Long story short, my siblings are in town this week so there’s no real post.
I could’ve slapped something together but I got drunk at the beach with them instead. COVID and about 5000km of the continent mean that I haven’t seen them in about two years so I’m taking this opportunity to bond with them and talk about the outrageous things our mother says from time to time.
As a consolation prize I offer up the following:
There’s a journalist named Dan Graeber who I follow on Twitter. He writes mostly about oil and gas from a ‘geopolitical’ perspective. Anyways, his Twitter bio - whether seriously or not - describes him as a ‘geopolitical whiz.’ He also writes a ‘report’ dealing with international relations and energy markets. Normally he’s aight.
Except for this week.
This week he got duped into believing that the Twitter account @DPRK_News is, in fact, the Twitter account of the North Korean regime. The truth is that DPRK is run by folks associated with noted attorney Ken White - if not Ken himself - also known by his Twitter handle @Popehat. Here’s the tweet:
This was such a slam dunk that I came out of a multi-year twitter absence to respond with the following:
In Graeber’s defense, a lot of news sites - such as Newsweek - have bought into the idea that the account is legit only to end up with egg on their faces. But call me tickled when Graeber responded to the response with this:
Which, dude take the L here. Don’t toss out some shit about the Daily Beast being sketchy. You could literally Google DPRK News legit? and the top responses are articles by Vox and Gizmodo about how folks keep falling for the account.
If the account actually tweeted out things that you would expect the North Korean government to post, then I wouldn’t have an issue here, but here’s a tweet from that fucking day.
Sorry dude, you’re either a moron, gullible, or you made a mistake. But the fact that Graeber’s first tweet talked about how it was the second tweet of its kind makes me think that it wasn’t a simple glancing mistake. Oh, and have I mentioned that this guy has a blue checkmark on Twitter?
This leads me to the following. If you’re seeing the absolute calamity unfolding in Afghanistan this weekend - the result of alleged experts [on their way to or from McKinsey] pulling frameworks and assumptions out of their rectums - and are surprised. Maybe step back and realize that self-proclaimed and ‘verified’ experts in geopolitics and international relations are too dumb to question the patently absurd.
Photo by Alex Perez on UnSplash