zazen

Perplexity already incorporating DeepSeek.

@BlueOak Well said. We have a corporatocracy cosplaying as a democracy. This is where liberal values are weaponised and practiced in a lopsided way to benefit power. This is why the saying goes: in the US capital controls the state, in China the state controls capital - though it more so directs it and checks it's excesses. Something our liberal values hinder us from doing. We'll scream authoritarian when Jack Ma is being checked in China, yet cry about oligarchic and corporate vampirism in our own countries. Our own values can't defend themselves, which is why elements of conservatism need to be integrated into a liberal world view - the conservative elements of discipline, survival, doing what is needed even it makes one look aggressive or heavy handed. If freedom of autonomy is fetishised as some apex value, then we'll never experience the benefits that the freedom of harmony will bring. We have a lopsided rebellious teenager approach to freedom, rather than a mature one. We can't get that we give up lower freedoms for higher ones. Every limit or constraint on freedom is seen as authoritarian. Sophisticated minds can understand the limits of absolute freedom in their critique of libertarianism but can't extend this thinking to other domains. When it comes to the relationship between people and corporations in domains of importance - healthcare, education, housing, and food - corporations are given the liberal freedom to act as they please, while the people are denied the liberal freedom to resist, adjudicate, or hold them accountable for profiteering and exploitation. Liberal values exist, but they serve the predator over the prey. It’s a one way street: corporations enjoy unrestrained economic liberty, while the public is given more trivial yet still valid freedoms - superficial liberties that do not threaten the structure of power. The people are granted freedom in indulgence, not in fulfilment of meeting their most basic needs. We can protest as loudly as we want, but never to meaningfully challenge power. Even these freedoms have limits if we step outside the approved boundaries or get too loud ie Snowden and Assange. China for example limits protest, but that doesn't mean you can't complain. They have a national help line 12345 anyone can call in fact - to complain, not to protest. The point being - the higher freedom of stability is prioritized over a individual or group protesting which can lead to constant political polarization. This drains the nations energy rather than directing it towards solving its problems. In the West we may be given the freedom to protest loud, in China they are attempting to give people the freedom to not even need to protest in the first place - by addressing their fundamental needs. This is the distinction between autonomous freedom vs harmonious freedom. The irony here is that if democracy truly functioned as intended, if we could enact our own will through the vote - then there shouldn't be so much need to protest and so much frustration within society. The system claims to represent the people’s interests but repeatedly doesn't because it serves elite interests. In Western democracies we are given the illusion of choice and to voice opinion, but in the domains that truly matter, corporations feast while their customers starve.

Watching/reading Peter Zeihan really helps in understanding how geography plays a role. US is truly blessed - he also mentions Argentina, France. Think of geography like the physical hardware, and people like the psychological software within that geography / hardware. Geography / hardware sets the limits, people / software maximize what’s within those limits or constraints. Similar to the whole DeepSeek saga - they maximized for efficiency within supposedly even less hardware (GPU’s - compute). Zeihan is too fatalistic though - he’s been calling for Chinas fall since forever (due to poor geography) and doesn’t consider the human element enough. Argentina for example which he say is blessed geographically hasn’t made the most of its geography.

The tech trinity above in full swing. First we had AI, then a new record in the domain of nuclear fusion energy, now they showing off robots for Chinese new year: When MAGA was talking of a golden age..

If the US were to crack down on corporate or oligarchic power, should we call it tyranny? Should we let capital control the state? Check out America getting adjusted to the reality of a multipolar world:

I came across this on X

Checking excessive power that can challenge, destabilise and undermine the state. Something we are now battling with in the West with oligarchs and corporatist influence. Theres a saying that goes: in the West capital controls the state, in China the state controls capital. But it’s more so that it directs and checks it when it gets out of hand. Not entirely controls it like some micromanaging OCD tyrant - which is the type of central planning that causes typical communist states to fail. Jack Ma was making the same remarks libertarian capitalists like Elon and Techno optimists like Marc Andreeson were making - criticising state regulation saying they stifle innovation, which is euphemism for “get off my back and let me consolidate power” US got deepseeked (I know what you thought - you dirty) by chatCCP and is coping. The best part is that this isn’t just a gain for China but due to being open source - is a gain for the entire industry. Every player and lab in US is going to start implementing and speedrunning AI development - which is equally terrifying as it is exciting. Techno optimists will say tech advancement will uplift us all - but if not given a parachute in the form of some compensatory UBI or safety net - then it isn’t a plot twist in humanity but more of a plot hole that tech elites will build over while we shout from the ditch.

