#eliot a. cohen

[quotesfrommyreading]

Much of the public discussion of Ukraine reveals a tendency to patronize that country and others that escaped Russian rule. As Toomas Ilves, a former president of Estonia, acidly observed, “When I was at university in the mid-1970s, no one referred to Germany as ‘the former Third Reich.’ And yet today, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we keep on being referred to as ‘former Soviet bloc countries.’” Tropes about Ukrainian corruption abound, not without reason—but one may also legitimately ask why so many members of Congress enter the House or Senate with modest means and leave as multimillionaires, or why the children of U.S. presidents make fortunes off foreign countries, or, for that matter, why building in New York City is so infernally expensive.

The latest, richest example of Western condescension came in a report by German military intelligence that complains that although the Ukrainians are good students in their training courses, they are not following Western doctrine and, worse, are promoting officers on the basis of combat experience rather than theoretical knowledge. Similar, if less cutting, views have leaked out of the Pentagon.

Criticism by the German military of any country’s combat performance may be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the Bundeswehr has not seen serious combat in nearly eight decades. In Afghanistan, Germany was notorious for having considerably fewer than 10 percent of its thousands of in-country troops outside the wire of its forward operating bases at any time. One might further observe that when, long ago, the German army did fight wars, it, too, tended to promote experienced and successful combat leaders, as wartime armies usually do.

American complaints about the pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive and its failure to achieve rapid breakthroughs are similarly misplaced. The Ukrainians indeed received a diverse array of tanks and armored vehicles, but they have far less mine-clearing equipment than they need. They tried doing it our way—attempting to pierce dense Russian defenses and break out into open territory—and paid a price. After 10 days they decided to take a different approach, more careful and incremental, and better suited to their own capabilities (particularly their precision long-range weapons) and the challenge they faced. That is, by historical standards, fast adaptation. By contrast, the United States Army took a good four years to develop an operational approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq that yielded success in defeating the remnants of the Baathist regime and al-Qaeda-oriented terrorists.

A besetting sin of big militaries, particularly America’s, is to think that their way is either the best way or the only way. As a result of this assumption, the United States builds inferior, mirror-image militaries in smaller allies facing insurgency or external threat. These forces tend to fail because they are unsuited to their environment or simply lack the resources that the U.S. military possesses in plenty. The Vietnamese and, later, the Afghan armies are good examples of this tendency—and Washington’s postwar bad-mouthing of its slaughtered clients, rather than critical self-examination of what it set them up for, is reprehensible.

The Ukrainians are now fighting a slow, patient war in which they are dismantling Russian artillery, ammunition depots, and command posts without weapons such as American ATACMS and German Taurus missiles that would make this sensible approach faster and more effective. They know far more about fighting Russians than anyone in any Western military knows, and they are experiencing a combat environment that no Western military has encountered since World War II. Modesty, never an American strong suit, is in order.

  —  Western Diplomats Need to Stop Whining About Ukraine

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Just as Andrei Sakharov was the most prominent late twentieth century exponent of the Westernizer school of Russian political and social thought, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the best manifestation of the Slavophile school. This rehashing by Eliot A Cohen of Solzhenitsyn's Harvard commencement address from 1978 is the day's essential read. While clearing out a storage room filled with books, I came across a slim volume, A World Split Apart, the text of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard commencement address. I remember listening to the speech at the time and being disconcerted by the petulant commentary it elicited. Solzhenitsyn had been in the United States only three years, having been expelled by the Soviet government and living as a recluse in Vermont. The consensus—certainly among the great and the good of Cambridge, Massachusetts—was that he was an ultranationalist, a reactionary, and, above all, an ingrate. At the time, I thought the reaction peevish and beside the point. Rereading the speech, it seems even more urgent that we pay heed to his excoriating critique of Western liberalism.

Solzhenitsyn did misunderstand some of the key elements of Western, and specifically American, liberal democracy. He was no democrat, although he unreservedly opposed cruel and arbitrary government. It is true, too, that his deep religious faith and mystical belief in Russia’s destiny were and remain alien to most non-Russians. And it is true, as well, that he had cordial if cautious relations in the early 2000s with Vladimir Putin, although he was staunchly in favor of letting the Soviet Union’s subject nations, including even Ukraine, go their own way. But what matters now as it did then is his critique of us. We have just seen a feckless House of Representatives pass a ludicrous impeachment of a Cabinet secretary by one vote—and then skip town while avoiding a vote on aid to Ukraine. We have seen the West’s inability to prevent the murder, by direct or indirect means, of a heroic dissident, Alexei Navalny, and the gleeful insouciance of the Russian dictator hours after it was reported. We have seen a foreign war used as an excuse to hound Jews on campuses and in the streets, and we have the horrifying spectacle of a possible return to the presidency of one of the most corrupt and dangerous politicians in American history. Which makes it worthwhile to return to Solzhenitsyn’s speech, a dark reflection for a different dark time.

The speech begins with a slap to our face: “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.” That is as true now as it was then, possibly truer. At home, a great political party collapses in craven subservience to a demagogue. Abroad, we fear to arm Ukraine adequately to defeat a monstrous aggressor; we fear to punish an Iranian regime that has repeatedly sought to kill our people and occasionally succeeds; we fear to face the fact that all of us in the liberal-democratic world are spending way less than what we need to defend ourselves. Domestically, we fear to dissent from the orthodoxies of our respective subcultures. Nowhere is this more true than among those who should prize intellectual courage, as Solzhenitsyn did. “Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad.” When the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression consistently rates America’s oldest and most prestigious university one of the very worst for freedom of speech, something is deeply amiss. And that is, of course, Harvard, the very university at which Solzhenitsyn spoke, whose motto is Veritas—“Truth.”

