DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
You can, however, convince yourself that the purges will get rid of the reason it's not combat ready, and trust the post-purge officer corps when they say 'Yes Supreme Leader.'
Where are we getting the idea that this is what is happening?
Jordan Schneider: What does this mean for Taiwan contingencies?
Jon Czin: I’ve actually been turning this question on its head. This isn’t the core driver of what’s going on, but Xi’s willingness to totally clean house — renovate the military, strip the high command down to its studs — shows he feels pretty comfortable about the external environment and the cross-strait environment in particular.
There are three big reasons for that. First, President Trump doesn’t seem personally invested in the Taiwan issue. The national defense strategy doesn’t even mention Taiwan, and they’re reading that signal pretty clearly. Second, President Lai Ching-te, whom they loathe, is in political trouble at home after the failed recall campaign this summer. There’s going to be an election in 2028, and the opposition KMT’s new leadership is saying very favorable things about Beijing. From their perspective, they’ve got breathing room, and 2028 is probably the next big pivot point where they sense a real opportunity to shape and shift the dynamic.
Again, that’s not a driver, but when Xi is thinking about all this, he probably feels pretty comfortable about the situation.
The other thing to point out: assessing the PLA is always challenging because, yes, there’s deeply rooted corruption, but the modernization effort remains really impressive. This is true of China’s economy and development writ large — there’s real rot, real dysfunction, and real corruption, but also real dynamism. They’re doing real things with actual impressive quality. Both coexist at the same time.
Even in the last few months, just a few weeks after the exclamation mark on the last round of purges at this fall’s plenum, the PLA conducted a pretty significant military exercise around Taiwan in the closing days of 2025. There was this theory floating around that because a bunch of people from the 31st Group Army were purged, they wouldn’t know how to do these things anymore. It’s pretty clear they still know how to do these things, based on the operation they pulled together at the end of last year.
You have to think this is terrible for morale. It’s not how you’d run a high-morale, high-tempo organization in the West. But it’s their system, and this is how they operate.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
Regrettable, how the idea of a well-organized militia of private citizens is now so demonized. Civilian self-organization and initiative used to be the big selling points of the American way of life. I guess the US has grown used to dealing with either inept drama queens or actual enemy state actors (or propping up "organic resistance" themselves).
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
Xi purges a former ally, so he can't be accused of favouritism
Mandatory Han Feizi on the techniques of the ruler:
The Yellow Emperor said: “A hundred battles a day are fought between the superior and his underlings.” The underlings conceal their selfish [interests], trying to test their superior; the superior employs gauges and measures to restrict the underlings. Hence when gauges and measures are established, they are the sovereign’s treasure; when the cliques and cabals are formed, they are the ministers’ treasure. If a minister does not murder his ruler, this is because the cliques and cabals are not formed yet. (Han Feizi 8.8)
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
In general, Chinese Communism seems to be more willing to tolerate ‘genuine conversion’ than Soviet Communism was. It might something to with the history of face and deference in China, I’m not sure. You see it even with the Uighurs.
I think it's more about the idea of «education». They think that people can be bent into shape so long as enough pressure is provided. This is the more humane Confucian side of the Chinese philosophy, balancing the liberal use of capital punishment. I'd like to say that Confucius would protest reeducation camps in particular, but… maybe not.
[17:22] Zi Gong asked, “Does the noble man also have things that he hates?”
Confucius said, “He does. He hates those who advertise the faults of others. He hates those who abide in lowliness and slander the great. He hates those who are bold without propriety. He hates those who are convinced of their own perfection, and closed off to anything else. How about you, what do you hate?”
Zi Gong said, “I hate those who take a little bit of clarity as wisdom; I hate those who take disobedience as courage; I hate those who take disclosing people's weak points to be straightforwardness.”
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
I really doubt that «Xi has no permanent residence in Beijing, stays in a hotel and gets ambushed» makes a lot of sense. He owns the damn place and they're obsessed with security.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
I think he might tolerate it for a time but he'll get rid of corrupt or inept allies when he no longer tactically needs them. Frankly he seems willing to get rid of pretty much anyone except Wang Huning.
A snarky, but I think mostly fair on the object level, Chinatalk episode. For extra fun: the comparison of Xi's latest purge and the US purge under Trump 2.0. Both this far have have had no effect on apparent combat readiness.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
Yes, I remember.
