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Within a month of me recording this, what I think is potentially the most politically important event of the year so far happened and no one noticed. I was in complete shock hearing about the war that was coming out between India and Pakistan while practically no one in the west was talking about it. Just Pakistan has more people than Russia and Ukraine combined, while India furthermore has seven times Pakistan's population. The these countries really do matter and they're going to matter more in the future. Another detail really stuck out to me about this skirmish, that being the very stark similarities to the outbreak of World War I. Of course I'm going to explore this more over the course of the video, but just for the easiest example, we're seeing two industrialized multi ethnic countries fight over a terrorist organization indirectly backed by the weaker sides to militant fanatical terrorist endorsing government. Then the stronger side attacks the others with shelling to cleanse their insulted honor. Is anyone else seeing shades of Franz Ferdinand here? This video is going to be fun since it's a character study of an entirely different region of the world, one which operates under completely different principles from the west, but is also timely to how we understand the world. Frankly, it's just a breath of fresh air not to have to talk about the West's ideological mental illness which overshadows every element of life here. Now onto Kashmir what does the future hold for business?
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Being an entrepreneur I can say from personal experience can be an intimidating and at times lonely experience. There are so many jobs to be done and often nobody to turn to when things go wrong. That's just one of many reasons that founders absolutely must choose their technology platforms carefully. Pick the right one and the technology can play important roles for you. Pick the wrong one and you might find yourself fighting fires alone in the e commerce space. Of course, there's never been a better platform than Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all E commerce in the United States. From household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style, just as if you had your own design studio with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. It's like you have your own content team and with the ability to easily create email and social media campaigns, you can reach your customers wherever they're scrolling or strolling, just as if you had a full marketing department behind you. Best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into Cha Ching With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com cognitive visit shopify.com cognitive once more. That's shopify.com cogn,
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India and Pakistan are caught in a vicious cycle and many people across the world find themselves in similar cycles looking for a way out. Well, Fume has a way out of at least one cycle which people get caught up in. Fume is an award winning flavored air device that delivers great taste without any harmful chemicals. Instead of inhaling vapor, you simply breathe in natural, non toxic flavors that satisfy the craving without the downside. So whether you're looking to keep your hands busy or curb an urge, Fume's premium wooden design is built for both flavor and function. The magnetic fidget features add an extra level of satisfaction, making it perfect for relieving stress or staying focused. Fume feels great in your hand and is easy to take anywhere whether you're at work, traveling or just relaxing. Relaxing at home, my go to flavor is crisp mint because it's super refreshing and keeps me feeling sharp throughout the day. But Fume offers tons of different flavors so there's something for everyone for a limited time. If you order the Journey Pack using my code whatifalthist, you'll get a free Fume Topper, an awesome accessory to level up your experience. So click the link or scan the QR code on the screen or over half a million people have started their journey away from nicotine. Start yours today. Part 1 A Note on Research When I was 16, I read 1984, a science fiction novel about a society in which Britain is basically an occidental North Korea. It's a masterclass in world building, and as a person who's read a lot of Marxist history, George Orwell is really absolutely brilliant at illustrating the nature of communism through a science fiction world where they gain total power. Keep in mind George Orwell was a professional Marxist for a while who fought in the Spanish Civil War, and through seeing the brutality there, he became disenchanted with communism. 