Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Peter Zeihan on who is going to win the US election | 30 with Guyon Espiner Ep.10 | RNZ" video.

  1.  @jbp122  You have to be able to tell the difference between "Peter Talking About Stuff He's Carefully Researched" and "Peter Talking About Stuff He's Heard From Deep State Strategy Types." It's fascinating to hear both types of take, one because you learn something important about the world, and the other because you learn something important about what the Deep State thinks and/or wants everyone else to think, that doesn't necessarily reflect the world as it is.
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  2.  @Reel___  Found the TDS sufferer.
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  3. They looked at the state of the world, and decided they really don't want to be part of it.
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  4.  @missykins3193  That supports my theory that he's primarily influenced by a relatively small cadre of "global strategy" types, who are occasionally hired as consultants for DoD or State. Their outlook is fascinating, and often includes insights not available to regular Americans, but it leads them to be out of touch with or dismissive of the culture, which then blindsides them from time to time.
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  5.  @radscorpion8  You forgot to get back on your other sockpuppet to make this reply.
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  6.  @gary_michael_flanagan_wildlife  There are definitely times when he's got some insight, though -- when he's done his research carefully, and his conclusions deviate from political orthodoxy in refreshing ways. Even when he's just parroting political orthodoxy, it's the political orthodoxy of the "strategic class", which is a fascinating ideology to study.
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  7. NZ is just so easy to love, if you like the outdoors. It's like California, with fewer dangerous crazies.
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  8. 25:00 Hey, Peter's backing off on his famine predictions.
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  9. Young people of Japan, heed his advice! It's lots of fun!
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  10. "The EU is a big dairy exporter in competition with New Zealand" Only if the Dutch farmers can hold the line against the Greens and Globalists.
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  11. One strength that NZ has that some may overlook, is innovation, creativity, and resourcefulness. Kiwis are known throughout the international racing world as some of the very best mechanics. If you're in America, chances are Amazon has whatever you need in a warehouse somewhere in the country. New Zealand? Chances are if you need a part right away, you're going to have to mill it yourself, or repurpose some other part to make do. If NZ can somehow put this to work in the custom engineering sector (with IP protections from a larger country to help out), that would be a very nice export business.
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  12. The drama gets clicks and sells books. Should 1984 have sold as many copies as it did? Sure, why not?
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  13.  @Greg-yu4ij  Lol, he's got Trump Derangement Syndrome.
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  14.  @danielsmithiv1279  Or (more hopefully) people say, "We really don't want that to happen, let's work to avoid it."
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  15.  @richardpeychers4076  I dunno. Apparently the Aussies joke about invading you sometimes. "100%... there for the taking"
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  16.  @enumeratenz  Are the mines under Essen really played out?
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  17.  @enumeratenz  What would it take to re-open the Zollverein?
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  18. "AUKUS" Yeah, NZ, we have to ask you -- are you really that independent from China? Blink twice if you're being held hostage.
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  19. The stuff that's checkable, he's probably okay. The rest? Take it with a grain of salt.
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  20. Agree here 100%. Someone needs to lock him in a room with 100 years' worth of global economic data, and not let him out until he's properly read through it all. That would get us some worthwhile presentations. =)
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  21. Peter, what are the economics and demographics of China's urban / rural split? I could easily imagine a dystopia where almost all young Chinese (i.e., what children people have) move to the city to become factory workers, becoming what prosperous citizenry China has, leaving their parents and grandparents in the countryside. These parents and grandparents are basically left to die in their impoverished villages. The best they might hope for is for their children to set them up in hospice care in the city, seeing to their needs until they pass on. Those without children -- the state would do what they could, which probably wouldn't be much. Canada-style "MAID' could well be the fate of tens, or even hundreds, of millions. At worst, gangs of opportunistic youths (or, as likely, opportunistic wolves) descending on these villages to pick them clean, while those in the cities toil away, richer but still ever fewer...
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  22.  @sgtmorningwood2288  He's got enough Deep State connections, that he might be right even if he's giving bulls**t reasons for it. Expect attempted 3am ballot dumps in 2024 unless Republicans step up their ground game with election monitoring.
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  23. Eh, 1984 and Brave New World are worth a read. So is Zeihan, in the same way.
