> China doesn't want Taiwan for TSMC. They want Taiwan because they see them as a rebellious province. In their mind, the Chinese civil war never ended and that island is the last bastion of the Kuomintang. One way I've heard it described in a way that is easier for Americans to understand is; Imagine at the end of the American Civil War, a confederate army retreated to an island like Cuba or Hawaii, they took it over and have been calling themselves the real America ever since.

We know this version is closer to the truth because Mao tried to take Taiwan

Its an imperfect analogy but I'm trying to illustrate an idea in a more relatable way. If you pick at the details it will fall apart.

I'm trying to help further the analogy by pointing out the fact decades prior to TSMC existing Mao Zedong used forced in an attempt to take Taiwan.

This to me is the correct answer. A lot of times in war it's not about logic or reason, it's about emotion and feeling. Throughout Chinese history, a leader is only "legitimate" or dare I say, have the Mandate from Heaven, when they have unified the country under one banner. It is a stain on their authority that there is "rouge" state outside the CCP's control. They will do anything to unify their country for national pride.

"rouge" means red

"rogue" means rascal

In context, both kinda work.

I guess KMT had red on its flag, but definitely wasn’t communist

Sometimes, we know just the word we want. And we know how to spell it. But we fat-finger it. Or our fingers trip. Or our brains just get the finger-tapping order a bit off.

None of these things requires an education in using the incorrect word. “Irregardless”? Give ‘em what for! Their/there/they’re? A nice reminder. Swapped a couple letters is a plausible explanation? A simple correct spelling followed with a * would suffice.

rogue*

Yeah I wasn't trying to be insulting or anything. It's a common mistake and I haven't seen a clever mnemonic for it yet.

How about:

Rouge is red, you rascally rogue!

No, no - don't bother, I'll see myself out :)

Would hearing them pronounced properly help? The only thing that sounds similar is the first letter.

Jesus, you realize people just mistype things sometimes? It really annoys me when people feel like they have to come in and correct others this way, it's so condescending.

Personally, I'm grateful to be corrected on a casual and anonymous forum if it saves me from making the same mistake on a formal document, condescension notwithstanding. My response to grammar cops is either, "Thank you!" if it was due to my ignorance, or "Oops, damned autocorrect/typo/ brain fart," if a lack of attention was at fault.

This specific one is so common, are people actually mistyping or getting autocompleted? flashbacks to Rouge One

And the worst are those people that make people feel bad for correcting spelling mistakes!

There are also many people that continue to make easily correctable mistakes because they don't know any better.

I’m not sure I agree, Xi already proofed that he’s a great political mind by his actions with in the inner politics of his own party. I think he’ll treat the war with Taiwan rationally as the political tool that it can be. When the set of constraints and what he has to gain will be in his favor he may do it. I’m not an expert but I honestly can’t not see him risk what he built for so many years for that amount of potential destabilization.

This is an interesting theory. Under this line of political thinking, it’s just as important that the U.S. project that they would come to help if the aim is political stability or maintaining the status quo.

Yes, communist nations especially need to protect the narrative that their way is the best way. Having the Taiwanese sitting off shore thriving outside of party control is embarrassing.

I'm so happy to live in the US, a country without ceaseless propaganda about how our way of life is the best and our democracy is the best and our freedom is the only way and there is no alternative to unfettered capitalism.

I mean on one hand we can do better but on the other, last I checked there's not been a time where citizens were hauled off to prison in the US for disparaging capitalism. Closest we came was the red scare in the 50s and that was tame in comparison to what Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Castro and Ho Chi Minh and (do I need to keep going?) put their subjects through.

>there's not been a time where citizens were hauled off to prison in the US for disparaging capitalism

There is a time where American citizens are hauled off to prison to do slave labour. That time is right now.

For disparaging capitalism?

In many cases, for nothing at all! Fabricated charges are extremely common in the American southeast.

Extraordinary claims require evidence.

Again, the US is not perfect. This doesn't invalidate my point in the top level comment.

The entire justification for Musk's DOGE & MAGA is that the status quo in the USA is not good and needs to be torn down.

From my observation, the West suffers from the opposite of Chinese or Indian nationalism, in excessive self-flagellation to the point of self-destructiveness. Critical Theory, Identity Politics, Woke, Anti-Woke, Postmodernism (both left & right), etc would be immediately crushed in those nationalist societies, they are very much a unique artifact of the Western order.

