Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compiletion episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gotta be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Welcome to it could happen
Speaker 1: here a podcast where we talk about things falling apart,
Speaker 1: and this week we're talking about our ability to have
Speaker 1: things that that don't get co opted by fascists falling apart. Garrison, Hello,
Speaker 1: take us, take us away. Yes, So today we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about kind of why maybe it's great not
Speaker 1: to see any aesthetic ground to fascists anytime it's uncomfortable
Speaker 1: to do. So we've brought on someone who I found
Speaker 1: on Twitter who wrote a very very great article about
Speaker 1: some kind of ongoing debate and drama around like anarchists
Speaker 1: symbols um and fascists trying to use symbols um. But
Speaker 1: I'm we are talking to a black ram. Hello, Hey,
Speaker 1: I was I was things I'm I'm I'm actually I'm
Speaker 1: actually doing okay, I've been I've been looking forward to
Speaker 1: this chat for a while. So yes, if, um, if
Speaker 1: people are unfamiliar, it looks like the past few weeks
Speaker 1: people have really freaked out about an eight pointed star.
Speaker 1: People really really seem concerned about it. Um. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: has a lot tied in with what's been happening in
Speaker 1: Ukraine because, as always happens when there's a new story
Speaker 1: that has anything to do with the far right, um,
Speaker 1: people got acquainted with some symbols that they had not
Speaker 1: been aware of before, particularly the san and rad, which
Speaker 1: is a common symbol that you'll see on members of
Speaker 1: the as Off Battalion kind of some other far right
Speaker 1: organization in Ukraine as well as elsewhere. You know, the
Speaker 1: christ Church shooter wore a son and rad, and then
Speaker 1: they started identifying all sorts of things that they felt
Speaker 1: looked like son and rad's everywhere on the internet, and
Speaker 1: things kind of spiraled from there. Well, and I think
Speaker 1: there's actually a little bit more to it than that. Well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna get into we're gonna get into black Ram's
Speaker 1: article here shortly. But yeah, I kind of first one
Speaker 1: just briefly go through. I think why it's this kind
Speaker 1: of why this debate happened now, because the debate has
Speaker 1: happened before, but it's never gotten this like intense. A
Speaker 1: big part of this his tied to Russia's invasion of
Speaker 1: Ukraine and everyone wanting to play like where's Waldo with
Speaker 1: symbols being like can you spot the son and red
Speaker 1: on the on the pictures of the as Off Battalion
Speaker 1: UM and I think the other so like so everyone's
Speaker 1: already kind of looking for symbols as like a fun game.
Speaker 1: But the other thing that's kind of happening is because
Speaker 1: of the Russia Dugan connection. Of Dugan's like a political
Speaker 1: fascist writer who's a very influential inside Russia. UM. But
Speaker 1: because of the Russia Dugan connection, some people are now
Speaker 1: seeing Dugan's symbol, the Uration Square for the first time, right,
Speaker 1: And now that they've seen the square, they're seeing anarchists
Speaker 1: using the Chaos Star, which looks a little similar. They're
Speaker 1: they're not the same, but they're because they just because
Speaker 1: they just learned about the Uration Square, now they're seeing
Speaker 1: the Chaos Star and they've never really noticed the castAR before.
Speaker 1: Maybe they're they just don't really care about what symbols
Speaker 1: random people use. But now that they see the uration
Speaker 1: symbol and they see the chaostar, they're making this connection
Speaker 1: here and they think this is a new development, right.
Speaker 1: They think this is like like they're they're asking themselves like,
Speaker 1: why are anarchists suddenly using this fascist symbol um, which
Speaker 1: they either think to themselves or they think out loud
Speaker 1: on Twitter dot com. Uh, which is really rich because
Speaker 1: I mean, anarchists have been using the chaost are longer
Speaker 1: than Dugan has been using his Uration square. And if
Speaker 1: you have been watching anarchists for any amount of time
Speaker 1: on the internet, I know you you would have seen
Speaker 1: them using the chaos star. Uh. It's not it's not
Speaker 1: a new development by any means. But because everyone's trying
Speaker 1: to like wear's Waldo and oh sent their way through
Speaker 1: the war, they're they're kind of drawing these false connections,
Speaker 1: which is kind of unfortunate because because there is actually
Speaker 1: some interesting things to talk about in terms of how
Speaker 1: Doogan did kind of base his design off of Michael
Speaker 1: Moorecox Chaos Star and a whole bunch of stuff around,
Speaker 1: like why anarchists use the chaos star and you know,
Speaker 1: there's a whole there's there's a nice debate to be
Speaker 1: had there around fascists always in asserting themselves in these
Speaker 1: subcultures and trying to gain ground, whether it be like
Speaker 1: the punk scene, the industrial music scene, uh, you know
Speaker 1: online gaming, right, fascists always trying to do this. Just
Speaker 1: often we want to we try to push back on that, right,
Speaker 1: like Nazia punks fuck off. But it seems specifically with
Speaker 1: the Chaos Star, a whole bunch of people just want
Speaker 1: to cave and let them kind of take this symbol,
Speaker 1: which is I know, I think not not a not
Speaker 1: a great instinct um, but to to kind of kind
Speaker 1: of talk about this and other kind of background stuff,
Speaker 1: like I said, we brought on a black ram Hello
Speaker 1: to help to help talk about this. So yeah, what
Speaker 1: kind of prompted you to write your article? I guess, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, watching this debate kind of go down, what
Speaker 1: what kind of actually just like what was what was
Speaker 1: the straw that broke the camel's back? And being like, Okay,
Speaker 1: now I need to write like a decently long article
Speaker 1: on this topic. I think I've said this on like
Speaker 1: on the on Twitter a little while before writing the
Speaker 1: actual article, But I think the the spark was a
Speaker 1: friend from a guy you may or may not have
Speaker 1: seen him around. He's like somebody who's like, well demn
Speaker 1: Stock but but but he has like anarchists leading on
Speaker 1: his bio, which I guess sort of which I guess
Speaker 1: sort of communicates the idea that he would probably like
Speaker 1: anarchism if he did not consider it to be impractical. Sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but anyways, I actually I kind of wavered on the
Speaker 1: idea of covering it at all. I thought it would
Speaker 1: I thought it would only go for like a few days,
Speaker 1: and it was sort of a Johnny come Lately by
Speaker 1: maybe a day or so, admittedly, but the figured it
Speaker 1: would be sort of ephemeral. But there's things I sort
Speaker 1: of kept seeing. But in the midst of writing it,
Speaker 1: there was like some tanking who went even fervor and
Speaker 1: made the link to the Chaos Star and I think
Speaker 1: it was the logo of the Sith Empire from certain
Speaker 1: Star Wars media. We'll talk about that like it's it's like, well,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, one has six lines and they're not
Speaker 1: even arrows. They're just like blocks in like a sort
Speaker 1: of hexagonal shape. But it's like the same guys really
Speaker 1: like the idea that the logo of the Ukrainian Armed
Speaker 1: Forces is actually the iron cross. Yeah. A big chunk
Speaker 1: of this, I think kind of the prehistory of why
Speaker 1: this became such a specific problem started with kind of
Speaker 1: Unite the Right in the period after that, where you
Speaker 1: had all these new fascist groups on the ground of
Speaker 1: the United States and they all had their symbols, and
Speaker 1: you know, I was a part of this to to
Speaker 1: to the degree that there's some culpability here. Um, a
Speaker 1: number of researchers, including myself, we're warning people like, hey,
Speaker 1: there's some like symbols that people are are taking to
Speaker 1: right wing gatherings and they're claiming to be normal conservatives,
Speaker 1: and these are these are symbols of groups like the
Speaker 1: Phineest Priesthood or groups like different kind of fascist organizations,
Speaker 1: and you might not be aware of them, and so
Speaker 1: you should know what kind of these, you know, the
Speaker 1: Khakistan flag or whatever means, because people are trying to
Speaker 1: kind of signpost their sympathy to these extreme groups. And
Speaker 1: that I think that was important because those people were
Speaker 1: legitimate problems, and um, they were trying to kind of
Speaker 1: stealthily hide they're very radical right wing sympathies behind some
Speaker 1: like obscure images. But the problem is that it got
Speaker 1: a lot of people looking not just looking for fascist
Speaker 1: symbols and everything, but also looking for the clout that
Speaker 1: comes from like pointing something like that out. And I
Speaker 1: think that's that's kind of the root of a lot
Speaker 1: of these these problems. And it's not surprising that it
Speaker 1: happened with Dugan's symbol that there's no absolutely not um
Speaker 1: because it does, like, again, if you're just like kind
Speaker 1: of a casual observer, it does look a lot like
Speaker 1: the chaos star and it makes its point and star
Speaker 1: with arrows, yeah, and it makes If you know anything
Speaker 1: about Dugan's philosophy, Alexander Dugan is a essentially a Russian
Speaker 1: political theorist and author. Um. There's a lot that's kind
Speaker 1: of said about how close he is to Putin. He
Speaker 1: certainly was at one point closer to Putin. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of debate as to whether or not Putin kind
Speaker 1: of saw him as more of like a useful uh
Speaker 1: person to kind of a useful propaganda Oregan, or whether
Speaker 1: or not he really bought into what Dugan was saying.
Speaker 1: But Dugan is and was a really big advocate of
Speaker 1: like what he called like multipolar um international politics, multipolarity,
Speaker 1: which is this idea that like the United States should
Speaker 1: not be a the hegemonic power in the world right,
Speaker 1: which it kind of was after the fall of the
Speaker 1: Soviet units. This idea that there should be a bunch
Speaker 1: of equivalent powers um, which is number one. You can
Speaker 1: see how a lot of folks on the left would
Speaker 1: be drawn in by that, even if they weren't particularly
Speaker 1: fans of putin just the idea that like, oh well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's been a problem that the United States, it's
Speaker 1: this massive hegemonic power. Perhaps it would be better if
Speaker 1: there were a bunch of equivalent powers um. And and
Speaker 1: it's one of those things where there's a logic to that,
Speaker 1: but it does kind of require ignoring all of the
Speaker 1: times in the past when we had a multipolar world
Speaker 1: and there was tremendous violence. There's a root error in
Speaker 1: this sort of pathway which sort of like refuses to
Speaker 1: deal with imperialism as a global system. Yeah. The reason
Speaker 1: that's a hang up is because once you once you
Speaker 1: think of imperialism as a global system, you you then
Speaker 1: have to move on to the idea that it a
Speaker 1: global system that then has to be dismantled globally. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't quite do that with capita because it implicates
Speaker 1: nations that are supposed to serve as like moments of
Speaker 1: world historic progress against like hegemonic capitalism, and it is
Speaker 1: one of those spooks of the mind that people kind
Speaker 1: of have to do away with well, which the Adicist
Speaker 1: movement sort of does pretty successfully, because that mostly comes
Speaker 1: from the fact that it starts off from the position
Speaker 1: of like the state as an actual sort of structural presence.
Speaker 1: It's sort of funny that, like the Marxist argument is
Speaker 1: usually down to like hyper focus on the state and
Speaker 1: hierarchy is idealist, which is odd when you consider that
Speaker 1: hierarchy and the state are very much material in the
Speaker 1: same way that capitalism itself is. So it's like it's
Speaker 1: it feels more like a sort of argument that's like, well,
Speaker 1: my materialism is the materialism, Your materialism is in fact
Speaker 1: a form of idealism. I think with with that, we're
Speaker 1: gonna go on a quick a quick quick head break,
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna come back. And I think we
Speaker 1: should probably now talk about like the origins of the
Speaker 1: Chaos Star and and Michael Moorecock and discordionism um, and
Speaker 1: then we'll kind of get into the kind of current
Speaker 1: current debate on it. Uh some more so anyway, here's
Speaker 1: here's here's some here's some ads for your ears coming
Speaker 1: in through the ear waves. Oh yeah, yeah, it's time.
Speaker 1: It's time to talk about more time for more so. Um,
Speaker 1: I guess, uh black Crab you you actually did a
Speaker 1: pretty good insistinct kind of things on how the Chaos
Speaker 1: Star came into being, initially via Michael Moorecock. Do you
Speaker 1: want it to just like as brief briefly talk about
Speaker 1: kind of how he came up with the symbol for
Speaker 1: his books and stuff. Okay, so full disclosure, I haven't
Speaker 1: really read books themselves. I've read some Michael Moorecock. A
Speaker 1: lot of what a lot of my familiarity from him
Speaker 1: is pretty secondhand. One of the main things of that
Speaker 1: is Serifungal being like this, this sort of eighties band
Speaker 1: that I sort of think back to. Their whole vibe
Speaker 1: is more Cox works. But but but anyways, the reason
Speaker 1: why the Chaos Star is the shape that it is
Speaker 1: is because what it's supposed to represent is meant to
Speaker 1: extend outward endlessly. Yeah, the counter symbol for order is
Speaker 1: a single a single upward pointing arrow voted with Funny enough.
Speaker 1: When I thought about that, I thought about the twas
Speaker 1: room or like tear. It doesn't really have to say meaning,
Speaker 1: but it's like upward pointing arrow in a symbolic context.
Speaker 1: That's the other example I have. But but that upward
Speaker 1: pointing arrow significies a straight and narrow expression of where
Speaker 1: possibility goes, where potential sort of goes, which create structure.
Speaker 1: The other the chaos Star, by contrast, has like the
Speaker 1: eight directions are meant to represent all directions in a
Speaker 1: circular sort of space, like a compass of sorts, and
Speaker 1: the energy and the potential and possibility goes out and
Speaker 1: all of them. We have no set path, no definite limit,
Speaker 1: no boundaries. It just goes. It just sort of goes
Speaker 1: out there. It's little wonder why the chaos magic movement
Speaker 1: embraced it for a very similar set of reasons. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's even because even though it is kind of a
Speaker 1: myth that there's absolutely no rules in chaos magic, what
Speaker 1: is true is that you can explore very a very
Speaker 1: very broad and like almost limitless range of like practical
Speaker 1: possibilities within that movement and that sort of within that
Speaker 1: sort of frame. It's a it's a very like post structuralist,
Speaker 1: post modern view of it. But this modern is how
Speaker 1: I've heard it described. And kind of getting back to
Speaker 1: the like what Morecock was in brief, because I do
Speaker 1: you think we need to kind of give an overview
Speaker 1: of who he is. Um, he's still alive. Um, last
Speaker 1: I checked. At least he's alive. I I heard him
Speaker 1: talking at an anarchist sci fi conference a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1: If you didn't immediately know who he was, he is
Speaker 1: the most influential fantasy author you have not heard of?
Speaker 1: He he he is like a George RR. Martin level
Speaker 1: of influence, if not significantly more so. Like he's he
Speaker 1: some people will say he's the most influential fantasy author
Speaker 1: since Tolkien. UM. And among his you've you've noted the
Speaker 1: band Sirith Ungle if you've, if you've been a fan
Speaker 1: of of any of the Warhammer games. Um, he's a
Speaker 1: huge influence on that because the thing that he created
Speaker 1: was kind of the the concept of chaos as a
Speaker 1: sort of religious entity. And I'm not going to get
Speaker 1: into like the depths of the lore in his books,
Speaker 1: but a lot of it is about kind of the
Speaker 1: struggle between order and chaos um and so the Chaos
Speaker 1: Star he he created that specifically like for this kind
Speaker 1: of theological like conflict that occurs throughout his books, and
Speaker 1: it became the symbol of like one of the sides
Speaker 1: in Warhammer, and this very like there's tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of people who have the Chaos star tattooed on them,
Speaker 1: not because of Warhammer, but or not because of any
Speaker 1: political reason or because of chast Mensic, because they were
Speaker 1: fans of like Warhammer forty or whatever. And it's interesting
Speaker 1: because in the same time, when I first got into
Speaker 1: anarchist political theory before long before I considered calling myself one,
Speaker 1: it was because I came across a book published by
Speaker 1: A k press Um I think I bought it in
Speaker 1: two thousands seven called No Gods, No Masters, and it
Speaker 1: was it's a collection. A lot of people have a
Speaker 1: copy of this book in in their house if they're
Speaker 1: into anarchist theory. It's like a collection of early anarchists,
Speaker 1: like people like Prudon essays on like the kind of
Speaker 1: the first wave of anarchist political theory and it has
Speaker 1: a chaos star on the cover. UM because number one
Speaker 1: Michael Moorecock identify is an anarchist. Um is a is
Speaker 1: a uh like as a like is both an author
Speaker 1: and someone who identifies as an anarchistic and yeah politically,
Speaker 1: and so his books had were particularly popular among anarchists, um,
Speaker 1: who don't always get a lot of chunks of pop
Speaker 1: culture to themselves. UM. And so he's he's. It was
Speaker 1: kind of from the beginning, both this nerdy fantasy symbol
Speaker 1: that you could see, you could you could put alongside
Speaker 1: a bunch of different ships from the Lord of the Rings.
Speaker 1: Not that I love the Lord of the Rings, but
Speaker 1: like you could see it as like like like somebody
Speaker 1: having a tattoo in Elvish. But it also took on
Speaker 1: almost immediately this dual meaning where it was actually representing
Speaker 1: aspects of anarchist political theory, and so it was put
Speaker 1: in printed on like books that were about political theory
Speaker 1: and had nothing to do with fantasy. So it's I
Speaker 1: can't actually I cannot actually think of another symbol with
Speaker 1: a similar pedigree. It's it's a really pretty unique case.
Speaker 1: It is. It is because it's it's less of like
Speaker 1: an anarchist symbol, but more a symbol created and used
Speaker 1: by anarchists. Like it was like it was, it was,
Speaker 1: it was, it was invented by an anarchist. It was.
Speaker 1: It was a symbol invented by an anarchist to represent
Speaker 1: something in fiction that had such resonance that people adopted
Speaker 1: it as an actual political symbol. Yeah. It honestly, it
Speaker 1: honestly doesn't require that much reach to see why people
Speaker 1: who would why people who like the idea of there
Speaker 1: being no hierarchy and no state, even if not total freedom,
Speaker 1: there's still like the most range that you could get
Speaker 1: that results in that negation. It doesn't take a lot
Speaker 1: of elaboration to see why the symbol expressly meant for
Speaker 1: the symbol of chaos would gain traction. Absolute. Absolutely, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was talking with Margaret Keilnjoy about this a while ago,
Speaker 1: and she was like, yeah, like if you were in
Speaker 1: the two thousands and then you were like a traveling
Speaker 1: crust punk, at least like people would have chaostar tattoos,
Speaker 1: because that's because that's like it's a yeah, expanding out
Speaker 1: in all directions, you know, you're those the single arrow
Speaker 1: is law and order. Instead, we're expanding out every in
Speaker 1: every possible way. Yeah, I mean I have a cast
Speaker 1: tattooed on me and I it's it's it's for primarily
Speaker 1: ideological reasons, as opposed to the fact that I spent
Speaker 1: my entire child with playing Warhammer of so, so yeah,
Speaker 1: it's I think now, so it is worth mentioning. So
Speaker 1: the cas star was invented in the sixties by Michael Morcock.
Speaker 1: Of course there is There's been other eight pointed stars
Speaker 1: over the course of thousands of years of history. Of
Speaker 1: course it is it is. It is like a broad
Speaker 1: like geometrical shape. Every kind of star has meant something, yes,
Speaker 1: but the specific design was was made by Michael Morcock um.
Speaker 1: And then because of because of more cocks like anarchist
Speaker 1: tendencies in fiction, his work was used or at least
Speaker 1: appreciated by a lot of the Discordians, which is also
Speaker 1: popular around the sixties a lot of the situationists um.
Speaker 1: And then as the Discordian situationist movement kind of morphed
Speaker 1: and started to kind of intermingle with parts of occultism,
Speaker 1: we have the chaos magic movement starting in the late seventies,
Speaker 1: which started also using the the Chaos Star, which makes
Speaker 1: sense because like what Robert you you were talking about
Speaker 1: how it's like it's like it's almost like personifying chaos
Speaker 1: as like a thing to worship um, which is actually
Speaker 1: a big part of early chaos magic text is is
Speaker 1: like like reveling in the idea of like chaos is
Speaker 1: like a primordial god, which there's there's a lot of
Speaker 1: primordial gods um in like the actual world, you know,
Speaker 1: like if you look like through through histories of various cultures,
Speaker 1: like chaos is one of the original primordial gods. So
Speaker 1: it is there's a big part of that in early
Speaker 1: chaos magic books about kind of looking at chaos as
Speaker 1: this like this very ancient force that should be kind
Speaker 1: of respected, and I think that that is of that
Speaker 1: is a big part of why the chaos magicians started
Speaker 1: using uh, the the Star. I mean, obviously there's a
Speaker 1: lot of crossover between like sci fi writers like Robert
Speaker 1: Anton Wilson Um and Michael Moorecock who then Robert Anton
Speaker 1: Wilson was very influential in the chaos magic movement, so
Speaker 1: you can see how this gets carried over from like
Speaker 1: anarchist sci fi to chaos magic, and then because it's
Speaker 1: in chaos magic, it gets way more visibility. So then
Speaker 1: it starts then he starts seeing it inside more more
Speaker 1: like underground anarchist scenes um. And then so around around
Speaker 1: this time, Dugan was starting his political career, and he
Speaker 1: was he was u was dabbling in a lot of
Speaker 1: various like occult circles himself. Right now, he's he's more
Speaker 1: of like a traditionalist, like a more like a Christian traditionalist.
Speaker 1: That is kind of his primarily. That is like, is
Speaker 1: that is his primary kind of a cult interest as
Speaker 1: long as it can be called a cult. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's not it's not worth getting too much into
Speaker 1: the weeds on on doing at this point, I think people,
Speaker 1: I think it's it's it's worth it. Like like he
Speaker 1: like he because he obviously did rip the he did
Speaker 1: take inspiration from the Chaos Star to make his own
Speaker 1: version of it. He's certainly because he was in those
Speaker 1: same circles, a cultic leanings and and a degree of knowledge.
Speaker 1: I think again, with a lot of things, a lot
Speaker 1: of things about Dugan are overstated, including his closeness to
Speaker 1: putin because he's this really easy in part because he's
Speaker 1: like so prolific, and and there's a lot available on
Speaker 1: him in English. It's really easy to kind of tie
Speaker 1: everything happening in Russia to do him to him. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think that's kind of a degree of what's
Speaker 1: happening here. There's a website I've forgotten the name of,
Speaker 1: but I think it had like a bunch of like
Speaker 1: online reproduction of Dugan's various writings from the nineties, all
Speaker 1: sorts of weird shit about occultism and Yeah, and yet
Speaker 1: I do think that there's a very obvious gulf between
Speaker 1: the Dugan of that weird eccentric, like esoteric Nazi sort
Speaker 1: of phase of like his relative youth versus today where
Speaker 1: he frames his entire rationale for multiplorality as a kind
Speaker 1: of Christian a Christian crusade against the hegemony that he
Speaker 1: legitimately believes to be a Satanic fire. Yes, basically said that,
Speaker 1: and it's not the only thing he considers satanic, like
Speaker 1: like we should point out that like one of the
Speaker 1: one of the main forces that were that we're going
Speaker 1: like against pussy Riot, where Eurasianists at that of that time,
Speaker 1: and he called them like devils and witches and taught
Speaker 1: his followers to show up with pitchforks. People in the
Speaker 1: West don't really understand them. So you get guys like
Speaker 1: when you get both Alexander Reid Ross describing him as
Speaker 1: an adherent of chaos magic and some guy from the
Speaker 1: National Review referring to him as the leader of a
Speaker 1: satanic cult somehow. Yeah, and and boy, I mean, there's
Speaker 1: a long history of people liking to flat liking to
Speaker 1: flatten um fascist movements with an occultic tradition to just Satanism.
Speaker 1: We're not gonna talk about that at length, but it
Speaker 1: whenever whenever you hear people talking about a problem and
Speaker 1: like they reduce it to its satanists, you should be
Speaker 1: a little on edge because usually they're wrong or at
Speaker 1: least incomplete um and they just have have kind of
Speaker 1: over Anyway, we don't need to get terribly into that.
Speaker 1: The only the only person I wanted to bring that
Speaker 1: up is because like this is around the same time
Speaker 1: that people that are fascists, we're trying to enter in
Speaker 1: a lot of different politicals, like some cultures, whether it
Speaker 1: be like the punk scene and industrial music, um, including
Speaker 1: like the the occulture, because that that is like their
Speaker 1: primary means, right, Like they try to like they are
Speaker 1: an aesthetic driven movement, they try to cop to any
Speaker 1: aesthetic and use it for their own gains and to
Speaker 1: to kind of overlook the anarchist origins of this thing
Speaker 1: just because fascists tried to cop it at some point.
Speaker 1: I think it's very silly, because then, like, what are
Speaker 1: you going to throw away all punk music like come
Speaker 1: up or even like or even like crosses like, yeah,
Speaker 1: a fascist still used variations of Christian crosses that still
Speaker 1: have essentially political Christian meanings. But I'd probably still assume
Speaker 1: that the majority of religious fascists do lean on some
Speaker 1: kind of Christianity, And to the extent that there's neopagans involved,
Speaker 1: there's sort of a minority. There's a couple of things
Speaker 1: that this is. Like. One of them would be kind
Speaker 1: of in the United States, fascist co option of of
Speaker 1: the flag of the United States, which we can talk
Speaker 1: a lot about like the fact that the United States
Speaker 1: is an imperialist power um and the genocide is done
Speaker 1: on under that flag without while still acknowledging that attempts
Speaker 1: by fascist movements to co opt it as a purely
Speaker 1: fascist symbol are problematic. In part because that symbol, the
Speaker 1: United States flag, has a lot of power to a
Speaker 1: lot of people. And so if you if the fascists
Speaker 1: kind of co opted totally, um, that's a harmful thing.
Speaker 1: That's a thing that can like allow them to get
Speaker 1: their brain worms into more people. Which doesn't mean like
Speaker 1: you should take and wave the US flag, but it
Speaker 1: does mean that, like it's just a matter of don't
Speaker 1: you don't have to let them take the ground, you know. Um.
Speaker 1: And I think on a kind of a different angle.
Speaker 1: One of the things I think about a lot is, uh,
Speaker 1: the first time I went to India, seeing especially in
Speaker 1: a large parts of India, you'll see swastika's hanging over
Speaker 1: the doors of many, many houses all over the place.
Speaker 1: You'll see them hanging from cars. They're they're constant things.
Speaker 1: And it's only unsettling if you have allowed yourself to
Speaker 1: forget that the swastika is a symbol that the Nazis
Speaker 1: stole from another culture, co opted and invested with a
Speaker 1: new meaning. Jan yeah, yeah, And why should people in
Speaker 1: other parts of the world, who have been using it
Speaker 1: for a totally different purpose for thousands of years, why
Speaker 1: should they be like, well, I guess we don't get
Speaker 1: this now. It's like in India has had to deal
Speaker 1: with their own fashion. Yes, and and and there's I
Speaker 1: mean again, we're delving into a lot of very deep
Speaker 1: topics because there's a lot to be said about how
Speaker 1: the fact that the Nazis took the swastika lead to
Speaker 1: degrees of sympathy within areas of Indian culture that allowed
Speaker 1: some fascist ideology to creep in. And like that's also
Speaker 1: tied to the fact that both the Nazis and a
Speaker 1: lot of Indian nationalists were fighting against the British Empire.
Speaker 1: It's all very complicated, right. They're guys, guys like vds
Speaker 1: of Our Care did who were founders of the Hinduva movement, Yeah,
Speaker 1: did openly praise Hitler. Oh yeah, Yeah. It's kind of
Speaker 1: easy for some people to think of it as entirely
Speaker 1: motivated by religion, but his whole concept of nationhood is
Speaker 1: entirely racial. Yeah. It says himself that it has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with religion. So yeah, and it's it's it's
Speaker 1: one of those things. If you actually want to understand
Speaker 1: things and engage with them in a useful area, you
Speaker 1: have to understand that history and grapple with it without
Speaker 1: like looking at a year old Hindu temple and going, well,
Speaker 1: I guess they were Nazis hash hash hashtag problematic. Yeah, ugly.
Speaker 1: The last thing actually want to talk about is how
Speaker 1: how how the kind of debate around symbols US to
Speaker 1: symbols has just kind of morphed into just fast jacketing
Speaker 1: anarchists in general and worrying about like, oh, the fascists
Speaker 1: are secretly infiltrating the anarchists and they're gonna turn anarchists
Speaker 1: into fascists. Just pretty silly, because I mean, if you're
Speaker 1: gonna I you're gonna turn anyone into fascists. Think anarchists
Speaker 1: are one of the hardest people to do to do
Speaker 1: that too. This is this is there's a lot of
Speaker 1: other people it's way easier to convince to become fascists
Speaker 1: than when anarchists go fascists they pretty hard well, yeah,
Speaker 1: but they the type of like fear mongering around it
Speaker 1: is still it's really frustrating because like I'm looking at
Speaker 1: all these I'm looking at all these tanky's like fast
Speaker 1: jacketing anarchists for using us for using a symbol created
Speaker 1: by anarchists which has been used by anarchists for decades, right, um,
Speaker 1: But then you also have like Tanky superstar Kalin Malplin
Speaker 1: regularly hanging out with like like Melvin regularly hangs out
Speaker 1: with dougod Of. And then you have someone who's like
Speaker 1: another like pretty like popular, like like tinky influencer like
Speaker 1: Ben Norton who openly uses Dugan's multipolar theory. Right, and
Speaker 1: so if if if, if you're looking for the most
Speaker 1: visible example of fascist nationalist rhetoric trying to enter into leftism,
Speaker 1: you should look at like the growing like patriotic communists,
Speaker 1: you know, people people like patriotic socialists, but yeah, the
Speaker 1: idea is basically the same. But yeah, it's like people
Speaker 1: like Peter Coffin and this like growing like patriot communist
Speaker 1: socialist kind of live streamer grifft um, which is like
Speaker 1: because like the easiest entry on the left for fascism
Speaker 1: is informs of nationalist authoritarian communism. Right, It's like you
Speaker 1: know that that's that that is how you get like
Speaker 1: national socialism. Right. Uh. It's like they just had this
Speaker 1: like super cringe e Nauz Bill convention just a few
Speaker 1: weeks ago with with some of the best moments on
Speaker 1: until Will Smith slapped that guy. Yeah, but like you know,
Speaker 1: you have you have like Coffin and Malpin hanging out
Speaker 1: and like Mopid regularly regularly hangs out with Doo Good.
Speaker 1: It's like, if you're gonna lift, if you want to
Speaker 1: be watching out for like a fascist creep, maybe you
Speaker 1: should direct it towards the people and just like doing
Speaker 1: it out in the open and not fast jacketing like
Speaker 1: queer anarchists who have been doing the thing that they've
Speaker 1: been doing for like decades. I guess one of the
Speaker 1: last things I bele mention is, uh, the hilarious incidents
Speaker 1: with the Sith Empire thing of people just fully of
Speaker 1: like fully getting consumed by their own brain worms and
Speaker 1: trying to insist that a Star Wars symbol uh is
Speaker 1: secretly uh fascist chaos star um and then doing the
Speaker 1: same thing to the Warhammer symbol um it is it
Speaker 1: is in in. I mean it's funny because like in
Speaker 1: Star Wars it is a fascist symbol, right, that is,
Speaker 1: that's not a fascist symbol in the real world, but
Speaker 1: it is within the world of of Star Wars that
Speaker 1: is absolutely a fascist. It's also it's also not a
Speaker 1: chaos star. It's not a chaos star. Uh. And in
Speaker 1: Warhammer it is a chaos star, but it's not a
Speaker 1: fascist symbol. It's actually an anti fascist symbol. Within the
Speaker 1: World War you can basically argue that, yeah, because it is.
Speaker 1: It is just frustrating looking at all these people being
Speaker 1: like trying to play trying to play the Wears Waldo
Speaker 1: game just to all like dunkan anarchists, and it's just
Speaker 1: kind of shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of
Speaker 1: anarchists culture um, and the history of like anti fascist anarchists.
Speaker 1: You know, most of the anti fascists that I know
Speaker 1: use the chaos star because it's because it's a red symbol.
Speaker 1: It looks rad, it looks cool. Um. And Yeah, trying
Speaker 1: to like in insisting that we must see this ground
Speaker 1: and let fascists use anything that they think is esthetically cool.
Speaker 1: I think is is a first of all, like a
Speaker 1: losing battle to actually just like to just just to
Speaker 1: to to start that now, I think is you would
Speaker 1: have some pretty bad implications for fascism and its use
Speaker 1: of aesthetics. You don't have to give them things just
Speaker 1: because they want to take those things. It makes sense
Speaker 1: that you would see like tankyas do it, because then
Speaker 1: with your tankie you could basically get into a position
Speaker 1: where you can basically discard all sorts of symbolisms and
Speaker 1: just replace everything with like old like Soviet symbology or
Speaker 1: so which is which is obviously not tied to eddie
Speaker 1: a trocity stead of happens, right, Oh, oh it's dentally.
Speaker 1: Don't ever tell them about Georgia. Yeah, don't don't tell
Speaker 1: them about Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Ukraine, that giant lake that
Speaker 1: was like the largest lake in Europe that they turned
Speaker 1: into a pile of poison. You know. Don't mention a
Speaker 1: few things, and Trotsky would be proud considering he wanted
Speaker 1: to turn mountains into like city structure. I mean that
Speaker 1: that actually is one of the things I think Trotsky
Speaker 1: was on the right ball about more ministrits, more minisirats.
Speaker 1: Let's tear it up some mountains. So any any any
Speaker 1: final thoughts on our lovely circular the chaos a chaos star.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking I'm thinking of a quote from like, uh,
Speaker 1: what was his name, Pablo Freer Day. I hope I've
Speaker 1: gotten that name right. A quote I've seen going around
Speaker 1: that I think goes around something to the effect that
Speaker 1: when the point of education isn't liberation, the goal is
Speaker 1: to become the oppressor. Um. You could sort of usually
Speaker 1: that quote is like relevant to like the material processes
Speaker 1: of like being inculcated into a capitalist system. So so
Speaker 1: so you can kind of make the most sense of
Speaker 1: it as basically like you are educated to become a
Speaker 1: boss instead of wanting to abolish all bosses vot. But
Speaker 1: but on but on a micro level, you can sort
Speaker 1: of apply it to the to the ways in which people,
Speaker 1: even in like radical spaces sort of to sort of
Speaker 1: become like self styled cops as it were. That I
Speaker 1: think is a phenomenon that a lot of the unarcho
Speaker 1: nihilist tendency sort of responds to. Anyway, this is coming
Speaker 1: from a perspective that is sort of flirtatious towards an
Speaker 1: arco nihilism, but not necessarily. But it's like you could
Speaker 1: a lot of the interactions with like they like certain
Speaker 1: people demonstrate that. There are some instances of it where
Speaker 1: I think I can't quite tell if it's po or not. Um.
