RadixJournal - October 11, 2023


All Over Again


Episode Stats


Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

133.86716

Word count

3,639

Sentence count

224

Harmful content

Toxicity

17

sentences flagged

Hate speech

26

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On the heels of the mass shooting at a music festival in Tel Aviv, we turn our attention to the recent events in Ukraine and the aftermath of the attack on a rock concert. Is it possible that we are returning to Cold War 2.0?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I have a very strong feeling that we have returned to 2001 to 2007 era of political discourse and dynamics.
00:00:16.000 And that in itself is interesting because I think from, let's say, 2015 through 2022, I think that that was a kind of Trump era of discourse.
00:00:33.820 People were becoming concerned with other matters. People were kind of maybe looking inward, becoming more nationalistic. The left was more concerned about internal dynamics and not terribly concerned with foreign policy dynamics or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, etc.
00:00:57.060 Now, there were some exceptions to that rule. There was the attack on Soleimani, on Iran. We came very close in late 2018, early 2019 to a full-on war with Iran.
00:01:12.760 And so things are still brewing. But I do think that matters flipped.
00:01:19.640 Now, I might have been engaging in some wishful thinking, but I had hoped in a way that a return to a lot of Cold War era thinking with the Ukraine conflict was overall a positive thing. 0.51
00:01:38.580 There was a big, aggressive, bad guy out there in the form of Putin and Russia, and it would inspire greater unity in the West, and it would maybe also test us to define what it means to be in the West.
00:01:59.920 Now, according, you know, as we've talked about at length, according to the dissident right, to a very large degree, the meaning of the West, what it means to be a part of this coalition, what NATO means as an alliance is homosexuality, drag queens, grooming of children, and the worship of Satan.
00:02:25.860 And in this respect, they agree more or less with Alexander Dugan and company and Vladimir Putin.
00:02:34.460 So we had a very new and interesting dynamic emerge.
00:02:40.280 And, you know, Cold War 2.0 wasn't all that I had hoped it might be, but I think it was interesting and brought up an interesting dynamic.
00:02:50.800 And also, I didn't have many reservations when it came to thinking about Cold War 2.0.
00:03:01.040 I was, the invasion of Ukraine was not justified. 0.83
00:03:09.200 I mean, it's understandable from the standpoint of Russia and Vladimir Putin, but I did not find any sensible way of justifying it.
00:03:20.980 And I was and am 100% behind Ukraine in that conflict.
00:03:28.500 Now, it is like we're reliving the 20th century in many ways, but, you know, what were years or decades are now weeks and months.
00:03:39.080 And I found it amazing the degree to which we have flipped back immediately into the Bush era when it comes to conservatives and Israel.
00:03:54.420 Now, there's no doubt.
00:03:56.480 I mean, I understand the horror about of what happened.
00:04:01.980 I think I think there was something poetically horrific about the attack on the music festival, which is where reportedly hundreds were slaughtered and raped and et cetera.
00:04:17.020 There was something weirdly poetic about that.
00:04:21.000 It was a desert music festival, a kind of all night rave that lasted into the morning.
00:04:26.940 And there was, you know, there's an image of a statue of Buddha and it was all for peace.
00:04:33.900 But it was basically a Dionysian festival.
00:04:38.200 Richard, I'm most interject.
00:04:39.860 I've seen a video literally on the telegram.
00:04:42.520 They posted it.
00:04:43.640 It wasn't that.
00:04:44.820 IDF were there.
00:04:46.100 There were literally 500 people.
00:04:48.420 And they posted it if you want.
00:04:50.160 What is your point?
00:04:51.440 IDF were there?
00:04:52.400 I'm not terribly surprised.
