My understanding of the present state of Taiwan is that they are unprepared for war in any real sense. Sure, they've bought a decent amount of American military technology, but that seems to be it.

Total war requires the preparation of the entire populace. Taiwan has not done this, and I doubt the present government intends to do so. Not only do you basically have to train your populace in terrorism, you also need to equip them with caches of a variety of weapons, entirely outside of government control.

Azerbaijan and Armenia's recent war shows just how the game has changed. Armenia had a much more capable and better-trained infantry. Azerbaijan had the latest in drone technology. "Guerrillas hiding in the mountains" don't fare well against combined-arms forces with FLIR-equipped drones.

The defensive proposition of total war is that you force any would-be invader to kill most, if not all, of the local population to achieve victory. Both during the initial invasion, as well as during at least a full generation of occupation.

In essence, you leave only two options on the table: "Leave us in peace" or "In exchange for us inflicting massive casualties upon your forces, you will receive what remans of a barren rock full of refugees, along with at least one full generation of terrorism levied against your people by ours. As a bonus, we are both native speakers of the same language and lack any visual ethnic distinction. Isn't that fun?"

I've made it a point to build up a set of phrases that allow me to express sympathy, and which have the advantage of being clearly visible expressions, rather than hollow tokens.

For example: "Your mom got cancer? That's a bad deal. Make it a point to spend as much time with her as you can. What can I do to help?"

Thank you for asking this question!

I live in Japan. What’s the brand?

For what it's worth, I had a similar journey. Not as much with strong emotions being triggered by trivial things, but I would routinely blame others for my negative feelings.

Coming to understand that I, and only I, was responsible for both my situation and my emotional responses was a difficult journey, but it also helped me address those negative feelings in a useful way.

I wonder if there's a correlation between the American emphasis on comfort and loss of utility for suffering as a social signal?

At least within notable chunks of American culture that I currently have a lens on -- don't live in the US at present, so do take this with a massive salt-boulder -- it seems that visibly suffering quickly earns the sufferer a large amount of sympathy/compassion/support/etc.

This begets more visible suffering -- to the point of harmful neuroticism -- in order to garner more support from the community, and I doubt this is in any way a conscious effort on behalf of any of the involved parties. Similar to an unruly child that keeps throwing temper-tantrums because her parents quickly give in and reward the unwanted behavior -- neither the child nor parents are really aware of the feedback loop in which they are trapped.

Moreover, in my observation, cultures where publicly visible suffering is ignored (or even punished!) don't seem to suffer from the same levels of neurotic behavior that I regularly see in specific American subcultures -- although increased suicide rates do seem to be an issue for when those cultures have yet to evolve mechanisms whereby suffering can be alleviated.

As being publicly accused of rape or sexual assault carries severe penalties for the accused, how do you intend to deal with false accusations?

I have a question in a similar vein -- how would one go about finding resources that don't have immediately available reviews -- videos, blogs, etc?