China's navy is now bigger than the U.S. Navy.[1] Not as many large ships yet, but for South China Sea dominance, aircraft carrier task groups are not necessary.
Worth noting that while China has a larger navy in terms of number of ships, the US Navy is larger in terms of tonnage, and most critically has more aircraft carrier task forces.
I am aware that there are still some unanswered questions regarding the role / effectiveness of aircraft carriers in a world of hypersonic anti ship missiles. But it's still some important context for that stat. These questions probably will not be answered unless a peer conflict occurs (which we can only hope never happens).
> Worth noting that while China has a larger navy in terms of number of ships, the US Navy is larger in terms of tonnage, and most critically has more aircraft carrier task forces.
China needs carriers if it is going to fight the US over, say, Puerto Rico.
It doesn’t need them to fight the US over Taiwan. Mainland China (well, the parts close to Taiwan, at any rate) is one big, unsinkable, aircraft carrier for that war.
OTOH, they do need amphibious assault ships, but they have lots of them (slightly fewer than the US does.)
How useful is that tonnage going to be after the first salvo? It's been a long time since "submarines or targets" and China has invested heavily in missile development.
Try as I might, I can't escape the conclusion that it is totally valid for China to "dominate" a body of water called the South China Sea. In similar fashion, Thailand dominates the adjoining Gulf of Thailand. That isn't to say that neighbors like Vietnam or Indonesia don't also have interests, or indeed that shipping wouldn't be welcome under any flag, but simple straightforward reality is right there in the name. If there were some other entity called e.g. The Holy Righteous Ethical Sea Dominators, maybe they would have a case for dominating the South China Sea or any other part of the ocean. There is no such entity.
Suggestions about how Canada could improve really ought to be directed to the Canadians. They might be amenable to different policies in sparsely populated regions like Hudson Bay. Continental USA has no analogous areas.
Non-Americans who wish to complain about USA have a broad range of topics from which to choose; there's really no need to complain that USA regulates the operation of airlines in USA airspace.
I only commented on what is the current dynamic. Your thoughts on why there ought to be a different dynamic is interesting, but it doesn't seem like something anyone could predict.
Somehow one doubts that a new "Kindergarten is Mostly Hardcore Porn Appreciation" charter elementary would escape legislative attention in our increasingly authoritarian climate...
A "Kindergarten is Mostly Singing Songs about Jesus" charter elementary, OTOH? We may have a few hundred of those already.
The line should be drawn wherever parents, teachers, and librarians choose to draw it. Politicians should not be involved. Top-down meddling has destroyed public education in USA, and this is just more of that. At some point we should stop making public schools worse.
Well.. to that I would say that parents HAVE drawn a line and teachers and people without children, perhaps such as yourself, are pushing back. Parents, IMO, should be the ones to draw the line. Not the teachers, not the state, and not third-parties that are fighting a political war.
As for top-down meddling, I agree with that. The Department of Education has been the worst thing for America's education system, not to mention half-baked federal policies on healthy eating.
The issue is that teachers and the administration are the government in most places. So if we are to have less meddling it would be to empower the parents to make decisions - to draw the line as you say - and force the schools and the teachers to follow that line.
Parents have some measure of authority in their homes, although sometimes the law acts in the interests of e.g. abused children. Public employees on public property don't take direction from parents, nor should they. Public school employees are managed by an elected body called the school board. Since school boards meet in the actual communities they govern, they are often somewhat democratic in nature. If parents don't like this situation, they can keep the children home where bookshelves, if they existed, would contain nothing but bibles and the "Left Behind" series. (Too bad about algebra and English...)
State legislatures are mostly not democratic. Rather than implementing the will of their constituents, state legislators spend their time campaigning and representing for those who fund their campaigning. TFA is just another example.
"...to draw the line as you say..."
To be clear, you introduced this banal cliche, and I used it once in response.
Aren't politicians involved whenever the will of the voters is being enacted? What if most parents in MO support what the politicians are doing? What if they called their representatives and asked them to take action against libraries?
If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.
> Aren't politicians involved whenever the will of the voters is being enacted? What if most parents in MO support what the politicians are doing? What if they called their representatives and asked them to take action against libraries?
