TiltingGambit
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User ID: 804
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
Okay I'm talking to myself here: no we are not even remotely close to anything even remotely like a fascist dictatorship. By almost every definition we are likely the farthest we have ever been from living in a fascist dictatorship.
It seems to be almost a Reddit left wing consensus that the year is 1933 and you should do whatever you would have done then if you consider yourself a good person. It's totally beyond me how this much panic has set in. I've never seen it in my whole life in any political domain.
So this means that deprogramming isn't so much a process of unwinding everything, it's just a matter of installing a new set of ideas. Deprogramming could happen in a few days, for some people it could probably happen in a single episode of John Oliver or Rachel Maddow.
The next election. That's all it's going to take. A liberal candidate will win and everybody will think they saved the world by showing up to vote (but won't ever think they were overreacting by calling the US a fascist state).
Dismantling the idea won't happen before the election, it can't happen before Trump is gone. Because Trump is literally Hitler, or at least trying to be. There can't be catharsis until he is gone and the threat is over. Don't let your guard down!
I'm just so dismayed at how the left is handling the current situation I just can't read anything online anymore. I actually logged back in here for the first time in years to get away from every subreddit I love becoming a home to normies wigging out. Even fucking movie review channels that have never said a political word in their lives had emergency panic threads stickied in their subreddits.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
“If you hold this position you’re an icky person”
I agree this is a bad rhetorical device but what's the best way to get around them just calling you ick and posting a screenshot of you on Twitter? I'm my experience engaging with it, they just call you cringe and recieve a trillion upvotes.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
"Just be normal" is possibly the worst objection to anything I could think of.
"I am the MOTHER in all contexts except for this particular one where the law requires me to declare I'm a father to act in the best interest of my child" is interesting, but a total nothing burger when you consider literally every other conceivable circumstance of a parent acting in the best interest of their child.
Gleefully posting laughing emojis on the twitter repost is fun and all, but i think the appropriate response to a handwave "lol stop being wierd and you won't have any problems, freak 😜" is "well that's just not how the world works."
Prioritizing your weird rules over normal rules means you are crazy and people should not want your kids as citizens.
Historically, the whole family is lucky to not be exiled.
Historically as in pre-enlightenment? We've spent a couple hundred years trying pretty hard to steer away from this type of ridiculousness for good reason.
Ideally I think space travel will continue to fly under the radar, and slowly get better and better.
I'm far from an expert but some of the brutally worthless projects undertaken by NASA (see Casey Handmer) seem to indicate this is the opposite of what's happening. Publicly funded projects are a complete win for the libertarian crowd with SpaceX (derided by everybody) the only player interested in making space work at all.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
They need the 'professional antifa black bloc veteran' to tell them what to do and how to do it and, most importantly, make sure they do turn up to do it.
I'm not sure we disagree on anything. I am saying that these methods are well understood in far-left protest-attendee circles. And trying to make flaky 20 year olds show up on time is a skill most Target managers have grappled with.
I'm just trying to balance out the WOs implication that this is America's Helmand province, or that insurgents might be arming themselves to the teeth, with an IED campaign just around the corner.
I am critical of these groups, believe me. They say they want peace, but they want war. They are incapable of having the kind of conversations that people on this forum consider critical for humanity. Every value is a disvalue, every truth, a lie. Every type of integrity a vilness of soul.
But at the end of the day they're strongest when taking over institutions, moving words around, and forcing compliance through abstract policy. I just don't see the American left as capable of what the WO is implying. These are small people.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
Because of what I said previously. Immigration hasn't been a major political issue compared to the UK or Germany. One Nation has received under 5% of votes for the last 20 years, despite us having twice the amount of immigrants as those countries.
Since covid there's been a general backlash from voters of both sides of the aisle re: cost of living and cost of housing. This has raised the question of immigration in spheres that aren't racial. E.g. a labor party (left wing) candidate saying they want to reduce immigration to decrease the demand for housing.
