Hello, neighbour

I spent a few hours last week trying — mostly unsuccessfully — to photograph the birds clustering round our bird-feeders. This is a poor photograph, technically speaking, but it’s the best of the bunch.

I set up my Nikon D700 on a tripod with a very good lens and remote control focused on particular feeders. It’s an excellent full-frame camera, but because it’s a single-lens reflex, it flips up the mirror before taking a picture. The blue-tits have such acute hearing and fast reflexes that they’re gone the moment the mirror starts to flip and there’s nothing to see when the shutter opens to take the picture!

My initial conclusion: anyone who thinks wild-life photography is easy has never done it.

Our holiday from history is over

A product of a weekend spent brooding on what’s happening in Ukraine…

Ever since Brexit and the election of Trump in 2016 I’ve had a sinking feeling that, in the long view of history, the post-war-era (the seven decades from 1946 to 2016) would come to be seen as a blip — a brief period in which democracy expanded and significant segments of the world (though of course not all — think Korea, Indochina, India & Pakistan, the Congo, the Middle East, just to name a few) came to regard peace, stability and some degree of prosperity as normal.

2016 was a pivotal moment because it highlighted the extent to which this comforting perception was the solipsistic illusion of a particular generation — mine. I’m a baby-boomer, a member of that lucky cohort of post-war Western babies who were the main beneficiaries of the period; we had free education, good jobs and careers, were able to own our own homes, had good healthcare and interesting lives, and wound up with generous pensions. And so when the Soviet empire imploded and disintegrated in 1989-1991 we complacently agreed with Francis Fukuyama that the world had indeed arrived at ‘the end of history’ with the future belonging to what we grandly called ‘liberal democracy’.

In the process, what we failed to notice was that that vaunted democracy hadn’t been so good for many of our fellow-citizens. The globalised economic system that had provided us with the good things in life had systematically and inexorably impoverished and excluded them, leaving them in post-industrial wastelands picturesquely called ‘rustbelts’. As Thomas Piketty rudely pointed out, this economic system had somehow managed to restore inequality to the levels it had before the First World War — an outcome that our politics had consistently failed to notice, or do much about. This was in part because Western political elites had been drinking the neoliberal Kool Aid since the 1970s and so allowed our democracies to morph into what John Kennith Galbraith, had he lived to see it, would surely have called The New Corporate State.

The political earthquakes represented by the Brexit vote in the UK and Trump’s election in the US should have dented our confidence in the triumphalist Fukuyama narrative (it certainly did that for me). A better reading of those shocks would have been to accept that history hadn’t come to an end and we were about to enter another phase. Or perhaps even a repetition of stuff that had gone before.

Which I fear is what we’re now seeing in Ukraine. The supposedly ‘smart’ super-integrated Russian military machine turns out to be not that smart after all, and is bogged down in a longer struggle than its dictatorial master envisaged. Which is why, in recent days, it is returning to type — or, more accurately, to a script we have seen before: a script that calls for the reduction of everything to smoking ruins, regardless of the collateral damage.

Those with long memories will recall that when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, a tiny (population 1.5m) Muslim republic in Southern Russia began agitating for independence. Boris Yeltsin launched an invasion of the country, with heavy artillery bombing everything in sight, but failed to quell the insurgency. So in 1996 Yeltsin signed a peace treaty with Chechnya, removed all Russian troops from the territory and granted broad autonomy to Chechnya, though not formal independence.

This ‘humiliation’ seems to have infuriated Vladimir Putin, who became Yeltsin’s Prime Minister in August 1999, and within months launched a renewed bombing campaign which bombed Grozny flat and this time succeeded in taking control of the little statelet and installing a puppet regime.

My fear is that what we’re seeing in Ukraine is this history repeating itself. But what do I know about these things? Interestingly, though, Thomas de Wall, an experienced journalist who does know about these things — and who covered the war in Chechnya, also sees the parallels. “There was a project,” he writes,

“to restore Chechnya to Russian control, and nowadays in 2022, to restore Ukraine to the Russian sphere of influence. And there was no Plan B. Once the people started resisting, which came as a surprise in Chechnya and is coming as a surprise in Ukraine, there was no political Plan B about what to do with the resistance.

There’s clearly no Russian Plan B for Ukraine. If that is indeed the case, then we know what’s likely to happen.

When Chechnya was being obliterated in 1999, most of us paid little attention. After all, it wasn’t a European country. But Ukraine is.

Our complacent post-1946 holiday has really come to an end.

Quote of the Day

”How smart is that? I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine, of Ukraine, Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful … And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. … There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right. … Here’s a guy who’s very savvy… I know him very well. Very, very well.

• Donald Trump, two weeks ago.

Trump’s way of talking is weird. He always reminds me of the know-all drunks one used to meet in saloon bars.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Grateful Dead | Deep Elem Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

Putin’s Challenge To The American Right

Terrific blast from Andrew Sullivan.

Steve Bannon summed it up: “Putin ain’t woke. He’s anti-woke.” Congressman Madison Cawthorn took it further: “Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt, and it is incredibly evil, and it has been pushing woke ideologies.” That plucky little Zelensky, speaking live to the British House of Commons as bombs rained down on his country’s cities? An “incredibly evil” “thug.” Our old friend Dinesh D’Souza, in his usual temperate style, sees the Democrats as posing “a far greater threat to our freedom and safety than Putin.” And Bannon is still urging his minions to give “zero dollars to Ukraine,” even as the corpses of children lie on the streets. There’s an alt-right edginess to this moral perversity.

And over the years, this drumbeat of love for the Russian dictator shifted the views of many grassroots Republicans. In the wake of Trump’s personal infatuation with Putin, the murderer’s favorability among Republicans jumped from 10 percent in 2014 to 37 percent by December 2016. Until as recently as January this year, “62 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents considered Vladimir Putin a stronger leader than Joe Biden.” That’s the primrose path down which the GOP led its supporters — seeing Putin as a more legitimate president than Biden.

The last two weeks, to put it mildly, have pummeled this narrative…

Great essay. The problem with Putin, as Trump will eventually discover, is that in the end he will be a ‘loser’. And the thing we will all have to worry about then is the stupendous economic power that’s brought ruination to Russia.

The DAO of Blockchain

Yesterday’s Observer column:

In 1982, a guy called Benjamin Hoff, who was then employed as a tree-pruner in the Portland Japanese Garden in Oregon, published a charming little book, The Tao of Pooh, in which he argued that AA Milne’s bear had ways of doing things that appeared to echo some of the principles of Taoism, the ancient Chinese philosophy. Taoism teaches the various disciplines for achieving perfection through self-reflection, and one of its central concepts is that of pu – the idea that you should always be open to, but unburdened by, experience.

The Tao of Pooh was a runaway success, spending 49 weeks on the New York Times’s bestseller list. This has given this newspaper columnist, whose occupation is even humbler than that of tree-pruner, an idea for a new, timely bestseller, the title of which – The Dao of Blockchain – neatly embodies two buzzwords for the price of one.

