主题：美国WASP统治的衰落？ -- 晨枫

因为实力不如人，决策机构被CIA渗透得像筛子一样，所以只能重用自己人，因为自己人中人才太少所以实力愈发不如人。这是大多数国家精英集团面临的局面。然而中国不同，中国的人口太多了，一个14亿人口的国家若是完成工业化，它的实力将远远超过西方国家的总和，而这个工业化过程仅仅需要三十年，年轻人在这里下注机会很不错。

过去几十年一直在摸石头，几乎没有人看到这个前景，当然也没人看到美利坚疲态已露。08年经济危机后这一切全变了，原来我们已经找到了正确的道路，原来美利坚正在奔向它的巅峰。所以你看到胡士泰、薛峰被抓了——有人愿意把自己的前途压在这个民族的未来上。

管中窥豹，水滴石穿，这才是中华文明千年不倒的真谛！

另补一句：小弟也是于时语的同好，关注于时语的评论很多年了 附于时语的专栏

Canadian parliamentary system makes the country less republic (such as US) and more democratic ( in terms of representation). There was a political revolution in 1960s, which further enhance the power of average Joes and weaken the power of traditional English elites.

Another problem is that Canada is a conferation of very powerful provinces and provincial politics in two provinces: Ontario and Quebec, has key impact on the national stage. It is difficult to say "the whole Canada is like..."

My impression of Quebec is that its Scottish WASPs have been kicked out and French politicians are all from humble family background, such as Trudeau or Parizeau. Political influence also does not live beyond many generations and you do not see "Kennedy" family in Quebec.

It seems that rich family in Quebec/Canada does not want to touch politics. Political career is something chosen by people from so-so families. Many politicans are career-long politicians with NO private sector experience and NO solid professional degree (most are political science majors): comments from local Quebecois friends.

The anglophone in Ontario are scottish immigrants+ former American loyalists who fled America + European and Asian immigrants. When I interact with some of the banking elites there, I do sense an exclusive club mainly dominated by Anglo-elites, but that's not true in the Ontario politics.

Alberta is dominated by Eastern European immigrants. There are many Canadians whose ancesters moved from Eastern Europe (such as Ukraine). Thus even harder to see true WASPs there.

British Columbia might have more WASPs because that's the retirement home choice for many former British empire officers. Therefore, it has high concentration of the military elites there.

Canada is a bit too static for me...

所以只能重用自己人，因为自己人中人才太少所以实力愈发不如人。

--lack of meritcracy is a permeating problem in China's society, not just in the top political level. In a school/company/low-level gov. agency which requires more professional capability than political wisdom, more and more job opportunities go to people with "connections".

That's the concern shared by many of my friends back in China. They are middle-class professionals there. There is no CIA involved, so PLEASE DO NOT BLAME foreigners for your own DOMESTIC PROBLEM.

WXmang has several articles on lack of meritcracy in China. You should read them.

因为实力不如人，决策机构被CIA渗透得像筛子一样，所以只能重用自己人，因为自己人中人才太少所以实力愈发不如人。这是大多数国家精英集团面临的局面。

Really? hehe.

被CIA渗透 or they choose to "diversify" their personal risk and do not put all eggs in China? Have you counted how many people have stepped on two boats? And one boat is located in Diamond Bar, Arcadia, Los Angeles, Newport Beach, Beverly Hills,Irvine ... on the west coast or New Jersey/New York/Connecticut... or in Sydney, Melbourne (among the most exclusive communities)...

I respect your patriotism. Thumbs up for you. But please do not represent China's political elites because you are not one of them.

08年经济危机后这一切全变了，原来我们已经找到了正确的道路，

--I was amazed by your optimism on 正确的道路. I fully agree with your attack on America for its failure around this financial crisis--but that's not surprising to me, because I saw it in late 2006 and shorted US market. Up till now, nothing surprised me.

原来美利坚正在奔向它的巅峰。

--Do not underestimate America's vitality-- in 1980s, Europeans and Japanese claimed the same thing and believe that they were destined to rule the world.

America's vitality lies with its ability to adapt and adjust. Crisis is nothing new in its history and crisis is good for itself.

