Thanks for your intelligent reply however I have some comments on your opinion.
1. The limitations on resources are why we're going to see more terrorism (as well as civil unrest) as the marginalized countries (as segments of society) see what they describe as 'decadence' among those countries who waste more in a month than they see in years. Thing is, if we shared some of what we've got, if we managed our resources better, there would be enough to go around for a lot longer.
Re: other planets, I don't expect to see extra-solar space travel or Star Trekkian demi-utopias. I expect a terran dystopia with an ever increasing gap between a slave-like middle class, an untouchable unemployed class and the industrial baron-princes.
2. Nice assumption, how'd you get to that one? I'm speaking from (admittedly limited) experience. In fact I've been through Hong Kong, Guangxi province and Guangdong province. Through. Not to one city. Through. As in travelling through. Stopping in villages, Seeing stuff, visiting family, buying chickens on the road, killing and plucking them myself, not assinine shutterbug toursim. No, I haven't been in the farthest 'outback' regions where the Party is colonizing Mandarin-speaking ethnics to overwhelm the natives. No, I haven't seen anyone carted off by the police. I have had to bribe my way through some situations with various gov't officials. In other cases I've been helped by genuinely nice and civic minded people. I have seen a lot of the reality of what's driving Chinese industrial and commercial "advancement". And a lot of it amounts to "we know labour is cheap here, lets use our own people and sell the rich Americans cheap crap." And my point is, to make myself clear, China is going to take advantage of its situation, and its own people, to move itself into a greater position of world power. Just like the current 1WNs did a century ago.
I never made the claim everyone in China has equal opportunity. I'm simply stating that its significantly less draconian than a generation ago or a generation before that. See what I said "smarts, cunning and connections". A statement that applies a lot to TROTW anyway.
3. You're making the assumption that I've not taken the limitations of the ecosphere into account. Most of the devastation your describing was supposed to happen by now according to a lot of doomsayers I remember quite well from the '70s. I expect it will be along shortly (perhaps 50 or 100 years).
However, kudos to you, you're correct, I'm not over the age of 60 and do not remember any of the Chinese civil wars. Nor am I unfortunate to have been on site for the various uprisings that were crushed during my lifetime. I am quite familiar with how my wife and her parents remember their horrific expeiences since the 1930s and I do know how to read western and Chinese propaganda. However, that said, I'd be more concerned about American leadership succession right now anyway and try to figure out whether the military, intelligence or some other internal power will be the first declare the current regime illegal, stage a coup or begin arresting people. Oh, that's right, they've been doing it for three years now. Silly me.
4. The UN is a polite lie. It always has been. It's called diplomacy. When the polite lie isn't useful, like any treaty the USA enters into, its discarded like a lit cigarette butt into dry leaves. You're absolutely right about the condition of the UN. The world powers have been destroying lesser powers and governments for decades either through assassination, economic manipulation, instigating coups, supporting gov'ts then pulling out, turning a blind eye to genocide then arming another group. The invasion of Iraq was only the most overt example of this. The USA could do this because, like Dennis Leary's song, "we have the bomb". I don't mean literally nuclear WMDs, but just the figurative Big Stick. The story about WMDs was another polite lie that some idiot thought TROTW would buy. Except some believe in the Big Lie of the U
The PRC is now in a position regarding labour and human rights that is quite similar to the USA 100 to 150 years ago. That is, a strong, technologically advanced empire has been built on the backs of an enormous prolitariate, the exploitation of sub-classes (in the USA's case, blacks, natives, the Irish, poor immigrants) and natural resources with few constraining laws to block profitability. The trouble is, while wealth in the USA was distributed amongst a few super-powerful socio-political special interests, in China it is largely centralized within the institution of the Communist Party - a party that has not been Communist in function for more than twenty years.
The industrial, financial and social reforms that were instituted in the early '80s have transformed China from a land where people were outcast from society because their grandfathers owned capital in the 1940s to a nation of opportunity for anyone with enough smarts, cunning and connections - i.e. no different than any western so-called democracy.
Now you see, the more that China (and India, Vietnam, anyone) exploits the first world nations' rapacious appetite for acquisition of material goods, the more that production will shift out of the first world and into the second world and third world. Gradually, over generations, this builds second world nations into first world superpowers/hegemonies. 3WNs (third world nations), if they have sufficient means, will start supplying the ascendant new hegemonies with cheaper goods. The other 3WNs will become breeding grounds for disease, poverty and what TROTW (the rest of the world) will see as terrorism.
