Digest 32: ‘Fuck Peloton’
Elon’s clip at the NYT DealBook summit saying advertisers blackmailing X (Twitter) can ‘go fuck themselves’ got a lot of airtime. But this, from Dana White, is even more hilarious – and pre-dates Elon’s outburst by a week.
This isn’t the usual tone of my Substack. But it’s too funny not to share. And it does make a very important point. The video has three waves of increasing hilarity. I encourage you to keep watching, and to watch all the way through. (Warning: lots of explicit language.)
Dana White is one of Trump’s personal best friends. He says of RFK Jr: ‘he’s fucking brilliant’. This is significant. Further:
RFK Jr wants to enact a global treaty banning autonomous AI killer drones. (I was arguing for this last May. Dominic Cummings and Steve Hsu have be warning about such drones for almost a decade.)
RFK Jr is one of few politicians to declare that Covid obviously started in a lab – and has pledged to stop U.S. gain of function research. (This could, quite literally, save humanity.)
RFK Jr actually talks about the history of the U.S. going off the gold standard, and thinks we should take steps towards reestablishing the integrity of money.
And of course, he wants to release the Kennedy Assassination Files. (The 1992 Kennedy Records Assassination Act mandated the release of all records related to the JFK assassination by 2017. Trump nor Biden followed it.)
This is a sane collection of policies the world needs.
Does RFK Jr have escape velocity to get past the paranoia of a ‘wasted vote’?
The last independent candidate to be polling as strong as RFK Jr now is, this early, was Teddy Roosevelt with the Bull Moose Party in 1912.
It’s just shy of a year out. RFK Jr is polling at 17% – in a three-horse race. He’s facing an incredibly weak sitting President, and an extremely divisive challenger.
Madder things have happened in politics, the past eight years.
One cannot write-off RFK Jr. Many more people should start endorsing him.
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A ‘Philosophy, Politics and Economics’ approach to Ukraine
Prominent intellectuals are starting to come out and concede that they have been wrong about Ukraine. This, from Nassim Taleb, is refreshing to see:
Following my Substack article last week about The Spectator’s Ukraine coverage, in the magazine this week was a (longer than normally allowed) article with the headline: ‘The Ukrainian war can only end in a peace deal’.
There are still a number of things I would disagree with in this piece, but it does note: a history of ‘magical thinking’; Zelensky’s decree banning negotiations (it’s Ukraine that’s outlawed negotiations, not Russia), and concedes that there now needs to be negotiations. I’m very glad this is finally getting due coverage.
It was jarring to see Owen (the author of the piece) say on SpectatorTV:
News editor: When did you think it became clear that Ukraine couldn’t win this war outright, and that a compromise would have to be reached with Russia?
Owen: Well, this was clear immediately, from the beginning. The full defeat of Russia and the removal of the Putin regime would be a nice goal, but it’s the biggest nuclear-armed power in the world. If we’re talking about defeating Russia in the sense of actually defeating it comprehensively as Germany and Japan were defeated in 1945, that was never really going to happen.’
…And to see the news editor vigorously nodding along. (When the magazine has been putting out ‘Slava Ukraine!’ type pieces for the past four months.) This does not (from the news editor) match the intellectual honesty of Taleb. But people are slowing beginning to wake up.
Two notable people who haven’t yet woken up, however, are the sitting U.S. President, who gave an utterly irresponsible speech this week in which he said the conflict could escalate to the point of U.S. forces getting involved (when he’s still not even spoken to Putin).
And the UK’s new Foreign Secretary (our former Prime Minister, David Cameron). Speaking in Washington this week alongside Secretary Blinken, Cameron seemed completely oblivious of how bad the military picture on the ground is. (1 minute)
His remarks were a PPE (‘Philosophy, Politics and Economics’ at Oxford) masterclass: articulate, polished, reassuring – and totally effing wrong.
Why is Cameron still comparing GDP statistics, completely unaware of the actual ammunition production capabilities of NATO versus Russia?
Who is briefing our new Foreign Secretary?
I am eternally grateful I left school at 17, and did not pursue PPE at Oxford (as is a quite plausible counterfactual for my life arc).
Front-line distortion syndrome?
In January, I had a digest section from hedge fund manager Alix Pasquet on how ‘a desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world’. (Meaning: you have to actually go out and see the real world to be an accurate analyst.) I concurred.
But over the past 21 months, journalists and commentators who actually travelled to Ukraine seem to have returned almost unanimously delusional.
Here’s a prime example: Douglas Murray, who usually passionately advocates for free speech, and is indeed a Director of the Free Speech Union, was so moved by what he saw in Kyiv that he actively championed conformity in thinking on Ukraine: ‘This is no time for contrarianism on Ukraine’, Douglas wrote.
