Angry Planet - How Ukraine Routed the Russian Military

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

What seemed unthinkable a year ago has come to pass. Ukraine has started its counter offensive and in a shockingly short amount of time has pushed Russia out of much of its territory. The Russian military appears to be collapsing with a rapidity that is shocking pretty much everyone.Well, maybe not everyone. People who’ve been paying attention to the minutiae of the war aren’t as surprised as the rest of us. That’s kind of been a pattern in coverage and punditry of Russia’s invasion.One of those smart guys is here to talk with us today on Angry Planet. It’s returning guest Aram Shabanian. He’s the Open-Source Information Gathering Manager at New Lines Institute, one of the minds behind The Fulda Gap, and one of the best Twitter follows you can snag @ShabanianAram.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world and their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. What seemed unthinkable a year ago has come to pass. Ukraine has started its counteroffensive and in a shockingly short amount of time has pushed Russia out of much of its territory. The Russian military appears to be collapsing with a rapidity that is shocking to pretty much everyone. Well, maybe not everyone. People who've been paying attention to the minutia of the war aren't as surprised as the rest of us,

and that's kind of been a pattern in the coverage and punditry of Russia's invasion. One of those smart guys is here to talk with us today on Angry Planet. It's returning guest, Aram Shabhanian. he's the open source information gathering manager at New Lines Institute, one of the minds behind the fold of gap, and one of the best Twitter followers you can snag at Shabanian, Aram. Sir, thank you so much for coming on. I said your name wrong the second time, didn't I?

I just realized it. But you got it right the first time, so that counts for full credit in my class. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm so sorry. No, no, pleasure to be here again, man. It's always good to be on. Okay, so let's, this has kind of been, I think, the big, dramatic

defense news, war news of the week. This counteroffensive launched at the end of August. I think the 29th was the official start date. Can you kind of give us a timeline of events since then? Yeah. So like you said, the 29th of August was the start of the counteroffensive. But it was really a few days before we saw action start to take place around Kharkiv. So originally, or Harkev, rather.

Originally, the offensive was in the south near Hirsson, and the Ukrainians brought a lot of media attention down there with them. They brought all the cameras. They brought all the media personalities. They told everybody, hey, look, we're launching our counteroffensive near Herson, right? And that's where everybody expected them to counterattack. That was the logical place to counterattack. And so we're watching down there, and I'm thinking to myself, something about this feels off,

because if I'm the Ukrainians and I'm fighting, you know, I'm fighting a much stronger opponent, the updog, if you will, and I'm the underdog, and I'm trying to stay on my toes. What's up, dog? Exactly. Thank you. I finally got one. I finally got, you know, I've been trying that one for a while. And, you know, I appreciate you give me that one. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Anyway, so the Ukrainians have got to keep their opponents on their toes, right? They've got to keep shifting the weight around. They don't want to be, they don't want to be where the Russians expect them to be because the Russians, despite what a lot of people think about their military at this point, are not a defeated force. And they still have a lot of firepower behind their artillery and their rockets and their tanks. So you don't want to be on the receipts. end of that firepower. So what do you do? You distract him in the south and then you punch him in the north near Harkev where nobody's expecting you to come in. And that's really what they've

done in the last couple of days. They've retaken land all the way up to the border with Russia and Ukraine all through Harcube Oblast and are starting to push into Donatskin-Luhanska Oblasts as well. And so it looks like a general collapse along the northern Russian front lines. And it's something to behold, to say the least. So can we talk a little bit more about what's been recovered? stuff that Russia has taken since starting the invasion earlier this year, or has Ukraine punched into stuff

that they lost in 2014 yet? They've punched in a few places to stuff that they lost in 2014, but as far as I know, they haven't secured any of those territories, anything that's substantial. The majority of what they've retaken was territory that was taken after 24th of February this year. And so, namely, it was

the city of Isiam was the large one. And that's where they've discovered a lot of the war crimes and crimes against humanity that have taken place. But for the most part, it was territory that's been taken since the 24th, especially in Oblasts. There weren't any Russian holdings prior to the outbreak of war. So they only had territory and Luhanska-Donetska Oblasts at the beginning of the war. I have a question about whether this is actually sustainable. And I don't mean more gains, but I mean, can they hold what they've just taken? They've done it so fast. And I would imagine they're spread a little thin, yeah?

