Links and Notes for March 11th, 2022

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming
• Video Games

COVID-19

Omicron BA.2 subvariant fuels new global surge of the pandemic by Evan Blake (WSWS)

“Scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam, a co-founder of the World Health Network (WHN), a global coalition of scientists and community groups that advocates for a policy of eliminating COVID-19 worldwide, recently spoke with the World Socialist Web Site. Summarizing the results of a major study on BA.2 from the University of Tokyo, he noted that “BA.2 transmits 40 percent faster than BA.1” and is “more vaccine-evading than BA.1.” He added that BA.2 “is much more severe” than BA.1 and “infection by BA.2 is resistant to previous infection by BA.1.”

“Dr. Bar-Yam concluded, “BA.2 is different enough from BA.1 that it should be given its own designation—its own Greek letter—according to the current numbering scheme. But that’s politically not very comfortable, because people are declaring this to be over and having a new Greek letter would raise questions that require us to reevaluate what’s going on.””

“In his interview with the WSWS, Dr. Bar-Yam emphasized, “It is easier now to do elimination than previously. Technology is improving. Our understanding has grown exponentially.” He added, “We must simply decide to do it, and then we will be in a much better shape.””

China mounts all-out effort to stop the spread of Omicron BA.2 subvariant by Evan Blake (WSWS)

“Most of the Chinese population supports these necessary public health measures to stop the spread of COVID-19. The initial lockdowns of January-March 2020 were highly chaotic due to the novelty of the situation, but nearly two years after the end of the lockdown of Wuhan, the process has become more streamlined and widely accepted.”

How Did this many Deaths become Normal? by Ed Yong (The Atlantic)

“The United States reported more deaths from COVID-19 last Friday than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays than deaths during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more last month than deaths from flu in a bad season, and more in two years than deaths from HIV during the four decades of the AIDS epidemic. At least 953,000 Americans have died from COVID, and the true toll is likely even higher because many deaths went uncounted. COVID is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after only heart disease and cancer, which are both catchall terms for many distinct diseases.”

“America is accepting not only a threshold of death but also a gradient of death. Elderly people over the age of 75 are 140 times more likely to die than people in their 20s. Among vaccinated people, those who are immunocompromised account for a disproportionate share of severe illness and death. Unvaccinated people are 53 times more likely to die of COVID than vaccinated and boosted people;”

“Older, sicker, poorer, Blacker or browner, the people killed by COVID were treated as marginally in death as they were in life. Accepting their losses comes easily to “a society that places a hierarchy on the value of human life, which is absolutely what America is built on,” Debra Furr-Holden, an epidemiologist at the Michigan State University, told me.”

“AIDS activism, for example, lost steam and resources once richer, white Americans had access to effective antiretroviral drugs, Steven Thrasher told me, leaving poorer Black communities with high rates of infection. “It’s always a real danger that things get worse once the people with the most political clout are okay,” Thrasher said.”

““Like gun violence, overdose, extreme heat death, heart disease, and smoking, [COVID] becomes increasingly associated with behavioral choice and individual responsibility, and therefore increasingly invisible.””

“Our acceptance of those deaths never accounted for alternatives. “When was I offered the choice between having a society where you’re expected to go into work when you’re ill or having fewer people die of the flu every year?” Wrigley-Field, the sociologist, said to me.”

Economy & Finance

How The “Uber Economy” Is Killing Innovation, Prosperity And Entrepreneurship by Greg Satell

“The 20th century was, for the most part, an era of unprecedented prosperity. The emergence of electricity and internal combustion kicked off a 50-year productivity boom between 1920 and 1970. Yet after that, gains in productivity mysteriously disappeared even as business investment in computing technology increased, causing economist Robert Solow to observe that “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

“When the internet emerged in the mid-90’s things improved and everybody assumed that the mystery of the productivity paradox had been resolved. However, after 2004 productivity growth disappeared once again. Today, despite the hype surrounding things such as Web 2.0, the mobile Internet and, most recently, artificial intelligence, productivity continues to slump.”

No, Crypto Isn’t Helping Ukraine by Peter Howson (Jacobin)

“Jackson Palmer, cocreator of top-ten cryptocurrency Dogecoin, explains things differently (Twitter):”

“After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity.”

“Putin has a black belt in nonlinear warfare. He is no doubt using this whole mess as cover for other insidious plans. His digital isolation is pushing him singing and dancing toward alternative payment rails and decreased reliance on the US-dominated economic system. His recent Instagram ban hints he may be following China’s lead. Like China’s government, his may fast-track a central bank digital currency, which, unlike regular cash, can be coded with conditions to severely limit the financial freedoms of ordinary Russians — a crypto-ruble. With this crypto-surveillance money, Putin allies can track and make sure citizens are buying only the “correct” things.”

“We’re All Recovering Marxists”: Interview With Mark Blyth by Manchester Green New Deal Podcast (Spotify)

“If carbon taxes worked, they’d have to be high enough that they would basically destroy the industries that they’re targeting. That’s not going to happen. Why do you have a carbon tax? If you want to encourage people to stop smoking, you’re not going to do it through cigarette taxes. That never stopped anybody. You do it through changing the fundamental incentive structures.”

You can’t just attack people’s livelihoods without giving them a replacement. They will fight tooth and nail to keep what they have and what they know. You have to transition them, or they will use all of their power—which may be considerable—to fight the change.

“We won’t actually address the fact that we licensed all of these bandits to buy and sell gas futures that they can’t actually deliver. And they’ve buggered up the whole market. Gas is a utility. That means that it has an economics associated with it that is basically big-scale and very low rates of return and it’s an infrastructure products and it should be owned by the state.”

He goes on to say that even a standard economics textbook says that. It’s not communism. But even the Labour Party can’t commit to that.

ESG Goes to War by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“If you’re an oil company, opening lots of marginal projects to drill lots of oil is bad for the environment, and something that your ESG-focused shareholders disliked a month ago, but it also reduces oil prices and so is good for Ukraine.”

Nickel Is Canceled by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“The whole point of an exchange is that it is a transparent and predictable place to agree to trades. On the other hand if price moves are too wild, and if they are driven too much by margin calls, you’re going to blow up enough exchange participants to undermine predictability anyway. (If a lot of traders go bankrupt, it is hard to avoid breaking trades. If some of those traders are nickel producers, bankrupting them due to soaring nickel prices is an especially bad idea: You need them to make some more nickel!)”

This system is so flawed.

“If you’re doing that you could make the escrow claims … tradable? Like, issue a tracking stock on your abandoned Russian JV assets? That seems distasteful and yet somehow correct. If you want to get rid of your JV assets, can’t sell them, and don’t want to abandon them to your Russian partners, one move is to effectively spin them off to your shareholders. Then you don’t own them anymore, but you have maximized shareholder value. And then if your shareholders don’t want to own Russian JV assets they can sell them, in indirect tradable-escrow-claim form to someone who does.”

Leaving Russia for Morals or Money by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“[…] politicians do not particularly want to see energy price inflation, so they exempted Russian oil from sanctions and then made a point of clarifying that so no one was confused into self-sanctioning. People self-sanctioned anyway. And they were … possibly right? Yesterday “oil had its biggest daily swing ever, with Brent surging to nearly $140 after the U.S. said it was considering a ban on Russian crude imports.” The market may have more accurately predicted future U.S. sanctions than the U.S. government did.”

“But realizing all these gains may be difficult, S3 Partners warns: “Shorts sellers, as well as long shareholders, may be stuck in their positions until trading re-opens in many of these securities.” If you shorted Russian stocks that are now halted, you are paying expensive stock borrow rates for positions that you can’t close. It’s probably good! Better than being long those stocks and unable to sell them. Still. Betting on disaster is hard because, if you win, there has been a disaster, and you might not get paid.”

“One point here is that, while it is definitely true that some ESG-focused investors have pushed energy companies to accelerate the transition to renewable energy, it is also very much true that profit-focused shareholders of U.S. energy companies have pushed them to stop drilling so much because of their long recent history of expanding capacity whenever prices rose and then ending up losing money.”

“You buy some stock in a company, you put out an open letter to the board saying “you need to start accepting Dogecoin, selling non-fungible tokens and installing Tesla chargers at your stores,” everyone on Reddit is like “this is cool, to the moon,” the stock goes up, and you sell at a profit regardless of whether the company does anything or any of this makes sense.”

The American Empire Self-Destructs, But Nobody Thought That It Would Happen This Fast by Michael Hudson (CounterPunch)

“Russia is discovering (or is on the verge of discovering) that it does not need U.S. dollars as backing for the ruble’s exchange rate. Its central bank can create the rubles needed to pay domestic wages and finance capital formation. The U.S. confiscations of its dollar and euro reserves may finally lead Russia to end its adherence to neoliberal monetary philosophy, as Sergei Glaziev has long been advocating, in favor of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).”

“I had expected that the end of the dollarized imperial economy would come about by other countries breaking away. But that is not what has happened. U.S. diplomats themselves have chosen to end international dollarization, while helping Russia build up its own means of self-reliant agricultural and industrial production. This global fracture process actually has been going on for some years, starting with the sanctions blocking America’s NATO allies and other economic satellites from trading with Russia. For Russia, these sanctions had the same effect that protective tariffs would have had.”

