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Comment by disqard | Hacker News Reader

Tbh, your comment looks like it was authored by an LLM -- what is a "telluric state"?

Telluric means relating to the earth. Thalassocracy means a state of the ocean. Or a maritime empire.

I take their overall point there to draw a parallel to small states as islands, small spits of sand, connected by the thalassocracies, or oceans, of the US and USSR. In some sense, this is actually reality, especially under the US system of global economic hegemony via free trade (or some approximate, thereof).

I'm not an AI, at least, I don't think so. It's been co-opted by Russian weirdos, but the concept of a "land holding civilization" versus a "maritime civilization" is one of those historical metaphors that aids understanding rather than undermining it. In my opinion at least.

The two organizational principles are so fundamentally different, they're almost apples and oranges.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tellurocracy

I fail to grasp the sentence though. What's a thalassocracy supposed to be in today's world?

The United States, with its blue-water navy, is commonly viewed as a Thalassocracy by a certain segment of the historian community. You can really go down the rabbithole but basically some people view the US as, at least in part, having the culture of an island scaled up to the size of a continent.

There's a similar train of thought that sea-based empires defeat land-based empires when the two do battle and some people view the conflict between the USSR and the United States during the cold war through that lense.

Terrestrial state, a state of (the planet) earth.

Not an LLM but maybe a francophone or a logophile.

Whats an LLM?

Large language model (like gpt3 or chatgpt)

Large Language Model, I think.

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