I mean there were shots fired in his general direction.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
I think late Mao was driven primarily not by [greater than usual] paranoia, but by a fairly reasonable belief that after his profoundly disastrous Great Leap Forward his throne grew shaky and he could only stay in power until death by getting everyone bogged down in bloody chaos, riding the tiger, so to speak. It is also likely that he genuinely believed that another round of social engineering is in order, thus «continuous revolution».
We do not see Xi acting weirdly or doing anything extravagant in any other domain. There's no tightening of censorship, no incomprehensible economic stratagems, the diplomacy is predictable and reactive, what we hear of the 15th 5-year plan is business as usual, Jack Ma is forgiven, most campaigns (against sissy men, tutoring, quantitative trading, whatever) are toned down, the recent exercises around Taiwan were roughly identical in scope and nature to the exercises in 2022, 2023, 2024. He's specifically purging the military brass, for whatever reason.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
Notably there's some history I didn't know: Xi Jinping's father was once "purged," but he wasn't executed, just removed from power for a while. He was eventually allowed to come back.
Mate, wait until he tells you what happened to Xi Jinping at the same time. And to Deng Xiaoping too.
[The more interesting part of Xi Zhongxun's purge timeline is that he's been Governor of Guangdong for two years and only then got formally exonerated.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
I find this theory the most plausible so far.
Some notes.
The first is purges of those directly tied to his political rivals, most notably the Bo Xilai faction he defeated to achieve and solidify his grip on power
It's very funny when people frame the Bo Xilai affair as «defeated to solidify his grip». Bo self-immolated. He was a populist, a comically venal character and deeply hated by the party elders (partially due to vigorous participation in the Cutural Revolution, denouncing and beating his father), his wife very likely slept with their British middleman to help send their son (at least, her son) to Harrow UK, and then flat out murdered the guy, with Bo's second-in-command defecting to the US in panic. What future could he have after that? How could Xi not «purge» him?
Likewise, another political enemy of Xi, Ling Jihua, got wrecked by his playboy son crashing to death in a Ferrari while fooling around with two girls; and the third enemy, Zhou Yongkang, took part in a coverup attempt. These cartoonish folks are the corruption that Xi has been fighting his entire career, their existence had forged his mandate to solidify power, and the reason they had power and could aspire to get more in the first place is that they were corrupt. I think many people miss this detail, but in the 00's China, there has been little distinction between «corruption» and «political advancement»; and therefore there's little difference between Xi «legitimately crushing corruption» and «solidifying his grip». His grip amounts to being the top guy in a system with meritocratic advancement biased by loyalty, he doesn't need bribery to keep it working, nor does he personally need money. But anyone who starts to siphon money out of the system, buy higher offices, sell positions downstream, and form a nontrivial personal patronage network, be that a representative of an established clique or an ambitious upstart, is a threat to Xi. And when that happens in the PLA (and it had been happening on a vast scale), it very quickly becomes an existential threat to Xi. I've been told there had been at least one semi-successful assassination attempt soon after he became Chairman; make of that what you will.
friends of Xi and allies may not have been targeted
This is a bit unfalsifiable. If they have been targeted, had they ever been his friends? Does Xi even have friends, is he the kind of person who can have friends? For what it's worth, he was the one who promoted Zhang Youxia all the way to first-ranked CMC vice chairman, and their fathers Zhang Zongxun and Xi Zhongxun (Xi respects his own father a lot) had been friends forever, as in theory were current-gen Zhang and Xi. According to Brookings, Youxia was part of Xi's inner circle! He also has already purged Qin Gang (Wolf Warrior alpha male), He Weidong and Miao Hua (Fujian clique, so theoretically Xi loyalists he had personally been promoting and relying on) and a host of other personal associates.
It's not clear to me that Xi had ever turned a blind eye to a friend's corruption or underperformance, at least I haven't seen such evidence. When people try to tie Xi personally to some corruption, they often cite his sister's riches (which he started pressing her to sell starting in 2012, apparently, and succeeded by 2014) but it seems that those were accumulated without his help and even before he became Chairman – remember, Xi is a son of a former Vice Premier, a man who had a real shot at Chairman position himself, his family is one of the most prestigious CPC bloodlines to begin with, and his siblings can capitalize on that. After looking through his family's biography and other sources, I think it's safe to say that Xi is a very severe, ideologically driven actor who just Does Not Like Corruption. There's no parallel to Putin or Maduro or whatever. I don't know why this is so hard for people to accept, we've known such autocrats in the 20th century.
