magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds.
To move away from drunk hookups into committed relationships, there is this kind of issue where libidos don't always match and as such some accommodation must be reached where either:
- The low-libido partner (usually but not always the woman) agrees to have sex more in exchange for some consideration,
- The high-libido partner (usually but not always the man) agrees to have sex less in exchange for some consideration, or
- Both agree on some middle ground.
One issue I've seen with a decent amount of feminist thought (including, to some extent, the article under discussion) is that it declares agreement #2 exploitative and defends women's right to outright renege on agreements #1 and #3 without consequence (as consequences are a form of coercion). That doesn't leave any zone of possible agreement.
I'm not saying it's alright to ignore a "no", but... there are circumstances where "no" is an arsehole move.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
I would just like to note for the record here that in Australia, it's unconstitutional for dual-citizens to serve in Federal Parliament (there's a minor exception in case of people who've attempted to formally renounce their foreign citizenship and failed; some countries don't allow renunciation of citizenship).
magic9mushroom
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2yr ago
· Edited 2yr ago
There is the slight possibility of an extremely-smart neo-Nazi who wrote (on his own or with DAN) a death threat that deliberately looks faked - a death threat that looks fake would be ideal insofar as the target would be scared (knowing she didn't write it herself) but she'd be in danger of getting accused of fakery if she published it. (That said, if you're smart enough to do that, you might be smart enough to just straight-up kill her and get away with it instead of beating around the bush.)
There is also the possibility, as Amadan has noted, of somebody not National Action but also not Shola sending this - perhaps as a false-flag by Antifa or similar groups, who would plausibly use some of the vocabulary of the letter. In this case it is "fake" in the sense of National Action not planning to kill her, but "real" in the sense of "yeah, she is somewhat honestly scared".
But yeah, probably not sent by white nationalists and Occam's Razor points to her making it up. And if it's actually true that she's gone to Twitter but not to the police, that's evidence of specifically her faking it since going to the police would still make sense in both the more complicated scenarios.
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
· Edited 8mo ago
It fully corrupts the parent/child relationship; every member of our society learns when they grow up that their mother once had the fully legitimized option to have them slaughtered, and depending on her social environment and character she may well have seriously considered it. It's a horror lurking in our collective unconscious which we willfully repress, in much the same way that we repress our own mortality by avoiding the thought of hospitals and old folks' homes, keeping them sterile, out of the way, antimemetic.
I'm not actually against abortion, but I have to say you're not wrong about this. I do remember being a kid (7-10 age range IIRC) and telling Mum "thanks for not aborting me", and her not being super-reassuring about it (I don't think she seriously considered it, but I'm damned sure that during my adolescence she often wished she had). It's a bit creepy.
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
· Edited 8mo ago
The literal Fair Game notice was/is a Scientology term; L. Ron Hubbard would declare someone "fair game", and this meant "use any and all means to ruin this person" (frivolous lawsuits, slander, illegal spying and leaking to tabloids, framing for crimes...).
There seems to be something akin to a Fair Game notice (though presumably not with that exact name) in place against Elon Musk following his purchase of Twitter (and gutting of its censorship bureau); loads of different federal agencies have done things to screw over unrelated Musk businesses (the one I recall off the top of my head is the FCC retracting the rural-Internet grant to Starlink, on the basis that it hadn't met the target yet, despite the target not being due for another couple of years; there's a dissent from that order which lists a bunch of others, though I don't know all the details, as well as noting that Biden was fairly open about this). My understanding is that this is half of the reason Musk's star has been waning recently (the other half being that Twitter isn't his sort of business and it's distracting him).
As noted, due to Twitter being among other things a news service, this is in direct opposition to freedom of the press (as well as impartial justice). You can plausibly argue that this is significantly worse than Watergate due to the sheer scale of the corrupt operation (the Sedition Act was still worse, but that was 225 years ago). But, uh, this seems to have not been a huge scandal, which has disturbing implications about the USA.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
Might as well be proactive regarding the "misinformation" issue. Using the top result on Google (the people on the news tonight IIRC didn't specify what they objected to, with one exception that I'll come back to) and the official No case mailed to every Australian at government expense (along with a Yes case of equal length).
