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colonna-durruti · 7 months

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A Mario mancano tre anni alla pensione, da 35 è impiegato nella grande distribuzione, in un supermercato Pam di Corso Svizzera a Torino.

A un certo punto la vita comincia a precipitare: il mutuo di casa schizza alle stelle, sua moglie si ammala. Mario stringe i denti, dà fondo ai risparmi. Ma con questi lavori mica metti in banca milioni e i risparmi finiscono presto.

Un giorno perde la testa, sono parole sue, e ruba sei uova e una scamorza affumicata dagli scaffali del supermercato, gli stessi che aveva riempito e su cui aveva vigilato per tanti anni. Lo beccano subito perché lui non è un ladro di professione, è solo un uomo disperato e affamato. Appena viene sorpreso con la scamorza nel sacco, ammette tutto e chiede scusa: “Ho sbagliato, ma vivo una situazione privata ed economica al limite del sostenibile. Non è una giustificazione, solo una spiegazione”.

All’azienda le scuse e la mortificazione non bastano. Il licenziamento in tronco arriva per raccomandata: “Appare particolarmente grave che lei abbia deliberatamente prelevato dagli scaffali di vendita alcune referenze per un valore complessivo di 7,05 euro e sia poi uscito dal negozio senza provvedere al pagamento delle stesse. Le scuse da lei fornite non possono giustificare in alcun modo l’addebito contestato. Considerati violati gli obblighi generali di correttezza, diligenza e buona fede, ritenuto venuto meno l’elemento fiduciario, avendo abusato della sua posizione all’interno dell’organizzazione a proprio indebito vantaggio e a danno della società, le comunichiamo la risoluzione del rapporto di lavoro per giusta causa”.

I sindacati, giudicando la misura del licenziamento sproporzionata, hanno fatto ricorso.

Anche Jean Valjean, il protagonista dei Miserabili, ruba un mezzo pane e per tutta la vita viene inseguito da Javert, il poliziotto che diventerà il simbolo universale della giustizia ottusa e, appunto, sproporzionata.

Ma questi sono gli aggettivi della burocrazia e dei tribunali, abbiamo bisogno di altre parole per capire un sistema disumano, che si basa su uno schiavismo legalizzato che (anche) nella grande distribuzione trova terreno fertile.

Questo sistema feroce – in cui si sono polverizzate le reti sociali (in un alimentari a gestione familiare la vicenda di Mario sarebbe andata a finire nello stesso modo?) e milioni di individui sono esposti alle intemperie del mercato – è pensato a discapito della maggioranza e a vantaggio dei pochi che si spartiscono le ricchezze del mondo, con l’avallo dei governi.

Il nostro, nonostante una situazione di crescente, paurosa povertà, ha abolito il Reddito di cittadinanza anche grazie a un’indegna campagna di stampa portata avanti dai principali giornali italiani per conto di lorsignori.

In un bel libro appena uscito per Einaudi, Antologia degli sconfitti, Niccolò Zancan mette in fila le storie dei nuovi Valjean: nella discesa agli inferi dell’emarginazione gli apre la porta Egle, un’anziana signora che fruga nell’immondizia del mercato di Porta Palazzo, in cerca di verdura per fare il minestrone. Ma nella vita di prima c’erano state una casa, una famiglia, le vacanze a Loano sulla 500. Poi si è ritrovata a vivere con la pensione di reversibilità del marito e la dignità perduta in un cassonetto della spazzatura.

In questo atlante della disperazione c’è tutto il catalogo degli emarginati: un padre separato, un senzacasa che dorme in auto, un cassintegrato, prostitute, migranti, rider. E un ladro di mance che viene licenziato come Mario. L’aiuto cuoco gli dice: “Da te non me lo sarei mai aspettato”. E lui gli risponde, umiliato, “nemmeno io”.

Invece è tutto prevedibile e ha un nome semplice: si chiama povertà. Dei poveri però non frega niente a nessuno, incredibilmente nemmeno dei lavoratori poveri: sono solo numeri nelle statistiche dell’Istat.

Finché non rubano sei uova e una scamorza.

(Silvia Truzzi, FQ 29 febbraio 2024) da Tranchida.

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fatehbaz · 1 year

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Didn't wanna clog up your post, and these sources are more about relationships of time with space/place, but here's some stuff that I've encountered:

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“Temporal sovereignty”. Contemporary US/Australian claims over time-keeping. Reclaiming agency by operating on Indigenous/alternative time schedules. The importance of the “time revolution” in the Victorian era to Euro-American understandings of geology and deep past, precipitating nineteenth-century conquest of time. Mid-twentieth century understanding of “deep time” and its co-option by the Australian state. "Deep time dreaming".

Laura Rademaker. “60,000 Years is not forever: ‘time revolutions’ and Indigenous pasts.” Postcolonial Studies. September 2021.

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How "time is a form of enclosure". Checkpoints, "baroque processes to apply for permits to travel", fences, incapacity to change residences, and other "debilitating infrastructures" work to "turn able bodies into a range of disabled bodies" by "stretching time". This is a "slow death" and a simultaneous "slowing down of life" because "it takes so long to get anywhere" and "movement is suffocated". Thus "time itself is held hostage". This "suspended state" of anxiety and endless wait-times "wreaks multigenerational psychological and physical havoc". "Checkpoints ensure one is never sure of reaching work on time. Fear of not getting to work then adds to the labor of getting to work [...]. Bodies in line at checkpoints [...] [experience] the fractalizing of the emotive, cognitive, physiological capacities" through a "constant state of uncertainty". "The cordoning of time through space contributes to an overall 'lack of jurisdiction over the functions of one's own senses' [...] endemic to the operation of colonial rule". This "extraction of time" produces a "depleted" and tired person "beholden to the logistics" of administrative apparatuses, community suffers and "communing is thrawted".

