Musk fascist salute

[Raze]

The French troops threat is nonsense, they said the same about Ukraine and didn’t do it. 

[TrustTheProcess]

5 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Well, yeah, all the problems boil down to selfishness and self-absorption.

Multipolar world sounds good in theory but in practice it leads to anarchy, with corrupt actors like Putin thinking he is on par with the West.

The West was right that communism was a failed worldview not on par with the West. And the same will happen again with Putin's kleptocracy. It will not outcompete the West. China is a more complicated matter.

Authoritarian governing system and culture is excellent in transitioning from an agricultural based economy to a manufacturing based economy. 

In terms of making the next step, going from manufacturing based economy to an innovation, consumer-driven economy requires a different value system. and this transition would be necessary in order to seriously compete with the United States as a dominant global power. 

Following orders, not standing out, submitting to authority, not embracing diversity. they can't compete in innovation. 

The Chinese can steal tech and make lateral technological improvements on existing American, but they are not built to make the kinds of paradigm shifting vertical tech break throughs with the scale and consistency that America can. They literally can't even access google. 

The paradigm that accelerated their development will soon set a glass ceiling for their development. it is kinda like islam. 

What do you think?

Edited 19 hours ago by TrustTheProcess

[Inliytened1]

3 hours ago, zazen said:

This is Americas problem too, or more broadly the Wests. As above so below - Musk is the microcosm in the macrocosm of Western civilization.

Can’t be at the table of multipolarity, just want to be at the head of it with all the arrogance that unipolarity brings - and is characteristic of the West.

US hubris is doing a god job at isolating itself amongst its allies it seems:

@zazen@Leo Gura it's important to remember that our country needs to be structured the way it is (capitalism)  for freedom.   If it wasn't, then a Musk couldn't even emerge to begin with.  So while you sit and throw sticks from your white tower note that the current structure of government made it possible for you to sit back in your tower and toss spitballs.  So while we bash Musk we should be grateful a Musk could exist.  We didn't like that a Musk couldn't exist and now that he exists we want to cry about how it's all muffled up.  But in truth you have the same opportunities he does - we all do.  I'll take a Musk in exchange for the ability to be a Musk.

Edited 23 hours ago by Inliytened1

[Inliytened1]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Well, yeah, all the problems boil down to selfishness and self-absorption.

 

It's called Capitalism

 

[Leo Gura]

3 hours ago, TrustTheProcess said:

The Chinese can steal tech and make lateral technological improvements on existing American, but they are not built to make the kinds of paradigm shifting vertical tech break throughs with the scan and consistency that America can. They literally can't even access google. 

The paradigm that accelerated their development will soon set a glass ceiling for their development. it is kinda like islam. 

What do you think?

I agree. It will be interesting to see how far the Chinese can push their censorship one party state.

[zazen]

3 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Well, yeah, all the problems boil down to selfishness and self-absorption.

Multipolar world sounds good in theory but in practice it leads to anarchy, with corrupt actors like Putin thinking he is on par with the West.

The West was right that communism was a failed worldview not on par with the West. And the same will happen again with Putin's kleptocracy. It will not outcompete the West. China is a more complicated matter.

In practice, Multi-polarity leads to anarchy only if one or more actors insist on being on top, which in this case is the West/US - that is for sure not a mindset on par with multi-polarity. Just like how the West was right about needing to tackle the failed worldview of communism in the past, perhaps today the ones actually advocating for multi-polarity such as Russia, China etc are right in tackling the uni-polar hegemonic world view of the West.

As mentioned in your first sentence - it's the selfishness and self-absorption of the West, and by extension the arrogance and supremacist worldview - that is a hindrance to multi-polarity, but you imply its the corruption of Putins worldview. I would reflexively think so too - shouldn't a nation with corrupted poor internal governance translate to poor international relations? Not necessarily. The distinction is that just because a actor wants to be on top of their own people, doesn't mean they want to be on top of everyone else - on top of the world.

Putins kleptocracy can fail and in its current form it won't compete with the West for sure. That's different from it being unable to share power with others - as you've mentioned before somewhere, you don't think he's acting imperialistic, at least not yet. A leader can be corrupt in managing their own country but still pragmatic in external relations - they can be domestically extractive but not internationally expansionist. Imperialism doesn't just rely on internal corruption but requires a expansionist worldview. The US for example acts as if whatever benefits the US must benefit the entire world. China and Russia act in their own interest, but they don't universalize those interests into a imperialistic worldview that is incompatible with multi-polarity - which by extension is incompatible in the modern era.

In the past we could afford to have a uni-polar hegemonic power, because the power to destroy the world many times over didn't exist. But in a world with multiple powers, which each have enough power to destroy the world many times over - there's no choice but to be multi-polar and share power with others, rather than have power over others - which is a worldview not on par with modern times and that the West currently holds.

