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When I think of governments helping their people, I think of Beijing 👍🏻
China’s been busy working on doing things like eliminating poverty, creating public infrastructure, providing healthcare, housing, food, and education for all citizens. Chinese government practically eliminated poverty, building infrastructure having used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century, building 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade.
China has also been doing things like ensuring that everyone has housing with 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world.China’s been improving real wages (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) that have gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country, and making sure people have high social mobility.
Congratulations on being unintentionally correct.
Tell me something, if China is so great, why do so many Chinese want to immigrate to the US, where they can get a better education and a better job and provide a better life for themselves and their family?
Where did you get the notion that many Chinese want to immigrate to your shithole country? For example, 80% of Chinese students, including the US, return home. If things are so bad in China and so great in the west then why are they coming back, and why are thousands of scientists fleeing to China from US?
It depends on which government.
The US is still a federal system with states acting as sovereign entities with powers and responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is for disaster relief. FEMA is there to provide guidance and resources, but disaster relief is supposed to be deployed at the state level. This is one of reasons why the National Guard has responsibilities to individual states.
Hawaii has never seen any wildfire or wildfire conditions like this before: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/climate/hawaii-fires-climate-change.html
Of course there should be preparations to counter climate change as it continues to aggravate situations like this, but I don’t like the excuse where the feds can blame the states and the states can blame the feds when shit hits the fan. It has become an excuse for inaction. Hurricane Katrina, Texas ice storms, California wildfires, the Kentucky floods, this could have been sorted out looonng ago.
Why do we make the choice to keep things this way when they always lead to disasters?
Don’t you know? It’s far more important to toss the blame football around than to actually prevent or alleviate disasters. Helping people? Bah! Far more important that we can blame someone else for the problem.
The problem is that the alternative is having the federal government immediately intervene in any emergency, which states would likely complain about.
Then let the states complain or, better yet, dissolve the fuckers
I guess the problem then is I care about having a government that doesn’t want to kill me or leave me to die, then. Excuse me, I should have been caring about civility within our decaying governing structure while people roast alive on the street! Oh you’ve made me see the light, you sure have.
I’m not trying to convince you this is correct, just explaining the politics behind why the situation exists. Or maybe you want a strongman who will protect you until they don’t.
I’d rather be protected “until they don’t” than not protected at all.
But maybe you don’t need a “strongman” to do that, but a robust system designed to deal with disasters. Doesn’t matter how strong an individual man is, he can’t fight wildfires alone.
Maybe just coldly explaining why the system doesn’t help people isn’t actually the “gotcha” argument you think it is. Maybe you should be demanding the system should help people, instead of just shrugging and saying that it doesn’t because of reasons.
But in the end, there needs to be a specific authority to answer to disasters. Right now, and for a while, it is state governments as making the federal government responsible erodes state sovereignty.
Outside of Trump, the federal government is there to help when asked, but it is still the responsibility of the states to manage response efforts.
Just FYI, I’m not American, and our state and federal governments have no problem co-operating when it comes to disaster relief, regardless of who is in charge. Our states will send firefighters around the country to where they’re needed, no questions asked, or hand-wringing about budgets or finger pointing at shitty politicians.
This idea about “states rights” is monstrous. A state is an intangible, it is just lines drawn on a map. You know what’s more important than that? Saving people’s lives. You guys are so worried about imagined tyranny that you’ll literally subject yourselves to far worse fates just in the name of some abject “freedom.” What freedom does a dead person have?
Just because something happens in America doesn’t mean it happens in the rest of the world. We look at your state of affairs with abject horror most of the time.
Or maybe you want a strongman who will protect you until they don’t.
Are you seriously doing the Tough Independent Rugged Real American LARP here?
Did you build your own home? Do you repair your own roads? Do you check your own food for botulism?
I was noting that the failure of the disaster response seems to be due to local government officials failing in their job.
What is the responsibility of a larger government entity for the governance of cities?
It’s the responsibility of the larger government entity to step in in some cases. Like in the cases of natural (or semi-natural) disasters or if the local governance shits the bed to the extent that people are dying. We’re not dealing with free imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire here, cities aren’t sovereign entities they’re administrative regions for the government.
Presenting a oh-so-large-its-scary government entity assisting locally during a disaster as a bad thing is certainly a take.
CHINA IS THE BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD AND EVERYONE SHOULD ASPIRE TO BE LIKE THEM. ITS NOT BAD TO HAVE LABOR CAMPS OR SOCIAL CREDIT SCORES.
ITS NOT BAD TO HAVE LABOR CAMPS OR SOCIAL CREDIT SCORES
Okay, let’s go see about these so-called “labor camps” and “social credit scores”
Social credit system: China’s “Social Credit Score System” - Fact or Fiction?
Xinjiang “labor camps”: Deep Dive: Adrian Zenz & Claims of “Coerced Labor” in Xinjiang China