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  24.  @MoonDoggie-hs2se  I do a lot of driving, through deep blue areas and "lean" blue areas. Aside from a scattering of Ukrainian flags and "in this house" yard signs, I have seen ZERO indication that Biden has any support. I see more enthusiasm for Jill Stein. This is borne out by the sparse attendance when he tries to have a rally. If Biden got zero votes in November, based on this lack of enthusiasm, I would not be at all surprised. Trump? 10x the support of any other candidate, and it tends to be organic (actually on people's residential property) rather than increase-name-recognition public streetcorners. MAGA is pretty common, and the fact that you still get social opprobrium for it in some circles, discourages more of his supporters from speaking out.
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  25.  @tatsuya2112  Yes, but the 5-year-olds were not seeing them. Nor there the elder statesmen of globalism. In a case that can be compared to "Only Nixon can go to China", only a homosexual in the Deep State can bring up the fact that cultures worldwide are not acting heterosexually enough to survive the century.
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  26. "They don't have enough people under 45 to buy what they produce" Peter, could you PLEASE comment a bit on why medical demand for 50+ doesn't count as demand?
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  27. Do you know what would solve America's problems? Building more McMansions, like in the 00's. Not even kidding. Space for kids. According to Peter's theories, this is probably why the US is still competitive, demographically.
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  28.  @dogshogun  Well, if he considers the Deep State his "consumer base", I guess. I would say he's more "captured by his sources" or "access journalist" than "audience captured" though.
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  29.  @dmlevitt  Expert? Occasionally. Polymath? Meh. Prescient? Once or twice. Omniscient? Absolutely not.
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  30.  @KipIngram  Peter's not really interested in having kids (or women at all) so he doesn't really see Germany pulling an hourglass-demographic like they did with JS Bach's help after the 30 Year's War. "On the farm kids are free labor, but in the city they're just expensive furniture" -- unless you get creative, and say, you want a chamber-orchestra. In which case popping out 20 or so and teaching them to play musical instruments (the ones that survive infancy, anyway) works surprisingly well.
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  31. "It's not bad to have a low fertility rate. It's bad to have a low fertility rate for decades." The logical implication of this, is that it is fine to have a low fertility rate as long as it rises dramatically again before decades pass. Even low-birthrate apologists have to rely on high-birthrate boosters, to the point that there is absolutely no point in being a low-birthrate apologist.
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  32.  @nancygawlowicz2562  His sources have probably been personally insulted by Trump, and if Peter wants the information to keep flowing, he has to join them in their indignance.
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  33.  @dan7564  Generally Trump's impulses are directed towards, "How can we make America domestically more like it was in the 1980s?" It could be worse, frankly.
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  34.  @dan7564  Sure, Democrats have had their election fraud machine going for a long time. LBJ certainly, FDR probably, Tammany Hall folks obviously.
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  35.  @josep3776  I think Peter is fascinated by Stratfor types, and other folks who advise / evaluate / participate in the Foggy Bottom milieu. I can't blame him, really, and couldn't guarantee that I wouldn't get swept away by that sort of "insiderism" myself.
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  36.  @integralmark  China still has hundreds of millions of impoverished citizens, in its rural interior. If those are the ones aging and dying, and the smaller population of youth that they have are getting richer in the cities, old age could solve their rural poverty problem for them. It wouldn't be pretty -- gangs of youths (or bureaucrats) (or wild dogs) picking over villages where the youngest person is 75, the elderly hoping that their children will set them up in a hospice apartment in the city, the childless elderly accepting FitBit-type tracking so that someone will notice when they die -- but it will "solve itself".
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  37.  @jacobcooney1715  I'm kind of surprised Zeihan hasn't noticed that the geography of the US is similar in many ways to the geography of China, if you rotated China 90 degrees clockwise. The cities of China's south shore are separated from the rest by a mountain range, kind of like the Rockies separate San Diego / Seattle from the rest of the US. The middle region of the country is a large drainage basin for a river or two, with New Orleans likened to Shanghai. The analogy falls a little flat, because the old Silk Road is not the Saint Laurence Seaway / Eastern Seaboard, but it holds remarkably well in other places. Still, when you think about Zeihan's division of countries by large geographical barriers, it's a surprise that Manifest Destiny ever got off the ground -- the Spanish West, French Mississippi, and English east of Appalachia seems a natural division of the place. You also have to wonder, according to Zeihan's thinking, why the Midwest (being a vastly bigger river network than the Hudson, Potomac, and Sacramento combined) hasn't conquered the Coasts.
