Societal survival of the fittest

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Weak societies will fall and be taken over by stronger societies.

Democratic societies tend to become weak and this cannot last forever, you can utilize weaknesses in democratic systems to slowly grab power, after that there will not be any more real democracy.

One way to measure how successful a society is to look at survival and reproduction since that will create the biological foundation for the future society. The by far biggest factor limiting the birthrate is females unwilling to have even close to the max number of children. There are several brutal methods (baby quotas, females as property) to maximize the fertility rate among desired females.

13 is a good age for a female to start breeding, if she is finished breeding early that will allow her to enter the economy and be productive to society early. It's also easier to force a young female to have children since it will be difficult for her to flee or fight back.

We also need to have a strong economy so we can support all the children we are raising as a society, this will also allow us to build a strong military. In order to build a strong society we need to be inclusive, not exclude people based on ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender expression. By attracting important individuals to our society we make it stronger.

Unless you are militarily stronger than all other countries on earth combined it's very important to build strong alliances to ensure you will come out victorious in the case of a world war. By winning the world war we will be able to drastically expand our borders and eventually rule over the entire planet.

 

[Admin]

Immigration and inclusivity
Societies that are inclusive and allow valuable individuals to enter will have an advantage over societies that try to exclude people based on factors that don't matter.

It's very important that you as a country put effort into attracting high-quality people to your society so it becomes stronger instead of some other country benefiting from them. By attracting important individuals from other countries you make your own society stronger and other societies weaker.

Unfortunately today borders are relatively fixed and if you take in immigrants that may result in less land and living space for your existing population unless you are later able to expand your borders and attain more resources for everyone.

If you have too many people in your country then you will have to import food to feed your population, this may come with some risks but there are strategies to manage that

0. keep food and other important items stockpiled so you will be able to survive for years if you are no longer able to import food.
1. have a strong military and make good geopolitical decisions securing trade of important goods.
2. eventually gain control over new areas allowing your citizens to spread out again.

Having a lot of people concentrated in the same area (such as a big city) does come with some military risk, you can try to mitigate this by having advanced defense systems but it may not actually be effective. Thus if you allow more people in the same area you might invite attacks by weapons of mass-destruction making everyone less safe. This is not however an issue of migration and it will actually be less bad in terms of inclusive fitness if the people who migrate to the city are genetically distant.

It's not just about being accepting with regard to ethnicity, it's also about being accepting with regard to culture, sexual orientation, gender expression and sex-characteristics.

 

[Admin]

Expanding your borders
As your population and resources grow you will become increasingly constrained by the amount of land you control as a society. In addition being constrained to a small space will make it easier for a hostile actor to target you since the area that needs to be nuked is a lot smaller.

Food production does require a lot of space and if the world population keep growing the value of agricultural land will also increase drastically since there will be harder and harder to make enough food in a given area, that potentially allow hostile nations to starve the population of a small area (relative to population size) since they lack the land required to produce the food themselves. In addition a nation with a lot of land may just decide to restrict exports due to high food prices in an attempt to please their citizens (resulting in other starving instead).

Rather than waiting until you become severely constrained by the amount of land you have you should expand your borders at the first good opportunity, you might not get a chance like that again. Denazification worked in germany after world war II and similar programs can also work in the future, for that reason it's generally better to avoid needlessly killing civilians.

If you instead remain as a smaller weaker country it will be more potential invaders in the future since it will take less for some other power to grow strong enough to invade you. Sure you could try constantly meddling in other countries to prevent some new big power to emerge but doing that will also be harder if you are a smaller weaker country. Several weaker countries might suddenly decide to marge into a larger state able to conquer you, preventing other countries from engaging in imperialism isn't going to protect you forever.

Even if you use semi-genicidal warefare methods like indiscriminate bombings of civilians areas and nuclear weapons there will be a lot of survivors in the area you conquered. These survivors can be re-educated and incorporated into your empire allowing your empire to gain more workers and have more soldiers and military equipment.

Rather than going up against some other strong country it's better to first just conquering weak nations that cannot defend themselves well first allowing you to grow even stronger before you eventually have to face a strong adversary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN9kPtK8qps

Short-term just using military might alone will be enough to expand your border but then if the population isn't on board with the system there will be constant friction. You will have to take action to align the public more with your new government and this may include actions that aim directly at genetics in-addition to attempts at changing culture.

 

[Admin]

Eugenics
Evolution by natural selection is a brutal and ineffective process. Therefore it can be tempting to take shortcuts when it comes to breeding a more fit population, this however will often end very badly, often worse than no selection at all 11

This however does not mean eugenics cannot work, it just means we need to be patient and give it the time it needs. Rather than trying to micro-manage breeding like we tried with dogs (and generally failed) we need to give evolution the time it needs to naturally adapt humans making the society stronger.

Societies that neglect their gene-pool will gradually weaken to the point where they fall and be conquered by societies that have a working eugenics policy, you making humanitarian excuses will not prevent your society from falling or your population to go extinct.

The reason humanity as a whole needs eugenics is that we cannot survive on earth forever, eventually the sun will become so hot it will try earth and all life on earth will die, moving to mars (assuming that would even be sustainable at all) would just buy us time, we need to move to other star systems in order to continue our lineage and civilization.

There is of course a lot of different methods that can be used for eugenics, it does not have to be a policy that is officially justified with eugenics. One example of this is baby quotas supposedly implemented for raising the fertility rate but then it's individualized to specifically target privileged individuals (forcing them to have and raise more children). We can justify this by saying "privileged people need to do their fair share in increasing the fertility rate" and also "we shouldn't force poor people to have children" and also make exceptions for people with genetic disabilities.

If eugenics is generally viewed as something bad then governments will have to figure out ways to do eugenics without the masses realizing the real purpose is eugenics. A policy can officially have some other purpose such as "supporting parents" or "keep people safe from dangerous people".

