Not a direct response to the tangent, but rather on the topic is touched upon.

I do actually get the sensation that the circle around Xi Jinping getting smaller every year seems to come at a price in terms of China's intelligence capacities. Not necessarily in their ability to gather it, but more in their ability to evaluate it and let it dictate policy. We're seeing less of "pragmatic China" these days, and far more "Xi's China".

China pulled a massive blunder on Russia's intentions in Ukraine. Chinese officials standing on stage stating that Russia had not and would not invade Ukraine, while media was literally rolling footage of Russian army groups heading towards Kyiv was a pretty spectacular blunder.

I honestly don't think they would have made that blunder 15 years ago. Going against the grain is not easy in most communist regimes, but I suspect that facts and analyses that run contrary to Xi's inner circle have become very dangerous.

The fallacy was you assuming that I had a low opinion of China's ability to assess national security capabilities of other countries.

I suspect they're are very good at it and it is certainly possible that China wanted to find out how the Biden Administration would react to a spy balloon in U.S. airspace.

All the other stuff you mentioned was all happening literally thousands of miles away from America.

How was China weakened after that blunder? If it has no significance then it's not a blunder.

So did the US just confirm that these baloons flew over during Trump's prez? I can link later if no one can find anything.

Apparently, a defense official said they did, but Trump and all the high-level officials during that time are saying they didn't.

Story checks out... Trump never did read the intelligence reports he was given.

I don't need to cite every passing thought I have, don't take yourself too seriously, this isn't some doctorate dissertation. Also, I would be very hard pressed to find a single headline bragging about a fighter jet shooting a balloon, or any military glory porn headline. Must be all in my head

Thanks for a thoughtful reply. I'm aware (less so than you) that there are a lot of moving parts. My comment is just about how this is blown way out of proportion, and how multi billion dollar fightet jets scrambled to tame a balloon is/could be over kill

It's probably not even a Chinese balloon. Probably an American balloon that they're claiming is a Chinese balloon and the Chinese are just going along with it because they agreements about that sort of stuff.

I doubt it .
China is not pleased at all by US action action.

How could you possibly know that?

They said it was a civilian balloon gone astray and complained about the shootdown.

There doesn't seem any reason to believe that.

That seems like an awful lot of international conformity when the US could just fly the balloon for whatever reason.

Why would China say it then ?
To try create politic problem to biden from the republicans ?

China wouldn’t take blame from that ballon just for fun ….

Sure but in this case the purpose would be to create a distraction and dominate some news cycles with some bullshit.

I will not be surprised if Hunter Biden had something to do with this balloon.

Ilmfao

I'm of the belief that the simpliest stupidiest cheapest **** can dominate the news cycles if need be. This seems like overkill from that angle, imo. No need to bring in the fighter jets here.

Do you seriously think that the US media is making up the reports from China, and that no one there has complained about the balloon being shot down?

Or you think China isn't really upset about it being shot down and are just pretending to be upset?

I don't think anything was made up, I did find it odd that they would even express dissatisfaction about it being shot down. I couldn't imagine them expecting anything else to happen. Unless they really did do it a lot under Trump and he did nothing about it.

The latter, not upset because I don't even think it was their balloon.

I mean the Pentagon literally announced to the public that there was a Chinese balloon flying over Montana or something.

Why would they do that if it were an actual Chinese balloon?

Even if it was spotted by someone (which idk if that was the case or not) they could have just said it was a US balloon.

So no matter what, announcing that there was a Chinese balloon was done with a purpose.

What would China have to gain from pretending it was their balloon that got shot down?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...nes-china-trip

They also announced that there is a second balloon over 'latin America"-- whatever that means given that Latin America is a massive geographic area.

The goodwill of the United States of America.

To be sure, I have no idea what's going on here but the story smells like bullshit and there is zero reason to believe either the Pentagon or China-- both being known liars.