It's really a result of the US being so heterogeneous. One side's status quo is the other side's in-progress radical reinvention. The pendulum is always on the move. You have to take the average position on a longer time scale to figure out where the country stands.

On a daily basis here on HN, capitalists and libertarians and others with the SV mindset work hard to protect the narrative that their way is the best way.

On the other hand, historically speaking, the various dynasties of China had been able tightly control markets when it was one of the jewels of the Silk Roads.

I prefer a free market myself, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking there isn't a narrative being pushed by people who profit off of free markets or capitalism.

There have been many periods of Chinese history with multiple competing dynasties, including transition periods. The Later Jin, for example, who became the Qing, took three generations to defeat the Ming dynasty; and they had been around since before the Song dynasty.

THe lands and territories also wax and waned throughout the centuries. A map of the territories controlled by the Qing at its peak is vastly different than that of the Tang or that of the Han dynasty.

This is more like the game of weiqi than it is the game of chess. The endgame isn't necessarily a decisive action with a win condition, but more of an accumulation.

It's worse than a rebellious province. It's a more successful rebellious province.

For China, they hold up all of these technical accomplishments and quality of life improvements they have made under their one party system. But now over here is Taiwan that never bought in and is doing even better! It undercuts all of their messaging.

If the communist party could wave a magic wand, they would take Taiwan and not just extract wealth, but also pump out a lot of propaganda that says Taiwan is doing even better under party rule and Western-style democracy was holding it back.

Hong Kong is a test case for what would happen to Taiwan (but with less shooting).

the US made China it's manufacturing arm and now the US wants to take that back? Kind of late. If China invades Taiwan, the US is to blame. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket.

And China made the US its source of income. The relationship works both ways. The consumer market in China is a disaster.

Hard to have a strong consumer market with 17%+ youth unemployment.

And the reason there's 17%+ youth unemployment is because there's a weak consumer market!

This is what happens when you structure your entire economy around exports: artificially weak currency, capital controls, artificially low wages, etc.

Well also the 50%+ savings rate for a long time (down to the 30%s maybe ten years ago, then back up for awhile)

If everyone in the US saved 30-50%+ it would not go well for our consumer market either.

Absolutely.

> If China invades Taiwan, the US is to blame

That's completely deranged. The CCP has intended to take Taiwan from day one. Before they even managed to drive the ROC out of mainland China they intended to take all of China, including Taiwan, and their failure to take Taiwan has never been something they were satisfied with.

Manufacturing has nothing to do with it. America only has anything to do with it insofar as they have helped Taiwan resist the CCP so far.

Yeah that weird logic is all too common recently. I'll paraphrase:

The ravenous wild beast is pounding at your door. The only thing standing before you and certain death is your front door that needs urgent repairs. You call your landlord begging for help but they say it's not their problem.

The beast smashes through the door and eats you up.

Some would agree that the landlord is to blame because of inaction. Some would argue instead that the landlord is not responsible for your problem. You should have not provoked the beast. Or fixed the door yourself. Or paid more rent etc.

This framing only works of the wild beast has no agency at all. It's by definition wild and we all know what it will do and it can't help itself but being a man eating wild beast. It has no moral obligation to not be a man eating beast.

But by applying this framing to Russia and CCP you're dehumanizing them. You're assuming that they are so evil they cannot possibly have any moral obligations and so the burden falls on third parties (or worse, you, their victim!) if they attack you!

> the US made China it's (sic) manufacturing arm..

i think it's more accurate to give credit where earned: one thing the CCP did smart was _win_ foreign business (US Apple and Dell etc) by building the rentable factory system with deep dependable supply chains directly adjacent. That was uniquely able , globally, to compete and win business.

The US didn't seemingly even think to do that, perhaps distracted by the Cold War?

US tariffs on China are worse for Taiwanese independence than TSMC building fabs in the US.

Pray elaborate! What is the mechanism of that, in your opinion?

(Not saying that the US policy is decent here, or anywhere else, under the current administration.)

The trade war reduces China's dependence on the US, whether through sales or holding US treasuries. This means China can invade Taiwan with less risk of economic sanctions. That said, without TSMC, and especially with the current administration, I doubt the US would step in.