Speaker 1: Somebody I s s somebody posted like a photo of
Speaker 1: themselves with like a like a jacket and they had
Speaker 1: like the upside down cross and the inverted pedogram on board,
Speaker 1: and somebody someone, somebody with like basically no followers who
Speaker 1: somehow blew somehow blew up when they posted that photo
Speaker 1: next to like a Nazi uniform to try and compare
Speaker 1: to the inverted cross to a swastika or no not,
Speaker 1: if not a swastika, then like maybe some other part
Speaker 1: of the jacket and the pentagram to like the arm
Speaker 1: band or something like yeah, yeah, And I think I'm
Speaker 1: still not sure if that was entirely serious. See, that's
Speaker 1: that's the thing is, like we have to be careful,
Speaker 1: like I don't like anarchist in fighting. It's rarely useful, um,
Speaker 1: and we have to be quick to be watchful for
Speaker 1: like how much of it is just people trolling or
Speaker 1: people trying to prompt in fighting just for the sake
Speaker 1: of infighting. Right, So if if like I tried for
Speaker 1: a long time to not engage in this debate because
Speaker 1: I don't like talking about this, like I don't like
Speaker 1: in fighting with anarchists. I don't like I don't like
Speaker 1: having these types of debates. So hopefully the next time
Speaker 1: this debate starts. We don't need to because we can
Speaker 1: just we can just point to how this last one
Speaker 1: went and say, no, look, we clearly demonstrated that this
Speaker 1: has a this has a long history of use by
Speaker 1: anarchists and invented by anarchists, and not starting, not starting,
Speaker 1: and not start the debate again because we we don't
Speaker 1: we we don't need to do it, and there's no
Speaker 1: telling if people are doing it sincerely or people doing
Speaker 1: it ironically, or people just doing it just to get
Speaker 1: you know, people upset um. And I mean like if
Speaker 1: you want to look at anarchists and look at I
Speaker 1: where where is right wing people whereas fascist trying to
Speaker 1: kind of blended with anarchists, Like look at like books right,
Speaker 1: look at and d caps right. These people who try
Speaker 1: to claim to be anarchists are very bad and actually
Speaker 1: blending in because they can't help themselves when they start
Speaker 1: talking about like the validity of anarcho capitalism or the
Speaker 1: validity of like small nation states like it's it is,
Speaker 1: it is. It is hard. It's hard to actually infiltrate anarchists.
Speaker 1: This is the thing that the FBI has said multiple
Speaker 1: multiple times. It's hard to actually do so whenever fascists
Speaker 1: try to blend in whether they're boogloo boys, they can't
Speaker 1: help but use their old like boogaloo symbols. They can't help,
Speaker 1: but just like like give hints. It is it is
Speaker 1: astonishing how how bad they are at this thing. So
Speaker 1: also bad at like the protection that they claimed to offer,
Speaker 1: Like there was a there was an article from like
Speaker 1: last year going over oh we're going over well, part
Speaker 1: of it mentioned that they were basically at this like
Speaker 1: purported protests that they were supposed to offer protection from,
Speaker 1: and most and most of what they did was get
Speaker 1: drunk and like this on the sidewalks. The boogloo boys,
Speaker 1: I've seen it, actual protests who are like with like
Speaker 1: with like cops stacking protesters, the bogle of voice of
Speaker 1: the first ones to run because their cowards. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: well I guess where can where can people bay? Where
Speaker 1: can people find in you on line? Where can people
Speaker 1: read your read your article like chaos Nihilism and the
Speaker 1: Way of No Surrender WordPress? Basically, um I could I
Speaker 1: call it a site left the rotical domain, but the
Speaker 1: but the link goes like my thoughts born from fire
Speaker 1: dot WordPress dot com. I actually try I actually try
Speaker 1: changing the U r L once I changed it to
Speaker 1: a left the radical domain I think in two Bells
Speaker 1: of thirteen fourteen, but I figured that doing so would
Speaker 1: funk up all of the stats and whatever, so I
Speaker 1: just didn't bother. Well, thank thank you so much for
Speaker 1: kind of writing, I would say, probably the most definitive
Speaker 1: stance on this debate at the moment, which we can
Speaker 1: always point point back to whenever this inevitably comes up again,
Speaker 1: and like a year or two, because I've seen it.
Speaker 1: I've seen it come up like every every few years.
Speaker 1: You see it. So thank you, thank you for that,
Speaker 1: and thank you for coming on. Um yeah, if you
Speaker 1: want to follow follow us, you can do it at
Speaker 1: the thing, you know, the thing, you know what our
Speaker 1: Instagram had happened here pod and cool Zone Media. You
Speaker 1: can look at my unhinged chaos tweets at Hungry bow Tie.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, nothing is true and everything is permitted. Also
Speaker 1: at a skatinus is where I go to like sort
Speaker 1: of ramble about politics and occasionally the occult and other things.
Speaker 1: We do. We do. We do love a good we
Speaker 1: do love a good ramble. All right, that that that
Speaker 1: doesn't for us today, Uh, funk fascists, Nazi punks, fuck off, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Welcome to it could happen here the only podcast where
Speaker 1: the hosts asks all listeners and guests to provide their
Speaker 1: Social Security number and bank account number, routing number, all
Speaker 1: that good stuff. UM. This is a podcast about how
Speaker 1: things aren't always great, uh, and maybe are kind of
Speaker 1: falling apart a little bit. And and it has also
Speaker 1: not been, for the most part, a podcast about the
Speaker 1: expanded war in Ukraine. UM, for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 1: We have done some coverage of that, but we've focused
Speaker 1: specifically on stories of individual people and and that's generally
Speaker 1: where I feel like our strength is as a program.
Speaker 1: But people have been repeatedly requesting we do a little
Speaker 1: bit of a bigger picture look at what's gone on
Speaker 1: in that conflict, and so I have brought Aram Chambanian
Speaker 1: into the studio. Aram, how are you doing, buddy? Oh?
Speaker 1: Not too bad man? How you doing today? Fine and
Speaker 1: dandy like sour candy. Now, would you describe kind of
Speaker 1: your your who you are and what you do and
Speaker 1: why why you're you're someone people should listen to when
Speaker 1: we're talking about a conflict like this, because you are
Speaker 1: one of the people who when everyone was like, there's
Speaker 1: no way Russia will invade, was was saying, well, maybe
Speaker 1: it might happen. Yeah, I mean, um well, I think
Speaker 1: one of the things that that sets me aside from
Speaker 1: a lot of other analysts out there is that I
Speaker 1: never thought I would become an analyst, and I never
Speaker 1: thought that I would do this. Um. I it wasn't
Speaker 1: set in stone from me. From the beginning. I thought
Speaker 1: I was going to be like a high school history teacher.
Speaker 1: And so I've always studied the world in terms of
Speaker 1: reading books on different conflicts around the world, and and
Speaker 1: I've tried to keep appraised on where these books have
Speaker 1: led to. Right, So if I read a book about
Speaker 1: the Second Congo War, it makes sense to then follow
Speaker 1: current events that are related to what happened after the
Speaker 1: Second Congo War. As a result, I followed things going
Speaker 1: on in Ukraine starting with year am I done? Um
Speaker 1: and elsewhere in the world, But but Ukraine has been
Speaker 1: one that I've focused on pretty heavily because um there's
Speaker 1: been a lot of information about Ukraine ever since because
Speaker 1: of how late the war happened in terms of human history,
Speaker 1: and in terms of recent conflicts, isn't that long ago?
Speaker 1: UM and so uh, I started following it back then.
Speaker 1: And I think that if you combine modern open source tools,
Speaker 1: modern technology, some of the stuff that organizations like Belling
Speaker 1: Cat can do with traditional research and and and knowledge
Speaker 1: some of the stuff that I've done in school, you
Speaker 1: have a really powerful tool to combat disinformation. UM. And
Speaker 1: I think that's one of the best tools we have
Speaker 1: to combat disinformation is wedding oh sent with traditional research UM.
Speaker 1: And Yeah, when it comes to open source intelligence, UM,
Speaker 1: the Ukrainian War is actually kind of one of the
Speaker 1: It's not the conflict where that really started to become
Speaker 1: a thing. That would probably be the Libyan Civil War
Speaker 1: when when that UM big and to be something people
Speaker 1: were talking about in a big way. But the Ukrainian
Speaker 1: the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in particular in two
Speaker 1: thousand fourteen, UM is really where open source intelligence kind
Speaker 1: of came into its own in a really widely known way.
Speaker 1: That's when Belling Cats reporting on the downing of MH
Speaker 1: on seven like went out, and that was kind of
Speaker 1: like the first first really huge international story involving like
Speaker 1: open source intelligent cracking a case. Um, and now since
Speaker 1: the expanded invasion of Russia back in February, we've kind
Speaker 1: of entered and again this isn't really where this period started,
Speaker 1: but this has been kind of we've seen an explosion
Speaker 1: of what I think would be fair to call open
Speaker 1: source intelligence disinformation. Um. Yeah, you want to talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about kind of some of the stuff that
Speaker 1: you've seen, because there's there's a number of accounts claiming
Speaker 1: to be doing os and on the Ukrainian war, um,
Speaker 1: and boy howdy, they are not all giving out good information,
Speaker 1: and it can be difficult for people to tell what
Speaker 1: they should trust because if you're if you're kind of
Speaker 1: just scanning over it, bad ocean or even outright fake
Speaker 1: ocean can look very similar to good ocean, right and
Speaker 1: and so I would put a lot of the ocean
Speaker 1: community into four rough categories. Uh there's uh osan analysts
Speaker 1: and those are pretty rare. Those are the kind of
Speaker 1: people who combine what they're seeing in real time on
Speaker 1: social media with a background of knowledge in the area.
Speaker 1: So like a Ukraine regional expert combining that with what
Speaker 1: they're seeing happen in Ukraine. That's an ocean analyst. There's
Speaker 1: some Twitter accounts that are more ocean aggregators. They don't
Speaker 1: really have much analysis that put into what they're what
Speaker 1: they're producing, but they spit out a lot of information
Speaker 1: in real time, and so if you follow the right
Speaker 1: ones that use the right sources, you can get some
Speaker 1: pretty decent information from them. Then there's more of the
Speaker 1: misinformation aggregators, which are accounts that just kind of spread
Speaker 1: whatever they see without regards to whether it's true or not.
Speaker 1: Um they'll sensationalized stories. You know, if there's the uh
Speaker 1: a rare command and control plane takes off somewhere in
Speaker 1: America that's known as the doomsday plane during the Cold War,
Speaker 1: they'll tweet out the doomsday plane is in the air.
Speaker 1: Doesn't mean the clear war right, And they're not doing
Speaker 1: it to be hurtful, they're doing it for likes. And
Speaker 1: then there's disinformation aggregators who are deliberately out there trying
Speaker 1: to sow discord and so problems. And those are four
Speaker 1: categories that I've seen all of them develop in their
Speaker 1: own ways in the last ten years. UM. I think
Speaker 1: the best best example of that final category, there's an
Speaker 1: account on Twitter called s MM Syria and If you
Speaker 1: look at the account, it looks almost identical to the
Speaker 1: os CES Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine. It takes the
Speaker 1: same kind of graphics and it has the same kind
Speaker 1: of terminology, but it's an assaddist disinformation outlet and so
Speaker 1: but they've woven their way into if you just like
Speaker 1: a casual glance at the war in Syria, you might
Speaker 1: believe that it's a valid source. And that's the kind
Speaker 1: of more malicious disinformation that I'm talking about, where like
Speaker 1: they know what they're doing and they're trying to confuse people,
Speaker 1: and it's there's you know, I think one of the
Speaker 1: best examples of something that really struck me recently as
Speaker 1: problematic in in the war in Ukraine, as you've got
Speaker 1: a video going around um of that purports to show
Speaker 1: Ukrainian soldiers shooting captured Russian soldiers um which is a
Speaker 1: war crime. And uh, I think credible people within the
Speaker 1: Ocean community have said this is something that desperately needs
Speaker 1: to be investigated more seriously. This this like is very
Speaker 1: has a very good chance of being legitimate and people
Speaker 1: should be looking into this. Whereas you've also seen folks
Speaker 1: who kind of reflectively jumped to defend Ukraine against these
Speaker 1: allegations putting out what I think is fairly shoddy ocean
Speaker 1: claiming to show like issues with the video and stuff,
Speaker 1: and it's like circling blurry sections of the video and
Speaker 1: saying like this is you know, looks like it could
Speaker 1: be edited, or this doesn't look credible, and it is
Speaker 1: the kind of thing. I think One reason people can
Speaker 1: get tripped up by that is prior to the invasion
Speaker 1: of Ukraine, there were some Russian false flag events that
Speaker 1: involved like cadavers, bodies that had been autopsy and stuff,
Speaker 1: which was broken down by people like Elliot Higgins at
Speaker 1: Belling cat Um and one of the things that again
Speaker 1: if you're just kind of looking at the surface level,
Speaker 1: you can see like, oh, well that those were videos
Speaker 1: that were faked, and so these like the o cent
Speaker 1: around this people like pointing out different sections of the
Speaker 1: video looks the same. Some of the differences are for example, Um,
Speaker 1: when they were analyzing the bodies and those those false
Speaker 1: flag footage, they brought in actual you know, corpse cutter ruppers, morticians, yes,
Speaker 1: to analyze like the cuts in the in the skulls
Speaker 1: and whatnot, as opposed to again just kind of a
Speaker 1: guy circling aspects of a video and being like this
Speaker 1: doesn't seem right, and it's like, um, but you can
Speaker 1: I can see why people get tripped up by it,
Speaker 1: and it it is important not to get tripped up
Speaker 1: by that kind of stuff because um, war crimes are bad,
Speaker 1: I think is a general attitude that we we both
Speaker 1: share um and and should be investigated regardless of like
Speaker 1: whether or not they're being done by the side who's
Speaker 1: also towing Russian tanks away with tractors. That you're you're
Speaker 1: on the side of right, like right, And I think
Speaker 1: that that's that's exactly an important distinction to because like,
Speaker 1: there are certain claims that have come out from the
Speaker 1: Ukrainian side, certain statements that have come out that as
Speaker 1: an osan analyst, I could probably look into more and
Speaker 1: maybe poke holes and stuff like the number of kills
Speaker 1: that the ghost of keys, right, Okay, maybe it's not
Speaker 1: thirty kills or whatever it is that people are saying,
Speaker 1: maybe he's not really, but that's not harmful as much
Speaker 1: as did these guys shoot people in the legs? Right? Right?
Speaker 1: So one of those bears examination just because of the
Speaker 1: nature of the claim. The other one maybe we can
Speaker 1: examine it after the war when it's not it doesn't
Speaker 1: really matter. If there is a Ukrainian ace fighter pilot
Speaker 1: who's dropped a bunch of a crazy number like obviously
Speaker 1: in a military sense of Russian jets are being down to,
Speaker 1: that doesn't matter. But like from the perspective of people
Speaker 1: just kind of observing this war as as news consumers,
Speaker 1: it doesn't really matter, whereas whether or not a country
Speaker 1: gets away with a war crime absolutely matters, and people
Speaker 1: are treating it with the same reflective handwave as they
Speaker 1: do when they accept these ghost of Kiev yes myths. Right,
Speaker 1: they're saying like, well, no, but I want the Ukrainian
Speaker 1: side to win this war, so we can't even look
Speaker 1: into any claims of war crimes. And that's just not
Speaker 1: how it's supposed to be. Like you condemn the crimes
Speaker 1: up front, and you investigate and you try to move forward,
Speaker 1: and that's how we prove that we're better than the
Speaker 1: opposing side. Like that's that's been the rule in this war,
Speaker 1: and it's been the rule in war's past. You know,
Speaker 1: you you prove that you're better than your opponents by
Speaker 1: being more decent. Yeah, and it's it's I have seen
Speaker 1: some really unsettling logic from some people along the line
Speaker 1: of like, well, these were artillerymen who have been you know,
Speaker 1: shelling civilian areas, so why shouldn't they be be shot
Speaker 1: in the leg? And the answer is because, like that's
Speaker 1: number one, it is a war crime to shoot captured prisoners.
Speaker 1: Likely that that is a thing that we as a
Speaker 1: as a species have attempted to make illegal um and
Speaker 1: problems and ought to be it is a thing that
Speaker 1: like should not be done. And there's actually of a
Speaker 1: wide variety of like tactical reasons why it's bad for Ukraine.
Speaker 1: If Russian soldiers believe they will be shot after being captured,
Speaker 1: it makes, among other things, it makes soldiers less likely
Speaker 1: to turn themselves in. UM. One of the wiser decisions
Speaker 1: that the Ukrainian government has made in this war has
Speaker 1: been really deliberately pushing um the idea that like, hey, Russians,
Speaker 1: if you surrender, will pay you, you can get Ukrainian citizenship,
Speaker 1: Like bring in your tanks, you know, land your planes
Speaker 1: or whatever, like, well, you know, we'll make it worth
Speaker 1: your while. Um, which is a lot which is potentially
Speaker 1: a force multiplier, right, UM, If Russian soldiers think when
Speaker 1: I get captured, they will shoot me. Then they will
Speaker 1: fight to the death, and Ukraine will lose more people
Speaker 1: in that fight, as opposed to if Russian soldiers think, well, ship,
Speaker 1: I could actually have a pretty decent life if I
Speaker 1: just turned myself into these guys and refused to fight.
Speaker 1: That means less people you have to fight. Um. So
Speaker 1: it it does. It does really matter whether or not
Speaker 1: this is happening. Um. And it's also just like on
Speaker 1: a moral level, you you shouldn't accept it. And I
Speaker 1: see some really I think one of the things that
Speaker 1: I find so unsettling about that logic like these are uh,
Speaker 1: these are you know, artillerymen who have been targeting civilian areas.
Speaker 1: Why shouldn't they be shot? Um, it's not that much
Speaker 1: of a leap to like some other ship we saw
Speaker 1: people saying in Vietnam, you know, these villages are harboring insurgents.
Speaker 1: Why shouldn't we treat them like the enemy? You know,
Speaker 1: Like all of this logic leads to people getting murdered
Speaker 1: who don't deserve to get murdered, and that is bad. Right.
Speaker 1: There's the snowball effect, the slippery slope effect with the
Speaker 1: moral side of it, and then like you're saying the
Speaker 1: practical side of it. I mean, if you look at
Speaker 1: part of the reason members of ISIS fought so hard
Speaker 1: in places like most of which because once you're in
Speaker 1: that organization, your options are a bullet or like a
Speaker 1: desert cell. If you're lucky, they're not going to treat
Speaker 1: you well and reintegrate you into society. Come on, like, no,
Speaker 1: that's not how it works, so you fight like hell,
Speaker 1: you know that's that's a very basic rule. That's pretty
Speaker 1: easy to understand, I would think. So that's why this
Speaker 1: needs to be looked into. And if it's proven false,
Speaker 1: if it's proven it to not be a correct true video,
Speaker 1: that just strengthens the Ukrainian side. But if it is
Speaker 1: proven to be true, it's something that needs to be investigated.
Speaker 1: It can't be overlooked. It can't be swept under the
Speaker 1: under the rug. Just because we we want one side
Speaker 1: of this war to come out on top doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that we have to ignore you're committing Like one, A
Speaker 1: good rule of thumb to approach a war from when
Speaker 1: you're trying to analyze it is that there there has
Speaker 1: never been a side in a war who have not
Speaker 1: committed war crimes. Um. So that should always be on
Speaker 1: your mind when you're trying to evaluate the reality of
Speaker 1: a war crame. It doesn't mean every claim of a
Speaker 1: war crime is true. That would be a very silly
Speaker 1: way to translate that. But it does mean that when
Speaker 1: there is a claim that the side you support has
Speaker 1: been responsible for a war crime, your default should be
Speaker 1: this is not impossible, and I should I should proceed
Speaker 1: from the area that this could have happened, and and
Speaker 1: it should be analyzed without reflectively dismissing it, and also
Speaker 1: without saying that like war crimes committed by a group
Speaker 1: of soldiers in a single part of a theater necessarily
Speaker 1: mean that the the war itself is being prosecuted in
Speaker 1: a criminal level by that government. Um. Because for example, well,
Speaker 1: I mean I was about to say U. S. Soldiers
Speaker 1: committed war crimes in World War Two, but actually the
Speaker 1: prosecution of that war was criminal in a lot of
Speaker 1: fundamental ways. But it does. That doesn't mean that like
Speaker 1: your granddad committed war crimes because other U. S. Soldiers
Speaker 1: who were in the field executed captured German POW's you know, um, Yeah,
Speaker 1: which I think is something people have an easier time
Speaker 1: understanding and it's not a war. They feel the need
Speaker 1: to have a series of character or less takes on
Speaker 1: in Twitter. Yeah, it's That's the weirdest thing about about
Speaker 1: the social media age and and kind of sent in general,
Speaker 1: is that while it does make it very accessible and
Speaker 1: easy for anybody to get involved in investigating these crimes
Speaker 1: and these events, it also means that everybody thinks they
Speaker 1: have an opinion that matters on it and uh and
Speaker 1: and in that sense, they muddy the waters. They they
Speaker 1: a lot of people can can imitate the ocent look
Speaker 1: pretty well. They can circle things in pictures that look similar,
Speaker 1: or as we saw in Syria, a lot they'd take
Speaker 1: two pictures of two totally different dudes and say these
Speaker 1: are the same guy, they're both members of Al Nustra
Speaker 1: are something like that, and they would compare the eyes
Speaker 1: and compare the chins and stuff, and it looks kind
Speaker 1: of like a belling cat image, but it wasn't right.
Speaker 1: That's the danger here is that like everybody can can help,
Speaker 1: but every what he can hurt now too, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's one of those things, every every aspect of
Speaker 1: this cuts both ways, because like the thing people started saying. Rightfully,
Speaker 1: so after the invasion or the expanded invasion I should
Speaker 1: say of Ukraine by Russia is like, well, now all
Speaker 1: of these people who were experts in whatever the last
Speaker 1: big story was are going to become experts on the
Speaker 1: Ukrainian conflict, right, which is absolutely a thing that happened.
Speaker 1: You get all of these people who I think are
Speaker 1: pretty bad journalists and reporters who suddenly like rushed to
Speaker 1: to have their commentary on this thing that they have
Speaker 1: ignored for the last eight years. Um. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, it's to talk about Belling Cat. The founder
Speaker 1: of Belling Cat, my old boss, Elliott Higgins, was like
Speaker 1: literally an unemployed dude sitting on his couch when he
Speaker 1: started analyzing war footage um and is now one of
Speaker 1: the most respected conflict analysts in the world. UM. And
Speaker 1: that is a thing the Internet has made possible. UM.
Speaker 1: I think a great example would be the Caliber Obscura Twitter,
Speaker 1: which is just like a dude in the UK who
Speaker 1: has an almost impossible ability to recognize firearms and pieces
Speaker 1: of firearms and so just analyzes people send him footage
Speaker 1: from all over the planet and he'll say, like, these
Speaker 1: are these guns? And this is where they came from.
Speaker 1: And this is uh, this one is like looks like
Speaker 1: this kind of gun, but it's actually, um, a fake
Speaker 1: one that's being made locally in this country, and it
Speaker 1: is supposed to look like this. And you can tell
Speaker 1: because like, um, that's not a person who Caliber did
Speaker 1: not like go to some sort of fancy gun school.
Speaker 1: They just are Uh. I mean, it's definitely not right
Speaker 1: to call them an amateur because quite frankly, I don't
Speaker 1: know any people who are working at institutes and better
Speaker 1: at the thing that Caliber does than Caliber is right, Um,
Speaker 1: But they did just start as a person on Twitter.
Speaker 1: You know. Well, that's the thing about this, this is
Speaker 1: that you get people who were not kind of born
Speaker 1: with an idea that they were going to become analysts
Speaker 1: and in this field. And so you have people like
Speaker 1: both of both of the people you mentioned, whom I
Speaker 1: I know personal I don't know Elliott personally, but I
Speaker 1: remember him for our days are shared days on a
Speaker 1: comedy website together. It's the website that show remained nameless,
Speaker 1: right Um. And then and then you know, uh, Caliber
Speaker 1: and I have talked on Twitter a bunch, and you
Speaker 1: know we're friends there and it's just interesting to see that,
Speaker 1: like both of them are very real people behind like
Speaker 1: their professional personality and their their expertise, they're also down
Speaker 1: to earth, real people, which is rare in this field
Speaker 1: because a lot of people are kind of elitist. Um
Speaker 1: and and and yeah Gatekeeper and neither of them are
Speaker 1: about that. They're both all about like getting as many
Speaker 1: people doing this as possible because more eyes are better, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: Elliott is is uh, I mean, the whole reason my
Speaker 1: career with Belling Cat existed is because, like I emailed
Speaker 1: him out of the blue one day and said, hey,
Speaker 1: I've been noticing this weird thing in videos of fascists
Speaker 1: talking to cops. Can I write a thing for you?
Speaker 1: And he was just like okay, And and that was
Speaker 1: I mean, like that was how that started. Um And
Speaker 1: he's I've met him since a couple at times, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it is a very I think is very informed. Because
Speaker 1: of the fact that he did not come from sort
Speaker 1: of this big institutional background. UM has has a humility
Speaker 1: with which he approaches his investigations that, uh, I think
Speaker 1: is one of the things you should look for in
Speaker 1: trying to decide whether or not open source intelligence that
Speaker 1: you're seeing on Twitter. Whatever is credible is how how
Speaker 1: how conclusive are they stating their claims? Are? How many
Speaker 1: times do they offer only a single possibility for what
Speaker 1: something is? Like? Um, you know, there's a number of
Speaker 1: things you can do. I think at this point we
Speaker 1: should probably move to a separate area of discussion, which
Speaker 1: is how's the how's this war going? Who, who's who's winning? What? Um? Well, so,
Speaker 1: I I made a statement on my Facebook page, my
Speaker 1: personal Facebook page, three weeks ago, and I still feel
Speaker 1: confident in that statement, and that is that well, Ukraine
Speaker 1: has yet to win this war. Sha has already lost.
Speaker 1: They've already lost their objectives, They've already lost what they
Speaker 1: what their goals were. And at this point it's a
Speaker 1: face saving venture on the Russian part. But a raum um.
Speaker 1: Russia carried out a cutting faint action to distract while
Speaker 1: they while they took the East by burning a fifth
Speaker 1: of their general staff and all of their armored vehicles.
Speaker 1: It was a cunning fat Yeah I saw someone on
Speaker 1: Twitter positive actually uh a move to use up all
Speaker 1: of Ukraine's ammunition. Brilliant, Yeah, just very very zab Brannigan logic.
Speaker 1: Half of Vladimir Putin. Ukrainians have a preset kill limit
Speaker 1: and once they hit ten generals, the army will shut down.
Speaker 1: But no, the war is not going well for Russia.
Speaker 1: Um and that's not to say that it's going great
Speaker 1: for Ukraine either, but no one needs to do less
Speaker 1: well to succeed here. Yes, it's a I mean because
Speaker 1: one of the things that is a black box, right.
Speaker 1: I do think because there was a lot of discussion
Speaker 1: earlier in the ward, particularly like how credible are these
Speaker 1: numbers that the Ukrainian government is putting out for for
Speaker 1: dead and for destroyed vehicles? And I think the oceans
Speaker 1: out there, like the verified vehicle casualties and stuff that
Speaker 1: we can verify, means that like obviously the Ukrainian government
Speaker 1: is patting their numbers, but not by as much as
Speaker 1: a lot of people might have, like it's not wildly off.
Speaker 1: Saw their first casualty account. I think first casual account.
Speaker 1: I think it was like day two or three, and
Speaker 1: then like all of the western and held me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: actually yeah, it's probably about two Oh my god. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In perspective for some people who may not that number
Speaker 1: may not jump out to them. We lost you know,
Speaker 1: just shy of three thousand soldiers killed during the Iraq Wars.
Speaker 1: So yeah, two thousand in a couple of days is
Speaker 1: an extraordinary number of losses. Yeah. And of course the
Speaker 1: black box here we don't have nearly as good an
Speaker 1: information on is what kind of casualties is the Ukrainian
Speaker 1: military suffered and what kind of civilian casualties have been suffered?
Speaker 1: And um, Obviously civilian casualties nearly always take much longer
Speaker 1: to get, um to the extent that it's ever. I
Speaker 1: think we have a better chance of getting objective civilian
Speaker 1: casualties for this because, unlike a lot of other conflicts,
Speaker 1: these civilians being killed, our civilians under the ages of
Speaker 1: a government that is a functional state, as opposed to Syria,
Speaker 1: for example, where the there's basically the only people with
Speaker 1: an interest in accurately reporting the death count are a
Speaker 1: number of different non governmental organizations. Um, because the people
Speaker 1: being are being killed by one government or the other,
Speaker 1: right including like this is this was the same thing
Speaker 1: like in Iraq. The civilians who died in Mosel were
Speaker 1: technically under the Iraqi governments. You know, whatever. Protection seems
Speaker 1: like the wrong word to say, but I can tell
Speaker 1: you from my experience there, there was no We still
Speaker 1: do not have anything that approaches a credible civilian death
Speaker 1: count for for that conflict, um and probably never will
Speaker 1: right and and on that note, on the civilian casualties note,
Speaker 1: we were talking earlier about what how you can identify
Speaker 1: a credible ostan account versus a one that you probably
Speaker 1: shouldn't give too much credence to. And one of the
Speaker 1: best ways to do that, honestly is is, ah, look
Speaker 1: at their their morals. I guess if they're ever posting
Speaker 1: and celebrating the death of civilians anywhere, you should probably
Speaker 1: disregard them. Like, yeah, I'll never see Elliott Higgins being like, yeah,
Speaker 1: suck at people of belowgrad like you got hit with
Speaker 1: a missile, Like it's not it's you know, it's not
Speaker 1: gonna happen. Yeah, it's not. It's the same thing as like,
Speaker 1: I get why people celebrate h, you know, battlefield victories. Obviously,
Speaker 1: I don't think, especially if you're literally a Ukrainian living,
Speaker 1: you know, in the area affected, I don't think there's
Speaker 1: anything morally wrong with celebrating opposing soldiers being defeated. But
Speaker 1: I am I continue to be deeply unsettled by footage
Speaker 1: celebrating things like the destruction of armored personnel carriers full
Speaker 1: of nineteen year old kids, um, even though a non
Speaker 1: insignificant number of those nineteen year old kids are accessories
Speaker 1: to war crimes. Right, Like, it doesn't mean like I'm
Speaker 1: broadly okay with it. I do. I do feel a
Speaker 1: lot better about celebrating losses of special forces units like
Speaker 1: the vdv UM that have been heavily involved in war
Speaker 1: crimes around the world, like that I have less kind
Speaker 1: of an issue with. But and I felt that personally.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm Armenian and during the Carback War, it
Speaker 1: was just day, every day I would wake up to
Speaker 1: dozens of videos of Armenian conscripts and soldiers being blown
Speaker 1: up and hunted from the air, and people on Twitter
Speaker 1: cheering for it because they were, for one reason or another,
Speaker 1: on the ZERI side. And like, I get it, you know,
Speaker 1: like you were saying, you want to cheer your battlefield victories,
Speaker 1: and I understand that from people who live on the
Speaker 1: battlefield and live near the battlefield, I get it. It's
Speaker 1: happening to you, to people thousands of miles away cheerleading
Speaker 1: on the internet. What the hell is wrong with you? Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe don't do that. Maybe don't do that, like you
Speaker 1: what the hell? Like you know, those are real people
Speaker 1: in that video that never did anything to you. And
Speaker 1: this is not like a sporting event where like they
Speaker 1: go home at the end of the day and they've
Speaker 1: just lost, like they're dead even when they do. Like,
Speaker 1: I've spent a huge amount of my career talking directly
Speaker 1: face to face with victims of ISIS, Right, I have
Speaker 1: been to like eight or nine refugee camps in two
Speaker 1: countries at this point, specifically for that were in addition
Speaker 1: to days spent on the refugee trail in between Hungary
Speaker 1: and Serbia talking to two Syrians and talking to um
Speaker 1: um people who had like fled the region. Uh. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, I can't help but like, like
Speaker 1: I've literally been under fire by ISIS and then had
Speaker 1: those ISIS guys gotten killed, and I have celebrated and
Speaker 1: cheered when that's happened. Um, And I'll never forget we
Speaker 1: were embedded with this mortar team and we were under
Speaker 1: fire from this sniper and the mortar team. I forget
Speaker 1: you can. In the article I wrote on it, I
Speaker 1: list the exact number of rounds fired, but it was
Speaker 1: like nine or ten something like that, where they're gradually
Speaker 1: walking in mortars until they get this guy um. And
Speaker 1: obviously we like cheered when they fucking killed this dude
Speaker 1: because he was shooting at us. And I remember, like
Speaker 1: kind of on our way out away from the front,
Speaker 1: my fixer Sangar was like, how many rounds did they
Speaker 1: drop before they got him? And I was like, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I think it was like nine or ten.
Speaker 1: I've got the footage somewhere, and he was like, I
Speaker 1: wonder what else they hit and and sang sangarsa Uhum
Speaker 1: like was born and raised in mosle Um, And it
Speaker 1: was one of those things we spent the very next day.
Speaker 1: We were like talking to people fleeing their homes and stuff.
Speaker 1: And not only did we we like see some of
Speaker 1: those people who lost family members too misses both by
Speaker 1: Iraqi forces and by coalition aircraft and stuff, but like
Speaker 1: we came upon this dead ices fighter in a fighting
Speaker 1: position where you could he he had been in there
Speaker 1: with his wife for days, and he had been wounded
Speaker 1: two or three days before he got killed, and you
Speaker 1: could see the evidence of the first aide she had
Speaker 1: done on him, and it was one of those things.
