EverythingIsFine
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I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4d ago
I mean the "smoking jars" link quite literally says that the PD hadn't yet determined if it was a real bomb or just window dressing. I mean, yeah at some point you have to judge how to present uncertain information, and bias can creep in, but news is hard and often the desire of end-users for news outstrips the pace at which the highest-quality information can come out, much less be processed and contextualized appropriately by journalists.
Again, news is hard. Nothing new here. I don't get why this is suddenly "a new low", this is just ... how news works?? Savvy readers were provided plenty of information in the NYT article itself to make their own judgement.
And it's not like that's the only thing the NYT has produced. 3 minutes ago I see this (I think new, separate article) headline and its "dek" (I learned a new word! the summary thing) saying:
U.S. Authorities Are Investigating Device Thrown Near Gracie Mansion
The device that emitted smoke during a protest near Gracie Mansion Saturday was designed to be deadly, a person with knowledge of the investigation said.
And to be fair, there's a bit of genuine ambiguity here: what do we call it? An IED? A grenade? A bomb? Some of these definitions strongly imply a certain amount of actual explosives, and that seemed to be the main sticking point/source of doubt, yes? You can "design something to be deadly" without, you know, successfully making it deadly. Obviously the device did NOT explode, so on a pedantic level "smoking device" is probably the most technically accurate term even if people with brains (you and I) obviously know that it's probably intended to be something like a grenade. I don't have a sub but I assume there's more, up to date info inside. Or are you bothered by a lack of an update on the OG article? Where it's positioned in relative terms to the other news?
Like sure, you can call it bias. That's fine. But I don't think it's this horror show of propaganda you're imagining.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5d ago
Also, the argument is weakened significantly because the phrase has a subject. If I say that sucks, sure it's fine. If I say "you suck", that's a little worse but not bad. But if I said "Dave sucks Bob off" then... yeah, it's the original meaning. If I say "damn", that's whatever. If I say "damn you" that's worse and more vitriolic. If I say "damn you to hell" then, yeah, that's like the original meaning again. As far as I can tell, this is a pretty universal rule.
I'm willing to buy that it's softer than US media presents it as, but it's total bullshit that it's lost all connotation. It's still quite hostile. Just like "fuck all republicans" is like, never going to be clean and always going to be something full of animus even if people drop a "fuck" all over the place in regular conversations.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5d ago
In a way it's a bit of a dry run for the (significantly worse) interruption they'd encounter with Taiwan action (even if it ended up just being sanctions). I'm curious whether they conclude it's a survivable risk or discover that it's worse than they expected (and if there's anything they can do about it)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5d ago
As far as I'm aware most of the narrative about inevitability is of the more 'timeless' Thucydides Trap flavor. However it's worth noting that I do sometimes read English-language Chinese propaganda: they are actually pushing this narrative! Their hope is that they can co-opt US intellectuals into thinking "we're too smart to fall into this silly trap". This is accompanied by (empty) blustering about how important "self-determinism" is and how they would never intervene in other countries' affairs (lol).
In parallel, they're trying to degrade American pride and nationalism more generally. No one is more happy than China (yes, even more than Russia IMO) at the flood of articles about homelessness in the US, racial violence, inequality, government dysfunction, etc). Interestingly, they seem to have tried to learn from the Communists of yesteryear: rather than explicitly promote left-wingers, they think that they can win on a pure negative-messaging platform. They will brag about how China can 'just do things' and is clean, orderly, family-friendly even, but they don't care if it catches on, they just want to provide a contrast. They don't care about promoting something like the IWW or Comintern or whatever. They view money as a more powerful ideological tool (internationally) than actual ideology. Of course, some of this is necessarily defensive: they don't want democracy to look attractive to Chinese people. But it's interesting to me nonetheless that this is the strategy that they've chosen to appeal to the Western intellectuals.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5d ago
Yeah, I believe the paradigm was mostly invented as a complement to combined arms warfare, and as you point out since this isn't traditional combined arms warfare (no ground troops) it doesn't really apply.
However I think it's too early to really say definitively how close to air supremacy they are, insofar as that makes sense to say. They're being careful, but clearly have a desire to start using more guided bombs than missiles (or even gravity bombs). Looking at the news, as of one or two days ago the US started using its nonstealth bombers: B-52's and B-1B's in Iran. That sort of hints toward yes, but IMO true air supremacy these days at least implies that you can use helicopters more or less freely as well, which is plainly not the case right now.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5d ago
Good post and good quoted post too.
