Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Count Dankula" channel.

Frankly, anything that makes a big deal about traditional Japanese metalworking is questionable. Traditional Japanese metalworking was all about getting a slightly above average, at Best, quality iron/steel out of absolutely shit tier ore. They did this largely by (near enough to) perfecting techniques that in Europe were displaced by easier, more efficient methods that gave better results but required either better ore or that one first figure out Other technology... that required better iron to begin with. Traditional Japanese metalworking is, to my recollection, Very good at getting decent quality out of scrap metal... but that used to be a job people did profesionally in its own right in Europe, and they were also pretty darn good at it. Basically, there was a time period when Japan was exceptionally technologically advanced relative to the rest of the world... it was basically the mid to late 1900s. Now, you can Usually count on something fancy that was actually made in Japan to have had uncommonly high Quality Control applied to it, ensuring absolutely everything was done Exactly Correctly (for whatever value of 'correctly' was applicable). But you will pay through the Nose for that, and you're paying for the trained expert to have followed the stated method perfectly, not for the method in question to be anything exceptional. Importantly, the things that applies to are generally NOT mass produced in factories! So, yeah, things like this might not automatically a scam, but they're also usually not worth the money.
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The idea of 'freedom of the press' litterally came about in opposition to the habit of certain european rulers of allowing only works they aproved of to be printed, or only their own people to opperate printing presses, and actively confiscating presses from people they disagreed with or disaproved of. The idea that 'journalists' (who worked for newspapers who had their own printing presses) were 'the press' is a much newer one. By analogy, it absolutely SHOULD apply to web hosting, websites and such. Television and radio broadcast is a little more debatable due to technical matters introducing pracitical issues on that front.
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@DoctorWhat210 Charles does have his good points to go with the less pleasing aspects, for all that many like to ignore them. Has some rather impressive achievements to his name, actually.
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'Based on a true story' also generally means 'some people with the same names as some of the characters lived in roughly the right area at roughly the right time... probably.' Some manage more accuracy than that, but it's as likely to be by lucky accident as by design when that happens.
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Realistically, no one sane is ok with that. Willing to put themselves in a situation where it might happen, sure. Ok with it? no.
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Well, to a point. there are reasons why there is 'international law' on the matter. Also, techically speaking, anything that happens on a ship flying a given country's flag is, at least for the most part, covered by the laws of that country. (and we're talking 'officially, according to the documentation' not 'physically has the relevant bit of cloth at the top of a mast at the time'.) So this is essentialy on the order of 'it's not a crime if there aren't any witnesses' ... which isn't entirely incorrect in some regards, but is also very likely to end poorly if acted on.
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There are a number of ways to achieve such things, ranging from Very careful placement and practice ahead of time to simply having an ear piece and someone telling them where things are, etc. Some of the things presented in the video are Very easy to explain (How can you tell someone wearing big dark glasses is looking 'right at' something? You can't. And, importantly, and the reason actually blind people tend to wear them, you can't tell that they're Not), others rather less so if you assume full blindness.
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It generally means 'effectively might as well be blind for any task where the ability to see at least X well is significant enough that we care about it', to my understanding.
