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Radio War Nerd #341 — Unforgetting The Korean War, feat. Blowback cohosts Brendan James & Noah Kulwin (Patreon)

Published:
2022-08-06 16:07:53
Imported:
2026-06
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Guests: Brendan James & Noah Kulwin, co-hosts Blowback 

Recorded: August 2, 2022

We talk about the Korean War with the cohosts of the excellent Blowback podcast, who just put out a 10-part series recovering the "forgotten war" history.

Subscribe here to the Blowback podcast and get all 3 seasons: Iraq War, Cuba, Korean War. Follow Brendan & Noah on Twitter.

Total time: 1:59:29

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

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Comments

Maura Willey

just finished s3 yesterday, excited for this

NYCM&AHole

Fucking hell “I’m a little older - I’m 31”. Goddamn kids!! (Grandpa Simpson meme)

Greg

I'm about halfway through BB season 3, it's sooooo good

Ander Pierce

Hmm, I might have to give BB a listen

Brandon

Good episode, will check out BB. One thing I did want to mention and maybe others agree- please do not put audio clips or sound effects as suggested....they are so distracting, straight dialogue is so much better

Blorst of times

Truman kind of sounds like the character “Gil” from The Simpsons.

Cole

Season 2 of the show is great because you get the sense they accidentally pilled themselves on the JFK assassination during their research.

David Andrews

The first two seasons of Blowback were outstanding but so far season three is even better. The combination of research, storytelling, humor and music is unbeatable. I highly recommend this series.

orc

Blowback Season 1 was amazing

CR

Season 4 is obviously Iran 1953

CR

Although given the Years of Lead and Belgian supermarket massacres discussions in previous episodes, Gladio and all of the other stay-behind operations is a close second guess

J P 3

The first season on Iraq was really spectacular. I am old enough to remember the war, but with the passage of nearly 20 years, it's still easy to forget just how insane the whole exercise was. The Cuban revolution series was also outstanding.

xxx

Sound effects and whatnot are a gimmick IMO.

Doug Cartel

Pelosi's official press statement in Taiwan was so banal and boring, but she did mention that taiwanese corporations were wanting to invest in the US. Now, just in the past couple days, Biden signed a bill to make semiconductor production into a domestic industry. Assuming she wasn't just being a senile dipshit worried about trade deals, I wonder if the unneccessary provocation is meant to speed up processor factory construction in the US? That way if china does invade taiwan the US can still produce 7nm processors and all that. Might be too highbrow a plot for her, I don't know. She would need help with that kind of planning, at least.

etienne

what I saw is that Intel is partnering with TSMC to move their highest-technology chips over there in Taiwan, which is a huge deal. On the other hand the onshoring happening is usually the lower-tech chips that form ancilliary hardware such as microcontrollers, memory, disks, stuff like that. I'm really scratching my head as to why Intel would take such a move. Sure, the Taiwanese have become insanely good at printing chips at the highest levels of performance, but aren't they scared of getting taken over by the PLA? It looks like either there's an iron clad warranty already in place by the Pentagon that it won't happen, or it's part of a move to *force* the Pentagon to enforce that warranty. Or it could be just cold balance sheet calculations that Taiwan is gonna ship the goods for cheaper, and the geopolitics don't exist.

etienne

It's kinda hard to discuss chips because there's a pretty big difference between the "legacy" chips using processes that are a decade or so old, and the microprocessors for desktops and smartphones that are pushing the technology forward. A technology that would produce the extreme high-performance desktop and server chips one year would slowly trickle down to microcontrollers a decade later. Ancilliary, low-tech chips is a small margins business and consequently it's been offloaded to asia on a mass scale, and the shortage of those is a big cause of the raise in prices of consumer electronics and cars. Basically the wfh shock made the demand for lower-tech chips explode, and those are a razor-margin industry that manufacturers don't want to invest into new fabs for that because, hey, it's a temporary demand spike, new fabs for this stuff isn't going to be needed when it's up a couple years down the line, or at least according to normal conditions and economics. Top technology server/desktop chips on the other hand, this is an area where Intel has dominated for a decade, with fabs in the US, Ireland and Israel, but these days they're having trouble competing with what AMD and Apple have been designing and contracting to ... Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, which prints most of those in Taiwan. But on the other hand, TSMC is planning on building a fab in the US to print chips for Intel. Intel really doesn't want to give their manufacture to another company, they've always been very proud of being an integrated shop that designs and prints the highest performance chips and sells them at a huge profit margin. But it seems like they've had some issues with the latest advancements and are willing to let TSMC print their high-end chips for a while until they regroup, build a new fab in Arizona, and get back to leading the pack as a vertically integrated manufacturer. Thing is, Intel might not be able to pull it off, and it's possible that they just lose a big chunk of the server market to AMD and enter like, death spiral? The CPU market is in a very interesting place right now. So anyways from what I understand a big part of this bill is aiming at onshoring that lower-tech, low-margin manufacturing, because as we're seeing it's liable to cause problems down the line.

