Radio War Nerd EP #415 — The War-se, The Warse-er: 2023 Review, Part 1
Recorded: December 20, 2023
Dr. Dolan & Ames review the worst year yet in our 8+ years of warnerd-podcasting. In part one, we discuss Israel's war on Gaza & larger ominous trends that point to an even war-se 2024.
Total time: 1:05:54
Direct link to this episode's mp3 here
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Comments (25)
Great episode guys. Just one minor correction to a correction: it *is* pronounced "guy-ana", and not "gee-ana". "Gee-ana" might be the Venezuelan/Spanish pronunciation, but the way it is pronounced in Guyana, by the people who live there, is "guy-ana" and has been for a very long time. If you pull up recent video clips where, say, President Ali or Vice President Jagdeo pronounce the name of their country that's how they do it. With an Anglophone Caribbean lilt of course.
Great pod and thanks for all the work this year. Also, with all due respect - Shamima Begum was groomed and radicalised from a very young age, not sure it’s fair to call her an idiot.
Appreciating you guys and all the great episodes this last year. How about what’s happening in post-Francophone Africa, specifically with Ibrahim Taoré? Also, for s+g, may I recommend the yt shorts that show Putin doing all sorts of things to the tune of disco Rasputin? Interesting yt shorts on Taoré as well. Health and happiness in 2024!
Great ep. Btw portugal stopped offering sephardic jews citizenship, i luckily got in in time lol
That was as depressing as fuck. Thanks a lot.
Re: Nord Stream Beside Hersh, legendary Ola Tunander wrote a series of articles with a detailed academic style analysis of it. Well worth reading. https://olatunander.substack.com/p/the-poseidon-attack-on-nord-stream https://olatunander.substack.com/p/the-poseidon-attack-on-nord-stream-ef2 https://olatunander.substack.com/p/the-attack-on-nord-stream-a-short https://olatunander.substack.com/p/the-amount-of-explosive-needed-for His series on the submarine war against Sweden is also superb.
Michael S Judge of the Death is Just Around The Corner podcast is fond of quoting Bill Hicks: “I always thought a war was between TWO armies…”
Re: the "War on Hamas" - I think the most accurate description is "the war on the Palestinians". e.g. Israel's actions are not limited to Hamas, they are not limited to Gaza, they are not even limited to the occupied territories. There has been talk about Israel expanding the war into Jordan, Lebanon. There are targeted campaigns against Palestinians or anyone critical of racist supremacists ideologies around the globe. With respect to Ukraine, I think the Biden's actions were defensible. The idea of Ukraine retaking Crimea should never have been the objective of the United States, but stabilizing the situation and trying to achieve a frozen conflict is likely better than the alternative of Russia successfully reducing Ukraine into a rump state without access to the Black Sea. Biden's decision to divert artillery and missiles to Israel for a war largely against a civilian population, instead of providing for Ukraine's defense, makes it much more likely that Russia achieves its original objective in the next year or two. Meanwhile, the risk of a regional war in the Middle East looks much more likely given the Biden administration's complete blundering of the situation. The other thing that has really struck me is the degree to which we may soon discover that there is a massive cost to having an inefficient, profit-driven military industrial complex. e.g. part of the reason that the so-called Axis of Resistance has been able to punch way above its weight is it is able to produce weapons in a very efficient and self-sufficient way. Meanwhile, we approach weapons production the same way that we do health care -- profit maximization first, second and third, with performance and return on investment as distant considerations. Given the amount of money that we have already spent arming Ukraine, there never should have been a production shortage of things like artillery shells. There is a production shortage because we have an inefficient, bloated, and profit-maximizing weapons procurement system.
Re: Michael Pollack’s comment and why Israel lets the settlers steadily torment Palestinians even though it’s broadly counterproductive for Israel… I suspect it’s like asking, why did the Jim Crow South let white people steadily torment Black people? Because that’s what the white southerners (/ Israeli settlers) signed up for. That’s a perk for them.
Exactly. We're always looking got practical or logical reasonings for these things. Think of the meatheads you grew up with (or anyone really lol). What makes people like that happy? Usually pissing off and humiliating people they hate/are below them
it may be a bit of a stretch… but 2023 echoes 1979. I genuinely feel that a lot of this past year is going to change the flow of global politics and war in ways that will be studied for decades to come.
It kinda sounds ridiculous, but I can only explain it as “It seems like more history is happening lately”
Found out about a real war nerd character recently from a friend who is one of his descendants, John Clay Mckowen (Mackowen), Ulster Scottish family moves to Southern Louisiana during Irish famine because of like Presbyterian immigration to slaveholding land in America (so from one colonial project to another) then gets caught up in the Civil War, apparently takes some Union general’s sword that’s passed down in the family (my friend is trying to track down this sword) then John clay becomes a doctor and disappears to Naples for a decade and writes a book on Capri that is still published today.
Netanyahu's definitely creating problems for diaspora jews, but if I remember right, he wants as many Jews to migrate to israel as possible anyways, so bad things in France means good things in israeli immigrations and customs. Hell, maybe Biden was pitching that when he claimed theres no safe place on earth for jews without israel; the sooner the diaspora flees to tel Aviv, the happier bibi will be. (And if Eli Valley's diaspora comic is any indicator, israelis think diaspora jews are subhuman knuckledraggers anyways, so why would they care, right?) It's so cool that this is the stupid fucking world we got in exchange for defeating communism.
Israel has always been conveniently inconsistent when it comes to who they want to move there. Just ask the Ethiopian Jews who were sterilized on arrival in Israel by being given contraceptive injections without their knowledge/consent.
Feel real bad after this episode. Real real bad. The global fascism index is off the charts, all the good guys lost or are dead or never existed, the remaining just regular guys are losing badly. Classic war nerd.
I didn't listen to it yet, but I'm pretty hopeful myself. One year before October 2023, the EU's foreign policy chief described Europe as "the garden", and most of the rest of the world as "the jungle", and worried that the jungle could intrude upon the garden. A year later, it did. The most surveilled place on Earth managed a jailbreak and humiliated their captors. Months later, they continue to humiliate the vaunted "pound-for-pound best army in the world". The "garden" cannot hold back the "jungle." Militarized borders will not stand. The first world can no longer dominate the third world as it did, and when the moment of truth arrives, it will fail. Overt fascism is rising as the covert fascism of the "rules-based international order" is falling, but the fascists of the 21st century do not have the industrial base for total war. They don't even know how to build such an industrial base - they still think that their fake app and real estate based economy can magically convert dollars into war materiel. They're cooked! God is with us!
The Biden admin feels like it’s staffed with a bunch of lab rats whose only experience is a theoretical knowledge of how to get food pellets by pulling certain levers… except when they go to pull those levers, no food comes out
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Is that swamp pop
Turkish lobby owns mayor Adams
gulenists are my waiters at the table of success
I am surprised the Boston dynamics dogs haven’t been armed and sent into the tunnels
Yay a great show to make the flight Houston more fun. I'm still hurt the good Dr. called Houston the worst place ever (paraphrasing).
I want to apologize to Dr. W Nerd for all the times I’ve slighted him, referring to him as simply “Mr. Nerd”