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Notes -
So in the post which earned me the ban, one specific line that invited complaints, glib pontification about my being brain-fried by Twitter, and even concern for my wellbeing (eg from @Throwaway05) was:
I stand by this line, and I believe it had aged very well indeed, complete with the claim of superiority of Iranian leadership material. In particular Ali Larijani, the butcher, the Kantian, had been vindicated, and killing him proved to be utterly futile. This is a triumph of the human over the bestial, reason over dogma, intellect and will over emotion and matter. Pretty clear-cut actually. I think Americans should reflect on this phenomenon, it's like their movies and cartoons, except they weren't the underdog protagonists.
The bolded part was labeled «Nazi talk», and: «Systematic dehumanization of someone you dislike and leadership figures of them is a classic sign of disordered thought processes that often lead to things like the rise of authoritarian states, ethnic cleansing, justification of deaths of people in that group (ex: Charlie Kirk).» Throwaway, being Mentally Well and Socially Adjusted, felt it prudent to only say that «the current admin has plenty worth complaining about».
I am obviously tempted to snark, but let's be civil. Throwaway, upon everything we've seen while I was out – do you think calling Trump and Hegseth, these two powerful men in particular, swine and worse – was undeserved? Do you think that after a perfidious attack during negotiations, Minab girls' school targeted by Palantir using SoTA AI and maps 10 years out of date and triple-tapped by supposedly Iranian Tomahawks, stealthily sinking a defenseless ship, «a whole civilization will die», «bridge and power plant day», «Death and destruction from the sky. All day long», moving goalposts and retroactively changing objectives of the operation, making up «regime change» with the regime getting unprecedentedly legitimized, lashing out at allies, withdrawing defensive arms from allies and freezing supplies to allies, insider trading, 30+ fraudulent declarations of victory and/or Deal to mislead the markets, bringing the global economy to the brink where SPRs would run dry and serious demand destruction would begin, and eventual concession of military defeat in Versailles, complete with thanks to Xi and Putin for not making it more pathetic – after this entire immense, destructive, disgraceful, fractally embarrassing, entirely unnecessary, wholly CHOSEN, heavily DEFENDED and RATIONALIZED here, shitshow that has defiled American reputation and deflated American mythos (not the LLM from Dario, which sort of saved the day) – …
…
do you think it was reasonable of you to give me a lecture on how I'm losing it, just because I expressed anger and disgust with what was happening and what it meant?
@aqouta do you still think it was my brain that got fried, and not of everyone here who treated this war as business as usual and a cause for armchair chuckling about… all manners of tedious war nerd minutiae?
@WandererintheWilderness do you still think Iranians have underperformed your standards for "human beings with moral agency and rational minds", and that Americans were more up to it?
And what have the warmongers got to say for themselves? @Shakes? @Iconochasm? I'm not even mad anymore, after all you lost, contra my expectations. I'm just kind of curious: can you process that this was a terrible idea and many supposedly cuckoo people who pointed out that the US will lose the war (like Scott Ritter) were, actually, straight up correct, at least?
America won. America killed a generation of Iran's leadership, destroyed Iran's military industrial complex, destroyed Iran's nuclear facilities, and is now negotiating how to destroy the dust. Casualties, 13 killed in action, a plane was hit with an Iranian missile and landed safely, another plane was lost in an accident. An American pilot had to eject above Iran and America was able to infiltrate Iranian land space and build an airstrip to get him out while Iran couldn't do anything. Iran declared the straight closed and the Americans launched night operations to escort ships in the dark. America blockaded the straight and Iran started to run out of energy and food.
Months ago the war critics made all sorts of predictions about how America was going to lose. Iran would be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. They would toll the strait. America might suffer hundreds of casualties or suffer a dramatic naval defeat. America's allies would turn on it. Gas prices would rise so high that the global economy would collapse. Basically none of these things happened. War critics have simply continued onto the next set of predictions. Because the Iranian regime didn't completely collapse, and sanctions will be lifted as part of a peace deal, America is supposed to have lost. Whatever you guys say. I don't think any of you want to be convinced. I think you just want to hate America.
