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You seem to have been correct about this incident.
Is there some reason I should go with the hypothesis "Dean knows what the CPC is up to better than I do" rather than the hypothesis "Dean is a Rock Cultist who was right this time"? I'm open to persuasion of the former, but there are lots of Rock Cultists, including many smug Rock Cultists.
My model of the PLA drills around Taiwan is that one of them is not going to be a drill, and the rest are both practice runs and decoys to make people think the real one is another drill and thus gain tactical advantage. To guess which ones might be real, I look at various indications regarding their chances of success and consider whether enough of them point in the direction of "this is the best shot they'll get for a while". March/April/October is one sign, since those are the best months for amphibious operations (though they do have other options). Unusual/temporary weakness in US leadership is another. Unusual/temporary weakness in Western militaries is another. Mood in Taiwan is another, as I certainly accept that the PRC would rather take Taiwan peacefully, though this one's basically stuck in the "on" position at this point since it's now been years since the crash of unificationist sentiment to lizardman following the Hong Kong fiasco (i.e. they have had time to plan and prepare to follow "non-peaceful means" now that the "possibilities for a peaceful re-unification [are] completely exhausted"; quotes are from the PRC's Anti-Secession Law).
The 2024 US election cycle was predictable as a shitshow since 2021, so I predicted well in advance that October 2024 would be a solid time to invade. Biden going senile (and not seeking re-election) and the West re-arming due to Ukraine also create the potential of a temporary vulnerability. So I considered it plausible that this might be the real one; this is the best chance they have for a while (until 2027 or so, unless something goes very wrong in the USA, but even if it does that won't be predictable so to be as good a shot it'd have to be very bad). I knew that they might not do it, and I made that quite clear.
Vague mockery is not going to convince me. You have to be able to spot and explain a problem in the above argument if you are going to convince me that we didn't just get lucky.
Sure. Let's start with 'pattern recognition.'
This is not the first time China has conducted a military exercise simulating a blockade of Taiwan. In all exercises simulating a blockade to date, Taiwan has not, in fact, been blockaded. Therefore, there is no causal relationship justifying a claim that a Chinese military exercise simulating a blockade of Taiwan is evidence of imminent blockade of Taiwan, as there must be other distinguishing features for the former to lead to the later. This takes even more meaning when there is a separate pattern of China conducting threatening exercises, but no attack or blockade, in protest to some Taiwan official statement or another. Again, distinguishing factors needs to be observed to justify claims of deviating from historical patterns of behavior.
We could go further with the advanced concept of backwards reasoning. If China were making a deliberate decision to initiated a military blockade of Taiwan, then what would we expect to see China do in the context of a deliberate leadup to war that would not be seen in the historical pattern of exercises-that-were-not-starts-of-war. This might include, for example, a pre-event propaganda campaign providing initial narrative buildup or international legitimization for the immeninent actions, particularly propaganda emphasizing the historical nature of rectifying the century of humiliation. It might include the mobilization of the Chinese navy, which is to say the social media reflections of the recall of shore leaves, the noticeable trends of all the Chinese naval groups readjusting their movements to start adopting both reinforcement of a blockade and preparing to intercept any efforts by regional naval actors to block it. It might include things like minimizing sanction exposure risk by a sharp withdrawal of PRC state-controlled economic funds from western financial institutions, demands made of the Taiwanese, and threats against external intrusion.
We would expect, in other words, to see actual effort correspond to the sort of actions that would be taken to launch a blockade, and not just the adjacent fleet sailing around for a day not actually stopping anyone going to Taiwan.
We can go further if you'd like, but it'd be punching more than a little down. As an alternative, I propose we let you memory hole this oops of a catastrophizing and then slightly more embarrassing attempt to reserve the right that you told me so.
They've been doing that for decades, including to Western media with extortion via access to the Chinese market and diplomatically via bribing the countries that recognise the ROC to switch. Certainly, this hence isn't something that was in my court for "they're about to do it now" (and I didn't claim it as such), but I don't think it's in your court either as a sign that will be there but wasn't. It's a sign that is always there (well, I suppose it'll stop being there when they go for it and either win or get "you are not allowed to keep insisting that Taiwan isn't a country" rammed down their throats the way the Opium Wars ended with "you are not allowed to keep insisting that Western nations are barbarians begging for your scraps" rammed down their throats, but at that point this discussion will be moot), and I'm not sure what good it would do them to increase the amount of it that is going out right before an invasion.
