Open Thread, 09/17/2019

22 thoughts on “Open Thread, 09/17/2019”

1. “I wonder if there is something even more deeply rotten in Westen societies”
   Seriously?
   I suggest to live in China for a year, without access to a VPN. That would give you an idea about the political climate.

   China’s society in general is at least as hypocritical & dishonest as in the US, probably even more so. There is a good reason that Chinese are generally very distrusting. Only exception: direct family.

   Can’t really see what exactly in “the West”* would be “more rotten” than in China. You would have to be more specific.

   * IMO, Western countries vary too much to lump them together like that. Even when it comes to PC/SJW-influence in education, where I see one of the greatest similarities, there is huge variation from the US on one end to Greece (or Hungary, depending on how you define “West”) on the other.

2. Concerning g of general intelligence, I always wondered about the concept in practise with people having so obvious strength and weaknesses at times and a lot can come to the same IQ in different ways so to say.
   But those with a very uneven distribution of their intelligence and abilities are the minority?

   Are there studies done to explore that problem, of the frequency of balanced to imbalanced intelligence structure in the population?

   We all know people good in maths, but bad in expressing themselves and their concepts and vice versa.
   But are such uneven abilities really rare and how can they be brought under the concept of general intelligence? Even more such relatively high numbers for its impact on the different abilities.

   Does the maths genius with speech deficits have a verbal defect or a special “maths gene”?

   Probably its just to early to ask such questions.

3. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4QYBbgLkGaULStiC5yc_1Q/videos?fbclid=IwAR2ICvhc3meYVIUqGUovX_s_GFDd6mzLvf5x_Jf28_T3OjqFaiM37QNBMfg&app=desktop sam burja youtube chan is interesting

4. I suggest to live in China for a year, without access to a VPN. That would give you an idea about the political climate.

   do you live there now?

5. China’s government is evil? I think that is a bit harsh, and you can tell from my twitter feed that I am no water carrier for The Party. However, the party is composed of 20 million people, this is a party the size of the Netherlands, and then there are also bureaucrats who are not party members. They are not all evil.

   The morality of most people in China is simply different. Most Chinese do not like the party but they also don’t want it to go away, because they are scared of the alternative. The last 30 years have seen unprecedented growth they have witnessed, have felt personally… Chinese are inherently practical and quite scared of “chaos”, even French Paris protest chaos scares the hell out of most Chinese, because in China when things like this happen, millions of people end up dying.

   Further, all people on the Mainland (and actually some Chinese overseas in other enclaves around Asia) are taught some version of “patriotic education” in that “Chinese were victimized by the West and Japan” and China deserves (due to it’s previous history and high culture) to be a respected regional power, if not world power. My own mother and father-in-law believe this. Many, including Xi Jinping, I think are quite nationalistic, and believe a strong nation requires sacrifice, and the only way to accomplish a “great renewal” is a strong focused single party system. That is the primary goal. Everything else, including personal freedoms, are secondary to the group goal of renewed Chinese respect and power. Even most middle class Chinese I know, to some degree follow this narrative. Democracy is not philosophical goal, it is a tool, and right now has limited and questionable utility. The media in the West only focuses on those who are against the party (often exiled in the West) not the hundreds of millions who think differently.

   I cannot tell you how many times I have heard the same Middle Class cohort talk about the 素质 (innate quality) of the lower classes, and much like some of the U.S. founding fathers, believe, left to their own advances, will vote China into hell. If anything, I can tell you from first hand experience, the lower classes, especially those that live away from the coasts are more ethnocentric and nationalistic than the elites in the coastal cities. Who knows what they would vote into power. I imagine something close to fascism.

6. “I got an S10. Anyone else have one?”

   I have not been that happy with the Samsung products I have owned. My $200 Moto G5plus still works, so I am not buying a new phone anytime soon.

   Since some of your readers live in India, I am curious to know if you have used a Moto phone there, and if there have been any problems with it?

7. bossel:

   I lived in China for more than a year.

   As a married foreigner, that does not speak Chinese, Razib would just be bored without a VPN. He could still see all the science sites he wants, but Western social media and very little Western news, even the uncensored news is throttled down, so navigating the sites is very annoying. Since he would also be in a large coastal city or at a university, I’m guessing he would find China superficially as free as the U.S. on a daily basis.

