The most popular episode of this podcast is Practical Lessons from Ukraine, which went over basic things to have and do if you are invaded. Almost two years later, we will discuss impractical lessons. Namely, how impractical and destructive it is in the long term to make purely pragmatic decisions in the short term... to move geopolitical goalposts to suit personal business opportunities... and to blur the lines of borders and treaties just to get media attention.
That's right, we will be discussing everything from Tucker Carlson's interview with Putin to Handwaving Freakoutery's analysis of Ukraine Aid (https://hwfo.substack.com/p/real-talk-about-ukraine-funding), and from Hillary Clinton to the Superbowl.
The most popular episode of this podcast is Practical Lessons from Ukraine, which went over basic things to have and do if you are invaded. Almost two years later, we will discuss impractical lessons. Namely, how impractical and destructive it is in the long term to make purely pragmatic decisions in the short term... to move geopolitical goalposts to suit personal business opportunities... and to blur the lines of borders and treaties just to get media attention.
That's right, we will be discussing everything from Tucker Carlson's interview with Putin to Handwaving Freakoutery's analysis of Ukraine Aid (https://hwfo.substack.com/p/real-talk-about-ukraine-funding), and from Hillary Clinton to the Superbowl.
This is probably going to be the most controversial episode yet, so buckle up. Hello and welcome to another episode of T-Rex Talk, which I am titling impractical lessons from Ukraine. The reason for that is the most popular episode, the most downloaded episode of this entire podcast has been practical lessons from Ukraine. It really focused on just kind of very, very practical lessons, really hands-on stuff that we were hearing about or observing from videos coming out of Ukraine in the first couple of months of the war Just really simple lessons.
Isaac:Like concertina wire is super useful, in fact, it has many uses. Everybody should have two or three rolls of it in their garden. Shed logistics and comms, things like long-distance communication lets you talk to other countries Very, very important when you are invaded but also really really short-range radios. You talk to people who you are setting up an ambush with on the other side of the street. That is super handy too, especially if you haven't had the chance to train for months and months on your ambush tactics. But it was really fascinating to see that footage, because fighting in built-up areas in sort of Western nations hasn't been done a whole lot recently and it's really, really rough. I guess we don't call it fighting in built-up areas anymore. I like the British acronym, the best fish and chips. Fighting in someone's homes and causing havoc in people's shops, that makes it sound very pleasant and proper, but it is actually very horrific to fight in urban environments and it gets even worse when it is your home.
Isaac:Now we're coming up on two years of war and things in many ways have devolved. At the front, people are more dug in and static and expended. Yet the combat is also evolving, particularly on that drone front which we've talked about on the podcast, but also the T-Rex Arms YouTube channel and the new T-Rex Labs YouTube channel. But this episode, because we have those other channels and the podcast, is becoming a little bit more historical, a little bit deeper in some ways. We're going to look at the more I would say big implications of the geopolitical and financial meddling that has gone on. Less immediate practical benefit, but still some interesting lessons on things that are deeply and horrifically impractical. Hence the title.
Isaac:And I want to point you guys, this is not exactly a homework assignment, but there's a fascinating article that you should read from Hand Waving Freak Outery, the statistician that I've mentioned on the podcast before, and I'll have a link down in the description describing who is sending aid to Ukraine. Now, obviously, the United States has given the most money. I don't actually know how much has been delivered, but we have appropriated officially through Congress about $113 billion all told, so that is the largest sum, but it's not necessarily the largest percentage of our GDP. Other countries are giving Ukraine a slightly larger percentage of their GDP than the United States, and so seeing who is actually doing the giving is kind of interesting, and essentially I'll link to the article down below. But it is two blocks. It is neighbors of Russia who don't want to get invaded, and so they would rather pay Ukraine to fight Russia than to do it themselves. This makes good sense. And then considerably less spending from people who are further away and don't think that the Russians can get through the Alps or don't think that the Russians can get through Germany. They're giving considerably less money.
Isaac:But the people the second group of people who are giving large amounts of money, the second group of countries that are giving large amounts of money, are English-speaking nations. So the geographic neighbors makes good sense. But why is it only the English-speaking European nations and Canada and the United States that are giving large chunks of their GDP to Ukraine? Why not people like France and Spain who are kind of nearby? Well, the reason is that the propaganda that exists, that is being created on Ukraine's behalf, is all being done in English, so we can see the value of that propaganda is billions of dollars. This idea that Ukraine is on the right side of history and this is the greatest moral struggle of our generation, this idea is pretty much exclusively being discussed by English-speaking western civilization type postmodernists on the internet. Now, who or what western civilization is and what propaganda is is probably a conversation for another time.
