A temporary truce with Russia is “meaningless” and will only lead to a further escalation in the ongoing military conflict between Kiev and Moscow, a member of the Ukrainian team negotiating in peace talks has stated. 

“We won’t agree to a ‘Minsk-3’ or ‘Budapest-2’ – it’s all pointless,”Mikhail Podoliak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said in an interview with RBK-Ukraine on Friday. 

“In a historical perspective, even a short one, all these ‘Minsks’ lead to great tragedies. None of these agreements will work without real mechanisms of preventing war,” he said, referring to the Minsk agreements, which were signed in 2014 and 2015 and were meant to end the war in the Donbass region of Ukraine. 

Moscow claimed that Kiev intentionally failed to implement any of their obligations under the agreements and continued their military campaign against the breakaway regions of Lugansk and Donetsk for eight years.

Podoliak also said that “Ukraine is not interested in a temporary truce with Russia,” and that “it’s important to push through such conditions that would not allow Russia to even think of attacking Ukraine or crossing its borders,” arguing that any temporary truce would stimulate Russia to take further hostile actions.

Commenting on the peace talks, he argued that the situation has changed as the Ukrainian people are now much more negative when it comes to any possible negotiations with Russia.

Nevertheless, Podoliak, who insists that “the Russian world is a world of death” and is “outside of human civilization,” claimed that Kiev believes the talks must continue as they can lead to the establishment of humanitarian corridors and the exchange of POWs.

The latest round of negotiations between Moscow and Kiev was held last week in Istanbul, Turkey, where, according to the Russian side, the Ukrainian delegation offered its first draft of written proposals on how to resolve the conflict. 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has since accused the Ukrainian side of trying to stall the talks by changing the wording of the proposals and backtracking on several key issues. He said on Thursday that the proposal sent by the Ukrainian side this week failed to mention that the security guarantees Kiev wants to obtain from leading world powers do not cover Crimea. Russia has considered the peninsula part of its territory since 2014, when it voted to reunite with Russia. 

Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Sky News on Thursday that Moscow hopes the military offensive in Ukraine will end in the near future, possibly “in the coming days,” through either the Russian military reaching its goals or the finalization of an agreement between the two countries.

Moscow attacked the neighboring state in late February, following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements signed in 2014, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German and French brokered Minsk Protocol was designed to regularize the status of the regions within the Ukrainian state.

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https://www.rt.com/russia/553542-ukraine-negotiator-truce-meaningless/

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It would be simple for Volodymyr-little-shit to sign an accord with Russia.... and prevent more deaths. But he prefers to sacrifice "his" people on behalf of the American Jewish Nazis... Good luck....

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.............

Australia’s a democratic wonderland. A vote of thanks to one rather strange man

Australians make too little of the success of our democracy. So it is unsurprising that last month, the centenary of an event which profoundly shaped it passed uncelebrated and unnoticed. On July 31, 1924, the amendments to the Commonwealth Electoral Act which enshrined compulsory voting at federal elections came into effect.

Any well-informed American, British or other foreign political observer or journalist will usually speak of admiration for an electoral system which gives every citizen a sense that they have a stake in the democratic process; one which removes any possibility that the result’s legitimacy might be called into question by claims that, because of variabilities in turnout, it did not represent the true will of the people.

Compulsory voting has had a hugely stabilising effect on Australian democracy. Objections to compulsion are overcome by the fact – as every election pedant will tell you – that the obligation is not to vote, merely to take a ballot paper. It’s such an infrequent and low-level civic obligation that only the sternest of hard-core libertarians would object.

Meanwhile, as is our glorious national custom of taking the pomposity out of serious occasions, election day in Australia is something like a national fete as we troop to schools and community halls to be greeted not just by party workers, but volunteers on cake-stalls, selling raffle tickets and barbecuing the ubiquitous “democracy sausage”. The vaguely festive character of Australian election days is unique.

We insufficiently appreciate how innovative Australia has been in its electoral laws and systems. We were the first to introduce the secret ballot – which became known internationally as “the Australian ballot” – as long ago as 1856, in colonial Victoria. In 1894, South Australia became second only to New Zealand in enacting female suffrage.

