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I know you're tongue in cheek with this, but man I don't like that the lesson being taught internationally right now is: "If even a single member of a particular ethnic group survives, and your ancestors did something oppressive to their ancestors hundreds of years ago, they will use this to extract reparations from you in perpetuity and will never let you forget what happened."
Similar logic for why, if you depose a monarch, you have to kill off their entire extended family, lest some loyalists later track down their teenage second cousin thrice removed and try to restore them to the throne.
We have a few social techs for allowing non-genocidal acclimation of oppressed populations but when they can all be trivially overridden by the logic that "any observed inequality in outcomes is proof positive of ongoing oppression which must be rectified" then guess what comes back on the menu.
Perhaps we can counter that logic by pointing out that whatever mechanism allows guilt to flow forward in time should also allow credit and pride to flow forward. So sure, maybe my great great great grandpappy beat some villagers that one time, but my family saved an awful lot of drowning children over the years too, so maybe it balances out.
The real lesson is actually 'if you oppress a group of low performers you must never stop. If you grow tired of oppression then leave no survivors, but only if they are low performers. It's fine to just liberate Chinamen or Ashkenazim because they'll catch up without really needing the help their more unhinged activists demand.'
Looking at the current geopolitical situation, there may have been other downsides.
The moment attitude to China changed from "how do we keep them in eternal poverty and civil war" to anything else, Americans lost.
It's that simple. They're mostly one people, they were backward for historical reasons. They are 1/2 of the world's high average IQ population.
Had US presidents read more Lothrop Stoddard, this would never have happened.
Fuck propping up the USSR to keep Chinese down would have made sense.
As a non-American, I find the notion that America should permanently kneecap anyone who might contest their dominance very off-putting. If America isn't clever enough, organised enough or stable enough to compete with China on an even footing, why should it be in charge of the globe?
I would also argue that even America benefits from having an actual rival that can go toe-to-toe with it. When America was competing with the USSR, it had to be focused and cohesive and attractive to its citizens. When the USSR died and the USA was left without rivals, it seems to me that it sickened and started to alternate between flailing around and infighting. (The same of course applies to China in reverse).
Because the comparison isn't America to some hypothetical perfect country. It's a comparison to China, and China's government is pretty shitty. If you have to choose between China and America and you're not in the Politburo, America is loads better even if you don't like some of the things America does.
At the very least, this is not an indisputable fact. I've known various Chinese in and out of the country and I've visited briefly; China had much tighter security and much more overt control of information than America, but it was, basically, just another country. The people clearly didn't consider themselves to be living in a dystopia. Nor were they smiling and desperately terrified like somebody in North Korea.
Meanwhile @No_one is literally arguing that America should keep any potential competitors 'in eternal poverty and civil war'. That strikes me as pretty shitty! Like, probably America is still the country that most of us would prefer to win a battle of superpowers if it absolutely must come to that, but that calculus changes very quickly if America starts throwing its weight around even more than it already does.
I'm not arguing that it should do so, or that it'd have been the right thing to do, I'm saying that had they been serious about preserving 'freedom in the future lightcone' or however e/acc guys who are anti-China put it, they'd have had to do that.
If CPC preserves its current ways of picking elites which is go to Chinese MIT/Harvard etc, pick psychologically most promising students who have already been established are 99.8th percentile and put them on the party career track - it's probably going to end up as the least stupid form of governance ever devised.
Then I apologise for misreading you. I come across the real article every so often and it irks me.
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