Not the type of video I normally do but it bothered me enough to make a rebuttal. Hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and New Years! ALSO: Be sure to order an Imperial Cat plush while you can! www.gimmeswag.com/products/imperial-cat-plush
I think it was probably worth it - alan fisher did a similar critique of a video he made on california high speed rail a few months ago and RLL responded in a dignified manner and took down and remade the video taking alan fishers criticisms into account so theres a decent chance of something similar happening here.
If Scotland splits from the UK the first thing it's going to do is apply for EU membership. The 2nd thing it's going to do is apply for NATO membership lol.
And that's assuming they don't do an East Germany kind of thing where even though both Germanys combined creating an entirely new country, the new Germany was automatically in NATO from the very beginning
As German I would love to have Scotland in the EU but only under the condition that Scotland helps in the defense of Europe, which de facto means membership in NATO. By the way: The EU is also a defensive alliance. However the EU does not have standing structures and there is a clause for countries which were neutral before entering the EU (Malta, Austria, Ireland and until last year Finland and Sweden).
RealLifeLore videos be like: Here's why the secret Scottish-Turkish alliance is the biggest internal weakness in NATO and how it ties to the Invasion of Ukraine. But first, let me take you back to the cretaceous paleogene extinction event, where the tensions between PRC and Taiwan started and North Korea sent nuclear missiles to the Andromeda Galaxy.
As someone who lives a 20 minute drive from Faslane, I couldn't help but laugh hearing him say the area around it is remote. If you follow the roads north you quickly get into remote areas, but the area Faslane is on is basically on the border of that and in range of the general population of west Scotland. "Far removed from any prying eyes..." There's even a big hill you can drive up and park on with a perfectly clear view of the whole base.
As a Faroe Islander, thank you! We get overlooked too often when discussing the GI(F)UK gap. Not that it (or a possible GIFIN gap) seems to be as relevant today as in the past but still, thanks for the shout-out!
@@mitchellcouchman1444 Well, we had a NATO radar and as far as equipment place is concerned things like that are what we could offer at best. But we do have both Iceland and Norway not that far away from us anyway.
@@weepingscorpion8739 its definitely a strategic point but hardly a replacement for Scotland's role. I mean some very obscure islands were used during the wars and served important functions
@@mitchellcouchman1444 scotlands role is a britosh naval base its not hard replace with the islands the navy is not loyal to scotland and wouldnt join scotland at the end of a referendum
Re: Scotland itself: when Scotland held its independence referendum in 2014, I distinctly remember the BBC explaining that it would keep the monarchy, let alone NATO membership. Before the war, I'd have worried more about Catalonia breaking from NATO than Scotland of all places.
It feels more likely scotland would be accepted to join NATO and EU by the member states than catalonia out of the two since no one seems to be opposed to scotland being independent or be excluded from the big european powerblock
I'm not Scottish (I live in Wales) but even his entire premise is based around an interpretation of Scottish politics and geopolitics that can best be described as 'cursory' or 'misleading'. His assumptions that the video bases itself on are formed through a filter that just does not mesh with the political realities of Scotland and the UK as a whole. It's just painfully obvious he's talking about a country that he doesn't know enough about
Aye they just seen independence supporters don't want to be in the UK and most (not all) don't want nukes. Then just assumed that means independence supporters are anti nato showing how little research they did
@Mon the well as a scot, anyone else get the feeling that he's making the common assumption that Scottish independence is a regionally divisive, politically tense issue like it is in northern Ireland? I feel like people forget the fact that most Scots aren't hard-core one way or the other, we just want autonomy and to be listened to, independence supporters rarely support complete iron walls between Scotland and the UK, and union supporters almost always support some degree of autonomy for Scotland. Each region of Scotland when polled on independence usually reflects the national view give or take a few percent. Yet, I feel many people assume we'd end up in a NI like situation.
@@dairreagh6468 No one in Northern England wants to be part of Scotland. The anti-English bigotry and bitterness are not lost on us and we are just as much English as any other part of England.
Thank you! RealLifeLore has recently published quite a lot of videos with a lot of rather simplistic, faulty or questionable conclusions. Which is a shame cause I actually liked many of his older videos.
Didn't he make a video about California High Speed Rail that was so wrong he took it down? I remember another RUclips made a correction video in response.
RealLifeLore? I stopped watching that channel after only a few videos, even disabled recommendations, because he kept saying stupid stuff for ex that climate change is good for Russia.
If Scotland ever did achieved independence, NATO would just ask the new nation if it wants to be the 33rd Member State of the alliance. *Problem Solved.*
Great video. That "NATO's Biggest Weakness is Scotland" video bugged the hell out of me for many of the same reasons mentioned here. The whole time they were talking about Scotland leaving NATO would be such a horrible thing, my eyes just kept drifting over to Norway. It made the whole video seem alarmist, freaking out over a nonexistent problem that isn't much of a problem, even assuming the worst in every possible way.
@Bob1934 First, screw you for being rude. I know exactly what I wrote. Secondly, you still have yet to communicate a single coherent point. Scotland hasn't left the UK and by proxy has not left NATO. There is no need for a naval base in Norway that can handle nuclear subs. Even if such a need existed, which it does not, it would only be a matter of time before such a base was built.
RealLifeLore has always given me serious "Wendover Productions at home" vibes. I feel like every other time he makes a video I get to experience a whole side of youtube I've never seen before when I start getting recommended their rebuttal videos.
as a poli sci grad/teacher reallifelore is one of the worst places to get info of any kind because it uses false premises and out of context 'evidence' without acknowledging counterclaims
@@GwainSagaFanChannel i do watch him, but for a different reason. you can gauge the mood of the public quite a bit based on the comment section, once you filter out spam and propaganda
His videos about why such-and-such country's geography is good or bad are particularly glaring. He'll use the country's present day success and lack thereof and find excuses for it.
Real life lore has made mistakes such as this before. He made a video about the Califronia High Speed Rail project and called it doomed, which warranted a rebuttal from transportation youtuber Alan Fisher. It seems like RLL now just selects a minute issue and makes a 30 min long video about it with a clickbaity title and over exaggerated voice, which ends up being misleading or entirely wrong.
His video of Ukraine back in February had several talking points that literally came from soft Russian propaganda and were debunked by Starsky several times, with thrustworthy (and not governmental) sources. In his Portugal's video he also made several mistakes, as well as in the "end of the Soviet Union" video. These small but relevant mistakes have been a common thing for at least a year now...
I'm glad you mentioned the silly voice. I really have a lot of difficulty watching even the better RLL videos because of that ridiculously overloaded intonation.
I noticed in RLL’s video about when Kazakhstan became the Soviet Union for 4 days, he actually got several of the dates of the individual Soviet republics declaring sovereignty and later independence out of order.
In his video about Ukraine in February he also used several talking points that came directly from Russian propaganda, literally (Starsky later said those myths were bullsh*t and even pointed out lots of thrustworthy sources (and not governmental) about it). Other videos also had disinformation, like the one of the high-speed railway in California, the "greatness" of the US, videos about Asian conflicts, etc. In a sense he's quite wrong sometimes and pretty sensationalistic as well - it works for most people but not for all. I started seing that last year in his video of "Portugal is Sea" (btw, I'm Portuguese) since he said several thing that were pretty wrong and biased, to be honest (sometimes pretty oversimplified).
This thing makes some channels im subbed get connected in a weird way. Like I would never expect to see Jhonny Harris inside a debunk video inside the debunk video of RLL.
I do too although I somewhat dislike how some of them go about it: with faux self-deprecation as they rip someone's work apart with their own chic set of graphics and superfluous maps.
100%. As a local I saw the flaws in the video immediately, but it made me wonder. How much information have I casually absorbed from educational videos on topics I'm less familiar with, without really questioning its accuracy? As long as fact-checking and rebuttals are viewed as part of a discussion rather than "beef", it can only be a good thing for viewers
As an IR scholar from Scotland, thank you for making this video. I didn't have the time nor means to rebut the flaws in Real Life Lore's argument to this effect so I'm really glad other content creators are taking it upon themselves. Keep up the good work!
I spent far too much time arguing in the comment section of that video. I didn't take anything in the video personally but it was just such a misguided and misinformed video I couldn't help get heated about it.
Making content like this isn't hard, so if you're actually qualified, I'd say give it a serious try. Most of the video and audio editing is basic stuff and can be learned very easily and nothing is wrong with "powerpoint-esque" videos as long as it's informative and/or entertaining. You could even record yourself speaking and just edit pictures over it when applicable.
The comment section of his video is filled with us Scots correcting him. Mostly about him saying Faslane is "in the middle of nowhere" when it's less than an hour away from Glasgow (our biggest city) and there is a town called Helensburgh just a couple of miles away, but also about most of what you've said. EDIT: Okay, you included that- my bad for hasty commentating.
The whole location argument is annoying how stupid it is, I am not sure why it even became an issue. Because it becomes a nuclear target, as if Glasgow wouldn't already be a top target? And if it was, so would Aldermaston where the weapons are made and stored, approximately ~5miles from Reading, England (population 175k). It is impossible for a nuclear weapon to have a meltdown like a nuclear reactor, of which many sit next to large cities. No nuclear weapon is EVER developed, since the very first ones in 1945, where there is a risk of it being detonated while undeployed. If Scotland does not want British military facilities in Scotland, then England or Wales will also gain the 1000s of ship building jobs that the SNP produly proclaims will stay in Scotland after voting for independence.
There was so much that bothered me in that reallifelore video so thank you for making this breakdown, I really appreciate it. Happy New Year from Scotland!
I saw this video too and I've never heard anybody talk about Scotland being a NATO weak point. I've heard of Poland and Lithuania, but Scotland being a weakness is just ridiculous.
But Scotland is a weakness if it goes independent as it essentially forces the second most powerful member of NATO to have to spend a monumental amount of money and time to reconfigure its entire defence strategy. Listen to defence analysts' opinions on it, they pretty much all say it would be disastrous for British, and therefore north and western European, security
Speaking of the suwalki gap , in his video about finland and sweden joining NATO he relied on an outdated RAND analysis that predicts that russia can easily occupy the baltics and close the gap , and not taking into account several factors : 1- Can russia actually manage to do it after seeing the current performance of the russian military in ukraine ? 2- Actually it's not 100% guaranteed that Belarus will allow russia to use it's territory to attack freaking NATO 3- Finland and Sweden even without joining NATO they have an obligation for mutual defense within the EU .
@@noureddine3648 Considering Russia's history in the region, I highly doubt they would be able to blitz the Lithuanian highlands and maintain control quickly as it is quite rugged and unsuitable for a mechanized blitz with dense forests and marshes Poland on the other hand is a lot more exposed and more suitable for a blitzkrieg, but even with that, they would still require Belarus to compile like you said
@@compatriot852 Also his famous ukraine video is pretty meh , he focuses on russia needing natural defenses beyond it's borders westward ( he's not the only one though ) and casually forgets that nuclear weapons changed that calculation forever , now russia is conventionally vulnerable like never before but no one is dumb enough to do it , a video about russia and ukraine that doesn't mention russia's deep rooted sentiment of ownership of ukraine and that they're entitled to a sphere of influence over central and eastern europe shouldn't be taken seriously .
So glad you made this video, I'm Scottish and massively into international politics. When I saw the real-life lore video I was appalled at the glaring issues in the video, thanks for making this video to clarify
@@Argentocoxos The thing is that you may enjoy rest of the videos without knowing about the mistakes he makes in those till he makes a video where you are knowledgeable enough to notice the mistakes. As someone from Finland, There are many mistakes in his video about Finland. I also knew many of the issues in this video about Scotland. It is good to see some of these things pointed out, but his channel is far from the only channel that makes this sort of stuff and mistakes. International news about Finland tend to repeat the same false claims over and over again and our politicians, even the president correcting them on those doesn't stop it.
I might not be from the UK, but during the entire video I was thinking “NATO shares intelligence and does joint military exercises/operations with other countries, right? I doubt Scotland would be that crazy and/or isolationist.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen dubious geopolitical or historical information from RLL. Honestly there’s a reason I’ve avoided his channel for quite a while now. I commend you for pointing out errors when you see them and hope that this can act as a wake up call to his channel. There’s enough misinformation and click bait on RUclips without Historytubers contributing to it.
Thanks for calling this out. As a student of IR and also a fan of RLL I was really disappointed when I watched their video. It's great to see someone with a platform pushing back in a friendly way.
