Comments by "buddermonger2000" (@buddermonger2000) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics" channel.

Political position and reform which is what he avoids deliberately
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@CraigPerry Yeah no not quite. It's literally part 2. It's Government Budget - Tax Revenue. Lower the former or raise the latter you get the same effect.
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@davidcoverdale722 Over medium and long tbh
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Yes boycott the USA in favor of the slave driven economy who wants to invade one of our greatest producers of modern tech.
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I kind of doubt it's just tanks. As of September 7th Ukraine had captured 1500 pieces of vehicles (range of MBTs and SPGs to Supply Trucks). Btw those were visually confirmed so that's a floor. And that was near the start. We're another week in and the logs are starting to catch up. On top of this I can't actually find anything that says 350 tanks were transferred over. 230+ T-72 variants were sent by Poland and other allies along with a batch of PT-91 Twarty which hadn't been disclosed. So it seems highly unlikely that it's gotten to even 300 tanks. Thus, 350 captured tanks is very much higher than 6 months of shipments.
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great power conflict time
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I mean, first off, this is 4 months old so, start with that.
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I mean first off, this is a year and a half old so, let's start with that
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They're already wealthy. But the stagnation has definitely taken its toll
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Can you point the other things?
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@logman72 A: No it actually wasn't. We've gotten numbers of 1500 vehicles visually reported as captured. And around 350 tanks captured. And the offensives aren't even done yet with the forces across the Dniepro about to be encircled. B: They were not "militarized police" and even if they WERE, it does not matter since they still had all of the equipment and stockpiles from the troops who were meant to be only temporarily reinforcing the South and on top of that the Units who were still there and meant to defend against what was meant to be a decently thin line and not a buildup for an offensive. C: He's not "happy" about it beyond the idea of what was considered a threat to the USA starting to no longer be such. And the things which demonstrate that. Unrelated but I'm a libertarian who's realistic about things. War is necessary. War is important. The idea of there being no war is idealistic nonsense that appeals to the idea that we're post-history and thus it's unnecessary bloodshed. It's a state of mind that is the childlike default of "killing bad thus war bad" as well as the cultural trauma from the world wars that the west is still dealing with. Some bloodshed now can prevent more later. Because a lot of times bloodshed cannot be avoided. And the best way to avoid it is to avoid total war with more limited warfare. It's going to become the norm very soon as well. Make sure to watch.
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1:20 Yeah this has never worked as even in other countries with very strong pro-natalist it just doesn't work. It's there, but it's not a cause unfortunately.
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It's in the thousands and while that's several orders of magnitude difference, these videos are very off the cuff and just from his head and so I can think of him saying "millions of people to throw" (which Russia does have), and confusing that for the statement with thousands of vehicles. Or even millions of tons of equipment. While there's genuinely a chance he really does believe that, the statement is so absurd and there are contexts where millions applies and so I'll give benefit of the doubt for now.
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I know it's funny, but he's unironically correct here. At least about the groups that broke. I'm even inclined to believe him regarding the independents who still didn't vote for Trump because there were seriously slim margins and the margins he's breaking down by demographics are honestly pretty large by election standards. Thus completely offsetting the gains by the independents.
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@LRRPFco52 Ultimately, he's looking from a factional point of view. While I'm inclined to believe you, I'm not entirely sure it's true. I think it's not quite the truth. I'm willing to believe unaffiliated voters did swing to Trump because of the conditions on the ground. However, first is that you're actually getting it wrong, and you're discussing the same group as he is. Peter mentioned that the majority of independents are leaning in one direction or another (and there are no registered independents, btw). So he was discussing the group who really doesn't have leanings because they're normies who get buyers remorse without having any real political leanings because they just don't care. They did break for Trump, but i can't tell you how much either direction. Their concentrations could absolutely matter in this case. However, I'd say that the 5 million vote difference between Trump and Kamala isn't actually from them. I think it'd be a much closer race if it was (and it still was a relatively close race). Though of course, the Amish are in fact indicative of the movement of unaffiliated voters. See, Peter's factional analysis is still correct in that most of the factions that traditionally voted Democrat did, in fact, break. Their traditional bases, often lifelong democrats, did all break for Trump in massive numbers. Even the black belt broke for Trump in certain areas. Thus, I'm more inclined to believe that the deciding vote in this election aren't actually from the purely politically unaffiliated, but more likely to be the breaking of the Democrat coalition, which is represented in spirit by Tulsi Gabbard and RFK. That's the group of previously "unaffiliated" voters who I suspect really swung this election.
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@Brian Miller Actually, it kind of is. It's a primarily Russian speaking part of the country, and do remember that the last time Ukraine was independent for longer than 5 years was when it was the Kievan Rus. The Russian empire would eventually take control of the now Western and Central Ukraine back in 1772-1793. From that point on, there was basically a continuum from the western edge of Russia of Ukrainian and Belarusian into Russia proper. Donbass is on the edge of historically western Russia just before the edge of the former Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth at its greatest extent.
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@Brian Miller Actually, all of those are legitimately historical excuses for conquest. Belgium and Canada are also possibly the worst ones to give since Canada is basically America and many areas have identities which align more with the states across the border than a Canadian identity (Canadian national identity is very muted outside of Ontario). Canada is American except Quebec, really. Belgium is also a fake country created as a buffer state between the Dutch and French, which only still exists because of the current norms, basically highlighted by the fact that Brussels governs the EU. Btw the word you're looking for is conquest, not colonization. Colonization implies you're sending your own people into that area. Taking the land from others is conquest. Also, no on Russian borderlands such as the Far East (sparsely populated by anyone at all), it's actually still majority Russian speaking on that borderland because that's the Russian wheat belt. Those who are not Russian speaking are minorities even in the regions where they're most prevalent except in places like the Turkic Republic and the Caucasus. Most of the truly non-Russian populations split off from the Soviet Union but still have Russian speaking populations right around the border area. Now to address the elephant in the room, you have completely missed the very obvious use case which I initially distributed when saying that. They are ethnic Russians. Russian is an ethnicity, and the Russian speaking populations are ethnic Russians. I don't know how I really need to specify that. And of course the Russian state is ideally supposed to be representing the Russian ethnicity. What's worse is that you've accused me as providing justification for the Kremlin despite utter nonsense because I said something ostensibly true and attempted to put things in historical context for you. Of which, I very much need to add, the Soviet borders were not made with ethnicities in mind and were explicitly drawn to screw over any resulting states, which is why there are Russian populations in literally every single succeeding states. And I'm going to reiterate how stupid it is that you didn't realize that it's not just the language, but the ethnicity.
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I understand the issue but frankly they're starting to be tallied the stockpiles and they're really big
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