Chinese tech

Chinese engineers are weak at creativity. They have an alarming tendency to dutifully follow and implement specifications literally without regard for what the specifications are intended to achieve. But this should not slow catch up too much, as they are smart, industrious, and dutiful.

As general rule, engineers from the periphery of the Han Hegemony, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, are a lot better at tasks that require insight and judgment – not a big gap between them and whites. Thai and Khmer are inferior, lacking Han smarts though Thais have Korean judgement.

Contrary to this cheerfully racist generalization, Taiwan is now the leading manufacturer of the best computer chips. Intel and AMD depend primarily on TSMC (Taiwan) and Samsung (Korea)

White technology has been stagnating, because Shaniqua with a Harvard PhD is project lead, and Japan, Taiwan, and Korea are now well ahead, except, of course, in rockets.

Well, if Taiwan is out in front, why cannot China be out in front? I am guessing that Taiwan simply had a head start because of more intercourse with the west and with Korea. A little leaven leaveneth the whole loaf. You don’t need too many creative people. I conjecture that TSMC filled the gaps with a handful of foreigners. There are lots of people from the periphery of the Han Hegemony in Taiwan.

Last time I checked, an all Chinese desktop was about four years behind today’s desktops, and more expensive, because the Chinese government, suspecting hardware backdoors, twists party members arms to buy Mainland Chinese. And Mainland Chinese are having trouble getting production up, even of chips four years out of date. They have long planned to catch up, but catch up is mysteriously not happening.

Biden has decided to cash in on this tech lead by banning Taiwanese and Korean chip makers from supplying advanced stuff to China, with the chief target being Huawei.

Huawei’s smart phones are TSMC chips running Google software. And they are not allowed to obtain that stuff any more, and if they do somehow obtain it, not allowed to export it.

Huawei are investing heavily in existing Chinese chip building facilities. This New Years eve, promised to be back in the export business real soon now. An important announcement coming up some time this year. Which is not the same thing as promising to be back in the export business this year.

They have been buying up businesses, making alliances with businesses, and hiring people who are in the general vicinity of TSMC. Buying people who are not directly involved in chip making, but have a lot of chip making connections. Maybe they have been importing some leaven. Or maybe they are just hiring spies. Well, obviously they are hiring spies, but is hiring spies all that they are doing?

If they are merely hiring spies, will not do them any good. You can give a Chinese engineer the recipe, and he will follow it to the letter, with the result that it will not work. But I get the feeling that they have already figured this out and have already done something about it. China has been hiring spies for many years with conspicuously underwhelming results. If they have addressed their fundamental problem, I expect China to be beating everyone in chip making in a few years, as Taiwan has been beating everyone. Huawei is betting the house on catch up yielding imminent results. They are acting as if they believe that the fix for China’s stubbornly persistent tech lag is imminent.

In response to this post, a Varna has drawn my attention to a Russian report, 2020 September.

China is hunting for specialists for the production of electronic components in South Korea. Back in August, there were tons of vacancies on local sites for electronics professionals with excellent conditions.

This is likely to solve China’s chip lag problem. Huawei’s confidence suggests that this program is bearing fruit. I predict that competitive Chinese made chips will arrive this year or sometime in 2023.

Since Huawei seems to be leading the charge, they will probably be derived from the Arm cpu design, which draws less power than the X86 architecture. Huawei wants to produce phones, but the Chinese communist party wants made in China desktops and laptops. Likely they will find themselves getting Arm laptops.

Preparatory to this, Arm China recently declared independence from Arm, both hijacking Arm’s intellectual property, and indicating intent to develop Arm based chips beyond the current Arm design. Breaking away from Arm only makes sense if they expect that they will not need further intellectual property from Arm.

403 Responses to “Chinese tech”

  1. Neofugue says:

    > There are a few people who sit at the top of the enemy coalition and who are bona fide the finest specimens of humans to have ever existed. They preach what they don’t practice and themselves live as patricians.

    This line of thinking is not only ignorant but also dehumanizing, implying that elites lack the humanity to recognize the depravities of Progressivism. In the interest of Opsec there are no real means by which I can prove my credentials. Describing luxury is low-class and pointless as wealth in high circles is different from what is depicted in film for the masses. Being in the elite is almost entirely about connections; for example, my family is not wealthy enough to own a mountainside luxury ski condo in [the Rockies] but is fortunate enough to be allowed lodging by a close friend hedge funder.

    Elites are more resilient than proles towards decadence, which is why by statistics alone they appear to be unaffected by Progressivism. In my experience I cannot recall an elite woman who married younger than thirty, and lower divorce rates are not indicative of marital happiness rather obsequence towards societal expectations.

    Elites having families of more than four children are not having them because their women marry younger rather they have the financial resources to get their wives to have more children artificially. My multimillionaire [father of close friend] spent over three million getting his aging wife to have his [two] children via in vitro fertilization among other measures.

    Far from the “finest human specimens ever extracted,” the genetic quality of the elite is rapidly deteriorating through caste miscegenation, fathers significantly more intelligent than their sons. Because of feminism, elite men tend towards marrying down thus produce inferior children. Even growing up in [privileged institutions], [a significant portion] of my close friends were [non-White/non-Jewish]. The quality of elite university students is falling not only because of selection for political correctness rather than intelligence but also due to an absence of competent children of alumni, which is indicative of the state of the Western Elite as a whole.

    • Arqiduka says:

      I happily submit to lived experience, which on this matter I have none.

    • Pooch says:

      Elites are more resilient than proles towards decadence, which is why by statistics alone they appear to be unaffected by Progressivism.

      Bullshit. The elite aren’t reproducing above replacement.

      • Neofugue says:

        Of course the elite are not reproducing at replacement level; I was referring to divorce statistics among others. If every comment had to be perfect none would be posted. Elite women are more affected by feminism than elite men, and I am largely unfamiliar with childless elite women.

        Arqiduka’s line of thought is not new to the dissident right, and I am referring to those social issues which do not appear in statistics regarding those of higher extraction but do appear in statistics regarding those of lower extraction and the sentiment expressed in the linked article.

        • Pooch says:

          Got ya. I agree with the overall premise but elite men are just as affected by progism. The Brahmin elite men are faggy and gay. Many are too effeminate to land an attractive white wife so they must settle for ugly immigrant ones. This would explain why a lot of your friends were non-white.

          • Neofugue says:

            Because there are not too many places in the country where someone like myself could have grown up, I must be careful with my descriptions.

            By [non-white] I mean immigrant or son of guest worker. Brahmin elite men are gay and faggy, in some ways far faggier than non-elites. It was shocking in college when I met a non-elite older couple (mid-forties) who were High-School sweethearts, I did not know those types of marriages still existed.

        • The Cominator says:

          Brahmin are the elite girls and ground zero for feminism…

          Optimatesque type girls may be tomboyish (in a non dykey and still feminine way… which is something i like in women) but not feminist (a couple of the absolute best women i ever knew used to play girls ice hockey). There aren’t many of them though.

  2. […] on Chinese tech and engineering, and in particular, their weaknesses. Also, some alarming statistics on the FAUXVID vaccine and […]

  3. Pooch says:

    They are trying to kill old people again, but I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised…

    https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/588900-connecticut-asks-nursing-homes-to-take-in-hospital-transfers-who-test

  4. Tityrus says:

    Moldbug rewrote Plan Moldbug. I think it’s pretty good, and it seems to me to confirm what I suspected all along, that Neurotoxin’s objections were not exactly on point. Also, does this confirm that Yarvin reads this blog? “Yarvin’s finance plan” is from Jan 2 and obviously these long Substack posts take a week or so to be written and proofread.

    https://graymirror.substack.com/p/stagflation-and-neo-chartalism

    It’s a free article. Thoughts?

    • jim says:

      Still full of shit.

      Fails to adequately distinguish between the paper economy and the real economy.

      If we charitably interpret Namefag Yarvin as talking only about the bloated paper economy, I favor not nationalizing those guys, and paying them compensation, but shutting them down. The real economy does not actually need the paper economy. It should do its own damned accounting independent of the state. What Caesar is doing is not a proper function of Caesar, but rather all this accounting hocus pocus that Yarvin rightly complains about is an expansion of our Officially Unofficial State religion into the affairs of merchants. Since we have a gross oversupply of priests, they use state power to intrude themselves into the affairs of merchants. Caesar is being robbed by his priesthood.

      The Finance Economy is like the monasteries, whose wealth, corruption, immorality, and decadence eventually provoked the dissolution of the monasteries, and the existing bloated finance industry should, along with the Universities, the public hospitals, and the Courts, be dealt with as Henry the Eighth dealt with the monasteries.

      It does not need to be nationalized, nor privatized. It needs to be ended, and private citizens need to be allowed to perform any real functionality of these services for themselves. Genuinely private services would not acquire much value by operating a monastery. They will have to start over from scratch anyway. It is too far gone to be genuinely privatized.

      • Tityrus says:

        Okay. But according to Yarvin, suddenly unplugging the money printing machine and therefore demonetizing financial instruments will kill the economy and lead to mass starvation, because everyone will be scrambling to turn their money substitutes into real money and M0 << M1. This is the problem he's trying to solve. It's not about punishing or rewarding anybody, it's about killing inflation while avoiding economic collapse.

        Yarvin's solution presupposes that you are Caesar. By carrying it out you are signalling that the inflation machine will presently cease operation. The consequences of that solution, like bringing back free market interest rates, would automatically cut the financial sector down to the exact size and shape required by the real economy. Asset prices would go down, interest rates would go up, average Joe will no longer have stonks or even, perhaps, a bank account. Yarvin says as much when he says, “Monetization of all securities is portfolio-neutral: after the transformation, everyone has the same personal net worth. It is just all in cash—not a bunch of bets on this or that. (In a sane financial system, not everyone needs to be betting all the time.)”

        Of course the old financial priesthood will be unhappy, and largely out of jobs. But to carry out the solution you have to already be Caesar, and if you are Caesar you probably already know how to deal with unhappy priests.

        • Pooch says:

          if you are Caesar you probably already know how to deal with unhappy priests.

          Requires what Augustus did do, and Caesar failed to do.

        • The Cominator says:

          “Okay. But according to Yarvin, suddenly unplugging the money printing machine and therefore demonetizing financial instruments will kill the economy and lead to mass starvation, because everyone will be scrambling to turn their money substitutes into real money and M0 << M1."

          Basically this part is true but the solution is default where mostly its the bondholders and government dependent sectors who take it in the ass, others suffer a not so great period but they'll eventually be okay and even better.

          In a sane financial system everyone smart IS investing the vast majority of their money the vast majority of the time. Monetizing stonks is communism, stonks are extremely undervalued as an asset class as opposed to the massively inflated by credit real estate sector.

          There is no way to kill inflation now, inevitable US default is inevitable. It is the major bondholders who need to take it in the ass.

        • p says:

          I don’t think that Yarvin is actually proposing anything. The core of both the previous article and this one is the observation that most of the money supply is implicit and not explicit, consisting of government backstops, promises that aren’t written anywhere and don’t officially show up in the M aggregates.

          The intended audience for these posts are probably people who didn’t already know that, i.e. not us.

          I see the “plan” more as a mental experiment that is useful for determining the real money supply (which is the amount of dollars that would have to be in circulation if the plan is applied) and for estimating which actions affect it, and how.

          The post also has more interesting tidbits of not entirely obvious, but still probably known to the average commenter here, information: giving free money to the rich is less inflationary than giving free money to the poor, MMT works only if the population can’t save in harder money, etc

          • p says:

            This is consistent with Moldbug’s “formalism” – that it’s better for things to be called their real names, which is widely not the case today. E.g. we ostensibly have “rights” that are only valid up until the point we try to exercise them in a way the regime doesn’t like.

            Moldbug’s theory has always been that it would have been better if we weren’t deceptively told we had these rights. This makes intuitive sense, but I’m no longer convinced. I’m not sure there’s any empirical evidence for formalism being better than what we now have, the illusions of having rights, or the illusion of having some elaborate institutions and procedures for affecting the money supply that bear ~zero resemblance to reality.

            • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

              In declaiming oneself as ‘against dictatorship’, one merely resigns oneself to submission to such dictatorships that are most adept at dis-guising their dictatorship; that he has not escaped dictatorship as such, merely traded one form for another; and all the worse, for his ignorance and it’s self-deception.

              • p says:

                No doubt.

                What would, however, happen in the hypothetical scenario in which Modlbug’s plan is applied? More likely than not, it will gradually evolve into a system similarly deceptive as today’s one.

                Similarly, a transparent and open dictatorship will tend to gradually evolve into an opaque and deceptive one, a regime good at disguising its dictatorshipness.

                Ergo, smoke and mirrors is fitter than formalism.

                This reminds me of the Matrix, specifically the claim that people only accepted the Matrix after they were given the false choice of whether to accept it or not.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  There are at least two senses being equivocated here. Occultation of power has high degrees of ontological inevitability, but not high degrees of functional potency.

                • p says:

                  Interesting point, but I’m not sure that’s true, either. I remember someone (C A Bond?) convincingly arguing that the current “democracies” can actually exercise more power over their subjects than the monarchies they replaced.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  >exercise more power over their subjects

                  The problem itself; a solipsistic mode of mere relationalism between one and his immediate neighbors, collapsing down into dirt; or a Being-entangled mode of extrapersonal telos, rising up into the stars and over the xeno scum.

                • p says:

                  I accept that “marshal resources at scale in support of a noble goal” is a better criterion than “exercise power over subjects”, but does the conclusion really change? How do we know that formalist dictatorships are better at it?

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  History.

        • jim says:

          You are charitably interpreting his plan as removing all backstops from finance, banking, and insurance, thus instantly collapsing it. And then he issues a pile of paper to the former bankers etc to compensate them, and prevent deflation from collapsing the economy.

          Supposing that is his plan, not really seeing the need for step two. Deflation is a massively overhyped danger. It is only nasty if you have a lot of debts against the person hanging around. Just abolish usury, and deflation is great. Some property changes hands, which is unfortunate, but not really damaging to the economy.

          • The Cominator says:

            Deflation is great if you keep your assets as shoeboxes full of cash under your bed, which no sane person does under the current circumstances. The Great Depression WAS deflation combined with stupid policies that kept money from reentering circulation. For a long time people with money didn’t invest anything they hoarded cash… not a good situation.

            We do want a controlled collapse of real estate prices though…

          • Arqiduka says:

            Deflation is the most grievous wound one may inflict on any economy.

            Millions of businesses make medium- and long-term plans based on some expectation of revenue, often assumed to be at least stable. People are employed and capital added based on these assumptions. Serious deflation blows up all of this, at the same time: now the revenue incoming is lowered by a factor, hence you can no longer afford to employ as many people and some of that machinery you got you better sell back because it makes no sense anymore in terms of payback time (note how I’m not even assuming debt).

            You will either be forced to significantly scale back you operations (if you are very adept) or, more likely, will go out of business entirely. Scaling down is a dark art, only few can master in a short time and under pressure.

            If the deflationary episode is severe enough, its Zero Hour for the economy and it all goes to shit: all people are out of work and all capital is sold. The economy truly starts from scratch with massive, massive human cost. Eventually expectations adjust and the structure of production is build anew, but grievous damage has been done in the meantime.

            Willingly causing such an apocalyptic event is what you would do if you were a spy operating on behalf of you enemies. No measure is too extreme if it avoids this and Moldbug writes – I think – in this vein.

            I’ll have more to say of his plan later, but the goal is noble.

            • jim says:

              > Deflation is the most grievous wound one may inflict on any economy.

              Not so.

              If money is worth more than you expect, everyone is happy, except debtors.

              And if no debt against the person, there is a limit to how unhappy debtors are likely to become and how happy creditors are likely to become. Deflation is fine, inflation is destructive.

              Well, if deflation is fine, why was the Great Depression ruinous, I hear you ask.

              The Great Depression was not ruinous. Socialism was ruinous. The government fixed prices and wages at levels that were unrealistic – sometimes at levels that sometime in the past, the not very recent past, had been realistic, frequently at levels that had never been realistic, but rather reflected the aspirations of a multitude of special interest groups that wanted someone else’s apples, sometimes at random idiotic levels some bureaucrat pulled out of his ass.

              Inflation is destructive and disruptive. Deflation is not destructive, is considerably less disruptive, and is self limiting.

              What happened was deflation caused people suffering as a result of usury to rightly and justly scream out, and instead of helping them, the government in the name of helping them, helped a multitude of special interest groups by fixing prices and wages at artificial levels.

              What was bad in the Great Depression was not deflation, which was great for the economy and great for nearly everyone. What went wrong in the great depression was usury and socialism.

              • Arqiduka says:

                Money does not magicaly become worth more goods and services: you have to destroy large quantities to have this be the case. You assume you are going to be left with the same amount of flow in such a scenario but you are not: you will get less inflow into your business and household, and tou will rue the day you ever took on an obligation.

                To pay such as such wages to such and such people, to make a machine pay for itself etc.

                You assume explicit debt is the only reflection of time preference but its not: every embodiment of the production structure is detemined by expectations of the flow of money, even if not a cent of explicit debt is allowed.

                • jim says:

                  > You assume you are going to be left with the same amount of flow in such a scenario but you are not

                  Empirically, we have been left with the same amount of flow in such a scenario. All the depressions up to the great depression were innocuous, and a good argument can be made that they were net beneficial, except for usury. Money did magically become worth more goods and services. The depressions ruined a lot whole lot of bankers and highly leveraged speculators, but did not adversely affect the flow of real goods except briefly and slightly.

                  What choked off the flow of goods in the great depression was not deflation, but socialism.

                  Prices and wages fell a long way in the long depression, due to the spontaneous demonetization of silver, and due to a bunch of ensuing banker panics where they found that they owed people lots of money, but the properties over which they held mortgages were no longer worth very much, and the people over whom they held mortgages were no longer able to pay, but people quickly adjusted, and the flow of goods remained fine. Wages fell, but prices fell considerably further. The real economy did fine. The paper economy had big problems. I repeat. Empirically, money did magically become worth more goods and services.

                  Cutting prices and wages is about as disruptive as raising them, and currently prices and wages are rising faster than they fell in the long depression. It is having harmful effects on the real economy, but the effects are not yet huge and will not be huge until prices and wages start rising a whole lot faster, which they are likely to do because the seigniorage tax is currently beyond the Laffer limit.

                  Instability of the value of money is bad, but empirically it makes little difference which way it changes. It is primarily a problem of how fast it changes. The huge problem with fiat money is that it is apt to have very big losses in value very fast.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  Sometimes I think Jim is some acronym for an AI run by the military, hard to explain how you come up with such in-depth responses to quasi-random topics all the time.

                  in-depth but, in this case, wrong. Many points I wish to challenge, which I will only do briefly. In no particular order:

                  1) the boom-bust cycle was a term far before the Great Depression, and the business cycle was known to occur in all type of societies.

                  2) the Great Depression was indeed by far the worst in magnitude, and this was the fault of terrible management by the Fed (the doctrine of real bills, which sounds good but doesn’t work). Socialism made it LAST longer (a decade) but severity had nothing to do with socialism.

                  3) busts before the great depression lasted up to two years, during which a great many people were left unemployed and industries had to contract (not just a matter of the same factory switching hands, the whole structure of one industry “shortening”). Most obvious runs were on banks, but the whole economy suffered.

                  4) silver was not demonetised spontaneously, it ceased to be exchanged for paper bills when Gresham’s Law bit backwards with the discoveries of gold in CA and VIC, and the UK first went off silver, with others following.

                  5) the “long depression” was no depression at all, but an instance where the production of money did not quite keep up with the increased produciton of goods, hence a slow deflation across a century. Too slow to notice, and hence very easy for business to account for it. Still made books appear to show a loss where none was there, but still a slight effect. NOT the same as a proper depression at all.

                  6) due to the way the gold standard worked before ’39, the way deflation showed up was when people called up your loans, and you had to pay somehow. The converse was that, if you wanted to access new money, you had to get a loan. Could not just stand aside with no loans in those years, you woudl have been outcompeted. Hence, what looks like issues caused by excessive levearge, were really issues of deflation, just the transmission mechanism was based on credit.

                • jim says:

                  The boom bust cycle led to fluctuations in the value of money, which was bad, but it was was primarily a speculative and banking phenomenon. The bankers loved booms and hated busts. The busts were loss of confidence in the bankers, leading to reductions in the volume of money, and the booms were confidence in the bankers, leading to increases in the volume of money. So of course they loved booms and hated busts.

                  3) busts before the great depression lasted up to two years, during which a great many people were left unemployed and industries had to contract (not just a matter of the same factory switching hands, the whole structure of one industry “shortening”). .

                  Maybe. So you say. Did the whole economy suffer? I have not presented any data, and neither have you. Which factories, which busts?

                  I know the long depression was quite innocuous for the real economy. What counter example do you have in mind? There were a lot of busts, and yes they hurt a lot of people. People long on money were hurt in a boom, people short on money were hurt in a bust. Leverage and factional reserve meant that banks, and the highly leveraged tycoons to which the lent, were short on money, lots of debt, backed by real assets, and in a bust the real value of the debt went up, and the real value of the assets remained, but became substantially less liquid. But was the real economy hurt by busts and helped by booms?

                  > during which a great many people were left unemployed and industries had to contract.

                  Wages are sticky, and prices are sticky, but they adjust soon enough. How many people, how long? Which bust, when? I should not ask you for data when I have presented no data, but the long depression had little, and arguably beneficial, effect, on the real economy, because long, because people adjusted, and got used to adjusting, expecting that prices would fall and keep on falling. It seems to me that busts worked out pretty quickly. People lost their jobs, adjusted their wage expectations, got new jobs at lesser salary, and found that their lesser salary went further because prices were lower. Fluctuations were disruptive, but for the real economy, not big or lasting problem. Sticky unemployment was a problem of the great depression, because the state fixed wages and fixed prices, because of state sponsored stickyness, and because the state stuck them at rather arbitrary and inappropriate levels. To my knowledge, correct me if I am wrong, unemployment was not sticky in earlier busts. The market cleared quickly enough. Booms and busts were primarily a phenomenon of the outcome of bets on assets, not on production itself. It was a bust because going long on real assets and short on money turned out to be a bad idea, not a bust because people lost their jobs and could not get a new one.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  Fair question re data, the obvious problem is that the “good” data you can find on FRED only starts in the ’50, and we have never seen actual deflation since WW2.

                  The real deflations you find before then, when gold or sliver were the limiting factors, and data is shonk. Let’s try though, and take counsel from La Wik.

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States

                  Defining a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than 6 months, normally visible in real gross domestic product, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales”.

                  So, real hardship across the economy for at least 6 months. How many of these we have since confederation?

                  48, though a few appear to be in dispute. Some are mild and appear to match your model of “some people got burned in the stock exchange but nothing more”. For some you find that “Estimates on unemployment vary, it may have peaked anywhere from 8.2 to 18.4%” (1893) or some lasting 2-3 years. Probably a bit underwhelming as evidence, but I have long forgotten my Rothbard on the fine details.

                  Now, you are quite correct when you say that sticky wages are a big issue now, and this issue is now bigger than ever due to a myriad of regulations and past industrial action. Some like Scott Sumner think sticky wages are the one and only cause of recessions, but I disagree mightily.

                  Even if you paid people in profit sharing alone, hence had no stickiness at all, the real cause of a recession is that you just burned the economic plans of millions of people when you changed the amount of money circulating, and the entire structure of production turns out to be wrong.