I reciprocate this exactly pal. I've followed RLL for a long time, but watching their vid on this made me doubt a lot of their other vids, that previously made me ponder other subjects that I wasn't otherwise familiar with.
A great video. And you are not the only one who found the wrong border line for Scotland infuriating. I live in that zone. Cumberland has not been Scottish territory for nine hundred years.
How does one actually get it wrong though? He probably just googled a map of Scotland and he used the line from the first result. Nobody's going around verifying every single pixel on a picture that comes from a reasonably good source.
yeah but thats not just like a few pixels off. thats like noticeably off the border line. its like moving the canada america border 20 miles up and saying nobody would notice
I'm sure RLL will take this as constructive criticism if he sees it. That's how he reacted to Alan Fisher's rebuttal on CAHSR, which was way harsher. He does however seem to have a problem with using sources on that are aggressively partisan but not obviously so when he deals with current events.
He will acknowledge the criticism and do absolutely nothing to change his ways. For just over a year now his entire channel has just been spewing whatever political propaganda is the top result on Google for any given issue. He's even flip-flopped between Russia/China-bias and NATO-bias. At this point I can't wait for something like China-India border warfare to heat up again and have him claim that the Uyghur prisoner camps both do and don't exist within the same month.
I want to second BadPak. I discovered your channel recently and it has inspired an interest in Jewish history. I especially appreciated your video on the Dreyfus Affair. I think my high school world history textbook made a one-sentence reference to it in a paragraph about European antisemitism. The subject deserves more than one sentence and one paragraph!
I've never watched an RLL video before (or heard of the channel) but that one turned up in my recommended videos for some reason. It was a frustrating watch for many reasons but as someone who stays about 45 mins drive away from Faslane, it did make me laugh out loud hearing it described as remote and far removed - the majority of the population of the country could be there within 90 mins.
It's bizarre and makes me think he either didn't bother to look at a map, looked at a map and made some sort of mental error of scale, or just thought remote and unpopulated sounded good and 'nuclear weapony' so he decided reality was less important than imagery. It's like saying the Isle of Grain in Kent is remote and unpopulated, which is true relative to a lot of surrounding areas, but you could still spit on it from London or vice versa with a favourable wind.
I just took a look at Faslane on maps. I'd call it like my local Haugesund and Årsvågen ferry. It's just a 40 minute car ride from the town, but it's a barren and craggy area that I wouldn't want to break down at. Because it's remote and quite far away from the nearest gas station or Circle K. Fun detail. On maps, you can see two Astute submarines and one Vanguard docked at the site. Very low-key, but also very scary given how much power is crammed into those vessels, both figuratively and literally. No US subs, which was interesting.
RealLifeLore videos are a good exercise in critical thinking. They are fun, but it's always good when I can pick up on still that's not great, like this and the California High Speed Rail one.
I was waiting for someone to mention the Californian HSR in the comments. If you're stickybeeking the comments at all Tigerstar, look up Alan Fisher's "California High Speed Rail has not Failed and RealLifeLore is wrong" reply video to RealLifeLore's old version of his Californian HSR video. This is definitely not the first time someone's done an extremely thorough debunking reply video of a RealLifeLore video - and RealLifeLore did end up dramatically revising the video afterward and hiding the old version. So, don't feel bad about writing a thorough reply video on this subject.
As someone who’s lived in Scotland almost her entire life I really appreciate you addressing pretty much every issue I had with RLL’s video. The idea that we would ever leave NATO is absurd, a large portion of Scottish independence is contingent on rejoining the EU (even though many member states have said they’d reject us) so the notion we’d make an active effort to stay out of NATO is insane
Scotland is a threat to NATO, as it has no own army and a political party that wants no army. It would need to be defended by other bigger nations, which would be a diplomatic problem.
@@grant6849 Spain did. France is also tentative. AND if Scotland wishes to join the EU it would take at least 10 years, probably much longer. The SNP has started to admit this, even though they tried to lie (mislead) about it.
Not to be needlessly contentious, but Scottish Independence isn't primarily predicated on EU membership - 48% of people so leaving the EU to be a worthy price for Indy back in 2014. Certainly, more people have moved to support Indy because of Brexit but I don't think Indy is 'contingent' on rejoining the EU - if it were, the SNP & Scottish Greens pre-2016 wouldn't have existed.
@@mrfreeman2911 Although Scotland currently has no independent army the SNP have stated they want to have a military post-independence. The British Defence Journal did an article (titled: Defence and security in an independent Scotland) where they interviewed SNP MP Stewart McDonald, SNP Defence Spokesman and member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and he outlines from Scotland post-independence. Although the plans are better than the plans they had back in 2014 they are not 100% convincing. However, there are still plans for an independent Scotland to have a military.
"Informative" videos on youtube should always be treated with caution. Especially in the case of a channel like RLL, remember that they are simply making a product, and optimising for a number of factors, including reach (i.e. clickbait or controversial topics) and cost (affecting the quality of research and script). I often find myself just blindly believing whatever is presented in informative videos because their presentation is really good, so all the more reason why I appreciate this video for calling out mistakes and reminding us that no channel is infallible.
Whats up with brits always demanding we pronounce their cities and regions with british accents but they won't pronounce our cities and regions with american accents
@@Tanador680 Not accent; pronuciation - for example, the American city of Birmingham is prnounced "Bur-Ming-Ham" but the British City it was named for is pronounced "Bur-Ming-Am". Surely common courtesy would be to pronounce each correctly no?
@@Aniaas1 Honestly kind of a bad example because if you are speaking even moderately fast it kinda sounds the same either way. (Not saying your point is wrong though.)
RealLifeLore’s channel is one of those “informative” channels that, in reality is just entertainment sprinkled in with easy to find ,subjective google search answers.
@@Rescuro Before you choose to respect him find out if he owned up and remade the video after discovering his mistake or after having his mistake pointed out to him. There is a huge difference.
Alan Fisher made a good critique about California HSR from RealLifeLore. He even responded to the video, fixed the mistakes in his own and uploaded a better one later.
And he apparently didn't learn a lesson from that experience, because imo the advice in this video that RLL needs to be more careful felt very similar to Alan's advice at the end of his critique video.
I don’t know how many people work on each video, but he should probably have someone else knowledgeable on the topic give it a quick fact-check first to avoid the obvious sloppiness which can hurt their credibility and/or misinform people.
Brilliant video! As a Scottish person who keeps up with geopolitics, and watches RealLifeLore often enough, their video really bugged me. The issue of independence is complex enough without more misinformation being added into the mix. Your video was much more balanced, pragmatic and non inflammatory - well done!
@@greywolf7577I’m disappointed in how Ireland was once treated with colonialism, genocide, and starvation. Also their stable use of proportional representation in single transferable vote for a century deserves to get more recognition.
@@gulogulo7636 No, it's independence. All Nations in the EU are sovereign, Scotland is not sovereign. Stop throwing around something that is widely debunked, it only proves how ignorant and/or dependent on misinformation you are.
Thing is... it wasn't _just_ misinformation, it was straight out unionist lies that RLL actively swallowed whole, then diseminated with little intelligence of context. As a Scot, I have now blocked RLL from my YT. It's pretty simple, if you spread unionist propaganda for your clickbait video you don't deserve my viewership.
The dumbest thing (in my opinion) about Reallifelore's >now deleted< video is essentially: "Scotland can't leave the UK because it will inconvenience the English" (and also the wrong border shown) 🤦🏻♀️
Yes as an Englishman I was struggling to see how Scotland becoming independent would inconvenience the English ?. Also Cumbria and about half of Northumberland would also leave the UK and be part of Scotland apparently 😂😂
@@lightfootpathfinder8218 The main thing seemed to be that they (Westminster Govt) would have to relocate the nuclear submarine base on the Clyde to somewhere in England or Wales. As if Scotland would just pull the plug the day after success in gaining independence rather than a phased removal of the nuclear facility elsewhere.
@@Jazzinthedark84 If the UK government really wanted to they could move the nuclear submarine base within a short time. Conventional submarines are based at devonport and Portsmouth so I can't see the whole submarine thing being a big problem. It would be far more difficult to relocate if the missiles were in silos in Scotland
This was the first real life lore video where i felt like something was "off" i was not sure what it was, and did not think about it too much. Great video on explaining this problem with the vid
You mean you watched the american civil war vid and ignored the thousands of comments of people saying they cant wait to murder liberals and didnt see something off?
It just felt outdated to me. This isn't the 80's anymore. We've seen recently how impotent Russia is. Aside from their nukes, they really aren't a threat to NATO nations.
I'd say theres quite a few that feel just... off, like the channel makes something and then you remember something they made a few weeks before that blows the current video out of the water.
Recently RealLifeLore has just been going downhill, I’m glad you’ve called this out. I watched the video and to say I wasn’t angry would be an understatement. Also the thumbnail thing was a massive issue for me because he couldn’t even double check, he got the country who he was talking about, he had the correct borders…
has been going this way for some time. His videos constantly seem to have mis-interpretations, oversimplifications, and out right falsities. Plus I constantly notice spelling errors and the border thing is ridiculous. And he can't bother to look up place name pronunciations sometimes it seems lol
Glad to see youre not the only one to recognise that. I used to watch him constantly but then something changed about the quality of his content around 2021 and it was just downhill from there.
people who care way too much about nit picking youtube videos. Wow these comments are just. "Im so upset at a THUMBNAIL" yeah go outside and get some fresh air ffs.
But if that 10 hour video has a mistake then every other RUclipsr should completely shat on them and make sure they never ever make another video again. Even if that mistake is just about interpretations or leaning against a different bias. That's the way of the Internet.
I’m glad you made this video. I live in the UK and study geography, and despite being recommended this RLL video multiple times by RUclips I never watched it because it was clear to me that the title could not possibly be a true statement or be supported by a valid argument.
Human Geography here, same feeling. Those entry level "I did 20 seconds research on Wikipedia about this complicated topic" videos are just too painful to watch. Then it touches on geopolitics and defense and the ex-officer in me ussually wants to just go bang my head against a wall until the images of the video leave my head. 😆 And I ended up a low level intel grunt who made fancy-looking maps. I imagine there's a lot of defense bigwigs out there who have that even worse.
Tbf Wendover is better than the other two, it's more like the Chipotle of geopolitics - still fast food but presented better and maybe slightly better for you
Yeah, but Wendover is actually good. I don't think RealLifeLore is a fair comparison. Something like Polymatter is closer, they both usually have something interesting to say that isn't straight-up wrong.
Honestly I saw the RLL video in my sub box and entirely dismissed it because it sounded batshit insane. Minutes into this video I was like "doesn't stop Scotland being a NATO ally" so I'm glad you addressed that.
Same, I generally like RLL's content but I saw the video in my recommended and I knew that it was immediately going to be mis-informative Regardless of what Scotland does, they can't exactly ruin any of NATO's plans and even if they did interfere with them then NATO could easily adapt around this entirely hypothetical obstacle
I used to like RLL but he's had a couple of BIG misses lately, making alarmist content and a lot of his "facts" are not thoroughly checked at all. Not too long ago several channels were making videos about his video on the train system in california being basically entirely wrong.
Yeah. Im getting more and more Business Basics/Casual vibes when they posted the whole "Europe's gonna freeze crash burn and die within 5 miliseconds into the winter". As a Central European I must say, the winter's gonna pass in about a month, i am and was warm the entire time RuZZia was claiming they're tearing EU apart, i find it very humerous. Anyways B.B./C. ended up making the video private and went back to PRC/CCP stuff. Honestly, it was an L moment compareable to RussiaToday's propaganda.
Real Life Lore is one of those strange channels that is somehow massive despite most of their videos coming across as something an undergraduate might produce during a 4 day long Adderall bender.
How are they strange? Isn't that the basic template most popular RUclips pop-science channels follow? Take a popular topic, make a google search, do the most basic of research, compile it to a visually appealing monetized and sponsored video, and publish it. Of course videos like that will amass more audience that something where a historian discusses about a subject for 2 hours on camera. It's not like RUclips is any serious research platform. Most people just kill time here by binge watching videos about useless garbage or interesting trivia.
@@goldbullet50 I liked RLL videos on "What if the Roman Empire united" or "What if the Mongol Empire united" etc. Those videos really illuminated how keeping together such a ridiculous empire would be impossible in 2023. Too many ethnicities, too many languages, and too many religions. I wanted him to make a video on what if the CSA returned but no dice.
