The Communist Party of China hasn't been "commies" in the traditional sense for a good while. They're more capitalist than parts of Western Europe.
I know about the Jasmine protests. How does that paper over the dissatisfaction with the current migratory labor situation (akin in some ways to southern Africa's with people going to the East for work rather than south.)?
The government isn't pushing the Go West initiative just for fun. They have an imbalance in the level of development between regions of the country that needs to be addressed.
Is the Chinese government under immediate existential threat from mass unrest?
No. And it's unlikely to be so as long as they continue to grow and increase the standard of living at the rate they have been. And yet, in any rapid growth situation, there will be dislocations and groups that get left behind.
Is there a tendency to label legitimate criticisms of the government as being "anti-Chinese" (akin to how legitimate criticism of the US government are sometimes labeled as anti-American)?
That's a starting engineer's wage compared to at least the average wage, and more likely the wage of a senior operator with years of experience and time at that particular company.
Are there companies that try/manage to get away with paying engineers entry level wages? Sure. But they tend to get what they pay for.
A more valid criticism would be based on the amount of debt in student loans carried by a starting engineer just getting out of college.
Right now there are large numbers of places in the US that if the democracy was that direct, you would have highly restrictive abortion laws, civil unions/gay marriage wouldn't even have made it as far as they have.
I'd submit that much of the civil rights legislation would never have passed either. At least without a much longer period of protest/uprising to push home that the status quo was untenable.
Foreign aid would have been eliminated long ago.
I tend to like the longer time for mass policy changes by representative government as demagogues of all flavors can sway a direct democracy.
Note, I'm not minimizing the problems of representative government. A major one can be summed up in one five letter word. Money.
We've sort of moved from a more unified main stream media model to something a little like the opposed advocacy sort of model used in legal proceedings. If it's not something MSNBC will take time to trawl through, Fox pobably will. And vice verse. etc, through the permutations.
And if neither of them get round to it, the opposition research people of the respective opposed parties or primary candidates will.
They normally list not only the Ad Council, but also the agency that contracted them as well. Listen to the end of one the next time. Sometimes they'll have as many as 3 sponsoring organizations.
Here's a link for the Ad Council web page of their sponsors.
The Ad Council works closely with government departments from HUD to Interior to DOE, to USDA to the same Homeland Security department the original post mentioned.
They are contracted the same way that NBC was to do this one. The only difference is they're a nonprofit.
I'm not trying to say this is a good or bad thing, I'm just pointing out that this is not an unusual situation.
The real question is not so much who the partner was, but is the information and presentation accurate.
How's this different than the PSA's that the Ad Council regularly runs? They're often done by outside corporations. They're usually "nonprofit" corporations. That doesn't always mean they don't have an agenda. Often the agenda is their very reason for being.
Don't believe me? Well, the NRA is a nonprofit corp, for example. At least portions of Earth First are nonprofit corp. The American Conservative Union Foundation that puts on CPAC is a nonprofit corp.
I could go on, but I've given examples that should be suspect to various parts of the political spectrum.
Is the point that it's only OK if they partner with $(groups) that $(individual) agrees with?
Club of Rome, Paul Ehrlich, peak oil, etc, etc. Now Friedman.
A succession of people saying all will be disaster unless you immediately do X that, by the way they consider wise to do for other reasons.
In the reign of Emperor Augustus, historian Livey claimed that if Rome did not return to its founding values (which didn't really exist during its founding by a pretty savage lot) it would surely fall.
He was right. 500 years later for the western part of the empire, and 1000 for the eastern part.
One day such doomsayers will be right. But thus far they have been wrong so many times.
Has anyone noticed how similar this is to the preacher that was saying the world would end on May 22nd?
Like him, when the world fails to end, they say they didn't account for something and set a new date. Now in October, I think?
Similarly, it's now not 1975 or 1980 when it falls apart and we all starve. It's 20xx and we've really got it right this time. We think...
Yeah. Uh huh.
(Note I don't think wasting resources, unending population increase or not conserving energy is wise. I'm highly in favor of efficiency increases. But the claim the gas tank is empty hasn't agreed with what actually happened.)
And what if those claims of how cheap and plentiful solar/renewables are really work?
The same shining lights of this game, Ehrlich, Lovins etc. have stated that a truly cheap clean, plentiful energy source/sources would be a disaster for the world. Mankind would use it to further destroy nature and thus should be limited in energy availability.