1 - "Australians will lose ownership of homes Variations of this claim include: Australians will be forced to pay reparations or the voice will increase taxes (ie, the voice will cost you money)"
Certainly, the idea that the referendum would directly imply reparations, that's false. The more measured case (and this one definitely is in the official No campaign) is that a Yes result would have a) built a Pro-Aboriginal consensus, which might make people more friendly to reparations, b) directly provided some level of soft influence to Aboriginals - that's the whole point, giving them an advisory body - which they might then use to advocate for reparations. I shy away from using this as motive to vote - feels a bit Machiavellian - but it seems plausible enough to me in terms of the facts (on both counts) and the Uluru Statement which inspired the voice does call for a "treaty" of some sort.
As for the latter part, certainly "voting for the Voice will directly raise taxes" is clear misinformation. The official No case merely said the Voice "will be costly" and said we don't know how much funding would be allocated to the Voice. It's not misinformation to say that government bodies cost money - that's extremely, obviously true - and "we don't know how much funding would be allocated" is also true.
2 - "The voice is legally risky Variations of this include claims that the voice is a third chamber of parliament, will dictate laws to the government, or will destabilise democracy"
Basically, the question here is "would the Voice have the power to block legislation". The No claim is that because the proposed change to the Constitution gives the Parliament the power to decide what powers the Voice has, Parliament might give the Voice the power to block Aboriginal-related legislation. The claim of misinformation is that this wouldn't or couldn't happen. To refute that claim, I cite the very article claiming it's misinformation:
Constitutional law experts are largely in agreement that there is nothing in the voice’s addition to the constitution which would lead to legal risk.
"Largely". That is, there are some that disagree (and indeed the official No case quotes a former High Court judge). So on the "could" question, there is some chance that trying it might work.
I ran the numbers, and was quite confident that the Parliament would not in fact do this; even if they tried, it would almost certainly fail to pass the Senate. But "the chance of X is very low" doesn't make "X could happen" misinformation; small probabilities of harm can be relevant to a vote if the harm is large enough. So on this one, I'll go to the wall on "plausible if unlikely; not misinformation".
3 - "The voice will divide the nation"
This is the one which was explicitly mentioned on the ABC coverage I saw. Not by an interviewee - one of the ABC journalists was interviewing the head of the No campaign, said this "wasn't factual" and asked him whether he regretted lying.
I don't understand the claims that this is misinformation. The claims that it's false (including the journalist, although not the article I'm beating up on) mostly just say "the Australian Constitution already gives the power to make laws for a specific race". The Constitution definitely does do that (it's extremely rarely used), but I'm not seeing why that makes "a specific body created to advocate for one racial grouping is dividing people into buckets by race" false.
The article I'm beating up on said that there are lobby groups already. Yes, there are, but not Constitutionally-recognised ones representing specific races. Again, not seeing the relevance.
My verdict: this is entirely true, the claims of misinformation border on misinformation themselves, I'll go to the wall on that.
4 - "The voice will force treaties"
See above under #1. The official No case said that this might lead to "Treaty" via people listening to the Voice and/or activists being emboldened, not that the Voice would directly force it. So the strawman/weak-man they're attacking would be misinformation, but the official case's point on this is quite plausible.
The article gets classy and says "There is no evidence for either, as the federal government has not indicated it will be engaging in those processes no matter what the outcome of the vote is." - do I really need to lay into this?
5 - "There are no details Variations of this claim include: you don’t know what you’re voting for and the voice is a Trojan horse for ‘secret agendas’"
I'm just going to quote the words in the article immediately following this:
There is plenty of detail. None of it is set in stone, because that is the parliament’s job, but we have an in-principle guide of what the voice under this government (because legislation can always be changed) would look like.
Exactly. We didn't know what we were voting for, because they had the legal option to change their minds afterward. Unlikely, perhaps, but not impossible.
Verdict: Largely accurate, not misinformation, I'll go to the wall on that.