“[…] how will India and Saudi Arabia view their dollar holdings as Biden and Blinken try to strong-arm them into following the U.S. “rules-based order” instead of their own national self-interest? The recent U.S. dictates have left little alternative but to start protecting their own political autonomy by converting dollar and euro holdings into gold as an asset free from political liability of being held hostage to the increasingly costly and disruptive U.S. demands.”

“U.S. diplomacy has rubbed Europe’s nose in its abject subservience by telling its governments to have their companies dump their Russian assets for pennies on the dollar after Russia’s foreign reserves were blocked and the ruble’s exchange rate plunged. Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and other U.S. investors moved quickly to buy up what Shell Oil and other foreign companies were unloading.”

“Too many observers have pointed out exactly what would happen – headed by President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov explaining just what their response would be if NATO insisted on backing them into a corner while attacking Eastern Ukrainian Russian-speakers and moving heavy weaponry to Russia’s Western border. The consequences were anticipated. The neocons in control of U.S. foreign policy simply didn’t care. Recognizing Russian concerns was deemed to make one a Putinversteher.”

“There already is a striking disconnect between the financial sector’s view of reality and that promoted in the mainstream NATO media. Europe’s stock markets plunged at their opening on Monday, March 7, while Brent oil soared to $130 a barrel. The BBC’s morning “Today” news broadcast featured Conservative MP Alan Duncan, an oil trader, warning that the near doubling of prices in natural gas futures threatened to bankrupt companies committed to supplying gas to Europe at the old rates. But returning to the military “Two Minutes of Hate” news, the BBC kept applauding the brave Ukrainian fighters and NATO politicians urging more military support. In New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 650 points, and gold soared to over $2,000 an ounce – reflecting the financial sector’s view of how the U.S. game is likely to play out. Nickel prices rose by even more – 40 percent.”

“Trying to force Russia to respond militarily and thereby look bad to the rest of the world is turning out to be a stunt aimed simply at ensuring Europe contribute more to NATO, buy more U.S. military hardware and lock itself deeper into trade and monetary dependence on the United States.”

Public Policy & Politics

Is the Whole World United in Isolating Russia? by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“Though the sanctioning of Russia has been massive in scale, it is hard to call Russia isolated when neither China nor India has joined the sanction regime. The two largest countries in the world make up nearly a third of the world’s population and are two of the world’s fastest growing economies. Both giants refused to join the US by abstaining from both the UN Security Council vote and the General Assembly vote condemning the Russian invasion.”

“Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that China is against any actions that “add fuel to the flames.” In a news conference, Wang called for dialogue and said “Washington is to blame for the conflict for failing to take Russia’s security concerns into consideration.” He reminded the US of the effect of NATO’s expanding east to Russia’s borders.”

“It is, perhaps, not surprising that Iran abstained at the General Assembly nor that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei blamed the US for the conflict and sympathized with Ukraine as another victim of trusting the US.”

“Like the countries of the Middle East, history and recent experience make it impossible for Latin America to subscribe to the US history ex nihilo school of thought or to trust the narrative of the US as a country that defends vulnerable victims from aggression from large powers who violate international law and interfere in other countries.”

“The world has rightly united in condemnation of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. But it is less obvious that the map can be painted in one color, as Western governments and media have insisted, in isolating Russia. The two largest nations on the map cannot be painted that color. Neither can much of Africa, the Muslim world or Latin America. While Europe and the nations that have benefited from US hegemony are united in isolating Russia, the nations who have been the victims of that benefit seem far less united.”

Threat of Nuclear Conflict is Higher Now Than in the Cold War by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch)

“The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was abrogated by the US in 2002, the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty was suspended by Russia in 2007. Three years ago, President Donald Trump abrogated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, while military-to-military contacts aimed at preventing an accidental confrontation between the US and Russia became infrequent.”

The NATO campaign against Russia will drive escalating class struggle across the world by Tom Hall (WSWS)

“The campaign against Russia, which includes a crippling sanctions regime aimed at starving out the Russian people and which has all but cut off Russia from the world economy, is aimed at the conversion of that country into a colony of western imperialism and the plundering of its natural resources. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, while it is reactionary and must be opposed, is the product of a years-long campaign of escalating provocations by NATO against Russia, using Ukraine as bait.”

“But among the worst hit will be developing countries in Africa and the Middle East. Starvation and famine in this region of the world is a real possibility. Eighty percent of grain in Egypt is purchased from Russia. Other major importers of Russian grain include Turkey, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Yemen.”

“At the same time, the corporate press will be counted on to brand any resistance from workers as the result of Russian sabotage, with workers acting as “Putin’s patsies,” as the British press recently branded striking London underground workers.”

War in Ukraine and Russia sanctions threaten food supplies in Middle East and North Africa by Jean Shaoul (WSWS)

“Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, geopolitical tensions had roiled global food markets, with dire consequences for countries reliant on imports from the Ukraine, including Lebanon and Yemen where more than half the population already suffer from acute food insecurity.”

“Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, gets around 86 percent of its imports from Ukraine and Russia and has been unable to find significant alternative supplies. Turkey sources 75 percent of its wheat imports from the two countries. Lebanon imports 60 percent of its total wheat consumption from Ukraine, Tunisia nearly 50 percent, Libya 43 percent and Yemen 22 percent.”

“Sudan’s deputy leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo flew to Moscow to offer Russia a naval base on the Red Sea in a bid to pre-empt sanctions.”

Ray McGovern: What Role Has the U.S. Played in the Ukraine Crisis? by Robert Scheer (Scheer Post)

“But Putin then was considered as pro-American, and he had the virtue of being a teetotaler, as opposed to Yeltsin who was a hopeless drunk. And actually he got into power largely through the efforts and support of the United States. That is all forgotten now, and Putin is simply seen as this madman.”

“Ted Postol, a longtime advisor to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon, and physics professor at MIT, is going to talk about the shortcomings—mind you—the shortcomings of the Russian radar systems for early warning. They cannot find U.S. submarines at sea, and that is a major, major fault. It exists now for many years. And so they don’t know. They don’t know if some of the false launches [unclear] innocent launch—whether the Triton submarines that carry these extremely powerful nuclear missiles, whether those missiles have already been shot off or not.”

“Well, he’s talking about the [Litvinenko] situation, and there’s no proof at all that the Russian government did that, much less that Putin was involved. The people who have looked at it very closely say, you know, this looks like a British intelligence operation.”

“Trump got out of the INF treaty. That treaty destroyed a whole class of intermediate-range ballistic missiles, because wise people on both sides said, look, we need 30 minutes to decide whether to destroy the world; we don’t want to have just 10 minutes because these missiles are ready to go in Europe, OK? That was exited by Trump.”

“So this is the rub. This is the rub on the ground. The U.S. and NATO are moving not only nations closer to Russia, but the ability to have a first strike against Russia, and with the deficiencies in their early-warning radar systems, this is a real, real threat we should all be afraid of.”

“And you’re telling me here a history that has been basically whitewashed totally. And we always pride ourselves on not being a totalitarian country, but if you can whitewash history, aren’t you just a more effective form of totalitarianism, because it’s so believable? You know? I mean, this is really what you’re laying out, and what you laid out in your remarks in that forum, that salon, was that this was all calculated to corner Putin. And the response is one that could have been predicted, and was in fact predicted.”

“By the coup you mean the replacement of a supposedly democratically elected—I don’t know how democratic any elections are where cartels in any country, and the top money, controls things. But such as it was, there was a leader in the Ukraine, [ost]ensibly democratically elected, […]”

The description “cartels in any country, and the top money, controls things” applies to the U.S. equally well.

“[…] what I am saying is whatever you claim you’re doing, and whatever you think you’re doing—whatever you plan to do in war, the civilians are going to take it in the neck. They don’t have the armor, they don’t have the protection, and ultimately they’re expendable because they can’t kill you the way the other troops can. And you end up being more considerate of the other troops than you do of the civilians. That’s what I mean. They become the cannon fodder. And I don’t care who’s doing it and who’s calling the signals—I’ve seen it. It’s the people in the small towns, the villages, the farmers, the workers—they get it in the neck, no matter where. No matter what you think you’re doing.”

“[…] all I’m saying, Bob, is that—you’ve seen civilian casualties like not too many of the rest of us—all I’m saying is we ought to wait till the jury is out here, or jury is back in, to figure out whether there’s been a measure of restraint against killing civilians, exercised by this devil Putin—the kind of restraint that the U.S. did not, of course, exercise going into Iraq and Afghanistan.

“RS: Well, that’s a good point of caution. I’m glad to be taken to school by you on this. And I hope you’re right, by the way. But again, we both agree there’s no good way to wage war.”

“But the fact of the matter is, it’s easy to criticize a Ray McGovern. Your voice is a lonely one now. People are attacking you in the most vicious way. And I suspect you’re going to turn out to be, unfortunately, right. Unfortunately in that if you’d been listened to earlier, we could have avoided this carnage, you know. But we’ll see.”

