The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Of Dams and Damn Trolls: A Reflection by Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

I don't usually do this, but today I'm going to be talking about the #haters. We'll also dive a little deeper into the Kakhovka Dam that was destroyed by the Russians. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/of-dams-and-damn-trolls

Hey everyone, Peter Zine here, coming to you from my favorite front range foothills trail. It's called the Golden Banner. I can see in the south all the way to Castle Rock, in the north, all the way to the Red Rocks Amphitheater, which is a great place to see a show, by the way. I'm going to do something today that I don't normally do. I'm going to talk about the haters. Yesterday, I released a video, or guess it would be this morning, released a video on why the Russians bloop the Kakova Dam,

and people came out of the woodwork to say I didn't know what I was talking about. obviously was the Ukrainians. Just to give you a quick refresh, two things. Number one, the Ukrainians are starting their counteroffensive. And by blowing up the dam, what the Russians have done is they've made a direct crossing at the dam impossible, obviously. But they've also made an amphibious landing on either side of the dam on the river impossible because the reservoir above the river is now draining very, very quickly.

And independent of that being a dangerous environment, it's going to leave behind a muddy bed, which is going to be very difficult to get any vehicles across. And then south of the river, everything is flooded. And when the waters do recede, a couple weeks from now, again, very, very muddy and difficult to move. So any sort of amphibious landing is going to be impossible. In addition, most of the thrust probably is going to be south from Zepernica towards the Sea of Zov.

And in that sort of scenario, Russian forces are going to have a choice of going one or two directions. Then go east to the Donbos and get back to Mother Russia, or then go southwest and cross over into the Crimean Peninsula. if the Ukrainians had been able to capture the Kakova Dam rather than have it destroyed, they had the chance of actually cutting those forces off. And then you might have tens of thousands of encircled Russian troops that would have to surrender. And the global hit to Russian power from that would have been immense.

That is now completely off the table. So from a purely military perspective, the Russians made a wise move. There's also a long-term economic issue. a million acres of southern Ukraine is no longer getting to irrigation water because it came from that reservoir. Water levels now drop below the levels of the canals, so they're dry. Aside from a few pockets of dry wheat, that's it. So you've just taken the single largest chunk of agricultural land in history offline all at once. Yikes. Anyway, back to the dam. This might seem kind of simple, but dams are giant pieces of reinforced concrete

that are hundreds of feet thick at the base. This thing's 1,500 feet from one side to the other. It's at least 200 feet thick, probably thicker. So it didn't keep good data on that for the rest of us. And you don't just throw a few bombs at this. If you want to take out the dam from the air, you attack the weak points. Those are specifically the control gates

and the navigation locks that you have on both sides up and below. That's not what was hit. if the navigation locks were hit, that would be where the water is flowing through. They're high and dry now. And if the control gates were hit, that wouldn't have necessarily led to a structural failure across the entire length of the dam, which is exactly what we're seeing. Now, this thing was blown up from the inside, specifically with tons of explosives, specifically located in the turbine room. And for the Ukrainians to have done that, they would have had to have launched an attack on the dam. Somehow the Russians who had been preparing for this for a year didn't notice. and then manage to smuggle like two cargo trucks worth of explosives

and place them and hit the trigger. No, no, no, no, no. You're also not going to do this with 500-pound bombs, or at least not one or two. So, you know, the other aircraft idea is like a direct attack on the dam. Well, I mean, number one, that requires aircraft, and there is no indication of aircraft or anti-aircraft fire in this area that night.

And you're not going to do it with one plane. You're going to do it with several, because it takes a lot to crack one of these suckers open. And then third, Ukrainians don't have fighter bombers. I mean, they inherited a few from the Soviet. They mean, they had at the beginning of the war. They haven't been flying in them because they're not any good in the dogfight rule. And they don't have the bombs that would be necessary anyway.

So you're talking about, what, multiple dumb drops with weapons that they don't have from platforms that they really don't fly? I'm sorry, the people who say that this was Ukraine are just headless at this point. Anyway, well, I guess that's the whole point. They're bots or trolls. So, this was definitely the Russians. One more thing. And yes, sometimes dams fail, but there's always warning. You'll have cracks, you'll have leaks. They don't fail catastrophically overnight. And yeah, yeah, yeah, this has been in a war zone. But it's not like it's been under attack. And for it to all fail catastrophically from within on the day that the Ukrainians are starting their counteroffensive? Yeah, no.

Let's talk about bots and trolls. So I have always had to deal with a lot of bots and a lot of trolls from a lot of places with the Russians probably being at the top of that list. They at one point were probably about 10, maybe even 15% of my total followers just before the war started. But then the war started. And when the war started, Western governments and the social media companies decided that enough was enough. And they had a broad scale purge of the Russian presence, both from the social media platforms themselves. And they cracked down on the financial transfers.

allowed them to hire trolls in other countries to make it look like they weren't, you know, Russian sourced. That all went away in the first two weeks of the war, and I probably saw the number of trolls and bots on my platform dropped by 99%. But then Elon Musk took over and said that this violates his idea of free speech, and so they're all back. In fact, I'd argue that there's twice as many now it's the word before the war, and they all came out of the woodwork in the last 24 hours to scream at me over the Kakova thing. What do you do about, What do you do about trolls? So first you have to identify them as a rule if they have a lot of numbers after the line You know it's a troll or you know it's a bot because there's not a lot of creativity that's put into the profiles

If you really want to you can scan through their feed and you'll see that a lot of these guys quote one another A lot of these guys quote one another so it really is kind of just a circular economy of crap second don't engage with them if you do They will make it into your feet on a regular basis, as will they're friends. The way Musk has rejiggered the algorithm is any engagement from you, it shows interest. So if there's a topic you don't care about, if you just think they're completely wrong and misinformation, don't engage because you'll get more and more and more and more of that. Third, don't block them, mute them.

If you block them, they're going to know, and they're going to move on and try a different strategy. But if you mute them, they don't know, and they're screaming into the void. and they won't ever show up on your feed or your platform again. And then they're wasting their time and their money and not yours. So hopefully this clears up a few things. For those of you who are real people and real followers, I hope this filled in some gaps for you. For those of you are trolls,

you can always reach me at my direct personal email. I'm a bitch at ashat.com. Tootles.