zeroth

new megathread, hot off the presses

We’re gonna end up with tariff hyperinflation, where China and the US send the tariffs higher and higher at a faster and faster pace until we end up with a 100,000,000% tariff rate on each other for approximately 3 minutes before it gets negotiated down again

welcome back, comrade!

It’s not mockery, I’ve long expressed how much I appreciate their viewpoints in the megathreads and have often pinged them for their take on something in the past.

It would be disingenuous to pretend that they haven’t had some big stinkers in their analysis, though; claiming Biden is playing a 7D chess game, or asking whether China should or shouldn’t nuke the US if the US nukes China, or whether Hexbear should continue to support AES countries if disavowing them would bring on more left-liberals

“I think yesterday perfectly encapsulate why I think we will increasingly see the US in a position of total domination, in a single day they’ve singlehandedly ended all international opposition to their empire. Now we are all waiting for the only thing that can truly bring about dedollarization: the heat death of the universe.”

the style of military campaign that we invested hundreds of billions of dollars into and made our main focus due to its relative inability to be directly countered by insurgent forces is no longer working

let’s instead try the style of military campaign which we have repeatedly and embarrassingly eaten shit doing every single time we try it, up to and including the present day

we have to do this instead of not dropping thousands of tons of bombs onto literal infants, we have literally no other choice

This megathread is dead, the new megathread is born. Now is the time of posters.

Next thread here.

Next thread here.

it’s a sign of how utterly broken my brain is by the internet that when I saw “the Virgin” I thought of the chad vs virgin thing and not the Virgin Mary

Like, don’t get me wrong, we should always have cynicism about what nations and leaders say vs what they do, but as you say, there’s a ton of societal/cultural/political factors at work (not least their history) and at the end of the day I’m just not convinced at all that China would want to arm Diaz-Canel with a thousand J-20s or whatever they envision, no matter how cool that would be.

I think it’s very telling that all China and Russia and Iran etc have to do is point at active, ongoing conflicts and color revolutions and be like “This is how the US and its foreign policy is negatively impacting us and the whole world,” whereas the US has these people looking at animal entrails and writing fanfiction about how China could, hypothetically, one day, do something even moderately disruptive to US hegemony beyond “making a lot of commodities and having a lot of foreign trade”. I wish the world, and China specifically, was one tenth as cool as these authors think it could be.

China’s is like: “Uh, so, yeah, the US has been arming Taiwan to the teeth, which we kinda deem to be part of us and everything like the One China Policy implies. No big deal or anything, we got no plans to invade any time soon and we won’t meaningfully respond to this beyond the occasional naval drill and building up airplanes and ships in case the US tries something.”

And the US is like: “Picture this: China building military ports in Maracaibo. A Chinese airbase on Cuba. Is this real? No. Is there any indication that this could be imminently real? No. Are any of these countries part of US territory? Well, no to that as well. But it is possible, as our best authors have fully reported on here, and we must spend $20 billion on election interference to prop up a failson to try and take on Maduro and then get embarrassingly booted out of the country.”

“Over the course of the last decade,” writes Admiral Holsey, “the United States has focused predominantly on the Indo-Pacific, while China has taken a global approach.” By going global, China has emplaced Latin America and the Caribbean “on the front lines of a decisive and urgent contest to define the future of our world.” The SOUTHCOM chief sees Beijing’s gambits in the Western Hemisphere as part of a globe-spanning strategic offensive: “China is assailing U.S. interests from all directions, in all domains, and increasingly in the Caribbean archipelago—a potential offensive island chain.”

We’re dealing with levels of projection that have never been seen before on this planet. And the worst part is that I know they don’t actually believe that China is fucking funnelling guns and fortifications into the Caribbean or whatever, they’re just writing this drivel to prod Trump into devoting more resources to the region + Latin America.

[…] By securing commercial and diplomatic access to seaports spanning the globe, then, China has been laying the groundwork for a network of Mahanian-style bases for many years. What would Holsey’s offensive island chain look like? For one thing, it would not be an island chain occupied entirely by authoritarian societies friendly to China and hostile to the United States. That’s a marked difference from Asia’s first island chain, inhabited solely by U.S. allies, partners, or friends closely spaced from one another on the map and wary of the mainland.

Nor would an offensive Caribbean island chain completely sever U.S. access to the Atlantic and Pacific, the way the first island chain—which encloses 100 percent of China’s continental crest—obstructs access to the Western Pacific and points beyond.

All of that being the case, it is doubtful in the extreme that China will negotiate military access throughout the Greater and Lesser Antilles, the loose line of islands that forms the northerly and easterly rim of the Caribbean Sea. The PLA Navy will be unable to make the Antilles into an impassable barrier, the way the United States and its Asian allies and partners can by stationing military implements along the first island chain.

But the Chinese navy could cause serious trouble anyway. Think about plausible candidates for PLA Navy bases in the Caribbean. Two stand out: Cuba and Venezuela. Cuba is a fraternal communist country, and perpetually impoverished. Thus, both out of ideological solidarity and in order to boost its economy, it might well prove receptive to CCP entreaties to host Chinese warships. Venezuela is ruled by a leftist regime and might likewise prove a convivial host for China’s navy.

