Austerity, military spending and Trump’s temper: the war in Ukraine continues

After months of the West distracting itself with elections, Ukraine is back in the headlines. Three years of fighting, tens of thousands dead, and Donald Trump insists he can end it all. So long as he doesn’t completely fall out with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, storm off in a huff and leave all of Europe to Russia. 

The great dealmaker will strike again, he says, if only the world will listen and give America access to Ukraine’s mineral resources, and show appropriate gratitude for being treated like a piece in Trump’s Make America Great Again game.

We’re on our own

Ukraine’s independence or territorial integrity doesn’t matter to Trump. Already, he has begun laying the groundwork for a potential sellout. He accused Zelenskyy of being a dictator, echoing the talking points of those who see Ukraine’s resistance as an inconvenience rather than a cause worth defending, and then had a very public falling out with Zelenskyy on TV.

Trump and the MAGA crowd at best don’t really care what happens in Ukraine and at worst are selling Ukraine out to Vladimir Putin because Trump never could resist the charms of a strongman. Trump’s willingness to undercut Ukraine is an alarming sign of what could come next for the rest of Europe. We’re on our own against Putin’s violent imperialism. 

Justice for Ukraine

In Britain, the establishment line remains firm: support Ukraine, back NATO, stand against Russian aggression. It’s easy to claim that Trump is disrupting that consensus. He may present his approach as the populist will of the people, like his stances on immigration or trans rights, but this time, I don't think he’s channelling a popular sentiment. Certainly not in the UK. I want justice for Ukraine, and I believe most people do too. I see Putin as the aggressor and so do most other Brits.

Although Britain and Europe’s support for Ukraine comes at a cost. Not as high as the cost to Ukraine itself for fighting the war, but in these lean times the cost to Britain cannot be dismissed out of hand. Even by those of us who believe Ukraine has a right to self-determination.

Austerity is the order of the day 

As Keir Starmer’s Labour government scramble to fund military aid, austerity is the order of the day. Especially as tax rises and borrowing are still off the table. I don't agree with increasing defence spending while public services suffer. The UK is now cutting foreign aid to redirect funds to the military, a move that former Development Secretary Clare Short did not hesitate to criticise.

What annoys me more is the suggestion from a Labour aide that only the “middle-class, educated London-type voter” would care about such cuts. As if the working class people of Middlesbrough are really pleased that their local schools and hospitals are being sacrificed so that we can have a bigger army. How blatant does Starmer’s Labour have to be that they don’t want my vote?

An impossible situation

I am deeply sceptical of how much we are spending on this war and whether increasing defence budgets is the right answer. I’m not the only one. Scottish Labour MP Brian Leishman, has circulated a letter that calls for defence budget increases to be funded by a wealth tax instead of Labour “turning its back on communities facing poverty, conflict and insecurity".

However, I also want Ukraine to survive this conflict and not lose its identity or a chunk of itself to an invading army. I know that the war should end with a negotiated settlement, not violence, but how do you negotiate with Putin; a war criminal who cannot be trusted for a second. It’s an impossible situation.

I understand that there is a contradiction here. I want Ukraine to be a free and independent state, but I am hesitant about sending British troops and weapons to Ukraine. I don’t have a problem with arming Ukraine, I just don’t want more austerity in the UK to pay for it when taxes could be raised. Supporting Ukraine is popular in Britain. I find it hard to believe that people, especially the wealthy, would be mortally opposed to paying more tax to help Ukraine. More austerity for more defence spending is not in our best interests

Hypocrisy and cruelty

Everyone has an opinion on the war in Ukraine, and most reveal glaring hypocrisy. The establishment preaches about sovereignty and war crimes in Ukraine, but turns a blind eye when it comes to Israel and Gaza. Another country lies in ruins, more collective punishment is meted out. Yet the outrage is selective.

I agree with Judith N. Shklar that hypocrisy is overly criticised amongst politicians and that cruelty is much worse. Trump is cruel, but he’s let off because he’s no hypocrite. Well, there’s enough cruelty to go around right now. The attacks on Ukraine and Gaza are both cruel, and I oppose them both.