I think the way his X post framed the question makes it a mismatch for the argument I was advancing. I agree that militarily the conflict doesn't change the calculus that much but if it does it's in the direction of "China would win". Maybe I wasn't clear enough about that. Or maybe it's that I think his "political" bullets are missing a bullet or two.
What it changes is how threats are communicated and how those threats can evolve into action. And it does in a big way. First of all, China must be realizing around now that they have no meaningful way of communicating their military capability to the world, but especially to US and regional allies, in a way they will respect and find authentic. Simply because China's military basically doesn't get used for anything and hasn't for decades (and no, building artificial reefs in the SCS doesn't count). So no proof of concept demonstrations. And they've been loud and annoying for decades about Taiwan so leaders are desensitized. Now, as a world citizen that's awesome and cool but it doesn't help them in the sense that a big stick doesn't work as a threat if people don't see its size correctly. (By the way, I also don't believe for a second that China's relative noninterventionism would or will continue, because the rhetoric around 'self-determinism' is not only just as fake as say America's in the Mexican-American war, but also because Exhibit A about ignoring self determination is literally the topic of this discussion.)
In Kissinger's setup, China has the capacity to inflict damage, probably has (internally) resolve and willingness to follow through, but cannot meaningfully communicate this resolve nor this capacity, at least not at scale. That's a crucial missing piece of the trifecta, which means that China's deterrence power is fundamentally flawed. The contrast is obvious: America not only makes threats but makes good on them and other countries fully recognize those threats, even more so after events of the last year.
Why, might you ask, does deterrence even matter? Overall, China patently still prefers (and prefers strongly) peaceful reunification for, I think, super obvious reasons, and prefers a military takeover without fighting anyone besides Taiwan equally as strongly over igniting a regional war with US or Japanese involvement (or even worse, Philippines and SK and Australia or something too). That is: political takeover >> military takeover >> military takeover and a fight with the US >> military takeover and a fight with the US and a fight with multiple regional allies of theirs, all separated by significant gaps. If you're proposing that they'd actually prefer a fight, or feels ambivalent about if the US or other allies intervene, or some other way I have that list of preferences wrong, I'm all ears to that argument but I don't think that's what you are saying? Because that changes the discussion considerably, if so.
Even if you're an internal, hawkish CCP member in the PLA, a war is risky as fuck even in optimistic scenarios, and the global fallout is probably even more unpredictable than that. So yeah, if I'm China I'm much more concerned about our chances of pulling off a Taiwanese takeover without anyone else intervening because that's the preferred solution anyways. ALL of that is downstream from deterrence (i.e. how much respect and fear you generate), and if China's deterrence has a problem the whole strategy has a problem. Thus, the second quote in the OP.
Briefly, btw, I think if we do use his list: 2, 3, and to a lesser extent 4 (base hardening, air power, space/cyber power) are a bit TBD, but maybe. 6 (casualty tolerance) might come into play but I think it's a useless data point. 7 (worth a war) probably nudges them a bit towards yes. 8 (war fever) is almost hilariously irrelevant, because Trump didn't even try to whip any up. 9 (ally commitment), the Pacific allies might get a low-scale idea how local populations might react or how their US bases would be exposed. 14 (economic damage to China) will be a very interesting data point to look at, TBD right now. 17 (deindustrialization) could go either way, but this conflict will probably have a minor impact. 18 (American innovation) works slightly against China here: the saying is that the military always prepares to fight "the last war" and the "last war" is increasingly looking more similar to China than it did 10 or 15 years ago. 19 (China's foreign influence) also works against China in a bigger way: they seem to be entirely impotent to affect this conflict in any meaningful way, even diplomatically. I think that's a bit of a reality check moment for them. Unrelated technically, but for 20 (counterintel) China just hacked the FBI pretty bad, as far as I can tell they are dominating there.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5d ago
I only specifically framed this conversation as describing a post-WW2 paradigm for a reason. WW2 was kind of the final worldwide wake-up call that this is what "total war" does to countries (militarily but also economically), and we've only become more technically capable of that kind of thing since then. Nukes were the nail in the coffin but the culmination of that direction of things. The entire history of war in the world since then has recognized that wars of sufficient global-power scale is so destructive that this energy usually needs to be channeled into smaller, more narrow areas of conflict. Thus, proxy war as a logical "riskiest acceptable" war. This era of relative peace is not an accident. It is rooted in the technological and logistical realities we find ourselves in.