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The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior is one of several reasons that a lot of Kiwis don't exactly have a positive opinion of France. Which is kind of amusing given that Technically (by way of integrating their former colonies that didn't get, well, decolonized, into France Proper) it's actually our Nearest Neighbour. Closer than Australia, in fact. Opinions on greenpeace are a bit more... mixed. Though I get the impression most people don't know or care much about what they do other than discouraging whaling (which we tend to take pretty seriously around here given that, among other things, the list of legal stuff Japanese whalers like to ignore includes New Zealand's Oceanic Borders. <_< )
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@-KillaWatt- Difference is that organized crime is Organized. There almost certainly wasn't less crime, just more effort put into keeping it out of sight and minimizing the spill over in day to day opperations. For the average citizen, yeah, so long as the guys in charge of the organized crime know where the lines are and stay inside them (and keep their underlings inside them as well) that's great, it actually works fairly well. And then you get the times when it Doesn't go that way, the people at the top are just that bit less motivated by Long Term profitability and sustainability and a bit more interested in any number of other things that encourage less reasonable behaviour. And then it all goes to shit. Like 'much, Much worse than it would ever be if you have a compitent police force but no gangs'. Because fundamentally, organized crime gangs, at their best, do a lot of the cops' work For them, in some respects more effectively due to not having to follow those pesky laws that are intended to stop those in authority from executing some convenient, but unrelated, random so as to 'be seen to be doing something about the problem' and other similar abuses. Which has it's obvious up sides... and obvious downsides. Which, yeah, if your local legal system, politics, and police between them are sufficiently fucked (the problem, incidentally, is almost universally corruption, rather than ideological affiliation), then well behaved gangs can actually be a step up. Of course, at their Worst, such gangs are indistinguishable from terrorist organizations... and it's a Lot more common for them to be closer to the worst they can be than they are to the best they can be, simply due to a combination of their recruitment pool and how human power structures tend to work once a given organization is allowed to grow past a certain size (that size is 'fairly small, with very limited ability to project influence beyond it's members', just by the by.)
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@Schniedel69 That would be "The United Kingdom Of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". Britain (when not used as a shortening of the above, of course) doesn't even include all of Scotland and Wales. Might not include all of England either, not sure on that one. Definitely doesn't include Northern Ireland. Because Britain is the Island. (and the term 'The British Isles' is sort of a mixed bag when it comes to nationalism, because it is partially derrived from the fact that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (at the time not only Northern Ireland) owned... Basically all of it... but also because it's an archapelago (not sure on the spelling there), and Britain is the largest island within said geographical feature... which so far as I know has no other name.)
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@josiahz21 Funny thing: supposedly the 'wizard' and his cat are based on a historic priest, and the smurfs are based on the deadly sins and various other rather concerning things of similarly unholy nature. ... ... I have no idea if that's actually true or someone just noticed some similar names and decided the overlap was funny, mind you.
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@Alfred5555 English, gramatically, has no gender. It Does, however, inherently mark Sex on a lot of nouns, including on a number that don't actually Have a sex, and things that aren't even alive. The reason this is not gender, in gramatical terms, is that gender is specifically an agreement system, forcing the adjectives and possibly verbs to change to match, which English doesn't do. Importantly, English doesn't actually mark gender in the sense of 'Gender Identity' either, and pretending it does is not only Really Annoying to people who care about language at all, it's also actively counterproductive to the cause of actually improving the lot of transgender people in general. Because ideological radicalisation ruins everything.
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@shamargentle5801 the reality of 'elite' units is that they're the ones who get priority on resources. Their actual compitence is secondary. In well run militaries, generally speaking there's some effort put into ensuring 'elite' and 'competent' actually line up, but historically, in Most armies, the 'elite' units aren't the ones who are best at their job, they're the ones who can be best trusted to turn their guns on the rest of the army rather than the leadership if the two should come into conflict, or the ones wealthy enough to provide their own superior equipment. Though, to be fair, it's rare for elite units to actually be less compitent than their army's average unit, for obvious reasons.
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It would be Antarctic waters south of Australia, probably.
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Ahh, fun. You went from 'very wrong' to 'psychotic evil'. Definitely an improvement.
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If the bounty was in Finnish currency, it was probably less about motivating Soviet troops to do their job, and more about hoping someone on the Finnish side would let their greed (possibly in combination with some degree of cowardice) outweigh their loyalty (and, for that matter, basic common sense and probably pattern recognition as well) and do the job for them.
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@ollikoskiniemi6221 the political compass Test has some substantial issues. The two axis grid is promotes is, none the less, vastly superior to the more common, and utterly useless, single line... mind you, that doesn't mean it's all that good, just that it's not completely useless.
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Definitely encountered it elsewhere from channels that did a very good job of the story. I agree that this is the funniest retelling though.
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Honestly, if he was king he probably couldn't/wouldn't have said half the things in the list.