   Perhaps Razib might get pissed tested at a bar, or questioned for his passport because he’s “brown”…and there aren’t many “brown” people in China, depending on where he is police might harass him. It’s not likely, never happened to me, but I heard stories from others.

8. I have no idea how to assess whether that genetic intelligence preprint is credible or not. Expert opinions, anyone?

9. that research group are experts. i know some of them personally

10. But I wonder if there is something even more deeply rotten in Western societies?

    The Chinese government gives me with willies with its social credit system and related surveillance and control technologies. However the Chinese can still tell the difference between male and female. The upper echelons/ upper classes of Western societies are in complete, insane revolt against reality itself, and the bill for that is coming due sooner rather than later.

11. Social credit system is a fantastic idea to balance out monetary incentives in the anonymized urban context.
    Not that greed, corruption and egoism are no problem.

    In the West a corrupted industry and educational system tries to tell people whats right and incites hate and life destroying measures against those which dont agree with the ideological nonsense spilled on us from birth on.
    How far are we from reeducational camps in many Western countries? How far goes the freedom for raising our children offside this insanity which is spreading like cancer?
    At least in China the strategy for political persecution makes some sense for the nation more often than not.

    At the same time which percentage of the population does well for the greater good without guidance? Anywhere? In the USA? Definitely not.

    If there is no complete breakdown of civilization in a natural disaster, total ABC war or religious frenzy, sure as hell surveillance and social credit system will come up everywhere.

    And again, its the tribe and communities coming back to techmocized people, thats what it is.

    Its not good or bad in itself, like nuclear power or genetic engineering, but its a tool which might have great or awful consequences, depending on who will use it for what. So people should be very careful about who controls these tools, society and policy.

    In the West people became much to careless about these things build up. As if the right to vote would really protect you if the times becomes critical. Just a hint: It won’t!

    Add to that the fact that you have in China an elite which is actually
    – not total dependent from the big money
    – can make long term Plans
    – can decide which means they want to use
    – have, even if sometimes corrupted, a sense for their people and their fate, the Future of their nation and the greater good in a LONG TERM perspective.

    Now I personally still prefer to live where I do. But if thinking about my people’s future and the Chinese, the Chinese seem to be in better hands.

    Not a good government in everyrespect, for sure not, but show me a much better governed state without huge advantages China just doesnt have.

    You cant compare China with Switzerland or Japan. China is too big and still underdeveloped.

12. A question of “I wonder if there is something even more deeply rotten than China in Western societies?” seems, while I don’t say any question should go unasked or talk smack at Razib, mostly to end up catalyzing a projection of internal issues by encouraging speakers to contrast China against their own ideal of what the West is and should be.

    Through the 00s to early 10s: A certain type of cultural conservative online, saw in China a supposed projection of an ancient meritocratic Confucian ideal, a resurrection of the 18th century Enlightenment idealization of China as a country of philosopher-kings untrammelled by the crude passions of the masses, ‘trade’ and the aristocracy, this time adding a lack of the taint of ‘postmodernism’ to their supposed virtues. (If they’re a nationalist, they’d also perhaps run to it as an example of a political class that supports national greatness). A certain type of post-colonialist Marxist saw a China as ready to lead to a world where “White supremacy” is broken and an example of what could *really* happen across the world once the supposed yoke of “Eurocentricism” and “neoliberalism” and “dependency theory” is lifted, and “PoC” are finally “liberated”. A certain sort of “radical centrist” saw China as the *triumph* of their Davosish, TED talking, acrylic and antiseptic brand of neoliberalism and technocracy and post-nationalism.

    And so on and so forth.

    It seems to me though, and probably increasing to more people in 2019, that China is actually less lofty than any of these options (and probably many other variants): A less exceptional than oft imagined authoritarian state, ruled by a party corrupted by at least lip service (and probably much more) to Communist ideology and by patronage. A country whose rulers are certainly no classically or scientifically educated meritocracy, not neoliberal and not “woke”, not particularly wise. A good deal less impressive in its growth than almost any of its “Sinosphere” East Asian neighbours (before and after democratic reforms) once we look at the context: the extraordinary leeway given it by the West for practicing export driven growth while remaining repressive, the sheer space of catchup growth possible, its favourable demographic boons, and the likely dubiousness of some of its statistics.

