Comments by "Snack Plissken" (@snackplissken8192) on "VisualPolitik EN" channel.

  1. One of the best things about continuing to advance nuclear reactor technology is that newer generations of reactors require less enriched materials. Not only does this mean less radioactive waste but it means that what would be a spent fuel rod for an older reactor could be a fresh one in a newer one allowing some nuclear waste to be recycled and if we can get reactors to the point that enrichment is entirely unnecessary, we can provide nuclear reactors to countries without providing them the means to create enriched materials for nuclear weapons. One of the rare silver linings of Putin's horrible war is that the industrialized world is finally seeing reason on nuclear power. The sooner we can replace dirty coal and dangerous nuclear reactors from the 60's with much cleaner modern nuclear the better.
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  2. If only mainstream news worked as hard as this channel to be even-handed. Gives you a lot to think about. Great work as always.
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  3. You do have to love the way that governments simply assume that every war will be over in a matter of weeks, despite the fact that you can probably count the times that has happened in modern history on one hand.
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  4. Ukraine can't defend itself without Crimea, and Russia sees it as crucial to its defense also. For Ukraine to give up Crimea, it would need security guarantees from the west, but then it only gave up its Soviet era nuclear weapons in exchange for such promises, which set the stage for Putin annexing Crimea and then invading Kyiv. As things stand, there is no reason for either side to come to the negotiating table.
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  5. I lived in Hawaii during the Japanese property bubble and after it burst. I had always wondered how Japan got to those hundred year mortgages we heard about. This video is a much better explanation than we ever heard stateside when we were trying to figure out how Japanese tourism had completely dried up.
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  6. When you consider that so many of the west's poorer allies have been using armaments made by the same communist countries that they are expecting to have to defend themselves against, it is incredibly valuable for a NATO country to supply less expensive high quality NATO compliant arms to them instead. And if countries like Poland license South Korean technology, they can help fill gaps in NATO supplies if they are not on the front lines of a conflict between east and west since bigger industrial powers like France, Germany, and to a lesser extent the United States have been sending Ukraine their military reserves without ramping up domestic arms manufacturing.
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  7. The biggest problem with fixing the broken financial systems of governments built on decades of promising free borrowed money to people is that nobody is willing to give up on the free borrowed money that they were promised until it's too late.
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  8. Great video. It's crazy to realize how tangled the web of alliances in that part of the world are. It makes a lot more sense why many of the great powers are reluctant to intervene, since they have allies on both sides of the conflict.
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  9. I had wondered why the western supporters of communism had no thoughts about communes being specifically targeted for annihilation.
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  10. I'd like to see a followup video about how power is balanced between the central government and the cantons. I hear a lot about how Switzerland lets its constituent regions govern themselves in a way that hasn't been possible in America since Senators stopped being appointed by the individual states as a check against the encroachment of federal power. In a world where massive nation states are full of regions who want to break away for political, financial, cultural, ethnic, and religious reasons, it seems we may all have something to learn from the Swiss model.
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  11. In the future you should probably not spend the first 3/4 of a video assuming that the audience will just agree that a religious group is evil with vague generalities and wait till you've already lost any chance of convincing people who don't already agree with that sentiment to try to give reasons at the very end. Whoever wrote this episode needs to catch up to the normally high standards of Visual Politic.
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  12. Like your parents always told you, if you can't or won't take care of the ones you already have, you don't get to have any more.
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  13. I had heard that Europe was trying to get regassification online but traditional media has said nothing about how (leading to guesses about spending years building plants in port cities). The conversion of other vessels into floating mobile plants goes a long way to explaining why there is increased faith that the winter will be less catastrophic than experts had been opining all year. Good job finding out the information the press seems to have so little interest in to help explain how the situation is evolving.
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  14. And this was why America had been pursuing a policy of normalizing relations between Israel and a Sunni coalition led by Saudi Arabia and armed by America to contain Iran and limit its ability to foment Shia revolutions across the Middle East.
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  15. Add to the dichotomy of Libya vs North Korea the fact that Ukraine gave up its Soviet Era nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees from the west and has been invaded by Russia twice, and It's not hard to imagine a world where nuclear weapons are considered the only valid deterrent to foreign invasion or forced regime change.
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  16. The more you tighten your grip, Putin, the more buffer-states will slip through your fingers.
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  17. I've seen Americans angry with refugees from the state of Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, or angry with economic migration from California to their states. Race, religion, and culture need not be different for refugees to cause serious social upheaval. Having large groups of people enter a community en masse is traumatic for that community just by itself.
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  18. China's international paranoia makes so much more sense in light of the information in the video. It's very easy in the US to see local decline compared with the information that China launders through the international press and think that Chinese global hegemony is inevitable. With China's coming demographic inversion and systemic issues, it is easier to see how China might see themselves as having a very limited window to make a bid for number one superpower status.
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  19. As a kid, I heard a Soviet joke about a hated new leader who heard about an old peasant woman praying for his success. He goes to the old woman to ask why she isn't rooting for his downfall like everybody else. She tells him that she prayed for his predecessor's predecessor to fall and when he did, his replacement was worse. Then she prayed for his predecessor to fall and when he did his replacement was also worse. She admitted she is praying for the current guy because she's afraid his replacement will be worse still. Don't forget that Putin was the replacement for Boris Yeltsin.
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  20. Sounds like Switzerland is learning the same lesson that Italy did about what happens when you trade your nation's one competitive advantage for EU membership.
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  21. Uncle Sam allowing a country that gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees to be invaded twice while kowtowing to every country developing nuclear weapons sends an unmistakable message to the world.
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  22. I noticed there was no mention of how Chinese Synthetic Opioids have gotten from the Mexican drug cartels to the United States in vastly increased quantity following the pandemic. While it is not the only place where the Fentanyl epidemic needs to be addressed, the reason (beyond potency) why supply is so vast and cheap cannot be ignored in any real attempt to curb its deadly effects.
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  23. When you look at Europe's long history of every kingdom switching sides multiple times a year in various wars, it's more surprising that NATO and the EU are still together at all. Don't forget that many countries switched sides as recently as between WWI, WWII, and the Cold War.
