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Turkey’s president has grabbed a bit more power for himself with the recent arrest of the mayor of Istanbul. The mayor was thought to be one of the few politicians who could challenge Erdogan.

Steven Cook will take us through it.

Talking about authoritarians is one of the things we do here, so strap in for another tale of turmoil on an angry planet.

• Shilling for kagi.com
• “Competitive authoritarianism”
• Negotiating with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party
• How to court the Kurdish vote while killing Kurds
• A stable of failsons
• “The Turkish Marc Andreessen”
• Why Erdogan hates Pennsylvania
• Disproving McDonald’s Diplomacy, once again
• Leveling a park to build a mall
• How Erdogan processed the Arab Spring
• “Fools, knaves, and rubes”—Oh my!

Turkey Can’t Live With, or Without, Erdogan

Ukraine Has Written a Folk Song About Its Drone

Turkey and Israel are becoming deadly rivals in Syria

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Special for our international listeners, did you know you can now buy a pathway to U.S. citizenship for the low, low price of $5 million sent directly to the U.S. treasury? For decades America’s immigration policies were a boon to its national defense. No one has better intelligence on a rival country than a fleeing dissident with firsthand knowledge.

Times have changed.

Gil Guerra of the Niskanen Center is here to talk all about those changes. It’s an episode packed with bizarre anecdotes and interesting tidbits about how America runs now. You’ll learn why evangelical Christians are turning their back on refugees, why China won’t accept deportation flights, and how to navigate the Darien Gap using short form video posts.

• Immigration is a foreign policy tool
• Dissident refugees as a strategic win
• What we know about how the “Gold Card” will work
• “You simply can’t create greencards out of nowhere.”
• How Mexico uses immigration to get concessions from the U.S.
• “At a certain point the people who send you into the blades look like the bastards.”
• Dealing with a dictator
• 20,000 Chinese nationals at the southern border
• The internet has made it easier to immigrate
• Navigating the Darien Gap, one TikTok video at a time

Op-ed: Trump’s gold card visa, explained

Domestic debate, global strategy: Revisiting immigration in U.S. foreign policy

China owns 380,000 acres of land in the U.S. Here's where

Weapons of Mass Migration

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For mercenaries, death is a business. It’s all about finding the right market. Wagner and other Russian mercenary groups have found willing markets in Africa. Journalist John Lechner spent years in Africa among the mercenaries and he’s on the show today to tell us about what he learned.

Lechner tells us how Wagner’s men think the U.S. media killed Prigozhin, why every theater (or market) is different, and the training regimen of a fresh convict recruit. It’s all in his new book Death Is Our Business: Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare.

The threats change…but the mercenaries stay the same.

• Interlinking militant Islam and the rise of modern mercenaries
• Russian mercenaries before Wagner
• Prigozhin rising
• Putin’s Chef was the father of ‘Hybrid War’
• Wagner in Africa
• ‘No one said mercenary life was gonna be easy.’
• Life inside Wagner
• ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’
• You can’t judge intent by results
• The Russian “royal” court is full of self starters and entrepreneurs

The Tip of Russia’s Spear

Death Is Our Business

Pardoned for Serving in Ukraine, They Return to Russia to Kill Again

Taliban Bureaucrats Hate Working Online All Day, ‘Miss the Days of Jihad’

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A lot of the people designing America’s technology and close to the center of American power believe some deeply weird shit. We already talked to journalist Gil Duran about the Nerd Reich, the rise of the destructive anti-democratic ideology. In this episode, we dive into another weird section of Silicon Valley: the cult of Rationalism.

Max Read, the journalist behind the Read Max Substack, is here to help us through it. Rationalism is responsible for a lot more than you might think and Read lays out how it’s influenced the world we live in today and how it created the environment for a cult that’s got a body count.

• Defining rationalism: “Something between a movement, a community, and a self-help program.”
• Eliezer Yudkowsky and the dangers of AI
• What the hell is AGI?
• The Singleton Guide to Global Governance
• The danger of thought experiments
• As always, follow the money
• Vulgar bayesianism
• What’s a Zizian?
• Sith Vegans
• Anselm: Ontological Argument for God’s Existence
• SBF and Effective Altruism

READ MAX!

The Zizians and the Rationalist death cults

Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down - Eliezer Yudkowsky’s TIME Magazine piece

Explaining Roko’s Basilisk, the Thought Experiment That Brought Elon Musk and Grimes Together

The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians

The Government Knows AGI is Coming | The Ezra Klein Show

The archived ‘Is Trump Racist’ rational post

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The Israeli military is using AI products from Microsoft to conduct its war in Gaza. Off the shelf AI products powered by the tech company’s Azure cloud computing system and OpenAI are helping the IDF sort through data, translate Arabic, and even pick targets. But AI translations aren’t perfect and these systems often make mistakes.

What happens when the consequences are life and death?

Associated Press global investigative reporters Garance Burke and Michael Biesecker are part of a team that broke the story about Israel’s use of Microsoft’s commercial AI in a war. They’re on the show today to help us sort through it all.

• Defining “AI”
• Off the shelf solutions for war
• Microsoft Azure as war’s translator and search engine
• “The Israel military is one of the leading militaries in the world adopting the use of AI to assist in its war efforts. They’ve been doing this for years.”
• AI is picking targets
• Students to militants
• AI’s mistranslations
• Blaming AI for human sins
• Matthew’s vision of a hellish automated future
• Employees push back
• The money is just too good

How US tech giants supplied Israel with AI models, raising questions about tech’s role in warfare

As Israel uses US-made AI models in war, concerns arise about tech’s role in who lives and who dies

Microsoft workers protest sale of AI and cloud services to Israeli military

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We’re living in a bizarre age of technofascism. The richest man who has ever lived, a man who dreams of colonizing Mars with his children, is America’s CEO. Donald Trump, the man people voted for, is just the chairman of the board.

