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 -
There's a perception in the US that Americans are in a new Cold War, now with China. I'm curious about how they perceive their standing in it. Pulling ahead, like in Raegan's time? Sputnik Moment?
But mainly, I want to hear from Shakes. At the end of June 2026, in another discussion about America Winning the Iran War, I told @Shakes that I'll be returning to his post in which he claimed:
Some updates since then.
First, a recap: in December 2025, the Chinese private launch provider LandSpace attempted a launch and recovery of their methalox powered medium class launch vehicle Zhuque-3 ("Vermillion Bird"), which is very much like Falcon 9 if you don't look at the details (I think it's what Falcon would have been if it were designed in 2020s). The launch and orbital insertion went well, the recovery… not quite, which prompted these kinds of headlines and understandable complacency in some circles.
On July 10th 2026, China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (for reference, known as the "First Academy", founded by the exiled communist Qian Xuesen, the co-founder of Jet Propulsion Laboratory which then became the core of NASA) has successfully landed the first stage of their medium class launch vehicle Long March-10B on a sea platform, using a novel net capture mechanism, thus making China the second nation with the capability to reuse first stages of orbital class vehicles, and the only one whose national space agency can do that. There has been commentary to the effect that it's cope for the fact that China can't into precise landing, that you won't have the net capture infrastructure on Mars/Moon/whatever, and that this is a nothingburger and further testament to their backwardness. On August 19th ie today, LandSpace has done this in a more traditional SpaceX manner, with ZQ-3 Y-2 landing on the ground pad. LandSpace was founded in 2015, and ZQ-3 had only been announced in late 2023 – the same year they had put the first methalox rocket into orbit. This, hilariously, puts them technically ahead of SpaceX for the second time. LandSpace is working on a full flow staged combustion methalox engine too, and it's reasonably mature; technologically it's about on par with Raptor 2. Given the track record so far, it's reasonable to say they will have a Starship class vehicle within 5 years. There are multiple similar projects being executed in parallel, both private and state-owned, eg Long March 9. It seems implausible in the extreme that China will find it hard to scale up the production of rocket engines (after all, they do make more WS-15s than F135s now, judging by J-20 vs F35 commission rate), steel tubes (come on) or concrete launch pads (…come on, really), or land permits (lol). So I find it likely that in a fairly short order they can match SpaceX (and thus the US and the world, because SpaceX is a near-monopolist now) in annual mass to orbit if they so wish. With Blue Origin's recent disaster and anklebiters like Rocketlab not doing anything interesting, it appears inevitable that the space race is just SpaceX vs China.
On July 16th, the private startup Moonshot AI has unveiled Kimi K3, the 2.8T, 104B active multimodal MoE, with very innovative architecture and ability to execute on long-horizon self-improvement-related tasks such as chip design or ML research/engineering, delivering performance close to the best American public models, solidly exceeding the previous domestic champion GLM 5.2. Right now it scores 60 on Artificial Analysis, 1 point behind Grok 4.6, and 2-3 behind Opus 5, Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol. (GLM 5.2 reached 53).
Also on Jul 16th, Chinese memory company CXMT completed its IPO subscription. Currently it's worth around $500B, underpinned by its central role in supplying DRAM chips to Chinese (and soon global) industry, including AI. They target 30% global market share by 2030. This is doable, given what I know about the velocity of upstream tool supply chain in China.
On July 18th, during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Huawei has demonstrated their Atlas 950 SuperPoD, boasting of the largest scale-up domain in systems for training advanced AI models (yes larger than anything Nvidia ships right now, and this is more important than raw FLOPS as we continue to increase the parameter count). You might be interested in this writeup on Huawei's design philosophy, it's pretty special and promises to compensate for their lack of advanced lithography. In short, their thesis is that the performance comes not so much from Moore's law as from minimization of latency across the entire architecture from transistor to cluster level, and their idea of a solution is 3D-native chip design for multi-layer logic, with very precise (1.5 µm currently, <1µm scheduled, well ahead of the competition) wafer-on-wafer stacking and the first chips demonstrating its viability (mobile Kirin SoCs) coming out in September. Multiple other companies, such as Alibaba, have also shown supernode-based designs, including one absolutely bonkers system from Oriental Computing that uses 14nm chips; as Jensen says, lithographic process is overrated compared to design, so I'm bullish on this line. At the opening ceremony, Xi Jinping delivered a pretty impressive speech on Chinese strategy with regard to AI, committing to support open source and international collaboration.
