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Ukrainesplaining©

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Ukrainesplaining©

To get into this party, you'll need to exaggerate

pgb
Mar 29, 2023
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The key context of the term Ukrainesplaining is that it’s one part of an old tradition – of who gets listened to, and who gets believed. It’s one corner of a poorly-lit room, in which biases and statuses warp assumptions and allocate more bandwidth and consequence to some people than others, creating an inequality of agency.

Tymofiy is a Z loyalist

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and one of the country’s famous Ukrainesplainers. (@tabletochki is a non-profit that crowdfunds for cancer patients.)

Timothy Snyder is also a famous Ukrainesplainer. The history professor was in Lviv over the weekend chatting up students and faculty at the Ukrainian Catholic University.

The part about Z being a mystery (15:39) made me laugh.

When Zelensky remained, when he stayed in Kyiv, that was mysterious. It was a mystery, in the profound sense of the word.

Oh, puhleaze.

I’m a big fan of Tim, but a critic, as well, especially when he exagerates the influence of Polish intellectuals and civil society movements on what happened in Ukraine and Belarus during the late 80s and 90s

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.

During the months leading up to the invasion, subjectiveness or subjectivity (субъектность) [of Ukraine] was used repeatedly as an artificial discursive term by Z to describe power-relations and social actions required for conducting foreign policy

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. Unfortunately for Ukrainians, the president confused subjectiveness with sovereignty and no one bothered to explain to him the difference.

Z’s decision to remain in Kyiv after Putin’s not-so-secret sneak attack on February 24, 2022 can be explained easily this way: If Z had decided to leave the capital (after assuring us for months that Russia’s invasion was neither imminent or inevitable), his political career would have de facto ended.

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The Bright Side of Shame. Something we already knew, but not really (May 17, 2020)

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History of Modern Ukraine. Classroom lectures (November 19, 2022)

I think about the mess differently, because my intellectual political baggage is packed with Miłosz, Budinas, Bykov, Taras, Baradullin et al. Last time I checked, Poland’s experiment in state building had devolved into a weird pseudo religious strain of electoral authoritarianism.

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Setting the Plate Clear. Subjectivizing Ukraine (September 6, 2021)

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