Cogitation in the Time of War #31 - About the discussion on the global public arena

Macron and Scholz at a press conference before a meeting in Berlin, back in January 2022. Image taken from this My India First article.

Today is day #97 of Putin's (Still Failed) Invasion of Ukraine; 551 hours and roughly 39 minutes have passed since my previous cogitation and since I haven't cogitated here about the war lately, I was planning to only write when we reached the 100 days milestone, where I would talk about the situation on that day, the previous assessments and again attempt to forecast what will happen next. But during all this time I continue to follow closely, even though the frequency of the news and the frequency of remarks by the people I follow and that I give credibility have also reduced - this is an evidence of a phenomenon I mentioned before, that time normalises a situation, so the war in Ukraine is not such a hot topic as it used to be.

Still as I was writing, I follow closely and today I ended up writing a much longer thread than I had anticipated about a sort of discussion or debate that is being going one in the Twitterverse but also generally in the public arena, or using the direct translation of the portuguese expression, the public square, so now I copy that here for proper documentation.

America's unique "problem" that the rest of the World doesn't have

Image taken from this RTE article.

I woke up to the news today of yet another school shooting that happened in the US, this time in the city of Uvade in Texas, where a teenager (18 years-old, not old enough to drink a beer but old enough to buy a gun and to kill; also old enough to die in the military if required) killed 19 children and 2 adults and injured another 16 in the Robb Elementary School (ages from 5 to 11 years old, so the same school type that my own kids attend). I had to pause writing my essay on another human tragedy happening on the other side of the globe and write some words about these tragedies that, no matter what people say, it's a unique "problem" to the US: mass shootings done by a "normal" citizen but more specifically school shootings, many times with young men as the shooters, using legally obtained guns.

Please don't stop taking care of your mental health

On April 26th, so a little more than 2 weeks ago, I tweeted the following: I have decided to adapt into my "international" blog the more personal texts I wrote in my original blog (in Portuguese) about my mental issues that lead to a serious burnout (and more) because #MentalHealthMatters.
And today I finally completed the adaptation (I use this verb because it is not a simple translation of word by word, I need to adapt expressions and styles) of the 7 texts I published last year on my mental struggle experience.
There was another reason I wasn't fully certain yet when I tweeted my decision; that I struggled still until very recently even though last year I thought I was fine, and being aware of the issues and have tools to fight back, I still felt bad again after some weeks of vacation in Portugal.

Cogitation in the Time of War #30 - Victory or Defeat Day?

At the time of writing, we in Western Europe and also the USA are still on May the 8th, the day we celebrate Victory in Europe Day, when it was announced that the Germans had surrendered to the Allies and thus the war in Europe was over. 1 day before, the Germans had signed their Instrument of Surrender, the legal document in Reims where it was stated that fighting was to stop at 23:01 CET of the 8th. This is the main reason why the 8-May is considered the day for people in CET (Central European Timezone) or earlier (further West), because the war stopped officially on that day.

However it was already the 9-May in the Soviet Union when this occurred, and adding to this, the Soviet High Command didn't fully agree with the signing in Reims as they claimed it had to happen at the seat of Germany's government, Berlin. So another gathering occurred on the night of the 8th and a new version of the Instrument of Surrender was signed, the last signature being put to paper on the 9-May, 00:16 local time. These are the main reasons that Russia is celebrating the Victory Day of the Great Patriotic War (as they call WWII) tomorrow, Monday the 9-May, and not today with the rest of the Allies (USA, UK and France, the other countries that alongside USSR controlled a section of Germany after this).

Cogitation in the Time of War #29 - West and East

It's been 7 days since last cogitation and probably it will be another 7 days before I publish the next one. Tis the season of spring holidays (May vacations as they call it here in the Low Countries) and after 2 years of restricted travelling (although we did cross the "big pond" at the end of last summer) we needed this as a family. I also needed to go on a road trip as the other day I realised that driving more than 100 km in a single trip had become a rare occurrence, let alone the more than 1000 km road-trips we did so often before having the kids...

But well, moving one from this personal take, it's time to cogitate a bit about Putin's (Failed) Invasion of Ukraine and how the situation has been developing. Just some thoughts and not a complete coverage of the last days (or even weeks).

Finally the formula to make her satisfied (and get laid regularly)

So during my daily browsing on the social media (Facebook, in this particular case) I came across an article from IFLScience (previously I Fuckign Love Science) entitled The One Day A Month When Women Most Love Sex, And Other Fun Facts About Sex (I Fucking Hate sentences with all words starting in caps!).

This is not new, the Facebook page from this entity is constantly resharing older stuff, and in this case this was initially published in June 2017 (almost 5 years ago, in this day and age, an eternity), but I don't remember reading it before. In case you don't want to fully read it, this is based on data collected from the Glow fertility app so it is based on real feedback provided by women themselves and like any other study or survey is flawed but should give a nice idea that is at least approximate to reality (at least for the countries where the app is used and data was collected).

La France comme prévu

 

Results are only partial as the moment I write this but the projections after the polls close in France have been very precise and no major surprises happen. As far as I know, people already accept the projections including Le Pen that has conceded, albeit considers a win the highest voting received by her party (the far-right that is now the less extreme).

This shouldn't have been a surprise, even though earlier polls suggested a closer election. But after the 1st round, where Macron got more votes than 5 years ago, to me it was much more likely. The next projections showed an increasing margin and the vote was clear. France stays in the same path and to me that is the best for us all; Le Pen would destabilise the EU and of course the current geopolitical situation in regards to the West stance on Russia and that to me could be catastrophic in some ways.

Cogitation in the Time of War #28 - About the refugees situation

When I shared in the Cogitation #26 my desire to help more on the humanitarian side, with the most visible aspect being the refugees who arrive here, fleeing from the war, my friend Marisa sent me a warning message where she stated that we need to use caution and common sense. She personally knows of (at least) one case where the family hosting refugee(s) ran into problems and she finds the help countries are providing now to be disproportionate when compared with other refugees from previous years who still face different obstacles and no one seems to care about them anymore. I cannot comment on the specific situation she knows about, as I have no knowledge of the facts (I only know that it happened, not what happened) but to me it's not surprising that situations like this happened and will continue to happen here and there, situations where refugees will abuse the goodwill of those who are helping them; we are talking about people so they are not all angels, some might be demons. And it's also very obvious that with the current crisis there is a much greater willingness on the part of other Europeans to help Ukrainians, when compared to others, but not only this is due to the proximity factor (physical, ethnic, cultural and religious at least) but also this refugee situation is different from the other refugee crisis that Europe has faced before.