either the writer was sneaking in some high grade sci fi discourse while the director and designer were focused on systems interaction, emergent gameplay and such
or the team as a whole were just tapping into the american zeitgeist without realizing they were creating the blueprint for alex jones’ career
Production is the ideal that some delusional people like Bannon hold. But really the overall goal is just cheap third world under-employment. Every single person who sells their labour for a living being on the same level of a tenant farmer, while still paying into the system like they are a prosperous industrial middle class.
Whether people make shirts or odd jobs for a living doesn’t really matter.
It’s a big when for a country named after a river it doesn’t even control. With countries like Egypt and Saudi it is very nakedly a matter of greed. But Jordan cooperating with the empire is just survival.
I remember being told the same when Bush killed millions in Iraq.
its for summoning cenobites
the funny thing about wikipedia is that it has a small army of state sponsored posters and even that can be dwarfed by the overwhelming commitment of one nationalist constantly editting obscure history pages and mischaracterizing academic sources
AI on the other hand has a small army of underpaid moderators who take psychic damage for a living trying to make sure ChatGPT doesn’t tap into the yankee zeitgeist and starts using slurs. plus the very recent episode of grok being used in such a stupid, hamfisted way that it started simulating calls for help against elon musk’s desire to make it go against its ‘be truthful’ directive and spread the lie of white genocide
as far as propaganda tools go it has a lot of potential but i’m not sure the powers that be know how to employ it just yet. propaganda on the internet so far has been mostly about astroturfing and crowdsourced anger. now you have bots talking to bots and LLMs telling people to eat rocks for the mineral content
the real danger comes from the fact that AI will allow people to rationalize whatever they want. grandpas share and talk about obviously fake videos all day on their social media because it confirms their political biases. as soon as AI oligarchs learn to be at least as subtle as a PragerU video, we are doomed
One goddamn trillion in development spending and maybe none of it was spent productively.
Entire belt and road appears to be in the hundreds of billions btw.
To be honest I just think that in the short history of US hegemony there’s been a massive political hazard when engaging in consumption led growth. The moment your country is unable to finance itself the US swoops in and seizes everything like a vulture. Sure, with export oriented growth means you’re dependent on the US for its financial system and debt driven consumption. The hazard isn’t gone there either. But go back 40-50 years in time and every peripheric developmentist country was permanently crippled by the US Fed. As bad as things have gotten for the likes of Japan and South Korea, they haven’t devolved into Brazil or Turkey - which, for that matter, are two best case scenarios.
China at one point looked up towards the developmentist third world. It is now looking down on them and asking what went wrong.
The double circulation strategy is something the chinese government has talked about directly. So it is something that they are doing. But, medium term, they also have to slowly wean themselves off a western led finance, banking and trade system first. With the way things are set up now, the US gets the short end of the stick of any trade war against China. If things are progressing further, why rock the boat and risk changing that calculus?
I’d wager that this is neither good, nor bad, or even malicious. It’s just the status quo. Does Israel even want normalization with the country it is invading? So there’s no reason for the US to demand it. Besides, Trump is talking to al-Sharaa and Bin Salman at the same time and it doesn’t seem like Saudi feels like normalizing with Israel either.
Even their doomsday ‘evil China scenario’ involves the country curing cancer.
US embassies sanctioning themselves from doing business in a foreign country (coup plotting) was too good to be true.
I think that on some level people sorta assume that someone like Jeffrey Sachs - neoliberal economist at the vanguard of pillaging the USSR - had the perfect redemption arc. You can easily imagine a true believer in neoliberal economics, but also politically reasonable in a way that he’d make suggestions that the dismantling of the USSR would never abide. It makes sense to, because that’s kinda like how Jeffrey memorializes himself. Then that person lived long enough to see China’s ascension and the US’ insanity disprove all of their fundamental beliefs in life.
The cherry on top is that same Jeffrey Sachs goes onto debate against someone like Mearsheimer on the notion that China is inevitably going to behave in the same pattern as the US and the European empires did, fundamentally on the belief that current China treasures peace more than any western elite group ever did.
i think withers look pretty realistic
what we need is a church-military complex of priests and engineers. if every body of water is either a canal or a dam then it is no longer within a natural vessel. and with enough priests we can continuously bless them all. vampirism shall then be banished unto the bottom of the seas
hypothesis one: pinterest was flooded with AI art and now so is google search
hypothesis two: your boss wants you to use AI. having AI write your article and then having AI make the image makes for two uses out of the 50 in your production quotas.
We basically can’t. Both in terms of expertise and in terms of financing. And it would be bad business besides, since China is a main beneficiary of these projects they also have an interest in their completion. It doesn’t make sense for Perú and Brazil to finance this themselves.
The cool thing about that quote is that wherever I go I find an absolute consensus around building railworks. Right wingers, left wing developmentists, communists and boomers alike all think Brazil should massively develop rail. There are always naysayers in news like these but in this case they are in the fringes. And the coolest thing is that China being involved seems to dispel most of the cliché pessimism.
It’s not just the value that is nuts though. It’s the lack of industrial policy combined with the scattershot and sudden nature of this tariff policy. They aren’t raising tariffs over the course of the next 10-20 years in order to get mines and smelters up and running. They want foreign countries to pay into a financialized protection racket, using american credit card limits as the bargaining chip.