Let me explain…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

• 27 Meaningful Ways You Can Help Ukraine Link

• You can also donate to the Disaster Emergency Committee (My own preferred route.)

• Other good ideas for support from The Ukrainian Institute in London

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Nothing is perfect

A gable-sized mural spotted yesterday in a Cambridgeshire village.

On reading, writing and reviewing

I read too much. And then, the moment after typing that sentence, I think, No! I don’t read enough — because I’m continually humbled by regular discoveries of books I ought to have read, but haven’t. Since there are only 24 hours in the day I try to compensate by seeking out reviews of books that fall into that category. I try to be choosy — in terms of looking for reviews by people who are informed and whose judgement is sound. But finding such people is sometimes an imperfect science.

I’m current reading Helen Thompson’s new book — Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century.

It’s terrific — deeply serious and learned, but not something one can skim, because she thinks we need three different kinds of history to understand how we came to be in the mess we’re currently in — histories that she then provides in depth. And as I wend my way through it — currently resisting the temptation to read other people’s reviews of it — I found myself thinking, Thank God I’m not reviewing it!. Which suddenly reminded me of a thought that Virginia Woolf once confided to her diary, and so I went looking for that.

Ah, here it is! The entry for Saturday 18 February, 1922, when she is recovering from a long (six-week) bout of influenza that knocked her out for a while.

She’s been reading La Princesse de Cléves, which Wikipedia describes as “a French novel which was published anonymously in March 1678. It was regarded by many as the beginning of the modern tradition of the psychological novel and a great classic work. Its author is generally held to be Madame de La Fayette”.

Woolf thinks it’s wonderful but also hard going. And then she writes:

Thank God … I am not reviewing it. Within the last few minutes I have skimmed the reviews in the New Statesman; between coffee & cigarette I read the Nation: now the best brains in England (metaphorically speaking) sweated themselves for I don’t know how many hours to give me this brief condescending sort of amusement. When I read reviews I crush the columns to get at one or two sentences; is it a good book or a bad? And then I discount those 2 sentences according to what I know of the book & of the reviewer. But when I write a review I write every sentence as if it is going to be tried before 3 Chief Justices: I cant believe that I am crushed together and discounted. Reviews seem to me more & more frivolous. Criticism on the other hand absorbs me more and more.

I so love Woolf’s Diaries. But now I really need to get back to Helen’s book…

Quote of the Day

“Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow-creatures is amusing in itself.”

• J.A. Froude, 1886

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Emmy Lou Harris and Mark Knopfler | Why Worry

Link

The song ends at 4’40” into the video — the remainder is just slow-scrolling titles.

Long Read of the Day

Communities of Extraction

As panic about the implications of a boycott of Russian oil and gas increases, stand by for massive lobbying by the extractive industries for a more relaxed regulatory attitude towards fracking proposals.

This striking paper by Wyatt Sassman of the marvellous Law and Political Economy Project provides a graphic illustration of how the politics of fracking exacerbate local inequality and pollute politics. In Colorado, for example, those politics

concentrated harms closer to people without meaningful oversight of industry siting, raising obvious distributional risks. There is perhaps no better example than the massive project located behind the Bella Romero Academy’s middle school campus. Denver-based company Extraction Oil & Gas had originally proposed to drill dozens of wells next to Frontier Academy, a school serving a largely white community in Greeley, Colorado. When the community organized against the project, Extraction relocated it next to Bella Romero Academy—a school serving a comparatively low-income, Latino community outside of Greeley in unincorporated Weld County, Colorado.

As a patent example of environmental injustice, the project received national and statewide attention. In a story run in the New York Times, one Bella Romero parent explained: “It’s like they said, ‘Put it where the Mexicans live, over there it’s O.K.’” Supported by environmental and racial justice groups, parents and nearby community members organized to oppose the project. Yet Extraction maintained that this was its preferred location, and the socio-legal structures fell into place: permits were issued, hearings denied, lawsuits filed, injunctions denied, wells drilled, wells fracked, and appeals lost. Weld County commissioners unanimously approved the project, publicly “blistering” its opponents as alarmist and opposed to the county’s economic growth.

There’s more shocking detail in the piece, which is what makes it well worth reading.

Big Tech is racing to swallow other companies before the Biden regulators strike

Google’s $5.4 billion bid to buy cybersecurity firm Mandiant is the latest in a string of high-dollar acquisitions by Big Tech.

• Microsoft announced a $68 billion deal for video game company Activision Blizzard in January.
• Amazon is under regulatory review for its $8.45 billion purchase of Hollywood studio MGM, announced last year.
• Meta (then Facebook) bought Kustomer for $1 billion and Giphy for $400 million in 2020, just a few months before the FTC sued the company over past acquisitions.

Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, says: “The new generation of antitrust enforcers will not be bullied.”

Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter warned in a January speech that he’s skeptical of conditions imposed by regulators that are meant to “fix” mergers — and instead will seek to block deals likely to reduce competition.

Why frantic Ukrainians are having such trouble getting British visas

I thought it was just the Foreign Office’s incompetence. Turns out that’s not the whole answer. It looks as though a better explanation might be that the government outsourced the visa process to an outfit called TLSContact, another one of those ‘service’ corporations that leech off the public sector.

Here are a few excerpts from openDemocracy’s report on the scandal:

It was claimed yesterday in Parliament that TLSContact’s visa centre in Rzeszow, Poland, had turned away applicants who had queued in freezing temperatures for hours, saying it had no slots available until the end of April. Reports on social media claimed the firm had been pressuring Ukrainians to pay for extra services beyond its basic free appointments.

The Labour MP Clive Efford slammed the situation as “complete chaos”.

Now it has emerged that the home secretary was told by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration in November 2021 that TLSContact was so hell-bent on making profit that its use posed a risk of “reputational damage” to the UK. The firm has been handed government contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds since 2014.

I’ve just looked at the Report. Here’s a sample from its conclusions:

Inspectors recognised that AVS [Added Value Services], provided by the CPs [Commercial Partners], are an important revenue stream for those companies and provide customers with an element of choice within their application process. The Home Office made it clear to inspectors that AVS are optional for applicants. However, respondents to the CfE indicated that, due to the complicated nature of the available guidance and the way AVS are “packaged” on the website, they were uncertain as to whether they should purchase these services to ensure that the Home Office viewed their application favourably. This view was supported by stakeholders, who were particularly concerned about the vulnerability of customers who may pay more in an attempt to influence the process. Customers who are not represented by agents face further uncertainty as to what services they should be purchasing and may end up paying for services that they do not require, adding to their financial burden.

Now back to openDemocracy’s story…

Staff working in UK diplomatic missions overseas have also expressed concern about the reputational impact of this “upselling” of AVS, particularly considering this may be the first interaction an individual has with the UK immigration system.

“Its sole focus is income generation. The human aspect is not at all valued,” one British Embassy whistleblower told the chief inspector.

The whistleblower added: “There are applicants being persuaded to buy unnecessary additional services at the [visa application centres]… The most recent contract with external commercial partners has meant that it is through ‘upselling’ these additional services that partners make their money.”

