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Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

Is there realistically a path to the west learning any of these lessons without going through WW3?

It’s not like any of this is news. My newspaper of choice has been telling me about how fast china moves, in vivid detail, since at least 2018 - others probably knew much earlier than I did. I watched a graphic documentary on YouTube about Shenzhen in 2019 that gave me all of the same information in this tweet, minus the accomplishments that have happened since then.

My own eyes have seen how their consumer goods have transformed in a very short time. Maybe other Americans don’t notice because the key categories (tech, cars) have so much protectionism. I’m not sure about the Europeans.

The west is better at coming up with excuses and red tape than actually solving problems, it seems.

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> Is there realistically a path to the west learning any of these lessons without going through WW3?

> The west is better at coming up with excuses and red tape than actually solving problems, it seems.

Most of the west still has this paterno-colonialist view of the world, we're too complacent, too sure of ourselves, it never changed, just look at how Trump talks about Iran, he is completely clueless about the history of this region of the world, they'd nuke themselves before accepting the unconditional surrender he asked for... It was the same with China: "let's move all our industries there, they are too dumb to figure anything out and they'll will be our cheap labor forever", well no, they're just as smart as us and as soon as they reached the threshold necessary to provide education to the mass they also reached our technological level.

It mostly is over for the west as we know it, demographically, politically, industrially, soon militarily, people who don't see it are straight up blind or historically illiterate, we're in a end of the Portuguese or British empire situation.

> they'd nuke themselves before accepting the unconditional surrender he asked for

To me it's a bit more complicated than that. Unconditional surrender can be achieved ... with boots on the ground all over Iran on a penetration level last seen in WW2. If you think Iran's government is as simple to decapitate as Iraq, think again.

Then you get the unconditional surrender of a government. Is the average Iranian amenable to tolerate this situation and get its terms dictated by the US? Nope, they're not the Germans in '45. You'll get decades of insurgency; if you think ISIS as a consequence of the Iraq Invasion was bad, look forward to even worse.

At the end of the day, Trump always chickens out. Look forward to the end of the American bombings the second the new leader gets him on the phone. The Israelis that's another thing.

> with boots on the ground all over Iran on a penetration level last seen in WW2.

It's four times larger than Iraq, with a much tougher terrain and they've been setting up militarily independent regions for the last 40 years specifically in case this would happen. The current operation at week 1 has already a worse public approval than the Vietnam war after 5 years of american dying in ground operations.

I'd love if they went in because it would precipitate the end the US empire by a good decade

>The current operation at week 1 has already a worse public approval than the Vietnam war after 5 years of american dying in ground operations.

Do you have a source for this? Numbers I find online vary wildly.

Edit: I found Al Jazeera was the one saying what you said, but I can't classify them as objective and accurate in this case, sorry.

If the war with Iran is indeed that unpopular we'll see at the midterms.

You can count Al Jazeera as objective and accurate, they have no interest in Iran's regime ruining the country anymore. Qatar just intercepted a bunch of Iranian missiles.

Only fundamentalist Iranians would resist like that. The regime is on very shaky ground in Iran. The avg Iranian would absolutely have a US led peace.

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