00:04:53.420 Police are at rock concerts all over.
00:04:56.940 No, they were having a gun fight with the people in between.
00:05:02.240 And I can literally show you that.
00:05:03.800 What is your point?
00:05:04.160 That's the kind of disinformation.
00:05:06.140 As in, they didn't just come there and slaughter 300 people like that.
00:05:10.740 You know, like small things like that do make a difference.
00:05:13.560 Don't.
00:05:14.400 No, they don't.
00:05:15.560 In fact, I mean, the IDF was protecting a rock concert and they engaged in a firefight.
00:05:22.880 Even if you would, even if the IDF, what are you suggesting?
00:05:26.360 That if the IDF is there, you're justified in shooting civilians?
00:05:30.380 No, any conflict, people could get caught in between.
00:05:33.700 But then the thing is, it'll be moralized for one side.
00:05:36.680 It'll be, oh, it'll be, oh, these are just civilians and they should never get talked.
00:05:42.800 Right?
00:05:43.040 But the other side is terror.
00:05:44.200 Like, on the other side, it's collateral damage.
00:05:46.760 And that kind of language, I get it.
00:05:48.180 Okay, maybe you may sympathize with one side more, but make that apparent instead of saying,
00:05:52.940 hey, they came there and they want to know.
00:05:55.600 They came there to fight the IDF.
00:05:58.540 And if there's a group in between the two, then that's a slight difference.
00:06:02.200 That makes a difference.
00:06:02.800 Well, I was simply noting a kind of horrific poetry to the situation of these images of
00:06:14.000 the music festival and then what are, I guess, called power gliders that were coming in.
00:06:21.640 So when I first heard about this, I thought that they were like actually hang gliding from
00:06:27.720 the hills, not exactly.
00:06:29.400 It was actually a much more of like a literal James Bond situation with power gliders and
00:06:36.620 these big fans on vehicles.
00:06:38.640 I mean, it was remarkable.
00:06:41.060 But coming in from the, from the horizon, it actually reminded me quite a bit of this novel
00:06:49.760 that I was revisiting last night called Platform by Michel Oudbeck.
00:06:54.000 It's, it's kind of, it's not one of his most celebrated works.
00:06:57.660 I actually think it's quite amazing, but it's, it's about a, these decadent Western French, 1.00
00:07:06.780 Frenchmen, and they decide to create a sex tourism, you know, company. 0.94
00:07:12.500 And in the end, a very, a situation like that actually occurs.
00:07:18.480 They're, you know, involved in various debaucheries and Islamic terrorism rears its head. 1.00
00:07:26.880 And, and in a, in a, in a kind of tragic way, but, but almost in a way in which there, these
00:07:33.480 decadent Westerners who don't even kind of believe in themselves and, you know, in, in 0.65
00:07:38.200 the narrators, Michel, I believe is the narrator's name in, in, in his own comments, he's like,
00:07:44.620 civilization can't exist with people like me in it.
00:07:47.560 I don't want anything.
00:07:49.160 I can't reproduce all, all I can do is, you know, chug Red Bull and Viagra and engage 0.99
00:07:56.460 in these cheap sexual adventures and watch porn and kind of fall in love with a woman who's 0.99
00:08:01.980 never going to be a mother. 0.98
00:08:02.940 And there's an almost a kind of like, it's an end of history book.
00:08:07.880 It was written actually just before 9-11, but there's an almost a kind of like secret
00:08:13.440 desire for Islamism, which I think is implied in the novel.
00:08:19.540 It's, it's very, very good and very powerful. 0.85
00:08:21.940 And I, I think I, I, I was reminded of that with these scenes of these kind of silly, decadent
00:08:30.460 e-girls, you know, dancing away at a party and reality, like the real intrudes onto their 0.83
00:08:38.940 life.
00:08:40.060 And, um, there, there is, again, it's, it's horrific, but I think there is a, uh, a poetic
00:08:46.220 irony to it.
00:08:47.540 Um, now, where are we in this situation?
