This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Not really. Maybe against drones, but even HELIOS is underpowered for intercepting realistic incoming missiles. You need to get to 1MW level lasers. The US is in the lead in this research, admittedly.
Finally, geography is also much less of a factor than commonly assumed when you can have barges letting you disembark on virtually the entire coast (ofc there's the obvious objection that barges will be destroyed by brave defenders, I'll let you think through counterpoints). "Taiwan only has 2 suitable beaches" is a hypothesis fit for a shithole without shipbuilding industry, pardon my French.
No, I'm being realistic. The advantages of Chinese industry are compounding very quickly, they've reached escape velocity of sorts. The US definitely can improve but the gap is likely to get wider over the next decade or two.
it's illustrations.
I really don't share popular skepticism with regard to F-35, but this isn't just about planes. Ford EMALS is just an older, less reliable system, Ma Weiming's MVDC architecture is superior from first principles, it builds on common civilian Chinese advantages in electrical engineering that are expressed in their grid and battery dominance. This is also why they can put EMALS on 076, on some trucks, on trucks stacked on a container ship, basically play with it like LEGO. This again is illustrative of the disparity in industrial capacity and diversity and prospects for military procurement in the years to come.
this is dubious because the core feature and design principle of J-36 is overpowered electric generation and radars (again building on their civilian advantages) so at the very least they can be expected to notice your Rhinos first. I won't engage in spiderman vs batman analysis, none of this will be about 1 on 1 dogfights of course.
Maaaaaybe you can say this in aggregate, but there are many domains where you're behind and the gap is growing because they are still improving faster.
I mean, how hard can it be? Americans did it. Broke-ass Communist Russians with inferior metrology did it. I've known people who did similar things for the Soviet Union, they're not some John von Neumann geniuses shooting lightning out the arse, just normal engineers; there's not much to all this Cold War magic by modern standards, it's likely less g-loaded than CATL battery process engineering or TikTok recommender algos. China is crushingly dominant in materials science now, they author like 50% of top papers. We'll see soon if Type 09V reaches Virginia levels of quieting, probably it comes close, reducing the gap by 20+ years.
you overestimate the role and misunderstand the nature of industrial espionage, that's a popular cope. Eg recently there's been a big brouhaha about them stealing ASML IP and building a EUV prototype. The leader of the project is Lin Nan, head of light source technology between 2015 and 2021, "Light source competence owner for metrology in ASML research". They have been advancing Western research until recently, and can do as well at home.
For one thing, prediction markets say it's almost certain that KMT wins the next elections, and everyone knows they're pro-cooperation with the Mainland; their representative insists on Chinese identity, is friendly towards Xi and opposes Taiwanese independence. Abuse from Trump and Lutnick is not very good alliance-building, Beijing barely needed to do a thing. Here's one perspective. There are such polls to drive the point home but I am not sure about it.
Things can change fast.
It seems this way.
As Colby points out in Strategy of Denial, blockade compulsion strategies rarely compel surrender. Now, I am not sure if the historical inferences hold given the modern necessity for energy but on the other hand if you're going to insist the historical record shows that amphibious assaults often work, I'm going to remind you that blockades and bombardments (by themselves) often do not.
Yes, I also think that an air assault is a viable strategy in addition to landing at pretty much any point across the island. This doesn't change the fundamental problem(s) with an assault on Taiwan. The barges are nice but they don't magically overcome the advantage of interior lines. And so forth.
So far the Chinese appear to be behind the United States (alone, and Australia, Japan, and South Korea are also relevant players here) in submarine manufacturing (quality and tonnage), space-to-orbit launch tonnage, aircraft manufacturing (quality, possibly still airframes as well, particularly considering US exports), directed energy weapons, and, if it matters, oil production and artificial intelligence. They do build a lot of boats, but the US and its allies can build antiship weapons faster and cheaper than China can build boats.
It's illustrative of your tendency to take something innovative and cool the Chinese have done (in a mock-up, mind you), not look for and therefore not find a comparable US example, and then declare the war over in favor of China. The US doing actual procurement such as putting lasers on their submarines (publicized 2020), flying next-gen fighter aircraft (also 2020), or flying a secret stealth electronic attack aircraft for over a decade (likely spotted 2014) - not interesting, nothing to see here.
You haven't thought through the implications of what you are saying. Now, there's doubtless a lot of secret sauce when it comes to the fine details of these things and how they work, but the laws of physics presumably still apply, and due to the inverse-square law, we should expect radar-warning receivers to detect emitters before the emitters detect a radar signature. I'll let you work out the implications of turning on that overpowered radar in a world of air-to-air antiradiation missiles.
This doesn't mean the J-36 is useless, by the way.
No they did not. The Russians were genuinely ahead in speed which is impressive in its own right, but they still haven't caught up to American quieting in nuclear submarines.
Not really "cope" so much as "a good idea" - the US government just launched copies of a Shahed at Iran and I think that's smart. I'm genuinely curious, while we're on the topic, to get your assessment of how the recent accusation by Anthropic that Deepseek used data harvesting to build their model.
Look, my position on the whole US v. China thing has not been US triumphalism. It's a war we could lose. But Chinese triumphalism rankles me the same way. It's very wrong to extrapolate from Venezuela and Day Two of Iran and conclude China would be a pushover too. But it's also very wrong to extrapolate from Chinese civilian shipbuilding numbers and conclude the US of A would be a pushover.
Going entirely off of this Wikipedia article, one could just as easily say that she opposes CCP rule over Taiwan, supports the status quo (the mainstream view), and wants closer relations with the United States.
This is almost certainly the best position for Taiwan to take, by the way, there's no point in provoking the mainland without material gain.
Yes.
More options
Context Copy link
The prediction-market volume on Taiwanese elections is way too small to take seriously. It means jack shit. The KMT is very unlikely to win.
For starters, Taiwan’s presidential election is plurality-wins. You can take office with under 50% as long as you get more votes than everyone else. Chen Shui-bian, the first DPP president, won with 39% in 2000 because the KMT split. Song Chu-yu, a former KMT politician, ran as an independent and carved up the KMT vote (he got 36%). The official KMT candidate, Lien, got 23%. If the KMT hadn’t fractured, they very likely would’ve won in 2000 and I think the situation today would have been better had KMT not let their collective brainworms take over. The DPP has been dominant ever since except the Ma years. Right now the anti-DPP vote is split between the KMT (more seniors) and the TPP (more young people), which in some ways rhymes with 2000.
And KMT just does not have charisma whatsoever. It's the lame party. Arguably since the DPP is the ruling party for a decade it start to be the lame party now and young people are moving away from it, but KMT is associated with Chiang, with old KMT soldiers speaking mandarin with Shandong accent, with the Chinese communist party who is equally not charismatic. It'll be a miracle for them to regain power, sans dramatic happenings.
My view is obviously that Taiwanese identity is nonexistent beyond not Chinese. And since Taiwanese people speak Chinese and can (and will because of the gravitational pull) view Chinese media contents, cultural osmosis makes eventual reunification a matter of time (hence the ban on Xiaohongshu and other Chinese social media in Taiwan). Anecdotally late Gen Z and Gen Alpha already seem less pro-independence than millennials and early Gen Z who are the current major voting blocks. But in the short term I don’t think things are going to get meaningfully better.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link