Donald Trump openly praised Viktor Orbán, as he has done repeatedly in the past. But he said, explicitly, Orbán is a good guy because he’s a “strongman,” which is a word that he clearly takes to be a compliment, not derogatory. You’ve written about the strongman fantasy in your Substack, so I’m curious: What do you think Trump is appealing to here?

Well, I’m going to answer it in a slightly different way, and then I’ll go back to the way you mean it. I think he’s tapping into one of his own inner fantasies. I think he looks around the world and he sees that there’s a person like Orbán, who’s taken a constitutional system and climbed out of it and has managed to go from being a normal prime minister to essentially being an extraconstitutional figure. And I think that’s what Trump wants for himself. And then, of course, the next step is a Putin-type figure, where he’s now an unquestioned dictator.

For the rest of us, I think he’s tapping—in a minor key—into inexperience, and that was my strongman piece that you kindly mentioned. Americans don’t really think through what it would mean to have a government without the rule of law and the possibility of throwing the bums out. I think we just haven’t thought that through in all of its banality: the neighbors denouncing you, your kids not having social mobility because you maybe did something wrong, having to be afraid all the damn time. African Americans and some immigrants have a sense of this, but in general, Americans don’t get that. They don’t get what that would be like.

So that’s a minor key. The major key, though, is the 20% or so of Americans who really, I think, authentically do want an authoritarian regime, because they would prefer to identify personally with a leader figure and feel good about it rather than enjoy freedom.

You mentioned the word banality, which makes me think of Hannah Arendt’s theory of the “banality of evil.” What would the banality of authoritarianism look like in America?

So let me first talk about the nonbanality of evil, because our version of evil is something like, and I don’t want to be too mean, but it’s something like this: A giant monster rises out of the ocean and then we get it with our F-16s or F-35s or whatever. That’s our version of evil. It’s corporeal, it’s obviously bad, and it can be defeated by dramatic acts of violence.

And we apply that to figures like Hitler or Stalin, and we think, Okay, what happened with Hitler was that he was suddenly defeated by a war. Of course he was defeated by a war, but he did some dramatic and violent things to come to power, but his coming to power also involved a million banalities. It involved a million assimilations, a million changes of what we think of as normal. And it’s our ability to make things normal and abnormal which is so terrifying. It’s like an animal instinct on our part: We can tell what the power wants us to do, and if we don’t think about it, we then do it. In authoritarian conditions, this means that we realize, Oh, the law doesn’t really apply anymore. That means my neighbor could have denounced me for anything, and so I better denounce my neighbor first. And before you know it, you’re in a completely different society, and the banality here is that instead of just walking down the street thinking about your own stuff, you’re thinking, Wait a minute, which of my neighbors is going to denounce me?

Americans think all the time about getting their kids into the right school. What happens in an authoritarian country is that all of that access to social mobility becomes determined by obedience. And as a parent, suddenly you realize you have to be publicly loyal all the time, because one little black mark against you ruins your child’s future. And that’s the banality right there. In Russia, everybody lives like that, because any little thing you do wrong, and your kid has no chance. They get thrown out of school; they can’t go to university.

We don’t imagine how a regime change is going to be at the dinner table. The regime change is going to be on the sidewalk. It’s going to be in your whole life. It’s not going to be some external thing. It’s not like this strongman is just going to be some bad person in the White House, and then eventually the good guys will come and knock him out. When the regime changes, you change and you adapt, and you look around as everyone else is adapting and you realize, Well, everyone else adapting is a new reality for me, and I’m probably going to have to adapt too. Trump wants to be a strongman. He’s already tried a ​​ coup d’état. He makes it clear that he wants to be a different regime. And so if you vote him in, you’re basically saying, “Okay, strongman, tell me how to adapt.”

Yeah, we could talk about Project 2025 all day. This new effort to bureaucratize tyranny—which was not in place in 2020—could really make the banal aspect a reality because it’s enforced by the administrative state, which is going to be felt by Americans at a quotidian level.

