A scathing review of the West.

[enchanted]

This video is about the decline of the West and BRICS.

[LordFall]

What are the main points and what do you think about them? 

[Lyubov]

BRICS... lol

You mean China, and yeah a multi-polar world seems to be emerging. 

[Raze]

I don’t see it. Russia has majorly declined from the Ukraine war. The US has far more wealth than China still, meanwhile China has major fertility decline and is surrounded by US allies it has major issues with.

[oldhandle]

USA is cooked, how could anyone possibly think otherwise just cuz they have money

[Lyubov]

14 hours ago, oldhandle said:

USA is cooked, how could anyone possibly think otherwise just cuz they have money

Because China doesn’t make anything original. They are a giant workshop. They do not innovate. They do this incredibly well though and have definitely come a long way no doubt. China has just as much if not more poverty than the USA and their surveillance state is incredibly expensive to maintain and comes at a great cost to the human soul. Western democracies also are facing a huge inflection point and challenges. We have basically seen the limits of stage orange capitalism and when a society faces issues like this they usually want to create an idea of the past being better and regress to an earlier stage instead of venturing into the unknown (green). Keep in mind China is not remotely developed enough to lead the world. If anything their form of government and world view fill in where the USA retracts, but doesn’t really offer solutions nor rules based leadership. There’s a reason the USA has the reach and treaties that it does (also in decline). What we should expect is the USA ceding power and influence and the world operating from 2-3 poles. A China lead center of power, a European one, and then a USA one. Russia and India will also fill in some of the power vacuum too.  

Edited yesterday at 02:18 PM by Lyubov

[Eskilon]

19 minutes ago, Lyubov said:

Because China doesn’t make anything original. They are a giant workshop. They do not innovate.

Lmao you cant be serious about this. This is pop news from the west demonizing China.

The developed part of china: Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities/states is decades ahead of the US in infrastructure and tech. Not just the USA but any western place.

 

Edited yesterday at 02:33 PM by Eskilon

[Hojo]

@EskilonShow me anything that proves this. I see a bunch of their buildings collapsing after 6 years.

Edited yesterday at 05:42 PM by Hojo

[Eskilon]

@Hojo Look up their railway and metro systems, train technology, ai development, space exploration tech, roads infrastructure, urban planning design, public spaces, architecture, airports, and much more. Compare it to the west and you will see.

Edited yesterday at 06:05 PM by Eskilon

[Hojo]

@EskilonIve used their AI music generator and it sucks. Their ai is more censored than ours.

How are their roads highly developed? I have seen their architecture crumble after 6 years.

Their urban planning sucks you dont even know if you are on the ground or not. They have trains that go through apartment buildings where people live.

I very rarely see building just fall over in the west. I don't think I've ever seen it.

I saw they built a bridge in China that collapsed in a week. 

Edited yesterday at 06:31 PM by Hojo

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

On 26. 11. 2025 at 11:15 PM, Raze said:

Russia has majorly declined from the Ukraine war.

Russia seems to keep miraculously losing incredible amounts of troops and materiel, its economy keeps sinking deeper into the gutter, and yet somehow, just as miraculously, Ukraine keeps giving up ground, unable to mount any successful offensive or retake its lost territories. So I don’t know how to feel about this narrative anymore. I’m not saying it’s wrong per se, the losses have to be significant, but clearly not significant enough. And if Russia tried its luck with other countries in the rest of Eastern Europe, I have very little faith that Western Europeans would be willing or able to help, let alone the US. A repeat of 1938 in the form of empty promises, only to bitch out in 1939, we already have a historical precedent for that

[zazen]

- Leading the world doesn't mean leading in the way the West has and has felt entitled to (Western exceptionalism) with some missionary zeal. States can lead through industrial capacity, logistics, trade corridors, technological innovations etc.  It doesn't mean imposing its moral framework onto others - which the West makes synonymous with ''leading''.  China doesn't trade with African nations with strings attached for them to accept a neo-liberal framework - which is why they'd rather deal with China than the West in the first place.