There’s a subtle distinction that can help understand how China operates. They aren’t a centrally planned state like prior communist states - they centrally direct. They don’t control businesses as much as they do direct them and then check the excesses gained from it. Politically centralised, economically decentralised - that political centralisation allows them to check excesses - something Russia hasn’t don’t well. In other words: China is centrally directed and actively checks the excesses of the gains made from central direction, ensuring that wealth is reinvested into national development and benefits a broader population. In contrast, Russia is centrally directed but fails to check those gains, allowing them to concentrate in oligarchic hands, leading to major inequalities and a lack of widespread development.

It’s difficult for a country to be 100% neutral. There’s naturally going to be bias and a tilting to one side or another ie Russian interest or Western. The difference here is that a neighbouring country tilting Westward flirts with and often does become part of NATO - which brings Western advanced weaponery onto Russias doorstep threatening its core - including a imperial mentality that isn’t so advanced and is war mongering. The same level of security threat doesn’t occur in reverse - as Russia doesn’t have a equivalent alliance system that binds nations into a article 5 type commitment. Asymmetrical threat - one is clearly more escalatory than the other. Westerners fetishize freedom and sovereignty in an absolutist way, as if it simply exists in a vaccum. “Do as thou wilt” same way we induldge hedonistically at home, we provoke geopolitically abroad. It’s not that other cultures or nations don’t value freedom, they value it differently - perhaps even approach it more multi dimensionally instead of like a rebellious teenager. Freedom of harmony has benefits that freedom of autonomy will never taste. PS I love the West and am not hating.

Same. A interesting and related tweet from Arnaud : “To me, the most fascinating aspect of Deepseek is the fact it stemmed from a hedge fund, a mere few months after China "cracked down" on the levels of compensation in the finance industry. It's also incidentally an important reason why the U.S. will struggle to compete with China. Let me explain. First of all, worth mentioning that this was predictably, as for most Chinese initiatives, presented by Western media as a terrible move- "why would China do this to the poor innocent bankers" . As usual they didn't even try to reflect on why China would do this: as we all know, all Chinese initiatives are always completely mindless and "crackdowns" are just what the Communist party does for fun... The actual reason this was done, I believe, is that China looked at the West - the U.S. in particular - and saw the overbearing importance of the finance industry at the expense of the real economy. And in particular they saw that the country's most brilliant graduates from the very best Ivy League schools went to work for the increasingly parasitic finance industry instead of working on stuff that actually made society move forward. Bloomberg lamented below that the "crackdown" would "fuel an industry brain drain" and yes, that was precisely the point: China doesn't want those who can most contribute to society to spend their careers building ever more senseless financial derivative products or new ways to trade crypto. It doesn't mean they don't want a finance industry, it does serve a purpose, just not one that becomes such a drain on society, in particular in terms of capturing the country's best talents. China would rather have them working on stuff like... artificial intelligence. And lo and behold, fast forward a few months, and you suddenly have hedge fund geniuses who found a new calling in AI. Too good a coincidence not to see a correlation there. This is something that would arguably be very hard for the U.S. to do, where capital is very much in control: an industry that becomes extremely wealthy, even if largely detrimental to broader societal goals, becomes difficult to reform. We're seeing this with finance, defense, big pharma, etc. It also illustrates that the U.S. and China are at different stages of their development: excessive financialization is a common pattern among late-stage great powers - from the Dutch Republic to the British Empire (but also Venice or Spain) - and a vicious-circle type factor of their decline. Emerging great powers are often more thoughtful and nimble about managing talent flows to achieve technological and industrial primacy. Looking at this question is also very interesting in the context of the H-1B visa debate in the U.S. It feels like the debate doesn't address the elephant in the room: why claim a shortage of top talent when the country's best minds are funneled to the finance industry? Much more coherent to first thoughtfully allocate talent at home before seeking to brain drain the rest of the world... Anyhow, yet another example of a Chinese policy that seems bizarre and incomprehensible to the West at first glance but which over the long run (and even short-run as illustrated by Deepseek) helps China develop another strategic advantage in the tech competition. Simply put: you want your best minds building real value, not extracting it from society.”

