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Javier E

High Steaks - Slack Tide by Matt Labash - 0 views

mattlabash.substack.com/...high-steaks

rage inner life peace self-control dysfunction psychology culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 04 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • In the whole Bible there are perhaps no words that everybody everywhere can identify with more fully than the ones St. Paul wrote to the Roman church:  “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” …..That is as rich a summation as any I know of the inner battle that we are all involved in. Which is the battle to break free from all the camouflaged and not so camouflaged hostilities that we half deplore, even as we engage in them.
  • These are the wars that go on within families, within marriages, the wars we wage with each other sometimes openly, but more often, so hiddenly. That even in the thick of them we are hardly aware of what we are doing
  • Sniping and skirmishing, defensive maneuvers, naked aggressions, and guerilla subversions are part of the lives of all of us.….If only we could see that the people we are  one way or another at war with are, more often than not, less to blame for the bad blood between us than we are.
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  • Because, again, more often than not, the very faults we find so unbearable in them are apt to be versions of the same faults that we are more or less blind to in our ourselves.
  • On this day, my text luckily came from the great Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian minister, highly-decorated writer, and theologian.  I’ll let some of his words play us out. They might seem a bit preachy. But that’s to be expected, since they come from a book called Secrets In the Dark: A Life in Sermons.
  • some shit arrived in the mail. Not figuratively. A literal bag of shit, postmarked with a return P.O Box, but which came by way of an anonymous sender. My wife asked who would send such a thing to me. It’s hard to say – the suspect list is a mile long.  Irate subjects? Irate readers? My mom?
  • Forty-two percent of those survey respondents reported they themselves were angrier in the last year than they had been in the past
  • a 2019 NPR-IBM Watson Health poll found that a whopping 84 percent of survey respondents said Americans are angrier today than they were a generation ago.  (The other sixteen percent were presumably too angry to stay on the phone.)
  • According to The 19th, an Austin-based nonprofit news organization, in 2020, the Federal Aviation Administration initiated 183 investigations of unruly passenger behavior, well above average, even for a COVID year in which air travel was significantly diminished. By November of 2021, that number had increased to 990 investigations, after reports of 5,240 unruly incidents
Javier E

Germany isn't turning its back on NATO. It only looks that way. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ny-ukraine-weapons-nato-russia

germany foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • What some commentators abroad see as appeasement, cowardice and the triumph of economic interests over security concerns, many Germans see as a grown-up, sensible and conciliatory approach to foreign policy. (A recent poll found that 59 percent of Germans supported the decision not to send arms to Kyiv.) Germans view themselves as enlightened, having moved beyond power politics, the national interest and militarism.
  • The idea of deterrence, or of the military being an element of geopolitical power needed for strong diplomacy, is foreign to most German citizens.
  • y she is referring to. They read the 20th century, and 1933-1945 in particular, as a lesson in the evils of geopolitics and militarism, and they internalized the post-1989 “end of history” narrative better than anyone else.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In a debate about the Russia-NATO standoff carried by my local German radio station, the dominant view was that de-escalation and diplomacy are what’s needed, with one listener commenting, “I am against weapons in general,” and another warning that nobody should talk about war since, “If you talk about something, it becomes possible.”
  • After the end of the Cold War, Germany spent decades insulated from the harsh world of power politics; most Germans believed that countries were converging toward a system that marginalized military power and favored economic power and legal proceedings. Now that great power competition and military conflicts are back, Germany does not know what to do.
  • Many decision-makers and voters in Germany remain deeply committed to the hope that all conflicts can be solved through dialogue under international law and international organizations such as the United Nations — as if all conflict resulted from misunderstandings instead of competing interests.
  • In a 2020 poll, only 24 percent of Germans said they considered that under some circumstances war could sometimes be necessary to achieve justice, while over 51 percent said war is never necessary.
  • Nonetheless, an increasing number of Germans are beginning to argue that one might also draw a different lesson from history — such as that it is not a good idea to try to appease aggressors.
Javier E

Of Course Putin Is Being Canceled - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...626978

cancel ostracism russia invasion

shared by Javier E on 09 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The ancient Greeks understood the power of creating outcasts. Athenians had a range of punishments available to them that would make even a southern Republican governor queasy, including death by exposure or being thrown into a chasm.
  • Economic devastation and cultural deprivation are powerful punishments. They are also an accurate description of what is happening to Russia as Western sanctions bite, private companies break links with the region, and Putin’s regime is excluded from international organizations and alliances.
  • A true cancellation typically involves the subject being cast out of their professional network, denied the ability to make money, and rejected by their social circle.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Russia’s status in the world has abruptly and obviously changed. Russians cannot escape their isolation as long as they cannot watch Netflix, access TikTok, or see their footballers play in international competitions. Pro-regime oligarchs, who once spent holidays in Europe, bought mansions in Mayfair, and visited their children at English private schools, now face visa restrictions and asset seizures. They have been denied the ability to use the rest of the continent as their gilded playground.
  • When a Russian spymaster complains about his country’s cancellation, our response should not be to laugh at an idiot confusing a culture war and a real one. Instead, we should recognize that economic and social isolation is a powerful weapon, and resolve to use it with the same restraint as any other weapon.
Javier E

The Quiet Ukrainian Dissent on Telegram - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...627068

telegram privacy private communications resistance russia culture politics tech

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • social media gave the revolution a “spirit for destruction.” The constant push for attention, the purity spiraling in which each activist had to prove himself more loyal to the revolution than any other, the disdain for the compromises of politics or the hard work of organizing—the coalition’s problems all seemed to extend from the culture of highly public platforms.
  • It was, Salem wrote, “group-think on steroids—an abomination of a monster with thousands of arms and no brain.”
  • Facebook or Twitter is social in the way a large cocktail party is, where you move from one conversation to the next, only half-hearing most of what is said, and where the loudest voice or funniest joke grabs everyone’s attention
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • A chat app can be social like a huddle of people in focused conversation. Participants are speaking to be heard by one another, not by the entire world. There is more concentration and potential for intimacy, and much less performance.
  • For Ukrainians and Russians resisting the war, the different ways of engaging through Telegram—receiving information through dedicated channels, forming groups committed to one topic, or chattering in hushed tones—benefit a people that will likely have to sustain a long insurgency.
  • a tool such as this one provides the opportunity to build what Zeynep Tufekci in her book, Twitter and Tear Gas, calls “network internalities”: all those deep relationships that help any movement survive through hardships
  • Chat apps are merely the latest expression of the smaller, more controlled spaces that have always been central to incubating new ideas or challenging existing ones.
  • in the Soviet Union, samizdat played this role. The underground, illegal, and self-produced writing, passed hand to hand, kept alive a shadow civil society during repressive periods.
  • The lineage of such underground communication stretches across history, from the 17th-century scholars in Europe who collaborated through letters on scientific experiments in defiance of Church doctrine all the way to the xeroxed and stapled zines of the 1990s, which set the tone of third-wave feminism.
  • What matters is that embattled Ukrainians and anti-war Russians are attempting to practice privacy and quiet communication—necessary virtues for a resistance movement.
Javier E