Doug Cartel

That's a lot and idk where to start replying but it would be very funny if AMD defeated intel someday

etienne

it would be tight as hell. fwiw my gameing rig has a ryzen. still holding my breath on ARM servers because adoption is slower than it looked like it would go a few years ago but any day now.

John Brady

One of the huge problems related to US attempts to reshore semiconductor fabs is that the USA literally doesn't have the engineers to run the fabs. And not only does it not have them, its pipeline for training them is hot garbage. If you want to see why, just look at international PISA rankings. China, meanwhile, is training up legions of kids every year with math skills to be top notch engineers (and again, see PISA rankings for the evidence). This is a huge contributor to why China is very rapidly catching up to Taiwan in semiconductor fab technology, while the USA has lost its lead and is falling further and further behind. China can, and is, "throwing people at the problem." They already know what's possible (based on what TSMC does) figuring out how to duplicate it is easy enough if you're willing to have teams of engineers grinding away at solving it. China has the engineers, the USA does not. I'm being flippant saying its "easy enough", its an incredibly hard engineering problem, but any engineering problem (assuming it is possible in known science) is solvable with enough qualified people and enough money, and China is all-in on solving it. And they know with certainty the problem is solvable.

Patrick Link

I wish it were better known that McArthur hated his nickname Dougout Doug

Alec

Ok we need the next episode to talk about the north korean offer to give russia 100k troops for ukraine… what would this even look like!?

Benjamin Cheney

Great and necessary episode that shines light on the truth of Korea. However, some non-Korea asides in the episode should be addressed. In particular, as someone who lives in Taipei (and who doesn’t think Pelosi’s visit was a great idea) I have to point out that most Taiwanese either were deeply mixed or supportive about the visit. The outright pro-unification minority (slightly less in number than the outright pro-independence demographic, which is also tiny) was very noisy and angry and they of course got the cameras on them, but they’re not representative at all of the vast supermajority of the population who just want the status quo and don’t want to be pawns or have their land destroyed (“better red than dead” you could say). I know I’m saying some heretical things and that might get fierce blowback (rim shot) from the "Everything is CIA/NED/Color Revolution" crowd, but this island and its history are much more complex than Western propaganda or Chinese state/nationalist discourse would have you believe. And a few people in the group seem quite excited about the potential destruction of the island and its people, which is pretty vile, especially when they're many thousands of kilometers away, completely safe. Noah and Brendan have done lots of outstanding work and have great integrity, but they should learn a lot more about the “renegade province.” Of course, if Mao had liberated Taiwan from the KMT in 1950 (as he was planning to do before he was interrupted) he would have been greeted as a near-messiah and all of this would be moot. A lot has changed since then, and I’ve gone on long enough but am happy to answer any questions. More than anything else, I want peace. (Never mind, I’ve already announced myself as a running dog, I know)

Benjamin Cheney

Correction- full messiah. Also, Tim Shorrock needs to come back on the show!

a clash of purple

It wouldn't look like anything because it's not true. I'd call it a lie, but I'm not even sure why anyone would make something so prepostorous up on purpose. I think it's a misunderstanding that got picked up because angloids have a completely deranged obsession with North Korea.

a clash of purple

Yeah, but Taiwan, or the ROC, whatever you want to call it, has never been anything more than a pawn between the U.S. and the PRC. No one in China or America cares about the Taiwanese people or what they want. As for Mao receiving a hero's welcome in Taiwan in some alternate history, I doubt it. If Chiang's people had wanted to live under the CCP, they wouldn't have followed him off the mainland in the first place. Personally, I think the whole situation is symptomatic of how nationalism is an evil and cancerous ideology that never leads to anything good. I don't know why communists are so obsessed with the idea that they have to let their movements be hijacked by nationalists and statists in order to receive popular support.

Benjamin Cheney

Very well put! Especially the third paragraph

Boobs123

I don't think it would be wrong to say that online tankie/chapo types really have it in for Taiwan and supporters of its independence movement. They can't bring themselves to admit that anything good has happened in Taiwan, or that the Taiwanese enjoy better lives than on the mainland.

a clash of purple

It's just more of the same attitude I was talking about; Westerners don't see Taiwan as a real place populated by real human beings. Leftists despise it because they think of it just as a proxy for the U.S. empire. It's the same attitude as Americans who hated Cuba because they imagined it to be nothing but a puppet of the Soviet Union. It's funny, there's never nearly enough hate for regimes who actually are just puppets for global empire. Taiwan would still exist if the U.S. vanished tomorrow. A state like Israel or Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, probably could not sustain itself in its current form without constant political and military support from the empire. You know, RWN has interviewed people who were in more physically dangerous situations than Tim Shorrock, but from a purely intellectual standpoint, I feel like he must have the most frustrating existence out of any of their guests. Even moreso than Carl Zha. The angloid press and ruling class are so incredibly and universally condescending and dismissive of Korea, it must be maddening.