Categories
international affairs

Can’t Eat Chips?

“The hawks will generally talk in terms of ‘the technology will fall into China’s hands,’” says political scientist Joseph Silos-​Mullen, referring to a threatened Chinese invasion of Taiwan, where 90 percent of the world’s high-​end computer chips are fabricated.

“That would never happen,” the author of The Fake China Threat assures, “because the United States has already said publicly that they would destroy — that they would literally bomb out of existence — those very factories.“

Wow. Sure seems those semiconductor chips are awfully important.

It’s a “pretext,” he argues — and I’m quoting from his November Tom Woods Show appearance. “Even if China had [the high-​end chip fabs], why wouldn’t China want to sell [chips] to the rest of the world? Right? What good is it just to hold all of the semiconductors? It doesn’t make any sense.”

After Solis-​Mullen complained about a lack of follow-​up questions in mainstream media discourse, historian and podcaster Woods inexplicably failed to ask him one. Instead, Woods doubled down by dismissing previous fears that some authoritarian dictator might monopolize “all the oil.”

Woods inquired incredulously, “What would you do with it? Unless you have a fetish for it. What would you do with it?”

“Drink it?” Solis-​Mullen jokingly asked.

Hahaha. But, seriously, Mr. Woods, no concerns at all about “so-​and-​so” having a monopoly on oil? Not even Putin? Or China’s Xi Jinping?

¡No problemo! Xi can’t drink the oil, after all. He would just have to sell it to us … and surely at very reasonable rates.

Right? Whew! That was close.

Maybe the CCP could “never” get its hands on those fabs producing all the high-​end computer chips, but if somehow it did, are we really supposed to believe it wouldn’t be YUGELY advantageous to China? 

Say, militarily?

You know, should this “fake” threat keep becoming more and more real.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *