It Could Happen Here Weekly 29

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compiletion episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's gotta be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions. Welcome to it could happen

(00:27):
here a podcast where we talk about things falling apart,
and this week we're talking about our ability to have
things that that don't get co opted by fascists falling apart. Garrison, Hello,
take us, take us away. Yes, So today we're going

(00:49):
to talk about kind of why maybe it's great not
to see any aesthetic ground to fascists anytime it's uncomfortable
to do. So we've brought on someone who I found
on Twitter who wrote a very very great article about
some kind of ongoing debate and drama around like anarchists
symbols um and fascists trying to use symbols um. But

(01:13):
I'm we are talking to a black ram. Hello, Hey,
I was I was things I'm I'm I'm actually I'm
actually doing okay, I've been I've been looking forward to
this chat for a while. So yes, if, um, if
people are unfamiliar, it looks like the past few weeks
people have really freaked out about an eight pointed star.
People really really seem concerned about it. Um. Yeah, this

(01:37):
has a lot tied in with what's been happening in
Ukraine because, as always happens when there's a new story
that has anything to do with the far right, um,
people got acquainted with some symbols that they had not
been aware of before, particularly the san and rad, which
is a common symbol that you'll see on members of
the as Off Battalion kind of some other far right

(01:59):
organization in Ukraine as well as elsewhere. You know, the
christ Church shooter wore a son and rad, and then
they started identifying all sorts of things that they felt
looked like son and rad's everywhere on the internet, and
things kind of spiraled from there. Well, and I think
there's actually a little bit more to it than that. Well,
we're gonna get into we're gonna get into black Ram's
article here shortly. But yeah, I kind of first one

(02:21):
just briefly go through. I think why it's this kind
of why this debate happened now, because the debate has
happened before, but it's never gotten this like intense. A
big part of this his tied to Russia's invasion of
Ukraine and everyone wanting to play like where's Waldo with
symbols being like can you spot the son and red
on the on the pictures of the as Off Battalion

(02:42):
UM and I think the other so like so everyone's
already kind of looking for symbols as like a fun game.
But the other thing that's kind of happening is because
of the Russia Dugan connection. Of Dugan's like a political
fascist writer who's a very influential inside Russia. UM. But
because of the Russia Dugan connection, some people are now
seeing Dugan's symbol, the Uration Square for the first time, right,

(03:06):
And now that they've seen the square, they're seeing anarchists
using the Chaos Star, which looks a little similar. They're
they're not the same, but they're because they just because
they just learned about the Uration Square, now they're seeing
the Chaos Star and they've never really noticed the castAR before.
Maybe they're they just don't really care about what symbols
random people use. But now that they see the uration

(03:30):
symbol and they see the chaostar, they're making this connection
here and they think this is a new development, right.
They think this is like like they're they're asking themselves like,
why are anarchists suddenly using this fascist symbol um, which
they either think to themselves or they think out loud
on Twitter dot com. Uh, which is really rich because
I mean, anarchists have been using the chaost are longer
than Dugan has been using his Uration square. And if

(03:53):
you have been watching anarchists for any amount of time
on the internet, I know you you would have seen
them using the chaos star. Uh. It's not it's not
a new development by any means. But because everyone's trying
to like wear's Waldo and oh sent their way through
the war, they're they're kind of drawing these false connections,
which is kind of unfortunate because because there is actually
some interesting things to talk about in terms of how

(04:16):
Doogan did kind of base his design off of Michael
Moorecox Chaos Star and a whole bunch of stuff around,
like why anarchists use the chaos star and you know,
there's a whole there's there's a nice debate to be
had there around fascists always in asserting themselves in these
subcultures and trying to gain ground, whether it be like
the punk scene, the industrial music scene, uh, you know

(04:38):
online gaming, right, fascists always trying to do this. Just
often we want to we try to push back on that, right,
like Nazia punks fuck off. But it seems specifically with
the Chaos Star, a whole bunch of people just want
to cave and let them kind of take this symbol,
which is I know, I think not not a not
a great instinct um, but to to kind of kind

(04:59):
of talk about this and other kind of background stuff,
like I said, we brought on a black ram Hello
to help to help talk about this. So yeah, what
kind of prompted you to write your article? I guess, uh,
you know, watching this debate kind of go down, what
what kind of actually just like what was what was
the straw that broke the camel's back? And being like, Okay,
now I need to write like a decently long article

(05:21):
on this topic. I think I've said this on like
on the on Twitter a little while before writing the
actual article, But I think the the spark was a
friend from a guy you may or may not have
seen him around. He's like somebody who's like, well demn
Stock but but but he has like anarchists leading on

(05:43):
his bio, which I guess sort of which I guess
sort of communicates the idea that he would probably like
anarchism if he did not consider it to be impractical. Sure. Yeah,
but anyways, I actually I kind of wavered on the
idea of covering it at all. I thought it would
I thought it would only go for like a few days,

(06:04):
and it was sort of a Johnny come Lately by
maybe a day or so, admittedly, but the figured it
would be sort of ephemeral. But there's things I sort
of kept seeing. But in the midst of writing it,
there was like some tanking who went even fervor and
made the link to the Chaos Star and I think
it was the logo of the Sith Empire from certain

(06:26):
Star Wars media. We'll talk about that like it's it's like, well,
it's like, well, one has six lines and they're not
even arrows. They're just like blocks in like a sort
of hexagonal shape. But it's like the same guys really
like the idea that the logo of the Ukrainian Armed
Forces is actually the iron cross. Yeah. A big chunk

(06:49):
of this, I think kind of the prehistory of why
this became such a specific problem started with kind of
Unite the Right in the period after that, where you
had all these new fascist groups on the ground of
the United States and they all had their symbols, and
you know, I was a part of this to to
to the degree that there's some culpability here. Um, a
number of researchers, including myself, we're warning people like, hey,

(07:13):
there's some like symbols that people are are taking to
right wing gatherings and they're claiming to be normal conservatives,
and these are these are symbols of groups like the
Phineest Priesthood or groups like different kind of fascist organizations,
and you might not be aware of them, and so
you should know what kind of these, you know, the
Khakistan flag or whatever means, because people are trying to
kind of signpost their sympathy to these extreme groups. And

(07:38):
that I think that was important because those people were
legitimate problems, and um, they were trying to kind of
stealthily hide they're very radical right wing sympathies behind some
like obscure images. But the problem is that it got
a lot of people looking not just looking for fascist

(08:00):
symbols and everything, but also looking for the clout that
comes from like pointing something like that out. And I
think that's that's kind of the root of a lot
of these these problems. And it's not surprising that it
happened with Dugan's symbol that there's no absolutely not um
because it does, like, again, if you're just like kind
of a casual observer, it does look a lot like

(08:20):
the chaos star and it makes its point and star
with arrows, yeah, and it makes If you know anything
about Dugan's philosophy, Alexander Dugan is a essentially a Russian
political theorist and author. Um. There's a lot that's kind
of said about how close he is to Putin. He
certainly was at one point closer to Putin. There's a
lot of debate as to whether or not Putin kind

(08:41):
of saw him as more of like a useful uh
person to kind of a useful propaganda Oregan, or whether
or not he really bought into what Dugan was saying.
But Dugan is and was a really big advocate of
like what he called like multipolar um international politics, multipolarity,
which is this idea that like the United States should

(09:03):
not be a the hegemonic power in the world right,
which it kind of was after the fall of the
Soviet units. This idea that there should be a bunch
of equivalent powers um, which is number one. You can
see how a lot of folks on the left would
be drawn in by that, even if they weren't particularly
fans of putin just the idea that like, oh well, yeah,
it's it's been a problem that the United States, it's

(09:25):
this massive hegemonic power. Perhaps it would be better if
there were a bunch of equivalent powers um. And and
it's one of those things where there's a logic to that,
but it does kind of require ignoring all of the
times in the past when we had a multipolar world
and there was tremendous violence. There's a root error in
this sort of pathway which sort of like refuses to

(09:47):
deal with imperialism as a global system. Yeah. The reason
that's a hang up is because once you once you
think of imperialism as a global system, you you then
have to move on to the idea that it a
global system that then has to be dismantled globally. Yeah,
you can't quite do that with capita because it implicates

(10:07):
nations that are supposed to serve as like moments of
world historic progress against like hegemonic capitalism, and it is
one of those spooks of the mind that people kind
of have to do away with well, which the Adicist
movement sort of does pretty successfully, because that mostly comes
from the fact that it starts off from the position
of like the state as an actual sort of structural presence.

(10:31):
It's sort of funny that, like the Marxist argument is
usually down to like hyper focus on the state and
hierarchy is idealist, which is odd when you consider that
hierarchy and the state are very much material in the
same way that capitalism itself is. So it's like it's
it feels more like a sort of argument that's like, well,

(10:55):
my materialism is the materialism, Your materialism is in fact
a form of idealism. I think with with that, we're
gonna go on a quick a quick quick head break,
and then we're gonna come back. And I think we
should probably now talk about like the origins of the
Chaos Star and and Michael Moorecock and discordionism um, and

(11:17):
then we'll kind of get into the kind of current
current debate on it. Uh some more so anyway, here's
here's here's some here's some ads for your ears coming
in through the ear waves. Oh yeah, yeah, it's time.
It's time to talk about more time for more so. Um,

(11:40):
I guess, uh black Crab you you actually did a
pretty good insistinct kind of things on how the Chaos
Star came into being, initially via Michael Moorecock. Do you
want it to just like as brief briefly talk about
kind of how he came up with the symbol for
his books and stuff. Okay, so full disclosure, I haven't
really read books themselves. I've read some Michael Moorecock. A

(12:04):
lot of what a lot of my familiarity from him
is pretty secondhand. One of the main things of that
is Serifungal being like this, this sort of eighties band
that I sort of think back to. Their whole vibe
is more Cox works. But but but anyways, the reason
why the Chaos Star is the shape that it is

(12:25):
is because what it's supposed to represent is meant to
extend outward endlessly. Yeah, the counter symbol for order is
a single a single upward pointing arrow voted with Funny enough.
When I thought about that, I thought about the twas
room or like tear. It doesn't really have to say meaning,
but it's like upward pointing arrow in a symbolic context.

(12:47):
That's the other example I have. But but that upward
pointing arrow significies a straight and narrow expression of where
possibility goes, where potential sort of goes, which create structure.
The other the chaos Star, by contrast, has like the
eight directions are meant to represent all directions in a

(13:09):
circular sort of space, like a compass of sorts, and
the energy and the potential and possibility goes out and
all of them. We have no set path, no definite limit,
no boundaries. It just goes. It just sort of goes
out there. It's little wonder why the chaos magic movement
embraced it for a very similar set of reasons. Yes,

(13:32):
it's even because even though it is kind of a
myth that there's absolutely no rules in chaos magic, what
is true is that you can explore very a very
very broad and like almost limitless range of like practical
possibilities within that movement and that sort of within that
sort of frame. It's a it's a very like post structuralist,

(13:54):
post modern view of it. But this modern is how
I've heard it described. And kind of getting back to
the like what Morecock was in brief, because I do
you think we need to kind of give an overview
of who he is. Um, he's still alive. Um, last
I checked. At least he's alive. I I heard him
talking at an anarchist sci fi conference a few weeks ago.

(14:15):
If you didn't immediately know who he was, he is
the most influential fantasy author you have not heard of?
He he he is like a George RR. Martin level
of influence, if not significantly more so. Like he's he
some people will say he's the most influential fantasy author
since Tolkien. UM. And among his you've you've noted the

(14:35):
band Sirith Ungle if you've, if you've been a fan
of of any of the Warhammer games. Um, he's a
huge influence on that because the thing that he created
was kind of the the concept of chaos as a
sort of religious entity. And I'm not going to get
into like the depths of the lore in his books,
but a lot of it is about kind of the
struggle between order and chaos um and so the Chaos

(14:57):
Star he he created that specifically like for this kind
of theological like conflict that occurs throughout his books, and
it became the symbol of like one of the sides
in Warhammer, and this very like there's tens of thousands
of people who have the Chaos star tattooed on them,
not because of Warhammer, but or not because of any

(15:21):
political reason or because of chast Mensic, because they were
fans of like Warhammer forty or whatever. And it's interesting
because in the same time, when I first got into
anarchist political theory before long before I considered calling myself one,
it was because I came across a book published by
A k press Um I think I bought it in
two thousands seven called No Gods, No Masters, and it

(15:44):
was it's a collection. A lot of people have a
copy of this book in in their house if they're
into anarchist theory. It's like a collection of early anarchists,
like people like Prudon essays on like the kind of
the first wave of anarchist political theory and it has
a chaos star on the cover. UM because number one
Michael Moorecock identify is an anarchist. Um is a is

(16:05):
a uh like as a like is both an author
and someone who identifies as an anarchistic and yeah politically,
and so his books had were particularly popular among anarchists, um,
who don't always get a lot of chunks of pop
culture to themselves. UM. And so he's he's. It was

(16:25):
kind of from the beginning, both this nerdy fantasy symbol
that you could see, you could you could put alongside
a bunch of different ships from the Lord of the Rings.
Not that I love the Lord of the Rings, but
like you could see it as like like like somebody
having a tattoo in Elvish. But it also took on
almost immediately this dual meaning where it was actually representing

(16:46):
aspects of anarchist political theory, and so it was put
in printed on like books that were about political theory
and had nothing to do with fantasy. So it's I
can't actually I cannot actually think of another symbol with
a similar pedigree. It's it's a really pretty unique case.
It is. It is because it's it's less of like
an anarchist symbol, but more a symbol created and used

(17:07):
by anarchists. Like it was like it was, it was,
it was, it was invented by an anarchist. It was.
It was a symbol invented by an anarchist to represent
something in fiction that had such resonance that people adopted
it as an actual political symbol. Yeah. It honestly, it
honestly doesn't require that much reach to see why people
who would why people who like the idea of there

(17:28):
being no hierarchy and no state, even if not total freedom,
there's still like the most range that you could get
that results in that negation. It doesn't take a lot
of elaboration to see why the symbol expressly meant for
the symbol of chaos would gain traction. Absolute. Absolutely, Yeah.
I was talking with Margaret Keilnjoy about this a while ago,

(17:49):
and she was like, yeah, like if you were in
the two thousands and then you were like a traveling
crust punk, at least like people would have chaostar tattoos,
because that's because that's like it's a yeah, expanding out
in all directions, you know, you're those the single arrow
is law and order. Instead, we're expanding out every in
every possible way. Yeah, I mean I have a cast

(18:10):
tattooed on me and I it's it's it's for primarily
ideological reasons, as opposed to the fact that I spent
my entire child with playing Warhammer of so, so yeah,
it's I think now, so it is worth mentioning. So
the cas star was invented in the sixties by Michael Morcock.
Of course there is There's been other eight pointed stars

(18:31):
over the course of thousands of years of history. Of
course it is it is. It is like a broad
like geometrical shape. Every kind of star has meant something, yes,
but the specific design was was made by Michael Morcock um.
And then because of because of more cocks like anarchist
tendencies in fiction, his work was used or at least
appreciated by a lot of the Discordians, which is also

(18:52):
popular around the sixties a lot of the situationists um.
And then as the Discordian situationist movement kind of morphed
and started to kind of intermingle with parts of occultism,
we have the chaos magic movement starting in the late seventies,
which started also using the the Chaos Star, which makes
sense because like what Robert you you were talking about

(19:12):
how it's like it's like it's almost like personifying chaos
as like a thing to worship um, which is actually
a big part of early chaos magic text is is
like like reveling in the idea of like chaos is
like a primordial god, which there's there's a lot of
primordial gods um in like the actual world, you know,
like if you look like through through histories of various cultures,

(19:34):
like chaos is one of the original primordial gods. So
it is there's a big part of that in early
chaos magic books about kind of looking at chaos as
this like this very ancient force that should be kind
of respected, and I think that that is of that
is a big part of why the chaos magicians started
using uh, the the Star. I mean, obviously there's a
lot of crossover between like sci fi writers like Robert

(19:56):
Anton Wilson Um and Michael Moorecock who then Robert Anton
Wilson was very influential in the chaos magic movement, so
you can see how this gets carried over from like
anarchist sci fi to chaos magic, and then because it's
in chaos magic, it gets way more visibility. So then
it starts then he starts seeing it inside more more
like underground anarchist scenes um. And then so around around

(20:17):
this time, Dugan was starting his political career, and he
was he was u was dabbling in a lot of
various like occult circles himself. Right now, he's he's more
of like a traditionalist, like a more like a Christian traditionalist.
That is kind of his primarily. That is like, is
that is his primary kind of a cult interest as
long as it can be called a cult. Yeah, it's

(20:38):
it's it's not it's not worth getting too much into
the weeds on on doing at this point, I think people,
I think it's it's it's worth it. Like like he
like he because he obviously did rip the he did
take inspiration from the Chaos Star to make his own
version of it. He's certainly because he was in those
same circles, a cultic leanings and and a degree of knowledge.

(20:58):
I think again, with a lot of things, a lot
of things about Dugan are overstated, including his closeness to
putin because he's this really easy in part because he's
like so prolific, and and there's a lot available on
him in English. It's really easy to kind of tie
everything happening in Russia to do him to him. Um. Yeah,
and I think that's kind of a degree of what's

(21:19):
happening here. There's a website I've forgotten the name of,
but I think it had like a bunch of like
online reproduction of Dugan's various writings from the nineties, all
sorts of weird shit about occultism and Yeah, and yet
I do think that there's a very obvious gulf between
the Dugan of that weird eccentric, like esoteric Nazi sort

(21:42):
of phase of like his relative youth versus today where
he frames his entire rationale for multiplorality as a kind
of Christian a Christian crusade against the hegemony that he
legitimately believes to be a Satanic fire. Yes, basically said that,
and it's not the only thing he considers satanic, like

(22:05):
like we should point out that like one of the
one of the main forces that were that we're going
like against pussy Riot, where Eurasianists at that of that time,
and he called them like devils and witches and taught
his followers to show up with pitchforks. People in the
West don't really understand them. So you get guys like
when you get both Alexander Reid Ross describing him as

(22:29):
an adherent of chaos magic and some guy from the
National Review referring to him as the leader of a
satanic cult somehow. Yeah, and and boy, I mean, there's
a long history of people liking to flat liking to
flatten um fascist movements with an occultic tradition to just Satanism.

(22:50):
We're not gonna talk about that at length, but it
whenever whenever you hear people talking about a problem and
like they reduce it to its satanists, you should be
a little on edge because usually they're wrong or at
least incomplete um and they just have have kind of
over Anyway, we don't need to get terribly into that.
The only the only person I wanted to bring that

(23:11):
up is because like this is around the same time
that people that are fascists, we're trying to enter in
a lot of different politicals, like some cultures, whether it
be like the punk scene and industrial music, um, including
like the the occulture, because that that is like their
primary means, right, Like they try to like they are
an aesthetic driven movement, they try to cop to any

(23:32):
aesthetic and use it for their own gains and to
to kind of overlook the anarchist origins of this thing
just because fascists tried to cop it at some point.
I think it's very silly, because then, like, what are
you going to throw away all punk music like come
up or even like or even like crosses like, yeah,
a fascist still used variations of Christian crosses that still

(23:54):
have essentially political Christian meanings. But I'd probably still assume
that the majority of religious fascists do lean on some
kind of Christianity, And to the extent that there's neopagans involved,
there's sort of a minority. There's a couple of things
that this is. Like. One of them would be kind
of in the United States, fascist co option of of

(24:15):
the flag of the United States, which we can talk
a lot about like the fact that the United States
is an imperialist power um and the genocide is done
on under that flag without while still acknowledging that attempts
by fascist movements to co opt it as a purely
fascist symbol are problematic. In part because that symbol, the

(24:36):
United States flag, has a lot of power to a
lot of people. And so if you if the fascists
kind of co opted totally, um, that's a harmful thing.
That's a thing that can like allow them to get
their brain worms into more people. Which doesn't mean like
you should take and wave the US flag, but it
does mean that, like it's just a matter of don't

(24:57):
you don't have to let them take the ground, you know. Um.
And I think on a kind of a different angle.
One of the things I think about a lot is, uh,
the first time I went to India, seeing especially in
a large parts of India, you'll see swastika's hanging over
the doors of many, many houses all over the place.
You'll see them hanging from cars. They're they're constant things.

(25:20):
And it's only unsettling if you have allowed yourself to
forget that the swastika is a symbol that the Nazis
stole from another culture, co opted and invested with a
new meaning. Jan yeah, yeah, And why should people in
other parts of the world, who have been using it
for a totally different purpose for thousands of years, why

(25:41):
should they be like, well, I guess we don't get
this now. It's like in India has had to deal
with their own fashion. Yes, and and and there's I
mean again, we're delving into a lot of very deep
topics because there's a lot to be said about how
the fact that the Nazis took the swastika lead to
degrees of sympathy within areas of Indian culture that allowed

(26:03):
some fascist ideology to creep in. And like that's also
tied to the fact that both the Nazis and a
lot of Indian nationalists were fighting against the British Empire.
It's all very complicated, right. They're guys, guys like vds
of Our Care did who were founders of the Hinduva movement, Yeah,
did openly praise Hitler. Oh yeah, Yeah. It's kind of

(26:25):
easy for some people to think of it as entirely
motivated by religion, but his whole concept of nationhood is
entirely racial. Yeah. It says himself that it has nothing
to do with religion. So yeah, and it's it's it's
one of those things. If you actually want to understand
things and engage with them in a useful area, you

(26:45):
have to understand that history and grapple with it without
like looking at a year old Hindu temple and going, well,
I guess they were Nazis hash hash hashtag problematic. Yeah, ugly.
The last thing actually want to talk about is how
how how the kind of debate around symbols US to

(27:06):
symbols has just kind of morphed into just fast jacketing
anarchists in general and worrying about like, oh, the fascists
are secretly infiltrating the anarchists and they're gonna turn anarchists
into fascists. Just pretty silly, because I mean, if you're
gonna I you're gonna turn anyone into fascists. Think anarchists
are one of the hardest people to do to do
that too. This is this is there's a lot of
other people it's way easier to convince to become fascists

(27:28):
than when anarchists go fascists they pretty hard well, yeah,
but they the type of like fear mongering around it
is still it's really frustrating because like I'm looking at
all these I'm looking at all these tanky's like fast
jacketing anarchists for using us for using a symbol created
by anarchists which has been used by anarchists for decades, right, um,

(27:51):
But then you also have like Tanky superstar Kalin Malplin
regularly hanging out with like like Melvin regularly hangs out
with dougod Of. And then you have someone who's like
another like pretty like popular, like like tinky influencer like
Ben Norton who openly uses Dugan's multipolar theory. Right, and
so if if if, if you're looking for the most

(28:11):
visible example of fascist nationalist rhetoric trying to enter into leftism,
you should look at like the growing like patriotic communists,
you know, people people like patriotic socialists, but yeah, the
idea is basically the same. But yeah, it's like people
like Peter Coffin and this like growing like patriot communist

(28:32):
socialist kind of live streamer grifft um, which is like
because like the easiest entry on the left for fascism
is informs of nationalist authoritarian communism. Right, It's like you
know that that's that that is how you get like
national socialism. Right. Uh. It's like they just had this
like super cringe e Nauz Bill convention just a few
weeks ago with with some of the best moments on

(28:54):
until Will Smith slapped that guy. Yeah, but like you know,
you have you have like Coffin and Malpin hanging out
and like Mopid regularly regularly hangs out with Doo Good.
It's like, if you're gonna lift, if you want to
be watching out for like a fascist creep, maybe you
should direct it towards the people and just like doing
it out in the open and not fast jacketing like
queer anarchists who have been doing the thing that they've
been doing for like decades. I guess one of the

(29:16):
last things I bele mention is, uh, the hilarious incidents
with the Sith Empire thing of people just fully of
like fully getting consumed by their own brain worms and
trying to insist that a Star Wars symbol uh is
secretly uh fascist chaos star um and then doing the
same thing to the Warhammer symbol um it is it

(29:40):
is in in. I mean it's funny because like in
Star Wars it is a fascist symbol, right, that is,
that's not a fascist symbol in the real world, but
it is within the world of of Star Wars that
is absolutely a fascist. It's also it's also not a
chaos star. It's not a chaos star. Uh. And in
Warhammer it is a chaos star, but it's not a

(30:00):
fascist symbol. It's actually an anti fascist symbol. Within the
World War you can basically argue that, yeah, because it is.
It is just frustrating looking at all these people being
like trying to play trying to play the Wears Waldo
game just to all like dunkan anarchists, and it's just
kind of shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of
anarchists culture um, and the history of like anti fascist anarchists.