From: https://substack.com/home/post/p-155779348 “The most industry-wobbling thing here is how DeepSeek achieved their feat. We can organically GROW intelligence of the general reasoning variety. They clearly demonstrate it. DeepSeek-R1-Zero was trained using RL (reinforced learning) directly on a base model without initial SFT (supervised fine tuning) marking a significant departure from conventional methods. This approach allowed the model to explore chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and develop capabilities such as self-verification and reflection. This suggests that reasoning abilities can be incentivized through RL, rather than relying on supervised data. Please read that again if it didn’t blow your mind. The models exhibited a self-evolution process where they naturally increased their thinking time and developed complex reasoning behaviors through RL.... An "aha moment" was observed in an intermediate version of DeepSeek-R1-Zero, where the model learned to re-evaluate its initial approach, showcasing the potential of RL to produce unexpected and sophisticated problem-solving strategies.” “Imagine teaching a child to ride a bike. You could give them a detailed manual (SFT), but they'll likely learn better by trying it themselves (RL), falling, getting up, and gradually improving. DeepSeek-R1's training process is similar - it allows the LLM to "learn by doing" and develop its own reasoning abilities, leading to a more robust and adaptable intelligence. This approach could revolutionize the field of AI, leading to more capable, efficient, and trustworthy LLMs that can be used for a wider range of applications. This is the way to AGI.”

There's a convergence of advancements happening that will completely change how we live. Generalizing here, but if we think of us humans as three components: body, mind, spirit. Map that onto the advancements currently under way in : automation (body), AI (intelligence/mind), energy (spirit). Automation scales human labor, AI scales human intelligence - and abundant clean energy is the input that animates the whole thing the same way spirit animates life. Human labor is expensive, our intelligence can be limited, and the energy needed to fuel civilization is either dirty, non-reliable or non transferable. This is the technological trinity - Jezus be damned. We could be entering a post-capitalist, post-scarcity world. What does money even mean? China's advancing in the energy department: https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/nuclear-energy/chinas-artificial-sun-shatters-nuclear-fusion-record-by-generating-steady-loop-of-plasma-for-1-000-seconds https://www.techno-science.net/en/news/kilometer-long-solar-power-plant-in-space-this-chinese-project-is-monumental-N26400.html - ''A solar power plant, floating 22,370 miles (36,000 km) above Earth, might seem like science fiction. Yet, China is actively working to bring this project to life, which could transform our energy supply. This project, comparable in scale to the Three Gorges Dam, aims to harness solar energy in space, where sunlight is ten times more intense than on Earth. The goal is to produce, in one year, an amount of energy equivalent to the world's oil reserves. Indeed, the announced production would be 100 billion kilowatt-hours annually.''

For sure.

Community noted on his own platform regarding his gaming rank. Seems power has gotten to his head. He thinks he’s a kingmaker. Some mix of Tony Stark and Thomas Jefferson. Quote tweeting Bad Ass Mofo at another nation being strong armed rather than negotiated with diplomatically.

Donald’s shooting from the hip. South America, Europe, Middle East.

@Husseinisdoingfine Perhaps Comrade.

