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

  1. 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.
    1
  2. 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.
    1
  3. 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.
    1
  4. 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.
    1
  5. 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.
    1
  6. 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.
    1
  7. Because non-NATO countries needed another reason not to trust agreements with western nations in the face of local expansionist dictatorships.
    1
  8. 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.
    1
  9. 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.
    1
  10. 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.
    1
  11. 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.
    1
  12. VisualPolitik: "Conflict between Iran and Israel escalates, Ukraine hardest hit."
    1
  13. 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.
    1
  14. 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.
    1
  15. 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.
    1
  16. If there's one thing Maduro needs, it's more resources to waste on further impoverishing Venezuela with his rampant corruption.
    1
  17. 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.
    1
  18. 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.
    1
  19. One government sponsored monopoly vs another. We may not know who the winner is, but the loser is probably the flying public.
    1
  20. 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.
    1
  21. 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.
    1