That is to say one of the PLA’s leading figures and an erstwhile close Xi ally really was selling nuclear secrets to the US
I strongly doubt this part of the story. It's «Some anonymous sources cited in Western media» and «said people familiar with a high-level briefing on the allegations» type report. Journalists make it sound like they're protecting the confidentiality of their sources, but they face no punihment for straight up inventing narratives. Just because all the journalists are repeating the same news doesn't mean they have corroborating evidence, they can be (and often are) just repeating each other. I've previously investigated similar turns of phrase (with regards to tech reporting) and it turned out that the journalist had been half misinformed and half confabulating. It often means just «some Chinese person has told me that». The closest thing to a corroboration we have is that supposedly «Gu Jun, the former general manager of China National Nuclear Corp., the state-owned company that runs China’s nuclear programs, provided some of the evidence against the top general», but that can as well do with, say, falsifying reports on warhead condition as with any CIA dealings.
My reasons for doubt have little to do with this prior or with Zhang Youxia's reputation, it's just… can you imagine the risk of leaking that to Western press, in Xi's China? For what benefit, just gloating? If you're not 100% sure the MSS won't trace it back to you, it's insanity. Though, I do doubt it on the object level too. Why would a high-ranking General sell nuclear secrets to the US? Was he expecting to get out of China and enjoy the profits in Miami? The way I look at it, better appropriate $100M in the PLA and risk a humiliating expulsion and retirement than get whatever money the CIA can offer but risk being killed. This is something a disgruntled engineer can do, one who's not so thouroughly watched.
I think Zhang probably got pulled down by his protege Li Yuchao, who got purged for corruption somewhat earlier. And the official Chinese accusaton, far as we can tell, is «They have severely fueled political and corruption problems that threaten the Party's absolute leadership over the armed forces and undermine the Party's governance foundation… gravely tarnished the image and authority of the CMC leadership and severely damaged the political and ideological foundation of unity and progress among all military personnel… inflicted grave harm on efforts to strengthen political loyalty in the military, the military's political environment, and overall combat readiness, posing a serious adverse impact on the Party, the country and the military». This is largely duckspeak but I think it can be interpreted as «created a personal fief and might have been planning a coup». The coup preparation, in turn, could have been fueled by anxiety about previous misdeeds (or Li Yuchao's own corruption) catching up to him, as Xi tightens the screws. We'll probably never know what really happened; all of that may be just Xi's paranoia. Authoritarian regimes are prone to prioritize defanging the army to reduce the risk of a coup even at the cost of combat readiness.
The general was not corrupt, but represented a generation of dim or mid-witted PLA sinecures unfit for any actual major conflict with a top-tier peer power (you know the one). A legacy of a poorer, more dysfunctional, more third-world, less capable, less advanced China, he has been replaced
Whether this is the intent or not, this will be the consequence. People often concern troll about Xi's purges by pointing out how these are the last «battle-tested» officers China («hasn't fought a war since 1979») has. But what use is 1979 experience in Vietnam against the US in 2020s-2030s? They didn't even do that well in Vietnam. Generally speaking, it's better to lose wars (so long as you don't suffer major consequences) than win and promote decorated officers who have internalized lessons inapplicable to your actual existential challenges. A victory freezes the doctrine evolution. The US has been winning every battle, and what's the result now? A force that's perfect for dunking on Taliban, Iraq and Venezuela while maintainig divine K/D ratio, I guess. A force that would probably not do great in a war of attrition against an industrial superpower. Russia dunked on Ukraine in 2014, and how has that served Russia in 2022, when said Ukraine had learned the lessons of its defeat? The Chinese aren't winning or losing wars, they study American triumphs and try to adapt, so that their measures are a superset of what Americans can plausibly react to. They've invented Systems Confrontation and System Destruction Warfare after meditating on the Gulf War, Kosovo War, Iraq war. How well can we expect an elderly veteran of the Sino-Vietnamese War to execute on such paradigms? It's probably better to start from scratch. (In fairness, there's also little reason to assume Xi is well equipped to understand and govern the modern China.)
In any case, I do not believe this substantially affects the Taiwan timeline. They are not ready by the standard implicit in their activities. They're only testing prototypes of a whole range of systems (ostensible sixth generation fighter jets, newer domestic engines on 5th gen, drone carriers etc.), the fleet is still building (years left to their first nuclear-powered carrier, it's under construction), they're seemingly not sure how to utilize robots in combat, very many things are clearly experimental and not in volume production or incorporated into standard training. Politically, they also hope the KMT administration (likely to win the next elections) will be more friendly and cooperate without the need for violence. Peaceful – if coerced – reunification is still the preferred outcome, and it is unwise to assume they have given up on that (or even that it is wholly impossible, especially given Trump).
That said, the popular theory that Zhang was the cool head against Xi's mad desire to flood Taiwan with meat waves of recruits reads like cope. Where do you all get this idea of different actors' personal dispositions with regard to Taiwan? More «anonymous sources»? Where does the idea about Xi's «hare-brained» schemes come from? If it happens, it will be a high-tech, highly automated, materiel-heavy war quite unlike historical amphibious invasions. Why would China not play to its strenghs and instead LARP as Americans on D-Day? They seem intent to solve as much as possible with pure industrial capacity, because that's what they have in spades. For example, let me present you: medium cargo ship outfitted with containerized AESA radar, CIWS, VLS cells and EMALS. How does their naval doctrine look like at this point? I don't think even they are sure.
In short it is plausible that Xi is just consolidating power or acting on paranoia, but I think these purges are not a big deal, despite the apparent high profile of victims.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
Does the fact that nobody goes to the Church have any impact on your glib judgement?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
Sorry, you are not a foremost expert of what do I know. I actually know personally quite a few Russians and talk to them regularly (at least once a week, often more). And of course, I read a lot of what was written about Soviet intelligentsia in 70s-90s
Sorry, all this snark is uninteresting. If that's the impression you're getting from your contacts, you are in a bubble, like many emigres. We're not in the 70s nor the 90s. As of 2020s, roughly 1% of the Russian population is Christian enough to bother taking part in the Christmas service, vs 47% of Americans. Churches in Russia are empty and subsist on government dime. American Christians also have coherent beliefs about, say, the Third Temple — a condition which would be unimaginable in Russia (outside professional Antisemitic circles) where nobody reads the Bible and Christianity is a vague, ethnically coded token of being based and patriotic, more like Chinese ancestor worship. There aren't even any "cultural Christian values" like charity. The State's preference to persist in this Orthodox advocacy is not indicative of the popular demand for irrationalism; quite the opposite, it's another grift vector and a top-down attempt at social engineering like the insane WWII sacralization (Immortal Regiment) that the people passively accept (which is actually a massive mark against Russian culture, just a different one).
Russia is an irredeemably jaded, atheistic country with performative orthotrad LARP (which liberals despise and so discuss a lot) at the top; the United States is a nominally secular polytheocracy and wholly indifferent to the ostensible Western tradition of rational thought or whatever. Weirder things had happened in history.
Your assorted defenses are even less interesting. The archetypal "Russian great" who can stand on the international stage, among Westerners you've listed, is not some cute Tyutchev. That's Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, Mendeleev and Lobachevsky, Suvorov and Zhukov, Serov, Vasnetsov and Vrubel, Pavlov and Vavilov, Pontryagin and Kolmogorov, Tsiolkovsky and Sikorsky, Korolev and Sakharov, Cherenkov and Glushko, and so on and so forth (seeing your snide remarks on Pushkin, motivated by his fairly minor African ancestry, I exclude clearly ethnically alien individuals like Levitan and Aivazovsky; but as they are recognized to be "spiritually Russian", they demonstrate the assimilative capacity of the Russian egregore, if anything). Those are obviously normal European elite human capital, whether from noble and admixed families or from the depths of Eastern European serf/Cossack/military/clergy genetic pool, with more or less intense educational and professional engagement with the West proper. There is no comparison to be made to the Japanese or Bolivians or Arabs, whether in achievement or, more to the point, in the degree of relatedness to the European cultural tradition; and your framing is simply a rationalization of the personal sense of distance from Ruskies and Soviets. This isn't so much Usenet or, rather, FidoNet as Tiphareth discourse straight from 2003 AD. It's all so tiresome.
You may notice I can answer questions on my presumed prejudices directly and resolutely, while you can not.
I do not recognize your "answers" as honest, because your entire line of argumentation – in essence, going back to the top, that «Russians are just Europeans from 200 years ago» thesis understates their moral and philosophical distance from the West, and why they're therefore more deserving to be considered vermin by modern Europeans – is deeply biased, whether you can recognize this or not. I've had enough of this sophistry with the likes of Verbitsky, long ago, so here my explanations end.