A British man who fled Kyiv with his Ukrainian family told openDemocracy he had been given a waiting time of 13 days for a visa appointment at TLSContact’s Budapest centre.

So how much does TLSContact get paid for their ‘services’?

It turns out that its parent company, Teleperformance Ltd, was awarded a £167m contract by the Home Office in 2014 to run the UK’s visa centres across Europe under the TLSContact brand.

And if you think that name rings a bell, then it should: The company was also paid nearly £259m by the UK Department of Health to run call centres for its dysfuntional Test and Trace programme during the pandemic.

It’d be nice to think that this was just an outlier, but actually it’s the new normal for a British state whose capacity has been hollowed out by decades of neoliberal outsourcing of critical tasks to private corporations.

My commonplace booklet

Cognitive Dissonance Rules OK

I sometimes think that the biggest single problem with us humans is our capacity for cognitive dissonance — the ability to believe two (or more) contradictory things at the same time. For example:

• A recent Pew survey reveals that a majority of Americans want to be carbon neutral but are unwilling to back the economic and political steps needed to achieve that.

• Likewise many if not most Internet users say they are worried that their privacy is being undermined by social media. But they continue to use said media. When challenged, they shrug and say they don’t have any alternative.

• Similarly, the claim that nobody who learns how animals are slaughtered for human consumption would ever eat meat again seems to be false.

• People (including British ex-pats) who voted for Brexit are infuriated when it turns out that their freedom to own houses and take vacations in the EU is severely curtailed.

And so on and so on.

As they say in Yorkshire: There’s *nowt so queer as folk.*

(Oh — and since you ask, I too suffer from cognitive dissonance.)

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Venice by night

Quote of the Day

“All the clever people end up in the Cabinet Office, all the ****s end up in the Foreign Office and all the brain dead morons end up in the Home Office.”

• An unnamed UK government official, in a text to Politico yesterday on the Home Office’s catastrophic failure to address the needs of Ukrainian refugees seeking entry to ‘global Britain’.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven | Symphony No.9 | Ode an die Freude (Ode to Joy)

Link

The Kyiv Classic orchestra played this in Maidan Square yesterday. I couldn’t find a recording of the entire performance, but I thought that this flash-mob performance from (I think) Spain fitted the mood. And of course it’s also the EU’s anthem, which makes it extra poignant. Watch the video and marvel at the children’s responses to the performance.

Long Read of the Day

The Dawn of Uncivilization

Remarkable essay by Peter Savodnik about Western (and particularly US) hubris, post-1989.

Here’s a sample from his time as a post-Soviet-collapse American reporter in Russia.

On one of those reporting forays, I wound up in Khabarovsk, seven time zones away from Moscow, where I’d gone to write about a Ukrainian stripper and her husband, an American G.I. who’d gotten himself in trouble. On my last night in town, I went to a dinner party in a microscopic, poorly lit Khrushchyovka, one of the countless apartments built under Nikita Khrushchev.

Toward the end, after all the vodka, the herring, the soup, the dumplings, more vodka, black bread, more vodka, one of my hosts, an older gentleman who had been a professor of literature, told me, as so many Russians had, “You can give up writing philosophical articles about Russia. You will never know it.” Ah, yes, this again. My outsiderness. “My sunny disposition doesn’t prohibit me from writing about your country,” I said, a bit too earnestly, in very stilted Russian that I had spent years slaving away at. Speaking slowly to make sure I didn’t miss anything, he replied: “It’s not your sunny disposition. It’s your frame of reference. Your frame of reference is America. But Russia does not want to be America. Russia exists in a parallel universe.”

At the time, I thought, Russia doesn’t know what it wants. There was little doubt by then about Vladimir Putin’s orientation, but Russians were another matter. It wasn’t just that they liked American popular culture—everyone did. It was that there was too much interaction between us and them. Too much business, cultural exchange, hop-scotching between New York and Moscow and Los Angeles and Vladivostok. We were connected now. Was that not validation of the Great American Promise?

In retrospect, the professor saw something—everything—that I did not.

We were not at the start of something brilliant and beautiful, but in the middle of a very short in-between…

There’s lots more like that. It’s a very interesting piece. And it has a chilling closing para:

Vladimir Putin knows how much daylight there is between hard geopolitical reality and American rhetoric. But we prefer to hew to the old platitudes. They make us think that we can rewind or undo or make things better if we just say the right things. It is time to imagine what our president seems incapable of: a new order, jungle-like, shot through with the fevers and hatreds of the world as it had always been before. Uncivilization.

The new Silent Majority — people who don’t tweet

In the findings of a fascinating survey by the Pew Foundation on social media use in the US there’s one amazing discovery: only 23% use Twitter — which means that over three-quarters of American Internet users have never tweeted.

This has all kinds of interesting implications, of which the most important is that old and new media should stop treating what appears on Twitter as representative of society as a whole. It’s actually a weird and unrepresentative subset of humanity — the part of it that has short attention spans and a tendency to outrage, over-excitement, virtue-signalling and sometimes hysteria. And the fact that something is ‘trending’ on Twitter tells us nothing other than that particular subset of humanity is excited about it.

I’ve used Twitter a bit ever since it first appeared (I’m @jjn1), and for a time I celebrated it as the newswire service for the ordinary person, not just the mainstream media. I understand that some of my friends and colleagues put it to very good and serious uses, and admire them for that. But most of the time I can only tolerate Twitter in short purposeful bursts. And I found my feed became a good deal less annoying when I found a way of turning off retweets.

More on the Victorian “gauge wars”

One reader was unimpressed by Patricia Fara’s piece that was yesterday’s Long Read. He writes:

Patricia Fara’s ‘History Today’ piece badly exaggerates the duration of the dispute over railway gauges. She herself says: ‘The 1846 Act decreed that future tracks should all be narrow gauge, but it permitted the broad track ones to remain and – crucially for Brunel – to be extended.’ The only new broad gauge lines built after that were contiguous with the existing routes. Making them narrow gauge would have inserted two extra changes of gauge, for example crossing from Plymouth into Cornwall. She continued, ‘Brunel kept building and kept fighting, although by the end of the century he had admitted defeat.’ Actually, he died in 1859. From then on, the difference of gauges was a problem for the GWR, which spent 30 years and a lot of money changing its tracks and its trains to standard gauge. It thus fell behind other railways in improving its routes and services for the growing traffic of the 1860s-1880s. And she fails to make a crucial point about lessons for today, that HS2, by being built to different standards (but not a different gauge) is not properly compatible with the existing network. As for Queen Victoria, the only reason for going from Portsmouth to Aberdeen via Gloucester could have been that she wanted to enjoy the scenery: it would have been (and still is today) shorter and quicker to go via London – all on standard gauge.

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Redirection done right

Seen on a wall in Aups.

Quote of the Day

”Fighting fire with fire only gets you ashes.”

