ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
17d ago
Without fixing its manufacturing base, the US will lose any conflict with China that isn't decided in the first few days regardless of whether we're talking about 2022 or 2025 level weapon stockpiles. The fact that running out of 155 mm shells, drones, and missiles in trying to supply Ukraine has led to military and civilian leaders realizing this is a problem and working to solve it is the best thing that could have happened for American military preparedness short of not having outsourced all of those industries in the first place, even if there is a temporary shortage as a result.
ResoluteRaven
17d ago
Ukrainians are by any measure I can think of more different from Russians than Taiwanese are from Chinese or South Koreans from North Koreans. Kiev began diverging from Moscow at the time of the Mongol invasions in the 13th century.
ResoluteRaven
17d ago
Also there's been a pretty large divergence between Malaysian Chinese (Largely spun off of southern Hokkien/Teochew/Cantonese/Hakka speakers who have remained in touch with mainland trends via the cultural sinosphere) and Mainland-Chinese, even when speaking Mandarin.
I wouldn't say that the language differences between Malaysia and the Mainland are that great, certainly not compared to the variation within China itself. You could find plenty of grandmother-granddaughter pairs from Fujian (and more from Taiwan, while we're at it) that would sound about the same, as their ancestors all spoke Hokkien. Perhaps the youngest and most highly educated generation of Mainlanders are converging on a Beijing accent regardless of hometown, but such a change has only just begun and will take decades or perhaps centuries to complete.
ResoluteRaven
17d ago
If being highly literate is the standard for knowing a language, then the vast majority of people in the world do not even know their native language. This is not to mention cases where someone's mother tongue lacks a literary tradition or even a writing system. It seems to me that in practice most people equate "speaking a language" with something like a B1 level on the CEFR, though your typical Anglophone would probably start saying they speak Spanish or French at an even lower level than that.
I do agree that most people underestimate how hard it is to get from that basic level to high literacy e.g. it would probably be easier for me to learn half a dozen (related) languages to B1 than to get to C2 in my heritage language despite the enormous head start of having literally spoken it at home my entire life. At the end of the day though, language is a tool, and what matters is if it serves its purpose i.e. if you can sing lullabies to your children in your mother tongue, haggle at the market in your local trade language, and read a book in the literary language of your imperial overlords, then you can have a fine life without bothering to "fully learn" any of them.
ResoluteRaven
29d ago
Ask any Chinese nationalist and you will hear all kinds of animosity towards Europe, particularly Britain and France but also the rest of the Eight-Nation Alliance. Right now it's a bit of a "for you it was the worst day of your life but for me it was Tuesday" sort of situation, but when the power balance is inverted it matters quite a bit what their feelings on the subject are.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
The cuts to science funding seem likely to do major damage to American R&D, cause a mass exodus of skilled workers to Europe, and give China the opportunity to get even farther ahead of us in key fields such as battery development. As an attack on the woke elements of the Academy they seem both disproportionate and poorly targeted, and as an attempt to burn it all to the ground they are clearly insufficient. I'd like to see someone at least propose a new Bell Labs-type enterprise as a replacement for the scientific infrastructure that they're trying to dismantle, if that's the way we're going.
In other news, Elon promised to start a new political party and to primary a bunch of Republican congresscritters if the bill passed. That should be entertaining to watch if he doesn't chicken out.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Maybe it doesn't matter, that in the end us dysgenic neurotics will end up being weeded out of the gene pool, and that future populations will be able to break out of this local minima and take over the world.
This is, unfortunately, the conclusion I have come to. The crisis of meaning is, like the problem of low birthrates, ultimately self-correcting via natural selection, as those without the psychological capacity to handle modernity will end up in some ideological or nihilistic dead end or another and fail to perpetuate their lines. But who knows, maybe someday we'll invent the mental health equivalent of GLP-1 agonists and people will be able to pop a meaning of life pill every morning to motivate themselves.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
I'm not here to change people's minds. I'm here because this is the online equivalent of an Enlightenment-era coffee shop with a rotating cast of brilliant and eccentric characters with whom to play word games and perhaps learn a thing or two about the world. Like its 18th-century antecedants, it may spit out some future revolutionaries, philosophers, or reformers who will go on to change the world, but that will happen out in the real world, not in this training ground.
Here, the bold may sharpen their rhetorical knives in combat against ideological demons modern and ancient that have been banished from polite society; some of us are just around for the thrill of the fight and don't have any grand vision for remaking the world, while others may discover that they had no stomach for it to begin with.