Isaac:But if you mix them together, the obvious thing that we need to talk about next is Vladimir Putin's interview with Tucker Carlson, and we're not going to dig deeply into that interview. I'm going to talk more about the reaction to that interview, because the first thing that happened when that interview was announced was that people were incredibly critical of Tucker Carlson for daring to do the treasonous and horrifying thing of actually giving airtime and having a conversation with somebody who was so definitively and intrinsically evil that he should not even be spoken to. Yes, actually a number of people who think that Tucker Carlson should be tried for treason for doing this particular journalistic endeavor is fairly high, even though a whole bunch of journalists on the other side interviewed Vladimir Putin in the past and we'll get to the changing goalpost in a bit. But after this interview which went relatively well, I think in a bunch of different ways and people were more interested in it than I thought that they would be Joe Biden had to also do a press conference to prove that he was mentally competent enough to lead the nation, even though the FBI had declared him well kind of mentally incompetent to stand trial for various national security-related documents. And that press conference that he did went so poorly that I now kind of question whether or not its real purpose was to defend him.
Isaac:But let's go back to the Putin interview. He did a much better job than I actually expected. It was pretty clear, it was interesting. He doesn't seem to know how long 30 seconds actually is, but he was sharp and he had some good points. And I haven't watched all two plus hours of the thing, but I watched a bunch of pieces of it and I think that the best take that I saw was his answer regarding the dollar.
Isaac:Tucker Carlson pointed out that the United States used the United States economy and the strength of that American dollar to build a world economy, to challenge the USSR after World War II economically more than militarily, and the Marshall Plan. I didn't go into that, but that is a big part of this. And he asked if Vladimir Putin agreed. And Putin didn't expressly disagree but he did say but now things are different. Your dollar is no longer that strong Because your nation has these arbitrary sanctions being imposed against people kind of randomly. That makes people kind of not trust it and the inflation makes it worth a lot less. And he pointed out that the only people weakening the American dollar are in the American government and the American people don't seem to know that. So he had a lot of small interesting points like that which I think are intriguing and revealing, but mostly what he did was give a big long history lesson which, like everything else today, was extremely polarizing and, like everything else today, generated a whole bunch of memes. So I enjoyed the memes, memes that go deep into the esoteric lore of Warhammer and Lord of the Rings.
Isaac:People saying I can explain to you why we invaded Ukraine, but first we have to go back to Morgoth and the first age of elves and men. I trust that you are familiar with the Silmarillion, but the fact that he did talk about this ancient history going back 800 years to this and 1,200 years to that. A lot of commentators and folks on the left actually saw that in and of itself as proof that Putin is literally insane, that he's mentally ill, that he's completely lost it and it is completely unhinged from reality. Because only an insane man would think that something which happened 1,200 years ago would connect to today, or that a history lesson on the Russian general cultural influential area would make us American internet people change our position on the war in Ukraine because we are not swayed by history. But in many ways I think that that kind of misses the point. Putin's ancient history lesson was not supposed to get those people to change their position. It was supposed to explain to everyone why he's not going to change his position, and so a lot of the online criticism of Putin is simply because he has some unshakable principles.
Isaac:There's not actually criticism on what they are. The principles that guide him may or may not be fascist, but it doesn't matter. We don't need to look at those. Anyone with that level of confidence or boldness is a fascist now Because people just are not used to this. People are used to being coddled and wheedled, and politicians in America today do not take hard stands. They follow the polls and they tell people what the people want to hear, and influencers and celebrities outside of the government are kind of the same thing. There's a lot of flattering and conjuring and convincing. If you watch influencers on Instagram try to sell you on a new product, a new earbud, a new way of doing this or a new thing that you can buy to do that, you will see really similar things Little sweetling stories about how you should be convinced that you're going to like this as much as they do.