1984 is a horrifying picture of what a world would look like where the communists get to totally win. Upon reading it as a teenager, my thought was I need to die before this happens. In other words, I would rather die than live in this kind of society that the moral thing to do would be to abort this new civilization asap. The scary thing I saw through it is that there are very, very many things that George Orwell wrote into 1984 that have actually come true, one of which is the complete ideological blur of information about the outside world. Researching this topic really hammered this lesson home to me, and I thought I needed to share it with you folks. There's this really good line in 1984 that goes, we were always at war with East Asia. What that means is that the information of the actual geopolitics of the outside world has become so blurred by propaganda that that it's impossible to even know who they're at war with at any given time. This is to cause the public complete disorientation. Britain, part of the Oceanic Empire, was always at war with East Asia, and then a month later they're at war with the other great power, Eurasia. The state immediately backtracks to say they were always at war with the other country, while in reality they were allies only a year or so before. This is stuff that happens today, and I was horrified when I saw as a teenager when the left backtracked on loving and hating Comey four times based upon the context of the Russiagate propaganda campaign they were trying to do. Or people forget, the Trump administration developed the COVID vaccine, while at the time the left was against it, but when they were in charge, the sides flipped with no recognition. This is what occurred before. The reason I bring this up is that in researching this topic it taught me some pretty horrible implications as to the accuracy or our ability to even get information from around the world. This was such a hard topic to research that it makes me question what's actually going on now in different continents. In trying to find information on this topic, which is ostensibly incredibly important to the world, I found the vast majority of news sources which were not covering it at all. I only found a handful of news sources that even mentioned it at all, with most of the mainstream media not talking about it. Please correct me in the comments if I'm wrong here, but I checked across a bunch of news platforms to only find one or two in the west which spoke about it, while a few more picked up information from that few which they covered a few days after the event already happened. The other thing I found as well is that there's no objective narration. The Pakistanis and Indians both have their own narratives, of which the Indian seems to be by far the dominant one in the west, as far as I can tell. This is since India is one of America's strongest allies these days, which we can see with Vice President J.D. vance's recent trip to India right before the war. This would suggest to me that his trip was the US giving a sort of thumbs up for the war, and as well as probably strategizing how India provides America's balancing ally to China on the Asian continent. The thing here is that India is not directly attached to the US media's self interest, at least as far as I can tell. And so the fact that they're not talking about this means that the media isn't just terrible on things where they are incentivized to be biased, they're terrible on everything, even things completely unrelated to what they're supposed to care about due to their self interest. And I find this with China as well, where the mainstream media will not talk about China and the horrible things going on there or call out the ccp. I find this ostensibly strange since China is our enemy and you'd think that these big tech companies which are working with the US government would see hurting China as part of the US's innate grand strategy, but you find the opposite. I'm sure there's at least one foreign policy source I'm not finding here to get this kind of information better, and please tell me what that may be in the comments. The main source of things for this type of knowledge is foreign policy magazines, but these tend to be a few months late, which means they can't cover on the ground stuff like journalism would. However, I found the only sources for this topic were practically the state sanctions narratives. This is not a good place to be since we know Even from the 20th century or within living memory, that the state sanctioned narratives can be so distorted as to be practically useless at finding the truth Truth. What this boils down to is I have no clue what's actually going on here. That really bugs me, since this is possibly the most important event of the year so far. Although I don't want to jinx myself by saying that, well, you can't hit critical mass information to actually understand it. I guess I must know how it felt for pre industrial thinkers who had to rely on merchant rumors of sea monsters and tavern gossip to know what was going on in the world. This isn't the world I was promised. I was told that Daddy mainstream media was honest. We would hold our hands. We were supposed to have honest information given to us by brave journos and wise experts serving the common good. None of that was true, but it was nice to believe. Now we must face the greater uncomfortability, the lack of certainty. That's always the case with the truth. What this means, in short, is I want you to know that you should trust the news even less than you currently do, especially so as it pertains to foreign events, which is something I've been tracking for a while. The two countries which I periodically study, even more so than America for current news, are China and Britain, both of which do horrifically dystopian things on a daily basis which the American public doesn't know about. Secondly, I periodically hear horror stories coming out of the rest of the world. Human rights abuses in Brazil, Germany, state collapses in Africa, or some