• Abigail van Buren

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | Limerick’s Lamentation

Link

This is a very old Irish tune which derives its title from the siege and fall of the city of Limerick to the English forces of Ginkel in 1691, at the end of the Williamite Wars. The tune is sometimes known as “Sarsfield’s Lamentation” from the name of the commander of the Irish forces at Limerick. Seems appropriate to a day spent watching footage of Ukrainians being forced from their homes by Russian shelling.

Long Read of the Day

The Battle of the Gauges 

A nice diversionary piece of railway history by Patricia Fara in History Today:

Queen Victoria was definitely not amused. Whenever she travelled from her estate on the Isle of Wight to her castle at Balmoral, she encountered the inconvenience of twice changing trains, once at Basingstoke and again at Gloucester. She had no choice: even royalty was obliged to mind the gap between railway tracks of different widths. Stations were regularly plunged into chaos as angry passengers and their cumbersome luggage were transferred between two sizes of train, while disgruntled manufacturers repeatedly protested about the delays and expense caused by the transition from one gauge to another. The Railway Clearing House estimated that each track shift added the equivalent of 20 miles to transport costs, but the business titans in charge refused to yield. By 1866, despite numerous attempts to impose conformity, there were still around 30 stations in Britain where the rails abruptly altered width.

This clash of wills and technologies – soon dubbed the Battle of the Gauges – lasted for decades. The major conflict was between supporters of narrow gauge and broad gauge tracks, which might sound as farcical as the episode in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, when the Lilliputians argue about whether boiled eggs should be opened at the big end or the little one…

Personally I always open mine at the larger end and regard anyone who does otherwise as potentially a bad egg.

The essay calls to mind the age-old dispute over VHS and BetaMax. And the Victorian dispute was resolved the same way. Sometimes history does repeat itself.

Does Wordle prove that we can have nice things on the Internet?

I’d seen the fuss about Wordle but had paid no attention to it until the New York Times paid its developer, Josh Wardle, a million bucks for it. Yesterday, I dug it out on my phone and played the game for the first time. I can now see why it’s popular and a bit addictive. But I won’t be playing it for the simple reason that life’s too short.

Still, I was interested in its developer, so when when I came on this New Yorkerpiece by Andrew Marantz, I stopped to read.

The first time I met Josh Wardle—four years before he invented the simple game that would make his last name, or a slant rhyme of it, unexpectedly famous—he was in Reddit’s San Francisco headquarters, in a state of near-panic, wondering whether one of his online experiments was about to descend into chaos. It was March 31, 2017. Wardle’s experiment was called Place: a blank canvas, a thousand white pixels by a thousand white pixels, which Reddit users could digitally deface in any way they pleased. I was on assignment for this magazine, reporting a story about Reddit, where Wardle then worked as a product manager. The central question of my story was also the central question of Wardle’s work, if not of the Internet itself: Can online spaces be designed so that the benefits of frictionless mass participation outweigh the costs?

Wardle had run such experiments before, and he’d learned a few lessons, the simplest of which was “keep things simple.” He had designed Place with a time constraint—each participant could change the color of one pixel every five minutes, no more—which would, he hoped, encourage collaboration. Other than that, there were essentially no rules. When such unbounded experiments go well, we tend to describe them using words like “democracy” and “freedom”; when they don’t, we more often invoke “entropy” or “mayhem.”

Do read the whole thing. Wardle is an interesting chap.

My commonplace booklet

 How To Best Use Twitter. Useful advice from Zvi Mowshowitz.

My own tip is to turn off retweets. Luca Hammer (Whom God Preserve) has a guide to how to do it.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Open Vincent

The gates to the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh in Arles.

Quote of the Day

”Everything is funny, so long as it’s happening to someone else.”

• Will Rogers

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sting | Russians

Link

Sting has resurrected this song, written under the shadow of another nuclear confrontation. Fits the mood of the present perfectly.

Many thanks to Neil Sequeira for alerting me to it.

Long Read of the Day

Space and Time

This is an unmissable analysis of the current state of the Russian invasion by Lawrence Freedman, one of the foremost scholars of warfare. The basic thrust of the essay is that Putin is running out of options as the ($500m to $1B a day) costs of the war mount and his army is apparently in disarray, at least in the North.

The decisions of numerous individuals will determine how this war ends. Can Ukrainian civilians remain steadfast in the face of merciless Russian bombardment? Can the apparently high Ukrainian morale be sustained through a major setback? And on the Russian side, what happens as people realise that they have been misled about the war’s purpose and that their young men have died in an exercise in futility? How are soldiers, many conscripts, responding to the frightening and unexpected situation in which they find themselves? What about officers, alarmed about their lost men and equipment and lack of reserves, unable either to fulfil their orders or to retreat? How do Putin’s courtiers, aware that the war is going badly, explain to their leader the dire consequences of the current strategy? And then there is Putin. At some point will it dawn on him that he has failed in the greatest gamble of his career?

If Freedman is right and Putin is ultimately destined to be cornered, that’s not necessarily good news for the world, though. Not all cornered animals have their paws on a nuclear button.

On the other hand… Politico had this interesting take on it yesterday:

Former Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Andrei Kozyrev tweeted a fascinating assessment of Putin’s military objectives and rationale last night. Kozyrev believes Putin “is a rational actor” who made three major “miscalculations”: he “started to believe his own propagandists” that Ukraine was led by Nazis … his military advisers lied to him about the state of the Russian army … and he believed his own propaganda that U.S. President Joe Biden is “mentally inept” and the EU “weak.” This leads Kozyrev to argue that Putin is not mad, but “wrong and immoral.” He adds: “Given that he is rational, I strongly believe he will not intentionally use nuclear weapons against the West … The ultimate conclusion here is that the West should not agree to any unilateral concessions or limit its support of Ukraine too much for the fear of nuclear war.”

And another thing… All those speculations about whether Putin is unhinged may actually be suiting his purposes. As Tim Harford observed at the weekend, Thomas Schelling’s book The Strategy of Conflict contains this interesting thought:

“It is not a universal advantage in situations of conflict to be inalienably and manifestly rational in decisions and motivation.”

And for once… I find myself agreeing with Ross Douhat:

We don’t need to take wild nuclear risks to defeat Putin in the long run. The voices arguing for escalating now because we’ll have to fight him sooner or later need to recognize that containment, proxy wars and careful line-drawing defeated a Soviet adversary whose armies threatened to sweep across West Germany and France, whereas now we’re facing a Russian army that’s bogged down outside Kyiv.

We were extremely careful about direct escalation with the Soviets even when they invaded Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan, and the result was a Cold War victory without a nuclear war. To escalate now against a weaker adversary, one less likely to ultimately defeat us and more likely to engage in atomic recklessness if cornered, would be a grave and existential folly.

WAR 101

If, like me, you’ve been wondering what it must be like to suddenly become a soldier, then this guidance from an American combat veteran might be helpful.

You’re a 22-year-old Ukrainian who has just been handed a Kalashnikov, four magazines of thirty rounds, a helmet, and body armor. Last week you were studying architecture at Kyiv National University. Now you’re standing in the lead rank. An officer counts off and puts a hand on your shoulder. “You’re a fire team leader.” He points at the next three people in your rank. “That’s your team.”

