You can subscribe to the The Economist (digital edition) for $189/year. This is actually cheaper than most (Bloomberg is $419, FT is $372).
Edit: I'm just sharing information on the cost of subscription. If you look at my comment history, you'll see I've done this for others, OUT OF PURE CURIOSITY. I've also commented about how it would be unreasonable to maintain subscriptions to multiple news websites given these costs. But sure, downvote me - love you guys ;-)
I managed to subscribe through DiscountMags at $50/yr a few years ago, and they allowed me to lock that price in permanently. It might be possible to get a similar deal during one of their promotion cycles.
Thing is, i read maybe 10-20 different news sites, not to mention the plethora of other sites with curated and written content.
No normal person can afford to maintain that number of subscriptions.
I wonder what a fair price for a article that gets 20-30k views would be, not to mention 2-300k. The price per view should be so low that some kind of crypto payment could work.
A browser plugin with a crypto solution that autopays for content on newssites you'd preapproved or something - and you would be able to pay as you go on the web.
If someone happened to agree with this analysis and was bearish on western liberalism, is there a place they should put their money in order to potentially profit?
No, there isn't. The best you could do is disassociate from any criticisms you have made about CCP. Better yet, start a pro-CCP newsletter in substack, and hope for the best.
Institutions like Apple, the NBA and the corporate press embraced this strategy a while ago. They echo CCP talking points about how terrible the US is, while largely ignoring factory worker conditions, Hong Kong and the ongoing Uyghur genocide.
Taking on CCP or any powerful entity ideologically is above the pay grade of corporate entities, so no surprises there. However the US government should put pressure on these entities and put sanctions when appropriate. You can't keep empowering authoritarian governments at your own expense.
If there were a macro theme, I would say inferior goods in the west to get exposure to downward mobility in the middle classes, and higher risk real estate in ascendent/emerging economies that China needs resources from.
Well, we see Chinese money flowing into western companies, so if you're going to invest like the Chinese do, it's into western countries. See Tencent's western purchases, for example.
I've also heard China's investing in Africa. For manufacturing? I haven't looked into it in any depth.
And there's Chinese interest in western real estate, particularly in the UK since the US started a low-key trade war.
I don't know how this compares to domestic investment at all, but you'll have a much easier time investing in similar fields to Chinese investors in the west than you will in China, I imagine.
I'd like to think that extreme racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry won't be a winning recipe. A lot of the advantages China has in their government is beneficial for competing with other nations but will eventually eat itself from within.
China promotes a monolithic Chinese identity above race and class. That's why they are called an ethnostate. It's the anti multiculturalism and it seems to be working for them for the most part. Despite the awful nazi grade stuff going on in some parts.
Side-stepping for a moment the humanitarian and ethical costs for a brief moment, an enforced homogeneity of ideology leaves little room for independent thinking. At some point, you end up passing down every decision down and idea down a party line like a bucket through a fire brigade. That severely stifles innovation and creates an incredibly narrow view of your options.
But I promised we'd come back to the humanitarian and ethical costs. Diversity is strength. It's more than twee corporate advertising, it's a truth. It's hard to approach new problems when everyone is reading off the same song sheet. Strengths become reinforced, but weaknesses become far more weak; it's a very brittle strength.
That's what I used to believe, that a totalitarian regime can never compete with a free society. The USSR tried and failed. But China is something different. They are extremely competent. And they are past their copy cat phase. I don't believe they have a creativity issue.
I think the free society model is failing given how easy to dissipate false information, especially the kind that get people riled up against each other. It's not a surprise the US feels so divided today despite all the progress made in civil rights.
Our enemies/adversaries know that. They know our weak spot. And they made it their strength. China found a way to do it without compromising other aspects of its society too much.
We stopped being a community not because we are a free society, but because we stopped communing.
This pandemic has been a comical caricature of how people have been living lately; siloed in their own homes, only interacting through an internet connection. This has made us incredibly susceptible to realities distorted by interested parties.
Again, a free society is our only way out of this. When I get my vaccine in the coming months, I'll be dedicating as much time I can to building strong communities. I encourage all to do the same, no matter how silly it seems. Join a hackerspace, a rock climbing group, volunteer at food shelters, become a scout leader... anything, so long as you promote community and togetherness in doing so!
In the west, problems of racism and homophobia get put out into the sunlight so they might be addressed. It leads to people exerting their democratic right to manifest against injustice and root out inequality.
In China, racism and homophobia doesn't exist because any mention of it gets wiped off the internet, and "different" people get shipped off into camps.
I wonder what percentage of people that make your argument are doing so in bad faith.
>I'd like to think that extreme racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry won't be a winning recipe
It worked just fine in/for the US though. Look back at the US's rise to where it is today and it was pretty bad. Another example is that it is still pretty bad in the US today and it is top dog anyways. I doubt it will make any difference in PRC either.
+ The US has decriminalized homosexuality and was one of the first countries to have same sex marriage
+ Has had robust hate crime laws and strong equal rights protections
+ Is slowly but consistently rolling back low level drug offenses
We always have to compare to our peers, not some unicorn standard. The US had continually been an extremely liberal and accepting society even with it's faults and missteps.
Yes and we should compare apples to apples not a ripe apple to a green one (or a unicorn). PRC and the US are in two totally different places in their development and you cannot compare directly. China won't go from 0-60 in zero days just because other nations are already up to speed. They have to go through development itself and it is, much faster than the US did. It isn't an attack on the US which your comment reads like you believe. It's just that a country that is going through a metoric rise does not get everything right from day one because others have it somewhere else. It takes time.
The thing China cares most about is to not be humiliated and attacked by the whites. We sent the 7th fleet to interfere in their civil war and help prop up fleeing Chiang Kai Shek in Taiwan. Curious to see how their civil war will end. The last US administration that drew up invasion plans on China was under term 1 of Obama and they figured that window was closed. That’s why they came up with TPP to economically strangle China (and the Huawei ban started under Obama as well).
The west is in decline because progressive values don't promote strength. They focus on class and are inherently divisive. Ironically, they only blossom in strong societies. The decline will allow other societies with a more conservative philosophy to take over and it will be their turn in a few centuries to succumb to the same tragedy. The baizuo tragedy.
Yes, because Trump was totally strong against other countries. He was a useless little bitch against China, Russia, North Korea, and anyone else willing to pay him a couple dollars to walk all over America.
That's ridiculous. No dictator has walked all over the US in the last 4 years or ever. Anytime we failed diplomatically it occurred with the knowledge that our military dominance was insurmountable and complete, but that it's use indiscriminately would not serve our overall diplomatic strategic policy of caring about human rights, and self-imposed limits on how we use our military. Any of our failures in war against dictators etc directly stems from self-imposed limits on how we use our military power. We could literally glass them but we don't. Thank goodness.
Military dominance is only insurmountable and complete when it's a credible threat, and ours hasn't actually won a war of note in over half a century. The best we've ever done in that timeframe has been to supplement military leadership that was already in place, and we've failed to even accomplish that half the time.
Our military is absolutely a credible threat. We did not win those wars because we restrained ourselves. Iraq could have easily been turned into a wasteland of death and destruction, for example. We could have done like the Romans, implemented complete tyranny, and lined their streets with staked bodies as a reminder to not rebel. Harbor terrorists among civilians? Leveling the whole city would send a message that harboring our enemies is a death wish.
But we are not willing to conduct such indiscriminate brutality. We tried to fight ethical anti-insurgent wars with our hands tied behind our back in order to preserve life and cling to our values. But pushed too far, that restraint could drop. So it IS a credible threat.
That's all really cute but it doesn't address the issue.
People who are living in their homelands are more willing to fight and more entrenched than foreign invaders, especially when they've been at war long enough that you can't simply target a couple of places to bring them to their knees. The US military is not a credible threat. They're simply another invader who will get tired of the conflict and go away.
We're not going to war with Russia or China. We didn't do it when Russia annexed Crimea, or when they targeted US troops in Syria, and we aren't going to do it when China puts its boot on the neck of Taiwan. It's a stupid political game to pretend otherwise.
We could have spent a quarter of the money we did and had the same outcome. There's absolutely no reason for the US to subsidize peace for the rest of the planet to the degree that it does. Every other liberal democracy on Earth gets to enjoy affordable housing, subsidized healthcare, affordable or free college educations, pensions, and a nice fat bank of vacation hours every year. We get a bunch of morons in blue who barely got out of high school using military grade gear on our own citizens because the armed forces has too much of it.
Wait. You mean the progressive 'knowledge worker', 'green energy', and 'service economy' focus that left millions under & unemployed wasn't a winning strategy?
It is the most excruciating thing, to watch your nation self-immolate in a blaze of self-righteous naivete and stupidity. Maybe when we are old we will be able to say "I told you so." So at least there's that.
> The west is in decline because progressive values don't promote strength.
Big reach. I think it's much less controversial to say it's in decline because of mindless consumerism, declining education budgets and corporate takeover of governance, which are hardly progressive.
Though the silver lining for America as an economic power is that, at least for now, identity wokeism seems to have displaced socialism as the main outlet for progressive energy. So we might actually avoid economic decline as long as big businesses virtue signal enough about supporting sex changes for children. That future sucks too, but at least we might not be poor.
I wonder if hawkish foreign policy along with an Imperialist mindset, is a crutch leading to the degeneration of domestic society.
Logic being: having & maintaining the dollar as a reserve currency created a context where it becomes more economically efficient to offshore labor & production, causing broken domestic feedback loops.
History demonstrates that Empires do not last forever. The contexts that lead to the rise of the host nation/entity taking on the mantle of Empire and the host nation/entity of the Empire change.
Progressives and 'woke politics' are the reason the US let its infrastructure crumble? I don't follow your logic. You are saying progressive weakness is the reason America has let its infrastructure crumble, and why America doesn't have universal healthcare, why its education system isn't as good as it should be? That sounds wrong.
I see a lot of claims lately that 'woke politics' are the reason the US has let itself crumble and underperform for decades (relative to its potential), but 'woke politics' is a fairly new thing, and progressives generally aren't against infrastructure spending or universal healthcare or investing in education/science/tech, so I don't see the connection. The 'woke'/progressive politicians actually tend to favor this type of major investment/public spending more than the right does.
Yet the education & healthcare system are funded more now than ever. It seems like throwing money at the problem does not make the problem go away; throwing money at the problem may make it worse. More expensive government has opportunity costs & enables the state to have more totalitarian control. How & why did education & healthcare get bloated?
The adoption of critical theory as a base for policy directions ("woke politics") is not what caused infrastructure to crumble. Infrastructure crumbles because it costs money to maintain while it does not return profit in the short term when maintained. In the long run crumbling infrastructure leads to a loss of profit or opportunities for such but by then those who decided not to invest in maintenance are long gone from their positions.
However, the adoption of critical theory does play a significant role in bringing about the decline of western society since it leads only to deconstruction of existing structures without providing functional alternatives.
So you consider China (which is winning) a society with a more conservative philosophy? I didn't realize China is a small-government free market place...
Counter point: Islamic empires until the Ottoman empire collapse post WWI. They flourished, yet were not "progressive" in the modern Western sense of the word.
That's not a counter-point. It only points out that there is more than 1 way to promote strength. (Or that progressiveness has nothing to do with the strength at all).
I don't think thats a counter point! Depending on which time frame you are talking about, the ottoman empire was a cosmopolitan fairly free empire. There was freedom of religion (of sorts, there was a tithe.) and a civil law system that appeared to have some semblance of working for the lay man.
If you compare the treatment of jews in venice, parts of the ottoman empire were a haven. Spain's loss was the ottoman's gain.
That's why I said they were not "progressive" in the modern Western sense. Islam is able to perfectly accommodate different cultures, and lead the host society to prosperity.
but they were progressive, comparative to the western world at the time. Hence why they were a mecca (excuse the pun) for creative and scientific types.
The problem here is the definition of the term "progressive". If you take it to mean "forward-looking" then yes, being progressive is a sure strategy for success in the long run, even if such success may come at a price in the short term. This, however, is not what most current "progressive" ideologies do, instead of looking forward they often look backward in time in search for grievances in need of redress. This, in combination with the rise of identity politics which drives people apart into groups vying for current or historical claims of being oppressed does the opposite of the original progressivism. This modern interpretation of progressivism - adherents of which are often called "regressive left" - does not lead to flourishing societies, the opposite is true.
Identify politics has been on the rise for a long time. The right heavily contribute to identity politics. See: openly racist GQP leaders, transgender bathroom ban, mexican "caravans" conveniently appearing in the news around election time, satanic panic, homophobia, muslim ban, "Kung flu".
In no way can you place the blame for the rise of identity politics squarely on progressives. I get the feeling that most people opposed to a more fair and equitable society are the ones currently benefitting the most from inequity.
I do not "blame" the rise of identity politics on anyone, I merely point out that it has been taken up by many people who consider themselves to be "progressive" and that it, in combination with the adoption of critical theory - specifically the practice of "deconstruction" - leads to a witches brew of regressive and destructive ideologies.
That is a good question to which I do not have a sensible answer other than a vague "both, probably". I suspect empires follow more or less the same trajectory as many family fortunes do: the founders build a base upon which subsequent enterprising generations build an empire. Once the empire has been established and more and more generations grow up with the certainty of it being there decay sets in. Eventually the empire either falls prey to its neighbours, decays without outside intervention or enters a steady state. The steady state makes it vulnerable to new ideas which might not necessarily be better than current ones but at least they are new or progressive.