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Not That crazy when you consider that blowing up a ship in another country's port could quite easily be argued to be an act of war and the general public was, to my understanding, already not too pleased with the nuclear testing in the pacific being a thing in the first place. Moderately impressive though.
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@Rockmih Yeah... That's not just a Europe thing. Where I live, the standard is reasonable force, which in practice is basically non-escalation in most situations (what, precisely, counts as "escalation" can be pretty situational, but the basics are pretty straight forward). And even then, while "defence of self and/or others" is a valid defence, it's an affermitive(sp) defence, where you basically have to go "yes, I did it, here's why it was legal anyway" (though in practice, it's one of those things you only get charged with in the first place if it's very obvious you're in the wrong or the whole situation is a huge mess.) There's no castle doctrine equivalent. You call the cops, and only if the situation escalates to actually being unavoidably dangerous before they get there do you engage in violence yourself. The USA is actually kind of unusual on this front, as such things are generally a Hallmark of states that are unable to actually maintain law and order consistently within their borders and have basically given up.
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@thepoliticalgunnut8018 Nah, it just sticks warning lables pointing you at sound medical advice when the video starts talking about COVID because there are so many dumbarses spreading 'cures' or 'treatments' that actually legitimately, provably, WILL fuck you up... like, you don't even need to be a doctor or anything to realise this, basic understanding of what bleach is and does and Not Being A Complete Moron will do. But there's still people peddling that nonsense. YouTube's a lot less biased than people tend to think. Oh, it has a bias. It has a very strong bias. That bias is towards 'whatever will keep you on Youtube longer to make the advertising numbers go up'. To that end it's recomendation software optimises towards figuring out what your biases and preconceptions are, and reenforcing and radicalising them (well, showing you videos that will). Because That's what gets you to stick around, making comments, watching more videos, and so on... Facebook, Twitter, and such are worse, as they'll do that, but also intentionally throw things from Opposing groups in from time to time, Just to make you Angry... because that also drives 'engagement'... which keeps you around... viewing advertisments (or at least, they can claim you did.) Keep in mind, Youtube has no idea what your biases and preconceptions are, all it knows is that videos with X,Y,Z traits keep you around longer while videos with A,B, and C traits result in you leaving faster. And this is done by bots, who have no idea what those traits even Are, only that they're present. So it recommends you videos with more X, Y, Z, and less A, B, C. Just so happens that for most people, that leads to political radicalisation in various directions. (for the more well adjusted, it leads to 'nothing but cooking videos' or 'all the Vtubers' or things of that nature.) You can train it to not do this, to some extent, mind you. It involves purging your history and then Deliberately watching enough random, completely different things that it gets confused. Your recommended lists will be complete Junk, mind you, but it won't be driving you ever further towards poltical extremes, either.
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Actually reducing consumption wouldn't do a damn thing to harm anyone. Randomly cutting off the supply without doing the work to actually reduce consumption needs First, would, sure, but that's not the same thing at all.
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They definitely do legitimately contribute to some legitimately sensible and helpful stuff in some places... and are apparently complete and utter nutters in others. such fun.
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I'm lead to believe it varies by species. Some have bounced back well, others are still in rather significant trouble (including some of the ones Japanese whalers keep going after last I checked... though that was a while ago now.)
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@ST4X-0N-ST4X You know what's actually Super Likely to kill you (and that the USA is also highly resistant to attempts to do anything about)? Cars. Bad road design, defective license requirements, not taking away people's licenses when they should be (or people driving despite not having a license...though as a side issue: removal of license for things that have Nothing To Do with driving), lack of safe alternatives to driving, bad car design... the list of contributing factors is LONG and the casualty rates are ridiculous... Mind you, it's a problem elsewhere too. Just... Usually less so. If only because the existence of functional public transport systems tends to reduce the number of people who Really Shouldn't Be Driving who do anyway for lack of other options. Note: there's a solid argument in favour of there being a right to freedom of movement, or the classic British 'right of way' (from which we get the term 'give way' (equivalent to American 'yeild'), meaning something along the lines of 'permit the other party to pass') Nothing about that requires car ownership (and, in fact, mass car ownership results in the construction of infrastructure that actively Obstructs the right of way, and ability to move, of those who do Not have a car, rather than infrastructure that actually facilitates Anyone being able to cheaply and easily go places).
