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[Robert Duigan @uMarhobane]

Really? A stalinist eurocrat wouldn't praise a US technocrat?

They literally have the exact same vision of the future - depoliticisation of society, elimination of meaningful power in democratic institutions

[yahoo @yahoolovesyou]

I think it comes from centuries of village life.

In a village you'll see the same people tomorrow and for the next forty years. Reputation is permanent, exit is impossible, and the norms get worked out so thoroughly that everyone's expected to get on board. That settledness and assuredness of the right way to act reads as European "chill."

Americans by contrast were drawn from every nation and thrown together, with no shared village norms to fall back on, so everything had to be argued out explicitly. Less elegance and subtlety, more crudeness, self-invention, practicality. A cowboy nation.

The European village didn't just hold its norms quietly, it enforced them. Look at this, "Codfish Law," Portugal's homegrown Janteloven. Look at Clavicular getting called out by random Frenchies.

Every rule is a brake on the individual: community over self, don't boast, don't act like you know more, don't disturb the harmony. This is the machinery a village uses to cut the tall poppy down. The "chill" is individual deviation being policed back into line until it goes quiet from long practice.

America escaped it not by being diverse but by being mobile: you could leave the village that knew you and start again where no one did.

Interestingly, English are the odd ones out. The island that broke village life early. Celtic Briton, Germanic Saxon, Viking Norse, French Norman piled together, a seafaring people who exported and absorbed, common law built case-by-case, the culture that invented the adversarial institutions: Parliament, the open court. America is just England with the last of the village removed.

[yahoo @yahoolovesyou]

I think it comes from centuries of village life.

In a village you'll see the same people tomorrow and for the next forty years. Reputation is permanent, exit is impossible, and the norms get worked out so thoroughly that everyone's expected to get on board. That settledness and assuredness of the right way to act reads as European "chill."

Americans by contrast were drawn from every nation and thrown together, with no shared village norms to fall back on, so everything had to be argued out explicitly. Less elegance and subtlety, more crudeness, self-invention, practicality. A cowboy nation.

The European village didn't just hold its norms quietly, it enforced them. Look at this, "Codfish Law," Portugal's homegrown Janteloven. Look at Clavicular getting called out by random Frenchies.

Every rule is a brake on the individual: community over self, don't boast, don't act like you know more, don't disturb the harmony. This is the machinery a village uses to cut the tall poppy down. The "chill" is individual deviation being policed back into line until it goes quiet from long practice.

America escaped it not by being diverse but by being mobile: you could leave the village that knew you and start again where no one did.

Interestingly, English are the odd ones out. The island that broke village life early. Celtic Briton, Germanic Saxon, Viking Norse, French Norman piled together, a seafaring people who exported and absorbed, common law built case-by-case, the culture that invented the adversarial institutions: Parliament, the open court. America is just England with the last of the village removed.

[yahoo @yahoolovesyou]

Review of Israel and Iran: The Geopolitics of the End Times

The Trojan Horse Was Liberal

Santos's piece ("Israel and Iran: The Geopolitics of the End Times") argues that the conflict can't be understood through strategy and material interest alone; that beneath the geopolitics runs a layer of religious eschatology that actually drives the combatants. He maps three: Israeli political messianism and the Third Temple current; American evangelical Christian Zionism reading the war toward Armageddon; and Iran's Twelver Shiism, where the state functions as preparation (tamhīd) for the return of the Hidden Imam. His thesis is that men sacrifice at the ultimate level for metaphysical reasons economic interest alone can't sustain, so any analysis blind to spiritual geography misses the point.

Santos reads the Western half of this conflict as religion leaking into statecraft: evangelicals, Armageddon, a divine plan rebranded as foreign policy. It is an elegant and increasingly common trope, yet it has the causation backwards. The durable engine of Western support for Israel was never Christian Eschatology. It was post-WW2 liberalism. And the eschatological frame, satisfying as it is, functions mainly to keep the audience from noticing that.

> in the United States, support for Israel is reinforced by a religious reading of history.

