| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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Regime Change Warnings
00:07:31
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| So I was thinking today, I keep hearing these warnings from the populist right or like the center populism, like breaking points or something. | |
| They're like, they're like, it's going to be a regime change war. | |
| And there was, I got another notification from an article in the Wall Street Journal that I read about there's more hardware in American hardware that is in the Middle East than there has been since the Iraq war days. | |
| So something is happening. | |
| Maybe it's a bluff or it's saber rattling to get something. | |
| But let me just say this. | |
| The easiest take in the world is to be anti-war because, you know, it's just like, oh, death is bad, you know, and it's like, thanks. | |
| You know, this is what you see from the anti, the anti-Zionists now who aren't even anti-Zionists. | |
| They're like, you know, Israel is killing children. | |
| They just yeah, it's just right. | |
| They keep saying it. | |
| It's boring. | |
| It's not serious. | |
| You're not actually questioning Israel. | |
| You're not getting it to the heart of the matter. | |
| You're just weeping crocodile tears over dead babies. | |
| And I kind of get it, of course, but it's just not serious. | |
| And that's what we've seen from so much of the right. | |
| But anyway, what I mean by this is that the easiest thing in the world is to be anti-war and just to say war is bad. | |
| Now, this is one thing that I started thinking about after Venezuela, which is that the right is convinced that America is in decline. | |
| And I think they're correct about that. | |
| We are clearly in decline when it comes to just, you know, our culture, the nation, institutions, average intelligence. | |
| Yes, we are. | |
| But why do you, do you really think that every other nation is not suffering the exact same fate? | |
| And in many ways, something worse? | |
| Like, do you think it's only America that's incompetent or something? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| And I am not, and I am not at all certain. | |
| In fact, I think it's the other way around that we have lost power relatively to other nations of the world. | |
| Now, you could make a strong case with China, et cetera, but overall, I'm not convinced that that is the case at all. | |
| Venezuela showed that a woke, ridiculous Trumpian dictatorship can just go in, do stuff, slap people around, and then leave. | |
| It's like, Buh-bye, Buh-bye, Buh-bye. | |
| Give the first lady a black eye and throw her in the fucking cargo hull. | |
| Yeah. | |
| That's what you want to do now. | |
| Yes. | |
| But, but we can still do things. | |
| And these other countries are more incompetent. | |
| They're more incompetent basket cases than we are, in fact. | |
| And so while I am quite hesitant to endorse regime change war or an extended war in Iran, I'm just going to sort of hand it to the Trump administration that they actually are able to do things. | |
| And I'm not going to kind of like come up here and be like, oh, it's going to be nuclear Armageddon. | |
| It's the worst thing. | |
| It's going to be a forever war. | |
| No, the institutions are competent enough to actually learn. | |
| They're not going to just repeat that immediately at the very least. | |
| It'll take them another 10 years before they do that again. | |
| But I don't know what to say. | |
| I mean, I wonder the degree to which Iran and countries like Iran are run by the same decrepit boomers with dumb millennials staffing the bureaucracies. | |
| Gen Xers have checked out. | |
| So we're not even a factor, but boomers and millennial run states that we actually can go and slap people around and get out and they're not going to do anything. | |
| And that's just my resistance left, the tankies are going to be like, oh, no, we'll destroy Israel. | |
| We'll do the straight of Hormuz. | |
| My professor at one point, John Mearsheimer, is like, you know, it's going to be a total land war that we won't win. | |
| I'm not convinced by any of these things, actually. | |
| So am I naive or am I getting at something? | |
| No, I don't think you're naive because this is like another useful utilization of the distinction between the American nation and the American empire, where the American nation is certainly in decline. | |
| But the American Empire, when you talk about, you know, Ukraine or Venezuela, it's like the American Empire is doing totally fine. | |
| It's meeting their aims. | |
| It's whatever, you know, it's as strong as it's ever been, whatever the case may be. | |
| But I do think there is like a kind of distinction to be made between Venezuela and Iran, where we didn't do regime change in Venezuela. | |
