Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

I’m more Christian than these people and I’m an atheist.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

Ah, the different things are different argument.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

There’s always a light at the end of the frog.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

FFS people, this was a good thing. take the win.

Pelosi: “He either is stupid, or he thinks the rest of us are.” Why not both?

Let’s show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Even though I know this is a bad idea, I’m off to do it anyway!

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Putin’s Bridge to Nowhere

Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Putin’s Bridge to Nowhere

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Russian (childhood) expat — ““General Armageddon” & Putin’s Bridge to Nowhere”:

… Vladimir Putin described the attacks as retaliation for the explosion that partly demolished his beloved bridge across the Kerch Strait connecting the Crimean peninsula to the Russian mainland. If you look at a map of the area, you realize that Nikita Khrushchev wasn’t, as Putin claims, a dunce and a traitor for making Crimea part of the Ukrainian S.S.R., rather than the Russian S.S.R. It’s a peninsula, and its only connection by land is to Ukraine, not Russia. It’s why Putin sent “volunteers” into eastern Ukraine as soon as he annexed Crimea in March 2014: he needed a land bridge, an easy way to get to this fancy new peninsula he’d stolen from his neighbor, as well as a way of supplying it with water, power, food and all kinds of other vital necessities. Unfortunately for Putin, his forces were stopped at Mariupol by the newly formed Azov Battalion, made up, in part, of far-right Ukrainian nationalists.

Putin had another plan to connect Crimea to the Russian mainland. Less than an hour after announcing the annexation, the Kremlin announced the tender for a state contract to build a bridge across the Kerch Strait, the body of water between Crimea and Russia. Putin gave the $5 billion contract to his childhood judo buddy, Arkady Rotenberg, a man who was such a talented businessman that he became a billionaire in the first decade of Putin’s rule. The bridge, which was supposed to accommodate both car and rail traffic, was a priority for the Kremlin, and unlike every other government project, it was finished ahead of schedule, just in time for Putin’s third reelection, in 2018.

Putin put a lot of stock in that bridge. As a man who thinks often about his historic legacy, he spoke explicitly about how he was able to accomplish a great feat of engineering, of crossing a sea that both Nicholas II and Josef Stalin had attempted, but failed, to conquer.

And so, we can imagine the agony that Putin felt when he discovered, in the early hours of October 8, that his bridge had been engulfed in a massive fireball that completely destroyed one of the two sections that carried automotive traffic, and damaged several kilometers of railway track. It could not have escaped his noticed that whoever had planned the bombing just missed his 70th birthday by a few hours. A report later indicated that the driver of the eighteen-wheeler that allegedly carried the explosives onto the bridge was set to detonate them on the day of the Russian president’s jubilee, but had stopped to take a nap…

It took Putin 36 hours to respond. On Sunday, in a hastily-staged, televised meeting in Putin’s office with his old college classmate and former K.G.B. buddy, Alexander Bastrykin, the slightly psychotic head of the feared Investigative Committee, the president let his country know that the bridge had been blown up by the Ukrainian special forces in an act of terrorism. Retaliation would be swift. Within hours, cruise missiles and other rockets were flying at every major city in Ukraine, disturbing whatever sense of normalcy had returned to Kyiv, the capital, or Lviv, in the far west.

It was a clear campaign of terror, and many close observers saw the fingerprints of one man: General Sergei Surovikin. A tall, stocky man with a shaved pate and an arched brow, Surovikin looks like a more menacing version of Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil. He was appointed to head Russia’s “special military operation” on the day of the bridge calamity, October 8, which was surely no coincidence. The news was hailed by hardliners all across the propaganda machine, from Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to television host and propaganda harpy Olga Skabeeva, who reminded everyone that Surovikin’s last name had its roots in the word surovy, meaning harsh or severe, and that his nickname was “General Armageddon.”…


Another Russian expat, now a historian:

First, he is just retaliating in rage against the Crimean bridge attack. He has already framed this as a “terrorist” act, which makes it easier to sell murderous strikes on Ukrainian civilians as a tit-for-tat. At the same time, he’s responding to right-wing calls for escalation.

