Day 555

Genocide was not discussed

Work on one of the world’s flattest cobblestone road segments has been completed in Kyiv (Photo c/o abdymok)

During that rather gruesome thing we went through last year there was a lot of content piped through YouTube to the fickle and aging Gen X audience. The percentage of garbage was high, but in every dumpster there lies the chance to find, say, an unopened bottle of beer (which, along with the return deposit, can practically rain good fortune).

By far my best and most surprising discovery was coincidentally a show about motorcycles and home renovations, Pasha’s Простой Пацан, the Ukrainian version of Camarata’s property maintenance channel, with several episodes about evacuating two-wheelers from Russia-occupied Mariupol.

Kazantsky’s and Tsymbaliuk’s channels, as well as Portnikov’s, are in the mix and sometimes entertaining. Also, Feigin, Grem, Latynina and Pastukhovs’ Kitchen. I’ve lost track of what people are saying on the radio, except for Internet interviews on Novoe Vremya and RFE/RL. No television, per se, since 2016, but there’s a lot to watch on Telegram.

I know that podcasters/columnists have — and should have — a very proud, proprietary opinion of their monologues and conversations. This is as it should be. Most good podcasts are made — if not with complete disregard than with significant disregard — for everyone who isn't part of the enterprise.

Which brings me to the above episode from The New York Times Opinion podcast, titled Is It Time to Negotiate With Putin? We’re past the “fairy tale stage” of the war in Ukraine. How does it end? in which three veteran columnists talk about Putin’s ongoing attempts to erase us from the universe.

Distances determine foreign policy. Nothing is more distressing on first contact with the idea of negotiating with Putin than the fear that more than a dozen journalists producing one podcast about ongoing genocide have lost their power to describe it.

This explains partially why I’m still puzzled by the “fairy tale stage of the war” mentioned in the episode’s subtitle. From 2014 to 2016? Maybe this is self-referencing, about stories published by The New York Times since Holodomor?