The real irony for students as these universities is that they can't ordinarily access international internet. This is aside from filtering, censorship, rules about websites, etc. The only way that a student with a campus connection can read, for example, the NYTimes series about the large and growing gap between rich and poor in China, would be to either pay for a real internet connection or find a free proxy server to use.
I guess it's an issue of cost to the universities (with I'm sure a much undesired accidental benefit of raising the threshold just that much higher for anyone wanting to read government independent news). And the applications for the high speed network I'm sure are research or engineering projects that will really benefit. But I can't help but wonder if there is more value in opening the network up to the world for these students rather than setting up this high-speed network, i.e. in expanding the number of nodes and connections of the network rather than increasing the size of existing connections.
Biggest reason why this won't work other than most people don't give two shits?
Year-over-year comparisons will be thrown off by this calendar system. He says it'll only be a little bit off but if you're going to be seasonally off year-on-year by almost a week, then it makes it really difficult to have accurate year-on-year time-series regressions. Think about how weather could really throw off any of the calculations... hurricane season being off by a week... instead of some guy scratching his head trying to think what date it is today, you have some guy scratching his head trying to figure out why store sales jumped year-on year.
I mean in East Asia (see the statements preceding it), and by white I don't mean the color, but Abercrombie & Fitch "all-American" white persons. I don't think the Geisha ideal has anything to do with the good point you bring up in your second paragraph, which I think is actually a lot more relevant.
The Geisha ideal is the same one that used to be found in European cultures, the idea being that in agricultural societies, those who are paler must also be richer, not having to labor in the fields all day. The fact that white people have all the money in the US not only explains why marketers should target whites and thus use white models, but also why whiteness is beautiful--it's the same mechanism as above, because people are dumb and they see this correlation between whiteness and power and then call it beauty.
Last, businesses don't care much about the bottom line, but that's not a justification. Changing people's ideas, educating people is important. A business taking part in racist practices just because they think that most people are racist is not justified--that would be circular reasoning. Otherwise we throw our hands up and just say the world is the way exactly it should be. And then we would have no right to feel disgust.
Okay, so another post pointed out the people she sold the rights to SciFi channel, which usually does a poor job with preserving the original work. But when she sold it, she believed that the script writer would have been the one who helped put together the LOTR movies, which was faithful to the books (I guess this depends on how fanatical you are about it), and it just ended up that it wasn't him. So you really can't blame her for thinking it was one way when she sold it and it turning out completely different.
Further, it's ridiculous to put the choice as "making everyone dark-skinned" as if white is the default. Default is the book. And it was a prominent feature of the book. You still don't explain why the book was white-washed--if it doesn't matter and if the reason is to stroke people's egos rather than to explore a future that sounds kind of possible to us in some ways but differs greatly in terms of race--then why should they be stroking the egos of white viewers? A conscious choice was made and I don't buy white is normal in the US where at least 30% of the population is non-white.
Factually, you're wrong about East Asia and whiteness in the media. There IS a lot of whiteness in media and advertising, and I think it begs for explanation. There is the conversion factor, that is there is a whole bunch of western (meaning American) works that are readily sellable once you subtitle it, so you may not modify it to native characters to air it. But tell me, how would you explain the prevalence of white models for cosmetics? Seriously how the fuck does that make any sense?
Do you really buy that white models are better looking than any other models? Even if they are, I mean the idea is that if you use the cosmetics, you'll look like the model right (as unlikely and stupid as that sounds)? But the cosmetics for brown haired chick with pale ass skin can't seriously work for black hair mildly colored skin. Like, it should make it so big of a leap that the ads shouldn't work. But they do. And I can only explain that through the fact that the dominant western powers have perpetuated a stereotype that white is beautiful. And everyone else has been beaten up historically so bad that it is not hard to see why they might accept such values. If you disagree, propose a credible, alternative reason for such prevalence. Again, part of my point in the original post was that those that are on the receiving end of racism can hold these racist values as well either because we all do or because they are in the inferior position and are spoonfed the racism by the dominant elites of society.
