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Radio War Nerd EP #173 — Nigeria Elections & Democracy's Decline, feat. Joe Costello (Patreon)

Published:
2019-03-20 23:32:33
Edited:
2025-11-19 19:44:03
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Guest: Joe Costello, author & political consultant

Recorded: March 16, 2019

First, the War Nerd and Ames discuss the Christchurch mosque shootings, which took place about a day before recording this episode . . . 

At 39:30 the Nerd and Ames are joined by guest Joe Costello, who recently returned from a months-long stint in Lagos as a campaign advisor to opposition candidate, Atiku Abubakar, who just lost the presidential election to Muhammadu Buhari . . . Joe takes us through his own career in democratic politics, starting with Ted Kennedy's insurgent campaign against Jimmy Carter in 1980, through Jerry Brown's 1992 campaign, the death of his old friend Pat Caddell, and discusses all the ways democratic politics are failing around the globe . . . 

Buy Joe Costello's book Of, By, For: The New Politics of Money, Debt & Democracy. Download Joe's latest work "The Politics of Technology". Follow Joe on Twitter.

Total time: 2:18:58

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Comments

Gengeros

What do you think of Tik history YouTube page? He’s doing a new series on the Courland pocket. I’m reading a blood in the forest about this little known battle of World War II. A must read for war nerds.

Avery

Brilliant on military tactics, unfortunately, beyond illiterate on political ideology...

moe

New outro! As a gunfucker, I'd like to comment on the AR thing: I only gave the wikipedia article on NZ gun law a cursory read, but usually all over the world 223 is deemed by both hunters and lawgivers to be too weak for deer (regardless of effect on thinner skinned animals like us humans). You don't only not need an AR for hunting deer; it's literally the wrong gun for the job. What the psycho probably owned the gun for was competition shooting, and much like the EU gun ban that's been in the works for a few years, this will lead to little change in the number of guns in civilian hands. People who own these guns usually already use them for competition (which is a tremendous way of training gun skills) and the only difference will be one more paper to file with the local police. The note I'd like to end this on is that after a shooting people always look at means, rarely opportunity, and never motive. To me this was a case of high-caliber fascism, unlocked and unsecured, readily available to an emotionally immature child who then proceeded to use it.

Richard Kim

The discussion on democracy in this episode reminded me a lot of this blogger's article, about what democracy used to mean for Americans: <a href="http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-winnowing-of-american-democracy-few.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-winnowing-of-american-democracy-few.html</a> This envisioning of democracy as an active worldview and way of life helps make sense of the opinion of liberals like John Stuart Mills who were perfectly fine with rejecting the idea of the secret ballot and the one-man-one-vote principle, as it seemed to devalue the worth of the individual who invested much more time into their local community and its governance.

Neil Manich

You guys should really talk to Kathleen Belew about her newish book Bring the War Home, especially in the wake of the Christchurch shooting. She does a deep dive and overview of the American White Power and paramilitary movement in the United States since Vietnam, that the internet is really taking international. Her research was really impressive and she connects a lot of seemingly disparate threads like the militia movement, the KKK, and American foreign policy that most people probably understand at an intuitive level, but it's great to see fully illustrated. And her book really breaks down how the move from centrally managed organizations to seemingly disconnected cells was a strategic move that unfortunately obviously worked. If you guys could manage to get her on I think she'd be a great guest.

D

It’s absurd to claim that congestion pricing in ny is a “regressive” tax, seeing as it’s pretty expensive to have a car in the city in the first place. (Granted much of these efforts are being astroturfed by Uber to crush the yellow-cabs, but that’s a separate matter...)

zaabittimov

Seems like Argentina is like Serbia when it comes to turning a blind eye to foreigners staying in the country. An American friend of mine went to try and get an official visa after having lived in Belgrade for quite some time (over a year) and the cops basically said, why bother with the extra paper work, just leave every 90 days. It’s not technically legal, but they also don’t care and it’s not hard to cross a border and come back. It was extremely weird to see the Christchurch shooter’s fascination with this part of the world. While he was driving to the mosques he can be heard listening to this serbian nationalist song “karadžiću vodi srbe svoje” (Karadžić, lead your Serbs) which was made popular by a meme in the past few years. As someone who knows a lot about ex-Yugoslav wartime music, there was something particularly surreal about hearing this super provincial sounding wartime song from 1993 being played by some dumb Aussie on the other side of the planet. For Americans it would be like watching someone in Somalia get super pumped up on a low-rent Toby Keith or some other patriotic country shit . To make thing weirder, it also seemed to be intercut with some British sounding piccolo marching music. For the record, I didn’t actually watch the full video, but that part in particular got a lot of play around here. The writings on his guns were kind of weird as well. There was a lot of relatively obscure Serbian stuff, but then also Skenderbeg, the national hero of the Albanian people. That would seem like an odd combo to somebody here, but not to someone who thinks of all Europeans as white. These western white nationalists never seem to understand that it doesn’t really work that way here. According to the news here, he only passed through most of the ex-Yugoslav countries, spending only a day or two at most, but did spend some time in Bulgaria and Turkey. In his manifesto, he dedicates an entire chapter to Turkey, and how the Christians will come an reconquer Constantinople etc etc. It just seems stupidly outdated and irrelevant, even by the standards of these morons.

Jack Firman

Spent some time in Australia working and living in Sydney. As a American thought would have so much in common with the local people. There where some things in common with the states I thought. Some nice coastal towns and that feeling the rest of country was a big Texas.

Eric

I lived in Oz in the 80's, when politically ozzies were hostile to Reagan, fairly anti-American, and lefty on lots of issues. However, xenophobia and racism were very openly expressed by regular people, especially against Asians, southern Europeans and people from the middle east, none of whom were considered white. Nothing about current politics in Oz surprises me, it has pretty much always been white power in flavor, only the targets have shifted. And as many good writers have shown for several years now, pretty much everything in the manifesto is very well represented in mainstream political parties/figures in Europe as well as Oz, even NZ, and of course the US, even if the language is more coy.

radiowarnerd

What's odd is that Macedonia in 2016 was very different about immigration. We stayed 90 days and applied for an extension and they said, NO in a ferocious tone of voice. We even brought our landlord to sweet talk them and I was prepared to offer money if that would help, but there was no leeway at all. You wouldn't think Macedonia was such a snooty place, but I think they were panicked about the waves of immigrants passing through.

radiowarnerd

My impression, though, is that in Australia they banned AR type weapons outright and skipped the paperwork stage. Or am I wrong about that?

Jim Vail

You should contact Nick Turse and Black Agenda Report writer on Africa for African analysis.

Sérgio Teixeira da Silva

The shooter didn't ignorantly conflate "whites" - Skanderbeg having been *Christian* is the relevant factor. Pjevaj Bosno!