"Left for what? There are no jobs that require college degrees. We've got PhDs flipping burgers and pushing mops, FFS."
And what's new about PhD's flipping burgers? Early 80s? Check. In the early 70s we used to kid my brother that when he finished his doctorate in anthropology he'd wash buses for a living. It was only partly a joke.
And it's not just the liberal arts. I work fixing lab equipment, and I've got a physics degree. Before that I was a sysadmin.
No jobs that require college degrees? Really? Sounds like the one your doing requires it to be considered.
Whether it should is a different story.
BTW, I did start and run a business for 2 years. It crashed with the housing downturn. So did a lot of other HVAC/Refrigeration companies.
(You're reading more into my comment than was there. It was twitting an AC saying that he'd gotten to slashdot 4 years early and falsely claiming a first post. Getting to slashdot first, or getting first post may be a little like winning the special olympics.;)
I'd include the left during the 60/ early 70s as a hotbed of the sort of thing you mention. The revolt against any sort of intellectual authority was taken up wholesale by the "turn on, tune in, drop out" generation.
Examples:
Mentioning a gifted program at that time was an anathema to educational theorists who held that nearly all ability was aquired and that all could be brought up to one level with enough effort.
Sadly, this often resulted in the "gifted" program at smaller schools at that time being the special ed room.
My father had to deal with that for much of that period, being a biology teacher. He got it from the religious fundamentalists on evolution, and the left on genetics when it was even obliquely applied to humans.
In literature and philosophy, there was a whole litany against the DWMs (dead white males) and the substitution of nearly anything else for well established classic texts. Some of this was good, as it introduced different viewpoints. But there was much baby that was tossed with bathwater.
Any intellectual pursuit that treaded on the wrong toes was suspect. To research genetic contributions to behavior (real research, not Shockley's nonsense) was suspect. It was a good question in the 70s whether fetters would be put on genetics research aimed at modifying organisms, and most of that didn't come from the right. The right's move against stem cells was a considerably later development.
This was taken to an extreme in the literary criticism movement that went almost to (and in some cases directly to) the belief that all ideas are equal, and no intellectual framework has any more sway than another. Presumably even if it's based on the psychic friends network.
My point is that unlike the view referenced in your article saying that anti-intellectualism was considered by many a hallmark of only conservative protestantism, it was and still is enthusiastically embraced by many different groups. The only criteria was that it be a form of study or knowledge that conflicted with the entrenched views of $(group).
A highly forgettable song about two federal agents going undercover at night in a park to arrest a flasher. They ended up hand cuffed together naked and citizen's arrested by the real flasher.
So, which version from Syrian state media do you prefer?
The one in which they were boasting of smashing the opposition, or the one in which they were playing down the numbers?
On Feb 24th 1982 the NY Times wrote: "The statement - a message of support from the Hama branch of the Baath Party to President Hafez al-Assad -said Government and party security forces ''taught the murderers a lesson that has snuffed out their breath.''"
This isn't prehistory to me. I was 20 at the time and kept track of geopolitics. Hama was known then. The extent of it wasn't so clear. And the memory of it was at least partly eclipsed by the Lebanon war later that year.
Don't just go to Wikipedia. Follow up the sources. Don't get sidetracked that a lot of them from the Wikipedia article are from Robert Fisk. There are many other accounts from more mainstream sources.
I agree with much of what you say. The current unrest hasn't reached a level that's a big threat.
My point is just that the previous actions in Hama provide a precedent. Some of those involved are still in the government. If things go sour for the Syrian regime, officials can point to Hama and say that it was fairly successful, had limited international fallout, and that it may be an effective option once again.
The Muslim Brotherhood was smashed by the Hama massacre and so wounded that for 20 years it wasn't a major problem for the government.
Further, I don't see the US and others to be in a position to intervene to stop such a move. Libya was possible because Gaddhafi had alienated so many world leaders and was a small enough player that UN action wasn't vetoed.
Syria is a very different case. They have a much more effective military that would take large forces to overcome, even if it was fractured between two sides. They also have much stronger ties to veto wielding members of the UN.
Unlike Libya, there's little chance of a refugee crisis coming directly to Europe, thus less to induce them to participate in an intervention.
