RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
There's a huge distinction between a country invading an ally and a country invading a non-ally. That's the whole point of alliances. Russia doesn't throw a massive tantrum when the US invades or bombs countries that aren't Russian allies, even with borderline Russian allies like Syria they show a level of restraint. They didn't give the Syrian government Smerch or Kalibr missiles and encourage them to kill all the US troops based in Syria. They didn't start handing out Manpads in Iraq and tell them to kill every Coalition soldier they saw.
Nukes are literally just big bombs, the 'nuclear taboo' is a social construct designed to keep the little countries servile before the big powers. The US seriously considered using nukes in Korea and Vietnam, wars that were very far from the US, wars the US could afford to lose. Even then they incinerated North Korea such that the entire country was wrecked and all cities were razed, via incendiaries rather than nukes. They wrecked much of Laos and Cambodia in the Vietnam War. Yet the US is not an international pariah because the US is a strong power and has things people want.
Russia isn't a pariah today outside the world of US allies. Even amongst them trade continues just via Azerbaijan or various stans. It doesn't matter whether you kill people with 155mm shells, drones, small arms or H-bombs, it's the same outcome. Russia still has oil and people want energy, minerals, food - even in China.
There are of course disadvantages to using nuclear weapons and various risks (Ukraine assembling a dirty bomb or launching various radiological attacks amongst other things) but it's not unthinkable that Russia would go nuclear over a high-intensity conventional war right next door to them if they judged that conventional victory was unattainable. They could be used for signalling purposes to compel immediate negotiations or en masse tactically to smash offensives, wipe airfields off the map, destroy command and control or logistics hubs, for the EMP effect... These are the ultimate weapons for a reason.
The US doesn't have a monopoly on massacring people and razing cities when easy victory becomes elusive, that's not how it works.
Furthermore, it's unlikely that 'maximum aid' could even achieve that outcome. It takes a long time to train people to use Patriots, tanks, F-16s and so on. Russia could assemble large new formations and try again, just as we've seen in 2023 and 2024.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
That remains to be seen, it depends on the peace deal they get and the real casualty figures, which we don't know.
'What actually happened' is still in a state of flux from the point of view of us observers who aren't privy to the secrets of the universe. It may be that the media is broadly accurate arguing that Ukraine enjoyed favourable casualty ratios due to high-tech western weapons and clever tactics. Or it may be that they were drafting men, shoving them into a trench and basically feeding them to Grad, Mista and Kalibr to buy time, that they suffer unfavourable exchange ratios. My suspicion is that the latter is more accurate, considering the preponderance of firepower on the Russian side and strong incentives for the media to lie in favour of Ukraine. If that is the case then Russia has a winning hand, they have suffered non-trivial losses and will be inclined to impose much harsher terms given the costs endured.
Of course retaining independence is valuable but if you're giving up significant amounts of territory where much of the population lived, then it has to be considered a defeat. Finland was probably wise to fight and lose. But they still lost. That should be the expected outcome.
There is a possibility of an unarmed man inflicting significant harm on a big, strong attacker.
But this is not a general rule, it's a special exception.
Many, many, many Ukrainians would be alive if this principle was fully understood by leading figures in their government. Russia is not a totalitarian communist regime. It's not significantly more corrupt than Ukraine.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
That Trump wants the war to end with a Russian victory is not in doubt - Trump has said it
Can you back this up with a source? Has he started sending military aid to Russia? Imposed sanctions on Ukraine? Or is he in fact sending military aid to Ukraine, which would suggest that he wants Ukraine to win?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
This just isn't how Nazism works. Why didn't they exterminate the French? Because they were not in favour of 'exterminating anyone who is a potential threat to your national safety'.
You can't generalize Nazi anti-semitism out like that. Jews were considered specially, different from every other people. They didn't launch a boycott of French shops in Germany, they didn't enforce various discriminatory laws against people who married French. They didn't mark out French people in public. Jews were seen as subversive and extremely dangerous, in part due to the revolutions that Jewish communist leaders launched in 1919. The Spartacists and the Bavarian Socialist Republic for instance.
