WingmanOnSix 🇪🇺🌐

Recovering #intldev #mediadev professional, lapsed diplomat, latchkey kid, Münchner

[WingmanOnSix 🇪🇺🌐 @RogueAttache]

“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.” – Henry Ford

#ThursdayThought

[WingmanOnSix 🇪🇺🌐 @RogueAttache]

@MsMelChen The obsession is wild: if Europe is such a failed continent, why is it living rent-free in your head 24/7?

And pls, anyone who’s dealt with US federal, state & local bureaucracy knows it’s not a libertarian paradise either. It’s just the same paperwork with worse healthcare. 🇪🇺

[WingmanOnSix 🇪🇺🌐 @RogueAttache]

D: Definitely not Twat-in-Chief Elon Musk

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

@DavidMKeyes Tell the Ukrainians about that cunt 🤷🏻‍♂️

[WingmanOnSix 🇪🇺🌐 @RogueAttache]

This!!! 👇🏻 #realstrategicforesight

[Dr. Sari Arho Havrén @SariArhoHavren]

Much of what's called "strategic foresight" on my feed is either prediction or a single set-in-stone thesis dressed up as #foresight.

The second is the dangerous one.
When the conclusion is fixed, foresight signals are forced to serve it. Every event becomes "proof," and anything inconvenient disappears. That's confirmation bias, not foresight.

Real foresight keeps several futures open and tests assumptions against each. You can map one development path, but only alongside alternatives, with explicit assumptions and signposts that would prove you wrong. The aim isn't being right. The aim is to help your clients, stakeholders, or audience prepare, and that's your real deliverable.

[Chris @citehchris]

replying to my boss “typical liberal question” when he asks me how many drinks I had on my lunch break

[WingmanOnSix 🇪🇺🌐 @RogueAttache]

As a general rule, Russia cannot be trusted about anything. Period! They outright lie, deflect, misdirect, gaslight and obfuscate. It's their SOP.

[John Bolton @AmbJohnBolton]

After Russia’s recent plague incident, U.S. readiness needs urgent review. Even if initial worries prove unfounded, history shows Moscow cannot be trusted regarding biowarfare.

https://t.co/hbnYM8hkSc

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Meloni: I do not miss the Russian tanks in Prague and Budapest. I do not miss the Berlin Wall.

If Ukraine stopped defending itself tomorrow, Russia would occupy a European nation and Soviet-style imperialism would return.

Surrender is not peace. It is conquest. 1/

[WingmanOnSix 🇪🇺🌐 @RogueAttache]

🤣🤣 Finance bros now also pontificate on weapon systems and military tactics. Is there anything they can't do?

[Philip Pilkington @philippilk]

S-400 is an air defence system, not an offensive missile system.

Bremmer recently fell for the Russian bot slop op. If you are following this boomer you are 100% ngmi.

[Radosław Sikorski 🇵🇱🇪🇺 @sikorskiradek]

@RepLuna @POTUS @SecRubio Madam, as a neighbour of both Ukraine and Russia, we would be delighted to support @POTUS in peace negotiations. Please note, however, that to get to a deal pressure should be put on the aggressor and not on the victim of aggression.

[AnthroVet50 @spooked75]

Whoever created this is a genius. Putin's Little Bitch

[Dr. Sari Arho Havrén @SariArhoHavren]

Didn't believe we'd see a day when the American president aids Russia in killing Europeans.

[Dr. Sari Arho Havrén @SariArhoHavren]

Many policymakers and analysts in Europe, myself included, have advocated closer ties with the US. Trump’s open hostility towards Ukraine and his administration’s (family’s) increasing dealings with Putin indeed tell us that such a position is becoming dangerous for Europe. Europe needs domestically produced weapons across all categories. If Ukraine can produce ballistic missiles from scratch in wartime, Europe can design and produce weapons that we don't have in the (grey-zone) peacetime.

