July 22, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:15
2754 Are Ron Paul and Vladimir Putin Best Friends?
Did you know that Ron Paul and Russian President Vladimir Putin were best friends? While the mainstream media rushes to repeat government propaganda and point fingers regarding the tragic Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 crash in Ukraine, Ron Paul urges caution before facts are known and a formal investigation takes place. Lucia Graves from the National Journal set her sights on the prominent libertarian figure with an embarrassing spear job attempt.
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Oh!
Defying absolutely zero stereotypes of female emotional reasoning.
There's a reporter for the National Journal who has written an article entitled...
Ron Paul is Putin's new best friend.
BFF journalism forever.
Oh, the credibility just oozes from her like the sweat from the belly fat of Jabba the Hutt after a particularly strenuous cross-taining mission.
So, this is what she writes.
She says, It used to be that blaming America for the crisis abroad was largely the province of liberals.
That folk wisdom appears to be changing.
Just ask Ron Paul.
In the days after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the former House member has been quick to attack.
The West and President Obama for pointing any fingers in the direction of Vladimir Putin.
So let's just close our eyes, hold our nose and steel ourselves to the sticking place and sink into the ooze of this neuro-linguistic hell.
So The first person to use the word blame loses.
It's like the first person to use the word bashing.
Oh, this is just US bashing!
These have no intellectual content whatsoever.
Blame is one of these words Well, we don't want to play the blame game.
It's one of these words that people use when they just want to manipulate you emotionally.
Blame is something that is automatically immature, is automatically subjective, is automatically projecting, is automatically emotionally driven and irrational.
So the first person who uses the word blame, again, without specific and objective evidence, has just lost So blaming America for crisis abroad was largely the province's liberals.
That folk wisdom, you see?
It's folk wisdom that America has anything to do with any crisis abroad in any way, shape or form.
It's just folk wisdom.
There's no truth behind it.
Neither is there any falsehood behind it.
What is there?
Well, there's just the words folk wisdom.
What do they mean?
Nothing!
There's no content whatsoever.
So automatically it's like, steal yourself.
It's sort of like...
There's this experiment in modern art where they get this monkey to throw paint into the jet stream of a jet that is currently firing its engines at a canvas.
Well, the article is the engine, the words are the paint, and we've just got to steel ourselves, put on our hazmat suit, and try and wade through it.
The former house member has been quick to attack!
Ah, you see, there's emotionally-laden language again.
Boy, I really had...
I was reading this score.
I hope that a man wrote this.
Please don't be such a stereotypical female perspective!
But this time it was not to be escaped.
Quick to attack!
See, is that an argument?
Well, quick to attack indicates emotional instability and aggression and irrationality and bigotry.
No intellectual content, just quick to attack the West and President Obama for pointing any fingers in the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
So, in this case, Ron Paul has been attacking the West and attacking President Obama for the mere act of pointing any fingers in the direction of Let's find out what actually happened.
Ron Paul wrote, just days after the tragic crash of a Malaysian Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine, Western politicians and media joined together to gain the maximum propaganda value from the disaster.
It had to be Russia.
It had to be Putin, they said.
He goes on to write, President Obama held a press conference to claim, even before an investigation, that it was pro-Russian rebels in the region who were responsible.
His ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, did the same thing at the UN Security Council just one day after the crash.
Well, first of all, Samantha Power, excellent Marvel Comics superhero name, but what is the problem with that?
Well, these are just off the top of my head, but U.S. intelligence, the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. intelligence worldwide not got the very best record in the known universe for getting things right.
Just off the top of my head.
They cracked the Japanese naval codes prior to Pearl Harbor.
They knew what they were sending.
They were warned that an attack was imminent, and yet Pearl Harbor took the U.S. entirely by surprise.
You know, if you ring an island dependent on natural resources that it can't produce internally, like oil, with a blockade, they're going to attack you because they have no other particular choice.
