Koen, että joulun alla valo on jotenkin pehmeämpää ja hiljaisuus tuntuu ehkäpä vielä tärkeämmältä kuin tavallisesti.
Jos etsit jouluksi luettavaa, joka ei huuda huomiota, vaan kutsuu sinua pysähtymään, "On – Olemisen kirja" saattaa sopia sinulle.
Open Letter
To the President of the Russian Federation
From the President of Ukraine
When you came to power in Russia more than 26 years ago, many people in Ukraine viewed you positively. That is how it was. But that is now in the past.
Now, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians view it positively that our long-range drones paid a visit to the opening of your forum in St. Petersburg, covering a distance of more than 1,000 kilometers. As you know very well, that distance is not the limit of our capabilities.
Let’s be honest about what we’re watching here.
🇺🇸 330 million people, the country that put men on the moon, defeated the Nazis is now sitting on its sofa watching its president post crayon drawings of Venezuela with an American flag on it.
At least the Russians who oppose Putin have a reasonable excuse not to speak up. Siberia is cold and windows are tall. At least North Koreans can point to the very real possibility of their entire extended family being relocated to a concrete box with no heating. These are legitimate barriers to civic engagement.
What’s America’s excuse?
You can vote. You can protest. You can run for office. Nobody is sending you to a gulag. The worst thing that happens is someone calls you a name on Truth Social. And yet, there you all sit, 330 million of you, watching a man who cannot spell “Venezuela” claim it as American territory, while nodding along like this is a completely normal thing for a head of state to do.
No dictator in modern history has done more damage to the prestige of a country’s highest office than this man, and he’s done it entirely voluntarily, with access to the full resources of the American government, and a communications team that apparently just lets him post whatever falls out of his head before breakfast.
Kim Jong-un, for all his considerable faults, has never once posted a map with a flag on it and called it foreign policy.
Think about that.
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth. #ApostolicJourney#Cameroon https://t.co/bKteFZ3iWE
I hope this statement is the end of Rubio in Europe:
1. Trump has insisted on annexing Canada & Greenland, which are part of NATO. That aggression is impermissible.
2. The main threat to European security is Russia's aggression against Ukraine & Europe. Your National Security Strategy ignores that and claims that Europe is the main threat.
3. The US has cut off all assistance to Ukraine.
4. The US has voted with Russia & a dozen of its rouge states in the UN claiming that Russia did not pursue a war of aggression against Ukraine.
5. NATO Article 5 has only been invoked once, but the US in 2001 after 9/11 & the whole of NATO stood up for the US.
6. Trump has repeatedly insulted the allies that lost about 1,000 soldiers for the US in Afghanistan.
7. Trump has all along claimed that NATO allies do not pay their share of NATO costs, which is untrue. They are now spending more on their own defense because nobody trusts the US under Trump.
8. Trump incessantly insults NATO allies for no reason. If you don't know how to behave, you deserve no sympathy or support.
9. The US started a mad war of aggression on Iran without consulting any allies but Israel. Immediately afterwards Trump started insulting allies as usual.
10. Trump's war on Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz & is causing a global economic crisis, which is entirely due to the stupidity and power of Trump, but you are defending this atrocity.
If you don't know how to think or behave, shut up!
"We forced Ukraine to give up nuclear weapons, cruise missiles, and strategic bombers..
We promised to protect Ukraine from Russia.
We made Ukraine vulnerable.
So yes,this is our war."
- Bill Clinton
🫡
STUBB: For 1% of Ukrainian land, Russia lost 500,000 soldiers. Ukrainians are killing over 30,000 Russians per month, and Russia can't recruit enough replacements. This may force a problematic general mobilization on Russian side. Plus, the Russian economy continues to suffer.
Incredible how Trump has lost all international authority.
Nobody abroad takes any of his statements seriously, because he lies all the time, knows no facts & changes his views ever so often.
What a tragedy for the US to have such a defect president.
1/5 Trump desperately needs to learn the concept of reciprocity.
He constantly abandons, threatens, and insults Europe, only to turn around and demand our naval support.
He launched a massive war without warning us, and now expects us to clean up the mess
”Yhdysvaltain nykyhallinnon ulkopolitiikan taustalla on ideologia, joka on ristiriidassa omien arvojemme kanssa esimerkiksi siinä, että se murentaa nykyistä kansainvälistä järjestelmää. Se toimii enemmän kansainvälisten instituutioiden ulkopuolella.”
Voin kuulostaa vainoharhaiselta, mutta minusta on alkanut tuntua siltä, että Trumpin hallinto pyrkii ajamaan maan kaaokseen, vetääkseen esille jonkin 1700-luvulta peräisin olevan sekasortolain tarkoituksena skipata edessä olevat vaalit.
PM Mark Carney:
It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can and the weak must suffer what they must. And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic
of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that
compliance will buy safety.
Well, it won't. So what are our options? In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. And in it, he asked a simple question, how did the communist system sustain itself? And his answer began with a green grocer.
Every morning, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window, workers of the world unite. He doesn't believe it. No one does.
But he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists. Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.
Havel called this living within a lie. The system's power comes not from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source.
When even one person stops performing, when the green grocer removes his sign, the illusion
begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down. For decades, for decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order.
We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection. We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods,
open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for
resolving disputes. So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons.
While Trump continues to rant about his need to own #Greenland, #NATO members send troops there to defend it ... against US.
Meanwhile in #Russia, they are chortling. Who in Kremlin imagined that Russian efforts to put Trump in White House would pay off so handsomely?
Five years ago today, Donald Trump urged his supporters to attack Congress and the Capitol over a proven lie. More than 140 police officers were injured.
Trump then pardoned the attackers.
He betrayed his oath and his country, and we won't ever forget it.
Good morning and Happy Tuesday to everyone who laughed when Hillary Clinton told trump to his face that Putin wanted a puppet, and now watches his punk ass nod along to Moscow like she predicted.
She didn’t miss. Not even a little.