randy r. potts
@thephatic
Okie journo + editor; Hromadske, New Yorker, AJE, Baffler, et al Tulsa / Baltimore / mieszkam w Warszawie queer as fuck; he/him for str8s Signal: thephatic.39
many of the claims in this post by @ukrainianana.bsky.social are not backed up by scholarship but I think it's a pretty good window into where a lot of Ukrainians are rn in re their neighbor, Poland
DC is a real city, one that doesn't just live and breathe politics; it's almost a million people, living on streets most Americans have never seen - a southern town, where ppl walk slowly in summer - of all American cities, it's maybe this city Donald Trump is terrorizing most
here in Warsaw it's 100 degrees today, 101 tomorrow, fewer than 10% have AC, and many older ppl especially live in Soviet-era apartment blocks built so poorly that higher floors become ovens; possibly related, here's a graphic for ya:
if you printed this out and walked around showing it to people on the street you wouldn't find one single person with any clue what he's talking about
if you know of BAP primarily thru his X account it's pretty wild that this (otherwise great) piece never mentions the homoeroticism
suddenly stikes me that Trump's White House cage match is some kind of sequel to Apollo Creed's bicentennial fight
my first trip here was 4 years ago, June 2022, when Poles invited Ukrainians to hold a joint Pride parade in Warsaw - as far as I know, it was the first Pride parade forced to relocate due to falling bombs - and now I live here and covered Pride for a local tv station as ... a local ...
really enjoying this poetic take on a memoir - every now and then there's a sentence that will just make me gasp
timeline snapshot: both Europe and US building out camps infrastructure:
how the closeted gay leader of the Polish right "congratulated" Peter Magyar's win in Hungary today ... so many brains, so much toast ...
proposing we turn Orban's "farm" into a gay bathhouse and tell Dreher he can live there for free, as a treat
when the Polish tv station I freelance for voiced this over today they had to bleep the President of the United States
the Israeli model for Gaza is also apparently being followed now in southern Lebanon; already there are multiple photos of Lebanese villages razed to the ground, some of them half a millennia old
today's haiku po Polsku: dzis, szare niebo Polacy ustawiają swoje koszyczki
just gonna put it out there that not bowing to golden idols is one of the most consistent themes of Christian rock
Edward Said's takedown of Bibi's *1986* book, "Terrorism: How The West Can Win"
on No Kings day we remember: this is how the Red Coats and King George talked about us, too
remains to be seen if the current govt will actually honor this; most likely they will do all they can to deny/delay until the elections in 2027; we can thank the (semi? pretty much everybody knows) closeted leader of the Polish right for this ......
Poland has taken another step towards marriage equality. Unlike in the US where, for instance, my husband and I getting legally married in NYC in 2012 was not accepted by TX, Poland can continue refusing *Polish* gay marriage licenses but has to accept them from other EU states.
Poland is both at the top of this list and, even a month ago, one of the US's closest allies in Europe - but - that's quickly changing and I'm not sure it is going to come to Trump's rescue in the strait. 🤷♂️
We’ve closed the #StraitsOfHormuz by mistake, can we use your phone?
related: even Germany's far right (NAZI) AfD is now saying that bc Iran, Trump is a war president, not a peace president