    Yet, for all this, still a huge economy and political power and military power, simply from sheer size, even if it never really equals the levels of development per capita as seen in the West or its East Asian neighbours.

    My point (if I have one) is that really needs to be looked at clearly, as it is, and certainly though I can’t claim to be perfect, I’d like to make the case again that doing so is pretty important, while projecting our internal cultural issues is a bit of a distraction. And recently, we’ve been pretty bad at this (particularly our more ideologically polarized and well educated citizens), and asking the right questions is a good way to help us get better at it. Not trying to come across as arrogant about this.

13. Agreed.

    What China makes so interesting is that they do things differently and they do things which most other countries don’t do so offensively right now, but might do in the near future. And its a big point that their leadership, although partly corrupt and incompetent, is indendent in its own way from big money and other nasty aspects of the Western world control.

    The real issue is its sheer size, no doubt about it. In many ways South Korean and Japanese people, of similar stock and culture, seem to be more impressive if they would be less dependent on the Western system and have a bigger size. But so its China which plays a major role.

    Everybody who knows more about the country says there is some dazzling light in China, but all around that, there is so much darkness still. The country has vastly different people and developmental paces. That’s hard to manage, I’d say a non-authoritarian system would have never been better about it. But I can imagine better authoritarian systems, and worse as well.

    The worst I see in the current Chinese system is that it does not enough against individual uncultivation, cruelty and exploitative behaviour among its own citizens. They seem to try, even with draconic measures, but most Chinese I met show better moral in the 2nd generation abroad than those from China directly and what you would gather from reports and personal experiences there.
    I don’t know all whats going wrong, why the Chinese people are too greedy and egoistic quite often and lack a refinement so typical for Japanese and Koreans. It seems after the end of the radical Communist ideology, they being “too much grounded” on the Capitalist, materialist reality of the “new system”. Or they were put down by the Communist revolution and sufferings in the first place?

    However, they seem to need a social credit system desperately, money is by far too important for the average Chinese. And its worse in those which are somewhat more developed than on the countryside even. So they moved far too much in the Capitalist sphere of thinking. Communism? A joke?
    Just some aspects are social, socialistic, in a Western sense of the word, a lot of things too much brutal Capitalism and Materialism, that’s much more of a problem in China.

14. Haaretz published a popular rendition of an article in “Cell” about reconstructing the face, the look of Denisovans. Iam pasting in this article below:
    sf

    Research Reveals What Mysterious Denisovans Looked Like

    DNA methylation data allows Israeli scientists to give illustrator a detailed list of the archaic human’s characteristics
    Asaf Ronel
    Sep 19, 2019 8:49 PM

    This image shows a preliminary portrait of a juvenile female Denisovan, based on a skeletal profile reconstructed from ancient DNA methylation maps.
    This image shows a preliminary portrait of a juvenile female Denisovan, based on a skeletal profile reconstructed from ancient DNA methylation maps.Maayan Harel

    Denisovan finger muddies picture of human evolution
    Breakthrough in human evolution: Denisovan fossil found in Tibet
    New species of hominin found in Philippines changes paradigm of human evolution

    The ability of scientists to discover new information from ancient remnants of DNA has revolutionized our understanding of the evolution of animals in general and humans in particular. Now, thanks to breakthrough research, the anatomical features of an extinct group of archaic humans known as the Denisovans has been reconstructed based only on their DNA.

    The research, led by Prof. Liran Carmel and David Gokhman of the Hebrew University, was published Thursday as the cover story in the scientific journal Cell.

    The Denisovans lived until a few tens of thousands of years ago in eastern and northeastern Asia. And until now, all that was known about them was based on a few small fragments of bone.

    They had different morphological characteristics than the Homo sapiens and Neanderthals who lived at the same time. Homo sapiens lived mostly in Africa and the Neanderthals in Europe and northern Asia — where they met the Denisovans and got to know them very well, even bearing children together.

    It seems the Denisovan branch of humankind would never have been discovered without the development of new methods for extracting, sequencing and analyzing ancient DNA.

