On an optimistic note, I am not convinced that China is going to win any cultural wars. America, for all its problems, still is essentially a leader for much of the developing world, at least in terms of culture. People watch American shows, know American celebrities, listen to American music, etc. This is facilitated by the fact that these cultural elements are pretty diverse and are open to immigrants. As in, a guy like Akon or Obama can be second generation American with parent(s) from abroad.
This same phenomenon doesn’t exist with China. Most people don’t know any entertainment that comes out of China, beyond a few video games. An African immigrant cannot move to Shanghai and expect his children to be treated as full citizens or even members of the Chinese nation. As long as China remains an ethnostate, I don’t see this changing.
The possible, but worrying scenario is that Chinese capital owns Western cultural production, implicitly (see: Disney or the NBA) or explicitly.
As Americans, I feel like we've gotten accustomed to the idea that soft-power means other nations consume our culture through media. We are used to the world listening to our music, watching our movies, and reading our books. We think that we influence the world through our superior and diverse culture. We want the rest of the world to be more like us.
But it seems like the Chinese Government isn't interested in evangelizing the "Chinese Way" around the world. They just want the other nations to enrich the Chinese Economy and fall-in-line during international disputes.
> The possible, but worrying scenario is that Chinese capital owns Western cultural production, implicitly (see: Disney or the NBA) or explicitly.
Tencent (PUBG, Fortnite, Path of Exile; Companies: Paradox Interactive, Klei Entertainment, Discord, Reddit, Splash Damage, Epic Games, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, Funcom, Riot Games, Grinding Gear Games ; Tencent hosts Call of Duty and League of Legends)
The share ranges from 5% to 100%.
Also, they're making movies with high production values. Drug War, various historical epics, Crouching Tiger, Shaolin Soccer etc. Bollywood may have more recognized moveis, but China makes better action movies. And I'm saying this as a person who didn't enjoy most of them (except for the Johnnie To movies).
I cancelled Netflix yesterday. Having watched a few things the absolute majority of its largely American content does not interest me at all. If it's any consolation I don't think I've ever watched anything Chinese.
I think China does have large media influence over the rest of the Asian continent today. The epic miniseries produced in China are translated and enjoyed by people throughout SEA. I wouldn’t instantly expect it to show up everywhere in the developing world, but in the SEA it’s definitely there.
Despite the love of the miniseries, most people in SEA are not dreaming of being Chinese (which is of course an impossibility.) The advantage of the US may be our comparatively relaxed immigration laws.
I'd say Korea is actually winning the cultural war. K-pop has taken the world by storm. Hollywood is in decline, if you'll notice, good movies are harder to come by nowadays.
Yes but a lot of the energy and talent that 20 years ago would have been making movies is now making TV series. Today is the golden age of TV like the 70s was for film.
Check out IMDb top movies by rating. There are about 5 or 6 of them from 2010-2020, and half of that number are actually pretty bad comic adaptations, getting their rating from wide fan base.
Big Hollywood is repeating itself, stakes are too high to embrace creativity, investors want a rock-solid path to success. Netflix is making uninteresting synthetic data-driven content. HBO made a stake on soft porn.
Author/independent movies are on decline too. Look at this year Oscar nominees: how much of them you feel you really should to watch?
I disagree. There are quite a few interesting movies out there. From 2019 alone: Uncut gems, Marriage Story, the Irishman, Us, 1917, Jojo Rabbit and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. All of those are good movies depending on the preference. In fact, they are innovative and creative. The main problem with judging now vs past, is the survivorship bias of the good movies, the bad ones are forgotten and lost.
Two of those are netflix movies - Irishman and Marriage Story, I don't see them any more synthetic than 1980's RAMBO 2-5? or God Father 2,3 etc. Movies were always based on the popularity, the difference being the better data.
> bad comic adaptations, getting their rating from wide fan base
The amount of haters and lovers might not offset each other perfectly, yet it should not matter after the hype dwindles. Besides, the top rated comic books adaptations are quite good - Joker?
I see my comment was flagged and I can't help but think that way too many on HN interpret comments on nationality and race in the worst possible light.
One can't have any meaningful discussion on HN about several political topics because the corridor of acceptable opinion is restricted to essentially the US and to some extent WE mainstream.
Anyway, after ~three strikes in ~11 years I think it's time I took a break on my own initiative because HN and the kind of news and discussions here don't offer anything positive for me any more.
