Comments by "William Innes" (@williaminnes6635) on "Will Israel Cause a World War?" video.

The big issue with Turchin is that the norm with data science is that you don't run a model back that far because the underlying model changes too much. You don't even run it back 20 years. It's a disturbing scenario, of course.
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@1mol831 Chicks can do a lot of stuff, but they can't do infantry.
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On the subject of the destabilization of Europe, purely from a Clausewitzian continuation of policy by other means perspective, preventing Europe from becoming a China- or India-sized potential competitor is as much in the interests of America as preventing the Turkic Hyperempire.
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@1mol831 Scythian noblewomen did fight as horse archers, the Soviets used female snipers and pilots during WWII, Heinlein included essays on why he thought female conservativism would make women superior space pilots, and there's always the odd Boudicca or Rani of Janshi willing to lead from the front...but if we're talking about infantry? No. The percentage of women who can keep up with basic standards for infantry is similar to the percentage of men well suited to be a Royal Marine or a US Navy Seal.
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You need to throw the narrative the occasional bone if you want to be allowed to remain up and monetized.
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@dariusgreysun Funny you should say that - trans are turning into a disproportionate share of recruits since the military covers breast surgery.
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@MLGDouglas I thought it was interesting and held validity having been a history major, but having dipped my fingers in data science, no longer consider it valid.
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@Lestibournes with the fence? That falls into the same category as the American success against the Pinoys in the second act of the Spanish-American War or the British success against the Boers in round two of those wars - unfortunate the name used by the British for that strategy given Israel's...peculiarities.
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@avroarchitect1793 well...the Ukrainian government says that, and...if that becomes a problem, the Maidan got them in, and something similar can be arranged to get them out
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@underballbutter 😆in the 1930s, yes? Oh dear! Well trolled, sir! I know when I've been had.
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@PeruvianPotato I forget where I heard it, but the line was from somebody who said they could never understand what motivated Pol Pot's animal hatred of the educated, until he began to interact with more woke American college graduates.
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family member of a family friend left. Said working from home was too annoying because of the noise the Hamas rockets and the sirens to warn people would make, then you hide from the bombardment, and it breaks up your flow.
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now THAT would be a way for whatifalthist to get shuttered on YouTube
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but Gaza is next to Israel, and you're at worst a five hour drive away from Gaza in anywhere in Israel. America as a propositional nation depends quite a bit on the health of the proposition at the heart of its civic nationalism. Israel isn't just an ethnostate, for people with paved roads and cars, it fits the classical ideal of size of the state. (forget who said it, but it was that a citizen ought to be able to walk from one border of his state to the next in a single day)
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@Kaiserboo1871 as Mark Twain put it, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme
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Not to pick a pointless argument, but your third sentence is inconsistent with the rest of what you wrote. Have a lovely weekend.
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I guess we'll see but...I've had too many videos about the tunnel campaign in South Vietnam recommended to me not to believe tunnel systems can't be ridiculous. The one Viet Cong trick was to dig a P-trap and fill it with water, so they couldn't be gassed. I expect at least some guys in Hamas have some design features in there that keep the water from rising into some portions of the tunnel system.
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eh the Palestinians are their own distinct thing from Egyptian Arabs at this point, a bit like how 18th century Americans were different enough from 18th century English while also being almost entirely an outgrowth of them I know neither Transjordan nor Lebanon has had great experiences hosting the Palestinians or are all that happy with the Palestinians who moved there after the Nakba, who form an unassimilated minority in each country.
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@hassanbassim4007 That's not what I've gathered from my chats with people from that part of the world who were going to school here. The Palestinian guy said he loved Transjordan, the Transjordanian guy said you had to watch out for the Palestinians, because they had short fuses and came in packs. The Lebs keep'em in walled camps IIRC and the main war crime of which Ariel Sharon was accused was allowing the indigenous Lebs to massacre a refugee camp of Palestinians, rather than risking any of his own men to reach the terrorists within.
