Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧 @pieist@qoto.org

What would the people who wrote, and ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment have thought about this Supreme Court decision?

Would they have thought, oops, our bad. We didn’t write that clearly enough.

They didn’t want anyone who had participated in an insurrection ever to hold public office, much less be allowed to run for President. They said that as clearly as they could.

They didn’t specify an enforcement mechanism—they trusted us future people to work out the details.

We’ve let them down.

Do you remember how the Russians won the war in #Chechnya? Well, for a start, they lost the first clash, which ended with the Khasavyurt agreement (1996).

It’s just that after that, “the Chechens sort of went mad”. - I write in quotes because that was the impression outside, as if in a screenplay. Kidnappings, banditry, human trafficking, corruption.

Then terrorism began, culminating in the blowing up of blocks of flats all over Russia…. all the way to Ryazan, where the attack was foiled and it later emerged that the ‘exercise’ had been prepared by the FSB. And Basayev completely out of the blue invaded Dagestan.

And that was the casus belli, Russia tore up all the 1996-1997 peace agreements and the ‘second Chechen’ began. Then it only got worse, after Beslan, Chechnya lost any remnants of international sympathy and the Russians were summarily given carte blanche to pacify it.

As we watch more and more fake stories about how “Ukrainians are doing something to Poles”, we should be aware that EQUALLY on Ukrainian channels there are identical stories about how “Poles are doing something to Ukrainians”. Sometimes these are mirror stories, as with the driver from Szczecin.

All these stories are part of a script written in Lubianka, and its next elements will be beatings of one by the other or even authentic terrorism with traces in the style of ‘Jarosz’s business card’.

Poland watched this in the 1930s and in the 1990s, it is a pity that these experiences have faded so quickly.

The role of individual players from Chechnya is interesting. There was a story behind Basayev’s possible collaboration with the GRU back in the days of the war in Abkhazia, when Chechen fighters with weapons crossed the Russian North Caucasus and entered Georgian territory from the republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia, almost as much as Girkin did to Ukraine.

The collaboration with the FSB of Arbi Barayev, one of the biggest thugs in the Republic of Ichkeria, was common knowledge. And yet both of them were not only unpunished but - especially Basayev - respected in Ichkeria. Basayev was even appointed a minister for his wartime merits.

And then he started an absolutely suicidal war for Iczkeria in Dagestan…. in partnership with Arbi Barayev. That’s more or less how some Ukrainian unit in the strength of 2,000 men on 20 February 2022 arrived from Ivano-Frankivsk and suddenly started storming Donetsk.

Iczkeria’s weakness was as much due to its geographical and political isolation as to its tribal culture, which resulted in various clans competing virtually non-stop for limited resources and influence.

Moscow’s hand is evident in all the above-mentioned actions, but after all, it would not have been possible if people of the likes of Basayev and Barayev had not been prepared to follow it.

Russia launches the pre-invasion playbook in Moldova. A "breakaway region" of the small state asks for Russian "protection" (against a peaceful, open, pro-European Moldovan government) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/world/europe/moldova-russia-transnistria.html

#Europe battles powder shortage to supply shells for #Ukraine

#Nitrocellulose, also known as guncotton, is a key ingredient in gunpowder manufacture.

"Would you know it, deliveries of this cotton from #China stopped as if by chance a few months ago"

#Nordic countries have found a substitute for the #Chinese cotton... innovation is at work, precisely to meet the need for powder, because... we have problems today with powder capacity".

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240302-europe-battles-powder-shortage-to-supply-shells-for-ukraine

#EU #Russia

Our paper on the values found in fairy tales from some European countries has been published. We studied how values are explicitly present in tales from Germany, Italy and Portugal using various NLP techniques, but most notably Word2Vec and Word Embedding with a Compass. We visualise synchronic semantic variation to show certain differences based on observations of the corpus, some of them already observed in previous literature. A discussed example in our findings is how motherhood in Germany is strongly related to generosity, whereas in Italy and Portugal it has stronger relationship to wisdom.

Fulltext available at: https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4dh-1.8/

@folklore @linguistics @bookstodon

Trump: "Immigrant vermin poison the blood of our country."

Media: "Here's why an incredible economy won't save Biden."

Trump: "I'll be a dictator."

Media: "Breaking: Biden gets a word wrong, kinda."

Trump: "1/6 was an insurrection."

Media: "Voters worry Biden is very, very old."

Trump: "I did nothing on gun control."

Media: "Biden is losing the religious vote."

Trump: "Also I'll end NATO, start WW3."

Media: "And now, the weather!"

Dear journalists: DO YOUR FUCKING JOB.

#Journalism

Random Telegram comments about Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson ROUGHLY took several AFU female prisoners of war and did such things…
Tucker Carlson tried pancake from a shovel and was left satisfied. Our elephant!
Tucker Carlson’s website started to sell NKVD knives from Kizlyar masters

Each of these is loaded with Russian idioms and tropes which I will just leave as an exercise for the reader…

Nothing to see here, keep moving along. Yes, the pandemic is over. No, no, "flu-like symptoms" is what we said.

Half of my daughter's school is off with what is probably Covid, but no-one's testing because:

1. You don't have to
2. Boxes of the free tests have now expired
3. Getting new tests costs money

The mentioned 'attachment' never appeared. Presumably sending this email was the last act of a member of staff so ill that they collapsed into bed immediately after hitting send.

So many of those opposed to DEI measures appear to believe that women and members of minorities would never have succeeded on merit, which belief succinctly demonstrates why DEI measures are needed in the first place.

I may be wrong, but I think the current political state of the US Border issue is:

GOP: The Border is a catastrophe! We must act!

Administration: How about if we..

GOP: NO!

Administration: Perhaps we could..

GOP: NO!

Administration: Could we just..

GOP: NO!

Administration:

GOP: And now we’re going to impeach you for not doing anything.

Why’d they call it “move fast and break things” when “hit and run” is shorter?

"Trash me all day, but if you want to feel your hands again, it will be $8"

@xahteiwi You can always tell when someone is calling in from the office because there's someone in the background with a really really loud voice who *never ever stops* and Teams can't filter them out because their voice is louder than the one making the call. (That person is one of the reasons were happy to WFH in the first place.)