do you think we are going into ww3?

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An equivalent system was set up after World War II with a peace anchored by the Allied Powers, decolonization, and the US-Soviet rivalry. That system has lasted for about 80 years and is showing significant strain.

What? No it hasn't. The cold war ended by 1992 at the latest. At that point the US achieved total, unipolar hegemony over the world and began exercising it. Clinton's "interventions" in Kosovo, Africa, etc. The Bush era Neo-Cons, those were all results of a new era of unchallenged American power and hegemony. That marked a new era.

Right now the world, led by China and Russia as well as other members of BRICS are trying to buck that total dominance and hegemony of the US and set up a multi-polar world but the US is not letting go, it is not ceding power, it has replaced international law as set out in agreement with the victorious powers of WW2 with "rules based order" which means its way or the high-way, the rule of their might and their wants and nothing else matters. Trump is flexing that built up power, the fact they control SWIFT, the fact the dollar is world reserve currency, their incredible ability to do sanctions to anyone anywhere and put a big hurt on them for defying US interests and wants. He's unleashing the full might, threatening sanctions, tariffs, straight up invasion to take Greenland or the Panama Canal, etc. All to do what? To maintain US primacy, to prevent the emergence of a multi-polar world where the US doesn't dominate everyone else and set the terms and rules for the entire world.

So there are movements to try and strive towards a Westphalian (multi-polar) order led by China, Russia, and followed in those steps by other BRICS nations but they are cautious, they don't want to anger the US and even China still backs down if the threats of sanctions gets too big. So right now we're in a struggle to determine what kind of world we have either a continuation, a hardening of US empire and unipolar hegemony, unchallenged dominance of the world and its peoples to their dictates and benefits or else a multi-polar world structured around Westphalian principles of sovereignty of individual nations and cooperation and peace born out of multiple strong powers checking each other's ambitions against other weaker nations.

The US ended an era of struggle and some independence for nations on its own after it won the cold war, it chose to build up its power, to break international law (Yugoslavia, Iraq, war on terror, sanctions regimes galore, etc), to replace it with "rules based order" which no one can solidly define the rules of because they're ever shifted based on the wants and needs of the US.

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It has still been a relatively peaceful time in human history post fall of the Soviet Union even when you include Iraqi and Afghani deaths as a proportion to the world's population. Wars still happened in that relative time of peace, but those conflicts were relatively contained to not create a new great power war.

Great powers haven't entered in open conflict on the scale of World War II, which was chosen as a bench mark.

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I mean, unless there is no major global war from now until the heat death of the universe or some other extinction level event, aren't we just perpetually going towards WW3?

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Other countries decide to band together and stop the United States.

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Most arguments against a potential WW3 happening seemed to base the assumption that we were dealing with mentally competent world leaders, who were ultimately worried more about their money and comfortable life, so would not let it happen. Trump and Elon have grown up in such wealth, they are completely disconnected from reality and I believe are insane enough to think they are untouchable by anyone and anything, even Putin knows he is not invincible. This swing to the right in Western countries seems to be filled with similar people, with the common belief that they will never truly have to deal with the consequences of their actions.
People with this level of insanity, do not care if the poors get ground up in their wars and this, i think it is now just a matter of time.

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It has if you think only conflicts in western land matter. What's more, the US might launder its military operations within proxy organizations and banking institutions but it absolutely has wars going on even outside Iraq and Afghanistan. Whistleblowers have confirmed the CIA as being behind every major terrorist attack in Chechnya and Xinjiang, and financing paramilitaries all over the world, as well as dealing with narcos and creating huge waves of drug violence in México, Ecuador and Colombia just to name a few.

Millions are dead as a direct result of US intervention in Iraq alone.

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Still less than the dead of World War II

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This is bullshit projection.

The Atlantic, 2021: The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth
Geopolitical Economy Report, 2022: China forgives 23 loans for 17 African countries, expands ‘win-win’ trade and infrastructure projects

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Sure, but this isn't an "inordinately peaceful "time just because it isn't as deadly as the single biggest war in all of history.

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In the west I think it’s mostly used to sell ads, but in other countries like China and Russia, I think it’s more sinister.

Which social media algorithm caused you to form this opinion?

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Economic growth is optimized by beginning a proxy war with China.