00:08:51.100 Now, as many people who are more sympathetic towards the Palestinians have correctly pointed 1.00
00:08:56.580 out, um, there have been thousands of deaths of Palestinians over the decades and including
00:09:08.940 children.
00:09:09.440 I mean, the Gaza Strip is a unique place.
00:09:11.720 So the, the Gaza Strip is, uh, seaside, uh, uh, community, uh, also bordering Egypt.
00:09:21.100 Um, it was, uh, land taken in 19, after the 1967 war.
00:09:27.780 Um, it's interestingly, if you fast, or if you, we rewind to 2005 with George W. Bush's
00:09:36.240 quest for global democracy, and he's going to solve all problems by making people democratic
00:09:42.360 because democratic countries don't fight each other.
00:09:44.540 Uh, there was this promotion of democracy and it was, it was a kind of land for peace
00:09:49.760 deal.
00:09:50.180 We're going to allow more administration of Gaza, uh, you know, because you're going to 0.96
00:09:56.660 become a democratic country.
00:09:58.280 Uh, again, it's this irony of that whole period.
00:10:02.020 And the kind of Democrats dilemma is what do you do when the guy you don't like actually
00:10:08.160 wins?
00:10:09.540 And, you know, Hitler was, um, you know, more or less, uh, and more, more than less a legal
00:10:18.960 chancellor of the Weimar, uh, parliament.
00:10:22.140 He did not come in and, uh, you know, shoot things up and assassinate a leader.
00:10:28.280 He was actually elected chancellor through the parliamentary democratic means.
00:10:34.980 So what do you do in this situation?
00:10:37.280 Like, what do you do when someone who's intolerant, uh, uses the, uh, uh, mechanism of democracy in
00:10:45.640 order to gain power?
00:10:46.620 Well, we had that on display in a, in a very open and unequivocal way with Hamas. 0.96
00:10:53.040 They overwhelmingly won the elections.
00:10:56.260 I have heard different statistics.
00:10:57.420 I think you should probably take all of these with a grain of salt, but they are, Hamas is 0.75
00:11:02.440 wildly popular and legitimate in Gaza, uh, 80, 90% of the population supports them.
00:11:10.900 So this again, brings up this question of, you know, do you understand terrorism as, you
00:11:18.360 know, what are we defining? 0.81
00:11:19.480 Are we defining a bunch of crazed lone wolves, like a school shooter or crazed Islamic? 0.87
00:11:26.360 You know, assassin or something like that, or actually you just, are you declaring something
00:11:32.100 as a terrorist that is an entity that is wildly popular among a population and that engages in many
00:11:39.620 non-terroristic acts, uh, like, uh, hospitals, feeding the poor, maintaining order.
00:11:47.380 I mean, can a terrorist entity actually administer something?
00:11:51.560 And irony upon irony of course, is that Hamas was backed if not created by the Likud faction
00:11:59.900 within Israel as a countervailing force to the Palestinian authority, uh, which has, you
00:12:08.060 know, was an exile.
00:12:09.360 It's long thought to be the kind of legitimate government and it styles itself as a, you know,
00:12:15.500 left-wing anti-colonial effort and so on.
00:12:18.580 It's, it's not really, uh, they're, they're Muslim, but they're not really, they don't define
00:12:23.320 themselves as a Islamicist or so on.
00:12:26.380 Um, Hamas does, Hamas is willing to engage in things like this.
00:12:30.860 They're also willing to administer hospitals.
00:12:33.060 I mean, it's a, it's a very weird situation and there's no easy solution to it.
00:12:39.080 Um, so, you know, yes, uh, there's no doubt that if there's just a pure death toll that
00:12:49.200 more Palestinians and including more Palestinian children have died in this conflict over this
00:12:55.580 past year and over the last decade, and you can even go back further than that.
00:13:01.420 The difference is that the Palestinians engaged in a flamboyant, outrageous action of attacking, 1.00
00:13:13.120 uh, sure, military targets in some way, but also just attacking civilians.
00:13:19.400 There has recently been a suggestion that babies were beheaded.
