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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

I have found general anti-war comments I have made here and elsewhere online to be unpopular. If WWIII starts, its likely that comments against participating or legitimizing it will be flagged here on HN.

The thing that people should understand is that wars are strategic. Any moral justification is just propaganda. The paradigm is "might makes right" and has been for millennia. The American Empire is a great example, and the Chinese Empire that comes after it will be the same. But that will be even shorter-lived than the Americans because AI will probably take control soon after. On a large scale, humanity operates at a moral level similar to that of ant colonies.

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The Chinese Empire is a fantasy. China will remain a great factory and little else. Everything there is still done using personal connections (eg. corruption). The basis of a globe spanning empire this system is not. When all your growth is due to external investment, external contracts, and external culture/politics, you can’t become the center.

Those common criticisms of their political system are valid, and certainly in some ways the west is more advanced. But realistically western political systems have their own severe (but different) problems, and the Chinese systems have their own advantages.

As I said, the bottom line for the world order seems to be deployment of force. Right now the most relevant force paradigms as far as I can tell are mass information control and bio-warfare (nuclear has largely been tabled.) The authoritarianism has given China an advantage in terms of controlling information and infection and that has been strongly proven out.

Really? We're taking, "Wuhan Flu" as fact on this of all sites? This is speech we can censor. Where's Dang?

If you think Covid was a lab escaped bio weapon then prove it or get off this site.

I didn't say it was a fact. I really don't know, but I don't want to believe it was an actual attack by one side or the other.

But regardless of what caused it, if you look at the effects, military strategists almost have to treat it as the Hiroshima of bio-warfare. Because it proves that such a thing is both extremely effective and also very hard to prove one way or the other.

Authoritarianism by itself doesn't explain the extreme lockdowns in China. But if the Chinese military sees Wuhan as evidence of the effectiveness of bioweapons and the start of an era, then the lockdowns can be seen as key to effectively defending against (or using) them. So tight pandemic response is now a core national security issue,

Another way to interpret all of it is as overall strengthening "society's immune response" to pandemics and so you could see that as a good thing in perverse way.

But that doesn't really change the military interpretation or brutal paradigm of global power that we seem to be stuck in.

Also, there's no evidence that China desires an empire. Americans believe China wants an empire for the same reason that people believe that the first instinct of a hypothetical full autonomous AI would be to enslave people. They're telling on themselves.

People who think AIs would enslave humanity wish to be slave owners themselves? What kind of logic is this? Sounds completely made up.

What? Any port in Africa would suggest otherwise. The Belt and Road initiative is not done for charity. When a Chinese state owned enterprise wins a mining contract in a country that is heavily indebted to the CCP you think is is mutual aid? The CCP has put the squeeze on a lot of countries recently for clear political reasons.

I'm sorry, could you please repost your argument in the form of TikTok, or one of those Youtube short videos? I really struggled to remember any context past those big words in that second sentence.

Ooh look! A squirrel! <scrolls>

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