Isaac:As opposed to declarations, there's very few people that actually declare things anymore or lead or have unshakable principles, and I think a really good example of this is the he Gets Us ads that ran during the Super Bowl a couple days ago. If there is anyone that should be making bold declarations, if there's anyone that should be taking a leadership stand and demonstrating some unshakable principles, it should be Christians talking about Christ. And yet the ad basically just says that Jesus is a nice guy who gets us. And yes, jesus gets us, but it's not because he's a nice pleading, cajoling, whittling person. He gets us because he made us, he understands us, because he's the king of kings and the Lord of lords of the universe where we live and because he is the only way, truth and life for us. This is the gospel of Scripture. It's very clear and it can be stated very clearly as a declaration that is unshakable. And the ads kind of reduce Jesus Christ to this nice guy who kneels before you so that he can wash your feet. Because he gets you, he'll be generically nice to you, because that's kind of how he gets you to sort of like him enough to be on his team or something, or perhaps not, because he doesn't really judge, like who knows. The ads are not clear.
Isaac:Now, at this point I should point out in this episode Some people are going to claim that I am equating Jesus and Vladimir Putin, which I am not. That is not the point. I did like certain things about Putin's interview, like the history, I like history, so I like the lecture and I like people who are principled, so I appreciated that he was making a case from principle rather than pure pragmatism. But I do want to say that I don't like all of his principles and I actually don't think that all of his history was accurate. Some of it was great and some of it like his Polish history. I think that kind of contradicts what Polish historians that I have read have written.
Isaac:And as we've talked about Ukraine a little bit in the past and we've talked about drones a little bit more recently, a lot of folks on the internet are demanding that I and Lucas and other T-Rex people take an official hardline stand. We need to take sides, but this kind of presupposes that there are two sides to take, and I want you to know that I haven't been trying to hide my position on the war in Ukraine, because I don't actually have a super clear one. My position isn't clear because the situation is not super clear and there aren't just two sides. Let's go back to the Super Bowl, for an example. I have a lot of friends who are more into sports than I am and they found themselves torn when it came to who to support for the Super Bowl. I mean, they didn't actually support anybody, but who they wanted to win because they like Kansas. They like Kansas City and it's been a great team in the past and it's been a great sort of center of this Midwestern conservative state. But Mr Taylor Swift is a Pfizer shill and he throws temper tantrums. Oh, and he's not actually Mr Taylor Swift, they're not married yet. And then I have people who hate San Francisco, the city, the town, because it's just the worst. But they love Brock Purdy because he's a great player and he seems like he's a great person and he's an outspoken Christian who aligns more with them. So how do you actually know which team to root for? The Super Bowl was only clear a couple of days ago to people who already had a strong pre-existing emotional or financial connection to the specific franchises, or people who jumped on the bandwagon at the very last minute, maybe because they like Taylor Swift a lot or maybe because they don't like Taylor Swift a lot. Taylor Swift had a much bigger impact on who people rooted for in the Super Bowl than any of the actual reasons to support any of the actual teams.
Isaac:And Ukraine is the exact same way, only with way more confusing layers. Now there is one part that is very clear I will point out that this current open conflict begins with some Russian invaders. Now, obviously, there is a lot of history, but there are very few situations in which invasion is actually just. It's not zero, but it's close enough to zero that in the absence of information and a complete and total understanding of every historical bit of data, the invaders are usually wrong. Which means that, in the absence of that information, supporting the defenders is usually a pretty safe call.
Isaac:And I want you to know that I am extremely sympathetic to those defenders, the Ukrainians who are defending their own towns and their homes. But it gets really complicated really fast, because I'm also very sympathetic to the Ukrainians who don't want to kill their own second cousins just because their Russian grandparents were forced to move to Ukraine by Stalin. I'm sympathetic to the young Russian men who are so tired of the Western manipulation of their nation that they're ready to attack Western allies or the people who they are told are Western allies, more on the fuzziness of foreign relations later. I'm sympathetic to the Russian men who are so disgusted with Russian leaderships, incompetence and disregard for life that they are ready to defect to the Ukrainian side. And I'm sympathetic to the Ukrainian men who are so disgusted by their own leaderships, incompetence and disregard for life that they would rather live as Russians. And I have a huge amount of sympathy, more all the time, for the very fearful teenagers who are hiding from drones and dodging mines and being gassed and dying in the mud for reasons that are not clear to them, and this is obviously both sides.