There are three people behind you. You’ve never seen them before. They await your command.

Generals are not, contrary to popular belief, the most critical decision-makers on a battlefield. The leaders of the fire teams are. The fire team is the smallest unit in battle, usually made up of three people and a leader…

Read on. It’s an eye-opener.

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The intruder

This handsome bird photographed on one of her regular visits to our garden.

She comes daily to nibble and peck under the bird-feeders, from which the Blue Tits, Robins, Great Tits and the occasional Starling dislodge fragments of seeds and peanuts.

It’s back to the future, with a vengeance

The ‘back’ in this case is 1939. The thought was triggered by an insightful piece by Neal Acherson in today’s Observer.

Putin isn’t Hitler. He will die a disappointed old nuisance in exile somewhere, rather than by Heldentod suicide in his bunker. Both men qualify as psychopathic dictators, swaddled from reality in fantasies of geopolitical revenge. But Putin’s grip on the Russian imagination is weaker than Hitler’s on the Germans. And his use of police terror against his own people, though horrifying, is distinctly less effective.

All the same, that wise historian Margaret MacMillan sees one desperately important parallel. Both men have meant what they said. And in both cases they were not taken seriously until it was too late. Hitler raved on in public about getting rid of the Jews and conquering Lebensraum in eastern Europe. But the “other Hitler”, in private, could sometimes talk quite charmingly and constructively about possible agreements. Obviously, foreign visitors concluded, the public stuff was just for show while the “serious” Hitler was revealing his real mind. Diametrically wrong! The crazy speeches gave his true intentions; the sober reflections over coffee were all lies. With Putin, the west wrote off his increasingly wild talk about breaking Nato’s encirclement and restoring Russia’s dominion over post-Soviet space. He couldn’t be serious. Under the bluster, wasn’t there still that shrewd, cautious Putin with whom one could do business? But Ukraine proves the opposite. The imperial dream is what he means. The meetings with western leaders across that long table, hinting at terms for a bargain, were all fake.

That’s why we’re back to 1939. The big difference is that there were no nuclear weapons then — which is why those of us who remember the Cuban Missile Crisis are so alarmed by the present crisis. Especially when one recalls that the two main actors in that drama — JFK and Kruschev — were both rational beings. (The irrational ones on the US side were the military, led by Curtis LeMay and Kennedy’s great achievement was to keep them under control.) But if Acherson’s parallel with Hitler is accurate, then apocalyptic irrationality may be on the cards. Indeed, one of the most important questions may be whether the Russian nuclear command would actually implement an order from Putin to launch a strike. (See this thread for some interesting commentary on the Russian chain of command.)

Putin’s been ranting that Western economic sanctions constitute “acts of war”, implying that they justify massive retaliation. But although they are doubtless inflicting pain on Russians, there is one overlooked aspect that may make them easier to bear, as Adam Tooze points out on his blog: Russian gas continues to flow into Europe,

with European customers now paying even more exorbitant prices, Russia is benefiting from a staggering surge in revenue. According to Javier Blas of Bloomberg, at the start of the year, Russia was earning $350 million per day from oil and $200 million per day from gas. On March 3 2022 Europe paid $720 million to Russia for gas alone.

So every day at the moment, Russia’s income from gas alone is $720m a day. And it’ll probably increase even more in the coming weeks. We’re in for a long haul.

Quote of the Day

”Love is not the distant moan of a dying violin — it’s the triumphant twang of a bedspring.”

• S.J. Perelman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chad Lawson | When the Party’s Over | Live At Wigmore Hall

Link

Given that our post-WW2 party is definitely over, I thought this might be appropriate for today.

Long Read of the Day

I Can See It (But I Can’t Feel It)

Lovely essay by Drew Austin on “the Millennial Aesthetic“ and how the Internet (and Instagram in particular) has transformed the physical world. It’s an elegant rant against “the Instagram-optimized settings that have proliferated in cities during the past decade — places that the Blackbird Spyplane blog describes as

a “high-efficiency, low-humanity kind of eatery where you point yr phone at a QR code and do contactless payment before eating a room-temp grain bowl under a pink neon sign that says ‘Living My Best Life’ in cursive.”

The world is increasingly divided between people who are addicted to Instagram and those who are not. I belong to the latter — which often surprises people, given that I’m a keen photographer. They are not convinced by my reply — that I have a life to live and work to do.

Anyway, hope you enjoy this essay.

Ukraine’s victories in the ‘TikTok war’ won’t stop the missiles

Yesterday’s Observer column:

So is the conflict in Ukraine – as some of the world’s media seem to think, the “TikTok war” – or, more generically, “the first social media war”? As Russian tanks rolled into the country, videos of frightened people huddling together, explosions blasting through urban streets and missiles streaking across Ukrainian skies suddenly replaced TikTok’s usual fare of memes, jokes, fitness and dance videos. “Ukrainian social media influencers,” reported Reuters, “uploaded bleak scenes of themselves wrapped in blankets in underground bunkers and army tanks rolling down residential streets, juxtaposed against photos of blooming flowers and laughing friends at restaurants that honoured more peaceful memories of their home towns. They urged their followers to pray for Ukraine, donate to support the Ukrainian military and demanded Russian users in particular to join anti-war efforts.” TikTok users across the country began livestreaming the war and the buildup of Russian forces, denying Vlad the Invader the ability to dominate the narrative about what was happening.

All of which is impressive. It was a light (sometimes the only light last week) shining in the darkness. What we were seeing, wrote Chris Stokel-Walker on Vice, was the “meme-ification of the Ukraine invasion”. In a networked world, this is supposedly a big deal because memes can be used to dominate the information space – now believed to be an important element of any conflict. The strange thing is that, up to now, we thought that the Russians were the Olympic champions of this stuff…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

I Booked an Airbnb in Kyiv

Lovely, imaginative act of solidarity by Alex Tabarrok. Link

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The Hound of Arles

Seen on a wall in that wonderful town during the annual Photography Festival some years ago.

Quote of the Day

”The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is an imbecility.”

• Admiral Sir John Fisher

Which is why armies use fragmentation bombs, poison gas and other ways of killing civilians.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Cannibals (A Night In London | Official Live Video)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Russia’s War on Ukraine: A Roundtable

This post from Bari Weiss’s Common Sense blog is also a ‘long listen’ if you prefer to listen to the podcast of the conversation between Niall Ferguson, Walter Russell Mead and Francis Fukuyama. But she also appends a good edited transcript of the conversation. What’s intriguing (to me, anyway) is the extent to which they disagree — especially as they come from the same neck of the ideological woods. Two of them (Ferguson and Fukuyama) are from the Hoover Institution, which Wikipedia describes (accurately IMO) as “a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government”. That of course doesn’t mean that they’re not interesting but…

Anyway, hope you find it interesting.

’Limits to Growth’ 50 years on

It’s 50 years since The Limits to Growth, a book based on a simulation model of the world created using the Systems Dynamics  modelling tool developed by Jay Forrester at MIT, was published. It caused a storm when it was published, but that subsided over succeeding decades until — ironically — attempts to model climate change brought simulation modelling back into fashion.