Why Ukraine matters

I don’t believe that Putin wants to conquer all of Europe, like a modern Napoleon, but he should still be opposed. If Putin is allowed to succeed in Ukraine he will next turn to states like Poland and Hungary, bullying them out of NATO and the EU, and under closer Russian control. Putin will then be in a stronger position to further destabilise liberal democracies all around the world by pushing disinformation online and supporting far-right parties in the West.

Putin’s victory would also embolden any other state that wants to use military power to achieve political ends. China would invade Taiwan. Israel would be even more willing to attack its neighbours. All because the idea that every state, no matter its size or strength, has the right to self-determination would have been thrown in the dust bin of history.

This is why it’s important that Ukraine triumphs over Russia. Not just for the future of Ukraine, but for the ongoing fight against authoritarianism that will define the 21st century.

Flirting with Putin

Meanwhile, the right flirts with Putin, drawn to his hardline stance against the so-called “woke agenda” and the fact that he is the toughest chimp in the cage and the right can’t resist the appeal of a big tough might-makes-right-guy.

Then there’s the centrists, who never met a foreign conflict they didn’t want to throw our army and someone else’s children into. Their rush to escalate is concerning, and Starmer’s suggestion that British troops could be sent to Ukraine is mainly his chance to look tougher on the world stage, recently convening world leaders in London to show support for Ukraine.

Then again, supporting Ukraine seems to be something that Starmer actually believes in. It’s the one issue where he doesn’t flip-flop to the opinion that tests best in focus groups. Ironically, this show of passion is actually fixing the death spiral in his poll ratings. Will he break his tax pledges over Ukraine, but not for the NHS, the economy, or the environment? It could happen.

Morally wrong and ineffective

I don't like Trump’s willingness to sell out Ukraine because he can’t magically resolve the conflict in 5 minutes; the length of Trump’s attention span. Not only because it’s morally wrong, but because it won’t work.

If Putin is allowed to consolidate his gains, he will simply regroup and attack again when it suits him. Putin held to the 30-day ceasefire agreed recently for only a few hours. Ukraine knows that Putin can’t be trusted, which is why they won’t accept peace on unfavourable terms. Trump doesn’t care about justice, only about ending the war and taking credit, regardless of the long-term consequences.

So the war will continue. Costs will mount. Trump may disrupt the status quo, and even pull American support for Ukraine, but Europe will press on without him, justifying ever more spending and sacrifice. However, how can I say I support Ukraine, without being willing to do anything? This is why I feel weapons should be sent to the fight, but that austerity isn’t the way to pay for it.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

What should the left do (and stop doing) to help the situation in Ukraine

Before we start, I want to say that the best thing you can do to help the people of the Ukraine is to donate to appeals that aid Ukrainian refugees or, if you can, volunteer to take in a refugee, or to support groups trying to help civilians inside the Ukraine. These are simple things that can make a much bigger difference than any amount of tweeting, arguing back with talking heads or writing long rambling blog posts. 

There are left-wing policies, which comrades have been pushing for years, which will help the situation, such as not allowing Russian oligarchs to launder their money through London or making it easier for refugees to live in the UK. The Tories are finally doing the latter, better late than never, and making it easier for Ukrainian refugees to come to the UK, but this hasn’t translated into more solidarity to refugees from elsewhere. Now the government has announced plans to send some refugees to Rwanda.

Another thing is to remember arguments we made during previous wars, such as The War on Terror, about all Muslims not being responsible for the actions of a few, or that we should be wary of a wave of Islamophobia caused by the conflict. Now, we need to be wary of Russophobia; a Russian person working in a bar in East London has no say over the action of their country. They shouldn’t be held responsible for it, and they don’t need anyone’s earful about the actions of the Russian military.

Stalinist eye roll

Another thing is to make sure you aren’t inadvertently sharing Russian propaganda online. And no, this isn’t becoming a vague rant about ‘Stalinists’ amongst the online left. There must be almost no-one in the UK who thinks that Stalin was a good idea and implying that there are many leftists who think so is just silly.

I guess the accusation of Stalinism implies that the person is a Tankie or, more accurately, an authoritarian Marxist-Leninist. I’m opposed to authoritarian Marxist-Leninism, but again, no-one thinks that Vladimir Putin is a Marxist-Leninist (unless you just assume he is because he’s Russian and so was Lenin).