If you read articles by smart people such as Mranderson/Wolfgan/WXmang, you will be more realistic about China.

所以你看到胡士泰、薛峰被抓了

--that's DESPERATE measure and abuse of governmental power. The fact about this case is that Australian firms are good at commercial espionage and easily corrupt top guys in various steel companies. Here China has two problems: steel firms are very very poor in internal control, professional ethics and the country lacks system to deal with commercial espionage issues. (another problem lies with the pay practice inside those firms)

Europeans/Japanese all buy steel ore from Australians, but the large scale corruption and failure in price negotiation is very unique in China.

BTW, one legitimate way for the gov. to intervene is to cite Commercial Anti-espionage law and let the law enforcement enforce the law under the request of domestic firms. Thus, you follow the rule of law, address the key problem and give no excuse for diplomatic trouble.

In contrast, these two guys were persecuted under the venue of "breach of national secret" and national security agency was even involved in the investigation. It was an awkward abuse of political power and perceived very badly in the English media: lack of transparency, arbitrary definition of "national secret" similar to the Stalin's practice, dirty play from the losers in a commercial transaction.

It also sent this clear signal here: so long as you are ethnical Chinese, no matter whatever is your citizenship, we will persecute you FIRST, violate your civil rights FIRST, and let loose the White Australian/American/Canadian. You are pushing those Asian Australians even closer to your opposite side.

Look at what happened later: Hu was sentenced then released--what a joke! If he violated your criminal code, you should prison him in your own country. Americans did that, Canadians did that. You are treating your own law as a piece of joke and further confirms the inaccurate labeling of "police state".

Then the Steel Industry Association failed again in price negotiation and Rio Tinto hiked up price again unilaterally, and Chinese lost out totally again.

In the end, a loss of your political reputation as well as commercial gain. You achieved nothing in the end.

I will not continue this debate. Let's agree to disagree.

China will continue its upward trend, for sure. But if you assume that the housing bubble and forthcoming fiscal problem in China will end up in nice shape, you are clearly too optimistic. Won and (w)ho placed a big bomb under the ass of the next top leadership after 2012, and we shall let history speak for itself.

BTW, I believe America will have the second dip and America will face major crisis before China does in the next 10 years. Euroland is first to fall.

我今年27岁，到2030年也不过47，我们不妨一起看看，2020年后的中国是如何通过东方式民主来调整分配结构的，希望到时候还能在西西河看到你。

http://www.ccthere.com/article/3008747

Read for yourself.

2020年后的中国是如何通过东方式民主来调整分配结构的--really admire your optimism. Good luck.

The Roots of White Anxiety

By ROSS DOUTHAT

Published: July 18, 2010

In March of 2000, Pat Buchanan came to speak at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. Harvard being Harvard, the audience hissed and sneered and made wisecracks. Buchanan being Buchanan, he gave as good as he got. While the assembled Ivy Leaguers accused him of homophobia and racism and anti-Semitism, he accused Harvard — and by extension, the entire American elite — of discriminating against white Christians.

A decade later, the note of white grievance that Buchanan struck that night is part of the conservative melody. You can hear it when Glenn Beck accuses Barack Obama of racism, or when Rush Limbaugh casts liberal policies as an exercise in “reparations.” It was sounded last year during the backlash against Sonia Sotomayor’s suggestion that a “wise Latina” jurist might have advantages over a white male judge, and again last week when conservatives attacked the Justice Department for supposedly going easy on members of the New Black Panther Party accused of voter intimidation.

To liberals, these grievances seem at once noxious and ridiculous. (Is there any group with less to complain about, they often wonder, than white Christian Americans?) But to understand the country’s present polarization, it’s worth recognizing what Pat Buchanan got right.

Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote, Espenshade and Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their mandate to be multiethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars “for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students,” leaving little room to admit financially strapped whites.

But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”

This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited — that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth.

Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland. In the Bush years, liberals fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the Tea Parties, they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.

This cultural divide has been widening for years, and bridging it is beyond any institution’s power. But it’s a problem admissions officers at top-tier colleges might want to keep in mind when they’re assembling their freshman classes.

