With 10 weeks to go before the elections, it’s time time refresh my Senate guide. So far, I’ve been wrong about 4 out of 18 Senate races, twice higher error rate than the 3 out of 27 calls in my 2018 California primary guide, but still accurate enough to be useful. Of course, the November success rates among the elections I called right and wrong before the primaries will be the final evaluation of my predictions.

Сила и надежда на успех продолжающихся в Беларуси протестов происходят из одного источника: единства между беларусами разных городов и деревень, разных профессий и социальных слоёв, разных политических убеждений. Это единство стало возможным благодаря тому, что цели, заявленные объединённым штабом, просты и очевидны, а методы протеста, предлагаемые каналом NEXTA — ненасильственные и не вызывают разногласий об их допустимости.

Заголовок дня на Тутбае – план Артёма Шрайбмана “Какой диалог может спасти страну.” Мне как-то неудобно после семи лет отсутствия на родине критиковать и предлагать свои решения, может всё-таки есть ещё в стране люди, способные предложить менее оторванный от реальности план?

On August 19, Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies organized a seminar on the potential democratic breakthrough in Belarus, featuring Michael McFaul, Francis Fukuyama, Anna Grzymala-Busse, and Kathryn Stoner. These are my notes for what I see as the key takeaways.

Like every political surprise, the snowballing protest in Belarus now seems to have been inevitable. It wasn’t. Like every dictatorship before it, Lukashenka’s regime still appears invincible. It isn’t. Now of all times it is essential for Americans to understand the nuance and the context of what’s happening in Belarus. This could be America. This can still happen in America.

These are verbatim translations of testimonies from several Belarusians protesting the fabrication of the presidential elections in Belarus.

У меня вопрос к ветеранам титульной оппозиции, которые сами никак не решатся взять тапок в руки и присоединиться к революции надежды, да ещё и других отговаривают. Вам что, особое приглашение надо?

As of this writing, daily new cases of COVID-19 in Germany, the most populous country in Europe with 83 million people, hover around 500. The entire European Union — population 447 million, a third larger than United States — reports stable 4,000 new cases per day. United States has now crossed 50,000 new cases per day and it keeps getting worse. Why? Because of fascists and lies.

United States is in the middle of its first existential crisis since the Civil War. US response to COVID-19 has become one of the worst in the world because of the mistakes we made in 2016. We can’t afford to keep making them, not when failure to restore democracy means that US, EU, and the rest of the world all fall to fascism, religious totalitarianism, and economics of slavery and serfdom. Where on this bottomless spectrum of disaster is your acceptable cost of “burn it down because the candidate I wanted didn’t win the primary?”

In short, we can’t. Voting for policies rather than for politicians is called direct democracy, and there are currently no functioning direct democracies in the world. They are all, including the political system of the United States of America, representative.