Opinion | Russians Must Accept the Truth. We Failed. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...russia-ukraine-putin.html

responsibility russia individualism culture politics history activism failure

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • In 2011, when it was announced that Mr. Putin would return to the Kremlin as president, tens of thousands took to the streets in protest. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and fomented war in the Donbas, we held huge antiwar rallies. And in 2021 we took to the streets once more throughout the country when Russia’s main opposition figure, Aleksei Navalny, was arrested after his return to Moscow.
  • I want to believe we did everything in our power to rein in Mr. Putin. But it’s not true. Though we protested, organized, lobbied, spread information and built honest lives in the shadow of a corrupt regime, we must accept the truth: We failed. We failed to prevent a catastrophe and we failed to change the country for the better. And now we must bear that failure.
  • Those who stayed have lost much of what remained of their freedom. After Mastercard and Visa suspended operations in Russia, many can’t even pay for a VPN service to get independent media.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The invasion of Ukraine marks the end, definitively, of Russia’s postwar era.
  • During the 77 years since World War II, Russia was regarded — no matter what other perceptions it carried — as the country that helped to save humanity from the greatest evil the world has ever known. Russia was the heroic country that defeated fascism, even if that victory forced 45 years of Communism on half of Europe.
  • Not anymore. Russia is now the nation that unleashed a new evil, and unlike the old one, it’s armed with nuclear weapons.
  • The primary responsibility for this evil lies squarely at the feet of Mr. Putin and his entourage.
  • Responsibility is the key.
  • for those who opposed the regime, in ways big and small, the responsibility is also ours to bear. How did it happen? What did we do wrong? How do we prevent this from happening again
  • responsibility was what we lacked
  • Russia is a very individualistic society, in which people, to quote the cultural historian Andrei Zorin, live with a “Leave me alone” mind-set. We like to isolate ourselves from one another, from the state, from the world.
  • This allowed many of us to build vibrant, hopeful, energetic lives against a grim backdrop of arrests and prison. But in the process, we became insular and lost sight of everyone else’s interests.
  • We must now put aside our individual concerns and accept our common responsibility for the war. Such an act is, first and foremost, a moral necessity.
  • it could also be the first step toward a new Russian nation — a nation that could talk to the world in a language other than wars and threats, a nation that others will learn not to fear.
Javier E

What Hannah Arendt's Work Tells Us About Ukraine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...627081

authoritarian isolation human rights citizenship autocracy Arendt

shared by Javier E on 19 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The toxic nationalism and open racism of Nazi Germany, only recently defeated; the Soviet Union’s ongoing, cynical attacks on liberal values and what it called “bourgeois democracy”; the division of the world into warring camps; the large influx of refugees; the rise of new forms of broadcast media capable of pumping out disinformation and propaganda on a mass scale; the emergence of an uninterested, apathetic majority, easily placated with simple bromides and outright lies; and above all the phenomenon of totalitarianism, which she described as an “entirely new form of government”—all of these things led Arendt to believe that a darker era was about to begin.
  • Once again, we are living in a world that Arendt would recognize, a world in which it seems “as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives”
  • In the totalitarian world, trust has dissolved. The masses “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • because Arendt feared for the future, much of The Origins of Totalitarianism was in fact focused on an excavation of the past.
  • the principle that led her down this path remains important: To grapple with a broad social trend, look at its history, try to find its origins, try to understand what happened when it last appeared, in another country or another century
  • To explain Nazi anti-Semitism, Arendt reached back not only to the history of the Jews in Germany but also to the history of European racism and imperialism, and to the evolution of the notion of the “rights of man”—which we now more commonly speak of as “human rights.” To have such rights, she observed, you must not only live in a state that can guarantee them; you must also qualify as one of that state’s citizens.
  • the questions Arendt asks remain absolutely relevant today. She was fascinated by the passivity of so many people in the face of dictatorship, by the widespread willingness, even eagerness, to believe lies and propaganda
  • it offers us a kind of dual methodology, two different ways of thinking about the phenomenon of autocracy.
  • To explain this phenomenon, Arendt zeroes in on human psychology, especially the intersection between terror and loneliness. By destroying civic institutions, whether sports clubs or small businesses, totalitarian regimes kept people away from one another and prevented them from sharing creative or productive projects.
  • when each person felt himself isolated from the rest, resistance became impossible. Politics in the broadest sense became impossible too: “Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other … Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.”
  • it is impossible not to wonder whether the nature of modern work and information, the shift from “real life” to virtual life and the domination of public debate by algorithms that increase emotion, anger, and division, hasn’t created some of the same results
  • In a world where everyone is supposedly “connected,” loneliness and isolation once again are smothering activism, optimism, and the desire to participate in public life.
  • he 20th-century totalitarian model has not been banished; it can be brought back, at any place and at any time.
  • The Origins of Totalitarianism does not contain a set of policy prescriptions, or directions on how to fix things. Instead it offers proposals, experiments, different ways to think about the lure of autocracy and the seductive appeal of its proponents as we grapple with them in our own time
Javier E