(30:22):
You know, most of the anti fascists that I know
use the chaos star because it's because it's a red symbol.
It looks rad, it looks cool. Um. And Yeah, trying
to like in insisting that we must see this ground
and let fascists use anything that they think is esthetically cool.
I think is is a first of all, like a

(30:42):
losing battle to actually just like to just just to
to to start that now, I think is you would
have some pretty bad implications for fascism and its use
of aesthetics. You don't have to give them things just
because they want to take those things. It makes sense
that you would see like tankyas do it, because then
with your tankie you could basically get into a position

(31:03):
where you can basically discard all sorts of symbolisms and
just replace everything with like old like Soviet symbology or
so which is which is obviously not tied to eddie
a trocity stead of happens, right, Oh, oh it's dentally.
Don't ever tell them about Georgia. Yeah, don't don't tell

(31:25):
them about Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Ukraine, that giant lake that
was like the largest lake in Europe that they turned
into a pile of poison. You know. Don't mention a
few things, and Trotsky would be proud considering he wanted
to turn mountains into like city structure. I mean that
that actually is one of the things I think Trotsky

(31:48):
was on the right ball about more ministrits, more minisirats.
Let's tear it up some mountains. So any any any
final thoughts on our lovely circular the chaos a chaos star.
I'm thinking I'm thinking of a quote from like, uh,
what was his name, Pablo Freer Day. I hope I've

(32:09):
gotten that name right. A quote I've seen going around
that I think goes around something to the effect that
when the point of education isn't liberation, the goal is
to become the oppressor. Um. You could sort of usually
that quote is like relevant to like the material processes
of like being inculcated into a capitalist system. So so

(32:31):
so you can kind of make the most sense of
it as basically like you are educated to become a
boss instead of wanting to abolish all bosses vot. But
but on but on a micro level, you can sort
of apply it to the to the ways in which people,
even in like radical spaces sort of to sort of
become like self styled cops as it were. That I

(32:54):
think is a phenomenon that a lot of the unarcho
nihilist tendency sort of responds to. Anyway, this is coming
from a perspective that is sort of flirtatious towards an
arco nihilism, but not necessarily. But it's like you could
a lot of the interactions with like they like certain
people demonstrate that. There are some instances of it where

(33:16):
I think I can't quite tell if it's po or not. Um.
Somebody I s s somebody posted like a photo of
themselves with like a like a jacket and they had
like the upside down cross and the inverted pedogram on board,
and somebody someone, somebody with like basically no followers who
somehow blew somehow blew up when they posted that photo

(33:40):
next to like a Nazi uniform to try and compare
to the inverted cross to a swastika or no not,
if not a swastika, then like maybe some other part
of the jacket and the pentagram to like the arm
band or something like yeah, yeah, And I think I'm
still not sure if that was entirely serious. See, that's
that's the thing is, like we have to be careful,

(34:02):
like I don't like anarchist in fighting. It's rarely useful, um,
and we have to be quick to be watchful for
like how much of it is just people trolling or
people trying to prompt in fighting just for the sake
of infighting. Right, So if if like I tried for
a long time to not engage in this debate because
I don't like talking about this, like I don't like

(34:22):
in fighting with anarchists. I don't like I don't like
having these types of debates. So hopefully the next time
this debate starts. We don't need to because we can
just we can just point to how this last one
went and say, no, look, we clearly demonstrated that this
has a this has a long history of use by
anarchists and invented by anarchists, and not starting, not starting,
and not start the debate again because we we don't

(34:45):
we we don't need to do it, and there's no
telling if people are doing it sincerely or people doing
it ironically, or people just doing it just to get
you know, people upset um. And I mean like if
you want to look at anarchists and look at I
where where is right wing people whereas fascist trying to
kind of blended with anarchists, Like look at like books right,
look at and d caps right. These people who try

(35:06):
to claim to be anarchists are very bad and actually
blending in because they can't help themselves when they start
talking about like the validity of anarcho capitalism or the
validity of like small nation states like it's it is,
it is. It is hard. It's hard to actually infiltrate anarchists.
This is the thing that the FBI has said multiple
multiple times. It's hard to actually do so whenever fascists

(35:27):
try to blend in whether they're boogloo boys, they can't
help but use their old like boogaloo symbols. They can't help,
but just like like give hints. It is it is
astonishing how how bad they are at this thing. So
also bad at like the protection that they claimed to offer,
Like there was a there was an article from like
last year going over oh we're going over well, part

(35:48):
of it mentioned that they were basically at this like
purported protests that they were supposed to offer protection from,
and most and most of what they did was get
drunk and like this on the sidewalks. The boogloo boys,
I've seen it, actual protests who are like with like
with like cops stacking protesters, the bogle of voice of
the first ones to run because their cowards. Yeah, all right,

(36:10):
well I guess where can where can people bay? Where
can people find in you on line? Where can people
read your read your article like chaos Nihilism and the
Way of No Surrender WordPress? Basically, um I could I
call it a site left the rotical domain, but the
but the link goes like my thoughts born from fire
dot WordPress dot com. I actually try I actually try

(36:34):
changing the U r L once I changed it to
a left the radical domain I think in two Bells
of thirteen fourteen, but I figured that doing so would
funk up all of the stats and whatever, so I
just didn't bother. Well, thank thank you so much for
kind of writing, I would say, probably the most definitive
stance on this debate at the moment, which we can

(36:54):
always point point back to whenever this inevitably comes up again,
and like a year or two, because I've seen it.
I've seen it come up like every every few years.
You see it. So thank you, thank you for that,
and thank you for coming on. Um yeah, if you
want to follow follow us, you can do it at
the thing, you know, the thing, you know what our

(37:15):
Instagram had happened here pod and cool Zone Media. You
can look at my unhinged chaos tweets at Hungry bow Tie.
Um yeah, nothing is true and everything is permitted. Also
at a skatinus is where I go to like sort
of ramble about politics and occasionally the occult and other things.

(37:36):
We do. We do. We do love a good we
do love a good ramble. All right, that that that
doesn't for us today, Uh, funk fascists, Nazi punks, fuck off, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

(38:02):
Welcome to it could happen here the only podcast where
the hosts asks all listeners and guests to provide their
Social Security number and bank account number, routing number, all
that good stuff. UM. This is a podcast about how
things aren't always great, uh, and maybe are kind of
falling apart a little bit. And and it has also

(38:24):
not been, for the most part, a podcast about the
expanded war in Ukraine. UM, for a variety of reasons.
We have done some coverage of that, but we've focused
specifically on stories of individual people and and that's generally
where I feel like our strength is as a program.
But people have been repeatedly requesting we do a little

(38:46):
bit of a bigger picture look at what's gone on
in that conflict, and so I have brought Aram Chambanian
into the studio. Aram, how are you doing, buddy? Oh?
Not too bad man? How you doing today? Fine and
dandy like sour candy. Now, would you describe kind of
your your who you are and what you do and
why why you're you're someone people should listen to when

(39:09):
we're talking about a conflict like this, because you are
one of the people who when everyone was like, there's
no way Russia will invade, was was saying, well, maybe
it might happen. Yeah, I mean, um well, I think
one of the things that that sets me aside from
a lot of other analysts out there is that I
never thought I would become an analyst, and I never

(39:29):
thought that I would do this. Um. I it wasn't
set in stone from me. From the beginning. I thought
I was going to be like a high school history teacher.
And so I've always studied the world in terms of
reading books on different conflicts around the world, and and
I've tried to keep appraised on where these books have
led to. Right, So if I read a book about
the Second Congo War, it makes sense to then follow

(39:50):
current events that are related to what happened after the
Second Congo War. As a result, I followed things going
on in Ukraine starting with year am I done? Um
and elsewhere in the world, But but Ukraine has been
one that I've focused on pretty heavily because um there's
been a lot of information about Ukraine ever since because
of how late the war happened in terms of human history,

(40:12):
and in terms of recent conflicts, isn't that long ago?
UM and so uh, I started following it back then.
And I think that if you combine modern open source tools,
modern technology, some of the stuff that organizations like Belling
Cat can do with traditional research and and and knowledge

(40:33):
some of the stuff that I've done in school, you
have a really powerful tool to combat disinformation. UM. And
I think that's one of the best tools we have
to combat disinformation is wedding oh sent with traditional research UM.
And Yeah, when it comes to open source intelligence, UM,
the Ukrainian War is actually kind of one of the
It's not the conflict where that really started to become

(40:55):
a thing. That would probably be the Libyan Civil War
when when that UM big and to be something people
were talking about in a big way. But the Ukrainian
the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in particular in two
thousand fourteen, UM is really where open source intelligence kind
of came into its own in a really widely known way.

(41:16):
That's when Belling Cats reporting on the downing of MH
on seven like went out, and that was kind of
like the first first really huge international story involving like
open source intelligent cracking a case. Um, and now since
the expanded invasion of Russia back in February, we've kind

(41:37):
of entered and again this isn't really where this period started,
but this has been kind of we've seen an explosion
of what I think would be fair to call open
source intelligence disinformation. Um. Yeah, you want to talk a
little bit about kind of some of the stuff that
you've seen, because there's there's a number of accounts claiming

(41:57):
to be doing os and on the Ukrainian war, um,
and boy howdy, they are not all giving out good information,
and it can be difficult for people to tell what
they should trust because if you're if you're kind of
just scanning over it, bad ocean or even outright fake
ocean can look very similar to good ocean, right and
and so I would put a lot of the ocean

(42:19):
community into four rough categories. Uh there's uh osan analysts
and those are pretty rare. Those are the kind of
people who combine what they're seeing in real time on
social media with a background of knowledge in the area.
So like a Ukraine regional expert combining that with what
they're seeing happen in Ukraine. That's an ocean analyst. There's

(42:40):
some Twitter accounts that are more ocean aggregators. They don't
really have much analysis that put into what they're what
they're producing, but they spit out a lot of information
in real time, and so if you follow the right
ones that use the right sources, you can get some
pretty decent information from them. Then there's more of the
misinformation aggregators, which are accounts that just kind of spread

(43:00):
whatever they see without regards to whether it's true or not.
Um they'll sensationalized stories. You know, if there's the uh
a rare command and control plane takes off somewhere in
America that's known as the doomsday plane during the Cold War,
they'll tweet out the doomsday plane is in the air.
Doesn't mean the clear war right, And they're not doing

(43:21):
it to be hurtful, they're doing it for likes. And
then there's disinformation aggregators who are deliberately out there trying
to sow discord and so problems. And those are four
categories that I've seen all of them develop in their
own ways in the last ten years. UM. I think
the best best example of that final category, there's an
account on Twitter called s MM Syria and If you

(43:43):
look at the account, it looks almost identical to the
os CES Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine. It takes the
same kind of graphics and it has the same kind
of terminology, but it's an assaddist disinformation outlet and so
but they've woven their way into if you just like
a casual glance at the war in Syria, you might
believe that it's a valid source. And that's the kind

(44:05):
of more malicious disinformation that I'm talking about, where like
they know what they're doing and they're trying to confuse people,
and it's there's you know, I think one of the
best examples of something that really struck me recently as
problematic in in the war in Ukraine, as you've got
a video going around um of that purports to show

(44:26):
Ukrainian soldiers shooting captured Russian soldiers um which is a
war crime. And uh, I think credible people within the
Ocean community have said this is something that desperately needs
to be investigated more seriously. This this like is very
has a very good chance of being legitimate and people
should be looking into this. Whereas you've also seen folks

(44:48):
who kind of reflectively jumped to defend Ukraine against these
allegations putting out what I think is fairly shoddy ocean
claiming to show like issues with the video and stuff,
and it's like circling blurry sections of the video and
saying like this is you know, looks like it could
be edited, or this doesn't look credible, and it is
the kind of thing. I think One reason people can

(45:09):
get tripped up by that is prior to the invasion
of Ukraine, there were some Russian false flag events that
involved like cadavers, bodies that had been autopsy and stuff,
which was broken down by people like Elliot Higgins at
Belling cat Um and one of the things that again
if you're just kind of looking at the surface level,
you can see like, oh, well that those were videos
that were faked, and so these like the o cent

(45:31):
around this people like pointing out different sections of the
video looks the same. Some of the differences are for example, Um,
when they were analyzing the bodies and those those false
flag footage, they brought in actual you know, corpse cutter ruppers, morticians, yes,
to analyze like the cuts in the in the skulls
and whatnot, as opposed to again just kind of a

(45:53):
guy circling aspects of a video and being like this
doesn't seem right, and it's like, um, but you can
I can see why people get tripped up by it,
and it it is important not to get tripped up
by that kind of stuff because um, war crimes are bad,
I think is a general attitude that we we both
share um and and should be investigated regardless of like
whether or not they're being done by the side who's

(46:15):
also towing Russian tanks away with tractors. That you're you're
on the side of right, like right, And I think
that that's that's exactly an important distinction to because like,
there are certain claims that have come out from the
Ukrainian side, certain statements that have come out that as
an osan analyst, I could probably look into more and
maybe poke holes and stuff like the number of kills

(46:36):
that the ghost of keys, right, Okay, maybe it's not
thirty kills or whatever it is that people are saying,
maybe he's not really, but that's not harmful as much
as did these guys shoot people in the legs? Right? Right?
So one of those bears examination just because of the
nature of the claim. The other one maybe we can

(46:56):
examine it after the war when it's not it doesn't
really matter. If there is a Ukrainian ace fighter pilot
who's dropped a bunch of a crazy number like obviously
in a military sense of Russian jets are being down to,
that doesn't matter. But like from the perspective of people
just kind of observing this war as as news consumers,
it doesn't really matter, whereas whether or not a country

(47:18):
gets away with a war crime absolutely matters, and people
are treating it with the same reflective handwave as they
do when they accept these ghost of Kiev yes myths. Right,
they're saying like, well, no, but I want the Ukrainian
side to win this war, so we can't even look
into any claims of war crimes. And that's just not
how it's supposed to be. Like you condemn the crimes
up front, and you investigate and you try to move forward,

(47:41):
and that's how we prove that we're better than the
opposing side. Like that's that's been the rule in this war,
and it's been the rule in war's past. You know,
you you prove that you're better than your opponents by
being more decent. Yeah, and it's it's I have seen
some really unsettling logic from some people along the line
of like, well, these were artillerymen who have been you know,

(48:03):
shelling civilian areas, so why shouldn't they be be shot
in the leg? And the answer is because, like that's
number one, it is a war crime to shoot captured prisoners.
Likely that that is a thing that we as a
as a species have attempted to make illegal um and
problems and ought to be it is a thing that
like should not be done. And there's actually of a
wide variety of like tactical reasons why it's bad for Ukraine.

(48:26):
If Russian soldiers believe they will be shot after being captured,
it makes, among other things, it makes soldiers less likely
to turn themselves in. UM. One of the wiser decisions
that the Ukrainian government has made in this war has
been really deliberately pushing um the idea that like, hey, Russians,
if you surrender, will pay you, you can get Ukrainian citizenship,

(48:46):
Like bring in your tanks, you know, land your planes
or whatever, like, well, you know, we'll make it worth
your while. Um, which is a lot which is potentially
a force multiplier, right, UM, If Russian soldiers think when
I get captured, they will shoot me. Then they will
fight to the death, and Ukraine will lose more people
in that fight, as opposed to if Russian soldiers think, well, ship,

(49:07):
I could actually have a pretty decent life if I
just turned myself into these guys and refused to fight.
That means less people you have to fight. Um. So
it it does. It does really matter whether or not
this is happening. Um. And it's also just like on
a moral level, you you shouldn't accept it. And I
see some really I think one of the things that

(49:27):
I find so unsettling about that logic like these are uh,
these are you know, artillerymen who have been targeting civilian areas.
Why shouldn't they be shot? Um, it's not that much
of a leap to like some other ship we saw
people saying in Vietnam, you know, these villages are harboring insurgents.
Why shouldn't we treat them like the enemy? You know,
Like all of this logic leads to people getting murdered

(49:49):
who don't deserve to get murdered, and that is bad. Right.
There's the snowball effect, the slippery slope effect with the
moral side of it, and then like you're saying the
practical side of it. I mean, if you look at
part of the reason members of ISIS fought so hard
in places like most of which because once you're in
that organization, your options are a bullet or like a

(50:09):
desert cell. If you're lucky, they're not going to treat
you well and reintegrate you into society. Come on, like, no,
that's not how it works, so you fight like hell,
you know that's that's a very basic rule. That's pretty
easy to understand, I would think. So that's why this
needs to be looked into. And if it's proven false,
if it's proven it to not be a correct true video,

(50:30):
that just strengthens the Ukrainian side. But if it is
proven to be true, it's something that needs to be investigated.
It can't be overlooked. It can't be swept under the
under the rug. Just because we we want one side
of this war to come out on top doesn't mean
that we have to ignore you're committing Like one, A
good rule of thumb to approach a war from when
you're trying to analyze it is that there there has

(50:52):
never been a side in a war who have not
committed war crimes. Um. So that should always be on
your mind when you're trying to evaluate the reality of
a war crame. It doesn't mean every claim of a
war crime is true. That would be a very silly
way to translate that. But it does mean that when
there is a claim that the side you support has
been responsible for a war crime, your default should be
this is not impossible, and I should I should proceed

(51:15):
from the area that this could have happened, and and
it should be analyzed without reflectively dismissing it, and also
without saying that like war crimes committed by a group
of soldiers in a single part of a theater necessarily
mean that the the war itself is being prosecuted in
a criminal level by that government. Um. Because for example, well,
I mean I was about to say U. S. Soldiers

(51:36):
committed war crimes in World War Two, but actually the
prosecution of that war was criminal in a lot of
fundamental ways. But it does. That doesn't mean that like
your granddad committed war crimes because other U. S. Soldiers
who were in the field executed captured German POW's you know, um, Yeah,

(51:57):
which I think is something people have an easier time
understanding and it's not a war. They feel the need
to have a series of character or less takes on
in Twitter. Yeah, it's That's the weirdest thing about about
the social media age and and kind of sent in general,
is that while it does make it very accessible and

(52:17):
easy for anybody to get involved in investigating these crimes
and these events, it also means that everybody thinks they
have an opinion that matters on it and uh and
and in that sense, they muddy the waters. They they
a lot of people can can imitate the ocent look
pretty well. They can circle things in pictures that look similar,

(52:38):
or as we saw in Syria, a lot they'd take
two pictures of two totally different dudes and say these
are the same guy, they're both members of Al Nustra
are something like that, and they would compare the eyes
and compare the chins and stuff, and it looks kind
of like a belling cat image, but it wasn't right.
That's the danger here is that like everybody can can help,

(52:59):
but every what he can hurt now too, Yeah, yeah,
And it's one of those things, every every aspect of
this cuts both ways, because like the thing people started saying. Rightfully,
so after the invasion or the expanded invasion I should
say of Ukraine by Russia is like, well, now all
of these people who were experts in whatever the last
big story was are going to become experts on the

(53:20):
Ukrainian conflict, right, which is absolutely a thing that happened.
You get all of these people who I think are
pretty bad journalists and reporters who suddenly like rushed to
to have their commentary on this thing that they have
ignored for the last eight years. Um. But at the
same time, it's to talk about Belling Cat. The founder
of Belling Cat, my old boss, Elliott Higgins, was like

(53:40):
literally an unemployed dude sitting on his couch when he
started analyzing war footage um and is now one of
the most respected conflict analysts in the world. UM. And
that is a thing the Internet has made possible. UM.
I think a great example would be the Caliber Obscura Twitter,
which is just like a dude in the UK who
has an almost impossible ability to recognize firearms and pieces

(54:04):
of firearms and so just analyzes people send him footage
from all over the planet and he'll say, like, these
are these guns? And this is where they came from.
And this is uh, this one is like looks like
this kind of gun, but it's actually, um, a fake
one that's being made locally in this country, and it
is supposed to look like this. And you can tell
because like, um, that's not a person who Caliber did

(54:25):
not like go to some sort of fancy gun school.
They just are Uh. I mean, it's definitely not right
to call them an amateur because quite frankly, I don't
know any people who are working at institutes and better
at the thing that Caliber does than Caliber is right, Um,
But they did just start as a person on Twitter.
You know. Well, that's the thing about this, this is
that you get people who were not kind of born

(54:49):
with an idea that they were going to become analysts
and in this field. And so you have people like
both of both of the people you mentioned, whom I
I know personal I don't know Elliott personally, but I
remember him for our days are shared days on a
comedy website together. It's the website that show remained nameless,
right Um. And then and then you know, uh, Caliber

(55:13):
and I have talked on Twitter a bunch, and you
know we're friends there and it's just interesting to see that,
like both of them are very real people behind like
their professional personality and their their expertise, they're also down
to earth, real people, which is rare in this field
because a lot of people are kind of elitist. Um
and and and yeah Gatekeeper and neither of them are

(55:34):
about that. They're both all about like getting as many
people doing this as possible because more eyes are better, Like, yeah,
Elliott is is uh, I mean, the whole reason my
career with Belling Cat existed is because, like I emailed
him out of the blue one day and said, hey,
I've been noticing this weird thing in videos of fascists
talking to cops. Can I write a thing for you?
And he was just like okay, And and that was

(55:55):
I mean, like that was how that started. Um And
he's I've met him since a couple at times, and yeah,
it is a very I think is very informed. Because
of the fact that he did not come from sort
of this big institutional background. UM has has a humility
with which he approaches his investigations that, uh, I think
is one of the things you should look for in

(56:17):
trying to decide whether or not open source intelligence that
you're seeing on Twitter. Whatever is credible is how how
how conclusive are they stating their claims? Are? How many
times do they offer only a single possibility for what
something is? Like? Um, you know, there's a number of
things you can do. I think at this point we
should probably move to a separate area of discussion, which

(56:39):
is how's the how's this war going? Who, who's who's winning? What? Um? Well, so,
I I made a statement on my Facebook page, my
personal Facebook page, three weeks ago, and I still feel
confident in that statement, and that is that well, Ukraine
has yet to win this war. Sha has already lost.

(57:01):
They've already lost their objectives, They've already lost what they
what their goals were. And at this point it's a
face saving venture on the Russian part. But a raum um.
Russia carried out a cutting faint action to distract while
they while they took the East by burning a fifth
of their general staff and all of their armored vehicles.
It was a cunning fat Yeah I saw someone on

(57:23):
Twitter positive actually uh a move to use up all
of Ukraine's ammunition. Brilliant, Yeah, just very very zab Brannigan logic.
Half of Vladimir Putin. Ukrainians have a preset kill limit
and once they hit ten generals, the army will shut down.

(57:46):
But no, the war is not going well for Russia.
Um and that's not to say that it's going great
for Ukraine either, but no one needs to do less
well to succeed here. Yes, it's a I mean because
one of the things that is a black box, right.
I do think because there was a lot of discussion
earlier in the ward, particularly like how credible are these

(58:08):
numbers that the Ukrainian government is putting out for for
dead and for destroyed vehicles? And I think the oceans
out there, like the verified vehicle casualties and stuff that
we can verify, means that like obviously the Ukrainian government
is patting their numbers, but not by as much as
a lot of people might have, like it's not wildly off.

(58:28):
Saw their first casualty account. I think first casual account.
I think it was like day two or three, and
then like all of the western and held me. Yeah,
actually yeah, it's probably about two Oh my god. Wow. Yeah.
In perspective for some people who may not that number
may not jump out to them. We lost you know,

(58:51):
just shy of three thousand soldiers killed during the Iraq Wars.
So yeah, two thousand in a couple of days is
an extraordinary number of losses. Yeah. And of course the
black box here we don't have nearly as good an
information on is what kind of casualties is the Ukrainian
military suffered and what kind of civilian casualties have been suffered?
And um, Obviously civilian casualties nearly always take much longer

(59:13):
to get, um to the extent that it's ever. I
think we have a better chance of getting objective civilian
casualties for this because, unlike a lot of other conflicts,
these civilians being killed, our civilians under the ages of
a government that is a functional state, as opposed to Syria,
for example, where the there's basically the only people with

(59:34):
an interest in accurately reporting the death count are a
number of different non governmental organizations. Um, because the people
being are being killed by one government or the other,
right including like this is this was the same thing
like in Iraq. The civilians who died in Mosel were
technically under the Iraqi governments. You know, whatever. Protection seems

(59:54):
like the wrong word to say, but I can tell
you from my experience there, there was no We still
do not have anything that approaches a credible civilian death
count for for that conflict, um and probably never will
right and and on that note, on the civilian casualties note,
we were talking earlier about what how you can identify
a credible ostan account versus a one that you probably

(01:00:16):
shouldn't give too much credence to. And one of the
best ways to do that, honestly is is, ah, look
at their their morals. I guess if they're ever posting
and celebrating the death of civilians anywhere, you should probably
disregard them. Like, yeah, I'll never see Elliott Higgins being like, yeah,
suck at people of belowgrad like you got hit with
a missile, Like it's not it's you know, it's not

(01:00:38):
gonna happen. Yeah, it's not. It's the same thing as like,
I get why people celebrate h, you know, battlefield victories. Obviously,
I don't think, especially if you're literally a Ukrainian living,
you know, in the area affected, I don't think there's
anything morally wrong with celebrating opposing soldiers being defeated. But

(01:01:00):
I am I continue to be deeply unsettled by footage
celebrating things like the destruction of armored personnel carriers full
of nineteen year old kids, um, even though a non
insignificant number of those nineteen year old kids are accessories
to war crimes. Right, Like, it doesn't mean like I'm
broadly okay with it. I do. I do feel a

(01:01:21):
lot better about celebrating losses of special forces units like
the vdv UM that have been heavily involved in war
crimes around the world, like that I have less kind
of an issue with. But and I felt that personally.
You know, I'm Armenian and during the Carback War, it
was just day, every day I would wake up to
dozens of videos of Armenian conscripts and soldiers being blown

(01:01:44):
up and hunted from the air, and people on Twitter
cheering for it because they were, for one reason or another,
on the ZERI side. And like, I get it, you know,
like you were saying, you want to cheer your battlefield victories,
and I understand that from people who live on the
battlefield and live near the battlefield, I get it. It's
happening to you, to people thousands of miles away cheerleading

(01:02:06):
on the internet. What the hell is wrong with you? Yeah,
maybe don't do that. Maybe don't do that, like you
what the hell? Like you know, those are real people
in that video that never did anything to you. And
this is not like a sporting event where like they
go home at the end of the day and they've
just lost, like they're dead even when they do. Like,
I've spent a huge amount of my career talking directly

(01:02:28):
face to face with victims of ISIS, Right, I have
been to like eight or nine refugee camps in two
countries at this point, specifically for that were in addition
to days spent on the refugee trail in between Hungary
and Serbia talking to two Syrians and talking to um
um people who had like fled the region. Uh. But

(01:02:49):
at the same time, I can't help but like, like
I've literally been under fire by ISIS and then had
those ISIS guys gotten killed, and I have celebrated and
cheered when that's happened. Um, And I'll never forget we
were embedded with this mortar team and we were under
fire from this sniper and the mortar team. I forget
you can. In the article I wrote on it, I
list the exact number of rounds fired, but it was

(01:03:10):
like nine or ten something like that, where they're gradually
walking in mortars until they get this guy um. And
obviously we like cheered when they fucking killed this dude
because he was shooting at us. And I remember, like
kind of on our way out away from the front,
my fixer Sangar was like, how many rounds did they
drop before they got him? And I was like, I
don't know. I think it was like nine or ten.

