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No One in Kyiv Knows Whether Russia Is Bluffing

From No One in Kyiv Knows Whether Russia Is Bluffing :

This moment is “strange—very, very strange,” Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister, told me. For people in his country, the Russian threat is both dire and entirely unsurprising. Zagorodnyuk noted, as everybody in Kyiv does, that Russia already invaded Ukraine in early 2014. The Russians already occupy Crimea, which is Ukrainian territory. Fake “separatists,” supplied with Russian weapons, already control a small piece of eastern Ukraine, where they continue to fight the Ukrainian army, every day of every week. Some 14,000 people, including both soldiers and civilians, have already died in a conflict that continues only because the Russian government wants it to continue. Before I even broached the subject of whether Ukraine’s armed forces were ready for a new offensive, Andriy Yermak, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, reminded me: “We are in a state of constant military preparedness now for eight years.”

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The C.D.C. Is Hoping You’ll Figure Covid Out on Your Own

From The C.D.C. Is Hoping You’ll Figure Covid Out on Your Own:

The job these officials have is tough, given both the reckless political opposition even to vaccines and the inevitable criticism even from people who support public health measures. Still, it’s so disappointing to enter 2022 with 2020 vibes, scouring for supplies, trying to make sense of official declarations that don’t cohere and doubting, and wondering what to do.

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How Donald Trump Could Subvert the 2024 Election

From How Donald Trump Could Subvert the 2024 Election:

Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.

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We suffer from Republican radicalization

From It’s not ‘polarization.’ We suffer from Republican radicalization:

While it’s true that the country is more deeply divided along partisan lines than it has been in the past, it is wrong to suggest a symmetrical devolution into irrational hatred. The polarization argument too often treats both sides as equally worthy of blame, characterizing the problem as a sort of free-floating affliction (e.g., “lack of trust”). This blurs the distinction between a Democratic Party that is marginally more progressive in policy positions than it was a decade ago, and a Republican Party that routinely lies, courts violence, and seeks to define America as a White Christian nation.

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Fix Facebook by Making It More Like Google+

From Fix Facebook by Making It More Like Google+:

A lot is wrong with the internet, but much of it boils down to this one problem: We are all constantly talking to one another. Take that in every sense. Before online tools, we talked less frequently, and with fewer people. The average person had a handful of conversations a day, and the biggest group she spoke in front of was maybe a wedding reception or a company meeting, a few hundred people at most.

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One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia

From One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia:

[H]istory is an edit war. Truth, factual and moral, hangs in the balance.

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The Death of White America Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

From The Death of White America Has Been Greatly Exaggerated:

During a rant about what he perceived as left-wing giddiness over the “extinction of white people,” [FOX News commentator, Tucker Carlson] asked, “Where did all these people go?” The millions of missing white Americans did not, in fact, go anywhere. And they are not being replaced by minorities. Growing numbers of white Americans have multiracial children and grandchildren. Others were recategorized in 2020 as multiracial themselves, instead of single-race white.

In other words, White America is only going extinct if you maintain the illusory violence of the “one drop rule.