I’m not intending to downplay the impact on minorities within China, or their growing global influence. It’s just that what China is doing is fundamentally the same category of human and national behavior we have seen for 100 years. Relatively speaking, it is less destructive than what came before. We must address it but the tools to do so are available and obvious.
It pales before the threat of climate change because that is a new category of threat to global society.
Why? Because water, food, and real property are fundamental to the health and economies of all nations, and climate change will create massive unfunded changes to those. It’s one thing to have an aggressive nation on the world stage a la China. It’s quite another if hundreds of millions of people need to migrate and have no money to do so. The latter is well within the realm of possibility given what we know about climate change.
Give me the climate (or nuclear) apocalypse, instead, please.
There were once 100M people in the Amazon basin, wiped out by plagues brought by Europeans 5 centuries ago. A few survived. The trees growing in unchecked in the depopulated Americas reduced CO2 enough to cause a mini ice age.
That won't be enough to bring down temperatures in the next collapse because the CFCs and HFCs won't go away. But at least the oceans will get less acid.
> That's a little bit overblown. Want to make a bet on longbets.org? I'll happily donate to a green cause.
"If civilization collapse by 2035, I vow to donate 3 flints and 10 sticks to a green cause."
Exactly.
That is exactly my main concern in the modern age also. Other countries are already interested in China's technology: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-23/sixth-world-internet-...
'Countries looking to crackdown on dissent and the spread of information — like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Thailand, Laos, Serbia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — have already signed up to China's "digital silk road".'
Well this notion is simply not true, these two things are tangentially related at best.
You sound like ‘because they demonstrated against my beliefs, they need to be shut down’. Not for this reason, there are plenty of other reason to pick from.
Our climate and ecology are certainly at risk, but I think the biggest threat in the world right now is the rapid rise of fascist China. They're challenging the notion that free speech and democracy are required for capitalism and economic gain.
China has grown so emboldened under President Xi that they're no longer content to just alter or buy out our media companies. They're flat out dictating marching orders to Western organizations and asking for employees that oppose their mandates to be fired. They're kidnapping foreign nationals and holding them hostage on trumped up charges. They've grown beyond stealing our ideas - now they're trying to supplant them.
That doesn't even begin to capture the things they're doing within their own borders. Surveillance state, social credit, travel limitations, Uyghur detention camps, supposed organ harvesting, Hong Kong / Tibet / Taiwan, ... In China it's actually 1984, and they're teaching the world that it works. If they win this battle, I worry we might wind up facing similar prospects in our future.
> Without massive progress in the next decade, civilization will probably collapse by 2035.
That's a little bit overblown. Want to make a bet on longbets.org? I'll happily donate to a green cause.