    In 2008, scientists found a single finger bone in the Denisova Cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains (the species was subsequently named after the cave). It seems to have come from a young woman. Two years later, the scientists — led by Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo — published the full DNA sequence extracted from the bone and showed that it came from a separate human species significantly different than Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. Denisovan teeth were found later, and earlier this year a lower jawbone, also identified as coming from a Denisovan, was found on the Tibetan Plateau.
    A model of a juvenile female Denisovan, based on a skeletal profile reconstructed from ancient DNA methylation maps.
    A model of a juvenile female Denisovan, based on a skeletal profile reconstructed from ancient DNA methylation maps.Maayan Harel

    Since 2010, studies of modern DNA have found vestiges of Denisovan DNA in the genome of modern humans in a number of places worldwide: In indigenous Australian aboriginals; residents of the Melanesian Islands in the Pacific Ocean; and also in Tibetans — who, recent research shows, inherited their ability to live in the thin mountain air from their ancient Denisovan relatives.
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    Scientists hypothesize that Denisovan DNA is the result of meetings between the different groups that occurred some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, at a time when Homo sapiens left Africa and reached Asia.

    Scientists now theorize that the branch of humans that led to Neanderthals and Denisovans split off from the branch that led to the development of Homo sapiens about 600,000 years ago. The first branch then split again about 400,000 years ago into separate branches: one offshoot led to the Neanderthals; the other led to the Denisovans.

    The genetic research has produced a much more complex picture of human evolution, which includes a great number of common descendants and genetic transfer between the various groups of humans.

    But excepting this genetic data and the very few fragments of bone and teeth, researchers were unable to say much about who the Denisovans were, how they lived and what they looked like. Now, though, the scientific race is on to find and identify more vestiges of our ancient relatives and resolve some of the mysteries surrounding them.

    A different approach

    Gokhman, Carmel and their colleagues, including Prof. Eran Meshorer from Hebrew University, Prof. Yoel Rak from Tel Aviv University and Prof. Tomas Marques-Bonet from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, have adopted a different approach to solving those mysteries. Previous research managed to produce a complete Denisovan DNA sequence — of a standard that is just as good as any sequence produced by modern labs today. Every letter in the ancient DNA sequence was sampled and sequenced about 30 times on average, which guarantees a high quality result.

    Carmel says that scientists nowadays do not have the ability to reconstruct the precise anatomy or appearance of individuals based only on their DNA. To circumvent this problem, the scientists used a method of reconstructing epigenetic patterns in the ancient DNA, which was developed in previous research by Meshorer and Carmel. Epigenetics is the science of changes to organisms and heredity that are found outside the genetic code of the DNA sequence itself, usually caused by changes to gene expression — in other words, which genes are turned “on” or “off” in each and every cell. Epigenetics helps explain why the human body has such a great number of different types of cells constructed from the same “instruction book,” aka the DNA sequence. As Carmel puts it, it’s what produces the enormous anatomic differences between a tadpole and a frog.

    One of the types of epigenetic changes being studied today, and which the research team focused on, is DNA methylation. This is the process in which methyl groups — a carbon atom with three hydrogen atoms attached (CH3) — are added to the DNA molecule. The methyl groups usually attach to cytosine molecules, one of the four bases that are the foundations for building all DNA, and this generally serves to repress the gene’s transcription.

    Over the past 20 years, the methylation process was revealed to be one of the main mechanisms in determining how genes are expressed (turned on or off). Examining DNA methylation allows scientists to reconstruct which genes are active and which are silenced at the level of a single cell — or the entire organism.
    This image shows a portrait of a juvenile female Denisovan, based on a skeletal profile reconstructed from ancient DNA methylation maps.
    This image shows a portrait of a juvenile female Denisovan, based on a skeletal profile reconstructed from ancient DNA methylation maps.Maayan Harel

    In their present research, the Israeli scientists created DNA methylation maps of the Denisovans, Neanderthals, ancient ancestors of modern humans, human beings living today and chimpanzees. In comparing these maps, the researchers focused on the areas where the DNA methylation differs significantly between species and subspecies of primates.

    In the next stage, the researchers consulted a very large data bank of monogenetic disorders — caused by a mutation in a single gene. This data bank also includes detailed information about the connection between the gene and the morphological phenotype (the way in which the specific gene variation is actually reflected in the anatomy of the individual who carries this variation).

    With the help of these data, the researchers were able to create a list of genes in which a higher or lower incidence leads to various anatomical changes — for example, a specific gene whose increased activity leads to the development of a broader skull.