One is hard-pressed today to name more than a handful of truly courageous professors, deans, and university presidents willing to jeopardize their careers and their social standing by taking unpopular stands—unyielding opposition to DEI rules and bureaucracies, for example. The very notions that reasonable people can disagree on important matters, that one’s point of view reflects individual thought rather than identity or tribe, and that physical intimidation has no place in civilized politics are all at risk. Solzhenitsyn talked about intellectuals because, as a Russian of that ilk, he believed that writers were the conscience of their countries. For politicians he had little use, but surely courage is sorely lacking there as well. When Donald Trump sneered at John McCain, a heroic figure if ever there was one, who had suffered terribly for his country and loved it unreservedly, Trump paid no political price. Which means that the problem was not so much Trump as it is us. It has been a very long time since a rising young American politician, badly injured in his own war service, published Profiles in Courage and was acclaimed for it.

At the root of the West’s troubles, Solzhenitsyn believed, was the view that man is the measure of all things, that social problems of all kinds can be managed away, that evil is not embedded in human nature, and that the ultimate purpose of life is happiness. In large measure, we in the West still believe these things. Above all we talk endlessly about happiness, as measured by psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists. To which Solzhenitsyn observed, if “man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die.” And as he pointed out, if such a credo holds, “for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good?” Which may explain the struggles of many armies, including the American, to fill their ranks.

By Eliot A. Cohen

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Eliot A. Cohen

Published: Dec 23, 2023

Like many alumni of Harvard, I have been following the misadventures of President Claudine Gay—first her coolly calibrated reflections on arguments for the genocide of Jews, and now accusations about the intellectual integrity of her published work—with appalled fascination. It is the latter topic on which I can claim some expertise.

I learned about plagiarism at Harvard by an accident of academic politics. The department of government, where I had received my Ph.D., had an opening for an assistant professor in the field of international affairs, and it had (in the department’s opinion) two equally attractive candidates. With Solomonic wisdom, they divided the position in half, offering me and my competitor half-time administrative positions. Mine was as the Allston Burr Senior Tutor in Quincy House.

The Harvard houses are modified versions of Oxford or Cambridge colleges. They are residences but not dormitories. Associated with each house was a group of faculty and visiting fellows who regularly dined and spoke there, and who helped constitute each house’s Senior Common Room. There was a staff of resident tutors, mainly graduate students, who taught sections of major courses and advised students in a variety of ways. And then there were the master and the senior tutor, also resident. The former presided over the collective life of the house; the latter was responsible for the students as individuals.

I should note here that the term senior tutor connoted a function that was chiefly educational. Harvard now calls them resident deans, because they came to do everything but educate, including directing students to mental-health resources and responding to the varied crises of a student’s life in the pressure cooker that is the college.. Harvard dropped the term master in 2016 because it reeked of the antebellumplantation. (Oddly enough, this compunction has not prevented Harvard from continuing to offer master’s degrees, for which it charges very healthy tuition.)

Harvard then took plagiarism seriously—and in one way still does, disciplining dozens of students every year for this gravest of academic sins. Even transgressions falling short of plagiarism could still constitute “misuse of sources,” for which a year’s probation and suspension from participation in extracurricular activities were the usual response. Plagiarists, meanwhile—those who had lifted someone else’s language without quotation marks or citation—were bounced from the college for a year, during which time they were required to work at a nonacademic job (no year-long backpacking trip) and refrain from visiting Cambridge. They would be readmitted after submitting a statement that examined their original misdeed and reflected on it.

The senior tutor was the one who received any initial complaint from a faculty member, some of whom were (or feigned to be) shocked when they learned that plagiarism could have material consequences. They would assemble the dossier, counsel the student, and present the case to the administrative board, composed of all the senior tutors and a few faculty and deans, about 20 people in all. The senior tutor would present the student’s case to his or her colleagues, and we would deliberate.

If the board voted to rusticate the offender, the student could make a personal appeal, which was surprisingly rare. After long conversations with their senior tutor, most of the students understood that they had gone seriously astray, and left with a feeling of, if not relief, then of catharsis. They could return to school with the slate wiped clean, and with much greater maturity and sense of purpose. This was, in part, because most plagiarists are not depraved or even lazy, but simply insecure. They came back as much more independent and self-reliant characters, which was what we wanted.

It was a very good system. Harvard’s approach to plagiarism then rested on the notion that even a disciplinary process should be educational. At its heart was the importance of accepting responsibility for one’s actions. It was not enough to correct the errant document; it was necessary to look at oneself in the mirror and say, “I did this, and it was wrong.” I believe that this approach was rooted in Harvard’s lingering mission of developing leaders of integrity and courage.

A leader must begin with a deeply rooted sense of responsibility; from there one moves to accountability, the ability to own one’s organization’s failings. For example, if Jewish students are being harassed and threatened on the university campus where one is president, it means saying, “I own this. I will fix it,” in simple and unqualified terms.

The members of the administrative board were predominantly teachers and scholars, not administrators, and that was crucial. We did not bring in lawyers. We did not hire expensive plagiarism experts as consultants. We read the materials carefully (the dossiers could be quite thick), deliberated, and made a decision. If a senior tutor got carried away defending a student from their house, their colleagues would gently but firmly nail the case to the undisputed facts. And when faculty members tried to intercede, they were equally firmly told that they were responsible for the grading side of the education, and we were covering the disciplinary side.

It is undisputed that Claudine Gay used other scholars’ language, often with the slightest modification or none, and occasionally without even a footnote acknowledgment. Were that not so, she would not have recently requested corrections to work dating back to her dissertation. I have looked at the evidence presented in various places, none of which has been controverted, and it is clear to me that this is plagiarism. For example, as The Harvard Crimson reports, her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation includes this paragraph:

The average turnout rate seems to increase linearly as African-Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. (If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one way to think about bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatterplot. A linear form would only result if the changes in one race’s turnout were compensated by changes in the turnout of the other race across the graph.)