They definitely are. But one thing to keep in mind here is that the Ukrainians, are retaking their own territory. And so it's not like they're conquering Russian territory where you have to put a conscript on every soldier, or a soldier on every corner to keep the populace down. These are people who want to be liberated by the Ukrainian military for the most part. And so it's a lot easier to hold that territory

with territorial defense militias and things of that nature than it would be in, say, any other conflict that we've seen in the last 30 years, really. Right, you're not meeting resistance from the public. You're not going to be facing a counterinsurgency, later. Right. Exactly. It's quite the opposite. And do you think that that would hold true also in places like Dinesk and Luhansk, where, you know, Russia has been in the country since 2014? Yeah, that remains to be seen. I mean, there are certainly people in those areas that have

wanted to be liberated for some time that have sought to be reunited with Ukraine. But then there's also a lot of people in those areas that are genuinely pro-Russian for one reason or another. I don't think a lot of it's, I think if they knew the bad game. that they were being sold. A lot of these people would not necessarily be as pro-Russian as they are, but they don't understand because of the propaganda environment and whatnot. And I apologize if you hear cats fighting. They're definitely fighting under me right now. So, yeah, I mean, it remains to be seen what the people in the annexed territories will do when the Ukrainians roll into town. And it remains to be seen what Russia will do, because the Russians have stated

already that they won't use nuclear weapons unless Russian territory is threatened. But do they count Crimea, Donetska, Luhansk, because Russian territories? or not. That's the question we all have to ask soon. Brief aside, tell the audience the names of your cats. So the kitten is named Nancy and Nancy Pelosi or Nancy Reagan, depending on the day. And then the other cat is Uday. His full name is Uday Saddam Hussein Al-Tecreides. It leaves no doubts in the mind. And I can't really tell you why they have those names.

They just seemed like good cat names at the time. And they both know their names now. So it can't do anything about it. Uday and Nancy. Got it. Okay. So is the you just said you just threw Crimea in there. Do you think is, has Ukraine made, has Ukraine said that it wants to retake Ukraine or Crimea, do you think that it will? They've said they want to.

They have made meaningful and genuine concrete actions toward that goal. And I think they will. They are not only attacking the bridges that lead to Crimea or that lead to the areas around Crimea. They're attacking bridges in a way. that military convoys can't cross them, but civilians can still retreat across them. They're dropping flyers and posting graphics online about, like, these are the roads we won't blow up on the way out of Crimea,

leave while you can. They're giving people egress routes. They're making a very realistic attempt, I think, to set the game to retake Crimea. And I think that they, if short of something catastrophic taking place, I think they will retake Crimea at the very least. I have a question about Russian power and why it seems like the air war isn't really happening. And I always thought that, or I mean, I'd even read, I mean, Russia has hundreds, thousands of planes, right?

And they can bomb the crap out of anything anywhere. They've got these wonderful planes. Well, they're obviously awful called the bear, right, with a reverse propeller. I mean, anyway, that's the bomber. Why is Russia letting Ukraine get away with this? Why are they not bringing in the planes? Well, it depends on the aircraft. So the bear, they have been using some strategic bombers, but they don't fly them over Ukraine.

