Youtube comments of Snack Plissken (@snackplissken8192).

  1. When you have to rebel against parents who change their views more often than they change the dog's water filter.
    2200
  2. If the theories are true that Shuten Doji and many other famous Oni were actually ethnic and religious minorities who were demoted to monstrous subhumans in the retelling, it makes Minamoto no Raikō's inability to live with himself even more poignant.
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  3. Who could have imagined that reorienting a children's entertainment company to aim at single adults in their thirties and forties could go so wrong?
    746
  4. As one of the many people who read the books because of the Witcher games, I would say that while Yennifer mostly exists to compare and contrast with Geralt though the Witcher Cycle itself becomes less about Geralt and more about Ciri as the story progresses. If they had stayed true to the source material, they would have had a story that ultimately focused on a young woman going from being a McGuffin to the protagonist as the story progresses. Ciri is prophesized to have incredibly powerful offspring, and that is the only thing about her that most characters in the story care about. Geralt and Yennifer both resent the fact that they have been made sterile, and both eventually become surrogate parents to Ciri and ultimately teach her that relationships don't have to be cynically transactional, while also giving her the strength to become the active master of her own destiny instead of a passive victim of it. The books already had a strong message about female empowerment, but since they did not emasculate the men, the show writers had to completely abandon them. Also, can I say, I really hate what the show did to Ciri's grandmother, Calanthe. In trying to make the freakin' "Lion of Cintra" more of a "girl boss" they somehow managed to make the most feared and respected ruler in the entire book series look like a weak and incompetent sop to feminists.
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  5. 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.
    363
  6. I always got the impression that Pilot's only real interest with Jesus was whether he had a claim of secular authority in Roman occupied territory, given how he was done once he heard that Jesus' kingdom was not of this world. It seemed to me that Pilot was probably sick and tired of hearing religious disputes that were couched as threats to the empire, and he wanted to cut to the chase on whether this was religious leaders trying to get him to do their dirty work for them. The way he tried to release Jesus and eventually dumped the responsibility for his death back on the religious leaders suggests this is a reasonable take.
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  7. 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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  8. 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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  9. The fact that totalitarian and profligate governments are the most eager to move to digital currencies should be concerning to all us little people.
    148
  10. 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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  11. I love how a sketch grew into a whole story arc.
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  12. This is what you get when the leadership of mainstream parties ignore issues that increasingly frustrate voters. If they had taken anti immigration sentiment seriously, voters would not have had to turn to AfD to demonstrate their anger. As AfD continues to grow, they will either be forced to adopt more serious policies to succeed, or their failure will provide an opportunity for another party to adopt the popular policies of their party. If neither happen, it will lead to protests and potential violence as the people become increasingly convinced that their demands will not be addressed through the democratic process and that will be bad for everybody.
    89
  13. It certainly has nothing to do with generations of isolating protectionism, causing many French industries to be about as internationally competitive as Hawaiian birds.
    86
  14. 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.
    75
  15. 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.
    67
  16. It's important to point out that Mao intentionally murdered every educated professional person who couldn't manage to escape China. Mao didn't even let chefs live. My grandfather had to get chefs from Taiwan for his US-based restaurant because there was nobody left in the part of China he grew up in who could cook restaurant quality Chinese food in those days. If Mao didn't even spare chefs, you can guarantee there were no metallurgists left to make the great leap headfirst into a furnace work. Mao murdered his way into his problems and then tried to murder his way out of them. Tens of millions of people were tortured, starved, and executed in one man's quest for power. It's horrible that many people in China no longer know of the atrocities Mao committed on their families and want the return of a Mao-like leader, because that will only lead to more misery and death for Chinese people.
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  17. I always figured the bicyclists in my neighborhood were just figuratively Satan. Now I know better.
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  18. My sister had a friend who learned to drive in rural Texas, did all her practice on the family farm, and took her driver's test in a cow field. The friend drove just like these Chinese drivers. My sister was forced to drive on actual roads with my old man for two years with her learner's permit, so she worked most of her fears and problems out before she could legally drive solo. Stringent Driver's License testing and schools offering drivers training courses on actual roads in vehicles with secondary controls in the passenger's seat for instructors are needed.
    63
  19. 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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  20. 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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  21. I had wondered why the western supporters of communism had no thoughts about communes being specifically targeted for annihilation.
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  22. If memory serves, the shale producers were saying that you can't heavily throttle production or temporarily stop it; that entire operations would have to be permanently shut down if OPEC tanked the prices for too long. The problem, it would seem, is that ramping production up requires years of planning and millions of dollars of infrastructure investment so there's really no way to just boost production till the prices dip back to 2019 levels. The argument would seem to be that you either have to bet your future on increasing oil demand being here to stay or sit on your money betting that politician's new-found love for oil will be short-lived.
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  23. The west tends to look at the Marshall Plan and assume it will work anywhere, but its modern equivalents have been a failure. After WWII, we were giving money to countries like Japan and Germany that already were advanced and prosperous money to rebuild to keep first world countries in the first world, rather than giving third world countries money to keep them from making the lateral move into the second world. Even countries that want to use foreign aid to advance their economies tend to have issues with perverse incentives created by aid programs. Money gained by useful trade causes more industry and builds interdependence, whereas money gained by gaming western politicians causes more corruption and builds resentment. Teaching a man to beg is never going to end the same as teaching him to fish.
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  24. 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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  25. It does make a difference when China has made no secret of its desire to get revenge for WWII, and America has made no secret of its love for nearly all things Japanese.
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  26. Europe: "We're happy to trade freely with you, so long as you adopt the most expensive rules that any of our countries saddle themselves with and that your trade goods never threaten to compete with our domestic industries."
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  27. Google long ago changed their motto from "Do no evil" to "No, do evil."
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  28. It's good to know that America isn't always the one on the receiving end of complex and devastating cyberattacks.
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  29. Considering that the Imperial Japanese labeled people who didn't worship the emperor as "dirt-spiders" and "woman-spiders" (from whom the Tsuchigumo and Jorogumo legends come) it would not be surprising if people in India referred to a disfavored group as "ants" confusing a hands-off historian like Herodotus.
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  30. 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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  31. 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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  32. 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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  33. Boeing gives me a warm feeling about twenty-hour road trips.
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  34. 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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  35. 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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  36. As somebody who was a dirt poor high school student in a city with good public transportation, I would regularly bum rides or pay for gas when I had already sunk the cost for an unlimited bus pass to avoid spending more than 50% longer to get to a destination because of travel time to/from and wait time for a bus, so this video makes a lot of sense to me.
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  37. Don't demand your citizens make more people when you so casually throw away the lives of the ones they've already given you.
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  38. The more you tighten your grip, Putin, the more buffer-states will slip through your fingers.
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  39. Sounds like Uncle Sam might benefit from allowing all his enemies to buy Chinese arms.
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  40. The biggest question going forward is whether companies will believe that tying up more money in increasing refinery capacity is a better gamble than spending it on migrating to clean energy. If refiners still believe that oil and natural gas is a doomed industry than demand will only increase outstripping supply of refinery capacity until such time as clean energy can replace it, which could be a long and expensive proposition for consumers. It would, after all, be an unjustifiable waste of people's pension plans to invest heavily in demand today that will be gone by the time that investment comes online.
    19
  41. 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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  42. I've heard/seen a lot of good explanations of how banking and fractional reserve works. This is one of the best ones. It is the first one I have seen that explains how extra money would come into existence even without a banking system per se because of the idea of future money.
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  43. 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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  44. Since printing money does not increase wealth, but just increases the amount of money the existing wealth is spread out over, it robs monetary savings and allows those who know how much the money is devalued to rob the people who have not yet figured it out.
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  45. 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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  46. 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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  47. Great video. I had not thought of the effects of foreign capital on currencies in countries with the curse of natural resources but it makes sense. One has to wonder if universal basic income might similarly reduce the reliance of politicians on tax revenue from the average tax-payer and further shift resources and policy preferences to the cash cows and their politically connected owners. For most of us, one of the worst possible policy outcomes is a Cyberpunk style future where a handful or oligarchs control everything and the average person is completely marginalized.
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  48. Losing twelve children, spending eleven years in war, dealing with the Antonine Plague, betrayal, and financial difficulties when you never wanted to be in charge does weigh heavy on a man who sold all the palace furniture instead of robbing the poor to balance the budget.
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  49. 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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  50. Very interesting video. In America we tend to either suggest that the recipient country is too corrupt or the donating country is too stingy but nobody does follow up to see if the aid structure might be doing more harm than good. I'd love to hear more about how NGOs can learn from past mistakes to maximize the benefits of aid money.
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  51. Increase baseline spending to appease interest groups and hope for an economic miracle to cover the costs? Sounds about right.
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  52. For a film done soup to nuts in a few months by a studio that has either distributed or backed existing projects before and couldn't get many professional actors to agree to star in, it's a lot better than you'd expect. It definitely could have used more time to cook, but it's serviceable as a sports comedy in the vein of Dodgeball. The meanest jokes come at the expense of Jeremy (Rob), Matt (Kris), and the Crane and Company guys (Jake, Blaine, and David) who are most of the main cast, and it's the "Lady Ballers" and the reporter who pushes them who are the villains of the film so it does not come off as mean as the movie's tagline suggests. Despite that, the ending is surprisingly heartwarming. It will probably take a few years of experience before DW+ hits their stride, but they are betting the farm on building a platform that will attract creators whose projects are unpalatable to the major studios and that large swaths of the public want badly enough to excuse less than Hollywood level polish. If it encourages more small studios to make genres of film audiences want with smaller and less risky budgets, it might help to convince Hollywood to leave their rut of the "safe" budget-busting blockbuster sequel flops that Disney and Warner Brothers keep pumping out.
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  53. "Write what you know." Brilliant.
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  54. Adaptation is how we stopped acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer. It's infinitely less cruel to the world's poor than economic abstinence.
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  55. You see, the reason why the promise of weight loss by eating sugar and lying around failed is because you trusted the wrong person to implement it.
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  56. 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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  57. 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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  58. 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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  59. 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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  60. My favorite image of Jesus is the "Chinesus" one where he just looks like Confucius. It's a perfect reminder if the fact that every culture depicts important people from the past as contemporary archetypes of their own culture. Even we "more evolved modern people" do this. Why else do you think we work so hard to paint so many famous people from the past as members of modern "it" groups rather than taking the time to show audiences historical context. The art of any time and place is more a reflection of contemporary beliefs, controversies, and values than objective truth because seeing things outside our own context is work. Even in an era when we unprecedented access to more objective historical scholarship, we are hardly better than our ancestors when it comes to throwing that objectivity out the window to use history as modern social commentary. Because of that; I enjoy those, like metatron, who research to try to find something closer to the original story. When you learn more about the original context, the history can come alive just as well as any modern interpretation, and is broadens your understanding of humanity as well.
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  61. 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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  62. "My successor will gladly pay you tomorrow for my political survival today." - Every politician ever
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  63. Also consider that northern regions generally built cultures around scarcity of resources, which caused wealth to be more strongly tied to ingenuity and hard work to make new resources rather than just corralling existing resources. The "Curse of Natural Resources" puts the resources primarily in the hands of those who can take rather than those who can make, and taker economies are always weaker than maker economies, since economics is not a zero-sum game.
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  64. 2016's Shin Godzilla was pretty great also. While it does not have giant robots, it succeeds at the modern Kaiju homage film idea that Pacific Rim tried for, but without falling into camp. Also, hearing the composer for Shin Seiki Evangelion, Shiro Sagisu, reprise his epic "Decisive Battle" theme in a Godzilla movie was a great callback since both stories involve high pressure situations where the coordination of millions of people are used to fight a hopeless battle against giant monsters with godlike power.