I agree with what you say. If I were in business, I would be terrified of Project 2025 because what it’s going to lead to is favoritism. You’re never going to get approvals for your stuff unless you’re politically close to administration. It’s going to push us toward a more Hungary-like situation, where the president’s pals’ or Jared Kushner’s pals’ companies are going to do fine. But everybody else is going to have to pay bribes. Everyone else is going to have to make friends.

It’s anticompetitive.

Yeah, it’s going to generate a very, very uneven playing field where certain people are going to be favored and become oligarchs. And most of the rest of us are going to have a hard time. Also, the 40,000 [loyalists Trump wants to replace the administrative state with] are going to be completely incompetent. When people stop getting their Social Security checks, they’re going to realize that the federal government—which they’ve been told is so dysfunctional—actually did do some things. It’s going to be chaos. The only way to get anything done is to have a phone number where you can call somebody at someplace in the government and say, “Make my thing a priority.” The chaos of the administration state feeds into the strongman thing. And since that’s true, the strongman view starts to become natural for you because it’s the only way to get anything done.

You’ve studied Russian information warfare pretty extensively. A few weeks ago the Justice Department indicted two employees of the Russian state media outlet RT for their role in surreptitiously funding a right-wing US media outfit as part of a foreign-influence-peddling scheme, which saw them pull the wool over a bunch of right-wing media personalities. Do you think this type of thing is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Russian information warfare?

Of course. It’s the tip of the iceberg, and I want to refer back to 2016. It was much bigger in 2016 than we recognized at the time. The things that the Obama administration was concerned with—like the actual penetration of state voting systems and stuff—that was really just nothing compared to all of the internet stuff they had going. And we basically caught zilcho of that before the election itself. And I think the federal government is more aware of it this time, but also the Russians are doing different things this time, no doubt.

I’m afraid what I think is that there are probably an awful lot of people who are doing this—including people who are much more important in the media than those guys—and that there’s just no way we’re going to catch very many of them before November. That’s my gut feeling.

While we’re on Russia, I do want to talk about Ukraine, especially since you’re there right now. I think one of the most unfortunate aspects of [the media’s coverage of] foreign wars—the Ukraine war and also the Israel-Hamas war—is just the way they inevitably fade into the background of the American news cycle, especially if no American boots are on the ground. I’m curious if this dynamic frustrates you as a historian.

Oh, a couple points there. One is, I’m going to point out slightly mean-spiritedly that the stories about war fatigue in Ukraine began in March 2022. As a historian, I am a little bit upset at journalists. I don’t mean the good ones. I don’t mean the guys I just saw who just came back from the front. [I mean] the people who are sitting in DC or New York or wherever, who immediately ginned up this notion of war fatigue and kept asking everybody from the beginning, “When are you going to get tired of this war?” We turned war fatigue into a topos almost instantaneously. And I found that really irresponsible because you’re affecting the discourse. But also, I feel like there was a kind of inbuilt laziness into it. If war fatigue sets in right away, then you have an excuse never to go to the country, and you have an excuse never to figure out what’s going on, and you have an excuse never to figure out why it’s important.

So I was really upset by that, and also because there’s just something so odd about Americans being tired of this war. We can get bored of it or whatever, but how can we be tired? We’re not doing a damn thing. We’re doing nothing. I mean, there’s some great individual Americans who are volunteering and giving supplies and stuff, but as a country, we’re not doing a damn thing. I mean, a tiny percentage of our defense budget—which would be going to other stuff anyway—insead goes to Ukraine.

And by the way, Ukrainians understand that Americans have other things to think about. I was not very far from the front three days ago talking to soldiers, and their basic attitude about the election and us was, like, “Yeah, you got your own things to think about. We understand. It’s not your war.” But as a historian, the thing which troubles me is pace, because with time, all kinds of resources wear down. And the most painful is the Ukrainian human resource. That’s probably a terribly euphemistic word, but people die and people get wounded and people get traumatized. Your own side runs out of stuff.