The ruling elite may decide to focus eugenics on them rather than on the general population such as having each male senator have over 100 biological children and then pick the most suited out of these 100 as a successor for each male senator. The senate can of course vote to force females to participate in this in the case some tries to say no. The ruling elite being strong is good for society as a whole, not just the elite.

 

[Admin]

Eugenics and diversity
Rather than aiming for a single goal the goal with eugenics should be to improve humanity in general while still maintaining a high level of diversity. A high level of diversity can be maintained by decentralizing eugenics and letting people with different preferences make different decisions.

Applying any evolutionary pressure will short term reduce diversity in weeding out the unfit, in nature this is counteracted by random mutations that introduce new diversity that can be selected upon. Reducing diversity had both advantages and disadvantages but it's possible to preserve a great deal of diversity while maintaining eugenic pressure.

Even if just 1% of the male population reproduce that's still 35 million, significantly larger than the typical populations of large mammals.

We do not however need to rely on random mutations to introduce new diversity to the gene pool; genetic engineering allows us to introduce new diversity to the gene pool that we can select upon via eugenics, this will allow for diversity that is actually useful when it comes to advancing humanity. We don't need to know exactly what will happen with the genes we try to introduce.

 

[Admin]

Sexual selection
Female Sexual selection will provide a great deal of diversity since different females have different preferences for sexual partner. The males females select may not however be the for society most suited for breeding, it's not clear how well the preferences females have align with what's ideal for society.

The current sexual selection is mostly based on genetic factors such as looks 12 13 this is due to several key factors, females no longer need male resources due to the welfare state and females entering the labour force. The sexual liberation has resulted in females having a lot more options while males have fewer options 14

There is conflicting data whether or not intelligent males would reproduce more but dysgenic reproduction among females is to be expected 15 16 good-looking people tend to be more intelligent 17 18 and thus female selection based on appearance is likely to favor intelligence.

Other selection criteria such as money and status also depend on intelligence 19 If you are mentally fit for society you will have an easier time gaining social status and resources and this will allow you to have more success attracting females to impregnate 20

As the bodies of males become more attractive due to female sexual selection the male body will become less and less important when it comes to female sexual selection and other factors such as intelligence and social status will become increasingly important. Different individuals select their partners differently but we can still see some general patterns such as females loving good-looking male psychopaths.

Female sexual selection is likely to favor males who are physically strong 21

It is very unlikely a female will be monogamous with an unattractive male, some guys might be lucky enough to find a female willing to waste herself on a loser but for the most part unattractive males will remain single or in very short relationships. Being rich might attract certain types of females even if you are ugly but these females will quickly 'fall out of love' if you stop being successful. Females in general prefer white males 22

 

[Admin]

Forced breeding
You can force people to breed and still allow them to select their partner(s). It is also possible to do forced breeding where females are given the final selection among the candidates in deciding who is going to make her pregnant.

Until/unless artificial wombs become viable at large scales there will be many reasons for the ruling elite to use forced breeding at some scale, it can be just for them or it can be applied wider. Using just 10% of the individuals born female for forced breeding could be enough to completely eliminate the need to push the general female population to have more babies giving them more freedoms.

Generally the females who have the highest fertility rate are not the most suited for breeding in terms of building a strong society 23 24 25

Since there is naturally a big male surplus there is little to no benefit in applying forced breeding to men, females are the reproductive bottleneck and thus the ones suited for forced impregnation, pregnancy, childbirth. Males will however be expected to support the extra children females are forced to have and this will include males that do not have any children of their own (such as due to being rejected by all females). Males without children will be subjected to higher taxes.

One method is to simply legally obligate females to have a certain number of children and this will be individualized such that capable and successful females are being given big quotas while females that struggle in life (such as due to low IQ) are not given any quota to meet.

Another approach is to give privileges to people who breed and implement it in a such way that the fertility rate increases more in females that have traits valuable for the future society.

A more aggressive approach is to outright reduce females to property and then have her be raped over and over again, this can continue until she has given birth 20 times. She will get physically punished and restrained if she tries to resist. No pain relief will be given during childbirth unless surgery (such as C-section). Young girls in particular are suitable for forced breeding since they will have less ability to free and they are also physically weaker making it harder for them to fight back physically. Teen girls are also suitable for voluntary breeding since they have low complication-rates and will be able to quicker get back into working since they finished breeding early.

https://vintologi.com/threads/teen-sex.20/#post-193

This makes it less likely people with bad genetics will rebel against the system since they are not really impacted by these aggressive breeding methods. People that used to be genetically privileged will now be subjugated and raped (sometimes over 1000 times) being humiliated as people with worse genetics can live normal lives.

Children females are forced to give birth to against their will does not have to be raised by said mother, they can also be raised by the father or the state. Having a mother less interested in child-rearing makes it easier for the government to gain power over the children and thus raise them to support the state and give them the skills needed to be good enforces of the system.

 

[Admin]

Forced breeding benefits
Since forcefully impregnating females provides a lot of potential benefits (there are many potential reasons to do so) we can expect this to become the norm in societies in the future, it's not just clear exactly how it would be implemented.

0. Reducing females to property is very effective for breeding females who have for society desired genetics, this form of eugenics would have a very significant impact while only affecting a small minority of the population.
1. Provide the ruling elite with free hands when it comes to creating their successors, female senators would also be able to freely select which mal(s) that would impregnate them/her and nobody within the borders would be allowed to refuse that.
2. Prevent females from being able to take care of their own children allowing the government to raise them to be loyal to the system instead.
3. increase the population allowing bigger economy and bigger military.
4. It would allow important males to reproduce a lot which can be used to reward males who contribute significantly to society or who are valuable to have as allies.
5. It would provide a lot of males with sexual entertainment.
6. Many females would probably enjoy it judging my r/rakekink
7. It could be used to gain control over females who are problematic for the government without actually breaking any law, maybe they figured out that the government were up to something most people view as bad and them being smart like that makes them into great candidates for breeding.

