Comments by "William Innes" (@williaminnes6635) on "Whatifalthist" channel.

  1. now THAT would be an own goal lol
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  2. It won't necessarily be bad when the Marxists get their revolution then the Islamists take over and everybody else says, "ah, a caliphate, well, at least there will be enough food" then the Islamists stone the Marxists.
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  3. Wasn't the Mongol Empire at its peak somewhat larger than the 2BE in terms of absolute land surface controlled?
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  4. Ryan Dawson was my go-to guy for a while. My takeaway out of trying actively to follow the Forever War in Syria though was that there is sort of no point in it, because at most you will see two months into the future of the narrative by listening to gonzo journalists and people at the edge of being a really intellectually honest conspiracy theorist and a rogue analyst, as a VERY active listener, prior to the late 2010s big tech crackdowns. Made 35% on the runup in General Dynamics by buying in the second Trump's Hail Mary lawsuits failed, then selling because I didn't want to get greedy. Figured there were good odds the markets had priced in the increased chance of war, but that wasn't hard to see. Nobody removes a peace president if they don't have a war in mind. That might as well have been the shadow of Odin bringing back his spear. I remember I was genuinely concerned and had a sense of it being the dawn of a new age when I heard Russia was invading The Ukraine. I thought to myself, holy crap, we're back to great powers and spheres of influence - we've gone back in time from the early 21st century to mid 19th century. Then Johnson went to Kiev, at the exact moment that if it was a limited war being waged with the objective of maintaining The Ukraine as a buffer zone between NATO and Russia, the powers that be would have been downgrading it to negotiations - right after the Russian abandonment of the Dnieper offensive. I looked at the news, looked at what else I had to do with myself, realized it was just another Forever War, realized that I had been had, realized that I had no chance against a professional propaganda campaign, realized I had no time to stay two months ahead of the narrative, and have resolutely tuned it out ever since, barring the occasional failure not to rise to the bait set by the subgenus of utter prat who supports The Ukraine on social media. I suppose my other takeaway is this, next time I'm not selling my war stocks until the war starts.
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  5. dude you literally show a graph of Chile starting with double the GDP per capita of Cuba when you say they started in the same place
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  6. There is a rump of left libertarians - mostly younger people and residual hippies - whom I personally believe ought always be made aware that they can always choose the same path in their personal ideological journey as did Edmund Burke. There shouldn't be a door per se between the room full of guys smoking weed and mumbling about astral projection and John Lennon and the room full of guys smoking weed and yelling about crypto and retail investing downstairs from the roomful of guys slowly sipping cognacs and smoking cigars listening to one guy talk about one stock at a time.
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  7.  @TheFoolish727  I mean...I agree with the literal meaning of the words he typed, since the video itself literally says that it won't engage with communist ideas themselves. My head canon is that Marx was just trolling for fun, but he was a compulsive who couldn't stop himself. Because he was a fairly heavy reader, it seems plausible to me that Marx would have been aware that Jean-Baptiste Say had disproven the labour theory of value as articulated by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations. Marx therefore initially for his own entertainment and later because as a compulsive he could not control himself wrote a series of long shitposts which begun with the pretense that the labour theory of value had not been disproven. In fact, during Marx' life, he actually managed to get under the skin of the finance minister of the Austrian Empire, Eugene Bohm von Bawerk, to the point that the latter wrote a point by point refutation of Marx' ideas - the farmer with the six sacks of grain, the last of which he feeds to some parrots whose chattering amuses him, is the image from the summary of this refutation which has always stuck with me. (I still have yet to read the full text of Karl Marx and the Close of his System.) The subjective theory of value, as articulated by Say and Bohm von Bawerk, is the origin of those econ graphs that show a consumer and producer surplus existing to either side of a price point, as well as the refutation of the central point of orthodox Marxism. Without the labour theory of value, there is no exploitation. So this video is not really a debunking of Marxist ideas so much as it is an articulation of a theory of why it is that Marxist ideas continue to appeal despite their foundation on a 250 year old theory that was debunked about a decade or so after its publication. The video is an attempt at social history, in broad strokes, not intellectual history. It's more akin to "libertarianism is male astrology" than a blow-by-blow debunking. After all, somebody could be drawn to a particular argument purely on emotional grounds or due to their own self-serving bias, and that argument could independently of why they support it actually be both valid and make true assumptions. Tangentially, I disagree with the inclusion of Stalin. Stalin was the best thing that could have happened to the Soviet Union and the world at the time. He rejected worldwide revolution, held the bureaucracy to account during The Great Purge, was able to attract sufficient foreign capital and managerial expertise by embracing the mixed economy in order to make the Five Year Plans succeed and to industrialize the Soviet Union, and is rejected - I would say with some degree of intellectual honesty - as a communist by orthodox Marxists as well as enough Leninists and Trotkskyists. Stalinism to the extent that one approaches it through the lens of Marxism is a system which has come about in a fair bit of the former west, albeit in an iteration which lacks a Stalin. The Purge is seen as a bad thing mostly because it targeted the Soviet equivalent of the modern managerial elite, and this is the caste which controls the discourse.