Putin's war and the Chaos Climbers - by Noah Smith - 0 views

noahpinion.substack.com/...ins-war-and-the-chaos-climbers

opportunism careerism ambition elite rivalry crisis culture politics right-wing leftist

shared by Javier E on 21 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The title of this post is a reference to a line from the TV show Game of Thrones, where the scheming nobleman Littlefinger declares that “Chaos is a ladder.” By disrupting the stability of the current regime, he intends to create space to move up in the world.
  • I see many of the above-mentioned figures on both the Right and the Left as Chaos Climbers — people who believe that the travails of the liberal order built after World War 2 represent an opening for their own fringe ideologies to advance their power.
  • it’s just a description of what has been actually happening over the last decade.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • If Putin defeats the Ukrainians, the conservatives that are standing against Putin will look ineffectual and weak. The Trumpists will then be able to solidify their control over the GOP.
  • Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, the socialist Left that started to revive itself with the antiwar movement and Occupy blossomed into a full-blown generational movement with the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign that revived the DSA, spawned a new generation of activist orgs like the Sunrise movement, and created a new (though still modest) socialist medi
  • So far, despite fierce factionalism, the socialists have not yet succeeded in taking over the Democratic party like Trump took over the GOP. But in highlighting the failures of centrist Dems to curb inequality, revive unions, fix health care, or save the welfare state, they clearly hope to be able to pull off a takeover at some point.
  • Establishment failures equal insurgent opportunities. That shouldn’t be too controversial.
  • Both the liberal center-Left and the conservative center-Right are basically committed to upholding the global liberal order. Putin, by invading and attempting to conquer a sovereign state, challenges that order. If Putin succeeds, even modestly, it represents a failure for the U.S. establishment figures who tried to stop him.
  • It was the failure of conservatism that gave rise to the Trumpist movement and the alt-right. Bush’s muscular interventionism ran aground in Iraq, laissez-faire economics crashed the economy in 2008, and Christian conservatism failed to halt the gay rights movement. The conservative paradigm that had taken over the GOP in the 70s and 80s failed all at once, and fringe elements — the alt-right, conspiracy theorists, Trump — sort of took over the party.
  • it also means a victory for raw power and will (perhaps implying that efforts like the January 6th putsch are the preferred method for attaining power).
  • But if Putin loses, then Trump and his allies who for years praised and defended Putin’s regime will be discredited. Success has a thousand fathers; failure is an orphan.
  • Even more damningly, if Putin loses, it’ll be a success for the globalist order — sanctions and aid to Ukraine will represent a triumph of international cooperation. Exactly the kind of world order the Trumpists want so badly to smash.
  • If Putin defeats Ukraine, it’ll be a debacle for Biden and the establishment, and perhaps a socialist candidate will be a little closer to winning the next primary.
  • So Chaos Climbers on the Right and Left both have some incentive to want Putin to win — or at least for the war to be perceived as a NATO loss.
  • What these people all fear is the return of the order of the 1990s — a return to the idea of liberal internationalism as the least bad of all possible systems of human organization.
  • many people all over the ideological spectrum allowed themselves to see the chaos of the last decade as a high and beautiful wave that would carry them to power…and now, if Putin is ejected from Ukraine by a triumphant international liberal West, the various Chaos Climbers may see their waves break and roll back.
Javier E

Mark Esper's Duty to Speak - 0 views

newsletters.theatlantic.com/...peak-up-democracy-constitution

trump crisis history conscience responsibility dissent warning official policy politics

shared by Javier E on 13 May 22 - No Cached
  • The risks of working for Trump were elaborated upon well in 2017 by my Atlantic colleague David Frum; our colleague Eliot Cohen also went back and forth on it and even changed his mind. The danger was obvious: You will end up selling your soul and you will likely fail to do much good
  • The counterargument was also obvious: The interests of the United States of America require that this train wreck of an administration—staffed with the likes of Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and His Faux-Britannic Excellency Sebastian Gorka—should have at least some non-stupid, non-craven, non-nutball types in the executive branch.
  • I argued at the time that there was no way to put child-safety bumpers on all the sharp edges of the White House, and that if Trump was going to drive the country into a ditch, the sooner we got on with it, the better. I am not sure now if I was wrong, but the best evidence against my position is that Esper may well have prevented a war with North Korea by averting Trump’s idiotic evacuation order for Americans in South Korea. If that’s the case, I’d have to say it was worth it to have someone in the right place.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • They had a duty to speak up sooner. And they failed in that duty.
  • These efforts allowed both Trump’s supporters and his critics to comfort themselves with the knowledge that someone, somewhere, was trying to limit the damage to the country. His fans could say, “He’s just inexperienced but he has good people around him,” while the opponents could say, “He’s an execrable moron but reasonable people are in charge, and they’ll save us from the worst.”
  • But the price for this quiet custodianship (a form of opposition to Trump described in detail by Miles Taylor, now known as the author of the famous “Anonymous” op-ed in The New York Times) is that the American people never really knew how much danger they were facing, at home and abroad, at any given moment.
  • Governments are more than just large organizations. They are a far more delicate web of norms and habits, and liberal democracies especially are built on informal agreements rather than black-letter law. Yes, we have tons of laws and administrative bumf that complicate our lives, but when it comes to the nature of our democracy, the Constitution manages to do it all in fewer than  5,000 words. Our basic rights as citizens take less than a page. The rest relies on us.
  • in the end, they have faith in the system. They see Trump as only one man, and the system as a bulwark of laws and regulations, people and committees, institutions and practices that will somehow kick in and prevent a catastrophe.
  • Esper, Mattis, Rex Tillerson, and many, many other people who crawled through the Shawshank sewer pipe that was the four years of the Trump administration needed to speak up the minute they were out. Instead, they teased their book bombshells or played coy games of slap and tickle on cable outlets.
  • And so when you know that the president is unhinged, when you know the country is in danger, when you know that plots are being hatched to subvert the Constitution, you have a duty to speak. This duty supersedes confidentiality, partisanship, or personal loyalty.
  • Think of all the people from whom we don’t have a full account of this mess, who did not speak up even as Trump was running for reelection or inciting an insurrection: Mattis, Tillerson, John Kelly, Robert O’Brien, H. R. McMaster, and many others.
  • These are experienced political figures who know that the public needs to be grabbed by the lapels and made to listen to a compelling story. The too-late book excerpts, along with all the throat clearing, the circumlocutions, the carefully phrased “but I’d still support the nominee” escape hatches don’t cut it.
  • I was in a vulnerable position as a government employee, and from the first time I spoke up, people tried to get me fired from the Naval War College. Even with tenure, I could have been dismissed if I was found to violate the Hatch Act, the law prohibiting on-the-job politicking by federal employees.
  • I called my family together nearly six years ago and said that I could lose my job if I kept writing about Trump. All of them told me to keep writing, and we’d deal with whatever comes.
  • for more than five years, the demands to fire me came so often, as one administrator later told me, that after a while they didn’t even bother to inform me about them anymore.
  • I cannot imagine what it would be like to be burdened with knowing the president was mentally unstable, that he wanted to fire missiles at Mexico, that he was planning to exit NATO, that he wanted to shoot unarmed protesters, that he wanted to invalidate a national election. That is a level of responsibility beyond anything I have ever experienced. This was Night of Camp David stuff, and I’m not sure what I’d have done.
  • But I’m reasonably certain I wouldn’t have kept it to myself until my agent told me I had a deal.
peterconnelly

