Putin Fears For His Life (6-26-23)

Posted on June 27, 2023 by Luke Ford

00:10 One man’s adventure beyond good & evil (5-15-20), https://rumble.com/vfss5j-one-mans-adventure-beyond-good-and-evil-5-15-20.html
09:40 Biodiversity Crisis Drives Eradication Campaign Against Super-Predators (6-10-22), https://rumble.com/v181y3x-biodiversity-crisis-drives-eradication-campaign-against-super-predators-6-1.html
17:00 Everybody hurts
23:00 Putin’s Speech Reveals New Weakness, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p18uCyKjer4
32:00 Interview with Jonathan Howard on Covid Contrarians, https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/interview-with-jonathan-howard-on-covid-contrarians
47:00 Why does Amazon Music keep pushing Phantom of the Opera on me?
48:00 Why does Youtube keep pushing Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin videos on me?
1:08:00 WP: This photographer documents queer beauty in the South amid anti-trans laws, https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2023/06/26/trans-visibility-photos/

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Conservatism & Liberalism & Covid (6-25-23)

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Luke Ford

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Book Review: The End of the World (Peter Zeihan) Is Wrong: Here’s Why.

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Luke Ford

Eric Engle writes in late 2022:

* What exactly is Peter Zeihan wrong about?
1. Zeihan Predicts the USA Will Withdraw from the World.
In Reality, Globalization will Continue and May Even Intensify with Invention
Peter Zeihan predicts, roughly, that the USA will withdraw from global engagement into a form of what I call neo-isolationism.
Zeihan argues that globalization has not benefited the USA. That is simply untrue. A better argument would be that the costs of global hegemony in dead Americans and trillions of dollars wasted for little or no perceptible benefit are simply too high for American voters. However, even the better argument is also untrue.
Zeihan miscalculates the costs and benefits to the USA of engagement.
The USA will not retrench, withdraw, or enter into any other form of neo-isolationism because states are, roughly speaking, rational power maximizers and the USA benefits with a sort of seignorage from global hegemony – literal seignorage in the case of the fact the dollar is the global currency, figurative seignorage in the form of several extensive and mutually supporting alliance and trade networks as well as soft power in the form of an attractive culture and ideology.
a. Zeihan Over-Estimates the Costs of the Failed Global War on Terror (GWOT)
Zeihan errs in part by over-estimating the damage done by 20 years of failed US liberal internationalist strategy. The GWOT was a costly failure. However, Zeihan doesn’t recognize just how much punishment the proles can take and still support the home team. Let’s just imagine London in 1940, Berlin in 1945, or Kyiv today. People no matter how beaten down don’t just roll over and give up.

* Although I do think Zeihan worth reading one must do so critically. Zeihan does provoke deep thinking about some of the factors which determine international relations and the resulting grand trends. His market-driven energy sector analyses are superb, since his corporate clients could never tolerate any inaccurate forecasts. When he strays outside of energy and agriculture markets, leaving the field of economics and entering into state-to-state relations the results are a fascinating mess, overlydetermined by geography and demography with inadequate consideration of history and ideology. I reach this conclusion with no great joy. Who wouldn’t wish to see the inevitable easy victory of America over tyranny through simple neo-isolationism and re-industrialization while the enemies of the republic collapse due to demography and geography? But “the world ain’t that simple bub”. The USA is locked into competition with varieties of authoritarianism and cannot merely “walk away”. China will not inevitably collapse, nor will global trade vanish to be replaced by famines and pirates. And these outlandish statements of Zeihan’s are why we can view him best as: very clever disinformation with some solid empirical foundations.

Too bad it won’t work.

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Does Peter Zeihan Present A Cartoon Version Of Reality? (6-25-23)

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Luke Ford

01:00 If I were watching, I’d want this!
04:00 PragerForce!
31:00 Book review: The End of the World (Peter Zeihan) Is Wrong: Here’s Why., https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=148932
41:00 Vlad Reacts: Peter Zeihan on Rogan, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AhWZGjbaJE
53:30 I Watched 99 Videos with Peter Zeihan in 2022 – Spoiler: he talks a lot about China, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG4xUo2MoUI
54:30 Is Peter Zeihan telling Americans what they want to hear?
1:02:00 Elliott Blatt joins to talk about his San Francisco meet-up with Deep Left Jokkul
1:27:00 Is Peter Zeihan or Ray Dalio Right About China’s Economy?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo9oA4T2zSM
1:30:40 History Speaks Goes On Richard Spencer: The Holocaust—and Holocaust Denial—in American Life, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/the-holocaustand-holocaust-denialin
1:56:00 Has Mark Weber given up on Holocaust denial?
2:02:00 David Cole has changed his views
2:30:00 Introduction to Step Seven and Self-Esteem, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN31FehHdbg

* “This is the more prestigious weekly magazine Luke Ford Stream. He has a utility line like Chevrolet, then his Cadillac Prestige streams. Fordy does some of his best material after the spiritual tranquility and spiritual reflection of the Shabbas.”

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Exhausting

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Luke Ford

I get a stream of requests from people to do things for them that they can easily do for themselves via a Google search, such as links to videos, books and essays.

These requests are the most innocuous things in the world in themselves, but they always presage more requests to come. I’ve never found that they are one-off. Instead, in my experience, anyone who once asks you to do something for them that they can do for themselves, will keep coming back to the well.

When I call people out for asking me to do for them what they can do for themselves, I don’t recall one time when the other party has said in effect good point. Instead, they’re always put out.

The conversation always goes like this:

Requester: “Luke, can you direct me to that Richard Spencer freakout post-Cville audio you played onstream the other day, but the version where somebody synced the rhythm of his words precisely to crazy piano notes/chords?”

I put into Youtube’s search engine, “richard spencer as a piano piece”, and the video is the first result.

Luke: “Here. You could’ve found it yourself on YT without asking me.”

Requester: “Well, no, I tried and failed. Before asking you. Was it much of an inconvenience? Some of us are out here raising children and such, sorry for the inconvenience, lol.”

So, there’s no point it seems in trying to educate people to stand on their own two feet. One just has to accept that as soon as one is asked to do this once, if you give in and help them out, there will be no end of requests. People will take from you as much as they can with no consideration as to their own dignity and yours.

It’s an interesting dynamic. I don’t know what to do with it. One time means nothing, but hundreds of people do this to me in the course of a typical year. Whenever anyone once asks me to do something I think they could do themselves, it never ends there. It goes on and on and these importuners never turn out to be princes among men. It’s exhausting. I’m not looking at things in the best way. There’s got to be a better way of handling this. So far, the best thing I’ve found is to refuse from request one to be a patsy unless I’m sleeping with the requester, G-d forbid.

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