You can't understand Nazism without getting to grips with the special place that anti-semitism has in Nazi ideology. Whenever Nazis looked out at the world, they saw a global network of Jewish financiers and media working against them. Paying off Churchill's debts: Henry Strakosch. Behind Roosevelt, Harry White and Morgenthau.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
if Putin doesn't take the L and decides to go nuclear ( which he probably won't) , then you implement a no fly zone over Ukraine and merk everything with a Z on it. Sounds too risky? Well then I guess you can take half measures but don't be surprised when it backfires.
Risk management 101:
Strategy A backfires and causes some land in Eastern Europe (not part of NATO or any US treaty ally) to change hands. And some people on the internet will complain about being betrayed.
Strategy B backfires and results in the incineration of Europe and North America, hundreds of millions of deaths by fire and famine. Western civilization is finished. And Ukraine especially is finished, they are at the front line. Zero good outcome for them. There are other delightful possibilities, like a still-bloody war of tactical nukes where Ukraine and much of Eastern Europe gets wrecked but most cities survive more or less intact.
Hmm, which is preferable? How should we reduce the risk here?
Yours is a genuinely dangerous line of argument. No Russian leader would think that the US would extend its nuclear umbrella so far beyond its treaty allies in the fashion you're proposing. It makes a complete mockery of nuclear strategy to signal totally uncredible deterrence and then back it up like this. Why so cavalier about a nuclear exchange? Why should anyone in Dallas or Manchester risk being incinerated over towns nobody can even name changing hands in Donetsk? Nobody promised to do this, there was no treaty, no deterrence.
Normalizing this hyper-aggressive attitude is one of the greatest dangers to civilization on the planet. Just because Ukraine made a fatal error, it does not follow that the entire Western world needs to double down and make an even bigger blunder.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
How is it more advantageous to fight the powerful and risk losing more?
If I'm being mugged, I can hand over my wallet or I can fight. If I fight I might get beaten up and still lose my wallet. If the mugger is some 150 kg, tattooed musclebound thug known for his huge gun collection (while I am unarmed and substantially smaller), then it's very likely I'll lose. Getting helpful advice and some second-hand brass knuckles from onlookers isn't likely to change the outcome. It's likely to end with me bleeding out, unconscious on the ground.
Nothing about what's happening should be surprising. It is very rare for small states to defeat big states in industrial wars where both sides are determined to win. Observe that the conclusion of the Winter War was Finland losing all the land that the Russians demanded and more. Size matters.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Alright then, Austria and Prussia had been a menace to their neighbors in Europe for hundreds of years, and their union in the German Empire was a greater menace after that. By Hitler's logic, the Allies would have been within their rights to implement a final solution to the German problem while they had Germany at their mercy following WWI.
No, none of that is in line with Nazi ideology. Hitler had no plans to exterminate the French despite them being a massive thorn in Germany's side. He wanted to weaken the French state significantly such that they'd not be able to contest German dominance of Europe but the French people had a place in the New Order. And he wanted an alliance with Britain the entire time. According to Hitler, Western Europeans were basically fine, just misguided. Western Europeans/Aryans were not supposed to be going around exterminating eachother.
It was in the East where peoples were going to be compulsorily removed from their land, enslaved and treated harshly in various ways. And even there there's room for moderation. The Allies planned initially to treat the German nation harshly post-war in the Morgenthau plan but then moderated their stance in peacetime when they concluded it would be unhelpful.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Spending is irrelevant. The Allies won WW2 because of capabilities, not expenditure. Europe already spends a lot more than Russia does, yet this spending isn't translating into Europe performing well. The UK and Germany alone spent more in 2023, according to the dollar figures. But they're not stronger than Russia by themselves.
The problem is not 'Europe is not spending enough', which implies that Russia is somehow outspending Europe. They are not. European NATO is spending about $400 billion a year, which is far more than enough to defend themselves. It makes zero sense that $400 billion is insufficient to defend against a foe spending about $100 billion in wartime. It makes zero sense that an alliance of 600 million could be threatened by 140 million.
The problem is that European spending is being allocated wastefully and that European strategy is muddled. Raising defence spending won't fix anything, what's needed is a plan to achieve specific capabilities and integrate them into a broader political strategy.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
But where is the logic in launching such an ambitious invasion?