…

That Havana or Caracas would go so far as to host such a system is doubtful: the United States does remain the regional hegemon by far, and the last attempt by an external great power to station its missiles on Cuba nearly led to thermonuclear war. But either of these countries might take the lesser step of admitting PLA Navy flotillas on a rotating or permanent basis without that shore fire support. Even smaller-scale arrangements would let Beijing threaten to stage what Mahan’s contemporary Julian S. Corbett called a “war by contingent.” Corbett recalls that a modest contingent of British Army forces supported by the Royal Navy landed in Iberia during the Napoleonic Wars. The army fought alongside Portuguese and Spanish partisans, bogging down French forces sorely needed for the main fighting front to France’s east.

In short, Britain extracted disproportionate gain from the amphibious expedition. The Iberian theater was so distracting, and devoured so many martial resources, that the little emperor wryly called it his “Spanish Ulcer.”

Think about what responses a Chinese naval presence—a Caribbean Ulcer—would likely elicit from Washington. It would beckon U.S. leaders’ strategic gaze to home waters, long regarded as a safe sanctuary. Tending to that zone of neglect would reduce the policy energy available for theaters like East Asia. It would stretch U.S. naval and military forces that are already under strain trying to manage security commitments all around the Eurasian perimeter. It would probably compel the U.S. Navy to station a squadron of combatant ships at one or more Gulf Coast seaports for the first time since the Navy vacated them after the Cold War. That would impose a new, old theater on the U.S. Navy—amplifying the demands on a too-lean fighting force. And on and on.

First, the US Navy doesn’t need any help to fall apart given the war they waged to unblock the Red Sea - and lost. Second, this is all under the assumption that China will indeed want to militarily challenge the US for hegemony, when there’s no indication of that at all. They don’t even want to economically challenge the US for hegemony right now, much to our disappointment. I think it’s infinitely more likely that China will eventually gain Taiwan back by some method or another (probably after a couple US aircraft carriers crash into each other and their satrapies in South Asia collapse due to lack of funding and/or internal unrest), then just basically chill. There’s no reason for China to get involved in a second Cold War when they know perfectly well how the first one ended for the USSR. They see how well the whole “world empire into which all goods flow and which produces nothing of productive value” thing is going for the US (increasingly badly) and rightfully see no reason to aspire to that position, when peaceful co-operation does genuinely seem more effective, efficient, and less likely to lead to catastrophic (and potentially nuclear) wars.

If you look through certain news sites about it (e.g. Reuters), there’s like a dozen images of fires and police before they meaningfully show crowd sizes. Expected stuff from the western media I suppose.

Extremely disappointing but I am curious what the hell he’s doing, given the growing relationship they have with Iran. If it goes any further than inviting to parades then I’m curious if Putin is angry at Iran for some reason, perhaps over Syria.

look, I’m fucking stupid okay

lmao

those four oblasts are looking awfully annexed for a “failed annexation”

It’s the classic argument path:

Liberals: “I hate [foreign government/country/corporation/person/etc] for [usually somewhat justifiable reason in a vacuum]!”

Communists: “Okay, sure, but [Western government/country/corporation/person/etc] does that same thing but much, much worse! Why aren’t you talking about them?”

Liberals: “Oh, I hate it when they do that too! We’re just talking about this particular [foreign government/country/corporation/person/etc] right now! Why are you deflecting? Are you trying to defend them? Whataboutism!”

Communists: go to their profile; literally no evidence that they have ever complained about a single Western entity in their lifetime, and may even have expressed support for Western entities that do even worse things

It’s quite racist (and antisemetic) to think that just because things look similar that they were intended to be the same thing. They’re not.

“Oh, you think that this fantasy race that has many of the anti-semitic tropes of Jewish people might in fact be a reference to Jewish people? Well, you’re the one who associates those features with Jewish people, not me. Just saying.”

This is where the moronic “maybe the curtains are just blue” reddit-tier analysis of literature gets you - completely unable to see any kind of allegory or metaphor, especially when bigots say that, no, that person in that book totally isn’t a racist caricature, it’s just a person with those traits!

If I wrote a book about a fantasy world where I used lots of sexist stereotypes about women - that they’re less intelligent; that they’re inherently subservient to men; that they “belong in the kitchen”; that they should be “barefoot and pregnant”; etc, and without ever even making a critical judgement of those traits or showed that the men in that society are bad for maintaining this status quo, then I would rightfully be called a raging sexist by people. They would probably believe I was one of those tradcath, alt-right MGTOW incel people. If I turned around and said “Uh, it says a lot about liberals that they think these traits are stereotypically true of women! Maybe they’re the real sexists, not conservatives?” then you would, hopefully (though I’m not so sure given your lack of sensitivity towards Jewish people) call me a total fucking dipshit.

Very true, so long as it begins with the most carbon-emitting people (e.g. western billionaires who own large pollution-emitting corporations) and works its way down