 

[Leo Gura]

22 minutes ago, zazen said:

Multi-polarity leads to anarchy only if one or more actors insist on being on top,

This is where your worldview is flawed.

Anarchy is an arms race to the top. There is no other possibility. Global anarchy forces someone to dominate and establish supremacy. If this was not the case, no government would be necessary at all. So your worldview has this fundamental flaw. If your view was correct, China would not need monopoly of power over its people and neither would Putin.

Your view is well intentioned but naive in typical leftist fashion and as mistaken as communism was in the last century. You underestimate man's nature. Man is worse than you know. China and Putin are worse than you know. And they would try to dominate the world if given the chance. There is nothing special about the American empire that makes it uniquely evil. That same evil exists in every nation that has a monopoly of power over its people. Because that is the only solution to anarchy.

Contemplate deeply what I said here. This is very important. This is very important for your political development.

Edited 19 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Inliytened1]

17 hours ago, zazen said:

In practice, Multi-polarity leads to anarchy only if one or more actors insist on being on top, which in this case is the West/US - that is for sure not a mindset on par with multi-polarity. Just like how the West was right about needing to tackle the failed worldview of communism in the past, perhaps today the ones actually advocating for multi-polarity such as Russia, China etc are right in tackling the uni-polar hegemonic world view of the West.

As mentioned in your first sentence - it's the selfishness and self-absorption of the West, and by extension the arrogance and supremacist worldview - that is a hindrance to multi-polarity, but you imply its the corruption of Putins worldview. I would reflexively think so too - shouldn't a nation with corrupted poor internal governance translate to poor international relations? Not necessarily. The distinction is that just because a actor wants to be on top of their own people, doesn't mean they want to be on top of everyone else - on top of the world.

Putins kleptocracy can fail and in its current form it won't compete with the West for sure. That's different from it being unable to share power with others - as you've mentioned before somewhere, you don't think he's acting imperialistic, at least not yet. A leader can be corrupt in managing their own country but still pragmatic in external relations - they can be domestically extractive but not internationally expansionist. Imperialism doesn't just rely on internal corruption but requires a expansionist worldview. The US for example acts as if whatever benefits the US must benefit the entire world. China and Russia act in their own interest, but they don't universalize those interests into a imperialistic worldview that is incompatible with multi-polarity - which by extension is incompatible in the modern era.

In the past we could afford to have a uni-polar hegemonic power, because the power to destroy the world many times over didn't exist. But in a world with multiple powers, which each have enough power to destroy the world many times over - there's no choice but to be multi-polar and share power with others, rather than have power over others - which is a worldview not on par with modern times and that the West currently holds.

 

What makes you think that the US doesn't want to be multi-polar?  I would like to think that China and Russia are perfect in terms of this but they aren't.  The US would have to trust them to do the same and it could backfire Any word about them or is it just a pile on the "West" fest? 

What would you like to see overall internationally?  

Edited 2 hours ago by Inliytened1

[Leo Gura]

2 minutes ago, Inliytened1 said:

What makes you think that the US doesn't want to be multi-polar?

The US certainly does not want multi-polarity. It is doing everything possible to undermine it at a geopolitical level. The entire purpose of US foreign policy is to profit from hegemony.

Edited 19 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Inliytened1]

32 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

The US certainly does not want multi-polarity. It is doing everything possible to undermine it at a geopolitical level. The entire purpose of US foreign policy is to profit from hegemony.

If it gave equal power to all countries that would remove its advantage.     He acts like Russia or China would also be OK with multi-polarity.   They would always seek to have an advantage.  Always.  You think Russia wouldn't?  Equality ain't the game boys.  Never was.

Edited 19 hours ago by Inliytened1

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Inliytened1 said:

He acts like Russia or China would also be OK with multi-polarity.

That's why we have arms races.

This is the arms race problem writ large. No party can trust the other parties to disarm. Which is why we can't have nice things.

Edited 18 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Bobby_2021]

White supremacists at one time put forth the same argument. That one race absolutely has to dominate the others, else those other races will dominate us.

Later we found out that multiple district races of people can live in harmony with each other without having to dominate each other. That doesn't lead to anarchy at all.

Multi polar world is absolutely not only plausible but also inevitable. The trend is set. 

Each major power will have to be content with it's own sphere of influence. US, Russia, China will all get to have it's own spheres of influence.

8 hours ago, Inliytened1 said:

China would also be OK with multi-polarity. 

China is not seeking global domination, neither is Russia, nor is India. But they do want their own spheres of influence. They will use military if they have to. And they will win because it is closer to their borders.

Seeking global domination is a uniquely western thing.