But where? Taiwan seems the obvious candidate. Not sure if that would really lead to (quaterly) economic growth though.

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In the west I think it’s mostly used to sell ads

The Twitter Files showed us that this is not true. Though corporate social media didn’t invent propaganda. Previously.

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I didn't just provide one example, though. There are cycles of war and peace in Europe that got mapped out to the globe as European nations became the dominant powers. There are eras of wars where various great and lesser powers participate in more destructive wars because the international order has broken down and isn't there to restrain belligerents. There are also times when costly wars don't end with a lasting "peace", but an armistice before fighting resumes.

We seem to be at a point where the post World War II international order is breaking down. When that happens historically, there is usually a big war and destruction on the order of magnitude of World Wars I and II.

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We have been in WW3 since Russia started it's fully scale invasion if Ukraine in 2022. The major conflicts if it just haven't become kinetic yet. China has conducted cyber attacks in the United States, Russia has been attacking undersea fiber. China is building ships that on gave one ouroose to invaide Taiwan. In 100 years thus will be seen as the early days if the war.

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Yes, surely with programs like PRISM and the NSA, and corporations collecting information about literally every aspect of our lives with every device we purchase...they are just trying to sell us ads.

Our ruling power structure is paranoid, our government is rogue and does not serve US citizens, they maintain control by invoking fear, outrage, and stress in the population and they count on our learned helplessness and slave mentality. They want us to be depressed, they want us to be tired, they want us to be poor and struggling, they want us to think we're the "good guys".

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Not sure if that would really lead to (quaterly) economic growth though.

Regarding war and money, the question often isn't who's positioned to gain the most, instead who's positioned to lose the least. We often don't measure self against history and reason, instead relative our competitors.

Taiwan seems the obvious candidate.

The US has already manufactured consent to have a proxy war with China. I assume we've not done it in Taiwan because we'd lose more on trade than we'd gain consuming weapons.

But where?

To be determined. We're ready and waiting for an opportunity to present itself.

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when the rich wage war it's the poor who die

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I think sort of, although it won't be as cut-and-dry and the first two. I think it'll be somewhere between a traditional 'hot' war and a cold war, where the larger players (ie: China, the US, Russia, the EU) will engage in propaganda wars, attempts to destabilize each other, cyber attacks, trade wars etc. while in areas outside of those groups (eg: Ukraine currently) there will be physical wars fought by proxy between the bigger groups.

I think we're seeing the start of it now, and IMO the US is probably doing the least well so far of the major groups. Russia is doing the destabilization thing, which is working quite well in Europe and spectacularly well in the US, China seems to be leading in trade and tech (both cyber attacking and just undermining the US tech sector with things like DeepSeek) and I think Europe's strategy seems to be to just bunker down and see what happens.

I think the main advantage the US traditionally has always had is its military - it's geared up very well for a big physical war, but I don't think this is that kind of conflict. And with the Trump administration's obsession with tariffs and the general disregard for education and soft power, I think the country is really heading in the wrong direction for what may be coming.

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Yes, the World Bank and the IMF. I've even seen it personally, which is what led me to dig down the rabbit hole - I got interviewed by a world Bank employee to explain why I was installing a system for an airport, and they kept trying to guide me to explain why it was helpful...I couldn't, because it was only useful if the Internet is down, and if that happens it's probably not useful because the system had to be taken down if there's bad weather, and the airport regularly flooded during storms anyways

They were constant protests and news coverage of projects being pushed on them, and it was an open secret for the airport workers. It was for things they didn't need or want, even though they had plenty of infrastructure in disrepair already

Argentina is the classic example, they resisted and had their currency destroyed, which makes international trade hard. Other countries go so deep in debt they have IMF officials installed in their government to implement austerity measures, some even are forced to hand over their currency printing powers

Sometimes countries get into our good graces, like Peru, and they are let off the treadmill in exchange for beneficial trade deals. That's after having their resource rights sold off and letting in foreign investments to extract wealth moving forward, but mostly they're kept in perpetual debt as leverage

It's a wild and very deep rabbit hole. The information isn't hidden, it's just spun in a positive light

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You're describing Imperialism as outlined by Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and its contemporary form by Hudson in Super Imperialism, but these are overwhelmingly done by Western countries, especially the United States. Do you have specific evidence of this being a primary factor for China specifically?

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do you think we are going into ww3?