- On innovation. Every civilization builds upon others - civilization is cumulative. Japan copied from the West, Korea from Japan, US from UK for its early industrial base. UK and Europe colonially plundered the world and built on top adding their own ingenuity and genius. It's not just who copied who but who takes and builds further upon the shoulders of giants.

- We need to look at trajectory and not just where things stand today. China has the largest science and tech talent pool in the world. The pipeline of STEM graduates is insane. They're filing a lot of patents and already leading in key areas: https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-technology-tracker/

'The Critical Technology Tracker is a large data-driven project that now covers 64 critical technologies spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas. It provides a leading indicator of a country’s research performance, strategic intent and potential future science and technology capability.''

The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–20074 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies.

https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/23/how-china-is-outperforming-the-united-states-in-critical-technologies/

BRICS+ isn't some coordinated mass uprising against the old imperial guard of the West. It's more pragmatically a coming together to equalise the global order in such a way as to not have 15% of the world population dictate to 85% of the world through the institutional leverage these colonial legacy powers have had and maintained till today. The ability to uni-laterally call the shots is what is fading. This doesn't meant the West is going to collapse or the US won't be a super power - it just won't be THE superpower. Some countries will fair better than others - Europe will stagnate most likely closer to how Japan has been the past decades, whilst US still has plenty of strong fundamentals.

On 27/01/2025 at 3:36 PM, zazen said:

 

We're in a world of transition and it's also not guaranteed what way things will go. Things will be turbulent - especially with the advent of AI. 

There's actually not many countries who are equipped to handle that turbulence. If (perhaps when) AI causes mass job displacement at a rate that economies are unable to replace those jobs - it's the countries which have competence, cohesion (social/cultural unity) and containment ability (state capacity to contain the excesses of capital and private interest that serve themselves above the national interest) - that will cope better. Small Nordic countries, Gulf monarchies, Singapore, China come to mind immediately. The world looks to be on the precipice of transforming faster than most states can transform themselves to keep pace.

The baseline of humanity may raise in the end with all these innovations, but there will be wide variation and friction on the way there. If a country and culture is allergic to the idea of state intervention (due to liberal freedoms, libertarian impulse) they will resist the much needed coordination and authority that only a state structure could provide to stabilize society among all the changes on the horizon. If the state is captured by private interests and capital elites (US for example) - will they wrestle with the state needing to reign them in and tax them enough to replace the lost incomes their tech companies will bring? There is going to need to be an inversion in that dynamic - state controlling capital rather than the other way round.

But when a system has been captured already, it's much harder to reverse things until a breakdown of that system and a re-building with a proper hierarchy in place of what the state is for and its role - which is the service of the people and the containment of private interests (capital) when they grow unchecked.  Right now, when China checks capital (notoriously Ali Baba) the West cries authoritarian. Liberalism's Achilles heel is that it’s scared of looking illiberal. And this is due to some juvenile notions of freedom of the individual - a flat binary 2D way of thinking about freedom without much context for a much wider framework of freedoms within which the individual is embedded. This will have to change and things will need to become much more holistic rather than crowning the individual and freedom as the apex values - no serious society can build cohesively and sustainably upon such values.

Edited 2 hours ago by zazen

[zazen]

22 hours ago, Hojo said:

Their urban planning sucks you dont even know if you are on the ground or not. They have trains that go through apartment buildings where people live.

That's one city your talking about - Chongquing. If anything that shows the engineering capacity to build a city in a place nature wouldn't so easily allow. We marvel at road networks in Switzerland cutting through mountains but in China its ''urban planning sucks'' lol. 

22 hours ago, Hojo said:

I very rarely see building just fall over in the west. I don't think I've ever seen it.

I saw they built a bridge in China that collapsed in a week. 

It's incompatible for China to be the logistical manufacturing hub of the world and have universally poor roads of which those logistics depend on.

