In this episode of Critical Conditions, Dan Perry and Claire Berlinski argue about whether sanctions work, why South Africa is the exception everyone misuses, and why refusing to do business with China shouldn’t be sold as a tool to save the Uyghurs—even if reducing dependence may still be strategically wise. We also discuss Russia’s sanctions as slow poison aimed at degrading capacity, the moral hazards of virtue-signaling policy, and why Joe Biden’s AI executive order was a sensible start in regulating a technology that could destabilize labor markets and governance.
Topics
Terry Glavin, Mark Carney, and how Canada’s elite and China are mobbed-up
Why sanctions rarely compel reform in closed autocracies (North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba)
Russia: sanctions as capacity degradation, not war-stopping
Supply-chain ethics versus coercive leverage
AI governance: Why the Biden EO was a good (if insufficient) start, and how a sociopathic tech oligarchy has blocked regulation
A brief detour into Moltboo…