 

[Admin]

Exporting your excess population
By having people leave for other countries you will spread the genetic foundation for your government gain ground. This will eliminate the need to outright kill people who would otherwise become a burden for your society.

These people getting abused in the countries they are sent to really isn't your problem, if they do not get raised well that will harm the society they were exported to, not your society. Them being abused their might even be a good thing since then they will be more likely to become a burden for the society decreasing the competitive risk the society pose.

If you are unable to export your excess population via voluntary means then you might have to resort to outright force. You can kill/castrate their males and replace them with males from your own population if you still have a male surplus after the war.

 

[Admin]

Multiple countries at war which each other
A strong nation can potentially get beated by making too many enemies even if all individual enemies are weaker.

If an individual state becomes stronger than all other states combines then said state can just keep expanding to eventually conquer the entire planet, this is good if you are in control in that state but you do not want someone else to be able to do that.

As the number of countries become fewer it becomes increasingly valuable to prevent an individual country from becoming too strong. Therefore if a country attempts to expand you may want to attempt halting that by aiding the nation they are invading preventing them from gaining ground too cheaply. You have to be careful with military aid though since it could end up in the wrong hand or the former ally may turn against you.

You might want to demand concessions in exchange for supporting some country such as demanding that you gain some control over their government or demand that they pay for the weapons you provide them.

Since becoming to strong will put a target on your back you may want to keep a lot of your military might a secret, otherwise weaker nations may just gang up on you. You also do not want to appear to weak since that might also invite attacks.

Let's say you have 3 countries with the following military powers

Country0: 40%
country1: 35%
country2: 25%

In this case country2 do not want to team up with either to invade to invade the other since when that war is finished country2 will be at a severe disadvantage against their former ally. What country0 could do however is to appear much weaker than they are and thus fool country2 into an alliance where country2 thinks they will once they turn on their former ally.

Of course no matter what you do there will always be a risk of some country suiciding into you which can hurt you badly even if you manage to eventually win over them. Ideally you should do your best to influence other countries into not attacking you. Instead you want them to waste and lives attacking your enemies while you sit back and grow your military might.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5q1rerf-qw

 

[Admin]

Governance
Having a stable government that makes the correct decisions in a timely manner is very important for continued expansion. Just one bad government can be enough to destroy the future of your society sending your country into disarray. There is really only 3 factors that matter when it comes to governance in terms of what's good for society.

0. Accuracy of the decision-making.
1. Speed of the decision-making (sometimes have to be minutes in the case of nuclear war).
2. Having the ruling elite be firmly in control when it comes to governing the country, not having to implement bad policies for the sake of remaining in power.

There is really only one type of suitable system and that is to give all power to a small elite "senators".

A note on 2 is that you can of course have a government for a while that does not satisfy 0 to 2 but then it's important that a government satisfying these actually take power before it's too late. Power-struggles can however be very destructive even if you end up with a good government so you do not want a system where only 0 and 1 is satisfied even if the new government would satisfy all 3 unless you somehow manage to do a orderly transfer of power which is unlikely.

Governing properly is very demanding for the individual doing it. You have to constantly make research and you also need a lot of individuals supporting you in this that you can trust. If the senator isn't put under strict confidence (basically imprisonment) he/she may intentionally or accidentally leak sensitive information, this risk increases when you give the senators more power or give them more freedom (such as ability to freely use the internet).

More people voting means that the probability of an individual vote actually making a difference becomes smaller which will make the people voting less motivated to do a proper job.

Having few people in charge also allow you to grow a cult-following for each individual leader increasing the confidence people have in the system allowing it to remain it place.

So why not concentrate the power in just one individual?

The issue is that individuals will never be fully reliable, they might be a sleep, do something other than governing (such as impregnating females) and over time people become weaker and less capable due to age or sickness. By instead having an elite in charge if an individual senator make a bad decision they will be able to stop that, if a senator start becoming senile he can be forcefully replace by his preferred successor.

https://vintologi.com/threads/elite-rule.24/#post-230

Ideally a majority of the senators should always be awake so they are able to instantly make a decision in the case of some emergency.

It's possible for individual senators or groups of senators to specialize in different fields but doing that too much will come with some danger since their interests will be different from the interests of the senate as a whole potentially resulting in dysfunction or instability of the different parts stop being aligned with each other. To avoid the overspecialization problem it's very important that all senators are highly involved with governance in general even if they decide to specialize at specific things.

Even if you you have a large number of senators (such as 99) and a lot of sub-division (such as giving each individual senator a lot of individual repsonsibility) most decisions will still have to be made at a lower level, the larger the government the harder it will be for the senate to properly govern everything. Thus we end up having to rely a lot on the private sector to do solve problems and make decisions for us since it's too burdensome and problematic to make all these decisions as a government.

Of course the ruling elite will naturally prioritize their own well-being above the well-being of the average citizens and this is not a bad thing since the elite is the most important individuals of society. Them forcefully taking females as breeding slaves would not be a bad thing for society since then they would create a lot of potentially very viable successors with a biological link to their predecessors, this is valuable since a cult-like following of the senators has already been established and this will naturally extend to the children of them that were selected as the first successors.

 

[Admin]

Laws and culture
The ideal set of laws does not depend much on culture or ethnicity of your population. Sometimes it's necessary to implement a bad law to appease the population (mob) of your country but in these cases the judiciary and executive branch will be able to limit the damage by not enforcing the law or only enforcing it when there are other reasons for wanting to punish these individuals.

Laws that don't promote the continuation/expansion of the society will are not sustainable and thus suicidal in terms of societal survival of the fittest.

There is hardly any need for having localized laws, things like environmental regulations do need to be different at different places but this does not depend much on culture unless you are going to let some culture destroy the environment for the sake of tradition.

The school system might also have to be localized to a degree, some people might also want to learn their own language in addition to the language of the country they live in.

People have different preferences regarding how laws should be but this already create a lot of conflicts within countries that have a mostly homogeneous culture. Two people with wildly different cultures can also have similar views on how society should be structured. Righwingers today in Unites States like Augusto Pinochet far more than most Chileans.