A 1996 scholarly paper by Bradley Palmquist and Stephen Voss reads as follows:

The average turnout rate seems to decrease linearly as African Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot (resulting only when changes in one race’s turnout rate somehow compensated for changes in the other’s across the graph).

It is a pretty complete steal, with the bizarre substitution of “increase” for “decrease.”

Even if, in the most tolerant and sympathetic of readings, this and similar copying merely constitute “misuse of sources,” it is disqualifying for a position of leadership at any university. Her failure to accept responsibility in stark and unqualified terms makes matters worse.

The Harvard Corporation has stood by President Gay, even as scandal has mounted. The New York Post reports that when it first raised the plagiarism accusations with Harvard, the response was not a comment on the evidence, but a 15-page letter from Harvard’s defamation lawyer. Instead of standing up for Harvard’s motto, Veritas, (“truth”), the corporation has hunkered down.

Students have a keen scent for the stink of hypocrisy; they understand Gay’s original misdeeds and the evasions of the Harvard Corporation. They may even realize that something has gone deeply awry with the university when a Harvard professor dismisses the claims as a right-wing attack and tells The New York Times,“If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting [the accusations] some credence,” as though the facts depend on the politics of those who point them out.

I have no idea how as a teacher at Harvard today I could look an undergraduate in the eye and hold forth about why plagiarism is a violation of the values inherent in the academic enterprise. They would laugh, openly or secretly, at the corruption and double standards. And I would not blame them for doing so.

President Gay is in a tough spot. The Harvard Corporation deserves to be in a much tougher spot, because it has betrayed the values that the university once cherished and that it still proclaims. In both cases, the remedy indicated is the one we senior tutors applied to many a student years ago: fess up, withdraw, and reflect.

[thatwritererinoriordan]

[yardsards]

music taste: jewish artists singing about the story of samson and delilah

they Understand. i can't articulate exactly what they understand but they definitely Understand.

(songs are "samson" by regina spektor, "hallelujah" by leonard cohen, and "with samson in washington state" by mal blum)

[imall4frogs]

“What will stick will be the videos of grandmothers dragged into captivity, children shot dead, young women stripped naked, corpses desecrated. For many Jews, the echoes are primal, and go back to the two-and-a-half-millennia-old Book of Lamentations: ‘Her virgins are afflicted … Her young children are gone into captivity … The youth and the old man lie on the ground in the streets … Thou has slaughtered unsparingly.’ The scenes are ones that scar so much of Jewish history, from the massacres of the Crusades to the pogroms of the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the ultimate horror of the Holocaust. They are deep and indelible in the psyche of even the Israeli who surfs on Saturday and doesn’t mind a ham sandwich; they will color everything that follows hereafter.”

—Eliot A. Cohen for The Atlantic

[xox000xox]

250 Hollywood Celebrities Sign Letter Demanding Big Tech Censor Anyone Who Opposes Trans Surgeries On Kids

Here are the names of every celebrity who wants to mutilate children. Remember them & for Gods sake, stop supporting their products, movies, shows etc.