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  24. If Japan's autonomous weapons cause the situations that their science fiction has been predicting for decades, the first couple of countries to get wiped off the face of the earth will probably have it coming. Although, we Americans might find out shortly thereafter that Tokyo has more hard feelings about Hiroshima and Nagasaki than they let on. That said, I'm more worried about the countries that want to seize regional (or international) hegemony through force (i.e. Russia, China, and Iran).
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  25. One might come away with the notion that foreign investors are disinclined to invest money in countries where the government is inclined to seize those investments.
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  26. Regulation was obvious but the interaction of universities and military contractors was something that I've only occasionally heard with respect to Israel. Thanks to this video it makes so much more sense why the US has been such a driver of innovation in the global economy.
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  27. "My successor will gladly pay you tomorrow for my political survival today." - Every politician ever
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  28. Russia knows that the west has limits to the sacrifices they are willing to make to win, and the west keeps forgetting that Russia has never managed to figure out why a Pyrrhic Victory is considered a bad thing. From at least the Napoleonic Wars to the present day, the west has still not come to the understanding that no matter how much Russia may want to look like the west on the outside, who they are on the inside has never changed to match it.
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  29. When has throwing caution to the wind and making massive money-no-object vanity public works for political gain ever turned out to be malinvestment?
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  30. Considering that the only industrialized country that breeds above the replacement rate is Israel and mostly because of the orthodox community, which VisualPolitik takes such a dim view of, it's probably fair to say that nobody has a solution that works to end demographic collapse in wealthy countries. In the industrialized world, only the more right wing communities of orthodox Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, and Mormons have higher birthrates. They view it as a religious imperative and tend to orient their communities towards having women employed in parenting. But these communities also tend to live outside of major metropolitan areas, where rising costs of living make the financial stability necessary for modern parenting increasingly difficult. The video suggests single motherhood as the solution to demographic collapse, but in the communities where single motherhood is most socially acceptable, it tends to increase the relative poverty of women in those communities and decrease social cohesion without having that great of an increase in birth rates. Most of Asia tends to have less equality between men and women than the west, and that definitely does not play well with well-educated and financially independent women who have choices their mothers didn't, but if improving equality between the sexes could improve birth rates, why are the Nordic countries also dying out? As VisualPolitik pointed out in an earlier video, the only place where early evidence suggests that falling infant mortality and rising standards of living have not caused the typical decrease in birth rates is in Africa. Whether this is Religion, Culture, or something else is hard to say. We also do not know that the trends will continue as development increases there. But it would seem that more questions should be asked about why the difference exists.
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  31. Good luck ending poverty and increasing tax revenue by vastly increasing the cost of energy.
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  32. I am glad to see that the writing has gotten more politically neutral for American politics. After Simon left, the tone became far less neutral in the first few US videos and I had considered looking for another channel for global political news.
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  33. World history has shown that leaving a wounded enemy regime to regroup and fight another day consistently leads to the worst possible outcome for the citizens of both countries.
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  34. I had wondered what happened to all the next gen DARPA projects I had heard about my entire childhood. Makes sense that we lost them all to quagmires and sequestration.
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  35. Another excellent video. It's nice to hear, on balance, why use to tactical nuclear weapons might cost Russia more than it would stand to gain. The point of relative yields between tactical nuclear weapons and conventional weapons already in play is a very important point that I've not heard anybody else make.
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  36. Taiwan builds almost all of the world's western-designed advanced microchips. If China takes their chip foundries, they instantly get billions of dollars worth of military R&D that took years to develop. On top of suddenly advancing their military tech, they immediately deny the west the ability to replenish their stockpiles of smart weapons and high-tech replacement parts. Those chips won't just effect the military but every civilian use of advanced chips. You can say goodbye to new phones, cars, computers, appliances, etc for years. Every industrialized country not strongly tied to Washington would have to come under Chinese hegemony to avoid their industries being crippled.
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  37. You guys are doing an increasingly good job of being evenhanded on American politics, congrats. Your points about the rise of cable news and the subsequent republican nationalization of local races via identity platforms are very interesting and something I had not heard before. Another point to consider is the leftward shift of educators and entertainers starting in the 60’s which lead the right to largely abandon education and television and begin focusing on political think tanks and radio. By choosing to compete in different arenas, it is only natural that the amount of common ground between the two parties would shrink. It is interesting to see how the parties have been realigning of late. The “tea party” movement of the last decade was an idealogical shedding of establishment moderates in the republican party which caused many former republicans to join the left and now the “cancel culture” is pushing establishment moderates in the democratic party out and causing many of them to join the republicans. It would be interesting to see in the next decade how both parties platforms change because of this realignment.
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  38. "Science" used to require people to learn about a subject and make observations in the real world. Now, public intellectuals just make abstract mathematical models from their ivory towers and have no interaction with reality. Better yet, as long as they reach the conclusions that their politically well-connected sponsors paid for, their work will be shielded from academic scrutiny. Companies like Philip Morris are far from the only set of deep pockets with agendas that do not coincide with the public good. The practice of laundering bad research through academic journals without legitimate scrutiny will only serve to further topple the public's crumbling faith in our institutions.
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  39. When Trump last threatened to pull American military support from Europeans if they didn't start fulfilling their NATO obligations, what happened? Did Putin seize European territory, or did Europe increase military spending? Biden ran in opposition to Trump's rhetoric about NATO, and then he told Putin that America would not act if Russia only invaded part of Ukraine, which he proceeded to do. Which is scarier, having more of European defense come at the expense of European social spending instead of American social spending, or having an America who says to leave it to them and then waits to follow Europe's lead when Putin prepares to invade? American taxpayers would be thrilled if Europe finally left the nest and became a fully-fledged partner in protecting global trade and national sovereignty from rogue nations.
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  40. Because it's definitely that the military is onmicompetent and incorruptible, and not that the rest of the government is spending most of its time workout entirely outside its realm of competency and without accountability.
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  41. It kinda sounds like a libertarian’s dream.