Regarding Greenland/Denmark: ”The funniest part of this - or most tragic, depends on how you look at it - is that Denmark is probably the most committed U.S. vassal state in the entire EU. Look: - they're a founding member of NATO - they've participated in nearly every major U.S.-led military operation whenever the U.S. asked, even the most controversial ones like Iraq - Denmark was revealed to be the base for the NSA's spying on European leaders (reuters.com/world/europe/u…) - Denmark always buys American military equipment over European alternatives - They've agreed to hosting a U.S. military base - in Greenland! (Thule Air Base) - which has been crucial for U.S. strategic interests since the Cold War And yet here you have Trump apparently seriously considering annexing 98% of their territory (yup, Greenland is big, and the rest of Denmark very small)! I mean, talk about cuckoldry... The irony gets even richer - and sadder - when you look at Denmark's response as per the FT's article (ft.com/content/ace02a…). Instead of showing any backbone, Mette Frederiksen, the Danish premier, offered "more co-operation on military bases and mineral exploitation." This perfectly encapsulates the European leadership's approach to U.S. relations: no matter how egregious the provocation, the response is more servility and more meekness. Yet the KEY lesson here is that servility obviously gets you nowhere. Europe needs to wake up, fast. Its weakness means that it's now very much not at the table anymore, it's on the menu. And this should serve as an immense wake-up call for other U.S. "allies" too: submission only breeds contempt and disregard for your interests, you can be crushed on the altar of your master's craziest whims. I know I'm a broken record on this topic but Europe is about to step into its century of humiliation if it keeps behaving like this. And the worst part is that no-one is going to care because of Europe's double-standards and hypocrisy in its own dealings with the rest of the world, Gaza being the latest example of this. By choosing to openly abandon even the appearance of principles Europe has essentially announced it was ok with "might makes right". A monumentally stupid thing to do when you aren't mighty yourself... Europe's leaders (if you can call them so), in their eagerness to be "good allies" by supporting the violation of international law in Gaza, have forgotten that principles aren't just moral luxuries - they're shields, and once broken for others, they no longer protect you either. Their forgetting this is especially egregious given Europe's own history. Because we've we've seen this many times before and perhaps the most salient example is the response - or absence thereof - to Mussolini's Italy invading Ethiopia in 1935, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian deaths. Despite Ethiopia being a member of the League of Nations, the UN-ancestor meant to prevent exactly such aggression, major powers chose to protect their fellow European power rather than uphold international law. With the consequences we all know about: the death of the League of Nations as a credible institution and the clear message to other European powers that hunting season on weaker nations and peoples was officially open. Within a few months afterwards, Hitler started remilitarizing the Rhineland. The century of humiliation that Europe is walking into has a uniquely self-inflicted quality to it, stemming from its own moral corruption and strategic myopia. Unlike China, which at least could claim to have been blindsided by European imperialism, Europe is actively participating in dismantling the very protections that could shield it from stronger powers. Which means it won't even have the moral authority to protest.” https://www.ft.com/james-politi

Perhaps he won the election, but people lost their minds.

First 2 min of this video: ''America isn't a democracy; America is an oligarchy. It's a plutocracy, ruled by the rich, of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. Democracy in America is just a smokescreen, a charade that they perform every election cycle to pacify you and make you believe that you have some stake in the system. But look at the reality. For roughly the first 100 years of American so-called democracy, only white male property owners could vote. The so-called "land of the free" was built on the exclusion of the vast majority of its people from the democratic process. This gradually expanded to include all white males and then, theoretically, black males—but not in practice. Eventually, they had to grant the vote to women and Native Americans. Imagine that the indigenous people of that land were the last to be given the right to vote. What kind of democracy is that? They never wanted power in the hands of the people. As the franchise of voting expanded to include those who were not white male property owners, the real power moved further away from the democratic process. They dangled the right to vote in front of you to make you think that you're a participant in power, but they kept the real power in the hands of the wealthy elite, increasingly so over the years. As the right to vote expanded, the relevance of the vote contracted. No one ever intended for power to be in the hands of the people, and it never has been. Just look at how money controls politics in America today. The Supreme Court's decision on the Citizens United case opened the floodgates for corporate money in elections. Billionaires and corporations pour millions and millions of dollars into political campaigns, drowning out the voices of ordinary people and the entire electorate. They're hiring candidates, writing laws, and purchasing policies that serve their interests. Is this democracy? No, this is oligarchy. When a handful of wealthy individuals can dictate policy and sway elections, obvious democracy doesn't exist. Politicians simply do a tour of duty in government to prove their loyalty to their funders before moving to highly paid positions in the private sector, working for the same people they worked for all along.''