It looks like you've created a new account to do ideological battle on HN. That's not what this site is for, so I've banned it. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you want to use HN as intended and will follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Seriously? "Mexican Caravans"? 18,000 UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN were "dumped" across the US-Mexico border in MARCH of 2021. And the current administration refuses to admit the "may" be a problem. Your selective ignorance is astounding.
Please don't use HN for political or ideological battle. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we ban accounts that do it.
Crossing into personal attack and name-calling is particularly not cool. No more of that, please.
it doesn't even matter. this whole discussion is people blaming the material decline of the west on their cultural hobby horse. basically, things you don't like on twitter is the cause, according to the comments here. i think we're totally blinkard by culture.
Please don't use HN for political or ideological battle. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we ban accounts that do it.
Understood. I will refrain.
Is there something about my comment that's more political than the ones above it? Like I guess I used a lot of buzzwords instead of vague political terms.
I don't know—we can't come close to seeing all the comments. If there are specific posts that you think should have been moderated, you can always let us know. But when a post hasn't been moderated, it doesn't follow that we must somehow approve of it—that's a big non sequitur!
I agree. Though these are examples of progressive 'class politics'. That doesn't exist in the west like it once did. Thanks to neoliberalism and its promotion of individualism, progressives now focus on identity. Worthy yes, but an ineffective replacement in terms of promoting unity amongst those with legitimate grievances.
This is overly simplistic. The west is in decline for tons of reasons in concert, not any one feel good reason. Identity politics/wokeism is just a symptom of a system already in decline, not the cause of it.
You could just as easily say that the internet is the reason the west is in decline because it allows loud minorities, corporations, and bad actors to amplify their voices and promote their agendas, sow division and discord, spread misinformation, and more. Which is also overly simplistic and not the sole reason for decline.
Progressive values focus on class? If only. Neoliberalism has successfully neutered the left by promoting individualism at the expense of collectivism. Progressive values now focus on identity.
I, personally am ambivalent on this subject. I see many signs that support the narrative of a west in decline while also seeing signs that it still has plenty of innovation and strength still left in it.
The center of technological innovation still resides here in the west.
In the west the industrial and technological prowess are demonstrated through its corporations. For a recent example, look at the speed of development, and efficacy of the vaccines developed in the West compared to the ones developed in China. Beating the west by creating a better vaccine, faster would have been like the Moon landing in terms of raising China's prestige and stature.
SpaceX, despite being only a mid sized company in the US, has a space program that is more advanced that any nation on Earth. Companies like Boston Robotics and Waymo continue to sprout up in the US.
In the event of a total war situation, the west would have a better chance of calling upon the expertise and knowledge of companies like these, much as it did in World War II.
However, things do change. China continues to rise. If it plays its cards right, it can become a rival to, and even eclipse the west. However the fact is, the west continues to be a center for innovation, that pulls in the smartest and brightest from all over the world. People from everywhere, including China, continue to immigrate to it and bring new blood to its competitive economic engine. Feeding the creative destruction of economic and technological innovation. China does not yet have this. It's corporations sit in service of their bureaucracy, its public discourse and innovation is hampered by its great firewall.
I don’t think national rivalries and all that will be around much longer. Borders are getting increasingly meaningless. People just want the freedom to make a good honest living anywhere on earth. Anything that gets in the way is doomed to fail. I believe this will happen in my lifetime.
China has always been extremely good for its top students, providing them with all they need to excel. Once China becomes a global superpower, I'd imagine many of them go back to working for China if they get the chance to with their new-found expertise from abroad.
It's very hard to disagree IMO. The west is in decline and unless something catastrophic happens in PRC or war breaks out (also pretty catastrophic) I can't see any future where the PRC isn't going to at least become on par with the US soon but most likely it will succeed it as top dog. The only question in my mind is where do the EU end up in all this and if Russia will become closer with PRC or EU.
IMO the biggest failure in all this is that the opposition to PRC's rise is the same old as we have seen before and it's very clear that it will fail. As an outsider to both the US and PRC it looks to me like the US does all it can to shoot itself in the foot continually for whatever reason while PRC is playing on a totally different level. Maybe because US policy are mostly only until next election?
Unless Russia gets another revolution, it's likely to remain its own pole. It has a sphere of influence, exports that its neighbours are dependant on, and an ossified political structure.
I would disagree wholeheartedly with you on that point.
Consider thefact that US external policies are always the same, Bush was the 'opposite' of Obama and yet US is still in Afghanistan and they still commit war crimes across the globe despite the fact since Bush Jr there was Lib/Rep/Lib presidents.
US - which still shapes worlds events by far - can start wars and fly drones in foreign countries that kill people there.
Russia can only send 'green men' to Ukraine or provoke a short term strike with Georgia.
This is not a result of a short term thinking nation.
The US's antiquated and ossified political system with its focus on minoritarianism and gridlock-as-a-design-objective are a major cause. As long as it's possible for ~30% of the country to drag everything to a halt, not a lot is going to get done. The push to restrict voting rights only amplifies that, but the real problem is that the US system is not built to produce a "mandate to lead", it is designed with an excessive focus on "checks and balances" that require supermajority control of all branches of government to accomplish the most basic of functions. Checks and balances and minority representation are good concepts in general but taken to too much of an extreme you end up with a government that cannot react to obviously changing circumstances, which is where we are now. That's the thing that's functionally going to put the US into decline, our government is simply so gridlocked that it cannot accomplish even its most basic functions, and it's a result of how the government is structured that allows and encourages this. If China and Russia don't do it alone, climate change and other problems certainly will.
It's analogous to the liberum veto in the Polism sejm - the system "promoted bipartisanship" by allowing the current legislation under debate and all previous legislation passed in that session to be vetoed at any time by a single member. That's good, right? You have to pass things that only everyone agrees with! But it was exploited by bad actors both internally and foreign powers who wanted to weaken and disrupt the government, to the point the polish state collapsed into a state of anarchy and provincial rule. Sound familiar?
Ultimately it is better to have a system of government that produces an administration that is capable of accomplishing its policy objectives, even if that means that your political opponents can also do things that you don't like. You can then structure the rest of the government around making sure that the administration remains representative of the population. But having a government that is routinely unable to do anything at all is a design flaw with the system, not something to be cheered, and that's the primary reason the US is in decline. It's better for somebody to be at the helm, than everybody arguing over which way to go and nobody driving.
On top of that the US tends to conceptualize "unlimited rights" to a much greater degree than virtually any country. That makes it far more susceptible to misinformation campaigns. The internet is the Atom Bomb of the information age - it makes misinformation far more deadly than it ever was before, because now you can take misinformation straight to the idiots themselves on a micro-targeted level. Certainly misinformation was a problem before, particularly with radio (eg Father Coughlin) but that was eventually curbed with broadcast regulations. As those regulations have eroded the problem got worse again, and now that we have private infrastructure that is totally unregulated it is becoming vastly worse again. Even worse than before in fact, because now you can micro-target the lies each person is most susceptible too. It's just a completely different ballgame than it was 30 years ago, and the regulatory scheme hasn't adapted to the idea that pretty much anybody can wield this potent weapon. The whole western world with its liberal (in the rights-based sense) philosophies are struggling with this but the US takes the most extremist positions in this area and is impacted the worst.
The lack of regulatory response to the rise of weaponized, micro-targeted misinformation campaigns is certainly amplified by the gridlock caused by minoritarian control at the government level, of course, these are all inter-related problems.
- The US is a impregnable continent with oceans on both sides. Poland is a flat plain surrounded by historical enemies. Congress isn't the Sejm and a single veto doesn't halt legislation. No one is going to invade the US and significant legislation still gets passed regularly. Poland also didn't have the entire apolitical infrastructure of the CIA, FBI, NSA, state governments, etc.
- Misinformation has always existed. The idea that somehow everything was true and honest back when we only had 3 TV stations is naive at best. The media has lost control of the narrative and they no longer have the power they once did to control information. It's as simple as that.
- You are assuming that the problem here is government and not culture.
- The physical isolation of the US is one of the reasons it's endured as long as it has, yes. We would be in a lot more trouble if we were physically accessible to enemies, of course. However, not all problems are man-made, climate change is an example of a problem that the US cannot dodge simply because it's geographically isolated. The healthcare crisis, COVID, worsening inequality, etc are all internal problems that the US is unable to address because of its ossified political system. We're not going to be able to ignore those problems forever just because we live on our own continent, we need a functioning government regardless.
Moreover, it is of course trivially true that no two historical circumstances are ever exactly the same. That doesn't mean we discard all historical parallels and lessons from history. That's a very trivial and shortsighted view to the lessons of history.
Obviously the US is not Poland circa 1500. But it demonstrates the problems that can be created from systems with extreme amounts of checks-and-balances. From there we can ask the question "are the US's systems of checks and balances extreme enough that they're causing problems?" and I think the answer is clearly "yes".
- Misinformation has always existed, just like bombs existed before the atom bomb. That doesn't mean the battlefield hasn't significantly changed from 30 years ago. Thanks to the work of Facebook, Google, and others, it is now possible to directly target individuals with the forms of misinformation they are most susceptible to. Just as that has revolutionized advertising, it has revolutionized information warfare, and the regulatory framework has not adapted to deal with that (partially because of liberal absolutism, and partially because of the generally ossified nature of the political system which prevents anything from getting done).
Moreover, back when the government was more functional, misinformation was recognized as a problem and addressed. Truth in broadcasting laws being an example. And as those regulations have been eroded (both legally and structurally with the transition to unregulated forms of broadcast over privately owned carriers) the problems have gotten worse. So yes, it's always been a problem, to the extent that we recognized that and deployed solutions to fix it, and as those solutions have been eroded the problem has come back and gotten worse.
- "Culture" is another trite excuse for systemic problems. It is not the overall cause of the problems. If your system of government and rights framework requires humans to be angels then it is not a good one - this is the same argument as "communism would work if we only found perfect humans". Well, humans aren't perfect, if the US government can't function with imperfect humans then that's a design problem.
But yes, generally the US does have a cultural problem with selfishness and lack of community outlook that doesn't help any of this. People refusing to get the COVID shot while they go around society and (stochastically) kill others and breed new mutations of the virus is just the most recent example, generally you have things like the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" and the focus on employers being able to use their religion to impinge on their employees' lives that are fairly uniquely american. We would be much better off with some community-oriented ideals to balance out that individualism.
The overall problem is structural, but the cultural problems certainly don't help.
> The US is a impregnable continent with oceans on both sides
This must be news to it, because it constantly acts as if it is existentially threatened by one foreign adversary or other, from Grenada to Venezuela to Iran/q to Mexico, and so on and so forth.
> Congress isn't the Sejm and a single veto doesn't halt legislation.
I believe the parent poster used that as an example of the absurdity of a checks-and-balances system, taken to the extreme. In the current state of the US, the checks-and-balances system results in pretty extreme outcomes.
> significant legislation still gets passed regularly.
Got to have to disagree there. The sole lasting legacy of a presidency, a supreme court, a senate, and a congress owned by the Trump party between 2016 and 2018 was... A lot of judicial appointments. [1] Its legislative efforts were not very successful - neither were Obama's[2] between 2008 and 2010, and I expect the same for Biden 2020-2022.
> Misinformation has always existed. The idea that somehow everything was true and honest back when we only had 3 TV stations is naive at best. The media has lost control of the narrative and they no longer have the power they once did to control information. It's as simple as that.
Now, I wasn't alive back in the sixties, and I am well aware of how media propaganda works... But you should spend some time interacting with true believers of QAnon, and you'll observe that something has fundamentally changed about how information spreads.
It feels like a qualitative change to me, you may argue that it's merely a quantitative change. Even if you are right, the point is not that the media 'simply' lost control of the narrative. Someone else has gained control of the narrative, at its expense, and the outcome is not pretty.
People were optimistic that the internet, and social media would let a thousand flowers of culture bloom. This... Did not happen. What we got instead, was an open-air cesspit, with a hydra's heads peering at us from the surface.
[1] It developed a bit of a legacy in the tail end of 2020 as well, but it's not exactly a legislative one, and there's still a slim hope that it won't be a lasting one, and that we won't have to go through it again every time a president loses an election.
[2] Whose sole lasting legacy is passing a Republican healthcare reform, which the Republicans have been gleefully attacking for the past decade. But at least it's got his name on it, so that counts for something.
Democracies that are actually constantly changing micro dictatures are failed democracies.
It is perfectly reasonable to stop to discuss and aim for consensus when you are not able to reach an agreement.
Otherwise each party just spends time and resources undoing what the other has done until then.
Good democracies are actually those that go even further and try to incorporate the needs of even smaller minorities/opinions in their decision making.
Reaching a consensus is a hard task but it is the cost of an ideal democracy as envisioned by Rawls for instance.
Look at countries that have high trust in their government, those are the most productive countries in the world.
China is definitely not an exemple in that regards, they have the numbers only because of their population. But on a per capita basis their productivity is abysmal. And that's without considering that most Chinese work 12h a day.
I don't think anyone considers, let's say the UK or Canada as a "micro-dictatorship". The UK and other parliamentary systems have fewer checks and balances with a deliberate orientation to producing a government with a mandate to rule, for example the leader of the executive branch is always of the same party as the legislature. I think the US system is probably a de-optimization from that approach.