Jabir K. Puar. "Spatial debilities: Slow Life and Carceral Capitalism [...]." South Atlantic Quarterly 120. April 2021.

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The "apocalyptic temporality" that presumes extinction. Indigenous Polynesian/Pacific perceptions and ways of being "destabilize the colonial present" and also "transfigure the past" by "contesting linear and teleological Western time". Indigenous "ontologies of cyclical temporality or inhabitation of heterogenous time". How United States and Europe colonized Oceania for weapons testing and conquest of tropical Edens while rendering local Indigenous people "ungrievable" and "without future". "Pacific time is a layering of oral and somatic memory". Instead of accepting an apocalyptic future or doomsday or nightmare, assert the possibility of a livable future, in spite of "Western temporal closures".

Rebecca Oh. “Making Time: Pacific Futures in Kiribati’s Migration with Dignity, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, and Keri Hume’s Stonefish.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies. Winter 2020.

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Colonial "space-time homogenization". The experience of "homogenous, empty time". Orientalist "time lag" and the naturalization of a supposed East-West hemispheric divide. Late Victorian imperial conceptions of temporality. The British establishment of the Greenwich meridian and International Date Line. The influence of British imperial seafaring and cartography on the establishment of time and on European/US feelings towards the Pacific Ocean. How the origin of English science fiction literature, space travel aspirations, and time travel narratives coincided with the Yellow Peril and xenophobia targeting East Asia.

Timothy J. Yamamura. "Fictions of Science, American Orientalism, and the Alien/Asian of Percival Lowell". Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representation of Asia in Science Fiction. 2017.

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Imprisonment as time-control. Here “the question of the past the present and the future indeed time itself looms” especially around the prisoner. “The law renders punishment in units of time”, taking away a the right to a future. There are alternative worlds, many of them, which have been practiced and brought into being, which colonization tried to obscure. There is “a whole anthropology of people without future embedded in the assumptions that justify mass imprisonment as poverty management”. "The prison’s logic exterminates time as we know it”. In prison, bodies have been alienated from time and history ... the punishment seems endless ... to “achieve a measure of agency and possibility it is necessary to redeem time”, to refuse the doom, fated to a life of abandonment.

Avery Gordon. “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity.” borderlands. 2011.

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Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Martin J.S. Rudwick, 2010) explores how the advent of European sciences like geology, preceding the "time revolution" when Europeans experienced revelations about the scale of "deep time", happened alongside and after the Haitian Revolution and other abolitionist movements. French, German, and British naturalists translated the explosion of "new" scientific knowledge from the colonies, so that the metropolitan European audience became a market for historical and scientific "narratives" about how "nature" and time functioned.

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Prartik Chakrabarti's writing on time, temporality, and "the deep past" as British imperial concepts built in conversation with colonial encounters with South Asia. (British Empire reaching such heights in the middle of the nineteenth century at the same time that the newly professionalized sciences of geology were providing revelations about the previously unknown vast scale of "deep time". New colonial anthropology/ethnology also presumed to connect this "primitive" past with "primitive" people.)

See Chakrabarti's "Gondwana and the Politics of Deep Past". Past & Present. 2019.

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We must witness and consider "multiple space-times" to understand how "unfree labour" of plantations was "foundational" to contemporary work, movement, subjugation, health, etc. We must "trace the geneaology of contemporary sovereign institutions of terror, discipline and segregation" [workplaces, imperial/colonial nations, factories, mines, etc.] back in time to plantations. How "the [plantation] estate hierarchy survives in post-plantation" times and places, with the plantation "being a major blueprint of socialization into [contemporary] work". The plantation was "a laboratory for [...] migration regulation in subsequent epochs" that practiced methods of racializing and criminalizing.

Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. "Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times". Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives. 2023.

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“Slow life” and the relationship between “settler colonialism, carceral capitalism, and the modulation of ... registers of time,” including “historical time, the stealing of time through the expansion of labor time, ... and the cordoning off of space through time”. For example, as in occupied zones or at border checkpoints, “the cordoning off of space through time” includes physical architecture like fences and customs, obstacles that impede movement and rhythm, so that “nothing ever happens on time” and there is “a stretching of time”. All the wasted time spent in line, showing papers, waiting for confirmation, etc. “is not a by-product of surveillance, it is the point of surveillance”. Such that “uncertainty becomes a primary affective orientation ... flesh as felt” with a racializing effect“. "This is a biopolitics conditioned through pure capacitation and its metrics”:

Jasbir Puar. In: “Mass Debilitation and Algorithmic Governance” by Ezekiel Dixon-Roman and Jasbir Puar. e-flux Journal Issue #123. December 2021.

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"Starfish time". Indigenous Australian/Aboriginal perceptions of time and "attending to more-than-human agencies of time". Acknowledging the timescales of entire ecosystems, as part of multispecies relationships, a "transcorporeal collaboration". Cyclical time vs linear time. Contrasting timescales experienced by insects that only live a few days and creatures that live for decades. "Starfish may seem to be still" but they slowly move; "larval time" and "the time it takes for eggs to develop and hatch"'. The "immensity of the alterity is literally incomprehensible"; "we can't know what these beings know" but we "should seek respect and be aware of how our lives are entangled".

Bawaka Country including, S. Wright, S. Suchet-Pearson, K. Lloyd, L. Burarrwanga, R. Ganambarr, M. Ganambarr-Stubbs, B. Ganambarr, D. Maymuru. “Gathering of the Clouds: Attending to Indigenous understandings of time and climate through songspirals.” Geoforum. January 2020.

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The use of calendars, dates, clocks, and industrial/corporate temporality as fundamental to the rise of plantations and financialization in United States/Europe, with a case study of the modern Colombian/Latin American state. Observance of certain dates and strict adherence to specific calendars support "mythologized deeds and heroic retellings" of colonization and industrialization. “The evolution and internalization of disciplined concepts of time” were intimately tied to the rise of wage labor in industrializing England and later during the global ascendancy of work and industrialized plantation monoculture, but the persistence of alternative time should “serve as a reminder that futures and the demarcation of epochs are never as simple as a neatly organized calendar”.