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  42. Considering how Europe bristles at being subject to the whims of American foreign policy, it would make sense for Europe to realize that their industrial base has been repaired from WWII for generations and build a credible defense industry and military forces. We Americans would love to sell you all your arms and to be the guy with the gun who can blackmail you freely with the deployment of our military, but that regularly cost us billions that most of the country would love to spend on literally anything else. Plus, if we ever lose global hegemony; you will be at the tender mercies of Russia, Iran, or China as your new regional hegemon. Let's not forget that much of Europe was ahead of America in military tech until the end of WWII; and now even tiny Israel develops tech that it sells to other countries, so Europe has no excuse. If Europeans can't compete, they should enter licensing agreements with other countries the way that many Asian arms manufacturers do with their clients so that the selling country gets a big initial purchase and licensing fees and the buying country eventually gets domestic arms manufacturing and R&D that is largely paid for by other countries.
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  43. Either hybrid warfare needs to be considered a hostile military action by any parties or by none of them. Putin would be less able to handle major disruptions of his infrastructure than the west since his country is poorer and its resources are devoted to the war effort.
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  44. Whether it is Hawaii, California, New York, or Alaska, you will find that the Venn Diagram of states whose infrastructure budgets go almost entirely to grift and states with long term one-party rule look less like the Mastercard symbol and more like the Japanese flag.
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  45. Will VisualPolitik rethink its policy of constantly scare-mongering viewers with Russian conquest, among other things, if Trump wins?
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  46. Politicians will realize that socialized medicine and physician assisted suicide can be parlayed into a solution to entitlement spending any day now. It's not like representatives of either party would vote against reckless deficit spending when their party is in power.
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  47. Ask the Greatest Generation how well deterrence works after the aggressors have been allowed to pass multiple red lines. The least expensive strategy for the stronger side; in terms of blood, treasure, and reputation, is to retaliate hard when the other side does something small and threaten to escalate even further if there is a next time. After you've already backed down one or more times, your only way to reestablish deterrence is at vastly greater expense to both sides.
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  48. Visual Politik always falls for Trump's bluffs hook, line, and sinker. His strategy is to play both sides. He tells allies to meet their defense agreements, or he might cut them off, and then he turns around and tells his enemies that he might just start an open war with them. It's the fact that everybody thinks he is volatile enough to do either that makes allies feel unsafe and enemies feel unsure. He might be a paper tiger, but nobody is willing to call his bluff. It certainly works better than letting your enemies think you won't do anything and your allies think you will, and then waiting till conflict has already broken out to provide military aid.
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  49.  @37wilde  That is an interesting point. While it functions in a way that is more consistent with the values of libertarians, the social policies of the people living there are more collectivistic than American libertarians tend to be. But I suppose that is the price of having a system that is responsive to the desires of the population, you have to have the majority to get your policy preferences enacted. Of course, if you chose your municipality based on local political preferences you could probably get pretty close to what you want.
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  50. Every new generation of Israelis has a change of heart about the necessity of making sacrifices for a strong defense when they are faced with the brutal reality that there are tens if not hundreds of millions of people who believe they have no right to even exist, and most of them are their neighbors. Israel isn't a large country. Everybody knows somebody who was murdered by HAMAS. This isn't a partisan issue, the war is being prosecuted by a unity government. Israelis will take up the question of military reductions only once the many Iranian proxies currently attacking them are destroyed. And it will probably be the children born after that who are the first to bring the subject up when they come of age, assuming that they don't see another invasion themselves. It's probably fair to say that none of the writers here have experienced the trauma of finding out that many of their fellow citizens have been murdered by foreign terrorists and/or soldiers and being unable to call their family members to verify if they are alive due to the sheer volume of people desperate to do the same.
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  51. The Conservatives haven't listened to their voters in decades. The Tories have governed no differently than Labour when it comes to hot-button issues like immigration and environmental regulation. Their interminable unwilling Brexit has managed to achieve the worst of both worlds, enraging everybody across the political spectrum. Eventually, people will stop voting against the opposition when voting for their own party does not get them the policies they most want. Long-standing one party rule has a bad habit of insulating parties from the interests of their voters, no matter your political ideology.
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  52. Or rich EU members could just finally pay what they agreed to for NATO and take this entire issue off of the table instead of screaming that the sky is falling because somebody wants them to pay a fractional share. American taxpayers will still foot almost the entire bill for relative world peace and the protection of global commerce either way, so don't expect sympathy for having to split the tip from the people paying for the rest of the meal and the bar tab. If you can't think of anything to say about geopolitics, you could just skip a video instead of remaking this dud over and over and over again.
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  53. Europe should stop mandating intermittent green energy that requires Russian natural gas as a backup and support the development of clean and economical small modular nuclear reactors. There is no point in having electric cars if they are powered by backup generation like filthy lignite coal power as they often are in countries like Germany. Maybe one day battery technology will get to the point where wind and solar can be stored cheaply when they are abundant and used when needed but they also kill endangered birds, beach whales, and cause other environmental harms that nuclear does not. Small modular also does not require enriched uranium and cannot meltdown so it is neither a military nor an environmental hazard the way people think of nuclear tech from the 50s.
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  54. Normally, countries who talk about transitioning away from natural resource exports are ones that have been squirreling away vast sovereign wealth funds and are looking to reinvest some of that money into creating opportunities in other sectors of their economy. The broke guy claiming he's gonna quit his job and strike it rich, however, is probably gonna crash on your couch and ask to borrow money.
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  55. With Putin desperate to hide the fact that ISIS-K were the most likely perpetrators, I would not be surprised if he is hoping to replay his Chechnyan strategy of paying off a terrorist leader to redirect their people's anger against Putin's enemies. It makes more sense to pay dictators to turn enemies into cannon fodder in Ukraine than to divert military assets from Ukraine to open up a second front. But after two decades of American decapitation strikes on Islamist terrorist groups, ISIS-K probably doesn't have a hierarchical leadership structure that would allow Putin to find a Ramzan Kadyrov type to pay to wrangle ISIS cells.
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  56. America won't support Israel destroying Hamas because DC want to ally with Iran. They somehow think the brutal theocratic death cult will create peace in the Middle East, while the Ayatollah can't even create peace in his own oppressed country. This is why Washington openly talks about overthrowing the duly-elected government in Israel and perpetually tries to undermine MBS in Saudi. They want the Sunnis to bow to the Shiites so they can deal with a single Iranian hegemony in the region. It is a mindbogglingly stupid betrayal of America's allies and the Iranian people and the reason why October 7th was allowed to happen in the first place.