Since then we've learned of multiple 100K GPU class cluster projects in China (Sugon, completed, Alibaba token factory apparently as well, unclear what's up with Zhipu's 1GW cluster; DeepSeek will also have gigawatt-class systems in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, as well as their own chips). These should be sufficient to design and train 10T models, ie comparable to the alleged size of Mythos Preview (and larger than the deployed Mythos/Fable; I am not privy to these details, though). Ryan Fedasuyk of Georgetown estimates that «No matter how we slice the data, we find China is well on its way to producing large numbers of AI accelerators».
On Jul 31st, DeepSeek has deployed and open sourced V4-Flash-0731, getting performance around GLM 5.2 (and much higher on some hard evals like ARC-AGI-2) at a ludicrously low price and parameter count, doing even better than GPT 5.6 Luna after the much-hyped 80% price cut. The situation with DeepSeek is a bit ambiguous, it's not clear if they're flailing (the subsequent Pro was barely any better, their harness project is insanely ambitious but clearly not even half-done); but it speaks to the fact that the Chinese tech ecosystem is now very large and dense and nobody can be champion for long. On Aug 14th, Zhipu has responded to Kimi with GLM 5.3 which is on par with K3 at a fraction of the cost and scale; one of their priorities has been cyberdefense (and thus cyberoffense) capability, plainly driven by concerns around Mythos/Fable. They'll release the weights in <2 weeks, as did Kimi, as did Alibaba Qwen with their 2.4T 95B MoE that's roughly in the same ballpark. The CEO of Zhipu, Jie Tang, is a professor at Tsinghua, and thus essentially a state official, a CCP member who regularly contributes to People's Daily, so we can consider him speaking for the Chinese policy (Xi's speech has much the same tenor). His philosophy is roughly as follows:
As an aside, on Jun 29 it became known that Meituan (a food delivery company) had trained a 1.6T 50B MoE on previous generation Chinese chips, almost certainly Ascend 910Bs. It went under the radar because the model isn't that good, but it sets a lower bound on what can be done going forward, by more competent actors, with more advanced hardware. Today, the globally dominant Hangzhou humanoid/quadruped robot maker Unitree also went public, and is now worth about $50B, ahead of the fraudulent American company FigureAI with $39B and no publicly sold robots to show for it. They clearly have the best hardware at the moment and unmatched development velocity.
I could go on. It's been a rather eventful period. But these are, I think, the most interesting and strategically significant domains: AI, hardware for AI, hardware for manufacturing AI hardware, robotics, and space.
Shakes, do you think China can't catch up?
I'm not Shakes, but I do share some of his American triumphalist views.
First, I want to push back on the idea that this is a cold war. I feel like that pays a disservice to just how serious and deadly the real cold war was. The world had just emerged from WW2, and everyone was armed to the hilt, epecially the Soviets. Both sides were building and testing nukes as fast as possible, with the main plan for WW3 to simply annihilate the other with mass nukes. Everyone was on a hair trigger alert, to the point where they had to make a special hotline between Washington and the Kremlin to de-escalate dangerous situations. US military spending as a percentage of GDP reached 13% in the 1950s Korean war, then 9% in the 60s Vietnam war, then 7% in the 80s. Soviet spending is hard to measure, but was likely an even greater burden for them, as they needed a massive military to keep their empire together.
Currently the US spends 3.4%, and that's projected to go down in the future. China spends around 1.5% (although with mass draft that doesn't count as spending). In other words, neither side is actually spending, or acting, as if there's a cold war. I feel like we're the two biggest kids in PE class, and everyone else around us keeps trying to get us to fight, when we really just want to play basketball. We can travel to each others countries as tourists quite easily and freely, which usually wasn't possible during the cold war. We're both each other's largest trade partner. These are peaceful times.
For right now the US still has the edge in Space and AI tech. Is it possible that China could catch up and take the lead? Sure, maybe. Maybe they land on the moon a few months ahead of us, or hit a new AI benchmark first. So what. The US would still have amazing tech in that area. I don't see a future where the US isn't at least a major player in tech, and the most likely possibility is that we'll still be the leader, since so many of the world's experts come here to work in AI. We're also, for what it's worth, investing heavily in using robotics and AI to compete with China in manufacturing- they used to have a huge advantage there with their large cheap labor force, but robots are even cheaper than that. For example, the US is now growing startups to break China's monopoly on rare earth refining.
