domain:moultano.wordpress.com
yofuckreddit
23hr ago
You know what? Actually, you're right. I've seen 2 fewer times so I was modifying my perception to account for it but after consideration 1 is superior.
ABigGuy4U
23hr ago
You can be as pedantic as you like, but it’s something NATO is genuinely concerned about.
ABigGuy4U
23hr ago
In a press conference Antony Blinkin stated that Ukraine wasn’t going to have elections until all its territory is recovered, including Crimea. In other words, Ukraine is never going to have elections again. My point is, Zelensky isn’t going to call elections and the US State Department isn’t going to lean on them to either.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
23hr ago
You could at least pretend to display some performative scepticism towards a Guardian article on immigration before uncritically accepting the narrative wholesale. Obvious baitpost.
aldomilyar
23hr ago
I live in Malaysia, my wife's family is a good study in that roughly half of her uncles and aunties are Singaporean and the other half are Malaysian Chinese. In my experience, the Malaysian family is first-language Chinese with passable English and Malay plus some dialect (albeit essentially a sliding scale of dialect versus English with each ensuing generation). The Singaporean family is about the same at the generation of my wife's parents, though for context they were about 18-19 at the time of Singapore leaving the federation and the younger generations are 90% English with some spoken Chinese but functionally illiterate.
According to them, the main difference is that in Malaysia the schooling system allows for private schools to be conducted in Chinese which is the only practical way to get literate in Chinese since even the majority of ethnic Chinese Malaysians will be functionally illiterate in Chinese characters. Also there's been a pretty large divergence between Malaysian Chinese (Largely spun off of southern Hokkien/Teochew/Cantonese/Hakka speakers who have remained in touch with mainland trends via the cultural sinosphere) and Mainland-Chinese, even when speaking Mandarin. Malay's an afterthought used for interacting with the government as it's essentially been replaced as lingua franca in Malaysia by English for anybody under the age of 30.
My wife's grandmother is in her mid 70s, she's illiterate despite being a fairly successful small business owner who's since retired to be a landlady and only speaks Hokkien (Possibly Malay but there's also a cultural distaste amongst Chinese when it comes to speaking the language outside of purely utilitarian purposes). Yet understands spoken Cantonese, Mandarin and Malay. Cantonese since it was dominant culturally in entertainment for a few decades, Mandarin though it only really entered Malaysia by the time she was middle-aged and Malay since one must occasionally acknowledge the landlords.
FtSoA
23hr ago
Look, China can do math. All the "resolve" in the world doesn't do us any good without missiles in the warehouse.
We have the USN and USAF and a nuclear triad ready for a full-scale confrontation with North Korea and/or China on any given day and have for decades. We can and should do more on that, but it's not like we don't have a lot of combat power in the region.
Resolve, on the other hand, is trickier. China won't care about escalation risk if they think we don't have the balls to put it all on the line for Taiwan.
If we are confident nuclear madman theory alone is sufficient to deter China, we don't need to do any of the above. But I don't actually think anyone wants to die in nuclear fire for Kiev or Taipei and as such the threat of a nuclear madman is unlikely to be persuasive and, even if persuasive, unlikely to be consistent in a democratic society.
I'd say we need to do both to maximize the chance of deterrence. In the US, we do not democratically launch nuclear weapons. Trump has lost his "madman" edge with respect to China, I think. Not that he couldn't get it back in short order.
But this is why, yes, I think Taiwan is a foregone conclusion if China waits and it's obvious to everyone what cards are on the table and who's bluffing. The Cuban Missile Crisis was about the Soviets parking missiles way closer to the US than we were willing to accept, so we engaged in a bit of brinkmanship and it wasn't a bluff.
But risk it all for Taiwan? For South Korea, in comparison, we have treaty obligations and troops deployed that will act as a tripwire.
Even assuming that this is true, could they really have done it without support or at least acquiescence+aftercare from the US? The way the adjacent Baltic states froze Germany out of the investigation and conclusions seems implausible if it was a Ukrainian solo gig that they were not appraised of, and without US pressure it seems quite strange that Denmark and Sweden would choose to snub Germany (if not the government, then at least its public) so heavily to give a small PR edge to Ukraine. (Meanwhile, with the Assange case, we have precedent showing that the Swedish legal system is happy to engage in perversion of justice at US behest.)
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