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  57. Considering how America let Putin invade Ukraine under three different presidents, only sanctioned Russia for attacking Kyiv after it was clear Ukraine could hold on its own, how they have slow walked military aid to both Ukraine and Israel, how they did nothing when China annexed Hong Kong in contravention of its treaty with the British, and how they handed Afghanistan to the Taliban in the model of the fall of Saigon, Japan has to realize that US security commitments are worth a bucket of warm spit. The political fallout over the deaths of US personnel stationed in Japan would be about the only thing that would draw the US into a conflict between Japan and one of its totalitarian neighbors, then again the US did not act over service members killed in Afghanistan, Americans kidnapped in Palestine, or US sailors killed by Iranian proxies attacking international shipping, so who knows. America is not a paper tiger militarily, but politically is clearly a different story.
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  58. You are claiming California’s surge is due to opening up? You know they closed down before even New York and never actually opened up. California’s surge actually suggests that our anti-covid measures may be less effective than we hoped. Since Simon left this channel seems to be losing the political neutrality and fact-based reporting it used to have.
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  59. I suspect it would be political suicide for a US president of either party to legitimize the Taliban and, besides, kicking the can down the road is what politicians do best.
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  60. The thing is, no country has ever been or will ever be rich enough to bring in impoverished immigrants equal to a significant percentage of their population in a short period of time without lowering the standard of living for the poor in their own society and providing significantly less resources to the immigrants than promised. It is also impossible to integrate vast swaths of people in short periods of time culturally and economically. The humane thing is to bring in only limited numbers of refugees with a fully funded plan for integration that does not divert significant funds from impoverished natives, and to set up temporary programs in poorer countries near the refugees with similar cultures that people will not want to stay in once conditions at home improve. While this means that relatively few refugees will find permanent asylum in wealthy countries and many people will find their new temporary home small improvement over the ones they fled, importing millions of people with no plan is going to lead to civil war. It's even worse when you have a country with ethnic minorities and regions who are already impoverished and who see the new immigrants as competing for the scraps of "charity" that the majority leaves them. This is why you see black Chicago residents demanding immigrants be thrown out and insisting that their Thanksgiving dinners were given to foreigners by white people who treat their fellow Americans worse than outsiders. Resources are limited and people with less are going to be particularly offended by having their share given to strangers, especially by rich people who would never dein to take the strangers in themselves and give their resources to them.
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  61. At least when global superpowers overthrow regimes for their own geopolitical benefit, they usually (at least try to) stick around long enough to ensure a stable puppet government to consolidate their gains. When such things are ostensibly done for humanitarian reasons, no similar commitment generally exists.
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  62. Biden is the only reason why Ukraine didn't attack Russia sooner, as they have been saying they need to do since the beginning. It's the fact that both Russia and Ukraine no longer think Biden is in charge that is why Russia isn't threatening to nuke NATO for allowing Ukraine to attack Russian soil, like they have until now. None of this would have happened in the first place if Biden hadn't allowed Putin to have Nordstream 2 to route oil to Germany without going through Ukraine so he could invade the country without having his oil exports cut off. Trump is the only American president (Republican or Democrat) Putin didn't steal territory under because, right or wrong, Putin thinks Trump might actually do the things he toilet tweets. If you look past the posturing, Trump seems to be in favor of the Henry Kissinger Realpolitik approach to ending the war, and it is pretty clear that neither Russia nor Ukraine have any reason to consider a peace treaty unless America strong arms both sides into it. I hate Russian imperialism as much as the next child of the Cold War, but we should be careful of sitting back and wishing for a total Russian collapse, since that may put nukes in the hands of warlords. If Russian History teaches anything, it's that things can always get worse.
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  63. I suspect both sides of the Atlantic will continue to subsidize their pet monopolies at the expense of taxpayers and the flying public.
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  64. While the reforms go too far to reduce the political power of unelected judges, if any Democracy proposed replacing their own judicial system with the Israeli one, there would be protests in the streets about the death of democracy. Most western countries have some limits on the political questions that judges can decide, and even when judges make unpopular political decisions they can often be overruled by legislative super majorities. Furthermore, judges in other democracies are generally appointed by elected representatives of the people, not by their predecessors. If right wing ultra orthodox judges were appointing their own successors and overruling the will of left wing secular governments and voters, the current system would be considered corrupt and anti-democratic. That being said, proposing that simple majorities be able to overrule courts was a horrible idea that swings the pendulum way too far the other way and Bibi made a big mistake trying to push for radical changes that appear to be entirely political rather than trying to get consensus for more gradual and moderate changes. It's best to look at rules from the perspective of what your political adversaries could do with them when they get into power, rather than what you can do with them while your side is still in control, because what goes around has a tendency to come back around.
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  65. The dictator never accepts amnesty unless his subjects are on his doorstep with weapons.
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  66. America and the EU are happy to fund Ukraine with just enough weapons to not lose, while buying enough Russian energy to keep Moscow's war machine rolling. No political leaders in the west are any more serious about tossing Russia out of Ukraine than they were about preventing Russia from invading in the first place. Every other country with an unratified executive security agreement with the west has got to be sweating bullets.
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  67. Trusting the west to keep its promises beyond a single executive term is one of the classic blunders.
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  68. Playing a musical bed over a clip that already has music at the start of the video was absolutely hideous sounding. Please never do it again.
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  69. History generally shows the corrupt system of power only ends when the dictator needs to wipe out his own power base and switch to a new one to survive.
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  70. This is why no institution should ever decide that a politician is Hitler. There are no limits on the crimes you are justified in committing to stop Hitler. Once an institution has broken the dam to stop a politician by any means necessary, there is no stopping the water till it's all run to the ocean. When the people at the top are praised for calling a politician a threat to the country, that justifies everybody all the way down the chain of command doing the same when they don't like the Commander-in-Chief. Now that it's been proven an effective tool of politics, it's probably going to require the establishment of "mutually assured destruction" to convince politicians that they can no longer use the military as an arm of their political party because politicians of all stripes love any abuse of power that they aren't regularly the victims of.