Understanding the War in Ukraine by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)

“Basic facts about the events taking place during a war are hard to establish, let alone ensuring the correct interpretation of these facts. Videos of apparent war atrocities that can be found on social media platforms like YouTube are impossible to verify. Often, it becomes clear that much of the content relating to war that can be found on these platforms has either been misidentified or is from other conflicts.”

““Two Ukrainian governments signed the Minsk agreements,” Kovalevich tells me, “but didn’t fulfill it. Recently Zelenskyy’s officials openly mocked the agreement, saying they wouldn’t fulfill it (encouraged by the U.S. and the UK, of course). That was a sheer violation of all rules—you can’t sign [the agreements] and then refuse to fulfill it.” The language of the Minsk agreements was, as Kovalevich says, “liberal enough for the government.” The two republics of Donetsk and Luhansk would have remained a part of Ukraine and they would have been afforded some cultural autonomy”

“Peace in Ukraine, he says, “is a matter of reconciliation between NATO and the new global powers, Russia and China.” Till such a reconciliation is possible, and till Europe develops a rational foreign policy, “we will be affected by wars,” says Kovalevich.”

Russia and Ukraine: Notes From Berlin by Victor Grossman (CounterPunch)

“North Korea was bombed so ferociously from 1950 to 1953 that hardly a building over one story high remained standing, big dams were destroyed, three million people were killed. Beginning a decade later, 400,000 tons of Napalm were sprayed on Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Again, some three million were killed, rain forests destroyed, generations of misshapen babies were predetermined.”

“Henry Kissinger, who helped with the plans, made his views of democracy clear: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and let a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” They weren’t, therefore; General Pinochet, in connivance with the CIA, the State Department and Chilean torture and killer squads did the rest.”

“Until 1990 such attacks were largely motivated by a deep hatred of anything even slightly connected with that fearsome menace, socialism – and its threatened confiscation of the millions – billions today – which they or their fathers had piled up thanks to the muscles, brains and sacrifices of the other 99 % of the world’s population. Not a penny should be taken from them, they determined, and this made them mortal enemies of the USSR and the so-called East Bloc.”

“Then came 9/11 and the need for a full-scale “war against terror,” twenty years of death and destruction in Afghanistan and, in 2003, more frightful bombing of Iraq. 29,200 “Shock and Awe” air strikes during the initial invasion, 500-pound bombs on densely-populated cities meant hundreds of thousands of deaths of which “46 per cent were girls and women and 39 per cent children.””

“Every single wartime death or wound is terrible, every missile, every bullet is unnatural. There are too many similar tragedies now in Ukraine. Yet, while writing this, I find myself thinking: Despite each and every tragedy – thank goodness that Ukraine has not been hit like Iraq in 2003, with the death of hundreds of thousands. Yet alas, while I see the Brandenburg Gate lit up with Ukrainian blue and yellow, I recall no Iraqi colors there in 2003, nor those of Palestinians in 2014 after the death of 547 children during the bombing of Gaza.”

“Perhaps it was their strength which prevented the Kyiv government from abiding by the peace agreements of Minsk, in which Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Kyiv had agreed on seeking solutions, with partial autonomy for the Russian-speaking provinces, or was it pressure from Washington and some local oligarchs which moved the current president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, at first seemingly in favor of negotiations, to back out?”

“And yet his soldiers, tanks and planes have invaded Ukraine, with results just as horrible for those affected, even if not on the same scale as American attacks in the Philippines and Vietnam, Nicaragua and Iraq – or in two of the worst crimes ever committed by humankind – at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

“I am against killing and destruction. I will therefore join in a march for peace – but not in step with the greedy, violence-hungry forces who have taken up this issue to pursue their own disastrous goals. They are not my allies and I fear the atmosphere of hatred now being cultivated, even against books and sopranos.”

Corporate Interests Are Pushing the Disastrous Idea of a No-Fly Zone by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“The only way to end this war without prolonging the suffering of Ukrainians or sparking global destruction is a political settlement between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States and the European Union. Unfortunately, that doesn’t sound nearly as sexy or viscerally satisfying as a shooting war, and it means a lot of wealthy, powerful people won’t be able to make a lot of money.”

The West’s Hands in Ukraine Are as Bloody as Putin’s by Jonathan Cook (Mint Press News)

“By contrast, we – meaning Westerners – are not responsible for Putin or his actions. I cannot vote him out of office. Nothing I say will make him alter course. And worse, anything I do say against him or Russia simply amplifies the mindless chorus of self-righteous Western commentary intended to cast stones at Russia’s warmongers while leaving our own home-grown warmongers in place.”

“Every death in the current war – Ukrainian and Russian – could almost certainly have been averted had the U.S. and its NATO allies not led Ukraine up the garden path. Had Ukrainians not believed that with enough pressure they could force NATO’s hand in their favor, they would have had to accommodate Russian concerns well before any invasion, such as by committing to neutrality.”

“[…] the Western media’s identification with Ukraine – and consequently the public’s identification with its plight – is based on Ukraine’s usefulness to the Western imperial project. Which is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.”

“Russia appeared initially to want a relatively short war of attrition to pacify Ukraine, forcing its nationalist government to drop aspirations to become a launch-pad for NATO weapons and impose on it instead neutrality. (Now that Russia has committed treasure and lives to the war, it will likely get greedier and want more. Reports suggest it is already demanding independence rather than autonomy for the Donbas region.)”

A Ukrainian Socialist Explains Why the Russian Invasion Shouldn’t Have Been a Surprise: An Interview with Volodymyr Artiukh by Jana Tsoneva (Jacobin)

“So, the Maidan uprising was quickly hijacked by one of these fractions to streamline the popular discontent into this pro-EU pro-NATO straitjacket. A whole stratum of self-organized volunteers, paramilitary groups, NGOs, political adventurers, and intellectuals emerged after Maidan, who combined nationalism, neofascism, economic liberalism, and “Occidentalism” — a loose idea of the Western civilization. This was amplified by Western soft power and a network of NGOs — the familiar story.”

“So, the war in Ukraine is not a direct consequence of NATO expansion. It’s Russia’s proactive step to change, to break this structure of power relations in which Russia existed. It was not reactive in the sense of an immediate threat, it was a predator’s attack at the moment when, according to the Kremlin, the enemy was at its weakest. The diplomatic spectacle was a distraction.”

“He’s interested in building this “vertical power” that begins and ends with the Kremlin. This is a very different thing to the Soviet Union. You need only look at how Putin talks to his Security Council, like to schoolchildren who failed their homework assignment. Compared to that, the Communist Party was a shining example of direct democracy.”

“Only wishful thinkers assumed that Putin would still want to go ahead with the Minsk process. By that time it was clear that even if Putin went along with Minsk, it would mean a war by other means, because the process implies that Ukraine reintegrates these territories, but they were de facto already integrated into Russia. They had their own military and so on, but being constitutionally integrated into Ukraine, they would have a free hand in the rest of the territory where they would clash with Ukrainian nationalists. In Ukraine, an internal revolt would have happened against such an implementation of the Minsk agreements, anyway. So, the Minsk process was another name for dismembering Ukraine and war in slow motion.”

“Ukraine’s elites were already resigned to the fact that these were not their territories and the elite in these breakaway republics never thought that they would join Ukraine. When Putin recognized their independence, there was briefly a sigh of relief among Ukraine’s elites. They didn’t know the war was coming. Until the last moment, they didn’t believe that there would be war. But they were relieved that they had finally gotten rid of these troubled regions.”

“I remain pessimistic in regards to the outcome of this war. I still don’t think that Ukraine’s army can prevail. As to whether Putin can achieve his goals of regime change: definitely not. There is no way he [Putin] can sustain a stable pro-Russian regime.”

“You remember Emmanuel Macron making a fool of himself proclaiming that, oh, I brought peace and the week after Putin invaded. So, the West can’t do anything, to be honest. The war, unfortunately, has to be fought out between the Ukrainian and Russian army. The balance of power on the battlefield will decide pretty much everything else. And there is no good news. It’s just death and death and death.”

“Some parts of the Left also needs to abandon the idea that Russia is somehow a continuation of the Soviet Union, or that it is the underdog in the imperialist fight that needs to be supported. We need to pay closer attention to what Russian scholars have done. We need to think more deeply about how the Kremlin guys picture themselves, what they imagine is happening around them and what may motivate them beyond what the West imagines is rational. Clearly their goals and the way they work is different than we imagine. We need to pay attention to the internal dynamics in the Ukraine-Russia relations. This is not something we know a lot about beyond the simplistic Western portrayal of the good democratic Ukraine versus the terrible authoritarian Russia or the evil Nazi Ukraine versus the eternally mistreated Russia.”

Russia is Ready To Replace France in West Africa by Ramzy Baroud (CounterPunch)

“While Western countries, along with a few African governments, are warning that the security vacuum created by the French withdrawal will be exploited by Mali’s militants, Bamako claims such concerns are unfounded, arguing that the French military presence has exasperated – as opposed to improving – the country’s insecurity.”

This is how we talk about French invasions, not Russian ones. The French are justified in their incursion into a former colony. No-one talks about it. Russia’s incursion is apocalyptic.

Sanctions are Blunt Instruments Which Punish Entire Populations But Hurt Leaders Least by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch)

“People outside Iraq wrongly felt that economic warfare must be kinder than the military variety. In reality, the casualties were higher, but they were less visible because those who died prematurely were the very old, the very young, and the very sick.”

“The invaders thought that the misery they saw around them was long standing and did not understand their own role in producing the general ruin.”

Ukraine, Taiwan, and Other Flashpoints in a New Age of Geopolitics by Michael Klare & Tom Engelhardt (Antiwar.com)

“But while Russia and the West disagree on many issues of principle, this is not a replay of the Cold War. It’s an all-too-geopolitical twenty-first-century struggle for advantage on a highly contested global chessboard. If comparisons are in order, think of this moment as more akin to the situation Europe confronted prior to World War I than in the aftermath of World War II.”

“Geopolitics – the relentless struggle for control over foreign lands, ports, cities, mines, railroads, oil fields, and other sources of material and military might – has governed the behavior of major powers for centuries.”

““Our objective is not to change [China] but to shape the strategic environment in which it operates, building a balance of influence in the world that is maximally favorable to the United States, our allies and partners.””

““The Taiwan issue is the biggest tinderbox between China and the United States,” said Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the U.S., recently. “If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road for independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in the military conflict.””

Just like Ukraine. In Ukraine, the goal is making U.S. gas more attractive. In Taiwan, it’s to seize 90% of high-end chip-making capacity from China.

Worthy and Unworthy Victims by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)

“It is to taint the sainthood of the worthy victims, and by extension ourselves. We are good. They are evil. Worthy victims are used not only to express sanctimonious outrage, but to stoke self-adulation and a poisonous nationalism. The cause becomes sacred, a religious crusade. Fact-based evidence is abandoned, as it was during the calls to invade Iraq. Charlatans, liars, con artists, fake defectors, and opportunists become experts, used to fuel the conflict.”

“The rank hypocrisy is stunning. Some of the same officials that orchestrated the invasion of Iraq, who under international law are war criminals for carrying out a preemptive war, are now chastising Russia for its violation of international law. The US bombing campaign of Iraqi urban centers, called “Shock and Awe,” saw the dropping of 3,000 bombs on civilian areas that killed over 7,000 noncombatants in the first two months of the war. Russia has yet to go to this extreme.”

““Thirty-five percent of the victims,” Nick Turse writes of the war in Vietnam, “died within 15 to 20 minutes.” Death from the skies, like death on the ground, was often unleashed capriciously. “It was not out of the ordinary for US troops in Vietnam to blast a whole village or bombard a wide area in an effort to kill a single sniper.””

“Drag Putin off to the International Criminal Court and put him on trial. But make sure George W. Bush is in the cell next to him. If we can’t see ourselves, we can’t see anyone else. And this blindness leads to catastrophe.”

When History Begins: Russia, Ukraine and the US by Sheldon Richman (CounterPunch)

“Contrary to what hypocritical U.S. rulers and their loyal mass media suggest, two propositions can both be — and indeed are — true: 1) that Russia has grossly, brutally, and criminally mishandled the situation it has faced with respect to Ukraine, and 2) that the U.S. government since the late 1990s has been entirely responsible for imposing that situation on Russia.”

“If, after absorbing this shocking record of indisputable facts, you are seething at what the U.S. government has done to squander a historic chance for good relations with Russia, you will be fully justified — and then some.”

“The measures included the bombing of Russia’s ally Serbia in the late 1990s; the repeated expansion of NATO, the postwar alliance founded to counter the Soviet Union, to include former Soviet allies and republics; the public talk of including the former Soviet republics Ukraine and Georgia in the Western alliance; the trashing of long-standing anti-nuclear-weapons treaties with Russia; the placing of defensive missile launchers (which could be converted to offensive launchers) in Poland and Romania: the attempts to sabotage the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline deal; instigating the 2014 regime change in Ukraine (following earlier regime-changes operations in Ukraine and Georgia); the arming of Ukraine since 2017; the conducting of NATO war exercises, with U.S. personnel, near the Russian border; the years-long evidence-free effort to persuade Americans that Russia manipulated the 2016 presidential election to elect Donald Trump; and much, much, much more.”

“No less a figure than Willia[m] Burns, Bush II’s ambassador to Russia and now Biden’s CIA chief, said in 2008, Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

“Yanukovych had been willing to deal with the European Union, but when he balked at the terms of the proposed loan, Russia offered Ukraine $15 billion under more favorable terms. This the EU and U.S. government could not tolerate. Yanukovych had to go.”

“[…] government sent large amounts of aid to Ukraine, but Obama refused to send weapons because he did not want to escalate the conflict or risk direct war with Russia. He noted, properly, that Ukraine was a core security interest of Russia but not of the United States and that in a conflict over nearby Ukraine, Russia would have a large advantage over the United States, despite America’s much larger military. Trump, however, reversed Obama’s policy and sent massive arms shipments to Ukraine, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons.”

“Would Russia have shelved plans for the invasion had Biden not been so wrongheaded? Who can say? But what was there to lose?”

“It’s ridiculous to think that Russia — given its $1.5 trillion GDP (smaller than Italy’s and Texas’s) and $60 billion military budget (6 percent of the total U.S. military budget) — is out to re-establish the Russian empire of old or the Soviet Union.”

Insurgency? by Yasha Levine (Immigrants as a Weapon)

“What annoys me most these days is seeing a lot of clueless people around the world cheering Putin on, as if he’s playing some genius-level game and striking at American imperialism. Nah, if anything, this attack has made American imperialism stronger, confirming all the narratives that it spins about itself to itself and to the rest of the world. And Russia doesn’t offer any alternative — no alternative values, no radically different ways of organizing society. Putin has nothing to offer, other than a comically conservative and nationalistic security state oligarchy.”

The podcast Extended episode: How the US Caused the Ukraine Crisis by Aaron Maté and Katie Halper (Useful Idiots) was excellent and informative.

“Note: This episode was recorded before Russia invaded Ukraine. The interview with Branko Marcetic provides a lot of useful context on how we got here.

“When we look at the progression of this war, the Biden administration and cable news hosts will tell you that Mastermind Putin foresaw this six moves back in his chess game, and that the only thing we could’ve done was impose more sanctions earlier.

“They won’t tell you about the US escalating tensions for years, stoking the 2014 coup and aiding neo-Nazi forces for its own benefit.

“Now, two war-mongering countries, both with bloated militaries, whose people are neglected in favor of entrenched elites, whose politicians profit from war, are back to causing destruction.

“And Ukraine is stuck in the middle.

“Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic joins us to break down everything happening in the region and the steps that led to Russia’s deadly attack.”

Calling for More War is Not a Desire for a Just Peace by Ron Jacobs (CounterPunch)

“What I’m calling for are an immediate and unconditional ceasefire and multilateral peace talks. If these two things can be established, the killing would diminish considerably. Furthermore, it would pave the way for a withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine, an end to sanctions, and an end to NATO expansion”

The Weird Politics of Biden’s Ban on Russian Oil and Gas by Elizabeth Nolan Brown (Reason)

““The reality is if we’re not getting this oil from Russia, we’re likely going to be importing more from another brutal dictator,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

““Instead of buying 3% of our oil from Russia, helping fund their aggression against Ukraine, we’ll likely increase on the 8% of our oil we import from Saudi Arabia and UAE, helping fund their Yemeni genocide,” commented economist Tarnell Brown.”

Noam Chomsky: US Military Escalation Against Russia Would Have No Victors by C.J. Polychroniou (Truthout)

“It’s easy to understand why those suffering from the crime may regard it as an unacceptable indulgence to inquire into why it happened and whether it could have been avoided. Understandable, but mistaken. If we want to respond to the tragedy in ways that will help the victims, and avert still worse catastrophes that loom ahead, it is wise, and necessary, to learn as much as we can about what went wrong and how the course could have been corrected. Heroic gestures may be satisfying. They are not helpful.”

“[…] repeatedly the reaction to real or imagined crisis has been to reach for the six-gun rather than the olive branch. It’s almost a reflex, and the consequences have generally been awful — for the traditional victims. It’s always worthwhile to try to understand, to think a step or two ahead about the likely consequences of action or inaction. Truisms of course, but worth reiterating, because they are so easily dismissed in times of justified passion.”

“The options that remain after the invasion are grim. The least bad is support for the diplomatic options that still exist, in the hope of reaching an outcome not too far from what was very likely achievable a few days ago: Austrian-style neutralization of Ukraine, some version of Minsk II federalism within. Much harder to reach now. And — necessarily — with an escape hatch for Putin, or outcomes will be still more dire for Ukraine and everyone else, perhaps almost unimaginably so.”

“Like it or not, the choices are now reduced to an ugly outcome that rewards rather than punishes Putin for the act of aggression — or the strong possibility of terminal war. It may feel satisfying to drive the bear into a corner from which it will lash out in desperation — as it can. Hardly wise.”

“To drive home the obvious, the IPCC just released the latest and by far most ominous of its regular assessments of how we are careening to catastrophe.

