Meyerlemon
1mo ago
I think in cases like this, it might be worthwhile to put asterisks next to those numbers. I agree that you shouldn't just go by pure vibes, but at some point you should also avoid citing authoritative sources that are obviously implausible or highly unlikely to be true, which I think applies here. I don't think anyone should just hallucinate "China has 5k IRBMs" without citing sources, but I also don't think an estimate that puts the PLARF's stockpile below the IRGC's, which itself might be an underestimate, is worth repeating without nuance just because it has the DoD's stamp on it. I also think there are good reasons to believe the IDF's estimate on Iranian missile stockpiles is likely more trustworthy than the DoD's on China, given how thoroughly infiltrated the Iranians seem to be.
Do I have better numbers? I wish I do, but here, DoD again:
In 2021, the PLARF launched approximately 135 ballistic missiles for testing and training. This was more than the rest of the world combined, excluding ballistic missile employment in conflict zones.
Missile launches are harder to hide than missiles and launchers, and that might provide a better estimate maybe, no idea how.
Meyerlemon
1mo ago
On a quick Google, DoD estimated last year that China has around 1,300 MRBMs and 300 launchers and only about 550 IRBMs and 300 IRBM launchers, adding 50 of each since 2024.
You do realize these numbers are comparable or even smaller than the estimate for Iranian stockpiles by IDF, don't you? It's almost funny. I surely hope Americans are not running their war plans with these estimates.
Meyerlemon
1mo ago
It’s a fantasy that Americans love to indulge in. Like how they “allowed” China to grow. Highest prevalence of main character syndrome, happens to both libs and magas.
Meyerlemon
1mo ago
I don’t even know if Iraq now is better than Saddam. You can’t do control experiments with reality and who know what Baathism will become today.
Meyerlemon
1mo ago
I agree, that’s one more reason why they shouldn’t claim to nuke Japan into the first world. They’re almost there already before ww2.
Meyerlemon
1mo ago
I didn't say Americans did nothing either, and there's no need to lecture me on the existence of GHQ and such. I said Americans, especially Americans today, should stop claiming other countries' hard earned achievements as their own. If anything the fraction of positive externalities America brought to those countries should be attributed to those apt politicians of yesteryear, and your country sure have changed a lot.
Meyerlemon
1mo ago
One would easily conclude that those countries do well with you out of the picture. Most glaring example being Saddam, Ghaddafi and Assad’s sand kingdoms. Diem’s Vietnam is worse than Vietcong’s Vietnam too. Plus whatever strong influence hbd has on these countries. Point being they have agency and you didn’t do much, and it would require some self-awareness for Americans to stop we wuzing others’ success.
Meyerlemon
1mo ago
Stealing valor again, how predictable. Japan built itself into a first world country, with mostly efforts from the Japanese people. How are Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and all those other third world countries doing after your carpet bombing? The world doesn’t revolve around you and you’re going to keep finding that out. You don’t get to claim credit here and there.
Meyerlemon
2mo ago
If you can identify easily what kind of persona won't do well here and summarize it in your points 1 and 3, that in itself is a consensus. Do you not see the contradiction? Not to mention the other consensus of opinions here. And with every crashout, it only gets stronger. Why you're being smug about it is beyond me.
Meyerlemon
2mo ago
Many such cases, I'm afraid.
Meyerlemon
2mo ago
Thanks. That’s interesting.
I guess I should be more careful with my phrasing. I shouldn’t have conveyed that ideology matters less than private business in the eyes of Sauron of the East. The reason we have such pervasive censorship is obviously downstream of their ideology. What I was trying to say is that the actual contours of the Chinese censorship machine are hard to gauge, and you probably can’t capture them with a simple low-dimensional model. Plus the fact that censorship used to be handled manually by low-wage, barely educated workers (it’s a running joke on Chinese internet that they hire people who barely finished 9 year mandatory education to read and censor your posts) makes it unpredictable and inconsistent. So you can’t easily infer state ideology just by looking at what they censor and what they don’t.
