The US no longer feels like a place where the rule of law applies.

For whatever you want to fault China with (human rights, personal freedoms, etc.), there is at least the facade of rule of law.

US is masks off and not even a thin veneer that rule of law applies any more.

I'm from the EU.

I'd rather China wins this. By a landslide.

I cant wait for the EU finally turns its back on the US and start integrating seriously with China.

Yeah, there's nothing about the current America I want to "win" AI; nor the people leading it.

I'm sure China has the same type of leadership, but they've yet to threaten to nuke a whole civilization.

Obviously, we want to be in the middle between what America represents and China, and that's currently Europe.

> The real winner in this subthread: negative polarization.

People being against their local elites is largely a good thing. That’s what the China boosting is mostly about.

> It's kind of incredible to watch. Show people two actors, point out the bad things one has done, and they instantly apply "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic and turn into China boosters. Without even considering that there might be, say, other options.

People aren’t cardboard cutouts with preprogrammed opinions. They are answering a pretty much yes-or-no question without necessarily giving all the reasons. And it can be tempting to say No to the US Hegemon on an American website, just as an off the cuff of my chair remark.

(And the person you responded to did the same, but with a US-positive response.)

And people do not necessarily sit around wishing for a better hegemon, either. But here’s the pro-USA (“foreign” policy version) script we’ve been seeing.

- America is a force for good

- ... and it if isn’t a force for good then it is a better hegemon than China

- ... and if it isn’t a better hegemon than China for you foreigners then it’s a better hegemon for me, an American

- ... and if it isn’t a better hegemon for you, poor American, it’s a better hegemon for me, rich American

- ... and anyway there will by necessity be some hegemon so you have to choose one

And they think to themselves. Okay. Going with this lesser evil hegemon logic I choose China.

Which again doesn’t mean that they actively want any hegemon at all.

> But because it doesn't have a free press, you and I (and most Chinese citizens) can't see what the downsides are. They're politely but firmly swept under the rug. And if you get on the wrong side of the "ordered society", it can go very badly for you.

I’m a blank slate on this so whatever you say. Most things I’ve heard about China are from the West. And the US in particular. Now recently there has been much more pro-China propaganda or whatever you call it. In terms of tech, infrastructure, even about being a supposed good hegemon to African countries or wherever.

> Perhaps the real lesson is how the American right have so successfully poisoned the idea of competitive politics and free speech that a literal one party state looks better than .. whatever the hell is going on over there. People would opt to give up their right to politics simply in order to not be subjected to politics.

No, you ask them a yes/no question and they choose the lesser evil!

I have no idea about civic engagement in China. No doubt America will tell me that it’s some kind of Black Mirror but literally real life.

Meanwhile in the West we have democracy, in our names. We have civic engagement. Yes yes yes. It’s not undemocratic. But it’s still dominated by the rich. Pick up a political science textbook and they talk about democracy in the West in real terms. As an elite-dominated institution with people-powered ornamentation.

People are not caricatures that either want the American military boot or the Chinese Han supremacy (or whatever is up with ethnicity in China).[1] But if you ask them if they want the American boot, guess what can happen? Them expressing displeasures with their overlords.

[1] This was apparently one of the super downsides of Chinese supremacy according to some corners of this thread. Ethnic majority racism.

> The EA people who decided to spend oodles of money working on AI ostensibly to prevent an insane thought experiment and then converted that effort into a for-profit corporation while insisting that actually giving money to the poor is bad because you'll have greater future utility by spending it on AI are worthy of scorn.

That was the e/acc guys though. Different acronym, even though they were a spinoff from the original EA guys.

I approve this message.

No, you see, if you lose your job you are poor. And in America, the poor don't deserve leisure. And any work they do has to be as punishing as possible, no matter how little effect that cruelty has on the bottom line

If there's no work to do, we can always invent more work. We just have to figure out who pays for it. Enjoying life is for those "communist" Europeans /s

It’s all about appearances isn’t it. America has dropped more bombs than China. When did China bomb a country last time? But appearances change and that is sad.

The only thing that changed was that America turned on its client states and started saying unhinged shit instead of appearances-speeches like spreading freedom and democracy.

Edit: replaced “has bombed more countries than China” with “dropped more bombs”

I think China has too much to gain by looking like the word's stable alternative to America. What really gets me depressed is their current trajectory towards cultural homogeneity, even internally. There seems to be a real push to calcify the Han identity. I don't know why dictators are so drawn to homogenizing their own cultures when nature itself seems to point to diversity as strength. It leaves me still kind of hoping America is somehow able to pull its head out of its ass, but they'll have to overcome their own oligarchy and entrenched structures - Trump was a symptom.

I don't agree.

China took a very rich business man and told him to stop showing his richness and start doing more for china.

China has a real plan for renewable energy and pushing through it.

China is smarter because it doesn't allow some people to vote for people like Trump and its smarter than russia because it is less motivated by one persons personal agenda.

I am puzzled by this sentence, which combines nationality, psychosis, and intelligence into one. What if the parent commenter is Vietnamese? Or Hungarian? Or Turkish? Will this fall into the "or" clause?

Beside posturing, modern China was only involved in skirmishes at the Indian border. What's delusional is blindly comparing China to Russia or the USA.