Sullivan is pathetic; the US is "prepared for dialog with Russia" while Putin is prepared to expand his war. What dialog? About Ukraine? About Russia's laughable "security concerns"?
Putin says he will only talk to America, excluding not only Ukraine but NATO. The Western appeasers only talk about "avoiding war". Uh, guys, the war started in 2014 when Putin invaded. Further appeasement means further aggression.
Putin's regime is issuing security statements referring to "former Soviet republics" as if they are his special property and not independent nations fully capable of telling Russia and Putin's mafia to fuck off.
If you believe in symbols as much as dictatorships do, the Russian hockey team playing in "USSR" uniforms this week was not just trolling. The USSR was a brutal totalitarian state, reviving it even for nostalgia is disgusting.
I am thrilled that as of this moment, my personal archive is available as NFTs on 1Kind.com. You can be part of my legacy by purchasing one of these exclusive digital collectibles. Browse the collection at 1kind.com.
I wanted to share dozens of personal items from my life and career, to open my archives. We have worked together from the start to create a new way of using NFTs to tell a story, one with real history behind it.
Items never before seen by the public include my personal notebooks and family photos. The cast includes the coaches that shaped my chess, my fresh start with a new career and family after chess, and, through it all, my greatest champion from the very beginning, my mother.
Language has power, and phrases like "cancel culture" and "woke" are used and abused as weapons. We must call things what they are if democracy and its values are to be preserved. My latest in @WSJopinion: wsj.com/articles/woke-…
Everything is hyper-politicized, turning shared interest and essential institutions into props for anti-democratic posturing, calls to violence, and the chilling of free speech.
Every destructive means is justified by the idea that fire must be met with fire, of "they started it," of victimhood. It's a doomed race to the bottom.
Two comments. 1) Not everyone can or should fight every fight all the time. And telling people to care about what you care about, not what they care most about, is harmful to activism.
2) My main concern about climate activism has long been how it increasingly resembles an ideological (or religious) belief that justifies every sacrifice in the present for a bright and glorious future. It's familiar.
I'm not a climate change skeptic. It's a huge issue requiring focus & resources. I'm a skeptic of those who would, for example, make worthless green deals with totalitarian regimes to distort the past and ruin the present in order to save the future.
A conceptual problem with the West's dealings with Putin for 20 years now is they assume there's ideology and strategy, when it's boring-but-effective money and chaos and corruption.
US media and pundits had a similar problem with Trump. Demagoguery doesn't have to be sophisticated or novel to work. If you control enough of the environment, you can win, or at least inflict huge damage.
Control can come from a populist's appeal on mass and social media or from a dictator's riot police. It can be billions flowing into Western institutions to weaken and corrupt them. It's not complicated. It's propaganda. It's mafia.
Honoring great deeds and risk-takers who defy conventional wisdom can inspire others to follow in their footsteps, be it into uncharted waters or outer space, and we sorely need such daring today. My op-ed on why I celebrate Columbus Day: wsj.com/articles/colum…
"This caricature of Columbus as little more than a rapacious villain is as simplistic and wrongheaded as the version of him as a savior-hero who proved the world was round." History is not a zero-sum game.
"We must teach the good and the bad of our leaders, our founders, our heroes and saints. Otherwise, myths take hold too easily, such as the Confederate “Lost Cause,” left to fester like an open wound."
"Lacking any legitimacy from fair elections at home, dictators are always eager to appear on international stages and summits, especially in the U.S."
Authoritarian regimes are aggressively infiltrating international institutions, from Russia's abuse of Interpol–whose Congress is being hosted by Erdogan's Turkey this year–to China's deadly manipulation of the World Health Organization.