I think it misleading to think of the United States as an entity in the power game that's being played. I much prefer Simon Dixon's FIC, MIC & TIC. Companies & countries are concepts, they don't actually exist outside of our minds. Sure, they command real people & resources but they're psuedo entities that we've created & permitted to exist in our realm. I suspect this was done to hide the strings moving the puppets & allow puppets to be replaced as needed. I don't disagree with what you're saying I just think it's more useful to talk about the controlling interests at play. The US is not a participant, it's a geographical region & a population but not a sovereign entity. China & possibly Russia are different.

Simon has been reading my BRICS posts from 2023 & 2024 -

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View quoted note → >”Companies & countries are concepts, they don't actually exist outside of our minds. Sure, they command real people & resources but they're psuedo entities that we've created & permitted to exist in our realm.” Very prescient. Both very right and in some sense, very wrong. If you had a time machine and went back 160 years to any city in what we call Germany and asked a random person what they were - none would have called themselves German. They’d be Bavarians or Prussians etc. Today they’d all be Germans first, Bavarians etc second. And yet the whole Prussian identity has been erased since then; they were the leading entity in unification, the dominant force in Germany for decades, and today 98% of people would think it’s a typo of Russia. They don’t understand that they were themselves a “nation”, they were as different from the Bavarians as Aussies are from the Welsh. These were Lutherans and Calvinists with a warrior-led bureaucratic system. The Bavarians were Catholics with an 800-year monarchy, they saw Vienna and the Holy Roman Empire as the centre of civilisation, they were entirely different to the Prussians. Das Deutsche Reich melded Bavarians and Prussians into one system, one country - Germany. This wasn’t done so puppets could be put in and out of power, there’s hundreds of years of geopolitical backdrop I can’t explain here with the Holy Roman Empire and the Hanseatic League and Napoleon and and and; THAT’S why Germany came into being. That today’s leaders are might be puppets is an altogether different story and misses the whole run up of how we got here. Yes in some sense, countries are very much made up. The map doesn’t make sense to any student of history - I’ll DM you separately on this point. In some sense; they’re the realest thing humans know. They are what stands between you and the barbarians razing your city and raping your wife and daughters. They are what drags your sons into war because some inbred royals have beef and want to measure their dicks against each other. Dismissing this as Simon does isn’t correct. He’s right about many things, most even, but just seeing things purely as factions isn’t 100% right either. I won’t say he’s wrong because he doesn’t claim these are all isolated well-defined entities and his labels are kind of catch-alls, but i heard his Xitter space with Ryan Dawson re Israel and I think that particularly showed his shortcomings where his factional view not properly accounting for nation states and the power in this mythos. 55 years ago; Vietnam was 2 countries. In fact it used to be multiple, the Cham people were basically genocided and barely exist today.. Nobody denies it’s 1 country today despite the differences internally. And nobody will fuck with them now because that 1 country has like 450k active duty military and 5 million reservists even though amongst them they’re as different as Prussians and Bavarians were, but they have a nation state “faction” in Simon’s terms that unites them. The MIC and FIC can’t sell them out; that was tried in the US-Vietnam war and look what happened.. Simplifying down purely to monetarily-aligned factions isn’t quite right. It denies humans their humanity, and humans are gonna human. They’re going to align with kin, and kin of kin, and they’re going to fight for their founding myths and the continuity of their people regardless of what some stock market number says.

Yeah - it wasn't always this way & it's not this way everywhere. China appears to have maintained their sovereignty while expanding. I think many of the SE Asian countries still have some sovereignty but they're being slowly coopted by China's influence. America & Europe (the west) has been captured using their legal & political processes. Democracy has quite a few flaws in that respect. The taking heads change but the lobbyist interests are always seen to. The idea that a western country's elected representatives serve the interests of the people has become a joke. They serve the commercial interests of their donors now & politics is just theatre to help that turd sandwich go down. To use western nations in your game theory is a mistake. Their incentives are private rather than being for the public. The becomes even more apparent when you start game out conflicts. On the surface, the US is using force to remove Iran's nuclear capabilities. But they've also thrown most of the world into an energy crisis that's threatening their economies. The US seems to be the least effected by the closing of Hormuz so you might think that's the main driver behind it. With the "complex" lens on though, you see the MIC making bank on defence contracts while the Iranian leaders are being undermined domestically. The US as a nation has no rational reason to invade except this pretext of "no Iranian nukes". The MIC & ultimately the FIC benefit greatly from the fighting & the eventual rebuild. It's the FICs long term agenda in the middle east that will eventually rise to the surface. If you think of the US as a participant in your game theory, you miss the incentives of the FIC that actually controls the actions of the US. Gov. A big one I noticed was in gaming out a nation state attack on Bitcoin. You could assume their objective is to destroy Bitcoin because it undermines their money printer. The reality is that the FIC have multiple disruptions in play & command multiple participants with stakes on either side. No matter what happens they benefit because they have hedged the outcome. Socialize the losses, privatise the profit. Bitcoin then becomes a great tool for extracting & laundering value. It's no longer seen as a threat to their fiat system because they have figured out a way to use it. It shifts your thinking in predicting outcomes when you better understand the incentives & participants at play in the game.

Account deleted 🤣

I like your analysis. Bitcoin is the only path for the US indeed. Mark Goodwin wrote a book about it as well (the bitcoin dollar)

To be clear: I don’t want the US to follow my ideas. I want them to collapse in to civil war and split back to what their founders intended as a federation of independent states. That’s a bit more explicit than Goodwin would say but I don’t care; Either the US keeps projecting empire on others or they implode and have to fight themselves. The latter is safer and better for 97% of humanity so I would side with that any day.