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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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I don't know why the Biden administration is being so cautious.

One that you missed: the Far East. Post-Hong-Kong, there is ~0% support for unification in Taiwan, so Beijing wants to invade; the only thing that might possibly deter this is the USA, and that's a full-time job that doesn't leave room for side gigs. If the million-man-swim does happen, the USA faces two incredibly-terrible choices - either it can break its word and throw Taipei to the panda, with a resulting enormous blow to the Western alliance system, or it can fight a Third World War with the likely result of "Pyrrhic victory, millions of Americans dead".

My gut says this last, best hope for peace will probably fail anyway, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not worth trying, and it certainly doesn't mean that people won't try it.

My gut says this last, best hope for peace will probably fail anyway

Where's a Babylon station when you need one?

Pro reunification sentiments went from about 11% to about 7%: https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7801&id=6963

16% to 7%; the final crackdown in Hong Kong was in 2020, but the major Hong Kong issues started in 2019 and that's AFAICT the reason for the massive signal in that year. And the three firm "no"s combined went from 44% to 58%.

Note also that the trend went from pro-Beijing in the mid-2010s to stable in the 2020s, at least when aggregating the two unificationist answers and the three hard-nos. I believe the PRC's claims that they want peaceful unification - they'd be stupid not to - but in 2018 the reports coming in to Xi would have looked way more conducive to that than they do now.

also, if the US fights China how am I getting my new iPhone