There's a certain amount of race turmoil in the US but a lot of ethnically mixed places do ok. I live in London normally and it's very mixed and works ok really.
Also in terms of Chinese culture the very racially mixed Singapore does rather better in most respects than China.
- 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.
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.
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.
There's a shocking number of comments here that insinuate or flat-out claim that China's autocratic nature is what their "inevitable success" is due to.
If China pulls ahead, it'll be because the West has neglected its democratic values. Valuing profits over people is not a democratic value; it favors the few over the many. It's also, coincidentally, what got us in this mess.
The West is hardly in an irreversible decline. It is, however, reckoning with the forces responsible for an ascendant China. It's a painful process, and I can't say what the result is, but I'm confident I do know the way out: a reinforcement of progressive democratic values.
When this pandemic ends, we need to work on creating stronger community, greater social equity, and work towards completely ending economic activity in non-democratic countries.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Wait. You mean the progressive 'knowledge worker', 'green energy', and 'service economy' focus that left millions under & unemployed wasn't a winning strategy?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Why did the US let its infrastructure get to such a bad state? And why are there so many dilapidated neighborhoods and literally crumbling schools?
The US is filthy rich, couldn't they have fixed these things decades ago? Just spend hundreds of billions investing in neighborhoods that have historically been intentionally left to rot?
Is it just disdain for the people who live in the crumbling areas? Serious question.
I see a lot of people lately say 'progressive woke politics' is the reason the US is declining with poor infrastructure, lack of universal healthcare, etc, but aren't progressives generally in favor of universal healthcare and improving infrastructure and other spending to improve quality of life?
Attempt of a serious answer: it seems like it's really Republican (party) ideology that government should be small enough to be able to be drowned in a bathtub, and any amount of money for the people is deemed sinful. Never mind that it makes sense to build good roads, fast trains, and even good schools to educate people.
Seems like the GOP has a "If we do x, that will prove our propaganda all this time has been wrong, and it's political suicide" problem. As an opposite example, they quickly agreed to Covid bailouts last year because blocking that money would've been an even faster way to commit political suicide.
Even Blue States have deficient infrastructure and lackluster public education. There are plenty of Blue States with Democrat super-majorities in state legislatures where the GOP can safely be ignored. Yet, the problems persist.
> ...government should be small enough to be able to be drowned in a bathtub...
The key piece you're missing is that this is the case for national government, because the rest should be managed at, ideally, the local government level where citizens are able to self-govern, such as on city council meetings. That power should move up the organizational structure only as far as it needs to (for instance, you cannot build interstate highways at the city level).
In a country the size of the US, consolidating political power at the national level turns politics into the spectator sport it's become.
Globalization combined with a strong dollar(due to our reserve currency status, which gives us power over other countries but at a cost) led to the export of millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs and businesses, causing a decline in manufacturing, mostly in rural areas.
I mean the US is going to shit, but it's important to ask: "Compared to what?" Our demographical outlook is actually much better than any other developed nation.
China's economy is based on the export of manufacturing goods. We are their main customer. More importantly, we are set up to be their only main customer for the next generation at least due to birth rates.
Every other developed nation has had a declining birth-rate while ours grew and then remained stable after the end of WWII. That means that Europe, Russia, and China are all set to become Japan as their populations age out of the workforce. This is the true cost of the 1-child policy and it will reverse their entire economy.
China will have to begin importing masses of foreign labor to make up for the shortfall. But the people buying all those goods will either be Americans or their allies in India. Keep in mind that Americans are split 50/50 on whether mass immigration is a good idea or not. China is unified against the idea. They also have far more unmarried young men due to that same policy. If you think we have a racial-supremacist problem in America I invite you to be patient.
There is simply no other country rich and populated enough to fund the Chinese manufacturing economy other than the American consumer economy.
I agree with the general sentiment that America is in decline, but every other developed nation is set to decline faster than we are. This gives us a relative advantage even if in absolute terms the world is going to shit.
China may still come out on top. Their leadership has vision and the political ability to plan more than 2 years in advance (really nice to have in a government), but it will be at least another 20 before they achieve undisputed supremacy.
In the long term, the West (Europe at first) went from at best a not particularly interesting place compared to, say, China to the global hegemon because
1. it became much better at war than the others [0]
2. it became much richer than the others [1]
Much has been written about how Western values and/or institutions and/or any other causes led to 1 and/or 2 and the interplay between 1 and 2.