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  65. 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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  66. As the percentage of the population collecting benefits becomes a larger percentage of the voting public relative to the percentage of the population paying for the benefits it becomes harder and harder to convince voters to vote for fiscal balance. Safety nets like the European Bank and the International Monetary Fund further disincentivise politicians against angering constituents in order to take steps necessary to prevent problems during another politician's term of office by insuring them that somebody else will have to fix it later. Pensions seem to be something that can only be fixed when voters can see the end is nigh and that nobody else will save them.
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  67. So interesting to hear about the Japanese situation from a news source that does not have a domestic political agenda they are trying to push with the story. Keep up the good work.
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  68. It's interesting since it seems that securitization is the framework by which non democratic nations now justify their aggressive acts as well. It could just be that people always use the popular justifications of the day to convince themselves that they are the good guys. But it is worth asking if we (as a global human society) have changed things for the better or worse with our modern security notions or whether we are just doing the same thing we have always done; namely telling ourselves that the other guy had it coming.
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  69. The logo with the stick man doing a squat inside a house is just too good. Props to the art team.
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  70. 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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  71. 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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  72. Good luck ending poverty and increasing tax revenue by vastly increasing the cost of energy.
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  73. This one probably won't be stuck in my head for decades like the original, but it's pretty good for a parody song.
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  74. Another major contributing factor to both the economic stagnation and the inability to reform the work culture is the Zaibatsu system. The Zaibatsus are so big that if they collapse, they will take vast swaths of the Japanese economy with them. This means that politicians and financial institutions are blackmailed into keeping them afloat, no matter how poorly run they are. This prevents the business cycle from weeding out business leaders, bad business practices, and bad businesses in general. This also means that there are a lot of incentives to create regulations that throttle the entry of small startups, starve them of capital, or to force them to join an existing conglomerate. If foreign investment goes right into the Zaibatsus then nothing will change, but I can't imagine Japan allowing foreign companies to get around the rules that have stagnated their domestic industries. But what incentive structure would cause Japanese politicians to risk the collapse of domestic industry in order to let zombie companies die and force painful reforms whose benefits won't be felt in the next election cycle or two?
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  75. 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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  76. WWII is another excellent example of the problem of apparent national strength. Not unlike two deer looking at each other's antlers before one backs down, nations look at their rival's military might to determine who would win in a fight before engaging in aggression. But when democracies have small military footprints relative to their industrial capacity and national willingness to fight, it gives nations with less capacity the idea that they could grab quick territorial concessions from said democracy. When quick initial victories lead to the other side gearing up for long term retaliation, casualties and costs mount up vastly higher than anybody would have predicted. Nobody wants to spend resources on war they don't intend to wage but just like any other animals, humans generally don't pick fights with rivals whose arsenals are equal to or larger than their own. The problem is looking like a genuinely unappealing target while trying to minimize the material costs and moral hazards involved with powerful militaries.
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  77. New technology requires massive amounts of money to develop. There are only two ways this happens; either governments pouring millions of taxpayer dollars into military advantages or millionaires pouring their own money into business advantages.
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  78. 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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  79. Great video. It is proof that you don't have to be a Pollyanna to distrust the data that Moscow chooses to publish. I'm glad to hear another voice pointing out that GDP is an easy statistic to cheat. Most outlets will never admit that governments can just deficit spend their way into "prosperity" by a measure of GDP alone. The Chinese have been doing it to hide slowing economic growth for decades, and most democracies play that game too. I'd love to see a breakdown of Russian trade balances, relative prices of and demand for foreign made capital such as industrial machinery, cost and demand changes of raw material imports, and a lot of other data that Russia is almost certainly blocking. But, much like train loads of cremation urns in Wuhan, there are probably secondary statistics that can suggest how things are actually going in Russia. Russia seems poised to keep its military production high enough to keep a hold of Ukrainian territory (at least for now), but will Gen Z Russians live with vague memories of how their country used to be rich and respected? That is a very different question.
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  80. Because having large concentrations of people in general couldn't possibly have anything to do with giving cities a greater pool of human capital?
    4
  81. Europe has babied their industries into uncompetitiveness with protectionist regulations since the end of WWII. Europe won't let the Americans compete with their native industries on an even field, so European companies can't compete with any free markets. The only way this will change is if Europe is willing to let their sub-par companies do bankrupt and provide a more favorable infrastructural and regulatory environment for new companies to replace them. But no government (including in America, Japan, or Korea) would willingly ever let a large company with many workers and lobbyists go bankrupt just because they waste the nation's resources being mediocre. Europe won't change until the cost of their broken system finally exceeds the cost of fixing it, and by then they will be generations behind.
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  82. When communists ask "but did you die?" they aren't being sarcastic, they are looking to improve their population control metrics.
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  83. 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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  84. 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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  85. 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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  86. I just love the fact that they are named after the downstairs toupee.
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  87. Like a dude, American GPS tells you to make a panic turn through somebody's front lawn. Like a chick, Chinese GPS tells you to pull over and ask the next rando you meet for directions.
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  88. At this point, even the fans are saying, "doctor, who?"
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  89. Male chauvinists everywhere will be thrilled to find these new allies in denying the existence of women who didn't fit twentieth century stereotypes of women.
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  90. Give a man a fish, and he will be fed for a day, teach a man to fish, and he will be fed for a lifetime. Give everybody a daily voucher for free fish, and you will just have more people demanding fewer fish. The problem is the breakdown of family structures and a lack of financial literacy. While the government could conceivable fix the latter by changing the priorities of the educational system, the former is generally harmed by the structure of government redistribution programs. People generally learn financial literacy from intact families who model the virtues of delayed gratification, without that reinforcement, it takes a lot more motivation to learn. The very motivation that well-meaning government programs tend to strip people of, particularly when benefits cut off the moment a recipient tries to take the first step to improve their lot, like getting an entry level job.
    3
  91. While I can't speak specifically for the green politicians in Europe, I know ones in America have been caught on hot mics saying the quiet part out loud, that they want to replace all privately owned vehicles with public transportation. I wouldn't be surprised if a few continental greens are also distressed that they have to build cities around the notion that the hoi polloi can go wherever they want whenever they want without so much as a "by your leave." Even if Chinese vehicles of questionable reliability take over the EV market, I'm sure politicians will ensure that the rich and well-connected will still be able to charge their EVs during prime hours on stressed electric grids, even as the poors are taxed and fined out of the private vehicle market entirely.
    3
  92. 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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  93. "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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  94. The American founding fathers would disagree with the notion that Somali pirates are a new phenomenon, though it is interesting to know what caused it to become the singular most talked about piece of international news for a number of years.
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  95. You know who else makes spelling errors? Heretics.
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  96. None of this is going to save the country if we don't restructure the national debt and entitlement programs. But those things are going to require voters to send enough Democrats packing that legislation can be passed without reconciliation or massive giveaways to a small handful of elected officials. We need people here to do like Javier Milei and educate the public to build grassroots support for changes that are considered politically impossible now.
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  97. If it works, it could go a long way towards normalizing relations between Islamic countries and the west. Saudi's position as the holder of Mecca and Medina give it a lot of clout in the Islamic world, and if you add economic success, they could pull a number of other countries into modernizing and liberalizing.
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  98. 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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  99. 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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  100. It kinda sounds like a libertarian’s dream.
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  101. Socially and economically, Europe has been slowly bleeding out into a warm bath for years. They aren't investing in the future because they don't plan to have one. Europe's social institutions are a shambles, they see humanity as a disease, they aren't having children because they have no hope for tomorrow, and they are sacrificing the future they have no connection to in order to pay for indulgence in the present. A society with no future goals and aspirations can only waste away. No amount of centralization of power could possibly compensate for a lack of drive at the individual level.
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  102. 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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  103. I think that sometimes consumers want cheaper products with shorter life expectancies for good reason. When I buy cables and adapters for electronics, I buy the cheapest I can get because they get left behind in hotels or lost in drawers, and they will be replaced with a new standard within a couple of years. I also own a two hundred dollar indestructible umbrella because I'm sick of cheap ones turning inside out during a rainstorm like they did my entire childhood, I no longer lose umbrellas, nor do I care if they are in style.
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  104. It turns out that immediately wasting any money you didn't actually earn is a fairly universal human trait.
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  105. If you think about it, stealing ideas from others and doing your best version of it is the basis of all language, culture, and invention for intelligent social animals. The English Bards and Greek Playwrights appropriated ideas from their peers the same way that Dolphins and Crows do. Patents are the aberration. Thus it would make sense to err on the side of less powerful and durable patents rather than more.
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  106. That last bit, about reprocessing it is probably largely thanks to advances in nuclear reactor technology which allow plants to run on vastly less enriched uranium than older models. If we focus on building cheaper and more efficient reactors we might be able to use new reactors to recycle spent fuel rods from older reactors until they are no longer a long term problem. Additionally, it would mean that no country would have a civilian use for uranium enrichment and countries could have nuclear power without the threat of them making nuclear weapons with civilian tech. Cleaner cheaper nuclear might finally break the dominance of coal power and bring a green future that much closer.
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  107. If first world countries even can compete with the third world for manufacturing, it is going to require relaxing regulations and other costly competitive benefits, which politicians are likely to balk at and the public may also find distasteful. Western societies sacrificed most of the redundancies in supply chains for decades to save money on labor, warehousing, and to take advantage of growing efficiency in shipping networks, and you can't undo all that overnight.
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  108. 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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  109. 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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  110. When your cat brings you a dead mouse, expecting it to make you happy, you grit your teeth and tell yourself it's too dumb to know better. This is harder to excuse.
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  111. "This will not be over quickly, and you will not enjoy it."
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  112. Israel will be safer and have a more politically restrained judiciary than Harris' America.
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  113. When the first movie came out I was so excited for a former storm trooper to potentially become a jedi and maybe to solve some fights with the faceless cannon fodder by humanizing them. And then they made him into the stereotypical, "black guy who the studio made us include but we really don't like." Johnson did him dirty. He tried so hard to be feminist that he managed to just be racist. If they had just focused on writing well we wouldn't have had Rey be a reviled Mary Sue and Finn being a hapless clown. Such a waste. I want my Knights of Ren brainwashed from Rogue One and my inspirational jedi Finn back.
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  114. I watched to the end (since you asked). I have no problem with the channel doing what it needs to do in order to subsidize the classic content I like best. I regularly skip content on channels I follow if I don't think a particular topic is worth my time, and that is fine because catering to a wide audience means covering topics that may be my cup of tea. If those videos enable the content I want, great.
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  115. The Caliphate of Badteethistan is prepared to use deadly force against citizens for criticizing the religion of peace for its violence.
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  116. Now I need to see a Gary Busey themed gas station.
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  117. The hilarious part is that there's a good chance he picked up the term from a member of the same faction of the cardinals who would be most happy to embarrass him for saying it. I mean, you know he didn't learn the word in language class. Though, the idea of having a foul-mouthed pope is pretty funny also.
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  118. Cracked used to be side-splittingly funny but they lost most of their good writers around 2015 and by the end of 2016 they pretty much stopped writing comedy altogether.
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  119. I like the idea by Vanderbilt University's Dr. Nathan A. Jacobs. He suggests that accreditation, which schools earn based on the work of individual scholars, should stay with the scholar him or herself instead of going to the college. That would allow scholars to offer their services in innovative and more cost-effective ways than through the ossified university system currently does. If obtaining a degree in some field of study were to become as cheap today (proportionally) as it was in the 50s, it would be much easier for people to gain degrees that are useful well-paying for middle class jobs and new programs could better align the needs of employers with that of job-seekers. I've learned more interesting and useful things about the humanities through YouTube videos, podcasts, and the works of scholars they recommended or featured than I ever did in college. Imagine how much more would be out there if scholars could offer their audience credit for engaging with their work. I think the university system is holding back the democratization of knowledge as much as advancing it today, and changing accreditation may be a key to getting both teachers and students a high educational value for their efforts and money. At the very least, it could seriously reduce the opportunity costs of education.