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  8.  @TheFoolish727  The other tangent I would make is that the economic calculation problem generally cited as a rationale for why an all-encompassing command economy would not work ignores transaction costs - which are why corporations exist for instance in the black box theory of the firm - I always want to say that one was Drucker's - and also assumes human limits on decision making and surveillance. With the advent of algorithms and cheap mass surveillance, an electronic system which fulfilled Mussolini's ideal of all within the state, all for the state, none against the state could be viable. The algorithms would only have to make decisions for absolutely all aspects of human existence on the most granular level and informed by a panoptic level of surveillance which were more efficient in aggregate than the results of the current heavily regulated, taxed, subsidized, etc. system which happens to exist, not as compared to some hypothetical free market only ever approached by humans during the stone age prior to the formation of states - any gift economy amounts to an informal options market within which n participants have exchanged zero-strike calls on 1/(1-n) of the results of their production for any given period, t, and such evidence as exists suggest that most human interaction was through gift economies in prehistory - and to a certain extent in the Second British Empire outside of India and Canada. The idea that people should be allowed to make any decision whatsoever for themselves therefore must rely in practical terms on some other set of arguments than back of the envelope economic philosophy.
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  9.  @CAProductions051  Cheers. https://cdn.mises.org/Karl%20Marx%20and%20the%20Close%20of%20His%20System.pdf
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  10.  @tanimation7289  There have been no revolutions meeting the standard of orthodox Marxism. Neither Russia nor China were deemed to be particularly close to the stage of development Marx termed capitalism, a prerequisite for any revolution meeting the standards set by Marx himself. What have been attempted have been heterodoxies of Marxism, which have become heavily inflected by the preexisting cultures of where they were applied, and which if anything deserve to be judged in terms of their success or failure in terms of the criteria they set for themselves. For instance, Mao publicly stated that the goal of the Cultural Revolution was Han ethnocide, or the cultural genocide of the indigenous people of China proper within their own traditional geography. The weakening of the social entrenchment of the Eastern Tradition in its former heartland must therefore be seen as at least a partial success of this policy. The genocides of Xinjiang and Tibet could be argued in similar terms to be partial successes, defined in Maoist terms.
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  11. That was a nice little gummer of a white pill. Thank you.
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  12. The direction my brain had gone with it was the opposite. Because a panoptic surveillance system is, thanks to machine learning and ubiquitous cellular devices, for the first time freed from the constraints of human management, the assumptions of the economic calculation problem will increasingly no longer apply, allowing for the indefinite success of a truly totalitarian system. In other words, we will have not a human managerial class and bureaucracy, capable of errors and leaving various things unregulated, but a bureaucracy of all things all at once, suffocating all individualism and initiative, and this system of omnipresent totalitarian control will not bring itself down in the manner of communism as run by human managers.
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  13. Pearson was the beginning of the end.
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  14. I wonder sometimes if the entire idea is to create such a low bar of expectations that one must only avoid dragging ones feet to clear it.
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  15. or a mild edit. At various points, Rudyard has gone out of his way to emphasize that America at heart is three separate foundational groups, the East Anglian religious fanatics in New England, the Quakers from the Midlands who settled in Pennsylvania, and the western English second and third sons of supporters of absolute monarchy whose titles exceeded their means who settled south of Mason-Dixon. In his original edit of this video, he said that an ethnic dimension from the perspective of the north would have been nonsensical in the American Civil War.
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  16. Cavaliers, Quakers, and Puritans, to put it in shorter terms in the reverse order.
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  17. Israel's a weird and I would argue bad example. I stopped criticizing it because I decided it fit better in the category of post-Ottoman dhimmi successor state, though there is a common element between these and the post-Austrian local ethnic group successor state - i. e. Hungary and other non-Western European countries. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire was a much more drawn out process than breakup of the Austrian Empire and I would argue begins with Greece and ends with Israel. (Though the Greek Orthodox Turkish speakers weren't expelled from Anatolia and Eastern Thrace and forced to live in Greece until the Turkish victory in the Turkish War of Independence, whereas the Mizrahim were expelled from Iraq, Transjordan, Syria, etc. immediately on the formation of Israel in 1948.) It isn't logical to hold a nonWestern state representing a nonWestern culture and whose claim to legitimacy falls within a distinctly Eastern pattern to Western standards.