Reinforced, perhaps, at the margins. Generated, no. The American consensus on Israel is a postwar liberal artifact; the moral settlement of 1945, read forward by a Boomer establishment that needs no Jesus to arrive at it. The decisive power base are not the Charlie Kirk style college kids but the Washington DC establishment realists and bureaucrats whose fixed commitment is to simply rise through the ranks, sucking up to whoever currently holds the power from the top. Where the prevailing power sits, that is the center; opposing it becomes, by definition, the fringe, the extreme. This is the median establishment position in both parties, and it is secular to the bone. To trace the support back to the Book of Revelation is to mistake the loudest tributary for the river.

> sectors of so-called Christian Zionism, with an evangelical matrix, interpret support for Israel as part of a divine plan.

Here the displacement becomes visible. Christian Zionism is the favored target precisely because it is what secular liberals feel the most comfortable target of their two minutes of hate. It is foreign to the secular critic, provincial, easy to hold at arm's length. One can flog it at length and feel adversarial while leaving the actual mechanism, liberalism's own postwar sacrilization of the Holocaust, entirely untouched. It is a critique engineered to look brave while striking only where striking costs nothing. The genuinely uncomfortable observation, that the rising power of Israel in Western politics was manufactured by the critic's own liberal inheritance, not by some exotic fundamentalist fringe, never has to be made. The evangelical boogeyman is the scapegoat and decoy that protects the liberal's conscience. All of liberalism's sins and failures are directed towards this fringe element that is then ritualistically sacrificed to salve the ego.

> Figures such as televangelist John Hagee present the confrontation with Iran as part of the mission to protect Israel and fulfil biblical prophecies.

Hagee is real, and marginal to the outcome. He moves no aircraft carriers. The pastors praying in the White House are set dressing on a policy that the liberal realist center would run identically if every one of them vanished tomorrow. Foregrounding them is how an analysis signals seriousness about religion while remaining comfortably silent about ideology. The metaphysical reading flatters everyone: the writer gets depth, the audience gets a villain it was already permitted to dislike, and the structural cause walks free.

None of this denies the eschatology. It relocates it.

The liberal West has an end-times vision too; it simply refuses to call it one. Liberal eschatology is kumbaya: history terminating in universal harmony, every people reconciled, the lion lying down with the lamb minus the lion. It is no less a theology of the end for being secular, and no less fervent for being implicit.

Set beside it, the others are equally complex about what they are. Israeli eschatology was never about harmony: it is Joseph ruling in Pharaoh's land and the despoiling of Egypt on the way out, the blotting-out of Amalek, the rebellion against Rome. It is a tradition that has never pretended the end is gentle.

Iranian eschatology is stranger, a hybrid: half the same universalist-justice dream the liberal would recognize as his own, the Mahdi restoring order to the whole earth, and half a thing liberalism has carefully bred out of itself- the readiness, concentrated at the top of the structure, to martyr the self for the nation.

And there is the real dividing line, which the religion-versus-strategy frame cannot see. Every party to this conflict is eschatological. The question is only whether your vision of the end can still ask you to die for it. Israel's can. Iran's can. Liberals would also gladly die to preserve liberalism, yet their only legitimate enemy is the insider "other", the conservative, never the outsider.

The end-times reading is most useful exactly where it is least suspected: in looking in the mirror. Explaining the West to a Western audience that would rather contemplate Armageddon than its own first principles.

[Guilherme Gomes Santos @guilherme94jose]

I have finally launched my Substack, where you can now read my article "Israel - Iran: The Geopolitics of the End Times", published in English.

In the coming days, I will be posting the remaining pieces. Subscribe!

[yahoo @yahoolovesyou]

Review of Santos' "US -- China: The Battle for the last Cyborg"

The Harmony That Wasn't

Santos asks the right question and then declines to answer it. He wonders whether the United States and China, under all the civilizational rhetoric, are merely contesting variants of the same Western technical rationality. He reheats the stereotypes of the "Brutish" cavalier Americans (cowboys, yankees) vs the "Serene" East (feminine, harmonious), and legitimizes it with discussions of Qi and Dao that exists more in seminar rooms than in the street level reality of the civilizations he is discussing.

Start where the claim is checkable.

> ...whether both the United States and China, despite all their civilisational rhetoric, are merely contesting variants of the same Western technical rationality.

