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It really is interesting to see the conversation here framed so narrowly within an understanding of China as some comical all powerful, omniscient entity coming

It really is interesting to see the conversation here framed so narrowly within an understanding of China as some comical all powerful, omniscient entity coming to steal your children. Practically no consideration of the structural weakness of China. Everything is framed in a "they're coming to get us" way and nothing is framed in a "We should probably adhere to the values that we think are valuable and they don't share". It just reminds me of the kind of distusting behaviour that happened post 9/11 where the concepts being defended were destroyed by those who claimed to be concerned about defending them. It's also funny to me that Thiel talks about how big science can't exist, as if CERN, NASA and many universities just disappeared off the face of the earth. It's always interesting how glaring claims like that go unchallenged in conversations like this. Or how he just casually suggests the logical thing to do is bomb North Korea and everyone just sort of sits there doing an uneasy smiling - as if he isn't suggesting millions of deaths on the North Korean side, hundreds of thousands of deaths on the South Korean side, and a humanitarian crisis that would primarily have to be handled by China.

remarkEon 6y ago
>It really is interesting to see the conversation here framed so narrowly within an understanding of China as some comical all powerful, omniscient entity coming to steal your children. I'm not sure we read the same transcript? Part of the second quarter of the seminar is spent talking about how China is so obsessed with their surveillance state because they, perhaps, perceive their situation as weak or fragile. This makes a lot of sense to me, and checks out with how other authoritarian states have behaved in the past. It's not even that profound of an observation if you couch it in the context of the larger history of 20th century totalitarian regimes. There's a burgeoning nervousness that exists on both sides, the West (broadly defined) and China, about the access to high tech semiconductors. All of that represents a discussion of weakness or single points of failure for both parties here. Since Thiel and Pompeo are such polarizing characters, to say the least, perhaps it's helpful to read things like this and imagine different names there in the transcript. A lot of this is just old fashioned Realpolitik, which I get it it's kind of frowned upon today for reasons that don't really make much sense to me, but it's just another IR lens to use to look at what is a return to Great Power Conflict.

remarkEon 6y ago

>It really is interesting to see the conversation here framed so narrowly within an understanding of China as some comical all powerful, omniscient entity coming to steal your children. I'm not sure we read the same transcript? Part of the second quarter of the seminar is spent talking about how China is so obsessed with their surveillance state because they, perhaps, perceive their situation as weak or fragile. This makes a lot of sense to me, and checks out with how other authoritarian states have behaved in the past. It's not even that profound of an observation if you couch it in the context of the larger history of 20th century totalitarian regimes. There's a burgeoning nervousness that exists on both sides, the West (broadly defined) and China, about the access to high tech semiconductors. All of that represents a discussion of weakness or single points of failure for both parties here. Since Thiel and Pompeo are such polarizing characters, to say the least, perhaps it's helpful to read things like this and imagine different names there in the transcript. A lot of this is just old fashioned Realpolitik, which I get it it's kind of frowned upon today for reasons that don't really make much sense to me, but it's just another IR lens to use to look at what is a return to Great Power Conflict.