Kissinger is an evil man but only because he knows how to play the game and wants the US to come out on top.
You don't say "Putin is an evil crazy man who hates freedom" because it's true, but because it's helpful to control the narrative away from talking about NATO.
The problems start when the propagandists start believing in it, or those who believe in it gain power.
democrats actually think they'll win votes because of this move
The propaganda has been strong for years, even before China was where it is now. Tibet, dog meat, communist, Tiananmen, etc. China was going to be hated as soon as it rose like any rival would be, but this has been in the works for a long time.
yes. even when everyone's incredibly xenophobic in the USA. this isn't going to make republicans start voting democrat, or non voters start voting. If you're a Republican, and both parties hate China, then you have no reason to change your allegiance over that alone. If you're a non voter you're not gonna suddenly start caring about partisan bullshit over the issue of China.
I posted this before, I'll likely post it again unless nuclear war happens:
:biden-harbinger: H A R M R E D U C T I O N :biden-harbinger:
Isn't the One China policy a precondition to any diplomatic relations with China?
Ayup. Hopefully there will be some kind of retraction or "oops sorry" soon because, like... This is just too much.
What if this is how Biden announces war with China? :thinking-about-it:
I don't know what else it would be. Maybe testing the waters to see what kind of reaction they get? Maybe poking China because they're pissed China won't bow down and join their Crusade against Russia?
This is a prelude to war. The decision to go down this path means they have decided they are willing to escalate to that level.
I doubt it will be this year, next, or even after that but the winds are blowing to war. The US has a huge quantity of things it absolutely must replace first prior to a potential war with China.
Born too late to live a nice long life and soak up the post ww2 economic miracle.
Born too early to experience the Posadist Utopia
Born just in time to get nuked. :D
Not a good time to live in a city or near any major military target. Communists should move to safer areas.
Look on the bright side; Someone might right a ridiculously idealistic and romantic novel about how we shitposted to the very end and died bravely, as an example to kids in the far off future.
:trump-anguish: Trade war with China!
:biden-harbinger: WAR WITH CHINA!
on the one hand this feels like performance akin to spelling it Kyiv instead of Kiev but on the other hand :doomjak::doomjak::doomjak:
they aren't real red lines. Tsai has already said Taiwan is already independent. It's just a fun LARP thing the CPC has to do to appease some people.
I mean doesn't it matter less to China what the Taiwanese government says, and more what the rest of the world says? China basically considers Taiwan a province in revolt, but if other countries started recognizing Taiwanese independence it becomes an international issue that challenges the legitimacy of their territorial claims rather than an ostensibly internal security issue.
Well, for one thing war tends to destroy a lot of capital, and then people who still have capital can use that capital to make even more capital re-building the capital they blew up.
War is also a great way to exterminate a lot of young people who might otherwise cause unrest at home.
War gives you a great excuse to hunt down and murder dissidents, minorities, and anyone else the regime views as undesirable or insufficiently loyal.
The US is losing it's roll as Hegemon, and if it thinks (delusionally) that it can destroy China without being destroyed in the process it can leverage it's position to re-assert it's imperial dominance over everything.
Also, our leaders are incredibly old, racist, insolated, technocratic, and ignorant. God alone knows what the hell is going through their alzheimer's riddled minds. And this SCOTUS thing proves that the nation will do any stupid thing it's told no matter how farcical it is because we're all stuck in the deathly inertial pull of the black hole that is America's soul.
I mean our top generals can literally just call china's top generals and talk about shit, like when that one dude called china to reassure them trump wouldn't do anything after he lost the election so maybe the military would be against any military action but idfk
:shrug-outta-hecks:
The US military is probably painfully aware of its own simulations where they try to intervene in Taiwan and get crushed. Fighting is one thing, getting sent off on a suicide mission is quite another.
why do they do so poorly in their simulations when they spend more on military than like the next 10 countries combined?
Partially because most of that money goes directly to pay salaries and insurance for a massively bloated MIC. Partly because the money gets spent on self-defeatingly high tech weapon systems. The F-35, for instance, can only fly something like once a week because of how much maintenance it requires for every hour of flight time, and it's impossible to get replacement parts for it because they're not producing enough of them and the logistics train is a nightmare. The US has to share spare parts with every country that flies F-35s across the entire planet and there isn't enough to go around. A super high tech space fighter is useless if it can only fly one sortie before it has to spend five days on the ground just waiting for a hypersonic cruise missile that cost 1% as much as the plane to blow it up. The MV-22 Osprey can do things that a conventional helicopter or plane can't do, but it's vastly more expensive than either and requires far more maintenance. The US surface fleet has no credible defense against hypersonic anti-ship missiles and it has no credible defense against Chinese attack submarines, which have an embarrassing habit of surfacing in the middle of US Carrier battle groups without anyone knowing in advance.
