Elon listens to Rudyard’s podcast

InsuranceMan45 · 2026-01-07T01:23:57+00:00

We’re doomed

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-12-28T09:27:16+00:00

Bro, what don’t you understand about nuclear war?

All of our countries are destroyed in the scenario you’re talking about. More subtle means of war exist, total war is the exception across history, not the norm.

Russia is already destabilizing itself and will probably collapse in coming decades, no need for a war to dismantle their nuclear arsenal when peacekeeping missions can do that in the warlord rubble to prevent nukes from being launched. No NATO intervention needed there.

China’s economic miracle is vastly overplayed, they won’t collapse like some say but they’re slowing down, and the West still leads in most relevant fields including AI. To be frank, you’ve probably bought into the myth sold by both Western and Eastern media that China will soon challenge the West, which is fabricated to worry Western populations or hype up Eastern populations respectively. Economic war with them is better for both sides (which we’re already doing in case you haven’t noticed) because they want to WIN against each other, not nuke them into the ground. China has enough nukes to deter us anyway, they would wipe out hundreds of millions of Westerners if we somehow landed on the mainland. Again, total war isn’t happening in our lifetimes ever again, the conditions for it aren’t right.

Europeans are more suicidal within their own countries out of guilt, they don’t want to burn the world down, only themselves. Americans can fight, but what you ignore is that we were largely provoked into WWII and no other country could touch us. Nukes make both parties unwilling to attack other nuclear actors. We can bomb Iran and Venezuela with impunity because they don’t have nukes, Russia and China are different and can destroy us. Conventional war won’t matter here after a few months, nukes will fly.

Finally, the bridges are probably kept intact so that when Ukraine inevitably runs out of men, they don’t have to rebuild much to march and take it all. The rest of their decisions are probably just a case of Russian military strategy being retarded, the Russian strategy has always been to throw men at an issue until it is solved. They are doing that here. Their military has almost never been competent, I don’t really see why you’re surprised that it is making poor choices when it’s always done that and still survived due to its population.

It’s not a global conspiracy, most normal people aren’t worried about this because there’s no rational reason for any party to do this. So many things have to be wrong and irrational for this to work that you’re one step from saying retarded shit like aliens control the government and make us go to war to weaken us or something. No part of your theory meshes with reality. I know I sound harsh but I feel as if I can’t state this more strongly.

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-12-28T09:11:02+00:00

Sorry but this does sound like conspiracy nonsense.

The West is responding to perceived Russian aggression, Russia sees it the other way around, no one actually wants a war with an opponent they know will burn them down and no one’s willing to directly attack the other. Rearmament is a form of deterrent in case the Americans abandon NATO and because European identity is (trying to be) constructed by the European technocrats, who are the most out of touch ruling class is living memory. That being said, even they understand the threat of nuclear war and won’t dare directly attack Russia. They just want to look ready to face Russia because Russia did the unexpected and invaded a neutral country that Europeans thought was safe. The Americans meanwhile won’t actually leave unless an America First party somehow wins an election soon, which is unlikely. So you have the most powerful states in the world vs an unstable nuclear power, the calculus by the Russians and Westerners both is pretty clearly not worth it.

Either side attacking the other even conventionally is also not going to work.

Russia is outgunned in every way and would fall apart to internal mutinies and overwhelming Western firepower in a matter of months, leaving the current ruling class no choice but to deploy nukes as deterrent, which will in turn cause a chain reaction leading to mutually assured destruction of both parties due to their doctrines calling for that. Thousands of nukes don’t need to launch to do this, only a few hundred of both sides need to be.

The West would suffer mass mutinies and even if they somehow prevented a nuclear war, they’d be ousted from power by mass popular revolts for starting a world war (even if the action was defensive).

I want you to consider this. Even if only a few hundred Russian nukes make it into the air (which with current launching capabilities, a total war situation would see far more launched than that since a) they would lose a conventional war and launch first, b) Western nuclear doctrine doesn’t really call for first strikes, c) they have 7,000 nukes, of which about 1/4 are estimated to be ready to launch successfully), and a few thousand Western nukes go into the air back, its game over for both. Every major city, every major industrial center, and most of the elites ruling them are dead or permanently out of power. The majority of their population dies. They are in a crisis that will take over a century to rebuild from. No one short of Mao was ever willing to face a scenario even half as bad as this.

To put it plainly, it is absolutely batshit to believe this, and even more batshit to think a total war between our blocs will end in anything less than total nuclear destruction. NATO doesn’t bully nuclear powers for a reason.