Why would you invade NATO so you can defend against NATO from mildly more advantageous geography?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Eurofighter
Damn, I did not realise they were only now adding AESA radars on those things, I thought they were half decent! Were they cribbing notes from Indian military procurement? Or did the Indians learn how to design aircraft from Europe and apply those lessons on the Tejas? The Rafales at least have AESA.
Yes tactical nukes are one field where I think there's a real case for further development. Poland's conventional forces won't be much good if Russia starts vaporizing them and demanding unconditional surrender, trusting that France and Britain won't risk their own infrastructure.
But it seems unlikely that either party would take such risks. Does Russia really want to subjugate some extremely unruly and recently irradiated Poles? Why would they so greatly desire to conquer the tiny Baltic states? There are potential strategic gains but huge risks.
And Europe's population is so high that they can afford to buy time with hundreds of thousands, millions of lives in low tech, defensive trench warfare. They might have readiness problems, they might have shortages of this and that. But they're so big that they have the time and space to fix this stuff and fight a long war. Russia does not have the blitzkrieg capabilities to reach the European industrial core before they can militarize. Bombing Ukraine is one thing but Russian PGM production surely isn't sufficient to bomb out the combined military industry of Europe.
Cradle is kind of xianxia but it doesn't capture the full essence of it. It feels like the characters are white, only pretending to be Asian. It's an emulation, a later Cradle scene give me a certain Marvel vibe as the good guys all portal in for a really big fight. That's appropriate, it's a Western book for Western audiences. Wight couldn't get away with race wars, sexism and what would surely be considered transphobia/homophobia like authors can in China.
Reverend Insanity is a different beast, you can tell that they're actually Chinese, playing these weird-to-us mindgames, reciting poems and so on. There's a certain level of sincerity in what happens. It feels a bit more like an open-world game in contrast to Cradle, where our MC is going through set-piece after set-piece, clearing chapter after chapter to reach his goals. For example:
In Cradle the tournament arc takes a whole book, as our heroes march on through to get the mcguffin, training and powering up, developing their character as necessary. They might cheat a little but the other side cheats harder and still loses, they are the bad guys after all.
In RI there are two tournament arcs. In the latter our MC is called in as back-up for his partner-of-convenience, ignores the call for a few weeks and only shows up (on his 4th fake identity) with a sneaky, devious, obnoxiously dishonourable plan to kill this one guy and make off with his soul and looted corpse, even if he has to get kicked out of the sect to execute the plan. The tournament wasn't over a mcguffin, it was about relieving political tensions from an earlier crisis and the big players giving lip service to Longevity Heaven's Edict. Our MC is not developing his character and heroically trusting in the power of friendship, he's an assassin ruthlessly optimizing his chance at success. Then he decides to strike while the iron is hot and ambush a few more people elsewhere before heading off to kill and impersonate someone on the other side of the world.
There's also a thematic level too with the Ren Zu interludes, it's not without literary merit IMO. Later on there's a big struggle over fate, whether the natural order decreed by fate is good, whether it inhibits freedom or protects humanity/the world, what sacrifices are needed to uphold it... It's a reflection of Cradle in that respect, though our MC takes the matter into his own hands.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
IMO it's more like the British and the French but worse in some respects.
Germany wanted land, demanded it and then took it when Poland refused to hand it over. Russia wanted land, found a pretend excuse, went in and took it. The straightforwardness of the robber.
Britain and France promised to protect Poland and launched the lamest offensive imaginable, into the Saar, before retreating back to the Maginot line. They clearly had no plan to save Poland from Germany and refused to even declare war on Russia (which was a wise move). They made promises that they couldn't keep but never even dreamed of demanding Polish resources as recompense for military assistance.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
According to the Telegraph, the US is planning to turn Ukraine into a colony: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/02/17/revealed-trump-confidential-plan-ukraine-stranglehold/
Donald Trump’s demand for a $500bn (£400bn) “payback” from Ukraine goes far beyond US control over the country’s critical minerals. It covers everything from ports and infrastructure to oil and gas, and the larger resource base of the country.
The agreement covers the “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine”, including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure (as agreed)”, leaving it unclear what else might be encompassed. “This agreement shall be governed by New York law, without regard to conflict of laws principles,” it states.
So Ukrainian courts are no longer in control. Reasonable from a certain point of view but well into 'unequal treaty' territory.
