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Respectfully Smokin,
As you well know, the Chinese cheat, lie and steal because they have no
legacy of creativity and innovation.
I'm asserting that these former habits are insufficient for them to ever
achieve global dominance.
I wish I shared your optimism. Take a good, long, look at our Government, from DC to many of the States, to the obstructionist policies which still exist, to the incredible push to send our industry down artificially lucrative but less effective paths, and despite that legacy of creativity and innovation, this nation is so busy squelching working legacy systems for dubious replacements for political reasons antithetical to our very core beliefs. We are, indeed, in trouble.
The Chinese may be hampered by their totalitarianism, but they are having an effect. Whether it be by building islands in the South China Sea and arming them (without court injunctions from all the people who would stridently object to throwing rocks overboard), to the elimination of political dissent at home. Had we not been so encumbered by lawsuits and court actions and injunctions to make sure our military bought addadictome/whackitofame operations instead of ammunition, we could have done so much more--at least bought a couple of rounds for the gee whiz cannon on the Zumwalt. The Chinese have few constraints, certainly none imposed by special interest groups, and not even through international accords while we are tying our arms hind our back with nonsense.
We have more aggrieved groups, who I am quite sure have been convinced their petty matters matter, who can't even seem to figure out how or what to f**k, dusted with drifts of snowflakes who curl up in a ball like fainting goats at the first loud noise.
Who is becoming ineffective? Take another look as our greatest generation and those who grew up in its shadow are dying out with damned few to replace them, and tell me which nation is in serious trouble and which is just beginning to assert its hegemony.
Consider the enemies of this Republic have succeeded, often by popular demand, in turning two generations of our people into a divided, self centered, pu$$y-hat-wearing protest mob who have serious grievances but who have never missed more than one or two meals in a row, who have ever had a choice of a warm bed and a roof over their head who consider themselves downtrodden--the world's fattest poor people, the most mollycoddled of all--and by decree, for any less is to make them wards of the state and their parents criminals.
Now, that isn't all of America, by any measure, but FFS, not knowing what line to get in at the fricking bathroom? I doubt our enemies are so encumbered. Instead of tolerating antifa, they drive the tracks over the people who protest them and finish the job, when necessary, for under a buck. --not that I advocate that extreme solution--but I recognize that whatever I think of it, it is effective. For those who are behind that national agenda, there is no quibbling over the fate of the three winged butterfly, they'll pick them out of the mud on the tracks after moving forward, if there is time. If not, oh well.
It isn't that our troops aren't the world's best, their equipment the same, it is that the ignorant, the whiners, pantywaists and hand wringers back home will be the ones without the stomach or spine for a fight, who will fold their protest placards and slink away or chant against those who stand to form that ever thinner line between them and the barbaric methods of those we face. "Toxic masculinity", indeed.
Those who sought their '60s redux have it (Pick a cause, any cause, they'll find a protest mob, or rent one) and I am concerned that our next war will be a flashback to another war lost, not on the battlefield of some distant land, but on the corners of fashionable streets right here at home. Maybe we already have that, with troops in the field and jihadis and Communists in Congress.
The Chinese aren't conflicted on that account, their Capitalism is just a means to an end--a gathering of resources, technology, manufacturing capability, and know how. They wait for the right time, train people to build it, fix it, and use it, and build their forces. The world sees the face they want the world to see, and very little else. They have the people and the resources to field that slightly lower tech in overwhelming numbers, and can out breed any people on the planet, should they choose to do so.
If we casually dismiss any threat because of our 'innovative superiority', we are more the fools, because there are those spies and traitors collecting that tech, not to mention an army of hackers, who are after that technology to transfer it to others who won't quibble about doing what they think needs to be done.
But there is still time to recognize the threat. Rome wasn't burned in a day.