6 - "The voice will allow the UN to take over Australia"
This is complete misinformation, no objections. (As you might expect, this one did not appear in any form in the official "no" case; this is just crazies.)
7 - "The Australian Electoral Commission will tamper with your votes"
Misinformation in the most blatant form that they're quoting, no objections. The AEC is highly trustworthy.
However, attention was drawn to the fact that ticks are counted as Yes and crosses are counted as invalid (not No). This is a known fact, the AEC went to court defending it against the alt-right UAP and won. This isn't tampering per se, the AEC told people to write Yes or No rather than to use a tick or cross, and it's not new for this referendum, but objecting to this policy isn't "false", it's an Ought statement saying that the speaker would prefer a different policy. On that one I'd say "not misinformation"; no Ought statement can be misinformation and the AEC 100% did the thing being objected to.
Note also on this one that the Yes campaign chose a colour representing itself that is identical to the AEC's official colour. They got in a little bit of trouble over this, although not a lot. So there were some things in AEC purple that were not impartial - they were Yes campaign material - although that's the Yes campaign being scummy and not the AEC.
Overall, I think it's fair to say that the No campaign's "misinformation" largely wasn't any such thing*, although as I noted there were crazies who said false things.
*There's one thing in the official No case that I think borders on misinformation. That's when they said "there is no comparable constitutional body like this anywhere in the world". Out of context I think that's false, although it's in the middle of an argument that there would be legal questions raised and in that sense it's justifiable because while similar bodies exist, it's not a 1:1 clone of them. Definite side-eye on that one, even if it makes a bit more sense in context.
magic9mushroom
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2yr ago
Footnote to post here https://www.themotte.org/post/53/the-motte-and-the-future/5620?context=8#context
I believe that "the progressive actors are acting with the earnestly held belief that they are making the world a better place" is more true than false, but because of a couple of edge cases I prefer the weaker "the core SJ movement >99.9% believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil". This felt off-topic there and is long-ish (it could be shortened, but only by abandoning my motte) so I'm putting it here.
Edge case 1: There exists a minority of SJers who like dunking on people enough and believe conservatives are evil enough that they will adopt a hostile approach to conservatives even when this is net-negative for the SJ movement. This is separate from SJers who honestly believe that being hostile and censorious is the most effective way to advance the movement's goals; those people (a majority of SJers TTBOMK) do believe they are making the world a better place. Obviously, this is not especially unique to SJ (any moralistic ideology will attract these sorts) and this definitely is a relatively-small minority, but I'm a pedant.
[Citation: I have a tab open of a forum discussion in which I told someone that a non-hostile approach would be better at converting people and he replied "Yeah, but on the other hand, fuck 'em". He honestly believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil, but he is acting in a way that he admits is suboptimal for making a better world due to spite.]
Edge case 2: There are non-SJers who say or do SJ things because they are incentivised to do so in some way by SJers. These people by definition do not believe that saying/doing SJ things makes the world a better place, or that SJ is good and conservatives are evil, but they are not core members of SJ. Again, not unique to SJ (this is almost definitionally true of any powerful paradigm) but I'm a pedant.
[Citation: I turned down being a dorm RA at my university (a paid role insofar as RAs are not charged rent, and a role I was already somewhat fulfilling unpaid because our dorm had no RA) because I would have been required to recite SJ ideology to my dorm. I can imagine that another non-SJer less committed to honesty than I might have taken the job.]
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
But I would like to add that, in my opinion, we are seeing a shift of moral mainstream and normie society going from following the Authority/Sanctity/Loyalty to the Care/Fairness framework.
I don't think that's true at all. Haidt's research is outdated. SJ, the successor ideology, is not really a three-foundation morality. It's what happens when a conservative-by-temperament with six foundations is raised in 90s liberalism (which was a three-foundation morality), sees it as the "standard", and attempts to "conserve" it. It has Authority (trust ScienceTM) and Sanctity (hate-speech-as-blasphemy); I'm not 100% sure about Loyalty since SJ is hostile enough to its "normal" foes that it's hard to spot any additional hostility for traitors, but callouts are to some degree an anti-traitor mechanism.
