We've never met, never even corresponded. I don't know the people close to her and, as far as I can ascertain, she doesn't know the people close to me. What I do know is:
a) I'm a pretty good talent spotter, across multiple fields, disciplines and domains.
b) she has talent.
When she joined FT Alphaville in, I think it was 2008, I thought "This one might be worth paying attention to."
Our time on this earth is limited, you can't do every thing, you can't read every story, you can't meet every person. So you have to make choices.
And because people in finance are basically in the information advantage/information arbitrage business, they are especially dependent on financial journalists, i.e. people whose own business is proffering information. But again, there is not time enough for all of them.
So you have to sort through the herd to find those who embody the most important attributes required by the professional consumer of business information. In approximate order of importance you want to know that: they are honest about reporting what they see, they are willing to correct errors as soon as they are found, for errors there will be, that they are intelligent enough and experienced enough to know what might be valuable to their readers, that they are creative, and this is distinct from being "original." No one is original and in fact I prefer writers who are aware enough and brave enough to credit the source of something and just lay it out there. The creativity is in the juxtaposition, the insights that can be gleaned in the interstices of various thoughts and concepts.
So with that explanation of why we follow Ms. Kaminska I will ditch her for a moment and do some self-referential (reverential?) reposting.
In authoritarian/totalitarian/tyrannical societies when people are attacked for their ideas, to the point that their ability to earn a living is threatened or destroyed they oftentimes keep their thoughts to themselves, while outwardly appearing to acquiesce to the authorities or the mob which is oftentimes created by the authorities.
This dynamic makes for a very dysfunctional society, exemplified by the old Soviet joke, "We pretend to work, They pretend to pay us." This ended up being the way of life from the Balkans to the Baltic, with various degrees of submission. After the East German revolt in 1953 was put down, the GDR was probably the most enthusiastic adopter of the totalitarian society required to force people to do things that are contrary to the human spirit, and thus had less distinction between outward appearance and inner beliefs; while people in Czechoslovakia and Poland probably had the most difficult time accepting the diktats from above and thus had the widest divergence between mouthing the party line and what they were actually thinking.
In the case of Poland it was so apparent to everyone involved that Stalin once remarked that imposing Communism on Poland was akin to “fitting a saddle onto a cow.”.
A major, major issue to be aware of is that when people begin to realize they are not alone in their thinking, their passive resistance begins to exceed the limits of containment and self-restraint that individuals have practiced, to the point you get Budapest in 1956, Prague 1968 or Tiananmen Square 1989. The rulers, fearing for their lives, much less their hold on power, tend to react violently to what they didn't see coming or, in the case of Gdansk in 1989 they try to cut a deal to hang on.
This rapid reveal of what the populace actually thinks and feels is the preference cascade.
Here's a 2022 post that will suffice as a quick overview:
When Self-Annointed Elites And Other Control Phreaks Care More About Image Than Substance
For the record, Potemkin, like Dracos, got a bad rap from history.
Excerpted from the Ecospohia essay "Potemkin Nation", August 18, 2021:
One of the repeated lessons of history is that when Potemkin politics become standard operating procedure in a nation, no matter how powerful and stable that nation might look, it can come apart with astonishing speed once somebody provides the good hard shove just discussed. The sudden implosion of the Kingdom of France in 1789 and the equally abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 are two of the most famous examples, but there have been many others. In every case, what happened was that a government that had stopped solving its nation’s problems, and settled for trying to manage appearances instead, discovered the hard way that governments really do derive their power from the consent of the governed—and that this consent can be withdrawn very suddenly indeed.
When things start to crumble they can crumble fast.
This is exactly the point made by Vaclav Havel in "The Power of the Powerless" and by Timur Kuran in his writings on preference cascades. If interested see:
Lessons From Communist Eastern Europe On Virtue Signaling and Other Things
And
Politics: I Am Told I Should Read Professor Timur Kuran To Understand Current American Politics
And what does this have to do with Ukraine?
For the first six or so months after Russia invaded Ukraine, someone who said or printed a word that might be thought by anyone to be disparaging of Ukraine or Zelensky or Western policy towards same, that someone was attacked. When I say anyone I mean some rando on Twitter might take offense, perhaps your Human Resources department, politicians and their cronies, anyone. And the attacks on that someone were as vicious as the Communists attacks on those who spoke out in Eastern Europe. And the emotions behind the attacks were usually just as faux and drummed up and phony.
But there are a lot of issues that spring from the events in Ukraine that are serious, that must be addressed and that for the mental hygiene of the Western populations that are funding the—what is now obviously a proxy—war against Russia, should be discussed.
Which brings us back to Ms. Kaminska.
She recently entered into an interesting, possibly unique, relationship with Politico.eu whereby she is Senior Finance Editor in Europe for Politico while continuing as founder/owner/editor-in-chief at The Blind Spot.
And as part of the agreement she will be republishing Politico content, both paywalled and not, for her subscribers. The first of these articles was:
