Notes on the News

By Gwydion M. Williams

China as a Global Example

Society Exists, and Immigrants Strain it

From Slave Plantations to the Vatican

Incomplete Humans Praising Incomplete Brain-Machines

Cure the Internet with a Digital Passport

Snippets

Young people tricked into crimes

Canada to Split?

Humans With Human Limits

China as a Global Example

“From Edison to Amazon, the US consistently invented the global future. The country suffered periodic anxieties about being overtaken, by the USSR in the 1960s, and by Japan in the 1980s. But America’s first plausible rival — the only one with the requisite scale of manufacturing, consumer markets and scientific brainpower — was China…

“Suddenly, this year, a chorus of American tech moguls is saying China has taken the lead. By 2030, the world might be using Chinese AI apps on Chinese devices while driving near-autonomous Chinese electric cars. If China has jumped from copying American tech to surpassing it, where does that leave Silicon Valley — and its relationship with its own country?”^[1]

Concerning the USSR, I’d been saying from the 1970s that the Khrushchev / Brezhnev line was wasting everything that Stalin had built by ruthless determination. And after the near-overthrow of Chinese Leninism in June 1989, that the Chinese version of Stalin’s system would last if it kept its nerve.^[2] ^[3]

It must have helped that they never denied that Mao’s own version of ruthless determination had succeeded. Or that his successors were very much part of the ruthlessness, until it applied to the party machine itself. (That was what the Cultural Revolution was all about.)

Mao’s heirs got super-fast growth by retaining such ruthlessness to keep emergent capitalists under control. Yeltsin let Russia be looted and impoverished by tricksters with a large element of violent crime. Criminals are also found in China, but don’t dare challenge the authorities.

How could good intentions go so wrong? Partly it is a confusion of language. People say ‘Freedom’, but what they mean is freedom within my own acceptable limits.^[4] Which need not be the same as your own notion of ‘acceptable limits’. Not on a whole range of matters.

One simple example is sex and gender. I’m old enough to remember when gay males were legal but expected to stay invisible, which had always been the case for lesbians. And I remember being gradually persuaded that this was unfair, having initially accepted it in an unquestioning manner.

It was certainly not an automatic understanding that freedom must be whatever the West’s media elite currently thought it was. Their global influence is in fact regressing beyond the West as a backwash from Western economic and military aggression. That includes a regression of tolerance for gays, which is very unfair. Which is also not unexpected.

China right now is reasserting a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ limit, pushing gay culture out of sight as it feels threatened by Western subversion. In India, almost any non-standard behaviour is tolerated, but gay relationships have limited legal recognition: part of a general move towards one particular view of Hindu traditions.

For economics, China flourished because its party-state machine sets limits and enforces them. Makes business interests serve them, as someone recently commented:

“Why China’s Stock Market Lags Behind Its Booming Economy

“China’s economic growth has been incredible it’s now the world’s second-largest economy, a tech and manufacturing powerhouse. But here’s the puzzle: while the economy has soared, China’s stock market has barely moved in 20 years. Why? The answer lies in hypercompetition. Unlike in the U.S., where big companies like Apple and Google dominate for years, China’s market is a battlefield. The moment one company succeeds, ten rivals jump in with cheaper or better products. The government helps fuel this—it cracks down on monopolies, so no company gets too powerful. Alibaba, Tencent, and others have all faced strict antitrust rules. Plus, Chinese consumers aren’t loyal to brands—they chase the best deal, forcing companies to keep innovating and cutting prices. This means economic growth benefits consumers, not shareholders. Profits stay thin because competition is so fierce. In the U.S., big firms enjoy high margins and steady returns. In China, companies must constantly fight just to survive.