@@genericyoutubeaccount579 "Too many ethnicities, too many languages, too many religions" Wait till you see India, Papua New Guinea or Nigeria. Then you will see actual diversity.
I didn’t watch RLL’s video but I saw the thumbnail, and I was shocked to learn that the part of Northern England I live in had been annexed by Scotland 😂
This is the second time I have seen a RUclipsr have to correct RLL on serious oversights in a video of theirs. I hope RLL learns from this and gets better moving forward
his videos, at least imo, often have incorrect information or at least extreme oversimplification. It pisses me off and I don't trust them as a refutable source for knowledge.
"serious oversights in a video" that is a MASSIVE stretch considering I just watched this and the biggest crime reallifelore made was the suggest that scotland might not join nato again after leaving the uk. Which is a fine opinion to have because it cant be proved either way, they haven't left the UK yet, but you people seem to think its a cardinal sin to consider a possibility? You are actually calling it "serious oversights"? How do you people spew forth these awful opinions seriously? Are you THAT arrogant?
I mean, anoraks and poli-sci wonks are just two of a long list of experts who will take any slight, of any magnitude, as a reason to get out of their arm chair to lecture at length about why what they just watched was wrong. It doesn't surprise me he stepped into the arena on accident, it could literally happen to anyone.
@@rambysophistry1220 Are you actually getting angry about people more well educated than you pointing out when you're wrong? This has to be the most pathetic cope I have ever seen.
@@hedgehog3180 So, I know the internet is pretty bad at getting across things like tone of voice and sarcasm and teasing. II also know that there are things like Poe's law in effect, along with a long list of other internet rules about how things can get misconstrued in one way or another. But I would sincerely like to ask, why does this post seem like I am mad, more then poking fun? Because, I sincerely am not mad at experts doing expert things, as opposed to just poking fun at the ones who look at small blunders and go straight to 10, when a 2 would suffice.
@@rambysophistry1220 it’s seen as hostile cuz you go out of your way to insult the ones doing the correcting, calling them “anoraks” and “poli-sci wonks”(weird insults chief). There’s also the fact that you seem to think that the video was harsh and overly berating of real life lore when it was very understanding and kind in its tone.
THANK YOU! I couldn't believe it when that video came out as someone who has a lot of respect for RLL's content, it's great that someone has taken the time to calmly and meticulously go through the problems with it.
Lol. After this video I just assumed RLL was just not worth watching. Sometimes someone does something so stupid you can never trust them again with anything sharper than a butter knife.
@@morerobotwarscontent1476 I watchd the video had never seen RLL content before and safe to say I will not watch any again, this was pure anti Scottish propaganda, with alarmist rhetoric....
The _real_ issue with the video is that they seem to assert that Scotland just casually annexes Northumbria and Cumbria should it gain independence. I feel like that may be _more_ of a geopolitical kerfuffle than GIUK Gap issue. I'm joking, if that's not obvious.
@@ryanread8617 I remember having to write an essay about Irish and Scottish independence for a political science class a year ago. I needed one more essay which I decided to dedicate as a “f**k Britain, I hope you crumble for the way you treated your colonies, and the way you treated the countries you saw as brothers.” (I had too much fun with it. lol)
@@alexanderrobins7497 You mean England? Since Britain is entire of Ireland and Scotland back then. I think people forget that 3 centuries of Scotland and England has caused every person in Britain to have DNA from both ancient kingdoms. Sure you can say f**k Britain, but back then that just how it was, other countries did the same, with wars. The difference with Britain it was the largest, and most recorded. You don't say that to other countries though they did the same and worse like the Mongolian Empire. Just think about this every country has both good and bad history, Britain good history is that when it reigned as the largest Empire in the world it was the most influential in advocating for the end of slavery. Basically Britain had the biggest role in ending slavery. I would say Britain ended slavery but that controversial, and it would likely make an argument. I just think people look at stuff 1 sided, like for 3 centuries Scotland has been with England, now that idea of independence has been driven it breaks apart two countries which have been married forever.
Thank you for taking the courage to disprove a video from someone as big as RealLifeLore, your arguments are well constructed and put together. I'm surprised RealLifeLore made so many outrageous mistakes in the first place (though perhaps these points all seem so obvious to me because I actually live in the UK)
In 2019, Scotland earned £66 Billion and had £80 Billion in public expenditure, a £14 Billion shortfall, last year it was £20 Billion. Britain has funded, and continues to fund, considerable shortfalls in revenue year after year. Scotland would have to get it's act together in a hurry if they wanted to pull away from the UK, especially if English firms withdrew from Scotland and trade ceases or is burdened by tariffs.
Also it would be worth mentioning the brain drain from migration into England which would further stifle the Scottish economy for a longer period of time
The big problem with your argument is the fact that Scotland is not allowed under Devolution rules to get into any kind of debt, and we do not have the fiscal powers to borrow. So, any shortfall in public spending that is pinned on Scotland, is actually money that is spent on Scotland's behalf by Westminster...
according to the way UK gov stats work, every single area of the UK has a large shortfall in funds, as they're all compared to London as that's where tax money ultimately goes to
You completely misunderstand Scottish state funding and the funding of an independent state. Scotland is funded by an annual fiscal transfer from Westminster to the Scottish government which is designed to be a population share of the UK government's annual spending. The Scottish government cannot legally spend any more than what is in its annual budget each year, save for an extremely limited ability to borrow to account for budgetary forecasting errors. I assume when you go on about what Scotland "earned" you are referring to tax revenues directly attributable to Scotland. Only six main taxes are attributable to Scotland, they being non-share, non-dividend income tax, land and buildings transaction tax, council tax, aggregate tax, landfill tax and business rates. Share and dividend inclusive income tax, national insurance, VAT, capital gains tax, corporation tax, import duties, windfall tax, and oil duty are examples of significant sources of tax revenue that Scotland has no control over and which contain no locational information within the UK. This all overlooks the fact that taxes aren't what fund an independent country. They are a lever of economic control that the government can use to control growth and inflation of the economy. If you really think that Scotland was such a financial burden on England you should really be asking yourself why the UK government fights so hard to prevent Scottish independence. Surely they'd be happy to be rid of Scotland?
@@tomirk4404So the English Tories deliberately destroyed huge swathes of Scotland's economy and you have the cheek to go on about brain drain from Scotland. Great way to sell the UK.
As a Scot watching RLLore's video, I got the impression that his knowledge of Scotland is watching Hollywood romantic comedies set in Scotland, where it's all one big highland countryside and everyone lives in charmingly rustic villages ruled by a lord in a castle, and we still use horse and carts as the chief form of transport.
So you don't do that? And wear kilts all day? With knee-high white socks? And eat haggis, lots and lots of haggis? And play the bagpipes all day, the sweet, sweet pipes? Darn it, I've been misinformed.
RealLifeLore is the store brand Wendover. He almost gets it right, but it stills tastes a bit funny. I remember going up the A81 on the motorbike, I we could SEE the ships in HMNB Clyde on a motorbike trip a few years ago. its not THAT secret and remote.
He was seemingly a bit right because if you look at his map the real weakness is that apparently Scotland will invade North England But yeah like you said Scotland is a important geopolitical place but not the only one and it would most likely stay in the nato
That would be a strength though. If they invaded northern England, they would take more poor regions from us, allowing the richer regions to spend even more on themselves including the military.
The idea of Scotland being a military weakness is as hilarious as the idea the Taliban might start a navy and sail to Britain to invade Scotland. I mean who do they think is going to go after Scotland?
The Russian navy lost a flagship, Moskva, to a country with basically no navy to speak of and where their air force was tiny and unable to be remotely close whose people were organizing molotov cocktails to resist their armies. And the Russian aircraft carrier is regularly on fire and in dock rusting away. I don't really think that the Russian Navy is much of a threat based on just sailing around if there was a genuine war. The only real threat they would have is if their SLMB ballistic missiles were launched from submarines, and that can happen just about anywhere.
@@edelweiss7928 "So you don't know our history 1600s onwards" Bro the Jacobite uprisings were in the 1700s after Union there was and still is bad blood there.
Spot on video and yes I am a Scot. I'll be honest I was raging after the video you mentioned aired. Grateful to you for correcting the mistakes and explaining why the information was so misguided and dangerous. Thank you.
Fed up of folks telling us we can't have our independence because NATO doesn't want us to, or because Spain wouldn't like it! Defeats the whole sentiment of "Self" determination
@mortaj - fellow Scotsman here, raging was how I felt too! I really enjoy RLL videos and learn a lot from them, but this one drove me mental. The guy usually seems like he knows what he's talking about, but after that video I'm no so sure. The very idea that Scotland would somehow walk away from NATO (or that they wouldn't have us) was bloody insulting nonsense. Thankfully he got piled on in the comments haha.
hi, thank you for pointing all this out, i actually live within a close proximity to Faslane and Coulport and these are issues and solutions i remember people talking about over a decade ago. It seems more common as of late for large infographic channels like reallifelore to have large theoretical holes in their videos and I'm glad someone is mentioning it.
I usually watch Real Life Lore videos but when I saw this title I didn't even bother to click on it because I already knew it was bs. It's good you made a video about it! Thanks!
The GIUK gap and sosus net are not just about preventing Soviet ballistic missile submarines from entering the Atlantic. The fact is that by the 1980s, the Soviets had the Delta III, Delta IV, and Typhoon class submarines, which could hit the United States from the Arctic. In fact, the Typhoon class can hit much of the United States firing from its dock. The GIUK gap was there to keep Russian cruise missile boats and conventional and nuclear attack submarines from entering the Atlantic and severing the sea lanes between the North America and Europe.
The point still stands thought that the net is less crucial than it used to be altogether because NATO expansion has made EU far less vulnerable to attack in the first place, giving it a lot more defensive terrain and strategic depth, plus the threat on its borders is much smaller.
Yes if you want to know more read what im reading....tom clancy's hunt for red october....details everything you know about the sosus nets which are read from a station in iceland to the multiple nato submarines patrolling the north sea
@@ronmaximilian6953 no im still starting on my submarine read list im finishing red october right now since thats what im only seeing in my high schools library im planning to search for more but im thinking of reading red storm rising next if there is no other submarine books By the im a high school sophomore
I recently looked at RLL's uploads and noticed that the upload frequency was about once a week. When I noticed that, I remember thinking, "There's no possible way you can spit out a video a week and simultaneously do the level of research needed to fully understand any of these topics." I'm also not a historian, but I do know calculus very well I remember one time RLL made a video about measuring the lengths of rivers where he mentioned taking limits and Zeno's paradox, and It could not have been clearer that he didn't understand what he was talking about there either. The quality of information is about as bad as what you might find on TV news
"There's no possible way you can spit out a video a week and simultaneously do the level of research needed to fully understand any of these topics." Thats objectively incorrect. Speak for yourself? These channels usually have teams/writers that help them. More unfounded ignorance in these comments. Wow wouldnt have guessed.
@@Labyrinth6000 Case in point The Scotland video (made December 13, 2022) directly contradicts the FInland Blocking Russia video (made November 25th, 2022).
I disagree. On the World War Two channel Indy Neidell does all his own research and comes out with a video weekly. He did the same when he was with The Great War. So far that's over eight years of weekly content, and can highly recommend both.
I literally left a comment on that video saying that Scotland doesn't want to leave NATO even if they do the UK, and it was pretty much buried. The whole video contained alot of interesting information but seemed to really want to force a narrative to highlight that information that simply wasn't true. Thank you for making this.
@@Hoosier_Daddy69 Polling shows that support for Scottish independence has gone both above and below 50% in the past few years. The most recent polling shows that a majority (excluding undecideds) support independence, likely due to the recession. It was also over 50% during the pandemic.
I moved to Scotland in 2020 and when RealLifeLore's video popped up on my recommended I added it to my watch later. Shortly thereafter, your video popped up and I did the same thing. It's taken me until this moment to actually watch your video and I still haven't watched RLL's, but just off the bat, the notion that the threat to NATO being Scotland leaving the UK hadn't even crossed my mind as a possibility for what RLL's video was going to be about. I thought it was going to be some sort of "Scotland is in this precarious place and it's easy to attack and then be used as leverage" kinda thing, but them threatening NATO by leaving the UK? Really? What a bizarre alternate-history-reality scenario to build up out of nothing o.O
There is a possibly more fundamental point. In the document "Scotland Future" it is claimed by the Scottish government that the referendum was to be a "once in a generation" or "once in a lifetime" event. Now the Scottish government have tried to get around this but as they claim that all of this has to be done legally I am not convinced that they actually have any legs left to stand upon.