Timothy Lorek. “Keeping Time with Colombian Plantation Calendars.” Edge Effects. April 2020.

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Indigenous people of Alaska and the US control over time management. For the past 50 years, Yupiak people have been subject to US government’s “investment in a certain way of being in time” which “standardized the clock” and disrupted human relationships with salmon. This US management model “anonymized care” and made “a way of attending to the life and death of others that strips life of the social and ecological bonds that imbue it” with resilience and meaning, which “ignores not only the temporality of Yupiaq peoples relations with fish, but also the human relations that human-fish relations make possible”. This disregards “the continuity of salmon lives but also the duration of Yupiat lifeworlds ... life is doubly negated” ... “futures depend on an orientation to salmon in the present”.

William Voinot-Baron. “Inescapable Temporalities: Chinook Salmon and the Non-Sovereignty of Co-Management in Southwest Alaska.” July 2019.

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"Idling" and "being idle" as a form of reclaiming agency and life. Case studies of fugitive Blackness in Caribbean plantation societies. “Disruptive waiting”. “The maroon’s relationship to time challenges [both] the totalizing time of the modern state, but also the [...] narratives to negotiate struggle in the [...] present" in "antagonistic relationship with colonial power". Defying the “European narrative of modernity”. Refusing to be productive.

Amanda Lagji. “Marooned time: disruptive waiting and idleness in Carpentier and Coetzee.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies. March 2018.

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Indigenous futures. "It is important to remember that some futures never went anywhere" and "yet they survive. These are futures suppressed and cancelled by colonial power." These are "parallel futures". "Colonial power must control the past so as to deny the emergence of" an alternative future; "colonial power creates a future in advance so that no others will take its place". Poor, racialized, Black, Indigenous people manifest alternative futures.

Pedro Neves Marques. "Parallel Futures: One or Many Dystopias?" e-flux. April 2019.

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The "legacy of slavery and the labor of the unfree shape and are part of the environment we inhabit". The "idea of the plantation is migratory" and it lives on "as the persistent blueprint of our contemporary spatial troubles", so we must seek out "secretive histories" that no longer "rehearse lifelessness".

Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe. 2013.

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“The temporal dispossession” of Congolese people. There is an “impossibility” of “predictable time” because temporal dispossession “disrupts the possibility of building a future”. Livelihoods/income is driven by market and price fluctuations in United States and Europe tech industries, so “there is an inescapable day-to-day sense of uncertainty”. As Mbembe says, “in Africa, the spread of terror ... blows apart temporal frames”.

James H. Smith. ‘Tantalus in the Digital Age: Coltan ore, temporal dispossession, and “movement” in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.’ American Ethnologist Volume 38 Issue 1. February 2011.

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“Slow death”. Chronic illness not just as a byproduct of colonialism/dispossession, but also as part of its aim, a weapon that debilitates people, who become exhausted. Dooming poor and racialized people to lives “without future” through debility, “a condition of being worn out”. Relationship of illness, lack of healthcare, and debt as functionally incapacitating, a form of death sentence. A “zone of temporality” unfolding unlike abrupt/sudden traumatic events and becoming an inescapable condition.

Jasbir K. Puar. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. 2017.

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The extension of poverty, landlessness, homeless, and imprisonment. "To be unable to transcend the horror of such a world order is what hell means", and "without a glimpse of an elsewhere or otherwise, we are living in hell". The utopian is not only or merely a “fantasy of” and for “the future collectivity” but can be claimed and built and lived here, now. There is "no guarantee" of “coming millenniums or historically inevitable socialisms”, no guarantee that “the time is right” one day if we wait just long enough. Instead: "can a past that the present has not yet caught up with be summoned to haunt the present as an alternative?" The "utopian margins", an alternate world crossing time and place, an "imaginative space and temporality to trace the remains of what "was almost or not quite, of the future yet to come", living as if it were the present. Colonialism tried to crush the many headed hydra of the revolutionary Atlantic, those who challenged the making of the modern world system.

Avery F. Gordon. As interviewed by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah. “Revolutionary Feminisms: Avery F. Gordon.” As transcribed and published online in the Blog section of Verso Books. 2 September 2020. And: Avery Gordon. “Some thoughts on the Utopian.” 2016.

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The US/European "city is the site of regulatory regimes" that try to impose a definitive narrative about history, progress, and possible futures. But it cannot achieve "a wholly Apollonian, seamlessly regulated realm" because the land "continues to be haunted by the neglected, the disposed of, the repressed". The "commodification" of landscapes "circulates an imaginary geography" mediated through advertisements, labels, soap operas, television, etc. which celebrate "sanctioned narratives and institutionalized rhetoric". A "wild zone" of informal spaces, debris. "Ruins are places where the things, people, and "other memories can be articulated". There is "a spectral residue" that "haunts dominant ways of seeing and being". "Alternative stories might be assembled", so that we can respect the people banished to abandonment, the periphery, and reclaim agency.

Tim Edensor. “The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space volume 23. 2005.

Also, how "master narratives of history as progress decompose" when faced with "a continuously remembered past" when "the ghosts of this past rear up in the ruin" to expose "the debris of unprecedented material destruction" of colonialism/empire-building. These "hauntings rupture linear temporality" and recall those people beaten down as "the trash of history". It is "essential to see the things and the people [...] banished to the periphery [...]."

Tim Edensor. "Haunting in the ruins: matter and immateriality". Space and Culture Issue 11. 2002.