If you are far-left enough to call yourself a Marxist-Leninist specifically, or a communist more generally, and you think that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a step towards the worldwide proletarian communist revolution, then you need your head examined. However, this probably only applies to about three people in a pub in Clapham. All this is to say I’m not sure what it really means to call someone a Stalinist today, so let’s park all the accusations of Stalinism.

More disclaimers

Real talk for a second: it is possible to share pro-Putin or Putin adjacent narratives, usually inadvertently, without having to tweet: “Go Putin! Russia is da bomb!” I want to have a talk about how this can happen and what to look out for. If you think I am joining some kind of mainstream media pile-on against lefties for not being sufficiently pro-war with Russia or anything like that then you can stop reading now. I want to have an honest chat about the effects of the stories and content we share online.

Whilst we’re doing the disclaimers, just so that you don’t think that I am joining the chorus of people accusing anyone who disagrees with the Labour Party line on NATO as being pro-Putin, I am aware that some have taken this as opportunity to accuse the left - or anyone even remotely critical of NATO or Western foreign policy – of being one of Putin’s useful idiots. This is an oversimplification. However, I have seen lefties - many inadvertently - sharing Putin propaganda online.

Right, with all that said, let’s get to it.

Pro-Putin narratives

There’s a range of narrative that you can share that supports Putin. Yeah, there are some people who are spreading Putin’s message because they believe it, but these are very rare. Only an idiot can look at Putin - a regressive, conservative Christian, nationalist - and think there is anything remotely left-wing about him.

More worryingly, there are those on the left who are inadvertently spreading Putin’s narrative that Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government are a neo-Nazi regime or have links to Nazi groups. Some on the left are sharing these narratives because they hate what liberals like, which right now is Zelenskyy.

Centrist cringe

Yes certainly, the love for Zelenskyy has taken on a weird edge in some outlets. I find articles like this one as cringe as the next guy does. It’s very strange that he is being treated like he’s a plucky, loveable underdog in a sitcom, not a man involved in an actual war. He’s not Ted Lasso and this war isn’t something to entertain people in between seasons of Love Island.

The centrist liberal stanning of Zelenskyy is more than a little detached from the reality of the war and is not much help to Ukrainian civilians. Yet, that doesn’t mean the people who hate the very online centrists should start hating Zelenskyy, or spread misinformation that he has links to neo-Nazis. Ukraine’s history with Nazism is too long and complicated to get into here, but I do feel some of this is fed by stereotypes of Eastern European people being on the far-right.

We’re all as bad as each other

Then there’s the people who say they’re all as bad as each other: West, East, US, UK, Russia, Ukraine - they’re all just as flawed as each other. This is a Putin narrative as it is something he says himself. He promotes the view that all nations are equally morally flawed to justify his repression of his own people. Don’t share these types of posts. Saying that the West and Putin’s Russia are the same is a massive oversimplification not worthy of any thinking person on the left.

Putin’s Russia is a much worse place to be than Britain or America, which are deeply flawed societies. Putin murders opposition politicians and represses free speech far beyond what happens in the West. At least 8,000 people have been arrested for protesting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There are eight letters in the Russian phrase for “no war” and even holding up a piece of paper with eight asterisks on it can get you arrested.

I am opposed to how our class of political and economic elites re-create their own power and use tools, nefarious and otherwise, to influence people to support them. I don’t like how much power muckraking tabloid newspapers, incendiary TV news channels and attention hording social media platforms - all owned by billionaires – have over the range of political views that are considered allowed by polite society. All this is bad, but it’s not as bad as what Putin does in Russia.

A list of war mongers

Saying that Putin’s Russia is a worse place than Boris Johnson’s Britain doesn’t undermine us criticising our own government and society for its many flaws. You can say that you’d rather live in the UK than Russia, but the UK is still rubbish.

Of all the shitty things about the US and the UK, the most relevant to this discussion is that we invaded Iraq on a flimsy pretext, and that those responsible for many thousands of deaths and the collapse of a country have faced no consequences. This is terrible and should not be forgotten. George Bush, Tony Blair and Putin are all war mongers with blood on their hands but that doesn’t make them interchangeable.

Saying Putin is a worse authoritarian and a worse war criminal is not to diminish how bad the invasion of Iraq was and the effect it has had on that country and the entire region: creating instability and misery for millions. The people responsible for this disaster are still part of the legitimate political discourse, a fact which blows my mind on a regular basis.