Abby Wambach

Adam Eli

Aitch Alberto

AJ Shively

Alan Cumming

Alejandra Caraballo

Alejandra Ghersi

Alex Clark

Alexandra Gutierrez

Alisa Ramirez

Allie Leonard

Allison Goldfrapp

ALOK Vaid-Menon

Alyssa May Gold

Alyssa Milano

Amber Ruffin

Amber Tamblyn

Amy Schumer

Amy Landecker

Andrew Polk

Angelica Ross

Annaleigh Ashford

Antoni Porowski

Aparna Brielle

Arden Myrin

Ariana Grande

Arisce Wanzer

Avan Jogia

Barbie Ferreira

Bebe Rexha

Bella Ramsey

Ben Barnes

Benito Skinner

Benj Pasek

Bethany Cosentino

Bethany Leavel

Billy Eichner

Billy Porter

Bob the Drag Queen

Bobby Berk

Bonnie Milligan

Brad Oscar

Bradley Whitford

Brandon Matthews

Brendan Hines

Bretman Rock

Brian Smith

Brigette Lundy-Paine

Brittany Tomlinson

Busy Philipps

Caesar Samoya

Camila Cabello

Camille A Brown

Cara Delevingne

Chani Nicholas

Chella Man

Chelsea Handler

Cheyenne Jackson

Chris Perfetti

Christa Miller

Cleo Wade

Colton Haynes

Corey Jantzen

Cynthia Erivo

Cynthia McWilliams

Cynthia Nixon

Cyrus Veyssi

D’Arcy Carden

Dakota Fanning

Dan Levy

Darren Criss

David Shatraw

David Oulton

Debra Messing

Deepica Mutyala

Demi Lovato

Des McAnuff

Devery Jacobs

Diana Maria Riva

Diane Guerrero

Dylan Mulvaney

Ed Droste

Eddie Ndopu

EJ Marcus

Elegance Bratton

Eliot Rahal

Elle Fanning

Elliot Page

Emily Hampshire

Emily V. Gordon

Emma Hunton

Erin Reed

Estefania Pessoa

FLETCHER

Freddy Thomas

Gabrielle Union-Wade

Gigi Gorgeous

Glennon Doyle

Gottmik

Grace Kuhlenschmidt

Griffin Dunne

Haley Baldwin Bieber

Hannah Gadsby

Harry Lambert

Hayley Kiyoko

Hilary Montez

Ilana Glazer

Indya Moore

Isaac Mizrahi

Jackie Bazan

Jacob Tierney

Jai Rodriguez

Jameela Jamil

James Blake

James Scully

Jaymes Vaughan

Jamie Lee Curtis

Janaya Khan

Janelle Monáe

Janet Hubert

Jazz Jennings

Jenna Lyons

Jennifer Kerr

Jeremy Fall

Jessica Betts

Jillian Mercado

Jinkx Monsoon

Joe DiPietro

Jonathan Van Ness

Jonathan Bennett

Jonny Pierce

Jordan Stenmark

Jordan Firstman

Jordan Roth

JP Saxe

Judd Apatow

Justin Baldoni

Justin Tranter

Kal Penn

Kamar de los Reyes

Karamo Brown

Kate Reinders

Katherine LaNasa

Kathryn Grody

Kellie Overbey

Kelly Devine

Kendrick Sampson

Kevin Harrington

Kevin Cahoon

Ki Griffin

Kimber Elayne Sprawl

Kimberly Drew

Kristin Chenoweth

Lachlan Watson

Laith De La Cruz

Laura Terruso

Lauren Jauregui

Laverne Cox

Lena Dunham

Lena Waithe

Lena Hall

Lilly Singh

Lily Rabe

Liv Hewson

Liza Koshy

Lola Tung

Lorin Latarro

Lovell Adams-Gray

Lucky Bromhead

Mae Martin

Mae Whitman

Maggie Boccella

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan

Mandy Patinkin

Marc Jacobs

Marc Kudisch

Marieme Diop

Martha Plimpton

Matt Bernstein

Matt McGorry

Matt Walton

Medalion Rahimi

Meena Harris

Megan Crabbe

Michael D. Cohen

Michaela Jaé Rodriguez

Michelle Buteau

Midori Francis

Miriam Silverman

Moj Mahdara

Mona Chalabi

Montego Glover

Munroe Bergdorf

Nate Wonder

Nats Getty

Neila Karassik

Nicholas Ferroni

Nico Carney

Nico Santos

Nico Tortorella

Nicole Maines

Niecy Nash-Betts

Nik Dodani

Ocean Vuong

Olly Alexander

Our Lady J

Padma Lakshmi

Patrick Stewart

Patti LuPone

Peppermint

Phillip Picardi

Phoebe Robinson

Poorna Jagannathan

Rachel Cargle

Rafael Silva

Ramy Youssef

Randy Shulman

Raquel Willis

Richa Moorjani

Rob Holysz

Robert Horn

Rory Dahl

Rosario Dawson

Rupi Kaur

Sam Smith

Sander Jennings

Sandy Rustin

Sara Bareilles

Sara Ramirez

Sarah Ramos

Sasha Velour

Scott Turner Schofield

Shawn Mendes

Shea Couleé

Shea Diamond

Sherri Saum

Sinead Burke

Solomon Hughes

Stephen Kunken

Susie Park

T. Oliver Reid

Taika Waititi

Tan France

Tatiana Maslany

Tess Holliday

Tiffany Namtu

Tommy Dorfman

Tracee Ellis Ross

Travis Alabanza

Tunde Adebimpe

Vivek Shraya

Wanda Sykes

Warren Carlyle

Wayne Cilento

Wilson Cruz

Yves Mathieu East

Zoë Chao

Zooey Deschanel

SHARE THIS WITH EVERY🤬NE‼️💯

[mariacallous]

Congressional staff delegations are simultaneously incredibly interesting and totally grueling. In order to convince the Ethics Committee that such trips are not corrupt boondoggles, trips have to be packed with meetings—the agendas for which have to be approved ahead of time. Which is why I was in Ukraine a couple of weeks ago as part of a staff delegation—led by the Center for Strategic and International Studies—to Poland, Ukraine, and Moldova to try to understand whether the United States should approve sending another $24 billion in supplemental aid to Ukraine. And, because our days were full of meetings, I had the opportunity to ask dozens of people from around the region what, to them, “victory” looked like.

Some argue that in order to reach a peace agreement, Russia should be allowed to continue its occupation of Crimea, and Ukraine should adopt a neutral stance toward NATO. Eliot Cohen argues that the shortest path to a cessation of conflict is through the collapse of the Russian military. Others maintain that an immediate cease-fire is needed. And still others maintain that peace can be achieved by bringing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin together to talk. In other words, ideas of how peace will come about in Ukraine vary.

All wars end, at least in theory. But getting parties to end organized state violence on acceptable terms is, to put it mildly, not easy. What a durable peace agreement might look like is therefore on everyone’s mind. Zelensky himself has promulgated a 10-point plan for achieving an acceptable peace. But talking to different people from around the region, other views surfaced.

A frozen conflict. This seemed to be the view most prevalent outside of Ukraine itself. Essentially, in this scenario, the Russian front line holds across eastern Ukraine and Russia maintains its grip on the east and Crimea. Fighting continues, but the major victory is that Russia does not take all of Ukraine. The Black Sea Fleet continues to harass Ukraine at sea and by launching missiles and drones, and Russian forces continue bombing civilian and military targets across Ukraine. With investments in (or donations of) air defenses, the harassment is manageable for the Ukrainian forces. This could ultimately take the form of the war formally continuing without significant gains on either side, or as a cease-fire mixed with intermittent periods of conflict.

As a strategist far removed from the front lines, I was reluctantly persuaded that this was the most likely, but far from the most acceptable, conflict outcome. Yet my visit to Ukraine convinced me otherwise—in particular, from seeing the impact of Russian war crimes firsthand and being told of horrors beyond imagination.