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  120. When the government conspires with political donors to give benefits to certain voters at the expense of all taxpayers.
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  121. Will VisualPolitik rethink its policy of constantly scare-mongering viewers with Russian conquest, among other things, if Trump wins?
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  122. 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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  123. Sweet Baby Inc kills another IP.
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  124. Yeah, because when have corporations ever knuckled under to pressure from governments to hand personal data to that government that they have no legal rights to? Besides, we all know that no government has ever tried to claw back rights granted to the populace by their predecessors.
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  125. Providing military training to a hostile foreign government sure sounds like an act of treason to me.
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  126. 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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  127. Yeah, pretty sure the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot have more than covered the feeling of mass murder for the universe without her calling for more.
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  128. Take a note from the animal kingdom and chew off your arm to save the rest of your body. Also works to end interminable shopping trips.
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  129. 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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  130. Even late twentieth century American Democrats and Republicans don't fall neatly into today's American Right and Left. Nixon created the EPA and enacted wage and price controls, and Kennedy passed tax cuts and famously called for personal responsibility. Just like multi-party democracies, American politics are made of shifting coalitions of interest groups that are either part of the ruling coalition or the opposition at any given time, this is why the major party platforms get completely rewritten for every new presidential nominee.
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  131. You need to have native English speakers check your scripts. Your metaphors are comically mixed, and you guys regularly confuse words like "more" and "less."
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  132. I miss the days when bad Star Wars fan fiction used to limited to small run books.
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  133. But can a modern bow shoot through screen accurate imperial stormtrooper armor?
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  134. They may be a little TOO real.
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  135. I was always confused why the Bible seemed to hate dogs so much when their society was heavily involved with herding. The idea that the verses are referring to behaviors of wild dogs rather than the domestic ones makes so much more sense. Since religious texts do not touch on all aspects of everyday life and there were no canine-related religious practices in Israel, it would not be unreasonable to find no positive references to dogs in the text.
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  136. Not sure why Disney thought they could cow a woman who has body-slammed far more imposing people than their executive board.
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  137. I remember your interest in la bete, it reminds me of you every time I see a story about it. I also remember your sea captain who knew everything about ships; “sometimes they float, sometimes they don’t.”
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  138. It's basic biology among all animal species capable of controlling access to resources and requiring heavy parental investment that females choose partners almost as soon as they are able to produce offspring to get access to the highest value males where males generally have to wait till they have secured access to vast resources before they can secure a mate. This is why, male elephants typically have their first offspring at 50 years old where females are closer to 15 years. Women holding out till the end of their childbearing years to get the highest value mate fail to understand the basic biology driving mate selection among species like their own. It is much better to find a man while you are young who seems relatively competent and driven than to hold out for the perfect sugar daddy. This is particularly true in eastern countries where having a male offspring to carry on the family name is still of paramount importance. Rich guys aren't gonna gamble on an older woman giving him an heir on the first and possibly only try. The CCP's real fear isn't unmarried women, it's the unmarried men who are their inevitable counterparts. In lions, horses, and many other species, low resource single males have nothing to do but to rove in groups trying to get stronger to overthrow the existing order and the males who control the resources and thus the most desirable females. In humans, these people would be the men who lash out against the government and seek radical reforms that married men would be disinterested in. China fears leftover women because the leftover men have nothing to lose risking their lives against the CCP.
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  139.  @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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  140. 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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  141. Trying to ban alcohol in a country that was made up largely of people who had been self selected for the alcoholic gene (criminals sentences to transportation, explorers, pioneers, and other risk takers) was never going to work.
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  142. Even democratically elected western governments inflate their numbers as much as they think their media and financial watchdogs will let them get away with. China has way more latitude to do it than most governments do because they don't have anything like a Free Press or a Freedom of Information Act.
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  143. I actually like Yasuke, but I do find it ironic that so many of the people who cheer having Yasuke as the protagonist of the new Assassin's Creed game were generally horrified by having Tom Cruise as the protagonist of the Last Samurai. Yasuke was a real person and Cruise's Algren was based on Jules Brunet who was also a real person. If they had set an Assassin's Creed game in the 14th century Empire of Mali (which they absolutely should do) and based the protagonist on a historical white person who was living in the country, there would have been hell to pay. I think there would have been less controversy if they had announced Yasuke as a major character in the story and even playable in a chapter or two, but not suggested that the Asian Assassin plays second fiddle to a non-Asian in the Asian Assassin's Creed game.
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  144. Interesting. Sexual relationships are inherently of greater risk and cost to a woman (due to pregnancy and child-rearing) than to a man. While there are limitations on both partners in a marriage contract, the focus seems to be more on defining inheritance rights for children and limiting the behavior of the partner with more physical and social power over the one with less (i.e. the man to the woman). In the case of same-sex couples, neither is capable of impregnating the other and any differences in standing would be the effect of social status rather than gender differences. Since males are more likely to seek variety in partners due to their low investment in reproduction and females are more likely to seek security due to their high investment, it would not be unreasonable to assume that female-female couples would be more likely to agree to be monogamous and male-male couples would be more likely to agree to be polyamorous. In that case, it could well be that same-sex couples have historically had less reason to seek a formalized relationship, even in a society where such a pairing was considered acceptable. If true, I think the reason why you see such arrangements with powerful people like Nero is probably due to the difference in social status more than the sort of reasons why people seek to have same-sex relationships recognized by the state today. I think Metatron is right that it's difficult to parse the status of same-sex relationships in the ancient world, and I think the presence or absence of formalized marriage may not have meant to the ancients what it means to us today. Still, interesting food for thought.
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  145. My money would be that, like the countries of the western hemisphere, Greek reforms will last as long as the first election after any real pain. Voters have no patience for short term suffering voluntarily undertaken for mid or long term benefits. As long as the international community is willing to prevent Greece from becoming a completely failed state, I can't see them hitting rock bottom and changing their ways. I hope I'm wrong, but countries seem to behave like addicts, they can only get better when they realize they can't blame anybody else for their problems and that they will literally die if they don't take drastic action now. When America dies from having interest payments higher than the entire national budget, the world will think longingly about the good times of the 2008 global financial crisis.
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  146. Whether Communist or Capitalist, the government paying companies to enter new industries and make product always creates perverse incentives that lead to uncompetitive and financially non viable products. The government can't pick winners because their idea of a winner is completely different to the market's idea of a winner.
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  147. My Canadian brother-in-law's response to this announcement was "sorry," or possibly "sorry?" it was hard to tell if the inflection went up any higher than it already was.
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  148. Imagine if they had to hear their employers disagree with their beliefs with every piece of spoken or written communications, heard contrary beliefs on 95% of all news sources, had everything they agree with shadow-banned on social media, and were cowed into hiding their beliefs when interacting with the general public.
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  149. 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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  150. Generally speaking, if you think South Park had no criticism of your side of the argument; you either don't have a dog in the fight, or you might not have a hamster in the wheel. Trey and Matt regularly to appear to go all the way with one side, only to end the episode with a sucker-punch to everybody who hasn't noticed the pattern in the last twenty-six years. The hope being that if you think their criticism of the other side was fair, you might consider their criticism of your side also.
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  151. "Slave" is a slur against Slavic people, since it was created to conflate the two on account of the fact that Slavic people were historically unlikely to have organized military protection from slave traders. Also, as an "Oriental" who grew up in a mostly "Oriental" community where everybody regularly used the word without a second though, I was shocked to discover that emotional hypochondriacs in cosmopolitan places like California had decided the word was verboten. My father and his parents faced actual and open racism and discrimination, they would have smacked me upside the head if I complained about the nothingburger microaggressions that people are offended by today. In the same way that a person who thinks everything is a divine appointment from god finds the will of god in everything, the person who thinks everything is systemic racism finds racism in everything. All else being equal, you can guess which of the two is perpetually miserable.
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  152. I had always wondered where the notion of the rapture came from, as it is one of the many popular Christian ideas that isn't specifically written in the text. I think it was because his first bible was a Scofield that my father got so wrapped up in the idea during the Jesus Movement of the 70s, despite rapture not really part of the theology of the denomination he ended up in. Pretribulation rapture always seemed inexplicable to me, since modern America seemed to be one of the few places in time where the church did not experience what American Evangelicals would describe as tribulation between the first century and the modern day. It's kinda hard to believe in a pretribulation rapture when you grow up with horror stories about the treatment of Christians under Communism. I always wondered why would we be spared from what tens of millions of people across the entire planet in two millennia had not been spared from?
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  153. The Florida thing is because Democrats are angry that a black academic hired by Republicans in Florida to create academic standards for teaching American History included a section talking about how some slaves were able to acquire useful skills like trades while enslaved. The academic and the state claim this was meant to suggest the ingenuity of enslaved peoples, where critics claim it was intended to say slavery was a universal good in line with some antebellum southern arguments for slavery. I leave it to you to guess which side only read the outline.
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  154. 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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  155. Outlaw Big Macs.
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  156. Because the solution to no longer being able to buy hydrocarbons from environmental regulation free Russia is to buy rare-earth-heavy energy technology from environmental regulation free China. It's a good thing that we don't all share the same earth, or pushing environmentally regulated industries out of your own country and becoming reliant on the cheaper products of unregulated second and third world countries would actually make climate change worse and stunt the growth of cleaner industrial processes while taking money from your own citizens and handing it to your international enemies.
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  157. For anybody wondering how poverty-stricken totalitarian countries who spend more of their military budgets on bribery than payroll get their hands on modern technology, the answer is theft. Western governments need to risk the ire of their military contractors and domestic bureaucrats and ensure that the intelligence community thoroughly vets their overseas contacts and contracts. Communists have gotten their hands on every major military technology since WWII through greedy and/or stupid westerners handing over western research, not their own domestic research and development. Remember, even the space race was initially fueled almost exclusively by kidnapped Nazi rocket scientists (though in this case it was on both sides).
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  158. To drunkenly go where no man has gone sober.
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  159. 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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  160. 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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  161. There's a massive difference between corporations that are large to take advantage of economies of scale or that require massive capital outlays in order to develop and produce products and those that are large to take advantage of the shortsightedness of politicians. It wasn't free competition that produced Japan's Zaibatsus and South Korea's Chaebols. Becoming "too big to fail" and supporting regulations that create impassible barriers to entry in a market is a response to governments.
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  162. Apparently youtube thinks you are a flat earther and they have to protect us from your heresy. I wonder if you can turn youtube’s “blasphemy alerts” off.
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  163. 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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  164. Yellowy brown was my initial response. As a warhammer tabletop player and the owner of a lot of visual reference books with armor, I'm used to seeing it depicted as something like a duller and less yellow gold.
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  165. I miss the days when "Is the Pope Catholic?" was a snarky way to suggest something self-evidently true and not a genuine question.
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  166. I also like Law and Order SUV.
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  167. I grew up on the Adam West and Michael Keaton Batmen but The Batman is probably the best version I've seen. The opening scene that established how the Batman works is incredible, and the reveal of the Batmobile is brilliant film making. Red and Blue are absolutely right that most fight choreography is completely generic. This is why Jackie Chan and his friend Sammo Hung are so beloved, the fights they choreographed told you something about the characters. Everybody remembers scenes from Jackie Chan movies where he is trying to protect some background object from being broken, for example. In books, fights almost have to be written to tell you about a character because the author can't count on your imagination to give you spectacle. As a narrative device, there really shouldn't ever be a fight that does not in some way inform either the central conflict of the plot, or a conflict with a character. If the hero feels conflicted about the use of violence, they may try to disarm or entangle opponents. Maybe rivals demonstrate the values of planning and flexibility respectively as part of their conflict over which is better. Fights should be an external metaphor for an internal conflict. Barring that, even just having combatants display their own individual qualities (i.e. your smart guy is really precise, your strong guy tends to cause collateral damage, your hero prioritizes protection over destruction, your lancer toys with opponents, your heart is careful to take enemies out of the fight out of the way, etc.) is a way to make a fight memorable. Ask people about the Battle for New York in the Avengers and the only thing people remember is the Hulk saying, "Puny god" and smashing Loki like a rag doll.
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  168. Chinese manufactured critical infrastructure is best described as a White Elephant. It's mind-boggling expensive and can't really be used for anything of value. Belt and Road victims should have an easier time convincing the international community that they should be discharged of all debts to China than they do when trying to get out of repaying IMF bailouts. The question will be whether China's collateral demands hold up in courts or not when the countries default.
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  169. But it's so cute when the lizard people pretend to be real people on the news.
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  170. 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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  171. I'm sorry to hear that. It must be rough for your family. I support you, and understand that you'll need time to look after your mom. God bless you, and I hope you are able to make the most of the time (may it be many years) that you have left with her.
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  172. It turns out that big budgets with even bigger demands combined with low pay and no oversight is not a recipe for success. It turns out that not everything in life works like paying foreign traitors and domestic hackers to steal from people with functional governance.
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  173. 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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  174. 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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  175. The Venn Diagram of people who know how to run things and people who want to run things kinda looks like two circles that bumped into one another and stopped there.
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  176. 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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  177. I'm so sorry to hear about your mother's passing. From your tribute, she sounded like an exceptional person whose loss will be very painful for your family. I wish there were easy words that could ease your pain. You are loved and respected by your followers, and I can't imagine anybody begrudging you any time you need to put family affairs in order and to process your grief. Dealing with estates and accounts can be an unbelievable time sink. Take care of yourself and your family, and I hope that you will be able to take solace in those good memories you have of her, and in the knowledge that you will be reunited with her in heaven one day.
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  178. He made a very interesting point on the value of the ruble and the Russian stock market, since both have limited exposure to the international markets they reflect more the government controlled sentiment within the country more than the views of the international trading community. He makes a good point that Russia has to import a lot of technology for manufacturing (i.e. semiconductors) which Russia (unlike China) has no domestic capacity to produce. I had been hearing that with high oil and natural gas prices, and neutral countries laundering Russian petrochemicals, that sanctions had not significantly hurt Russian government revenues. But they make the point that transporting gas outside of pipelines requires liquification capacity in the export country and gasification capacity in the import country which take time and capital to set up. Oil, on the other hand, can still be transported in tankers and those can be shifted to different destinations but he points out that Russian oil tankers only take 1-5 days to get oil to Europe but take several weeks to reach Asia which significantly decreases the profit margins for Moscow. Another interesting point was that while Russia is being cut off from Euros and US dollars due to both export restrictions from the west, and also from it's own policy of cutting off energy exports to Europe while selling more oil to China; it's imports from China have also been dwindling. If the Russian economy were doing as well as Putin claims you would expect Russia to spend all those extra incoming Yuan to buy Chinese imports to make up for the economic inputs they cannot get from Europe. In order to build up domestic production to make up for lost imports the would need both large quantities of capital and an influx of skilled workers rather than the brain drain that has been reported since the start of the war. I'm not entirely sold on the idea that the western sanctions have been as effective as the guest suggests but this long form interview lays out a case for a weakening Russia that seems much more compelling and honest than the talking points that American government officials and media have put out on the subject. I guess time will tell if sanctions hurt more than just the world's consumers in the long run. Still, it was an excellent and thought provoking interview.
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  179. It makes sense that as new technologies drive the production of greater and greater wealth that the value of the old money would decrease relative to the new. We are no longer the same society we were in the past where hereditary ownership of land was the only determiner of wealth. Countries like Venezuela waste their resources on graft like a cocaine-fueled heiress, while resource poor countries like Switzerland or Israel create businesses and technologies that create new wealth like a college student's garage startup company. The more value that can be created with innovation, the smaller the percentage of the pie old money resource control will be.
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  180. 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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  181. Communism is a cargo cult. Marxists have no idea how the world works and they just make "feces" up as they go along in their crude and murderous parody of reality.
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  182. I suspect his version changes a lot more things, like that pesky Mosaic law from Deuteronomy 21 that you aren't allowed to just unilaterally murder your own kids because you don't like them.
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  183. Don't forget that, before these modern nation-states were gobbling up lands in Asia, Africa, and the Near East, they gobbled up their neighbors in Europe. Even if politicians cynically blame the capital for their own local mismanagement, you don't have to be a person of color to resent being ruled by distant people with a different language, history, and culture, particularly when you aren't rich. Unless the weaker economies of the EU turn around, I think we can expect growing calls for independence from various European ethnic groups. That the separation might just cause more problems than it solves will be a problem for future politicians.
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  184. Other channels like Real Science have similarly suggested that while the Nuclear Power Plant has the lowest cost per kilowatt-hour, they also take the longest before they start generating a profit. This is deadly when combined with the changing economic and political environment discussed in this video. Since the Small Modular Reactors deal with most of the economic and supply-chain problems of their bigger relatives, any country willing to provide political stability to nuclear power should be able to take advantage of this emerging technology. We need a clean energy source that does not harm endangered species and their natural habitats the way that windmills, hydroelectric, and solar do, and as nuclear technology improves we will be able to generate power without having to enrich uranium, which would dramatically reduce the main environmental and military threat of nuclear.
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  185. 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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  186. In much the same way as most of the west claimed to be founded by Trojans, there were an awful lot of western countries that claimed to continue the legacy of the Roman Empire. Some eastern countries still claim to be the successors of Rome to this day.
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  187. Trump is only asking Canada to stop helping the CCP import chemical weapons (fentanyl) into America. Trump is trying to pull a reverse Nixon and turn a weakened Russia against America’s greatest threat, Communist China. Neither of these two things is hard to understand. Trump is treating the Communist Chinese the way America treated the Communist Russians during the Cold War. Besides that, Trump is using threats of tariffs to convince “allies” to agree to reciprocal tariff rates instead of the one sided protectionist tariffs that most of them started after WWII and continue to this day. Then he has been threatening Europe to stop treating America as its private army. You never stop to think what America might think about the things your channel complains about. We’ve tried to explain the obvious to you for some time but you think the European side is the only side in any conflict.
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  188. 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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  189. Panelists on Germany's Deutsche Welle came to a similar conclusion recently too, but it's good to hear from a source not directly tied to the sanctions. My main concern, though, is not whether sanctions have hurt Russia but whether sanctions can be effective in countries with state control of all media, completely fake elections, and where the government imprisons and/or murders most dissenters and all rivals. Sanctions have so far failed in their stated goals in countries dictatorships like Cuba, North Korea, and Iran. The question is whether or not you can create enough momentum to topple Putin without having incipient evil dictator whom Putin thinks is safe pulling the strings.
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  190. Maybe all the time he spent talking to Russian bots about Trump will help him to navigate the battlefield.
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  191. Running classic House of Strahd or Tomb of Horrors is another way to up your game and change all your friendships forever.
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  192. 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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  193. Adam Carolla predicted his kid would get harassed if he failed to become gay in his 2010 book "In 50 Years We'll All Be Chicks." We are basically there.
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  194. I grew up mocking the "seashells" from Demolition Man (America's only major pop culture bidet reference), but when I briefly lived in Japan, my mind was changed. I live in the mountains where the water is as cold as a death row inmate whose last appeal has been denied, and I put a basic thirty dollar unpowered unit in my commode. To my shock and surprise, it was actually fine. It's nothing like stepping into the shower with that Stygian water, so I never bothered to upgrade to a heated one. Even in the dead of winter, I don't care, and I have become that sissy that runs the shower to get it hot before I step in. I buy a pack of tp once or twice a year to dry up at the end, and I haven't used a plunger in almost a decade. Better yet, if you get the runs, you will cry at how much more gentle the bidet is than even the cushiest tp after your fourteenth trip to the bathroom of the night. Try a cheap one, worst case scenario, you're out less than fifty bucks and maybe two hours of time to install and then remove it. It will make you weak and dependent, but you will love it all the same.
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  195. Continuing to shovel trillions of dollars of new debt kind of defeats the purpose of raising the interest rates, while making interest payments take up an even larger percentage of GDP. Even if announced data does not look too bad, all the US economic data gets revised down months later after people stop paying attention to it. Washington lies like China, but they eventually dump the actual data when nobody is looking to avoid being treated like the liars they are.
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  196. 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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  197. Yeah, but what if you want to turn your economy around without reducing government spending or public corruption? Visual Economic has yet to show us that one accounting trick that the IMF hates to turn your economy around overnight with no pain or hard work.
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  198. Given the limited run time, the film swaps a lot of the banality and questions about how war changes men in the book for futility and poignancy which work better on screen. The Drinker is right that the adaptations work well for a film, keeping the pacing from dragging and helping the less historically literate get a better sense of context. The film was clearly adapted for the purpose of accentuating the meaningless horror of WWI and it delivers on that purpose. A great film based on a great book that could never have been done justice had it been made in Hollywood.
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  199. Thanks to "totally not AI," the turnaround for parody videos is now fast enough to satisfy the youtube algorithm.
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  200. Reach exceeding its grasp is sort of the defining feature of the Luciferian intellect for a reason.
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  201. The dictator never accepts amnesty unless his subjects are on his doorstep with weapons.
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  202. 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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  203. Somebody told the network it was a post war pioneering sci fi drama with deep characterization and sophisticated writing. They should have just told them brothels in space. I loved that show since the day the first episode aired. My only consolation is that at least Farscape was able to survive. I couldn't have handled losing both of them.
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  204. The bottom line is that Europe will never agree to provide the support Ukraine received under Biden, let alone the level of support Ukraine needs to recover the regions Russia has been strategically flooding with Russian settlers for generations to deny Ukraine a militarily defensible border. Ukraine is foolish if they think Europe wants anything more than to use them to bleed the Russian military dry for their own protection. If the EU actually committed to defending Ukraine, it would become clearly very quickly that Europe has been shirking it's NATO obligations for years expecting Uncle Sam to pay the entire tab for European protection.
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  205. I feel like they tried hugs not bullets somewhere before...
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  206. Trusting the west to keep its promises beyond a single executive term is one of the classic blunders.
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  207. China is artificially propping up their troubled domestic manufacturing with government support. Their domestic market is cratering and they are financing continued production with loans. History shows China will eat a fair bit more than half the cost of tariffs to avoid dropping production. If tariffs can drop EU demand for tofu dreg cars, and Trump keeps China out of the US market, they will be stuck selling at even bigger loses to the third world till their economy collapses. Once China has to drop output on their government supported new industries they will reach the tipping point and their whole economic house of cards will collapse. The CCP will prove they cannot provide prosperity in exchange for tyranny. The CCP needs to fail to free a billion people from an authoritarian nightmare. None of this will help Europe to become competitive, but Europe has no stomach to make the sacrifices to become competitive so at least they can help to end tyranny.
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  208. 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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  209. Once you start counting verbalized pauses in public prayers, "so just's" "father god's" and "we ask you's" will start to make your teeth itch.
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  210. Oh, thank the Enclave. As somebody who played a little Fallout 1 and 2 but sank more hours into 3, 4, and New Vegas than I ever want to find out; I was afraid this was going to be another Witcher/Rings of Power level debacle.
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  211. This is as 80s as parachute pants.
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  212. 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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  213. He's a surprisingly good sport.