Now, that aside: most of the things you mention are things I didn't check because I don't know how to/have access to check them, which means I couldn't take them into account before making my decision of whether to warn. If you had mentioned them to me at the start of this conversation rather than literally 100% of your first two posts' reasoning being (significantly-although-not-wholly-inaccurate) bulverism of my mental state and absurdity heuristic, I would probably have retracted immediately. And, if you either teach me how to find out such things, or agree to tell me such things if I get worried again, I can take them into account before deciding whether to issue warnings in future (though it will likely be some time before that happens)!
You chose to treat me as a drooling insane child rather than a reasonable person not in possession of all the facts. This was not only immensely rude, it was useless; we just went around in circles for six posts until you actually started saying something meaningful. What the fuck was the point of all that?
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Did you predict the 2022 special military exercise? What were the visible actions that were not part of the historical pattern of exercises-that-were-not-starts-of-war? There wasn't some big propaganda push afaik, and neither was there a withdrawal of the hundreds of billions in economic funds that subsequently got trapped in western banks.
I assume you mean the Russian one? Sure. I was noting they still weren't committed until they were, but I was one of the realtively people on the forums arguing that the invasion threat was credible and shouldn't be dismissed because of visible factors. It was a relatively minority position back then due to European inclinations to reference the Iraq War intelligence failures / this was American fearmongering / a very memorable denunciation that I knew nothing of slavic brotherhood.
I wasn't sure if the intervention would be tailored to the Donbass and if the other forces were diversionary (they did appear to be too small for a full invasion, but enough for a significant impact), and I believed (and still do) that Putin might have pulled back at the time if he got some of the geopolitical concessions he was angling for at the time (like the Nord Stream pipeline completion). I even thought Ukraine would crumple.
But I was very much against 'this is just another drill.'
Among other things fact that the Russians had left equipment near Ukraine in 2021, and then not taken it back home with them, allowing it to be proximal and staged so that when they did the 2021 exercise it was building up new force capabilities that were far beyond normal levels. This was significant because when Russia or equivalent countries do a military exercise, they generally don't actually bring enough to do a full invasion and it's visible from orbit. The fact that Russia didn't take it's equipment back home, but then brought in another small army's worth of stuff, and then kept bring more stuff in, was the visibly apparent 'they have an invasion-scale force assembled' which they didn't need if they were 'just' doing exercises.
Additionally, 2021 had multiple developments that correlated with pre-conflict shaping, including a massive pre-invasion propaganda campaigns both against Ukraine (fake nation, nazi narratives) and international legitimization by framing it against NATO (the NATO infrigement/withdrawal demands), the European energy non-refil in which they didn't go through their normal practice of filling European gas stocks during the summer per normal practices, and there was the Russian dynamic behind the Belarusian migrant crisis which was a challenge / shaping perceptions of the new German government.
You misremember. The propaganda campaigns were in 2021 mostly, but they were very consistent with pre-war justificaiton narratives, on three grounds- trying to prep the target population (we are you liberators / brothers freeing you from despotic rule), the home population (Russia is standing up for itself for historical Russian brotherhood and territory), and internationally (are war is historically justified and also it's NATO's fault).
The Russian funds were frozen, but the anamolous economic behavior pre-invasion was the effort to increase European dependence on Russian imports through supply chain artificial shortages of gas.
Notably, in turn, the Russian funds not being immediately moved was a reflection of how the Russians thought the conflict would go (a quick fait accompli the Europeans would ascede to), which has generally been understood to be a mistake for a long-war (which a Taiwan blockade would likely be).
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Based off of Dean's posting history and areas of knowledge he does have potentially relevant domain specific knowledge.
Other indicators (financial markets, lack of U.S. ramp up, etc.) indicate no reason to be worried as of yet.
Good news: China is a more competent adversary and isn't going to light the world (and themselves) on fire. Well bad news but good news here.
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