Comments by "Bob" (@bobs_toys) on "The Armchair Historian" channel.

You should tell your govt this.
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Sorry. Not soldiers. Well defended unbiased election monitors who want to ensure that people want the correct things.
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Alexander Zakharchenko If he isn't a gorilla in every negative sense of the word, I don't know what is. Ukrainian guerillas are much better.
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Not enough Russian soldiers to guarantee the result.
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It's well known that sugar is bad for your health.
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At that point in time, except for Japan they basically weren't. Edit: at least not in any way anyone had any reason to care about. They were sources of resources.
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It's the problem with using people of a particular ethnicity as an excuse to invade a place. If you want to be safe from that particular excuse, what other options do you have but to make them leave? Imagine how much better of Ukraine might be now if it had made all the Russians leave in the 90's.
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@sebe2255 and 100 percent less invaded. Also, they'd be 1/6th less populated for Ukraine. 5 percent for Lithuania. 0.5 percent for Georgia. It feels like it would have been an easy argument to make for a lot of Russia's neighbours.
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@sebe2255 so you make the excuses more difficult.
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@sebe2255 one of the flaws of western society is that we're a high trust society. We tend to assume people are telling the truth. At least as they see it. The less outrageous the BS, the less likely we are to respond to it. The more outrageous the BS, the more likely we are to respond and the harder that response will be. Plus their own people want to think that there's a better reason for their hardship and lost loved ones than the dwarf in charge wanted it. Dictators are politicians, too. They've just got a few more tools available. This is why the Russian fiasco was such a disaster for the CCP. It got us over the psychological hurdle of calling BS and doubting what right the invader had to simply being ready to respond to it.
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@sebe2255 really, though. They do care deeply. Which is why the CCP hits the roof every time someone says Taiwan is an independent country that doesn't owe a thing to the PRC.
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@tylerbozinovski427 as the husband and father of two Han Chinese, that doesn't mean much. Neither owes a thing.
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The thing to remember here is that they weren't looting from Japan, they were looting from China. They stole everything that wasn't nailed down from the people they were meant to be helping. And the Japanese soldiers weren't watching Japanese women being raped by Russian soldiers. They were watching Asian women. They did the same to the Northern Chinese and Koreans as they did to Eastern Europeans, but without the collaborated with Hitler excuse. What they did in eastern Europe and Germany wasn't Russian soldiers getting revenge, it was Russian soldiers being Russian soldiers.
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Realistically, no. Things are far worse for the poor in your average socialist state than they are for the poor in your average capitalist state. If you scare away all the rich, then you've scared away all the major contributors to your economy. You've scared away the brains needed for an economy. What remains just isn't enough. As far as someone breaking in during the night to murder your family goes, the only person I know who's genuinely afraid of that is my wife. Raised in the PRC.
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@aclock2 there's normally more than that to homelessness. This who are what we think of as homeless (sleeping rough, as opposed to having no consistent residence) are about one in six hundred of our populations. That's far fewer than are on welfare in any place. That's not a poverty thing so much as a mental health or drugs thing. Obviously with exceptions, but that brings a low percentage even lower. So here you're not just talking about those on low incomes, or even the unemployed, but the very worst case scenarios. If you think being in that stratum ends well for them in a socialist state, you'd be mistaken. And to cover it before we get there, if you think capitalist social democracies such as Denmark or Sweden are socialist, you're also mistaken.
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It was more there wasn't much that could be done about it, and it was better than the alternative. That's quite different to trusting them. It's like the British (rightfully) didn't trust the CCP to adhere to the Hong Kong handover agreement. There weren't really many alternatives.
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@tylerbozinovski427 what were the alternatives to handing it back? If you're curious about anything on it, I've taken numerous walks up by the Hong Kong Shenzhen border as well as lived there during the protests and their aftermath.
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@tylerbozinovski427 and then what happens? For example, what happens if the water is cut off? Keeping in mind that in either case, the UK has (unfortunately) acknowledged the PRC as the successor state to the ROC. And even without that, it would be plenty of reason to get nasty. And the lease on the new territories was 99 years. It wasn't in perpetuity. Not handing it back would have meant that the UK was illegally occupying Chinese territory. It would have been the aggressor there. They could have handed the new territories only, but that would have left a tiny and extremely vulnerable heavily populated island without either a food or water supply that had suddenly been cut off from a major part of it. Kowloon is pretty small. You can walk from one end to the other in a few hours.
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Hitler wasn't insane. He knew what he was doing. He was an incompetent narcissist, but he was sane. I've heard it said he wasn't even a sociopath. Stalin was. He went out of his way to be cruel to those around him. Hitler did have the ability to emphasise, but convinced himself not to. To call him insane excuses his crimes (he didn't know what he was doing. He didn't know any better) He knew. As for Stalin, not insane, but absolutely a narcissistic sociopath.
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@shaquillewilliams7888 why? There's a difference between doing what needs to be done and either simply not caring about or enjoying suffering.
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@mirzahamzabaig5667 is that meant to contradict anything I've said?
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@mirzahamzabaig5667 can you quote what it's meant to contradict? Pretty sure the only person here who's mentioned Churchill is you.
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@mirzahamzabaig5667 so no you can't quote me. I think we're done. I'll be in touch when I've got some new boots. That's the next time I'll be looking for someone with your ability with a shoehorn.
