Some Berlin-based organization called the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) has compiled a global “Academic Freedom Index.”
It reminds one of that ranking showing the US best prepared for a pandemic, and indeed, to confirm my point, the GPPi proceeded to Block me when I made that point to them on Twitter.
Evolutionary psychologist Lee Jussim has compiled some examples of Western academic freedom in action. Wrongthink papers are getting retroactively retracted. Blank slatism is the only acceptable explanation for differences in social outcomes. Nor is there much of a space for critics of American imperialist hegemony – I do not believe old warhorses like Noam Chomsky will be replaced in the decades ahead.
Western universities are turning into indoctrination camps where the officially sanctioned and only “handshakeworthy” worldview is Wokeperialism.
But really, as with most things, details matter. If you want to research the death toll of the Great Leap Forwards, I can't conscientiously recommend China as a base. Researching the B/W gap in intelligence? Yeah, I'd go with China in that case.
— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) July 27, 2020
However, even this assessment of mine on China may be unduly harsh.
As commenter yakushimaru says, a case can be made that there is now actually far more freedom of speech in a Chinese university than in your typical Western madrassa:
A female professor was relieved of her teaching duties when it became widely known that she’s been saying, publicly and on the web, things like praises of Japanese raping of Nanjing. She’s still got the salary and all. Just no more teaching. 🙂
And her sayings became widely known only because she’s involved in some active back and forth on the web over the COVID-19 handling in Wuhan. She’s been posting such stuff for quite a number of years.
She studied in a Japan university. On hearing her treatment, some Japanese professors protested publicly until they being informed that she’s saying praises of such kind and the Japanese professors took back their protest.
To be sure, the West retains the edge in international university rankings. But these things coast largely on past reputation and accomplishments. China now published more papers than the US, and are rapidly catching up in terms of total number of “quality” publications as well e.g. as proxied by the Nature Index (indeed, China now leads on the Physical Sciences + Chemistry section, with the US only retaining its absolute lead thanks to a huge advantage within the “softer” Life Sciences).
Wael Taji Miller, in a 2019 article for Palladium Mag, argues this is an unsustainable and necessarily temporary state of affairs:
Despite these challenges, Western universities remain ahead in most established global rankings. While it seems likely that Western universities will retain the top spots for the near future, we might pause to question how much their status derives from actual research output and teaching quality, rather than the reputational benefits that ‘eliteness’ brings. Ultimately, whether or not the outraged backlashes against figures like Carl are justified makes no difference to the larger picture, wherein Western college campuses are increasingly characterized by student conflicts, redlined research topics, and the elevation of external societal goals above internal academic outcomes.
Incidentally, there is possibly even greater academic freedom in Russia than in either the West or China. While Western researchers have to submit to the braying SJW mobs, and Chinese researchers at least have to pay lip service to ideology, there’s neither one nor the other in Russia. So far.
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I never knew Mongolia was such a bastion of academic freedom!
Given a meaningful percentage of modern-day Mongols are descended from Genghis Khan, the HBD crowd might have something to say about that given he was biased against freedom of any kind whatsoever.
Similar point was made by Peggy Sastre in 2019 article with a few examples:
https://quillette.com/2019/04/01/activists-must-stop-harassing-scientists/
“At the moment I prefer to stay anonymous,” explains an astrophysicist. “I am not proud of this, but I have to eat, and I am also responsible for the research opportunities of my students and my postdocs.” He hadn’t killed anyone. Rather, he had just chosen to move from Australia, the country where he earned his degrees and spent most of his career, to China. Why? Because, as a researcher, he has more freedom in China.
What is worrying is that this goes well beyond social sciences.
The ideological need to conform is also reinforced by systematic affirmative action. If you are a young white male and independent minded, your career prospects in Western academia look dubious even if talented.
“Insufficient Data” for the US and Australia pretty much tells the true story.
GPPI’s assessment of global academic freedom reminds me of all those MSM stories we saw about the Biden crime family after details of Hunter’s laptop were revealed.
https://twitter.com/iiirefxa/status/1328683885832654850
Western universities offer unparalleled freedom to publish pap like this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318300770_Decolonizing_energy_Black_Lives_Matter_and_technoscientific_expertise_amid_solar_transitions
How much does academic freedom impact the quality of education and research anyway? Okay, it might harm genetic research by a fair bit, but other subjects? Academic freedom isn’t the reason western universities has the best researchers. They have the best researchers because they have the best researchers which attracts the best researchers. Then there’s the prestige on top. That’s a situation which is hard to break.
Russia is one of the big losers in this situation. Russia has comparable education levels to western countries (say as measured by some combination of PISA and quality of undergraduate degrees) but many more Russians leave to do research in western universities than westerners move to Russia to do research.
The researcher in the article quoted by HyperDupont is an astrophysicist.
I got out of academia a few years ago, there was no woke nonsense pushed on hard scientists researching uncontroversial topics then. People more senior than myself were made to do what they used to call “endless stupid courses”, on admin and teaching styles fire extinguishers etc. They were introducing an “unconscious bias” one as I was leaving; it’s probably much worse now.
The sad thing is this kind of meaningless gobbledygook may possibly be found inside a hardcover by MIT Press.
From the text, a meeting by Sun People. This is not satire.
Solar panels: They (as well as TVs) grow on trees, ya know. These power stations, they be da oppressive.
This will end in dead people stacked to the ceiling. Better them than us.
A decision has to be taken soon.
According to this paper out of Mongolia, hardly anyone in Mongolia is a descendant of Genghis Khan.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0161622
The authors suggest Genghis Khan was a white man of R1b-M343 fame:
Maybe it’s a leftover of Freiherr von Ungern-Sternberg’s attempt to create a new Empire in Mongolia? (Probably not)
The ‘free’ countries of Western Europe which responded to academic questioning of the Holocaust by making it illegal (fortunately this is not part of free speech, as per the ECHR)
As you said, every country, every civilization have its own sensitive topics.
I can imagine Chinese scientist who says “my research proves Xi Jinping Thought is load of shit” will have some problems.
What is the most sensitive topic in today’s RF?
I cannot think about anything else than WW2 history. Great Victory in Great Patriotic War is the cornerstone of modern Russian state ideology, the foundational myth of modern Russia.
What would happen to someone who shits on this most sacred myth?
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/no-victory/
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/stalin-is-not-great/
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/annatar-on-soviet-military-casualties/
And not some internet nobody, but legitimate academic scientist?
There is one I know about, Mark Solonin.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD,_%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BA_%D0%A1%D0%B5%D0%BC%D1%91%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Solonin
https://www.solonin.org/
TL;DR: Mark Solonin agrees with Vladimir Rezun (“Victor Suvorov”) that Stalin started the war and Hitler was only defending himself.
He also says that Soviet army in 1941 refused to fight for Stalin and voluntarily surrendered.
He also says that Soviet atrocities against Germans were much worse than German atrocities against Soviet people.
He also says that Soviet casualties in WW2 were much lower than official history admits, and most of the 27 million official war dead were victims of Stalin blamed on Hitler.
https://www.solonin.org/en/article_fire-in-the-storehouse
Something guaranteed to trigger every Russian patriot.
What happened to Solonin?
Cancelled? Imprisoned? Poisoned with novichok? Personally fed to bears by Putin?
Nope. He publishes his works in hundreds of thousands of copies, writes in newspapers and appears on official radio.
All together, it seems to me that your appreciation of Russian freedom of academic speech and research is accurate 🙂
Mongols practiced religious tolerance, even under Genghis. Their empire actually allowed for a new kind of freedom – the ability to travel in relative safety on long east-west axis. (arguably that is what brought the Black Death to Europe.)
Not to make an apologia for them – your freedom is limited if you are forcefully impressed to be the first wave, storming some city’s walls.
I think there is a sort of distinction, on temporal lines:
The Holocaust is about events that ended 75 years ago, and it has become more repressive as time has gone on. Meanwhile, the Cultural Revolution only ended about 44 years ago, and directly when it ended, I believe it was taboo to look at it too critically.
What does drive this fascination with China success more: Schadenfreude from America’s decline or the vicarious joy of success by the unsuccessful?
wokeperialism. i like it.
the real tell in the academic world will be if western researchers begin to abandon ship for China or Russia, or some other country where they can work freely, and not have the jews on their backs constantly.
Some topics are taboo in America, mostly unimportant topics like race research. What does one learn? If black dysfunction is proved by science to be innate, it changes nothing. The topic is essentially political.
In China the issue is more structural. A brilliant junior researcher in an unpolitical field like physics may not be able to present his findings if they substantially contradict the findings of his superior or the consensus of respected Chinese in the field. Social sensitivity dominates scientific discourse. Worse, such a climate creates an insidious and pervasive climate of conformity, such that one feels a subtle pressure to not even think outside the box, as that can threaten ones career.
In America, social sensitivity can restrict the range of science in a few high profile fields, in China social sensitivity is structural, widespread, and pervasive.
In reality however, both in America and in China science has become bureaucratic and no longer boldly experimental and imaginative. Bureaucratic rules and regulations confer a sense of safety, but good science takes risks. In a world preoccupied with safety, I don’t anticipate any large breakthroughs anymore, but only incremental improvements. And the few breakthroughs there will be, will come from America.
Communist laws preventing job contract terminations in China? No fire-at-will like in the USA?
PC BS made most of Western “social sciences” total bunkum. Natural sciences are still mostly OK, but on their way down. A simple example: when you create your profile for biological journal, you can encounter question like “what sex you mostly identify with?” Any biologist worth the name knows perfectly well that animals have only two sexes, while some other living things have a third one – hermaphrodite, i.e., the combination of these two in the same organism. Everything else is pure BS. It’s like asking whether you, Joe Sixpack, mostly identify with Napoleon or Julius Cesar. This is a question that psychiatrists should be asking, not scientific journals.