A unilateral US intervention is unlikely due to the heavy deployment of forces in other theaters. Yes, we have forces next door in Iraq, but the fallout would be large. An Israeli ground intervention would be geopolitical dynamite and they'd be very unlikely to be welcomed by any side of a Syrian civil war.
The record of the past indicates Syria would pay a high international cost for such an action, but that would only last a few years. Compared to losing its position on top, the Alawite regime might consider that acceptable.
The name that worries me is Hama. It's a city in Syria where there was an uprising nearly two decades ago.
Hafez Assad (the father of the current president Bashir Assad) ordered the city of Hama to be put to the sword in 1982. Low estimates of the death toll for that one are 10K, with regime members boasting of much higher totals.
The Syrian regime has the advantage that the people in the regime and in control positions of hte military are largely Alawites, unlike the majority Sunnis. Thus, they'll be less likely to shy away from attacking the populace than say, the Egyptian Army was.
I'm not sure Bashir Assad will feel he has all that much to lose if the uprisings have indeed reached a state that seriously threatens his regime. He may resort to a family tradition.
Google traces targeted gmail password trawling attacks to China.
Reaction?
The "independent" (and presumably "fair and balanced") Global Times calls Google "snotty nosed". The equally "independent" Xinhua News Agency says that the acusation that China was behind the gmail phishing was "evil intentioned".
The Chinese military ups the ante and accuses the US of an undeclared cyber war on the whole world.
In other news, the Reichstag still appears to be vaguely smoldering.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, we've seen how they deal with Islam. Just look at how they treat the Uighurs as compared to Han Chinese.
"Doesn't it suck when the commies are right?"
The Communist Party of China hasn't been "commies" in the traditional sense for a good while. They're more capitalist than parts of Western Europe.
I know about the Jasmine protests. How does that paper over the dissatisfaction with the current migratory labor situation (akin in some ways to southern Africa's with people going to the East for work rather than south.)?
The government isn't pushing the Go West initiative just for fun. They have an imbalance in the level of development between regions of the country that needs to be addressed.
Is the Chinese government under immediate existential threat from mass unrest?
No. And it's unlikely to be so as long as they continue to grow and increase the standard of living at the rate they have been. And yet, in any rapid growth situation, there will be dislocations and groups that get left behind.
Is there a tendency to label legitimate criticisms of the government as being "anti-Chinese" (akin to how legitimate criticism of the US government are sometimes labeled as anti-American)?
Well, I think you just answered that question.
He's comparing apples to oranges.
That's a starting engineer's wage compared to at least the average wage, and more likely the wage of a senior operator with years of experience and time at that particular company.
Are there companies that try/manage to get away with paying engineers entry level wages? Sure. But they tend to get what they pay for.
A more valid criticism would be based on the amount of debt in student loans carried by a starting engineer just getting out of college.
There is no unrest in Zengcheng, and it's all instigated by subversive foreign elements.
They didn't have any operating power reactors anyway.
Just means they'll continue to use other sources or indirectly use nuclear by letting France build them along the border.
Right now there are large numbers of places in the US that if the democracy was that direct, you would have highly restrictive abortion laws, civil unions/gay marriage wouldn't even have made it as far as they have.
I'd submit that much of the civil rights legislation would never have passed either. At least without a much longer period of protest/uprising to push home that the status quo was untenable.
Foreign aid would have been eliminated long ago.
I tend to like the longer time for mass policy changes by representative government as demagogues of all flavors can sway a direct democracy.
Note, I'm not minimizing the problems of representative government. A major one can be summed up in one five letter word. Money.
Perfect way to grow more prairie. Just make all the prairie plants genetically resistant to herbicides.
This either has to be a troll or you're getting started kinda early on the tequila bottle.
It's hard to deforest an area by growing so many trees that you use up too much water.
We've sort of moved from a more unified main stream media model to something a little like the opposed advocacy sort of model used in legal proceedings. If it's not something MSNBC will take time to trawl through, Fox pobably will. And vice verse. etc, through the permutations.
And if neither of them get round to it, the opposition research people of the respective opposed parties or primary candidates will.
Simple?
Yeah, right. Some joker says "Let there be light.", and I end up having to wade through vector calculus and Maxwell's equations.
It's certainly useful for analog systems.
Now we just need something with that kind of electron mobility that still has a band gap so it can be shut off for digital.