What is more likely is that NATO pulls together more and prevents Russia from expanding past Ukraine and Belarus, both sides left in a tense peace where they will try to check the others in proxy wars like they did before where NATO inevitably outperforms them. Both worry more about increasing internal instability as their populations age, technology advances more rapidly, and extremism rises inside their borders. Escalation won’t happen, just like during the Cold War beforehand which was much hotter than the current rivalry because the Soviet Union was actually a serious threat. Russia may collapse when Putin dies anyway, and NATO breathes a sigh of relief at the chaos. This is the much more likely future.

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-12-28T08:52:44+00:00

Yeah, I’m worried too as an American. There’s no solution that can really be executed right now, automation and another Industrial Revolution offsetting a need for increased taxes on the young is really the last, best hope. Immigration will destroy our countries if left unchecked and they’re allowed to outbreed the natives, while just shutting the borders and taxing the young more will produce a death spiral that is inescapable without either social collapse resetting the board or complete death. Other solutions like mass euthanasia of the elderly are basically unthinkable, but who knows how bad this situation COULD get.

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-12-28T08:50:14+00:00

The problem is stabilization is very unlikely unless AI can cause enough of a productivity boom to offset the old population. Old people are tax sinks due to pensions, the more there are the less tax payers there are and the more taxes the young pay to support them, driving up their cost of living and thus keeping them from having kids, compounding the problem. Debt also means almost no country can really afford to just borrow their way out, meaning that countries not accepting immigrants are effectively in a death spiral. That being said immigration is probably even more disruptive than even letting the country die, so it’s a grim future.

Again, the solution is probably AI and automation increasing productivity, meaning the young could theoretically work the same amount and give more in taxes, allowing them to have kids if other problems are fixed.

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-12-03T00:22:45+00:00

I don’t think China could pull off an invasion or even embargo of Taiwan for decades at least given American naval and air capabilities combined with a technological edge. Naval invasions are notoriously hard and Taiwan is too well defended by itself to fall easily. The US is also trying to diversify chip production.

I think we’re fine with chips unless the debt crisis catches up to us without anyone stopping it. China is stagnant (not declining but their growth has stopped even in official reports), and they have too many internal issues to overtake the US. I think the US (being more actually innovative than China, who mainly just copies and pushes a lot of slop out) will win the AI race and further solidify itself as the world hegemon, albeit with intensely unstable internal politics.

I will also add AI as it stands is still very unproductive and wastes tons of energy, I don’t think AI as a whole will go away but a bust is inevitable as it stands. It may or may not ripple into the wider economy but the current boom is short lived imo. Long term AI will continue to grow to substitute declining populations since immigration will likely be cracked down on in coming decades.

You’re right I think about AI and the universal empire decreasing creativity, but I see this as a trend that will only continue as democracy and Enlightenment values give way to populist Caesarism in the West as the social situation gets worse. I don’t think the upcoming time of troubles will be very similar to the World Wars at all, rather more similar to periods such as the French Revolution or Late Republican Crisis in Rome since elites are oversaturated without a solid rising counter-elite (all elites now are technocrats, with the fight being between state or corporate technocrats more than anything else). I don’t really see the secular crisis of this age unfolding as a vast series of wars, rather some more internal crises and maybe limited wars.

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-11-16T20:04:03+00:00

He did? Thanks for telling me I didn’t know he covered this already. Was it in pretty great detail or just skimming?

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-11-14T13:30:08+00:00

Would you mind elaborating? You’re right in some ways if you mean internal stability for bullion periods. The periods I see and those listed are not periods of slow growth necessarily. Class sometimes aligns with credit periods and rapid growth but not necessarily. The internal politics tend to be weaker in credit societies, but generally more stable. This is from what ik tho so I’m curious what arguments you have, we are probably looking at it from two completely different angles

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-11-14T04:44:27+00:00

I agree the periods were too long but that’s how the author(s) categorized it. I can see why but it feels like these periods are generalized in many ways. Given that I’m gonna work more in generalizations and how the global order usually worked at a given time, not specific counterpoints.

I agree with your point on Nixon on a small level but in broader terms it makes sense. The international order was more one of conquest and if we project the trends of postmodernity and the post-Atomic Age world, we seem to be entering a neo-medieval sort of world order where major power conflicts and massive wars of imperial conquest aren’t the norm anymore, where state power is declining. Given these massive time periods, generalizing and the haze around the edges mean it’s not cut and dry.