One Nation has obviously been around forever, but has always been unpopular. It's recent success (in polls, not in practice) is attributed to both cost of living and more recently, Bondi.
German anti immigration parties are getting 20%+ in the polls. UK voted for brexit at least partially, or wholly, as a response to immigration. Australia just doesn't have that movement.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
I do think security services should investigate though. If I was the FBI I'd create a task force that includes ex-Green Berets and CIA SAD 'color revolution specialists' and go digging if they haven't already. If its American citizens acting autonomously, then fine, but if there are foreign agitators then pull them out root and stem.
We did in Australia and as I said in another comment, it wasn't so much former Iraqi tortures or NKVD agents. Just 55 year old women and 60 year old men who had been living off their fruitstall money in the NSW hinterlands for 20 years and attending protests as their "job".
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
What do you mean, those are the shadowy influencers teaching this behavior!
Lol true. I thought the WO was implying that an e.g. foreign expert in insurgencies was teaching them. Not the 55 year old grievance collector in this case.
a) Normal people don't have time to do this shit for 20 years. They are almost certainly sponsored by someone top-down.
The two people who were the defacto leaders have been doing these kinds of protests for decades while living on basically environmentally neutral hippie compounds out in rural australia. They're not normal, they're not "sponsored', they just do this kind of bullshit because they really like to.
b) If they were ex-NKVD, how would you know?
We checked and you'd need to take my word.
These groups do think of themselves as insurgents against authorities. But I'm just saying the temperature of the message should be read a lot cooler than "and this is now Fallujah".
They're still comprised mostly of cringe, unemployed, lefties.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
Edit: "Your average person on the street doesn't know how to do this. There has to be a cadre teaching them."
Protestors in Australia have been organising into role-based teams for years. These guys, for example: https://disruptlandforces.org/our-commitment/
They had spotters, volunteers to be arrested, financing to get their legal fees paid for, organisers, logistics people who were caching immobile vehicles that were later used to block traffic, "legal observers", medics etc. They rented a nearby location to use as a base and store supplies like water, banners, paint, etc.
Their spotters were going around the facility working out if they could infiltrate it or cause mischief for the attendees. There are rumours they even paid for a stall inside under a false business name and were going to use their lanyards/business credentials to get in and set off fire alarms or flares etc.
So I disagree with the implication that you need shadowy influencers teaching this behaviour. You can have 15 lefties sitting around, playing "war" for a few weekends, who will work most of this out. The Disrupt Land Forces crew had "professional grievance collectors"/"Professional protestors" consulting with them and running training. These guys weren't exactly ex-NKVD assets or anything. Just people who had been going to protests for 20 years and had an idea of how to disrupt police operations for these events.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
To start, they could take some of the small Taiwan-controlled island like Kinmen which would be very easy.
Taking Kinmen and the coastal islands is generally described as the end of a feasible ground conflict. Feasible meaning, the commanders can say "We can do it" with a straight face. Even then, there's no guarantee they don't do a VDV style "what would the Americans do?" and fuck it up with sheer incompetence.
My impression is that they really don't want to be a part of the PRC, but they're also not a very militaristic country. They've got a lot of old people, and a lot of computer engineers, but not too many bloodthirsty military types. A few years of this might be enough to convince them to just give in, especially if they were promised special treatment.
Maybe, but the history of conscription means that you do have a core population that have trained to go to war, visualised what it would be like, and have been given the confidence that only military service can give re: doing your part. I don't think the ROC politicians would roll over without a legitimate blockade, or buildings being blown up.
The Taiwanese military is definitely a basket case, and they know it. So maybe they take the out before their kids all die in the mountains and rice paddies. I doubt it though.
It's not the 90s anymore when Taiwan was 100x richer than the mainland, the mainland economy is actually quite decent now and continuing to grow. So I suspect that this is just meaningless rhetoric, like how North Korea periodically threatens to destroy Seoul and Washington.