00:13:24.280 Now that was reported and I don't want to say that that's been confirmed.
00:13:30.760 There's no, no real evidence has been provided for that.
00:13:33.620 It's simply a kind of hearsay of a reporter was saying, you know, these, um, IDF troops,
00:13:39.580 reservists were here.
00:13:40.960 They they're beheading babies.
00:13:42.160 Now, what do we make of this?
00:13:43.660 But there has been evidence of hostage taking.
00:13:47.540 There has been evidence of slaughtered families.
00:13:51.200 Uh, it, it was, you know, that this girl who's become a kind of negative celebrity, a kind of
00:14:00.060 celebrity of horror, this, um, dual citizen from, uh, uh, Germany and Israel who's, who was
00:14:08.060 taken and, um, uh, brutally raped and then paraded around town.
00:14:14.200 Um, um, elderly women were taken and taken as hostages.
00:14:18.460 Uh, I imagine that many of these hostages are already dead after what has taken place with
00:14:28.080 the, uh, bombardment of Gaza.
00:14:31.060 Um, I, I mean, looking forward, uh, and I'll let some other people jump in here.
00:14:38.780 Um, I, there's always been a few different ways that the Palestinian question can be settled.
00:14:50.800 And this goes back even to the days of the British mandate and Palestinians. 0.65
00:14:58.660 I mean, I was rereading before I came, I was rereading this morning, um, Ilan Pope's book
00:15:03.900 on 10 myths about Israel.
00:15:05.220 I mean, he is a very good historian, you know, it's a left-wing book published by Verso,
00:15:11.100 but that doesn't mean it's not, it doesn't mean it's wrong.
00:15:14.520 It actually, uh, probably far more accurate than any right-wing book written on the subject.
00:15:19.300 But there was a assumption, just an assumption that population transfers had to take place,
00:15:27.140 even if we go back to the 1930s and forties, uh, and that the Palestinians were there and that
00:15:34.720 something needs to be done, done with them.
00:15:36.400 Now you can take this in a different ways.
00:15:39.740 Like what is Israel going to be? 0.88
00:15:42.060 Is it going to be a Jewish state and almost like a Jewish state let that is bordering a Arab 0.94
00:15:50.680 Palestinian Muslim state and they share Jerusalem.
00:15:54.600 So Jerusalem's in the, um, you know, it's, it's shared between the West bank and Israel proper.
00:16:01.200 Are they going to share the holy city of Jerusalem and live in peace with their neighbors?
00:16:08.040 Are they going to live in, you know, one of the kind of compromise solutions are, are they
00:16:11.860 going to create a demilitarized, defanged, totally neutered Palestinian state that they 1.00
00:16:19.620 can live beside?
00:16:21.100 Or are they just going to engage in full on ethnic cleansing and push the Palestinians out 0.87
00:16:28.660 and send them to Jordan or Iraq, et cetera?
00:16:31.760 This was, as Popeye points out, a clear assumption of early Zionist, even the left wing Zionist of,
00:16:40.580 well, we're creating this project.
00:16:42.500 So what do we do with these people who are here?
00:16:44.880 And the assumption was not to kill them all or anything, but a population transfer, which
00:16:51.680 no doubt, you know, is dubiously moral and would involve death at some level, I'm sure,
00:16:58.300 but was a population transfer that would send them to Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, et cetera.
00:17:05.120 And Bibi Netanyahu has been engaging this on a slow motion level in the West bank.
00:17:11.560 So again, Gaza is run by Hamas.
00:17:14.740 Gaza is responsible for these attacks. 0.98
00:17:16.960 Gaza is being bombarded.
00:17:18.360 There's a West bank, a much larger area that is landlocked, unlike Gaza, and it includes
00:17:26.520 Jerusalem.
00:17:28.620 And they, the settlements, I put some of these up in the scratch pad.
00:17:36.040 There, there was an interesting article on Vox in terms of just the number of settlements
00:17:42.580 and maps.
00:17:44.560 I'll just share the screen just so you can kind of take a look at this.
