Snippets 9: Tyler Cowen interview on talent; the coming Kami-kwasi collapse; what UK politics looked like in 2010

'Push what is falling'

Snippets are below a demoralised thought on UKR.

America update next week for sure.

Hundreds of Auschwitz’s in an hour

Who said this?

The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-Nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do… [T]his [UKR] is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for… There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not. Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years. 

Some appalling Putin-stooge? No. President Obama.

It’s roughly 100% irrelevant to UK/US interests whether eastern UKR is controlled by the Putin-oligarchs-KGB-mafia or the Zelensky-oligarchs-KGB-mafia.

‘International law and the rules based order’? You mean the ‘rules based order’ that applied to us invading Iraq?

‘Humanitarian concern’? You mean the ‘concern’ we showed when millions got slaughtered in the middle of Africa, and we sat on our asses watching TV?

‘His tanks will keep going across Europe’? You mean the army that has failed so badly in Ukraine is going to defeat the whole of Europe and America using conventional weapons?

Hundreds of Auschwitz’s in an hour *is* extremely relevant not just to US/UK interests, but, given the effects on climate/agriculture etc, to the billions of the southern hemisphere not immediately killed.

If our Idiocracy acts like UKR *is* worth hundreds of Auschwitz’s in an hour, as if some magic alchemy has turned this near-worthless land into an existential issue for us, what should a ‘rational’ Putin infer?

A/ It would be insane for them to actually believe this so they must be bluffing, which is itself insane.

B/ For reasons impossible to fathom, perhaps driven by this insane Twitter thing I’ve been shown, the mad fools genuinely are OK with hundreds of Auschwitz’s in an hour rather than see me grab east UKR.  

C/ God knows what they think I’ll ignore their threats and grind on in UKR and they’ll fold at some point, maybe when their voters riot over blackouts.

Assume he concludes B, as our Idiocracy want.

Does he then sigh, tweet ‘I fucked up’, withdraw from UKR and shoot himself?

If not, what does our Idiocracy do, other than hope that he’s shot and replaced by a Russian version of AOC who applies for EU membership and leads LGBTQ++ marches through Red Square with Zelensky live tweeting, finally resolving the long debate about whether ‘Russia is a European country’…? Assume he gets shot. What do we do if the person who shoots him is no AOC lookalike but a Kadyrov lookalike who says ‘Putin fucked up by not solving this in 2014, he was too weak, I will solve it’?

Every Deep State person I ask says the same thing: there is no fucking plan, the idiots in No10 just keep saying Putin must fail, Truss wants us to recapture Crimea starting World War III, the MoD has got even shitter than ever in 2022.

Hoping Putin leaves UKR and is replaced by an AOC-lookalike is no more a plan than the ‘pandemic plan’ published in March 2020 was an actual plan. Remember how that worked out for us? Faced with mass death we had to ditch it and get an ‘actual plan’ as we put it to Boris on Saturday 14 March.

Do you think that the stable deep state geniuses who gave us Iraq and the Afghan debacle last year are going to execute a brilliant plan for regime change in Russia?

Much of elite Twitter has undergone an interesting phase transition.

They normally sell themselves as anti-nationalism, anti-racism, anti-hate, anti-violence, pro-international cooperation — and most definitely always anti-Nazi. Hence of course why they’re anti-Brexit, Brexit being both actually mad like believing in QAnon (an Oxford economics professor has actually written this) and racist.

But now Professors at Oxbridge and Harvard are happy to tweet gloatingly drone footage of Russian ‘orcs’ being blown to pieces, resembling the 4chan Nazi teens they’re normally so down on. Before the war, Congress defined Azov as a neo-Nazi organisation and banned funds going to it — now our 4chan Profs retweet their propaganda while we shovel zillions to them and rebrand them as … anti-Putin so … anti-Nazi!

People who suggest that threatening hundreds of Auschwitz’s in an hour is justified only by the most existential of interests are denounced as KGB agents and insufficiently full of hate for the enemy, sometimes by the same crowd who called me ‘mad’ for saying Putin may have blown up the Moscow flats himself to justify the Chechnya war.

The extremely ‘respectable’ and establishment Leon Panetta says that if Russia fires one tactical nuke, America ‘must’ launch war just as it ‘must’ over Taiwan.

I wonder if it does escalate to the stage of people fleeing cities and these 4chan Tweeters in SW1 and Oxbridge have to tell their families they may be dead shortly, will they then collapse and demand surrender on Twitter, or will their last tweets be along the lines of ‘well Putin was insane so it had to end this way, at least we stood up for international law, it would never have happened but for Brexit and Trump, if we hadn’t escalated Putin would have killed us all anyway’…?

After all, a large fraction of the political media and elite academia convinced themselves that Carole Cadwalladr understands how Facebook advertising works and had unmasked a conspiracy connecting Putin-Trump-me-Brexit. If you can believe that you can persuade yourself of anything.

In parallel, they’re simultaneously demanding that we threaten China with nuclear war if they re-unite with all their Chinese relations in Taiwan. Reagan accepted One China and was guided on Taiwan by the extraordinary Lee Kuan Yew, yet was denounced as a mad warmonger by the 4chan Profs back in the day. Now, the Reagan view on One China is denounced as ‘Chamberlain/appeasement/Munich’ too.

I’ve been called mad for 20 years. My warnings, year after year, that our Idiocracy could blunder into pandemics and nuclear escalation was seen as so mad it wasn’t worth arguing with. I didn’t expect that the evidence finally convincing elite media and academia that I’m insane and/or a Putin-agent, would be my suggestion that JFK’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis (including rejecting military advice to escalate and bomb) is highly relevant to avoiding hundreds of Auschwitz’s, and that I would finally be seen as ‘beyond the pale’ for saying things like ‘welcome Russians fleeing Putin, don’t ban them from sports and arts, aren’t we supposed to oppose inflicting punishments on ethnic/national groups simply for belonging to such a group?’.

PUTIN STOOGE!

Some of those who were right about covid in February 2020 — when the experts were saying ‘closing the borders is racist, masks don’t stop the spread of disease’ — are now texting me along the lines of ‘the experts are saying Putin’s irrational for starting the war but too rational for nukes, is it time to get out of London?’

One bit of good news — Macron said today that France will not use nukes even if Russia fires one at/near UKR and France does not support UKR attacks inside Russia.

One of the best things that could happen is for Truss to be replaced by someone who states the same clearly from No10 — and makes clear they will not support Panetta-like calls for direct war with Russia unless Russia launches war (not subversion, not terrorism) on NATO.

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will…

‘All Turkey, including the various people who live there, is not worth so much that civilised European peoples should destroy themselves in great wars for its sake.’

‘We are not here to consider the happiness of the Bulgarians but to secure the peace of Europe.’

‘Every great power that seeks to bring pressure and influence to bear on the policies of other countries and to direct affairs outside its sphere of interest, that plays Pericles beyond the confines of the area allotted to it by God, is pursuing power politics, not the politics of self-interest, and is in the market for prestige.’

‘Bulgaria, that little country between the Danube and the Balkans, is far from being an object of adequate importance ... for which to plunge Europe from Moscow to the Pyrenees, and from the North Sea to Palermo, into a war whose issue no man can foresee. At the end of the conflict we should scarcely know why we had fought.’

‘One must make these sheep stealers plainly understand that the European governments have no need to harness themselves to their [Balkans] lusts and their rivalries.’

‘I am opposed to the notion of any sort of active participation of Germany in these matters [Balkans], so long as I can see no reason to suppose that German interests are involved, no interests on behalf of which it is worth our risking … the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian musketeer.’ (All of these comments are Bismarck.)