Victim of Communism
How many years and how fortuitous do the circumstances have to get before people stop insisting an invasion is imminent?
There’s an enormous amount of value in China and Taiwan remaining friendly trading partners. Westerners refuse to acknowledge this.
China takes Taiwan - ram prices will go through the roof
Guess who has figured out how to make cheap high end RAM already?
If China feints towards Taiwan, the Taiwanese government flinches, and the TSMC factory goes to in smoke, China becomes a top 3 provider of high end chips inside of the month.
I don’t think I’ve lived to see a president who wasn’t accused of this
Latin American dictators seem to be lining up behind him and Rubio like ducklings.
I think the next president is going to inherit an absolute rogue’s gallery of “friends”
Very important to know the difference and be clear eyed about it
All that sounds Woke to me
It’s helpful to understand what you actually have control over, rather than confusing good fortune for savvy decision making.
So much of the joke is that they won’t need to.
唯一的制胜之策就是不参与
even when you do have a choice, how often do you actually read what you’re agreeing to?
You don’t bother precisely because it’s an enormous amount of work for no discernable benefit.
What are you doing to do? Not rent a car or fly on a plane? Not own any electronics or motorized vehicles? Not rent an apartment? Not use software?
We have the option to try to vote with our wallets
Do we? What good is money if we can’t spend it?
people agree to it
Hardly an agreement if it’s predicated on access to a service, particularly if the service is a utility, a monopoly, or a cartel.
If every vendor uses uniform language as a means of mitigating their own collective liability, the agreement is functionally coerced.
As a general rule, arbitration is a great tool for multiple parties to resolve a dispute without going all the way to trial.
The issue isn’t with arbitration on it’s face, but forced arbitration as dictated by a single party.
You really can’t figure out how an institution as large and complex as the US military might have a way to learn things
It’s a matter of thinking of them. You’re got to actually employ them, too.
Is the US actually doing this? Or is institutional memory getting shredded by DOGE, et al?
Van Riper only won by using “motorcycle messengers” that traveled at the speed of light
Van Riper used units designated as civilian material/personal to fill a gap in communications, in a war game that substituted certain functions of the combat as turn-based for expediency. They weren’t moving at the speed of light. They simply existed in the scenario, were used in a clever manner, and were able to function freely because the attacking US forces ignored them.
Van Riper used a few other tricks - toggling mobile radar stations so they won’t be easy to target by enemy artillery and using speedboats to harry American Navy - which the US leadership considered “cheating”.
But then… 24 years later… all of these tricks (and more) were used by the IRGC to devestating effect.
Americans learned absolutely nothing.
Really depends on the tanks and drones in question, the soldiers involved, the commanders running the operation, the actual objectives of the mission, yada yada.
Just straight off the bat, drones aren’t great at securing supply lines or moving large volumes of cargo long distances.
you learn a lot from losing.
What do you really think the Hegseth military is going to learn from this?
It should be noted that the U.S. military loses effectively on purpose
Weird to give all this up now
Taking a lighter sentence or gambling on the death penalty? I wouldn’t call that weird at all.
The point is that Greenland isn’t safe because the US has run out of interceptor missiles to deflect Iranian SCUDs.
Most militaries don’t have a very specific kind of anti-ballistic missile defense system that uses $15M/pop interceptors that need to be fired in clusters of 3-5 to be effective per incoming target.
The Americans aren’t running out of bullets or tanks or fighter-bombers. They’re running out of these specific suites of precision anti-air defense tools. And they’re running out because they’ve spread their arsenal across four continents, in an attempt to beat Russia and Iran in an active conflict, while still holding a gun on China and Pakistan.
These weapons shortages aren’t slowing down the Rubio/Hegseth campaign to blow up fishing boats in the Carribean and close off international waters around Cuba. It doesn’t stop them from arming militias in the Philippines and Indonesia, in their crusade to enslave the native peoples of the Pacific Rim. It won’t stop them from sending more special forces in to kidnap a president from Venezuela.
This is the difference between fighting a modern war with a rival industrial power and shoving an underdeveloped, largely rural country into the metaphorical locker.
Europe doing jack all is a whole different fucking problem
It’s very hard to get someone to stick their neck out if they know it’ll get chopped off.
Europe kowtowing to American Imperialism is the root of the problem.
China and Taiwan already do an enormous amount of trade. And some of Taiwan’s biggest companies are heavily invested on the Chinese mainland.
Despite the DPP’s fervent desires, that’s not going to change. So now the only question is whether an isolationistv party can continue to hold a majority in a country with an increasingly China centric economy.