00:17:49.140 But you can see this, I think this was published in 2016.
00:17:53.540 I'm sure there's actually better work on this, but you can see the number of Israeli outposts
00:18:00.360 and then Israeli settlements all over the place.
00:18:03.660 They're not even centralized.
00:18:06.500 This right here is a, shows a graphical progress or a map progress of settlements and outposts
00:18:14.960 from 1970 to 2016.
00:18:16.560 As you can see, they are everywhere.
00:18:19.240 And here are just basically numbers of the population of settlers.
00:18:23.320 So, I mean, in 1980, we're talking about a tiny amount of people.
00:18:27.820 I don't know if there's 10,000 or so are engaged in settlements.
00:18:31.840 As of 2016, when this was published, it's 350,000.
00:18:37.200 I mean, these have grown under Netanyahu's leadership.
00:18:41.200 I would assume that there's half a million settlers there.
00:18:44.160 So, it's a slow motion form of ethnic cleansing or terraforming, if you will. 0.92
00:18:54.020 It's a slow motion way of simply bringing all of these people into the West Bank and thus, 1.00
00:19:01.860 you know, making it a fait accompli.
00:19:03.560 You will never have that territory.
00:19:08.360 This is, you know, what are you going to do with the million and strong Jews who live there?
00:19:16.320 It just, it becomes a slow motion ethnic cleansing that has taken place.
00:19:22.300 Many of the criticisms of Bibi Netanyahu and the obvious intelligence failure that occurred allowing this to happen is that Bibi's eyes were fixated on the West Bank.
00:19:37.000 He wants to send, use the IDF, use the intelligence force to defend settlements because this is the project. 0.96
00:19:44.120 So, we can't just kill them all. 0.53
00:19:48.420 We don't want to have a two-state solution. 0.99
00:19:51.240 Bibi, whatever he might say, he has never wanted a two-state solution. 0.71
00:19:55.860 He wants a occupation that will last indefinitely.
00:19:59.400 So, what do we do?
00:20:00.600 We just do it slowly.
00:20:02.680 It might take another 40 years, but in another 30 to 40 years, there might be 2 million settlers in the West Bank.
00:20:10.100 And it gets to a point where nothing can be done.
00:20:13.500 There is no possible way that you can have a Palestinian state in the West Bank with this many Israeli Jews in it. 1.00
00:20:21.320 And not just Israeli Jews, but this many right-wing, highly religious Israeli Jews who vote for the Likud party.
00:20:29.920 So, that is the plan.
00:20:33.080 Now, Gaza is a different story.
00:20:34.940 Again, it's a much smaller area.
00:20:37.160 It's, as you've probably heard on many of these reports, I mean, it's one of those densely populated places on Earth.
00:20:46.420 And it's administered by Hamas. 0.71
00:20:49.940 And, you know, I think Bibi's solution to this might be just destroy it and massive bombardment. 0.99
00:20:58.400 The hostages be damned. 0.99
00:21:01.800 They're martyrs for the cause. 0.99
00:21:04.000 And we'll just eliminate this problem.
00:21:08.620 And I don't know.
00:21:10.040 I mean, I'm not in Israel.
00:21:12.060 I don't know what the feeling is.
00:21:16.140 It's all I can do is look at, you know, American news sources.
00:21:24.300 I can look at speeches by Bebanyahu.
00:21:27.620 I can look at news events.
00:21:28.840 And my sense is that there definitely is a liberal faction that is going to push back on Netanyahu in any sort of destruction of Gaza and the continued ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
00:21:48.720 But this attack was so dramatic, so just insane on some level.
00:21:57.120 And that, again, through social media, through television, et cetera, it's just, it has refocused everyone's eyes onto Israel.
00:22:10.180 And it has gained the support of the United States, Joe Biden, the Western world, the NATO alliance.
00:22:19.480 I mean, Germany is projecting the Israeli flag onto the Brandenburg tour.
00:22:24.520 I mean, it is, it has become Ukraine two years on, basically, or something close to it.