I do agree with you that over-recognition of identity is a problem too. Maybe my sex matters more, maybe my occupation, maybe I'm just a big weirdo. Whatever the case though, I do think it would be insulting to not recognize someone's communal cultural identity if they and their community feel it's important.
Regarding LOTR, the essential story was recreated, but no modification was made to make it more Disney-happy-world-everything is good politcally correct for American or worldwide audiences. The reason was, as you say, to stay true to the written work. So then, why the hell was Le Guin's work changed? If you read her article, she says the skin tones are important and she says people who read her books think it's important too.
Your logic regarding mythologies or traditional literature is correct; these should not be a reinterpretation of these stories using concepts we derive from mixed ethnicity modern democratic nation states. Point taken. But it's not applicable. Le Guin's work is NOT constrained by history. She is purposely imagining a future where Western white male dominance no longer exists. It's a fantasy, and the reason for the fantasy is something more like Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" than Beowulf. Any interpretation of the work without consideration of such a prominent detail like the skin or ethnicity of characters that differs greatly from other works in the fantasy/sci-fi genre is if not mistaken, at the very least highly incomplete.
As I mentioned, I don't buy the amusement park-one-of-every-color-it's-a-small-world super safe view of multiculturalism. I think there's something extraordinarily darkly subversive about this view of the world, which is entailed by your statement that you don't ever notice the skin tones of characters. Sure, we want to all live in harmony together. I'll buy that. But to reduce the real, virile, living breathing cultural and ethnic communities to flat two dimensional smiley singing dancing caricatures, that's racism too. Colin Powell was asked once something like "So color doesn't matter to you?" and his quick retort was "Doesn't matter to who?". Ethnicity matters and to not recognize it is as insulting as to mischaracterize it as deviant or inferior or to make it out to be some kind of strait jacket the way stereotypes do.
This is also the difference between the official model of multiculturalism of Canada and the United States. Canada envisions a mixed bag of communities that can preserve their specific ethnicities living together in liberal democracy without rolling over differences as in the "melting pot" of the United States (I don't mean that this actually happens in practice in the United States nor that it should).
One last point. I really take offense at the "I have a friend that is x and he or she thinks y so y is okay" model of argumentation. Just as there is the difference between authorial intent and actual thematics, there is a difference between someone being of x race and doing or thinking y and whether that y is racist or not. Blacks in America after did all sorts of ridiculous caricatures of themselves as clown sort of performers--this absolutely does not legitimize what they were doing. It is not a big leap to think that even people of degraded x race may buy into the racism. That was the argument behind why schools should be integrated in the US since it was shown that black children were buying into the myth that they were intrinsically inferior and that they needed to be shown by society that they were every bit as capable as white students. I'm not necessarily taking issue with your Maori friend's comment, but as I said, I find that line of argumentation quite distasteful.
Long response, hope you can find some things that you agree with.
Le Guin wrote a sci-fi series that was intended to complexify and breakdown the super-whiteness of sci-fi and fantasy, i.e. LOTRs, Vampires, etc. Look, I liked LOTRs but it got a little creepy how white everyone was, and how the only slightly non-white, Arab/African looking guys are bad guys. Le Guin knows she achieved her intended effect because people write to her telling her it did.
So big media wants to turn this written work into a widely viewed video work. Because they believe in the racism of the general public, they commit a racist act themselves (of course they may claim so only to deflect the accusations of racism to others). The theoretical discussion about authorial intent versus thematics is interesting but besides the point--what "unrealized" or "unintended" insights were brought into the film by white-washing it? That's the point.
Taiwan's official position is that it is a sovereign nation and does not make claims to China. This is not to say that they are rejecting all vestiges of their former positions because on the international level, China forces everyone to perceive any changes as moves towards "independence".
Substantively, this means that Taiwan is still officially Republic of China (not People's Republic of China) and they still have both national and province level governments (conceiving Taiwan to be both nationa and province). The latter issue is slowly changing and the province level government is being removed. Will Taiwan officially make everything called Taiwan? Right now they are renaming government enterprises as Taiwan (Taiwan Steel Manufacturing instead of China Steel Manufacturing or whatnot). But the more high level stuff will almost certainly be taken by China to mean that Taiwan is officially declaring "independence". So intentionally, they would like to, but to the extent that they are constrained by China, they cannot completely remove all the vestiges of their former claims to all of China.
