Reverend_Hellh0und

meh, maybe it was misunderstanding O. I thought I read you stating they had an excuse for thier authoritarian behavior.


Answer me this. Is it right they do this or wrong?

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كافر
Caith siar é agus ná lig anair á

Orion

No problem.

I don't see it as that black and white... first, because I am not Chinese or a permanent resident in China. I have the luxury of visiting there and then coming back to Canada again. Maybe if I grew up in China I might find it wrong, but then again a lot of the public there supports the government. As a student of history and modern politics, both which are highly interpretive, I aim to be as objective as possible, and part of that requires me to not adhere to "right" and "wrong".

But for the record, I do wish that humans worldwide could be afforded a high standard of human rights, and I apply that philosophy to everywhere, including Canada where I live. If you scratch deep enough, everywhere is lacking in some way. Likewise, I also acknowledge that some places are not ready for a high level of human rights, and maybe they never will be. It is not my place to judge another culture, but I like to understand why a certain country's status quo is the way it is.

dirtpoorchris

The only time a culture is not ready for high level of human rights is one that needs them supressed to function. Without the supression the power would not exsist.

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America. God is wearing black.

Orion

I don't disagree... I'm just saying that because of the current state of affairs in China such as its rapid growth, huge environmental problems, and megaprojects taking place on as scale never before seen in history, a violent transition in government right now would lead to the collapse of the entire nation. The only way it can be done peacefully is if the government relinquishes that power, and it's not going to, so people should not be shouting for the Chinese to overthrow their government. That government is all that stands between them and universal poverty for its people. Better the devil you know...

The West publically does not endorse China's lack of human rights, but its economic policy supports it. We can afford to live more luxuriously here because Chinese workers don't have rights to higher pay or workplace standards. If the workers get rights (which would automatically accompany universal human rights in China), then our prices go up and our standard of living goes down. I think this could be a good thing since North America consumes too much in the first place, but in principle, our governments would never want it. Yes, we could always move elsewhere, but nowhere in the world has such a vast quantity of cheap labour as China does. It's bad for them, but good for us.

The cycle of suppression in China is internally propped up just as much as it is from outside sources.

FreeThinker

Chinese from China that want to go back to apply their degrees in the Chinese economy? Hur hur... no. And the entire point of mentioning degrees was to prove that higher education in the US is much better than China, which, if you insist that Chinese scholars get their degrees here, means you agree with me.

Obama isn't dumb, and neither is McCain. And what free speech does the US government censor exactly? Child porn on the internet? OH NO WE CAN'T LOOK AT KIDDIE PORN? DAMN OUR FASCIST GOVERNMENT.

In today's world the press is not the only source of information one has.
Here we are a nation with a "free press" and yet the public was still so ill informed and unquestioning that it allowed the government to propagandize us into a bogus war in Iraq. So much for the gaurdians of freedom.
What I am saying is that the people that live in the society are more informed of their own government than someone on the outside getting their information from biased news sources.

My wife is from Osaka. We've been married 6 years. I can read, write, and speak Hiragana and Katakana. Also, no one in Japan gives a sh*t about politics or world affairs. They have some of the worst voter turnout of any democracy on the planet. Do I know more than most Japanese people do about their government? Yeah, I do. Don't assume anything about what I do or do not know.

First of all, saying that Vista is utter rubbish is probably one of the most ignorant things I've heard on this forum, and I've heard quite a few. Vista took 5 years and billions of dollars to develop. It is dynamically aware of the exact specs and drivers for every piece of binary hardware connected to the system. It can utilize more than 4 processors at the same time to run the same program. It organizes files on the hard drive based on how much you use them - programs you use more frequently are clustered near the OS data so they run faster. Vista can take an external flash drive and turn it into virtual memory.

If you don't like Vista, it's probably because you have a crappy computer. Vista needs decent hardware to run correctly. Don't complain that your toyota engine blew up when you put jet fuel in it. That, or you have a ton of garbage programs running in the background that you are too lazy to get rid of.

I happen to know a few Chinese programmers. They code bots for a game I used to play. None of them have any formal training in program design, and the code they write is messy as hell. Name one single commercially applicable program developed by Chinese coders IN CHINA. Good luck with that.

Japan was and is a capitalist democracy. China is totally different.

FreeThinker

GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA AHAHHAHAHHAHAH.

It's going in my sig.

FreeThinker

You have to be kidding.

You spent about 5 pages explaining why China needs an oppressive government to keep itself in power, and that without censorship their country would plunge into chaos. Don't even try to pretend you were just here giving everyone a history lesson. You were defending their crappy system, not acknowledging it.

John Hobbes319

That's not true at all, in order for China to sell the currency they have to find someone willing to purchase it, nothing will change save for who owns the currency, tell me how would simply switching ownership of the currency cause a depression???

Orion

From here : "China has $1.33 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves, with $407 billion in U.S. Treasuries, the second-largest holder after Japan. A substantial sell-off of the reserves could spark a recession in the U.S. economy."

Currency works much like any other commodity. You dump a large sum of it onto the open market, and supply drastically increases. A drastic increase in supply lowers price or value, and thus the U.S. dollar would depreciate to a large degree in a short amount of time. You could argue that once that large supply hits the open market that other investors would take advantage of the low price to acquire large numbers of reserves, but $1.3 trillion is a lot of money and it would not happen overnight.

You are simply blind to what I wrote. I did not say that China needs an oppressive government to stay in power, but that the current oppressive government is all that it has standing between prosperity and national collapse. They are maintaining a very delicate status quo, and any transition right now would lead to decades worth of setbacks and widespread disparity much higher than current levels.

Do you think the CCP is stupid? They know that people don't like the oppressive regime, but China cannot afford, even by virtue of its resource limitations, a transition to universal human rights. The sky would be black and more people would be starving. China has already said that maybe someday its people will have more rights, once it is fully industrialized and the environmental problems are addressed. Until then, it cannot afford dissention during the industrialization process, because the megaprojects are extremely sensitive and delicate. I guess what I'm trying to say is, it is easy to judge them from our perspective as these evil, power hungry, fear mongers that want to control an empire, but there are practical reasons for why they are maintaining such tight control. It's not so black and white.

I already said that I am not in favour of repressed human rights, however China is a very unique case and if you would care to delve into its history and rise to industrialization you would understand why its current status quo is what it is. I'm not attempting to justify the lack of human rights, but to explain why it is what it is, because often all you get coming from the Western public is irrational hatred of China for being Communist and oppressive. There are survivalist forces at work there.

John Hobbes319

Once again the commodity is already on the market that is how China acquired it in the first place, it is not anything like the Fed printing up a whole bunch of new currency because this currency is already in the market, all that would happen is it would change hands, and simply changing who owns the currency will in no way effect the value of said currency.

Say you have a gold bar, if I purchase that gold bar from you does the value of that gold bar change? No it does not. Say you have a million gold bars, if I buy those gold bars from you will it effect the value of gold as a whole? No not unless you have just mined that gold and are adding something to the market which hadn't already been there.