“Meanwhile, the necessary actions are stalled, even driven into reverse, as badly needed resources are devoted to destruction and the world is now on a course to expand the use of fossil fuels, including the most dangerous and conveniently abundant of them, coal.”

“There is nothing to say about Putin’s attempt to offer legal justification for his aggression. Its merit is zero.

“Of course, it is true that the U.S. and its allies violate international law without a blink of an eye, but that provides no extenuation for Putin’s crimes. Kosovo, Iraq and Libya did, however, have direct implications for the conflict over Ukraine.

“The Iraq invasion was a textbook example of the crimes for which Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg, pure unprovoked aggression. And a punch in Russia’s face.”

“The status of international law did not change in the post-Cold War period, even in words, let alone actions. President Clinton made it clear that the U.S. had no intention of abiding by it. The Clinton Doctrine declared that the U.S. reserves the right to act “unilaterally when necessary,” including “unilateral use of military power” to defend such vital interests as “ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources.” His successors as well, and anyone else who can violate the law with impunity.”

“Russia is a kleptocratic petrostate relying on a resource that must decline sharply or we are all finished. It’s not clear whether its financial system can weather a sharp attack, through sanctions or other means. All the more reason to offer an escape hatch with a grimace.”

The US-Ukrainian Strategic Partnership of November 2021 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine by Editorial Board (WSWS)

“The Russian invasion of Ukraine has raised the specter of nuclear war and is acquiring an ever more violent and bloody character. Even taking into account the unending propaganda in the media, horrific incidents, such as the destruction of a maternity hospital in the southern port city of Mariupol, reveal an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.”

“The key to understanding this is the US-Ukrainian Charter on Strategic Partnership, signed by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on November 10, 2021.

“Dispensing with the usual cautious language of diplomacy, the Charter’s language was that of an offensive military alliance. It pledged to “hold Russia accountable” for “aggression and violations of international law” and “its continuing malign behavior.”

“The Charter endorsed Kiev’s military strategy from March 2021 which explicitly proclaimed the military goal of “retaking” Crimea and the separatist-controlled Donbass, and thereby dismissed the Minsk Agreements of 2015 which were the official framework for settling the conflict in East Ukraine.”

Note the date when this was signed. The U.S. was already in partnership with Ukraine with the explicit goal not only of taking back Donetsk and Luhansk completely, but also Crimea. Black on white.

“It will fall to historians to uncover what promises the Ukrainian oligarchy received from Washington in exchange for its pledge to turn the country into a killing field and launching pad for war with Russia. But one thing is clear: The Kremlin and Russian general staff could not but read this document as the announcement of an impending war.”

“Finally, in the weeks leading up to the war, while constantly warning of an impending Russian invasion, the Biden administration made no diplomatic effort to avoid it and everything to provoke it.”

“If America did something similar — like invade Mexico — and the same jingoistic, militaristic dynamic had taken over America’s domestic politics, a majority would be for it — but there’d be quite a few people on the other side, too. They’d rightly be mocking the notion that “we need this war to protect American national security,” because to them this “national security” represents the worst, most rotten element in American oligarchic society. And they’d be right.”

I’m not arguing that the ruling class in Russia is right to spout their horseshit about “national security”. It’s moderately more believable the U.S. talking about Iraq because it’s right on their doorstep, but it’s still horseshit. What’s the difference between Poland and Ukraine? Poland probably has U.S. nukes right now…and probably has had them for a while.

A Russian antiwar view on things by Yasha Levine

“From a Russian anti-war perspective, this invasion looks very different. This invasion means the total meltdown of living standards, the weaponization and ascendency of the worst, most toxic nationalistic cultural and political currents, and the retrenching of a corrupt, centralized oligarchic state security apparatus. Now there is the very real possibility of a drawn-out conflict and an insurgency, which will lead to instability within Russia, result in a massive crackdown on dissent, and grind through more death and suffering in Ukraine.”

Democrats, Republicans, Biden agree on staggering increase in military budget by Patrick Martin (WSWS)

“The record military spending is supplemented by another $14 billion, labeled “aid to Ukraine,” although the bulk of it is spending to support US military operations in Eastern Europe, including the deployment of thousands of additional troops, tanks and warplanes.”

A Profile in True Courage by Richard C. Gross (WSWS)

“Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky should get the Nobel Peace Prize for unifying the West to fight for liberal democracy and combat a major symbol of autocracy, Russia. Let’s hope it’s not posthumously.

“His bravado against overwhelming odds is a shining example of a battle for freedom and national dignity, a true mouse that roared, and refuses to surrender, often telling Western allies that salute him that he is a target of assassination.”

JFC. Myth-making before our very eyes. This is the kind of self-deluding bullshit that’s going to get a lot more people killed.

Extended episode: How the Ukraine War Helps US Empire by Katie Halper & Aaron Maté (Useful Idiots)

“For a while, pundits have been predicting the decline of American superpower. Although some decline is inevitable, don’t expect Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to precipitate it.

“As the American Prestige podcast’s Daniel Bessner and Derek Davison explain, the US ability to invade another country and commit war crimes that would merit US sanctions if it was any other country, and without any backlash, underscores America’s overwhelming strength.”

The podcast 608 − The World’s Mack (3/7/22) by Chap Traphouse (SoundCloud) was also excellent and informative. And funny.

“We’re back from the first leg of our tour of the South and here to look at the responses to war in Ukraine brewing in the foreign policy op-ed world. We’ve got reading series by Shadi Hamid in the Atlantic and our old friend Max Boot in WaPo, both asking “well, yes, American foreign intervention has been very bad in the past, but maybe this time it would be very good?””

Barbarians at the Gate – In Russia and on Wall Street by Russ & Pam Martens (Wall Street on Parade)

“Now that we are seeing the shocking images daily on television news shows of what unchecked authoritarianism looks like […]”

Yes, yes, sure. This is absolutely the first time we’ve ever gotten to see unchecked authoritarianism. Thanks for joining, Pam and Russ. Until a couple of weeks ago, these two used to deliver relatively level-headed financial news. Now, their articles are littered with references to how intensely they’re following foreign-policy news and included their own “analysis”, which amounts to regurgitating the simplistic line they’re being spoon-fed by the U.S. media. It’s a bit of a shame, because it makes it harder to wade through and find the interesting information that they’re capable of delivering.

For example,

“Perhaps Putin should have thought about that before he invaded the neighboring country of Ukraine and launched a barbaric bombing assault on hospitals, schools, churches and apartment buildings.”

“The wives and mistresses of the billionaire Russian oligarchs will henceforth have to travel outside the country to buy their Hermes Birkin handbags, their Apple iPhones, their Starbucks’ lattes and their Cartier Love bracelets.”

JFC. Are there no level heads left? People at this level of anger can be talked into anything.

Roaming Charges: The Trembling Air by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“If I were Ukrainian and living in Kyiv or Odessa, I’d certainly be out on the streets, rolling flaming tires at Russian tanks. But I’m not and I certainly don’t know what’s to be done from here. Or who will do it.

“Still the Ukrainian resistance–as courageous as it is–cannot defeat the Russia military. Most of those armchair strategists urging it to intensify the fighting are at no risk themselves. NATO will not intervene. Russia can and will escalate the war, ratchet up the bombing and destruction until there is nothing left for fleeing Ukrainians to come home to. Look at the ruins of Syria, the rubble of Homs and Aleppo. Instead of pushing for more war–even if the cause seems just–the only moral position is to call and continuing calling for a ceasefire and to stop using Ukrainian civilians as pawns in a larger depraved game.”

“Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US Ambassador to the UN, condemned Russia’s use of cluster munitions, proclaiming that these indiscriminate weapons have “no place on the battlefield.” Within a few hours, the US Mission deleted her comment from the transcript because the Pentagon refuses to endorse a ban. (The Saudis have been using US-made cluster bombs in Yemen.)”

“Wake me when the sanctions on Russia are harsher than the sanctions on Cuba or Venezuela. The only invasion Cuba’s launched has been with doctors to fight the global pandemic, a true humanitarian intervention which earned them a scolding from the US Sec of State…”

“We’ve now surpassed the Freedom Fries level of absurdity for Russophobia: the Cardiff Philharmonic has scrubbed its planned performances of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.”

“The last time wheat prices spiked to the current levels was back in 2007 and 2008, sparking protests across nearly 40 countries. Then a jump in grain prices in 2009-10 helped fuel the Arab Spring uprisings…”

Senate passes biggest-ever US military budget with unanimous Democratic support by Jacob Crosse (WSWS)

“With remarkable speed, the Democratic-controlled Congress passed the $1.5 trillion budget bill, with more than half of the total going to the Pentagon, $13.6 billion to the Ukrainian military, and nothing to fight the COVID pandemic.”

The podcast Episode 188 − SPECIAL EPISODE: US Empire Shuts Down Dissident Voice by Lee Camp & Eleanor Goldfield (LibSyn) was an excellent recap of the current state of U.S. and European censorship. The Russians are censoring too, but we are censoring and calling ourselves the good guys, in contrast to those censoring Russians.

“Lee Camp’s show “Redacted Tonight” brought you anti-war, anti-corporate comedy every week for 8 years. Today it was ended in a matter of minutes by the US government war machine. You can continue to support his vital work at Patreon.com/LeeCamp.”