You didn't even mention energy, where China is still massively dependant on oil and coal imports. They've handled the Iran crisis by... importing and burning even more coal, leading to horrendous pollution. Meanwhile the US just pumps more oil (and can now get it from Venezuela, as well as Canada or Mexico when necessary). Not to mention the interesting advances being made in new forms of nuclear. That said, I'm impressed with how much cheap solar PV China has been able to produce, and I wish them all the best in continuing to produce more. That seems like a huge win for humanity as a whole, not some cold war sputnik moment. (and the US is also producing lots of new solar. I worry about Europe's energy situation though... they don't have much oil, they seem culturally dead set against nuclear, and they have terrible geography for solar.)
Then there's demographics. The US has issues here too of course, but China really has issues. They're down to just 1 child per woman on average, despite a lot of effort to boost it, and they can't really do immigration like the US does. So in about 20-40 years, they'll be in a very awkward spot with massive population of retirees, very few working-age people to support them, and almost no children. That will put a huge strain on their economy and technological growth, unless of course the singularity comes along to change everything before then.
This seems to equate Europe with Greater Germany.
France loves their nukes, they're going to add another 6 modern reactors to their existing fleet of 57, and are planning a second tranche of 8 more for the 2030s. Zero reactors are scheduled to go offline, they intend to run them until the reinforced concrete itself reaches its lifetime limit.
The solar situation is clearly worse than the US (top tier solar potential, globally), but actually comparable to China. Both have a few thousand kilometers between the good solar locations (Spain, Italy, Inner Mongolia, West Chinese Deserts) and the major energy consumers (European Blue Banana, Chinese Coast), so both will have to put down a lot of ultra high voltage DC power lines. Europe has a lot less distance to bridge, but needs maybe 20% more panels than China. Both can (and do) also just move the big consumers to where the panels are. Greater Germany can also somewhat compensate the lack of solar potential with better land-based wind resources. Those can make very cheap power as well (but are less well suited to integration with battery storage, so they'll need serious innovation with flixible loads).
Of course, the biggest problem of the EU in all of this is the same as the US: its insanely difficult to get permitting for anything of that scale. China needs to bridge thousands of kilometers more with power lines, but can just build those. A 50 GW UHVDC link between Germany and Spain pretty much needs subsea cables, because no way you'll get the permit for 2000 km of fat power poles - not in Spain, not in Germany, and certainly not in France.
Oil is funny. Europe just needs to stop burning it. Norway alone makes enough crude to satisfy the entire European chemical feedstock demand, if you add the UK you don't even need to retool the refineries to crude-to-chemical optimization.
I'm well aware that France has nuclear reactors, and probably I should have mentioned that, but didn't want to get to into the weeds about a side point. France is very much an outlier and Europe, and their fleet of reactors was mostly built in the 80s and 90s, and it was built mostly to serve their own national needs, not to be the powerhouse for all of Europe. They can export some energy, but not nearly enough to power the continent.
I also don't think the solar situation is at all comparable to China. Europe is significantly further north than China, like 10 degrees or more, with only the northern parts of China overlapping with the southern parts of Europe. That massively increases the seasonality problems of solar. Building solar panels in Spain to export energy all the way out to Germany, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe doesn't seem like a real solution, even if you ignore the difficulty of crossing multiple international borders. I know they've gotten some energy from solar and wind, and that's great, but they haven't increased capacity nearly as much as they would need to "just stop burning oil," let alone the natural gas they import.
None of this is to say that Europe is doomed, or anything, it's just that they're facing strong headwinds in energy that will limit their growth. Meanwhile in the US we just have a huge abundance of seemingly every source of energy.
That's true, there's also not nearly enough transmission capacity installed for them to literally do that. But still, that's a lot of base load taken care of. France exports about 17% of the total electricity it generates. So on average, around 10 of those nukes permanently power its neighbors (and peaks go significantly higher, of course).
You can just look that up. The world bank has a pretty through study on the solar potential of different countries. They made a nice map to show the results and published their methods. Inner Mongolia is less than 10% better for solar than Spain, and has similar seasonality. The better regions are thousands of kilometer further west, and have "challenging terrain" (lots of mountains).