You can't seriously assert that India who never once in history ever dominated another culture is just as pacifist/domineering as US or Britan.

Edited 10 hours ago by Bobby_2021

[Bobby_2021]

We need to make it clear what does it mean to "be on top". (No pun intended.)

Economic domination devoid of military is preferable. The problem with western dominance and the reason it is unsustainable is that it uses military, coups and sanctions to establish domination over others and this is self defeating.

This is why China produces better AI and Russia has a far more resilient economy. 

Every country should maximize economic prosperity. If China can produce more phone and technology, and that is what you refer to as domination, that is a good thing. 

But dominating other countries by means of military and threats is self defeating. Just like chattel slavery was unsustainable because you can put people in chains for so long. This type of slavery is undesirable and unsustainable. 

@zazen What do you think?

[zazen]

@Bobby_2021 I agree. Nothing wrong with countries striving to be dominant economic players - they just shouldn't economically dominate others which delves into economic imperialism, through coerced one sided deals that are extractive rather than productive. The Western sense of universal supremacy causes them to want primacy. 

If there’s a notoriously crazy driver (US) on the road, that incentives others to get bigger cars with better airbags and bumpers for survival. Imagine if instead of drivers needing to waste money on their cars (military expenditure) they could have spent it on their children's education (national development).  Perhaps its better if the crazy driver gets off the road and goes to driving school or rehab. Instead of spurring on the world  into militarization just to keep up, we should just rehabilitate the problem at its source.

My response to Leo and Inleytened below reinforce your points about multi-polarity.

15 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

This is where your worldview is flawed.

Anarchy is an arms race to the top. There is no other possibility. Global anarchy forces someone to dominate and establish supremacy. If this was not the case, no government would be necessary at all. So your worldview has this fundamental flaw. If your view was correct, China would not need monopoly of power over its people and neither would Putin.

Your view is well intentioned but naive in typical leftist fashion and as mistaken as communism was in the last century. You underestimate man's nature. Man is worse than you know. China and Putin are worse than you know. And they would try to dominate the world if given the chance. There is nothing special about the American empire that makes it uniquely evil. That same evil exists in every nation that has a monopoly of power over its people. Because that is the only solution to anarchy.

Contemplate deeply what I said here. This is very important. This is very important for your political development.

@Inliytened1

It's a trap to conflate human nature with Western behavior - or to assume the Western worldview is universal. No nation is uniquely bad, but the West has been typically so if we examine history up to the present. Conquest and war have been the norm, but not all conquest and war were the same. The way power is exercised matters. Human nature is the same everywhere, including the nature of power - but nurture isn't the same everywhere. Not everyone in the same positions of power act the same way.

John Mearsheimer style realism is only "real" about the nature of power - but completely blind to the power of nurture. While leftist naivety is blind to the power dynamics of survival, the realist view is blind to principles being able to nurture nature and power towards better ends. The belief that humans live only by power is Western nihilism disguised as realism - a projection of the Western psyche.

Westerners are raised within a power structure where they have only ever seen power wielded as dominance, conquest, and supremacy. We project this assumption onto all other civilizations, believing that power can only function in a zero-sum game. This view is deterministic and fatalistic. It's no surprise that every major realist thinker comes from the West - because a civilization detached from the soul, shaped by atheistic materialism and Darwinism, cannot conceive of anything beyond the struggle for survival and domination.

Western civilization has been dominance driven since its pagan origins. That harsh, cold and scarce environment shaped the psyche to value material accumulation, conquest and war as survival mechanisms. When Christianity arrived, it served as a counterpoint to that ethos - but the Western mind never fully internalized it. Instead of the principles of Christianity transforming the West, the West weaponized Christianity to serve imperial ambition and astro turfed it on top of the pagan ethos. This is why Nietzsche spoke of the tension in the Western soul between “master morality” (pagan dominance) and “slave morality” (Christian humility). The dominant ethos was never overturned, only temporarily restrained. Christianity became a tool of empire rather than a force that changed empire itself.

As Christianity has declined in the West, its been replaced with Social Darwinism - survival of the fittest is treated as principle. The West never truly abandoned "might is right" - it only changed its justification. First it dressed up raw power in Christian language (Divine Right of Kings, Manifest Destiny). In modernity it dresses up power in the language of natural selection, competition, and market forces. Nationalist Christian neocons are larping as Christians. They use Christianity to cover their impulse for domination  - their worldview is far closer to pagan tribalism than the teachings of Christ. Meanwhile, the secular left, despite rejecting and even mocking religion like rebellious teenagers - unknowingly inherit their moral compass from Christianity. Values like equality, justice, and human rights were not natural to pagan Europe but were introduced to the continent and injected into its bloodstream.