We were played by the Russians, psychologically, about the way wars are fought. And that stretched out the war. That’s the thing which bothers me most. You win wars with pace and you win wars with surprise. You don’t win wars by allowing the other side to dictate what the rules are and stretching everything out, which is basically what’s happened. And with that has come a certain amount of American distraction and changing the subject and impatience. I think journalists have made a mistake by making it into a kind of consumer thing where they’re sort of instructing the public that it’s okay to be bored or fatigued. And then I think the Biden administration made a mistake by not doing things at pace and allowing every decision to take weeks and months and so on.

What do you think another Trump presidency would mean for the war and for America’s commitment to Ukraine?

I think Trump switches sides and puts American power on the Russian side, effectively. I think Trump cuts off. He’s a bad dealmaker—that’s the problem. I mean, he’s a good entertainer. He’s very talented; he’s very charismatic. In his way, he’s very intelligent, but he’s not a good dealmaker. And a) ending wars is not a deal the way that buying a building is a deal, and b) even if it were, he’s consistently made bad deals his whole career and lost out and gone bankrupt.

So you can’t really trust him with something like this, even if his intentions were good—and I don’t think his intentions are good. Going back to the strongman thing, I think he believes that it’s right and good that the strong defeat and dominate the weak. And I think in his instinctual view of the world, Putin is pretty much the paradigmatic strongman—the one that he admires the most. And because he thinks Putin is strong, Putin will win. The sad irony of all this is that we are so much stronger than Russia. And in my view, the only way Russia can really win is if we flip or if we do nothing. So, because Trump himself is so psychologically weak and wants to look up to another strongman, I think he’s going to flip. But even if I’m wrong about that, I think he’s incompetent to deal with a situation like this. Because he wants the quick affirmation of a deal. And if the other side knows you’re in a hurry, then you’ve already lost from the beginning.

[edutainer2022]

Over 140 injured in one missile strike as of now. The rescue operation is called off. Several colleagues from my department live there as it's just a 2 hour commute to Kyiv.

This is what it's like to be Ukrainian right now. You're just trying to live your life, hoping one of the russian missiles doesn't suddenly take it from you.

City of Chernihiv, downtown, middle of the weekend day. 129 people were injured (among them 15 children), 7 were killed by a Russian ballistic missile. Among the dead is a 6-year-old child.

[petiplacha]

What Ukraine sounds like is a completely new format, a musical  journey. Musician and composer Yevhen Filatov (The Maneken, Onuka)  collects the sounds of Ukrainian cities and creates a melody from them.  And you are watching it.  

Melody of Kyiv - fifth city  

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Stellantis wants to make scabbing woke

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

I know, I know, it's weird when the worst people you know are right, even when they're right for the wrong reasons: like, the "Intelligence Community" is genuinely terrible, pharma companies are murderous crooks, and Big Tech really does have a dangerous grip on public debate. The swivel-eyed loons have a point, is what I'm saying:

https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/

When conspiratorialists and reactionaries holler about how the FBI are dirty-tricking creeps who are framing Trump, it's tempting to say, "well, if Trumpists hate the FBI, then I will love the FBI. Who cares about COINTELPRO and what they did to Martin Luther King?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter

It's a process called "schizmogenesis": forming new group identity beliefs based on saying the opposite of what your enemies say, and as tempting as that is, it's extraordinarily foolish and dangerous:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

It means that canny reactionaries like Steve Bannon can trick you into taking any position merely by taking the opposite one. Bannon's followers are even more easily led, so it's easy for him to convince them that we have always been at war with Oceania. The right has created an entire mirror world of "I know you are but what am I?" politics.

Anti-vax co-opts "bodily autonomy." Climate denial becomes environmentalism ("wind turbines kill birds"). Transphobia becomes feminism ("keep women-only spaces for real women"). Support for strongmen becomes anti-imperialism ("don't feed the war machine in Ukraine"). These are the doppelgangers Naomi Klein warns us against:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

The far right has even managed to co-opt anti-corporate rhetoric. Culture warriors rail against "woke capitalism," insisting that when big businesses take socially progressive positions, it's just empty "virtue signalling." And you know what? They've got a point. Partially.