Chinas consumed more concrete in a few years than the US used in the entire 20th century. The scale of build up is enormous - including the time-scale its all done within. Of course there's going to be viral failures and corruption here and there where standards are dropped or sub-standard materials are used. In the West not a whole lot is being built anywhere near this level. When new things finally get approved they act like its a big achievement - for example in the UK we just got the go ahead for another runway at Heathrow Airport that was deliberated over many years and will cost over £40 billion (will go over budget as always and not be on time) lol meanwhile: 

 

 

Also, what my above comment was talking about regarding containment of parasitic financial elites and steering private capital away from speculation and towards more productive domains. Here is what I mean: 

On 1/28/2025 at 7:54 AM, zazen said:

A interesting and related tweet from Arnaud :

“To me, the most fascinating aspect of Deepseek is the fact it stemmed from a hedge fund, a mere few months after China "cracked down" on the levels of compensation in the finance industry.

It's also incidentally an important reason why the U.S. will struggle to compete with China.

Let me explain.

First of all, worth mentioning that this was predictably, as for most Chinese initiatives, presented by Western media as a terrible move- "why would China do this to the poor innocent bankers" . As usual they didn't even try to reflect on why China would do this: as we all know, all Chinese initiatives are always completely mindless and "crackdowns" are just what the Communist party does for fun...

The actual reason this was done, I believe, is that China looked at the West - the U.S. in particular - and saw the overbearing importance of the finance industry at the expense of the real economy. And in particular they saw that the country's most brilliant graduates from the very best Ivy League schools went to work for the increasingly parasitic finance industry instead of working on stuff that actually made society move forward.

Bloomberg lamented below that the "crackdown" would "fuel an industry brain drain" and yes, that was precisely the point: China doesn't want those who can most contribute to society to spend their careers building ever more senseless financial derivative products or new ways to trade crypto. It doesn't mean they don't want a finance industry, it does serve a purpose, just not one that becomes such a drain on society, in particular in terms of capturing the country's best talents. China would rather have them working on stuff like... artificial intelligence.

And lo and behold, fast forward a few months, and you suddenly have hedge fund geniuses who found a new calling in AI. Too good a coincidence not to see a correlation there.

This is something that would arguably be very hard for the U.S. to do, where capital is very much in control: an industry that becomes extremely wealthy, even if largely detrimental to broader societal goals, becomes difficult to reform. We're seeing this with finance, defense, big pharma, etc.

It also illustrates that the U.S. and China are at different stages of their development: excessive financialization is a common pattern among late-stage great powers - from the Dutch Republic to the British Empire (but also Venice or Spain) - and a vicious-circle type factor of their decline. Emerging great powers are often more thoughtful and nimble about managing talent flows to achieve technological and industrial primacy. 

Looking at this question is also very interesting in the context of the H-1B visa debate in the U.S. It feels like the debate doesn't address the elephant in the room: why claim a shortage of top talent when the country's best minds are funneled to the finance industry? Much more coherent to first thoughtfully allocate talent at home before seeking to brain drain the rest of the world...

Anyhow, yet another example of a Chinese policy that seems bizarre and incomprehensible to the West at first glance but which over the long run (and even short-run as illustrated by Deepseek) helps China develop another strategic advantage in the tech competition. Simply put: you want your best minds building real value, not extracting it from society.” 
 

 

[Hojo]

@zazen Why are you comparing a road going through a mountain to a train going through peoples apartment buildings. They are complete opposites.

China putting all their money in big cities just to appear flashy while their people have to worry about their apartment buildings collapsing while they sleep in them. Wow bright colourful lights go china.

We dont put bright colourful lights in everyone of our buildings cause we arent showing off. China does this to save face that their building and roads arent made from papier-mâché.

The put all their money into the bigger cities while everyone else suffers to appear advanced.

All china does it put its money into appearing to be advanced.

Their are no birds in Chinas cities because they are all dead from pollution.

China says how do we appear advanced? We put colourful LEDS on everything.

