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Full Version: Jordan Peterson: It's ‘naïve’ to think Russia will lose the war
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He's been accused of being one of those Vlad admirers, or apologists, who are also: "But I'm not a Putin buff, or apologist. I'm not."
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https://youtu.be/BnxxELn00gk

EXCERPTS: . . . (0:32) He's [Putin] a lot more like everybody else than anyone thinks. You know, the notion that he's Hitler or Stalin -- that's just foolish. I don't see any evidence for that at all. First of all, Hitler and Stalin were very singular types; and there's a bit of Hitler and Stalin in everyone. So you know, there's some truth in that, maybe...

[...] (1:48) You can't have a totalitarian state unless every single person is willing to lie about everything all the time. And you can think about that as top down, because the leaders lie too, and they also enforce punishments if you don't lie. But then you can also think about it as the totalitarian spirit being replicated at every level of the society. So in a truly totalitarian state husbands lie to their wives, and parents lie to their children, and the totalitarian state is actually the grip of the lie.

[...] (3:56) But I do know that naive notions that the Russians are going to lose somehow, or that we're going to win, I just don't understand that. What do you mean we're going to win? What are we going to win here, exactly?

Well, I guess a victory would be that the Russians retreated from Ukraine, with Ukraine in ruins, right? Wow, all right, that's a hell of a victory. I think Putin could manage that because he could tell his people and I think they might buy it. It's like we accomplished our objective, we devastated Ukraine, and we kept it out of the hands of the West. That's not great, it's not what we'd hoped for, but it's better than the alternative.

[...] (5:06) We can't win against Vladimir Putin, anyhow, because you cannot win against someone you cannot say no to. Period. And we can't say no to Putin, because we sold our soul for his oil and gas.

And we did that to elevate our moral stature in relationship to saving the planet. So here we are facing a very dire winter, hoisted on the petard of our own foolishness and moral presumption that we're saving the planet. We'll see, I don't think so, it doesn't look like it to me.

This is the most catastrophic issue here, assuming that we're facing an environmental crisis of planetary proportions. Which is not something I buy by the way, but assuming we are... then I would imagine that you would put in place measures that would ameliorate that problem instead of exacerbating it. But all the measures you're putting in place are actually making the environmental problem worse. So how is that even vaguely acceptable?

I look at that and think, oh, it's just like what George Orwell said about middle class socialists 50 years ago: It's not that you love the planet, it's that you hate humanity.

We'll see what happens this winter. It's very terrifying to me, especially here, because your energy prices have gone way out of control. And that's going to hurt a lot of poor people, and certainly around the world. As well the World Bank already estimated that we've put 350 million people into what they call a food insecurity. 350 million -- that's three times as many as the communists managed to kill. Maybe we can manage that in the winter, but the planet has too many people on it, anyway, so you now that's just poor people.

I wonder if people who only read Peterson get all the times he's speaking from another point of view. When you listen to him, with anything resembling a sense of social cues, it's very clear, but a lot is lost in print.

Peterson probably shares my opinion...that Putin is evil and that the much smaller country of Ukraine can't possibly beat Russia through attrition. Although, if the Ukraine takes lessons from Israel...