I told a friend I met in China about this site and she reads it regularly. She also reads New York Times regularly. The big issue is really college students don't have access to international internet (only domestic) except if you pay for it or if you use proxy servers that only a few people know about. The other issue is the inability to read English. I guess it's been posted on Slashdot that google China does some censorship and there's also the censorship of text messaging which is a huge form of communication in China.
For wireless hackers with a real anarchist bent, one real crazy thing they might try to do is to get around the 5 or so trunk lines that China uses to connect with the rest of the world, beam uncensored interenet from Hong Kong or Russia or if they are really crazy across the Taiwan strait and setup a whole bunch of uncensored proxy servers. I do think that it's going to get beyond the ability of China to censor so much traffic at a certain point, but it'd be quite an interesting hack.
You are about 30 years off the mark. The government that occupied Taiwan WAS from China and attempted to claim that they were the sole legitimate government of Taiwan and China. Taiwanese people, however, were not the ones making this ridiculous foreign policy position as at the time, it was a Leninist style dictatorship. The mainlanders that occupied Taiwan created the one China policy, which the Taiwanese have to live with today.
The really ridiculous thing today is that China might not have ever cared about Taiwan (back in the imperial days it never did) if Taiwan had simply not said that THEY were the legitimate rulers of China. I've talked to a lot of people in China who don't even know about the history of Nationalists fleeing to Taiwan and Taiwan's long separation of over a hundred years from China (too much propaganda I guess), and it's said that the only reason the party leaders in China care is because there'd be huge public pressure on them if they ever let Taiwan DECLARE (not become since they are) independent.
To sum up, Taiwan pretends they own China. China's knee-jerk reaction is to get pissed off and say no we own you. Taiwan becomes democratic throughout 80s and 90s and says actually the real Taiwan never said we own China and we don't want to. China forgets the original reason and because of issues of appearance on the international level, decides that it can't "give up" an island historically it rarely ruled. To analogize, it's like saying we really belong to Britain since a long time ago we did.
The ones on TV are pretty bad, but not all professional reporters are bad--check this analysis of Bush's supposed lack of litmus test on Slate.com The reason Bush brought up a Supreme Court case about abortion, is apparently because it is code word for strict constructionist which is code word for anti-abortion (because to Bush it is so obvious that the Constitution is anti-abortion that to state otherwise is to be activist). I think there are few people other than legal scholars that are honestly "strict constructionist". Whatever your stance on abortion is, Bush is clearly anti-abortion.
Okay, I have a lot of issues with what you say, and I'm sure if I laid out my particular political program you would with mine as well.
One issue that I can't let go before refocusing. Taking a specific example of European invasion in the Americas, the Spanish conquest, we know from many sources that absolutely it is the case that the Spaniards knew that the native peoples were human and they were very aware of the cruel and disgusting nature of their actions. It is much more likely, from having read these accounts, that people wanted to justify in their minds what they were doing, and not that they were somehow actually unaware that these were actual human beings. I agree with you in that I think human beings can be very selfish--and as selfish creatures they are capable of horrendous actions without resorting to also their ignorance and stupidity.
Here is my central question for you though. You seem to take some sort of Hegelian/Marxist position that there is a temporal division between what is right for today and what was right in the past. So, my understanding of what you are saying is that we are progressing in our moral system as we gain more and more knowledge. This is not a unsustainable position, but isn't there a problem in the degradation of the ideas of a single instance in time with such a position: what do the rights in human rights mean, if it is merely a modern idea that does not exist across all times?
This idea that what is right for us is not necessarily what was right for them back then also problemitizes both the assertion that the Roman tradition should be read to educate us on the American system today and that the Roman tradition, if not to be read exclusively, should be read with emphasis. Our system has evolved beyond the Romans--so what does analysis of its historical roots add?
I should add that it is obvious I am a supporter of classical studies of many cultures, as that is something I have done myself. But, I don't think you've justified your particular position.