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Unfortunately, the treaties about such things allow very limited scientific whaling... and also involve a lot of small pacific islands that are rather poorly off and thus VERY suseptable to bribes (of the 'we'll build this really important infrastructure for you at little or no additional cost if you vote against the latest attempt to get rid of the loopholes we use to hunt whales' sort.). And without getting that sort of things passed (and, frankly, if it did, Odds are good Japan would just withdraw form the agrement unless it involved a lot of other stuff that was very important to them) trying to deal with the whalers in any sensible way rappidly starts causing .... Problems.
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@justinlast2lastharder749 CD ROMS never really entirely took over at all, despite various attempts to make it so or pretend it had already happened, because they weren't actually suitable for the main thing most people used flopy discs for. CDs were great for distributing software, and for distributing and storing and playing music, but their limitations made them decidedly unsuitable for just... random file transfers. DVDs were basically just CD version 2, now good enough for video. Even rewritable CDs and DVDs were worse for the tasks floppy discs were actually used for in every respect except storage space. What actually killed the floppy disc was... the USB Flash 'drive', which actually Was suitable for the jobs floppy discs were mostly used for, while having eliminated basically all of the downsides of the floppy disc. (incidentally, while a 3 1/2" floppy disc could be called a 'disk', it's the only one. Because 'disk' is actually short for 'diskette', a dimunitive of 'disc' derived from the fact that it was so much smaller than its predicesors. no other computer disc is a diskette, and thus no other computer disc is a disk. English also uses the 'disc' spelling for all other contexts where hte word pops up.)
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Not to say they have anything close to a monopoly on the latter, mind you.
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Blowing it up In Someone Else's Harbour could quite easily be considered a terrorist act, however... against the owner of the harbour. Heck, it wouldn't take much stretching to consider it an act of war. ... Fortunately for all concerned, the NZ government of the day was fairly well aware that a war with France wouldn't have gone terribly well. Consider, however, that the population of NZ wasn't terribly keen on the whole "Nuclear testing in the pacific" thing Either.
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... given the sort of idiocy 16 year olds routinely get up to of their own accord... you'd need a Lot more evidence than that to justify claiming that the individual was a plant. Now, law enforcement and the legal system taking Full Advantage of the resulting situation to achieve something they wanted to anyway when the opportunity presented itself? sure. A plant? Decidedly less likely. To much risk of it blowing up in their faces, Badly, if it leaked.
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@TheCynicalAutist The vast majority of significant issues were fixed or otherwise no longer relevant before the media even heard of it. I mean, it COULD have caused some major issues if the people in charge of certain critical systems had decided to be idiots, which does happen from time to time, but... they didn't, so it was fine.
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@ShrexyGuy More than Guy Fawks's crew had, at least. Keep in mind, it's not so much the idiot politicians you have to worry about. Other aspects of 'the government' are generally much more compitent (if not always in a direction one might like.)
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Last I had heard people were quite happy with American nuclear weapons staying the hell away (well, nuclear weapons in general. Enemy nukes in particular, for obvious reasons :P), but general opposition to the very idea of considering nuclear power plants as an Option had substantually reduced. Also amusing: The nuclear free policy becoming a Thing was mostly an accident of miscommunication... and even then it Initially only banned nuclear Weapons, and may have put some restrictions on precisely where nuclear powered ships could or could not dock (but, of course, the USA wasn't going to reveal which ships did and didn't have nuclear weapons and/or powerplants, so the result was just 'no American ships at all'.) Of course, events then proceeded as they did.
