Survival Mode Thinking
Pre-experiencing Ukraine's PTSD
During that rather gruesome mess we went through last year there was a lot of content piped through the Internet to the fickle and aging YouTube crowd. The percentage of garbage was high, but in every dumpster there lies the chance to find, er, an unopened bottle of beer (which, along with the return deposit, can practically rain good fortune).
This clip about Wagner Private Military Company posted by The Wall Street Journal nine hours ago is an example of a typical discovery.
The way WSJ re-chews execrable bullshit like the various Vice franchises, or the video clips posted from the relentlessly vacuous Kyiv Post, or the tooth-pulling strident moral advocacy heard on Kyiv Independent’s Powerline podcasts, is just so bang on you want to lie motionless near a warm radiator.
Do search around – there are now zillion and one Wagner explainers on YouTube, and the tenacious will find pre-invasion clips about corruption floating around torrentially, courtesy of Bellingcat.
To contrast and compare, watch TV Burp. Or, rather, don’t.
Henry David Thoreau said "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end... We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.1"
So, what is interesting and serious?
Wapo’s Bogotá bureau chief and White House economics reporter via Syracuse and Vox team up to help us pre-experience Ukraine’s looming PTSD disaster in their story, titled “Tinder in the trenches: How war has changed love and sex in Ukraine.”
In it Casey Taft, a staff psychologist at the National Center for PTSD in the VA Boston Healthcare System, observes:
That the entire country has essentially been one big war zone for almost nine years probably makes the situation even more complicated, minus Tinder and the sex toys, plus prohibition of ibogaine, psilocybin and marijuana.
Walden, Chapter 1. Economy. Henry David Thoreau