Important work here from the NYT. Ross wasn’t run over. He dropped his cell phone, which he had shifted to his left hand to draw his weapon. And then he shot and killed a person with the gun in his right hand. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/v...

“Lifeless… foam around his mouth. Nobody wants to see their kids like that.” ICE attacked a family trying to LEAVE the besieged neighborhood and hospitalized a 6 month old baby that couldn’t breathe.

"I miss the comfort of believing Germans were different. I miss believing that we Americans could never be led by a fearmonger to commit atrocities he claimed were necessary and good. I miss believing we are not like them." Thank you, Shalom Auslander, for saying what needs to be said.

Putin, failing in his east European war, summons his American clients to organize a diversion in western Europe.

It is in no way “law enforcement” to beat up an American 10th grader and steal and sell his possessions.

It’s been 16 years since the Citizens United decision that ushered in the current era of corrupt politics. I’m headed to the Senate floor right now to take stock of the wreckage that case caused.

And here we are: the entire transatlantic alliance is now talking about Greenland, instead of talking about ending the war in Ukraine.

.@PabloReports: What do you make of this union worker who called out Trump as pedophile protector? Raskin: I think that he was speaking in a factual sense

There’s a Russian word for this, which we lack in English: prodazhnost’ (продажность)

Jon Stewart just seems heartbroken at the end of this clip.

"Everything can be different."

A bit of Orwell to start your morning, courtesy of Kristi Noem:

Интимный опыт войны изнутри, очень человечный, без претенциозности, российским журналистом, который стал украинским солдатом. Петя Рузавин учится примиряться с близостью смерти не становясь отстраненным.

"How Fascist Leaders Hide in Plain Sight | Marci Shore" Brad Carr Podcast @marcishore.bsky.social 11 Jan 2026 [1:38:56] #PoliticalCult #Cult https://s.cultpodcasts.com/osKn1qwzHkyITDRkfCD6Mw

"In Venezuela, nothing about this has changed since the extraction of Maduro. All that has happened is the spread of this practice to the US. The ICE agent who shot the mom in the face was spirited away, to be investigated by the same federal institution, the Depart. of Justice, that holds Maduro."

No words. 💔 #Justice4Renee

"He doesn't care about the people of Venezuela any more than he cares about the people of America. . . Donald Trump doesn't even pretend like this is going to do something for anybody other than the oil companies and him and his family." @raskin.house.gov

After viewing the clip of the event which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota- he then proceeds to lie about EVERYTHING in it, aside from the fact that it is, indeed, "a horrible thing to watch." #25thAmendmentNOW

Renee Nicole Good could have been any one of us observing an ICE raid.

LT Gov. Flanagan: She had stuffed animals in the car for her child, for her six year old child

Google the video & see for yourself. This is not law enforcement. This is murder. Sickening.

"[C]rumbled walls revealed the interior of a third-floor apartment: floral wallpaper, an overturned mattress, a woman’s handbags still hanging from their hooks. . .We think of our private lives as sealed off from the public world, but war reveals the provisional nature of those walls. . ."-Ira Wells

Samuel Alito flew two flags used by insurrectionists. Clarence Thomas' wife plotted to overturn the 2020 election. Both justices refused to recuse themselves from SCOTUS cases related to the January 6th plot. It's a stain on our nation that this has effectively been forgotten.

"America stands for cruelty and white supremacy right now in the world."--Jason Stanley

Thank you to @terrelljstarr.bsky.social in Kyiv for cheering me up today. I think we should counter Putinist and Trumpist performative sadism with more performative multilingualism and friendly encounters with strangers over mulled wine.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia has hailed the troops fighting his war in Ukraine as sacred heroes. But confidential complaints filed by troops and their families reveal a pattern of brutality and coercion in the ranks that is hidden from the Russian public. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

"The practice he was describing has become so common in the Russian military that it has its own name: obnuleniye, or 'zeroing out.' It can mean lethal orders designed to get soldiers killed by the enemy. Or it can involve the direct killing of soldiers by their fellow troops on the battlefield."

"If there is no boundary between real and unreal, good and evil, life and death, then nothing means anything, and we face a nihilist abyss." @marcishore.bsky.social in #IWMPost @iwm.at www.iwm.at/publication/...

"Russian commanders threaten their own soldiers with death so often that the killings have their own name — 'zeroing out.'"

"« S’il n’y a pas de frontière entre le réel et l’irréel, le bien et le mal, la vie et la mort, alors rien n’a de sens, et nous sommes confrontés à un abîme nihiliste. » Marci Shore 👉 La Russie. www.iwm.at/publication/...

I have never seen a look of contempt as pure as the look in this Ukrainian soldier’s eyes when he faced his Russian captor about to execute him.

A synthesis of denial and performative sadism.

"Trump officials celebrated with cake after slashing aid. Then people died of cholera."

Americans: this is our tax money being used to pay the guards in El Salvador to keep immigrants on their knees for 24 hours and lock them in boxes with no ventilation. We are all implicated in this, just as "ordinary Germans" were implicated in Auschwitz.

For Turkish-speakers interested in the aftereffects of the Soviet experiment today:

"It's because you do good work."

With thanks to Canada's Global Television Network for streaming this when CBS censored it--and to the students at the Human Rights Center at University of California, Berkeley who are doing the work to learn the truth.

This struck me too. As Anne Applebaum doesn’t mention, she wrote a classic history of the Gulag.

Crises tend to correlate with intense literary activity, but not necessarily with intellectual perspicacity. Our picks of 2025 have clearsightedness in abundance – as do all the articles Eurozine has had the privilege to publish in the past year. www.eurozine.com/our-picks-of...

These days it dies surprisingly often in broad daylight.

As a historian I've looked at hundreds of thousands of pages of government documents. And I just have to say that aside from being obviously illegal and clearly suggestive of some major crime, this “redaction” business is not a position in which serious people or serious governments find themselves

“Right before our eyes, a world order is being formed in which truth as a category does not exist.”--Oleksandr Mykhe See illustration below:

First question on KGB cognitive test is also a picture of lion, giraffe, fish & hippopotamus. They beat the shit out of you until you say the giraffe is the hippo. Explains a lot tbh.

Thank you!

The History department at the University of Toronto is searching in the field of Ukrainian history. networks.h-net.org/group/discus...

OTD in 1878 Stalin was born. We have to pretend we are liberating Ukraine from Nazism cos we have not yet liberated ourselves from Stalinism.

“Enough Ukrainians decided they were willing to risk their lives to overthrow tyranny, and that’s what they expect from the Russians.” My conversation with @marcishore.bsky.social about the promise of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution & the nihilism of Russia’s war. meduza.io/en/feature/2... @meduza.io

Historian Marci Shore reflects on the promise of Ukraine's Maidan Revolution and the nihilism of Russia's war

“The subliminal possessiveness toward a revolutionary heritage adds another dimension to Ukrainian art curator Vasyl Cherepanyn’s observation that the Maidan “was so fundamentally European that it turned out to be too European for today’s EU.”