Of the team that built the ‘Limits’ model, only Dennis Meadows is still around. (His wife, Donella, who also worked on the model, died in 2001.) The not-for-profit Resilience.org website had the good idea of interviewing Dennis Meadows on the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book. I found the transcript of the interview fascinating, not least because I did a live, transatlantic interview by phone with Meadows for the BBC way back in 1973. And two of the PhD students I supervised did dissertations on the L-to-G model. So this is a topic dear to my heart.

Here’s how the conversation started:

Q: First, how is reality tracking with the scenarios you and your colleagues generated 50 years ago?

Dennis: There have been several attempts, recently, to compare some of our scenarios with the way the global system has evolved over the past 50 years. That’s difficult. It’s, in a way, trying to confirm by looking through a microscope whether or not the data that you gathered through a telescope are accurate. In fact, accuracy is not really the issue here. Our goal in doing the original analysis was to provide a conceptual framework within which people could think about their own options and about the events that they saw around them. When we evaluate models, we always ask whether they’re more useful, not whether they’re more accurate.

Having said that, I will also say that the efforts which have been undertaken have generally concluded that the world is moving along what we termed in our 1972 report to be the standard scenario. It’s an aggregated image of the global system, showing growth from 1972 up to around 2020, and then, over the next decade or two, the principal trends peaking out and beginning to decline. I still find that model very useful in understanding what I read in the papers and in trying to think about what’s coming next.

Worth reading.

’Talking Politics’ bows out

Yesterday’s edition of the Talking Politics podcast was the last. After six years, its host, David Runciman, his colleague Helen Thompson and their producer, Catherine Carr, gathered in David’s office in Cambridge to bring it to a graceful close.

Its passing leaves a gap not only in my week but also in the public sphere. There was nothing quite like it in the exponentially-exploding podcasting world. TP built up a massive audience across the world because it offered a unique opportunity for people everywhere to hear David and Helen and other prominent scholars of politics, international relations, economics and technology put events of the day into the wider and deeper contexts on which true understanding depends. Many middle-school pupils in their final years were influenced by it to consider studying politics at university. I know that if it had been around when I was a teenager, I might have taken that route rather than studying engineering.

But all good things come to an end. Six years is a long time doing a weekly show in the middle of busy professional lives. And if any educational bureaucrat wants to see what real public ‘impact’ is like, then Talking Politics provided a pretty good paradigm. It’ll be a very hard act to follow.

Londistan: favourite city of Russian oligarchs

My Observer colleague, Nick Cohen, had a fine column on Sunday about how Putin’s wealthy friends have used the UK’s swingeing libel laws to silence and censor journalists who find out too much about them.

In the safe space of the House of Commons, Labour MP Chris Bryant quoted from leaked government documents, which stated Roman Abramovich should be watched because of “his links to the Russian state and his public association with corrupt activity and practices”. God help anyone who says as much outside when the government has not put him on its sanctions list.

Bear the costs of challenging wealth in mind when you wonder how London became a centre of corruption. Anglo-Saxon law brings class justice rather than real justice. The verdicts of individual judges are not to blame – whatever their faults, they do not take bribes. But the price of reaching a verdict is so high that few dare run the risk of being left with the bill. A system can be rigged even if the people in charge of it are honest, and there is institutional prejudice in the English justice system in favour of wealth that is as pervasive as institutional racism in the police.

Let one example stand for thousands. The Parisian intellectual Nicolas Tenzer tweeted that the French equivalents of George Galloway and Nigel Farage acted as the Kremlin’s “useful idiots” when they appeared on Putin’s propaganda channel RT. RT sued, claiming that not only had Tenzer libelled the station but that he was guilty of an “encroachment on the dignity” of its journalists – as if security guards did not strip its hacks of dignity every time they went to work. Naturally, the French courts found against RT. Astonishingly to anyone involved in the struggles for free speech in the UK, the cost of the case was just €10,000 (£8,400).

Compare that with the price of writing about the Putin regime in the UK. In January 2021, after Putin’s agents had poisoned him but before he was jailed, the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny praised Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People. It is indeed the book of the moment, which shows how KGB men created the world’s most dangerous rogue state. Abramovich, three other Russian billionaires and Putin’s energy company Rosneft sued.

The case was trivial. Belton’s publishers HarperCollins settled it agreeing to make changes to the text most readers wouldn’t notice. Yet although it never went to a full hearing, the case, it was revealed to me, cost HarperCollins £1.5m – 178 times the price of the libel trial in France. In effect, HarperCollins was fined a small fortune for publishing an anti-Putin book by the English legal system.

One of the most nauseating aspects of the Tory government’s sudden resolve to go after Putin’s buddies in London is that it took his murderous assault on Ukraine to embarrass them into action. They have presided over a period in which London became the world’s leading money-laundering centre for the dodgy super-rich from abroad. Many of the city’s fancy law firms have gleefully (and profitably) tendered to the legal needs of visiting plutocrats, and the co-chairman of the Tory party, Ben Eliot, not only raised nearly £2 million of Russia-linked donations for the party (according to the Financial Times), but makes his living running an outfit called Quintessentially, which the paper describes as,

a luxury concierge company that launched its Russia office in 2006, and has expanded it to roughly 50 employees at its base in Moscow.

The concierge group removed some content related to its Russian operations from its global website this week after Vladimir Putin, the country’s president, launched his invasion of Ukraine.

However, it has not taken down its separate Russian-language site with the slogan: “Access the inaccessible. Achieve the impossible.”

The FT goes on to explain that Quintessentially (which has membership fees ranging from $20,000 to $40,000 a year) has

boasted of how it helped wealthy Russians in London find properties, advise on the best schools and staff such as nannies”. One former staffer said the group often helped its Russian clients hold lavish parties.

As I write this, the owner of this ‘concierge’ service is still the joint chairman of the UK’s governing party.

My commonplace booklet

And while we’re on the subject of London’s role as the money-laundering centre of the world, why not tune in to hear the Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford and Abingdon reading out (under Parliamentary Privilege) the names of the 35 London-based oligarchs named by Alexei Navalny.

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On reflection…

Quote of the Day

”I used to be Snow White… but I drifted.”

• Mae West

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Händel | “The Harmonious Blacksmith” | Wilhelm Kempff

Link

Long Read of the Day

 George Packer on the War in Ukraine

Transcript of another sobering conversation, this time between Packer and Yascha Mounk.

Q: What do you think the lasting significance of this moment is going to be?