As with all mirror-world politics, the anti-woke-capitalism shuck is designed to convince low-information right-wing pismires into buying "anti-woke pillows" and demanding the right to pay junk fees to "own the libs":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

But woke capitalism is bullshit. Corporations – profit-maximizing immortal transhuman colony organisms that view workers and customers as inconvenient gut-flora – do not care about social justice. They don't care about anything, except for minimizing compensation for workers while maximizing the risk those workers bear; and locking in and gouging customers for products that are as low-quality as can be profitably sold.

Take DEI, a favored target of the right. It's undoubtably true that diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives have made some inroads on correcting bias in hiring decisions, with the result that companies get better employees who would have been excluded without this explicit corrective.

However, corporations don't value DEI because they abhor their history of hiring bias. Instead, DEI is how corporate management demonstrates to workers that their grievances are best addressed by trusting corporate leadership to correct their error of their ways – and not by forming a union.

Before the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, corporations would create fake "Company Unions" whose leadership were beholden to the company executives. These were decoy unions: they looked and sounded like unions, but when they negotiated with management, they were actually working for the bosses, not the workers.

This is more mirror-world tactics. They're the labor equivalent of the "crisis pregnancy centers" that masquerade as abortion clinics in order to fool pregnant people and trap them with endless delays until it's too late to terminate their pregnancies. Company unions get workers to trust in negotiators who are secretly working for the bosses, who emerge from the bargaining table with one-sided, abusive contracts and insist that this is the best deal workers can hope for.

Company unions were outlawed 90 years ago, and for decades, labor had a seat at the table, with wages tracking productivity gains and workers getting protection for discrimination, unsafe labor conditions, and wage-theft. Then came the neoliberal turn, and 40 years of wage stagnation, increased inequality, and corporate rule.

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Finally, finally, we have reached a turning point in labor, with public approval for unions at levels not seen since the Carter administration and thousands of strikes and protests breaking out across the country:

https://striketracker.ilr.cornell.edu/

It's not just the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA, either. For the first time in history, the UAW is striking against all the major automakers, and they are winning:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/10/striking-uaw-workers-win-key-battery-plant-concession-from-general-motors/

The automakers are getting desperate. Stellantis – Chrysler's latest alias, reflecting the company's absorbtion into corporate-human-centipede of global carmakers – has mobilized its DEI programs, trying to get marginalized people to believe that scabbing is a liberatory activity:

https://theintercept.com/2023/10/10/uaw-auto-strike-stellantis/

Stellantis calls each of its DEI silos a "Business Resource Group" (BRG): there's a "Working Parents Network," an "African Ancestry Network," "Asians Connected Together," a "DiverseAbilities Network," a "Gay & Lesbian Alliance" and more:

https://blog.stellantisnorthamerica.com/2021/07/20/business-resource-groups-drive-inclusion-and-diversity/

The corporate managers who lead these BRGs have established a scab rotation for each subgroup, calling on members to cross a UAW picket-line at a Michigan Parts Distribution Center run by Stellantis subsidiary Mopar:

Each BRG will pick a specific day of the week/weekend to volunteer as a team. Help continue to be the RESOURCE the BUSINESS can count on! Stellantis needs your help in running the Parts Distribution Centers (PDC) to ensure a steady supply of parts to our customers while negotiations continue. Working Parents Network has identified Friday, October 13 as WPN’s BRG Day at the PDCs!"

Now, these BRGs weren't invented by marginalized workers facing discrimination in the workplace. They come from literal union-busting playbooks produced by giant "union avoidance" firms that charge bosses millions for advice on skirting – or breaking – the law to keep workplace democracy at bay. All the biggest anti-union consultancies love BRGs, from Littler Mendelson to Jackson Lewis. IRI Strategies touts BRGs as a way to "union-proof" a business by absorbing workers' grievances in a decoy committee that will let them feel listened to.

