2D3D
21hr ago
US aids Pakistan because Pakistan surrendered oversight of CIA activities in the Hindu Kush listening posts entirely in exchange for having its own free hand to do its own dastardly shit, and from there the Pakistanis leveraged their place as 'useful assholes' for many players globally, a role India never managed because India saw itself too important to aid foreigners at all and so was bypassed by major powers. The Pakistanis asked for US help and offered something in return, India always said it could chart its own course while begging for aid whenever shit hit the fan (request for US carriers in 1962 war, request for USSR submarine support against the US carrier group in 1971, requests for SU30 technology transfers, requests for IMF bailouts, requests for waiver for purchasing Russian/Iranian oil, etc etc etc)
Kishores own reputation within the international commentariat is a byproduct of market demand for a non-Chinese articulate ostensibly neutral heavyweight that isn't bogged down by domestic political considerations polluting the discussion: Kishores commentary and analysis is hardly more breathtaking than informed western China observers that seem similarly dispassionate about capability convergence inevitability like basically the entire US Chamber of Commerce circa 1998-2013, or Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Nye if you want to be intellectual about things.
However, Kishores own media ascendancy is also a byproduct of a deliberate internal tension within the Singapore foreign policy establishment where a pro-US advocate is always raised up at the same pace as an anti-US advocate, and the two actually switch positions depending on the needs of the moment. Kishores antithesis is Kausikan Bilahari, who himself enjoys some time on the media circuits when a counter to the China ascendancy is also sought. You can see the same pattern in others, there is also Chan Heng Chee and Tommy Koh, but that gets too deep into the weeds of Singapores arcane adversarial-cooption civil service modality.
Also, and lets be fucking frank here, Kishores pro-China anti-US sentiment comes from what looks like a fairly obvious chip on his shoulder. His first book was 'Can Asians Think', a direct rejoinder to a presumed racial contempt that supposedly existed in the western policy establishment which denigrated asian (specifically southeast Asian (singapore) at time of writing, but later extended to China and the subcontinent) intellectual ability and execution capacity. Thing is, even at that time of writing the US policy establishment and broadly the west as a whole recognized asian capability and its necessity to be actively managed. Kishores voluminious presence on the media circuit is downstream of what looks like obvious status reassertion, and that there is an especially receptive audience because US domestic political considerations make people cast about for an ostensible 'neutral' just happens to direct that gravy train straight to Kishores lap.
2D3D
2d ago
Its ok, after pounding Jamal in the butt long enough the jewish rape dog sees the error of his ways and tries to hunt down netanyahu, and the book ends with netanyahu on all fours in a gimp suit smirking "who do you think these dogs trained on." fin.
thank you thank you i'll accept my hugo award in straight male tears and romantasy darkweb tokens.
2D3D
2d ago
Wait, I hear techno Euofunk. It... its chuck tingle! He's here to save the UK from the evil censorship bill! Hooray hooray we don't need fake moustaches to go on wattpad anymore!
2D3D
2d ago
We may be overreading the magical powers of LLMs here. Frequency of posters matters more than granularity and the LLM will pull a dataset towards a big badfit rather than a small goodfit. I shoved the AAQC from Rov_Scam, RandomRanger, myself, MonkeyWithAMachinegun, 100prooftollbooth and Claude kept insisting it was TracingWoodgrains, Naraburns or FCfromSSC as the authors. I'm sure if I fed all the AAQCs into Claude it'd cluster everyone as either self_made_human (indian), 2rafa (new york finance), Tracingwoodgrains (vaguely angry pseudoliberal) or FcfromSSC (boomer) since theres a corpus of adjacency there. Surprisingly about 10 samples in and I didn't get any dean hits, so something must be happening to make Dean a particularly unscrapable voice.
Point is, the magic autocomplete is fun but it isn't accurate, but really if you think about it does it matter? Do we really have distinct voices on this forum as it were, or are we ourselves mirroring dominant stylostic term somewhere present in drips and drabs to make patchwork argument golems to slug it out? Who the fuck knows.
2D3D
2d ago
I'm certain its got nothing to do with fucking and everything to do with dominance. My tiny female dog used to hump my big male dog, and she tried to hump the car hubs too. Its not like they didn't fuck, but the leadup seemed to be entirely irrelevant.
2D3D
2d ago
Mounted! Finding Habibis Red Rocket
He thought he could find paradise through matyrdom, but instead paradise found him. Does Jamal need to seek heavenly rewards when true love is just one doggy treat away?
2D3D
4d ago
Yes, that did end up being the find out phase after fucking around. Maybe Iran believes it was either hiding its fucking around better by pretending to cooperate with the JCPOA and 'new number who dis' to their proxies when they themselves were finding out, but its certainly decided that riding out the finding out phase is relatively painless compared to what Saddam encountered.
2D3D
4d ago
The precedent is Saddams pugnacious ambiguity about WMD, where signaling WMD potential was meant to keep other actors off his back while he, I dunno, tried to beat brain cells into Uday. The utility of having a WMD program in the pocket seems to be too tempting an ace to keep from developing, even if it meaningfully changes the strategy of the table if people have to consider hidden cards.
Kishore is definitely smart, dont let my conveyed irritation at his playing the pop geopolitics circuit distract from the strength of his simplistic reductive concepts. If anything Kishore is an aberration to the Singaporean institutional resistance to highfalutin grand theory, their operational modality is see the world as it is not as you wish it to be and maintain internal red teaming to avoid blinkers.
My own experience is unimportant. On the internet I could be Kishores disciple or a disgruntled taxi driver or anything in between, what matters is verifiability. Kishores own books give the necessary info and in the professional sphere if you encounter a single Singaporean in any eliteish profession like finance or tech anywhere globally you're two kevin bacons away from knowing someone with deep insider knowledge of the Singaporean civil service operational modalities which really aren't that opaque anyways. That contact could be any one of us. It could be you! It could be me! It could even be - ok its me I know these dudes directly.
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