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The current War of Northern Aggression "discourse" has brought to mind the top 100 first place greatest mistake in US state craft: not letting Burnen' Sherman just march back and forth for a couple years or finishing hardcore full reconstruction.
Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy, or second order effect from it. Imagine the conservatives we could have in this country if the wellspring of the tendency was John Adams and the federalists; rather than Rutherford and the lost causers.
Wrapping up the entire holographic southern cultural package with opposition to Washington eg. the North, eg the technocratic, rich part of the country has led to a situation where Technocratic Tech-billionaire Technologists are shackled to the cultural traditions of south, either Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension lacking any of the actual cultural roots that european aristocrats have; or hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.
You can watch these tendencies poison Republican politics live all the time; it's why even though the Democratic party is jam packed full of passionless ossified corporate aphorism chat bots, when republicans have all three wings of the government they STILL can't get anything done. There is a deep state problem, but it's not the 'unelected bureaucrats' in washington, it's the decaying corpses of Jefferson Davis and Johnny Reb clinging on to conservatism's ankles and dragging it down into the mud.
Why are so many Americans committed to sneering at and impugning the traditions of their warrior class? We all know that the South provides a disproportionate number of soldiers. Washington DC has the lowest enlistment ratio proportionate to population (this reveals a lot about how the US works), South Carolinas has the highest. Furthermore whites take up a larger proportion of the combat arms, diversity is more prevalent in rear areas and admin. I conclude that Southern whites are integral to the US war machine.
Nearly all of the people here are white-collar, I assume. A few have military experience but not very many. It's not our place to belittle those who march off to fight and die at our direction, at the will of the white-collar class. We can give orders, we can enjoy a privileged position at the top of a hierarchy, we can enjoy the fruits of war without sharing in the costs (should there be any fruits) - the bare minimum we should do is give some respect to those who do the fighting.
In Australia we had this case where some of our special forces were a bit overenthusiastic, they shot a couple of prisoners because there was no room on the helicopter, according to legend they stole one guy's artificial leg for use as a drinking trophy. There was a huge media storm about it, a Royal Commission, a massive defamation trial trial that our special forces guy Roberts-Smith lost. He was uncouth, the whole thing was a bit of a shambles. You could tell that the legal class were disgusted and repulsed by this guy and he despised them back.
OK, so Australian special forces killed a few dozen people they shouldn't have. That's a drop in the ocean compared to the West extending the war 10 years past the point we'd clearly lost, allying with the child molesters and drug exporters against the Taliban. The vast majority of the moral harms were committed by careless policymakers and senior officers who committed troops to achieving the unachievable. A huge part of it must have been embarrassment over losing to a small band of semi-literate goatherders with no advanced weapons, foreign backers or money.
And yet nobody dragged Bush, Obama, Petraeus or Trump over the coals - no Royal Commissions (or whatever American equivalent) for them, not for disastrous wars at least. If our leaders get zero accountability for huge crimes, those who follow their commands and deal with the farcical conditions should enjoy immunity for small crimes, let alone not being sufficiently classy.
Who wants to join special forces, do intense training, go off to fight a meaningless, futile war and be hauled over the coals for any excesses?
Who wants to join the US army if the war memorials and bases for their subculture are going to be defaced and renamed, if they're going to be sneered at for being uncouth hill people? Perhaps this is why the US military is so understrength in a time of global crisis. You don't tend to get classy, sophisticated people joining as infantry (who are still vital) - we should appreciate this and not demand this from them.
Do you want to go and risk getting turned to meat paste by Chinese hypersonics? Do you want to risk getting your guts ripped out by HE, get burned to the point everyone is repulsed by the sight of you? No. I don't either. Those who take that risk are making a special social contract and deserve support from the top of the pyramid, not contempt.
The people who will stop Chinese hypersonic missiles will be, and I am only slightly being hyperbolic, are trans furry military members in some bunker in Nevada piloting drones or other military gear, not some guy who signed up for reasonable reasons like access to college or career training or the darker reasons.
We already saw this in Ukraine - lots of hype over the true non-woke military, and it's regularly getting shredded by missiles that are largely being guided by a they/them army.
The actual thing that'll probably stop Chinese hypersonic missiles is a combination of they probably don't really exist in the way that anti-woke people hype them up online in the obsessive way they tend too, a corrupt Chinese procurement process that makes the US process look clean and normal, and the fact we've probably got stuff we're working on that we don't have to hype up the way the Chinese do to look strong.
This is untrue. Military does not produce or design weapons. Yes, furries can operate weapon system, but they won't have them because the US military and industry contracting system is broken.
The 'war' with China is already lost, if we go by statements of a former foreign minister of Singapore, who says both militaries understand US cannot win a conventional war, which is why the Chinese are now building a more robust nuclear force that'd deter the US from escalating in case of a conventional war.
Which is why Ukraine army is advancing, their offensive has succeeded and Russians do not have fire or aerial superiority over the front line. Because 'they/them' army has destroyed their ability to make things go boom. Yes, very true.
Of course a land war over Taiwan is unwinnable for the US. Taiwan is directly next to China’s 1.4 billion people and 2m soldiers, with easy resupply and colossal domestic manufacturing capacity next door. The US is thousands of miles away, has a vastly longer supply chain even to nearby bases in Japan and South Korea, has much less casualty tolerance, and is honest that the main strategic value of Taiwan is chip factories that thoroughly destroying would defeat the point of the defense, preventing any easy repulsion of an attack once large numbers of Chinese forces had landed.
But this doesn’t mean the US is weak, any more than a weak man beating a strong one on home territory while his opponent is only allowed to use his pinky finger serves as a good way to judge their respective actual fighting capacity.
As for Ukraine, Western intelligence predicted a full and successful invasion and Ukrainian surrender in a matter of days, which is why everyone was pulled out and all embassies closed. Two years later Russia has suffered 300,000 casualties, many of its best units have been destroyed by death and injury, and not a single American soldier has died for it. The only price has been a tiny fraction of GDP that’s less dear than many individual federal programs which accomplish much less.
Which is why it's a damn good thing Taiwan is an island. Deny China the strait, and everything changes.
Do Americans have it in them to setup a durable blockade that can escalate to a nuclear war for long enough to make it meaningful? Do they have it in them to completely wreck their (and the world's) economy and to scramble to get local industrial capacity back online?
Every time I read about a sustained conflict between modern great powers, the first two moves sound reasonable and after that it's basically reading like the end of the world as we know it, even in the scenarios that are explicitly not nuclear.
If neither side fully escalates it is a matter of who is willing to escalate further. If both sides are willing to escalate, but stop short of nuclear weapons, there is no existent navel force, or combination of navel forces, which can sustain a Taiwanese blockade in the face of Chinese opposition.
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