Why this Stargate project may not pan out as expected:

Check what Jordan Peterson has to say regarding others ''wealth'' and resources below, time stamped 36-37min. ''It isn't necessarily the case that the denizens of the Islamic world look to progressive Western democracies as the ideal, but that turn out to be a problem if you're importing them on mass because their fundamental predisposition might not be Democratic and yet they're in a Democratic Society. So it isn't obvious what to do about that okay, the next thing I would say is it's pretty bloody easy for the rich Muslim countries who are absolutely awash in I would say undeserved oil money to moralize about the superiority of their culture, I mean the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia were a little fringe tribal cult before the West stupidly dumped a trillion dollars on them and allowed them to propagandize the entire world, they would have been a backwoods Arab tribe lost in the desert forever if it wasn't for oil money, we're unbelievably naive on that.'' - Jordan Peterson This is a imperialist mindset. The same way ''BlackRock Inc, the world's largest money manager, warned that so-called "resource nationalism" was on the rise globally, threatening to undermine investment in sectors where governments were playing too heavy a hand.'' (https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/blackrock-sees-resource-nationalism-a-threat-to-mine-investing-idUSL3E7LO3GH/). Imagine that, the audacity for a country to claim sovereignty over its own resources. According to JP, that's undeserved you see - a mindset underpinning and in line with the predatory parasitical nature of vulture funds born in the West, but who have outgrown their national nests and now spend their adolescence feasting on other nations. When those nations are now rising up and hip to their game, kicking ex colonialists out - its no wonder the US is now turning inwards towards dominating its own hemisphere or even its allies in Europe which it has used as a pawn to poke the Russian bear. People probably won't watch videos longer than 20 min so here are two shorts of this guy rebutting JP's remarks (though the full video is well worth a listen): No country can develop internally when its external environment is constantly destabilized - it’s like building a foundation on quick sand. Imagine your a nation with 100's of millions of mouths to feed and lift out of poverty, the wound of the century of humiliation is still tender and healing, which the British empire heavily inflicted on you (opium crisis). They have now passed the baton of dominating imperialism over to their Atlantic cousins who you have witnessed destabilize countries around the world. They claim everyone should be a Democracy just like them (lol) but you have seen them use the permeability of Democracies to interfere and subvert the very notion of the word itself. This is a serious undertaking. Of course China or other nations are going to be wary of opening up and allowing access to hostile agents which are so clearly visible. But libertarians and liberal purists will cry ''freedom'' and ''rights''. Meanwhile in Western lands they have none of this with regards to actual matters with gravitas - such as economic freedom, rights to safety, or to a decent health care system in the US. You're given freedom in trivialities - pronoun yourself how you want, stream porn 24/7 and fry your brain on games - but China are so evil because they regulate the toxic habits of their citizens for their own good. Maybe they actually care about the well being of their citizens. According to populists ie the popular sentiment ie democracy - Western leaders are viewed as having contempt for their citizens. When their own people vote against the establishment, they are referred to as populists (implying a negative connotation), but when the popular vote goes in favor of the establishment - the establishment call it democracy, funny that. Again, this is the issue with Western absolutist, binary thinking. It can't think of freedom and rights in 3d, holistically. It can't fathom the restriction of lower freedoms for the higher freedom of safer streets, stable politics, and economic progress that doesn't swallow the masses. When we force feed our own people with notions of liberty, freedom and human rights - and in the most simplistic of ways - they stumble over themselves in contradictions. Liberals are so attached to the label and their incomplete view of liberal values - that they can't integrate the idea that it's more conservative values that even allows liberal values to exist. That we are biologically conservatively (nature-form) yet spiritually liberal (nurture-formless). That liberal values are incapable of defending themselves without elements of conservatism (survival) - and that its not so back and white, because life isn't so. Because the West has lost the transcendental, its people get bogged down in trying to fill that void by putting themselves into neat political camps and ideologies (to feel a sense of belonging that is natural for any human to long for, and that the material obsessed, individualistic and imperialistic ethos of their civilization has robbed from them). This is found in every domain - from food (vegans vs carnivores) to political systems (socialist vs capitalist) to geopolitics (with us vs against us). Even if the West does practice justice, equality, and human rights domestically, it blatantly fails to extend those principles when it comes to dealing with other nations. So of course, it's the most natural response to deflect away from how the West deals with other nations and instead point fingers to how those nations deal with their own people - to imply that they are less developed. Because when it comes to the game of how nations relate to each other, it’s clear that the West is the clearest offender in abusing civil norms in dealing with others. Ponder this: perhaps the West is able to practice certain noble principles domestically, and has the luxury to indulge them, only because of the unprincipled manner in which they have dealt with and still do deal with the rest of the world. Perhaps they are able to be Democratic at home (though they still fail to be so in healthy way) due to being anti-democratic abroad. Perhaps having immense wealth from exploiting foreign lands, allows for more stable politics at home due to enough pie for everyone. And to finish, perhaps this now shrinking pie (wealth) is actually what’s causing the derangement and polarization of politics itself. Because when everyone’s got enough to eat, no one’s gotta find a scapegoat to lash out at.

