Mitch Daniels threatens CCP snitches
Boiler up
I talked about Zhihao Kong and similar cases on a podcast a couple of weeks ago. This is the sort of intimidation and shadow warfare that people in the West need to stand up to. Instead, intellectuals and leaders in the West have continued to placate and appease the CCP. I didn’t see this until Alex Tabarrok posted it, but Mitch Daniels is standing up and speaking out.
Good for Mitch Daniels. It is shameful that other university presidents are not making similar statements. Georgia, Brandeis, and Florida State are all called out in the article.
Julia Galef’s scout mindset is reasonable when there is time and space to scout. But when the soldiers come for the scouts, the scouts get killed. In other words, there is a need for the soldier mindset as well. Here are three more places, in addition to universities and free speech, where the West needs to fight instead of survey.
1. Electronic and cyber security. Foolishly, several decades ago, when the attacks on the then-world-leading West’s internet presences began, the West’s leaders did not realize how serious the attacks were. Not growing up with computers, not even being remotely familiar with the state of technology - remember George Bush’s shock a a supermarket checkout scanner? - the leaders thought that cyberspace attacks didn’t count. They counted. They should be treated as acts of war. It will be difficult to change that approach now, but it should start with the US funding privateers to fight in the cyber combat zones, and it should end, after a useful war, with a new Monroe doctrine for cyberspace. NB This ought to include the realization of the internet’s transformative purpose, which is terraforming for AI. There’s more than one way to terraform a planet, and we should be aiming for a way that supports human and AI individual potential and enables the pursuit of happiness by all.
2. Human genetic engineering and biowar. While the West tippy-toes around the fetal cell issue, other nations have rung the bell on a high speed, if covert, race toward improving the human genome. Biowar and bioterror are only better in that it has received, after the pandemic, about 1% of the attention they deserve. Bioattacks are the biggest existential threat to humanity (nuclear war may prevent a larger risk to civilization as we know it, but it is less likely to reduce the present and future human population on Earth to zero).
3. The arts and the culture. Disney thanked the Uighur concentration camp despots. They haven’t done much better since. Hollywood continues to suck up to China. Meanwhile in the Middle Kingdom, instead of frolicking through the countryside with their scout mindset bonnets on, CCP officials are banning NBA teams who dare wonder aloud if China might be a little on the bad side for herding a million Uighurs into concentration camp and raping their spouses. Thank goodness for the WTA and ITP refusing to go into China after the Peng Shuai rape. Way too much rape in China! Here’s a quick decider for the NBA or any other organization that might find itself on the Great Fence: Does the nation systematically rape (literal Tom Robinson-accusations-type rape, not metaphorical rape) a million of its own citizens? If your answer is yes, then that nation is Bad, and you should Get Out.
This list could easily go past three items. I’d add space and foreign aid as well. I think space, at least, the West recognizes it’s in a battle. The shock at the recent hypersonic missile results testifies to that. But it’s not just that sort of space: it’s supra-orbital, it’s interplanetary. The West should revive the nuclear pulse propulsion idea now; we likely could have settled the solar system with that. As far as foreign aid, the Belt and Road Initiative is not meeting with as much long-term success as the CCP would have liked in some places, but in other places it is doing quite well. Meanwhile the US focuses on mosquito nets instead of DDT and drones instead of HUMINT.
When I think about this, I wonder what assurances we have that when the next crisis comes, we will not find the USDOD to be as hidebound, enfeebled, and helpless as we have found the CDC to be in the face of the covid pandemic.