But I think the case is going to become more and more obvious as time goes by. America is building an economy in space. We have rockets that catch themselves in the air and wifi where there are no cell towers. We revolutionized energy, we export energy now. We are leading the AI superrace. We still have the strongest navy and the strongest planes in the world. Europe is falling behind. China can't catch up. We are building a next-generation tech stack the entire world will rely on and nobody else is close to catching up. It's an American century.
Ah. Very well, carry on winning then. This is what the Chinese call spiritual victory. Seriously though…
Literally what does it matter? Why do you even mention this? "Kill some dudes" is not a meaningful military objective.
that would hit so hard if war proponents didn't move through different war objectives.
Some did get fulfilled. I'm personally partial to this specific Truth:
This, as far as I can tell, has come to pass in its entirety. Iran has chosen new great and acceptable leaders (Mojtaba Khamenei and his team); Trump even wants to meet with him. The US and allies will aid Iran in reconstruction, granting Iran (and Oman) authority over the Strait, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. Iranian military-industrial complex is fine (estimates for missiles and drones suggest they're not halfway done, whereas you are out of interceptors) and will be upgraded, given that there are no terms prohibiting that (which there were in Witkoff&Kushner's draft). The nuclear question didn't move much from their "surprising proposal" you responded to with assassination of Khamenei's family, and they had a decades-old fatwa on nukes to begin with. Americans acknowledging Iranian regime's legitimacy and committing to "not deploy any additional forces in the region" is as close to UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER for a superpower as one could imagine.
Yes, I imagine so.
I fear that I am going to be repeating, until the end of time, that just because you read something in a newspaper doesn’t mean it’s true.
What I mean is, knowledge in the fog of war is unfalsifiable. The real information about how many interceptors America has is classified. So is the information about how many of them we used. It would take a lot of scrutiny to prove that what’s floating around on the internet has any credibility. A lot more scrutiny that what I’ve seen on social media.
I remember, for example, when Russia was going to run out of bullets weeks into its invasion of Ukraine. Or when Hillary was so far ahead of Trump that she didn’t even have to think about him anymore.
So when we start factoring out these unfalsifiable rumors, it seems pretty obvious to me who won. America can threaten Iran at will and they have no meaningful way to retaliate. Their only recourse is to attack shipping on the Strait, which can strain the global economy but is not nearly as dramatic of a lever as had once been imagined. America is in such a different weight class from Iran that we have to start inventing hopes that maybe America’s super weapons ran out of ammunition and the Iranian rockets will definitely blow something up next time, any day now.
This gap will grow as America is the only power capable of building into Space and the AI frontier.
That's not how wars work, though. You lost in Korea, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, and in every occasion you enjoyed vast military superiority by the end. "We can kill them, they can't kill us" is simplistic and part of the problem, which is a bronze age savage's theory of victory coupled with an actually cost-sensitive political and economic system.
As for interceptors, I find the alleged exhaustion rates plausible despite "classified" noise from your India-tier corrupt officials, for the following reasons: corrupt people are generally untrustworthy; we know 21st century America is generally subpar at physical production; we know that some arms sales were frozen and THAADs were harvested from Korea; we know that interception rates have declined over the war, esp. in Israel; we know the bases are wrecked.
I won't even argue the facts again (China is about 5 years behind in space and 8 months in AI). On priors, why do you believe this is even plausible? You must know that you have fewer people than China, fewer highly intelligent people, lesser talent allocation to STEM, less industrial capacity, less energy, less cutthroat markets, less… pretty much everything, except some legacy IP. Is this just blind patriotism?
I think they’re a little further behind than that but let’s take this a step farther.