What you're seeing is a paradigm shift in "what is conserved", and while it's taken a long time to fruit this tree was planted in the 1960s. I don't think that it's new in history; the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire is an obvious example. It definitely is very hard to reverse at this stage absent some sort of large shock* because the next generation's temperamental-conservatives are now your enemies - they're trying to conserve the new ideology. Without such a shock, your best bet is to try to nucleate a new counterculture based on some of the old principles but with the vibrant and consistent ideology needed to attract the next generation's temperamental-rebels (which is the alt-right in a nutshell), but even then it won't be the same and could be terrible in its own way (to take the low-hanging fruit, Nazi Germany was not the Kaiserreich, and even if it had counterfactually lasted long enough to stabilise, it would still not quite have been).
*The most plausible shock I can imagine is if the most-affected areas - i.e. the cities - are literally and specifically depopulated for some reason, be that nuclear war, a plague, civil war causing food disruption, or economic collapse again causing food disruption. There may be other possibilities I do not see.
NB: This post discusses what Is and Will be, not what Ought be. That which works is not necessarily good.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
TBF Scott's "pseudonym" was originally only intended to block prospective bosses from finding his blog on cursory name search; it wasn't really intended to protect against cancellation. It achieved what it was supposed to i.e. getting him hired.
Also, a decent chunk of these people were literal teenagers at the time that they made those mistakes, and this is hardly limited to Rats.
magic9mushroom
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2yr ago
· Edited 2yr ago
First time I've seen the term, so don't give this too much credence, but when I see it I think "someone who wants to try fascism again but doesn't think Hitler was a good prototype".
Like, let's be clear here, by the standards of fascism Hitler was a total failure. The central dogma of fascism is to prioritise the goals of the society and, yes, the race over those of the individual, in order to succeed and compete as a group - and you win if your group is the one left around to write history books. Obviously, Hitler's actions did not benefit Germany, Germans or German culture in any enduring fashion; WWII and its aftermath saw a shocking number of Germans killed, dispossessed or re-educated into Polish or Russian culture, and saw Germany semi-permanently dethroned from great-power status and lose a lot of territory. Hitler didn't intend that, of course, but the whole point of fascism is that it doesn't care about what you intended - it's social-Darwinist and only cares if you won.
Fascism can never truly be nice, but the ideology's not totally meritless even from a "societal virtues" point of view; we yearn for a purpose beyond ourselves, we yearn for a community that cares for us as kin and is free of exploiters, and we certainly yearn for the power to overcome foreign threats to our way of life and culture. I'm not a big fan of the sacrifices fascism makes on those altars (and it has to make a lot of them), but I will grudgingly grant that you can be a Literal (Post-)Fascist without wanting to be Literally Hitler (postwar Japan is perhaps the most positive long-term case of a near-fascist society; there are a few other examples in East and South-East Asia - though I'd exclude the PRC as being too close to Literally Hitler - and 50s America also had significant fascist attributes in a somewhat-positive fashion).
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
Would you mind giving me confidence levels on your predictions of:
- Trump won't be declared the winner;
- If Trump is declared the winner, he'll not take office;
- If Harris takes office, Elon Musk will be arrested in the next year?
magic9mushroom
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11mo ago
- I can't remember which centre-left memelord said "Who was President in summer 2020 is a key election issue." but the point isn't that people have forgotten who was President, it's that Trump has successfully convinced people that he wasn't making the decisions and the Deep State is to blame for the screw-up.
Wasn't it proven that the vaccine was intentionally delayed to come out after the election in order to spike Trump's chances? Like, Zvi mentioned this, and if anything he's got TDS; he's no Trump shill.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Buying the grease through an exchange program just seems way too expensive. Having the grease is pretty important though. They should probably just pay some popular youtubers or ticktockers to do lifestyle viewpoint videos on rural/urban people. Idk, I'm not smart enough to figure out an alternative.