They keep them far away from Ukraine, and they'll drop cruise missiles at long range and then turn around, right? Close air support and aircraft that fly directly over the battlefield are having a really rough time in Ukraine, Russian aircraft, just because the Ukrainian surface-the-air missile threat was never eliminated. The Ukrainian radar system is still somewhat intact. Their surface air missiles are intact, and they've gotten a lot of man pads and surface air missile systems from NATO and the Western Allies. In this last defensive in particular, the Flak Panzer Gepard that the Germans gave Ukraine have apparently come in handy, repeated, safeguarding the advances. And you can imagine why they might. You know, if you're not familiar with the platform, it's basically a tank that somebody's taken the turret off of and put an anti-aircraft turret on top of. So it can advance with your armored vehicles. You don't have to wait for it to deploy. ploy and set things up, and it can keep you safe from drones and helicopters and close air support aircraft and things of that nature. And so what they've really done, the Ukrainians,

is they've layered their air defenses in quite an effective way that's made it quite difficult for the Russians to strike accurately. Then you factor in the idea that the Russians didn't have that many precise weapons to begin with. You know, most countries don't stockpile precision weapons the way the U.S. does, and this isn't just to knock Russia on that front. I mean, the NATO allies started running low on stocks during the intervention in Libya, you know. And so most countries don't stockpile weapons the way that we do. And so the Russians are seeing the natural end result of that is that if you don't spend as much military as the U.S. does, you're not going to have as much military to use. It's pretty basic, right? It tracks pretty easily.

Yeah. How did, on the ground, how has this become such a route? It just seems really incredible to me. Like, I would expect the counteroffensive to kind of drag out and be a slog and there be kind of entrenched positions, but it just seems like the Russians are just fleeing and leaving behind equipment. I think a lot of it has to be that, well, in part it was the areas that were struck originally near Harkiv were held by Lujans People's Republic Separatists largely. And so these were not the real Russian army, right? These guys were conscripts a lot of the time. And so against like, the cream of the crop of the Ukrainian army, they don't stand a chance. But beyond that, you have to factor in morale. And the Russians are feeling pretty low at this point. I mean, even with all of their efforts going into the areas around Sivir Danezsk, they were only able to advance small amounts every couple of weeks. And what we were really seeing then was the culmination of Russian forces in Ukraine. And I think that every Russian soldier on the ground knows that, that despite all the

propaganda back home and all the rhetoric online and on the radio waves and television, that the Russian army is largely rotten at its core. And this rot comes from lack of funding, but it's also an institutional rot. It's the result of 30 years of cronyism and corruption. And so, yeah, the military is really powerful. Like I said, if you're where they, if you're where they expect you to be, then you're going to get crushed, sure. But if you can rapidly orient yourself around the battlefield and keep the initiative on your side, which is something every take. table top gamer will know, you've got to keep the initiative on your side, right? And if you don't keep the initiative on your side, you're going to start getting sluggish. And that's what's

happened with the Russians, is that they don't have the ability to rapidly change direction and face different fronts and move forces around. Because of this institutional rot, because of corruption, but also the Russians, the Ukrainians have been very effective at using long-range rocket artillery to strike Russian arms depots and to strike Russian transport. And so between that and the ongoing low, low intensity, but notable partisan warfare in Russia and Belarus that has disabled a lot of train tracks and bridges. It's very difficult to move forces back and forth from Kharkiv to Hurson. And so I think that's what we're seeing is that just the Russians weren't, they weren't ever designed to fight a war like this because they didn't think they were going to.

Speaking of morale, I don't know if you saw an article that was in the Washington Post yesterday about these letters that were found once the Russians had pulled back. I think it's an isium. But basically, they're writing not home, but to their officers saying, I really want to go home. I'm really tired. And I'm tired morally as well as physically. And, you know, I asked for leave, but I'm not getting it.

And apparently another letter said, well, I was supposed to go home to get married. And you're not letting me. I mean, it just seems like, yeah, you were talking about morale. It sounds like, wow, it's really bad. Yeah, I mean, I think even the most gung-ho Russian soldiers who were pro-war thought the war would be over by now. Nobody's really gung-ho about like, let's get into a quagmire. That'll be awesome. I can't wait to sit in a trench for months and miss my own wedding.