Although in theory a Type 2 war could still take place today, it requires a certain mutual understanding that tends to unravel as war grows more costly, which is a very slippery and quick gradient. It's very noteworthy that the only Type 2 war as I mentioned was before China themselves had nukes! And even then, it was only constrained to more local spheres in part because the US has managed to pull of the whole "oh no it's not OUR war, it's the United Nations' war". Which is almost impossible to replicate. Furthermore, the nature of modern missile and otherwise longer-range warfare means that restricting combat operations to only a specific theater is increasingly only a fiction (and certainly not militarily workable). China being so close to Taiwan only turbocharges this point.
Of course this mostly applies to global powers because they are the only ones capable of such large-scale total war but also because they have, frankly, much more to lose. You can see echoes of these dynamics on lower levels of power but it's strongest at the top tier and nukes are only part of the reason (a big part though).
The difference lies in direct exposure and proxies. Ukraine offers a sort of weird middle ground, semi-proxy war of the type we've seen several times throughout the Cold War to varying degrees. Iran, we fundamentally expect to get punched back, directly, not even exclusively through Iran's proxies. Thus a fight over Taiwan, where we expect the punches to land directly face to face is much closer to Iran situationally. Taiwan is currently a latent proxy, but there is really only a few, very implausible scenarios where we'd support Taiwan only by proxy. If China makes a go at it, either we leave them to try to handle it themselves or we get directly in the fight.
In other words: we've seen Ukraine-like situations before a couple times and not much happened most all of those times. We've seen Iran though recently, and to an extent not previously seen (the Soleimani response and then even the 12-day 'war' response were qualitatively different) since Iraq.
There's once big exception to the rule: proxy wars don't usually escalate to direct wars. The Korean War. This actually works in my argument's favor, though, because the US put themselves directly in the fight and it led to direct confrontation.
Picture the following scale:
- Two powers fight each other directly
- Two powers fight each other within a specific theater only
- One power fights another's proxy (which is materially supported by the other power)
- One power's proxy fights another power's proxy (both are materially supported)
- One power's proxy fights another's proxy (but only one is provided support)
- Unrelated wars (w/r/t the two powers)
WW2 was a Type 1 war. These have not happened since WW2 for a reason. The Korean War was a Type 2 war. It's really the only Type 2 war, though Sino-Soviet border clashes might count if you squint, or India-Pakistan if you stretch. A Taiwan-triggered war would probably be closer to a Type 2 war than a type 1 war, but it definitely wouldn't be a Type 3 war. If you count Ukraine as a US proxy, then that was a Type 3 war. To understand what Type 3 wars usually look like, let's look at history, because these are much better understood:
Vietnam: the US thought about flirting with an upgrade (it's worth noting that Type 2 only actually happens if one side strikes and the other side fights back) but decided against it pretty deliberately. Yom Kippur (arguably), the Soviets threatened to put a trigger force into a collapsing Egypt. Both sides went on nuclear alerts but basically both sides pumped the brakes. Soviet-Afghan war, both sides avoided escalation, even though Pakistan was a US ally in the middle of getting their own nukes. The Syrian Civil War was a kind of Type 3.5 war, because air power blurs the lines a bit. No escalation occurred and both parties were pretty careful to avoid an upgrade.
In this context, Ukraine is very much a 'known quantity'. So yeah, even though it seems counterintuitive that a small, direct fight between a power and a small(ish) country is better as a signal than a big, direct fight against a proxy, Ukraine is virtually guaranteed in practical terms to remain a Type 3, while a Taiwan clash jumps from nothing straight to a Type 2 or even Type 1 (if China decided to do a first-strike kind of action, including in space), do not pass go, do not collect $200. This makes Iran a much better signal of how willing the US is to get into a big, direct fight, with direct exposure, because it is a direct conflict, and Iran has a population bigger than the size of Germany, and twice the size of Ukraine! So yes, it's a decent assessment of the risk appetite the US currently has as well as its competence.
The instant jump to a Type 2 war, or more serious, is because Taiwan is an island (and quite close to China), thus after combat begins no pure-proxy assistance is possible. There is no such thing as a protected airlift or sealift out of Taiwan, or meaningful weapon-smuggling into a warzone around it. You either break a blockade with force or you don't. Taiwan is fundamentally incapable of being a Type 3 conflict for this reason.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
6d ago
That's fair, but usage of subs is a substantially higher bar both operationally as well as in the decision-making of things. Notably, an SLBM launch tends to generate substantially fewer false positives (as an absolute number, more relevant here for nuclear risk) than INF-type intermediate-range missiles (which already proliferate not just in presence but usage as well) simply because it generates dramatically fewer positives to begin with. Not that e.g. China ever participated in said INF treaty, though, but the logic still applies to actually being willing to mount, or actually mounting, these types with nuclear warheads. I hope. Unfortunately AFAIK their IRBMs and the like are capable of quick swap, and recent trends towards a launch-on-warn, hair-trigger profile bodes poorly. So the hope comes in the form of: China being smart enough to never ever get caught mounting them (or ideally even thinking about doing so). Thankfully due to physical realities, mainland US is far enough away from Russia that this kind of thing is, well not quite a non-issue, but less worrisome, so maybe it's half-moot.
