The TFM Show: 11/11/2023

6:30

The lottery ticket oil bet since oct 7 has always been on something unexpected happening as a result of so many actors involved and so much chaos.

An Israeli general executes Hamas prisoners. Houthis launch a chemical attack. A rogue Hezbollah commander sinks an American ship with his missiles.

All of that is still very much in play, and is actually escalating as we get to the point of full Israeli control of the strip. It was never going to be Iran or Russia or OPEC, it was always going to be some wildcard that turned the heat up from 6 to 10.

5:45

Pearly is the new Lauren Southern. A talking point regurgitation machine with tits. That you guys keep falling for this thirst trap nonsense shows you still give a shit what women think, which means you still think theyre your equal. As long as you believe in equality, nothing will change.

5:45

Uhhhh TFM was actually Xi Jinping this whole time? That is his entire program. Outside of the moronic lockdown nonsense, the main reason the Chinese economy is struggling is because Xi is reversing the last decade of ghost city foreign investment nonsense that was creating huge wealth inequality. Shitty for investors, but good for all the people left behind by white elephant economic growth.

5:40

My dad was an architect, and this is a common trope among everyone involved in construction and shelter. This idea that you can physically build utopia through structures.

Of course our environment has an impact on behavior, but it's not as impactful as people think outside of the extremes. Moreover, our ability to technocratically tweak behavior through these related professions is effectively zero.

Behavioral architecture, engineering, urban planning etc is effectively the crypto of the industry. A bunch of well meaning kids who dont know what theyre talking about jerking each other off at irrelevant conferences.

5:10

The original 'mongolian' army might have been even less than half ethnically mongolian, even before later incorporations of soldiers from their conquests of civilized (urbanized) regions. Ghengis's brilliance was that he broke the old norms of tribal warfare in the steppes, and unified them all under a much more meritocratic order.

It is no surprise then that the empire's already questionable 'mongolian' culture failed to assimilate a single region that they conquered, and they were all instead quickly assimilated by the cultures of the various conquered regions.

All that said, I think the commenter was referring to the fall of the Ottoman empire, which had dominated the post-mongol middle east from the 16th century up until the early 20th century.