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Comment by thesmallestcat | Hacker News Reader

> the USA is merely a player whose ability to interfere in the outcome is being carefully managed. (And the same is true about Russia, incidentally.)

Agreed. The world rests on China's and soon also India's shoulders. They already rule the world economically and diplomatically, the next domino to fall will be cultural influence. Russia is a good demonstration of the impotence of military power alone, and hard power is looking like the US' only advantage over China.

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Their respective per capita GDP is a small fraction of the Western world. If that’s what economic dominance looks like I’ll pass.

And the US' per capita GDP is a fraction of Luxembourg's.

Your post is borderline trollish considering Luxembourg has a population of less than San Francisco. And the fractions are somewhat different with the US in much closer per GDP striking distance to the tiny city-state protectorate of Luxembourg versus the huge per capita gap between the USA and China.

Please try to post constructive comments. This is not Reddit.

The comment was constructive. You brought the attention to "GDP per capita" yourself, so pointing out the obvious problem with that metric singled out is as ad rem as it gets.

If the comment pointed out a country of comparable size (within an order of magnitude) to the US with a significantly higher GDP per capita (on a similar order to the gap between the USA and China), it would have been constructive and informative.

Imagine a discussion of average tech salaries among the tech giants and someone points out they know a company with 2 people and the average salary is $350k per person. That's irrelevant and derailing.

We should try to increase the per capita GDP in the US then.

USA GDP per capita is $57k. Luxembourg is $100k. Does that really qualify as fractional?

Don't worry about the downvotes. Freedom of speech is a pillar of American society, until you express doubt about their unassailable exceptionalism, at which point the censure is relentless.

Good thing censure doesn't deny anyone their free speech! If it did, you might have actually made a well-formed argument.

It's also good that your point is empirically, observably false. Few non-Americans can actually match Americans in the amount of passion that goes into doubting and angrily denouncing American exceptionalism.

"you might have actually made a well-formed argument".

I'll leave you to pat yourself on the back. The downvotes don't bother me in the slightest.

> Few non-Americans can actually match Americans in the amount of passion that goes into doubting and angrily denouncing American exceptionalism.

Ironic.

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