Thank you. I live in Scotland and follow local and geopolitics and the reallifelore video really bugged me with all the false information they provided. Your video really resolved all the issues I had.
Right?? A real lack of research was put into our internal politics and relationships with other countries, never mind the many geographical issues before Scotland is the biggest weakness.
It’s a minor point given the topic of the video but as someone who lives in Wales, his video oddly implied Wales was much more aligned with England than it is.
i think the difference here is that wales is practically almost entirely dependent on England, while disdain might be had there are afaik no real plans or desires to leave. By comparison, scotland and northern ireland have the systems and ability to secede at any time should they really desire too (and england let them without bloodshed)
@@azzzertyy THE F*CK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT????? It is completely illegal for any country in the Uk to just secede, and they're all dependant on England. England provides a lot of money to these countries that they wouldn't get otherwise.
Yeah, the entire RLL argument of "Scotland will need to reapply to NATO" is idiotic He forgets that West and East Germany united and became Germany. They didn't need to reapply to NATO even if they were now a mixed military, now did they? So stupid
@@w33btrash69 " Scotland leaving the UK would make it a new separate entity." So you are saying that the GDR and the FRG are still entities? That is news to me. As far as I was aware two entities ended and one created, just as #IndyRef2 will lead to one entity ending and two created. So the only difference being that NATO will get two new entities this time instead of just one. It's amazing the stuff you folks write expecting no one to analyse it.
Thank you so much for making this video. I watched it last night and as a Scots-Australian and more so as someone who knows about basic geography and European politics I was about ready to scream hearing RLL talk about if Scotland would join NATO, NATO presence in the Atlantic and how NATO interacts with non-member nations. Also your thumbnail correcting the border healed a hole in my soul, even if it would be nice for Scotland to own the South Berwick. Good video! 👍
Thank you for pointing out the issues with that video. I was impressed when Mr Beat pointed out the problems with Jonny’s video. I encourage more channels to correct the mistakes of other channels so that we can make RUclips education more accurate and reliable.
Thank you for making this, RLL's video is an absolute car crash somebody needed to set it straight and I feel this video had done that quite accurately and succinctly.
@soundscape26 Not really, he's always accumulated millions of views infact his older videos had the most views than his current, but the RUclips algorithm promotes his videos faster than before so I can see why he's making geopolitical videos.
Also, why would Scotland just let Russian ships in an active war into their territorial waters? Turkey isn't letting Russian warships cross into and out of the Black Sea, same would apply here. You can't just ignore territorial boundaries unless you're willing to go to war with a country and in this case Scotland will just work with NATO. I feel like that in of itself makes Real Life Lore's video moot
Thanks for making this. Knowing all the facts you talk about here, I was shaking my head the whole time watching RealLifeLore's video, but didn't take the time to refute him. I'm glad someone did, and people will watch a well-made video anytime over reading a lengthy comment, regardless of how well argumented it may be.
Thanks for making this! I’m Scottish & found some of RLL’s arguments in that video infuriating and thought they demonstrated an alarming lack of knowledge/research for someone with such a large audience (who are likely to take his word at face value). It’s a very complicated issue and it’s evident he really didn’t delve into the intricacies of it. Don’t understand why he bothered publishing something so half-baked and, at times, just flat-out incorrect.
Thank you, I'm always happy to get information from additional sources, and thank you for being constructive and helpful, rather than bashing real life lore.
its good to see a video that challenges other history politics youtube videos, its always difficult to know what videos to believe when they present themselves as experts, its useful to be able tto see two sides of an argument
I remember that my social studies teacher showed us this in class. And I was actually thinking of some of your points while watching it (especially the one about Norway).
the submarine issue is also overstated, the UK has other nuclear handling facilities and submarine bases. it wouldn't be cheap but with a bridging agreement it's not a deal breaker. and scotland has big incentives to provide a bridging agreement as that's one of the big NOs for independence. The wrong scottish borders of the video Really bugs me
Name them? That's a lie.. Portsmouth can't handle ICBMs just nuclear submarines The reality is the Faslane base would be UK base like Gibraltar or Diego Garcia islands The nuclear deterrent would require a new base. It would cost tens of billions ( Scotland would pay ) and to decommissioned Faslane would take 30 years
As a Scotsman who is a geopolitical nerd, and stationed on one of the multitary bases mentioned during the video, this was absolutely the most ridiculous video I've ever seen on RUclips. I'm being serious I've never seen something so on the nose for my own expertise where it's from a supposedly trusted source and not some out of season April fools joke. Thankyou for making this to counter it directly.
I love seeing 4 of my favorite channels all together in the same video. I'm really liking the corrections that have been going on lately. They have been really respectful. Correction videos satisfy that part of me that is yelling at the monitor during videos with mistakes or misunderstandings. This corner of youtube has better peer review than many scientific studies.
Excellent video. Just to add, the idea of plugging the GIUK gap (or an analogue to it) from Soviet vessels weren't only to control missile subs from getting in range of more places, but to protect the convoys of ships carrying equipment and materials from North America to Western Europe that was considered crucial for NATO to defend against a concerted Warzaw Pact attack. While it may seem less relevant now than during the Cold War, I'd argue that this is because of political developments (i.e. a shift in the balance of power between Russia and NATO in Europe) than technological developments in the range and precision of mssiles.
It should also be pointed out that the fact nuclear armed submarines still exist means that patrolling areas like the GIUK gap and First Island Chain aren't pointless. ICBMs aren't without weaknesses; mainly that there's a significant amount of time between when a launch is detected and when it hits its target, which gives whoever's on the receiving end time to counterattack and take some kind of defensive action. Nuclear weapons launched from submarines aren't going to have that issue if they're close to their target.
Watching the RLL video, I already had something in the back of my brain telling me there is at least one thing missing, that would reduce the impact very much. Thanks for that clarification in a friendly, but direct way! And now I'm going to check what your channel is usually about.
Not the type of video I normally do but it bothered me enough to make a rebuttal. Hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and New Years!
ALSO: Be sure to order an Imperial Cat plush while you can! www.gimmeswag.com/products/imperial-cat-plush
Emperor tigerstar
I send you some maps can you rate them pls?
I think it was probably worth it - alan fisher did a similar critique of a video he made on california high speed rail a few months ago and RLL responded in a dignified manner and took down and remade the video taking alan fishers criticisms into account so theres a decent chance of something similar happening here.
its always good to see you branch out.
there is a new hearts of iron 4 dlc called by blood alone that came out. Hope you will do a video about that
If Scotland splits from the UK the first thing it's going to do is apply for EU membership. The 2nd thing it's going to do is apply for NATO membership lol.
And Nato would accept right away. They know whats Scotlands worth.
And that's assuming they don't do an East Germany kind of thing where even though both Germanys combined creating an entirely new country, the new Germany was automatically in NATO from the very beginning
As German I would love to have Scotland in the EU but only under the condition that Scotland helps in the defense of Europe, which de facto means membership in NATO. By the way: The EU is also a defensive alliance. However the EU does not have standing structures and there is a clause for countries which were neutral before entering the EU (Malta, Austria, Ireland and until last year Finland and Sweden).
Scotland is beautifull and as a dutch I agree with our german brethern they would fit right in into the european community
@@spoonkus5893 do me a favour and delete your comment.
RealLifeLore videos be like: Here's why the secret Scottish-Turkish alliance is the biggest internal weakness in NATO and how it ties to the Invasion of Ukraine. But first, let me take you back to the cretaceous paleogene extinction event, where the tensions between PRC and Taiwan started and North Korea sent nuclear missiles to the Andromeda Galaxy.
Most normal RLL video
As someone who lives a 20 minute drive from Faslane, I couldn't help but laugh hearing him say the area around it is remote. If you follow the roads north you quickly get into remote areas, but the area Faslane is on is basically on the border of that and in range of the general population of west Scotland.
"Far removed from any prying eyes..." There's even a big hill you can drive up and park on with a perfectly clear view of the whole base.
As a Faroe Islander, thank you! We get overlooked too often when discussing the GI(F)UK gap. Not that it (or a possible GIFIN gap) seems to be as relevant today as in the past but still, thanks for the shout-out!
Only problem with such a small island would be logistics would get messy under an actual war scenario compared to Norway or Scotland
@@mitchellcouchman1444 Well, we had a NATO radar and as far as equipment place is concerned things like that are what we could offer at best. But we do have both Iceland and Norway not that far away from us anyway.
@@weepingscorpion8739 its definitely a strategic point but hardly a replacement for Scotland's role. I mean some very obscure islands were used during the wars and served important functions
@@mitchellcouchman1444 we did serve a pretty important geopolitical position in the last world war
@@mitchellcouchman1444 scotlands role is a britosh naval base its not hard replace with the islands the navy is not loyal to scotland and wouldnt join scotland at the end of a referendum
Re: Scotland itself: when Scotland held its independence referendum in 2014, I distinctly remember the BBC explaining that it would keep the monarchy, let alone NATO membership. Before the war, I'd have worried more about Catalonia breaking from NATO than Scotland of all places.
Yeah like what would Scotland gain from leaving NATO?
catalonia isn't really important to nato
It isn't guaranteed that Scotland would be a part of NATO.
@@hobbabobba7912 NATO wants Scotland and Scotland wants NATO, so the rest is filling out forms.
It feels more likely scotland would be accepted to join NATO and EU by the member states than catalonia out of the two since no one seems to be opposed to scotland being independent or be excluded from the big european powerblock
I'm not Scottish (I live in Wales) but even his entire premise is based around an interpretation of Scottish politics and geopolitics that can best be described as 'cursory' or 'misleading'. His assumptions that the video bases itself on are formed through a filter that just does not mesh with the political realities of Scotland and the UK as a whole.
It's just painfully obvious he's talking about a country that he doesn't know enough about
Aye they just seen independence supporters don't want to be in the UK and most (not all) don't want nukes. Then just assumed that means independence supporters are anti nato showing how little research they did
I mean he made some good points in it
@@gothicgolem2947enlighten us
@Mon the well as a scot, anyone else get the feeling that he's making the common assumption that Scottish independence is a regionally divisive, politically tense issue like it is in northern Ireland? I feel like people forget the fact that most Scots aren't hard-core one way or the other, we just want autonomy and to be listened to, independence supporters rarely support complete iron walls between Scotland and the UK, and union supporters almost always support some degree of autonomy for Scotland. Each region of Scotland when polled on independence usually reflects the national view give or take a few percent. Yet, I feel many people assume we'd end up in a NI like situation.
@@euanstokes2828 If Scotland frees itself from Westminster, can they take the north of England with them. Please
I like how, in RLL’s idea of Scottish independence, not only does Scotland secede, but she also takes Cumbia and Northumberland with her
I know plenty of people there who would be very happy with that arrangement
Personally I think we should move the border to just bellow manchester.
I’d love to add the Lake District to our country, lots of tourism as well, fits the landscape of Scotland better than England anyway
@@AFFootballHighlights Guess you would like Old Trafford as part of the deal too ?
@@dairreagh6468 No one in Northern England wants to be part of Scotland. The anti-English bigotry and bitterness are not lost on us and we are just as much English as any other part of England.
Thank you! RealLifeLore has recently published quite a lot of videos with a lot of rather simplistic, faulty or questionable conclusions. Which is a shame cause I actually liked many of his older videos.
Didn't he make a video about California High Speed Rail that was so wrong he took it down? I remember another RUclips made a correction video in response.
@@fum2121 He reuploaded the video with some corrections but the point was the same, California's high speed rail struggling.
RealLifeLore? I stopped watching that channel after only a few videos, even disabled recommendations, because he kept saying stupid stuff for ex that climate change is good for Russia.
Any examples of what's wrong with his recent videos?
Could you give us any examples what's wrong with his recent videos?
As someone who was annexed by Scotland in the orginal thumbnail. I am glad you fixed that
its only a matter of time until the rise of the scottish empire lol
As a Scot, I will make sure your town is devoured by Scotland when we get independence
As a French, I will support Scotland independance and help them to annex all of England with pleasure
@@thatfrenchguy8972 "Allez les deux bleus!!!"
@@johnriach8365 🇫🇷🤝🏴
love that scotland casually owns northumberland and cumbria
Give it time -_-
Of course, anything south of Hadrian's Waĺl was Britannia.
Carlisle was the seat of Macbeth.
honestly knowing people from there, they sound like they wouldn't mind it
Now it can enact its full re-transformation into Pictland!
bring back strathclyde
If Scotland ever did achieved independence, NATO would just ask the new nation if it wants to be the 33rd Member State of the alliance.
