Comments by "Black Cat Dungeon Master\x27s Familiar" (@blackcatdungeonmastersfami5311) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics" channel.

  1. Immigration of people with very similar culture and genetics from Scotland and England caused huge problems four hundred years ago, Northern Ireland has broken off. It's bizarre how any Irishman can know that but still think the vastly greater modern immigration from mainly Africa is going to be a manageable problem.
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  2.  @AlfaGiuliaQV  Yeah seriously I do. Only ignorant Americans think it's unusual to speak several languages.
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  3.  @Withnail1969  Not only does Zeihan speak no Russian, he wilfully mispronounces the names of famous places and people and even gets different people confused. He has the knack for confidently talking about subjects he knows next to nothing about.
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  4. LOL it's undiluted propaganda. For example claiming Mariupol can only be supplied by road - er no there's a railway there now and onwards up to the front. And he didn't mention Avdivka which is likely to fall in the next couple of months, that's pretty huge.
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  5. LOL yeah maybe Finland could sanction Russian oil and gas, that'll show them.
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  6. Again Zeihan demonstrates he doesn't have a clue about reality, all he looks at is age profiles. France is heading towards civil war. Germany is aging more but third world immigration has turned France into a loosely held together patchwork of enclaves, it's no longer a nation state in the sense of the France which emerged in de Gaulle's time. The French nation will survive but only in isolated enclaves. Most likely the country will break up over the next few decades just as Yugoslavia did. In contrast, although Germany has severe problems with immigration too, the numbers still favour the ethnic Germans. The non European immigrants are mainly concentrated in several big cities which can be isolated if there's a civil war.. The European immigrants in Germany are generally well assimilated.
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  7.  @blafonovision4342  And you think Russia can't retaliate if the US Navy sinks a Russian ship? Are you advocating war against Russia or are you just advocating piracy?
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  8. With a much smaller population Russia trains more engineers than the USA. The claim that Russia is short of engineers is blatant propaganda.
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  9. F16s won't do well against Russian SAMs
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  10.  @thelonerick  LOL The British /US relationship since WWI has seen the UK go from the centre of the world's largest empire and the financial centre of the world to a US satellite. No, this relationship has been great for one side it hasn't been great for the other side.
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  11. Never. Ukraine has served its purpose, to cost the Russians live and equipment regardless of the cost to Ukraine itself. And make tens of billions for the US armaments industry.
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  12. Totally leaving out how the US wouldn't talk to the Russians about the US stationing interception in Eastern Europe. Zeihan is a propagandist, not a neutral commentator. As for the "genocidal warpath", the number of civilians killed in Ukraine is a tiny proportion of the civilians killed in US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria etc.etc.
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  13.  @atapene  I'm not an expert but it's not a secret defence companies get away with charging outrageous prices. It's not just the Russians, the Japanese are able to build modern submarines much cheaper than the US too. It's not just defense, the US government is driven by industry lobbying, big business spends billions buying politicians. Pharma and Wall St are just as bad as defense.
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  14. Watching neutral sources on the war, Russia is now gaining more territory than Ukraine without taking the high losses in infantry that Ukraine has been. Russia just opened a huge offensive in the north. There's no way the Russians would do that if they had any doubts about being able to hold their land corridor to Crimea. Taking Crimea was never going to happen outside of the Western media echo chamber.
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  15.  @brokenaura23  Ukraine is starting to crack. America spent twenty years in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with .. the Taliban
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  16.  @paulholbrook7315  LOL is that how you admit you're wrong?
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  17.  @paulholbrook7315  The Vietnam war lasted more like ten thousand days. And ended with a US withdrawal. Afghanistan was twenty years and ended the same.
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  18.  @Somerandomname1999  Because quantity matters. Obviously. It's like saying why would the US need to buy Patriot missiles from Japan if they can't produce their own (which is happening). The US do produce their own (obviously that's where Patriots are from) but in a major war, ammunition consumption is huge.
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  19.  @sambones1092  Zeihan makes some ridiculous claims for example Scotland is a large energy exporter and its demographics are way healthier than places like the Baltic countries. There are pockets of dire health but that's not typical for Scotland overall.
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  20.  @Whatsupwiththisname  In case you haven't noticed Wagner are pretty good at shooting down attacking aircraft.