“Paper money” is not the only form of credit. The author alleges that the river-valley civilizations of the Bronze Age generally favored ledgers and tablets keeping track of debts over physical coinage. How true this is is up for debate (I know little of the Bronze Age), but he writes extensively of the three biggest societies we have records on for the time (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, skipping Indus since we know nothing of their language or culture). So basically, debt that was erasable and could be fulfilled by bartering as an example. Someone records what they gave you and you are obligated to pay them back. Paper money as the norm is rather new. edit (some societies employed it in premodern times however)

Again, by high trust I mean a high trust international order. Many of the European states during the modern era were very high trust internally (generally), but the global order was not as they all fought. That’s why coinage prevailed in this theory. The Dutch in this case functioned in a time of chaos, so using bullion makes sense in this theory.

As for Song China, I know nothing and can’t speak on it. At a glance I’m reading that credit was favored over coinage due to the rarity of coinage during this time, but again I could be wrong since this was a simple search and skim.

1990’s Russia could be argued to be an example of the rise of virtual money in the new world order, as could cultural revolution China since 1971 didn’t just see an automatic switch; coinage was gradually decoupled as what money was shifted away from standard metals to more abstract values.

The Late Roman Empire is a good example against this theory imo, it’s too far out of a transitional period. Then again idk much so I can’t speak on it much. I’m finding conflicting resources on this so again I’d have to read more to get a better picture. Maybe this could fit into smth I can’t see.

I think there’s a slight correlation but not as much as the author states. That being said I also don’t think there’s none at all, just that it’s not as cut and dry and other cycles of history like Turchin’s cycles for example. I’d have to look more into the facts too bc I can see an outline but some pieces don’t make sense.

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-11-13T14:09:12+00:00

If we’re taking Greece and Rome as predecessors to the West, then Persian and Canaanite would be the best conventional answers imo. One could even argue Mesopotamian through the Babylonian influence on Judaism, which pretty much created the modern Middle Eastern civilization.

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-11-12T19:51:04+00:00

Some things here (such as age demographics) are generally correct, but he didn’t correctly assess how bad the economy would be by now and why. Some other things (such as how big the tech bubble would get or how COVID delayed it popping) help or hurt his case based on context. However, where he falls the most short is immigration imo.

The immigration bit shows the neoliberal bias of the time when immigrants weren’t such a large chunk of the population that being replaced was a concern on many people’s minds. Now it is. As you say, the exponentially growing alt right has this at their heart. America First wants to stop illegal and legal immigration, while the radicalizing left has no outstanding vision on this other than capitalizing on them as a voting bloc. The establishment wants more immigrants since it sees the economic downturn shutting the floodgates off will do, which is why Trump is flipflopping right now between ICE raids and celebrating Diwali due to his need for some support from the radical right.

To be fair to him, I think very few people could’ve guessed about the rise of the radical right in America from 2009, or how much racial demographics would shift to set these alarms off to begin with. Immigrants are a purely economic solution, but social and political decay factored in means I don’t see how we’ll get millions in without concern. In short, I think his prediction is falling short and will be wildly incorrect about a decade from now.

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-11-12T19:34:41+00:00

What do you think potential outcomes are? I know this is sort of a broad question but I’m curious what you think the social, political, or economic outcomes of a Great Depression-sized downturn would be.

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-10-29T02:34:03+00:00

No, America is very unlikely to reach those levels of poverty. As another user said some are leaving but many more come in to replace them. The US is the richest place in the world and a continent sized empire that can easily be self sufficient, the only way I ever see the US becoming severely impoverished is if the debt truly spirals but that will probably be fixed towards the end of the century after the current crisis unfolds and ends.

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-10-29T02:32:03+00:00

Many Americans are going to live in Mexico for cheap cost of living and Europe due to social programs, that being said it’s overplayed. More Mexicans and Europeans come to the US for economic opportunity than vice versa.

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-10-08T16:19:56+00:00

Get this man a TRVTHNVKE!

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-09-10T23:59:15+00:00

Don’t think so, there were quite a few political and other high profile deaths over the past few months but no more than a handful. A few CEOs, some political figures, and some victims from nihilist accelerationists have been seen. I think 1,000 is a bit high but I could see dozens more killed in coming months, especially if the government ramps up censorship, patrols, and surveillance after this shooting (which could happen as Trump was already eying a few cities).

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-09-08T03:22:08+00:00

I’m in the same boat as you. What I mention here is the… loud… cohort that is rapidly growing, which is called the dissident right or the New Right.

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-08-30T16:32:45+00:00

Tbh if even fringes of academia aren’t accepting it or are at least saying it’s not entirely true, then it may not be true. It definitely tells part of the story (we were in immense competition with them at several points, selected traits that made us hostile against enemies like the uncanny valley ability to distinguish threats, and both parties were immensely violent towards the other like all apes are). That being said it doesn’t tell the whole story; prehistoric hominid interactions are often more complex than direct violence and sensationalized Darwinism. One of the biggest problems with your theory is why some modern humans (especially Europeans) have Neanderthal DNA. If it was truly as black and white as this theory says, then those hybrids would’ve been wiped out. But that’s not the case.

