I’ve been thinking about China, the USA, and the future a lot lately. Chalk it up to getting older, or worrying about what world my son will be living in when he’s a working adult, whatever. But it’s been on my mind.
As Singaporean journalist Melissa Chen has so eloquently explained, China is thinking strategically when it comes to geopolitics. They're thinking about how to beat the USA within 15, 20, 25 years. Its cultural fabric is made of this: the current generation understands it needs to sacrifice so that future generations will flourish. If you want to hear Chen talk about this in depth, I suggest listening to this podcast clip, because she goes deep on this topic.
China and Russia both employ massive internet troll farms to sow division here in the USA. And it's working. Disinformation is the hot war right under our noses. 19 out of 20 of the top Christian pages on Facebook are run by overseas troll farms. Similarly, 8 of the top 12 African-American Facebook pages are run by troll farms, per MIT Technology Review.
The bottom percentiles of Chinese schoolchildren (read: poorest) outperform US students in science, math and reading.
We can't get out of our own way.
If we don't get our heads out of our asses and soon, the world will be a very different place by the time our kids approach middle age.
China is playing a long game, and meanwhile we sit around refusing to admit Jan 6 2021 was an attack on democracy, pretending violent rioting is "peaceful protesting," and angrily turning on our fellow man at the slightest disagreement about any cultural issue whatsoever.
(At least that’s how it goes on social media, which is a frictionless, thoughtless and mostly consequence-free way to engage and react to online discourse. I have found that most people are very reasonable when talking about topics in person, and the lunatic far-left and -right fringes notwithstanding, most Americans sit in the middle of the political alignment bell curve. But that’s another topic for another post.)
We better wake up, or we're all going to be looking back on these days as the golden days before things got really bad.
Empires fall from within. Not all wars are fought with tanks, planes, ships and infantry.
This one sure isn’t, but it’s raging nonetheless.
Something to think about as we approach 2022.
Happy holidays.
So very true, sad but true! As long as we keep telling ourselves we are the best, nothing will change.
Very well said. No one is running planes into buildings any longer. They realized we are an easier target than thought and all they need to do is turn us against ourselves and we in turn run the proverbial plane into the building 1,000 times over ourselves. A very sad state of affairs.