Couldn't agree more. I think the chances of an invasion are small. But when you get old men who read too many history books clamping down on political and military dissent... it does give you reason to question these things.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
Spurious claims of asylum are technically legal, but I'd group it into illegal for mental model purposes. Why?
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
But aren’t the perennial questions 1) whether the Taiwanese are willing to fight a prolonged war, given that they’re an advanced economy unlike the Ukrainians who arguably had little left to lose, and 2) the US’s (and to a lesser extent Japan’s) willingness to engage in an unlimited shooting war with China?
Yes. But I don't think Taiwan is low hanging fruit by itself anyway.
The state of their military reserves also seems less than ideal.
Yeah they're terrible. But it's easier to get conscripts to destroy bridges and sit in trenches than it is to conduct amphib ops, or manoeuvre their tanks through complex terrain. Like I said, PLAAF jets and bombers would be a major problem for Taiwanese ground forces, but PLA brigades still need to capture ground. And I'm just not sure they're up to it.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
As of yesterday it has, yes. Before 2020 it was between 1-5%. By 2022 it was 5%.
Bondi was definitely a driver of the latest spike, so the message should be to reduce illegal immigration and violence perpetrated by immigrants.
Stop the boats worked as a policy and increased overall satisfaction for most voters. Aggressively dealing with illegal immigrants does work.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
Yeah it's definitely worth breaking up the scenarios into e.g. most likely, most feasible, most acceptable, most dangerous, etc. An amphibious invasion is the most dangerous (most dangerous that is acceptable to the CCP at least) scenario, but far from the most likely.
I think a war on a 1-3 year time horizon favours the US. I think a war on a 5+ year time frame favours China. I don't think a toehold on Taiwan shifts things too much, I'm very much of the opinion that an occupation of Taipei is the only physical occupation that achieves a defacto peace with Taiwan. But a blockade is much more complex and it's much much harder to determine what would happen there.
Mild tangent...
I'm pretty confident Chinese naval skill and technology remains super overmatched by US and Western navies. Putting hulls in the water is really cool but it means that you're naturally promoting officers who face less of a bottleneck than those before them. We don't know, but the PLAN could be scrounging officers into command positions that would, if the navy wasn't expanding so rapidly, be middle of the ladder candidates.
The PLAN carrier fleet is a good example. A US admiral generally needs to start his career flying planes off the deck of a carrier. From there he commands a squadron, becomes an EX of a carrier, then a CO of a ship, and a carrier after that. He'll be promoted into a flag position, maybe as a director or deputy for a shore based position where he rounds off his military understanding. He gets a couple more commands, of a carrier strike group or something, then gets the US 7th Fleet.
This guy knows what it is to take off from the carrier, has trained a squadron himself, commanded ships, departments and has competed every step of the way to take command of the fleet. A Chinese admiral today has never flown a plane off a deck of a carrier, will be asking his guys to do things he couldn't do himself, doesn't understand the impact of the conditions, etc etc. Their carriers are only just coming into service, which means there has been no incremental improvements of technology with lessons learned from previous deployments or mid-life upgrades. We know the Chinese aviation arm isn't as good as the US Navy's, because their sortie rate is not that good. It is getting better with practice, but it'll take a full generation to peak.
The Chinese have a lot of advantages re: manufacturing but a lot of limitations re: institutional military knowledge. The Chinese have at least air parity with the Taiwanese coalition across the SCS, maybe air superiority if their fighters perform as promised (definitely not a given). But I'm pretty sure they hemorrhage materiel rapidly when they start coming up against Western/coalition soldiers, sailors and airmen.