Remember all of this is happening in the context of a fairly unruly few days for the Russian establishment characterized by visible attacks on Shoigu from Kadyrov and co. So this is Putin “reasserting control” and responding to probable domestic critics.

Second, this is a (highly futile) effort to undermine Zelensky’s support base by demonstrating that Kyiv is not safe and that for all the news from the frontlines, Zelensky has not been able to make it any safer than it was at the start of this war.

Finally, and this is probably the key motivation, this strike aims to demonstrate capability, if not the intent, to obliterate Kyiv because of course there’s an implied nuclear threat behind each conventional strike into the heart of the Ukrainian capital.

Putin is basically saying here that he cannot be outplayed in the fame of oneupmanship simply because he suffers from no moral restraints. It’s a serious message and it’s not clear yet what our response to this will be.

President Nixon talked a big game about his Madman Theory, but it’s beginning to seem as though Putin actually has come unmoored from consensus reality…

When you hear talk of the alleged danger of “humiliating” the Putin, it’s most often from a talker who is ouching from the humiliation of his/her past cheerleading for Putin. They hope that if western diplomacy rescues Putin from his debacle, it will also redeem them from theirs.

A successful defense of democracy by a coalition of fellow-democracies that exposes the western supporters of Putin, right and left, as crooked and stupid – that is the outcome that the pro-Putin talkers fear. That’s why they invoke “nuclear war” to head that outcome off.

Firing a nuclear weapon onto a Ukrainian field or into a Ukrainian city would be a horrific crime. But it won’t save Putin from defeat. There’s only one thing that can save him: his western friends, headed by Donald Trump. They are invoking “nuclear war” to justify themselves.

Putin’s western friends are acting for the same ghastly mix of reasons as ever. For them, nothing has changed this fall. For them, “nuclear” is only the latest argument to frighten non-stooge voters into doing what the stooges wanted to do all along, for their own stooge reasons.

Meanwhile, what is actually deterring Putin from using nuclear weapons is the same thing that deterred the USSR before him: Western capabilities and his own survival instinct. Without nukes, he still has a path to emerge from this war alive, even keep power. If he uses them? No.

When this war ends, and for many years afterward, those in the West who don’t value or cherish the economic and security architecture that links democracies from Estonia to New Zealand – will blush when Ukrainians answer: “We believed in you. Why won’t you believe in yourselves?”

Reader Interactions

85Comments

  1. 1.

    Martin

    So, sure looks like Putin/Xi own Musk now. Can’t tell if they offered to arrange loans for Musk to get the $40B he needs to buy Twitter, or he just threatened to knock out Starlink, but the feds better get on it.

  2. 2.

    MattF

    This is the guy that various US presidents thought would ‘reset’ the bad relations between Russia and (nearly) everyone else. Nope. It’s a good thing that the veil is lifted. Give me a day or two, maybe come up with a second good thing.

    ETA: And what, exactly, is TFG getting from Putin, hmm?

  4. 4.

    zhena gogolia

    @zhena gogolia: I love that when I googled to find that tweet, what I got was “Interview with Biden fails to lift Jake Tapper’s ratings” and “Biden fails to address influence-peddling accusations.”

    The internet is broken.

  6. 6.

    Alison Rose 💙🌻💛

    Some days, reading news about the war, I just want to scream. Others, I want to cry. And some days, it’s both. Most days, really. Like today.

    Also this:

    Second, this is a (highly futile) effort to undermine Zelensky’s support base by demonstrating that Kyiv is not safe and that for all the news from the frontlines, Zelensky has not been able to make it any safer than it was at the start of this war.

    is surely true, but fills me with so much helpless rage, I feel like my brain might implode. It’s not only stunningly disingenuous for russia to do this, but I fear it will work all too well on too many absolute stone-cold morons out there.

  8. 8.

    Wapiti

    @zhena gogolia: didn’t see the clip, but if anyone understands that a head of state can just, you know, withdraw forces from a bad situation, it’s President Biden.

  10. 10.

    Layer8Problem

    @MattF:  “And what, exactly, is TFG getting from Putin, hmm?”