Speaker 1: I guess I could try to make the case that like, well,
Speaker 1: maybe she was a captive and didn't want to do it,
Speaker 1: but quite frankly, everything I saw in there makes me
Speaker 1: believe like she cared deeply for him and stayed with
Speaker 1: him until the bitter end, trying to keep him alive
Speaker 1: and fighting. Um. And that doesn't mean he's not like
Speaker 1: a monster, and it doesn't mean he shouldn't have been
Speaker 1: killed because he's a fucking dashi who was in the
Speaker 1: middle of doing enabling a series of terrible things. But
Speaker 1: he's also like, you can't you can't ignore the humanity
Speaker 1: of of somebody when you have seen that element of
Speaker 1: what what happens in the conflict, and that has stayed
Speaker 1: with me quite a bit ever since. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: it's one of those things. And you gotta you gotta
Speaker 1: remember that the majority of young men of fighting age
Speaker 1: around the world who joined a military or armed organization
Speaker 1: or an insurgent group, whatever it may be, they do
Speaker 1: so typically because it's whomever is in charge of the
Speaker 1: area they're growing up in. Right, You don't join the
Speaker 1: Russian Army because you wait all the options, and the
Speaker 1: Brazilian Army offer some good aid, you know, some good
Speaker 1: healthcare packages. And I looked at the Italian Army, but
Speaker 1: really I want to go with the Russian. No, you
Speaker 1: go with wherever you were born, yeah, whether, And you know,
Speaker 1: and I was talking to my roommate about this last night.
Speaker 1: We were watching this footage from the flood of nineties
Speaker 1: here in Oregon, you know, and it's this National Guard
Speaker 1: a helicopter where they're pushing bales of hay out of
Speaker 1: the back of the helicopter down to cows stranded out
Speaker 1: in your tillamook. And so depending on when you join
Speaker 1: the National Guard, you either fed cows hey from a
Speaker 1: helicopter or deployed to Irock. That's the luck of the draw, right,
Speaker 1: That's not fair. No, they don't deserve to die any
Speaker 1: more than the guys dropping the hay out of the
Speaker 1: helicopter did, right. But people get yeah, they get carried
Speaker 1: away with like turning it into a sport almost, and
Speaker 1: they forget that there's people on the other end, and
Speaker 1: that like, well, some of them are threats and they
Speaker 1: may need to be dealt with. It's like, you know,
Speaker 1: a bear comes at you in the woods. You shoot it,
Speaker 1: you don't, you don't skin it and make fun of it,
Speaker 1: like yeah, you know, I go kill its kids. You know,
Speaker 1: that's not that's not how it works, you know. So
Speaker 1: like yeah, yeah, don't don't be don't be a piece
Speaker 1: of ship, Like don't don't don't don't lose your humanity, um,
Speaker 1: because I mean, one of the things that makes it
Speaker 1: easy to lose your humanity is that like videos of
Speaker 1: ship getting blown up looks dope, right like it it does.
Speaker 1: It looks cool to watch things get blown up. That's
Speaker 1: in fact, I suspect how a lot of people who
Speaker 1: become very good oh since investigators part of what draws
Speaker 1: them in. It's just like I'm sure that was a
Speaker 1: part of why Caliber started obsessively researching guns. Is like
Speaker 1: their neat guns are neat. You know, weapons are interesting.
Speaker 1: People are inherently interested in in weaponry. Um, which is
Speaker 1: not a good thing. It's just the thing, you know.
Speaker 1: It's not a bad thing either. It's just like a
Speaker 1: thing human beings will always be interested in. But as
Speaker 1: warfare is as natural to us as eating and fucking. Um, well,
Speaker 1: you're talking about the mortars, right, the mortars walking in
Speaker 1: And there's this video on YouTube of made by an
Speaker 1: American Navy attack squadron of them dropping bomb after bomb
Speaker 1: on targets and muzzle and and and uh rocca places
Speaker 1: like that, and it's set to the Devil's going to
Speaker 1: cut you down, And every time there's a beat in
Speaker 1: the music, and you see a bomb drop, and some
Speaker 1: of these bombs it's like four bombs dropping at a time,
Speaker 1: dropping an eight story building. And so I'm sure there
Speaker 1: was a guy inside there with a weapon, but like
Speaker 1: you want to tell me there wasn't anybody else in
Speaker 1: that eighth story building, And like, okay, yeah, you're celebrating
Speaker 1: the death of the combatant there, but like also all
Speaker 1: those other people are being celebrated indirectly, and so like
Speaker 1: you gotta remember that, like these bombs explode and they
Speaker 1: take out a large area, and these fights are happening
Speaker 1: in cities a lot of the time. Yeah, the weaponry
Speaker 1: that the United States uses is more precise than something
Speaker 1: like a barrel bomb, but not by as midy orders
Speaker 1: of magnitude as you would hope. Um. And and precision
Speaker 1: doesn't precision matters, Yes, it's not a non important an
Speaker 1: important thing, but Ultimately, it doesn't matter if your missile
Speaker 1: went right into that living room full of civilians and
Speaker 1: blew them all up, or if you leveled the block
Speaker 1: and maybe you know, killed them indirectly. Like you gotta
Speaker 1: know what you're hitting. The target is what really matters, right,
Speaker 1: So it doesn't matter if you can hit the target,
Speaker 1: you gotta make sure it's the right target. And that's
Speaker 1: where we're starting to have issues now, is like we
Speaker 1: can hit targets really well, we just aren't always sure
Speaker 1: that it's the right yes, as opposed I mean, and
Speaker 1: and you are seeing. So let's let's talk about we
Speaker 1: we started this chatting about Ukrainian potential Ukrainian war crime. Um,
Speaker 1: what we have absolute documentation of a tremendous amount of
Speaker 1: war crimes on behalf of the Russian UH invaders, including
Speaker 1: a thing that they have done repeatedly in Syria, which
Speaker 1: is the targeting of hospitals and medical facilities, um with
Speaker 1: with terrible civilian casualties as a as a result. And
Speaker 1: this is something that the New York Times actually published
Speaker 1: an incredible article based on a mix of O cent
Speaker 1: and like I'm not entirely sure how they got them,
Speaker 1: but combat flight recorders, like the audio that these these
Speaker 1: Russian fighter pilots were sending back and forth to command
Speaker 1: as they attacked hospitals in Syria. Um, so we actually
Speaker 1: have a tremendous amount of detail about like what it
Speaker 1: looks like inside the cockpit and in like the control
Speaker 1: room and whatnot, as air strikes are being ordered on
Speaker 1: medical facilities. I really recommend people check that article out.
Speaker 1: Um it's it's pretty harrowing. Ship. But UM, yeah, are
Speaker 1: you are you surprised at all by kind of what
Speaker 1: you are what you've seen so far in behalf of
Speaker 1: the Russian forces in Ukraine. No, no, not even not
Speaker 1: even the slightest, Because I followed the war and in
Speaker 1: Syria rather closely. And uh, I mean there was a
Speaker 1: point when they had to stop marking the hospitals with
Speaker 1: hospital marketings because the Russians would target them so consistently.
Speaker 1: The United Nations had to stop giving the Russians the
Speaker 1: coordinates of the hospitals and in Aleppo because they kept
Speaker 1: getting targeted. Um. There was an AID convoy that was struck,
Speaker 1: I believe by Syrian aircraft, but it was the targeting
Speaker 1: was given to them by Russian aircraft. Um. It was
Speaker 1: just an AID convoy coming into Aleppo, a United Nations
Speaker 1: and Aid convoy, and it was bombed and strafe repeatedly
Speaker 1: for you know, several hours. Um. Things like that that
Speaker 1: happened so regularly in Syria to the relative silence of
Speaker 1: the rest of the world. Um, that led me to
Speaker 1: believe that when they go into Ukraine, they're not going
Speaker 1: to be any gentler. Um. A lot of people suspected
Speaker 1: early on that, like, well, they it's harder to demonize
Speaker 1: people who look like you, so they're not going to
Speaker 1: have as much of an easy time demonizing Ukrainians. And
Speaker 1: I think there has been some degree of difficulty with that,
Speaker 1: at least in terms of some of the conscripts on
Speaker 1: the Russian side. But the other thing we're seeing is that,
Speaker 1: like a lot of these a lot of people seem
Speaker 1: to genuinely believe the mission of denazifying Ukraine. And so
Speaker 1: if that's what you believe you're doing, then the bombing
Speaker 1: does surprised, It doesn't become a surprise. Right. If you
Speaker 1: think that you're going into Ukraine to suppress it and
Speaker 1: occupy it, then bombing city city is full of Russians,
Speaker 1: Russians and Russian speakers seems like a bad idea, but
Speaker 1: if you believe that they're all Nazis, then it makes
Speaker 1: sense that you might just blow them up because they're
Speaker 1: all the enemy. I'm not saying I'm not condoning it.
Speaker 1: I'm saying no, But I mean that is literally what
Speaker 1: the US government in the British government did in World
Speaker 1: War you know exactly. There have been claims made that
Speaker 1: what Russia is doing in places like mary A Pole
Speaker 1: amounts to an active genocide. Um, what is your opinion
Speaker 1: on that? Genocide is a big word. It's yeah, but
Speaker 1: you know, it has a lot of meaning behind it,
Speaker 1: in the sense that like, just because somebody is killing
Speaker 1: large numbers of people and doing so in heinous ways
Speaker 1: does not make it a genocide. You have to an
Speaker 1: attempt to destroy culture and destroy heritage and things of
Speaker 1: that nature. Um, as it stands, I would say that
Speaker 1: it looks likely that there are signs of potential genocide
Speaker 1: in Mariable. I am not confident enough to come out
Speaker 1: and say that I conclusively think it's happening, but the
Speaker 1: way that it looks like the the city is being
Speaker 1: deliberately targeted to either force the entire population to flee
Speaker 1: or to radicalize them one way or the other. Is
Speaker 1: it goes beyond military target you know. I think the
Speaker 1: thing that were that I that is the most like
Speaker 1: troubling potential sign of an intention of genocide is the
Speaker 1: reports that the Russian government has been evacuating civilians that
Speaker 1: they have in parts of Mariopole. They have captured two
Speaker 1: places in Russia, which is this is a misconception. You
Speaker 1: don't have to just be killing people, as you stated,
Speaker 1: it's an attempt to destroy a culture, which you can
Speaker 1: do by killing, but you can also do by things
Speaker 1: like separating moving people, like forced migration and whatnot. Like
Speaker 1: there's aspects of that at again, look at like the
Speaker 1: genocide of the Native Americans in the United States. It
Speaker 1: was not all straight up killing. A lot of it
Speaker 1: was forced migration, um, which is an act of genocide
Speaker 1: as well. Um. And that's the kind of thing where
Speaker 1: I'm I'm kind of waiting for more reporting on that
Speaker 1: to the to see here exactly what's happening in the
Speaker 1: extent to what's happening, But that really troubles me in
Speaker 1: terms of potential signs of a genocide. Yeah, and when
Speaker 1: they when they coined the term genocide after World War Two.
Speaker 1: It was it was with reference to the Holocaust, but
Speaker 1: but what they had in mind was the Armenian genocide. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when it when they when they drafted these words, and
Speaker 1: because it was beyond just sheer number of people killed,
Speaker 1: if we're talking sheer number of people killed, the Nazis
Speaker 1: also killed six million other people in addition to the
Speaker 1: six million Jews they killed. The reason we talked about
Speaker 1: the Jews is one, six million is a lot of people.
Speaker 1: And two it was a deliberate attempt to destroy their
Speaker 1: entire culture. You make them have never existed, and that's
Speaker 1: very different and very scary. Dying is also very bad,
Speaker 1: the idea of dying and then all of the people
Speaker 1: who were like you just don't exist anymore, and all
Speaker 1: your books and your literature are gone. Like that's that's monstrous. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's why there's a difference between genocide and mass killing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's it's the difference. Like we talked about US
Speaker 1: war crimes in World War Two, of which there were many,
Speaker 1: including the fire bombing of Dresden. I would argue, but
Speaker 1: it's not an act of genocide because when they fire
Speaker 1: bombed Dresden. It was certainly um the killing of civilians
Speaker 1: without particular regard to the direct military efficacy of the action,
Speaker 1: But it was not an attempt to destroy German culture
Speaker 1: or obliterate the German people. And you brought up the
Speaker 1: Armenian genocide. Well, we'll talk about this at some point
Speaker 1: behind the bastards, but you mentioned that that was kind
Speaker 1: of what the people when the term genocide was invented,
Speaker 1: that was what people were looking at, even though it
Speaker 1: was kind of a direct response to the Holocaust. It's
Speaker 1: also worth noting that like when the Nazis planned the Holocaust,
Speaker 1: they to the Armenian genocide as a model. Um Hitler's
Speaker 1: literal statement was when people when he was asked during
Speaker 1: like one of his his dinners with a bunch of
Speaker 1: Nazi officials, like what what about kind of the international
Speaker 1: reaction to what we're planning to do? He was like, well,
Speaker 1: who remembers the Armenians? You know? Like that was his
Speaker 1: That was his attitude, is like, we'll get away with
Speaker 1: it because nobody did anything during this genocide, right and
Speaker 1: and and I think while I would hesitate to call
Speaker 1: the entire war in Ukraine and genocide. Yes, as of yet.
Speaker 1: I would say that there's a similarity between the Armenian
Speaker 1: genocide and and how that led to the Holocaust. There's
Speaker 1: a similarity between the Russian war crimes committed in Syria
Speaker 1: and how that led to the war crimes being committed
Speaker 1: in Ukraine, in the sense that if the world had
Speaker 1: stood up earlier, we would not be seeing this now. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The problem is the world looked the other way when
Speaker 1: the Russians bombed hospitals in Syria, when they repeatedly bombed hospitals.
Speaker 1: In fact, the world didn't just look away. A lot
Speaker 1: of people in the West mocked it. I'm sure you've
Speaker 1: heard it as often as I have. The last Hospital
Speaker 1: and Aleppo joke, right where, oh they're bombing the lost
Speaker 1: last hospital and Aleppo again. Well, the reason that happened
Speaker 1: is because when you bomb the hospital, they build a
Speaker 1: new one, and then it gets bombed again three days later,
Speaker 1: so they've bombed the last one again. So it wasn't
Speaker 1: a joke. It was just a tragedy that kept playing
Speaker 1: out that people couldn't really fathom, so they mocked, right.
Speaker 1: And so when that's the attitude of a lot of
Speaker 1: the world, it's no surprise that what's what's happened in
Speaker 1: Ukraine as has run out of control? M hm, Where
Speaker 1: do you think we go from here? What are you
Speaker 1: what are you expecting to kind of see next within
Speaker 1: this conflict? You know, the most recent kind of reporting
Speaker 1: is that Russia's pulling. Russia's framing it is they're pulling
Speaker 1: back from Kiev to to focus on other fronts. Uh.
Speaker 1: The Ukrainian side is saying like, well, they've been defeated
Speaker 1: around Kiev and they're pulling back. What do you think
Speaker 1: kind of we're seeing next? What is your opinion on
Speaker 1: kind of the next stages here? So I think it
Speaker 1: really depends on Vladimir Prutin's power and how long he
Speaker 1: remains in a position of unchecked power. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: necessarily he will fall from power. I'm saying that how
Speaker 1: long can he go as the only guy calling the shots?
Speaker 1: Because as it stands right now, it doesn't look like
Speaker 1: he's the same Vladimir Putin that we were used to
Speaker 1: dealing with. It seems like something may have changed with him.
Speaker 1: And that's a wild card because if if Vladimir Putin
Speaker 1: wants to continue to escalate here he can continue to
Speaker 1: do so because he may not be getting the same
Speaker 1: reporting that we are about the condition of his army.
Speaker 1: He may think his army is doing better than they're
Speaker 1: doing and that they actually are just repositioning. So if
Speaker 1: that's the case, there's a chance to he'll escalate against
Speaker 1: potentially in NATO country. I find that unlikely, but there's
Speaker 1: still a chance for it. I think what's more likely
Speaker 1: is that we're going to see the Russian military refocused
Speaker 1: efforts in the east, in in Donetskan Luhansk, with an
Speaker 1: attempts to create a land bridge to Crimea through the
Speaker 1: area through Mariopol Melitopa area UM and I think they're
Speaker 1: going to try to rucify the area as much as
Speaker 1: possible and remove as many of the Ukrainians as possible
Speaker 1: UM one way or the other. And I don't know
Speaker 1: if they'll be successful in that, but I think simultaneously
Speaker 1: while they do that, they're going to try to tie
Speaker 1: down and destroy as much of the Ukrainian military as
Speaker 1: possible UM, which will be difficult because the units in
Speaker 1: the east are Ukraine's best equip units. So I don't
Speaker 1: know how this ends. I don't see a reasonable end
Speaker 1: to this insight, but that's just because there's too many
Speaker 1: variables at the moment. I do think one thing that's
Speaker 1: kind of worth looking at this war in a historical context.
Speaker 1: A number of comparisons have been made to both of
Speaker 1: the world wars here, um, I think the thing that
Speaker 1: it most reminds me of is World War One, not
Speaker 1: in that it's a conflagration on that scale or in
Speaker 1: that um it's a similar war in terms of the combat,
Speaker 1: but it is an example of the first big war
Speaker 1: that utilizes a variety of weapons and tactics that have
Speaker 1: been battlefield tested in a series of smaller wars, right, um,
Speaker 1: And I think we are seeing in Ukraine for the
Speaker 1: first time the actual will. I think one thing that
Speaker 1: we have seen is that drones. And I'm not talking
Speaker 1: about the big ones here. You know, they get a
Speaker 1: lot of the bay rock tar and stuff like get
Speaker 1: that gets a lot of attention, but like small the
Speaker 1: kind of drones anyone listening to this could pick up
Speaker 1: and buy today, right, Those drones, I think are proving
Speaker 1: to be a game changer on a tactical level, in
Speaker 1: a similar manner to the machine gun in in the
Speaker 1: turn of the last century. Before the last century. Yeah,
Speaker 1: with the drones, I've often machine guns are good good comparison.
Speaker 1: I've often thought of it as like the airplane, and
Speaker 1: that we had airplanes and we haven't had combat airplanes.
Speaker 1: Before World War One, we didn't have very many of
Speaker 1: them because nobody really realized the utility of them in war.
Speaker 1: And then as the war got closer and then the
Speaker 1: war started, countries started to slowly build up these small
Speaker 1: fleets of aircraft, and then by the end of the war,
Speaker 1: everybody had an air force. I think we see the
Speaker 1: same thing with these small consumer drones, is that like,
Speaker 1: by the end of this war or whatever conflagrations are
Speaker 1: coming after it, every military in the world is going
Speaker 1: to have little little you know, phantom phantom threes or whatever,
Speaker 1: basically for every infantry squad. One of the things that's
Speaker 1: so wild is that if if you again, if you're
Speaker 1: sitting here right now, have not an insignificant amount of money,
Speaker 1: let's say three to four thousand dollars and the enough
Speaker 1: mechanical like competence to carry out modest repairs on your
Speaker 1: own car, you could, with things entirely available over the shelf,
Speaker 1: build a weapon system capable of disabling a variety of
Speaker 1: armored vehicles at night. You know, like you that that
Speaker 1: is a thing that individual people, You could do that
Speaker 1: and you can have it up and running in a
Speaker 1: matter of days. I just I'm imagining the next protest
Speaker 1: in unnamed city. Yeah, and a consumer drone flies over
Speaker 1: the police line and drops a little thing on him.
Speaker 1: This is bang. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people, even even as as influential and meaningful
Speaker 1: as they've been on the battlefield in Ukraine, I think
Speaker 1: people still are kind of slow to understand the extent.
Speaker 1: Like there's one of the wildest stories that's come out
Speaker 1: of it is that the Ukrainian military has a an
Speaker 1: outfit of civilian drone operators using hacked and home built
Speaker 1: drones to attack Russian forces at night. UM and they
Speaker 1: have been The documented of efficacy of their raids has
Speaker 1: been significant, And I can I can remember spending a
Speaker 1: brief period of time with an Iraqi military unit that
Speaker 1: was just using d g I phantoms that they had
Speaker 1: rigged to drop what were since essentially mortar shells with
Speaker 1: shuttlecocks on them from a height. UM, and they were
Speaker 1: very effective at killing people. UM. As isis, drones were
Speaker 1: effective at sort of spotting, you know, mortars for folks well.
Speaker 1: And one of the things I saw I SIS used
Speaker 1: their more their drones for great effect wasn't so much
Speaker 1: to kill large numbers of enemy soldiers. It was to
Speaker 1: do the same thing that American predator drones and report
Speaker 1: drones had done for for decades by that point the
Speaker 1: terror groups, which is let them know you can't gather
Speaker 1: in large numbers. Yeah, if you gather in large numbers
Speaker 1: of your target. And so you saw a Rocky soldier
Speaker 1: saying no more than two or three in a group, ye,
Speaker 1: any more than that will get targeted, you know, And
Speaker 1: so they flipped the equation basically yep, and don't I
Speaker 1: mean I one of the reasons why I I have
Speaker 1: a general policy heavily informed by my time in Mozle
Speaker 1: that the last place I want to be in a
Speaker 1: anywhere near a war zone is an armored vehicle. Um.
Speaker 1: Because that's really unless you are in something that's heavily
Speaker 1: up armored, like an im wrap. Little bombs dropped by
Speaker 1: drones can do significant damage to something like a humpy
Speaker 1: and that's exactly what you target. You don't target a
Speaker 1: Toyota Corolla with a drone like that, unless you specifically
Speaker 1: know an individuals in that Corolla that you want to kill.
Speaker 1: But you may just behind the lines see a target
Speaker 1: of opportunity in an armor see an armored lightly armored vehicle,
Speaker 1: and drop a immunition on it. And that's one of
Speaker 1: the things this is done. There's a lot of talk
Speaker 1: prior to the expanded Russian invasion about how immediately Russia
Speaker 1: was going to get air superiority, and that's obviously a
Speaker 1: bigger story than just drones. There's a lot of factors
Speaker 1: and why Russia. It's probably accurate to say they have
Speaker 1: superiority in a number of parts of the war, but
Speaker 1: they don't have supremacy like that. It's not like an
Speaker 1: absolute matter. And part of that is because, um, it's
Speaker 1: not really possible to at this moment. Someday, I suspect
Speaker 1: there will be more effective ways of stopping drones and
Speaker 1: at like a theater level. Um, maybe, but it certainly
Speaker 1: hasn't happened yet. Yeah. Yeah, And and that's the thing.
Speaker 1: You know, there's there's the drones, and then there's also
Speaker 1: on the Ukrainian side, they you know, I think they
Speaker 1: recognize that air force against air force, the Russians have
Speaker 1: a numerical superiority. So you can deny the Russians air
Speaker 1: supremacy by shooting down their planes with man pads. You
Speaker 1: don't have to have an air force to deny your opponent.
Speaker 1: You just have to dine them the ability to freely
Speaker 1: operate in your airspace. And this is one of those things.
Speaker 1: There's been a lot of talk about a no fly zone, um,
Speaker 1: which I tend to think would be a bad idea
Speaker 1: in the traditional sense in terms of like the US
Speaker 1: and NATO sending in planes to down Russian planes over Ukraine.
Speaker 1: There's a number of reasons why that's concerning. But you
Speaker 1: can effectively establish a no fly zone by shipping in
Speaker 1: a funckload of man pads exactly. Yeah, And I'm not
Speaker 1: against that. I think in terms of what kind of
Speaker 1: what kind of armed arms support is ethical to provide,
Speaker 1: giving people the ability to stop planes from bombing cities
Speaker 1: is broadly speaking, one of the most ethical things you
Speaker 1: can do in terms of shipping munitions around the world, right,
Speaker 1: and the other advantages that man pads. I'm sure somebody
Speaker 1: could turn it into a lethal ground weapon, but they're
Speaker 1: pretty hard to yeah, use against ground targets, against houses,
Speaker 1: things like that, not really what they're designed for. So
Speaker 1: it's not like just handing over, you know, some indiscriminate
Speaker 1: weapon to the Ukrainians to use against Russian cities. You're
Speaker 1: you're giving them a weapon that's specifically used against military aircraft.
Speaker 1: Like most man pads can't reach the altitude the airliners
Speaker 1: are out even so yep, so I think that's probably
Speaker 1: what we want to talk about today. Um, you wanna
Speaker 1: plug your plug ables, tell people where they can find
Speaker 1: you in your analysis out in the wild. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you can. You can follow me on Twitter. My handle
Speaker 1: is at Shabanian Rum and uh I work I published
Speaker 1: occasionally with the New Lines Institute. Uh so you can
Speaker 1: see my work there as well. And I have a
Speaker 1: website that I seldom update, the Folded Gap dot com
Speaker 1: um hasn't been updated and probably eight months now because
Speaker 1: I've been tired. But um, yeah, those are the places
Speaker 1: to find me and uh d m s are open
Speaker 1: on Twitter. So if you ever have questions or anything
Speaker 1: like that, let me know. I'm happy to talk with
Speaker 1: anybody who's got questions on these kind of things. Hell yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's gonna be us. So you know, enjoy this
Speaker 1: analysis of the of the war in Ukraine. Um, before
Speaker 1: we return you to your regularly scheduled multi part series
Speaker 1: on Nazi cat girls. Uh. The primary focus of this
Speaker 1: podcast money money. This is welcome, Dick had happen here?
Speaker 1: It is me, Christopher Long. Uh, this is a This
Speaker 1: is a podcast about things falling apart, things putting back
Speaker 1: together again. And also today it's just about money. Um.
Speaker 1: And also well, okay, it is not just about money.
Speaker 1: It is about money and is about seemingly seemingly esoteric
Speaker 1: arguments about the nature of money that actually turned out
Speaker 1: to be extremely important for any post revolutionary society or
Speaker 1: even just this society. So yeah, and and joining joining
Speaker 1: me to talk about this are Kyle Flannery and Steve
Speaker 1: manned where the co editors of Strange Matters magazine, which
Speaker 1: is a new workers co op that's in the middle
Speaker 1: of a fundraising drive. So yeah, go Stworth the magazine.
Speaker 1: And uh, even Kyle, welcome to the show. It's great
Speaker 1: to be here, Chris, thanks for having us. The basis
Speaker 1: of this interview is a piece that is coming out,
Speaker 1: actually when is it coming out that that's a good
Speaker 1: question that I should probably have asked of this. Um,
Speaker 1: let's see, it will come out later this month. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there'll be out later this month. That is about the
Speaker 1: history of money and what money is. So I guess
Speaker 1: we can we can start there, which is, yeah, can
Speaker 1: can you walk us through a bit about the debate
Speaker 1: over what money is and how sort of various people
Speaker 1: have gotten parts of it wrong and parts of it right. Sure.
Speaker 1: I got into this debate as a economics graduate student
Speaker 1: in eleven and a book that really kind of shaped
Speaker 1: my initial understanding was David Graeber's Depth the First five
Speaker 1: Thousand Years and yeah, it's excellent. Um it's it's very long,
Speaker 1: and it's a bit scattered, but I love what he
Speaker 1: put together with it. And um, so he kind of
Speaker 1: introduced me to ideas of from a school of economic
Speaker 1: thought called chartile is UM and chartial is M is
Speaker 1: kind of the theoretical forbear of M M T and
Speaker 1: m M T is, which is modern monetary theory is
Speaker 1: kind of in the news now as a theory which
Speaker 1: is saying, like, okay, if you if you're a government
Speaker 1: that issues its own money, its own currency, that is
Speaker 1: not really backed by anything. It's not backed by any
Speaker 1: other currency or any other commodity. Then you don't really
Speaker 1: face a financial limit as far as how much you
Speaker 1: can produce. You you're the sole source of that money,
Speaker 1: and you can spend it into existence, spend by buying
Speaker 1: things the money into existence, and people will accept it
Speaker 1: to the extent that they either need it or they
Speaker 1: want it. And that's one theory that's kind of in
Speaker 1: the air now. But chartali is Um, over a hundred
Speaker 1: years before this, is putting out very similar ideas around
Speaker 1: money that is um created by states in order to
Speaker 1: martial physical resources. They call it biophysical resources, which is
Speaker 1: just a fancy word of meaning all of the material, people, techniques, um,
Speaker 1: physical processes that are required to create economic activity. So
Speaker 1: to the extent that people either need or want your
Speaker 1: money UM, you can use it as a social technology
Speaker 1: sort of to marshal those resources into action, and you
Speaker 1: being a state, chartali is Um says, so from Chartalism
Speaker 1: we got m MT. But David Graverer's book is about
Speaker 1: a lot more than just Churtleism and MT, So it's
Speaker 1: about the origins of money, and origins of money, it
Speaker 1: turns out, are at least five thousand years ago. As
Speaker 1: the title says, UM, there are examples of UM early
Speaker 1: accounting systems that are where people are just UM. Rather
Speaker 1: than there being a circulating medium of exchange type money
Speaker 1: like a coin or something or a daughter bill, there
Speaker 1: were just records of what people own and what people
Speaker 1: owe and their debts and credits against each other. And
Speaker 1: it was in early Mesopotamia there. So we have these
Speaker 1: early accounting systems that yield more advanced credit systems over time,
Speaker 1: that are ruled by temples UM, which are sort of
Speaker 1: proto states in a way in terms of like they
Speaker 1: administer the flow of goods and services through their territory
Speaker 1: and between their territory and another temple's territory using their
Speaker 1: domestic money, but also international money. International money was facilitated
Speaker 1: through trade networks. Trade networks use things like UM. They
Speaker 1: needed to convert between a domestic money and international money.
Speaker 1: And Gregory goes through these like wonderful examples of UM,
Speaker 1: silver and other medals being used as like international means
Speaker 1: of payment. UM. That's sort of our term in our
Speaker 1: piece basically, which is covering them foreign exchange. But UM.
Speaker 1: He says, like in order to get from the domestic
Speaker 1: money into the international money. UM. You need to have
Speaker 1: these linkages of experts in the temple and the trade
Speaker 1: networks to get together and make um credit instruments which
Speaker 1: knit them together into this trade network. And from there
Speaker 1: we go into UM. I don't want to spend too
Speaker 1: much time on the history, but we go from there
Speaker 1: to situations thousands of years later, we get coins. Coins
Speaker 1: are being minted by starting in the fulle six hundred BC.
Speaker 1: I want to say, Carl, yeah, that that sounds about right.
Speaker 1: So um the first I someone can correct me if
Speaker 1: I'm wrong. But I've been doing some homework on this
Speaker 1: because I've been on a few podcasts and there's like
Speaker 1: like numismatists in the comments and whatnot. But um, the
Speaker 1: first okay, the first mixed gold and silver coin was
Speaker 1: sometime in the seventh century BC, and the first gold
Speaker 1: coin was not long after. I think it was like
Speaker 1: they were both Lydian kings, like one after another. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to hit that because someone said I
Speaker 1: got wrong earlier. But um uh, these coins were kind
Speaker 1: of the first widely used sort of retail means of
Speaker 1: settling debts, like at the point of sale between people.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't just an accounting system. It was an
Speaker 1: elaborate credit system with no circulating means of payment. It
Speaker 1: was a circulating money. Now and it's getting around um
Speaker 1: based on military conquest. Military conquest in the excellent age
Speaker 1: spread the use of coins much wider than the domestic
Speaker 1: spheres in which they were first minted. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: think we should like just just to talk about it
Speaker 1: about like roughly when this is like you know like
Speaker 1: if if if you go back, I mean this this
Speaker 1: is slightly later, but one of the huge sort of
Speaker 1: like like the periods where like the entire Mediterraneans using coinage,
Speaker 1: right is you know you're this this is this is
Speaker 1: when you're dealing with you're sort of like classical Greek
Speaker 1: like you have you have your gree your Greeks and
Speaker 1: your Persians, and you have your sort of like Athens
Speaker 1: and sparta Um and that those guys are very much uh,
Speaker 1: they're engaged in this thing that Graver calls the the
Speaker 1: military industrial coinage slavery complex, the military industrial coinage complex. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I yeah, I think he has slavery on the
Speaker 1: end because it's yeah, it's it's this giant sort of places,
Speaker 1: giant warfare system. Right, these are like like Athens is
Speaker 1: an empire, right, they run around, they steal, they see
Speaker 1: people's gold, this golden silver byance, and they like have
Speaker 1: slaves that work in this this whole sort of light
Speaker 1: like this. Yeah, you get the system of empire that
Speaker 1: is like what the actual ages sort of defined by. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's like whereas previously, like so precious medals did circulate,
Speaker 1: but they weren't in coin form, and they were more
Speaker 1: as like a bulk means of payment stored from one
Speaker 1: temple to the next, almost as if they are central banks,
Speaker 1: but central banks don't exist yet, and actual actual age
Speaker 1: coinage system gave rise to the more much more sophisticated
Speaker 1: medieval coinage system. And I'm going breezily through this because um,
Speaker 1: there's a lot there, but several years, there's several thousands
Speaker 1: years they're passing in a few minutes here, so um,
Speaker 1: bear with me. But there are there now in the Mediva,
Speaker 1: Medieval and Renaissance times, not only do we have the
Speaker 1: coin is circulating, but we also have credit instruments um
Speaker 1: which uh are being submitted, transferred, transmitted rather between banks uh,
Speaker 1: between banks in different countries and territories that are saying, hey,
Speaker 1: you don't even need to based on what is written
Speaker 1: on this piece of paper, I already know you're good
Speaker 1: for it. I will dispense with the coins uh that
Speaker 1: I have in my bank because this paper signifies that
Speaker 1: they you're good for it, basically, and so that greatly
Speaker 1: speeds things up in terms of UM settling commerce debts
Speaker 1: and and uh settling bills between different UM states. So
Speaker 1: but going through all this history, the point of it
Speaker 1: is that at every at every sort of step of
Speaker 1: the way, you see, okay, there's a lot of different
Speaker 1: types of money. They're circulating and they're being exchanged against
Speaker 1: one another, and there also seems to be a domestic
Speaker 1: sphere and international sphere. The international means of payment, which
Speaker 1: is a analytic category that um I and my co
Speaker 1: author John Michael Cloone thought up, is kind of sort
Speaker 1: of sets the tune as far as what uh, what
Speaker 1: kind of hierarchy of money, if you will, develops in
Speaker 1: each of these ages. So like in the prior to
Speaker 1: the Axle Age, there were both there was bulk settlements
Speaker 1: from one temple to the next in terms of silver
Speaker 1: although it wasn't coins, it was just UM like bullion
Speaker 1: basically UM, and then and then later it was coins,
Speaker 1: and then later it was bills of exchange, and then
Speaker 1: after a while there emerged gold standards UM that existed
Speaker 1: between nations, and they had central banks eventually, which UM
Speaker 1: hoarded goal old not because not just because they are
Speaker 1: fetishizing it or something something basic like that, but rather
Speaker 1: because it was the established international means of payment. And
Speaker 1: if you either you need that or you need something
Speaker 1: that is easily transferable into that in order to conduct
Speaker 1: your trade, especially if you're developing country or um A
Speaker 1: otherwise like an upstart state of some type. Now today
Speaker 1: we're in a dollarized world. The dollar is the international
Speaker 1: means of payment from one onwards the M M T story, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's basically true. The E then the for
Speaker 1: the US government as the issuer the sole issue of
Speaker 1: the dollar, which is a fiat currency which is not
Speaker 1: backed by anything UM. Yeah, you can make as much
Speaker 1: of that as what you want. You could make, you
Speaker 1: can create and spend into existence as need dollars as
Speaker 1: the US government wants, and then delete it from existence
Speaker 1: by taxing it away. And that makes perfect sense totally
Speaker 1: acknowledged that. But there's some problems nonetheless in terms of
Speaker 1: how they apply that into a more general theory, because
Speaker 1: it's like, can you, okay, you can make as much
Speaker 1: of your own money, what about other types of money
Speaker 1: from the perspective of a US state craft interested individual,
Speaker 1: Like why would you care about other people's money? Basically,
Speaker 1: if you're just the full sole source of the of
Speaker 1: the US dollar, which happens to also be the international
Speaker 1: means of payment, of course you wouldn't are if you're like, say,
Speaker 1: to Tunisia. The Tunisian dollar is accepted almost nowhere as payment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and one one of the big things, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not the soul driver and people start for emphasize this.