Sometimes there isn't a cheap substitute. And, well, I sure think this is a better value-add than the various ideological projects already in schools (it's not negative, for one thing), and in the limit it costs less than a civil war would, so "expensive" is relative.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
I think jeroboam's claim is that high-profile cases of leftists being jailed for hate speech would cause SJers to realise what a bad idea the laws are and undo them - the lesson of "I never thought the leopards would eat MY face".
I think that this claim is false because my read is that most SJers would react not with "oh shit this sucks, guess this gun's a bit dangerous to have available" but with "how dare they defile our gun and use it on us, we must destroy them so utterly that they can never use it again"*. But still, it seems to be coming from an assumption of Free Speech Good.
*To ironman this argument: a lot of the more-wingnut SJers believe that they have already essentially bet their lives on winning the culture war; that failure already means they literally get executed. This means that there is actual zero capability to deter them from escalation; if they win, then you can't punish them, and if they lose, (they think) they'll be killed either way, so the only thing that matters is P(win). And to be fair to them, in the main situation where I see them losing (voter base existence failure due to nuclear war) I would fully expect my prime political activity to be yelling "please no White Terror" for the next few years. But that's something of a special case due to the suddenness and the lopsidedness of power in the aftermath.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
The way Australia rules this is that if you've made a good-faith attempt to renounce foreign citizenship then you count as being only an Australian as far as Australia's concerned (and thus can be elected to Parliament). There are, after all, some countries that do not allow renunciation at all.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
I don't know why the Biden administration is being so cautious.
One that you missed: the Far East. Post-Hong-Kong, there is ~0% support for unification in Taiwan, so Beijing wants to invade; the only thing that might possibly deter this is the USA, and that's a full-time job that doesn't leave room for side gigs. If the million-man-swim does happen, the USA faces two incredibly-terrible choices - either it can break its word and throw Taipei to the panda, with a resulting enormous blow to the Western alliance system, or it can fight a Third World War with the likely result of "Pyrrhic victory, millions of Americans dead".
My gut says this last, best hope for peace will probably fail anyway, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not worth trying, and it certainly doesn't mean that people won't try it.
magic9mushroom
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4mo ago
But within reason, I generally lean on the side of privileging the freedom of the (public) artist, regardless of the aesthetic preferences of the public who will be exposed to their work. If it's that important to you, then you should consider becoming an artist too. And if it's not sufficiently important to you, then you are at the mercy of the people to whom it was sufficiently important.
I'm not sure that this is coherent. If the artist has the freedom to put a sculpture of a gory corpse outside my house against my will, because that fits his conception of beauty, then do I not have the freedom to melt down his sculpture with a blowtorch against his will, because that fits my conception of beauty? Am I not also an artist, for making the world around me more beautiful as I see it?
You might say "well, he got approval from the government and you didn't", but since we're presupposing that the public agrees with me, and since this is presumably a democratic government that is supposed to follow the public will, for the government to give him and not me approval is an obvious bug, not intended behaviour.
magic9mushroom
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4mo ago
There are several interlocking factors that make any September 11 lookalike impossible, at least in a way that TSA checks can help to prevent.
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Passenger agency. September 11 got 3/4 successes because every previous plane hijack had been to hold the passengers hostage, not to use the plane as a battering ram. This meant that in 3/4 cases the passengers didn't zerg-rush the terrorists. That's over now. Flight 93 will happen every single time. Indeed, this response is so ingrained that it goes off accidentally some amount of the time when somebody is misidentified as being a terrorist.
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Plain-clothes police on board planes. Usually these guys mostly wind up having to prevent a would-be terrorist from being lynched, due to #1, but they do provide an added layer of protection.
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Cockpit security doors. These do trade off "passenger is a terrorist" against "pilot is himself a terrorist", but "pilot is a terrorist" is specifically something that can't be stopped by the TSA checks; he doesn't need any unauthorised items to fly a plane into a building. This is basically a matter for background checks on pilots, and TTBOMK they do a decent job at weeding out terrorists (though a worse job at weeding out random suicides).