    Ongoing extension of the terms of his loans.

    A firm promise that Putin’ll recommend him for membership in the Evil League of Evil with an executive committee seat.  Real Soon Now.

  11. 11.

    Geminid

    Some tankies are using the specter of nuclear war to castigate liberals supporting Ukraine. Anti-tankie Michael Paulauski retweeted one a couple days ago, who gloated that “centrist Panera moms” would regret their mindless support of Ukraine once realized how close we are to a nuclear war.

    Her “centrist Panera moms” line was so funny It made me choke on my avocado toast.

  12. 12.

    Baud

    @Geminid:

    centrist Panera moms” would regret their mindless support of Ukraine once they understood how close nuclear war has come.

     

    Why would such moms or anyone else regret supporting Ukraine because we got “close to” nuclear war? That would mean that we did not have a nuclear war.

  13. 13.

    patrick II

    @MattF:

    Back in 2003 Putin asked Robert Kraft to see his Super Bowl championship ring.  Kraft handed it him, Putin took it, put it in his pocket and walked away.  A couple of large bodyguards prevented Kraft from following.

    That is not much in the context of war and genocide we have seen since, but still, it was so outlandish (what other world leader would even consider doing that?) it made me think that Putin is a man totally without scruples, a gangster who takes what he can when he can.  I don’t know how we could have ever thought anything else.

  14. 14.

    Geminid

    @Baud: I guess it’s still a possibility.

    But I think lefties like this one are just very bitter, and feel better by sneering at liberal women and dismissing them as “centrists.” That epithet is now often applied to just about any Democrat who talks back to lefties. Or else they use “K-Hive,” which they equate with “centrist.”

  15. 15.

    Suzanne

    @Baud:

    Why would such moms or anyone else regret supporting Ukraine because we got “close to” nuclear war? That would mean that we did not have a nuclear war.

    I mean, if nuclear war breaks out, it won’t have been Ukraine that started it.
    This is the “logic” of abusive husbands time immemorial.

  16. 16.

    Baud

    @Suzanne:

    Yes, but that’s a question of blaming the victim.

    The tankie argument above is that saving Ukraine isn’t worth nuclear war, but people would regret it even it even there is no nuclear war, but we got “close” to nuclear war.  That makes no sense.

  18. 18.

    Another Scott

    Looks like the remaining road bridge is in worse shape than one might have thought:

    3 photos.

    New photos of Crimean bridge were published. It’s visible that the second road is a bit wobbly 🤏 pic.twitter.com/vyIvvo3abP

    — Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) October 12, 2022

    This is what the queue at the ferry crossing in Crimea looks like

    The waiting time in the queue is 3-4 days, said the "head" of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov.

    According to him, there are about 900 trucks in the queue now.

    🇺🇦Real War pic.twitter.com/C78MxAwgP3

    — Sander (@SanderRegter) October 12, 2022

    [ womp, womp ]

    (both via ErikAukan (he of the tapestries))

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  19. 19.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @MisterForkbeard: I tried to slog my way through the NY Mag article about the laptop. As near as I can tell, all the allegations come from between 2017 and ’19, when Biden was out of office.

  21. 21.

    Geminid

    @Baud: I think the person was saying that we were close to war and it was still a possibility. People like this might actually hope for a nuclear war, as long as they do not get hurt. Then they could really rub centrist Panera mom noses in it.

    Some of these people are very, very bitter, and long for Democratic failure of any kind. I do not follow them on Twitter but run into them on accounts like Michael Paulauwski’s. He’s a self-described democratic socialist who spends half his time fighting with democratic socialists and those to their left.

  27. 27.

    Geminid

    @Baud: Paulauski is someone who likes to push back on lefties, and thinks its an important task. He seems to genuinely believe in democratic socialism, but thinks it is best built from the ground up rather than imposed from above. I think that to Paulauski, the lefties who constantly try to undercut the Democratic Party are actually impeding a more progressive economic system.

  28. 28.

    Captain C

    @Suzanne:

    This is the “logic” of abusive husbands time immemorial.

