All bets are off when your political opponent resorts to death squads and political assassinations. You can understand now why Trump 2.0 and DOGE are so singularly focused on extirpating what they call “The Swamp”.Consider that we have the first-ever assassination photo showing a bullet in motion (Thanks to the high performance of the global shutter, the A9 III can achieve a maximum shutter speed of 1/80,000 second. As Sony says), So I don't think it was staged tho.
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As for the fast healed, again you can see from the photo (which it's took by A9S3 too, proud to be sony boy) that it is just bruise, nothing major like cartilage tissue.
Trump 2.0 official thread
- Thread starter siegecrossbow
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To be fair, that is what Europeans said of the crumbling Qing Chinese Empire. They wanted to carve it up between amongst one another, but then decided to kill each other before they got to it. Was going through basically all the things you mentioned.
You had a basically totally collapsed country that went through a total revolution, foreign wars and more civil war before coming out the other side relatively intact for what it was.
So actually, it is possible to reform and come out the other side.
By the way, now that you mention the Qing Dynasty: I’ve seen a lot of people everywhere comparing the Trump and Musk duo to various historical figures from China. But I have no idea how no one has mentioned Yuan Shikai yet.
Yuan took power when China was already falling apart. He promised to "fix" things and stability but ended up making things worse. At one point, he even declared himself emperor, thinking people would support him, but instead, his actions sped up China’s decline.
Like Yuan, Trump misunderstood his country’s problems. The world had already changed, and his way of thinking was stuck in the past.
Both also faced elites' resistance. Yuan assumed China’s powerful families and generals would back him, but they turned against him.
I think the post-Trump era in the US will look a lot like China’s ‘Warlord Era’, where different neo-feudal oligarchs (now turning political strongmen like tech elites are already wet-dreaming or classic warlords) control their own territories and power becomes fragmented.
The difference is that China eventually reunited and rose from the ashes, but the US won’t. Because the US doesn’t have a deeply rooted shared history holding it together over time.
It’s more like an accidental creation, similar to India, a product of historical coincidences, not an organically developed, cohesive society that lived there forever and together - so what will drive them to re-unify?
For example, China has a 5,000-year history of continuous cultural development for lasting cohesion-building; China is also the most enduring civilization in history, having repeatedly revived itself from collapse while preserving its core cultural, philosophical, and administrative traditions.
In contrast, the United States, with only a few centuries of history, is a fragmented construct, a "Frankenstein" if you will that cannot be compared in terms of cultural continuity and the ability to "come back".
We should have expected China to unify and rise to greatness again because we had many such similar reference points in history coming from them in the past when the exact same thing happened. Whereas the US is totally the opposite of that. It's not even a normal Western-style nation-state, not to mention a civilization-state.
People look at the modern US today and think, "How could it collapse? People still eat well, they still spend, they still live at first-world standards." (through debt and financial bubbles and a bunch of fake data and media brainwashing.)
But they don’t realize that modern living standards have risen everywhere on average, that’s not what prevents collapse. Collapse is driven by something deeper: envy and inequality. Even if everyone were millionaires, human nature would still create resentment and conflict because we like to compare ourselves in-group socially.
And right now, millions of Americans are barely scraping by one paycheck from disaster, juggling multiple low-paying service jobs and there is an overproduction of elites who feel like they deserve more and aren't getting it. Record homelessness, and record billionaires. CEO pay 300 times workers' compared to 20x half a century ago.
What’s holding everything together? Deflationary innovations from China, East Asia, and Germany, and cheap labor from the rest of the world. Without manufactured cheap imports and technological advancements keeping inflation somewhat in check, things would be even worse.
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Preface: "I always start the day with two cups of tea"...
It's not impossible and I think the trick is actually quite simple. US has the cultural potential to be a leader, just as China had. China lost the leader role when it fell behind the west on education. It retook the role again after it went past them in education.
If US/NATO can get better education system than China, then in a few decades, they would be invigorated and depending on if China made missteps, poised to recontest the lead.
But even though it's a simple premise, it's going to be very very hard due to present circumstances. Even trying to get US let alone all NATO to China= in education is going to be extremely difficult or impossible. Let alone something that is better.
For every empire like China or Germany that always rebounds after awhile, there are ones like Spain which just fell and never recontest the top spot again.
You're correct bro, There is a precedent, just look at the Roman empire and see the aftermath. The American do a lot of study regarding the collapse and see a similarity between the Mexican and the Visigoths. Their solution is base on demographic, expelling people of different colors and culture and assimilate others with share Anglo Saxon values which is why the countries belonging to Five eyes are ripe for the picking creating the largest nation in the planet expanding 2 continents.
The much bigger issue with tariff driven taxation is it makes it critical for the government to import everything and produce nothing locally
This is even worse than many redditors. What's the next he is gonna say, Russia and China entered a hot war perhaps?
But he's a classic conman. Nevertheless, I understand him and he is funny and charismatic.
The real suckers and idiots are the American people supporting him as some savior unironically.
Look at how he is pissing over them with such dishonest nonsense yet they eat it all up like he's speaking reality.
This just shows you that you don't need advanced human capital to become a superpower, you just need to be at the right place at the right time in some super-fortunate cases. America never deserved to be compared to China. It was just a crazy unfortunate time for China also.
I think there is 0 chance that even 1/100 level of such bullshit and dishonesty of this nature could pass in China anywhere.