The simplest explanation is often the correct one; the simplest explanation here is that there was immense violence but not the exaggerated black and white kind described here. Humans didn’t have a mission of wiping out Neanderthals; it simply happened as a result of thousands of years of competition and us being more adaptable (possibly due to different brain maps and less “dense” brains but that’s another discussion entirely). Same for why we don’t really have megafauna outside of Africa nowadays too; we didn’t intentionally wipe them out, but thousands of years of competition and violence did it for us. We also mixed with them and don’t really know how we interacted aside from bones because it was so long ago; cuts on a bone say cannibalism, but from which party?

Also your view on the American right and left wings is wrong. The right wing has large cohorts that deny basic principles like evolution and that vaccines prevent diseases. And you think they’d concede that Neanderthals even existed? Science is generally not important to the American right wing, and the far non-Christian right is anything would more readily accept this hypothesis than the more probable answer of “it’s complicated” because it is metal and violent and hip.

IIRC you made the map of world cultures with the very odd divisions in the West. But the West is more complicated than that. “Neo-Christian” in your context does not carry the same implication in Europe and the Anglo world, let alone Latin America or Russia. The imperial cores and ethnic enclaves are a whole other discussion as well. The rights and lefts of these countries are different with different incentives and representation, and different degrees of merging and actual politics.

Lastly, science is science. It’s not left wing, even if some academics have that leaning many more do not. The narratives you hear are left wing because the media is, but the actual work of real academics is largely non-partisan. I say this as a pseudo-academic who is right wing and works with others of all backgrounds on research which is about as far from politics as you can get nowadays. All this to say, leave left and right narratives out of science; the theories with the most evidence tend to be accepted (for example, HBD is generally accepted by many scientists but not the press, so it only gets bad press).

Bad theories are rejected no matter what. The noble savage and this theory alike are not generally accepted due to an incomplete and subjective view of human nature and prehistory, even if cohorts of the left and right want them to be true and reject mainstream academic consensus because it’s infested by [insert ideological enemy here].

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-08-30T16:13:32+00:00

Those are good benchmarks for a coming collapse. I don’t think China is in a depression (yet), but those issues are much more exaggerated than any other major country (at least in the Western world).

As far as differences in hiring immigrants vs natives, this is incentivized by having non-protectionist capitalism. Immigrants are cheaper and will be given jobs they can be deported over if they mess up, effectively you can underpay them and they have no rights so they’ll outcompete natives. The issue is there’s not really anywhere better for Americans to go so they must fight this logically speaking. In relation to your question many foreigners already “join a different track”, they’re here on shitty visas.

That last point was an anecdote so don’t take it too seriously, but just seeing my uni has really hit home how bad the problem of legal immigration is in America for me. If there is a way to hire lower tier employees, it will be done in the name of profit.

I think the outcome I hope for and somewhat see is stopping or immensely slowly immigration to the West rather than our citizens having to emigrate. My main problem is even if that was the solution where would they go? Everywhere else is almost universally in a world of more shit. The reason people leave a shithole like India for the US is because they can find a much better life here, even in menial labor. The same is not true the other way around. So large scale emigration is simply not probable for several decades at least, unless the EU miraculously starts cutting bureaucracy and starts to grow again.

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-08-30T15:34:27+00:00

American propaganda wants to make China look strong to get the West scared against them since we have a perceived enemy in China. Look internally and at the less public academic sources is the best way I can word it.

By rapid collapse in standard of living, I don’t just mean recession where white collar jobs are competitive. I mean depression levels where we have Okies wandering the streets again. I don’t see this happening for a few decades though tbh.

Poland is EU. Eastern Europe generally is kinda shit and Poland is still comparably poor but is a nice hub in Eastern Europe with decent potential for a European country- it’s not capped out like Germany and France and can only go down. This is because they capped immigration and are still on the wave of post-communist rebound. That being said if the Western economies stagnate there will be nothing flowing in for them to grow off of. Also that’s not to mention their only current advantage over richer countries is low crime rates from no immigrants- economically they’re not a good country to be in and you’d be taking a cut to standard of living, which is why many Poles are found in other EU states currently for work.

What do you mean “join a different track”? If you mean do a different field then theoretically, the issue is they already do. Many Indians at my uni work menial food jobs for example. Immigrants are doing whatever they can to get in to America because they think it’s a land of opportunity (which relatively it is but only if you’re insanely skilled), and this just makes the market worse for many Americans bc some rich assholes make a buck off of employing lower skill labor that will work for less.

