Credibility budgets. Free-speech champions are not free speech full-time all the time.
Tucker Carlson pounds the drums for free-speech. He is as close to the truth is anybody I listen to, but he's not always there.
He has committed a number of obvious errors when it comes to Ukraine. Tucker has been using the very around number 600,000 Ukrainians killed for quite a while. The number is suspicious in its size, its roundness, the fact that it hasn’t changed much for a few months, and the fact that other bloggers, especially Col McGregor use the same figure.
I think what Tucker wants is to stress that it's a large number and that cannot be known exactly. The Ukrainians certainly do not reveal the number of their casualties, nor do the Russians. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense claims that as of August 28, 612,390 Russian soldiers had been killed, wounded or captured. The Institute for the Study of War has its own numbers. Newsweek recently did an estimate.
Tucker’s implication is that the cream of Ukrainian youth is being decimated. He presents himself as a defender of Ukrainian youth. As if Russians were not also dying. He glosses over the question of who started the war, saying only that there were neocon provocations. Certainly true, but it is also true that Putin calls everything a “provocation,” especially when Ukraine has the temerity to shoot back into Russian territory or even as recently, counter-invade Russia.
We know nobody personally, but Oksana knows a couple of women who have lost husbands serving in the army. None of my Ukrainian friends have been drafted. A few have volunteered. A neighbor, in his sixties, served for most of 2022 and was released on account of his age. A few young men left the country early in the war. Others of them are still here, telling me that they would have a hard time leaving now and that they expect to be called up. Two couples are expecting babies next month, hastening starting families just in case.
Draft age is a funny business. The opposite of the US, it largely exempts student-age people but extends up to about sixty. One of the nervous guys is fifty. I see lots of young men working in supermarkets, post offices, gas stations and the like.
There are apparently war-wounded men begging outside the subways. It strikes me as odd that I have seen mostly the same faces for the last two years. It is possible that these guys are able to defend their panhandling territory against newbies, but it can also be that amputees are being relatively well taken care up. As one example, when we took a bike outing a month ago, we ran across a guy and his girlfriend on the path, he cycling with a prosthetic leg. Estimates of the number of amputees range from 20,000 to 50,000. The ratio of amputees to killed in action is also hard to place. At any rate, I notice one or two a month, in town or on the bus.
The situation certainly differs in other parts of the country. The refugees we know from Donetsk, Mariupol and other Russian-occupied areas lost lots of acquaintances and family members as those places were taken over in 2014 and again in this war. Kyiv’s air defenses are the best in the country.
Back to Tucker, in my opinion his 600,000 number is high. He must know it is high, and not have any strong desire to be better informed. It is a number to stick to, like six million for the Holocaust and Holodomor.
Tucker repeatedly contended that the Ukrainians blew up the Nova Kakhovka dam on June 8, 2023. In this he echoed the whole claque, including Col. McGregor. It made no sense; I did a video on the topic at the time. The dam is a huge structure that was totally under Russian control. The only way to blow it up would have been by planting massive amounts of explosives in precise locations within the dam itself. His speculation that it was the work of unseen and unheard missiles launched by Ukraine was laughable.
The extent of the error comes into focus now, as only last week Russian missiles struck another of the large dams across the Dnipro, the one that forms the Kyivskii Sea about ten miles upstream from us. All commentators, Russian and Ukrainian, agreed that there was no chance whatsoever that the dam would be breached. It might happen if they were able to strike the dam in the same spot with wave after wave of their biggest missiles, or if they used a tactical nuclear weapon. Has Tucker, McGregor or any of the others admitted they were wrong? No.
Tucker has continued to say over the course of 2 1/2 years that Ukraine is losing this war. And yet, a look at the map indicates that Ukraine has actually gained ground since the middle of 2022. It is not clear that Ukraine is winning, but the claim that it is losing would be wrong. It's the Russians who have been losing ground on average. It's true that there gaining some ground in the area within thirty miles of the Donbas territory they have held, but they have also lost ground in Kherson, Kharkiv, and now Kursk on Russian territory. To claim that Ukraine is losing the war is lazy and inaccurate.
So, take that, truth teller. If you want the truth, you need to tell the whole truth, including the part that doesn't support your narrative.
All that said, I generally support Tucker Carlson. I believe he is closer to the truth than not. I have the same quibble with Robert Kennedy. He uses the same sloppy 600,000 figure for Ukrainian casualties. It doesn't go into much detail, saying only that he wants to end the war. He does not acknowledge Russian brutality and the atrocities that they have committed. on. Those are obvious.
Another place a Kennedy perhaps goes overboard is to claim that 60% of American youth now suffer from chronic disease. I have no doubt that it's gone up since his and my childhood. He says that the figure was about 6%. The claim 60% now seems to me to be a little bit excessive. I don't know for sure, and there it is certain that there is no fixed methodology for assessing these things, but I think that he fudges his numbers a little bit high to make his case.