(01:03:31):
I've got the footage somewhere, and he was like, I
wonder what else they hit and and sang sangarsa Uhum
like was born and raised in mosle Um, And it
was one of those things we spent the very next day.
We were like talking to people fleeing their homes and stuff.
And not only did we we like see some of
those people who lost family members too misses both by

(01:03:52):
Iraqi forces and by coalition aircraft and stuff, but like
we came upon this dead ices fighter in a fighting
position where you could he he had been in there
with his wife for days, and he had been wounded
two or three days before he got killed, and you
could see the evidence of the first aide she had
done on him, and it was one of those things.
I guess I could try to make the case that like, well,

(01:04:12):
maybe she was a captive and didn't want to do it,
but quite frankly, everything I saw in there makes me
believe like she cared deeply for him and stayed with
him until the bitter end, trying to keep him alive
and fighting. Um. And that doesn't mean he's not like
a monster, and it doesn't mean he shouldn't have been
killed because he's a fucking dashi who was in the
middle of doing enabling a series of terrible things. But

(01:04:34):
he's also like, you can't you can't ignore the humanity
of of somebody when you have seen that element of
what what happens in the conflict, and that has stayed
with me quite a bit ever since. Yeah, and it's
it's one of those things. And you gotta you gotta
remember that the majority of young men of fighting age

(01:04:57):
around the world who joined a military or armed organization
or an insurgent group, whatever it may be, they do
so typically because it's whomever is in charge of the
area they're growing up in. Right, You don't join the
Russian Army because you wait all the options, and the
Brazilian Army offer some good aid, you know, some good
healthcare packages. And I looked at the Italian Army, but
really I want to go with the Russian. No, you

(01:05:18):
go with wherever you were born, yeah, whether, And you know,
and I was talking to my roommate about this last night.
We were watching this footage from the flood of nineties
here in Oregon, you know, and it's this National Guard
a helicopter where they're pushing bales of hay out of
the back of the helicopter down to cows stranded out
in your tillamook. And so depending on when you join
the National Guard, you either fed cows hey from a

(01:05:39):
helicopter or deployed to Irock. That's the luck of the draw, right,
That's not fair. No, they don't deserve to die any
more than the guys dropping the hay out of the
helicopter did, right. But people get yeah, they get carried
away with like turning it into a sport almost, and
they forget that there's people on the other end, and
that like, well, some of them are threats and they

(01:06:02):
may need to be dealt with. It's like, you know,
a bear comes at you in the woods. You shoot it,
you don't, you don't skin it and make fun of it,
like yeah, you know, I go kill its kids. You know,
that's not that's not how it works, you know. So
like yeah, yeah, don't don't be don't be a piece
of ship, Like don't don't don't don't lose your humanity, um,

(01:06:24):
because I mean, one of the things that makes it
easy to lose your humanity is that like videos of
ship getting blown up looks dope, right like it it does.
It looks cool to watch things get blown up. That's
in fact, I suspect how a lot of people who
become very good oh since investigators part of what draws
them in. It's just like I'm sure that was a
part of why Caliber started obsessively researching guns. Is like

(01:06:44):
their neat guns are neat. You know, weapons are interesting.
People are inherently interested in in weaponry. Um, which is
not a good thing. It's just the thing, you know.
It's not a bad thing either. It's just like a
thing human beings will always be interested in. But as
warfare is as natural to us as eating and fucking. Um, well,

(01:07:04):
you're talking about the mortars, right, the mortars walking in
And there's this video on YouTube of made by an
American Navy attack squadron of them dropping bomb after bomb
on targets and muzzle and and and uh rocca places
like that, and it's set to the Devil's going to
cut you down, And every time there's a beat in
the music, and you see a bomb drop, and some

(01:07:25):
of these bombs it's like four bombs dropping at a time,
dropping an eight story building. And so I'm sure there
was a guy inside there with a weapon, but like
you want to tell me there wasn't anybody else in
that eighth story building, And like, okay, yeah, you're celebrating
the death of the combatant there, but like also all
those other people are being celebrated indirectly, and so like
you gotta remember that, like these bombs explode and they

(01:07:45):
take out a large area, and these fights are happening
in cities a lot of the time. Yeah, the weaponry
that the United States uses is more precise than something
like a barrel bomb, but not by as midy orders
of magnitude as you would hope. Um. And and precision
doesn't precision matters, Yes, it's not a non important an

(01:08:08):
important thing, but Ultimately, it doesn't matter if your missile
went right into that living room full of civilians and
blew them all up, or if you leveled the block
and maybe you know, killed them indirectly. Like you gotta
know what you're hitting. The target is what really matters, right,
So it doesn't matter if you can hit the target,
you gotta make sure it's the right target. And that's
where we're starting to have issues now, is like we
can hit targets really well, we just aren't always sure

(01:08:29):
that it's the right yes, as opposed I mean, and
and you are seeing. So let's let's talk about we
we started this chatting about Ukrainian potential Ukrainian war crime. Um,
what we have absolute documentation of a tremendous amount of
war crimes on behalf of the Russian UH invaders, including
a thing that they have done repeatedly in Syria, which

(01:08:50):
is the targeting of hospitals and medical facilities, um with
with terrible civilian casualties as a as a result. And
this is something that the New York Times actually published
an incredible article based on a mix of O cent
and like I'm not entirely sure how they got them,
but combat flight recorders, like the audio that these these
Russian fighter pilots were sending back and forth to command

(01:09:13):
as they attacked hospitals in Syria. Um, so we actually
have a tremendous amount of detail about like what it
looks like inside the cockpit and in like the control
room and whatnot, as air strikes are being ordered on
medical facilities. I really recommend people check that article out.
Um it's it's pretty harrowing. Ship. But UM, yeah, are
you are you surprised at all by kind of what

(01:09:35):
you are what you've seen so far in behalf of
the Russian forces in Ukraine. No, no, not even not
even the slightest, Because I followed the war and in
Syria rather closely. And uh, I mean there was a
point when they had to stop marking the hospitals with
hospital marketings because the Russians would target them so consistently.
The United Nations had to stop giving the Russians the
coordinates of the hospitals and in Aleppo because they kept

(01:09:57):
getting targeted. Um. There was an AID convoy that was struck,
I believe by Syrian aircraft, but it was the targeting
was given to them by Russian aircraft. Um. It was
just an AID convoy coming into Aleppo, a United Nations
and Aid convoy, and it was bombed and strafe repeatedly
for you know, several hours. Um. Things like that that
happened so regularly in Syria to the relative silence of

(01:10:20):
the rest of the world. Um, that led me to
believe that when they go into Ukraine, they're not going
to be any gentler. Um. A lot of people suspected
early on that, like, well, they it's harder to demonize
people who look like you, so they're not going to
have as much of an easy time demonizing Ukrainians. And
I think there has been some degree of difficulty with that,

(01:10:42):
at least in terms of some of the conscripts on
the Russian side. But the other thing we're seeing is that,
like a lot of these a lot of people seem
to genuinely believe the mission of denazifying Ukraine. And so
if that's what you believe you're doing, then the bombing
does surprised, It doesn't become a surprise. Right. If you
think that you're going into Ukraine to suppress it and

(01:11:05):
occupy it, then bombing city city is full of Russians,
Russians and Russian speakers seems like a bad idea, but
if you believe that they're all Nazis, then it makes
sense that you might just blow them up because they're
all the enemy. I'm not saying I'm not condoning it.
I'm saying no, But I mean that is literally what
the US government in the British government did in World
War you know exactly. There have been claims made that

(01:11:30):
what Russia is doing in places like mary A Pole
amounts to an active genocide. Um, what is your opinion
on that? Genocide is a big word. It's yeah, but
you know, it has a lot of meaning behind it,
in the sense that like, just because somebody is killing

(01:11:50):
large numbers of people and doing so in heinous ways
does not make it a genocide. You have to an
attempt to destroy culture and destroy heritage and things of
that nature. Um, as it stands, I would say that
it looks likely that there are signs of potential genocide
in Mariable. I am not confident enough to come out
and say that I conclusively think it's happening, but the

(01:12:11):
way that it looks like the the city is being
deliberately targeted to either force the entire population to flee
or to radicalize them one way or the other. Is
it goes beyond military target you know. I think the
thing that were that I that is the most like

(01:12:32):
troubling potential sign of an intention of genocide is the
reports that the Russian government has been evacuating civilians that
they have in parts of Mariopole. They have captured two
places in Russia, which is this is a misconception. You
don't have to just be killing people, as you stated,
it's an attempt to destroy a culture, which you can
do by killing, but you can also do by things

(01:12:53):
like separating moving people, like forced migration and whatnot. Like
there's aspects of that at again, look at like the
genocide of the Native Americans in the United States. It
was not all straight up killing. A lot of it
was forced migration, um, which is an act of genocide
as well. Um. And that's the kind of thing where
I'm I'm kind of waiting for more reporting on that

(01:13:14):
to the to see here exactly what's happening in the
extent to what's happening, But that really troubles me in
terms of potential signs of a genocide. Yeah, and when
they when they coined the term genocide after World War Two.
It was it was with reference to the Holocaust, but
but what they had in mind was the Armenian genocide. Yeah,
when it when they when they drafted these words, and

(01:13:37):
because it was beyond just sheer number of people killed,
if we're talking sheer number of people killed, the Nazis
also killed six million other people in addition to the
six million Jews they killed. The reason we talked about
the Jews is one, six million is a lot of people.
And two it was a deliberate attempt to destroy their
entire culture. You make them have never existed, and that's

(01:13:59):
very different and very scary. Dying is also very bad,
the idea of dying and then all of the people
who were like you just don't exist anymore, and all
your books and your literature are gone. Like that's that's monstrous. Yeah,
And that's why there's a difference between genocide and mass killing. Yeah,
And it's it's the difference. Like we talked about US
war crimes in World War Two, of which there were many,

(01:14:21):
including the fire bombing of Dresden. I would argue, but
it's not an act of genocide because when they fire
bombed Dresden. It was certainly um the killing of civilians
without particular regard to the direct military efficacy of the action,
But it was not an attempt to destroy German culture
or obliterate the German people. And you brought up the

(01:14:41):
Armenian genocide. Well, we'll talk about this at some point
behind the bastards, but you mentioned that that was kind
of what the people when the term genocide was invented,
that was what people were looking at, even though it
was kind of a direct response to the Holocaust. It's
also worth noting that like when the Nazis planned the Holocaust,
they to the Armenian genocide as a model. Um Hitler's

(01:15:03):
literal statement was when people when he was asked during
like one of his his dinners with a bunch of
Nazi officials, like what what about kind of the international
reaction to what we're planning to do? He was like, well,
who remembers the Armenians? You know? Like that was his
That was his attitude, is like, we'll get away with
it because nobody did anything during this genocide, right and

(01:15:23):
and and I think while I would hesitate to call
the entire war in Ukraine and genocide. Yes, as of yet.
I would say that there's a similarity between the Armenian
genocide and and how that led to the Holocaust. There's
a similarity between the Russian war crimes committed in Syria
and how that led to the war crimes being committed
in Ukraine, in the sense that if the world had

(01:15:45):
stood up earlier, we would not be seeing this now. Yeah.
The problem is the world looked the other way when
the Russians bombed hospitals in Syria, when they repeatedly bombed hospitals.
In fact, the world didn't just look away. A lot
of people in the West mocked it. I'm sure you've
heard it as often as I have. The last Hospital

(01:16:06):
and Aleppo joke, right where, oh they're bombing the lost
last hospital and Aleppo again. Well, the reason that happened
is because when you bomb the hospital, they build a
new one, and then it gets bombed again three days later,
so they've bombed the last one again. So it wasn't
a joke. It was just a tragedy that kept playing
out that people couldn't really fathom, so they mocked, right.
And so when that's the attitude of a lot of
the world, it's no surprise that what's what's happened in

(01:16:28):
Ukraine as has run out of control? M hm, Where
do you think we go from here? What are you
what are you expecting to kind of see next within
this conflict? You know, the most recent kind of reporting
is that Russia's pulling. Russia's framing it is they're pulling
back from Kiev to to focus on other fronts. Uh.
The Ukrainian side is saying like, well, they've been defeated

(01:16:48):
around Kiev and they're pulling back. What do you think
kind of we're seeing next? What is your opinion on
kind of the next stages here? So I think it
really depends on Vladimir Prutin's power and how long he
remains in a position of unchecked power. I'm not saying
necessarily he will fall from power. I'm saying that how
long can he go as the only guy calling the shots?

(01:17:09):
Because as it stands right now, it doesn't look like
he's the same Vladimir Putin that we were used to
dealing with. It seems like something may have changed with him.
And that's a wild card because if if Vladimir Putin
wants to continue to escalate here he can continue to
do so because he may not be getting the same
reporting that we are about the condition of his army.
He may think his army is doing better than they're

(01:17:31):
doing and that they actually are just repositioning. So if
that's the case, there's a chance to he'll escalate against
potentially in NATO country. I find that unlikely, but there's
still a chance for it. I think what's more likely
is that we're going to see the Russian military refocused
efforts in the east, in in Donetskan Luhansk, with an
attempts to create a land bridge to Crimea through the
area through Mariopol Melitopa area UM and I think they're

(01:17:55):
going to try to rucify the area as much as
possible and remove as many of the Ukrainians as possible
UM one way or the other. And I don't know
if they'll be successful in that, but I think simultaneously
while they do that, they're going to try to tie
down and destroy as much of the Ukrainian military as
possible UM, which will be difficult because the units in
the east are Ukraine's best equip units. So I don't

(01:18:16):
know how this ends. I don't see a reasonable end
to this insight, but that's just because there's too many
variables at the moment. I do think one thing that's
kind of worth looking at this war in a historical context.
A number of comparisons have been made to both of
the world wars here, um, I think the thing that
it most reminds me of is World War One, not

(01:18:37):
in that it's a conflagration on that scale or in
that um it's a similar war in terms of the combat,
but it is an example of the first big war
that utilizes a variety of weapons and tactics that have
been battlefield tested in a series of smaller wars, right, um,
And I think we are seeing in Ukraine for the

(01:18:58):
first time the actual will. I think one thing that
we have seen is that drones. And I'm not talking
about the big ones here. You know, they get a
lot of the bay rock tar and stuff like get
that gets a lot of attention, but like small the
kind of drones anyone listening to this could pick up
and buy today, right, Those drones, I think are proving
to be a game changer on a tactical level, in

(01:19:20):
a similar manner to the machine gun in in the
turn of the last century. Before the last century. Yeah,
with the drones, I've often machine guns are good good comparison.
I've often thought of it as like the airplane, and
that we had airplanes and we haven't had combat airplanes.
Before World War One, we didn't have very many of
them because nobody really realized the utility of them in war.

(01:19:41):
And then as the war got closer and then the
war started, countries started to slowly build up these small
fleets of aircraft, and then by the end of the war,
everybody had an air force. I think we see the
same thing with these small consumer drones, is that like,
by the end of this war or whatever conflagrations are
coming after it, every military in the world is going
to have little little you know, phantom phantom threes or whatever,

(01:20:02):
basically for every infantry squad. One of the things that's
so wild is that if if you again, if you're
sitting here right now, have not an insignificant amount of money,
let's say three to four thousand dollars and the enough
mechanical like competence to carry out modest repairs on your

(01:20:23):
own car, you could, with things entirely available over the shelf,
build a weapon system capable of disabling a variety of
armored vehicles at night. You know, like you that that
is a thing that individual people, You could do that
and you can have it up and running in a
matter of days. I just I'm imagining the next protest

(01:20:43):
in unnamed city. Yeah, and a consumer drone flies over
the police line and drops a little thing on him.
This is bang. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like there's a
lot of people, even even as as influential and meaningful
as they've been on the battlefield in Ukraine, I think
people still are kind of slow to understand the extent.

(01:21:04):
Like there's one of the wildest stories that's come out
of it is that the Ukrainian military has a an
outfit of civilian drone operators using hacked and home built
drones to attack Russian forces at night. UM and they
have been The documented of efficacy of their raids has
been significant, And I can I can remember spending a

(01:21:24):
brief period of time with an Iraqi military unit that
was just using d g I phantoms that they had
rigged to drop what were since essentially mortar shells with
shuttlecocks on them from a height. UM, and they were
very effective at killing people. UM. As isis, drones were
effective at sort of spotting, you know, mortars for folks well.
And one of the things I saw I SIS used
their more their drones for great effect wasn't so much

(01:21:47):
to kill large numbers of enemy soldiers. It was to
do the same thing that American predator drones and report
drones had done for for decades by that point the
terror groups, which is let them know you can't gather
in large numbers. Yeah, if you gather in large numbers
of your target. And so you saw a Rocky soldier
saying no more than two or three in a group, ye,
any more than that will get targeted, you know, And
so they flipped the equation basically yep, and don't I

(01:22:10):
mean I one of the reasons why I I have
a general policy heavily informed by my time in Mozle
that the last place I want to be in a
anywhere near a war zone is an armored vehicle. Um.
Because that's really unless you are in something that's heavily
up armored, like an im wrap. Little bombs dropped by

(01:22:32):
drones can do significant damage to something like a humpy
and that's exactly what you target. You don't target a
Toyota Corolla with a drone like that, unless you specifically
know an individuals in that Corolla that you want to kill.
But you may just behind the lines see a target
of opportunity in an armor see an armored lightly armored vehicle,
and drop a immunition on it. And that's one of

(01:22:52):
the things this is done. There's a lot of talk
prior to the expanded Russian invasion about how immediately Russia
was going to get air superiority, and that's obviously a
bigger story than just drones. There's a lot of factors
and why Russia. It's probably accurate to say they have
superiority in a number of parts of the war, but
they don't have supremacy like that. It's not like an
absolute matter. And part of that is because, um, it's

(01:23:14):
not really possible to at this moment. Someday, I suspect
there will be more effective ways of stopping drones and
at like a theater level. Um, maybe, but it certainly
hasn't happened yet. Yeah. Yeah, And and that's the thing.
You know, there's there's the drones, and then there's also
on the Ukrainian side, they you know, I think they
recognize that air force against air force, the Russians have

(01:23:37):
a numerical superiority. So you can deny the Russians air
supremacy by shooting down their planes with man pads. You
don't have to have an air force to deny your opponent.
You just have to dine them the ability to freely
operate in your airspace. And this is one of those things.
There's been a lot of talk about a no fly zone, um,
which I tend to think would be a bad idea

(01:23:58):
in the traditional sense in terms of like the US
and NATO sending in planes to down Russian planes over Ukraine.
There's a number of reasons why that's concerning. But you
can effectively establish a no fly zone by shipping in
a funckload of man pads exactly. Yeah, And I'm not
against that. I think in terms of what kind of
what kind of armed arms support is ethical to provide,

(01:24:21):
giving people the ability to stop planes from bombing cities
is broadly speaking, one of the most ethical things you
can do in terms of shipping munitions around the world, right,
and the other advantages that man pads. I'm sure somebody
could turn it into a lethal ground weapon, but they're
pretty hard to yeah, use against ground targets, against houses,

(01:24:42):
things like that, not really what they're designed for. So
it's not like just handing over, you know, some indiscriminate
weapon to the Ukrainians to use against Russian cities. You're
you're giving them a weapon that's specifically used against military aircraft.
Like most man pads can't reach the altitude the airliners
are out even so yep, so I think that's probably

(01:25:04):
what we want to talk about today. Um, you wanna
plug your plug ables, tell people where they can find
you in your analysis out in the wild. Yeah, so
you can. You can follow me on Twitter. My handle
is at Shabanian Rum and uh I work I published
occasionally with the New Lines Institute. Uh so you can
see my work there as well. And I have a

(01:25:24):
website that I seldom update, the Folded Gap dot com
um hasn't been updated and probably eight months now because
I've been tired. But um, yeah, those are the places
to find me and uh d m s are open
on Twitter. So if you ever have questions or anything
like that, let me know. I'm happy to talk with
anybody who's got questions on these kind of things. Hell yeah,
well that's gonna be us. So you know, enjoy this

(01:25:50):
analysis of the of the war in Ukraine. Um, before
we return you to your regularly scheduled multi part series
on Nazi cat girls. Uh. The primary focus of this
podcast money money. This is welcome, Dick had happen here?

(01:26:22):
It is me, Christopher Long. Uh, this is a This
is a podcast about things falling apart, things putting back
together again. And also today it's just about money. Um.
And also well, okay, it is not just about money.
It is about money and is about seemingly seemingly esoteric
arguments about the nature of money that actually turned out
to be extremely important for any post revolutionary society or

(01:26:44):
even just this society. So yeah, and and joining joining
me to talk about this are Kyle Flannery and Steve
manned where the co editors of Strange Matters magazine, which
is a new workers co op that's in the middle
of a fundraising drive. So yeah, go Stworth the magazine.
And uh, even Kyle, welcome to the show. It's great
to be here, Chris, thanks for having us. The basis

(01:27:04):
of this interview is a piece that is coming out,
actually when is it coming out that that's a good
question that I should probably have asked of this. Um,
let's see, it will come out later this month. Okay, Yeah,
there'll be out later this month. That is about the
history of money and what money is. So I guess
we can we can start there, which is, yeah, can

(01:27:25):
can you walk us through a bit about the debate
over what money is and how sort of various people
have gotten parts of it wrong and parts of it right. Sure.
I got into this debate as a economics graduate student
in eleven and a book that really kind of shaped

(01:27:46):
my initial understanding was David Graeber's Depth the First five
Thousand Years and yeah, it's excellent. Um it's it's very long,
and it's a bit scattered, but I love what he
put together with it. And um, so he kind of
introduced me to ideas of from a school of economic

(01:28:07):
thought called chartile is UM and chartial is M is
kind of the theoretical forbear of M M T and
m M T is, which is modern monetary theory is
kind of in the news now as a theory which
is saying, like, okay, if you if you're a government
that issues its own money, its own currency, that is

(01:28:29):
not really backed by anything. It's not backed by any
other currency or any other commodity. Then you don't really
face a financial limit as far as how much you
can produce. You you're the sole source of that money,
and you can spend it into existence, spend by buying
things the money into existence, and people will accept it

(01:28:51):
to the extent that they either need it or they
want it. And that's one theory that's kind of in
the air now. But chartali is Um, over a hundred
years before this, is putting out very similar ideas around
money that is um created by states in order to
martial physical resources. They call it biophysical resources, which is

(01:29:15):
just a fancy word of meaning all of the material, people, techniques, um,
physical processes that are required to create economic activity. So
to the extent that people either need or want your
money UM, you can use it as a social technology
sort of to marshal those resources into action, and you

(01:29:38):
being a state, chartali is Um says, so from Chartalism
we got m MT. But David Graverer's book is about
a lot more than just Churtleism and MT, So it's
about the origins of money, and origins of money, it
turns out, are at least five thousand years ago. As
the title says, UM, there are examples of UM early

(01:30:01):
accounting systems that are where people are just UM. Rather
than there being a circulating medium of exchange type money
like a coin or something or a daughter bill, there
were just records of what people own and what people
owe and their debts and credits against each other. And

(01:30:21):
it was in early Mesopotamia there. So we have these
early accounting systems that yield more advanced credit systems over time,
that are ruled by temples UM, which are sort of
proto states in a way in terms of like they
administer the flow of goods and services through their territory

(01:30:43):
and between their territory and another temple's territory using their
domestic money, but also international money. International money was facilitated
through trade networks. Trade networks use things like UM. They
needed to convert between a domestic money and international money.
And Gregory goes through these like wonderful examples of UM,

(01:31:06):
silver and other medals being used as like international means
of payment. UM. That's sort of our term in our
piece basically, which is covering them foreign exchange. But UM.
He says, like in order to get from the domestic
money into the international money. UM. You need to have
these linkages of experts in the temple and the trade

(01:31:31):
networks to get together and make um credit instruments which
knit them together into this trade network. And from there
we go into UM. I don't want to spend too
much time on the history, but we go from there
to situations thousands of years later, we get coins. Coins

(01:31:54):
are being minted by starting in the fulle six hundred BC.
I want to say, Carl, yeah, that that sounds about right.
So um the first I someone can correct me if
I'm wrong. But I've been doing some homework on this

(01:32:14):
because I've been on a few podcasts and there's like
like numismatists in the comments and whatnot. But um, the
first okay, the first mixed gold and silver coin was
sometime in the seventh century BC, and the first gold
coin was not long after. I think it was like

(01:32:35):
they were both Lydian kings, like one after another. Anyway,
I just wanted to hit that because someone said I
got wrong earlier. But um uh, these coins were kind
of the first widely used sort of retail means of
settling debts, like at the point of sale between people.

(01:32:59):
So it wasn't just an accounting system. It was an
elaborate credit system with no circulating means of payment. It
was a circulating money. Now and it's getting around um
based on military conquest. Military conquest in the excellent age
spread the use of coins much wider than the domestic
spheres in which they were first minted. Yeah, and I

(01:33:21):
think we should like just just to talk about it
about like roughly when this is like you know like
if if if you go back, I mean this this
is slightly later, but one of the huge sort of
like like the periods where like the entire Mediterraneans using coinage,
right is you know you're this this is this is
when you're dealing with you're sort of like classical Greek
like you have you have your gree your Greeks and
your Persians, and you have your sort of like Athens

(01:33:42):
and sparta Um and that those guys are very much uh,
they're engaged in this thing that Graver calls the the
military industrial coinage slavery complex, the military industrial coinage complex. Yeah,
and I yeah, I think he has slavery on the
end because it's yeah, it's it's this giant sort of places,
giant warfare system. Right, these are like like Athens is

(01:34:02):
an empire, right, they run around, they steal, they see
people's gold, this golden silver byance, and they like have
slaves that work in this this whole sort of light
like this. Yeah, you get the system of empire that
is like what the actual ages sort of defined by. Yeah. Yeah,
And it's like whereas previously, like so precious medals did circulate,
but they weren't in coin form, and they were more

(01:34:24):
as like a bulk means of payment stored from one
temple to the next, almost as if they are central banks,
but central banks don't exist yet, and actual actual age
coinage system gave rise to the more much more sophisticated
medieval coinage system. And I'm going breezily through this because um,
there's a lot there, but several years, there's several thousands

(01:34:48):
years they're passing in a few minutes here, so um,
bear with me. But there are there now in the Mediva,
Medieval and Renaissance times, not only do we have the
coin is circulating, but we also have credit instruments um
which uh are being submitted, transferred, transmitted rather between banks uh,

(01:35:12):
between banks in different countries and territories that are saying, hey,
you don't even need to based on what is written
on this piece of paper, I already know you're good
for it. I will dispense with the coins uh that
I have in my bank because this paper signifies that
they you're good for it, basically, and so that greatly

(01:35:35):
speeds things up in terms of UM settling commerce debts
and and uh settling bills between different UM states. So
but going through all this history, the point of it
is that at every at every sort of step of
the way, you see, okay, there's a lot of different

(01:35:56):
types of money. They're circulating and they're being exchanged against
one another, and there also seems to be a domestic
sphere and international sphere. The international means of payment, which
is a analytic category that um I and my co
author John Michael Cloone thought up, is kind of sort
of sets the tune as far as what uh, what

(01:36:22):
kind of hierarchy of money, if you will, develops in
each of these ages. So like in the prior to
the Axle Age, there were both there was bulk settlements
from one temple to the next in terms of silver
although it wasn't coins, it was just UM like bullion
basically UM, and then and then later it was coins,

(01:36:44):
and then later it was bills of exchange, and then
after a while there emerged gold standards UM that existed
between nations, and they had central banks eventually, which UM
hoarded goal old not because not just because they are
fetishizing it or something something basic like that, but rather

(01:37:06):
because it was the established international means of payment. And
if you either you need that or you need something
that is easily transferable into that in order to conduct
your trade, especially if you're developing country or um A
otherwise like an upstart state of some type. Now today

(01:37:29):
we're in a dollarized world. The dollar is the international
means of payment from one onwards the M M T story, Yeah,
I mean that's basically true. The E then the for
the US government as the issuer the sole issue of
the dollar, which is a fiat currency which is not

(01:37:50):
backed by anything UM. Yeah, you can make as much
of that as what you want. You could make, you
can create and spend into existence as need dollars as
the US government wants, and then delete it from existence
by taxing it away. And that makes perfect sense totally
acknowledged that. But there's some problems nonetheless in terms of

(01:38:12):
how they apply that into a more general theory, because
it's like, can you, okay, you can make as much
of your own money, what about other types of money
from the perspective of a US state craft interested individual,
Like why would you care about other people's money? Basically,

(01:38:33):
if you're just the full sole source of the of
the US dollar, which happens to also be the international
means of payment, of course you wouldn't are if you're like, say,
to Tunisia. The Tunisian dollar is accepted almost nowhere as payment. Yeah,
And and one one of the big things, I mean,
it's not the soul driver and people start for emphasize this.