Opinion | Gen Z Is Cynical. They've Earned It. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...en-z-uvalde-covid-climate.html

opinion new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • As Kasky put it, you open up the door on any day, and either there is an invisible virus that could make you incredibly sick, or the threat of gun violence. “Parkland was a formative shock for my generation. And then Covid comes and completely pulls the curtain aside and shows us there have been no inner machinations to help us if everything comes to a boiling point.” Our conversation reinforced what I already hear from Gen Z — that it’s clear to many of our younger citizens that our institutions, and the older adults who run them, aren’t going to save them.
  • There is evidence, too, that Covid’s emotional toll has been particularly hard for young adults. The American Psychological Association does a regular survey called Stress in America, and in October 2020, the APA was already sounding the alarm:
  • “I think I’ve watched teens become more cynical, and raise more pointed questions than ever about the decisions adults make, which of course plays to one of the true strengths of adolescents. They are designed to question authority, and they are built to point out painful realities.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • this group of teens is extremely politically aware and active around issues ranging from racial injustice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to climate change to LGBTQ+ rights. “If you want to have a more hopeful angle,” Damour said, “teenagers are incredibly skilled at organizing, incredibly skilled at using media networks to communicate with one another and to develop arguments and messaging. The teenagers I talk to are very clear about the sense that it will fall to them to try to make things better.”
  • By contrast, when I was in my teens, I was politically disengaged, and barely any national events broke through my adolescent myopia. I was cynical, sure — lots of teenagers are mini Holden Caulfields. But I didn’t do anything about it. We had the luxury back then of being cynical and doing nothing to improve things, or at least we thought we did. I think fewer teenagers subscribe to that cynical-and-also-apathetic model now.
peterconnelly

White House to be lit orange for gun violence awareness - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

gun awareness

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The White House will be illuminated in orange Friday night in honor of National Gun Violence Awareness Day, as the nation has been shaken by a recent string of deadly mass shootings.
  • Several other government buildings -- including California's Capitol dome and City Hall in New York City -- will also be lit up in orange over the weekend.
  • President Joe Biden on Thursday issued an appeal for stricter gun laws, including a ban on assault weapons, tougher background check laws and a higher minimum age of purchase.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Project Orange Tree, an organization started by Pendleton's friends after a youth panel discussion about her death, began the movement to wear orange to raise awareness and honor her.
  • The idea comes from hunters who wear the color to alert fellow hunters to their presence.
Javier E

Covid at Home: Why Only Some People Test Positive - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ng-household-transmission.html

pandemic covid tests negative symptoms analysis

shared by Javier E on 06 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • On the day my daughter first tested positive, my 11-year-old son announced that he wasn’t feeling well and began developing classic coronavirus symptoms: headache, fatigue, sore throat, runny nose. My husband followed two days later with a sore throat and stuffy nose. Yet despite testing daily for seven days straight, my husband and son never tested positive for Covid-19 — including on PCR tests administered on my son’s fifth day of symptoms, and my husband’s third. (And yes, we did some throat swabs, too.)
  • I called experts in immunology, microbiology and virology to get their take.
  • And this rapid response changes everything about what happens next.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • One of the first questions experts asked me was whether my family was vaccinated. Yes, I said: My husband and I are vaccinated and boosted, and our kids are vaccinated but not yet boosted. This is a relevant question because, if you’re exposed to the virus that causes Covid-19, “your immune system kicks into action a lot faster if you’re vaccinated versus not vaccinated,”
  • First, the swift immune reaction slows the rate of viral reproduction and spread. “This is what the vaccines are there for — to educate your immune system so that it gets a jump on the invaders before they are able to replicate out of control,”
  • Because the virus doesn’t replicate as quickly in vaccinated people, they may be less likely to test positive for Covid-19 after coronavirus exposure, because their immune system “keeps the viral load below the level of detection,”
  • It’s possible, then, that my husband and son did catch Covid-19, but their vaccinated immune systems fended off the infection so well that they never had enough viral proteins in their nose or throat to test positive. And their continual negative tests probably meant that they were never that contagious
  • If my husband and son never tested positive, why did they feel sick? Even if a vaccinated person doesn’t have much virus in their body, they can still have powerful Covid symptoms
  • That’s because many illness symptoms — fever, malaise, runny nose, fatigue — are actually caused by the immune system’s response to the virus, rather than the virus itself
  • And as for why I felt fine, Dr. Morrison said that perhaps my immune system fought off the incoming virus so quickly that I didn’t even have a chance to feel sick. “It sounds to me like you were definitely exposed,”
  • maybe I had high levels of vaccine antibodies or immune cells called T cells that were able to kill the invading virus before it had a chance to alert the parts of my immune system that would incite symptoms.
  • All this said, nobody really knows what happened to me, my son or my husband. When it comes to understanding how Covid-19 affects the body, “there are so many open questions,”
  • people can have different experiences for many different reasons. For instance, Dr. Andino said, it’s possible that the virus was replicating in parts of my husband’s or my son’s body that the tests didn’t reach
  • Research suggests that the coronavirus can replicate in the pancreas, heart, brain, kidneys and other organs, although vaccination may reduce the chance that the virus spreads outside the respiratory system.
  • Dr. Andino said that he and his colleagues have been conducting studies in which they follow and repeatedly test entire households after one person in the home tests positive for Covid-19. “What we see is exactly what you described — that some people in the household don’t test positive,”
Javier E

