Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Feb. 16, 2022 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:31:56

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #330

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hello and welcome to episode 330 of the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for the 16th of February 2022.
	Today I'm joined by Carl.
	Hello!
	And we're going to be talking about the Democrats spying on Trump and him being right about it all along, as we knew.
	We're going to talk about the shenanigans and maneuvers, political and military, on the borders of Ukraine and Russia.
	And finally, we are going to talk about, let me just pull it up, The Vikings, who are apparently transgender now.
	Did you know about that?
	I didn't know about that.
	But before we get into that, let's check out all of the good stuff that's come up on our site since you last tuned in.
	We have this article here by Hugo, which is an analysis of Joe Biden's first year in office.
	I haven't read it yet.
	It's not terribly complimentary.
	Oh, imagine my shock.
	If you can believe that.
	It is good in details now.
	But Hugo, of course, has a background in international relations.
	I'm sure he'll be paying due attention to the fallout from the Afghanistan withdrawal.
	Then we also have stuff like this video here by Carl, which is The Thesis of Conservatism.
	Yeah, basically, what's the argument that conservatives are making in the absence of left-wing politics is basically what I was aiming for, because this is something that I think a lot of conservatives don't really have an answer to, because the framing is always, well, we're...
	The progressives driving at the speed limit trying to resist the inevitable march of progress because they see some value prior to that.
	Okay, well, where did that come from?
	What is that?
	How is that built?
	And I think I've done quite a three-dimensional look at why, in the absence of left-wing politics, conservatism can still exist and is valuable.
	It's not just reactive, fundamentally.
	It has an essence all of its own, which many people seem to have forgotten as they've been caught up in politics.
	Yeah, no, no, that's exactly the point.
	And so it's sort of a self-generating conservatism.
	We also have articles on the site such as this one here by myself, The Conquest of Decadence, where I examine the moral degradation of the West lightly, but then consider how does one actually recover from decadence?
	How do you get back to a state which you can be proud of?
	I liked the focus on Eric Zemmour in this as well, because you can see that he is trying for a reconquest, but this is not generally a successful tactic, which is not good.
	But I love Zemmour.
	I think Boise Day is brilliant.
	Absolutely, but I think you'll enjoy that analysis.
	And then we also have premium videos such as this one here, which is an interview with Luke Avery about the wisdom in the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament.
	Yeah, I did this with Luke.
	I had read the Bible in my 20s when I was a new atheist, and I It is a sort of...
	A thought experiment that covers the entire universe and all through time and space and then grounds itself very firmly in an individual's life experience.
	And so you get this wonderful perspective shift that it's like a really great palate cleanser to your own view of your own life where everything seems like it's crowding in and you can't handle it.
	And there's a lot of good ancient wisdom in there.
	It's not necessarily religious.
	I mean, there are religious aspects to it because it's the Bible, but There is still, like, practical, real wisdom in there.
	And it was a real pleasure to do this podcast.
	Real pleasure.
	Excellent.
	You can access all of this stuff and more on our website.
	And if you want to view the premium stuff, a membership, a bronze tier, costs just £5 a month.
	And without further ado, let's get into the news.
	Yeah, so, Donald Trump appears to have been right about the Democrats, specifically Obama and Clinton, spying on him during and before his presidency.
	Now, you may remember CNN. I mean, this is just one article from 2020, but I could have pulled dozens and dozens of articles from all of the various left-leaning mainstream outlets.
	Isn't it spying on your opposition, which was the whole Watergate scandal?
	That's exactly it, yes.
	Interesting.
	And it was, I believe, one bug in the presidential office.
	So one bug was enough to bring down...
	Nixon, yes.
	I believe so.
	It may have been a couple, but it was very small scale, and this is not very small scale.
	And so this is remarkable.
	Well, we'll go into the media reaction in a minute.
	So, this is just an article from 2020, and I just want to show you the framing from CNN. They say, This raised
	alarm.
	This in 2020, they wrote this, right?
	Well, we know that's not true, but we'll get to that in a second.
	This raised alarms in the US intelligence community, so the FBI opened an investigation and utilized routine surveillance methods to find out what was going on.
	Along the way, the FBI made some serious mistakes, but there's no evidence that Obama or Biden were personally involved in anything.
	Hmm.
	So, we know that Obama's FBI spied on Trump.
	This has been revealed, frankly.
	The spying began early in 2016 as a robust opposition research tactic of the Hillary Clinton campaign transformed into an insurance policy to handicap the Trump administration.
	To be clear, as soon as this Pfizer surveillance warrant was granted, again, just to go back to the CNN framing, routine surveillance, no, this was special surveillance that had to be authorised by a court.
	This was done under Obama.
	They had access to the entire Trump campaign.
	When the details began to trickle in on the full extent of the Obama-Biden-Comey espionage scheme against Trump, the former FBI director provided the most incredulous response.
	And this is remarkable.
	You're going to love this.
	The FBI, the Department of Justice, conducted court-ordered electronic surveillance.
	I have never thought of that as spying.
	You can't be serious.
	That's just literally a statement.
	That's a video of him saying it.
	I just have never thought of that as spying.
	Or maybe now's the time that you do start thinking about spying, because that's what you were doing.
	Like, what a ridiculous response.
	But anyway, right?
	So, we'll go to September 2021, when, of course, we found out that the Russiagate scandal was not just a complete hoax, but something that the Hillary Clinton campaign created in order to try and undermine Donald Trump.
	As reported by the New York Post, a federal grand jury handed an indictment requested by Special Counsel John Durham, whose name we'll come back to in a minute, and it's fresh proof that the entire Russiagate scandal was manufactured by Hillary Clinton's campaign.
	Durham is the Sorry, I thought you were going to say that.
	Durham is the federal prosecutor tasked with investigating the origins of the investigation itself into the rush case.
	So he's investigating what happened there and is targeting a lawyer called Michael Sussman, who again we'll get back to in a minute.
	And isn't that interesting?
	Michael Sussman seems a bit mimetic, doesn't he?
	He's very sus.
	For lying about a client he met when doing this investigation.
	The FBI later disproved the claim during the Endless Rushgate investigation as a special counsel, Robert Miller's team, found itself unable to verify anything from the much-hyped allegations of two years' work.
	And so the summary that the New York Post gave us is just simply that the Democrats had weaponized the FBI and the intel community for political purposes all on the basis of a lie.
	Yeah, and it wasn't just the fact that this was bad press, because of course it was.
	The media was talking about nothing else for years.
	I mean, they were calling it treason.
	Right, but it was the fact that they were able to then bring to bear sort of the eye of Sauron onto the individual members of Trump's team, who they could get handicapped, tied up, and kicked out of office, so that he was left isolated and unable to run the country effectively.
	Doing everything they could to hamstring his administration in its early years and before trying to stop it from even coming about.
	But yeah, and intimidating people close to him and working with him.
	And that's not even including the social intimidation.
	You may remember there being a slew of articles saying, I'm a Trump supporter or a person close to the administration in Washington, D.C. I can't get a date.
	And it's like, yes, there was definitely a deep culture of this.
	Mm-hmm.
	But anyway, so this is important, I think, because it brings us to John Durham's latest filing that Fox have reported on, and seems to be fairly transparently, whereas almost nobody else reported on.
	So this was three days ago, but only now, after this has come out, is the, I guess what it's called, the opposition media daring to touch it, and you'll see how they're covering this.
	So Fox has given us quite a lot of good detail that I'll just go through, just to summarise it.
	So Barr, just to be clear though, the origins of the investigation.
	Bill Barr, former Attorney General, had appointed Durham in 2019 to investigate the origins of the FBI's Russia probe, which was called Crossfire Hurricane, which began in 2016 through the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
	And so Muller's investigation, of course, found no evidence of criminal activity, and so Durham is essentially cleaning up after this to see what they were doing and why this all came about.
	I know I'm slightly sidetracking, but isn't Crossfire Hurricane a very revealing name for this investigation?
	Very interesting, isn't it?
	Well, there's nothing about Russia that relates really to a crossfire hurricane, but about suppressing a president, for example, with a hurricane of crossfire, I think that would be a very apt name.
	I don't know how they came to that name.
	Anyway, so the Clinton campaign, as Fox has titled this, have paid people to infiltrate Trump Tower White House servers in order to link Trump to Russia, Durham found.
	So Durham filed this motion on the 11th of February and focused on potential conflicts of interest related to representation of former Clinton lawyer Michael Sussman, who has been charged with making a false statement to a federal agent.
	The false statement was that in the indictment they say that he told then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016, less than two months before the election, that he was not doing work for, quote, This was the lie.
	I mean, obviously there were no ties, but he was claiming he wasn't working for anyone.
	Well, his finances reveal that he was actually working for the Clintons.
	Durham's filing said that Sussman's billing records reflect that he repeatedly billed the Clinton campaign for his work on the Russia Bank 1 allegations.
	Well, there you have it.
	That's open and shut, right?
	Exactly.
	So I presume he's doing time right now.
	Well, this is the accusation it will then go to a court.
	It's all very breaking news.
	But you wouldn't know from watching the mainstream media.
	The filing revealed that Sussman and the tech executive met and communicated with another law partner who was serving as general counsel to the Clinton campaign.
	The ties just keep getting deeper.
	In connection with these efforts, Tech Executive One, which is the organization that did the actual hacking, exploited his access to non-public and or proprietary internet data.
	Now that's important, non-public or proprietary internet data.
	The filing states, In doing so,
	Tech Executive 1 indicated that he was seeking to please certain VIPs referring to individuals at Law Firm 1 and the Clinton campaign.
	This is what Durham has evidence for.
	If he can prove that, that's a bombshell.
	It seems that he can.
