Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Pathological Gigantism and the Demise of the West | Senator Mike Lee | EP 346" video.

  1. Dr. Peterson, please listen to all of Eisenhower's Farewell Address. His warning against "Scientific-Technological Elites" is even more vital to your message today, than his more famous quote about the military-industrial complex. You should try to interview Thomas Sowell as well, on the topic of Public Intellectuals, if the two of you could tolerate the irony of such a conversation.
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  2. "World War 1 put the continent of Europe through a bandsaw for no gain whatsoever" The best explanation of WW1 I've seen, is it decided whether the Austro-Hungarian Empire was still a Great Power (spoilers: It wasn't) or whether Russia could tear off its Slavic Balkan territories (spoilers: they couldn't). The massive steel-producer Germany used the opportunity to issue a Mahanite challenge to the declining steel-producer Britain on the high seas in the name of imperial expansion (Shocking twist: Jutland was indecisive), and any idea of a short war was overwhelmed by the static grind of the land war on the Western Front. Everything anyone expected at the beginning of the war basically backfired, except for the dismantling of the Hapsburg Empire. The collapse of the Romanovs, Hohenzollerns, and Ottomans were unintended consequences, an exception to Mahan's doctrine of the decisive naval battle was discovered, and the idea of short, splendid little wars, was thrown into its worst repute since the Treaty of Westphalia.
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  3. "Will the endgame involve Ukrainian tanks on Red Square? Which country will have built those tanks, America?" The newest "Leopard" tanks are going into service in Ukraine, I hear. So it's possible we could see German tanks rolling into Moscow, 80 years on.
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  4. "State Street, Blackrock, etc, are investing based on the severity of the climate apocalypse that besets us" Almost. They are investing based on the expectation of future regulatory capture by the interests of Wokeness and climate apocalypse. Betting on regulations has been one of the better ways of making money on Wall Street, for some time now - and it's a whole lot easier than trying to figure out which companies will be naturally successful. These investment firms have made buying politicians and buying regulators into a virtue.
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  5. "Some people are making an awful lot of money off of this war" Eh, not so much. The profit margins on ammunition are pretty low, all things considered. And if you want to sell exquisite weapon systems, your best customers aren't people whose countries are half-wrecked; they have no money. Even if you can force a peace on your terms, reparations famously backfire. Your best customers are prosperous people in thriving countries who have looming threats on their doorstep. I'm confident that defense contractors could make even more money if we made peace in the Ukraine, even at the expense of several DonBas provinces, and stuffed the rest of the countries bordering Russia with enough defensive armaments to make the Kursk salient look like a nursery school playground. There is no slippery slope when the next step is vastly more dangerous and difficult than the last. Then, we simply let the Russian demographic crisis age their fighting men into oblivion. Or, we let Putin look as clever as Bismarck, by making peace with us (and even something of an alliance), and turning his armies East to make sure the Chinese are too busy with a land war on their doorstep, to attempt to take over Taiwan. =)
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  6. Who was worse, Vladimir Putin, or Saddam Hussein?
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  7. "We're in it with the Ukrainians until the end - what does that look like?" I don't know. The last Ukrainian dies?
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  8. "To overturn an executive branch regulation, Congress has to overturn the veto of the same president whose executive branch created the regulation. This is wrong." Is there a good test case you can put in front of the Supreme Court to correct this?
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  9.  @atheosmachina  Yeah, more's the pity. His ideas are extremely current, though, and should be propagated as much as we possibly can.
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  10.  @jsharp9735  Eh, not compared to the German military-industrial complex that Eisenhower was thinking of when he wrote his speech. Krupp was basically the prince of Essen, bankrolled the Nazi party when it was nearly bankrupt, and sold arms all over the world. He was, for a time, the world's richest man -- and not by any small amount. US defense contractors, on the other hand, are scattered up and down the Fortune 500, making up no more than 4% of this country's GDP. CEOs tend to receive middling compensation, again compared to other Fortune 500 companies. Compared to Silicon Valley companies, they're bit players on the national stage. Speaking of those Silicon Valley companies, they are the Scientific-Technological Elite that Eisenhower warned about. As the Twitter Files indicate, they are FAR more of a threat to the freedom and financial security of Americans than the military-industrial complex. It's Google's world, we're just living in it.
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  11. "They're facing, by Chinese standards, quite the rebellion on the home front" Do you mean by totalitarian government standards? Because by historical Chinese standards, "quite the rebellion" typically involves eight-digit casualty figures. I expect the next Chinese rebellion will hit nine figures, all things considered.
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