Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "Sweden In NATO (Recap) || Peter Zeihan" video.

@MABSDK1993 Only a total ignoramus would describe the US as poor.
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@nedimyra Norway is not the richest country on earth, otherwise it would develop and manufacture all of its own weapons. I love Norway, but that doesn't change the facts. There is only one #1 economy and top industrial/military power on earth at the top, with no peers.
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@nedimyra Wealth is measured by security, real estate, assets, DTI ratio, and liabilities. Norway isn’t even a top contender in those combined categories. Norway is entirely dependent on the US for advanced weapons systems and most of its security, whereas the US is not dependent on Norway for much of anything. You can listen to myopia in your media and academia talking local propaganda about how great Norway is all you want, but it will never change the realities I mentioned. Been doing my homework in this space since the 1970s with ground truth data, not the academic flatulence of professors and ignoramuses.
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@nedimyra My family is from Finland on my mom’s side, and I’ve spent a good part of my life living in the Nordic counties. I remember when ARPAnet was developed and had my hands on the early modems when we were living in West Germany from 1980-1982. None of your assertions are matching reality other than some basic statements about geography.
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@nole8923 It's more complex than that. I've lived in 8 different US States and 2 of the Nordic Countries, have citizenship in both the US & EU. If you have no life, quality of life doesn't matter and the Nordic countries don't respect your individual right to life as a human being, so you start off with a major eliminator criteria right off the bat. Scandinavia enjoys its security on the back of the American taxpayer, so that part is out of balance. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland benefit from hundreds of billions in US RDT&E on critical defense programs that they've been able to purchase without ever contributing a dime to the development of those systems. (F-16/F100, F/A-18/F404, F-35A/F135, AIM-7, AIM-9, AIM-120, APG-66, APG-68, APG-81 etc.) Saab Gripen uses US GE engine, servos, landing gear, brakes, and many of its subsystems so it isn't a domestic program as advertised. Advanced medical diagnostics systems, equipment, and drugs used in Scandinsvia were almost all developed and manufactured in the US. Transportation, telecom, satellite, and many other systems used to benefit the Nordic nations were mostly developed and made in the US. There have been things made in the Nordics that benefit the US in normal trade like Kone elevators and escalators, Nokia, and Ikea of course. US housing costs have sky-rocketed because foreign investors are buying up residential real estate to park their money in the US economy while generating monthly cash flow in billions, because the US economy is more stable than Europe's. I literally had a Finnish friend of mine die on an organ waiting list because the Finnish NHS deemed him not as worthy to receive a new liver. The NHSs in Scandinavia and Finland are a joke compared to what we have in the US. Taxes are out of control and purposely-punitive in Sweden and Finland to artificially depress the entire population for the purpose of social equality, which really handicaps the societies as a whole, making them dependent on the US for security because they neglect their defense budgets. Quality of life in the Nordics has more to do with geography and clean water from the lakes. When many people are able to have a summer cottage where they can get away from the cities, it's very healthy to be out in nature. You can say the same thing about Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, many places in CA, UT, CO, WV, VA, and NC for cabins. It's an imbalanced comparison to pick tiny little populations of traditionally-homogenous Aryan peoples with 334 million Americans living in vastly-different geographic regions of the US. I found most of the claims about the Nordic nations to be childish propaganda fed to the people steadily to create a pacified and servile populace. As far as governments go, the Nordic nations are astonishingly-childish to watch in-action, with the multi-party divisions, lots of stupid leftist women, and low-T males who know precious little about the world or their own history in general. These are places where parliaments frequently resign en masse, and place defense of their nations at the lowest priority. They can't be taken seriously, which is sad to say coming from the US system where politicians have been owned by organized crime since the 1920s.
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@nole8923 Lived through all of that as well. Quality of life in many ways has improved in the US, while more stressors have been added so it’s not as black and white as some make it out to be. We were still under the threat of MAD, but the world was simpler with bi-polar super powers. 1960s US was one of the most chaotic periods in history, maybe only out-done by the Civil War. JFK, MLK, and RFK assassinations, riots, Vietnam War protests, LBJ WH policies, exclusion of blacks from much of the middle class sector they had worked into, and the beginning of the welfare state that ultimately destroyed the black family to beget waves of crime in the 1970s-1990s with fatherless black inner-city gangs and the cocaine epidemic. 1st half of the 1980s was still in recession from the terrible 1970s policies and global market forces with OPEC, along with a new wave of punitive government regulations on blue collar middle class in the US. FDR had no such protections, as he was a stooge for the organized crime families who took over in the 1920s, along with the socialists and Soviets in many ways. He transferred gargantuan amounts of US technology to Stalin and allowed Soviet Lend-Lease Generals to dictate policy to US manufacturers during the war. Financially collapse of 2007-2009 was created by Congressional welfare promotion politics that dictates to lenders to issue mortgages to people without bank accounts who normally wouldn’t qualify for a home loan. Banks that were smart got rid of those loans and people started bundling them as junk, which European banks bought up stupidly. The main people that needed to recover from 2007-2009 in terms of housing liabilities were the ones who took out variable rate mortgages and got taken when the bottom dropped out, and their payments went up. I wouldn’t describe that as the average American, since most mortgages already existed prior to that period. Your recollection is common to talking points from partisan class-warfare propaganda, which does not align with the completeness of the picture. I find the political parties do a terrible job of understanding domestic issues because it’s all about trying to tidy-up complex metrics into partisan angles. It gets even worse for foreign policy matters where they both really fall flat on their faces trying to see the world through tiny partisan lenses.
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@scyphe I've lived all over the US, Germany, Finland, and have spent a bit of time in Sweden, and Denmark. We have family in Sweden from my Finnish side. It has more to do with different geographic regions, weather, food, transportation, entertainment, personal security, health & wellness, and multiple factors that don't compare well when you take a giant Nation with 338 million people covering vast regions from Hawaii and Alaska to Florida, and try to compare them with a few State-sized nations with tiny populations of relatively-homogenous cultural-ethnic groups. There are things I love about Scandinavia and Finland (geography, history, lakes, architecture), and things I don't (nanny state beaureaucrats, excessive taxes, broken NHS, collectivism, church-state, VAT, capital gains, restrictions on freedom of speech and thought, restrictions on personal security, neglect of national defense, etc.). All that said, there are a lot worse countries to live in and I place the Nordics more to the top of everywhere I have been, but still under the US.
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