2rafa
4d ago
Half of congress in the 80s had literally fought Japan in the Second World War, anti-Japanese hostility was far from purely economic.
China was at best a secondary antagonist in the Cold War (and no longer after 1972). Korea is little remembered, before the memory of almost all living Americans and the present state of North Korea means that most people have no idea of how involved the PLA was. So the last ‘real war’ that was USA vs China was what, the Boxer Rebellion?
It could change if Xi panics and decides to abandon the slow game for Taiwan (which would be surprising) by staging the most audacious possible invasion involving a first strike at American bases, but even in the event of a ground invasion (unlikely) I consider that relatively unlikely.
Some grand global game of competition in which AMERICA NUMBA ONE just doesn’t really exist in the minds of most Americans in the way it does for the Chinese or even for, say, the French. American identity is tied to more amorphous things that don’t really have anything to do with global affairs like the Wild West and country music. A Dane or Swiss will gladly lecture you on why Denmark or Switzerland is the best country on earth (both would be mostly correct). Americans don’t really do that except in a very tongue in cheek Team America World Police way and even that is mostly limited to the middle class.
Italians abroad will talk about Ferrari and Columbus and pasta. Americans abroad don’t really lecture anyone about Google and Microsoft and Chevron. It’s not shame in the German way, but it’s not really pride either; global economic and cultural hegemony just isn’t central to American self-conception.
2rafa
4d ago
The problem with meritocracy is that it’s pointless.
If you want meritocracy, just administer a single IQ test to every child at 10 years old and distribute every accolade and job based upon that and whatever protected characteristics you want to prioritize (‘Other Backward Castes’, ‘Pardo’, ‘gender diversity’, ‘URM’, ‘BAME’, whatever) and you will be more efficient than the entire wretched body of meritocracy - not just in America - but in even more degenerate systems like those of South Korea, India and elsewhere.
The whole making kids study for 7 hours after school to pass bullshit tests isn’t meritocracy, it isn’t education, it doesn’t make for a successful society. It’s pure ideology. It doesn’t serve the objective of allocating power, resources or status in any way, since along whatever lines you want, you can do it more efficiently in another way.
Well, except one line.
Imagine your children are second or third generation immigrants. You are wealthy. Pure meritocracy will see your children (due to IQ reversion to mean) likely outcompeted by others - either immigrants or natives. Pure status hierarchy, legacy, families with centuries of history and deep social ties to those who run the august intellectual bodies that are the leading universities will outcompete you. Looks and charisma will also largely favor the beautiful, tall, etc, which probably isn’t your kids.
So what is one to do?
Build a ridiculous status system that specifically prioritizes an absurd and unreasonable level of parental investment. Monetarily yes, but also in terms of time, your children’s and yours. Make the kids suffer, so that parents from nicer cultures that care more about kids choose not to push them through the ridiculous pantomime. Poor families won’t have the knowledge, time or money to compete with you. Very rich ones won’t care to. And the future is yours.
One of the unique realities of both British and American imperialism is that Empire was and is not central to the national identity of either people.
British Imperial identity was, as many historians have relatively well argued, invented wholesale in the last thirty years of Empire. In fact, the greatest and only real grand celebrations of Empire occurred between 1918 and the Second World War, when Britain’s relative global power had been in decline for more than fifty years. At the true height of Empire in the mid-19th century, identity was more English than Imperial, and international competition was more focused on the French than anyone else (even as the opium wars raged, as the scramble for Africa slowly began, as British money surged into South and Central America, as settlement in Australia grew rapidly etc etc etc). Pomp and ceremony in the colonies, even India, was very limited until the 1920s.
Similarly, in America, most American identity has nothing to do with America’s global power or prestige. America is much larger and more geographically diverse than England, unlike that country it doesn’t really even need to trade with its regional peers. Unlike those final days of the British Empire, most American media doesn’t really reference American imperialism. Most stories are set solely domestically, while even most international ones treat the rest of the world the way a pre-imperial American might have a century and a half ago, with a certain distance, a foreignness from petty domestic conflict (see Indiana Jones versus James Bond, for example). Most Americans have no major opinions on foreign policy.
America is often called a reluctant hegemon. I disagree, it’s an incidental one. The empire is not important to the American psyche, to American identity. I won’t comment on the Russian or Soviet empires, but I get the feeling they may have meant more to their inhabitants, at least some of them, than the American Empire does. In part, this is reflected in the fact that even most Americans consider the wars in which America participates done either for moral reasons or self-interested ones. Economists say that American hegemony makes the world safe for profitable American companies, but most of these still make the vast majority of their revenue in-country. I think, on balance, this is like an Englishman in 1910 extolling the virtuous export of Britannic Civilisation, namely a very nice just-so story to explain how things came to be so.
