The team & the fans

by Frank L Palmer for Information War

Community

(This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday, Dec. 03, 2025 Wednesday, Dec. 03, 2025 at 3:59:32pm PST

When you sit in the bleachers, you can praise or criticize all the players on the team, even the greatest stars. You can tell everyone within earshot what you would do if you were the coach.

What you can’t do is affect the score.

Similarly, some of us are following the invasion of Ukraine with intense interest. We are debating the strategy involved in holding Pokrovsk. We are agreeing on the villainy of the pro-Putin politicians.

As long as we atr talking among ourselves, we are doing nothing to influence the course of the war.

Now, the amount of material and monetary support from the West is a major influence on the course of the war. Whatever we — Daily Kos members — can do to encourage that support is the greatest contribution we can make short of going there and taking up a gun.

Writing LTEs (letters to the editor) doesn’t make you a star, but it does pug you on the team. There are other ways of bending opinion, and you haven’t seen me criticizing any of them, but I think this os an effective one.

On October 23m I wrote a LTE to the Washington Post. It aid:Not too long ago, some people -- and not only Putin's American fan club -- saw the Dobropyla salient as the beginning of a breach in Ukraine's defenses in the Donbas. The Ukrainian defense lne was going to crack, and Russia would take a huge section of Ukrainian territory.

Now, the Ukrainian military has taken most of the salient back, and the process of doing so has left the Russian army with less material and fewer soldiers. Next time that we start counting Russian chickens, let's wait until they hatch.