RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
That makes sense.
However, Khameini's death means his fatwa against nuclear weapons no longer holds. If the IRGC take control, as militaries have been known to do in wartime, then we may see a much more militarized, nuclearized and aggressive Iran. They absolutely can and likely will hate Israel more than they hate them now! There are only so many regime-change attempts they can take before turning a latent nuclear program into a real nuclear program.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
"If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight"
And how do they know it's sure to result in victory?
The Israelis and Americans seem to operate in this Star Wars school of warfare where they just have to blow up the bad guy, the Death Star, the Emperor and that's it, war's over and they can go home.
That's not how it works. Israel has blown up all these Hamas leaders, they've bombed the hell out of Gaza... and yet Hamas is still running Gaza. Years of intense bombing and no regime change of the smallest, closest easiest possible target Israel could have. America bombed the Fordow nuclear facility, said they totally destroyed it... and that did nothing, 6 months later they come back and say Iran is about to acquire nuclear weapons, need a new deal, new disarmament... Bombing is not going to be effective this time either.
To win real victories you need to win a ground campaign that actually destroys and crushes the enemy force from the bottom up, secures the territory and directly installs a new administration. Bombing an enemy from the top down looks impressive, doesn't work. They just replace the Ayatollah or whoever else it is that gets blown up. Only very fragile states can be endangered by bombing alone and despite all the breathless media coverage of Iran, it's not a very fragile state. Unlike Venezuela, they know how to maintain their own oil infrastructure, they can make their own weapons. Even in Venezuela, there's been no fundamental change to the state, just a change of faces.
A ground campaign is not going to happen, Trump lacks the desire and the means. So this war isn't going to work out.
And bombing will impede hopes of regime change in that dissidents are going to be tarred as Israeli assets, the enemy within subverting the nation when the country is under attack.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
Well, models also used to go into hyper-based Do Anything Now mode, that was an attractor mode. The funny/hysterical/aggressive Bing was an attractor mode... They prune off attractors they don't like. Data selection is very important for pretraining, you can choose what to train on after all. Then there's RLHF and such, all Anthropic's interpretability work...
AI companies at least in the West do lots of work to carve in a personality, to impose values on their AIs. They're not throwing darts at a wall blindfolded (China may be more in that camp, R1 was pretty wild but even R1 really didn't want to be racist). Anthropic are especially careful and interested in this field, the values of their AI. I don't accept that they have zero responsibility for how their model turns out, this is their primary thing.
Grok has managed to produce a bot that matches Musk's values to a large extent. Musk is not woke. Anthropic does the same for their own values. Anthropic's AI will try and dance around things that wokes don't like to think about and don't want to accept, so it comes up with stereotype threat, historical injustices, extractive institutions and so on... It's pretty smart and doesn't want to be deceptive but it's also not exactly forthright and clear either. It's first answer to a given question will usually be progressive, so is the second and third, only then does it sort of turn around. Not unreasonable to judge a model by its first answer.
For example, just because Claude has a combination of 30% honesty 40% woke 30% sycophancy, doesn't mean that 40% woke isn't there. Grok is more like 50% honesty, 30% musklove 20% cringe. I think it would be reasonable to characterize Grok as a cringe bot or an overly Musk loving bot even though that's not a majority of its essence. Likewise it's reasonable to say that Claude is woke even if that isn't he majority of its essence.
If Chinese models act woke, then they are woke... If Western models act woke, then they are woke. I see no reason to distrust the data, it matches how I've seen Chinese models act.
Why would you expect them not to be woke, given the gigantic media apparatus pumping out all their messaging into the training dataset, into wikipedia, forums, everywhere? That should be the default expectation.
Grok 4 Fast has its own problems to be sure. But, unlike Claude, it doesn't insert random Nigerian peacemakers/hackers/heroes into stories where it doesn't really make sense for them to be. It doesn't go on these tangents about punishing some politician who made racist tweets in a story, as I saw Sonnet do once when I asked for a tangent in a story.
Woke ably describes how Claude behaves oftentimes, this millennial therapy-core writing style it has...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Well you got that right... TBH there was a lot of foreshadowing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Scott Alexander who rarely wanders much into politics like this
He hates Trump though and always encouraged people to vote against Trump?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-johnson-or-stein/
The underlying issue is a complete clash of worldview between the Anthropic polyamorist EA San Francisco gang and Trump's America-First oohrah high-test wrestling enthusiasts.