Did they get Pearl Harbor right?
Absolutely not.
At some point, if I remember rightly, some superpower invaded Afghanistan and got swamped down in a bog-like war that sucked the very living soul out of the entire domestic population and did a huge job to collapse the economy.
Some superpower invading Afghanistan to the detriment of its entire empire.
No, no, it was, oh, USSR! So close!
Just two letters off from what I was thinking.
The USSR and did the CIA, anyone overseas, anyone figure out that Russia was about to invade Afghanistan?
No, they didn't!
Did they predict, right, so the Cold War started, of course, after you allied with the Russians in the Second World War, and what happened?
You had a multi-decade life-or-death struggle between the remnants of capitalism And the excesses of communism.
Public enemy number one.
The hammer and sickle bastards who were going to walk all over and bury us and stomp their hobnail boots into our children's foreheads.
They are enemy number one.
That's kind of the point of the whole overseas intelligence operation, to figure out what's going on with Russia.
Did they have any idea that Russia was going to collapse?
No clue at all.
In fact, right before Russia collapsed, they said, Russia's super strong.
Oh wait, no, it's gone!
So, yes, they might have missed out about a little Iranian revolution that occurred.
Ayatollah Khomeini, kidnapping, held the U.S. Embassy members for, what, 444 days or something like that?
Right before the Iranian revolution.
In the 70s, the CIA said, there is no evidence of any imminent revolution, none whatsoever, in Iran.
Oh, 9-11, 9-11, 9-11, any advance warning, any particular preparation, any particular, right?
Nothing.
Nothing whatsoever.
Oh, Colin Powell at the UN talking about where all of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction Well, it was a slam dunk that he had weapons of mass destruction.
Oh, actually, turns out not so much with the weapons of mass destruction.
Anyway, we could go on and on with all this kind of stuff, but let's just go on with the article.
So the fact that Ron Paul might be just a little skeptical about American intelligence, American overseas intelligence, which is a Three-part, triple-paddy oxymoron is somewhat understandable if you know anything about American history other than what is taught about in ru-cis-boom-bah American patriotic textbooks.
Well, so when Obama says, oh yeah, it's Putin!
It's gotta be!
We know!
We know!
Well, nonsense.
Excuse me.
So, Ron Paul's argument, says the article, which he first made in a Friday television appearance, was quickly picked up by the Kremlin-funded English-language outlet Russia Today.
Hi, RT! And on Monday, the permanent mission of Russia to NATO, a group tasked with facilitating cooperation between Russia and NATO, tweeted out his column.
Well, I think that's...
Quite reasonable.
You see, one of the things that Ron Paul appears to be suggesting...
Let's go a little bit further.
One thing that Ron Paul is clearly stating is, until there's an investigation, let's not assume we know who is to blame.
Let's not assume we know who is responsible, is probably a better word than blame.
Well, there is, you know, pretty much a multi-millennia Anglo-Saxon common law tradition called innocent until proven guilty.
You know, just point fingers in a complex international situation and say, that guy!
Go!
Get him!
This is not the opening to the movie Shrek!
This is...
Questions of force and war.
And so, it may be a fairly good idea to say, let's not assume we know who's to blame, given that our intelligence is fundamentally retarded.
Let's not assume we know who to blame until there's an investigation.
That's actually not pointing fingers at people.
That's trying to talk down a lynch mob, right?
Remember this lynching thing?
Trying to talk down a lynch mob is not the same thing.
As pointing fingers at someone.
You're trying to lower not other people's fingers but their possible weaponry from a possibly innocent party.
Okay, so it's easy to see why these Russians, says this woman, liked the piece.
Politically, it's a much sounder line of argument for protecting Russia from blame than what's being reported on Russian TV, much of which is funded by the Kremlin.
Oh yeah, can you imagine a government having inordinate control over media outlets, say, by providing them for information and sources and actually giving them ads made by the government to run as if they're not made by the government?
