Tag Archives: MoreFreedomFoundation

Greece and Turkey’s Mediterranean Gas Clown Show

Today’s video is a particularly crotchety one. I sometimes worry a bit that I’m insufficiently respectful to the heads of state of these countries in videos like this one. But in reality it’s these politicians that are being disrespectful of their duties to their countries. The East Mediterranean issue is fundamentally not a very serious one, yet Turkey, France and Greece are committing military forces as if real issues are at stake. This kind of thing could back fire terribly. I don’t think it will. But the reckless actions that these men are taking are certainly not going to get me to treat them respectfully. I hope you enjoy my explanation of one of the more requested topics in recent months.

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How We Failed Black Panther | Chadwick Boseman & Cancer

Cancer Sucks. Fundamentally, that’s what today’s video about. It’s absurd that a 43 year old should be dying of cancer in the 21st century, and honestly it’s absurd that anybody should. We have the technologies and principles we need to be moving much more quickly on cancer than we are today. The main thing holding us up today is a failure of political imagination and a dramatic mis-allocation of funding.

The death of Chadwick Boseman is significant for many reasons, but I don’t think this aspect has been covered enough. Today’s video is an attempt to correct that oversight.

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The UAE Israel Peace Deal Is The End Of An Era

This is a video I’ve wanted to make for a while. After looking at it intensely for at least three years now, I’ve got some very strong opinions on the history of the Arab World. I’ve been reluctant to lay them out however, because it’s impossible to talk about the Arab world in general without talking about Israel. It’s a topic that is guaranteed to alienate at least half my audience. As you can tell from today’s video, my views are capable of irritating all sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I have held off on addressing that conflict directly because of general chicken-heartedness, and a feeling that I haven’t read enough on the subject yet.

Well a week or so back Israel and the UAE took it out of my hands. The deal announced by Trump is tremendously significant, though not for the reasons that the parties or the deal-makers suspect. This really could be a turning point in Arab history more generally. Or maybe not. Anyway, I’m delighted to have been forced to get these ideas out there. Let me know what you think!

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Trump’s Re-Election Means War With Iran | Election 2020 8

It’s frustrating when I upload a video and realize I’ve left something out. What today’s video needs is a brief description of the mechanism that makes me think Trump’s war with Iran is inevitable. It’s not like Trump will start a war with Iran. The actions that have already been taken by the Trump regime mean that there will be some sort of Iranian reprisal within the first months after his re-election. Despite his savage expansion of almost every war the US was already fighting, I do still hold the unfashionable belief that Trump knows a new war would be stupid. It doesn’t matter. The damage has already been done. Iran’s year delayed revenge for Soleimani will be too outsize to not respond to. Hundreds of dead US soldiers? A high profile assassination of a beloved US figure? Whatever. It will be something that no US president will be able to avoid responding to. And then we will be off to the races. I am convinced that the only chance for avoiding this horrific result is the election of Joe Biden.

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Egypt’s Libya Intervention is Embarrassing | Libya 5

Man, I was really hoping to make it to Egypt one last time before I started critiquing the Sisi regime. Oh well! This regime could have as much as a decade to go, so no pyramids for me for the foreseeable. I feel like Egypt’s dictatorship forced my hand a little bit, by threatening to invade Libya to back up one of the region’s most pointless strong men, Khalifa Haftar. It’s a shame. I do hear mixed things about Egypt under Sisi. Some claim the economy has turned around, though I don’t see much proof of it. Some claim that he brings stability, but it looks to me like the sort of stability the Shah of Iran provided in the 1970s.

If your regime is based savage repression, as Sisi’s very much is, it tends to lead to bad decisions. I believe that this threatened intervention in Libya is potentially one of those very bad decisions. Today’s video lays out why Libya is a conflict that Egypt should avoid getting more involved in.

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Elon Musk vs. China | Starlink, Tesla, SpaceX and the New Cold War | Markets Are Dumb 14

Today’s video hints at something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. We all know China’s great internet firewall as a source of great repression. But China’s maintenance of a separate national internet has also left it weirdly independent of the US tech giants that rule the internet everywhere else.

China has worked hard to co-opt the newest of the Tech behemoths, Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX. General Motors and other foreign car companies battled for decades to build up their competitive position in China. Musk was building a massive factory in China under favorable terms before he sold his millionth (100,000th?) car. China was wise to try to get this guy on their side, but as today’s video explains, it’s unlikely to work out well for them in the long term…

I’d like to make more videos in this vein, thinking through the outside power of tech companies and what it means for geopolitics, but that depends on how this video does. If you like it, share it around…

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Goodbye Haghia Sophia, Hello Ayasofya

This video was a depressing one to make. Throughout my time in Turkey, President Erdogan threatened to close the Haghia Sophia Museum and turn it into a Mosque. Now he’s finally done it. It’s possible to argue that he did it because he feels internally insecure, or because he feels internationally secure. Maybe it’s both.

I mixed the personal and the historical in this one in a way that I’m not entirely sure worked. It’s a news story I felt I had to address, but what I really think I’m trying to say with this video is pretty simple: It makes me sad.

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Yemeni Lives Matter | Yemen 20

The past month of protest and progress in the United States has been inspiring. The Establishment, Fox and Democratic, has expended a ton of energy on getting people scared of things like Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, and Police Abolition slogans. They haven’t managed to slow the momentum. The failure of CHAZ has actually been helpful, getting people to focus in on the possible again. All over the country, previously impossible looking things have been happening. There is certain to be back-sliding, but excellent progress has been made…

What I would like to see, and what today’s video argues for, is a shift in focus to what US white supremacy means abroad as well as domestically. Black lives matter. But so do Yemeni lives. The Yemeni catastrophe would not be possible if the US public gave a damn about Yemeni lives. Today’s video is an attempt to get people to care.

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Ladakh: China’s Missed Opportunity | India & The Border

Today’s video covers the India-China border dispute, which has gotten significantly more serious over the past 48 hours. I don’t have much to contribute to what’s happening on the ground, even the real reporters are having difficulty figuring that out. But the fact that China is embroiled in this lethal border dispute indicates a serious problem for the country.

China has missed an extraordinary opportunity. Now that I think of it, so have the Russians, the Chinese, and anybody else who has been set up as an enemy of the United States. Before this year he still had his defenders, but in June of 2020 there are few people who dispute that Donald Trump is the dumbest, weakest, and easiest to bribe president in US history. Yet after three and a half years of Trump’s time in power none of these legendarily so threatening actors have managed to do much at all to advance their interests. China, supposedly the country ready to supplant us, has managed to dig itself a massive hole geopolitically and financially. It’ almost as if we’re spending too much money on our military…

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Abolish Police? Defund? Dismantle? Minneapolis, Camden and the Future

Having finished today’s video I’m almost wondering if it’s too conservative. My sense of what police abolition means is what happened in Camden, New Jersey. Everybody on the old force was fired, the union was broken ( it later reformed), and the new, better police force has a fraction as many abuse claims AND crime has fallen precipitously. But I see on the twitter that people are envisioning all kinds of more radical futures. New corps of non-police officials could be charged with looking after the mentally ill. The money spent on policing could be devoted to any number of different aims, from the plausible to the ridiculous…

People are thinking in much bigger terms than just better, less present policing. It’s weird to find myself in the cautious mainstream on criminal justice… and I love it! It’s a sign of just how far the conversation has moved since my first videos on the drug war back in 2011. Back then many of my friends thought I was nuts. Now I’m being outpaced by people who could plausibly have political power in a few cities across this country. It’s a sign of how quickly things have changed for the better. These are, perhaps surprisingly, very optimistic times here in the United States of America.

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