“I saw hacksaws, chainsaws, axes, and machetes there. Everything was covered in blood.” Ukrainian military medic Yuriy Armash describes the terror inside Russian torture chambers. Ukrainian military medic Yuriy Armash spent more than a year in Russian captivity. Among other places, he was held in one of the most notorious torture facilities in the Kherson region, established by Russian occupiers inside a seized police station in Nova Kakhovka. There, he learned the stories of many people and witnessed how the Russians’ system of terror against local civilians operated. How Russians torture prisoners “The interrogations began on the very first day. They were conducted by the same FSB officers. During interrogations, they covered my face and handcuffed my hands behind my back. They asked where the weapons were, how many people were in our reconnaissance group, where our positions were, where we had come from, and what our mission was. They used an awl. They would pull the skin on my neck, pierce it, and leave the awl hanging there so I could feel it. Because I wasn’t telling them what they wanted to hear, since I couldn’t tell them something that didn’t exist, they started using a knife. They stabbed me in the leg. They would take a knife and press it into my upper leg until they felt the blade reach the bone. When the Russians realized they weren’t going to get an answer, they used a ‘Tapik,’ a military field telephone. They attached its wires to my ears and kept turning the crank, sending electric shocks through my body until I started screaming.” How Russian occupiers abused civilians “Starting April 20, they began taking me out to provide medical assistance to civilians who had been severely beaten by the Russians. I remember treating a woman who was about 40 years old in one of the two punishment cells in the basement. I bandaged her head because she had been beaten with a rubber baton. There were all kinds of injuries. They broke people’s legs. Men under the age of 35–40 were treated particularly brutally.” A room filled with blood-covered torture instruments “I never expected the level of brutality I witnessed after February 24. Although I had seen many things before that, I was honestly shocked. At the Nova Kakhovka police station, I entered rooms where I saw things that absolutely terrified me. I saw hacksaws, chainsaws, axes, and machetes. Everything was covered in blood. The room with the blood-covered torture instruments was on the second floor of the police station, in the left wing. It was just an ordinary office. But there were also more secret rooms in the building where they never even took me. At the police station, the occupiers also forcibly removed tattoos they didn’t like from the bodies of detained civilians. Some had their tattoos cut out with knives. Others had them burned off with potassium permanganate. Russian occupiers raped even children “When Buryats and Kalmyks were stationed at the police department, they frequently entered the cells of young women under the age of 25–30. They even sorted the women by age and placed them in separate cells. From time to time, women were taken out of their cells and brought to another wing. The young women were taken there at night and raped. When the Russians’ rotation was coming to an end, they sometimes entered the cells and raped the women right there. My cell was nearby. I could hear everything clearly… The worst case involved a 14-year-old girl whom the Russians were holding captive. She tried very hard to hide the fact that she had been raped. One day, when we were taken outside for a walk, I noticed that she was bleeding. I asked her what had happened. She didn’t want to answer. I asked, ‘Did Russian soldiers do this to you?’ She silently lowered her head. I assured her that no one except me would ever know about it. After that, she answered: ‘Yes.’”

Not a factory. Not a protest outside a gate. Their homes. Their families’ cars. At night. A group calling itself “The List” has gone after defence workers’ homes in Fleet, Dunfermline and South Queensferry. Houses and cars were covered in red paint, tyres slashed, and “baby killers” sprayed on a garage. They boast of a “bank of addresses” built from hacking and leaks. “Quit your job, or risk a visit from The List.” If that’s not a threat, what is? Footage: The List, via Daily Mail

On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders. And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap. I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece. A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable. Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000. At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation. At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product. Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved. At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper. B. The mechanism: why it's systematic. When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient. In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work. The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in. C. Suffering demands a culprit. A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second. But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat. And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world? D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain. Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem. Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit? No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time. E. One lens, a thousand causes. And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them. F. The perfect inversion. Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second. It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene. G. The ballot box confirms it. In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease. In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state. H. The way out. These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target. The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture. That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

When Ukraine destroys Russian data centers, hoards of aggressive right-wing bots disappear, and Twitter becomes much friendlier. Isn’t that interesting? So much of our politics is driven by the internet, and so much of the internet is driven by Russians who want to hurt us. Shouldn’t we do something about that, given that we know it?

Angry but important - @HJoyceGender with wider thoughts higher education in the UK today following the Jason Arday affair. She and others were shocked to see some of what passes for scholarship today. (Also makes a reference to @CharlotteCGill ) ‘Arday’s plagiarism, and the poor quality of his individual work, are the least of what is so enraging about this story. The bigger problem is that he was part of a broader endeavour that made both him and others more stupid and useless. In a functioning market — one without government subsidies for useless qualifications and where the customers and end consumers’ interests were aligned — fields like the one Arday worked in would attract few or no students — perhaps the occasional eccentric with private means. Academia is supposed to be self-regulating, but the Arday affair shows that it really cannot be trusted. In a mawkish and condescending op-ed published in the Telegraph on August 19th, five days after Arday’s death, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge, Chris Smith, wrote: “Our former Senior Tutor at Pembroke College in Cambridge used to say in his speech to the incoming first-year students, on their first day: “You’re not here to learn to be clever; you’re here to learn to be kind.” We should all perhaps reflect on that message, in the aftermath of the tragedy of Jason Arday.” Honestly, what does he think Cambridge is — a pre-school? What does he think universities are for? Kindness is taught by example, and largely before children turn 18. And no institution can have more than one purpose. If they try to add another, they will inevitably lose sight of the original one and end up with none. For universities, that purpose is supposed to be the pursuit of knowledge, not “kindness”. Pursuing knowledge will sometimes be unkind. When academics who commit plagiarism and departments who appoint incompetents for base reasons such as politics are revealed in public and shamed, it will feel “unkind”. And more generally, free inquiry will sometimes turn up inconvenient, unwanted and actively hurtful truths. A university that thinks kindness is more important than those truths is not worthy of the name.’ open.substack.com/pub/helenj…