So yeah, in theory those short windows still exist, but risk-wise the two things are orders of magnitude apart.
The SK-Japan-China axis is especially hard to gauge, because to be honest none of them have really managed to set aside historical grievances or fears. China is big and scary, Japan did some horrific stuff in WW2, SK doesn't want to be the little kid on the block anymore, and then there's ancient history too, lol. I lowkey think that dynamic is way harder to predict in the next 50 years than NK is. Still my feeling is the same: fewer actors -> less risk.
Bringing up Japan is a good point. If Japan as seems likely were to help the US defend Taiwan, that would fundamentally change the Chinese-Japanese relationship far beyond the current trends. However, I'm skeptical that even a more warlike Japan would get their own nukes. Nuclear sharing is the most on the table and that's not that weird - it's still a US-Chinese dynamic. I will grant that what I've ignored here is the substantially closer physical proximity to these allies and time zone issues means that nuclear dynamics on this local axis (with presumed remote US decision making) is a major challenge that can't really be mitigated easily.
Along the lines of spreading nukes around to allies, if the US actually were to follow through and let Saudi Arabia get nukes, that would be absolutely disastrous. That's in my mind the most likely path to countries like Vietnam wanting to sign up too.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
6d ago
The other issue is more generalized: it's easier to bear discrimination if there's some kind of minimum, critical mass of "people like you" alongside. Thus exceptionally asymmetric professions tend to stay that way without some effort simply due to self-selection after an attempt to break into the career, even if you don't have heavy pre-selection pressure.
The liberals aren't wrong about how this load is real. Not insurmountable, but like in aggregate real, and also personally noticeable. My soon-to-be-aunt, for example, works as one of just something like 4 women in an office of 50 male engineers in a very specific niche industry (she is office staff and part HR, yes). But she's got frustration. For example, pointing out some serious design (and also UX) issues with their terrible looking, outdated website. Ignored and belittled, sadly, despite putting some effort into a strong proposal. These weren't like, 'matter of taste/branding' changes they were 'universal design principle' type things, too. And yeah, over time that's the kind of thing that makes people quit even if it's not like, a dealbreaker by itself. However, having one or two other women in the room for a decision too does seem to be a big tipping-point difference anecdotally in terms of limiting discrimination.
Interestingly enough if you run the math, it's quite helpful to avoid auto-self-segregation if you insist on even basic diversity quotas. And I think segregation is bad for society. It's probably bad for business too, but I think there's a few quite large caveats involved.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
6d ago
Weirdly, my younger (in college, lesbian) sister, when pressed, will outright claim that "women are better than men in every way" yet decline to call this sexism. I'm still a bit flummoxed on how to address this - I think her classic argument is along the lines of how you must view anything like racism or sexism in context of the direction of traditional oppression, but we usually don't get that far before feelings are hurt so that's the one topic we try to avoid recently when family gathers. I guess I'm inclined to simply call this a lack of emotional maturity rather than a genuine intellectual failing for now, we'll see if she feels the same in 5 years, much as that feels stereotypical or possibly-paternalistic/hubristic to type.
More generally, I think the issue here comes down to "money". Money is powerful. Money distorts emotions. Money buys lots of things, notably including many nontangible items too (indirectly). Money ends up being a power system in and of itself. I think unless we manage to agree on the moral nature of money and what it does to people and society, we're going to have trouble coming to grips with the intersection of gender and careers. I don't think that's a super hippie-commie thing to say, nor a super-religious thing to say, just plain truth. My mini-thesis, at least.
I'd be very interested to see some of these thread responses paired with "what do you think about money, its role in society, and its personal influence?" (Bonus points: paired with how financially comfortable are you/secure in your future)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
6d ago
I can easily buy that decreased risk appetite and increased internal focus makes jobs more appealing to women, causatively, in fact I think even liberal sociologists would quickly agree, but I'm not quite sure it follows that the profession drops in stature. But not for the two candidate reasons listed.