(01:38:54):
I'm going to caveat this immediately because people will yell
at me. But like, one of one of the very
important things about the dollar is that the dollar is
what you can buy oil in. And this is extremely
important because if you are a society in the world,
you need oil. Um, this is basically universally true. And
and this you know, but and the fact that you

(01:39:14):
need to buy oil, and and the fact that you
need to buy a lot of other things that are
manufactured in the US means you have to find some
way to get U S dollars. Now, again, the US doesn't.
This doesn't matter for the U S because we can
just make them. Well okay, a, this is another thing.
This stuff gets very weird and convoluted very quickly. Um.
But the essentially the US can just sort of make

(01:39:37):
this money technically speaking as a federal reserve. And there's
all of this just incredibly convoluted finance stuff. But yeah,
the the US like doesn't the US does not have
to worry about obtaining U S dollars. You could just
do it. But you know, yeah, if if you're if
you're if you're I don't know if true Trenisia, if
you're Denmarks an example, Yeah, den Mark. Yeah, like you
you you need to find a way to get US

(01:39:59):
dollars because you need to have stuff, you need to
use US dollars to buy it. Mhm. Yeah. And so
in our national context, this is after all of the
history I just went through, since about or so when
we went off the gold standard. Um, we have a
system of central banks dominated by the dollar, and the
dollar represents about of settlement of all trade and the

(01:40:25):
next five or so currencies are plus the US account
for like a d of all trade, so there's really
just a few currencies which dominate everything, with the US
being outsized among them. And when you look at the
historical record, this is like very similar to other forms

(01:40:47):
of international means of payment, where it's like, okay, I
either need to have the one that's at the top,
or failing that, one of the other sort of reserve currencies,
even though that that that terminology didn't really exists prior
to about eighty years ago. Um. But yeah, so like
if you don't if it's not gold, then okay, it's

(01:41:08):
the US dollar, So we need dollars or we either
need to be printing dollars because we're the U S
or for not them, then we need to get into
either U S Dollar or the yen or the euro
or one of the major trading currencies. And um, like China,
China does a lot of trade with the US and

(01:41:28):
they sell things to us, We give them dollars. They're rational,
they put their dollars into treasuries to gain a little
bit of a return instead of just holding the dollars
themselves for no return. Do we explain I guess what
a treasury is because yeah, sorry, Uh, the treasury bill
is if you receive dollars, you can use them to
purchase what's called a treasury note or a treasury bill

(01:41:50):
and notes too. So if you ever hear something to
talk about tea notes, that that's what this is. Yeah.
So it's a way to learn. It's like moving from
your checking to your savings account essentially. So if you
have just dollars in a bank, it doesn't earn hardly anything.
If you're in a saving if you go into the
savings account, which is basically the treasury the treasury bills,
you'll learn a little more and you'll learn dollars. You

(01:42:11):
won't earn reminity from them. You'll learn more dollars and
dollars for the international means of payments. So that's good. Yeah.
So so like basically like there's the US government puts
out a bond and like you buy it and then
when when whatever it like expires or there's like a
ten year team note that people talk about that's like
years you buy it and yeah, it'll give it'll give

(01:42:32):
you like a certain amount of dollars like later on
that is more than what you paid for it HM exactly,
So you'll learn a little bit of interest over time,
and then you may earn like a little lump sum
when it matures in in the future. So China has
tons of dollars. It's part of a huge strategy that
they have in order to manage their foreign their foreign

(01:42:55):
currency reserves or what's called for X. So for X
is the that's the term. We're going to use a
lot um. That just is the foreign currency reserves you
have on hand in order to pay for things that
are only available for sale in currencies that you can't
make yourself. Okay. So you know you have this question

(01:43:17):
of like why do we care about this? Right, Like
why do we people who want to make the world
better care about this? And the answer is, okay, take
take take your hypothetical scenario, your your Your hypothetical scenario
is the scenario in which like a a a bunch
of workers in alliance with like tribal confederations have taken
Vancouver Island, right, and they've set up a new They've

(01:43:39):
they've set up a new government that they have worked
out sovereignty arrangements. Things have happened. You now have a
new you have you have a new sort of entity
that that is in Vancouver Island. Um. Yeah, so so
immediately you have you have both you have both resources
and you have problems. Right. You have a certain amount
of resources that on Vancouver Island, right, you have you know,

(01:44:02):
you have like you have literally like what what you
have the things that are on the island. Right. You
have cars, you have like probably some yaches you've managed
to like steal you have you know, you have you
have shops, you have production facilities, you have extremely large
number of very good Chinese restaurants. Uh you have trees. Trees, yeah,

(01:44:26):
you know restaurants. I mean also it's true like I yeah,
my my my family spent a lot of time like
specifically going going to Vancouver Island just to eat Chinese food. Uh. Yeah,
you know, and say say like, let' let's say you've
taken Vancouver Island and you you expand out and you
now have like a swath of Canada, right that that
is that is that is now sort of been liberated,
and you know, you have you have you have a
lot of resources. You have sort of timber, you have

(01:44:49):
I don't know, maybe you have coal, maybe you have
other stuff you have, you have, and you also have
a lot of people and yeah, you have a lot
of labor and and those people have a lot of skills,
they have a lot of education, they have like you know,
they have, they have, they have, they have a belief
that you can make the world a better place. And
I think this is where you know, this is this

(01:45:12):
is the arena in which MMT can sort of explain
what you're doing next. Mhm Yeah. So you have this um,
you have a territory, this undergone revolutionary change, and you
have biophysical resources that are in it and biophysical resources
that could be in it. And you have and you

(01:45:34):
also have the social technology of money. Some of the
money you can just make yourself. Other moneys you cannot
um M m T in the is applicable in the
sense that it says in this scenario. I think the
most the way MMT is most acclicable is to say
everyone can be employed. Who wants to be employed, Yeah,

(01:45:56):
there's they're the One of their principal ideas is a
job you're in a federal job guarantee. And it could
be applied just as easily conceptually in this situation. It says,
UM there's nothing preventing a revolutionary government of some type, um,
not necessarily a states, but any any non state type
of administration from setting up something sort of like a

(01:46:20):
central bank to make its own money, to martial domestic resources,
domestic in terms of within its own territory, and to
get everyone everyone who wants to be employed, to be
employed and to be paid for their work. Like not
to be too vulgar, but like why why this is

(01:46:40):
stuff is important? This monetary theory in this history is like,
people want to be paid for their work. They're not
going to go inviter things. They want to get paid. Yeah,
And I think this is something that like you know,
if if if if you look at sort of like
the thing that gets held up was like the classic
example of an anarchist revolution, right is is what happens
in Spain necinety six. And if if if you look

(01:47:02):
at what they do right like very almost immediately after
the revolution, what happens is you have basically like a
union of all of the bank workers, and those guys
take over all the banks, um, and you you have
you have the individual work like workers in different unions
starts seizing, they start seasing the factories that start seizing
like the trains. And once they've done that, they start

(01:47:24):
just pulling all of their resources into you know, like
in into like they have they they now have this
like they have they have the banking union. The banking
union is is that the sort of sexual body that
has resources that can distribute it. And you know what
what what MMT is essentially saying is like, yeah, so
as long as what you're moving around is the resources
that you have in your territory, like you can just

(01:47:45):
create money in order to do that, and you can
sort of you know, and you can use this to
get people to do certain things. And like you know,
the Catalonians, like they they the equals if one's wages,
for example, I mean, it would be better if we
equalize everyone's wages. I do agree with that. Yeah, well,
you know, I mean they did do with a lot
of other stuff that's like okay, so like they get
rid of a lot of jobs that are like sort

(01:48:07):
of managerial stuff or like just bullshit jobs they just
kind of eliminate and yeah, and you know, and this
this frees up people to like do stuff that actually
matters and is real instead of sort of dislike this
sort of bureaucratic hierarchy that's above them. And yeah, but
and I think the other thing they do that's that's
very important for our sort of scenario for us talking
about money is that like they they immediately start like

(01:48:30):
they start seizing gold and they start seizing you know,
like they start seasing foreign currency. And yeah, and I
think that this this is where we can get into
where where I guess MP doesn't work because m T
like it's it's it's it doesn't. It doesn't really think
much about the fact that like, Okay, you have Vancouver Island,

(01:48:51):
you have a part of like Canada, right, there is
a lot of resources that you don't have. Absolutely, Yeah,
that's that's that's gonna be a lot of why foreign
exchange matters so much as that, you know, you inevitably
you think, what if we just made an autartic society.

(01:49:13):
That's sorry, that's a little I probably jump got a
little bit there. What if we just made everything ourselves?
What if we made a society that was fully economically independent. Um,
that's what autarchy tends to be used to mean. And
the answer to that is because that sucks. The problem
with it is that it sucks like you, you don't

(01:49:35):
want to be trying to manage an autartic society on
multiple grounds, uh, not least of which is that I mean,
we've we've we've seen societies try to do it, and uh,
you know, we me, me and Steve could go for
hours and hours and hours talking about historical precedents of
previous economic systems, many of which did try to be autartic,

(01:49:57):
because that was something that monarchy has liked a lot,
was the idea that their their kingdom could be fully independent.
Because the thing is that when you're economically independent, that
means that you've got a certain amount of security, of
international security. Uh. And there's kind of a trade off
where the more stuff that you're reliant on importing, the
more vulnerable you are to the people you're importing and

(01:50:19):
screwing you. But it's just so massively difficult to be
a good producer of every possible good. Yeah, and and
this and this is this is true even if you
have an annoyance amount of resources, like I think, you know,
we can talk about one case study of this, which
is socialist period China, and you know, social spirit China.
They they have they they they're they're getting resources, and

(01:50:43):
especially the early periods, you're getting some resources from like
Hong Kong, they're getting some stuff from the Soviets. But
you know they get into like Mao famously does not
like markets. Um, this is a this is the thing
that is known about Mao, and so Mao is like, Okay,
We're like no, we're going to shut off the sort
of like ket system that we that we've been running
sort of through Hong Kong. And then you know, China

(01:51:05):
have been getting technology transfers and aid from the USSR.
But you know, the US are in China got into
a bunch of political fights and the US are like
pulls out all of advisors and you know China, China
has an enormous amount of resources, right, they have a
large population, they have they have just an enormous geographic mass,
and so they basically try to you know, build into

(01:51:28):
target society and they try to sort of just okay,
well we'll just what does martial our resources and we'll
just sort of like, well, we'll plan a way out
of it. And they run into this problem, which is
that there is actually things that they need from other countries,
which is technology, and they hit this thing I've talked
about before, which is, uh, like they basically get this bottle,
this production bottleneck where it's like, well, okay, so in
order to produce more industrial goods, than need more food.
But the problem is, in order to produce more food

(01:51:49):
to support a large urban population, uh, you need more
industrial goods, right, You need your like fertilizers, need your
tractors and need stuff like that, and you know, and
once they're cut off from sort of the rest of
the world from through Hong Kong, and for the U. S.
S R. They don't have what they you know, they're
they're sort of they're sort of scrambling to figure out
how we do this. And their solution is a greatly forward,

(01:52:10):
which is essentially we're we're we're gonna just bust through
this whole thing, and we're gonna do it by forcing
everyone to work for like an absolutely enormous like increase
in hours. Right Like, We're we're gonna we're gonna have
peasants working in the fields literally until they collasse some exhaustion,
and it just doesn't work. It is a it is
a epocal failure. There are millions of people die from
famines and you know, and the sort of the response

(01:52:32):
to this is that, like is that China eventually ends
up like winds up opening its economy again. Yeah and
yeah and yeah, and like you know, and this is
the thing, like if if China, which has like just
just an astounding breath of natural resources, can't pull this off,
like it's probably just not a good idea because it's like, yeah, well,

(01:52:53):
I mean we even have like a very you know,
a very contemporary example that you know, makes they will
make certainly makes my blood, boy, and I'm sure we
will make some of the listeners blood boil. The vaccines, uh,
you know, the realistically, you know, the the coronavirus is
fund is a more or less is an incredible threat

(01:53:13):
to basically adding every state on the planet at this point.
And the really really chemical and biomedical research is done
in just a handful of places on the planet. Uh.
And there have been attempts to create vaccines outside of
those places, and they have been somewhat successful, but it

(01:53:33):
has been difficult, and most places are just not in
a position to create a to develop their own competing technology. Uh.
And even China struggled with creating their own competing vaccination technology.
And I'm not at all a bio biology expert, understand
it's a not quite a sufficient vaccine, the sinovac. But

(01:53:57):
at the end of the day, this is like South
Africa not developing their own independent vaccine. That's a quite
sophisticatedicated economy. All of all the very South American countries
could have pulled their resources together in theory, but it's
so hard to turn a dime and develop from scratch
a primary research industry. Uh, it's so difficult, and it's

(01:54:18):
so not worth it. It's you know, if you have
trade relations with a country that has technology developments in
a field that you really care about, it's just not
really worth it. Like we don't the United States doesn't
really compete with several sort of forms of Japanese technology
because it's just not worth the bother. Uh. Just let

(01:54:40):
Korea and Japan handle that for US, and we buy
it and they accept our our four x they accept
our dollars. But you know, let's say you're the Philippines, Yeah,
how are you going to get those? And uh, this
is this is now international trade and international politics. And
if we're creating our now independent Vancouver Island, we have

(01:55:02):
now entered into this territory, we have now entered into
international politics and international trade. Yeah, and and this this
is an arena that's fraud in a lot of ways
because it's it's you know, as you've sort of been
talking about, right, it's it's not just that you need.
It's not sing that you need for XP. It's like example,
like you know, if you have you have your sort

(01:55:23):
of like you know, you you you you have your
new society and like Vancouver, right mack you violence, you
know you need the thing you need mostly is dollars.
And this is this is a real problem because this
requires you to have something that you can turn into dollars.

(01:55:43):
And you know, okay, so you're you're going to have
some amount of dollars that are just there right from
from when you see society. There's there's assets you can
sort of just sell off that like okay, like do
we really need this yacht? Like okay, we can, we
can we can sell this for some amount of dollars.
But this becomes a real economic problem because you need
to produce something that you can exchange for dollars, and

(01:56:07):
you know, there's there's a pretty good chance that like
whatever sort of new currency whatever new sort of like
MMT currency that's like, oh, it's it's controlled because we're producing.
It moves our resources around. We can make a bustment
as we want, Like yeah, you have to actually be
able to look convert that into dollars. And you know
why why does the U? Y is the US going
to want your currency? Yeah, it's a bit dialectical because

(01:56:31):
you have to. Okay, you have your m m T currency,
which domestically is accepted because of text receive ability or
something uh or or national fervor if you will to
um create a new democratic confederalists society um, and that's
accepted there. But yeah, you need US sellars. So like

(01:56:54):
you need us sellars. But why do you need them?
Partly because like you eventually want to not need them. Yeah,
and so you have what you can You have assets
right now that you can just sell, so that's one way,
but long term you can't do that. So you need
to have cash flow over the long haul that allows
you to buy what are called capital goods, which are

(01:57:18):
is a fancy term for machines that make machines or
machines that make some sort of like in product, which
is a physical thing. It's not like a service or something.
And um, you want to classic like really classic economic
development advice that is actually pretty good is you want

(01:57:41):
to move up what's called a value chain and eventually
be not producing, um, just like a stable crop or something,
but doing really innovative advanced technology things later on. So
you like, here's where I am, here's what I have,
Here's what I could have. Though, how do I get there? Um,
part of of part of the formula to get there

(01:58:02):
is yes, acquiring for X, but it's other things like saying,
how do I cultivate political alliances that will yield trade
partners such that I have a stable flow of for
X and uh, maybe even technology transfers you know, or
something down the line which could be a game changer. Um,
you need to have an education system. Like if you're

(01:58:25):
a fan of the economist Torstin Veblen, he thought like
in his mind he thought the economic development was ultimately
from the human intellect and like everything was downstream of that.
So like you need to have money to um, you
can use your m M T money to create a
basic education system and you can augment it with buying

(01:58:45):
importing things that you can't yet make and using it
to create like a university or something which can do
R and D work. Um, you have to you have
to find tools to get enough of the money that
you can't just infinitely produce for X in order to
augment what your society can produce beyond what initially could

(01:59:11):
and show essentially that you, okay, I can make a
better mouse trap like I. I don't need to. I
don't need donations from well meaning imperial powers or something.
We're building what we need in order to move up
the value chain and then build out our productive capacity

(01:59:31):
in such a way that, um, it doesn't leave anyone behind.
Everyone is everyone's employed because we're doing the classic M
M T stuff on the home front, such as a
job guarantee, but we're also doing the international economic development
stuff of assiduationally monitoring our foreign foreign currency reserves and
then using them to import things that we cannot yet

(01:59:54):
make but can make things internally and then have a
a snowballing effect as far as being able to sell
even higher value things which UM to our trade partners
who are hopefully share our values of like democratic confederalism
or whatever you whatever you're chosen guidelines are yeah, and

(02:00:17):
this is something that like, this is something that that
becomes very difficult in like the current market. You know,
this is this is to some extent like why the
Cold War went the way it did, right, which is
that you know, once once you have the Zinosovie explant,
and once you have like you have Chinese and Russian
troops killing each other on the border um China, it

(02:00:38):
like enters the situation where it's like, well, okay, so
we still want to do economic developments, but we've lost
the Soviet unions as a typology as a way to
get to knowledgy transfers, and their solution to that was
to ally with the U S. And this is like
it works out for the Chinese economy. It is an
apocal disaster for like literally everyone else on earth because

(02:01:00):
it means that capitalism is the thing that wins the
Cold War. And and this means that like you know,
I mean like if you look if you look at
how you know, like the things that China are doing
in order to be able to get technology transfers for
the US. It's like like there's so there there are
joints like Chinese CIA like operations inside of China that

(02:01:20):
are like monitoring Soviet missile site. So there's just like
CIA app post just like in China that are just
you know, doing spying. Like for for the U. S. Government.
There's like they invade Vietnam, which is you know, and
it's such as the invade neenomen's like they've made Vietnam
and then they fight this like this really you know,
the immediate war just last that long, but they fight

(02:01:41):
this like horrible border war that goes on for like
a decade that kills enormous numbers of people, and you know,
and the end result of this is like yeah, like
you know, trying to get the signalogy transfers and they
developed economy, but everyone else on Earth, yeah, because is
like everyone who's ever tried to be a labor organizer
in like you know, and like how Salvador gets murdered

(02:02:03):
by a bunch of fascists and every development econ is
so fucking frustrating because every single step of the way,
there's like there's like a really razor thin line between
risk and reward at every step of the way. And
so like imperial powers will dangle technology transfers or extended
trade agreements on some favorable terms in exchange for allowing

(02:02:28):
them to just like go to war with your neighbors,
like or rope you into it, or or extract resources
that would be value for you later in your development phases. Yeah. Actually,
uh this leads to me, um, you know, going to
our hypothetical here thinking about Vancouver Island, the People's Republic
of Vancouver Island, and we can kind of talk about

(02:02:50):
some of development traps because that's kind of what I'm
was turning through my head right now because I'm looking
at the Wikipedia page for Vancouver Island. Is that incredibly
deep research, and so what they listen under the economy
is there's a tech sector, logging, fishing, tourism, and food um.
And so you know we're talked first about like you
could like sell off like the yachts and the cars

(02:03:12):
and stuff like that. Uh, and that's I don't even
know if that counts as a sector of the economy
at that level. That's a yeah, you can start sale.
But you know, logging and fishing, those are those are
pretty solid primary sector economies, you know, you know, to
that describe the terminology, you know, they've got this. This

(02:03:33):
is part of that hierarchy that Steve was talking about
that you know, the chain of development, and a primary
sector is like a basic extractive element of your economy
a mine, uh, logging, phishing, food production, you know, basic goods.
And then you know, you talk about a secondary development,
which is like manufacturing in the territiary, which is you

(02:03:54):
know services. Those are kind of your basic Those are
usually considered like sectors of the economy, but in a
way they kind of correspond to development um and they
require different amounts of developments. And you know the thing
about primaries that everybody needs those things, Like unless people
just stop using wood for construction, which we are very
far from doing. We still use a lot of wood

(02:04:16):
for construction. Uh, your logging industry is going to have
buyers um until people stop buying eating fish. Your fishing
industry is going to have buyers. Yeah, up to a
really ludicrously bottomless reserve. But you're gonna be stopped on
that secondary industry until you have capital. Like I don't
mean just like the sense of having a lot of money,
but you know the right money, and well, you need capital.

(02:04:40):
Production need capital, you need the machine, you need, you
need major factories, you need your need yeah. Uh, and
wealthy countries partly in order to maintain their powers they
have they they want to be the only seller of
capital kids. Yeah, and and they're gonna be very withholding
about it. Like a really good example for right now,

(02:05:02):
I like all of the inflation stuff going on, like
the chip shortage. Yeah, so the machines that make the
machines that make the chips, Holy sh it, those are
like those are they only make like fifty of those
a year? Yeah, and it's all two companies. Yeah, you know,
the thing with the thing with the chip shortage. Right.

(02:05:23):
It's also like so if you can be like the
people who do that, that gives you a lot of
economic power. Like this is this is one of Taiwan's things, right,
which is that like you know, it's like, okay, so
why hasn't Taiwan just sort of been bowled over by
by China? And like, I mean, there's a lot of
sort of geopolitical reasons for them. It's also partly it's
just that like, yeah, like Taiwan has this enormous chipmaking
industry and it's incredibly advanced, and you know, it has

(02:05:46):
like you know this this is I think and everything
that that that's a real problem for sort of revelation
society doing this is that like yeah, like Taiwan's chip
making economy, like it's not like people like fall in
like vats of chemicals like a lot, like there's a
lot of there's a lot like just horrible sort of
labor application. And then this comes back to even you're

(02:06:08):
sort of like like you know, if you're talking about
your your sort of primary primary sector stuff in the economy,
which is that like okay, well yeah, I mean like
oils particularly example of this, but like you know, same
with timber, and same same with fishes, like these are
extractive industries, and this becomes a real problem for a
lot of your sort of like newly revolutionary developing societies
because you get this tension between um like and you

(02:06:31):
see this a lot in Latin America's like this is
there's a huge tension like this Simplivia for example, he
se as an Ecuador two where like you have different
factions of do you have different factors of the political
movements where you have people who are like okay, yeah,
I'm I'm okay with just like you know, building these
highways through indigenous land or just like doing massy forestation
or like doing doing open pit mining, and those people

(02:06:53):
will be like, those people will be leftist right there.
People are like, Okay, well we need to do this
because we need to like you know, this is an
antipoverty measure. We have to be at the value chain,
we have to increase your production. But then you know
you have the indigenous people who's like, homes these are right, Yeah, yeah,
you can rationalize, yeah, the intellectual backing. Yeah, and like
and this this happens like in in China too. There's
like like a lot of the interstation has been absolutely devastating,

(02:07:16):
like and and and this this becomes a real like
the fact that you need for REX becomes this like
incredible trap that that you you sink into because it's like,
on the one hand, like, yeah, like there are resources
that you need in order to have a function anxiety,
but it's also that that you can't get in your territory.

(02:07:37):
But also like the cost of getting that for REX
is enormous and and a lot of times it's it's
it's it's a it's something that just simply destroys the
revolutionary project. Well it hit me when I looked at
this list of Vancouver's economic sectors was uh, you know,
tourism being listed among the big ones in my mind

(02:07:57):
immediately into Cuba two pre revolution, precastro Cuba, and your
precast Cuba has all these things going for it. Off
when you're when you're looking at from like a developmental standpoint,
you know, it's got this like very good productive base
of primary resources like sugar. Uh. It has great relations
with the United States of America, particularly through the mafia. Uh. Yeah, wonderful, right,

(02:08:21):
it has, Uh, the tourism industry is very successful. It's
producing manufactured cigar, so it even has a secondary industry bridge,
but is still absolutely failing to develop in a way
that is meaningful for the people living in Cuba. You know,
pre pre castro Cuba was a nightmare for most people. Uh.

(02:08:41):
And that's you know that, that's like Steve said, you know,
there's this razor thin thing between risk and reward. And
during that, you know, during the fourties and fifties in Cuba,
it was just it just made so much sense to
just stick with this impoverty, extractive tourists, heavy mafia friendly economy.

(02:09:03):
And yeah they were friends with the US. They could
have gone technology transfers in principle, but were they actually
going to h And I's something we have to think
about with our our people's republic of Vancouver Island, is
you know, yeah, like people are going to want our logs,
people are gonna want our fishing. American tourists are going
to come here and go whale watching and that's gonna

(02:09:24):
bring in forex. But are we gonna be able to
like leverage that and how leg Yeah? Yeah, And I
kind of want to move the conversation to like I
think people might be listening and saying like, Okay, yeah,
I can see why far actually be important, but like,
what are the specific ways in which we can acquire
it but also manage it? And it's like, okay, well

(02:09:46):
without which we want without tell being socialists who want democracy? Um, okay,
So I think if we're I'm I'm picturing some sort
of a sim Belie structure taking shape because I'm a
lipsock Libertrian socialist. Um and uh it could be something else,

(02:10:09):
but any case, Uh, I think they should appoint fifty
or so people, some of them experts, some of them
not two examine. They should do a thorough economic analysis
of the entire island, and you should do it on
the basis of here are the assets we have, Here's
where we want to go in terms of assets, how

(02:10:32):
do we get from here to there? And one of
the assets that you have is, okay, we have so
many U S dollars, we have so many Canadian dollars,
we have reserve balances. So we need to import things.
We can make some of it ourselves. We need to
buy the rest of it. We can't buy all of
it now. We need to cash flow some of this.