They normally list not only the Ad Council, but also the agency that contracted them as well. Listen to the end of one the next time. Sometimes they'll have as many as 3 sponsoring organizations.
Here's a link for the Ad Council web page of their sponsors.
http://www.adcouncil.org/default.aspx?id=72
The Ad Council works closely with government departments from HUD to Interior to DOE, to USDA to the same Homeland Security department the original post mentioned.
They are contracted the same way that NBC was to do this one. The only difference is they're a nonprofit.
I'm not trying to say this is a good or bad thing, I'm just pointing out that this is not an unusual situation.
The real question is not so much who the partner was, but is the information and presentation accurate.
How's this different than the PSA's that the Ad Council regularly runs? They're often done by outside corporations. They're usually "nonprofit" corporations. That doesn't always mean they don't have an agenda. Often the agenda is their very reason for being.
Don't believe me? Well, the NRA is a nonprofit corp, for example. At least portions of Earth First are nonprofit corp. The American Conservative Union Foundation that puts on CPAC is a nonprofit corp.
I could go on, but I've given examples that should be suspect to various parts of the political spectrum.
Is the point that it's only OK if they partner with $(groups) that $(individual) agrees with?
Club of Rome, Paul Ehrlich, peak oil, etc, etc. Now Friedman.
A succession of people saying all will be disaster unless you immediately do X that, by the way they consider wise to do for other reasons.
In the reign of Emperor Augustus, historian Livey claimed that if Rome did not return to its founding values (which didn't really exist during its founding by a pretty savage lot) it would surely fall.
He was right. 500 years later for the western part of the empire, and 1000 for the eastern part.
One day such doomsayers will be right. But thus far they have been wrong so many times.
Has anyone noticed how similar this is to the preacher that was saying the world would end on May 22nd?
Like him, when the world fails to end, they say they didn't account for something and set a new date. Now in October, I think?
Similarly, it's now not 1975 or 1980 when it falls apart and we all starve. It's 20xx and we've really got it right this time. We think...
Yeah. Uh huh.
(Note I don't think wasting resources, unending population increase or not conserving energy is wise. I'm highly in favor of efficiency increases. But the claim the gas tank is empty hasn't agreed with what actually happened.)
And what if those claims of how cheap and plentiful solar/renewables are really work?
The same shining lights of this game, Ehrlich, Lovins etc. have stated that a truly cheap clean, plentiful energy source/sources would be a disaster for the world. Mankind would use it to further destroy nature and thus should be limited in energy availability.
"Left for what? There are no jobs that require college degrees. We've got PhDs flipping burgers and pushing mops, FFS."
And what's new about PhD's flipping burgers? Early 80s? Check. In the early 70s we used to kid my brother that when he finished his doctorate in anthropology he'd wash buses for a living. It was only partly a joke.
And it's not just the liberal arts. I work fixing lab equipment, and I've got a physics degree. Before that I was a sysadmin.
No jobs that require college degrees? Really? Sounds like the one your doing requires it to be considered.
Whether it should is a different story.
BTW, I did start and run a business for 2 years. It crashed with the housing downturn. So did a lot of other HVAC/Refrigeration companies.
(You're reading more into my comment than was there. It was twitting an AC saying that he'd gotten to slashdot 4 years early and falsely claiming a first post. Getting to slashdot first, or getting first post may be a little like winning the special olympics. ;)
It was never just the right or the religious.
I'd include the left during the 60/ early 70s as a hotbed of the sort of thing you mention. The revolt against any sort of intellectual authority was taken up wholesale by the "turn on, tune in, drop out" generation.
Examples:
Mentioning a gifted program at that time was an anathema to educational theorists who held that nearly all ability was aquired and that all could be brought up to one level with enough effort.
Sadly, this often resulted in the "gifted" program at smaller schools at that time being the special ed room.
My father had to deal with that for much of that period, being a biology teacher. He got it from the religious fundamentalists on evolution, and the left on genetics when it was even obliquely applied to humans.
In literature and philosophy, there was a whole litany against the DWMs (dead white males) and the substitution of nearly anything else for well established classic texts. Some of this was good, as it introduced different viewpoints. But there was much baby that was tossed with bathwater.