By the early decades of the past century, Australia had become a laboratory of democratic experimentation as different jurisdictions not only extended the franchise, but introduced new variants to the standard voluntary first-past-the-post system used in Britain, the United States and elsewhere.

Apart from compulsory voting, our most important reform was the introduction, in 1918, of the preferential method of voting, following the recommendations of a royal commission on elections, which reported in 1915. This innovation has a very strange backstory.

The preferential system of voting resulted from the work of a 19th century mathematician, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who spent his life as a don at Oxford’s grandest college, Christ Church. Dodgson, who never married, was happiest in the company of young girls, whom he often sketched and photographed. He developed a particular fondness for the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, Dr Henry Liddell.

One day in the summer of 1862, he took Alice Liddell (13 at the time), together with two of her schoolfriends, on a picnic, during which he enchanted them with a story about a little girl who fell down a rabbit hole and had a series of fabulous adventures. He turned the story into a manuscript, which he dedicated to Alice as “the love-gift of a fairytale”. It was published in 1865 under Dodgson’s nom de plume, Lewis Carroll. Alice in Wonderland became probably the most beloved – and certainly the most successful – children’s book in the world.

When he wasn’t dreaming up charming stories to entertain little girls, Charles Dodgson was a seriously good mathematician. One of his fields of interest was what we today call choice theory. In June 1874, he published a paper in which he proposed what he claimed to be the most exact method for expressing an ultimate preference among a multiplicity of alternative choices. It became known among mathematicians as “the Dodgson method”.

Something of an academic entrepreneur, Dodgson did not confine himself to scholarly journals. He published his theory in a pamphlet, which he circulated widely, and also published a version of it in the St James’s Gazette in May 1877. It became known in political circles as well as mathematical ones.

In his biography, Lewis Carroll, Morton Cohen claims that Dodgson’s interest in voting methods had been piqued in the rarefied air of Oxford academic politics. He even suggests that it was originally devised to alter the voting procedures at Christ Church as part of an academic intrigue to displace Liddell, which “grew out of his smouldering animosity towards the dean”. Liddell had long detested Dodgson because of his disapproval of Dodgson’s obsession with his daughter.

Although he failed to usurp Alice’s father, Dodgson’s interest in voting systems grew. He later developed other voting methods specifically for parliamentary elections, one of which he called “proportionate representation”.

When the royal commission on elections reported in 1915, it recommended the adoption of the Dodgson method. (We don’t know whether the royal commissioners were aware that the mathematician who invented it was Lewis Carroll.)

When you cast your vote at the federal election next year, as you munch on your democracy sausage and reflect on the relaxed, good-natured mood of election day in Australia, have a quiet chuckle that the rather strange man who gave us the method of choosing between Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton is the same person who also gave us the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is a professor at ANU.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-s-a-democratic-wonderland-a-vote-of-thanks-to-one-rather-strange-man-20240823-p5k4tt.html

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GUSNOTE: THE GENERAL COMMENT ABOUT VOTERS NOT APPRECIATING THE AUSTRALIAN VOTING SYSTEM IS PURE BRANDIS CRAP...

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

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Yet, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), otherwise known as Lewis Carroll, was an enigma. Like JJ Tolkien, CS Lewis and Charles Williams, he was a strongly religious man. But was there a darker side to him? He had a stutter and was of poor health… And Catherine Robson refers to Carroll as "the Victorian era's most famous (or infamous) girl lover”...

Dodgson's existence remained little changed over the last twenty years of his life, despite his growing wealth and fame. He continued to teach at Christ Church until 1881 and remained in residence there until his death. Public appearances included attending the West End musical Alice in Wonderland (the first major live production of his Alice books) at the Prince of Wales Theatre on 30 December 1886. 

The two volumes of his last novel, Sylvie and Bruno, were published in 1889 and 1893, but the intricacy of this work was apparently not appreciated by contemporary readers; it achieved nothing like the success of the Alice books, with disappointing reviews and sales of only 13,000 copies.