The warfare advantage is primarily tech-based against peer enemies. Training and sheer size may matter against asymmetric foes but against China it's basically whoever has the best technology.
Given the relative size of Western countries and the rest of the world (China is about four times as big as the US for instance), the West needs to be many times richer per capita to be a larger economic power than China or India. Note that the West used to be a much higher percentage of the world population in the past.
There's a lot of catching up both in technology in particular, including military technologies, and economic catch up more broadly; it is very unlikely that the West can leap again and grow/innovate so much faster than China & India can't catch up enough to dominate.
People in this thread seems to be too focused on what they see as a cultural decline within the US and not see the economic and technology long term catch up.
>Note that the West used to be a much higher percentage of the world population in the past.
I wonder about this quite a lot. This is obviously mainly due to the boom in developed world esp China, but do you have any opinions about 'fixing' the fertility rate in the West? Is it futile when the developing world incl China will always have higher rates?
> This is obviously mainly due to the boom in developed world esp China
Europe (and the "West" aka where Europe sent its surplus citizens) went through its fertility transition [0] earlier than the rest of the world. Hence it increased its relative size as it experienced a high fertility / low death period, and decreased its relative size after it went to a low fertility / low death while part of the rest of the world went into their high fertility / low death phase.
So we can probably expect currently high population growth to transition to the low fertility / low death endgame. China is already well past it.
As far as I know, no country went back to a high fertility / low death scenario, though countries stabilized at various level of low fertility.
Most Western countries have institutions that rely on population growth (high debt that would lead to enormous debt per capita if the number of people decreases, unmaintained infrastructure, pay-as-you-go pensions...). So they will either have to fix their fertility rate in a dramatic way, massively reform many of the core institutions of society, or have high immigration & handle it well.
> 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?
It's because we stopped focusing on creating things, and instead started laser focusing on making sure that everybody gets exactly the same amount of everything all the time. It's ridiculous. We are trust fund children who don't understand where the money came from, and it will be our undoing.
Twitter, NYT, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and the like have monetized dividing us, and they have a multi-billion dollar a year budget to figure out how to be more efficient at it.
We demonize people who create things. We demonize people who want to form communities, and we even demonize people who might dare to suggest that The United States is rightfully an example for the rest of the world.
We have gutted our education system. Many of my wealthy friends are either pregnant or have recently have had children. 0 of them will send their kids to a school where they learn that math is racist, the united states is completely racist, white people are racist, trees are racist, grammar is racist, and that they should be skeptical and distrustful of their parents.
We've gone from "America is a beautiful project we all create" to "America is a mine with jewels at the bottom, and we need to extract them and make sure that everybody gets their fair share".
I think you've got a lot more ideology than facts going on in this post.
> started laser focusing on making sure that everybody gets exactly the same amount of everything all the time
This doesn't sound at all like the America in which I've lived my whole life. Just in my life alone there's been Reagan's legacy, Clinton's welfare reforms, Bush's tax cuts, the 2008 financial crisis and the fallout, and that's when I started to stop paying attention because it was getting too depressing.
Looking at China, they're at least trying to eliminate poverty whereas here it seems like our goal is to make it worse, and help a few billionaires get richer along the way.
I disagree with some parts of this comment because I think it misunderstands that there are real, historical, unaddressed grievances commingled with an entitlement mindset. (The rich also have an entitlement mindset, as it turns out.)
But the bit about schooling hit home for me. I'm supposedly in one of the most successful school districts of my city, but the stories I hear from parents ahead of me are disturbing. There is some real wackadoo stuff being exported directly from the university into young teachers and transferred into young minds.
I just heard one about a teacher refusing to mention how civil rights leaders prayed before their marching--literally skipping those pages of the book. I was creeped out when the TX schools were trying to downplay Jefferson's racism, but this secular, CRT re-narrativizing of history is just as bad.
My advice? Ignore most things other parents say. My youngest graduated from high school last year. A public school. A sane school - though you'd never know it when listening to the other parents. Parents are nuts and you should take everything they say with a huge grain of salt. (Except me of course!)