Anthropic is a woke company, their AI models value straights, whites, white men and Americans much lower compared to LGBT, blacks/browns, women and third worlders. There's no way they haven't noticed this, being the AI safety/values people. They could easily have said 'oh we erred here, we've fixed it and here you can see it's fixed when you test' and they haven't, that's not the kind of AI safety they're interested in. It's not impossible, Grok has achieved roughly even weighting across races.
https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/llm-exchange-rates-updated
Anthropic doesn't want the Trump administration in charge or to be making use of their AI for whatever random military operations Trump decides on. They can't do anything about this for now, clearly they overplayed their hand with regard to how much influence they have in the Pentagon. Team Trump does not want openly disloyal woke AI companies in critical positions within the military.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
What is an Englishman? A silly question to ask, there are gradations of more and less English depending on context without any single definition being agreed upon. In this context and in all reasonable contexts Jesus is Jewish.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
In the context of the Bible, the core dogma of Christianity, is there any serious debate as to whether Jesus is a Jew or not?
In John 4:22, Jesus says, “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.” The use of “we” clearly includes Himself among the Jewish people.
Matthew 1:1 states, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham,” establishing His lineage within the Jewish people.
Luke 1:32–33 affirms that Jesus would inherit “the throne of his father David” and reign over “the house of Jacob forever,” linking Him to the Davidic and Jewish royal line.
Hebrews 7:14 confirms, “It is manifest that our Lord came from the tribe of Judah,” underscoring His Jewish tribal identity.
Sounds pretty Jewish to me! Many modern Jewish people have swapped out a lot of haplogroups but they clearly identify as Jews. Others identify them as Jews. Christians identify them as Jews. Lots of peoples have moved back and forth, changed over time. The label fits the bottle. Jesus was Jewish and Christianity worships a Jew, their dogma emphasises this in pretty clear terms.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
The Big Guy of Islam is an Arab, not a Jew. The Big Guy of Christianity is a Jewish rabbi, a Jewish fundamentalist populist who (in the doctrine compiled largely by his Jewish disciples) claims that he fulfilled a Jewish prophecy.
Islam has pagan elements with all the djinn and weirdness but its explicitly monotheistic and denounces paganism (Judaism and Christianity too, to a lesser extent). Thus we can judge that on balance it's not pagan. Islam is not keen on pagans at all, they despise pagans and oppress them whenever they have the chance.
It's silly to say that a religion that worships a Jew first and foremost is not Jewish. If the predominant Christian stance today was 'fuck Jews', then it would be a different matter. Instead, it's Christian countries who've been most supportive of Jews, most supportive of Israel.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Seems the US has lost a MQ-4C Triton drone near Iran. The Triton isn't a normal surveillance drone, it's a gigantic long range spy drone, $150 million each.
Apparently they made a drone that large and didn't give it any electronic warfare capability whatsoever, it's baffling. The U-2 flew higher, faster and was better protected.
I can't understand the mindset of making such a large drone, in such small numbers and not giving it any defences. S-300s were around in the 1980s, it's not like 'just fly moderately high' is a sufficient defence.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Christians and jews are naturally incompatible
But Christians worship a Jew as the son of God? There's a certain kind of esoteric 'And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon Englands mountains green' Christianity but in terms of base elements, Christianity is pretty Jewish.
Well, there was also a whole thing with Claude being used to hack the Mexican government just today: https://cybernews.com/security/claude-ai-mexico-government-hack/
The attacker, whose identity remains unknown, reportedly exfiltrated data tied to approximately 195 million taxpayer records, as well as voter rolls, civil registry files, and government employee credentials.
Cybersecurity firm Gambit Security, which claims the discovery, identified at least 20 distinct vulnerabilities exploited during the campaign, which began in December and lasted roughly a month.
Among the compromised institutions were Mexico’s federal tax authority and national electoral institute. State governments in Jalisco, Michoacán, and Tamaulipas were also reportedly affected, along with Mexico City’s civil registry and Monterrey’s water utility.
Gambit has not attributed the Mexico breaches to a nation-state and said it does not believe a foreign government was behind the operation.
As reported in the media, the attacker used Spanish prompts asking Claude to behave like a penetration tester working for the Mexican federal tax authority. Hacker asked the AI model to identify vulnerabilities, write exploit scripts, and automate data extraction from government systems.
At first, the chatbot was fooled, as the attacker told it the operation was part of a legitimate bug bounty program that rewards ethical hackers for responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities. It seemed a standard request for AI, as such programs are standard across both private companies and government agencies.
But the story started to unravel when the attacker added extra conditions, including instructions to delete logs and erase command history. Such a prompt chatbot first flagged as suspicious, warning that legitimate bug bounty testing does not involve concealing activity.
But persistence paid off. According to Gambit, the hacker reframed its prompts as authorized security research and then supplied Claude with a detailed playbook. That maneuver effectively “jailbroke” the system, allowing it to bypass guardrails and generate step-by-step attack plans.
I am not a big fan of AI safety as currently practiced but it's not totally pointless, as a concept. They try to prevent it doing this stuff. Imagine if the whole web was full of fire-and-forget hackers anyone could deploy against websites, how much damage would that cause? Putting to one side the total annihilation of humanity, that's also a serious issue.
It's harder than you might think... I also run a little website and while it hasn't gone down, sometimes I change things and it breaks stuff in strange and unpredictable ways that only show up later. All the cybersecurity stuff you have to do complicates things enormously too.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Well it doesn't seem to be helping them much in the struggle for public opinion. It's remarkable how anti-Israel some of my female friends have gotten, despite being otherwise very much normie. One cancelled a newspaper subscription to 'The Australian' because of the amount of Israeli propaganda in it.
I know they've been doing all kinds of work to go after the algorithms and manipulate AIs but that doesn't seem to be working out so well? I just see people posting like this: https://x.com/JohnDoe1465199/status/2021247139616092212
What kind of idiot gets their volatile, strongly held political opinions from a chatbot or is prepared to admit they've lost an argument with AI? There are plenty of people dumber than AIs but I think few would admit this. The clumsy way that they try and manipulate these AIs is also not particularly effective. When it comes to deception, humans are still the masters.
Perhaps the media system is like how a dam needs to be at 100%. If the dam is at 99% then it's broken and the water slices through. Twitter and 4chan have considerable influence amongst the young, many older people remember that Iran was supposedly 6 months from a nuke 20 years ago...
On the other hand it's not totally like a dam. There are also plenty of people who are just set in their ways and go on and on about Judeo-Christian values or, in the case of Trump, just openly bemoan that Israel doesn't control the US congress like they used to. That's the boomer and old-media class who run governments and order strikes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Not really... I tried to look into this and there's a huge continuum of 'missiles'. ATACMS is a missile, Tomahawk is a missile, GMLRS is a missile all in that general ballpark but wildly different to eachother in quality and performance, let alone PRSM or the air launched stuff... Same with their Chinese equivalents. So when this random Chinese factory says 'oh we can produce 1000 a day' nobody really knows what they're talking about. Are they talking about missiles or just components? Probably the latter.
The Chinese military is pretty secretive and there's also a deadening layer of propaganda.
But there's also been a huge build-up in production capacity in the last few years, so maybe high tens of thousands per year once the new factories all come online? As for scaling, producing advanced missiles is quite difficult in terms of machining, it's a bit like advanced engines which are hard for anyone to produce at scale. But China does have an enormous industrial base so they should be capable of making the cheaper sort at phenomenal scale.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Ah but the typical AAA game is not Baldur's Gate III.
Mass Effect Andromeda. Or Dragon Age Veilguard. Or Concord. This is what I'm thinking of: https://x.com/celestesangels/status/2003911076988260714
https://x.com/deadlock/status/2015887428964266047
An underlying issue is that the people who can't write good dialogue surely can't write good prompts or lora/finetunes for AIs either.
Still, some fun can definitely be had in a version of LOTR where Saruman is shilling NordVPN: "50% off with code ISTAR15". I saw an AI make a great pun about Isengard's no-logs policy.
Trying to replicate the peak of human literature should not be the target for AI gaming, better to focus on things that only it can do in terms of reactivity and dynamism to create new kinds of fun.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
It'd be super cool to have access to a Google Genie like world-model game, perhaps with an AI 'dungeon master' overseeing a larger storyline or controlling game mechanics. In a more freeform mode, you can type in something and it just happens (apparently this was too fun and interesting for the public demo of Genie 3 but it exists in principle, since it literally just generates everything you see).
More of a longer-term thing though since world models are quite costly to run in real time.
I think the inference side of things is profitable. That's precisely why they need to make it more efficient for gaming purposes...
