131–140 of 483 posts
China's third aircraft carrier, the Fujian, was launched last week. This is the lead ship of a new carrier class. Carrier #4 is said to be under construction at Dalian. (There's so much shipbuilding in China that it's hard to tell if a new hull is a warship or just another giant container ship.)
These are not nuclear powered. That's expected with the next class of carrier.
US-centric approach. How about if China decides to fill the power vacuum that the isolationist US leaves. How about if eg. COSCO buys out the port operators around the globe. How about if they decide to protect their shipping routes with their military so that they carry on with providing goods to the globe. Globalization is still in the best interests of China, even if the US decides to abandon it.
> How about if China decides to fill the power vacuum that the isolationist US leaves. Zeihan argues that this is impossible on demographic grounds. The after-effects of the One Child Policy and the mass migration from farms to cities ensures a lack of soldiers, a greying population, and economic/military decline. Throw in Xi's unprecedented cult of personality that prevents anyone reporting bad news as the icing on…
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People always complain about how inhumane it is to create those things. Nobody ever asks the Rat Things how they feel about it.
Apparently the rat things are down with it. It's all puppy dog heaven until they have to go into action, and they like that as well.
IRL I've heard people criticize using dogs as weapons of war with the specific criticism "Do you think the dog actually likes jumping out of a plane?"
And my immediate answer is "There's plenty of valid criticism you can levy at that use case, but this ain't it. Because the answer is 'yes.' Lots of dogs do. The ones that don't, wash out of military dog training. By-and-large, a dog's default is to go with the pack, so if its handler is chill with the jump so's the dog."
Dogs aren't human beings and don't experience the world like human beings. The empathy circuitry they engage so effectively in us can make us forget that sometimes.
I’ve been following Zeihan since his first book. I’m yet to find a credible counter argument to his theses. And he’s being proven right at an alarming pace this year. So far this year we’ve had: - A land war in Europe - Food insecurity in the developing world - Breakdown of supply chains and shipping routes - Nation states resorting to seizing each other’s ships (see Greece-Iran issue recently). Everything that he ha…
I just read all Zeihan's books. The only counterargument I can think of is that maybe with our interdependent world, sanctions have gotten effective enough to substitute for US military power to some extent. Zeihan himself has said China has to be reevaluating the idea of an attack on Taiwan, after seeing the sanctions and boycotts against Russia. Sanctions haven't stopped Russia but Russia is a food and fuel exporte…
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I think Snowcrash is intentionally campy and satirical? At any rate I don't think what science fiction writers do is "exploring possible futures" so much as "telling lies for fun and profit" as one author entitled his fiction writing craft book.
Exploring possible futures is exactly what sf writers do as is telling lies for fun and profit. Predicting possible futures is not part of their job description, though sometimes it seems that way.
In fact it's been a while since I read Snowcrash but it's set implausibly close to when it was written in 1992. This is presumably intentional.
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> Might we see the nation-state get replaced by a web of competing mercenaries, each of which effectively serves as a protection racket for their customers? Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, explores this possible future. Great book.
I think Snowcrash is intentionally campy and satirical? At any rate I don't think what science fiction writers do is "exploring possible futures" so much as "telling lies for fun and profit" as one author entitled his fiction writing craft book.
In any case, speculative fiction is usually more about the present than it is about the future. The original Star Trek, for instance, dealt quite a bit with the racial politics of the 1960s, even though it was set in the 2260s. The hypercapitalism in Snow Crash (and other cyberpunk works around that time) reflected the trend of American society in the 1980s and 90s. It was less "telling lies" and more logical extrapolation of the existing trend, which hasn't really been arrested since, either.
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Would you believe that the US policy of continually expanding NATO, combined with a military coup of the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014 are more to blame for Putin attacking Ukraine? I wouldn't blame Biden. I'd blame Clinton, Bush, and Obama. But hey, you weren't actually asking to be informed about anything that wasn't CIA approved corporate news talking points. You just wanted a pithy straw man…
I would only believe that Putin is to blame for Putin attacking and brutalizing Ukraine. And Syria. And Chechnya. And Georgia. Sorry, apparently I’m brainwashed.
China's Navy is now bigger than the US Navy. Few have noticed. China's third aircraft carrier, the Fujian, was launched last week. This is the lead ship of a new carrier class. Carrier #4 is said to be under construction at Dalian. (There's so much shipbuilding in China that it's hard to tell if a new hull is a warship or just another giant container ship.) These are not nuclear powered. That's expected with the next…
I’ve been following Zeihan since his first book. I’m yet to find a credible counter argument to his theses. And he’s being proven right at an alarming pace this year. So far this year we’ve had: - A land war in Europe - Food insecurity in the developing world - Breakdown of supply chains and shipping routes - Nation states resorting to seizing each other’s ships (see Greece-Iran issue recently). Everything that he ha…
18 years and 9 months . Zeihan is very funny. I don't think he is particularly 'smart' (wait for me a second here). I think he instead makes obvious conclusions from undeniable evidence like demographics and geography. The 'smarter' more institutional types from Brookings and Hoover tend to argue from policy and politics backwards and then the facts become inconvenient.
US-centric approach. How about if China decides to fill the power vacuum that the isolationist US leaves. How about if eg. COSCO buys out the port operators around the globe. How about if they decide to protect their shipping routes with their military so that they carry on with providing goods to the globe. Globalization is still in the best interests of China, even if the US decides to abandon it.
China's navy can't go further than 1,000 miles from the shore. They can't protect shipping anywhere outside of their coast.