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@momatotsosrorudodi That's... silly. Communisim in it's 'true' form is a vague utopia. Socialism in its 'true' form is just co-ops plus or minus various government safety nets (didn't even start out as an ideology, just solutions to specific issues that had come about as a result of capitalism and the industrial revolution). Communism as implemented by various 'Communist' states is ... authoritarianism with a side of central planning... And to be fair, the 'central planning' part has it's place in certain matters when implemented competently... but much like the free market it has Major Problems when applied to things it Really Shouldn't Be... and when you are ideologically incapable of actually using the right tool for the right job, well... it goes poorly. Like.... you can make a positive argument for most of the things 'communists' Claim to want to do... once you sanity check the specifics for compliance with reality... but... really. The one thing communist governments did well (when they managed to put competent people in charge of things) was speed run the industrial revolution stage of things while dodging some of its pitfalls (and falling even harder into others, in some cases, mind you).... and having done that they promptly.... stalled out until and unless they implemented reforms that amounted to decentralising control of most things. Which would be why China isn't actually communist in the slightest (beyond the various aesthetic trappings) anymore by has largely reverted to how the old Chinese Empire used to do things administratively and a mostly fairly western model for economic matters. That said, I'd give you good odds that if you actually analised most of the capitalist sides arguments they'd consist of little beyond bullshit propaganda that didn't hold up to reality Either. Because as ideologies go they're both pretty shit. Various subsystems advocated for by proponents of both are quite useful when properly applied to the correct things, but neither system is any way to run a government, a country... or even an economy, really. There's a reason why basically everyone actually runs what is termed a 'mixed' economy these days, and most of the more livable places run something that's a Lot closer to the middle than either end.
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@peterhoulihan9766 More significantly, those industries where it actually had a chance to cause problems beyond 'ah, yes, need to correct some paperwork' had noticed and fixed it years before the media picked up on the issue.
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@jusss31 I suspect there are other candidates for replacement that would be subject to rather less debate from the sort of people whose opinions are actually worth anything, somehow. From what little I remember of who appears on American currency, anyway. Of course, American money in general is long overdue for an overhaul, it rates very poorly on almost every metric so far as 'items used as currency' go (that's independent of the USD's value and usefulness as a currency, mind you.) I mean, it still beats 'rocks too large to move, several of which are underwater' and a few other similarly impracticle alternatives, but as actually practical options go... it's pretty bad.
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Well... if we're going to be honest, opposition to Very Careful implementation of nuclear Power has reduced a LOT. But you're right about the rest of it.
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... You know what the Greatest Argument in favour of regulation and restriction of gun ownership in most of the world is? The absolute Shit Show that is the USA's handling of firearms. Note that there are other countries with similarly limited restrictions on the ownership of firearms that have no such problems. The reasons are varied, but mostly amount to cultural factors that do not apply in most other countries, and bringing them about would involve rejecting current cultural elements that the locals quite like... so... fire arms regulations it is!
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There's a rather distinct difference: Piracy explicitly involves killing people, stealing cargo, or hijacking vessels, to my understanding. Then there's various rules about navigation, safety, and such, the violation of which may be some sort of crime. Then there's just being an obstructive pain in the arse... and so long as you're not endangering anyone other than maybe yourself... well, your right to protest isn't exactly protected, but if the other ship starts taking potshots at you... technically, if anyone's engaging in piracy, it's probably Them (in reality they're probably doing something more along the lines of 'reckless endangerment' or something.). It gets even more fun when you consider that, in some places, the ships they're 'protesting' are technically poaching, or only dodging such a charge on a technicality. (seriously, the only reason Japanese whaling ships in NZ waters aren't just sunk out of hand is... well, ok, because the people making the decisions are sane and don't want a war with Japan. But the general public sentiment is (or at least certainly was last I heard) that if that weren't an issue then the navy patroling for and sinking whalers and other poachers on sight would be entirely right and correct. Not to say they don't patrol for them now, but short range boats with an MG or two and a loud hailer are rather less heavy on 'actually getting the message across' than something with an actual gun putting an acutal hole in ship getting up to such nonsense, ya know?).
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