In China, the creation of industrial barons, mostly with connections to The Party, _will_ in fact distribute wealth and power.
Will it solve all the problems of human rights, poverty and everything western 1WN hypocrites complain about concerning China? Of course not. But then again, considering the human rights abuses inside the USA, the non-functioning so-called democratic system, the ownership of the government by industrial barons, the brainwashing of the people by mass big-monied media, the rampant flouting of international law, really, the USA and most 1WNs have no cause to complain other than that they see someone new on the field who's just as capable of playing dirty cricket as the current old school players.
The really cool Hong Kong cinema is still a lot of Cantonese and those southern regions you spoke of are largely natively Cantonese. The new economic zones of Zhuhai and Shenzhen are both heavily Cantonese and it reaches up to the border of Guangdong prov with Guangxi prov. Guangzhou in Guangdong is a great place to make money as are ZH and SZ. If you want to talk to the people then either language will do fine.
Disclaimer - I was born atheist, became agnostic when I started trying to make logical sense of the universe, now I'm Buddho-Christian-heretic. I believe in God, but I believe evolution, quantum theory and rocket science - at least as far as they are scientific explanations for natural phenomena. I'm particularly thankful for anti-biotics, insulin and fetal heart monitors.
From an anthropological standpoint 'atheism' quacks like a duck, therefore it is a duck... er, religion. Thing is you see, atheists are as varied as deists. Atheists are segmented into cults of personality, cults of dogma and then there's all the millions of non-practicing atheists, like my friend the born-Catholic, reborn as sexist, alcoholic jock. To him God/god/goddess/gods (etc) is just a non-issue.
Atheism is an -ISM. It's a belief system the super-ordinating maxim of which is "there is no god", (not, "I don't believe in God") and all other values stem from that. This can be as ancient as Buddhism or as modern and topical as a talk show where libertarian lawyers tear apart ex-Catholic priests to the chears of the studio audience.
Atheism has plenty of positions on morality, just as there are plenty of sects in Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and any other religion, and few of them agree any more than deists/theists. Some atheists think abortion is just fine because human life has no meaning. Some think abortion is an abomination because human life is the only thing that has meaning.
Some atheists actively pursue the destruction of theisms. (Like Communists and Socialists.) Most, like my friend, couldn't give a fig. There are other _groups_ that feel theists/deists are deluded, incapable of seeing logical truth and are therefore insane. This group of atheists, seeing that the deists/theists are irrational, would like to ensure deists/theists aren't allowed to vote, or, in some cases, raise children, since they would pass on their irrationalism to the children.
Atheism is institutionalized in the charters of rights and freedoms, constitutions and innumerable legal documents of various nations. It is likewise institutionalized in the forms of Communism and Socialism. The mental health community in North America, as I have seen it, is vehemently hostile to any form of belief that does not elevate the individual and said individual's impulses to pre-eminance. I've known shrinks to push their patients to cast off all "religious" beliefs and just do whatever they felt like. Some of those people have AIDS now.
Untold magazines line any newstand's shelves catering to the belief in the non-existence of any form of supernatural reality. They promote the infallibility of science, the superiority of humanity and the eventual ascendance of the human mind to transhuman and possibly transcendent states. Science departments at universities don't take a stand of "we're not here to talk about supernatural realities, we're here to measure the natural world". They publicly castrate anyone who asks a simple question about intelligent design. Or anyone who questions the presently accepted theory or points out that the current theory superceded a previous one and the current one might be as wrong as the previous and, wait, why are you throwing me out of the class, I have scientific proof, wait...
And most philosophy departments will have one or more experts on the dogma/doctrine (depending on sect) that is Freud's "The Future of an Illusion". That will get pounded on dogmatically, emphatically and emotionally every chance the professor gets.
From my experience, atheism is an active and varied belief system which is deeply entrenched within the modern cultures of the world.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not down on atheism. It's just really, really unscientific to think that atheism isn't a religious belief system.
I've talked to too many so-called web gurus who refuse to make their code cross-browser compatible because "those other browsers are too picky". It's called standards compliance you idiots. If these simpering fools are tired of IE then they don't have to write for it, they don't have to support it. They should start making it clear (to users and MS) that using Mozilla or Opera or whatever is better than IE. Then when IE's market share starts to drop maybe MS will get a clue.