The question of war termination, therefore, isn’t just about which flag is raised over which territory; if it were, a land-for-peace kind of deal could be feasible. Rather, Russia and its military forces have made it clear that they are intent on brutalizing and eradicating Ukrainian culture and people. Russians have tortured Ukrainians (and are still doing so), murdered them, and thrown them into mass graves. Tens of thousands of war crimes have been reported and, according to Ukrainian investigators I spoke with in Kyiv, those represent the tip of the iceberg. To the Ukrainians, a frozen conflict means allowing Russia to continue brutalizing their fellow countrymen and women in the east—and it invites Russia to attack Ukraine again later, once it has reconstituted its forces.

Every inch of Ukrainian territory is taken back. Almost every Ukrainian stated that this was the minimum necessary requirement for peace. In their view, anything short of regaining all of the territory that was part of Ukraine prior to the 2014 invasion (read: Crimea, too) would only result in a Russian strategic pause, and another bloody start to the war at the time of Russia’s choosing.

Ukrainian interlocutors also made the point that regaining Crimea remains essential, since the peninsula is a key piece of real estate for launching operations against the rest of Ukraine. Many Ukrainians also see their resistance as a bulwark against Russia’s neoimperial ambitions: If Russia can retain any part of Ukraine, its appetite for regaining other “lost” territories will never be suppressed.

The Russian regime is overthrown—not just Putin. Ukrainian interlocutors who made this point argued that Putin has staked his own regime’s survival on successfully winning Ukraine. Putin has used a martial, violence-oriented vision of masculinity to strengthen his grip on power and Russian society. A defeat in Ukraine—especially when Ukraine has been depicted as alternately fascist and corrupted by Western feminists—would severely undermine the authoritarian order that Putin has constructed. According to this logic, Ukrainians taking back Ukrainian territory could deal a death blow to Putin—yet without some kind of change in polity, another threatening authoritarian actor would likely take the reins in a post-Putin Moscow. Instead, this idea of victory envisaged the hope of a changed and chastened Russia.

Ukraine is a thriving democracy. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, Ukraine experienced a bumpy path toward democracy—to put it mildly. Support to  Ukraine since 2014, particularly in development and humanitarian assistance, have allowed Ukrainian civil society to become a pretty cohesive network of community builders and democracy advocates. This has enabled staggering numbers of internally displaced persons from the east to be absorbed by, and resettled in, places like Kyiv and Lviv.

It has also created a useful foundation upon which Ukraine can advance its efforts to bring its government and economy up to standard to join the European Union. In this view, the seeds are already in place for Ukraine to be one of Europe’s leading democracies—it’s now time to cultivate them. Doing so will require continued economic and humanitarian support, in addition to providing Ukraine with the military capabilities needed to win the fight.

These are discussions for Ukrainians—and perhaps not the same ones that Americans should be having. Here, the question that keeps being asked is: What does victory look like to the United States? In many ways, Washington is far removed from the war in Ukraine, both geographically and geopolitically. Ukraine is neither a U.S. neighbor nor a NATO ally. Why should Americans care how this war ends? Why should Americans invest another $24 billion in Ukraine when there are problems on the southern border and forest fires in Maui?

Sure, $24 billion is a big number, but displacing entrenched Russian defenses was never going to be a cheap proposition. And it’s a whole lot cheaper than putting American boots on the ground in Ukraine.

But what kind of world do we want to live in? The answer requires speculation, of course, but strategy is, in many ways, inherently speculative. To start with, it’s an obvious point, but one worth restating: The world is watching. In Europe, Russia has demonstrated neoimperial intentions—and its former empire extended into what is now NATO territory. Interlocutors across much of Central and Eastern Europe consistently make the point that Russia’s appetite for land will hardly be sated if it wins in Ukraine.

Do we really want to tempt fate, and the Russians, into creeping into NATO territory—aggression that will inherently draw the U.S. into the conflict (Indeed, we may already be seeing this conflict creep in Romania.)? On the other side of the globe, in the view of observers in Asia, China is watching whether the United States will follow through on its assurances to Ukraine in order to gauge whether it will also do so with respect to Taiwan.

. It  is also worth considering how destabilizing such a world would be to the global economy, and by extension to the American commercial, economic, and security interests that are so intertwined with the global order the U.S. helped construct. Economies need stability in order to prosper; a world characterized by chronic geopolitical instability would likely affect the United States in all sorts of ways. Some believe that a war with China over Taiwan would cost the global economy $2 trillion. And sure, there are risks to continuing to support Ukraine, but giving the Ukrainians the ammunition and other assistance they need remains our best shot at countering expansionist authoritarian regimes and the attendant instability that would arise from the kind of world we would live in if Ukraine is defeated.

More importantly, do we want to live in a world wherein an authoritarian state can massacre its democratic neighbors?.  Ukrainian children are being separated from their families and deported to Russia.  The horrors of this war are mind-bogglingly terrible. Do we really want to look the other way?  The line must be held, and the line is now in Ukraine.

What does victory look like? It starts with a free Ukraine.

