311–320 of 606 posts
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Idk, I think a much more effective way to destroy the US would be to send armed gangs through the streets and have them kidnap people from their houses at random. That would cause far more destruction than merely telling people you were doing that without actually doing it.
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You don't want there to be good schools that some people can get into and and garbage schools for everyone else. What you need is a high minimum standard that every last school in the nation has to adhere to and it shouldn't be possible to graduate from any of them without being able to read at grade level.
Whether you want that or not depends on what you're trying to achieve. China has pursued basically the approach you're talking about: focusing on key province to advance them to the cutting edge. The last time China participated international high-school testing, they published scores only four Beijing and three other wealthy provinces: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re... . And those score…
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But related to this article, is China winning in terms of accumulating talent? I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China. If they succeed, it’s purely with their own talent. The US still has that advantage even if it has less of it, unless I am mistaken.
Chinese is too difficult of a language. I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper. Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English. If I have a heavy English accent, I just don't speak Chinese instead of sounding like a for…
The characters are indeed a nuisance, but can be overcome with Anki/SRS. Chinese learners struggle with its tonal nature due to a lack of exposure to speaking/listening because they have no experience with tones. English speakers always decry Chinese tones as insurmountable as if it’s the only tonal language, but half of all languages are tonal, so it’s doable with practice.
In fact, Chinese has become more similar to Indo-European languages over the past century. Chinese now has an odd form of hypotaxis (think: conjugation, inflection, etc.), whereas it previously only had parataxis (combine two characters to generate something new). For example, 药性 (medicinal) is OG Chinese (ish), but now you have words like 科学性 and 简化, which make a lot more sense to an English speaker because they were noun-ified. Modern Chinese does this (literally) everywhere: all you see is 是, 性, 化, 的, 被. This makes the language much more amicable to an Indo-European native speaker.
Perhaps your difficulty is due to modern Chinese’s verbose (almost bureaucratic) syntax? These examples you gave make sense to me if you follow their literal reading. They sound stupid if translated to English, but not necessarily nonsensical.
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This is a thing that you don’t notice until you experience it. No more compelling argument that we’re doing something wrong as a nation than that first time stepping onto an American street after visiting a civilized country.
I live in a civilized European country and gravely miss the freedom of speech I had in the USA that I don't here. I'm terrified one tweet will get me jailed for 30 months.
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> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China I don't think this is the case at all.
People already said that 25 years ago when the US started officially torturing prisoners. And 25 years later, highly qualified immigrants are still lining up to move to the US.
I understand that the government is now too coarse to use soft power, and maybe it wasn't even working as well as it used to, but it is bizarre to undercut the sciences when their military capability is derived almost entirely from high technology since they can't field or lose lots of soldiers. I get they want to be Rome 3.0 or some bullshit, but Rome was famous for investing in engineering. A bunch of dunces. Or pe…
They're happy to fund the military, they have a list of words [1][2] that they use to flag grant applications, including "female", "bias", "political" and others. Cuts seem to be directed at biomedicine, health and social studies. [1] https://grant-witness.us/ [2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-fede...
They are also attacking Harvard, the number 1 science university in the US. There's a scandal at Harvard last month where the Dean of Science was fired because he was protesting against eliminating graduate students in the sciences (they eventually settled for something like firing him and 50% cuts to my knowledge). I have no love for Harvard by the way, I never thought I would be defending them.
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> seem evil for enforcing immigration law When people living otherwise-blameless lives begin getting accosted, beaten, or killed on suspicion of the legal equivalent of unpaid parking tickets , then yes, the new enforcement occurring is indeed "evil." When they start willfully breaking all sorts of other major laws and violating court-orders to enforce the minor law, yes, that's usually evil. When rationales last-use…
Go try the same in a non-Western country and report the comparative experience. Histrionics over normal law enforcement that is tame and well-regulated by global standards is embarrassing — it makes Americans look uneducated and childish.
I live in the US. Why should I have to accept the comparatively poor standards of some "shithole country"? (Be sure to recall whose phrase that is.)
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Meanwhile, China has "genius camps" for young people, to skim off the cream of the cream of the crop, so they can go on to do amazing things for their country. It blows my mind what we've done in the last year, to damage our ability to compete on the world stage.
It bears repeating: for everyone who insists that the US Executive Branch isn't compromised by our enemies, what different actions would someone who was compromised and trying to speedrun the destruction of American power, influence, and hegemony have taken?
BBB slashed funding for cutting edge medical research which would not only save, or at least prolong lives, but also generate revenue for this country -- when we export our IP, or when people come here for some of the most advanced medical procedures. To say nothing of immigration policies which actively repel some of the best and brightest and may be leading us to an actual population decline.
Sure we weren't perfect by an stretch before, but it feels like we're getting drowned in a toilet at the moment.
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> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China I don't think this is the case at all.
People already said that 25 years ago when the US started officially torturing prisoners. And 25 years later, highly qualified immigrants are still lining up to move to the US.