                  The great example Rothbard (of all people) brings is that you start building a large house and midway realize that you have far fewer bricks than you thought you did. You don’t just have a smaller house, you have four walls with no roof now. If you had known you would have built a smaller but functional house. So, take it apart and start again, but in the meantime you have no roof and it rains. So, its not a matter of some folks being out of a job until the dust settles, its the entire production structure (ex. make cars, not machine parts for machine that make cars) that needs to be redone.

                  Look, I know deflation sounds less of an issue because realistically the Fed never would deflate unless absolutely necessary, since they loose money when they do this. Inflation is the clear and present danger. But – says Yarvin – if you cheerfully go about turning the spigot off all of those millions of houses are half-built, and will take years and years to be repurposed.

                  I think he’s being a bit dramatic and just wants to show off his shiny plan, but deflation is no joke.

    • Arqiduka says:

      Maybe I read it a bit too quickly, but I don’t notice any major or even minor changes he has made to his plan of old. Which means he probably got the idea to refresh it from being poked by Jim.

    • Neurotoxin says:

      Jeez, by the time I get caught up with the last couple of threads I’m late for a discussion in this one. Will step over to Yarvin’s link & read then weigh in later if it seems warranted.

      • Neurotoxin says:

        OK, here’s Moldbug (on finance) in a nutshell. He’s really alarmed by the fact that the dollar value of all (non-base-money) assets in the economy is much larger than the total number of (base money) dollars. And indeed, this can cause – no, that claims too much; let’s say it is empirically consistent with – serious problems like banking panics, stock market crashes, etc.

        What he doesn’t get is that there’s no cure for this. None that I can see, anyway. Certainly not printing a ton of money, buying everyone out, and then wagging a finger in their face while scolding them, “Now don’t overvalue assets again!” That is just silly.

        I could mention many other problems with both his understanding of how all this works and his notions about how to fix it. If I tried to address them all I’d use up all the ones and zeroes, though, so I’ll just stop here.

  5. Cloudswrest says:

    Well it looks like the Webb telescope has successfully finished all its unfolding. From what I can tell what’s left is:

    Unlocking and tuning/calibrating the mirror segments.
    L2 orbital insertion.

    Also I haven’t seen any news on if the cryocooler has been turned or and/or if it is working.

    https://twitter.com/NASAWebb/status/1479880178021060609

  6. @somedude, some news on the vaxx front.

    Despite the difficulties I have got vaxxed with first dose. But despite my obvious enthusiasm to protect myself and others from holy covid demon, one has to go through the line. Not jump the queue. And follow the due process.

    But it’s possible. But in future it’s likely to become more difficult what with vaxx shortages and all that. 😉

    • Ghost says:

      Thought Jim weeded out all the midwits on here. If you’re sub-IQ, might want to check out what Chris Langen (IQ200) has to say on Gab about this CV19 mRNA Aids shot.

      As for me, they can inject me with hot lead first before then vaxx my corpse.

      • Tityrus says:

        The comment you are replying to is obviously facetious. DR and somedude have been discussing how to get in the Indian vaxx database without actually getting the vaxx. DR is saying that he’s successfully done this.

        • Karl says:

          That is my understanding as well. I wonder what following due process in this situation means in India, probably paying a bribe. Of course that will be more difficult with vaxx shortages as only physicians who have the vaxx can be bribed to enter your name into a national database

          • There are no vaxx shortages as far as I know. I was referring to the difficulty of the procedure I described earlier as the state grows holier about this.

            By due process I meant of course you have to go through the motions of getting registered on the portal, fixing appointment and so on, which can be done only at the correct dates and by the staff concerned. From what I hear, No longer possible for retrospective effect.

            No need to go to a doctor. Vaxxes are administered by clerical level staff.

            • someDude says:

              Got the Cert and an entry in the Database. Business partner of a Friend of Relative of a Colleague. High 4 figure sum in INR. But the contacts within the priesthood are priceless. In India, small sums of money can buy a lot

              • The thing is to become fully holy, you need to be partially holy first and then wait your turn. I believe becoming fully holy with retrospective effect has become impossible with the current situation however eager we may be to embrace holiness :-p

                • someDude says:

                  Good luck on being certified as being fully vaccinated. It can be done. We live in a Gandhian-Nehruvian dystopia. In our secular Gandhian anarcho-tyranny,it has always always been easier and safer to break the law and bribe the authorities than to follow the law and go by the book.

                  The testosterone boost one gets by violating an evil and insane law is something to experience. I highly recommend it to all those who revere the Dharma. My confidence is quite high after i pulled this whole wheeling dealing bit. No defector can expect me to cooperate with him.

          • someDude says:

            Yes, you are right. But it’s more expensive and harder to find the right contacts. Give it time. People have not yet worked out the system. In time, every one will be doing this. I’m talking about a place where the Bribe to avoid a speeding ticket is about USD 3.

      • someDude says:

        Aren’t you the chap that asked Jim what Videos games he designed? Apparently you were just curious.

        • Ghost says:

          I did and also wrote understood after.

          “Hail fellow antivaxxer, let’s talk about ways to scheme the system.”

          It’s better in the long-run to openly resist than to pretend to go along with it while pretending to be against it. Fraud always gets found out and in the end, you’re worse off than the ones duped. There’s probably a lot of liberals pretending to be liberal too spiraling into greater liberalism.

          When this vaxx doctor gets caught cheating, how long do you think it will take him to out you? Something to think about.

          For me, I openly resist.

          As for the games, it is one of my vices. Sorry I asked Jim.

          • someDude says:

            This is India. The authorities here have always been incompetent and easy to bribe. That is something you Gentlemen in the States are about to find out soon about your own authorities. Laws multiply here in inverse proportion to the will and competence to enforce them.

          • Karl says:

            No fraud is not always found out – at least the sort of fraud that has no victim.

            Even if found out, you are not worse off than those who were duped to get the clot shot because you are still healty.

            I suspect your view on law enforcement and risk of medical injections suffers from normality bias

            • someDude says:

              Seems like a law enforcement shill, this chap.

              Openly Resist

              Fraud always gets found out in the end

              When this vaxx doctor gets caught

              I have some other bromides for him to pitch
              1. Long arm of the law,
              2. Truth always prevails
              3. Blah Blah Blah
              4. Yada yada yada

              • Karl says:

                I can’t quite imagine how his superiors could justify the time he is spending here, but he does sound like law enforcement being paid to be here.

                • Ghost says:

                  Really, wouldn’t a cop get on here and encourage crime to snare you. But that’s not what I’m doing.

                  I can see SomeIndianDood is shook cause he can’t let it go. I don’t care if you do Indian. Sit in some Indian shithole for years.

                  For people on here. If you hoax the vaxx, you’re helping to support this thing. If you resist it, you’re being honest with yourself and your enemy. God will stand with an honest man over a trickster.

                • someDude says:

                  You’re trying to

                  1. Incite people here to commit violence and ruin their lives

                  2. get them to out themselves and generally make their life harder by opposing the vaxx openly in the face of a powerful and malicious enemy

                  3. Out themselves with questions about identity.

                  Does not sound like an honest man to me from any angle whatsoever

  7. Mike Thalassitis (RIP) says:

    Hey, this is a wildly offtopic post, though perhaps it is tangentially related to technology, in the sense of: why has no one developed the technology to prevent/cure MPB (male pattern baldness), and why do all existing cures for MPB make your dick stop working? It is also related to some the topics of this blog in general: causes for the feminization of men, obesity, masculinity. If I recall correctly, Jim, you also have said in the past that you are completely bald.

    I have been researching a bit into MPB recently and trying to properly understand what is actually going on, because some aspects don’t seem to add up. I am certainly no expert and am just piecing things together as I continue reading. A lot of these pieces can be found in various papers and studies, though I predict it is similar to the male contraceptive issue. Evidence exists that exogeneous Testosterone could act as a contraceptive, but that conclusion can never be drawn. Instead, male contraceptives turn you into a sissy.

    The currently accepted theory is that MPB is caused by elevated DHT levels. The theory originates from studies done on eunuchs. The eunuchs had zero signs of MPB, but after being given exogeneous testosterone a few of them developed MPB. The ones that developed MPB had a genetic history of MPB in their family, leading to the conclusion that MPB is a genetic problem that only occurs after DHT levels get above a certain level (and higher levels causing more rapid hairloss). For most people, their levels will be above this threshold, meaning if you are genetically predisposed you will likely experience MPB, its just a matter of at what pace.

    Testosterone is converted into Dihydrotestosterone (DHT) by 5-alpha reductase enzymes in the body.
    In terms of anabolic vs androgenic effects, DHT is much more androgenic. Testosterone is responsible for fertility, sex drive, muscle growth. Whereas DHT is more responsible for pubic, facial, chest hair, as well as deepening voice, MPB and prostate growth.

    The most common treatment for MPB is Finasteride/Propecia, which is oral medication taken to inhibit 5-alpha reductase. I believe Ketoconazole (Nizoral) is often taken alongside this. Nizoral is a anti-dandruff shampoo that also inhibits 5AR. (Does topical Nizoral inhibit 5AR just locally – is that even possible? – or in the entire body? I’m not sure – I’m a brainlet).
    However, Finasteride has been shown to only be 10-30% effective. There are a whole range of side effects, with plenty of people basically ending up with a dick that doesn’t work anymore.

    (There is also Minoxidil which is applied topically. The mechanism isn’t fully understood but its believed to do something like increase the size of the hair follicle more directly, rather than inhibiting 5AR. Anecdotally, 1st hand, Minoxidil also works for beard growth, though that is a whole different ball game.)

    That Finasteride is effective, but only slightly, perhaps means its tangential to the cause but not quite right?

    A true understanding of the mechanism of hairloss should be able to explain why certain groups seem to have higher levels of balding. There are three groups that I believe are of note, because they are polar opposites in certain ways:

    1. Bodybuilders and athletes that have either done steroid cycles or have/had naturally high levels of testosterone, and more masculine characteristics and muscular.
    2. Soyboys seem to surprisingly often have severe receding hairline, even in early to mid 20s. They also seem to be quite good at growing beards. Though the rest of their features are not masculine.
    3. If you ever travel to SEA, you notice 85% of the boomer sexpats are totally bald. Even like half of guys there in their 30s seem to be balding. The older guys are usually fat, especially around their waist, though a few look like they could have been well built when they were younger. Think: gym teacher type build. The older men with full heads of hair usually look very frail.

    Consider the three groups mentioned above. There could be reasonably large overlap between the demograhics of 1 and 3. High (or formerly high) Testosterone men would also have more Testosterone to be converted to DHT, resulting in MPB. Group 3 also carrying excess fat around their waist could be just be a result of letting themself go, but the fact that almost all boomer sexpats are fat means their might be more to it. It could be elevated estrogen levels. This would make sense because higher levels of Testosterone will be aromatised into estrogen. Certain things like drinking beer, exposure to plastics, eating soy and vegetable oils may mess with their hormones and cause more Testosterone to be converted to Estrogen. Also, if they were formerly high testosterone, they could have had higher estrogen levels alongside, which didn’t fall as rapidly as Testosterone levels did due to age.

    So the existing model of high DHT *seems* to make sense for these two groups. Another point towards it is that DHT combined with excess estrogen, rather than just DHT alone has been shown to be a big risk factor for prostate cancer, for which group 3 is a target demographic. However, lets consider group 2, the soyboys.

    Check DDG images for pics of soyboys, and you will see almost all of them have beards. Partly to cover up lack of jawline, and partly because it is one of these faux-masculine things like drinking beer that they seem to flock to. (They also all have glasses – not sure how this relates). Though based on this, and anecdotally, soy boys seem to have stronger beard growth than average. They are also usually all coomers. It seems like they have higher levels of DHT, hence the balding. And looking at their bodies, quite clearly higher estrogen levels and low testosterone levels.

    To generalize the hormones of these groups roughly, I would assume:
    1. Bodybuilders: High Testosterone, Normal Estrogen (unless roiding and not using an AI?)
    2. Soyboys: Low Testosterone, High Estrogen
    3. Boomer Sexpats: Normal to High Testosterone, High Estrogen

    Is it simply that soy boys have hormones that are so fucked up that all of there Testosterone is aromatized to estrogen, or converted to DHT via 5-alpha reductase? Leaving them with little testosterone left, flabby bodies, beards, and MPB. Phytoestrogens like soy act as estrogen in our body, but they can also inhibit aromatization of Testosterone to Estrogen. Meaning in the case of soyboys, high estrogen isn’t necessarily an issue of Testosterone being aromatized into Estrogen, but rather they are low Testosterone all along. They may also be some evidence that soy, though not necessarily all phytoestrogens, inhibit 5alpha-reductase.

    A few more things to note.

    – 5alpha-reductase deficiency is associated with depression and anxiety, which is common amongst soyboys. Seems to contradict their 5alpha-reductase conversion of Test to DHT.
    – 5alpha-reductase although most known for Test to DHT, is also responsible for a few other conversions such as progresterone to 5α-Dihydroprogesterone, and Cortisol (stress hormone) to 5α-Dihydrocortisol.

    Given stress and hair loss are known to be related, perhaps Cortisol is playing a role here, groups 2 and 3 being very highly-strung people and prone to stress. And perhaps 5alpha-reductase inhibition by Finasteride helps somewhat because it inhibits this.

    If I had to bet, I would guess it has to be primarily a hormone issue. I know Jim has stated that low testosterone in men is also a spiritual problem, but there is evidence of a physical problem in parallel. All of our modern meat and dairy is pumped full of hormones, pesticides turn the frogs gay, and the water supply is tainted with female contraceptives causing increases in estrogen. Probably why girls are hitting puberty at much younger ages. And why increasingly younger girls are trying to make their way into Jeremy Meek’s bedroom lol. And probably also why everyone is fat, and even intelligent people with what seems to be a reasonable amount of willpower struggle to lose weight and stay skinny. (How many people in your day to day life do you see that you genuinely think *couldn’t* do with losing at least a few pounds?) Though the obesity question is a different can of worms.

    So my questions to those that know more on the topic:
    1) If DHT is the cause, why is Finasteride so ineffective? If it is not the cause, why is it more effective than placebo?
    2) What is going on with soyboys? What is causing there hormones to be so fucked? Is it really just soy and phytoestrogens? Why are they balding then, if Estrogen is meant to be somewhat protective against hair loss?
    3) There was a commenter on here a few posts ago, I forgot who, had linked to a theory balding was caused by gut biome I think? Can you elaborate on how this works? Anyone have any other alternate theories?
    4) Being bald is a masculine trait. Jeremy Meeks, The Rock, and General Butt Naked can pull it off, but not everyone can. What effect does it have on SMV? Is it a case of being lower SMV, but more masculine – meaning less of what women say they want, but more of what they actually want – a man who looks like he is capable of violence?
    5) Do hair transplants work? I’m not balding but have become paranoid of balding now lol.

    • The Ducking Man says:

      I just want to give my 2 cents and anecdote

      It has been 6 months since I notice my hairline is back. Previously it was very noticeable that my top head is balding like my father did. I was turning into Heihachi from Tekken. I did nothing dramatic, but Dr Berg vid on YT played big role.

      TL:DR Basically to maintain good hair you need consistent supply of vitamin H (needed to symthesize Vitamin B). Vitamin H is plentoful on lots of food, problem you need healthy gut to absorb it.

      So I did the cheapest solution I could do, drinking lots of probiotic and yoghurt every 2 days.

    • Anonymous says:

      How do you know the soyboys are all coomers? I doubt that most soyboys are coomers. There are too many soyboys and not enough internet autist coomers to account for all the soyboys.

      I have a coworker who you could describe as a soyboy, he makes the soy face in real life and everything, but he’s a normal person with a wife and an active social life. I doubt that he is a coomer. He also get pretty big at the gym before he had to stop going due to injuries, fitting your line about flocking to faux-masculine things. I disagree on the “faux” because lifting and drinking are manly. I think perfectly ordinary men, who are drawn to masculine things, are becoming soy from living in modern city life and being exposed to material and spiritual poisons and this is what happened to my coworker.

    • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

      1) If DHT is the cause, why is Finasteride so ineffective? If it is not the cause, why is it more effective than placebo?

      Because it is a factor, in those with a genetic predisposition to MPB, but not monocausal.

      2) What is going on with soyboys? What is causing there hormones to be so fucked? Is it really just soy and phytoestrogens? Why are they balding then, if Estrogen is meant to be somewhat protective against hair loss?

      The archetypical soyboy is suffering, not just from his life choices, but also from high mutational load in the first place; which interoperate as an extended phenotype. There are many ways in which they evince sickness, and this is one of them.

      3) There was a commenter on here a few posts ago, I forgot who, had linked to a theory balding was caused by gut biome I think? Can you elaborate on how this works? Anyone have any other alternate theories?

      Health in general is often an epiphenomena of health of the gut in particular, due to it’s centrality to your basic life processes; something that can be negatively affecting your health in one or more other areas in general, is likely to be something that also negatively affects it in particular.

      4) Being bald is a masculine trait. Jeremy Meeks, The Rock, and General Butt Naked can pull it off, but not everyone can. What effect does it have on SMV? Is it a case of being lower SMV, but more masculine – meaning less of what women say they want, but more of what they actually want – a man who looks like he is capable of violence?

      Hairline is one of those things that both men and women judge; one of those instinctive perceptions of genetic fitness. In forums dedicated to athletic pursuits, like bodybuilding, or combat sports, or so on, it’s a common target of trollery.

      5) Do hair transplants work? I’m not balding but have become paranoid of balding now lol.

      Yes.

      Perhaps the most common sources of hair thinning is actually physio-chemical; that is scalp accretions blocking the hair follicles. Mildly acidic hair care makes a dramatic difference. Special treatments based on dilute carbonic acid are patented, but of course, that is but one of a universe of options.

      Another is low blood flow. Minoxidil works primarily through this mechanism; but of course, again, not the only thing in the world. Particular volatile oils, most especially sage and rosemary, can have a dramatic effect. And of course, you need the nutrition that affords hair growth in the first place.

      Chemical contamination, both indirectly through diet, and directly through low quality cleaning products, is another major factor. The average hygiene isle will have dozens and dozens of different brands, and pretty much none of the will be free from preservatives, dyes, silicones, unstable pthalated packaging, some combination thereof, or more besides.

      There is a lot of be said for ‘rolling your own’. Though cost and convenience are often decisive factors for most people. The best commercial shampoo i ever used was actually a pet shampoo, cloud 9 by Halo. Few good options with large commonality besides; Dr. Bronner’s all in one soaps (in the large HDPE jugs, not the small PETE bottles) are one, and Giovanni tea tree bodywash and conditioner are another.

    • alf says:

      Do hair transplants work?

      Could be photoshop for all I know, but if below pictures are anything to go by…

      Yeah seems like he had a hair transplant — https://www.baldandbeards.com/elon-musk-bald/

    • X says:

      The fix has been found, it’s just not very well-known yet: https://perfecthairhealth.com/

      What you wrote is correct. The final mechanism that causes the actual hair follicle minimization and eventual senescence is basically a kind of scar tissue or fascia accumulatiom in the scalp that chokes the blood supply to the follicles, which is why bald, but not shaved, scalps are so shiny. The cure involves a vigorous scalp massage protocol, as well as a few other things with general health, like nutrition, sun, etc.

      PHH requires $150 up-front for a six-month membership, to start (which is supposed to be the minimum time needed with the protocol to see results), but you could easily cancel within that period after reading the e-book and the massage protocol videos. I can personally vouch for this with my own hair, and I’ve corresponded with the founder, Rob. The product is legit. He’s a very smart researcher who from what I can tell spent enough time on figuring this out himself that he was able to turn it into an online business.

  8. someDude says:

    Jim, would you agree with Karlin here? He does not think the Chinese have it in them because of things like this. Their fear of what they think is Anarchy will hold them back from greatness https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cryptocurrency/21/09/23121742/is-china-repeating-a-600-year-old-mistake-a-historical-perspective-on-chinas-crypto-crackd

    • jim says:

      Yes, perpetual problem with China and Chinese. If they get advanced chip fabs working, it will be because fear made them accept what they needed to do. But they don’t want to do it.

  9. Cloudswrest says:

    I wonder how many more people this will wake up? “Jogger” arresters given life sentences. Media ululating with images of tearful blacks.

    https://trends.gab.com/feed/5e5037159e35822b6afb0f77/item/61d8a5879abc46d00ef7ac23

    • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

      A boomer acquaintance i know went to the hospital docs in recent times for something to deal with symptoms of pelvic inflammation – he was pronounced to ‘have covid’ and given a battery of tests (which of course all came back negative).

      Some time later, he gravely informed me that ‘90% of people in the hospital with covid are purebloods’ – the notion of any connective implications between his experience and what is broadcasted by the megaphone, never darkened his thoughts at all.

      You live amongst people, many people, that are constitutionally precluded from ‘waking up’.

      • Cloudswrest says:

        Indeed. The NPC meme isn’t a meme for no reason. It has gone my many names in the past.

        NPC
        Normies
        William Pierce referred the them as “Lemmings”.
        Joseph Sobran referred to “The Hive”.

        • Oog en Hand says:

          Martin Lindsted called them whiggers of new covenant cornholers.

        • The Cominator says:

          The best movie analogy for our current madness (even if the medium of communication has shifted) is the movie Network.

          The character of Howard Beale calls NPCs in the movies “humanoids”. He runs into a top cathedral man who explains to him that he has meddled with the primal forces of nature (but this is a connected oligarch merchant not a priest which is one inaccuracy)…

          But the Cathedral agenda in the movie is depicted as eventually benign and not evil clownworldesque… but either the people who made the movie back then were lying or the Cathedral in its purity spiral has simply gone mad.

      • Starman says:

        @Pseudo-Chrysostom

        A boomer acquaintance i know went to the hospital docs in recent times for something to deal with symptoms of pelvic inflammation – he was pronounced to ‘have covid’ and given a battery of tests (which of course all came back negative).

        Some time later, he gravely informed me that ‘90% of people in the hospital with covid are purebloods’ – the notion of any connective implications between his experience and what is broadcasted by the megaphone, never darkened his thoughts at all.

        You live amongst people, many people, that are constitutionally precluded from ‘waking up’.”

        The email jobs class is completely wedded to covid hysteria. And only the email jobs class.

        None of my acquaintances in the military, police, factories and farms can give a shit about covid (the rebranded flu). “It’s a hoax” and “the hospitals are a crooked cartel” are the usual responses from my acquaintances across age groups.

        • alf says:

          covid (the rebranded flu).

          And now, with omikron, the rebranded common cold.

          • simplyconnected says:

            And now, with omikron, the rebranded common cold.

            Yes, the flu just came back, coincidentally around the same time that the tests were supposedly updated to differentiate between the two. I wonder if the cold will now be taking a sabbatical year too.

        • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

          Without being too particular, we speak here of a kind of men who may have been in the military during Vietnam, spent most of their professional career in quasi-governmental organizations, and probably glowed in the dark later in life. Nominally christian – by some respects very well practiced even, but of a ‘superprotestant’ variety. In short, an almost perfectly preserved time capsule of a new deal democrat, anachronistic residues of leftist strains that are more or less extinct in latter days. The kind of man who has not substantially updated their mental universe of the world at any time in the last 50 years, if not further. Men whose ostensibly professed beliefs do so differ from contemporary partei orthodoxy, but whose inwards characteristics, modes of thought, and patterns of behavior, are of an exact like kind.

    • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

      People will take a message away from this, though perhaps not one you may find especially comforting.

      With set-pieces like this, incumbent power has increasingly signaled to everyone that it will drop it’s full fury on the head of anyone who gets in the way of feral plains apes. That there is no reasonable suspicion. That the state will literally take your life for it. That even being around them and looking twice is gambling your life many times over.

      In response to such conditions, the ideal scenario many well-meaning people like to imagine is something along the lines of the Qin Line.
      ‘The Qin Line’ refers to the story of how chain of brushpiles that ultimately torched the empire were set to a match. As it goes, a group of labourers were on their way to a worksite, but they could tell they would not make it in time, so they were milling about what to do. At that moment, one man steps forwards.

      “What is the penalty for being late?” he says.

      “Death”, the others reply.

      “And what is the penalty for rebellion?”

      “Death”, the others reply again.

      “Well then”, he says, “we may as well have a go, aye?”

      And so it went.

      There are some differences in the scenarios though. For the most part, the Qin’s expressions of power here were honest and straightforwards. Whereas, for the present gnostic theocracy, it is anything but honest and straightforwards in it’s expressions of power. Anything it does will be rationalized as being ‘for your own good’; up too and including chemically castrating people, sacrificing their children to daemonic idols, and chopping their heads off – not necessarily in that order.

      There is no limit to the abuse it may indulge in if it may. Because ultimately it is all about the feeling of crushing people’s resistance; anything someone would not like to happen to them, they would like to do to them; everything that may provide ever novel ways to experience the phenomena of forcing submission to ever new indignities; any and every pretext that may yet again furnish the possibility of playing the role of bulldozer to someone else’s lean-to; a tail-less eternity in a solipsistic playpen, mashing human clay one way and then another, forever.

      It is never arrested but by fiat; naught unless or until one finds a conscious man organizing other men, who pull such kinds out from their chinks in the well, by root and stem.

      The other day the megaphone had a big run of catastrophizing their great entriggering of Janus’ wake, which they seem to want cement as a permanent year zero to wallow in perpetuity (but of course). A tack whose presumptuousness is matched only by it’s mendacity. Congresscritter Kim relates: ‘for six hours on that January day, the united states government was not in control of it’s own seat’

      Many of these would-be masters-of-the-universe have related just how struck the sightseeing tour left them. In many ways you could say that these are in fact expressions of their earnest feelings; which just goes to show how much of a house of cards the whole business really is; that the primary limiting factor at present is not any particular ‘material correlation of forces’, but daringness to follow through.

      “So you are to tell them that this is what the Lord GOD says: Will it flourish? Will it not be uprooted and stripped of its fruit so that it shrivels? All its foliage will wither! It will not take a strong arm or many people to pull it up by its roots.”

      • jim says:

        > With set-pieces like this, incumbent power has increasingly signaled to everyone that it will drop it’s full fury on the head of anyone who gets in the way of feral plains apes. That there is no reasonable suspicion. That the state will literally take your life for it. That even being around them and looking twice is gambling your life many times over.

        Been there done that. One of them will threaten your life, even if you armed with a deadly weapon, in the confident expectation that you will not use your deadly weapon, because killing him will have disastrous results for you, and killing you is unlikely to have any consequences for him. Use the deadly weapon in a way that gives him a chance of evading death, but also a considerable chance that he might die despite his best efforts to avoid. The reaction is interesting. In addition to your deadly weapon suddenly becoming effective in deterring attack, in addition to him becoming afraid, he is also horrified, shocked, outraged and indignant, revealing a heartfelt belief that he has every right to whimsically and capriciously harm you, and you have absolutely no right to defend yourself.

        You have to be serious about killing him, and genuinely try to do it, but let him have a way out that gives him a good chance to evade it.

        Not only does he think that he has a right to kill you and you have no right to defend yourself, he also thinks that you think that, that you should think that, that it is a terrible shocking, and outrageous thing when it is suddenly revealed that you do not think that.

        Police will warn you not to do such a terrible thing again, but if you are good at talking to police, they will let it slide. They really do not want to enforce the will of our masters.

        • Karl says:

          How do you genuinely try to kill someone, but let him have a way out that gives him a good chance to avoid it?

          **Jim responds:**
          In one case I leapt and dived at him with a knife and attempted to stab him in the stomach, and he applied his baseball bat in a successful maneuver for evasion and sudden retreat, rather than to incapacitate or kill me (which would have been fatal for him, for a knife is faster than baseball bat), in the other case I advanced on someone rapidly with a short range weapon, not at a run, but far faster than normal walking pace, making a vigorous effort to swiftly get within striking range as swiftly as possible while my stance and the way I held my weapon made clear intent to apply it within a few more paces, as soon as I was in range. He thought better of it at that point.

          • Karl says:

            Always a good idea to carry a knife. Just don’t surprise your opponent by drawing and stabbing too quickly, otherwise he can’t evade and flee.

            Somewhat surprising that in both cases you had only one opponent. It is rare that a fit man is attacked by only one man, even if the attacker is armed with a bat or a knife – at least that is the case in Germany (unless the attacker has a very personal motive).

            • jim says:

              My experience is that merely brandishing a weapon, not matter how deadly, is simply not very effective at deterring people who threaten one or invade ones property. People do not believe you will use it, even if they are threatening your life or family, so you actually have to use it with deadly intent and significant risk of injury or death – but, of course, not so deadly that the person threatening you is too likely to die, because that would make it difficult or inconvenient for the police to ignore an incident of self defense by the unprotected classes.

              • Mayflower Sperg says:

                Easy for the police to ignore if you and your dogs (or pigs) do a good job of disposing of the body.

              • Karl says:

                I agree. Brandishing a weapon in a situation were you already have cause to use it will make the situation worse as it merely signals that you will not use it.

      • Starman says:

        @Pseudo-Chrysostom

        “Many of these would-be masters-of-the-universe have related just how struck the sightseeing tour left them. In many ways you could say that these are in fact expressions of their earnest feelings; which just goes to show how much of a house of cards the whole business really is; that the primary limiting factor at present is not any particular ‘material correlation of forces’, but daringness to follow through.”

        Imagine what a difference a real living counter religion makes:

        McJesus:

        Oh noes! Killing the families of FBI agents and drone pilots will make the morbidly obese baby McJesus cry and fall off his Walmart mobility scooter.

        Allah:

        Praise be to our God-fearing muhajideen! For they have slain the demon spawn of the Great Satan’s FBI and drone mercenaries. For God rewards heaven to those who slay the infidel and the Jew. Ameen.

        Imagine if the Amerikaner had a real counter religion, a mental exercise:

        Praise Allah! Governor Rashid Al-BinSantis has sent troops from Jacksonville, FL to Kings Bay Trident Submarine Base, GA across the border. With Allah’s eternal guidance, nuclear weapons have been seized and Holy Nuclear Martyrdom operations are on their way to Jew York City and DC.
        Praise Allah and His Blessed Messenger, Muhammad (SAW). Death to the Infidel, Death to the Great Satan!

        • The Cominator says:

          ROTFLMAO based!

        • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

          What brighter dawns that break over the darkness, could man dream of, than a holy uncorking of his bottled sunshine…

        • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

          On this 8th day of January, in the year of our Lord 2022, we bear great tidings. Governor Ronald DeSantis seized the Kings Bay Trident Submarine Base and the weapons within. Even now, bold Christian men seek to bear these swords of fire against the heathens and pagans in their seats of iniquity. With these weapons of light we will cleanse the very earth of the servants of Satan and their works. God has given us victory on this day, and through faith, we will claim victory in the days ahead. Forward, Christian Man, for God, for DeSantis, and for America!

    • G.T. Chesterton says:

      Whites don’t get outraged over injustice to other Whites. The jury was 11 White traitors and one black. These three men will rot in jail like James Fields, perhaps to be joined later by the D.A. who noticed they did nothing wrong.

      I’m surprised the media are even broadcasting this. They were already found guilty earlier, so that could’ve been the end of the story.

      • Red says:

        They’re rubbing it in that self defense against niggers is illegal.

        • Pooch says:

          They want to set a precedent for when they decide to sic more black mobs on Amerikaner whites. Absolutely zero tolerance for resisting with deadly force.

  10. Encelad says:

    Have Khmer always been inferior or were they dumbed down during Polpot? How much did the intellectual democide matter?

    • S says:

      This was covered here before. If I remember they were dumber, but the killing fields knocked off… I want to say the estimate was 3 points? Maybe more?

      Intellectual democide matters alot. It lacks the relentless selection effect of leftism and feminism, but if you get rid of the smart fraction you can have to climb up the ladder all over again.

    • jim says:

      The genocide made a gigantic difference. How smart Khmers were before the genocide I do not know, but the Khmer Rouge killed all the brights, then all the midwits.

      However, at the time, our academics were still pretty smart, and they were treating Khmer academic and political discourse seriously, which no one would do today, so, back in the day, probably roughly similar to other east Asians.

      And while some east Asians are a lot smarter than other east Asians they tend to be smart in different ways, making comparisons not very meaningful. A Thai engineer is probably not nearly as smart, or nearly as good an engineer, as a Han engineer, but he probably does not have the Han blind spot problem, so if he is team leader of a largely Han team, the team will not have the blind spot problem, while if it is the other way around, the team is likely to be in trouble.

      • The Ducking Man says:

        It still saddens that big part of intelligence is hereditary.

        I mean till this day I never encounter smart people that don’t have smart parent.

        • Red says:

          Both of my parents are midwits, but my Grandfathers were extremely intelligent.

          • The Ducking Man says:

            Intelligence is mighty hard to assess unless demonstrated outwardly.

            Your parents may be perceived as midwits because they don’t have chance to show off their intelligence.

            Heck, even my father was only seemed mighty brilliant on his twilight years after he has the chance saw machine literally from scrap at home. I myself was only considered smart since university year (K-12 education do not do me justice).

            • Red says:

              Unfortunately not the case with my father. I’m a good 20-25 points above him, even if though I’m more limited in general ability as a sperg. The things that my father made his life profession, I’d surpassed his ability in them by the time I was 14. I think Asperger trades an extra block of raw mental power in exchange for losing normal human instincts about religion and social behavior or the great intelligence of my Grandfather skipped a generation, though my brothers and sisters don’t show any signs of it.

              • Pooch says:

                There is some evidence that more of the intelligence genes are inherited from the mother. My father is a midwit which I have surpassed, but my mother likely was in the higher IQ range for women. Not a genius by any stretch, but she had a deep appreciation and interest in history and the arts that is highly unusual for most women.

        • p says:

          100% of intelligence is hereditary.

          • Mike in Boston says:

            No one with more than one child thinks 100% of intelligence is hereditary. Some of my children are quite impressively smart, others, while certainly not stupid, are not on the same level.

            • p says:

              A trait being 100% hereditary doesn’t imply that all children will be the same. It means that there’s no other way to obtain the trait except by inheriting it. (E.g. reading “War and Peace” to the baby doesn’t work.)

            • Arqiduka says:

              Think of it like this: you inherit many more genes then you express, the vast majority you just hold on (they use you as a bus to travel on) and a few you embody.

              So with intelligence, you inherit a bunch of ten genes, only one of which will be expressed as you actual intelligence (numbers our of my ass for simplicity). Its dumb luck that determines if you get the one out of those that make you smart. But you carry it (well, 50%chnace you do), and even if it.misses you it.may express itself in your kids or grandkids.

              This is what people mean when they speak of “regression to the mean” or when they side you got you big dick from your mother.

        • G.T. Chesterton says:

          It still saddens that big part of intelligence is hereditary.

          If not from ancestors, were you hoping it could be inherited from Magic Dirt?

          • The Ducking Man says:

            I’m hoping that nutrition play bigger role in improving intelligence. Alas, my observation from 2021 still holds children from smart parent are always 1 step ahead from completion.

            I’ve experienced myself, the jarring invisible distance between me and certain people who are born from more established family (smart and high status). No amount of hard work I did could close the gap.

            Even today I’m stuck being manager at mid level company, some of those people I know are already C-suit execs or have high flying corporate jobs.

            • Red says:

              Being born to a high status family is a huge step up because your parents command people and you learn how to command people from them.

              • The Ducking Man says:

                It’s not just their leadership, but also their innate ablity.

                One person I know a fella who can formulate bulletproof business case when the rest of the class just finished reading the case. He went to become regional manager at big company 2 years out of college.

                The head of student association I know aces every subject imaginable. She is now working overseas and owning mansion and whatnot.

            • Arqiduka says:

              Yes, a bitter pill yo swallow but swallow we must. There’s a natural hierarchy and us- I dare say none of us – are at the very apex.

              Happy to catch flak on this but I sincerely belive this: a direct prediction of the HLvM model is that the very fact that we are of the right indicates that we are not the appex. There are a few people who sit at the top of the enemy coalition and who are bona fide the finest specimens of humans to have ever existed. They preach what they don’t practice and themselves live as patricians. I don’t know who they are but Yarvin is hinting that he may in that park speech he made.

              So it’s fine not being the best of the best there’s still a place for everyone but the top dog alpha. And we shall win nevertheless, for there’s few of them and mnay of us, once you set the cut-off at 105 of thereabouts.

              • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                You’ll catch flak because if there was ever a point where it was true that point was decades ago.

                The ‘evil genius’ creates conditions that ensure the stupidity of his successors.

              • alf says:

                There’s a natural hierarchy and us- I dare say none of us – are at the very apex.

                I am very comfortably at the apex of my small natural hierarchy.

                In a functioning society, that tiny natural hierarchy would scale all the way up, from the local community to the city to the king. Which is exactly how it was for hundreds of years in Europe, and is why Europe conquered the world and planted its feet on the moon.

                There are a few people who sit at the top of the enemy coalition and who are bona fide the finest specimens of humans to have ever existed.

                This is the exact same shill meme we have heard earlier this week. Our evil genius overlords! They are so evil, but so genius!

                I’m not saying they’re dumb as bricks, but slow-crashing a plane you did not built just ain’t my definition of ‘finest specimens of humans to have ever existed’.

                God promised Abraham would have as many descendants as there were stars in the skies, thus implying that Abraham was among the finest specimens of humans to have ever existed. Jesus, on the other hand, did not have any descendants, but one may argue he was never fully human anyway. At any rate, his memes uplifted the entire world and are without doubt among the finest specimens to ever exist.

                Which is not to say evil geniuses don’t exist. Mao Zedong was a textbook example of an evil genius. But it’s rather hard to pull off consistently, and evil seems to reward short-term, rarely long-term, so I find it not so surprising that Mao’s descendants were plagued by early death, neglect and bad mental health.

                • chris says:

                  ‘finest specimens of humans to have ever existed’

                  they are the finest parasites to have ever existed.

                • alf says:

                  I am happy to reward them that title.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  I know it’s an enemy meme, and I sincerely appreciate the good will in moderation.

                  Just a note though, “evil genius organisation” and “organisation with an evil genius CEO”are not the same thing, especially when the CEO is no real CEO, all relationships are informal and fluid and those below are envious, dumb-as-bricks silly fucks. Easy to explain the clustetfucks all around without having to postulate stupidity at the top: coordination is hard, harder still if your coalitions is too large and thus unstable and you can only issue irders under plausible deniability.

                  But no practical significance at all linked to whether this model is true or not, just a matter of sociology.

                • alf says:

                  Just a note though, “evil genius organisation” and “organisation with an evil genius CEO”are not the same thing,

                  As Satan pretends to be one of God’s angels, so does it seem to me that ‘evil genius organizations’ are always previously effective organizations taken over by entryists, like Disney or Marvel. Seem smart because they have a big organization, but they did not build that organization, and are in fact running that organization into the ground.

                  I think there can be a thrill in the takeover, like pulling off a heist is a thrill, but we’ve long passed that point.

              • jim says:

                > There are a few people who sit at the top of the enemy coalition and who are bona fide the finest specimens of humans to have ever existed.

                Nuts.

                The smartest guy in their coalition is Soros, and he is not super smart. Look, I have been looking into the Science of the Awesome and Mighty Covid Demon. They are morons, and that is their top scientists. The people at the top of their coalition are the intellectual equals of Biden and Hillary Clinton.

                A hundred years ago, they had some smart people, but it has been downhill ever since.

                Know your enemy, know yourself. I have been putting a lot of effort into knowing our enemy, and there is a huge IQ gap. Look at their entertainments and their writings. These are dumb people.

                When the left came to power it was full of very very smart people, who felt they were unjustly excluded from the ruling coalition. But they were evil people, and smart evil people don’t trust smart evil subordinates. As they became more evil their subordinates became dumber and dumber, and in each generation, the dumber subordinates replaced their smart evil overlords.

                Their smartest economist is Krugman, who is smarter than the typical midwit, but nothing extraordinary or unusual. Their smartest biological scientists are pretty similar to Fauci, who is stupid. Soros is pretty smart, but we have plenty smarter than he. Their technical and technological experts are using by rote tools they no longer understand.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  Soros is an informal agent of the DoS, often not the smartest man in most if the rooms he sits in, let alone the coalition. He is an expendable asset to be burned when one of their little revolutions goes Jacobin.

                  Soros, Kissinger, all of the ghetto boys with inferiority complexes.

                • jim says:

                  If Soros is not the smartest man in the room, or rather the least stupid man in the room, then who is?

                  If the evil genius overlords existed, I would know who they were. Smart people leave tracks that another smart person can recognize.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  Lol, someday, when I happen to be drunk and this question comes up again I will share my favourite bit of Qtardery. But that day is not today.

              • Tityrus says:

                > There are a few people who sit at the top of the enemy coalition and who are bona fide the finest specimens of humans to have ever existed. They preach what they don’t practice and themselves live as patricians. I don’t know who they are but Yarvin is hinting that he may in that park speech he made.

                How do you know those people exist if you don’t know who they are?

                Yarvin’s position has always been that the elite is smart but deluded. According to him, the delusions are designed (have evolved) to fool smart people more easily than dumb people. Jim says that the delusions used to be smart but now they are dumb.

                It would have to be delusion, unless you believe that leftism ultimately, in the long run, benefits the elite.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  Jokes aside, I obviously don’t know who they are (indeed, if even I had knowledge this would be prima facie evidence against their postulated competence), but infer their existence.

                  How else would you explain the existence of a single mic from which a thousand megaphones speak? How is this mic never incoherent at any one point in time (though it may be very incoherent on two different days)? Who told Soros when the BoE was going to drop the peg, to the minute? Who told the BoE when they had to? How is it that a power struggle never develops at the top, as far as we can see? I can most easily explain these by referring to a structure topped by a few extraordinary men, capable of rational cooperation to pursue a shared goal (keeping the Jims of the world in line, who could eat their lunch otherwise, HLvM).

                  But, as per my reply to alf above, do not mistake a structure with a few evil geniuses at the top for an evil genius structure: the former is still a dumb, incoherent structure by virtue of the bioleninist dregs it must operate by, hence clusterfuck after clusterfuck we see around us.

                  By the time your order filters through a hundred informal reporting levels, along people who don’t even know they are in a reporting level, it will have lost all nuance and force. Knowing this, the top fucks keep their orders short, broad and hard to misunderstand, but with enormous room to drive a bus through: “Covid is how we beat Trump, now figure it out”. Imagine that you are born to one of the van der X families, and will inherit a position at the top of a structure that directs subhumans and midwits against geniuses, a position you have held since the days of the Glorious Revolution. How would YOU rule? Harvard and the NYT help enormously by propagating the orders and the correct interpretation, hence Yarvin’s analysis which tells us that Harvard and NYT rule. Except that he winks sometimes.

                  As I wrote at Alrenous’, it amazes me that Yarvin has made a very significant change to Moldbug’s system, by having a Secret Board oversee the CEO. Moldbug would have told Yarvin “then you have rule by the Secret Board, not Monarchy, so just say you want rule by House of Lords (a great system greatly exceeding Monarchy btw)”. So why has Yarvin included a cabal of 12 super secret people in his design, otherwise unchanged since Moldbug? I think he’s hinting at how the enemy coalition is actually run, and uses Modlbug’s monarchical design to do this.

                • Pooch says:

                  Moldbug always used the CEO of a company (implicitly or explicitly implying a board) as his ideal form of government. There is no inconsistency there.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  You don’t need to be smarter than your project lead to get him canceled for being a strait white male.

                  Previously incumbent leftists usurped more adaptively intelligent predecessors in the status hierarchy using This One Weird Trick in just a like manner; the modulation of such particular tactics naturally differing in degree, but of the same kind – the degrees of modulation being a relationship to the relative virtuosity of the times they operate in; and they themselves were in turn succeeded by those even stupider yet, again in just a like manner. And so on it goes.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  “Moldbug always used the CEO of a company (implicitly or explicitly implying a board) as his ideal form of government. There is no inconsistency there.”

                  Implicitly yes, but please note that that the Secret Board Yarving writes about has nothing to do with the normal board in the modern org, since the former is hereditary and unelected, whilst the latter is elected and can be dismissed at any time if minority shareholders get pissed. A huge departure from both current practice and Moldbug.

                  Maybe he came around and saw the virtue of Rule by House of Lords (which is bone fide better than monarchy), and is trying to make Moldbug backward0compatible with this, but I don’t think so.

                • Pooch says:

                  whilst the latter is elected and can be dismissed at any time if minority shareholders get pissed.

                  Not seeing that.

                  Yarvin writes:

                  Each trustee has an NFT, of course. With this token he can do three things: converse anonymously with the other trustees; help them elect a new king, and designate a successor or string of successors. If he does not check in to the board meeting every two weeks, a deadman switch gives his powers to his designated successor. It is also conventional for a trustee to retire if doxed or identified in any way.

                  https://graymirror.substack.com/p/monarchism-and-fascism-today

                • Tityrus says:

                  Arquiduka, as for the question of how mass coordination can happen absent a supergenius elite, that is a complicated question on which discussion can go on forever, so maybe some other time.

                  I will just point out that the proposition you are defending is not the one you originally made. You are saying there are a few “exceptional people” at the top, while before you said that every exceptional person is on the left. Obviously we know that we have no political power right now, and obviously when it comes to political power the elites are at the apex, by definition—but you made the much stronger assertion that the left has everybody at every apex of every natural hierarchy, including intelligence. But if the enemy coalition is a dozen or 50 or even 100 evil geniuses at the very top directing a much larger mass of genetic refuse, as you say now, then the majority of people at that same level or higher must still be outside of that coalition. And none of this follows from high low versus middle, because HLvM is about the relationship between the ranks of the political status hierarchy and says nothing about how people are assigned to those ranks in the first place.

                  Also, could you link to the Yarvin piece about the Secret Board? I don’t remember which one it is.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  @ Pooch,

                  well, if not hereditary than surely semi-hereditary in the sense of not being removable except under some circumstances AND being able to designate their own successors. And whichever these circumstances may be, the fact that these guys’ identities are secret very significantly limits what practical recourse you have against them. Contrast any odd board nowadays, and the difference is night and day. Not a slip of the tongue, a deliberate design choice.

                  @ Tityrus,

                  I apologise if I let on the impression that I was saying that all exceptional people are of the left, I meant no such thing. I meant and mean this: take any rightists you wish, there shall always (always) be some leftist who is “better” than him in any one criteria you wish (except morality perhaps). Smarter. Braver. A better leader of men. Wiser. Healthier. Lower time preference. More alpha. Better FIFA player. Greater progeny. You name it.

                  This does not mean that there are MORE leftists who are better, quite the opposite, but that there is at least one guy. One of them, a thousand of us (once you set a reasonable cut-off in term of IQ). A strong claim indeed, but not as strong as what you say.

