Children,

the western order is done, in the same way that the British empire was over in 1920. It'll take some time to obviously fall, and there may be a lot of shooting, but we've already lost.

We did so when we gave China our industrial base. As for the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, their end will come in the next 30 years. They have no real economies and will fall. Iran might survive, simply thanks to US sanctions forcing it to actually develop its own economy, one it must protect now against China.

Good and evil are not simply a matter of opinion or POV. That the god-botherers think they know what evil and good are, and are often wrong about both does not change that.

Confucius tried to deal with this, his solution was called rectification of terms. Radical subjectivity was a tool for dealing with socially rigid evil systems, like say Victorian England (or late Confucian China, for that matter).

Newtonian and Copernican certainty was used to smash the Feudal church. But Newtonian physics was wrong as a metaphysic.

If there were only one thing I could get people to understand it would be that good virtually always leads to good and evil to evil. Doing the right thing generally leads to positive upwards spirals, and doing the wrong thing leads to downwards spirals. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions and rare.

Forcing the right thing to done also prevent sociopaths and psychopaths from taking over your society or group.

I don't quite get the idea in circulation that Russia is weak and backward and incapable of making weaponry. Russia has some of the best scientists and engineers in the world (and coders) and anyone who thinks otherwise is on something real good. Russia's arms industry is the second largest in the world. They are a major resource producer and while they can't buy weapons from China they can get everything they need to make weapons from them that they don't make themselves.

learn your own intellectual footprint.

What are the things you're almost always right about?

What are you right at about chance level?

What are you a reliable negative indicator for? I'm almost always right about anything that's a trendline or has self-reinforcing spirals. I think well in those terms.

I think the Ukraine war will be seen, in retrospect, as the moment Chinese rise became inevitable. Putting Russia and China firmly together made/makes it impossible to take out China using military force/blockade & that's all the US still has an advantage in. By advantage in this case I mean "absolute advantage", not comparative. US naval projection over international waters is still huge compared to China and w/o Russia the US had a massive nuclear advantage.

It really is weird to have the "superpower" of being able to see the obvious.

Obviously Iraq did not have WMD. Obviously neither the Iraq nor Afghan occupations would succeed.

Obviously letting Covid rip will cause a mass disabling event which will severely damage our societies Obviously China does not regard the US in specific as a friend, since for 12 years the US has publicly stated, over and over again, that China is enemy #1.

Obviously Russia would not let Sevastapol be taken away from them.

Obviously Russia would not let Ukraine join NATO.

If you're really sure Putin is losing, you should be more worried, not less. If Russia loses this war, Putin is done. The idea that he won't escalate if he's in a corner is the exact opposite of the actual incentives.

If he loses power, he will be killed. 100% I wonder about people, really. Have they never been in a raw power situation, where someone rules by fear and might?

When things go wrong, if the group loses, the leader is in great peril, and not just them, their family and core supporters.

After Obama won in 2008 essentially all institutional/big donor funding for the Netroots (progressive blogosphere) dried up overnight. Obama hated us, and made sure to get us.

Meanwhile Google/Facebook were killing advertising rates.

Netroots = dead.

https://twitter.com/SusanofTexas/status/1478423175977484292

Something a lot of folks forget is that for most of the 2000s progressives were far stronger online than conservatives; it wasn't even close.

Obama made sure to end that.

Friend familiar with the Ivies told me that they stopped wanting the smartest people from about 90.

But recently they've realized that smart people, not super conformists, are needed. So they're seeking them again.

Problem is it takes 20 yrs min for them to become leaders. What the Ivies have tended towards for generations now are "super conformers" -- straight As and spent all their time in adult extra-curriculars. People who spent all their time doing what authority wants.

But in the past, they did seek out many of the very smartest, to.

There's no one more irritating to argue with than someone who took Economics 101 or the equivalent and doesn't know that all the simple rules get walked back later.

(Economics is still BS, even at the top level. But at least later classes admit some of the problems.) decreasing price does not always increase demand. People do not optimize utility (by any definition that is not circular). People are not rational. The market is not even slightly rational. The market does not discount the future well at all.

