Posted on 04/16/2020 5:19:45 AM PDT by C19fan
Had I been asked in late 2019 what would eventually break American global dominance, I’d have said the rise of China. Projections indicated that by 2030 or so, China would overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy. When was the last time the U.S. had not been the largest economy? According to the late economic historian Angus Maddison, it was about 1880. And what nation was the largest economy in that year? China.
My thinking, pre-pandemic, was that the psychic shock of America’s eventual demotion might trigger cultural and political turmoil, as the nation would find itself forced into a reckoning. Then came 2020. The true shock to our civilization has come not from our own self-image but from nature itself. Western elites were clearly not prepared for this turn, a shattering of our conceit that reality is ours to create. In the U.S., bickering about an appropriate official name for Covid-19, along with a sequence of bureaucratic blunders that led to dire shortages of diagnostic testing and medical gear, highlight the core competencies of today’s media and governmental elites: administrative turf wars and verbal jousting to burnish status in positional games. Even in this high-stakes moment, they cannot abandon unproductive old reflexes. In a strange turn of events, twenty-first-century American elites turn out to resemble the Chinese mandarins of yore, absorbed in intricate intrigues at court to advance their careers while European gunboats prowl the waterways.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
Prosperity breeds weakness and stupidity. It’s true in the general sense.
a few rotten treasonous apples
is not a reason to throw out the entire harvest.
Our Entrepreneurial class is great. But it seems like any bureaucracy in government, business or academia is incompetent. Our basic Establishment class is ignorant, inefficient and misguided.
We need to get rid of our “elite”.
God help us all if brain dead Byedone gets elected. He likey China.
Also adoration of entertainment stars. They are definitely non-essential.
So we made a mistake in WWII and backed the wrong Asians...
We also backed Communism, and Unionism, and Public Education...
Americans are historically over-generous.
Yes. Appropriate as the comparison is, it comes as no surprise to the honest and wise. Half of America, including much of her elites have succumbed to--and even champion--the decadence of Western Civilisation.
If anyone understands the cycles of decadence-ascendancy-decadence, it's the Chinese.
President Trump is convinced that decadence, until it has reached a certain point-of-no-return, can be reversed, or that, if there's any uncertainty about it, it's worth a try, America having nothing to lose.
That's why he risked everything (a considerable amount, in his case) to try and save his beloved USA from decadence and destruction.
Whether or not he's right, remains to be seen.
But one thing has been proven: When decadence infects a society, the entrenched establishment, including the elites unite in strong opposition to anything and anyone who attempts to reverse it.
Whether because they have a vested interest in promoting the decadence, or they don't understand it, or it constitutes their paradigm of reality--all powerful forces--they fight, as if for their survival, against any attempt to reverse--or even acknowledge--the decadence.
The Chinese certainly understand all this better than the Americans do, and they use their knowledge to their advantage.
President Trump understands it though. He knows exactly what's going on.
The big question is this: Will enough Americans awaken to this reality in time to save the USA?
If not for themselves, then for their children?
What you just posted made me think of two things:
1) the Ottoman Tulip period, when candles were put on turtles backs, whereupon said turtles walked through the sultan/emperor’s tulip garden
2) the period of Chinese history that had people, especially women, with fingernails that looked to be just under 12 inches.
Gwenyth Paltrow’s candle and $200 lunches that you, too, can make from her ‘cookbook’ is an indication for us.
Are elites are part of a kleptocracy, not a meritocracy.
"They would have us believe that the shape of the world is purely a function of our wills, and that reality can be bent to our ideology without limitation."
What better example of the fantasies of those who have succumbed to the decadence, fantasies that have replaced the Western search for TRUTH--TRUTH for its own sake--wherever it may present itself--a search that, among countless other gifts, allowed man to fly to the moon and defeated such scourges as polio, smallpox, and cholera?
The conviction that reality can be bent to ideology governs US academia and the once-revered US news media.
The notion that that gender is a performance intelligible only in a social matrix is a laughable example but there are more subversive and intrusive ones.
In the unlikely even that they should muster such wisdom, they would dash en masse to the support of President Trump, which they have so far resisted with the tenacity of the psychotic defending cherished delusions from the threat of truth.
"Science and engineering are instruments that grant us insight and mastery only through massive investments of time, energy, and will"...
...and, of greatest importance: the relentless, unwavering pursuit of TRUTH--TRUTH for its own sake.
I hate to tell this guy but the US still has “global dominance,” the Chicoms are much further away from us now than they were six months ago, and the China Virus sealed the Chicoms’ doom even faster than they were gonna already see it.
Razib Khan is brilliant and brilliantly articulate, but I’m afraid he’s missing the fundamental point.
Engineers provide answers and solutions. Using science.
I don’t agree. The scientific method asks questions and seeks methodically to discover TRUTH. This provides answers and solutions.
Natural Philosopher?
If there is a major natural disaster such as a major pandemic or global warming, it will be better for the masses, in the long run, to be living in a capitalist, technologically advanced country, with a large amount of wealth and capital accumulation, than an impoverished, socialist country, which will end up begging the capitalist country for help.
The handwriting is right there on the wall for all to see.
The Chinese see it. President Trump sees it. Many people see it. You and I see it.
Those who don't see it don't want to see it. They are they most dangerous of all.
Who? Me? I don’t know about that, but I certainly seek truth.
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