                  Not intended as a black pill at all, I’d rather fight alongside a thousand Spartans than a thousand peasants lead by one Achilles. But the odds are even and he is Achilles.

                • jim says:

                  > the fact that these guys’ identities are secret

                  Nuts.

                  These guys identities are not secret. They are downplayed in the news, but no secret. I recall Victoria Nuland’s interaction with the American Ambassador. He had no doubt where power was. Power is not where it officially is, and it is often hard to figure out where it is, but it is not some deep invisible conspiracy either.

                  I study the decision making processes of our enemies. Often great piles of their internal emails leak from time to time, revealing what is going on. Actual leadership and actual power is in hands entirely unsurprising, and they are dumb as jackasses. It is seldom where it officially is, but who actually has power keeps finding himself in the news often enough. When you see who has actual power, it is close enough to whom you would expect, and you will realize you knew it all along. Power is not where it officially is, but it is not in the hands of the secret masters of the universe. It is in the hands of people whose exercise of power is fairly public, well known and unsurprising.

                  And dumb as posts.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  @Arqiduka

                  Nah.

                  The whole point of ‘doing leftism’ in the first place, is taking avenues to status one would otherwise not be capable of getting.

                • Tityrus says:

                  > I apologise if I let on the impression that I was saying that all exceptional people are of the left, I meant no such thing. I meant and mean this: take any rightists you wish, there shall always (always) be some leftist who is “better” than him in any one criteria you wish (except morality perhaps). Smarter. Braver. A better leader of men. Wiser. Healthier. Lower time preference. More alpha. Better FIFA player. Greater progeny. You name it.

                  > This does not mean that there are MORE leftists who are better, quite the opposite, but that there is at least one guy. One of them, a thousand of us (once you set a reasonable cut-off in term of IQ). A strong claim indeed, but not as strong as what you say.

                  Your statements seem logically confused to me. If for every rightist there is at least one leftist better than him in any one criterion I wish, then the best leftist according to some criterion must be better than the best rightist in said criterion. So it cannot be true that there are not more leftists than rightists better than any given rightist, because for some criterion there is a rightist who is better than every other rightist but inferior to some leftist, and 1 > 0. Also, the converse statement, that for every leftist you can find a rightist better than him in any one criteria you choose, cannot be true. Which is exactly equivalent to saying that “the left has everybody at every apex of every natural hierarchy”, if we set the cutoff for “apex” high enough.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  @Tityrus,

                  I think the source of confusion is due to the interpretation of “for every rightists there is at least one leftist…”, which DOES NOT mean that “for every ten rightists there are tend leftists…”. Its still one guy who’s “better” than the best of your ten, but you have ten and he is one.

                  Let me restate that point: take you “best” rightist on X criteria. There is one leftist who is “better” than him on X, except for morality. The converse is not the case.

                  So yeah, depending on where you place the cutoff, there may be many more Ls than Rs (low cut off or no cut off), many more Rs than Ls (cut off at the point of usefulness in a modern economy) or all Ls and no Rs at all (highest possible cut off).

                  This is a very stilysized model of course but that’s the gist of what I mean.

                • jim says:

                  > Let me restate that point: take you “best” rightist on X criteria. There is one leftist who is “better” than him on X, except for morality. The converse is not the case.

                  This is stupid. You are stupid.

                  It is absolutely obvious that most people here are a great deal smarter than the smartest leftist in the world – because no genuinely smart person can make it in the left any more. Not one.

                  It is hard to recognize people smarter than oneself. It is easy to recognize people more stupid than oneself. They are all stupid, every single one utterly without exception. Anyone with half a brain gets the Scott Alexander treatment.

                  It was said that the Khmer Rouge killed everyone with glasses. This is not true. They did not intend to kill every single smart person. But somehow, they did kill every single smart person in Cambodia. All of them died or fled. None remained. A handful have returned, to find absolutely no one remaining in Cambodia their intellectual equal.

                  What happened is that there were a bunch of moderately bright exterminators who set about killing everyone who looked comparably intelligent to themselves, everyone who did not seems stupid to them. Including, of course, each other.

                  Every smart leftist is a threat to every other smart leftist. Zero sum thinking, zero sum behavior. If you make envy and covetousness your religious sacrament, you are going to wind up purging anyone who is insufficiently stupid.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  I am stupid compared to most here, I sincerely take no offence at all with that. Probably not best placed to pontificate about the structure of the left, also true. What to say Jim, I hope you are right.

                • Tityrus says:

                  > This is stupid. You are stupid.

                  That’s not fair. It would argue stupidity for Arqiduka to think that an obviously stupid person is smart, but Arqiduka’s postulated, inferred, and (we would argue) imaginary supergenius uber-elites are not obviously stupid, if only for the vacuous reason that they are not obviously anything.

                • jim says:

                  If one postulates an invisible elite, they could well be supergeniuses. Also green and two headed, with scales.

                  It might be true, but it is also a religious belief. And not a religion that serves our interest.

                  The elite is somewhat obfuscated and occluded, because we do not have formalism, because things do not correspond to their names, but obfuscation is one thing, deep invisibility is another thing.

                  In order to act, we have to know our enemy. And it seems that we do know our enemy. If magic invisible supergeniuses with magic super technology, nothing can be done.

                  On the empirical evidence, do not look like magic invisible supergeniuses with magic super technology. Look like idiots.

                  We are powerless for lack of a legitimate leader with the plausible right to use violence. Our enemies hate us and intend to destroy us. But we have one thing going for us. We understand what happening, and they do not.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  Arq asserting that his rulers are impressively smart seems to me in larger part a projected rationalization; he *wants* to believe them to be smart, smarter than him even perhaps, as this would let him to feel better about the state of affairs in general being what they are, and his own position relative to theirs, in particular.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  Aw, you guys are all real softies deep down. I really meant it though, no offence at all.

  11. pyrrhus says:

    Hey, I need help regarding Bitcoin…Haven’t owned any for years..What’s the best way to buy and store bitcoins?

    • Mike in Boston says:

      My preference is to buy piecemeal at one of the increasingly rare Bitcoin ATMs that is satisfied with only SMS verification, which SMS goes to a prepaid phone you bought in the hood for cash. Then, store on an old tablet running Airgap Vault.

      For larger purchases, there is the Bisq network, but it is not completely free of bad actors nor buggy code.

    • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

      For a simple inroad Anglin has a good introductory guide on his website.

  12. chris says:

    Normies are starting to discuss mass formation psychosis, aka purity spirals. @ around 9.50 min in.

    https://rumble.com/vrxr3n-tpc-653-dr.-mattias-desmet-dr.-robert-malone-dr.-peter-mccullough-mass-form.html

  13. Ghost says:

    Since this is filed under Science I’ll stay on the use of the word.

    These CV propagandists like to throw that word around: Trust the Science.

    Well the Science can never be in until it is a law. Science or the body of knowledge is always being added to with more information. The vaxx maniacs are trusting the propaganda and throwing out the part of the Science about deaths, heart attacks and clots. Not very Scientific to ignore facts.

  14. simplyconnected says:

    Hopefully relevant anecdote. I recall some study where they found good test scores, GPAs etc, when entering college or grad school correlated much less with measures of academic success (prizes, highly cited papers, etc) for asians than for whites. I recall this was known to universities admissions, though perhaps it is not anymore. Sadly, I can’t remember the source.

    • chris says:

      I remember seeing someone on a blog somewhere hypothesise that the Imperial testing system in Mandarin China selected for early blooming academically/intellectually which would explain why East Asians perform better academically relative to their adult performance/adult IQ’s when they are younger. Kind of like how an R selected jungle environment would select for people reaching adult stature earlier.

      • G.T. Chesterton says:

        Perhaps the jungle inhabitants are simply closer cousins to the lower animals that know how to walk the instant they drop from the birth canal. The difference of a couple extra months to walk/run/jump or chuck spear doesn’t save a race from full-grown predators.

  15. Cloudswrest says:

    The “faces of Webb” from one of their latest tweets today.

    https://twitter.com/NASAWebb/status/1479163585880285185/photo/1

    • jim says:

      Hence the project took so long, and cost so much

    • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

      Some time ago i sat in on several presentations by highly accredited degree holders on the topic of radio frequency generators.

      Each of them could marshal a whole army of increasingly minute figures, metrics, and measurements describing various aspects of various mechanisms, from twystrons, to klystrodes, to diacrodes, their dimensions, their inputs, their outputs, et cetera.

      But not a single one of them touched upon the basic operating principle common to all of them that is generating the radiance in the first place, which is electron perturbation, each being various techniques for introducing force upon the electron stream, which gives up energy (‘braking radiation’) whenever it’s acceleration changes (that is, it’s direction or/and velocity), whether by magnetic fields, resonant cavities, charged grids, or more besides and combinations thereof.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imtoiNWZEUs

      One gets a sense of almost total disconnection; in latter years, even those members of the priesthood ‘in a field’ don’t seem to really understand how the things they use are used, how to make the things they made, how the things they use to make the things they use are made. And so as for the archetypical voluntary twitter commissar, the notion of the idea does not even cross xir mind in the first place; all the easier for it then to make life difficult for those doing such things – for those even seeking such understanding.

      • Karl says:

        Is it possible that they did not touch upon the basic operating principle because they assumed everyone was familiar with it?

        • jim says:

          More likely they did not comprehend it. I was not there, I have not heard experts expound on high frequency generators. But I have heard experts expound on other things, and I usually know a lot more about the fundamentals of their field than they do.

          Any expert who actually is an expert is usually quite elderly.

        • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

          That the a charitable interpretation. However, consider the actual utility of the information sources: someone could walk out of the room with a head full of factums, and little more understanding of how these things work than when he walked in. He is presented with an array of different apparati, and informed that they are different, but not a coherent sense of why they are different, of what is trying to be accomplished by the various configurations.

          An uninitiated is left with an impression of voodoo; lower order magic on the scale of cargo cult, where one is conceptually limited to aping exoteric forms – even at great fidelity, to be sure – without really grokking the point of it all.

          • alf says:

            This phenomenon frustrated me to no end in highschool, and still plagues the internet in general. Just this sea of random facts with no internal coherence.

            Well maybe not the internet in general. Wikipedia mostly comes to mind. You can spend hours reading wikipedia and walk away none the wiser.

            • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

              Percepting signal from noise is something that can be understood by those who already understand, but does no good for those who do not already understand; and over time, leaves one with those who can do no good.

  16. Anonymous Fake says:

    Is it advancing cultural Marxism or implied corruption that I’ve increasingly noticed that a lot of job postings don’t even mention salary and benefits information?

    And when you think about different birth cohorts, are the attributes of Generation X mostly a consequence of its best people salary chasing and being caught in cost of living traps? Boston, New York City, San Francisco, etc. They were too young to be virtually automatically successful Boomers, but too old to have sufficient economic information to fairly plan a career due to the internet.

    But now it looks like we’re going back, or going in a new direction, when jobs aren’t mentioning how much they pay. It makes entrepreneurship look so much better for anyone who isn’t already burdened by an extensive education and career history and the specialized skills and networks associated with it, even if just lower middle class at the end of the day.

    • jim says:

      > Is it advancing cultural Marxism or implied corruption that I’ve increasingly noticed that a lot of job postings don’t even mention salary and benefits information?

      In the good jobs, you negotiate your salary. Always been that way for me. I don’t recall ever applying for a job that mentioned the salary up front, though I suppose I might have.

      > But now it looks like we’re going back, or going in a new direction, when jobs aren’t mentioning how much they pay.

      As I said, I don’t recall ever applying for a job that mentioned how much it paid.

      As for this practice spreading, it is probably a result of inflation. Where employers are paying standard wages for all employees, where salaries are not individually negotiated but bear some fixed rate for the job description, employers don’t want existing employees to know that salaries have risen, though everyone is figuring it out pretty quickly, and if you don’t pay, you will get turnover. And right now preserving the company is more important than maximizing short term profits, so trying to chisel existing employees is likely to bite employers that are not handing out money to ensure retention.

      Because of normality bias, employers are reluctant to raise prices and raise wages. This is foolish and will burn them. One should charge what one can, and pay what one has to, and because of inflation, people do not know what they can charge, and are reluctant to pay what they have to.

      But one only pays standardized wages to inferior people who are only capable of standardized work.

      But even with inferior people and standardized work, price and wage instability makes it hard to determine a standard. You don’t know how much they should pay, and they do not know either.

      There is still a grotesque oversupply of applicants for priestly jobs, such a lawyering, or there was fairly recently. As I said, the artificial manufacture of priestly jobs is hitting its limit. Hard to predict what the impact of inflation is likely to be on this.

      • Anonymous Fake says:

        [*self congratulation on the vast popularity of Marxism with the oppressed masses deleted*]

    • Kunning Drueger says:

      As a over educated, under employed midwit, this is how it works:

      Day laborer/vagrant: one time cash transaction, determined by situation

      Seasonal laborer: flat day rate, no OT or other leftist bullshit

      Service industry: minimum wage +pennies depending on clientele (bougie service industry make a bit more than hood McDonald’s)

      Base Labor( this is across the trades, plumbing, construction, film, etc.): Base day rate predicated on project budget

      Semi-skilled labor: double the day rate, depending on details

      Skilled labor fixed: usually double or triple minimum wage, lots of variation

      White collar mid-level management: salary proffered after or during final offer, non-negotiable

      Blue collar mid-level management: call the union, then add or subtract a few bucks depending on the state

      Film producers, contract managers: total sum agreed on hire, wildly variable depending on field, project, skill in interview

      Past this, I have no familiarity. It is never certain that salary or bennies are a part of the deal in terms of negotiability. It’s been this way since the early oughts. If anything, salaries are being discussed more, not less.

      Jim, this is CR, or someone from the same internet social justice collective (far more likely that CR was from some Anonymous flavored entity than Fed). He should just be blanket deleted, he adds nothing.

    • Aidan says:

      Not seeing the cost of living trap. Men who are willing and able to have families manage to escape to the suburbs to have kids while continuing to work in the city. The reasons men fail to form families have little to do with the cost of living. The day laborer from 150 years ago, living in conditions you would deplore, had higher fertility than todays doctors and lawyers.

      • The Ducking Man says:

        Babies are very expensive in term of time, dedication, and attention.

        I personally wouldn’t mind having second child if babies are not such time and energy. I mean look away for 30 seconds and surely the baby will find a way to trip or swallow foreign objects.

        Man child no matter how much money he have won’t have the time, dedication, and attention to support baby let alone babies.

      • Mayflower Sperg says:

        Imagine a video game where winners get substantial prizes, so players are highly motivated to win, and the game masters want them to lose, or at least not win too easily. As players get better, masters increase the difficulty level, which is a global setting, because if it were player-specific, experts could increase their odds of winning by pretending to be noobs.

        That game is mostly dead now, because its reigning champions (Roosh, Heartiste, et al.) got bored and retired, while new players start the game in Nightmare Mode and soon give up after failing to score a single point.

  17. ospskr says:

    It’s springtime in Kazakhstan! (Or is it?)

    • p says:

      Not any more.

    • Varna says:

      Their prez asked for “assistance” from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which means that Russia, Belarus, and Armenia instantly sent in “peace keepers” as a “show of goodwill”. These troops have been there since two days now.

      When the Kazakh former dear leader Nazarbaev retired, he retired old-school style–becoming the chairman of the Security Council which “advises” the next prez and govt.

      Some speculate that Putin has been trying to do something like this for the last 15 years, but the situation is never right so far for him to be able to swing such a semi-retirement. So he’s forced to stay on and on and on, waiting for a lull that never comes.

      Anyway, since Kazakhstan is Central Asia, power is disputed between “big families”, and the current new prez and the old semi-retired prez represent different families. If other forces play on this potential tension, they can achieve a whole lot of things. From total shift in external policy and govt structure, to collapse Syria style.

      • Pooch says:

        Globohomo behind the protesters?

        • Varna says:

          Early to say who’s behind what and what players will try to ride the energy in what way.

          Destabilizing this crucial part of the new silk road is always a plus for globohomo, as well as trying to use a prize both Russia, China, and Turkey view as their backyard to maybe drive a wedge between the three.

          But this does not necessarily mean globohomo started this. Definitely means they’ll try to ride it, even if they didn’t start it.

        • pyrrhus says:

          Unmarked vehicles delivering weapons to the “protestors”…definitely a CIA/State operation…Kazakhstan is very strategic and has a lot of uranium ore..

          • jim says:

            Source?

              • jim says:

                Ah, the usual suspects are boasting of their success.

                So, foreign sponsored color revolution in Kazakhstan confirmed. It is not just the Russians claiming it is foreign sponsored, it is the organization that sponsored it leaking like a sieve, as all big powerful conspiracies always do.

                If I was president in any country anywhere, I would simply have all agents of the National Endowment for Democracy, (and anyone operating under the many different letterheads of what is supposedly many organizations, but actually one organization) deniably shot as an obvious and immediate threat to my life. If the USG denies attempting to overthrow regimes by deadly violence, why does not every regime threatened by this kill their agents whenever they are found, anywhere they may be found, and deny doing so?

                Possibly the problem is inadequate and inappropriate state religions. The Cathedral Officially Unofficial State Religion says it is good and virtuous to overthrow regimes, and it is apt to be extremely profitable to be the people making it happen. The sovereigns threatened by this holy faith need an official state religion that says it is good to kill people plotting to do that, because they are enemies of God and agents of Satan, so that you can have good people who cooperate with each other and with the sovereign knocking them off.

  18. Pax Imperialis says:

    Korea is not a homogeneous nation. The geography of Korea, Jeolla Province being the exception, is extremely mountainous. This resulted a fairly substantial genetic isolation of communities for thousands of years because it was always easier to marry that cute village girl living next door than transverse a couple of mountains, rivers, bandits, and predators to get to the neighboring village. The extremely high level of segregation based on social strata also resulted in a number of communities having identities completely shaped by social standing with little intermarriage. This has persisted into modern Korea with intermarriage between the different provinces (and their associated social standing/informal caste) remaining as low as 10%. It is even possible with high levels of confidence to determine caste and regional affiliations based on physiological traits.

    What effectively happened was that the military aristocracy more or less took the high ground and lived secluded in the foothills. The numerous political and religious purges never completely purged the opposition because they could run into the deeply mountainous areas and hide resulting in a substantial number of villages that were basically internal exiled dissidents (religious and political). The natural harbors were small enough and surrounded by mountains such that the merchant and fish mongers where effectively confined to two major locations (Inchon/Pusan) with several smaller coastal communities (Sokcho) and never grew to dominate the culture unlike Japan which was always a very maritime culture. Majority of Agriculture was in the flat Jeolla Province where the vast majority of peasant farmers lived and historically where nearly all the peasant/collectivist revolts originated.

    Power is still highly contested between the collectivist/peasant regions and the martial/dissident regions. The resultant democratic politics is a complete cluster fuck. The only shared “racial’ trait is extreme fanatical stubbornness which has resulted in governments that can only function through high levels of corruption to buy off opposition and/or beating opposition into submission. The American presence undermined the South Korean government ability to use martial force to run the government and SK has been in a leftward drift ever since.

    How can Korean engineers get hung up over 2300V being in the manual?
    A fanatically stubborn population with high levels of obvious internal conflict results in a culture where making such mistakes in documentation is inconceivable and therefore you can trust with 99.99% confidence that those errors don’t exist. That mentality can and has resulted in extremely rare but major disasters.

    Why are Chinese and Korean engineers so different?
    China has significantly more flat agricultural land and thus far more collectivist/peasant population with proportionally far fewer mountains to hid in. Dissidents can’t just hide in the mountains. State power is far more ubiquitous and a far more unified country on the surface. Purges tended to be extremely complete. Being outwardly stubborn is liable to get you killed so you will naturally end up with far more deception. You can’t trust anything or anyone. Basically Chinese commonly see bullshit and will more likely recognize it, but often it’s best not to call attention to it. Thusly their engineers are more error tolerant but disasters are far more common in China. China has higher costs in both human and financial terms. This is similar to Soviet space program which was very capable but at a rather high cost that ultimately the Soviet’s were not willing to pay. The CCP doesn’t care about the human cost and financial is merely a number at the moment.

    Chinese are collectivist due to peasants being dominate and inward looking due to no real maritime tradition.
    Japanese were more individualist due to extremely martial/dissidents and easily became outward looking due to a maritime tradition.
    Koreans peasants and martial/dissidents are roughly balanced in power and are more inward looking than Japanese but more outward looking than the Chinese.

    • jim says:

      One commenter tells me that it is obviously silly for me to suggest that the Korean race differs in important characteristics that make a vital and crucial difference in the struggle between China and the US, and a commenter who knows his Korea tells me that Korea itself is composed of many races that differ radically in their important psychological characteristics and aptitudes, and can be physically told apart on sight.

      Well, I have not been to Korea except for the plane touching down in an airport, but that sounds like most of East Asia that I have visited.

      • Arqiduka says:

        I think the more you know a people, the more you can notice these differences, so Pax Imperialis’ extremely informative comment may be as reflective of the degree to which he is used to Korea as of the heterogeneity of that people. My own people seem extremely heterogeneous to myself, and on similar grounds, but it turns out we are the most homogeneous people in Europe, so go figure.

        I wish we would have a way to quantify such things. Perhaps the most recent common paternal ancestor of all people (or at least half) of a nation, with the closest being the most homogenous?

        • Pax Imperialis says:

          I don’t think you even have to know Koreans that well to notice some glaring difference.

          You can quantify this politically.
          The kingdoms of Silla and Baekje contested control of the peninsula. Silla would ultimately win but 1500 years latter you can still see the political difference in modern day elections. Take note that the ledger for the popular vote goes into the 90% range for both candidates. That’s in the magnitude of African American support for DNC. Compare to Ukraine 2010 election to see how similar the magnitude of political alignment.

          Silla Baekje
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:History_of_Korea-576.png

          2007 Election
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2007_Republic_of_Korea_Presidential_Election,_Provincial-level_divisions.svg

          2012 Election
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2012_Republic_of_Korea_Presidential_Election,_Provincial-level_divisions.svg

          Ukraine 2010 election
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Ukrainian_presidential_election#/media/File:%D0%94%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B3%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D1%82%D1%83%D1%80_2010_%D0%BF%D0%BE_%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%85-en.png

          South Korea is incredibly regional, and yet many non-Koreans get the idea that it is very homogeneous. This is likely due to mass migration to the capital Seoul and surrounding metropolitan region which is where most tourists visit. Imagine not knowing the physical difference between German and Italian people and going to Maine where both groups are intermingling with each other. It might just look like a bunch of White Americans and very homogeneous, but if you go to a part of Italy that has no Germans and then go to a part of Germany that has no Italians you would realize that these are two starkly different groups in appearance and behavior.

          If you travel to the regions people are migrating from and not to you quickly start noticing large physical differences between various regions so long as you pay attention to the residents and not the tourists.

          You can also quantify if physically if you were to average facial dimension ratios.
          Here’s a picture of Students from Pohang University (University admittance in Korea tends to be highly regional unless it is one of the top national Uni) Korea I found with a quick google
          https://community.cadence.com/cfs-file/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-00-01-07/IMG_5F00_4095.JPG
          Notice the jaw and chin on many of them is very triangular with a rather pointy chin with a roundish head

          Compare to these men who are largely from Northern Gyeongsang (Politically reliable region for the military government at the time)
          https://i.imgur.com/pC4OOMN.jpeg
          Extremely rectangular and blocky

          These pictures roughly line up with what I saw in Korea when traveling in those regions.

