6 ms·

The PRC isn’t fucking around. They’re playing for the whole show and the West is bringing a significantly weaker game than it did against a significantly dumber

The PRC isn’t fucking around. They’re playing for the whole show and the West is bringing a significantly weaker game than it did against a significantly dumber geopolitical adversary last time. Being England or whatever isn’t the end of the world, there is life after global hegemony, but e.g. the USA should be realistic about the fact that e.g. shit like a legislature whose job is to get nothing done isn’t how you win in full-contact sports. For all its innumerable faults, flaws, and outright human rights violations: the West of the latter 20th century seemed like a plausible v0.0.1 of some future, hypothetical, benevolent society. Sucked ass if you were a minority but there was movement on that, real wages seemed to be trending ok, technological innovation was on point. It looked to be going somewhere. I’m not sure when it all went sideways, but the PRC is looking more than happy to design the future, and it seems unclear at best if that would be a net win in the “get to Star Trek as fast as possible” game.

jackcosgrove 5y ago
If you're looking for a turning point, it was fall of 2001 with the 9/11 attacks and China's accession to the WTO. The USA became distracted and the 00s were the time when China's economy grew like gangbusters.
- colordrops 5y ago
  Turning point for China, yes. The turning point for the USA was as late as the Reagan administration dismantling the country for profit, though the seeds were planted earlier.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
- gamegoblin 5y ago
  One could also make an argument that the fall of the USSR began a period of complacency. Terms like “the end of history” [0] come to mind. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
- benreesman 5y ago
  Speaking for myself I’m happy that many millions of people got lifted out of crushing poverty in Asia. I think it’s a good thing that the economy in the PRC started producing fewer famines and more of a middle class. The part I’m less happy about is whatever point the Western economies began working less well for most people in them. Even serious economists have trouble being rigorous about this sort of thing, so I won’t even try. But I don’t think I’m the only one with a queasy feeling that Eastern elites seem to be admitting more people to the middle class while Western elites seem to be pushing people out of it. In spite of there being powerhouse economies in both systems. People love to nitpick this stuff to pimp whatever dumbass Ayn Rand thing, but people outside the elite in the West seem to be doing worse over time, and that is not how you get an economy that is and feels fair, that’s not how you make sure the talent rises to the top, that’s not how you get a financial system that isn’t a ripoff, that’s not how you get a government that gets shit done, that’s not how you get a military that buys good weapon systems at a compelling price point. That’s not how you win.
  - mousepilot 5y ago
    Libertarianism isn't very realistic anyways. I read something pretty interesting recently that pretty much convinces me that the folks at the top get there by luck rather than merit. Obviously I'm sure that they themselves would disagree but I'm talking about them, not to them. The US got to the position it is in the 20th century by luck, we discovered a new world with wealth to exploit, took the country from the indigenous, then had a stack of decades with slavery, then took that momentum into the world wars, coming out on top into the boom years when our competitors were saddled with rebuilding ruins. If we're in decline then its our own undoing, heck we pretty much inherited the best deal in the world and pissed it away. The people who like Ayn Rand don't like history.
  - spats1990 5y ago
    >But I don’t think I’m the only one with a queasy feeling that Eastern elites seem to be admitting more people to the middle class while Western elites seem to be pushing people out of it. I agree with this and everything in your comment but that specifically doesn't really make me queasy. I'm glad that the elites of some countries still seem focused on creating positive outcomes for their citizens, even if some in the West may want to quibble about the nature of those outcomes. What gives me the queasy feeling is reading threads like this on HN where the top comments discuss the "security risk" of Chinese nationals/ABCs in American STEM fields (the parent makes the distinction of those fields related to national defence, but replies do not) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28334051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28334051, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28332562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28332562) and the general preponderance of what I consider extremely shortsighted, low-info, and jingoistic comments. It's frightening. It's possibly hyperbolic but these comments about "security risk" in particular seem to carry the shadow of internment camps. My basic queasy feeling is that certain western elites may be sleepwalking into something very bad here. I really hope that this feeling I have is just that mid-pandemic feeling of living through history in the making, but metastasized into areas where it doesn't belong. edit: the comments I refer to are I guess a microcosm of the fact that China hawkishness in all its forms is one of the very few bipartisan issues in US politics right now. I'm not American, and again, this makes me very uneasy.
jimbob45 5y ago
>Sucked ass if you were a minority This is just propaganda from minority groups. For the vast majority of non-immigrant minorities, life has been reliably excellent.
- KittenInABox 5y ago
  Do you have evidence of this claim? Thank you!
- coryrc 5y ago
  We put ethnic Japanese in concentration camps after stealing away every bit of wealth they accumulated. White women have only been able to vote for 100 years. Some black women half that. American Indians were driven off their land.
  - htyland 5y ago
    This subthread is about the latter 20th century. The 1990s were more relaxed racially than we are now, thanks to the outrage industry.
    - coryrc 5y ago
      Okay. Number of babies born out of wedlock was starkly differentiated by race, as were high school and college graduation rates. Cabrini Green came down in 1995. 600k+ people fled Detroit from 1960 to 2000. Only some of them were welcomed.
rglover 5y ago
It went sideways when the CCP/PRC realized that they could just sell off their citizens to U.S. corporations as cheap slave labor. My speculation is that they also figured out an effective system for blackmailing the executives of those companies and U.S. politicians into doing whatever they want (e.g. Christine Fang). The subsequent ideological compromise of the West is the result of the CCP getting its tendrils into Western leadership (https://nypost.com/2020/12/13/us-companies-riddled-with-members-of-chinese-communist-party/ https://nypost.com/2020/12/13/us-companies-riddled-with-memb...) and culture. This video of John Cena apologizing for recogizing Taiwan as a country in Mandrin should have been a deeply frightening wake up call: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zre2p7mg64g&ab_channel=ChinaUnderCCP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zre2p7mg64g&ab_channel=China....
n8cpdx 5y ago
The West and Americans (in my experience) take for granted that civil rights, free speech, democracy, and other values automatically create better outcomes than authoritarianism. This is how it was taught to me, and it seems baked into the culture. Unfortunately, the reality is that while (in my opinion) liberal values create better outcomes, it takes care and concerted effort to get the benefits. A democracy isn't automatically better than an authoritarian regime; that assumes that the democracy is effective and that the authoritarians are not. The CCP is clearly effective. They are able to nail jello to the wall and have it stick. The US Congress is clearly not effective. Chinese people got to go to movie theaters and eat at restaurants and dance at raves for most of 2020 and 2021; I, as an American, could not. The CCP delivered for their people in a way that the US did not. The United States is not particularly effective at national security (2021-01-06), foreign engagements (Afghanistan and Iraq, last 20 years), or social mobility (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_United_States#Current_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...). The media ecosystem is a mess (due to purposeful de-regulation), voting rates are abysmal, education is poor by rich world standards. Democracy doesn't work well when the populace is not sufficiently educated, accurately informed, and empowered by a political system (see the Senate's strong R electoral advantage). We keep choosing leadership who lose at the polls because we haven't invested in modernizing our democracy. The US and other Western states need to step up and put in the work to prove that their values can deliver for their people better than the authoritarians can.