PS: Having now read ‘WW3 For Dummies’, I’d say that this - new - voice at Saker is a good one, if his debut is anything to go on (because yes, the voices there, as with Off-G, and everywhere I suppose, are variable in quality).
How he describes what’s happening seems spot on to me. I would only add two points:
Don’t forget the Long Descent, which is mandatory for ALL parts of the world eventually (Greer suggests, from his wide reading of history, that it will take a century or so at least to play out; though the Meadows studies - ‘The Limits To Growth’ and ‘TLTG: The Thirty-Year Update’ - suggest that the most acute pressures will be receding, thankfully, by the end of this century).
And also: don’t be pessimistic about upshots. The smell of the situation (aka my intuitive rather than rational sense of it) is that the would-be global-hegemon gics trying to run everything in the West have grossly over-estimated the objective controllability of the situation; and indeed their own competence to do such controlling, even if it were controllable.
I think that the Davosoid fools are destined for history’s trash bin, not for the godlike immortal borg-status which they fantasise. (If these fools weren’t so self-entranced by their own Kurzweil/Hariri-style techietechie Faust-fantasies, the clods would see that they already have that timelessness, as a given, simply by being Individuated Units of Consciousness of Big Mind, aka immortal souls…)
I see a bad time coming for the states of the erstwhile world-domineering West. But I also see involuntary simplicity - otherwise frankly described as force-majeure enforced near-poverty - as the ultimate fate of ALL societies, anywhere on Earth.
There will be fragmentation though, into sovereign regions and states, and for many of them, the involuntary simplicity will be entirely bearable, indeed something of a real boon. The only big if, which remains a permanent question in human affairs (at least until we evolve into something spiritually better than we are now) is who gets to hold ultimate sovereignty within each region or state: the gics and their bourgeois servitors; or the plebs.
Sorry to keep hammering the same old tropes, but that boils down to the perennial contest: scarcity-socialism versus neo-feudalism? Genuine populist democracy (if that’s actually really possible); or the rule - seen universally since the advent of agrarian-revolution-enabled mass societies - of the self-appointing gic class.
I always favoured anarchism (automatically, instinctively socialistic) as the most morally spotless form of human society. But I’ve never been a proclaimer for it, because I’ve never yet seen a convincing answer to the crucial question: what does an anarchist community do when the nazi-thug war-bands, with their nazi-thug ‘charismatic’ leaders, march in and tell us, at sword-point, that they’re in charge now and we plebeian dross do absolutely as we’re told or die horribly in short order?
Anarchists have never turned up a convincing answer to that question, to my knowledge. Perhaps because there just isn’t one. La lotta continua - permanently (until that evolutionary improvement…).
Meanwhile, my ultra-low-labour, turf-grown potato plants are doing well (hint, hint! ), converting my initially-sceptical neighbours to troobleevers as they watch; pics and instructions coming up shortly, when the plants are all nearer to harvest time…