What does Elon Musk believe? Is there a playbook for DOGE? How bad are things going to get? On this episode of Angry Planet journalist Gil Duran, author of The Nerd Reich newsletter, walks us through what’s coming.

Over on The Shatter Zone, journalist and former Angry Planet guest Robert Evans has published a document that Democratic think tanks are passing around. It gives extra context to Duran’s reporting. All the major players and themes we talk about in this episode are there: Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, the Butterfly Effect.

If you want to understand why so many federal workers are getting fired and the Silicon Valley ideology that’s infected D.C., then give us a listen.

• Curtis Yarvin’s unimpressive programming career
• “Democracy doesn’t work”
• Bullshit and cherries
• RAGE and Reboot
• The Chairman of the Board
• It’s always about the money
• “Move fast and break things” comes to D.C.
• The Engineer’s Disease
• Nick Land is mentioned and I’m sorry
• “Trump is more intellectual property than man.”
• The horror of comedy
• Selling the Nerd Reich to the Religious Right

The Nerd Reich

AI Video of Trump Sucking Musk's Toes Blasted on Government Office TVs

Trump’s AI Gaza Video Is the Tip of a Horrifying ‘Gaz-A-Lago’ Iceberg

Techno-Fascism Comes to America

Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.

'Reboot' Revealed: Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator Playbook

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President Donald Trump wants to build an American Iron Dome. He even signed an executive order to make it happen. It’s a terrible idea, one we’ve tried before, and one that will make America less safe.

In this episode, Joseph Cirincione returns to the program to detail his personal history with complicated and costly missile defense systems.

• It all starts during a snowstorm in 1982 and with the High Frontier
• Zombie defense pitches
• It’s almost impossible to knock a bullet out of space with a bullet
• How Israel’s Iron Dome works
• Slow and hot vs fast and cold
• Lasers don’t work, thanks Teller
• Pitch: lasers in space. Reality: missile batteries in Alaska
• These systems only work half the time and only under perfect conditions
• SpaceX contracts abound!
• A Pentagon Powerpoint slide enters chat
• Jason’s Superman reverie, starring Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor
• How do China and Russia react?
• “The enemy gets a vote.”
• The last arms control treaty
• Ronald Reagan: anti-nuclear advocate
• How SDI kept us from eliminating nuclear weapons
• Anatomy of an arms race
• AI is coming to nuclear command and control

Project 2025 and Trump Are Cooking Up a Recipe for a New Nuclear Arms Race

The Iron Dome for America Executive Order

The national missile defense fantasy—again

Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture

Why the US General In Charge of Nuclear Weapons Said He Needs AI

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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the interim head of USAID, for however much longer the agency lasts. For 60 years, the massive bureaucracy was a vehicle for American soft power abroad. Trump, Elon Musk, and all their creatures don’t like it. It might soon be gone.

Nicole Widdersheim is the deputy Washington director of Human Rights Watch with a long history of humanitarian work. She’s here on Angry Planet today to walk us through this new era of the American Empire.

• A brief history of USAID
• The size and cost of USAID
• Critiquing a bureaucracy
• People like you when you give them stuff
• Defense, diplomacy, development
• The real world consequences of the ending of foreign aid
• A mallet, not a scalpel
• Supporters need to get cynical
• USAID did a bad job of defending itself
• Americans don’t care about the human cost
• The Glorious Republic of Jasonvania wants food aid
• Congressionally approved rice to North Korea
• It turns out the cruelty is, in fact, the point
• At USAID, Waste and Abuse Runs Deep
• No one read those reports on Afghanistan
• How China’s “Belt and Road” actually works
• The end of USAID will screw over American farmers
• Trumpism is a lack of consistency 

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• The pros and cons of globalization
• The end of trust in the global system
• What was behind the WTO protests of the 1990s
• How 1999's WTO Protests Influenced the Policing of Protests Today
• China, China, China
• The Covid shock
• White goods?
• And we have to talk about McDonald’s
• How sanctions created the multipolar world
• “There’s no trust between the U.S., China, and Russia.”
• Autocrats or historical forces?
• Martyring Jack Ma
• What will happen to prices
• How to make a T-shirt
• How much would the iPhone cost if it were made in America?
• The Houthis attack on the global supply chain
• “I don’t know why you’re so sad about McDonald’s”

Goodbye Globalization: The Return of a Divided

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Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow. Marine Corps veteran J.D. Vance will soon be vice president. Pete Hegseth, a man with a Crusader Kings tattoo who doesn’t want women to serve in combat roles, is probably going to be confirmed as secretary of defense. Over New Years, two members of the U.S. military committed domestic terror attacks.

Today on Angry Planet we get into the highs and lows of the American military with Marine Corps vet and author Phil Klay. 

• What are the limits of amoral pragmatism?
• “Most troops are opposed to murder.”
• A rant about Crusader Kings.
• Vance’s view.
• Trump, Hegseth and the Honor of the American Military
• Asking Pete Hegseth how many pushups he can do during a confirmation hearing
• The Cult of ‘Sicario’
• Anguish and Anger From the Navy SEALs Who Turned In Edward Gallagher
• Sen. Ted Cruz insulted a ‘woke, emasculated’ U.S. Army ad. Angry veterans fired back.

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