That is true, but the main reason for this is how much money is invested into research. As the Empire and its coterie of vassals are committing collective suicide, the Ponzi scheme of the US dollar and treasuries, along with the financial system based on this Ponzi scheme, will inevitably collapse. Then the allocation of real research resources would change dramatically, and with it the direction of the flow of research-capable people.
For the neutral observers, the latter, for the nationalists, the former.
Most nationalists tend to point to China and use its economic growth and technological advancements as a way of saying “we told you so”. I’ve even heard some say that Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is National Socialism, which might actually be true to some extent, but then again socialism was always “national” to one degree or another before the term was hijacked by all sorts of weird vested interests like LGBT and multiculturalists.
Genghisid descendants formed much of mongolian feudal class all the way to the 20th century so they must have been exterminated thoroughly during the bolshevik and stalinist purges.
It was only a matter of time before revisionism would arrive to Mongol historiography. Now we are being made to believe it was one big happy clappy party for all concerned.
This is quite a valid point, in the mainstream at least, it’s very hard to think of any major, respected harsh critics of US imperialism that aren’t over 50 years old. I can’t think of any young or even middle-aged people who write honestly about the middle-east (in English) to compare with Norman Finkelstein, Robert Fisk (RIP) or John Bradley. Although the collapse of journalism as a self-supporting profession likely has as much to do with it.
Truth about the origins of WW2 cannot be discussed in public in Russia.
Any non experimental “science” is subject to groupthink enforced by peer review. Climatology comes to mind. In the UK, groupthink in epidemiology has not yet emerged so Oxford and Imperial College are at war! Psychology now called neuroscience by the respectable has moved from one groupthink to another despite serious attempts at experiment, sadly not reproducible. Russia suffers from this as much as anywhere. Worse! History is called a science in Russia! We need different metrics for career advancement in science in.
“Freedom” in liberal theory is incoherent nonsense and thus can only be a propaganda term when used in that context. “Freedom” in political analysis is just analysis of the level of conformance with American political and social policy; since America’s state ideology defines “freedom” as itself, obviously those most politically dominated by America are most “free”.
Just like an all black baketbal team is 100% “diverse” and becomes less “diverse” the more non-black players are added, being totally dominated by American ideology is to be 100% “free”, and the more alternatives to American domination are available to you the less “free” you become.
Along with the end the end of the world, if Artificial General Intelligence is the explanation for the Fermi Paradox. Look at the way US science failed to foresee that China would contain the 2020 virus in the same way it had the last one (SARS in 2002-3), even though the 2011 movie ‘Contagion‘ predicted just such an occurrence.
Warnings of existential risk like the movie Contagion are ‘such things as dreams are made of’, and not taken seriously in a Western world going headlong for short term efficiency. China has a lot of intelligent people who are now brought together to associatively mate as never before. That IQ boosting effect is greatly underestimated, except perhaps by Charles Murray.
I think it is relating intelligence research to social class that is taboo, and race is the outer defence perimeter. The upper middle class are to an unprecedented extent genetically superior, they instinctively know that open discussion of this subject by the lower orders of society is not a good idea. The smart are dwindling numerically as they get smarter and more economically successful with every generation, which is unstable in a society where everyone has a vote.
Equal opportunity makes genes the dominant developmental force in modern society. At present China maybe does not have any great advantage in intelligence, and it cannot draw on immigrants from all over the world, certainly not Jews from Russia.
China has unbeatable economy of scale, and an additional advantage in associative mating inasmuch there is an excess of males (more competition). A generation hence swarms of surpassingly intelligent Chinese will be flooding out of their breeding grounds.
For a while.
The past is no guide to what can be expected from Jewish post millennials. Without real Jews, what enduring advantage does America have?
I remember that a dozen or so years ago on Steve Sailer’s old HBD email-list, I used to joke with people that a little down the road, there might be an exodus of American scholars to Chinese universities, not merely for the practical emoluments, but also for the greater academic freedom.
At the time, I speculated that Phil Rushton would be offered the first Mao Chair of Human Biodiversity at Beijing University…
This is a great place for hilarious “peer-reviewed” “scholarly” articles: https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview
Like this:
https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1309790018219761664
This is someone’s Ph.D. dissertation:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EjvlkmwWAAU7Wyq.jpg
21st century American scholarship is fun.
I’m critical of the liberal narrative regarding Andalusia. That’s why I think the Mongols’ religious tolerance is so interesting – it is impossible for liberals to fit the Mongols into a liberal framework. The multicultists have such a hard time seizing it. You’ve basically got to be a Mongolian nationalist in order to celebrate the empire.
Of course, the Mongol empire was the second-largest the world has ever seen, and, in relative terms, it was fairly short-lived, so those two things probably predicated the religious tolerance to a certain extent.
Incidentally, that gay novel Anatoly mentioned a while back with the
Georgian[AK: Armenian] and Azeri was printed in Mongolia. Quite bizarre, given the distance. Maybe, the CIA runs a press there, to run books into China.China is not as stupid as you think. They will never permit to be seen as the last refuge for racists and other deplorables.
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That seems to be bogus given that the IQ of Harvard Law School students is 128, and you would naturally expect graduate students to be more intelligent than undergraduate students.
Her name is 梁艳萍 for a reference point. I am not trying to publicize anying, just in case anyone wants to check on the details. It is public information in China.
I have to say that the censoring can be done in all kinds of subtle ways. China being pressured by western influences, and the need to maintain a good image, and that the Party is quite a visible Deep State, all make an assessment on Freedom of Speech not an easy task.
One interesting example. A professor a few years ago sort of trying to push the envelope decided to become a candidate in a local election, i.e., taking the words of the Party on democracy seriously by the letter. He then naturally was reported by NYT but failed to be elected by the numbers. Later on, he was removed from teaching and was given a “research” position in the library effectively censoring his ability to do much. After all this was not a true political leader, merely a teacher able to influence his students and it was by the resources of the university. More interestingly he then moved to USA and became a Chinese nationalist (not KMT) since.
Another example. A second tier math department a few months ago became famous for being selected by an established western institution as the best math department in China based on their metric I suppose. It immediately became targets of ridicule on Chinese social media. The university quickly replied that they were emphatically aware that they were not the best but somehow in trying to improve themselves by metric they apparently fooled the western institution unintentionally.
First of all it is a relative ranking. It doesn’t require a lot of academic freedom to be “more free” than China or Russia.
Secondly, there are plenty of places in the US where you can get an academic degree and avoid all the SJW crap – Hillsdale, Pepperdine, Thomas More even BYU. Those universities don’t have the prestige of the left-wing Ivy League or big State Us, but they offer an excellent rigorous education. No other country in the world offers the wide range of educational opportunities that the US does. Lack of prestige is not the equivalent of censorship, as much as many on the Right pretend that it is.
Russia and China may not have SJW issues, but neither do they encourage independent thought or questioning the wisdom of the ruling party. If you want to keep your head down and do engineering, the universities are fine, but useless as places to study history, political science or economics. The educational systems are incredibly corrupt. There is a reason why top Russian and Chinese students try to go abroad.
Instead of whining so much about how some professor at Princeton or Cornell wants to censor thought, maybe the Right needs to simply focus more on building up alternative institutions. The beauty of America, as opposed to Russia, China, Turkey, etc., is that building alternative institutions is still possible.
To be fair, I suspect a lot of Russian researchers move West for quality of life issues as well. Most people would prefer to live in Palo Alto, Zurich, Delft or Guilford, UK rather than anywhere in Russia given the choice, especially if you intend to raise children.
This is a good point, but with the fixation on Social Justice they are also insisting more and more on blank-slatism and the idea that all inequality is due to injustice and oppression. It seems like it will only be a matter of time before obsessing over equity and differences in achievement between racial groups leads on to people realising that the gaps within any given racial group between its various members are usually as large as those between different ones. And they have already decided that the only possible reasons for this can be injustice and oppression.
There is no evidence for the increase of heritability. I do not think there is evidence for heritability difference between low IQ and high IQ sub populations. The more talented find reasons to work less as often as the the less talented have incentives to work harder.
I didn’t want to raise children in the UK, from the moral degeneracy/mental health point of view. I don’t know about Russia but Belarus seemed a more positive environment.
What did he mean by this?
Incredible self-delusion. We’ve become much less free in Western thinking.
OTOH, a lot of other countries are bad in other regards.
And besides, does any country besides China, Russia, Japan, etc. even matter for freedom in academia? Brazil, maybe. The intelligent sects of Iran and the Levant; India’s upper castes do matter, ofc. Academic freedom in Peru, Gambia and Bhutan wouldn’t be really important…
I’m not sure I would put the UK in the same category as Switzerland, Northern California or the Netherlands in terms of average salary and standard of living. Those are basically “top tier” countries/regions and I wouldn’t consider the UK top tier any more.
I’d say in terms of economy, standard of living and demographics (ie “diversity”) the UK is probably most comparable to France.
Anecdotally, there is a freedom in all exact sciences, I mean fundamental research & the rest.
I don’t know about the far East, but I suspect that ex-Communist countries are freer re philosophy; they just don’t care about most problems plaguing the West.
Race, IQ, evolution, sex/gender, homos … are not discussed in “eastern” academia, but I think most of them are not woke- just don’t think these things are relevant.
Islam is sometimes discussed, but, not too deep. I would say that ex-Commie countries simply do not take homo/gender/race/IQ into consideration; they would be, I guess, as hypocritical as the West. They just don’t want to talk about it.
