26 Monday December 6 2021 | the times
Comment
Samantha’s departure feels real and
poignant: perhaps what is missing will
prove to be the most interesting thing
about the new series. Most women
have a Samantha in their lives; I did.
In my twenties she was the best
playmate in town, but come our
thirties she remained a renegade
who didn’t want what she was
supposed to want. The rest of us bent
into matrimony and motherhood,
instead she made her escape. I
worried I got boring, I worried she
got lonely. “Friendships fade.”
Now my babies are growing up
and want to know who the crazy one
is in my photos and stories. I’m
glad and sorry she got away.
Especially now, post-Covid, in
an era not just of safe sex but
“safe socialising”, the whole
world is sorely lacking what
Samantha symbolises:
stranger-trusting, risky,
rebellious hedonism.
Samantha is important.
Wherever you are
girlfriend, I haven’t
forgotten you. I
wish you a very
merry party season.Love racier F1
T
he behind-the-scenes
racing series Drive to
Survive is like a
Formula One induction
programme for “newaudiences” like me. It turned cars
going “neaoww” around a track, one
of the most boring “sports” in the
world, into Top Gun. Except real and
even more homoerotic, if that were
humanly possible. This season our
very own Lewis Hamilton is the Tom
Cruise hero “Maverick” and his arch
rival is the clinical Max “Iceman”
Verstappen. I have become
unhealthily invested in the idealistic
Hamilton-Maverick and his attempts
to beat the cold, egoistic Iceman.
Even better, being witness to the
pair’s intense after-race locker room
finale; if the cameras could show
more of that and less of the
cars, thank you.Football’s more fun
I
went to my first football
match in south London in
the late 1980s and for some
reason, after a few hours of
being crushed by gangs of
testosterone-poisoned,
punchy people, I didn’t go
back for 30 years. And then
I went to watch Arsenal last
week and it was like
awakening from some kind of
football coma. Sure, there still
weren’t that many more
women, but there was a
noticeable change in sexual
politics. The stadium
displayed a huge Gay
Gooners banner, and at half-S
amantha has gone from Sex
and the City. When the TV
series reboots on Thursday,
after a gap of 18 years and two
execrable movies, the foursome
of Manhattanite female friends are
down to three. Samantha, forgive me:
back then I thought you were a bit of
a nutter because you couldn’t stop
having sex. Now I miss you.
For those of you who didn’t watch
and rewatch Sex and the City back in
the day, it was like a corporate
training video for womanhood in
which Samantha was “the goer”. The
actress Kim Cattrall, post-traumatic
after those films, has refused to
reprise the role, so the scriptwriters
have ejected her character from her
social group. “Friendships fade,”
explained one of the makers of the
new series, with New York cruelty.
One reviewer in The New Yorker
dismissed the original Sex and the City
as consumerist nonsense: “The Lying,
the Bitch and the Wardrobe”. But
Biden must resist joining Putin’s poker game
Russia is creating a crisis over Ukraine that it will offer to solve if the West bows to its demands
making. It signed the Nato-Russia
Founding Act in 1997 and jointly
established the Nato-Russia Council
in 2002. Indeed, the alliance was so
keen to mollify Russia that it held no
exercises in the new member states,
placed no external troops there and
explicitly excluded Russia from its
threat assessment, precluding even
outline contingency plans about how
to respond to a Russian attack.
Only in 2010 did Nato, belatedly,
change its strategic concept to include
the defence of its eastern members.
That followed a cyberattack on
Estonia in 2007, the war in Georgia in
2008 and a menacing military exercise
in 2009 in which Russia rehearsed
an attack on the Baltic states and a
nuclear strike on Warsaw.
Even then Nato’s response was
mainly on paper. Only Russia’s
attack on Ukraine in 2014 eventually
prompted the deployment of small
tripwire forces in Estonia (led by a
British contingent), Latvia, Lithuania
and Poland.