If such universities are trying to create an elite as diverse as the nation it inhabits, they should remember that there’s more to diversity than skin color — and that both their school and their country might be better off if they admitted a few more R.O.T.C. cadets, and a few more aspiring farmers.

我曾经头天看他发文说中国应该在南海保持克制，隔几天他就写篇文建议中国加入阿富汗战场。同样是海外军事行动，反差却这么大。

纽约时报的读者以自由派为主，因此可以算是另一面的看法。对这个问题，我没有什么自己的观点。不过从这些评论里，我觉得美国现在自由派与保守派之间的鸿沟确实越来越深。双方都视对方为怪物，不可理喻。如果这种情况长久持续下去，不是美国之福。

评论1

Having taught at a state university, a private college, and a community college over the past 15 years, and having raised four children through the public school system in four different states, I can affirm what many others are saying in their responses to this column: the lack of white, middle class Christian students in many of our universities is due to their parents' preference for quiet, Christian colleges where their children will only be exposed to points of views similar to their own. There is not enough space in the comment section for me to tell all about students who refuse to watch certain films, read certain books, or participate in certain activities where I've taught because it's against their Christian upbringing. If the word evolution comes up in any context, I've seen adult students cover their ears, close their eyes, and shake their heads in denial. So, let's not blame the so-called elite colleges for not admitting more white, rural, Christian students into their institutions. Let's place the blame where it belongs: on the students and their parents who would never consider these schools for fear that it might interrupt or - God forbid - change their way of thinking.

评论2

Universities genuinely strive to create diverse classes and campuses because we recognize that what a student contributes to his or her community is greater than what is reflected by SAT scores. I work as a faculty member at a selective state school and I participate in admissions. I certainly can't speak for all schools, but I know that we assiduously consider a huge range of factors. We look at everything that puts a student's scores in context. I personally divide these into two categories: factors that show the student's individuality, and factors that suggest the student may have had to work harder for the same marks as someone else - meaning that those scores actually mean more about the student's aptitude and potential. I look at factors like parental education and income, whether the student had to work full time during high school, whether he or she had to support a parent or sibling, or had to overcome addiction within the family. When I see that a student had to work full time to help contribute to a single-parent family, and that he or she still maintained a strong GPA, that GPA score means much more to me than the same score achieved by a student who had nothing else to do (nothing else obligatory, at least) other than school work. In my own experience, I find this "favors" - although that misuses the term - many students from immigrant families. This is not because of a racial preference. It is because an intensely hard-working young person simply is the better candidate and the better bet for future success than the not-so-hardworking young person.

I doubt your analysis of the numbers, and I doubt that the blame for perceived exclusion has as much to do with admission to higher education as with the hysteria that frequently accompanies shifts in privilege.

What I don't doubt is that many lower to middle-income white Christians that used to have an automatic preference over racial minorities (if not over affluent white Christians) feel that the world has changed significantly now that access to privilege is more closely aligned with merit. That's right: It has changed. For everyone.

评论3

As a secular liberal homeschooling mom in Indiana, where most of the homeschoolers (and therefore most of my friends) are much, much more conservative, rural, and religious than I am, I think of myself as a liberal who knows enough about conservatives not to be afraid on a new Timothy McVeigh every time I see a farmer. Let me hasten to reassure Mr. Brooks that even should Harvard fling her doors wide to rural whites, few rural whites will care to step inside. Most of the moms I know, homeschoolers or otherwise, want their kids to go to state universities for two reasons - it is always considerably cheaper to be an in-state student, and it keeps kids close to home so they will be more likely to settle down nearby & keep up the all-important family ties. You don't understand 'working class conservatives' at ALL if you don't recognize the primary importance of family in these decisions.

圈子外的人必须依赖圈子内的人才有可能发达-->圈子外的人实际上并没有安全感，无论是因为他们发达手法的肮脏还是其他什么，最重要的是他们不是圈子内的-->于是圈子外的人倾向于捞一把就跑，这加深了他们“捞一把”时候的不择手段-->圈子内的人越发不信任圈子外的人，圈子更加牢固-->返回到第一条。

实际上几千年来都在这个怪圈里头打转。近有民营企业，远有胡雪岩、沈万三。