Dave 🇺🇦

why you asking?

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

It’s surprisingly difficult to get people to engage in a conversation about what the US policy options are vis-a-vis Israel and Palestine and how those options relate to the desired end goals.

[Dave 🇺🇦 @darkwing003]

Good for him.

[Mark Z. Barabak @markzbarabak]

NEW: What’s in a name? A confounding U.S. Senate race.

In Alaska, Dan Sullivan is facing Dan Sullivan in one of the country's most competitive contests. Is it a plot to boost the Democratic challenger, Mary Peltola, or mere coincidence?

It sure smells fishy.

[Shannon Watts @shannonrwatts]

DONATE TO ANNIE ANDREWS!!! If we want to win the Senate, we need to win everywhere: https://t.co/QPFiPIs7ic

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

The working class used to vote Democratic. They're steadily abandoning the party.

Nominating rough, tough dudes who remind leftist consultants of the kids who picked on them in junior high will not win the working class back.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Sheriff's deputies in Adams County, Ohio kicked down Afroman's front door on a tip about a basement dungeon. The house does not have a basement. They found nothing, seized cash anyway, and left. Afroman's response was to turn the raid footage into music videos and merchandise. The deputies' response to that was to sue him for using their likenesses without permission. A jury sided with Afroman in March. He showed up to trial in an American flag suit, which is either the most on brand outfit in the history of American jurisprudence or exactly the right one.

His actual argument holds up better than the outfit suggests. I am the government supervisor, he told Reason. I have the right to criticize and critique my government, my employees. That is not a joke dressed up as a legal theory. That is the First Amendment, stated in language a Supreme Court justice would take four paragraphs to say worse.

The deputies figured they could violate his rights, then sue him for objecting to it, and win, because that is apparently how things work in a county small enough that the police department and the courthouse share a snack machine. A jury of ordinary people looked at that arrangement and said no.

[Oxana Shevel 🇺🇦 @OxanaShevel]

Electric current, nails in the knees. Including 🇷🇺 “in European security architecture” while leaving unpunished state-sanctioned mass torture of civilians & pow would not increase European security. Impunity will breed more aggression& close possibility of meaningful change in 🇷🇺

[Olga Patlyuk 🇺🇦 @OlgaPatl]

This photo must be seen by the entire world so people understand what Russia truly is.

A mother is holding her child as tightly as she can, trying to shield them with her own body while Russia drops guided аerial bоmbs on Sumy.

No child should grow up in a reality like this. No mother should have to become a human shield to protect her child.

[(((DeanObeidallah))) @DeanObeidallah]

Michael Fanone's take on Lindsey Graham is one of the most powerful I've read:

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

By the way, for what it’s worth, no one anywhere in Ukraine among Russian speakers, including where I grew up in Donbas, not even the most diehard consumers of Kremlin TV propaganda, ever considered themselves “ethnic Russians” in the same sense as people in Moscow, Siberia, or Vladivostok.

They always saw themselves as ethnic Ukrainians, with Ukrainian surnames, living in Ukraine, but speaking mostly or exclusively Russian, while still knowing Ukrainian and practicing distinctly Ukrainian traditions.

Even for the most hardline supporters of closer ties with Moscow (who, in reality, naively believed Putin would come and shower them with oil money), the difference between Ukrainians and Russians was always obvious. On Donbas, ethnicity simply was never the issue.

It was only after the war began in 2014 that Russia’s Ministry of Truth suddenly declared that we had “always been Russians,” and its paid useful morons are still, with a straight face, trying to pretend that night is day.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

"Noah you should go to China"

No I should not

[Andy Olivera @soyandyolivera]

Graves disturbios en Suiza tras quedar eliminados

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

She has a future because she’s got more nous than her cohort and far better instincts. She didn’t endorse Platner because she knew a rotten apple when she saw one; perhaps the yield of having served drinks to creeps like him. She’s also being assailed by fanatics in her own movement (almost always an accelerant of political maturity). At minimum, I see an Abzug-to-Pelosi trajectory.

[Kadi🇪🇪🌻 @TheFl0orIsLaVa]

I'm sorry you're unhappy with the war you started. Have you tried fcking off?

[Jamesetta Williams 💕 @jamesetta_w]

Biden had a whole host of consumer protection and junk fees initiatives that included banking, airlines, hotels and utilities, entertainment tickets and more. At the time the media and the left basically ignored these initiatives or called them insufficient. Trump either rescinded or prevented most of them from going into place.

