Some or all of you must be thinking that too many “unrelated” things are going on for it all to be either accidental or in fact unrelated.
There seems to be a clear message out there that this world is coming to an end, and everybody should prepare, get their shit together and be ready to leave at any time.
Also, there are things clearly going wrong with the world, making the status quo untenable. I will list the short and long term problems in no particular order.
The Western civilization is falling; the scourge of feminism produced a temporary increase in economic output at the price of doubling the workload per family at half the pay per breadwinner, and also reduced the birth rate to the lowest in the world, while the concept of universal human rights prevents the wealthy Western countries from shielding themselves from the influx of migrants from countries with high birth rates, who are essentially parasites unable to contribute anything of value to the West, and their only intent is to harvest the resources that are exposed due to the West’s ideological vulnerability. The ideological concepts of progressivism, of replacing the religious foundations of the West with secular ones by introducing the concept of “human rights”, brought the entire civilization to the point where this concept will either be recognized as fallacious and deadly and thus rejected, or the entire civilization will collapse from both internal and external pressures. One thing is certain: the men in the west will not offer their lives in defense of a feminist civilization that openly rejects their essence. The civilization will fall without any defense, and the “powerful and emancipated” feminist women will be bought and sold on the Muslim slave markets of the future Europe. When Islam conquers the West, it will be nothing but darkness and death until the end of time. There is no culture that became Islamic and then stopped being Islamic. The only way that happens is when the Muslims are militarily defeated and purged from a territory, but once a population contracts the mental disease of Islam, it cannot be cured. The same applies to other mental infections, such as Christianity or Communism. The Christian ethics, according to which the poor are inherently virtuous compared to the rich, refuse to die once planted, and were simply recycled by Communism. Once a population contracts Communism, it refuses to be cured, because it implicitly assumes to have a high moral ground. East Germany is a wonderful example. Similarly, once someone contracts Islam, some implicit assumptions about the nature of the relationship between human beings and the transcendental are basically impossible to remove, and those happen to be the most harmful ones, such as the assumption that God wants/demands human submission. Once that’s implicitly accepted, it’s game over for the human spirit.
The world is dying. The layout of the tectonic plates, as of some 65 MY ago, opened up the circumantarctic sea current which plays a role that can most accurately be described in thermodynamic terms as a method of pumping fluid through a heatsink, after first circulating it through all the heat exchangers. Every single time in the history of the planet when ocean could circulate freely around one of the poles, it ended up with a planetary glaciation, which ended only when the layout of the continents due to slow geological forces rearranged the land mass in such a way as to impede the Coriolis-driven free flow of sea water around the poles. It takes a while for the planet to cool down, and this time it took 65 MY, but a few MY ago the process accelerated so much that almost all the buffer gasses leeched out of the atmosphere and into the ocean, to the point where Milankovitch cycles actually started throwing the planet in and out of periods of glaciation. This is a fatal threat, because historically speaking glaciations are extinction level events for hominid species, and this Pleistocene glaciation cycle is only an overture to the runaway glaciation, where Milankovitch cycles are no longer sufficient to bring the planet out of glaciation, at which point the ice covers the entire surface of the planet, and stays there until the tectonic plates shift again to impede the circumantarctic watercooling pump. It’s quite ironic to see all the fuss about global warming on a planet that is on its death throes due to runaway cooling. The only thing that could actually save the planet is if the Andes were crushed and used to fill in the gap between Antarctica and South America. I’m not sure that the current trend of replenishing the buffer gasses with industrial output will have any permanent effect, because the actual cause of the problem is geological. It might turn back the clock and give the world a few more millions of years of borrowed time, and then again it might produce a large Dansgaard-Oeschger event that might actually accelerate the process of cooling. The thing is, nobody knows, because the climate models are just not good enough; too many thermodynamic buffers and accumulators, and the system is inherently chaotic. The long term prognosis is unchanged: unless by some miracle the increased CO2 output manages to stabilize the climate on the pre-Pleistocene levels, almost all life on the Earth’s crust will be extinct in the timeframe of a couple of millions of years. Humans will be extinct much sooner than that.
We are in a critical phase of the West where the perfect storm is brewing, the kind not seen since the collapse of the Roman Empire. America obtained total control of the global economy, and holds the world hostage with a combination of economy and technology. Those forces are straining and will inevitably collapse. I can’t see America going down into the night without a fight, and my analysis is that what we are seeing since the 2001 in the world are merely steps America is taking to make sure that the collapse goes down on their own terms, and that they are the ones set up to emerge as the leading power once again when the nuclear dust settles. Russia appears to have complete understanding of the situation and seems to be spreading this understanding among other powers, and their strategy is to not take the bait, buy time, prepare in all possible ways, and turn what America planned as a game of chicken into a bull fight, where the bull of America keeps charging and provoking conflict, and the matador of Russia skillfully evades, dodges and absorbs, until the bull tires out and is reduced to just standing there for the kill. America is doing its propaganda thing, but for the first time in history it’s not working, because you can’t convincingly portray someone as aggressive when he’s objectively trying to avoid conflict at all cost and you’re the one charging at him and poking at him for years, trying to provoke a retaliatory strike in vain. This game, however, will soon end, because American economy is on borrowed time since 2008. The people who kept it running for so long are incredibly smart, incredibly competent, and they have immense means at their disposal. The fact that they kept it up for so long, despite the terrible cost inflicted to America’s geostrategic position by the fact that Dollar was openly used as a weapon, is testimony to their competence. However, the others are not stupid either. If anything, the Russians are smarter, and the Chinese are not far behind either, especially since they are consulting with the Russians and coordinating strategic moves. It’s quite difficult to de-dollarize your economy and do it in such a way as not to provoke total confrontation with America before the process is done, but people doing it are very good at what they are doing. From what I can see, the experts on both sides are incredibly smart and they are not really making unforced errors in this complicated game of chess, but I don’t see many ways of it ending that don’t include a nuclear war. At one point, America will run out of time, and will be forced to initiate a conflict regardless of whether their psychological warfare against Russia and China was effective; they would prefer to play the role of a good guy defending the free world from the evil forces, but if that doesn’t work, they will still strike openly as a power-hungry empire that doesn’t want to go down quietly. The inherent arrogance of America makes this inevitable.
Society is at the point where the combination of increasingly totalitarian states and pervasive technological surveillance all but guarantees complete and permanent loss of personal freedoms, as well as the loss of ability to manifest forms of society that politically diverges from the form that is presently in power. Essentially, the West is turning into a form of Stalinist Soviet Union, but armed with cameras on every corner, and AI that looks through all those cameras, as well as those on the satellites and drones. People sense this somewhere, and while some rationalize and justify, and others murmur in protest, everybody understands that doing something about it will come at incredible personal cost. However, at a certain point everybody will rise up at once, as was always the case in the end of all totalitarian systems of the past. People who are in power today will end up like Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. However, this is not inevitable, and it’s quite possible that everybody will live on like cows on farms – captive, controlled, comfortable and powerless to change anything. But they will proceed to like the trending things on Facebook and Twitter, thinking they are changing the world, and they will trade Bitcoin, thinking they are wealthy. People fear strong AI because they think the machines will end up ruling the world, but I think Frank Herbert was closer to the reality of what is to happen: it’s not the machines, but people in control of the machines, who will enslave you, and the stable end-results will be either the Brave New World, or a Butlerian Jihad. The lesson of Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad? “Thinking” machines are just something other people use to enslave you.
But there is something more important at play in the background, something that is actually important, and yet even if I told you what it was, which I in fact already have, nobody would take me seriously, so I won’t even bother. It’s not as if words or belief will affect the outcome.