    I was just about to type this.  It’s the same thing as asking the wife with the black eye what she did to provoke her husband, or for that matter, telling a rape victim it wouldn’t have happened if only she hadn’t smiled at him/worn a revealing outfit/existed.  It’s abuser and enabler logic, and oftentimes by people who really ought to know better.

    The abuser can stop the abuse at any time, by ceasing to abuse, whether on a personal or international level.

  29. 29.

    Suzanne

    @Baud: I think the tankies really just like Putin but want to find a “respectable” way to like him, and have people tell them how smart and rational they are.

  30. 30.

    Jay

    Early in the war, advocates of pressuring Zelensky to give land for peace argued that we had to do so because Putin was so strong. Today, they say we have to do so because Putin is so weak. (That they continue to assign us this imperial role to the US is also noted.)— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) October 12, 2022

  31. 31.

    randy khan

    @Suzanne:

    I love that Sanna Marin snickers at the absolute unrelenting dumbness of the question.

    Yeah, that was good.  Naturally, misogynists and pro-Putin trolls are claiming that what she said was somehow stupid or out of bounds (my favorite of which is something about how she should be careful because Russia could invade Finland next, which something tells me would be a worse debacle for Russia than Ukraine, not even considering that Finland has applied for NATO membership and NATO members are saying they would defend Finland even before it joins).

  32. 32.

    Jay

    Russia is urgently modernising 800 sixty-year-old T-62 tanks for the war in Ukrainepic.twitter.com/h6wLckCzNd— Business Ukraine mag (@Biz_Ukraine_Mag) October 12, 2022

    they are going to need to mobilize and train up 800 loaders, because the T-62 does not have an autoloader and every Soviet/Russian tank afterwards, starting with the T-64, replaced the loader with an autoloader.

  35. 35.

    Jay

    Multiple Ukrainian military and civilian leaders say they don’t fear a tactical nuclear strike by Russia, saying it would work against Russia and mobilize the world even more to back Ukraine in its existential fight for survival.— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) October 12, 2022

    suck it tankies,……………

  36. 36.

    MazeDancer

    Gift link around paywall on WaPo article on witness who works for Trump and helped move boxes of documents at this tweet.

    Between that, possible flipping of Attorney Corcoran, and video footage of people moving the boxes around Mar-a-lago, Trump nailed.

    Fortunately, Trump will not be locked up next week, so he still has to sit with E. Jean Carroll’s attorneys for sworn deposition next week.

  38. 38.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Baud: best as I can tell, that Hunter was trying to sell access to his unemployed father during a time when Republicans had the proverbial trifecta

  45. 45.

    WaterGirl

    Is there anyone here who would drive across that bridge in a truck, or go across it on a train?

    For a million dollars?  Five million dollars?

    Surely every vehicle that goes across is makes the bridge weaker and weaker, no?

  51. 51.

    Yutsano

    @kalakal: 

    I wouldn’t, not until after its had a comprehensive structural survey and passed with flying colours.

    Honestly? I wouldn’t even trust it then.

  52. 52.

    zhena gogolia

    One of the Russian antiwar YouTube people I was watching today is expecting more attacks on the bridge. We’ll see.

  55. 55.

    Anoniminous

    This is just amazing.  Russia is building   World War 2 era defensive lines in Luhansk.  And it didn’t work then, either.  This plus the 800 or so T-62 Tanks they are going to hand out to the mobilized means Russian military technology is actually regressing.
    Soon, comrades, the JS IIs will be unleashed to destroy NATO’s King Tiger Mark VI panzers!​

  56. 56.

    Wapiti

    @Jay: We had tanks that old at Fort Hood. Most were lined up in the cannibalization point. Occasionally range control would decide the tank gunnery ranges needed new targets and they’d drag a few hulks out to get shot up by modern tanks.

  57. 57.

    Suzanne

    @WaterGirl: As noted above, some freeze/thaw cycles will fuck the bridge up all on its own. Other than that, it’s more susceptible to a shock load.

  60. 60.

    Jay

    @topclimber:

    Putin’s been threatening The West with Nukes since 1999.

    Every past redline of his has been crossed, no nukes.

    If Russia uses nukes they will be destroyed, internationally, economically and militaraly.

