There’s no question that our situation with China is on the messed up side, but I can’t possibly support Dodd’s position (and I like him generally) and the effects it will have on all corners of society and especially on Chinese-Americans and people like me who require dimsum for sustenance. On the other hand, if it’ll move the Overton window, go Dodd. (: Or if he’s saying it ironically, as a rhetorical maneuver, to make people realize the complexity of the situation. But while I would encourage every American product born in China to be certified in the US (not every single one, clearly, but representative samples), I certainly don’t want to give up my food.

Sophist, you’re living up to your name, i.e. “a person who reasons adroitly and speciously rather than soundly,” though I’m dubious about the former.

So I’m living up to my name, save for the fact that I’m really not? Pfft, and I’m the one being instructed to put down the bong.

That comment was not directed at you. Get down off your high horse and stop it with the self referential obsessivity dude.

So you accuse me of thinking that China ought to be a “supremely enlightened country like the US”, but because you didn’t single me out by name you claim that the set of “USasians [who] self righteously criticize the Chinese” wasn’t intended to include me? Maybe I should just hand you my username right now, because you’ve got that “speciously rather than soundly” bit nailed.

Depends on your definition of “civilisation”, of course. The Die-Off, if/when it comes, is going to be a terrible thing to live through even for the survivors. But once approximately 90% of the current human population has died of famine, disease, exposure, or murder, those of you who make it to the other side will have many years’ worth of preserved food, manufactured goods, and libraries on paper to tide you over while the urban asphalt breaks down, since it will break down, and those rotting piles of corpses will provide an enormous bonus of fertilizer…

I can’t speak knowledgeably about conditions in Australia, but look at the Katrina tragedy in New Orleans from the other side of the wingnuts’ idiocy: Even though the people trapped in the ravaged city were by and large the most “marginal” members of the community — the chronically poor, homeless, elderly, very young, ill, addled, badly-educated — most of them did not immediately start preying on each other. Most of the confirmed looting was actually scavenging, people taking supplies to keep themselves and the people around them alive. Despite the wingnuts’ paranoid drooling, the dark-skinned “hordes” trapped in the Superbowl mostly behaved with at least as much honor and dignity as a bunch of upper-middle-class white people queuing up for the chance to buy an iPhone. In fact, the people who seemed to have behaved worst were the fortunate ones just outside the devastated areas: the sheriffs who turned refugees back at the exits to “protect” their clean white gated suburbs, the Blackwater mercenaries strutting around the high-ground, high-rent districts, the racist idiots who were more interested in rescuing tanks of fertilized embryos than dying patients in flooded nursing homes.

People do what they have to do to survive, and we’re genetically encoded for cooperation at least as much as we are for competition. Heck, I can’t cook myself, but I can grow vegetables, I’ve done basic nursing, sew well enough to keep bodies covered & drafts blocked, know enough about animals to keep the livestock alive & the vermin outside the compound, and have faith in my ability to find & follow written directions to cover all the survival-related skills I haven’t mastered. And I’m relatively old, and haven’t any offspring to protect, at that. As long as even a single-digit fraction of the “educated” population survives, the human race won’t lose the basic skill sets ranging from literacy to simple machinery like windmills, hydro-powered generators, perhaps bicycles. I may not survive, and possibly you may not (or may choose not to), but I believe that HTML and Mikey and Jillian and Candy — to pick some names at random — will still be around after the Worst. I just fervently hope it won’t come to that “Worst”, and devoutly hope that we’re smart enough to get off the Glorious Excess Express in time.

Ewww

So we’ll have a lot of folks who know the ins and outs of a duck’s bum with respect to Microshaft Word, but wouldn’t know a radish from a dog turd in the natural world. Can’t see them surviving, and I’m not sure I can see civilisation surviving once the infrastructure goes.

It’s a very fragile construct we’ve got here, kiddies. Let’s do something about it while we still can.

I believe that should be “Kuomintang”. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Matey, you’ve been pushing this line since God was a boy: please give it a rest. It’s been at least a year since the first time I saw this, and nothing’s been banned yet, so methinks you’re talking through your arse, yes?

Kthnxbai.

Re:

“Also, it may help to know that I write these posts with Brad DeLong in mind. Few people in the blogosphere can infuriate like he can, because most people who are as wrong as he is on trade are stupid and evil wingnuts, but obviously he’s not. He really does morally know better, but the economic dogmatist in him overcomes his otherwise perfectly decent judgement on only this subject and the effect is execrable stuff like what is in the link in the last paragraph of the post. Really, it’s not just a smear of gigantic proportions in that post, but it’s a fundamental logical error of undistributed middle.

“So, that’s my mindset. Then, strategically, there’s the explanation I gave mikey.

