Scott Burchill makes a good analysis in Pearls and Irritations on how the US is ‘a rogue state’ and becoming a pariah (alongside Israel) over recent events in Gaza, and how its influence is waning. It’s hard to argue with a lot of his points; certainly here, with the exception of some politicians who either watch or read too much of the Murdoch Press or conspiracy media funded by the US, what was once a rumble (should we let US nuclear-powered warships in?) is now mainstream. There are fewer people willing to accept the US orthodoxy.
Burchill adds how Gaza meant that Putin ‘can hardly believe his luck’ and notes China’s advances in ‘AI, quantum computing and semiconductors’. Certainly on the latter I’d trust Chinese IT skills over many occidentals’ given the regularity with which western tech, over relatively simple things, fails or does not work as advertised. One’s biggest concern in this multipolar world is there isn’t a single bugger you can trust.
Which is that moral, righteous power that believes in social democracy rather than authoritarianism or anocracy? Neither Australia nor New Zealand is, plus we’re too small, anyway. Germany? Not with younger voters being drawn to AfD. Whomever they are, somehow I don’t think they’re Anglophone. Better brush up those foreign language skills.
How does it feel to reach the end of 2023 and a year of Google effectively restricting this blog on its searches (not that I can prove this conclusively, only circumstantially)? The 700-view-per-post norm is now fallen to the double digits, and has been there since January, probably after this post saying that Google’s entire business is a negligence lawsuit away from collapsing. And I know first-hand that Google censors bad news about itself.
You know, it doesn’t really matter. I’ll still write what I want to write, even if the fairer search engines barely figure in referrer stats. I’m looking to the long term, and Google is looking more and more like a house of cards each day, with the Epic win and the Department of Justice’s continued antitrust lawsuit.
However, on the other side of tech, the sad thing is that OnlyKlans still exists, thanks to those who continue to post there regularly for no reason I can fathom. It really should be where Myspace was in 2007, but we see both OnlyKlans and Substack both deciding it’s OK to monetize Nazis. Facebook has known this for years, and these days, Meta censors pro-Palestinian content. Reddit’s CEO has also won, after “doing a Putin” and ridding the service of any opposition to his rule. Big Tech looks sad these days, and in 2024, we really need to bypass them more than ever.
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