Any intellectual pursuit that treaded on the wrong toes was suspect. To research genetic contributions to behavior (real research, not Shockley's nonsense) was suspect. It was a good question in the 70s whether fetters would be put on genetics research aimed at modifying organisms, and most of that didn't come from the right. The right's move against stem cells was a considerably later development.
This was taken to an extreme in the literary criticism movement that went almost to (and in some cases directly to) the belief that all ideas are equal, and no intellectual framework has any more sway than another. Presumably even if it's based on the psychic friends network.
My point is that unlike the view referenced in your article saying that anti-intellectualism was considered by many a hallmark of only conservative protestantism, it was and still is enthusiastically embraced by many different groups. The only criteria was that it be a form of study or knowledge that conflicted with the entrenched views of $(group).
"You were designing bio-methane plants?"
A hundred grand for a lot of stinky hot gas?
Not a bad deal, though it sounds a little like politics which also concerns stinky hot gas.
"I don't think it's fair to require that geeks be 50+ years old."
Who said life was fair, young'un?
"Cause I didn't go to college and so got here 4 years before everyone else."
And you'll still be here four years after everyone else has left.
Reminds me of "Smith And Jones" by Ray Stevens
A highly forgettable song about two federal agents going undercover at night in a park to arrest a flasher. They ended up hand cuffed together naked and citizen's arrested by the real flasher.
So, which version from Syrian state media do you prefer?
The one in which they were boasting of smashing the opposition, or the one in which they were playing down the numbers?
On Feb 24th 1982 the NY Times wrote: "The statement - a message of support from the Hama branch of the Baath Party to President Hafez al-Assad -said Government and party security forces ''taught the murderers a lesson that has snuffed out their breath.''"
This isn't prehistory to me. I was 20 at the time and kept track of geopolitics. Hama was known then. The extent of it wasn't so clear. And the memory of it was at least partly eclipsed by the Lebanon war later that year.
Don't just go to Wikipedia. Follow up the sources. Don't get sidetracked that a lot of them from the Wikipedia article are from Robert Fisk. There are many other accounts from more mainstream sources.
I agree with much of what you say. The current unrest hasn't reached a level that's a big threat.
My point is just that the previous actions in Hama provide a precedent. Some of those involved are still in the government. If things go sour for the Syrian regime, officials can point to Hama and say that it was fairly successful, had limited international fallout, and that it may be an effective option once again.
The Muslim Brotherhood was smashed by the Hama massacre and so wounded that for 20 years it wasn't a major problem for the government.
Further, I don't see the US and others to be in a position to intervene to stop such a move. Libya was possible because Gaddhafi had alienated so many world leaders and was a small enough player that UN action wasn't vetoed.
Syria is a very different case. They have a much more effective military that would take large forces to overcome, even if it was fractured between two sides. They also have much stronger ties to veto wielding members of the UN.
Unlike Libya, there's little chance of a refugee crisis coming directly to Europe, thus less to induce them to participate in an intervention.
A unilateral US intervention is unlikely due to the heavy deployment of forces in other theaters. Yes, we have forces next door in Iraq, but the fallout would be large. An Israeli ground intervention would be geopolitical dynamite and they'd be very unlikely to be welcomed by any side of a Syrian civil war.
The record of the past indicates Syria would pay a high international cost for such an action, but that would only last a few years. Compared to losing its position on top, the Alawite regime might consider that acceptable.
The name that worries me is Hama. It's a city in Syria where there was an uprising nearly two decades ago.
Hafez Assad (the father of the current president Bashir Assad) ordered the city of Hama to be put to the sword in 1982. Low estimates of the death toll for that one are 10K, with regime members boasting of much higher totals.
The Syrian regime has the advantage that the people in the regime and in control positions of hte military are largely Alawites, unlike the majority Sunnis. Thus, they'll be less likely to shy away from attacking the populace than say, the Egyptian Army was.
I'm not sure Bashir Assad will feel he has all that much to lose if the uprisings have indeed reached a state that seriously threatens his regime. He may resort to a family tradition.
Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hama_massacre
Google traces targeted gmail password trawling attacks to China.
Reaction?
The "independent" (and presumably "fair and balanced") Global Times calls Google "snotty nosed". The equally "independent" Xinhua News Agency says that the acusation that China was behind the gmail phishing was "evil intentioned".
The Chinese military ups the ante and accuses the US of an undeclared cyber war on the whole world.
In other news, the Reichstag still appears to be vaguely smoldering.