The Conditioning is the thing - brain-washing basically - via crisis-activated reality manipulation. Oldest trick in the book. Very frightening though. Coz it's spreading, not contained to China. Centralized power in a small world - so we can get things done - that's attractive to all the moguls.

As you mentioned, does it build it's own momentum towards war, though? You've geared the people up for it - you hold a lot of economic Aces that could ruin the west - a lot of internet-crippling cyber-warfare capability - is it too good an alignment to pass up on?

My take is that it's purely for conditioning, and not something too good to pass up on because this conditioning will be permanent. They're not going to ease up in the near term. Why would they? What value to the CCP is there in easing up?

I've been in a lot of virtual meetings over the last few years with westerners in China, and in the course of those meetings I might bring up small talk like mask mandates or testing or Taiwan, and they fall silent. Seriously. And these are Americans, Brits, Europeans earning their living in China and completely conditioned not to respond or even engage with questions regarding anything that crosses the line. It's very disturbing. You look at these people staring into Zoom, silent, just like the Chinese.

I've seen this hundreds of times. The CCP is very effective at what it does.

But here at Formosahut, we can say what we please.

Fuck the CCP.