DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
15d ago
All this is special pleading.
Yes, but this is war propaganda
Is the current perception of Russians not war propaganda? In times of peace, or even during the Cold War, our high culture was considered continuous with the European one in a manner that high Japanese or Zimbabwean culture obviously wasn't, and the Russian thinking class was deeply integrated into the European network, worked and studied in Europe. I don't feel the need to namedrop. Now, of course, irate Ukrainians get a platform to claim that Pushkin was a mediocre imperialist savage or demand reassignment of historically recognized national identities of scientists. But that's noise. Rhetoric about a small sliver of «basically Aryan» elite and the mass of subhuman orc peasants underneath is likewise motivated and unchanged since Nazi rationalizations of their losses. Sure, Russia is relatively less productive than the highest tier of Western European states, and was later to the party. A difference in degree, not kind.
But they never genuinely considered each other's cultures subhuman vermin.
I believe this is retconning, the cancerous nature of German culture was a legitimate topic of debate. But the point is not so much how they regarded each other at the time as how a modern day enlightened Brit or a French would view a normal 19th century European, with his belligerence and his backwards views on various social matters.
And as soon as communists were overthrown - actually, as soon as their revolutionary fervor weakened - modernist rationalism went away
I get that you emigrated around that time and will never refuse to dunk on the Slav goyim. But by this standard, how is the US part of the rational knowledge tradition? 100+ million Evangelicals, megachurches, charismatic pastors, absurd sects, widespread science skepticism and conspiracy theorizing, Psi as a legitimate military research field, open appeals to theology in policymaking. On the other hand, the US happens to have the world's premier scientific institutions and technical companies. Russia can't boast of the same, it merely has better IT sphere than all of Europe and some universities supplying talent to American megacorps. Rationalism has never and nowhere been default mass culture.
So, as Russia were returning to its traditional national values (Orthodox Christianity started its resurgence
There's no Orthodox resurgence as of 2025, Russia is a transparently secular state, despite government's awkward efforts to astroturf belief.
I'm sure Chinese and North Koreans pretend even harder, but nobody - including themselves - believes in this pretense
And I'm sure this is poorly thought-out rhetoric because no, neither Kim nor Xi pretend to be elected, as there is no institution of general elections of leaders in those nations. «Representing the people» from @Eetan is absurd goalpost movement – is L'État, c'est moi a claim to have democratic mandate as well?
You're shoehorning it.
I'm still not entirely sure why they're so gung-ho for China but maybe it's more "any stick will do to beat the West" instead of figuring out "if China really does become the sole global superpower, how will that affect Russia?"
Have you considered that «motivated cognition» is not a legitimate cognitive style but just a bias, and by default people won't seek to think in a motivated manner?
To put it simply, that I literally mean what I write, and moreover that I'm simply correct on the object level, irrespective of any hopium and copium about Western, Russian or any other fortunes?
P.S. Russia is fucked in pretty much any eventuality, nobody will bail us out of our mistakes. But the popular concern trolling from Westerners about why Russia eg risks occupation of the Far East, secretly suffers in its economic relationship with China, and should antagonize a 10x larger neighbor and join some imaginary Whyte Western Civilization Alliance (as if we'd even be let in), is very galaxy brained and clearly either insincere or, again, motivated thinking.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
15d ago
You consistently conflate «culture» in the broad sense and something like «soft power/media exports/arts/presentation/aesthetics/charisma». For all the rhetorical zeal, I am trying to use the words precisely. There is a culture of business and management, a culture of warfare and diplomacy, a culture of innovation and policymaking and so on. There arguably is a certain holistic quality to the «Chinese culture» as a general style or attitude behind various Chinese ideologies, practices and behaviors. But we can sidestep the debate about essentialism and focus on specific domains. Such as the large domain of industrial productivity, or the subdomain of AI research, where we've seen an establishment of a clear template post-DeepSeek. I of course have another post in this series, on MoonshotAI that's become a paradigmatic example of a Chinese company that adopted DeepSeek's philosophy, approximated their culture. This, in turn, is embedded in the traditional Chinese culture and is not so much about competitive mimicry – DeepSeek has no credible business plan to steal and copy, Moonshot has some but had even more of it before the pivot – as about shame and virtue; the commandment to recognize your inferiority in the face of a superior man, learn and then try to measure up.
The dimensions of culture that I find interesting are consequential even if literally nobody outside of China except me pays attention. I'd go so far as to say that this idea you stubbornly return to, that Chinese culture needs to earn anyone's attention by means of virality and appeal, is characteristic of a consumerist culture where facts are only as worthy as they're entertaining, even if they can kill you or render you irrelevant.
I don't give a rat's ass about my reputation on this forum or any other, and this account (as well as its predecessor) is a tiny part of my online presence. For the purpose of the discussion, I'm better than my opponents for the specific reason that I've thought of more important things and thought better before making my top post 1 day ago, and can defend my position candidly, whereas they need to move goalposts, change topics and fall back on fallacies.