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  38. "Who is going to win the 2024 election?" "Biden in a landslide" Er, no. There is no enthusiasm for Biden even in the bluest of blue areas. In an honest election, it's Trump in a landslide. Peter has his position for one of two reasons, one naive, the other terrifying: - Peter is naively wishcasting his own political beliefs onto the nation. He considers himself an "independent", and believes that every other independent thinks the way he does. This is manifestly not the case. - Peter has terrifying inside knowledge of Biden's political machine taking illegal immigrants and plugging them into enough states to win the electoral college. This is basically the end of democracy in the United States (those in power manipulating the laws such that they win, very much against the CLEARLY stated will and interests of the citizenry), but would be just fine with an Internationalist like Zeihan.
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  39.  @Greg-yu4ij  They're probably paying him in access. If he said the obvious truth about Biden, his contacts in State and DoD won't talk to him anymore, most likely.
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  40.  @jorndoff2002  Even when he's wearing The Glasses?
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  41. "Republicans aren't even getting all Republicans to show up" NeverTrumpers have almost vanished as a political entity. Trump is making inroads with non-traditional Republican voters -- Biden has slipped below 80% among African-Americans, for example, and below 70% among younger African-Americans. This, after Democrats could count on 92%+ of their votes since the '60s. (Over 99%, if the votes come in late enough on election night.) Hispanics also support Trump at about 45% -- this, after the Democrats have pounded Trump on his immigration stance. It hasn't really helped; a majority of Hispanics are against illegal immigration too. Trump lost a few white women and gained massive numbers of minorities. This will contribute greatly to Trump's landslide in 2024.
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  42. There's one prediction about the US and fracking that I'm really sad didn't come true.
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  43. "I am an internationalist" We know, Peter. We know.
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  44. "We would need 800 destroyers to patrol the seas, we only have about 60" What about Mahan's "fleet in being" idea? A given city may not have enough police to have one walking every beat in the city, but they have enough so that they can be deployed to hot spots to force people to take police into account when they decide how to behave. Same way, small-time pirates may be endemic to certain hard-luck neighborhoods around the globe, but any nation that wanted to involve itself (un)officially in piracy would have one of the world's biggest air forces bearing down on it, in the form of a single American carrier group.
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  45. "No one is in a worse position than the Chinese" How is their fertility problem interacting with their poverty problem? If most of the bulge of elderly they are dealing with are impoverished anyway, it seems that one problem will solve the other. It won't be pretty, but it will be solved. That said, youth un- and under-employment in China is a disastrous problem, not sure what the numbers are on that but iirc they're worrisome.
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  46. Eh, we need doomsayers sometimes. Do you really dislike George Orwell or Aldous Huxley because they weren't entirely right?
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  47.  @danielsmithiv1279  Sometimes predicting doom can help stave it off.
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  48. His Deep State sources would dry up completely if he didn't show any sympathy to the pummeling Trump unleashed on their egos.
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  49.  @blakebrown534  In open primaries?
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  50. @wecanjump7512 Trump is gaining among African-Americans (20% and climbing, and his support skews young) and Hispanics (holding at about 45%, so the "California model" of demographic destiny the Democrats are praying for, is not holding). I seem to remember someone saying, "If Republicans ever get more than 20% of the African-American vote, the Democrats will never win nationally again." We're headed that way now.
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  51.  @stevebusfield199  They won't literally hold their nose, Steve, even if they'd have to because Biden literally sh*ts his pants at diplomatic events. This has happened more than once, and has been caught on camera. In the same vein, Biden may well be president-for-life any day now, like William Henry Harrison. No one would vote for Kamala. I would take long shot odds -- 1 in 10, maybe -- that Biden doesn't make it to the convention and Hillary tries to get the superdelegates to acclaim her the nominee.
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  52.  @scrapbrainsinc  I don't think they can replace him at the convention, because the superdelegates are probably still in Hillary's pocket. We'd have a repeat of 2016, only moreso, because of the gains Trump has made in the African-American and Hispanic demographics.
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