*Problem Solved.*
Blocked by the uk?
@@crocodileguy4319 uk block blocked by the us
@@gunilive781not how it works
@@efficientwill until the US threatens to leave the alliance, when its important enough like scottland the us will get what it wants
@@gunilive781 Sweden is fairly important yet they were blocked by Turkey and just them for years on end for political reasons.
Great video. That "NATO's Biggest Weakness is Scotland" video bugged the hell out of me for many of the same reasons mentioned here. The whole time they were talking about Scotland leaving NATO would be such a horrible thing, my eyes just kept drifting over to Norway. It made the whole video seem alarmist, freaking out over a nonexistent problem that isn't much of a problem, even assuming the worst in every possible way.
Same lol
Maybe he doesn't like Scotland leaving the UK
@Bob1934 Not sure what your point is. There are none because there is no need for one.
@Bob1934 First, screw you for being rude. I know exactly what I wrote. Secondly, you still have yet to communicate a single coherent point. Scotland hasn't left the UK and by proxy has not left NATO. There is no need for a naval base in Norway that can handle nuclear subs. Even if such a need existed, which it does not, it would only be a matter of time before such a base was built.
As a Scot we just want power over ourselves, britain is right wing while Scotland is left wing
We didn't want to leave the EU either
the Scottish invasion of Cumbria has begun apparently
Next will be the Welsh liberation of Birmingham.
You guys just can't let it go apparently.
as somebody from cumbria i approve
I think we’d be better off if Scotland annexed all of England at this point tbh
and Northumberland
His channel slowly became way more about earning money, by stretching the video as much as possible and not always checking the facts.
Thus the fate of all "fact" channels
You can hear it in his tone. I swear I can notice how he is "bored' while trying to act energized.
His videos have always been awful imo
I thought you were talking about EmperorTigerstar’s Channel.
So Whatifalthis 2.0?
RealLifeLore has always given me serious "Wendover Productions at home" vibes. I feel like every other time he makes a video I get to experience a whole side of youtube I've never seen before when I start getting recommended their rebuttal videos.
Wendover Productions is RLL im pretty sure.
@@NotePortal Nah, completely different guy
@@andrewrogers3067 why do they sound so similar
@@jjbarajas5341 Half as Interesting and Wendover are the same
@@Isvoor I mix them up all the time.
They do sound somewhat alike, but mostly its that the style of video is extremely similar.
as a poli sci grad/teacher reallifelore is one of the worst places to get info of any kind because it uses false premises and out of context 'evidence' without acknowledging counterclaims
All his videos?
I stopped following that channel even people who never studied history would give better explanations than him would
True its a really biased channel, like you say never acknowledging counterclaims.
@@GwainSagaFanChannel i do watch him, but for a different reason. you can gauge the mood of the public quite a bit based on the comment section, once you filter out spam and propaganda
His videos about why such-and-such country's geography is good or bad are particularly glaring. He'll use the country's present day success and lack thereof and find excuses for it.
Real life lore has made mistakes such as this before. He made a video about the Califronia High Speed Rail project and called it doomed, which warranted a rebuttal from transportation youtuber Alan Fisher. It seems like RLL now just selects a minute issue and makes a 30 min long video about it with a clickbaity title and over exaggerated voice, which ends up being misleading or entirely wrong.
His video of Ukraine back in February had several talking points that literally came from soft Russian propaganda and were debunked by Starsky several times, with thrustworthy (and not governmental) sources. In his Portugal's video he also made several mistakes, as well as in the "end of the Soviet Union" video. These small but relevant mistakes have been a common thing for at least a year now...
I'm glad you mentioned the silly voice. I really have a lot of difficulty watching even the better RLL videos because of that ridiculously overloaded intonation.
And plugging Nebula to watch part 2
We have another Alan Fisher viewer here… greetings.
His voice makes the videos hard to watch honestly LOL. I dunno if RLL talks like that all the time but it’s too distracting
I noticed in RLL’s video about when Kazakhstan became the Soviet Union for 4 days, he actually got several of the dates of the individual Soviet republics declaring sovereignty and later independence out of order.
In his video about Ukraine in February he also used several talking points that came directly from Russian propaganda, literally (Starsky later said those myths were bullsh*t and even pointed out lots of thrustworthy sources (and not governmental) about it). Other videos also had disinformation, like the one of the high-speed railway in California, the "greatness" of the US, videos about Asian conflicts, etc.
In a sense he's quite wrong sometimes and pretty sensationalistic as well - it works for most people but not for all. I started seing that last year in his video of "Portugal is Sea" (btw, I'm Portuguese) since he said several thing that were pretty wrong and biased, to be honest (sometimes pretty oversimplified).
I think there is a lot of misinformation about that event anyway, as it was a really fast and chaotic event, I wouldn't blame RLL for that one
He does lots of mistakes
It’s honestly depressing how many channels just get information wrong, and they also have a big following
The biggest mistake in that video is the Latvia and Lithuania flag switch
"I saw this video from RealLifeLore that had a lot of problems"
Yep. That’s RealLifeLore
I like RUclipsrs fact checking each other’s, it make the educational channels more accountable on watch they produce
Indeed, I like this too and wish it would happen more often
This thing makes some channels im subbed get connected in a weird way.
Like I would never expect to see Jhonny Harris inside a debunk video inside the debunk video of RLL.
I do too although I somewhat dislike how some of them go about it: with faux self-deprecation as they rip someone's work apart with their own chic set of graphics and superfluous maps.
100%. As a local I saw the flaws in the video immediately, but it made me wonder. How much information have I casually absorbed from educational videos on topics I'm less familiar with, without really questioning its accuracy? As long as fact-checking and rebuttals are viewed as part of a discussion rather than "beef", it can only be a good thing for viewers
@@JamesHewat "faslane is remote". Glasgow: allow me to introduce myself
As an IR scholar from Scotland, thank you for making this video. I didn't have the time nor means to rebut the flaws in Real Life Lore's argument to this effect so I'm really glad other content creators are taking it upon themselves. Keep up the good work!
Thank you. Can an actual Scot make a video about what would likely happen? I think they know their political situation better than anyone else. =P
I spent far too much time arguing in the comment section of that video. I didn't take anything in the video personally but it was just such a misguided and misinformed video I couldn't help get heated about it.
Making content like this isn't hard, so if you're actually qualified, I'd say give it a serious try.
Most of the video and audio editing is basic stuff and can be learned very easily and nothing is wrong with "powerpoint-esque" videos as long as it's informative and/or entertaining. You could even record yourself speaking and just edit pictures over it when applicable.
Infra-Red?
@@matenaka146 "International relations" essentially geo politics
The comment section of his video is filled with us Scots correcting him.
Mostly about him saying Faslane is "in the middle of nowhere" when it's less than an hour away from Glasgow (our biggest city) and there is a town called Helensburgh just a couple of miles away, but also about most of what you've said.
EDIT: Okay, you included that- my bad for hasty commentating.
I audibly went no it's not when he said that in the video cause I live in Paisley like a 30 min drive from Faslane.
I read helensburgh as Heisenberg 💀💀
The whole location argument is annoying how stupid it is, I am not sure why it even became an issue. Because it becomes a nuclear target, as if Glasgow wouldn't already be a top target? And if it was, so would Aldermaston where the weapons are made and stored, approximately ~5miles from Reading, England (population 175k). It is impossible for a nuclear weapon to have a meltdown like a nuclear reactor, of which many sit next to large cities. No nuclear weapon is EVER developed, since the very first ones in 1945, where there is a risk of it being detonated while undeployed. If Scotland does not want British military facilities in Scotland, then England or Wales will also gain the 1000s of ship building jobs that the SNP produly proclaims will stay in Scotland after voting for independence.
To be fair, it's a _hilariously_ obvious mistake that deserves to be mocked by as many Scots as can be bothered, plus some non-Scots on top.
I did the same lol I’m from granite city (Aberdeen)
There was so much that bothered me in that reallifelore video so thank you for making this breakdown, I really appreciate it. Happy New Year from Scotland!
tbh overdramatising seems to be the real life lore thing
I saw this video too and I've never heard anybody talk about Scotland being a NATO weak point. I've heard of Poland and Lithuania, but Scotland being a weakness is just ridiculous.
But Scotland is a weakness if it goes independent as it essentially forces the second most powerful member of NATO to have to spend a monumental amount of money and time to reconfigure its entire defence strategy. Listen to defence analysts' opinions on it, they pretty much all say it would be disastrous for British, and therefore north and western European, security
Speaking of the suwalki gap , in his video about finland and sweden joining NATO he relied on an outdated RAND analysis that predicts that russia can easily occupy the baltics and close the gap , and not taking into account several factors :
1- Can russia actually manage to do it after seeing the current performance of the russian military in ukraine ?
2- Actually it's not 100% guaranteed that Belarus will allow russia to use it's territory to attack freaking NATO
3- Finland and Sweden even without joining NATO they have an obligation for mutual defense within the EU .
@@noureddine3648 Considering Russia's history in the region, I highly doubt they would be able to blitz the Lithuanian highlands and maintain control quickly as it is quite rugged and unsuitable for a mechanized blitz with dense forests and marshes
Poland on the other hand is a lot more exposed and more suitable for a blitzkrieg, but even with that, they would still require Belarus to compile like you said
@@compatriot852 Also his famous ukraine video is pretty meh , he focuses on russia needing natural defenses beyond it's borders westward ( he's not the only one though ) and casually forgets that nuclear weapons changed that calculation forever , now russia is conventionally vulnerable like never before but no one is dumb enough to do it , a video about russia and ukraine that doesn't mention russia's deep rooted sentiment of ownership of ukraine and that they're entitled to a sphere of influence over central and eastern europe shouldn't be taken seriously .
But imagine Russian submarines going freely to the Atlantic over Scotland
So glad you made this video, I'm Scottish and massively into international politics. When I saw the real-life lore video I was appalled at the glaring issues in the video, thanks for making this video to clarify
Yeah like this is one of those videos that a normal person could just see and be like wtf.
Same.
As a fellow Scot who normally really enjoys RLL's videos, I was very disappointed when I watched it.
@@Argentocoxos The thing is that you may enjoy rest of the videos without knowing about the mistakes he makes in those till he makes a video where you are knowledgeable enough to notice the mistakes. As someone from Finland, There are many mistakes in his video about Finland. I also knew many of the issues in this video about Scotland.
It is good to see some of these things pointed out, but his channel is far from the only channel that makes this sort of stuff and mistakes. International news about Finland tend to repeat the same false claims over and over again and our politicians, even the president correcting them on those doesn't stop it.
@@Argentocoxos I can imagine people from other countries he covers feeling the same. RLL is the McDonalds of geopolitical channels.
I might not be from the UK, but during the entire video I was thinking “NATO shares intelligence and does joint military exercises/operations with other countries, right? I doubt Scotland would be that crazy and/or isolationist.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen dubious geopolitical or historical information from RLL. Honestly there’s a reason I’ve avoided his channel for quite a while now. I commend you for pointing out errors when you see them and hope that this can act as a wake up call to his channel. There’s enough misinformation and click bait on RUclips without Historytubers contributing to it.
He literally makes stuff up when its about middle east or china, but everyone believes them
Thanks for calling this out. As a student of IR and also a fan of RLL I was really disappointed when I watched their video. It's great to see someone with a platform pushing back in a friendly way.
RLL is always disappointing when it's on a topic you know something about. I assume it's as inaccurate for those I know little about too.
I reciprocate this exactly pal. I've followed RLL for a long time, but watching their vid on this made me doubt a lot of their other vids, that previously made me ponder other subjects that I wasn't otherwise familiar with.
Student of infra red??
@@XTSonic I really don't know why people watch them when you can research damn near any video they do and find it full of errors
A great video. And you are not the only one who found the wrong border line for Scotland infuriating.
I live in that zone. Cumberland has not been Scottish territory for nine hundred years.
How does one actually get it wrong though? He probably just googled a map of Scotland and he used the line from the first result. Nobody's going around verifying every single pixel on a picture that comes from a reasonably good source.
yeah but thats not just like a few pixels off. thats like noticeably off the border line. its like moving the canada america border 20 miles up and saying nobody would notice
Yeah, but if we do go independent, Cumbrians are welcome to join us 😉
@@stingraypoindexter And suddenly I want to move to Cumbria!