[juneiper-art]

Kaveh Akbar / Charles Bukowski/ Jennifer Clarvoe / Charles Bukowski / Leonard Cohen / e.e. cummings / T.S. Eliot

Thinking about The Dark Urge and Gortash

[ghelgheli]

The Stuff I Read in June/July 2023

Stuff I Extra Liked is Bold

I forgot to do it last month so you get a double feature

Books

Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee

Heteropessimism (Essay Cluster)

The Biological Mind, Justin Garson (2015) Ch. 5-7

Sacred and Terrible Air, Robert Kurvitz

Wage Labour and Capital, Karl Marx

Short Fiction

Beware the Bite of the Were-Lesbian (zine), H. C. Guinevere

Childhood Homes (and why we hate them) by qrowscant (itch.io)

piele by slugzuki (itch.io)

بچه‌ای که شکل گربه میکشید، لافکادیو هرن

بچه های که یخ نزدند، ماکسیم گورکی

پسرکی در تعقیب تبهکار، ویلیام آیریش

Küçük Kara Balık, Samed Behrengi

Phil Mind

The Hornswoggle Problem, Patricia Churchland,  Journal of Consciousness Studies 3.5-6 (1996): 402-408

What is it Like to be a Bat? Thomas Nagel, (https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674594623.c15)

Epiphenomenal Qualia, Frank Jackson, Consciousness and emotion in cognitive science. Routledge, 1998. 197-206

Why You Can’t Make a Computer that Feels Pain, Daniel Dennett, Synthese, vol. 38, no. 3, 1978, pp. 415–56

Where Am I? Daniel Dennett

Can Machines Think? Daniel Dennett

Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons, Derek Parfit (https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118922590.ch8)

The Extended Mind, Andy Clark & David Chalmers, Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998): 7–19

Uploading: A Philosophical Analysis, David Chalmers (https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118736302.ch6)

If You Upload, Will You Survive? Joseph Corabi & Susan Schneider (https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118736302.ch8)

If You Can’t Make One, You Don’t Know How It Works, Fred Dretske (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4975.1994.tb00299.x)

Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing

Minds, Brains, and Programs, John Searle (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00005756)

What is it Like to Have a Gender Identity? Florence Ashley (https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzac071)

Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data, Emily M. Bender & Alexander Koller (10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.463)

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜 Emily M. Bender et al. (https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922)

The Great White Robot God, David Golumbia

Superintelligence: The Idea that Eats Smart People, Maciej Ceglowski

Misc. Articles

Ebb and Flow of Azeri and Persian in Iran: A Longitudinal Study in the City of Zanjan, Hamed Zandi (https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110694277-007)

WTF is Happening? An Overview – Watching the World Go Bye, Eliot Jacobson

Using loophole, Seward County seizes millions from motorists without convicting them of crimes, Natalia Alamdari

Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens, Cathy J. Cohen, Feminist Theory Reader. Routledge, 2020. 311-323

Is the Rectum a Grave? Leo Bersani (https://doi.org/10.2307/3397574)

Why Petroleum Did Not Save the Whales, Richard York (https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023117739217)

‘Spider-Verse’ Animation: Four Artists on Making the Sequel, Chris Lee

Carbon dioxide removal is not a current climate solution, David T. Ho (https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00953-x)

Fights, beatings and a birth: Videos smuggled out of L.A. jails reveal violence, neglect, Keri Blakinger

Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek, Gabriel Rockhill

The Tyranny of Structurelessness, Jo Freeman

Domenico Losurdo interviewed about Friedrich Nietzsche

Keeping Some of the Lights On: Redefining Energy Security, Kris De Decker

Gays, Crossdressers, and Emos: Nonormative Masculinities in Militarized Iraq, Achim Rohde

On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin

Our Technology, Zeyad el Nabolsy

Towards a Historiography of Gundam’s One Year War, Ian Gregory

Imperialism and the Transformation of Values into Prices, Torkil Lauesen & Zak Cope

[jewish-ship-showdown]

Ships that have already qualified (read before submitting):

Jude Lizowski/Jonesy Garcia

Tyler Kennedy "TK" Strand/Carlos Reyes

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/Gwen Stacey

Willow Rosenberg/Winifred "Fred" Burkle

Francine Frensky/Muffy Crosswire

Susan Ivanova/Marcus Cole

Kate Kane (Batwoman)/Renee Montoya

Barry B. Benson/Vanessa Bloome

Jake Peralta/Amy Santiago

Willow Rosenberg/Tara Maclay

Jack Zimmermann/Eric "Bitty" Bittle

Justin "Ransom" Oluransi/Adam "Holster" Birkholtz

Danny/Reuven

Larissa "Lara" Bogdan/Jasmine

Kelsey Pokly/Isabella "Stacks" Alvarado

Rebecca Bunch/Audra Levine

Rebecca Bunch/Greg Serrano

Rebecca Bunch/Nathaniel Plimpton

Samantha "Sam" Manson/Danniel "Danny" Fenton

Bruce Wayne (Batman)/Selina Kyla (Catwoman)

Bruce Wayne (Batman)/Clark Kent (Superman)

Clark Kent (Superman)/Lois Lane

Harley Quinn/Pamela Isley (Poison Ivy)

Barney Guttman/Logan Nguyen

Leah/Chanan

Shay Goldstein/Dominic Yun

Marvin/Whizzer

Trina/Mendel Weisenbachfeld

Perchik/Hodel

Tzeitel/Motel

Monica Gellar/Chandler Bing

Molly McGee/Libby Stein Torres

Rachel Berry/Noah Puckerman

Fiddleford McGucket/Stanford Pines

Cristina Yang/Owen Hunt

Cristina Yang/Preston Burke

Levi Schmidt/Nico Kim

Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam

James Wilson/Gregory House

The Baker and/The Baker's Wife

Kim Possible/Ron Stoppable

The Jewish People/The Shabbat Bride

Alec Hardison/Parker

Max Eisenhardt (Magneto)/Charles Xavier (Professor X)

Steve Rogers (Captain America)/James "Bucky" Barnes

Arnold "Arnie" Roth/Michael Bech

Arnold "Arnie" Roth/Steve Rogers (Captain America)

Billy Kaplan (Wiccan)/Teddy Altman (Hulkling)

Bobby Drake (Iceman)/Hank McCoy (Beast)

Bobby Drake (Iceman)/Johnny Storm (The Human Torch)

Layla El Faouly/Mark Spector (Moon Knight)