In order to evaluate how good a law is you need to look at how it affects the gene-pool of your population, if it will make your population more fit over time then your society will be able to grow stronger and out-compete other societies that did not have as good policy with regard to eugenics.

 

[Admin]

The origin of morality
Animals that act in a way not ideal for survival and reproduction may end up being replaced by animals that make better decisions in terms of survival and reproduction. The moral views and emotions humans currently display is a result of evolution in an environment very different from the current environment and this is a big contributing factor to humans currently deviating far from what's ideal in terms of survival and reproduction, in addition evolution itself is a very slow and gradual process that very often will not even come close to reaching perfection.

Thus over time evolution enforces a darwinian morality meaning people are forced to adapt to the environment. People that break laws may end up jailed or even killed and this will create evolutionary pressure not to break these laws.

Humans are currently in control over the environment and thus the morality will to a very large extent come down to decisions made by humans, by changing the environment we can change the direction of human evolution.

 

[Admin]

Cultural evolution
Some cultures will naturally spread while other cultures will become increasingly less common. A culture can grow by reaching new people or by being transferred to children being born to said culture. Culture can spread and adapt much faster than the pace in which genetics can change and thus cultural evolution can also be very valuable in terms of individual survival of the fittest (individual genes, not individual humans).

Cultures that promote fertility will spread naturally by causing higher birthrates among individuals that believe in said culture, furthermore people that are neurologically susceptible for said culture will end up reproducing more and thus keep spreading the culture even if it's unpopular among most people.

How easy it is for a particular culture to spread will depend on society and neurological factors. Some cultures will naturally appeal to people and gain popularity even though it's bad in terms of survival and reproduction, this will however die out over time.

It's in the interest of society to promote culture that is beneficial for the society itself allowing these cultural views to become the societal norm and what most people follow.

 

[Admin]

Will societal survival of the fittest create a dystopia?
While societal survival of the fittest will enforce many policies currently viewed as bad/dystopian it's not clear that it would actually be less fun for the average citizen than the current society, sure it would be different but would it really be worse?

Societal survival of the fittest would act as a strong force against government dysfunction, that means that even if government were to become more authoritarian/despotic (which is to be expected) they would at least be functional.

Since focus would be on winning a war governments would have to deprioritize 'helping' people who do not want to be helped in the first place (such as teens engaged in what's viewed as socially destructive). Governments would focus their mandates/force on societal good instead of just controlling people due to political correctness.

A female being reduced to breeding slave might be unpleasant for her (unless she enjoys the brutal domination) but it can be very fun for the male able to forcefully impregnate her over and over.

Fighting a war can be traumatic but it can also bring a lot of excitement, being deep in enemy territory with your sniper looking for civilians to execute. Piloting a fighter jet hoping to prevail against your adversary, dropping a big nuclear bomb and seeing a beautiful cloud.

Hydrogen bomb (thermonuclear weapon)

You might hide in a cellar as the war goes on and when you finally goes out the war is over and then you will be able to rebuilt a new much better global society. With the new world government there would no longer be the push for individual countries to constantly get an edge over each other endangering/harming humanity as a whole and the planet, we could finally get along with solving issues such as climate change and finding ways to expand humanity beyond this planet.

When we look back at the brutal war it will not be looked back as a dystopia but an amazing triumph for our new society, by crushing all other states on the planet the new government would have full legitimacy and full authority.

Since the world would now be stable there would be less need for instant decision-making and we could instead focus more on having a government that is very reliable and stable. For that purpose we might want to expand the senate from 7 to 63 seats to 15 to 999 seats. The government would also likely focus on improving peoples lives and in general make earth a nice place to live on as a human.

 

[Admin]

Misguided policies
While you can try to put effort figuring out which policies are actually good for expanding the power of a state crushing competing powerstructures actually succeeding in that to the point where you eventually govern the entire planet will be very difficult to pull off.

An example of a policy very likely to be misguided is consription, this wastes valuable time of your citizens that could be used far more efficiently. It's generally far better to have actual professional soldiers. Using conscripts will be politically costly and often they will demand further rights in exchange for their service that is vastly inferior to what a professional soldier would do. WInning wars is not really dependend much about how many people you can command, instead it's far more important to be effective using powerful weapons of mass destruction.

Eugenics policies have very often been very misguided where people are subjected to horrific abuses with near zero gain in terms of actually improving the genetics of the population. The nazis killed people they viewed as mentally ill but that didn't reduce the incidence of people viewed as being schizophrenic. The nazis also killed around 5.1 million jews which was very dysgenic and made most people righteously hate the nazis.

 

[Admin]

What if you as a society just ignore compettion and just try to make it a nice place to live in?
While this may make people satisfied/happy short term they might not be as happy when their beloved country get invaded by 2 powerful nation at once resulting in the citizens being killed, tortured, raped and used for medical experiments.

There is no shortage of IS videos illustrating the bad consequences that can come with weakness, this remains true even if the invaders eventually lose, they still did significant harm to your people before that.

But just playing defence will also not work long-term, over time one or several powers will grow stronger and stronger so unless your society also expand defending against aggression will become increasingly difficult and eventually not even realistically possible if possible at all.

If rome hadn't expanded they would have been crushed by Carthage and there would never have been a great roman republic or the succeeding roman empire. Expanding your borders will also give your citizens more living-space which itself also brings satisfaction to the public and will allow continued economic and military growth.

 

[Admin]

Justifying military expansion to the masses
When you expand your borders it's important to convince your public that you are doing the right thing. For that reason it's important that you as the government have a firm grip over media and religion so you make people think the war is a great thing.

One common technique is to demonize the ones you are invading, as a last resort you can just make stuff up but in most cases you can find real issues with their society and you can use that to make the public understand that their government is bad. You could also just weaponize things like racism and use that to fire up the public. These racists can be useful as soldiers since they will be more likely to die fighting against the people they hate (racism isn't the actual reason for the war but racists don't care).