The US will take 50pc of recurring revenues received by Ukraine from extraction of resources, and 50pc of the financial value of “all new licences issued to third parties” for the future monetisation of resources. There will be “a lien on such revenues” in favour of the US. “That clause means ‘pay us first, and then feed your children’,” said one source close to the negotiations.
It states that “for all future licences, the US will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals”. Washington will have sovereign immunity and acquire near total control over most of Ukraine’s commodity and resource economy. The fund “shall have the exclusive right to establish the method, selection criteria, terms, and conditions” of all future licences and projects. And so forth, in this vein. It seems to have been written by private lawyers, not the US departments of state or commerce.
Now it is the Telegraph, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. Still it's extremely obnoxious behaviour from America. First it's "You have a bright future in the West. Come on, we'll totally let you into NATO. Just draft a few million more men, victory is near!". And then it's "hand over all your resource wealth, quickly now. Trusting us was a fatal mistake." If this is the case, then America doesn't even have the straightforward dignity of stabbing a man in the front and robbing him, it's pure villainy: trick him into an unwinnable fight, then demand he empty his pockets.
Talk about debt trap diplomacy!
Why is everyone so obsessed with military spending, especially as a % of GDP?
We constantly hear complaints that Europe isn't meeting its 2% defence spending targets. Or Trump wants them to reach 5%.
Defence spending is a basically meaningless number that has only a very tenuous relationship with capabilities, which actually matter. The Taliban did not outspend America in Afghanistan. North Korea could thrash Australia (our defence budget approaches 60-70% of North Korean GDP according to those who invent these numbers) in a war. They have ICBMs and H-bombs, we could barely reach them and couldn't do any damage. Russia has a smaller economy than Italy according to the GDP calculators. But in terms of capabilities...
What is it that Europe needs that they don't have? Ammunition? Then build ammunition factories. Shell factories should be cheap, this is WW2-era technology. Drones? Then build drone factories. Defence spending seems to usually translate into ludicrously expensive purchases of equipment from the United States, which is why the Americans want it constantly raised.
In reality Europe doesn't need any additional militarization. The European half of NATO has about 2 million troops, a population of about 600 million. If Russia is struggling to burn through Ukraine's male fighting age population, how are they supposed to cut down 20x more? How is Russia supposed to man a frontline from Turkey to Finland? How is Russia supposed to contest huge navies with submarines and aircraft carriers? How is Russia supposed to deal with large and powerful air forces, Eurofighters and F-35s? Why would Russia attack such a gigantic, powerful, nuclear-armed alliance?
The European half of NATO alone has the power to smash Russia's conventional forces and force them to fall back on nuclear weapons, where they Russia has a considerable superiority. No additional militarization is needed. There's plenty of room for defence cuts, unless Europe plans on helping the US fight China, nuclear war with Russia or further wrecking in the Middle East.
Talk of defence spending should be wound down and replaced by talk of what specific capabilities are needed to achieve specific objectives. Is it necessary to build fortifications in Lithuania? Do airbases need to be hardened against drones? Anything but 'lets throw billions of dollars in the general direction of these schlerotic military bureaucracies that consistently fail to deliver success'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Not everything that comes out of China is tasteless, they produce plenty of good stuff.
Wukong and Marvel Rivals are good, though they're not my kind of game. There's Genshin Impact which is pretty good though again, gacha isn't my thing. How is that not tasteful? They made up a huge original fantasy world that captivates millions of people just like Star Wars. Mechabellum and Dyson Sphere Program are quite strong in the strategy genre, which is my thing. There are a bunch of Chinese mods for even fairly obscure games like Star Sector that got translated back into English for people for people to play here. You can't make game mods without craftsmanship, nobody does that seeking a profit.
And there are plenty of good translated Chinese novels, as mentioned downthread. The Three body problem series for one, how is that not tasteful or sophisticated? It dares to break some conventions and says that treehugging and spiritualism isn't such a great idea, let's embrace technology. It points out that men are getting more effeminate and soft over time and projects this trend into the future in a mildly unsettling way. It has a wide range of original ideas in an expansive universe, truly alien aliens...
China is a very big country! You can't judge the entire output of such a huge country from a single film. It's like watching the highest grossing American movie Avatar, and concluding that all American culture is CGI moralist slop with no deeper meaning or value than 'empathetic scientists good, mining and military bad'. And maybe there are a few exceptions.