    They then had the basic anatomical structure — that of modern man — to compare to a list of genes whose change causes an anatomical difference from that same basic model, and methylation models that demonstrate how these genes change between the species and various groups of archaic humans that were studied, said Carmel.

    When the scientists applied the new method they had developed to the methylation map of the Neanderthals and chimpanzees, they attained an 85 percent level of accuracy in the comparison between their anatomical model and the known scientific findings.

    Carmel said further confirmation of the validity of the model they constructed can be found by comparing it to an ancient skull fragment that was discovered about three years ago in China. Until now, they had been unable to identify which human species it belonged to.

    An article analyzing the skull fragment described eight prominent characteristics, which the scientists derived based on the fragment that had been found in China, but it did not mention Denisovans. “We compared the findings to our model and found it had seven of those eight characteristics,” explained Carmel.

    Carmel said further support for the model was discovered after the article was submitted for peer review in Cell: The mandible that was identified earlier this year as coming from a Denisovan.

    In the article that presented the jaw fragment, four prominent characteristics were described, said Carmel. As a result, eight conclusions could be drawn from them — and for each of the characteristics, we can examine whether the jaw of Denisovan man was more similar to that of Homo sapiens or Neanderthals, he said. Once again, seven out of the eight characteristics that were observed based on the analysis of the jaw also appeared in their model.

    So, with the list of differences between Denisovan man and Homo sapiens — which was verified as far as possible based on the existing findings — the researchers turned to scientific illustrator Maayan Harel.

    Based on their list, she made a model of Denisovan man — in cooperation with Rak, a physical anthropologist who has been studying archaic humans for decades. Based on this, Harel then created for the first time a scientifically based illustration of the faces of those mysterious ancient humans who went extinct tens of thousands of years ago.
    Asaf Ronel

    Asaf Ronel

    Haaretz Correspondent

15. But I wonder if there is something even more deeply rotten in Western societies?

    So I guess this is the line that triggered everyone (myself included). 🙂

    Our rot is definitely not as great and a bit different I think. We are suffering from a failing neo-aristocracy.

    I do fear our own privatized social credit system – Google, Facebook and friends. I’m one of those libertarians who fears any “big” — not just big government — as a threat to individual liberty.

    Razib, is the Dikotter book on your recommended list?

16. “I do fear our own privatized social credit system – Google, Facebook and friends. I’m one of those libertarians who fears any “big” — not just big government — as a threat to individual liberty.”

    What you describe is an oxymoron, because in the world we live in, without a big government and structures, you can’t keep alive your individual freedom and protection both from hostile forces from within, as well as from outside.

    In fact its a constant political struggle to keep up a balance, because individual freedom in the sense many American Libertarians understand it is an unnatural, inhumane condition.

    Not necessarily in a negative way, but still it is. This means you have to constantly struggle and invest to keep this unnatural condition alive. Something natural is easy to establish and to care for, because the human nature being drawn to it. So you need to support a big government which shares your ideals, rather than trying to keep it down. Because one way or another, every power vacuum will be filled. If politics leave a ground, business will take it. And I prefer politicians which were voted for and could be held responsible before anonymous financial constructs using private companies to take control.

    Just in principle though, since the government could be even worse than a “nice independent company”. But in the system we live in, the government and financial giants will get their grip on the private company anyway and transform it into something bad regardless were it started originally. Small companies and independent politicians are similar in this respect.

    Anyway, the strive for individual freedom is more natural and an innate tendency than the egalitarian ideology in general and things like radical feminism and genderism in particular. The latter is even much more of an unnatural condition, which needs constant investments by the system to keep it up in those which are capable of intellectual conditioning. Its so unnatural, you don’t achieve the conditioning in intellectually and educationally lower standing individuals. The idiocy of the ideological distortion needs to be learned intellectually, then it can be felt, not vice versa.

    That’s one of the reasons why education and higher intelligence are negatively correlated to reproductive success in this manipulated system. A large portion of the low IQ and not so educated population won’t be as indoctrinated and planned enough to comply to the consequences of these intellectual and systemic failure.
    They being immunised by stupidity and lack of socio-economic success.