It's a little bit of an awkward self-reinforcing question, or poorly defined, because in my view what we typically call "status" or "stature" is mostly set by men for men (invoking a sense of ranking, not just goodness or desirability) while women operate their own parallel system of "status": perhaps "respectability" that mostly dovetails but diverges in some key ways, as a system by women for men; and something like "social capital" which more often operates by women for women. The systems often dovetail but are not in fact interchangeable because they prioritize differently (but correlate well because the primary drivers such as exclusivity, intellectual rigor, social function, or most commonly, wealth generation are super similar). You might notice that, for example, how prestigious high-risk jobs are highlight this.
I don't think the difference is huge so that's a valid objection, but I do think it's a very real piece of nuance that pops up particularly in certain fields. I'm not denying/ignoring that surveys seem to find predictive power in feminization of professors and prestige, just that we have to be pretty careful about the words and might be doing that thing where two people think they are talking about the same thing but really aren't. A man and a woman, in different contexts, might both call all of my 3 proposed paradigms above "status"!
I haven't gone digging too deeply, but I'm pretty sure the classic "prestige surveys" do not attempt to disambiguate, like at all. It's a collapsed index. There's a small handful of studies exploring power dynamics and prestige as distinct IIRC, but very little else. I think this is mostly because the money-prestige link is so dominant! Which to my eyes signals that you simply cannot consider them in isolation, and statistically creates a lot of traps all over the place. At any rate, when I skimmed a few studies related to this, quite a few of them seem to admit straight up that prestige alone is very likely a flawed construct with iffy methodological rigor.
But as you say to the broader point, it's still quite open whether broadly speaking, jobs change -> therefore women enter or women enter -> therefore the jobs change. As to whether women enter -> men flee is the right factual framing (are we talking absolute numbers, proportions, changes in training pipelines?) to be honest I don't know what the data suggests there.
Personally I'm against expansion in the number of nuclear-armed states, full stop, no matter how virtuous. Because the nukes don't easily go away, if at all, and I do worry about tail risks. Mostly of the variety: some idiot breaks the strong taboo and drops a "tactical" nuclear bomb, and then the taboo is way weaker and more shit can happen (direct response or down the road), though you can't entirely discount accidents/misunderstandings/etc as a potential source of disaster. The way it seems to work is risk scale much more strongly with the number of independent actors involved, not number of nukes, so while a mutual US-Chinese nuclear arms race would be bad, I think it's bracketed for me within the 'normal' level of badness. Way less risky in relative terms than allowing someone like, say, Japan (lol) to get nukes even if they seem trustworthy in the near and medium term. There's something to be said for the (sadly now defunct) Cold War arms treaties limiting stuff like intermediate range nuclear-capable missiles simply for the human fact that a 5-minute snap decision is quantitatively and qualitatively much worse than a 15-minute snap decision, though I'm hopeful this logic is clear enough most actors don't meaningfully arm missiles with nukes at those ranges even if the treaty is dead.
As to whether the relative risk of an emboldened China contributing to generalized nuclear tension is greater than the risk of a conventional fight over Taiwan escalating to nuclear exchange(s), that I'm not quite sure. I think a purely nuclear POV probably says that direct global powers at war is the higher risk. As to whether China believes that Taiwan is so 1000% "China proper" that they'd be willing to risk using nukes? On paper they do, but I think it's mostly clear that in practice they don't.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
6d ago
Put simply, it increases China's power, especially locally, to a dramatic degree. China gains the ability to meaningfully project power further in the region without real restraint, including ruling the seas there completely. Historically, this kind of naval+regional dominance always leads to the power getting used or abused. It's naive and wrong to think that wars only start of territorial greed, and therefore no territorial ambitions means no risk of war, though I'm not sure if that's what you were implying or not.
At any rate, I think there's a pretty reasonable case to make that China getting more powerful and influential is bad for the world. I don't think it's awful for the world, but definitely bad in relative terms, and bad for America as well. Global power isn't really zero-sum, but I think American power would diminish at least proportionally in a lot of areas simply because we've nearly 100% occupied a few particular global niches for a while, which leads to some similar dynamics.
Diplomatically, and this is probably the big one, there's no way this wouldn't result in a hit to American reliability, already somewhat in question. This kind of soft diplomatic capital is really hard to replace, and really valuable. Speaking frankly, there's always this element of reputation+raw power that serves as a background to even seemingly unrelated negotiations. The US has leveraged this to our advantage over the years; it can work in reverse, too. It's like a meta-multiplier.