Yeah, they basically have to roof over half of Spain, and quickly, if they stay committed to the current strategy - but they could do just that, and indeed have started to do so. It's the cheapest way to make power, after all, they just need to invest. And I wasn't joking about the DC subsea cables. They're already building the first one, to France. The EU is investing in GW scale DC power lines to strengthen the internal electricity market between direct neighbors.
And that's just par for the course with large scale solar. China is miles ahead with doing all that, and the US will also have to put up many GW of new transmission capacity towards the East Coast. Solar has gotten to cheap not to do that. The alternative is to just move all the data centers, aluminum smelters, ect. to where the panels are. We'll certainly see both.
More options
Context Copy link
A lot of countries have nuclear reactors and plans to build more. It's only really Germany that has major energy issues and lacks credible plans to deal with it (even if this bleeds over into other places) .
Poland is about to get its first, I believe, and Czechia is expanding theirs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a very common failure mode on The Motte. Many people think that all of Europe is like the worst aspects of UK and Germany combined. You can see this in any thread that even mentions censorship in Europe and threads that talk about energy politics.
A similar situation applies to LNG. Reduction of cheap LNG supply is a local problem specific to certain countries. Most uses of it for energy production can be replaced with just plain electricity produced by other methods. LNG isn't even particularly important as transportation fuel the way oil is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
These are times in which the citizenry assumes peace. There is a difference. The EMH does not apply to military spending or popular sentiment.
Or to put it another way: when Xi Jinping told the PLA to prepare the capability to invade Taiwan in 2027 (he said this multiple years ago), do you think that he wasn't being serious?
I'm not saying we're definitely going to have a nuclear war next year. He might call no-go. The West might eat Beijing's cock. Or we might have a conventional war that doesn't go nuclear (this last one is very unlikely, though). But it's a live option. And, obviously, "decent chance of WWIII" is pretty serious. But we are not serious people.
Nobody takes great-power war into account, 'tis true. Nobody does cybersecurity as though WWIII is a thing that might happen (we mandate smart cars, because we're too used to the only hacker threat being organised crime who have nothing to gain by killing 50,000 people in rush hour). Nobody does reliance on space as though WWIII is a thing that might happen (the moment there's a great-power war, lol ASAT and LEO is destroyed by Kessler syndrome). Nobody does urban planning as though WWIII is a thing that might happen (YIMBY). I don't think that this is because WWIII's impossible. I think that this is because it's been 73 years since a great-power war and 81 years since a total war, most of the Western population is less than 78 years old, and the various other pressures on Western attention and business practices have had their way - after all, the IQ 100 way of learning to take something seriously is generally to get burned by it.
(There was a whole pile of commercial integration between the great powers in 1914, too. WWI happened anyway.)
He is entirely serious. He's generally a serious person and doesn't joke. People should take everything he says seriously, unlike with Trump. However, like Trump, he says a whole lot of things.
He wants a powerful, intimidating military and he wants to get Taiwan. He does not want to invade Taiwan to get it, if possible. He prefers to think that it's still possible to get Taiwan without a military operation. He certainly doesn't want a full scale war (to say nothing of a nuclear war) with the US, over Taiwan or otherwise. He has priorities, and Chinese national strength and development clearly take priority over any symbolic wins. Finally, he's likely supremely unimpressed by Russian and American performance in their ongoing wars, so will be extra reluctant to try something in this genre, even if he comes to believe that the PLA has some sufficient capability. The capability of the US is well respected in China.
Of note, he had this interesting meeting with the KMT Chair this April.
Xi:
Cheng:
Cheng's QA:
……
My understanding is that for now Xi intends to bet on the KMT winning elections and pursuing gradual integration with the hope for eventual formalization of a "One country two systems" version of the nebulous 1992 Consensus (which neither side precisely defines). This is a long-term and uncertain bet but it is unlikely to be settled either way by 2027, irrespective of the Chinese Military's preparedness.