> they hold up all of these technical accomplishments and quality of life improvements they have made under their one party system. But now over here is Taiwan that never bought in

Never bought in to one party rule huh? It seems like people forgot about the 38 years of martial law:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_Taiwan

This isn’t an abstract comparison. CCP mostly overthrew the existing government and Taiwan was a continuation of that existing system. So for that system be quantifiably better is an issue independent of things like elections.

It’s a clear demonstration that failures like the great Chinese famine simply wouldn’t have happened if the communist revolution failed. That’s a significant political issue, because people from that time period are still alive so they can’t simply erase the memory of it.

Even so, this doesn't change the fact that anything that Maoists could take credit for was done better by the non-ideologue dictator next door.

But the fact that the martial law came to an end largely democratically is good evidence that both democratic reform was easier outside of the CCCP, and that the Taiwanese single party rule was probably not as totalitarian as some people claim.

> It's worse than a rebellious province. It's a more successful rebellious province.

That statement just made me LOL. In what dimension other than foreign investment do you see Taiwan as more successful than China? In 2025, it's pretty clear that China has self sovereignty, is the world's factory, leads in BRICS, and isn't subject to the US empire.

Per capita income? Percentage of people with education/clean running water/out of poverty? Things that actually matter to the daily lives of people?

Yes, China has lifted millions of people out of poverty over the last few decades, but the median person in China is still vastly worse off than the median person in Taiwan.

Chinese people know that Taiwan is only what it is because of money pumped by the US into the little island. It has always been the strategy of Western countries to support little states in the vicinity of enemy countries as a way to contain and divide the nation.

So when people in the US buy stuff and it's made in (mainland) China is that not considered money being "pumped by the US?"

U.S. Imports from Mainland China: $438.9 billion

U.S. Imports from Taiwan: $116.3 billion

Please explain how your logic survives this basic analysis.

I mean, we are also going to brush past the infrastructure development done by the Japanese when they occupied Taiwan during the Meiji period that made it a valuable island to begin with. Or that Taiwan did a better, more equitable and less violent version of land reform than Mao did. And that Taiwan never expelled academics and didn't attempt the Great Leap Forward.

If so, it would sound like the Chinese people are being mislead about the economic history of the island they supposedly claim.

North Korea has self sovereignty, space rockets, nuclear weapons, and sends its troops to a war overseas to project its power!

South Korea is just much more successful at putting bread (and many other foods) on the tables of its citizens. It is also more advanced technologically, and, curiously, has a working democratic government instead of a hereditary single-party rule.

Taiwan is 3x more prosperous per capita. PRC just has a lot more people.

So Norway and maybe Monaco are more successful than the US?

there are multiple success metrics

also, to answer the original question: yes they are

well that really depends on the metric right?

do you care about quality of life? literacy? about social justice? about women's rights?

or about who has the most richest billionaires or the strongest military?

or who has the best american football teams?

Not every people care about the same things. Some people would rather live in a country that treats others as shit, and take pride in that and absolutely don't see the point why other other countries have some better metrics on some they may consider useless stuff like education.

EDIT: I mean, I know it sounds silly, but failure to understand that there are so many people who literally don't give a shit about why education matters, or why empathy matters is the reason we are in this situation. We took for granted that there are universal values, and organized our societies around goals oriented towards those universal values and in the meantime we got this resentment brewing in part of the population that got exploited by populist forces

In improving the lives of their people?

Yes, absolutely.

Norway, probably yes. Their population is more educated, and their civil society much better functioning than the UK. Their society is less unequal and (I’m pretty sure) their quality of life figures would be higher. Monaco is just a tax wheeze and playground.

Norway's GDP is driven by their nationalized petroleum business (20 - 35% of GDP)

I mean, it depends on what you mean by "rebellious". There is a lot more nuance than that. From the Kuomingtang's perspective, the CCP are the rebels.

One piece of history is that after Sun Yat-Sen died, his successor Chang Kai Shek purged the Kuomingtang of any socialist, community, and otherwise left-leaning members of their assembly. When some members escaped the purge, this sowed the seeds of the CCP that came to fruit after fighting off the Japanese during WWII.

When the Kuomingtang retreated to Taiwan, it was not run as a republic or a democratic society. Martial law ended in 1987 and a second political party did not appear until it was illegally formed in 1986. The Kuomingtang and its coalition continues to identify with China -- the civilization -- whereas the DDP-lead coalition is done with that and wants their own national identity of Taiwain.