(02:10:53):
We need to We need to do export led growth.
As the developed the classic development ECON people would say,
where we say, we have some industries where we can
gradually and consistently ramp up to the point that they
give They give us the types of money which we
need in order to input capital goods. The machines that

(02:11:16):
build machines two, buy them, learn how to use them
and maintain them, and then build more ourselves. Ideally and
over the course of say, basically, I'm basically suggesting that
Vancouver Island should have a ten year plan. They should

(02:11:37):
have a ten year plan for further economic development, and
it should be as democratically decided upon as possible within
the limits of like Okay, there's some experts which will
obviously be needed and not everyone can do that. But um,
whatever assembly structure you have should be given oversight ultimately

(02:11:59):
and you should say, um, just be really frank with it,
Like we have these are biophysical resources. Now in ten
years they should be this in order to get there,
each year, these things need to happen. We have to
have this much foreign currency, we have to have this
many workers involved in this industry. Um, we can change

(02:12:22):
things along the way, but we're constrained by these factors
where like we need trade partners, we need uh two
reverse engineers, some technology that we've acquired or something in
order to to educate ourselves on how to create chips
or something in the future. UM yeah, there's like there

(02:12:46):
should be like an extremely vigorous discussion of what assets
do we have, what do we need, what's our goal
and then thread together a development plan from there and
then use your m m T money to marshal the
resources that you currently have and that you need for
like the next year, say domestically, while monitoring and augmenting

(02:13:08):
your foreign currency reserves and um, using the tools of
monetary policy to safeguard those reserves and economize on them
in order to import what you can't yet make so
that you can make it in the future. I think
the thing that we should learn from the fact that
like a lot of these projects haven't worked is well,

(02:13:32):
I think it's twofold. One is that you have okay,
there there there's constant sort of like there's traps you
have to avoid that have to do with like, for example,
like who actually has access to the forex because this
is what this is a way that like you know,
and also like because it's it's very very easy to
like access to sort of like incidentally redeveloped ruling classes

(02:13:54):
when you're trying to do playing technology stuff and when
you're trying when you're dealing with enormous amounts of foreign currency,
and this is a problem and you know. And in
the second problem has to do with sort of like
how how how do you make sure that your economy
essentially doesn't end up as a resource colony and this
has this has other components and you know, and I
think I think this is something that like like there

(02:14:16):
is a lot that can be done if you control
like a regid of territory but there's there's political limits
on it. And the political limits have to do with
you know, who actually controls the sort of like vast
majority of resources and technology. And the only way to
really deal with that is that like, you know, you

(02:14:38):
can't you can't sort of have like you if if
if you want to actually have sort of long term stability,
you can't just have your sort of like your your
like libertary and social counsels in one country. I guess
it's a it's a thing that has to like keep
moving and keep spreading because otherwise it becomes it becomes
just increasingly difficult, and you come under increasing pressures, you know,
for you know, in order to do things that you

(02:15:00):
be that you need to do in order to make
sure people don't starve, in order to make sure that
people have educations, to make sure that people you know,
are able to sort of live with their lives, and
also like in order to make sure that you don't
just annihilate the annihilate the entire environment doing this, because
that's something that happens a lot when in these developmental
estates is that like, you know, you get you you
know you you you get groups who are like come

(02:15:21):
in the power and are like, well, okay, we're like
we're gonna be an ecological regime, and then you know,
they wind up having to they wind up doing oil
extraction and like well prepit mining, because that's you know,
that that's the easiest way to to get money. And
I think I think, like I I think it's it's

(02:15:41):
valuable that like, these are things that if you're serious
about taking power, you have to think about. But I
also think it's it's important to keep in mind just
the the inherent limits that you have if you're just
sort of if you're if you're completely isolated, like if
you're a completely isolated referee street movement in one place,

(02:16:02):
it doesn't have people where that you can you know,
give stuff to and move stuff around between. Yeah, I mean,
it's it's it's always been kind. I mean, that's that's
been like a kind of inevitable thing that like, you know,
there are there are communes in my extended family. You know,
I've got members of my family who live on you know,

(02:16:22):
those little farm communes, and they're not fully economically independent. Um,
and I'm sure that we could find people who would
be willing to say, oh, you know this is like,
this is totally fake. This is not a real commune
because they you know sell uh, you know, sell sunflower
seeds at the farmers market and stuff. Uh. And that's

(02:16:46):
kind of the unfortunate. That's kind of like the tough
reality that unless you managed to create a truly global revolution,
as I said, unlet's until you've got like two thirds
of the population under your umbrella. Uh, you're going to
have foreign relations and you're going to have foreign trade,

(02:17:08):
which is going to uh, it's going to be it's
going to be difficult to manage. You know, you're going
to have to be both. You're going to have to
have like a you know, a diplomatic core. That's something
we're barely mentioning here, but like we're gonna need to
have diplomats coming out of this council if we're talking
about them having relations with the US and Canada. Uh,
and you're negotiating these trade deals. You know, these trade

(02:17:29):
deals don't happen out of nowhere. Um. And you know,
we kind of brushed this aside, but it's a it's
a bit of as a bit of a misperception that
people tend to have that the United States is pro
free trade in like an extreme sense that like any
trade of the United States is done without any tariffs.
Oh dead, No, I don't think that you if you

(02:17:53):
believe that without having done a lot of research, I
do not think that that is an absurd thing to believe,
because that is the propaganda that is passed along in
common knowledge. A very quick examination of how trade works
between international actors will reveal that there are thousands and

(02:18:13):
thousands and thousands of tariffs active all the time in
every trade to Yeah, and like the like the big
one with the US agricultural subsidies, which are just it
is it is it is illegal to have them. We
have like just in just like billions and billions of
billions of dollars agricultural subsidies that have producing cheap food.
That's like we're not even good at making it. Like

(02:18:35):
it's it's a complete disaster. It Let mean this like this,
this is just single handedly annihilated the economies of like
enormous swass of the globe because because no one can
compete with withoth American agri culture subsidies. And it's you know,
and and but like when when you join the free
trade system, like that's one of the carve outs. That
was that's that's that's in the w t O is
you can't have uh subsidies for for your culture programs

(02:18:55):
except for the US and it's it's great and I
mean food one dies. Well, there's all sorts of like
weird technical ways that you can create pseudo subsidies, you know. Uh.
You know, Italy very famously has a price floor on wine. Uh.
And this means that you know, if you if you
make a bottle of wine that nobody would buy for

(02:19:17):
the minimum price, the government will buy it off of
you for that price. And so there there are wineries
in Italy that just produced wine at such a this
so bad nobody would buy nobody you would have to
pay people to drink it. But the government just buys
it at this minimum set price and then throws it
enough in a giant Olympic swimming pool that uh to
go rot uh And like there are yeah, there there there.

(02:19:40):
The trade is, you know, there's a lot more complex.
The free trade is kind of a meth at the
international level. Uh. It is at it's at the most cynical.
Free trade as a doctrine is a cudgel used by
more powerful countries that they impose that you have to
do free trade with um and that they get to

(02:20:01):
do protract and trade with you. Well, it's a it's well, firstly,
like you mentioned, it's a myth. And historically speaking, we
had like, we had infant industries in this country that
we're highly protected from the verily earliest days through most
of the nineteenth century and into this one century, and

(02:20:21):
we had uh, we had expert lead growth from infant
lead for infant industries in the US. And that's precisely
the opposite advice we now turn around and give via
our imperial like apparatus from the I m F and
the World Bank to developing counts and like countries. Countries

(02:20:43):
that that examined what the US was telling them to
do and did the opposite. Are the ones that succeeded. Yes,
like South Korea said no, funk that, and there they
went up the value chain and they did all of
the things that we said Vancouver Island should do basically, yeah,
except except not being evil. They did not do that.
They were evil. They were evil for a time, and

(02:21:05):
they were dictatorial, but in terms of their economic development
plan divorced from political reality, which is probably naive of
me to say, um, they took the opposite advice of
the I m F in terms of that narrow scope. Well, yeah,
I think the other thing that's kind of important here
that I haven't really touched on yet, is it, like
so part part of part of what was going on
with with South Korea's economy is that South Korea's economy

(02:21:26):
was was a war economy, and it was a war
economy designed to build I mean, originally just it was
it was war economy because they were finding a war, right,
But then it became this i mean ess central access
of sort of the corruction of the Korean War, and
that it became this access that like it became a
huge part of the American sort of arms industry in
in Vietnam. And this is the sending that Japan has

(02:21:46):
this too, where both these economies are like a huge
part of the reason why they're able to develop is
because they get enormous amounts of just money and the
guaranteed contract and stuff like that from American military development.
And this is a this is another really big problem
for like you're sort of free state that like you've
created like whatever you're sort of like Council Republic, you're
like if on the zone, you're like indigenous confederation. Is

(02:22:08):
that like you need weapons and the people who make
guns are like the US and Russia And this is
a really you know and and you know, we've we've
been talking on this show about about producing like three
D point weapons, but I mean, you know, in terms
of things like you know, you're like artillery, right, like

(02:22:31):
k of your mortars and like things like that, were like,
you know, you you can't. You can't three D prints
the best of my knowledge, And I'm like ent sure
about this that like unless you had extremely advanced facilities,
and even then it's not clear. Like I I like,
I don't think anyone on Earth has ever pred three
D printed like an anti aircraft rocket, like you can
you can you know, you can't make you can't make stingers,

(02:22:52):
you can't make man pads. You can't make like anti
tank anti aircraft weapons. Not to get too much into it,
but like the way in which Ukraine is fighting like
Russian tanks and it's very specifics is kind of encouraging. Actually, yeah,
but like because you feel like the like specific yeah,
I mean there's only a few companies for making the
components for these things. Yeah, it's a problem. And that's

(02:23:13):
that's like the personnel launched the in law or whatever things. Yeah,
like the anti taking and takers like if you can
get them, they're effective and they do they do stuffing
from by the US or the UK. Yeah, yeah, and
that's that's that's a huge problem if you're you know,
not trying to like be a political colony of these

(02:23:35):
two things. And and this this is another trap that
you see, like you see did Cares especially falling into,
which is that that they you know, Okay, so like
on the one hand, yeah, you do need weapons, right,
like you you need you need some kind of military complex,
and you need arms order to make sure that like
you know, you're not like the US doesn't rull tanks
across the border. But simultaneously, like there's there's a thing

(02:23:56):
that happens a lot with this is happticularly with Petro States,
where you know, okay, so the the the the US
is like, okay, so we need this oil, right, and
how how do you how do you deal with the
sort of balance payments ephas And the answer is we
just sell them like a hundred billion tanks and we
just like we just like dump f thirty fives on them,
and you can get into these scenarios where like you
get these like because I mean, the problem with weapons,

(02:24:18):
right it is like okay, so you need them to survive,
but they also they don't produce anything, right, in fact
that they're sort of they're sort of net economic negatives
because the only thing you could do with a gun
is I mean, I guess you could technically hunt, but
like you know that the thing you're doing with the
weapon is destroying value. Yeah yeah. And I mean and
then they were crying maintenance. Yeah yeah, Like these things
are substantial net negatives. Yeah, and and and you know,

(02:24:39):
and and countries get sucked into these traps. Were like
you know, okay, we're just gonna keep buying American weapons
because of security or like uh we we we want
to invade some other country. You're like, well, you know,
and you see this so hew weaponry to like back
back when that was the thing and today modern Russian
trap wheny where it's like you can you can get
funneled into these traps were like the ruling class of
your society just decides it's the thing that it wants

(02:25:01):
to spend his four X on his weapons, and you
have to be very very like you have to be
you know, and this is the thing that happens like
like Evner Hoax for example, famously like makes just a
bunch of bunkers, right and like militarized society and it's like, well,
you know, part of this is just Hoax being extremely weird,
but like, yeah, you have to be very careful when

(02:25:25):
your society that is genuinely under threat that you're not
sort of like just throwing all of your resources into
into stuff like that where you know, it doesn't it
doesn't pre us anything, but you know, and yeah, also
I mean this is it is a need like like
whatever the Vancouver Economic Planning whatever group should like one

(02:25:48):
of one of the objectives would frank would be military
of course, Yeah, um you need to. I don't know
if you could get your hands on in laws or
man pads or anything like that, but you, um, I
think you would be foolish frankly not too distribute and
train on weapons and stuff like that. Yeah, and that yeah, yeah,

(02:26:12):
like I think I think like, yeah, it's like you
have to use some of it for that and it
sucks because this is something that like this, this sucks
you into the arms complex, right, Yeah, Rose is using
its oil revenues um to fund its expenditure almost is
at least like in the last time I checked, was

(02:26:34):
to defense forces. Yeah, and like and a lot of that,
a lot of that came from dollars, euros and turkishly
right that they required to oil. Yeah, and like this
and this is the thing that like, yeah, this, this
is this is a problem if you're into your revolution
society surrounding people who just literally want to murder you,
or it's like stuff like this winds up happening and

(02:26:56):
you wind it like I don't blame them, Yeah, it's
like it's obviously it's like reality. Yeah, And I think
that's a you know that that that's a good example
of like what happens if the revolution doesn't spread and
if you get sort of like you get isolated, contained
by imperial powers who just want to murder to you,
is that you wind up, like you basically you want,

(02:27:19):
you wind up fighting an endless war against both the
proxy forces and the real forces of RBS that are
significantly large and more powerful than you. And yeah, and
there's a lot of times there's not much you can
do about it. But it's like I think, you know,
in terms of like like in the school of high principle,
like this is why internationalism is important. I mean yeah,
And of course obviously the other answer is, you know,
selling out on the revolution and you know, we we we.

(02:27:43):
You know that there's the example that people didn't think
about of Serritza. You know, Sursa gets elected on all
these like radical promises for Greece and then just doesn't
do any of them. Um. And then you can look
at say Nepal, and you know, the communist one in Nepal,
and then they establish a government that's functionally you know,
it's a liberal government. My my, my, my. My favorite

(02:28:05):
Nepal fact is that, Okay, so Nepol has like seventeen
different like Maoist factions, but the guy ahead of of
the of the largest Maoist faction, uh yeah, I think
it's him. Is he's the one who now lives in
the mansion of the guy who used to be the
Nepalese head of security. And it's like, uh, we've well

(02:28:25):
this is this, this has gone great. We've we've changed
the person in the mansion kind of yeah. And I
mean the and you know, uh, not too surprisingly. You know,
the second leader a couple about a year ago, Karen
was on the verge of declaring a new people's war
against the Maoist faction. Yeah, Maoist war against the malice.

(02:28:47):
Like yeah, I mean that's you know, you you you
end up. It's yeah, it's it's tricky to try to
like game it out, so to speak, because you know,
my I maybe I'm just squeamish. I am hoping for
things to not happen with the river of blood. Yeah,

(02:29:09):
in life, I hope that, uh, I hope that we
don't get rivers of blood. Um oh, plan plan for
war so you get you get peace. Yeah. Yeah, but
you like, like like Chris has said, you know, you
can get trapped into like that that escalating security dilemma. Uh.
And of course, you know, investing in security doesn't actually
necessarily to security. We have you know, over a century
of looking at Latin American countries that investments in the

(02:29:32):
military is just investments in the next civil war. Yeah,
or you get cooled, and then that's that's another problem. Like,
like I mean, it's weird because it's like it's a
double edged strey because like the twenty century, like there's
all there's a lot of like socialistic governments that come
into power just from military coups, but also like probably
more of those governments like get overthrown by their own coups.

(02:29:55):
And it's yeah, there's there was one lesson I learned
from playing Tropical It's good if you've tried to invest
more in your No matter how much you invest in
your military, it only will ever get you up to
surviving a coup. Yeah, don't have colonels and don't have generals. Yeah,

(02:30:16):
then then you get captain's cups. It's always colonels. Yeah,
there's always colonels. It's because they're like passed up for
general ship by the next administration or something. Yeah. Again again,
sometimes sometimes you do get like stumes as you get
like your pinochet, and so sometimes you do get your
captain's cups, and it's like this is a that goes

(02:30:36):
that's ambition right there when the cap is the government. Yeah. Well,
once your captains of hit fucket mode, it's a bad Yeah,
that's indicative of like bigger, deeper problems. Yeah. Well, I
think like the baths are an interesting example of this
because like, okay, like the Baptists were never like good,
but like, you know, the Bathists like originally like we're

(02:30:58):
kind of a mass movement, but then and increasingly, like
over time, as as they consult their power to the
military sort of revolutions, like it becomes increasingly just the
Baptists are powerful because they have control of like various
portions of the military, and you know, and like the
the the end result of this is like instead of
having revolutions like you just get you just get all
political power has nothing to do with whatever is happening

(02:31:19):
in the street. You get these giant protests that are
like we want to go back to being part of
the United the the United Republic, and it just doesn't
matter because the actual political power is just what happens
when the army fights itself. And yeah, I think like
there's no easy solution to that other than just like
don't have an armed body that's separate from just the

(02:31:40):
masses of people, which is difficult to do, but also
like or just armed the people somewhat. Yeah, and and
you know, it's means of violence should be more evenly distributed. Yeah,
I will say that was I guess part of why
the scenario we had started off with like you've declared
that people's republic, because the question how you get that
people's republic feels like that's of your podcast podcast episodes. Yeah, yeah,

(02:32:06):
you know, we've done, we've done, we've done, just like
a miracle has occurred, but like a revolution has occurred
and then I don't know, they like or something like
as I like to say, it's good to have a
plan for it if you win. Yeah, well, and I
like to win and then fumble once you've already gotten Yeah,
and this this this is something that like that actually
does happen a lot, which is like you get into that,

(02:32:29):
you get into these revolutionary like moments, but then there's
just sort of like no like no one has any
idea what to do next, and so they sort of
bungle it or you know, you get into scenarios, yeah,
or you get too revolution scenarios where like nobody's thought
about what happens next, and that that's that's another way
that like, yeah, these things class at the time, and

(02:32:50):
that's another way you get like you know, this this
isn't somethings like the whole of the sort of like
the trial and error of the point of the twentieth century,
which most of which is sort of and in an
error is that, you know, a bunch of people were
experimenting and a lot of stuff they tried didn't work,
and there are lots of reasons for that. But you like,
you have to in order to win, you have to
actually be serious about taking power, and you have to

(02:33:13):
be you know, you have to be thinking strategically and
have a like, have at least a vision of what
you're going to do before you like you know, like
before things happen, because otherwise there's just sort of like
you know, because you just you just get sort of
mass confusion and yeah, and say what say what you
all about the fascists they know what they're gonna do
when they see its power. They're not confused about it. There.

(02:33:36):
Their problems are what you do after. Yeah, they're not
confused about that those first like hours when things start
out the way. I hope that nothing we've said. I
hope that nothing we've said on this podcast kind of
makes people think like, oh, they so they have like
one weird trick basically to like secure secure your power,
um and like and that and that we aren't like

(02:33:57):
singularly focused on acquiring for X or something. Also, it's
just like it's an important lever too to have at
your disposal. Like, well, number one, you should know that
it's important. Number two, you should have tools in place,
such as like running a running a fixed extra fixed

(02:34:18):
exchange rate or something to make it a bit easier
to acquire for X on the whole, or doing capital
controls or doing price controls or something like that. And
you should have these tools in mind in order to
get from year one to year ten in terms of
your biophysical resources, like here's what we have, here's what
we need, and you know, some of that could be military,

(02:34:40):
some of that could be economic, and some of that
could be political. And um, no, one like I don't
know the answers. We don't know the answers, but um,
at each step of the way, you need to find
groups of people who can come together and think objectively
about them. Yeah, I I want. Yeah, it's not that

(02:35:03):
I think that there is an answer. I'm kind of
thinking about almost a little bit parallel to like, we
know that if we create our you know, if if
socialist managed to sees any amount of power they're going
to reform whatever health care system they're currently existing in. Uh.
We know this is going to be better, because it
would be hard for it to be worse. Uh. But

(02:35:27):
you know that's making a good hospital system is not
the entire thing that makes a revolution happen. It is
just one of those things that you need to do
and you need to think about it. And my objective here,
and it's a lot of my objective with you know,
making this whole magazine project, is that my socialism means

(02:35:49):
that we all we have say over our lives. You know,
that's fundamental to me, that we have say over what
we do with our lives. And I want to make
sure that the people who are in this with me,
which is hopefully everybody. I am an optimist. I'm hoping
that everybody is with me on creating a better socialist world,
that all of us are at least somewhat informed about

(02:36:10):
the decisions we're making. I'm not actually economically trained, you know,
I'm I I've learned this stuff as I've gone. It's
not insurmountable. Ah, and uh, it's you know, I would
want the decision about how do we make a socialist
economy you know, the core of socialism worker control of
the means of production that the people involved. Again, hopefully

(02:36:31):
everybody uh has you know, at least has an inkling
of what's going on. I don't want people to be
confused and baffled by the decisions being made on their behalf. That's,
you know, a fundamental evil of a capitalist system. We
don't know what the fun decisions are being made for
us by powerful people. Well, part of the part of

(02:36:54):
the problem comes back to education, because like people are
um the rois of hogged. They've hearted the knowledge of
how to plan in certain respects, and I think socialists
socialists will sometimes look at the body of knowledge in
terms of planning and economy and say, like, well, because

(02:37:15):
they are the only ones who know how to do that,
the knowledge itself is tainted, and like, I don't need
to learn this because it's evil. Basically, I don't need
to learn how to manage a currency board or do
forex management because that's money and that's evil stuff. Yeah,
I hope, I hope. What we've described so far says

(02:37:36):
like I don't know if it's evil or not, but
it's important and it should be. I think I honestly
think you're going to probably probably fail if you don't
consider these things at each step of the way. Yeah,
and and even in your like one of the things
that that you see a lot with socialist countries is

(02:37:57):
they have basically have like a firewall, right where they
try to keep a separation between the parts of their
economy that like are planned and the parts of their
economy that like are about moving forwards around. And I think, like, okay,
like there are varying degrees of effectiveness of this, but
like this is like even even if you're like, okay,

(02:38:18):
like we want to get rid of the economy, right,
like we want to get rid of labor, We want
to get rid of all the stuff as a concept,
like you're gonna have to deal like until until you
like win, right like until until you've like until you've
raised a flag over like New York, Berlin, Shanghai, like

(02:38:39):
a New Delhi at the same time, right like you're
you're gonna be you're gonna have to be dealing with
this stuff. And how how you do that and how
quickly you're able to figure this out, how quickly you're
you're able to implement, and how quickly you're able to
sort of like seize control of and use the resources
that you have in order to advanta your political object use.

(02:39:02):
You know that that that that's going to be one
of the things that tourms whether or not your revolution
survives no matter what it's fighting for. Mm hmm. Like
in addition to all the military stuff, um, military and economic,
I think you have to just say, like you have
to get to a point economically and militarily and all
their other stuff to where you can just say to

(02:39:23):
international powers like I don't need to make some moral
claim to you, I've built a better mouse trap. I'm
going to let the people decide. And it's like it
just shows people living freely together, uh and enjoying a
good standard of living and they don't need to exploit
each other to get it. And like for not everyone,

(02:39:45):
but many people, that will be really appealing. And you
have to have like, uh, well more than just a
diplomatic corps, you have to have like an entire like
a full court international push to say like it's just
a better mass trap. It's like it's, um, I don't
need to focus on moral claims about like well it's

(02:40:07):
better because you should just care about people because of like,
you should care about people more than capitalism permits because
it's just morally right. Um, that may be the case.
But also people want to get paid and they want
to be treated well and have a decent standard of
living at the same time, and we can do it.
So here's so here's how like you've you've shown them

(02:40:28):
specific steps you've taken, and you've shown them the material
standard of living that is shared democratically, and um, it's
not just like a state giving handing things out to people.
It's like a a um, true industrial democracy where it's
like you you get plugged in, you make decisions along

(02:40:52):
the way, and um, yeah, basically that Yeah, I think
I think I think that's a pretty good note to
to end on as a a a thing that we
want and things that are going to have to be
components of it. And also I guess thinking about you know,

(02:41:13):
like rejecting theories about money as incomplete that don't deal
with the fact that you don't have all the resources
in your country and you in fact indeed other things
to acquire them that you cannot simply create into existence. Yeah,
do you too have anything else you want to say
before I guess you move into plugs. I mean, like
like I said, I mean, I you know, we we

(02:41:36):
This might have sounded like a whole bunch of you know,
high minded, theoretical egghead crap, but again I am I'm
not formally educated on this stuff. This is stuff that
I have learned and participated in as a socialist first
and foremost. And it's been driven uh from the get go,
at least for me, from um, a really fundamental desire

(02:41:59):
for ecal for egalitarianism, and for people having a say
in their own lives. And I hope that the people,
uh who have stuck with us through this, who didn't
know these concepts before, feel a little bit more equipped
to participate in a discussion about, um, how you would

(02:42:19):
handle these things. And as as I kind of alluded to,
this scale is all the way down to you know,
twelve hippies on a farm. Uh, you know this, This
the scales all the way up until you've got a
total total global communism pretty much anything below that. This
this this principal scale, and I I hope that people

(02:42:42):
feel um more able and more willing to engage both
first of all, you know, to to tell liberals to
you know, shut the funk up that I should have
a say over how I participate in the economy, even
when that's things like for X that seemed very abstract
and far away. I am, I'm a person who's affected

(02:43:03):
by this. Therefore I've got a stake there for my
opinion matters. Uh, and that you you can get there,
you can learn, and you should be allowed to participate
in that. And yeah, this is what I'm trying to create,
is you know that socialists do not feel like they can.
Those are just get brow beaten out of the room
of a discussion because some liberal nerd pushed up their

(02:43:23):
glasses a whole bunch and spun their bow tie and
then sense of bullshit, like you know, you it is
your life, and ah, you have a right to have
an opinion on it. And this is not an insurmountable
thing too, It's it's hard. I want to be clear here.
This is hard, and I want but I want you
in the discussion. Well so, yeah, so I guess speaking

(02:43:47):
speaking of things that people are involved in, I can.
I can do transitions like this because I'm a professional. Um, yeah,
do you do, you too? Want to talk a bit
about your magazine. Sure. Like we mentioned at up top,
we're uh. Kyle and I are both co editors of
Strange Matters magazine, and we're in the middle of a
fundraiser right now, and you can find the fundraiser at

(02:44:08):
the r L tiny url dot com slash Strange Matters
no no dashes or anything um. You can also follow
us on Twitter at Strange Underscore Matters. And the magazine
itself is going to be a We're a literary magazine,
and each issue we're publishing in both prints and digital.