On the college front things are a little different. My oldest two went to private, liberal arts schools majoring in mathematics and science. The SJWs make life irritating and the administrations kowtow to them a bit excessively but they still ended up getting a good education. My youngest is going to a public university - even though the nonsense is present, the student body and the administration largely ignore it except where there's a legitimate case (I know that's subjective, but what "most people" would consider to be a legitimate case). Most of our "culture wars" are made up by Fox News and CNN to give their talking heads something to blather on about. Hell, if we're all in agreement on most things - which we largely are - then why would you watch them? Their whole business model is making mountains out of molehills.
The funny thing is China believes it. You may recall Japan thought we were in decline, too.
Honestly, at no point in my life have a seen the future of the United States as being brighter than I see it now. Do we have problems? Absolutely! But we're doing a much better job not sweeping those problems under the carpet than we did in the past and that's the key to our getting those problems solved.
Just curious. How do you feel about Alabama advancing its "creation science" bill? Clearly, unequivocally there are reactionary trends taking us far in the opposite direction you say we are going.
I will always take the path of science over the path of superstition and manufactured grievances.
I think that it's a classic example of ideology infiltrating the classroom. Creationism could be taught in a philosophy class, but it has very little relation to the scientific process.
But I would say that these trends are localized. The urban coasts are not the same as Alabama, and I see the error as springing from an identical root: the desire to control the narrative and impose a particular political conscience on the youth.
Agree with exploitation mentality, disagree with "everybody getting their fair share" being the core. That exploitation/financialization mentality really hit its stride with Reagan, though both parties eventually vied to see who could do it more. It is ostensibly independent of where the money goes to.
>We demonize people who create things. We demonize people who want to form communities, and we even demonize people who might dare to suggest that The United States is rightfully an example for the rest of the world.
>a school where they learn that math is racist, the united states is completely racist, white people are racist, trees are racist, grammar is racist, and that they should be skeptical and distrustful of their parents.
uhh what? that's a lot of background beliefs that you assume readers believe/know about.
>started laser focusing on making sure that everybody gets exactly the same amount of everything all the time. It's ridiculous.
>It's unbelievably, unbelievably sad.
I largely agree with you, but in my opinion, the position you're expressing in the former quote (specifically the extremity of the position, rather than its quality) contributes to existence of the latter. There are way too many absolutes in your complaint - you're exaggerating out of emotion.
Flamewar comments like this will get you banned on HN, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. You take the community a major step into hell when you react like this; it damages the commons, and it's not ok. No more of this, please.
It's funny you think that, because black folks in America have been saying for years that they deserve a cut of what was stolen from them, and the response is "we have ours, go pound sand."
No, the miniscule strides made towards a more equitable society are not the issue. We laser focused on the generation of profit for the few at the expense of everything and everyone else. Where do you get your news? OAN?
Wrong. China is not betting on it, rather the US is betting that China is betting on it, to poise China in an adversary role.
China has plenty of its own problems to mind and its road to mondernization is far from over. It's the US that's in question. Why is it fussing over China so much? Why not mind its own business? Why blame everything on China when the US could spend the time improving lives for its own citizens? Or is its blood-sucking, globally exploitive economy cannot function without the sacrifice of an imaginary enemy?
US is the one that gets red-eyed all over a country that's doing good, just because itself can't seem to get out of the decline. What the US doesn't have, others can't either.
Just as a commercial worker, if you look at trying to do business in China it seems China very much does think about foreigners and foreign business much more than most of the western world.
China has absurd outlandish reactions to anyone whispering Taiwan, or saying a single negative thing, and you think the US is the one that is “red-eyed”?
For all the hand-wringing over the decline of the West, it never seemed very likely to me. Half the world's GDP comes from the liberal democracies of North America and Europe. That economic and political power is not going to bow down to any other world power that is not ideologically aligned. The West will do business with China for exactly as long as it's in the West's interest. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that supply chains can change and businesses can adapt when required to.
Exactly. China has never opposed a strong, healthy and positive US. It's the US that's getting increasingly poisonous over China, to maintain its hegemony. A change of political mindset could really see the world with two great countries with different but competitive systems that could learn from each other and see each other's shortcomings.
Political proselytism. Certain advocates for democracy believe that democracy and autocracy cannot coexist in the same world and autocracies must be toppled wherever they appear.
Honestly I'm seeing parallels with the christian crusades. Remember that religion and politics were historically one and the same.
China needs structural reform before it can exist harmoniously with the US and the rest of the advanced economies. The gap is just too big in terms of civil liberties and rule of law.