	He's the person with all the evidence doing the investigation.
	Tech Executive 1 and his associates exploited this arrangement by mining the Executive Office of the Presidents of the United States DNS traffic.
	So the internet connection in Trump's presidential – in the presidential office was – the DNS data was siphoned off of there and sent to parts unknown, you know, a university to various others to go to the Clinton campaign.
	That's crazy.
	That's literally bugging the president.
	It's a little more sophisticated by the way it works, but that's literally what's happening.
	It's way worse than Watergate.
	Yeah.
	And so they did this for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.
	Durham says that the allegations relied, in part, on the purported DNS traffic that Tech Executive 1 and others had assembled pertaining to Trump Tower, Donald Trump's New York City apartment building, the executive office of the president, and the aforementioned health care provider.
	This is why.
	Everywhere.
	Yes.
	Full spectrum surveillance of the President.
	By the deep state that he has declared himself in opposition to.
	Yes.
	How interesting.
	It's wild that this is the case.
	And it's not just exploding politics in the United States.
	This is the end of any kind of good faith Republican system.
	This is a predatory organization in the deep state that is actively opposing the democratic nature of the United States.
	Yeah.
	Well, they're doing it to protect their democracy.
	Exactly.
	So anyway, in Sussman's meeting with the second US government agency, Durham said he provided data which he claimed reflected purportedly suspicious DNS lookups by the entities of internet protocol addresses affiliated with a Russian mobile phone provider and claimed that these lookups demonstrated that Trump or his associates were using supposedly rare Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House.
	There weren't the chances of that.
	But just very tangible stuff.
	He used a Russian-made phone.
	Oh, that's definitely a collusion then, isn't it?
	And so Durham says, well, the special counsel's office has identified no support for these allegations.
	So it's like, okay, so there's no evidence supporting that claim, but Durham does have evidence for his claim.
	And so, naturally, there are Republicans who are like, well, we're expecting a few more indictments from Durham then.
	Former Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, said that he's expected to see quite a few more indictments to come out of this.
	This is something that is going to be ongoing for a while, I suspect.
	And apparently, a source familiar with the probe told Fox that there has been much more activity behind the scenes than what has been visible to the public, saying that Durham has done this right and kept it a secret, which is interesting.
	And so Fox have given us an analysis of their own, which I think is worth going through, because again, we're not experts on this.
	And there are some quite worrying implications here.
	And so the first one is the Biden administration has a clear conflict of interest.
	The filing implicates current National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
	He was implicated in this.
	So there is obviously a conflict of interest.
	So essentially, Jake Sullivan should at the very least be relieved of his position.
	Sullivan was the last person who should be advising the president of national security because, I mean, he seems to be a rat.
	Intelligence agencies can be weaponized for partisan politics.
	This is what this is proof of.
	No one can trust the mainstream news outlets who buried this story.
	Well, yeah, I think we've all come to that conclusion.
	Again.
	Yet again.
	Yet again.
	I mean, we all know this.
	The lying was not accidental.
	No, that's absolutely true.
	They were lying, and the Clintons team knew they were lying.
	They knew the Alphabank allegations were a red herring, according to Durham's indictment of Sussman.
	Security clearances are not secure.
	I mean, if the President of the USA isn't secure from hacking, who is?
	And, of course, the Department of Justice is compromised.
	An analysis by Margot Cleveland, the Federalist, revealed that Durham's filing also highlighted the revolving door that exists between the D.C. proletariat and government employment.
	So there are lots of people milling around in D.C. who are trying to get into offices, and apparently it's just back and forth.
	And of course the media is quite silent on this issue, which is weird, isn't it?
	I mean, you'd think if the media wasn't, you know...
	I mean, this is four days later.
	Well, they're supposed to be, what, the fourth estate holding power to account?
	Speaking truth to power?
	I should have got that picture of Hillary Clinton on the plane with all of the press, shouldn't I? They're all drinking champagne and they're whining and dining the press.
	She flies around the world and it's like, hmm, why is the fourth estate not holding power to the camp?
	But it goes back to the segment we did with Josh and I about the civil service, where essentially they believe in the same ideology, which is a new development.
	So they're on each other's team and they know it.
	Yes, that's very much it.
	And so you get people like former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Rona McDaniel, complaining, well, look, you've been telling lies for the last five years or so, and this massive bombshell comes out and you're just silent on it.
	Radio silence.
	Virtually every baseless Russian collusion allegation against Trump got printed and aired for four years.
	Do you remember the pissed dossier?
	There's nothing to any of this.
	Which just one guy came up with with no substantive evidence.
	Well, it seems that he was connected to British steel.
	He was connected to British intelligence.
	And it seems that he may have been paid to just fabricate it.
	Mm-hmm.
	But anyway, but of course they're not covering it.
	So let's, the New York Times finally felt that, okay, fine, we'll publish something, but you're lying.
	It's like, right, so a liar is going to call us liars while we're holding the evidence.
	That's very interesting.
	And you notice the framing here.
	Court filing started to furor on right-wing outlets, but their narrative is off track.
	It's not saying they're wrong.
	We just don't like the way their narrative is going.
	The latest alarming claims about spying on Trump appear to be flawed, but the explanation is Byzantine, underlining the challenges for journalists in deciding what merits coverage.
	It's too difficult for the public to understand that we've corrupted the Republic, so we're not going to bother telling them.
	New York Times, folks.
	So they say, the entire narrative appears to be mostly wrong or old news.
	That's it.
	Seems to be breaking and accurate.
	The latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracies through Mr.
	Trump and his allies.
	There is evidence of a conspiracy.
	There is actual evidence of this.
	You paid him.
	The entire narrative, sorry, the press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place, Trump said, which seems to be a true statement up until this point.
	And he says, well, there are many problems with this, right?
	For one, not much of this was new.
	It's just old news.
	So talking about the Yota phones, which are the Russian-made smartphones, that had apparently connected to networks at Trump Tower, it's like, yeah, but we don't know that was Trump.
	How do you know that wasn't just Russian tourists?
	You know, we don't know who that was, right?
	And so they say this, that by Jody Westby and Mark Rash, both lawyers for a Mr.
	Dagon, who is part of the university that's under allegation.
	And it says, Well, that's not what Durham said.
	Durham said, While Trump was in office, you were taking private and proprietary DNS data.
	So they're just lying.
	Well, to our knowledge, well then your knowledge is wrong.
	Your knowledge is insufficient.
	You're acting as if this is a statement of fact.
	This is not a statement of fact.
	This is a statement of untruth.
	And of course the garbage media, the journalistic rubbish that is produced by a place like the Daily Beast.
	Just as if none of this is true, as if there's nothing important going on here.
	Fox News goes hog wild with exaggerations about the Durham Probe.
	No.
	Fox went through with quite a fine-tooth comb and gave us a very clear and concise outline of what happened, and they were very specific, quoting specifically from Durham himself, who's the guy doing the investigation.
	So I don't really see why you would say that, but they conclude with, regardless of the increasingly fact-free nature of their spin, it doesn't appear that Fox News is going to slow down with its Trump-was-right coverage any soon.
	You liars.
	You're just lying.
	You're lying to the public.
	You're flat out lying.
	And then Mother Jones, of all places, why Mother Jones?
	What the hell are you doing publishing articles like this?
	Is John Durham deliberately stoking right-wing conspiracy theories?
	We can go to the next one, John.
	What are you talking about?
	You're a liar.
	His latest filing is fueling Trumpian disinformation.
	It's not disinformation, but it's true.
	You're the liars.
	It's disgusting watching you lie.
	But look at this.
	All this hyperbolic harrum thing, call it disinformation, arises from imprecision and perhaps false information in Durham's filing.
	You mean, I don't like it, it doesn't agree with the narrative we've already set out.
	And despite the fact that the facts rebuke what you're saying, you're going to commit to your lie in the face of what's true.
	Very interesting.
	And so yeah, we'll leave that there.
	More is going to come of this, of course, in the future, and I do suggest that you actually follow media outlets that are going to report on this with some degree of honesty.
	Yeah, there just seems like there's so much of a conflict of interest here that it's laughable trying to rely on CNN or New York Times for accurate information at all.
	And they're so committed to the lie, if they back down on any part of it, then the whole thing unravels.
	So everything.
	So, you know, the guy who's doing the investigation who's got the receipts, he's literally got, well, you paid for this, you got this private DNS information, you put all of this together, and you lied about that as well.
	And they're just like, no, no, no, no.
	All that's a lie.
	Don't worry about the facts.
	We've got this narrative that we've committed to, and we're just going to assume you will continue to believe us.
	It's amazing, the arrogance of it.
	Absolutely awful.
	So let's talk about Ukraine, because this has been on the news recently, and things sound pretty dramatic.
	I think everyone will agree.
	It's headline news on basically every major news outlet.
	So I've been getting into the weeds to try and work out what everyone's saying, and what is actually happening, and whether there is a large or small discrepancy between them.
	And then from there, to interpret...
	Sorry to laugh!
	That's just...
	Yeah, there's going to be a large discrepancy.
	I haven't looked at any of your segments so far.
	I have no idea what you're going to tell me, but I already know what the answer is.
	But then from there, it's about trying to interpret who's trying to do what, who's actually doing what, and what the general tenor of it is like.
	So if there's a question to keep in mind here as we go through this segment and all the details, it's who wants what and who is doing what is probably the way to...
	So, developments.
	Is this all hot air, or is something going to actually happen?
	That's probably the main question on people's minds.
	So the situation has been taking a rather strange turn, I think.
	As far as public statements go, let's check in the noise from Russia.
	So we have this sort of stuff.
	We're pulling back troops, but exercises will continue, seems to be the general statement out of Russia.
