And yet, freelance reporters like Sotloff and Foley are at the core of every foreign story. From 2003 to 2012, newspapers axed 16,200 full-time newsroom jobs and magazines cut 38,000 jobs. A survey conducted by the American Journalism Review of 10 major newspapers and one chain found that between 2003 and 2011 the number of foreign correspondents dropped from 307 to 234. But in 2011 that number would have been much lower had AJR not also included contract reporters, who often perform the same duties as staffers but without the same benefits or pay. Freelancers working on a story-to-story basis are left to fill the void left by laid off staffers.
Earlier today, I slugged a post — the “link” that follows this — “Mariupol Under Fire”, which related articles I went a seeking. I wasn’t too far off the mark:
However, what I ended up doing was scraping and posting news clips, and “Mariupol” was forgotten, except in the slugged title and on Twitter. My apologies then to those who today had been seeking similar data on the appearance of Russian military assets in the Ukrainian battle space.
Now, the slug that Twitter treated as a header as turned true!
Or more true than was suggested earlier. The following is about an hour old from the Los Angeles Times:
“It is a totally new game,” said Oleg Odnorozhenko, deputy commander of the volunteer Azov Battalion, adding that the city’s fighters are now certain they are being attacked by regular Russian army troops, not just mercenaries and homegrown separatists.
To be sure, this has been Mr. Putin’s war from the beginning. After Victor Yanukovych fled Kyiv in late February and the parliament appointed an acting government in his place, it was Mr. Putin’s order that sent “little green men”—professional soldiers in Russian-style combat fatigues but without identifying insignia—to seize the Crimean peninsula, the most blatant land grab in Europe since World War II.
The ragtag battalion was hurriedly put together from a group of civilians including a piano teacher, bulldozer operator, steel worker and bodybuilding instructor as pro-Russian rebels advanced on Mariupol over the past week.
Renewed shelling of the city on Thursday, despite hopes that a ceasefire might be agreed on Friday, meant Ukrainian troops continued to organise defences in case of an all-out assault by pro-Russian separatists Kiev says are backed by Moscow.
A day before a planned ceasefire in east Ukraine, Russia-backed rebels edged closer to Mariupol, threatening a final push against the strategic port city, which the Ukrainians have promised to defend at all costs.
It was unclear whether the rebel advance was merely a show of force, or the prelude to a proper attack on the city, but as night fell, shelling was audible from the city centre.
“Ukraine exists,” was the understated but undeniable election slogan of the (failed) 2010 Yushchenko presidential campaign. Crimea, Ukraine’s most restive and most beautiful area, was finally settling in for the long haul—better to be a strange, anomalous, mostly Russian-speaking Ukrainian appendage than to be inside a paranoid, authoritarian Russia. That the revolution against Yanukovych, a triumph of human fortitude, should result in the loss of territorial integrity is sad but comprehensible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and here is this one.
Gazprom’s natural gas production fell 19.6 percent last month compared with the same period last year, as the state-owned behemoth struggles in the face of increasing competition at home and declining exports that are due in part to a breakdown in the political relationship between Moscow and Kiev.
“The open aggression from the Russian side against sovereign countries means the there is an attack not only against Ukraine, it is an attack against the peace in Europe,” Grybauskaitė said in Tallinn on Wednesday.
My friends in Islam are wrestling with what to do with ISIS, and the talk is not about joining.
Some are trying to find their way between persecution as Shiites and cooperation with Sunni Kurdish Peshmerga, for example. We don’t appreciate the crevasses in multiple self-concepts (x religion x sect x nation x locality x external relationships) involved in making what are both political and personal military decisions.
By way of mistaken aggregation, simple prejudice may misguide our perception of true states of affairs.
On the Sunni side in the middle east, every stable regime plus every peaceful human subscribed by legacy now finds status divided according to the word of Baghdadi: either accept his authority as caliph to rule over all Islam or prepare for battle with his forces. The irony of that possession has a cosmic ghastliness to it: who among theocratic or clerically authorized autocrats would not claim the same favor and infallibility?
The President’s lank position, so far, is to leave the matter of becoming resolved up to Muslims involved de facto in these wars, albeit with the exception of either protecting patently American assets, as in Iraq, or encouraging the moderate among the revolutionary forces assailing Assad in Syria. If boundaries are broached, as has happened some in Israel’s Golan, then additional measures have to be taken to maintain the geographical parameter of the heavy fighting (associated terrorism in foreign lands then becomes the province of established government agencies developed to address domestic threats).
I think Obama’s play between personal engagement and insouciant disengagement is a part of his stage management: why shouldn’t the rest of the world, and as it yearns to be free, police and defend itself?
People make up their minds about the world and themselves as they go along. Culture, experience, and information both lead and push all of us down or chosen or programmed paths, but left alone in mind, the mind has its own life and, predominantly, survival mission: it faces quandaries posed by the malignant, and often it fails and becomes the patsy or tool of the vicious; sometimes too, it rises to the occasion and takes a giant step forward from where it has been pinned by history, circumstance, and time.
“It isn’t healthy to get so sensitive over words.” Actually: opposite, Hatem Ade, because language is what has brought us (from secret group to global society in perhaps concentric circles) to this pass. There are so many directions to go as regards “words have a power”, but let me suggest this distillation: language is a natural human behavior; it is a cultural invention that abets survival within the bounds of each language society; and the cultural invention becomes a cultural suspension.
We literally live in language.
Every autocrat — malignant narcissist, political cabal — understands the primacy that language has in their ascent to power and their remaining in power, and not one of the type fails to overlook the information atmosphere in which their people — their subjects or subjugated people (eventually, it’s up to the people to decide which they are) — exist.
The above premise is never far from thought in every piece on this blog.
It’s there in the mention that the Islamic Small Wars are chiefly about integrity (and it is not okay to lie either to Muslims through patronizing speech or non-Muslims in deceitful speech).
It’s there in the idea that political reports from despotic regime (and their state-controlled media) must be greeted with deep skepticism because the political purposes of powerful controllers and influencing agents naturally corrupt the gathering and expression of observation sensitive to such interests.
It’s there in the notion that the generational transmission of language includes a “social grammar”, i.e., quietly discerned and internalized social rules about speech and what works in relation to needs and what might be met with cuffing.
Russia is a revisionist power; It has the means to pursue its objectives; It is winning; and Greater dangers lie ahead.
I recommend that the United Kingdom and its allies:
Give up any hope of a return to business as usual; Boost the defence of the Baltic states and Poland; Expose Russian corruption in the West; Impose sweeping visa sanctions on the Russian elite; Help Ukraine; and Reboot the Atlantic Alliance.
The usual set-up goes like this: the empath is forced to make a stand on seeing the sociopath say or do something underhand. The empath challenges the sociopath, who straight away throws others off the scent and shifts the blame on to the empath. The empath becomes an object of abuse when the apath corroborates the sociopath’s perspective.
The situation usually ends badly for the empath and sometimes also for the apath, if their conscience returns to haunt them or they later become an object of abuse themselves. But, frustratingly, the sociopath often goes scot free.
Even when on September 1st, 1939, after the Soviet-German pact had been signed, shots resounded in the Free City of Danzig, the Western powers mustered up only enough courage to embark on the so-called phoney war. Their belief in being able to save their own skin by turning a blind eye on the destruction of Danzig emboldened Hitler to make the next act of aggression. After that he captured Warsaw, then another European capital, Paris, and not long after that the Nazis started dropping bombs on London. Only then the Allies cried out loud: “This must stop! Let’s win this war once and for all!”
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