And i tried to show them that Blinken has more or less literally said that the purpose of the tiktok ban is to bring it under us control and they just don't hear it, don't see the man's own damn words, it's astonishing?!

Nearly everything is made in China or has parts or materials from China.

Actual war would shut down pipelines for medicine, consumer electronics of every kind, appliances, tools, reagents, etc

I don’t know if people realize how reliant we are on China.

I think some people unironically believe that manufacturing can be brought back to the West with the wave of a hand. Never mind that you need to build the factories. Never mind you have to retrain a generation of people who have lost institutional knowledge about manufacturing. Never mind the fact that China produces the most machine tools of any nation in the world. Just manifest it with thoughts and prayers.

Just to be clear, this one particular argument is exactly what was said before the great war.

It's never been an argument against war. It assumes rationality and intelligence in our leaders.

InshaAllah I may live to see the Chinese blockade of America. Mother of all sanctions.

Okay, at the risk of being that person, the F-35 loses in a stand up fight because it's not designed in a doctrine sense to get in stand up fights. On paper it's designed to leverage its status as a stealth fighter to avoid those stand up fights by either avoiding them entirely or get one of the most important things in a A2A engagement, getting the first missile salvo off.

So regardless on how actually good the F-35 is, having it's blueprints to have the knowledge on how to counteract it is still incredibly useful in case it happens to be very good for what it's designed to do.

Why the fuck would China want to steal the plans for the F35?

So they can build one and laugh at it

But it is known that the Chinese brain pan isn’t capable of innovation so if they have jets that are peer-competitive with the west then they obviously stole it

it's just unoriginal CIA propaganda. it's filled with a bunch of unimaginative and fairly unintelligent ppl with no morals. once you recognize how they do things you start seeing it everywhere.

A lot of things are getting me about this, but one of them is i'm saying "china is not a threat to you" and this fascist starts frothing at the mouth yelling "not a threat? China's not a threat?! Let me list all the ways Nato can kill chinese people inside china with our superior weapon systems! You still think china's not a threat? All of their weapons suck and we can murder tons of chinese! That isn't a threat to you?" And it's like jesus fucking christ what the fuck dude?

Yeah, China is a banned topic amongst my libs because it always leads to arguments. At least that means they don't casually badmouth China every conversation, because they've learned I will call them out for it.

Want me to send some transcripts? I ask "why is china a threat to you?" And they start screaming about how good nato weapons are for killing chinese and it's like... they're salivating for massacring chinese people and they somehow think that their lust for destruction constitutes a threat from china. in sone way i absolutely cannot ascribe rationality to.

I sincerely believe people who don't have extensive, face to face experience with American's do not and maybe cannot understand how fucking awful our people and leaders are, the complete dehumanization of others, the absolute drive to steal everything at any cost including the destruction of the planet. I just don't think most people think like that, and vis versa, I don't think Americans can understand taht most of the world doesn't think in zero-sum terms of absolute conquest, submission, and extraction.l

I suspect there will eventually be a time where Taiwan sees that it's coupled to falling stars in the West and seek peaceful reunification.

Given that there's been a harsh lesson of the dangers of outsourcing, it's unlikely they'll fortify the Taiwanese economy with another huge, critical industry any time soon.

Once the re-onshoring has reached a sufficient level that the West no longer NEEDS TSMC plants, the strategic value for the island plummets. The current security guarantees are pretty damn expensive, especially considering that the leading countries backing them have some crippling long-term risk factors (failing educational systems in 2025 are hardly the recipe for 10% annualized growth in 2040)

I live in Taiwan and to quickly summarize, they will never invade. It's literally a "face" thing for them. Historically, China gave 0 shits about Taiwan until the KMT losers started to claim it when they lost their war. It's funny seeing Chinese nationalists get pissed off over Lai's milquetoast statements. I would strongly prefer China adopt Russia's rhetoric style which is more FACT BASED. Call Taiwan out for funding ASPI. Call the US out for forcing Taiwan to pay protection money by buying useless arms.

I have been unable to slam that through their skulls. The us government security forces murdered a man almost on my doorstep and set off a global uprising that resulted in god knows how many deaths across the world, they made my city the most heavily occupied by military forces in the world to protect a cop, but we need to worry about china.