Indeed. I think jessuastin probably meant something like nationalized identity-driven politics. It's a valid difference.
> If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.
I like choice but not vouchers. There are basically two issues with vouchers.
The first is that they're usually implemented in a fashion that is simultaneously regressive (on income) and re-distributive (on geography). Ie, they're often implemented as pure grift.
The second, and more important, is that we already have experimented with a hybrid public/private system where some public funds flow to private options! The result is runaway spending and the market driving emphasis toward a bunch of bullshit cost disease stuff instead of actual learning outcomes. No matter how bad our public K12 system is, you will never convince me that our higher ed system is better, and that's what an American public/private hybrid system would, empirically, end up converging to.
I could get behind a voucher system that (1) gives each kid the same amount of cash and also (2) caps all tuition and fees for any school receiving even a dollar of voucher cash.
I'd also be okay with just not providing state funding for education at all, but it'd be a sort of terrible world for most families and I genuinely wonder how many people realize how bad things would get for most families...
I live in one of the most rural counties in Missouri, where libraries could actually close as a result, and I doubt I could find one parent in ten among my neighbors who wants the legislature to waste time on this cynical grandstanding. The problem with our libraries is not that there is pornography there. One notes that both of the execrable politicians quoted in TFA represent suburban districts on the Kansas border. I'm sure there are people in the Ozarks who agree with them, but overall we've got different priorities.
The unwarranted assumption you make in this comment is that legislation in USA reflects the will of the population. That is very rarely the case, and this is a perfect example. No one in this state woke up this morning worried about porn in an elementary school library.
I support vouchers, because even imperfect improvements are improvements. If a child isn't being served by a school, even poor parents should be able to do something about that. We can imagine a world in which the public schools offer enough options to help every child, but we don't live there yet.
> If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.
Bad assumption. That's a fundamental POV difference between "I pay taxes to fund the public education system" and "I pay taxes to pay for kids to go to some school". The notion that those tax dollars belong to the parents and not specifically the public school system depends on which of those you think is, or should be, the case.
For my part, if the money's not exclusively funding the public school system, I don't want to pay any taxes toward schools. Talk about bottom up!
[EDIT] FWIW I'm actually for allowing districts to experiment with this, because I doubt mine would do it and I think the results would be hilarious, but would prefer not to have to move to another state to avoid it, so would rather the red parts of my state not impose it on my district.
If operating with the best model you have is intuitive and not logical, then everything in science it intuitive and not logical, so we might have to redefine your use of "logical" to be more useful.
When you're defending a position now known to be wrong, this sort of statement is more rude than it is enlightening (or convincing).
Similar to the palm oil, when imported, the tallow comes in on chemical tankers (whose cargo tanks' most recent cargoes were things like benzene or methanol at the cleanest).
The better informed are all aware that after discharge, if the remaining barrels of benzene or methanol can be completely removed by suction and evaporation from the designated edible oil compartments and all associated pipelines and hoses, there is never any cleaner equipment.
Considering earlier voyages, there is no way 12 hours of shipyard cleaning is going to be as effective at removing traces of previous cargoes like acrylonitrile or spent transformer oil, compared to a full voyage when loaded with hundreds of tonnes of such a clean, strong solvent as high-purity benzene or methanol.
So you can only imagine whether everyone involved will all play their supposed part to the fullest extent you might have in mind when preparing for bulk edible oils. Every time.
Sometimes expediting the movement will have to take precedence, other times there "just might" be the attitude of "why bother?"
And when you're the one climbing down inside the vessel compartment to inspect for cleanliness, there can be quite a bit of pressure not to reject a tank that looks so clean (as long as there is no obvious wetness) compared to some of the other choices on board the same ship. Once any of the crew or yourself has been down there and come back up without immediate ill effects, it's been long thought it can't be that bad unless you actually saw something wrong visually.
Certificates of Cleanliness, if required, will always be a part of the paperwork package.
And may I remind you it's the methanol that carries the skull & crossbones, not the benzene.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/03/27/the-new-york-times-i...