	They say they've pulled some troops back from the border, and there are unverified clips that they've revealed of, for example, tanks and lorries, which they claim are moving away from the border, either in Crimea or in East Donetsk or in Belarus.
	But then there are lots of other people saying, actually, no, either that photo was from last year, or it's not the place you say it, is it somewhere else?
	Or it is the place you say they are, but they're going in the opposite direction, towards the border, not away from it.
	we have this statement as well.
	We don't want war from Putin in his conference with Putin and Schultz.
	And he says here, he stated that Russia did not want war, and he was ready for talks with the US and NATO on limits for missile deployments and military transparency.
	However, he reiterated that the West had not addressed Russia's security concern with the borders of NATO reaching Russia, and that assurances that Ukraine would not join NATO anytime soon were not enough.
	Moscow wants a guarantee that Kiev will never become part of the alliance.
	So that's the statement coming out of Putin.
	They don't want war, apparently.
	They're pulling their troops back.
	And then we have a statement from the Russian ambassador in Ireland that war in Europe would be insane.
	And he says, he expands on this, but it's ambassador speak.
	I don't know if you've heard much of ambassadors' public statements, but apart from the Chinese, they're a completely different brand.
	Who do not care about anything.
	They're basically agitators, Chinese diplomats.
	They call them wolf warrior diplomats.
	Oh, do they?
	They do.
	That's a great title.
	But apart from those lunatics, ambassadors' public statements are largely meaningless, I think, and should be taken with a grain of salt.
	Well, yes.
	I mean, they've got a direct interest in constantly covering for their own country.
	Yeah, it's almost like the art of diplomacy is saying nothing while appearing to say something.
	Yes, through many words.
	Indeed.
	I think it's worth noting that Russia is hardly innocent on the border issue either.
	I mean, you know, they've taken Crimea and they...
	Constantly, apparently, just physically move their own border in Ukraine as well.
	So it's not like the Russians are in any way innocent about, you know, on the concept of borders.
	But I do think there is merit to the question of why is NATO now at Russia's border?
	It does make you wonder, doesn't it?
	Yeah, and from a Russian perspective, that's a betrayal of the last 30 years of international relations.
	So I believe even, was it...
	I think it was definitely Bush had said to them that they weren't going to.
	But was it Reagan as well?
	Did he say something similar?
	Well, I think the agreement was made in the 1990s, is my understanding.
	But honestly, even in the 1990s, there was essentially almost a proxy conflict between the West and Russia over the breakup of Yugoslavia.
	And Russian diplomats said, although I haven't got the quote here, that even though America was supposed to be our friend, it wasn't a particularly nice friendship.
	We didn't behave particularly like friends.
	I can't say I'm terribly proud of our foreign policy towards Russia.
	Our being the West.
	Yeah.
	Now, I won't go over what Western media is saying because you can find it for yourself and there's so much to go through.
	But just to briefly summarise, 140,000 troops are massing on the border.
	They're building field hospitals.
	They could invade at any moment.
	The invasion of Ukraine is imminent.
	All civilians and military advisers were hurriedly withdrawn from Ukraine.
	The US moves its embassy from Kiev to Lviv, away from the border, and so on and so forth.
	War is very much possible.
	Oh my god, this is a disaster, what's happening?
	So that seems to be the general tenor from the West.
	Oh, there's been nothing but.
	I mean, that's all I've seen being reported.
	Oh my god, something imminent is happening in Ukraine.
	And it's weird because it felt very much like just a very paper-thin media narrative, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Now, they might be correct.
	I'm not saying that.
	I mean, if as I'm speaking, all of a sudden there is invasion and Russian tanks cross the border, then hold me responsible.
	But it does seem like there is a rather large amount of catastrophizing here.
	And it's hard to really tell how justified it is.
	But we'll move on.
	The reaction from Ukraine, I think, is a little more balanced.
	And it's largely that the West...
	Sorry about this.
	Before you go on, I think this is the one that really matters, right?
	This is the revealed preference.
	There's all this noise coming from media that's 20,000 miles away, but the people who are actually on the ground, I think their reaction seems to be the most important one.
	Yeah, I think that's fair.
	So let's see what they have to say.
	And Mr.
	Biden said he thinks Putin will move in on Ukraine, while Boris Johnson has warned that gloomy intelligence suggested Moscow was planning a lightning raid on Kiev.
	Meanwhile, personnel from both the US and UK embassies in the Ukrainian capital have been ordered home, a move that President Volodymyr Zelensky labelled overreacting.
	And what he's done instead...
	So there have been reports that today is going to be the day of the invasion.
	And so in response of that, Zelensky has called for a so-called Day of Unity.
	He's created a new one-off holiday for the whole of Ukraine.
	So a report here.
	Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday called on the country's people to fly flags and sing the national anthem in unison on February the 16th, a date that some Western media say Russia could invade.
	Ukrainian government officials stressed that Zelensky was not predicting an attack on Wednesday, but responding sceptically to the foreign media reports.
	They tell us February 16th will be the day of the attack.
	We will make it a day of unity, Zelensky said in a video address to the nation.
	They are trying to frighten us by yet again naming a date for the start of military action, he said.
	On that day, we will hang our national flags, wear yellow and blue banners, and show the whole world our unity.
	Zelensky has long said that while he believes Russia is threatening to attack his country, the likelihood of an imminent invasion has been overstated by Western allies, responding to Moscow's efforts to intimidate Ukraine and so panic.
	It's very, very interesting.
	Hmm.
	I mean, I'm sure a few days ago I saw a statement from Zelensky where he was just saying, I don't believe there's an invasion that's going to happen.
	Not just you're overreacting, but this is just flat out not true.
	And, I mean, don't quote me on that because I might be wrong.
	But, I mean, if this is the president of Ukraine...
	I would think that he would be more concerned if there was a genuine risk of an invasion.
	But then again, you might say that it's his duty to show a calm face and make sure people don't panic or there's no mass exodus.
	That is true.
	But I think that if I was the president of a significant country and I was expecting the invasion, why aren't the Ukrainians massing an army?
	Mm-hmm.
	I mean, they do have an army in the field at the moment, surrounding Eastern Basque and Luhansk.
	They do have, I believe, 200,000 reservists on call.
	But you'd be calling them up, wouldn't you?
	Yes.
	Yes, but it's complicated because that could also be seen, as it was in World War I, as a casus belli.
	My neighbour is mobilising their reserves, they're obviously going to attack somewhere, that justifies a preemptive strike.
	So it's difficult in that sense.
	But yeah, let's just consider, so from Putin's perspective, There are two main narratives as to what his goals are, as I can understand it.
	One of them is that he's looking at Ukraine and saying, look, this is backed heavily by the West, bordering the EU and NATO and so on.
	The longer I leave it, like if I leave this to my successor, the stronger Ukraine will get and the worse that will be for Russia.
	So maybe invading now will be bad, but it's better than all the alternatives.
	So that's the main narrative that's justifying the idea that Russia is going to invade.
	But then I think from what I've seen of Putin's geopolitics is he's an extremely canny operator.
	Yes.
	He is perhaps the last statesman left in Europe in that sense.
	He's certainly not above a lie or 20,000.
	And he will very sort of dispassionately lay out something in a way that convinces you that it is true and then go off and do something that is justified in hindsight because it works for Russia's interest.
	That's the art of real politics.
	I think he is definitely playing 40 chess to summarize that.
	Yeah, sorry.
	To put it in two words instead of 20, sorry.
	No, no, no.
	I think he definitely is.
	And it could be that an invasion is an option.
	It's maybe a 1 in 10, 1 in 5 case he will invade.
	Maybe he's thinking about that.
	It's a possibility.
	But maybe he's just reacting pragmatically to developments on the ground.
	And maybe he thinks, well, OK, when all of the West and their advisers run away without us even firing a shot, maybe that sends enough of a message to the world without us having to look.
	I mean, look at what happened in Afghanistan.
	Right.
	So there's an article here.
	Is this just a massive overreaction?
	Let's lean on this case a bit.
	In Moscow, war drums aren't beating, and the public doesn't favour invasion.
	And that's another good point.
	It's not like the Russian public has been whipped up into a fever of ultranationalism about Ukraine.
	It's not like, for example, the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, where the people in mainland China are convinced that Taiwan is theirs and should be theirs any minute.
	That just isn't there in Russia, as far as we can ascertain.
	On the phone from Moscow was Mikhail Gorbachev's long-time right-hand man, Pavel Palashchenko.
	At the Gorbachev Foundation, he's been trying to assess if a Ukraine invasion is likely or whether the West is overreacting.
	He leans to the latter.
	He's found certain things strange.
	In Vladimir Putin's state-controlled media, there's been no drumbeat for war.
	If the Kremlin leader is about to invade, isn't it likely that his propaganda machine would be making a big case for it?
	You would think so, said Mr Palashchenko, who first worked with Mr Gorbachev in 1985, so before the fall of the Soviet Union.
	As far as he can gauge public opinion, which isn't easy to do in Russia, he sees no appetite among the Russian people for a showdown.
	They don't want war.
	There's some complaints about NATO meddling in Ukraine, he said on Tuesday, but it's not a top-of-mind issue.
	The Western reaction is what is coming more severe.
	And you can definitely see from a Russian perspective the rhetoric that's coming out of the West and the Western media, the hysteria...
	It's mad.
	It is.
	It's almost to the level...
	And I've seen some op-eds in Fox News and so on where there are...
	military-industrial complex coming out of the woodwork to say, if there's any conflict in Ukraine, America has to get involved.
	We have to have boots on the ground, planes in the air, everything.
	And this is what all Western leaders have been saying.
	Even Canada said, even Trudeau said something similar.
	It's like, really?
	Right.
	Canada's interested.
