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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Went over Noah's recent twitter posts and he's as bad as I remember. Recounted here:

https://www.themotte.org/post/1160/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/250998?context=8#context

He's just all over the place. He wants to comment on cyberwarfare capabilities in China, but I doubt he has knowledge in that area.

Then on U.S. energy production policy.

Then on Haitian migrants in Ohio.

But makes glaring errors in each comment, and that's just the ones I semi-randomly picked as examples.

This is the stuff you GENERALLY don't get from Zeihan, Silver, or Scott, they wouldn't make STRONG claims well outside their area of expertise and then fail to back up any of it.

Yud, well, his whole thing is that AGI is likely to kill off humanity and he's seeing more and more signs he feared might arise and yet few people seeming to care, it must be a bit of a living nightmare for the guy.

His book is a good example, where it's stated as a prediction rather than a highly unlikely worst-case scenario. Funnily enough, Noah had the same critique as I did.

I also read Zeihan's book and skimming that review I'm not even sure Noah understand the arguments. He makes the following statement:

There’s also the strong possibility that China — the only state capable of overthrowing U.S. power by force — will choose to cooperate with the U.S. to keep the sea lanes open, simply because of the catastrophic consequences to China of not doing so (which Zeihan vividly describes). Ultimately, Zeihan’s predictions of global anarchy rely on countries collectively making decisions that are utterly disastrous for themselves.

But he earlier grants that "The first of these [demographic collapse] is probably unavoidable." So he's accepting the premise that Zeihan uses there!

And Zeihan's whole point is that China is in such rapid, terminal demographic decline that they will collapse entirely on their own, with or without U.S. keeping the sea lanes open, so unless you can explain why a Chinese collapse WON'T happen, then 'U.S.-Chinese Cooperation' is not a viable solution because there won't be any China to cooperate with.

I don't know how a guy can miss or ignore points this badly without it being intentional. the reason countries will collectively make decisions that are disastrous for themselves is that they won't have much choice once the demographics collapse forces their hand!