The fundamental uselessness of the Thucydides Trap is it assumes only two powers, locked in a zero sum game. Anyone familiar with classical Greece is well aware that shortly after the end of the Peloponnesian War Sparta lost to the rising power of Thebes, and Thebes in turn was eclipsed by Macedon.

the "Thucydides Trap" shows how bad history can succeed if it serves a purpose

Jews wanted a border and an army and a state in order to protect themselves, which is the same thing that Palestinians want, because like it or not *we live in a world of states.*

Because until ~15 years ago "reversion to mean" models were decently accurate - see the fertility bouncebacks in ex-Soviet countries in the mid-2010s, US fertility recovery in the 2000s after the economic hard times of the 1970s and 1980s, and China's recovery from the One-Child Policy in the 1990s.

When Mitsubishi bought the Rockefeller Group in the 1980s there was a brief moral panic about the Rockettes being turned into geishas.

China is *much* bigger than Japan (around ten times bigger, in fact) and so it's important not to downplay the massive scale of the Chinese domestic economy. It's definitely not just exports. But China's demographics are worse and its debt arguably is too.

As a regular curmudgeon who views a university as being a college of faculty rather than a service provider for students... They are right to view graduation as a day for them, which belongs to them. It is their rite of passage. It does not belong to invited speakers or university leadership.

By mid century china would need to bring in nearly 10 million new workers per year to keep the workforce stable. And keep them. The total number of migrant workers in the gulf, China would need to semi-permanently hoover up that many every ~3 years.

I don't think they can for this. It works for the gulf states because of their size, weath, and the amount of labor available relative to their needs. Even Saudi Arabia, the biggest gulf state, only has 35 million total.

The US would in many cases be better off if many of the highest-paying blue-collar jobs were automated. Certainly not all of them, but there are grotesque inefficiencies in transport infrastructure that stem from protectionism that doesn't need to exist.

While China really does not think in centuries most of the time, the times the CCP *does* actually think ahead often end with catastrophic blunders. Examples include "Song Jian read all the 1970s Malthusians and took them at face value" or "Mao wants everyone to have a backyard steel forge."

Seeing lots of theories about why the crime decline is continuing (phones, lead, both of which I think matter) and nobody saying the most obvious one: the opioid epidemic has peaked and was driving a lot of violence.

"I wonder what the impact on the world's largest service economy would be if we came up with a way to automate high-paying services?"

The administration's strategy has transparently been kicking people it thinks it can get away with kicking while running away from anything it can't handle.

the essense of Colby's ideology was supposed to be "what if we abandoned our democratic allies in Europe to concentrate on China", in practice it is "what if we abandoned all our democratic allies to become even more invested in stupid wars in the Middle East"

Most genocides are not the Holocaust and do not involve gas chambers. Gaza, Xinjiang, and Ukraine all fit the bill without involving the physical extermination of entire peoples.

It really is a sort of "stolen valor" for culture - specifically, robbing from someone who's been dead 2,700 years. Culture changes, mutates, and adapts. There are literally Hindus in India who believe Muhammad was the final avatar of Vishnu, which is frankly *much* more exotic than black Helen.

Actually, the future is half-Jamaican, half-Vietnamese, but it was born in Philly so has a US passport.

One annoying thing about the culture war is that reviews are borderline worthless now. I have no idea if Nolan’s Odyssey will be good or not but I know it’ll be review bombed into oblivion by a horde of chittering monkeys regurgitating talking points from a YouTuber named “The Based Alcoholic.”

When the Assad regime crumbled and I went to Syria for the first time, I immediately noticed some Uyghur fighters among the rebels. I wanted to know more. www.npr.org/2026/05/17/g...

I think unions that do this cease to get the protection of Democratic loyalty, and should be punished until they learn what side they should be on.

America is a big country, inhabited by many Americans. It's the 3rd-largest nation in the world by both population and land area, it's not at all surprising that it is stunningly diverse. You wouldn't expect Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh to be the same either.

The 21st century will belong to no one.

Thank you Brian Kilmeade. I was sure hoping we’d go for the “2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine” approach to the conflict. We should make sure to pack our dress uniforms for the victory parades.

“someone *else* made poor choices, but i can’t blame them for it”, sure you can. you can and you should. their choice has negatively impacted nearly all of us. being an adult is *about* making choices.

RCP 8.5 came out at a very strange time (the tail end of the Chinese commodity boom) and so it was taking as assumed certain conditions that are probably going to wind up being unique in world history (the industrialization of a 1.4 billion-person nation in ~20 years).