	And you can imagine, if you just put yourself in the state of mind of a Russian at this point, it does not really seem from that perspective like Russia is being this evil aggressor with grand delusions of power.
	It seems like the far better financed and larger militaries of the West are encroaching on your doorstep and fomenting a crisis, which could be the justification for the conflict.
	The counterpoint would be, well, they have already taken a part of Ukraine.
	That's true.
	A, people won't really believe them, they'll look mad, whatever they do is an overreaction, blah, blah, blah.
	Well, Putin, being a judo master, will probably know the Japanese saying from Miyamoto Musashi, which, broadly speaking, translates as only an idiot tells his enemy what he's about to do before he's going to do it.
	So yes, you could say that Russia explicitly denying things and saying the opposite, for example, when it comes to moving troops away, is actually a sign that something is going to happen rather than it isn't.
	Sun Tzu's famous maxim, all warfare is based on deception.
	And yes, you're right.
	We can see we have an approximate disposition of forces here.
	This was as of 15th of February, which is yesterday.
	So this is a map of Ukraine.
	Just familiarize yourself with that.
	You've got the main city, Kiev, very close to the Belarusian border.
	And yeah, Ukraine is literally surrounded from all sides because that little bubble there is Transnistria, which is a pro-Russian separatist.
	Right.
	Region.
	Yep.
	Yeah, they can attack from all points of the compass, so the strategic situation is pretty grim for Ukraine, even if it does have a large reserve force.
	I imagine it's probably quite easy for them to move troops through Belarus as well, given the relationship between them.
	Well, they are currently conducting a massive military exercise there.
	Those triangles are all Russian military units in Belarus.
	Oh, right.
	Yeah, no, I hadn't read that.
	Yeah, no.
	Okay, yeah, well, there we go.
	Yeah, so they're already there.
	They could, at the moment, at a moment's notice, probably a phone call from Putin.
	They could conduct one large pincer movement down towards Kiev from the north and one encircling the east from Crimea and Russia.
	So, yes, they do have, by the looks of it, strategic superiority here.
	But I can see no indication from any media, though I may be wrong, that Russia has properly mobilised its military reserves, which means that the battalion tactical groups in this map are in fact significantly below their wartime maximum strength.
	Russian motor rifle brigades and regiments consist of two full-strength professional battalions, as well as one understrength battalion that may be rapidly brought up to its full complement, and one more that is mainly staffed by conscripts.
	So within five to seven days of mobilisation, according to military analysts, This rises to four combat-ready battalions.
	But that mobilisation has not happened, which would be a key indicator of conflict, you would think.
	But Twitter users have been tracking Russia's military build-up.
	up.
	Let's play this clip.
	Close one.
	I think it really helps you actually see the river.
	I think that will move about 20 helicopters there, for those who are listening.
	They just keep coming Unfortunately I don't speak Russian so I can't translate it Should have been counted soon.
	You see them just going off into the distance.
	It's very spooky, actually.
	For us, occasionally, we see one plane, one helicopter, and it's like, oh, look at that.
	We're going to see a full unit of them like that.
	It's quite something.
	But it's not just units on the ground.
	If we go to the next clip...
	This is from a train driver.
	He's got his smartphone out.
	He's like, hey, look at this!
	That is what looks like the motorized forces of an entire Russian division just sitting on the tracks, pointing in the opposite direction.
	I can't help but notice all the snow.
	It's very cold, isn't it?
	It's still winter there.
	I suppose we'll get to it afterwards, but this is why I think that Putin is playing 40 chess here.
	Now I'm not a military expert, but that looks like mobile artillery or something.
	It's some kind of armour, isn't it?
	I'd like to be on the receiving end of that.
	Then if we go to the next clip...
	I am taking time to go through all of these, just so that you can see what's happening on the ground.
	So this is an actual infantry unit, just chilling out by the side of the road and all of their equipment.
	They're in white winter camo.
	And then if we go to the next one, this is from an armoured exercise that's taking place in Belarus.
	I believe this is official, but I'm not entirely sure.
	And you can just see all of these vehicles in perfect working order, driving around.
	Doing army things.
	Then finally we have this one here.
	Which just shows what looks like a line of tanks just parked at the side of a road going back in a dirty gray column on the asphalt.
	So yeah, that is the physical pictures of the military build-up.
	If we go back to the strategic map, I've done a little reading, and it's worth comparing this strategic build-up to one which was done last year.
	So last year, there was a big series of Russian military exercises called ZAPAD 2021.
	And people thought, analysts thought there might be an invasion of Ukraine last year.
	And so they're comparing what happened then to what happens now.
	Okay.
	So I'll read quickly.
	Taken together, the scale of the Russian buildup near Ukraine in 2021 suggested that the Russian forces were prepared to undertake deep offensive operations rather than be used simply as a deterrent against perceived Ukrainian attempts to retake Donbas.
	After the Kremlin achieved its political objectives, e.g.
	testing the West and pressuring the Ukrainian government by other means, It announced a drawdown of some forces deployed at the border.
	While this decision may have de-escalated the situation, pre-positioned Russian equipment at Pognavo remained unchanged until late July, when Russian forces began to move the equipment in a yet unknown direction.
	This movement coincided with the introduction of Russian units into Belarus for the September drills.
	These two developments indicate that Russia is moving and building up its forces in anticipation of the active phase of the Zapad 2021 exercise.
	They continue.
	In the months and weeks before the exercise, Zapad 2017, there were fears that Russia could either leave its troops behind in Belarus and dominate the country militarily, or that Zapad was a readiness exercise that disguised a more belligerent plan to attack the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia.
	So there are significant Russian enclaves in the Baltics as well, aren't there?
	Yes, I believe so.
	They are ex-Soviet nations, of course.
	The Zapad 2017 scare nevertheless had an interesting origin.
	It seems that the entire narrative that shaped Western concerns about the drill rested on one story about logistical preparations for the exercise.
	It alleged that the Russian armed forces rented 4,162 flat rail cars in 2017 for the delivery of military cargo to Belarus there and back, which would presumably allow the redeployment of a motor rifle division, in addition to what had already been planned to be sent to Belarus.
	However, the new division, even if deployed, certainly would not have changed Russia's military posture from defensive to offensive simply because the force was too small.
	Deployment of its division-level unit should have been regarded as a signalling effort at best, rather than a genuine attempt to conduct offensive operations against a neighbouring state.
	And if we go on here, we have a quick comparison of the Russian and Ukraine military forces.
	Who are you putting the money on, do you think?
	Well, Russia have a vast superiority.
	Yeah.
	900,000 active duty troops, 2 million reservists, nearly 10,000 tanks, 6,000 artillery pieces, 2,000 combat aircraft, as opposed to 160.
	But this leaves out any American intervention, of course.
	It does, or NATO intervention.
	And so, yeah, there is a load more that I could go through, but I think I'm going to leave it there.
	Fundamentally, some people have said that the invasion risk is now decreasing.
	It may seem that tensions will remain at this high level while both sides maneuver for advantage.
	As I said before we started, it reminds me of a game of chess, blitz chess, where a flurry of moves are being made on the board, but no pieces are yet being taken.
	I honestly think that Putin's gaslighting our leaders.
	I think he's gaslighting through the media because I think he's worked out.
	Because if you listen to Putin's critiques of the way the West operates, they're surprisingly incisive.
	And I think he's realized that the media actually has a terrifying and terrible effect on public opinion.
	And public opinion has a terrible effect on the opinion of what goes on with politicians.
	And it's created a kind of very negative feedback loop.
	And so all he has to do is just move things around.
	And we have worked ourselves up into this absolute froth.
	And he can just say, well, this was just a routine exercise.
	What are you talking about?
	Just pull his troops back or say, well, we're just exercising in Belarus.
	What are you talking about?
	We do this all the time.
	We did this last year.
	And so it is making, again, it seems to be like harking back to Soviet tactics of Yeah, absolutely.
	There's so much invested in Russia when it comes to Europe's heating, for a start.
	The fact that he's doing this in the winter, and there are so many small tells that make me think he's not stupid.
	He knows that, okay, if he invades Ukraine, it's going to be all-out war.
	And at the end of the day, I don't think Russia can win that.
	And that's the thing.
	And I think he knows that as well.
	And so he's playing this slow game, a war of position, where he gets what he can, While he can, like Dot Ness, Crimea, it grows Russian influence, outmaneuvers the West diplomatically and makes us look like we're insane.
	The fact that the media hasn't bitten their tongue slightly and toned down the position makes us look, and the fact that our politicians react to what the media does and says.
	It makes us look like we're kind of unhinged and we're terrified.
	And you put that in context with Biden's absurd withdrawal from Afghanistan.
	And it makes the West look weak and useless.
	And it makes our allies doubter.
	I think he understands as well the incentive structures that are operating within media.
	The first platform to generate a really big click-baity headline that Russia's going to destroy Ukraine gets the most clicks.
	So they're actually competing with each other to hype the situation up into ridiculous hysteria.
	So he doesn't even have to do that much.
	Exactly.
	That's the thing.
	If he just moves units into Belarus for a routine training exercise and moves them back, that's the entire Western media in this giant hysterical state.
	And what have they really done?
	Nothing.
	And so I wonder how much of it is a game that's being played at our expense.
	I really do.
	But anyway, so let's move on to talking about something that's a bit more light-hearted, but still at least regionally appropriate.
	The Vikings would have transgender.
	Did you know?
	Do you know why?
	They found one.
	One woman with a sword.
	Oh, not this canard again.
	Yes.
	Oh, for goodness sake.
	But you'll see why this has come back up.
	But this was in 2017.
	They found a...
	It was, in fact, an old grave that was found on the settlement of Burka on the island of Bjorko in Upland in Sweden.