This was an excellent podcast that provides a succinct analysis of the situation in America in relation to censorship and the war in Ukraine as of March 6th, 2022. Only 30 minutes.

Victoria Nuland: Ukraine Has “Biological Research Facilities,” Worried Russia May Seize Them by Glenn Greenwald (Scheer Post)

“When asked whether Ukraine possesses “chemical or biological weapons,” Nuland did not deny this: at all. She instead — with palpable pen-twirling discomfort and in halting speech, a glaring contrast to her normally cocky style of speaking in obfuscatory State Department officialese — acknowledged: “uh, Ukraine has, uh, biological research facilities.” Any hope to depict such “facilities” as benign or banal was immediately destroyed by the warning she quickly added: “we are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the Ukrainiahhhns [sic] on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach” — [interruption by Sen. Rubio]”

Rubio and Nuland then cheerfully agreed that, should any biological or chemical attack occur in Ukraine, that it would 100% be the Russians’ fault. They just a priori decided that—because they can. Because they know that they would control the narrative, regardless of what actually happened. I thought it was adorably unironic when Nuland said,

“There is no doubt in my mind, Senator, and it is classic Russian … uh … technique, to blame on the other guy, what they’re planning to do themselves.”

Yeah, that’s not just a Russian thing. You’ve literally described what you were doing in that sentence.

“You can vote against neocons all you want, but they never go away. The fact that a member of one of the most powerful neocon families in the U.S. has been running Ukraine policy for the U.S. for years — having gone from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton and Obama and now to Biden — underscores how little dissent there is in Washington on such questions. It is Nuland’s extensive experience in wielding power in Washington that makes her confession yesterday so startling: it is the sort of thing people like her lie about and conceal, not admit. But now that she did admit it, it is crucial that this revelation not be buried and forgotten.”

The White House is briefing TikTok stars about the war in Ukraine by Taylor Lorenz (Washington Post)

“This week, the administration began working with Gen Z For Change, a nonprofit advocacy group, to help identify top content creators on the platform to orchestrate a briefing aimed at answering questions about the conflict and the United States’ role in it. Victoria Hammett, deputy executive director of Gen Z For Change, contacted dozens with invitations via email and gathered potential questions for the Biden administration.”

In case you might be confused: this is 100% not state propaganda. That is what Russians do.

“The Washington Post obtained a recording of the call, and in it, Biden officials stressed the power these creators had in communicating with their followers. “We recognize this is a critically important avenue in the way the American public is finding out about the latest,” said the White House director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty, “so we wanted to make sure you had the latest information from an authoritative source.””

I repeat: 100% not propaganda. Just “mak[ing] sure you had the latest information from an authoritative source.” Pot-a-to, po-tah-to.

The byline of Taylor Lorenz should come as no surprise.

“Jules Terpak, a Gen Z content creator who makes TikTok essays about digital culture, said the White House’s decision to engage creators such as she was essential in helping to stop the spread of misinformation. “Those who have an audience can ideally set the tone for how others decide to assess and amplify what they see online,” she said.”

Ahahahahaha. OMG so far up their own asses.

“TikTok has been overrun with false and misleading news since the war broke out, and, on Thursday, the company said it finally would begin labeling state-controlled media on its platform.”

Obviously, influencers engaged by the U.S. State Department will not be subject to such labels.

“President Donald Trump often engaged online creators and Internet figures, and he hired an influencer marketing firm during his reelection campaign. On Wednesday, he appeared on the NELK boys “Full Send Podcast” where he spoke at length about the Iran nuclear deal and the U.S. strategic oil reserve. The episode was live on YouTube for only a few hours before it was removed for violating the platform’s policy on misinformation.”

Delivered utterly without irony. Our censorship is not censorship. Go back to your Two Minutes Hate (Wikipedia), you absolute fucking simps.

U.S. Condemns Russian Bombing Of Hospital As Horrific Act That Any World Power Could Theoretically Commit (The Onion)

“Biden went on to state that Russia’s gruesome crime against ordinary citizens was a tragedy that would go down in history, unlike some others, he added, that hopefully won’t.”

The NATO-Russia conflict spirals out of control by Editorial Board (WSWS)

“In the US media, there is an atmosphere of absolute war hysteria, with demands for further escalation made without the slightest concern for the consequences. The prospect of a nuclear third world war, for decades viewed as a civilization-ending cataclysm, is now debated on the Sunday talk shows.”

“War has a logic of its own. While Russia may have underestimated the response of NATO to the invasion, and NATO may have underestimated the response of Russia to its provocations, the working class cannot underestimate the danger of the crisis spiraling into a world war involving the use of nuclear weapons.”

Demonizing Russia Risks Making Compromise Impossible, and Prolonging the War by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch)

“The danger is that the understandable reaction to the butchery of civilians turns into all-embracing Russophobia that lets Putin off the hook and makes it very difficult to bring the war to an end. Thus, the owners of Facebook and Instagram are to allow users in some countries to say “Death to Putin” and express similar slogans about killing Russian soldiers, though not civilians.

“This is the modern equivalent of popular cries of “Hang the Kaiser” that became a slogan towards the end of the First World War. But this total demonisation of an enemy carries a price because it makes compromise impossible and ensures that wars will be fought to a finish.”

“It is chilling – and very First World War – to see the blitheness with which commentators now denounce compromise with Putin without understanding that this means a prolonged campaign which is all too likely to escalate into a nuclear conflict.”

Roaming Charges: The Thoughts That Pulled the Trigger by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“One of the most recurring complaints in my inbox […] is that I spend too much time criticizing NATO and the US instead of Putin. Let me be clear: I loathe Putin and his menacing regime, which has jailed several of my friends and CP writers (Boris K. several times). I think his invasion of Ukraine is reactionary, imperialistic and criminal. But I don’t have any influence over Putin or responsibility for his actions, except to the extent that my own government has helped set the stage for the unfolding carnage in Ukraine. As a US citizen whose taxes (such as they are) help finance the world’s largest and deadliest military machine, I have an inherent obligation to criticize my own govt. for provoking war and not peace, for risking the lives of millions of civilians to advance its dangerous geo-political objectives, for continuing to leave the entire planet cowering under the threat of nuclear annihilation thirty years after the end of the Cold War. There are no clean hands and ours are among the filthiest.”

Tom Engelhardt: Cold War II or World War III? by Tom Engelhardt (Scheer Post)

“If you look at the American experience, whether in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan (or the Russian experience in that same country), the one thing you know is that this can’t end well, not for Vladimir Putin or Joe Biden or Donald Trump or the rest of us, not on a planet that humanity insists on taking down. A tip of my hat goes to the outraged Russians who have hit the streets to protest the war in Ukraine, as Americans did (myself included), however briefly, in that spring of 2003 when the invasion of Iraq loomed.”

Cornel West Sees a Spiritual Decay in the Culture by Vinson Cunningham (New Yorker)

“You’re not dealing with deportation. You’re still locked into a very knee-jerk defense of NATO so that the militarism still goes on—everybody knows if Russia had troops in Mexico or Canada there would be invasions tomorrow. He sends the Secretary of State, telling Russia, “You have no right to have a sphere of influence,” after the Monroe Doctrine, after the overthrowing of democratic regimes in Latin America for the last hundred-and-some years. Come on, America, do you think people are stupid? What kind of hypocrisy can anybody stand?

“That doesn’t mean that Putin is not still a gangster—of course he is. But so were the folk promoting the Monroe Doctrine that had the U.S. sphere of influence for decade after decade after decade after decade, and anybody critical of you, you would demonize. Yet here are you, right at the door of Russia, and can’t see yourself in the mirror. That’s spiritual decay right there, brother, it really is.”

“We must first be in deep solidarity with our Ukrainian brothers and sisters who are suffering and resisting. We must also be in solidarity with our Russian brothers and sisters who are protesting and going to jail against the war. And we must try to stop the war, recognizing that the American empire has little or no moral authority when it comes to violation of international law and the overthrow of national sovereignty, as in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia.”

“And that’s why we have to be committed to being certain kinds of persons, no matter what the possibilities are for triumph. We have a chance of a snowball in Hell of fighting for freedom. We fight anyway, because it’s right and because it’s just. And we just get crushed when we get crushed, but we get crushed with a smile.”

Germany Deserves a Big Share of the Blame for the Ukraine Disaster by Dave Lindorff (CounterPunch)

“Of all the NATO member states, Germany is the one that should be standing firmly behind that solemn promise by Secretary Baker and then-President George H. W. Bush not to move NATO’s boundary any closer (his actual words were “Not one inch closer”), to Russia than the eastern border of the country.

“It was a kind of founding promise of the birth of a reunified Germany.

“Instead, Germany is supinely responding to the bloody war in Ukraine that its own cowardly acquiescence to US anti-Russia actions has allowed happen by announcing plans to significantly boost its arms spending (mostly by buying advanced military weapons from US arms makers).”