I am extremely tired of @Amadan's regular appeals to AAQCs and have equally regularly stated that I do not want any special treatment, indeed I consider these passages a way to undermine my current (obviously correct and fair) arguments, because it invites the assumption of some DEI quality, and this dumb sneering and psychologizing from petty status-conscious anklebiters giddy to see a «big shot» fall below their level. The whole ethos of kid gloves for the «AAQC caste» and high standards for The Rest never sat right with me, same as any other casteism and nepotism, and it's in violation of Good Governance 101:
No well-organized republic ever cancels the demerits of its citizens with their merits, but after having instituted rewards for a good deed and punishments for an evil one, and after rewarding a man for having acted well, if that same individual later acts badly it punishes him without any regard whatsoever for his good deeds. …if a citizen who has rendered some distinguished service to his city also gains the confidence that he will be able to undertake without fear of punishment some bad action, he will become in a brief time so insolent that every element of civic life will disappear.
So if my behavior merits punishment on general grounds, I publicly ask for the rules to be upheld without any unfairness and bias at least in my case. I'm just not going to petition the mods for special treatment in the other direction, in some bizarre act of performative masochism.
P.S. Personally I don't even understand the theory behind special treatment. Presumably the idea is that Quality Posters are exactly divas of the sort you think me to be, narcissists who might feel slighted by having rules applied to them fairly, and would leave, taking their Quality Contributions with them. Inasmuch as that's the case, I believe it's long term preferable to filter such Quality out, because Actually Quality Posters have both confidence and self-control to behave prosocially and accept the law with equanimity.
But I have no ambition of litigating for rule amendment this late into the game.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
17d ago
I'm a Russian. It's not about being effete or not. While Russia is a «European» country in most ways that matter taxonomically, it's obviously not part of the Western cultural and political space.
Now what does this have to do with the profound absurdity of your threat model?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
17d ago
You're constantly lying and twisting my words, even in this case –
You started this thread by saying everyone here is too dumb and American to be worth talking to,
– which seriously undermines your judgement of what is or isn't undignified in my eyes.
To be precise, my words were:
I've said before that I had stopped posting here because it's a purely American Affairs Discussion community and, for a non-American, those affairs are only instrumentally interesting due to their effects elsewhere, and they become less interesting as America recedes from the world stage. The silence on the ongoing global events reinforces my impressions both of the US and of this forum. It's a pity because in terms of the culture war, it's very significant.
Do you believe you're following the spirit or at least the letter of the rules by construing this as «everyone here is too dumb and American to be worth talking to»? How's this doing on charity?
You posture as a neutral arbiter, but at the very least you are «returning the sentiment» like the rest of us.
Did you delete your post agreeing with this faggot, by the way?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
17d ago
Congratulations on being absorbed like Tibet
Really now? Canada, being absorbed like Tibet, by China? Because of trade? Even while the Secretary of the Treasury of the US openly wants to take Alberta?
That's the threat model?
This gibberish gets +10?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
17d ago
Since @Amadan had apparently deemed me not deserving of a ban yet (a bold strategy), I'll take this as an opportunity to explain myself, hopefully for the last time, in plain language.
What the hell is wrong with you? You were a respected user of this forum! Alas, I can't remember what originally made me so fond of you. Like, I literally can't remember the things you would talk about before February 2022.
It's tempting to answer «See? Nothing of value will be lost». More specifically: what made people fond of me was, I think, merely the style of my writing. I'm a talented polemicist, if I do say so myself. My prose at its best has a poetic dimension, my ESL idiosyncrasies add some cute novelty and charm, my arguments are emotionally charged and my metaphors evocative. It's as satisfying for me to write as for the reader to watch me rip into his tribal enemies. Less charitably put, I'm a content creator, a journalist, appreciated for entertaining commentary on current events. My pulpit was akin to some American comedian's show, Stewart or Colbert's, or a podcast in this era, where Fuentes runs his mouth off on the hot topic of the day, with a dash of Russian perspective that, for the reader, was a market-differentiating gimmick. But journalists aren't human beings, are they? Much less respected thinkers. Nobody needs the opinion of a journalist; his job is to affirm the opinion of the consumer. So when I deviate from the prevailing sentiment, I get insults, mockery, I'm called a naive shmuck or an enemy propagandist, and receive condescending personal advice. Ah well! Journalists come and go. It's really not worth remembering their transient blather, you're doing it right.
The thing is, for all the pride I have in my writing ability, I look down on journalists too. It's my thoughts that I am trying to share. Mainly thoughts about the evolution of civilization and communities under effects of technology, and large-scale cultural dynamics seen through the prism of archetypal events and artifacts; and the style is supposed to be a simple appetizer (which in fact often gets in the way – it's not a cultivated skill but just how I write, how I talk naturally… See – another overlong too-Russian sentence, a digression that flows well phonetically but makes the reader's eyes glaze over).
