Comments by "Antony Wooster" (@antonywooster6783) on "Q u0026 A: Existential conflict" video.

  1. 21:41 In the West, you could not have such a factory set up and ready to start producing, say, shells, because it would be privately owned. That would mean that the accountants and the shareholders would be complaining that it was non-working capital, tied up in a non-productive way. It would either have to be used for something else or it would have to be written off and scrapped and the factory used for something else or sold to a, preferably, non-competing company. Anyway, idle plant in private industry, is regarded as a waste of capital. This is why the west has too little ammunition and very little chance of making much more any time soon. In addition, I suspect that shells are relatively unprofitable and making state-of-the-art weapons pays many times better. So making shells has been neglected, and the factories that made them have been sold off for office building or some much more profitable activity such as financing car purchases.
    5
  2. I think the Chinese opposition to the Roman Catholic Church goes back a long way. I do not know which Emperor it was, that asked a Cardinal who had been sent to China to negotiate better treatment for RC missionaries than they had been getting: "The head of your Church, the Pope, is a very powerful ruler?" "Yes, he is!" replied the Cardinal, as one might expect. "And in a dispute between the Roman Catholic Church and a local ruler, for I understand that you have churches all over the World, would the followers of your faith side with the Pope or with the local ruler?" I am not sure how the Cardinal tried to wriggle out of saying that the Roman Catholics are morally bound to prefer martyrdom to going against the orders of the Pope, but the upshot was that the Emperor said: "Well, why should I want such an organization of traitors in my domains?"
    4
  3. 3:09 relates to this comment.
    1