You Are Going to Get COVID Again … And Again … And Again - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...639436

covid effects response pandemic history crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 28 May 22 - No Cached
  • You’re not just likely to get the coronavirus. You’re likely to get it again and again and again.
  • “I personally know several individuals who have had COVID in almost every wave,” says Salim Abdool Karim, a clinical infectious-diseases epidemiologist and the director of the Center for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa, which has experienced five meticulously tracked surges, and where just one-third of the population is vaccinated.
  • er best guess for the future has the virus infiltrating each of us, on average, every three years or so. “Barring some intervention that really changes the landscape,” she said, “we will all get SARS-CoV-2 multiple times in our life.”
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • that would be on par with what we experience with flu viruses, which scientists estimate hit us about every two to five years, less often in adulthood. It also matches up well with the documented cadence of the four other coronaviruses that seasonally trouble humans, and cause common colds.
  • For now, every infection, and every subsequent reinfection, remains a toss of the dice. “Really, it’s a gamble,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist and long-COVID researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. Vaccination and infection-induced immunity may load the dice against landing on severe disease, but that danger will never go away completely, and scientists don’t yet know what happens to people who contract “mild” COVID over and over again
  • Or maybe not. This virus seems capable of tangling into just about every tissue in the body, affecting organs such as the heart, brain, liver, kidneys, and gut; it has already claimed the lives of millions, while saddling countless others with symptoms that can linger for months or years.
  • considering our current baseline, “less dangerous” could still be terrible—and it’s not clear exactly where we’re headed. When it comes to reinfection, we “just don’t know enough,”
  • Perhaps, as several experts have posited since the pandemic’s early days, SARS-CoV-2 will just become the fifth cold-causing coronavirus.
  • A third or fourth bout might be more muted still; the burden of individual diseases may be headed toward an asymptote of mildness that holds for many years
  • Future versions of SARS-CoV-2 could continue to shape-shift out of existing antibodies’ reach, as coronaviruses often do. But the body is flush with other fighters that are much tougher to bamboozle—among them, B cells and T cells that can quash a growing infection before it spirals out of control
  • Those protections tend to build iteratively, as people see pathogens or vaccines more often. People vaccinated three times over, for instance, seem especially well equipped to duke it out with all sorts of SARS-CoV-2 variants, including Omicron and its offshoots.
  • promising patterns: Second infections and post-vaccination infections “are significantly less severe,” she told me, sometimes to the point where people don’t notice them at all
  • Bodies, wised up to the virus’s quirks, can now react more quickly, clobbering it with sharper and speedier strikes.
  • “There are still very good reasons” to keep exposures few and far between, Landon, of the University of Chicago, told me. Putting off reinfection creates fewer opportunities for harm: The dice are less likely to land on severe disease (or chronic illness) when they’re rolled less often overall. It also buys us time to enhance our understanding of the virus, and improve our tools to fight it.
  • Immunity, though, is neither binary nor permanent. Even if SARS-CoV-2’s assaults are blunted over time, there are no guarantees about the degree to which that happens, or how long it lasts.
  • A slew of factors could end up weighting the dice toward severe disease—among them, a person’s genetics, age, underlying medical conditions, health-care access, and frequency or magnitude of exposure to the virus.
  • for everyone else, no amount of viral dampening can totally eliminate the chance, however small it may be, of getting very sick.
  • Long COVID, too, might remain a possibility with every discrete bout of illness. Or maybe the effects of a slow-but-steady trickle of minor, fast-resolving infections would sum together, and bring about the condition.
  • Every time the body’s defenses are engaged, it “takes a lot of energy, and causes tissue damage,” Thomas told me. Should that become a near-constant barrage, “that’s probably not great for you.”
  • Bodies are resilient, especially when they’re offered time to rest, and she doubts that reinfection with a typically ephemeral virus such as SARS-CoV-2 would cause mounting damage. “The cumulative effect is more likely to be protective than detrimental,” she said, because of the immunity that’s laid down each time.
  • people who have caught the virus twice or thrice may be more likely to become long-haulers than those who have had it just once.
  • Some other microbes, when they reinvade us, can fire up the immune system in unhelpful ways, driving bad bouts of inflammation that burn through the body, or duping certain defensive molecules into aiding, rather than blocking, the virus’s siege. Researchers don’t think SARS-CoV-2 will do the same. But this pathogen is “much more formidable than even someone working on coronaviruses would have expected,
  • Seasonal encounters with pathogens other than SARS-CoV-2 don’t often worry us—but perhaps that’s because we’re still working to understand their toll. “Have we been underestimating long-term consequences from other repeat infections?” Thomas said. “The answer is probably, almost certainly, yes.”
  • the rhythm of reinfection isn’t just about the durability of immunity or the pace of viral evolution. It’s also about our actions and policies, and whether they allow the pathogen to transmit and evolve. Strategies to avoid infection—to make it as infrequent as possible, for as many people as possible—remain options, in the form of vaccination, masking, ventilation, paid sick leave, and more.
  • Gordon and Swartz are both hopeful that the slow accumulation of immunity will also slash people’s chances of developing long COVID.
  • The outlooks of the experts I spoke with spanned the range from optimism to pessimism, though all agreed that uncertainty loomed. Until we know more, none were keen to gamble with the virus—or with their own health. Any reinfection will likely still pose a threat, “even if it’s not the worst-case scenario,” Abdool Karim told me. “I wouldn’t want to put myself in that position.”
peterconnelly

