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Another week, another Tucker interview, another transcription of a juicy part by yours truly. I promise, this is unusual, I haven't listened to two in a row, at all, ever.
This week is Jeffrey Sachs. The part below is just after 1:44.
That was the first mention of Israel, that I could recall, but the whole conversation is about Ukraine, Russia, Putin, and NATO. It's not exactly new to me, but it's refreshing to hear someone so clearly say that this is a war of choice, and the choice is being made by the USA, and their puppet states involved in NATO.
And that was all before any discussion of COVID. tl;dl, it's obviously from a lab, we (USA) pretty clearly funded it, and Fauci has been running the germ warfare branch of the DoD for decades. Which lab, and how is unknown, but, in his own words:
Great interview, and I'm glad that Tucker has twitter dot com to host his stuff, rather than be consigned to the fringes of the internet.
Simple answers should ring alarm bells. Opinions framed as The Truth(tm) should have them blaring. Sachs' Ukraine comments seems to live in same epistemic universe as John Mearsheimer - expressed in his 2015 talk here, which subsequently went incredibly viral during the full invasion. So it's definitely an opinion and not The Truth. It's hard to understate the popular appeal of Mearsheimer's message (its arguably the most rapidly and widely circulated wonky political lecture in human history). Mearsheimer could be correct. I think his arguments about NATO expansion are best rebutted by the archives here, this article here, with a quick overview here
For a great steelman of Mearsheimer POV I highly recommend the rapid and very accessible 2018 book by contemporary Stephen M Walt: "The Hell of Good Intentions". I found it largely persuasive on many accounts. (FWIW, with regard specifically to "not one inch east" I think it's 60% myth, 80% rhetoric, and 100% irrelevant because no binding paperwork was ever signed, let alone with an extant entity. NATO expansion in general is more contentions IMO).
I also think those the Palestinians are animated by more than mere terrestrial concerns. Sachs stating that all Israel needs to do is assure peace and statehood is outrageous. Asserting such a wild opinion is True only redounds to my incredulity. AFAIK the intractability of the Israel / Palestine conflict is well earned.
If Israel abandoned the settlements in the west bank and ceded a strip between there and gaza to make a contiguous polity, it would not stop 100% of the Palestinians who are pissed off that Israel exists at all, but it would surely take the wind out of their sails enough to make Jihad unfashionable
Israel ceded all settlements in Gaza and exhumed Jews buried there before fully pulling out in 2005. The Gazans elected Hamas and nineteen years later, here we are.
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