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

  1. 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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  2. 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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  3. 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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  4. 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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  5. 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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  6. 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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  7. 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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  8. 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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  9. 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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  10. 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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  11. 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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  12. 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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  13. 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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  14. 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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  15. The dictator never accepts amnesty unless his subjects are on his doorstep with weapons.
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  16. 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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  17. Trusting the west to keep its promises beyond a single executive term is one of the classic blunders.
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  18. 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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  19. 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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  20. 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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  21.  @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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  22. 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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  23. 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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  24. 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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  25. Sounds like the VisualPolitik crew gave politicians entirely too much general credit simply for standing with Ukraine.
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  26. 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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  27. 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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  28. 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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  29. 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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  30. 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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  31. 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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  32. 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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  33. 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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  34. 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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  35. 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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  36. 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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  37. 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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  38. The cure looks worse and worse compared to the disease every election cycle.
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  39. 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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  40. 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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  41. 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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  42. 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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  43. 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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  44. 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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  45.  @37wilde  That's very interesting. Thank you for linking that information.
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  46. 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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  47. 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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  48. 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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  49. And now a whole new generation gets to understand the dyspeptic feeling of realpolitik.
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  50. 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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