@@theaveragecomment1014 said no one ever
I'm sure RLL will take this as constructive criticism if he sees it. That's how he reacted to Alan Fisher's rebuttal on CAHSR, which was way harsher. He does however seem to have a problem with using sources on that are aggressively partisan but not obviously so when he deals with current events.
Hey man, just wanted to drop in and say i love your content. I am not a jew at all, but do like the insight in this specific culture and history.
He will acknowledge the criticism and do absolutely nothing to change his ways. For just over a year now his entire channel has just been spewing whatever political propaganda is the top result on Google for any given issue. He's even flip-flopped between Russia/China-bias and NATO-bias. At this point I can't wait for something like China-India border warfare to heat up again and have him claim that the Uyghur prisoner camps both do and don't exist within the same month.
I want to second BadPak. I discovered your channel recently and it has inspired an interest in Jewish history. I especially appreciated your video on the Dreyfus Affair. I think my high school world history textbook made a one-sentence reference to it in a paragraph about European antisemitism. The subject deserves more than one sentence and one paragraph!
I've never watched an RLL video before (or heard of the channel) but that one turned up in my recommended videos for some reason. It was a frustrating watch for many reasons but as someone who stays about 45 mins drive away from Faslane, it did make me laugh out loud hearing it described as remote and far removed - the majority of the population of the country could be there within 90 mins.
It's bizarre and makes me think he either didn't bother to look at a map, looked at a map and made some sort of mental error of scale, or just thought remote and unpopulated sounded good and 'nuclear weapony' so he decided reality was less important than imagery. It's like saying the Isle of Grain in Kent is remote and unpopulated, which is true relative to a lot of surrounding areas, but you could still spit on it from London or vice versa with a favourable wind.
My grandma literally used to live somewhere where if you could walk 2 minutes you could watch boats patrolling the waters…
In Texas, a 90 minute drive is what half the population goes through to get to work.
I just took a look at Faslane on maps. I'd call it like my local Haugesund and Årsvågen ferry. It's just a 40 minute car ride from the town, but it's a barren and craggy area that I wouldn't want to break down at. Because it's remote and quite far away from the nearest gas station or Circle K.
Fun detail. On maps, you can see two Astute submarines and one Vanguard docked at the site. Very low-key, but also very scary given how much power is crammed into those vessels, both figuratively and literally. No US subs, which was interesting.
could his thumbnail be a contender in the "worst maps" series?
RealLifeLore videos are a good exercise in critical thinking. They are fun, but it's always good when I can pick up on still that's not great, like this and the California High Speed Rail one.
Channels like RLL and Infographics have really gone down the toilet once they started making videos on politics and history.
I was waiting for someone to mention the Californian HSR in the comments.
If you're stickybeeking the comments at all Tigerstar, look up Alan Fisher's "California High Speed Rail has not Failed and RealLifeLore is wrong" reply video to RealLifeLore's old version of his Californian HSR video. This is definitely not the first time someone's done an extremely thorough debunking reply video of a RealLifeLore video - and RealLifeLore did end up dramatically revising the video afterward and hiding the old version.
So, don't feel bad about writing a thorough reply video on this subject.
As someone who’s lived in Scotland almost her entire life I really appreciate you addressing pretty much every issue I had with RLL’s video. The idea that we would ever leave NATO is absurd, a large portion of Scottish independence is contingent on rejoining the EU (even though many member states have said they’d reject us) so the notion we’d make an active effort to stay out of NATO is insane
Scotland is a threat to NATO, as it has no own army and a political party that wants no army.
It would need to be defended by other bigger nations, which would be a diplomatic problem.
No nation in the EU has ever said that they would reject Scottish accession to the EU
@@grant6849 Spain did. France is also tentative.
AND if Scotland wishes to join the EU it would take at least 10 years, probably much longer.
The SNP has started to admit this, even though they tried to lie (mislead) about it.
Not to be needlessly contentious, but Scottish Independence isn't primarily predicated on EU membership - 48% of people so leaving the EU to be a worthy price for Indy back in 2014. Certainly, more people have moved to support Indy because of Brexit but I don't think Indy is 'contingent' on rejoining the EU - if it were, the SNP & Scottish Greens pre-2016 wouldn't have existed.
@@mrfreeman2911 Although Scotland currently has no independent army the SNP have stated they want to have a military post-independence. The British Defence Journal did an article (titled: Defence and security in an independent Scotland) where they interviewed SNP MP Stewart McDonald, SNP Defence Spokesman and member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and he outlines from Scotland post-independence. Although the plans are better than the plans they had back in 2014 they are not 100% convincing. However, there are still plans for an independent Scotland to have a military.
"Informative" videos on youtube should always be treated with caution. Especially in the case of a channel like RLL, remember that they are simply making a product, and optimising for a number of factors, including reach (i.e. clickbait or controversial topics) and cost (affecting the quality of research and script).
I often find myself just blindly believing whatever is presented in informative videos because their presentation is really good, so all the more reason why I appreciate this video for calling out mistakes and reminding us that no channel is infallible.
It's always endearing to hear an American pronounce glasgow right.
One day...
Whats up with brits always demanding we pronounce their cities and regions with british accents but they won't pronounce our cities and regions with american accents
@@Tanador680 not asking you to say it in an accent just asking you to say it right and we can say american cities and places fine buddy
@@Tanador680 Not accent; pronuciation - for example, the American city of Birmingham is prnounced "Bur-Ming-Ham" but the British City it was named for is pronounced "Bur-Ming-Am". Surely common courtesy would be to pronounce each correctly no?
@@Aniaas1 Honestly kind of a bad example because if you are speaking even moderately fast it kinda sounds the same either way. (Not saying your point is wrong though.)
You literally gave voice to every thought I had about his video. Well done from one emperor to another, friend. Keep up the good work.
RealLifeLore’s channel is one of those “informative” channels that, in reality is just entertainment sprinkled in with easy to find ,subjective google search answers.
Yeah. A lot of people think "research" means "the first two pages of hits on a web search."
And he's becoming more and more "how can I use this half-assed research to push my beliefs" and less and less about making an even entertaining video.
@@BruceDoesStuff His California High Speed Rail video that he had to remake was really embarrassing.
@@39bailey the fact he remade it and owned up to the mistake makes me respect him a lot more
@@Rescuro Before you choose to respect him find out if he owned up and remade the video after discovering his mistake or after having his mistake pointed out to him. There is a huge difference.
The original video is now Private, wonder why ???🤔🤔
Just noticed that too ... 😂
Alan Fisher made a good critique about California HSR from RealLifeLore. He even responded to the video, fixed the mistakes in his own and uploaded a better one later.
And he apparently didn't learn a lesson from that experience, because imo the advice in this video that RLL needs to be more careful felt very similar to Alan's advice at the end of his critique video.
I don’t know how many people work on each video, but he should probably have someone else knowledgeable on the topic give it a quick fact-check first to avoid the obvious sloppiness which can hurt their credibility and/or misinform people.
Please never hesitate to make these kind of videos. People make mistakes sometimes and nothing wrong with correcting them.
wish more geopolitic analysis channels would do this, the community could turn out feeling more dynamic and get more views
RealLifeLore didnt make a mistake... he is a NeoLib... he has bad opinions, and uses bad information to support it.
Reallifelore makes mistakes in every video, glaring ones sometimes
This need more like!
@@kyleduynguyen2309 how do you pronounce "Nguyen" in your name?
Brilliant video! As a Scottish person who keeps up with geopolitics, and watches RealLifeLore often enough, their video really bugged me. The issue of independence is complex enough without more misinformation being added into the mix. Your video was much more balanced, pragmatic and non inflammatory - well done!
I'm disappointed that Ireland isn't part of NATO.
@@greywolf7577I’m disappointed in how Ireland was once treated with colonialism, genocide, and starvation. Also their stable use of proportional representation in single transferable vote for a century deserves to get more recognition.
It isn't independence you want though, just a different dependence!
@@gulogulo7636 No, it's independence. All Nations in the EU are sovereign, Scotland is not sovereign. Stop throwing around something that is widely debunked, it only proves how ignorant and/or dependent on misinformation you are.
Thing is... it wasn't _just_ misinformation, it was straight out unionist lies that RLL actively swallowed whole, then diseminated with little intelligence of context. As a Scot, I have now blocked RLL from my YT. It's pretty simple, if you spread unionist propaganda for your clickbait video you don't deserve my viewership.
The dumbest thing (in my opinion) about Reallifelore's >now deleted< video is essentially: "Scotland can't leave the UK because it will inconvenience the English" (and also the wrong border shown) 🤦🏻♀️
Yes as an Englishman I was struggling to see how Scotland becoming independent would inconvenience the English ?. Also Cumbria and about half of Northumberland would also leave the UK and be part of Scotland apparently 😂😂
@@lightfootpathfinder8218 The main thing seemed to be that they (Westminster Govt) would have to relocate the nuclear submarine base on the Clyde to somewhere in England or Wales. As if Scotland would just pull the plug the day after success in gaining independence rather than a phased removal of the nuclear facility elsewhere.
@@Jazzinthedark84 If the UK government really wanted to they could move the nuclear submarine base within a short time. Conventional submarines are based at devonport and Portsmouth so I can't see the whole submarine thing being a big problem. It would be far more difficult to relocate if the missiles were in silos in Scotland
@@lightfootpathfinder8218Clout I guess?
Wait why did it get deleted
This was the first real life lore video where i felt like something was "off" i was not sure what it was, and did not think about it too much. Great video on explaining this problem with the vid
You mean you watched the american civil war vid and ignored the thousands of comments of people saying they cant wait to murder liberals and didnt see something off?
The original califirnia high speed rail video also gave off similar vibes
It just felt outdated to me. This isn't the 80's anymore. We've seen recently how impotent Russia is. Aside from their nukes, they really aren't a threat to NATO nations.
I'd say theres quite a few that feel just... off, like the channel makes something and then you remember something they made a few weeks before that blows the current video out of the water.
Anti Scottish propaganda with zero substance is what I seen when I watched it....
Recently RealLifeLore has just been going downhill, I’m glad you’ve called this out. I watched the video and to say I wasn’t angry would be an understatement. Also the thumbnail thing was a massive issue for me because he couldn’t even double check, he got the country who he was talking about, he had the correct borders…
Downhill is right man
has been going this way for some time. His videos constantly seem to have mis-interpretations, oversimplifications, and out right falsities. Plus I constantly notice spelling errors and the border thing is ridiculous. And he can't bother to look up place name pronunciations sometimes it seems lol
Glad to see youre not the only one to recognise that. I used to watch him constantly but then something changed about the quality of his content around 2021 and it was just downhill from there.
@Landon Maybe just really, really calm?
people who care way too much about nit picking youtube videos. Wow these comments are just. "Im so upset at a THUMBNAIL" yeah go outside and get some fresh air ffs.
Every history RUclipsr just needs to join forces and make a ten hour history video touching on everything with thorough research. Music by Bill Wurtz.
But if that 10 hour video has a mistake then every other RUclipsr should completely shat on them and make sure they never ever make another video again. Even if that mistake is just about interpretations or leaning against a different bias. That's the way of the Internet.
@@CheapSushi then we'll repeat the cycle until only one is left, the ultimate history RUclipsr.
@@thelovewizard8954 oh god now all I’m imagining is Highlander the movie but their all history RUclipsrs
@@Linki8uu
An Ultimate Showdown then?
And the kuzgesagt narrator
I’m glad you made this video. I live in the UK and study geography, and despite being recommended this RLL video multiple times by RUclips I never watched it because it was clear to me that the title could not possibly be a true statement or be supported by a valid argument.
Human Geography here, same feeling. Those entry level "I did 20 seconds research on Wikipedia about this complicated topic" videos are just too painful to watch.
Then it touches on geopolitics and defense and the ex-officer in me ussually wants to just go bang my head against a wall until the images of the video leave my head. 😆
And I ended up a low level intel grunt who made fancy-looking maps. I imagine there's a lot of defense bigwigs out there who have that even worse.
RealLifeLore, Wendover Productions and Johnny Harris are the McDonalds of geopolitics
This comment is perfect
Tbf Wendover is better than the other two, it's more like the Chipotle of geopolitics - still fast food but presented better and maybe slightly better for you
The infographics is up there too, they’re equally bad in their own ways
Yeah, but Wendover is actually good. I don't think RealLifeLore is a fair comparison. Something like Polymatter is closer, they both usually have something interesting to say that isn't straight-up wrong.