[Rory Cellan-Jones @ruskin147]

Extraordinary letter in @ft from former UK defence attaché at Moscow embassy - we warned you about Putin but you listened to the City instead

[Timothy Snyder @TimothyDSnyder]

When Ukraine destroys Russian data centers, hoards of aggressive right-wing bots disappear, and Twitter becomes much friendlier. Isn’t that interesting? So much of our politics is driven by the internet, and so much of the internet is driven by Russians who want to hurt us. Shouldn’t we do something about that, given that we know it?

[Roman Anin @RomanAnin]

I spent 15+ years investigating Russian secret services and organized crime. I know people who served with Putin in the KGB and sat in on his deals with St. Petersburg crime bosses. So let me explain the "diesel deal" the way they would — in gangster slang. Because that's the language Putin actually thinks in.

First, the facts.

Putin just raised Russia's 2027 military budget by 27% to a record 17.1 trillion rubles — about $203 billion. Who budgets that kind of money for a war they're about to end?

The FT reported yesterday that Western intelligence has warned the heads of European defense companies that Russia is plotting to assassinate them.

Since September, Tusk, Macron and the intelligence services of Poland, Czechia, Latvia, Belgium, France and Denmark have all warned that Russian hybrid attacks — including drone and missile strikes — will intensify in the coming months.

None of this looks like a country preparing for peace.

Who actually benefits?

🇺🇸 What the US gets: Every serious analysis I've read says the announced volumes won't move American diesel prices. This is a PR move for Trump before the midterms — a story about prices that will "very, very soon" come down once his friend Vladimir's tankers reach US shores, plus the chance to claim he ended another war (I've lost count). The only US "benefit" is Trump's rating.

🇷🇺 What Russia gets: billions of dollars to keep funding its genocidal war against Ukrainians. Sanctions relief. A demonstration of power to the rest of the world. A deeper rift between the US and its European allies. And a real chance to disrupt US weapons and intelligence flowing to Ukraine.

So what is Putin's actual goal?

Trump's disapproval is at record highs and polls show his party will most likely loose midterm elections. In less than a month his power will be badly weakened. Why would Putin sign a long-term peace deal with a lame duck whose signature will soon be scrutinized at best and annulled at worst?

He wouldn't. And here's where the slang comes in.

In the eyes of Putin and his siloviki, Trump is a baryga — a greedy, unscrupulous businessman who puts profit above law and principle. Gangsters despise barygas, but they love using them. The goal is always to turn a baryga into a lokh — a mark, an outsider who doesn't understand the rules of the underworld and gets played to serve the gang's interests.

By signing the diesel deal, Putin plays two scenarios at once:

A) The deal miraculously helps his lokh keep power — great.

B) The deal changes nothing, the baryga loses the midterms — but by then it has already done its job: inflamed US political tensions and acted as arson inside the American system.

Putin knows that the majority of Americans support Ukraine. He knows that by signing, Trump draws unprecedented criticism, including from his own party. And he knows a baryga won't give up power easily, because he will have to answer for everything he did in office — this deal included. That's classic gangster/secret-service method: tie a man to your organization, make him a partner in your crimes, so he can't walk away.

Pouring more oil — diesel, in this case — onto the most explosive fault lines of American politics, raising the stakes for Trump and pushing him past the point of no return serves Putin far better than a peace deal that could be voided within months.

Remember: Putin's goal in the West is chaos, not peace.

[Dan Crenshaw @DanCrenshawTX]

Here’s the real question: Why don’t you turn on Starlink over Russia so the Ukrainians can take out Russian ballistic missile launchers? One small action and you immediately save children from dying every day. Refusing to do so is like watching your friend die while you hold his EpiPen over him. It’s that simple.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[gianmarco @GianmarcoSoresi]

Man who won’t give his employees piss breaks claims many piss breaks on the horizon

[WingmanOnSix 🇪🇺🌐 @RogueAttache]

@gideonrachman Don't mistake being unassuming/unworldly for humbleness.