Matthew Hawk (Two-Gun Kid II)/Clint Barton (Hawkeye)

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/Betty Brant

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/Eugene "Flash" Thompson

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/ Felicia Hardy

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/ Harry Osborn

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/Katherine Anne "Kitty" Pryde

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/Mary Jane "MJ" Watson

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/Wade Wilson (Deadpool)

Steve Rogers/Bernadette "Bernie" Rosenthal

Wanda Maximoff/The Vision

Midge Maisel/Susie Myerson

Hal Emmerich (Otacon)/Solid Snake

Casey Goldberg-Calderon/Lunella Lafayette

Fran Fine/Max Sheffield

Ben Gross/Devi Vishwakumar

Winston Schmidt/Cece Parekh

David Jacobs/Jack Kelly

Seth Cohen/Summer Roberts

Scout Touzani/Elias Wyrick

KJ Brandman/Mac Coyle

Lavinia Asimov/Poison Oak

Phineas Flynn/Isabella Garcia-Shapiro

Anon's Mom/Dad

The person reading this & their partner

Jerry Seinfeld/Cosmo Kramer

Simon Lewis/Isabel Lightwood

Danielle/Maya

Bram Greenfeld/Simon Spier

Miryem Mandelstam/The Staryk King

David Rose/Patrick Brewer

James T Kirk/S'chn T'gai Spock

Worf Rozhenko/Jadzia Dax

Kanan Jarrus/Hera Syndulla

Brian Jeeter/Krejjh

Bobby Singer/Rufus Turner

Jonah Simms/Amy Sosa

Reish Lakish/Rabbi Yochanen

King David/Yonatan

Devorah/Barak

Moses/Tzipporah

Ruth/Naomi

Yaakov/The Angel

Rowan Roth/Neil Mcnair

Klaus Hargreeves/Dave Katz

Cecil Palmer/Carlos The Scientist

Josh Lyman/Donna Moss

Little Ash/Uriel

Lucille "Lucy" Kensington/Dr. Edison "Ed" Tucker

Fox Mulder/Dana Scully

Anshel/Avigdor

Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer

Wanda Maximoff (The Scarlet Witch)/Jericho Drumm

Bruce Wayne (Batman)/Shondra Kinsolving

Bruce Wayne (Batman)/Talia Al Ghul

Ben Grimm (The Thing)/Alicia Masters

Velma Dinkley/Daphne Blake

Velma Dinkley/Marcie Fleach

Didi Pickles/Stu Pickles

Velma Dinkley/Coco Diablo

Babushka (Tatiana)/Dedushka (Ivan)

Kitty Pryde/Illyana Rasputin

Natasha Romanoff/Wanda Maximoff

Marc Spector (Moon Knight)/Clint Barton (Hawkeye)

Hillel/Shammai

S'chn T'gai Spock/James T Kirk/Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy

S'chn T'gai Spock/Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy

Frankie Bergstein/Grace Hanson

Annie Edison/Jeff Winger

Maxine Myers/Paula Cohen

Baby Houseman/Johnny Castle

Tevye/Golde

Michael "Mike" Wazowski/Celia Mae

Talmudic couple having gay sex in the attic

Tim Drake/Kon El (Conner Kent)

Violet Baudelaire/Quigley Quagmire

Reuben Kent/Feliks Kaufmann

Anshel/Avigdor/Hadass

Amram/Zelikman

Anshel/Hadass

SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN UNTIL MAY 8, 2023 @ 12:00 AM EDT

[quotesfrommyreading]

Nor can the troops on the front line be sheltered from the brutal truths about their leaders and the war itself that Prigozhin uttered on his abortive march on the Kremlin. Someone at last has said it, and the someone who did, brute though he may be, is the kind of leader who visited the front lines, paid his men and their survivors well, and has a kind of thuggish charisma that Putin lacks. Presumably, Ukrainian psychological-warfare experts are spreading the Prigozhin videos and audio recordings far and wide among their enemies.

  —  The Three Logics of Russia's Prigozhin Putsch

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[U.S. Embassy Warsaw]  ::: A massive crowd turns out in Warsaw to hear President Biden

* * * *

“Symbols matter: a Kennedy or a Reagan at the Berlin Wall, a Churchill with a cigar and a bowler, for that matter a green-clad Zelensky growling, ‘I need ammunition, not a ride.’ Simply by taking the hazardous trip to Kyiv, Biden made a strategic move of cardinal importance.” 

— Eliot Cohen, the Atlantic

* * * *

President Biden, speaking to an enthusiastic crowd outside Poland’s Royal Castle, urged the world’s nations to recommit to a unified defense of Ukraine, saying global democracy was at stake and accusing Russia of committing crimes against humanity through its “abhorrent” acts against civilians. A few hours earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin, addressing a joint session of the Russian parliament, reiterated his attacks on what he called Ukraine’s “neo-Nazi regime” and, in a surprise move, announced that Moscow was suspending its participation in New START, the last remaining U.S.-Russia nuclear arms agreement.

U.S. officials said that the timing of the two speeches was coincidental and that Biden had decided long ago to travel to the region for the first anniversary of the brutal war. But if the president did not plan his remarks as a response to Putin’s, they nonetheless often sounded like a rebuttal of the Russian president.Putin said during his televised state of the nation address that Western elites “started” the conflict in conjunction with Ukraine. 

Biden, in his address, responded that it was Putin who “chose this war,” adding, “The West was not plotting to attack Russia, as Putin said today.”Biden also used soaring terms to cast the war, as he has before, as one front in a worldwide struggle between autocracy and democracy. “When Russia invaded, it wasn’t just Ukraine being tested. The whole world faced a test for the ages,” Biden said before a large crowd on a cold night with a colorful backdrop. “Europe was being tested. America was being tested. NATO is being tested. All democracies are being tested. And the questions we face are as simple as they are profound: Would we respond, or would we look the other way?”