This is true even for more politically aware, heterodox thinkers. People will say America goes to war for powerful banana companies, for oil, for revenge, because of the Jews, because of some leader’s personal grudge. An earnest interest in world domination and American political hegemony is considered laughable, even if it’s mentioned in a PNAC leaflet everybody treats it as a ruse. Nobody believes in it. “America’s mission is to export liberal democracy to the world”. No, I don’t think even Hillary Clinton believes that.
But America can cope spiritually with the collapse of its global power better than most other historical empires for one reason. Because an invasion of the homeland is so unlikely, and because the domestic market is so large, and because they have so many resources, Americans can simply stop caring about the outside world if the news gets worse.
It’s the rest of the world that will be less lucky, and which will experience radically more upheaval. The Chinese will need to solidify their offer for new vassal nations though, because currently it isn’t particularly compelling, and they have a quality around them that seems to make a lot of enemies, which means their hegemony might be resisted more than the present arrangement.
2rafa
4d ago
Software is special because the previous wave of applicants didn’t just need the H1B, they also needed whatever local cartel was required. The bar and going to law school in America and the fact the law is a verbal heavy field strongly preference native speakers raised in the US. The AMA locks foreign doctors out of any desirable residency places (which it mandates for almost all foreign doctors). Engineering has various local licensing requirements, and a lot of federal stuff requires you to be a citizen anyway. Meanwhile, sales, consulting, finance and a lot of other professional service jobs have a strong sales/relationship component which again makes it harder for Indians and Chinese applying from overseas.
Software engineering was unique in that it didn’t really require social skills, doesn’t usually require client interaction, paid well enough to get the visa, didn’t have a domestic licensing cartel and could be taught as a technical skill in foreign universities and schools.
2rafa
4d ago
Amusingly, this will only make it easier for smart Indians to import their countrymen. It’s just that instead of Infosys it will be some motel owner in Iowa who figures out that there’s a local shortage of massage therapists or health administrators or insurance salesmen or machinery operators or vegetable traders or whatever is both in demand and locally deemed hard to hire for and sets up a business that brings over people who did a bullshit 3 month fake degree in whatever it is from an amendable university in his hometown.
The only thing that would really fix the program (other than scrapping it) is to limit no more than 10% of visas to a single country.
2rafa
4d ago
Quite a sweet story, Love Actually indeed (it’s interesting that there isn’t a comma in the actual movie, maybe because both “love, actually, is all around us” and “love actually is all around us” are grammatically correct? I’m no English lecturer).
Anybody is capable of cheating in the right circumstances, and so the first duty of the maritally faithful is to avoid those situations. But just like the propensity to get drunk various from person to person, with people who can have have four or five drinks and cut themselves off without a second thought and people who cannot have a sip of alcohol without a one hundred percent chance of blacking out, propensity to cheat varies too, especially in middle ground situations that are neither “my spouse is the only non-geriatric adult of the opposite sex I interact with in any real capacity, ever” nor “I regularly get drunk and do MDMA with a group of hot beautiful people I’m attracted to who all want to have sex with me”.
Scamming and stealing is definitely fun in and of itself for a lot of people. It’s why some bored housewives with money shoplift trivial value merchandise they can easily afford is a thing. Every few years here in England there is a story about some wealthy City banker using fake (or no) tickets on a commuter train and getting caught for years of fare evasion. Sure, even for the moderately wealthy that’s thousands of dollars, but it’s not about the money, it’s about the thrill. On Extreme Couponing many of the participants had money and treated it as a hobby.
However, the reason why the Somalis in Minnesota are stealing billions from the government instead of playing Fortnite isn’t just because they want to. It’s because they can, and the system isn’t really set up to catch them. They exist outside the complex web of North Western European social interaction which exists everywhere above the lowest dregs of that region’s indigenous underclass (Marius Hoiby types), and in which you would probably face some social shame or tut-tutting for ripping the government off for billions (interestingly I think this instinct is less developed in England, where the native working class have a reputation for cheating the state, both at the bottom on welfare (“benefits”) and at the top (see Michelle Mone’s PPE case)).
Northwestern Europe, especially the nordics, and so especially Minnesota, were just uniquely high trust. Singapore is also a very rich, safe and peaceful country with high quality of life, but because the state expects that whatever incentives they offer will be ruthlessly exploited by the very intelligent and cunning populace this is factored into planning. If someone is making tens of millions in China by exploiting a government program then someone in the government is corruptly in on it and local CCP management on a regional / sector level is either getting paid to look away or is being cut in. In Minnesota, I doubt there are any Jorgensens or Lunds who have made a billion off of this scam, they just let it happen.
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