Speaker 1: I'm going to caveat this immediately because people will yell
Speaker 1: at me. But like, one of one of the very
Speaker 1: important things about the dollar is that the dollar is
Speaker 1: what you can buy oil in. And this is extremely
Speaker 1: important because if you are a society in the world,
Speaker 1: you need oil. Um, this is basically universally true. And
Speaker 1: and this you know, but and the fact that you
Speaker 1: need to buy oil, and and the fact that you
Speaker 1: need to buy a lot of other things that are
Speaker 1: manufactured in the US means you have to find some
Speaker 1: way to get U S dollars. Now, again, the US doesn't.
Speaker 1: This doesn't matter for the U S because we can
Speaker 1: just make them. Well okay, a, this is another thing.
Speaker 1: This stuff gets very weird and convoluted very quickly. Um.
Speaker 1: But the essentially the US can just sort of make
Speaker 1: this money technically speaking as a federal reserve. And there's
Speaker 1: all of this just incredibly convoluted finance stuff. But yeah,
Speaker 1: the the US like doesn't the US does not have
Speaker 1: to worry about obtaining U S dollars. You could just
Speaker 1: do it. But you know, yeah, if if you're if
Speaker 1: you're if you're I don't know if true Trenisia, if
Speaker 1: you're Denmarks an example, Yeah, den Mark. Yeah, like you
Speaker 1: you you need to find a way to get US
Speaker 1: dollars because you need to have stuff, you need to
Speaker 1: use US dollars to buy it. Mhm. Yeah. And so
Speaker 1: in our national context, this is after all of the
Speaker 1: history I just went through, since about or so when
Speaker 1: we went off the gold standard. Um, we have a
Speaker 1: system of central banks dominated by the dollar, and the
Speaker 1: dollar represents about of settlement of all trade and the
Speaker 1: next five or so currencies are plus the US account
Speaker 1: for like a d of all trade, so there's really
Speaker 1: just a few currencies which dominate everything, with the US
Speaker 1: being outsized among them. And when you look at the
Speaker 1: historical record, this is like very similar to other forms
Speaker 1: of international means of payment, where it's like, okay, I
Speaker 1: either need to have the one that's at the top,
Speaker 1: or failing that, one of the other sort of reserve currencies,
Speaker 1: even though that that that terminology didn't really exists prior
Speaker 1: to about eighty years ago. Um. But yeah, so like
Speaker 1: if you don't if it's not gold, then okay, it's
Speaker 1: the US dollar, So we need dollars or we either
Speaker 1: need to be printing dollars because we're the U S
Speaker 1: or for not them, then we need to get into
Speaker 1: either U S Dollar or the yen or the euro
Speaker 1: or one of the major trading currencies. And um, like China,
Speaker 1: China does a lot of trade with the US and
Speaker 1: they sell things to us, We give them dollars. They're rational,
Speaker 1: they put their dollars into treasuries to gain a little
Speaker 1: bit of a return instead of just holding the dollars
Speaker 1: themselves for no return. Do we explain I guess what
Speaker 1: a treasury is because yeah, sorry, Uh, the treasury bill
Speaker 1: is if you receive dollars, you can use them to
Speaker 1: purchase what's called a treasury note or a treasury bill
Speaker 1: and notes too. So if you ever hear something to
Speaker 1: talk about tea notes, that that's what this is. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's a way to learn. It's like moving from
Speaker 1: your checking to your savings account essentially. So if you
Speaker 1: have just dollars in a bank, it doesn't earn hardly anything.
Speaker 1: If you're in a saving if you go into the
Speaker 1: savings account, which is basically the treasury the treasury bills,
Speaker 1: you'll learn a little more and you'll learn dollars. You
Speaker 1: won't earn reminity from them. You'll learn more dollars and
Speaker 1: dollars for the international means of payments. So that's good. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so like basically like there's the US government puts
Speaker 1: out a bond and like you buy it and then
Speaker 1: when when whatever it like expires or there's like a
Speaker 1: ten year team note that people talk about that's like
Speaker 1: years you buy it and yeah, it'll give it'll give
Speaker 1: you like a certain amount of dollars like later on
Speaker 1: that is more than what you paid for it HM exactly,
Speaker 1: So you'll learn a little bit of interest over time,
Speaker 1: and then you may earn like a little lump sum
Speaker 1: when it matures in in the future. So China has
Speaker 1: tons of dollars. It's part of a huge strategy that
Speaker 1: they have in order to manage their foreign their foreign
Speaker 1: currency reserves or what's called for X. So for X
Speaker 1: is the that's the term. We're going to use a
Speaker 1: lot um. That just is the foreign currency reserves you
Speaker 1: have on hand in order to pay for things that
Speaker 1: are only available for sale in currencies that you can't
Speaker 1: make yourself. Okay. So you know you have this question
Speaker 1: of like why do we care about this? Right, Like
Speaker 1: why do we people who want to make the world
Speaker 1: better care about this? And the answer is, okay, take
Speaker 1: take take your hypothetical scenario, your your Your hypothetical scenario
Speaker 1: is the scenario in which like a a a bunch
Speaker 1: of workers in alliance with like tribal confederations have taken
Speaker 1: Vancouver Island, right, and they've set up a new They've
Speaker 1: they've set up a new government that they have worked
Speaker 1: out sovereignty arrangements. Things have happened. You now have a
Speaker 1: new you have you have a new sort of entity
Speaker 1: that that is in Vancouver Island. Um. Yeah, so so
Speaker 1: immediately you have you have both you have both resources
Speaker 1: and you have problems. Right. You have a certain amount
Speaker 1: of resources that on Vancouver Island, right, you have you know,
Speaker 1: you have like you have literally like what what you
Speaker 1: have the things that are on the island. Right. You
Speaker 1: have cars, you have like probably some yaches you've managed
Speaker 1: to like steal you have you know, you have you
Speaker 1: have shops, you have production facilities, you have extremely large
Speaker 1: number of very good Chinese restaurants. Uh you have trees. Trees, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know restaurants. I mean also it's true like I yeah,
Speaker 1: my my my family spent a lot of time like
Speaker 1: specifically going going to Vancouver Island just to eat Chinese food. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and say say like, let' let's say you've
Speaker 1: taken Vancouver Island and you you expand out and you
Speaker 1: now have like a swath of Canada, right that that
Speaker 1: is that is that is now sort of been liberated,
Speaker 1: and you know, you have you have you have a
Speaker 1: lot of resources. You have sort of timber, you have
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe you have coal, maybe you have
Speaker 1: other stuff you have, you have, and you also have
Speaker 1: a lot of people and yeah, you have a lot
Speaker 1: of labor and and those people have a lot of skills,
Speaker 1: they have a lot of education, they have like you know,
Speaker 1: they have, they have, they have, they have a belief
Speaker 1: that you can make the world a better place. And
Speaker 1: I think this is where you know, this is this
Speaker 1: is the arena in which MMT can sort of explain
Speaker 1: what you're doing next. Mhm Yeah. So you have this um,
Speaker 1: you have a territory, this undergone revolutionary change, and you
Speaker 1: have biophysical resources that are in it and biophysical resources
Speaker 1: that could be in it. And you have and you
Speaker 1: also have the social technology of money. Some of the
Speaker 1: money you can just make yourself. Other moneys you cannot
Speaker 1: um M m T in the is applicable in the
Speaker 1: sense that it says in this scenario. I think the
Speaker 1: most the way MMT is most acclicable is to say
Speaker 1: everyone can be employed. Who wants to be employed, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's they're the One of their principal ideas is a
Speaker 1: job you're in a federal job guarantee. And it could
Speaker 1: be applied just as easily conceptually in this situation. It says,
Speaker 1: UM there's nothing preventing a revolutionary government of some type, um,
Speaker 1: not necessarily a states, but any any non state type
Speaker 1: of administration from setting up something sort of like a
Speaker 1: central bank to make its own money, to martial domestic resources,
Speaker 1: domestic in terms of within its own territory, and to
Speaker 1: get everyone everyone who wants to be employed, to be
Speaker 1: employed and to be paid for their work. Like not
Speaker 1: to be too vulgar, but like why why this is
Speaker 1: stuff is important? This monetary theory in this history is like,
Speaker 1: people want to be paid for their work. They're not
Speaker 1: going to go inviter things. They want to get paid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think this is something that like you know,
Speaker 1: if if if if you look at sort of like
Speaker 1: the thing that gets held up was like the classic
Speaker 1: example of an anarchist revolution, right is is what happens
Speaker 1: in Spain necinety six. And if if if you look
Speaker 1: at what they do right like very almost immediately after
Speaker 1: the revolution, what happens is you have basically like a
Speaker 1: union of all of the bank workers, and those guys
Speaker 1: take over all the banks, um, and you you have
Speaker 1: you have the individual work like workers in different unions
Speaker 1: starts seizing, they start seasing the factories that start seizing
Speaker 1: like the trains. And once they've done that, they start
Speaker 1: just pulling all of their resources into you know, like
Speaker 1: in into like they have they they now have this
Speaker 1: like they have they have the banking union. The banking
Speaker 1: union is is that the sort of sexual body that
Speaker 1: has resources that can distribute it. And you know what
Speaker 1: what what MMT is essentially saying is like, yeah, so
Speaker 1: as long as what you're moving around is the resources
Speaker 1: that you have in your territory, like you can just
Speaker 1: create money in order to do that, and you can
Speaker 1: sort of you know, and you can use this to
Speaker 1: get people to do certain things. And like you know,
Speaker 1: the Catalonians, like they they the equals if one's wages,
Speaker 1: for example, I mean, it would be better if we
Speaker 1: equalize everyone's wages. I do agree with that. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean they did do with a lot
Speaker 1: of other stuff that's like okay, so like they get
Speaker 1: rid of a lot of jobs that are like sort
Speaker 1: of managerial stuff or like just bullshit jobs they just
Speaker 1: kind of eliminate and yeah, and you know, and this
Speaker 1: this frees up people to like do stuff that actually
Speaker 1: matters and is real instead of sort of dislike this
Speaker 1: sort of bureaucratic hierarchy that's above them. And yeah, but
Speaker 1: and I think the other thing they do that's that's
Speaker 1: very important for our sort of scenario for us talking
Speaker 1: about money is that like they they immediately start like
Speaker 1: they start seizing gold and they start seizing you know,
Speaker 1: like they start seasing foreign currency. And yeah, and I
Speaker 1: think that this this is where we can get into
Speaker 1: where where I guess MP doesn't work because m T
Speaker 1: like it's it's it's it doesn't. It doesn't really think
Speaker 1: much about the fact that like, Okay, you have Vancouver Island,
Speaker 1: you have a part of like Canada, right, there is
Speaker 1: a lot of resources that you don't have. Absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's gonna be a lot of why foreign
Speaker 1: exchange matters so much as that, you know, you inevitably
Speaker 1: you think, what if we just made an autartic society.
Speaker 1: That's sorry, that's a little I probably jump got a
Speaker 1: little bit there. What if we just made everything ourselves?
Speaker 1: What if we made a society that was fully economically independent. Um,
Speaker 1: that's what autarchy tends to be used to mean. And
Speaker 1: the answer to that is because that sucks. The problem
Speaker 1: with it is that it sucks like you, you don't
Speaker 1: want to be trying to manage an autartic society on
Speaker 1: multiple grounds, uh, not least of which is that I mean,
Speaker 1: we've we've we've seen societies try to do it, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we me, me and Steve could go for
Speaker 1: hours and hours and hours talking about historical precedents of
Speaker 1: previous economic systems, many of which did try to be autartic,
Speaker 1: because that was something that monarchy has liked a lot,
Speaker 1: was the idea that their their kingdom could be fully independent.
Speaker 1: Because the thing is that when you're economically independent, that
Speaker 1: means that you've got a certain amount of security, of
Speaker 1: international security. Uh. And there's kind of a trade off
Speaker 1: where the more stuff that you're reliant on importing, the
Speaker 1: more vulnerable you are to the people you're importing and
Speaker 1: screwing you. But it's just so massively difficult to be
Speaker 1: a good producer of every possible good. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: this and this is this is true even if you
Speaker 1: have an annoyance amount of resources, like I think, you know,
Speaker 1: we can talk about one case study of this, which
Speaker 1: is socialist period China, and you know, social spirit China.
Speaker 1: They they have they they they're they're getting resources, and
Speaker 1: especially the early periods, you're getting some resources from like
Speaker 1: Hong Kong, they're getting some stuff from the Soviets. But
Speaker 1: you know they get into like Mao famously does not
Speaker 1: like markets. Um, this is a this is the thing
Speaker 1: that is known about Mao, and so Mao is like, Okay,
Speaker 1: We're like no, we're going to shut off the sort
Speaker 1: of like ket system that we that we've been running
Speaker 1: sort of through Hong Kong. And then you know, China
Speaker 1: have been getting technology transfers and aid from the USSR.
Speaker 1: But you know, the US are in China got into
Speaker 1: a bunch of political fights and the US are like
Speaker 1: pulls out all of advisors and you know China, China
Speaker 1: has an enormous amount of resources, right, they have a
Speaker 1: large population, they have they have just an enormous geographic mass,
Speaker 1: and so they basically try to you know, build into
Speaker 1: target society and they try to sort of just okay,
Speaker 1: well we'll just what does martial our resources and we'll
Speaker 1: just sort of like, well, we'll plan a way out
Speaker 1: of it. And they run into this problem, which is
Speaker 1: that there is actually things that they need from other countries,
Speaker 1: which is technology, and they hit this thing I've talked
Speaker 1: about before, which is, uh, like they basically get this bottle,
Speaker 1: this production bottleneck where it's like, well, okay, so in
Speaker 1: order to produce more industrial goods, than need more food.
Speaker 1: But the problem is, in order to produce more food
Speaker 1: to support a large urban population, uh, you need more
Speaker 1: industrial goods, right, You need your like fertilizers, need your
Speaker 1: tractors and need stuff like that, and you know, and
Speaker 1: once they're cut off from sort of the rest of
Speaker 1: the world from through Hong Kong, and for the U. S.
Speaker 1: S R. They don't have what they you know, they're
Speaker 1: they're sort of they're sort of scrambling to figure out
Speaker 1: how we do this. And their solution is a greatly forward,
Speaker 1: which is essentially we're we're we're gonna just bust through
Speaker 1: this whole thing, and we're gonna do it by forcing
Speaker 1: everyone to work for like an absolutely enormous like increase
Speaker 1: in hours. Right Like, We're we're gonna we're gonna have
Speaker 1: peasants working in the fields literally until they collasse some exhaustion,
Speaker 1: and it just doesn't work. It is a it is
Speaker 1: a epocal failure. There are millions of people die from
Speaker 1: famines and you know, and the sort of the response
Speaker 1: to this is that, like is that China eventually ends
Speaker 1: up like winds up opening its economy again. Yeah and
Speaker 1: yeah and yeah, and like you know, and this is
Speaker 1: the thing, like if if China, which has like just
Speaker 1: just an astounding breath of natural resources, can't pull this off,
Speaker 1: like it's probably just not a good idea because it's like, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean we even have like a very you know,
Speaker 1: a very contemporary example that you know, makes they will
Speaker 1: make certainly makes my blood, boy, and I'm sure we
Speaker 1: will make some of the listeners blood boil. The vaccines, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the realistically, you know, the the coronavirus is
Speaker 1: fund is a more or less is an incredible threat
Speaker 1: to basically adding every state on the planet at this point.
Speaker 1: And the really really chemical and biomedical research is done
Speaker 1: in just a handful of places on the planet. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there have been attempts to create vaccines outside of
Speaker 1: those places, and they have been somewhat successful, but it
Speaker 1: has been difficult, and most places are just not in
Speaker 1: a position to create a to develop their own competing technology. Uh.
Speaker 1: And even China struggled with creating their own competing vaccination technology.
Speaker 1: And I'm not at all a bio biology expert, understand
Speaker 1: it's a not quite a sufficient vaccine, the sinovac. But
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, this is like South
Speaker 1: Africa not developing their own independent vaccine. That's a quite
Speaker 1: sophisticatedicated economy. All of all the very South American countries
Speaker 1: could have pulled their resources together in theory, but it's
Speaker 1: so hard to turn a dime and develop from scratch
Speaker 1: a primary research industry. Uh, it's so difficult, and it's
Speaker 1: so not worth it. It's you know, if you have
Speaker 1: trade relations with a country that has technology developments in
Speaker 1: a field that you really care about, it's just not
Speaker 1: really worth it. Like we don't the United States doesn't
Speaker 1: really compete with several sort of forms of Japanese technology
Speaker 1: because it's just not worth the bother. Uh. Just let
Speaker 1: Korea and Japan handle that for US, and we buy
Speaker 1: it and they accept our our four x they accept
Speaker 1: our dollars. But you know, let's say you're the Philippines, Yeah,
Speaker 1: how are you going to get those? And uh, this
Speaker 1: is this is now international trade and international politics. And
Speaker 1: if we're creating our now independent Vancouver Island, we have
Speaker 1: now entered into this territory, we have now entered into
Speaker 1: international politics and international trade. Yeah, and and this this
Speaker 1: is an arena that's fraud in a lot of ways
Speaker 1: because it's it's you know, as you've sort of been
Speaker 1: talking about, right, it's it's not just that you need.
Speaker 1: It's not sing that you need for XP. It's like example,
Speaker 1: like you know, if you have you have your sort
Speaker 1: of like you know, you you you you have your
Speaker 1: new society and like Vancouver, right mack you violence, you
Speaker 1: know you need the thing you need mostly is dollars.
Speaker 1: And this is this is a real problem because this
Speaker 1: requires you to have something that you can turn into dollars.
Speaker 1: And you know, okay, so you're you're going to have
Speaker 1: some amount of dollars that are just there right from
Speaker 1: from when you see society. There's there's assets you can
Speaker 1: sort of just sell off that like okay, like do
Speaker 1: we really need this yacht? Like okay, we can, we
Speaker 1: can we can sell this for some amount of dollars.
Speaker 1: But this becomes a real economic problem because you need
Speaker 1: to produce something that you can exchange for dollars, and
Speaker 1: you know, there's there's a pretty good chance that like
Speaker 1: whatever sort of new currency whatever new sort of like
Speaker 1: MMT currency that's like, oh, it's it's controlled because we're producing.
Speaker 1: It moves our resources around. We can make a bustment
Speaker 1: as we want, Like yeah, you have to actually be
Speaker 1: able to look convert that into dollars. And you know
Speaker 1: why why does the U? Y is the US going
Speaker 1: to want your currency? Yeah, it's a bit dialectical because
Speaker 1: you have to. Okay, you have your m m T currency,
Speaker 1: which domestically is accepted because of text receive ability or
Speaker 1: something uh or or national fervor if you will to
Speaker 1: um create a new democratic confederalists society um, and that's
Speaker 1: accepted there. But yeah, you need US sellars. So like
Speaker 1: you need us sellars. But why do you need them?
Speaker 1: Partly because like you eventually want to not need them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so you have what you can You have assets
Speaker 1: right now that you can just sell, so that's one way,
Speaker 1: but long term you can't do that. So you need
Speaker 1: to have cash flow over the long haul that allows
Speaker 1: you to buy what are called capital goods, which are
Speaker 1: is a fancy term for machines that make machines or
Speaker 1: machines that make some sort of like in product, which
Speaker 1: is a physical thing. It's not like a service or something.
Speaker 1: And um, you want to classic like really classic economic
Speaker 1: development advice that is actually pretty good is you want
Speaker 1: to move up what's called a value chain and eventually
Speaker 1: be not producing, um, just like a stable crop or something,
Speaker 1: but doing really innovative advanced technology things later on. So
Speaker 1: you like, here's where I am, here's what I have,
Speaker 1: Here's what I could have. Though, how do I get there? Um,
Speaker 1: part of of part of the formula to get there
Speaker 1: is yes, acquiring for X, but it's other things like saying,
Speaker 1: how do I cultivate political alliances that will yield trade
Speaker 1: partners such that I have a stable flow of for
Speaker 1: X and uh, maybe even technology transfers you know, or
Speaker 1: something down the line which could be a game changer. Um,
Speaker 1: you need to have an education system. Like if you're
Speaker 1: a fan of the economist Torstin Veblen, he thought like
Speaker 1: in his mind he thought the economic development was ultimately
Speaker 1: from the human intellect and like everything was downstream of that.
Speaker 1: So like you need to have money to um, you
Speaker 1: can use your m M T money to create a
Speaker 1: basic education system and you can augment it with buying
Speaker 1: importing things that you can't yet make and using it
Speaker 1: to create like a university or something which can do
Speaker 1: R and D work. Um, you have to you have
Speaker 1: to find tools to get enough of the money that
Speaker 1: you can't just infinitely produce for X in order to
Speaker 1: augment what your society can produce beyond what initially could
Speaker 1: and show essentially that you, okay, I can make a
Speaker 1: better mouse trap like I. I don't need to. I
Speaker 1: don't need donations from well meaning imperial powers or something.
Speaker 1: We're building what we need in order to move up
Speaker 1: the value chain and then build out our productive capacity
Speaker 1: in such a way that, um, it doesn't leave anyone behind.
Speaker 1: Everyone is everyone's employed because we're doing the classic M
Speaker 1: M T stuff on the home front, such as a
Speaker 1: job guarantee, but we're also doing the international economic development
Speaker 1: stuff of assiduationally monitoring our foreign foreign currency reserves and
Speaker 1: then using them to import things that we cannot yet
Speaker 1: make but can make things internally and then have a
Speaker 1: a snowballing effect as far as being able to sell
Speaker 1: even higher value things which UM to our trade partners
Speaker 1: who are hopefully share our values of like democratic confederalism
Speaker 1: or whatever you whatever you're chosen guidelines are yeah, and
Speaker 1: this is something that like, this is something that that
Speaker 1: becomes very difficult in like the current market. You know,
Speaker 1: this is this is to some extent like why the
Speaker 1: Cold War went the way it did, right, which is
Speaker 1: that you know, once once you have the Zinosovie explant,
Speaker 1: and once you have like you have Chinese and Russian
Speaker 1: troops killing each other on the border um China, it
Speaker 1: like enters the situation where it's like, well, okay, so
Speaker 1: we still want to do economic developments, but we've lost
Speaker 1: the Soviet unions as a typology as a way to
Speaker 1: get to knowledgy transfers, and their solution to that was
Speaker 1: to ally with the U S. And this is like
Speaker 1: it works out for the Chinese economy. It is an
Speaker 1: apocal disaster for like literally everyone else on earth because
Speaker 1: it means that capitalism is the thing that wins the
Speaker 1: Cold War. And and this means that like you know,
Speaker 1: I mean like if you look if you look at
Speaker 1: how you know, like the things that China are doing
Speaker 1: in order to be able to get technology transfers for
Speaker 1: the US. It's like like there's so there there are
Speaker 1: joints like Chinese CIA like operations inside of China that
Speaker 1: are like monitoring Soviet missile site. So there's just like
Speaker 1: CIA app post just like in China that are just
Speaker 1: you know, doing spying. Like for for the U. S. Government.
Speaker 1: There's like they invade Vietnam, which is you know, and
Speaker 1: it's such as the invade neenomen's like they've made Vietnam
Speaker 1: and then they fight this like this really you know,
Speaker 1: the immediate war just last that long, but they fight
Speaker 1: this like horrible border war that goes on for like
Speaker 1: a decade that kills enormous numbers of people, and you know,
Speaker 1: and the end result of this is like yeah, like
Speaker 1: you know, trying to get the signalogy transfers and they
Speaker 1: developed economy, but everyone else on Earth, yeah, because is
Speaker 1: like everyone who's ever tried to be a labor organizer
Speaker 1: in like you know, and like how Salvador gets murdered
Speaker 1: by a bunch of fascists and every development econ is
Speaker 1: so fucking frustrating because every single step of the way,
Speaker 1: there's like there's like a really razor thin line between
Speaker 1: risk and reward at every step of the way. And
Speaker 1: so like imperial powers will dangle technology transfers or extended
Speaker 1: trade agreements on some favorable terms in exchange for allowing
Speaker 1: them to just like go to war with your neighbors,
Speaker 1: like or rope you into it, or or extract resources
Speaker 1: that would be value for you later in your development phases. Yeah. Actually,
Speaker 1: uh this leads to me, um, you know, going to
Speaker 1: our hypothetical here thinking about Vancouver Island, the People's Republic
Speaker 1: of Vancouver Island, and we can kind of talk about
Speaker 1: some of development traps because that's kind of what I'm
Speaker 1: was turning through my head right now because I'm looking
Speaker 1: at the Wikipedia page for Vancouver Island. Is that incredibly
Speaker 1: deep research, and so what they listen under the economy
Speaker 1: is there's a tech sector, logging, fishing, tourism, and food um.
Speaker 1: And so you know we're talked first about like you
Speaker 1: could like sell off like the yachts and the cars
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. Uh, and that's I don't even
Speaker 1: know if that counts as a sector of the economy
Speaker 1: at that level. That's a yeah, you can start sale.
Speaker 1: But you know, logging and fishing, those are those are
Speaker 1: pretty solid primary sector economies, you know, you know, to
Speaker 1: that describe the terminology, you know, they've got this. This
Speaker 1: is part of that hierarchy that Steve was talking about
Speaker 1: that you know, the chain of development, and a primary
Speaker 1: sector is like a basic extractive element of your economy
Speaker 1: a mine, uh, logging, phishing, food production, you know, basic goods.
Speaker 1: And then you know, you talk about a secondary development,
Speaker 1: which is like manufacturing in the territiary, which is you
Speaker 1: know services. Those are kind of your basic Those are
Speaker 1: usually considered like sectors of the economy, but in a
Speaker 1: way they kind of correspond to development um and they
Speaker 1: require different amounts of developments. And you know the thing
Speaker 1: about primaries that everybody needs those things, Like unless people
Speaker 1: just stop using wood for construction, which we are very
Speaker 1: far from doing. We still use a lot of wood
Speaker 1: for construction. Uh, your logging industry is going to have
Speaker 1: buyers um until people stop buying eating fish. Your fishing
Speaker 1: industry is going to have buyers. Yeah, up to a
Speaker 1: really ludicrously bottomless reserve. But you're gonna be stopped on
Speaker 1: that secondary industry until you have capital. Like I don't
Speaker 1: mean just like the sense of having a lot of money,
Speaker 1: but you know the right money, and well, you need capital.
Speaker 1: Production need capital, you need the machine, you need, you
Speaker 1: need major factories, you need your need yeah. Uh, and
Speaker 1: wealthy countries partly in order to maintain their powers they
Speaker 1: have they they want to be the only seller of
Speaker 1: capital kids. Yeah, and and they're gonna be very withholding
Speaker 1: about it. Like a really good example for right now,
Speaker 1: I like all of the inflation stuff going on, like
Speaker 1: the chip shortage. Yeah, so the machines that make the
Speaker 1: machines that make the chips, Holy sh it, those are
Speaker 1: like those are they only make like fifty of those
Speaker 1: a year? Yeah, and it's all two companies. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: the thing with the thing with the chip shortage. Right.
Speaker 1: It's also like so if you can be like the
Speaker 1: people who do that, that gives you a lot of
Speaker 1: economic power. Like this is this is one of Taiwan's things, right,
Speaker 1: which is that like you know, it's like, okay, so
Speaker 1: why hasn't Taiwan just sort of been bowled over by
Speaker 1: by China? And like, I mean, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: sort of geopolitical reasons for them. It's also partly it's
Speaker 1: just that like, yeah, like Taiwan has this enormous chipmaking
Speaker 1: industry and it's incredibly advanced, and you know, it has
Speaker 1: like you know this this is I think and everything
Speaker 1: that that that's a real problem for sort of revelation
Speaker 1: society doing this is that like yeah, like Taiwan's chip
Speaker 1: making economy, like it's not like people like fall in
Speaker 1: like vats of chemicals like a lot, like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of there's a lot like just horrible sort of
Speaker 1: labor application. And then this comes back to even you're
Speaker 1: sort of like like you know, if you're talking about
Speaker 1: your your sort of primary primary sector stuff in the economy,
Speaker 1: which is that like okay, well yeah, I mean like
Speaker 1: oils particularly example of this, but like you know, same
Speaker 1: with timber, and same same with fishes, like these are
Speaker 1: extractive industries, and this becomes a real problem for a
Speaker 1: lot of your sort of like newly revolutionary developing societies
Speaker 1: because you get this tension between um like and you
Speaker 1: see this a lot in Latin America's like this is
Speaker 1: there's a huge tension like this Simplivia for example, he
Speaker 1: se as an Ecuador two where like you have different
Speaker 1: factions of do you have different factors of the political
Speaker 1: movements where you have people who are like okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm okay with just like you know, building these
Speaker 1: highways through indigenous land or just like doing massy forestation
Speaker 1: or like doing doing open pit mining, and those people
Speaker 1: will be like, those people will be leftist right there.
Speaker 1: People are like, Okay, well we need to do this
Speaker 1: because we need to like you know, this is an
Speaker 1: antipoverty measure. We have to be at the value chain,
Speaker 1: we have to increase your production. But then you know
Speaker 1: you have the indigenous people who's like, homes these are right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can rationalize, yeah, the intellectual backing. Yeah, and like
Speaker 1: and this this happens like in in China too. There's
Speaker 1: like like a lot of the interstation has been absolutely devastating,
Speaker 1: like and and and this this becomes a real like
Speaker 1: the fact that you need for REX becomes this like
Speaker 1: incredible trap that that you you sink into because it's like,
Speaker 1: on the one hand, like, yeah, like there are resources
Speaker 1: that you need in order to have a function anxiety,
Speaker 1: but it's also that that you can't get in your territory.
Speaker 1: But also like the cost of getting that for REX
Speaker 1: is enormous and and a lot of times it's it's
Speaker 1: it's it's a it's something that just simply destroys the
Speaker 1: revolutionary project. Well it hit me when I looked at
Speaker 1: this list of Vancouver's economic sectors was uh, you know,
Speaker 1: tourism being listed among the big ones in my mind
Speaker 1: immediately into Cuba two pre revolution, precastro Cuba, and your
Speaker 1: precast Cuba has all these things going for it. Off
Speaker 1: when you're when you're looking at from like a developmental standpoint,
Speaker 1: you know, it's got this like very good productive base
Speaker 1: of primary resources like sugar. Uh. It has great relations
Speaker 1: with the United States of America, particularly through the mafia. Uh. Yeah, wonderful, right,
Speaker 1: it has, Uh, the tourism industry is very successful. It's
Speaker 1: producing manufactured cigar, so it even has a secondary industry bridge,
Speaker 1: but is still absolutely failing to develop in a way
Speaker 1: that is meaningful for the people living in Cuba. You know,
Speaker 1: pre pre castro Cuba was a nightmare for most people. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that's you know that, that's like Steve said, you know,
Speaker 1: there's this razor thin thing between risk and reward. And
Speaker 1: during that, you know, during the fourties and fifties in Cuba,
Speaker 1: it was just it just made so much sense to
Speaker 1: just stick with this impoverty, extractive tourists, heavy mafia friendly economy.
Speaker 1: And yeah they were friends with the US. They could
Speaker 1: have gone technology transfers in principle, but were they actually
Speaker 1: going to h And I's something we have to think
Speaker 1: about with our our people's republic of Vancouver Island, is
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, like people are going to want our logs,
Speaker 1: people are gonna want our fishing. American tourists are going
Speaker 1: to come here and go whale watching and that's gonna
Speaker 1: bring in forex. But are we gonna be able to
Speaker 1: like leverage that and how leg Yeah? Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: kind of want to move the conversation to like I
Speaker 1: think people might be listening and saying like, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can see why far actually be important, but like,
Speaker 1: what are the specific ways in which we can acquire
Speaker 1: it but also manage it? And it's like, okay, well
Speaker 1: without which we want without tell being socialists who want democracy? Um, okay,
Speaker 1: So I think if we're I'm I'm picturing some sort
Speaker 1: of a sim Belie structure taking shape because I'm a
Speaker 1: lipsock Libertrian socialist. Um and uh it could be something else,
Speaker 1: but any case, Uh, I think they should appoint fifty
Speaker 1: or so people, some of them experts, some of them
Speaker 1: not two examine. They should do a thorough economic analysis
Speaker 1: of the entire island, and you should do it on
Speaker 1: the basis of here are the assets we have, Here's
Speaker 1: where we want to go in terms of assets, how
Speaker 1: do we get from here to there? And one of
Speaker 1: the assets that you have is, okay, we have so
Speaker 1: many U S dollars, we have so many Canadian dollars,
Speaker 1: we have reserve balances. So we need to import things.
Speaker 1: We can make some of it ourselves. We need to
Speaker 1: buy the rest of it. We can't buy all of
Speaker 1: it now. We need to cash flow some of this.
Speaker 1: We need to We need to do export led growth.