Enraging and deeply stupid 

Some of these Bush and Blair era politicians show no self-awareness of what they did and the role they had in it. Condoleezza Rice recently said on Fox News: “When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.” She also added: “It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order.” This level of hypocrisy is both enraging and deeply stupid.

At least George Bush Jr had the decency to condemn his own invasion of Iraq when he said: “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” The only issue with this is that he was trying to condemn Putin and not make amends for himself.

Criticising NATO and Western governments

The left should be critical of NATO and its long-term strategy. Keir Starmer’s hard-line on NATO criticism isn’t in the spirit of free debate and it doesn’t help us understand how this conflict came about. Besides, you can criticise NATO and still say that Britain should be in it. My view is that it was a mistake to try and expand NATO closer and closer to Russia, but that doesn’t mean we should now abandon Ukraine to be destroyed by Russia.

Criticising NATO is not just a far-left idea. Henry Kissinger said Ukraine shouldn’t join NATO and the Pope has been critical of NATO. People from across the political spectrum have said that enlarging NATO would be seen as a threat by Russia. Starmer would consider the Pope’s and Kissinger’s view too left-wing to be allowed in the Labour Party.

We should also be critical of Western governments’ role in Putin’s gaining his stranglehold on power. He was considered an ally in the War On Terror and we turned a blind eye to his activities in Chechnya, then Georgia, then Syria because we didn’t want to get involved or run the risk of triggering a larger conflict. The British and American governments hold some responsibility for what has happened and the left mustn’t let this be forgotten.

Blaming the left

It’s possible to advance left-wing narratives and not fall into the trap of spreading Putin’s propaganda. It just requires some thought before posting. What the left also needs to be wary of is those taking this as an opportunity to blame the left for the conflict. Apparently, everything from trans-rights to “cancel culture” is responsible for Putin feeling confident enough to invade Ukraine, or has taken the machismo out of the West’s response. As if Joe Biden was thinking of cancel culture when he decided not to fire American missiles at targets in Russia as soon as Putin’s army crossed the border.

You can’t move for some right-wing hack saying that students with purple hair creating safe spaces on campuses, or people in London drinking craft beer and wanting housing to be slightly more affordable and jobs to be slightly better, are the ones responsible for Russian tanks rolling through Ukraine.

I’m not sure what the left is supposed to have done. Neutered the West’s resolve by not loving soldiers so much they want to throw hundreds of thousands of them into the jaws of the mechanised death machine? Apparently, any deviation from right-wing politics makes us militarily weak, so debates about colonialism must be forever silenced so that more space can be created for loving war so much that every country in the world quakes in fear of the West.

A love of war and Putin

Behind all this admonishing the left for the wussification of the West is a disturbing right-wing streak of thinly disguised praise for Putin. “He’s a real man,” they seem to say, when claiming that the problem with the West is that we care about things other than the problems that can be tackled with huge armies and an obsessive, uncritical worship of the military. Putin doesn’t care about toilets for non-binary people, or making universities more open to poor or BAME people, or climate change, they say. That’s what makes him strong and able to invade other countries. How this isn’t praise for Putin and saying we should be like him, is beyond me.

There’s also those on the right that give Putin cover. From Nigel Farage to Tucker Carlson, there is an entire ecosystem of right-wing shock jocks and nationalist politicians eager to praise Putin openly and spread his narratives. These people have big audiences, and they use them to spread disinformation about the invasion. We should make sure that no one ever forgets these people’s support for Putin.

My main response to this conflict is that I don’t want a war that could easily turn nuclear and even if didn’t could leave Europe devastated. Sorry if that makes me a soy boy cuck for not being really up for mass death of a hitherto unimagined scale? Is that really what the right wants? A huge war? And if the so-called man in the street isn’t so keen on massive wars as he used to be, isn’t that because the recent big wars, like the War in Iraq, were started on flimsy pretexts, were badly managed and generally made the whole situation worse?

Condemn Putin and help refugees

The left should condemn Putin wherever possible. He’s a belligerent right-wing nationalist who abuses democracy, represses his own citizens and now is inflicting enormous amounts of destruction on the people of the Ukraine.

