Substack Notes Vol 5.7
Substack Notes from Feb. 13th - Feb. 28th
Here are some more selected Substack notes from the past few weeks:
Feb. 15th - A Locked Room
“I'm glad that we got to see this, because it revealed how out of touch Putin is. Tucker begins with a simple question of what the threat was on February 22. Putin's response spends half an hour on the entire history of Russia.
We're used to people in the Middle East talking like this. An obsession with deep history is the characteristic of cultures that fight wars that never end. No one wonder no one even in the Russian speaking part of Ukraine wants to be part of Russia. Modern people care about their own lives and freedom and want a vision of the future.
That's what Ukraine and the West offer. Not endless lectures from a grumpy uncle on how Vlad Vladimirovich sent love letters to Svetlana the Elegant in 1207 and why this proves that Russians and Ukrainians are one people.
When talking about geopolitics, the deeper someone goes in history, the more disconnected they are from modern reality, and the less likely they are to be a rational actor who can be negotiated with. Putin had arguments he could've started with about the US interfering in Russian affairs or whatever, but he's deranged enough to think that leading with a lecture on the history of the Slavic peoples is how you sell a war in the twenty first century.
Surely a case of free speech is the best disinfectant. I knew Putin talked a lot about history, I had no idea his brain had deteriorated to this point. Hopefully Russians can one day soon have a leader who cares about making their lives better, rather than fighting wars based on what he read in history books.” -
Art - Eddie Mendoza
Responding to:
Feb. 16th - A Locked Room
Those are the symbolic and visible signs of the issues but they don't encapsulate it. Widespread opposition to SAT's, merit, the free market (in favor of victim grievance and equity-based selection criteria)? Almost total rejection of free speech and free expression? The popular beliefs that America is a white supremacist superstate and that the family, language, borders, and police are all thoroughly oppressive concepts that should be swept away? Maybe these ideas haven't corroded American society that deeply YET but give it another 10 years. Watch the rot continue to spread... I will check back in with you then. Flags and parties don't even begin to define the problems on the Left.
Feb 23rd - A Locked Room
“…Russia's influence efforts were marginal compared to the efforts undertaken by the actual Trump and Clinton campaigns. The IRA spent $100,000 on ads; the campaigns spent $80 million. Each time a Facebook user stumbled across some content designed to persuade him to vote for Trump, it was overwhelmingly likely that the originator of said content was a real, sincere Trump fan rather than a Russian troll. In any case, the kinds of voters that swung the election to Trump—older, working-class white voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania—were not exactly the most online demographic. On the contrary, they disproportionately received their news from more traditional technologies, like talk radio and television.
Perhaps that's why so many in the mainstream media fell in love with the idea that Russian social media malfeasance was the real culprit behind Trump's win: It helped them to deflect from the fact that their own, obsessive coverage of his every word was worth $ billion in free media for the Trump campaign.
So when Pelosi continues to say that Trump's behavior is best explained by some secret Russian connection, she is clinging to a theory that doesn't hold much water…
Note, however, that no mainstream fact-checking organization or misinformation watchdog group is springing into action to correct their claims. Liberal news outlets reported on the interview—The Huffington Post cheered Pelosi for putting Trump "on blast"—without calling it into question whatsoever. It's very telling what gets counted as misinformation and what doesn't.”
-Robby Soave, reason.com