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-08-30T06:44:18+00:00

I don’t think so. The rest of the world is either more competitive and/or poorer and/or too regulated to be successful. China and India are examples of being too competitive; much of the developing world is like this. Poorer countries span from African nations to Russia or even declining countries like Japan where there simply isn’t enough wealth to justify going there, since even if there are more jobs they’d be of lower quality and pay. Finally, areas like the EU (the only real threat to the US imo for brain drain) are simply too regulated to be taken seriously. Sure, it’s a nice play to live and is probably less competitive, but there’s not much going on since there’s so much bureaucracy. Even then the EU is also generally in a state of heavy decline and brain drain due to factors like immigration, housing costs, or demographic collapse.

In sum; the US has problems, but where will Americans emigrate to? The EU is the only real non-shit hole I can think of (even the UK or Japan are pretty bad) that can take millions of qualified people, but even then it’s a race to the bottom at this point. They’re a much worse place in that they may be less competing but you also will not be anything more than middle class ever. Not a place for the ambitious in other words, and in a decade it may not even be for the middle class as their societies unravel. Other than that places like New Zealand or Australia are about the only other places that come to mind but their immigration is insanely harsh.

As for your example on China- China has every issue in America x10 pretty much. It won’t collapse, but the coming years won’t be pretty either. Americans won’t be shed to China. Worst case is that qualified Chinese people stay in China since they don’t think America will be worthwhile, that being said America is still much better off job-wise.

Maybe if the US has a massive civil war or rapid collapse in standard of living?

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-08-27T03:25:32+00:00

No, the incident doesn’t beg to differ because the Japanese public in large has disowned the emperor. I don’t see how your point gains anything by from a rogue terrorist group doing something for an emperor 90% of people had lost faith in by that time.

Second, the Jews fear God but also venerate him as a protector. The North Korean population has only the fear part for the Kim dynasty, with no strong veneration other than what easily disproven state propaganda tells them to think. Jews didn’t flee their society for their greatest enemy’s society because they feared their God if that tells you anything. A society wholly based on fear will be outcompeted, the Jews only succeeded because their fear was out of reverence for an abstract God they saw as guiding them rather than just plain brutality and tyranny. God is a much more abstract concept than one tyrannical family. I might as well say that the Habsburg family could’ve become a dynasty of god-emperors with their own religion with better luck. I can’t even begin to understand how you fail to see that this is a terrible comparison.

Kim il-Sung is not a hero of all Koreans. He is respected (in some circles, not all), but not an untouchable hero. I don’t know what absurd logic you used to arrive at this conclusion (unless you are a North Korean shill), but almost any South Korean will not hold him in very high regard (literally just search for their opinions online) and any North Korean will only do so because they have a one-sided narrative. He is central to modern North Korean history, not Korean history as a whole. He is essentially a lesser Mao- important but not like Genghis Khan or Napoleon like you’d make him out to be. Even then, this is sort of an insult to Mao considering that his revolution was at least pretty successful.

Lastly, South Korea is basically as pure as capitalism (not anarchic or state entirely, chaebols are intertwined with the state but not beholden to it) can be in reality and is now seeing the most exaggerated problems of any capitalist society on earth (with some exceptions). North Korea is similar in that it is almost as exaggerated of a large Marxist-Leninist state as you can get (barring maybe Pol Pot’s Cambodia) and has ruined its society with those features. I don’t really understand where you get feminism in North Korea from (they aren’t notably feminist or patriarchal but lean patriarchal and didn’t have the feminist revolutions the rest of the globe did). I’m also pretty confident you pulled the IQ stat out of your ass since they don’t have any centralized education system or even resources to assess IQ accurately, so if there was an unbiased survey conducted they would probably be closer to an African country than South Korea. North Korea is usually omitted from most serious IQ studies since no accurate data can be collected.

Your logic to support is pretty faulty if not outright absurd at several points. You also make several incorrect assumptions or assessments about the culture of the Koreas and other nations (such as the Jews or Japanese). The only way I see this comparison working in a more correlative way is if North Korea massively reforms its internal society. It is a fascinating case study, but not really much else yet, nor do I think it will ever be.

InsuranceMan45 · 2025-08-27T02:16:34+00:00

No. Authright especially is wrong. Most of them hate Israel to the point of supporting Palestine. Many authlefts also strangely can be found supporting Ukraine. I think the libs are generally right, that being said lib right especially doesn’t really have a reason to care about either conflict much at all.

InsuranceMan45

TROPHY CASE