Archives for 2024

Three housekeeping notes. First, Rosie is doing great. She’ll see her regular vet Friday, which will be the first time her regular vet has seen her since she started chemo. This is just routine. Thank you for all the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

Second, about a month or so ago Cole and I had a discussion about tweets. Specifically, because Apartheid Clyde keeps mucking around with the code and the API, embedding tweets is really mucking up the site. There’s just no way for any developer to stay on top of the mess. Of course the majority of Ukrainians and those reporting on Ukraine are continuing to do so on the hellsite, which is why I was continuing to embed them. I’ve already checked and Nitter posts don’t embed. But I think all of us would like to give the Starlink Snowflake less exposure, so over the next few days I’ll be trying just using the Nitter link and copying and pasting the content combined with using BlueSky embeds where I can. This will mean less screen shots and videos, so may not be optimal and I may have to go back to doing things the other way. Thank you all in advance for your forbearance.

Third, I’m taking several days of leave to recharge. That’s from my actual paying work.  Tomorrow I will do a post on where we are in the wake of yesterday’s and today’s news. However, I want to make an important point right now: what you all did here, including Watergirl’s organizing, was incredible. The civic action you all undertook, providing donations for, or both was amazing and you should all be very, very proud of your efforts. The reason we are where we are though is because while civic action is necessary, it is not sufficient by itself given the reality of the past nine years. The President-elect’s movement is a revolutionary one that revolves around a revanchist, reactionary racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, and (white) Christian nationalist ideology fused with a cult of personality around the President-elect. And this movement is aided and abetted by extreme gerrymanders, extreme voter suppression, extreme voter disenfranchisement, low intensity revolutionary violence/the threat of violence, and the subversion of the federal judiciary and the 25 states where the GOP has trifectas. As necessary as civic action is, it is not sufficient to counter that. It has to be combined with counter-guerilla warfare to counter the violence/threats of violence and counter-political action to counter the subversion of the federal courts, the extreme gerrymanders, voter suppression, and voter disenfranchisement. Unless an individual or small group is going to undertake a partisan counter-guerilla warfare campaign, which would of necessity have to be violent, these things can only really be done by government officials. And they weren’t. They weren’t even undertaken. I’ll have more on this tomorrow, but I wanted to make sure that everyone recognizes that you all did everything you could possibly do in the one line of effort that can be done by the citizenry. You all did great and important work, take both pride and as much comfort in that as you can!

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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War for Ukraine Day 987: Adjustments & ChangesPost + Comments (38)