Listen live Fridays noon to 2pm Eastern on Revolution.Radio later archived at https://kevinbarrett.substack.com
First hour: Edward Curtin‘s new essay is “Numbed by Numbers on the Way to the Digital Palace.” He writes: “We are pissing our lives away on abstractions, forgetting that notation is a system of symbols that direct us to what they intend. The key is to grasp what is intended. The cognitive construction of the number system is a useful tool, but when it is pushed as the essential tool to grasp the meaning of life it has become a tool of control…The Internet and digital media are the greatest propaganda tools ever invented. They have come to us on the wings of numbers. They are insidious in the extreme.” Along the way, Curtin cites Dostoevsky and Jonathan Crary, decries “The use of the term 9/11 to refer to the events of September 11, 2001,” and leaves open the implicit question of whether and how the “mathematization of our thinking” can be reversed.
Second hour: Michael Walsh, AFP’s Spain-based Europe correspondent, joins me, Kevin Barrett, AFP’s North Africa correspondent, for a little trans-Mediterranean dialogue.
In his recent American Free Press article Michael Walsh notes that Putin’s right-hand man, Dmitry Medvedev, advocates “the reduction of Kiev to ashes” and says the defeat of the West is “inevitable.” The reason should have been obvious to Western policy-makers from the get-go: “For Western countries, it is a distant conflict but for Russia, it is a war of self-preservation…” Or to use the hackneyed and somewhat un-Muslim metaphor on involvement vs. commitment: In a ham-and-eggs breakfast, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed. Russia is fully committed to winning; as the biggest nuclear power on Earth it would use all of its weapons and reduce the Earth to cinders before it would allow itself to be defeated in a conflict it sees as existential. That is, after all, what nuclear weapons are for. So the notion that Ukraine can win, i.e. Russia can lose, is a lunatic fantasy that only cokehead fools like Zelensky could ever even pretend to believe.