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@hassanbassim4007 I guess I don't know if the Lebs still hold it against the Palestinians for having provoked the Israeli intervention that destabilized Lebanon and set off the civil war in the 1980s.
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@hassanbassim4007 well yeah we are talking about countries with fair sized Christian populations
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@hassanbassim4007 You think it's mostly a face saving thing by the king of Transjordan with respect to Transjordan's claims to West Bank, which...I'm willing to believe, these are all face-based cultures, I just don't believe for a second that the Palestinians in particular aren't seen as a horrible minority by absolutely everybody in their immediate vicinity, and there is WAY too much Muslim-on-Muslim terrorism for me to believe that the ummah is much more than an ideal to which to aspire.
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People who have big mouths who are neighbours with intractable tribesmen do not really have an option other than vocally to sit on the fence. 😀
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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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The British relocating the Belgians to the Congo instead of getting involved in War One is the good guy timeline.
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@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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@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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oh I think the guy who runs this channel was cured of that by 40 minutes of sophomoric gotchas delivered with decent competence by Vaush
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That is what one gets out of a BA in the humanities with a GPA that falls just shy of that magical gray zone between a B+ and an A-. At best, you're qualified to have an internet argument and know whichever set of obscure arguments necessary. Not that I regret it, I love my old college major, but...the guy who runs this channel gets to work in the field for which I studied much more than I ever will. The trick is, if you're actually in college or thinking of it, if you like a period and are obsessed with it to the point of wanting to give decades of your life to advancing the understanding of minor details of it, DON'T study it at the undergraduate level. History departments spread their undergrads thin on a variety of different stuff. You'll have some background general knowledge, but, so does everybody else, and knowing what to do in a college library legit does not matter. Instead, pick up languages, and try to bum time off researchers in the field to ask what software competencies they would want in an assistant, then go for classes which teach those.
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Religious studies and classics departments are a bit more clear cut in terms of a direction for grad school. If you're in classics, you're learning Latin and ancient Greek, you're learning the tip of the canon, you get to grad school, you learn the rest of the canon, you learn the modern commentary on it, you're a classicist. Religious studies varies, add Hebrew if you're doing Christianity, Buddhist studies, expect to be guided toward Sanskrit - though Sanskrit guys are going to be as good at or better than Buddhist studies guys at the nuts and bolts of Buddhist studies - as well as having to pick up a bit of Tibetan and Japanese. It makes for a bit more of a culture with the TAs where the undergrads are thought of less as undergrads and more like grad students that have yet to hatch, because the material relates more to the fundamentals of the discipline. That bimodal thing in male humanities TAs, where half of them want to win a pedagogy award and the other half of them see their undergrads as a nuisance distracting them from research, it's still present, but its muted.
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@PeruvianPotato Stalin was definitely a pragmatist, though. Stalinism as a heterodoxy of Leninism allows for the dictatorship of the proletariat as established by the revolutionary vanguard leaping directly from feudalism to socialism - Lenin's heterodoxy from Marx - then to ignore the cause of worldwide revolution, and to go so far as to allow foreign capitalists to repatriate their profits in order to attract sufficient capital and entrepreneurship for socialism to succeed. Trotsky was a WAY bigger whack job than Stalin.
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@cmleibenguth I'd read an elaboration.
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@cmleibenguth and am open to changing my perspective, but for now, I see the line to be held as Dover, not the Dnieper.
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If the alternatives weren't the Eurocrats and the Xiists, it would be so much easier not to simp for 'murica.
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more to the point, should Israel at some point cease to be a democracy, it would be no reason for the United States to cease to be an ally of Israel
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well yes that's what he said - he has the detailed videos up elsewhere on his channel. Not that they're all expert material or anything, or that I can't say I haven't caught him in a few mistruths or inaccuracies.
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but from the perspective of people who do not have to deal with its migration crisis, the current state of affairs is nearly optimal - the continentals will squabble over minutiae indefinitely If Thatcher-era policymakers in UK had planned to influence matters in this direction, the only error they made was in failing to account for the increase in the level of hatred the UK civil service would have for normal people in UK.
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