As someone living in Asia, its clear to see that Asia is the future.
Looking back at life in North America, it looks so crude and old fashioned. People are constantly bitching about politics and one party or the other. Karen's are ratting everyone and wanting to see the manager.
Is life perfect here? Hell no.
But it seems in the west we are fighting over the past instead of fighting over the future.
"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.
As a European, I've never been so pessimistic about the EU but so optimistic about the USA. I really feel like European leaders need some kind of wake up call.
Yes, they are very complacent. Perhaps a single strong leader could be the source of inspiration, the catalyst to a stronger European continent. Right now, the people are not inspired by any of the current "leaders".
As a European, I feel the complete opposite. The US can learn a lot from Western Europe on how to run a healthy Democracy for the people and not the rich.
There was a similar story about the ascendancy of Japan over the west in the 1980's, but demographics eventually slowed Japan's growth. There were simply not enough young people to keep the economy growing and take care of the growing elderly population. A similar thing is happening with China as many young people chose to not have children or only have a single child. So far in human history this trend towards fewer children in advanced societies is irreversible. The successful parts of the "west" have counterbalanced this trend by attracting and integrating young immigrants (both educated and working class). Unless China becomes a more attractive place for immigrants it is probably nearing its peak potential.
I wish we (the USA) would take this opportunity to recognize China does some things in certain circumstances better than us and capitalize on that.
- Infrastructure (public transportation and high speed rail is far superior in China)
- Reproductive rights for women (abortion is available for all women in China)
There are others, but it doesn't need to be a battle. China has a ton of issues too (non-free media, Xinjiang situation, an 'end justifies the means' like view on things, lack of direct representation in their "democracy", etc.).
We should take the good and reject the bad. All of the posturing is bad for the world at large, I think.
Reproductive rights? Funny. Yes, they can get an abortion. But there was a time, rather recently, when they literally did not have the right to reproduce.
There's an imbalance with information here, just like there was with the USSR back in the day. The U.S. is an open book that anyone can peer into; China is the opposite. Complicating matters is that the main lens into the U.S. is through 24 hr news orgs that long ago abandoned objectivity for sensationalism. It's easy to conclude something is in decline if all you ever see is perpetual chaos. The reality is, mostly, a lot more chill and nuanced.
The so called "mainstream" news organizations have completely abandoned objectivity, at least when it comes to politics. They are de facto the propaganda wing of the Democratic party. If you comb through the articles being written, most of them are worded in a way that conveys a favorable position for the Democratic party platform and its politicians.
Does anyone really believe the wumao is limited to China? The CCP has its hands in everything. Social unrest, identity politics, political correctness. They're patient, easier to overthrow the west by sowing internal division and weakness than guns and armies.
It is just where we are in the long term debt cycle. The US dollar will devalue in the next decade, but we aren't facing a collapse or anything. We are out of monetary tools (interest rates near zero) to stave off deflation, so we will turn to fiscal tools (printing money). This is a good thing as it will make the US more competitive on exports. We may lose our global reserve currency status but that is not a sustainable position, so it is somewhat inevitable.
The US is still one of the most desirable places for foreign talent. I hope we maintain that position. That creates demand for US resources and provides the people currently here with a comfortable retirement. China is not so welcoming to foreigners, nor is it very desirable given the pollution.
Debt in our own fiat currency is not a problem unless it causes inflation. If anything, we have underrealized our economic potential by artificial monetary constraints.
An under-rated asset to the United States is it's attraction of immigrants. If the US could muster the willingness to make immigration a fast and smooth process once again, it would be an enormous benefit.
I agree that the "West" is in a decline, and I'm hopeful we can get out of it. The issue I have with these articles is that it suggests the "West" has always ruled the world, when reality is a bit different. The US was never hegemonic over Russia, China, or India.
China also has some serious issues to tackle related to their massive growth and demographic problems. This is made worse by their unwillingness to open up their markets and try to fight the US on consumer spending - which powers much of the economic power that the US has.
China tries to control the narrative as it is advantageous to do so. Reality is, I think India's economy has more chance to overtake the world than China but nothing is for certain.
The US economy is led by people who mostly look to create window dressing on profits in order to bail out with a large parachute.
And the increasing economic inequality means that attempts to stabilize our economy are captured mostly by the rich, leading to asset bubbles.
