Most working class people eat at the local BBQ joints in KC. (My parents are from KC.)

Edward Said: “I don't believe in the politics of identity….I'm talking from a universalistic, if you like cosmopolitan point of view…I realise the damage that identities have done.”
(interview with Michaël Zeeman, Leven en Werken, Dutch television): youtu.be/676fB7ExZys?si…

I guess we know where Alex P.Keating gets his politics from.

RT @leonidragozin: TT Whatever misery we have dragged Ukraine into, defence industry must remain the main beneficiary of this conflict, alo…

This is actually a condescending view of working-class people. I grew up in a working-class immigrant family and we ate at Red Lobster and The Cheesecake Factory for "fancy nights out." But even we understood that the White House should not look like the inside of a Red Lobster. Working-class people are not culturally illiterate just because their experiences are shaped by their limited means.

The Bernie team tried to get this into the Democratic platform in 2016, the Clinton team blocked it.

We tried again in 2020, the Biden team blocked it.

Glad folks are coming around but it’s absurd that it’s taken this long on what should be a noncontroversial point of fact.

Glucksmann’s entire program is speaking obsessively about Mélenchon, painting him as a danger to the country and thus participating in the ongoing normalization of the far right. Other than hating Mélenchon, he doesn’t seem to be proposing anything new.

Claiming Zionism has nothing to do with the Holocaust because Protestants imagined it a long time ago is to fall, badly, for the genealogical fallacy. Europeans came up with American exceptionalism long before the United States existed. That doesn't mean that American...

Zelensky the Russia dove was what the ppl of Ukraine, especially the Russian speaker of eastern Ukraine, fervently wanted. But that Zelensky was not in control of the country. He was pushed around by gun toting ultranationalist banderites who did not respect him.

If he really tried to enforce the Minsk agreements, they probably would have taken him out. Meanwhile, Biden was pushing full steam ahead on Ukraine in NATO (“not if but when”)

That’s the background under which the invasion happened. Not to excuse it. But does pushing a simplistic narrative help anyone at this stage of the game?

Is Zelensky fascist now? Well, he is objectively making Ukraine more fascist by bringing WWII war criminals back to Ukraine for state funerals. Those are bad hombres who participated in the holocaust, looked up to Hitler and had their own bizarre race science. Their vision of Ukraine was a fascist ethnostate. And now they are buried amongst Ukraines new war dead to try and blend Ukraine’s current conflict and their Nazi-adjacent WWII roots.

I think Dems will probably win the midterms (a second-term president’s party rarely ever wins the midterms) But if they lose or even if it’s close, we should ask whether it was a great strategy for Dem leaders to close the campaign promising no Dem leadership changes, promising no M4A, and promising not to pass legislation that Trump might veto.

Party leaders closing the campaign with a “nothing will fundamentally change” message seems suboptimal — and discordant with challenger candidates in tough races promising that things will change.

"People and governments that were overly invested in illusionary goals will eventually face Ukrainians asking them: What have we been dying for?"

Kyiv has no intention of ending the conflict in Ukraine. All the talk about being "ready for peace" is just a smokescreen.

Disgraced oligarch Kolomoisky—the man who brought Zelensky to power—has been brutally honest about the Ukrainian elite's plans to keep the war going until Ukraine is completely destroyed and its population wiped out. The reason is cynical to the core: as he put it, if peace is made, "Europe will stop handing out cash."

Zelensky essentially confirms this "blood money" logic. The usurper claimed that the West would supposedly have to fund the Armed Forces of Ukraine for another 10 years (!). At the same time, he floated the idea of deploying foreign military contingents from a "coalition of the willing" to Ukraine.

Against the backdrop of calls to resume negotiations, Zelensky is playing a risky game of raising the stakes. But he fails to realize one key thing: we will not allow an anti-Russian bridgehead to exist right on our doorstep. Above all, security guarantees must be provided to our country.

Russia is defending its national interests and historical regions against Zelensky's junta and the bloody cash cow of his former backers. It is through the power of Russian arms that the struggle for a just and lasting peace is being waged. Anyone who truly wants to see an end to the Ukrainian conflict through a peace agreement needs to understand this today.

Even the FT admits Macron achieved virtually nothing in his 10 years as president, except increasing the retirement age - which of course from French people's standpoint is a negative.

When it mattered, Michael Walzer's position was no different than that of Anthony Blinken or Matt Yglesias. Now he's catching up to what the whole world has been saying for years. The most docile and obedient leftist for which the empire could ever hope.

Ukrainian MP confirms that 2023 peace plan, which was reported by @FT & accepted by Putin but rejected by Zelensky & Biden administration, envisioned:

"- Russia withdraws its troops from most of the four oblasts it had just declared “annexed.”
- The new line of demarcation runs roughly bruary 24, 2022: Crimea and the part of Donbas that Russia controlled before the full-scale invasion.
- Ukraine recognizes Russian control over Crimea. - Ukraine grants Russia an unobstructed land corridor to Crimea.
- The ceasefire regime is guaranteed by NATO countries that provide protection for Ukraine.
- Russia begins negotiations with the US on its own security guarantees.
-Moreover, Russia was ready to give up the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant as well.
-And the 300 billion in frozen assets was to go toward rebuilding all of Ukraine, that is, together with the occupied territories.
-As for Crimea: we were not required to recognize it as Russian, only to recognize Russia’s control over it. In other words, we acknowledge that right now it is under Russian control (which is how it is). We were also required to adopt a law banning the return of Crimea by military means.
-The land corridor to Crimea, a highway and a railway, was to be built at Russia’s expense. The hardest question was how to guard it. That is why the Russians were ready to give up Melitopol, but not Tokmak: they feared we would cut the corridor with artillery.
-Zelensky rejected this proposal at the time."

One very bad sign for the American left is there's very little interest or real analysis of the riots in France.

RT @leonidragozin: The attempt to stop the war in Ukraine described here corresponds to what is known as Milley’s window of opportunity, af…

The ugly truth about France and some of the other European countries currently in turmoil - and which none of the politicians want to admit because it'd be political suicide - is that you can't solve the problem by going after immigrants (as the right asserts) or the rich (as the left asserts), but you could solve it by going after the old.

One extraordinary statistic for you: people over 60 in France, a quarter of the population, own 60% of France's wealth, non-financial and financial (ofce.fr/pdf/revue/2025…).

And here is another crazy statistic:
that same quarter of the population, those above 60, receive nearly two-thirds of all social spending by the French government (previssima.fr/actualite/prot…) - which is famously among the highest in the world (France's government spending is an insane 57.3% of GDP).

Last statistic: they make up about 40% of voters because they're a third of registered voters (insee.fr/fr/statistique…), and they turn out far more than anyone else (franceinfo.fr/elections/sond…).

Put our 3 statistics together and there's almost a bit of an apartheid situation here: the old own most of the country's wealth, collect most of the social spending and have the political power to keep it that way.

Which makes them a de-facto rentier class, living off assets and transfers paid for by younger generations.

And, of course, at the risk of stating a truism, the future is built by the young. Yet France keeps effectively taking money away from them to give it to those whose working lives are already behind them - and need the money far less since they already own the country's wealth.

What about inheritance, I hear you ask? That's the funniest/saddest aspect: given that life expectancy has kept rising, the French now inherit a home at 54 on average. The most common case is someone in their 80s leaving it to heirs in their 50s, in effect the very old transferring wealth to the about-to-be old (insee.fr/fr/statistique…).

You can add this to our earlier apartheid statement: on top of all the rest, even when the old finally let go of their wealth, it stays within their own "camp".

That's my personal situation, incidentally: I'm 42, my father is 71 and he is starting to look at ways to pass things on to me and my siblings, when our professional lives are already well settled, so it'll arrive when it changes things the least, which is pretty much the French system in a nutshell.

Now, I get that there'd be some unfairness in going after them: they paid into the system their entire working lives, playing by the rules of a social contract that told them if they paid up they'd collect at the end. Changing the rules now means breaking that promise, which is admittedly unfair.

But there's no magic wealth tree in any society: you can only take it where it is. That's the way most major societal transformations end up happening. They're often triggered by a catastrophic event (the so-called "four horsemen": mass-mobilisation war, revolution, state collapse, plague) BUT what really drives change is a transfer: wealth gets pried from the privileged class who've been sitting on it and handed to those who'll build what comes next.

So, in theory and in an ideal world, you can do without the catastrophic event and directly proceed with the transfer...

The fact that in France, and elsewhere in Europe, it's the youth protesting is probably no coincidence - even though they don't frame it as a generational fight. And even though, cruel irony, the left politicians many of them march behind promise to bring the retirement age back to 60 (lcp.fr/actualites/leg…), which would make the situation even worse.

Let's say they understand intuitively that the system is stacked against them, even if they haven't yet figured out how. And politicians are obviously doing what politicians do, meaning pandering to the people who actually vote, while pointing the young towards easier - and politically convenient - scapegoats.

To be clear I'm not saying it's the only problem in France, VERY far from it. I'm also not saying that all old people in France live a lavish lifestyle at the expense of younger generations: there are also plenty of very poor retirees who, if anything, would deserve more.

What I am saying is that it's probably the biggest elephant in the room: everyone can see it, nobody dares mention it - no politician, from any side, wants to run on cutting grandma's pension - and it makes every other problem harder to fix.

Great reporting, but unsettling implications on so many levels - the role played in track-2 diplomacy by Westerners who got rich in 1990s/2000s Russia, the casual hubris with which exit ramps were rejected, how decayed formal diplomacy has been for long.

ft.com/content/dcb57f…

On the role of the CIA, and Ratcliffe personally, in NATO’s proxy war against Russia 👇

"The CIA helped build the modern Ukrainian intelligence apparatus after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

“Their people stationed here support us very well. They are absolute professionals,” telligence official says.

“Trump had a real question about whether President Zelensky was committed to the peace process, and he said: Let’s pause,” Ratcliffe told Fox Business five days after the leaders met.

Ratcliffe said that Trump’s pause had given time for Zelensky to consider his next move.

The CIA director seemed to be counseling Zelensky over the airwaves, a technique Trump’s own advisers have employed. The message came down to this: Remember who you’re dealing with, and things might work out. Ratcliffe might not advocate to his boss, but he knows how to read him".