This claim can easily be checked. Open Google Scholar and look at who is producing different kinds of engineering or AI research. Chinese-name researchers typically publish constantly and incrementally, in dense rapid series of iterative improvements that compound into something formidable; Western researchers publishes less frequently but aims at forever hunting the next paradigm. If a cosmotechnics exists at all, it lives there, in the daily orientation of ten thousand people bent over a problem; not in five-year plans, not in warmed-over Confucius. It does in fact reveal a distinct relation to technics, but not the kind that Santos imagines. It is the logic of Shanzhai and Tall-poppy Syndrome vs the drive to explore new vistas.

> In the Taoist and Confucian thought that Yuk Hui explores, technics resembles an instrument of harmonisation rather than domination... the Dao... and the Qi...

We can grant that the Shanzhai (mountain bandit fortress) style is superficially Daoist: zoom into the real, copy, refine, decline to interrogate the bigger picture, let the chips fall where they may. In practice, to call it "harmonious" is naive in the extreme. It is cutthroat, red in tooth and claw. The liberal outside the system and the orientalist HK academic in his ivory tower both prefer Laozi sanitized for export, because the real thing is unpleasant to look at. It would be gauche to point out the messiness.

This Shanzhai, bandit capitalism, culture of china is OLD, but was rarely the stuff of philosophers, so it may have been overlooked by academics seeking beautiful orientalist things to teach about. Nonetheless, this part of Chinese civilization was indeed canonnized long ago, in Water Margin, the Outlaws of the Marsh. Westerners, Brazilians included, would understand modern China far better through that lens than through the serene Laozi they keep reaching for.

> Modern (Western) technology developed under the dominion of instrumental reason, orienting tools toward the overcoming and control of nature rather than toward a harmonious relation with it.

A tired trope and a false dichotomy: the brutish Westerner, the esoteric harmonious other. This narrative survives, one suspects, because migrants to the West are in a foreign land, so outnumbered that they must adopt peacefulnesss, passivity, yin, accommodation. Then Westerners mistake this for the traits of civilization the migrant left. Do business in their homeland, where they are the majority, and the logic inverts. Harmony there is the figleaf the strongman on top tells to the ruled to keep them quiet, to make open debate feel like bad manners. Democracies run on dialectic, on talking back; the single-party state files exactly that under disharmonious. Hold your tongue, defer to the boss, do not debate in the open.

Moreover, claiming that technology "dominating nature" is due to modern, western capitalism belies reality. Iberians and Britons ran heavily-polluting, industrial-scale tin operations around 2000 BC, before coin or capitalism, and the Chinese rerouted entire watersheds long before modernity. Nobody waited for Heidegger to start bending the world to the will.

> Xi Jinping has revived Confucianism as the soul of the nation... not the harmonisation with nature or the flourishing of cultural diversity.

To imagine Confucianism a friend of diversity is to misread it at the root. Its animating impulse is the codification of ritual, however arbitrary, toward standardization- fewer cultural forms, not more.

The tension between the Confucian drive toward standardization and hierarchy and the Shanzhai drive toward rebellion and innovation is an ancient one. Daoism itself seeks to square the circle by allowing those lower down the hierarchy enough rope to hang themselves, only intervening to set incentives and not micro-manage. The current Confucian tidying of China into clean, legible shapes and monoculture is not a betrayal of the tradition. It is the tradition, running on schedule.

All in all, the dichotomy Santos identifies should not be rationality against harmony.

Both the West and China are deeply competitive, albeit in subtly different ways. Chinese look upon the West with its open arguments, assumption that "we" can reach a common understanding, and constant paradigm innovation with skepticism and alarm.

Among Chinese, there is little assumption of Good Faith among the others. Debates are about domination, not synthesis. And yet, as Confucian hierarchy wanes and Shanzhai waxes, the conflict becomes quieter. People are placid on the surface, while pursuing their own interests or sharpening knives in silence, showing their true strength only when they are so powerful no one is left to object. Sun Tzu, not Heidegger. Water Margin, not the Tao Te Ching. The Gestell reading holds; it simply has teeth the piece preferred not to show.