Consider all of the technologies that constitute global power, or that will. Nuclear, Satellites, rockets, rare-earth metals processing, silicon chip design, quantum computing, drones, artificial vision, robotics, energy dominance, etc. etc.
America is dominant or competitive in all fields. America was first to rockets that can catch themselves in the air. America was first to AI. America leads in biotechnology and robots. America leads in space.
China is still behind. They have developed with incredible speed but they have to maintain that pace to keep up. They have, to give them their due, genuine leads in a few fields. They are winning on rare earths and drones, they have the best solar and batteries. They now manufacture the most ships. But they are not producing bombers as advanced as anything made in America. They don’t yet have the rockets to colonize space. They can’t actually replace America’s role at the center of global security.
Not to mention that, fundamentally, China’s rise has been parasitic on America’s wealth. America protects the sea lanes that Chinese vessels rely on. China’s industrial rise doesn’t happen without America handing over the blueprint. Their genuine scientific advancements are still plagued by a culture of cheating and inefficiency that is worse than anything in the Replication Crisis.
China can grow out of this if they have the time. Do they have the time?
Maybe within five years they can replicate SpaceX rockets. But Elon is already pushing the frontiers again with data centers in space and AI. So in five years China might still be three years behind. Maybe in eight years they’re two years behind. Etc.
But China’s continued success is not assured. The fundamentals actually look quite mixed. China’s population is starting to age and even shrink. Capital continues to flee. Tariffs and trade deals are going to erode China’s marginal efficiencies in bulk manufacturing.
I think the likeliest outcome is a kind of China 1970s, or maybe like Japan in the 90s. Population turnover and changing economic fundamentals produce a decade of stagnation. Stagnation produces social malaise (if not unrest). And then China’s progress keeping apace with America stalls. This is already happening — American growth has started outpacing China these last few years. It doesn’t take much for China to stall.
I think this is much likelier than a dramatic shooting war or global conflict. I think it’s unlikely that America faces these same challenges. America is passing through a period of reform and is likely to come out the other side stronger.
Nobody else is even a competitor. Russia is too small to compete on all fronts. Europe is not going to begin building next-generation tech. India is not going to catch up. South America and Japan will be American satrapies. Europe too for that matter.
I keep coming back to space because it’s so stark: Because of SpaceX America is going to build dominance where no one can follow. If you run a mining operation in the Congo or an oil tanker at sea, you plug your operation into Starlink and everything runs through American computers. It’s better than the petrodollar. America wins again.
Yeah China has more people but so what? When has sheer numbers made the biggest difference? Besides, America has access to the smartest talent from Japan, Europe, Latin America, etc. Elon Musk was etc. etc. Everybody wants to live in America for its cities, its beaches, its money, etc. etc. etc.
We’re still having this debate in English. My Swedish friends all speak English. The Germans all care about Trump. Nobody is learning Chinese. Nobody cares about Xi Jinping. America makes the world, China copies America, not the other way around.
At worst it's been symbiotic. Your whole economy is parasitic, which you market as "center of global security", "reserve currency" and what not. Do you honestly believe you could afford these investments without decades of China exporting deflation via cheap manufacturing? You'd run into a couple more financial crises without their "parasitism". Well, they even helped you exit the real one in 2008, at some cost.
Stealth bombers and heavy lift rocket vehicles as a means to provide "the center of global security" is a funny phrasing. We're in 2026, the DoD is renamed to the "Department of War", could we drop the euphemisms? After Greenland, too. You also make systems like THAAD, but we've seen how it goes. It's maybe the center of global security for one specific Middle Eastern nation. Just having a heavily militarized industry is not much of a flex.
Are we still doing this Zeihanite nonsense? You demonstrably can't unilaterally unblock the "sea lanes" when they're threatened by Houthis and Iranians. Moreover you're now the primary cause of those sea lanes getting blocked in the first place. It's a pure protection racket. And as you say, they make vastly more ships than you do. They could escort their own ships if need be, which Trump admitted.
