The United States Senate has shamed itself, its country — where 90 percent of the people can be in favor of an issue that gets defeated — and democracy. The first two statements are indisputable. The third is a logical conclusion one could draw by looking at how the Chinese reacted to Wednesday’s victory for the NRA and spineless politicians over common sense and long-overdue legislation. Evan Osnos has the story you want to read:
For any Chinese critic of the United States, though, the news was as sweet as waking up to a snow day: “All the Senate of that country ever does is spend taxpayers’ money on sacrificing the interests of the American people in order to protect the interests of the guys in charge.… What did you expect?”
Chinese nationalists assumed that campaign finance was to blame for this, and they cited the result as a reason to ease off the criticism of corrupt Communist Party officials: “Some dumb folks in China think ours is the only country where people care only about money.… In fact, there are immoral people everywhere who care only about money.”
But it would be a mistake to assume that everyone in China is pro gun control…. Just to review: those are angry Chinese people dreaming of gun ownership so that they might be able to shoot government officials, each other, and themselves. This is a strange time to be Chinese, watching the American system from afar.
Cowardly, shameful, wimpy — these are not terms the Chinese are accustomed to seeing attached to the United States government. They all apply at this moment.
China Responds to Gun Control’s Failure (The New Yorker)
It’s times like this when I get lots of questions from my Chinese students asking why democracy is so great….even they can see that the US government has become utterly dyfunctional.
That’s when you just hammer them with jingoistic rhetoric and shame them for not being as free as you.
“90 percent of the people can be in favor of an issue”
90 percent according to whose polling?
By what method did they poll?
Was it truly random?
What was the sample size?
What distribution?
I’m always skeptical if these numbers when they don’t post any methodology of how they arrived at the number, just……. bam! Look we have a number!
In the statistics class I took, if we’d tried that we’d have failed the class.