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  18. The British relocating the Belgians to the Congo instead of getting involved in War One is the good guy timeline.
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  19.  @thinkpolhub  It wasn't very likely given part of the reason for Flanders and Wallonia being welded together was the British after that seventh war with France deciding it would be good to have another independent country there - the whole idea OF Belgium was the guarantee of neutrality - don't know if that was what was going through the minds of the British colonial bureaucrats when they decided to stick together the four Ottoman provinces that eventually became Iraq - but minus British involvement in War One, the Ottomans would have had a chance to stagger along, constantly 30 to 50 years behind the times and constantly maligned for their approach to rebellions, but keeping a lid on the region.
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  20.  @thinkpolhub  Which could have lead to some weird stuff in the rest of the world. Brazil was the seat of the Portuguese royal family and IIRC Rio was technically the capital of Portugal for the duration of the wars with France, but that was the relocation of the seat of administration of a preindustrial power, say Belgium had been evacuated to Congo, that would have been the skilled labour to industrialize, and Congo would have been the only land Belgium had as an empire. That would have meant they would have had no option but to double down on industrializing it. Without War One, the strains on India would not have happened - the Army of India was well suited to colonial policing actions but not to trench warfare - which would have meant figures like Gandhi would not have become nationalists - Gandhi stalled the debate on Indian Home Rule for some time - and India could easily have become a Dominion in the 1930s or 1940s - probably the 1930s famine would have been avoided by Indian self-government, the way subsequent bad harvests in our timeline did not turn into famines under the Republic of India - and stayed a Dominion until the 1980s or 1990s. Africa would have looked a lot different, with an industrializing Congo at its heart, not having had for instance the effects of the scorched earth tactics employed by von Lettow-Vorbeck in our timeline. An industrial Congo would have caused heavier infrastructure investment in British possessions to make sense, and the notion that there was something intrinsic to Africa that made it poor as opposed to it being simply a very big place with very many engineering challenges to be overcome would probably be laughed at. Psychologically, the French, Germans, Russians, and Austrians might have got a bit bummed out about the meaning of life if things still bogged down into trench warfare, and the Ottomans would have the fatigue factor of dealing with the way their region would be in their absence, but...that wouldn't have affected the British, Belgians, Portuguese, Japanese or Americans. etc. Mental tangent.
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  21. By the definition of genocide used by the United Nations, I would question whether any of the examples in A qualify. Obviously they're examples of mass manslaughter, but genocide only counts if it targets an ethnic or religious group. If a government wants to kill everybody with autism, for instance, and goes around targeting children with autism - as the trans rights movement appears to do so - then while this constitutes the imposition of conditions calculated to make it impossible for the group to exist - through sterilization, the removal of children from their families is specifically noted in the UN definition of genocide in particular - so, the involvement of child protective services to "protect trans kids" for instance - a neurological minority - or a class minority in your examples - can not be the subject of a genocide as they are excluded from its definition.
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  22. It's the optimistic perspective.
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  23. 44:30 sponsored content isn't nice
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  24. so he complimented you
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  25. Australia is never going to go for it.
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  26.  @SeattlePioneer  sorry, intended subject of reply was CANZUK - a silly idea to extend some of the provisions within the CPTPP to professional qualifications and residency. THAT is never going to happen because of Australia.
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  27. ah so you did not live around Toronto, then
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  28.  @AnthonyDibiaseIdeas  Canadian national failure can be assumed as a given. Quebec went in a different direction starting in the 1960s but at this point that process has all ready had its effect. Secularism has proven to be incompatible with multiculturalism and all attempts to find a middle path have resulted only in failure. The question is, what is the most effective way to get rid of the federal government root and branch.
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  29.  @raminagrobis6112  I disagree I think accusing Quebec of parasitism robs Quebec nationalists of the optimism for their province's future they will require to participate in the orderly dissolution of Confederation. We gave it a good shot, it doesn't work, time to shake hands like grown-ups, and call it a day.
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  30.  @info781  You're assuming federalists continue to be overrepresented in other provinces.
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  31.  @info781  I would be surprised if you people could get the average police officer or soldier to agree to do that for you.
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  32.  @hunting4honeys  I forget why I began to hit "do not recommend channel" on those, but I remember that I did.