Well, it certainly helped, especially while they were a nation of uneducated peasants with like $900 per capita GDP (1999). As time goes, this argument loses its luster.
No, their R&D is quite efficient now. I routinely see smaller teams on lower budgets getting more done than in the US.
This is cope, sorry.
First, Japan didn't just fall into "stagnation" and "malaise". It was a functionally non-sovereign country which you deliberately fucked over with these "trade deals", incapable of providing its own security, dependent on imports of food and energy (not in a cute "would have to ration" way, in a "shutdown in 6 months" way), and it had a contagious real estate bubble collapse. None of these features are shared with China. Actually I often say that Americans drawing this analogy are telling on themselves. They helplessly lost several industries to a tiny island nation they had previously conquered, and instead of an existential crisis, their takeaway is… "we're invincible, China will be the same"?! Are you serious? Japan with nukes and 12 times larger population would have rendered you irrelevant by 2000s.
Second, no. This "has started outpacing" is largely a function of exchange rates, which China is alleged to suppress for RMB. In national currency terms the cumulative growth has been about equal since 2020. That's really good performance for the US stage of development, admittedly. But at some point they fully deflate their real estate bubble, and you notice that their industry and R&D have been growing quite a bit faster.
More to the point, you seem to not engage with the core fundamentals that matter: your clown government and your simply insufficient talent pool.
Pretty much every time. This is the story of America and Japan, too. Americans do have this strange conception of themselves as a plucky underdog who miraculously wins by Just Being That Good. But even the Soviets barely had an edge in population, probably had none if you exclude assorted Central Asian dependents, and were burdened by a suicidal economic doctrine. This isn't the case with China.
I'm telling you, this isn't enough. This entire list of rabble is just too small, they barely produce talent. Add India, add whatever, it's all just not enough smart people. The only real argument is brain draining China itself, which seems to be going worse lately.
Yes, Trump is more charismatic. Your Swedes and Germans care about Trump. But why should anyone care what Swedes and Germans care about? Trump spits on them. He cares about Xi's opinion.
America sure would like to try to copy some of China, it's just actually hard.
I don't know, this really doesn't feel coherent to me except as anger about America. I don't think you don't understand how the global economy works, I think you're just denying it for some sort of quixotic reason. It's as if you need America to be the Great Satan. When America invented all of the categories we are debating in the first place. America has an insufficient talent pool? America invented the talent pool. America perfected university educations for working-class people while China was trying to starve them. How many Chinese are alive today because of Norman Borlaug? We can debate this in English on an American website built using American technologies transmitted across American cables built under the protection of American ships. You're speaking English because of America. Your webpages are speaking Javascript, because of America.
America is parasitic? You wouldn't even be here without America. This is like the pyramid complaining that the ground is beneath it.
If you want, it's possible to be critical or even very critical of American leadership, lots of people are. But when you step through the looking glass it's a little ridiculous. China's industrial rise doesn't happen without America creating the global market, letting China in, supplying China with energy and raw materials and capital and IP. China still sends a quarter of a million students to American universities every year. What's the harm in admitting that? You can still criticize America for fighting bad wars in the Middle East or prognosticate China's eventual supremacy. Unless your precis is simply that you hate America. Because, otherwise, it's not coherent to argue that America is parasitic on the world because all we have are our ships and China's ships are better anyways.
Notably, this didn't happen.
Well, what happened next? What's the next part of the story? Did it work out for Japan? Does Japan rule the world now? Did America ever have a political reckoning over the economic policies that lead to outsourcing?
America + Europe + Japan + whatever is larger than China. America + India is larger than China. You are failing to advance any consistent standard of analysis except that you believe America must be inferior.
I write in English because this is a forum with the norm of speaking English, you speak no other languages, and I'm willing to talk to you. It's a bit ridiculous to inflate your sense of importance on these grounds. Believe it or not I continue to exist when I don't speak with you or engage with any other American.