Journalism & Media

Russian-backed cable news network RT America shuts down by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“Camp went on, “For anyone to celebrate this brand of McCarthyism, this kind of mass censorship—I was censored on three platforms in the span of three days. My YouTube videos of Redacted Tonight were banned throughout Europe and the UK, my show was gone. And, on top of that, my personal podcast Moment of Clarity was deleted from Spotify in three days … the idea that anyone would celebrate this level of censorship is really tragic.””

“And giving context, if people think giving context is somehow justifying, that’s utter nonsense. We should be intelligent; we should understand the context of these issues.””

Orwell was Right by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“[…] seeing how pathetic and manipulative it is for Russians to prevent reporting on war casualties, we’d recall the folly of the ban we had for nearly twenty years on photographs of military coffins, or the continuing pressure on embeds to avoid publishing images of American deaths from our own war zones. We should be able to read that Twitter and Facebook are cracking down on the “fake accounts” spreading “misinformation” that “Ukraine isn’t doing well” and notice that Russia’s measures against “fake news” and “disinformation” about its own military failures — though far more draconian and carrying much more severe penalties — are rooted in the same concept.”

“Lying to others is shameful, but lying to ourselves and not even realizing it, that’s hardcore spiritual decay. We’re being driven faster toward the cliff-edge of this moral insanity with each new act of mass forgetting.”

“The ideal citizen of Orwell’s Oceania bubbled with rage a mile wide and a millimeter deep and could forget in an instant passions that may have consumed him or her for years. We just did this, with a pandemic that had the country steaming with indignation until it was quietly declared over the moment Putin rolled over Ukraine’s borders. We switched from “the pandemic of the unvaccinated” to “Putin’s price hikes” in a snap. National outrage moved a few lobes over with zero fuss, and now we hate new people; instead of “anti-vax Barbie,” we’re barring Russian and Belarussian kids from the Paralympics.”

Meet the Censored: Cherie DeVille by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“DeVille, who also writes for the [???] has been warning for years that the power private monopolies and duopolies like Visa and Mastercard have accrued in the digital economy should worry everyone, not just porn performers, that this problem would soon pop up in other arenas.”

“For the most part, however, the public shrugged at the idea of private companies working with governments to seize funds or deny services to groups or individuals who hadn’t even been charged with a crime.”

“Whether or not you agree with sex work as a profession, the precedent of our financial institutions having any control over freedom of speech, or becoming more important than laws and government, I think is a red flag in a variety of ways across the board that really have nothing to do with porn or adult content.”

“I work for a company, yes, that company is going to have my paperwork, but OnlyFans and other places like YouTube are distribution platforms. They have no ownership over my content, but now they have the IDs and personal information of all of my coworkers stored in their database. Are they even keeping that safe? And in what way? They don’t legally need that information. I legally need it. The only reason they need that is because of the financial institutions.”

“I love having a legal profession. I love having a profession that is protected because that gives me agency. That means that if something bad happens on set, I have legal recourse. When you push people’s careers underground because Visa and MasterCard have decided that you can’t put a whole hand in an ass, you’re creating an illegal environment for content and that’s just more unsafe.”

“Look at what HBO is producing. These are rules that only affect us. Can you imagine if, in mainstream, they weren’t allowed to combine sexual content with blood, or sexual content with non-consent? Take Euphoria even. I understand that none of those actors are under 18, but they’re basically showing pretend underage sex.”

“Sure, it’s great and it’s positive when we’re all digging it, but what about when it’s something we’re not digging? Who makes the rules and how do we decide? Is financial pressure even more powerful than military pressure? Who gets to make those choices for countries? It’s a new technological age.”

Science & Nature

From millionaires to Muslims, small subgroups of the population seem much larger to many Americans by Taylor Orth (YouGovAmerica)

“Amercians [sic] tend to vastly overestimate the size of minority groups. This holds for sexual minorities, including the proportion of gays and lesbians (estimate: 30%, true: 3%), bisexuals (estimate: 29%, true: 4%), and people who are transgender (estimate: 21%, true: 0.6%).

“It also applies to religious minorities, such as Muslim Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%) and Jewish Americans (estimate: 30%, true: 2%). And we find the same sorts of overestimates for racial and ethnic minorities, such as Native Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%), Asian Americans (estimate: 29%, true: 6%), and Black Americans (estimate: 41%, true: 12%).”

Why Can’t the CDC Tell the Truth About Smoking and Vaping by Teenagers? by Jacob Sullum (Reason)

“In the 2021 NYTS, less than 2 percent of high school students reported that they had smoked cigarettes in the previous month, down from 4.6 percent in 2020, 8.1 percent in 2018, and 15.8 percent in 2011. The CDC completely overlooks this good news, because it undermines the agency’s attempt to gin up public alarm about “tobacco use” by teenagers.

“The NYTS measured a sharp increase in past-month e-cigarette use by high school students between 2017 and 2019, which led to many warnings about the “epidemic” of underage vaping. But that rate, which peaked at 27.5 percent, fell to less than 20 percent in 2020 and about 11 percent in 2021.”

Philosophy & Sociology

The Revolutionary Feminism of Thomas Sankara by Adele Walton (Jacobin)

“Sankara’s International Women’s Day speech addressed not only the concerns of Burkinabe women but the systematic oppression of women globally. “Inequality can be done away with only by establishing a new society,” he declared, “where men and women will enjoy equal rights, resulting from an upheaval in the means of production and in all social relations. Thus, the status of women will improve only with the elimination of the system that exploits them.””

“During his presidency, he appointed women to government positions and amended the constitution, making it mandatory for presidents to have at least five women ministers in cabinet at all times. For Sankara, “Conceiving a development project without the participation of women is like using four fingers when you have ten.””

“A week before his assassination in a France-backed coup in October 1987, Sankara declared, “Whilst revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.” His words ring out today as we continue the struggle for a radical transformation of society, one that uplifts and empowers us all.”

Notes of a Russophile by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“I will not say that I was like George Orwell who went to Spain to “shoot fascists” but ended up spotting with his rifle only weak and confused human beings. But I did have the sharp sense at that moment that “the enemy” is an abstraction and as such perpetually evasive of the concretization of political resistance in the form of a street protest, and that the adolescent pump-attendant was not only not the enemy, but not even a suitable symbolic stand-in for the enemy. I hated apartheid. I also hated lying on the concrete at the gas-station, in part because I sensed, unlike my cohort of peaceniks, that this gesture really had nothing at all to do with apartheid, that we were not just missing our target, but failing even to understand what sort of thing our target was.”

“Restraint is what is needed, all around; restraint at its most magnificent can save the world, and at its most personal can help us to maintain our individual dignity.”

“I have been taken aback by the sudden proliferation of blue and gold bicolor flags, the appearance ex-nihilo of a whole new class of people suddenly passionate about Ukraine’s freedom, people who appear able to think only in slogans, and far too impatient to bother to follow out the geopolitical consequences of any given strategy for reestablishing this freedom.”

“[…] about the same amount of time, the Ukrainian flag has come to look like the kente cloth: a charged symbol that far too many people are throwing up without thinking about what they’re doing, so certain that it offers them a shorthand sig[n] of their own basic moral goodness that they become insensate to any call for caution or any spirit of defeasibility.”

“It may at least be said that the war has delivered us that “vibe shift” the young people had been predicting for a few weeks prior to the invasion. It has made old preoccupations seem irrelevant, drafts of essays begun before the invasion seem unfinishable. Those who feel no need for caution in their enthusiasms have been able to embrace this change, and to shift their ways of speaking with a quickness equal to the speed of history itself.”

“War changes the vibe, and casts us in a different light than before. The foolhardy now appear brave; the cautious appear cowardly.”

“Everything is topsy-turvy right now, I mean. We’re the same people as before, but the vibe-shift was total, and some who were ridiculous now have the occasion to be sublime, while others who were full of confident language really just do not know what to say.”

“One thing it is perhaps worth saying is that I love Russia, and I want no part of an anti-war movement that makes its case by contrasting the virtuous Ukrainians with the vicious Russians.”

“I have sometimes expressed a cautious admiration, two cheers out of a possible three, for the Soviet model of multiculturalism, which, however top-down and constraining, at least did a good job of institutionalizing minority identities, standardizing minority languages, stimulating a literary culture in them, and so on. Where the political integration within the federation is not in doubt, as for example the Tuvan Republic, Putinism tends to retain the Soviet model by inertia.”

“[…] another country’s flag is quickly becoming a de-rigueur semiotic accessory in ways that I also have trouble affirming, even if the cause is just.”

“It is therefore not because this time around I am not a citizen of the aggressor state that I find myself less than morally certain about how even to express my opposition to Russia’s invasion, but because I don’t think, say, the question of setting up a no-fly zone is the sort of thing that’s best resolved by upvoting or downvoting. The fact that all social movements, from urban-combat resistance in Ukraine to anti-police-brutality protests in the US, are fated to be quickly swallowed up into this gamified system, means that while twentieth-century great-power politics are still more relevant than we had become accustomed to thinking, we now have some additional and distinctly twenty-first-century problems that have to be navigated in parallel to the ones we have inherited.”

