Новости за 23.02.2022

Several things can be true at the same time. Vladimir Putin, for instance, can be an imperialist ghoul who started a 170,000-troop pissing contest along Russia and its allies’ borders with Ukraine. And the United States can be a declining empire that has helped inflame the situation in its quest to climb back atop the so-called rules-based international order. Similarly, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz moving to at least temporarily halt the Nord Stream 2 pipeline can be good news for the planet... Читать дальше...

Growing up in rural West Virginia, Paul Darwin Picklesimer (they/them) strove to follow their mother’s advice: Don’t push your personal beliefs on others. So when Picklesimer perceived animal abuse while reroofing barns with their dad, they would try to “find a balance of putting a seed in someone’s mind to show that animal’s perspective a bit, without trying to tell people what to do.”

On Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his “formal attorney general opinion” that gender-affirming health care for trans kids is “child abuse,” a chilling pronouncement that landed in the midst of Republican legislators’ multistate fight against LGBTQ rights, overwhelmingly focused on teens and children, and trans kids in particular. Later that day, responding to Dallas Morning News’s coverage of his decision, Paxton suggested gender-affirming health care consisted of “chopping... Читать дальше...

One of the odder theories to emerge during Donald Trump’s presidency—and this was, it should be said, a Golden Age of odd theories—was that the president’s erratic behavior, bombastic social media presence, and general incoherence were, in fact, strategic. Trump, in this way of thinking, was a twenty-first-century iteration of Nixon, who embraced what his former chief of staff Bob Haldeman referred to as “the Madman Theory.” 

Romania is home to one of the largest and most important old-growth forests in the world—but its trees are disappearing at an astonishing rate. Meanwhile, a spate of attacks has shaken environmentalists and activists in the country. On episode 43 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk with the reporter Alexander Sammon, who recently traveled to Romania to investigate illegal logging for The New Republic. Can Europe’s forests survive the global appetite for timber?

War is so very expensive that it’s a wonder any deficit-conscious Republican ever allows it to happen. The Iraq War cost more than $3 trillion. The Afghanistan War cost $2.3 trillion. The Ukraine War won’t cost us that much because we’re unlikely to commit troops. But just one day in, oil futures hovered near $100 a barrel, which was higher than they’d been since 2014, and it’s predicted they’ll rise to $125 or $150.

The Supreme Court announced on Tuesday that it would take up a case involving a Christian web designer who claims that Colorado’s anti-discrimination law prevents her from denying her services to same-sex couples. At first glance, 303 Creative v. Elenis appears to be the latest effort to get the justices to decide whether religious freedom claims can trump civil rights laws that protect gay and transgender Americans from discrimination by private businesses. But it’s actually a much stranger case... Читать дальше...

The little things stood out during Joe Biden’s sober nine-minute Tuesday afternoon speech addressing the most serious super-power crisis of this century.

Soon after Russian leader Vladmir Putin’s announcement that he would recognize two separatist regions in Ukraine, he deployed troops there. Both moves violated international law and Ukrainian territorial integrity and sovereignty, and will cause immense suffering. The next day, President Biden announced sweeping sanctions against Russia. The cumulative results are the most serious crisis in European security in the twenty-first century.

On Monday afternoon, Russian President Vladimir Putin put paid to the notion that the latest crisis he has engineered on Russia’s border with Ukraine somehow pivots around the question of Kyiv’s membership in NATO. Instead of focusing on matters such as security relations and military alliances, Putin—isolated and irate, almost Strangelovian in front of the camera—railed about a different topic entirely: empire, and Russia’s right to its former colonial holdings.

President Joe Biden announced wide-ranging sanctions on Russia on Tuesday, in response to what he described as “the beginning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine,” joining European allies in imposing economic penalties for what he called “a flagrant violation of international law.”