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > Chinese people got to go to movie theaters and eat at restaurants and dance at raves for most of 2020 and 2021; I, as an American, could not. I suspect this is largely CCP propaganda. > The United States is not particularly effective at national security (2021-01-06), foreign engagements (Afghanistan and Iraq, last 20 years), or social mobility (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...). The media ecosystem is a mess (due to purposeful de-regulation), voting rates are abysmal, education is poor by rich world standards I'm not sure that I accept these as facts, but even so, I believe you're comparing the US to other democracies. If you compare the cohort of democracies to the cohort of authoritarian regimes, how do the democracies compare? I suspect China is an outlier among authoritarian regimes, and even while we marvel at Chinese foreign policy, their per-capita GDP and other indicators don't suggest that they are meeting our Western standards for "effective government". And even if an authoritarian government is more effective at establishing a global hegemony, what's the point if it comes at the cost of its citizens' basic rights, prosperity, etc?
akira2501 5y ago
> I’m not sure when it all went sideways, When we sold our manufacturing base and equipment to them, then bought the same products from them just shipped over seas. They had suppressed labor prices and used it to tilt the table.
dv_dt 5y ago
There is this guy named Karl (and actually if you read carefully a guy named Adam Smith) that has some relevant predictions on how that went sideways.
kragen 5y ago
Well, on one hand you have mass ideological repression, concentration camps designed for cultural genocide against ethnic minorities, and censorship that means you can't trust common knowledge, so we don't even know if the persistent rumors of mass organ harvesting from religious dissidents are true. But on the other hand you have the capacity to manufacture respirators and stop pandemics dead in their tracks, not to mention most of the world's microelectronics (particularly if you include ROC), and PRC was vaccinating people in July of last year, only four months after the first vaccine was developed (in March in the USA). Meanwhile, the EU has banned borax on grounds that amount to pure superstition, California has banned xylene, Texas only recently repealed a years-long lab glassware ban, the US Supreme Court didn't legalize screen-scraping until this year, and the USA still has 1% of its adult population imprisoned, just like shortly after the lead-driven crime wave crested 30 years ago (I guess its legislature does get some things done; they also direct the world's biggest military budget). Also, the US maaybe just passed 50% of the population believing in evolution, and gifted programs are being cut out of their high schools because they "promote inequality". And apparently police killing people with impunity is a major political cause in the US now? And let's not forget that Armadillo Aerospace had to abandon their working rocket engine design and restart from scratch because nobody would sell them peroxide, probably due to the US regulatory regime surrounding product liability. And when Clinton launched the National Nanotechnology Initiative in 02000, instead of diamondoid mechanosynthesis we got the fraudulent rebranding of any random submicron particle research, down to the study of medieval stained glass, as "nanotechnology". In short, the US and EU are stupid enough that they're dooming themselves, regardless of whatever happens in China. I can empathize. Having your government run by the kind of people who would vote for Donald Trump might be okay as long as the government doesn't control anything important, but inevitably putting the foolish and stupid in charge of the wise and learned is going to end in disaster, as it has with the covid pandemic. On the other hand, dictatorships and monarchies are no guarantee of wise leadership, often the opposite; they tend to oscillate randomly, often when succession happens. Marcus Aurelius is succeeded by Commodus, who is succeeded by Pertinax, then Didius Julianus, and the country is thrown into catastrophe. Qin Shi Huang may have been an asshole who destroyed China's cultural heritage, but he wasn't the fool Qin Er Shi was. I'm not sure Star Trek is a worthy ideal; it's a militarist naval soap opera that doesn't begin to grapple with the political and psychological implications of post-scarcity civilization. Let's have the courage to imagine a future worth living in, and then create it.
throwaway894345 5y ago
