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E252 - Exiting the Star Wars Castle

🕑 Added 2024-06-17 09:00:06 +0000 UTC

Comments

Isaac Suárez

Y’all should check out “The Quincy Institute”- (it was founded by Andrew Bacevitch, a very good military analyst who’s work on the US empire in the Middle East). It’s a realist IR think tank that, imo, has been the only consistently sane source of analysis on the Russo-Ukraine war. RWN and American Prestige (another good IR left leaning podcast) interview some folks from there. Also, re “armed resistance and the weathermen revival”- I often find myself thinking about the first scene of the film “The Baader Meinhoff Complex” (the story of the German RAF.) The initial spark was a student demonstration in front of the Shah’s Iranian embassy in the early 1970s- SAVAK plainclothes personnel attacked the students with 2x4s, and when the police intervened- a cop shot and killed a student. The legitimate anger that arose from this repression brought together the first generation of the RAF. I feel like we are in an age where millions of young, educated, angry people have had their share of “sparks.” No good will come of this- terrorism never brings the change that motivates it. I also think of the first scene of “28 Days Later” (where chimps, who are infected with the zombie virus, are forced to watch footage of mob violence.) It feels depressingly prescient.

Trazdat

You’re missing the full orwellianian misdirection in the phrase “Rules based international order” by taking it at face value. Being based on, rather than bound by, amorphous rules, rather than accepted international law, gives a consistent explanation for what would otherwise appear as hypocrisy.

Thomas Leposa

During the pandemic I started listening to "This Week in Virology" (TWIV), which is a podcast by fairly high up professors in fields like virology, immunology, medicine ect. They even had Fauci on at one point. Anyway, near the beginning of the pandemic (March - May 2020), one of the researchers involved with Ecohealth Alliance, which is a nonprofit connected with the Wuhan Lab, predicted COVID would eventually become a childhood disease - which as far as I can tell is what happened. The SARS-COV 2 virus is now one of the 5 or 6 coronaviruses that circulates through the human population. It no longer causes severe disease because humans have built up immunity to it through vaccination, natural infection, or both. Regarding the "lab leak" issue: I don't think we'll ever find irrefutable evidence one way or the other, and it almost doesn't matter to me because a lab leak from gain-of-function research clearly was something reputable scientists were worried about and warned about yet researchers connected with Fauci and the NIH decided to play god and continue the research anyway. The willingness of people like Fauci and other public health officials to lie and/or make definitive statements when they didn't actually have evidence to back those statements up is my take away from the pandemic.