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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27188 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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First of all, China must be realizing around now that they have no meaningful way of communicating their military capability to the world, but especially to US and regional allies, in a way they will respect and find authentic. Simply because China's military basically doesn't get used for anything and hasn't for decades (and no, building artificial reefs in the SCS doesn't count). So no proof of concept demonstrations.

If China wanted to demonstrate their military prowess, they could simply march over their border with Burma and put an end to the civil war there. No one would care enough to stop them and they have a reasonable enough humanitarian justification for intervening. For whatever reason, they seem content to operate through proxies and occasional arms sales for now.

Burma does not impress anyone -- wake me when they head into India...

Why would China want to do that? It's not like the US ever fought a nuclear power and for good reason.

Doing easy things is not a good demonstration of military prowess -- that doesn't make the hard things smart to do, but it would be impressive if China could take territory from India. (preferrably without getting nuked, but AIUI there's not a real MAD situation in play with India -- so I'd still be impressed if the Chinese got their hair mussed a little)

I think the reason is looking at the shitshow of American and Russian interventions across the world and deciding do nothing and win is a pretty good ethos.

Yeah unless the USA start directly hitting China or maybe some crazy AGI situation it seems pretty clear they'll overtake sooner or later economically on the current trend. Why spazz and complicate things

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