And for their AI they want for someone else to do it and then copy it in a worse way.

Edited 2 hours ago by Hojo

[Apparition of Jack]

People say America is going through its “fall of Rome” moment but I disagree. I think it’s going through its “Crisis of the Third Century” moment.

America’s problems are huge, don’t get me wrong, but not to the extent that they fundamentally threaten the structure of the entire system itself, and nothing that can’t be overcome through some visionary, high-energy leadership.

In Rome’s case, this was done through Diocletian’s reforms (moving power away from the decaying city of Rome itself, and towards more important and prosperous regions) and later on the new social glue of Christianity under Constantine.
 

A similar process is happening in America - the old, vested capital interests are proving unable and unwilling to address the vast needs of the people of the nation, but a new, highly mobalised grassroots version of democracy is taking shape to resist it (enabled by the rise of social media and spearheaded by figures like Bernie, Mamdani, AOC, and even liberals like Pete Buttigieg and John Pritzker IMO.) 

Likewise, as Rome’s situation in the world changed, so too will America’s. Rome went from being an expansionist-minded empire dependant on a highly stratified chain of command, to a more stability-minded empire with a focus on more local command chains with more nimble soldiers. America will go from being the absolute, globally-minded hegemon to a more regionally-minded, diplomatic outlook.

Culturally it’ll also shift. As mentioned before, Rome managed its increasing social tensions by abandoning unresponsive paganism and lethargic elites and adopting the more egalitarian and civic-minded Christianity. America will shift out of 1980’s style Wall Street orgies and bravado and to more communal-minded civic participation and celebration. Again, the worldview espoused by Bernie (“not me, us”), Abundance liberals etc will be key to this. 
 

I have reason to believe that things are going to get better for the West, but we won’t be the sole imperial hegemons that we once were (which honestly is probably for the best.) We’ll still have challenges, sure, but the social energy will be there to not only tackle them but radically rethink how we overcome them too.

 What all of this looks like in practice though, I can’t say. We’ll figure that out once Trump is gone and MAGA is dead. But I do know it’ll be the long-awaited reprieve we’ve all been waiting for.

[Hojo]

@Apparition of JackI kinda see it as an evolutionary time. It can fail or it can evolve into something better but with change.

[Apparition of Jack]

Just now, Hojo said:

@Apparition of JackI kinda see it as an evolutionary time. It can fail or it can evolve into something better but with change.

Yes, change is the operative word here. The idea of life being about getting a job -> earning lots of money -> buying nice cars -> retiring in the Bahamas will fade out, and be replaced more with participating in communal life and engaging with many of the new emerging technologies to innovate in health, science, literature, etc.

”Bosses” might not be as much of a thing as they once were. 4- or even 3-day work weeks will become the norm. Jobs will blend together as the internet allows people to hold multiple roles at once.

For a lot of people this will feel uncomfortable at first (“why am I being invited to some gay community garden event?!”) but as the shock from COVID wears off and the depths of corporate corruption unveiled, people will begin to organically desire something else. Besides, AI is going to take all our jobs anyway, we might as well find some use for our time, lol.

So yeah. Evolutionary times ahead. It’ll be different to what we’ve been used to but it certainly won’t be worse, put it that way. 

[Lyubov]

On 11/27/2025 at 5:27 PM, Eskilon said:

Lmao you cant be serious about this. This is pop news from the west demonizing China.

The developed part of china: Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities/states is decades ahead of the US in infrastructure and tech. Not just the USA but any western place.

 

I am being serious but don't take it to such a serious degree. Of course they innovate in some areas. But by comparison to the USA they are a giant workshop. They are woefully behind in many industries even ones they do contribute to. 

[Eskilon]

15 minutes ago, Lyubov said:

am being serious but don't take it to such a serious degree. Of course they innovate in some areas. But by comparison to the USA they are a giant workshop. They are woefully behind in many industries even ones they do contribute to.

You are seriously misinformed.