While it's clear that ideological dominos isn't really a thing, I would argue that it's possible to kick off a cascade of weakened alliances. Like it or not the US has essentially provided some degree of security guarantee for decades and decades to Taiwan. On top of NATO doubts, this means that functionally all of our 'guarantees' are increasingly seen as pure convenience. Mechanistically, this is bad because alliances have synergistic effects based on mutual trust that dissipate when trust decreases. As an illustration, think of a vendor relationship. A little wiggle room based on trust can be mutually beneficial to adapt to changing circumstances, or even provide material improvement like how banks give better lending terms to certain outfits; once the trust is gone, though, lawyers start to enter the room, threats start to happen, and transactions shrink in size and scope.
Economically, I think you're underrating the knock-on effects. Sure, we've reduced our reliance on China a bit, but where has that reliance gone? Its neighbors, mostly. If China suddenly gets a stronger grip on Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, etc. this greatly reduces trade leverage, even if our relationship with South Korean and Japan were to remain identical.
More subjectively, it would also be morally quite sad. Taiwan is a functioning, independent democracy with strong claims to self-determination.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
6d ago
Yes. And AI makes this only more stark. The reality is, working memory can only work with what's already in the brain as background. Knowing facts as well as frameworks for understanding, especially in science, literally enable higher thinking. There's limits of course, and we can debate what a sensible "baseline" is, but science instruction in basic chemistry, physics, biology, and to some extent math (that's a whole other conversation) is absolutely essential. And similar arguments apply to basic reading, history, geography, and bits and pieces of the humanities. If anything, recent research has actually underscored that especially US education has shied a little too far away from memorizing and internalizing facts, because you do need that baseline as I said to do anything more complex.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
6d ago
Or just bad cost weighting of the hot-crazy matrix!
So as one of the resident Taiwan pessimists, I have surprising news. Contrary to all my expectations, Trump might have actually pushed back a Taiwan invasion. I'm always a little suspicious of the variable quality of Time magazine stories, but this laid out a pretty cogent case. First, my prior base case:
With the U.S. military depleted and distracted by a conflict on the other side of the globe, observers worried that Chinese strongman Xi Jinping may never have a better opportunity to move on the democratic island of 23 million, whose “reunification” he has called “the great trend of history.” The fear is that Trump’s transactional bearing and embrace of a “might is right” doctrine—both in his own actions and his ambivalence regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—could be interpreted as a green light by Xi.
“Will Xi be tempted to take advantage of U.S. potentially exhausting smart munitions and attack Taiwan even if the PLA is not fully ready?” asks Prof. Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London. “Possible.”
You can definitely still make this case. I'm almost tempted to. On a very substantial fact-based level, the US in the next 1-2 years especially will be possibly at the lowest level or readiness in a great while: large portions of the fleet will need refits, interceptor stocks will take years to recover even under optimistic scenarios, other precision munitions are also low, every conflict lowers US domestic appetite for more, and contrarily war would improve domestic approval within China that's otherwise a little grumpy with recent so-so growth. Additionally, there's some mild but decent evidence that US defenses are indeed still vulnerable to the new classes of hypersonic missiles. US capacity and abilities are sure to spike again in the 3-5 year time frame as the US not only implements highly relevant fixes to problems that have been exposed recently, but also continues to re-orient its efforts to prioritize things that threaten China more both directly and indirectly, so the window is real but closing.
However, on a more how-the-real-world-works level, war is less likely. Trump demonstrated quite clearly that the US military is far more capable and combat-ready than observers had assumed. It has the capacity to plan carefully thousands of targets, kidnap or assassinate world leaders (though with nuclear-armed China I disagree that this is very relevant), completely overwhelm air defenses without losses (including at least some amount of Chinese-made equipment in both Venezuela and Iran), sustain and project power across the globe, process an enormous amount of intelligence and surveillance with decent accuracy, and more. And clearly the President can unilaterally do whatever they want, with Trump in particular shedding a previous (avowed) aversion to conflict. DPP is not weak exactly, but definitely having some down moments compared to the more pro-China KMT within Taiwan, mildly raising hopes of a political reunification. And Taiwanese self-defense efforts as far as I can tell remain pretty lackluster despite continuing to shell out for some high end systems. Furthermore this is a tiny little dry run of how badly the global oil supply can get screwed with even a regional war, doubtless actual action would be worse, and I'm guessing China feels a bit of that pain.