I don’t think that is entirely what they intended, and intention seems more relevant here than actual outcomes. If they had (have, since were in year 2026) panopticon-like tools, I’m sure they’d be happy to use them. Maybe then it would be easier to infer the state-promoted ideology by looking at which kinds of wackos they allow to speak.
As a side note, I’m always fascinated by the obvious difference in preferences between Western and Eastern men when it comes to women. Wu is barely attractive to me, and I’d guess general Chinese netizens would rate her 5/10 tops. Not because she’s “fat” as my anorexic countrymen thinks, it’s about facial features. I have a friend I’d rate maybe 3/10, but she ended up with a blue-eyed German boyfriend who, to me, looks like the kind of guy you’d see in Nazi propaganda posters. And obviously in porn featuring EA women, the preference for EA men vs Western men also seems very different. It’s pretty fun to observe, and I’m curious whether anyone has studied it.
I think it’s broadly known that hardline Chinese nationalists and the far right are censored on Chinese social media.
I don’t think that is “broadly known”, certainly not here, which is why I’m posting. Some people pattern-match them to fascists and assume they would not target nationalists, but that apparently is not true. Like you said, the communist party is left wing in nature and is skeptical of nationalists, while still having to draw its power from the Chinese nation whose people are by and large nationalist. So they censor right-wing nationalists, but also anti-nationalists, which creates confusion for observers across the pond. Many such cases, where one method of inference works in the US but not China and vice versa.
I always wanted to know how the party reconciles the gap between the nationalist majority and its communist core. The banner on the left of Tiananmen says “Long live the People’s Republic of China” while the one on the right reads “Long live the unity of the peoples of the world”. That tension has been there forever.
One obvious thing they are doing right now is redefining communism. After all they are the only surviving communist party with that much power, and who is to say their interpretation is wrong. So on Chinese national television you will see explanations of why Mozi was proto-communist, why Laozi was proto-communist, and even why Confucius himself was basically a communist after all. Turns out our Yan and Huang ancestors had been communists all along. I wake up - another psyop about a known Confucian being communists ad infinitum. Good luck with that rehabilitation campaign. I love to see it.
Edit: oh you probably know this but they are censoring communists too. The communist book club (马克思主义学社) in Peking was banned many times and I’m not sure if it exists anymore. And various communist bilibili internet celebrities, avant-garde feminist artists, third worldists who see the party as socialist imperialists, yada yada. Transitional pain I guess.
Meyerlemon
2mo ago
I've heard of her and had the vague impression that she was more ambivalent toward the CCP, or mildly pro-CCP even, or at least not the usual kind of diasporoid hater. What’s the story there if you care to explain? Who is she, and why is she censored?
That said, my point is that Chinese censors seem to care far more about slutty outfits, trans, and gayness than about actual politics (with the obvious disclaimer that yes of course you get censored if you say really naughty things). You can see that in the crackdown on homoerotic novels, despite how popular they seem to be in the SEA market, which you might think pragmatic politicians interested in maximizing national power would be happy to let flourish.
Meanwhile complete nobodies or moderately well-known online accounts post things you would expect the censors to crack down on but turned out just fine. At the same time, accounts are also regularly banned for promoting “伪史论”, i.e. the claim that all western history from Mesopotamia to the Renaissance is fake. Plus the overt Han nationalists, plus the America haters who use too many curse words etc. If you're on the internet enough you certainly develop an intuition for the overall contour of Chinese censorship, but the frequency of both false positives and negatives suggest either that they are rather clumsy at it (which is definitely true), and/or they simply do not care enough to e.g. run sentiment analysis on everytihng (which I think is also true).