	And this was known as the first urban centre of Sweden.
	So it was founded in 750 AD and sports a population of maybe up to 1,000 inhabitants for a few hundred years until the location...
	Wait, that's an urban centre?
	It is in...
	Dark Ages Sweden.
	Oh, that must have been a chilly time to live.
	Yeah, but Sweden gets more sun than you'd expect, actually.
	So it's actually...
	The summer in Sweden is quite pleasant.
	But anyway...
	And so around the perimeters of the site, there are lots of cemeteries containing some 3,000 burial mounds.
	And 1,100 of these graves have been excavated.
	And so this is, you know, it's an old settlement.
	There are lots of people buried there.
	And so you would think that we would have lots of good data.
	And we do, in a way.
	But one of the burials investigated by this one chap called Hjalma Stolpe was recognized even at the time, and this was in the 19th century, the end of the 19th century did this.
	Of being of an unusual character, and he said this was most remarkable of all the graves in the field.
	It was an underground wooden chamber.
	A body had been interred, dressed in clothing, with details evoking the fashions of the Eurasian steppe.
	Two horses, one of which was bridled for riding, had been arranged on a platform on the chamber's edge, and the deceased individual was surrounded by a large number of weapons.
	A bag of gaming pieces was placed on their lap, and a gaming board was propped up beside them, as if they were playing a game of, I don't know, whatever the ancient...
	Neftafel.
	Whatever it was.
	Probably tough.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	It's a cool game.
	Check it out.
	But the interesting thing is they're dressed as a step nomad.
	Step nomads often, you know, they use their horses.
	They fire bows from horseback.
	This has been a very ancient and well-tested form of warfare that lasted until the invention of the gun.
	It was awful as well.
	But it's interesting how this Eurasian steppe nomad, what appears to be, I couldn't find any actual DNA evidence that connected them to the Eurasian steppe, but if they were buried with a bunch of horses in the Eurasian manor, wearing Eurasian clothing, I think it's fair to make the assumption.
	But anyway, so this is very interesting, this warrior.
	And of course, because it was a warrior, it appeared to be a warrior, it was assumed that it was a man.
	The individual's clothing was analysed and this apparently led them to come to the conclusion that it was a cavalry commander under the immediate authority of some other royal war leader.
	The tasseled cap they had particularly was unusual.
	It was manufactured in Kiev, they think.
	And typically made for high status people.
	So you can see that there was a lot of contact with the Eurasian steppe by people in this time period.
	And they moved a lot.
	People seem to think that people in the Middle Ages just sat in a village and never went anywhere.
	No, that's not true.
	true, there were massive, massive movements of people all throughout human history to be honest.
	And so they assumed it was a man, obviously, because why wouldn't you?
	But genetic analysis, new kind of genetic analysis that's based on the sequencing, the enamel of their teeth, has revealed that it was a person with two XX chromosomes.
	My God, let's break out the queer theory, because this has turned everything on its head.
	So the assumption that it was a man, of course, was just natural, because we have lots of other graves in which people are buried with their sorts of male and female adornments.
	And so the weapons being male ones, you've actually seen that sort of thing, And the genetic testing tends to bear that out.
	And the other ones are females.
	So this was normal.
	But this turned out to be a woman.
	So who knows?
	So they say, of course, they say things like this.
	Queer theory provides a potentially fruitful means of engaging with this individual.
	And their sense of self may have been, in our terms, non-binary or gender fluid.
	These are not our terms.
	Identity may have been something to negotiate, to choose and re-choose on a daily basis.
	They may have been transgender.
	Queer theory is not a fruitful means of engaging with anything.
	I agree.
	That is, oh my goodness, that's just nonsense.
	I know.
	As if this person's like, well, sorry, you've got to choose my right pronouns.
	And as if there haven't been women leaders as well.
	Especially in step nomads in particular.
	This is where the Greeks got their legends of the Amazon.
	Because life on the step is not fun.
	And it turns out that everyone has to be a warrior.
	So you don't get to just not.
	But anyway, they do say though, we strongly believe that interpretation of all burials must be undertaken with care.
	And we should be naturally cautious in assuming the items buried with the dead represent their own possessions or reflect their activities in life.
	Okay.
	Of course, because this could be symbolic.
	This could be a person who, through blood and heredity, had assumed a position that it was, you know, the lord or whatever.
	And so, you know, you have to have this sword, you have to have this equipment, even if you personally don't use it.
	And there are other examples of, like, disabled people who are buried with the same things.
	But no one thinks that this disabled person is on a battlefield swinging an axe.
	But it's reflecting, reflects their status in life.
	And they point out that this is crucially important in relation to gender, which has long been identified as a problematic aspect of funerary archaeology, because you simply don't know.
	Well, how about gender was invented in the 20th century, so anything before the 20th century can't be gender related.
	How about that, huh?
	That is a great point.
	And one they don't bring up.
	No, they don't do that.
	Because that would undermine the narrative.
	That would undermine the queer theory applied to this.
	And so, in their opinion though, this is a grave of a woman who lived as a professional warrior and was buried in a Martian environment as an individual of rank.
	And that might be true.
	You know, that absolutely might be true.
	One, One, there are thousands of graves that have been on Earth, and we have unearthed tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of bodies from ancient history all over the world.
	I mean, there are at least a thousand found in Pompeii alone, for example.
	We've got thousands in Britain.
	We've found gladiators, we've found this, we've found that.
	We have actually got quite an interesting and detailed cross-section of people living in all of human history.
	And one is a woman in a grave with a sword.
	Okay.
	How does History Channel represent this?
	Oh, no.
	DNA suggests Viking women were powerful warriors.
	A, this looks like it wasn't a Viking woman, right?
	It looks like it's a Eurasian woman, right?
	B, it was one.
	C, you don't know that she wasn't just buried with this as an honorific.
	This is not what this suggests.
	But this is in 2019, and this was going from the Burka grave.
	But they do point out this is the first Viking grave to contain both weapons and female remains.
	How might female remains end up in a grave with weapons?
	Slaves, that's right.
	They were buried as slaves.
	This is an ancient Scandinavian funeral custom where they would literally kill the slaves and put them in the grave with the master.
	And the slaves, of course, were often female.
	That sounds like a barbaric custom.
	Yes, it was a barbaric custom.
	Well, it's sati, isn't it, in a way?
	Yes, and it's awful, obviously.
	But that's what they did back in the 9th century in Scandinavia, because they were barbarians.
	But it's not to say there aren't other graves that are of high-status women, but they are just buried with female-oriented accompaniments.
	And this whole thing has been sparked, this whole segment was sparked by this Times article.
	Sunday Times, quote, Viking hordes may have been trans.
	Well, to be fair, in terms of their destructive impact on Western civilisation...
	Disallow.
	I'm thinking of the ideologues here.
	Good save.
	But that is just staggering, isn't it?
	Now, if somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 Vikings came over in the Great Heathen Army, I mean, it was well chronicled by the English because they were ravaging their country...
	No mention of it.
	You didn't mention anything about them having blue hair?
	No.
	No, nothing about that.
	No mention of women posing as men or men posing as women.
	No.
	They didn't bring longboats full of hormone supplements, did they?
	It just wasn't recorded.
	And it doesn't show up in the archaeology either.
	The venerable bead is so unreliable sometimes.
	He is, yeah.
	The way he characterises it is just Northmen.
	So we assume they're men from the North.
	But we didn't check their genitals or ask their pronouns.
	But this is just the most staggering article in the world, and I thought it'd be fun to go through.
	Viking hordes may have been trans.
	I just...
	I just...
	Transgender warriors were among the Vikings who ransacked Scotland more than a thousand years ago, a leading historian, quote-unquote, believes.
	Sasha Coward, who specializes in gender...
	That cannot be a real name.
	That's a real name.
	Such a Coward is a real name.
	Basically, yeah.
	Sasha, I think it is.
	Sasha Coward, but it does sound like such a coward, who specializes in gender and sexuality.
	Ah, yes.
	Here we go.
	Here we go.
	Said it would be a mistake to believe that Viking society subscribed to traditional gender roles after recent discovery suggested that some celebrated warriors were female.
	That one.
	The one example is the one in Burka.
	That's the example.
	Oh dear.
	And we have dozens of others where it's women buried with female ornaments.
	One where they're buried with a sword and say, ah, that's it.
	Got them.
	They're all trans.
	They're all trans.
	I knew it.
	And yes, I do happen to be a specialist in gender and sexuality, just so you know.
	She says, the stories you hear are fierce, hot-blooded warrior men of violence and pillage.
	The notion can make it hard for us to look at the 8th to 11th centuries in Scotland without a strong cisgender and heterosexual bias?
	Good.
	And I guess the people writing at the time had a strong cisgender and heterosexual bias.
	It can be a challenge to see the roles of gender non-conforming people to pull apart the understanding of gender, sex, and identity as they really were for the people we now call the Vikings.
	How much queer theory do you think there was in Sweden in the 9th century?
	I'm going to go with hard zero.
	I love this.
	Sounds like some Loki nonsense to me, if you ask me.
	Absolutely.
	This is unbelievable.
	And it's so obviously the imposition of modern ideology on the path.
	Yeah, it's like the Marxist historians who look at, like, Bronze Age history and say, oh yes, of course, the Hittites were communists, or some ludicrous assertion.
	Ah, it's got to be about resource distribution.
	It's like, yeah, it's not about the way they thought of the gods or anything.
	Anyway, at the very least, men and women in Viking society could break from traditional constructs of male and female roles, and it is possible that we are talking about people who today would identify as transgender or non-binary.
	Unfortunately, they weren't born today, luckily for them, so they didn't have the choice.