On the object level (or is it the meta level?) I think people have not yet developed antibodies for bots/shills, especially bots. There's a kind of rigid commitment to free speech, too – «so what if he speaks weird?! It's the content that matters!», because people legitimately haven't internalized the astronomically high prior for the provenance of emdash slop, pointing out bots looks like paranoia. AI is too cheap and too good, we are not updating fast enough. There must be some high profile case to drive the point home.
There also is opportunistic support for voices in agreement.
On the more serious base reality topic, I think the problem with ICE is that the US is forming a whole new class of empowered oprichniki. American cops are already notoriously low human capital, but these guys in the videos are glib, sadistic and power-tripping like the worst kind of cops, and they are getting even with not so much illegals as the entire blue tribe; and the red tribe vicariously enjoys what they're doing. The worse the reputation of the ICE gets, the worse people are attracted to join it; the more it's excused by Trump's entourage, and signal-boosted by the regime social media (I can't call the current White House X account anything else), the bolder they become. The nervousness and tribal defensiveness (which i suspect you feel) also exacerbates the spiral; in a vacuum, these news would be condemned just 5 years ago by all but the most psychotic Red Tribers, now it's being normalized. Trumpism wasn't (isn't?) destined to become a form of fascism, but the ICE is a bona fide project of creating brownshirts, whether intentional or not. These are scum, and they're personally indebted to Trump. It's a very nasty kind of thing to have in a nation.
You still think it's about the hard but necessary work of reversing the demographic replacement or cracking down on crime, about culture war and unfair double standards. I believe that's too optimistic a way to look at the situation.
P.S. Minneapolis Police Chief on the track record of his boys vs the ICE.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
Christianity stated to become fashionable among Russia's intelligentsia right about 70s, as I said. Sure, there are still a lot of atheists
Still, huh.
Sorry, you don't know shit about "private beliefs" of Russians. Please save these insights for hangouts of retirees in Brighton Beach. Russian state-backed theocracy has about as much penetration as Hungarian traditionalism and pronatalism. (Also "not Western" I guess).
This is the second time you use words which make me suspect you have problems with Jews. Is that right? Speak plainly - are you an ideological anti-Semite, or do you think using antisemitic tropes somehow makes you cool kid?
I think that you in particular, JarJarJedi, are a very annoying, very stereotypical Russophobic Soviet Jew emigre, bitter about his treatment back in Russia/USSR or pre-Soviet pogroms or whatever else, who feels entitled to characterize Russians as de facto subhumans and gerrymanders historical Russian cultural achievements so that they're overwhelmingly attributed to "not really Russians" (ie Jews and Western Europeans, or at least "Russians who were effectively not Russians", circularly creating a distinction between Russian and European high culture); you're too weaselly to spell it out like this; and I do not recognize your entitlement to do this or to question me on my prejudices.
Your DARVO is also not appreciated. You're not as clever as you think.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
Some Nazis were known for having a soft heart. John Rabe is a famous one. He seemed to misunderstand the nature of the larger movement.
On 23 February 1938, Rabe left Nanjing. He traveled first to Shanghai, returning to Berlin on 15 April 1938. He took with him a large number of source materials documenting Japanese atrocities in Nanjing.[14] Rabe showed films and photographs of Japanese atrocities in lecture presentations in Berlin, and he wrote to Hitler, asking him to use his influence to persuade the Japanese to stop further violence. Rabe was detained and interrogated by the Gestapo; his letter was never delivered to Hitler.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
"a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, attitudes, and habits of the individuals in these groups"
It's not conflation. It's just what culture is.
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 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.
I'll charitably amend this to "we have an irreconcilable difference in understanding of words".
That is my point,
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.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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.
So what?
@self_made_human proceeds to generate a lot of prose, but all he really needed to do was press for some substantiation of this argument. «Weights» is a word. What LLMs really are is information. Why exactly is this specific mode of information incompatible with having high-level properties like «personality flaws»? You accuse him of incoherence in the inane tiger side debate, but «models are weights, ergo anthropomorphized traits don't apply except as a loose metaphor» is basically schizophrenic in my book. What's the actual claim here? That anthropomorphic properties are substrate-dependent, that functionalism is wrong? Just say so instead of snarking and appealing to incredulity. Ideally with some defense for this opinion.
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