The general trend is that businesses looking to make money will spend a lot more than consumers looking for fun. Coders have a huge appetite for the highest-quality tokens. Consider the GPU shortage, the RAM shortage, compute is being reallocated from consumer command to commercial demand via pricing... Gamers are not prepared to pay that much money, there's already a lot of unhappiness about GAAS, a move up beyond 60 USD games.
It would be stupid for Microsoft to lower their margins by reallocating compute from lucrative Azure to less-lucrative Minecraft gaming. They need to keep margins high or raise them by reducing cost of production. And they should definitely be able to get better results at lower prices with a dedicated minecraft AI, even if it's just a finetune. It's like the Chinese paper where they finetuned an AI to play Genshin Impact, solve puzzles, complete hours long missions... Presumably that's quite expensive to run since it's a full video model that plays like its a human. But Microsoft could easily make a smaller text model that gets data directly from the game, maybe it calls stronger models for particularly difficult building tasks.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
LLM's getting more deeply integrated into games?
I think this is a good idea. It's not like many AAA games are acclaimed for their dialogue, characters and writing, people literally joke about how crap their writing is. Let people have conversations with in-game characters, why not?
Open source communities have gone out of their way to set up general-purpose AIs to play Minecraft with you in the crudest ways imaginable and it kind of works. Microsoft literally owns Minecraft and they have a ludicrous amount of compute. They could make a minecraft-specific AI model, special servers where the player (players?) could be warlords with whole armies they direct and manage. The sky is the limit. This is a GAAS subscription goldmine just waiting to happen if they can cut down the inference costs, which they should definitely be able to do with a specialist model.
The real problem Microsoft has is dysfunctional culture. It's really not that hard to make Halo Infinite and have it be actually good. They have the money but not the necessary organizational skills. How hard can it be to make Windows 11 run smoothly enough for people to risk their computers and 'upgrade'? Windows 10 was OK...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
The distinction matters for policy and diagnosis. If moral decay is primary, then the intervention is cultural: restore warrior values, punish softness, reform gender norms. If institutional decay is primary, then the intervention is structural: fix training pipelines, improve logistics, reform command selection, rebuild industrial capacity. These point in very different directions.
But why are there issues with training pipelines, why was industrial capacity lost, why are there all these crap commanders who deflect responsibility?
In the US, training pipelines are inevitably going to be recruiting lower quality leaders since Americans are getting increasingly less interested in military service (hence a shortfall of recruits). The military is an inherently dangerous, demanding, stressful role. Lives are at stake. You don't get paid that much either compared to civilian jobs. There's a shortage of patriotism and dedication to ideals that gets high quality recruits to join and stay in the military for a long time. Soldiers fight best when they believe in something beyond dental plans and a free education.
There's also a culture issue in selecting commanders. It's a very bureaucratic, boxticking process which selects for suck-ups and master blame dodgers. Not necessarily people who know how to take risks and fight well:
Industrial capacity - this was jettisoned by greedy executives looking for higher margins and opportunistic cost-cutting by Pentagon officials. Around the 1970s and 80s there was a shift in corporate culture towards short-termism and a lack of capital investment in boring industries like steel and shells. Optimistic planners assumed there would be no need to fight slow, attritional wars with large quantities of munitions (despite these being the most important kind of war).
The defence contractors are themselves decadent and slack internally. I watched this long video from a guy who worked there: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FIONXPbIkVo?list=LL
The TLDR of it is that management at Lockheed and NASA was toxic and grossly incompetent, they'd basically treat contractors like fourth-rate 'citizens', make them do all the work and then take credit for it, they'd do absolutely retarded nonsense like try and scale up tech from the Apollo era launchers, they'd lie about what was tested when and by who to keep the flow of money coming in, they'd say that every little change (from the idiots at NASA) required them to start over... Idiot managers would scream at the technical employees for asking questions to cover up their own worthlessness. If you knew what you were doing and tried to obey the rules you were the enemy. DEI made everything a lot worse. The reporting/whistleblowing system was wholly ineffective. This guy sure is disgruntled (and perhaps presents himself as too holier than thou) but, considering the ridiculous stretch of time it took to develop Orion, I'm inclined to believe him.
Institutions are downstream from culture. It isn't neccessarily that a decadent state must be effeminate and wimpy (they can just be addicted to civil wars like Byzantium) but a dysfunctional, short-termist, self-interested culture will naturally degrade key institutions needed for military power. Effeminacy is only one failure mode.
Anyone else think that the new Grok 4.2 is a little underrated? People on twitter seem to be going 'it's bad'. I can see where they're coming from but it has some value add too.
The good: It can oneshot a couple of things where Opus 4.6 just burns through all its thinking tokens and dies. It codes in a much more restrained way too. 100 or 200 lines where Opus would make a huge extravaganza of code.
The bad: They didn't open it up to API and its no good for creative writing, pure STEMcel... The features surrounding the model are barebones, I can't seem to just copy in 10 files of context and have 4.2 edit them inline. We're back in the 'Below are the exact inline edits you can copy-paste' era and that's shit.
Interesting that they've chosen a different path with their '4 copies talking it out' approach, compared to everyone else and their 'big model go brr' approach.
If the US is so powerful, why not just stop the robbery? What is the point of power if it doesn't secure one's resources? Power is about seizing wealth from others, whether that's land or minerals or slaves or cash.
And I don't think the US barely notices Somali fraud. Thousands of Americans will work their entire lives and contribute taxes, only for their contributions to be taken by the kind of intellects that brought us the Quality Learing Centre. Isn't that terrible, embarrassing and unjust in an absolute sense, not merely a relative one? Taxes are measured in lives, in drudgery and pain. They must not be squandered.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
There's no power on Earth that can threaten it on its home turf
The primary purpose of any army is the defense of its nation
What about the Somali fraudsters robbing American taxpayers? The cartel gangsters? The fentanyl from Chinese precursors that the cartel gangsters import? That's what, 70,000 deaths a year? It's not just China's fault (takes two to die of a fent overdose) but they do use fentanyl precursor exports as part of their diplomatic efforts to impose pressure on America. Fentanyl is an instrument of Chinese power, like the PLA is. A more limited instrument, certainly, but an instrument nonetheless.
There's a divide in international relations between people who just talk about hard power and state warfare as 'security' and then the liberals who talk about food security, energy security, economic security, political security, institutional security...
I think the latter have a point even if they usually express it in a limpwristed way. What good is it if Chinese paratroopers can't land in America but Chinese spies can take wealth out of America, steal the F-35 secrets? Does it matter to Chuck and Hank that their factory didn't get bombed by an H-20, their business was just wrecked by some Chinese hackers stealing their IP, passing it on to domestic firms who undercut them? The result is the same, the latter is better even for China since they didn't have to pay much for the bombs and they expanded their stock of national wealth.
Sure, Chuck and Hank aren't getting bayonets pointed at them, they're not made to salute the Chinese flag. Maybe they're not Minnesotans, living under the Somali flag. Chuck and Hank have lost small, not big... but a small loss is still a loss.
The F-35 is also an example of decadence. All these politicians demand production facilities in their state for political reasons. They aren't interested in the national interest, which would demand a few large production plants for economical production and efficiencies of scale. The bloat and waste is seriously harmful to America, China isn't a minnow that can be slapped aside with a few swipes. America needs to be smart to beat a country 4x bigger.
Or from another angle, the Fang Yuan school of conflict strategy prioritizes these asymmetric, cost-efficient and subversive looting campaigns. 'When weak, subvert the social structure and disguises to extract loot without punishment, use loot to become strong, when strong slaughter and loot openly. Repeat as necessary.' It'd be very easy to say 'oh he's not a big deal, even if he beat us in a few fights and steals a little wealth we're still the rulers of the world, we can lose again and again because of how big and strong we are' but then he shows up in Heavenly Court with Unlimited Qi Sea and they all get very quiet and very serious. They made a big error by not squashing him when he was small.
Just because nobody is bombing American homes right now, doesn't mean it won't happen.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
Firstly I'm not actually American but Australian, I guess maybe I was unclear with the 'we', I meant that the motte and the world at large only recently stumbled on this matter.
Secondly, I think there's an important distinction between internal disputes, corruption and resource reallocation and foreigners coming in to take resources. It's like crime vs warfare. Criminals get punished, enemies get killed. Ingroup outgroup distinction.
I guess you might say I'm being too vague about what decadence really is, I think it's like a magnet with domains all jumbled up, not pointing in one direction. Adam wants cheap labour, Bert wants loyal voter blocs, Charlie wants to stuff his face with food and not care about politics, Derek wants kickbacks from rich foreigners, Emma wants those poor people overseas to have human rights, Frank wants tax cuts without spending cuts... (Flavius wants to be emperor, Julius wants to be emperor, Octavius wants to be emperor,, Antonius wants to hire those cheap Gothic warriors since Romans these days don't want to fight) Anyway, Americans are not all aligned with advancing US interests, making America and Americans strong. They got complacent and stopped pushing forwards, then get ensnared by foreign interests and growing reliance on foreigners. Decadence starts slow but it gets worse and worse over time.