    Some systemic failures are so bad, they only work with the best human and cultural resources available halfway. Once they consumed the natural resources they could work with, because they are not sustainable, they will collapse.

    The material wealth too is build on shaky grounds, because the financial systems exploitative and instabile nature will come to surface rather sooner than later.
    You have a fun situation now in the West. Everybody with an idea of it knows that the financial system we have right now is a failure, its collapsing like the Western demography. If the national banks increase interest rates, the economy will crumble (so they can manipulate economy and policy), but even the lowest and negative rates don’t save you any more if the smallest things go wrong in this great world economic system.

    What we see now is a race of the different “elites in charge” for the control of their people when the inevitable crash and systemic transformation will take place. We see different pathways in America and China, but in the end they approach a very similar goal: The total surveillance and control of its populace, so that even if the material satisfaction will falter, people can’t topple the ruling class in time before the transformation being completed.

    The main difference is in China you know who is responsible and in charge, whereas in America a lot of the decision making people are behind curtains and most in front are puppets. And if they are no puppets when they start their political rise to power, they will be drilled until they do what the establishment wants by the corrupt administration they need to rely upon and the mass media which can distort everything they do.

    You can sue people, everyone in America can be sued, its a mess but at least you might get the law on your side if you need it and get the right lawyers too. That’s a great difference to the authoritarian states. And many of the small transgressions of the political and financial elite, often with great consequences for individuals, will be caught and stopped, while they run wild in authoritarian and corrupt regimes. People there are even more helpless against the abuse of power, which is the worst even in the otherwise ok governed undemocratic states.

    But what about the will of the people and long term plans for the greater whole and good, the well being of the majority and a good development of society? Look at public-opinion polls, even long term preferences of the US populace, and what politicians actually did in the states? That’s irreconcilable! The country was transformed and deformed in ways just a few people wanted it originally, and the majority couldn’t help. Even if they voted against it, it was still done by politicians which just broke their promises.

    Is that really what a democracy should be about, broken promises and plans made by a corrupted few?

    Got it better or worse in the West in the last decades?

    Most of you, regardless of where you stand otherwise, will hopefully agree that it got worse in the West, and better in countries like China – even if its still overall much better in Western countries and worse there.
    Now that alone should be a warning for everyone. If a just ok governed, post-Communist, part-corrupted authoritarian state system does overall a much better job for the development of their society and people than the corrupt politicians we have voted into office in Western countries, then something goes horribly wrong. And a lot of people are really dissatisfied, its obvious and for objective reasons.

17. So let’s see: Politicians should have more power because “I prefer politicians which were voted for and could be held responsible before anonymous financial constructs using private companies to take control.” While at the same time “The country was transformed and deformed in ways just a few people wanted it originally, and the majority couldn’t help. Even if they voted against it, it was still done by politicians which just broke their promises.”

    Reminds me of the girlfriend who says, “Sure he beats me but I can’t leave him cause I know he loves me.”

18. @Obs

    Not sure where to start with a response — you said a lot.

    I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but to me you seem to be making an argument for a “strongman” type government. Maybe something like Russia has today?

    I strongly disagree. Concentrations of power attract human who thirst for power. The form of the power (government or corporate) matters little. Once an individual like climbs the ladder, it is difficult to dislodge them.

    These people don’t fight corporate power — they coerce it. The result is typically a symbiotic relationship with a few chosen oligarchs.

    Best thing to do is to never create concentrated power.

19. I don’t prefer a strongman generally, and for sure not systematically. Rather I would say that politics is about solving problems, creating good and preventing bad developments for the state and its people, with an eye on the whole of mankind too. If a political class creates more problems than it solves, I don’t care for how it came into office.

    The corporations must be coerced indeed, because whats important is that politics control the financial and economic sphere and not the other way around.
    If the big money moulds laws and election campaigns, mass media and the educational system’s direction like they want, they are in charge and not politicians. And its politics alone which can control them, because individuals, regardless of how free they think they are, are nothing in comparison.

    If its about laws and political decisions, the economy and its experts could, in theory, bring their point forward. But if its about who is in charge and what kind of policy being made, the corporations and rich have to do one, or better two steps back and let the populace and its political class make decisions where they want to head to. And after this decision making process, they have to comply.