Cultivation Wuxia is pretty funny if you know what's actually involved in that style of Taoist/Mahayanna cultivation.

About five hours a day is sort of minimum for the "superpower" attainments, and it takes years. Unless you started way young, you aren't a pretty boy. also the sort of person who will do that amount of cultivation turns out to be surprisingly uninterested in all the things that heroes in shows/books do. It's like if reading thousands of books gave you superpowers. "Yes, I could do X, but I prefer reading!"

It's really not true that Joe Biden doesn't give a shit about student debt.

Joe Biden was a motive force behind the bankruptcy bill that made it impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy.

Joe CARES about your student debt, he wants you to be chained to it for life.

https://twitter.com/JordanUhl/status/1358862180582649859

why the hell would Joe Biden, who helped make sure students would drown in debt, want to undo his work? This is his legacy and you want him to cancel student debt?

Crazy. Asking a man to destroy his life's work.

I'll tell you a secret as someone who worked on paper and computers, being there for the transition: in most cases computers make business processes slower. A lot slower. Old mainframe processes were also faster than micro processes.

In auditing I found the difference about 4X.

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1329315470999126016

A search function is only good if you know what you're looking for, exactly, for example. It was far faster to scan old paper files in audits.

Computers were generally used for control, to make workers take all sorts of steps. The slow downs were massive.

I think, for politics/economics, it's simpler to delineate the characteristics of a healthy society and then say "if not this, then it's unhealthy."

This actually leaves a lot of room for variation, rather than being very limited, it just absolutely doesn't allow certain things. for example, you cannot have a healthy society with high levels of inequality or with an elite who does not experience the consequences of their decisions.

Corbyn thought he could make peace with his enemies, so he didn't re-select or remove the whip from anyone. Now his enemies, in power, are not making his mistake. The Left and Corbyn were only acceptable when they weren't a threat.

https://twitter.com/iwelsh/status/1329140846948659201

In a way I'm glad centrists are being so vindictive to Corbyn and I almost hope they drive other leftists out of the party. The route forward in Britain is to leave Labour and start a new party. Yeah, the Tories will win for a while, so be it.

No peace with enemies.

Banning a company from your country is one thing, destroying it at home, another:

androidauthority.com/huawei-sells-h… both sides are hurtling towards a new cold war. The Chinese are convinced America will do anything to keep them from technological equality, the Americans that the Chinese are a bunch of bullying cheats.

Folks, I like a real intellectual as much as the rest of you. But people like Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize) and Francis Fukuyama (End of History) are who were pushed as the great intellectuals of the neoliberal era. I mean, "history is over" is about as stupid as you can get. "Corporations only responsibility is to shareholders" is also as stupid as you can get (and it didn't even work out that way, it worked out as a way for execs to overpay themselves with stock options.)

Obama was a piece of shit. He immunized rich people stealing people's houses, increased drone murders 3X, vastly deliberately increased fracking & turned Libya into a place with slave markets.

And those are just a few of the shit things he did. Obama was also worse on whistleblowers than Bush II, by the way.

He really was walking human garbage and did vast harm. People who think otherwise are either clueless or garbage human beings themselves.

You have terrible leaders in part because you lie to yourselves about them.

The simplest thing you MUST understand about the US, Britain, France and so on is that if you aren't in the top 2-3%, your leaders hate you and have nothing but contempt for you. They think you're worthless, replaceable eaters who don't understand how the world works.

https://twitter.com/iwelsh/status/1272655573042020355

Elites want you poor, because if you're poor you have less power. They think that they deserve their money and power and if you deserved any money or power you'd have it.

It's not just that they don't care about you, it's that they actively despise you and want you hurt.

In fact, as someone who followed it in real time at the time, as my job, McCain's numbers beat Obama's when he opposed the bailouts. When he changed his mind, he lost the election.

That's the actual history.

https://twitter.com/WillMcJ/status/1209876973348102144

as an aside, calls on TARP to Congress were between 200:1 to 1000:1 against. There has never been a more lopsided set of calls to my knowledge.

Obama broke arms to get the bill passed. Pelosi wasn't going to pass it till he intervened.