You speak as if you have some special insider knowledge.

I personally would guess that the 9-dash line also has something to do with them wanting to take Taiwan.

Insider knowledge? Not really, unless you count asking actual chinese and taiwanese nationals what they think about it instead of assuming their world view is the same as my own.

Thanks for clarification. Do you believe nationals of these countries (or any country in the world) know what the CCP actually wants i.e. its true goals?

I think their true goals are pretty transparent, but the specifics of how they plan to achieve them are more secretive.

The CCP primarily wants to gain power. Political, economic, and social. The levels of ambition probably vary by individuals inside the party, but generally involves a uniform level of control across all regions of China (including Taiwan from their point of view), and enough global power to give them a free hand in East Asia.

Chinese nationals may put more emphasis on increasing prosperity. Taiwan nationals may put more emphasis on strict control and global power. Individual reactions largely vary. Out of both groups, limitations on personal liberties cause the harshest criticism of CCP, with the one child policy almost universally seen unfavorably.

> They want Taiwan because they see them as a rebellious province

Is it really this, or is that just cover for it being in the first island chain?

It is really that. It's part of their country (according to them).

Yes except it’s not as if they went to Cuba, it’s more like the confederates fled to Long Island.

You are unfortunately not understanding how you are being deceived. Confederate in this store didn't flee. They won and there really is the Real America on Long Island.

I won’t push back on that. I wasn’t trying to assign one side as victor or morally superior by comparing the Taiwanese to the Confederates.

> Imagine at the end of the American Civil War, a confederate army retreated to an island like Cuba or Hawaii, they took it over and have been calling themselves the real America ever since.

In reality while the confederate states were part of the United States, the Republic of China (Taiwan) was never part of the Peoples Republic of China (communist China), its the reverse.

Analogies don’t have to be 100% perfect. The Confederate analogy gets the point across just fine.

It only deceives.

Not really, because it likes to the conflate the negative connotations of the confederates and their slavery to the ROC, when it's more like if the Union Government was in a civil war with the Confederates with the Union controlling most of the land, but then the British/Mexicans/Canadians, etc invaded and the Union broke it's back holding that back, then when the invaders finally retreated the Confederates were able to reorganize and defeat the Union, so then it would be the Union that retreat to Long Island or something.

Instead of doing blind analogies, it would be alot better just to directly describe the events of what occurred, but that's going to be inconvenient for the CCP and their supporters to introduce some nuance into the conversations.

> a confederate army retreated to an island like Cuba

No, it's the other way around. Imagine that the South is victorious, and the last remnants of the North forces remain in, say, Long Island, calling themselves the original American Republic, claiming their lineage from the revolution of 1776. Technically they would be!

The Taiwanese regime is a remnant of the original Republic of China established in 1914, and Kuomintang is one of the original democratic parties of that republic. The Communist regime are the "rebels" of the Communist revolution of 1949. But, as they say, a rebellion can never succeed, because if it does, it's called another way.

> They want Taiwan because they see them as a rebellious province.

We can argue about what the exact desire is - there's 100M people in the CCP - we'll probably never know an exact answer.

The important thing is - China is willing to spend a LOT more money to take Taiwan than it is economically worth.

So this idea that 1) China wants Taiwan for chips, 2) War would cost more than chips, 3) Therefore, Taiwan is logically safe - is a fallacy.

The war in Ukraine is never going to pay off for Russia. They're not fighting that war to make money. They're fighting that war because a bunch of dick bags got together in a room and decided it was expedient for them for millions of people to lose their lives.

There's one big strategic thing the Ukraine war offers Russia and that's a nice balmy port and (if they'd managed the original 3 days to Kiev) removing a potential invasion front on it's juicy underbelly.

The only reason Russia is against NATO is the article 5 - it makes attacking peaceful nations more expensive and risky for them. That is all there is.

> The only reason Russia is against NATO is the article 5

Nah, they are also against Article 4 (regional security), which while not as concrete of a commitment, applies much more broadly, and which leads to things like the current support for Ukraine, not just Article 5 (mutual defense), which only affects hem when they would want to target a NATO member’s territory in and in a couple areas close to Europe or North America.

What port? They already have Crimea (since 2014) and the Black Sea isn't really 'balmy.'