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  214. Given their take on the Alamo, I suspect this might not be a real news site.
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  215. 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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  216. Maybe if Germany had listened to Trump instead of Putin, they wouldn't have reorganized their economy around currently-sanctioned Russian oil and natural gas.
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  217. Great points, particularly at the end. I have seen unexpected character death intended to dramatically break tone turn into unexpected comedy gold before.
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  218. Mosab Yousef is an articulate man with a fascinating story. He did a great long-form interview with Jordan Peterson not long ago where he explained how he went from a presumptive future leader of Hamas to somebody who believes that everyone in Hamas, even his own father, is beyond salvation. It really explains why he views Hamas the way he does.
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  219. I can't wait for AI to make the film that it made this article about.
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  220. Dredd was such a great film. I've watched it almost as many times as movies I have nostalgia for. Headley puts in a great performance but Urban takes the cake. His willingness to stretch his talents to emote through the mask in order to stay true to the character does not get enough respect. If Kurt Russel can emote with only his eyes in Soldier, Urban can do it with just his chin in Dredd. One of the absolute best parts of the movie is that Dredd acts consistently as the sorta Lawful/Neutral embodiment of cold ruthless justice. Seeing judge Anderson's transformation from teacher's pet to cunning enforcer under Dredd's tutelage is great character development. My only gripe is that Dredd didn't fail her in the end for losing her weapon. He told her in the beginning that losing her weapon would mean an automatic fail. If Dredd had failed her anyway and she freely admitted it but had showed that she was confident she would pass even Dredd's standards the next time that would have been the best was to show that she had fully integrated the lessons she had learned from the iconic hero and could fully stand on her own two feet.
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  221.  @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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  222. Thank you for being even-handed and showing prominent and respected thought leaders from both sides of the aisle.
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  223. 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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  224. My first thought, when the Euro was proposed, was that member countries would try to pawn their future debt crisis on one another and ruin the whole experiment. That has proven true. Relatively small and homogenous countries can barely agree to suffer any pain to get their economic houses in order, how was this going to work with most of a continent?
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  225. Italy probably wouldn't have bet their entire economy on being Europe's producer of cheap goods in the twentieth century, and endlessly devalued their currency till China's ascension to the WTO left them in economic ruins. Rome's expertise was in reverse engineering and improving technology. They probably would have been something like Germany (quality manufacturing) with a touch of Japan (adopting and adapting new technology) so we would likely have Roman box trucks, industrial machinery, and consumer electronics competing around the world today like they still do with sports cars in our timeline.
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  226. Global investors can now stop investing in developing cutting edge western technology companies because a corporation under the control of the world's leading counterfeiter claims to have done even better all by themselves for pennies on the dollar with no secret help from their government and will give the producers of valuable IP free access to their data aggregation product with no ulterior motives whatsoever. It's an offer so good, it absolutely has to be true.
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  227. 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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  228. Number seven is a shocker.
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  229. 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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  230. I think it's more fair to say that weapons have an additive effect to physical strength on lethality, rather than a multiplicative effect. People with physical advantages still have an advantage all other factors being equal, but the more lethal the weapon, the smaller the relative advantage becomes. If a weapon were a multiplier then we wouldn't say that "God made man, Colt made him equal" because the gun would then make brutes vastly more lethal than the average men. You don't need to be Mr. Atlas to launch a nuke, and a child pressing the launch button would not make it any less lethal. Klavan does not know about armed combat. He is a screenwriter. Clearly, none of them know anything about combat. I think it is probably fair to him to say that he is comparing a layman's view of the relative realism of something like The Last Duel, which isn't a wire-work CGI fantasy fight, to Hollywood superhero movie waif-fu where a 90 lb woman can send a full-grown man flying with the slightest touch. He is clearly overstating his case for reality but not for his native film industry's depiction of reality, which I suspect is more what he is actually describing. If he were to watch HEMA instead of Hollywood, my guess is he would probably try to meet reality closer to the middle.
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  231. Somebody needs to stop the Johnson's from sneaking in during the last song of the worship set every week.
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  232. It's the difference between learning how to develop technology and learning how to steal it via industrial espionage. The former is more expensive and time-consuming but gives you the knowledge to innovate, the latter sometimes fails hilariously when you don't actually understand the basics. The Chinese Communist Party lacks the resources and humility to do things the right way. That's why so many of their much vaunted electric car models are so bad they are uninsurable in China.
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  233. Narcissistic ingratitude is a key ingredient in leftism. If they gave that up, they'd have to buy a bust of Ronald Reagan to put on their mantle.
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  234. Soldiers/police in Russia acting like brigands with Chinese nationals is hardly unique to this situation. Soldiers engaging in brigandry is a European tradition that predates the Middle Ages, and is one of the reasons why to this day Europeans, particularly Eastern Europeans, tend to hate law enforcement. Even in the ancient world, armies usually plundered the peasants in any land they traveled through, friend or foe. America is only different because we became a country after the British concept of a professional civilian police forces had become the norm in much of Western Europe, so we basically never had underpaid military draftees acting as police while being forced to "live off the land." We also happened to be angry at the British army for commandeering private residences to billet soldiers when we wrote our constitution. Combine that with America only having an active draft during four wars, only fighting on American soil in one war, and having an all volunteer army the rest of the time and you can see why America overall has a historically abnormal love for their armed services.
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  235. Sounds like the VisualPolitik crew gave politicians entirely too much general credit simply for standing with Ukraine.
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  236. My father was a huge Trekkie. He would take me and my brother to conventions every year and we used to watch TNG, DS9, and even Voyager religiously. After the third episode in a row where captain Archer from Enterprise was tied to a chair and beaten I swore off Star Trek. When my father called me to come watch the first episode of Discovery with him, because he thought Michelle Yeoh was the new captain, I came to realize I had made the right decision almost two decades earlier. The series is dead to me. Not even fond memories of my late father could entice me to consider watching another. I'm not even mad at them anymore. I just don't care.
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  237. Chinese Capitalism has something for everyone in American Politics. A total disregard for the environment on one hand and a total disregard for human life on the other. Rampant counterfeit food and concentration camps are a small price to pay for getting rid of all those pesky values and morals. I can't imagine why so many people have risked death to flee the country with only the shirts on their backs.
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  238. Boston Pee Tarty.
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  239. 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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  240. 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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  241. In America we joke that you lease a Dodge but buy a Toyota because the Dodge will blow a head gasket after 30,000 miles. Meanwhile, in China, your entire frame crumbles to dust by then.
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  242. 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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  243. 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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  244. Traditional Confucian morals have been completely destroyed by the impious and amoral CCP. Like so much of Communist China, Huawei brings shame upon their ancestors.
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  245. Global investors can now stop investing in developing cutting edge technology because a corporation under the control of the world's leading counterfeiter claims to have done even better for pennies on the dollar all by themselves and will give advanced dual use research almost free access to their technology with no ulterior motives whatsoever.
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  246. The problem is not that socialism needs more data to work, but that it needs to be Laplace's Demon, knowing the position and momentum of every particle in the universe to predict the future and no amount of AI will be able to calculate the information it does not have. The free market, on the other hand, works like the balance of animals in nature. It incentivizes individuals to exploit imbalances for personal benefit and thus rebalance the system. It allows some level of inefficiency and impractical novelty because shocks to the system may cause such an anomaly to survive where more efficient organisms might fail. The push and pull of extinction and mutation cull the impractical while allowing for innovation and redundancy to protect from unpredictable future events. A top-down system, even with an unethical amount of data and the most perfect calculation, cannot know that a lab worker might accidentally spread a virus, or that a hurricane might hit an unprepared community. It cannot predict the accidental discovery of a new battery technology or a breakthrough in a stalled energy science. We should learn from the Gros Michel Banana. They were all one single plant with no genetic diversity and no variation in biological defense mechanism. The Panama Disease hit them, and the Gros Michel went from ubiquitous to nearly extinct worldwide within a decade. Companies and cities can use separate AI to help with central planning, but doing so on a state or country wide basis is asking to turn a small disaster into a gigantic one, just like the bananas.
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  247. No Asian parent I have ever known (and I grew in a place where most people were at least part Asian) would have allowed their child to speak in such an obnoxious manner. Most of them would have washed their kid's mouth out with soap and/or tanned their hide for acting in such a manner. My grandparents would have straight-up disowned her. She's got to be a Californian. It's the only place I've ever seen where Asian parents have that little influence on their children's behavior. Her ancestors must be spinning in their graves.
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  248. I liked the vid. The concept seems like fun. I am eager to see more of these.
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  249. That’s it. The original avatar asked hard questions without simple answers but korra sidesteps the hard questions its villains ask by Shaymalaning the into cartoon characters. I also hated the part where they destroy the most interesting aspect of the avatar, the past lives. The past avatars were an amazing device to create mentors who were already dead and inherently flawed but created amazing opportunities for introspection and philosophical debate. They could fill a character’s psychological holes but were also hollow and melancholic because they are echos of the dead, not living people.
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  250. The Communists voted with the Fascists to put Hitler into power in Germany, and WWII only started because Russia initially Joined the Axis Powers to protect Germany's eastern border and Japan's western border, so Germany could invade Europe and Japan could invade the Pacific. The distinctions between the two totalitarian factions really only come into existence when Hitler and Mussolini purge their former allies to consolidate power (as all dictators do) and then decides to strike Russia before Russia strikes them. If Hitler and Mussolini had kept a few prominent Communists in their inner circle or Japan had managed to keep Germany and Russia from distrusting one another, we would probably not think the totalitarians had a left/right dichotomy at all. Also, Democrats used to be proud to be red and many of them openly sided with the Communists (particularly after the USSR switched to the allies) or were Communists who fled persecution in Europe, but they had to change to blue when the US and Communist Russia fought for control of Europe's fallen empires after WWII because Red Leftists were suddenly the enemy of America, and it has stuck because Communism is still more or less politically radioactive in America to this day.
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  251. I can't take seriously any 2024 predictions that overestimate the Padre's that much.
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  252. 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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  253. Does standing in front of the open hood of a stopped truck to grunt and nod knowingly count?
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  254. Chinese drones are only invisible when nobody is looking, not even the Chinese. Talk about a cargo cult.
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  255. Studios need to add man-buns to the bracelets for "historical accuracy."
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  256. It sounds like Canada has not treated its banks as a political tool the way politicians in America have gotten away with for over a century. It would be interesting to compare countries with relatively few and clear banking regulations and find out what the minimum rules are to ensure banking transparency and prevent fraud. I suspect many advanced countries have a large percentage of regulations that do more to help oligopolies maintain power than actually protect consumers. The more power banking regulators have, the more incentives banks have to plow money into lobbying for regulatory capture, after all.
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  257. You also have to consider that legislative majorities can override a presidential veto and cause presidents to be remembered for policies they opposed. President Clinton signed NAFTA, GATT, and welfare reform because Newt Gingrich nationalized the midterm legislative elections through his Contract with America and turned the public heavily in favor of policies that Democrats opposed. Similarly, Regan had to deal with a Democratic legislature who killed many of the president's campaign promises or forced compromises. US presidents are most likely to implement their own policies in the first half of their term if they ride a legislative majority into office, though the legislature's increasing delegation to executive branch bureaucracies and increased use of executive orders is starting to change that balance.
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  258. Noodle Incidents are an amazing tool for roleplaying games. If I have anybody even halfway competent with improv at the table, I will go for at least two in the first session.
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  259. Unless "Christian Mysticism" goes in the opposite direction of garden variety Christianity in this matter; the whole AI being made by man rather than god (and thus having no soul), wouldn't that probably make somebody less likely to think their AI was sentient rather than more? Not that it really makes the Google employee (who is arguably too close to the subject to be objective) any more credible if he did.