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"Many kinds of time" of bacteria, fungi, algae, humans, and "Western colonialism meet on the gravestones". Some creatures, like lichen, are very long-lived and "these temporal feats alert us that modernity is not the only kind of time, and that our metronomic synchrony is not the only time that matters". The "long duree evolutionary rapprochements to the quick boom and bust of investment capital" where "minor forms of space and time merge with great ones". Extinction is "a breakdown of coordinations with reverberating effects". Ghosts remind us that we live in an impossible present, a time of rupture. "Deep histories tumble in unruly graves that are bulldozed into gardens of Progress". "Endings come with the death of a leaf, the death of a city, the death of a friendship".

Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Burbandt. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. 2017.

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Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History. (Edited by Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker, and Jakelin Troy. 2023.)

Chapters include: "Bugarrigarra Nyurdany, Because of the Dreaming: A Discussion of Time and Place in Yawuru Cosmology" (Sarah Yu et al.); "Songs and the Deep Present" (Linda Barwick); "Yirriyengburnama-langwa mamawura-langwa: Talking about Time in Anindilyakwa (James Bednall); "Across 'Koori Time' and Space (John Maynard)

#im sorry i guess i accidentally deleted this post so here it is again #colonial #imperial #temporality #abolition #indigenous #multispecies #ecology #temporal #futures #haunted #halloween i guess idk #ecologies #tidalectics #archipelagic thinking #caribbean #victorian and edwardian popular culture #extinction

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dontforgetukraine · 2 months

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Having recently spent a few weeks in Poland and Estonia, I formed the impression that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has transformed neighbouring countries in ways that US and western governments completely fail to grasp. Two years of war have radically reshaped expectations.

From the Estonian colleague who calmly told me there will be a Russia-Nato war in the next few years in which Estonia will be partially or completely destroyed, to the Polish mother who no -longer wants her son to pursue a military career--people are drawing conclusions.

They are concluding that Nato is feckless and cannot or will not deter Russia. They are questioning whether their own institutions, and allies, are up to the challenges confronting them. And they are factoring likelihood of war into their own life plans in ways that shocked me.

I mention this because the US and Nato seem to assume that as long as the invasion of Ukraine is contained to Ukraine, and Russia is not actively invading other regional countries, whatever happens in Ukraine (such as the destruction of a children's hospital) stays in Ukraine.

Washington, Brussels, and Berlin have all the time in the world to manage the invasion. If it is eventually resolved to their satisfaction, what happened in the interim--the death and destruction, the blighted lives and hopes--won't matter to much to anyone except Ukraine. They are sadly mistaken. Yes, Ukraine and its people are bearing the brunt of Russia's invasion of Europe. But even if the invasion should end tomorrow, the reputational damage to Nato (and I daresay the EU) has been huge. They have been exposed as inept and compromised. Do Biden, Scholz, et al. think that allowing Russia to ravage Ukraine with impunity will work out well for the Euro-Atlantic institutions that undergird their own power and prestige? People in CEE countries see their supposed allies allowing neighbour Ukraine to be annihilated. People in CEE countries are not fools or passive victims. They see what is being allowed to happen to their neighbour and update their own views accordingly. This is one reason (among many) why the delay in achieving Ukrainian victory is so damaging to the collective West. It's already too late for honour or conscience, but self-interest alone should lead us in the West to help Ukraine expel Russia from its territory sooner rather than later. The credibility of our alliances is ebbing away. Ukraine must win soon to salvage what's left of it.

—Matthew Light, Associate professor of criminology and European studies, University Toronto (Source)

#Ukraine #NATO #russia is a terrorist state #quote #Matthew Light

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mariacallous · 13 days

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As multiple crises flare, and as her Sept. 10 debate with former U.S. President Donald Trump approaches, Vice President Kamala Harris needs to anticipate a potential swipe over the Biden administration’s Balkans record. The former president has proudly cited his own record in the region, and Trump’s former Balkans special envoy, Richard Grenell, has trolled Harris on her alleged ignorance of the region. And the truth is that the situation across the Balkans, with barely an exception, has only worsened on U.S. President Joe Biden’s watch.

At a deeper level, confronting Biden’s struggles in the Balkans can help Harris to urgently refine her own foreign-policy convictions. The essential international task for any president is to wield U.S. power to advance U.S. interests.

The Biden administration’s inability to do so in the Balkans—where the West holds strategic leverage—offers a bracing, universal lesson. Discarding Biden’s core democratic principles, his State Department has “cozied up”—to use Harris’s term—to an autocrat, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic. Just like Trump, Biden officials have failed to grasp the unavoidable price of cutting deals with a strongman: weakness.

Emboldened by U.S. supplication, Vucic has openly revived the Greater Serbian nationalist project that led Yugoslavia to war three decades ago. Now he has applied that philosophy to his relations with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Montenegro. Both directly and indirectly, Serbia has consistently undermined each country’s sovereignty, functionality, and Euro-Atlantic aspirations.

An armed Serbian plot hatched last September in the northern Kosovo town of Banjska—near where U.S. troops are deployed—sought to divide the country by force. This brazen violation of Belgrade’s peace terms with NATO could only have been executed with support from Serbian officials, none of whom have been held to account.

A U.S. administration that regularly slaps sanctions around the region has barely managed to sanction any Serbian officials. Snubbing Washington, Vucic installed two of the few U.S.-sanctioned figures in the newest Serbian government. One of them—Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin, a notorious former intelligence chief and Kremlin acolyte, —met with Russian President Vladimir Putin again on Sept. 4, declaring that “Serbia is Russia’s ally” and adding that “under Aleksandar Vucic’s leadership, Serbia would never join NATO, nor would it impose sanctions on the Russian Federation.”

Vucic’s allies and rivals alike see the disparity in the U.S. posture toward Belgrade and act accordingly. In a visit to Sarajevo in late August, CIA Director William Burns confronted the “worrying secessionist rhetoric and actions” of Milorad Dodik, the pro-Russian president and government of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Serb entity. For much of its tenure, the Biden administration has vainly appealed to Vucic to restrain Dodik, ignoring their shared interest in Bosnia’s demise.