This is not a condemnation. I generally support RFK as well as Tucker, but I have to recognize that he too sometimes fudges the truth. At other times he seems to ignore it. This is the world we live in. I have no doubt that this is been true throughout history. Disraeli was quoted as saying there lies, damned lies and statistics. In the 19th century, during Disraeli's. time as prime minister, government lied egregiously about the lethality of smallpox, the opium trade with China and much else.
Tucker is naïve to suppose that there ever was a golden era in which the truth was more abundant than it is today. He is equally naïve to suppose we can ever establish or reestablish a regime in which total truth will dominate. It is naïve to think that there will ever be a system of media dissemination of information is without bias.
The implication for my family is that they must listen skeptically to everything. Double check where we can. Fortunately, the sources generally remain available. But you have to look.
This piece is an excellent prelude to a broader one on Eric Weinstein’s marathon interview with Chris Williamson, coming up later. His position is that no public figure can totally avoid hypocrisy and self-interest. His stance is the same as mine – there is nobody with whom he agrees entirely. He proposes that we accord each of them a hypocrisy budget. Judge them on the totality of their work and don’t dismiss them out of hand for one stand with which you disagree.
More later. As a lead-in, let me offer the observation that the Internet allows us to listen to more unfiltered wisdom from public intellectuals than I can remember. Eric Weinstein is the brother of equally impressive Bret Weinstein. In the presentation above he speaks about his contacts with more of the intellects of this age than I can remember, among whom are Joe Rogan – many mentions – Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins.
Weinstein has good words to say about just about everybody. The most surprising to me, coming at the end of the broadcast, were Nicole Shanahan, Bobby Kennedy and JD Vance. He has had fairly extensive contact over the years with all three and vouches for the sincerity of their concern for those whom Hillary called “deplorables.”
School is underway again in Lake WeBeGone. Eddie, no longer the youngest kid in Russanovsky Lycée, maxed the placement test, putting him in the advanced track within his already selective school. So far, so good. Interesting that Weinstein tells us that he was a B student in high school, not coming into his own until college. Interesting anecdote. His high-school aged son, determining that all of the top East Coast universities taught the same stuff in their physics curricula, and that he could learn most of it just by reading the books, taught himself over the summer, after which he took the physics GRE to demonstrate that university was not essential. His kid is certainly not dumb, but it also illustrates the fact that college is overrated. I’ll surely write more on the subject in the coming years.
After the defenders of Mariupol who could doubt the resolve and morale of those fighters? Apparently, the police aren't seizing young men from the streets?
Tucker Carlson occasionally does good stuff, but he's largely a pain in the ass. He has little or no knowledge of relevant history, which means he can be snowed with loads of BS "history" by people like Putin and most recently, Darryl Cooper (a podcaster who does the "Martyr Made" show). Putin , of course, snowed Carlson with a half-hour disquisition of obviously and provably false Ukrainian history, in which Putin purported to show that Muscovy was prior to Ukraine, and that Ukraine is derivative of Russia - and that the Ukrainian language is a dialect of Russian. The opposite, of course, is the truth - the Primary Chronicle was composed in Kherson in 1138 or so, when Muscovy was a collection of savage tribes, and Moscow at best was a collection of mud huts, at best. Its official founding was in 1254, over 100 years later... Ukraine had a literature going back at least 300 years before that. And Ukraine had been settled and civilized since 200BC (and before) by the Pontic Greeks - I've got one of their coins, a Pontus Amisos, from before 200BC. Tucker swallowed it hook, line, and sinker - and at some point Putin(!) questioned whether Carlson was doing a serious interview, since it was obvious to Putin that he came absolutely unprepared. I'd have asked about the foundation documents for the CIS from 1993, of which both Ukraine and Russia were founding members (and of which both remain as members to this day), and in which the signatories agree to both honor and defend each others' borders as of 1991 - which Putin broke twice, in 2014 and 2022. That would have been a good question, but Tucker didn't get close to it. I find that looking at the website for the Russian Foreign Ministry gives me most of Tucker's talking points, quickly, without having to waste time listening to him (or MacGregor, or Mercouris, or Ritter, or any of the rest of that crowd.)
Similarly, for Darryl Cooper, on the topic of Churchill in World War II, Cooper alleged that Churchill "dragged" the US into war with Germany, and Tucker let him get away with it - or simply didn't know any better - and I suspect the latter. The fact is that Hitler, as a signatory to the Axis Pact between Germany, Italy, Japan, and Romania, declared war on the US on December 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declaration of war on Japan by the US. Absent that declaration of war by Hitler, it's doubtful that the US would have entered into the war with Germany, due to the strength of the America First movement and the opposition of the Republican party to war in Europe. And I doubt that Churchill called up Hitler on the phone and asked him to do that. There were strong ties between American industrialists and Hitler - see https://www.reformation.org/wall-st-hitler.html for details - and Hitler had a life size portrait of Henry Ford, with whom he was on very friendly terms (Ford built the trucks which Hitler used in the Blitzkrieg) in his office at the Reichskanzlerei. Of course, Tucker is utterly ignorant of all of this, and allowed his guest, Cooper, to spout his nonsense without challenge. Listening to Tucker is like picking pecans out of a mound of horseshit - sometimes, you'll get a pecan, but it's usually the horseshit.