@@borzoi2607 that's a great analogy, because like chipotle, wendovers quality has taken a nose dive in the last 5 years.
I'm glad you picked up on the incorrect border between Scotland and England, that really bugged me when I first noticed it lol
Real life lore also showed incorrect map of India too
I like the new border, lol
@@ianscott3697 course you do, you get the best part of England (Lake District), but also the worst part (Newcastle)
Honestly I saw the RLL video in my sub box and entirely dismissed it because it sounded batshit insane. Minutes into this video I was like "doesn't stop Scotland being a NATO ally" so I'm glad you addressed that.
Same, I generally like RLL's content but I saw the video in my recommended and I knew that it was immediately going to be mis-informative
Regardless of what Scotland does, they can't exactly ruin any of NATO's plans and even if they did interfere with them then NATO could easily adapt around this entirely hypothetical obstacle
I did exactly the same thing. Usually like his videos but the title alone was enough for me to dismiss it as nonsense.
I used to like RLL but he's had a couple of BIG misses lately, making alarmist content and a lot of his "facts" are not thoroughly checked at all. Not too long ago several channels were making videos about his video on the train system in california being basically entirely wrong.
Yeah. Im getting more and more Business Basics/Casual vibes when they posted the whole "Europe's gonna freeze crash burn and die within 5 miliseconds into the winter". As a Central European I must say, the winter's gonna pass in about a month, i am and was warm the entire time RuZZia was claiming they're tearing EU apart, i find it very humerous. Anyways B.B./C. ended up making the video private and went back to PRC/CCP stuff. Honestly, it was an L moment compareable to RussiaToday's propaganda.
Real Life Lore is one of those strange channels that is somehow massive despite most of their videos coming across as something an undergraduate might produce during a 4 day long Adderall bender.
I like him better than Polymath. That one hides the ads in the structure of the video, and it seems dishonest.
How are they strange? Isn't that the basic template most popular RUclips pop-science channels follow? Take a popular topic, make a google search, do the most basic of research, compile it to a visually appealing monetized and sponsored video, and publish it. Of course videos like that will amass more audience that something where a historian discusses about a subject for 2 hours on camera.
It's not like RUclips is any serious research platform. Most people just kill time here by binge watching videos about useless garbage or interesting trivia.
@@goldbullet50 I liked RLL videos on "What if the Roman Empire united" or "What if the Mongol Empire united" etc. Those videos really illuminated how keeping together such a ridiculous empire would be impossible in 2023. Too many ethnicities, too many languages, and too many religions. I wanted him to make a video on what if the CSA returned but no dice.
hahaha accurate
@@genericyoutubeaccount579 "Too many ethnicities, too many languages, too many religions" Wait till you see India, Papua New Guinea or Nigeria. Then you will see actual diversity.
I didn’t watch RLL’s video but I saw the thumbnail, and I was shocked to learn that the part of Northern England I live in had been annexed by Scotland 😂
How was your time as a citizen of Greater Scotland?
You'll have the reavers back again in no time
This is the second time I have seen a RUclipsr have to correct RLL on serious oversights in a video of theirs. I hope RLL learns from this and gets better moving forward
not even serious oversights, just like incorrect premises for videos
Wouldn't hold my breath for that to happen if I were you. ;)
his videos, at least imo, often have incorrect information or at least extreme oversimplification. It pisses me off and I don't trust them as a refutable source for knowledge.
What was the first?
"serious oversights in a video" that is a MASSIVE stretch considering I just watched this and the biggest crime reallifelore made was the suggest that scotland might not join nato again after leaving the uk. Which is a fine opinion to have because it cant be proved either way, they haven't left the UK yet, but you people seem to think its a cardinal sin to consider a possibility? You are actually calling it "serious oversights"? How do you people spew forth these awful opinions seriously? Are you THAT arrogant?
ReaLifeLore will soon learn to not mess with the crazy map people, just as he learned not to mess with the crazy train people
I mean, anoraks and poli-sci wonks are just two of a long list of experts who will take any slight, of any magnitude, as a reason to get out of their arm chair to lecture at length about why what they just watched was wrong. It doesn't surprise me he stepped into the arena on accident, it could literally happen to anyone.
@@rambysophistry1220 Are you actually getting angry about people more well educated than you pointing out when you're wrong? This has to be the most pathetic cope I have ever seen.
@@hedgehog3180 So, I know the internet is pretty bad at getting across things like tone of voice and sarcasm and teasing. II also know that there are things like Poe's law in effect, along with a long list of other internet rules about how things can get misconstrued in one way or another.
But I would sincerely like to ask, why does this post seem like I am mad, more then poking fun? Because, I sincerely am not mad at experts doing expert things, as opposed to just poking fun at the ones who look at small blunders and go straight to 10, when a 2 would suffice.
@@rambysophistry1220 it’s seen as hostile cuz you go out of your way to insult the ones doing the correcting, calling them “anoraks” and “poli-sci wonks”(weird insults chief). There’s also the fact that you seem to think that the video was harsh and overly berating of real life lore when it was very understanding and kind in its tone.
@@rambysophistry1220 L
Sunday April 23, 2023 as of me typing this the video is no longer available. Does anybody know when RealLifeLore took the video down?
THANK YOU! I couldn't believe it when that video came out as someone who has a lot of respect for RLL's content, it's great that someone has taken the time to calmly and meticulously go through the problems with it.
Lol. After this video I just assumed RLL was just not worth watching. Sometimes someone does something so stupid you can never trust them again with anything sharper than a butter knife.
@@morerobotwarscontent1476 I watchd the video had never seen RLL content before and safe to say I will not watch any again, this was pure anti Scottish propaganda, with alarmist rhetoric....
The _real_ issue with the video is that they seem to assert that Scotland just casually annexes Northumbria and Cumbria should it gain independence.
I feel like that may be _more_ of a geopolitical kerfuffle than GIUK Gap issue.
I'm joking, if that's not obvious.
naw at this point england would probably give us the north so they can save more money lol
I'd hate if England and Scotland split, they've been together for 3 centuries, they're so intertwined. I'd be disappointed and sad.
@@taggymcshaggy6383Not sure I want to be part of ethier Scotland or England as someone from " the North "
@@ryanread8617
I remember having to write an essay about Irish and Scottish independence for a political science class a year ago. I needed one more essay which I decided to dedicate as a “f**k Britain, I hope you crumble for the way you treated your colonies, and the way you treated the countries you saw as brothers.”
(I had too much fun with it. lol)
@@alexanderrobins7497 You mean England? Since Britain is entire of Ireland and Scotland back then.
I think people forget that 3 centuries of Scotland and England has caused every person in Britain to have DNA from both ancient kingdoms.
Sure you can say f**k Britain, but back then that just how it was, other countries did the same, with wars. The difference with Britain it was the largest, and most recorded. You don't say that to other countries though they did the same and worse like the Mongolian Empire. Just think about this every country has both good and bad history, Britain good history is that when it reigned as the largest Empire in the world it was the most influential in advocating for the end of slavery. Basically Britain had the biggest role in ending slavery. I would say Britain ended slavery but that controversial, and it would likely make an argument.
I just think people look at stuff 1 sided, like for 3 centuries Scotland has been with England, now that idea of independence has been driven it breaks apart two countries which have been married forever.
Thank you for taking the courage to disprove a video from someone as big as RealLifeLore, your arguments are well constructed and put together.
I'm surprised RealLifeLore made so many outrageous mistakes in the first place (though perhaps these points all seem so obvious to me because I actually live in the UK)
In 2019, Scotland earned £66 Billion and had £80 Billion in public expenditure, a £14 Billion shortfall, last year it was £20 Billion. Britain has funded, and continues to fund, considerable shortfalls in revenue year after year.
Scotland would have to get it's act together in a hurry if they wanted to pull away from the UK, especially if English firms withdrew from Scotland and trade ceases or is burdened by tariffs.
Also it would be worth mentioning the brain drain from migration into England which would further stifle the Scottish economy for a longer period of time
The big problem with your argument is the fact that Scotland is not allowed under Devolution rules to get into any kind of debt, and we do not have the fiscal powers to borrow. So, any shortfall in public spending that is pinned on Scotland, is actually money that is spent on Scotland's behalf by Westminster...
according to the way UK gov stats work, every single area of the UK has a large shortfall in funds, as they're all compared to London as that's where tax money ultimately goes to
You completely misunderstand Scottish state funding and the funding of an independent state.
Scotland is funded by an annual fiscal transfer from Westminster to the Scottish government which is designed to be a population share of the UK government's annual spending.
The Scottish government cannot legally spend any more than what is in its annual budget each year, save for an extremely limited ability to borrow to account for budgetary forecasting errors.
I assume when you go on about what Scotland "earned" you are referring to tax revenues directly attributable to Scotland. Only six main taxes are attributable to Scotland, they being non-share, non-dividend income tax, land and buildings transaction tax, council tax, aggregate tax, landfill tax and business rates.
Share and dividend inclusive income tax, national insurance, VAT, capital gains tax, corporation tax, import duties, windfall tax, and oil duty are examples of significant sources of tax revenue that Scotland has no control over and which contain no locational information within the UK.
This all overlooks the fact that taxes aren't what fund an independent country. They are a lever of economic control that the government can use to control growth and inflation of the economy.
If you really think that Scotland was such a financial burden on England you should really be asking yourself why the UK government fights so hard to prevent Scottish independence. Surely they'd be happy to be rid of Scotland?
@@tomirk4404So the English Tories deliberately destroyed huge swathes of Scotland's economy and you have the cheek to go on about brain drain from Scotland.
Great way to sell the UK.
As a Scot watching RLLore's video, I got the impression that his knowledge of Scotland is watching Hollywood romantic comedies set in Scotland, where it's all one big highland countryside and everyone lives in charmingly rustic villages ruled by a lord in a castle, and we still use horse and carts as the chief form of transport.
So you don't do that? And wear kilts all day? With knee-high white socks? And eat haggis, lots and lots of haggis? And play the bagpipes all day, the sweet, sweet pipes? Darn it, I've been misinformed.
My life has been a lie
RealLifeLore is the store brand Wendover. He almost gets it right, but it stills tastes a bit funny. I remember going up the A81 on the motorbike, I we could SEE the ships in HMNB Clyde on a motorbike trip a few years ago. its not THAT secret and remote.
@@dutube99 not entirely, haggis is atleast fairly common
speak for yourself - I love my horse and cart
He was seemingly a bit right because if you look at his map the real weakness is that apparently Scotland will invade North England
But yeah like you said Scotland is a important geopolitical place but not the only one and it would most likely stay in the nato
That would be a strength though. If they invaded northern England, they would take more poor regions from us, allowing the richer regions to spend even more on themselves including the military.
@@mappingshaman5280 aye tbh england would probably happily give us the north of england if we became independent
2nd treaty of Durham buddy - we'll just be claiming what's rightly ours ;P
@@bobvance8017 Its either haggis or post-Thatcher economic ruin I'm afraid, no other option
It might rejoin NATO it can’t stay as Scotland as a independent country would leave it once leaving the U, and would have to rejoin
The idea of Scotland being a military weakness is as hilarious as the idea the Taliban might start a navy and sail to Britain to invade Scotland.
I mean who do they think is going to go after Scotland?
The Russian navy lost a flagship, Moskva, to a country with basically no navy to speak of and where their air force was tiny and unable to be remotely close whose people were organizing molotov cocktails to resist their armies.
And the Russian aircraft carrier is regularly on fire and in dock rusting away.
I don't really think that the Russian Navy is much of a threat based on just sailing around if there was a genuine war. The only real threat they would have is if their SLMB ballistic missiles were launched from submarines, and that can happen just about anywhere.
England probably. It's tradition at this point.
@@MaytayMaya so you don’t know our history 1600s onwards, why would our brothers invade us, that’s like saying Prussia is gonna attack Bavaria lmao
I wish the Taliban would do that, as it'd be funny to watch them attempt it. Also, the Taliban would be at war with France too, because Auld Alliance.
@@edelweiss7928 "So you don't know our history 1600s onwards"
Bro the Jacobite uprisings were in the 1700s after Union there was and still is bad blood there.
This is a really well informed video correcting miss-information while being as respectful as you can to a fellow youtuber, keep up the good work!
Spot on video and yes I am a Scot. I'll be honest I was raging after the video you mentioned aired. Grateful to you for correcting the mistakes and explaining why the information was so misguided and dangerous. Thank you.