(02:44:33):
And the print issue one is about three pages, and
it's split in a half between the front pages which
is um topics like economics, philosophy, politics, um more technical fields,
and then the back pages is art um uh like

(02:44:55):
culture reviews, um apology, anthropology like uh more, sir. We
we kind of attached it to the word meaning like
meaning development, and and there's a middle resting spot which
is actually called the phuton, which is a play on
the word fujutan, which is like kind of a resting

(02:45:18):
spot between those two halves where there's going to be
short pieces of usually humorous nature, and overall it's going
to cover a wide range of topics and you can
find out more of us. You can find out more
about us on our fundraiser on our website Strange Managers
dot co op. We've got a couple of articles already

(02:45:39):
off on Strange Matters dot co op. We have a
Steve wrote an amazing piece explaining of some very uh
in very layman's terms of arguments about what inflation is
and why we should care about it. You know they're
quite good, yeah, very relevant. Right now, we have a
truly delightful review of very contemporary, very recently made cyberpunk

(02:46:02):
works by Elizabeth Sanderford, author of Neo Reaction of Bassilisk,
which anybody who listens to this podcast needs to read
New Reaction of bass Lisk uh, and she did as
the wonderful favor of doing a pop culture review for us.
We've yeah, we've also got a work by the editors
Words for Our Present Reality about what how how can

(02:46:26):
we discuss what actually exists in the world and what
are the shortcomings with our current just like the basic
levels of our discourse, and how can we advance beyond
beyond this difficulty? And it's you know, it's something that
sounds like it's supposed to be this very high level philosophy,
but we've been I think, uh, I don't want to
take too much credit for this, because I was not

(02:46:46):
the main writer on it. Uh. I think that we've
successfully managed to bring it down to a to a
lower brow level, uh, you know, to a to a
level that doesn't require you to have eighteen letter after
your name of various college degrees. We also managed to
publish a piece by a Russian dissidents, And I'm very

(02:47:08):
excited for the works that people are going to see
in the future from us. We've got a history of
black cooperative movements. We've I wrote a nice little diddy
about colonialism in modern board games. Uh. I'm I'm very
excited for people to get the chance to read these
and uh you know, it's all kind of in the
service of I was creating a more almost democratizing the

(02:47:34):
socialist world and making it, making it meaningful, making it useful,
and also making it pleasurable for people to be socialists
and to fight for a freer and more equitable world. Yeah,
do you two? Do you two want people to find
you on social media? And if so, where, Okay you
can say no to this. People do sometimes because first

(02:47:55):
hell sight. Okay, well I don't have social media, so
your is not really on social media. I am on
some social media, so you can find You can find
me at at kept him in Whackham and I'll spell
that out because it's kind of confusing at C A
p M in w A C c M spelling your

(02:48:22):
own nat name. Um. Yeah, so strange matters is our
our campaign will run through this month and it's going
pretty good so far. But we can use uh, every
little bit of support goes a long way, so yeah,
find find us at our website and also the fundraiser. Yeah,

(02:48:42):
we're not getting paid. Just to be clear, this is
the we We need to pay the authors, we need
to pay for the printers. But you know this is
not us trying to make a quick book. This is
us trying to make sure we we are not willing
to accept paying our writer's substandard. We're going to pay
our writers higher than market rate as on principle, because

(02:49:03):
we think the market rate is just too low. It
really is. Yeah. And um oh and by the way,
we're I think I mentioned it, but we're our workers cooperative,
so we're a d percent worker own in control. There's
no there are no levels of employment or ownership. We're
all horizontal. Yeah yeah, so yeah, go go check our

(02:49:27):
change matters. Um. Yeah, thank thank you too, both for
thank you both for joining us. It was a wonderful time. Chris,
thank you, thank you for having us. Yeah, and if
you want to find more of us, Uh, we're at
Happens your pod on Twitter, Instagram. I keep saying Instagram.
I've never actually I'm not on Instagram. So I've been

(02:49:47):
told we have one. I've never interacted with it. Uh yeah,
and uh, cools and media. It has our other shows.
Go listen to them. Uh, they're good and we work
a lot on them. By Oh, it could happen here,

(02:50:21):
and it's currently happening there there being Ukraine, which is
in the midst of an invasion by the Russian government.
I'm Robert Evans. This is a podcast about bad things
and how to make them better, joined as often by
Garrison and Chris, my co hosts, and we are talking
about some of the advice, good and bad, that's been

(02:50:46):
going around on social media about how to disable and
destroy armored vehicles. This is something we've kind of waited
to do until the conflict was a little bit more
of a mature state. But in brief, if you have
been following what's been happening in Russia through the lens
of social media or what's pepping at Ukraine through the
lens of social media, one thing that has happened is
in the early stages of the invasion, a whole bunch

(02:51:07):
of people flocked, particularly to Twitter, but also not this
did not just stay on Twitter. There were a large
number of mainstreams news articles published on the subject of
the things people were saying to talk about different ways
civilians could disable Russian armored vehicles or otherwise stymy and
thwart the progress of Russian military units through their cities. Um.

(02:51:30):
And this has been accompanied by things like the Ukrainian
government giving out information on how to make molotov cocktails
we talked about this in our Molotov Cocktail episode, and
putting out really neat infographics on where to throw molotov
cocktails to disable armored vehicles. Um. But it's also come
with a lot of bad advice that I don't want
people who are maybe looking at the potential of urban

(02:51:50):
combat happening in their future to take away from this conflict,
because there's also a lot of disinfos, So that's what
we're talking about today. Yes, and I guess one of
the first places to probably discuss this urban combat idea
is they probably the guy who's tried to make kind
of a career and of talking about urban combat, which
would be who wrote a relatively viral Twitter thread on

(02:52:12):
this topic, and it's been writing about this thing for
the past few years. Um, he's a he's the the
chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Points Modern War
Institute and served for like a quarter of a century
as an infantry soldier, including two deployments into Iraq. And yeah,
the past few years, he's tried to kind of make

(02:52:33):
a name for himself as the guy who writes about
urban combat. And obviously since this was happening largely when
Russian started invading Kiev, John Spetzer put put together some
of his thoughts that went pretty viral on this on
this said topic. Yeah, and it's it's frustrating. You've got
a quote in here from one of the articles about
he was giving out that says some of his advice,

(02:52:53):
which is preparing simple Molotov cocktails. It's already being seen
on the streets of Kiev, which is kind of framing
it as if Spin Sir advised the Ukrainians. Absolutely not true.
Before he made that thread, the government was urging people
to rest. And also, like Molotov cocktails got their name
from people in Finland not super far from Ukraine resisting

(02:53:15):
the Russian military in a very similar way to add
they're being used by Ukrainian civilians. Now, um what I
I believe what John Spencer did. He's a guy with
some qualifications. Um, certainly like not a random person. We'll
talk about random people giving advice to on Twitter. But
he's also all None of his advice is new, none
of it is from him, none of it is counter intuitive.

(02:53:38):
A good deal of it is bad, And most of
what he said that is good is just him pulling
things from US military combat manuals and from Ukrainian military
combat manuals and then putting it up in social media
in order to go viral and try to get another
book deal by making it look as if he is
giving advice that is being adopted in real time, which

(02:53:58):
is not what is happening. I mean, Like a good,
good instance of this is yeah claiming that they're making
Mulotov cocktails due to his advice. I mean, there's a
picture in that very article that was taken before he
even posted that thread. So it's like, no, they're they're
people know how to make Multov cocktails. That's not hard
to find out. In a lot of cases, the Ukrainian
Ukrainian government was giving out instructions on how to do it.

(02:54:20):
And I mean, and if you if you look at
this picture, um, it looks very similar to a lot
of a lot of like the the almost like small
defensive weapons factories that we saw across the States. We
would often see just collections of bottles, uh, just ready
to be thrown, all kind of laid out in in
in in milk crates, very similar to this photo. Now

(02:54:42):
there was there was less actual Mulotov cocktails, but the
way that this is whole, the way this all set
up looks looks very similar to any kind of insurgency
tactics of being like, yeah, there's gonna be spontaneous on
the ground organizing because people are just kind of naturally
gifted at that. And on a on an object ti level,
Molotov cocktails have a place on an urban battlefield. They

(02:55:03):
can be useful weapons for disabling armored vehicles, for causing distractions,
for injuring and even sometimes killing soldiers. They are they
are capable of doing that, and they that's part of
why the Ukrainian government put out these guides showing like
where to huck the sons of bitches in order to
disable you know, transports and armored vehicles and whatnot. Now

(02:55:25):
that said, attempting to attack a military column with a
molotov cocktail in most circumstances is very close to suicidal,
and I've watched a number of videos of Ukrainians do it.
In the times that seemed to be most successful is
when you have areas where the Russians are attempting to
establish control, You have small groups of vehicles that are

(02:55:46):
moving down residential streets, you have a significant amount of traffic,
of civilian traffic occurring alongside those military convoys, and as
they passed the convoy, a civilian hucks a molotov, or
as they pass of building, a civilian hucks a molotov
um And those seem to be, broadly speaking, the situations
in which people have kind of gotten away with it.

(02:56:08):
We don't have any kind of I'm not aware of
any kind of solid UH overarching analysis of all of
the use of molotovs in this but that is broadly speaking,
a potentially effective way to use a molotov cocktail UH
in order to degrade military capacity of an occupier. What
doesn't work and what Spencer and a number of other
people suggested is HU can paint at tanks or other

(02:56:31):
armored vehicles. And that may be surprising to a lot
of people. I think there's a lot of folks who
want to believe this UH, want to believe that that
that could really work, because it's like you walk ship right,
it feels like the kind of thing in surgeon should
be doing. Yes, But here is the thing. When you

(02:56:53):
have police officers who are tear gassing an area and
you huck a bunch of paint and you get it
over their face masks and they cannot see, it reduces
their ability to tear gas you for a while. It
makes them uncomfortable, it makes them have less fun, and
it damages gear. When you huck a bunch of paint
at an armored vehicle, the armored vehicle will return fire
with a fifty caliber mounted Dashka or some other similar

(02:57:16):
gun which fires bullets. That are large enough to take
chunks the size of your head out of concrete, and
you will be torn apart in your organs, liquefied in
a hail of metal. Um. Meanwhile, the paint that you
are attempting to throw at that vehicle is almost certain
to have no impact on it. Um. Not only are
you unlikely to get close enough to use the paint,

(02:57:36):
because you have to be considerably closer to do that
than you have to with a molotov in most situations,
but also tanks are built with the understanding that it
is possible that one or more of the ways in
which they see will be obstructed. Tank drivers are trained
to drive blind. There are ways of utilizing tanks when
vision is obstructed, because in the kinds of fights that

(02:57:58):
tanks are built to get into, they are often in
situations where there was so much smoke around the exactly
that there is effectively zero visibility, which is why when
Spencer started talking about people throwing paint at tanks, a
number of tank drivers came out and said, that's actually
horrible advice, like, they don't work that way, And I
was I was chatting with a couple of people. Um,

(02:58:20):
there was one fellow former Green brand name Mike Nelson,
who was posting about Spencer and very angry that he
was basically copying material directly from stuff published by the
Ukrainian government, and then like getting up anytime journalists or
media figures would comment about Ukraine, would like there's a
nasty post here where Anne Cabrera, who I think is
some sort of reporter, was like, I feel heartsick upon

(02:58:43):
the latest news out of Mariopol. My god, just like
expressing hard and human terry and tragedy. And Spencer posts
a link to his personal website and says me too,
not sure if you saw my MANI manual for the
Urban Defender, but it is available in English and Ukrainian. Yeah,
it's it's so like anyway grifty ship like that. But
because that it is all that's very different than also

(02:59:04):
like throwing paint at like a squad car or like
a riot like a riot truck that's coming through because
if obscure their vision, the worst that they can do
is crash into a wall. They're not going to start
firing uh massive explosion rounds from a central Uh. Yeah,
so they they do not like for one thing, the
like the police as bad as they can be. Their

(02:59:27):
default when they come under any kind of like attack
is not to start firing machine guns wildly in all directions,
which Russian not yet at least um. But you know,
the other thing, I was chatting with Matthew Mora, who's
a is has been one of the guys who's biling
ailing get Spencer on Twitter. Matthew was a Marine Corps

(02:59:49):
tank commander and was blown up in Afghanistan. So he
was in a tank that was attacked several times and
eventually destroyed. UM, So he's he has some firsthand knowledge
about what works and does not work a against tanks.
And one of the things he pointed out is that
the people who destroyed his tank put together I don't know,
hundred two hundred dollars worth of various accelerants and random

(03:00:11):
scrap metal and made a bomb that destroyed an Abrams
tank that works a lot better than paint. And it's
it's the kind of thing where I think one of
the things that's frustrating here is you've got a lot
of these like American kind of military academic guys and
I know Spencer served, but that doesn't necessarily mean much
that doesn't mean just being deployed to Iraq doesn't mean
you did anything. But they were deployed and maybe they

(03:00:33):
did see urban combat. But I have watched United States
soldiers in an intense urban combat environment UH, and most
of what they did was be inside of m wraps
because it's very hard to blow those up. While the
Iraqi military did a great deal of the fighting, and
when US soldiers did engage in fighting, they did so
with absolute air supremacy and with artillery supremacy UM. Which

(03:00:55):
isn't to say that it wasn't dangerous, but it is
a profoundly different situation than engaging in urban combat when
the airspace is contested and when you do not have
artillery supremacy. So what does that mean in terms of
like what can people actually take away that's useful from
this um? Well, on an individual level, something have been

(03:01:16):
extremely effective. Ukrainian territorial defense militias have been very effective
at doing things like picking up small arms, going out
in small patrols into UH rural environments around the area
where Russian troops are moving in small convoys, and oftentimes,
because of the way the advance went, you would have
a single or a couple of Russian munition trucks essentially

(03:01:39):
alone and unsupported, trying to find their way around. Um.
You had civilians doing stuff like turning signs around, like
removing signs, which they were instructed to by the areas
creating officials as well. Yes, yes, and which I'm sure
some people just started doing because it seemed like a
good idea. UM. But that sort of ship causes them
to burn fuel, causes them to abandon vehicles. You had

(03:02:00):
these kind of independent groups of farmers towing away abandoned vehicles.
You had small raiding parties attacking convoys and attacking isolated units.
You had cases where you know, Russian military units early
in the fight would get into Kiev uh kind of
on accident and be ambushed by territorial defense units and

(03:02:20):
wiped out. And those are all very effective examples of
of decentralized kind of ground up resistance against a major
military force. Now, one thing we don't know that is
important if you think about the potential that you might
have to endure something like this, is we have no
idea what the casualties were like among those kids. It
is a total black box, and it's it's probable that

(03:02:42):
part of why Russian forces did the war crime they
did in Bucca Um was because they had an attitude
that all civilians were insurgents, which is, you know what
happens when you have kind of a people's war, which
doesn't justify an active genocide, um, but it is something
people should keep aware of. When you start fucking with
the signs and ambushing the convoys and throwing molotovs, one

(03:03:04):
of the things that will happen is it will accelerate
the violence that is being done. Yeah, and it makes
to the civilian justified target in some you know propaganda lens, Yeah, exactly.
And that doesn't mean like it's you should resist if
you are invaded, um. But these are things that also
should be noted is this is what happens when you resist,
right that This is what a modern war of this

(03:03:25):
type looks like. Other things that I'm not sure if
they've been effective, but they're certainly not bad strategies is
the construction of a lot of vehicle barriers tank traps.
Next is the barricade thing, both than what we've been
kind of seeing or speculated about in the East and
then how we've seen you know, barricade set ups a

(03:03:46):
lot in the past few years in various resistance movements
to you know, a variety of success levels and non
success levels. Yeah, and and and these are like you know, barriers,
tank traps of a very long history and in warfare.
So they absolutely can be and have been effective many
many times on the battlefield. So this is not an
area of does this thing work? But it is a

(03:04:07):
question of like and and this is something we just
don't seem to have perfect data on did it Did
it particularly play a role in what's happening here? And Um,
that's harder to tell. Um. And it's probably going to
be different, you know, depending on the tactical in an
area you're talking about, which kind of like theater you're
talking about. But um, you know one thing that's like

(03:04:27):
the way in which these kind of barriers, hedgehawgs and
like whatnot work, is there there an area denial tool.
It's like an area denial tool four vehicles, um. And
it makes military units slow down, it makes them take
more time in clearing area. Um they have to tow
things away or blow them up. Um. And they also
can provide, depending on the type of thing, cover for

(03:04:49):
infantry and in urban combat situations, which obviously can cut
both ways a little bit. But there's a reason why
you see these kinds of things in every conflict and
also a reason why p will put them up in protests.
It can be very useful to deny the vehicles of
the enemy access to an area temporarily, and a big
pile of metal always does that of the time. It

(03:05:11):
requires something to deal with it. Yeah, that was something
that was very kind of considered when there was an
increase in like vehicular attacks, uh during like a lot
of vehicles running into a massive, massive marches, there was
definitely a concerted effort to try to block off streets
where stuff is happening, whether that be like you know,
corkers for marches of people who specifically block off the

(03:05:34):
sides of streets with their own cars to follow the
march around, or you know, less less effective arricades like
throwing a chain like fence in the middle of the street,
which is I guess better than nothing sometimes but also
maybe not the most effective thing. Yeah, in terms of
trying to like build layered barricades, that's not just you know,
one flimsy wall, but it's a series of things that

(03:05:54):
can compress down. And when you're talking about barricades in
a kind of militant situation, there's there's broadly speaking, going
to be two purposes. One of those purposes is to
create a to add to the friction that you are
attempting to create for the enemy. And that's that's all
insurg All insurgent warfare is about creating friction, right, because

(03:06:16):
friction degrades assets. It's over time. It it called basically like, okay,
so say you've blocked off a bunch of roads and
you've added fifteen twenty miles to the transport distance that
this convoy has to go. Well, generally speaking, in the
case of war, when you're talking about war, it's assumed
that about one mile is in terms of wear and
tear like tins plus miles um. Because of how much

(03:06:39):
more difficult the strain on vehicles is in those situations.
So you've added a great deal more strain on the vehicles.
That increases the chance that one of them is gonna
blow a tire, one of them gonna crack an axle,
one of them is going to have an engine block
go like blow or whatever, um, Which means over time,
if you're doing this a bunch. If you're setting up
barricades and you're effectively increasing or all the amount of

(03:07:00):
travel time or at least the amount of idoling time
that forces have to go in by a significant amount.
Your guaranteeing a certain number of those vehicles are going
to break or be rendered inoperable in that time. And
you're also the other thing that they do is they
allow you to deny area and funnel the enemy into
a specific into a place more advantageous for you, right,

(03:07:22):
And this can be advantageous if you're trying to set
up an ambush, if you're just trying to buy time
for forces to move back to a better position. Um,
it can you know, there's a number of uses for it.
But if you set up a series of obstacles like
this and guarantee that they're going to have to find
an alternate route, and you know, broadly speaking, because it's
your terrain, what kind of route they're going to take, um,
then you could do stuff like drop throw a drone

(03:07:44):
at them, or if because of the damage you've done
to the roads and the difficulty of how difficult you
made it to advance, they wind up just parked for
a long time. That's also a great situation to bomb
people with a drone, which is by far the most
effective weapons unit that we have seen built civilians in
this war. By the way, UH, it's not molotovs, it's
certainly not paint. It is UH civilian volunteers who put

(03:08:08):
together combat drones using generally d j I drones that
they have upgraded with thermal imaging cameras in order to
see at night. And they have used three D printed
parts in order to drop bombs from UM and they
have done carried out for weeks now hundreds of extremely
successful night time raids on Russian positions. This has been

(03:08:30):
effective for a couple of reasons. One of them is
that the Russian military does not widespread half effective night vision. UM.
We don't need to get The reasons for this are complicated,
based in a mix of like appropriations, corruption, issues with
the technologies they do have, YadA, YadA, YadA, but they
do not have the capacity in large scale to carry
out operations at night to the extent that the Ukrainians do. UM.

(03:08:52):
And so you get when nighttime comes these forces that
were advancing in places like Kiev clustering up and huddling
for the night, and then these hunter killer drones would
sneak in at night and they are impossible to fucking
see in daytime. I can tell you from experience. At night,
their ghosts just dropping bombs on on armored vehicles and
on groups of soldiers. Um and these you know what

(03:09:15):
you have seen with these units which have been integrated.
They are like started out as civilian volunteer groups. They
have been integrated into the military to a significant extent.
And I think what you do have Some of this
is conjecture on my part, but you've had a lot
of Russian officers in generals killed generally because they have
been communicating over open phone lines. And I suspect some
of what's been going on is when they figure out

(03:09:37):
where one of these guys is, they send some of
these fucking drone units and to blow them up, because
it's not hard if you know where someone is to
kill them with the drone. In this way, I think
the other thing to talk about in terms of you know,
building obstacles, building barricades is the whole cover versus concealment
thing where a lot of people think that if they
hide behind a barricade, there now impervious, which obviously isn't

(03:09:57):
true if a drone is gonna get you, and obviously
isn't true for a large a large number of the
ammunitions that get fired, whether they be bullets or tank grounds. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it's and I think that's something In videos
I have watched of Russian soldiers responding to contact, you
have seen a lot of people in ambushes that they

(03:10:18):
lost hiding behind vehicles, UM, which if it's an armored vehicle,
definitely can protect you from small arm fire. But if
somebody shoots that vehicle with a with a javelin, you
may find yourself next to a cooking off tank. UM.
And I have seen it like people hiding behind fucking fences,
which is terrible to hide behind, UM, failing to go

(03:10:40):
to ground, which is always your best bet is to
kind of get behind a burm or something, get loaded
the fucking ground. And it's It's interesting to me a
lot of the worst videos of responding to contact that
I've seen on the Russian side have been there. The
Ross Guardia units. I'm not great at pronouncing Russian, but
they are essentially police special forces units that actually makes sense.

(03:11:02):
They have every video I've seen of these guys handle
being ambushed very poorly because they're not trained for that.
They're trained to go bust into a house and arrest somebody,
you know, like this is not where they're what they're
supposed to be doing. The other thing that Spencer really
focuses on is this whole like um sniper idea of

(03:11:23):
of being afraid of someone, of someone just cutting you
down from above, which obviously kind of is you know,
more of a thing with the drone stuff as well,
but this idea of not even being good at firearms,
but just having the threat of taking fire from somewhere
as you can't see in terms of like knowing your
terrain better than whatever invading force does and knowing how

(03:11:44):
to set up spots where it's it's less you're less
likely to get shelled. Um, I mean yeah, and that's
that's very I mean, this is very basic and old
military doctrine. But this is like, you know, the ways
a sniper can work in a deservein environment is you
have a large number of guys and they are trying

(03:12:06):
to move to a specific area and if they take fire, um,
that limits their options from forward movement unless they're willing
to just risk getting hit, and generally they're not, and
then you find yourself kind of holding up for time
to take out the sniper, which can be uninvolved in
difficult process for just a single sniper. And yeah, that's
definitely a thing like that. You don't have to be

(03:12:28):
the fucking of Chris Kyle in order to effectively work
in that kind of situation. Now, what makes that effective
Because if you just have a sniper attacking police officers
or soldiers in an urban environment, generally speaking, there exists
the ability to deal with that pretty fucking quickly. But
if you have small units of snipers kind of oftentimes

(03:12:49):
just like civilians with hunting rifles who are doing that
within the context of soldiers also being resisted by other
soldiers and dealing with like an active combat environment, then yeah,
a handful of people with rifles can be a significant
force multiplier. It's a lot extra to deal with, and
I suspect ship like that has been part of why
you have seen cities like Mariopold resists so long under

(03:13:13):
overwhelming forces that there's a pretty wide, comprehensive amount of
resistance going on in those areas um And yeah, a
single person if they're not like the only person engaging
with the enemy in that in that area, UM, can
make it a lot harder for them to effectively respond
to contact. I think the last thing I wanted to

(03:13:35):
kind of get into today is the whole I mean,
this kind of ties into the weaponized on reality aspect
of being like all of these people who are giving
you know, I just listened advice on Twitter dot com,
whether they be John Spencer, whether they be you know,
the wife of a former marine, whether they be tank
mechanics whatever, like everyone's everyone's doing this now, and it's

(03:13:58):
all seen as like completely valid. Right, We're giving instructions
on how to do urban insurgency online, um, and this
is totally fine. Yet when you know, when information from
Hong Kong gets used in protest kind of uh propaganda
for urban insurgency instructions, then it's like international like organized
like terrorism. Yeah. Yeah, if you're telling people had to

(03:14:20):
use fucking laser pointers, yeah, it's like the selective thing.
How but you're like, Okay, we're allowed to tell people
how to do urban insurgency right now, but when this
is over or in the past, it's it's it's not allowed. Right,
you have John Spencer, who I doubt would be giving
I doubt was a big fan of any Black Lives
Matter demonstration just but but I mean, I certainly doubt

(03:14:43):
was giving people instructions and how to disable bearcats. Yeah,
I don't think he was giving instructions and how to
ambush police officers or anything like that. So you have
this whole coalition of people on Twitter dot com giving
all this advice out how to do urban insurgency and whatever. Well, also,
you know, when ever something is happening like that where
they live, it is that that is obviously bad and

(03:15:05):
obviously not a good thing, whether you know, for you know,
you could talk about whatever like ideological drive people have,
but I think this is just an interesting thing worth
talking about in terms of how we will offer we
will view. You know, this type of discussion of urban
insurgency is always like a bad thing, all right. It's
always this thing that like terrorists do you're helping, you know,
you're you're always you're mooting for the destruction of civilization

(03:15:25):
or whatever, um. And then it just takes a few
things for you get you know, an instructor at West
Point to start, you know, posting threads to help sell
his new book on these very same topics. Yeah, I
mean there's I think a little degree to which I
might push back on some of that, not necessarily, Spencer,
But I can't remember during like the Fed War in Portland,
which was the probably the part of Portland that like

(03:15:46):
most people are aware of, when you had a bunch
of federal agents snatching people, it was the most warlike
part of the you you had for this brief period
of time a lot of folks because I took part
giving out advice on Twitter to respond to and handle
police munitions. Um that when I think that certainly went
more viral than it would have gone in a different

(03:16:09):
sort of situation. Um And I think you do have.
I think part of what you're seeing in Ukraine, and
this is just sort of a general thing that happens
online is when something a news moment, blows up in
a way that is like big enough it disrupts the
norms and suddenly for a while you can talk about
things like how to disable government armored vehicles and fight
like you know, the reality suddenly becomes so much bigger,

(03:16:33):
and what is what is acceptable discourse suddenly expands out
much bigger than what it usually tells. It becomes a
lot more permeable. And I do think broadly, Like we're
shooting on Spencer here because he's frustrating to me. Um,
but I do think that, like, really really broadly. Um,
it's good when stuff like it's good for people to
think about. Even if I don't, I certainly don't. I

(03:16:54):
certainly do not want there to be I don't want
anyone listening to this who has not experienced urban warfare
to experienced urban warfare. I will absolutely I will. I
will say that right now. But it is not bad
for people to be thinking about and talking about the
ways in which a civilian population can do damage to
an invading organized military force. That's not a bad discourse

(03:17:16):
to exist, and it's not bad for people to be
thinking in this way. And it's not bad for the
people who are potentially in power to have that in
the back of their heads, you know. Yeah, I mean, like,
the one of the first things you sent me when
I started working for it could happen here was the

(03:17:37):
was the city is not neutral peace? Um on Urban
combat is hard. Um. Yeah, it's definitely. It's the thing that, Yeah,
it's it's always it's it's worth thinking about, but you
don't want to. We're not trying to wish on anybody.
And I think you can. You can look at all
of like the weirdos on the internet who have like

(03:17:57):
you know this, you know this is some degree of
like not sees who have done this, but also just
like random other people who have flown to Ukraine to
help join fight off the Russians because they think it's
going to be cool and they'll be able to work
with the Azov Batalion or something, who then get stationed
to basically be cannon fodder because they're this like twenty
year old from America who's never actually held a gun before.
I hope that one's true. It is just like a

(03:18:20):
post because if it's true, then it means that someone
in the Ukrainian government is consciously making the choice to
use one of the Azov veterans as cannon fodder, which
is funny, funny, extremely funny. If it's happening, right, we don't,
that's not that's not confirmed. Certainly, a percentage, probably not
an insignificant percentage of dudes who have done shown up
to do this have like been like, oh my God,

(03:18:40):
what the fuck? Um, some of them I'm sure just
didn't have much experience. I'm sure some of them were
dudes who had experience being on the side with overwhelming
air power. Um, and we're like, oh fuck, but you
also do It's fair to note like the stories of
people like having like freaking out go viral. Um. There's
plenty of videos of like mixed foreign or units in