Like, that's not what anybody's in it for, right? And so, like, even the most hardcore Russian soldier, I think at this point is thinking, what the hell have we gotten into? And without God winning too much, it kind of strikes like von Stoffenberg and the assassination attempt on Hitler, right? Where it's all these German officers who are trying to kill Hitler, not because they're against his policies necessarily, not because they don't think that the rhetoric Hitler has put out for years as decent, but because they don't like that they're losing the war. And that's what a lot of, I think some of the more gung-ho guys are just kind of bummed that they're losing the war. And so you combine that with people who just genuinely don't want to be there and nobody wants to fight. Do we have any idea what the Russian casualties are like?

They're very high. We don't have any casualty numbers at this point that I would call reliable. But are you talking since the counteroffensive began or just overall? Both. I mean, one we kind of know, the other we basically don't know at all, right? Right. The overall is supposedly around 50,000, which is a lot. You know, fans at home will note that's a lot.

about what we lost in the Vietnam War. And so that's a lot of soldiers. Since the counteroffensive began, I think the numbers are probably going to go up substantially. But I think a lot of the Russian soldiers and conscripts have been fleeing. They've just been running for their lives and abandoning their equipment. I mean, we're not talking like a tank here or there. I'm talking like, you know, five tanks, 10 tanks, 15 IFEs or something,

just sitting there in decent working order, abandoned, full of ammo. That's not what an army that's anywhere close to winning does. a defeated army right there. And that's equipment that Ukraine now has and could possibly utilize. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Do you, can we talk about the reports we're going to get out of liberated areas?

Is there anything that looks as grim as I always say this wrong? Boucher. Yeah, there is. And I think it's going to get worse as days go on. The Russians have been outright recruiting some of the worst elements of their society as conscripts into the military. There have been the man who

runs the Wagner PMC, mercenary group has been recruiting from prisons lately, going to prisons and telling people, you know, if you go to Ukraine and you fight for three months or six months, I think it was, then you're free to go when you get back. But if you lose the will to fight while you're in Ukraine, we're going to execute you. And so, you know, this, this harkens to some of the worst atrocities that have been committed throughout the last hundred years where these inmate gangs will be pressed into military service and they've got nothing to lose. And so they commit atrocities. And I think that's what we're going to start seeing more of is these atrocities as the Russians get more and more desperate, you know, and again, not to Godwin too much, but the Holocaust got really executie toward the end, right? Like the beginnings of the Holocaust were more policy and law-oriented, and they were definitely atrocious, but they really started gassing people a lot toward the end of the war when it started to look like Germany was losing the war.

And so that's kind of, I think, what we're seeing here with the Russians is that as these soldiers get more and more desperate to hold the territories they've taken, they're going to start taking more and more draconian measures, and we're going to see that play out in the civilian population. So this is something that I know that you've specifically studied and we've had you on the show to talk about before. What is the state of what we'll call Russia's genocide of Ukraine? Right. The last time we'd spoken, y'all had kind of issued this report talking about what exactly was going on.

Has anything changed or is it just kind of more of the same? It's honestly more of the same. It's picked up and it's frenzy and it's a frenzy. its fury, both the atrocity crimes themselves and the physical killings, the evidence of such, and then the rhetoric on the Russian side. It's all increased and gotten crazier, which is to be expected, right? I mean, that's how these things go, is that they don't, extremism doesn't fade away. It blows up. And so I think that's what we're seeing is we're saying the last gasps of this, this imperialist extremism that's tried to exert itself on Ukraine.

