Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Explaining American Civilization" video.

  1. "Americans pay no attention to other countries" Someone did a hilarious man-on-the-street in Australia where they presented a blank map of the United States and challenged Aussies to fill in the names of each state, without looking at their phones.
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  2.  @ihatejpmorgan  New York City is a zombie, having been critically injured about the time that Google took over basically all media. Books, advertising, music, TV (YouTube), all that money is flowing through Silicon Valley now, with some branching off to Amazon in Seattle. The collapse of Europe will only accelerate the slide into irrelevance of the old East Coast Establishment.
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  3. Our inability to be complacent about our own failings even when our enemies have serious internal problems, is part of our resilience.
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  4.  @Kaiserboo1871  If Zeihan's riparian supremacy theories are correct, the Midwest should be in charge of North America. The fact that it isn't, shows a great weakness in his theory. Why should the Hudson and Sacramento river systems be outperforming the Mississippi?
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  5. The United States is running into trouble now, because we are being run into the ground by our top-heavy bureaucracy which sees no limits on its power.
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  6. Paul Vanderklay refers to it as a "paper pope".
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  7. "The continent-spanning railroads are the best example of state cooperation" Um, no. Arguably the only thing the state did was declare the railroads had the rights to land, that they could build on or sell. Not exactly a small thing to be sure, but unless you count the US Cavalry clearing the natives off of the land (which was somewhat incidental), the railroads were almost entirely a capitalist enterprise.
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  8. Wait a minute, the north end of Burma and the east side of PNG are Protestant??
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  9. Californians are Portuguese? That's insane. Sorry, no, aside from a couple of Lopes and Sousas, California is about as mixed as you can get.
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  10. "I worry that a leftist social-engineering technocracy will seize power in America" Yup. We're in another Cold War, this time instead of answering the question "What is the best political-economic structure to optimize the production and distribution of the fruits of the Industrial Revolution?" (answer: the market-economic limited welfare state, thank you and good night) we are dealing with the question "What is the best way to harness expertise spawned in the Information Revolution, in the service of a free people?" I recommend the expert class has their powers limited by the old anti-tyrannical formulation, "to encourage, to be consulted, and to warn". Your thoughts?
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  11. Modern America is based on the fact that the ideas of Frederick Jackson Turner and Alfred Thayer Mahan were victims of their own success.
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  12. 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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  13. Paul Vanderklay refers to the Constitution as a "paper pope".
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  14. "Americans pay no attention to other countries" Have you ever heard the saying, "God invented war to teach Americans geography"?
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  15. Monuments and place-names play a bigger role than we might thing, in keeping those historical connections alive.
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