In June, Vucic hosted Dodik and other nationalists in Belgrade at the openly irredentist “All Serbian Assembly.” In July, the pro-Serbian speaker of the Montenegro Parliament Andrea Mandic, orchestrated a resolution calculated to anger Croatia, an Adriatic neighbor that had fully reconciled with its onetime enemy. Executed at Serbian behest, the resolution instantly casts a shadow over Montenegro’s path to the European Union by inviting obstacles from Zagreb, which is an EU member. Like Putin, Vucic is threatened by the EU aspirations of a smaller, supposedly artificial neighbor, Montenegro, which Belgrade seeks to subjugate.

The most serious deterioration is in Kosovo, where Prime Minister Albin Kurti has infuriated Western diplomats with a series of provocative moves in the Serb-predominant north of the country. Determined to finally assert Kosovo’s sovereignty over legacy Serbian institutions, Kurti’s unilateral actions risk undoing his country’s internationally designed constitution, which guarantees a secure place for minority Serbs.

Already deflated after the Banjska fiasco, Kosovo Serbs are near the point of giving up on life in Kosovo—a result that will play into Serbian and Russian designs to undermine the Western, multiethnic order in the region.

Despite U.S. and EU sanctions, Kurti has continued his “instrumentalization” of Kosovo’s police in the north after the disastrous decision by Belgrade loyalists to march Serbs out of the Kosovo police force and other institutions in November 2022. As Grenell has noted, sharp U.S. State Department condemnations of Kurti’s actions have fallen on deaf ears.

Grenell and Biden officials are both missing the point. Kurti continues his irresponsible populism for one, counterintuitive reason: defiance of the U.S. resonates with the most pro-U.S. public in the world, Kosovar Albanians. Citizens of Kosovo, as well as many in North Macedonia and Montenegro, see Kurti as the only figure standing up to Belgrade, which has suffered no penalty for its acts or omissions that led to violent confrontation with NATO peacekeepers.

Mounting U.S. and European fury at Kurti—astride mounting U.S., French, and German investment in Serbia—only exacerbates the problem. Galvanized by Washington’s transactional leadership, French President Emmanuel Macron visited Belgrade at the end of August, sealing the sale of French fighter jets and signing an array of agreements, including in nuclear energy. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz arrived to fanfare in July, overseeing the signing of an EU-Serbian agreement on critical raw materials that will advance the long-stalled mining of lithium in Serbia’s Jadar Valley.

Channeling Washington, Paris insists that the arms package—which comes on top of a yearslong, disturbing weapons acquisition spree by Belgrade—will “anchor Serbia in the West.”

To the contrary, a decade of Serbian foot-dragging on EU reform has proved that Aleksandar Vucic’s ruling party is anchored in autocratic exploitation, strengthening anti-democratic rule at home, and weakening democratic neighbors in Belgrade’s own neighborhood. With his position increasingly secure, Vucic bluntly told Macron during their recent meeting that “joining the Western sanctions [on Russia] is not an option.”

Against this phlegmatic backdrop, the U.S.-backed, EU-led dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo is moribund. Neither Vucic nor Kurti will move forward with the unsigned normalization “accord” that Washington and Brussels insist both sides accepted last year. Eliminating any ambiguity, former Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic formally notified Brussels in December 2023 that Belgrade does not consider the U.S.-EU-mediated accord to be legally binding.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine that Putin launched in February 2022 handed Washington another golden opportunity to challenge Vucic’s duplicitous so-called balance between Serbia’s phony EU candidacy and his real friendships with the autocrats in Moscow, Beijing, and Budapest. Overwhelmed by this seismic geopolitical event, Belgrade was terrified that Washington, along with leading European capitals, would finally call Vucic’s bluff, demanding the same fidelity to the EU position on the invasion that Serbia’s fellow candidates to the bloc had shown.

Instead, the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade immediately lauded Serbia’s half-measures. By May 2022, with his confidence restored, Vucic had signed an in-your-face, three-year gas deal with Putin. In September 2022, Vucic embarrassed U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Under-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland at the United Nations, engineering the high-profile signing of a foreign-policy pact with Russia shortly after meeting the two senior U.S. officials.

The next month, Serbia signed an agreement with Hungary to build a pipeline to deliver Russian oil to Serbia, breaking Vucic’s energy commitments to Biden just as he had done to Trump. And in November, Russian state-controlled TV network Russia Today announced that it would launch its website in Serbia, in direct defiance of EU sanctions.

After initially calling for Belgrade to impose sanctions on Russia, U.S. Ambassador to Serbia Christopher Hill has now pronounced the U.S. government “pleased with the growing forms of cooperation between Serbia and Ukraine.”

No one in Washington should be pleased with the shortsighted, unambitious, and unnecessary trade of democratic values for autocratic disorder. Had Vucic finally been confronted with the need to give up his charade, Belgrade may have voluntarily spread Serbian military munitions to the Ukrainian battlefield without spreading Russian political ammunition throughout the region.

The proof: to this day, the Kremlin has inflicted no price on Belgrade for arming Moscow’s mortal enemy in Kyiv—not even verbal condemnation. Putin’s biggest potential threat to Vucic— ceasing Moscow’s ritual opposition to Kosovo’s membership in the U.N.—would be self-defeating. The Russian president dreams of trading Kosovo for Crimea and other Ukrainian territory in a deal at the U.N. Security Council that is sanctioned by Washington.

In short, Putin has limited options in the Balkans—which means that so does Vucic.

Free from either Russian or Western pressure, Vucic has millions of reasons to continue the highly lucrative, low-risk cash flow from arms sales that go to Ukraine. Indeed, the entire premise that Belgrade needs to be weaned from its traditional friendship with Moscow is flawed. Vucic’s alignment is ideological and voluntary, as proven by his enthusiastic alignment with non-Slavic autocrats in Beijing and Budapest. It was no coincidence that on his May European tour, Chinese President Xi Jin Ping spent most of his time in Hungary and Serbia. Flouting EU policy on Iran, Belgrade last week vowed to “expand bilateral relations” with Tehran, the strategic partner of both Beijing and Moscow. Domestically, the Serbian government enjoys near total dominance of the media narrative in the country (and sizable, poisonous influence in the wider region.)