And sure enough this seems to be the initial reaction. Here for example, we have a typical bellwether academic at a flagship university saying stuff like this:
Li Yihu, dean of the Taiwan Research Institute at Peking University, said the reunification process would enter an “accelerated phase” in the next five years and the mainland needed to do more to communicate an understanding of what he said was the inevitability of the process.
“Currently, we are doing very well in terms of building the capacity and the resolve to use [military deterrence], but we still need to work on ensuring that … both overt and potential adversaries fully understand the consequences of deterrence and the gains and losses,” he said.
He was referencing the deterrence theory of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who argued that deterrence was a product of the physical military capacity to inflict damage, the resolve and willingness of leadership to act and the potential rivals’ perception and understanding of the deterrer’s power and resolve.
Reading between the lines, the obvious message is: wow, actually, the US is doing really well at deterrence recently in all of these three areas, especially demonstrated capacity and resolve, and China has, well, very little to show for its own efforts. No big operations besides military exercises. No real allies willing to pitch in. Unclear transmission of internal resolve to America, too. So in our how-the-world-actually-works framework, China is missing the essential psychological ingredients to actually pull off deterrence even if I still believe that in terms of the nuts and bolts, China could win pretty handily even if the US intervenes (in terms of a conflict itself) and has more cards to play in terms of the "how". They know it, too, but that's likely not going to be enough.
As such I'll take a predictive L in advance. My predictions about 4-5 years ago that a Taiwanese invasion would happen in approximately this timeframe was wrong. Difficult to foresee political factors significantly distorted the general strategic picture, which I assert remains accurate. My primary failing was underweighting the political side of things and the significant variance there, along with its impact on the strategic calculations necessary to pull the trigger on a big move.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
6d ago
The ideal of a "stress-free woman" is not how human relationships work, including marriage as a logical subset. I mean I didn't think it needed to be said, and maybe this wasn't your intent, but women are people too, and ALL (meaningful) relationships take some kind of work or investment. And no, simply paying the bills doesn't count (although it IS a large input). With that said, yes I agree that a decent share of (especially current modern) men would take that tradeoff. Truly, money and status doth corrupt and lead to nearsighted, misguided happiness pursuits. Including many 'liberal' efforts that are counterproductive (from claims that 'all happiness is relative' ignoring basic needs to overly self-indulgent prioritization to rejecting some fundamental human patterns).
I also think "excommunicating for certain lines of work" is an unacceptable values tradeoff, even if it's practical in the sense that it's been done before and 'worked'. As a culture we certainly are too individualistic, the extremes need to be dialed back, and yeah it's possible that as a society we need to figure out if there are better ways of wealth sharing for mutual baseline prosperity than some of the lackluster or downright harmful solutions some have proposed or tried (e.g. communism). As a sort of system-first moderate, I honestly think the Bernie liberals might be on to something with the idea that we can get something decent with smart and targeted tax and governmental policy, but there's probably still at least some kind of gap beyond that. Ideally, I think the uber-rich should do a better job of self-cultivating values of giving back on a more direct level (beyond just creating vanity projects, larger yachts, and giving indirectly via somewhat useless nonprofits), though as a society we can't really force that to happen very easily if at all.
Regardless, I feel like cultural technology can solve this problem even if we haven't quite yet. Along those lines, I don't view stuff like 10% quotas bad at all - some decent research suggests that many fields have "tipping points" where being too homogenous hurts (perhaps in output, but definitely in terms of allowing the minority class to feel welcome or stable). That is not to say that 50% in every field is an ideal. Just that some reasonable minimum allows the society to fulfill the value of "allow people to do and work how and where they want without making it a major pain" while still permitting some 'natural' gender differentiation. In that sense, of course lots of modern liberal efforts are misguided alongside their disproportionate effort, but it doesn't mean all modern liberal efforts at better parity are worthless!