If someone came to that conclusion about the US you'd assume they had an axe to grind against America. There is more to American film than Avatar, there is horror, comedy, superheroes, romance, oscarbait... There is more to American culture than one Hollywood film, as we all know because America projects their entertainment all around the world. Plus a huge number of non-Americans speak English.
China doesn't project its culture all around the world, much of it is never translated (especially smaller, niche products). So you see a bunch of slop like Honour of Kings (Chinese DOTA) and some gems and think 'oh it's mostly slop with some exceptions' because you never see the niche products in the first place. They're not vomited out at you by a gigantic global media system. You don't look for them and they might not be in English (or have a lame sounding name like Honour of Kings). You get the equivalent of Chinese Avatar and Call of Duty, never see Chinese Homestuck or Worm or Factorio. And you hear about some Chinese gems but never see a gem in your own preferred areas.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
We live in one of two worlds:
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The Secret Service was genuinely trying to protect Trump and were so clownishly incompetent that people in the crowd were warning them about a guy with a gun going up onto the roof but still let him take his shots. Men With Guns are supposed to be their forte, this is the one thing they're not supposed to let happen. Why wasn't there a drone or something providing overwatch? How hard can it be?
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The Secret Service/Deep State was trying to kill Trump and chose some MKUltra victim who wasn't a good shot, as opposed to something like a drone or a precision mortar strike which would at least be reasonable for them to heroically fail to intercept. Intercepting drones is hard.
Either way they don't come off as very capable.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Quite right, the infamous Salo Thread on HIV has extracts from a book where certain gays compared closing the bathhouses they were using to have lights-out orgies to gas chambers.
We can never criticize the genre-unawareness of zombie movie protagonists when stuff like this happened in real life:
Many members from the gay community were at that meeting. Bobbi Campbell, who was already infected with AIDS, was standing at the back. I remember at least three members of the gay community, nude, just with towels around them, holding signs that said, "Today the baths; tomorrow the ovens." They meant that, if we let you close the baths on us, next thing you'll quarantine us, then we'll be in jail, then you'll destroy us, like a Hitler. It was very, very extreme.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Unapologetic whataboutism is the best kind. It's no good when people say 'I decided the subject of discussion will be something that paints me in a good light and you in a bad light. No it's actually a fallacy if you try and do the reverse'. The rhetorical tool of whataboutism favours those with the bigger megaphone, those with agenda-setting power.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
The Chinese social credit system is hugely overrated in intensity. You don't really lose Social Credit quantitatively if you're late to dinner like Noah Smith seems to have thought: https://x.com/pretentiouswhat/status/1780129054240510461
Most of the obtrusive stuff the Chinese state does is just the same old heavy-handed policing but with modern surveillance technology. If they don't like you the police will bring you in to 'drink tea' with them and mess with you. If you dissent on the internet they can get rid of your content the old fashioned way, with human/machine censors. East Germany didn't need social credit to be totalitarian and neither does China. The strongest anti-Chinese arguments shouldn't be social-credit related.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
That is a good, thought-provoking response. My primary concept of libertarianism is pursuit of a smaller state which just does less in all domains generally. The Britain of 1900 vs the Britain of 1950 for instance. One of the most important liberties strikes me as not getting dragged away by draft officers, heading off to fight and possibly die in a trench somewhere. Or having to pay high taxes (which are needed for powerful armies). Reason-magazine libertarianism might be seen as inauthentic by other schools of thought I guess but it does seem like libertarianism.
There's nothing inherent in libertarian philosophy that requires a low state capacity for dealing with external threats
With regards to state-capacity libertarianism, I have fewer complaints. It does lead to an increasingly expansive definition of military capacity though. You obviously want to have state arsenals and dockyards, that expands out into investments in steel and chemicals, support for heavy industry and power plants, technical education in schools... At some point it merges with a nationalist state's military-industrial complex. It's a basically continuous spectrum. But at the far end you end up with China's five year plans to develop strategic industries and huge state investments to reorient the economy on autarchic lines, inculcate patriotism and nationalism into the youth and it can hardly be called libertarian. They've clearly passed some key threshold a long time ago.
libertarian attitudes thrive in places like the Anglo-Scotch border region, the Comanche tribes of North America, I hear perhaps Somalia
Was the Anglo-Scottish border really that bad? It was bad by British standards. Most of Britain was pretty peaceful. There was long-term low intensity violence. Likewise with the American westwards expansion.