BRGs, in other words, are the Crisis Pregnancy Centers of workplace discrimination. They're a Big Store Con, a company union dressed up as corporate social responsibility.

Now, let's not pretend that unions have a sterling record on race and gender issues. Giant labor organizations like the AFL had to be dragged into racial integration, and trade unions have sometimes been on the wrong side of anti-immigration panics:

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/american-labor-movement.html

But unions have also been the most reliable way for people of color and women to win better workplace treatment. The struggle for racial and gender justice was fought through labor organizing. Remember that MLK's "I've Been To the Mountaintop" speech was given in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis:

https://www.afscme.org/about/history/mlk/mountaintop

Black organizers have always been militant labor organizers. Labor Day commemorates the victory of the long, hard-fought Pullman strike, where Black workers brought one of the most powerful companies in America to its knees:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike

And women have always fought for gender justice through the labor movement: the New York shirtwaist strike is the Ur-example, when women-led unions fought thugs and scabs on icy New York streets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_shirtwaist_strike_of_1909

It's no surprise that labor activism, anti-racism and feminism go together. Since the earliest days, the labor justice struggle was also a social justice struggle. To learn more check out Kim Kelly's Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fight-Like-Hell/Kim-Kelly/9781982171063

The most exploited, underpaid, and abused workers in America are also the most marginalized (duh).

From nurses:

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/kaiser-healthcare-union-says-week-long-strike-possible-early-next-month-2023-10-09/

To teachers:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-04-18/l-a-teachers-win-21-wage-increase-in-new-lausd-contract

To Amazon warehouse workers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Labor_Union

To publishing assistants:

https://apnews.com/article/harpercollins-union-strike-ends-0a94238718879066d9b21af6266be526

To baristas:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/29/business/starbucks-union-wages/index.html

To fast-food workers:

https://www.ufcw.org/about/

The vanguard of today's labor surge is Black, brown, female and queer. Without a union, workers who face discrimination are on their own, hoping that their bosses will voluntarily do something about it. Black workers in Tesla's rabidly anti-union shops face vicious racism, from slurs to threats to violence. Without a union, they have to rely on the shifting whims of an Apartheid emerald mine space-Karen for relief, or hope for help from the NLRB or a class-action lawyer:

https://apnews.com/article/tesla-racism-black-lawsuit-class-action-21c88bddf60eca702560be58429495de

The far right isn't wrong when they holler that woke capitalism is bullshit. As with so many of their mirror-world causes, they've got a point, but only a limited one. The problem with woke capitalism is that it's no substitute for a union. The problem with relying on Business Resource Groups to fight racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia is that these struggles are all class struggles, and a BRG is never going to fight against the company that created it.

To understand how bankrupt woke capitalism is, conside this: Stellantis is calling on its "Working Parents Network" to scab this Friday. Stellantis is also being sanctioned by the Department Of Labor for discriminating against nursing mothers – the same "working parents" that the BRG is meant to protect:

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2023/02/08/investigation-finds-stellantis-violated-rights-of-nursing-mothers-at-sterling-heights-plant/

Woke capitalism is just another kind of "predatory inclusion," like Intuit's campaign defending its "Free File" tax-prep scam, where they're claiming that ending this ripoff is racist because it denies Black families the right to be tricked into paying for something they are entitled to get for free:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/27/predatory-inclusion/#equal-opportunity-scammers

When I learned about Intuit's wokewashing, I thought I'd found woke capitalism's rock bottom, but I was wrong. Stellantis's call for woke scabbing is a new low.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/11/equal-opportunity-class-war/#inclusive-scabbing

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[sweetiecutie]

141 x Eastern European reader relationships hc’s

Warnings: some cussing, stereotypical behavior, pretty much safe, not meant for russians - just scroll past

A/n: I was heavily inspired by this post by amazing @kivino, absolutely go and check it out!!

Pretty much all of 141 were in Eastern Europe with missions - Ghost and Price were with missions in Ukraine, Soap, Gaz and Price were to russia.