	And, of course, the one example given for this is the 10th century burial site at Burka, which was excavated over 100 years ago, and one of them was confirmed to be, well, assumed to belong to a high-status female warrior now.
	Let's test that again.
	Mm-hmm.
	Neil Price, professor for archeology at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, previously observed that the female Viking may have been transgender.
	Why couldn't she have just been a woman who was a warrior from the Eurasian steppes where you actually did get warrior women?
	She's wearing all this Eurasian stuff.
	She's got a couple of horses.
	Vikings not known for their horses.
	Known for their shield walls and their boats.
	She looks like an immigrant.
	Why not go with the immigrant aspect?
	Look at this successful immigrant who integrated into Viking society.
	Female empowerment, mass immigration good.
	No, now we've gone to the transgender narrative.
	But also, this is an extremely sexist transgender narrative because according to feminist theory, like, I mean...
	She's not a woman.
	Well, yeah.
	She's a man.
	Well, no.
	According to feminist theory, I would say that women can dress however they like, don't you know?
	And it reveals nothing about their sexuality if they want to go around swinging swords and things.
	That's absolutely true.
	But according to intersectional theory, if she dresses like a man, she a man, regardless of what the biology says.
	So now the woman has actually...
	So hang on, the drag queen's female, though, according to intersectional theory.
	Well, they're inferring the identity, I assume, of the thing.
	But that means that essentially this wasn't a woman.
	And so what they're saying is, if trans men are men, then this was a man, then there's nothing incongruent about any of this, and women lose out again, according to intersectional theory.
	But anyway, they say, you know, we know the gender identity of the person in the Norse period is often tied to their role in Viking society, not just the biology they were born with.
	Hmm.
	Do we know that?
	No.
	No, I don't think we know that.
	No, you're just imposing that modern ideological assertion on history.
	Well, that's exactly what Coward goes on to say.
	Queer theory is an important part of archaeology and can help us understand the complexity and diversity of past societies.
	Man, just keep reaching.
	Also, they're all gay.
	Oh, right.
	Okay.
	I mean, why not?
	Let's just go for this one as well.
	This is another recent one.
	So, in 2009, in Moderna, Italy, construction workers dug up a grave with two skeletons in it that were holding hands.
	Proof.
	Proof positive that this was...
	Well, it was assumed it was a man and a woman.
	And so they were called the lovers, right?
	Because you assumed that was the case.
	And they did a DNA test on them through the same process.
	And it turned out that they were both male.
	And it's like, right, okay, well then they must be gay.
	It's like, oh, so...
	I mean, they were buried together.
	That's a little, yeah.
	The people burying them had made them hold hands.
	They didn't die holding hands.
	But the thing is, that's not necessarily true.
	I mean, does that make Saudi Arabian men gay?
	Right, exactly.
	Because they wander around holding hands.
	Which, I mean, don't get me wrong, I think's a bit sus.
	It happens in India as well.
	It's a cultural practice.
	Exactly.
	But the point is, this is once again, and things, I'm not even saying they're not gay.
	I think it's probably likely that they were.
	But we don't know.
	And that's the point, isn't it?
	The whole thing here.
	We actually don't know any of these things.
	And what we are doing is projecting our ideological preferences backwards through the past.
	And so, who knows?
	You know, it could be this 5th century Italian men were gay.
	Could be.
	Might be.
	So what?
	You know?
	Like, we don't know.
	But they, of course, had made this very clear that they want it to be the case.
	And so, yeah, basically a lot of archaeology is now being perverted by modern ideology, as you might have expected.
	And I think we'll leave it there.
	Let's go to the video comments.
	The other villain faction?
	Well, if you want to use political terms, you could say they were anarchists, but really, they're just classical supervillains.
	People who are slighted by the world and want to cause chaos and destruction.
	The two kinds of villains come to blows, and the classical heroes win.
	From a meta perspective, they're saying, screw shows with politics, bring back the classic heroes versus villains.
	Now, I might not agree with that, but I know you will.
	And that right there is why my hero academia is, and always shall be, the daddest anime.
	I'm still not watching it.
	I appreciate the effort you've gone to here, but I'm not watching it.
	Oh my god.
	Now how am I going to get your purse back to you, Ralph?
	Hey Sargon, aren't you ever coming back to YouTube?
	How am I going to get your purse back to you?
	You should come on my show.
	I need a new purse.
	What's wrong, man?
	Ralph, are you scared of a pink rabbit's anime girl?
	Really?
	I have no idea.
	I have no idea what is happening right now.
	Who let this comment through the process?
	What?
	Let's go to the next comment.
	Carl, in response to your request for things to say, if you ever get on GB News that you made on Louis Laval's stream, I think a variant of your Universal Men's speech could be useful for Normies to hear.
	Also, what do you think of James Lindsay's recent interactions with the people in AA's circles?
	Lastly, I found an excellent clip view, and I think it's a view at least.
	Hopefully you'll enjoy.
	I'm a furry, uwu, what's this?
	senpai awu thanks uh Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
	Thanks.
	What is it with all the anime stuff coming up?
	I bet there's been building up for the past four days.
	I think that James Lindsay is generally doing the Lord's work, and I think that AA's group of friends are being deeply autistic when it comes to their consideration of him.
	But I'll talk to him about that next week, I think.
	So you can watch his stream to find out.
	My opinion on that.
	But no, I think James Lindsay is doing just great and he should carry on.
	And these people are being strange.
	What was the other question?
	I didn't catch it.
	I can't remember what the other question was.
	Sorry.
	I think there is some controversy in the office over James Lindsay.
	I think that while we generally agree he's on the right track, he can be a little too tribal and assume bad faith a little too quickly.
	Yes, and I think that comes from being a full-time culture warrior.
	It's difficult to get out of that mentality.
	It's a bad thing to be.
	But his critiques of critical race theory and the social justice left are very good, in my opinion.
	I think Thomas is about to burst through the curtain.
	But yeah, Thomas has some concerns.
	I mean, I told him to email him and see for lots of discussions.
	Yeah, I think there could be a fruitful collaboration there.
	Let's go to the next comment.
	Book recommendation for Carl, Bo, and anyone who likes Greek history.
	It's kind of split into three sections.
	They've got about the equipment, about the psychology of warfare, and about what the formation does for the unit.
	But what makes it really interesting is that the author, Paul, is actually not a professor of history.
	He's a professor of biology.
	He studies swarm behavior in insects and animals and then applies that to the development of the battlefield.
	So very good read, highly recommend, and time to get back to work.
	It does sound like a very good read.
	There's a lot of controversy about Hoplite warfare, as in people are like, okay, how did this actually work?
	Because we've got lots of different accounts, and the thing is, there's not just one thing.
	As you saw on there, was the spear overhand, or was it underneath?
	And we have accounts of them couching their lances and charging, so putting them under their shirt and charging.
	Basically, it's not just one thing, but that sounds like a fascinating book, and I probably will get it.
	While Besmanov's first book delves into the detail of active measures, his second scrutinizes the activities of Novosti and how they are tied to KGB activity.
	Besmanov recalls the kinds of work, articles, the APN required, and the scale of pay for those, as well as the punishments if the roles were to be reversed.
	He provides examples of the backstabbing and casual racism that underpinned the organization.
	His particularly scathing remarks about Trudeau Sr.
	were peculiarly amusing and apposite given his son's unfolding legacy.
	That sounds very interesting.
	So, for those who don't know, Thomas Schumann is, of course, Yuri Bezmenov.
	Oh, is he?
	Yes.
	I didn't know that.
	I mean, I did know he had a pseudonym.
	Right, okay.
	That's very interesting.
	At least I believe so, anyway.
	I'm going to check that, but I'm almost entirely sure.
	Right, okay.
	Fascinating.
	As I follow up to my previous video comments, the person in question I'm referring to essentially has the attitude that they can defeat the Sultans of Chattelay Discord server because they have weaponized autism.
	This is a flawed idea because I'm going to count the number of people on that server who do not have a form of weaponized autism.
	We have Fractal, we have Sophie, we have Francesca, and we have a feminist.
	So it's one form of weaponised autism versus 200 more.
	You're never going to win that one, and your best bet to not be hated is to stop being a dick.
	What?
	Maybe you should just DM each other, I mean...
	It's meant to be questions.
	Right.
	Is that all for the video comments?
	Nice video on conservatism.
	The Latin conservate means to preserve, conserve, maintain, or to save.
	Whether the world, your nation, relationship, or your room, you should only abandon it if it is condemnable, unprotectable, unsalvageable, or too costly to maintain.
	Stay in California, leave my state alone.
	Yep, based.
	I do think that, however, that while it can be useful to lean on the etymologies of words, I don't think it should become the be-all and end-all of the argument because I've seen some insane draw logic coming out of arguments to etymology.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Next comment.
	A common refrain I hear from the normie conservatives and the vaunted moderate liberals is that it doesn't matter if the far left is in charge because You know, we have the Constitution and laws that protect us from any excesses they might do.
	The problem the Canadians are probably going to run into, though, is that when the far-left people are in charge, the law is whatever they say it is, and woe betide those to contradict them.
	Yeah, that's the main problem, isn't it?
	The will of the people operating the institutions has to be one of upholding the laws, and they can just ignore those things that they don't want to continue and prosecute.
	So I completely concur with your point.
	He is referencing as well a classic 80s manga which I have been recommended numerous times which is very much about politics and the difference between monarchies, oligarchies, republics and so on.
	I haven't got around to it yet because I can't find a Japanese copy in the UK. Borders are closed.
	Next comment.
	Alright guys, I've got a joke for you.
	How many Lotus Eaters does it take to plug in a vacuum cleaner?
	Oh, for goodness sake, who put that on the bloody?