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  71.  @ArawnOfAnnwn  China has a huge military build up where they are putting missiles on artificial islands all across the pacific causing complaints from India, Japan, the Philippines etc and have been increasing attacks on boats in international waters as well as conflicts on their land borders, particularly in India. They are in a race with India to create a scenario where they can either shut down international shipping or circumvent such a blockade. All that seems rather paranoid given that most of the industrialized world is terrified of having China cut off their supply chains.
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  72. I get the feeling the rest of us can look forward to more decades spent cleaning up after the messes left by French Colonialism.
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  73. Cartel-owned slave labor is cheaper than paying a living wage to underprivileged citizens who are not in the workforce. It's a twofer of disgusting behavior that this channel would not support under any other circumstances.
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  74. The Palestinian state has grown into a convenient forever excuse for local Arab governments who want it as an issue to prove their Islamic bona fides or redirect anger from their own citizens. As such, none of them would benefit from a two-state solution, which is why they have supported voices in Palestine that call for the dissolution of any Jewish state, knowing that Israel can never support such a solution and thus the conflict will exist forever. Many of the countries that used Israel as a convenient scapegoat for their own internal political unrest were willing to make peace with Israel to get access to newfound Israeli oil or defense technologies and to prevent the Iranians from toppling their governments by exporting the Iranian revolution to their Shia populations, but then Washington pivoted to appeasing Iran and attacking the anti-Iranian coalition led by Saudi, forcing those countries to try to make a separate peace with the Iranians under the umbrella of their new Chinese backers, thus threatening to end the normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors. When America angered its Sunni allies by making overtures to Iran, the Chinese pounced so that they can try to replace the US as the guarantor of peace in the Middle East in exchange for oil.
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  75. Sounds like the VisualPolitik crew gave politicians entirely too much general credit simply for standing with Ukraine.
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  76. If access to weapons were the main cause of violent crime, then big blue cities with the most restrictive gun laws would have the lowest violent crime rates and small rural towns with the most legal gun ownership per capita would have the highest. The problem is the disintegration of the social fabric. Old world countries with a strong national identity, shared culture, common religious practice, and homogenous population don't have to work as hard to keep social cohesion as the new world does. Where you do see tension is primarily where old minority groups want out of nation states that don't represent them, or unintegrated migrants want full citizenship. You don't have race riots, violent protests against the government, and crime waves when people have a strong sense of representation, community, and belonging.
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  77. Putting aside other concerns, supplying Ukraine is probably the cheapest way America will ever find to update military doctrine to accommodate modern drone technology, as well as to gain intel for the development of drones and drone countermeasures. When you consider that Abrams tanks cost about 10 million, F-35s cost over 80 million, and aircraft carriers cost around 13 billion each, it's quite the bargain to learn at the Russian's expense.
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  78. Putin has already managed the unthinkable by miraculously driving both Finland and Sweden into the waiting arms of NATO, allowing the west to potentially shut Russia out of the Baltic and the Atlantic. He has also demonstrated the strength of Russia so mightily that he now appears to be turning to America to save him from his Chinese allies who have been robbing him blind and want Russia's only Pacific port returned to them with the rest of the land Russia seized in their "unequal treaties." Even without the questionable possibility of sending Serbia to the EU, I'd say, officially annexing Ukrainian territory that Russia had long ago successfully colonized, has clearly done wonders for history's judgement of Czar Putin. And this was under a US president who couldn't remember that he was not long the vice president and an EU that gave Russia more money than they did Ukraine.
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  79. The big takeaway from Ukraine is that nukes are a great deterrent, and executive agreements with the US are not legally binding. If the US Senate does not ratify a treaty, you are lucky if it lasts till the end of the current presidential administration. Let's not forget that both administrations friendly to Russia (Obama) as well as administrations hostile to Russia (Bush and Biden) allowed Russia to carve up Ukrainian territory in violation of the Budapest Memorandum (which the UK was also party to).
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  80. None of this would have been possible if Biden hadn't made the brilliant strategic move of proving to Russia and Ukraine that nobody is in charge of America. Before Biden's debate and removal from the presidential race, the Russians kept threatening Washington with nuclear escalation to keep Ukraine from launching offensives into Russian claimed territory. Now there is nobody to threaten, and the Ukrainians have finally done what they have been insisting they needed to do from the very beginning. The only thing that could have made Biden more brilliant would have been if he had forced Russia to continue to sell all its oil to Germany through the Nordstream 1 pipeline that runs through Ukraine, so they would never have invaded in the first place. Trump never could have continued his own sanctions on Nordstream 2, and convinced Russia that he might do something crazy if Russia escalated.
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  81. Europe would have to commit to a total ban on buying Russian natural resources, and America would have to actually enforce sanctions against countries like China and India for buying Russian oil in order to impoverish Putin to the point where he would be removed by the military. Furthermore, the west would have to make it clear that any future Russian imperialism would be met with an inability to sell Russian resources in order to ensure free and fair elections last more than one administration. As long as Russia has the oil, minerals, or other goods to keep a leader in power without income and corporate taxes, the people will never be free, and their neighbors will never be safe.
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  82. If China engaged it's navy around Australia you have to wonder if India wouldn't see that as an opportunity. After all, China and India hate each other and have constant border disputes. They are spending a lot of money developing the ability to cut one another off from international trade via the sea but at the end of the day it still takes ships to enforce such a blockade.
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  83. Free speech considerations aside, it's oddly kinda nice to see American legislators gutting somebody else's transnational tech company for a change. It seems it's always the EU doing it to America.
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  84. It might be less a question of priority than a question of what can be accomplished for the resource expenditure. Israel can absolutely beat Hamas. They are vastly more powerful than their adversary and international patience for their self-defense is limited so that conflict will have the quickest resolution with the least expenditure. If Taiwan can be kept out of a war, it is probably the second-cheapest conflict for Washington to achieve its goals in. If America has to fight a proxy war with China over Taiwan, China has vastly more resources and military power than any of America's other geopolitical rivals, so maintaining the status quo in Taiwan is paramount. Ukraine is a bit more tricky, since Russia has the stronger war machine than Ukraine, and it's already a hot war. Washington either has to ramp spending up to give Ukraine the resources to win, threaten to cut support to get Ukraine to the bargaining table, or publically do the first and quietly threaten the second to pressure both sides into a compromise, but Uncle Sam has hedged his bets and has put only limited pressure on Putin to avoid Russian threats of escalation and no pressure on Zelenskyy to avoid giving its allies excuses to moderate their positions on Russia. The administration would probably have an easier time getting the hawks on the right to fight with their populist wing if they seemed to have a plan to end the conflict or if Ukraine was making visible progress. The sad truth is that, right or left, American politicians have a long tradition of declaring any perceived stalemate as an intractable quagmire that must be abandoned when the conflict belongs to a president of the opposing party.