(03:19:01):
heavy combat, including a bunch where you can hear US
and British dudes. Finally, like, because a lot there's a
lot of people who have legitimate, like hard combat experience
who have have volunteered to go do this. Yeah. The
one thing I also do find kind of uncomfortable is,
I mean, no, it's not super unlike what what what
we're doing now that we're trying to come at it
from a more uh like critical standpoint, but like Americans

(03:19:25):
who maybe have gone to a protest or two but
no real experience, just going on Twitter dot com and
talking about how they think beating an army is best done,
how that works. Yeah. Well, and like you know, if
if you look at like the okay, like the times
that like the US has actually attempted to fight its
own Army, right, Like the last time this happened was

(03:19:48):
the L L A. Riot and ninety two and they
got their ship pushed in like it it went really
really badly for the people on This was really ugly.
There was a lot of bodies. Yeah, and like and
you know, and part part of what you know, and
I will say, like part of what's I guess you
still about this is like yeah, this is I mean,
this is the thing that is I mean I wasn't
alive for it, but like at like Robert, you were

(03:20:10):
alive for that, like like that that that is a
thing like in living memory. The Army has been deployed
on American soil and one of the things that went
wrong is that the people on the ground had basically
no time. And this is something you can read from
from like the Army's accounts of this, is that like
the people that they were dealing with had no tactical

(03:20:30):
experience what wherever they did it, they had no conception
of tactics, and the Army was able to very quickly
crush them. And you know, if if you don't want
that to happen to you, yeah, like that there there
there is a way which is stuff is important to
be thinking about. But also like dear God, that is
the worst ship, Like yeah you that here. Here's what's

(03:20:53):
what's important to understand about that anytime you are dealing
with any kind of conflict, like physical conflict that involves
violence and and that can be as narrow as like
a protest, you know, where people are squaring off with
the cops, or an actual like full on military conflict,

(03:21:15):
the winner is the person who is most disruptive to
the enemies. Ode loop, right, um, observe, orient, decide act.
That's the loop that you go through when you are
trying to decide how to act in any kind of
a kinetic situation UM on the streets and a protest.
One of the things where I where we have all
seen people be the most successful against cops is when

(03:21:38):
you change the rules on them. Is when they are
in a situation they did not anticipate being in, because
they tend to freak out and they tend to respond
and effectively, right, you do not want to if you
see them preparing to act in a certain way because
they believe you were doing a specific thing, you ideally
do not then do the thing they are preparing for
because that is a situation which you're gonna wind a
battering yourself against a riot line. Right. Um, that's what

(03:22:01):
the that's the core of the move be like water
thing from Hong Kong, is the idea that do not
engage them in a way they are prepared for, and
that that that is a that is a piece of advice.
Broadly speaking, that's just as true in a war as
it is in a protest situation. On their own terms.
What this also means is that you don't want to
be playing by a set of rules that are ineffective

(03:22:24):
in the situation you're getting into. So like when you
had protesters in in l A engaging with the military,
they were playing by the rules of how do you
deal with cops and suddenly they were dealing with soldiers
and boy, howdy are the rules different? You know? Um?
And likewise, the Russian military was trained and blooded to

(03:22:46):
a large extent in conflicts in places like Syria, where
again they had air supremacy, Um, they had artillery supremacy.
They were backing the state that was fighting against these insurgents,
and so they're soldiers gained the combat experience they had
with every advantage in their pocket. Um. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military,

(03:23:08):
if you're talking really about like because we've talked about
a lot of little things that have maybe had an
impact on the conflict here, and they're one of the
things that's had the biggest impact on how the Ukrainian
military has responded and and comported itself in this war
so far versus the Russian is for years eight years
since this conflict started, the Ukrainian military has developed a

(03:23:28):
posture of having soldiers sign up for these brief contracts,
sending and rotating them through the battleground and the dawn
boss so that when this war started, they had a
huge number, more than anyone else in Europe, of combat
veterans who got their experience fighting against a peer adversary
when they did not have supremacy and artillery or air
support when they engaged them um. And then the Ukrainian

(03:23:52):
military very intelligently spread these guys out amongst their their
their units, which is what you want to do. Any
military is going to want to spread out your veterans
among units, because you're not everyone's not going to be
a combat veteran, but you want some guys who know
what it's like to be shot at and every kind
of unit that might get shot at because they stiff
in the back of everybody else. And this is what
So again, when when the war started, to get back

(03:24:14):
to what I'm saying, the Russian military entered preparing for
a police action like the ones they carried out in Czechnia,
um like what they did have done for Assad in Syria,
and they got a war, and the Ukrainians came into
that fight prepared for a war. So you you, I
think one of the things that is important when you
look at consider any kind of possibility of being involved

(03:24:35):
in a conflict is you want to know what are
the rules your opponent is going in ready to abide by, right,
what are the things they are expecting to happen, What
is kind of the rubric with which they are looking at,
what they expect to occur in this conflict? And by god,
you want to be going in there with a different one,
you know, um And that again, depending on how you

(03:24:58):
do it, that can go badly or that can go
really well, because like I said, if you're if you're
going and prepared to fight cops and you wind up
dealing with soldiers, that's not great. Um. But if you
have prepared, if you are able to kind of lock
your enemy into the kind of conflict that they're not
ready to face, um, then generally speaking you'll win. We

(03:25:19):
have twenty years of experience in the War on Terror
of more or less that going down. Yeah, there's a
there's a there's a good example of this also with
the like with the i d F s a war
against hes Blo in two thousand and six, where it's
like the IDEF is a really good army, but they'd
spent like I don't know, like they spent like forty
years basically just sort of like, yeah, they've been about

(03:25:40):
forty years doing police actions. Yeah, and then they run
into Hesbla and they expect Hesbah is going to just
you know, they've made Lebanon jails and six and their
expectations that Hesblah is going to go to ground, They're
gonna do a guerrilla war and instead has blood like
when they go into bunkers. But they stand in fight
and the id F gets smashed and like you know,
they pull out and they spend a bunch of time
just like murdering people from the air. But like they

(03:26:00):
don't win the war. And like like that that happens
a lot, especially with these armies that are used to dealing,
used to doing these sort of police action things, and
they losed enemies that like the fact that the I
d F Lost Award has blood is like by like
balance of forces. It's like this is inconceivable, Like how
on earth did they possibly lose this? But it's like, yeah,
this stuff happens because they weren't like, yeah, they they

(03:26:23):
were they were doing they were doing this police action thing,
and they weren't used to They hadn't fought an enemy
that was actually going to stick in and fight them
since like the seventies. Yeah, I mean a lot of
the great defeats in military history because a force came
into a situation expecting a different kind of fight than
what they got. That was a part of what happened
to Napoleon when he invaded Russia, right, and the Russians

(03:26:45):
did not respond the way that he expected a state
to respond to having their capital occupied, um, and effectively
kind of starved him out. There was other ship going
on there. Attrician had really depleted the French military before
it got there. But but yeah, um, yeah, how how
I went on how I would want to wrap up
this is basically saying like and all of that stuff
regarding how this war has really prompted a lot of

(03:27:08):
things that were seemingly more unexpected and seemingly thought to
be previously more impossible. UM in terms of how fast
both rhetoric around these these types of conflicts can spread
and more and the role in which like disinformation and
misformation is used for you know, both both sides to
to to gain digging ground on the other and how

(03:27:30):
you know, relating back to it could happen here is
MS in terms of like the urban crumbles or like
you know, the small small like urban collapses, um, and
you know, escalating escalating like inter inter country conflict in
various places around the world. How fast certain things can
happen that we once thought are kind of more impossible
or improbable at the very least. You know, how how

(03:27:53):
fast you can get people giving advice on how to
take out armored vehicles on Twitter dot com. How fast
you can get you know, people like people who are
you know, seemingly are part you know, seemingly not not
tied to certain just certain like ideas or theologies giving
out you know, information on types of types of ways
to resist invading or oppressing forces. It is it is

(03:28:16):
an interesting kind of It's like case studies the wrong
word because it is it's it's obviously having horrible effects
with you know, thousands and thousands of people being slaughtered um,
but it is it is intriguing to watch, how, you know,
in terms of like the microcos of macrocosm idea of
of eventually you know, conflict, if conflict breaks out in

(03:28:37):
other places around the world, and next in the next
few years, how are current like social media landscape, How
are kind of rules around like urban conflict, like urban
conflict and all of these things kind of interact with
each other and how we view Yeah, what is what
is likely and what we you know, who who you're
going to predict is gonna do X thing based on

(03:28:58):
people invading a city that it's not theirs? Yeah, um,
I mean I think in terms of stuff that that
people can take out of this, you know, without necessarily
needing to prepare to fight in an urban insurgency. One
of them is that anytime big ship happens and and
more big ship is going to keep happening for us,

(03:29:18):
you have a window of opportunity through which you can
get things across to people that they would not normally
listen to. UM. And that is a really important time,
and it helps to think about the kind of situations
that might occur in the kind of things that you
want to push out into the world. UM. Because this
is this is is true with climate change as it
is with war. Right, We're going to have more disasters,

(03:29:41):
and when those disasters hit, it will be easier to
get people to talk about radical solutions to things like
climate change, and it will be easier to do things
like get out in the fucking streets and get large
groups of people agitated. You know, we're we're at some point,
fucking God willing, we will have of the climate change

(03:30:01):
equivalent to what happened in where something so terrible and
fucked up happens that a lot of people take to
the streets, and hopefully we will succeed to a greater
extent in forcing actual change than maybe we did in
But but that's that's something like that could very well happen.
And so that's one of the lessons I think you

(03:30:22):
can take out of this again without sort of obsessing
over military technology or getting into gunfights with fucking soldiers
is Ukraine is hard evidence that that is the way
the media environment works. You get these moments where you
can really push some wild ship to people. That's that's
why I like the whole uprising or insurrection model more

(03:30:44):
than the revolution model, because the uprising model posits that basically,
you have you know, base base society based reality, you know,
always at like the base side level, then uprising happens.
It's like it's like shooting up onto a graph. Suddenly,
so many things that are outside the normal way that
we view you know, systems, the governance systems of you know,
social control. So many things become so much more possible

(03:31:06):
in this like heightened place. Um. And that's what the
uprising does. It gets things that were suddenly that were
once so far away and once just only in the imagination.
It almost it makes them so much closer. Right. There's
this feeling in like July during the height of the
fed war, being like so many things feel possible in
this one moment, nothing is true and all is permitted,

(03:31:26):
Like you can you can get away with some ship. Yeah,
And so using the uprising model, yeah, it can really
and or or the or the instruction model like it
can really it can really make things feel so much
more possible than what they usually feel like. And that
there's you know, brief moments in time where massive social
change can happen, and you know you have to learn

(03:31:48):
how to recognize when this moment are happening and then
organize effectively when they do happen. Yeah, yep, well I
believe that does it for us today. Um yeah, we
when we've been wanting to talk about this topic for
a while in terms of you know, one of the
very first things that's not happening was various governments giving

(03:32:08):
guides out on where to attack armored vehicles with ball tops.
We're like, oh wow, this is this is intriguing to
have a government giving out instructions. Um, this is probably
has some implications on how we view you know, uh,
collapse in the in a in a general concept. So yeah, Ever,
since that's not happening, we wanted to talk about it.
So yeah, it certainly leaves us with a lot to
think about. And I didn't get to go on my

(03:32:30):
rant about the structure of the Russian military visa VI
their lack of an n c O COREP. But maybe
we'll talk about that in the future. I'm sure we'll
have enough time to talk about this in the future. Uh. Well, everyone,
h I don't know, do do something productive? Yeah, do
do something productive. I don't charge armored vehicles. Don't charge
armored vehicles with paint. Maybe think about the different things

(03:32:54):
you would like to get a bunch of people suddenly
radicalized on Twitter to do in the immediate wake of
a horrible climate disaster in which large numbers of folks
are suddenly willing to take to the streets seemingly overnight.
Maybe thinking about that and and trying to talking with
your buddies about it, and being like, hey, if everybody
gets out in the streets again, what kind of information

(03:33:17):
do I want to spread? What would be good to
get people talking about in that instance when they're suddenly
listening for I don't know about two weeks. It feels
like you get about two weeks to honestly, Yeah, Well,
in the wake of the new I PCC report, we
have what we should certainly have a lot to think about.
All right, Bye bye, it's goblin mode. Welcome to Happen

(03:33:56):
here a podcast that is today in goblin mode. Uh,
you know what it's about you've her to say it
like about twenty million times. But yeah, I'm your host,
Christopher Wong and uh with me today we have Juniper,
who is a really twitter ship post extraordinary extraordinaire, on

(03:34:16):
to discuss language, media, culture, of the nature of reality,
and Goblin Mode. Junifer, Welcome to the show. Hiy, how's
it gone. It's going good. It's going much better. Since
Goblin rode ceased control of the world, we are now
living in the age of Mode. And Drew mar Show

(03:34:36):
said this morning, apparently it's quite a time. I didn't
realize just posting would like just posting would influence so
much around me. I guess it's been an interesting time
for sure. Yeah. So, so I wanted to talk to
you about sort of the absurdity that is Goblin Mode. Um,

(03:34:57):
and I want to hold off on talking about what
Goblin Mode like is isn't for a bit because I
think that's actually, weirdly the less interesting part. And I
want to start with instead the story of how Goblin
Mode became like a thing and why I am reading. Uh.
I keep I keep like, every every time I look
for more Goblin Mode headlines, there's more goblin mode headlines

(03:35:18):
like the I think my favorite so far is from Bloomberg.
It's a dieselent. Diesel prices have gone goblin mode. Forget
crude oil. This could be the real energy emergency. Yeah,
that that is by far one of my favorites to
uh the full headline too, if you search for that
one is it's what you said, but then it adds

(03:35:39):
on thanks to the Ukraine War. An official Bloilberg headline
with goblin mode and the Ukraine word. I gotta that's
just by part of my favorite one amazing. The other
part of three that's extremely funny is that so the
people who are doing these articles, I keep getting asked,

(03:35:59):
so someone someone's asking like an intern to find a
picture of a goblin, and they keep posting pictures of orcs,
which is like enormously funny to me. Okay, so I'm
not sure what they're searching to get those. I don't know.
It's really incredible, Okay, So yeah, I guess I should.
So we should start from the beginning of this story,

(03:36:21):
which is, yeah, can you talk about your ship post
and uh, what you were thinking at the time when
you made a ship post that randomly like has has
had months long ripple effects on the world. Sure, I
think you were right though, like the post itself, and

(03:36:41):
that's like the least interesting part of all of goblin
mode in my opinion as well, Like just seeing the
ripple effect is what's been super interesting and really funny
to me. But um sure yeah the post. Um basically,
I think it was like the day that um what
Kanye West and Julia Fox, which there's a quick note,

(03:37:02):
I've never heard of Julia Fox before any of this.
So I like sometimes if like you know, Twitter is
all talking about one thing, the most recent thing being
like the Will Smith slap, like everyone's talking about that.
So whenever like some like big event like that is
happening and everyone's posting about it, I try to like
think of some creative different posts I can do, you know,
just to get in on the the discourse or whatever

(03:37:24):
you wanna call it. So I just I really don't
know what compelled me to make a fake headline, But basically,
I just I just decided to search. I think I
was driving home from work and I just decided to
search like Kanye West, Julia Fox, and I just found
the first headline and I just edited it to say, um,
Kanye West doesn't like it when Julia Fox goes goneling basically,

(03:37:46):
and that's why they broke up. That was that was
the whole lessons of the of the post itself. Um,
and I really didn't think too deeply about it beyond
just making the post, and it just it caught fire
with like I guess what we would probably all normally
normally Twitter like people that aren't even like necessarily leftists
or anything like us. Um, it just really caught a

(03:38:07):
hold with the whole of Twitter and pretty much like
most of the people that saw it. You can you
can go back and check the replies. Most people think
it's real at the time and replying about all things
it's real, and no one, like hardly anyone verified it.
It was like kind of insane to see yeah and
just just cost yeah, I think it's funny because again,

(03:38:30):
like you could very you could you could just google
this right, Like you can just google it and it'd
be like, oh, wait, hol on, this isn't real. But
like no one did that, and it was like, yeah,
like you could have just easily searched the main part
of the headline, like Kanye West to Julia Fox. It
was literally the second or third headlines you can have
found the same website, same author, but seeing that it

(03:38:52):
wasn't the correct headline. Although that does remind me when
there was the initial article about my post um, I
forget who wrote it at this point, I think I was, Yes,
that's right, it was the focus they they they for
some reason, it made the assumption when they decided when
they decided to talk about my tweet that the website,

(03:39:15):
like the headline that I made made up the original
website like edited that part out. So they thought that
my headline was real, but it was just and taken away.
And so that also affected what some people thought about
it too, Like they thought a lot of people thought
it was really real. That's that's what's insane to me
about this. Yeah, and like you and like like Vogue

(03:39:39):
like picked this up. This was just like a thing
that that like everyone believes us real. Everyone was just
reporting on it as news and there's so much like
there's so much like incredible stuff about this, like part
of it, you know, so what if the articles that
that gets published about this after so like there's this

(03:40:01):
initial period where everyone is running around going like oh
my god, it was goblin Mode, and then Julia Fox
has to make a statement that's like, no, there was
no goblin Mode. No one said this. Yeah, yeah, that's
That's the interesting about the evolution of goblin Mode, like
stemming from my post specifically, is at first the coverage
was talking about whether my post was real or fake

(03:40:23):
and talking about that aspect of it. But as time
has gone on, it's kind of evolved away from that.
Like you you won't see any goblin Mode article talk
about the original like Julia Fox tweet that jump started
this whole thing anymore. It's kind of like shifted away
from that initial that initial post, which I found really
interesting that that's what sustaining this. I feel like, yeah,

(03:40:46):
I wanted to read a uh, I wanted to read
a passage from one of the art I don't know
why I'm calling it a passage. It's just like a sentence,
but read part of one of the art goals that
that came from up from the the initial search, which
is from the streetwear company called high Snobby. Don't tell
me if I'm like pronouncing that wrong. Uh well, okay,

(03:41:10):
that's not not to Twitter. If I'm pronouncing that wrong.
My Twitter is at I right, okay, yell there, Um yeah,
but I want I want to read this quote because
I think it's interesting. So the article, they have this
whole thing that's like, Okay, they get to the denial,
they post your tweet about like, oh my god, I
can't believe Julia Fox had to respond to this, and
then they say, I'm not saying Fox was lying, but

(03:41:32):
wearing a borderline not suited for work dress, a purse
trimmed and human DNA and d I y I make
up to an Oscar's after party? Is goblin mode to
a t? And I think this brings up an interesting question,
which is to what extent was goblin mode real in
the first place before You're sort of mean to went
went viral? So like the phrase itself, you mean yeah, yeah,

(03:41:58):
like I want part of the phrase existed before my post. Yeah,
And I think it was also like what were you thinking, Like,
did you have like a conception of what goblin mode
like was before he made the post? So so the
only thing I had in my mind at that point. Um,
it's it stems from specifically, Um, do you do you

(03:42:20):
know the user on Twitter hottie pants? Do you happen
to know that guy, I don't think so now he
goes by I think his ad is like punished Pants
or something like that. But anyways, he around that time,
he was posting a lot about like goblins. He was
He would post a lot about like goblin time and
like it's oh, it's goblin time, and he would just

(03:42:41):
make like a bunch of just like posts like that.
So goblins were on my mind at that point. And
then I forget his user name, but his um I
think his user name is um uncontrolled. I for I
forget his user I'll have to tell you afterwards or something.
I I don't remember off the top of my head,
but he he may a post that went viral, uh,

(03:43:02):
something to the effect of like um, your honor UM.
I was going goblin mode at that time, you know
that format that's like you're in the court, but excuses like, oh,
I'm going goblin mode. It really in my head. That's
really the only reference I had, So I didn't make
up the phrase. A lot of people think I made
up the phrase goblin mode, which I definitely did not. Um,

(03:43:23):
but I think just there was a lot of people
posting about about goblins around that time, like early in
mid March, and I just in my mind, I was like, oh,
you know, I'm just gonna say Goblin Mode on this
this ship post Aboulia Fox. I don't. I really don't
know why. It's just the first thing that popped in
my head. And whenever something pops in my head, like
a tweet idea, and I laughed myself. I'm like, okay,

(03:43:44):
I should post it. I don't know, and it seemed
to work. Did you end up so one of these things?
What are these things? I think is really interesting? Is
that right? So okay, so you have you have your
first wave of like it's the goblin Mode thing, and
then you have your second wave articles that are trying
to blaine what goblin Mode is. And I was I
was wondering if if you'd see if you'd actually even

(03:44:05):
seen the post. I just like I linked to the
chat um. There was like like the thing I'd seen
from goblin Mode before thislike all started, was just like Reddit.
It was someone on Twitter had a tweet that went
viral about goblin Mode and it was about just like
someone It was about this Reddit post of like someone
creeping around their house and pretending acting like a goblin. Yes, yes,

(03:44:28):
So I didn't see that until I made my post,
like in my initial because I think someone linked it
under my post and I was like, oh, Ship, this
is just like a thing, Like this is actually like
a thing. And then I started popping off more because
people saw that reply. I'm real like, oh, Ship, this
is like actually a thing. And to my surprise, that
like totally worked out for me, like everything kind of

(03:44:49):
just came together and it really insane fashion. Oh that's
another tweet to the one that you linked the That's
when I was going, that's when I was in goblin mode.
That came before my tweet too. Had you had you
seen that one before you made it? I followed her,
I followed Telgore. I might have seen it. I don't remember.
I remember the other one I was referencing before. Um,

(03:45:12):
I might have seen that one now, yeah, like I
I think like that. That was what was interesting to
me about this was that, like the moment it went viral,
there was this whole sort of like attempt because there
was an attempt to figure out what it is, and
then there was an attempt to like back project a
history on it, and so you get a lot of
these articles and you get a lot of people like

(03:45:32):
I don't know, like I would talk to people about
this and they would like, you know, okay, so they
do this thing or it's like okay, so they go
to know your meme, they look at the Google trends,
and then like the people sort of like, you know, okay,
Like there was an urban Dictionary thing from like two
thousand nine that was like a completely like a weird
sex thing. It was like completely unrelated to this, but
it was interesting to me the way that people like, Okay,

(03:45:56):
so you have this thing that goes viral, right, and
like you're just sucking around like there's no act, Like
it's just sounds cool. But then like yeah, there's an
extent which it becomes this like you know, it gets
into the sort of like viralty machine, and so you
have all these journalists who like have to cover it
right because like, you know, the the way the journalism

(03:46:18):
bottle works is okay, so you have this trend, right,
people can see it trending. You see something on Twitter,
you do like four sets of Googles, and you write
an article about it, and it's like, well, okay, because
they're trying to you're trying to capitalize on on the
clicks as fast as possible. So when someone googles what
is goblin mode, it's like, okay, your thing comes up.
But it's interesting because it's like it's like they have

(03:46:39):
to fill the content in because there isn't any Yeah. Yeah,
that's what what was interesting about the specific that first one,
the focus article, it was just a lot of like
filling in where there was really nothing. Yeah, and that's
what's interesting about that. Yeah. And then and then like
after that, like all the other articles are like you
get to see this proliferation sort of of how the
media works where it's okay, so you have the initial article,

(03:47:01):
the initial article google some stuff and it's basically just
making it up because they're they're trying to like give
coherence or like give am meeting to an empty signifier.
And then after that, it's like all of the other
articles are just copying off of the first article, and
you get this like Ora boris of like everyone just
is repeating the same thing over and over again, and
none of them seem to understand that, like it was

(03:47:24):
not that the thing that they originally talking about was
just kind of like that's really all it was, and
it's it is interesting to see how it is just
able to proliferate off of as you as you were saying,
they just google search urban, they find an urban dictionary,
and it's like my article urban dictionary is is a

(03:47:47):
good source. Yeah, and like I think this this is
I mean, I think there's there's like a few interesting
things here, one of which is about how yeah, like
I had this before, Like I'm not sure if I
actually talked about this on the show. So the day
of the Atlantis shooting, Garrison and I spent a lot
of time trying to like track down the shooter, and

(03:48:08):
there was there was this like fake Facebook post that
was going around and you know, Garrison I has spent
like a lot of time looking for this guy and
we okay, well we realized that this guy just doesn't
have a Facebook, right, and so we were like so
like I was like look at this, Like I saw
his fake Facebook post and I was like, oh, this
is fake. And then like a bunch of a bunch
of like a bunch of like actual journalists like found

(03:48:28):
you know people because journalists have been passing around the
fake Facebook post as like this is a suppost alleged
to be a thing, and then and then suddenly they
were like, oh, hey this is fake. Hey you can
see all these things like oh look, it's like uh,
you know, like there was like the it was pretty
clear of it, like his face had been copied and
pasted into like a thing that's it was supposed to

(03:48:51):
look like a Facebook post because there was all these
like minor details about that, which is wrong, and it
was like, okay, so this isn't real. But the media
cycle of it was like all of these people saw
my Twitter post that was like this is fake, and
then they just wrote a story off of it and
like never mentioned that that that they literally got it
from like me fucking around on Twitter. Like it's like

(03:49:13):
and it's like and it's like you look at this
stuff and the extent to which these people are just
like these people who are journalist, who are you know,
supposed to people journalists are just like woefully unprepared. Even
people even who people who are extremely online like wind
up being woefully unprepared to deal with like anything, like

(03:49:35):
they're woefully unprepared to deal with anything of any complexity
or deal or like figure out that they're being like hoaxed. Yeah, yeah, no,
you're you're you're really right about that. I mean, I
mean I think this it's I don't know what I
would call this phenomena, but there's definitely something there where
it's like they we'll see something like I don't know,

(03:49:55):
and I don't know what it is about specifically Twitter
that like I feel like it's where a lot of
people get news just in general, but I feel like
a lot of journalists just assume anything that they see.
Maybe I'm over generalizing, but if they see something on Twitter,
even if it's like a joke, like they'll just assume
it's real or something I'm not. I'm not entirely sure.

(03:50:16):
Like it's super easy to make a fake post. I
do it all the time. I make all sorts of
like fake fake things. Most of them are more obvious
than Goblin But I guess, but I don't know that
they're I don't want to say journalists are too trusting. Yeah, well,
and but I will say, like there are times where
there's genuine Like when when you first started posting the

(03:50:37):
headlines of like the actual Twitter articles that were about
Goblin mode, I like I didn't do about it looking
up because I just assumed they were fake. Yeah, it
was like a lot of people told me, Like I
think specifically, the the one that like most of my
followers realized that they weren't fake anymore was the one
that was like, um as a disabled uh them in

(03:51:00):
goblin mode. This goblin mode trend is really problematic, and
people people decided to look that one up and we're like, oh,
it's real. And then everyone was like, wait, we're all
these other ones that you were posting real And I'm
like they were all real, Julia Foxlan real. It was

(03:51:20):
agencies have been all these news organizations. I've been writing
all this insane shit about nothing. Yeah, and there's there's
you know, I mean, I think that this one is
funny just because like yeah, I mean like it's goblin
mode right, like it's it's it's it's just funny, like
there's no like you know. But but I mean, I
think that there's an interesting thing that happens with with
the specifically the disabilities one, because the disabilities one isn't

(03:51:41):
like it's basically about something completely different that the Goblin
mode things spawned, which is that like, like the the
other thing that happened with Goblin Mode. Was that Okay,
So people saw Goblin Mode and then physicularly on like
TikTok Um. I don't I don't know if they knew
where it came from, but like people like people turn
just gobblin mode into an actual thing where like it

(03:52:03):
became this thing about like I like, I I think
I think this is also influenced by like some of
the like ship post answers that you gave the media
people that were like gobblin Boe could be whatever you want.
It's when you aren't awake of the padel or like
you're not doing your makeup in the pandemic or whatever.
Like yeah, but but but it's interesting that field like that.