Being American, I agree that the size of our territory is a good thing, but of course what we mean when we say good is it's good for us but maybe it's not good for everyone (problematic because the ideals of democracy are supposedly universal), and the way in which we acquired was highly illegal and most importantly _contradictory_ to our supposed principles.
I'm going to take strong issue with your dismissal of treatment of the former treatment of Native Americans and Blacks (and Asians, and Jews, and the old blacks Irish and Italians, and gays, and any easily identified group that had yet to establish itself in America). This is a big deal because you say that we should learn from the past, but I do think it's ridiculously idealized into some kind of ideal myth. Fact of the matter is, founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson were well read in classical studies, and I think they really did understand the full implications of democracy. That is precisely why Jefferson and others struggled so much with slavery, owning slaves, yet believing it to be morally wrong. A more likely explanation to their behavior is something like "but everybody else was doing it", not necessarily that these ideas about equality are so modern or that they didn't know about it.
I do agree that classics should be studied, but having been exposed to both Western and Eastern classics (4 semesters of Western, 2 of Eastern), I absolutely would not agree to a curriculum focusing merely on Greco-Roman tradition. They are highly flawed practical models that we should not try and revert to--they do provide however a good source of "intellectual furniture" which we can use to construct our ideal world that we can hope to develop towards in the future. And if we take this more of an idea generation, as a source for paradigms that we can pick and choose from instead of some kind of real, necessary genealogy, then it would absolutely make sense to draw also from Eastern traditions as well, and see how they dealt with the universal problems of suffering, human existence, social organization, ethics, etc.
One counterexample to your sort of educationally conservative viewpoint:
All of our elites in America were educated in the ideal way you describe above, but at the same time, there is little evidence that such an education saved us in the past. This did not prevent American empire building in our earlier days, racism, corruption, or many of the sins of our past. How would you respond to such a critique?
You really do assume a lot when you already call a two-party duopoly a shortcoming. Why would diversity in the number of parties actually mean anything in terms of more closely satisfying some sort of overall aggregation of voter preference? Is it possible there is diversity within parties and even between the Democratic and Republican parties? Do you really think we would have gone to war for example, if Democrats had won the last election? And is war not a big difference?
One example to blow this all up--Ralph Nader--Had he run from within the Democratic Party, he probably would have been a much greater force for change than running from a third party. He would have gotten national coverage and he would have probably influenced the other candidates, perhaps the way all the candidates, Al Sharpton included, seemed to have formed a mosaic that became Kerry. Nader had the option to do it, but he is too scared to be more than just fringe.
I don't necessarily trust the quoted piece of data, but if I did, your argument is still flawed.
First we can deduce that our current system has led to the concentration of wealth. But then, we must decide what the natural state of affairs is when there is no government intervention. If we discover that concentration of wealth would be at an even higher level, then government intervention has slowed down concentration of wealth.
In any case, it is well known among economists and Jesus that the rich and richer and the poor get poorer (relatively speaking) in a system where there is no taxation. It just makes sense--rich guys can make investments, but the poor have to make short-term gambles at the expense of long-term benefits. Examples--poor might not have enough left over to spend on preventative health care, they probably have 0 invested and nothing significant saved, and any time they get in a tight spot, they're more likely to be screwed. Rich on the other hand invest, can make all the decisions from the long-term point of view, probably wouldn't even need to buy certain types of insurance (because they have enough money and time to probably earn a higher expected value than from buying insurance).
It also happens that this libertarian position on taxes is also the biggest problem with Bush's tax cuts. The overall pie may really grow (and a lot of very intelligent macroeconomists would challenge that and up till now it looks like they would be right), but a decrease on income taxes will accelerate the natural growth in difference between rich and poor.
Uh... you realize that that was one of things he did right? Install solar panels? And he does give rational and justification on an economic basis for why solar panels can be better than fossil fuel fired plants.
I think one of the lines of reasoning that is highly prevalent, but also totally unjustified is some kind of need for balance. As in, "They're all just a bunch of liars"... "They're all the same anyways"... "He did ____ but so did ____"... "He's no better", etc.