Packer: It’s very hard to know, since the moment has just begun. As much as I expected this—I never thought Putin was bluffing—I’m also shocked by it. There’s something profoundly disturbing and astounding about the sight of tank columns, airborne assaults, and ballistic missiles in Europe. I think it could go one of at least two ways. Either this will be the moment when Western democracies realize that there’s a new Cold War—which is very hot right now in Ukraine, but which has been building for years, in the form of great power autocracies that have become more and more bold and energetic, using threats and force to get what they want. The moment when not just the Western democracies, but all democracies realize that they have to put up a struggle—to see this as a concerted threat to what we care about, and that it’s not going to stop in Ukraine. It may not stop in Hong Kong. So that would be one way to mark this moment, looking back: as the moment when, essentially, the democracies got serious and realized that this was a fight that they couldn’t keep avoiding. And I don’t mean guns-blazing “fight”; I mean seeing this as the greatest threat to our interests, which really are very close to what our values are, or should be.

The other way it could go is that this is a moment that Putin wins, and doesn’t really suffer enough to regret. Xi Jinping sees it as an outrageous move that Putin got away with, and that they—and other autocratic and kleptocratic states who have been in informal alliances—are emboldened and begin to act with more and more impunity and audacity. Meanwhile, the rest of the world continues to look on with horror, but in a sort of state of passivity or paralysis. I think the next few weeks are going to tell us a lot more about which of those two outcomes we’ll look back on when we think about the invasion of Ukraine.

We’re appalled by Putin now, but the west gave him the green light

Good column in the Guardian by Jonathan Freedland.

The History Channel is broadcasting live. The US commentator who made that quip meant that events currently unfolding in Ukraine will be remembered for many decades to come, that future generations of schoolchildren will be called to memorise the date of 24 February 2022. But it’s true in another, darker sense too. For this is a grimly retro war. Russian troops marching across an international border, closing in on a European capital? Families sheltering in underground stations, children parted from their fathers, civilians donning uniforms and reaching for rifles, vowing to fight to the death for their homeland? An actual invasion of one European country by another? Footage of such events looks strange in colour: it should be in grainy black and white.

Because Europe was meant to have left such events behind, if not in the 1940s – when the Nazi bombardment of Kyiv began at 4am one day in 1941, rather than the 5am hour chosen on Thursday by Vladimir Putin – then later in the 20th century, when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956 or Prague in 1968. Instead, history is back – confronting us with a choice we imagined we’d made long ago.

Freedland’s point is, in a grim way, the obvious one: that nobody who was paying attention over a decade and a half could have been surprised by Putin’s invasion. He transgressed three times over that period, and each time didn’t pay the price for his aggression. So not surprisingly he assumed he’d get away with overrunning Ukraine.

This is all the wisdom of hindsight, of course. Same applies to the question of how it was that Germany and other continental European states felt able to make themselves so vulnerable to an autocrat over critical supplies of gas and oil.

There’s something about contemporary democracies and their ruling elites that makes them congenitally incapable of thinking ahead.

My commonplace booklet

Clever use of the Tinder app by a young Ukrainian woman.

She conned invading Russian soldiers into giving away their locations. Link

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Springing up

Quote of the Day

”How much better for Putin if he had waited until 2024. Didn’t he see that the US is sliding down the path to electing a Putin lapdog in 2024. Why bother with Ukraine? He was about to land the big fish.”

• Dave Winer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | The Winter’s End

Link

Well, it is the second day of Spring.

Grace under pressure

This came from Dave Pell this morning:

The fighting is in Ukraine, but the front in this war stretches from Kiev to Mar-a-Lago. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and MAGA’s Big Lie are both part of a broad war against democracy. Hopefully Americans will be inspired by Ukrainian bravery and stand up for democracy, because it’s all connected.

As a teen during the Holocaust, my dad was hunted by Ukrainian henchmen working for the Nazis. When history pushed, he pushed back. Today, he would be proud of the courage shown by Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky. When the U.S. offered him an escape route, he responded, “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.” Man, I wish my dad — who survived the Holocaust because he got a gun and ammunition — was around to hear that line from a Jewish leader in Europe. Zelensky, the former comedian who used to play the part of a fictional president, found himself in a situation that is all too real. The guy Trump thought was so weak that he could be blackmailed during that phone call has proven himself strong enough to becoome an international hero fighting against a corrupt madman and for democracy. He is the very opposite of Donald Trump.

As Franklin Foer writes his Atlantic piece, A Prayer for Volodymyr Zelensky, “The whole world can see that his execution is very likely imminent. What reason does he have to doubt that Vladimir Putin will order his murder, as the Russian leader has done with so many of his bravest critics and enemies?” And yet, as history pushes, the standup stands firm. During the last years of his life, my dad repeatedly lamented that Americans weren’t taking the threat to our democracy seriously enough. “Vhy aren’t the people out in the streets?” Well, today, inspired by the Ukrainian grandson of a Holocaust survivor, hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets across Europe, and even in Russia itself. The fight is there. The fight is here, too. It’s the same fight my dad fought. It’s all connected.

Franklin Foer’s prayer for Zelensky

Dave Pell referred to this. It goes in part like this:

When Zelensky rejected Washington’s offer of exile, he wasn’t making an obvious decision. After Germany invaded France, Charles de Gaulle made his way to London. Or to take a more recent example: Afghan President Ashraf Ghani boarded a helicopter out of Kabul the moment he heard a rumor that the Taliban had entered the city. And, really, who could blame them? Most human beings would rather not have their enemies hang their corpse from a traffic light, the sort of historic antecedent that is hard to shake from the mind.

In Ukraine, the decision for a leader to flee would be the expected choice. It’s what his predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, did in the aftermath of the revolution in 2014, leaving behind his palace filled with exotic cars and ostriches for the safety of Moscow. The enduring failure of Ukrainian democracy has been the gap between the code of behavior that applies to the elite and the one that the rest of the country must follow. It’s been the elites who profit off the state, who stash their ill-gotten fortunes in French villas and Cypriot bank accounts, while their compatriots have stagnated. By staying put, Zelensky has erased this gap. There’s no airlift awaiting his fellow residents, so rather than accepting the perk of his position, he’s suffering in the same terror and deprivation that they are forced to endure.

A week ago it wasn’t at all obvious that the world would rally to Ukraine’s cause. Nor was it clear that the Ukrainian people would mount a collective resistance to the invasion of their country. There are many reasons why the tide has turned like it has, of course. But it is hard to think of another recent instance in which one human being has defied the collective expectations for his behavior and provided such an inspiring moment of service to the people, clarifying the terms of the conflict through his example.

Last night, Zelensky posted a video of himself standing on the street, speaking into the humble recording device of the smartphone, stubble crusting his face, surrounded by the leadership of the nation, stripped bare of all the trappings of office. “We are still here,” he told the nation. I pray that will be the case tomorrow.

Amen.

Long Read of the Day

‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes

Look, I know you’re busy. We’re all busy. But if you read nothing else today make time for this remarkable interview with a remarkable woman, Fiona Hill, who has worked both as an academic expert on Russia and as a presidential advisor in both Republican and Democratic administrations. She also testified to the congressional impeachment hearing on Trump’s dealings in Ukraine.

This is a transcript of the interview that Maura Reynolds, a Senior Editor at Politico, conducted with Hill on February 28. Reynolds says that she wanted to know what Hill had been thinking as she watched the footage of Russian tanks rolling across international borders, what she thinks Putin has in mind and what insights she can offer into his motivations and objectives.

