Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Whatifalthist" channel.

Mormons are, strictly speaking, a revival of a heretical sect that the Council of Nicaea was convened to dispose of. Ask someone in the 2nd century "Is someone a Christian if they believe [what Mormons believe]" they'll say "That depends on who you ask". Ask someone from the 5th century onward "is someone a Christian if they believe [what the Mormons believe]" they'll say "No."
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If "Christian fascists" are so organized and effective, why have Christians been losing so much ground in the culture war for as long as I've been alive? I think that once Christians get organized and effective, the takeover of all of our institutions will be entirely peaceful.
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"Pure Darwinism says we should breed as much as possible -- it's possible to do that, but it's not what makes us happy" The vast majority of people are deeply regretful -- in ways that cause acute misery -- if they do not have children. Evolution is important enough that we should be skeptical of protests to the contrary.
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@nathan_408 Ronald Reagan, born 1911 Margaret Thatcher, born 1925 George H W Bush, born 1924 Richard Nixon, born 1913 Henry Kissinger, born 1923 George Kennan, 1904 Pope John Paul II, born 1920 I like Peter Robinson (of "tear down this wall" fame) as much as the next Conservative who's ever heard of him, and I'm grateful for all the young soldiers who lost their lives, but they were standing amongst elder statesmen of the highest water. The Boomers who grew into power, were just not the same caliber. If they'd had their way (and they are having their way all too often, today) the communists would have won.
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It's only "bad" by the lights of this culture, which can't sustain its birthrate. This culture's values will be irrelevant, within a couple of decades. When women are expected to stay at home to raise their kids until at least age 5, and only to work part-time outside the home after, (and the variety of gainful employment available without leaving the house will climb back up to pre-cotton-mill levels) it's not going to be seen as oppression at all. Just like we're judging the past by our own value set, ("women were oppressed then" rather than "women were giving their all to try to keep babies alive, and keep people from collapsing mentally because half of babies died anyway") the future is going to judge women-at-home from its own value set. 2125 is going to look far more like 1925 than 2025 -- and not the ridiculous "flapper" minority either, who will be just as critiqued in 2125 as they were in 1925.
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China is basically the United States rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, if China had been settled entirely by immigrants coming down the Silk Road and up from Vietnam. The central plain draining a major river (drains east in China, drains south in America), the independent minded coastal cities separated by major mountainous terrain (in the south for China, in the west for America), and a connection to the rest of the world's trade network (northwest for China, northeast for America). As our level of ethnic mixing increases -- people moving for jobs, especially among the college-educated -- we're splitting into three countries: Atlantica, Pacifica, and the Midwest (which includes every county that can't see an ocean, plus much of the Old South, minus major urban colonies of Atlantica and Pacifica.) According to Zeihan's geopolitical theories, the rivers of the Midwest should make it the dominant power on the continent, but it isn't, calling into question his thesis of riparian determinism. Atlantica and Pacifica are the "coastal elites", which have an uneasy alliance based on their interests in global trade, common interests of large blocs of money, and desire for bureaucratic / clerical dominance. The Atlantica elites (with their legacy power bases in Washington DC and New York) have recently been supplanted by tech billionaire elites from Pacifica, as we've seen with the installation of Kamala Harris as Vice President despite having no qualifications, and their pushing the empty suit Gavin Newsom as a replacement for the old Atlantican champion Joe Biden.
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@oitubeman1019 Something like a third of all Germans were killed during the war. JS Bach (the composer) helped fix this by having like 20 children.
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Paul Vanderklay refers to the Constitution as a "paper pope".
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"For the first time in history you could decouple s*x from pregnancy" Nonsense. Any culture that knew how to make sausages knew how to make prophylactics, and that goes back millennia. The discovery of vulcanization (which allowed us to use more-effective latex) occurred in the early 19th century -- just before the Victorian Era. Sorry, but the physical effects of "the pill" are not terribly significant. The dire effects of family collapse -- now expanded into population collapse -- are likely to drive us to a new Victorian Era, as government turn to the basics of what keeps populations stable.
