Blog

Biden’s Middle East Legacy: Reality or Illusion? New Episode of the Kyle Anzalone Show

In this episode of the Kyle Anone Show, we unpack the narratives being crafted by officials in the waning days of the Biden administration. Jade Sullivan’s recent interview with Ian Bremmer reveals surprising developments in the Middle East that have shaped our understanding over the past year.

We explore how Israel has reestablished dominance and examine critical shifts involving Iran and Syria. However, amidst these discussions, it’s crucial to address what’s often overlooked: the devastating impact on Palestinian lives due to U.S.-backed actions. Join us as we unpack these complex issues and their implications for global politics.

Competition Is Cooperation

“The pricing process is a social process. It is consummated by an interaction of all members of the society. All collaborate and cooperate, each in the particular role he has chosen for himself in the framework of the division of labor. Competing in cooperation and cooperating in competition all people are instrumental in bringing about the result, viz., the price structure of the market, the allocation of the factors of production to the various lines of want-satisfaction, and the determination of the share of each individual. These three events are not three different matters. They are only different aspects of one indivisible phenomenon which our analytical scrutiny separates into three parts. In the market process they are accomplished uno actu. Only people prepossessed by socialist leanings who cannot free themselves from longing glances at socialist methods speak of three different processes in dealing with the market phenomena: the determination of prices, the direction of productive efforts, and distribution.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Anti-War Blog – “The world is so beautiful. Let me leave calmly…”

Anti-War Blog – “The world is so beautiful. Let me leave calmly…”

That’s it, mum, goodbye,” he is dying, dead, a Ukrainian soldier in his last moments caught on helmet camera makes his peace. The eight minutes leading up to his death have been shared on social media, a close combat struggle between him and his Russian counterpart. With his left eye stabbed, his own blade turned onto him and pushed into his neck, the Ukrainian soldier talks calmly to his foe who stops the attack.

They share a moment, a break in the absurdity of war.

The world is so beautiful. Let me leave calmly. Go away, please.”

The Russian soldier bids his enemy farewell and adds, “You fought great.” Then in an act of mercy he ends the Ukrainian soldier with a hand grenade.

A mother lost her son.

Another clip of the Russian soldier sharing his perspective has also emerged, he calmly breaks down the melee with pain behind his eyes. There is regret, but a professional distance lingers. A reminder that human men will kill strangers not out of hatred or any personal self interest, only because they have been ordered to do so.

They fight for survive inside a world created by government and tribalism. A world that strips away the individual and replaces them with collectives. These are neither young individual men, but representatives of their government, their nation. The fight to survive in war that profits local masters and distant foreigners who could not care less about their sacrifice or the terror experienced and inflicted. In fact most on this planet are indifferent to a young man’s death. It’s war, is the mantra of disdain the commoner shrugs along with the political masters.

It is war.

I Miss you. I miss you. I miss you…” The soldier repeats as he bleeds out, to his mother. Perhaps to a lover or the world itself.

The inhumanity of the clip has come not from the two men engaged in death but the distant digital fingers of voyeurs who remain comfortable with their opinions and perspectives. The children brains who compare what they see to a video game, those who seem confused by the Asiatic appearance of the Russian soldier, a Yakut and then those who break down from the limited visuals what the dead soldier should have done. Life and death on the screen is entertainment to them.

The moment of intimate violence, a microcosm of war itself, shared to the world to go viral in a niche part of the internet for a limited time, the price for such fame, a man’s life. His family will see the clip no doubt, witness his courage, hear words spoken from a clear mind, note his dignity and the respect shown from his enemy. Though none of that is comfort or a replacement for a human being lost to the mechanised madness of policy.

It’s not a movie or a video game.

It’s war.

The pornography of violence in the clip is less present than the futility of war itself. As the Russian proverb goes, If you live next to a cemetery, you can not mourn every body.

The Russian-Ukraine war is a graveyard that has filled the cemeteries of both nations with soldiers and civilians bodies. We should mourn for them all. They died in a war that outsiders mostly view as a bloody piece of the grand chessboard of the great game of world affairs, the sacrifice of a proxy in order to contain a threat. These are not flags on a map, but real people.

Let me breathe, it hurts a lot. “

“You fought great.”

Let me leave in peace. Don’t touch me, I’m done. Let me die. “

That’s it, Mum, Goodbye.”

Crucial Economic Calculation

“The advocates of totalitarianism consider ‘capitalism’ a ghastly evil, an awful illness that came upon mankind. In the eyes of Marx it was an inevitable stage of mankind’s evolution, but for all that the worst of evils; fortunately salvation is imminent and will free man forever from this disaster. In the opinion of other people it would have been possible to avoid capitalism if only men had been more moral or more skillful in the choice of economic policies. All such lucubrations have one feature in common. They look upon capitalism as if it were an accidental phenomenon which could be eliminated without altering conditions that are essential in civilized man’s acting and thinking. As they neglect to bother about the problem of economic calculation, they are not aware of the consequences which the abolition of the monetary calculus is bound to bring about. They do not realize that socialist men for whom arithmetic will be of no use in planning action, will differ entirely in their mentality and in their mode of thinking from our contemporaries. In dealing with socialism, we must not overlook this mental transformation, even if we were ready to pass over in silence the disastrous consequences which would result for man’s material well-being.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

If You Read One Book This Year

sowellkd

Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas Sowell

This new year, please take the time to read this book, one of the most important books for my thinking in my lifetime.

It speaks to my observation on war being a collision of complex adaptive systems informed by “institutional mechanics”, the systems they have in place before collision.

And humans are built on incentives.

Here’s a great review.

Besides resting on a backbone of the Hayekian understanding of the use and role of knowledge in economies and societies more generally and Alchian’s evolutionary framing of economic issues and phenomena; the biggest comparative advantage of this book compared to other great books by other great economists is Sowell’s insistence throughout the text to refer to political systems, social phenomena, and economic issues exclusively by characteristics as dynamic processes, or has he often puts it, their institutional mechanics rather than their hoped for goals.

And for the record, Hayek reviewed this book in 1983 (3 years after it was published) for Reason magazine and called it the best book on general economics published in many years and really sung its praises to a surprising degree for Hayek.

I gave this book a five out of five Marlen-Starrs because five is the maximum amount I was allowed to rate it, if I could have given it six out of five stars, I would have! This is tied for my favorite book of all time with Antifragile by Nassim Taleb.

medium.com/@spenceranto…

Knowledge and Decisions

Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me

 

Which Came First: The Individual or the Group?

“It is illusory to believe that it is possible to visualize collective wholes. They are never visible; their cognition is always the outcome of the understanding of the meaning which acting men attribute to their acts. We can see a crowd, i.e., a multitude of people. Whether this crowd is a mere gathering or a mass (in the sense in which this term is used in contemporary psychology) or an organized body or any other kind of social entity is a question which can only be answered by understanding the meaning which they themselves attach to their presence. And this meaning is always the meaning of individuals. Not our senses, but understanding, a mental process, makes us recognize social entities.

“Those who want to start the study of human action from the collective units encounter an insurmountable obstacle in the fact that an individual at the same time can belong and—with the exception of the most primitive tribesmen—really belongs to various collective entities. The problems raised by the multiplicity of coexisting social units and their mutual antagonisms can be solved only by methodological individualism.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Podcasts

scotthortonshow logosq

coi banner sq2@0.5x

liberty weekly thumbnail

Don't Tread on Anyone Logo

313x0w (1)

313x0w (1)

313x0w (1)

Pin It on Pinterest