For most of my adult life, I’ve learned history almost exclusively by reading books. I took American and World history in high school and two quarters of American history in college, but after that, I became a history autodidact. I’ve written several book reviews (and published three of them), but this is the first course […]
One reason politics is so hard is that our words are often heard by different audiences, and a message that is well-calibrated for one type of listener may work poorly for listeners with different roles, values, or interests. To illustrate: Phillips O’Brien has a piece in the Atlantic with the headline “Time is on Ukraine’s […]
Are North Korean Workers Going To Annexed Portions Of Ukraine? Maybe. An October 21 report in NK Daily says so, with further speculation on this matter on blogs that cover North Korea. Supposedly Kim Jong Un agreed to this with V.V. Putin in their most recent meeting. The number supposedly to be around 800-1,000, with […]
Thinking about the election is depressing and anxiety provoking, so let’s focus on situation in Ukraine. Progressive Democrats ask Biden to negotiate with Putin This letter to Biden from some members of the progressive caucus is a big mistake, assuming the progressives want to save lives and prevent a genocidal Russian takeover of Ukraine. Putin […]
The desire to manage escalation risk – especially the risk of a nuclear attack – has clearly led the United States to withhold weapons from Ukraine. We may also be slow-walking delivery of weapons or limiting quantities to reduce escalation risk, although perceived delays could be due to training and logistics issues or our own […]
Mark Hertling is one of the people I follow on Ukraine. He is a staunch advocate for arming Ukraine, but he recently had a tweet thread defending what some see as the overly cautious and slow approach taken by the United States. Here are some tweets from his thread: Now, maybe we should be sending […]
A Deadline Passes And Stalin Is Exchanged For Peter The Great, Barkley Rosser, Econospeak I am not all that much into posting about the ups and downs of the Special Operation in Ukraine, but it seems that there has been one of those lines crossed. While it was not widely publicized, June 10 was apparently […]
Commenter and Blogger Dale Coberly I have been reading William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill. I do not know how reliable Manchester is, but I think I have learned more about a couple of things I thought I knew about, which might be worth thinking about with regard to events in Ukraine. Churchill was a […]
Recently, we have learned that the Russian military is vastly less capable than anyone imagined. Also, in three whole weeks, Ukrainians have markedly reduced the capabilities of the Russian military. Therefore, naturally many governments (including the German government) have decided they must spend more on their militaries to face the Russian threat. This makes no […]
I should stop posting about Ukraine, since I have no expertise and not much ability to judge the credibility of things I read. But I keep reading and want to share some twitter threads about Russian logistics that I found interesting. I had assumed that the Russians would eventually get their logistics problems more or […]