The problem is that there is no reason reality must be so balanced. If you took all the negative charges from both sides as being entirely truthful, then fine, because they are partisan, of course it turns out both candidates suck, both candidates are liars, whatever. But come on, do you really think all of those negative charges are true? If they really are dishonest, then are you going to believe their charges about the other guy being dishonest just on the face of it? Before you accept those charges, I suggest you do research, and if you want expert opinions, I personally think [slate.com] has some high, high quality well-written, well-researched pieces, mainly because these guys are some of the best journalists around and they call other journalists on their bullshit.
Most people that claim Adam Smith know little about economics and even fewer have ever read him. I take very strong issue with those that claim Adam Smith very casually. With that said, I think my reaction is driven by the posts on Slashdot, and not any one person's ideology.
Adam Smith said invisible hand, but that's because it seemed to meet the interests of everyone at the same time. Smith decided that it was okay that Mr. Capitalist-Bitch can make a buck because he makes society better as a whole and doesn't just benefit himself. So if you see something fucked up, you don't need to go back to economics and say, well, gee, that's what the market decided so it's okay--the market was only justified, the rules were only accepted, because it's supposed to be good for everyone.
I think that's the biggest fallacy when people claim free markets. You can't use the market to justify that something is okay. The market is okay because we decided that it appears to usually bring an outcome that's good for everyone--if it brings an outcome we don't like, then we certainly don't have to accept it. It's not sacred, even if some people act like it is.
hey, this is off topic, i know, but i take issue with: "On the other the peasants never really mattered in China..."
um... can we say COMMUNIST REVOLUTION? seriously, the whole reason mao succeeded is because he got the support of the people.
on topic--here's an example of how weak the filtering is in some ways. a friend of mine tells me that Taiwan's president, "Chen Shuibian [in Chinese of course]" is blocked on Google, but this is easily circumvented by simply searching for "Chen Shui".
you can probably think of many ways of circumventing IM filtering or google filtering as well.
50% of people are NOT dumber than the average person. Think distributions with heavy tails, such as the wealth distribution--a few people are really, really rich, bumping the average up, but having no effect on the dense middle part of the distribution.
50% of people are dumber than the median person, and such a person does not exist if the set has an even (non-odd) population.
Come on, you are really pulling the heart strings, but there are many actions which a starving man may take or a woman with a starving family may take, but many of those actions are illegal. Let's not prejudice this by calling it Un-American either since that's exactly how it was used in the McCarthy era--as a dangerous political tool where no one dared oppose for fear of being called "Un-American".
Fact is, we have all sorts of laws creating intellectual property, and the idea is that it should give incentive to and spur further acts of creativity and hard work. This is what is supposed to happen in most cases, under normal circumstances, even though I suppose Slashdot gives quite a bit of coverage to cases where this doesn't occur.
So, I don't think "feeding your family" is such an automatic excuse--the effects of bringing down non-compete agreements is much larger than this poor guy getting to feed his family. And you don't know that he's poor either.
FYI, The reason IBM sells lower clocked processors is because the chips they use are much higher quality, with a lot of error correction built in.
With something this huge and parallel, you're probably going to have a lot of error correction going on, so to see what would give you the most bang for the buck, you'd have to examine the economics of getting fewer more reliable chips versus getting more less reliable ones (and I bet the answer isn't necessarily so clear).
I'd query the OSA foundation (http://www.osafoundation.org) since they're using python to make a pretty hefty GUI PIM. Dang, what they're doing sounds like such a good idea; I hope they finish soon.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess it's an issue of cost to the universities (with I'm sure a much undesired accidental benefit of raising the threshold just that much higher for anyone wanting to read government independent news). And the applications for the high speed network I'm sure are research or engineering projects that will really benefit. But I can't help but wonder if there is more value in opening the network up to the world for these students rather than setting up this high-speed network, i.e. in expanding the number of nodes and connections of the network rather than increasing the size of existing connections.
Year-over-year comparisons will be thrown off by this calendar system. He says it'll only be a little bit off but if you're going to be seasonally off year-on-year by almost a week, then it makes it really difficult to have accurate year-on-year time-series regressions. Think about how weather could really throw off any of the calculations... hurricane season being off by a week... instead of some guy scratching his head trying to think what date it is today, you have some guy scratching his head trying to figure out why store sales jumped year-on year.