Historically religion has been a common rationalization for wars, if they have a different religion you can use that to stoke religious hate against them, if it is the same religion you can just point to how they are not following your religion in the right way.

 

[Admin]

Impact of the belief in reincarnation
People who believe they are likely to be reborn as human on earth will be more motivated to make earth a nice place to on, for that reason you want the ruling elite to believe in reincarnation on earth as a human since then they would be more likely to actually make earth a nice place for humans to live on.

As for the evidence for this?

Well there are good reasons to believe in some continuation of consciousness after death but it's not clear how likely you would be to actually reincarnate as a human on earth.

https://vintologi.com/threads/the-vintologi-theory-of-consciousness.652/

 

[Admin]

Societal reproduction
Societies can besides just expanding also multiply. A single empire can be shattered into multiple smaller parts. In addition the ruling elite of one society could potentially implement themselves as rulers of some other country.

By gaining control over things like media you can utilize weaknesses in democratic systems to gain control over them.

In the case of non-democracies you might be able to find a way to topple the ruling elite there but if their leaders are competent that is not going to work out without a significant military interventions.

It's a bit unclear what the equivalent to genetics is for societies, there are multiple factors here

0. The genetics of the population
1. The leaders (especially in the case of stable elite rule).
2. Cultural factors (especially religion).
3. The societal structure (how the government works technically, corporate structures, etc).
4. Laws
5. physical factors like buildings, infrastructure, etc.

 

[Admin]

Societal survival of the fittest as a great filter?
So far when we have looked at the rest of the universe we have not found any good sign of life, everything outside earth appears to be completely dead, if there are other civilizations out there we cannot see that.

Could it be the case that one reason why we do not see anything is that societal competition forces societies to become increasingly agressive and take bigger and bigger risks for gaining control over society and that this results in advances civilizations quickly turning very bad since it cannot last very long?

While nuclear weapons appear very dangerous they are nowhere close to be able to wipe out humanity, what they could do however is to set humanity back.

Maybe a bigger risk is climate change where societal competition pushes societies to destroy the environment (not just the climate) since societies respecting the environment more than their competitiveness would be put at a disadvantage. Since emissions in the air tends to spread around the entire planet reducing emissions really does not make sense in terms of societal competition since the emissions also harms your societal competition.

One potential danger is artificial intelligence, a very powerful artificial brain could be extremely dangerous and as we have already established if there are multiple competing societies safety measures will go out the window and societies would instead take big risks for runaway AI just in the hopes that it would help them win the societal competition.

 

[Admin]

Societal survival of the fittest as a deterrent
People are not very willing committing societal suicide for the sake of some political ideology they believe in.

The main reason why societal survival will crush with its heavy iron first is because people generally have a very poor understanding of what actually makes societies competitive.

People who believe in various ideologies that are bad for society generally believes that society benefit from that so they will keep pushing it without realizing how destructive it would be.

The ones knowingly pushing for destructive ideologies will generally be the losers in society who just wants to bring the system down. Some people might actually benefit from CCP gaining control over North America.

 

[Admin]

Madman theory
If you have nuclear weapons but it's obvious you are unwilling to actually pull the trigger and kill millions of people other countries will not take you seriously, for this reason both trump and nixon tried to play crazy but it didn't really work.

You need to demonstrate you are indeed crazy enough to launch nukes or other countries will not respect you.

This can be applied to many situations, when people know you will not do anything crazy they will not respect you and people are likely to take advantage over you since you are afraid of conflict.

Empty threats can sometimes work out but usually it doesn't and you may end up in serious troubles. Trump tried bluffing against North Korea threatening to nuke them but that didn't work, Kim Jong Un saw through his bluff.

 

[Admin]

"mutually assured destruction" debunked
The notion that the short-term catastrophy caused by nuclear war would prevent it from happening is very much false. What it does mean however is that countries looking to expand will prioritize targets who cannot defend themselves with nuclear weapons (such as Ukraine).

But once only nuclear powers remain in order to expand you will have to be willing to take nuclear hits. There are multiple ways to mitigate the damage that can be caused by other nuclear powers.

0. Spreading out your population and important material/infrastructure over a large area
1. Having people and important infrastructure hidden under ground safe or mostly safe from nuclear weapons.
2. interception of nuclear missiles
3. Have great food stockpiles (ideally lasting years).
4. Doing a first strike to severely damage the nuclear capability of the country you are invading.
5. Deterring a retaliation by having a lot of nukes yourself (so a leader might be afraid to hit back even if you nuke them).

The correct strategy is to start a nuclear war at the moment you have a great enough chance to win. Otherwise if you wait you will give your opponents a chance to surpass you and you do not want that, win now when you can.

Some people have claimed that nuclear war would cause disastrous fallout but that ignores the fact that 2056 tests of nuclear bombs has already been done and most people are just fine, sure there were some issues with it (which led to testing being halted) but nothing like the apocalyptic disaster people have claimed would follow.

https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nucleartesttally

The total radioactivity of the fission products is extremely large at first, but it falls off at a fairly rapid rate as a result of radioactive decay. Seven hours after a nuclear explosion, residual radioactivity will have decreased to about 10 percent of its amount at 1 hour, and after another 48 hours it will have decreased to 1 percent. (The rule of thumb is that for every sevenfold increase in time after the explosion, the radiation dose rate decreases by a factor of 10.)

https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-weapon/Residual-radiation-and-fallout

Most of the tests were performed over a period of about 20 years, but even if they had all gone off at once it wouldn't have destroyed the world. Nuclear winter is caused by ash from the burning city below being injected into the stratosphere by the intense updraft. So if the nukes aren't targeted at cities there is no nuclear winter effect.

A nuclear winter is very much surviveable for humanity.

The winner of the nuclear war would have control over food so the survivors of the winning country would probably be fine, others might be fucked though.

StaysAwakeAllWeek wrote:

It's not even clear there would be a nuclear winter at all now with the current far smaller nuclear stockpile and much less flammable cities, plus the extra 1 degree of buffer from global warming.

AllergicTOredditors wrote:

Ok smart guy lets wargame this.

First strike, if you can take out command syructure and launch capability you would be able to limit a response now how do you do this since most advanced nations, those with satellite bound early warning detection. In order to get around this you would have to stealth only get a weapon in there so let's play the United States as the target and Russia as the aggressor, Russia gives its mythical suitcase nukes to a couple of I haven't bound zealots of any particular religious order however since they are recruiting from the Middle East factions will say they're Muslims acting in a terrorist capacity, so they're able to get suitcase nukes very close to the US Capitol during a time when they know that the nuclear football is in town and they can get close enough, within a mile., To detonate that would take out the primary responder that being the president and the nuclear football now at the same time a coordinated attack would happen on Cheyenne mountain and within 15 to 20 minutes you could get a sub launch on to primary military bases like Andrews and El Gordo that would limit strike back capability you're going to get hit you're going to suffer damage but not that much,

Now if you have the ability knock down your missiles in the boost phase, your chances of winning got even better, so you're able to knock out a lotof missiles on the boost phase with either space borne kinetic weapons or a system similar to thaad (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) your chances of winning are getting even better.

Now we get to the re-entry vehicle stage are you able to knock out incoming mirvs? Does your country have something similar to iron dome? If so then yeah we're looking at a victory here.

So several major cities have taken heads but you had the foresight to stockpile food reserves medical reserves and personnel outside of areas affected by radiation and destruction from nuclear detonations, if the covid pandemic has taught us anything then we have stockpiled and very likely have if you've been planning this attack, how about if the aggressor was China and you have ghost cities that all of the sudden became populated overnight prior to your sneak attack well your chances of surviving and winning a nuclear war just got even bigger.

Nuclear detonations aren't that terrible I know that sounds inhumane and uneducated but the fact is that the blast radius is only about 1 to kilometers and the radiation is a little over that there's plenty of websites out there that show you the effects of a standard detonation they're not going to be dropping tsar bombs on us they're going to be dropping ballistic missile warheads on us, according to Wikipedia the average yield of a reentry vehicles about 1.2 megatons , And according to simple Google searches the average destruction radius is about 7 miles this includes initial blast pressure wave shockwave and radiation, it takes out a city not an entire country and believe me one country let's say the US so you've managed to take out the nuclear football and Cheyenne mountain and knocked down most of the outbound missiles you take a few hits for five but the United States has suffered a hit on Denver hit on Washington DC very likely hit on California I hit on Florida and some of the coastal areas they're probably not going to want to continue the fight and calm it down so you have a limited exchange with a clear winner and a clear loser it just depends on how stealthily and quickly you can act before the other guy it all depends on the very first hit and that has to be a ground base explosion not as devastating as an Air blast but if you hit the targets you're meant to hit then it's super devastating and will win you the war.

 

[Admin]

Can we avoid a world-war by having countries voluntarily join a union?
The first obvious issue is that forming a union peacefully would require all parties to agree to it which isn't particularly easy when there are a lot of parties involved. You likely still have to conquer a lot of areas with military might .

Furthermore when unions are formed the states of said union typically maintain a lot of autonomy. EU is weak and united states had a civil war when the south states tried to break away from the union. The European Union still doesn't even have an army (some have pushed for that unsuccessfully).

There is also the issue of legitimating and stabilizing the new union government. How many European would be comfortable having members of the chinese politburo standing comitte vote on their laws?

 

[Admin]

Economic interdependence
It is sometimes claimed that countries being economically dependent on each other would result in general peace since you would harm yourself by doing an invasion.

The first obvious issue with this is that for a lot of products alternative sourcing exists or you can just stockpile what you need until you are able to find replacement.

The second issue with this reasoning is the fact that countries could just resort to protectionism and economic nationalism to make sure they can produce all vital products themselves.

The third issue with this argument is that often when you invade you can spare a lot of their industries and just take them over, you do not neccessarily have to just destroy everything. China would probably Spare the TSMC factory if they invaded Taiwan.

TSMC is currently building chip-factories in multiple countries which will result in the west no longer needing Taiwain for computer ships.

There has been many cases of sanctions being attempted to harm a country without invading them but this has very rarely actually been effective in deterring invasion. If sanctions doesn't work to prevent war then clearly economic interdependence would also not work, it's all wishful thinking people engage in because they view war as this awful thing to avoid not realizing that it's not something you can avoid in the first place without having a strong and stable world-government.

 

[Admin]

World war III prediction
The russian invasion of Ukraine did not come as a surprise. Putin has ignored sanctions in the past so it was not surprising he did that again. The sanctions russia were subjected to did however end up being a lot more brutal than putin anticipated and the war hasn't gone anywhere close to as well for putin as he was expected.

Right now the EU and NATO is supplying Ukraine with lethal weapons hoping to that a peaceful end of the conflict can be reached. The issue is that Volodymyr Zelenskyy now wants Chrimea back which putin is very unlikely to agree to. Russia is demanding a dimilitarization of Ukraine in addition to them staying out of NATO which would leave them basically defenseless. It would be very stupid of Ukraine to trust Russia again (they already tried that earlier when they gave up their nuclear weapons)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Ukraine

Several articles have mentioned the west being dependent on Ukraine for neon gas, this however seems to be a temporary issue that can be overcome by producing that elsewhere, therefore NATO will be unlikely to intervene for that reason alone.

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/ukraine-war-flashes-neon-warning-lights-chips-2022-02-24/'

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/russia-ukraine-chip-shortage-invasion-b2023283.html

What if the west keep pushing?
Obviously it's not in the interest of russia to keep escalating in this situation since they have no chance of willing world war III even if all non-NATO countries of the world join on their side (which won't happen obviously). Since joining on the side of putin would be basically suicide in WWIII few if any countries would actually do that.

Russia/putin being crazy enough to launch nuclear weapons would not wipe out NATO, their nukes would cause millions of deaths (mostly people in cities) but it would not kill most of the conventional NATO military. NATO would of course respond by sneding Nukes back to Russia which would leave russia with relatively very weak conventional forces.

China would likely at first be neutral and later in the war join against Russia to do annexations (making a part of Russia Chinese). The west would likely force some democratic system on the part of Russia they gain control over.

The nuclear war would benefit china significantly while destroying Russia and weakening NATO and the EU. China still would not be able to conquer the world since the west would still have nukes left and very strong conventional weapons.

How hard will the west push?
Whether or not the west intervene will likely depend on how the war progresses. Russia can likely get away with humiliating Ukraine into giving up even more territories but they probably would not let Russia conquer the entire country.
Russia resorting to genocidal warfare would make a NATO intervention a lot more likely and this will tie the hands of putin, it will be risky for him to indisciminately bomb civilians.

What about Russian security?
The invasion so far has been a disaster for russian security. It has turned the world largely against putin making putin a security liability for Russia. Russian media/propaganda is being banned and the russian economy is in shambles. The longer this continues the worse situation russia will be in.

Meanwhile Ukraine is preparing for guerilla warfare by giving out guns like candy and teaching their citizens how to make molotov cccktails. A war dragging out for 10 years would be an utter disaster for Russia, they very much cannot afford that while they face massive sanctions. Russia also cannot win world war III, that leaves russia with just one safe option which is to get a peace agreement but now Ukraine wants all their territory back and so also apply for NATO membership.

But NATO countries are not willing to let Ukraine join NATO any time soon so in the short and medium term not invading Ukraine would have been better in terms of security. The issue however is putin wanting to restore the territory of the soviet union which would neccessity further wars including against NATO countries, this explains why russia wants NATO countries like the baltic states to be expelled. NATO prevents Russia from expanding into any nato territory and putin hates that, the larger NATO becomes the less russia can expand.

How likely is nuclear war?
It's very unlikely that nuclear war will not happen at some point. For 2022 the risk might be around 6% with the most likely culprit is vladimir putin launching nukes out of rage/spite basically committing suicide in the process. There has been speculation about putin having cancer which might explain why is is keeping up the aggression against the west.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17793192/does-vladimir-putin-have-cancer-russia-president/

The by far most likely outcome of the conflict is some peace agreement allowing putin to save face, it's a bit unclear what that will entail though. Most likely putin is (like Trump) applying the madman theory but it's likely that his bluff will be called in that case (similar to how Kim Jong Un called Trumps bluff).

The risk with ignoring nuclear treats is that you might run into a situation where you are actually up against someone who is crazy for real and not just pretending. This is why it's important to build proper shelters so you do not have 20% of your population genocided in a nuclear war.

 

[Admin]

From world war III to world domination
You do not have to conquer the entire planet at once to reach world domination. You just have to maintain your military dominance while you expand your borders.

What you can do is to bomb countries who refuse to submit to your rule while not actually occupying them, you just case enough damage to prevent them from ever becoming a treat to you.

A full occupation requires around 1 soldier for every 50 people you occupy and you might not have enough soldiers to do that after a war, especially if you didn't resort to a lot of genocidal warfare.

washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2004/05/09/a-proven-formula-for-how-many-troops-we-need/5c6dbfc9-33f8-4648-bd07-40d244a1daa4/

 

[Admin]

"Peace through strength"
The stronger you are militarily the less willing other countries will be to mess with you since they know that they would lose a full war if the conflict is escalated too that. This is especially the case if the strong nation is willing to go to war.

The only reason Putin can be aggressive is because the West does not want a world war III even though we could reach total world domination via that war (we are militarily very much superior). If we had expanded NATO more aggressively (including Ukraine and Georgia) two russian invasion would have been prevented since it would be suicide for Putin to invade a NATO country. We do not have to cave to the weaker party. Doing concessions to putin only encourages further aggression, not just by showing that his aggression does not have consequences, it also makes Russia stronger relative to NATO which will increase the chance of putin initiating world war III (since he would have a better shot at getting to a draw).

The second issue with the "peace through strength" doctrine is that it required you to constantly maintain military superiority. If a country surpasses you then you might end up in trouble. Of course often when a power is rising said power will be attacked by the declining power in order to prevent that shift in power but that requires going to war and it might not actually stop the decline of what used to be the dominant power.

Furthermore a strong power might underestimate a rising power not going to war with them until it's too late.

Therefore the correct policy is to just keep expanding as much as you can when you are dominant so you never give another country a chance to treated your dominance. You can only delay the war for so long.

It is worth noting that you can not actually assume that leaders will do what's best for their countries, a leader controlling a weaker nation might still initiate aggression against a stronger ruining their country. Hitler started world war II only to face a devastating loss (he never had a great chance of winning).

 

[Admin]

John J. Mearsheimer doesn't understand societal survival of the fittest
He has recieved a lot of attention lately where he basically blames the west for the Ukraine disaster, this is only partly correct.

https://uacrisis.org/en/9283-reply-john-mearsheimer-putin-realist

So far the war has been really bad for russian security, it turned the world against putin and strengthened NATO.

You need to resort to "blood and soil" reasoning to justify the invasion from russia's perspective. Putin does indeed seem focused on trying to restore the soviet union or to build a greater Russia (which mearsheimer specifically denied).

John mearsheimer did correctly predict Russian aggression but that's not really much of an accomplishment, it was obvious that was going to happen after Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons.

https://www.academia.edu/57955152/Case_for_a_Ukrainian_Nuclear_Deterrent_The

If NATO had been expanded more aggressively to include Ukraine the invasion wouldn't have happened since Russia does not want to trigger article 5 to start a war they would lose. Had we actually put nuclear weapons in Ukraine that would have likely reduced the risk of aggression since that would have made world war III even more disastrous for Russia that it already is. The more dominant the west is militarily the more aggressive we can be against other countries and the less aggressive other countries can be against us.