I think about this stuff because that's what had always been interesting to me, everything else being only instrumentally significant. I came here from SlateStarCodex, which – no idea if you're aware, it's been long ago – is part of the LessWrong sphere; and LessWrong, with all its rational thinking and ratfic and general discussion and weird autist sex things ephemera, had always been a wrapper for the community obsessed with problem of artificial general intelligence. Under pretty sensible and obvious assumptions, this is the most important facet of the causal backbone of reality. Now LessWrong readers had graduated into employees and CEOs of megacorps whose projects the United States Government is treating as the Hail Mary in a geopolitical competition at the end of history. So am I coming back to the core issue.
So, what would I want to be remembered for, if it were a choice? This piece about DeepSeek, from July 2024. I did some honest work. Observed the market, inspected the models, read the tech reports, and highlighted a thing that will significantly redefine the US-PRC AI race. Long before it caused the panic at Meta and imposion of their LLaMA project (and rendered the entire Western LLM open source scene obsolete). Long before R1 set fire to Nvidia's stock, and the founder going on to meet with Xi Jinping and Trump name-dropping DeepSeek as a wake-up call for the US a week after inauguration. Over a year prior to the entire Chinese tech pivoting on a dime and starting to spawn DeepSeeks, so that now even Meituan (yes the food delivery company) is contesting OpenAI at the frontier and open sourcing their work. Back then, in the summer of 2024, I said: «…confident vision, bearing fruit months later. I would like to know who's charting their course, because they're single-handedly redeeming my opinion of the Chinese AI ecosystem and frankly Chinese culture.» That someone was Liang Wenfeng. In 2025 he was on Nature 10, and the vibe was as follows: «DeepSeek has also become a symbol of a transition in the country’s reputation — from master imitators to true innovators, according to Liang and other Chinese researchers. “The shift is real, and it’s accelerating,” says Yu Wu, a researcher at DeepSeek. Now the world is eagerly awaiting the firm’s next reasoning model, R2, which is rumoured to have been delayed by issues with hardware and training data. One good bet is that Liang’s company plans to give R2 to the world for free. “We’re committed to open source forever,” says Wu.» This is representative, you can doubt me but I say quite confidently that the self-perception had already changed. Roughly a year ago I submitted a post on the deeper cultural priors and possible outcomes of this transition event, too, cheekily written in tandem with R1 to illustrate the point of its genuinely unusual cognition compared to Western LLMs of the time; it got downvoted to hell for «AI slop», earned me some warnings, so it's deleted now. A pity, I'd like to link it to show how my/R1's predictions were prescient. Instead we still have the endless rehashing of boomer takes about Chyna stealing-copying-faking, no soft power, bad media exports, counterproductive propaganda, nobody likes them etc – missing the point entirely.
Subjectively, I believe it's about as interesting as if someone in the 1970 discovered that the Soviet Union had quietly opened a Special Economic Zone in the Khabarovsk Krai and they're speedrunning to a Japan-style Neon Cyberpunk there. What does this say about the ideological competition between the Free World and the Warsaw Pact? About the assumptions we're reliant on for predicting the Communist Party's strategy and future outcomes? In the 1970, such a report would be a bombshell in the USA, I'd wager. Today, in this forum, people will create megathreads (actually fail to create a megathread, so it's just dozens of threads cluttering the main one) about some ICE dude shooting some protestor woman. Charitably that's the same logic as mine – an outlier event that may be the herald of a bigger trend or at least can serve as a focal point for a big picture discussion. That's fine, I'm simply saying the big picture is bigger than the intra-American culture war and deserves at least a fraction of attention. In fact, I believe that the current form of the culture war, with the empowerment of Trump as a Caesarist figure, the growing influence of the Tech Right, progressives losing all their cancel power, even these land grab attempts and bizarrely high American belligerence and contempt towards allied nations — is driven not just by the endogenous trend of woke fatique, but by the undercurrent of existential anxiety about the Chinese rise, not dissimilar to the Sputnik shock. The failure of the fast AGI gambit, the resilience of their economy, the authority in international organizations flowing their way, are gnawing at the roots of American confidence, some left unarticulated in the polite society – national, political, cultural, civilizational, even racial. And DeepSeek was what had put it into focus for me.
But enough about DeepSeek. The point is, I wanted to share my surprising finding about the contemporary Chinese culture in a consequential domain, seen through the keyhole of this specific open source research program.
And I don't want to claim prescience. It's not like I've always been so China-pilled. On the contrary, my predictions had been lousy and highly biased in the opposite direction, if anything; they were worse than that of our resident, less prolific China bulls like @RandomRanger. As late as in 2020, I had leaned towards modeling them as a large, superficially significant, but non-live player compared to the US, doomed specifically by cultural rigidity and myopia of the elites, a paper tiger/dragon – a theory that's still finding quite some purchase here. In my 2020 Viewpoint Focus, I've said
China is no Iraq, it has WMDs, but its position and threat (and the intent to do harm) are also vastly overstated by our local hawks. […]. It does not have a domestic semiconductor industry, and the recent sanctions on SMIC show that its position is precarious. Without semiconductors for Huawei chips, not even Great Firewall can be maintained for long (iirc they're not even fully independent on 40nm); they will come up with something, but by that point the US can, probably, male double-digit GDP increases thanks to AI – and the CCP will not have the necessary compute.
