In public, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says his country’s growing friendship with China is unshakable — a strategic military and economic collaboration that has entered a golden era.
But in the corridors of Lubyanka, the headquarters of Russia’s domestic security agency, known as the F.S.B., a secretive intelligence unit refers to the Chinese as “the enemy.”
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Yeah, we are now at about 30ish % of the adult population with reading skills under 2nd grade level, ie, functionally illiterate.
… And that metric is almost 10% worse than it was 10 years ago.
We’ve gone from about 20% illiterate to about 30% illiterate in 10 years.
Normally you only see a decline like that in a country that is an active warzone, or a smaller country has been utterly devestated by an immense disaster.
If you go by ranking of countries by literacy rate, we dropped from somewhere in the top 20 to 30… to between the top 80 and 90… in ten years.
It is an utter disaster.
It goes beyond literacy and education, the reality that people experience is completely manufactured. Hypernormalization of everything. Governments manipulating public perception of events and history has rendered most of the population incapable of even interpreting their own experiences much less the world around them. This is a problem much larger than reading levels or education, people are sleep walking.
Edit: russia being part of this conversation is not a coincidence
The sad truth is it doesn’t matter how true or fabricated whatever it is people believe, as long as it keeps them coordinated and united as a nation… Or else the other nations that really like your stuff and land might make their people all believe the same thing and they can gain advantage over time.
No one likes hearing this cute little opinion I have but I think the greatest enemy the USA has today is not the right wing nut jobs nor the left wing jobs, it’s division itself.
Believe it or not, american citizens today are experimenting two things history is very familiar with:
Sorry, sorry, I mean:
Cause those are totally different.
Either way, when things get this polarized, fights get ugly. Pushing and shoving cannot be unpushed or unshoved… trust and good faith are lost, and they don’t fix themselves.
Only thing that can possibly unite the US with the current level of polarization is nothing short of an atrocity within borders.
Sorry if it’s insensitive to talk about these kinds of opinions out loud. just sharing my honest perspective.
That’s brutal. I’m sorry.
I appreciate the sentiment, on a human level, but on another, the grand scheme of things, the historical level… we deserve it, but the rest of the world doesn’t deserve what will happen because of our self-imposed stupidity.
We are a dying empire, going supernova in spectacular fashion.
I can only hope that we as a country do not lash out further… but we probably will.
As I am from los Estados Unidos, I am the one that should be apologizing to the rest of the world.
When, not if, the US Dollar collapses, it will have an exaggerated effect on South American and Central American countries in particular, many of whom have largely tied their economy to its stability.
I agree with all your predictions and the geopolitical risks you mention, but as far as I’m concerned, you’re cool. All around the world, everyone is ruled and bossed around by horrible people. Yours just happen to have bigger guns and the gold standard for central bank reserve currencies. I don’t think it’s fair to consider every single person that lives in a country/empire/whatever a bad human being or someone who deserves bad things, no matter how horrible the empire in its collective efforts.
You guys have good valuable people. I’ve had the fortune to meet a few and stay friends with them. I’m sure this is true for even the most perverse organizations. Some people are just there cause they didn’t have any better alternatives.
The value of someone is a case by case basis thing as far as I’m concerned. There’s no passport that skips the line to condemnation or salvation.
I figure it’s just like in poker, you know? The cards we have, we got dealt. The question isn’t why didn’t we get the hand we wanted, or how could we redesign the game in order for everyone to get good cards… The game will be over by then. Only thing that matters is how we play what we’re dealt.
And yes, I realize the cards both of us might get very soon might be very bad, but I guess i’d rather see if I can make some kind of play with whatever I have and have fun with the other people around me than endlessly grieve about the ones I wanted or the people that stopped me from getting em.
Much love, my friend. It’s not your fault and nothing is the end of the world (believe it or not, not even the end of the world). You have nothing to apologize for that you didn’t personally do freely and knowingly, and even if you have those, everyone does and most are less reflexive about it. Stay strong.