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Thanks for your intelligent reply however I have some comments on your opinion.
1. The limitations on resources are why we're going to see more terrorism (as well as civil unrest) as the marginalized countries (as segments of society) see what they describe as 'decadence' among those countries who waste more in a month than they see in years. Thing is, if we shared some of what we've got, if we managed our resources better, there would be enough to go around for a lot longer.
Re: other planets, I don't expect to see extra-solar space travel or Star Trekkian demi-utopias. I expect a terran dystopia with an ever increasing gap between a slave-like middle class, an untouchable unemployed class and the industrial baron-princes.
2. Nice assumption, how'd you get to that one? I'm speaking from (admittedly limited) experience. In fact I've been through Hong Kong, Guangxi province and Guangdong province. Through. Not to one city. Through. As in travelling through. Stopping in villages, Seeing stuff, visiting family, buying chickens on the road, killing and plucking them myself, not assinine shutterbug toursim. No, I haven't been in the farthest 'outback' regions where the Party is colonizing Mandarin-speaking ethnics to overwhelm the natives. No, I haven't seen anyone carted off by the police. I have had to bribe my way through some situations with various gov't officials. In other cases I've been helped by genuinely nice and civic minded people. I have seen a lot of the reality of what's driving Chinese industrial and commercial "advancement". And a lot of it amounts to "we know labour is cheap here, lets use our own people and sell the rich Americans cheap crap." And my point is, to make myself clear, China is going to take advantage of its situation, and its own people, to move itself into a greater position of world power. Just like the current 1WNs did a century ago.
I never made the claim everyone in China has equal opportunity. I'm simply stating that its significantly less draconian than a generation ago or a generation before that. See what I said "smarts, cunning and connections". A statement that applies a lot to TROTW anyway.
3. You're making the assumption that I've not taken the limitations of the ecosphere into account. Most of the devastation your describing was supposed to happen by now according to a lot of doomsayers I remember quite well from the '70s. I expect it will be along shortly (perhaps 50 or 100 years).
However, kudos to you, you're correct, I'm not over the age of 60 and do not remember any of the Chinese civil wars. Nor am I unfortunate to have been on site for the various uprisings that were crushed during my lifetime. I am quite familiar with how my wife and her parents remember their horrific expeiences since the 1930s and I do know how to read western and Chinese propaganda. However, that said, I'd be more concerned about American leadership succession right now anyway and try to figure out whether the military, intelligence or some other internal power will be the first declare the current regime illegal, stage a coup or begin arresting people. Oh, that's right, they've been doing it for three years now. Silly me.
4. The UN is a polite lie. It always has been. It's called diplomacy. When the polite lie isn't useful, like any treaty the USA enters into, its discarded like a lit cigarette butt into dry leaves. You're absolutely right about the condition of the UN. The world powers have been destroying lesser powers and governments for decades either through assassination, economic manipulation, instigating coups, supporting gov'ts then pulling out, turning a blind eye to genocide then arming another group. The invasion of Iraq was only the most overt example of this. The USA could do this because, like Dennis Leary's song, "we have the bomb". I don't mean literally nuclear WMDs, but just the figurative Big Stick. The story about WMDs was another polite lie that some idiot thought TROTW would buy. Except some believe in the Big Lie of the U
The PRC is now in a position regarding labour and human rights that is quite similar to the USA 100 to 150 years ago. That is, a strong, technologically advanced empire has been built on the backs of an enormous prolitariate, the exploitation of sub-classes (in the USA's case, blacks, natives, the Irish, poor immigrants) and natural resources with few constraining laws to block profitability. The trouble is, while wealth in the USA was distributed amongst a few super-powerful socio-political special interests, in China it is largely centralized within the institution of the Communist Party - a party that has not been Communist in function for more than twenty years.
The industrial, financial and social reforms that were instituted in the early '80s have transformed China from a land where people were outcast from society because their grandfathers owned capital in the 1940s to a nation of opportunity for anyone with enough smarts, cunning and connections - i.e. no different than any western so-called democracy.
Now you see, the more that China (and India, Vietnam, anyone) exploits the first world nations' rapacious appetite for acquisition of material goods, the more that production will shift out of the first world and into the second world and third world. Gradually, over generations, this builds second world nations into first world superpowers/hegemonies. 3WNs (third world nations), if they have sufficient means, will start supplying the ascendant new hegemonies with cheaper goods. The other 3WNs will become breeding grounds for disease, poverty and what TROTW (the rest of the world) will see as terrorism.