July 2022, about their first mass produced 7nm chip:
I've evaluated this as a swan song of Chinese industry. Very laudable, might prove to be a big deal, but my model of those «Chinese triumphs» is that they're on their last legs, sinking hundreds of billions into desperate attempts at getting out of the deadlock, and will end in a whimper as the US crushes them without even paying much attention and bickering over some asinine culture war topic of the week that barely parses as meaningful statements to people outside the bubble of American religion/ideology…
By September 2023, I've updated to this–
History is still likely to repeat – that is, like the Qing China during the Industrial Revolution, like the Soviet Union in the transistor era, the nation playing catch-up will once again run into trade restrictions, fail at the domestic fundamental innovation and miss out on the new technological stage; but it is not set in stone.… It leaves us in the uncomfortable situation where China as a rival superpower will plausibly have to be defeated for real, rather then just sanctioned away or allowed to bog itself down in imperialist adventurism and incompetence.
– but I still held to the idea that odds are stacked in the West's favor. Tech is one thing, culture is another. And even my knowledge of the tech progress was lacking, nevermind the culture, to say nothing of its changes. In my defense, one had to have direct exposure to intra-Chinese discourse (and then, very specific circles) to get that part right then.
To my embarrassment, even in the DeepSeek post, I've been hedging:
This might not change much. Western closed AI compute moat continues to deepen, DeepSeek/High-Flyer don't have any apparent privileged access to domestic chips, and other Chinese groups have friends in the Standing Committee and in the industry, so realistically this will be a blip on the radar of history.
My «realistically» amounted to saying they're strategically dumb and myopic and unable to capitalize on their advantages the way Americans can on their own. I've been extremely, catastrophically overrating Western exceptionalism and profoundly incurious about China, partially due to the influence of this America First community. Not blaming anyone here; mea culpa.
So for over a year I've been trying to steer the discussion so that my errors and my negative contributions were negated. All I've got is steady erosion of my reputation and, by 2026, accusations of working for the Ministry of State Security from some Canadian who, family lore aside, might know less about China than I now do.
And now this shit:
I hope you find a nice girl in Argentina man.
Thanks. Now how about you stop condescending and try to actually fucking read? How much more must I chew it for you to make it digestible?
I hope this clarifies my position somewhat.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
17d ago
I don't think anybody would look on European culture of late pre-Victorian era and regard it as "species of non-human vermin"
Yet I think Brits looked at Kaiser's Germany and saw exactly that, even a century later. Was Germany not European? Of course, the entire «Evropa» concept is retconned, Europeans didn't think of themselves as a unified culture. They could talk a good game about shared White superiority compared to other races, but they easily dehumanized each other too. Russia was at the margins of Europe, but it's a matter of timing and degree, not kind. Prussia was another outlier. When did their absolute monarchy end, 1848?
Russia, however, never embraced the values that Europeans held at that time - like the concept of personal authonomy, limited participatory government, pursuit of rational knowledge for the betterment of humanity, etc.
Chutzpah. Soviets bought the rational knowledge stuff hook line and sinker, 80s-90s were a time of genuine enthusiasm about democracy human rights, and even today Putin pretends to be an elected representative with all the dressings of a parliamentary system. You know this, of course.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
17d ago
How would a formal request for a ban not be a toddler-fit in this framing? I am simply saying that I do not intend to change my behavior. You are offered to price it in and act accordingly.
I'm not a wounded party, I am simply correct and you are wrong, particularly in this case.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
17d ago
China is on a roughly South Korean demographic trajectory. I think their population will fall even faster than pessimistic UN predictions. To what extent that matters, I am not sure. They'll probably have an advantage in workforce with tertiary education over the entirety of the "developed world" for the next two-three decades, by which point labor may become irrelevant. If the problem were the lack of labor in the shorter term, we wouldn't be seeing increasing youth unemployment while productivity keeps ballooning. (The absence of it in eg Japan is not so much about better economy or more advanced stage of demographic transition as about cultural mandate for low productivity of service employment; China isn't willing to subsidize that many bullshit jobs and Chinese graduates are not willing to take full-time low status menial jobs, they'd rather live on parents' savings and do gigs). At this rate of automation, I expect nations will become more preoccupied with reducing population, and China will be one of the most automated and the fastest-shrinking societies, so optimistically it'll cancel out. Then there is the political issue of aging; I am pessimistic about the culture and politics of old societies. Homogeneity and lack of politically significant subgroups with markedly different productivity (as in the US with its racial spoils system) at least reduce the tension.
As of now though, Chinese government is the most vigorous of all I know in trying to boost fertility, they're running policy experiments across provinces and have some results. If all goes well, they may pull back to 1.1-1.2 TFR, and I expect the productive subgroups of the West to naturally stabilize around the same point.