Jews? They don’t figure prominently in eastern European consciousness. Here, hypocrisy can be seen, from Czechia to, I guess Russia, in avoidance of Gypsy question.
And let’s be real- in all cultures, the academia has been the refuge of moral cowards, opportunists & sleazebags. That some of them had been geniuses doesn’t alter the fact.
Stupid academic rituals, boring way of life, rootless cosmopolitanism, snitching, ….. Despicable.
Seems rather Freudian to attribute everything to a neurosis.
Not many Americans are enjoying America’s decline.
As to the second, what is your preferred scenario? Nigeria becoming world hegemon? Or would you rather America remained in the top spot, while precipitously declining? The decline is a fact. It is built-in, and will certainly continue for decades, at least.
Bare minimum, we can at least feed ourselves with the hope that China’s rise will encourage the West to do some hard thinking and re-evaluate its ideology. Maybe, it won’t happen – and it will just encourage the billion Americans idea.
You are over-generalizing.
Academic rituals (funny dress, stupid hats, etc.) are European in origin (North America is aping those), but in the rest or the world these rituals are not observed.
If you do real science, there is nothing boring about it. Nature provides you something new and unexpected every day, which makes your life less boring than in case of any other profession.
Rootless cosmopolitanism. In my experience, this is a myth. Your roots are in your culture, and that is inside you, so it stays with you wherever you move. If anything, having more than one reference culture gives you a better perspective. For example, I grew up in Ukraine + Russia and live in the US. Due to this experience, I find many Americans surprisingly naïve: a lot of things they believe are new I’ve already seen in the Soviet Union and know the results. So, I feel like a guest from the future.
Snitching. This might be common in “social sciences”, but not in real ones. “Social sciences” is a contradiction in terms, they have very little to do with science and do not use the core rule of science: if the facts contradict a theory, you throw away that theory. In this situation “social sciences” do the same thing as religions: they throw away the facts to remain “true believers”.
‘The West Is #1 in “Academic Freedom”‘
We’ll get over it.
Yes and this is early socialization that mostly ends by the time you are over 20. Your roots stay in your school, the playground, the classmates, the natural places around where you grow up as a child, the smells of the change of seasons from childhood.
I noticed this a lot when an alarm wakes up in the morning, and I realize I was dreaming about some argument with an annoying redharied classmate that I did not see since I was 10 years old, thousands of kilometres distant. In the deepest dreams where you are worrying about work in the office, the brain returns to the classrooms at school, and remaps the adult conflict onto some argument in your schoolrooms.
Or that if I have a nightmare, it will be about a building that was in my street when I was 11 years old.
Mind never escapes your school classrooms, and the streets or paths you walked in your youth. This is the deep roots of the soul. When I dream at night about a forest or a river, it will usually be a detailed picture of one where I lived as a child – while the new adult locations (however attractive or beautiful) seem in the dreams just a kind of superficial abstraction, without much detail.
The latest roots I have are university days. I guess that was the last age at which your soul is still forming roots – I can still have nightmares about being unprepared for university exams. But everything that happens in life after university, is like a superficial acculturation that doesn’t have much effect on the soul.
–
To create a rootless person, you would need to give some degree of sensory deprivation in their youth. Or alternatively, they would have been cut off from their early memories and socialization, so they don’t remember where.
What is common, is not a rootless person, but the person who feels like they are living in the wrong time or epoch. I was born in the early 1990s, and I already feel chronologically misplaced in anytime after around 2010. 2020 feels like we are living too far in the future. Every year further into the future, feeling that year on the calendar looks more wrong.
I won’t address other issues, but it is boring. Not the discussions with colleagues, your own work, grappling with problems …. but the entire referee mafia bullshit, completely unnecessary meetings, numerous academic obstacles & requirements which are totally waste of time, a sense of being a part of an oiled machine however you individually may enjoy your work as such….
It’s funny that in society we esteem more the university teacher, than the school teacher.
Yet the first thing we were shocked about when we went to the university, was how incompetent the teaching we received was on average, compared to in the school.
There were good teachers and courses. But overall, the material became more complicated (so should be more carefully taught), but was instead thrown on us incompetently, and in a half-cooked way. Sometimes it was like trying to arrange a puzzle, to comprehend the notes from a certain lecturer.
I wonder if few people in the country are more disorganized and incompetent in their job, than a lot of the people who work in a university.
I still have some kind of post-traumatic nightmares about graph theory/combinatorics, because of confusingly organized lectures, complicated material, with then being given difficult exams and problem sets. And then the responsibility for a university’s incompetence, is with the students, not the staff – as the students (rather than staff) are the people who are punished if they don’t achieve a good outcome in the course.
‘…“Social sciences” is a contradiction in terms, they have very little to do with science and do not use the core rule of science: if the facts contradict a theory, you throw away that theory. In this situation “social sciences” do the same thing as religions: they throw away the facts to remain “true believers”…’
In practice, you have a point, especially of late.
In theory — and this still still holds in the less fashionable and more genuinely intellectual byways of academia — you’re wrong. Logic and the rules of evidence apply there as well — if not precisely in the same way as in the physical sciences.
‘Russia is one of the big losers in this situation. Russia has comparable education levels to western countries (say as measured by some combination of PISA and quality of undergraduate degrees) but many more Russians leave to do research in western universities than westerners move to Russia to do research.’
It’ll change. The objective facts of the situation will inevitably prevail.
Consider the United States in 1850. A global intellectual leader?
Lol.
Now, fast forward to 1950.
I wouldnt take such studies seriosly, Im reminded of one silly past study that claimed that people of ancient China were genetically more close to Europeans than the Chinese. The study was later harshly debunked and it was shown that it used faulty methodology
“Even more surprisingly, the three smallest genetic distances for the 2,500-year-old Linzi population were from the Turkish, Icelander, and Finnish, rather than from the east Asian populations.”
Ha Ha Ha you cant make this up!
https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/17/9/1396/994964
Same with that tomb in Tavan Tolgoi, there was no actual proof in that study that they were members of the Borjigin lineage, also the area has no specific meaning for the original Mongol tribal confederacy, the Mongols of nowadays and especially of the past were extremely preoccupied with the sacral geography, holy mountains and places, anyone who has studied Mongolian folklore on the Secret history of the Mongols, which by the way is only Mongolian book that has survived from the era of Chingghis Khaan.
Also there is historical evidence that Indo-Europeans inhabited the western an southern fringes of Greater Mongolia, or more specifically Ordos region of Inner Mongolia and Dzungaria, but there is no evidence of them from the area where the Mongols originated, which is the border region between Mongolia, Manchuria and Transbaikalia. That tomb could well have been a tomb for leaders of one clan or tribe that had submitted to Chingghis Khan, your study did not have any definitive evidence of their genetical link to the Borjigin clan. That study also preoccupies too much with the Caucasoid and Mongoloid appearances, yes such things make sense when you compare one extreme with another, like an Irishman with the Chinese, but the Central Asian population has always been somewhere in the middle, with many variations. Its true that its told that the Great Khaan had a red hair, but red hair is very recessive, so there could have been Mongols with red hair, my mother, my grand mother and my great grand mother stubbornly still claim to me that there are or were such Mongols in some villages in near history. Or the red hair couldve been just a metaphorical symbol about his martial qualities, the Chinese deity of war Guan Yu has a red skin, he was a real historical general, but he is always portrayed with red skin. Still no one knows surely Great Khaans Y-Haplogroup so all such studies are highly hypothetical. Chingghis Khaan had many leaders who had various ethnic backgrounds, they all were part of the aristocracy of the Mongol Empire, so again its very far fetched to make such conclusions based on findings from one tomb.
Or maybe you are just lacking in the minimum IQ or competence needed to pass the course, a lot of bright people in high school suddenly feel stupid in college, sort of a small fish in a big pond thing. I mean the thinking is that someone with the minimum amount of intelligence needed for the course will be able to comprehend the lesson unless the professor is literally asleep in class, and if the student does not understand the lesson it is because the student is lacking the minimum intelligence needed to clear the course. I mean there are always the couple of students in class who always have no problems passing the course, or getting summa cum laude no matter how “incompetent” the professor is in teaching, or how difficult the subject is. Plus the professor is being paid for his research, and teaching well is actually is a negative value added as far as the quality of his research output is concerned.
I have been a China bull since 1993 or 1994, when I was first reading stories about the Chinese economic growth. I noticed that the Four Asian Tigers were three quarters Chinese countries, and so it was obvious to me that the very fast growth which had happened in Japan since the war, and in the Four Tigers since the 1960s, and in China since the early 1980s, is likely to continue in China for several decades. When I mentioned in geography class that China would become a superpower and ultimately would challenge American hegemony, I was ridiculed by my unimaginative geography teacher. It gives me a certain satisfaction to be proven right when others were wrong.
I also grew to hate the American dominated system, which hates me, a gentile white male, and whose propaganda makes me and my kind the top villain of history. It naturally gives me some satisfaction to see those fools who wouldn’t listen to me and people like me circling down the drain.
I don’t like China that much, for what it’s worth. It’s certainly not a country built for me or my kind. It’s built for the… Chinese. But at least I can understand why it’s not built for me. I find it natural. I find it unnatural that the Western world, built by white men, is now working against white men. If we are to be extinguished, at least give me the satisfaction of seeing the western elites, Jews or not, who decided they could turn our civilization against its core constituents, getting destroyed by external enemies. I want them to come back begging to white men to help them against the external enemy, and I want to laugh in their face.
Actually after the war Stalin kept secret the real death tolls and casualties of the Soviet Union, for he feared that USA and Britain would think that the war strategically weakened Soviet Union and would make them bolder. The real Soviet death tolls were publicised long after the Stalins death.
So in other words your comment is utter bullshit.