Today the West is caught in a deep internal struggle between these two paradigms. A pagan, power driven ethos that prioritizes domination above all else VS a lingering Christian ideal that principles should transcend power and check its excesses. That tension manifests in politics, economics, and culture. This is why some elements reduce morality to power dynamics, and dismiss cooperation as naive. This is why some elements (who are unfortunately in the driving seat) within the West are so deterministic and fatalistic. It's not a universal law of human nature - it's a specific cultural conditioning that views power as the only reality and views the reality of power as only being dominating rather than liberating. The Western psyche mistake its own cultural psychology for universal truth. Civilization doesn't have to be a constant war of all against all.

13 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

That's why we have arms races.

This is the arms race problem writ large. No party can trust the other parties to disarm. Which is why we can't have nice things.

Multi-polarity can lead to anarchy due to corrupt actors, but uni-polarity inevitably corrupts the hegemon, which then abuses its position - causing anarchy anyway. As we have seen by the US’s actions in the last century.

Multi-polarity is a system where multiple poles of power can act as checks and balances on one another. This is the same principle behind why democratic governance is considered superior within Western politics - so why not extend that logic internationally.

In a world where power guarantees mutually assured destruction (MAD), survival itself can enforce cooperation. We don’t have to rely on ideals or principles for coexistence if self-interest alone compels it. That’s why the world hasn’t collapsed into total war since the Cold War. Mutually assured destruction has forced restraint, which is why on the contrary we "have nice things" at all.

The question is, if arms races are so bad, why is the US sprinting toward doomsday? And who is the US even racing when it spends more on militarization than the next nine countries combined - include three times more than it's ''rival'' China. In reality, the US is just racing itself in a frenzy. It’s trapped in its own bubble imagining phantom enemies and boogeymen to justify its expansion. 

Multi-polarity means being arm in arm. Uni-polarity means arms up, flexing muscles. One is based on mutual security, the other on perpetual escalation. Not all arms races are the same. A system where multiple powers keep each other in check is far safer than one where a single, overarmed hegemon dictates terms until it collapses under its own weight - or traps itself (Thucydides's Trap) when it inevitably faces a rising power.

Edited 4 hours ago by zazen

[Leo Gura]

7 minutes ago, zazen said:

As Christianity has declined in the West, its been replaced with Social Darwinism - survival of the fittest is treated as principle. The West never truly abandoned "might is right"

It's always been social darwinism. Everywhere.

[zazen]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

It's always been social darwinism. Everywhere.

Darwinism (nature) is a constant in all time and place -  but how Darwin the monkey is socialised (nurture) differs across time and place. Ideally, the raw nature of power is nurtured and refined through principles.

Darwin is the hardware, physical, natural state of survival and competition. The social aspect is the software, psychology and cultural narrative that runs on top of that hardware.

Social Darwinism is a fact of reality. But bad actors use this truth not as description but as prescription and license to indulge their power fantasies because “it’s just nature”. They turned Darwin into their personal hype man for empire.

Different civilizations, different socialization of Darwin.

Edited 1 hour ago by zazen

[Leo Gura]

@zazen Great! Let's see Putin and Xi reliquish their power over their people. Then we can talk about how good they are.

[Raze]

18 hours ago, Inliytened1 said:

If it gave equal power to all countries that would remove its advantage.     He acts like Russia or China would also be OK with multi-polarity.   They would always seek to have an advantage.  Always.  You think Russia wouldn't?  Equality ain't the game boys.  Never was.

Russia and China are trying to create multi polarity by increasing their power to compete with the US. The US is trying to stop them to maintain hegemony.

 

Edited 1 hour ago by Raze

[OBEler]

On 26.1.2025 at 10:46 PM, Leo Gura said:

A fascinating phenomenon on the online right is that they start off innocently repeating and sharing Nazi jokes, not taking them seriously, but after a few years of that, they just end up agreeing with the Nazi ideology.

They start off as online edge-lords, then transform into Nazis.

It's a process of self-radicalization.

Wow you nailed it. I personally know someone autistic with high intelligence who went this way. It was just s joke he said, on Krautchan using the n-word etc.

20 years later on he doesn't use this forum anymore but he is still the same but radicalized completely. He has no job, no education, deeply addicted on heroin and when I meet him on the street he rants 1 hours over these n*** and jews full of hate. He turned into a complete nazi with Springerstiefel and trench coach. He is just annoying when he does that because you can't stop him.

 

To Musks behavior:

I am from Germany. Musk gestic is NOT a nazi salute guys..look at his wide spread fingers on his heart. No nazi would do such a salute. Further more Musks salute looks natural he did that for the first time and from the bottom of his heart to express his feelings. It looks not mechanical like someone who saluted 10000 times already.

Edited 43 minutes ago by OBEler