Silence, Insouciance, Takesmanship by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“In the present moment, I am stunned to see ordinary people expressing hostility towards individual Russians, past or present, with no connection to the Putin regime. I am even more stunned by the widespread toleration of this hostility by the media and by those in power, as if it were an unambiguous expression of righteous anger against the invasion. I see in it a deep confirmation of my fear that human beings are nothing more than bloodthirsty fools, and that there is no illusion more powerful than the belief in one’s own righteousness, which makes the thirst for blood appear as a virtue.”

“For the moment, as Russia imposes itself on our forgetful and easily distracted consciousness, no one is yet seeing the value of knowledge and history of the place; the righteous stance for the moment is proud ignorance, coupled with a vapid and transparently late-adopted Ukrainophilia.”

“I could have told you at any moment over this period that the new way of speaking was not underlain by any real commitments, and that what was motivating it could move on to another target or cause or victim, depending on how you see things, tomorrow. And so now, overnight, it is the Ukrainian diner at the corner, and not sporting kente cloth or lifting up BIPoC voices, that offers the surest signal of righteousness. But it is not sincere, it never was sincere, and it shrouds a horrifying bloodthirst.”

The Internet Is Not as New as You Think by Justin E.H. Smith (Wired)

“Female emperor moths emit pheromones that can be detected by males more than 15 kilometers away, which, correcting for size, is a distance comparable to the one traversed by even the most resonant sperm whale’s click. Nor is there any reason to draw a boundary between animals and other living beings. Numerous plant species, among them tomatoes, lima beans, sagebrush, and tobacco, use airborne rhizobacteria to send chemical information to their conspecifics across significant distances, which in turn triggers defense-related gene expression and other changes in the growth and development of the recipient. Throughout the living world, telecommunication is more likely the norm than the exception.”

“Some might object that, even if for the sake of argument it is conceded that sperm whales and elephants send out signals that may be processed as information—that is, as a symbolic encoding of propositional content that is then decoded by a conscious subject—the same surely may not be said of lima beans.”

“We may still ask why, when telecommunication in both conscious and unconscious life forms evidently involves the same principles and mechanisms, we assume that our own telecommunication is a product of consciousness, rather than being an ancient system that arose in the same way as lima bean signaling, and only belatedly began to allow our human consciousness to ride along with”

“[…] could it be, correlatively, that the internet is not best seen as a lifeless artifact, contraption, gadget, or mere tool, but as a living system, or as a natural product of the activity of a living system?”

“To some extent, telecommunication is just amplification: Simply to speak to a person in a normal voice is already to telecommunicate, even if at naturally audible distances we have learned to be unimpressed by this most of the time. But with a glass or a saucer or ear trumpet, the ordinary qualities of sound waves are magnified, and the possibility for total global surveillance of all conversations from a satellite of our planet becomes thinkable.”

“In the middle of the 19th century, a French anarchist and con man by the name of Jules Allix managed to convince at least a handful of Parisians that he had invented a “snail telegraph”—that is, a device that would communicate with another paired device at a great distance, thanks to the power of what Allix called “escargotic commotion.” The idea was simple, if completely fabricated. Based on the widely popular theory of animal magnetism proposed by Franz Mesmer at the end of the 18th century, Allix claimed that snails are particularly well suited to communicate by a magnetism-like force through the ambient medium. Once two snails have copulated with one another, he maintained, they are forever bound to each other by this force, and any change brought about in one of them immediately brings about a corresponding change in the other: an action at a distance.”

“The story of Jules Allix reminds us that a rigorous historian of science may learn just as much from the fakes and frauds as from the genuine article: Even when someone is lying, they are nonetheless doing the important work of imagining future possibilities.”

“In this minimal sense, the sperm whale’s clicks, the elephant’s vibrations, the lima bean plant’s rhizobacterial emissions, and indeed Lucian’s listening disc, are all varieties of wi-fi too, sending a signal through a preexisting “ether” to a spatially distant fellow member of their kind (and also, sometimes, to competitors and to prey of different kinds).”

“The spider’s web may be properly—meaning not only metaphorically—considered as the locus of its extended cognition. An arachnid’s nerves do not extend into the filaments it spreads out from its body, but the animal is evolved to apprehend vibrations in these filaments as a fundamental dimension of its sensory experience. The spider’s sensation is not “enhanced” by the vibrations it receives from the web, any more than my hearing is enhanced by the presence of a cochlea in my inner ear. Perceiving through a web is simply what it is to perceive the world as a spider.”

“And if we agree with the commonplace that a domestic pig or goat is an “artificial” being, in that it is nature transformed in the pursuit of human ends, why should we not also agree that the algae is farmed by fungus or the fungus is enlisted by the tree to pass chemical messages and nutrient packets along its roots (much as the internet is said to facilitate “packet switching”)? Why should we not agree that this technique is technology too? Or conversely, and perhaps more palatably for those who do not wish to rush to collapse the divide between the natural and the artificial: Why should we not see our own technology as natural technique?”

“Rather, Kant supposed, we will always be cognitively constrained, simply given the way our minds work, to apprehend biological systems in a way that includes, rightly or wrongly, the idea of an end-oriented design, even if we can never have any positive idea—or, as Kant would say, any determinate concept—of what the ends are or of who or what did the designing. In other words, we are constrained to cognize living beings and living systems in a way that involves an analogy to the things that we human beings design for our own ends—the clepsydras and ploughs, the smartphones and fiber-optic networks—even if we can never ultimately determine whether this analogy is only an unjustified carrying-over of explanations from a domain where they do belong into one where they do not.”

“[…] it is thus an unjustified anthropomorphization of ducks to attribute the capacity for such an action to them; and that moreover it is dangerous to do so, since to say that ducks rape is to naturalize rape and in turn to open up the possibility of viewing human rape as morally neutral. If rape is so widespread as to be found even among ducks, the worry went, then some might conclude that it is simply a natural feature of the range of human actions and that it is hopeless to try to eliminate it.”

“The same goes for ant cannibalism, for gay penguins, and so many other animal behaviors that some people would prefer to think of as distinctly human, either because they are so morally atrocious that extending them to other living beings risks normalizing them by naturalizing them, or because they are so valued that our sense of our own specialness among creatures requires us to see the appearance of these behaviors in other species as mere appearance, as simulation, counterfeit, or aping.”

“If we were not so attached to the idea that human creations are of an ontologically different character than everything else in nature—that, in other words, human creations are not really in nature at all, but extracted out of nature and then set apart from it—we might be in a better position to see human artifice, including both the mass-scale architecture of our cities and the fine and intricate assembly of our technologies, as a properly natural outgrowth of our species-specific activity.”

Technology

Question: Doesn’t DuckDuckGo just get its results from Bing anyway? Are they actually manipulating what must already be manipulated results even further? Or are they just dogpiling on the wave of “something must be done. This is something. Let’s do that.” hysteria?

So that means any results that include anything along the lines of “you know, America hasn’t always prioritized the world’s best interests” will be eliminated, right? Writing #NATORULEZ into the keywords will be standard SEO soon.

The crackdown on “those expressing support for Putin” is not to be welcomed. Who determines what constitutes “support”?

Programming

Microsoft Orleans (Microsoft Docs)

“Stream processing is reliable: grains can store checkpoints (cursors) and reset to a stored checkpoint during activation or at any subsequent time. Streams support batch delivery of messages to consumers to improve efficiency and recovery performance. Streams are backed by queueing services such as Azure Event Hubs, Amazon Kinesis, and others. An arbitrary number of streams can be multiplexed onto a smaller number of queues and the responsibility for processing these queues is balanced evenly across the cluster.”

“Orleans has become the framework of choice for building distributed systems and cloud services for many .NET developers.”

Video Games

Dysmantle is a Revelation and the One-Armed King is my God by Peter Welch (Still Drinking)

“In the real world, my career and my marriage may be at risk. I can’t remember why that seems important.”

“Analogy fails me here. Cocaine seems too strong and not strong enough. Crack was always superlative and anyway has fallen out of idiomatic favor. Perhaps smoking, but smoking is exquisite and unsatisfying,3 while Dysmantle is exquisite and satisfying. The best I can come up with is it’s like eating warm, rich milk chocolate sprinkled with sea salt and microdoses of psilocybin.”

“As abstract as the story is, it still informs direction, so elements of gameplay and discovery are interwoven as epiphanies explaining mysterious radio messages heard three days before. The interaction with the environment creates the story even more than the didactic elements.”

“Ways are blocked by cold and heat, water and broken bridges, broken circuit panels, poison gas, unopened teleportation gateways, and walls you can’t bring down until you can. Nothing feels forced or out of place, and all obstacles hint at the future moment when you will be able to swat them away like a god, making the initial, more difficult navigation a worthwhile pursuit.”

Putting Elden Ring’s 12 million sales in context by Kyle Orland (Ars Technica)

“The closest recent open-world analogue to Elden Ring’s sales is Cyberpunk 2077, which managed a whopping 13.7 million sales in its first 21 days despite launch issues that forced delistings and a widespread return program. Elden Ring is also matching pace with mega-hit Grand Theft Auto V, which sold about 29 million copies in six weeks after is 2014 launch. That game has since gone on to sell a mind-boggling 160 million copies across multiple hardware generations, although much of that long-tail success was driven by the continuing draw of GTA Online.”