Isaac:The fog of war is really, really thick in Ukraine and it goes all the way to the very top, and in some ways Putin is right. This war is indeed a product of centuries of Russian cultural, political, geographical strife and development and injustice and growth and meddling. But in other ways, this war is the result of very new, modern, today's geopolitics as a game that is played by very modern current present bureaucrats with a very modern present definition of the state, driven by very modern bad laws. And when you have bad laws, you will always get fuzzy application. Foreign domestic policy gets really hazy, borders get really unclear, allies get less clear. Putin has never been a legal ally of the United States. It's never been contractually bound to help us and we've never been contractually bound to help them. But you know that certain American politicians are heavily entwined with their politicians in business, so that means things have gotten a lot fuzzier.
Isaac:And I want to tell you who I have no sympathy for. No sympathy for military commanders who want to fight hard battles at the expense of their own men because of pride, pride of country, pride of military, pride of self, whatever. Also, military commanders who will send their men into hard battles without functioning equipment because they pocketed the maintenance budget out of greed. And then there's the politicians, of course the politicians of nations who are at war, who escalate or refuse to de-escalate situations because it's such good money. And then also the politicians outside of those nations at war who will send money to manipulate that war for their own selfish gain, but who I really, really dislike and despise. The very bottom of the list here are the bureaucrats and the experts at various institutions and NGOs and think tanks and various departments and offices in different governments, who constantly undermine nations, their own or other peoples, and they move the goalposts all the time for the benefit of their own personal agendas or maybe their own personal pocketbooks or maybe their own personal employers.
Isaac:I don't know if you remember this, but in 2008, russia invaded Georgia and nobody cared, and then, when they took Crimea, nobody cared. Now they're taking a bit more of Ukraine and people are losing their minds, people like Hillary Clinton. She is super rapidly anti-Russia right now, just foaming at the mouth that Russia needs to be dealt with, but I want you to remember that she was the secretary of state during those previous two Russian invasions and she did nothing. And I don't think she said anything either, possibly because the Clinton Foundation had just gotten more than $100 million from Russia at that time. Maybe, but she was pro-Russia enough at that time that she also sold them all of our uranium reserves. So, yeah, I mean you could make the case that Russia has just changed a whole lot in the last 10 years and that's why her position has changed, but Russia really hasn't changed.
Isaac:They have the exact same leadership and the exact same goals and they're doing the exact same things that they were doing in 2014. It is the American and European leaders and bureaucrats and globalists and experts who have changed their positions over the last 10 years, and not just once, but many, many, many times. They may have the same big goals, but the friends and the enemies and the projects and the policies are all based on these incredibly short-term benefits and these entirely short-sighted, selfish, pragmatic moves, and I find what are truly, truly despicable these folks, I will say rulers. They're not leaders because they're not leading their people. They're not sending their own people into the meat grinder because it will boost their own pride or power or wealth. And then I think what's even worse is the rulers who send other people's people into the meat grinder for money or fame or mere virtue signaling.
Isaac:I think a good example of this is last week's border bill, which was supposedly to protect America's borders. People's always have a really attractive name, but of course, at the inside of the bill are a whole bunch of things that have nothing to do with it. Like this bill to protect America's borders would have sent another $60 billion to Ukraine so that their current war of horrific attrition could last even longer. But it also gave $14 billion to Israel and it also gave $10 billion to the people of Gaza. So you know that $10 billion. That's not for weapons, obviously, but we also have, you know, I would say, a 40-year track record of seeing where humanitarian aid to Gaza goes, seeing what happens to the water pipes and so forth and so on. The more money we give to Gaza, the more the innocent people who live there suffer, like the children and the Christians who are kind of trapped there. And so what you end up doing if this bill had passed, we would essentially be paying both sides to kill each other and destroy their countries. This is like the proxy wars that we used to fight against the Soviet Union, but now we're just fighting them against ourselves for reasons that I don't even think the people who benefit fully understand. This is the destruction of families and cities and history and future, and technically it's the exact same thing that we're doing with Ukraine and Russia right now, although technically the Democrats haven't sent checks to Russia in about 10 years, but the stuff that a lot of our aid to Russia paid for is being used in Ukraine Now.
Isaac:Last week, donald Trump got in a lot of trouble with the media because he said that if he were re-elected president, he would not defend NATO countries that did not pay their fair share, that did not hold up their end of the contract, that did not fulfill the requirements of the treaty, and this was deemed to be incredibly, horrifically and inhumanly cruel. It is far more loving and compassionate, according to the detractors, if you do have that foreign country that has done no work to protect itself. It is far more compassionate for you to promise them unlimited money and bribe them to stay in fights they can't win for as long as it's humanly possible. Until you know, there aren't very many humans left. There's a lot of NGOs and experts and bureaucrats and journalists and folks like that who do not want clearly delineated nations and clearly written treaties and clear contracts with clear terms, because it would be much better for them and more fun and more self-serving If all future armed conflicts were handled more like the Super Bowl.