Fed up of folks telling us we can't have our independence because NATO doesn't want us to, or because Spain wouldn't like it! Defeats the whole sentiment of "Self" determination
dubidudi
@mortaj - fellow Scotsman here, raging was how I felt too! I really enjoy RLL videos and learn a lot from them, but this one drove me mental. The guy usually seems like he knows what he's talking about, but after that video I'm no so sure. The very idea that Scotland would somehow walk away from NATO (or that they wouldn't have us) was bloody insulting nonsense. Thankfully he got piled on in the comments haha.
@@RustyPetterson The guy never knows what he's talking about
Everyone: **Talks about the inaccuracies of the video**
Me: Why are the borders underwater?
hi, thank you for pointing all this out, i actually live within a close proximity to Faslane and Coulport and these are issues and solutions i remember people talking about over a decade ago. It seems more common as of late for large infographic channels like reallifelore to have large theoretical holes in their videos and I'm glad someone is mentioning it.
I usually watch Real Life Lore videos but when I saw this title I didn't even bother to click on it because I already knew it was bs. It's good you made a video about it! Thanks!
The GIUK gap and sosus net are not just about preventing Soviet ballistic missile submarines from entering the Atlantic. The fact is that by the 1980s, the Soviets had the Delta III, Delta IV, and Typhoon class submarines, which could hit the United States from the Arctic. In fact, the Typhoon class can hit much of the United States firing from its dock. The GIUK gap was there to keep Russian cruise missile boats and conventional and nuclear attack submarines from entering the Atlantic and severing the sea lanes between the North America and Europe.
The point still stands thought that the net is less crucial than it used to be altogether because NATO expansion has made EU far less vulnerable to attack in the first place, giving it a lot more defensive terrain and strategic depth, plus the threat on its borders is much smaller.
@@pax6833 I don't expect the Russians to pour through the Fulda gap or to have a "Red Storm Rising" play out in real life.
Yes if you want to know more read what im reading....tom clancy's hunt for red october....details everything you know about the sosus nets which are read from a station in iceland to the multiple nato submarines patrolling the north sea
@@deathsquadron3311 have you read "more
Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage" and "Stalking the Red Bear?"
@@ronmaximilian6953 no im still starting on my submarine read list im finishing red october right now since thats what im only seeing in my high schools library im planning to search for more but im thinking of reading red storm rising next if there is no other submarine books
By the im a high school sophomore
I recently looked at RLL's uploads and noticed that the upload frequency was about once a week. When I noticed that, I remember thinking, "There's no possible way you can spit out a video a week and simultaneously do the level of research needed to fully understand any of these topics."
I'm also not a historian, but I do know calculus very well I remember one time RLL made a video about measuring the lengths of rivers where he mentioned taking limits and Zeno's paradox, and It could not have been clearer that he didn't understand what he was talking about there either. The quality of information is about as bad as what you might find on TV news
"There's no possible way you can spit out a video a week and simultaneously do the level of research needed to fully understand any of these topics."
Thats objectively incorrect. Speak for yourself? These channels usually have teams/writers that help them. More unfounded ignorance in these comments. Wow wouldnt have guessed.
Most videos are made weeks or even a month in advanced by teams of people, not by RLL the guy himself.
@@Labyrinth6000 Case in point The Scotland video (made December 13, 2022) directly contradicts the FInland Blocking Russia video (made November 25th, 2022).
I disagree. On the World War Two channel Indy Neidell does all his own research and comes out with a video weekly. He did the same when he was with The Great War. So far that's over eight years of weekly content, and can highly recommend both.
Honestly, perun finds a way to do it. I have no idea how, but he does
I literally left a comment on that video saying that Scotland doesn't want to leave NATO even if they do the UK, and it was pretty much buried. The whole video contained alot of interesting information but seemed to really want to force a narrative to highlight that information that simply wasn't true. Thank you for making this.
Scotland doesn't want to leave the uk either.
@@Hoosier_Daddy69 Polling shows that support for Scottish independence has gone both above and below 50% in the past few years. The most recent polling shows that a majority (excluding undecideds) support independence, likely due to the recession. It was also over 50% during the pandemic.
I moved to Scotland in 2020 and when RealLifeLore's video popped up on my recommended I added it to my watch later. Shortly thereafter, your video popped up and I did the same thing. It's taken me until this moment to actually watch your video and I still haven't watched RLL's, but just off the bat, the notion that the threat to NATO being Scotland leaving the UK hadn't even crossed my mind as a possibility for what RLL's video was going to be about. I thought it was going to be some sort of "Scotland is in this precarious place and it's easy to attack and then be used as leverage" kinda thing, but them threatening NATO by leaving the UK? Really? What a bizarre alternate-history-reality scenario to build up out of nothing o.O
There is a possibly more fundamental point. In the document "Scotland Future" it is claimed by the Scottish government that the referendum was to be a "once in a generation" or "once in a lifetime" event. Now the Scottish government have tried to get around this but as they claim that all of this has to be done legally I am not convinced that they actually have any legs left to stand upon.
Thank you. I live in Scotland and follow local and geopolitics and the reallifelore video really bugged me with all the false information they provided. Your video really resolved all the issues I had.
Right?? A real lack of research was put into our internal politics and relationships with other countries, never mind the many geographical issues before Scotland is the biggest weakness.
It’s a minor point given the topic of the video but as someone who lives in Wales, his video oddly implied Wales was much more aligned with England than it is.
i think the difference here is that wales is practically almost entirely dependent on England, while disdain might be had there are afaik no real plans or desires to leave. By comparison, scotland and northern ireland have the systems and ability to secede at any time should they really desire too (and england let them without bloodshed)
England and Wales are closer than Scotland and England
@@azzzertyy this isn’t true
@@AzeriaAnglos think they rule the world still
@@azzzertyy THE F*CK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT????? It is completely illegal for any country in the Uk to just secede, and they're all dependant on England. England provides a lot of money to these countries that they wouldn't get otherwise.
10:40 Was waiting the whole video for him to address that lol
Thank you for clearing this up for people. I'm Scottish and felt like you represented our situation a lot better.
Yeah, the entire RLL argument of "Scotland will need to reapply to NATO" is idiotic
He forgets that West and East Germany united and became Germany. They didn't need to reapply to NATO even if they were now a mixed military, now did they? So stupid
@@RazorsharpLT Unifying is different to splitting up.
@@w33btrash69 And how is it different in regards to NATO?
@@RazorsharpLT Scotland leaving the UK would make it a new separate entity. Its the United Kingdom that is the NATO member, not Scotland.
@@w33btrash69 " Scotland leaving the UK would make it a new separate entity." So you are saying that the GDR and the FRG are still entities? That is news to me. As far as I was aware two entities ended and one created, just as #IndyRef2 will lead to one entity ending and two created. So the only difference being that NATO will get two new entities this time instead of just one.
It's amazing the stuff you folks write expecting no one to analyse it.
Thank you so much for making this video. I watched it last night and as a Scots-Australian and more so as someone who knows about basic geography and European politics I was about ready to scream hearing RLL talk about if Scotland would join NATO, NATO presence in the Atlantic and how NATO interacts with non-member nations. Also your thumbnail correcting the border healed a hole in my soul, even if it would be nice for Scotland to own the South Berwick. Good video! 👍
We'll annex it back one day.
Thank you for pointing out the issues with that video. I was impressed when Mr Beat pointed out the problems with Jonny’s video. I encourage more channels to correct the mistakes of other channels so that we can make RUclips education more accurate and reliable.
God I can't tell you how satisfying it is that the thumbnail is correcting the border that bothered me so much. Tigerstar doing the Lords work
Thank you for making this, RLL's video is an absolute car crash somebody needed to set it straight and I feel this video had done that quite accurately and succinctly.
Massive oversights
Thank you for doing this response video. It really sucks that the video is taken as gospel due to RLL's large fanbase.
Remember when realifelore never made geopolitical videos?
That was the channel's best phase. Now he makes bloated geopolitical videos full of errors but also gets the millions of views.
@soundscape26 Not really, he's always accumulated millions of views infact his older videos had the most views than his current, but the RUclips algorithm promotes his videos faster than before so I can see why he's making geopolitical videos.
@@theuniverse5173 Yeah, in terms of views I guess you are right, but his subs exploded mid-2021 when he shifted to geopolitics.
@@soundscape26 agree
He gaslights everything 🗿
Also, why would Scotland just let Russian ships in an active war into their territorial waters? Turkey isn't letting Russian warships cross into and out of the Black Sea, same would apply here. You can't just ignore territorial boundaries unless you're willing to go to war with a country and in this case Scotland will just work with NATO. I feel like that in of itself makes Real Life Lore's video moot
Thanks for making this. Knowing all the facts you talk about here, I was shaking my head the whole time watching RealLifeLore's video, but didn't take the time to refute him. I'm glad someone did, and people will watch a well-made video anytime over reading a lengthy comment, regardless of how well argumented it may be.
Looks like RLL took down the RUclips version, but left it up on Nebula 😅
Thanks for making this! I’m Scottish & found some of RLL’s arguments in that video infuriating and thought they demonstrated an alarming lack of knowledge/research for someone with such a large audience (who are likely to take his word at face value).
It’s a very complicated issue and it’s evident he really didn’t delve into the intricacies of it. Don’t understand why he bothered publishing something so half-baked and, at times, just flat-out incorrect.
Thank you, I'm always happy to get information from additional sources, and thank you for being constructive and helpful, rather than bashing real life lore.
its good to see a video that challenges other history politics youtube videos, its always difficult to know what videos to believe when they present themselves as experts, its useful to be able tto see two sides of an argument
I remember that my social studies teacher showed us this in class. And I was actually thinking of some of your points while watching it (especially the one about Norway).
Huh. I recall feeling a bit iffy about this episode and you've done a good job articulating why. Informational and respectful, nice video
I´m surprised many people actually think that RLL gives reliable information XD
I know.... Unbelievable
the submarine issue is also overstated, the UK has other nuclear handling facilities and submarine bases. it wouldn't be cheap but with a bridging agreement it's not a deal breaker. and scotland has big incentives to provide a bridging agreement as that's one of the big NOs for independence.
The wrong scottish borders of the video Really bugs me
Name them? That's a lie..
Portsmouth can't handle ICBMs just nuclear submarines
The reality is the Faslane base would be UK base like Gibraltar or Diego Garcia islands
The nuclear deterrent would require a new base. It would cost tens of billions ( Scotland would pay ) and to decommissioned Faslane would take 30 years
As a Scotsman who is a geopolitical nerd, and stationed on one of the multitary bases mentioned during the video, this was absolutely the most ridiculous video I've ever seen on RUclips. I'm being serious I've never seen something so on the nose for my own expertise where it's from a supposedly trusted source and not some out of season April fools joke. Thankyou for making this to counter it directly.
I agree with your sentiments - but multitary??
@@caeruleusvm7621 Yis. The multitary indoostryal conplex is not to be misunderestimated.
Thank you for making this video! The real-life lore one should be blatantly inaccurate to anyone from the UK but will be confusing for many.
He took the video down :P
Since his California High Speed Rail video (although he did take the original down and correct it) I've been skeptical of his channel since.
I love seeing 4 of my favorite channels all together in the same video. I'm really liking the corrections that have been going on lately. They have been really respectful. Correction videos satisfy that part of me that is yelling at the monitor during videos with mistakes or misunderstandings. This corner of youtube has better peer review than many scientific studies.
Excellent video. Just to add, the idea of plugging the GIUK gap (or an analogue to it) from Soviet vessels weren't only to control missile subs from getting in range of more places, but to protect the convoys of ships carrying equipment and materials from North America to Western Europe that was considered crucial for NATO to defend against a concerted Warzaw Pact attack. While it may seem less relevant now than during the Cold War, I'd argue that this is because of political developments (i.e. a shift in the balance of power between Russia and NATO in Europe) than technological developments in the range and precision of mssiles.
It should also be pointed out that the fact nuclear armed submarines still exist means that patrolling areas like the GIUK gap and First Island Chain aren't pointless. ICBMs aren't without weaknesses; mainly that there's a significant amount of time between when a launch is detected and when it hits its target, which gives whoever's on the receiving end time to counterattack and take some kind of defensive action. Nuclear weapons launched from submarines aren't going to have that issue if they're close to their target.
Watching the RLL video, I already had something in the back of my brain telling me there is at least one thing missing, that would reduce the impact very much. Thanks for that clarification in a friendly, but direct way!
And now I'm going to check what your channel is usually about.