“So, while China’s economy grows, its stock market doesn’t boom like America’s. But that’s not necessarily bad—it means more innovation, better prices, and a dynamic economy. The lesson? A strong stock market doesn’t always mean a strong economy—sometimes, it’s the opposite. China’s model is different, and that’s why its stocks tell a different story.”^[5]

And that was not the only choice. Western ‘experts’ say and seem to believe that Mao left China a wreck: that the USA under Nixon and Kissinger graciously rescued it. But detailed figures exist: China under Mao grew faster than the USA.^[6] Lifespans grew faster than in other similar poor countries.^[7] Critics give far too much importance to a 1959-61 setback caused by excessive optimism. They ignore more than 20 years of grand achievements that needed just the same optimism. As US business tycoon Zuckerberg put it, move fast and break things.^[8]

Fans of Star Wars are circulating the phrase revolutions are built on hope: it would surely surprise them to learn that this was exactly what Mao was about. Myself, I’ve always seen the morals and politics of the Star Wars franchise as rather silly.^[9] Also their views on gender and race started out much inferior to Star Trek, which itself has updated over the years.^[10]

For China, the ‘experts’ don’t question the hard data: they simply ignore it. That’s the trash that Western politics has been relying on.

Society Exists, and Immigrants Strain It

We humans probably evolved separate cultures and languages even before we became modern humans with modern skills. Chimps sometimes use simple tools, but different tools in different regions. Whales sing different songs in different ocean basins. So it is unlikely we were ever one culture or could all talk to each other. And if we were, we quickly diverged.

But we could do things that earlier breeds of human could not. And possibly evolved complex ceremonies and most notably marriage to filter out the not-quite-human relatives’. Keep out those who could not manage it, just as a chimp could not manage it. No adult chimp can even be trusted to live free among humans.^[11]

Maybe Neanderthals could manage our ceremonials: we have some of their DNA, and we keep finding evidence that they were much closer in culture than was once thought. And I am confident that normal individuals in all current human cultures and so-called races have essentially the same abilities.^[12]

But express them differently. Just as a cook with milk, eggs, and tomatoes could produce a range of different meals, so do cultures shape people into different functional humans.

Ceremonies also test a willingness to conform to the local human norm, as well as the capacity to do so. Necessary for a human society to survive.

We are never just ‘we humans’. Up till the 1960s, there was a real chance that most of the global population would be absorbed into either a Russian version of modernism or an Anglo one. The utopias of H G Wells were an inspiration for both, but this technocratic vision always had critics. One was E. M. Forster’s 1909 science fiction story ‘The Machine Stops’: but he had nothing better to offer. And the Soviet Union as modelled on Wells did the bulk of the work in defeating the Nazi alternative to liberal failures in the 1930s.^[13]

The Soviet Union messed up first, becoming much too crudely Russian in imposing its own values. Stalin had understood that it was a tricky process. He was a Georgian who had adapted to Russian culture, and there’s a suspicion that his family had Ossetian origins. In any case he had a system that balanced national and universalist feelings, and passed on the same to Peoples’ China. But within a few years Khrushchev had invaded Hungary and quarrelled with China. From there it was downhill all the way, ending with Gorbachev and Yeltsin thinking they could say ‘freedom’ and not have events spiral into ends they had never intended.

You influence some of the people, some of the time. That’s what a society is. But the liberal idea of it is muddled and conceited. It supposes that their own system is natural and must prevail. And are lost when it does not:

“The [Far Right] AfD believes that ethnic Germans have a special connection to their country due to their shared culture and experiences, which non-ethnic German citizens lack, especially those from civilizationally dissimilar societies across the Global South who only recently arrived there.

“These views actually aren’t extremist at all since they’ve been shared by the vast majority of humanity throughout history in their own contexts. In fact, they’re still popular in non-Western societies, the same places from which most of Germany’s non-ethnic-German population originates. From Africa to West Asia and the Indo-Pacific, most of these countries believe that original inhabitants have a special connection to their country, which can take several generations for newcomers’ descendants to share.”^[14]

If you believe that it takes several generations to assimilate, you are something other than a racist. A racist would deny it could ever happen. Saying it takes time and needs limited numbers is just realism.

Unstructured democracy fails. The rich can dominate by encouraging fear and suspicion.

From Slave Plantations to the Vatican

I wasn’t surprised that the new pope wasn’t one of the cardinals from Black Africa. But noticed that a European and Roman Catholic debt to Black Africa has been paid in another way.

According to DeepSeek,^[15] there were three confirmed past popes from Africa. All from Romanised North Africa, which Christianised early. But an objective view would place North Africans closer to South Europeans than to Sub-Saharan Africans. It was military and historic accidents that made them mostly Muslim and Arabic-speaking.

On his mother’s side, Leo XIV / Robert Prevost is descended from the small minority of survivors from among the many victims of New World slavery. Mixed race families from New Orleans and from Hispaniola in the West Indies.^[16] And ‘mixed race’ mostly means past sexual exploitation of black women; quite often outright rape.

It is not common for people from this background to get the top jobs. Obama’s father was from Kenya, East Africa. The father of Kamila Harris was Jamaican, with a probable ancestor who was an Irish plantation-owner:^[17] but she didn’t get the top job.

This new pope seems as firm as Pope Francis on the rights of the poor. But rather than see the positive, a lot of supposedly left comments regret than he will not ditch the entirety of Christian tradition when trendy Anglos believe something different. Myself, I saw logic in the position of the late Pope Francis:

“While maintaining that homosexual acts are sinful, he has emphasized that LGBTQ+ people should be treated with dignity and respect, and not marginalized. He has also expressed support for civil unions for same-sex couples and permitted the blessing of same-sex unions” ^[18]

This keeps solid ground, while protecting gays. For if Christians historically were basically wrong on sex, why should they have any authority on any other matter? Bacchus Rules OK, possibly.

I myself take a secular view. But most Western secularists are losing realism about how the world can actually be improved. Remain baffled but dogmatic as they lose ground even at home.

Incomplete Humans Praising Incomplete Br ain-Machines

Intelligence isn’t a thing. It’s a mix of many things, some many-splendored. Some probably outside our current understanding. I’ve talked about it before:

“Unlike a computer, specific tasks happen in particular locations. Computers usually have a Central Processor Chip and a few extra microprocessors for special tasks like graphics. The brain has dozens of specialist areas and no obvious centre. Brain damage may knock out one particular function and leave the rest of the brain working fine.”^[19]

People may be normal or superior in most talents, but lacking others. Dyslexics cannot handle the written world. People with Amusia cannot recognise familiar tunes, such as Happy Birthday in Anglo culture. People on the autistic spectrum cannot handle normal social relationships, but may be brilliant at abstract analysis.

One sensible explanation for this is the ‘Thousand Brains’ hypothesis. As well as specialist centres for talents, we have a number of separate centres that try to balance these for actual actions:

“Western culture is built on the concept of ‘The Individual’. A free-standing entity that should be left alone, as far as possible. And vast changes since the 1960s can be explained as individuals discovering who they really are…

“Human brains are not fixed individual identities. The Western liberal view leaves most of us unsatisfied, and people in other cultures increasingly doubt it.^[20]

There may be many ‘persons’ inside us. All of these access our actual bodies through an older brain centre inherited from the first mammals. Seeing danger, it chooses between two ancient survival strategies: running fast or else freezing and hoping not to be noticed. It often does so when our intelligences wish otherwise, and perhaps know that this is not the best response. So we run when we will certainly be caught, or we freeze in the face of an oncoming tidal wave.

But it’s not absolute: people are less likely to freeze if others are shouting clear commands (“RUN NOW!”).^[21] That’s also why army training works, but on occasions a whole military unit will run. Or some run and some stay: people with experience of war say that a novel called The Red Badge of Courage has it shown very realistically.

And away from threat and violence, anyone who drinks alcohol knows that it knocks out those parts of our brain that inhibit risks and violence, and also notions of shame and guilt. Good in moderation, and disastrous if it runs out of control.

As for AI, brain machines: to get useful results the experts have so far had to build systems that are utterly unlike human brains. That surpass us on some matters, but cannot do things that a very average human 5-year-old will have no trouble with.

From very early in the Computer Age, computers were doing maths that was beyond the human experts. But only recently could they handle words with any dexterity.

Dextrous, but horribly flawed:

“In his classic essay On Bullshit (1986), a liar and a truth teller are playing the same game, just on opposite sides. Each responds to facts as they understand them and either accepts or rejects the authority of truth. But a bullshitter ignores these demands altogether…

“Frankfurt’s essay neatly describes the output of AI-enabled large language models. They are not concerned with truth because they have no conception of it. They operate by statistical correlation not empirical observation.

“‘Their greatest strength, but also their greatest danger, is their ability to sound authoritative on nearly any topic irrespective of factual accuracy.”^[22]

Liars mostly don’t lie without hoping to gain from the lie. Fantasists are much more dangerous:

“A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse

“A new wave of ‘reasoning’ systems from companies like OpenAI is producing incorrect information more often. Even the companies don’t know why…

‘Last month, an A.I. bot that handles tech support for Cursor, an up-and-coming tool for computer programmers, alerted several customers about a change in company policy. It said they were no longer allowed to use Cursor on more than just one computer.

“In angry posts to internet message boards, the customers complained. Some canceled their Cursor accounts. And some got even angrier when they realized what had happened: The A.I. bot had announced a policy change that did not exist.

“‘We have no such policy. You’re of course free to use Cursor on multiple machines,’ the company’s chief executive and co-founder, Michael Truell, wrote in a Reddit post. ‘Unfortunately, this is an incorrect response from a front-line A.I. support bot.’

‘Today’s A.I. bots are based on complex mathematical systems that learn their skills by analyzing enormous amounts of digital data. They do not — and cannot — decide what is true and what is false. Sometimes, they just make stuff up, a phenomenon some A.I. researchers call hallucinations. On one test, the hallucination rates of newer A.I. systems were as high as 79 percent.

“These systems use mathematical probabilities to guess the best response, not a strict set of rules defined by human engineers. So they make a certain number of mistakes. ‘Despite our best efforts, they will always hallucinate,’ said Amr Awadallah, the chief executive of Vectara, a start-up that builds A.I. tools for businesses, and a former Google executive. ‘That will never go away.’”^[23]

The rich IT bosses hope to sack most of the lesser humans, and soon afterwards download into immortal computers. And are deluding themselves. Incomplete humans, as shown by the messes several of them have made as advisors to President Trump.

Cure the Internet with a Digital Passport

“Almost half of young people would prefer a world without internet, UK study finds

“Half of 16- to 21-year-olds support ‘digital curfew’ and nearly 70% feel worse after using social media…

“A quarter of respondents spent four or more hours a day on social media, while 42% of those surveyed admitted to lying to their parents and guardians about what they do online.

“While online, 42% said they had lied about their age, 40% admitted to having a decoy or ‘burner’ account, and 27% said they pretended to be a different person completely.”^[24]

The current set-up is failing because it sticks to libertarian principles – allow anything and hope it all ends well.

As far back as the year 2000, I was warning that the whole Liberation By Internet idea was a fantasy.^[25] ^[26]

Part of a New Right fantasy that has failed to improve the West’s economy beyond what was already being done from the 1940s to 1970s

Having a Digital Passport would fix many problems. We accept that passports are needed for the physical movements of our bodies. They would also expose people doing on-line harassment or spreading false stories. And need not reveal anything more about ourselves than we wish to make public. Just stop anyone from lying about it.

Sn ippets

Young people tricked into crimes

“Thailand was the first country in Asia to legalise the use and purchase of cannabis leaves in February 2021 and the whole plant in June 2022.

“The Thai authorities were trying to alleviate the overcrowding in their prison system.

“The evidence suggests that the result has been an opening of the floodgates for the international drug smugglers, who regard naive young travellers as easy prey.”^[27]

Drug traffickers might also ‘feed’ outsiders to corrupt elements in drug enforcement, who have to show some successes.

I’d also say that Thais should fix their society rather than think they can live with drugs. But it’s up to them how they do this.

Canada to Split?

If Trump hopes to break up Canada and take in the parts most similar to the USA, he may well succeed. Canada’s West and East have distinct cultures with solid views of themselves. But in the middle, Alberta in particular does not feel at home:

“’We have more in common with America than the rest of Canada’…

“Who thinks the province should push for a split from Canada and form its own nation? About half the crowd raise their hands.

“‘How many people would like Alberta to join the US?’ Another show of support from half the crowd.”^[28]

Trump might also not be unhappy if the USA itself were to voluntarily dissolve itself, with the current polarised sides each going their own way. He may see the current mix as beyond saving.