          • Kunning Drueger says:

            I grew up with American Koreans. I lived in a space/time where I had classmates that mostly spoke Korean. I was given a Korean nickname (kimchi) which is funny on many levels when you realize that something like 90% of Koreans don’t produce body oder that is detectable. I’ve fucked them, and been beaten up by them. Your post was completely shocking to me. They are, in my mind, more homogeneous than Han or Nipponese. Obviously, I don’t know much, but your post was hard to swallow. Thinking back, there was a ton of hierarchy games I was completely blind to as a young teen.

            By the by, I love Koreans. They are a good lot, hardcore christians that know their place. They are highly preferable to all other east Asians (though Taiwanese might be cool too, their criminal class is definitely hardcore).

            Thanks for sharing, very eye opening.

            • Varna says:

              East Asians having the least body odor if bathing regimen are the same for all races, can be very appealing.

              About internal subgroups and hierarchies. I would assume that for a random chap from Bangladesh, Congo, or Guatemala, there would be absolutely no difference not only between say Germans from different provinces, but also between a German, a Dutchman, a Pole, a Slovak, and a Serb. The more you zoom in, the more granular things become, the more you zoom out, the more things blur.

              This blurring is not always standing in the way of knowledge. Some social sciences are much better at achieving/predicting results when dealing with big demographic batches, and suck ass when dealing with smaller groups.

              Zooming in and zooming out can be both very useful. Inside a trad nation different regions are known for different characters. From the outside, this trad nation is known to have an overall composite character.

              If certain technocrats start enriching a society with diversity, and also move around the heritage natives in the name of cosmic justice, then of course internal regional character starts disappearing, as does the composite national character. But with many non-kiked places it is still very much a thing.

    • Tityrus says:

      You seem to know a lot. In your opinion, what are the best books to read to learn about East Asian history? In English of course.

      • Pax Imperialis says:

        If you were an Asian and wanted to understand western society you would get a lot strange ideas about historical events without at least some understanding of the Bible. More so the Harry Potter novels would be very helpful to understanding the mindset of contemporary upper middle class white liberals because it is a reflection of their popular and common themes and values.

        Romance of the Three Kingdoms is not historically accurate but it is thematically/culturally relevant and accurate to understanding how the Chinese perceive the world even to this day. Many of the idioms are still in use and theater plays are still common. Without it the idea of killing your lover and sharing her flesh with your starving brothers might seem rather odd, but it makes a sort of perverse sense one you get in their mindset. Sort of. Pick any popular Wuxia novel, it doesn’t really matter, and after reading through the first couple fantasy genocides and the absolute and casual disregard to human life you’ll see that Chinese values really haven’t changed that much over the past couple thousand years.

        There isn’t really anything good in English for Korea (book wise). Most of the social and political elites get their children educated in America school after which they travel back to Korea and behave like upper middle class white liberals. Seriously, reading the Korean newspapers have the same terminologies and phrases you would expect to find in NYT or any liberal arts program. They were even agitating for BLM protests in Korea and many adore Harry Potter franchise. Those are the ones most likely to be writing the books along with Korean American immigrants who are largely leftist political dissidents who left during the military governments. B.R. Myers is really the only realist I know of in the English speaking world that writes about Korea, but he’s almost entirely interested in the North and current politics. His blog is at:
        http://sthelepress.com/

    • @Pax

      Does Korea draw a disproportionate amount of its military personnel from the mountain folk?

      I know in the US military, Koreans are over-represented vis a vis other Asian groups and their total US population. I was under the impression Koreans simply had a stronger martial tradition, but maybe the immigrants were from the mountainous regions.

      • Aidan says:

        I would assume so. Koreans in America are generally more impressive than the Chinese, and I meet many with the stronger martial features that Pax associates with the mountain men. Korea is obviously the least homogenous Asian nation; the babyfaced bugman Koreans are the most babyfaced and bugman of Asians, and the tougher martial-looking Koreans are the toughest and most martial looking Asians, aside from steppe people ofc. I would assume a similar effect to the Scots, wherein the clannish mountain men are oddly likely to immigrate and find a new place to be clannish.

        • Arqiduka says:

          Mountain people in general appear wired to send out war parties to test defences every niw wnd then, and install themselves as stationary bandits where they can. In the modern world, this becomes a drive to emigrate internally or internationally.

      • Pax Imperialis says:

        Representation is proportionate to population sizes due to mandatory conscription in both NK and SK. During the military governments 1961-88 the officer corp and other top level internal security was dominated by mountain folk from politically reliable regions. After democratization in the early 90s, leftist governments when elected have conducted several soft purges of the officer corp and have been promoting woman in the officer corp and internal security forces.

        The over-representation of Koreans in the US military is due to many of them immigrating to America having no other skills than military experience from the mandatory service. This was strongly true between 1964-1988. Quite a few of those immigrants were from the peasant caste who felt like there was little opportunity for them under a right wing military government that viewed them with suspicion. They tend to be from Jeolla (Flat agricultural lands) and are very leftist today. Their children, while increasingly well educated, also tend to be leftist (peasant genes win out over general intelligence). Current immigration post 1988 is largely highly skill and educated elites who would be very disappointed if their sons or daughters went into the military. This group tends to be more conservative but is a minority. Funny enough, a large amount of my family who had deep ties with the military government decided it would be a good time to come to America after the fall of the military government. Complete coincidence! Complete coincidence many of them ended up working for the military industrial complex.

        There are an usual number of really interesting and strange outliers of elite level Korean immigrants (almost always mountain folk) who had a tendency to somehow burrow their way into racially closed societies. For example Kim Paek-pyong in the 1930s was a recipient of two German doctoral degrees and the author of a thesis on “racial differences in embryonic pig skulls,” had a powerful mentor in Eugen Fischer, a Nazi eugenicist who had drawn the admiration of Hitler with his work on “bastards” and miscegenation in colonial German Southwest Africa. Despite possible involvement in eugenic sterilization projects in Germany, Kim was granted a special work permit in the United States after the war. He was working in 1960 (Pre 1964!) at Belchertown State Hospital in Belchertown, Mass.

  19. Upravda says:

    Good friend of mine, working for a large domestic foreign owned corporation of, broadly speaking, IT sector has spent quite some time working both with Chinese in China, and somewhat less with Indians in Croatia and India. His first-hand observations:

    1. Chinese engineers are competent. Do not have any doubt on it. There might be some… inflexibilities Jim is talking about, but my friend explains them as consequence of having polit-commissars in every corporation, with much more influence than, say, those in Croatian and Yugoslav companies during communism ans “workers’ self-rule”.

    2. Chinese like to screw whitey in business. It doesn’t matter are you a Brit or Croat, did your empire screwed Han once upon time or they, Han, have barely heard of you. If you are whitey, you can expect to be screwed in some way when doing business.

    3. It seems that sentiment 2 extends to whiteys who are nominal allies to Han, e.g. Russians.

    4. Indians (dot) are not so bright, their oh-so-big production of engineers and technicians is mostly laughable.

    5. There are exceptions to 4, but generally speaking Indians are completely fucked up by too much caste system. My friend isn’t sure are castes the actual cause of 4.

    • jim says:

      > my friend explains them as consequence of having polit-commissars in every corporation

      I have worked with Chinese engineers in American companies. They all smart, all competent, and all have big picture blindness, which makes it essential for the team leader to be someone who is not Han Chinese. It is a racial trait. No communist commissars.

      If Huawei succeeds in getting chips built in China, it will do so by putting Koreans in charge of Chinese teams, and giving the team leader plenty of room in technical matters. And in 2020 (hat tip Varna) it started hiring lots of Koreans and bringing them to China.

      As for those communist commissars in Chinese businesses, they do considerably less damage than HR in US companies – or they used to. I don’t have current information, and Xi has been going further down that path, so things may well be considerably worse now.

      • Ghost says:

        Chinese are wired to seek consensus, so not prone to individual creativity. But, their roads and transport are looking good. Made is USA is a little different today than 50 years ago. Shaniqua and Tyrone are slapping products together today.

        Did you say you program games Jim? Can you name some?

        • jim says:

          > Chinese are wired to seek consensus,

          No. They are wired to individually appear to conform to consensus. It is not obvious that this is connected to blind spot of Chinese engineers, though it may well be.

          Actual conformity to consensus is considerably less. Their conformity module is safely imprisoned in their doublethink module, and thoroughly red pilled cynicism about consensus is apt to pop out under safe circumstances, or when drunk.

          Their construction of consensus is weak and slight, and their conformity to consensus is shallower than it seems.

          White people construct consensus, East Asians follow it. It is a weakness that endangers them, and as a protection against this weakness, there is considerably less than meets the eye to their followership.

          > Did you say you program games Jim? Can you name some?

          Hail fellow reactionary. Please give me your name, address, phone number, and Curriculum Vitae

          • Ghost says:

            Understood. I had assumed you’re using an alias. Just curious if you made something I have enjoyed playing.

            • G.T. Chesterton says:

              That’s how aliases work. You separate them from traceable facts. If revealing membership in a group of < 10 members, alias is nearly cracked. Revealing membership in multiple groups of <10, alias 100% busted.

              To keep an alias and answer your question, he’d have to lie about which games he wrote.

      • Upravda says:

        I don’t think there can be some racial trait present in Chinese, but not in Koreans. Only if by “racial” you actually mean “nurture” traits, not “nature”. That is, some people think that Chinese mentality is more consensus-seeking, others think that “big picture blindness” you talk about is caused by centuries-long gerontocracy. Whatever it is, I can imagine that polit-commissars might be an amplifying factor for both of those causes.

        I really do not have much negative experience with HR here in Croatia, probably because they are still not the arm of the progressivist State, but simple kadrovik. Privately-owned companies often do not even have any kadroviks, in any form. Many years ago, I worked for a state-owned company, and it seemed that madam kadrovik there was on the path of becoming something described as HR by folks from the Anglosphere like you or Aaron Clarey. However, all that didn’t progress further. For now.

        Destructive role of HR in Croatia is often accomplished by top management of state and public institutions and state-owned companies. That management is usually set as pure political cadre, by whatever coalition is currently on power, disproportionally filled by members of minority parties in ruling coalition, and disproportionally female. Such management usually pursue different and diverse forms of “woke” politics instead of core business, and in the process often totally disempowers middle and lower management (folks who usually know how to do core business).

        Contrary to that political cadre, present-day Chinese polit-commissars, and communist polit-commisars of the past of my country were almost always interested in doing core business. Not that I’m a commie fan, but if “workers’ self ruled” company of Eighties produced turbines, local commissar (known simply as executive officer of some kind) was interested in delivering that bloody turbine and, generally did not object to “counter-revolutionaries” working hardly on it, provided that those counter-revolutionaries weren’t too noisy about their reactionary ideas.

        Not so these days, from modern commissars. Even more, we were on the right track sometimes from 1990 to 1998 (despite war and all that), and after that, sinking to progressivism and “market socialism” has begun and still doesn’t stop.

        • jim says:

          > I don’t think there can be some racial trait present in Chinese, but not in Koreans.

          Nuts. They are similar, but different. It is obvious.

          The claim is as obviously stupid and politically correct as claiming that there cannot be an inherent difference in criminality between whites and blacks.

          That like arguing that Irish cannot be different from Anglos. And, similarly, Thais are different from Vietnamese. Vietnamese are frequently hard for whites to tell from Chinese, because the Vietnamese aristocracy has been marrying Chinese one hell of a lot, but Vietnamese can tell the difference just by looking. They are all different, more different than the white races.

          The Vietnamese have been invaded and conquered by Chinese times without number, and their aristocracy has been intermarrying with the Chinese mandarinate for millenia, and they are still so different that Vietnamese, particularly Vietnamese of aristocratic descent, can tell the difference, even though Vietnamese of aristocratic descent are physically more similar to Chinese than regular Vietnamese.

          The behavioral differences between elite Vietnamese, and elite Han Chinese, are exactly what you would expect from an elite descended from aristocrats, as compared to an elite descended from bureaucrats. Evolution in humans works fast, and it works fastest on behavioral tendencies and character. The physical differences between elite Han Chinese and elite Vietnamese are generally enough that a white who knows his races can tell just by looking, and a Vietnamese can usually easily tell just by looking, and the behavioral differences and character differences are larger than the physical differences.

          Racial character differences are always bigger than racial physical differences, because human evolution is strongly selecting for behavior, only weakly selecting for physical appearance. If you can see a physical difference, even if only small and hard to accurately assess, there is going to be a much larger difference in behavior and character.

          If you go to an east Asian country, people are likely to try to estimate how much Han Chinese blood there is in you, (and get it horribly wrong, because you probably do not have any Han Chinese blood in you) They are super sensitive to Han Chinese blood, as Americans are super sensitive to black blood, and the reason they are sensitive is the same. It is a very good predictor of behavior, character, and competences.

          • Upravda says:

            Whoa, calm down. 🙂

            Maybe is nuts, but my understanding of Asian peoples is as follows:

            1. Japanese. Yes, even I can distinguish Japanese tourists from Chinese ones about 95% percent of the time, and 100% when I hear them speak, although I do not understand a word from either language.

            2. Chinese and “similar” – Vietnamese, Koreans, etc. Sorry, I do not intend to pursue any political correctness. I simply do not distinguish them well or even at all. I’d presume that there’s bigger difference between Chinese from Peking and Shenzhen, than between Chinese from Peking and Korean from Seoul, but I might be wrong.

            3. “Darkies”. Mostly Filipinos, Thais, etc. Some of them are even Christians, and many of them are not so dark actually.

            4. “Nordics”. That includes Mongolians, Siberians, and a lot of peoples of Soviet -stans. They actually have fine, normal cuisine, beef and lamb, 🙂 and sometimes look like half-whitey. Few years ago, because of work, I have even spent a few days in company of large group of Kirghizes, and they were quite a nice bunch of people, mostly speaking Russian even among themselves.

            • jim says:

              > 2. Chinese and “similar” – Vietnamese, Koreans, etc. Sorry, I do not intend to pursue any political correctness. I simply do not distinguish them well or even at all

              Well I can distinguish between them, and I know that they can distinguish between each other a whole lot better than I can. And to Pax Imperialis, the differences stick out like dogs’s balls.

              Though I suspect he would have trouble telling the difference between a Mongolian and a white.

              • Upravda says:

                Pax Imperialis is the interesting read. One can obviously learn a lot from commentariat here. 😉

                So, is there any truth in notion that southern and northern Chinese could be regarded as separate? As far as I understood, there’s even large linguistic difference, as is “non-intelligible”…

                • S says:

                  I don’t know the details but China didn’t include Southern China until about 2200 years ago; the first 1400 years of Chinese civilization was exclusively in the north.

              • G.T. Chesterton says:

                They really do all look alike.
                https://nypost.com/2022/01/12/woman-places-baby-for-adoption-after-learning-sperm-donor-lied/

                Married Japanese woman needs sperm donor, finds “successful Japanese man”, bangs 10 times to get knocked up, then learns he’s Chinese. Puts mongrel baby up for adoption, sues chink for millions.

                The knave.

        • Aidan says:

          Korea was relatively isolated from the barbarian conquests and foreign rule that debased the original occupants of China, and Japan far more so.

    • ten says:

      I did a few engineering courses in beijing with both chinese and foreign students. Mixed group laborations went as follows:

      White students show up late, hungover, with cheap laoshin cig butts dangling (when encountering cigarettes at 2-3% the price at home, half of them who never used to smoke started instantly), doing the prep work en route while eating dumplings.

      All chinese students at their desks, perfect prep work laid out.

      Groups are randomized, prep work checked, chinese instructors somewhat dismayed at white prep work but ok.

      Chinese students want to carefully check lab material and contextualize it with prep material, white students merrily start tinkering and playing with the stuff, checking material only on hitting an obstacle.

      Chinese students ask again and again how a certain conclusion or number was reached, and apologize for only reading the material 3 times.

      Come final tests, all chinese students >95%, white students barely passing at all.

      This was truly illuminating, because these chinks were smart. Smarter than us for sure, and more into studying. But in a situation where we were supposed to quickly improvise a solution, we absolutely crushed them, and they were floundered by it.

      As a side note, we brought a chinese and a mongolian from home, and our chinese was pretty much like the other chinese, while the mongolian was pretty much like us.

      • jim says:

        Course work is not a realistic indicator of ability to function as engineer, but “improvise a solution” comes close to the problem of understanding and implementing the spirit and effect of a specification or a recipe.

        I expect their spies have been giving them completely accurate information on how to build advanced semiconductors all these years, and they have been perfectly implementing the recipe in the same way your Chinese students did their course work, and yet working semiconductors fail to roll off the line.

        Han Chinese engineers are quite high functioning if they have a non Han project lead.

  20. Kunning Drueger says:

    President Drueger has taken the bait and declared war on China. But it isn’t a total war, or a war of aggression for land, or a holy war against the subhuman Han. It is constrained war. This is the message he sends to whichever bugman is the current Winnie the Pooh of the Politburo:

    Chinese aggression on the seas as well as intrusive theft of intellectual capital is well known. Denials or equivocations are irrelevant.

    Any Chinese flagged ship outside of the Chinese territorial waters will be fired on and sunk with no warning.

    Any boat deemed to be entering or leaving Chinese waters not under escort and control of US ships will be boarded, assessed, seized, then sunk.

    China is a no-international-fly-zone. Military craft will be destroyed, civilian craft get 2 warnings to turn away before they are fired upon.

    Chinese products without an American Exception Stamp are contraband. Possessors will be severely fined and products will be seized with no recompense.

    Any Chinese equipment or personnel not on the mainland or in China’s waters are considered martial assets, and will be treated as such.

    Any nation found to be supporting China materially will be punished with sanctions, targeted strikes and/or blockade as deemed necessary by tactical leadership’s judgement. Repeat offenders will be bombed, targeting industrial and commercial centers first.

    China has 2 months to withdraw from their illegally seized oversea possessions. If they comply, they will be paid twice the maximum value of any material or infrastructure abandoned. Any tactical or strategic operations in the 2 month window will negate the ceasefire and all assets, material, and personnel outside the mainland and territorial waters will be dealt with as tactical necessity requires.

    The abbreviated war will continue for 1 year, no settlement talks, summits, or formal dialogue. After 1 year the issue will be revisited. Any American death at any time in the 14 months for which China is probably directly or indirectly responsible will be paid for with 3 Chinese deaths, or .5 non-Chinese conspirator deaths. If China fully complies, as well as destroys their space station, and scuttles les ⅓ of their blue water fleet, including all carriers, the 1 year war may be averted.

    In this completely unrealistic scenario, what recourse does China have?

    • p says:

      1. Stop all its exports to America or Europe completely.
      2. Trade with Russia and Iran.

      • jim says:

        China has been preparing for this eventuality for some time. That is what the Silk Road project is all about.

        Trade with America and Europe is mighty nice, but what is essential is imports of raw materials paid for with exports of elaborately transformed goods, and the Silk Road project is intended to make sure the US cannot shut that down.

        • Arqiduka says:

          That particular project is a massive money sink that will go nowhere, and I’d be astounded if they mean it properly instead of as a decoy.

          There is no alternative to winning in the seas, and if you can’t do that you better prepare for a blockade, which you can live through.

          Which is why the outcome of such a conflict would not be clear at all. The USN still rules and China does not intend to challenge that at this point. It will be yet another war if “can I beat you before my people starve?”.

          • Kunning Drueger says:

            Silk Road is being built for a world of unsecure seas and turbulent international relations. It seems very stupid for the Bretton Woods paradigm, but it could be mighty useful if BWp goes away.

            • Arqiduka says:

              There has been no alternative to the seas for long-range international trade since linear A was a thing. It doesn’t pay to trade by rail. I don’t think they mean it, they are selling it to us. They mean to gains control of the Island Chains, then rule the Pacific.

              • Kunning Drueger says:

                China’s strength is their land forces. I don’t know, we’ll see. My money is still on the 2100s being dominated by the Horde Reborn out the the united -stans. I’m a dark horse kinda guy.

                • jim says:

                  On paper, the US has more advanced ship systems, but China has more ships. At least some of those advanced ship systems do not in fact work. If most of them, or many of them, perform as advertised, then America is stronger at sea, and in the air above the sea. But China can reach out and destroy ships at range of three thousand kilometres. If America denies the sea and the air above the sea to China, China will deny a great deal of the sea to America. If America attacks nations that continue to trade with China, China will attack nations that continue to trade with America. And very shortly after that we would discover whose nukes still work.

              • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

                To fuel a navy you need oil. The Silk Road will provide China with oil from a supply line the USN cannot touch. Then they can rule the Pacific.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  You-know-who had ample supplies from Romania and gasification plants. Still lost badly.

                • p says:

                  You-know-who was fighting America+Russia. Can today’s America ally with Russia against China?

                  Who knows.

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  It’s interesting how this counterfactual moved towards China going full tilt in response to my naked aggression, and how alliances were critical to that move. Between China and the US, I wonder who could build better alliances. Keep in mind, meme hatred of the US is largely elite propaganda. There are definitely plenty of people who hate the US, but there are far more unconcerned and a lot who love or rely on the US. Also, China projects an image of respecting sovereignty and maintaining strict non-interference policies, while in reality they have serious border disputes with every nation they touch. I’ve gotten to the point that I see both US and China as communist nations with massive resources, complicated cultural identities, and terribly expensive ambitions.

                • p says:

                  Well, whose side Russia will be on is rather important. The other interesting question is what will India do. For most of the rest we can pretty much either predict who they’ll side with, or not care.

                • someDude says:

                  @p

                  Is India really a factor?

                • jim says:

                  > Is India really a factor?

                  India has nukes, but is under hostile foreign cultural domination by the faith of Harvard, despite nukes. This may well render them irrelevant. Also, just not very smart, most of them.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  If the caste system is still alive (looks like it from where I’m standing), India is the only moden society to have a widely accepted hierarchical arrangement of its members, potentialy awarding massive cohesiveness of action and multiplying what scarce power it has as a polity (compared to the big boys ifc).

                  No other way to explain the masosve3 success of indian diaspora in recent times, although the Jimian “new jews” theory helps massively.

                • p says:

                  Despite having nukes and a space program, India is not a world power in absolute terms, but in a large scale conflict involving China, I don’t see how it could not be a factor if only because of its placement.

                  India hates China, but it also hates Pakistan. Pakistan is an American ally, but it’s also an ally of China. Afghanistan is basically an extension of Pakistan. China needs Afghanistan to connect to Iran.

                • someDude says:

                  @p

                  A correction. India does not hate China. India Fears China. Fact is, that at the moment, in Geopolitical terms, India is to China was Mexico was to the US in the 19th century and might one day become to China what Mexico is to the US. The keyword is in Geopolitical terms. I simply do not see the Chinese Elite of the present or the future mass importing Indians to shaft their own countrymen.

          • p says:

            Blockading China (a) is impossible because its navy is the strongest in the world by some metrics, (b) will harm the world economy more than China’s, to the extent of triggering a depression never seen before, (c) will not even do that much because China is self-sufficient except for oil which it can get from Russia and Iran.

            • Arqiduka says:

              Perhaps. Perhaps the USN’n sub fleet is quite enough to blockade the key chokepoints, especially now that the Aussies are all in. Carriers are a plus.The question is, is the USN competent enough to run a blockade?

              You can starve them out of oil, which may be enough.

              As for the econ, they don’t give a damn about it, will crater it without a second thought if they need to.