This is just fetishism of the US system as taught in 3rd grade social studies. Everyone with a different system is not a "micro-dictatorship". The US system is actually not particularly good compared to other western liberal nations, due to the aforementioned frequent inability to form a government with a mandate to lead. The founders had lots of ideas, some of them were good, some of them didn't work, and some were harmful from the get-go, and any critical analysis of any system needs to be able to acknowledge the existence of flaws in the execution or even design of a system.
The US system was a fairly early example of a democracy and most other governments saw the mistakes and chose not to repeat them. The US also chose not to repeat them for those countries whose constitutions we wrote (eg Germany or Japan).
Everyone realizes it's a bad system, but reform is too difficult, and decline and collapse is the alternative. So that's what's going to happen. It's quite likely that voting rights will be reduced over the next 2 years, cementing minority control of the government for an indefinite period of time, and we already saw what happened over the last 4 years with that minority rule.
> The US system is actually not particularly good compared to other western liberal nations, due to the aforementioned frequent inability to form a government with a mandate to lead.
What other western nations? Examples, please.
If the choice is dictatorship that absolutely suppresses me, or a liberal government that panders a little harder than it should to virtual signal, I'd gladly take the latter any day of the week, even if it means putting up with ridiculous social justice wankery.
What does a world led by China have to offer anyone, except dictatorship and exploitation? "Communism with Chinese Characteristics" is just Crony Capitalism, with 1984-style repression.
You're literally replying to a comment that gave examples. Please don't post in bad faith as if there were not examples given, that's not a positive discussion.
> What does a world led by China have to offer anyone
never said it did, again, putting words in my mouth is not a good-faith discussion and I ask that you stop.
More than glad to reply if you'd like to engage with the ideas I've discussed. It's not my job to repeat my post 27 times line-by-line, or to defend arguments that I did not make.
The US is stuck at the reaching a concensus step. The system blocks participants until they do which is not so bad unless the participants categorically refuse to collaborate. In which case you can have a government blocked for many yeas as happened in Belgium.
And it's definitely not at the step of listening to smaller interests with only two major opinions being represented.
That will be abused by a slim majority to dominate a slim minority, by claiming that members of the slim minority are openly playing to block the system. At that point, you no longer have any requirement to reach a consensus - it's just "50% + 1 runs over 50% - 1".
The West is on the rise technologically and in decline socially. But I wouldn't be too quick to call the decline irreversible. The democracy is still in a good shape despite some challenges.
The West went through many crises. This is not the first one, and not the last one. So far, nothing indicates that the social crisis is irreversible and the West won't be able to bounce back.
> The democracy is still in a good shape despite some challenges.
What political pathways do you see for correcting both our two-party system and increased gerrymandering? It seems to me like those two factors are large contributors to our increasing political polarization, and fixing them would require the political parties to behave irrationally from a game theory perspective.
Easy: give the individual states more responsibility. This has already begun. There is really no reason why California and Alabama need to have 100% of the same laws on highly contentious issues.
I think polarization across the country is mostly a consequence of too much centralization. The federal government has too much power, so the political parties organize themselves in that way. Everything becomes zero sum.
If states had more variation, I think you'd see less polarization, because the threat of a federal decision applying to everyone is far less of a worry.
Actually there is because southern states are well on their way to removing women's rights to do what they want with their body, installing theocratic governments, and resurrecting Jim Crow laws. If that's not a reason for more federal involvement I don't know what is.
No, not really, it's getting pretty bad in the southern states lately, or perhaps it's just the propaganda I prefer...but it does appear like a bunch of red states have passed abortion restrictions, some states worse than others, and these laws will be challenged in court, and with the supreme court being the way it is, it's really iffy.
Abortion is a complex moral issue and if you think it isn’t, you haven’t researched the topic well enough.
Ditto for the other issues mentioned in your comment. The lines you’ve used (“control of their bodies, Jim Crow”) are indications that you get your information from propagandistic sources.
Gerrymandering is being fought at the state levels with some real teeth now. A fair few states have laws already on the books, and many more are considering such laws. It's by not means a solved issue, but awareness of it is quite high and there is real activism towards ending it.
The most interesting parts to me are seeing areas where the US corporations finally tell the US political class "fuck off".
Sure, they'll slap a BLM web page and hire more [whatever race you tell us is cool to hire]. They'll tribute some token amount to the cause du jour propped up by Democrats, but allow unions? That's open war and it got crushed exceedingly fast as we saw with Amazon..
It's fascinating to watch the dynamic as companies sing praises on one hand, but are clearly preparing their daggers on the other. The Democrats don't understand what they're doing by openly being hostile to half the country and its values, and they're in for a rude awakening when the corporations decide that they've had enough.
This will continue until the people of the West feel threatened by China. And then, I think it will be a new playing field for Chine where they need to lay low and do fancy PR, which is not something they're capable of. During the height of the pandemic, Chinese ambassadors all over the world handled public relations terribly. We'll see worst when they need to speak directly to the people of other nations when things get tense.
>IMO the biggest failure in all this is that the opposition to PRC's rise is the same old as we have seen before and it's very clear that it will fail. As an outsider to both the US and PRC it looks to me like the US does all it can to shoot itself in the foot continually for whatever reason while PRC is playing on a totally different level. Maybe because US policy are mostly only until next election?
I would say it's mainly because there is a sizeable number of people in the US that are benefiting from favourable trade relations with China to lobby for not rocking the boat (not to mention purposely scuttling long-term strategic programmes to isolate China like the TPP).
So the issue really is that there are bad actors that are putting their own private interests before that of the nation. Historically in China, this is also how many dynasties fell.
Not sticking with the TPP was such a dumb move by Trump (but I believe Hillary was going to dump it as well, so it's days were numbered either way). We need to step back into that agreement and put more weight behind it and working with democratic countries for manufacturing rather than with dictatorships.
I wouldn't say the west is in decline in absolute terms though maybe in relative power as the likes of China get richer. Against that the culture of 'the west' is I think spreading to more counties. Places like Japan have long been western allies and I think a lot of countries wouldn't be very taken with the Chinese system.
With all of articles like this, I am puzzled how correct is this? Is it possible that China isn't really betting but only the Economist that think so?
I mean Biden admin use the word 'China' to accelerate his wishes (infrastructure, stimulus and so on).
We are declining because we are becoming more like China. More censorship, larger control of central government, currency manipulation. I actually see this as inevitable as you get a larger and larger population freedoms need to get reduced to maintain a stable society.
Disagree. The first part, becoming more like china due to censorhip, etc is true.
The 2nd part has no basis in reality. The issue is the concentration of power in the hands of the technocrats who now make decisions for everyone on censorship, currency manipulation, etc.
It isn't inevitable, its the result of the concentration of power and the failure of the US government to regulate massive monopolies especially in the tech space that have crushed or bought out newcomers, concentrating power further and ruining progress via buyouts and copying.
If you don't pay people for writing, writers will find other ways to get paid which runs the risk of their writing being tainted/biased by their monetization method (i.e. their writing just becomes marketing).
Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here. You did that repeatedly in this thread, and you broke the site guidelines egregiously with this one. Please read the rules and do no more of this on HN.
I'm not going to ban you right now because you've posted other comments that are within the intended use of the site, but you've been seriously abusing it also. Comments like this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26697627 are not ok.
One-liner national putdowns are nationalistic flamebait. If you had written substantively about "standard practices" that would be different, but you didn't.
As for your GP post, if you read the site guidelines you'll see immediately why that wasn't acceptable as an HN comment.
Yeah except China actually cares about continuing that improvement. You've got that spring water now, but who is working on getting you a newer, better spring water, and has anybody called them a racist sexist misogynistic homophobic demon yet?
No, but nobody called America that either. Your anti-PC hyperbole in this thread is wearing quite thin.
If you don't like being called a [racist, sexist, whatever], then either change or grow some thicker skin. People pointing out racially charged or misogynistic language in interpersonal situations is NOT causing widespread economic or industrial damage.
No municipal water supply in the US ever canceled an infrastructure project or a new filtration plant because of political correctness.
No, the worst that happens if somebody calls you a racist is... somebody called you a racist. You don't pay a fine, your business isn't seized, and -- most germane to your "point -- your water filtration plant isn't demolished.
And the so-called top dog of the west have cities where people for years had to get bottled water because the whole city were poisoned and whole states are drying out. Not everyone in the west are as lucky as those of us with clean water. Definitely not the US.
>And the so-called top dog of the west have cities where people for years had to get bottled water because the whole city were poisoned and whole states are drying out.
The point remains. Tap water is by default not drinkable, whereas water in the US is (barring some exceptions).
No it clearly is not. It migh be to you but I would never drink water in the US from the tap. When you are used to clean groundwater and discussions about water from the Alps not being clean enough then the water in the US is not even on the same level.
And how did it look in the US in the 70's when it were booming like China is now? Children in plastic cocoons because the air were toxic with lead, drinking water full of crap, dead fish everywhere from dumping of chemicals in lakes and sea, radioactive waste leaking, etc.
I don't think "irreversible decline" meaning the raw metrics get worse. I think here it means the structure and ideology of the CCP means they will never be able to deliver what the West can deliver, especially on the personal freedoms front.
Maybe decline is the wrong word, and collision course is a better one.
As China globalizes and becomes more exposed to the outside world, they will start to wonder why they can't vote on things like environmental regulation, or why the local factory pollutes their river but they have little say in that process.
In this sense, this is the decline. It's the CCP being undermined by their own economic liberalization.
It is my impression, given the repressive approaches taken in Hong Kong and Tiananmen, that any aggrieved group in China may have great difficulty communicating views in an efficacious way.
Your examples says nothing about the rise (or decline) of the west. Only about how it is right now. That is missing the point. Those stats you mention seen over time show that the west is at best at a standstill while PRC have risen meteoric. The middle-class in PRC were pretty much nonexistent some decades ago in PRC. They did get the better standard of living and it is still becoming better. It doesn't go as fast as it once did but far better than the west.
1. At least it's drinkable and not poisoned like in China.
2. No it is not. Have not you seen the dystopian reality of Beijing from last month?
3. Chinese healthcare is hazard on its own.
4. I have. China is not attracting anyone on a comparable level like the EU or the US. Also you dont get to stay and work in China even if you married someone from there.
2.? Are you serious? This was a sandstorm, a very natural phenomenon. In fact, I love sandstorms since they remind me of my best times in Beijing.
3. They have clinics that would make most western clinics cry. Yes, they charge like western clinics too. But I have been for a minor thing in a normal Chinese hospital, a friend of mine had his appendix removed and another US friend of mine got a major surgery in a Chinese military hospital.
4. Don't know where you have been. Shanghai and Beijing is full of young and ambitious people from all over the world. They look for the future, not for the past. I was an immigrant in the US myself (also have an US passport now). The US was always closed for me. Zero opportunities. In China it is a brand new world. Opportunities, ambition, money. I consider it my home.
Very natural phenomenon that is caused by Chinese deforestation and exploitation of the country.
>4. Don't know where you have been. Shanghai and Beijing is full of young and ambitious people from all over the world. They look for the future, not for the past. I was an immigrant in the US myself (also have an US passport now). The US was always closed for me. Zero opportunities. In China it is a brand new world. Opportunities, ambition, money. I consider it my home.
How much does CCP pay these days? Do you get sponsored tours to Chongqing ?
The gobi desert should be very old. You may have a point that it is growing, but:
"The Gobi Desert is expanding through desertification, most rapidly on the southern edge into China, which is seeing 3,600 km2 (1,390 sq mi) of grassland overtaken every year. Dust storms have increased in frequency in the past 20 years, causing further damage to China's agriculture economy. However in some areas desertification has been slowed or reversed.[15]
The expansion of the Gobi is attributed mostly to human activities, locally driven by deforestation, overgrazing, and depletion of water resources, as well as to climate change.[15]
China has tried various plans to slow the expansion of the desert, which have met with some success.[17] The Three-North Shelter Forest Program (or "Green Great Wall") was a Chinese government tree-planting project begun in 1978 and set to continue through 2050. The goal of the program is to reverse desertification by planting aspen and other fast-growing trees on some 36.5 million hectares across some 551 counties in 12 provinces of northern China.[18][19]"
"How much does CCP pay these days? Do you get sponsored tours to Chongqing ?"
No idea. They pay nothing to me. But I would happily take a passport. I going to get permanent residence rights through marriage. Otherwise I would attempt to become a HK citizen, since you cant get a mainland passport and the green card option is not very tempting on current legislation.
Regarding #2, I was in Shanghai and Beijing in late 2019. I had a lot of discomfort first landing in Beijing; Shanghai's haze was not as bad but it still shows up in pictures. I imagine this is what the USA's coal country used to feel like when it was in active swing.
We've had numerous examples of third world style infrastructure failures (Flint water, Texas power outages) within the US that will likely continue. We have under invested in infrastructure for decades, while China has done quite the opposite.
Freedoms are increasingly becoming an illusion in the West. Saying something unpopular or taboo on the internet (even if it were years ago) is likely to cut you off from both your income and healthcare (as healthcare is tied to your employment).
All not to mention the simmering social unrest caused by insane income inequality, the levels of both private and public debt, and the likelihood of the dollar losing its reserve status in the next few decades. Things do not look good for the US.
Why do I get the feeling that 'unpopular' is just a euphemism for 'racist' here. You're saying you want to cancel cancel culture?