I'm answering tersely because I'm expecting a permaban, as requested.
Ya know, it's really obnoxious to keep telling people what their ethno-nationalist origins are, and when corrected, double down
No. This is gaslighting plain and simple, so I won't read the rest of your screed. I'm tired of this nonsense. Ban me at least for a month, better permaban.
On the object level.
We have many Chinese and non-Chinese people here who have relevant fresh experience and diverse takes, eg here. He apparently doesn't have Chinese nationality, and it's not clear he's ever had it; more importantly not clear whether he's been there in any recent past, or indeed even once – I asked and he avoided the issue. That is obnoxious. He's opportunistically claiming to be "Chinese" in this chain to legitimize sweeping dismissive statements on what China is like addressed to a "foreigner", but ordinarily he says he's "Canadian", showing he's a foreigner himself. This is hypocrisy. He shares some psychodrama about [white] Canadian treatment of ethnic Chinese, which is irrelevant to the issue at hand – I have zero interest in his ethnic background or identity, we're talking about knowledge, not HBD and legacy. Han Chinese people do not have any essentialist property that allows them to be more insightful about China than any other "foreigner", that's my assertion. And you're trying to frame me as… well, whatever.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
17d ago
He's very reluctant to clarify that, so I think he's either second gen or a Hong Konger.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
17d ago
I am Chinese. I have Canadian citizenship, but that makes me no more a Canadian than a dog born in a stable a horse. And my countrymen see me in this way, as well.
My condolences. Racism is horrible.
On the object level, if you're born "in a stable", if your countrymen are Canadians, if you're a Canadian of Chinese ancestry – I repeat, it's not clear what your claim to knowing anything about China of 2026 is. You are a foreigner for the PRC, as am I.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
18d ago
Okay, and that's what Trump is doing because he believes (rightly or wrongly) America doesn't need allies and supplicants, and you're bitching about that?
What is this, just face-saving? The conceptual difference is that the US already has an alliance network, so it makes no sense to just dismantle it, even at cost. But, like, I'm not really "bitching", I'm okay with it, go on. I'm not sure what's better for me in the end, because one important variable is how the desperation dynamics affects the severity of American chimpouts, and I don't have a model for it.
The practical difference is that without allies, within 3-5 years you cease being anything remotely like a peer power to China. It's just unserious to talk about. It's not only a matter of industrial scale, brainpower and state capacity (China outclassing the US in each), it's that they are a near-autarky, and half of your advanced economy including the MIC is dependent on allied supply chains (a fact obscured by relative share of trade in GDP, but a true one). Obviously this means that even Trump's USA is unlikely to torpedo the current system, but it's worth keeping in mind the alternative.
They hate the Japanese, what do you imagine they think of India?
They think vastly better of India, Russia, America and cockroaches than of the Japanese. You have no clue what you're talking about if that's your argument.
is that they consider these territories as already belonging to them. Can't be a superpower if you're just taking back your own property.
And indeed Tibet is internationally recognized Chinese clay. The territorial claims of the PRC are consistent since before the formation of the PRC and only were scaled down over time. CIA-supported governments in exile do not inherently override governments of nation states. "Free Tibet" is some vintage psyop, I'm sort of confused to still see it. Maybe we'll feel this way about Gaza in a few decades.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
18d ago
Replying to some of your other comments here, why the obsession with Marvel and funko pops?
I think that's representative of the level of American cultural development. Ne Zha 2 is also representative of China (it's high production value slop).
Next - some significant fraction of Chinese can talk intelligently about the lakers or European football. How many Americans have heard of Lin Dan or Shi Yuqi?
Again. What of it? Are you saying that the Canadian pivot is because they've become fans of Lin Dan? My thesis is not that the Chinese soft power is very deep (though in some segments it's growing, and it'll help product sales etc.), it's that the popularity of your national media does not translate into political allegiance. That's not how the causality flows. America did not become the Shining City Upon a Hill and the leader of the strongest military alliance in history by producing popular media slop, it's just one of the many facets of their current eminence. Great Britain's greatest media days were after the British Empire collapsed. Hong Kong out-soft-powered all of China, their content was popular in the Mainland, they still got crushed and now they pitifully complain in the UK to stop the construction of the Mega-Embassy. It's all a very big attention sink, but a very minor factor, at the end of the day.
And indeed, an overwhelming superiority in cultural exports can even undermine you. What good did BLM protests in Chelyabinsk do for the USA? Brainrotten Russian teenagers may hunt for signs of racism at home, but they know where Saint Floyd perished, and won't buy into the more carefully curated myth of Jeans, Bubblegum and Freedom like their parents did. It's actually pretty hard to have both a vibrant and a propagandistically coherent cultural scene. The dividends on having everyone just use your memes, your frameworks, your critiques, live in your world, are… unclear to me. Something something master's tool master's house? Sorry, I'm not that Kendi yet.
What was your point again?