@linamkhan (literally the same person who worked for Biden) is implementing a similar playbook with Mamdani at the local level and the left is crazy about it!

It’s the vibes theory of politics, time and time again.

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

Sorry, but anyone who seriously believes that a sanctioned Russian oligarch from the Kremlin’s inner circle, and one of the biggest beneficiaries of Russia’s war against Ukraine, decided on his own, without the Kremlin’s approval, to publish an article in a Western outlet because he’s some courageous free thinker who genuinely just wants “change” and “respect” for Russia simply does not understand Russia.

The desire to find a hero who will “come and fix everything” is extraordinarily naïve.

[Josh Moser @TheMozKnowz]

Erling Haaland the last Norwegian player to leave the stadium. Stayed behind until 9:30 PM local time to take photos with family and other fans. He became one of the most beloved players in the sport by Americans during this tournament. #worldcup2026

[Shannon Watts @shannonrwatts]

“Patriarchy gives us different expectations and standards for men and women. I mean, does anyone think a woman with no political experience, tattoos and a history of alcohol abuse who said dumb things on the internet would be able to raise tens of millions of dollars and become a major party Senate candidate?" https://t.co/AS1WAOlYrq

[Kareem Rifai 🌐 @KareemRifai]

Lindsey Graham's bipartisan Russia sanctions bill has been stalled for over a year — now is the time to finally pass it and impose real, crushing consequences on Russia and its sponsors.

[Volodymyr Yermolenko @yermolenko_v]

The West will continue searching for the “other Russia,” the “alternative Russia,” another pole within Russia. It does so because the West itself has been shaped for centuries by pluralism—by contestation, by competing centers of power. It was formed as an arena of struggle, as both agora and agon, as a Nietzschean clash of wills.

It was through the rivalry between pope and emperor, religion and state, kings and barons, Catholicism and Protestantism, capitalism and socialism, imperialism and anti-imperialism, empire and republic that the West gradually crystallized. And so it instinctively imagines the rest of the world in the same way.

But Russia is different.

Russia has no genuine otherness. Its “otherness” is merely another expression of its sameness. “Democracy” becomes a component of imperial rule. Religion becomes an arm of the state. “Anti-imperialism” becomes a vehicle for imperialism. The “proletariat” becomes an instrument for exploiting the proletariat. “Enlightenment” becomes another form of obscurantism.

In Russia, “otherness” is the tyrant’s trick. “Opposition” is an imperial project. There is no second pole in Russia. There is only one. The North Pole

Russia has never been structured by pluralism. It has aspired to monism: to the total hegemony of imperial “unity.” That is where its assimilative energy comes from. Any genuine otherness must be persecuted. In its place, the regime manufactures a counterfeit otherness—an imitation designed to reinforce sameness.

Because the West is always searching for an alternative, for another pole, it has long invested hope in Russian culture and Russian “spirituality.” Not just today—it has done so for centuries. “Yes, but there is Russian culture,” people say, hoping that from its depths, an alternative will emerge.

Then come the Ukrainians, who see in Russian culture not the cure for the disease but its symptoms. Its diagnosis. Its case history. Its self-description. Its archive of evidence. And the West does not understand this.

“You Ukrainians are so harsh.”

But Ukrainians simply have a long memory.

“We’ve seen this before.”

The short history of Russia is the story of an “alternative” appearing on the stage of history only to reaffirm, once again, that tyranny has no alternative. It is the story of everything changing so that nothing changes.

Peter I rejected the old Muscovite Tsardom only to build an even more tyrannical Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks rejected the Russian Empire only to build an even more tyrannical Soviet Empire. Putin rejected the Soviet Empire only to build an even more tyrannical Rashist empire.

We’ve seen this before.

The “other Russia” is possible only as something other than Russia. Only as the end of the Russian Empire.

The countries that broke away from the Russian empires of the nineteenth and then the twentieth centuries ultimately became European: Finland, Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, the countries of the Caucasus—each with its own complexities, but all moving in that direction. That is the model we should continue to advance. That is where our hope lies.

The other Russia can emerge only if we get something other than Russia. At least, other than the Russian empire

European empires collapsed. They turned into nation states, ready to cooperate with others. Time for the Russian empire to collapse too