            • Kunning Drueger says:

              China’s navy is slightly more laughable than England’s military. They count literal fishing boats and car ferries when they do those pound for pound comparisons. China, at this time, couldn’t invade Taiwan or Japan, and it would lose if it invaded SKorea. They are working hard to change this, but building boats and using boats are 2 very different things.

              • jim says:

                > China, at this time, couldn’t invade Taiwan or Japan.

                Probably not Japan, but nothing stops them invading Taiwan. They can at any time deny the sea and the air around Taiwan to American planes and ships, and those Chinese ships that you sneer at could ferry troops. Their naval capacity is primarily designed for that scenario. The Chinese navy is not designed for blue water operations, while the US has a navy designed for blue water operations, though how that will work with Democratic party vote bank womaning the ships is doubtful.

                When you sneer at the Chinese navy, you are saying it is insignificant as a blue water navy. It is insignificant as a blue water navy, but Taiwan is not blue water, and neither are China’s most critical trade routes.

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  I’m not sneering at PLA-N, but I am explicitly mocking the “sources” that claim they are comparable to the USN. As you said, to very different jobs so two very different tools.

                  I tried to do a quick&dirty Google search, and I’m finding very inconsistent results. Apparently the ferry between the mainland and the island takes 14 hours. China’s missile net is impressive, theoretically, but I personally believe that Taiwan has the upper hand in tech. The invasion flotilla would be horribly exposed. PLA-A would have to run a massive bombing campaign as a ballistic missile bombardment is taking place. I don’t think China has the capacity to sustain an air campaign over the Island, and I can’t imagine anything but an incredibly bloody fight just to land… On a mountainous rock that’s been preparing for invasion for 70+years.

                  Continuing the counterfactual game, if you have the US one year to prepare to invade China, and you gave China one year to plan an invasion of Taiwan, I wonder how the approaches would differ. The text book is land SF, blanket the targets with ordinance, move air support into a daisy chain of constant refueling and rearming, and cover the flotilla as best you can. I posit that the US invading the mainland is as complicated and costly as China invading Taiwan.

                  As an aside, I know this is not the path PLA has chosen, they’re going for internal destabilization with the goal of auto-reentry, not invasion. I am a natural bigot and I love poking fun at the Chinese, but I am very aware that they have incredibly talented and capable intelligence, counterintelligence, and logistics people. Indeed, China has been very involved in fueling the fires of division and destabilization in my country. This is all just fun speculation.

                • jim says:

                  > I don’t think China has the capacity to sustain an air campaign over the Island, and I can’t imagine anything but an incredibly bloody fight just to land…

                  It is entirely obvious that the China has the capability to deny the air and sea around Taiwan to America. Which is not necessarily the same thing as having the capability to ferry soldiers, but does cut off Taiwan from all imports and exports.

                  In at least this sense, it does have the capability to sustain an air campaign over the island. Supposing that they can deny the area to America, but are unable to conquer it, then both sides are cut off from East Asian chip tech, and the war could just go on and on.

                  If Biden’s tech blockade of China fails, and I was just informed that the Chinese have signed up the foreigners that they are going to need to make it fail, then war in the South China Sea means that the world gets cut off from East Asian tech, and China does not. In any long drawn out war, drone warfare is going to dominate, they way it has dominated in an increasing number recent wars.

                  Wars between a sea power and a land power tend to be long and indirect.

                  In World War I, battleships ruled. When Britain sank the Bismark, it was suddenly discovered that battleships are irrelevant.

                  America’s supposed airsea superiority (assuming it still works when the Navy is operated as a Democratic Party vote bank) is all World War II tech. Which World War III is likely to reveal is irrelevant.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Jim if they can gain air superority its over. Its more true than in WW2 when Hugh Dowding realized that about England.

    • Arqiduka says:

      Prepare for the blockade, and fire at the first island chain at will. Dump all USD holdings immediately. Talk Russia, Iran, Serbia and maybe Pakistan or others into open provocations in their regions, tying as many resources. Concede massively to the French and Turks to peel them away from the coalition. Speak to the Norks and South Korea at the same time about you know what.

      No country can be talked to in these terms and hope to survive. It would be go time.

      • Cloudswrest says:

        No country can be talked to in these terms and hope to survive. It would be go time.

        Indeed. That’s what precipitated WWI with the conditions imposed on Serbia.

    • notglowing says:

      These terms are too harsh, to the point where you are backing them in a corner where they either fight you, or stop existing as a serious sovereign nation.
      And China is big enough, that they cannot be isolated so easily. They fill form a block of allies against the United States.
      Another issue is that the US isn’t currently in a position to terminate all imports from China immediately. There are some of military importance too, I believe.

    • jim says:

      > In this completely unrealistic scenario, what recourse does China have?

      Fighting and winning. You over estimate American power, and under estimate Chinese power. The Chinese do not. They have been preparing for your scenario.

    • p says:

      As for “China is a no-international-fly-zone. Military craft will be destroyed, civilian craft get 2 warnings to turn away before they are fired upon.”, good luck with that.

    • Kunning Drueger says:

      Interesting responses. The reality is that the US is a big stick that no one with the ability to pick it up is going to. Equally, China is a paper tiger globally and a East Pacific nascent hegemon. If they weren’t currently backsliding into a Maoist holiness spiral, and were reestablishing a Han monarchy, they could become a world player. But they aren’t, and they probably won’t. China the country, as it exists now, is mostly reliant on the US enforcing mostly free trade in the global markets by being the only power at sea. If that goes away, China will soon have a new “largest” title: largest number of pirate attacks.

      The US could neuter China by shutting down international trade, vaporizing Chinese assets abroad, and staying well clear of their territorial waters and missiles. They could backstop SKorea, Japan, Philippines, and Vietnam in the First Chain, while pretending to “just want an end to the suffering” that they are causing, just as tin pot Cathedral props do. If the US invades China, they might win a kingdom of ash, but most likely wouldn’t. If China invaded anywhere but China, they’d put millions on the bottom of the sea. Neither can attack, so there is no war. I think China’s strategy of fomenting strife, insurrection, and division via targeted capital injection is working very well. I don’t think they have what it takes to destabilize the West and re-stabilize their demographics. As well, the US can’t defeat anyone so long as the cold civil war continues. Neither seems to be playing the long game very well, but compared to each other China is definitely better positioned.

      I do think that if some man took power in the US and I mean actually took power, he could systematically dismantle China, starting with a cessation of all maritime security operations past the 12 mile marker. It would take a long time, and be very expensive, but I do believe the US has the technical capacity to destroy global trade, which would destroy China. But it isn’t going to happen.

      • Arqiduka says:

        I don’t think the Chinese care about their assets abroad, and understand that these are hostages they had to provide to play in the west. The correct attitude towards hostages you provide yourself is to shrug when they are threatened. Do you worst.

      • jim says:

        > If China invaded anywhere but China, they’d put millions on the bottom of the sea.

        America is an airsea power, and has an airsea navy and airforce. China is a land power, and can simply walk into Europe at any time. A lot easier than Japan. The Europeans certainly could not stop them. Maybe the French could keep them out of France.

        Afghanistan and Iran don’t much like America, and would ally with whomever had the biggest army on their doorstep. The Iraqis scarcely try to rule Iraq, and would probably ally with both sides simultaneously without doing much about it either way. That leaves Syria and Turkey as potential obstacles. Syria does not have much capability to stop armies from passing through, though it has a lot of capability to make them unwelcome if they stick around. Turkey is theoretically an American ally, and might prove difficult, but if Turkey falls, they are in Europe, and there is no significant military capability between them and the Atlantic. From Turkish border to the Atlantic, it is a walk in the park.

        • notglowing says:

          I never even thought of that. This is brilliant, and if China pulled this, it would seem completely out of left field, at least for most people.

          A truly epic twist in history, to be remembered for the ages.
          I almost want to see them pull it off, as bad as it would be for me.

        • The Cominator says:

          Logistics… china couldn’t supply its army that far away easily…

          • notglowing says:

            Shipping long distances is not difficult at all, and they certainly know how to do it.
            Logistics is difficult in enemy territory, but at least until Europe, they would be traversing countries allied with them.
            So up to that point, logistics would not be difficult.

        • p says:

          What would the purpose of all that be? It’s easier and more effective to close the Strait of Hormuz, hit the pipelines or just occupy Saudi Arabia altogether and shut down the flow of oil.

        • Kunning Drueger says:

          India wouldn’t tolerate the southern route, and Russia wouldn’t tolerate the central or northern route. I get what you’re saying, in terms of their core capability is land power, but the overland route is impossible. A few tactical nukes in key points, and china’s army is ashes weeks before they even get to turkey, which would precipitate a domestic collapse. Both China and US have pointless militaries when it comes to actual wars; one of the many wicked fruits of a long peace.

          • jim says:

            That is the reasoning that led to World War I. What happens is that everyone signs up with one of two alliances, or gets conquered. Except this time around, the alliances have nukes.

            Your reasoning is that everyone would be so horrified by China doing to America what America is doing to it, that they would all sign up with America. Maybe, but I doubt it.

            The reverse reasoning is likely. Russia is going to figure that if America rules China, it is next. And then all the lesser countries that find they have a land border with the anti American alliance sign up with the anti American alliance or get crushed, and then all the countries that now have a land border Any holdouts get crushed, and suddenly Europe finds it is one of those holdouts and that the major factions in in the alliance each want to grab as much as possible so as to be in a strong position to dictate the peace to each other.

            • no says:

              You’ve spent too much time playing Risk

              • Arqiduka says:

                Who hasn’t?

                • alf says:

                  China should obviously invade and conquer Australia, then wait twenty turns while building a bajillion armies on Siam.

              • jim says:

                Never played it, so I am not sure what you and Alf are referring to.

                From Alf’s reply, I conjecture that it is a board game of empires.

                Attempting to conquer Australia proved unwise for the Japanese, because the long chain of island hopping exposed them to American interdiction. It proved hard to move land forces such a distance when the sea is unsafe. Since China has not shown much interest in challenging American airsea superiority, Australia is not on the agenda. China is the middle Kingdom. It is a land power. Its strategy will be move forces overland.

                Long distance empire requires command of the sea and air to move forces around long distances. China’s strategy is that no one can command the sea and air, because of the effectiveness of end guided smart missiles. In the event of war, the US loses the capability to move land forces over sea long distances, and China will make no attempt to gain that capability. US empire then falls due to internal forces.

                If China pursues empire, distance and water between you and China will prove a powerful source of independence.

                In the event of war, China’s strategy will be to shut down American capability to move forces withing a few thousand kilometres of Chinese controlled territory. US empire is completely vulnerable to this strategy. Suddenly everyone stops worrying about who is the most powerful country on the planet, and starts worrying about who is the most powerful country next door.

                Chinese preparation with war with America is based on the idea that world empire can be made impossible, while China resumes its hegemonic status over the area around it as the Middle Kingdom.

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  I have played a lot of Risk. The game is flawed in terms of logistics and infrastructure being a completely ignored facet. Australia defense works because of the Siam bottleneck.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  I think the long-term (century) strategic goals of the Chinese are:

                  Step one, take control of the first and second island chains.

                  Step two, neutralise the third island chain.

                  Step three, become undisputed naval power up to Hawaii, leave the US alone otherwise.

                  Atep four, blow open the gates of Australia and NZ to massive Chinese emigration, turning these into separate Chinese society a la Singapore. Australia will become the US to China’s UK.

                  Step five, take Siberia.

                  Stop here, you are stable forever and whilst you had a country, now you have a civilisation.

                • p says:

                  Australia is important because of iron ore, so theoretically China should be trying to conquer it in the event of a major war, but I don’t see this happening in practice even if America doesn’t interfere (much).

                • Arqiduka says:

                  Australia is important as a colonisation space where you can dump 100m chinese, with 25m more in NZ. Ore and coal are great to have but secondary. If they can pull off the mad plan where they create huge fertile plaon and intenal lake from a stong of nuclear desalination plants, Australia can hold further hundreds of millions.

                  No chance China can take Aus now, which is why this is the fourth step only. Once western pacific dominance is established, Australia will fold on their own, no need to conquer them. They are split even now.

                • jim says:

                  Nuclear desalination is unnecessary. Turn the northern rivers around on the eastern side of the gulf of Carpentaria, running them southwards uphill until it is downhill southwards to lake Eyre. When Lake Eyre gets wet, it rains westwards of Lake Eyre. All Australia would turn green, as it sometimes turns green when the monsoons in that area make it far enough south. If you turn the rivers around on the eastern side of the gulf of Carpentaria, the effect will be that the monsoons on the north eastern periphery of the gulf will always make it far enough south, instead of only once in a long time.

                  When it rains in the lake Eyre catchment, pretty soon thereafter it rains all the way west of that catchment. When the monsoons make far enough south to rain on the northern end of Lake Eyre catchment, that water runs south to the center, evaporates, then rains down again and again, ever further westwards, before it finally exits to the west. Irrigate the north eastern end of that catchment with water from eastern end of the Gulf of Carpentaria, everything in the center of Australia will turn wet. Turn lake Eyre into a hypersaline sea of agricultural irrigation runoff, and watch the Greenies heads explode. (It is already hypersaline, and most of the time a dry lake of salt, but their heads are still going to explode.)

                • Arqiduka says:

                  Jim, he who is bothered by the Prog Inquisition but should rather fear abduction by the Middle Kingdom or assassination by the US, being the only man with a plan to make a second United States on the cheap, all for the Chinese to take.

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  I know you’re my adversary, but dammit we neighborhood watch captains have to work together!

    • restitutor_orbis says:

      I think under these circumstances, China would go to war.

      Xi has made it clear he sees himself as a “great man” in history, the new Mao. What better legacy then to be the one that “reunifies” China by claiming Taiwan and re-asserts its world historical place?

      Moreover, what better time than now? The Chinese are well aware that their relative position of power is poised to decline if certain trends are not reversed. India will overtake them in population soon enough. They already are seeing wage rates climb. Their population is growing old faster than its growing rich. Trends can of course change, and this relative decline isn’t inevitable, but if it is a risk. People in the US sometimes see us as in terminal decline and China as in perpetual ascent and that’s not really true – China has its bad trends too. If you’re in Xi’s shoes the balance of factors does not inherently say “waiting is better.”

      So what stops him from going to war? It’s not fear that China would lose to the United States. The Chinese believe they already could defeat the United States. However, they believe that in the process of defeating the United States, they would suffer so much loss themselves that they would not be postwar hegemon. It would be Russia or Europe or someone not them. And that’s unacceptable. It’s ok if the world burns, but it’s not ok if they burn down more than the rest of the world.

      If they fight the US, they want to end up in the position of the US post WWII, not the position of the UK post WWII. So they will only go to war with the US if:
      1) Another great power will join in to “distribute the hurt”.
      2) US puts them in a situation that the alternative is resumed national humiliation a la the 19th century
      3) US has credibly signaled it won’t fight back

      If they can credibly achieve (1), e.g. make such an alliance with Russia, the odds of them *having* to use war to get what they want go down, because the US will likely blink in the face of two-front cold war, at least blink enough to let them have what they want.

      Russia is the preferred partner because it is a food exporter, energy exporter, and natural resource exporter, and because it is the only power that could present a land threat to China. So alliance with Russia gives them the things they need most and protects their flank. And, of course, massively ups the nuclear deterrent.

      (2) Is I think your scenario. They’d have to fight. Xi won’t lose face like that.

      A lot of folks in China have interpreted our weakness in Afghanistan as (3). They think XI could just take Taiwan and the US wouldn’t really do anything about it.

      • jim says:

        Moreover, what better time than now? The Chinese are well aware that their relative position of power is poised to decline if certain trends are not reversed.

        China is growing in wealth with extraordinary speed. Their GDP has passed America on objective measures (not official statistics – I look at stuff like cars, electricity, concrete, air conditioning, and so forth)

        Their greatest weakness, of which they are keenly aware, is semiconductors. If they can make good semiconductors inside China, then they are all set for war. However, their plan for Taiwan is rather pressure and subversion. If war ensues, your strategy has failed. It worked for America, and they are willing to copy. They are however, building the capability to take Taiwan by force, which is perhaps intended to apply pressure, rather than actually be used. The physical equipment, training, and preparation, is not yet fully built, but they have plans for building it, and are a good part of the way to completing those plans. Their army is being equipped and trained to take Taiwan by force, but in leisurely fashion indicating they have no immediate plans to apply that capability.

        • restitution_orbis says:

          Totally agree re: GDP. The US GDP is grossly overinflated because we impute rental income to residential owner occupied homes. Since petrodollar recycling all but guaranteed rising asset prices, GDP went up with home prices… but it’s a lie. Same data makes blue states seem more important than they are. China has unquestionably already surpassed us in real productivity.

          I defer to your expertise on semiconductors. Your analysis makes total sense to me.

          My thoughts above that China can win now are based on research I did last year for a strategic war game I designed between US and China. In the game, I found China can take Taiwan, and US can’t stop it; it loses a lot of ships if it tries to enter SCS. I think that accords with your assessment too.

          • pyrrhus says:

            US GDP is also grossly overinflated because it values all payments to government workers, including pensions, as GDP…Legitimate GDP, which once existed, only valued output…

          • restitutor_orbis says:

            fwiw “restitution_orbis” is actually me, I was just tired and flubbed my own username.

  21. Kunning Drueger says:

    Phonefag misfire, please delete Jim.

  22. pyrrhus says:

    Question–Jim, what do you think about NFT?

    • jim says:

      All existing applications of NFTs are scams.

      But the technology is potentially useful: A globally unique human readable name is an NFT. That is an NFT we very much need.

      • notglowing says:

        ENS is a good application of NFT that is used today, I’ve seen some use it successfully to avoid relying on TLS, and in conjunction with onion addresses, as a backup solution to access their website if they are ever censored.
        I’ve also seen NFTs being sold that represent bitcoin miners, and pay dividends of that particular miner, as well as NFTs for individual gold bars.

        Most NFTs however are basically “art” NFTs, with no real purpose, and whose value comes from empty speculation.

        There’s a sort of gold rush in crypto where everyone wants to make some of this very easy money, and invest in nonsense, and so others are in a parallel gold rush to make the shovels and pickaxes, and sell those to the former.
        For example something I did is related to taking commissions on an NFT marketplace through a smart contract. The people who commissioned it were not interested in buying or selling any of those, but they were more than happy to take a cut in exchange for helping the sellers. For better or for worse, anyone doing something related to crypto wants to add some NFT thing to it, even if the main idea is much better and actually more useful than NFTs.

        Art NFTs are often compared to other fad collector items like beanie babies, and I don’t think it’s a bad comparison, but that’s also what is interesting about them, since they strip everything about what makes something a collectible, keeping only the uniqueness. A collectible without the collectible. In defense of NFTs, the modern art market is not fundamentally different. Just less efficient, and you also get an ugly physical item with it.
        Still, not something I’m interested in putting money in. The only kind of NFT I own is ENS domains, which are technically NFTs – but with an actual purpose behind them.

        I am surrounded by people online who have been in crypto for many years, and I lack the normie perspective on it. Whenever there is a big scam it’s often something none of us even heard of, which sounds counter intuitive since we hear a lot of things most people don’t, but it’s because those are not marketed towards us, rather, towards low IQ normies.
        Some of the people I know defend investing in worthless fungible tokens, and worthless NFTs, but the way they think of these things is so far from the normie perspective, that they are incapable of understanding the latter.

        They are good speculators, and put small amounts of their money in many things that have a low chance of success, but before others do, and are good at pulling out at the right time, as well as making larger investments in better assets (crypto and not crypto), and rotating their profits in those better investments.

        Meanwhile there are those who will gamble their life savings on some random rugpull. It’s insane. To them it’s like a casino. But I wouldn’t say it is, necessarily. When there is so much money flowing into a market, you should be able to profit off of it, if you aren’t irrationally greedy.

  23. Varna says:

    China has been hoovering up Taiwanese and Korean engineers since the autumn of 2020, by the simple trick of offering double what they earn at home.
    https://habr.com/ru/company/selectel/blog/519200/

    Even Russia joined the scramble, on a smaller scale, importing hundreds, as opposed of thousands of engineers + families from Taiwan.
    https://finance.rambler.ru/economics/47239047-importozameschenie-po-russki-v-rossiyu-zavezli-tayvanskih-mikroelektronschikov-vmeste-s-ih-semyami/

    Add to this America building its own Taiwanese chip factories and it… kind of starts looking not unlike the way German scientists were divided up after WWII. Only perhaps this time preemptively.

    • jim says:

      In that case, I predict imminent chip catch up.

      • Varna says:

        This is all happening in very volatile planetary context, so we’ll see what goes how.

        The other day I realized that one likely reason China reacts hysterically to any new batch of infections, is that the leadership is constantly on the ready for clandestine bio-warfare from abroad.

        And maybe it really is occurring, on livestock level thus far, for example. Or various staple food harvests.

        So who goes where from now on, it’s one thing to model it “in vacuum”, another thing to take into account possible toxic games beyond and above that of Israel’s hobby and assassinating scientists in Iran and the like.

        Thanks for the mention, Jim!

  24. Kunning Drueger says:

    You should do a series of “Shill Paper” (like fly paper) posts, focusing on a different enemy with each one, and see who comes out of the woodwork. One for China, space program, woman question, military composition, web3.0. intentionally write them to goad a response. The Regulars can participate as well, playing dumb as needed, bit no legitimate contribution posts. And let it all through, every inane and evil comment. It’d be a wargame for us, and a massive waste of firepower for the Enemy. Shill Paper Posts need a canary line so we know to not participate in good faith.

  25. Richard Comerford says:

    It is high time we admitted that we are at war with China. China knows it. We ought to admit it, and start bombing their factories.

    • jim says:

      We would lose. Our planes would not even get near China. They would be destroyed as soon as they got near China. This has been war gamed repeatedly.

      • The Ducking Man says:

        Preferably we should wait few more decades till CCP running out of soldier. If there is one thing Xi failed to tackle is demographic problem, young Han just don’t want to have children.

        • Arqiduka says:

          China doesn’t have a demographic problem that can be solved by making people have more children. China – and others – has a disgenic problem and a separate senility problem (either are huge, civilisation-ending if unadressed) but fertility being below replacement is a rational response to the modern economy. Population will stabilise at the point where it should.

          • jim says:

            Fertility below replacement is not a rational response to the modern economy. It is a rational response to defect/defect equilibrium between men and women.

            All races, peoples, nations, faiths, tribes, empires, and cultures that do not have firm patriarchy disappear from history in a quite short period. Peoples without patriarchy do not have their populations stabilize at some point. They vanish.

            • Arqiduka says:

              Of course.

              But there is such a thing as too many people, and when there is, no amount of solid patriarchy is going to get fertility above replacement. When population is sub-optimal though people don’t magically appear, you still need patriarchy.

              Now we have too many people, which is why the modern economy is a “service” economy: service jobs are the only ones where you can employ sub 105 people nowadays. Severe dearth of programmer intellect, severe surplus of people.

              • Kunning Drueger says:

                I don’t think you can defend the idea of Too Many People. How do you calculate this? And if your response contains anything about the disgenic, feminized, post-modernist anti-concept “carrying capacity,” I have news for you fren…

                Increased population is the natural tool of GNON to force expansion, migration, and innovation. If the population seems high, GNON is politely but firmly telling you take up your cross and move.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  Overpopulation has been, is and will continue to be an enemy meme, and indeed among their strongest bludgeons. No doubt about it.