He (and not to single him out: every other commentator who visited Ukraine) propagated a delusional military picture (November 2022):
‘It’s perfectly clear to me that Ukrainians are winning the conflict; that the Russians are losing – they are being beaten back – and the question now is not whether Vladimir Putin can hold onto the four regions he tried to annex this year, but whether or not he can even go back to the status quo ante of 2014 and hold onto Crimea. The Russian forces are depleted; they’re demoralised… The Russians are sending ill-equipped, badly demoralised troops at the front, and the Ukrainians are filled with morale and desire to win.’
How did this happen?
In Owen’s article this week for The Spectator, he informs us:
‘We can euphorically lie to our people and our partners,’ Mayor Klitschko told Der Spiegel last week. ‘But you won’t be able to do this for ever.’
If you’re getting out from behind your desk to travel to a country to be lied to and propagandised, it will make your judgement worse – not better.
Douglas heroically does conduct interviews while under rocket fire, but other commentators I observed who returned from Ukraine seemed to return with such a lofty pride about their having spent 48 hours there (as if a weekend trip to Kyiv were equivalent to them actually themselves having served a term on the front line), I consider this further distorted their judgement.
What is the lesson here? Actually don’t go to the country of conflict? (The vast majority of people who have been proven correct – Professor Mearsheimer, David Sacks… – I believe never did travel to Ukraine.) Your desk thus actually is a better place from which to view the world?
I don’t know. It’s deeply confusing.
Ukraine does seem to have had an ability to make usually rational-thinking people think ‘magically’.
Entrepreneurs seeing reality
An eminent entrepreneur wrote to me last week (after my Spectator article) to say:
‘It is interesting how entrepreneurs seem to have stepped in [in applying critical thinking about Ukraine] to fulfil the role of journalists here. Maybe because we’ve learned to see the world with non-ideological eyes, because otherwise our businesses would fail :-)’
Naftali Bennett himself – the former Israeli Prime Minister who tried so earnestly to negotiate a peaceful resolution between Zelensky and Putin – is, of course, naturally an entrepreneur.
As is Jared Kushner. As is David Sacks.
Could we get a few more entrepreneurs into the State Department, please?
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Just to note: David Sacks notes RFK Jr as his favourite candidate (30 seconds):
‘He might be my favourite, to be honest. I would certainly take Kennedy over Trump. For sure.’
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One policy suggestion that could further fuel RFK Jr’s rise, from Dominic Cummings: term limits. (Clip for ~2 minutes)
‘If you just do regular focus groups with people [in the US], and you chat around and ask what sorts of things people want, one of the first things people spontaneously say is “term limits”. We’ve got all of these old people; we’ve got these senile people in both parties. It’s an embarrassment for us on the world stage; we’ve got to have term limits and drive these old people out and get new talent in. It cuts completely across party support – AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] fans support it; MAGA people support it. It’s a total home run. But the old parties can’t support it. It’s declaring war on the system. But if you’re a third party and you’re prepared to take risks and you’re openly at war with the system anyway…’
I consider RFK Jr might actually be brave enough to do this.
As Tucker Carlson noted of Bobby (2 minutes):
‘Bobby Kennedy, man, I’ve never seen anybody get right to the core issues affecting the country the way he has. I don’t agree with him on everything, but he names names. In a big way!
…He is giving a massive middle finger to the establishment. Like almost as aggressively as I’ve ever seen anybody.’
Media cover ups abound:
Dominic on the ongoing UK Covid inquiry:
‘Part of the structural problem with the media coverage is that the MPs and old media hate me more than anybody else so they are systematically screwed – in order to present the truth they’d have to say I was right, this is impossible, so they must distort.’
This is very depressing. And (though the two are extremely different in character), the same is of course true of Trump on many things. We have ‘2016 derangement syndrome’.
Clean bathrooms
I will end with this (also first shared by Dominic) on X…
Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador, saying in a speech how even the cleanliness of bathrooms is a detail not too small for him to point out:
This reminds me of the book The Score Takes Care of Itself – on three-time Super Bowl-winning coach Bill Walsh taking over the (then bottom-ranking) San Francisco 49ers. Walsh began by writing the club’s secretary a three-page memo on how to answer the phone perfectly. His first training session with players began ‘Gentlemen, this is a football [holding one aloft]’. He conducted sessions on how to tie one’s shoes perfectly.
The team went from bottom to Super Bowl winners in a few seasons. If you get every detail right… the score takes care of itself.
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