Systems Confrontation and System Destruction Warfare.
Finally! Someone who knows what the fuck is going on and how China will handle a war with the US.
Yes, this is how China would do it. I could’ve written this myself. If I’d had an army of consultants and a boatload of time. There are still people left somewhere who can think about the actual world as it is rather than as they imagine it to be. Cool.
Russian spy ship ‘directed lasers’ at UK forces, says defense secretary.
Again, NATO is already at war with Russia. It’s just that no one besides Russia is acting like it.
We should actively be kicking Russia out of Ukraine now with 500,000 troops as well as shoring up defenses in the Baltics and Poland. Germany as well.
But we aren’t and won’t. And we’ll pay for that heavily in a few years.
No, China won’t do much if any bridge-blowing. First, it’s not a very effective tactic compared to the alternatives. Bridges are extremely strong (for obvious reasons) so it’s not actually easy to take most of them out with conventional weapons. Second, the US has an extensive road network with many alternate routes.
What China would actually do to hobble our logistics is bomb our seaports and data centers. This is much easier, much more effective, and these are vastly harder to do impromptu repairs on.
The job market is going to look drastically, radically different in five years. We are about to see the largest job loss since most manufacturing decamped for China and Mexico.
Get ready.
Russia’s latest big Ukraine offensive gains next to nothing, again
Ian Welsh: WINNING! OMG I LOVE PUTIN!
Everyone else: Seems not that great to sacrifice 500+ people for every dozen meters gained. That’s not really sustainable.
More seriously, Russia’s strategic position is incredibly weak and worsening as the war goes on. Time used to be on Putin’s side but as Europe seems to be waking up to the peril a bit, it no longer is.
At the pace of the past 30 days, seizing what remains of the four regions Mr Putin already claims—Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia—would take until June 2030. (For Russia to occupy all of Ukraine would require a further 103 years.)
Russia will never occupy all of Ukraine because the attacker’s problem is that as the lines get smaller, they also get easier to defend. (This is due to having less distance to spread personnel and war materiel over.) Ukraine will not give up the fight easily as they know a genocide will occur if they do, so the war will grind on 2-3 more years until Russia agrees to a cease-fire and then tries again in 7-10 years.
That’s my best guess, anyway.
Remember: if China really chooses to go to war against us, you won't learn about it through blaring headlines and social media posts. Unless you're at the highest levels of government, you'll learn about it through the unexplained digital silence you suddenly experience. https://t.co/98xE1Hxeae
— Tom Shugart (@tshugart3) October 3, 2025
Yes. China’ll be taking out satellites, cutting undersea cables, hacking infrastructure and bombing data centers.
How do I know? Because that’s what I’d do, and I’m awesome at this shit.
my rough view is that the future will look much more like the past than the present. we are at the end of a great historical abnormality: this level of cultural stability and relative secularism is over. we’re going back to the basics of savage violence and divine faith
— Will Manidis (@WillManidis) October 5, 2025
I was talking to my partner about something very similar earlier today. The idea of continual upward progression is an illusion. Unless we make it happen. We seem to be turning away from that, so the most likely eventuality is regression to the mean.
Which is that most people are illiterate. Secularism is rare. Most states, if they exist at all, are heavily authoritarian and repressive. Wars are common, but small. Tech is still present but mostly comes from those few states that have not been Islamicized.
We should be trying hard to avoid this fate but don’t appear to be doing much.
In the near term, Russia and China are the greatest risks.
In the medium term, though, nuclear war with an Islamicized Europe is a pretty significant risk. Assuming the current trends continue, an Islamic, extremely repressive Europe is likely in 40-60 years. They’ll have French (or Pakistani, or both) nukes by then.
And that’ll be very bad for the US.
my basic view is that the future will look much more like the past than the present. we are at the end of a great historical abnormality: this level of cultural stability and homogeneity, and relative secularism is over. we’re going back to the basics of violence and divine faith
— Will Manidis (@WillManidis) August 1, 2025
I basically agree with this. Europe will be Islamicized. It’ll be a backwater for 500 years, much as it used to be. The USA will go Christian dominionist and will resemble the pre-US 1730s and 1740s again, but for 300-500 years too. Also a horrible oppressive also-ran.
China is in decline, but probably will at least avoid being turned into a theocracy or theocracy-lite.
The future probably lies with Latin America and non-China Asian states (not India).
Why Peak China may finally have arrived.
Agreed. Both China and America are on the decline. The world will be very different in a few decades in ways we cannot yet imagine.
FYI an uncertain economy is even worse for investment and future growth than a merely bad economy.
A bad economy is predictable. Uncertainty, however, is economic death. And Trump is overloading us with uncertainty. In fact, providing nothing but. This will result in very bad things. Already is, really, but unless an actual nuclear attack or tsunami hits economic headwinds generally take 6-9 months to have much noticeable effect.
We’re in the winds now. Storm is coming; depression is on the way. Just give it time.
Gonna be interesting to see what happens to the economy when the inevitable AI crash occurs. The economy is already exceedingly weak and teetering on the edge of or already in recession.
The AI bubble bursting will probably usher in the depression that’s on the way.
I have a dark horse candidate: Latin America, and not just for bio stuff, but for everything.
Eventually, as the EU becomes Islamicized and the US becomes an authoritarian Christian dominionist horror show, the smart people from the EU, the US, Russia, China and even India will converge on Latin America as it gets its shit together. Buenos Aires will be the new Silicon Valley; something close to Schengen for LATAM will be enacted about when research universities there supplant America’s as they embrace tech the US is now trashing (mRNA and other biosciences, renewable power, and so many more).
By 2100, Latin America will be the place to be. The US and China will be sad also-rans and the EU will be under a new caliphate.
US economy shrinks in first quarter of Trump 2.0 amid sweeping tariffs.
This is the beginning of the beginning of the depression that is on the way. This quarter of economic decline didn’t occur because of tariffs, but rather due to business uncertainty. That is actually worse than tariffs and as long as Trump makes random unaccountable decisions the economy will only get worse.
Too much is up in the air at the moment for more substantive claims, but we are definitely going to be in a depression for a while. The best case scenario is 2-3 years. I give this a 30% chance. The most likely case is 5-8 years of depression followed by low growth. I give this one a 60% chance. And the apocalyptic case is complete destruction of the economy with further Trump-like figures succeeding him. This would perpetuate depression conditions (even if there is some intermittent growth occurring due to how great was the decline) for 20+ years. This of course has a 10% chance of happening.
We are living in terrible times. They’re already here. Most people just don’t know it yet because they can’t see that the plane has already lost all power and the mountains loom in the distance.
An increasingly terrible culture. I think Neal Stephenson was right — in the future, the majority of people will be illiterate again. We’ll regress to the long-term mean of about a 10-20% literacy rate and everyone else will use glyphs/emojis and communicate with video only.
We’re already on that path and accelerating down the hill; little to nothing will stop it now.