[Washington Post]

[sweetdreamsjeff]

The poetry that inspired Jeff Buckley

Aimee Ferrier

Sun 1 October 2023 21:15, UK

Voices as incredible as the one belonging to Jeff Buckley don’t come around too often. Unfortunately, after releasing one record, Grace, Buckley, with all his potential, was taken away too soon. At the age of 30, the singer went for a swim from which he never returned, drowning in the Mississippi River.

Yet, his legacy lives on as one of the most influential artists to emerge from the 1990s, and his music is widely celebrated today for its emotional and lyrical complexity. Not only did Buckley possess an otherworldly voice, but he was also an extremely gifted guitar player and writer, with all his talents combining to create a masterful body of work.

Even when Buckley was covering other artists’ songs, such as ‘Lilac Wine’, ‘The Other Woman’ and ‘Hallelujah’, he imbued the pieces with his own distinctive style. Yet, his penchant for covers wasn’t a reflection of an aversion to writing. Buckley knew how to pen a stunningly poetic track, with songs like ‘Lover, You Should’ve Come Over’ and ‘Morning Theft’ suggesting that even if Buckley didn’t have the vocal pipes he was gifted with, he’d get by just fine as a writer.

Buckley took inspiration from many different writers and musicians when writing his own songs. Musically, Buckley looked back to folk artists like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and, of course, his own father, Tim Buckley, from whom he was estranged. Elsewhere, he loved the work of Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the rich tones of Nina Simone, and Led Zeppelin, calling Robert Plant “my man”.

However, when it came to his literary inspirations, Buckley had an extensive book collection, which he no doubt looked to for ideas when writing his lyrics. He owned a lot of poetry, with Rainer Maria Rilke proving to be a particular favourite. Not only did Buckley own Dunio Elegies, Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations Poems from the Book of Hours, but he also owned his epistolary collection Letters to a Young Poet.

Buckley was also a fan of the classic American poet Walt Whitman, owning Leaves of Grass and From the Soil. Of course, no poetry collection is complete without copies of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell and Illuminations, alongside some Charles Baudelaire – Buckley-owned Paris Spleen. The singer also owned the Selected Poems of confessional poet Anne Sexton and modernist writer T.S Eliot.

Check out Buckley’s complete poetry collection below.

The poetry that inspired Jeff Buckley:

Dunio Elegies – Rainer Maria Rilke

Poems from the Book of Hours – Rilke

Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations – Rilke

Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman

From This Soil – Whitman

The Odyssey – Homer

Early Work, 1970-1979 – Patti Smith

You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense – Charles Bukowski

Selected Poems of Ezra Pound

The Complete Lyrics – Hank Williams

A Haiku Journey: Basho’s Narrow Road to a Far Province – Matsuo Basho

Paris Spleen – Charles Baudelaire

The Captain’s Verses – Pablo Neruda

Selected Poems – T.S. Eliot

A Season in Hell and Illuminations – Arthur Rimbaud

Writing and Drawings – Bob Dylan

Ode to Walt Whitman – Federico Garcia Lorca

New Poems: 1962 – Robert Graves

Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems – Jim Carroll

Selected Poems of Anne Sexton – Anne Sexton

Selected Poems – John Shaw Neilson

Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge – Demore Schwartz

The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara – Frank O’Hara

Poems – Pier Paolo Pasolini

Space: And Other Poems – Eliot Katz

Tim Buckley Lyrics

[abellinthecupboard]

List of poets whose work I've posted:

Poetry Magazine selections

The Adroit selections

Diode Poetry selections

Sixth Finch selections

Ada Limon

Adam Zagajewski

Adonis

Allen Ginsberg

Amy Clampitt

Andrea Cohen

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Swir

Anne Sexton

Ben Johnson

Billy Collins

Cathy Linh Che

Carolyn Marie Rodgers

Chard deNiord

Christina Rossetti

Czesław Miłosz

Dalton Day

Denise Levertov

Dian Million

Donika Kelly

Dorianne Laux

Edward Hirsch

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth “Sister Goodwin” Hope

Ellen Bryant Voigt

Gloria Bird

Gregory Orr

Gwendolyn MacEwen

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Jack Gilbert

James Hayford

James Longenbach

Jenny George

Jim Harrison

Joanna Newsom

John Berryman

John Dowland

John Keats

Jorie Graham

Joy Harjo

Kitchen McKeown

Kuhu Joshi

Langston Hughes

Linda Pastan

Lisel Mueuller

Louise Glück

Mary Karr

Mary Oliver

Mary Tallmountain

Matt Hohner

Matt Rasmussen

Matthew Arnold

Michael Gray Bulla

Miles Walser

Morag Smith

Natalie Diaz

Ocean Vuong

Penny Shutt

Phil Ochs

Phillip B. Williams

Roberta Hill Whiteman

Ronald Wallace

Ruth Stone

Sayat Nova

Sherman Alexie

Stephen Kampa

Sugawara no Michizane

Thomas Lux

T.S. Eliot

Wanda Coleman

W.H. Auden

Will Alexander

Wisława Szymborska

When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry

myself

[kaphkas]

Top five poems? 📒

I’m unfortunately a complete naif when it comes to poetry (although I’m trying to improve - I’ve just bought Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing!) So these are all either poems I’ve encountered online, or ones that I had to read for my English degree

My Cat is Sad - Spencer Madsen

Telemachus’ Detachment - Louise Glück

Warming Her Pearls - Carol Ann Duffy

Two-Headed Calf - Laura Giplin

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T.S. Eliot