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What's going to be the big apocalyptic struggle this election?
I wrote a piece over at my blog about how at this time in 2020 we were already in "2 Weeks to slow the spread", were about 1 month out from the first anti-lockdown protests, and 2 months out from the Summer of Floyd.
It seems obvious to me that all the chaos in the wider American empire concentrates around election years and seems to have the oxygen sucked out of it on off years.. 2020 is obvious, 2016 was only slightly less history changing, and even the 2008 financial crisis was an election year event.
There's a lot of really obvious candidates: Ukraine could go south really catastrophically really quick; the middle-east is speculated to kick-off with a potential Israeli invasion of Lebanon; and going shearly off the numbers the US southern border is one of the largest population transfers in human history with few precedents since WW2 or the even the 4th and 5th century.
But I don't know, maybe it's my mind trying to fit things too neatly to the 2020 framework... it feels like the election hasn't started yet, it feels like there's some shoe to drop or issue I'm missing, something as far from public consciousness as Immunology in Jan 2020, or racial politics in March 2020...
I can feel this massive issue just behind my peripheral vision that's about to draw all my attention and require its own Motte containment thread, and that will devour the media and twitter, for months on end.
I feel like there's this huge world shattering issue that's about to explode and within the next few months I'll be lamenting that I only have 24 hours in the day to read enough about it, convinced that it DEMANDS every second of my attention.... And I have no idea what it is?
-Is Trump going to die?
-Will a Nuke Launch?
-Is China about to take Taiwan?
-Are all those Chinese and foreign nationals on the southern border about to start targeting power infrastructure?
-Is there about to be a financial crisis?
-An "Internet Lockdown"?
-Hot ethnic cleansing in Europe?
-Global food chain collapse? .
Give me your best guess.
What will be the major containment thread at the Motte between now and election day?
This feels like one of the most boring presidential elections of my lifetime. So far it's mostly about Trump's personal scandals and Biden's age, both things that we've known and discussed already for what feels like forever. And it's frustrating, because like you said there are lot of big dramatic issues that we could be talking about. But neither of the parties seems to really want to talk about them in a clear way. There's been zero discussion of things like:
But this is not discussed. Both candidates seem pretty similar, honestly- they both want to more or less leave things as they are, with just minor disagreements over taxes and trade policy. Fair enough, maybe it'll be good to have a boring election for once. This reminds of Clinton vs Dole in 96, which was a match between an incumbent vs a very old senator, with most of the debate being around Clinton's personal scandals.
CCP controls TikToc. For all their many sins Facebook and X are not similarly run by the CCP.
Yes I know that's the official explanation, plus potential security holes. But then why not ban alibaba, wechat, weibo, etc? Or for that matter the billions of electronic devices manufactured in China? Is this the beginning of a general trade war on China, or is it just this one specific app? I want to see a real debate between Trump and Biden on this, instead it just sorta got rushed through Congress.
To be fair, it isn't just TikToc being targetted. More and more Chinese ownership or supply of communications infrastructure or devices have been banned in the past few years.
HTC Android devices are banned in the US. The import or sale of Chinese telecom equipment is banned. Previously installed Chinese-made cellular equipment was removed and replaced with non-Chinese equivalents at a cost of billions of dollars. The export of American made telecom components to China is banned by the US government. Etc, etc. This is a general trend picking up steam these past 4ish years.
I have and use Wechat on my phone. I only use it to communicate with Chinese immigrants in America or to video call Chinese people in China. I'm sure it is Chinese spyware and probably should be banned. But if few non-Chinese people use it then it isn't a major problem. Not exactly mass dataharvesting our youth.
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