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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.
I agree with Sachs general sentiment that the US government has deceived the people far too much with disastrous consequences.
I'm not sure I buy Sach's argument that if we "told the truth" about Ukraine or Israel there would be no war. Maybe less US intervention or involvement. Based on my limited knowledge and understanding maybe Putin wouldn't have invaded Ukraine to try to create proxy barrier, but Israel I doubt there could ever be a peaceful 2 state solution. Pretty sure Israel has tried multiple times throughout it's history to do exactly that and each time it was rejected by the Palestinians.
There is a question to be considered about if a government should actually tell the citizens 100% of the truth. It's easy to say we should always be truthful as a matter of principle, but there is a good reason lying exists. Most people lie, or at least only tell the partial truth, to people close to them all the time, and sometimes that lying is done with good intentions. But you know what they say about good intentions.
Government deception of recent times have done a tremendous net negative to the population, but is that because they didn't tell the truth or because they didn't tell the truth about the wrong things? Could there exist information where lying about it or not releasing it would be to the benefit of the people of the country? One example could be that a nation is engaging in conflict with another nation and lies to its own citizens to prevent crucial information from being passed on to its adversaries. Is lying to the population acceptable in times of war or conflict? And the follow-up question, is a nation as powerful as the US ever not in conflict with a nation like China which holds radically different political and cultural views? Should the US allow China to grow even stronger and bigger, or should it engage in economic and political battles to check its growth?
Edit: Edited to replace "lying" with "deception" when appropriate.
When has the US government lied about foreign policy in the last decade or so? The last major incident I can think of was the runup to the Iraq war, but that was an exception that proves the rule.
Are you just using "lying" here as a stand-in for "position I disagree with" or "unrealistically rosy assessment"?
Just offhand, government officials bragged publicly about lying to Trump in order to get away with disobeying his lawful orders regarding troop deployments. Does that count?
how much work is "within the last decade" doing here? We're currently discussing how government agents routinely break the law with impunity, illegally concealing their actions and deliberations from federal record-keeping, and have been for decades. To the extent that these deliberate attempts to keep the public in the dark fail, they usually take years to fail, and more years for the failures to become general knowledge. It's entirely possible that so long as you maintain a "within the last decade" standard, you can ignore an entirely arbitrary amount of malfeasance indefinitely. In fact, that conversation is itself about an example of the government lying to the public about an extremely important matter, in order to cover up their own involvement!
How do you disambiguate "unrealistically rosy assessment" from "lie"? Take Afghanistan, which started about two and a half decades ago. Were the twenty years of official pronouncements about that conflict "a lie", or were they "unrealistically rosy assessments"? Take the pullout specifically, which was less than a decade ago; no one has actually explained how such a clusterfuck occurred, or who was actually responsible for it. We have every reason to believe that particular disaster was the fault of specific actions taken by specific people, and those actions and people should be readily identifiable through the reams of paperwork the commands in question generate. And yet, nothing. It's just a thing that sorta happened, no idea why, no idea who, pay no attention, move along. Is the claim that the pullout wasn't really anyone's fault a lie? If not, why not?
Is Fauci and his underlings covering up the evidence of a lab leak a lie? If not, why not? Is the claim that six feet of separation or mask mandates or the safety and efficacy of vaccines being a matter of settled science a lie? If not, why not?
And this isn't even getting into lies laundered through private entities with the tacit support of the government, which in my view are still government lies. Does none of this register to you?
Trump's underlings lying to him to avoid implementing orders they didn't like is a clear example of insubordination, but the comment I quoted was specifically about the US government lying to the American people.
We can go to two decades if you like, but I don't think it changes much. It became clear within a few years that Bush's claims of Iraqi WMDs were BS. Nothing since really comes close to that.
I'm not sure what parts of the Afghan pullout would be classified as lies. It was handled about as well is it could have been, with 2 exceptions: 1) the Pentagon predicted it would take months for the Afghan government to fall instead of days, and 2) that one suicide bombing that occurred. #1 was pretty clearly not a lie since it's quite hard to gauge peoples' willingness to fight. The Pentagon overestimated it Afghanistan, and then underestimated it in Ukraine a few months later. Putin also misjudged it in that case. It's a tough thing to get right. Importantly, nothing about the big picture in Afghanistan was ever really hidden from the public. Some officials or generals would come out from time to time and make statements claiming "it's getting better, trust us", but anyone could look at the evidence and see it clearly wasn't. The NYT and other news organizations had a slow but steady drumbeat explaining how bad things were.
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