Are you a Polack? Oh sorry I meant are you from Privislinsky Krai? By the way who the hell calls his country by the name of field? Fieldland or Landland, a real example of Polish or Fieldish / Fieldlander ingenuity!
There are Russian historians who say things pretty openly. I have seen a Russian TV show (it had English subtitles on YouTube) with a couple historians arguing whether what Stalin did (the pact with Hitler) was beneficial for the USSR. They agreed that it made it way easier for Hitler to start the war, but they made it clear that Stalin had a limited understanding of the situation (e.g. he didn’t know how much of a risk taker Hitler was, or how successful his military would be, etc.), and overall one of them “supported” Stalin’s decision while the other criticized it. It didn’t seem like a taboo topic at all.
“as a researcher, he has more freedom in China”
Really? As an astrophysicist? I can see as a geneticist or an IQ researcher, but as an astrophysicist?
Are Black Holes now a taboo research subject in Australia?
Sorry I meant that Solonins opinion is utter bullshit.
That is partially true when you need to grow through the ranks, from Assistant to Associate Professor, and then from Associate to full Professor. When you become full Professor and don’t want to be a department chair or something, you can ignore most of those stupid things, focus on science (which is not boring), and have two 2-3 week vacations every year to go wherever in the world you want (in my case, mostly out of the US) and have fun.
As to peer-review, I found that in 99% of the cases your paper becomes better in revision even if reviewers’ comments are stupid. Thing is, if the reviewers did not get it, most of potential readers won’t, either. So, you explain things better and by doing that make your papers more accessible to those who don’t work in your immediate field, but are simply curious.
With increasing PC BS, academic life becomes worse. However, Soviet experience comes in handy: just like in the USSR, when someone is earnestly telling you that 2×2=5 (or that BLM is “largely peaceful”, or that there is “systemic racism”, or that 2020 elections did not involve massive fraud that changed the result), you refrain from calling that person an idiot or worse, you simply keep your mouth shut.
I know, this is not an honest position, but it is expedient as the US becomes a madhouse with senile moron at the helm.
While political correctness/”wokeness” is less prominent in Eastern countries than Western countries, it’s by no means non-existent. In my experience nationalists in Eastern countries are more likely to emphasise that they’re “not racist” than nationalists in Western countries are and that their objections to non-white immigration are for cultural/religious reasons, not race/IQ related. That’s basically a form of political correctness.
I think the reason Eastern academia avoids discussion of race/IQ is because they like to maintain the perception of being totally non-racist, which is why as you said they sometimes discuss Islam, because obviously that’s religious/cultural and therefore not “racist”, but would never discuss the race question. I’ve noticed that Easterners often like to virtue signal/brag that they’re not racist in comparison to Western countries, and point to things like the BLM riots as being a result of Western racism.
I find Easterners usually wishy-washy on LGBT matters too, like often they’ll say that the LGBT “lifestyle” shouldn’t be actively promoted in the media, but at the same time they avoid actually condemning homosexuality in itself.
So I don’t think it’s quite true to say political correctness doesn’t exist in Eastern countries, I think it does it’s just not as extreme and out of control as that in Western countries.
Why should sane people condemn a mental disorder? It is enough to treat homosexuality exactly like schizophrenia. After all, both are incurable mental diseases. Media should not call it normal, the authorities should not allow schizophrenia pride parades, but we should remember that we can’t help the sufferers of either disorder.
There really needs to be a publish confirmation box. Damn it Ronny!
Did a little experiment. I don’t use faggoty shit like twitter or facebook but I wanted to see the tone of the normal world so I did what any “gamer” would do, I went on Discord (my second time ever using this illiterate application) and dug up all the old IRC groups that have transferred over. I wanted to see what ‘gamer’ opinions were on Floyd, Iran, IQ/genetics, gender dysmorphia, the things that Unz.com allows us to talk about freely…..
Jesus fucking Christ…. I’ll tell everyone here a secret: Do not hesitate to scam, fleece, or outright rob your ‘fellow man’. He is way too fucking retarded to be even considered human or to be allowed to have any usable capital in his pocket.
I now understand fully why Jewish people maintain their ‘choseness’. I can see from their perspective (being bright, but not geniuses) why they treat the rest of humanity with such contempt. I don’t even fault them anymore. Good for them. It was a personal failing on my part for not observing what they clearly deduced millennia ago.
There is such a HUGE gap in knowledge with these Discord ‘people’ (I use this term lightly here). I thought the world was a “silent majority” who understood faggots aren’t people, women are physically/emotionally/mathematically weaker, and IQ/smart fractions are a thing….. but shieeeeeet Karlin was right all along. The world really is 82 IQ average. The level of dissonance in peoples minds is perplexing.
Discord users will go on and on about Russian hacking & meddling of elections. They’ll talk about how AIPAC has too much influence in US government. Yet they won’t connect that maybe Israel and AIPAC have done more to influence US elections than any other country. I honestly thought I was talking to a bot half the time (willfully programmed to gloss over any rationality). When I tried to connect the dots I was labelled an anti-Semite and banned.
Who knows maybe I was talking to a bot…. I can probably spam an entire 3,000 word article with links on bots (including how TV networks/Hollywood use bots to up-review their shitty productions), their IP origins landing in some US base, and the technology behind bots in general (Diablo 2 bots for life BITCHES!!!!!)
When I tried to tell Discord users that black people are treated quite well in the US compared to minorities in China (Uighur anyone?) and proceed to link pictures and articles of how the PRC deals with criminal-minorities (or how fast it deports black people when they commit crime) I would get banned. Even when I try to relate how Canadian police probably would have done the same thing they did with Floyd (and Canadians have a stereotype of being overtly pussy-ish) I would get banned.
Chinese-Americans would ban me if I even mention that while China is great, it’s not so great if you have strong opinions against its government (yeah that one surprised the shit out of me, I guess Chinese-Americans don’t like to engage with the fact their home country is badass)
When I tried to highlight that the US may be a large nation but a lot of its problems aren’t anything unique I would get banned.
Shit when I corrected an individual about how the UK also owned slaves and that the US isn’t in some monopoly of having people of colour live amongst whites (“reminding them that they were always descendants of slaves” as I quote one of the subhumans) I would get banned.
I understand I can be a bit abrasive but I assure you I handled it with tact and care (ie I didn’t call people faggots or weak-titty or anything if you are curious… well not all the times anyway).
The world does need to return to a population of 500 million. I can forgive this ignorance in the 90s, where most people didn’t have access to the internet (and if they did wasted/passed their time downloading porn at a whopping average of 0.9 kb/s) but now there is literally no excuse for this illiteracy. It’s willful illiteracy.
Google/et al shadow bans and directs traffic to websites they want… you know why? Because they know most people deserve to be swindled. The internet became a dopamine drug for these plebs (as a once professional addict believe me). They just want to get on and feel good. No one wants to read how the ethnic group they hail from might have deep-rooted autism or low IQ. No one wants to look at how shitty the planet is and that the US/West are probably the BEST humanity has to offer (overall score, don’t gay out on me and give me specifics).
It was a major red-pill for me. I had thought we were legion. That we were everywhere just keeping quiet with polite smiles. But no. Gamers are supposed to be hard, tough, shit-talking trolls. They were the REAL internet before fags and normies came on and ruined it with their short-sighted cuck-like logic.
Now…. Gamers are the lowest sub-entity form of internet users……. how did this happen?
I feel lousy. I’m gonna go set 3 car tires on fire to make me feel good. Fuck this planet. DAMN IT RUSSIA JUST NUKE EVERYTHING ALREADY YOU ASSHOLES!!!!!
Karlin you were right all along. God help us all. God help us all……
One swallow does not make a spring in Russia.
It’s not the students’ responsibility, when teachers in the university can be (not just in my experience) incompetent and disorganized people.
It’s the university’s responsibility for hiring the bad teachers, and it’s country’s responsibility for not having professional universal standards in the course design and teaching.
From my university days, I still sometimes have a few nightmares, inspired by an incompetent course in combinatorics. It’s funny to still have post-traumatic stress dreams from university. People were panicking, and downloading books and lecture notes from other universities, to understand gaps in lectures, and problem sets we couldn’t understand. When we talked about it with doctorate students in maths, and they say “wtf”. And we were not even maths students.
Especially when your students are primarily from in a different discipline, and are studying an abstract field so they will have better understanding of fundamentals of certain techniques that they will use professionally. This kind of student doesn’t have the same amount of knowledge as a student directly studying the subject, and needs a careful instruction.
Sure, maybe if you are a young Isaac Newton, and can understand the topic like in a cartoon with a light bulb. Such students, would be convenient for incompetent universities. But then things like lectures and teachers, would be superfluous, and without a job. And so would be universities.
My experience was the opposite. I was below average and lazy until the last years in the school.
However, at university I had motivation and clear understanding of what I wanted, and started becoming addicted to my subject. When you have a simple goal, and can see the steps you need to follow in a simple way – it becomes easy to be well organized and have high scores.
University courses should be like climbing a reliable and well designed ladder, without steps suddenly missing (where students have been known to fall into an abyss).
I have read Russian researchers endorsing the Icebreaker theory. So what is it that, in your opinion, gets censored in Russia? What’s the unquestionable “wisdom of the ruling party?”
Icebreaker theory was never meant to be anti-Soviet. Quite the opposite. Stalin wanting to preemptively attack Hitler and save the world and Jews was a good thing. Russians prefer that image to that of Stalin being trusting and servile nincompoop in Hitler-Stalin partnership. Icebreaker theory basically does way with Molotov0-Ribbentrop. And you can’t fault Stalin and Red Army for being almost totally destroyed in 1941. They were preparing to attack and destroy Hitler so they had no time for thinking about defending. It is really interesting that Hitler fan boys and contrarians like Ron Unz, who is no fan of Stalin, love Viktor Suvorov while in fact his writing glorify Soviet Union, Stalin and KGB.