As to what may happen down the line, I suppose I'm just a high enough decoupler that the fact that in some future conflict I may need to take up arms against the majority of my fellow posters here doesn't bother me too much. If that ends up being the case, then it was fun while it lasted and I wish you all good fortune in the civil wars to come.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
1. Yes
2. Yes
3. +10 on the highway, +5 otherwise
4. Left lane is for faster traffic, but not for passing only except on highways with 3 or more lanes
5. No
6. No
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
It's just part of a broader trend of infantilized language that reached its zenith with the millennials who shaped the culture and vocabulary of reddit, cf. "adulting", "girlboss", referring to people in their 20's as "kids" at risk of being "groomed" by anyone even a few years older than them, etc.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
What is the evidence that admitting foreign students is taking spots away from domestic students, rather than subsidizing them as Noah Smith claims? Why should we even be trying to increase the enrollment of (normie) white students when all making college education quasi-compulsory has done is inflate the minimum credentials needed to get a decent job and waste a bunch of people's time and money? It has never been easier to get an education in whatever subject you want on your own or start your own company, so to say that the weak (by world standards) form of discrimination that white students face in school is depriving them of opportunities they need to make something of themselves seems like a bit of a stretch to me. Their ancestors, the generation that produced all the marvelous inventions that underpin modern life, had it far harder. They couldn't study electrical or chemical engineering or computer science because they had to go out and invent those fields from scratch themselves, after spending their childhoods translating Latin in unventilated schoolhouses. The only thing students today want for is purpose, and that is not something that tinkering with college admissions is going to resolve.
As for the value of educating foreigners who do not intend to stay, it consists chiefly in the spread of liberal American values to the elite of neutral or enemy nations, destabilizing governments that are hostile to us and creating a naturally pro-American constituency and reserve of goodwill that can be drawn from in the event of a geopolitical crisis. We are also implicitly holding the children of high officials in China, South Korea, India, etc. hostage should a conflict develop with their home countries. In medieval times, you usually had to beat sombody in a war to get that kind of deal, but today they come here willingly.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Yes because they were part of the empire.
I'm not sure importing Chinese students really makes them part of the empire.
Chinese-Americans have been part of the empire since the 1850's, longer than Italians, Poles, or Jews.
If we're looking to the Roman example how well did it work out with Arminius?
The Romans system worked for over four centuries (taking the Social War as the starting point) far longer than any of us expect the American one to, individual cases of betrayal aside.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
The Romans and the Ottomans certainly were. Hell, Egypt was run by Circassians for centuries and the elite of Tsarist Russia was disproportionately Volga German. An empire by definition consists of multiple peoples without a common ethnic heritage, so all this nationalist talk of "foreign brains" would be alien to them.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
As far as I know, the schools most dependent on tuition from Chinese international students to stay afloat are mid-tier public universities in flyover states, not the most highly ranked, and by extension the most woke, private schools. I suppose Iowa State may still be too progressive for Vance or whoever is the brains of this operation, but I think a better strategy would have been to kneecap the top colleges and then raise up some midwest state schools in their place.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
There is certainly espionage happening that needs to be dealt with, but the wording of the announcement would seem to indicate that implementation of this policy will, like most things to come out of this administration, be indiscriminate, haphazard, amateurish, and probably lead to a worse outcome than if nothing had been done at all. If anyone thinks we can win a cold war against China without immigrant brainpower, they are out of their minds. However smart you think white kids from the midwest are, they aren't going to become ubermenschen who are worth 4 Chinese apiece just because we banned affirmative action and are kicking out all the international students.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
I'm not expecting a solution; I don't even really disagree with any of it. But even if the sky were falling and we all saw it coming I would eventually get tired of people running around screaming "the sky is falling!" without any original commentary.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
The absolute last thing anyone here needs is more blackpills about dating. Yes, the apps suck. Yes, there are people who will always be more attractive than you due to the vagaries of genetics and society. Yes, birth and marriage rates are going down the drain. No one can deny these things; we live them every day and they have been discussed to death here and elsewhere. If you have some new data apart from Tinder screenshots, that would be interesting. If you insist that we must all accept our place at the bottom of the totem pole in our new de facto polygamous society, that could be an interesting line of inquiry too. After all, we have plenty of historical examples for comparison, as well as other analogous traits (e.g. will people respond any differently to being told they belong to a group with below average IQ vs. a group with below average reproductive success?). Just give us something to work with besides "we're cooked, gooners."