African Union Head Will Urge Putin to Release Ukraine's Grain - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...grain-putin-african-union.html

ukraine new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • DAKAR, Senegal — With many of the world’s poorest countries facing alarming levels of hunger and starvation, the leader of the African Union is set to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin on Friday and urge him to lift Russia’s blockade on urgently needed cereals and fertilizer from Ukraine.
  • Warnings by the United Nations that Russia’s naval blockade in Ukraine could lead to famines around the world, and accusations by Ukrainian and Western leaders that Mr. Putin is weaponizing a major source of the world’s food supply, have so far produced limited results. Millions of to
  • ns of grain remain stuck in Ukraine; Mr. Putin has suggested that this would change if the West lifted sanctions imposed on Moscow after the invasion.
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  • “The entire world is suffering from this conflict, but we in Africa are already facing the collateral damages,” said Ousmane Sène
  • The Kremlin said in a statement that the two leaders would discuss “the expansion of political dialogue and economic and humanitarian cooperation with the countries of the continent.”
  • More than 14 million people are on the brink of starvation in the Horn of Africa, according to relief groups, and nearly 40 million people are at imminent risk of famine in West Africa this year, according to the World Food Program, a United Nations agency.
  • For months, African leaders also shunned President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who asked at least twice to address the African Union. Mr. Sall said Thursday that Mr. Zelensky could soon address the organization in a videoconference, although no date has been announced.
  • In West Africa, one of the most visible effects of the war so far has been on bread prices that were already on the rise. In Burkina Faso, bakers went on strike last month after the government shuttered bakeries that had raised the price of a baguette. In the Ivory Coast, bakers have decreased the size of the baguette in the face of soaring wheat costs.
peterconnelly

Trump's lawyer says they left voicemails for former executive assistants in attempt to ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Lawyers for former President Donald Trump said they made one phone call to most of his former executive assistants in their effort to try to contact them as part of the New York attorney general's investigation into the Trump Organization's finances.
  • In a new court filing Friday, Trump attorney Michael Madaio said they obtained contact information for 10 of Trump's 13 former assistants from the Trump Organization and left one voicemail message each for six of them on May 18. The calls were never returned. He said they also spoke with two former assistants who said they would call back, but never did.
  • The New York attorney general's office has one business day to respond to Trump's filing and make any objections as to whether Trump has met his obligations to satisfy the lifting of the civil contempt order.
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  • Attorneys for Trump and the attorney general have been engaged in a back and forth over whether Trump has scoured file cabinets, storage rooms and electronic filings to produce records called for by the subpoena.
peterconnelly

Hindus in Kashmir Desperate to Flee Amid Spike in Attacks - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mir-hindu-pandits-attacks.html

kashmir attacks new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • ANANTNAG, Kashmir — As hundreds of Hindu families fled the Kashmir region in recent weeks amid a spike in targeted militant attacks, Sandeep Raina, a 38-year-old engineer, resigned himself to his worst fear: that he would have to abandon his home once again.
  • The return of minority Hindus to Kashmir, two decades after a huge exodus in the face of militant attacks and threats, has been held up by successive Indian governments as an illustration of how they are bringing normalcy to the restive Himalayan region.
  • The administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Kashmiri Hindus say, has tried to prevent many Hindus from fleeing their residential colonies in recent weeks. The Hindu residents are demanding that the authorities lift the blockades and transfer their jobs and families to safer places outside the valley.
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  • Stripping the region of its special status had long been a goal of India’s Hindu nationalists.
  • Kashmir has been disputed between India and Pakistan since the end of British rule in 1947. In the late 1980s, a Kashmiri separatist movement, which received support and training in Pakistan, intensified the targeting of the region’s Hindus, known as Pandits. A mass migration of tens of thousands of Hindu families — perhaps 300,000 people in all — followed.
  • At the Vessu camp in the same district, where Mr. Raina and his family live, one-third of the 900 families have fled their modest two-bedroom houses.
  • The organization said that there had been more than a dozen targeted attacks, some fatal, recorded against Hindus since 2020. The Indian news media said a total of 18 Hindus had been killed since the 2019 change in the region’s status. Many Muslims seen as supporting the government have also been killed.
  • “Don’t force Kashmiri Pandits to pelt you with stone,” Mr. Jotshi is seen in a video telling the police, referring to an act that young local Kashmiri Muslim sometimes resort to against the region’s heavy security forces.
  • “We want to leave, at any cost,” Mr. Jotshi said. “We do not want to die here.”
peterconnelly

Canada Decriminalizes Opioids and Other Drugs in British Columbia - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mbia-decriminalizes-drugs.html

new york times canada drugs

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Facing soaring levels of opioid deaths since the pandemic began in 2020, the Canadian government announced Tuesday that it would temporarily decriminalize the possession of small amounts of illegal drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamines, in the western province of British Columbia that has been ground zero for the country’s overdoses.
  • The announcement was applauded by families of deceased opioid users and by peer support workers
  • British Columbia declared drug-related deaths a public health emergency in 2016.
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  • “For too many years, the ideological opposition to harm reduction has cost lives,” said Dr. Carolyn Bennett, the federal minister of mental health and addictions, at a news conference on Tuesday.
  • British Columbia has been a leader in Canada’s harm reduction movement.
  • Decriminalization will allow police to focus on organized crime and drug traffickers, instead of individual users, said Sheila Malcolmson, the provincial minister of mental health and addictions. “We will take this year ahead to ready our justice and health systems,” she added.
  • The exemption will go into effect on Jan. 31, 2023, and will expire after three years.
  • “I think making drug use easier for them is kind of like palliative care,” said Mr. Doucette, who spent 35 years working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police before retiring, most of which he spent in drug enforcement. “It’s just condemning them to a slow death because of drugs, whereas if you get them off drugs, get them a life back, they can enjoy life.”
  • British Columbia has one of the highest per capita rates of drug death across North America, at 42.8 deaths per 100,000 people in 2021, according to provincial data.
  • In the U.S., the 10 states with the highest level of drug overdose, have rates ranging between 39.1 deaths per 100,000 in Connecticut, to 81.4 deaths per 100,000 in West Virginia, according to the latest mortality data, for 2020, by the Centers for Disease Control.
Javier E

Opinion | From Voodoo to MAGA to Buffalo - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-taxes-great-replacement.html

conservatism movement gop opportunism

shared by Javier E on 17 May 22 - No Cached
  • What has changed, however, is the behavior of Republican elites, who used to push back against conspiracy theories but now cheerfully embrace them whenever it seems politically expedient.
  • Which, I’d argue, is where voodoo economics comes in — not as an idea but as a determinant of the kind of people who became Republican politicians.
  • The rise of supply-side economics coincided with the rise of movement conservatism — an interlocking network of elected officials, media organizations, think tanks and lobbying firms. Because the movement’s core ideology involved reducing taxes on the rich, it was lavishly supported by billionaires and corporate interests, and this in turn meant that it offered job security to anyone who remained sufficiently loyal.
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  • Who was attracted to this movement? Many were careerists: people happy to serve as apparatchiks, following whatever the party line happened to be at the moment.
  • when I say that I miss voodoo economics, what I really mean is that I miss the illusion — which I shared — that the impact of its rise would mainly be limited to the politics of taxes and spending. What we now know is that the embrace of crank economics presaged the general moral collapse of the Republican establishment.
  • This collapse opened the door for paranoia and conspiracy theorists of all kinds
  • There is, I would argue, a direct line from the Laffer curve, to Jan. 6, to Buffalo.
Javier E