Well as I said for STEM courses in premiere colleges and universities (and this blog and the HBD sphere tends to think that all non-STEM and liberal arts fake are inherently garbage anyway) the professors are being hired for their research rather than for their teaching skills, and the better and the more time they spend teaching the worse their research output tends to get, and the top colleges that are not liberal arts colleges are primarily research universities, and the most talented students in the graduate and undergraduate level tend to want to attend universities with a solid research reputation, plus the more inherently talented students tend to do quite well no matter the teaching skills of the professor or the difficulty of the subject anyway. Ironically the better teachers are found at liberal arts institutions since they can concentrate more on the teaching, but then this blog tends to think that the liberal arts are inherently rubbish, or that verbal IQ is not as prestigious as math IQ. And most professors who are good at research basically think that teaching is a waste of time and so they just do the bare minimum not to get dismissed from their jobs.
Good question.
What kind of speech gets you in trouble in today’s Russia, in practice?
(feel free to add anything I forgot)
Tier one
1/ Criticism of business practices of local boss. Local as local, where you live. Every city/town/village have a boss, and the smaller the place is, the more dangerous is to mess with him. (if you go through the famous lists of dead Russian journalists, you will see that they were killed not by Putin, but because they messed with some local mafioso)
2/ Any criticism of Caucasians. Especially, god forbid, CHECHENS.
Tier two (expect long prison term)
3/ Support of violence against Russian government
4/ Support of ISIS or other jihadists
5/ Neo-Nazi 1488 stuff
Tier three (expect cancellation, harrasment, beating if you are at wrong place and time, even prison term is possible if you are unlucky or really persistent and work hard to earn it)
6/ Proselytizing for Mormons, Jehova’s Witnesses or any American evangelical sect
7/ Proselytizing LGBTQ values, especially to minors
8/ Advocating for separation of any constituent part of Federation
9/ Incitement of national hatred
10/ Shitting on any established religion (Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism etc.)
11/ Shitting on Russian armed forces
Tier four (expect being unpopular and possibly cancelled if you really work on it)
12/ All the political stuff we debate on this blog. No one in power really cares what some nobody on the street thinks about Putin, Ukraine, Syria and other things we are agitated about.
Exactly. Rezun paints Red Army in 1941 as the world’s greatest fighting force and Stalin as real life 666D chess player whose “clever plans” always worked.
He says that if Stalin managed to strike first, Red Army riding on super duper special secret amphibious highway tanks would cut through Europe as hot knife through butter and stopped only at the Channel.
In practice, there is no evidence that Germans had any fear of Soviet Union. The official German expected little resistance at all, they really expected to get all the way to Astrahkan before winter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-A_line
The plan was for the Red Army to the west of the line to be defeated in a quick military campaign in 1941 before the onset of winter.[5] The German Wehrmacht assumed that the majority of the Soviet military supplies and the main part of the food and population potential of the Soviet Union existed in the lands that lay to the west of the proposed A-A line.[5] If the line were reached, the Soviet Union would also be deprived of around 86% of its petroleum assets (oil territories in the Caucasus).
BTW, I do not understand why Soviet Union never made “Suvorov thesis” official.
The 1939 M-R pact and the total debacle of 1941 were two greatest embarrassments of Soviet history impossible to forget and impossible to explain.
Wouldn’t “We were ready to strike at the fascist beast and destroy it once and for all, but the beast hit first” be better official line than “The fascist beast signed a treaty with us and promised do not attack us. WAAH! We trusted them so much! WAAH! No one can expect that they would betray us, WAAH WAAH WAAH!”
I had similar experiences. In one discussion in the early 2000s (when I was ~14/15) on the usefulness of various languages with a Russian Gen X, I opined that it was Chinese, to be met with guffaws in response, the argument being that China is a Third World shithole, how they can only ever “copy” stuff, and how Japanese will remain much more important. I wasn’t even particularly IQpilled at that point, but already my observations of East Asian tiger growth, of their cultural closeness to China, and of an appreciation that population = power made it seem obvious that China would at the very least become a US-tier power and possibly substantially more powerful. I do agree that many people find it hard to envisage fundamental changes to their models of how the world works. This no doubt becomes harder with age, as those models become more fixed and rigid.
Twisting historical facts to paint yourself as the baddies, incredibly arrogant and incompetent ones at that, would be a real Big Brain move.
There’s a reason Rezun’s thesis enjoys its greatest popularity within the Butthurt belt.
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/romania-491.jpg
The Icebreaker theory was written by a Soviet defector, who was anti-Soviet. His theory was picked up by anti-Soviet people around the world. It is strongly rejected by Sovoks.
Perhaps many people interpret it the way you do, but I’d wager not many.
Yes, the theory is basically only supported by people who hate Stalin and the USSR, while it’s universally rejected by Sovoks. For the obvious reason that it makes Stalin and the USSR look bad in the eyes of the vast majority of people who are not utu.
If you want to know what exactly is disfavored by the Russian state, here is the official list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_List_of_Extremist_Materials
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%BA_%D1%8D%D0%BA%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%85_%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2
Full list here, all 5123 items.
https://minjust.gov.ru/ru/extremist-materials/
You can see it is dog’s breakfast of all things of stuff, added ad hoc by various courts and tribunals, not product of some coherent plan.
Unlike in free countries like UK, reading and possession of materials on the list is legal, only production and distribution is illegal.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/14/home-office-proposes-offence-of-possessing-terrorist-propaganda
If you are in Russia and, for example, Hitler’s Table Talk happens to be your favorite bedtime reading, you have nothing to fear as long as it stays in your bedroom 🙂
The future biographers take a note.
The genius of predictive powers were manifesting itself when Karlin was still a normal boy before he discovered the all explaining theory of IQisms.
But for his generation, his views were well-adjusted. He will be pension age, when China is pushing by the middle income trap, and it will be income competitive with the West.
On the other hand, for a child born in 2020, who will be at the important age of entering their profession in the 2040s – then Chinese languages might become such an important and useful language for a wider set of professions like English is today (beyond certain businesses which export to China).
These stereotypes we have about the development level of countries are not necessarily very maladjusted on a practical level, because although the development level of countries changes in a way which has dramatic end results for historians – our life is short relative to history, and these changes are slow relative to the usable years of our youth.
It’s difficult for us to imagine that 19th century Scandinavia was a poor region, but then our life is so short that it is not practically necessary to make those adjustments in our stereotypes of most countries’ economic level.
Events like war and oil booms, had contributed to very accelerated developments, so that someone in the 1940s would view Italy as a poor country, but by the 1980s, they would have to adjust their view to see it as a wealthy country. Similarly, to view United Arab Emirates in the 1960s, compared with today, can be very dramatic. However, even such accelerated economic miracles, are quite slow relative to a person’s working life.
-.
China is very rapidly developing country by historical standards, while Japan has been stagnating terribly for decades – but for the Generation X person, across important years of his life China will be undeveloped, while Japan will be developed.
He will likely have to adjust his stereotypes from the 2040s – but he will be an old man by that time.
Even in terms of Asian tigers like South Korea, you could have passed your working years, before you to need to adjust your stereotypes. A young graduate who was 22 years old when South Korea was middle income, will be 50 years old to be working in the wealthy South Korea, where incomes are comparable with Western countries.
https://i.imgur.com/wIuCrFu.jpg
I always believed when I was a child, that China would be the next superpower – because they said it regularly on television and in the newspapers.
It was one of the most common and accepted predictions of the epoch, along with the future ecological problems. I remember watching a documentary as a child – “Why China will be the next superpower?”
When they discussed the Beijing Olympics in the years before 2008 – it was usually discussed, in the sense, that “the Olympics will display the arrival of China as superpower in 2008”. (The impression I received was that China would be the next superpower from 2008 onwards.)
However, the perspective you lack when you are a child, is how slow these predictions are, and how short your life is relative to history. As a child, you imagine that China would be a wealthy superpower, “in a few years”, rather than “in a few decades”. And you don’t understand “in a few decades” – means that the most important and decisive years of your life will be over by then.
Being too young, you probably don’t know that in the 1980s in the USSR there was a joke that optimists study English, pessimists study Chinese, while realists study Kalashnikov automatic rifle.
What I like best is bright green Mongolia. Simple recipe to be high on academic freedom: have no academia. Only uninhabited islands can surpass that.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/China_70_years_Shareable-1.jpg
Defector is a nice name for a traitor.
Probably no way to prove it, as with reiner Tor’s anecdote, but it’s established I was making the same arguments (plus or minus) wrt China in the year that I began blogging (2018): https://www.unz.com/akarlin/a-long-wait-at-the-gate-of-delusions/
This is a bit of an exaggeration.
This is a period and an issue that I recall clearly, and there were many, many more pundits arguing that Sinotriumph predictions were wrong than there were actually making them.
In fairness to the great Stalin, I doubt anyone predicted that France would fall in a couple of weeks (in event of a German invasion), nearly everyone was expecting there a repeat of the static slugfest of WW1, so from his perspective signing Molotov-Ribbentropp was perfectly reasonable.