Speaker 1: As the developed the classic development ECON people would say,
Speaker 1: where we say, we have some industries where we can
Speaker 1: gradually and consistently ramp up to the point that they
Speaker 1: give They give us the types of money which we
Speaker 1: need in order to input capital goods. The machines that
Speaker 1: build machines two, buy them, learn how to use them
Speaker 1: and maintain them, and then build more ourselves. Ideally and
Speaker 1: over the course of say, basically, I'm basically suggesting that
Speaker 1: Vancouver Island should have a ten year plan. They should
Speaker 1: have a ten year plan for further economic development, and
Speaker 1: it should be as democratically decided upon as possible within
Speaker 1: the limits of like Okay, there's some experts which will
Speaker 1: obviously be needed and not everyone can do that. But um,
Speaker 1: whatever assembly structure you have should be given oversight ultimately
Speaker 1: and you should say, um, just be really frank with it,
Speaker 1: Like we have these are biophysical resources. Now in ten
Speaker 1: years they should be this in order to get there,
Speaker 1: each year, these things need to happen. We have to
Speaker 1: have this much foreign currency, we have to have this
Speaker 1: many workers involved in this industry. Um, we can change
Speaker 1: things along the way, but we're constrained by these factors
Speaker 1: where like we need trade partners, we need uh two
Speaker 1: reverse engineers, some technology that we've acquired or something in
Speaker 1: order to to educate ourselves on how to create chips
Speaker 1: or something in the future. UM yeah, there's like there
Speaker 1: should be like an extremely vigorous discussion of what assets
Speaker 1: do we have, what do we need, what's our goal
Speaker 1: and then thread together a development plan from there and
Speaker 1: then use your m m T money to marshal the
Speaker 1: resources that you currently have and that you need for
Speaker 1: like the next year, say domestically, while monitoring and augmenting
Speaker 1: your foreign currency reserves and um, using the tools of
Speaker 1: monetary policy to safeguard those reserves and economize on them
Speaker 1: in order to import what you can't yet make so
Speaker 1: that you can make it in the future. I think
Speaker 1: the thing that we should learn from the fact that
Speaker 1: like a lot of these projects haven't worked is well,
Speaker 1: I think it's twofold. One is that you have okay,
Speaker 1: there there there's constant sort of like there's traps you
Speaker 1: have to avoid that have to do with like, for example,
Speaker 1: like who actually has access to the forex because this
Speaker 1: is what this is a way that like you know,
Speaker 1: and also like because it's it's very very easy to
Speaker 1: like access to sort of like incidentally redeveloped ruling classes
Speaker 1: when you're trying to do playing technology stuff and when
Speaker 1: you're trying when you're dealing with enormous amounts of foreign currency,
Speaker 1: and this is a problem and you know. And in
Speaker 1: the second problem has to do with sort of like
Speaker 1: how how how do you make sure that your economy
Speaker 1: essentially doesn't end up as a resource colony and this
Speaker 1: has this has other components and you know, and I
Speaker 1: think I think this is something that like like there
Speaker 1: is a lot that can be done if you control
Speaker 1: like a regid of territory but there's there's political limits
Speaker 1: on it. And the political limits have to do with
Speaker 1: you know, who actually controls the sort of like vast
Speaker 1: majority of resources and technology. And the only way to
Speaker 1: really deal with that is that like, you know, you
Speaker 1: can't you can't sort of have like you if if
Speaker 1: if you want to actually have sort of long term stability,
Speaker 1: you can't just have your sort of like your your
Speaker 1: like libertary and social counsels in one country. I guess
Speaker 1: it's a it's a thing that has to like keep
Speaker 1: moving and keep spreading because otherwise it becomes it becomes
Speaker 1: just increasingly difficult, and you come under increasing pressures, you know,
Speaker 1: for you know, in order to do things that you
Speaker 1: be that you need to do in order to make
Speaker 1: sure people don't starve, in order to make sure that
Speaker 1: people have educations, to make sure that people you know,
Speaker 1: are able to sort of live with their lives, and
Speaker 1: also like in order to make sure that you don't
Speaker 1: just annihilate the annihilate the entire environment doing this, because
Speaker 1: that's something that happens a lot when in these developmental
Speaker 1: estates is that like, you know, you get you you
Speaker 1: know you you you get groups who are like come
Speaker 1: in the power and are like, well, okay, we're like
Speaker 1: we're gonna be an ecological regime, and then you know,
Speaker 1: they wind up having to they wind up doing oil
Speaker 1: extraction and like well prepit mining, because that's you know,
Speaker 1: that that's the easiest way to to get money. And
Speaker 1: I think I think, like I I think it's it's
Speaker 1: valuable that like, these are things that if you're serious
Speaker 1: about taking power, you have to think about. But I
Speaker 1: also think it's it's important to keep in mind just
Speaker 1: the the inherent limits that you have if you're just
Speaker 1: sort of if you're if you're completely isolated, like if
Speaker 1: you're a completely isolated referee street movement in one place,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have people where that you can you know,
Speaker 1: give stuff to and move stuff around between. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's always been kind. I mean, that's that's
Speaker 1: been like a kind of inevitable thing that like, you know,
Speaker 1: there are there are communes in my extended family. You know,
Speaker 1: I've got members of my family who live on you know,
Speaker 1: those little farm communes, and they're not fully economically independent. Um,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure that we could find people who would
Speaker 1: be willing to say, oh, you know this is like,
Speaker 1: this is totally fake. This is not a real commune
Speaker 1: because they you know sell uh, you know, sell sunflower
Speaker 1: seeds at the farmers market and stuff. Uh. And that's
Speaker 1: kind of the unfortunate. That's kind of like the tough
Speaker 1: reality that unless you managed to create a truly global revolution,
Speaker 1: as I said, unlet's until you've got like two thirds
Speaker 1: of the population under your umbrella. Uh, you're going to
Speaker 1: have foreign relations and you're going to have foreign trade,
Speaker 1: which is going to uh, it's going to be it's
Speaker 1: going to be difficult to manage. You know, you're going
Speaker 1: to have to be both. You're going to have to
Speaker 1: have like a you know, a diplomatic core. That's something
Speaker 1: we're barely mentioning here, but like we're gonna need to
Speaker 1: have diplomats coming out of this council if we're talking
Speaker 1: about them having relations with the US and Canada. Uh,
Speaker 1: and you're negotiating these trade deals. You know, these trade
Speaker 1: deals don't happen out of nowhere. Um. And you know,
Speaker 1: we kind of brushed this aside, but it's a it's
Speaker 1: a bit of as a bit of a misperception that
Speaker 1: people tend to have that the United States is pro
Speaker 1: free trade in like an extreme sense that like any
Speaker 1: trade of the United States is done without any tariffs.
Speaker 1: Oh dead, No, I don't think that you if you
Speaker 1: believe that without having done a lot of research, I
Speaker 1: do not think that that is an absurd thing to believe,
Speaker 1: because that is the propaganda that is passed along in
Speaker 1: common knowledge. A very quick examination of how trade works
Speaker 1: between international actors will reveal that there are thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands of tariffs active all the time in
Speaker 1: every trade to Yeah, and like the like the big
Speaker 1: one with the US agricultural subsidies, which are just it
Speaker 1: is it is it is illegal to have them. We
Speaker 1: have like just in just like billions and billions of
Speaker 1: billions of dollars agricultural subsidies that have producing cheap food.
Speaker 1: That's like we're not even good at making it. Like
Speaker 1: it's it's a complete disaster. It Let mean this like this,
Speaker 1: this is just single handedly annihilated the economies of like
Speaker 1: enormous swass of the globe because because no one can
Speaker 1: compete with withoth American agri culture subsidies. And it's you know,
Speaker 1: and and but like when when you join the free
Speaker 1: trade system, like that's one of the carve outs. That
Speaker 1: was that's that's that's in the w t O is
Speaker 1: you can't have uh subsidies for for your culture programs
Speaker 1: except for the US and it's it's great and I
Speaker 1: mean food one dies. Well, there's all sorts of like
Speaker 1: weird technical ways that you can create pseudo subsidies, you know. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, Italy very famously has a price floor on wine. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this means that you know, if you if you
Speaker 1: make a bottle of wine that nobody would buy for
Speaker 1: the minimum price, the government will buy it off of
Speaker 1: you for that price. And so there there are wineries
Speaker 1: in Italy that just produced wine at such a this
Speaker 1: so bad nobody would buy nobody you would have to
Speaker 1: pay people to drink it. But the government just buys
Speaker 1: it at this minimum set price and then throws it
Speaker 1: enough in a giant Olympic swimming pool that uh to
Speaker 1: go rot uh And like there are yeah, there there there.
Speaker 1: The trade is, you know, there's a lot more complex.
Speaker 1: The free trade is kind of a meth at the
Speaker 1: international level. Uh. It is at it's at the most cynical.
Speaker 1: Free trade as a doctrine is a cudgel used by
Speaker 1: more powerful countries that they impose that you have to
Speaker 1: do free trade with um and that they get to
Speaker 1: do protract and trade with you. Well, it's a it's well, firstly,
Speaker 1: like you mentioned, it's a myth. And historically speaking, we
Speaker 1: had like, we had infant industries in this country that
Speaker 1: we're highly protected from the verily earliest days through most
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century and into this one century, and
Speaker 1: we had uh, we had expert lead growth from infant
Speaker 1: lead for infant industries in the US. And that's precisely
Speaker 1: the opposite advice we now turn around and give via
Speaker 1: our imperial like apparatus from the I m F and
Speaker 1: the World Bank to developing counts and like countries. Countries
Speaker 1: that that examined what the US was telling them to
Speaker 1: do and did the opposite. Are the ones that succeeded. Yes,
Speaker 1: like South Korea said no, funk that, and there they
Speaker 1: went up the value chain and they did all of
Speaker 1: the things that we said Vancouver Island should do basically, yeah,
Speaker 1: except except not being evil. They did not do that.
Speaker 1: They were evil. They were evil for a time, and
Speaker 1: they were dictatorial, but in terms of their economic development
Speaker 1: plan divorced from political reality, which is probably naive of
Speaker 1: me to say, um, they took the opposite advice of
Speaker 1: the I m F in terms of that narrow scope. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think the other thing that's kind of important here
Speaker 1: that I haven't really touched on yet, is it, like
Speaker 1: so part part of part of what was going on
Speaker 1: with with South Korea's economy is that South Korea's economy
Speaker 1: was was a war economy, and it was a war
Speaker 1: economy designed to build I mean, originally just it was
Speaker 1: it was war economy because they were finding a war, right,
Speaker 1: But then it became this i mean ess central access
Speaker 1: of sort of the corruction of the Korean War, and
Speaker 1: that it became this access that like it became a
Speaker 1: huge part of the American sort of arms industry in
Speaker 1: in Vietnam. And this is the sending that Japan has
Speaker 1: this too, where both these economies are like a huge
Speaker 1: part of the reason why they're able to develop is
Speaker 1: because they get enormous amounts of just money and the
Speaker 1: guaranteed contract and stuff like that from American military development.
Speaker 1: And this is a this is another really big problem
Speaker 1: for like you're sort of free state that like you've
Speaker 1: created like whatever you're sort of like Council Republic, you're
Speaker 1: like if on the zone, you're like indigenous confederation. Is
Speaker 1: that like you need weapons and the people who make
Speaker 1: guns are like the US and Russia And this is
Speaker 1: a really you know and and you know, we've we've
Speaker 1: been talking on this show about about producing like three
Speaker 1: D point weapons, but I mean, you know, in terms
Speaker 1: of things like you know, you're like artillery, right, like
Speaker 1: k of your mortars and like things like that, were like,
Speaker 1: you know, you you can't. You can't three D prints
Speaker 1: the best of my knowledge, And I'm like ent sure
Speaker 1: about this that like unless you had extremely advanced facilities,
Speaker 1: and even then it's not clear. Like I I like,
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone on Earth has ever pred three
Speaker 1: D printed like an anti aircraft rocket, like you can
Speaker 1: you can you know, you can't make you can't make stingers,
Speaker 1: you can't make man pads. You can't make like anti
Speaker 1: tank anti aircraft weapons. Not to get too much into it,
Speaker 1: but like the way in which Ukraine is fighting like
Speaker 1: Russian tanks and it's very specifics is kind of encouraging. Actually, yeah,
Speaker 1: but like because you feel like the like specific yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's only a few companies for making the
Speaker 1: components for these things. Yeah, it's a problem. And that's
Speaker 1: that's like the personnel launched the in law or whatever things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like the anti taking and takers like if you can
Speaker 1: get them, they're effective and they do they do stuffing
Speaker 1: from by the US or the UK. Yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's that's that's a huge problem if you're you know,
Speaker 1: not trying to like be a political colony of these
Speaker 1: two things. And and this this is another trap that
Speaker 1: you see, like you see did Cares especially falling into,
Speaker 1: which is that that they you know, Okay, so like
Speaker 1: on the one hand, yeah, you do need weapons, right,
Speaker 1: like you you need you need some kind of military complex,
Speaker 1: and you need arms order to make sure that like
Speaker 1: you know, you're not like the US doesn't rull tanks
Speaker 1: across the border. But simultaneously, like there's there's a thing
Speaker 1: that happens a lot with this is happticularly with Petro States,
Speaker 1: where you know, okay, so the the the the US
Speaker 1: is like, okay, so we need this oil, right, and
Speaker 1: how how do you how do you deal with the
Speaker 1: sort of balance payments ephas And the answer is we
Speaker 1: just sell them like a hundred billion tanks and we
Speaker 1: just like we just like dump f thirty fives on them,
Speaker 1: and you can get into these scenarios where like you
Speaker 1: get these like because I mean, the problem with weapons,
Speaker 1: right it is like okay, so you need them to survive,
Speaker 1: but they also they don't produce anything, right, in fact
Speaker 1: that they're sort of they're sort of net economic negatives
Speaker 1: because the only thing you could do with a gun
Speaker 1: is I mean, I guess you could technically hunt, but
Speaker 1: like you know that the thing you're doing with the
Speaker 1: weapon is destroying value. Yeah yeah. And I mean and
Speaker 1: then they were crying maintenance. Yeah yeah, Like these things
Speaker 1: are substantial net negatives. Yeah, and and and you know,
Speaker 1: and and countries get sucked into these traps. Were like
Speaker 1: you know, okay, we're just gonna keep buying American weapons
Speaker 1: because of security or like uh we we we want
Speaker 1: to invade some other country. You're like, well, you know,
Speaker 1: and you see this so hew weaponry to like back
Speaker 1: back when that was the thing and today modern Russian
Speaker 1: trap wheny where it's like you can you can get
Speaker 1: funneled into these traps were like the ruling class of
Speaker 1: your society just decides it's the thing that it wants
Speaker 1: to spend his four X on his weapons, and you
Speaker 1: have to be very very like you have to be
Speaker 1: you know, and this is the thing that happens like
Speaker 1: like Evner Hoax for example, famously like makes just a
Speaker 1: bunch of bunkers, right and like militarized society and it's like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, part of this is just Hoax being extremely weird,
Speaker 1: but like, yeah, you have to be very careful when
Speaker 1: your society that is genuinely under threat that you're not
Speaker 1: sort of like just throwing all of your resources into
Speaker 1: into stuff like that where you know, it doesn't it
Speaker 1: doesn't pre us anything, but you know, and yeah, also
Speaker 1: I mean this is it is a need like like
Speaker 1: whatever the Vancouver Economic Planning whatever group should like one
Speaker 1: of one of the objectives would frank would be military
Speaker 1: of course, Yeah, um you need to. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you could get your hands on in laws or
Speaker 1: man pads or anything like that, but you, um, I
Speaker 1: think you would be foolish frankly not too distribute and
Speaker 1: train on weapons and stuff like that. Yeah, and that yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like I think I think like, yeah, it's like you
Speaker 1: have to use some of it for that and it
Speaker 1: sucks because this is something that like this, this sucks
Speaker 1: you into the arms complex, right, Yeah, Rose is using
Speaker 1: its oil revenues um to fund its expenditure almost is
Speaker 1: at least like in the last time I checked, was
Speaker 1: to defense forces. Yeah, and like and a lot of that,
Speaker 1: a lot of that came from dollars, euros and turkishly
Speaker 1: right that they required to oil. Yeah, and like this
Speaker 1: and this is the thing that like, yeah, this, this
Speaker 1: is this is a problem if you're into your revolution
Speaker 1: society surrounding people who just literally want to murder you,
Speaker 1: or it's like stuff like this winds up happening and
Speaker 1: you wind it like I don't blame them, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like it's obviously it's like reality. Yeah, And I think
Speaker 1: that's a you know that that that's a good example
Speaker 1: of like what happens if the revolution doesn't spread and
Speaker 1: if you get sort of like you get isolated, contained
Speaker 1: by imperial powers who just want to murder to you,
Speaker 1: is that you wind up, like you basically you want,
Speaker 1: you wind up fighting an endless war against both the
Speaker 1: proxy forces and the real forces of RBS that are
Speaker 1: significantly large and more powerful than you. And yeah, and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of times there's not much you can
Speaker 1: do about it. But it's like I think, you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of like like in the school of high principle,
Speaker 1: like this is why internationalism is important. I mean yeah,
Speaker 1: And of course obviously the other answer is, you know,
Speaker 1: selling out on the revolution and you know, we we we.
Speaker 1: You know that there's the example that people didn't think
Speaker 1: about of Serritza. You know, Sursa gets elected on all
Speaker 1: these like radical promises for Greece and then just doesn't
Speaker 1: do any of them. Um. And then you can look
Speaker 1: at say Nepal, and you know, the communist one in Nepal,
Speaker 1: and then they establish a government that's functionally you know,
Speaker 1: it's a liberal government. My my, my, my. My favorite
Speaker 1: Nepal fact is that, Okay, so Nepol has like seventeen
Speaker 1: different like Maoist factions, but the guy ahead of of
Speaker 1: the of the largest Maoist faction, uh yeah, I think
Speaker 1: it's him. Is he's the one who now lives in
Speaker 1: the mansion of the guy who used to be the
Speaker 1: Nepalese head of security. And it's like, uh, we've well
Speaker 1: this is this, this has gone great. We've we've changed
Speaker 1: the person in the mansion kind of yeah. And I
Speaker 1: mean the and you know, uh, not too surprisingly. You know,
Speaker 1: the second leader a couple about a year ago, Karen
Speaker 1: was on the verge of declaring a new people's war
Speaker 1: against the Maoist faction. Yeah, Maoist war against the malice.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, I mean that's you know, you you you
Speaker 1: end up. It's yeah, it's it's tricky to try to
Speaker 1: like game it out, so to speak, because you know,
Speaker 1: my I maybe I'm just squeamish. I am hoping for
Speaker 1: things to not happen with the river of blood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in life, I hope that, uh, I hope that we
Speaker 1: don't get rivers of blood. Um oh, plan plan for
Speaker 1: war so you get you get peace. Yeah. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: you like, like like Chris has said, you know, you
Speaker 1: can get trapped into like that that escalating security dilemma. Uh.
Speaker 1: And of course, you know, investing in security doesn't actually
Speaker 1: necessarily to security. We have you know, over a century
Speaker 1: of looking at Latin American countries that investments in the
Speaker 1: military is just investments in the next civil war. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or you get cooled, and then that's that's another problem. Like,
Speaker 1: like I mean, it's weird because it's like it's a
Speaker 1: double edged strey because like the twenty century, like there's
Speaker 1: all there's a lot of like socialistic governments that come
Speaker 1: into power just from military coups, but also like probably
Speaker 1: more of those governments like get overthrown by their own coups.
Speaker 1: And it's yeah, there's there was one lesson I learned
Speaker 1: from playing Tropical It's good if you've tried to invest
Speaker 1: more in your No matter how much you invest in
Speaker 1: your military, it only will ever get you up to
Speaker 1: surviving a coup. Yeah, don't have colonels and don't have generals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then then you get captain's cups. It's always colonels. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's always colonels. It's because they're like passed up for
Speaker 1: general ship by the next administration or something. Yeah. Again again,
Speaker 1: sometimes sometimes you do get like stumes as you get
Speaker 1: like your pinochet, and so sometimes you do get your
Speaker 1: captain's cups, and it's like this is a that goes
Speaker 1: that's ambition right there when the cap is the government. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: once your captains of hit fucket mode, it's a bad Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's indicative of like bigger, deeper problems. Yeah. Well, I
Speaker 1: think like the baths are an interesting example of this
Speaker 1: because like, okay, like the Baptists were never like good,
Speaker 1: but like, you know, the Bathists like originally like we're
Speaker 1: kind of a mass movement, but then and increasingly, like
Speaker 1: over time, as as they consult their power to the
Speaker 1: military sort of revolutions, like it becomes increasingly just the
Speaker 1: Baptists are powerful because they have control of like various
Speaker 1: portions of the military, and you know, and like the
Speaker 1: the the end result of this is like instead of
Speaker 1: having revolutions like you just get you just get all
Speaker 1: political power has nothing to do with whatever is happening
Speaker 1: in the street. You get these giant protests that are
Speaker 1: like we want to go back to being part of
Speaker 1: the United the the United Republic, and it just doesn't
Speaker 1: matter because the actual political power is just what happens
Speaker 1: when the army fights itself. And yeah, I think like
Speaker 1: there's no easy solution to that other than just like
Speaker 1: don't have an armed body that's separate from just the
Speaker 1: masses of people, which is difficult to do, but also
Speaker 1: like or just armed the people somewhat. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: you know, it's means of violence should be more evenly distributed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I will say that was I guess part of why
Speaker 1: the scenario we had started off with like you've declared
Speaker 1: that people's republic, because the question how you get that
Speaker 1: people's republic feels like that's of your podcast podcast episodes. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we've done, we've done, we've done, just like
Speaker 1: a miracle has occurred, but like a revolution has occurred
Speaker 1: and then I don't know, they like or something like
Speaker 1: as I like to say, it's good to have a
Speaker 1: plan for it if you win. Yeah, well, and I
Speaker 1: like to win and then fumble once you've already gotten Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this this this is something that like that actually
Speaker 1: does happen a lot, which is like you get into that,
Speaker 1: you get into these revolutionary like moments, but then there's
Speaker 1: just sort of like no like no one has any
Speaker 1: idea what to do next, and so they sort of
Speaker 1: bungle it or you know, you get into scenarios, yeah,
Speaker 1: or you get too revolution scenarios where like nobody's thought
Speaker 1: about what happens next, and that that's that's another way
Speaker 1: that like, yeah, these things class at the time, and
Speaker 1: that's another way you get like you know, this this
Speaker 1: isn't somethings like the whole of the sort of like
Speaker 1: the trial and error of the point of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: which most of which is sort of and in an
Speaker 1: error is that, you know, a bunch of people were
Speaker 1: experimenting and a lot of stuff they tried didn't work,
Speaker 1: and there are lots of reasons for that. But you like,
Speaker 1: you have to in order to win, you have to
Speaker 1: actually be serious about taking power, and you have to
Speaker 1: be you know, you have to be thinking strategically and
Speaker 1: have a like, have at least a vision of what
Speaker 1: you're going to do before you like you know, like
Speaker 1: before things happen, because otherwise there's just sort of like
Speaker 1: you know, because you just you just get sort of
Speaker 1: mass confusion and yeah, and say what say what you
Speaker 1: all about the fascists they know what they're gonna do
Speaker 1: when they see its power. They're not confused about it. There.
Speaker 1: Their problems are what you do after. Yeah, they're not
Speaker 1: confused about that those first like hours when things start
Speaker 1: out the way. I hope that nothing we've said. I
Speaker 1: hope that nothing we've said on this podcast kind of
Speaker 1: makes people think like, oh, they so they have like
Speaker 1: one weird trick basically to like secure secure your power,
Speaker 1: um and like and that and that we aren't like
Speaker 1: singularly focused on acquiring for X or something. Also, it's
Speaker 1: just like it's an important lever too to have at
Speaker 1: your disposal. Like, well, number one, you should know that
Speaker 1: it's important. Number two, you should have tools in place,
Speaker 1: such as like running a running a fixed extra fixed
Speaker 1: exchange rate or something to make it a bit easier
Speaker 1: to acquire for X on the whole, or doing capital
Speaker 1: controls or doing price controls or something like that. And
Speaker 1: you should have these tools in mind in order to
Speaker 1: get from year one to year ten in terms of
Speaker 1: your biophysical resources, like here's what we have, here's what
Speaker 1: we need, and you know, some of that could be military,
Speaker 1: some of that could be economic, and some of that
Speaker 1: could be political. And um, no, one like I don't
Speaker 1: know the answers. We don't know the answers, but um,
Speaker 1: at each step of the way, you need to find
Speaker 1: groups of people who can come together and think objectively
Speaker 1: about them. Yeah, I I want. Yeah, it's not that
Speaker 1: I think that there is an answer. I'm kind of
Speaker 1: thinking about almost a little bit parallel to like, we
Speaker 1: know that if we create our you know, if if
Speaker 1: socialist managed to sees any amount of power they're going
Speaker 1: to reform whatever health care system they're currently existing in. Uh.
Speaker 1: We know this is going to be better, because it
Speaker 1: would be hard for it to be worse. Uh. But
Speaker 1: you know that's making a good hospital system is not
Speaker 1: the entire thing that makes a revolution happen. It is
Speaker 1: just one of those things that you need to do
Speaker 1: and you need to think about it. And my objective here,
Speaker 1: and it's a lot of my objective with you know,
Speaker 1: making this whole magazine project, is that my socialism means
Speaker 1: that we all we have say over our lives. You know,
Speaker 1: that's fundamental to me, that we have say over what
Speaker 1: we do with our lives. And I want to make
Speaker 1: sure that the people who are in this with me,
Speaker 1: which is hopefully everybody. I am an optimist. I'm hoping
Speaker 1: that everybody is with me on creating a better socialist world,
Speaker 1: that all of us are at least somewhat informed about
Speaker 1: the decisions we're making. I'm not actually economically trained, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I I've learned this stuff as I've gone. It's
Speaker 1: not insurmountable. Ah, and uh, it's you know, I would
Speaker 1: want the decision about how do we make a socialist
Speaker 1: economy you know, the core of socialism worker control of
Speaker 1: the means of production that the people involved. Again, hopefully
Speaker 1: everybody uh has you know, at least has an inkling
Speaker 1: of what's going on. I don't want people to be
Speaker 1: confused and baffled by the decisions being made on their behalf. That's,
Speaker 1: you know, a fundamental evil of a capitalist system. We
Speaker 1: don't know what the fun decisions are being made for
Speaker 1: us by powerful people. Well, part of the part of
Speaker 1: the problem comes back to education, because like people are
Speaker 1: um the rois of hogged. They've hearted the knowledge of
Speaker 1: how to plan in certain respects, and I think socialists
Speaker 1: socialists will sometimes look at the body of knowledge in
Speaker 1: terms of planning and economy and say, like, well, because
Speaker 1: they are the only ones who know how to do that,
Speaker 1: the knowledge itself is tainted, and like, I don't need
Speaker 1: to learn this because it's evil. Basically, I don't need
Speaker 1: to learn how to manage a currency board or do
Speaker 1: forex management because that's money and that's evil stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I hope, I hope. What we've described so far says
Speaker 1: like I don't know if it's evil or not, but
Speaker 1: it's important and it should be. I think I honestly
Speaker 1: think you're going to probably probably fail if you don't
Speaker 1: consider these things at each step of the way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and even in your like one of the things
Speaker 1: that that you see a lot with socialist countries is
Speaker 1: they have basically have like a firewall, right where they
Speaker 1: try to keep a separation between the parts of their
Speaker 1: economy that like are planned and the parts of their
Speaker 1: economy that like are about moving forwards around. And I think, like, okay,
Speaker 1: like there are varying degrees of effectiveness of this, but
Speaker 1: like this is like even even if you're like, okay,
Speaker 1: like we want to get rid of the economy, right,
Speaker 1: like we want to get rid of labor, We want
Speaker 1: to get rid of all the stuff as a concept,
Speaker 1: like you're gonna have to deal like until until you
Speaker 1: like win, right like until until you've like until you've
Speaker 1: raised a flag over like New York, Berlin, Shanghai, like
Speaker 1: a New Delhi at the same time, right like you're
Speaker 1: you're gonna be you're gonna have to be dealing with
Speaker 1: this stuff. And how how you do that and how
Speaker 1: quickly you're able to figure this out, how quickly you're
Speaker 1: you're able to implement, and how quickly you're able to
Speaker 1: sort of like seize control of and use the resources
Speaker 1: that you have in order to advanta your political object use.
Speaker 1: You know that that that that's going to be one
Speaker 1: of the things that tourms whether or not your revolution
Speaker 1: survives no matter what it's fighting for. Mm hmm. Like
Speaker 1: in addition to all the military stuff, um, military and economic,
Speaker 1: I think you have to just say, like you have
Speaker 1: to get to a point economically and militarily and all
Speaker 1: their other stuff to where you can just say to
Speaker 1: international powers like I don't need to make some moral
Speaker 1: claim to you, I've built a better mouse trap. I'm
Speaker 1: going to let the people decide. And it's like it
Speaker 1: just shows people living freely together, uh and enjoying a
Speaker 1: good standard of living and they don't need to exploit
Speaker 1: each other to get it. And like for not everyone,
Speaker 1: but many people, that will be really appealing. And you
Speaker 1: have to have like, uh, well more than just a
Speaker 1: diplomatic corps, you have to have like an entire like
Speaker 1: a full court international push to say like it's just
Speaker 1: a better mass trap. It's like it's, um, I don't
Speaker 1: need to focus on moral claims about like well it's
Speaker 1: better because you should just care about people because of like,
Speaker 1: you should care about people more than capitalism permits because
Speaker 1: it's just morally right. Um, that may be the case.
Speaker 1: But also people want to get paid and they want
Speaker 1: to be treated well and have a decent standard of
Speaker 1: living at the same time, and we can do it.
Speaker 1: So here's so here's how like you've you've shown them
Speaker 1: specific steps you've taken, and you've shown them the material
Speaker 1: standard of living that is shared democratically, and um, it's
Speaker 1: not just like a state giving handing things out to people.
Speaker 1: It's like a a um, true industrial democracy where it's
Speaker 1: like you you get plugged in, you make decisions along
Speaker 1: the way, and um, yeah, basically that Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: I think I think that's a pretty good note to
Speaker 1: to end on as a a a thing that we
Speaker 1: want and things that are going to have to be
Speaker 1: components of it. And also I guess thinking about you know,
Speaker 1: like rejecting theories about money as incomplete that don't deal
Speaker 1: with the fact that you don't have all the resources
Speaker 1: in your country and you in fact indeed other things
Speaker 1: to acquire them that you cannot simply create into existence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: do you too have anything else you want to say
Speaker 1: before I guess you move into plugs. I mean, like
Speaker 1: like I said, I mean, I you know, we we
Speaker 1: This might have sounded like a whole bunch of you know,
Speaker 1: high minded, theoretical egghead crap, but again I am I'm
Speaker 1: not formally educated on this stuff. This is stuff that
Speaker 1: I have learned and participated in as a socialist first
Speaker 1: and foremost. And it's been driven uh from the get go,
Speaker 1: at least for me, from um, a really fundamental desire
Speaker 1: for ecal for egalitarianism, and for people having a say
Speaker 1: in their own lives. And I hope that the people,
Speaker 1: uh who have stuck with us through this, who didn't
Speaker 1: know these concepts before, feel a little bit more equipped
Speaker 1: to participate in a discussion about, um, how you would
Speaker 1: handle these things. And as as I kind of alluded to,
Speaker 1: this scale is all the way down to you know,
Speaker 1: twelve hippies on a farm. Uh, you know this, This
Speaker 1: the scales all the way up until you've got a
Speaker 1: total total global communism pretty much anything below that. This
Speaker 1: this this principal scale, and I I hope that people
Speaker 1: feel um more able and more willing to engage both
Speaker 1: first of all, you know, to to tell liberals to
Speaker 1: you know, shut the funk up that I should have
Speaker 1: a say over how I participate in the economy, even
Speaker 1: when that's things like for X that seemed very abstract
Speaker 1: and far away. I am, I'm a person who's affected
Speaker 1: by this. Therefore I've got a stake there for my
Speaker 1: opinion matters. Uh, and that you you can get there,
Speaker 1: you can learn, and you should be allowed to participate
Speaker 1: in that. And yeah, this is what I'm trying to create,
Speaker 1: is you know that socialists do not feel like they can.
Speaker 1: Those are just get brow beaten out of the room
Speaker 1: of a discussion because some liberal nerd pushed up their
Speaker 1: glasses a whole bunch and spun their bow tie and
Speaker 1: then sense of bullshit, like you know, you it is
Speaker 1: your life, and ah, you have a right to have
Speaker 1: an opinion on it. And this is not an insurmountable
Speaker 1: thing too, It's it's hard. I want to be clear here.
Speaker 1: This is hard, and I want but I want you
Speaker 1: in the discussion. Well so, yeah, so I guess speaking
Speaker 1: speaking of things that people are involved in, I can.
Speaker 1: I can do transitions like this because I'm a professional. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: do you do, you too? Want to talk a bit
Speaker 1: about your magazine. Sure. Like we mentioned at up top,
Speaker 1: we're uh. Kyle and I are both co editors of
Speaker 1: Strange Matters magazine, and we're in the middle of a
Speaker 1: fundraiser right now, and you can find the fundraiser at
Speaker 1: the r L tiny url dot com slash Strange Matters
Speaker 1: no no dashes or anything um. You can also follow
Speaker 1: us on Twitter at Strange Underscore Matters. And the magazine
Speaker 1: itself is going to be a We're a literary magazine,
Speaker 1: and each issue we're publishing in both prints and digital.
Speaker 1: And the print issue one is about three pages, and
Speaker 1: it's split in a half between the front pages which
Speaker 1: is um topics like economics, philosophy, politics, um more technical fields,
Speaker 1: and then the back pages is art um uh like
Speaker 1: culture reviews, um apology, anthropology like uh more, sir. We
Speaker 1: we kind of attached it to the word meaning like
Speaker 1: meaning development, and and there's a middle resting spot which
Speaker 1: is actually called the phuton, which is a play on
Speaker 1: the word fujutan, which is like kind of a resting
Speaker 1: spot between those two halves where there's going to be
Speaker 1: short pieces of usually humorous nature, and overall it's going
Speaker 1: to cover a wide range of topics and you can
Speaker 1: find out more of us. You can find out more
Speaker 1: about us on our fundraiser on our website Strange Managers
Speaker 1: dot co op. We've got a couple of articles already
Speaker 1: off on Strange Matters dot co op. We have a
Speaker 1: Steve wrote an amazing piece explaining of some very uh
Speaker 1: in very layman's terms of arguments about what inflation is
Speaker 1: and why we should care about it. You know they're
Speaker 1: quite good, yeah, very relevant. Right now, we have a
Speaker 1: truly delightful review of very contemporary, very recently made cyberpunk
Speaker 1: works by Elizabeth Sanderford, author of Neo Reaction of Bassilisk,
Speaker 1: which anybody who listens to this podcast needs to read
Speaker 1: New Reaction of bass Lisk uh, and she did as
Speaker 1: the wonderful favor of doing a pop culture review for us.
