Tonic Discussions - Ep005 - WWIII
Are we on the verge of WWIII? Or has it already started? Who will be, or are, the belligerents? What are their victory conditions? What are their strategies and tactics? Who’s got the best chance of winning? And which will prove to be more decisive: magic, or faith?
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, , , , , and me as we get deep into the spiritual and philosophical implications of the next - or ongoing - great power war, on Youtube:Or on Spotify:
The spiritual war aspect of this has some resonance for me. I'm not (very, conventionally) religious, but one thing that I've sort of kept faith in is the fundamental *lawfullness* of reality. Whatever the particulars of our circumstances are, they have some identity, and the moves we make within them have the consequences that they have. And ultimately, we are all playing with the same matter in the same world with the same rules.
The "magic" thing sort of touches on this. The real nightmare, for me, is sort of this: Is the world really just some dream-shifty plaything of "special" people that get to make shit up, change the entire nature of the world, and the rest of us just have to scramble to adapt? Their lies don't matter, because tHeY WiN, period, unconditionally, doesn't matter, full stop.
You can have people who do honorable, real, useful work (usually in the world of matter) that other people need, and they get crushed and dominated, bankrupted by assholes who just have infinite money in their bank acounts, while the balance in yours is whatever they need it to be to humiliate you. LOL, you should have been born special.
You can grind away for more than half of your life, piling up skills that attempt to address the world we find ourselves in - math, engineering, physics, etc. Only, LOL, the world doesn't need you anymore, it needs some enfant terrible from (whatever-connections) that can make shit up. They stand astride the world like a collossus, and you have to scramble for scraps.
You can develop artistic talents only to have someone train a neural network on your work and put you out of work, even though their stupid model has no comprehension of *objects in space*, much less the world the art was attempting to address. But suddenly your hard won skills are useless. The model's output is unusable garbage, a mockery of your style staring back at you, but it doesn't matter, ThEy WIN, yOU LoSe.
You can fight for a decent cause for a decent nation, only suddenly LOL, nope, it's an evil cause and a lunatic nation. You can go to bed in a country that reveres personal liberty, and wake up in 1984, where everyone is seeking to turn their neighbor in for failing to inject their kids with poison.
Their shameless stupid lies are more true than your knowledge. More true than the truth. What do they need morals or decency or creativity or intelligence for, the world simply bends to their will? Suddenly glitches to their will? What is the use of a mind in such a world? What is the point of existing in such a world? What do you do when *reality itself is a lie* and an affirmation of the glory of the liars?
There is this chess game though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSCNW1OCk_M
ChatGPT vs Stockfish. Stockfish is an actual chess AI. ChatGPT gets to make up the state of the world. It's insane. It doesn't need to be sane, it can cheat. And it still somehow loses, because it's insane. Stockfish just keeps grinding away, making whatever it can out of whatever situation it finds itself in.
I don't believe these spoiled monsters can actually rule the world with "magic". But clownworld is like a desert - a desert with scarecly a drop of reality to be found. But we exist - we exist as conscious beings with minds built to deal with a world that is *real*, that has ontological inertia, so reality has to be out there somewhere.
A very satisfying discussion which I found stimulating.
Mark Bisone's comments on unconventional weapons were spot on. The reliance on unconventional force is a function of American industrial weakness and the changing racial composition of the population (too few white boys to sacrifice en masse as was once traditional). Think Machiavelli's 'fox' strategy (cunning) taking priority over the 'lion' strategy (audacity). A regime with a weakening base of support cannot afford traditional mobilisation of the masses (either militarily or politically). So in warfare they opt for special forces, psy ops, info wars, wonder weapons. In politics they aim to demobilise the masses and keep them docile and demoralized.
The simultaneous application of these strategies on a planetary basis is now underway.