Like look, I'll give you that there exist an incredibly small fraction of people that actually embody the spectre you are trying to conjure here. We have so so many more pressing issues in this country than fear of wokeness--like the rise of domestic white-supremacist terrorism.
The same computer and Internet connection that you used to post this message of "genuine interest" will also allow you to -- independently -- search for tons of actual US government reports and independent academic studies of US white supremacist terrorism, the arrests made, deaths and injuries caused, etc.
In fact, I'd bet you can find 100 of those papers before you can find a single peer-reviewed study demonstrating any macroeconomic impact of "somebody said something racist on the Internet and everybody yelled at them!"
One of the quotes from the most recent study which seems to contradict there's a rise in violence:
"White supremacists, extremist militia members, and other violent far-right extremists were responsible for 66 percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in 2020—roughly consistent with their share in other recent years. For example, on June 7, Harry H. Rogers—a self-proclaimed leader of the Ku Klux Klan—intentionally drove his pick-up truck into a crowd of Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Henrico, Virginia. One protester was injured, and Rogers received a six-year prison sentence. In addition, anarchists, anti-fascists, violent environmentalists, and other violent far-left extremists conducted 23 percent of terrorist attacks and plots in 2020—an increase from the previous three years, in which violent far-left incidents comprised between 5 and 11 percent of all domestic terrorist attacks and plots. For example, on August 29 in Portland, Oregon, Michael Reinoehl—an Antifa extremist—followed two members of the far-right group Patriot Prayer and then shot and killed one of them, Aaron “Jay” Danielson."
These are important trends and I pay close attention to them as I believe we're going to be facing a sharply decreasing quality of life for the average American in the coming years which will provoke anger and unrest. These are going to be ingredients to serious problems, some of which will trigger a broad increase in violence. Unfortunately I have little faith in our current leadership or system to deal with these challenges.
You must be seriously disconnected from reality, both ways, to say something like this, like disconnected on a cyberpunk level. It's funny to even give the slightest thought of trying to rebunk some of those points lol.
1 & 2) For once most people in the west have access to safe and good tap water.Chinese urban dwellers dont. Most people in the west live in places with significantly better air quality than chinese.
... As a frequent visitor to China I can tell you its a mixed bag. Many areas enjoy western levels of water and air quality. Many areas do not. What is lost in environmental quality is offset by an unprecedented ability to escape poverty, an academic meritocracy (albeit testing based), and rising income and wealth levels the West cannot presently match.
3) Most people in the west get to enjoy freedoms chinese cant even talk about
... In absolute terms a large number of Chinese ethnicities and religions are seriously repressed and abused. In aggregate however, the Chinese system catapulted so many of its citizens out of poverty and into the middle class you will find as much (if not more) national pride at China's rise than you will contempt. I sadly observe that certain freedoms may prove to be overrated compared to others, along the lines of Maslow.
4) West is attracting young people from all around the world.
... The West needs a reversal of the balance of payments. The West needs good paying middle class jobs. The West needs to re-domesticate much of its supply chain. The West needs to prepare for high intensity war in order to deter/prevent it. This laundry list of Western needs is incompatible with the expectations of today's 'young people' who are oblivious to these existential threats, great power decline and the relative unimportance of their priorities to their actual survival.
How many Mainland Chinese do you actually know? Have you talked to them?
My in-laws are all Mainland Chinese. They have access to safe and good tap water, either back in their home town literally in the mountains or in a big city like Wuhan.
Air quality is not great, I'll give you that. But it's also not the worst, at least not in every measure. E.g. many big cities in China had lower NO2 levels than other big cities in other country, in 2016, and those numbers come from NASA: https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/no2/world/east-asia/wuhan
The majority of the people in China don't care about the kind of freedom you talk about. As a nation, they seem to have a very singular goal: follow the Party, make progress, and beat the rest of the world.
China is also attracting lots of young people from other parts of the world. There are quite a few twitter accounts of Laowais who seem to enjoy life in China because they've seen past the values of the West.
Interesting. What would you consider are the values of the West? And, in your opinion, what are the values of the Chinese society? And don't you think there are overlaps and so, which one?
No retorical questions, I am truly interesting in your answer.
Or maybe I should put it another way: they've seen past the priorities of values of the West.
I think that, as civilisations, we all aspire to mostly the same values. We just have very different priorities. For the Chinese, it's economic progress over freedom. (In fact, they are mostly free to say whatever they want as long as they don't try to rally and secede or topple the government. As a point of anecdatum, I discuss politics with my brother-in-law over WeChat. We don't always agree with the official narrative. Neither of us has been censored or arrested.)
> For the Chinese, it's economic progress over freedom.
And do you think that this is the case because of some sort of permanence in chinese culture or is it just a transient artefact of the economic situation?
Is Chinese middle class really a known variable?
If you look at the west, the current doxa was not always focused on human rights and individual freedom. The same drive to economic progress has actually dominated much of its history since the renaissance and it can be argued that it was the main engine to political progress. My grand parent main political goal was mainly to ensure they would have enough to go by once they get old.
Don't you think that, as chinese middle class's economic situation evolves, its priority might not also change?
I think what's going to happen in china in the next 20 years are going to have as much impact on the world than the colonization of the new world by europeans 500 years ago. And chinese middle class will be at the center of it.
> We don't always agree with the official narrative. Neither of us has been censored or arrested.)
And if the chinese government were to do something that you consider truly horrible, would you consider that expressing your opinion openly and publicly would be considered "to rally and secede"?
Again I am not trying to trigger you, I am just trying to understand a collective state of mind on which, I believed, we are poorly informed in the west.
I am very much agree k_sze's comments, I will add some of mine. Chinese's group (family/school/party/country) feeling is stronger/higher priority than a individual. This is recognized and accepted without any government's push. Although most of Chinese is atheist, good portion of common religious believes are considered as a philosophy and is built in social normal, everyone expect to follow. They have less bias toward other ethnic groups, most of time they enjoy each others' difference through each other's food. They very much believe nothing is impossible to some degree of foolish, this leads them to take some long term projects that could not justified in normal ROI alone. Professionally, they respect farmer and scholars higher than politicians and business people, this does not stop them wanting be rich.
I think there are many overlaps with old West value.
> The majority of the people in China don't care about the kind of freedom you talk about. As a nation, they seem to have a very singular goal: follow the Party, make progress, and beat the rest of the world.
Sure. The people of Russia didn't care about freedom and just wanted to follow the Party, too. Until they were given the chance, and it turned out that they actually wanted freedom and didn't give a rip about following the Party, because the Party was denying them the freedom they wanted, and was feeding them a perpetual diet of lies in the process. And despite all the lies, they could tell that it was lies, and that it wasn't freedom.
Now, it didn't work out in Russia. They didn't wind up at freedom. They wound up back with lies. But the point is, however much it looked in Soviet years as though everyone wanted to follow the Party, that was just a facade.
Are the Chinese so different? Do they really not care about freedom? Do they really in their hearts want to follow the Party? Or can they tell that it's all propaganda, and they just are going along on the surface?
The one difference is that China has delivered a fair amount of prosperity to a lot of people, which the Soviet system didn't. That might buy the Party in China another generation. But then the next generation sees that as the baseline. Can the Party continue to deliver improved prosperity? And will that be enough to keep people from wanting actual freedom?
They are probably not wrong. When you look at the infighting within the US that is front page news every day...the decline is in full swing. People care less about how to actually improve the country than they do about trying to hold entire professions accountable for the actions of a few (not just cops)...then we are focused on the wrong things. Spending hundreds of days protesting something instead of putting that time toward actually cleaning up neighborhoods or tutoring underprivileged youth and it's all a waste. Defund the police...just emboldened the criminals and caused more death than anything the police have done. 17 people have been killed by Police in Portland between 2013 and 2020...so far in 2021 there have been more homicides in Portland than there were in 2017 and 2018 and we are on track for over 100 homicides this year.
The US became a super power in the last 200 years...and the focus should be maintaining our competitive edge and working where there will be benefit.
Thank you. Some of the poorest people I know are deeply moral. Indeed a poorly run home is the largest predictor - and too little (or too much) money does magnify the problem, poverty isn’t synonymous with crime.
Yes, the gun violence reduction team was disbanded. Since then the number of shootings has skyrocketed. Police are in such disarray and completely disrespected that they don't even go into certain neighborhoods anymore.
Claiming "defund the police" is the obvious cause of an increase in crime while completely ignoring the global pandemic and its economic/employment effects and their resulting impact on crime is confirmation bias.
OK, well reducing the police is hardly an appropriate action in the middle of a crime spike. Ted Wheeler said the shootings started trending up a few months before the disbanded the gun violence reduction team...so is that better or worse? The team was disbanded because the stats came out that almost half the people pulled over by the team were black...so it's immediately racist. However half of the shooting victims are black and more than half the suspects are black. The shootings occur in primarily black neighborhoods...which is where the team focused their efforts. I guess to avoid the perception of being racist they would rather get rid of something that was working and let people be killed.
Seriously. While we were pretending that communism was defeated and the Cold War has been over since 1989, the CCP has infiltrated western corporations, institutions, and schools right under our noses. Lord knows what sort of havoc they have instigated and what IP they have stolen.
Did you entirely forget about the 60s? Domestic unrest and geopolitical power aren't that tightly connected. People have been saying the West is "in decline" for decades and it's almost always by people looking at chance in society as being some kind of negative force. The "social change misinterpreted as cultural decline" is basically a meme at this point.
Hitler believed that America was in such moral decline that the country would be unable to unify and run any kind of large-scale war effort in Europe. The Nazis had a particular derision for jazz music, viewing it as a way for "undesirables" to corrupt and destroy society. Again, internal division and cultural change had little bearing on America's ability to move vast amounts of equipment and manpower to Europe when the country decided to.
> putting that time toward actually cleaning up neighborhoods or tutoring underprivileged youth
The US has tried again and again these naively optimistic programs targeting “neighborhoods” and “the youth”, to no avail whatsoever.
The terrible reality is that the long-term prospects of a civilization are inexorably dominated by its demographics, and the demographics of the US are spiraling down towards disaster. We have exhausted the Flynn effect and our intelligence levels are declining. We continue to bulk-import millions of people with heritable intelligence levels below those required to sustain the level of civilization we have enjoyed in the past. Those segments of our population that produce enough wealth to sustain our political program are reproducing below replacement rate.
Unless we pull off a massive demographic reversal, which is probably impossible at this point, China is absolutely correct. The future of the US is, optimistically, Brazil, and pessimistically South Africa.
> When you look at the infighting within the US that is front page news every day...the decline is in full swing.
I don’t see how there’s any other option either. At this point there a multiple “factions” who’s end vision of society is actively hostile to certain other factions.
Sure, when the nation was still pretty young and the world was much different with many great powers, there was a civil war.
Do you really think the US could maintain dominance if half the nation went to war with itself again, in more modern times? Not that I think any future conflict would be remotely similar.
> Do you really think the US could maintain dominance if half the nation went to war with itself again, in more modern times?
No, not really. But... I don’t really have any way of knowing. I just have to remind myself that, as ugly as it has gotten, it used to be a whole lot worse, and we survived and thrived, and so maybe we can do it again.
This is EXACTLY what the Defund Police movement is about. It's recognizing that half of city budgets are used for policing and some of those resources instead could be used to cleanup the neighborhoods and teach children.
If policing takes half the budget and nobody wants to raise taxes, then clearly to get resources to do other things, like teach underprivileged youth and cleanup neighborhoods, you must take away from some group, and since police take up such a HUGE part of the budget and they already do things they shouldn't be doing (like dealing with mental health issues), then it's clear we must reduce police budgets to free up resources.
EDIT: Before you downvote, take a moment to actually research why people are wanting to defund the police. And If I'm wrong, show me.
You are saying you would like people to actually improve the country, but are saying defunding the police counters that.
When people say they'll want to defund the police, they are not saying there should be no police. People want a different police. There are structural problems that are not easily fixed, as we have seen. Making a new police-like organisation from the ground up is a way to fix those structural problems.
I'm not sure if I agree that is the best solution, but people that do are trying to improve the country that way.
In fact, all people that are protesting do want to improve the world. But they realise that they are held back. See climate change and inequality. Those problems cannot be fixed without getting the people in power to help.
Destroying inner cities is not helping. Pulling money away from the police in the middle of crime spiking and giving it to experimental task forces that have little in the way of experience is not a great idea. Portland just decided that to combat all of the shootings and crime happening in the city's parks they will add more unarmed park rangers. This should go well...
I wholefully agree with you. That is harmful. Though, it is only a small subset of the people who are guilty of that. So we should speak to those people instead of the whole group that is critical of the current police force.
> Portland just decided that to combat all of the shootings and crime happening in the city's parks they will add more unarmed park rangers.
Well, you have got to start somewhere. That are structural problems in the police force which aren't going away anytime soon. We should do something about that. We've learned that arming police more certainly isn't helping.
I'll be surprised if, in 10 years, we wouldn't conclude that Portland's efforts were helpful to come to a solution to the problem. Solving problems, also what OP is talking about, is a long term effort.
So, you’re suggesting that the USA is in decline because marginalized groups are demanding equal treatment?
I’ll agree that police violence is a symptom of much larger systemic issues, but you seem to be implying that the larger
systemic issue is... people are unhappy with the USA and they should stop being unhappy and support the USA.
Have you considered why they might be unhappy, why they may very well have legitimate grievances?
