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Notes -
The PRC's doing another round of drills around Taiwan.
There's a real possibility that this one is the ruse of war that the others were meant to make believable; all the stars have basically aligned. The charm offensive failed in 2019-20 with the Darth Vader stunt on Hong Kong, there's a shitshow of a US election campaign in progress (two assassination attempts plus a disqualification attempt), the US President is significantly demented, William Lai got elected Taiwanese President earlier this year, and October's a good month in terms of weather conditions for amphibious assault, plus Beijing's adversaries are re-arming and Biden will be gone before April so that puts some degree of time pressure on them.
I wouldn't panic just yet; even if this is the big one (and it may not be), my guess is that they won't open WWIII with a nuclear first strike on CONUS/Europe/Australia (pre-emptive ASAT use to wipe out US satellites - and probably destroy all other low-earth-orbit satellites as collateral damage - is a possibility, though, so you may lose any communications dependent on those). But anything that you might have trouble doing later - beating the rush to buy bottled water/non-perishable food/aluminium foil/iodide tablets or whatever (not all of those are applicable to all of us), or maybe starting construction of a fallout shelter - this is your advance warning. As far as Guam/Japan/South Korea go, there may be pre-emptive missile attacks on US bases, but I still wouldn't expect cities nuked as part of the opening move so my advice is mostly the same. But if you're in Taiwan itself, I'd suggest getting out; if this goes hot there'll likely be a blockade attempt by the PLAN, so you may not be able to get out later.
To be clear, I'm more worried now than I've been since at least 2017 (the Trump-Kim yelling match) - and I was in Melbourne then, and thus personally at risk. I was mildly nervous back in April of this year, but you'll note that I didn't make a post like this then.
Remember that your life is worth a lot more than a few hundred bucks; it is rational to take action even if you rate the chance of nuclear war as "small but significant". Remember also that it is good to survive; while QoL might suck in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war, we'll recover, and if you have any ideological goals you will in almost all cases help them more if you're still around to advocate and act for them (note that if you're in the military or can otherwise help win the war, that's a worthy cause; I'm not advising desertion). That said, good luck to us all and I hope I'm worried over nothing.
m9m out.
EDIT: The drills seem to have completed; we seem to be safe for now.
Way to undercut your credibility, lol.
2017 was practically an archetypical example of American ethnocentricism of thinking their internal political squabbles reflect how other key actors view the world. No one who remotely paid attention to Korea for any amount of time was particularly surprised by rhetoric that wasn't matched by mobilization by North or South, and no one whose seen a 'don't hold me back, bro' moment of bar-posturing would have missed the caveats on both sides were using throughout. Variants of 'If you attack me, then you will regret it' were blatantly (and politically) being misrepresented and misreported by actors whose motive was to inspire panic and fear in the audience.
Meanwhile, in Korea, coverage of the 'crisis' had far more of a 'wow, the American media are talking' tone than one of concern... if they covered it at all. Certainly the South Koreans weren't mobilizing their society for a conflict.
How and why the Americans would wage a war against North Korea without South Korean support or ascent was, of course, rarely if ever raised and never addressed beyond possible dismissals of 'the South Koreans don't have a choice.'
Well, you're certainly demonstrating the classic failure mode of utilitarians, who struggle to conceptualize or deal with conceptual infinities and start doing irrational things on the basis of existential dread spirals.
No, the Chinese are not about to try and cold-rush Taiwan, or try to start a war via blockade that would be publicly jumped on by both US political parties for electioneering purposes. No, there isn't any particular grounds for panic-buying resiliency goods beyond the universal basis to have a stockpile for emergencies. No, the nukes (and the satellites) are not about to fall.
You are doomposting. Go back to bed and sleep it off.
You have the right to ignore my warning if you so wish. As I said, I might look paranoid in a few days.
(In case I don't, though, no memory-hole for you.)
Not only am I ignoring your warning, I am recommending for your own health- mental as well as possibly physical- to get some rest.
You are doom posting. Go sleep it off.
FYI:
Went to bed Monday morning around 4AM. Got up about 3:30 PM. Posted the top-level at 9:10 PM. Went to bed Tuesday morning at 3AM. Got up around 1:30 PM. Posting this at 2:45 PM. I do not retract my concerns.
I'm a night owl, not insane from lack of sleep.
And yet, Taiwan remains unblockaded, the nukes are not flying, and the satellites are not falling. Instead, in the last 48 hours, the Chinese ships returned, nuclear sabers were not rattled, and one of the most impressive technical feats of a decade has foreshadowed an even greater resilience of the space economy.
Yesterday was not the start of a war. There was no particular reason to believe that yesterday was the start of a war. That the many various reasons why not were beyond to are what demonstrated a lack of basis for your judgement and justification for fears, much as your lack of perception in 2017 led you to be 'nervous' and believe yourself 'at risk' during a propaganda cycle. The world does not function as you think it does, and the way you think it does is a result of fear mongering you decided to try and spread to others.
You are not charged with insanity. You are charged with a lack of sound judgement.
You seem to have been correct about this incident.
Is there some reason I should go with the hypothesis "Dean knows what the CPC is up to better than I do" rather than the hypothesis "Dean is a Rock Cultist who was right this time"? I'm open to persuasion of the former, but there are lots of Rock Cultists, including many smug Rock Cultists.
