Some Thoughts on the War in Ukraine

Like all right-thinking people, I've been glued to the TV and internet this week, following what's happening with Russia's invasion of Ukraine and devouring all sorts of takes from mainstream news sources and also people on social media. Going back through the archives of this blog, it's not the first time we've been here, but the difference back then, almost exactly eight years ago and coincidentally right after the Winter Olympics, is that the Russians appeared content with just taking over a portion of eastern Ukraine and scaring their former satellite.

Now, however, they've gone all out, rolling all the way into Kyiv and intending to topple the entire country. The reaction from the West has been surprisingly unified, though not without some foot-dragging here and there: the EU took a day or two to commit to cutting Russia and Vladimir Putin out of the SWIFT financial messaging system, and Britain's immigration apparatus has had a few missteps with regard to letting Ukrainian refugees in. But even Putin allies like Poland and Hungary have been quick to offer help to fleeing Ukrainians (quicker than they would to Syrian refugees, who were in many cases also displaced by Russian activity, but never mind).

On the one hand, it's hard not to think that these are the actions that the West should have taken eight years ago, when Russian forces drummed up a separatist movement in Crimea and shot down a passenger plane. Re-reading my blog post from back then, it's clear that this week's actions wouldn't have been possible if he hadn't been emboldened by his success in pulling those other things off back then: after all, his vision of an imperial Russia, protected from the West by a buffer zone comprised of former Soviet vassal states, is unchanged.

I've seen pleasingly few tankies arguing in favor of Russia's invasion, but it's worth talking about Russia's claim that the invasion is caused by the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO. This article claims it's a smokescreen to hide the fact that Putin views any liberal democracy on its doorstep as a threat, which is persuasive when you consider that Ukraine's thoughts on joining NATO have changed various times over the last few decades - at the very least, NATO didn't seem in a huge hurry to sign Ukraine up. That seems to bolster the argument I made in the paragraph above.

On the other hand, there's been a lot of commentary over the enthusiasm of many high-profile Republicans, including Donald Trump, for Putin and this invasion. My suspicion is that Trump is excited because he can't see anything outside of the lens of how it makes him look, so anything that threatens to make Joe Biden look bad is good for him. Other Republicans have dredged up "wokeness" and... being tolerant of LGBTQ people as reasons to support Putin. Whatever, guys.

I can't shake the feeling, however, that it's good we don't have Barack Obama in the White House to deal with this. He whiffed hard on the Crimea thing and the Syria thing, which likely has something important to do with Putin's actions this week; if he had still been president, I'm sure Obama would be taking the same actions as Biden, but it's an open question if his State Dept team would have been equipped for anything happening in Europe.

To put it another way, if Biden or (God help us) Hillary Clinton had been president in 2014, would they have taken a stronger line against Russia swallowing Crimea, given their more Eurocentric understanding of foreign relations?

That said, I think the unity among western democracies now is also a response to years (decades) of Russian-funded far right extremism and populism across the US and Western Europe. Trump's presidency and the Brexit vote may have been wake-up calls for the US and EU of just how well-integrated Putin's allies were in media (i.e. Russia Today) and among far-right parties like those in France, Germany and Italy. Germany must also be feeling increasing heat (no pun intended), given its reliance on Russian gas and former chancellor Gerhard Schröder's closeness to Putin.

It's easy to criticize the response in 2014 with hindsight from the Trump administration, where the "president" went out of his way to praise Putin, but eight years ago Obama had no idea who'd be succeeding him as president, nor that the UK would vote to leave the EU. But as I said, kicking Russia out of SWIFT and isolating the regime is probably what Obama should have done in 2014, when the seeds for the current conflict were being sown.

About That Two-Year World Cup Idea

Amid the controversies around FIFA's corruption and support of dictatorial regimes worldwide, the organization also seems intent on bugging the hell out of football fans. A good example of this is the idea being championed by former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger, which would see the World Cup take place every two years instead of every four.

It's kind of surprising that nobody, at least in the sources I read, has anything good to say about this plan. The theme seems to be that the existing World Cup format, with its 32 teams (expanding to 48 in 2026), is already bloated, so doing it twice as often would be terrible. It would also crowd the regional championships out of the calendar, particularly the European championships, which are typically held on the non-World Cup even-numbered years. Also, I don't know how many pundits have raised this, but the players are already exhausted by the existing schedule, and shoe-horning another global tournament into the capital won't help with that.

Yet FIFA seems to still be exploring this idea, despite it getting about as much support (or maybe less) as the European Super League. This is fairly good proof that they don't care about what fans want, so in the interest of offering bad ideas, let me make a suggestion on a changed format to the two-year World Cup.

The first point is that it would be lighter-touch, to keep from wearing the players out and bankrupting host countries, so we'd cut it back down to 24 teams. The second is that it would be even more global than the existing tournament, so instead of complicated allocations that inevitably favor Europe, each confederation would be represented by a four-team group, arrived at by whatever qualifying format that individual confederation prefers.

Obviously this would dramatically reduce the number of European teams participating, and probably limit it to four of the biggest five teams (England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain). That said, each of those teams except for England has won one of the last four tournaments, so you can argue we're just cutting the chaff out. Also, remember that this is a thought experiment piling bad ideas on top of more bad ideas.

Most of the other confederations would have similar numbers of teams participating, but the big winner would be Oceania, which currently gets up to one place but only if its qualifying team wins a playoff against another confederation. Giving Oceania four spots would guarantee participation for New Zealand, of course, and potentially convince Australia to return from Asia, where it's been competing since after 2006.

The groups would play out as normal, each team playing each other team in its group once, and the top team from each confederation would move to the second round, consisting of two groups of three teams, with the top team progressing to the final. There would not be seeding, so Europe and South America could potentially meet in this round, otherwise they'd still dominate the final... though it must be said that having a regular Europe v South America final would already be an improvement over the last four World Cups, as a South American team reached the final just once (Argentina in 2014) and the semi-finals just twice (Uruguay in 2010, Brazil and Argentina in 2014). 

And there you have it: my facetious suggestion for a format that would support a two-year World Cup schedule, while also making it more equitable among each confederation. You'd get classic matches between the biggest teams of all regions every two years, which is surely what FIFA really wants, and the tournament would be easier to fit into a single country, meaning it wouldn't require host nations to bankrupt themselves (and therefore wouldn't be limited to taking place in dictatorships or across multiple countries).

As I've said, this is more of a joke than anything else, but it gets to a competitive imbalance that's been evident in the global game for the last decade and a half, namely that Europe has sucked all the competitive air out of the room. As mentioned, the last four winners have been among the traditionally strongest teams in Europe (and if England continues its progress from the last World Cup and Euros, is in with a decent chance of winning in Qatar 2022); at the same time, because Europe got 14 spots last time, even though as many European teams went out in the first round as Asian teams, there were still 10 European teams in the knockout rounds.

It's pretty clear that European teams are the strongest overall, since the club system across UEFA is the best-funded and most organized, meaning that even its relatively mediocre teams, like Sweden or Poland, benefit from players being in the best leagues and honing their skills against the best players in the world. And these best players in the world get lured to Europe, thereby weakening their home leagues, most notably in South America. It's notable that two of the semifinalists in 2018, Belgium and Croatia, weren't in the top five of Europe and still proved stronger than almost everyone else in the world.

I generally like the format of the World Cup as it is, and because my first World Cup was 1998, which was the first to field 32 teams, I also don't mind that number of participants. That said, while the format favors the strongest regions, it would be nice to see the other regions narrow the gap with Europe, but it's unlikely to happen as things stand. My suggested format isn't really workable, but at least opens the possibility of non-European winners, and makes the tournament an actual "world" cup, rather than a showcase for the big five European leagues with everyone else making up the numbers.

Two Bad Takes on the Joe Rogan Thing

Quick one this week, because my main focus at the moment is on a novel. However, I wanted to date this blog by writing down some thoughts on the Joe Rogan controversy that's been going on recently. Specifically, I wanted to respond to a couple of takes on it that I've seen, which take opposite sides but that happen to be both a bit short-sighted.

To be clear, I absolutely think Rogan's been platforming a lot of people that he shouldn't, especially when it comes to the Covid-19 vaccines. I just had a look at his guests for the past 18 months or so, and there are far too many who are questioning the vaccines, and nowhere near enough who are talking about the actual science. I was briefly heartened when I saw he'd talked to Oliver Stone, but then I dug into Stone's views on the virus and he's notable in this sphere for having gotten the Russian Sputnik V vaccine. Nothing too wrong with that, I suppose, though the article mentions that Vladimir Putin himself wouldn't get that vaccine (not a great endorsement, y'all); it then also quotes Stone as saying that Russia and China aren't enemies of the US, which is... also short-sighted. Though it's not one of the bad takes I'm writing about here!

The point is, I'm fully in support of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and all the other artists who are removing their work from Spotify over its deal to be the sole platform for Rogan's podcast. It doesn't really matter that these are older artists whose listeners are not likely to overlap much with Rogan's. Rogan is doing society a disservice, and acting in bad faith, and Spotify's reaction to the whole thing has been shameful.

Now, the first bad take is from Edward Snowden, for whom I usually have a lot of time. I saw some comments of his on Twitter where he talked about this controversy, pointing out (rightly) that there are a lot of people condemning Rogan who've never listened to his podcast (this is related to the next bad take, about which more anon). He then suggested that no one is actually taking Rogan's advice on vaccines seriously, which... what? What? What?

That makes no sense! Of course people take what he's saying seriously - if they didn't, Spotify wouldn't have blown $100 million getting the exclusive rights to his show. Snowden pointed to Rogan's logo, a vision of his grinning face with a third eye, as the reason why nobody's going there for medical advice. I agree that sensible people shouldn't do that, but when you repeatedly have Robert Malone, Pierre Kory and Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying on, to say nothing of that mentalist Alex Berenson, then you're actively trying to get people to not take the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. Snowden should fucking know better.

The other bad take is from a friend of a friend who said on Facebook that Rogan had turned into Rush Limbaugh. On the face of it, it's not actually that inaccurate, though I think that talking to Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders during last year's primary race adds a little nuance. What annoys me about this comment is that it's perpetuating this false dichotomy of everything falling into either left or right.

Rogan probably does fall more on the rightward side of things, because he seems to have a lot of guests on who are concerned with "cancel culture". But I'm just wary of lumping him in with people like Limbaugh, because he just doesn't seem clever enough to exploit the forces he's helping to unleash. He's probably smarter than I'm giving him credit for, and he's probably issuing his "apologies" in bad faith, but he also doesn't seem to have Limbaugh's knack for provocation.

What I find annoying is, as Edward Snowden suggested, people who've never listened to a Joe Rogan Experience episode falling all over themselves to declare him the next Donald Trump. I've listened to the odd episode, and all I'll say is, he's stupid and paranoid and riddled with conspiracy theories, but he's not cohesive enough in his ideology to be one of these Ben Shapiro-type dingbats.

Not everyone who questions the vaccines or "cancel culture" is right-wing: as an example, I give you Bill Maher, who has also platformed Weinstein and Heying and who rails every week about how much he hates political correctness. He's not exactly an AOC-style progressive, but you can't legitimately call him a right-winger either. He may be platforming a lot of these people too, but the consensus seems to be that when Milo Yiannopoulos went on Maher's show, he ended up saying all the things that caused his own downfall.

This is the difference between Maher and Rogan, as far as I can tell. Maher may give some of the crazies a platform, but he doesn't give them a free ride. Meanwhile, the crazies know that they can go on Rogan because he still seems to think he's just shooting the shit in his basement. I'm not saying I'm sorry for Rogan, but it does look a lot like he's being taken advantage of. Though if he is, he's getting a lot of money for it.

I'm probably nitpicking here, so I'll wrap up. But as I say, not everything we disagree with on the left is as bad as Limbaugh or Trump. Not every antivaxxer is a right-winger. Yet if we persist in characterizing them as such, we play into the right's hands in portraying us as the woke mob. Let's have some nuance, and let's deplore Rogan from a position of knowledge, rather than of ignorance.