37 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
  2. Apr 2024
    1. Worth, Robert F. “Clash of the Patriarchs.” The Atlantic, April 10, 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/05/russia-ukraine-orthodox-christian-church-bartholomew-kirill/677837/.

      A fantastic overview of the history, recent changes and a potential schism in the Orthodox Church with respect to the Russia/Ukraine conflict.

    2. Perhaps the most troubling possibility is that Kirill’s Church, with its canny blend of politics and faith, turns out to be better adapted to survival in our century than mainstream Churches are.
    3. In October 2018, just weeks after his tense meeting with Kirill in Istanbul, Bartholomew dissolved the 1686 edict that had given Moscow religious control over Ukraine.
    4. a young man named Mykola Kosytskyy, a Ukrainian linguistics student and a frequent visitor to Athos. He had brought with him this time a group of 40 Ukrainian pilgrims. Kosytskyy talked about the war—the friends he’d lost, the shattered lives, the role of Russian propaganda. I asked him about the Moscow-linked Church that he’d known all his life, and he said something that surprised me: “The Ukrainian Orthodox Church”—meaning the Church of Kirill and Putin—“is the weapon in this war.”All through his childhood, he explained, he had heard priests speaking of Russia in language that mixed the sacred and the secular—“this concept of saint Russia, the saviors of this world.” He went on: “You hear this every Sunday from your priest—that this nation fights against evil, that it’s the third Rome, yes, the new Rome. They truly believe this.” That is why, Kosytskyy said, many Ukrainians have such difficulty detaching themselves from the message, even when they see Kirill speaking of their own national leaders as the anti-Christ. Kosytskyy told me it had taken years for him to separate the truth from the lies. His entire family joined the new Ukrainian Church right after Bartholomew recognized it, in 2018. So have millions of other Ukrainians.

      Example of a church mixing religion with social and political order and resultant problems.

      See also: scholasticism

  3. Mar 2024
  4. Dec 2023
  5. Sep 2023
    1. Adler's record of ineptness is pret ty good so far — but he surpasses it with his third Revolution. He dis likes both Marxists and Moscow, so how did the Russian Revolution be come one of the great sources or change in modern society? Because “with the Russian Revolution, we have, for the first time, the emer gence of the welfare state” — mild offspring sired from such ferocious parents. In the past, only right‐wing kooks thought F.D.R. derived his in spiration for W.P.A. from the Bol shies!

      Reference to the "welfare state" in 1971 by Gary Wills.

    1. that's that is the Dirty Little Secret 00:12:08 of where we're at right now with Americans at each other's throats politically it's being created caused on purpose by the Chinese and the Russians who are manipulating people 00:12:22 through um use of phony websites and other disinformation campaigns being run which is a type of warfare that's being run 00:12:34 against the American people and they're falling for it
      • for: example, example - internet flaws, polarization, disinformation,, example - polarization, political interference - Russia, political interference - China
      • example: polarization, internet flaws
  6. Jul 2023
  7. Feb 2023
    1. The complexities of the response of South Africans to the war in Ukraine are discussed in this story. On the one hand, the South African ANC government has had a historical political and economic relationship with Russia that continues up to the invasion of Ukraine. On the other hand, the ANCs struggle against apartheid puts it in a paradoxical situation with the huge atrocities Russia is now perpetrating upon Ukraine.

      Violations of early NATO treaty and alleged corruption within the Ukraine government cannot justify Putin's continued human rights atrocities.

      In this day and age, does national sovereignty justify war? In this day and age, the need for Mutually Assured Destruction is indeed MADness .

      With climate change breathing down our necks as well as the 6th mass extinction, we appear to be a world gone mad.

    1. The long-term consequences of Russia’s war are less clear. But experts are concerned it may also lock in more future fossil fuel dependence as places like Europe search for replacements for Russian fuel.
      • Russian war may increase usage of fuels
      • this could make reaching the 1.5 Deg C target more difficult
  8. Jun 2022
    1. Moscow began restricting exports of inert, or "noble" gases, including neon, argon and helium to "unfriendly" countries at the end of May, according to a report by Russian state news agency TASS. All three gases are used to produce the tiny electronic chips found in a raft of consumer products, from smartphones to washing machines to cars, and which have been in critically short supply for months.

      Russia supplies 30% of the global chip industry with neon, argon and helium, necessary for chip manufacturing.

  9. Mar 2022
    1. What history teaches us about how autocrats lose power — and how Putin might hang on.

      Putin has spent a significant amount of resources on making his regime coup-proof and revolution-proof. His main strategy is to minimize any chances of coordination.

    1. How Vladimir Putin’s childhood is affecting us all

      Putin is merely at the extreme end of the spectrum of people with ACE. Indeed we could take the title of this article and substitute with many other people, in public as well as our own private lives: How X's childhood is affecting us all. We all know at least one person we could substitute for X!

    1. EU officials on Tuesday outlined a plan to achieve energy independence from Moscow "well before 2030." The European Union would start by reducing demand for Russian natural gas by two thirds this year

      Good for climate change, bad for Putin.

    1. i 00:05:49 will tell you i mean you've got eighty percent german approval right now for spending two percent of gdp on defense that's astonishing i mean the anger of the german people at what the russians 00:06:01 have done is so far beyond the imagination of where you could have been a couple weeks ago five months ago two years ago and i do think there's a greater willingness to take hardship

      This could be a key moment in time to launch a global Bottom-up, rapid whole system change initiative.

    1. Russia has said it may close its main gas pipeline to Germany if the West goes ahead with a ban on Russian oil.

      This could be a blessing and a boon to climate change transition to a fossil fuel free world.

