Ages ago I signed up to Dominic Cumming's substack thing out of curiosity, but wasn't prepared to pay for the privilege of reading his long essays, so didn't bother further. I got this email last week, I though some might be interested in reading his ramblings...although a lot of it seems to be "I was right!" there are some interesting bits.
Twitter is great for tracking news in some fields. In some Twitter communities there are intelligent, insightful, good-faith discussions. It’s appalling for politics and intolerable during a war. Westminster is addicted to it. The addiction adds to the worst dynamics of the old media organisations: constant hysteria, distortion, the collapse of standards for judging ‘facts’, a desperate search for clicks, no explanations of (or even interest in) the real wiring of power deep in the system, international relations and war reduced to stories much more simplistic than the classic fairy tales we read to children
Much more ‘news’ is invented than people realise. It was clearly worse in summer 2019 than 2016. It got worse in 2020. And it’s always worse in a war. Many front page stories are pure inventions. Many senior western journalists now retweet army training scenes from years ago and literally video game footage as if it’s ‘heroic UKR defence’ — some of them do this while also pontificating on ‘disinformation’ and ‘what a heroic job the media is doing’*
As the media thrashes around in one emotional spasm after another, herding towards some conventional wisdom then, after a spasm, herding in a new direction, the narrative whiplash intensifies: closing the borders is racist against China… closing the borders is obviously sensible only Brexit idiots oppose it… masks don’t work … wear masks or you’re evil… ‘the rule of law’ is fundamental, ‘process’ is good… seize the evil’s people stuff now, ‘process’ is an intolerable smokescreen… sanctions won’t hurt normal Russians just the regime … we’ll use sanctions to wreck their economy and anti-war Russians (the most anti-Putin!) must be booted out of everything from chess to opera (even though it’s what Putin wants us to do)… it’s an invasion, he wants millions of Ukrainians in Russia… it’s genocide, he wants to kill all the Ukrainians…
Many of them are now cheerleading for things like a ‘no fly zone’ in total ignorance of the history of nuclear near-misses and how lucky we were to survive the Cold War. They’re emotional and they’ve spent years venting their emotions on Twitter … do something, don’t worry about nuclear war because … err… ‘World War Three has already started’! Imagine what the survivors of nuclear holocaust would make of that meme
Advice: only use Twitter with Lists on something like Tweetdeck. I have lists for e.g science, national security/military/intel, finance, and I have a specific list for politicians and political journalists so I only see them when I want to
The current situation could escalate towards a general war. In summer 1914 we had a much more serious set of people in crucial jobs and the crisis moved much slower than a nuclear crisis does. They were overwhelmed by scale, speed and complexity and made disastrous decisions. Those in charge in the west now, such as Biden and Boris, are an order of magnitude less serious/competent. They’re dealing with something moving potentially hundreds of times faster than summer 1914 (decisions on nuclear weapons potentially have to be made in minutes) with potential casualties on the scale of ~billion. For years I’ve warned that this scale, speed and complexity — systems problems requiring systems thinking — is far beyond the capabilities of our critical institutions which would collapse in a major crisis. Covid proved the point. But of course these critical institutions have not changed
In the UK the situation is worse than in spring 2020 because a lot of very able people came to help then, they’ve almost all gone and the few left are marginalised and/or looking for other jobs. Rather than changing the institutions, in the UK the PM has led a campaign to rewrite the history of covid and the collapse of No10 and the Cabinet Office. This has guaranteed no learning from the collapse. The broken No10/Cabinet Office system — a system that cannot communicate the most simple things, never mind execute something hard — is now responsible for signals concerning nuclear escalation
Even if we avoid general war the effects of recent events on energy, food markets and so on will be profound. Sharp sudden price rises for food have often sparked revolutions, e.g 1848. Huge economic disruption is colliding with a) deluded energy policies in the west for 20 years, b) over a decade of roughly zero/negative real interest rates (unprecedented in centuries), and c) supply chains already reeling from covid and changes in China
dominiccummings.substack.com/p/dan-wang-and-ryan-petersen-on-china?s=w
© 2022 Dominic Cummings