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
That's fair - but also definitely the trend in the last few years to make the show more TV-friendly than stadium-friendly. I speculate some of that is actually Apple TV's influence, but honestly the half-time show really IS for the TV audience, not the people in the stadium.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to start listening to Bad Bunny, but to me the point is more just something fun to look at and talk about in between the ads
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Because for a few decades now there's intense pressure NOT to innovate in any way shape or form... and music fundamentally does have some inherent limitations in terms of how differentiated it can be within rigid paradigms. In math terms, there aren't enough "degrees of freedom" within the "country music" narrow genre to allow meaningful variety, much less appeal outside the borders.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
You know what? The halftime show was a lot of fun. Bad Bunny did a great job and as far as I can tell the message was definitely much more one of unity than one of criticism, contrary to the Trumpist worries. His only lines in English? God Bless America (although with the slightly subversive implication that America = 'the Americas' more broadly). The dancing was great (Indian - Hispanic unity there, white America really doesn't get/value dancing atm), the visuals were very varied and fun to look at, although I personally can understand a decent amount of Spanish I think there was probably enough going on that non-speakers would probably still enjoy?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
It's my understanding that absent actually aiding a specific crime, it's perfectly legal albeit obnoxious to whistle and make people aware of police/ICE presence (lookout for a robbery no but generally warning people about ICE or a speed trap is fine) and is not sabotaging an arrest. Although you may get arrested anyways despite it being plainly unlawful for ICE to do so (personally I think the incentive structure regarding illegal arrests is pretty damn flawed but that's an issue for another day). Blocking a street on the other hand, against a specific patrol, is obstruction, yes. Blocking a street more generically is nominally a traffic crime and therefore not ICE jurisdiction, though obviously the line between those two is pretty weak. Blocking a street as part of a larger group is a different kind of discussion that has to do with "authorized" vs "unauthorized" protests and generally you can't march on a street that normally has traffic unless you have a permit.
It is historically true that the American rationale for when revolution is justified vs unjustified is a little muddled, although the Declaration of Independence attempts a standard. I mean, we did have a civil war over more or less that same issue. However speaking on the Constitution more broadly, despite some flaws I find it hard to argue too hard against it seeing as it's still the oldest democracy in the world. Norway is the second oldest and only dates to 1814 and even then it and many others typically went through far more extreme changes over the years to the core structure than ours did. The American Constitution notably stands virtually unchanged in its core formulation (the most significant change, in the long view, being merely senators being popularly elected). The rest were details, or adding in new rights, and not a fundamental reshaping of the balance of power or the structure of the checks and balances! This is quite rare. IIRC Belgium has a better claim and even that is almost 50 years later (amusingly they did somewhat the opposite than we did about 15 years ago, changing their senate from direct election to an assortment of regional parliaments).
I suppose it's fair to think that the loose interpretation helped its longevity, but to me rather it's that the checks and balances were generally done well, that the amendment process usually worked all right, and thus it's still a success I attribute to strength of structure, not looseness of structure. And although history is not a great experimental proving ground, that longevity is pretty decent evidence that at least something has worked. A lot of Americans at least are often surprised at how many democracies have had to toss out or totally rejigger their constitutions much more recently than you'd naively expect.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I quite like the constitutional convention idea. I think I've even endorsed it here before. And it's notable that the Constitution even allows it, because it feels like this is precisely the sort of situation where conventions are the reasonable thing, since partisan negotiations aren't working and problems are obvious.
Lowering numbers seems good, but I'm reluctant to part with the whole 6-year staggered approach which usually balances presidential elections with off-cycle ones and acts as a further brake on spur of the moment changes. Making them come from the state legislature again seems at first glance to be somewhat reasonable. I think one thing that's under-optimized in the system as it currently is, is personal integrity/judgement. Too much selection on issues alone, and not enough on someone we trust to think about the issues deeply and make a good decision.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
A pet theory of mine is actually that the last 50-70 (?) or so of history is qualitatively different than previous eras because leaders are too easy to kill or remove. It used to be that movements would generate Washingtons and Jeffersons and Lafayettes and such who built up their reputation and fame and could lead after winning, or at least strike a deal. But in the modern era, assassinations and executions are relatively more common, and emigrating relatively easier, such that countries suffer "leadership drain" during civil conflict and make civil wars worse than in previous eras. Also, compromise is more difficult because leaders have less political capital at their command. At least, so the thinking goes.
I addressed this:
I stated right at the top that in terms of an actual conflict, I think China would win relatively decisively. But even if you think you will probably win, that's not the only option on the table. I think that on balance, military options should be downweighted because of pre-existing preferences to take it over without US intervention. Why?
To oversimplify, to take Taiwan without a major intervention, you're counting on one of these:
Here's my logic. Since China has realized that it's bad at meaningfully bluffing, this makes the relative chances of pulling off a non-intervention takeover much lower in relation to the risk of an intervention. The risk shifts to military conflict. And of course in all of this, there's the "nothing happens/waiting" scenario. Since China's "utility function" is afraid of risk, and weights a nonintervention so much higher than a risky direct conflict, the overall effect of this risk shift is, somewhat counterintuitively but valid mathematically, towards "nothing happens". That's what I'm trying to get across: not all these options are of equal desirability, and this new reality where Chinese deterrence is ineffective means the most desirable options are less likely to work.
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