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@shaquillewilliams7888 So I'm sorry you didn't understand what I posted. I'd thought it was fairly obvious (keeping in mind, I'd taken Hitler OUT of the insane psychopath column and pointed out the difference when it comes to someone like Stalin) Unfortunately I don't really know any way to explain it any better than I already had. You could try re-reading what I'd actually said, then quoting anything you disagree with. Until then, I'll put you on my backup assistant list for when I get new boots. Edit: Maybe it's worth looking up what these terms actually mean.
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@shaquillewilliams7888 looking at your other posts, it more looks like you're upset at criticising Stalin or the socialist/communist movement in general. If that's not the case, I apologise for being mistaken. If it is the case, you need to learn to deal with it. It's a failed ideology that's brought nothing but mass death. Stalin was a brute whose only virtue was that he wasn't quite as bad as Hitler(but he wasn't much better) and Mao makes the pair of them combined look like complete amateurs when it comes to mass murder. I don't view socialists as being any better than the Nazis. The ideals might have been better, but after the last century the it's blatantly obvious that the ideals don't and won't match the reality. Woodrow Wilson was a horrible human being by most civilised standards, but by the standards set by the USSR, Germany and the PRC, he was an absolute saint.
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@shaquillewilliams7888 >>There is literally nothing that Stalin or Mao did that the UK, US, France, Spain, and Portugal didn’t do.<< There's something they didn't do that those places did do. They created successes. Stalin, Mao, etc were epic failures and, particularly with Mao, they knew it. >>But nothing is a tragedy until it happens to people in the core of these empires. Literally millions of people dead and nothing.<< Check the human development index sometime. That's a measure of success right there. Nothing has brought more people out of poverty than Capitalism has. >>The ONLY people who are seen as tyrants in the west are people who take wealth away from the rich. << I'm pretty sure Putin's a classic example of a tyrant who doesn't take wealth away from the rich. >>Communists made horrible errors and were responsible for deaths. They were also overly repressive This is not the same as the deliberate cruelty that the major empires have visited across the world. << Here, we'll have a real problem. Mao KNEW what was going on. Stalin KNEW what was going on. Pol Pot KNEW what was going on. The Kims KNEW (and know) what's going on. If you want to say that Western leaders did horrible things, that's fine. I know that if I ask for a quote where I come close to denying this, I'll be met with silence. But don't even think about telling me that these people didn't KNOW exactly what they were doing. What they did might have started as a mistake, but they kept these mistakes going even after they KNEW what they were doing. What? You think the Holodomor was an accident? You think Mao wasn't able to look outside his window and see the starvation? You think Kim Jong Il was ignorant of the widespread starvation in his own country? >>The US segregated it’s population (north & south) and almost exterminated the entire native population. << Yes it did. >>The US has 25% of the worlds prisoners and only 5% of the population << Kind of depends on how you define a prison, doesn't it? Are the Uighurs imprisoned? Or are they in schools? What about when you literally make an entire country a prison, as was the case in the USSR and is the case in North Korea? Or what if you simply flat out lie about your numbers? The US houses 25% of those who are OFFICIALLY prisoners. That's not remotely the same as housing 25% of the world's prisoners. And the number ignores to a shameful degree the difference between a prisoner in the US and a 'student' in Xinjiang. >>Wealth redistribution brought nothing but vitriol from the countries where wealth > human life.<< Kind of depends on how it's done. Socialism has been an epic failure. Social Democracy, which is using the proceeds of capitalism to fight inequality has done quite well. As far as wealth being worth more than human life goes, economies matter. They matter enormously. Poverty kills. Poverty kills en masse. >>They made Haiti pay for wanting to be a free society, Ousted Arbenz in Guatemala, Tried to put the Czar back in power during the Russian revolution, Couped Allende in Chile, Killed Thomas Sankara (greatest leader to ever live, Assassinated Lamumba, Ousted the Shah in Iran, Assassinated MLK, Assassinated Fred Hampton, Bombed their own citizens (Blair Mountain, Tulsa Massacre, MOVE bombings), bombed Grenada, Put Fascist in power in DR, Honduras, etc—who were responsible for a global campaign against all progressive movements<< Yep, a lot of very bad, commonly indefensible actions have been done by Western countries, but... >>Stalin was a brute. The US was the most brutal empire of the 20th century. Not even close. Not remotely close. The USA was a country that did do some horrible things that we expected better from. But what it's done over several centuries doesn't come close to what the PRC or the USSR (also empires) did in 70 years . And unlike these two countries, the USA has had some successes. The USSR was a failure that spawned failure. The PRC's successes have stemmed from Mao being dead and no longer actively screwing things up. Unlike Russia and the PRC as well, the USA has learned and improved. It's not perfect. It's a long, long way from being perfect. However it's much better than it was. Whereas Russia and the PRC are more of the same. The only thing their leaders have learnt is how to stay in power.
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@shaquillewilliams7888 >>PRC raised the most amount of people out of poverty in human history. You’re literally just saying things lmao. Nothing you’re saying is rooted in facts so I won’t be reading it. Take care<< They did this by temporarily giving up on fighting Capitalism. When Deng Xiaoping stopped making it a literal crime to try and run a business, the Chinese "miracle" started. They didn't lift 'raise' people out of poverty. They stopped going out of their way to keep people IN poverty. And if that's the best response you can make, you've really got nothing. Anyway, if refusing to read is how you maintain your worldview, that's your choice. It's a very ignorant worldview, and your last post just shows the depth of ignorance, but there you go.
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