cerebus23 said:
Therumancer said:
Well, I'd get used to more of this if it's true. I've been saying for years we needed to start taking a much stronger hand with China, people of course didn't listen, and during that time they have been becoming much more powerful, while telling people exactly what they wanted to hear and offering a lot of "too good to be true" trade deals.
It's not surprising that they are using the corps of hackers they built up for things like this, and I imagine they are going to get a lot more belligerant with their military in coming years as well.
That said, the big question here is whether or not the US goverment is going to get involved here, or at least act to confirm whether we're seeing other nations attack our information infrastructure.
All told though I will say that I can't see China being too concerned about a petition, if they really are attacking a political site, there must be more than that to the story.
I agree but how does one go about getting tough with a country of 3 billion people in the midst of what may be the largest military expansion and modernization in world history, meanwhile i am sure they are not beefing up their military that much just for giggles. China is the 3000 lb gorilla in the room that everyone tries their hardest to ignore, and meanwhile that gorilla gets more and more aggressive.
THese hacker attacks coming out of china seem to increase in frequency and scope as well, and as tight a lid as china has on their internet activities and the way they monitor this stuff there is little chance in hell that they have no idea the hows and whys of these things, and could easily stop it if they so wanted.
Big country big problems coming down the line.
Well, understand that I'm "that maniac" who was suggesting a massive pre-emptive strike back in the 1990s when I saw this coming, basically stopping them BEFORE they could build up this kind of power base, since it was obvious where the wind was blowing. This of course being unpopular for humanitarian reasons, as well as the simple fact that a lot of people wanted to believe that China was our friends, despite all evidence to the contrary. A lot of our allies receiving some very beneficial trade from them certainly didn't help matters any, because like people anywhere they wanted whatever was going to make them happy at the moment.
As time has gone on, China has gotten progressively stronger, and we've been ignoring the problem for moral reasons (The US believes in being reactive as opposed to proactive), and simply because of the sheer scale of action it would cause, and the number of people that will die. We're getting to the point where as the power becomes increasingly imbalanced China is going to throw the first punch when it's ready, and we're going to wind up reacting under it's terms. It will still be a major war, but one that we certainly won't enter into with any kind of major advantage.
Right now I think various technologies on both sides, US missle interception (which upset the Russians) and the Chinese anti-satellite lasers (do a search for China, Satellite, and Lasers as keywords, you'll find plenty of stuff) has taken ICBM delivered WMD largely off the table even if nobody wants to admit it yet, and it's becoming a question of when China has built up enough military forces, especially naval, to begin serious belligerance and military conquest. If nothing else, they want more living space to deal with their overpopulation.
Given that it's inevitable that there is going to be a war, I mean China simply CAN'T reduce it's population and resource consumption fast enough to avoid the issues of it's own needs, even if it wanted to, I'm pretty much of the opinion that our best option is to get as many allies as we can together and strike pre-emptively with the intention of wrecking China's infrastructure and military production. Reducing their population would actually probably benefit them as well as us as well, because it would actually remove a lot of the pressures the nation is under, if we don't wind up taking it down outright.
This is very militant, and "insane" by a lot of people's standards, but the point is that I figure it's going to happen anyway, and all holding off is going to do is make China increasingly harder to win against.
The thing is that nobody wants to "pull the trigger" so to speak, because everyone knows it's not going to be some dirty little police action like in The Middle East. We're talking "World War III" and a lot of damage to the entire globe. People themselves also always want peace, a few more years of peace is "worth it" to people who are detached enough to think that what is being fought for won't wind up mattering to them, but the loss of friends and loved ones will.
It's not a GOOD thing, it would be nice if there was enough resources for everyone to just really mind their own business and progress up to their potential, but there isn't, and that's not even getting into the dogmatic reasons why such a war is inevitable.
I know a lot of people are going to disagree with me (I've said this all before here), but this is yet another sign that things are getting worse, and we're increasingly in denial over the situation with China simply because nobody wants to admit what's going to happen because the prospect of anothr conflict like "World War II" is horrifying, especially seeing as even more people will die given the greater world population.
