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Podcasts, videos, books and articles of the week 121

Musk financing the AdF edition

Dustin Du Cane

21 Dec 2024 — 5 min read

After building a Nazi forum, Musk will now fund European Nazi parties (Reform and AdF) in between blowing up the American budget, competitive Diablo play, running a car company, building rockets and being the world’s best Dad to 34 children.

The news about the Xmas attacks just broke and I can’t comment except to say, stinks of Reichstag fire. I’m totally wrong on this and pulling this out of my arse like a Moscow taxi driver about terrorism, a MAGA genocidal fascist about Russian logistics, a Pacific War historian on the Eastern Front, or a Vienna think-tank expert on Russia.

This is going to be weaponized.

But more importantly all we’re sending our sympathy to the victims and families of victims.

Musk and Kuntian philosophy

With a strange combination of satisfaction and dismay, I consistently find my chosen era of research to be relevant to the present day. When I decided to take a close look at Ross Perot for my book, the parallel was obviously Trump: a “pragmatic” billionaire who presented himself as the radical solution to the country’s ills. I had some inkling he reflected something else in our era: the growing domination of tech oligarchs. But little did I know…

Ethnic violence

In December 2013 I was interested in the fact that Bashar Al-Assad was still in power in Syria, more than a year after many people had predicted his inevitable downfall, so I did a bit of research and wrote an article about the resilience of the Alawis - the religious minority that the Assad family belongs to - and the possible reasons for it. (You can find it here.) Since I was living at the time in the Caribbean region, the context for the article was partly those in the Americas that describe themselves as ‘Syrians’. In Trinidad there is a fairly significant Syrian community (many of whom might more accurately be called Lebanese) which includes many of the richest families in the Caribbean region. There are similar communities across much of Latin America including around four million Syrian-Brazilians. Most of these people come from Levantine Christian communities whose ancestors travelled to the Americas as a result of religious persecution in the Ottoman Empire. The available evidence indicates that the total of Ottoman emigrants to the Americas in the period from 1860 to 1914 probably came to 1,200,000, of which nearly ninety per cent were Christians.

American medical genocide on the poors and sick for fun and profit

Whatever health insurance plan Luigi Mangione was on before, however high his deductible or copayment might have been, whatever grievance he may have had with United Health Care, he is now going to enjoy full medical coverage, subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, for the rest of his life. That’s how broken, and how stupid, our healthcare system is.

More American crazy

On this edition of Parallax Views, a separate portion of the recent conversation between J.G. and Reason Magazine's Matthew Petti is presented. In the course of their most recent conversation, J.G. and Petti ended up talking about the recent flap of mysterious drone sightings that have occurred in New Jersey and seemingly spread to other states like Pennsylvania. These drone sighting and the sensationalistic response to them are akin to the UFO sightings of old, conjuring up a slew of conspiracy theories and, arguably, mass panic.

More Israeli crazy

On this edition of Parallax Views, journalist Patrick Hilsman, an editor at Turning Point Magazine, joins the show to discuss recent reports of leaked documents discovered after the overthrow of Assad in Syria that seem to reveal collaboration between the Assad regime and Israel.

People never learn that the enemy of your enemy is the enemy of your enemy and that’s it.

Wargames, wargames never change

After some preliminary reading, there’s definitely a few titles that pique my interest. The most notable one to me is The Red Burnoose: Algeria 1857, which takes a more civilian perspective to Algerian resistance a century before Insurgent is set. In some of my earliest design notes, I seriously considered making Insurgent a solo- and/or cooperative-only game where player(s) took on various roles within the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria.

Moron Musk