Isaac:They're kind of loose and they're spontaneous and they're very much open to interpretation by the rulers and the experts. Where, you know, you have this conflict within the NFL and nobody really pays attention because we just wait for a couple of big names to sort of float to the top. And then bam, average Americans suddenly get interested and they pick sides based on, you know, whatever the media attention is, or a vague emotional connection to where they went to school or something. But mostly people pick sides in the Super Bowl based on which celebrities are attached to which side, who's waving this particular color of flag, and then corporations spend millions of dollars to buy advertising that will connect them to the event and then various political causes will attach themselves to the ceremony so they can get more eyeballs and they can influence people. Everybody kind of knows this. Everyone knows that Taylor Swift getting involved in the Super Bowl somehow made it a much bigger and more powerful cultural event than it has been in the past. So the celebrity thing is sort of a big deal Now.
Isaac:America's elites used to be a lot more pro-Russian than they are now, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I wonder if things would have gone differently between Russia and Ukraine in the United States if they still had better celebrities on their side. So Sean Penn obviously is a very cool actor in the eyes of America's elites and he gave Zelensky one of his two best picture Oscars. But the only actor who's really on Vladimir Putin's side is Steven Seagal, and Steven Seagal probably hasn't been cool since the collapse of the Soviet Union. So yeah, I guess there was no hope for Russia, but it's all very arbitrary and very artificial. I could roll out the old bread and circuses line Like that's what the Super Bowl is and that's what these particular current thing conflicts are, sort of applicable and overused. But nowadays the circus is so much more than a mere distraction. It's all about confusion and disinformation.
Isaac:Like Joe Biden's pre-K message was about shrink flation. He blamed the snack companies. When you go out and you buy your Super Bowl snacks, he said. You will notice that they are smaller than they used to be. There's less in the chip bag than there used to be because greedy corporations have decided to shortchange you, average Americans, who are just like me, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the inflation that my administration has caused. I'm just out here telling the big snack companies hey, quit shortchanging my people, because, as president, that's literally all I can do. That's my whole thing.
Isaac:That was right before the Super Bowl, and then, right after the game was over, he posted a tweet showing himself with glowing red eyes because his media team does not actually know how to meme claiming that things had gone exactly as he and the Kansas City Chiefs had drawn it up. So apparently, the commander in chief rigs the Super Bowl. I think that's the takeaway from that tweet. So yeah, like I said, it's all very artificial and arbitrary and confusing. It is more than just distraction, and that is even more true on the global political front, thanks to the media's attention and the way that they are casting.
Isaac:This particular Russia-Ukrainian conflict is not just distracting us from more pressing matters at home, but it is actually destroying an entire generation of other people for some sort of immediate, short-term private gains. This will obviously have massive implications for the future, but then again, people who don't care about history don't think that's a very big deal. But the destructive consequences of this kind of meddling from people who don't care is incredibly depressing. I can guarantee you right now this will certainly not be the most popular episode of T-Rex talk, because it isn't full of very handy, practical things that you can do, like buy a couple more rolls of concertina wire Now.
Isaac:This episode is pretty dark and somewhat discouraging, but I have a couple of reasons why I think you should be encouraged.
Isaac:First of all, I think that as these experts and rulers flip-flop back and forth on these issues, all while putting more and more media attention on themselves, people will begin to notice.
Isaac:People noticed that there is less food in the bags that they are buying, to the point where the president had to point it out. People are going to remember a lot of the things that were said about Russia and a lot of the things that were said about Ukraine, and they're going to see what happens next, which means that they will see the incredible cost and cruelty and the collateral damage of making such insanely short-term policies for private gain in this, what is known as the global community. But the second reason that I would like you to be encouraged, even in the midst of all this discouraging stuff that we are talking about and continues to have incredibly devastating effects around the world, is that ultimately there will be justice Because there is an ultimate authority, and I can't believe I'm saying this. He gets us as convoluted and confused and contentious as all this international meddling has gotten, and as difficult as it is to discern what people's motivations might be. You should be encouraged that there is a judge out there who gets all of us one way or the other.