But it was not extremely severe violence. The Native Americans could not produce 80,000 troops seemingly out of nowhere and ride up to besiege Boston like the average steppe horde circa 500 AD. Cities weren't being razed to the ground. It was not the kind of violence that threatens national extermination if you lose - it was that for the natives, not the Europeans. In Eastern Europe you had cities getting razed and countries getting wiped off the map all the time. In Asia you had steppe nomads showing up and exterminating whole countries. Or they'd install themselves as the leaders and conduct humiliation rituals. Small kin groups and decentralized defence works against a small tribe of natives but will not hold back the Mongols, Goths or Manchu.
I think there's a certain kind of sympathy Anglos think we have with the Eurasian powers. In Australia we have ANZAC Day and bands playing The Last Post, there's a lot of mythologizing. In the US there's supporting the troops and so on. But our wars are nearly always fought overseas and/or against much weaker opponents. In WW2 we lost 0.5% for Australia and 0.3% for the US. Not 17% like Poland or 13% like the Soviet Union. That is a totally different kind of warfare.
Doing what the US did in WW1/2 and switching from huge civilian industry to wartime industry when war arrives is a privilege of geography and size. In 1941 the US Army was smaller than the Portuguese army, that just wouldn't work in Eurasia. The most important thing for winning a huge struggle like WW2 is being big, industrialized and resource-rich, military efficiency and ideology is secondary. If the US had to cope with having negligible oil production like Germany, a population 50% lower, shortages of iron, nickel, chromium and just about everything except coal... German victory in Europe would be hard to avoid.
Germany is the heartland of the Anglo-Saxons (who, if memory serves, were noted in antiquity for their egalitarian attitudes) and (almost) the geographical home of the Austrian school of economics!
Germany is also the home of Prussian enlightened absolutism and militarism, von Schleicher's Military State, Marxism and national socialism itself, I don't think it can necessarily be claimed as a bastion of libertarianism. It's certainly not a very libertarian state today and wasn't historically, aside from the Holy Roman Empire period.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Britain does have an aircraft carrier and enough H-bombs to put a real dent in any country on the planet. The weakest of the strong powers is still a strong power.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
To a certain extent sure, but it's usually only very sheltered peoples that embrace libertarianism. The British avoided the need for a large standing army because of their geography. The US enjoyed the luxury of having no strong powers in their entire hemisphere. Neither power ever really suffered at the hands of any foreign forces like the less fortunately positioned countries.
If you tried libertarianism in central Europe or Asia, then you're in for some really bad experiences. Germany - 25% dead in the Thirty Years War. Unity is strength, be the hammer not the anvil. Poland -- annexed because they weren't strong and autocratic enough. Decisive, central leadership has its virtues. China - massive crises and disasters with tens of millions dead whenever the state shows weakness. Don't show any weakness.
What is the libertarian response to a bunch of bandits coming over the hill? There's more of them then there are of you. They're bandits, they're professional robbers and you're an amateur homestead defender. You need numbers, you need preparation, you need professionals, you need a state to fight them off. The only way to be without those things is if people are benign and don't decide to repress you in the first place. In fact the bandits could make their own state as stationary bandit. They become the nobles that own all the land that you pay taxes to, they provide protection. Either way you lose freedom if there are enough bad people.
Sometimes I wonder whether our world is in the slow lane regarding technological growth, whether we really tapped all the resources we could.
What if eugenics really took off and there were breeding programs for geniuses like how China breeds tall basketball players? What about cloning? Or genetic engineering? Or encouraging high fertility amongst the most productive in society? Or just throwing more of our elite talent and capital into the sciences?
The 'overpopulation' meme hit us really hard.
Also, China was definitely in the slow lane in our timeline, right? How does it go much worse for them than our timeline? By virtue of size and demographics they're always supposed to be one of the strongest powers on earth. Only thing I can think of is Japan going in and wrecking them with gas and/or bioweapons while the Europeans are distracted.
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