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
The Chinese don’t desire control of the world. They never have, it’s not in their genes.
You know that for like two millennia China had a policy of "no equals, only tributaries and rebels", right? That's a large part of why the Opium Wars happened; Qing China insisted that it wouldn't treat the Western powers as sovereign nations - there were to be no negotiations, only tribute, acknowledging the Emperor as their feudal overlord, and begging him for magnanimity - and while the Dutch played along with the farce, the Empire on which the Sun Never Sets said "fuck that" and kicked over the anthill.
And the core tenet of the CPC's legitimacy is that that pratfall was a terrible injustice and that it will bring China back to the glory that preceded it.
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
The PRC wants the South China Sea, Taiwan, Senkaku, Ryukyu (they've openly put out feelers, even if they haven't officially demanded it yet), and a few territories along the Indian border, plus maybe Korea, plus some degree of control over the policy of ~everywhere (see e.g. the Fourteen Demands).
Japan and South Korea will nuclearise if Taiwan falls unfought. Pure if-then. In a world where the USA is not willing to defend East Asia and the PLAN has Pacific Ocean access unobstructed by the First Island Chain, Beijing would otherwise be able to dictate terms to them due to the threat of blockade (neither country is remotely close to food security).
Unless we feel like performing the kowtow, we're probably going to have to fight the PRC, and if so we should fight it while our allies are all intact and the geography works against it.
magic9mushroom
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9mo ago
· Edited 9mo ago
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I notice that 100% of what you've said both in your blurb here and in your blurb on YouTube avoids the appearance of partisanship, but the actual video is very clearly intended to get people to vote for Harris. This is disingenuous.
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You have zero mention of the issue that, hey, this situation sucks and that preferential voting would help avoid these kinds of dilemmas.
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You paper over the issue that while politicians do often keep their promises, a lot of things simply aren't on the ballot. You don't even acknowledge the possibility that for some people, not voting for either major party is in fact the correct choice because there's no difference on the relevant issues. (To give an example, I tried to single-issue vote on civil defence last election year here in Australia, but I couldn't, because all parties' civil defence policies were the empty string; I eventually gave up on that and voted on other, less-important issues, but like 80% of what I wanted simply wasn't available to vote for.)
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Your description of the case for not voting for the lesser evil as an excuse for "it feels bad" is to a fair extent a strawman (also your naïve first-order consequentialist point is greatly exploitable), and reeks of using Dark Arts to shame people into doing what you want i.e. voting for Harris.
Overall, this is get-out-the-vote propaganda masquerading as a fair look at the options, I'm disgusted, and my opinion of you is drastically lowered. This is the case even though I would mildly prefer that Harris won.
magic9mushroom
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11mo ago
No, we get that by rewarding incompetence (there's that sign tap again...). We don't need to overcorrect to fix that, we just need to actually punish those people instead of promoting them or whatever.
@RandomRanger's point is that if you are rewarded for recklessness (or punished for prudence) a lot of the time and only punished for recklessness when something goes wrong, the punishment when something goes wrong needs to be large to outweigh the benefit and thus provide a net disincentive.
This isn't critical infrastructure, come on. It's freaking antivirus. It's not the only one, nor is it ubiquitous. It's just another software product.
I hear that it's basically required in a bunch of fields for regulatory compliance purposes; is that not so? Also, uh, I can't get any hard numbers but I'm guessing a bunch of people died due to hospitals getting hit. When you're playing the government-contracts game, there are responsibilities attached to that.
I'm willing to bet you that the technical people did want to test updates. Maybe their direct managers did too, although that I'm less certain about. But at the end of the day, when your boss says "do this or else", very few people are willing to take the "or else" option. That's not unreasonable of them.
