Dire Straits

Ever since I was a wee little lad, there’s been a recurring piece of “breaking news” to the effect of “China does military thing, alarming Taiwan”. Of course China is presented as the aggressor who is picking on it’s much smaller neighbor, the country of Taiwan. And, the narrative goes, Taiwan is a US ally and we’ve pledged to support them, so if China were to follow through on attacking Taiwan, they would drag the US reluctantly into World War III. This is a compelling narrative if you don’t know a lot about the history of China during the 20th century.

In fact, “Taiwan” isn’t actually a thing, at least not as we like to think of it. Taiwan is officially called the Republic of China; “mainland” China is the People’s Republic of China. Both governments believe themselves to be the only rightful rulers of all of China. The cut-and-paste paragraph in news articles relates that China sees Taiwan as a “rebellious province”; you could also say that Taiwan sees the PRC as it’s 33 rebellious provinces.

During the 1940’s, China underwent a revolution that culminated when Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic. By the early 1950’s the revolutionary period had died down and the PRC was effectively governing most of China, with one notable exception. The overthrown Republic of China government had set up a “temporary” capital in Taipei, Taiwan Province and continued to assert that they were the legitimate government of all of China. The ROC was all but defeated and confined to a small island, but the PRC lacked the ability to carry out an amphibious invasion and retake the final province that wasn’t under their control. Thus, the Chinese civil war ended in a stalemate that endures to this day.

It’s 2018, and the government of Taiwan — a tiny island — still presents itself as the legitimate ruler of the entire country of China. In fact, Taiwan held the Chinese seat at the United Nations (including the Security Council) until the world came to its senses and recognized that the PRC was the actual Chinese government and that the leftovers who were hanging on to one tiny island province could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered the legitimate rulers of the entire country. On the flip side, the PRC seems okay-ish with allowing Taiwan to govern itself autonomously while pretending that they’re not, as long as Taiwan doesn’t declare formal independence (although I think China could be justified in reasserting their authority over the island; it is historically a Chinese province, after all).

There is a point that I’m building toward with all of this history: considering the series of events that led up to the China-Taiwan standoff, it seems incredibly ridiculous that the United States has gone all-in on defending Taiwan and would get pulled into a war with China over it.

Taiwan is, historically, part of China. The Republic of China only continues to exist due to a historical/logistical anomaly. Their claim to be the sole legitimate government of all of China is ridiculous. The war is over and they lost. For the United States, a war with China would be a disaster; fighting them on their own turf would be catastrophic, as would the economic and diplomatic aftermath. Why would we go to war to defend a tiny fraction of a rump state that can’t accept the fact that they were defeated? We don’t have to go to war with China over Taiwan. We could just not do it.

There’s a lot of political games and history involved, but at the end of the day, I hope that if war breaks out between China and Taiwan, the United States will find a way to stay out of it. But with Tronald Dumpster at the helm, who even knows?

The prophecy fulfills itself

There’s such a thing as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The belief that something is true, or the desire for it to be, can influence a person’s behavior in such a way to cause it to become true — even if it was originally false.

We’ve been hearing rumblings that the federal government may soon end public service forgiveness for federal student loans. This forgiveness is an incentive for college graduates to work for state, local and federal governments. In exchange, after 120 on-time and in-full student loan payments, the remaining balance of the student’s debt is forgiven.

Why get rid of this program? One could look at it as simple deficit-hawking: the government can’t afford to simply stop collecting this debt.

But looked at another way, we can see a self-fulfilling prophecy. For decades we’ve been bombarded with the dogma that the government can’t do anything right, and that (insert Congressman Whoever’s cousin’s contracting firm) could do any task the government could but better and cheaper. I reject this reasoning on both theoretical and anecdotal grounds, but that’s another blog post; the point is, the right wing in US politics believes this to be true regardless of whether or not it actually is.

This influences their behavior such that they tend to neglect, undermine, or put obstacles in the way of the “big” government, making it difficult to effectively operate. Many public service jobs involve doing real shit work and often (contrary to popular belief) pay substantially less than their private-sector equivalent jobs. There are likely to be a substantial amount of people who are willing to stick it out for a decade in order to get the monkey of student debt off of their back, and without that incentive, would bail. This would lead to higher turnover and more vacant positions that are harder to fill, increasing inefficiencies and hampering agencies’ abilities to do their job. And then the Paul Ryans of the world will say, “See? I told you the government can’t do anything right, and it’s actually getting worse.”

The thing is, going out of your way to make your prophecy fulfill itself doesn’t prove your point. It simply proves that you’re a malicious asshole who wants to screw people over for your own personal benefit. Not that we should expect anything less from the likes of Paul Ryan and Donald Trump.

Don’t do that

It’s almost 50 degrees Fahrenheit (above zero) in Anchorage, in early January, today. So this little tidbit that’s been on my mind for some time seems appropriate for me to vent.

Please don’t use this as “proof” that climate change is real.

You know when Donald Trump tweets shit like “oh man it’s cold in the Midwest in January, climate change must be fake lulz!” and he’s obviously an idiot for saying that? Yeah. Well when you say a warm day proves climate change is real, you’re kind of doing the same thing.

Climate change is real, but an occasional short-term deviation from the mean in any location doesn’t prove anything, one way or another. The temperature is going to regularly dip and spike below and above the mean, sometimes by a wide margin. But when we talk about climate change, we’re referring to long-term changes world-wide. Trying to take a snapshot in one moment at one place and extrapolate that to the entire globe over decades is ridiculous. It’s far too small of a sample size. That’s true no matter which side of the line an outlier falls upon.

So don’t be a reverse Donald Trump. I mean, you can still punch Nazis, but what I’m trying to say is that one warm day doesn’t prove climate change.