4/Bernie does call China out for both human rights abuses and economic mercantilism, but still criticizes both parties for being too anti-China.
It's not clear what he's referring to.
5/Meanwhile, Peter Beinart ludicrously praises Bernie for voting against the Endless Frontier Act (a science funding bill!), claiming that it's an anti-China bill, and that voting against it was similar to voting against the War on Terror.
6/In fact, Bernie's reason for voting no was that he thought the bill would hand money to billionaires. But it's a sign of just how silly folks like Beinart have gotten that they see *government funding for science* as an aggressive act against China.
7/Anyway, all of these arguments coming out from the Left assume that China would be a willing, cooperative partner on issues like climate change, if only the U.S. wouldn't be so hawkish and aggressive, etc.
This is, simply put, B.S.
8/Engagement with China was our policy for decades upon decades.
It didn't stop China from scuttling the Copenhagen climate talks.
9/Nor has anyone put forward a reasonable argument for how U.S. wheedling, cajoling, or "moral leadership" is going to dissuade China from building the fleet of new coal plants it is now building.
12/Bernie Sanders himself acknowledges the failure of our engagement policy to improve China's human rights or economic record. So why does he want to double down on a failed strategy?
13/OK, so how about the allegation that hawkishness by the U.S. foreign policy establishment is provoking Cold War 2?
This claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Most of China's intensifying conflicts are with its neighbors, rather than with the United States.
14/China's popularity in its region was never high and has slipped to very low levels in recent years. Other countries around the world are regarding China more negatively, too.
19/None of this has to do with U.S. hawkishness. It's all about countries in Asia wanting U.S. help to balance an increasingly scary and increasingly powerful neighbor.
THAT is the root of Cold War 2.
20/Now, some leftists argue that the U.S. presence in Asia is itself an act of aggression, and that helping maintain the status quo (even at the request of Asian countries) is American imperialism.
Does this make any sense? No.
21/The status quo in Asia since 1980 has been *remarkably* good, especially for China. It has led to enormous prosperity, rapid catch-up growth, and cultural flourishing, all in an environment of peace.
22/A Chinese conquest of Taiwan or other aggressive military adventure wouldn't just slaughter a bunch of innocent human beings. It would disrupt a situation that is making life dramatically better for literally billions of Asian people.
23/Anyone sympathetic to leftist arguments on this issue needs to realize that this situation is NOT like the Iraq War. The U.S. is not attacking; it is reacting, as are China's neighbors. We are now playing defense.
24/In addition, if China conquered Taiwan or other territory, and the U.S. stepped back and did nothing, there's a good chance it would open up a whole new global era of conquest and war -- only this time, with nukes.
25/The Left's accusations that the U.S. is responsible for Cold War 2 are actually a call for appeasement.
Cold wars are bad. But appeasement in this case is even worse.
1/A brief thought about the Critical Race Theory wars.
When my dad was in high school, a girl he knew got pregnant. Abortion was illegal, so she had an illegal underground abortion, which was botched and rendered her permanently infertile...
2/She was also a devout Catholic, so this caused a huge rift with her family. She developed severe mental issues because of this, and was basically incapacitated for life.
The ban on abortion utterly ruined her life.
3/When I was young, Culture Wars in America were all about abortion. Right-wingers would picket abortion clinics and pass laws to make abortion harder to get. Occasionally someone would even murder a doctor for doing abortions.
We've reached some sort of inflection point in our politics where things have stopped meaning anything, and have become in-group signals without any external significance.
All the shouters have found product-market fit now. They have their messages down, their followings are primed to mash the retweet button. Everyone stays in their lane. There's little real discussion, just an infinite recursion of hipsterisms.
I need to do a whole running series of stories about the weird encounters I have when I wear my "Free Hong Kong" shirt around San Francisco. Everyone stops me and wants to talk politics.
Today a Greek immigrant real estate developer stopped me to give me a very dadcon lecture about how socialist kids are just lazy, and if you work hard and believe in God, anyone can succeed.
In the middle of his spiel he stopped to say hi to his friend, a Black construction worker who was walking down the street with a boombox blasting Kpop.
This, by the way, is why I think "realist" fiction is actually a more fantastical kind of fantasy than the kind with dragons.
In "realist" fiction, the fantasy is how the characters feel and behave. But unlike dragons, people believe this fantasy represents reality.
People will read "Cat Person" and think they now know the dark truth about human relationships. But the real relationship "Cat Person" was based on, while not ideal, was much sweeter and healthier than the dark fantasy depicted in the story.
Interesting! Was just talking about this question with @JvNixon. I think the key is to first redesign the system of scientific credit, and then after that to build an education/funding system around that base.
My view of universities is that while education is an important function, it's also not that hard to get right. But research is also an important function, and is hard to get right. So we need to think more about how to optimize the research component of universities.
Some people are asking "Why combine teaching and research?".
For grad students the answer is very clear: 1) Only profs have the ability to teach and train grad students 2) Profs need grad students to do much of the actual research