“Also, it really bothers me when I counterattack (from the Left) people who’ve made careers out of attacking my beliefs *from the right*, and then people who ought to be a bit more sympathetic to my position come in and argue that first, I’m an asshole and purist for counterattacking, and second, that I’m the one being rightwing! Gah. Yet these same people do nothing but cheer when Atrios and Greenwald attack O’Hallon and Friedman, or when Kos tears Harold Ford a new one on MTP. Guess what? I’m doing the same thing as they are: warring on a belligerent, de facto wingnut position *that happens to be* clothed in Leftist threads.”

When USasians self righteously criticize the Chinese, not just the government, for their penal policies it seems to the point to remind them that their own country’s keeping the largest percentage of its population in prison of any nation on earth.

Again, please provide a photo of me on my high horse, or shut right the hell up. Do I think the US penal system is a travesty? Yes, but that doesn’t negate the fact that the Chinese penal system is a absolute fucking travesty.

Cheer up, HTML; what’s done is done, but I don’t believe the economic/environmental mistakes of the last 100 years are necessarily fatal. It’s going to be very, very painful — whichever side “wins” this particular argument — but Gaia is a tough mother and the human race is, for better or worse, one of her more successful offspring.

The real question is whether we’re willing (or capable) of scaling back to, say, 1950s living standards… or whether we’re going to claw desperately for every last kilowatt of Glorious Excess until the point where we’re all tipped back into the 1750s.

I took a class in population ecology back in 1973, and there was a long equation that was supposed to predict when a rapidly-reproducing mammalian species in a closed environment was due for a die-off. (Because, as I’m sure everyone here at SN! knows, when you have white rats in a lab cage, or voles in a meadow, or rabbits in a woodland, they tend to breed right up to the limits of their food supply and just a little further… but the “population” normally crashes before the habitat is exhausted past the point of recovery. Ninety percent of the rats/voles/bunnies die, usually from an emergent pandemic, with a side order of murder/suicide/reproductive failure. This is a Good Thing, as long as you’re not one of the bunnies in the unfortunate 90%.) Of course, being college students & therefore smartasses, some of my mathematically literate classmates worked through the equation using global population versus land mass, and found that the human race was due for a die-off sometime around the end of the 1970s. And we managed to cheat that particular deadline (AIDS is a textbook example of the sort of swiftly-emergent plague predicted in the numbers), although the thought experiment gave me one more reason not to breed.

Barring nuclear winter, I think we’ll get kicked back a few hundred years and a few billion people before we can completely trash the neighborhood. The question is whether our Human Exceptionalism (our mighty brains, our clever fingers) will enable us to change the angle of the drop as we scale down. Willingly or not, those of us at the top of the global economic pyramid (practically everyone in the First World, plus the inhabitants of the global nation of Richistan) are going to “lose” such perks as spending three hours a day commuting in an SUV or buying tons of cheap badly-made disposable crap or flying to Disneyworld or Cancun or Saint-Tropez every year. The question is how we replace the SUVs and the commutes and the disposable crap with alternatives that will make (most) people more-or-less as happy as riding in circles towing our tons of stuff.

I’m not quite sure, but I think you’re volunteering to brush your teeth with this toothpaste I have here. I believe the brand name translates to something like “Chiang Kai-Shek Takes His Vengeance”.

Another race to the floor instead of the ceiling – and it will be a floor for those nations with high standards – is precisely the wrong thing to endorse.

Something like the WTO is the right idea but as usual it’s been executed poorly. The WTO should establish a consensus quality standard that all member states have to meet; states who meet the standard should not face import restrictions on their products, and those who don’t should be subject to tariffs and refusals to trade which would then be backed by the WTO. The United States should not lose in the WTO for protesting shoddy and/or dangerous Chinese goods, no matter what the effect on Wal-Mart’s bottom line may be. The fact that we can predict losing such a protest at the WTO says that the WTO needs reform, not that we need to adopt Kucinich’s plan to return to bilateral trade agreements, tariffs and embargoes. That is the system of the bad old days and we need to move in more cooperative, multinational directions.

That’s what this liberal thinks.

Nothing gets me hotter than watching children who are missing fingers work like slaves…it’s better than screwing puppies and eating them.

Not subtle enough?

Well, part of the problem, as I see it, is that you counterattack pre-emptively, which makes it hard to really think of it as a counterattack. It seem more like you’re just poisoning the well in advance by negatively characterizing your presumptive debating opponents.

I found this thread generating a lot more heat than light, which makes it incredibly difficult to figure out what everyone is really saying they see as the problem and the solution.

Regarding the February DeLong post you linked to, it’s a little hard to track exactly what you’re saying about it. Maybe if you break it down and address the “fundamental logical error” instead of dismissing it as “execrable” and “a smear of gigantic proportions,” it would be easier for those of us (i.e., me) who do not focus on this issue the way you do to figure out your position.

Consider this a request for “HTML China Trade Policy 101.”

Who in his perfect mind spend money in this supermarket?

:)

T.F