China’s economy will face a hard landing. The Economist
China’s economy’s dangerous period of sluggish growth. The Economist
Likelihood of a hard landing for the Chinese economy. Bank of Canada
China currency move nails hard landing risk coffin. Chicago Tribune
A hard landing in China. Wilbanks, Smith & Thomas
China Seeks a Soft Economic Landing. Westchester University
Banking crisis imperils China. New York Times
The great fall of China? The Economist
The Risk of a Hard Landing in China. Nouriel Roubini
Can China Achieve a Soft Landing? International Economy
Can China avoid a hard landing? TIME
Hard Landing In China? Forbes
China’s hard landing. China must find a way to recover. Fortune
2010: Hard landing coming in China. Nouriel Roubini
2011: Chinese Hard Landing Closer Than You Think. Business Insider
2012: Economic News from China: Hard Landing. American Interest
2013: A Hard Landing In China. Zero Hedge
Congratulations, You Got Yourself A Chinese Hard Landing. Forbes
Hard landing looms for China. The Economist
Is China’s Economy Going To Crash? National Interest
China’s Coming Financial Meltdown. The Daily Reckoning.
2019 China’s Economic Slowdown: How worried should we be? BBC
I did not question it. I believed you. I am more interested in motives. What drives a young person to want to be right about the future. This requires good ability for a delayed gratification but once when proven right in the future no peers would remember it and thus not care for it. So the reward would be consumed in solitude or one would develop a habit of record keeping to be able to remind others that ‘Look, I was right again.’ I am interested in the psychological mechanism that is behind it. A delayed gratification that in fact is solitary and thus futile indicate some escape mechanism from the present which apparently is under less of control than the imaginary future. Children develop talents which they have by liking what they are good at but by the same reasoning by avoiding what they are not that good at. Like for instance a lack of ability of being dominant with an imposing authority among peers in the present may sent a young man to seek the sense of domination into the imaginary future.
Makes sense reiner Tor, that was the only time period in the last 3 decades, that China had any economic growth 1991-1995.
Does China deplatform or arrest its own version of coronavirus skeptics or anti-mask advocates as threats to public order? I am sure despite claims of Chinese conformism, there are quite a few of them running around, how come we do not hear from them nor do they gain wider traction in society? I am sure they have their own version of libertarians with views that masking and quarantines are inimical to civil liberties, how come we never seem to hear them, nor do they get publicized in the media, I do not recall seeing anti-mask rallies, or rallies protesting against government quarantine measures, or at least I do not see them being reported widely on English language media. Do the Chinese just have less freedom to advocate for these views compared to coronavirus skeptics in countries like Germany, the UK, or the US? What will happen to people with views like Mike Whitney, or Ron Paul, or Ilana Mercer, or CJ Hopkins, or Audacious Epigone on the coronavirus if they are Chinese citizens living in China, and they try to make their views on the coronavirus gain wider traction in Chinese society, do you people think that the Chinese government will allow these types of people to broadcast their views on the coronavirus freely and allow them to gain a widespread following among the population? Or are some sorts of freedoms better than other sorts of freedoms for the people around here?
Those here who claim that China is freer at present than the US should explain why we do not see on mass media, anti-coronavirus quarantine protests, or protests against laws requiring people to wear masks, or protests that question the efficacy of masks in China like we do in Western countries, I mean Mike Desantis clearly is against mask orders, and government policy makers like Governor Noem of South Dakota is against any mandatory coronavirus restrictions at all, and even if Biden is president there is not much he can do legally against this. If the governor or Communist party chief in Hubei or Fujian were to take a position that he would defy Beijing and not impose any coronavirus restrictions, or that he is against masks mandates because he thinks that they are ineffective, or that he is against forcible quarantines because he views mass quarantines or laws forcing people to wear masks as being against the fundamental civil liberties of Chinese citizens, how long do the people here who claim that China is freer than the US or other Western countries think Beijing will not him to last in his position without silencing him? Do you people think that the Chinese government will allow people like Scott Atlas or Sunetra Gupta to just air their views that herd immunity is the proper strategy to pursue, or will Beijing forcibly silence the views of experts with similar views in order for their wrong ideas to not reach a critical mass of people and thus cause wider public harm? If people think that China is freer than the US and the West, or as free as the West, why is China not allowing coronavirus skeptics and people who do not agree with Beijing’s views on how to deal with the coronavirus pandemic to air and promote their views like they do in Western societies? Or do these civil libertarians here think that forms of freedom are less valid than others?
Imagine that the former head of the Chinese CDC, or the former president of China were to say live on CCTV or whatever is the Chinese version of Facebook or Twitter that the coronavirus pandemic is one big hoax, or that its threat is massively overblown by power-hungry central government officials and fake medical experts, what do you people think would happen to that person? How long would he be allowed to be seen in public?
If Scott Atlas, Elon Musk, or Governor Noem were Chinese with the same level of social prominence as they have right now in US society, with the same views that they have, and they try to advocate for these positions in opposition to Beijing’s anti-coronavirus measures, what is the possibility that they would not be in jail right now? I mean if China were as free as the US, then they would face no legal restrictions on their freedom of speech right? And no government official in Chinese would deplatform them or put them in jail for their views and activities right? What about Ron Unz, he is clearly still a free man, if he were Chinese, and he had the same views of the Chinese government that he has of the US government, would he not be stuck in a remote labor camp doing 100 years or hard labor, or at the very least placed under solitary house arrest with zero communication with the outside world?
Come on, try saying that the Chinese Communist Party needs to be destroyed in the middle of Tiananmen square, with a live feed from CCTV and the Chinese version of Facebook or Youtube, like how the US government needs to be destroyed right in front of Capitol Hill when Obama or Biden is president, and see what happens to you in China if you were Chinese.
Quintessential utu/AaronB post.
But if navel-gazing and prognosticating about politics is a habit of powerless people, that isn’t saying a lot. How many people can say they have any influence, however miniscule, over even local council affairs?
I do not know about China but in Taiwan some people were fined and arrested for spreading rumors about Covid-19. This was a right thing to do when the success of your strategy depends on almost 100% cooperation and compliance. Taiwan’s goal was to quash the epidemic from the day one. They began monitoring flights from Wuhan on Dec. 31, 2019, the same day China communicated to WHO thats something is happening. So far they succeeded: 698 cases and 7 deaths.
“Do you people think that the Chinese government will allow people like Scott Atlas or Sunetra Gupta to just air their views that herd immunity” – Don’t be ridicules. When Gupta released her paper around March 20 China was almost done with Wuhan outbreak having less than 10 deaths daily. Gupta paper is garbage. She did what she did because she was asked by a PR firm with ties to MoD and SAGE. It was the last ditch attempt to stop the lockdowns. She destroyed her reputation as a scientist but her willingness and flexibility that she demonstrated may open doors to another career.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/trumps-vaccine-moderna/#comment-4285329
Being able to be right about the future is an useful trait if one wishes to eventually live into the future.
My point was merely that it appeared that the discussion was pretty free, and neither the facts nor their interpretations were particularly distorted.
Eye-opening, once more. That tops the feminist glaciology example Steven Pinker cites in Enlightenment Now!.
PS
I think this stuff will eventually peter out and those featuring it know will then say that it was some kind of rites de passage stuff to get minorities elevated…
https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2015/10/12/saupload_Gordon_Chang-Benjamin_Chasteen9372-20150930.jpg
Okay, so the Chinese have less freedom to be dumb. Anti-mask people were forced to wear masks, and now they are free to enjoy life with neither masks nor an epidemic.
The difference is that the Chinese government is reasonably successful in its stated goal of making life better for the Chinese people. While the American government is pretty unsuccessful in serving the interests of the American people. So the situation is not entirely symmetrical, because a reasonable person would be way less likely to hold the same bad opinions about the Chinese government as about the American government.
This post was about academic freedom. So, basically, how likely it is for a scientific research to be repressed and the scientist face negative consequences. It didn’t concern itself about the freedom of lunatics to be lunatic.
I would certainly be happy to accept a restricted right to criticize the government in exchange for said government giving me way fewer reasons to criticize it.
Basically, the taboos in the West are antithetical to common sense and reason. While the Chinese taboos are merely about the Party clinging to power. Thinking that CCP rule is good for China is easy to believe for anyone familiar with the situation. Thinking that blacks are just as intelligent as and not any more violent than whites is a sign of being a drooling idiot.
If you really wanted to use an authoritarian system to handle this better you could just use it to suppress any knowledge of the virus and let nature run its course without media panic. We could have all just enjoyed life and some people (including me) would have had an extra flu this year without ever knowing that we had some super special pandemic virus.
The recent rise in rankings of Chinese and other Asian universities appears to be driven by top down pressure to publish at any cost.
How much of this research is quality material remains to be seen.
I for one wouldn’t trust a system that ranks the 2 universities of tiny Singapore in the top 10 institutions worldwide.
The title of the below table says it all.
https://www.economist.com/img/b/1000/2401/90/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20181117_CNC757_0.png
You might be unhappy with your Western life, but selecting the Chinese government as the rosy alternative to contrast with, is difficult for me to follow.
US government has achieved some bad things for its population, like promotion of high fructose corn syrup (contributing to an obesity crisis), refusing still to ban asbestos, investing in the military instead of infrastructure, and not developing universal healthcare.
But it does not seem to match the Chinese government, which instituted one child policy, prevented 400 millions births, resulted in a hundred million missing girls, so that nowadays there are tens of millions of excess Chinese young men to Chinese women at marriageable age.
Aside from that disastrous attempt at demographic engineering, there are other ways that China’s government policies had damaged their population. For example. until last decade, Chinese government prioritized coal burning, with still today 66% of electricity produced from coal, which often near cities, resulting in millions of deaths from air pollution.
China also relocate millions of people from their homes, for projects like Three Gorges Dam. There is not evidence of a prioritization of the ordinary people.
China’s government also is admirable example to follow, for its religious policy, particularly in relation to Islam, and strategy to assimilate Uyghurs and prevent terrorism. It could be a role model for the relation to Muslim terrorism in the 21st century.
