Comments by "George Carty" (@GCarty80) on "Dwarkesh Patel" channel.

  1. One big reason why the lands of the former Arab caliphates (roughly the lands from Morocco to Pakistan inclusive) are so screwed up is because of the custom of marrying one's father's-brother's-daughter: the Arabic language even has a special phrase "bint al-'amm" to describe such a preferred wife. This custom is believed to have originated in the Levant about a century before the birth of Muhammad, but was spread over a wide area by the 7th-century Muslim conquests. This type of cousin marriage isn't just genetically harmful (and more so than the globally more common mother's-brother's-daughter variety of cousin marriage) but also splinters society into self-contained clans that hinder nation-building. It is notable (for example) that most of the personnel of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq were drawn from his own clan from the city of Tikrit. And one of the reasons why fundamentalist religion is so popular in these territories, is because religion is one of the few forces that can transcend clan loyalties.
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  2.  @FormerPessitheRobberfan  I strongly expect that surnames were introduced throughout most of Europe as part of the effort to combat cousin marriage.
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  3. The coal miners of South Wales were still Welsh in spite of speaking English, and similarly the coal miners of Donbas were still Ukrainian in spite of speaking Russian. The only part of Ukraine that was actually mostly ethnic Russian (as opposed to Russian-speaking Ukrainian) was Crimea.
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  4.  @darbyheavey406  The problem isn't so much the Islamic faith as the custom of father's-brother's-daughter marriage which was spread from Morocco to Pakistan by the Islamic conquests. This splintered society into self-contained clans at odds with one another and thus hindered nation-building.
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  5. More accurately Crimea (with its majority ethnic-Russian population) was this century's Sudetenland.
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  6. Unfortunately China now has as much manufacturing capacity as the US, EU and Japan combined.
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  7.  @moiseshuerta3984  The poor parts of the USA don't have much homelessness either. US homelessness is heavily concentrated in California.
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  8.  @mikedearing6352  Ukrainian, not Jewish
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  9.  @clement2780  In the Israel-Hamas war both sides are arguably on death ground: in 2018 the UN Special Rapporteur for the Situation of Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories predicted that in two years Gaza would be "unliveable" due to a collapsing health care system and a lack of safe drinking water.
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  10. Or a Mastodon account?
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