It doesn't freeze which by Russian standards is balmy, an accidental shiboleth that trips up Russians pretending to be American online is they'll mention unprompted "warm water port" as a notable feature.[0]

This invasion is partially an extension of their goal of securing Crimea with a more solid land connection rather than the more easily interrupted bridge connection that was their only connection until they pushed up to their current lines in Eastern Ukraine.

[0] eg: https://preview.redd.it/least-obvious-russian-tweeting-about...

> an accidental shiboleth that trips up Russians pretending to be American online is they'll mention unprompted "warm water port" as a notable feature.

That's just reddit paranoia. "Warm water port" is a term of art which means a port that stays free of ice. It's not about comfortable swimming temperatures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port#Warm-water_port

Reddit just uses this as an excuse to say that anybody discussing reasons Russia might have started this war, other than "they're being evil for the sake of being evil, just like in my manchild Marvel/Harry Potter/Star Wars movies" is secretly a Russian bot, because even if you know such reasons might exist your willingness to discuss them, or unwillingness to go along with a simplistic groupthink narrative, is something which must be suppressed and punished. The cause is more important than your desire to have an honest conversation!

Anyway, this kind of language policing and "shibboleth" crap lame slacktivism. Go enlist. Ooh, that's probably a shibboleth too. Beep boop, Imma robot because I don't walk in lockstep with Reddit!

No it's when it's used in contexts outside Russia, note I've been saying it but I'd be a shitty Russia astroturf account to be calling myself out too..., people can say warm water ports. It's mentioning it like it's a notable feature elsewhere in the world that's the telltale sign because it's pretty much only a notable feature for Russia because their other ports freeze in the winter. It's not a notable feature of Texas that it's ports are warm water ports. Every US port except small ones in Alaska that serve the fishing industry are warm water and the same is true of most of the world where all non land locked countries have at least a few lovely balmy ports to choose from.

It isn't paranoia because for most counties all of their ports are "warm water" and only Russia has an obsession with "warm water ports" and is likely to use this phrase. For most countries it is like saying "car with wheels" it is just redundant.

It's also well known that Russia has a lot of fake accounts on social media sites.

So many.

>"they're being evil for the sake of being evil, just like in my manchild Marvel/Harry Potter/Star Wars movies"

The amount of times I've seen people on reddit reply to (presumably real) Ukrainian redditors with a show of solidarity composed of some slogan from a Hollywood movie or to try to explain/compare their situation in Ukraine / on the world stage to an Avengers movie is honestly baffling. I genuinely can't believe that people live framing their existence and perspective of the world without the context of cheap power fantasy fiction. It's so cringingly out of touch that I'm almost far more willing to believe people talking like that are the Russian bots people are constantly harping on about trying to make Western public support look bad.

I use China in this context to mean the Chinese state which given their system is interchangeable with the CCP. So you can subv in CCP in my statement or even Xi if you want since he is unequivocally running things.

In the case of Ukraine, Russia's (read: the russian government which is synonymous with Putin who dictator in all but name) motivation is somewhat similar. But they don't see Ukraine as a rebellious province. They see it as a vassal state as they do all of the other former SSRs and members of the Warsaw pact. Putin and his nationalist group have a very old world view of things and a very specific concept of what their rightful sphere of influence is and what exactly it means to control it. This isn't even unique to them. After securing power, the Bolsheviks quickly attempted to bring former Russian imperial possessions back under their control. That included Ukraine, Poland and Finland. Poland and Finland were able to secure their independence, Ukraine was less fortunate. For all the talk of anti imperialism, they were just as imperial as their predecessors. So this is just russians being russians and an inability for their world view to evolve past the 19th century.

> "They're fighting that war because a bunch of dick bags got together in a room and decided it was expedient for them for millions of people to lose their lives."

Pretty sure Putin needs to start wars, conflicts, terrorist events to maintain political stability. That is to say, he can't lose power because they'll kill him.

> They're not fighting that war to make money. They're fighting that war because a bunch of dick bags got together in a room and decided it was expedient for them for millions of people to lose their lives.

Please stop saying things like this. It doesn't help anyone.

Honest question: are you asking them to not express this idea? Or that they used uncouth language?

To not express the idea.

What's wrong about this idea? Russia is actively sending men from provinces to die to lower the possibility of secession of those provinces. It might have been one of the main goals of the war.

China is basically circled on all sides by US-allied forces and with Taiwan being one it really limits their force projection capabilities in the Pacific. That's the actual pragmatic reason, not some ideology thing, imho

Everyone wants to think there is always a "pragmatic" reason. It helps to think that there is always a rational cause for everything, every decision that is made. And we map cynicism about our own politicians onto everyone else, thinking that surely they don't mean what they say either.

There's not always a rational reason. Ideology is a real thing. World leaders do not always act in "rational" ways, nor are they always playing 4D chess.

Bingo! Trying to assign reason to emotional decisions is like reading tea leaves. And we're all subject to these emotional forces.

On the contrary - i don't see the value in playing couch psychoanalyst when there's a perfectly legit realpolitik reason available.

> Imagine at the end of the American Civil War, a confederate army retreated to an island like Cuba or Hawaii, they took it over and have been calling themselves the real America ever since.

I mean, for a decade or so, try to re-unify, sure. But 75 years later, with slavery abolished and a completely different governmental system? I'd like to think most Americans would have accepted the New Normal by that point. If anything this tells me how irrational Chinese and Russian attitudes are.

Taiwan's elites are Japanese, and they are universally despised on the mainland.

There is no “reason” or justification. The decision to invade has already been made, all these explanations exist for the sole purpose of making it easier to do nothing about it when the invasion happens. Chinese people feel they way they are taught to feel.

China's fundamental argument distilled to its most pure form is "we are strong enough to do this, what are you going to do about it?" A world where the strong do whatever they want because no one can do anything about it is not a world anyone should want to live in.

All of the Chinese expressing these opinions from a position of safety can’t seem to put themselves in the shoes of Taiwanese. The inhumanity of an invasion is being hidden by high level ideas like history.

The American civil war comparison fails. No American sits and thinks about invading the UK to “complete” our revolution and that’s much closer than your scenario.

> A world where the strong do whatever they want because no one can do anything about it is not a world anyone should want to live in.

You're fooling yourself if you don't think we live in, and have always lived in, this world.

Citizens like me, living in a relatively just society, can tell ourselves the world is not like this because of our daily lives, but the reality is if some group of people even stronger doesn't care, the strong get to do what they want.

I thought the whole Russia/Ukraine thing snapped people back into the reality of the world we live in, and I'm quite amazed that there are still people that don't realize this is how the world is, and always will, be.

So we're back to promoting slavery then? Because that is a thing that happens if we just allow the strong to do whatever they want. It seems to me that this kind of cynical "realistic" pessimism is part of what fuels totalitarianism. Russia has succeeded in falling back into this because their citizens believes that might makes right.

But might isn't one thing. Might arises from complex underlying relationships between people and it arises from what people believe in. Might makes right yes. But what people believe is right also makes might. When people stop believing that it's impossible to stand up to totalitarianism - that's when it wins.

One can recognize (correctly or not) something being true without wanting it to be true.

I find this particular "You shall believe that things are how we think they ought to be" conformism quite baffling - it's obviously wrong.

I mean reality have aspects of both. We have the capacity to make things how they ought to be, to an extent - especially if we agree on what ought to be. This discussion boils down to how far we think that extent goes.

I think we tend to both under and over estimate how far that goes. We underperform when we lack the means to coordinate. When we align and stay motivated we can push ought to to is pretty damn far.

> You're fooling yourself if you don't think we live in, and have always lived in, this world.

While I agree it is different now because everything is in the spotlight and you can’t get away with things like you used to. So not sure I would go as far as “always will be”.

Also not sure there is a need to say how amazed one is about one other’s opinion, since it belittles it.

Freedom is a function of solidarity -- each man's willingness to sacrifice for his fellow man. If some are willing to make the sacrifice you can be free. If none are willing to make the sacrifice then all will die a slave. Unfortunately this means that some of the architects of a world we want to live in won't get to experience it.

Don't think you can single out China here.

Brexit, electing Trump a 2nd time, Iraq war, Israeli occupation of Palestine. Pick your own examples

Weve always been a world where propaganda wins and the strong ruling class do what they want, we should drop the pretense and hypocrisy that it was ever any other way.

Are you implying Brexit and Trumps second term is due to propaganda?