Economic policy China is probably a mix of good and bad, but there’s obviously a lot of good ideas there (especially in attracting foreign investment).
However, from the Chinese taxpayer’s point of view in external policy, the government already seem to be copying America and the Soviet Union, in terms of wasting money on third world countries. China is especially wasting money in Africa.
Ruling elite of China, are also enriching themselves, and then moving their money through children into countries like Canada, which is probably not a good trend for the ordinary peoples’ point of view. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZs2i3Bpxx4.)
About coal plants, maybe China has no choice because they were a cheap source of power for what was a middle-income country? China did overbuild on infrastructure, particularly on expressways and high-speed rail, but as for its strategy of suppressing household wealth and consumption in favor of investments, it is just following what Taiwan, Korea, and Japan did.
Lack of the daily humiliation of globohomo can be amazingly pleasant. Perhaps not for someone like you, but it can be for others.
Libertarianism is pretty much an exclusively American phenomenon. Outside the US libertarians are a tiny fringe group.
I know that despite strong measures (unheard of during any other flu season) hospitals are working at close to full capacity in many countries. While obviously COVID-19 is not the Great Pestilence, it’s certainly way worse than the flu. For example I know people who had only mild symptoms (basically just the flu or even milder), who couldn’t return to their normal workout regimen after over a month (when tried, they had very strong muscle pain and one of them had to spend a day in bed despite not finishing the workout), and then there are people hospitalized, like the mom of a friend spent a week in coma in intensive care. She is old (70), but absolutely healthy (just returned from skiing in Austria in March when she fell ill), and I have never heard of any healthy person capable of skiing on a red slope ever being hospitalized with the flu, so N=1 certainly supports a much higher hospitalization rate. Of course we can also see the full hospitals with our naked eyes, doctor friends and acquaintances telling me the same, even if I didn’t believe the statistics, which also tell the story of an illness vastly worse than the flu. (Fortunately still not super deadly, especially not for healthy people like me.)
You might perhaps argue that doctors are useless and thus the collapse of the healthcare system wouldn’t matter, but saying that it’s just the flu is just silly.
Being forced to celebrate the (perhaps bogus) achievements of a strongman (like Xi Jinping) is unpleasant, but at least it’s something I can understand why he wants me to do that. It’s not a total insanity like celebrating diversity and atoning for the guilt of being white in the name of racial equality. And because it’s not nearly as insane, it’s also not nearly as humiliating.
reiner Tor has already touched on this issue but…
If the predictions of demographic decline are accurate, by the end of this century various Western governments will have achieved the feat of making what had been the majority ethnic group in their country (more than 90% of the population in 2000) relatively small ethnic small minorities (under 20% by 2100). The Chinese government does not seem to be on course to do this with its own population, despite other serious mistakes it has made.
Rather than looking at demographic change and considering what kind of factors might be behind it, you see different Western governments introducing policies to hasten or speed up the process and shut down any discussion of it; basically encouraging the ageing white ethnic majorities of these countries to internalise black nationalism and identities based on racial guilt and their own racial inferiority.
This tendency is being actively embraced by educated, affluent younger white people for some reason (the future governing elites of these countries). Such weird stuff is not happening in China, which makes China seem normal at the moment.
Wow, are you referring to the USA? In no other Western country are whites predicted to be less than 20% of their country’s total by 2100.
In the USA, White people weren’t 90% of the population in the year 2000, and it’s unclear if they were ever more than 90% of this country. Here, just look at the results of the 1980 census. Non-Hispanic white people were just 79.57% of the USA in 1980.
https://www.censusscope.org/us/chart_race.html
Even in the 1950 census, whites were just less than 90%, and that was with a lot of immigration from Europe in the early 20th century. Note that the white population still dropped from 89% to 79% from 1950-1980 — despite all that European immigration and the so-called “baby boom” — which was a really modest increase in fertility from a below-replacement level.
The reason white people have struggled to constitute 90% of this country’s population has nothing to do with government policy, and everything to do with white women. White women are defective, they never reproduce, their wombs are like a decripet, spider filled basement in to which things go but never return. This is due entirely to a cultural deficiency among white Americans, and has nothing to do with the government, which wants white women to breed, nd has tried, and failed, to get them to do so.
(Kind of like how America’s alcohol problem is due to a white cultural defect. Look how many people on this website turned to their favorite brand of scotch when it sunk in that Donald Froomp was losing. No other race has this kind of cultural defect, where it is publicly acceptable to announce that you are going to actively attempt to distort your perception of reality by consuming a toxic waste product.)
AGAIN, this white population decline thing is nothing new. It has nothing to do with a conspiracy or a governmemt policy. White women don’t breed enough and haven’t for over 100 years. They weren’t breeding in the 1920s and they aren’t breeding today.
Anyway, China has this problem within China as well, and is anything but normal. The Chinese are in fact the ones who actively aborted their people with the 1 child policy, and shipped millions of infants overseas to be adopted, in the effort to deliberately quell population growth; so you are probably a coping CCP troll. And now, even despite lifting the 1 child policy, their fertility rate is still below replacement and falling. No developed country has ever been able to climb back above replacement despite countless millions spent in research and incentives programs. And there’s evidence that Chinese fertility is even worse than the statistics let on.
The same exact thing applies to Europe. Euro countries have begged their women to reproduce but they staunchly refuse, despite being offered lucrative incentives.
A word to all paranoid schizophrenics on the right out there: it’s never the Jews, the globohomo, the WASPs, the cabal, the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, or the illuminati. It’s the person next door; it’s you.
China is no different then us in having a portion of modern history being unquestionable. No university will ever publish anything like the “Leutcher report” or “Rudolf report” on the homicidal gas chambers. It will however publish things like “the handbook of psychoanalytic holocaust studies” (published by Routledge 2019).
The arc of communism seems to become less repressive as time goes by, while the arc of Western liberalism seems to become more repressive.
In England, a boy was recently arrested for dropping off leaflets about demographic trends at people’s homes, in a predominantly white area. He was arrested at school in order to embarrass him and brought to a distant police station. They used two police cars. And they also searched his room and took his hard drives. He was later released, though his property is still being kept. But, I’m sure it was quite an unpleasant experience – in the same situation, I probably would have lost my cool.
The inevitable collapse of China is the ultimate boomer fantasy. They need it to be true because China’s rise is a repudiation of everything they have believed all of their lives.
Our public health care system collapsed because of the lockdowns. I’m going to a private dentist right now because public dental care in Helsinki basically ceased to exist half a year ago. It was already a system where you had to queue for ages and the extra pause of the spring lockdowns plus making the staff enforce extra steps with masks, sanitizers etc just stretched the queues to the point where they stopped giving appointments.
At the private dentist I of course don’t have to worry at all about masks or any of the other stuff. The same is true of all health care, really: private works because they could opt out of most of the lockdown and hyper-hygiene madness, public crashed not because they would have been overwhelmed by corona cases but because the lockdown absolutely wrecked everything.
I had corona back in the spring and I went to a hospital that was entirely emptied of everything else and dedicated to corona only. An empty building with a full staff doing essentially nothing except waiting because there were 3 patients. It was just a flu but I had weird after effects for weeks – though the doc suspected that I might have caused the extra symptoms myself through bad diet while self isolating (I have problems with acid reflux).
Well it is not unpleasant for me to live in the North Western Europe, in the sense I am not given daily humiliation, and in most areas I have privileged life, and surrounded by beautiful architecture and polite people. (I only suffer from some difficulties in terms of paperwork and bureaucracy, not driving automobile, etc)
My city has rainbow flags on houses in the term time, but I am not oppressed by this – LGBT is the virtue-signaling fashion of the nerdy local students, who are polite, bourgeois, cultured, people, and good neighbours to live near.
On the other hand, if I was in China, I am sure I would have “relative humiliation” (in comparison to Western Europe) in terms of having to breath worse air, more pollution, living in small anthills (average living space of Chinese person is 40 metres square, while in Western Europe it is 80-90 metres square), less salary, lower sanitation quality, potentially difficult government, complex language, strange taboos, dystopian architecture, etc.
Perhaps it is possible that Chinese women would “cargo cult” me as a white man (although it is not my taste for women)? But probably I would feel a little self-conscious as an racial minority in any country, even though China is not the most intolerant country for foreigners. You are Chinese so for you this racial feeling would be a reverse situation, as you are living as a racial minority if you live in the West, but in China you would feel at home in terms of yoru appearance.
Overall, there are few industrializing (or industrialized) countries which seem less attractive to me to live in than China, unless for people who have a particular passion or interest for Chinese culture and history. But I would love to visit China as a tourist sometime this decade, and be proved wrong at least on a tourist level.
Of course, the American government should have imposed a stricter selective immigration filter (but this is not only a problem in America – but rather almost all developed countries have the same story. I.e. in Russia there is a similar story with the borders onto the third-world neighbours).
But the fact half the world is trying to flood into America, is because of their high salaries – America is a victim of their own economic success and desirability as a destination for immigrants.
If/when China becomes developed later this century, then half the world will start trying to flood into China. (It’s not clear if they will have a strict immigration policy or not when this immigration flood begins).
However, I don’t think US government’s lack of sufficiently strong immigration policy to prevent the mass flooding of immigrants, can be compared with the Chinese government forcing a one-child policy, that has resulted in now having an excess of 30 million men to women at marriageable ages.
You can judge this by international comparison. US government is not unique in insufficiently strict immigration policy (it’s a common situation in wealthy countries, especially as importing cheap labour is good for certain businesses), while China’s government has been internationally unique in the one-child policy.
Like China, India also has a problem of tens of millions of excess males to females, but in India this problem was not directly triggered by the government, while in China the radical government policy was the trigger that combined with traditional culture to produce this excess of men.