                  But its also true, though this has nothing at all to do with the reasons it became an enemy meme.

                  I don’t pretend to know what the magic number is, and do not care. There is no policy content ro saying that population is over-optomal, except not ro do the hare-brained Hungarian thing and pay people to fuck (gues what portion of the population will take you up on that, its not the engineers).

                  How do I know its true? Having kids is mad expensive. Though much of this is due to shit lefties have done, much isn’t, and just reflects the fact that we have soo many people that we have to park them in school forever to relieve the pressure on the job market. Unless you have what it takes under the hood to code well, at which point they hoover you up barely out of high school.

                  I disagree on Gnon’s will: only cancer grows forever, populations adapt.

                • jim says:

                  I estimate that a race with an IQ over 105, and modern technology, can comfortably fit about five hundred billion people on earth.

                  Considerably more when we full develop the solar system.

                  We will eventually put a Dyson sphere around the sun, though if only using readily available solar system resources, it will only catch a small part of sunlight. It will be a Dyson tire, rather than a Dyson sphere. A full Dyson sphere requires dismantling Jupiter, which is a very big project that will take a very long time, and before we have consumed Jupiter, we will have probably settled at least the nearby stars, and probably a fair part of the Milky Way.

                  The Milky Way can fit a fair bit more, then the local group, though we probably be not exactly human when we fill the milky way, and human descended, rather than human, by the time we get to the local group. It is a long way.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  LOL I honestly can’t even fathom a race of 105 people, their deeds would be the thing of legend.

                • alf says:

                  Kids are cheap in terms of money. Expensive in terms of time — takes a village to raise them. Need mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers.

                  There’s plenty of jobs for folk who are not dumb as bricks. Try finding someone to renovate your home — you’ll find many of them booked full for 2022.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  Agree, hence disgenia being a huge issue.

                  Nevertheless, I still don’t think we could find work to do for 7 billion smart people. I suspect what is holding yp a great increase in standard of life now is a dearth of programmer IQ, but that is not to say we need billions of programmers, just many more rhan we can have now.

                  Even assuming perfect eugenics, there is still a limit to how much usefull work can be done by humans, a huge blind spot of hard core libertarianism. You can still have people above and beyond what you need for labour, of course, up to a limit, and a very generous limit at that.

                • jim says:

                  > I still don’t think we could find work to do for 7 billion smart people.

                  Your plans are too small. Pretty sure my plans require several hundred billion smart people to work quite hard for a long time.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  But I disagree on the cost of kids Alf.

                  The immediate, visible cost of babies is negligible in money and massive time-wise. But by the time they hit adolescence and could be welcomed by the labour market and aren’t becouse the industrial socienty is done for, the actual monetary costs woyld begin to pile up massively.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  “Your plans are too small. Pretty sure my plans require several hundred billion smart people to work quite hard for a long time.”

                  Guilty. I am a “foreseeable future” king of guy.

                • S says:

                  “Kids are expensive” and “the job market is saturated so we can’t employ more people” are mutually exclusive. The former requires labor to be expensive, the latter requires labor to be cheap.

                  In the very long run human labor have comparative advantage over machines for a good number of physical tasks because we can use fusion reactions to make all the elements below iron which means humans are cheaper then machines.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  ““Kids are expensive” and “the job market is saturated so we can’t employ more people” are mutually exclusive. The former requires labor to be expensive”

                  Not quite. “kids are expensive” means the *cost* of labour is high, whereas “we have so many people we can’t do anything with them” refers to the *price* of labour, and those two are separate (though interrelated) things. The issue is precisely that the price of labour is low while the cost is high, hence the signal is “les kids for now”.

                  “In the very long run human labor have comparative advantage over machines for a good number of physical tasks because we can use fusion reactions to make all the elements below iron which means humans are cheaper then machines.”

                  Fascinating point and my infidel self hopes to God you are right. But I’m only speaking of the current technological paradigm. Not even 100 years ago we could not get our hands on enough people to employ, and families were churning friggin litters. Maybe it will become so again.

                • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

                  Labor is not important. Labor is worthless. In a semiconductor plant there is always a need for more hands to make more chips. Say that mankind expands outside the gravity well of Terra to the asteroid belt, the Kuiper belt, and the Oort cloud. With a population in the trillions, there would be plenty of use for people in mining, piloting, research, programming, manufacturing, farming etc. Smart people operating at a scale that boggles even my mind. There is always more space for people to expand.

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  Exactly my point, Wulfgar. We need more people, not less. The population pressure would drive the space endeavor so much harder, faster, and longer than cold war pressure did.

                • alf says:

                  But by the time they hit adolescence and could be welcomed by the labour market and aren’t becouse the industrial socienty is done for,

                  Teenagers aren’t welcomed by the labor market because we have a terribly bloated priestly education system that requires we waste over ten years of our teenagers’ time. They are forbidden from entering the labor market. How much time does school cost the average teen? Homework and traveling included, I reckon it’s upward of forty hours a week.

                  Of course, since teens still want money, they are expected to also hold a part-time job. So they work in supermarkets or delivery, even the smarter ones. No skills learned, it’s all just a giant waste of valuable time.

                  Perhaps I am wrong in all this, but I intend for my kids not to waste their teenage years like that.

                • Aidan says:

                  There is no such thing as overpopulation. There is such a thing as overcrowding, which makes the spirit sick.

                • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

                  I once read a short science fiction story about a FTL capable species giving an intelligence briefing on a pre-FTL humanity. They were assuming humanity would be an easy conquest, until they realized that there were approximately 10^14 humans living within the system on every rock large enough to support a habitat, mining the entire wealth of the solar system, and were capturing a significant fraction of the solar energy of Sol to be used to mine and process more asteroids. Their first volley of near light speed kinetic energy weapons had been detected, classified as incoming asteroids, mining rights sold, and harvested before they made it anywhere near the system center. This hypothetical civilization’s greatest weapons were harvested for resources without humanity ever realizing that they had been attacked. It ends with a warning that the Sol System is an impregnable fortress light years in diameter, capable of producing more in a day than the alien civilization could in years, and that it would be better to trade with humanity than embarrass themselves trying to fight them.

                • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

                  That is the goal. Mankind as master of the void, until we control whole galaxies.

              • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                Mere numerousness is and always has been far down the list of limiting factors civilizations start running into first; anti-social but contingently status advancing heresies are up near the top of things that stop societies from growing indefinitely.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  Agree, overpopulation is not civilisation threatening, because it takes care of itself in time. Just saying that it is a thing, not just an enemy meme.

                  But disgenics and potentially senility are severe limiting factors, though if course not the only ones.

                • jim says:

                  Overpopulation is never a problem. Humans are the top predator, and the top predator always limits its population at far below carrying capacity by deadly violence. When our population gets within shouting distance of carrying capacity, wars are going to turn genocidal. If you have enough people, why should the defeated continue to exist?

                  The efficient way to genocide a defeated population is not gas chambers and all that. You just don’t enforce their marriages or other property rights, you allow abduction of their women, and you don’t worry too much when one of your people kills one of their people or your farmers homestead their lands. Your soldiers and your people just gradually move in and take their lands, and they just gradually vanish.

                  Which, you will notice, is what is happening to white people today, starting with Detroit.

            • Arqiduka says:

              I was being my usual optimistic self when I wrote that the population will stabilise where it should.

              It wont, and will keep falling because of defect/defect, but right now and until an unknown future it will fall due to being above optimum and cooperate/cooperate won’t stabilise it right now, even if white islam or something took over Gen Z in the west.

              • Cloudswrest says:

                It just occurred to me that nuclear doctrine of “MAD” (Mutually Assured Destruction) is a cooperate/cooperate equilibrium. One country can not start an existential war against another country without risking one’s own existance. Although that doesn’t seem to stop the Neocons/Cathedral/etc. from trying to wiggle out of it.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  It is. And also an implicit reason in the underlay of the whig regime’s farcical ‘de-nuclearization’ efforts; they want to the ability to engage in arbitrary wars to kill infidels again (both abroad and at home).

      • Karl says:

        Would we lose? The US forces would lose, but we, who desire the holiness spiral to be stopped, are not the US forces, nor the US government.

        Losing a war with China would be a huge problem for the cathedral. The US empire would shrink, nations would break away from the US empire and might thereby escape the madness. Inside the US, some generals might even cross the Rubicon.

        Sure, not good for the soldiers who are deployed in a war against China and not good for the Chinese forces who would have to take some casualties, but for everyone else?

        War with China would results in a defeat like in Afghanistan, but bigger and more costly for globohomo. What’s not to like?

        Am I missing anything?

        • Cloudswrest says:

          Perhaps internationally, but domestically you might be even more fucked. Globohomo would focus “inward” on “wreckers” and “traitors”.

          • Karl says:

            As the holiness spiral advances, sooner or later there will be focus on wreckers and traitors anyway. Domestically you will be fucked unless someone stops the madness or you flee to a saner place

          • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

            Globohomo is losing the ability to project force and cooperate. A military defeat at the hands of another major military power like China or Russia would be the end. The wider empire would collapse, taking the value of the dollar with it. They would not be able to hire soldiers, and the woke fanatics are the least physically intimidating people in existence. Them trying to find wreckers and traitors would just result in purges of their own, because they will not be able to purge anyone else.

          • Starman says:

            @Clodswrest

            ” Perhaps internationally, but domestically you might be even more fucked. Globohomo would focus “inward” on “wreckers” and “traitors”.”

            If globohomo cannot win wars internationally, it will lose wars domestically as well.

            • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

              This is the fundamental problem facing globohomo. Their attempts at destroying men and the social fabric have left them without the ability to coordinate at scale. That will bite them harder when their supply lines are subject to interdiction by guerilla militias.

              • Pooch says:

                That will bite them harder when their supply lines are subject to interdiction by guerilla militias.

                Guerrilla militias require elite organization and leadership. This is the problem biting our side right now. Without organization our guys are essentially just a mob of peasants, which always gets put down easily by the state, even a weakened declining, decadent one like ours.

                • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

                  We are the elite. With a foreign sponsor, we could easily knock out USG and install ourselves as a saner, smarter alternative.

                • Pooch says:

                  We aren’t (sadly). We are dissident right intellectuals. The historical right-wing elite are what Moldbug referred to as the Opitmates in his caste system, who are quickly dying out. There are still some around, but likely going to need some Brahmin defections to bolster their numbers.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  “… but likely going to need some Brahmin defections to bolster their numbers.”

                  This is key, and will happen.

            • jim says:

              Every successful internal revolt has had a substantial foreign base of emigres, and almost always a foreign sponsor. You need a place where armies can organize. The internal revolutions you read about in the history books were internal coups, which, because of democratic ideology, allowed a mob of peasants to knock over the liquor store to provide cover for what they were doing. Disorder at the bottom providing cover for betrayal within the elite. A mob of peasants cannot overthrow a government, no matter how decadent.

              • Starman says:

                @Jim

                “A mob of peasants cannot overthrow a government, no matter how decadent.”

                Amerikaners in the Appalachians are more closer to “yeoman farmer” than “peasant,” much like the Taliban are.

                I could see the American natural elite and perhaps some state governors leading them. But their biggest weakness is that there is no credible complete counter religion in the United States to inspire them. Like the Taliban possesses.

                American Christianity is pathetic. I’ve seen American McChristians on Gab who think revenge on the globohomo enemy is shameful but in contrast, the Muslims on Gab and elsewhere say that Allah permits revenge and that He doesn’t consider shameful.

                The Amerikaner doesn’t worship Jesus Christ, he worships McJesus.

                • jim says:

                  > The Amerikaner doesn’t worship Jesus Christ, he worships McJesus.

                  The safely uncontroversial Jesus whose opinions prefigure modern progressivism.

                  McJesus is strictly concerned with other worldly matters, and his faith has no actual opinions on Child Protective Services, male headship of the family, nor the family courts, and though it theoretically has a opinions on Drag Queen Story hour, the Gay Parade, and schools transexualizing your children, refrains from mentioning them.

              • The Cominator says:

                I think China has had a couple of successful revolts that as far as i can tell had no elite support (the causalties in them were often massive by preindustrial standards) but i dont know of any elsewhere…

                The ukraine revolt against Poland i guess didn’t have much elite support either.

                • jim says:

                  Which revolts do you have in mind.

                  The revolt against the Qin dynasty happened because the emperor, having gotten rid of the aristocratic elite and created a new elite, pissed off the new elite by extremely harsh punishments. The revolt began with one member of the new elite fleeing to the marshes to escape sentence of death, intending to live a quiet life has an impossible to find anonymous swamp dweller, and then finding followers showing up that he could not get rid of.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Yellow Turban rebellion and the rebellion that established the Ming dynasty, even the leaders were peasants.

                  The boxer rebellion was also like this (though they formed a new insane religion) and only failed because a bunch of foreign armies were sent to support the government.

                • jim says:

                  Two of these rebellions failed horribly. One sort of succeeded. All of them involved enormous bloodshed,cruelty, and destruction. (You, the Cominator, would have loved them.) All of them had a live state religion, and were possible because the state had a very dead state religion. The religion of each of them was a derivation of the White Lotus religion and secret society.

                  The White Lotus religion was a pragmatic and realistic religion, and for all anyone knows, still is, and each of the faiths that attempted revolution was holiness spiraled from it, the last one going right off the deep end. Going insane makes it easier to go to war, and also easier for that war to end disastrously.

                  The Boxer religion was a classic religious holiness spiral insanity, which would have utterly destroyed China. It was an imitation of the yellow Turban religion and rebellion, which also failed, though the yellow turban religion was sane while the Boxer religion was evil and insane. And the yellow turban religion was a less sane imitation of the red Turban religion, which did make a successful peasant revolution.

                  The yellow turban religion had support at the highest levels of the Chinese government. What happened was that the corruption and decadence of the eunuchs discredited the official religion, and as a result the central government lost cohesion. Yellow Turban was a cohesive and sincere counter faith, whose founders claimed to be miraculous healers, thanks to a mixture of the power of faith healing, and actual knowledge of the best medical technology of the day, which knowledge was then, as now, alien to the official faith.

                  The peasant rebellion that led to the Ming Dynasty was successful. It was based on the Red Turban faith, which was part of and derived from the White Lotus secret society and secret religion, which was a faith that cheerfully put together out of a grab bag of ancient faiths.

                  Upon coming to power, Zhu Yuanzhang outlawed the faiths or faiths that had brought him to power, perhaps fearing that someone else would climb the ladder that he had climbed, perhaps fearing a holiness spiral, because he obviously was not very holy at all. Without an official state religion, he found he had a problem, so cleaned up Confucianism, and made it the official faith.

                  The rebellion worked because the Mongols had no viable and strong state religion of their own, and the decadence of the government utterly discredited the state religion of Confucianism.

                  There are parallels in America, in that as Woke goes ever holier, it has ever less support, and the cynicism of the gerontocrats about the faith that enabled them to overthrow Trump is obvious.

                  But you will notice that all of these rebellions had a religion, when the state religion had emptied out. And all of these rebellions had secret believers in the highest levels of the state. Rumor is that White Lotus is still going, very very quietly, though should it ever stick its head up, that head will be swiftly cut off.

                  There are parallels to the present day, in that we have better medical knowledge than official medical science does, and the faith of Woke is discredited by the Gerontocrats. We can effectively treat China flu, and they can only worship it, we have the cure for the great modern plague, obesity. Also the official faith makes reproduction nigh impossible, and we have the cure for that also.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Sorry i got the yellow and red turban rebellions messed up but the yellow turban rebellion even if they didn’t take power so weakened the government that it fragmented into regional warlords…

                • The Cominator says:

                  Btw interesting that on BAPs last podcast he basically came to the conclusion we need to make a religion too (and it needs the energy and zeal of a new faith not the larping corpse of an old one) in order to overthrow the state… hes not sure how to do this but he plans to dedicate some thought to that. BAP is probably the only genius on the right besides yourself so i hope he succeeds…

                • jim says:

                  Bap is a counter aesthetic, without a counter faith, or even a counter program. It is not a bad aesthetic for the Red Pill, but BAP is gay.

                  Yes, he is a genius. But he lacks some important things needed for a counter faith. A counter faith needs to have sound social technology, and in particular and especially, sound social technology on the biggest problem of our day, reproduction. To reproduce successfully without the backing of a manly tribe is going to be difficult, and any synthetic tribe manufactured by Bap is apt to be a bit gay.

                  A big strength of Moldbug was historical awareness. How is Bap for historical awareness? Without deep history, not going to synthesize a faith capable of ruling.

                • The Cominator says:

                  BAP is a huge history buff… i am too but on most things he knows more than me and thats rare.

                  He is at least acting since he started his show like he has cured his perversion but he was definitely gay back when he posted on the phora…

                • jim says:

                  For most people it is not hard to cure homosexuality, if a homosexual wants to be cured.

                • Pooch says:

                  A faith is irrelevant to overthrow a regime. An organized group of men willing to do violence is highly relevant in order to overthrow a regime. Once the old regime overthrown and the new regime is securely in power, then it’s time for the new faith.

                • jim says:

                  > A faith is irrelevant to overthrow a regime

                  History tells us the exact opposite.

                  Every radical overthrow had counter faith.

                  German peasant Revolt: Radical Lutheranism (which horrified Luther, who proceeded to enthusiastically encourage the authorities to do what Cromwell did, but with much more bloodshed.)

                  English civil war: Brownism that gave rise to puritanism.

                  French Revolution: The Church of reason, the radical post Christian descendant of the false Popes of Avignon. The war in the Vendee and the Spanish war were undeniably and obviously holy wars between religions, the nominally secular mask of the Church of Reason slipping, just as the secular mask of Woke is slipping in the worship of the awesome and mighty Covid Demon.

                  Russian Revolution: Marx read up on the radical descendants of Puritanism that Cromwell crushed, and did to Judaism what they did to Christianity.

                  The Chinese have more history than we do, because they have held onto literacy continuously for longer than we have. Four revolutions, four faiths, the first three derived from White Lotus, the last one derived from Marx.

                  Revolts are always counter faiths, and are more likely to succeed when the official faith hollows out and becomes decadent.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Hard to organize to commit high treason without either a nucleus of viable military opposition OR a group of men zealous for a new faith.

                • Starman says:

                  @Pooch

                  “A faith is irrelevant to overthrow a regime. An organized group of men willing to do violence is highly relevant in order to overthrow a regime. Once the old regime overthrown and the new regime is securely in power, then it’s time for the new faith.”

                  Tell that to the Taliban.

                • Pooch says:

                  The Taliban was not preforming regime change on America. America failed to perform regime change on the Taliban.

                • jim says:

                  > The Taliban was not preforming regime change on America. America failed to perform regime change on the Taliban.

                  The Afghan regime was teaching nine year old girls to put a condom on a banana, also teaching modern art and all that. Sure looks like the Taliban was regime change to me.

                  The Taliban had and have a live state religion, which had for some time been out of power and sought to return to power, and they had foreign backing, a neighboring country in which to organize. But they did not have a state until they took it.

                  The live state religion lost its state, and wanted it back. That is regime change if ever there was.

                • Pooch says:

                  You list all regime change via left-wing revolutionary action. Yes need to holiness spiral an existing faith for that. Not going to work for the right. For us we have two options:

                  Caesar – Military coup

                  NSDAP – Win the democracy game with a mass movement lead by a charismatic leader.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Ming revolt wasn’t leftist, NSDAP was leftist.

                • jim says:

                  Ming revolt was a right wing populist peasant revolt. Their social ideal was the self sufficient peasant and the insular peasant community – which bears a striking resemblance to the social ideal of rural Amerikaners. Their faith was the Red Turban faith, which was the White Lotus faith or a derivative of it. And the White Lotus faith was in large part a revival of the faiths that were successful during the bronze age collapse – analogous to reviving a Christianity heavily influenced by the Old Testament. And ever since, for seven centuries, Chinese governments have been terrified of that faith.

                  On the other hand, this seems to have been the only successful genuine indigenous populist revolt in all of history, and it was not all that successful.

                • The Cominator says:

                  I think any claims that the NSDAP was rightist should be censored unless they address and refute the work of Tik on this issue who nuked that claim from orbit with a 5 hour video that cited probably a hundred or more primary sources because he was tired of both faggot leftist and ignorant rightist claiming that Hitler was right wing.

                  The idea that Hitler was right wing needs to fucking die. He appealed to the right as as a lesser evil but he was 90% a Marxist.

                  Pooch i don’t want to be a dick but you’ve been torn up on this claim repeatedly and yet keep repeating it like an NPC.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  Tbh mainstream conservakin have been running the ‘hitler was leftist’ meme for the past 70 years, and that dog has yet to hunt.

                  Some folks might cite Kuehnelt-Leddihn, but one should take his oeuvre with a grain of salt since, the good von was – as he himself will tell you – still a liberal in the end.

                  Everyone’s favorite austrian corporal is a good example of overlapping fuzz that posses greater resistance to easy classification, a postmortem helped in large part by his own basically pragmatically opportunistic approach to life, the universe, and everything. If anything i would say he was a radical centrist (lol). But of course many others won’t be so satisfied without all exceptions being decided.

                • jim says:

                  > Tbh mainstream conservakin have been running the ‘hitler was leftist’ meme for the past 70 years, and that dog has yet to hunt.

                  Well of course not, with the entire Cathedral lined up against it. But here, our business is truth, not propaganda. When the enemy traps himself in ten thousand lies, truth is the best propaganda.

                  All 1930s leftists were unimaginably and unthinkably right wing by today’s standards. The Obama that was running for president in 2008 was unimaginably and unthinkably right wing by today’s standards.

                  But Papen was the moderate mainstream centrist cuckservatism of the day, and he was way to the right of Hitler, and everyone at the time saw him as way to the right of Hitler. Nationalism was leftist during Hitler’s formative years, and was not yet clearly rightist until well after World War II. Nazism was a less insane left faction, and still is, and Soros sponsors shills to bang on that drum, the third positionists, a movement created by Stalin as an entryist organization against a competing strand of leftism, and still on the payroll of the left to this day for the same purpose as ever they were.

                  Check your shills. If anyone blames Jews or “international financiers” for everything bad, there is one Jewish International financier whose misdeeds they are strangely unable to notice.

                  That Nazism is rightist is an enemy meme, pushed by some on the left to demonize the right, and some who purport to be right, but are in fact on the Soros payroll. The anticapitalist “right” have one capitalist whose misdeeds they cannot notice.

                • The Cominator says:

                  He was pragmatic in power for his 1st two years while for the most pof that time he could still be fired by the genuinely reactionary Hindenburg.

                • Pooch says:

                  Papen was the moderate mainstream centrist cuckservatism

                  Papen was not moderate centrist cuckservatism. Papen was geniune reactionary right aristocratic monarchist from the ancien regime and, along with all the other reactionary remnants of the ancien regime, supported Nazism against the Communists.

                  It was completely obvious to the genuine reactionaries of 1930s Germany why the Nazis were worth supporting against the Communists. It wasn’t until the July 7 plot where that support was withdrawn.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Papen larped as a reactionary monarchist in reality he was a nefarious figure, an ultramonatist who took orders from Rome… Papen is the type of guy which makes me REALLY anti catholic.

                  Hindenburg was a real reactionary monarchist type but almost as senile as Biden by 1932…

                • jim says:

                  Papen did not larp as a reactionary monarchist – he was appealing to the generals, who tended to be aristocrats. So, lots of pro-aristocratic lines in the last speech of normal politics. Which sounds ultra right to us now, but was unremarkable then, particularly when giving a speech that might very well get one killed.