Perhaps we can strengthen our union by addressing these centuries old grievances? My understanding of your post is, you just want them to stop complaining without doing anything to help them.
> So, you’re suggesting that the USA is in decline because marginalized groups are demanding equal treatment?
Some demand equal treatment, some demand better treatment and other not only accept their life-style, but to consider their niche life-style as something more desirable than an average life style.
> but to consider their niche life-style as something more desirable than an average life style.
I don't see how this follows as a rebuttal of the gp comment, if anything it says (to me) that the US is _not_ in decline because we're willing and able to have conversations and make progress on what should be accepted in modern society. This comment feels like a soapbox to me rather than contributing to any sort of discussion, because nobody can comment on _what_ groups you're referring to, and there are no sources to be had. Very disappointing.
The way it's being done is the problem. No one can have a discussion about things anymore. It does us no good to be living on the moral high ground as our borders are invaded and our technology stolen. I'm not saying people shouldn't be treated equally...however the actions of a few don't speak for the entire country (this goes for bigots, radical islamists, mass shooters, rogue police officers and many others). Everyone loves to be offended by something now...but it's not the majority and passing more laws won't make people less racist.
"ITS GAZE fixed on the prize of becoming rich and strong, China has spent the past 40 years as a risk-averse bully. Quick to inflict pain on smaller powers, it has been more cautious around any country capable of punching back."
The same could be said about the United States' behavior on the international scene these past decades.
I don't like China and find what they're doing in Xinjiang abhorrent (and I believe that the Western media reports are truthful and not just made up shit), but that part of the article made me wonder if the West has been or is as bad, but the Economist (and myself) ignore it because, "Hey, we're the good guys!".
There isn't a lot of outrage about miners of rare minerals with dangerous working conditions or poorly paid Bangladeshi textile workers, or the slave workers building the Middle Eastern countries (at least not to the level where western politicians talk about sanctions), is it because these people are suppliers for our Apple, H&M, or that they have a lot of oil and money which we wish to attract?
From my knowledge of what is happening in xinjiang, I strongly questions what the western media reports are saying. My opinions are very long so I posted it on medium. I would appreciate it if you have the time to take a look. I offer my perspectives on the issue. https://lty13800.medium.com/my-thoughts-on-xinjiang-daa8d391...
God, your response is too long, too rambling, and would take too much time to refute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop . But here I am having wasted half an hour anyway.
You're doing the same thing you accuse them of doing, using online videos (apparently Chinese-sanctioned ones!) to claim things aren't happening. Sure things look nice there, but I would question if these video makers are being sponsored by China, or being lead through a Potemkin village: https://theprint.in/opinion/china-is-paying-foreign-journali... (yeah, random link from a Google result, very trustworthy). If I were the Chinese government, I'd find the few people who are willing to say my version of the story, and lead the Youtubers to them.
Even the Malay vlogger wrote in her captions that her friend got into an incident where police asked her to take off her Muslim garment, and the friend seemingly able to get away with keeping it on because she was foreign... how is that not religious oppression? In her vlog I see mostly Han Chinese, and she even added a part where she said people around her are asking each other why she has a headscarf on.
Anyway, your long response haven't convinced me that the CCP aren't doing oppression in Xinjiang. I'm not going to defend the "1 in 12" number, nor can I defend the maybe exaggerated Western media reports you have read, but my guess is the oppression is done in a hushed way that you won't see it by walking into a Grand Bazaar.
lol - they aren't just betting - they are aiding and abetting through their sycophants in the media, academia and amazingly big business too.
While we argue about right/left/dem/republican they continue to divide and conquer through attrition. And we are letting it happen right under our collective noses.
An internet that is open to our geopolitical adversaries is a U.S. weakness, not a strength. It's like inviting our adversaries to war with us in our own territory.
- China is net food and energy importer. Look at last year for a preview of future food. The land they leased in Africa won't help in terms of climate shift, locusts, etc. Who is the number of one food and energy exporter?
- China has an aeging population, and it's already a rapid shift.
- China's infrastructure isn't as well built as other countries (see their most important infrastructure project ever being the literal definition of half-assed), and it will start degrading, and maintenance is a pain. What happens when a few dams collapse, or nuke plant blows up?
- Supply chains are moving elsewhere.
- Taiwan has enough medium-range missles to take out the Three Gorges Dam, which is effectively MAD as far as China is concerned. One could also see Taiwan being a few minutes away from going nuclear, if need be(learning the Ukraine lesson).
- The US controls space, and will solidify it's grip in the next 3 years. Nobody is within even a decade of SpaceX's launch technology. 60s solid fuel missles to launch small satellites into orbit won't cut it. Putting Mir 2.0 into orbit won't cut it. A moonbase that is effectively an even more expensive and worthless version of Belt and Road won't cut it (and obviously will provide less jobs).
- What do you do about automation, if it wipes out jobs for all the restive angry young men?
Now sure, a war in the South China Sea favors China heavily, but I don't think the "Let's party in Taiwan" scenario is winnable for them without wiping out 80% of their agriculture, their entire biomedial industry and their main banking centre, along with a bunch of nuke plants and military bases. Not to mention the US soon being able to just stack depleted uranium telephone poles in orbit to protect it's dependencies. A larger scale war in SE Asia would probably just drag the region back 50 years, and China would likely be on the losing end as all their neighbors hate them, and India for example has a very competent military.
The whole "West is in decline" narrative assumes countries are static- the US is especially dynamic in terms of social trends. We are about to end the war on drugs and undergo a massive shift in our education trends as we realize most schooling is worthless, and there is decent chance we'll go to UBI. Now granted the current expamles of UBI in the ME don't bode well, but it's kind of a hazy future.
Now if this was for Western Europe, sure I could buy it.
Agree with everything except the implications about Belt and Road. This was actually strategically clever by China. In 2012 they stopped purchasing (as much) US debt which stopped feeding our reserve currency system. Being a reserve currency requires a country to run persistent trade deficits, not the most sustainable but when everyone takes the inflow of USD and buys bonds, it feeds the USD back into the system allowing it to go on. China bucked this trend and instead started putting their money to work in Africa. This undermines the USD's position petty well.
Chinas wealth is based on neither. So what? Many rich countries import energy. BTW, China is serious about fusion and thorium reactors.
" China has an aeging population, and it's already a rapid shift."
Most countries do and this can still Change.
"- China's infrastructure isn't as well built as other countries and it will start degrading, and maintenance is a pain."
I am sure that the huge and extensive bullet train network in the US won't show any sign of aging very soon. Just kidding.
"- Supply chains are moving elsewhere."
Unlikely, the Chinese type of clustering is hard to replicate. Lower things like textiles and assembly might move to Vietnam. Owned by Chinese companies.
"The US controls space, and will solidify it's grip in the next 3 years. "
Yes, sure. Good luck with that. Sure the Russian will also we happy about it. If I remember right, the next version of the S400 System can even shot satellites out of orbit, but I may be wrong.
"What do you do about automation, if it wipes out jobs for all the restive angry young men?"
Chinese will be leading in automation. Not sure about the angry young man. A Chinese person seems to be happier and more able to endure things in my experience. Strangely, I found many very sensitive to hunger.
US vs China would be an interesting war. The US has very to no experience in fighting such a war. What most Americans don't know (and actually phrased to me in this way by my US professoer): The second world war was a German-Russian war in Europe. The US industrial might helped Russia, but the US fighting was negligible. Russia lost every two days as many people as the US in a ten year war against Vietnam. The US has never fought an equal opponent. Just as a word of caution.
This is either ignorant or dishonest. Just because the US wasn't insanely profligate with lives, doesn't mean they didn't make a huge contribution to defeating Germany. Multiple German armies were defeated by the Western allies in Africa, Italy, France, the low countries and subsequently Germany. Germany's war production was crippled by USAAF and RAF bombing, and its transport was almost totally destroyed. Perhaps most importantly, Germany's ability to fuel its vehicles was removed by the bombing campaign. Literally thousands of 88mm guns were kept in the Reich because of the bombing, and these would have been on the Eastern front shredding Russians otherwise. Without this contribution, the USSR could at best have reached a stalemate. Anyone who denies this has an agenda.
Like I said, the number of deaths is not a good measure of contribution towards actual defeat. Sending punishment battalions to die in their hundreds of thousands was a Soviet choice, and not a good one. Allowing millions of men to be encircled in 1941 was Soviet incompetence. Likewise, sending men into battle unarmed was Soviet callousness.
Africa absolutely was a major theatre. The defeat of the Axis in Libya and Tunisia removed their dominance over the mediterranean, and allowed the Suez canal trade routes a level of safety and ultimately ensured allied economic dominance. Russia would not have received the same level of economic support if it was not clear.
The Germans had not lost the war in 1942. A less despotic leader could have strategically retreated 500 miles and stabilised after Stalingrad.
Also, if you're uncertain about the year when the landings in Normandy took place, perhaps your overall grasp on events is less than perfect?
And the US leaders used the metric of more dead Vietnamese than Americans as proof they were winning the war. They literally created the term “The McNamara Fallacy” because it’s a poor metric of success.
I made no claims about WW2. My claim is that you can’t distill a complex system like war into an overly simplistic formula like “more dead = win”. There are system effects that distort this, particularly with asymmetric warfare.
As an aside, snark is discouraged on HN. Your account is new, son of encourage you to take a look at the guidelines for posting if you haven’t already.
A 20,000 kg rod costs $200m to launch into LEO at $10k/kg. At $200/kg it's only $4m.
Uranium price per kilo seems reasonable at $60/kg, so we're getting to a point where the raw material cost is not that different from the getting the damn thing to LEO.
If you can get each complete rod down to say $200m, ie the cost of a cruise missle for the DOD, that's a pretty impressive capability.
RFGs are just a subclass of "kinetic impact weapons", which are _definitely_ feasible.
RFGs are rod-shaped to minimize air resistance during re-entry. Tungsten is the material they're most associated with, but DU would likely work just fine as well. A (relatively) small, tungsten rod can be launched by braking from a parking orbit which would mean extremely little in the way of detectable activity. Even if it were detected... it's already at apogee, already at orbital speed, and already on a virtually unstoppable course to impact.
To take this a step further - realistically, Elon Musk is on the cusp of being the most powerful man the world has ever seen. Once SpaceX has a semi-permanent presence in orbit and beyond, he would have the practical ability to launch attacks anywhere on Earth with a destructive potential on par with nuclear weapons.
> They say some Chinese officials are convinced that the eu will soon drop its Xinjiang-related sanctions, because Europe cannot recover from the pandemic without Chinese growth.
Anyone else think they are grossly underestimating the EU?
Why does it have to be the West versus the East? Why does "one side" have to be right and the other wrong? Can't we just take the strengths of each and acknowledge the weaknesses of both and form a better society?
West in decline? This was predicted back in '18 when Spengler published his famous book, "The Decline of the West". Oh wait, that was 1918.
The "west" faces a relative decline, which is something to celebrate.* And I can hardly blame the Chinese government for taking an assertive position or for capitalizing on weaknesses in their perceived adversaries. But China faces some structural problems just at the time when the western powers are starting to reevaluate some fundamental assumptions of the last 40 and 75 years.
All around this sounds like a net good all around. Yes, even the repressive activities of the Chinese government I believe will moderate, as the US has become less thrusting in its own imperialism.
* Edit: I say this as someone born in the "west", living in the USA right now. Too much imbalance leads to stagnation, both in company policies (i.e. corporate monopolies) and geopolitics.
I mean he was right (in that there was a decline of the West, or Europe in particular - I am not familiar with the content of his book beyond that). The West went from conquering & dominating almost every place of the planet despite being but a small minority of its population to losing the vast majority of their conquests. The tech difference between say Paris, 1918 & Shenzhen, 1918 was much higher than today - in fact I would say Shenzhen is ahead.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadEdit: I'm just sharing information on the cost of subscription. If you look at my comment history, you'll see I've done this for others, OUT OF PURE CURIOSITY. I've also commented about how it would be unreasonable to maintain subscriptions to multiple news websites given these costs. But sure, downvote me - love you guys ;-)
No normal person can afford to maintain that number of subscriptions.
I wonder what a fair price for a article that gets 20-30k views would be, not to mention 2-300k. The price per view should be so low that some kind of crypto payment could work.
A browser plugin with a crypto solution that autopays for content on newssites you'd preapproved or something - and you would be able to pay as you go on the web.
I've also heard China's investing in Africa. For manufacturing? I haven't looked into it in any depth.
And there's Chinese interest in western real estate, particularly in the UK since the US started a low-key trade war.
I don't know how this compares to domestic investment at all, but you'll have a much easier time investing in similar fields to Chinese investors in the west than you will in China, I imagine.
Side-stepping for a moment the humanitarian and ethical costs for a brief moment, an enforced homogeneity of ideology leaves little room for independent thinking. At some point, you end up passing down every decision down and idea down a party line like a bucket through a fire brigade. That severely stifles innovation and creates an incredibly narrow view of your options.
But I promised we'd come back to the humanitarian and ethical costs. Diversity is strength. It's more than twee corporate advertising, it's a truth. It's hard to approach new problems when everyone is reading off the same song sheet. Strengths become reinforced, but weaknesses become far more weak; it's a very brittle strength.
I think the free society model is failing given how easy to dissipate false information, especially the kind that get people riled up against each other. It's not a surprise the US feels so divided today despite all the progress made in civil rights. Our enemies/adversaries know that. They know our weak spot. And they made it their strength. China found a way to do it without compromising other aspects of its society too much.
