If your nihilism doesn’t make you happy, you’re doing it wrong. The absence of meaning should be a liberating factor, not a limiting one. It’s actually dope as fuck that there’s no greater purpose to your life, you can never fail as a person when there’s no standard you feel you have to meet.

Whether they’re all-in on China or think that Xi is the anti-Christ, the end result is exactly the same: absolutely nothing whatsoever. There isn’t a local left, much less a national left; certainly there isn’t anything that anybody could seriously call an international movement. The opinions of random westerners mean absolutely nothing to the CCP. Fixating on what we have zero influence over is wholly unproductive.

Maybe in 20 years we’ll have cobbled together a movement that Beijing thinks is even worth offering a nod to, but right now we’re a bit too irrelevant to worry about our place on the global stage.

The alternative is admitting that they had a complete meltdown over a balloon. People can force themselves to believe basically anything if it can save them the embarrassment of admitting they were enthusiastically wrong.

Thankfully it was only a warship, if it was a balloon things might have gotten serious.