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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31256 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Real shit has already started. I find the notion that this is the local peak and we'll have some respite unreasonably optimistic. There is, in principle, no reason for the war to not escalate into seven-figure casualties range, global economic issues not to deepen into a new Great Depression (related, h/t @sciuru), the war over Taiwan and subsequent Chinese and Russian collapses not to begin in, like, Q2 2023, then we get first serious AI incidents and global censorship/compute regulation regime, nuclear exchange by 2024, famines by 2025, supervirus plague (many variants currently in development) and what have you – up to and including NGO/Messiah/Basilisk coming. Garbage time is running out, like Nick Land warned us but we didn't listen. «Nothing ever happens» is sooo 2015.

Now as for your analysis, China has its own set of insurmountable structural problems, self-inflicted but at the same time exploited by the US: food dependence (yes, they won't starve outright the moment Malacca is blockaded, but no, they are actually not food-secure, they need to import that livestock feed, fertilizers and everything else and will not be able to pivot to rationing in emergency), chip/tech dependence that'll very painfully restrict their long-term ability to attack Taiwan with its accelerating militarization, collapsing real estate bubble, terrible ecology and soil health, brain drain, spiking dependency ratio plus failing soon at the automation cope (because, again, no chips), being boxed in by American allies, and plain degenerating governance that has unironically fallen in some respects to the lows of Mao era (and none of those problems will be solved by the planned assault on Taiwan). Iran suffers from similar woes (oh look) – and so does every other anti-America country.

There really is no trade-off between helping Ukraine crush Russian imperial ambitions and choking China (or defending Taiwan, or encouraging a revolution in Tehran), and expanding influence in the EU; those efforts load, and load only modestly, completely different non-interchangeable sectors of American economy and state capacity, and accordingly there is no advantage to China from Russia getting into this mess in the form of American weakening. Other modes are also dubious. Resource colony? No, there's no significant advantage here aside from the ability to demand discounts; Russia is already near-maximally dependent on China, and is unable to deliver as much as they need and more than is already delivered. We still don't have a reliable transport route, the «silk road» goes through Kazakhstan which is rapidly losing respect for Russia and drifting out of its sphere of influence; pipelines are fragile, as we've learned recently; construction of new connections has been criminally slow etc. In non-essential trade like fish and other foodstuff, China has been sabotaging trade on the pretext of COVID. Of course Russia has primed the world for blanket sanctions against aggressors. Plus a lot of previous gen Chinese military technology is derived from Russian/Soviet models, so now the free world is getting free training in destroying it. In general, getting your ally diminished is not any sort of 4D strategy (though I would't put it past them to grossly miscalculate). The list of demerits goes on.

But none of this matters in the grand scheme of things. What matters is that Russia and China are in terminal decline because they cannot retain talented people, and the point of no return has been passed some substantial time ago. I am always appalled by economic/political analysis which ignores this and focuses on some nonsense like GDP growth or even trade surplus. Who cares? If you don't have talent you cannot compete; worse yet, you have to allow talentless people to climb hierarchies of competence and power (if only to maintain short-term order and production pace), and they reinforce the culture of underhanded competition that closes off the hierarchy to remaining talent, which accelerates its flight or just rots on the bottom of the society; in the end you have a police state with serfs, and that's less than nothing in our era. Both countries are like men with fatal illness (or gradual blood loss); at times they grasp for panaceas, at times they feel mad rage, and at times they feel better and get complacent, but it already does not matter because the bottom line has been written long ago.

An appropriate Galkovsky quote from 1989:

Leontief said:

«No state system, as history shows, has lived more than 1,200 years: many states have lived much less».

Now there is a shift, a formation of new nations. Modern France or England are already France and England only in the geographical sense. The brain is American; the body is gradually being mullattized (mixed marriages, mass immigration of Blacks and Arabs). As a result, new ethnicities are gradually emerging, with a new history, a new religion. Already this France resembles France of the 18th century only as much as the «Holy Roman Empire of the German nation» resembled the original Roman Empire.

And it is very naive to resent this. Leontief observed, correctly again:

«There are people who are very humane, but there are no humane states ... Frankly they too are organisms, but of a different class; they are essentially IDEAS reified into a known social order. IDEAS have no humane heart. Ideas are inexorable and cruel, for they are nothing other than the clearly or vaguely understood laws of nature and history».

It is madness to lament the mortality of men. People are mortal. And this is terrible. But it is a law, an idea. One can feel its cruelty and immorality. But to «denounce» Death... She won't argue with you. You can curse her for decades, but you won't get an answer. Just gradually your sight and hearing will begin to weaken, your teeth and hair will fall out, your skin will become wrinkled and flabby... Then as if the glass shard cuts into your heart and that's it...

That's why anti-Americanism is so crude, so unintelligent. America is first of all a certain idea, and an idea cannot be destroyed. Americans themselves follow it involuntarily, of course. To think that this or that state is perishing «because of the Americans» is as ridiculous as to think that a person is dying of a heart attack. «What do people die of? – Illness». – No, people die of Death.

True to form, he wrote «Jews» and «Anti-Semitism» instead of «Americans» etc. in the original. But this replacement probably only makes things better, and does not change the point.

Now there is a shift, a formation of new nations. Modern France or England are already France and England only in the geographical sense. The brain is American; the body is gradually being mullattized (mixed marriages, mass immigration of Blacks and Arabs). As a result, new ethnicities are gradually emerging, with a new history, a new religion. Already this France resembles France of the 18th century only as much as the «Holy Roman Empire of the German nation» resembled the original Roman Empire.

This is bullshit. Whoever wrote this does not know France at all. Sure, we are closer to America now. Sure, we look less like 18th century France. But does America look like 18th century America? This argument is shitty. Modern France does not look like 18th century France because we have cars, planes, trains and computers. Nothing to do with America by itself.

The relationship to the economy and to the culture is not at all the same in France and in the US. It's not that French people oppose freedom to own weapons, it's that they do not even understand why anyone would not oppose it.

  • Currently, there is a strike in refineries that would have created an oil shortage if the government did not react by using strategical reserves. Can you imagine that in the US?

  • There is a national ban of headscarves (or actually any kind of religious or political symbols) at public schools in France. Can you imagine that in the US?

  • In the last presidential election, we got an actual socialist at 22% (the guy is anti NATO and thinks Taiwan should belong to the US). Macron got 28% and Le Pen 23%. Can you imagine that in the US?

  • Healthcare and retirement schemes are state-controlled. Can you imagine that in the US?

The only one of your four things hard to imagine in the US is the national ban on religious symbols at public schools. Healthcare and retirement are already heavily state controlled. Strikes happen in the US too, though far less often than in France. And while our system tends to whittle presidential elections down to two serious candidates, we did have Bernie Sanders (an actual socialist) in the primaries in 2016.

Bernie Sanders politics would be center right in France. There is a french guy I know that was supporting Bernie Sanders in the US and François Fillon (the mainstream right wing candidate in 2017) in France...

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