The Geisha ideal is the same one that used to be found in European cultures, the idea being that in agricultural societies, those who are paler must also be richer, not having to labor in the fields all day. The fact that white people have all the money in the US not only explains why marketers should target whites and thus use white models, but also why whiteness is beautiful--it's the same mechanism as above, because people are dumb and they see this correlation between whiteness and power and then call it beauty.
Last, businesses don't care much about the bottom line, but that's not a justification. Changing people's ideas, educating people is important. A business taking part in racist practices just because they think that most people are racist is not justified--that would be circular reasoning. Otherwise we throw our hands up and just say the world is the way exactly it should be. And then we would have no right to feel disgust.
Further, it's ridiculous to put the choice as "making everyone dark-skinned" as if white is the default. Default is the book. And it was a prominent feature of the book. You still don't explain why the book was white-washed--if it doesn't matter and if the reason is to stroke people's egos rather than to explore a future that sounds kind of possible to us in some ways but differs greatly in terms of race--then why should they be stroking the egos of white viewers? A conscious choice was made and I don't buy white is normal in the US where at least 30% of the population is non-white.
Do you really buy that white models are better looking than any other models? Even if they are, I mean the idea is that if you use the cosmetics, you'll look like the model right (as unlikely and stupid as that sounds)? But the cosmetics for brown haired chick with pale ass skin can't seriously work for black hair mildly colored skin. Like, it should make it so big of a leap that the ads shouldn't work. But they do. And I can only explain that through the fact that the dominant western powers have perpetuated a stereotype that white is beautiful. And everyone else has been beaten up historically so bad that it is not hard to see why they might accept such values. If you disagree, propose a credible, alternative reason for such prevalence. Again, part of my point in the original post was that those that are on the receiving end of racism can hold these racist values as well either because we all do or because they are in the inferior position and are spoonfed the racism by the dominant elites of society.
I do agree with you that over-recognition of identity is a problem too. Maybe my sex matters more, maybe my occupation, maybe I'm just a big weirdo. Whatever the case though, I do think it would be insulting to not recognize someone's communal cultural identity if they and their community feel it's important.
Your logic regarding mythologies or traditional literature is correct; these should not be a reinterpretation of these stories using concepts we derive from mixed ethnicity modern democratic nation states. Point taken. But it's not applicable. Le Guin's work is NOT constrained by history. She is purposely imagining a future where Western white male dominance no longer exists. It's a fantasy, and the reason for the fantasy is something more like Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" than Beowulf. Any interpretation of the work without consideration of such a prominent detail like the skin or ethnicity of characters that differs greatly from other works in the fantasy/sci-fi genre is if not mistaken, at the very least highly incomplete.
As I mentioned, I don't buy the amusement park-one-of-every-color-it's-a-small-world super safe view of multiculturalism. I think there's something extraordinarily darkly subversive about this view of the world, which is entailed by your statement that you don't ever notice the skin tones of characters. Sure, we want to all live in harmony together. I'll buy that. But to reduce the real, virile, living breathing cultural and ethnic communities to flat two dimensional smiley singing dancing caricatures, that's racism too. Colin Powell was asked once something like "So color doesn't matter to you?" and his quick retort was "Doesn't matter to who?". Ethnicity matters and to not recognize it is as insulting as to mischaracterize it as deviant or inferior or to make it out to be some kind of strait jacket the way stereotypes do.
This is also the difference between the official model of multiculturalism of Canada and the United States. Canada envisions a mixed bag of communities that can preserve their specific ethnicities living together in liberal democracy without rolling over differences as in the "melting pot" of the United States (I don't mean that this actually happens in practice in the United States nor that it should).
One last point. I really take offense at the "I have a friend that is x and he or she thinks y so y is okay" model of argumentation. Just as there is the difference between authorial intent and actual thematics, there is a difference between someone being of x race and doing or thinking y and whether that y is racist or not. Blacks in America after did all sorts of ridiculous caricatures of themselves as clown sort of performers--this absolutely does not legitimize what they were doing. It is not a big leap to think that even people of degraded x race may buy into the racism. That was the argument behind why schools should be integrated in the US since it was shown that black children were buying into the myth that they were intrinsically inferior and that they needed to be shown by society that they were every bit as capable as white students. I'm not necessarily taking issue with your Maori friend's comment, but as I said, I find that line of argumentation quite distasteful.