> For all its innumerable faults, flaws, and outright human rights violations: the West of the latter 20th century seemed like a plausible v0.0.1 of some future, hypothetical, benevolent society. A large digression, but I do wish we didn't need these silly ritual flagellations each time we mention that the West was actually pretty good. To call these things "human rights violations" implies that the West defied some accepted standard for how we treated people, but the West was always on the leading edge for human rights (slavery, colonialism, racism, etc were normal on virtually every continent until the West decided they were wrong). We often talk about the West as though it is some great failure because it didn't emerge from the mists of history fully-formed and prepared to adhere to our modern moral standards, ignoring the fact that our modern moral standards are precisely the product of millennia of Western progress.
- benreesman 5y ago
  I think you make a fair point and arguably better articulate something I was trying to say. People, institutions, and nations do in fact need to be viewed in the context of the relevant time period, applying present-day values to e.g. the Framers is a silly waste of time. They did what they did, hopefully it was their best, and there seems to be lasting value. On the other hand while it is in fact unreasonable to expect a civilization to spring socially equitable from the forehead of Zeus, we should also continue to strive to be better.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    To be perfectly clear, I wasn't rebutting you, but the bizarre anti-West kayfabe culture. > On the other hand while it is in fact unreasonable to expect a civilization to spring socially equitable from the forehead of Zeus, we should also continue to strive to be better. I don't think even the most zealous western chauvinist would disagree with this. :)
- vikiomega9 5y ago
  I agree with you except post-independence in the middle of the 19th and 20th century, the supposedly benevolent West hedged and continue to plunder and usurp Africa and Asia. Values based? Sure, see how rational it is, for you but not for us. We must agree upon universal declarations and you better listen up we know what we're doing. I have no idea why you think these are `silly ritual flagellations`. Drop everything, the British left the Indian subcontinent in flames. Oh wait, this sounds a lot like Afghanistan. Down vote me for all I care, but if you've not experienced the horror of colonialism and the mess we have to pickup after and fix, with poverty, disease and f_cking IP (TB, Aids, Food Security), and fragile democracy setup to serve external masters, in the presence of evolved men, I respectfully ask you to be empathetic to a lot of voices that still can't be heard. You clearly don't seem to understand the utter s_it some of us and our parents have lived through. Sure, the awesome Western cultural evolution is grand and something to wait for, who knows what form it will take. Ok, let's drop all of history except the last 70 years. The zenith of evolution. A poor country had to give you, the West, the finger to save the less fortunate from Aids[1]. I respectfully ask you to continue to self-flagellate. [1] https://qz.com/india/1666032/how-indian-pharma-giant-cipla-made-aids-drugs-affordable/ https://qz.com/india/1666032/how-indian-pharma-giant-cipla-m....
platz 5y ago
> the USA But, according to the article, ARM Britain didn't sell to China, SoftBank (Japan) did.
obviouslynotme 5y ago
>e.g. shit like a legislature whose job is to get nothing done isn’t how you win in full-contact sports So we need a totalitarian government to compete with their totalitarian government? No thank you. If your company gets ripped off by the Chinese, like many do, then that is your company's fault.
- benreesman 5y ago
  There’s a little daylight between having a central committee and having legislators who don’t even pretend that the top of their to-do list every day is preventing, ya know, legislation. This is a non-partisan observation. Everybody pulls this shit these days.
  - obviouslynotme 5y ago
    If you want a rubber stamp committee, then someone has to dictate that rubber stamp.
benreesman 5y ago
I find it more than a little disturbing that most of the interest in this comment centers on people trying to refute what amounts to a parenthetical that while a lot of things were looking pretty awesome in 1960 in e.g. the US, being black or gay probably weren’t among them.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Being black or gay in the west was better than being black or gay in any other part of the world. There are still countries where homosexuality is punishable by death. Being black or gay in the US in the 1960s was worse than being white and straight in the 1960s, but my precise point in my sibling comment is that this a stupid criticism because the West was pioneering equality. There seems to be some widely-held superstition that if we acknowledge Western progress, then we will stop progressing.