I'm shocking!
Never happens in the West.
Where conspiracy theories abound.
See, saying you know someone's responsible before there's even an investigation is not just a conspiracy theory where they say this is what I think happened or what might have happened or what is claimed to have happened certainly didn't happen.
That's called a conspirator fact.
That's called rank bigotry.
One report, this is a report from Russia, promotes the idea that the airliner was already full of corpses when it took off from Amsterdam.
Well, tragically for this woman, somebody who works for Free Domain Radio, speaks Russian.
And so we had a look at the original article.
This is not even remotely true.
And it's not even a stretch of the truth.
This is an outright lie.
So this woman is saying one report promotes the idea that the airliner was already full of corpses when it took off from Amsterdam.
We read this report.
The report actually says there's a lot of crazy conspiracy theories.
One which is impossible to believe is that an airliner took off with...
Bodies already in the seats.
So they're saying, whoa, there's a lot of crazy conspiracy theories about there.
One which is impossible to believe is this.
And then according to this woman's, I guess we could call it a brain, Okay, let's call it a prank.
This woman's brain interprets that website saying these are crazy conspiracy theories which can't be believed as it's promoting the idea that the airliner was already full of corpses when it took off from Amsterdam.
Another claims the tragedy was somehow mysteriously the result of the Ukrainian military confusing the airliner for Putin's presidential plane.
Putting the word mysteriously in doesn't make it mysterious at all.
So anyway...
So here's Russia expert, Julia Ioffel, and she says, watching some of these Russian newscasts, one comes away with the impression of a desperate defense attorney scrounging for experts and angles, or a bad kid caught red-handed by the principal trying to twist his way out of a situation in which he has no chance.
Well, that's some great analysis there.
I wish you hadn't beat another woman.
Please stop reconfirming these stereotypes.
One comes away with the impression that...
Is that what experts do?
I thought experts actually dealt in facts and evidence.
Like, why not quote me something that's just not an outright lie?
Why not quote me something where they're double talking or twisting or changing their story in midair with no reference to it being changed?
One comes away with the impression that, you know?
I mean, this is like going to a bank and saying to the teller, I came away from my last bank statement with the impression that I had a million dollars.
Could I have them, please?
Show me some numbers.
Show me some facts.
One came away with the impression that it's like a desperate defense attorney and a kid who's good in a school.
Is this seriously what passes for journalism these days, you prostitutes?
Not that any of the outlandish coverage is particularly useful to Putin.
Oh, so he's aiding Putin, but in a way that doesn't aid him.
As David Remnick recently wrote, Putin has become something of a victim of his own propaganda machine.
Unlike the National Journal, I suppose.
The wild exaggeration on nightly broadcasts has, quote, become a problem for Putin because this system cannot be wholly managed.
Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Putin advisor, told Remnick of the Russian media, the news programs have overheated public opinion and the collective public imagination.
What does that mean?
Would you actually like to provide any evidence?
She goes on to write, never mind that Secretary of State John Kerry, in his blanket appearances on the Sunday talk shows, was careful not to directly blame Putin for the disaster, noting that culpability is a judicial term.
Sorry, that should have actually put you to sleep.
Culpability is a judicial term.
Kerry did note an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that Russia provided the separatists in eastern Ukraine with the weapons used to shoot down the airliner last week.
He did, however, assign the Kremlin some blame for fueling conflict in eastern Ukraine and arming separatists with military equipment.
So, John Kerry feels that it's really terrible for governments, you see, to fuel conflict in Ukraine.
The fact that America has pumped $5 billion into its own particular favored parties in the conflict over the past number of years, apparently that's not a destabilizing thing.
The fact that America is one of the biggest arms dealers in the world, I'm sure, does nothing to inflame conflicts around the world.
And arming separatists with military equipment?
I wonder if America has ever done that at all.
Yes, I think it has.
But that didn't dissuade Paul, Ron Paul, from attacking American officials for, supposedly, jumping to conclusions.
