Comments by "George Carty" (@GCarty80) on "Jake Broe" channel.

  1. On the other hand the Gazans still had loads of kids (to the point that over 40% of the territory's population is children under 15) in spite of nightmarish living conditions there.
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  2.  @spxram4793  No: the phenomenon I'm thinking of is the "rentier state". "Dutch disease" refers to how oil and gas exports cause a country's currency to become more valuable, rendering other industries uncompetitive. It is arguably one of the reasons why UK suffered especially badly from deindustrialization after 1980, as North Sea oil exports strengthened the pound.
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  3. Last year there were anti-mobilization riots in Dagestan: makes me wonder if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict going hot again may have saved Putin from a possible revolt in the Caucasus?
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  4.  @edwxx20001  Hungary would likely be a problem (at least as long as Orbán is still in power) but Turkey not so much, given that Ukrainian entry to NATO would be a major improvement to Turkey's geopolitical position (it would make their Black Sea position far more secure), in a way that Finnish or Swedish entry would not have been.
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  5. Water is arguably a unique commodity because of how much of it we need, especially for agricultural use.
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  6. Most Eastern European countries are highly nationalistic: the revolutions of 1989 weren't so much for democracy as for national liberation from the Kremlin's yoke. Hungary is worse than most because of its language is totally unrelated to that of its neighbours, because Hungary isn't very urbanized (its second-largest city has only 200k people) and because of its resentment at losing so much territory from the Treaty of Trianon.
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  7.  @emigrator08  Jake already calls MTG "Marjorie Traitor Greene". 😉
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  8.  @sanher20  The Croats, Slovenes and Baltic countries always wrote their own languages in Latin script, and Turkey dumped the Arabic script largely because its omission of most vowels makes it unsuited to the Turkish language.
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  9. Although note than 4 Labour MPs in heavily-Muslim districts were defeated by independent candidates running on pro-Palestinian tickets.
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  10.  @simchalebovitch6944  I think this may have been the actual truth.
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  11.  @udikai7799  Ok MAGAt
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  12.  @LMB222  So was Ronald Reagan, who many Americans found to be an inspiring leader.
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  13. Given that it's mostly old military equipment, is the "$60b" what it originally cost to produce (adjusted for inflation), or is it what it would currently be worth if it were sold on the open market?
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  14.  @laars0001  "Солодше нам у бою умирати, як жити в путах, мов німі раби." ("It is sweeter for us to die in battle than to live in chains, like dumb slaves.") - March of Ukrainian Nationalists, 1929
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  15. It was notable that Stalin's gulags were several times deadlier in wartime than they were in peacetime.
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  16.  @ak5659  Oil and gas.
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  17.  @syon600  Unlikely given that Gazans have been stateless since 1948 as the Egyptians (who occupied Gaza between 1948 and 1967) never gave them citizenship. Jordan did give West Bank Palestinians citizenship then, but washed its hands of them in 1970 after the PLO attempted to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy.
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  18.  @martinedwards2004  Ukrainian is more phonetic than Russian, as it doesn't devoice final voiced consonants (unlike most other Slavic languages, or German for that matter), nor does it pronounce an unstressed "o" like an "a".
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  19.  @JakeBroe  Especially as Mariupol is likely embittered enough at Russia that the threat of a Ukrainian suicide bomber (most likely someone who lost their family at Russian hands) is appreciably non-zero.
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  20.  @sagittariusa7662  Are you sure that 20% of the EU's grain consumption comes from the UK (more than from France or Germany)? AFAIK the UK is a big net importer of food (even if not as much as in the early 20th century: we increased our productivity considerably after WWII), even if that is more likely because of its dense population than because of any problem with production.
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  21. ​ @bastianelsenhans6639  Shouldn't that be "Ceterum censeo Moscoviam esse delendam"?
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  22. For that you'd need to build your own steelmaking capacity instead of just exporting your coal and iron ore to China.
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  23.  @Lasse65  Crimea was never an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. It was still the Crimean Khanate (albeit an Ottoman satellite state) 1430-1793, and it was still part of Russia (albeit demilitarized by treaty) 1856-1917.
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  24. I wonder if this mentality is driven by the fundamentally parasitic nature of Moscow itself? Moscow is a freak of geography in that it is a 10+ million metropolitan area that is: * very far north (almost at the 56th parallel) * very far from the sea (about 700 km away) * not located within good quality farmland (Russia's best farmland is far to the south).
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  25. Героям Слава!
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  26.  @hayleyxyz  Lukashenko was originally popular in Belarus thanks to a generous welfare state that was in fact paid for by Russia. In effect the country was a heavily-subsidized propaganda showcase, like Cold War-era Cuba was for the Soviets, or like West Berlin was for NATO. I wonder if Belarusians are now increasingly hostile to the regime, now that it is no longer in a position to fund that welfare state as Russian gas exports to the EU have been slashed.
