how to derail a civilization

playing on high move lookahead

one of the surest ways to lose a game is to play against an opponent who can think more moves into the future than you can and who orchestrates a deep game on timescales that are in excess of your consideration. you’ll see small moves and fail to grasp their significance. you may even think you’re gaining advantage when, in fact, your one move look ahead is about to get you into serious trouble against someone who has already mapped out the next nine.

this gets doubly dangerous when playing against someone who has a fuller or stronger concept of the game than you have. as a certain point, you’re not even in the game at all.

this gets hopelessly magnified by the fact that those who only think one move ahead or in first order effects are rarely good at conceiving of others who can do such things. they tend not to believe in it. then they lose. and call it luck. because it’s easier than realizing how badly you were outplayed.

there is a fascinating science fiction trilogy (one of the most interesting and original i’ve read in years) called “the three body problem.” this is reference to a longstanding math issue around the complex interactions of three bodies’ gravitational fields and the lack of a general case solution to how they will wind up moving even if you know their initial positions and velocities.

i won’t ruin the whole sweep of it for you, but wish to foreground one fascinating aspect that may play a little bit of a spoiler (so be warned).

an alien race seeking to (at a point in the distant future as the travel time is large) colonize earth decides to be sure that they will succeed when they arrive by preventing earth from developing the capability to fight them. the key technology they possess (and we do not) is dimensional understanding and folding/unfolding. they fire subatomic particle sized computers at earth that arrive and then set about subtly thwarting/manipulating the results of all our high energy particle colliders. this is to prevent earth from getting the real data it needs to make the next major jumps of science and compete with the invaders. effectively, it freezes our technological level in place and prevents us from progressing. if all your data is bad, you’re going nowhere.

it’s a nasty, subtle idea.

the author of the book is cixin liu and the book was originally written in chinese. and this is telling. because this is not a western way of thinking. but it’s a very chinese one.

from ideas like the “hundred year marathon” to the deliberate penetration of universities, companies, and government to extract knowledge and intellectual property, the chinese government thinks in timeframes an order of magnitude past those of the west. they think of themselves as “the middle kingdom” below heaven but above the barbarous “rest of humanity.”

they too have a belief in a kind of “manifest destiny.”

and they too play nasty, subtle games.

so do other asiatic nations.

now imagine you wanted to play this same “alien long-game” with another superpower who you desire and feel duty bound to supplant as global hegemon.

how do you weaken them?

how do you lock them in pace and render them unable to progress or compete with you?

because it sure seems like “destroying the fidelity of their education and educational systems” would be a fine place to start. so too would be “destroying their faith in sound technologies and convincing them to chase absurd, malfunctioning ones.”

there is a fascinating confluence of “green” parties, especially anti-nuclear activism, and funding from various communist sources.

even the EU parliament has started asking questions.

so has NATO

and even the ever gormless US congress

and it goes back much further to vilifying nuclear and making what is, in reality, about the overall safest most effective power source known into something the west is too fearful to pursue or advance choosing to bet instead on the slow energy suicide of pretending that wind and solar are real grid scale options and that fossil fuels are killing the world, that fracking is somehow a grave risk, and that burning wood is carbon neutral. (it’s not)

these are the things taught in school as matters of basic canon and the “science is settled” gang that may not be disputed likes to get its new cultists young. this is now grade school level doctrine to be taught, taught, and taught some more, drilled through repetition and struggle sessioned into those who disagree.

and guess who has been “interfering in schools?”

now, the thing about this sort of meddling is that it works like cockroaches. for every one you see, there are hidden legions behind them. how big is this really? who knows? but this is clearly the nasty, subtle, long-game.

and, of course, one of the big proponents and enablers of/fixers for the belt and road initiative is none other than hunter biden.

joe’s brother james appears potentially involved as well.

what’s honestly most surprising here is not that politicians are being bought and paid for or that china is happy to do so but rather how embarrassingly cheaply it can be done. this is not even “dynastic wealth” kind of bribes and sinecures. it’s a few tens of millions. chump change by modern business standards and indistinguishable from zero to a nation state of any size or wealth. it’s sort of sad really.

but when these same people start telling us that they must censor us and prevent or from seeing or saying the wrong things “for our own good” as though they inhabit some exalted and enlightened positions as opposed to being the agents of selling us down the river, well, then that which might have been sad becomes grotesque.

it’s literal propaganda. it’s soviet style suppression and maoist struggle sessions pretending to be “the science.” are we seriously going to pretend that it is not a coincidence that when you scratch off the patina of green or woke on these movements that you find the red of marxist dogma underneath? is is just another big ol’ co-ink-i-dink that these same folks endlessly accuse their enemies of the precise foreign influence of which they themselves seem to be so deeply under the sway?

it does make one wonder if there is someone pulling the strings here…

always accusing the innocent of their own atrocities…

if you wanted a weapon to destroy a society, how could you improve upon the confluence of carbon obsession and woke? you’ll make them poor. you’ll convince them that math is racist. you’ll pit group against group, make a muddle of sexuality, vilify child rearing, and have everyone so furious fighting over and politicizing nothing that they’ll barely notice their demographic decline, their school scores sliding, their science stultifying and politicizing, and their family structures dissolving. you’ll have them clamoring for truth ministries and ideological purity over fact.

if you’ve got a nastier playbook than that, i’d love to hear it.

we can argue about just how capable these plans and planners really are and whether they started all this or just saw an opening and leaned in, but ask yourself: what if they are doing this deliberately?

consider the possibility that this is not a system breaking but rather one working as intended. (it’s just not our system. it’s one aimed at us as a weapon.)

consider the possibility that the reason that these ideologies break everything they touch is that they were designed to as some sort of societal universal solvent. (and note that it’s certainly not stuff china or russia would allow at home)

we can argue about who schemed what and who is an unwitting dupe or useful idiot, but this is not terribly germane to the way it’s playing out or into whose hands it’s playing us and ours.

consider the possibility that this is not the winnie the pooh you want your kids tuning into…