In China, the creation of industrial barons, mostly with connections to The Party, _will_ in fact distribute wealth and power.
Will it solve all the problems of human rights, poverty and everything western 1WN hypocrites complain about concerning China? Of course not. But then again, considering the human rights abuses inside the USA, the non-functioning so-called democratic system, the ownership of the government by industrial barons, the brainwashing of the people by mass big-monied media, the rampant flouting of international law, really, the USA and most 1WNs have no cause to complain other than that they see someone new on the field who's just as capable of playing dirty cricket as the current old school players.
The really cool Hong Kong cinema is still a lot of Cantonese and those southern regions you spoke of are largely natively Cantonese. The new economic zones of Zhuhai and Shenzhen are both heavily Cantonese and it reaches up to the border of Guangdong prov with Guangxi prov. Guangzhou in Guangdong is a great place to make money as are ZH and SZ. If you want to talk to the people then either language will do fine.
Disclaimer - I was born atheist, became agnostic when I started trying to make logical sense of the universe, now I'm Buddho-Christian-heretic. I believe in God, but I believe evolution, quantum theory and rocket science - at least as far as they are scientific explanations for natural phenomena. I'm particularly thankful for anti-biotics, insulin and fetal heart monitors.
From an anthropological standpoint 'atheism' quacks like a duck, therefore it is a duck... er, religion. Thing is you see, atheists are as varied as deists. Atheists are segmented into cults of personality, cults of dogma and then there's all the millions of non-practicing atheists, like my friend the born-Catholic, reborn as sexist, alcoholic jock. To him God/god/goddess/gods (etc) is just a non-issue.
Atheism is an -ISM. It's a belief system the super-ordinating maxim of which is "there is no god", (not, "I don't believe in God") and all other values stem from that. This can be as ancient as Buddhism or as modern and topical as a talk show where libertarian lawyers tear apart ex-Catholic priests to the chears of the studio audience.
Atheism has plenty of positions on morality, just as there are plenty of sects in Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and any other religion, and few of them agree any more than deists/theists. Some atheists think abortion is just fine because human life has no meaning. Some think abortion is an abomination because human life is the only thing that has meaning.
Some atheists actively pursue the destruction of theisms. (Like Communists and Socialists.) Most, like my friend, couldn't give a fig. There are other _groups_ that feel theists/deists are deluded, incapable of seeing logical truth and are therefore insane. This group of atheists, seeing that the deists/theists are irrational, would like to ensure deists/theists aren't allowed to vote, or, in some cases, raise children, since they would pass on their irrationalism to the children.
Atheism is institutionalized in the charters of rights and freedoms, constitutions and innumerable legal documents of various nations. It is likewise institutionalized in the forms of Communism and Socialism. The mental health community in North America, as I have seen it, is vehemently hostile to any form of belief that does not elevate the individual and said individual's impulses to pre-eminance. I've known shrinks to push their patients to cast off all "religious" beliefs and just do whatever they felt like. Some of those people have AIDS now.
Untold magazines line any newstand's shelves catering to the belief in the non-existence of any form of supernatural reality. They promote the infallibility of science, the superiority of humanity and the eventual ascendance of the human mind to transhuman and possibly transcendent states. Science departments at universities don't take a stand of "we're not here to talk about supernatural realities, we're here to measure the natural world". They publicly castrate anyone who asks a simple question about intelligent design. Or anyone who questions the presently accepted theory or points out that the current theory superceded a previous one and the current one might be as wrong as the previous and, wait, why are you throwing me out of the class, I have scientific proof, wait...
And most philosophy departments will have one or more experts on the dogma/doctrine (depending on sect) that is Freud's "The Future of an Illusion". That will get pounded on dogmatically, emphatically and emotionally every chance the professor gets.
From my experience, atheism is an active and varied belief system which is deeply entrenched within the modern cultures of the world.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not down on atheism. It's just really, really unscientific to think that atheism isn't a religious belief system.
I've talked to too many so-called web gurus who refuse to make their code cross-browser compatible because "those other browsers are too picky". It's called standards compliance you idiots. If these simpering fools are tired of IE then they don't have to write for it, they don't have to support it. They should start making it clear (to users and MS) that using Mozilla or Opera or whatever is better than IE. Then when IE's market share starts to drop maybe MS will get a clue.