Seriously, though. You should go back to making fun of teenage girls from San Francisco tweeting 'defund the police.' The crowd loves it. Make a patreon and gofundme, some Thiel acolyte with deep pockets will buy you a Trump Gold Card
You have no idea how little this pitiful anklebiting attempt (or whatever it was) stings. I have no need to seek or beg or whore myself out, and I could come to the US any time I wanted, welcomed and accommodated, within the last 2 years.
Pleasuring the North American crowd is beneath me. I only talk of what I find interesting. Sometimes I get carried away.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
18d ago
I perceive integration with Europe one of the major sources of my subordination.
No matter which way net subordination actually flows, maybe it's time for a peaceful divorce then.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
18d ago
No, you are a Canadian, you self-identify as one except for the purposes of making this «as a Chinese» take, and it appears we'd both be foreigners in the PRC.
I've given you a vast attack surface, but you're turtling up because you have no comeback. From your post here it's clear you don't have any extra insider knowledge, it's just old memes any white guy with yellow fever could come up with. I
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
18d ago
Nothing you've said changes that in practice, on the ground, Chinese cultural exports, political engagement and geopolitics don't work. I use the phrase "uncharismatic" but sub in "ineffective" or whatever you need. China has no allies, nobody likes what they produce, and nobody likes what they say. China got rich building things that were invented by westerners. Not by producing novel goods that everybody loves.
This is just kanging that gets produced in a terminally ill society that's running out of a things to boast of and so points to legacy and accumulated prestige. Nobody cares anymore for what the ingenious whites claim to have invented, sorry to say, that's a very boomer-coded thing in a very non-white and industrial world. This is the kind of thing that «everybody loves» in 2026.
Concretely, China gets from the EU, for starters:
- 300 billion euro a year in pure trade surplus
- technologies like Nexperia (the Dutch tried to take it back on, apparently, American orders, found out they have no leverage, folded, then there were very interesting hearings on Karremans), KUKA and Idra
- engineers educated in top Western schools and companies, like Lin Nan, to accelerate their research.
- growing FDI, one German plant closes in Germany – one opens in the Inner Mongolia
- non-recognition of Taiwanese sovereignty, absence of any coordination to act against them if they mode
- some amount of intelligence gathering
- Macron and others shilling for JVs and more cooperation, up to breaking the semiconductor blockade, which means betraying an existential interest of their very scary and important suzerain.
- Unwillingness/inability of Europe to do anything against them, even as they supply advanced military technology like laser point defense systems to Russia, for testing and geopolitical hijinks.
What China does not get: military bases in Europe, even though the US (still has bases in Europe) has been rude lately while they're nice and only formally Communists, anything about "alliance".
I think they're fine with this trade.
You agreed the world would cut ties with China and back the USA.
I guess I need to make it clearer for you. I said that the world will do nothing substantial, nothing beyond symbolic handwringing, unless China actually loses the war. It'll be treated by Europe (nevermind Russia, Africa, India, LatAm, Middle East…) about as seriously as the Israeli war/genocide, or less than that: condemnations + weapons contracts.
Mind you, it's if there is any war, which there likely won't be as the US will retreat and Taiwan just fold.
You got embarrassed because your foundational premise was wrong. Next time, just say "lol my bad. I still think Americans exhibit this behaviour"
It's not my foundational premise that you're an American. My "foundational premise" is that your beliefs are representative of Americans and I think they're wrong.
and I wouldn't even have engaged
I didn't mind you engaging initially, I thought you might go beyond "uncreative bugmen low EQ" cope mixed with geopolitical concern trolling.
Notably, none of this has any relation to «cultural exports» which you started with in your argument about WWIII alliances, so I assume you've quietly conceded the point.
Still, I think this is cope and embarrassing narrative peddling.
They have terrible diplomacy, sure. Just like they have terrible propaganda. But you're desperately trying to shoehorn trade deals into the form of alliance building. I believe they genuinely expected that dysfunctional African or Oceanian states can be a good investment and grow even at a fraction of their speed. You're imagining that all those BRI projects are some very long, awkward, failed foreplay to a military alliance. I'd need to see actual Chinese proposals to this effect to believe it. Papua New Guinea signs defense treaty with Australia. Is this really a big deal? China has a profitable bilateral relationship with Australia as such.
Wolf warrior diplomacy is commonly understood to have been an appeal to domestic audience in the age of social media, like bizarre American behaviors are.
It goes without saying that CCP members saying "We come in peace" can be regarded with some skepticism.
And yet your only scenario for the war is «South China Sea». They are openly saying they intend to take Taiwan, «easy way or the hard way», in Trumpspeak. This is what that navy is primarily for, as well as other assets in the theater – overmatch against any conceivable allied fleet. Is it common among «analysts» to interpret it as the first step to world domination?
Your analysts must be trying too hard. People usually mean what they say.