Reynolds got her money’s worth. And you can have it too.

And thanks to Seb Schmoller for alerting me to it.

Putin’s Bloody Folly

David Remnick’s New Yorker piece:

What threatens Putin is not Ukrainian arms but Ukrainian liberty. His invasion amounts to a furious refusal to live with the contrast between the repressive system he keeps in place at home and the aspirations for liberal democracy across the border.

Meanwhile, Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, has behaved with profound dignity even though he knows that he is targeted for arrest, or worse. Aware of the lies saturating Russia’s official media, he went on television and, speaking in Russian, implored ordinary Russian citizens to stand up for the truth. Some needed no prompting. On Thursday, Dmitry Muratov, the editor of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, said that he would publish the next issue in Russian and Ukrainian. “We are feeling shame as well as sorrow,” Muratov said. “Only an antiwar movement of Russians can save life on this planet.” As if on cue, demonstrations against Putin’s war broke out in dozens of Russian cities.

And were brutally repressed, I think.

Things will have to get much worse in Russia for the population before street revolts become unquashable. And the big problem about political mobilisation there is the almost complete absence of a countrywide organisational infrastructure for mobilisation — as openDemocracy points out:

Russian society lacks institutions that are capable of taking up the organisation of protests, especially at short notice. For example, the 2021 protests over Navalny’s arrest were organised through Navalny’s network of local coordinating teams around the country – perhaps the only real political machine left in Russia. Since the end of the last decade, the Navalny network has been the centre of all protest activity in Russia. The organisation included 45 regional branches, with 180 full-time employees and an unspecified number of volunteers.

Thanks to these resources and planning, the network managed to establish contact with a wide section of Russian society. After the Navalny network was declared an extremist organisation in June 2021, the legal structure was liquidated and many of its employees were forced to emigrate abroad. The social media accounts of the network (including Telegram channels and mailing lists) – which established contact with Russian audiences – were more or less frozen.

That’s why Navalny was seen as such an existential challenge by Putin. He had built a network that could to to him what had been done to other authoritarians in other places.

My commonplace booklet

This is lovely — a Twitter bot that automatically logs the flights (and destinations) of Russian oligarchs’ private jets.

Currently tracking this lot:

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Smoke signals

Quote of the Day

”Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?”

• James Thurber

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jimmy Yancey | Five O’Clock Blues | 1939

Link

Just as good at 9am IMHO.

Long Read of the Day

A Future For The Lakes

A fascinating and thought-provoking essay by Lee Schofield on how the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has been re-wilding a part of the Lake District that they lease. Includes a few paintings by the author.

As visually spectacular as the land we took on at Haweswater was a decade ago, it was damaged in all sorts of ways. Ancient woodland clearances, followed by centuries of grazing, coupled with peatland drainage, a superabundance of deer, river engineering, hedge removal, fertiliser and pesticide use had left the place in tatters.

An overgrazed, over-drained landscape is one in which water moves swiftly. The faster the water flows, the more energy it has, and the greater its capacity for erosion. Sediment reaching Haweswater reservoir, into which our land drains, is bad news for water quality.

Working in partnership with landowner United Utilities, we’re ten years into a transformation of our third of the reservoir’s catchment, restoring its ability to slow and purify water, alongside bringing back some of its natural riches.

Thanks to Andrew Curry, in whose blog I first saw it.

What if Putin turns out to be a ‘loser’?

Heather Cox Richardson’s wonderful blog set me thinking about the US Republicans…

Since 2016 there have been plenty of apologists for Putin here in the U.S. And yet now, with the weight of popular opinion shifting toward a defense of democracy, Republicans who previously cozied up to Putin are suddenly stating their support for Ukraine and trying to suggest that Putin has gotten out of line only because he sees Biden as weak. Under Trump, they say, Putin never would have invaded Ukraine, and they are praising Trump for providing aid to Ukraine in 2019.

They are hoping that their present support for Ukraine and democracy makes us forget their past support for Putin, even as former president Trump continues to call him “smart.” And yet, Republicans changed their party’s 2016 platform to favor Russia over Ukraine; accepted Trump’s abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops from northern Syria in October 2019, giving Russia a strategic foothold in the Middle East; and looked the other way when Trump withheld $391 million to help Ukraine resist Russian invasion until newly elected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to help rig the 2020 U.S. presidential election. (Trump did release the money after the story of the “perfect phone call” came out, but the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which investigated the withholding of funds, concluded that holding back the money at all was illegal.)

But rather than making us forget Republicans’ enabling of Putin’s expansion, the new story in which democracy has the upper hand might have the opposite effect. Now that people can clearly see exactly the man Republicans have supported, they will want to know why our leaders, who have taken an oath to our democratic Constitution, were willing to throw in their lot with a foreign autocrat. The answer to that question might well force us to rethink a lot of what we thought we knew about the last several years.

And of course we know that Trump’s favourite sneer was to call opponents ‘losers’. Which makes one wonder how he will respond if Putin turns out to have dug a big enough hole to endanger his political survival.

Bossware is booming

Further to my Observer column on Sunday, here’s a clip from a report by Valentina Romie in yesterday’s Financial Times:

Staff surveillance is at risk of “spinning out of control” Britain’s largest federation of trade unions has warned, adding to concerns that the UK has fallen behind its EU counterparts in this area of workers’ rights.

About 60 per cent of employees reported being subject to some form of technological surveillance and monitoring at their current or most recent job, in a survey by the TUC published on Monday — up from 53 per cent the previous year.

Three in 10 respondents agreed that monitoring and surveillance at work had increased during the Covid-19 crisis. The survey was conducted in England and Wales between December 14 and 20.

Also: A study by the European Commission found that “there has been a sharp increase in the demand for online workplace surveillance tools” as a result of the pandemic-induced shift to remote work.

BP sees the light

Well, well. The BBC reports that BP is to offload its 19.75% stake in Russian state-owned oil firm Rosneft after Russia’s “act of aggression in Ukraine”. So it has yielded to pressure from the UK government to make the move since Thursday’s invasion.

BP’s share in Russian state oil giant Rosneft has long felt uncomfortable; this week under heavy political pressure it became untenable.

The chairman of Rosneft, Igor Sechin, is a close ally of President Putin. Rosneft supplies fuel to the Russian army.

Immediately offloading the stake to a potentially inappropriate buyer was not an option.

The company has decided to “divest” – meaning it will sever its financial ties with Rosneft, stop taking a dividend and step back from its two seats on the board.

Company officials say it is too soon to say exactly how this stake will be disposed of.

It could potentially be seized, or sold.

It will mean a significant financial hit, but a price BP had little choice but to pay.

The BP CEO Bernard Looney said that he had been “deeply shocked and saddened” by the situation in Ukraine and it had caused BP to fundamentally rethink its position with Rosneft.

Interesting. Would this be the same Bernard Looney that the PA News agency reported as appearing on a panel with Putin last October, an appearance that he later described as a “privilege”? Shurely shomw mkishtake, as Private Eye would say.

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