All right, angry, independent listeners, we're going to pause there. a break if you're listening on the substack, there is no break. Thank you for sticking around. We are back on with Aram talking about Ukraine and maybe some other things closer to the end. All right. So I want to read some of the speech that Zelensky gave on September 12th and then ask a question about it. So this was posted on telegram where it was aimed directly at Russians. Quote, read my lips without gas or without you, without you, without light or without you, without you, without water or without you, without you, without food or without you, without you. Cold, hunger, darkness, and thirst are not as scary and deadly for us as your, quote,

friendship and brotherhood. At this point, do you think that this thing has a diplomatic end? I mean, in the sense that diplomats will sign documents at the end, yes, but I think that this ends in a number of ways, this ends when Russian forces are completely pushed out of Ukraine militarily. They don't have to be defeated on the battlefield. They can leave on their own accord. That's fine. But when they leave Ukraine completely, Ukraine won't be

satisfied until they have every square inch of their territory back. And honestly, I think this won't end until Vladimir Putin is in the ground. I don't think that he will allow this to end until he's in the ground because he's made it personal. He's made the entire Ukraine portfolio his own personal purview. And a failure there would be a failure

of Vladimir Putin at the one thing he's tried to do for the last 25, 30 years, which is to get Ukraine in line, 25 years, rather, to get Ukraine in line. And so if you fail at that, what's the point of your strongman dictatorship? What's the point of your entire government, right? People aren't afraid of you anymore. Your government falls. And so I think in order to stave that off, he's going to fight until the very bitter end. And I think that either he is going to have something natural happen to him that takes him out of the picture, or he might, I've heard there's a lot of, like, I guess they don't make windows as sturdy in Russia. people fall out of them a lot or something, especially like radio officials.

So, it's really weird how that happens. So something like that could happen to him. I would hope. No, I would never wish that upon anybody. But if it did, you know, it would definitely change the battlefield equation. Yeah. I've been reading a lot of people have been submitting op-eds like crazy saying that Putin is going to be overthrown if he can't get his act together in Ukraine. And the one thing he can't do, as I think you've just been saying, it's like he can't lose.

He cannot afford to lose. People will, you know, he'll go one way or another, as you said. Right. And we've got some pretty smart people saying it. So it's interesting. Yeah, it's, and I think Putin's greatest fear was going out the way that Gaddafi went out. You know, he saw that happen in 2011, and that's part of the reason I think that he came back into power was to stop that from happening to him and the people that he had close to him. And honestly, the truth is here, he probably could have kept things going for the next 10, 20 years if he hadn't in any.

invaded Ukraine. But yeah, he did. Do we, we psychoanalyze Putin too much on the show, but why? Why, why is this so important? Why is this the, the thorn that he can't seem to let go of to mix metaphors? Well, you have to, you have to think about what Zelensky stands for to Putin, right? Because, so in 2014, they have a revolution in Ukraine. They overthrow the pro-Russian leader and Viktor Yonakovich Viktor Yonakovich is overthrown and Petroposhenko is elected.

Petro Poroshenko, despite being maybe anti-Russian occupation of the Donbos, is an oligarch. He's old money. So he's somebody that Putin can deal with, but he's still something new. Putin isn't crazy about the idea of democracy,

but okay, it's an oligarch, it's not really democracy, right? But then Zelensky gets elected, and he's not an oligarch. He's kind of an every man. He's a comedian, right? This represents that the next guy maybe won't be a comedian. Maybe the next person will just be an average politician who genuinely has the support of the people. And if I'm a Russian citizen and I'm looking across the border at Ukraine, I'm thinking, hey, why can't we do that here? All they had to do was protest in the streets for a few months and they got rid of their old leaders and now they have a genuine democracy, which is

kind of a moving thing. It was a bit more than protesting in the streets for a few months. It was like medieval warfare in the streets for a few months and snipers. It was siege warfare, yeah. Yeah. But that's the way that it might look to somebody in Russia, right? Well, all they did was protest for a bit and they got a new government. All we have to do is X, Y, Z, and we can have a new government, right? Just follow their lead.

