Roundup: World In Upheaval

I may be reusing that title a lot during 2025—and probably beyond.

Upheaval at home and abroad. Trump hasn’t changed his mind about Greenland—or Syria:

Megatron @Megatron_ron

BREAKING:

 Trump to withdraw US forces from Syria

Israeli media reports that Trump informed Israeli government that he intends to withdraw US forces from Syria.

3:02 PM · Jan 28, 2025

Deep State must be freaking out.

Probably not coincidentally, Trump has invited (summoned?) Netanyahu to the WH. Trump wants to talk about peace in the Middle East, which is not at all what Israel wants—Israel wants chaos as a matter of long standing policy. Difficult to parse this invite/summons, but that’s Trump these days:

MenchOsint @MenchOsint

Trump has personally invited Netanyahu to the White House next Tuesday.

1:50 AM · Jan 29, 2025

Hard to square this next proposed EO with First Amendment, especially given the expansive definition of “anti-Semitism” (= criticism of Israel). As a matter of constitutional law, my understanding is that persons who are legally present in the US (resident aliens, foreign students, foreign workers, etc.) enjoy much the same rights as US citizens. I presume there will be legal challenges to placing First Amendment rights at the discretion of Israel’s Lobby or the Israel Lobby’s paid agents in Congress:

Megatron @Megatron_ron

JUST IN:

Trump will deport everyone who is against the Jewish supremacy in the US.

Trump set to sign order instructing federal agencies to "combat antisemitism," which may include deporting anti-Jewish activists.

7:01 AM · Jan 29, 2025

For the record, I disagree with Megatron’s framing of this. The first obvious objection is that the EO would only apply to non-citizens, and will be challenged. Secondly, the opposition to Israeli policies by non-citizen students (and others legally present in the US) is not about Jewishness. It’s about the Zionist ideology as that ideology adversely affects non-Jews. The Zionist ideology is a movement among Jews but is not coextensive with Jewishness and is not supported by all Jews—especially not by younger Jews.

In any event, world opposition to the genocide against Arabs in Palestine will probably increase in the coming year. US sanctions against opponents of genocide will only isolate the US further at a time when the geopolitical and economic plates are shifting almost by the day.

Megatron @Megatron_ron

JUST IN:

 Russia says that Washington has supplied Israel with weapons used to kill Palestinian civilians

Russian Representative to UN Nebenzia SLAMS Israeli US-backed UNRWA ban, and Israel's impunity in Gaza:

"Washington has supplied Israel with weapons used to kill Palestinian civilians and didn’t give a pass to any UNSC decisions preventing Israel from implementing Gaza plans"

5:51 PM · Jan 28, 2025

On the tech front the fallout from Chinese intiatives in AI technology continues. The Chinese actions threaten a major part of the American Empire’s model for global hegemony. Philip Pilkington and others summarize. These developments are likely to challenge the status of the USD and US financial markets at a time when Trump is seeking to restructure US geopolitical commitments and needs stability at home.

Philip Pilkington @philippilk

DeepSeek guy [Liang Wenfeng is] ran a hedge fund and was interested in Jim Simons and Renaissance Technologies. Hard to summarise in a Tweet but this strongly suggests that he’s as much interested in trashing the scammy elements in the Western financial system as he is in AI. 

4:19 AM · Jan 29, 2025

unusual_whales @unusual_whales

JUST IN: Alibaba, $BABA, has released a new AI that it says is better than $META, OpenAI, and DeepSeek.

Philip Pilkington @philippilk

Tfw the Chinese just start absolutely flooding the market for tech products and literally no one in the West has a clue what to do…

This is key to understanding the coming disruption:

I’m long skeptical of relying on the tech sector as your key economic/geopol engine, but together with USD/financial dominance that has been the US model since the 90s. That is evaporating before our eyes and there is nothing to replace it - in the short term, at least.

China is taking apart the American tech economy brick by brick and the West is trapped in some bizarre hall of mirrors. Hard to watch.

Looks like the American tech sector are going into bunker mode and will soon be asking for tech-protectionism (not even clear that’s possible).

Matthew Carrigan @carrigmat

Complete hardware + software setup for running Deepseek-R1 locally. The actual model, no distillations, and Q8 quantization for full quality. Total cost, $6,000. All download and part links below:

8:17 AM · Jan 28, 2025

Philip Pilkington @philippilk

A couple of thousand bucks…

It’s. So. Over.

This model of tech oligarchy that our financialized economy and legal system has long fostered and protected has become the foundation for continued American global hegemony. It’s facing a fundamental challenge that won’t go away:

Warwick Powell | 鲍韶山 @baoshaoshan

Capabilities needed to empower ordinary people & small enterprises in developing countries can be delivered on $200 smart phones.

The model changed. Open source tech, not constrained by computational power, can now reach everyone. This “prices people in” through abundance, which isn’t good for business models that assumed economic rents underpinning profits.

6:01 AM · Jan 29, 2025

Philip Pilkington @philippilk

China is switching the world from a model based on paywalled tech tied to a subordinate productive sector to a model based on cheap/free tech subordinated to a dominant productive sector. In this world there are no shortcuts: compete or die.

Glenn Diesen’s latest substack is an attempt to explain the Western mindset that underpins what I’ve long called its war on reality—the entire liberal ideological agenda. This may seem to be an arcane topic, yet it is an inquiry that is fundamental to an understanding our cultural crisis, and which has had many tragic consequences in the real world that is denied or rejected:

How Europe’s New Political Class Began Rejecting Reality

I won’t go through the entire article—just the portions that point to the foundation for the war on reality, which stems from the late medieval breakdown of philosophy (nominalism) and the resulting rise of ideology that promised mind control over reality. Thus, the default ideology of the West is Kantian, which simply asserts that reality is “created” by the mind. Or if you prefer, the mind structures a reality that can’t be known—this is a denial of any reality other than that asserted by the mind.

Of course the consequences of this mindset are manifold. We see it in the irrationally exuberant confidence in our ability to control, especially, human reality by reinventing human nature. Diesen, a political philosopher who focuses on geostrategy, mostly talks about the effect of this mindset—the denial that reality can be known and must be taken into account—on international relations. Here are the key passages. Note the denial of rationality as insight into reality, replaced by “constructive” thinking, the supposed subjugation of reality to human desires. Of course, reality always gets the last say. All of what Diesen says here should sound very familiar to the ears of Americans who follow politics:

What explains the decline of strategic thinking, pragmatism and rationality in European politics?

Europe’s Reality as a Social Construction

The political class that emerged in Europe after the Cold War have become excessively ideological and committed to narratives to socially construct new realities. The Europeans embrace of postmodernism entails questioning the existence of objective reality as our understanding of reality is shaped by language, culture and unique historical perspectives. The postmodernists therefore often seek to change narratives and language as a source of political power. If reality is a social construction, then the grand narratives can be more important than facts. Indeed, ideological narratives must be defended from inconvenient facts.

The European project had the benign intentions of creating a common liberal democratic European identity that would transcend the divisive national rivalry and power politics of the past. The relevance of objective reality is contested, and narratives about reality are believed to reflect power structures that can be dismantled and reorganised.

The prevalence of constructivism and focus on “speech acts” in the EU has led to the belief that even using realist analysis and discussing competing national interests entail legitimising realpolitik and thus socially constructing a more dangerous reality. Speech acts refer to the use of language as a source of power by constructing political realities and influencing outcomes. By reducing the focus on security competition in the international system, it is assumed that power politics can be mitigated.

Is it possible to socially construct a new reality? Do we transcend security competition by not addressing it or do we neglect the responsible management of security competition. Can we transcend national rivalries by focusing on common values or does the neglect of national interests result in decline?

Of course, it is this fundamentally magic based mindset—rhetorical incantations are believed capable of controlling and transforming realities based in human nature—that has led to social perversions as well as the utterly irrational (and unquestionable) belief that Russia could be subjugated. The remedy for this ideological debacle is a return to Christian faith based in the perennial realist philosophy. Faith—reasoned belief—goes hand in hand with philosophy—the love of wisdom, reasoned insight into reality. That’s a long road, but the upheaval we face may lead more to set out on that journey.