Wow I hated this. Upvoted.

I just want all of you to be normal.

Normal is what got us here, so I’ll pass.

You gotta love drama among the genocide crew.

Well akshually you only need to be within the European Broadcasting Area to participate; Middle Eastern countries other than Israel just don’t.

c\Normativedeterminism

International students generally are ineligible for pretty much all financial aid.

Nope. Top American universities are pretty generous—probably the most generous among first-world countries—with need-based aid for undergrad internationals if you can get in (which is expectedly more difficult than for domestics). I know a few people in top American universities with full or near-full rides, most relevantly including one in Harvard, so yeah they exist. Of course most internationals are still filthy rich full-payers, but technically it’s not all filthy rich full-payers.

The reality is that cutting out international students actually harms an institution’s ability to provide aid to American students.

Definitely true.

That particular famine’s not the real warning though, that’s just war shit and Russian cyclical famines that were ended by modern agriculture.

Okay so cyclical famines don’t kill millions of people that’s not how that works. The main cause of the famine was the war, but the war caused the famine through (among other things) War Communism. In the immortal words of one angry Irish dude: God created the potato blight crop failures; the British Communist Party created the famine.

What you want is the Lysenkoism-caused famines that followed it, partly because the Soviets were so desperate to end the cycles and thus prove their legitimacy.

Those are more clear-cut since there was no war to blame for incompetent Soviet policy, but I wanted to point out that even Lenin himself was a failure as a ruler and not at all the source of sound socioeconomic ideas when it comes to actually solving the problem he claimed to have the solution for.

I’m not interested in entering this argument (I lose IQ points every time I argue with a centrist), but I have to say: The inconsistency in your beliefs is palpable, Mr/Miss “I support Joe Biden”.

I don’t think you should be taking socio-economic understanding from the guy whose mismanagement caused/exacerbated this. And, you know, created an authoritarian state out of a revolution; that was bad too.

Okay now this is something the rest of the world should take notes about.

We’ve come full circle.

Yeah definitely true, but this stuff is more relevant for people who actively try to be a thorn in the government’s side, like lefties or dedicated pro-Palestine activists. The average prospective international student isn’t that so they can easily get by (of course this doesn’t apply to the current admin), while on the other hand I simply wouldn’t feel safe in a place where mildly politically charged comments about food prices or the job market can get me rounded up and interrogated, or where I don’t know which of my classmates or colleagues is a government informant. More than political freedom the personal safety guaranteed by that political freedom (even if, as you said, it’s just keeping up appearances) is what’s at stake here.

I think they’ll find few of them will take that offer, given the CCP’s intolerance to dissent. I’d also guess rich internationals will just go somewhere else, while poor internationals won’t be able to go without the kind of generous financial aid top American universities offer.

I mean that’s true and it makes me happy, but dude I don’t think you’re supposed to be proud about it when you run the damn country.

I am not going to miss the “pax” Americana, but it’s sad seeing this and knowing that the world’s total rate of scientific advancement will go down considerably for at least a decade.

Why does this look like a child molester?

Less support for Israel could very well have been one of the thing Qatar gets out of that deal

If this turns out to be true I might actually cheer for the Gulf for once.

Stupidity, capitalism and conservatives (so a lot of stupidity).

Very good answer, comrade.

This sounds a lot more dramatic than it actually is, but that’s probably a good thing.

Maybe, but do you want the government and its rich patrons to have that power? You’d find yourself working until 80.