Similarly, Belgrade’s oft-cited support for pro-Ukraine declarations and U.N. General Assembly resolutions over the war have little do with solidarity with Ukraine and everything to do with advancing Serbia’s regional agenda. As senior officials, including Vucic, have admitted, Kosovo—not Ukraine—is the reason for Belgrade’s steadfast, vocal support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

If she wants to become the U.S. president, Harris needs to understand now the peril of discarding core values just because standing up to autocrats seems like too much work. “A Europe that is whole, free, and at peace” is a stated U.S. strategic objective, not a slogan. Leaving the Balkans as a deteriorating mess is a strategic victory for the United States’ adversaries.

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world-of-wales · 7 months

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Happy International Women’s Day! Celebrating the impact of amazing women today, and every day. Here are just a few of the brilliant women we’ve been inspired by over the past 12 months. #IWD2024

After her daughter Brodie's death by suicide in 2020, Emma Webb launched a suicide prevention campaign. Brodie was a talented equestrian, which is what inspired @thewebstermwebb’s challenge pulling a life-size resin horse 160 miles from Chepstow to London.

Sarah Goldson has directed the @Wimbledon Ball Boy and Girl training since the 2012 Championships. The training helps develop life skills among young people, with 280 BBGs selected from local schools.

Vaitea Cowan is a co-founder of @Enapter, a company aiming to account for 10% of the world's green hydrogen by 2050. Enapter won the Fix Our Climate category at the 2021 Earthshot Prize and continues to thrive.

Bianca Sakol is the founder and CEO of @Sebbys_Corner, a shop-style baby bank which believes no child should go without the basic essentials they need to thrive. They provide a warm, welcoming environment and gives families choice and dignity to choose the items they need.

Mother and daughter, Jennifer and Emilia Clarke, were awarded MBEs for their brain injury charity work. They are co-founders of @SameYouOrg, a charity which develops better mental health recovery treatment for survivors and raises awareness around rehabilitation.

Dr. Gubby Ayida has been the CEO of @EvelinaLondon since May 2023 and oversaw its opening of the new Children’s Day Surgery Unit last year.

Wendy Simm was born and raised in Moss Side, Manchester and founded ‘Keeping It Real 24/7.’ The food bank focuses on delivering culturally important foods to those in need, such as yams and sweet potatoes, which generally are not provided by other food banks.

Captain Preet Chandi is a British Army Captain who holds three world records for polar trekking, most recently in December 2023 for becoming the world's fastest woman to complete a solo South Pole ski expedition.

Barbara Smith is a psychotherapist who has served over 16 years with @BritishRedCross, offering psychosocial support in disaster and war zones, aiding those in trauma.

Sarina Weigman began her role as England Women’s Head Coach in September 2021, leading The @Lionesses to Euro 2022 victory. She was presented with an Honorary CBE in June last year.

Renee Salt is a Holocaust survivor who was born in Zdunska Wola, Poland in 1929. She survived both Auschwitz and Belsen, but her family did not. Renee has spoken to thousands of young people as part of @HolocaustUK's programmes.

Professor Uzo Iwobi founded @rcccymru to boost art, heritage, and culture for minority groups in Wales. She empowers African Caribbean elders through learning initiatives and mentors young people to fulfil their aspirations.

In 2024, @hmsoardacious will be represented by Team Valkyrie, the first all-serving women's military team to row across the Atlantic. The @toughestrow challenge raises money for military charities and organisations that support veterans and their families.

- The Prince and Princess of Wales

#kensingtonroyal #international women's day 2024 #prince of wales #princess of wales #kp twitter #kp tweets #8.03.2024 #february24

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updownlately · 1 year

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it hurts to hate somebody

so this is a new thing i'm doing. if you're confused, check this out! this is the first headcannon i've got :)

song: hurts to hate somebody by chase atlantic

will probably be a fic

going to be angst -> might have a part two of a reunion, no promises though. or i might just make it end in fluff...you never know (cuz i don't know myself)

a break up between reader and a footballer

reader’s anxious, they’re more new to the league and so they’re still building a name for themselves

the first year they’re a bench player for the team

they date the other player

things don’t work out cause r doesn’t want to go public bc they don’t want their personality to be based around the fact that they’re dating an important footballer

they go back and forth for months on whether they can reveal the relationship to the public

tons of small arguments and fights leads to them slowly getting distant

they eventually break up when r goes to another team (maybe an opposing one?) as a starter though, cause they’re finally getting better at the game

reader is really anxious though after the move cause it’s a new environment and everything

it sucks for them to be alone and they see their ex doing okay and stuff and it just brings sadness.

im thinking leah for this one just cause i can incorporate the arnold clark cup dub or the euros dub, or maybe an arsenal tournament win into this but it could be any player really

i have some ideas on how to end it but i’m not gonna give spoilers here :).

lyrics this is based off of:

"exhale, i’m breathing / im tired and anxious”

“should’ve kept you a secret, im so sorry / i realize i’ll never be the man you want me to be / and if you want you can leave”

“i wish i could forgive and forget / i’m so sick of feeling salty / it hurts to hate somebody / sometimes i just wish we’d never met / cause id rather feel nothing / if it hurts to hate somebody”

“wanna wake up and forget that you’re not around”

#storylines #ihths #woso x reader #woso imagine #woso fanfics #leah williamson x reader #angst #leah williamson imagine #my writing

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fabiansteinhauer · 9 months

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Gute Nachrichten

Bewilligt. Der Antrag auf den nächsten Forsch- und Lehraufenthalt in Pernambuco ist von brasilianischer Seite aus bewilligt. Recife, minha cidade, ich komme zurück, schon 2024, vielleicht sogar für vier Wochen.