And, I mean, if you think about the Russian population, they're a lot like the Ukrainians. They're not going to be afraid of siege warfare, right? So the same tactics that worked in Ukraine would work in Russia, I think, is the thought that Putin had and that the people. people may have had. And so they had to invest in the failure of the Ukrainian project. They had to make sure that Ukraine failed and failed drastically. Ukraine could not be allowed to have a democratic process that went through because then the people across the border in Russia and in Belarus might start looking at Ukraine. That might start looking at a lot harder. And I mean,

we saw the protests in Belarus in 2020 and 2021 and leading into 2022. We saw protests in Kazakhstan as well. So the former Soviet space was starting to get a little bit shaky. And so I think Putin acted in a way that he thought was his only option. I would. disagree with that profoundly, but I think he saw it as his only option. Yeah. And it's interesting because we are still seeing this kind of crack up of that post-Soviet Russian sphere of influence, right? As you said in a shit post tweet just an hour ago, Gorbachev's old heart was the only thing keeping CSTO together. Can you explain that to the audience? I want to answer for your tweet. It's mostly just a joke, but basically the CSTO, the collective

Security Treaty Organization is like the reincarnation of the Warsaw Pact without most of the Warsaw Pact. It's like Like Warsaw. Basically, yeah. Yeah, no, Warsaw. But yeah, it's effectively, it's the former Soviet bloc or former Soviet states minus the Baltics, minus Ukraine, in a

security alliance. I think Azerbaijan's an observer. Or there might be a full member at this point. But the idea is that, you know, we're a block that fights together. If one of us gets attacked, we can call from military support from the others, blah, blah, blah. As Armenia has learned in the last two years, that's not really true. Kazakhstan was able to call the CSTO in earlier this year to crush an uprising and is now talking about leaving the organization, which doesn't vote well for Putin's project, right? Because if Kazakhstan leaves the CSTO, that's the biggest of the Central Asian

states, and the other Central Asian states might be looking at them as a leader of some sorts. At the same time, we have Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. There are border clashes that have been going on with the last 48 hours between the two of them, with 15 to 20,000 people being evacuated from border areas because of the shelling. Armenia and Azerbaijan are at each other's throat still, with Azerbaijan attacking into sovereign Armenian territory this time, not Nagorno-Karabakh, but actual Armenia. And so a lot of people say that the breakup of the Soviet Union was a peaceful process, and I think they just didn't look at history as a long enough timeline because it has not been a peaceful process. And what we're seeing now are the last gasps of the Soviet Union, right? We're

saying the last dying gasp in the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire, I think, is really what's happening. So we would be remiss if we didn't ask you about Armenia, which I think was the first, the first time you were on the show, we talked about this, I think. I think so. Can you talk a little bit more about what's going on now? Seeing some especially brutal and horrifying things. First thing when I woke up on social media this morning, some people had flagged some things for me. Can you tell me what exactly is going on? Yeah, so effectively, after the last war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, things had started moving toward a negotiated settlement of some kind, not to Armenia's favor, of course, but a negotiated settlement nonetheless. When Russia went into Ukraine and started to lose the war, Azerbaijan basically abandoned the negotiating table and started ratcheting up tension. About a week ago, I noticed the Azeri Ministry of Defense posted something about Armenians are infiltrating into Azerbaijan to carry out nefarious. acts or something like that. And I knew that they were going to do something after that. And they did a couple of days later. They started shelling within Armenia proper. And again, I would like to

to delineate here for people. The war, the last war was over a disputed territory called Nagorno-Karabakh, which the international community sees as part of Azerbaijan, but was occupied by Armenia. This current conflict is over Armenian territory, proper Republic of Armenia, internationally recognized by everybody except Pakistan who still doesn't recognize Armenia's existence for various reasons. Recognized by everybody, though, pretty much that this is Armenian territory. That's what's been getting attacked. And so this is kind of akin to Putin going into Ukraine. It's the same kind of blatant invasion of a neighbor. It has just not been met with the same response from the international community for a number of reasons. So to kind of clarify what I'd been alluding

to earlier, and I don't know if you've seen that as well, but it looks like Azerbaijan is doing what I'd call war crimes posting on telegram. Do you find this stuff credible? Yeah, Azerbaijan has a tendency to do that. They post both gratuitous numbers of drone videos of Armenians being blown up from the sky, but also these like torture and defilement videos that you'll see of prisoners being executed or people having parts of their bodies cut off or whatever. Those have been pretty prolific from the Azerbaijani side, and I always have to be careful with statements like that because I am an Armenian, and I don't want it to come across like I'm saying Armenians are morally more righteous than Azeris or whatever.