    2. Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said a "rejection of Russian oil would lead to catastrophic consequences for the global market", causing prices to more than double to $300 a barrel.

      Could the world be convinced to payfor this price?

    3. Germany and the Netherlands

      What would convince them? We need rapid sensemaking!

    1. Because of the invasion in Ukraine, “people are reminded of the problem, but then they resort to sort of quick fixes, which are not really for the long term,” says Rolf Wüestenhagen, director of the Institute for Economy and the Environment at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

      Tradeoff higher gas prices with accelerated climate change and sanctioning Putin.

    2. At a global climate meeting Monday, Ukraine’s representative, Svitlana Krakovska, pointed out the connection: “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots—fossil fuels—and our dependence on them,”

      Kill two birds with one stone.

    1. quarter of the key nutrients used in European food production come from Russia.

      Sorld is dangerously dependent on an aggressor nation’s supply of fertilizer.

    2. Russia also produces enormous amounts of nutrients, like potash and phosphate - key ingredients in fertilisers, which enable plants and crops to grow. "Half the world's population gets food as a result of fertilisers... and if that's removed from the field for some crops, [the yield] will drop by 50%," Mr Holsether said.

      Geopolitical vulnerability of the existing dependency on Russian fertilizer.

    1. Actually asking people to do this would be something of a last resort, said Ben McWilliams, a climate and energy analyst at Bruegel.<img alt="These US cities tried to cut natural gas from new homes. Republicans and the gas lobby stepped in" class="media__image" src="//viahtml.hypothes.is/proxy/im_///cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/220217094013-01-cities-fossil-fuel-emissions-large-169.jpg">These US cities tried to cut natural gas from new homes. Republicans and the gas lobby stepped in"But who knows? It's an unprecedented situation. I could imagine a kind of political campaign, a real push by European leaders saying, look, if you can help us by turning down 1 degree on your thermostat, it's going to help. And you can see people uniting behind this, against Russian gas," he told CNN. "But ultimately, you'll need much more than this in response."One approach would be to replace around half the gas from other sources, McWilliams said. The United States is already shipping Iiquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe, and EU officials are also looking to countries like Azerbaijan and Qatar. The other half will need to come from cutting demand, McWilliams said, especially as Europe prepares for next winter.Heavy industries, like steelmaking and chemical production, will need to reduce their operations. Homeowners investing in solar panels and heat pumps could help take some pressure off heating systems.Tara Connolly, a campaigner with the international NGO Global Witness who specializes in gas, says that Europe must launch an emergency program to insulate homes, replace gas boilers with heat pumps and accelerate the transition to renewable energy."It is abundantly clear that Europe's gas dependence has provided Putin with the resources to engage in his bloody venture in Ukraine, whilst hampering Europe's response,"

      A feasibility study would be informative.

    1. You wrote another essay last week in “The Economist”, and you argue that what's at stake in Ukraine is, and I quote you, "the direction of human history" because it puts at risk what you call the greatest political and moral achievement of modern civilization, 00:18:31 which is the decline of war. So now we are back in a war and potentially afterwards into a new form of cold war or hot war, but hopefully not.

      This is why Ukraine is not just a localized problem, but the problem for humanity going forward.

    2. For centuries, Kyiv was looking westwards and was a part of a union with Lithuania and Poland until it was eventually conquered and absorbed by the Russian Empire, by the czarist empire. But even after that, Ukrainians remained a separate people to a large extent, and it's important to know that because this is really what is at stake in this war.

      Putin's twisted logic rests on the assumption that Russia's conquering of Ukraine by war for a brief part of history justifies his (false) assertion that Ukraine was always a part of Russia.

    1. This is a moment that we should seize, in all seriousness, in order to take on the two huge existential plagues that face us this morning: the climate crisis, outlined in this new IPCC report, and the fact that we have a madman with nuclear weapons who’s used the revenues from oil and gas to intimidate and terrify the entire world.

      This is the critical observation - everything is interconnected. It is a nexus of problems that requires that we deal with all dimensions of the problem simultaneously.

      Putin is the nexus of so much that is wrong with the world. He is like an octopus that has its arms in multiple crisis of the planet.

      The political polarization of the US, the ascendancy of the puppet government of Trump and the blatant cognitive dissonance of the extreme right who are impervious to facts is reminiscent of the propaganda imposed upon the Russian people themselves for one reason - it was part of Putin's master plan: https://youtu.be/FxgBuhMBXSA The US population has been split by Putin's information warfare system, the same one he uses on the Russian population.

      The fake news programmed by Russian propaganda about the Ukraine war has worked effectively to mislead the Russian populus: https://youtu.be/kELta9MLOzg The same pattern of psychological manipulation has also had the same impact in the belief system of the typical hardcore Trumpist.

  10. Oct 2021
  11. Oct 2020
    1. “every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués. If we cannot abandon fatalism and indifference in the face of deficiencies of our own society, Moscow will profit.”

      Perhaps the best defense against active measures is a little bit of activism of our own

  12. May 2020
  13. Dec 2016
    1. The share of state-owned and state-controlled companies contributing to gross national product increased from 35 percent in the early 2000s to 70 percent now.

      Did not know Putin has substantially re-socialized the Russian economy.

  14. Nov 2016
    1. United Kingdom Census had estimated in the year 2001 that more than 15000 people were Russian-born and were residents in the UK. It is very obvious that 15000 is not a small number. Another obvious fact is that this number might have increased in the past several years. Well, this number has increased a lot. It had been estimated in the year 2014 that more than 150,000 Russian people were the residents in London.http://blog.selectmytutor.co.uk/the-future-of-russian-language-in-the-united-kingdom/

  15. Mar 2014