Great post and writing Emerald. I agree. Iraq, Afghanistan, countless coups, mob behavior in dealing with and threatening the ICJ or even Tik Tok by extortion of a fire sale to Western oligarchic hands, including so much more - can't be pinned solely on just Zionist ideology. In fact, even Zionism can be argued to be a Western implant itself - led largely by Ashkenazi Jews of European descent, carrying the ethos of Western conquest and colonization into the region. That contrasts starkly with the coexistence historically practiced by indigenous Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. That further reinforces the point that the West’s ethos hasn’t fundamentally changed and that our development has been lopsided and one dimensional. The distinction between material and moral development can't be overlooked. We can develop horizontally in the material, yet lack in the vertical dimension of ethics and morals - in our dealings with others. The development of skills and systems honed for material accumulation can far outpace the commensurate moral development that would use that newly gained power in a more just way. The US’s full throated support for Zionism reveals a level of complicity that Spiral Dynamics can't excuse. The idea that development is linear - moving from stage to stage like levels in a video game - is a linear Western way of thinking which is a bit too reductionist and simplistic. It’s the same mindset that gave us "manifest destiny" which Trump literally invoked yesterday - blatant imperialism that further reinforces the idea that the West hasn't evolved in its character or domination driven ethos since its Paganistic roots in Europe, all the way through its colonial days and now deep into its imperial era. Materially bloated, but morally and ethically anorexic. Spiral dynamics can too easily let the US off the hook by claiming it’s acting at a "higher stage" when it’s clearly operating out of a lower stage and by lower values. Ironically, it achieves material gain through the lower values of exploitation, subjugation and domination, then retroactively claims to have gotten those ill gotten gains due to its higher values that others are lacking or behind in. The West acts as if it introduced these values to the world, that it brought the world into the ''1st world'' era to play by ''1st world values'' - never mind the appeal of these universal values that have had ancient civilizations and cultures aspire towards them from way back when. The West definitely institutionalized and systematized them, credit where credit is due - but they have also weaponized them as a veneer to mask their imperialist underbelly and hypocritically finger wag everyone else for not embodying values they themselves don’t. The tools have changed, but the core behavior remains the same. Acting like Hulk in a suit, smashing and dominating the planet. And what good are the tools if the user of them is sloppy in their wielding - even dangerous in their wielding. Spiral dynamics basically boxes, labels, and ranks development into neat little boxes - which can then be used to explain away power imbalances by claiming it’s part of some grand evolutionary process we just need to move through - and that the West is so clearly ahead in that very process which is a notion that falls under scrutiny.