Speaker 1: We've yeah, we've also got a work by the editors
Speaker 1: Words for Our Present Reality about what how how can
Speaker 1: we discuss what actually exists in the world and what
Speaker 1: are the shortcomings with our current just like the basic
Speaker 1: levels of our discourse, and how can we advance beyond
Speaker 1: beyond this difficulty? And it's you know, it's something that
Speaker 1: sounds like it's supposed to be this very high level philosophy,
Speaker 1: but we've been I think, uh, I don't want to
Speaker 1: take too much credit for this, because I was not
Speaker 1: the main writer on it. Uh. I think that we've
Speaker 1: successfully managed to bring it down to a to a
Speaker 1: lower brow level, uh, you know, to a to a
Speaker 1: level that doesn't require you to have eighteen letter after
Speaker 1: your name of various college degrees. We also managed to
Speaker 1: publish a piece by a Russian dissidents, And I'm very
Speaker 1: excited for the works that people are going to see
Speaker 1: in the future from us. We've got a history of
Speaker 1: black cooperative movements. We've I wrote a nice little diddy
Speaker 1: about colonialism in modern board games. Uh. I'm I'm very
Speaker 1: excited for people to get the chance to read these
Speaker 1: and uh you know, it's all kind of in the
Speaker 1: service of I was creating a more almost democratizing the
Speaker 1: socialist world and making it, making it meaningful, making it useful,
Speaker 1: and also making it pleasurable for people to be socialists
Speaker 1: and to fight for a freer and more equitable world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: do you two? Do you two want people to find
Speaker 1: you on social media? And if so, where, Okay you
Speaker 1: can say no to this. People do sometimes because first
Speaker 1: hell sight. Okay, well I don't have social media, so
Speaker 1: your is not really on social media. I am on
Speaker 1: some social media, so you can find You can find
Speaker 1: me at at kept him in Whackham and I'll spell
Speaker 1: that out because it's kind of confusing at C A
Speaker 1: p M in w A C c M spelling your
Speaker 1: own nat name. Um. Yeah, so strange matters is our
Speaker 1: our campaign will run through this month and it's going
Speaker 1: pretty good so far. But we can use uh, every
Speaker 1: little bit of support goes a long way, so yeah,
Speaker 1: find find us at our website and also the fundraiser. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not getting paid. Just to be clear, this is
Speaker 1: the we We need to pay the authors, we need
Speaker 1: to pay for the printers. But you know this is
Speaker 1: not us trying to make a quick book. This is
Speaker 1: us trying to make sure we we are not willing
Speaker 1: to accept paying our writer's substandard. We're going to pay
Speaker 1: our writers higher than market rate as on principle, because
Speaker 1: we think the market rate is just too low. It
Speaker 1: really is. Yeah. And um oh and by the way,
Speaker 1: we're I think I mentioned it, but we're our workers cooperative,
Speaker 1: so we're a d percent worker own in control. There's
Speaker 1: no there are no levels of employment or ownership. We're
Speaker 1: all horizontal. Yeah yeah, so yeah, go go check our
Speaker 1: change matters. Um. Yeah, thank thank you too, both for
Speaker 1: thank you both for joining us. It was a wonderful time. Chris,
Speaker 1: thank you, thank you for having us. Yeah, and if
Speaker 1: you want to find more of us, Uh, we're at
Speaker 1: Happens your pod on Twitter, Instagram. I keep saying Instagram.
Speaker 1: I've never actually I'm not on Instagram. So I've been
Speaker 1: told we have one. I've never interacted with it. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, cools and media. It has our other shows.
Speaker 1: Go listen to them. Uh, they're good and we work
Speaker 1: a lot on them. By Oh, it could happen here,
Speaker 1: and it's currently happening there there being Ukraine, which is
Speaker 1: in the midst of an invasion by the Russian government.
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans. This is a podcast about bad things
Speaker 1: and how to make them better, joined as often by
Speaker 1: Garrison and Chris, my co hosts, and we are talking
Speaker 1: about some of the advice, good and bad, that's been
Speaker 1: going around on social media about how to disable and
Speaker 1: destroy armored vehicles. This is something we've kind of waited
Speaker 1: to do until the conflict was a little bit more
Speaker 1: of a mature state. But in brief, if you have
Speaker 1: been following what's been happening in Russia through the lens
Speaker 1: of social media or what's pepping at Ukraine through the
Speaker 1: lens of social media, one thing that has happened is
Speaker 1: in the early stages of the invasion, a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of people flocked, particularly to Twitter, but also not this
Speaker 1: did not just stay on Twitter. There were a large
Speaker 1: number of mainstreams news articles published on the subject of
Speaker 1: the things people were saying to talk about different ways
Speaker 1: civilians could disable Russian armored vehicles or otherwise stymy and
Speaker 1: thwart the progress of Russian military units through their cities. Um.
Speaker 1: And this has been accompanied by things like the Ukrainian
Speaker 1: government giving out information on how to make molotov cocktails
Speaker 1: we talked about this in our Molotov Cocktail episode, and
Speaker 1: putting out really neat infographics on where to throw molotov
Speaker 1: cocktails to disable armored vehicles. Um. But it's also come
Speaker 1: with a lot of bad advice that I don't want
Speaker 1: people who are maybe looking at the potential of urban
Speaker 1: combat happening in their future to take away from this conflict,
Speaker 1: because there's also a lot of disinfos, So that's what
Speaker 1: we're talking about today. Yes, and I guess one of
Speaker 1: the first places to probably discuss this urban combat idea
Speaker 1: is they probably the guy who's tried to make kind
Speaker 1: of a career and of talking about urban combat, which
Speaker 1: would be who wrote a relatively viral Twitter thread on
Speaker 1: this topic, and it's been writing about this thing for
Speaker 1: the past few years. Um, he's a he's the the
Speaker 1: chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Points Modern War
Speaker 1: Institute and served for like a quarter of a century
Speaker 1: as an infantry soldier, including two deployments into Iraq. And yeah,
Speaker 1: the past few years, he's tried to kind of make
Speaker 1: a name for himself as the guy who writes about
Speaker 1: urban combat. And obviously since this was happening largely when
Speaker 1: Russian started invading Kiev, John Spetzer put put together some
Speaker 1: of his thoughts that went pretty viral on this on
Speaker 1: this said topic. Yeah, and it's it's frustrating. You've got
Speaker 1: a quote in here from one of the articles about
Speaker 1: he was giving out that says some of his advice,
Speaker 1: which is preparing simple Molotov cocktails. It's already being seen
Speaker 1: on the streets of Kiev, which is kind of framing
Speaker 1: it as if Spin Sir advised the Ukrainians. Absolutely not true.
Speaker 1: Before he made that thread, the government was urging people
Speaker 1: to rest. And also, like Molotov cocktails got their name
Speaker 1: from people in Finland not super far from Ukraine resisting
Speaker 1: the Russian military in a very similar way to add
Speaker 1: they're being used by Ukrainian civilians. Now, um what I
Speaker 1: I believe what John Spencer did. He's a guy with
Speaker 1: some qualifications. Um, certainly like not a random person. We'll
Speaker 1: talk about random people giving advice to on Twitter. But
Speaker 1: he's also all None of his advice is new, none
Speaker 1: of it is from him, none of it is counter intuitive.
Speaker 1: A good deal of it is bad, And most of
Speaker 1: what he said that is good is just him pulling
Speaker 1: things from US military combat manuals and from Ukrainian military
Speaker 1: combat manuals and then putting it up in social media
Speaker 1: in order to go viral and try to get another
Speaker 1: book deal by making it look as if he is
Speaker 1: giving advice that is being adopted in real time, which
Speaker 1: is not what is happening. I mean, Like a good,
Speaker 1: good instance of this is yeah claiming that they're making
Speaker 1: Mulotov cocktails due to his advice. I mean, there's a
Speaker 1: picture in that very article that was taken before he
Speaker 1: even posted that thread. So it's like, no, they're they're
Speaker 1: people know how to make Multov cocktails. That's not hard
Speaker 1: to find out. In a lot of cases, the Ukrainian
Speaker 1: Ukrainian government was giving out instructions on how to do it.
Speaker 1: And I mean, and if you if you look at
Speaker 1: this picture, um, it looks very similar to a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of like the the almost like small
Speaker 1: defensive weapons factories that we saw across the States. We
Speaker 1: would often see just collections of bottles, uh, just ready
Speaker 1: to be thrown, all kind of laid out in in
Speaker 1: in in milk crates, very similar to this photo. Now
Speaker 1: there was there was less actual Mulotov cocktails, but the
Speaker 1: way that this is whole, the way this all set
Speaker 1: up looks looks very similar to any kind of insurgency
Speaker 1: tactics of being like, yeah, there's gonna be spontaneous on
Speaker 1: the ground organizing because people are just kind of naturally
Speaker 1: gifted at that. And on a on an object ti level,
Speaker 1: Molotov cocktails have a place on an urban battlefield. They
Speaker 1: can be useful weapons for disabling armored vehicles, for causing distractions,
Speaker 1: for injuring and even sometimes killing soldiers. They are they
Speaker 1: are capable of doing that, and they that's part of
Speaker 1: why the Ukrainian government put out these guides showing like
Speaker 1: where to huck the sons of bitches in order to
Speaker 1: disable you know, transports and armored vehicles and whatnot. Now
Speaker 1: that said, attempting to attack a military column with a
Speaker 1: molotov cocktail in most circumstances is very close to suicidal,
Speaker 1: and I've watched a number of videos of Ukrainians do it.
Speaker 1: In the times that seemed to be most successful is
Speaker 1: when you have areas where the Russians are attempting to
Speaker 1: establish control, You have small groups of vehicles that are
Speaker 1: moving down residential streets, you have a significant amount of traffic,
Speaker 1: of civilian traffic occurring alongside those military convoys, and as
Speaker 1: they passed the convoy, a civilian hucks a molotov, or
Speaker 1: as they pass of building, a civilian hucks a molotov
Speaker 1: um And those seem to be, broadly speaking, the situations
Speaker 1: in which people have kind of gotten away with it.
Speaker 1: We don't have any kind of I'm not aware of
Speaker 1: any kind of solid UH overarching analysis of all of
Speaker 1: the use of molotovs in this but that is broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: a potentially effective way to use a molotov cocktail UH
Speaker 1: in order to degrade military capacity of an occupier. What
Speaker 1: doesn't work and what Spencer and a number of other
Speaker 1: people suggested is HU can paint at tanks or other
Speaker 1: armored vehicles. And that may be surprising to a lot
Speaker 1: of people. I think there's a lot of folks who
Speaker 1: want to believe this UH, want to believe that that
Speaker 1: that could really work, because it's like you walk ship right,
Speaker 1: it feels like the kind of thing in surgeon should
Speaker 1: be doing. Yes, But here is the thing. When you
Speaker 1: have police officers who are tear gassing an area and
Speaker 1: you huck a bunch of paint and you get it
Speaker 1: over their face masks and they cannot see, it reduces
Speaker 1: their ability to tear gas you for a while. It
Speaker 1: makes them uncomfortable, it makes them have less fun, and
Speaker 1: it damages gear. When you huck a bunch of paint
Speaker 1: at an armored vehicle, the armored vehicle will return fire
Speaker 1: with a fifty caliber mounted Dashka or some other similar
Speaker 1: gun which fires bullets. That are large enough to take
Speaker 1: chunks the size of your head out of concrete, and
Speaker 1: you will be torn apart in your organs, liquefied in
Speaker 1: a hail of metal. Um. Meanwhile, the paint that you
Speaker 1: are attempting to throw at that vehicle is almost certain
Speaker 1: to have no impact on it. Um. Not only are
Speaker 1: you unlikely to get close enough to use the paint,
Speaker 1: because you have to be considerably closer to do that
Speaker 1: than you have to with a molotov in most situations,
Speaker 1: but also tanks are built with the understanding that it
Speaker 1: is possible that one or more of the ways in
Speaker 1: which they see will be obstructed. Tank drivers are trained
Speaker 1: to drive blind. There are ways of utilizing tanks when
Speaker 1: vision is obstructed, because in the kinds of fights that
Speaker 1: tanks are built to get into, they are often in
Speaker 1: situations where there was so much smoke around the exactly
Speaker 1: that there is effectively zero visibility, which is why when
Speaker 1: Spencer started talking about people throwing paint at tanks, a
Speaker 1: number of tank drivers came out and said, that's actually
Speaker 1: horrible advice, like, they don't work that way, And I
Speaker 1: was I was chatting with a couple of people. Um,
Speaker 1: there was one fellow former Green brand name Mike Nelson,
Speaker 1: who was posting about Spencer and very angry that he
Speaker 1: was basically copying material directly from stuff published by the
Speaker 1: Ukrainian government, and then like getting up anytime journalists or
Speaker 1: media figures would comment about Ukraine, would like there's a
Speaker 1: nasty post here where Anne Cabrera, who I think is
Speaker 1: some sort of reporter, was like, I feel heartsick upon
Speaker 1: the latest news out of Mariopol. My god, just like
Speaker 1: expressing hard and human terry and tragedy. And Spencer posts
Speaker 1: a link to his personal website and says me too,
Speaker 1: not sure if you saw my MANI manual for the
Speaker 1: Urban Defender, but it is available in English and Ukrainian. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's so like anyway grifty ship like that. But
Speaker 1: because that it is all that's very different than also
Speaker 1: like throwing paint at like a squad car or like
Speaker 1: a riot like a riot truck that's coming through because
Speaker 1: if obscure their vision, the worst that they can do
Speaker 1: is crash into a wall. They're not going to start
Speaker 1: firing uh massive explosion rounds from a central Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they they do not like for one thing, the
Speaker 1: like the police as bad as they can be. Their
Speaker 1: default when they come under any kind of like attack
Speaker 1: is not to start firing machine guns wildly in all directions,
Speaker 1: which Russian not yet at least um. But you know,
Speaker 1: the other thing, I was chatting with Matthew Mora, who's
Speaker 1: a is has been one of the guys who's biling
Speaker 1: ailing get Spencer on Twitter. Matthew was a Marine Corps
Speaker 1: tank commander and was blown up in Afghanistan. So he
Speaker 1: was in a tank that was attacked several times and
Speaker 1: eventually destroyed. UM, So he's he has some firsthand knowledge
Speaker 1: about what works and does not work a against tanks.
Speaker 1: And one of the things he pointed out is that
Speaker 1: the people who destroyed his tank put together I don't know,
Speaker 1: hundred two hundred dollars worth of various accelerants and random
Speaker 1: scrap metal and made a bomb that destroyed an Abrams
Speaker 1: tank that works a lot better than paint. And it's
Speaker 1: it's the kind of thing where I think one of
Speaker 1: the things that's frustrating here is you've got a lot
Speaker 1: of these like American kind of military academic guys and
Speaker 1: I know Spencer served, but that doesn't necessarily mean much
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean just being deployed to Iraq doesn't mean
Speaker 1: you did anything. But they were deployed and maybe they
Speaker 1: did see urban combat. But I have watched United States
Speaker 1: soldiers in an intense urban combat environment UH, and most
Speaker 1: of what they did was be inside of m wraps
Speaker 1: because it's very hard to blow those up. While the
Speaker 1: Iraqi military did a great deal of the fighting, and
Speaker 1: when US soldiers did engage in fighting, they did so
Speaker 1: with absolute air supremacy and with artillery supremacy UM. Which
Speaker 1: isn't to say that it wasn't dangerous, but it is
Speaker 1: a profoundly different situation than engaging in urban combat when
Speaker 1: the airspace is contested and when you do not have
Speaker 1: artillery supremacy. So what does that mean in terms of
Speaker 1: like what can people actually take away that's useful from
Speaker 1: this um? Well, on an individual level, something have been
Speaker 1: extremely effective. Ukrainian territorial defense militias have been very effective
Speaker 1: at doing things like picking up small arms, going out
Speaker 1: in small patrols into UH rural environments around the area
Speaker 1: where Russian troops are moving in small convoys, and oftentimes,
Speaker 1: because of the way the advance went, you would have
Speaker 1: a single or a couple of Russian munition trucks essentially
Speaker 1: alone and unsupported, trying to find their way around. Um.
Speaker 1: You had civilians doing stuff like turning signs around, like
Speaker 1: removing signs, which they were instructed to by the areas
Speaker 1: creating officials as well. Yes, yes, and which I'm sure
Speaker 1: some people just started doing because it seemed like a
Speaker 1: good idea. UM. But that sort of ship causes them
Speaker 1: to burn fuel, causes them to abandon vehicles. You had
Speaker 1: these kind of independent groups of farmers towing away abandoned vehicles.
Speaker 1: You had small raiding parties attacking convoys and attacking isolated units.
Speaker 1: You had cases where you know, Russian military units early
Speaker 1: in the fight would get into Kiev uh kind of
Speaker 1: on accident and be ambushed by territorial defense units and
Speaker 1: wiped out. And those are all very effective examples of
Speaker 1: of decentralized kind of ground up resistance against a major
Speaker 1: military force. Now, one thing we don't know that is
Speaker 1: important if you think about the potential that you might
Speaker 1: have to endure something like this, is we have no
Speaker 1: idea what the casualties were like among those kids. It
Speaker 1: is a total black box, and it's it's probable that
Speaker 1: part of why Russian forces did the war crime they
Speaker 1: did in Bucca Um was because they had an attitude
Speaker 1: that all civilians were insurgents, which is, you know what
Speaker 1: happens when you have kind of a people's war, which
Speaker 1: doesn't justify an active genocide, um, but it is something
Speaker 1: people should keep aware of. When you start fucking with
Speaker 1: the signs and ambushing the convoys and throwing molotovs, one
Speaker 1: of the things that will happen is it will accelerate
Speaker 1: the violence that is being done. Yeah, and it makes
Speaker 1: to the civilian justified target in some you know propaganda lens, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And that doesn't mean like it's you should resist if
Speaker 1: you are invaded, um. But these are things that also
Speaker 1: should be noted is this is what happens when you resist,
Speaker 1: right that This is what a modern war of this
Speaker 1: type looks like. Other things that I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: they've been effective, but they're certainly not bad strategies is
Speaker 1: the construction of a lot of vehicle barriers tank traps.
Speaker 1: Next is the barricade thing, both than what we've been
Speaker 1: kind of seeing or speculated about in the East and
Speaker 1: then how we've seen you know, barricade set ups a
Speaker 1: lot in the past few years in various resistance movements
Speaker 1: to you know, a variety of success levels and non
Speaker 1: success levels. Yeah, and and and these are like you know, barriers,
Speaker 1: tank traps of a very long history and in warfare.
Speaker 1: So they absolutely can be and have been effective many
Speaker 1: many times on the battlefield. So this is not an
Speaker 1: area of does this thing work? But it is a
Speaker 1: question of like and and this is something we just
Speaker 1: don't seem to have perfect data on did it Did
Speaker 1: it particularly play a role in what's happening here? And Um,
Speaker 1: that's harder to tell. Um. And it's probably going to
Speaker 1: be different, you know, depending on the tactical in an
Speaker 1: area you're talking about, which kind of like theater you're
Speaker 1: talking about. But um, you know one thing that's like
Speaker 1: the way in which these kind of barriers, hedgehawgs and
Speaker 1: like whatnot work, is there there an area denial tool.
Speaker 1: It's like an area denial tool four vehicles, um. And
Speaker 1: it makes military units slow down, it makes them take
Speaker 1: more time in clearing area. Um they have to tow
Speaker 1: things away or blow them up. Um. And they also
Speaker 1: can provide, depending on the type of thing, cover for
Speaker 1: infantry and in urban combat situations, which obviously can cut
Speaker 1: both ways a little bit. But there's a reason why
Speaker 1: you see these kinds of things in every conflict and
Speaker 1: also a reason why p will put them up in protests.
Speaker 1: It can be very useful to deny the vehicles of
Speaker 1: the enemy access to an area temporarily, and a big
Speaker 1: pile of metal always does that of the time. It
Speaker 1: requires something to deal with it. Yeah, that was something
Speaker 1: that was very kind of considered when there was an
Speaker 1: increase in like vehicular attacks, uh during like a lot
Speaker 1: of vehicles running into a massive, massive marches, there was
Speaker 1: definitely a concerted effort to try to block off streets
Speaker 1: where stuff is happening, whether that be like you know,
Speaker 1: corkers for marches of people who specifically block off the
Speaker 1: sides of streets with their own cars to follow the
Speaker 1: march around, or you know, less less effective arricades like
Speaker 1: throwing a chain like fence in the middle of the street,
Speaker 1: which is I guess better than nothing sometimes but also
Speaker 1: maybe not the most effective thing. Yeah, in terms of
Speaker 1: trying to like build layered barricades, that's not just you know,
Speaker 1: one flimsy wall, but it's a series of things that
Speaker 1: can compress down. And when you're talking about barricades in
Speaker 1: a kind of militant situation, there's there's broadly speaking, going
Speaker 1: to be two purposes. One of those purposes is to
Speaker 1: create a to add to the friction that you are
Speaker 1: attempting to create for the enemy. And that's that's all
Speaker 1: insurg All insurgent warfare is about creating friction, right, because
Speaker 1: friction degrades assets. It's over time. It it called basically like, okay,
Speaker 1: so say you've blocked off a bunch of roads and
Speaker 1: you've added fifteen twenty miles to the transport distance that
Speaker 1: this convoy has to go. Well, generally speaking, in the
Speaker 1: case of war, when you're talking about war, it's assumed
Speaker 1: that about one mile is in terms of wear and
Speaker 1: tear like tins plus miles um. Because of how much
Speaker 1: more difficult the strain on vehicles is in those situations.
Speaker 1: So you've added a great deal more strain on the vehicles.
Speaker 1: That increases the chance that one of them is gonna
Speaker 1: blow a tire, one of them gonna crack an axle,
Speaker 1: one of them is going to have an engine block
Speaker 1: go like blow or whatever, um, Which means over time,
Speaker 1: if you're doing this a bunch. If you're setting up
Speaker 1: barricades and you're effectively increasing or all the amount of
Speaker 1: travel time or at least the amount of idoling time
Speaker 1: that forces have to go in by a significant amount.
Speaker 1: Your guaranteeing a certain number of those vehicles are going
Speaker 1: to break or be rendered inoperable in that time. And
Speaker 1: you're also the other thing that they do is they
Speaker 1: allow you to deny area and funnel the enemy into
Speaker 1: a specific into a place more advantageous for you, right,
Speaker 1: And this can be advantageous if you're trying to set
Speaker 1: up an ambush, if you're just trying to buy time
Speaker 1: for forces to move back to a better position. Um,
Speaker 1: it can you know, there's a number of uses for it.
Speaker 1: But if you set up a series of obstacles like
Speaker 1: this and guarantee that they're going to have to find
Speaker 1: an alternate route, and you know, broadly speaking, because it's
Speaker 1: your terrain, what kind of route they're going to take, um,
Speaker 1: then you could do stuff like drop throw a drone
Speaker 1: at them, or if because of the damage you've done
Speaker 1: to the roads and the difficulty of how difficult you
Speaker 1: made it to advance, they wind up just parked for
Speaker 1: a long time. That's also a great situation to bomb
Speaker 1: people with a drone, which is by far the most
Speaker 1: effective weapons unit that we have seen built civilians in
Speaker 1: this war. By the way, UH, it's not molotovs, it's
Speaker 1: certainly not paint. It is UH civilian volunteers who put
Speaker 1: together combat drones using generally d j I drones that
Speaker 1: they have upgraded with thermal imaging cameras in order to
Speaker 1: see at night. And they have used three D printed
Speaker 1: parts in order to drop bombs from UM and they
Speaker 1: have done carried out for weeks now hundreds of extremely
Speaker 1: successful night time raids on Russian positions. This has been
Speaker 1: effective for a couple of reasons. One of them is
Speaker 1: that the Russian military does not widespread half effective night vision. UM.
Speaker 1: We don't need to get The reasons for this are complicated,
Speaker 1: based in a mix of like appropriations, corruption, issues with
Speaker 1: the technologies they do have, YadA, YadA, YadA, but they
Speaker 1: do not have the capacity in large scale to carry
Speaker 1: out operations at night to the extent that the Ukrainians do. UM.
Speaker 1: And so you get when nighttime comes these forces that
Speaker 1: were advancing in places like Kiev clustering up and huddling
Speaker 1: for the night, and then these hunter killer drones would
Speaker 1: sneak in at night and they are impossible to fucking
Speaker 1: see in daytime. I can tell you from experience. At night,
Speaker 1: their ghosts just dropping bombs on on armored vehicles and
Speaker 1: on groups of soldiers. Um and these you know what
Speaker 1: you have seen with these units which have been integrated.
Speaker 1: They are like started out as civilian volunteer groups. They
Speaker 1: have been integrated into the military to a significant extent.
Speaker 1: And I think what you do have Some of this
Speaker 1: is conjecture on my part, but you've had a lot
Speaker 1: of Russian officers in generals killed generally because they have
Speaker 1: been communicating over open phone lines. And I suspect some
Speaker 1: of what's been going on is when they figure out
Speaker 1: where one of these guys is, they send some of
Speaker 1: these fucking drone units and to blow them up, because
Speaker 1: it's not hard if you know where someone is to
Speaker 1: kill them with the drone. In this way, I think
Speaker 1: the other thing to talk about in terms of you know,
Speaker 1: building obstacles, building barricades is the whole cover versus concealment
Speaker 1: thing where a lot of people think that if they
Speaker 1: hide behind a barricade, there now impervious, which obviously isn't
Speaker 1: true if a drone is gonna get you, and obviously
Speaker 1: isn't true for a large a large number of the
Speaker 1: ammunitions that get fired, whether they be bullets or tank grounds. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's and I think that's something In videos
Speaker 1: I have watched of Russian soldiers responding to contact, you
Speaker 1: have seen a lot of people in ambushes that they
Speaker 1: lost hiding behind vehicles, UM, which if it's an armored vehicle,
Speaker 1: definitely can protect you from small arm fire. But if
Speaker 1: somebody shoots that vehicle with a with a javelin, you
Speaker 1: may find yourself next to a cooking off tank. UM.
Speaker 1: And I have seen it like people hiding behind fucking fences,
Speaker 1: which is terrible to hide behind, UM, failing to go
Speaker 1: to ground, which is always your best bet is to
Speaker 1: kind of get behind a burm or something, get loaded
Speaker 1: the fucking ground. And it's It's interesting to me a
Speaker 1: lot of the worst videos of responding to contact that
Speaker 1: I've seen on the Russian side have been there. The
Speaker 1: Ross Guardia units. I'm not great at pronouncing Russian, but
Speaker 1: they are essentially police special forces units that actually makes sense.
Speaker 1: They have every video I've seen of these guys handle
Speaker 1: being ambushed very poorly because they're not trained for that.
Speaker 1: They're trained to go bust into a house and arrest somebody,
Speaker 1: you know, like this is not where they're what they're
Speaker 1: supposed to be doing. The other thing that Spencer really
Speaker 1: focuses on is this whole like um sniper idea of
Speaker 1: of being afraid of someone, of someone just cutting you
Speaker 1: down from above, which obviously kind of is you know,
Speaker 1: more of a thing with the drone stuff as well,
Speaker 1: but this idea of not even being good at firearms,
Speaker 1: but just having the threat of taking fire from somewhere
Speaker 1: as you can't see in terms of like knowing your
Speaker 1: terrain better than whatever invading force does and knowing how
Speaker 1: to set up spots where it's it's less you're less
Speaker 1: likely to get shelled. Um, I mean yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: that's very I mean, this is very basic and old
Speaker 1: military doctrine. But this is like, you know, the ways
Speaker 1: a sniper can work in a deservein environment is you
Speaker 1: have a large number of guys and they are trying
Speaker 1: to move to a specific area and if they take fire, um,
Speaker 1: that limits their options from forward movement unless they're willing
Speaker 1: to just risk getting hit, and generally they're not, and
Speaker 1: then you find yourself kind of holding up for time
Speaker 1: to take out the sniper, which can be uninvolved in
Speaker 1: difficult process for just a single sniper. And yeah, that's
Speaker 1: definitely a thing like that. You don't have to be
Speaker 1: the fucking of Chris Kyle in order to effectively work
Speaker 1: in that kind of situation. Now, what makes that effective
Speaker 1: Because if you just have a sniper attacking police officers
Speaker 1: or soldiers in an urban environment, generally speaking, there exists
Speaker 1: the ability to deal with that pretty fucking quickly. But
Speaker 1: if you have small units of snipers kind of oftentimes
Speaker 1: just like civilians with hunting rifles who are doing that
Speaker 1: within the context of soldiers also being resisted by other
Speaker 1: soldiers and dealing with like an active combat environment, then yeah,
Speaker 1: a handful of people with rifles can be a significant
Speaker 1: force multiplier. It's a lot extra to deal with, and
Speaker 1: I suspect ship like that has been part of why
Speaker 1: you have seen cities like Mariopold resists so long under
Speaker 1: overwhelming forces that there's a pretty wide, comprehensive amount of
Speaker 1: resistance going on in those areas um And yeah, a
Speaker 1: single person if they're not like the only person engaging
Speaker 1: with the enemy in that in that area, UM, can
Speaker 1: make it a lot harder for them to effectively respond
Speaker 1: to contact. I think the last thing I wanted to
Speaker 1: kind of get into today is the whole I mean,
Speaker 1: this kind of ties into the weaponized on reality aspect
Speaker 1: of being like all of these people who are giving
Speaker 1: you know, I just listened advice on Twitter dot com,
Speaker 1: whether they be John Spencer, whether they be you know,
Speaker 1: the wife of a former marine, whether they be tank
Speaker 1: mechanics whatever, like everyone's everyone's doing this now, and it's
Speaker 1: all seen as like completely valid. Right, We're giving instructions
Speaker 1: on how to do urban insurgency online, um, and this
Speaker 1: is totally fine. Yet when you know, when information from
Speaker 1: Hong Kong gets used in protest kind of uh propaganda
Speaker 1: for urban insurgency instructions, then it's like international like organized
Speaker 1: like terrorism. Yeah. Yeah, if you're telling people had to
Speaker 1: use fucking laser pointers, yeah, it's like the selective thing.
Speaker 1: How but you're like, Okay, we're allowed to tell people
Speaker 1: how to do urban insurgency right now, but when this
Speaker 1: is over or in the past, it's it's it's not allowed. Right,
Speaker 1: you have John Spencer, who I doubt would be giving
Speaker 1: I doubt was a big fan of any Black Lives
Speaker 1: Matter demonstration just but but I mean, I certainly doubt
Speaker 1: was giving people instructions and how to disable bearcats. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think he was giving instructions and how to
Speaker 1: ambush police officers or anything like that. So you have
Speaker 1: this whole coalition of people on Twitter dot com giving
Speaker 1: all this advice out how to do urban insurgency and whatever. Well, also,
Speaker 1: you know, when ever something is happening like that where
Speaker 1: they live, it is that that is obviously bad and
Speaker 1: obviously not a good thing, whether you know, for you know,
Speaker 1: you could talk about whatever like ideological drive people have,
Speaker 1: but I think this is just an interesting thing worth
Speaker 1: talking about in terms of how we will offer we
Speaker 1: will view. You know, this type of discussion of urban
Speaker 1: insurgency is always like a bad thing, all right. It's
Speaker 1: always this thing that like terrorists do you're helping, you know,
Speaker 1: you're you're always you're mooting for the destruction of civilization
Speaker 1: or whatever, um. And then it just takes a few
Speaker 1: things for you get you know, an instructor at West
Speaker 1: Point to start, you know, posting threads to help sell
Speaker 1: his new book on these very same topics. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean there's I think a little degree to which I
Speaker 1: might push back on some of that, not necessarily, Spencer,
Speaker 1: But I can't remember during like the Fed War in Portland,
Speaker 1: which was the probably the part of Portland that like
Speaker 1: most people are aware of, when you had a bunch
Speaker 1: of federal agents snatching people, it was the most warlike
Speaker 1: part of the you you had for this brief period
Speaker 1: of time a lot of folks because I took part
Speaker 1: giving out advice on Twitter to respond to and handle
Speaker 1: police munitions. Um that when I think that certainly went
Speaker 1: more viral than it would have gone in a different
Speaker 1: sort of situation. Um And I think you do have.
Speaker 1: I think part of what you're seeing in Ukraine, and
Speaker 1: this is just sort of a general thing that happens
Speaker 1: online is when something a news moment, blows up in
Speaker 1: a way that is like big enough it disrupts the
Speaker 1: norms and suddenly for a while you can talk about
Speaker 1: things like how to disable government armored vehicles and fight
Speaker 1: like you know, the reality suddenly becomes so much bigger,
Speaker 1: and what is what is acceptable discourse suddenly expands out
Speaker 1: much bigger than what it usually tells. It becomes a
Speaker 1: lot more permeable. And I do think broadly, Like we're
Speaker 1: shooting on Spencer here because he's frustrating to me. Um,
Speaker 1: but I do think that, like, really really broadly. Um,
Speaker 1: it's good when stuff like it's good for people to
Speaker 1: think about. Even if I don't, I certainly don't. I
Speaker 1: certainly do not want there to be I don't want
Speaker 1: anyone listening to this who has not experienced urban warfare
Speaker 1: to experienced urban warfare. I will absolutely I will. I
Speaker 1: will say that right now. But it is not bad
Speaker 1: for people to be thinking about and talking about the
Speaker 1: ways in which a civilian population can do damage to
Speaker 1: an invading organized military force. That's not a bad discourse
Speaker 1: to exist, and it's not bad for people to be
Speaker 1: thinking in this way. And it's not bad for the
Speaker 1: people who are potentially in power to have that in
Speaker 1: the back of their heads, you know. Yeah, I mean, like,
Speaker 1: the one of the first things you sent me when
Speaker 1: I started working for it could happen here was the
Speaker 1: was the city is not neutral peace? Um on Urban
Speaker 1: combat is hard. Um. Yeah, it's definitely. It's the thing that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's always it's it's worth thinking about, but you
Speaker 1: don't want to. We're not trying to wish on anybody.
Speaker 1: And I think you can. You can look at all
Speaker 1: of like the weirdos on the internet who have like
Speaker 1: you know this, you know this is some degree of
Speaker 1: like not sees who have done this, but also just
Speaker 1: like random other people who have flown to Ukraine to
Speaker 1: help join fight off the Russians because they think it's
Speaker 1: going to be cool and they'll be able to work
Speaker 1: with the Azov Batalion or something, who then get stationed
Speaker 1: to basically be cannon fodder because they're this like twenty
Speaker 1: year old from America who's never actually held a gun before.