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  260. Japan and Rome demonstrate that a willingness to reverse engineer the ideas and technologies of stronger foreign cultures can take a poor people to a wealthy people in fairly short order if the people don't buy into notions of inherent inferiority and victimhood. Sure, Japan had bitter internal conflicts over Westernization just like Rome did with Hellenization, but it's hard to argue with the improvements in the lives of the people.
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  261. Considering that Biden has tightened protectionist policies and further cracked down on technology sales to China. It's not a material difference. Also, every president since at least the 70s has promised to return America to the manufacturing power it was in the 50s in order to bring back high paying blue collar jobs. If it were that easy to devalue the currency to revive American exports, somebody would have done it already. There are entrenched interests that benefit from a strong dollar, and they probably have a lot more sway over American policy than a new Fed chairman would. American manufacturing will never come back as long as there are countries with low wage bases, high education, legal certainty, and access to capital. Everybody knows it, but all politicians pretend they don't. Trump does all his thinking out loud and does almost none of the things he verbally brainstorms. He does it because people like you take him seriously and then panic, giving him the upper hand. TRUMP IS PLAYING YOU. You are just embarrassing yourselves.
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  262. 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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  263. 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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  264. In other words, it's everything the colossally ratioed trailer promised.
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  265. 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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  266. Might take even longer. I wasn't a huge fan of Voyager but I hated Enterprise so much that I have refused to even hate watch anything Star Trek has done in the last quarter century. Star Wars has now also reached full apathy for me.
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  267. Having a modern American Civil War movie where the press are the heroes is kinda like having a modern California Wildfire movie where the homeless are the heroes. The only difference is that the homeless are more likely to have the self-awareness to lay low after they set the whole place ablaze.
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  268. Legalizing crime does not have unintended consequences. Those consequences are quite intentional.
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  269. 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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  270. Boy, it's a good thing for green technologies that shift all their dirty work to the environmental regulation free second and third world that we don't all share the same planet.
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  271. China spares no expense paying for corruption. I hope the same contractors Xi is paying to rip him off help depose him.
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  272. This is the price you pay for trying to develop weapons powerful enough to allow you to draw down troop levels and save money on war matériel. The US gambled on nukes as a way to avoid committing unpopular levels of funding and manpower to fighting the Soviets after WWII. The fact that Russia just kidnapped more German scientists than we did and paid traitors for weapons technology ensured that the benefits were short-lived. The Cold War only ended when America used a combination of military spending and outright bluffs about space based weapons to tip the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. Evolutionarily, weapons are a hard-to-spoof show of the relative health and strength of an organism. In nature, an organism with a smaller weapon will yield to a similar organism with a larger weapon rather than risk death fighting. Modern weaponry has proven to be a poor proxy of strength, since the countries that display weapons now are mostly free riders from countries that paid for the research and development and many modern armies are like bucks with hollow horns that will shatter on impact. This is bad because it is an honest measurement of relative strength that keeps fights between unequal opponents from happening. WWII happened because the Axis Powers underestimated the industrial power of the Allies, and a similar argument could be made of the Cold War. They thought they legitimately had much bigger horns and picked what they thought would be an easy fight that ended up costing everybody dearly.
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  273. 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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  274. 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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  275. 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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  276. Few things in life are quite so funny as people failing to grasp obvious satire.
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  277. The cure looks worse and worse compared to the disease every election cycle.
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  278. The commenter must have missed three or four presidential election cycles of his own side complaining about media companies and the politically selective allowance of election year ad buys, or he would have known to rant about Youtube/Google. It's not any online creator's fault that one side has more money to buy ads on a platform that is more friendly to those ads.
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  279. There are only so many ways to encourage unwanted groups to simultaneously breed more and reproduce less.
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  280. Imagine you are an ancient man. You do not have the strong jaws and powerful physiques of other Hominids. Without fire to cook with, you will grow weak from malnutrition. Without fire to protect, you will die of exposure or from predation in the dark of night, where the flashing eyes of monsters are unhindered. The gods once threw down their divine thunderbolts and started a great fire. Your ancestors stole from that fire and nurtured it for generations, like their very survival depended on it. Even after the secret of creating fire was discovered, the significance of that kept flame did not die out easily, for the fire is the very symbol of early human civilization itself.
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  281. In the future, historians will discuss how jeans were created with metal rivets to protect prospectors from Indian attacks.
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  282. I'm sure every starving homeless person given food or money by somebody with their phone out slaps it away in disgust instead of thanking his lucky stars that his benefit was in somebody else's personal interest.
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  283. At the end of the day, no matter how hard you work to make an idiot-proof government, nature will work to make a better idiot and eventually nature will win.
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  284. Every country with money chooses to bribe corrupt poor countries to get policy concessions. If the poor countries don't want to be taken advantage of by rich countries, they need to switch from small coalition governments to genuine large coalition democracies because it is easy and cheap to bribe a few people to get what you want but vastly harder and prohibitively expensive to bribe the majority of a nation, even a small one. America's goal in the IMF was initially to bribe dictatorships to stay out of the Soviet sphere of influence, not to lift them out of poverty. If we actually wanted to lift them out of poverty, we would let corrupt small coalition governments fail so they have a chance to become large coalition governments and only offer aid to the extent that their governments require genuine majority support and now just that they have fake elections. But if we did that, we would run the risk of the people of these countries wanting different things than the countries supplying the money, and no voter would ever support politicians giving money to foreign countries in exchange for thwarting said voter's will.
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  285. Wages going up every year? Not even the boomers I know have ever lived that fantasy.
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  286. 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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  287. These women fundamentally misunderstand the biologically differences between a low investment reproductive strategy and a high investment reproductive strategy. If they were low investment animals like fish or spiders, the females attract males by demonstrating that they have greater access to resources than their competitors because the male is expected to provide no investment beyond the male gamete and the female will provide limited investment in vast quantities of offspring on her own. Humans, however, are high investment reproducers. Because females will spend most of their reproductive years providing care to a small number of offspring, it is the females who are choosy and prefer males who demonstrate high access to resources because the females will dedicate most of the time needed to gather resources in caring for offspring. Therefore, the female's most valuable traits (in the eyes of her male counterparts) are physical signals of reproductive health and span of reproductive years. A female who sacrifices her youth to gain access to resources discourages interest from high investment males while attracting low investment males, which is the opposite of what these women say they want. Humans may have more leeway to act against biology than fish, but they are statistically unlikely to do so because biological drives operate far below the conscious level.
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  288. You guys are insane for thinking the guy who brags about threatening Putin that he would bomb the s out of Moscow if he invaded Ukraine is going to give Putin everything he wants. If you had listened to Trump when he told you to do your job and contribute your NATO minimums to defense, Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine. If you had listened to Trump when he warned you not to complete the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that Russia needed so they could invade Ukraine without the Ukrainians being able to bomb the Nord Stream 1 and cut off Europe from all Russian energy, you could have avoided the invasion. He even threatened to leave NATO to warn you to protect yourselves in case the next US president was somebody whom Putin would not respect, but you were too smart for that. You can't count on America to always have cowboys at the Resolute Desk, especially since American presidents haven't sent treaties to the Senate for Ratification since the middle of the last century, which means they have zero binding legal authority. If Europe intends to seize the position of global reserve currency, it had better be prepared to take the responsibility as world police that comes with it. The British Pound was the Global Reserve Currency during the Pax Britannia, when the UK could forcibly end the global slave trade with military and economic pressure. They lost this in the 30s, and America took over and got stuck with the obligation to protect global free trade. Europe won't even take the lead to protect Europe from Russia, let alone provide military escorts in the Bab-El-Mandeb Strait. Americans resent having to protect you as much as you resent us for having to protecting you. If you want a better position from which to push even more protectionist tariffs on America, pay for your own territorial defense for a change.
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  289. 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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  290. A faster and more self-reliant Marine Corps designed to hit big Chinese military assets while having fewer large targets to hit back sounds like it might be a smart gamble. If nothing else, one of America's biggest advantages against rogue states is the fact that our experienced and well-trained noncoms on the ground can make bigger tactical decisions without running them back to the capital, and this seems to enhance the long range destructive power the Marines have on hand. Since we're not like Imperial Japan, where the branches were bitter political rivals trying to undercut each other for personal power, having the Marines focus on doing what they do best better and coordinating with the other branches for their specialties seems like a good way to focus on America's strengths over micromanaging and backbiting dictatorships. As slow as the American Military Establishment is to turn around, the People's Liberation Army has to be vastly more ponderous.
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  291. Don’t forget that warhorses are stupid expensive and ransoming the rich guys and their gear back is a big source of spoils. So, if you were in an advantageous position and thought you (and your buddies) could safely beat the knight you probably wouldn’t be so eager kill the horse or rider.
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  292. What, no love for quadriplegics? Sounds like illegal discrimination.
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  293. 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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  294. Buying off voters with debt-fueled make-work projects, command and control economy dictated from the capital organized to pay off oligarchs, kinda makes you wonder if the Nazis who fled to the Americas set them down the same path, or they just found countries that shared their economic ideals to begin with.
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  295. 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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  296. The fact that America's medical system tries to save premature babies at a much earlier age than in countries with socialized medicine, which simultaneously increases the number of premies who live while necessarily converting those who can't be saved from uncounted "stillbirths" into "infant deaths," is never taken into account. Also, you do realize that if you let people who are guaranteed to cost more than they pay in insurance avoid paying any premiums until they need a payout, that no reasonable person would ever pay an insurance premium while they are healthy. The entire point of insurance is to convince enough healthy people to spend years paying into the system to cover the costs of the ones who end up unhealthy, to collectivize risk. The biggest problem with abandoning a user pays system is that the person who pays is the sole arbiter of what treatment the patient is allowed to have. This is why Canada now recommends assisted suicide for anybody who wants expensive treatments, and Britain bans people from coming to America to seek treatment for conditions that are deemed terminal across the pond. In America, we let insurers kill people instead because employer-sponsored health insurance was created to allow employers to hire workers at an effectively competitive wage despite Richard Nixon's mandating maximum wage levels, which he created to try to stop the free market. Since Obamacare, most employers I have worked for had changed their policies every year and offered new policies with less coverage for more money. I keep losing my plans and regularly have to change doctors to stay in network. Before Obamacare, I had never seen my employer change their plans in the 2–4 years I worked for them.
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  297. Eric Metaxas wrote in his recent book "God's Not Dead" that they did locate cities of the plains roughly where the Bible said they were that had been hit by an air burst meteor (like the Tunguska Event) and which had subsequently gone from being perpetually occupied for centuries to going centuries without habitation. If I remember correctly, one of the sites was Tell el-Hammam in Jordan. Either way, there were real cities that were destroyed by fire from above that people were afraid to resettle that the story would likely have been based on.
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  298. If Covid-19 was the cause of the mass immigration into the US, why did it start in 2021, and why is it increasing as the virus has been decreasing and the effects of Covid policies have been wearing off? The immigration started ramping up when the Remain in Mexico policy was abandoned, and it rose again when the Covid Title 42 Program that allowed for the expulsion of asylum seekers ended. Legal immigration is way too hard in the United States and needs to be made easier as illegal immigration is made harder so that the delta between the two will shrink. This will make human trafficking (which goes hand in hand with drug trafficking) less profitable, while allowing higher immigration levels that businesses want. Of course, reforms in higher education to focus on useful education would reduce the need for skilled immigration and reform of public benefits and wage controls (like allowing welfare recipients to do low paid work while keeping their benefits) would help to reduce the need for unskilled immigrants without hurting the young and the poor. Also, blaming the poorest people in America, the young and underprivileged minorities, of deliberately attacking unskilled illegal immigrants by applying for entry level jobs is a morally repugnant argument. Hiring a Venezuelan to work under the table so you can avoid hiring a black person for minimum wage is the kind of thing that both the left and right find offensive, albeit for not entirely overlapping reasons.