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"We didn't even have a word for gravity until the 17th century" What? The concepts "gravity" and "levity" are Aristotelian, referring to the tendency of some things to be heavy and fall, and for some things to be charged with "levity" and go upwards.
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"When something happens in Western Civilization, New York either created it, or is on top of it." This is no longer true. Every aspect of media -- advertising, publishing, journalism, news, TV -- has been taken from New York by Silicon Valley / the Internet, in the form of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, etc. Note that "Mad Men" is a historical period piece.
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"Once Rome fell it couldn't be put together again, although Justinian tried" Arguably, he and Belisarius made sure it was too wrecked to function. If he had taken another approach, he might have succeeded.
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"All things create their opposite" Any definition has an inverse. This isn't really "created" so much as discovered.
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"Americans pay no attention to other countries" Have you ever heard the saying, "God invented war to teach Americans geography"?
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"We don't demand tribute from our neighbors or randomly annex them" Who's here after Trump's comments about "Canada the 51st state", "We should buy Greenland", and we're in the middle of the Great Tariff Uncertainty?
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Christian love: to will the good of the other. - St. Thomas Aquinas
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What do you make of the fact that most women, worldwide, are on artificial hormones that fool their body into thinking that it's already pregnant? How about the fact that these chemicals do not break down quickly, have gotten into the water supply, and are adversely affecting men as well?
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"They were all around at the same time as China" That's like saying they were all around at the same time as Britain, or at the same time as Europe. China is a geographical description, and to some limited extent a cultural one. Just because from time to time different imperial houses arise that can claim to give orders to far-flung peoples, doesn't mean the is any more continuity there. In fact, the fatality rate of Chinese civil wars arguably means there's less continuity.
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"Science is humility personified" Er, except that it leads to Hilbertian hubris: "We must know. We will know!"
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"Imagine if we have to restart our civilization" Imagine restarting our civilization without easily accessible fossil fuels. We're best off not letting things collapse in the first place.
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"No one could have predicted the Naxi movement in 1900" A movement that leveraged the Kaiser's pan-German nationalist propaganda and educational system, an aggressive rump of Prussian militarism, and the mass mobilization of the working class? Eh, someone might have come up with that. They'd have been as shocked by the collapse of the old Imperial houses as anyone else, though.
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"It would be hard to oppress g*y people who are well-liked today" Er, how much of that is simply suppression of criticism under Wokism? I suspect that once word gets out about how handsy g*y men tend to be when in positions of power (like tech investors), but especially power over children -- teachers, doctors, etc -- we're going to see the backlash against the entire rainbow agenda, not simply the most extreme.
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"Mercury was equated with Thoth, and the Norse equivalent was Odin" Interesting to note, that when Jung tried to describe what was happening in Germany in the 1930s and early 40s, he said it was like Wotan wandering in the world again. He has an essay on that you might find interesting.
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Monuments and place-names play a bigger role than we might thing, in keeping those historical connections alive.
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"Sadly, a world where women are more oppressed, wage growth would improve markedly" I'm not sure giving women the option to be at home with their kids to age 5 counts as "more oppressed", especially when you think about how that would basically end the mental illness epidemic.
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The number for Christianity in Iran is probably closer to 10-15% -- a single evangelical Christian ministry is reaching 10 million+ people in that country.
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"Last year, Ethiopia had as many babies born as all of the EU combined. What kind of world does that create?" Oddly enough, a Lutheran one. See: religion in Ethiopia.
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"It sounds like the Eucharist was a psychedelic" Or it's something Christians did INSTEAD of psychedelics.
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"All of these companies that rule the world are based out Ecotopia except Netflix" Which is on the border of Ecotopia I guess, being at the south end of Silicon Valley in Los Gatos?
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