Insane in the Ukraine, Insane in Ukraine

I've transferred this blog to Substack , partly because it looks nicer and has various bells and whistles, but mostly because I'm a bit disturbed by the response I got from the Blogger 'team' (or algorithm) to my post "Nazis in Ukraine? That's ridiculous, they have a Jewish president!" . I published the post on Feb 4, and on Feb 8 I received a (presumably automated) email from 'The Blogger Team' informing me that the post had been unpublished because "Your content has violated our Malware and Viruses policy. Please visit our Community Guidelines page linked in this email to learn more." No further explanation was given, but I was invited to submit it for review once I had fixed the problem. Needless to say, the post doesn't contain any malware or viruses, or link to any pages that might qualify as such. I didn't change any of the post, apart from adding the note to the Blogger.com content moderation team that is still there, and

Since the beginning of Russia's Special Military Operation in Ukraine, the conflict has been universally characterised in the western media and by western politicians as a battle between democracy and autocracy/dictatorship, with Ukraine firmly on the side of democracy. If such an insulting oversimplification were to be taken seriously (and not everyone does), what exactly are the criteria by which Ukraine could be judged to be a democracy and Russia an autocracy? Freedom of the press Since 2019, laws have been introduced in Ukraine that curtail press freedom in the name of ' fighting disinformation ' or 'stopping the spread of fake news'. In practice this means that the Ukrainian National Council for Radio and Television Broadcasting are able to block websites and TV and radio stations, if they don't approve of what they're saying. In February 2021 , they used these powers to shut down three TV stations. In January 2023 , the draft bill introduced in 2

**Note to the blogger.com content moderation bots/humans: This post was flagged as violating Community Guidelines, specifically because "Your content has violated our Malware and Viruses policy". I have no idea how this post could contain malware or viruses, and none of the links are harmful, so I don't know how I can make it acceptable. Maybe the real reason has nothing to do with malware or viruses? ** Someone - a Jewish person as it happens - said that to me, pretty much verbatim. And it's true, it is ridiculous! Unfortunately, that doesn't make it untrue. Volodomyr Zelensky has stated that his great-grandparents were killed when German troops burned their village during WW2, that all of their male children joined the Red Army, and that of those children, only his grandfather survived the war. He is not only Jewish, his first language is Russian. Either of these things could make him expendable for diehard Ukrainian nationalists - in fact, expendable may be