That the censor is incredibly vague and occasionally seem to act against "their" interest is incredibly frustrating. That might be the whole point, so called 罚不可知则威不可测. It also degrades the Chinese internet discourse dramatically. Shameful and wasteful, in that the discourse is discouraged at all levels of society which is detrimental, although I do not believe in free speech absolutism. That being said I think the usual American talkpoints re Chinese censors are still incredibly ignorant. I can hold both viewpoints at the same time without any internal contradictions.
I guess it’s interesting to see which conspiracy theories are tacitly backed by the CCP.
...Again, what is the proof that Jiang is backed by the CCP? By that standard, everything in China is backed by the CCP. If the standard is simply that he works in China, is Chinese, and isn’t in prison, then sure, but even the “is Chinese” part is questionable since he holds Canadian citizenship. This guy is employed at a fucking Chinese high school, and that means he is backed by the CCP? He’s Canadian and was educated at Yale, ffs. Chinese nationalists might as well claim he’s a non-citizen who should be deported on the basis of his Yale diploma alone.
China, like America, is a land of wackos. Go on the Chinese internet and you’ll find Chinese Zionists, Chinese Dai-Nippon Teikoku lovers, Chinese Scientologists, Chinese communist femboys, Chinese flat earthers, and everything under heaven. Remember the Chinese brother of Jesus? We’ve had plenty of them throughout history, and things are not really that different now from 100 years ago, except that the wackos have even more exposure. Some of those wackos are employed by Peking or Tsinghua, which is far more meaningfully “CCP-backed” by any standard than Jiang.
The CCP also doesn’t really care about wacko history channels on Youtube. They care more about “muh protecting private business” than about protecting wackos who happen to be “aligned” with their ideology. They just took down a social media account with millions of followers for spreading the "fake news" that caffeine in boba tea is so damn high it's addictive (which harmed the business of a major Chinese tea chain), even though that same account had a track record of publishing negative coverage of Chinese real estate bubbles, Chinese local government debt, and how the Nationalist Party played a stronger role than the communists in the Sino-Japanese War.
Americans are practically blind to Chinese internal discourse, and the same cannot be said for the Chinese.
It’s all so tiresome.
Meyerlemon
2mo ago
Many people have profile pics, basically a blob of color. Their flairs are colored, and their usernames have a specific pattern. Yours, for example, starts with a capital B, has three capital letters, and is medium in length…
A lot of regulars also mention their nationality or ethnicity once in a while. Eventually you just remember.
I dunno. Maybe it’s my autism showing, but the autism prevalence here has to be really high.
Meyerlemon
2mo ago
Most regulars are known to be American, Indian, Russian, Jewish, Chinese, Finnish, Dane…. I also keep a mental catalog of who might be what nationality based on their respective knowledge on things if they never explicitly revealed their nationality. I don’t think anyone’s intentionally hiding it anyway, so what real use does a location marker have?
Meyerlemon
2mo ago
I’m not debating that. I agree with you. And I’m taking notes on those who think bombing Iran would make them surrender. I plan to have a good laugh rereading those comments if they don’t age well. I just disagree with equating Okinawa with the Japanese home islands. They’re far away, and Japanese see Ryukyu/Okinawa as colony at best during the early 20th century.
Meyerlemon
2mo ago
”Mainland” makes rather less of a difference when the entire nation consists of islands.
Okinawa is still ~400 miles away from the nearest Japanese home islands. And the early 20th century Japanese don’t exactly see Ryukyuan as their own people while someone from Nagasaki obviously is. Invading the home islands certainly is different from invading Okinawa.
Meyerlemon
2mo ago
Not seeing the utility in having just enough bureaucratic red tape to ensure swift and lethal force delivery while actually saving a few lives (Iranian lives, a people with an actual civilization, which should have some extra utility), and then lowkey saying “I voted for this” when tragedy strikes. That in my book is being unable to have a positive vision.
Meyerlemon
2mo ago
Have Americans lost the ability to envision a positive future for their own country? You lead the most powerful and one of the greatest nations ever to exist on this planet. You proudly proclaim your democratic traditions and the spirit of freedom - yet this? Reflexively choosing between the lesser of two evils, unable to craft a positive vision or imagine a way forward, opting to be maximally cynical and completely unconstructive. What the hell is wrong? Seriously what is wrong?