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  21.  @markvargus6519  If you think his US politics analysis is bad you're going to love the crap he talks about Russia and Ukraine :)
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  22.  @mtapp113  He's not so much anti-Republican as pro-Washington establishment. The uniparty.
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  23. Zeihan tells blatant lies about a lot of topic. Especially the Ukraine war.
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  24. He also ignored the war NATO started on Serbia to seize territory from Serbia by force - much like what Russia is now doing in Ukraine.
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  25.  @oleskou2436  So what's the point of listening to his blatantly propagandistic opinion at all? If he's far out of date? BTW. The Russians are still using FABs in great number quite successfully. Maybe some get jammed but they're still going to land close to target and whatever can jam something like that is going to have a very local effect.
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  26.  @dw620  Doesn't matter who owns it, it's jobs, exports and a tax base. Same for the oil industry or the wind industry.
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  27.  @yahtyscids194  Here's some examples- near the start of the war he was banging on about how much the Chinese and Russians really hate each other and Russia needs to watch out for a Chinese move into Siberia - it's just ridiculous fantasy. China and Russia have never had stronger relations. He's been claiming for years that the Chinese will lose 500 million to starvation if America cuts their sea lanes, no mention of China now having pretty good rail lines to Russia and the Chinese navy being the second biggest in the world. He's been claiming the Russians are engaged in a "genocidal war" in Ukraine. Where's the evidence? A few small scale atrocities happen in every war. Putin talks about the Ukrainian people being pawns of the West, not an enemy to be destroyed. Millions of Ukrainians support the Russian side. He keeps talking about the Kerch bridge as if 1) it's completely shut down - no, it's back up and running months ago and 2) the Russians have no ships or ports and can't just move stuff by sea. He's contradicting himself there especially because one of his main talking points is how efficient water communications are compared to road and rail. Just a few but you could go on all day. He's only really worth listening to, to know what the CIA propaganda line is. As for Germany, his pessimistic forecasts for Germany are ... exaggerated. Not completely wrong but heavily exaggerated.
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  28.  @jonlittle5032  No, before the invasion. See Jacques Baud, Swiss intel officer who documented it.
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  29.  @ChucksSEADnDEAD  LOL you think Western soldiers never commit suicide? You think Ukrainian morale is better than Russian morale?
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  30.  @Cullaica  So what? It wasn't hard. There was a large Russian army massing on the border. Zelensky had been elected on a peace platform but instead stepped up attacks on Donetsk. Lots of people predicted it would result in a war including Zelensky's best buddy Arestovych - he thought it would result in a Russian collapse and great Ukrainian annexations of Russian territory.
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  31. If you actually fact check Scottish demographics, it's not that bad. Way better than most of Eastern Europe. England's demographics are slightly younger only because of the immigration - and as we see in France that's a way bigger problem than an aging population.
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  32.  @davidmclean357  The main maintenance cost is the tritium decays pretty quickly so needs to be replaced periodically. Not cheap or easy. Fission only weapons aren't such a problem.
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  33.  @wintermute-  People just get annoyed by the blatant propaganda. Bots don't tend to write such relevant comments as what Carlos wrote. Bots tend to write bland generic fan boy comments. And there are plenty such comments here.
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  34.  @elKarlo  People assume Russia will accept negotiations. It's not clear Russia will. There were already negotiations a month into the war. Russia pulled back from Kiev because there was an agreement. Then Kiev cancelled the agreement. Russia will be very reluctant to trust any pledges. The war might go on until there's a complete collapse. Which might well happen this year. In that case, Russia occupies the territory they want and what remains falls into anarchy and probably gets occupied by NATO armies.
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  35. You might as well say infantry are obsolete because they're even more vulnerable than tanks. People have been saying tanks are obsolete for over a hundred years now.
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  36.  @Tree.fiddy.  There's a clue in "all the territory he wants". Putin is basically telling Ukraine to surrender. That's not a sign of weakness. As for glacial progress.. there's a better reason. Russia's in no hurry. Economy is growing, war support is high, casualties are sustainable and down on last year according to Mediazona, Ukraine is gradually weakening, most of energy production is destroyed now. Why would Russia risk an escalation by panicking the NATO with something dramatic?