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  85. I wish them all the best, but I suspect that the phrase "curse of natural resources" will play prominently in their future.
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  86. Trump is going to want Ukraine to sign on to a peace agreement without recovering all the territory they have lost to the cowardice of prior US administrations (Bush, Obama, and Biden) but that does not mean that Ukraine will end up in a worse position than they will if the next US president continues to drip feed financial and material support while handcuffing Kyiv strategically. Both Zelenskyy and Putin have backed themselves into a corner and cannot end the war militarily or diplomatically unless the US is willing to make a credible threat of force to end the stalemate. Putin thinking Trump is as crazy as Visual Politik does may be the only thing that that can end the war without millions of additional casualties on both sides. The total collapse of Russia is probably not on the table and if it were, there is a good chance it just leads to more Russian nuclear weapons in the hands of rogue nations. A weakened Russia that can still fend off a starving China may the least problematic outcome for global stability.
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  87. Politicians, like their voters, will never choose to do the hard thing to prevent or reverse a problem. They only consent to fix things once they hit rock bottom, and the pain of fixing it is a lateral move from the current disaster.
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  88. The cure looks worse and worse compared to the disease every election cycle.
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  89. After eight years, it seems Visual Politik has finally decided to take medication for its Trump Derangement Syndrome. The constant hysteria over the man's offhanded comments while ignoring his actual policies has been tiring. The man is a moderate lifelong Democrat whose social positions are in many ways (including gay rights) to the left of 2008 Barack Obama, whose fiscal policies are generally closer to libertarian (outside of Covid spending and tariffs on China), and whose foreign policy is to use negotiations rather than troops to push the American agenda. The right loves him because the political establishment in DC and in the media hates him, and the right hates the establishment and has been trying to express it to politicians for decades. Anybody who has ever read or heard him talk about his book "The Art of the Deal" would know that intolerable initial demands and bluster is his technique for shifting the center line of compromise, not his actual intent. But this channel has been snowed by Trump harder than Kim and Putin because they took his tweets and what the legacy media said about his tweets to be the unvarnished truth. If this channel looks at what he does, it will probably be 60/40 pro Trump.
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  90. When big cities develop perpetual one party rule through policies like district gerrymandering, block voting, and ballot harvesting, the entrenched political elites take all the political power from the voters. Those elites are established interests whose policies are designed to prevent upward social mobility and stifle potential business competitors through complex and confiscatory tax schemes and monopoly favoring regulations. When the policies get Draconian enough, the net taxpayers use their superior resources to vote with their feet, leaving the interest groups and tax beneficiaries behind. Essentially, without electoral competition, politicians slowly eat the goose that lays the golden eggs. Also, as Europeans maybe you don't know that cities have their own executives, laws, police forces, and prosecutors. High crime Red states get most of their crime from blue cities.
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  91. Russia will continue its regression from European country back to feudal mud farm, thanks to Tsar Vladimir. People will look at pictures of Moscow from the 90s the way we look at pictures of Tehran from the 70s.
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  92. All the more reason why it is unforgivable that western leaders refused to support the Iranian people when they risked their lives to demand the end of the evil and oppressive theocratic government who provided the political support, weapons, training, and logistics for October 7th. The massacre never would have happened if the west had supported their demands for free and fair elections. But, western leaders would rather try to buy off a genocidal dictatorship with oil than make friends with the people of a once vibrant democratic country. If Israel frees the people of Iran from their dictator and helps to facilitate legitimate elections, we might actually live to see an era of relative peace between the sons of Abraham. MBS isn't the only leader in the region who knows that the oil rich countries have a limited window to use their wealth to branch out into peaceful trade before new energy technology returns them to poverty.
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  93. The African Catholics are booming for the same reason as the Salafist Muslims, and European and American Catholicism is busting for the same reason as Sufism. In trying to compete with progressive atheism, the latter have lost the vital elements that drive people to actively participate in religious practice and pass those practices on to their children. Having unchanging rituals and rules that bind communities together across time and across the world are integral to religions, providing the faithful with a sense of belonging and purpose that being a two holiday a year religious practitioner does not. "Cultural" religious practice all over the world is dying out, but the traditional brand of the world's religions that Visual Politik so is afraid of is growing because it still provides the connection and meaning that people in cultures across the world have embraced religion for all of human history for. Traditional religions give people a stronger sense of identity, but that identity necessitates differentiating them from other religions or irreligion, and that will necessarily breed tensions. Despite modernity's best efforts to turn us into highly evolved interchangeable widgets, it turns out that we tribal bipedal primates still mostly feel a deep emotional need to be tribal and not free floating citizens of the world.
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  94. Limiting China's access to foreign tech is not a long-term solution if China can freely steal billions of dollars worth of military and industrial research every year. After all, the Soviets were able to keep up surprisingly well with the west through technological theft, and they couldn't safely hack databases from half a world away. That won't get them the manufacturing base, but multi-nationals partnering with Chinese government controlled entities to manufacture in China will. President Xi has made the calculation that he can take full totalitarian control of his country and threaten the world, so long as he can promise his people that they will live better than they did under his predecessors. That kind of pressure can only be applied slowly by fundamentally changing the dynamics of global trade. But that means that people have to be willing to pay more money for products made outside of China, and I'm not sure how much appetite there is for that.
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  95.  @37wilde  That's very interesting. Thank you for linking that information.