I have spent most of this year
working on a think tank report on
Baltic Sea regional security. The
picture is daunting — for us. Nato
forces there are heavily outnumbered.
They have no air defences and little
long-range strike capability. We lack a
maritime strategy for the region; the
command structure resembles a plate
of spaghetti. For Russia to portray
these puny forces as a threat is absurd.
So too is the idea of encirclement:
just one-sixteenth of Russia’s land
frontier borders Nato countries.
We should tell Putin that his
complaints are nonsense. Instead, we
negotiate with ourselves about how
to appease him.other irritants. He can demand
further demilitarisation in
neighbouring countries: an end to all
military exercises, perhaps, or the
withdrawal of the Nato tripwire
forces in Poland and the Baltic states.
Long-term energy deals would
entrench Russia’s role in exporting
gas to Europe. With Nato and the
EU rendered ineffective, Russia can
increase its presence further in the
Black Sea and continue boosting its
influence in former Yugoslavia.
Other countries see this danger
clearly. On Thursday the Finnish
president, Sauli Niinistö, pointedly
praised Nato as a force for stability in
Europe and insisted that any
decision on his country’s future
membership was none of Russia’s
business. Though nominally outside
the alliance, Finland is already far
closer to it than some of its existing
but laggardly members.
Finland’s worries, and its now-
soaring defence spending, underline
the central weakness in Putin’s anti-
western threnody. Nato did not
expand because of a secret plan to
encircle or humiliate Russia. It was the
other way round. Russia’s persistent
bullying of its neighbours stoked their
desire to join the alliance. Sweden,
which dismantled its defences in the
1990s, is also boosting defence
spending and strengthening its ties
with the United States and with
Britain because Russia persistently
intimidates it.
Russia forced changes in Nato, too.
When the alliance first admitted
members from the former Warsaw
Pact, it did so in consultation with
Russia, offering the Kremlin
generous involvement in its decision-L
eaked US intelligence reports
suggest that Russia is
planning to attack Ukraine
soon, with 175,000 troops
massing on the country’s
northern and eastern frontiers.
Vladimir Putin is already laying down
an artillery barrage of misleading
claims about the threat Nato
supposedly poses to his country, and
contentious demands about how to
de-escalate the crisis. Like a mafia
don, he creates a problem and then
offers to solve it — at a price.
One result is tomorrow’s
emergency video call with President
Biden, giving the Russian leader the
international prestige that he craves.
Indeed, before a shot is fired Russia is
shaping the argument and its
outcome. The explicit wish list is a
formal end to Nato expansion, limits
to the military presence on its
borders and Ukraine’s de facto
dismemberment. But the real gain is
much bigger: an end to the post-1991
security order in Europe. Russia will
no longer be bound by promises and
standards of the past. Welcome to a
new world where might is right.
Ukraine is the immediate target
because of the threat it poses: not
military, but political. If the other
large, majority-Orthodox, ex-Soviet
country can prosper in freedom, why
must Russians endure the corrupt,
pompous, repressive and stagnant
rule of Putin? Russian propagandists
depict Ukraine as a failing state and a
fascist hellhole because its success as
a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-
party democracy (with a president
who is, incidentally, both Jewish and a
native Russian speaker) is intolerable.
Putin in May called Ukraine the
“anti-Russia”. In July he published a
rambling, obsessive essay insisting
that Ukrainians and Russians are
“one people”. The separation of their
language, culture and identity is
supposedly artificial: the result of
outside meddling. Ukrainians who
think differently are deluded.
Putin may believe his ownpropaganda. We should be outraged
by it. Ukraine is a real country;
Russia guaranteed its territorial
integrity in 1994 (in return for
Ukraine giving up its Soviet-era
nuclear weapons stockpile). That
deal, the Budapest Memorandum,
was unconditional. It did not contain
footnotes saying, “unless we don’t
like your government”. Ukraine’s 40
million people should not be treated
as pawns on someone else’s
chessboard. They have real hopes
and real grievances, unlike Putin’s
manufactured ones: 14,000 have died
in a war that Russia started.