America created this, that, all very fair, most of it very valuable. That's about what could be expected from a European society that gets a whole new continent for a frontier and faces no credible threats, but I guess the institutional achievement of Founding Fathers shouldn't be dismissed either. A century or two of unchallenged exponential growth can go a long way. As it stands though, what difference does all this boasting make for the present moment? Does it slow down your decline in share of new drugs developed, for instance? No, the "global economy" doesn't really depend on you, this isn't 1950s when everyone else who matters was bombed to hell or in a semi-colonial shithole condition. No you're not protecting the sea lanes, this just isn't a thing that is happening, you're contesting them. No, you're not making the rest of humanity a favor by printing debt and sucking out capital; it's just something you can afford to do. You're a big and important player, with lots of soft and hard power, that has developed solipsism and near-religious delusions about its potency, primacy and destiny, and about how much silliness it can actually afford in mistreating other nations.
This is disturbingly grandiose and sounds like a Marvel villain's monologue. Your culture has processed the abstract opinion about hegemony into tacky merchandise, into propaganda. This might have sounded authentic in the last century and, objectively speaking, sounds over the top today, in this largely Made-In-China physical world. But identity can be a lagging indicator.
Seriously speaking I don't really think either China or the US are "parasitic"; you started this. China used your IP and capital, which it could not create ex nihilo or procure elsewhere (or at least not that fast). You used cheap Chinese labor, for decades, to allow your own abundance and rent-seeking on your legacy. They had a choice (poverty, slower technological progress, worse security), so did you (higher inflation, perhaps even recession, political turmoil). Nobody chose otherwise out of charity; and neither situation would have been catastrophic. You grossly overestimate the baseline of Chinese capability and the volume of the exchange (look up historical FDI for instance). They speedran to rockets, satellites and thermonuclear weapons without American input and with very little Soviet one; they could have built modern China without you too.
Archetypal specific case: General Motors sold Magnequench to Deng Xiaoping's family, because GM, and by extension America, chose cutting costs and maximizing profit over controlling the rare earths/magnets supply chain in the long term. The Chinese could not "steal" it or "parasitize" on it; they paid the fair price, on the terms of the game you have designed, the game you are clearly so proud of. Now here we are, where REEs and magnets are something China has a chokehold on, developing on the open ambition preceding that acquisition by years. It's simply entitled to act as if they've gotten the better deal, or as if they had less right to what they got out of it.
Tragically, no, Americans are still riding that high.
What I'm trying to explain, in very simple words, that for the first time in your not so long history of independence you have a peer competitor, and on most meaningful metrics it's bigger than you. This has never happened before, you were only ever dunking on underdogs, you don't have a concept of "a bigger power than the US". Obnoxiously celebrating how you've never had a reckoning after Japan, rather than reflecting on how close it was with merely post-war Japan and what this fact says about absolute American capability, just goes to show you don't really grasp this very simple and important quantitative detail.
No. If you want a consistent standard, how about this: still fewer intelligent people and less industry. For example, Meituan alone outperforms India, Japan and most if not all of EU in AI. In electricity production, this entire list combined is maybe 20% above China, and good luck making any use of India. You don't have a sense of scale for what's going on.
P.S.
I have actually looked it up. In nominal USD, the US is up 46% between 2020 and 2025. China did 38% and if we account for the exchange rate, just 30%. So that's something. One can tell a story about GDP divergence here. The issue is that they've had <5% inflation and you had 25-29%. So in terms of "real growth" (anchored to 2017 dollars), the US can report 13% and China ≈32%. Your "real GDP" is $24.2T, not ≈$32T.
I don't put much stock in these numbers, anyway. The point is, you can tell any story with numbers if you know how to spin them (this is still very basic, one could counter with analyzing debt structure or "true purchasing power" or whatever), and I think your, Shakes, information environment provides you with a diet of exclusively self-congratulatory spins.
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