this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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How effective is it, I wonder?
With what happened in Hong Kong recently I imagine it can't be too effective in the short term, but at the same time the slow trickle of disinformation and whataboutism and bots online preaching their BS can have a way of radicalizing and turning people.
And it's not like the US' trackrecord doesnt make it easy to show examples of us doing wrong around the world.
Yes, very good points.
I highly recommend watching Larry Lessig's "Our democracy no longer represents the people. Here's how we fix it" speech from 2015.
He compares democracy in Hong Kong and the USA by looking at who nominates who eventually rules.
The people in China are terrible, and the people in USA are terrible. The vast majority of them are greedy, omnicidal, mass-extinction causing monsters. One is worse than the other, but both are so amazingly terrible that we should be boycotting both, and all the other dictatorships and oligarchies.
Personal anecdote, but I was in Taiwan recently for my grandmother's funeral. People (at least in Taipei) are surprisingly pro China. I've heard excuses like, "Chinese people don't fight Chinese people" or "China is threatening Taiwan to tell the US to back off, they don't actually want to do anything." Also, there has been rising skepticism towards the US due to a perceived refusal to back Ukraine by bringing them into NATO.
There is no doubt in my mind that, if China chose to go to war, that the US would defend Taiwan with boots on the ground. I see Taiwan as too strategically important for defending the liberal international world order, and letting Taiwan fall would set a precedent for the South China Sea, where China's getting its way could spell the end of freedom of navigation in a region that a third of global trade passes through.
Given current Taiwan political trends, I think many people are dissatisfied with the Tsai administration and would like to seek more business and cultural exchange with the mainland. Among the four presidential candidates, if you add up the three opposition candidates vs the incumbent DPP representative Lai, you will see that a majority oppose the DPP. However, there has been indecision as to which opposition candidate to unify behind.