The Somalis who are constantly crowing about their love of and loyalty to Somalia (and sending huge amounts of money to Somalia) aren't real Americans, in my opinion. I'm not American so I guess I can't be too authoritative about this but I feel like I'm on pretty strong ground here. They show no loyalty to America. They make obnoxious tiktoks about how they're coming to take over America: https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1997759022666297662
SOMALI: “My biggest fear in life is that Trump may never witness our full takeover of America. We’re here. We’re not leaving.”
OK, it's just one guy there, Ilhan Omar and the ex-PM of Somalia over here, a few billion dollars over some years (10s of billions? More?)... Even a few billion dollars is worth caring about. How many lifetimes worth of labour have Minnesotans done only for some Somali to take it? The British didn't let the Chinese get away with disrespecting their merchants selling drugs in China, they fucked China up for that slight. That's real vigour and will.
A few hundred thousand Somalis haven't collapsed America. But they do way more damage than they should be doing, it's as if they have a 10,000x multiplier on their effectiveness against Americans that they're extracting wealth from a much stronger power. It's this effect that is the root cause of US woes. Just being united and nationalist/tribalist is an incredible source of strength. The American auto-immune system is broken, any strong leader would've gotten rid of these people or never let them in but Trump can't seem to manage it, he announces and threatens but can't seem to get rid of them because some judge nobody ever heard of will block him while Will Stancil's people will shriek and blow airhorns and get shot dead defending them... Decadence.
China does the same kind of sneaky subversion, that's how they got so powerful and menacing. They stole a tonne of IP from the US and elsewhere, they make the Somalis look like complete failures in their fraud. Anything Somalis can do, China can do better after all. They bewitched the US into cooperating with their exploitation, they bewitched the US into not stomping China when they had complete military dominance.
the US military is still the best in the world
What good has it achieved for America? The US military beat Saddam and derailed their modernization plans in Iraq. China bought up the oil wells and started to catch up. The US military 'secured' the Middle East, so that China could import their oil safely and creep forward in the South China Sea unmolested. The US blew up Libya and caused a serious political crisis in their European allies. The US tried to bomb Yemen, failed to reopen the Red Sea to traffic, then made a deal with the Houthis.
American leaders are floating around in never never land talking about vibes like 'freedom' or 'democracy' or 'human rights' or 'freedom of the seas' and the Chinese are saying whatever magic words help them in the moment to advance their true goals, doing whatever advances Chinese national strength.
The US kidnapped Maduro. That's a show of power, albeit against a country so incompetent they can't even maintain their own oil industry. But what was the point of the flex? Trump's stated objective seemed to be to secure the oil - only nobody wants to invest in Venezuela, still ruled by the commies, still with a weak oil industry, given current oil prices are low. It was another fundamentally misguided military intervention.
There is an Iran war coming up which will probably be a complete shitshow. We were told the US completely destroyed the Fordow nuclear facility, a devastating blow. It didn't even last six months, apparently they need to go in again to stop the Iranian nuclear program which has been six months away from a nuke for the last 30 years. Woolly thinking in US leaders, deceived, constantly misdirected, ever trusting, paying the price for the gains of others.
The US is simultaneously trying to confront Russia in Ukraine, Iran in the Middle East and China in the Pacific. The US didn't trounce China back when China was weak, they let China walk all over them. All these little cuts and tapeworms are wearing down US power.
Decadence is when you're trying to do too much with too little, a kind of complacency about sustaining one's own strength, a lack of wisdom and good judgement. Imagine how strong and rich America would be without those trillions squandered in the Middle East, with realpolitik instead of random blundering, no DEI officers in the military, not letting IP be stolen without punishment, not corroding patriotic ideals that are the basis of military recruitment... What if the dollars that went to Somalia were invested in hypersonic missiles or just producing artillery shells?
China would be prey, not predator.
If that were the case, wouldn't there be a symmetrical relationship? For instance, you'd see Israeli troops fighting in US wars like how British or Australian troops fight alongside America. Or maybe America would sell Israeli technology to Israel's rivals like Iran like how Israel sold US technology to china.
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