"Perpetrators of horrible crimes are not diabolical monsters who courageously do what they are doing--they are cowards doing it to sustain the fantasy which motivates them." - Zizek
The Riga City Court sentenced pro-Kremlin activist Jelena Kreile on July 10 to three years in prison on charges of justifying war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine and the genocide and crimes against humanity committed by the Soviet Union in Latvia. Kreile openly expressed her support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, carrying a bag with a large letter "Z," which is used as propaganda to underpin Moscow's aggression against Ukraine. Investigators say the 56-year-old also placed Russian national flags with mottos expressing her support for the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the windows of her residence. - RFL
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi spent a busy day with his Russian counterparts negotiating energy and business deals and hobnobbing with Russia’s elite as India seeks to deepen an already friendly partnership with Russia to fuel its own rapid economic growth during the Russo-India summit in Moscow on July 9. - BNE
Russia, despite achieving a significant drop in unemployment in recent years, is grappling with severe labor shortages exacerbated by its expanding defense industry amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. While Western sanctions have adversely affected various sectors of the Russian economy, the defense industry has seen substantial wage increases of 30% to 60% over the past two years, according to a statement from Russia’s first deputy prime minister. - Labor shortage close to 5M people as human asset scarcest resource nationwide
I became communist because I was Catholic. I did not change religion, but I remained profoundly Catholic. I don’t go to church but this doesn’t matter; you don’t ask people to go to church. I remained a Catholic, that is, an internationalist universalist. I thought that inside the Communist Party there were more adequate means to realize universal fraternity. And then, there was the influence of my wife who had fought in the terrible resistance and who had taught me a lot, a lot. Everything has come to me through women, and this is the reason why I attribute a very important role, a predominant role, to the women’s movement. Women don’t know their capacity, the possibilities, their capability to do politics. - Louis Althusser philosopher
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A global internet sweep that examined the websites and mobile apps of 642 traders has found that 75,7% of them employed at least one dark pattern, and 66,8% of them employed two or more dark patterns. Dark patterns are defined as practices commonly found in online user interfaces and that steer, deceive, coerce, or manipulate consumers into making choices that often are not in their best interests. - ICPEN
"As Americans, we tend to view ourselves as a shining example of freedom and prosperity to the rest of the world. But what does freedom mean in a society captured by billionaires, where elections are bought and paid for, and where you are “free” to do only that which you can afford?" - Shawn Fein UAW President
Marxism did not make many inroads in Indian thought in North America – as opposed to its adoption by Indigenous thinkers elsewhere in the Americas – until the Second World War. Six decades before theories of settler colonialism were developed by Maxime Rodinson for Israel and, in their current academic configuration, by Patrick Wolfe for Anglo-settler states, Karl Kautsky refined the distinction between ‘work’ colonies, where Europeans settled and conducted extermination, and ‘exploitation’ colonies, where the aims were more purely extractive and relied on local labour. But the importance of radical politics for Native American thinkers wasn’t merely abstract. Lenin’s policies on safeguarding Indigenous cultures in the Soviet Union were looked on by many Native Americans as preferable to the forced assimilation initiatives of the US Bureau of Indian Affairs. When Native nations petitioned to attend the Versailles Peace Conference, the Wilson administration dismissed them out of hand. - London Review of Books
Burkina Faso's military junta bans homosexual unions
Instead of saying “the future is still open, we still have time to act and prevent the worst,” one should accept the catastrophe as inevitable, and then act to undo what is already “written in the stars” as our destiny…it is in our power to rewrite the past that leads to this future. - France Between Two Disavowels
The US announced on Wednesday that it will deploy missiles to Germany that would have been banned under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which the US withdrew from in 2019…The US refused to negotiate with Russia on either issue, and the Trump administration tore up the treaty. It was clear the US exited the treaty so it could deploy intermediate-range missiles near China, leading Russia to propose a moratorium on the deployment of INF missiles in Europe. But the US never accepted the offer. - Antiwar.com
Recently Webster spoke with art critic and podcast co-host Ben Davis about the fresh uptick of interest in psychoanalysis among artists now, the uses and abuses of therapy in art, and her new pamphlet titled The Psychoanalyst and the Artist, where she writes about what analysts can learn from two artists in particular, the sculptor Louise Bourgeois and the painter Carroll Dunham. - Artnet
Reindeer herders play critical role in monitoring Finland’s eastern border with Russia
The UAW’s federal monitor twice pressured the union to back off its call for Gaza ceasefire, then launched an investigation. The rise of UAW President Shawn Fain has been met with alarm in powerful corridors. …“You called President Fain and introduced your conversation with President Fain as one that was ‘strictly on a personal level’ during which time you shared with President Fain your personal concerns about the Union’s position on the crisis in Gaza,” he wrote. “Your call to President Fain on an issue so blatantly outside of the Monitor’s jurisdiction was inappropriate as your Office holds disproportionate power over the UAW, and even a ‘strictly personal’ sharing of opinion implicitly implicates such power dynamic. Nonetheless, out of respect for you and the office of the Monitor, President Fain discussed the conversation with only those in his inner circle and chose not to escalate the improper exchange any further.”- Ryan Grim
“Every single Democrat that I’ve talked to, and I’ve talked to about 1,000 in the past week, every single one thinks the same thing, which is we’re totally, totally screwed,” says one person close to the White House. - FT
"Philosophy possesses no opinions, for there is no such thing as philosophical opinion. ... Philosophy is the objective science of truth, it is science of necessity, conceiving knowledge, and neither opinion nor the spinning out of opinions." - Hegel
It is good that we still have newspapers, and that they still report these details in the fine print. It would be better if they gave us more help in putting it all together. - Bidenism Abroad