Okay, so John Kerry says we can't establish that it's his responsibility.
So that's exactly what Ron Paul is saying.
Now, again, I'm sorry to put your brain through this because normally this is the kind of triple twister way that a intestinal snake winds its way around your lower belly, but when Ron Paul says about Obama, don't jump to conclusions, you can't say for sure he's guilty, that's bad!
But when John Kerry does it.
That's good.
So it's good when John Kerry agrees with Ron Paul, who's saying something wrong.
Deal with it if you can, if you dare!
This is like being strapped to a table with O'Brien above you.
After outlining everything that Western media outlets in their rush to repeat government propaganda have ignored, Paul posited that, quote, the real point is it's very difficult to get accurate information.
Yes, it is very difficult to get accurate information.
Is it so hard to simply demand a real investigation, Ron Paul asks.
He also, in his Friday interview on Newsmax, Drew parallels between the Russian-made missile system's alleged connection to Thursday's attack and the capture of U.S.-made weapons by Islamist insurgents in Iraq, arguing where the missiles were originally manufactured is relatively meaningless.
Paul says, that may well be true, but guess what?
ISIS has a lot of American weapons.
We sent weapons into Syria to help the rebels, and al-Qaeda ends up getting it.
It doesn't mean that our American government and Obama deliberately wanted ISIS to get American weapons, right?
So, if it turns out to be the case that it was Russian separatists in Ukraine who fired the missile, hopefully mistaking the passenger plane, the civilian plane for a military transport, or maybe even Putin's plane, who knows, If it turns out that the missiles were manufactured in Russia, well, that's not good, for sure.
And that doesn't make the Russian government look good.
But if you're the U.S., you really can't be pointing any fingers because so many American-made weapons have ended up in the hands of people who America considers enemies.
I mean, I assume that Russia, to some degree, views the Russian separatists in Ukraine as...
Allies, or at least as brothers divided by all of the geographical hiccups and accidents of the Second World War, but it doesn't mean that then somehow Putin is to blame.
Or if it does, then we've got an international court of trials for war crimes that is going to pretty much suck up everyone who's ever been in charge of a country and has ever had a gun that has ended up in someone else's hands, which is everyone.
So basically, we're just going to have a giant frat house reunion party of the G7, of NATO, of Russia, of China, of everyone else.
Whose weapons have surprisingly not stayed in the invisible, conceptual, moon-based spiderweb of, ooh, these weapons have to stay with our friends.
That never happens.
So that's, I think, his point, if I may paraphrase it.
So who gets the weapons, says Paul, so who gets the weapons is a big difference.
Between how they got them and what happened and what the motivations were.
So even if it was a Russian weapon, that doesn't mean a lot.
Okay, yeah.
I mean, didn't they have a Fast and Furious where they gave marked weapons to drug gangs in Mexico which ended up being used to kill Americans?
Is that something which we now must impeach for?
Putin's old talking points says the article have been more subdued.
In an address published online overnight, the Russian president calls for an international investigation of the crash site, adding, Russia will do everything possible to shift the current conflict in the east of Ukraine from today's current military stage to the stage of discussion at the negotiation table.
With his cool, dispassionate rhetoric, Paul seems to be just about the best voice for Putin's interests anywhere, and better surely than Kremlin TV. Paul is a more respected source, in America anyway, and his defense of Putin wasn't grounded in conspiracy theories.
Still, he may have to compete with Alan West for the title of Putin's Best New Friend!
And there, I assume because the last brain cell committed seppuku and wished to die rather than keep typing the article ends, and this is Big heap, plenty pitiful.
There's no facts in here, really.
Just a bunch of slurs and emotionally manipulative language.
I would like to continue, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to have some sort of borax-based scrub of my frontal lobes so that I can resume doing philosophy rather than face-planting into the absolute venom-filled, sofistic bowl of this particular article.