Appeasement on the other hand only encourages aggression and this is the real reason for why the war started. Putin had gotten away with aggression in the past (including nerve gas attack against the UK) and this ended up giving him the wrong idea.

The strong party (NATO/EU) does not have to make any concessions to the weaker party (putin) in this case, it would be suicidal for putin to start a war against us and he probably knows that, he can only be aggressive if we let him get away with it. The only reason why we cannot take more aggressive stances against Russia is because of their nuclear weapons and our limited defense against them combined with a populations who do not want a nuclear war even though their countries would win militarily if that would take place.

While "societal survival of the fittest" does enforce prioritizing security for your own country many leaders will not actually act based on what's best for their country. Russia ended up with a leader focused on himself and his power and we will likely see a "societal survival of the fittest" enforcement as sanctions crush the Russia economy and cripple their war machine.

This happens when a weak power becomes too aggressive, they get crushed.

A lot of people advocated against letting Ukraine NATO since that would weaken russias security situation. Instead appeasement was tried which ended in utter failure.

The world was much more dangerous when the soviet union was a significant rival power to the US. It became much safer after the soviet union crumbled making NATO dominant.

Once you are approaching the point where you are becoming more powerful than all other countries combined the rational thing is to push down the gas paddle before other powers manage to unite against you. Then you can just keep expanding to gain more territory to the point where you control all of earths territory eliminating all competition.

 

[Admin]

About "irredentism"
Often when a country loses territory that will cause significant bitterness among the population and this is something you can weaponize to justify a war.

The issue is that often the territory you lost in the past is not the most strategically important territory right now. Often there are other ways to expand that is a lot more beneficial for your empire.

Given that "societal survival of the fittest" will continue until one society dominate the entire planet it's better to just focus on expanding in general and eventually you will get back any lost territory, more importantly you will have conquered the entire planet.

Interestingly Africa has completely rejected Irredentism and ehtno-nationalism in favor of the borders they inherited from colonial powers. People in africa generally want to instead create something new, bigger and better.

All afrikan countries already beloing to the "african Union" which is modeled after the EU. There is also a movement specifically for an "East African Community" where they try to unite multiple countries into a single federation with one common president.

https://www.eac.int/

 

[Admin]

Constructed states vs states resting on the past
States that are constructed tend to be more militaristic and also stronger. The roman empire for example was build via conquest.

Unites states and Israel were both created by taking lands from people who used to live there and both have very strong militaries relative to the size of their population. Since imperial states cannot rely on things such as common culture they need to rely more on things like competent governance, a strong military and effective social control.

 

[Admin]

Why we might se WWIII soon
As expected putin is losing the Ukraine war really badly and just sending more cannon fodder to the front isn't going to cut it. He cannot win the war without using nuclear weapons and he is obviously very unwilling to back down at this point.

1. USA has promised there would be "disastrous consequences" if russia used nukes in Ukraine.
2. Putin might think 1 is a bluff.
3. If putin ignores the warning the US is basically at a direct war with the US if the US wasn't bluffing with regard to "disastrous consequences".
4. NATO cannot back down since that would send the wrong message.
5. Putin doesn't seem at all willing to back down.

This also means that the best way to reduce the risk of WW3 is for NATO to stand firm and strong so putin doesn't get the wrong idea. If we show weakness putin might call when it isn't actually a bluff.

You might think "ww3 will not happen because muh mutually assured destruction but that's not actually how it works. The only thing that has prevented ww3 so far has been NATO superiority and NATO being unwilling to just conquer the entire planet due to the high temporary cost in doing so. The US actually had a chance to destroy USSR before they got nukes but they didn't take that opportunity because the leaders wasn't willing to force that sacrifice upon people, instead we got the cold-war which could have ended way worse.

Why western leaders are more likely to pull the trigger now
the EU and the US are having a lot of issues now, this makes it more tempting for leaders here to start a war so they can unite people behind the government and mobilize. If you are about to lose the next election going to war might change that because people rally behind the leader in a crisis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally_'round_the_flag_effect

A: probability of putin using nukes against Ukraine: 16%
B: Probability of putin using nukes directly against NATO country: 4%

For scenario A the ww3 chance should be around 25%
For scenario B the ww3 chance should be around 75%.

ww3 chance: 7%

Just don't live close to any major city or military base and have at least 1 month of food stockpiled. Having a cellar or some other nuclear shelter can also help a lot but for a lot of people that's not really realistic right now.

It might be inaccurate to call this a world war since it would be basically just russia against NATO and it would be over rather quickly, still millions of people would die. China would not join on the losing side, they would try to stay neutral (they are already sortoff trying to do that).

 

[Admin]

Was the nordsteam 1 and 2 destructions a warning to russia/putin ?
One important aspect when it comes to deterence is demonstrating you are willing to go the full mile. The US blowing up nordstream 1 and 2 would for that reason make strategic sense at least. If the US was behind it it was clearly the right decision, putin needs to be put in his place, same with germany.

A lot of people got the impression that Trump could do something like that but Biden is far more likely to actually pull the trigger when it comes to that stuff, he isn't going to get re-elected anyway as things stand now so he might aswell go out with a bang. Biden also doesn't have that much left of his life-span so he has little to lose.

Biden did promise that nordstream 2 wouldn't open if russia invaded but he refused to go into any details in how he could prevent that.

 

[Admin]

Don't listen to pro putin/russia morons
Earlier they were claiming "russia is winning" and then Ukraine regained 8000 Km² of territory and russia announced a 'partial' mobilization in a desperate attempt to stop the Ukrainian advances.

Ukraine will not be able to use the NATO weapons provided to them since they are not trained to use them

Turns out that with some training (that the west were easily able to provide) they could learn to use these NATO weapons (such as javelins, himars) and now Russia cannot win without massive usage of nuclear weapons.

https://deepstatemap.live