I guess your kind of jaded analysts who don't believe propaganda, all these think tank morons with Chinese characters in Twitter handles, who have lived in China long enough to infer menacing signals from how many cups are before Xi, also analyzed Chinese Miscalculation last October, when they Showed Their Hand and Revealed Being A Bad Actor Before the World, Inviting American Retaliation. Do you remember that phase? I do, the entire Analyst Community, people like Greer, Doshi, they were unanimous that China just can't into diplomacy and blundered to save face again, or it was a rogue MOFCOM or MSS agent, or that the Analysts (and Bessent) need to publicly insist on this to give Xi «face» when he rolls export controls back, etc. etc, all this condescending and ignorant garbage from a position of control. How has that worked out? The US was the one miscalculating, Xi never had to save face, Trump fumed a bit and went to Busan to ask for a ceasefire, and that was that. And then Korea signed on to the currency swap with China. In general, for all that they're failing in diplomacy, the decoupling from them is going very poorly indeed.
Yeah so let me reiterate: even in your most motivated, pro-China reasoning, you cannot envision a world that doesn't immediately freeze trade with China and pray to god that Trump fixes it. We both conclude
No, I do not permit you to «reiterate». No, we do not both conclude. I didn't say that, your rephrasing is a retarded American fantasy. Why do you need to do this? Just directly mock what I actually say, if you would be so kind.
I meant more like «Macron freezes those optically significant FDI projects he's been begging China for in Davos». Not even trade with Russia is totally frozen. You're delusional if you believe Europe reacts stronger to Taiwan because «China cannot into diplomacy» and ultimately «China bad media exports». All those lurid images are completely detached from the scenario I mentioned.
So... what's your actual criticism of my previous post? You made a whole new post to attack my previous one, but when it comes down to it, you agree I'm right. What's going on here?
I suppose what is going on here is that, at least for the purposes of this debate, you're incapable of communicating in plain language, and it's obnoxious of you to pretend to, so I won't cooperate.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
18d ago
It's an indictment on Chinese culture that we can have an international community that is absolutely aghast at the US diplomatic and cultural engagement right now. But exactly zero rich, first world nations, are seriously discussing swapping alliances to China.
Have you considered that the major cultural «defect» here is simply that China is not offering alliances to anyone? That they have strictly one ally, and that ally is Pakistan, which they use solely to keep India distracted? That they believe, and perhaps reasonably, that they do not need any allies or supplicants to achieve what they want? They don't even try to arm Iran. They are watching Russia and Ukraine bleed, and calmly sell weapons to both sides, and lobby for more EVs in the EU. They did not bother to loudly condemn American aggression towards Greenland, just reiterated the commitment to the UN Charter and asked to not be used as a pretext. They don't care.
NATO was not formed at the behest of smaller nations; it was a deliberate American project of expanding the US-UK alliance network in the face of the very credible and loudly proclaimed Soviet expansionism. You are talking as if China is proposing a counter-NATO security bloc a la the Warsaw Pact, and is being rejected because Wukong is an inadequate counter to Spiderman. Tell me, had the Soviets wooed the world with their high culture? Was it Rachmaninoff or Tarkovski that kept Czhechoslovakia tethered, or perhaps the Strugatsky brothers? No, it was a crude ideology and the threat of violence. During Mao's era, Chinese culture was incomparably more ghoulish and impoverished than it is now, and yet they had a far greater global reach. Maoism still finds some purchase among American intellectuals – with no input from Beijing.
What you confirm to me is that for a Westerner it's largely pointless to study China. All that expertise, just to play a glass bead game with your starting priors.
Not sure if you've studied this, but the official Chinese position on the matter of great power politics is:
Deng noted in this speech that China should state clearly to the world that "China is not a superpower, nor will she ever seek to be one. If one day China should change her color and turn into a superpower, if she too should play the tyrant in the world, and everywhere subject others to her bullying, aggression and exploitation, the people of the world should identify her as social-imperialism, expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it." These words were endorsed by Chairman Mao Zedong and put into the speech in their entirety.
[…] On December 1, 2017, at the opening ceremony of the CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-level Meeting, President Xi Jinping reiterated China's commitment of never seeking hegemony or expansion no matter what stage of development it reaches. China will neither "import" models from other countries nor "export" the Chinese model or ask other countries to copy the Chinese practice.
This is a pledge China made to the international community and the code of conduct for international relations that it has always followed. Despite changes in the international landscape, China's commitment to "never seek hegemony" has never changed, and its original aspiration to "uphold peace" has never wavered. China has honored its words, as a major country is expected to do. China has not and will never betray the solemn commitment it made to the world at the United Nations.
Obviously the lofty rhetoric about never bullying smaller states may sound very quaint now. But the philosophy, I think, is straightforwardly upheld. They do not intend to act as a superpower no matter how strong they get. They consider it a distraction.
If a ship gets sunk in the SCS tomorrow, the free world holds their nose and rallies under the freedom eagle in 5 minutes flat. Are you disputing that
Yes, I am. I think the «free world» makes concerned noises, cancels some trade deals, and politely offers Trump to sort it out or whatever. The French are not going to lose their entire fleet (which they may need to defend from American aggression, as they have known for a while) in the South China Sea. Had the «free world» truly cared about preventing Chynese domination, it wouldn't have traded the recognition of Taiwanese sovereignty for the privilege of investing into the Mainland economy.
