I can’t believe we’re here again. Most believe the United States is within hours of launching our own attack on Iran, if we haven’t already. It’s a catastrophic return to the evils of the Bush administration. It’s pretty clear we’ve learned nothing. Today’s video is an attempt to help people learn something. Though on a day like today, it’s hard to see why I bother.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results. After 45 solid years of Reaganite bipartisan rampaging in the direction of deregulation and “market-based solutions”, the Trump presidency can only be seen as a sort of psychopathy. To every action there is a reaction, and I believe the United States has been moving one direction for 45 years, first steadily, then psychotically. We’ve got 45 more months of Trump, but I think it’s already time to start thinking about what comes after. Not just after Trump, but after his complete discrediting of the past 45 years of political orthodoxy in the United States. I hope you enjoy my first effort at that.
I’m very worried about war with Iran. But even I am getting sick of hearing myself say it. If you ask me today, I tend to think that the Trump administration is too busy with other stuff to manage an attack on Iran. But all it takes is a single stray missile landing in one of the US’s way-too-many bases across the Middle East. The worst thing can always happen. One selfish old man, Joe Biden, inflicted a completely unnecessary second Trump term on us. Nothing that strange has to occur to drop us into our next trillion dollar war. Join us as we talk through what that might look like, and how horrifically absurd it is that it’s a real prospect.
Wow, I guess I’ve been doing this a little while. Ten years ago this month, this channel had an early success with a video entitled “3 Reasons China Will Never Rule The World”. A lot has happened over the past ten years. In a discord chat earlier this month, MFF’s social media manager Loga suggested I update that decade old video. Today’s video is my attempt to do exactly that. Am I still as skeptical of claims of Chinese power in the age of Trump? Check out today’s video to find out.
Trump won’t make peace with Russia. Simply put, he can’t. Too many of his donors, and too many of his campaign promises are riding on his amping up US oil and gas production. He can’t keep that production up if he crashes prices, and that’s what would be necessary to get peace with Russia. I got annoyed enough at these simple facts being left out of all the coverage over the past week that I went ahead and made an unproduced video on the topic.
I love it when I can use a “YouTube Drama” video to talk about an important topic. So imagine my delight when Johnny Harris, a YouTube star I’ve critiqued once before, dropped a half-learned video on nationalism. It wasn’t THAT bad a video. There were some fairly egregious errors, that I addressed, but what bugged me most was the general attitude. According to Harris, all that matters about nationalism is its potential for disaster. That’s an important part of the story, but there’s a lot more to nationalism than just that. Like the independence of almost every country on the planet, as just one example. It was fun to make “What Johnny Harris Gets Wrong About Nationalism” and I hope you enjoy watching it.
Syria’s fall took me by surprise. I had become so used to the status quo, I didn’t think there was any way it could change. But at the end of the day, that status quo was unacceptable to too many people, and it had to end. Today’s video includes some unproduced reflections on the promise and peril of this development, and some speculation on why I missed just how shaky the regime was.
Well, I didn’t expect that to take three years! With today’s video, “How Yemen Beat Saudi Arabia” I have completed my most epic video project ever, the “Yemen vs. Empire” series. Initially planned as a trilogy, the series ballooned up to six episodes. And the episodes got longer every time. The first episode, covering the conflict with the Ottomans from the 1500s to the early 20th century, was fifteen minutes long. This final episode is 57 minutes long, well over twice as long as any other video I have ever produced. As is the case with most projects, the closer I get to the present day, the more unsettled the story is, and the more I feel compelled to include.
Throughout this series, I’ve been touched to hear from Yemenis who find the information provided unbiased, and even useful for their own understanding. I wonder if that will continue as I bring the story down to the present day, with its very live controversies? Can’t wait to find out. I am so happy to have put this whole project out into the world, and deeply grateful to the patrons who have made it possible.
I’m delighted to present the fifth episode in my “Yemen vs. Empire” trilogy(?)! And we’re not done quite yet. In attempting to document the war in Yemen we’ve all been looking at for the past decade, I realized there was no way I could fit it all into one video. So with today’s video we’re covering the final fall of Ali Abdullah Saleh, from 2011-2017. The next, and final, for sure this time, Yemen vs. Empire video will cover the conflict from the Saudi-Emirati invasion in 2015, down to the war’s end in 2022.
This one was fairly straightforward. It’s easy to get caught up in the roiling clusterbomb that is US foreign and domestic policy failure in 2024. But we should be paying more attention to what China is up too. On a lot of levels China is weaker looking than they have been in decades. The upward economic trajectory is slowing, and their demographics are apocalyptic. But they are still the second greatest power in the world, and they are just beginning to figure out what that can mean. And they are getting smarter. Very quickly.