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  96. Imagine if a country allowed thieves to leave custody without bail, let them keep what they stole, refused to put out an arrest warrant when they refused to show up for their court date, and paid them to commit the crimes. You really think such a policy would have no effect on crime rates? If Texas ever manages to secede from the union, it won't happen unless or until America has a "great divorce" where red states secede from their blue cities and vice versa because national politicians on both sides are like transatlantic colonial masters who don't know the people they allegedly represent and are unwilling to let them govern themselves. The entire reason America seceded from Britain and created its own Constitution and Bill of Rights was so that individual communities could be allowed to rule themselves by their own cultural standards under the umbrella of common law. If one side can abuse federal power to turn Texas into California, the other side can abuse the same power to turn New York into Florida, and the ones who lose in both scenarios are "We the People."
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  97. I wish them Godspeed, but globally recognized mass protests didn't do Hong Kong or Iran any good. They have to cut Maduro off from oil money. History proves time and again that unless the dictator lacks the money to keep his supporters and protectors happy, lets it be known he is about to purge his supporters, seems about to die without a successor who will keep his supporters, or is overthrown by a superior outside military force, they basically never lose.
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  98. The Budapest Memorandum is a perfect example of the meaninglessness of Executive Agreements with a country that has elected governments. Presidents make agreements that they know will never be ratified by the Senate because the American people will never agree to them. This means they are making bargains that rely on future presidents of the opposition party to honor in the face of certain voter opposition. If the President thinks America would actually honor this agreement, they would send it to the Senate as a Treaty, period. Any agreement that can be overturned by one man is meaningless. International law only binds the US to a signed treaty. If it's not a treaty, it's a scam.
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  99. And now a whole new generation gets to understand the dyspeptic feeling of realpolitik.
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  100. American support of Ukraine is part of a strange realignment in American politics. Many of the institutions the left used to distrust, such as: big corporations, the intelligence community, criminal prosecutors, and the military-industrial complex, are becoming increasingly trusted on the left and distrusted on the right. It may have to do with the left embracing Obama's intersectional coalition and Trump picking up many of the left-behind voters with his turn to populism, or maybe it's fueled by the public perception of whose side these institutions are on, but it is bizarre to watch. Those viewers in multi-party parliamentary systems are probably more used to seeing named factions split off of the ruling or opposition coalition, but it's usually a lot more subtle than this in a two-party system. Either way, political commentators on both sides of the aisle are generally baffled by the reversals.
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  101. The concern with mail in voting is that many states do not update their voter rolls. My state sends 2-3 unsolicited ballots per voter so the post office has millions of ballots which belong to voters who are dead, moved out of state, have changed their names, or who have received another ballot at their current address. If only a fraction of these ballots are intentionally or unintentionally misused that could flip districts and potentially states given how thin the margins of victory are in places. Universal mail in balloting would be great if the government didn’t ignore people sending back ballots and voter registrations with “deceased” and “has not lived here for over 10 years” and instead proactively updated their voter rolls.
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  102. Because Trump accusing Biden of handing Putin a second prisoner exchange win can only mean that Trump plans to surrender Europe to Russia? Could you at least humor the viewers and pretend to have some modicum of objectivity? This makes me wonder if your research team just looks at hysterical comments on social media for ALL your stories. Seriously, do you realize how hard this kind of lazy partisanship makes it for people to promote your channel to people who might otherwise watch it? You do know it is possible to get flack from both the left and the right for being poorly-informed hacks without actually being thoughtful moderates.
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  103. Ukraine certainly seems to think that they only way they can get any of their territory back in a settlement is to have Russian territory to trade for it, and they can only try to take that Russian territory while there isn't a functioning US president for Putin to threaten in order to stop them.
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  104. Now Trudeau can return home to attempt to have a physical fitness regimen with all the benefits of vigorous exercise but all the policies of lethargic leisure.
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  105. Leveraging Venezuela to get a win against Cuba might not be the worst idea in the world. Besides, Trump will probably give Maduro more in lip service than in concessions. For all his talking up of Kim and Putin, he kept up sanctions on them and thwarted their geopolitical aims such as keeping Nordstream 2 dead to keep Putin from invading Ukraine. I think we all benefit from the US achieving its policy goals without putting boots on the ground and flattery mixed with bravado might be the cheapest price we can pay for it.
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  106. If I'm not mistaken, the EU seems to be broadcasting that they intend to cut energy to industry over the winter to prevent shortages from freezing out citizens. I've heard many news sources (probably including VisualPolitik/Economic) reporting that EU-based industries are talking about shutting down plants till spring because of prices and rationing. So, rather than asking about the people of Europe making it through winter; it might be a better question to ask whether EU economies, which are coming out of the covid crash, can wait out LNG infrastructure. I've yet to hear what economists think proposed winter rationing will do to the global supply chain. Might be a good video for the sister channel.
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  107. Because non-NATO countries needed another reason not to trust agreements with western nations in the face of local expansionist dictatorships.
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  108. Ukraine has been saying since the beginning of the war that they need to be able to hit Russian assets inside of Russia in order to win. The only reason they didn't destroy Russia's entire rail system near the border is because Washington knuckled under to Putin. I suspect what has changed now is that neither Ukraine nor Russia thinks there's any point in talking to Biden about changing the length of Ukraine's leash.
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  109. You need absolute control of the military if you expect legislators to surrender their power entirely to the executive, this has been known since at least the days of Julius Caesar.
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  110. You want to know why Israel hasn't cut Iran's oil off? Who has overseen vast increases of Iranian oil sales? Who has intentionally threatened America's alliance with Saudi Arabia? Who has been begging Venezuela for more oil? Who has been dumping the Strategic Oil reserves every time an election comes up? Who illegally withholds aid congress has appropriated for Israel's self-defense? If Israel cuts off Iranian oil, prices will go up, Saudi will sit on their hands and hope for a more favorable administration. A certain somebody will stop shooting down Iranian missiles and block Israel from acquiring replacement missiles for Iron Dome. America easily overmatches Iran, and Israel has clearly demonstrated that they can reach any Iranian leader anytime they want. If America was willing to work with Israel, none of this would ever happen. The Iranian people don't the ayatollah threatening the world with radicalism and death. Nobody in the Middle East wants the Iranian regime to continue. The only people who do are those who want to buy oil from a corrupt tyranny without interruption, even if it leads to future nuclear annihilation.
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  111. With China firing all the leaders of its most celebrated division, it's rocket force, because the vast majority of the money it spent in the last decade on modernization was used for corruption to the point that it found that many of its ICBMs are filled with water rather than rocket fuel and the missiles can't even leave the silos because their hatches have rusted shut, I think it's fair to say that both the major military powers of the east and west are looking more and more like paper tigers. The big question is whether much of the world will try to get nukes because they no longer trust their major allies to protect them from foreign invasion.
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  112. VisualPolitik: "Conflict between Iran and Israel escalates, Ukraine hardest hit."
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  113. China's window of opportunity to expand its empire is quickly closing as they face a future with no young people to send to war, but President Xi recently got a rude awakening (and has been quietly firing military leaders left and right) as he found out that his much vaunted rocket force has also been robbing him blind. Despite all his efforts to modernize his military, he has untold numbers of missiles whose fuel has been replaced with water as the rank and file soldiers have stolen the fuel to cook with. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. China's Beidou GPS system is so bad it tells drivers to ask for directions, and this is the system that their smart weapons will rely on to hit targets and their military will use to navigate to targets with. Ask the Russians what happens when you have to get out and ask the hostile natives for directions. China is nowhere near as powerful as they claim to be, but it's the desperation that makes a cornered animal dangerous, and Xi may just cross his fingers and hope the west is too scared to call his bluff and that is the kind of scenario that runs the risk of turning into a conventional or even a nuclear war.
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  114. Biden already demonstrated that the president can refuse to spend money allocated by congress with impunity. He did that with military aid passed on a bipartisan basis to replenish Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system. Not that Trump, a lifelong New York Democrat, is going to touch Great Society social spending programs, which will turn the middle class and poor against him. Even if you had enough political power to pass constitutional amendments, the only method of paying for government spending that any politician could survive advocating is growth. The only way to actually fix the budget is to sell off vast swaths of government owned property, return most of the federal government's unconstitutional power grabs back to the state and local governments, and restructure and or cut most of the New Deal and Great Society social welfare programs, and the opposition party would control all three branches the very next presidential election to try to roll it back. The best Trump can do is to grow out the tax base, make some regulatory cuts to encourage growth, and slow the growth of government. The voters would have to be afraid of a full governmental collapse to authorize any actual fixes like Javier Meilei is doing. Fears about DOGE are a joke. Politicians already take money from wealthy billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Jeff Bezos, the Koch brothers etc. to push their political goals, not to mention money from foreign countries including the Chinese, Russians, Iranians, and Qataris who have agendas hostile to America. There is already a revolving door between government employees, multinational companies, and advocacy groups funded by the world's richest people. Even if Musk uses DOGE to benefit himself, this is just business as usual in Washington, and one could argue that at least we the press would be looking for him to corruptly benefit himself in a way they won't do with the current entrenched special interests.
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  115. Sure sounds like the European Parliament has way too much power. Divest a good chunk of that power back to the constituent countries, and it will go a long way in curbing the temptation to bribe European MPs.
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  116. If there's one thing Maduro needs, it's more resources to waste on further impoverishing Venezuela with his rampant corruption.
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  117. With its lingering political corruption issues, I have to wonder if India will be able to take advantage of corporate decoupling from China to launch itself into the ranks of the wealthy developed nations. They have a gigantic and fairly well-educated population, but their legal system does not inspire the kind of confidence that many others based on British Common Law do. I'd love to see India reform its government, reduce ethnic tensions, work its way up the value chain, and put a democracy in the international position currently occupied by Communist China. Fingers crossed that it succeeds.
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  118. You can't take people into a country and then be unwilling to force both sides to make some level of compromise to integrate them into that society. France takes their cultural "purity" more seriously than any other first world country. They have to make up "French" words for every concept they borrow from America or any other country. At the same time, they don't want to sully French culture with foreign ideas, they are content to shunt immigrants into ghettos and let them sort themselves out rather than doing the hard work of inculcating them into French culture and ideals. People only get along with the strangers in their midst when they break bread with them and share common interests with them. Keeping strangers outside the mainstream only breeds violent distrust on both sides. If a society isn't willing or able to integrate foreigners, they should not take on the responsibility of hosting them to begin with. It's like adopting a youth whom you don't intend to look after or care about, you will just take away his chance at a happy life and give him somebody new to hate.
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  119. One government sponsored monopoly vs another. We may not know who the winner is, but the loser is probably the flying public.
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  120. If Biden's Administration didn't actually support Amlo's positions on the cartels and immigration, he could have just made excuses like instructing his DOJ to throw a court case or two to keep his predecessor's policies (like the Remain in Mexico Agreement) in place. Trump said he'd build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, but he mostly just repaired existing wall and didn't ask Mexico for a dime, much like his predecessor. Obama, who Biden served as VP under, basically ended up doing that with Bush's Middle East (like drone assassinations) and Immigration Policy (like mass deportations) and Biden himself did that on Trump's China Policy (largely tariffs). Politicians on both the left and the right regularly claim they will do one thing if elected, and then do whatever their advisors tell them will allow them to avoid a disaster that will cripple their party and their own reelection prospects in office.
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  121. I'm glad Visual Politik finally realized that slow-walking just enough weapons to not end the war in Russia's favor is a terrible strategy. The only ones benefitting from the Biden's Vietnam strategy are the world's arms manufacturers, who are using it to develop and test weapon capabilities at the expense of Ukrainian lives. Trump has been saying since the beginning that Ukraine should be given a strong hand to negotiate and end to the war with Russia. Ukraine was never going to get any territory back from Russian control without "crossing red lines" by doing things like attacking Russian infrastructure in Russia or taking Russian territory to trade back for Ukrainian. Having a nuclear power fighting a smaller non-nuclear power with tenuous security agreements was never going to end in a total victory for the later side. It was always going to end in either a victory for the former or a face-saving compromise where both sides are unhappy but have some PR victory they can claim to their supporters. The war needed to be stopped before it began, with heavy sanctions on Russia for amassing troops on the Ukrainian border and the continued prohibition of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. It's Berlin and Washington's fault for assuming Putin would quickly win and deciding to make feckless statements while trying to secure more Russian oil and gas.
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