Putin will not stop with Ukraine.
Having made us accept Russia’s
paranoid worldview he can deal withRussia’s bullying of its
neighbours stoked
their desire to join Nato
time they interviewed one of the Gay
Gooners’ organisers who explained
that in 2013 they became the first
LGBT+ football supporters group in
England, and have since grown to be
the world’s biggest. They also made it
sound the most fun: when I came
home and told my boyfriend, he
looked thoughtful and asked: “Do
you have to be gay to join?”View from his phone
T
o get access to my boyfriend’s
Arsenal pass I had to take his
phone for the day, and so I gave
him mine. I didn’t expect this to be
such an unsettling exercise in self-
awareness. First, seeing his social
media feeds felt like walking into the
wrong home. Who were these noisy
people with their uncomfortable
views? Why was I getting news on
“mega-structures” in China? Ads for
hair restorer and cleat brushes?
When I called our son, he answered
in a series of incomprehensible bleats
and banter before switching back into
English saying, “Sorry, thought you
were Dad.” Why didn’t he joke with
humourless old me? Even worse,
when my boyfriend called me, I saw
my name on the screen accompanied
by my dead-eyed photo and felt a
flash of horror. In our polarised
online world I would recommend
viewing yourself through someone
else’s screen. My world seemed so
tiny from a distance.Helen Rumbelow Notebook
My real Sex
and the City
pal made an
escape too
It isn’t smart to let
Chinese-made AI
toys get kids’ data
Elisabeth Braw
T
hinking about Christmas
presents for your children,
your grandchildren or
other young people in your
life? You may be tempted
to buy them something you think
will be not just fun but educational
as well: a smart toy. But you’d do well
to educate yourself first, because
even though smart toys are filled
with artificial intelligence (AI) we
have no idea what they do to our
children or where our children’s data
goes. Smart toys are a perfect tool for
authoritarian regimes.
If you’re like me and tens of
millions of others, you grew up with
Fisher-Price’s Chatter Telephone.
Just in time for Christmas, the iconic
phone has arrived equipped with
Bluetooth so we can use it for real
phone calls. Why chat with
imaginary friends? Indeed, why play
with imaginary friends? The
booming global smart-toy market
supplies gadgets that are powered by
the internet and AI and act as
children’s teachers or their digital
friends. And the market is booming,
growing at an annual rate of about
34 per cent and expected to reach
$18 billion (£13.5 billion) by 2023.
As with most other technology,
China dominates.
But despite using AI and having an
enormous influence on children,
smart toys are unregulated. We don’t
know what goes into them or who
gets access to the data they collect
about our children. What’s more, we
don’t know what playing with smart
toys does to children’s brains. “Smart
toys come with backstories,” notes
Kay Firth-Butterfield, a British
former judge who is now head of AI
at the World Economic Forum.
“How do we make sure that children
are able to think creatively? If they
don’t, does it matter? We imagine
it does but we simply don’t know
because very little research is
being done.”
What matters a great deal, too, is
what smart toys teach children,
because digital teachers and digital
friends disseminate values. Nobody is
documenting what sort of
conversations children are having
with their smart toys, and how those
conversations influence them.
Imagine the potential for a regime
intent on influencing children at
home and around the world. There’s
no evidence yet of Beijing imposing
its will on China’s impressive smart-
toy industry, but it has the power to
do so. That puts smart toys in a new
light, not just in the West but in the
developing world as well. Imagine
STEM-teaching toys disseminating
Beijing’s worldview along with
physics and geometry.
Children will need to learn with
artificial intelligence. But real
intelligence is invaluable, too. Happy
Christmas shopping!Elisabeth Braw is senior fellow at the
American Enterprise InstituteEdward
Lucas@edwardlucas