Getting cancelled on social media, as examined through the lens of Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung:

All over America, there are people who wake up, every day, to find themselves transformed into giant bugs – in the view of others, if not themselves. The psychological journey here is a lot like that of someone who has been cancelled innocently. Who, suddenly, is being treated as a monstrous vermin by everybody else in society, and is just trying to go about their lives on the inside.

— Walter Kirn, on America This Week, episode 47

This is a very interesting observation from Walter Kirn on America This Week, episode 45:

You know the one thing [Robert F.] Kennedy [Jr.] and Trump do have in common, genuinely? They’re both peace candidates, to some extend. And, frankly, that seems to be the thing you’re not allowed to be.

I’ve read a lot about what J.K. Rowling has said. People have likewise told me a lot of things that J.K. Rowling has said. But funnily enough, when I then went and listened to J.K. Rowling, she never quite said these things. She said some things that I don’t agree with and others I do very much agree with. But she never said these terrible things people told me about. This leads me to believe that most people actually have no idea what J.K. Rowling actually stands for.

If you want to find out and if you’re not afraid to think for yourself and challenge some of the bullshit people believe and write about, listen to this podcast where she’s interviewed – quite critically, actually – by Megan Phelps-Roper, who’s a remarkable person with a remarkable story in her own right. Believe me, this is an hour worth investing if you care about the truth of things.

I’ve read many stories today, proclaiming this date to be the one year anniversary of the war in Ukraine or of Russia’s invasion of the country. That is so obviously not true by any criteria one could possibly apply with a sane mind, that it actually quite amazed me that everyone was running with it. It also made me angry. So I had to write and talk about it, even though I’m still not completely recovered from this cold.

Here’s a newsletter issue on the topic:

→ The New Age of Militarism — As the war in Ukraine escalates, common sense withers

…and also a podcast episode:

→ The Private Citizen 145: War Never Changes

Today is not the anniversary of the war in Ukraine. That is just one of the propaganda lies by people who are afraid to stand up for peace and fight against murder and injustice.

The stuff that’s being dredged up as part of The Twitter Files reporting is quite astonishing. Here’s people at Twitter debating whether to prompt people to not be afraid of a disease is medical misinformation. The people in charge at Twitter back then really do seem quite insane.

→ How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate, David Zweig

In a surreal exchange, Jim Baker, at the time Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, asks why telling people to not be afraid wasn’t a violation of Twitter’s Covid-19 misinformation policy. In his reply, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of Trust & Safety, had to explain that optimism wasn’t misinformation.

I’ve updated my map of the Ukraine conflict.

It’s pretty hard to find reliable information on the war in Ukraine that’s not based solely on the propaganda of one of the parties involved. It’s even harder to find a map of the current situation on the ground that’s clearly laid out. Because of this, I’ve done my best to produce such a map, based on the most reliable third party information I could cobble together.

What happened in Ukraine last week was an obvious consequence of The West’s ambitions and goals in the last thirty years. It is also a direct consequence of Obama’s and Merkel’s disastrous foreign policy. This should have been obvious to anyone who knows the first thing about foreign policy and history. A war has been fought in Ukraine for eight years now, anyone who was surprised about WAR IN EUROPE last week hasn’t been paying attention. The people who wrote those headlines and the politicians who claimed something “unthinkable” or “unforeseen” just happened are idiots and should be fired immediately.

The West forced regime change in Ukraine in 2014, the Russians responded, both sides escalated again and again over the last few years and now Russia invaded. This is a tragedy. It is a failure of diplomacy that is as much the fault of Vladimir Putin as it is the fault of us in Germany and the US who elected warmongers and people who know more about gender policy than they know about foreign policy.

Ted Galen Carpenter wrote a great opinion piece in 1945, which was also republished in The Guardian, and which explains exactly what went wrong very concisely:

→ Ignored Warnings: How NATO Expansion Led to the Current Ukraine Tragedy

History will show that Washington’s treatment of Russia in the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union was a policy blunder of epic proportions. It was entirely predictable that NATO expansion would ultimately lead to a tragic, perhaps violent, breach of relations with Moscow. Perceptive analysts warned of the likely consequences, but those warnings went unheeded. We are now paying the price for the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s myopia and arrogance.

At this point in the night, I feel it’s time for a quick reminder from His Bobness that the history of the United States of America has been more turbulent than most people remember.

Ever since the British burned the White House down
There’s a bleeding wound in the heart of town
I saw you drinking from an empty cup
I saw you buried and I saw you dug up

   — Bob Dylan, Narrow Way