	Daisy!
	Come on, boys.
	You're letting the guys down.
	The girls are laughing at us.
	That is true.
	Operating any new piece of machinery takes a certain leading curve.
	I guarantee you that if we were to take photos of people's houses, then mine would not look like a tip.
	Let's put it that way.
	Let's move on to the next one.
	For goodness sake.
	Quickly, quickly, move on.
	I'm getting mad.
	I'm going to take this off and go over there right now.
	Let's play the next one.
	I think I'm doing pretty good for the first time walking in Power Armor.
	I'm going to be practicing shuffling along and then seeing if I can lift my legs higher once I get the hang of that.
	I'd love to put in, like, a pair of counter-rotating flywheels to help maintain my balance, but I still gotta do some research into building one of those.
	Pretty sure in the Starship Troopers novel, the Power Armor had flywheels or balancing gyros, but Johnny Rico fell down anyway.
	Nobody tell Carl the Japanese animated Starship Troopers.
	Wait, what?
	I didn't hear that.
	I didn't realize the animated Starship Troopers.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And it's more accurate to the book as well, because I mean, in the film, I imagine budget constraints and whatnot prevented them from accurately representing it.
	It's a snake enjoying its lunch, for anyone listening.
	It does look actually quite cute.
	It does.
	It looks like it's having a good time.
	Okay.
	Very nice.
	It looks like it's got goggle eyes on.
	Yeah.
	It looks like they've just been stuck on.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Let's go to the next comment.
	We've heard your frustration with COVID, with the measures that are there to keep people safe.
	We've heard you.
	It's time to go home now.
	You've seen what happens.
	You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil.
	I know how you feel.
	But go home and go home in peace.
	So does this mean we can impeach Trudeau for inciting insurrection?
	Just a thought.
	Yeah, I mean, he does seem to be inciting those truckers by the standards used to de-platform Donald Trump.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	It's almost exactly the same statement.
	It's just farcical.
	But that harks back to the other chap's comment about, look, it really is the people in the institutions.
	What they believe is what's going to happen.
	So you can't just say, well, we've got a piece of paper and everything will be fine.
	That's true.
	Okay, so my fellow Canadians, if you don't want to see democracy die, then you've got to start emailing and phoning your MPs and keep trying to call them until you actually get a hold of a real person.
	And if you're not a Canadian and you want to help out, then call the consulate or the embassy and talk to them about the concerns you have going on in Canada.
	And you just might help us out a lot in our battle for freedom.
	Good luck, Lance.
	Yeah, good luck.
	Real speed.
	Tony D and Little Joan with another legend from the Pines.
	From the Princeton Alumni Weekly comes the story of old man Seeger.
	Seeger was a banker who lived in Princeton and built his own house.
	He loved to do carpentry to relax.
	But unfortunately, his wife died in childbirth around the time of the Civil War.
	His house fell into disrepair and he fell into a deep depression.
	But in the afterlife, he apparently has continued his hobby Man, I love carpentry.
	I wish I did it.
	Hello, Lotus Eaters.
	Sorry about the quality of this video.
	I've just bought a new set of headphones, and I'm just wanting to test this microphone out to see how good the quality is.
	So earlier today, I went to the shops at a mall in Sydney, and I didn't bother wearing my mask, which is not the first.
	And only one person bothered to ask me to wear it, whilst everybody else was asking me to scan in, both of which I rejected.
	But I found it odd that they seemed more focused on the QR codes.
	Well, that's the thing they're really concerned about, isn't it?
	Because, I mean, I do, you know, the conspiracy theorists are like, well, it's really about making sure that everyone's on a database and making sure everything's tracked and traced and, you know, on the spreadsheet and maintained and accounted for.
	Yeah, I think there's probably some truth to this.
	Yeah, I think so.
	I mean, Trudeau is the perfect example.
	The entire world is just like, okay, well...
	The entire world, apart from Australia and New Zealand, are like, yeah, okay, there's no danger here.
	We don't need to be doing this.
	And Trudeau hasn't backed down an inch and has just called the truckers evil, and they are a threat to proper Canadians or something?
	They've thought that for a long time.
	I mean, Thomas Sowell talked about it in the 90s with the vision of the anointed, and Hillary Clinton just said it outright when she had her infamous deplorable speech.
	speech, they genuinely think that the civil society of the country that they run is the enemy.
	It is the enemy of progressivism.
	It is the enemy of the World Economic Forum agenda, which is the same totalizing ideology that is now pushing its borders right up to Russia.
	And I'm sorry, but that's an unhinged perspective to take.
	And if they think that they are the enemy of the people, then perhaps they will fulfill that prophecy.
	I mean, they make themselves the enemy of the people, don't they, by that standard?
	If they say, well, look, you guys are holding us back, we've got a plan here, then not good news.
	I mean, to be honest with you, I don't think Trudeau is going to be hesitant to use violence on the truckers if he thinks it becomes practical.
	I don't think he'll care.
	I think he genuinely despises them.
	Anyway, let's go to the comments.
	Baron Von Warhook says, it's amazing how the Democrats spent four years non-stop spying on Trump and they couldn't find anything that could be used against him.
	Yeah, and just to pause on that, honestly, I can't believe that Donald Trump was like the goodest boy of America.
	I know.
	Of all people.
	Mm-hmm.
	I mean, come on, I was expecting that something would have come out, it would have taken money from somewhere because it's Donald Trump, right?
	But no, it turns out he did literally nothing.
	But anyway, yeah, Biden does count the screw-ups on camera almost every day and the Republicans won't do anything.
	It's like having Hitler wandering into your sniper scope and not pulling the trigger.
	Well, sorry, there was actually...
	It's a very nice analogy.
	There is.
	It is.
	But there was actually an article that I didn't have time to get to, that I left out, that was the Republicans basically like, look, we're actually in the minority position at the moment, so we can't actually initiate this, that, and the other, because the Democrats just voted down.
	So this is why the midterms in 2022 are so important, because then if we can retake the House and the Senate, then we can start absolutely smashing them, and they had better.
	And the Democrats know that an absolute, apparently, quote, schlocking is coming, and So, good luck.
	Free Will says, the government is corrupt, the press is corrupt, the law enforcement is corrupt, the establishment is rotten to the core, and we're on our own.
	Well, that's what the truckers are finding out, isn't it?
	Student of History says, I'd like to clarify in no uncertain terms that using government power to obstruct a political candidate is highly illegal and has killed politicians' career in the past.
	Asked Nixon, he didn't even do it, but still got hung.
	Actively spying on the President of the United States of America is espionage full stop.
	Yeah, that's the point, though, isn't it?
	If I did that, I'd be an enemy of America, right?
	Espionage for who or what is the question?
	And it's hard to put the finger on it, isn't it?
	But I think that this World Economic Forum order, this, you know, the sort of rationalistic order that wants everything categorized and summarized in the database, I do think this is some kind of emergent civilization that is essentially peeling itself away from the traditional intuitive civilizations of the West.
	I really think this is what's happening.
	I think they're very much in the story of Icarus at the moment.
	They think they're soaring away from the ground towards the sun.
	And I think they are going to come crashing down to reality.
	Fingers crossed, I'll tell you.
	But anyway, carrying on with the comment.
	So anyone spying on the President of the United States of America is espionage full stop.
	Anyone who's involved in the situation is guilty of committing acts of espionage on the POTUS would receive.
	I'm going to go with severe consequences because I don't feel like getting black bagged.
	But really, I mean, Trump said that in a more fair time, this would be punishable by death.
	And it's like, well, it is treason.
	So, I mean, you know, just saying, I mean, it is a treasonous thing to do.
	That used to mean something.
	That was before it was the moral and intellectual fashion of Western elites.
	Exactly.
	Absolutely brilliantly put.
	Omar says, the gaslighting doesn't hurt as much as when remembering more than half of the public, including the Democrats, believe the media are the enemy of the people.
	Even when they have full control of the MSM and social media, they're still losing control of the narrative.
	All these wine moms and their cats have left is cope.
	Yeah, and coping about Joe Rogan as well.
	It's interesting.
	Apparently, there are people who I wouldn't have thought were very involved in politics, but they revealed themselves by posting something on Facebook about Joe Rogan.
	It's like, you don't watch him.
	I know you don't watch him.
	And they're like, Joe Rogan's an auntie.
	It's like, okay, now I know what you've been reading.
	Simon says, I would once again like to say that by today's standards, Nixon did nothing wrong.
	I would have to go back and revisit Watergate.
	I remember watching a documentary about it a few years back and thinking, okay, well, I mean, it was a sensitive tripwire, but he was right.
	By today's standards, My understanding was that it was the cover-up that did more damage than the actual event itself.
	Yeah.
	But it was one of the rare cases of the media essentially bringing down a precedent.
	And arguably you could say they had a bit less credibility then.
	I think you'd probably be wrong, but you could make a better argument than today.
	M1ping says, we weren't spying, we were secretly collecting information of our enemies.
	Yeah, that was an amazing quote.
	What a statement!
	Well, I've never considered electronic surveillance to be spying.
	What is?
	You know?
	Anyway, Angel Brain says, I think people are being woefully naive about these matters.
	The government is hugely paranoid.
	Power tends to unearth...
	Power unearned, sorry, tends to lead to the fear that you will be found out.
	They've been doing this since 2001.
	You develop a tech response to spying on your foes, who may also be your citizens.
	And once the tech is good to go, you change the law to make it not only legal to use, but compelled by government fiat.
	Tech first, law later, ethics debatable.
	Fair point.
	SH Silver says, this political scandal is too big for the powers to be to ignore, but don't expect the deep state to persecute its own culpable members.
	Durham would frame this as a partisan fight between two campaigns that the intel agencies were duped into joining rather than the establishment acting in concert against the populist front.
