President Biden will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in person for the first time in a year during a summit in San Francisco. It will be the second in-person meeting between the two leaders since Biden took office.
I mean... this is probably good for the world as a whole since China is the new "near peer" bogeyman for the most funded standing military on the planet.
But... unless we can get some guarantees for Taiwan... this is not good. And Pooh Bear ain't going to be backing off of his strong man military invasion to bleed his entire military dry.
The guarantee for Taiwan is that it's in neither country's best interest to start a hot war with the other.
As long as Taiwan is integral to US national security (it is because of their chips,) the US will defend Taiwan as though it were its own.
To think otherwise is asinine, and I challenge you to wait until China invades Taiwan while it's still a vital asset to US national security and then you can tell me I'm wrong.
You're going to be waiting a long time, just saying.
And what might make Taiwan no longer "integral to US national security"? Having an even stronger military ally in the region.
And what keeps those semiconductors "safe"? The knowledge that this won't be a clean war. This won't be landing troops in an airport after targeted bombardments and then decapitating leadership. Russia tried that and it led to their semi-competent soldiers being killed and the current slog of a war.
And you know what was a big factor in that? Western military and intelligence support.
Without that? Quick invasion and then an insurgency. But China Don't Care about "the optics". Just look at their ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs, their subjugation of Hong Kong, or even how thoroughly they have (internally) covered up why Tiananmen Square is a touch subject. And even externally, people know that more for "ha ha, China covered it up" rather than WHY there was a massacre in the first place. Insurgencies don't last long under those conditions.
And if the US has "strong military ties" with China? That more or less means we have to pick and choose who we actually support in the event of a war. And it probably won't be the smaller military. Otherwise we would have told Pooh to go fuck himself and not bothered with this.
Can't expect public guarantees but if Xi doesn't actually believe his saber rattling bs, he might give some private commitment. If anything like this happens, we'd hear it in the rhetoric of Biden and his administration vis-a-vis Taiwan.
China has consistently said it will only invade Taiwan if it declares independence. Taiwan can only do that if it rewrites its own constitution. Western media never bother with details like that though, it diminishes China's bogeyman credentials.
Go read those mod logs when the lemmy.world admins are pushing a new policy. And remember that, when banning someone, all of their posts and comments are deleted. Leaving an incredibly one sided narrative that usually can't even be bothered to list a real reason for banning.
That is just the nature of online message boards. But it is REALLY funny that you are talking about how online records, controlled by the leadership, are proof that the leadership are good and fair. In a thread about the CCP.
If a user is banned from the instance, all of their content is deleted/hidden if the appropriate box is ticked. To no surprise, the lemmy.world modlog is completely broken and I can't get it to load any bans., But https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/557 is the feature request/MR that provides this capability to all instances.
So let's say somebody says something that one of the admins doesn't like. They ban the user for some "valid" reason and then automatically delete all evidence. So a pedo being banned for being a pedo? Good. Someone who questioned a policy change being called a pedo and being banned? Hope the wayback machine scraped the site, I guess.
Lemmy is nice because it is the vibe of the old vbulletin and pbboards of the 00s. It also has almost every single one of the problems of those boards.
But, again, it is just hilarious to see this being argued in a thread about the CCP. "Its cool. All the online records say this was justified and that so and so never existed"
But said deletions bypass the modlog entirely. I don't know what happens to previous content that was in the modlog for other reasons, but the offending comment will never even enter it.