Commentators in the West (or Brazil) ought turn inwards to contrast these to their own societies. The irony is that real bottom-up harmony, the decentralized kind, is far more a Catholic Brazilian inheritance than a Chinese one: the pickup band jamming together in the café, strangers talking amicably in line at the grocery store or bank.

We can always point the finger at others and decry them. But it would profit us more to, grab the bull by the horns and build the kinds of institutions that WE love and value ourselves.

And for us? It is dialectic. Good faith sharing and disagreement. It is then that we can come together and build what we are looking for on Earth.

[Guilherme Gomes Santos @guilherme94jose]

As promised, “US - China: The Battle for the Last Cyborg” is now available in English. Originally published in Spanish last month.

I’ve also launched a Substack, follow me there.

[Guilherme Gomes Santos @guilherme94jose]

Ok. A few thoughts on what Marc Andreessen is saying here. What he says is interesting.

It's true that the United States and China take different approaches to technological development, particularly at the institutional and organizational levels. The U.S. operates through a more decentralized model driven by private companies and market competition. China, by contrast, follows a far more centralized model, with the state setting strategic priorities and using technology as a tool of governance and surveillance.

But... at a deeper level, both operate within the same technological rationality. China modernized by adopting the technological categories of the West without developing a philosophy of technics rooted in its own intellectual traditions. Although Taoism and Confucianism offer a distinct conception of technics, China’s contemporary technological project is ultimately driven by the same logic that underlies the American model. It is largely compelled to do so in order to remain competitive in the global technological race.

To keep it brief, I address this topic in my latest article, “US - China: The Battle for the Last Cyborg”, which develops key points that are not transcribed here.

[ℏεsam @Hesamation]

“Anthropic is a mystery to me,

I’ve never seen a company lead its field while being so negative about what it does.

My initial theory was REGULATORY CAPTURE, and I think they’re very close to achieving that.”

Predicted 2 weeks before Fable 5 ban by Uber investor Bill Gurley.

[Sean McClure @sean_a_mcclure]

We keep seeing the odd “original AI” academic saying things like “we’re building AI wrong.” The usual @ylecun vibes.

This confuses people, because *obviously* AI is going extremely well and we’re *obviously* on the right track.

So what’s up?

This happens because the academic approach is not what led to AI success. What almost nobody wants to admit is that it was *not* fancy algorithms or deep academic thinking that pushed AI forward, it was scale. Period.

The math is old. The process is old. It’s scale made possible by entrepreneurs that led to the realization of genuine complexity that exhibits intelligence.

Academics cannot stomach this, anymore than they can accept that the free market runs on its own. Academics want to design the outcomes. They want to be the brains in the room. They want there to be super difficult and sexy problems to solve and they want to be the ones who solve them.

But that’s not how progress works. It never has. And AI is no different.

Nobody ��made AI possible.” It emerged inevitably from scale. The mathematical foundation of AI is over 300 years old.

The dissonance between what is obviously working and the so-called original academics who supposedly made it possible, is precisely because academics cannot accept that they in fact had very little to do with what we today call AI.

[Mia Bao @mialalala2]

Just watched @kaifulee 's interview on the US-China AI landscape. A few takeaways felt especially useful✌️:

1. The US is currently about 15 months ahead of China in frontier AI models.

2. Top US AI companies are like “geniuses trying to win the Nobel Prize,” while Chinese AI companies are more like “a group of smart kids forming a study group.” They still compete, but open source creates more shared learning.

3. China’s AI companies face a real monetization challenge in enterprise software. Many Chinese companies are less used to annual subscriptions or usage-based pricing, and still tend to think of software as project-based work.

4. For the same product, Western, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian companies may be willing to pay around 8x more than Chinese companies. That helps explain why many Chinese AI companies are expanding overseas.

5. China may produce many breakthrough AI consumer apps, because Chinese companies are especially strong at consumer apps, hardware, robotics, embodied AI, and AI-first devices.

6. The US may continue to lead in frontier models, while China may move faster in turning AI into products people actually use.

7. His advice for young people in the age of AI: you don’t necessarily need to become an engineer first. What matters more is accountability, taste, conviction, courage, and foresight.

More👇

[yahoo @yahoolovesyou]

Activist: "Why are you so invested poking holes in The Narrative™ "

Academic: "Isn't it important to know if the narrative is actually true or not?"