jackcosgrove 5y ago

If you're looking for a turning point, it was fall of 2001 with the 9/11 attacks and China's accession to the WTO. The USA became distracted and the 00s were the time when China's economy grew like gangbusters.

colordrops 5y ago
Turning point for China, yes. The turning point for the USA was as late as the Reagan administration dismantling the country for profit, though the seeds were planted earlier.
- webmaven 5y ago
  https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
gamegoblin 5y ago
One could also make an argument that the fall of the USSR began a period of complacency. Terms like “the end of history” [0] come to mind. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
benreesman 5y ago
Speaking for myself I’m happy that many millions of people got lifted out of crushing poverty in Asia. I think it’s a good thing that the economy in the PRC started producing fewer famines and more of a middle class. The part I’m less happy about is whatever point the Western economies began working less well for most people in them. Even serious economists have trouble being rigorous about this sort of thing, so I won’t even try. But I don’t think I’m the only one with a queasy feeling that Eastern elites seem to be admitting more people to the middle class while Western elites seem to be pushing people out of it. In spite of there being powerhouse economies in both systems. People love to nitpick this stuff to pimp whatever dumbass Ayn Rand thing, but people outside the elite in the West seem to be doing worse over time, and that is not how you get an economy that is and feels fair, that’s not how you make sure the talent rises to the top, that’s not how you get a financial system that isn’t a ripoff, that’s not how you get a government that gets shit done, that’s not how you get a military that buys good weapon systems at a compelling price point. That’s not how you win.
- mousepilot 5y ago
  Libertarianism isn't very realistic anyways. I read something pretty interesting recently that pretty much convinces me that the folks at the top get there by luck rather than merit. Obviously I'm sure that they themselves would disagree but I'm talking about them, not to them. The US got to the position it is in the 20th century by luck, we discovered a new world with wealth to exploit, took the country from the indigenous, then had a stack of decades with slavery, then took that momentum into the world wars, coming out on top into the boom years when our competitors were saddled with rebuilding ruins. If we're in decline then its our own undoing, heck we pretty much inherited the best deal in the world and pissed it away. The people who like Ayn Rand don't like history.
- spats1990 5y ago
  >But I don’t think I’m the only one with a queasy feeling that Eastern elites seem to be admitting more people to the middle class while Western elites seem to be pushing people out of it. I agree with this and everything in your comment but that specifically doesn't really make me queasy. I'm glad that the elites of some countries still seem focused on creating positive outcomes for their citizens, even if some in the West may want to quibble about the nature of those outcomes. What gives me the queasy feeling is reading threads like this on HN where the top comments discuss the "security risk" of Chinese nationals/ABCs in American STEM fields (the parent makes the distinction of those fields related to national defence, but replies do not) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28334051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28334051, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28332562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28332562) and the general preponderance of what I consider extremely shortsighted, low-info, and jingoistic comments. It's frightening. It's possibly hyperbolic but these comments about "security risk" in particular seem to carry the shadow of internment camps. My basic queasy feeling is that certain western elites may be sleepwalking into something very bad here. I really hope that this feeling I have is just that mid-pandemic feeling of living through history in the making, but metastasized into areas where it doesn't belong. edit: the comments I refer to are I guess a microcosm of the fact that China hawkishness in all its forms is one of the very few bipartisan issues in US politics right now. I'm not American, and again, this makes me very uneasy.

jimbob45 5y ago

>Sucked ass if you were a minority This is just propaganda from minority groups. For the vast majority of non-immigrant minorities, life has been reliably excellent.

KittenInABox 5y ago
Do you have evidence of this claim? Thank you!
coryrc 5y ago
We put ethnic Japanese in concentration camps after stealing away every bit of wealth they accumulated. White women have only been able to vote for 100 years. Some black women half that. American Indians were driven off their land.
- htyland 5y ago
  This subthread is about the latter 20th century. The 1990s were more relaxed racially than we are now, thanks to the outrage industry.
  - coryrc 5y ago
    Okay. Number of babies born out of wedlock was starkly differentiated by race, as were high school and college graduation rates. Cabrini Green came down in 1995. 600k+ people fled Detroit from 1960 to 2000. Only some of them were welcomed.

rglover 5y ago

It went sideways when the CCP/PRC realized that they could just sell off their citizens to U.S. corporations as cheap slave labor. My speculation is that they also figured out an effective system for blackmailing the executives of those companies and U.S. politicians into doing whatever they want (e.g. Christine Fang). The subsequent ideological compromise of the West is the result of the CCP getting its tendrils into Western leadership (https://nypost.com/2020/12/13/us-companies-riddled-with-members-of-chinese-communist-party/ https://nypost.com/2020/12/13/us-companies-riddled-with-memb...) and culture. This video of John Cena apologizing for recogizing Taiwan as a country in Mandrin should have been a deeply frightening wake up call: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zre2p7mg64g&ab_channel=ChinaUnderCCP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zre2p7mg64g&ab_channel=China....

n8cpdx 5y ago

The West and Americans (in my experience) take for granted that civil rights, free speech, democracy, and other values automatically create better outcomes than authoritarianism. This is how it was taught to me, and it seems baked into the culture. Unfortunately, the reality is that while (in my opinion) liberal values create better outcomes, it takes care and concerted effort to get the benefits. A democracy isn't automatically better than an authoritarian regime; that assumes that the democracy is effective and that the authoritarians are not. The CCP is clearly effective. They are able to nail jello to the wall and have it stick. The US Congress is clearly not effective. Chinese people got to go to movie theaters and eat at restaurants and dance at raves for most of 2020 and 2021; I, as an American, could not. The CCP delivered for their people in a way that the US did not. The United States is not particularly effective at national security (2021-01-06), foreign engagements (Afghanistan and Iraq, last 20 years), or social mobility (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_United_States#Current_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...). The media ecosystem is a mess (due to purposeful de-regulation), voting rates are abysmal, education is poor by rich world standards. Democracy doesn't work well when the populace is not sufficiently educated, accurately informed, and empowered by a political system (see the Senate's strong R electoral advantage). We keep choosing leadership who lose at the polls because we haven't invested in modernizing our democracy. The US and other Western states need to step up and put in the work to prove that their values can deliver for their people better than the authoritarians can.

throwaway894345 5y ago
> Chinese people got to go to movie theaters and eat at restaurants and dance at raves for most of 2020 and 2021; I, as an American, could not. I suspect this is largely CCP propaganda. > The United States is not particularly effective at national security (2021-01-06), foreign engagements (Afghanistan and Iraq, last 20 years), or social mobility (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...). The media ecosystem is a mess (due to purposeful de-regulation), voting rates are abysmal, education is poor by rich world standards I'm not sure that I accept these as facts, but even so, I believe you're comparing the US to other democracies. If you compare the cohort of democracies to the cohort of authoritarian regimes, how do the democracies compare? I suspect China is an outlier among authoritarian regimes, and even while we marvel at Chinese foreign policy, their per-capita GDP and other indicators don't suggest that they are meeting our Western standards for "effective government". And even if an authoritarian government is more effective at establishing a global hegemony, what's the point if it comes at the cost of its citizens' basic rights, prosperity, etc?

akira2501 5y ago

> I’m not sure when it all went sideways, When we sold our manufacturing base and equipment to them, then bought the same products from them just shipped over seas. They had suppressed labor prices and used it to tilt the table.

dv_dt 5y ago

There is this guy named Karl (and actually if you read carefully a guy named Adam Smith) that has some relevant predictions on how that went sideways.

kragen 5y ago

Well, on one hand you have mass ideological repression, concentration camps designed for cultural genocide against ethnic minorities, and censorship that means you can't trust common knowledge, so we don't even know if the persistent rumors of mass organ harvesting from religious dissidents are true. But on the other hand you have the capacity to manufacture respirators and stop pandemics dead in their tracks, not to mention most of the world's microelectronics (particularly if you include ROC), and PRC was vaccinating people in July of last year, only four months after the first vaccine was developed (in March in the USA). Meanwhile, the EU has banned borax on grounds that amount to pure superstition, California has banned xylene, Texas only recently repealed a years-long lab glassware ban, the US Supreme Court didn't legalize screen-scraping until this year, and the USA still has 1% of its adult population imprisoned, just like shortly after the lead-driven crime wave crested 30 years ago (I guess its legislature does get some things done; they also direct the world's biggest military budget). Also, the US maaybe just passed 50% of the population believing in evolution, and gifted programs are being cut out of their high schools because they "promote inequality". And apparently police killing people with impunity is a major political cause in the US now? And let's not forget that Armadillo Aerospace had to abandon their working rocket engine design and restart from scratch because nobody would sell them peroxide, probably due to the US regulatory regime surrounding product liability. And when Clinton launched the National Nanotechnology Initiative in 02000, instead of diamondoid mechanosynthesis we got the fraudulent rebranding of any random submicron particle research, down to the study of medieval stained glass, as "nanotechnology". In short, the US and EU are stupid enough that they're dooming themselves, regardless of whatever happens in China. I can empathize. Having your government run by the kind of people who would vote for Donald Trump might be okay as long as the government doesn't control anything important, but inevitably putting the foolish and stupid in charge of the wise and learned is going to end in disaster, as it has with the covid pandemic. On the other hand, dictatorships and monarchies are no guarantee of wise leadership, often the opposite; they tend to oscillate randomly, often when succession happens. Marcus Aurelius is succeeded by Commodus, who is succeeded by Pertinax, then Didius Julianus, and the country is thrown into catastrophe. Qin Shi Huang may have been an asshole who destroyed China's cultural heritage, but he wasn't the fool Qin Er Shi was. I'm not sure Star Trek is a worthy ideal; it's a militarist naval soap opera that doesn't begin to grapple with the political and psychological implications of post-scarcity civilization. Let's have the courage to imagine a future worth living in, and then create it.

throwaway894345 5y ago

> For all its innumerable faults, flaws, and outright human rights violations: the West of the latter 20th century seemed like a plausible v0.0.1 of some future, hypothetical, benevolent society. A large digression, but I do wish we didn't need these silly ritual flagellations each time we mention that the West was actually pretty good. To call these things "human rights violations" implies that the West defied some accepted standard for how we treated people, but the West was always on the leading edge for human rights (slavery, colonialism, racism, etc were normal on virtually every continent until the West decided they were wrong). We often talk about the West as though it is some great failure because it didn't emerge from the mists of history fully-formed and prepared to adhere to our modern moral standards, ignoring the fact that our modern moral standards are precisely the product of millennia of Western progress.

benreesman 5y ago
I think you make a fair point and arguably better articulate something I was trying to say. People, institutions, and nations do in fact need to be viewed in the context of the relevant time period, applying present-day values to e.g. the Framers is a silly waste of time. They did what they did, hopefully it was their best, and there seems to be lasting value. On the other hand while it is in fact unreasonable to expect a civilization to spring socially equitable from the forehead of Zeus, we should also continue to strive to be better.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  To be perfectly clear, I wasn't rebutting you, but the bizarre anti-West kayfabe culture. > On the other hand while it is in fact unreasonable to expect a civilization to spring socially equitable from the forehead of Zeus, we should also continue to strive to be better. I don't think even the most zealous western chauvinist would disagree with this. :)
vikiomega9 5y ago
I agree with you except post-independence in the middle of the 19th and 20th century, the supposedly benevolent West hedged and continue to plunder and usurp Africa and Asia. Values based? Sure, see how rational it is, for you but not for us. We must agree upon universal declarations and you better listen up we know what we're doing. I have no idea why you think these are `silly ritual flagellations`. Drop everything, the British left the Indian subcontinent in flames. Oh wait, this sounds a lot like Afghanistan. Down vote me for all I care, but if you've not experienced the horror of colonialism and the mess we have to pickup after and fix, with poverty, disease and f_cking IP (TB, Aids, Food Security), and fragile democracy setup to serve external masters, in the presence of evolved men, I respectfully ask you to be empathetic to a lot of voices that still can't be heard. You clearly don't seem to understand the utter s_it some of us and our parents have lived through. Sure, the awesome Western cultural evolution is grand and something to wait for, who knows what form it will take. Ok, let's drop all of history except the last 70 years. The zenith of evolution. A poor country had to give you, the West, the finger to save the less fortunate from Aids[1]. I respectfully ask you to continue to self-flagellate. [1] https://qz.com/india/1666032/how-indian-pharma-giant-cipla-made-aids-drugs-affordable/ https://qz.com/india/1666032/how-indian-pharma-giant-cipla-m....

platz 5y ago

> the USA But, according to the article, ARM Britain didn't sell to China, SoftBank (Japan) did.

obviouslynotme 5y ago

>e.g. shit like a legislature whose job is to get nothing done isn’t how you win in full-contact sports So we need a totalitarian government to compete with their totalitarian government? No thank you. If your company gets ripped off by the Chinese, like many do, then that is your company's fault.

benreesman 5y ago
There’s a little daylight between having a central committee and having legislators who don’t even pretend that the top of their to-do list every day is preventing, ya know, legislation. This is a non-partisan observation. Everybody pulls this shit these days.
- obviouslynotme 5y ago
  If you want a rubber stamp committee, then someone has to dictate that rubber stamp.

benreesman 5y ago

I find it more than a little disturbing that most of the interest in this comment centers on people trying to refute what amounts to a parenthetical that while a lot of things were looking pretty awesome in 1960 in e.g. the US, being black or gay probably weren’t among them.

throwaway894345 5y ago
Being black or gay in the west was better than being black or gay in any other part of the world. There are still countries where homosexuality is punishable by death. Being black or gay in the US in the 1960s was worse than being white and straight in the 1960s, but my precise point in my sibling comment is that this a stupid criticism because the West was pioneering equality. There seems to be some widely-held superstition that if we acknowledge Western progress, then we will stop progressing.