Strenges Programm! Zwei Sachen sind zu erledigen: Der Forschungsbericht ist zu übergeben, d.h. das Protokoll und die Kommentare zu dem Aufenthalt 2019. Dazu würde ich gerne, falls ich wirklich vier Wochen dort sein kann, jede Woche 90 Minuten vortragen mit anschließender Diskussion. Perspektiven einer Kulturtechnikforschung, die Bild- und Rechtswissenschaft sein soll, das ist etwas aufwendig, weil es doch für viele neu und ungewohnt ist und man etwas Zeit braucht, um von den rhetorischen Institutionen (die in in Recife Lehr- und Forschungsschwerpunkt sind) über juristische Institutionen (sei das jetzt Gaius oder ein aktueller Fall zum Privatrecht oder zu Menschen- und Grundrechten) zur Theorie der Kulturtechniken zu kommen.

Dann will ich drei Sachen weitertreiben: ein Protokoll zu einem Forum auf der Insel Itamaraca (die Fotos wurden mir einmal gestohlen); eines zu dem Sumpf in Recife (sehr unsicher, ob und wie ich das mache) und eines zu einem Markt im Sertao, denn ins Sertao muss ich eh so oft und lange wie möglich.

Der Markt in Buique bietet sich als Rindermarkt an, einmal war ich schon kurz dabei. Pesquiera ist noch noch nicht ganz Sertao, das ist in einem kleinen, sanften und recht grünen Tal, das sich bei Arcoverde zum Sertão hin öffnet, dort liegt dann auch schon das Val Catimbau (oben im Bild) mit seinen mäandernden Tafelbergen und seinen Graphismen nahe, das ist bereits magische Zone.

Ich kann es noch nicht wirklich glauben, dass ich wieder nach Recife komme, vermutlich werde ich erstmal leicht weinerisch oder mild hysterisch geschüttelt, wenn ich lande und das irrisierte und irrisierende Licht, die chromatische Aberration um mich herum habe und dann sicher weiß, ich könnte jetzt in zwei verschieden fantastischen Hotel wohnen: dem altschicken Hotel Central ohne Klimaanlage aber mit Nachbarschaft zu dem Wohnhaus von Clarice Lispector oder aber in dem 1980-Hotel schlechthin, dem Atlante-Plaza, dem Hotel mit blauverspiegelter Fassade, Klimaanlage, Dachpool und Bar unter künstlichem Wasserfall, also in der Zeitmaschine, die einen in die Filmära zurückträgt, in der Pierre Richard und Gert Fröbe noch in gemeinsamen Filmen auftraten oder Typen wie Albert R. Broccoli Talente wie Lotte Lenya und Robert Shaw um sich sammelte, um ... James-Bond-Filme zu produzieren. Kicher! Das muss man sich mal vorstellen. Der ganze Aufwand für fröhlichen Neunzigminutenklimbim, mit dem man dann noch eine große Industrie finanzierte. Gab es alles mal, wird Tag für Tag unglaubhafter, aber manche Hotels in Recife erinnern daran, dass es mal Zeiten gab, in denen Heterogenität und Homogenität wie Fuchs und Hase 'Gute Nacht' sagten. Nix wie hin.

Das Hotel Central hat zwei Sterne, rational betrachtet ist das korrekt berechnet. Kostes darum nur ungefähr 30 Euro pro Nacht mit Frühstück. Das ist ein Witz, totaler Witz. Das Hotel ist eine Sehenswürdigkeit, ein Museum, ein Studierobjekt. Man sollte seine Phobien leicht in Unerschrockenheit übersetzen können, sonst wird es in der Nachbarschaft schnell rauh und ungemütlich. Die Nachbarschaft lebt nämlich, thut einem aber nix, wenn man ihr nix thut und immer genug Geld bereit hat, das man gerecht zu teilen bereit ist. Zivile Besteuerer und Zöllner können einem da mal schon begegnen, aber die begegnen einem auch hier. Der Vorteil des Central: Das war der erste sogenannte Hochaus von Recife, ist äußerlich geschickt renoviert, vermittelt etwas vom Glanz der dreißiger Jahre und man bekommt eine Sinn für die Maße und die Explosion der Maße. Keine Klimaanlage, auch das iste in Vorteil, weil man von der Luft und der Feuchtigkeit erfährt, ohne sie in den Standard globaler Industrieproduktion zu übersetzen. Der Körper merkt sich das schnell, Luft hat Dialekte und Akzente, Färbung und Modulierungen, und es lohnt sich, auch wenn man vermutlich am Anfang glaubt, dort keine Luft zu bekommen und niemals schlafen zu können. Es geht, man gewöhnt sich daran - und hat dann Erinnerungen, die man sonst nicht hätte, das dichtet ein bisschen am Lebenslauf.

#forschungsbericht

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felipeandletizia · 11 months

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October 25, 2023: Casa Real released new pictures of Princess Leonor ahead of her 18th birthday on October 31st.

July 3, 2022: Visited the Dali Museum in Girona

July 16, 2022: Soccer match of the “UEFA Women’s Euro 2022” between Denmark and Spain at Brentford Community Stadium in London, UK

May 20, 2023: Graduated from UWC Atlantic College in Wales, England

July 31, 2023: Summer photosession at Alfabia Gardens in Mallorca

August 17, 2023: Arrival at the General Military Academy of Zaragoza where the princess begun her military training that will last for the next 3 years

October 21, 2022: Visited Arroes, Pion y Candanal, winner of the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award of Best Asturian Village.

