I’d imagine by then some sort of peaceful reunification might’ve taken place. Military wonks I read always say that demographically China needs to act soon but I dunno, maybe in 2040 an invasion can be carried out by robots to preserve all the little emperors.
I don’t know that demographics are really gonna matter. Both Taiwan and China have roughly the same demographic problems (Taiwan’s is actually worse) so it’s not like either side would be at a disadvantage because “we don’t have enough young men to draft into the war”.
Well, Taiwan will always have that problem in the sense that their population is less than 1/50th the size of China’s. But both of them have the same problem that they have rapidly aging populations and the median age citizen is like 45 or 50 years old.
But even more to the point, any future war will not be very dependent on manpower anyway. For one thing, it will be a relatively high-tech “capital-intensive war” based on naval power and missile and drone strikes. There will be no months- or years-long grinding trench warfare on land, no pumping wave after wave of infantry into the meat grinder until there aren’t enough teenage boys in the country left to draft. If the Chinese can sail across the Strait alive and capture a port or establish a beachhead on Taiwan’s coast and can protect that port/beachhead from being turned into a crater by enemy artillery, drones, and missiles for at least a day or two, then they’ve won. Taiwan’s defense does not depend on the willingness of any very large portion of its young men to carry a rifle and die for their country.
There’s already a basic understanding of this in Taiwanese society. There’s widespread draft dodging in Taiwan and it’s not political, it’s not because any significant number of young people sympathizes with China. The attitude is just “what would be the point of me serving in the army? What possible difference could it make? If the war breaks out and we lose, it won’t be because of a lack of manpower.” There’s an understanding that the outcome of any potential war is entirely up to global political and economic factors mostly outside Taiwan’s control, and to the US-China relationship.
Taiwan will do all it can to stock up enough missiles, artillery, and drones so that they can do their part of a hypothetical US-Taiwan effort to defeat an attempted Chinese invasion. But they know “their part” of that effort is not really the most important part. What matters more is how strong China’s navy and economy are, how politically committed the US is to Taiwanese independence, and how crucial a functioning Taiwanese tech industry is to the world economy.
The woman said all the detainees, including the women, were “arm and leg shackled” the entire time, including when they landed in another country for several hours while the plane refueled.
According to the woman, officials asked the detained men to sign “a document they didn’t want to.”
“The government officials were pushing them to sign the documents and threatening them,” the woman said. “I heard them discussing the documents and they were about the men admitting they were members of TdA” or Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang whose criminal activity prompted President Donald Trump to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport its members with little-to-no due process.
[…]
“The remaining women asked, ‘What happens to us?’” the woman said in the declaration. “I was told that the president of El Salvador would not accept women. I was also told that we were going back to detention in the U.S.”
According to S.Z.F.R., she was returned to the U.S. in the middle of the night.
In a separate sworn declaration, a Nicaraguan migrant said he was also returned to the U.S. after being on one of the planes that landed in El Salvador.
“I overheard a Salvadoran official tell an ICE officer that the Salvadoran government would not detain someone from another Central American country because of the conflict it would cause,” the Nicaraguan man said in the declaration.
“I also heard him say that they would not receive the females because the prison was not for females and females were not mentioned in the agreement,” he said.
gilgamesh is the bigger man than me because if a snake ate my flower that grants immortality that i wanted to use for myself i wouldn’t touchingly come to peace with my own mortality and the mortal legacy i leave behind. i would be like if there was a flower that could make me immortal maybe there are other ways
I am genuinely shocked at how little the second Trump administration has to offer other than rage and destruction.
There’s just a list of enemies who aren’t going to be allowed to get away with it anymore and that’s literally it, they can’t articulate anything else that they want or value.
Also most of their official communications read like unhinged Facebook rants from your grandpa.
the innumerable butterfly effects exerted on human relations by the fact that in text messages you have to think of something to talk about or you essentially disappear, whereas if you lie your head on someone’s shoulder you can’t disappear
Sometimes it does feel weird talking about NSFW bans because you either see it discussed in the sense of “NSFW bans are bad because the systems just randomly shoot innocent queer people!” or “The NSFW was bad (supposedly) but all the weirdos who jacked off to porn went away so things are nicer now” and its like
man that’s great meanwhile I don’t think Mastercard should decide if I pay someone to draw Cynthia from Pokemon being brainwashed or not.
firm believe that not everything happens for a reason, sometimes things are just cruel. and they shouldn’t have happened and it’s not supposed to be a lesson because we never deserved such thing.
hm some people in my inbox got really mad at this specifically. nothing you can say will convince me that some of the pain and suffering we go through is our “fate” no, it isn’t
max1461
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