In any case, when those 49K Chinese EVs arrive to Canada, we'll see what soft power with Chinese characteristics looks like in a rich first world nation.
No. You admit being Canadian, perhaps of Chinese ethnicity. Maybe a Taiwanese or a Hong Konger at that, given how you specify not getting into fights with «Mainland» Chinese here. And I do not know when you've last been to Mainland China and how long you've lived in Canada, but you write like an Indian, with the over-the-top emotive rhetorical flourish and confident pride in your eloquence that I have never seen a Mainland-educated person display in English (then again I could be accused of much the same). You might even believe this alone makes you better than them, you assimilated so well after all, and the Chinese are known for strong internal racism. However, I'll allow that you're probably a first-generation immigrant, seeing as how you attack fellow immigrants and give them this boomerish no-nonsense advice on fitting in. You are also not particularly informed about the conditions of either American or Chinese economy, given that we've seen a spectacular refutation of your June thesis («The American economy is not dependent on imports from China») here with the October MOFCOM Surprise that forced the US into a humiliating climbdown. I'd say >5 years since last stay in China. Right? The idea I'm seeing among people routinely doing business with China, the knowledge of Chinese way of life is completely obsolete within about 5 years.
More generally, I put extremely little faith in «I'm from X and here's the ugly truth» type takes, ironic as that is, given that I'm sometimes providing such opinions on Russia. Many people are dissatisfied in the condition of their nation; those are the Russians saying they're inept orcs and the frontline will crumble in two weeks, the Americans complaining of their intolerable wage slavery to the middle-class Shanghainese on Rednote, and of course the Chinese who've internalized the more charismatic white narrative about their inferiority, or just grew dismayed of the grift and striverism. But many Chinese including my friends in various walks of life and in different countries hold views opposite to yours; and many Chinese outside China are straightforwardly coping, starting with their patron saint Gordon Chang and the COVID refugee cohort that had accepted a permanent QoL hit in emigration and thus sustains itself with news of the coming Chinese collapse. Whereas most Chinese dissidents, in my experience, are straight up mentally ill (excluding eg. Ai Weiwei), and there's no talking to them. I've visited a local Falun Dafa branch, the food was okay, but my takeaway was «wow, if the MSS ran this thing, they'd find little to improve for the purposes of lulling the US into complacency». That's the nervous system of the overseas anti-CCP Chinese and much of the Western conservative media, their newspapers informing Republican policymaking – a hive of loudly insane religious freaks who couldn't cut it in China. It had put some things into perspective for me.
It's also quite condescending to assume that a foreigner, one from a former Communist country at that, is naively engaging with «tightly controlled PR». Your homeland's PR is hilariously tone-deaf and transparent; if the MSS or whatever were employing people like me, they'd get much further, but they treat propaganda as a sinecure for officials' failsons. My opinion is based on primary sources, not on «PR». I can literally see who's doing what, with what dependencies, with what labor, and the Chinese are doing about 50% of the interesting stuff in the world, delivering us the world that's moving forward twice as fast.
Please explain why you believe the communists in China are more trustworthy partners that the Americans.
Mainly because the average quality of Americans and the Chinese doesn't matter so much – institutions that serve as the bottlenecks do. The CCP imposes some standards of competence and prosociality, as opposed to the American beauty pageant, and Xi in particular is like 3 standard deviations above Trump in personal integrity, which has effects downstream. Xi's ministers are humans, Trump's are weird hypebeasts; Xi's policies are motivated by long-term rational self-interests, Trump's by petty cruelty and delusions, therefore the Chinese in aggregate become more predictable and more reliable partners. This is trivially obvious to a neutral observer from going through their biographies and watching their actions, and actions of both countries, for several years.
If I were a Maoist Third Worldist, I would not be saying that China is not really Communist.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
18d ago
In my opinion it has not come to a close at all. If you think Trump just gets to TACO, pretend he's always wanted a "deal" and go back to the status quo with no repercussions, you're very… optimistic. These trade arrangements with China or security ones with India are not a bluff, the entire American worldview on this is completely delusional and self-serving. The EU, just like China, isn't doing deals to posture or to impress or intimidate Americans, it's trying to improve its currently grim long-term trajectory, and American nonsense is telling them what to avoid. We have learned a useful thing, too – that Trump can be deterred with economic consequences even in the absence of any military capability.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
18d ago
That I, a non-American, had to make the top level post was evidence enough that it's of secondary interest at best.
See? You even quote it and think it supports your position. We can read the same lines and come to the opposite conclusions. I think a culture is interesting for what outcomes it produces. You think a culture is interesting for how much interest it generates. As I've told you already:
I'll charitably amend this to "we have an irreconcilable difference in understanding of words".
Well then all I can say is that your point is not interesting to me and has zero consequence. Enjoy imagining the daily life of an Indian businessman or something.
More options
Context Copy link