1.) It's notable that China's statement about it explicitly refrained from condemning Russia's move.
2.) The West is talking a good game about unity - and, indeed, the calls for invoking Article 4 of NATO's founding document are encouraging, as is the joint statement from theBaltic states - but even though how this was all going to unfold has been apparent for months, if not years, there is no decisiveness even at this dark hour. Is it not clear now that Putin doesn't give a flying fuck about sanctions? We are letting this happen with no plan for addressing it.
3.) Why is the West caught flat-footed? Because over the last 300 years or so, it has lost its sense of purpose. A chain of influences from Rousseau's belief that man is basically good and turned on a wrong path by "society" through the Romantic poets' prioritization of moods and feelings and their denigration of the institution of marriage through Marx, Freud, Dewey, Sartre, and the rise of a popular culture based on secular distractions, the West has lost all sight of a transcendent lodestar.
4.) Takes framing the situation as Putin painting himself into a corner have not aged well.
5.) The crisis brings into sharp relief the poisonous nature of Trumpism. It has fatally infected the Republican Party (Oh! GOP Senators are standing in unity against the invasion! Excuse me, but their cowardice in the wake of stolen-election claims is still fresh in our memory. And I'd invite you to spend a moment taking in the details of a recent photo of Ted Cruz with Herschel Walker. They're at Mar-a-lago, seated underneath an obscenely fawning painting of Trump posing in a golf sweater.) Exhibit A is the Russian television network RT showing Tucker Carlson's rant from the other night, with Russian subtitles. Three column titles from today's Townhall.com: "Trudeau's Canadian Fascism Is A Bigger Threat to America Than Putin" by Kurt Schlichter, "Stop Talking About Ukraine, Republicans!" by Ann Coulter, and "Why Is The Left Suddenly Worried About The End Of Democracy?" by Victor Davis Hanson. This oh-look-a-squirrel attempt to dismiss the most historically impactful event of the last 74 years is apparent to anybody not eyeballs-floating-in-Kool-Aid brainwashed, but there's still a significant swath of the populace that is.
6.) God help us.
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