[jeetoid]

I think we should ignore people in universities since they're the ones who brought us here, advising us to embrace global trade and admit China into the WTO under the obviously wrong thinking that trade would somehow magically transform them into a liberalized ally.

What ended up happening was the complete deindustrialization of the US and decimation of the working class, massive trade imbalance and essentially handing over untold wealth to the despotic Chinese regime.

Only an academic could come up with such a disastrous plan under such sophisticated and intelligent pretense.

[dttze]

That happened because capital wanted it to happen. Blaming academics is just fascist garbage that avoids addressing the real issue.

Of course capital is saying now it can fix all the problems they caused. I’m sure you believe them too.

[jeetoid]

> Blaming academics is just fascist garbage

isn't this flamebait?

[dttze]

Your initial post mirrors fascist rhetoric and is just an ideological rant.

Maybe try explaining how academics strong armed capital into deindustrializing and you’d get a better response.

The fact you went right to rules lawyering shows your weak position.

[archagon]

No, what you posted was flamebait: a rant against “academics” (all of them?) presented without evidence by a brand new account. This is just calling it out.

[jeetoid]

> presented without evidence

I laid out how globalism was pushed by the economic academic consensus as the enlightened approach to international relation with China.

I said that it has clearly failed to advance US interests over the past 30+ years and resulted in the decimation of the working class in America and hollowing out of the economy.

I don't think that's a rant, nor argument without evidence.

[cantrecallmypwd]

Exactly. Castigating an entire group of people as a useless, singleton hivemind.. that reeks of the stench of despicable, blind hatred.

[turnsout]

I love it when capitalists complain about capitalism working as intended. Everyone wants a free market until they're just not good enough to compete. Then the whining starts.

[jeetoid]

Let me just elaborate that a country like the US that artificially floats it's own currency as the global base currency will of course piss away its wealth and through bypassing the natural corrective mechanism [0] will have no way to reverse course.

[0]: lost wealth (typically gold reserves) -> a weaker currency -> global economic incentive to begin exporting valuable goods and begin steadily recouping the lost wealth

[momo_hn2025]

One thing that confuses me is how short-term Americans tend to think about certain issues. For example, how can you be so certain that a country like China cannot transition into a more democratized society? Are you basing that assumption solely on the developments of the past 20 years? Is that the extent of your perspective? Think about how much democracy existed when the United States transitioned from an agricultural society to an industrial powerhouse. How long did it take Western countries to evolve into democratic societies? And let’s not forget that democratic systems themselves can evolve over time.

[mindslight]

While I agree with you on this particular article, I disagree with your broader conclusion of anti-intellectualism. How exactly do you think we might get ourselves out of this situation if we don't even use a map?

Anti-intellectualism has helped bring us to this position, by neutralizing opposition into the easily-discardable "they took our jobs" rather than focusing on the actual mechanism by which the US working class was getting screwed - massive money printing to maintain price inflation (the official policy, in direct opposition to the marketing refrain that offshoring would reduce prices). That newly-printed money (representing the economic gains from offshoring) was then mostly given away to banks to loan back to us and otherwise pump up the asset bubble (ie "the rent is too damn high"). But even that realization has been neutralized by anti-intellectualism, with the myopic focus on the "deficit" and "government debt" in lieu of overall fiscal responsibility - once again helping to facilitate the trend of looting by the upper class with the cover of achieving society-wide austerity while turning a knob that does nothing of the sort.

Now this same anti-intellectualism has brought us Trumpism with its blind anger. All swagger and impotence, alienating our long-time allies and destroying our cherished American freedoms, putting us in a much worse position to do anything about China. And of course cheered on by the same people who've finally realized they've been had - by the previous scam quickly disappearing in the rear view mirror.

[jeetoid]

We won't see eye-to-eye on this, who exactly were the reasonable intellectuals that were going to save us? Maybe Hayek or Mises, Keynes won the day and look where we are.

The past century is defined by Progressivism, from the New Deal and subsequent Great Society, which was hoisted by the World Wars and complete centralization of society into the administrative state run by supposed experts.

At every level it's been experts and intellectuals of all sorts, think someone like Paul Krugman - there's countless others, who we're told have it all figured out and we should simply accept all their demands and if anyone disagrees well they're rubes and what do they know.

[cantrecallmypwd]

Anti-intellectualism is a noxious disease symptomatic of ignorance and the Dunning-Kruger effect.