We should be vigilant, criticise those who need criticism and do whatever we can, big or small, to help the people of the Ukraine. Remember that anything you can send or give, financially or in goods or services, to help a refugee or a person in a conflict zone will do more to make this terrible situation better than a billion tweets or Facebook updates.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Everyone’s hot takes on the Ukraine invasion are causing me to lose the will to live

What could be the greatest tragedy of my life so far is currently unfolding in Ukraine. Although, pitching the genocide of the Rohingyas in Myanmar, the Syrian Civil War and other untold tragedies against each other in the worst bracket of all time seems in especially bad taste.

Yet there is plenty of bad taste to go around. From commentators stating that war has returned to Europe for the first time since 1945 - as if the Yugoslav wars and the Kosovo crisis didn’t happen - to war reporters saying this feels different because the war is in a country of white people, sorry I meant a “civilised” country.

From surfing the never-ending hot take machine that is the Internet, I can see that as well as all the bad taste, we have people stupendously missing the point. This includes everyone trying to make the invasion about themselves. As if you, sitting in a Victorian townhouse in Hackney reading about the invasion via the Guardian app on your iPad, can imagine one-tenth of what it is like to live with the possibility of having a Russian missile crash through your apartment block at any moment.

The lowest point for Europe

I don’t have much to add on a geopolitical level, other than this is terrible and breaks my heart every time I look at the news. So, I will reserve the rest of this article for sniping at people on the internet who are taking the lowest moment for Europe – at least since I first got a passport and started taking boozy holidays in Germany - as an excuse to fill the internet with absolute drivel.

This includes, and is not limited to: the people who think that this has been caused by Brexit; the people taking this as an excuse to blame everyone for everything; the centrists calling everyone to their left a Putin apologist; and the armchair military commanders who accuse anyone questioning anything NATO ever did as somehow being part of a plot to bring down the beloved international order so that a self-obsessed, murdering authoritarian can roll tanks across the UK.

On the other hand, there are those laying the blame at the feet of NATO with massive enthusiasm for online finger-wagging, acting as if a perfectly constructed witty Twitter put-down will make a difference to people suffering on the ground in Ukraine. My advice to the energetic liberal owners of social media is to take ten minutes off from dunking on internet loudmouths to donate to the causes collecting goods for refugees. That will make a difference. Being a keyboard hack won’t.

All imperialism is bad

There are also the rare, but annoyingly vocal, pro-Putin lefties. This tendency has been greatly exaggerated for the purposes of meme wars, but it’s still irksome to come across useful idiots mainlining Russian propaganda, ‘because BBC’, and spending all the livelong day accusing everyone except Putin of being responsible for the war that Putin *checks notes* started.

As George Monbiot put it: “The people who have amplified these excuses are not, as they claim, anti-imperialists. They are rightly opposed to western imperialism, but will bend over backwards to accommodate Russian imperialism. Some are paid stooges. For others it’s ‘my enemy's enemy is my friend’.”

Trust me when I say that even if the US or NATO is your enemy, Putin is not your friend. Also, if you have gone past “all imperialism bad”, through “American imperialism is the worst”, and ended up at “therefore Russian imperialism good” then there really is no helping you. Allow me to bastardise the Dead Kennedys and say: “Putin lefties fuck off!”

Do something

Then there are the ceaseless centrist soldier-hugging “do somethings” who, as usual, are spending a lot of time on Twitter after the divorce. I understand this desire to use the power that the West has to improve the situation, but I am not sure what we can do, apart from what we are doing. Even the Tories are trying to get Russian money out of the City of London, which is surprising, although, of course, we should have done it years ago.

Closely allied to the “do somethings” are the beard-scratching liberal intellectuals who have lots to say on this (columns to file and all that) but not a lot to offer. You don’t need a degree from Oxford to notice that the invasion is awful, but if NATO does anything that even smells like attacking the Russian army, that will lead to a (likely nuclear) war with Russia. It’s painful to realise that there is very little of immediate practical effect that the West can do without risking the life of every living thing on the planet. Countries with nukes get to act awfully. I don’t know, maybe we should have gotten rid of the nukes in the 60s.

The sensibles weigh in

King of the Sensibles, Jonathan Freedland, summed it up when he said: “This then, is the choice. Do we want to live in the world described by Zelensky, where democratic states are protected by an international system of rules, however flawed and inconsistent that system might be? Or do we want to live in Putin’s world, governed by the law of the jungle and where the only right is might?”