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
I think your LGBT and mental illness criteria are too strict, as they would exclude many young women who identify as bisexual or mentally ill due to peer pressure/social contagion and not because they belong in those categories as traditionally defined. For most of them it's just a phase they will grow out of, just as being an online edgelord with political opinions it would be unwise to discuss in polite company is for most of the young men here (no offense intended, I count myself among you).
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
while Harvard is very good, it’s not as if their institutions primary purpose is supporting ground breaking work in the physical sciences
Harvard's graduate programs are top tier in basically every science. Schools like Harvard and Yale may think of themselves, and wish to be seen as, liberal arts institutions that act as finishing schools for America's future elite while letting the eggheads at MIT and Caltech do the dirty work of science and engineering, but in practice every elite university has the same set of R1 research programs in STEM, and trying to shut down any of the top ~20 will do approximately the same amount of damage to American science as any other.
More broadly I don’t think that people have really thought through how corrosive having tons of international students is to the us university system (this comment applies to state schools as well as elite institutions). Put succinctly, academics advance their careers by getting grants, and publishing papers. This means paying talented post docs and graduate students. Having an essentially open boarders system for this means that academics can access foreign labor at a fraction of what it would cost to hire us students, so instead of having one or two students who are paid slightly more, you end up with academics who have 8-10 students, 2 of whom are domestic and the rest are international.
Domestic and international grad students and postdocs are paid the same and receive the same benefits. It's not as though you can accept a bunch of Indian PhD students and give them half the normal stipend, at least at any institution I'm familiar with. The size of a lab is usually dictated by how much grant money a particular professor can bring in, with salaries for each position fixed by the university. A new assistant professor might only have enough funding to support a handful of students, while an academic superstar could have dozens of lab members and spend very little time with each one as he jets from one conference to another or advises startups on the side. Some immigrant professors may prefer to bring in people from their home countries, which is annoying, but their labs tend to stay small because they are recruiting from a more limited pool and they write worse papers without native English speakers to assist.
In my experience, a decent fraction of international students at the undergraduate level are spoiled rich kids who could not have gotten into an American university on their academic performance alone, but at the graduate level you get students who are much less concerned with empty prestige (not even Asians would get a PhD just for bragging rights) and are on average smarter and harder working than their domestic counterparts. The ability to brain drain the rest of the world is the superpower that has enabled American dominance in science and technology ever since Operation Paperclip, and destroying it out of spite (at what, I'm not even sure) would be an act of such catastrophic stupidity that it would make a communist dictatorship green with envy.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Dark chocolate truffles for something sweet and Korean BBQ pork jerky for something savory.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
I think expecting a city-state to have the same sort of industrial manufacturing capacity as nations 4 to 20 times its size is a bit unfair. It's precisely for this reason that Singapore, and Hong Kong before it, intentionally specialized in finance and not in building cars or integrated circuits. The UAE is in a similar position and has chosen the same path. Perhaps being a bank is in some moral sense inferior to being a factory, but if the choices are between that and remaining poor I know what I'd pick.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
No middle eastern countries except perhaps Iran and Turkey have the native human capital to sustain a competitive modern economy. If I were them I would rather copy the Emiratis and bootstrap my development by importing foreign talent and becoming a financial hub than simply coasting on oil money until it runs out. At least the former would have a slightly higher chance of durably improving the living standards of my people.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
I would say the argument for Chinese immersion over Spanish immersion is that it's a lot easier for an adult English-speaker to pick up Spanish down the line if they have a need for or interest in it, whereas they will be unlikely to ever master Chinese pronunciation unless they were exposed to the language at an early age.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Whose definition of eudaemonia are we using here? Surely a risk-averse conformist with low agency is more likely to be happy with whatever their lot in society is than an iconoclast burning with ambition who chafes at authority? Even if what you value is a life lived in service of humanity's expansion into the cosmos, the differences between men and women derive from women's role in childbearing, which absent artificial wombs is an essential part of any society (and is not well-served by them taking on dangerous tasks and getting killed). If you were in fact able to eliminate this role through technology, then there would be no reason for women as a separate category to exist at all.
The fertility crisis isn't going to be solved in or by Ukraine. If a solution is found, then Ukrainian wartime casualty counts will be irrelevant assuming they stay within 20th century (i.e. WWI level or less) norms, but could make the difference between Ukraine existing or not as a sovereign state in the future. Presumably the soldiers fighting are motivated by nationalism and care about such things. If a solution isn't found, then we go extinct and this discussion is moot.
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