The asset bubbles means that those in the shrinking middle class are being squeezed out of housing, and with the markets now all serving the upper class and permanently in bubble territory everyone is just chasing after lottery tickets in the economy.
Doing a good job and running a company well are naviely old-fashioned values. Everyone just needs to get rich from crypto and that'll save us...
Can we get a new a trade deal with China which enforces democratic and labor rights? Otherwise please embargo them for the sake of humanity, shift industry back to the West and forget about them.
Can we get a new a trade deal with the US which enforces democratic and labor rights? Otherwise please embargo them for the sake of humanity, shift industry back to Europe and forget about them.
See how insane it sounds? Because it's not like the US is a shining beacon of democracy and worker rights. Sure it's better than China but by how much compared to say Scandinavia? It's all degrees. An Amazon worker looks like someone working under slave-like conditions from where I'm sitting.
Though if we can trade - corporate-ism for innovation, complacency and entitled-ness for hard work, political brainwashing for issue based activism, gradual progress for leap frogging - I would still bet on America.
While it’s a bit late, there is still a chance for America to re-establish itself as the leader. If we don’t wake up for another 5 years, we may indeed be on an irreversible path.
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.
Ever since about the 1960's-1970's, it has been a slow, gradual frog boiling of American culture, institutions, government, community, and society. Look at all the neighbors and people in public who refuse or don't interact with each other. This was not the case 40 years ago. American socialization with strangers and neighbors was entirely different. Americans barely acknowledge the presence of one-another apart from pointing out microaggressions, espousing conspiracy theories, or berating someone for "how so stupid they are for believing X." At some point, if people don't need or want each other, and don't benefit from the presence of one another, it stops being a civilization and starts being a prison colony where the inmates look to escape.
Morris Berman discussed it to a degree in 2000.
Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam (2000) hinted to it. Heck, there are countries now with restaurants that cater to solo diners. That seems really depressing.
The late Chalmers Johnson predicted it convincingly in 2006 and during a few interviews.
America: The Farewell Tour by Chris Hedges (2018).
When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present by Nick Bryant (2021).
Most civilizations tend to last an average of 250 years until corruption and other factors causes their effective collapse. I think there is often a combined gradual decline and more sudden decline into effective collapse when civilizations lose their "critical mass" to maintain basic infrastructure and services. There are numerous failed states in the world that perpetually operate on the edge of this condition. Healthy civilizations needs lofty aspirations that don't lead to insolvency.
Economics and power is not that simple. I'm sure most commenters here know about China's demographics - but it is asinine to think they'll collapse because of an ageing population. That's not how the world works.
Lenin was right. "Capitalists will sell to Communists the rope from which they will hang" That's exactly what is happening right now. USA outsourced much of its production to China (and elsewhere) and essentially handed over supply chain control to China. 80% of medical supplies are exported from China, along with rare earth metals, electronics, etc.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
I suspect that the Chinese Government are feeling increasingly vulnerable as their citizens become wealthier and begin to question the authority of the communist regime.
The west is probably in the best shape it has ever been in if measured in prosperity, freedom and life expectancy.
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).
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?
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.
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 certain corners of the Internet oft derided as right-wing whackjob conspiracy theorists are to be believed, not only is China betting that the West is in irreversible decline, but is covertly actively sewing the seeds of the factors driving that collapse.
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?
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 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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
Japan went through this. They built tremendous levels of debt. Private debt is 200% and their government debt is 250%. Just before their debt problem got out of control their deficit spending made the world think Japan was going to take over the world. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JapanTakesOverTh...
The thing is... Japan in the late 80s didnt seem like they had a debt problem because they always do this in a 'debt to gdp' but if your spending also increases gdp. It hides the problem until its a disaster.
It's not so much a genocide but rather slave labour, the chinese debt problem is so bad that they are only maintaining the status quo because of their slave labour.
When does it change? When does it break? May never change. The USSR fell and got rid of their gulags. china may never fall.
The West is in total decline. We are living through the complete collapse of the old order and the values of Western Civilization are being replaced before our very eyes.
All of our advantages are being withered away and there is really nothing special about the West.
China is confident and is executing a plan to grow very quickly. They have embraced markets and their people are growing wealthy.
Personally I'm betting on China to win, my money is there. The Chinese work hard, they produce everything, their government works, their society is united and peaceful and the 21st century is literally theirs to take.
What do we have to offer the world? Soy Beans? Scrap metal? A government that doesn't produce results? I have trouble finding a single advantage.