This pandemic has been a comical caricature of how people have been living lately; siloed in their own homes, only interacting through an internet connection. This has made us incredibly susceptible to realities distorted by interested parties.
Again, a free society is our only way out of this. When I get my vaccine in the coming months, I'll be dedicating as much time I can to building strong communities. I encourage all to do the same, no matter how silly it seems. Join a hackerspace, a rock climbing group, volunteer at food shelters, become a scout leader... anything, so long as you promote community and togetherness in doing so!
Have you read the news about the "west" lately? US politics and Brexit are two biggies that seem to fall in line with this.
In the west, problems of racism and homophobia get put out into the sunlight so they might be addressed. It leads to people exerting their democratic right to manifest against injustice and root out inequality.
In China, racism and homophobia doesn't exist because any mention of it gets wiped off the internet, and "different" people get shipped off into camps.
I wonder what percentage of people that make your argument are doing so in bad faith.
It worked just fine in/for the US though. Look back at the US's rise to where it is today and it was pretty bad. Another example is that it is still pretty bad in the US today and it is top dog anyways. I doubt it will make any difference in PRC either.
+ The US has decriminalized homosexuality and was one of the first countries to have same sex marriage
+ Has had robust hate crime laws and strong equal rights protections
+ Is slowly but consistently rolling back low level drug offenses
We always have to compare to our peers, not some unicorn standard. The US had continually been an extremely liberal and accepting society even with it's faults and missteps.
It's hard to know if you're talking about China or about the US here
Worth watching the whole video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO3izbn201s
The US military is a money pit.
But we are not willing to conduct such indiscriminate brutality. We tried to fight ethical anti-insurgent wars with our hands tied behind our back in order to preserve life and cling to our values. But pushed too far, that restraint could drop. So it IS a credible threat.
People who are living in their homelands are more willing to fight and more entrenched than foreign invaders, especially when they've been at war long enough that you can't simply target a couple of places to bring them to their knees. The US military is not a credible threat. They're simply another invader who will get tired of the conflict and go away.
We're not going to war with Russia or China. We didn't do it when Russia annexed Crimea, or when they targeted US troops in Syria, and we aren't going to do it when China puts its boot on the neck of Taiwan. It's a stupid political game to pretend otherwise.
Like I said, the military is a money pit.
Yes, but it's a very visible money pit. Its purpose is to discourage any other country from throwing their own money into a similar pit by competing.
It's in many ways even less useful than Historical Marxism. (Which is a damn low bar to fail to clear.)
Big reach. I think it's much less controversial to say it's in decline because of mindless consumerism, declining education budgets and corporate takeover of governance, which are hardly progressive.
Logic being: having & maintaining the dollar as a reserve currency created a context where it becomes more economically efficient to offshore labor & production, causing broken domestic feedback loops.
History demonstrates that Empires do not last forever. The contexts that lead to the rise of the host nation/entity taking on the mantle of Empire and the host nation/entity of the Empire change.
I see a lot of claims lately that 'woke politics' are the reason the US has let itself crumble and underperform for decades (relative to its potential), but 'woke politics' is a fairly new thing, and progressives generally aren't against infrastructure spending or universal healthcare or investing in education/science/tech, so I don't see the connection. The 'woke'/progressive politicians actually tend to favor this type of major investment/public spending more than the right does.
However, the adoption of critical theory does play a significant role in bringing about the decline of western society since it leads only to deconstruction of existing structures without providing functional alternatives.
also, your account is screwed. These are not the sort of opinions one's allowed to have connected to their real name
Venice in the 1400s,
London in the 1685-1700
Paris 1875-1914
vienna 1890-1914
London in the 1960s
All of these cities flourished because they were progressive.
If you compare the treatment of jews in venice, parts of the ottoman empire were a haven. Spain's loss was the ottoman's gain.
In no way can you place the blame for the rise of identity politics squarely on progressives. I get the feeling that most people opposed to a more fair and equitable society are the ones currently benefitting the most from inequity.
Crossing into personal attack and name-calling is particularly not cool. No more of that, please.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
You could just as easily say that the internet is the reason the west is in decline because it allows loud minorities, corporations, and bad actors to amplify their voices and promote their agendas, sow division and discord, spread misinformation, and more. Which is also overly simplistic and not the sole reason for decline.
If west is in decline please stop sending your top students abroad to study (and stay there). Great job promoting brain drain.
I am tired of this unfounded narrative that the west is in decline. No, it’s not. It’s actually getting stronger by the day especially the US.
The center of technological innovation still resides here in the west.
In the west the industrial and technological prowess are demonstrated through its corporations. For a recent example, look at the speed of development, and efficacy of the vaccines developed in the West compared to the ones developed in China. Beating the west by creating a better vaccine, faster would have been like the Moon landing in terms of raising China's prestige and stature.
SpaceX, despite being only a mid sized company in the US, has a space program that is more advanced that any nation on Earth. Companies like Boston Robotics and Waymo continue to sprout up in the US.
In the event of a total war situation, the west would have a better chance of calling upon the expertise and knowledge of companies like these, much as it did in World War II.
However, things do change. China continues to rise. If it plays its cards right, it can become a rival to, and even eclipse the west. However the fact is, the west continues to be a center for innovation, that pulls in the smartest and brightest from all over the world. People from everywhere, including China, continue to immigrate to it and bring new blood to its competitive economic engine. Feeding the creative destruction of economic and technological innovation. China does not yet have this. It's corporations sit in service of their bureaucracy, its public discourse and innovation is hampered by its great firewall.
A Chinese proverb comes to mind - "We'll see"
America is getting weak.
IMO the biggest failure in all this is that the opposition to PRC's rise is the same old as we have seen before and it's very clear that it will fail. As an outsider to both the US and PRC it looks to me like the US does all it can to shoot itself in the foot continually for whatever reason while PRC is playing on a totally different level. Maybe because US policy are mostly only until next election?
elections in the US are like earnings calls for public companies and drive the same short-term thinking.
Consider thefact that US external policies are always the same, Bush was the 'opposite' of Obama and yet US is still in Afghanistan and they still commit war crimes across the globe despite the fact since Bush Jr there was Lib/Rep/Lib presidents.
US - which still shapes worlds events by far - can start wars and fly drones in foreign countries that kill people there.
Russia can only send 'green men' to Ukraine or provoke a short term strike with Georgia.
This is not a result of a short term thinking nation.
It's analogous to the liberum veto in the Polism sejm - the system "promoted bipartisanship" by allowing the current legislation under debate and all previous legislation passed in that session to be vetoed at any time by a single member. That's good, right? You have to pass things that only everyone agrees with! But it was exploited by bad actors both internally and foreign powers who wanted to weaken and disrupt the government, to the point the polish state collapsed into a state of anarchy and provincial rule. Sound familiar?
Ultimately it is better to have a system of government that produces an administration that is capable of accomplishing its policy objectives, even if that means that your political opponents can also do things that you don't like. You can then structure the rest of the government around making sure that the administration remains representative of the population. But having a government that is routinely unable to do anything at all is a design flaw with the system, not something to be cheered, and that's the primary reason the US is in decline. It's better for somebody to be at the helm, than everybody arguing over which way to go and nobody driving.
On top of that the US tends to conceptualize "unlimited rights" to a much greater degree than virtually any country. That makes it far more susceptible to misinformation campaigns. The internet is the Atom Bomb of the information age - it makes misinformation far more deadly than it ever was before, because now you can take misinformation straight to the idiots themselves on a micro-targeted level. Certainly misinformation was a problem before, particularly with radio (eg Father Coughlin) but that was eventually curbed with broadcast regulations. As those regulations have eroded the problem got worse again, and now that we have private infrastructure that is totally unregulated it is becoming vastly worse again. Even worse than before in fact, because now you can micro-target the lies each person is most susceptible too. It's just a completely different ballgame than it was 30 years ago, and the regulatory scheme hasn't adapted to the idea that pretty much anybody can wield this potent weapon. The whole western world with its liberal (in the rights-based sense) philosophies are struggling with this but the US takes the most extremist positions in this area and is impacted the worst.
The lack of regulatory response to the rise of weaponized, micro-targeted misinformation campaigns is certainly amplified by the gridlock caused by minoritarian control at the government level, of course, these are all inter-related problems.
- The US is a impregnable continent with oceans on both sides. Poland is a flat plain surrounded by historical enemies. Congress isn't the Sejm and a single veto doesn't halt legislation. No one is going to invade the US and significant legislation still gets passed regularly. Poland also didn't have the entire apolitical infrastructure of the CIA, FBI, NSA, state governments, etc.
- Misinformation has always existed. The idea that somehow everything was true and honest back when we only had 3 TV stations is naive at best. The media has lost control of the narrative and they no longer have the power they once did to control information. It's as simple as that.
- You are assuming that the problem here is government and not culture.
Moreover, it is of course trivially true that no two historical circumstances are ever exactly the same. That doesn't mean we discard all historical parallels and lessons from history. That's a very trivial and shortsighted view to the lessons of history.
Obviously the US is not Poland circa 1500. But it demonstrates the problems that can be created from systems with extreme amounts of checks-and-balances. From there we can ask the question "are the US's systems of checks and balances extreme enough that they're causing problems?" and I think the answer is clearly "yes".
- Misinformation has always existed, just like bombs existed before the atom bomb. That doesn't mean the battlefield hasn't significantly changed from 30 years ago. Thanks to the work of Facebook, Google, and others, it is now possible to directly target individuals with the forms of misinformation they are most susceptible to. Just as that has revolutionized advertising, it has revolutionized information warfare, and the regulatory framework has not adapted to deal with that (partially because of liberal absolutism, and partially because of the generally ossified nature of the political system which prevents anything from getting done).
Moreover, back when the government was more functional, misinformation was recognized as a problem and addressed. Truth in broadcasting laws being an example. And as those regulations have been eroded (both legally and structurally with the transition to unregulated forms of broadcast over privately owned carriers) the problems have gotten worse. So yes, it's always been a problem, to the extent that we recognized that and deployed solutions to fix it, and as those solutions have been eroded the problem has come back and gotten worse.
- "Culture" is another trite excuse for systemic problems. It is not the overall cause of the problems. If your system of government and rights framework requires humans to be angels then it is not a good one - this is the same argument as "communism would work if we only found perfect humans". Well, humans aren't perfect, if the US government can't function with imperfect humans then that's a design problem.
But yes, generally the US does have a cultural problem with selfishness and lack of community outlook that doesn't help any of this. People refusing to get the COVID shot while they go around society and (stochastically) kill others and breed new mutations of the virus is just the most recent example, generally you have things like the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" and the focus on employers being able to use their religion to impinge on their employees' lives that are fairly uniquely american. We would be much better off with some community-oriented ideals to balance out that individualism.
The overall problem is structural, but the cultural problems certainly don't help.
This must be news to it, because it constantly acts as if it is existentially threatened by one foreign adversary or other, from Grenada to Venezuela to Iran/q to Mexico, and so on and so forth.
> Congress isn't the Sejm and a single veto doesn't halt legislation.
I believe the parent poster used that as an example of the absurdity of a checks-and-balances system, taken to the extreme. In the current state of the US, the checks-and-balances system results in pretty extreme outcomes.
> significant legislation still gets passed regularly.
Got to have to disagree there. The sole lasting legacy of a presidency, a supreme court, a senate, and a congress owned by the Trump party between 2016 and 2018 was... A lot of judicial appointments. [1] Its legislative efforts were not very successful - neither were Obama's[2] between 2008 and 2010, and I expect the same for Biden 2020-2022.
> Misinformation has always existed. The idea that somehow everything was true and honest back when we only had 3 TV stations is naive at best. The media has lost control of the narrative and they no longer have the power they once did to control information. It's as simple as that.
Now, I wasn't alive back in the sixties, and I am well aware of how media propaganda works... But you should spend some time interacting with true believers of QAnon, and you'll observe that something has fundamentally changed about how information spreads.
It feels like a qualitative change to me, you may argue that it's merely a quantitative change. Even if you are right, the point is not that the media 'simply' lost control of the narrative. Someone else has gained control of the narrative, at its expense, and the outcome is not pretty.
People were optimistic that the internet, and social media would let a thousand flowers of culture bloom. This... Did not happen. What we got instead, was an open-air cesspit, with a hydra's heads peering at us from the surface.
[1] It developed a bit of a legacy in the tail end of 2020 as well, but it's not exactly a legislative one, and there's still a slim hope that it won't be a lasting one, and that we won't have to go through it again every time a president loses an election.
[2] Whose sole lasting legacy is passing a Republican healthcare reform, which the Republicans have been gleefully attacking for the past decade. But at least it's got his name on it, so that counts for something.
Democracies that are actually constantly changing micro dictatures are failed democracies.
It is perfectly reasonable to stop to discuss and aim for consensus when you are not able to reach an agreement.
Otherwise each party just spends time and resources undoing what the other has done until then.
Good democracies are actually those that go even further and try to incorporate the needs of even smaller minorities/opinions in their decision making.
Reaching a consensus is a hard task but it is the cost of an ideal democracy as envisioned by Rawls for instance.
Look at countries that have high trust in their government, those are the most productive countries in the world.
China is definitely not an exemple in that regards, they have the numbers only because of their population. But on a per capita basis their productivity is abysmal. And that's without considering that most Chinese work 12h a day.