    If The West or Ukraine gives into nuclear blackmail, then nuclear blackmail will never end and you can kiss goodby to any freedom.

     

    @topclimber:

    when Ukraine win’s, they will be less destroyed than if they lose, because Russia’s goal is to completely eliminate the existence of Ukraine and every Ukrainian on the planet.

  61. 61.

    Miki

    @Wapiti: “if anyone understands that a head of state can just, you know, withdraw forces from a bad situation, it’s President Biden.”

    Yup. Yup, yup, yup.

  62. 62.

    Kent

    @Jay: I recall seeing a comprehensive list of all the times in the past 20 years that Putin has threatened nuclear blackmail over every issue large and small.  Was that on Twitter?  It was every year or so like clockwork.

    I wish I could find it and bookmark it again.  Anyone know what I’m talking about?  Nothing pops up with a Google search.

  63. 63.

    Jay

    @Wapiti:

    the Soviet Union/Russia has/had a policy of stockpiling obsolete arms. The theory was that in a conflict with the West, the latest weapons would be quickly attrited on both sides, then the older weapons would be rotated forward, and so on an so on, until in the end NATO would be fighting with sticks and rocks, while they would have T-34’s and Moson Nagants.

  65. 65.

    Jay

    @Kent:

    yeah, it was on twitter,

    may be else where but all the nuke hype and panty wetting, (non gender specific) has pushed it way past page 22 on a google search.

  66. 66.

    Suzanne

    @WaterGirl: So a shock load is any kind of sudden force, can be vertical or horizontal. Think of the WTC towers…..the steel structure of the building was enough to hold itself, until it finally gave way, the top portion dropped (and F = ma) and then it collapsed progessively.  I am not a forensics person, nor a structural or civil engineer, but my understanding is that most of these structural failures are shocks, not normal fatigue. One big impact or horizontal load.

  69. 69.

    Suzanne

    @WaterGirl: So it is obviously weaker. That might mean that it is okay with “normal” traffic going over it. But it’s probably more vulnerable to any sort of shock, like a more-severe-than-typical windstorm or snowstorm. Or a boater accidentally hitting one of the supports. Or even a car accident that happens on the bridge.

    I had a project where there was a shock load on the crane. No one was hurt, but that was dumb luck. Crane picked up some (very) expensive and heavy medical equipment, and it had not been properly secured within its crate. It shifted, shocked the crane, and swing and hit the building. There was a video that went viral some years ago where a crane experienced a shock load while letting a slab and the slab almost flattened the workers and the entire crane fell over. It’s not the load/weight itself, it’s the effect of speed/acceleration that makes it so dangerous.

  70. 70.

    OB-1

    @Anoniminous: Those “World War 2 era defensive lines” are still useful defenses today. If placed correctly, the concrete obstacles (some may be ‘dragon’s teeth’) will make it difficult for vehicles such as tanks and armored personnel carriers to cross a field. Ditches can do the same thing. They can also be placed to channel an attack into pre-defined fields of fire where the attackers would likely suffer more casualties. Ukraine has also been building similar defensive lines.

     

    @Anoniminous:

  71. 71.

    Jay

    @OB-1:

    Dragon’s teeth are only good these days against wheeled vehicles like BRM’s, and in the Wagner vid they are being emplaced a mere 20 feet infront of the “trench lines”, way to close to be an effective means of hindering any attack.

    The trench digger is just digging straight trenches, unconnected, and dumping the spoil onto the surface facing towards the enemy, so, obvious to spot. Dimitri, (War Translated) on twitter has a vid up of Russian Mobliks who abandoned their trench line when it flooded up to their arm pits.

    The Ukrainians build their trenches in the tree line or verge, where they are concealed. They zig zag their trenches so that a shell strike does not travel far down the trench line before it’s blocked by the zag. Drains are installed, along with firing benches, grenade holes, bypasses and 2 man shelters good up to a direct 105mm hit. The “front line” trenches are connected by “Communication Trenches” to the second line of trenches, where most of the Company shelter and wait for an attack.

    A proper trench is much much more than a ditch.

  72. 72.

    Jay

    @OB-1:

    Dragon’s teeth are only good these days against wheeled vehicles like BRM’s, and in the Wagner vid they are being emplaced a mere 20 feet infront of the “trench lines”, way to close to be an effective means of hindering any attack.

    The trench digger is just digging straight trenches, unconnected, and dumping the spoil onto the surface facing towards the enemy, so obvious to spot. Dimitri, (War Translated) on twitter has a vid up of Russian Mobliks who abandoned their trench line when it flooded up to their arm pits.

    The Ukrainians build their trenches in the tree line or verge, where they are concealed. They zig zag their trenches so that a shell strike does not travel far down the trench line before it’s blocked by the zag. Drains are installed, along with firing benches, grenade holes, bypasses and 2 man shelters good up to a direct 105mm hit. The “front line” trenches are connected by “Communication Trenches” to the second line of trenches, where most of the Company shelter and wait for an attack.

    A proper trech is much much more than a ditch.

  73. 73.

    Calouste

    @Ksmiami: Finland has the largest artillery force in Europe and, as the land of the 10,000 lakes, there are numerous bottlenecks between those lakes where invaders can be carpet bombed with said artillery.

  74. 74.

    Edmund Dantes

    @WaterGirl: live load and static load. Most structures are designed to handle different levels.

    a static load is a load that is always there and is usually constant (for all intents and purposes). Think like the weight of the bridge itself (ignoring wind load and other stuff) it doesn’t change much.

    live load is the stuff like cars and trucks going over all the time. Now if that load is gradually added the structure’s materials and supports  has more time to absorb the weight and allow its tension/compression to slowly disperse out the load.

    now a shock load is a super sudden loading of the structure. It can cause things to snap or break even though it might be below the structures max weight limit just because the supports don’t have time to reach an equilibrium or fully transfer the weight/force to all the structures designed to absorb it. Thus a failure occurs. Weak points break rhen

  75. 75.

    Anoniminous

    @OB-1: ​
     
    Blowing a path through the dragon’s teeth and using bulldozers to fill in the ditch is the job of Combat Engineers. Wehrmacht was able blast a path through similar defenses during the Battle of Kursk in a couple of hours.

  76. 76.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Alison Rose 💙🌻💛:  You are looking at this wrong. The Ukrainians did serious damage to Russia’s ability to wage war with that attack, the blow to Putin’s ego is merely a nice bonus.  Putin is being a complete dimwit with missile attacks since it does absolutely nothing to get him victory and squanders a limited resource at the same time.

  78. 78.

    leeleeFL

    @patrick II: I, for one, have always thought he was a KGB thug who should meet the pointy end of a KGB umbrella.  Why anyone thought he was going to do anything good has forever escaped me.

  82. 82.

    Geminid

    @leeleeFL: “tankie” is slang for people on the left who take a line regarding Russia that others would condemn as appeasement. The word dates from the Cold War.

    There is a large “anti-imperialist,” cohort on the left (“anti-hegemonic” is also used). Some have sided Russia in this war, or effectively sided them by urging peace talks that would almost certainly leave large areas in Ukraine under Russian control. The International Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America is an example.

    When I follow the Iranian protests on Twitter, I encounter a few western apologists for the regime. If I look up their own timeline I usually find they are anti-hegemonists generally, and also denounce what they say is a war for and by NATO.

    But some of these apologists just have a lot of animus towards Israel, and consider Iran’s government to be an “enemy of my enemy,” and thus a friend.

  84. 84.

    Geminid

    @leeleeFL: Paulauski self-describes as “DemSoc, liking a anarchy.” It doesn’t sound like he’s much for meetings!

    I think the “liking anarchy” part of the description just means that Paulauski is not a statist and believes that democratic socialism is best built from the ground up through social institutions like labor unions, and co-ops, etc. He does criticise the DSA on occasion, both for its errant foreign policies and its occasional attempts to impose organizational and ideological  conformity.

    Last I saw, the DSA has just under 100,000 members. It seems to have some internal controversy right now. Their next convention won’t be held until summer, 2023, but it could be heated.

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