As a weedy, pathetic, unconfident and awkward man who resorts to saying all my mean things online, I don’t want to live by Putin’s law of the jungle. It sounds awful. But how do we stand up to ‘might makes right’ without getting into a fight with a nuclear-armed, trigger-happy thug? I don’t think appealing to Putin’s sense of justice and fair play will work. I want the sensibles to tell me how we make the nuclear gangster stick to the international system of rules, however flawed and inconsistent that system might be, in a sensible way. I have been thinking on this all week and can’t work it out.

Freedland went onto say: “Putin does not care if his people suffer. He’s priced in the hit to his oligarch pals, just as he’s priced in the loss of Russian military lives. For him, conquering Ukraine – and removing the example of a democratic neighbour that might show Russians a different life is possible – is worth it.” Freedland is making the point better than I am that all this crying of “do something” is pointless.

The view from the right-wing bellends

Then, of course, there are those who have taken this as an opportunity to swipe at the left, because why break the habit of a lifetime? This includes the Telegraph, who said that an RMT tube strike was in sympathy with Putin. I guess we’re at the point where we can say anything in print, no matter how deranged, and if it vibes with our readers then it’s okay. I’m not going to stoop to the Telegraph’s level for a joke. I’m going to say that anyone who believes that headline needs to stop sniffing glue as it’s fucking up their brain.

Then there are those who blame ‘the woke’ for this. On some level, you have to admire their enthusiasm for culture wars in a month most people took off from flogging their hobby horse out of respect for the dead. Then again, you don’t get to be Ben “King of right-wing Internet bellends” Shapiro by taking a break from blaming the woke for everything that’s wrong with the world.

Although, he’s really outdone himself this time: claiming that the West having a greater range of pronouns available (read being accepting of trans people or non-binary people) makes us look weak and thus has emboldened Putin. I guess you could blame peace-loving, tolerant, accepting social justice warriors for a violent conflict triggered by a homophobic, belligerent nationalist. That makes perfect sense. The only alternative is that the conservative patriotism that Shapiro and his ilk spouts is really to blame and that the Republicans he shills for are just a less effective version of Putin.

Belligerent conservative nationalists

Conservative nationalism is rotten all the way down. Whether you are policing people’s bathrooms or invading your neighbours, the belief that there is a God-given traditional order to the world - and that all these young people with their pronouns, dyed hair, respecting people of different colours, identities & faiths, and Tiktok accounts are debasing this natural order - is causing most of the misery in the world.

Remember, Steve Bannon took time out from being a throbbing caldron of online hate to back Putin for being anti-woke. But expressing that doesn’t get Shapiro retweets from people who follow MMA, so, as usual, everyone must be whipped up into a fury at vulnerable minorities whilst Putin, a belligerent conservative nationalist himself, is laughing all the way to his ammo store.

Nukes are bad

Whilst all this is going on, Putin and the self-important hardmen who claim to be the leaders of the free world are hurtling us ever closer to a nuclear war. Maybe we shouldn’t have a global political system that encourages the most venial, pole-climbing, ambitious, selfish and self-important people to struggle to the top, and then give them the power to destroy the world.

We might be about to find out that nuclear dick swinging is more than just a disturbing way that world leaders decide who’s the alpha dog in the military-industrial kennel and has real world risks. Of course, saying nukes are bad is about the same as being a Communist, despite Joseph Stalin’s love of the bomb. We did have a political leader in the UK who said nukes were bad and he wouldn’t use them, and everyone thought this was the same as surrendering to Putin.

So, the free world is led by big tough men who will use nukes and won’t be pushed around by, er, big tough men with nukes like Putin. Apparently, this is all in our best interest as we were all told when politicians of the left and the right voted for more nukes at a time when millions relied on food banks. Special mention must go to the liberals auditioning for a role in Dr Strangelove who said that nukes were bad, but we need them, although we should never use them. Peter Sellers turned over in his grave at that one.

Get off Twitter

So now we have political leaders, left and right, falling over each other to say they will use nukes against Putin. This race will continue right up until the moment where they do use nukes against Putin and everyone and everything dies. At least then they will have finally achieved the long sort after end of history.

Yeah, you can tell I’m really angry at everyone right now. Because you’re all obsessed with your hobby horses and not helping anyone. Maybe I should just get off Twitter and go for a walk, whilst I still can.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay