Draughts vs Chess vs GO – why the West is losing the battle for world domination?

weekend blog

First, I’d like to thank a reader for alerting me to the following quote from the TV series Yes Minister: “No one really understands the true nature of fawning servility until he has seen an academic who has glimpsed the prospect of money.”

This pretty much sums up how our supposed ‘scientists’ are prostituting themselves to the highest bidder.

On the same subject, here’s an excellent article from the Daily Mail journalist Ian Birrell. While almost every other journalist deftly avoids any criticism of China and any suggestion that the Chinese plague accidentally leaked from a Wuhan lab, Birrell has tenaciously followed the lab leak theory. But in this article, he examines the intellectual honesty of our leading prostitutes (sorry, I obviously meant ‘scientists’)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10396419/IAN-BIRRELL-DID-science-establishment-try-silence-fears-Covid-leaked-China-lab.html

Draughts vs Chess vs Go?

Yesterday I was, as one does, pondering the world situation over several vodka cocktails. And I came up with a possible analogy explaining why the West is losing to both Russia and China. Like all analogies, this is a simplification. But it may also help partially explain the West’s declining influence in the world.

My proposition is that the leaders of the West, Russia and China are playing completely different games.

The West’s “Draughts” (checkers in the US)

The West’s leaders are playing draughts – a simple game with simple moves which requires little strategic or long-term planning. You make a move, your opponent makes their move, you respond and so on. A simple, binary and short-term approach to internal policies and international relations

Russia’s “Chess”

Putin’s Russia, on the other hand is playing chess – a more complex game in which successful players think many moves ahead, have a strategic plan and will even make sacrifices to lull their opponent into mistakes which can then be exploited.

For example, Putin has played a blinder with Russian gas supplies. For years, Putin dismissed man-made climate change as nonsense. Then suddenly he seemed to change his mind and claimed to be an avid believer. If I remember correctly, at the time Russia was closing down many of its old Soviet coal-fired power stations and replacing them with gas-fired power. So, Russia would have reduced its CO2 emissions anyway. Putin’s agreement to CO2 reductions encouraged Western leaders to go faster with their ludicrous net-zero policies closing down cheap reliable power stations and replacing them with expensive unreliable wind and solar. Moreover,�the crazed Angela Merkel shut down Germany’s nuclear power industry following the Japanese Fukushima tsunami. Merkel seemed to be unaware that Germany is largely land-locked and there are no tsunamis in Germany. Maybe someone should have bought Merkel an atlas?

As this year’s energy crisis hit Europe, Europeans suddenly realised to their surprise that they were dependent on Mr Putin’s goodwill to keep European lights on, their homes warm and industry functioning.

This strategic chess move by Putin completely blindsided the West’s useless draughts-playing leaders and has left them powerless to stop Russia’s expansionist ambitions. If they upset Putin, he can close down much of Western Europe’s economy.

China’s “Go”

I’m not familiar with the Chinese game “Go”. So here (in blue) is a description from Wikipedia:

Go�or�Weiqi,�Weichi�is an�abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day.�

The playing pieces are called stones. One player uses the white stones and the other, black. The players take turns placing the stones on the vacant intersections (points) of a board. Once placed on the board, stones may not be moved, but stones are removed from the board if the stone (or group of stones) is surrounded by opposing stones on all orthogonally�adjacent points, in which case the stone is�captured.^[4]�The game proceeds until neither player wishes to make another move. When a game concludes, the winner is determined by counting each player’s surrounded territory along with captured stones and�komi�(points added to the score of the player with the white stones as compensation for playing second).^[5]�Games may also be terminated by resignation.

Despite its relatively simple rules, Go is extremely complex. Compared to chess, Go has both a larger board with more scope for play and longer games and, on average, many more alternatives to consider per move. The number of legal board positions in Go has been calculated to be approximately�2.1�10¹⁷⁰,^[11][a]�which is vastly greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe, estimated to be of the order of 10⁸

While the West’s leaders only think a few months ahead and Putin’s Russia is thinking in terms of years, our Chinese Communist Party (CCP) friends have a long-term plan for total world domination within the next fifty to one hundred years. Every major Chinese company has CCP members on its board and follows a long-term strategy dictated by the CCP:

• they have been working to make Western economies totally dependent on China by, for example, cornering the world’s supply of rare earth metals, dropping prices when challenged in order to bankrupt any Western competitors
• becoming one of the world’s major sources of microchips on which most Western industry is now dependent
• using the Belt and Road initiative to monopolise the world’s trade routes and ports
• handing over huge, unrepayable loans to corrupt Third-world politicians in order to take control of vital assets in those countries. The CCP has basically bought Barbados for about $500m and now Sri Lanka is bankrupt and unable to repay interest on its loans from China. So we can expect a CCP takeover there. Pakistan is also in hock to the CCP as are many other countries. The CCP even controls vast tracts of agricultural land in countries across the world, water rights in parts of Australia and much of New Zealand’s economy
• when the Wuhan Chinese plague was unleashed on the world, the only country capable of supplying all the PPE and test kits which were so desperately needed was China
• taking control of many of the world’s international organisations either using corrupt Third-world proxies as at the ludicrously misnamed World Health Organisation or by ensuring Chinese officials were appointed as at Interpol. Though, if I remember correctly, the guy running Interpol was arrested and charged with corruption during a visit to China. Maybe he was corrupt? Or maybe he had been insufficiently enthusiastic about obeying his CCP bosses’ demands to use Interpol’s resources to crack down on Chinese dissidents living abroad? Who knows?

Why no demands for reparations?

In any normal situation, you would expect our Western rulers to be demanding answers as to how the Covid-19 plague started. There was one bleat from Australian PM Scott Morrison. The CCP immediately punished Australia by banning coal and beef imports from Australia and putting tariffs on some other products (like wine) from Australia.

But apart from Scott Morrison’s comments, our rulers have been strangely reluctant to probe Covid-19’s origins.

Moreover, if Covid-19 was caused by a Chinese lab leak, which the CCP then covered up with the supine obedience of the utterly corrupt World Health Organisation, you might expect our rulers to impose massive tariffs on Chinese products as a form of reparations for the damage caused to our economies. But the West is now so dependent on China that no Western leader dares risking upsetting the CCP.

In the game of world domination the CCP is clearly playing a different, more strategic, more complex and more long-term game than Russia and the West and that’s why the CCP is winning.