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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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The US is in the lead in this research, admittedly.

It seems this way.

Moreover China is likely to do a blockade and bombardment, as dictated by the common sense.

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.

"Taiwan only has 2 suitable beaches" is a hypothesis fit for a shithole without shipbuilding industry, pardon my French.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Broke-ass Communist Russians with inferior metrology did it.

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.

that's a popular cope.

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.

their representative insists on Chinese identity, is friendly towards Xi and opposes Taiwanese independence.

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.

Things can change fast.

Yes.