Usually when "do this" has massive negative externalities, you want a) to have the boss get in trouble for saying that, b) to have the civil/criminal penalty for "do this" be larger than the corporate penalty for "or else". Basic game theory; you want "do this" to never be picked, so you need to make sure those picking never have an incentive to pick it regardless of what other shenanigans are going on.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
3/ China and Taiwan
This feels less likely than the previous two examples, mostly because there's no active conflict in the region yet so there are still several further stages of escalation that would need to be crossed before nuclear weapons become worth considering for anyone involved. The US also seems to be taking steps to reduce their dependence on Taiwan. On the other hand, the US is interested in countering Chinese influence for reasons that go beyond the situation with Taiwain, and if China starts making SK and Japan worried enough to think about establishing their own nuclear programs, the US might start to find its credibility in the region tested.
Reasons I'm shit-scared* about this one:
- The PRC probably has some sort of attack (not sure if it's invasion, bombardment, or general blockade) being prepared for 2024-5 if the US election is enough of a shitstorm - their plan to integrate Taiwan peacefully died a horrible screaming death when Xi Jinping did an "I am altering the deal" on Hong Kong, the US military is old but being modernised, and the shitstorm was obvious several years in advance and isn't necessarily going to recur afterward. As more direct evidence, the head of ASIS (Australia's equivalent of the CIA - note that Australia shares intel with the USA in the Five Eyes) said that "a linear path" leads to "great-power conflict" and he hopes leaders make decisions to take us off that path.
- If the ROW doesn't come in to defend Taiwan, the First Island Chain is broken - rather than being confined to the South China Sea and East China Sea (by sea mines in the various narrow straits in Indonesia/Malaysia/the Philippines/Taiwan/Japan), the PLAN gets to operate in the blue-water Pacific because of the ports on Taiwan's east coast. This is an existential threat to Japan and South Korea because their population densities are so high they require food imports to avoid mass starvation, so if Taiwan falls both of them will almost certainly withdraw from the NPT and acquire nuclear weapons in order to deter the PRC from blockading them in event of conflict (and thus allow them to have foreign policies that aren't dictated by the PRC by that threat). Also, if the PRC doesn't stop with Taiwan (and they likely won't; they've already started claiming the Ryukyu Islands) and WWIII happens anyway, it's going to be harder with Taiwan in PRC hands. As such, I give a high chance (about 80%) that the ROW does in fact come in, because nuclear proliferation sucks and if nuclear war's inevitable anyway we should have it on the best terms possible.
- I find it highly unlikely (about 10%) that a conventional conflict over Taiwan (with the USA in play) wouldn't go nuclear. The problem is that the PRC's nuclear deterrent is fairly fragile - the sea leg is strongly hampered by the aforementioned First Island Chain, the air leg doesn't have the range to reach the USA or Europe, and in event of conflict there would be enemy nukes quite close to almost all of China (the Bay of Bengal and India proper, Taiwan itself and the uncontested waters east of it, and South Korea, plus the bombers the USA would be heavily using anyway are nuclear-capable) so they'd get at most like 10 minutes of warning before their land leg was neutralised by the siloes being nuked (which the USA can do, because it's got a lot more nukes than the PRC does). This means the PLA would have to be on a hair-trigger in order for their deterrent to do anything, and the coalition would be strongly tempted to also be on a hair-trigger in order to perform such an alpha strike (and minimise the death toll) in event of an intercepted launch order or launches starting. Hair-triggers are bad, because they go off accidentally - see the Duluth bear and Vasily Arkhipov incidents for examples of the sort of things I'm thinking about. The chance of nuclear war per day is only like 1-2% (it would be less, but nobody would have launch-detection satellites because PLA doctrine for WWIII for decades has been to start out with massive ASAT use and that means Kessler syndrome wipes out all of LEO, and while there are backups they're not as reliable), but that adds up very fast.
It's a long way from assured, but the spectre of imminent WWIII hangs over the globe once more.
*Well, I'm not especially scared for my own life, because I took action to ensure I only die if we have total state failure - I live in Bendigo and have 20L of water in my bathroom cabinet. But I'm scared for other people's sake, and I'd have less creature comforts.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1yr ago
If you don't intend Mottizens to be able to understand a post, I'd suggest sending it as a PM instead.
General rule of politics is that systems will be about as corrupt as they can get away with. One would presume that DOGE was not baked into the calculations of how much they could get away with.
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