"Naturally, violence is never an answer, nor is it a politically effective tactic." Abhorrent under normal circumstances certainly but declaring the primary drivers of both the workers rights and civil rights movements ineffective is laughable. Power cedes nothing without violence.
Yes, unambiguously. They appear to be aggressively investing in collaborative foreign policy projects globally, have a stellar track record when it comes to not starting random wars around the world, and their economic planning and engagement with decarbonization efforts massively outshine the US.
There's an invisible tradeoff here. The US has an extremely expansive view of free speech, so you get a very noisy picture of its politics, half of which is Infowars-level insane lies. This is a large cause of its problems. China absolutely does not have free media, and if it did it wouldn't publish primarily in English, so its negatives are very hard to see. Even for Chinese speakers.
I'm not an apologist for Chinese repression, but America still has or once had slavery, child labor, torture (Abu Ghraib), patent medicine and unsafe food, racist policies that prevent wealth accumulation (redlining), mass pollution, racism and mistrust of non-white-skinned people, a terrible healthcare system for most, and still debates over the utility of vaccines, has a poor K-12 education outcome, refuses to severely punish notorious white-collar criminals and make their victims whole, immunizes its law enforcement from prosecution when it violates others' civil rights, and vests the President with absolute immunity or a presumption of immunity in exercising its powers. And those are just the embarrassments and atrocities I can think of right now.
I don't want performative apologetics; I want the still-existing problems to be remediated. I also want my fellow Americans not to deny our history and present reality. Recognition and apology are not identical.
You seem to be not distinguishing things that have happened hundreds of years ago with things that are present, exaggerating the scale of things that are still present, and not acknowledging that those things are widely recognized and even taught in American history classes.
The For Profit Penal System (tm) and the resulting recidivism rates associated therewith, while not technically slavery, isn't exactly not slavery either. Anyway was there something specific you're trying to defend here or is this merely an exercise in performative nitpicking?
> not acknowledging that those things are widely recognized and even taught in American history classes
In some states, yes. In others, the content is being censored (another embarrassment for America, which once censored the teaching of evolution!). See, e.g.:
The same can be said without irony about the current administration in the US so there is that. Anyway it's perfectly reasonable to point out the ways in which the CCP is outperforming western governments. If that bothers you then I'd say you may want to contact your representatives.
I'm not hearing a whole lot of talk about No Child Left Behind or the near-total elimination of analysis and synthesis from modern curricula either, but having watched a 14 year old navigate what passes for elementary and middle school currently I'm unsurprised that test scores continue to slip.
Parents watching what their kids were learning (or not learning) was probably the largest acceleration into home and alternate school in history. That's what happened to nearly every family in our home school co-op.
Funny you should mention that, we're currently looking for a home school co-op in our area. It has become apparent that my child has learned basically no analytical skills whatsoever so I'm planning on homeschooling for a year to see what improvements that makes before making a final decision about what to do for high school.
I find it offensive that comments that appear to be legitimate additions to the conversation are downvoted into oblivion and then flagged without even a single response to suggest where the author of the comment in question was in error. This is definitely not what I would expect to see on an ostensibly neutral platform that claims to be dedicated to technical discussion of issues on their merits.
If you're looking at the same comment I am, I suspect it just tripped AI-generated-comment heuristics, perhaps people's personal ones and perhaps the site's. It's an unfortunate world for people who like em dashes and have some genuine reason to be creating a new account.
America has absolutely been all of that and more within living memory. The problem is it's getting to the point where you need to be pushing 50 to remember a time when this was the case.
The downvotes in absence of any reply suggest there's a group of individuals who think your position is so correct it's functionally unassailable but are offended you said it out loud.
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