Geopolitics

Tucker Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Russia on February 6th, 2024. This thread reflects my thought process about the events around the conversation, the conversation itself and the following implications. Read on.

Tucker Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Russia on February 6th, 2024. This thread reflects my thought process about the events around the conversation, the conversation itself and the following implications. Read on.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fOCWBhuDdDo

This is the alt account of Sister Hazel. Writings at https://powerlaw.systems. Building https://testnet.uvio.network. 

The announcement of the interview was apparently already too hot to handle for some people. A common point of view on the opposing spectrum was the fear of legitimizing a war criminal by providing Putin with a prominent platform.

The very people having grown up under the privilege of freedom of speech found it once again appropriate to silence a key figure of a geopolitical conflict. Welcome to the civilized world.

Let's get all the smoke and mirrors out of the way first. Putin talked a great deal about the Russian history, going back thousands of years. He points to Neo Nazi movements that are apparently everywhere and have to be eliminated under all circumstances.

Putin talked about economic data and made all kinds of vitality comparisons to explain how strong Russia is and how the western aggression backfired. All of these nazi and econ narratives are rather irrelevant distractions from what actually matters here.

The challenging circumstances in front of us are all about competence. It takes a lot of integrity and intellectual honesty to recognize that most decisions we have to make do in fact reside on a long spectrum of gray areas. Where we are going there are only few clearly identifiable rights and wrongs.

Your personal proximity to the issue will inevitably increase the magnitude of your cognitive bias on the matter at hand. We see many people perceiving something as propaganda. And the strategy those people often utilize to respond is their own version of propaganda. This is not helpful.

Now to the facts. All Russia wanted for the past 30 years was for NATO not to advance further. NATO did advance further. We knew advancing NATO lines further is perceived by Russia as aggression. And yet we did the aggressive thing, for decades. We knew what we were doing, and we did it anyway.

Slowly, and then all at once, the conflict escalated and Russia justified the war against Ukraine as defense mechanism including all the smoke and mirrors. This tragedy is all wrong and heartbreaking. The Ukraine became the geopolitical pawn sacrifize in the name of idealogical group think clashing into a common enemy.

Conflicts are always fought on the back of the weakest. And the weakest do always simply shoot the messenger. The messanger in this case was Russia, or Vladimir Putin for that matter. And somehow it remains a headscratcher how our institutions could allow such a situation to drag on and eventually escalate.

Questions we should be asking are not being asked. Who allowed this conflict to happen? Who voted for NATO expansion? Who had the most to gain from this conflict? Who is actually in charge here?

It is certainly not the president. The president does not even know where he is most of the time.

Prolonged military conflict could have been prevented. we know that for a long time. Western politicians of third party countries acted to prevent the very peace deals Russia and Ukraine were ready to sign. Those very politicans that are long out of office without bearing any consequences.

Whether it is war in Ukraine, the poison we feed our chrildren, or all the other things we go along with, as long as there are enough distractions on the screen.  All those things add up, and they start with you, regardless in which country you live or what narratives you like to believe.

We are collectively caught up in a system that is holding us hostage, enabling unelected officials to run the country, by interpreting the rules in arbitrary and capricious ways, without there ever being any consequences. Time and time again the systems leaves us with only bad choices.

It is about time for us to step up the game and become collectively able to cut through the noise. We got to start asking the real questions and not back down in front of generic excuses. It's about time we take a look in the mirror. This is not good enough.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

What actually matters here is how we got here and how we can possibly move on together. The following contains a couple of pills that are quite hard to swollow. So I want to level set the reader and frame the conversation we have to have.