Certainly these were due to social media manipulation

In my opinion it is a populist movement, and we should accept this hard truth. Trump is in office due to "manipulation" to the same extent that any speech is manipulation. He is a salesman and has sold his vision for the country successfully.

Is that not definitionally propaganda?

The downvotes for your comment are quite telling of the demographic of Hacker News. But even leftwing media are admitting the Democrat party has a problem:

https://newrepublic.com/article/192078/democrats-become-work...

"We cannot solve this problem without an honest assessment of who we are. How we see ourselves as the Democratic Party—the party of the people, the party of the working class and the middle class—no longer matches up with what most voters think."

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/01/21/eric_adam...

The Democratic Party "Left Me And It Left Working Class People"

https://www.thirdway.org/report/renewing-the-democratic-part...

"For the first time since the mid-20th century, the central fault line of American politics is neither race and ethnicity nor gender but rather class, determined by educational attainment. But in the intervening half century, the parties have switched places. Republicans once commanded a majority among college-educated voters while Democrats were the party of the working class. Now the majority of college educated voters support Democrats"

But I suppose there's too many well-off, well-educated, white collar elites on this site who aren't willing to face the reality that their politics have been ruining blue collar lives for decades, and the political backlash has finally hit a crescendo powerful enough to wash over Washington. So I guess we blame it all on disinformation campaigns?

https://www.aaiusa.org/library/disinformation-campaigns-aime...:

Almost daily, Michigan’s Arab Americans voters in precincts of heavy concentration are receiving glossy mailings with messages like: “Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff: Unwavering Support for Israel” or “Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff, the ultimate pro-Israel power couple” or “Kamala Harris and Elissa Slotkin [the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan]: The proven team we can trust to stand up for the Jewish community.” And targeted video messaging on social media sites saying things like “Kamala Harris stands with Israel.”

Meanwhile, in areas of Pennsylvania where there are heavy concentrations of Jewish voters, homes are receiving messages like: “Kamala Harris will embolden anti-Semites” or “Donald Trump always stands up for the Jewish people.” And targeted video messaging on social media platforms saying “Kamala Harris will not be silent about human suffering in Gaza” or “Two-faced Kamala Harris: Standing with Palestine and not our ally, Israel.”

These mailings and social media posts are paid for by a dark money group, Future Coalition PAC. Researchers have identified that one of the major donors to this group is Elon Musk, the principal owner of X and a strong supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential bid.

UK Parliament has found substantial interference from Russia UK politics - including interfering in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum

https://www.dw.com/en/russia-report-damning-of-uk-government...

i honestly cannot believe an intelligent person can just boil it all down to this and be satisfied with it.

There's a reason for everything, whether you like the reason or not.

its a world of occasional regional nuclear exchange

Everything has a reason. Xi didn't make that decision for the lulz. The reason is they see Taiwan as part of China and in active rebellion. Simple as. That doesn't make it right, but that explains why they are doing it. You don't have to accept that but that's what actual chinese and taiwanese nationals have told me and I'm inclined to believe them.

> and have been calling themselves the real America ever since

This isn't really the situation with Taiwan though. The main reason Taiwan is still officially called the Republic of China is because changing that will likely trigger the PRC.

> Imagine at the end of the American Civil War, a confederate army retreated to an island like Cuba or Hawaii, they took it over and have been calling themselves the real America ever since.

It is a great analogy. However, in this case, that small island was taken by China even before the American Civil War. To put it into perspective, it was during the time when Isaac Newton was working on gravity.

And one episode of Open To Debate [1] argued Taiwan is the worst possible place to confront China:

> I used to give battlefield tours at Gettysburg, an extraordinary place. ... a certain cavalry General John Buford ... surveyed the ground and he knew right away he looked at the hills and said, this is good ground, ... The geography favors us. Well, I want to tell you folks, he saved our country that with that appreciation. But this is the opposite. This is bad ground. This is the worst possible place to confront China

[1] https://opentodebate.org/debate/taiwan-indefensible-0/

> I'm not saying China is right in wanting to invade Taiwan.

I find it very surprising that a lot of otherwise intelligent people have trouble with telling endorsement from explanation. Like when I tell people about some political (or not) figure's opinions and worldviews, I'm somehow defending them. I'm not! I'm doing it exactly to

> understand your potential adversaries' motivations

Happens all the time on the internet.