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  37. Zeihan's take on everything is always to present in the most optimistic terms for America
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  38. FPV drones can't destroy a real tank, the payload is too small.
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  39.  @kmaggs7804  Luckily for the EU, not yet a member :)
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  40.  @meiko_kaji  Here are some good ones History Legends - smart arse executive summaries of particular aspects from time to time Military Summary - factually excellent well sourced in detail analysis, generally twice per day. Feel free to ignore the speculations. Slight pro-Russian bias. Weeb Union - also thoughtful analysis, slight pro-Russian bias. Theti Mapping - irregular detailed updates and good analysis, totally neutral. Defense Politics Asia - regular, detailed updates and analysis In the English speaking Internet, the large majority of channels are strongly pro-Ukrainian most to the point where they're outright propaganda. The above ones are at minimum honest.
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  41.  @chapter4travels  There are good reasons for that, mining some of that stuff is an environmental nightmare. That's why China is the world's biggest supplier, they care less about the environment. But sure you can build mines in North America, Australia whatever, it won't happen overnight though. Could take years to replace Chinese imports.
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  42. And buying back Patriot missiles from Japan because the US is running so low
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  43. The bear got a bloody nose last time but the bear won the fight. Finland ended up smaller and also lost a lot of people.
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  44.  @EyeOfMagnus4E201  Interesting points - I think you're underrating both the Russians and the Ukrainians. Have a look at the size of the professional Finnish army - it's tiny. Sure the American 101 division or British regular infantry or whatever are good soldiers but that's a pretty tiny number of guys. The point is both Ukraine and Russia but especially Ukraine are fighting mainly with conscripts/reservists. The pre-war Ukrainian professional army is gone just like the high quality pre-war British professional army was gone by late 1915. Dead or injured or at best diluted in a much bigger replacement of civilians. In Russia's case most of the guys fighting now are at least volunteers who have to do service anyway and sign on for Ukraine partly from patriotism, partly because the pay is pretty good. But there's plenty of the prewar professionals left too. The regular Russian army hasn't even taken high casualties apart from the VDV maybe. Only the pre war DPR/LPR guys have taken the brutal kind of casualties the Ukrainian professionals have. But the Ukrainian army now is mainly guys who were not soldiers before the war. Obviously some of them will now be battle hardened veterans but a lot don't want to be there at all. The average age is about 43 last I heard. Some are as high as 70. If Finland fought a war with Russia it's going to be the same thing. There'll be a tiny number of high quality well trained professionals but the vast majority of the Finnish army are going to be guys who don't get a choice. Many of whom would rather be with their families or safe overseas. Same for other NATO countries. As for Russian casualties the only reliable source we have is Mediazona who spends a serious effort tracking down obituaries and similar from Russian newspapers and websites. They only found around 40,000 KIA. And look at the chronology of when they are, it's mainly from 2022. Since the Russians got themselves organised their casualties just haven't been that high. The British MOD claims and US gov claims are just propaganda you can ignore just like Russian claims about Ukrainian casualties. I realise this isn't the website where people are going to want to hear Ukraine is getting a kicking but I'm following the fighting for a couple of hours a day and from where I'm sitting it's looking pretty damn one sided nowadays.
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  45.  @debater452  You think military service isn't mandatory in Russia? The point is the size of the populations. In a serious war Russia would have a bigger army than the entire Finnish population. Finnish smack talk about Russia is ridiculous.
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  46.  @bretseattle  This one is more like an American counter revolution. Removing the Jacobins.
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  47. If you think Russia blew this up, ask yourself why Ukraine has opened the upstream sluices.
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  48.  @charlesoleary3066  Yeah he should really be a fantasy novelist!
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  49. Have a look at the Minsk II accords and tell me NATO honestly tried to abide with what NATO countries signed. Even Merkel and Hollande admitted the treaty was not made in good faith.
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  50.  @southtexasprepper1837  Except I'm not claiming that. What you lack is the entire context. You quote the Budapest Memorandum but ignore the long line of broken promises to Russia about NATO expansion. As for invading Crimea in 2014, the background to this is a NATO sponsored violent coup supported by a minority of the population against the wishes of the majority to overthrow the democratically elected president and replace him with extreme nationalists. Answer me honestly, what would the USA do if the Chinese staged a coup in Canada and installed an extremist pro-Chinese government?
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