	Which is the more accurate framing, in my opinion.
	And Riss says, yet again, something people laugh at Trump for saying, but it's proven true.
	Honestly, it's a shame that while in office, Trump didn't lock up the Clintons and John Durham for the four-year hoax that was Rushgate.
	No, Durham's...
	Comey?
	No, no, no.
	Mueller.
	Mueller, yeah.
	For the Rushgate hoax.
	Well, there is always 2024 to correct that mistake.
	Hashtag, let's go, Brandon.
	On Ukraine, let's see how people fit with our coverage.
	Baron Von Warhawk says, I'm guessing Biden is going all-in into Russia's fear porn as a distraction from his own failings.
	Just a quick aside on that.
	Well, that's not new, is it?
	Oldest trick in the book.
	Yeah, oldest trick in the book.
	If you're an Argentinian junta or something.
	Galtieri.
	Yeah, you would...
	He literally goes on and says that.
	Sorry, sorry, sorry.
	Go on.
	He's desperate for any foreign distraction in order to shift the public focus and anger on Putin.
	Like what Leopoldo Galtieri did with the Falklands.
	Great minds.
	What Biden hasn't considered is that wars never go the way politicians and generals imagine, and if he can't even handle cavemen in Afghanistan, I doubt he can handle Putin, boys.
	Yeah, this is a very salient Machiavelli quote.
	Wars begin when you will, but don't end when you please.
	Absolutely.
	Justin B says, it really does seem that the West wants a Barney with Russia and have chosen Ukraine as the battleground since Putin started pressuring them.
	Probably so as to distract from how much power and respect the leaders are losing over their behaviour over the last few years.
	And it's interesting, isn't it?
	And it does look like they want to boy with Russia.
	It really does look like they're amping up for something.
	It's like, okay, so you've pushed Russia literally back to its own borders, practically.
	Which are the smallest borders it's had in hundreds of years as well.
	Yes.
	Not just hundreds of years.
	I mean, when was Russia smaller than this?
	It's unbelievable to think that Russia wouldn't have influence in Ukraine in the same way that America would think it unconceivable that they couldn't have influence in Mexico or Canada.
	It's a great power.
	It's going to have influence over its neighbors.
	And so NATO trying to essentially cut that off, I mean, there's a part that just doesn't seem fair.
	Well, there's a broader discussion behind this as well, which is the idea of whether the world should be unipolar or multipolar.
	And Russia's position is that it should be multipolar, i.e.
	America can have its sphere of influence, but it shouldn't dare pretend that this is the global, universal, revealed, progressive truth that everyone in the world should follow, and Russia should be left to deal with its neighbours.
	Captain Charlie the Beagle says...
	Amazingly, it was funny here in Ireland that the Russian ambassador to Ireland did more to help Irish fishermen over a single meeting than the Irish government did since we joined the EU. Oh yes, we haven't covered this.
	No, I don't know what that's about.
	So essentially Russia announced a fairly short notice naval drill, naval exercise in international waters near Ireland, or Irish waters, I forget which, I believe international near Ireland.
	And so Ireland basically said to its fishermen, okay, stay out of this zone.
	The fishermen protested.
	They were like, we're not going to be pushed off by some Russian destroyers and missile cruisers.
	Where are you going to go then?
	So there was a conversation and the Russian ambassador made the exercise move away to different locations, my understanding.
	But yeah, it was just another part of this whole issue.
	Does Ireland have a navy?
	I don't believe so.
	If they do, it will be tiny.
	They basically rely on us and or the EU for their defence contributions while basically slagging us off every second.
	Aren't we like the majority of the EU navy as well?
	I believe so, yes.
	I would imagine we are.
	So basically Ireland, what they say, they're relying on us for protection.
	Yes, they are.
	A student of history says, Russia invading Ukraine...
	Help, Britain, help!
	Oh, yeah.
	Sorry, go on.
	Russia invading Ukraine would be like America invading Canada.
	Yeah, I hear some random American don't like what Trudeau is doing, but invade?
	That sounds horrible to attack a cousin.
	Hang on a second.
	I think you might have a point there.
	I'm listening.
	Excuse me.
	XYNZE says, while those movements of equipment are quite concerning, the question is, do we, the punters, know where these clips were taken?
	Were they planted to get us ramped up?
	We've been deceived by the media and our leads before.
	So the clips that I pulled out have basically been circulating among amateur military analysts on Twitter and so on.
	So while we can't absolutely verify the credibility, they're not sort of doctored, ready for our consumption by the BBC or CNN. But I thought we would cover the propaganda that's been put out about this, of the Ukrainians training black children and grandmothers, and the fact that one of the guys training has, what's the Nazi group in Ukraine?
	I can't remember the name of them.
	They've got a particular symbol, though, that this guy training the grandmother happened in the picture, had in his arm.
	And Vice Magazine have put out, you know, I saw them put out an article saying, why are neo-Nazis training old women in Ukraine?
	And so I thought we were covering it, but we can talk about it another time.
	But it looks like there's a fair amount of, like, dodgy, like, black propaganda being put out by our side on this.
	Well, this is potentially the media stories circulating around the start of a war.
	And if you know anything about history, you should know that there's going to be all sorts of nonsense, misinformation, lies, propaganda, you name it.
	As we saw in Syria.
	Yes, and as Nazi Germany did before they invaded Poland and before they invaded Czechoslovakia and so on.
	And it always happens.
	It's something everyone does.
	And if Putin is genuinely going into this to play the game of doing the propaganda part of starting a war and the mobilization without actually invading, then that's a rather unique strategy and an expensive one because mobilization is not cheap.
	That's true.
	It's not cheap.
	It's a big gamble.
	But it might be worth the money to drive our leaders insane.
	Yeah, might be worth the lols anyway.
	Well, yeah.
	Tom Wye says, I believe you are being extremely charitable towards Russia and without warrant.
	Russians see Ukraine as a rightful part of their empire due to cultural and linguistic ties.
	The situation is actually not similar to the prelude to World War II and justifications Hitler had for the annexations of Austria and Sudetenland.
	Well, thanks for bringing that view up because that is the main view of why we should act against Russia.
	It is that if we let them advance one inch, then we are basically appeasing Hitler and we're being horrible people.
	But I just don't think the historical parallels work.
	So fundamentally, I hate to be on the side of the mid-century Germans here, but the borders of the German state following the Treaty of Versailles were deliberately very, very small.
	They deliberately carved off large minorities of German people from the German Empire, as it was then.
	In order to punish Germany and restrict their power and so on.
	And this was not something that emerged naturally out of the will of the peoples involved whose lives were turned upside down as they were forced to leave all of their possessions or emigrate or live in another state and so on.
	And so this is why he even made the Lebensraum argument as far as I can understand it.
	It's because it could actually resonate with some people who were concerned about revanchism after World War I. So I think just to say Hitler used that argument, therefore, is wrong.
	It's a bad idea.
	I think it's also rather catastrophizing to think that these two tiny republics of Donetsk, Lehanced, and the Crimea, of course, are in any way on the same document, the same dossier, as taking over the world or storming tanks into Europe as taking over the world or storming tanks into Europe or anything like that.
	I just don't think, even if Russia wanted to, even if Putin was the mad dictator who, like, Fox News correspondents want him to be, I don't think he would have the capability to do that.
	No.
	I mean, I think that, frankly, it's the declining population of Russia that essentially hamstrings absolutely any I don't know.
	The immense strain it puts on a regime to do that, you know, and I understand that Putin is not universally loved in Russia.
	And I just don't think it's the character of the man.
	Like, you know, Adolf Hitler was clearly very impulsive when it came to making big sweeping decisions.
	He was a lunatic as well.
	I mean, I know that's thrown around quite often, but I think it's important to understand his actions and his character.
	But also he seems to make passionate decisions based on idealism.
	And methamphetamines.
	And methamphetamines, yeah.
	And the remarkable faith in the superiority of the Aryan race.
	Oh, we'll conquer all the way to Moscow or whatever.
	It's like, okay, yeah, great.
	He clearly made a bunch of bad tactical decisions, whereas Putin doesn't seem to be making bad tactical decisions.
	I don't think Putin's a genocidal maniac or anything.
	He doesn't appear to be.
	He just appears to be a kind of Machiavellian realpolitik autocrat, which, okay, it's not good from a liberal democracy perspective, but it's not the worst thing that can happen.
	I don't think this makes him the moustache man.
	No, I don't think so.
	But I think it's a good point to bring up, and I think it's good to bring up because we are in this danger, everyone having learned about World War II. That's the only frame of reference we've got.
	That any time you refuse, you don't take military action in a situation you're appeasing Hitler.
	And sometimes that's true, but sometimes it's not, and I think it's worth meditating on that.
	Just a quick thing on that as well.
	Generals were always fighting the previous war, right?
	And this is the problem that we've had, is we haven't had a significant war between major powers in Europe for quite some time.
	And so that's the only frame of reference people have got.
	But the thing is, the world has very obviously changed.
	You know, there's no appetite anywhere for mass mobilizations.
	There's no appetite anywhere for, you know, like huge sweeping territorial changes.
	You don't believe in social Darwinistic visions of the future of nations.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And so, I mean, I'm not saying that Russia isn't trying to take Ukraine.
	I think it obviously is.
	The question is, like, you know, what are we prepared to do to stop that?
	And do we think we can stop that?
	Because, as you said, historically, we're in a very unusual position at the moment.
	And it could be like the historical rubber band is just waiting to snap back, you know?
	And I'm not saying it's right or wrong.
	I'm saying it might be something we can't really prevent.
	And on that note, unfortunately we are out of time so we're going to have to end it here.

▲