The War in Ukraine Is the End of a World - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673197

turning point cold war world order epoch international relations

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • On this grim anniversary, I will leave the political and strategic retrospectives to others; instead, I want to share a more personal grief about the passing of the hopes so many of us had for a better world at the end of the 20th century.
  • I grieve for the young men who have been used as “cannon meat,” for children whose fathers have been dragooned into the service of a dictator, for the people who once again are afraid to speak and who once again are being incarcerated as political prisoners.
  • And then, within a few years, it was over. If you did not live through this time, it is difficult to explain the amazement and sense of optimism that came with the raspad, as Russians call the Soviet collapse,
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  • I have some fond memories of my trips to the pre-collapse Soviet Union (I made four from 1983 to 1991). It was a weird and fascinating place. But it was also every inch the “evil empire” that President Ronald Reagan described, a place of fear and daily low-grade paranoia where any form of social attachment, whether religion or simple hobbies, was discouraged if it fell outside the control of the party-state.
  • the idea that anyone in Moscow would be stupid or deranged enough to want to reassemble the Soviet Union seemed to me a laughable fantasy. Even Putin himself—at least in public—often dismissed the idea.
  • I was wrong. I underestimated the power of Soviet imperial nostalgia. And so today, I grieve.
  • It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state, and so today the front line of freedom is in Ukraine
  • I have lived through two eras, one an age of undeclared war between two ideological foes that threatened instant destruction, the next a time of increasing freedom and global integration. This second world was full of chaos, but it was also grounded in hope
  • I was convinced that everything I knew was more than likely destined to end in flames. Peace seemed impossible; war felt imminent.
  • Now I live in a new era, one in which the world order created in 1945 is collapsing.
  • The United Nations, as I once wrote, is a squalid and dysfunctional organization, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity.
  • The Soviet collapse did not mean the end of war or of dictatorships, but after 1991, time seemed to be on the side of peace and democracy, if only we could summon the will and find the leadership to build on our heroic triumphs over Nazism and Communism.
  • But democracy is under attack everywhere, including here in the United States
  • I will celebrate the courage of Ukraine, the wisdom of NATO, and the steadfastness of the world’s democracies
  • But I also hear the quiet rustling of a shroud that is settling over the dreams—and perhaps, illusions—of a better world that for a moment seemed only inches from our grasp.
  • I do not know how this third era of my life will end, or if I will be alive to see it end. All I know is that I feel now as I did that night in Red Square, when I knew that democracy was in the fight of its life, that we might be facing a catastrophe, and that we must never waver.
Javier E

Stanford Faculty Say Anonymous Student Bias Reports Threaten Free Speech - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ting-bias-anonymously-cbac78ed

stanford student bias free speech system reporting anonymity culture university

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • A group of Stanford University professors is pushing to end a system that allows students to anonymously report classmates for exhibiting discrimination or bias, saying it threatens free speech on campus.
  • The backlash began last month, when a student reading “Mein Kampf,” the autobiographical manifesto of Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, was reported through the school’s “Protected Identity Harm” system.
  • The reporting system has been in place since the summer of 2021, but faculty say they were unaware of it until the student newspaper wrote about the incident and the system, spurring a contentious campus debate.
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  • The system is designed to help students get along with one another, said Dee Mostofi, a Stanford spokeswoman. “The process aims to promote a climate of respect, helping build understanding that much speech is protected while also offering resources and support to students who believe they have experienced harm based on a protected identity,” she said.
  • The Stanford faculty’s effort is part of broader pushback against bias-reporting systems around the country. About half of college campuses have one—more than twice as many as five years ago—according to a 2022 survey by Speech First, a conservative nonprofit.
  • Prof. Santiago said he is wary that anonymous complaints could be exaggerated or used to attack someone. He helped collect 77 faculty signatures to petition the school to investigate free speech and academic freedom on campus, the first step to getting rid of the anonymous-reporting system. 
  • The system defaults to anonymous reporting and most students file that way. They use an online form to describe how the bias was demonstrated, which triggers an inquiry within 48 hours. Both parties are contacted.
  • Participation in the inquiry is voluntary. But it may not feel that way to accused students, said Juan Santiago, a professor of mechanical engineering who favors getting rid of the system.
  • “If you’re an 18-year-old freshman and you get contacted by an administrator and told you’ve been accused of some transgression, what are you going to do?” Prof. Santiago said. “They may not call that punitive but that can be very stressful.”
  • At Stanford, students can report a “Protected Identity Harm Incident,” which is defined as conduct targeting an individual or group on the basis of characteristics including race or sexual orientation. The system is meant to “build and maintain a better, safer, and more respectful campus community,” according to the school’s website.
  • Senior Christian Sanchez, executive vice president of the Associated Students of Stanford University, the student-government group, said the system is necessary and important. Mr. Sanchez, who describes himself as Chicano, said he has bristled in the past when another student has addressed him as “G,” short for gangster.
  • He has let it roll off his back, he said, but less thick-skinned students should have a path for redress.
  • he reports are stored in a platform operated by a third party called Maxient, a Charlottesville, Va.-based company that has contracts with 1,300 schools—mostly colleges and universities in the U.S
  • Only Maxient and a small number of people within the student affairs office have access to the records, said Ms. Mostofi. She declined to say how long they are stored.
  • A dashboard maintained by the school lists a few incidents students have reported using the anonymous system, including the removal of an Israeli flag and a racial slur written on a whiteboard hanging on a dorm-room door.
  • At the University of California, which includes 10 campuses, the reporting system collected 457 acts of “intolerance or hate” during the 2021-22 school year. Of those, 296 were defined as offensive speech. The UC said those incidents include “gestures, taunts, mockery, unwanted jokes or teasing, and derogatory or disparaging comments of a biased nature.”
  • Free-speech advocacy organizations including the Goldwater Institute, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Alumni Free Speech Alliance have advocated against bias-reporting mechanisms.
  • After Speech First challenged bias-response systems at the University of Texas, the University of Michigan and the University of Central Florida, all three schools changed or disbanded their systems.
  • Stanford Business School professor Ivan Marinovic said the bias-reporting system reminded him of the way citizens were encouraged to inform on one another by governments in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China. 
  • “It ignores the whole history,” he said. “You’re basically going to be reporting people who you find offensive, right? According to your own ideology.”
Javier E