My totally unjustified, out of pocket assessment, is that I think counting VLS cells or ship hulls is something that's going to be looked back on like we look back on all of Sadam's tanks. Yes, it's not a fair comparison as Chinese ships are actually modern. But I think commentators greatly underappreciate the likelihood that the Chinese military isn't actually the professionalised force it claims to be. I think it could rapidly devolve into a Russian-style calamity, where US ships are picking off Chinese ships at will, and this terrifying armada is actually constricted to a coast guard type role after they lose 50 frigates in a week.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
Zhang allegedly believed that this was functionally impossible, and that the only way to even appear to comply with the political directive would be through a lot of boondoggles and diversion of effort away from other, more fundamental aspects of military training and readiness.
This is the closest subject that the Motte will ever get to my wheelhouse. Pre-Ukraine I did a major workup on this question about Taiwan vs China. There's a lot to it, but ultimately the only thing that prevents the underprepared and inadequate Taiwanese military from being crushed in three days is the underprepared and inadequate Chinese military that has been tasked to do it.
You just never get the scale of the problem until you compare the resources China has to commit to the invasion against the Taiwanese ground forces.
You have China's eastern theatre command which has three group armies (corps sized). The 72nd and 73rd group army have four amphibious combined arms brigades between them. The 71st is the heavy group army clearly designed for breakout operations once a beachhead has been established.
The Southern Theatre Command is postured to cover the Eastern Theatre Command's flank, and probably deal with the SCS and defeat incoming American marines. They have two amphib brigades.
At any one time, due to training schedules and the integration of recruits/conscripts, one third to two thirds of any amphibious brigade will not be qualified for amphibious operations. The PLAAN marines are in an even more dire situation. Like US counterparts, they don't get the good gear and are expected to make do with what they have: rifles and a fighting spirit (these units are rightly rated as far below the quality of US Marines).
If you want a reference class, Stormin' Norman in the first gulf war had 8 full western divisions of armoured, mechanised and airborne infantry attacking across terrain that is unambiguously perfect for mechanised warfare. That's something like 25 brigades worth of troops. 2003 Iraq had 5 divisions and aboit 15 brigades.
So China wants four amphibious brigades to secure the most hotly contested amphibious landing zone on the planet. Then break out with extremely heavy armoured brigades that will be contesting a hyper compressed battlefield which is limited in the east by unpassable mountains and the west by the ocean. And there are only two possible landing zones, which leaves zero room for Normandy-Calais style mind games.
Post-Ukraine we can establish two things for sure. The battlefield will be completely transparent to both sides. There won't be information asymmetry. Everybody will know where everybody else's tanks and trucks are.
Secondly, poorly trained troops and conscripts are not capable of exploiting their armoured advantages in this environment.
China makes great tanks and armoured vehciles. But they still mostly rely on passive defensive technology: front end armour. These tanks are going to be expensive targets for Taiwanese conscripts sitting off the side of the road, just like Russia's have been.
I'm pretty confident Chinese generals could say "we will wipe Taiwan's memory off the face of the earth". But to ask them to complete the most complex military manoeuvre possible, while staffing their units with inexperienced, poorly trained recruits, and not having enough of them is asking the impossible.
Chinese defeat on the beach, or on the breakout, or in the city streets looks like the most likely outcome. I'm positive at least that the operation would be a total disaster even if some massive aerial campaign clinches a victory. A million Taiwanese conscripts are a planning problem that Chinese generals aren't going to be able to deal with easily.
If Xi is firing people until he gets the answer he wants he's in for a big situation in the war room come D Day. And these structural issues aren't going to be overcome by swapping chairs.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
It shifts it up, for sure, but like 5% to 7.5% or something. Not insignificant at all, but not like 20% is what I meant.
There's a lot of institutional pressure to not invade Taiwan in China.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
The extension would be: if nuclear secrets were really being passed to the US, would the CCP want to embarrass themselves by admitting it domestically?
My reaction was "who knows what's really going on there." Followed by "I suppose they just want an excuse to drop him out of a helicopter."
Western media releases are often panicked, middle of the night, written from the back of a car on a phone type jobs to get ahead of the Washington Post expose release at 5.30am. CCP ones are usually much more deliberate, attempting to portray the situation as they want it to appear. Chinese media does question weird disappearances, but there's a lot more top down control over narrative and publishing timeframes.
