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Wednesday, Feb 08, 2023 - 21:45 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Star-Crossed Tweets

Well, we might have spoken too soon. Floating about the Land of Guns is probably the last place an inflatable target wants to be (with county authorities having to remind their constituents not to open fire at it); the calls for restraint would not last another day, as the blunderbusses, six-shooters, sawn-off shotguns, AWP sniper rifles, a ton of surplus M4A1 carbines, and personal cannons came out. It would finally be some F-22s to provide footage for the next Top Gun movie (as the U.S. counters China's own recent flashy war propaganda media with some of their own), as the fighter jets downed the offending Red balloon off the Carolina coast, to Team Red protest.

The connection with the Nena hit song appears to finally have been made by the media at large, with various outlets already declaring it possibly a defining moment in the New Cold War; so much for Presidential jiao wei, I guess. That a balloon made that much of a splash (and not only when it hit the water) did have some wonder whether all the fuss had been purposely manufactured, given its relatively minor advantages over untouchable (by treaty) satellites. Not only that, despite Western media outrage on the illegality of the overflight, it's not exactly like such unannounced spying is unknown to Team Blue, what more with the Pentagon publicly announcing their own blimps last year. The most on-point speculation here seems to be that it was meant as precedent for when and if Team Blue (i.e. American) aircraft enter Team Red (i.e. China's) airspace in the future - which given a projection of war between the two before 2025 by a top U.S. air force general, might unfortunately not be too long in the coming.

On that air defence bit, it has been confirmed that NORAD (already played Turn 11, Action Round 1) had indeed failed to detect this and previous Red balloon incursions, which however may just be an excuse to snag more funding while the going's good. Well, whatever else one might think about the current U.S. admin, they have reducted some inflation after all.


Turn 12, Action Round 4 (Team Blue)


Joining in on the idpol bandwagon!
(Original sources: twilightstrategy.com, businessinsider.com,
wikipedia.org, twitter.com)


This floaty diversion notwithstanding, one expects most of the geospatial information-gathering (a.k.a spying) in Cold War II to happen by satellite, to which Team Blue can hardly avoid mentioning SpaceX's Starlink. The first and largest low Earth orbit satellite constellation existing, Starlink is yet another brainchild of possibly the closest thing Earth has to an Iron Man - Elon Musk. While largely marketed as for commercial Internet access, this direct successor to the (original) Cold War-era Strategic Defense Initiative (popularly termed "Star Wars") clearly retains massive military potential. And indeed, Starlink has already proved its worth in the Ukrainian war effort (if at some cost), with an overtly-martial "Starshield" spinoff announced just last December.

This contribution to the world at large - before going into his revitalization of the entire electric car industry with Tesla, or vision to spread humanity to Mars as a truly interstellar species - is not why Musk has been in the news lately, recall. Instead, the previous liberal techbro darling (and sometime troll) - has become the latest in a long line of targets to be smeared and villainized by the FAKE NEWS media machine, for the sin of... buying Twitter and basically treating everyone more equally. The outrage from both sides now being fact-checked was great and puzzling in equal measure, with prominent leftists rage-quitting because they couldn't count on Twitter (glowies) being able to censor dissent against their wokeism any longer.

There would be an early frenzied drive amongst said wokeists to promote alternatives like Mastodon about last November, alongside scare stories about advertiser resistance and whatnot, but the passage of some months yields an undeniable verdict: the vaunted exodus has failed. Mastodon daily active user count has levelled off to less than two million, as compared to over 250 million for Twitter (including a post-takeover rebound), most of whom probably didn't even notice the change in ownership. The numbers do get better when one considers Mastodon variants, by far the most popular of which is probably The Donald's high-energy Truth Social, which also has about two million daily active users just by itself, while operating under the limitation of not being available outside the U.S. of A.



One of the innocent websites previously censored, and now graciously (and rightly) unbanned, by Musk
(Source: babylonbee.com)


Conservatives (also now known as "far-right" for some reason, in the mainstream media) and classic liberals/moderates have actually gone through this diversification to other platforms long before this, with brave underdogs such as Gab, Parler, Gettr, Rumble, Telegram? etc. building up the modern alt-tech counterculture behind the scenes in recent years, what with default providers such as Google, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit etc. increasingly getting corralled into a single acceptable perspective - apparently under the direction of the FBI, the CIA and George Soros, amongst the usual NWO suspects. But honestly, there's only so much psychological influence ops that even the average easily-swayed zoomer can take, before mentally checking out.

In any case, decamping to Mastodon amounts to a defeat for the woke cause, which probably explains the half-hearted follow-through by the movement's thought leaders. The value of (background) Control of the leading microblogging platform lies in being able to (dishonestly) cultivate desired views and opinions as the norm - or at least as the "prestige" attitude - by boosting (or outright fabricating) supporting tweets, and banning (or silently suppressing) objections. While the audience would be the general public for Twitter, the reach would be limited if users could be forced out to alt-tech versions such as Gab, which suited the authorities just fine; unfortunately for them, this reasoning applies to Mastodon too.

Sure, one can "take back control" from the bad billionaire by joining your very own furry server and customize the rules to whitelist only known acceptable allied groups and block the rest (if one can even find them), but this is of course just creating a filter bubble and preaching to the choir - and let's just say that a lot of those offended enough to switch to Mastodon over the reintroduction of free speech, are the type to be capable of starting a flamewar in an empty chatroom. Without "far-right" boomers to unite against, one very much expects them to devolve into petty internecine bickering - which however would spare the remaining 248 million or so Twitter remainers the drama, and thus be a net benefit for humanity.

Common sense one can get behind!


But back to the urgent business of Cold War II. Team Blue plays Star Wars for 2 Ops, disavowing the prequels. The Event is of course very strong if the U.S. has the Space Race lead, but from how they're spazzing out about China colonizing the moon (with a first crewed mission planned for 2027) instead of sending their own missions, this doesn't seem to apply.

1 Ops: +1 Influence in Benelux (4/1). As covered last October, "no cold war" somehow came to include a unilateral ban on chip exports to China by the U.S., which was obviously not bought by Beijing. Not only that, America arm-twisting their own firms into an embargo is one thing, but setting up an alliance to prosecute the Chip War is quite another. The Netherlands have seemingly been blackmailed persuaded to join in on the Team Blue shutdown of semiconductor exports to China, which was essential due to their monopoly over the most-advanced photolithography machines available globally.

1 Ops: +1 Influence in Vietnam (2/1). The full-court tech press is on, with Apple "friendshoring" their manufacturing from China to Vietnam, and MacBooks scheduled to roll off the line about mid-year. Basically the "concentrating of rewards to (exclusive) friend groups" as proposed last May, and one daresays much more of such is to come in the future.



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Next: Will Wonders Never Cease


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Of Logic, Looting, Twitter & Disinformation (Part II)
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