Zelensky turned down a US offer of evacuation, the Ukraine Embassy in Britain said Saturday on Twitter. “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride,” Zelensky told the US, according to the embassy. — CNN Until his surprise election in 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy played a president on TV. Today, the 44-year-old is…
Saturday morning, gleaming sunlight upon pure fallen show, and at Starbucks I wrestle with words again. Each day presents a new contestation to say what is sayable. Before turning in last night I noted that on television an interview conducted with a female Ukrainian diplomat. By all appearances it was a measured, sober, responsible…
“Western leaders and diplomats,” she wrote, “think they live in a world where rules matter, where diplomatic protocol is useful, where polite speech is valued. All of them think that when they go to Russia, they are talking to people whose minds can be changed by argument or debate. They think the Russian elite…
The tendency of all … who have ever wanted to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life,…
All revolutions are aesthetic… Taste is power, and power is politics… So taste has enormous power to shape history. If it makes your scalp tingle, it’s art. “Bad taste is real taste, and good taste is just the residue of someone else’s privilege.” Jazz exemplifies the possibly doomed experiment of being totally free, with…
A Russian invasion of Ukraine would look like the kind of war that has been largely absent in the past 80 years and that was once common. It would involve a powerful nation setting out to expand its regional dominance by taking over a neighbor. A war like this — a voluntary war of…
Capitalism is an extractive circuit which quite literally crisscrosses the world. 1. Its global value chains stretch through physical infrastructure and “frictionless” financial flows at the speed allowed by telecommunications; fossil fuels; and geophysical, technological, psychosocial, and bodily limits and “optimizations.” 2. It connects economically and ecologically dispossessed agricultural communities in the Global South…
A long quotation on the role of violence, — some difficult issues consequent to deciding upon a violent act, necessary for survival. This world is a violent place. Homo Sapiens often have recourse to violence. Ask any who live in Ukraine, or who lived in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Syria… Places wet with blood,…
After more than five hours of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, there was little doubt Emmanuel Macron walked into the grizzly bear’s den — and he got mauled. With more than 100,000 Russian troops and heavy weapons massed on the Ukrainian border, the French president and his advisers had insisted that,…
We object to the inquisitors who want to create faith and virtue from without; We object to all forms of fascism which seek to fashion the happiness of man from without; And also the paternalism which thinks that it has done something for [humankind] by prohibiting him from certain possibilities of temptation, whereas what…
