Be Careful What You Are Reading There, Comrade

I like this paragraph:

What an exciting time to be alive. The world is changing, shifting before our eyes. You won’t find signs of the real changes in DC or New York, or London or Brussels. The international event of this year is the Shangai Cooperation Organization (the SCO), meeting now in Tianjin, China. You won’t hear much about the conference from Western news outlets. There are plenty of places where you can learn about it, however. Or why not go to the official government outlets themselves, such as RT, TAAS, or Global Times? I know that is heresy here in Babylon the Great. Propaganda, you say? Okay, but then don’t respond by quoting the NYT, the WSJ, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, the Telegraph, or the Economist; for you are deep into goose-meet-gander territory then. - Introduction from A Tale in Two Pictures

but then I'm a big consumer of heretical media. The rest of A Tale in Two Pictures is about how Asia is overtaking the west, and if you are looking at gross economic clout, that is probably true. But USA is still way ahead of the rest of the world in terms of freedom. Asia has been under the thumb of authoritarian rulers since forever, I'm not sure they could change if they wanted to. We are currently having an argument here about freedom and civilization, because civilization is incompatible with unlimited freedom. I am confident we will sort it out eventually. But then some new mental disease will take hold of the population and noisy ones will start making a fuss, so then we'll have a new argument that we'll have to sort out. And so it goes. At least it keeps a large section of the populace entertained.