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  33.  @Campocosas  People who herd one species of animal will always get the infectious diseases which can be transmitted by vector from their livestock to themselves. The heart of the infection is the US northeast and the intellectual and residual genetic descendants of the Puritans. If one shares the English language with those people, then one will always be prone to infection by the language viruses they spread.
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  34. That assumes the economic war with China does not come to an end before the pools of kind-of qualified and kind-of honest people drawn in by the traditional First World outside of Japan exhaust themselves in Middle Income Nations as the old style Third World ceases to exist. The development of human cloning technology was all ready well under way in the 2010s, driven by the closure of the Indian and Thai commercial surrogacy industries driven by the Baby Gammy fiasco. They only need a stem cell to create a gamete. Two gametes make an embryo. An embryo can be grown to a fetus and then to mature viability in a plastic bag.
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  35. an ethnonationalist, sure and there ought to be nothing seen as wrong with that a civic nationalist is in a bit of a different position it is absurd to be an ethnic nationalist as a member of a nation which was founded by several ethnicities and continued thereafter to add ethnicities and admixtures thereof.
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  36. Sure, but differences between regions in Confederation are generally greater than between their adjacent American regions.
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  37. You realize Leo Frank tried to frame the black guy who swept the floors at the pencil factory he managed for the thirteen year old girl he raped and murdered, right? That is the only kind of person of which the ADL has ever stood in defense, from their inception. They are a pedophile organization, much like NAMBLA.
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  38. I personally don't mind self-described communists as individual people, at least in my part of the world. One of them introduced me to Robert Nozick's arguments while trying to make an argument against anarchism prior to beginning to identify as the opposite gender following a number of police contacts after he - at the time - had given lip to a cop after calling the cops on his own library room event claiming the Proud Boys - before they had been listed as terrorists in this jurisdiction - had taken over his library room for a ritual fist fight, and when the cop asked him to leave as a person who had not registered his organization as an official student club, he had decided to try to argue his case - clearly enough he just wanted the attention - then he got a bit spicy about a year or two later at a counterdemonstration for an antiimmigraiton rally, and the police took that as his third strike. Not a bad guy, just a bit off. One of my good friends is a communist, though not that into it, which may be as a result of having a diagnosis for a mental illness for which he is medicated. Self-described socialists, on the other hand, are bags of dog shit as human beings and the least intellectually honest and ethically inclined individuals I have ever met. I have bottomless contempt for the kind of person - at least from this part of the world - who openly claims to admire Sweden or similar Scandinavian systems. You'll never pin down a socialist on what exactly they believe, but they will always be the most useless parasitic incivil unpleasant selfish immoral shit stains you will ever encounter, at least in this part of the world. What's socialism? Who knows. What's a socialist? The worst asswipe you will ever meet in your life.
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  39. well it worked for Voltaire, at least according to Will Durant
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  40.  @danisagoodman4294  CANZUK as proposed is for sure not happening. Australia will never agree to freedom of movement. Possibly America might be admitted under very particular terms as an associate of the CPTPP, which is the actual Pacific organization interested in cooperating to make sure that the effect Japan was able to exert when central banks had been keeping interest rates low of financing the western Pacific as an alternative to the Chinese debt trap continues to be the case. A SCANZUK as a sort of club within a club of First World English-speaking Commonwealth jurisdictions sharing some common business shorthands could make some sense, but this would be primarily a talk shop.
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  41. 23:47
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  42. 17:45
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  43. Hopefully not. 😃
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  44. well it has Chinese police stations so
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  45.  @steve19811  maybe for finance and in the past for engineering. Mostly though it's just a case of having the shit luck of a vector between the language virus mill of New England and our societies in the form of the English language.
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  46.  @steve19811  Sometimes I think it would have been nice had there been a Gofuckett Indian tribe who had just tomahawked every last Puritan who landed, leaving America as strictly cavalier in etiology.
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  47. Thank you for your engagement. 😃
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  48. They'd just have to allow fracking, use their surplus hydro to hash for BTC, and make it slightly easier to mine gold. They'd collapse in real GDP per capita for a couple of years, of course, but they'd get the message pretty clearly soon thereafter.
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  49. The definition of right and left hand magic you use is exactly the opposite of that used by Alastair Crowley.
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  50. Well, not exactly, but for Crowley, the right hand path involves trade-offs - animal sacrifice for minor favours - whereas the left hand path involves sacrifice of the soul of the "priest" himself. It's been a while since I read my Crowley and the hard drive where I was keeping it - and the better half of my readings from undergrad - crashed during pandemic.
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