If a new boyfriend coyly admits that he likes a particular kind of porn ("big tits, MILFs") in response to your playful question on the third date, you should probably assume this is like 25-50% of the kinkiness he really goes for (anal, gangbangs).
"He released nuclear secrets" does sound better than "he's been on the CIA payroll for 15 years" for example.
Zhang Youxia was in custody for three months. Initially the CCP pushed that this was about corruption, bribes, and forming political cliques. The nuclear secrets thing came out later. Maybe this is to absolve Xi from the very real criticism of unfairly cleaning house/purging. It's hard to argue with a dismissal if a guy is giving nuclear secrets away and can be portrayed as an unfortunate necessity amid a national betrayal. Liu Zhenli was chief of staff of the CMC and removed at the same time though, and as far as I can see they haven't claimed he's a CIA source.
The CMC has been cut down from 7 to 2 members, and I just can't be sure what's going on. Like @stuckinthebathroom says, the sole survivor is a political appointee, Zhang Shengmin. And he's new to the job, only 12 months in or so. His background seems to be hunting down corrupt officers... or giving Xi the pretence to remove political/military rivals?
The main takeaway is that Xi is definitely personally in control of more of the party and military than ever before. I doubt this shifts the Taiwan needle to dangerous new levels, but it does seem like Xi is getting older and instead of doing succession planning he could be doing legacy planning (the Putin special?)
Dunno. I'm just hoping more of these chinese missiles are filled with water instead of fuel than we know about.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
I'm not sure this is true at all, but why would it be scary if it were?
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
Yeah man I'm fine with a Kiwi coming over to Australia to install my HVAC, but that's just me.
Aren't whites going to be a minority in the states in like 20 years? How's that gel with the above comment?
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
No most of our immigrants are british and kiwis over that time. In recent years, e.g. since 2019, india/china immigration has increased. But importantly these aren't illegals which is what the whole discourse.
Most foreign born australians are:
British, Kiwi, Chinese, Indian, Filipino.
it’s just not a political issue because… Australians don’t have the self-preservation instincts that Americans do?
My point was that it's not political and you can have both high immigration and high satisfaction with it. Re: infrastructure, no this isn't collapsing. Re: housing, yes but this seems to be a problem across the board with all alglosphere countries, including ones with half as much immigration as Australia.
In 2025 we had about 75,000 immigrants from the UK and NZ, and about 75,000 immigrants from India for context. Most of the chinese immigrants are on e.g. student visas or temporary visas, compared to most e.g. brits who move here permanently. So the self preservation thing here might be overstated.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
I think I'd say that even if media comes second, it's a major force multiplier. You can have 500 guys in a city who all really want to fight ICE. But the NYT seal of approval turns that 500 into 50,000. Legacy media retains the prestige to set the ethical tone of these kinds of things, despite having fuck all readers. And their power to endorse or condemn movements is what matters to a lot of these protest groups. Most of protesting is signaling, and purely signaling. You need to be confident you're on the right side, and you need a third party you trust to make that clear. Prestigious media organisations can still act as those arbitrators.
The broader media campaign in this context is itself a product of structural insurgent groups. Even if the nature of the media insurgent groups is different from the whistle-blowing groups, that itself is consistent with the nature of those GWOT networks-of-networks.
Yes I agree. Which is why I'm saying the number one problem these types of anti-insurgency campaign need to deal with is that media campaign. You can tell everybody ISIS is evil because they are, and they relish in that. Working out how to do that with "save the whales" guys, who project via media that they're just trying to stop a hispanic mother of 5 from being deported is a very hard problem.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
I started my career in Afghanistan. I don't have anything interesting to say except that the problem in both cases was the media. There was never a genuine kinetic threat that would cause the Coalition to fail. The coalition was winning by denying the Taliban access to wealthy cities. There was no reason the deployment couldn't have become a low intensity denial of movement operation around key population hubs indefinitely. But the media called it the forever war and assumed it had to end one day (plenty of occupations don't, actually, end).