Activist: "No, I'd prefer to be outraged."

[Frances Widdowson @FrancesWiddows1]

Student: Why are you focusing on this claim?

Widdowson: Because it resulted in many things, we need to get to the truth of it.

Student: Did it have any effect on people's lives?

Widdowson: It is fundamental, because it influenced many claims, such as genocide occurring.

[The Cognitive Revolution Podcast @CogRev_Podcast]

China tells the world it doesn't need American chips.

Meanwhile, DeepSeek and Alibaba are privately lobbying Beijing to let them use American chips.

@deanwball breaks down the gap between the narrative and reality in a conversation with @labenz.

[The Cognitive Revolution Podcast @CogRev_Podcast]

Anthropic got banned for selling its model to China.🇨🇳

Except the company wasn't Chinese.❌

It was SK Telecom — South Korea's national telecom 🇰🇷, sibling of SK Hynix, which makes the HBM chips inside every Nvidia GPU.

You can't make this up. @deanwball @labenz

[Felix Lee @felixleezd]

Why I left Singapore for SF. 🇺🇸

Last week, I made a video telling Singaporeans to stop romanticizing leaving the country. It went viral. The media picked it up and sparked a national debate.

The top comment everywhere: “Then why did you leave?” Fair.

Singapore is the best-run city to live in. I didn’t leave for lifestyle. I left to learn what we’re rarely taught: how to take real risks.

In SF, failure isn’t shameful.

People quit great jobs, build something “crazy,” watch it flop, then start again... no gossip, no permanent stain. In Singapore, one failure can follow you, so we play it safe.

I wanted to live where betting on yourself is the norm. When everyone around you is building something wild, you start thinking bigger too, not because they’re smarter ���, but because nobody tells you to be “realistic.”

I needed to live somewhere where betting on yourself is the default, not the crazy option.

And it rubs off on you.

But here's the part I don't say to the media.

Singapore already the infrastructure most countries would kill for. The one thing we don't have yet is a culture that celebrates the person who tried and failed instead of judging them.

That's what I'm here to learn. And when I've learned it, I want to spread it to the world. This isn't "US vs Singapore." I just believe the best version of any is one where more of us are allowed to dream big.

Alas, America is the arena to be in.

[Richard Werner @scientificecon]

Worth listening to these WEF ideas as we try to understand the mindset of the central planners

[Mike Benz @MikeBenzCyber]

Why KOSA is a huge mistake.

[Mike Benz @MikeBenzCyber]

Riddle me this, @RoKhanna. If closing USAID could cause so many child deaths in Africa, why would the African Union's top diplomat in DC celebrate USAID's shutdown? Does she like dead babies? Is she ignorant? How else do you explain her arriving at the same conclusion as DOGE?

[yahoo @yahoolovesyou]

@IntuitMachine America is the descendent of a Christian culture. We are called to see that God's "Kingdom come, on Earth as it is in Heaven."

However, the USG is increasingly tightly controlled from tel-aviv, which has a different set of priorities & values.

[yahoo @yahoolovesyou]

@DRTnky Is this something that the youth care about too? I mostly just see finance guys believing most strongly in it, because they profitted off of ESG initiatives.

[yahoo @yahoolovesyou]

They seek to recreate the USSR minus central economic planning.

[yahoo @yahoolovesyou]

More evidence that the elite cartels that run the West are inspired to copy CCP style total surveillance and social credit scoring.

[Mololuwa | Cybersecurity - (The God Complex) @cyber_rekk]

The EU is building an age verification system that requires a passport to access adult content online

A security researcher hacked the app in under two minutes

Passport data was stored in plain text
Biometric checks were disabled without triggering any alarm

The EU's response: the app still has value even if it can be bypassed

Their solution to the bypass: discuss restricting VPNs

The proposed VPN countermeasures include blocking commercial VPN IP ranges, triangulating GPS with carrier data, and ISP-level traffic filtering

No VPN ban has been passed
The direction of travel is clear

A system built to protect children is leaking passport data and pointing toward infrastructure controls that journalists, lawyers, and dissidents depend on

They are lying
they built a surveillance system that doesn't work
and the fix is more surveillance

Tshhhhhh