industrial nation on the verge of bankruptcy. Practically none of this gets into the American press, and even less so the American collective consciousness. Sure, the news might say there's some instability in Germany or South Africa, but they'll underplay it as much as possible while putting it deep into their websites, which no one under 60 will read. This stuff barely ends up online, ever. And I want to make clear that the Internet is not an accurate representation of human knowledge. Most of the very most important information is not on the Internet, either since it's been scrubbed by the authorities or it never left a book in the first place. The Internet is more controlled and manipulated than you probably think. The real world we live in is Probably a lot more chaotic than we believe the media and the denial of the public consciousness puts up this comfortable facade that things are okay now, focusing on menial things Trump said or some celebrity gossip, while insane things are happening across the whole world. I only look at cable TV when I'm at the gym and I have to look up at the screens they have there. And I'm always shocked at how petty and gossipy the mainstream media is. It's disgusting. You know, people didn't know about Hitler, Stalin, Mao or the Khmer Rouge in the general Western public when they were going on. The Internet hasn't really connected the world and all the propaganda that they said would happen within living memory on top of this. India is a democracy, but I would not call it a free country. Narendra Modi, who is a complex figure who as far as I can tell has governed India quite well on a balance sheet, is known for several human rights abuses. Between the massacre of several thousand Muslims which occurred with his support when he was the governor of his home province of Gujarat, his ruling party has been known for significant anti Muslim discrimination. As their raison d' etre is anti Islamic, who has been Hinduism's greatest enemy for the last thousand years. On top of this, we've seen the persecution of journalists and cultural figures opposed to the BJP's rule. India Today is a highly patriotic society, much like Europe a century ago. And even in completely free societies like Britain, France or America during the World wars, there was significant control of the media just through implicit social understandings. To not say things would make your country look bad. However, Modi's government is not as understanding as those nations, with for example, periodically banning WI fi in the contentious province of Kashmir where India is known as the world's leader and shutting the Internet down. Critics of the regime have been silenced or faced with legal charges. What I'm saying here is that our only real source is from India and that's not very trustworthy information. At the same time, Pakistan is dramatically worse than India in this regard. This is an opening to talk about the kinds of societies which wanted a war to prove their national vigor or to look at the similarities in World War I, Europe and modern South Asia. Part 2 the great industrial wars I was obsessed with China when I was a teenager. That was since all the authorities told me that America was a declining power while China would replace us. It horrified me that the American elite seemed practically reconciled to this fate with no comprehension how horrifying and evil a world run by Communist China would be. I only saw apathy and thought that my generation's duty would be to fight China. Thus I should try to study the enemy in advance in order to shadow box the future rivalry. I also went to a school with a lot of Chinese people where I wanted to learn how their culture was different from mine. When I was a teen, I wanted to be a strategist for the US government. While I later realized that due to my skin tone, age and sex that would be impossible, I read like a dozen books on the topic to try to understand how China worked. That's a separate video where I'll have to talk more so about that in the future, given so much interesting is going on in China that practically no one talks about. In some ways China is more interesting than America now. However, in my studies on China and its geopolitical aims, I kept finding similarities between Asia Today and Europe around the start of World War I. To go through a few of these, one of the big ones is that between these two you have a multipolar political system composed of various nationalistic countries with different interests tied together by large transcontinental alliance networks that there was a huge amount of tension across the region with lots of people smoking around a huge pile of gunpowder that if something wrong happened somewhere that it could spread very quickly over very large dimensions, that things nearly went wrong enough that if they would keep going, something would have to happen at one time or another. The public generally never hears about foreign policy, a trend which I noticed back in high school and has only recently gotten vastly worse. Accurate information on things going on around the world is nigh impossible to find today. The managerial class treats foreign policy as their own private fief, which the public should be kept away from ever thinking about so our viziers can govern us wisely towards social suicide. However, the world today is split by two great alliances. The first is America based, which for literary irony I will call Oceania or the Anglo Saxon state in 1984 and I'll call the other Eurasia, another great Empire in 1984. India, Japan, South Korea, the Gulf Arabs, the European Union and the English speakers are allied. China, Russia, what I call colloquially the former Mongol Empire alongside Burma, North Korea, Syria and the Stans in Pakistan are also united as allies. This means that if one of these countries gets attacked, it has the potential to spark a trans Eurasian war, something which I've spoken about before in several videos. When historians have gone back to look at the world wars, they tend to treat them as an inevitability caused by the social instability from The Industrial Revolutions a necessary tragedy and I would tend to agree. Europe had so much tension built up that they needed a lot of changes that did not happen and the only way they could was through a large war. I think it's similar to today in that too many things have needed to happen, but have not, so when change comes, it will look like a flood. The Industrial Revolution caused mass disturbances in both Europe and Asia, which meant that a war was needed to reset the social structures for these new realities in both Europe and Asia. With the Industrial Revolution, you saw antiquated government systems from the agricultural age, whether monarchies, military dictatorships or Maoists that could not rule under a wealthier, better educated and urban public. On top of this, the emergence of a new industrial middle class creates a sense of national consciousness which as it flowers, grows to enormous proportions. Westerners have no concept how nationalistic Asians are. It's frequently even more insane than World War I era Europe. Just talk to a Chinese or Indian nationalist about their own nation's history or interests and you'll find a fanatic Politicians in these countries very frequently nearly start wars to rally support among their publics. Something which also happened in Europe a century ago as the public of that era greeted war with excitement, an opportunity to show off their heroism and national greatness. For Pakistan, India and China especially, they'll go to war over the heads of their own populations to get their approval. It's really annoying and must be a function of shame based cultures which I talk about in this wonderful video I made, that all the governments openly say that they're about to fight a horrible bloody war all the time and then don't do it. This must be some sort of taunting ritual with rhetoric that provides incredibly easy plausible deniability to actually start a war. Historically, this sort of behavior is not encouraging to see. It's very similar to the July Madness when World War I started in which European youth would party for an entire month. How excited they were about going to war. I want to emphasize this since it shows how much social trust has collapsed in the west over the last century. Men were sad and would have identity crises when they weren't allowed to fight in the world wars. Miners would lie about their age to fight in the army young. And there was a universal love of nation in that time period. Today that's completely unimaginable, but it does show somewhat what Asia is like today. Let's not forget this. Since Asia will become our greatest rival at the current rate, let's not let them overtake us with their greater energy, South Asia has a very low average age, much like World War I era Europe. Historically, young populations cause wars. Since the nation is pulsating with so much energy. This is probably why a war like this is treated with excitement in South Asia. While I have not seen a similar dynamic in East Asia, the Chinese government has been rattling their public for a war against Taiwan, Japan, India and America for years. And what I can tell from my faraway look is this has been met largely with cynicism by the Chinese public. East Asia is an old place with higher average ages and lower birth rates than America. The Chinese public may start a war, frankly, just to kill off the excess young men, because Chinese zoomers are really struggling read the text wall and as an excuse to gain totalitarian power over their own public. However, if they do so, it will be a profoundly tragic decision. Unlike India, which since it's younger, can afford to lose young men for now at least, the population bomb strikes everyone, even India and Africa. India and Pakistan also have significantly more young men than women for comparable reasons as China, even though India is worse than China's famous case of this due to the way Asiatic societies work, families will prioritize male children over females to carry on their clan lines, which is a normal cultural trait that goes back thousands of years in Asia due to hard times. However, what this means is that both India and China have downwards of 50 million excess men versus female population, while both are witnessing the same mating crisis as the West. This doesn't even include the other things like hypergamy or issues with dating apps which China shares with the West. I have friends in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan who tell me that arranged marriage markets are as f ed up as dating is in America. In Afghanistan, it's impossible for men to afford bride price even after working for years in wealthier Iran. This means that the incel war analysis I've spoken before about inside the west also applies in Asia frequently. Even more so, I've spoken in several previous videos about the potential for a third world war. I'm going to ease your mind a little here by saying that as of now, I don't think we're on the verge of World War three. Each of the great powers has their own internal issues and things that stop them from having their full ability to wage war that I think you couldn't get all of them to wage a world war. However, I still do think we could have large or regional wars. For example, I think that the Chinese and Indians could have a war which we keep seeing scares for but haven't come to fruition yet. In that case, America may try to get involved in said war, which would cause a world war, with another comparable option being Taiwan as a flashpoint. But I frankly think if America tries to fight China, this would just cause a state collapse here. America physically cannot wage a war with China in its current precarious state. China, as far as I can tell from their highly censored media, where they could be weaker than I think due to being totalitarian, could hypothetically wage a war with America by just shooting people who resisted, but it would be so costly on their social structure as to cause irreparable damage that would kill the Chinese Communist Party within the next decade at most. This region, which I call the Eurasian Arc of Fire, constantly faces war scares. The thing that we found with Israel, Burma, Armenia and Ukraine is that war can break out at any time, even among industrialized countries. The good thing is that said wars have not spread outside their local context yet. The arc of fire stretches from Russia's skirmishes in the Baltic through Ukraine, then Armenia, the Levant, the Gulf, Pakistan, Taiwan and the Koreas. I haven't even named half the flashpoints yet. It tends to be that before nations start wars that their media flares up with insane hysterical bloodlust for a few months beforehand to get their population angry enough to fight. I've been tracking this since you could see it a lot before the Russia Ukraine conflict. Hamas doesn't have an industrial grade media mouthpiece, but you can see now how the same principle is at work with their allies in the Muslim world. At this point, across the entire world the media is heavily controlled by ruling regimes and thus it reserves the right to change its opinions on a dime to support its backers. But the countries I see now, and I'm intrigued to see what other ones you guys notice in the comments that are have a level of rhetoric where it would be very easy to justify war are these. These are the nations which have put their media into a fever pitch enough so that they could start a war tomorrow without much issue convincing their publics. Red and Blue State America have hit this threshold with each other, but not foreign powers yet India, Pakistan and China are all mutually at this threshold with each other. It's insane how much the European Union's press, which markets itself as an ostensibly pacifist empire, uses arguments which would justify an unprompted war with Russia quite easily. Everyone in this game is playing with fire across the world, whether inside America, Taiwan or India and its neighbors. We see governments edging up against declaring an all out war. Many times before, societies have openly said they're ready for war and it's about to start. However, they fail to pull the trigger. I think it's since the myth of our age is so strong that no man has the courage to end it. We all wanted to believe that history was over, that strife would end and we'd see an age of endless wealth and peace. We all know deep in our souls that that myth isn't true anymore. However, even in Asia, people are unwilling to make the jump to finally say that something will happen. Mark my words, something big will happen within the next few years. Something so titanically big it will mark our lives before and after it. Everything we worried about before will come across as stupid and petty. Too many players in this game are playing with fire and soon one will get burnt badly. Let's hope to God the fire stays contained there Part 3 what happened here? Now that I've given you the context, let me give you the best understanding of what went down within the last month along India and Pakistan's borders. As I said before, a terrorist group sympathetic to Pakistan committed an act of terrorism inside India. India then blamed the Pakistani government for this and surprisingly the Pakistani government didn't even disagree. This then escalated to India and Pakistan lobbing missiles across their border, in which India, from the biased news I saw, seems to have radically outperformed Pakistan, which is to be expected given India has completely thrashed Pakistan in the several wars they've had since independence. The similarity here is that between the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Bosnian terrorist group the Black Hand, which was supported by the Serbian government. This then spiraled into World War I as the Russians backed the Serbs when the Austrians declared war on them, while the Germans backed Austria. Things spooled out into a global war from there. The difference here is that the 1914 attack was significantly more damaging to Austro Hungary's honor than the murder of a few civilians was to India. Today, Serbia and Pakistan are both relatively weak countries which supplement said weakness with ideological fanaticism combined with vicious envy for their superior neighboring multi ethnic empire. Both India and Austro Hungary saw Pakistan or Serbia with contempt and loathing. They saw it as a lesser nation that was feral, causing too many problems. One who needed to be taught a lesson. Serbia and Pakistan both offset their weakness by supporting various terrorist groups among the ethnic allies in a larger enemy empire. The Balkans and India are both complete messes to study. I've been meaning to make a video analyzing modern India and its potential for being a superpower. But frankly, India is the place in the world that's hardest to understand. I have a friend who read dozens of books to understand India and he tried to explain it through talking about a terrorist battle in a single city on the border between Pakistan and India. He went through the ethnicities, religions, castes, mafias, clans and government agencies involved in this single conflict over that single city. This is India writ large, a society as complex as the Internet. I have a rule that India breaks every rule of anthropological principles which I can explain in this text wall. In the Balkans, which is quite similarly complicated. The Serbs had lots of co ethnics like the Bosnians, which they sadly grew to hate under Yugoslavia, who they were trying to liberate from Austria at the start of the century. Both Serbia and Pakistan are sort of shameless terrorist sponsoring states. Serbia started a war over an illegal Bosnian terrorist. Act's honor being an easy example. Pakistan housed Osama bin Laden when Pakistan was an American ally 20 years ago. Osama lived a block from the Pakistani military's headquarters and was working tightly with them. The Pashtun Taliban coming down from Afghanistan have conquered a sizable region of northwestern Pakistan and the Pakistani government's been incapable of dealing with it since they are fundamentally dependent on radical Sunni Islam, the same as the Taliban, as a way to unify their highly ethnically diverse population around something. While their ruling class has been a complete failure since independence. Thus the ruling coalition can't unify around kicking the Taliban off their own land, since too many are sympathetic. Not a single Pakistani president has finished his term of office since independence. The funny thing is that leading up to independence in 1947, the British were completely assured that Pakistan would become stronger in the time after. This was since the British worked closely with the Muslims in their conquest of India, given the Muslims were India's earlier conquerors and did have a genuinely higher level of civilization. However, since independence, India has completely surpassed Pakistan on almost every level. India has seen a wide scale industrial revolution within the last few decades, although one interestingly caused by service industry work among the higher castes rather than manufacturing, which is normally the case. This has completely changed India, transforming it into what will easily be the second most powerful country in the world by the 2000-30s. India does have very sizable issues, especially so clustered around secular cycle variables. With life for the average Indian having gotten worse in the last few decades, with issues including infringement on freedom or elite aspirant overproduction. However, Indians today can look upon their country with pride as a place that is growing and strong. This is not the case with Pakistan. Pakistan never saw the breakdown of feudalism and serfdom which India did. Pakistan never really industrialized and has a huge dissatisfied peasant population which has very little social mobility. As the time has passed, India has surpassed Pakistan in nearly every regard. With India's economy taking off as its government gains greater ability. I'm frankly in complete shock that Pakistan survived this long. I would bet that the average Pakistani is having trouble putting food on the table now, as Pakistan is is one of the most foreign food dependent countries on earth. India's ruling party, the bjp are Hindu nationalists who passionately hate Pakistan, which is also returning the sentiment in the other direction for both Pakistan and India. They are ethnically diverse countries to an insane degree. Westerners can't really understand. And these are artificial countries made by the British that have not done that much nation building. I like to say that partly since I love seeing the Hindu nationalists froth at the mouth. It's fun. Thus, both India and Pakistan use the other as an enemy to combine their own coalitions which barely hold together as is. Thus they have an incentive for war. What we saw here was that after the terrorist attacks, the gradual escalation between India and Pakistan kept going. Lots of people at the time brushed this off as normal business, but I've been following this region for a while and this is significantly greater than any earlier scare I had seen. I knew that this was different in this regard. I was correct in that we saw India, for example, bombing the entire axis of Pakistan, which is a pretty big country. I saw a pretty big red flag when the Indians bombed as far south as Karachi or Pakistan's enormous cosmopolitan seaport, as well as Islamabad, the capital, and then up in the north beyond Kashmir, which is under an Indian control now. This shows a degree of escalation beyond what we've seen before, in which when these nations aren't serious, they just attack their troops a little bit around the border, which is normally enough to rally their own populations. This signified to me that they planned on going for the jugular of Pakistan as a society, not just the borderlands. Five years ago, when I was still a college kid and barely an adult, I predicted that India and Pakistan would have a war over their water supply and that India would cut off Pakistan's water supply. This was obvious to me at the time since it was clear that India would not have enough water for their growing industrial populations while they could also screw over their worst enemy, Pakistan, which is killing two birds with one stone. This just recently occurred with India cutting off their shared water treaty with Pakistan over the Indus River. The Indus is one of the most historic rivers ever bringing life to an otherwise parched desert and much like the other river valley civilizations, being a base for a strong and advanced Bronze Age civilization. That being the Harappans. The Harappans were actually the numerically and geographically largest Bronze Age civilization of anywhere in the world. India has the headwaters for a significant amount of the Indus, which they're going to cut off now to use for their own purposes. Keep in mind that Pakistan isn't an industrialized country with a plurality of the population still living as peasant farmers. Furthermore, these are poor peasant farmers who are using the land to its fullest, where if the water level decreases, they will starve. Pakistan had experienced historically bad flooding within the last few years as well. There is nothing as bad as a desperate man in this water situation, unless there's some variable I can't see, is not going to go away while it borders on existential for Pakistan and this region of India, which also does not have enough water. It's funny talking about this while Texas, where I live now, is having a historic level water crisis. The Indus river also used to be the western border of India against those they called the Yavanas or Westerners. It would not surprise me if India is buttering itself up for the potential conquest of eastern Pakistan. We forget this in the west, but lots of countries today want to conquer their neighbors, while we ourselves are strange outliers for caring about peace. If Narendra Modi conquered Pakistan, which would totally be doable on a purely material basis, he would be seen as the greatest Indian president. India would secure its western flank, grow, wipe out its greatest rival while returning to its organic pre industrial borders. However, such naked aggression is not tolerated in the current Pax Americana UN world said order cannot last more than a few years at the current rate, and I think the Indians know that. One of the predictions I made a few years ago, which I forgot about until it occurred recently, was the rebellion of Baluchistan. In the context of modern Pakistan, an imperfect coalition of various ethnicities based predominantly around the Indus Valley, the Baluchis have gotten the rotten end of the deal. The Baluchis are in the desert out by Iran, and the region has significant natural resource deposits. However, none of the money from said resources are spent on them. With Baluchistan being the poorest part of Pakistan, the Baluchis are pushing for independence now, which is a sort of bellwether for Pakistan's weakness Since Baluchistan is a de facto colony of the east of the country, if India does end up taking Pakistan east of the Indus, then the rest would be taken up either by the Taliban coming down from the Afghan mountains, which is already happening, as well as Baluchistan's independence. However, now I have no accurate information as to the nature of Pakistan's internal strength. They've made it this far and thus I'm not inclined to believe they will collapse this year. I wrongly predicted that this war would spiral and get larger. I admit I may have a bias towards calling my shots too early, but for events like this you tend to find that once you hit critical mass players, you can't stop a process and that spills outside their control. India and Pakistan both publicly state multiple times that they were about to have a war, completely destroy their enemies and enjoy it. They exchanged fire over major cities and skirmish, but it then stopped. It's funny, people like to default onto the nothing ever happens school of thought, which will be such an embarrassing opinion a few years in the future once something inevitably does happen. However, I can't distinguish in the early stages a war like this not starting versus a war that genuinely does start, like Israel or Ukraine. I think this time India and Pakistan tested the waters, saw that their populations were ready for this, but then assessed that the global order had not deteriorated enough for it. I think both sides want the global order to be even more unstable so that they can fight this war under a cover of plausible deniability. From everything I've seen, this is a situation in which a war will occur, but not today. Let's check back on this in a few years to see what happens.
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I.