My model of the PLA drills around Taiwan is that one of them is not going to be a drill, and the rest are both practice runs and decoys to make people think the real one is another drill and thus gain tactical advantage. To guess which ones might be real, I look at various indications regarding their chances of success and consider whether enough of them point in the direction of "this is the best shot they'll get for a while". March/April/October is one sign, since those are the best months for amphibious operations (though they do have other options). Unusual/temporary weakness in US leadership is another. Unusual/temporary weakness in Western militaries is another. Mood in Taiwan is another, as I certainly accept that the PRC would rather take Taiwan peacefully, though this one's basically stuck in the "on" position at this point since it's now been years since the crash of unificationist sentiment to lizardman following the Hong Kong fiasco (i.e. they have had time to plan and prepare to follow "non-peaceful means" now that the "possibilities for a peaceful re-unification [are] completely exhausted"; quotes are from the PRC's Anti-Secession Law).
The 2024 US election cycle was predictable as a shitshow since 2021, so I predicted well in advance that October 2024 would be a solid time to invade. Biden going senile (and not seeking re-election) and the West re-arming due to Ukraine also create the potential of a temporary vulnerability. So I considered it plausible that this might be the real one; this is the best chance they have for a while (until 2027 or so, unless something goes very wrong in the USA, but even if it does that won't be predictable so to be as good a shot it'd have to be very bad). I knew that they might not do it, and I made that quite clear.
Vague mockery is not going to convince me. You have to be able to spot and explain a problem in the above argument if you are going to convince me that we didn't just get lucky.
Sure. Let's start with 'pattern recognition.'
This is not the first time China has conducted a military exercise simulating a blockade of Taiwan. In all exercises simulating a blockade to date, Taiwan has not, in fact, been blockaded. Therefore, there is no causal relationship justifying a claim that a Chinese military exercise simulating a blockade of Taiwan is evidence of imminent blockade of Taiwan, as there must be other distinguishing features for the former to lead to the later. This takes even more meaning when there is a separate pattern of China conducting threatening exercises, but no attack or blockade, in protest to some Taiwan official statement or another. Again, distinguishing factors needs to be observed to justify claims of deviating from historical patterns of behavior.
We could go further with the advanced concept of backwards reasoning. If China were making a deliberate decision to initiated a military blockade of Taiwan, then what would we expect to see China do in the context of a deliberate leadup to war that would not be seen in the historical pattern of exercises-that-were-not-starts-of-war. This might include, for example, a pre-event propaganda campaign providing initial narrative buildup or international legitimization for the immeninent actions, particularly propaganda emphasizing the historical nature of rectifying the century of humiliation. It might include the mobilization of the Chinese navy, which is to say the social media reflections of the recall of shore leaves, the noticeable trends of all the Chinese naval groups readjusting their movements to start adopting both reinforcement of a blockade and preparing to intercept any efforts by regional naval actors to block it. It might include things like minimizing sanction exposure risk by a sharp withdrawal of PRC state-controlled economic funds from western financial institutions, demands made of the Taiwanese, and threats against external intrusion.
We would expect, in other words, to see actual effort correspond to the sort of actions that would be taken to launch a blockade, and not just the adjacent fleet sailing around for a day not actually stopping anyone going to Taiwan.
We can go further if you'd like, but it'd be punching more than a little down. As an alternative, I propose we let you memory hole this oops of a catastrophizing and then slightly more embarrassing attempt to reserve the right that you told me so.
They've been doing that for decades, including to Western media with extortion via access to the Chinese market and diplomatically via bribing the countries that recognise the ROC to switch. Certainly, this hence isn't something that was in my court for "they're about to do it now" (and I didn't claim it as such), but I don't think it's in your court either as a sign that will be there but wasn't. It's a sign that is always there (well, I suppose it'll stop being there when they go for it and either win or get "you are not allowed to keep insisting that Taiwan isn't a country" rammed down their throats the way the Opium Wars ended with "you are not allowed to keep insisting that Western nations are barbarians begging for your scraps" rammed down their throats, but at that point this discussion will be moot), and I'm not sure what good it would do them to increase the amount of it that is going out right before an invasion.
Now, that aside: most of the things you mention are things I didn't check because I don't know how to/have access to check them, which means I couldn't take them into account before making my decision of whether to warn. If you had mentioned them to me at the start of this conversation rather than literally 100% of your first two posts' reasoning being (significantly-although-not-wholly-inaccurate) bulverism of my mental state and absurdity heuristic, I would probably have retracted immediately. And, if you either teach me how to find out such things, or agree to tell me such things if I get worried again, I can take them into account before deciding whether to issue warnings in future (though it will likely be some time before that happens)!
You chose to treat me as a drooling insane child rather than a reasonable person not in possession of all the facts. This was not only immensely rude, it was useless; we just went around in circles for six posts until you actually started saying something meaningful. What the fuck was the point of all that?
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Did you predict the 2022 special military exercise? What were the visible actions that were not part of the historical pattern of exercises-that-were-not-starts-of-war? There wasn't some big propaganda push afaik, and neither was there a withdrawal of the hundreds of billions in economic funds that subsequently got trapped in western banks.
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Based off of Dean's posting history and areas of knowledge he does have potentially relevant domain specific knowledge.
Other indicators (financial markets, lack of U.S. ramp up, etc.) indicate no reason to be worried as of yet.
Good news: China is a more competent adversary and isn't going to light the world (and themselves) on fire. Well bad news but good news here.
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