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  27. The Treaty of Trianon was the one which dismembered Hungary : the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary was broken up by the Treaty of Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
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  28.  @TheBandit7613  Petrostates (a category including both Russia and many Arab countries) tend to be tyrannies because the oil export revenue gives the state tremendous independent power that isn't dependent on collecting taxes from the people.
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  29. If China did invade the Russian Far East, I wonder if the West would greenlight Japan to reclaim Karafuto and Chishima (aka Sakhalin Oblast)?
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  30. Interesting that China claims Sakhalin as theirs: if they were to take back that island wouldn't the Japanese be shitting bricks about the possibility (if China takes Taiwan too) of being practically encircled? Or do you think that in that scenario the West would give Japan a green light to reclaim Karafuto (to use the Japanese name for the island)?
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  31. A lot of them were very well propagandized by Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity.
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  32. ​ @donaldcarey114  I didn't think Versailles was intended to reduce Germany to an agrarian country: aren't you confusing it with the Morgenthau Plan proposed for Germany after WW 2? The Morgenthau Plan was ultimately never carried out because it would likely have resulted in a famine in Germany that would have driven them into the hands of the Soviets, which may well have been the intention of the plan's real author Harry Dexter White, who turned out to be a Soviet mole.
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  33.  @voidtempering8700  The war is currently stalemated because the ground is a sea of mud in the vicinity of the front line.
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  34.  @gregbrogan9061  Sadly I expect the Donbas to be a depopulated wasteland by the time this war is over: the population loyal to Ukraine will have fled west or been murdered by the Russian occupiers, while the population loyal to Russia will have fled east or been expended as conscripted cannon fodder. Elsewhere in eastern and southern mainland Ukraine the population is overwhelmingly pro-Ukraine, and I could even see them gradually abandoning the Russian language, as it has been stigmatized by the war. That leaves Crimea where ethnic Russians actually make a majority: will this war end with the Ukrainians and the West angry enough to consider expelling them to Russia, much as the Sudeten Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II?
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  35. If they'd REALLY wanted to piss off those cruise ship visitors, they'd have greeted them with "We were born in a great hour", complete with the final call for a Ukraine from the San to the Caucasus. 😉
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  36. I guess the Dutch have a powerful motive: "avenge MH 17!"
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  37. Russia is one of the worst countries in the world as far as divorce and abortion rates are concerned, so it's a strange role model for anyone supposedly concerned with Christian values.
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  38. Americans need to take inspiration from what the Ukrainians did in 2013-4.
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  39. I'm guessing Tucker Carlson was a great propagandist for Putin?
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  40. The Poles have long had a saying "za naszą i waszą wolność" (for our freedom and yours).
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  41.  @robinstevenson6690  Roughly 80% of American women had kids for most of its history, but during the immediate post-WWII years it was more like 98%. There's a reason why the 1950s was obsessed with "juvenile delinquents", and why in the 1960s (once those kids came of age) there was a massive crime wave.
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  42.  @nsevv  "The Russian state is not based on treaties" -- Sergey Kirienko, First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration of Russia.
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  43. Artyomovsk (or Artemivsk in Ukrainian) was the town's Soviet-era name, derived from the name of a Bolshevik revolutionary who came from there. It was reverted to Bakhmut in 2016 as part of Ukraine's decommunization program.
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  44.  @williamzk9083  Actually there were separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk (the regions which together comprise the Donbas), but they were mostly killed by the Russians and replaced with their own agents. Although those separatists were dumb in the extreme: sure they were pissed off that their region's sugar-daddy Yanukovych got overthrown, but why would they be under any illusions that Putin's Russia (a kleptocracy let's not forget!) would help them economically? That probably explains though why the separatists were mostly poorly-educated people (USSR-nostalgic old folk, coal miners and especially cops) with the educated population remaining loyal to Ukraine.
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  45.  @adammorris3082  There's no apostrophe in "Nazis" unless you're talking about something belonging to an individual Nazi.
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  46.  @ulrichvonhermann2548  Even now the Swedish language uses the expression "polsk riksdag" ("Polish parliament") as a synonym for "chaos".
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  47. The Hetman vs the Tsar!
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  48.  @Celebmacil  I sometimes wonder also if Finland will regain Karjala, if Ukraine will gain Kuban, or Japan will reclaim Karafuto (= Sakhalin) in the event of a Russian collapse.
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  49.  @OKEAHKPACA-pd1gl  While here in the UK most of our Russia-sympathisers are on the far left (*cough* George Galloway) in many other Western countries (including the US and France) they are predominantly right wing.
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  50.  @ingoditrust7784  That would explain why some political leaders support Russia (although I suspect blackmail is actually more important than bribery). It doesn't explain why millions of ordinary (for example) MAGA Americans would support Russia.
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