The only known occasion on which he travelled abroad was a trip to Russia in 1867 as an ecclesiastic, together with the Reverend Henry Liddon. He recounts the travel in his "Russian Journal", which was first commercially published in 1935. On his way to Russia and back, he also saw different cities in Belgium, Germany, Poland, and France.

Dodgson abruptly ceased photography in 1880, though he had established his own studio on the roof of Tom Quad. He had created around 3,000 images, and was an amateur-master of the medium, though fewer than 1,000 images have survived time and deliberate destruction.

He stopped taking photographs because "keeping his studio working was too time-consuming". He used the wet collodion process while commercial photographers had started using the dry-plate process in the 1870s, taking pictures more quickly. Popular taste changed with the advent of Modernism, affecting the types of photographs that he produced. As if Carroll could not have adapted to new ideas?...

A study by Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over half of his surviving work depicts young girls, though about 60% of his original photographic portfolio is now missing. Dodgson also made many studies of men, women, boys, and landscapes; his subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues, paintings, and trees. His pictures of children were taken with a parent in attendance and many of the pictures were taken in the Liddell garden because natural sunlight was required for good exposures.

Some late twentieth-century biographers have suggested that Dodgson's interest in children had an erotic element, including Morton N. Cohen in his Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1995), Donald Thomas in his Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with Background (1995), and Michael Bakewell in his Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1996). Cohen, in particular, speculates that Dodgson's "sexual energies sought unconventional outlets", and further writes:

We cannot know to what extent sexual urges lay behind Charles's preference for drawing and photographing children in the nude. He contended the preference was entirely aesthetic. But given his emotional attachment to children as well as his aesthetic appreciation of their forms, his assertion that his interest was strictly artistic is naïve. He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even to himself.

Cohen goes on to note that Dodgson "apparently convinced many of his friends that his attachment to the nude female child form was free of any eroticism", but adds that "later generations look beneath the surface" (p. 229). He argues that Dodgson may have wanted to marry the 11-year-old Alice Liddell and that this was the cause of the unexplained "break" with the family in June 1863, an event for which other explanations are offered. Biographers Derek Hudson and Roger Lancelyn Green stop short of identifying Dodgson as a Paedophile (Green also edited Dodgson's diaries and papers), but they concur that he had a passion for small female children and next to no interest in the adult world.

Catherine Robson refers to Carroll as "the Victorian era's most famous (or infamous) girl lover” in her book Men in Wonderland — The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman.

Chapter four. Lewis Carroll and the Little Girl: The Art of Self-Effacement   

What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning? 

                       (Lewis Carroll, “Through the Looking Glass”)   

WHEN I first read Lewis Carroll’s late and unloved work, Sylvie and Bruno, I was searching for material that might help to bring the Oxford don's two main forms of creative expression, fiction and photography, into relation with his favorite subject in each genre, the little girl. Carroll studies have generally employed one particular girl to do this work for them: Alice Liddell, Carroll's most  inspirational muse in both media, is used as a kind of revolving doorway, allowing critics to move  effortlessly from one art form to the other. The  following passage appears, at first sight, to offer an  alternative and less-trodden route to my desired nexus:  

There are some things one says in life — as well as things one does — which come automatically, by reflex action, as  the physiologists say (meaning, no doubt, action without reflection, just as lucus is said to be derived "a non lucendo"). Closing one's eyelids, when something seems to be flying into the eye, is one of those actions, and saying "May I carry the little girl up the stairs?" was another. It wasn't that any thought of offering help occurred to me, and that then I spoke: the first intimation I had, of being likely to make that offer, was the sound of my own voice, and the discovery that the offer had been made.  

The  narrator of Sylvie and Bruno, a weary seventy-year-old man, is here explaining how he finds himself carrying an unknown crippled child out of a railway station. (A couple of pages later it will transpire that this child is not a real child at all, but a phantasm who swiftly transforms herself into the eponymous Sylvie, a metamorphosis that comes as no surprise in a work that habitually switches between realism and fantasy.) Here, in the middle of a story that presents the pairing of the old man and the little girl as the most natural thing in the world, the narrator provides an instance of the immediate and irresistible attraction ... 

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