| We kind of did administration change, right? | |
| We just took out, it was a, we have the vice president taking over and then, you know, welcoming the whatever American official on stage, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. | |
| But it's, I think it's different for a couple of reasons with Iran, where one, to make the case that the vanilla intervention was about Jewish power serving Israel's interests, whatever, was a stretch. | |
| It was a huge stretch to make that case. | |
| Us going to war, doing some kind of regime change, decapitation strike, whatever the case may be in Iran is purely an Israeli geopolitical aim that we are effectuating, right? | |
| Yes. | |
| And then secondly, it's not the same where if you think about Venezuela having a kind of constitutional republic structure with a president, a vice president, whatever, okay, get rid of the president. | |
| You have the vice president take over. | |
| If they do what we want, then it's okay. | |
| If they don't, we'll do it again, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. | |
| The structure of the Islamic Republic is different. | |
| And with, it's like, okay, so you take out the Ayatollah and the top brass or whatever. | |
| It's not necessarily the legal, the composition of the state is different, right? | |
| So I don't know if it can easily be done one-to-one in the same type of way where it's like, okay, we get rid of the top level and the next ones rise up and we work with them, whatever. | |
| But that being said, I don't think we're going to do a protracted ground invasion, whatever. | |
| Nick's show, I think last night was all about Iran and he talked a lot about this. | |
| And he's like, yeah, we are building up like very much in the region to do like maybe prolonged airstrikes, whatever the case may be. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I don't think it'll be, I don't think, again, it'll be a regime change war. | |
| I think it'll be a war of really trying to degrade infrastructure to, you know, really make them like incapable of retaliating, but having to still, we'll still have the same, if not the same administration, definitely the same regime. | |
| Yeah, much like Venezuela is what you're saying. | |
| I mean, could they not decapitate the Islamic revolution? | |
| I mean, there are existing sort of constitutional nation-state-y democratic institutions that are in Iran. | |
| I mean, Iran has a president. | |
| They have a parliament, parliament. | |
| Yeah, but they have like a, you know, the council of jurists. | |
| Are you going to take out three jurists? | |
| Are you going to take out the whole like, it's more like saying like, rather than just taking out Maduro, you're taking out Maduro and the Supreme Court, you're taking out the president and the Supreme Court and the congressional leadership. | |
| It's like, it's a little bit more of a bigger, you know, lift. | |
|
Buildup To Detachment
00:01:37
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| Yeah. | |
| But we'll see. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I think I think something is going to happen due to this buildup, but I don't know. | |
| Perhaps I have a sort of cynical indifference about this stuff. | |
| It's just hard to care. | |
| It's hard to care. | |
| It's very different than when I was a lot younger. | |
| The country was different. | |
| The world was different. | |
| The buildup to Iraq in terms of, you know, criticism, dissident criticism coming from libertarians and leftists, not coming from liberals, by the way, and this prolonged buildup and legitimization of the Iraq war. | |
| I don't think we've not seen anything resembling that. | |
| I think that was almost like a holdover of the 20th century. | |
| And at this point, they're like, we don't give a fuck, actually. | |
| We're just going to do it. | |
| I almost think, I almost feel as though the culture has finally, and I think we talked about this the last time I was on. | |
| I think the culture has finally caught up to the Gulf War didn't take place. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| The culture is like these wars don't exist. | |
| You know, it's like, it just exists on the screen, exists on your phone. | |
| If you ignore your phone, there's no war, et cetera, et cetera. | |
| I think the culture finally now actually reflects it in a way that Baudrad was speaking about something nascent, but I think it's fully matured at this point where I think the general population feels this kind of just aloof detachment from it where it's like, all right, whatever. | |
| I guess there's a war. | |
| And you're cocooned in your phone. | |
| I mean, the phone is like being in a pod in a way. | |
| You know, it's you. | |
| You could be on a bus surrounded by people, but you're in your little world. | |
| Your little fragmented cultural world. | |
| Yeah. | |