This is just fetishism of the US system as taught in 3rd grade social studies. Everyone with a different system is not a "micro-dictatorship". The US system is actually not particularly good compared to other western liberal nations, due to the aforementioned frequent inability to form a government with a mandate to lead. The founders had lots of ideas, some of them were good, some of them didn't work, and some were harmful from the get-go, and any critical analysis of any system needs to be able to acknowledge the existence of flaws in the execution or even design of a system.
The US system was a fairly early example of a democracy and most other governments saw the mistakes and chose not to repeat them. The US also chose not to repeat them for those countries whose constitutions we wrote (eg Germany or Japan).
Everyone realizes it's a bad system, but reform is too difficult, and decline and collapse is the alternative. So that's what's going to happen. It's quite likely that voting rights will be reduced over the next 2 years, cementing minority control of the government for an indefinite period of time, and we already saw what happened over the last 4 years with that minority rule.
What other western nations? Examples, please.
If the choice is dictatorship that absolutely suppresses me, or a liberal government that panders a little harder than it should to virtual signal, I'd gladly take the latter any day of the week, even if it means putting up with ridiculous social justice wankery.
What does a world led by China have to offer anyone, except dictatorship and exploitation? "Communism with Chinese Characteristics" is just Crony Capitalism, with 1984-style repression.
You're literally replying to a comment that gave examples. Please don't post in bad faith as if there were not examples given, that's not a positive discussion.
> What does a world led by China have to offer anyone
never said it did, again, putting words in my mouth is not a good-faith discussion and I ask that you stop.
More than glad to reply if you'd like to engage with the ideas I've discussed. It's not my job to repeat my post 27 times line-by-line, or to defend arguments that I did not make.
And it's definitely not at the step of listening to smaller interests with only two major opinions being represented.
The West went through many crises. This is not the first one, and not the last one. So far, nothing indicates that the social crisis is irreversible and the West won't be able to bounce back.
What political pathways do you see for correcting both our two-party system and increased gerrymandering? It seems to me like those two factors are large contributors to our increasing political polarization, and fixing them would require the political parties to behave irrationally from a game theory perspective.
It's not called the United States for nothing.
If states had more variation, I think you'd see less polarization, because the threat of a federal decision applying to everyone is far less of a worry.
Ditto for the other issues mentioned in your comment. The lines you’ve used (“control of their bodies, Jim Crow”) are indications that you get your information from propagandistic sources.
Sure, they'll slap a BLM web page and hire more [whatever race you tell us is cool to hire]. They'll tribute some token amount to the cause du jour propped up by Democrats, but allow unions? That's open war and it got crushed exceedingly fast as we saw with Amazon..
It's fascinating to watch the dynamic as companies sing praises on one hand, but are clearly preparing their daggers on the other. The Democrats don't understand what they're doing by openly being hostile to half the country and its values, and they're in for a rude awakening when the corporations decide that they've had enough.
They are aggressively making moves in the South China Sea and going full-tilt on the propaganda.
And they often lie about what they will accomplish.
I would say it's mainly because there is a sizeable number of people in the US that are benefiting from favourable trade relations with China to lobby for not rocking the boat (not to mention purposely scuttling long-term strategic programmes to isolate China like the TPP).
So the issue really is that there are bad actors that are putting their own private interests before that of the nation. Historically in China, this is also how many dynasties fell.
The 2nd part has no basis in reality. The issue is the concentration of power in the hands of the technocrats who now make decisions for everyone on censorship, currency manipulation, etc.
It isn't inevitable, its the result of the concentration of power and the failure of the US government to regulate massive monopolies especially in the tech space that have crushed or bought out newcomers, concentrating power further and ruining progress via buyouts and copying.
Most people in the West get to enjoy freedom and access to utilities money cant buy in China.
1) For once most people in the west have access to safe and good tap water.Chinese urban dwellers dont.
2) Most people in the west live in places with significantly better air quality than chinese.
3) Most people in the west get to enjoy freedoms chinese cant even talk about
4) West is attracting young people from all around the world.
Chinese middle class will demand the same standard of living like people in the West and CCP will be unable to give it to them.
By pretty much every imaginable metric China has improved for nearly everyone (in China) for the past 50 years. Is this also true in the USA?
I don't think China is superior to the USA, but to say China is in a "irreversible decline" is ridiculous.
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/ce/celt/eng/jmgx/jjxs/t124869.htm
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/china-economic-growth-histo...
https://www.cfr.org/timeline/us-relations-china
Meanwhile I have access to delicious spring water from Alps.
China has achieved only superficial changes that will bite them in the ass in the future.
Chinese has a booming middle class as well as a lot of poor people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not going to ban you right now because you've posted other comments that are within the intended use of the site, but you've been seriously abusing it also. Comments like this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26697627 are not ok.
Also the "lifting out of poverty" is standard propaganda spread by CCP https://www.firstpost.com/world/china-claims-to-have-ended-e...
What's nationalistic about that?
As for your GP post, if you read the site guidelines you'll see immediately why that wasn't acceptable as an HN comment.
If you don't like being called a [racist, sexist, whatever], then either change or grow some thicker skin. People pointing out racially charged or misogynistic language in interpersonal situations is NOT causing widespread economic or industrial damage.
No municipal water supply in the US ever canceled an infrastructure project or a new filtration plant because of political correctness.
No, the worst that happens if somebody calls you a racist is... somebody called you a racist. You don't pay a fine, your business isn't seized, and -- most germane to your "point -- your water filtration plant isn't demolished.
And the so-called top dog of the west have cities where people for years had to get bottled water because the whole city were poisoned and whole states are drying out. Not everyone in the west are as lucky as those of us with clean water. Definitely not the US.
The point remains. Tap water is by default not drinkable, whereas water in the US is (barring some exceptions).
And how did it look in the US in the 70's when it were booming like China is now? Children in plastic cocoons because the air were toxic with lead, drinking water full of crap, dead fish everywhere from dumping of chemicals in lakes and sea, radioactive waste leaking, etc.
I dislike China but the US also has those issues, people are just unware of them.
Maybe decline is the wrong word, and collision course is a better one.
As China globalizes and becomes more exposed to the outside world, they will start to wonder why they can't vote on things like environmental regulation, or why the local factory pollutes their river but they have little say in that process.
In this sense, this is the decline. It's the CCP being undermined by their own economic liberalization.
Will they? As far as I know censorship has been amazingly successful
2. Air quality is improving fast.
3. The the right to unaffordable health care?
4) Obviously you have never lived in China. Sorry to break the news to you. Yes, China is attracting young people from all over the world too.
3. They have clinics that would make most western clinics cry. Yes, they charge like western clinics too. But I have been for a minor thing in a normal Chinese hospital, a friend of mine had his appendix removed and another US friend of mine got a major surgery in a Chinese military hospital.
4. Don't know where you have been. Shanghai and Beijing is full of young and ambitious people from all over the world. They look for the future, not for the past. I was an immigrant in the US myself (also have an US passport now). The US was always closed for me. Zero opportunities. In China it is a brand new world. Opportunities, ambition, money. I consider it my home.
>4. Don't know where you have been. Shanghai and Beijing is full of young and ambitious people from all over the world. They look for the future, not for the past. I was an immigrant in the US myself (also have an US passport now). The US was always closed for me. Zero opportunities. In China it is a brand new world. Opportunities, ambition, money. I consider it my home.
How much does CCP pay these days? Do you get sponsored tours to Chongqing ?
"The Gobi Desert is expanding through desertification, most rapidly on the southern edge into China, which is seeing 3,600 km2 (1,390 sq mi) of grassland overtaken every year. Dust storms have increased in frequency in the past 20 years, causing further damage to China's agriculture economy. However in some areas desertification has been slowed or reversed.[15]
The expansion of the Gobi is attributed mostly to human activities, locally driven by deforestation, overgrazing, and depletion of water resources, as well as to climate change.[15]
China has tried various plans to slow the expansion of the desert, which have met with some success.[17] The Three-North Shelter Forest Program (or "Green Great Wall") was a Chinese government tree-planting project begun in 1978 and set to continue through 2050. The goal of the program is to reverse desertification by planting aspen and other fast-growing trees on some 36.5 million hectares across some 551 counties in 12 provinces of northern China.[18][19]"
"How much does CCP pay these days? Do you get sponsored tours to Chongqing ?"
No idea. They pay nothing to me. But I would happily take a passport. I going to get permanent residence rights through marriage. Otherwise I would attempt to become a HK citizen, since you cant get a mainland passport and the green card option is not very tempting on current legislation.
We've had numerous examples of third world style infrastructure failures (Flint water, Texas power outages) within the US that will likely continue. We have under invested in infrastructure for decades, while China has done quite the opposite.
Freedoms are increasingly becoming an illusion in the West. Saying something unpopular or taboo on the internet (even if it were years ago) is likely to cut you off from both your income and healthcare (as healthcare is tied to your employment).
All not to mention the simmering social unrest caused by insane income inequality, the levels of both private and public debt, and the likelihood of the dollar losing its reserve status in the next few decades. Things do not look good for the US.
Like look, I'll give you that there exist an incredibly small fraction of people that actually embody the spectre you are trying to conjure here. We have so so many more pressing issues in this country than fear of wokeness--like the rise of domestic white-supremacist terrorism.
In fact, I'd bet you can find 100 of those papers before you can find a single peer-reviewed study demonstrating any macroeconomic impact of "somebody said something racist on the Internet and everybody yelled at them!"
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/us/domestic-terrorist-gro...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...
One of the quotes from the most recent study which seems to contradict there's a rise in violence:
"White supremacists, extremist militia members, and other violent far-right extremists were responsible for 66 percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in 2020—roughly consistent with their share in other recent years. For example, on June 7, Harry H. Rogers—a self-proclaimed leader of the Ku Klux Klan—intentionally drove his pick-up truck into a crowd of Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Henrico, Virginia. One protester was injured, and Rogers received a six-year prison sentence. In addition, anarchists, anti-fascists, violent environmentalists, and other violent far-left extremists conducted 23 percent of terrorist attacks and plots in 2020—an increase from the previous three years, in which violent far-left incidents comprised between 5 and 11 percent of all domestic terrorist attacks and plots. For example, on August 29 in Portland, Oregon, Michael Reinoehl—an Antifa extremist—followed two members of the far-right group Patriot Prayer and then shot and killed one of them, Aaron “Jay” Danielson."
These are important trends and I pay close attention to them as I believe we're going to be facing a sharply decreasing quality of life for the average American in the coming years which will provoke anger and unrest. These are going to be ingredients to serious problems, some of which will trigger a broad increase in violence. Unfortunately I have little faith in our current leadership or system to deal with these challenges.
... As a frequent visitor to China I can tell you its a mixed bag. Many areas enjoy western levels of water and air quality. Many areas do not. What is lost in environmental quality is offset by an unprecedented ability to escape poverty, an academic meritocracy (albeit testing based), and rising income and wealth levels the West cannot presently match.
3) Most people in the west get to enjoy freedoms chinese cant even talk about
... In absolute terms a large number of Chinese ethnicities and religions are seriously repressed and abused. In aggregate however, the Chinese system catapulted so many of its citizens out of poverty and into the middle class you will find as much (if not more) national pride at China's rise than you will contempt. I sadly observe that certain freedoms may prove to be overrated compared to others, along the lines of Maslow.
4) West is attracting young people from all around the world.
... The West needs a reversal of the balance of payments. The West needs good paying middle class jobs. The West needs to re-domesticate much of its supply chain. The West needs to prepare for high intensity war in order to deter/prevent it. This laundry list of Western needs is incompatible with the expectations of today's 'young people' who are oblivious to these existential threats, great power decline and the relative unimportance of their priorities to their actual survival.
My in-laws are all Mainland Chinese. They have access to safe and good tap water, either back in their home town literally in the mountains or in a big city like Wuhan.
Air quality is not great, I'll give you that. But it's also not the worst, at least not in every measure. E.g. many big cities in China had lower NO2 levels than other big cities in other country, in 2016, and those numbers come from NASA: https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/no2/world/east-asia/wuhan
The majority of the people in China don't care about the kind of freedom you talk about. As a nation, they seem to have a very singular goal: follow the Party, make progress, and beat the rest of the world.
China is also attracting lots of young people from other parts of the world. There are quite a few twitter accounts of Laowais who seem to enjoy life in China because they've seen past the values of the West.
Interesting. What would you consider are the values of the West? And, in your opinion, what are the values of the Chinese society? And don't you think there are overlaps and so, which one?
No retorical questions, I am truly interesting in your answer.
I think that, as civilisations, we all aspire to mostly the same values. We just have very different priorities. For the Chinese, it's economic progress over freedom. (In fact, they are mostly free to say whatever they want as long as they don't try to rally and secede or topple the government. As a point of anecdatum, I discuss politics with my brother-in-law over WeChat. We don't always agree with the official narrative. Neither of us has been censored or arrested.)
And do you think that this is the case because of some sort of permanence in chinese culture or is it just a transient artefact of the economic situation?
Is Chinese middle class really a known variable?
If you look at the west, the current doxa was not always focused on human rights and individual freedom. The same drive to economic progress has actually dominated much of its history since the renaissance and it can be argued that it was the main engine to political progress. My grand parent main political goal was mainly to ensure they would have enough to go by once they get old.
Don't you think that, as chinese middle class's economic situation evolves, its priority might not also change?