People bizarrely expect China to lash out in desperation. If they had such a temperament, Taiwan would be smoldering ruins already, if not just successfully captured. For all the armchair theorizing on the difficulties of the amphibious logistics, the porcupine nature of Taiwan (complete bullshit), the superiority of American subs or missiles (exhausted in Iran) or whatever, the prior on success and timeliness is at least as strong as Russia had in 2022, and in my opinion much higher. Xi just doesn't think like Putin or Trump about risk-return in such matters, he's not an out-of-touch gambler. War is inherently risky and costly and is not the only option available, so he will try to avoid war, despite the commitment to reunification "eventually".
Lyle Goldstein says it well:
then again,
Since I specifically didn't make the certainty claim, I'm not sure we have a disagreement.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Atmospheric drag makes LEO Kessler proof. It is self cleaning.
Does a bunch of debris from an explosion in LEO cause Kessler syndrome? No. It deorbits within weeks thanks to atmospheric drag. Vacuum isn't much of a vacuum in LEO.
Starlink is VLEO, as I understand it partially for that reason (it would be destroyed by an LEO Kessler event, but won't cause one). LEO goes up to 2,000 km.
Oh, don't get me wrong, Kessler syndrome in LEO's not the end of the world or anything; it will eventually self-clean and it doesn't pose much of a hazard to things going further. What I'm saying is that people spending on LEO infrastructure now (and yes, Starlink's part of that) are implicitly assuming no WWIII.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Let me ask you this. How much time do you spend listening to Xi Jinping speeches? Are you fluent in Chinese? Do you keep up with all of his internal briefings and read all of his essays?
I'm going to guess the answer is no. Me neither. It's impossible to keep up with everything like that unless its your professional job. So I rely on trusting those professionals, instead of trying to figure it all out myself. But that means we can't take one statement out of context from a foreign leader and take it literally- let the professionals who analyze this stuff figure out what it means. If they're not worried, I'm not either.
Politicians love to talk, it's what they do. Most of it is aimed at whatever audiencee they're talking to at the time, not for foreign nations. So it sounds to me like he made some rah-rah patriotic "make the PLA great again!" speech to encourage the troops, which then got picked up by foreign media, and they've been scaremongering us for years. Because that's what media does.
Notice Xi Jinping hasn't done. He hasn't loudly repeated the threat over and over again, like real warmongers do. He's never said anything to Taiwan at all. He hasn't significantly increased military spending, or built any amphibious invasion craft, or worked the general public up into a militaristic frenzy like the leaders did before WW1. There's just no parallel at all in modern times to the massive nationalistic arms race that preceded WW1.
Your info may be out of date.
Ok, find and replace "any" with "a significant amount of." Five barges is not the sort of invasion force that threatens WW3.
The barges aren't ferries. The barges are mobile docks for ferries, with long ramps to overcome the various countermeasures Taiwan has at its beaches. That's why there aren't very many of them.
The ferries are ferries. The PRC is big on the idea of "civil-military fusion"; rather than commission a fleet of dedicated military transports, they told all their shipbuilders that all their roll-on-roll-off ferries (for moving cars over water) had to be tank-compatible.
Um.
They are, which is a very-large chunk of why I am.
(Also, if we're using Reliable Sources, I'll note that the actual, official Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than it ever was in the Cold War. The experts are very concerned. What's different to the Cold War is the vibe among laymen.)
Is that reflective of the world situation, or is it being used as a commentary on "we dislike Donald Trump"?
Some of column A, some of column B, some of column C (they're also IMO-overly worried about global warming, which is unrelated to nuclear war and only somewhat related to Donald Trump). There's a reason I said "if we're using Reliable Sources", and a reason I capitalised the phrase (the reference is to this, and to a certain episode of DS9).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Taiwan will be anschluss-ed with China. That is inevitable. Even the KMT knows it. So far it seems that KMT is trying to get there the easy way and the DPP are trying to see how hard the hard way will be.
I don't think it is inevitable, although avoiding it may get a lot of Taiwanese (and others) killed.
If it goes nuclear, the USA has a lot more nukes; China would have to surrender. Of course, Taipei and Tainan would assuredly be nuked in the process.
(Also, I think the term "Anschluss" is misleading here; Austrians generally welcomed the actual Anschluss, while Taiwanese support for unification is lizardman since Xi pulled a Darth Vader on Hong Kong.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If those were their only assets and if they needed to threaten a larger nation than Taiwan (say, Japan or Philippines), I would agree with you.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Minor quibble: that number would have to go up very slightly to meet the new NATO requirements, and I presume the US will be more than willing to meet said commitment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link