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  299. When I was a kid, I got one second hand, and we could only afford new batteries about every other month, so I had to find wall sockets to plug it into in places with enough light to play (so I often plugged it in near table lamps wherever I went). The batteries were reserved for when I could not find an outlet. If I had somehow managed to get a Lynx or a Game Gear, I would never have gotten the hundreds and hundreds of hours I got out of my Game Boy. I still have many fond memories of Mega Man, Super Mario Land, and Link's Awakening, because Nintendo chose affordability and clever tricks over showiness.
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  300. 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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  301. Imagine a Dragon Age game built around a Homosexual character converted to Heterosexuality by the Church of Andraste. A story that rubs your nose in that message as the core element of the narrative and that casts judgement on any character who disagrees. I would find it obnoxious and cloying, and I wouldn't have to disagree with the message to think so. Origins was built on the idea that nobody is as good as they think they are or as bad as their enemies claim they are. They took the South Park route of dealing with controversial subjects. You could side with anybody you wanted and justify it, but you would always have some moral "ick factor" staring you in the face like spoiler Bhelen being an open-minded progressive willing to help the Gray Wardens but also being a scheming murderer. Origins was a complex and morally nuanced game with no absolute "good guys" which I played over a dozen times through to experience every story variant. Dragon Age II was half finished Shovelware that forced you to make inexplicable binary choices like "be an absolute monster to somebody" or "encourage them to do evil to other people." I couldn't even play Inquisition. I will never purchase another Dragon Age product ever again, nor will I ever talk up any of the good Dragon Age games ever again lest I create more disappointed fans.
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  302. 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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  303. Cracked's writing went from knee-slappers to colon blow about seven years ago. All their good writers moved on, and their farm team is strictly JV.
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  304. Whether they are pretending to be the real Jews, the real Trojans, the real Romans, or the real Egyptians, when people pretend to be descendants of folks they have no relation to it's a sad reflection on their own achievement. Just like how individual families often lie about their ancestors to help their egos, rulers and nations often do the same. Better to make a name for yourself from nothing than to do nothing and pretend to have come from something. The former case makes you exceptional, the latter case makes you embarrassing.
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  305. I'd ask how stupid Europe would need to be to hand control of their countries to a hostile foreign power like China, but these same clowns built their "green economy" on imports of Russian oil and natural gas after we warned them not to do that either.
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  306. I remember when Kenzer & Co came out in 2001 with "Hackmaster," a spin-off of the comic strip "Knights of the Dinner Table" and send-up of D&D with the possibility of running an albino, hemophiliac, amputee fighter. Hasbro continues to miss the joke and has now made their character creation based unironically on the premise of making characters who share all of their player's physical and mental illnesses.
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  307. Sounds like China went to war with their industrialists, hit the global economic crisis, got into a trade war with the west, had a government forced housing bubble meltdown, shut down their own economy for covid, and then got into another trade war with the west. Supreme Leader Pooh does not seem to realize that his country is punch drunk and will probably trigger a new wave of sanctions to attack Taiwan without having recovered from any of the economic problems of the last couple of decades. Almost all of these things are expressly the fault of the dictator.
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  308.  @37wilde  That's very interesting. Thank you for linking that information.
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  309. Considering that people have killed one another to settle disputes from the dawn of time to today, it's hardly surprising that governments would want to codify it as a last resort in order to put some limits on the practice.
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  310. When my grandparents were young, a college degree was a strong proxy for either being a social or intellectual elite. The percentage of positions for the elites is not directly correlated with the number of people who get degrees. This forces the elites to get more and more advanced degrees to prove their status and compete for the limited number of elite jobs, while increasing the cost of credentialing for everybody. It's precisely inflation. By making university close to universal, you just guarantee that your barista and your delivery driver have taken on tens of thousands of dollars in debt and put off family formation for several more years. The university income premium is a prime example of why the average income, with its heavy weighting of outliers, is much less important than the median. University is only worth it for people who can complete a high value major and parley that study into work in the field they studied in, otherwise it's just a debt trap to keep you out of the middle class.
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  311. Once the government gains a certain level of money and power, the only way to avoid being chosen as a loser by that government is to offer it even more money and power, creating a downward spiral that eventually ends in the state choking out all freedom and economic activity. This is why you should not allow governments to seize emergency powers. Once the emergency is over, the tyrant finds a new excuse to make the emergency permanent. It's how Rome lost its republic, and it's been how America has been losing its republic.
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  312. Such a good topic. The accreditation system is pretty bad in the US. With few exceptions (i.e. STEM, Medical, or Law), you can't really make rational educational decisions based on value. I think the best system would be one in which the schools were judged based on how successful their average graduates were, that students and lenders had a good idea how much various majors were worth in terms of expected income, and where universities could only charge what people could afford. In other words, if you know that your premed is worth a lot of money because most of your graduates get into good med schools and make high incomes, you could afford to charge more for it and would thus put more of those resources into improving your premed program. If your communications department mostly just churned out minimum wage employees, lenders would not lend for it, students would not want it, and you would either have to improve your program or drop it to focus on what your school was good at. This way, low value programs would be picked up by schools whose specialty was low cost education, and high value programs would be kept by the schools that gave students the best financial prospects. This means that worthless programs would largely disappear because they cost borrowers money in the long run, low value programs would become cheaper because no big money will chase them, and high value programs would be more expensive but have the best access to loans which even poor students could pay back when they became rich tax payers.
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  313. Holy crap, Robert Rath is on this channel! Woot!
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  314. As a person who lives in a city where 80% of jobs are in service and retail, I imagine a four-day workweek would have a similar effect to what increased the cost of labor through minimum wage increases have had, namely increasing automation and making employment opportunities more scarce for low skilled workers particularly for the young and minorities.
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  315. 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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  316. The women who met that last man's relatively modest standards where probably scared of being judged by the loud angry women who didn't. These women's peer groups are probably no small amount of the problem many of these women have. The most unreasonable would turn on any of their more reasonable peers and ostracize them for making more progress in the dating world, and women will pull each other down like lobsters in a pot even more than men because conformity with other women is an ingrained survival mechanism among women and has been around for millions of years.
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  317. Sounds like any serious attempt at competitive chip development requires special economic zones.
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  318. "Take my chocolate, not my life."
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  319. My key takeaway is that there are more terms for baby-batter than I had previously imagined.
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  320. 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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  321. 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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  322. And now a whole new generation gets to understand the dyspeptic feeling of realpolitik.
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  323. Like most fans I was skeptical of Cavill at first but his threading the needle of portraying the book and game versions of Geralt was the only reason I was willing to give the Netflix Witcher a shot. I hated all the dumb changes they made and the only other decent casting was Jaskier, Mousesack, Vesemir, and the dang horse. You would have thought Snyder's abortion of a Superman movie and the nightmare that was Assassin's Creed would have taught studios that having writers who hate the source material was suicide. The fact that the Netflix writers saw Rings of Power take a dump on fans and decided that slapping fans in the face was for pikers is beyond stupid. Either the Witcher hater writers get defenestrated or the Netflix Witcher goes down the memory hole along with the low-budget Polish TV adaptation that Sapkowsky hated so much.
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  324. 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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  325. The worst example of a permanently downtrodden people who were forever ruined by colonization from western empires is the primitive dwellers of the British Isles. They've been in shambles even since the Romans brutally colonized them, robbed their wealth, slaughtered their people, and largely destroyed their native culture. They couldn't turn it around, so why imagine that anybody since then could?
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  326. 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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  327. Wait, are you sure this is different from the original commercial?
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  328. Woke programming is aging about as well as milk.
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  329. Brother, Spam ain't that cheap anymore.
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  330. Baby birds are the peanut butter of the animal world, EVERYTHING eats them. E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G.
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  331. Social animal behavior 101: if an individual lies to others and harms them, the perpetrator has to demonstrate that they understand that what they did was wrong, make restitution to the harmed, and show repeated proof that they are now worthy of having trust in them restored. If the offender refuses to engage in this restorative behavior, they are shunned from society.
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  332. People wanting to marry those who share traditional family values and be cherished rather than people with twisted progressive values and be seen as assets should not be surprising. Shared values and dedication are the most important aspects of a match. The whole reason why humanity moved from rich men with harems and poor men wanting to overthrow them is because, in a society where children don't regularly starve to death, it is better for children to have loving parents than relative material comfort. The high status leftover women of China should go to the west and find narcissistic Machiavellian men to match with. They will easily outcompete the narcissistic Machiavellian leftover women in those rich countries with their comparatively humble standards.
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  333. We breathlessly await the day an intersectional child tweets aloud that the house of the mouse emperor has no clothes.
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  334. I once played a character who was kinda like myself in 2nd Ed and I (unsurprisingly) took every attack on my character personally. Then I passed my 12th birthday and realized it was stupid to play myself and have spent the rest of my life putting layers or abstraction between myself and my character by playing characters who were unlike me (nonhuman, older, younger, female, evil, cheerful, stupid, emotionless, parents, criminals, etc.) but had one or two aspects of their personality that I could resonate with. The whole purpose of a roleplaying game is to take on the role of somebody who isn't you and inhabit their world for a time.
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  335. The first time a major flood/earthquake/wildfire hits a city full of concrete batteries, will nobody care or will comparisons to Chernobyl come up thought global media? The low energy density might be more of a blessing than a curse with this kind of technology.
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  336. I played High Elves and Bretonians in 5th Edition also. They were great looking armies to field.
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  337. 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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  338. 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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  339. 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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  340. Just remember, starving Chinese youth, putting more Beidou satellites into orbit that tell PRC tanks to ask locals for directions is more important than you having food and shelter.
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  341. Good to see China pay dearly for illegally acquiring American dual use technology, though it is sad to know that Xi won't be hoisted by his own petard... unless there's more sabotaged stolen American tech in their arsenal.
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  342. It is quite interesting how so many widely accepted theological ideas grow up outside of the original text. The channel Religion for Breakfast is a great place to find similar content for anybody who is hankering for more.
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  343. Just like Palpatine, she keeps returning, no matter how much the fans hate it.
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  344. 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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  345. I'm deeply offended that they would recommend the Animorphs. Where's content moderation?
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  346. I'm glad I stopped buying cable back in the days when the National Enquirer Channel just ran documentaries like The History of the Gun.
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  347. Maybe if they rename "Brave New World" to "1984" it will test better. Everybody loves nostalgia.
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  348. 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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  349. Here I was thinking this was going to be about the heresy of GW suddenly making Slaanesh preexist his/her/its birth for no good reason. I don't see the problem with femme custodes, after all the first thing I think when I imagine Darwinian Jingoistic Fascist Theocratic Patriarchies is highly progressive views of gender equality. I mean, it's not like people who want females in their armies can just play Sisters of Battle, Eldar, Tyranids, Chaos, or Tau.
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  350. I think the book "The Dictator's Handbook" has the right of it. Essentially, a politician's real ideology is their own political survival. If they need the support of wide swaths of the people, and can easily be removed, they will do what the people want. If they need only a few influential supporters and are hard to remove, they rule exactly the same as any other tyrant, regardless of their stated party. Every ruler dreams of pulling up the ladder behind them to ensure perpetual power, and that is why their policies change when their circumstances change.
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  351. 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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  352. The fact that China has decided to prop up it's economy with debt fuled make work projects like money sink high speed rail that nobody can afford to use and massive housing projects in places nobody wants to live in a society where people have children way below the rate of replacement suggests that there is no plan for how to keep the economy from stalling out in the long term and it's not like Xi will allow the market to decide where to invest capital in order to ensure long term growth.