Speaker 1: I hope that one's true. It is just like a
Speaker 1: post because if it's true, then it means that someone
Speaker 1: in the Ukrainian government is consciously making the choice to
Speaker 1: use one of the Azov veterans as cannon fodder, which
Speaker 1: is funny, funny, extremely funny. If it's happening, right, we don't,
Speaker 1: that's not that's not confirmed. Certainly, a percentage, probably not
Speaker 1: an insignificant percentage of dudes who have done shown up
Speaker 1: to do this have like been like, oh my God,
Speaker 1: what the fuck? Um, some of them I'm sure just
Speaker 1: didn't have much experience. I'm sure some of them were
Speaker 1: dudes who had experience being on the side with overwhelming
Speaker 1: air power. Um, and we're like, oh fuck, but you
Speaker 1: also do It's fair to note like the stories of
Speaker 1: people like having like freaking out go viral. Um. There's
Speaker 1: plenty of videos of like mixed foreign or units in
Speaker 1: heavy combat, including a bunch where you can hear US
Speaker 1: and British dudes. Finally, like, because a lot there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people who have legitimate, like hard combat experience
Speaker 1: who have have volunteered to go do this. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: one thing I also do find kind of uncomfortable is,
Speaker 1: I mean, no, it's not super unlike what what what
Speaker 1: we're doing now that we're trying to come at it
Speaker 1: from a more uh like critical standpoint, but like Americans
Speaker 1: who maybe have gone to a protest or two but
Speaker 1: no real experience, just going on Twitter dot com and
Speaker 1: talking about how they think beating an army is best done,
Speaker 1: how that works. Yeah. Well, and like you know, if
Speaker 1: if you look at like the okay, like the times
Speaker 1: that like the US has actually attempted to fight its
Speaker 1: own Army, right, Like the last time this happened was
Speaker 1: the L L A. Riot and ninety two and they
Speaker 1: got their ship pushed in like it it went really
Speaker 1: really badly for the people on This was really ugly.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of bodies. Yeah, and like and
Speaker 1: you know, and part part of what you know, and
Speaker 1: I will say, like part of what's I guess you
Speaker 1: still about this is like yeah, this is I mean,
Speaker 1: this is the thing that is I mean I wasn't
Speaker 1: alive for it, but like at like Robert, you were
Speaker 1: alive for that, like like that that that is a
Speaker 1: thing like in living memory. The Army has been deployed
Speaker 1: on American soil and one of the things that went
Speaker 1: wrong is that the people on the ground had basically
Speaker 1: no time. And this is something you can read from
Speaker 1: from like the Army's accounts of this, is that like
Speaker 1: the people that they were dealing with had no tactical
Speaker 1: experience what wherever they did it, they had no conception
Speaker 1: of tactics, and the Army was able to very quickly
Speaker 1: crush them. And you know, if if you don't want
Speaker 1: that to happen to you, yeah, like that there there
Speaker 1: there is a way which is stuff is important to
Speaker 1: be thinking about. But also like dear God, that is
Speaker 1: the worst ship, Like yeah you that here. Here's what's
Speaker 1: what's important to understand about that anytime you are dealing
Speaker 1: with any kind of conflict, like physical conflict that involves
Speaker 1: violence and and that can be as narrow as like
Speaker 1: a protest, you know, where people are squaring off with
Speaker 1: the cops, or an actual like full on military conflict,
Speaker 1: the winner is the person who is most disruptive to
Speaker 1: the enemies. Ode loop, right, um, observe, orient, decide act.
Speaker 1: That's the loop that you go through when you are
Speaker 1: trying to decide how to act in any kind of
Speaker 1: a kinetic situation UM on the streets and a protest.
Speaker 1: One of the things where I where we have all
Speaker 1: seen people be the most successful against cops is when
Speaker 1: you change the rules on them. Is when they are
Speaker 1: in a situation they did not anticipate being in, because
Speaker 1: they tend to freak out and they tend to respond
Speaker 1: and effectively, right, you do not want to if you
Speaker 1: see them preparing to act in a certain way because
Speaker 1: they believe you were doing a specific thing, you ideally
Speaker 1: do not then do the thing they are preparing for
Speaker 1: because that is a situation which you're gonna wind a
Speaker 1: battering yourself against a riot line. Right. Um, that's what
Speaker 1: the that's the core of the move be like water
Speaker 1: thing from Hong Kong, is the idea that do not
Speaker 1: engage them in a way they are prepared for, and
Speaker 1: that that that is a that is a piece of advice.
Speaker 1: Broadly speaking, that's just as true in a war as
Speaker 1: it is in a protest situation. On their own terms.
Speaker 1: What this also means is that you don't want to
Speaker 1: be playing by a set of rules that are ineffective
Speaker 1: in the situation you're getting into. So like when you
Speaker 1: had protesters in in l A engaging with the military,
Speaker 1: they were playing by the rules of how do you
Speaker 1: deal with cops and suddenly they were dealing with soldiers
Speaker 1: and boy, howdy are the rules different? You know? Um?
Speaker 1: And likewise, the Russian military was trained and blooded to
Speaker 1: a large extent in conflicts in places like Syria, where
Speaker 1: again they had air supremacy, Um, they had artillery supremacy.
Speaker 1: They were backing the state that was fighting against these insurgents,
Speaker 1: and so they're soldiers gained the combat experience they had
Speaker 1: with every advantage in their pocket. Um. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military,
Speaker 1: if you're talking really about like because we've talked about
Speaker 1: a lot of little things that have maybe had an
Speaker 1: impact on the conflict here, and they're one of the
Speaker 1: things that's had the biggest impact on how the Ukrainian
Speaker 1: military has responded and and comported itself in this war
Speaker 1: so far versus the Russian is for years eight years
Speaker 1: since this conflict started, the Ukrainian military has developed a
Speaker 1: posture of having soldiers sign up for these brief contracts,
Speaker 1: sending and rotating them through the battleground and the dawn
Speaker 1: boss so that when this war started, they had a
Speaker 1: huge number, more than anyone else in Europe, of combat
Speaker 1: veterans who got their experience fighting against a peer adversary
Speaker 1: when they did not have supremacy and artillery or air
Speaker 1: support when they engaged them um. And then the Ukrainian
Speaker 1: military very intelligently spread these guys out amongst their their
Speaker 1: their units, which is what you want to do. Any
Speaker 1: military is going to want to spread out your veterans
Speaker 1: among units, because you're not everyone's not going to be
Speaker 1: a combat veteran, but you want some guys who know
Speaker 1: what it's like to be shot at and every kind
Speaker 1: of unit that might get shot at because they stiff
Speaker 1: in the back of everybody else. And this is what
Speaker 1: So again, when when the war started, to get back
Speaker 1: to what I'm saying, the Russian military entered preparing for
Speaker 1: a police action like the ones they carried out in Czechnia,
Speaker 1: um like what they did have done for Assad in Syria,
Speaker 1: and they got a war, and the Ukrainians came into
Speaker 1: that fight prepared for a war. So you you, I
Speaker 1: think one of the things that is important when you
Speaker 1: look at consider any kind of possibility of being involved
Speaker 1: in a conflict is you want to know what are
Speaker 1: the rules your opponent is going in ready to abide by, right,
Speaker 1: what are the things they are expecting to happen, What
Speaker 1: is kind of the rubric with which they are looking at,
Speaker 1: what they expect to occur in this conflict? And by god,
Speaker 1: you want to be going in there with a different one,
Speaker 1: you know, um And that again, depending on how you
Speaker 1: do it, that can go badly or that can go
Speaker 1: really well, because like I said, if you're if you're
Speaker 1: going and prepared to fight cops and you wind up
Speaker 1: dealing with soldiers, that's not great. Um. But if you
Speaker 1: have prepared, if you are able to kind of lock
Speaker 1: your enemy into the kind of conflict that they're not
Speaker 1: ready to face, um, then generally speaking you'll win. We
Speaker 1: have twenty years of experience in the War on Terror
Speaker 1: of more or less that going down. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: there's a there's a good example of this also with
Speaker 1: the like with the i d F s a war
Speaker 1: against hes Blo in two thousand and six, where it's
Speaker 1: like the IDEF is a really good army, but they'd
Speaker 1: spent like I don't know, like they spent like forty
Speaker 1: years basically just sort of like, yeah, they've been about
Speaker 1: forty years doing police actions. Yeah, and then they run
Speaker 1: into Hesbla and they expect Hesbah is going to just
Speaker 1: you know, they've made Lebanon jails and six and their
Speaker 1: expectations that Hesblah is going to go to ground, They're
Speaker 1: gonna do a guerrilla war and instead has blood like
Speaker 1: when they go into bunkers. But they stand in fight
Speaker 1: and the id F gets smashed and like you know,
Speaker 1: they pull out and they spend a bunch of time
Speaker 1: just like murdering people from the air. But like they
Speaker 1: don't win the war. And like like that that happens
Speaker 1: a lot, especially with these armies that are used to dealing,
Speaker 1: used to doing these sort of police action things, and
Speaker 1: they losed enemies that like the fact that the I
Speaker 1: d F Lost Award has blood is like by like
Speaker 1: balance of forces. It's like this is inconceivable, Like how
Speaker 1: on earth did they possibly lose this? But it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this stuff happens because they weren't like, yeah, they they
Speaker 1: were they were doing they were doing this police action thing,
Speaker 1: and they weren't used to They hadn't fought an enemy
Speaker 1: that was actually going to stick in and fight them
Speaker 1: since like the seventies. Yeah, I mean a lot of
Speaker 1: the great defeats in military history because a force came
Speaker 1: into a situation expecting a different kind of fight than
Speaker 1: what they got. That was a part of what happened
Speaker 1: to Napoleon when he invaded Russia, right, and the Russians
Speaker 1: did not respond the way that he expected a state
Speaker 1: to respond to having their capital occupied, um, and effectively
Speaker 1: kind of starved him out. There was other ship going
Speaker 1: on there. Attrician had really depleted the French military before
Speaker 1: it got there. But but yeah, um, yeah, how how
Speaker 1: I went on how I would want to wrap up
Speaker 1: this is basically saying like and all of that stuff
Speaker 1: regarding how this war has really prompted a lot of
Speaker 1: things that were seemingly more unexpected and seemingly thought to
Speaker 1: be previously more impossible. UM in terms of how fast
Speaker 1: both rhetoric around these these types of conflicts can spread
Speaker 1: and more and the role in which like disinformation and
Speaker 1: misformation is used for you know, both both sides to
Speaker 1: to to gain digging ground on the other and how
Speaker 1: you know, relating back to it could happen here is
Speaker 1: MS in terms of like the urban crumbles or like
Speaker 1: you know, the small small like urban collapses, um, and
Speaker 1: you know, escalating escalating like inter inter country conflict in
Speaker 1: various places around the world. How fast certain things can
Speaker 1: happen that we once thought are kind of more impossible
Speaker 1: or improbable at the very least. You know, how how
Speaker 1: fast you can get people giving advice on how to
Speaker 1: take out armored vehicles on Twitter dot com. How fast
Speaker 1: you can get you know, people like people who are
Speaker 1: you know, seemingly are part you know, seemingly not not
Speaker 1: tied to certain just certain like ideas or theologies giving
Speaker 1: out you know, information on types of types of ways
Speaker 1: to resist invading or oppressing forces. It is it is
Speaker 1: an interesting kind of It's like case studies the wrong
Speaker 1: word because it is it's it's obviously having horrible effects
Speaker 1: with you know, thousands and thousands of people being slaughtered um,
Speaker 1: but it is it is intriguing to watch, how, you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of like the microcos of macrocosm idea of
Speaker 1: of eventually you know, conflict, if conflict breaks out in
Speaker 1: other places around the world, and next in the next
Speaker 1: few years, how are current like social media landscape, How
Speaker 1: are kind of rules around like urban conflict, like urban
Speaker 1: conflict and all of these things kind of interact with
Speaker 1: each other and how we view Yeah, what is what
Speaker 1: is likely and what we you know, who who you're
Speaker 1: going to predict is gonna do X thing based on
Speaker 1: people invading a city that it's not theirs? Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: I mean I think in terms of stuff that that
Speaker 1: people can take out of this, you know, without necessarily
Speaker 1: needing to prepare to fight in an urban insurgency. One
Speaker 1: of them is that anytime big ship happens and and
Speaker 1: more big ship is going to keep happening for us,
Speaker 1: you have a window of opportunity through which you can
Speaker 1: get things across to people that they would not normally
Speaker 1: listen to. UM. And that is a really important time,
Speaker 1: and it helps to think about the kind of situations
Speaker 1: that might occur in the kind of things that you
Speaker 1: want to push out into the world. UM. Because this
Speaker 1: is this is is true with climate change as it
Speaker 1: is with war. Right, We're going to have more disasters,
Speaker 1: and when those disasters hit, it will be easier to
Speaker 1: get people to talk about radical solutions to things like
Speaker 1: climate change, and it will be easier to do things
Speaker 1: like get out in the fucking streets and get large
Speaker 1: groups of people agitated. You know, we're we're at some point,
Speaker 1: fucking God willing, we will have of the climate change
Speaker 1: equivalent to what happened in where something so terrible and
Speaker 1: fucked up happens that a lot of people take to
Speaker 1: the streets, and hopefully we will succeed to a greater
Speaker 1: extent in forcing actual change than maybe we did in
Speaker 1: But but that's that's something like that could very well happen.
Speaker 1: And so that's one of the lessons I think you
Speaker 1: can take out of this again without sort of obsessing
Speaker 1: over military technology or getting into gunfights with fucking soldiers
Speaker 1: is Ukraine is hard evidence that that is the way
Speaker 1: the media environment works. You get these moments where you
Speaker 1: can really push some wild ship to people. That's that's
Speaker 1: why I like the whole uprising or insurrection model more
Speaker 1: than the revolution model, because the uprising model posits that basically,
Speaker 1: you have you know, base base society based reality, you know,
Speaker 1: always at like the base side level, then uprising happens.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like shooting up onto a graph. Suddenly,
Speaker 1: so many things that are outside the normal way that
Speaker 1: we view you know, systems, the governance systems of you know,
Speaker 1: social control. So many things become so much more possible
Speaker 1: in this like heightened place. Um. And that's what the
Speaker 1: uprising does. It gets things that were suddenly that were
Speaker 1: once so far away and once just only in the imagination.
Speaker 1: It almost it makes them so much closer. Right. There's
Speaker 1: this feeling in like July during the height of the
Speaker 1: fed war, being like so many things feel possible in
Speaker 1: this one moment, nothing is true and all is permitted,
Speaker 1: Like you can you can get away with some ship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so using the uprising model, yeah, it can really
Speaker 1: and or or the or the instruction model like it
Speaker 1: can really it can really make things feel so much
Speaker 1: more possible than what they usually feel like. And that
Speaker 1: there's you know, brief moments in time where massive social
Speaker 1: change can happen, and you know you have to learn
Speaker 1: how to recognize when this moment are happening and then
Speaker 1: organize effectively when they do happen. Yeah, yep, well I
Speaker 1: believe that does it for us today. Um yeah, we
Speaker 1: when we've been wanting to talk about this topic for
Speaker 1: a while in terms of you know, one of the
Speaker 1: very first things that's not happening was various governments giving
Speaker 1: guides out on where to attack armored vehicles with ball tops.
Speaker 1: We're like, oh wow, this is this is intriguing to
Speaker 1: have a government giving out instructions. Um, this is probably
Speaker 1: has some implications on how we view you know, uh,
Speaker 1: collapse in the in a in a general concept. So yeah, Ever,
Speaker 1: since that's not happening, we wanted to talk about it.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it certainly leaves us with a lot to
Speaker 1: think about. And I didn't get to go on my
Speaker 1: rant about the structure of the Russian military visa VI
Speaker 1: their lack of an n c O COREP. But maybe
Speaker 1: we'll talk about that in the future. I'm sure we'll
Speaker 1: have enough time to talk about this in the future. Uh. Well, everyone,
Speaker 1: h I don't know, do do something productive? Yeah, do
Speaker 1: do something productive. I don't charge armored vehicles. Don't charge
Speaker 1: armored vehicles with paint. Maybe think about the different things
Speaker 1: you would like to get a bunch of people suddenly
Speaker 1: radicalized on Twitter to do in the immediate wake of
Speaker 1: a horrible climate disaster in which large numbers of folks
Speaker 1: are suddenly willing to take to the streets seemingly overnight.
Speaker 1: Maybe thinking about that and and trying to talking with
Speaker 1: your buddies about it, and being like, hey, if everybody
Speaker 1: gets out in the streets again, what kind of information
Speaker 1: do I want to spread? What would be good to
Speaker 1: get people talking about in that instance when they're suddenly
Speaker 1: listening for I don't know about two weeks. It feels
Speaker 1: like you get about two weeks to honestly, Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: in the wake of the new I PCC report, we
Speaker 1: have what we should certainly have a lot to think about.
Speaker 1: All right, Bye bye, it's goblin mode. Welcome to Happen
Speaker 1: here a podcast that is today in goblin mode. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know what it's about you've her to say it
Speaker 1: like about twenty million times. But yeah, I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Christopher Wong and uh with me today we have Juniper,
Speaker 1: who is a really twitter ship post extraordinary extraordinaire, on
Speaker 1: to discuss language, media, culture, of the nature of reality,
Speaker 1: and Goblin Mode. Junifer, Welcome to the show. Hiy, how's
Speaker 1: it gone. It's going good. It's going much better. Since
Speaker 1: Goblin rode ceased control of the world, we are now
Speaker 1: living in the age of Mode. And Drew mar Show
Speaker 1: said this morning, apparently it's quite a time. I didn't
Speaker 1: realize just posting would like just posting would influence so
Speaker 1: much around me. I guess it's been an interesting time
Speaker 1: for sure. Yeah. So, so I wanted to talk to
Speaker 1: you about sort of the absurdity that is Goblin Mode. Um,
Speaker 1: and I want to hold off on talking about what
Speaker 1: Goblin Mode like is isn't for a bit because I
Speaker 1: think that's actually, weirdly the less interesting part. And I
Speaker 1: want to start with instead the story of how Goblin
Speaker 1: Mode became like a thing and why I am reading. Uh.
Speaker 1: I keep I keep like, every every time I look
Speaker 1: for more Goblin Mode headlines, there's more goblin mode headlines
Speaker 1: like the I think my favorite so far is from Bloomberg.
Speaker 1: It's a dieselent. Diesel prices have gone goblin mode. Forget
Speaker 1: crude oil. This could be the real energy emergency. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that is by far one of my favorites to
Speaker 1: uh the full headline too, if you search for that
Speaker 1: one is it's what you said, but then it adds
Speaker 1: on thanks to the Ukraine War. An official Bloilberg headline
Speaker 1: with goblin mode and the Ukraine word. I gotta that's
Speaker 1: just by part of my favorite one amazing. The other
Speaker 1: part of three that's extremely funny is that so the
Speaker 1: people who are doing these articles, I keep getting asked,
Speaker 1: so someone someone's asking like an intern to find a
Speaker 1: picture of a goblin, and they keep posting pictures of orcs,
Speaker 1: which is like enormously funny to me. Okay, so I'm
Speaker 1: not sure what they're searching to get those. I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's really incredible, Okay, So yeah, I guess I should.
Speaker 1: So we should start from the beginning of this story,
Speaker 1: which is, yeah, can you talk about your ship post
Speaker 1: and uh, what you were thinking at the time when
Speaker 1: you made a ship post that randomly like has has
Speaker 1: had months long ripple effects on the world. Sure, I
Speaker 1: think you were right though, like the post itself, and
Speaker 1: that's like the least interesting part of all of goblin
Speaker 1: mode in my opinion as well, Like just seeing the
Speaker 1: ripple effect is what's been super interesting and really funny
Speaker 1: to me. But um sure yeah the post. Um basically,
Speaker 1: I think it was like the day that um what
Speaker 1: Kanye West and Julia Fox, which there's a quick note,
Speaker 1: I've never heard of Julia Fox before any of this.
Speaker 1: So I like sometimes if like you know, Twitter is
Speaker 1: all talking about one thing, the most recent thing being
Speaker 1: like the Will Smith slap, like everyone's talking about that.
Speaker 1: So whenever like some like big event like that is
Speaker 1: happening and everyone's posting about it, I try to like
Speaker 1: think of some creative different posts I can do, you know,
Speaker 1: just to get in on the the discourse or whatever
Speaker 1: you wanna call it. So I just I really don't
Speaker 1: know what compelled me to make a fake headline, But basically,
Speaker 1: I just I just decided to search. I think I
Speaker 1: was driving home from work and I just decided to
Speaker 1: search like Kanye West, Julia Fox, and I just found
Speaker 1: the first headline and I just edited it to say, um,
Speaker 1: Kanye West doesn't like it when Julia Fox goes goneling basically,
Speaker 1: and that's why they broke up. That was that was
Speaker 1: the whole lessons of the of the post itself. Um,
Speaker 1: and I really didn't think too deeply about it beyond
Speaker 1: just making the post, and it just it caught fire
Speaker 1: with like I guess what we would probably all normally
Speaker 1: normally Twitter like people that aren't even like necessarily leftists
Speaker 1: or anything like us. Um, it just really caught a
Speaker 1: hold with the whole of Twitter and pretty much like
Speaker 1: most of the people that saw it. You can you
Speaker 1: can go back and check the replies. Most people think
Speaker 1: it's real at the time and replying about all things
Speaker 1: it's real, and no one, like hardly anyone verified it.
Speaker 1: It was like kind of insane to see yeah and
Speaker 1: just just cost yeah, I think it's funny because again,
Speaker 1: like you could very you could you could just google
Speaker 1: this right, Like you can just google it and it'd
Speaker 1: be like, oh, wait, hol on, this isn't real. But
Speaker 1: like no one did that, and it was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like you could have just easily searched the main part
Speaker 1: of the headline, like Kanye West to Julia Fox. It
Speaker 1: was literally the second or third headlines you can have
Speaker 1: found the same website, same author, but seeing that it
Speaker 1: wasn't the correct headline. Although that does remind me when
Speaker 1: there was the initial article about my post um, I
Speaker 1: forget who wrote it at this point, I think I was, Yes,
Speaker 1: that's right, it was the focus they they they for
Speaker 1: some reason, it made the assumption when they decided when
Speaker 1: they decided to talk about my tweet that the website,
Speaker 1: like the headline that I made made up the original
Speaker 1: website like edited that part out. So they thought that
Speaker 1: my headline was real, but it was just and taken away.
Speaker 1: And so that also affected what some people thought about
Speaker 1: it too, Like they thought a lot of people thought
Speaker 1: it was really real. That's that's what's insane to me
Speaker 1: about this. Yeah, and like you and like like Vogue
Speaker 1: like picked this up. This was just like a thing
Speaker 1: that that like everyone believes us real. Everyone was just
Speaker 1: reporting on it as news and there's so much like
Speaker 1: there's so much like incredible stuff about this, like part
Speaker 1: of it, you know, so what if the articles that
Speaker 1: that gets published about this after so like there's this
Speaker 1: initial period where everyone is running around going like oh
Speaker 1: my god, it was goblin Mode, and then Julia Fox
Speaker 1: has to make a statement that's like, no, there was
Speaker 1: no goblin Mode. No one said this. Yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: That's the interesting about the evolution of goblin Mode, like
Speaker 1: stemming from my post specifically, is at first the coverage
Speaker 1: was talking about whether my post was real or fake
Speaker 1: and talking about that aspect of it. But as time
Speaker 1: has gone on, it's kind of evolved away from that.
Speaker 1: Like you you won't see any goblin Mode article talk
Speaker 1: about the original like Julia Fox tweet that jump started
Speaker 1: this whole thing anymore. It's kind of like shifted away
Speaker 1: from that initial that initial post, which I found really
Speaker 1: interesting that that's what sustaining this. I feel like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I wanted to read a uh, I wanted to read
Speaker 1: a passage from one of the art I don't know
Speaker 1: why I'm calling it a passage. It's just like a sentence,
Speaker 1: but read part of one of the art goals that
Speaker 1: that came from up from the the initial search, which
Speaker 1: is from the streetwear company called high Snobby. Don't tell
Speaker 1: me if I'm like pronouncing that wrong. Uh well, okay,
Speaker 1: that's not not to Twitter. If I'm pronouncing that wrong.
Speaker 1: My Twitter is at I right, okay, yell there, Um yeah,
Speaker 1: but I want I want to read this quote because
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting. So the article, they have this
Speaker 1: whole thing that's like, Okay, they get to the denial,
Speaker 1: they post your tweet about like, oh my god, I
Speaker 1: can't believe Julia Fox had to respond to this, and
Speaker 1: then they say, I'm not saying Fox was lying, but
Speaker 1: wearing a borderline not suited for work dress, a purse
Speaker 1: trimmed and human DNA and d I y I make
Speaker 1: up to an Oscar's after party? Is goblin mode to
Speaker 1: a t? And I think this brings up an interesting question,
Speaker 1: which is to what extent was goblin mode real in
Speaker 1: the first place before You're sort of mean to went
Speaker 1: went viral? So like the phrase itself, you mean yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like I want part of the phrase existed before my post. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think it was also like what were you thinking, Like,
Speaker 1: did you have like a conception of what goblin mode
Speaker 1: like was before he made the post? So so the
Speaker 1: only thing I had in my mind at that point. Um,
Speaker 1: it's it stems from specifically, Um, do you do you
Speaker 1: know the user on Twitter hottie pants? Do you happen
Speaker 1: to know that guy, I don't think so now he
Speaker 1: goes by I think his ad is like punished Pants
Speaker 1: or something like that. But anyways, he around that time,
Speaker 1: he was posting a lot about like goblins. He was
Speaker 1: He would post a lot about like goblin time and
Speaker 1: like it's oh, it's goblin time, and he would just
Speaker 1: make like a bunch of just like posts like that.
Speaker 1: So goblins were on my mind at that point. And
Speaker 1: then I forget his user name, but his um I
Speaker 1: think his user name is um uncontrolled. I for I
Speaker 1: forget his user I'll have to tell you afterwards or something.
Speaker 1: I I don't remember off the top of my head,
Speaker 1: but he he may a post that went viral, uh,
Speaker 1: something to the effect of like um, your honor UM.
Speaker 1: I was going goblin mode at that time, you know
Speaker 1: that format that's like you're in the court, but excuses like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm going goblin mode. It really in my head. That's
Speaker 1: really the only reference I had, So I didn't make
Speaker 1: up the phrase. A lot of people think I made
Speaker 1: up the phrase goblin mode, which I definitely did not. Um,
Speaker 1: but I think just there was a lot of people
Speaker 1: posting about about goblins around that time, like early in
Speaker 1: mid March, and I just in my mind, I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm just gonna say Goblin Mode on this
Speaker 1: this ship post Aboulia Fox. I don't. I really don't
Speaker 1: know why. It's just the first thing that popped in
Speaker 1: my head. And whenever something pops in my head, like
Speaker 1: a tweet idea, and I laughed myself. I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: I should post it. I don't know, and it seemed
Speaker 1: to work. Did you end up so one of these things?
Speaker 1: What are these things? I think is really interesting? Is
Speaker 1: that right? So okay, so you have you have your
Speaker 1: first wave of like it's the goblin Mode thing, and
Speaker 1: then you have your second wave articles that are trying
Speaker 1: to blaine what goblin Mode is. And I was I
Speaker 1: was wondering if if you'd see if you'd actually even
Speaker 1: seen the post. I just like I linked to the
Speaker 1: chat um. There was like like the thing I'd seen
Speaker 1: from goblin Mode before thislike all started, was just like Reddit.
Speaker 1: It was someone on Twitter had a tweet that went
Speaker 1: viral about goblin Mode and it was about just like
Speaker 1: someone It was about this Reddit post of like someone
Speaker 1: creeping around their house and pretending acting like a goblin. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: So I didn't see that until I made my post,
Speaker 1: like in my initial because I think someone linked it
Speaker 1: under my post and I was like, oh, Ship, this
Speaker 1: is just like a thing, Like this is actually like
Speaker 1: a thing. And then I started popping off more because
Speaker 1: people saw that reply. I'm real like, oh, Ship, this
Speaker 1: is like actually a thing. And to my surprise, that
Speaker 1: like totally worked out for me, like everything kind of
Speaker 1: just came together and it really insane fashion. Oh that's
Speaker 1: another tweet to the one that you linked the That's
Speaker 1: when I was going, that's when I was in goblin mode.
Speaker 1: That came before my tweet too. Had you had you
Speaker 1: seen that one before you made it? I followed her,
Speaker 1: I followed Telgore. I might have seen it. I don't remember.
Speaker 1: I remember the other one I was referencing before. Um,
Speaker 1: I might have seen that one now, yeah, like I
Speaker 1: I think like that. That was what was interesting to
Speaker 1: me about this was that, like the moment it went viral,
Speaker 1: there was this whole sort of like attempt because there
Speaker 1: was an attempt to figure out what it is, and
Speaker 1: then there was an attempt to like back project a
Speaker 1: history on it, and so you get a lot of
Speaker 1: these articles and you get a lot of people like
Speaker 1: I don't know, like I would talk to people about
Speaker 1: this and they would like, you know, okay, so they
Speaker 1: do this thing or it's like okay, so they go
Speaker 1: to know your meme, they look at the Google trends,
Speaker 1: and then like the people sort of like, you know, okay,
Speaker 1: Like there was an urban Dictionary thing from like two
Speaker 1: thousand nine that was like a completely like a weird
Speaker 1: sex thing. It was like completely unrelated to this, but
Speaker 1: it was interesting to me the way that people like, Okay,
Speaker 1: so you have this thing that goes viral, right, and
Speaker 1: like you're just sucking around like there's no act, Like
Speaker 1: it's just sounds cool. But then like yeah, there's an
Speaker 1: extent which it becomes this like you know, it gets
Speaker 1: into the sort of like viralty machine, and so you
Speaker 1: have all these journalists who like have to cover it
Speaker 1: right because like, you know, the the way the journalism
Speaker 1: bottle works is okay, so you have this trend, right,
Speaker 1: people can see it trending. You see something on Twitter,
Speaker 1: you do like four sets of Googles, and you write
Speaker 1: an article about it, and it's like, well, okay, because
Speaker 1: they're trying to you're trying to capitalize on on the
Speaker 1: clicks as fast as possible. So when someone googles what
Speaker 1: is goblin mode, it's like, okay, your thing comes up.
Speaker 1: But it's interesting because it's like it's like they have
Speaker 1: to fill the content in because there isn't any Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what what was interesting about the specific that first one,
Speaker 1: the focus article, it was just a lot of like
Speaker 1: filling in where there was really nothing. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: what's interesting about that. Yeah. And then and then like
Speaker 1: after that, like all the other articles are like you
Speaker 1: get to see this proliferation sort of of how the
Speaker 1: media works where it's okay, so you have the initial article,
Speaker 1: the initial article google some stuff and it's basically just
Speaker 1: making it up because they're they're trying to like give
Speaker 1: coherence or like give am meeting to an empty signifier.
Speaker 1: And then after that, it's like all of the other
Speaker 1: articles are just copying off of the first article, and
Speaker 1: you get this like Ora boris of like everyone just
Speaker 1: is repeating the same thing over and over again, and
Speaker 1: none of them seem to understand that, like it was
Speaker 1: not that the thing that they originally talking about was
Speaker 1: just kind of like that's really all it was, and
Speaker 1: it's it is interesting to see how it is just
Speaker 1: able to proliferate off of as you as you were saying,
Speaker 1: they just google search urban, they find an urban dictionary,
Speaker 1: and it's like my article urban dictionary is is a
Speaker 1: good source. Yeah, and like I think this this is
Speaker 1: I mean, I think there's there's like a few interesting
Speaker 1: things here, one of which is about how yeah, like
Speaker 1: I had this before, Like I'm not sure if I
Speaker 1: actually talked about this on the show. So the day
Speaker 1: of the Atlantis shooting, Garrison and I spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time trying to like track down the shooter, and
Speaker 1: there was there was this like fake Facebook post that
Speaker 1: was going around and you know, Garrison I has spent
Speaker 1: like a lot of time looking for this guy and
Speaker 1: we okay, well we realized that this guy just doesn't
Speaker 1: have a Facebook, right, and so we were like so
Speaker 1: like I was like look at this, Like I saw
Speaker 1: his fake Facebook post and I was like, oh, this
Speaker 1: is fake. And then like a bunch of a bunch
Speaker 1: of like a bunch of like actual journalists like found
Speaker 1: you know people because journalists have been passing around the
Speaker 1: fake Facebook post as like this is a suppost alleged
Speaker 1: to be a thing, and then and then suddenly they
Speaker 1: were like, oh, hey this is fake. Hey you can
Speaker 1: see all these things like oh look, it's like uh,
Speaker 1: you know, like there was like the it was pretty
Speaker 1: clear of it, like his face had been copied and
Speaker 1: pasted into like a thing that's it was supposed to
Speaker 1: look like a Facebook post because there was all these
Speaker 1: like minor details about that, which is wrong, and it
Speaker 1: was like, okay, so this isn't real. But the media
Speaker 1: cycle of it was like all of these people saw
Speaker 1: my Twitter post that was like this is fake, and
Speaker 1: then they just wrote a story off of it and
Speaker 1: like never mentioned that that that they literally got it
Speaker 1: from like me fucking around on Twitter. Like it's like
Speaker 1: and it's like and it's like you look at this
Speaker 1: stuff and the extent to which these people are just
Speaker 1: like these people who are journalist, who are you know,
Speaker 1: supposed to people journalists are just like woefully unprepared. Even
Speaker 1: people even who people who are extremely online like wind
Speaker 1: up being woefully unprepared to deal with like anything, like
Speaker 1: they're woefully unprepared to deal with anything of any complexity
Speaker 1: or deal or like figure out that they're being like hoaxed. Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: you're you're you're really right about that. I mean, I
Speaker 1: mean I think this it's I don't know what I
Speaker 1: would call this phenomena, but there's definitely something there where
Speaker 1: it's like they we'll see something like I don't know,
Speaker 1: and I don't know what it is about specifically Twitter
Speaker 1: that like I feel like it's where a lot of
Speaker 1: people get news just in general, but I feel like
Speaker 1: a lot of journalists just assume anything that they see.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'm over generalizing, but if they see something on Twitter,
Speaker 1: even if it's like a joke, like they'll just assume
Speaker 1: it's real or something I'm not. I'm not entirely sure.