All of them worked with Eastern Europeans, so boys are generally acquainted with Slav traditions and superstitions - not to whistle within a building, for example, or not to pass things through the threshold. But working with Eastern European for a few weeks and having a romantic relationship with one - completely different things.

So here are some headcanons of how Task Force 141 deals with their Slavic lover<3

Simon “Ghost” Riley

Starting off - Simon loves your culture. He finds many national quirks amusing; his favorite one tho, is how boisterous and bossy Eastern European women are. Usually people tend to be scared of him due to his intimidating stance and quiet behavior. But these ladies who are barely over 160 cm? They can beat the living shit out of him with a single slipper, and he both respects and slightly fears them for it.

For some strange reason Ghost can’t learn a word you teach him, but all the swearings that accidentally slip off your tongue throughout the day? Ghost knows all of them by heart. And he can’t hide a small smile of amusement whenever he hears you cussing angrily over spilled tea or shattered mug. And his favorites so far are ‘kurwa’ and ‘blyat’

Simon is a huge fan of your country’s cuisine! He’s a big man, so he requires proper nutrition. And all the delicious meals your mom cooks? He’s nomming everything to the last crumb! Simon is especially fascinated with a godly meal called “shashlik” - he is definitely a meat eater, Riley loves him a juicy steak freshly off the fire. And eating a meal that consists purely out of roasted meat - a paradise for him.

Captain John Price

Now, this man is most acquainted with all Slavic traditions of all 141 since he works closely with Nikolai, so throwing him off wouldn’t be that easy. But still, having an Eastern European partner does give him some unexpected experiences. For example, John is really surprised by how easily and lightheartedly you and your family joke about dark topics as death, physical traumas or alcoholism. And while everyone is rolling with laughter Price is like “What the fuck is wrong with you guys🧍🏻‍♂️”

If some of your relatives happened to speak English, John will do his absolute best to speak slowly and reduce his accent to minimum, so that they can understand him better. I think it’s just so sweet of him 🥺

What never fails to impress Price is that how much Eastern Europeans care about their appearance. In UK people don’t bother much about their looks, preferring clothes that are comfortable rather than fashionable. And seeing all these people on the streets wearing luxury brand stuff, women with full on glam makeup, their hair made elegantly - it makes him wonder just how much time and effort these people put into their looks. (He soon learn just how expensive and tedious that is once you two start dating)

Kyle “Gaz” Garrick

I’m pretty sure many Eastern European countries have this magnificent dish - meat jelly. Looks and sounds terrifying, true cultural shock for Kyle’s poor British soul. Or soup called Okroshka - even tho I grew up eating it, I still question its existence, no wonders Kyle gets absolutely weirded out by it.

Many Eastern Europeans, especially in small towns and villages, are very unfamiliar with people of color. It’s not because they mean ill, no, but simply because it’s very rare to see foreigners in such places. So, when Kyle came over to your home for the first time, all neighborhood was quite literally gawking at him. And Garrick, being more closed-off and shy person, was really unnerved by it. What especially set him off was when some random grandmas on the streets asked him “Whose are you?”😭

Oh and he loves, loves, loves when you spill the tea about your family members, sometimes even in front of this exact person bc they can’t speak any English. Sounds mean to do so, but Kyle is very eager to hear about all the drama, glancing discreetly at relative in question. Everyone thinks it’s so cute, watching you two cooing at each other in soft voices in a faraway corner, but in reality you two are just talking shit about everyone in the room😂

John “Soap” MacTavish

What Johnny likes the most about Eastern Europeans is just how generous they are, how they treat all guests with such kindness and hospitality. Usually, when Scottish/British/Irish person invites you for some tea - you do have tea and some sweets. In Eastern Europe though, if you are invited for some tea, you will be having a three meal course of delicious national dishes with incredibly tasty bakery for a dessert, and, of course, tea as promised. And afterwards they will also give you some food in a plastic container so you can take it home. Johnny was genuinely surprised by such warm treatment.