I think what's going to happen in china in the next 20 years are going to have as much impact on the world than the colonization of the new world by europeans 500 years ago. And chinese middle class will be at the center of it.
> We don't always agree with the official narrative. Neither of us has been censored or arrested.)
And if the chinese government were to do something that you consider truly horrible, would you consider that expressing your opinion openly and publicly would be considered "to rally and secede"?
Again I am not trying to trigger you, I am just trying to understand a collective state of mind on which, I believed, we are poorly informed in the west.
Sure. The people of Russia didn't care about freedom and just wanted to follow the Party, too. Until they were given the chance, and it turned out that they actually wanted freedom and didn't give a rip about following the Party, because the Party was denying them the freedom they wanted, and was feeding them a perpetual diet of lies in the process. And despite all the lies, they could tell that it was lies, and that it wasn't freedom.
Now, it didn't work out in Russia. They didn't wind up at freedom. They wound up back with lies. But the point is, however much it looked in Soviet years as though everyone wanted to follow the Party, that was just a facade.
Are the Chinese so different? Do they really not care about freedom? Do they really in their hearts want to follow the Party? Or can they tell that it's all propaganda, and they just are going along on the surface?
The one difference is that China has delivered a fair amount of prosperity to a lot of people, which the Soviet system didn't. That might buy the Party in China another generation. But then the next generation sees that as the baseline. Can the Party continue to deliver improved prosperity? And will that be enough to keep people from wanting actual freedom?
The US became a super power in the last 200 years...and the focus should be maintaining our competitive edge and working where there will be benefit.
Out of curiosity, have any other items than "defund the police" happened in, say, March 2020 through the present, that might've affected crime rates?
Claiming "defund the police" is the obvious cause of an increase in crime while completely ignoring the global pandemic and its economic/employment effects and their resulting impact on crime is confirmation bias.
The US has tried again and again these naively optimistic programs targeting “neighborhoods” and “the youth”, to no avail whatsoever.
The terrible reality is that the long-term prospects of a civilization are inexorably dominated by its demographics, and the demographics of the US are spiraling down towards disaster. We have exhausted the Flynn effect and our intelligence levels are declining. We continue to bulk-import millions of people with heritable intelligence levels below those required to sustain the level of civilization we have enjoyed in the past. Those segments of our population that produce enough wealth to sustain our political program are reproducing below replacement rate.
Unless we pull off a massive demographic reversal, which is probably impossible at this point, China is absolutely correct. The future of the US is, optimistically, Brazil, and pessimistically South Africa.
I have many. You should start with these:
https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jense...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270739/pdf/mp2...
I don’t see how there’s any other option either. At this point there a multiple “factions” who’s end vision of society is actively hostile to certain other factions.
Some time ago there was even an active shooting war between US factions, and yet the country still was ascendant afterwards.
No, not really. But... I don’t really have any way of knowing. I just have to remind myself that, as ugly as it has gotten, it used to be a whole lot worse, and we survived and thrived, and so maybe we can do it again.
EDIT: Before you downvote what I say below, read about the Defund the Police movement. Start with the wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police
This is EXACTLY what the Defund Police movement is about. It's recognizing that half of city budgets are used for policing and some of those resources instead could be used to cleanup the neighborhoods and teach children.
If policing takes half the budget and nobody wants to raise taxes, then clearly to get resources to do other things, like teach underprivileged youth and cleanup neighborhoods, you must take away from some group, and since police take up such a HUGE part of the budget and they already do things they shouldn't be doing (like dealing with mental health issues), then it's clear we must reduce police budgets to free up resources.
EDIT: Before you downvote, take a moment to actually research why people are wanting to defund the police. And If I'm wrong, show me.
Here is the wikipedia page to start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police
When people say they'll want to defund the police, they are not saying there should be no police. People want a different police. There are structural problems that are not easily fixed, as we have seen. Making a new police-like organisation from the ground up is a way to fix those structural problems. I'm not sure if I agree that is the best solution, but people that do are trying to improve the country that way.
In fact, all people that are protesting do want to improve the world. But they realise that they are held back. See climate change and inequality. Those problems cannot be fixed without getting the people in power to help.
I wholefully agree with you. That is harmful. Though, it is only a small subset of the people who are guilty of that. So we should speak to those people instead of the whole group that is critical of the current police force.
> Portland just decided that to combat all of the shootings and crime happening in the city's parks they will add more unarmed park rangers.
Well, you have got to start somewhere. That are structural problems in the police force which aren't going away anytime soon. We should do something about that. We've learned that arming police more certainly isn't helping.
I'll be surprised if, in 10 years, we wouldn't conclude that Portland's efforts were helpful to come to a solution to the problem. Solving problems, also what OP is talking about, is a long term effort.
I’ll agree that police violence is a symptom of much larger systemic issues, but you seem to be implying that the larger systemic issue is... people are unhappy with the USA and they should stop being unhappy and support the USA.
Have you considered why they might be unhappy, why they may very well have legitimate grievances?
Perhaps we can strengthen our union by addressing these centuries old grievances? My understanding of your post is, you just want them to stop complaining without doing anything to help them.
Some demand equal treatment, some demand better treatment and other not only accept their life-style, but to consider their niche life-style as something more desirable than an average life style.
I don't see how this follows as a rebuttal of the gp comment, if anything it says (to me) that the US is _not_ in decline because we're willing and able to have conversations and make progress on what should be accepted in modern society. This comment feels like a soapbox to me rather than contributing to any sort of discussion, because nobody can comment on _what_ groups you're referring to, and there are no sources to be had. Very disappointing.
The same could be said about the United States' behavior on the international scene these past decades.
There isn't a lot of outrage about miners of rare minerals with dangerous working conditions or poorly paid Bangladeshi textile workers, or the slave workers building the Middle Eastern countries (at least not to the level where western politicians talk about sanctions), is it because these people are suppliers for our Apple, H&M, or that they have a lot of oil and money which we wish to attract?
You're doing the same thing you accuse them of doing, using online videos (apparently Chinese-sanctioned ones!) to claim things aren't happening. Sure things look nice there, but I would question if these video makers are being sponsored by China, or being lead through a Potemkin village: https://theprint.in/opinion/china-is-paying-foreign-journali... (yeah, random link from a Google result, very trustworthy). If I were the Chinese government, I'd find the few people who are willing to say my version of the story, and lead the Youtubers to them.
Even the Malay vlogger wrote in her captions that her friend got into an incident where police asked her to take off her Muslim garment, and the friend seemingly able to get away with keeping it on because she was foreign... how is that not religious oppression? In her vlog I see mostly Han Chinese, and she even added a part where she said people around her are asking each other why she has a headscarf on.
And how do you explain this lady's experience? Did the CIA/western propagandists pay here to write this? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/12/uighur-xinjian...
Anyway, your long response haven't convinced me that the CCP aren't doing oppression in Xinjiang. I'm not going to defend the "1 in 12" number, nor can I defend the maybe exaggerated Western media reports you have read, but my guess is the oppression is done in a hushed way that you won't see it by walking into a Grand Bazaar.
While we argue about right/left/dem/republican they continue to divide and conquer through attrition. And we are letting it happen right under our collective noses.
- China is net food and energy importer. Look at last year for a preview of future food. The land they leased in Africa won't help in terms of climate shift, locusts, etc. Who is the number of one food and energy exporter?
- China has an aeging population, and it's already a rapid shift.
- China's infrastructure isn't as well built as other countries (see their most important infrastructure project ever being the literal definition of half-assed), and it will start degrading, and maintenance is a pain. What happens when a few dams collapse, or nuke plant blows up?
- Supply chains are moving elsewhere.
- Taiwan has enough medium-range missles to take out the Three Gorges Dam, which is effectively MAD as far as China is concerned. One could also see Taiwan being a few minutes away from going nuclear, if need be(learning the Ukraine lesson).
- The US controls space, and will solidify it's grip in the next 3 years. Nobody is within even a decade of SpaceX's launch technology. 60s solid fuel missles to launch small satellites into orbit won't cut it. Putting Mir 2.0 into orbit won't cut it. A moonbase that is effectively an even more expensive and worthless version of Belt and Road won't cut it (and obviously will provide less jobs).
- What do you do about automation, if it wipes out jobs for all the restive angry young men?
Now sure, a war in the South China Sea favors China heavily, but I don't think the "Let's party in Taiwan" scenario is winnable for them without wiping out 80% of their agriculture, their entire biomedial industry and their main banking centre, along with a bunch of nuke plants and military bases. Not to mention the US soon being able to just stack depleted uranium telephone poles in orbit to protect it's dependencies. A larger scale war in SE Asia would probably just drag the region back 50 years, and China would likely be on the losing end as all their neighbors hate them, and India for example has a very competent military.
The whole "West is in decline" narrative assumes countries are static- the US is especially dynamic in terms of social trends. We are about to end the war on drugs and undergo a massive shift in our education trends as we realize most schooling is worthless, and there is decent chance we'll go to UBI. Now granted the current expamles of UBI in the ME don't bode well, but it's kind of a hazy future.
Now if this was for Western Europe, sure I could buy it.
Chinas wealth is based on neither. So what? Many rich countries import energy. BTW, China is serious about fusion and thorium reactors.
" China has an aeging population, and it's already a rapid shift." Most countries do and this can still Change.
"- China's infrastructure isn't as well built as other countries and it will start degrading, and maintenance is a pain."
I am sure that the huge and extensive bullet train network in the US won't show any sign of aging very soon. Just kidding.
"- Supply chains are moving elsewhere." Unlikely, the Chinese type of clustering is hard to replicate. Lower things like textiles and assembly might move to Vietnam. Owned by Chinese companies.
"The US controls space, and will solidify it's grip in the next 3 years. "
Yes, sure. Good luck with that. Sure the Russian will also we happy about it. If I remember right, the next version of the S400 System can even shot satellites out of orbit, but I may be wrong.
"What do you do about automation, if it wipes out jobs for all the restive angry young men?" Chinese will be leading in automation. Not sure about the angry young man. A Chinese person seems to be happier and more able to endure things in my experience. Strangely, I found many very sensitive to hunger.
US vs China would be an interesting war. The US has very to no experience in fighting such a war. What most Americans don't know (and actually phrased to me in this way by my US professoer): The second world war was a German-Russian war in Europe. The US industrial might helped Russia, but the US fighting was negligible. Russia lost every two days as many people as the US in a ten year war against Vietnam. The US has never fought an equal opponent. Just as a word of caution.
This is either ignorant or dishonest. Just because the US wasn't insanely profligate with lives, doesn't mean they didn't make a huge contribution to defeating Germany. Multiple German armies were defeated by the Western allies in Africa, Italy, France, the low countries and subsequently Germany. Germany's war production was crippled by USAAF and RAF bombing, and its transport was almost totally destroyed. Perhaps most importantly, Germany's ability to fuel its vehicles was removed by the bombing campaign. Literally thousands of 88mm guns were kept in the Reich because of the bombing, and these would have been on the Eastern front shredding Russians otherwise. Without this contribution, the USSR could at best have reached a stalemate. Anyone who denies this has an agenda.
For starters: http://www.fallen.io/ww2/
Start at 4:45
Africa absolutely was a major theatre. The defeat of the Axis in Libya and Tunisia removed their dominance over the mediterranean, and allowed the Suez canal trade routes a level of safety and ultimately ensured allied economic dominance. Russia would not have received the same level of economic support if it was not clear.
The Germans had not lost the war in 1942. A less despotic leader could have strategically retreated 500 miles and stabilised after Stalingrad.
Also, if you're uncertain about the year when the landings in Normandy took place, perhaps your overall grasp on events is less than perfect?
As an aside, snark is discouraged on HN. Your account is new, son of encourage you to take a look at the guidelines for posting if you haven’t already.
Rods from God is actually real? Thought it was a failed research project?
A 20,000 kg rod costs $200m to launch into LEO at $10k/kg. At $200/kg it's only $4m.
Uranium price per kilo seems reasonable at $60/kg, so we're getting to a point where the raw material cost is not that different from the getting the damn thing to LEO.
If you can get each complete rod down to say $200m, ie the cost of a cruise missle for the DOD, that's a pretty impressive capability.
Im not sure what cruise missiles are you talking about?
RFGs are rod-shaped to minimize air resistance during re-entry. Tungsten is the material they're most associated with, but DU would likely work just fine as well. A (relatively) small, tungsten rod can be launched by braking from a parking orbit which would mean extremely little in the way of detectable activity. Even if it were detected... it's already at apogee, already at orbital speed, and already on a virtually unstoppable course to impact.
To take this a step further - realistically, Elon Musk is on the cusp of being the most powerful man the world has ever seen. Once SpaceX has a semi-permanent presence in orbit and beyond, he would have the practical ability to launch attacks anywhere on Earth with a destructive potential on par with nuclear weapons.
Anyone else think they are grossly underestimating the EU?
The "west" faces a relative decline, which is something to celebrate.* And I can hardly blame the Chinese government for taking an assertive position or for capitalizing on weaknesses in their perceived adversaries. But China faces some structural problems just at the time when the western powers are starting to reevaluate some fundamental assumptions of the last 40 and 75 years.
All around this sounds like a net good all around. Yes, even the repressive activities of the Chinese government I believe will moderate, as the US has become less thrusting in its own imperialism.
* Edit: I say this as someone born in the "west", living in the USA right now. Too much imbalance leads to stagnation, both in company policies (i.e. corporate monopolies) and geopolitics.