Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war and its reverberations
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Michael Weiss / Twitter:
🧵New from @holger_r and me: “Karl,” our Estonian defense specialist, offers his insights into Russia’s eastern offensive.“The offensive started at the weekend. That’s when the intensity of the battles grew. We know because Russia’s losses were higher than on the days before.”“This phase will be different than when the war started on Feb 24. Russia will not attack across the whole frontline, simultaneously. The intensity of fighting is roughly twice as much as what came before.”“The Russians are focused on two axes: 1) Izyum, 2) Severodonetsk and surrounding towns. They’ve had some success in Kreminna, but that’s a tactical decision by Ukraine. 130 Russians were hospitalized from there in the last day. This indicates dozens were killed. That’s a lot.”
We continue with our exploration of Twitter for stories you don’t see elsewhere. As Hunter noted last night, the think tanks are more skeptical of Russian capability.
Dmitri / Twitter:
I want to tell you a story about one Bashkir man whose name was Rif (pron. R-e-e-f).Bashkirs are native people of Bashkortostan region in Russia, which lies on the border between Europe and Asia. Get a glimpse of what the norm is for a large proportion of the Russian citizens.
When I last saw him in 2010, Rif was around 55. All his life he lived in a village Uzungulovo, about 30km from Beloretsk town in Ural mountains of Russia. This region is known for vast forests, fertile plains, wide rivers, tall mountains, and lakes full of fish.
Adam Davidson / Twitter:
TIL that people still don’t understand why so many journalists are mad at Dean Baquet and the NYT.
Yes! There has been much amazing reporting done.Yes! You can point to many articles about Trump and an anti-democratic GOP.
But,The NYT–uniquely–has the ability to concentrate the world’s attention and drive coverage on TV, radio, and every other paper.
It has, largely, used that power to OVER emphasize minor Democratic issues and to UNDER emphasize major GOP issues.
Under Pressure, Cracks Appear in Le Pen’s New Moderate Image
Most of the debate appeared to be capping her so-called detoxification effort: where Macron at times appeared arrogant during the near three-hour televised sparring match, Le Pen was calm and composed.
And then the subject of Islam, identity and security came up. She cited “barbary” and “savagery” — code words used by the far-right to refer to people of color — and linked migrants to violence and crime. She said she’d ban the Muslim veil in all public spaces. If that happened, it would become the only country in the world to do so.
Le Pen needed to land a major punch to close the near 12 percentage point gap with Macron. She might have hoped these dog whistles would win over people who voted for Zemmour, who didn’t make it to the second round. But a poll published by Opinionway on Thursday was unchanged from the previous survey. With just two days of campaigning left, it’s hard to see how she can jump ahead.
Alex Pareene / Substack:
They Know How Journalism Works! They’re Just Against It!
They want someone to knock on your door, too. Not to put you in the newspaper, though.
On Tuesday, Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz published a story about a repulsive creep who uses her large online following to, essentially, subject random LGBTQ people (and especially trans people) to harassment, and worse. The piece is meant to help explain who is behind the right’s furious anti-trans moral panic, how the right’s propaganda machine finds the “main characters” that help stoke that moral panic, and how this creep used that propaganda machine to grow the following that now helps provide her with new people to feed into the meat grinder.
So, naturally, much of the Twitter debate about the story was about Media Ethics, because Lorenz knocked on the creep’s door.
It remains a sadly common belief among many journalists that “regular people” have misconceptions about journalism and the news gathering process that can be cleared up with greater transparency and better media literacy education. I think most people have essentially no opinion on the news gathering process. I imagine they think of journalists, when they think of journalists at all, as the people yelling questions at mayors, shouting over the din of exploding flash bulbs, while the mayors sort of wave their hands and say they have “total faith” in their police departments to, say, apprehend The Penguin, or investigate themselves for shooting an unarmed teenager.
Or people in big coats standing on the sides of rain-slicked highways gesturing broadly at ten-car pile ups. You know, news.
Philip Bump / WaPo:
The intertwining of identity with political and cultural power
Something else happened about a decade ago that is pertinent here. In 2014, a group of developers and critics began espousing more diversity in video games. That triggered a massive backlash that leveraged the connectivity of the Internet to abuse and harass a number of public targets, most of them women. This was dubbed “GamerGate,” and it established a pattern by which groups of anonymous individuals gather and bully their perceived opponents with the aim of frustrating, scaring or silencing them.
GamerGate also bled into the real world, with the targets of harassment having their phone numbers and addresses published to either be annoying — crank phone calls, ordering pizzas for delivery — or to be dangerous, like making verbal threats. At the extreme, harassers would tell local police that an armed standoff was in progress at the target’s address, a process called “swatting” after the SWAT teams that harassers hoped would be sent in response.
Is Kevin McCarthy toast?
“Thank God my private conversations weren’t recorded after Jan. 6,” the lawmaker said. “We were all very emotional.” In that sense, they argued, Republicans on the Hill could be more forgiving of McCarthy because they were in the same boat: concerned about Trump, but too afraid of him to do or say anything about it.
The senior GOP aide, however, wasn’t so sure. They noted that the entire situation Thursday shows that McCarthy has a “trust” issue.
“He’s a bald-faced liar who literally just has no problem completely lying. And that doesn’t sit well with members,” the senior aide said. Still, they noted that McCarthy has plenty of time before a potential speaker run to win back any defectors.
Just remember that being a shameless liar, for the Republicans at least, is a feature and not a bug. The more shameless the better.