I not bullish on the West - it’s being replaced by other cultures quicker than it can adapt.
However the West still has a lot to offer the world from mRNA to SpaceX to Seneca. Frankly, China’s success had come from copying western civilization and while the west may not survive, the spark will endure. Just elsewhere.
yeah but they built a nasa clone in 10 years. Till now they have managed to get everithing done on a scale unimaginable for anyone in the west. Our only hope is that hey will collapse from recent overheating of economy and political authoritarianism that is plaguing china from early 2010'
The disconnect between the two sides is, on the one hand, not based on anything concrete. So maybe we can patch it up somehow. Like, before the Civil War, slavery is a real thing with real human and economic effects. Today though, conservatives are mad about what exactly?… It seems like they're mad about a generalized disrespect which the mainstream culture has towards them. And fair enough, they aren't imagining that. But they vent this anger into really bizarre things like trying to keep trans people from using the bathroom and imaginary voter fraud prevention laws. And those are the mainstream, non-conspiracy minded Republican issues!
On the other hand though, if there can't be any communication between the two sides, if anyone adopting a position that is popular with 40% of the public makes them a pariah to the other 40%, I just don't see how you can run a country like that. I also don't see any causes on the horizon that would cause the current trend to reverse and for things to become less polarized.
So my current best guess is that we are in the quiet period now, things will stew along for the next 2 to 4 years, then Trump will run again or some other crazy thing, and then there will be secession crisis. It doesn't have to happen, but preventing it from happening requires the Republicans to denounce Trump and anyone associated with him, and I don't think they're going to do it. That isn't to say that the Republicans will necessarily be the ones to precipitate the crisis. I think it's pretty much equally likely that Trump/a Trumpist wins and then the blue states decide to leave. I think something like that probably would have happened in 2020 if he had squeaked out another narrow electoral college win, so it could happen in 2024 or 2028 instead.
> Today though, conservatives are mad about what exactly?… It seems like they're mad about a generalized disrespect which the mainstream culture has towards them. And fair enough, they aren't imagining that.
It's a bit more than that. A growing proportion of conservatives see the world very differently than their left-wing counterparts. This is most easily demonstrated at the moment by the fact that 60% of self-identified Republicans believe the election was stolen via voter fraud[1].
Set aside your own beliefs about the specific issue for a moment, and ask yourself: how would you feel if you honestly, truly believed that Trump legitimately won the election? Would your beliefs be strengthened or weakened when the opposition compared the person you believed won the Presidency to Hitler, and their supporters (you) to Nazis[2]?
> But they vent this anger into really bizarre things like trying to keep trans people from using the bathroom and imaginary voter fraud prevention laws. And those are the mainstream, non-conspiracy minded Republican issues!
You're right. Those issues are politicians pandering to their bases, and emphatically setting themselves on the "hardliner" side of a party that is in turmoil and at risk of fracture.
There are other issues that, if pressed, will absolutely unite the GOP and sweep everything else aside. Foremost among those: gun rights. If the Biden administration is successful in moving against firearms - especially if through legislation - the divisions within the GOP will disappear in a heartbeat.
> So my current best guess is that we are in the quiet period now, things will stew along for the next 2 to 4 years, then Trump will run again or some other crazy thing, and then there will be secession crisis.
I agree. I don't know if Trump will remain relevant, but I see every sign that red states are beginning to seriously consider secession as a possibility. It's an extremely unlikely one today, yes - but it was extremely unlikely in most of the 1850s as well... until it wasn't.
I’ve heard my right wing family members talk about voter fraud since at least 2000, but it’s basically a symptom of the bigger problem, which is a failure of belief in human nature. Changing the topic briefly, how do I know that 9/11 was not an “inside job”? Do I know anything about whether jet fuel melts steel or surveillance of the Pentagon hit, etc.? No, I do not. How then? Well, I know human nature, and so I know a conspiracy involving thousands of people cannot be hidden successfully for twenty years.
Okay, so was there widespread voter fraud in 2020? Prior elections? I’m not an expert in election monitoring, but again, I know about human nature and the mainstream media, so I know that if there were, it would be known.
But the Republicans have decided they just don’t believe in Americans anymore, so they don’t trust anything. It makes unity impossible. I think the only cure unless something really changes is divorce.
> Changing the topic briefly, how do I know that 9/11 was not an “inside job”?