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  353. Kinda sounds like Venezuela is dependent on Biden's energy and trade policies to be economically viable.
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  354. 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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  355. "Climate Science" is exactly that, a tautology. Its purpose is to give the rich and powerful an excuse to destroy economic opportunity for the poor and decrease the human population for the benefit of the elite.
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  356. I watched Guardians of the Galaxy III and Deadpool and Wolverine, but I skipped everything else in 2024. Probably won't bother with the next Avengers either. Marvel has become like DC to me where I only follow one or two franchises until they blow it and I maybe wait for a reboot in ten years.
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  357. 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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  358. 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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  359. If the world's governments have known about aliens for (at least) decades, why have chief executives not used this information to distract from their personal scandals before?
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  360. I was doing something else while listening, so I thought he kept saying his video was sponsored by Macarena, the late 90's dance craze. Sometimes you forget that most languages have the good sense not to have that ugly screechy English "e" sound as well.
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  361. Start the video by taking about a book that suggested that the collapse of local layers of social institutions causes loneliness and and then claim capitalism causes social isolation because the government isn't giving people more money? People felt connected and were involved in their communities for millennia before the modern concept of isolation and before federal social safety nets. It would be nice if you spent less time trying to shoehorn every issue into communism vs capitalism. Philosophy started before Camus and it continued even after the 70's.
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  362. Dr. Drew Pinsky has been warning for years that he and his fellow board-certified addiction medicine specialists have experienced growing concerns about weed-induced psychosis in certain populations of patients, stemming from the radical increases in THC consumed by weed users. The problem is that nobody is studying it, so you can neither definitively prove nor disprove a causal link or properly weigh your risk factors.
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  363. Bacteriophages evolve faster than bacteria, so it makes sense to sample and study them as treatments for deadly mutations of bacteria. If natural predators from the human biome can be quickly spread across the world to cull threats to humanity, you could end pandemics in the early stages and create extreme evolutionary pressure for benign strains.
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  364. When have you ever seen a green ask for proof that one of their policies has actually improved any of the metrics they claim to care about? These are the people who shut down regulated domestic hydrocarbon production and then beg countries with no environmental regulations to pick up the slack. These are the people shrugged when it came out that we sent most of our "recycling" to China because their container ships would otherwise return empty and China just burned the plastic, gave Chinese people cancer, and actually did more harm to the planet than if they had just left it in landfills. These are the people who grant licenses for wind turbine operators to kill endangered bald eagles. These are the people who will force the populations of cities whose power grid is primarily supplied by coal to buy electric cars in order to create coal-powered cars. Eliminating the world's most environmentally regulated natural gas production in order to force the world to burn more coal is par for the course for "environmentalists."
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  365. It's insane to me that the people who had been cursing NAFTA for decades for killing high-paying union jobs now suddenly have a problem with protectionism while the people who passed NAFTA, were the ones who killed it. When Trump is around, nobody seems to have a single political principle that supersedes support of or opposition to him.
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  366. If enough ditsy actors destroy their shows by saying stupid things attacking their audience, maybe studios will go back to demanding actors who can keep their pie hole shut.
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  367. 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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  368. VisualPolitik: "Conflict between Iran and Israel escalates, Ukraine hardest hit."
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  369. Yes, but what is the mechanism that causes the seatbelt to stay extended whenever you get out of the car so the mechanism always gets caught in the door jam?
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  370. 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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  371. Degrowth is a great recipe for depriving the rich countries of the wealth to develop cleaner technology, mass produce it, and innovate it till it's affordable; as well as to ensure that the poor cannot afford to think about the future. Degrowth is a "luxury belief" advocated by those who have already gotten theirs and who won't have to live or ever face somebody who will have to live with the consequences. If the elites really care about saving the planet, instead of jet-setting across the world to be seen in exclusive brands decrying the working poor, they should be investing their wealth into developing things like carbon capture technology, small modular nuclear power plants, hydrogen power, and better battery storage technology to improve the viability of wind and solar power so they don't need coal or natural gas backup plants.
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  372. Brutalism hates humanity The feeling is mutual.
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  373. Neanderthal Apex Predator Theory sounds like the setup for a modern theory of phrenology to me.
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  374. Fauci ordered this for delivery last fall. I wonder if he can get his money back.
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  375. 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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  376. I had been wondering why this technology didn't seem to have made it to market after nearly three decades. It sounds like something that maybe a well-educated, but low wage country like India could still take advantage of, but the dream of first world urban farming may be nothing more than a dream.
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  377. We have created a world where the most sociopathic win.
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  378. Xi's legacy will be ruined cities that never housed people with the epitaph "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."
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  379. 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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  380. When you consider the fact that any hospitable land constantly changes hands through immigration and conquest, a given person of a specific region is as likely to be related to the enemies of their local historical figures as they are to be the descendants of those figures.
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  381. As a half-asian person I never saw people who looked like me portrayed in media, and it never occurred to me until I became an adult and started seeing token asians. As an asian person I hated seeing asian vikings. It feels super insulting to me. Like I can’t appreciate something which is not about me unless there is an out of place representation of me present. The notion that you cannot identify with or feel empathy for another human being (or a character) just because they are not exactly the same as you strikes me as either narcissism or psychopathy. I would empathize better with a well written and performed character that does not share my race, sex, socioeconomic status, national origin, culture, religion, time period, etc than to have a suspension-of-disbelief breaking inclusion character made to specifically represent me.
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  382. "She's in Austin."
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  383. His math has been decolonized, but his brain has been recolonized by Cordyceps Unilateralis.
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  384. Imagine if we had solved the problem of acid rain by making more people die in poverty, instead of using wealth and innovation to fix the problem. Same thing with the hole in the ozone layer. Fewer people using CFCs forever is not a viable replacement for replacing CFCs with safer refrigerants.
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  385. I think the article comes down to, if it doesn't work in Hollywood than the people who bet their lives on it for centuries must have been idiots.
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  386. The drive towards exploration predates the human species. Animals also possess it. It is our capacity to recognize the irony of "discovering" something that is known to or built by others that makes us different than the creatures in which the biological drive to discovery was founded and passed on to us. Discovery is important because the unknown has the potential to unalive us or to fundamentally change life in a way that might guarantee the survival of our descendants for unfathomable stretches of time and change the very nature of those offspring as a species. Think of the first sea creatures to leave the intense competition of the oceans for the land, the first animals to move into the trees for shelter, or the first hominids to rely on fire to cook food, protect themselves from cold, and ward off predation. Much of what we find morally reprehensible in people today are the traces of our ancestors and the stories of journey to becoming us engraved in the collective unconscious by the same Baldwin Effect that created all animal instincts.
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  387. I feel ashamed of my cultural appropriation of White European culture every time I put on a suit and tie. Shockingly, the judge did not think that was a valid excuse to show up to court in sweatpants. I think he may have been a racist.
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  388. 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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  389. 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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  390. The initial argument is basically Laplace's Demon (short version, if an entity knows the position and velocity of every particle in the universe at a given time it can perfectly predict the future). People tend to confuse the actions of the silent right hemisphere, which gets heavy input from the body, with a lack of free will because the left hemisphere, which possesses language, lacks the right's ability to know what the other hemisphere is thinking. When the left is forced to recognize that it so often retroactively justifies the actions of the right hemisphere, it thinks that its free will has been violated because it thinks it is the entire mind since it is the only internal voice it hears. Ian McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" explains this in great detail.
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  391. Classical art was created to ennoble the viewer, modern art is created to launder money.
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  392. It's good to know that, regardless of cash flow and stolen intellectual property, the perverse incentive structure created by Communist dictatorships can severely cripple operational effectiveness. Of course, if America also chooses to use its military for the financial benefit of the well-connected and the political goals of leadership, we won't be in any position to throw stones.
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  393. 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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  394. 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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  395. Let's make it cheap and easy to build low income housing, said no politician or their constituency ever.
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  396. 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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  397. We probably have international trade, decreased world poverty, and increases in global government participation for our modern notions of morality. People are vastly more concerned about hurting others when it hurts themselves in some way.
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  398. Ah, the old maple and sickle, a 1-5 year heads up on where America is going.
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  399. I have never been able to understand the notion that you can only identify with, like, or try to be like individuals who look exactly like yourself. As a sino/semetic hybrid, nobody ever looks like me anywhere (though if Keanu Reeves puts on some weight and you squint really hard...). I have always identified with characters based on what they think, or feel, or represent in a story. It never occurred to me that a character should look like me. And when characters are made Asian (for example) when it does not fit the story it kills my suspension of disbelief. When I saw an Asian Asgardian in Thor I was angered to have my suspension of disbelief yeeted out the theater and wondered if I should be insulted that they thought Asians can only watch movies with Asians in it. I loved Creed not because the character looked like me but because I could empathize with the protagonist feeling like he had to prove himself and walking in a long shadow. I could empathize with the female protagonist of the Babbadook because I could understand feeling out of control and being afraid that you might be a bad person inside. I am all for mainstream stories humanizing people from all walks of life and showing us their experience so we can see our shared humanity. I want to see stories about the trickster god Anansi, Iranian Muslim Women, or Filipino street food. But if you put token Han Chinese in there I can't take the story seriously. I can forgive Bollywood or Hong Kong Cinema for not being able to scrounge up a cast that looks anything like the characters in their stories, but in America we really have no excuse. I think we should have more stories with minority characters but those should be stories written for and (even better by) such people. I would happily take another Black Panther movie over a Captain America movie where Steve Rogers is made black. I just find the notion of tokening for the sake of representation to be insulting as a non white person and as an audience member whose suspension of disbelief has been harmed because the creators assumed that I can't handle experiencing somebody else's story.
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  400. And here I thought that the transatlantic slave trade destroying the transmission of cultural knowledge, language, and history among African slaves was considered one of the great sins of slavery. I guess oral traditions can be conveyed by genetic memory or something.
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  401. Communism teaches that all human relationships are built on power, not mutual reciprocity. If everything is an exercise of power, then why wouldn't you steal, cheat, and kill to get ahead? Capitalism might be able to peacefully adapt to Confucian moral principles but not to Communist Atheism. Capitalism has no moral framework of its own because it is just the economic model of Enlightenment Protestantism. Religion is a common narrative that sets baseline of expected moral obligations for its adherents and an ideal to aim for, allowing some level of trust between strangers that was not possible in the world of hunter gatherer tribes. Religion was the social fabric that let cities exist and later allowed for the existence of pluralistic societies. In destroying traditional Chinese religion, the CCP destroyed all the social fabric that trust is built on. Thus, when they moved from Russian Styled Marxism to "Communism with Chinese Characteristics," China just switched from amoral collectivism to amoral individualism.
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  402. I've read reports suggesting that the problem for China with their African investments is that many of the loans come from provincial level bureaucrats looking to make a quick buck, rather than the central planners in Beijing, so there is no overarching plan just lots of corruption, palm, greasing, and lies about results. According to those reports, the reason why the investment is tapering off is that Xi cottoned on to how much money was being quietly lost and started cracking down on his corrupt government officials who were making the malinvestments.
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  403. 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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  404. It's quite hard to argue with that last one.
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  405. Ryan Holliday's book "Trust Me I'm Lying" explains in great detail how both marketers and demagogues have been exploiting the click-based monetization strategy of modern media to push lies as truth verified by experts while the media happily swallows free content indiscriminately. His main argument is that the paid subscription model of news is what pushed America's sensationalist yellow journalism news model to the trust-based system that the internet has since destroyed. It's a great read from a highly philosophical center-left former marketer that explains one of the main reasons why the media and expert class have lost their credibility.
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  406. The day I see a politician agree to accept even the same amount of money tomorrow for his personal pet projects as he got today, I will be ducking my head for incoming airborne swine.
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