He remembers a lot of random words you say: names of different objects and foods or whole sentences like “turn on the lights” etc in your mother tongue. Johnny likes listening to you talking on the phone with your relatives, his ears perk up slightly whenever he catches a familiar word. But can he actually spell or write these words down? Not really. And if your language uses Cyrillic alphabet? Absolutely no. (This thought came to me based off @kivino’s hc’s)

When Johnny visited your home for the first time, he was actually surprised to see this stereotypical picture: a bratz doll gf and her shreck bf. He was also surprised by how unattractive most Eastern European men are, especially those in their 40s.

Likes, reblogs and comments are highly appreciated! Feedback is very important for writers, give us some love and appreciation<3

[lynxindisguise]

Obviously Project 2025 and the attack on women and members of the LGBTQ+ community is absolutely horrifying and very much real, no matter how much Trump has tried to distance himself from it.

But I want to talk about what's in the Republican Party's actual plan, because these are probably the things that will happen first, and it may also be helpful in terms of speaking to conservative relatives (especially the ones who are not fully gone far-right MAGA worshippers and are, instead, confused as to why everyone is so upset) about what exactly they voted for.

Mass deportations. This is the main platform he ran on. On a human level, this is horrifying, and it's going to cause unthinkable and unconscionable suffering. Maybe it'd be helpful to discuss how immigrants (including privileged white legal immigrants) pay taxes, can't vote, don't have access to benefits, and cannot risk committing even minor crimes for fear of deportation. Maybe it wouldn't. So. On an inhuman level, this is very expensive and a massive waste of resources. If you can't get people to give a shit about other human beings, you can at the very least ask how these deportations are not going to detract resources and attention away from the 'American needs' they keep harping on about.

Getting rid of all environmental regulations and AI regulations and amping up use of coal and oil. This is devastating for the entire world in the fight against climate change. I think this is how Trump means to reduce inflation, though his entire 'reduce taxes and reduce inflation' plan is so incredibly vague. At best, it's more trickle down theory bullshit.

Reducing American involvement in foreign conflicts. This sounds really great, actually. And yet. No foreign conflicts are specified—except for strengthening support to Israel. So. It would seem that the US is becoming even more involved in genocide, and most likely less involved in aiding Ukraine.

Improving the American education system. Hilariously, Trump's solution to a failing education system is to get rid of the Department of Education and leave everything up to the states? When you read on, it becomes clear that this is so schools can teach exclusively American history—and a very specific, propagandized version of it at that.

He mentions wanting to build a DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD around the US? Why is no one talking about this? This is formally written down. What the fuck does that mean?

He also talks about REDUCING censorship and protecting freedom of speech. In the coming years, I would ask your conservative relatives to hold him to that.

They also promised affordable housing, college, and healthcare. There's no plan for how the fuck they're going to do this while decreasing taxes, but I'd tell your conservative relatives to hold him to that as well.

The whole plan is here if you feel like reading the word 'great' 800 times. If you don't want propaganized idiots telling you you've fallen for the 'leftist propaganda,' come armed with indisputable facts of what the Republican Party has said they will do.

[youmisguidedmartyr]

Here's the rant about Dwarves with Scottish accents that was promised in this post, my thoughts still aren't as organised as I would like them to be but if I don't get my opinions out there i will keel over and die. So here we go

Up until Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the Lord of the Rings franchise, and then eventually The Hobbit, dwarves didn’t have Scottish accents. I can’t find anywhere that Tolkien said dwarves should have Scottish accents, so why do they have them in the films? The idea is that dwarves are supposed to have a feeling of “Celtic-ness” about them, but then why does it have to be Scottish instead of Irish or Welsh (with the exception of Gimli given his actual Welsh actor), over any of the other Celtic nations? Especially when dwarven languages and writing styles were supposed to be more like Hebrew and Arabic.