US military spending is focused heavily on being as expensive as possible, not being efficient and practical. If we were concerned about practical warfighting we'd be building of AI-driven F-16 drones, or just regular F-16s, instead of a handful of White Elephant F-35s. We'd still be building A-10 Warhogs, which are overwhelmingly the most successful ground attack aircraft ever designed, with massive firepower and massive survivability and loiter time. We wouldn't have fifty different procurement programs for different kinds of light and medium armored trucks that all suck and are over-specialized and end up needing to be replaced every few years. The only thing the US military is smart about right now is using drones as much as possible, since drones are relatively cheap, but you still can't win a war with air strikes no matter how cheap it gets.
In a hot war with China over Taiwan the US would probably lose whatever carrier battle groups were sent to Taiwan in massively one-sided massacres. And without the carrier battle group the US has nothing. It can't send troops to Taiwan without carriers to support and protect them, so it can't do shit unless it wants to escalate all the way to nuclear.
The other part of it is that the US military is expensive because we're an occupying army. Instead of staying at home conserving resources for a real war we're spread out in hundreds of military bases across the globe, and all those bases need cash for housing and fuel and electricity and weapons and salaries and god knows what else, and if we stop paying for it all we lose our death grip on that region.
China's army can be cheap because the PLA stays at home and doesn't fuck with the internal affairs of most of the countries on the planet. And they can be cheap because they can build a hypersonic cruise missile for a million dollars that will kill a carrier worth a billion dollars.
Well, for one thing war tends to destroy a lot of capital, and then people who still have capital can use that capital to make even more capital re-building the capital they blew up.
Is shit like that really necessary anymore? We’re kinda past the days of guys in top hats smoking cigars who own coal mines, the rich today have like 200 different financial Ponzi schemes that make them money and even if they fuck that up the government can just print them money. On top of that the rich today seem to have accepted they’ve reached the upper limit of decadence, it’s not like getting 10% richer is going to unlock the holodeck research tree or anything, now they’re just either pursuing clout or building bunkers in New Zealand to fuck off to.
Is shit like that really necessary anymore?
yes, nothing about the way capital functions has changed. it's not about money per se but about the falling rate of profit.
On top of that the rich today seem to have accepted they’ve reached the upper limit of decadence,
you misunderstand the way accumulation functions, they are in a war of all against all
War is also a great way to exterminate a lot of young people who might otherwise cause unrest at home.
:deeper-sadness:
I don't think the military industrial complex wants a war with a peer power. They would prefer a war with someone we can just drop bombs on with no threat of retaliation. But obviously I don't actually know
They want a destructive war, one that would destroy a lot of industry and kill a lot of people. Under capitalism, that's the fastest way to maintain the status quo of the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer.
Eh, I just checked the link and it still spells out that America recognize One China Policy
The United States has a longstanding one China policy, which is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the three U.S.-China Joint Communiques, and the Six Assurances
And also this line:
The United States will continue to support Taiwan’s membership in international organizations where statehood is not a requirement
Good this is just enough to justify moving the WW3 clock a few minutes back then.
Yeah but they removed the verbiage explicitly acknowledging China's government as the sole legal government of Taiwan, as well as the parts saying that Taiwan is part of China, and that the U.S. does not support Taiwan independence.
Yeah they say that the U.S. has "a long-standing One China policy" but that's like the Supreme Court justices saying that Roe V Wade was the law of the land and that they would uphold the law of the land.
It's saying, oh look we have this treaty that Nixon signed several decades ago, like a token nod to diplomacy that the U.S. has to do in order to keep doing business with China, while also packing in some ominous words about the Taiwan Strait and the "best interests" of Taiwan's people.
yeah this mystifies the language (making it less likely you get angry spluttering from rabid partisans) without actually changing much else
:doomer:
:doomjak:
Please, God, can we make a decision between instigating war with China, or Russia, and not go back and forth between both? Who's driving this clown car?
Who’s driving this clown car?
That's the trillion dollar question, isn't it?
:nuke: :biden-harbinger: :nuke:
IF WE CAN'T RUN A GLOBAL EMPIRE, THEN NO ONE CAN
I'm lost. how does saying taiwan is a part of china make war more likely? Obviously the second part is bad though, maybe that's what everyone is concerned about.
This is the political equivalent of very slowly, very deliberately, scuffing dirt on someone's shoes.