But for whatever reason, in this war in particular, people in Azerbaijan who are fighting in the military seem to think that this will help their side. This helps their propaganda. This helps their war effort. And I don't think it does. I mean, it definitely strikes fear into the heart of Armenians, but it's not. You can hit a dog and it'll fear you. It doesn't mean it respects you, right? It's like you're not going to get the respect of your neighbor

and you're not going to get a long-term peace settlement until you earn their respect. And if you just keep smacking them and abusing them, you're never going to get that respect. And the stuff I've seen, it's also so visceral and so grotesque that it's like international community step up, do something kind of footage.

Right, it is. And I think part of that is that Azerbaijan recognizes the international community's not going to do anything. Because Armenia's only allies in the world. are Russia and Iran. Yeah. Which is not great. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Our circles of concern aren't complicated enough, I don't think. You would think human beings being tortured would be enough, but know what team are those human beings on. Yeah. It's super important when you're posting about wars online. Right. Sporting event now, so.

Jesus. Okay. Speaking of people being assholes on the internet, let's go back to Ukraine. I feel like every step of the way with this fucking war, there has been contrarian people posting about, posting like dumb analysis that have just been completely wrong, every step of the way. And some of the voices are very loud.

Some of them have blue check marks. Some of them are quote unquote important people. Why is this, why are people so blind to what is so obvious? obvious. I know that you and I had talked before the war started. You were one of the only people that I knew that was like, yeah, this is going to happen. And here's why. Look at these placements. They're building field hospitals here. This is stuff you don't do unless you're going to invade. And people just kind of ignored all that. Why do you think even now, months later, this kind of thinking still persists? I think a lot of it is there's like a institutional momentum toward like we want to assume that Putin is still a rational. guy on the inside and you can still bring him back to a reason. That's part of it. And I think part of it is, and I hope all the listeners out there know this, I don't shock anybody with this fact, but it's actually legal in all 50 U.S. states and in every U.S. territory to shut up when you don't know something. It's actually completely legal. The police won't come after you. FBI won't keep records on you, nothing. And I think a lot of people don't get that. They don't get that you can actually not have an opinion on something you don't understand. You could actually defer. to an expert. I think a lot of people with blue check marks and people with big audiences, it's even

worse for them because people look to them and go, hey, hey, how come this thing is happening? And they instead of just saying, I don't know, buddy, look it up yourself. They have to have an answer because it makes them feel better to have an answer. And I hate to sound like a bitter old man, but I really think that's part of it, is that people just aren't good at accepting that they don't know things sometimes. And then you factor in the fact that a lot of these people that are in leadership positions are, if you think back on high school and who it was that took student leadership positions in high school, no offense, I was one of them, not the best people and not really great at shutting up when they need to, myself included. So I think that's part of the problem is that people just don't like to be wrong and they don't like to not have an opinion on something.

That's especially developing and big. I think that's a good place to end with the general message. It's okay to say I don't know and it's great to shut the fuck up. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners is always Angry Planet. is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nadel. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like us, if you really like us, kick us $9.00 over at Substack, Angry PlanetPod.com,

or Angry Planet.substack.com. Get you bonus episodes, which the next one we're going to record Monday. It's going to be about 9-11. We've never done a 9-11 show before. So we're going to do that. You also get early access to all of the episodes. So if you're listening to this now, it means you paid, and it's Friday.

If you're on the mainstream, it's coming on Monday for you. Confusing, if you're listening on Monday, I know. You wouldn't be confused if you'd given us the $9.