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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12410 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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Okay, so we actually agree on more than we disagree on. And we're probably 99.9999% aligned on the current state of affairs.

The difference is just in the prognosis of the outcome.

I'll combine these three things from your last post:

Yes, that's why I said it's the "training montage" part. They're not there yet, but they're fucking grinding to get there. They have a CATOBAR carrier to git gud on, they'll soon have more. Eventually they'll have nuclear powered ones so they can learn that too. There in the middle of the "decades of trial and error" part,

while the Chinese are hitting new deadlift PRs every month (still smaller than us, but growing!) and drinking a river of creatine.

They're slowly expanding their global base network. Their recent "totally not practicing to cut Taiwan off" drills continue to expand.

Time and timing are the big issues here. We've all heard the 2027 deadline / prediction for shit popping off. I don't really think it matters if that's actually 2026, 2028, 2030. But I think it's true that the CCP has a closing window of opportunity before (a) They experience something live COVID again (b) Power struggle at the top after Xi dies or (c) The demographic wave breaks and they actually HARD lose for another century. Truly, I think it's no later than 2035 (that's stretching it) before CCP has to shit or get off the planet.

Will their eye of the tiger training montage be complete in that amount of time? I'd argue no. Again, multiple decades of naval experience really are necessary. Maybe you can shave it down to 20 years starting from .... 2009? 2013? But I don't think you can just fuck around and find out how to do large scale amphibious work in 5 - 10 years.

Note to the Mods (@amadan, just tagging you off the top of my head) -- can we self-submit this as a "understanding actually developed out of some initial rounds of shouting" award?

yeah I'm with you

I give them longer than 2035 on the demographic piece, but yeah we could get another Deng who decides to chill tf out post Xi, who knows.

I generally have a pretty low opinion of the ability for the PLA(N) to pull off an amphibious invasion, although it's offset by:

  1. the fact that Taiwanese procurement is so fucking stupid

  2. the fact that Taiwanese people generally don't seem that committed to defense/dying for their country, although that's what everyone thought about Ukrainians pre-2022

  3. the fact that China doesn't even need to invade immediately, everyone talks about "okay but the USA will just blockade China and they'll crumble" which I disagree with, but more importantly, if China is fucked by a blockade, Taiwan is mega fucked. A Chinese blockade is basically an immediate "lights out and also you're now starving" to the population of Taiwan.

I hope they don't pull it off, but I dislike all the trends.

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