Today’s video is kind of a case study in the importance of striking while the iron is hot. I was very, very excited to make this video a month and a half ago. An outline, and copious notes came to mind almost instantly. But instead of finishing off the script, I focused on the other two videos in the series, confident that this would be a big blow-out finale. Early next week when I finally sat down to write this script, I was a bit non-plussed. The ideas and the outline still made sense to me, but the vigor and rigor of the ideas have gone flabby. I don’t know. The video still makes some worthwhile points. But I’m not particularly happy with the final execution. I am, however, happy to have finally said my piece on cryptocurrency. Should be able to avoid this topic until the next run up in price a couple years from now.
US media seems allergic to deep dives on how this “New Cold War” got started. So I went ahead and wrote one. Today’s video mostly serves as a trailer for this medium post that lays out the whole story. Give it a read!
Today’s video is an attempt to bridge a gap I see in a lot of economic discussion on twitter, in academia and in mainstream journalism. There seems to be a growing sense that the US economic consensus is changing in a bigger way that it has for four decades. The old Reaganite consensus seems to be falling apart. Some deplore this shift, but many more seem to love it. What neither the pro- or anti-camp seems to be doing in a serious way is reckoning with how cryptocurrency fits into this picture. This is a major oversight. How can we talk about the economy, money and finance without discussing a growing insurgency against all of those things? Today’s video attempts to put the two pictures together, and point out that Crypto ideology is very much on one side of this broader economic debate.
I’ve been bothered by Cryptocurrency for quite some time. I started following it seriously again after the 2017 peak and crash. I’ve always been leery of talking about it because I so fundamentally did not get why it continued to be a thing. After researching it at great length in recent months, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the world that’s crazy, not me. If cryptocurrency continues on its current trajectory, it’s got a lot of terrifying implications. I begin to unpack those in this video, which is intended to be the first of three.
I’m a bit of a broken record when it comes to Tunisia. I have been making the same argument on here since 2016, but people keep not listening. Considering the amount of damage the US has done to Tunisia’s neighborhood, and considering the value of Tunisia’s democratic experiment for the long term interests of the United States (going back to George Washington), the US and Europe should just be giving the country money. Not loans, not conditional, but just outright gifts in an attempt to keep its democracy going. It’s been about two years since I’ve made that argument, so with today’s video I trot it out again…
I don’t talk about Russia much. Mostly because I don’t take it very seriously. I take its nukes very seriously, but my fears there are more about mismanagement of stockpiles than the possibility of intentional use. When it comes to Russia’s position in the world I see it as an under-funded and doomed power that is trying to do way, way too much with what little it has left. When Russia looks strong, it’s usually because the United States has done something incredibly stupid, like overthrow a democratically elected president on Russia’s periphery or destroy an Arab state.
This impression does not seem to be widely shared, so I suppose a video explaining this view is long over due. Weirdly, my excuse for finally getting this complicated map video out there is what I believe to be an unacknowledged Russian victory. We’ve been hearing about all these farcical Russian victories for half a decade, and now that there’s a real one, everybody seems to be ignoring it. Today’s video also explains why that is…
One of my goals with this channel is to constantly add to the breadth of countries covered. I think today’s video does a great job of doing exactly that. You’ve certainly heard me complain about Libya before, but I’ve always avoided this aspect of the tragedy, because it’s just so damn complicated. There are a lot of moving parts to the fall of the Sahel. Two developments convinced me to take the time necessary to make this video happen. One negative, and one very positive. The death of Chad’s president at the hands of a militia trained in Libya, and the almost miraculous ( and very tenuous ) emergence of a unified government in Libya. Diving into Chad, and comparing it with what I know about Sudan gave me some more perspective on the region. Obviously, I am barely scratching the surface here, but I feel like this is a crucial piece of information for understanding this vital region of Africa. I also enjoy the way the information was conveyed. I hope you do too!
Let me explain something about the psychology of Americans to any Hamas supporters or anti-anti-Hamas folks who may be out there. This could just be me, but I think it probably applies much more widely. In recent years I have been falling away from the knee-jerk, no questions asked, pro-Israel stance I was born with. For a week now I have been following events in Israel & Palestine with growing outrage. I am stewing about the injustice of what now seems to be a permanent state of apartheid. I spent the past two days putting together a video condemning the occupation and urging change. After the news that 20 Gazans had been murdered, including 9 children, I became even more outraged, and spent last night looking for ways to make the video more scathing and angry…
…and then I woke up this morning to find that Hamas had successfully murdered two Israelis.
I just spent the morning making my video more mild and milquetoast and “Both sides”. I briefly considered bagging the vid entirely and running a rant on that pipeline attack instead. You can already see the effects in this post. I say Hamas murdered Israelis. But I just said that the Gazans were murdered. By who? Who knows? I am an American and Israelis have been murdered, I don’t care anymore. Is this unfair? Of course! I am deeply conscious of this messed up psychological tic that still values Palestinian life about a tenth as much as Israeli life. I hate that about myself. But it’s still there. And I am somebody who is trying to do better. A lot of people who may have been paying attention to this conflict for the first time will now tune it out entirely. “Sad they can’t get along, not my business.” Today’s video, which I will still run, highlighted a shift that I was seeing in US media post-Trump, and post-War on Terror. This Palestinian uprising felt different. US media was paying attention and getting beyond the AIPAC talking points. This uprising no longer feels so different. Hamas rockets have sent this set of “clashes” straight back to the standard media playbook. We ARE in a new era. Palestine does have new opportunities. But none of them will be realized with this old playbook. Hamas is the Israeli occupation’s best friend.
Ahhh, poor Hillary Clinton. One of this channel’s first great successes was a polite video explaining why she shouldn’t be president, and here I am now, fondly wishing she had won. To be clear, I made that video all the way back in 2014, I took that video down after Trump was nominated, and I kept it down throughout the 2016 election. There’s no question in my mind that Clinton was a more competent politician and would have made a better president than Donald Trump. Today’s video makes it clear how much the world lost when she lost the election in 2016. But Politics is always more complicated than the personality of individual contestants. Today’s video attempts to play the tape all the way through, and look at the ways that any Democratic president might have been defeated by the absurd politics of the Coronavirus in the United States.
You may notice that today’s video looks a little different. I don’t know why it took this long for me to do this, but this weekend I finally signed up with Storyblocks, a company that provides stock footage. In recent years I’ve become more and more concerned with keeping my videos within the letter of copyright law. I didn’t realize until this afternoon how limiting that was. Back when I started out I just grabbed whatever from wherever, with the certain knowledge that nobody would ever come after an obscure channel in Turkey. But in 2017 I started being a lot more careful. I’m very grateful for what I’ve learned through that process and the skills I’ve built…
But man today was fun! With Storyblocks it feels like 2014 again. They’ve got a clip for most anything I want to talk about. I was aware of this flexibility as I finalized the script, and I think it allowed me to put something together that’s a little freer, and maybe even a little bit funny. Anyway, today is the most fun I’ve had editing in ages, and it’s the first of the new “long form” videos that I’m actually proud of. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did…