00:22:31.760 I think there actually is more ambivalence and criticism among the people who are supporting Israel right now.
00:22:39.420 But it is a lot like Ukraine 2.0.
00:22:43.880 And they have this opportunity to do it, at least for the coming months.
00:22:49.000 There is going to be a lot of apologies that are going to be put out by Western sources for any sort of bombardment and destruction of Gaza.
00:22:59.100 Joe Biden has unequivocally said, we've got your back.
00:23:03.400 The American people stand with Israel.
00:23:05.840 That, you know, again, you can interpret it however you want.
00:23:09.220 That strikes me as just a green light.
00:23:10.840 So I think consciousness has changed over the past three days.
00:23:21.680 I think we've returned to a kind of 9-11 feeling on the right and in the media writ large.
00:23:31.860 I think how this is going to affect, yeah, Dark Day for Dark Brandon.
00:23:39.720 Yeah, I agree because he, you know, there have been all of these reports of his criticism about Bibi Netanyahu.
00:23:47.940 He thinks he's a bad prime minister. 0.86
00:23:49.620 He's corrupt. 0.98
00:23:50.500 He's been indicted as a corrupt actor. 0.99
00:23:53.660 We need to move to something else.
00:23:55.420 I mean, whatever you want to say about the United States and its support of Zionism, you know, Jewish leadership within State Department, et cetera, the mass media, et cetera, et cetera.
00:24:07.520 The United States has had a two-state solution as a policy.
00:24:13.660 And the Oslo Accords, et cetera, are about that.
00:24:18.240 Now, you can question this, you can say, you can have all sorts of criticism, but that is, that has been the policy of the United States for some time. 0.69
00:24:30.620 And I just feel that is now ridiculous and impossible.
00:24:36.200 I mean, if there is, and again, Biden, I think genuinely saw and accurately saw Bibi Netanyahu as a real problematic actor in this regard.
00:24:47.540 He is opposing this solution that we've come up with, where two little statelets, nation states living side by side, not at war with one another, and we can just solve this and be done with it.
00:25:01.840 That is over.
00:25:03.500 There is no two-state solution ever.
00:25:06.640 That is just, people talk about this and wring their hands and, you know, speak wistfully of one day we're going to have a two-state solution.
00:25:17.520 This is just nonsense.
00:25:20.600 It is not, it could have happened in the 90s, could have happened maybe even in 2005.
00:25:25.880 There was an almost opening as a silver lining of George Bush's terrible war in Iraq.
00:25:31.240 All of these things were kind of sort of possible, but I just think they are totally impossible at this point.
00:25:39.920 And so, yeah, there is, there, a one-state solution is also possible.
00:25:47.200 I mean, I don't think Bibi Netanyahu wants this.
00:25:49.420 A one-state solution of greater Israel in which Jews are going to increasingly be outnumbered and, to be brutal about it, outbred by Arabs. 1.00
00:26:00.760 And so the identity of Israel as a Jewish state is going to slowly, slowly dissipate.
00:26:06.880 That is still a possibility.
00:26:09.960 That can be done.
00:26:11.200 But in my view, that was really the only possibility.
00:26:14.720 This just construction of two states that have different agendas, et cetera, side by side, done much like the creation of Israel, done by the United Nations or the United States.
00:26:25.200 It just, it always struck me as unworkable.
00:26:27.960 I thought this was kind of always a pipe dream.
00:26:30.060 But a one-state solution is very much possible.
00:26:33.700 But I don't see it now.
00:26:38.120 And maybe I am becoming cynical and I'm exaggerating these things, but I do think that we're going to see a, obviously, a kind of continued ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
00:27:00.440 But I absolutely think we are going to see a destruction of the Gaza Strip. 0.99
00:27:06.640 It's going to be televised on social media.
00:27:09.400 And I will leave it at that.