While many of your inferences are incorrect, its more important to note that you should avoid self-projecting yourself on others. That comes off as autistic.
The “rainbow flags” are a surface expression of a much more significant and invasion form of logic that does in fact, invade one’s life daily. While it doesn’t bother you for any variety of reason(possibly because you’re not even looking for a family and more or less fit the definition of a liberal), this is hardly true of many others.
I don’t think UK guarantees much of unlimited “freedom of speech”. It’s not like America – the English concept of free speech is much more limited.
Although England seems to have quite decentralized authority, that doesn’t mean there is some special freedom. If you act like there is some unlimited “free speech” in countries like England, then you deserve a Darwin Award.
Unlike in the USA, UK seems quite a self-policing society though – for example, the rate of imprisonment is more like a typical European level, than the American level.
And you are writing in an angry way again, because I criticized China unfairly, and you are proud about China, despite or partly because of being a Chinese immigrant who doesn’t live in their country.
As you are Chinese, it would be more useful if you could write some information about your country. For example, are the claims of this writer accurate? (I know the newspaper is a biased source which is usually critical of the authorities)
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3047798/how-chinese-officials-inflated-nations-birth-rate-and-population
Wow, that is pretty dark. Those are for people who die by their own stupidity.
Less blacks – it really is that simple.
It has been becoming perceptibly more narrow in recent years, probably following 2010. IIRC at some point after 2000 the Labour government started to introduce a more expansive concept of hate speech and hate incidents, this was beefed up in the wake of the Iraq War to deal with the Islamism in the British Muslim communities, then expanded to include the native British far-right groups (who were becoming more active partly because of the Islamist terrorism and grooming gangs).
But the last few years, with the emergence of wokeness and the political climate following the Brexit vote, it has narrowed again. There was an official push for police forces to devote more time to investigating and suppressing hate speech and cataloguing hate incidents and cancel culture began to emerge within the media and academia. Around about this time the number of police investigations into problematic speech in the UK started to significantly exceed the number in, say, the Russian Federation, apparently by a factor of 10.
Finally, after George Floyd and the BLM rioting earlier this year, you have to be relatively careful what you say in work places and in public, and what you write on social media if it is connected to your real name, depending on who your employer is.
The interesting thing is that it seems that, outside of some politically engaged leftist people, some ethnic minorities and some middle class progressive types, this is no longer emerging organically as social taboos around certain kinds of opinions (something that always existed) but is being enforced by big institutions, employers and the government.
Your comments about China actually matter very little to me; my emotional state is significantly unimpacted by random online comments but the points made were still valuable in regards to projection. My fondness of China and especially the Party is not that much; my hate of globohomo which has very personally affected me is quite encompassing.
I think the points raised in the article are possible, but it should be noted that the author is specifically building his career on this projection(his book is literally called Big Country with an Empty Nest), so he has every reason to argue for it. Some of his assumptions are questionable – like increase in birth necessarily should have proportionate increase in complications(not necessarily, if there’s decrease in pollution or adverse inputs), and that there is “reduced willingness to raise children” which he provides no data for(really quite skeptical of the comparison to Taiwan in particular). Other points, such as discrepancies in official numbers, are more valid concerns.
That seems to be the case. Although I’m not sure it’s actually anything to do with communism. I think it’s in the nature of authoritarianism to trend towards tolerance while it’s in the nature of democracy to trend towards totalitarianism.
Democracy means that everybody’s business is everybody else’s business.
Finland did and is doing very well.
This claim in the article seems a little implausible at the first look:
^Is it really possible to miscount for 121 million people?
^ This inference in the article also sounds questionable. The countries are at different stages of development.
The aging population can be bad for the future dependency ratio of the country, but in the intermediate time it could make it easier to manage for the authorities.
On the other hand, the unintentional consequence of the excess of males to females at marriageable could be possibly an unfavourable wind for political stability.
No, the government wants to increase children – that’s pretty well known and something they hype on quite a bit as of late. What they want and what the population does is very different especially with the ever increasing cost of child care due to status inflation. Crowding and urbanization does not promote fertility rate.
Political stability isn’t not particularly threatened by gender ratio as it is by all of the collective issues of an aging population with decreasing percentage in the working population. Its unlikely to be a major challenge at the moment as the CCP has long eradicated any rivals.
It’s all bogus. We’ve had protests, mostly by tourist industry, restaurant owners and so on who’ve been destroyed by the overreaction. You just never hear of them in government media or the big corporate media because Finland is a tightly controlled country and too small to be of interest to foreign reporters. We have to use VK and other alternative ways to get the word out on anything.
All countries are “doing well” compared to the projections of a black plague like die-off that we were supposedly going to get. Most of my boomer relatives who have to rely only on Finnish media still believe that hundreds of thousands of people are going to die in Sweden and millions are going to die in Russia (“Putin believes that the virus is a hoax and is letting Russia die” is one of the big propaganda narratives here).
The only thing that Finland has done well is back out from lockdown fairly early on and that’s entirely due to the Swedish example. Northern European governments observed and correctly concluded that only the very old and very sick need special protection so what we now really have is only hygiene theater with recommended but not obligatory masks etc. Of course there’s less opposition to the measures now when they’re considerably more Sweden-like and non-authoritarian than the insane German-like totalitarian mess that we had in early spring.
I think with communism, the revolution grinds to a halt, after a while. Democracy is endless revolution.
Yes, very well put.
I feel I should inform you, Mr. Payne, that I am considering filing suit against you for your nonconsensual reading of my mind.
While I am not yet 40, like you I have spent my adult years thinking “if only we can reach enough people, if only we found the right combo of charisma and intellect, if we only had the right medium, etc.” Forget about it, the soulless mind of the contemporary NPC is a dark abyss that no light can reach.
I do have to say though, it seems to me like the typical person has gotten qualitatively stupider in the last few years. I have been wondering what can possibly be going on, as people have never in my life struck me as this stupid! Especially since Trump took office, I have heard the dumbest things come out of the mouths of supposed intellectuals, heard successful professionals express the most illogical and counterintuitive positions, everyday people consent to the most authoritarian measures without questioning any of it! (These are personal life observations.)
The short time frame of the mental decline would seem to argue to me against physiological explanations such has changes in brain structure, etc. (Although the boomers have gotten older and I see this decline in my parents.) So what gives? Of course, I do not have a clear answer, but I am in the mood to speculate…
I think the downward trends in education, the decline in jobs involved in making things, and the evisceration of the family over the course of several decades have created fertile ground for the present state of mass confusion.
Having taught econ at a college for some years during the Obama years, I can say that the average college student in America has left high school with severe deficits in basic math, reading and writing skills. The “professionals” in education studies have often argued against these basics and have emphasized the importance of “critical thinking skills.” The problem with this line is that the basics are the tools by which we can think critically. For example, without quantitative reasoning skills, one cannot coherently construct a case against the scamdemic numbers and thus one is inclined to “just trust the SCIENCE!” Without a decent vocab, it is difficult for people to formulate thoughts, even when they have a vague feeling that things are not right.
In the era before mass schooling, many people went into the trades at a relatively young age. Even if they didn’t have a lot of formal knowledge, I think that the work of making things helps to tether people to reality. In recent years I have noticed that construction workers and mechanics seem to have better critical thinking skills/common sense than “educated” types. Perhaps because they can’t make things work or stay up with slogans and have neither the time nor energy for bullshit.
The collapse of the family and its replacement with single mothers and fleeting friendships has disrupted the channels by which traditions and the lessons of the past are passed on.
The above factors make the average person very vulnerable during periods of economic and political turmoil. Now, if during the rough times, the elite were delivering coherent messages, explaining things in logical terms, etc. the average person wouldn’t seem so dumb, because even without their own skills, they could just go along with the word of an honest intellectual class.
Sadly, however, we do not have an honest intellectual class, we have Jews and their sycophants. What I have been seeing these last few years seems to be a concerted effort by them to sow as much confusion (Discord?), distrust, and fog into the national and international discourse as possible. Society seems to have become a mass asylum. Things people have known to be true since the dawn of man (chicks don’t have dicks) are heresy!
I can say that I am smart (IQ about 130), have a decent and rigorous education, am well-read, have a good nose for bullshit, and even I am confused about the end game of these policies. I can only imagine what it is like for others.
But Scott Atlas is right: you get what you accept. At the end, for all the bashing of Jews I am capable of, they would be nothing without the good goyim doing the grunt work for them. I dealt with a cancel culture experience some years ago trying to wake up these goyim (I thought I was a good goy for not mentioning “Jews” but only the goyim were none the wiser.) At the end of the day, the Jews did what they wanted and no goy backed me up. No wonder the Jews have so much contempt for us, most of us deserve it.
The problem for me is that (((they))) truly live by “tob shebbe goyim harog.” The best goy = bad goy. At this point, do I even have a side? May they both get what they have coming! Pass the popcorn!
Can you hear yourself? No, because your psychosis became you. I shot of prolixin may help.
Hmm, seems like some of the unz writers are correct. China just needs to protect it self n wait for the west to kill it self.
China needs to keep developing and becoming less dependent on its exports to the Empire and its sidekicks. However, to be a success it needs to avoid traps that are destroying Western civilization: wokenism and “liberalism” in all forms. Simple rule of thumb is, if the US or Soros tell you to do something, do the opposite. When the US and sorosoids badmouth you, that’s a sign that you are on the right track. If they praise you, correct your ways, as that’s a sure sign that you made a horrible mistake somewhere.
Ha. I had the exact same thought when I replied to a retarded zionist troll anon. Since he was against the invasion of taiwan, I was like china should invade as soon as it’s possible precisely because he was against it.