Speaker 1: Like it's super easy to make a fake post. I
Speaker 1: do it all the time. I make all sorts of
Speaker 1: like fake fake things. Most of them are more obvious
Speaker 1: than Goblin But I guess, but I don't know that
Speaker 1: they're I don't want to say journalists are too trusting. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: and but I will say, like there are times where
Speaker 1: there's genuine Like when when you first started posting the
Speaker 1: headlines of like the actual Twitter articles that were about
Speaker 1: Goblin mode, I like I didn't do about it looking
Speaker 1: up because I just assumed they were fake. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was like a lot of people told me, Like I
Speaker 1: think specifically, the the one that like most of my
Speaker 1: followers realized that they weren't fake anymore was the one
Speaker 1: that was like, um as a disabled uh them in
Speaker 1: goblin mode. This goblin mode trend is really problematic, and
Speaker 1: people people decided to look that one up and we're like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's real. And then everyone was like, wait, we're all
Speaker 1: these other ones that you were posting real And I'm
Speaker 1: like they were all real, Julia Foxlan real. It was
Speaker 1: agencies have been all these news organizations. I've been writing
Speaker 1: all this insane shit about nothing. Yeah, and there's there's
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, I think that this one is
Speaker 1: funny just because like yeah, I mean like it's goblin
Speaker 1: mode right, like it's it's it's it's just funny, like
Speaker 1: there's no like you know. But but I mean, I
Speaker 1: think that there's an interesting thing that happens with with
Speaker 1: the specifically the disabilities one, because the disabilities one isn't
Speaker 1: like it's basically about something completely different that the Goblin
Speaker 1: mode things spawned, which is that like, like the the
Speaker 1: other thing that happened with Goblin Mode. Was that Okay,
Speaker 1: So people saw Goblin Mode and then physicularly on like
Speaker 1: TikTok Um. I don't I don't know if they knew
Speaker 1: where it came from, but like people like people turn
Speaker 1: just gobblin mode into an actual thing where like it
Speaker 1: became this thing about like I like, I I think
Speaker 1: I think this is also influenced by like some of
Speaker 1: the like ship post answers that you gave the media
Speaker 1: people that were like gobblin Boe could be whatever you want.
Speaker 1: It's when you aren't awake of the padel or like
Speaker 1: you're not doing your makeup in the pandemic or whatever.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, but but but it's interesting that field like that.
Speaker 1: I really don't know if the TikTok's thing came before
Speaker 1: or after. I think it's after. Yeah, from what I've seen,
Speaker 1: it's it seems like it actually became a thing after.
Speaker 1: And that was really interesting to me too, because it
Speaker 1: was like it's this way in which, like you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so you start running into these sort of like fundamental
Speaker 1: problems about the nature of reality where it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: so we made this thing that is fake, right, but
Speaker 1: then it became real because enough enough people believed it
Speaker 1: was real that it turned into a thing that people
Speaker 1: actually use to describe stuff. And then you know that
Speaker 1: that's how you get to like you get a bunch
Speaker 1: of people complaining about how like there was an article
Speaker 1: that was like the Great resignation and going Goblin mode
Speaker 1: or like the two great threats to employers as they
Speaker 1: try to force people back to work. Like yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's like the goblin mode, like self manifested into reality.
Speaker 1: Like I feel like a lot of journalists are saying,
Speaker 1: like people being lazy and like, you know how the
Speaker 1: whole meme of like, oh, no one wants to work anymore.
Speaker 1: I feel like a lot of people are trying to
Speaker 1: like attributing like oh, not wanting to work and being
Speaker 1: lazy to goblin mode, and it's it's self manifested through
Speaker 1: the media or TikTok or whatever whatever it might be.
Speaker 1: I actually don't know, but it's it's become a thing
Speaker 1: now and in a really strange way. Yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think I think this is like this is an
Speaker 1: interesting way of looking like, you know, like this was
Speaker 1: the whole sort of like like in in terms of
Speaker 1: like okay, in so far as posting can actually affect reality,
Speaker 1: which it can, but not as much as people seem
Speaker 1: to think, like there are there are there are people
Speaker 1: who like seem to think that like the three letter
Speaker 1: agencies care what they post on Twitter, which is like
Speaker 1: it's like no, no, no, hold on, hold on if
Speaker 1: if we post correctly interventions, it won't happen. It's like
Speaker 1: if you've seen the c I A like like like
Speaker 1: there's there's this whole thing where it's like you know,
Speaker 1: I mean this, it's okay, this this is gonna be
Speaker 1: the like someone's gonna pull this out of context and
Speaker 1: be like, hey, look at Don Chris is but like
Speaker 1: you know, like this is this is kind of what
Speaker 1: happened with Trump, which like this is this isn't like
Speaker 1: what the meme magic was like if if you just
Speaker 1: meme something long enough, you can kind of turn it
Speaker 1: into reality by just sort of convincing enough people that
Speaker 1: it's real, that it and and you know and once
Speaker 1: you've done that, like you you have effectively made the
Speaker 1: thing real. Right. It was interesting about this one is
Speaker 1: it's just like it's like a lot of people like
Speaker 1: do that on purpose, right, Like this is how this
Speaker 1: is like there's a lot of propaganda stuff that works
Speaker 1: like this or like, you know, this is like what
Speaker 1: the meme before jan Trump bullshit was, Like you just
Speaker 1: this like completely like as a joke on accidents. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't. I didn't intend this. I just mean I
Speaker 1: just wanted to make a one off joke. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: didn't think that would happen. But if you're you're you're
Speaker 1: totally right about the whole, Like I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: know how much like the Trump magic was really a
Speaker 1: self manifestation of him kind of just winning the election
Speaker 1: and keep becoming popular with a certain people. But it
Speaker 1: definitely feels like like that self manifestation of like posting
Speaker 1: to a certain extent really can become real if it
Speaker 1: just like hits a certain ziteguist of some sort and
Speaker 1: like they just didn't. I think a crucial part of
Speaker 1: it is it needs to get picked up by the
Speaker 1: media and taken seriously by journalists specifically, because the thing
Speaker 1: that really, uh, I feel like broke the camel's back
Speaker 1: for Goblin about specifically was the first journalist that reached
Speaker 1: out to me because she she wanted to interview me
Speaker 1: about the whole. The whole experience, like and and her
Speaker 1: coverage of it was about the whole fake mame thing
Speaker 1: and then how it became sort of a thing in
Speaker 1: that aspect um, and then um from there, they all
Speaker 1: a lot of different journalists and websites referred back to
Speaker 1: that article, and now it seems to be the one
Speaker 1: that everyone's referring to now is the Guardian article about
Speaker 1: it that seems to be like the media's favorite piece
Speaker 1: about it, which is the one that talks more about
Speaker 1: it being like a lifestyle trend. And I think that's
Speaker 1: where it really went off, is when like some people
Speaker 1: took in the TikTok aspect of it and kind of
Speaker 1: manifested it that way. I think it's a couple of
Speaker 1: interesting political consequences of this, one of which is that like,
Speaker 1: like Twitter as a platform isn't really I mean, since
Speaker 1: Trump got banned, it's kind of like it hasn't really
Speaker 1: been where most like stuff is happening, like TikTok is exploding.
Speaker 1: I mean, you still have like the boomers on Facebook,
Speaker 1: Like it hasn't like it hasn't been the sort of
Speaker 1: like driving force of politics that normally is. But the
Speaker 1: one thing that it has is that all of the
Speaker 1: journalists are still on there, and that means that yeah,
Speaker 1: like there's all these weird political consequences. Were like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can sort of like like you can just sort
Speaker 1: of will things into existence by convincing journalists that it's real.
Speaker 1: And that's I think really scary in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: because you know, like the people who are really really
Speaker 1: good at the sort of manipulation are right wingers, and
Speaker 1: right wingers could have sort of like like I don't know,
Speaker 1: like I people are probably mad about me for this,
Speaker 1: but like one of the things that I remember from
Speaker 1: like God was just two dozen sixteen. It was like
Speaker 1: there was this whole discourse about like, uh, like there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of like all a bunch of people are
Speaker 1: really mad about like there being a black stonone trooper
Speaker 1: and Star Wars, yeah, the whole Yeah, it's interesting about it.
Speaker 1: Was like yeah, I think I think that was just yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there there. There's the thing that was interesting about it
Speaker 1: was like so I know people who like who like
Speaker 1: looked into it beforehand, and it was like the only
Speaker 1: people who were talking about this it was like people
Speaker 1: who were confused because they thought that Star Troopers were
Speaker 1: all clones and we're like wait, why wait? And then
Speaker 1: and the other thing there are other group of people
Speaker 1: who were mad about this was storm Front, and store
Speaker 1: Front was able to like turn this into like like
Speaker 1: a discourse, like they able to they were able to
Speaker 1: convince journalists like this was a real thing that like
Speaker 1: a significant number people are mad about, and then it
Speaker 1: like actually turned into a thing that a stnificant number
Speaker 1: of people are were mad about. Because you can sort
Speaker 1: of just like like you you can start these like
Speaker 1: panics and like this is one of the things we're
Speaker 1: talking about in our trans episodes where like, you know,
Speaker 1: a fairly small network of well funded people can cause
Speaker 1: like enormous swass of the US to just lose their
Speaker 1: ship and get extremely violence and get like you know,
Speaker 1: and and the specific thing they're mad about changes like
Speaker 1: pretty frequently. But you can just sort of like if
Speaker 1: if you're able to manipulate the media well enough and
Speaker 1: you you know that there's other ways to do this,
Speaker 1: Like you know, you could do it by like weird memes.
Speaker 1: You can do it by you know, being the cops
Speaker 1: are just like having press releases that you send out,
Speaker 1: you can have you can do it through like these
Speaker 1: sort of like astro turf, Like I don't know you
Speaker 1: have like an astro turf intellectual, like what's his name,
Speaker 1: Margaret Upo, But it's it's it's interesting to me that
Speaker 1: like they all seem to work, like the pathway through
Speaker 1: it all seems to be very similar. Which is what
Speaker 1: you do is you convince aboutch of media people or
Speaker 1: something is real, and then once once they start taking
Speaker 1: it seriously, it sort of manifests itself into reality. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know that, that is what I realized what was happening,
Speaker 1: Like I one of my initial points that I was
Speaker 1: trying to make after um, the whole goblin thing, after
Speaker 1: the first article came out, I was like, it really
Speaker 1: made me realized, like how potent fake I hate saying
Speaker 1: this phrase just because it's become such like a nothing
Speaker 1: sort of phrase, but like fake news is how how
Speaker 1: easy it is to just like instead of goblin mode.
Speaker 1: I decided like maybe let's say I'm like a crazy
Speaker 1: right winger and I had this weird digeist moment causing
Speaker 1: a panic about like trans people, and I made like
Speaker 1: a fake tweet like that you would we see that
Speaker 1: happened all the time, like trans people people, A lot
Speaker 1: of people hate us, um, and it would be super
Speaker 1: easy put it in the right community. UM, make this
Speaker 1: fake tweet or a fake headline, and people right wing
Speaker 1: or specifically will go wild and it'll really influence the discourse.
Speaker 1: I mean, look at the current I mean it's it's
Speaker 1: kind of over now. But the last it it was
Speaker 1: last week, the swimmer, the trans swimmer, that one, the
Speaker 1: women's competition. I mean, the amount of vitriol that was
Speaker 1: able to be created over that. Just imagine what, like,
Speaker 1: as you said, like a well funded height network of
Speaker 1: um but I don't know, but for lack of a
Speaker 1: better phrase, like fake news creators, just all they would
Speaker 1: need to do is put something out on Facebook, the
Speaker 1: boomers see it, and then it's over. Yea, what what? What?
Speaker 1: What are the things I learned about? Like, well, I
Speaker 1: was doing research for Weirdly an episode about Reverend Moon.
Speaker 1: Was that like people figured so this is sort of
Speaker 1: like this is like how Republicans came to power, Like
Speaker 1: that they figured out you could do shoot like this,
Speaker 1: and like Rubber Fiugieri like in like in like the
Speaker 1: sixties figured out that like if you just if you
Speaker 1: sent like you could just send letters to like they work.
Speaker 1: I guess they weren't even boomers that if you just
Speaker 1: send letters to old people that would say stuff like
Speaker 1: planned parenthood is harvesting baby fetuses, you could just get
Speaker 1: the really mad and it's like and it's funny because
Speaker 1: you know in the citties like he's he's doing this
Speaker 1: like by mail, right, like he is mailing you a
Speaker 1: chain letter. It's just stuff. Yeah, it became just like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like he's just like it's it's weird because you
Speaker 1: can watch them invent this and then it's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: this guy was funded by like a weird cult guy
Speaker 1: who was trying to take over the world, who was
Speaker 1: being backed by the Korean CIA, and it's like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, it gets into this, Yeah, it all sort
Speaker 1: of comes back into this weird thing where yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I like one of one of the what the
Speaker 1: political transformations I've had since I started working here was
Speaker 1: like I didn't take like it's sort of a similar
Speaker 1: to what you were saying, Like I didn't take the
Speaker 1: like weaponized unreality like fake new stuff like that seriously.
Speaker 1: And then it was like you cover it every day
Speaker 1: and it's like, oh my god like the like the weird,
Speaker 1: like like watching like four Chan like invents the I
Speaker 1: actoually don't know if it's portunately was one of watching
Speaker 1: like just weird right wing like message boards invent like
Speaker 1: the Ukrainian biolab thing, which like grand Mean Wall now
Speaker 1: tweets about and like like like the like the official
Speaker 1: state media of Russia and China are like talking about
Speaker 1: these bio labs and it's like it's turned into this
Speaker 1: weird like like thing where like yeah, like like actual
Speaker 1: countries with like nuclear weapons are like basically using ship
Speaker 1: posters as like as like a way to do propaganda,
Speaker 1: and it's it's just like really the weird. I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's this really weird and incredibly disturbing media space to
Speaker 1: live in. Yeah, it's it's like a it's a weird
Speaker 1: synthesis of ship posters just posting online to like whatever audience,
Speaker 1: and I guess like media of some sort and not
Speaker 1: maybe not like um in the in the case with
Speaker 1: the biolot I don't know too much about that, especially
Speaker 1: cause I'm black by gun Greenwald, so I don't see
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff. But you know, it's it's interesting
Speaker 1: how how kind of interlocked there. And and to your
Speaker 1: point about the earlier about the whole Trump me magic thing,
Speaker 1: like I didn't take that too seriously at the time,
Speaker 1: Like in I was like, Oh, all these silly right
Speaker 1: wingers making these means like this isn't gonna do anything,
Speaker 1: Like I I don't. I really don't know if it
Speaker 1: really had an effect, but I mean it's we can't
Speaker 1: really ignore the power of that. Just simply manifesting something,
Speaker 1: even if it's artificial, can actually have a hole about
Speaker 1: certain people. Um as we were saying with the mailing letters.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you just say enough, if you say
Speaker 1: something enough to the right type of person, they'll just
Speaker 1: believe it. I mean, it's it's not hard to lie
Speaker 1: to people as horrible as those to say. It's really
Speaker 1: not that hard to lie to people. Yeah, Like I
Speaker 1: mean that's the whole sort of like everyone yelling groomer
Speaker 1: like constantly about trans people. It's like, yeah, they just
Speaker 1: lied over and over again. And like half the people
Speaker 1: who were like saying this stuff are actually pedophiles. And
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter because you know, if you just like
Speaker 1: do this ship over and over again, you get these
Speaker 1: you get just get these like hate bobs and it's yeah, no,
Speaker 1: the right wing, right wing or specifically are phenomenal at
Speaker 1: creating hate mobs. Yeah, it's kind of incredible to witness.
Speaker 1: It's it's really scary, but it's it's an incredible thing
Speaker 1: to see. There's not really an equivalent, i would say,
Speaker 1: on the left in the way that um even maybe
Speaker 1: in liberals there's an equivalent, but like on the on
Speaker 1: the left, there's not really like an equivalent to like
Speaker 1: some like mob in that way. Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I think that's you know, like, Okay, there's always an
Speaker 1: extent to which like these stuff the stuff has like
Speaker 1: material constraints, Like you know, I thought to talk about
Speaker 1: like constantly on this show, the fact that like this
Speaker 1: is like this is the stuff that the DEO cons
Speaker 1: believed and then they ran into the material constraints of
Speaker 1: the Iraq War and their entire project imploded. And like,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think one of the reasons why this
Speaker 1: is easier for the right is that like there's the
Speaker 1: there there's a there's a there's there's a there's always
Speaker 1: a political base for them that is there that they
Speaker 1: can access fairly easily, which is okay, they they they
Speaker 1: have access to like you know that they have access
Speaker 1: to like a vast swath the petit boars. Well, they
Speaker 1: have access to a bunch of of white business owners.
Speaker 1: They have access to like this sort of like this
Speaker 1: like white professional class. They have access to this sort
Speaker 1: of like white gentry e class, and like those people
Speaker 1: can very easily be of like whipped into a frothing rage.
Speaker 1: And like part of it is because like that that's
Speaker 1: essentially that's just what they're That's what their class interest is,
Speaker 1: that's what they're sort of like like their status, the
Speaker 1: racial hierarchy like brings them to do already. And you
Speaker 1: could sort of like you know, if you just shovel
Speaker 1: a bit of coal on it, you can you can
Speaker 1: you can make the fire go absolutely. And I mean
Speaker 1: it's talked about a lot, I'm sure, but like the
Speaker 1: one thing that is really powerful is Fox News. Fox
Speaker 1: News will pick up literally anything like I saw I
Speaker 1: saw a post on Twitter just the other day, screenshot
Speaker 1: or just just a picture of Fox News and they
Speaker 1: they cited the lives of TikTok Twitter account talking about
Speaker 1: school classrooms. It's like, what is that like not like
Speaker 1: the right wingers will just take the source of a
Speaker 1: random Twitter user that has a take that takes messages
Speaker 1: from random people that message them and then that's their news.
Speaker 1: Like that is just insane to to to to to
Speaker 1: be fair to Fox News, which is not a thing
Speaker 1: I will ever say a and uh, it wouldn't It
Speaker 1: wouldn't surprise me if that whole thing like because so
Speaker 1: the I don't know if you saw this the lives
Speaker 1: of TikTok person is like, is that that thing is
Speaker 1: run by an old Bush administration person? I did not
Speaker 1: know that. Yeah, so it wouldn't. I mean, Okay, like
Speaker 1: the there there there's probably a three and four chance
Speaker 1: that they just saw someone who's like trying to own
Speaker 1: the libs on TikTok. But there's like a one in
Speaker 1: four chance that like all the old like Bush network
Speaker 1: people like know each other and that's why they're promoting it.
Speaker 1: That's that's a good point. That's a good point. I
Speaker 1: mean that, well maybe I don't know, like it's it's
Speaker 1: it's one of those things where it's like it becomes
Speaker 1: I don't know, it becomes really difficult to to know
Speaker 1: the extent to which the beliefs. Yeah, well how organized
Speaker 1: they are into the extent to which they believe what
Speaker 1: they're saying, because part of that, like that becomes like
Speaker 1: you know, if if, if you know who's behind that,
Speaker 1: it becomes easier to sort of be like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: we're just sort of playing a game. But it could
Speaker 1: also just be like, no, this is this is content
Speaker 1: that we like, uh, we were all too lazy to
Speaker 1: go or just message the person to see who they are,
Speaker 1: Like I mean, they had the specifically in this case,
Speaker 1: the lives of TikTok Lady. They had her like on
Speaker 1: TALX news once talking oh yeah yeah, referenced her multiple times,
Speaker 1: so they have to know her. Yeah yeah, yeah, that's that.
Speaker 1: That's another technique that they do a lot, which that
Speaker 1: they take someone who is like you know, like a
Speaker 1: like an old part like who's literally a Republican operative, right,
Speaker 1: and just laundered them as an actress. Actually, the funny
Speaker 1: part is you see like like the New York Times
Speaker 1: and Ship like all the main street outlets do the
Speaker 1: same thing too, where it's like yeah, well, well, like
Speaker 1: any time you see an article that is like I
Speaker 1: was a Democratic voter, but I'm going to vote for
Speaker 1: the Republicans nine times out of ten that person is
Speaker 1: a Republican operative and if you google their name and
Speaker 1: look hard enough, you can just find it. And it's like,
Speaker 1: and that's the only thing that other thing was like
Speaker 1: I don't know whether they whether they're just lazy and
Speaker 1: don't check, or whether they're just sort of like doing
Speaker 1: this kind of like I don't know that what what
Speaker 1: what whe whether they're doing this on purpose? Because I
Speaker 1: mean that you know, That's that's the thing with journalism,
Speaker 1: Like it's it's difficult to like, when someone screws something up,
Speaker 1: it's it's difficult to determine a lot of times whether
Speaker 1: it's malice or whether it's they're just the only research
Speaker 1: they did was they googled something. Yeah, I feel like
Speaker 1: in the realblem that we're talking about right now, it's
Speaker 1: like right wingers, I think a lot of it. Obviously
Speaker 1: it's pretty malicious a lot of the times. But in
Speaker 1: terms of like the whole goblin mode situation where that
Speaker 1: that stemmed off just from like random like Guardian whatever articles,
Speaker 1: I think I think that was just more of like, oh,
Speaker 1: let's kind of trying to explain this thing that is
Speaker 1: apparently now a trend and we're manifesting it in real time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I do think there's like this distinct in between. Next,
Speaker 1: I feel there's no like like with God, there's there's
Speaker 1: no nefarious aspect of it, but that like technique can
Speaker 1: be used in a very nefarious way, and I think
Speaker 1: that manifests in the most easy to waste, the easiest
Speaker 1: to see ways in right wing media. Yeah, I do
Speaker 1: want to also mention that, like the Yeah, I I
Speaker 1: think I said briefly, like the people who do this
Speaker 1: the most often are cops, Like the cops. And if
Speaker 1: if you see a story about the police in a
Speaker 1: manship newspaper and you see the same story in another paper,
Speaker 1: it's because they're basically printing a press release. And you know,
Speaker 1: I mean this this gets used to like launder just
Speaker 1: straight up police lies about shootings they manufactured, like the
Speaker 1: entire crime wave thing, like the whole thing about people
Speaker 1: taking boxes off of trains. It's like, yeah, you look
Speaker 1: into it and it's like, yeah, there's these like the
Speaker 1: there's the sort of like shadowy police networks of people
Speaker 1: who are basically running I mean they have enormous budgets
Speaker 1: to do this too, Like they have these enormous um
Speaker 1: like departmental like public outreach budgets, and those public outreach
Speaker 1: budgets are basically them running information ops on us, which
Speaker 1: is incredibly fun. You know that that is absolutely like
Speaker 1: a real phenomena. I I don't know too much about
Speaker 1: it specifically in cops, but I know, I know the
Speaker 1: White House does that all the time, where it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's a White House leap and it's like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: they wanted people to see this. This is entirely intentional. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they try a balloon stuff a lot, and that's I
Speaker 1: don't know, and like that this is this is goblin mode.
Speaker 1: Is like the fun version of looking at how all
Speaker 1: this stuff works. But this stuff happens with stuff that
Speaker 1: is extremely deadly and has real world consequences. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's some It's something we need to be thinking
Speaker 1: about and trying to I don't know if used for
Speaker 1: good is the right thing, but like it's something that
Speaker 1: we need to be really conscious of as we're dealing with,
Speaker 1: you know, a bunch of fascists trying to murder everyone. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I mean that that's been the most interesting thing about
Speaker 1: this to me is watching Like I hate calling it this,
Speaker 1: but just for lack of a better word, kind of
Speaker 1: like goblin mode is like being manufactured, like manufacturing consent
Speaker 1: in real time, like from the genesis of my post,
Speaker 1: watching it in real time, seeing all these articles come
Speaker 1: out and kind of all tie into each other and
Speaker 1: refer back to each other. It's been it's been kind
Speaker 1: of eye opening about this topic that I think a
Speaker 1: lot of leftists kind of know a lot about, like
Speaker 1: in terms of like medium manipulation and you're it's you're
Speaker 1: right when you said it's like the fun version of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it has been the fun version of it. But
Speaker 1: deep down it's like, oh, this is kind of like
Speaker 1: watching like how they did like they this might be dramatic,
Speaker 1: but like how they did the Iraq War in real time,
Speaker 1: Like this is on some level that's very similar media strategy.
Speaker 1: And I think, I mean, I think I think there's
Speaker 1: specifically gobler mode. I think there's because because like the
Speaker 1: Iraq War, there's a lot of malice there and but
Speaker 1: but in this one, it's like, yeah, like that, you know,
Speaker 1: not all of the media, like all of them, like okay,
Speaker 1: in order for something that's completely fake to get traction,
Speaker 1: it doesn't require everyone involved being malicious. What it requires
Speaker 1: is one person saying a thing and then a bunch
Speaker 1: of journalists being too lazy to actually look into something,
Speaker 1: and that just you know, basically reprinting the article, but
Speaker 1: like rewriting a few things, which happens constantly, and yeah,
Speaker 1: and and that, like you know, the thing I think
Speaker 1: that's scary about that is it reduces the number of
Speaker 1: actors who actually have to be involved in a thing
Speaker 1: for it to just sort of like take off like this,
Speaker 1: which yeah, because like I think like there's there's an
Speaker 1: extent to which okay, like it rocks, Like something on
Speaker 1: that scale is pretty rare because it requires, like in
Speaker 1: an enormous amount of buying from a lot of people.
Speaker 1: But there's lots of small examples of this stuff that
Speaker 1: just happened sort of constantly and that stuff like yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, as we've been talking about like that,
Speaker 1: that that kind of thing with small numbers actors and
Speaker 1: then people just sort of lazily reprinting articles like that stuff. Right.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think the best example of this is currently,
Speaker 1: at least just in my mind, because I am trans,
Speaker 1: the the whole trans panic that's happening right now. I
Speaker 1: think that's a really good example of it is just
Speaker 1: where like some website will print this certain thing and
Speaker 1: then it becomes a hysterical panic talking about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I think that the best. The most recent example
Speaker 1: that was that spa where it was like some person
Speaker 1: claimed like made it made a bunch of claims where
Speaker 1: they were like they might have seen a trans person maybe,
Speaker 1: and it turned into just like literally mobs showing up
Speaker 1: at this spa, like anti trans bobs, like a bunch
Speaker 1: of fascists showing up, a bunch of like like yeah,
Speaker 1: and that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's that affects reality. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that really affects people. Yeah. And and like the the
Speaker 1: the other one, the other one that that we've talked
Speaker 1: about in the trans episodes is people to people are
Speaker 1: starting to do this kind of stuff with ginger clinics,
Speaker 1: and it's you know, yeah, it's like yeah, like that
Speaker 1: that's only a matter of time before they start killing people,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, yeah. The media can easily whip someone into
Speaker 1: frenzy to do that. I mean we've seen that in
Speaker 1: the past with I think, as you referenced before, like
Speaker 1: the whole like abortion whole, like in the nineties and
Speaker 1: early two thousands, the whole abortion panic. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: we saw we saw people die over stuff like that.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, bombings like and you know. And the other
Speaker 1: thing is that like they're winning, like they are on
Speaker 1: the verge of after this like half a century long battle,
Speaker 1: like they are on the verge of over turning ro
Speaker 1: he weighed. Yeah, yeah, like you know that. And that's
Speaker 1: I think a really grim thing for the left where
Speaker 1: it's like, like, what one of the asymmetries here is
Speaker 1: that like if a leftist like assassinated the head of
Speaker 1: Ice right like they were, like I would be in
Speaker 1: prison in like a day and a half. There'd be
Speaker 1: like fifteen people who be shot in police raids. Like yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know, but like when when the right wing
Speaker 1: just like it does terrorism, like just murders abortion right
Speaker 1: as it works, And that's a really grim asymmetry. But
Speaker 1: it's sort of the reality of the situation that Brian right,
Speaker 1: And yeah, that reminds me of the This is a
Speaker 1: while ago. This was during the Black Lives Matter protests.
Speaker 1: I don't even remember why he was on the fed's radar,
Speaker 1: but there was the dude I think in Portland, and
Speaker 1: there was like a there was like a raid and
Speaker 1: they just shot the dude in the remember that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it happened again in Uh. Yeah, they just
Speaker 1: murdered him. And then like it happened again with Winston
Speaker 1: Smith in uh in Minneapolis where like the like the
Speaker 1: cops were mad at him because he was like he
Speaker 1: was one of the leaders of what's happening in Minneapolis
Speaker 1: and they just walked up and shot him. Yeah and yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's it is a really bleak look at
Speaker 1: you know, how this country actually works, which is not
Speaker 1: really what I expected this episode to be. Ending up.
Speaker 1: I just like, we'll do a fun episode about Goblin
Speaker 1: Bode and now it's like, yeah, he was the state
Speaker 1: just assassinating people and they're gonna keep doing it. And
Speaker 1: also they're gonna like to start bombing abortion not well,
Speaker 1: I mean to keep bombing abortion clinics and start bombing
Speaker 1: gender clinics, and it's like that doesn't actually happen, but
Speaker 1: but yeah, I think it was our point was that
Speaker 1: it was like we've seen that happen in the past. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of the reactionary media feeling the hysteria through it doesn't
Speaker 1: even matter if it's real or fake stories that's that's
Speaker 1: the main issue is it can be totally fake and
Speaker 1: it'll it'll just fuel hysterics against anyone, any any target. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's just like yeah, like what the we should probably
Speaker 1: close out. But like the one that's been fun for me,
Speaker 1: and by fun, I mean dear God, has been the
Speaker 1: fucking the Wuhuan biolab ship, which was like literally like
Speaker 1: like literally this this was this like literally this whole
Speaker 1: thing was a psi oup by Steve Bannett who was like,
Speaker 1: this is how we can have Trump win the election
Speaker 1: by by by uniting everyone in like anti Asian hate,
Speaker 1: and like it worked. Like well, I mean, okay, he
Speaker 1: he lost the election, but like you know, all like
Speaker 1: eventually this is this just like completely crank, like absolutely batship.
Speaker 1: All the people who are advocating for it are like
Speaker 1: like they like they're like mushroom scientists or they're like
Speaker 1: people who like you know, like like they're they're like weird.
Speaker 1: I ever met In Truthers, Like all these people, you know,
Speaker 1: like were were legitim mice by the media and like
Speaker 1: that had that had an enormous impact on the last
Speaker 1: sort of two years of anti ation violence. Like that's
Speaker 1: like that that's the thing that way to get as
Speaker 1: bad as it did. And again, it is just completely fake.
Speaker 1: There's nothing, it's it's there. They're just they're just you know,
Speaker 1: like a bunch of fascists made up a lie about
Speaker 1: a plague so that they could try to win an
Speaker 1: election by like burdering Asian people. And yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's it's that. That's the interesting thing is that if
Speaker 1: you look at um, like poles about like, oh, how
Speaker 1: do you feel about China, Like you go back even
Speaker 1: just four years ago, most people were like, I don't
Speaker 1: have exact numbers on my head, um, but most people
Speaker 1: it was like maybe split like oh, like China is
Speaker 1: kind of scary, or like China, China is okay. But
Speaker 1: like most Americans at this point, even like a lot
Speaker 1: of liberals do not like China. Like it's like even
Speaker 1: the rest like China. It's like it was just manifested
Speaker 1: through the whole maybe not all through the whole Buhanu
Speaker 1: lab but just the last few years and years of
Speaker 1: both by the government and Trump's government ratcheting hard against China,
Speaker 1: and just like anti China or even anti Chinese like
Speaker 1: people sentiments. Yeah, and there's an interesting thing there too,
Speaker 1: where it's like, okay, so for the first about so
Speaker 1: that this pivot starts when which when Trump starts a
Speaker 1: trade war, right, and there's this interesting thing where it's
Speaker 1: like for the first about two years of it, it
Speaker 1: was like the views about China were changing, but the
Speaker 1: actual level of anti Asian violence wasn't doing much. But
Speaker 1: then when COVID hit, it was like you know it
Speaker 1: was it was it was kind of like an abstract thing, right,
Speaker 1: it was like, okay, well we don't like China, but
Speaker 1: like there was nothing that there wasn't like a super
Speaker 1: strong like the thing you could point to to directly
Speaker 1: tie it to Asian people. And then the moment the
Speaker 1: moment the pandemic started and then the moment that like
Speaker 1: Wuhan shit started, it was like suddenly there was like
Speaker 1: a concrete thing that you could point to, and it
Speaker 1: was that was like, hey, look it's the Chinese people.
Speaker 1: The they're they're they're they're spreading the plague, they benefactured
Speaker 1: the played a lab is because they're dirty. Like the
Speaker 1: moments became that was when everything just like all the
Speaker 1: tax skyrockety like that. That's that's that's when like everything
Speaker 1: just sort of like really like kicked off, and that
Speaker 1: was like hysterics. That was like the targeted hysteria of
Speaker 1: I would say, yeah, yeah, and it's well, you know,
Speaker 1: the fun thing I'm bracing for is like, yeah, this
Speaker 1: looks like it's gonna be the Democrat strategy two as
Speaker 1: well as Republican strategy, and it's like, oh, hey, more
Speaker 1: of us are gonna die. This is gonna be fun.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, yeah, it's kind of scary. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: just started out as a fun episode. But yeah, it's
Speaker 1: how kind that was fun, So I guess it was
Speaker 1: still a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah. Do you have
Speaker 1: anything else that you want to say or do you
Speaker 1: want to tell people where to find you? Um? I
Speaker 1: don't really have anything to say necessarily. All I really
Speaker 1: do on the internet, at least like my my whole
Speaker 1: internet in that prevate presence right now is just on Twitter. UM.
Speaker 1: If you want to follow me, it's um at meAll meu. UM.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you'll have like that link or anything.
Speaker 1: It's kind of hard to spell with the last the
Speaker 1: whole MEU it's i'm eu w. But that's really all
Speaker 1: I have is just my Twitter. Yeah, that's all. That's
Speaker 1: all I really do online. I mean, it is extremely funny,
Speaker 1: and every once in a while you create Goblin Mode
Speaker 1: as an actual thing, which is Yeah, it's fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have a good time on Twitter people. People complain
Speaker 1: about that website a lot. But yeah, since I joined
Speaker 1: the like twenty nineteen or whatever, I haven't looked back.
Speaker 1: It's it's a lot of fun about a lot of
Speaker 1: cool people. Yeah, I've known of you for a while,
Speaker 1: but it's nice to actually talk to you. You too, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. It was a good time. Yeah, So go
Speaker 1: Goblin Mode. Don't let the fascist murder trans people. H Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is manning. It happen here. You can find us
Speaker 1: on Twitter, Instagram at happen here pod. Uh. Yeah, have fun,
Speaker 1: find cool trinkets suppressed the turfs gotta you gotta have
Speaker 1: the trinkets. You gotta find the that's what Goblin knows
Speaker 1: all about getting trinkets. That's right, all right, by folks. Hey,
Speaker 1: we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 1: now until the heat death of the universe. It could
Speaker 1: happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website, cool
Speaker 1: zone media dot com, or check us out on the
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.