The (medium and long-term) future is not Chinese, but that's mostly because the PRC is going to run out of kids before China can become a high-income country:

MEUs won't actually help. You'd have to take a large portion of the country to prevent Hormuz from being threatened. Taking Kharg or Bandar Abbas does nothing. Either tolls get paid or the route is abandoned. It's like the Houthis in Yemen - the Bab el-Mandeb is functionally a dead zone these days

Also it's not as though Helen of Troy's race is an important component of the story. She wasn't abducted for being white, she was abducted for being attractive. Whereas the protagonist in *12 Years A Slave* is in fact literally abducted and dragged away to a foreign land because he is black.

It's the same exact "I live in a rich coastal urban city like NYC and thus I think all Americans live in one" framing, the sole difference is that Americans who go to China have 7-10 times the disposable income of the native population so they don't notice Chongqing is ludicrously unaffordable.

tbh the latter wasn't even all that effective, all it really did was marginally reduce fertility of the few minorities who didn't live in enclaves and introduce systematic violence against women by local officials

(Yes, character matters and some historical figures have distinguished character that deserves comment, but hagiography of this sort of a sin.)

Yes, the US and China look functionally identical when it comes to vaccine uptake, and the rollout of the Sinopharm Covid vaccine was an absolute debacle and one of the primary reasons zero-Covid was maintained all the way through 2022.

The eternal cycle of naivete on this app has swung back towards hee hoo actual CPC propaganda lmao

Here’s what actually happened: Texas Instruments repeatedly passed over company VP Morris Chang for promotion to CEO despite 25 years of excellent results. He then accepted an invitation from Taiwan’s government to build what would become TSMC.

People made this prediction in the 1990s and early 2000s too, when the Chinese coastline was industrializating faster than the interior. But the CCP has built a pretty effective Han Chinese hegemony and most people understand they'd be worse off in a separate ethnic Tai state or something like that

This is a great way to describe Silicon Valley's culture, and why it's so weird. The best comparisons are Indian conglomerates (Reliance, Tata, Adani Group) rather than anything American. Even the South Korean chaebols don't work like this anymore. It's like something out of an emerging economy.

I’m honestly unsure what Silicon Valley’s theory of victory is here. As far as I can tell, the plan is: 1.) Suck up to president who has annihilated the taboo on political violence 2.) Take everyone’s job 3.) Expose them to nonstop extremist propaganda And like... For fuck’s sake, why?

It's not going to collapse as long as Musk is still alive, the man is a wizard when it comes to wooing investors out of their cash and has completed the rhetorical (not actual) transformation of Tesla to "AI company". What *would* probably collapse it is ending the Chinese EV tariff.

Honestly, the argument is less that the 21st century will be the Chinese Century and more that the upcoming Chinese Quarter-Century (2025-2050 or so) would inflict cataclysmic damage on the rest of the planet before the PRC collapsed under its own weight.

Many developed countries (Japan, China, much of Europe) do not actually bother with physical employees to run their train lines, because a lot of the work is automatable. The correct response to this (much like the longshoremen strike before it) is ruthless automation.

There are also giant coal buildouts in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh - all of which are in the same region and are fueled by the huge Indonesian coal reserves that are now being tapped.

They've actually gotten *worse* about the coal thing in the past decade:

"Oh sure, in the WORLD there's a strong correlation between "capitalist market" and "democratic politics". But it's *incoherent* according to this book I read."

It’s weird that Helen of Troy being played by a black actress is a problem, but most of the rest of the Mediterranean, Greek and Turkish characters being played by incredibly fair and blond haired people of British, Irish and Scandinavian descent isn’t. And by weird, I mean entirely predictable.

I really do believe that this is because many admins and speakers are neurotic about gender and think that hard truths make hard men. Opening your speech with "God is dead, the Easter bunny isn't real, and your parents will die in memory care having forgotten your name" is for the speaker, not you.

My FIL is convinced a surgery went badly because my MIL didn’t bride the doctor enough. I thought that was wacky, surely doctors will treat their patients the best they can regardless of bribes, but my wife told me I was being a naive American

There's a reason the savings rate in China is extremely high, and it's not just that the central government imposes giant capital controls that make it hard to invest outside the country.

'Dense, walkable cities' is ... uh ... no. Chinese cities are not dense! They are extremely, extremely sprawled! You can't drive around all of the outskirts of greater Beijing in a single day! (I've tried.) Walkability is extremely variable by neighborhood.

I don't know where this bizarre idea that China has universal health care comes from, but it very much does not by any normal standard. It has a highly tiered system that brutally discriminates against rural patients and imposes often crippling financial costs.