(03:52:27):
I really don't know if the TikTok's thing came before
or after. I think it's after. Yeah, from what I've seen,
it's it seems like it actually became a thing after.
And that was really interesting to me too, because it
was like it's this way in which, like you know, okay,
so you start running into these sort of like fundamental

(03:52:49):
problems about the nature of reality where it's like, okay,
so we made this thing that is fake, right, but
then it became real because enough enough people believed it
was real that it turned into a thing that people
actually use to describe stuff. And then you know that
that's how you get to like you get a bunch
of people complaining about how like there was an article

(03:53:09):
that was like the Great resignation and going Goblin mode
or like the two great threats to employers as they
try to force people back to work. Like yeah, it's
it's like the goblin mode, like self manifested into reality.
Like I feel like a lot of journalists are saying,
like people being lazy and like, you know how the

(03:53:30):
whole meme of like, oh, no one wants to work anymore.
I feel like a lot of people are trying to
like attributing like oh, not wanting to work and being
lazy to goblin mode, and it's it's self manifested through
the media or TikTok or whatever whatever it might be.
I actually don't know, but it's it's become a thing
now and in a really strange way. Yeah, yeah, And
I think I think this is like this is an

(03:53:51):
interesting way of looking like, you know, like this was
the whole sort of like like in in terms of
like okay, in so far as posting can actually affect reality,
which it can, but not as much as people seem
to think, like there are there are there are people
who like seem to think that like the three letter
agencies care what they post on Twitter, which is like

(03:54:13):
it's like no, no, no, hold on, hold on if
if we post correctly interventions, it won't happen. It's like
if you've seen the c I A like like like
there's there's this whole thing where it's like you know,
I mean this, it's okay, this this is gonna be
the like someone's gonna pull this out of context and
be like, hey, look at Don Chris is but like
you know, like this is this is kind of what

(03:54:33):
happened with Trump, which like this is this isn't like
what the meme magic was like if if you just
meme something long enough, you can kind of turn it
into reality by just sort of convincing enough people that
it's real, that it and and you know and once
you've done that, like you you have effectively made the
thing real. Right. It was interesting about this one is
it's just like it's like a lot of people like

(03:54:54):
do that on purpose, right, Like this is how this
is like there's a lot of propaganda stuff that works
like this or like, you know, this is like what
the meme before jan Trump bullshit was, Like you just
this like completely like as a joke on accidents. Yeah,
I didn't. I didn't intend this. I just mean I
just wanted to make a one off joke. Yeah, I
didn't think that would happen. But if you're you're you're
totally right about the whole, Like I don't. I don't

(03:55:15):
know how much like the Trump magic was really a
self manifestation of him kind of just winning the election
and keep becoming popular with a certain people. But it
definitely feels like like that self manifestation of like posting
to a certain extent really can become real if it
just like hits a certain ziteguist of some sort and
like they just didn't. I think a crucial part of

(03:55:36):
it is it needs to get picked up by the
media and taken seriously by journalists specifically, because the thing
that really, uh, I feel like broke the camel's back
for Goblin about specifically was the first journalist that reached
out to me because she she wanted to interview me
about the whole. The whole experience, like and and her
coverage of it was about the whole fake mame thing

(03:55:56):
and then how it became sort of a thing in
that aspect um, and then um from there, they all
a lot of different journalists and websites referred back to
that article, and now it seems to be the one
that everyone's referring to now is the Guardian article about
it that seems to be like the media's favorite piece

(03:56:17):
about it, which is the one that talks more about
it being like a lifestyle trend. And I think that's
where it really went off, is when like some people
took in the TikTok aspect of it and kind of
manifested it that way. I think it's a couple of
interesting political consequences of this, one of which is that like,
like Twitter as a platform isn't really I mean, since

(03:56:39):
Trump got banned, it's kind of like it hasn't really
been where most like stuff is happening, like TikTok is exploding.
I mean, you still have like the boomers on Facebook,
Like it hasn't like it hasn't been the sort of
like driving force of politics that normally is. But the
one thing that it has is that all of the
journalists are still on there, and that means that yeah,

(03:57:00):
like there's all these weird political consequences. Were like, yeah,
you can sort of like like you can just sort
of will things into existence by convincing journalists that it's real.
And that's I think really scary in a lot of ways,
because you know, like the people who are really really
good at the sort of manipulation are right wingers, and
right wingers could have sort of like like I don't know,

(03:57:21):
like I people are probably mad about me for this,
but like one of the things that I remember from
like God was just two dozen sixteen. It was like
there was this whole discourse about like, uh, like there's
a bunch of like all a bunch of people are
really mad about like there being a black stonone trooper
and Star Wars, yeah, the whole Yeah, it's interesting about it.

(03:57:45):
Was like yeah, I think I think that was just yeah, yeah,
there there. There's the thing that was interesting about it
was like so I know people who like who like
looked into it beforehand, and it was like the only
people who were talking about this it was like people
who were confused because they thought that Star Troopers were
all clones and we're like wait, why wait? And then
and the other thing there are other group of people

(03:58:05):
who were mad about this was storm Front, and store
Front was able to like turn this into like like
a discourse, like they able to they were able to
convince journalists like this was a real thing that like
a significant number people are mad about, and then it
like actually turned into a thing that a stnificant number
of people are were mad about. Because you can sort
of just like like you you can start these like
panics and like this is one of the things we're

(03:58:26):
talking about in our trans episodes where like, you know,
a fairly small network of well funded people can cause
like enormous swass of the US to just lose their
ship and get extremely violence and get like you know,
and and the specific thing they're mad about changes like

(03:58:48):
pretty frequently. But you can just sort of like if
if you're able to manipulate the media well enough and
you you know that there's other ways to do this,
Like you know, you could do it by like weird memes.
You can do it by you know, being the cops
are just like having press releases that you send out,
you can have you can do it through like these
sort of like astro turf, Like I don't know you
have like an astro turf intellectual, like what's his name,

(03:59:10):
Margaret Upo, But it's it's it's interesting to me that
like they all seem to work, like the pathway through
it all seems to be very similar. Which is what
you do is you convince aboutch of media people or
something is real, and then once once they start taking
it seriously, it sort of manifests itself into reality. Yeah,
I know that, that is what I realized what was happening,

(03:59:33):
Like I one of my initial points that I was
trying to make after um, the whole goblin thing, after
the first article came out, I was like, it really
made me realized, like how potent fake I hate saying
this phrase just because it's become such like a nothing
sort of phrase, but like fake news is how how
easy it is to just like instead of goblin mode.

(03:59:54):
I decided like maybe let's say I'm like a crazy
right winger and I had this weird digeist moment causing
a panic about like trans people, and I made like
a fake tweet like that you would we see that
happened all the time, like trans people people, A lot
of people hate us, um, and it would be super
easy put it in the right community. UM, make this

(04:00:15):
fake tweet or a fake headline, and people right wing
or specifically will go wild and it'll really influence the discourse.
I mean, look at the current I mean it's it's
kind of over now. But the last it it was
last week, the swimmer, the trans swimmer, that one, the
women's competition. I mean, the amount of vitriol that was
able to be created over that. Just imagine what, like,

(04:00:37):
as you said, like a well funded height network of
um but I don't know, but for lack of a
better phrase, like fake news creators, just all they would
need to do is put something out on Facebook, the
boomers see it, and then it's over. Yea, what what? What?
What are the things I learned about? Like, well, I
was doing research for Weirdly an episode about Reverend Moon.

(04:00:59):
Was that like people figured so this is sort of
like this is like how Republicans came to power, Like
that they figured out you could do shoot like this,
and like Rubber Fiugieri like in like in like the
sixties figured out that like if you just if you
sent like you could just send letters to like they work.
I guess they weren't even boomers that if you just
send letters to old people that would say stuff like

(04:01:21):
planned parenthood is harvesting baby fetuses, you could just get
the really mad and it's like and it's funny because
you know in the citties like he's he's doing this
like by mail, right, like he is mailing you a
chain letter. It's just stuff. Yeah, it became just like yeah, yeah,
it's like he's just like it's it's weird because you

(04:01:42):
can watch them invent this and then it's like, oh, yeah,
this guy was funded by like a weird cult guy
who was trying to take over the world, who was
being backed by the Korean CIA, and it's like, I
don't know, it gets into this, Yeah, it all sort
of comes back into this weird thing where yeah, I
mean I like one of one of the what the

(04:02:04):
political transformations I've had since I started working here was
like I didn't take like it's sort of a similar
to what you were saying, Like I didn't take the
like weaponized unreality like fake new stuff like that seriously.
And then it was like you cover it every day
and it's like, oh my god like the like the weird,
like like watching like four Chan like invents the I
actoually don't know if it's portunately was one of watching

(04:02:28):
like just weird right wing like message boards invent like
the Ukrainian biolab thing, which like grand Mean Wall now
tweets about and like like like the like the official
state media of Russia and China are like talking about
these bio labs and it's like it's turned into this
weird like like thing where like yeah, like like actual

(04:02:49):
countries with like nuclear weapons are like basically using ship
posters as like as like a way to do propaganda,
and it's it's just like really the weird. I don't know,
it's this really weird and incredibly disturbing media space to
live in. Yeah, it's it's like a it's a weird

(04:03:10):
synthesis of ship posters just posting online to like whatever audience,
and I guess like media of some sort and not
maybe not like um in the in the case with
the biolot I don't know too much about that, especially
cause I'm black by gun Greenwald, so I don't see
a lot of stuff. But you know, it's it's interesting

(04:03:30):
how how kind of interlocked there. And and to your
point about the earlier about the whole Trump me magic thing,
like I didn't take that too seriously at the time,
Like in I was like, Oh, all these silly right
wingers making these means like this isn't gonna do anything,
Like I I don't. I really don't know if it
really had an effect, but I mean it's we can't

(04:03:52):
really ignore the power of that. Just simply manifesting something,
even if it's artificial, can actually have a hole about
certain people. Um as we were saying with the mailing letters.
I mean, if you just say enough, if you say
something enough to the right type of person, they'll just
believe it. I mean, it's it's not hard to lie
to people as horrible as those to say. It's really

(04:04:14):
not that hard to lie to people. Yeah, Like I
mean that's the whole sort of like everyone yelling groomer
like constantly about trans people. It's like, yeah, they just
lied over and over again. And like half the people
who were like saying this stuff are actually pedophiles. And
it doesn't matter because you know, if you just like
do this ship over and over again, you get these
you get just get these like hate bobs and it's yeah, no,

(04:04:37):
the right wing, right wing or specifically are phenomenal at
creating hate mobs. Yeah, it's kind of incredible to witness.
It's it's really scary, but it's it's an incredible thing
to see. There's not really an equivalent, i would say,
on the left in the way that um even maybe
in liberals there's an equivalent, but like on the on
the left, there's not really like an equivalent to like

(04:04:59):
some like mob in that way. Yeah, yeah, I mean
I think that's you know, like, Okay, there's always an
extent to which like these stuff the stuff has like
material constraints, Like you know, I thought to talk about
like constantly on this show, the fact that like this
is like this is the stuff that the DEO cons
believed and then they ran into the material constraints of

(04:05:20):
the Iraq War and their entire project imploded. And like,
I mean, I think one of the reasons why this
is easier for the right is that like there's the
there there's a there's a there's there's a there's always
a political base for them that is there that they
can access fairly easily, which is okay, they they they
have access to like you know that they have access

(04:05:42):
to like a vast swath the petit boars. Well, they
have access to a bunch of of white business owners.
They have access to like this sort of like this
like white professional class. They have access to this sort
of like white gentry e class, and like those people
can very easily be of like whipped into a frothing rage.

(04:06:02):
And like part of it is because like that that's
essentially that's just what they're That's what their class interest is,
that's what they're sort of like like their status, the
racial hierarchy like brings them to do already. And you
could sort of like you know, if you just shovel
a bit of coal on it, you can you can
you can make the fire go absolutely. And I mean
it's talked about a lot, I'm sure, but like the

(04:06:24):
one thing that is really powerful is Fox News. Fox
News will pick up literally anything like I saw I
saw a post on Twitter just the other day, screenshot
or just just a picture of Fox News and they
they cited the lives of TikTok Twitter account talking about
school classrooms. It's like, what is that like not like

(04:06:45):
the right wingers will just take the source of a
random Twitter user that has a take that takes messages
from random people that message them and then that's their news.
Like that is just insane to to to to to
be fair to Fox News, which is not a thing
I will ever say a and uh, it wouldn't It
wouldn't surprise me if that whole thing like because so
the I don't know if you saw this the lives

(04:07:06):
of TikTok person is like, is that that thing is
run by an old Bush administration person? I did not
know that. Yeah, so it wouldn't. I mean, Okay, like
the there there there's probably a three and four chance
that they just saw someone who's like trying to own
the libs on TikTok. But there's like a one in
four chance that like all the old like Bush network
people like know each other and that's why they're promoting it.

(04:07:27):
That's that's a good point. That's a good point. I
mean that, well maybe I don't know, like it's it's
it's one of those things where it's like it becomes
I don't know, it becomes really difficult to to know
the extent to which the beliefs. Yeah, well how organized
they are into the extent to which they believe what

(04:07:48):
they're saying, because part of that, like that becomes like
you know, if if, if you know who's behind that,
it becomes easier to sort of be like, oh yeah,
we're just sort of playing a game. But it could
also just be like, no, this is this is content
that we like, uh, we were all too lazy to
go or just message the person to see who they are,
Like I mean, they had the specifically in this case,

(04:08:09):
the lives of TikTok Lady. They had her like on
TALX news once talking oh yeah yeah, referenced her multiple times,
so they have to know her. Yeah yeah, yeah, that's that.
That's another technique that they do a lot, which that
they take someone who is like you know, like a
like an old part like who's literally a Republican operative, right,

(04:08:30):
and just laundered them as an actress. Actually, the funny
part is you see like like the New York Times
and Ship like all the main street outlets do the
same thing too, where it's like yeah, well, well, like
any time you see an article that is like I
was a Democratic voter, but I'm going to vote for
the Republicans nine times out of ten that person is
a Republican operative and if you google their name and

(04:08:51):
look hard enough, you can just find it. And it's like,
and that's the only thing that other thing was like
I don't know whether they whether they're just lazy and
don't check, or whether they're just sort of like doing
this kind of like I don't know that what what

(04:09:11):
what whe whether they're doing this on purpose? Because I
mean that you know, That's that's the thing with journalism,
Like it's it's difficult to like, when someone screws something up,
it's it's difficult to determine a lot of times whether
it's malice or whether it's they're just the only research
they did was they googled something. Yeah, I feel like

(04:09:32):
in the realblem that we're talking about right now, it's
like right wingers, I think a lot of it. Obviously
it's pretty malicious a lot of the times. But in
terms of like the whole goblin mode situation where that
that stemmed off just from like random like Guardian whatever articles,
I think I think that was just more of like, oh,
let's kind of trying to explain this thing that is

(04:09:53):
apparently now a trend and we're manifesting it in real time. Yeah,
I do think there's like this distinct in between. Next,
I feel there's no like like with God, there's there's
no nefarious aspect of it, but that like technique can
be used in a very nefarious way, and I think
that manifests in the most easy to waste, the easiest

(04:10:15):
to see ways in right wing media. Yeah, I do
want to also mention that, like the Yeah, I I
think I said briefly, like the people who do this
the most often are cops, Like the cops. And if
if you see a story about the police in a
manship newspaper and you see the same story in another paper,
it's because they're basically printing a press release. And you know,

(04:10:37):
I mean this this gets used to like launder just
straight up police lies about shootings they manufactured, like the
entire crime wave thing, like the whole thing about people
taking boxes off of trains. It's like, yeah, you look
into it and it's like, yeah, there's these like the
there's the sort of like shadowy police networks of people

(04:10:58):
who are basically running I mean they have enormous budgets
to do this too, Like they have these enormous um
like departmental like public outreach budgets, and those public outreach
budgets are basically them running information ops on us, which
is incredibly fun. You know that that is absolutely like
a real phenomena. I I don't know too much about

(04:11:20):
it specifically in cops, but I know, I know the
White House does that all the time, where it's like, oh,
there's a White House leap and it's like, oh, no,
they wanted people to see this. This is entirely intentional. Yeah,
they try a balloon stuff a lot, and that's I
don't know, and like that this is this is goblin mode.
Is like the fun version of looking at how all

(04:11:42):
this stuff works. But this stuff happens with stuff that
is extremely deadly and has real world consequences. And yeah,
it's it's some It's something we need to be thinking
about and trying to I don't know if used for
good is the right thing, but like it's something that
we need to be really conscious of as we're dealing with,

(04:12:06):
you know, a bunch of fascists trying to murder everyone. Absolutely,
I mean that that's been the most interesting thing about
this to me is watching Like I hate calling it this,
but just for lack of a better word, kind of
like goblin mode is like being manufactured, like manufacturing consent
in real time, like from the genesis of my post,
watching it in real time, seeing all these articles come

(04:12:27):
out and kind of all tie into each other and
refer back to each other. It's been it's been kind
of eye opening about this topic that I think a
lot of leftists kind of know a lot about, like
in terms of like medium manipulation and you're it's you're
right when you said it's like the fun version of that. Yeah,
and it has been the fun version of it. But

(04:12:48):
deep down it's like, oh, this is kind of like
watching like how they did like they this might be dramatic,
but like how they did the Iraq War in real time,
Like this is on some level that's very similar media strategy.
And I think, I mean, I think I think there's
specifically gobler mode. I think there's because because like the
Iraq War, there's a lot of malice there and but

(04:13:10):
but in this one, it's like, yeah, like that, you know,
not all of the media, like all of them, like okay,
in order for something that's completely fake to get traction,
it doesn't require everyone involved being malicious. What it requires
is one person saying a thing and then a bunch
of journalists being too lazy to actually look into something,
and that just you know, basically reprinting the article, but

(04:13:31):
like rewriting a few things, which happens constantly, and yeah,
and and that, like you know, the thing I think
that's scary about that is it reduces the number of
actors who actually have to be involved in a thing
for it to just sort of like take off like this,
which yeah, because like I think like there's there's an

(04:13:52):
extent to which okay, like it rocks, Like something on
that scale is pretty rare because it requires, like in
an enormous amount of buying from a lot of people.
But there's lots of small examples of this stuff that
just happened sort of constantly and that stuff like yeah,

(04:14:13):
I mean, you know, as we've been talking about like that,
that that kind of thing with small numbers actors and
then people just sort of lazily reprinting articles like that stuff. Right.
I mean, I think the best example of this is currently,
at least just in my mind, because I am trans,
the the whole trans panic that's happening right now. I
think that's a really good example of it is just
where like some website will print this certain thing and

(04:14:35):
then it becomes a hysterical panic talking about it. Yeah,
Like I think that the best. The most recent example
that was that spa where it was like some person
claimed like made it made a bunch of claims where
they were like they might have seen a trans person maybe,
and it turned into just like literally mobs showing up

(04:14:57):
at this spa, like anti trans bobs, like a bunch
of fascists showing up, a bunch of like like yeah,
and that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's that affects reality. Yeah,
that really affects people. Yeah. And and like the the
the other one, the other one that that we've talked
about in the trans episodes is people to people are

(04:15:18):
starting to do this kind of stuff with ginger clinics,
and it's you know, yeah, it's like yeah, like that
that's only a matter of time before they start killing people,
Like yeah, yeah. The media can easily whip someone into
frenzy to do that. I mean we've seen that in
the past with I think, as you referenced before, like

(04:15:38):
the whole like abortion whole, like in the nineties and
early two thousands, the whole abortion panic. Yeah, I mean
we saw we saw people die over stuff like that.
It's yeah, bombings like and you know. And the other
thing is that like they're winning, like they are on
the verge of after this like half a century long battle,

(04:15:59):
like they are on the verge of over turning ro
he weighed. Yeah, yeah, like you know that. And that's
I think a really grim thing for the left where
it's like, like, what one of the asymmetries here is
that like if a leftist like assassinated the head of
Ice right like they were, like I would be in

(04:16:22):
prison in like a day and a half. There'd be
like fifteen people who be shot in police raids. Like yeah,
but you know, but like when when the right wing
just like it does terrorism, like just murders abortion right
as it works, And that's a really grim asymmetry. But
it's sort of the reality of the situation that Brian right,

(04:16:43):
And yeah, that reminds me of the This is a
while ago. This was during the Black Lives Matter protests.
I don't even remember why he was on the fed's radar,
but there was the dude I think in Portland, and
there was like a there was like a raid and
they just shot the dude in the remember that. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it happened again in Uh. Yeah, they just
murdered him. And then like it happened again with Winston

(04:17:04):
Smith in uh in Minneapolis where like the like the
cops were mad at him because he was like he
was one of the leaders of what's happening in Minneapolis
and they just walked up and shot him. Yeah and yeah,
and it's it's it is a really bleak look at

(04:17:25):
you know, how this country actually works, which is not
really what I expected this episode to be. Ending up.
I just like, we'll do a fun episode about Goblin
Bode and now it's like, yeah, he was the state
just assassinating people and they're gonna keep doing it. And
also they're gonna like to start bombing abortion not well,
I mean to keep bombing abortion clinics and start bombing
gender clinics, and it's like that doesn't actually happen, but

(04:17:45):
but yeah, I think it was our point was that
it was like we've seen that happen in the past. Yeah,
of the reactionary media feeling the hysteria through it doesn't
even matter if it's real or fake stories that's that's
the main issue is it can be totally fake and
it'll it'll just fuel hysterics against anyone, any any target. Yeah,

(04:18:08):
that's just like yeah, like what the we should probably
close out. But like the one that's been fun for me,
and by fun, I mean dear God, has been the
fucking the Wuhuan biolab ship, which was like literally like
like literally this this was this like literally this whole
thing was a psi oup by Steve Bannett who was like,
this is how we can have Trump win the election

(04:18:29):
by by by uniting everyone in like anti Asian hate,
and like it worked. Like well, I mean, okay, he
he lost the election, but like you know, all like
eventually this is this just like completely crank, like absolutely batship.
All the people who are advocating for it are like
like they like they're like mushroom scientists or they're like

(04:18:51):
people who like you know, like like they're they're like weird.
I ever met In Truthers, Like all these people, you know,
like were were legitim mice by the media and like
that had that had an enormous impact on the last
sort of two years of anti ation violence. Like that's
like that that's the thing that way to get as
bad as it did. And again, it is just completely fake.

(04:19:13):
There's nothing, it's it's there. They're just they're just you know,
like a bunch of fascists made up a lie about
a plague so that they could try to win an
election by like burdering Asian people. And yeah, yeah, and
it's it's that. That's the interesting thing is that if
you look at um, like poles about like, oh, how
do you feel about China, Like you go back even
just four years ago, most people were like, I don't

(04:19:35):
have exact numbers on my head, um, but most people
it was like maybe split like oh, like China is
kind of scary, or like China, China is okay. But
like most Americans at this point, even like a lot
of liberals do not like China. Like it's like even
the rest like China. It's like it was just manifested
through the whole maybe not all through the whole Buhanu

(04:19:56):
lab but just the last few years and years of
both by the government and Trump's government ratcheting hard against China,
and just like anti China or even anti Chinese like
people sentiments. Yeah, and there's an interesting thing there too,
where it's like, okay, so for the first about so
that this pivot starts when which when Trump starts a

(04:20:17):
trade war, right, and there's this interesting thing where it's
like for the first about two years of it, it
was like the views about China were changing, but the
actual level of anti Asian violence wasn't doing much. But
then when COVID hit, it was like you know it
was it was it was kind of like an abstract thing, right,
it was like, okay, well we don't like China, but
like there was nothing that there wasn't like a super

(04:20:40):
strong like the thing you could point to to directly
tie it to Asian people. And then the moment the
moment the pandemic started and then the moment that like
Wuhan shit started, it was like suddenly there was like
a concrete thing that you could point to, and it
was that was like, hey, look it's the Chinese people.
The they're they're they're they're spreading the plague, they benefactured
the played a lab is because they're dirty. Like the

(04:21:02):
moments became that was when everything just like all the
tax skyrockety like that. That's that's that's when like everything
just sort of like really like kicked off, and that
was like hysterics. That was like the targeted hysteria of
I would say, yeah, yeah, and it's well, you know,

(04:21:23):
the fun thing I'm bracing for is like, yeah, this
looks like it's gonna be the Democrat strategy two as
well as Republican strategy, and it's like, oh, hey, more
of us are gonna die. This is gonna be fun.
So yeah, yeah, yeah, it's kind of scary. Yeah, this
just started out as a fun episode. But yeah, it's
how kind that was fun, So I guess it was

(04:21:47):
still a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah. Do you have
anything else that you want to say or do you
want to tell people where to find you? Um? I
don't really have anything to say necessarily. All I really
do on the internet, at least like my my whole
internet in that prevate presence right now is just on Twitter. UM.
If you want to follow me, it's um at meAll meu. UM.
I don't know if you'll have like that link or anything.

(04:22:09):
It's kind of hard to spell with the last the
whole MEU it's i'm eu w. But that's really all
I have is just my Twitter. Yeah, that's all. That's
all I really do online. I mean, it is extremely funny,
and every once in a while you create Goblin Mode
as an actual thing, which is Yeah, it's fun. Yeah,

(04:22:32):
I have a good time on Twitter people. People complain
about that website a lot. But yeah, since I joined
the like twenty nineteen or whatever, I haven't looked back.
It's it's a lot of fun about a lot of
cool people. Yeah, I've known of you for a while,
but it's nice to actually talk to you. You too, Yeah, yeah,
it was. It was a good time. Yeah, So go

(04:22:54):
Goblin Mode. Don't let the fascist murder trans people. H Yeah. Yeah,
this is manning. It happen here. You can find us
on Twitter, Instagram at happen here pod. Uh. Yeah, have fun,
find cool trinkets suppressed the turfs gotta you gotta have

(04:23:19):
the trinkets. You gotta find the that's what Goblin knows
all about getting trinkets. That's right, all right, by folks. Hey,
we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
now until the heat death of the universe. It could

(04:23:40):
happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website, cool
zone media dot com, or check us out on the
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Thanks for listening.