The choice to give your high born dwarf character an English RP accent over the Scottish one that you’ve given every other dwarf, and that people now associate with Tolkien dwarves, is doing nothing but painting the picture that the English RP accent is a sign of superiority over the other dwarves (the ones with the Scottish accent). Why does the “better born” dwarf have a different national accent to his subjects??

However, looking at Thorin, THE HIGH BORN DWARF, he has an English RP accent… hmmmmmmm

So does Fili and Kili (the OTHER dwarven Princes), and them along with Thorin are meant to be the "attractive" ones... hmmmmm

This RP accent is also making people think back to the elves, ALL of which sport this RP accent MIGHT I ADD (also who are the fan favourites…)

Obviously, it isn’t the accent that’s at fault, and I don’t really see a problem with giving the elves RP accents (beyond it blurring the complicated lines between the elven races left over from the first age)

But why do the stereotypical rough and tough characters, the heavy drinkers, the angry and abrasive characters have to have Scottish accents? OH! Is it because this is how the world sees Scottish people? Sick man of Europe (second only to Ukraine who’s in the middle of a FUCKING WAR), rude and angry, wrongfully prideful and stubborn headed?? Fuck off

I don’t care that the dwarves are this way, because that would be stupid, but why do you have to use this particular accent to "reinforce" it

And also, the way that they only seem to use one fucking type of accent? I DO NOT sound like that and yet, I’m still Scottish and I’m still offended that you’re using my nationality and my people in this way.

And don’t come at me with all this “but you have to differentiate between the races” bullshit because they obviously don’t care about that given all the ELVES and all the MEN and most of the HOBBITS are fucking about with some form of an English accent, and they don't even limit the different English accents to a specific race or regional area

Only the stubborn, prideful, and rude dwarves get Scottish accents. Them and the “stupid, comic relief” Hobbit.

[originalleftist]

NBC has called it for Trump- he'll get at least 270.

Assuming that holds, and it looks like it will, a few things:

Do not despair. No matter how hopeless you feel. That's just another form of "obeying in advance".

Do not lash out violently. It may sound cathartic to some, but it won't change anything except to get you and probably other innocent people hurt or killed, and make it easier for Trump to get support for violent crackdowns.

We have two and a half months to prepare- either to try to block Trump's taking power, or to resist what he does starting on Inauguration Day.

We cannot afford selfishness, nor apathy, nor recklessness or impulsiveness. We must be resolved, deliberate, and strategic.

Unions should be organizing to strike. If 5% of the country went on strike, it would bring everything to a halt just like that. If you are involved in a union, and are willing to run some risk, start organizing for this.

State and local governments should be organizing to resist deployments of Federal troops against them.

Hell, Biden and other Democratic office holders, including the House if we succeed in taking it, should be refusing to recognize Trump's legitimacy and organizing to block the transition on the grounds that he is Constitutionally ineligible as an insurrectionist.

If you are a Democrat or marginalized person (that includes anyone with a uterus), and aren't prepared to resist, you should try to leave the country in the two and a half months you have left before Trump can close the borders.

Above all:

WE DO NOT GIVE UP.

This is the real world, not a myth or a fantasy novel. There are no final victories in history, nor final defeats. We lost this round. It hurts. I imagine it will hurt more when it fully sinks in. A lot of people will probably suffer and die who didn't have to.

But that does not mean that we give up. THAT is how fascists truly win.

And if this all seems like wishful thinking, remember this:

A lot of countries have been in a lot worse position than America is now. For example, Ukraine has been in a worse position than we are, in a number of ways, for basically it's entire history. It faced Soviet genocide and Nazi genocide, finally regained its independence with the fall of the Soviet Union, only to find itself under a Russian puppet regime.

It then ousted that regime in the Maidan protests, and has been fighting against Russian annexation and genocide, with far too little support, for over a decade.

It did not surrender.

Maybe it will after tonight. But I doubt it.

And if it did, it would still have fought longer and harder against longer odds than we face in America today.

So to hell with giving up. Almost 64 million Americans and still counting voted for Kamala Harris, and we are not going to just lie down and obey Dear Leader.