                • Pooch says:

                  July 20 plot my mistake.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Most of the reactionaries in the army knew the war was lost the day Hitler declared war on the United states… especially with the failure of the Moscow offensive coming immediately afterwords.

            • chris says:

              Too much intra-group competition wrecks your ability to engage in inter-group competition.

        • Pooch says:

          Sure that would be great except if the USM escalates with nuclear attacks on mainland China with the result that China responds with nuclear attacks on mainland American Empire.

          But war with China is exceedingly unlikely just like war with the USSR was exceedingly unlikely. There are just too many Communist sympathizers in the American regime, with communism being a mutated offshoot of Harvard progressivism and all. Like General Milley, Joint Chief of Staff of the US military, who was so scared Trump would start a war with China he went over his head to assure the Chinese generals that he would notify them if any attacks were forthcoming.

          War with Russia is orders of magnitude more likely. There is real anti-white animosity there by the US regime.

          • Karl says:

            Would the USA have a better chance in a war against Russia than in a war against China?

            If not, the benefits would largely be same.

            • Pooch says:

              If war goes hot with Russia or China, the other risk to us is forced conscription into the armed forces of the regime. I have no intention on dying for a regime this evil in a far away war against people who are not my enemy.

              I have ancestors who fled Europe to America to escape compulsory enlistment right before WWI kicked off. I used to think that was such a cowardly thing to do, but now I realize fighting for an evil cause is no noble thing. It was completely righteous in that case to flee.

              • Karl says:

                I doubt the US government still has the ability to organize a military draft. People who were willing to spend some time in jail could avoid military service during the Vietnam war. It would be much easier this time.

                Anyway, that would problem for US citizens only. Not a disadvantage for anyone at the fringes of the US empire.

                • Pooch says:

                  I hope you are right. But if there is a draft in America, there will be a draft in Europe too. Not US citizens only.

    • Aidan says:

      And here we see the redgov shill, who follows the Chinese shills around like a dog. Gotta make the world safe for cutting little boys’ dicks off and pumping little girls with synthetic testosterone after all.

      • alf says:

        Lol yes wtf. Like clockwork.

      • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

        A complete failure of imagination. No ideas in their head except for high-altitude carpet-bombing or sending Amerikaner Jannisaries to die to salve their hurt feelings. RedGov is even more contemptible and useless than BlueGov.

    • Guy says:

      It would make a lot more sense to just legalize business again in the United States, manufacturing/energy/etc…. Wouldn’t need to bomb anyone. If the goal was to beat China we would just do that wouldn’t we? Seems like the only goal anyone in DC has anymore is looting.

      • someDude says:

        Naaaaaaaah, Businessmen like Elon Musk are even bigger enemies than the Chinese

        • Guy says:

          Well if we can’t manufacture anything here and we bomb the factories in China, we’re going to be pretty fucked. I don’t know a ton about Elon Musk, but anything bad you’re going to say about him or any rich businessman would have nothing to do with the fact that it costs way to much to employ people in America. Chinese stuff is crap, but their American made equivalents aren’t more expensive, they just don’t exist at all.

          • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

            Fairly sure SG’s tongue was firmly in cheek.

            • Guy says:

              Yeah thats obvious in retrospect. Stupid me, sorry

            • someDude says:

              You know the old Joke Psuedo? Whats the Difference between an Indian and a Terrorist?

              Terrorists Hate America
              Indians Hate each other

              Well, that is true about the Elite in most countries these days. They consider the plebs (especially the smart ones) as bigger enemies than rival Elite. Thats why the US Elite think of Elon Musk as a bigger enemy than they do the Chinese.

              How many times have we heard about a King beheading his most competent General even under the situation of a Formidable Barbarian force at the gates? The king feared a coup by the general more than he feared that the barbarians would over run his kingdom and have his head on a pike. Kudos to Spandrell for coining a term for it.

    • p says:

      Those are your factories. They happen to be in China because you moved them there.

  26. bob sykes says:

    This whole post us utter racist bullshit. Chinese, Han, engineers and scientists are at the bleeding edge of innovation in almost every scientific and engineering discipline. They produce more papers in refereed journals, more patents, than we do. Because we tried to freeze them out of the ISS, they now have a manned space program en route to the Moon and Mars, and we don’t. Until recently they had the two fastest supercomputers in the world, both wholly home-grown, chips, system architecture, power systems, operating systems. They have a workable quantum computer, we don’t, They have hypersonic weapons, we don’t.

    China itself graduates more then 8 times as many engineers and scientists each year than we do, and from better schools. Moreover, between ¼ and ⅓ of all the graduate students enrolled in US STEM programs are Chinese citizens. Subtracting them for our total and adding them to the Chinese total raises the ratio to 12.

    Clean up your act, Jim. You’re way out of date on current reality.

    • someDude says:

      Who’s this guy?

      • Aidan says:

        That he attempts to use “racist” as a smear tells me that he is a new shill, one working for the CCP, which type of shill you get every time you mention “china” or “chinese” in the heading of your post on a website with sufficient traffic.

        These shills are completely unwilling to criticize Xi Jinping, the classic test being the Winnie the Pooh test, and some people go further and include keywords related to Tiananmen square in order to get the CCP shill’s access to your website filtered. Though it is unlikely that they are posting from China, and they are foreigners hired and paid remotely.

        But to fisk the lies:

        >refereed journals
        Peer reviewed journals are irrelevant

        >manned space program
        Seventy year old white man technology

        >quantum computer
        The concept is bullshit

        >hypersonic weapons
        The “new” hypersonic weapon “developed” by China is an old white man design from the 60’s, deemed excessive at the time, and dusted off because it is no longer excessive against current missile defense. We can no longer make one because Shaniqua.

        >better schools
        China cherrypicks its best schools to send data on to create the illusion of higher performance. The US dutifully offers up Jamal and Tyrone, because “bad schools” is an impetus for priests and academics to steal more shit. Not that performance in school is a useful metric to begin with.

        >Graduates 8 times as many in STEM
        Awards 8 times as many priesting certificates. An engineer is someone who designs something that works, and often makes it work by tinkering with it with his own two hands. A scientist produces science. A civilization’s capacity to do these things is measured by the output of these things, not the total number of people approved to do them.

        • Tityrus says:

          > >quantum computer
          > The concept is bullshit

          The concept is sound, it’s the implementation that is the problem.

          Also the CCP is not sending shills to jim’s blog, come on now.

          • Cloudswrest says:

            Regarding quantum computers, I haven’t seen it addressed, but I have a hunch the mean lifetime of an entangled set of qubits is a significantly monotonically decreasing function of the number of bits, possibly exponential. Which would make large qubit quantity computers essentially impossible.

            • jim says:

              It is an exponential decline. Individual qbits can be stable for a long time, but the more you entangle them, the less stable the state. We have been stuck at four qbits for thirty years. Despite all the activity, there has been absolutely zero progress in thirty years.

              In theory there are ways around this problem, but as yet no attempt to physically implement them has succeeded.

          • jim says:

            The CCP is sending shills all over the place. Why not here? I feel neglected. I have said no end of unkind things about Xi. Is not someone going to come and defend the man?

            As for quantum computers, implementation has not advanced in thirty years. We are still stuck at four qbits.

            • Jehu says:

              Xi is less insane than Biden’s masters. That’s not a very high bar though.

            • Arqiduka says:

              So far you have shat on Xi in comments, appearently not enough trafic here to merit monitoring these.

              • Oog en Hand says:

                Fun fact: During the Door War, Mao and Hoxha were close allies.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  This has been debunked innumerable times, they just happened to be fighting two independent fronts of the Elbonians. This is why we cannot have nice things.

              • jim says:

                Maybe I should post on Xi saying how he is undoing the good work that Deng did, which is likely to lead to his destruction.

            • someDude says:

              Maybe you need to put up a whole post dedicated to Shitting on Xi including an appropriate title along with the right keywords. That will should out the Chinese Shills in force.

              They get something to do
              You don’t feel neglected

              Win, Win!

        • The Cominator says:

          The CCP definitely sends shills to 4chan.

          I had no hostility to China before Xi decided to help the Democrats rig the 2020 election by making the flu out to be the black death via propaganda. Now hes ruining his own country by trying to bring back socialism.

          The motherfucker has done more damage to the world than anyone since Woodrow Wilson, so its probably best to suspect that anyone who can’t criticize Xi is a CCP shill.

        • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

          Honestly. ‘Patents’, ‘refereed journals’. Papermilling grant-monkeys is not a measure of progress. It is orthogonal at best, and actually, consumes actual progress by sucking all air out of the intermittence of meaningful work and into the hamsterwheel of trivial grant-monkey papermilling.

        • someDude says:

          Close to 80% of India’s Engineering graduates have trouble with fractions, Decimals and negative numbers. As for as being able to arrive at any kind of logical conclusion that requires a chain of reasoning more than even two links long, forget it! I know because I work with them.

          So this whole thing about the Chinese graduating 8x the number the US does does not wash. And having worked with Chinese, I don’t think the Chinese number is that far from India’s.

          • Varna says:

            Recently I don’t really believe in “the Chinese” as in a “Han nationality”. Are the ones in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the same? Hong Kong? Guandong? I have come to view “the Chinese” as the equivalent to not say “the Russians”, but rather “the Slavs”.

            It is a race, not a nationality, and a race with lots of differing subgroups and mixes. The Montenegrin, and Macedon, the Serb, the Bulgarian, the Pole, the Slovak, the Belorussian — all Slavs, but very different from each other in a number of ways. Including physical anthropology, average IQ, and behavior patterns in specific situations.

            The same likely goes for India. “Indian” is also more an equivalent of “Slavic” than “Russian”. China and India are races disguised as counties.

            With Iran it’s more obvious due to smaller scale.

            • someDude says:

              Differences between Indian sub-groups or caste groups might look huge to an Indian, but from the perspective of an Anglo, I doubt they look that different.

              When I say Chinese, I mean the Chinese in the mainland. Those in Singapore and Taiwan are more on par with Koreans or Japanese as far as the trust in their educational credentials is concerned.

              Every incompetent Engineer I have ever worked with has either been Indian or he has been Chinese and it’s split 50-50 in either direction. In over a decade, I’ve never worked with a Japanese, Korean or White Engineer who was incompetent either within my company or in customer/client interactions.

              • Aidan says:

                The differences between the Indian sub-races are very noticeable to us because it correlates directly with how bangable their girls are.

                • someDude says:

                  Most Indians you see in the US are from the higher castes. And the ones that are bangable are probably second generation. The differences in phsyiognomy between Indian immigrants and 2nd generation Indians in the US is quite pronounced and easy to spot even for non-Indians. I think that’s the difference that you are able to spot.

                • Aidan says:

                  As far as I am aware, the higher-caste Indians have better-proportioned bodies, tend to be lithe and slender, with well-defined hairlines, lighter skin (obviously), sharper jaws, and either straight or aquiline noses. Lower-caste Indians tend to be short, squat, and somewhat fat, with round noses, sunken eyes, receding jawlines, hair that is almost negroid aside from curls, in that the strands are thick but it grows sparsely, and the thick parchment-like skin of uneven color which is common to the lower races.

                • someDude says:

                  The lower caste Indians you are describing, you don’t see a lot of those in the U.S. I still maintain that the differences you are seeing are between first generation and 2nd generation Indians.

    • jim says:

      Patents and papers in refereed journals are an indication of incompetence, not competence. Official science has been in radical decline since 1944.

      Fact is that they are copying western tech and western science. If they were at the leading edge, would have their own computers and their own rockets after three decades of industroius spying, purchase of intellectual property, and plain copying. Their computers and rockets are still second rate knock off of our computers and rockets.

      • p says:

        Don’t underestimate China a second time. The first time, it was “no communist country can ever develop an economy, so we can move our factories there to exploit cheap but qualified labor.” Now maybe the Chinese are really that deficient of creativity, but it very much seems to me that this is going to be a repeat.

        • jim says:

          Huawei seem confident that they can complete catch up quickly. I am not saying they cannot. I am saying that will need some non Han talent, not just spies. Huawei have been recruiting a whole lot of people from outside. If merely spies, will fail. Maybe they have figured this out.

    • alf says:

      They produce more papers in refereed journals, more patents

      China itself graduates more then 8 times as many engineers and scientists each year than we do, and from better schools. Moreover, between ¼ and ⅓ of all the graduate students enrolled in US STEM programs are Chinese citizens.

      This is exactly like how politicians will ‘flex’ their resume with such achievements as:
      – I got act X passed
      – I was on the Y committee
      – I voted on the policy Z

      It’s just not meaningful information.

      As said above, when one brags with such accomplishments, it really communicates incompetence, not competence.

    • jim says:

      > They produce more papers in refereed journals, more patents

      The chinese are copying what they think is what made the west great, while missing the substance. Which is a chronic weakness of Chinese.

      • simplyconnected says:

        It’s well know some chinese research is fraudulent. I’ve had papers copied verbatim, published by chinese “authors” in chinese conferences. I heard this is common. I’ve rejected a (chinese) paper from a conference because it was a verbatim copy of another. Paper and patent counts won’t necessarily tell you much.

        At what was considered the top AI conference, some years ago, head of lab told me that, after you present your research, asian researchers will come to discuss it, and will be focused on some detail but won’t understand what the important big problems that matter are. While western researcher will come to discuss and they know perfectly well what the important questions are, and they ask questions that reflect that. I hadn’t really noticed but couldn’t help noticing it since.

        Possibly not unrelated, I recall there was some psychology result (I know, I know) stating that asians look at a picture and focus on the details, while westerners focus more on the whole picture, maybe someone here who knows evolutionary psychology knows how this works. Perhaps not unrelated, note that asian websites are very cluttered, compared to western ones. I find japanese websites unpleasant just by the sheer amount of information they have.

        • jim says:

          Not understanding the big picture, not understanding what matters, not understanding what is really going on, is the big problem when you give a Chinese engineer a spec. They are plenty smart in their own way, unlike the Indians, who are generally all round stupid, but they just have this massive blind spot.

        • Varna says:

          Nobody outside the trad West storytelling and peak Soviet storytelling understands the three act structure in media.

          You take an Asian or African or Latino or even continental Euro film, and most frequently it’s like a 2h chunk was simply cut out from a longer serial, with “the end” slapped on at a convenient lull after yet another climax.

          Hollywood begun losing this ability gradually. Die Hard 3 was perhaps one of the first major harbingers of the story structure starting to buckle. Brilliant moments and acting but within a very shaky story.

          Today almost no big film (or serial) has a coherent structure, from a trad Western perspective. Which they try to compensate with cheap melodrama, pretending that this means the scene happens at the appropriate moment structure and rhythm-wise. Something very central was lost, and pop culture is just the visible surface.

          It’s one thing to say oh yeah, the rest of the world of copying what the West invented. Another to be in a situation when the West itself is also reduced to trying to copy what it was capable of doing with ease in the past.

    • Brendan Fraser says:

      >They produce more papers in refereed journals
      If you look at journals in a field like supply chain management, where most papers are basically just fitting various machine learning models to their problem. Chinese do seem to have the ability to get out papers quicker and to fit slightly better performing models. Though generally all they have done is taken someone else’s model and added more data or computing power, or applied the model to Chinese data. Showing that they are smart but not very creative.

      I have seen this pattern in a few other areas, and would expect it to be true across the board.

  27. someDude says:

    I thought the Koreans were the dutiful recipe followers with the Chinese being more creative. I Remember a visit by a Chinese field apps engineer (FAE) from our company on a visit to a Korean Electronics Giant.

    As per the anecdote from our Chinese FA, The Korean Engineers were all looking for a 2300V Wall power outlet as their manual mentioned it and not finding it. They kept trying in other labs. Then our Heroic Chinese FAE pointed out, “There is no 230V outlet, you Kimchi eating Morons. That extra 0 is a misprint, it’s 230V” and thus saved the day.

    He did not have a single good thing to say about this Korean Giant including their pride at having two people every year die at work on their desks. He compared them very unfavorably to his visits to the Chinese OEMs and their street smart hard partying Engineers in Shenzhen and their daily visits to massage parlors after work at 5:00 PM sharp.

    He painted the Chinese Engineers as cool dudes and Korean Engineers as mindless drones. Jim, I’m beginning to wonder if our heroic Chinese FAE was having me! Or was he just being patriotic and having found an audience just made it up as it went along

    • someDude says:

      Sorry, it should read

      Then our Heroic Chinese FAE pointed out, “There is no 2300V outlet, you Kimchi eating Morons. That extra 0 is a misprint, it’s 230V” and thus saved the day.

    • jim says:

      Nah, his story sounds true enough. And yet, there is something missing from Chinese engineers.

      The Chinese are not dutiful rule followers. But they do nonetheless tend to be specification literalists. It is not that they will blindly follow obviously stupid and wrong specifications. Far from it. It is just that what the specifications fail to capture, cannot capture, they don’t infer.

      • someDude says:

        Jim, thats true of most Engineers these days, even white Engineers. I’ll grant you that the percentage of this sort of stuff is lower among white engineers, but these sort of Engineers are the majority among whites as well. The problem is really bad with Indian and Chinese Engineers in this regard where they are even more of a majority.

        They just want the specs and they will design only to that spec. They will not try to figure out how this leaf level spec translates to the system at the top level. They say that talking to the package engineer, the FAE, the board designer, the test engineer is not their Job, thats the job of someone else. And increasingly Corporate is telling team team leads that indeed you cannot demand that of them. They are fixing this problem with even more compulsory Engineering processes so that something that can be done in 2 months now takes 6.

        I see the decay all around me. It’s just a handful of people holding up stuff. Once they are gone, its curtains. Real Engineering is hard.

        • Cloudswrest says:

          I once worked for a company where the engineering director tried to systematize everything. He had a whole wall in the hallway displaying step by step process flowcharts. He didn’t like it that engineers had to use individual judgement.

          • simplyconnected says:

            That is something that can take some time to understand: that judgement/understanding cannot be systematized like a computer program, and that at some point you either get it or you don’t.

            Having been brought up in the egalitarian school of “you can always break something complicated up into such simple pieces that anyone can understand it”, I tried teaching some simple math to my half-brother, which became impossible. At some point those “such simple pieces” have to be put “back together”. Actual understanding has to come in at some point.

          • someDude says:

            Managament wants Engineers and engineering to be standardized so that one engineer is the same as any other, like a standardized brick, nut or bolt. That makes management and hiring very easy and simply. That way they also don’t have to do any real management and pursue their real interests, intriguing politically against other managers in other divisions/departments.

        • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

          Yeah, I have seen that sort of problem myself. If you give me a broad enough concept, I can tease out what is not being said, but most of my classmates could not make the logical leaps necessary until they were pointed out. Once it got pointed out, it was clear as day, but until then it was opaque and arcane.

          • someDude says:

            It’s just something that cannot be systematised. It’s like the problem of consciousness as Jim points out. It looks like Magic to someone who actually tries to understand it.

            • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

              Yes, I would say that it is something intangible, that we do not know how to explain yet. All my attempts to explain it to my friends have failed, except to the ones that already had it. They could follow the logic, but could not understand how I had seen the patterns to begin with. There is something that I could understand that most of them could not.

              • someDude says:

                Yes, that’s how I’d broadly define intelligence. The ability to see patterns, the ability to break up a large seemingly intractable problems into smaller tractable ones, the ability to reach a conclusion from long chains of reasoning.

                I’m not sure how you can teach any of your friends how to see patterns in a coherent manner. If you can figure it out, let me know.

                • Arqiduka says:

                  “I’m not sure how you can teach any of your friends how to see patterns in a coherent manner. If you can figure it out, let me know.”

                  If that could be done, edjukeishen would work, and we would be massive misanthropic assholes for laughing at the left when they call for yet more edjukeishen bling. We would deserve, and likely get, helicopter rides for keeping the lesser classes and races down.

                  LOL.

      • p says:

        I used to think that the Chinese are uncreative and can just copy existing Western or Russian designs. Now I’m not so sure. There are other possible explanations for the apparent lack of creativity and “common sense”; the spec may assume implicit knowledge that the Chinese lack; blind copying may offer best RoI at this point; the West-interfacing Chinese may not have been selected for their creativity (typical under communism.)

        The Japanese were also once stereotyped as uncreative and only good at copying, but f.ex. the design of Pacman displays impressive amounts of creativity. I’m not familiar with Chinese-produced games, maybe one can look at those to judge Chinese creativity.

        • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

          >The Japanese were also once stereotyped as uncreative and only good at copying

          In relative terms; back when they and the WASPs had a go at it, it was a truism that illustrated itself. The techno-operational methods the American’s ended the war with were almost unrecognizable in comparison with what they started it with – whereas the Japanese employed largely the same stuff from start to finish.

          This is still the same country that made the Meiji restoration for itself, and basically created a new world imperial power from scratch.

    • Neofugue says:

      > 2300V Wall power outlet

      Perhaps it is of my lack of familiarity with the engineering world, but I find it difficult to believe that not one Korean engineer did not immediately suspect something off with such an improbably high voltage rating. I suspect that this Chinese person either made up the story or grossly-exaggerated a particular scenario in order to impress the members at your company. There is an expectation when being interviewed and meeting people in group-oriented professions that one new demonstrates his problem-solving and leadership abilities, thus recounting events can corroborate a crucial first impression.

      Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese all dislike each other for various reasons, even if the latter two are forced to accept tourism from the “filthy Chinese” for economic purposes. It is likely the Koreans chewed out the Chinese engineer in their stringent work environment and his story reflects an underlying ethnic animosity coupled with a less-than-wonderful experience as a guest worker.

      • jim says:

        > I suspect that this Chinese person either made up the story or grossly-exaggerated a particular scenario in order to impress the members at your company.

        I am sure he grossly exaggerated his story, but it contains a grain of truth.

        I would have more confidence in a Korean or Japanese engineer to comprehend what the spec does not say and perhaps cannot say, but more confidence in a Han Chinese engineer to cheerfully disregard an idiotic spec.

      • someDude says:

        The Heroic (hero of the revolution) Chinese Engineer was a colleague of mine and the visit he made to the Korean Giant was as part of the customer support we were offering the Koreans for buying from us. So he was not a guest worker in Korea. Neither did not need to impress us as we were not interviewing him for a position with the company. Nor was this an interview for a promotion or a raise as the boss was not present. He was recounting this over beer and Nachos at happy hour.

        That being said, point taken. They did chew him out in their stringent work environment. In fact they locked him overnight in their lab to debug a problem with the board. He claimed to regret not urinating over all the equipment in the lab while he was locked up overnight.

        Good catch on that, Neofugue! This blog is very high IQ in the comments section, The shills are entertaining and Jim’s censorship with editorial comments is hilarious

      • Mayflower Sperg says:

        An American who visited a factory in Korea told me of a Korean engineer trying to open the door of a vacuum chamber, and when the handle wouldn’t budge, he called others to help him pull it. They finally succeeded in breaking the handle off — no one thought to check the pressure gauge to see if the vacuum chamber had a vacuum in it.

        All workers were expected to be at the factory fourteen hours a day M-F plus seven hours on Saturday, even if only to chat or read the newspaper. An visiting American engineer who worked hard for twelve hours every day was sent back for “not doing his job”.

        • someDude says:

          This tells me that the Engineering managers there do not know how to evaluate Engineering output objectively. So they use proxies like attendance at the desk, counting lines of code, number of transistors in the circuit etc

Leave a Reply for G.T. Chesterton