Russians abandon wartime Russia in historic exodus - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...russia-diaspora-war-ukraine

russia exodus emigrants history

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Initial data shows that at least 500,000, and perhaps nearly 1 million, have left in the year since the invasion began — a tidal wave on scale with emigration following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
  • The huge outflow has swelled existing Russian expatriate communities across the world, and created new ones.
  • Some fled nearby to countries like Armenia and Kazakhstan, across borders open to Russians. Some with visas escaped to Finland, the Baltic states or elsewhere in Europe. Others ventured farther, to the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Thailand, Argentina. Two men from Russia’s Far East even sailed a small boat to Alaska.
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  • The financial cost, while vast, is impossible to calculate. In late December, Russia’s Communications Ministry reported that 10 percent of the country’s IT workers had left in 2022 and not returned.
  • those remaining in the depleted political opposition also faced a choice this year: prison or exile. Most chose exile. Activists and journalists are now clustered in cities such as Berlin and the capitals of Lithuania, Latvia and Georgia.
  • “This exodus is a terrible blow for Russia,” said Tamara Eidelman, a Russian historian who moved to Portugal after the invasion. “The layer that could have changed something in the country has now been washed away.”
  • the influx of Russians into countries such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which have long sent immigrants to Russia, set off political tremors, straining ties between Moscow and the other former Soviet states. Real estate prices in those countries have shot up, causing tensions with local populations.
  • For many Russians choosing to flee, Armenia was a rare easy option. It is one of five ex-Soviet countries that allow Russians to enter with just a national ID — making it a popular destination for former soldiers, political activists and others needing a quick escape.
  • Given the shared religion and use of language, Russians typically do not face animosity or social stigma in Armenia. Obtaining residency permits is also straightforward, and living costs are lower than in the European Union.
  • Yerevan has attracted thousands of IT workers, young creatives and working-class people, including families with children, from across Russia. They have established new schools, bars, cafes and robust support networks.
  • n the courtyard of the “Free School” for Russian children, established in April, Maxim, a construction company manager, was waiting for his 8-year-old son, Timofey. The school started with 40 students in an apartment. Now, there are nearly 200 in a multistory building in the city center.
  • “I did not want to be a murderer in this criminal war,” said Andrei, who is being identified by his first name for safety reasons
  • Like the White Russian emigres of the Bolshevik era and the post-Soviet immigrants of the 1990s, many of those leaving Russia because of the war in Ukraine are probably gone for good.
  • The family has adapted seamlessly to Yerevan. Everyone around them speaks Russian. Maxim works remotely on projects in Russia. Timofey likes his school and is learning Armenian. Maxim said he is sure the family will not return to Russia.
  • Tanya Raspopova, 26, arrived in Yerevan last March, with her husband but without a plan, overwhelmed and frightened.Then she heard that another emigre was seeking partners to set up a bar, a space where Russian expats could come together, and she wanted to help. Tuf, named after the pink volcanic rock common throughout Yerevan, opened its doors within a month.
  • They started with a neon-lit bar and kitchen on the ground floor, which soon expanded into a small courtyard. Then they opened up a second floor, then a third. Upstairs there is now a recording studio, a clothing boutique and a tattoo parlor. On a Wednesday night in January, the place was packed with young Russians and Armenians singing karaoke, drinking cocktails and playing ping-pong. “We have since created such a big community, a big family,” Raspopova said. “Tuf is our new home.”
  • Thousands have chosen the UAE, which did not join Western sanctions and still has direct flights to Moscow, as their new home. Russians enjoy visa-free travel for 90 days, and it is relatively easy to get a national ID, through business or investment, for a longer stay.
  • The high cost of living means there are no activists or journalists. Dubai is a haven, and the go-to playground, for Russian tech founders, billionaires under sanctions, unpenalized millionaires, celebrities, and influencers.
  • Shortly after the invasion, conversations in Moscow’s affluent Patriarch Ponds neighborhood turned to the best Dubai real estate deals, said Natalia Arkhangelskaya, who writes for Antiglyanets, a snarky and influential Telegram blog focused on Russia’s elite. A year later, Russians have ousted Brits and Indians as Dubai’s top real estate buyers, Russian-owned yachts dock at the marina, and private jets zigzag between Dubai and Moscow.
  • Russians can still buy apartments, open bank accounts and snag designer leather goods they previously shopped for in France.
  • The UAE’s embrace of foreign business has lured a stream of Russian IT workers seeking to cut ties with Russia and stay linked to global markets. Start-ups seek financing from state-supported accelerators. Larger firms pursue clients to replace those lost to sanctions.
  • About a dozen people arrived to discuss opportunities in India, which has maintained ties with Russia despite the war. Most expressed bitterness about the Kremlin’s politics and a longing for Moscow when it was an aspiring global hub.
  • “The most important thing for me is to be able to develop international projects and to integrate my kids into a global community, so they grow up in a free environment,”
  • Andrei works as a delivery driver and shares a modest room with two other men in a shelter set up by Kovcheg, a support organization for Russian emigrants. “Before the war, I never followed politics, but after the invasion, I started reading about everything,” Andrei said. “I feel so ashamed about what Russia has done.”
  • “Every extra month leads people to get used to a different country,” she said. “They get a job there, their children go to school, they begin to speak a different language. The longer the war lasts — the longer the dictatorship in the country continues — the fewer people will return.”
  • the expats could become “a repository of relevant skills for a better, freer, modern Russia.” For now, though, Rojansky said, the outflow sends a clear message.
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