Meyerlemon
2mo ago
That is all fair. But what I’m saying here has nothing to do with technology or geography. I’m saying that the humility needed when talking about catastrophic events like this is seriously lacking.
I don’t want to indulge in speculating about whether the J36 would win a dogfight against the F35 or whatever. That’s not the point, and what basis do I (or anyone here except the VP who may or may not have lurked here) even have to trust judgments like that anyway? And that’s only a very small issue when what we’re talking about is ww3. I know the Chinese and the Americans are generally competent and that makes things even harder to predict than US decapitating leadership of random third world countries.
Someone below said that no one knowingly walks into a quagmire, and I think that captures my sentiment pretty well. I want the Chinese government to make sure we do everything we can to prevent catastrophe, then try its utmost to make peaceful reunification a reality, and have at a concept of a plan in place if shits really does happen, in that order.
Meyerlemon
2mo ago
The “Xi is surely finished - the CCP elites are rising against him” is such a tired genre after Bo Xilai is out. And the ability and will for the Chinese government to control information flow is much stronger now compared to then. Tell me what are the signs that he’s losing control?
I beg Americans to stop consuming YouTube or xitter slops on Chinese politics. The Chinese themselves don’t even understand Chinese politics enough to give you that level of insights. A couple of neurotic Chinese dissidents assuring that Xi is surely finished this time or English teacher in China/grifters posting the coming collapse of China ver#192 don’t know shit. Please ask your most trusted AI to summarize their previous findings and check their predictive power. That’ll save everyone’s time.
Meyerlemon
2mo ago
This isn't exactly an attractive outcome.
Better than “martyred” by tomahawks for sure. Or poisoned by plutonium.
What's the per capita rate of execution in China compared to America?
More. Irrelevant of course. Again wake me up when they start striking or assassinating DPP or NPP leaders. They’re right there across the narrow water.
Meyerlemon
2mo ago
That’s where Epoch Times and other Chinese expats take you. Some call themselves “bed listeners”, ie if you’re under someone’s bed to listen to the cracking sounds when they have sex. The point being that you can’t get information directly from the communist party, just like you can’t be a transparent voyeur, so you’d have to infer things from the way they arrange cups during politburo meetings, the orders they call out names in government papers etc. It’s a clever name and they do occasionally get things right, but the noise level is incredibly high.
Btw Americans should have realized a long time ago that x country diaspora don’t usually give you more insights than trusted American domain experts. Diasporoids like Pahlavis or Southern Vietnamese or Chinese dissidents are more neurotic than average and wanted to summon Roman Legions to do their biddings, and have incentives to distort reality to get what they want.
I want to remind people once again that neither your government nor mine is a single entity with coherent, unified beliefs. I do miss the era when Americans with a positive vision wanted to bring peace and prosperity everywhere, even if sometimes wrongheaded or naive. I think that’s noble and admirable, and I wish my government could be as outward-facing as yours to bring more positive vision to the world, and I thank Americans deeply for that vision. But the main driver behind those policies was that Americans benefited dramatically from "helping" Western Europe through the Marshall Plan, "helping" Japan rebuild with loans and subsidies, and "helping" China reform its command economy. It was a fair trade, and you agreed to the terms. You have bigger guns too and I’m not sure if those countries were able to resist.
Reneging 50 years later and saying "we’ve been fooled/ripped off!!!" - you’ve got yourselves to blame, sorry. How about you give back those benefits you reaped all those years too? Same with the NATO situation these days.
You most certainly did carpet bomb North Vietnam, if the term carpet bombing means anything. The Korean War too, I’m not counting them here because it’s a human tragedy caused by China, not because of the initial war, but you did carpet bomb them nonetheless. Not even going to provide source here because it’s easily google-able.
More options
Context Copy link