#Princess Leonor #Princess Leonor of Asturias #Princess of Asturias #Leonor's 18th Birthday #October 2023

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 7 months

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Tim Campbell

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 29, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 1, 2024

Today’s story is that in the negotiations to fund the government and pass the national supplemental security bill, MAGA Republicans appear to be losing ground. Biden appears to be trying to weaken them further by making it clear it is Republicans, not Democrats, who are preventing new, strict border security legislation.

The first of two continuing resolutions to fund the government for fiscal year 2024 will expire tomorrow. Fiscal year 2024 began on October 1, 2023, and Congress agreed to a topline budget, but it has been unable to fund the necessary appropriations because MAGA Republicans have insisted on having their extreme demands met in those measures. In this struggle, former president Trump has urged his loyalists not to give way, telling them in September 2023: “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!”

But a poll from last September showed that 75% of Americans oppose using brinksmanship over a government shutdown to bargain for partisan gain.

After kicking the can down the road by passing three previous continuing resolutions, House Republicans a week ago expected a shutdown. But today they backed off. The House passed a short-term continuing resolution that pushes back the dates on which the two continuing resolutions expire, from March 1 and March 8 to March 8 and March 22. The vote was 320 to 99 in the House, with 113 Republicans joining 207 Democrats to pass the measure. Ninety-seven Republicans opposed the bill, as did two Democrats who were protesting the lack of aid to Ukraine.

Tonight, the Senate approved the continuing resolution by a vote of 77 to 13. President Joe Biden is expected to sign it tomorrow. “What we have done today has overcome the opposition of the MAGA hard right and gives us a formula for completing the appropriations process in a way that does not shut the government down and capitulate to extremists,” Senate majority leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) said.

Trump opposes helping Ukraine in its fight to resist Russia’s invasion, and under his orders, MAGA Republicans have also stalled the national security supplemental bill, which contains Ukrainian aid, as well as aid to Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and humanitarian aid to Gaza. The measure passed the Senate on February 13 by a strong bipartisan vote of 70 to 29, and is expected to pass the House if Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) takes it up, but so far, he has refused.

Today, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) told reporters that “several” House Republicans are willing to sign a discharge petition to force Speaker Johnson to bring a national security supplemental measure to the floor for a vote. A simple majority can force a vote on a bill through a discharge petition, but such a measure is rare because it undermines the House speaker. With Johnson refusing to take up the Senate measure, Fitzpatrick and his colleague Representative Jared Golden (D-ME) have prepared their own pared-down aid measure. Fitzpatrick told CNN’s Jake Tapper Tuesday that “[w]e are trying to add an additional pressure point on something that has to happen.”

Speakers from the parliaments of 23 nations wrote to Johnson yesterday and urged him to take up the Senate measure, saying that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has “challenged the entire democratic world, jeopardizing the security in the whole European and Euro-Atlantic area,” and that “the world is rapidly moving towards the destruction of the sustainable world order.”

On Tuesday, Johnson met with President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate majority leader Schumer, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) to discuss the importance of funding the government and passing the national security supplemental bill. There, he was the odd man out as the other five pressed upon him how crucial funding for Ukraine is for U.S. national security.

Yesterday, Johnson told Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity that the leaders told him he was “on an island by myself, and it was me versus everyone else in the room.” He went on: “What the liberal media doesn’t understand, Sean, is that if you’re here in Washington and you’re described as a leader that’s on an island by themselves, it probably means you’re standing with the American people.”

But an AP-NORC poll released today shows that it is not Johnson but the others at that meeting who are standing with the American people: 74% of Americans, including 62% of Republicans, support U.S. aid to Ukraine’s military.

The struggle between Biden and Trump for control over U.S. politics played out starkly today as both were in Texas to talk about immigration. Both say the influx of migrants at the southern border of the United States needs to be better managed. But Trump blames Biden for what he compares to a war in which an “invasion” of criminal “fighting-age men” are pouring over the border. (NBC News noted that “there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the United States” and that, in fact, their review of crime data ”shows overall crime levels dropping in those cities that have received the most migrants.”)

Trump promises he would solve immigration issues instantly with executive orders, although his orders during his term faced legal challenges.

In contrast to Trump’s promise to dictate a solution, Biden emphasized that the government should work for the people. In Texas, he noted that the federal government has rushed emergency personnel and funds to the state to combat the deadly wildfires there that have burned more than a million acres, and he urged Congress to pass a law to address border issues, as he has asked it to since he took office.

Such a measure is popular, and earlier this month, Trump undermined a bill that was tilted so far to the right that it drew the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and the U.S. Border Patrol union. Senators from both parties had spent four months hammering the bill out at the insistence of House Republicans, who then killed it when Trump, apparently hoping to keep the issue open for his campaign, told them to.

Today, Biden urged Congress to pass the $20.2 billion bipartisan border bill that would, he said, give border patrol officers the resources they need: 1,500 more border agents, 100 cutting-edge machines to detect and stop illegal fentanyl, 100 additional immigration judges to deal with the backlog of cases, 4,300 more asylum officers, more immigrant visas, and emergency authority for the president to shut the border when it becomes overwhelmed.

Biden spoke directly to Trump: “Instead of playing politics with the issue, instead of telling members of Congress to block this legislation, join me, or I'll join you, in telling the Congress to pass this bipartisan border security bill. We can do it together…. Instead of playing politics with the issue, why don't we just get together and get it done. Let’s remember who the heck we work for. We work for the American people, not the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. We work for the American people.”

Trump may not share that perspective. Last night, Maggie Haberman and Andrew Higgins of the New York Times reported that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has undermined democracy in Hungary, will visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago next week as Trump scrambles to find the more than half a billion dollars he needs to pay the fines and penalties courts have ordered. “We cannot interfere in other countries’ elections,” Orbán said last week, “but we would very much like to see President Donald Trump return to the White House.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#GOPutin #political cartoons #Tim Campbell #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #American Foreign Policy #war in Ukraine #Russia #dictators #Orban #government funding #feckless Speaker of the House #National Security

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