If you're interested in reducing risk of civil war you need to deal with the media. If you can't deal with the media you can't reduce risk. How you deal with it is a whole other problem. But I'm of the opinion every single military/government operation needs an extremely robust media strategy, treated like a win condition. Because we keep losing winning wars due to hostile media reporting.
The surge worked in Iraq. We were preventing Afghan women from entering a lifetime of servitude in Afghanistan. And ICE is enforcing a federal (but unpopular) law. And all three of these have been defeated by the media.
Governments need to realise that without media support these operations will fail.
The WO who posted that tweet is a shooter. He wants to go shoot high value targets (figuratively I hope) in the anti-ICE protests. He needs to recognise that this isn't the path to victory. The structural insurgent groups he believes are forming are a problem. But they're a second order effect of the broader media campaign that is rallying these groups under a banner. Just like ISIS, young people are vulnerable to these types of calls to arms.
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
I suggested that employers are required to check working rights a few threads ago. It's what Australia does. Australia has approx double the "born overseas" population of Germany, the UK or the US. But we also have pretty unforgiving policy towards illegal immigration or even asylum-seekers (until proven that they are somewhat legit). Overall, I really believe these two policies (ruthlessly preventing illegal immigrants entereing + making sure everybody one meets in polite company has had an accountant or government bureaucrat check their papers) are why immigration is mostly a non issue in Australia.
Aside from this costing businesses more in wages, nobody really had an objection.
going after the employers is the best and only reasonable way to do anything about illegal immigration
As above, when implemented properly I think you need both. Australia sends asylum seekers to off shore detention facilities and don't let them set a foot on the mainland until they have been verified (this has been moderated a bit: we have onshore detention for low risk persons, e.g mums with 2 kids who aren't going to disappear the day after the hand cuffs come off).
But I do think this is a really good policy. It means that:
- the individuals themselves have to keep their documentation up to date, or they stop getting paid. Out of date paperwork seems to be one of the major problems in the US right now.
- the individuals have less incentive to immigrate unless they personally know who/how to find who will pay them under the table
- there is a distribution of responsibility for ensuring people in country are supposed to work there. The government is doing it's checks, but Thompson from HR is also tracking Visas in a spread sheet.
- politically viable: you are promoting jobs for americans.
So what's your objection?
TiltingGambit
1mo ago
Nah man. I think you're just used to it.
Being abnormal does not equate to "acting on any whim". And being abnormal is definitely not a clear cut negative for society. What is it, like 75% of silicon valley unicorn founders are autistic? People with a propensity to not conform, socially or otherwise, seem to be disproportionately progressing society right now.
The law does, generally, accept people who are not optimal parents as the parents of their own children. And in this case, where these two people are undoubtedly the parents of this child, it should definitely accept it also.
Are you arguing that the Irish government should not accept that the actual, biological parent, is a parent, in this case?
An argument that basically goes "Trans people are weird, they should choose not to be, in an ideal world we would exile them or kill them, because I've had enough of losing these arguments" is just not working for me. Maybe you have all this background info that, if included, forms this into some rationale that I could follow. But as presented, this is the same level of "boo outgroup" ranting that the Reddit lefties are doing about everybody who voted for Trump. We can all just pick the political opponents we don't like, call them freaks and wish death on them because we're tired of each other.
I just come from a position where I think that type of rhetoric makes the world a worse place. I think it's a dogshit take, not because I am actually pro trans or anything. I'm pretty moderately to aggressively against the movement. But if you have some total insensitivity towards the specific issues in question, and can't differentiate from a bad expectation and a reasonable expectation (you seem to explicitly state you don't care what the issue is) you're definitely in a position to make the world worse. Which is what you're doing.
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