    And thats the problem why Democracy, which was always easier to corrupt by the financial elite, has now a much bigger problem, too big to be ignored. If the big financial and corporate forces can largely evade the punishment of the political leadership of a state, but the state can not their counterattack, who is in charge?

    Democracy becames a farce if the big financial and corporate forces can blackmail and corrupt every political class voted for. Remind you, especially the international law and arrangements being almost completely moulded the way the corporations wanted it.
    Whole nations can be sued like a small trickster if they don’t comply to the rules made by the Oligarchy or touch an “investment”. This is insanity!

    But like with other developments, the lawyers and lobbyists for the financial and corporate power did a lot of preparatory work before the majority of people ever thought about it.

    There are therefore just two options: You are able to create an international structure which controls the Oligarchy, or you cut everything down to the national level and start anew, with the big risk of a huge crash or conflict being a longer term result.
    Another alternative, I would propose, is to make a deal, but obviously, only strong governments can make a deal with the Oligarchy. Either they comply or everything being cut back to the national level where they can’t evade.
    That’s a huge issue for the whole world and the USA and China are in the centre of this decision. As things are, probably not elsewhere, but definitely in the USA, you need a strongman to turn things around. Because the political system of the USA is just like it is and needs a deep and complete renewal.
    If the USA don’t do it and proceed in being one of the main proponents of corporate power and control in international relations, its obvious that the conflict will become even harder and more dangerous on the international level.

    The main reason why the USA create those boogey men kind of propaganda about some authoritarian regimes like China and Russia is, that they don’t comply and subordinate themselves under the new rule of the law. I’m all for law and rules, but not if they being made by the wrong people for the wrong reasons, then I support those which oppose them, even if I know what they do is not the golden standard either.

    But imagine there would be no opposition to the US-GB project on the international level, how bad would it be? We saw it after the fall of the iron curtain. When Communism was a real threat, the Western systems had to do something for their people, listen and control the Oligarchy. They were still there, but they had to shut up on certain matters, because their was this political threat. As soon as the external threat was gone, and the idea of one World and “the end of history” came up, the ran amok. And they do so to this day, with boogey men being created (like Islamic Terrorism), but also soft political issues with hard consequences (like radical Feminism and Genderism) for developing the social control and surveillance measures they wanted. At the same time taking the rights and law from the people.
    It would be funny if the radical left in the USA, so often abused for corporate big money interests, would at some point really turn on the so called “elite” because they take the crap they talk serious out of a sudden.
    And the establishment would have created a atmosphere of pseudoreligious moralism and witch-hunts were even the people which are really in charge can’t say “this doesn’t bother me”.
    Would be fun if their monster would eat them after all. But I doubt it, because so far the Oligarchy was always capable of manipulating the US left in ways which resulted in policies which harm the general population and ruin its future, but not their very own base of power.

    But probably that’s the only way to more freedom after all, because the connection needs to be cut and basically, what they call Populism on the left or right, is nothing but policies which don’t follow their recipe all the time. Its not independent, but the first step to independent. Even if they demand and do stupid things, they don’t act like puppets any more. And its only then that people could think about politics and what they really want, not before.
    If they are just puppets on strings, even if they sound more reasonable at times, they are not your politicians, but their’s. That’s a pity, because so much nonsense comes from populism. But if reasonable politicians are not allowed to make independent decisions, you have to take the risk of unreasonable ones trying their best – and don’t being just puppets.

    Because if things would go on like they did between 1990-2016, we would all wake up in a corporate controlled, corrupted AND totalitarian world – not just state, without any emergency exit left any more.

    The fun thing really is that another surveillance state like China is the counterbalance necessary to still stand a chance. Because if they would be completely in the same world system, those in charge need to take no considerations at all any more. And what that means we could see in the first phase of the transformation since 1990.

20. Oh, my God. I died and went to the 1930s.

21. So 4 days ago a video showing 3-400 detainees handcuffed & blindfolded at a train station in Xinjiang was uploaded to YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGYoeJ5U7cQ

    There’s an analysis of the footage indicating it was filmed around August 20, 2018, among other things – https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1175354363503505409

    One standout screencap – https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EE-xgbQU8AEtVPm.jpg

22. “I wonder if there is something even more deeply rotten in Western societies?”

    You already know my view, so I won’t argue with you. But I am curious: what rot exactly worries you most about the West?

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