If you enter the conversation believing that, then I suppose you have no way of knowing. It's reasonable that people tell you you're wrong and that your belief is crazy. The difference that I see is that people don't tend to tell you that you - specifically you - are evil because of your beliefs.
> How then? Well, I know human nature, and so I know a conspiracy involving thousands of people cannot be hidden successfully for twenty years.
I'm not so sure about that.
Consider that the F-117 first flew in 1981 but wasn't made public until 1988.
MKUltra was operational from 1953-1973 but wasn't mentioned at all in the public record until 1975 during a Senate hearing. There were very few details made public then, and it wasn't until the mid 1990s that the full scope of the project started to come to light. I remember when "MKUltra" was really only something discussed in conspiracy circles; I first heard the name on Coast to Coast AM in the early 2000s.
> Okay, so was there widespread voter fraud in 2020? Prior elections? I’m not an expert in election monitoring, but again, I know about human nature and the mainstream media, so I know that if there were, it would be known.
First, let me clarify that I don't even have a strong position on this. I don't think it's likely that voter fraud was a deciding factor in the 2020 election, nor that it happened significantly more or less than in prior elections.
That said, looking at this objectively, you assert "if there were, it would be known." According to the polling I referenced in the GP, it is "known" by ~60% of GOP voters.
> But the Republicans have decided they just don’t believe in Americans anymore,
This strikes me as a non sequitur. They don't trust the prevailing narrative - which again, I strongly believe is likely to be the truth - but it doesn't follow that they "don't believe in Americans."
> so they don’t trust anything.
THIS is the core issue I see. Putting myself in the shoes of a stereotypical GOP voter, I would be distrustful of the media due to their extensive coverage of "Russiagate" (which I would see as having been either a complete fabrication or a partisan witch hunt) and their silence on the "Hunter Biden's laptop" story (which I would be confident would have been the primary issue in the election if it had not been covered up). I would be distrustful of social media due to what has been presented to me as the ongoing suppression of conservative voices across multiple platforms, followed by the aggressive deplatforming of Trump on Jan 7th. Finally, I would be distrustful of the government itself because of the "Deep State" narrative that Trump and others have repeatedly reinforced over the past ~5 years.
At that point... who would I trust? Where would I turn to find facts? From that perspective, it looks like there has been a consistent and successful campaign to keep me from being able to trust every single previously reliable source of information.
> It makes unity impossible. I think the only cure unless something really changes is divorce.
I completely agree with you. The way things are today, the two "sides" here have irreconcilable differences. Whether or not they want to work together is honestly largely irrelevant; they each believe the other to be both malicious and to have a long history of deception.
I truly don't see a clear path forward that maintains these two communities living in the same polity.
> That said, looking at this objectively, you assert "if there were, it would be known." According to the polling I referenced in the GP, it is "known" by ~60% of GOP voters.
It is not known by a court of law, despite numerous opportunities for the Trump team to do so. At best, Trump is so incompetent that he predicted massive fraud before the election, had it happen, and then failed to collect any evidence of its having happened. If he's really that incompetent, we're better off with the fraudsters.
Again, it doesn't take deep insight to figure out the above. It's just common sense about human nature, how the courts work, how the media works, etc.
Re: Hunter Biden's laptop, the Trump team chose to sit on the story until October, so the media chose to ignore it. Impeachment #1 had already made it clear that Trump was planning to attack Hunter. Why should the media choose to let themselves be played? If Trump's team wanted the story to be publicized, they had months and months to do it but instead they waited until October and the media declined to cover a story that was a best irrelevant to Biden Sr.'s job performance.
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.
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.
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!
>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.
It's because we're too worried about participation trophies, gender pronouns, and PC garbage culture. It's become petty culture without any spine or backbone, whining about everything instead of doing anything. Minding everyone else's business instead of minding your own. Add to that all the misaligned government spending and cognitive dissonance. Factions upon factions of petty hedonistic groups. I also would not say this is not reversible.
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.
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).
This same phenomenon doesn’t exist with China. Most people don’t know any entertainment that comes out of China, beyond a few video games. An African immigrant cannot move to Shanghai and expect his children to be treated as full citizens or even members of the Chinese nation. As long as China remains an ethnostate, I don’t see this changing.
The possible, but worrying scenario is that Chinese capital owns Western cultural production, implicitly (see: Disney or the NBA) or explicitly.