Long response, hope you can find some things that you agree with.
Le Guin wrote a sci-fi series that was intended to complexify and breakdown the super-whiteness of sci-fi and fantasy, i.e. LOTRs, Vampires, etc. Look, I liked LOTRs but it got a little creepy how white everyone was, and how the only slightly non-white, Arab/African looking guys are bad guys. Le Guin knows she achieved her intended effect because people write to her telling her it did.
So big media wants to turn this written work into a widely viewed video work. Because they believe in the racism of the general public, they commit a racist act themselves (of course they may claim so only to deflect the accusations of racism to others). The theoretical discussion about authorial intent versus thematics is interesting but besides the point--what "unrealized" or "unintended" insights were brought into the film by white-washing it? That's the point.
Substantively, this means that Taiwan is still officially Republic of China (not People's Republic of China) and they still have both national and province level governments (conceiving Taiwan to be both nationa and province). The latter issue is slowly changing and the province level government is being removed. Will Taiwan officially make everything called Taiwan? Right now they are renaming government enterprises as Taiwan (Taiwan Steel Manufacturing instead of China Steel Manufacturing or whatnot). But the more high level stuff will almost certainly be taken by China to mean that Taiwan is officially declaring "independence". So intentionally, they would like to, but to the extent that they are constrained by China, they cannot completely remove all the vestiges of their former claims to all of China.
For wireless hackers with a real anarchist bent, one real crazy thing they might try to do is to get around the 5 or so trunk lines that China uses to connect with the rest of the world, beam uncensored interenet from Hong Kong or Russia or if they are really crazy across the Taiwan strait and setup a whole bunch of uncensored proxy servers. I do think that it's going to get beyond the ability of China to censor so much traffic at a certain point, but it'd be quite an interesting hack.
The really ridiculous thing today is that China might not have ever cared about Taiwan (back in the imperial days it never did) if Taiwan had simply not said that THEY were the legitimate rulers of China. I've talked to a lot of people in China who don't even know about the history of Nationalists fleeing to Taiwan and Taiwan's long separation of over a hundred years from China (too much propaganda I guess), and it's said that the only reason the party leaders in China care is because there'd be huge public pressure on them if they ever let Taiwan DECLARE (not become since they are) independent.
To sum up, Taiwan pretends they own China. China's knee-jerk reaction is to get pissed off and say no we own you. Taiwan becomes democratic throughout 80s and 90s and says actually the real Taiwan never said we own China and we don't want to. China forgets the original reason and because of issues of appearance on the international level, decides that it can't "give up" an island historically it rarely ruled. To analogize, it's like saying we really belong to Britain since a long time ago we did.
The ones on TV are pretty bad, but not all professional reporters are bad--check this analysis of Bush's supposed lack of litmus test on Slate.com The reason Bush brought up a Supreme Court case about abortion, is apparently because it is code word for strict constructionist which is code word for anti-abortion (because to Bush it is so obvious that the Constitution is anti-abortion that to state otherwise is to be activist). I think there are few people other than legal scholars that are honestly "strict constructionist". Whatever your stance on abortion is, Bush is clearly anti-abortion.
Okay, I have a lot of issues with what you say, and I'm sure if I laid out my particular political program you would with mine as well. One issue that I can't let go before refocusing. Taking a specific example of European invasion in the Americas, the Spanish conquest, we know from many sources that absolutely it is the case that the Spaniards knew that the native peoples were human and they were very aware of the cruel and disgusting nature of their actions. It is much more likely, from having read these accounts, that people wanted to justify in their minds what they were doing, and not that they were somehow actually unaware that these were actual human beings. I agree with you in that I think human beings can be very selfish--and as selfish creatures they are capable of horrendous actions without resorting to also their ignorance and stupidity. Here is my central question for you though. You seem to take some sort of Hegelian/Marxist position that there is a temporal division between what is right for today and what was right in the past. So, my understanding of what you are saying is that we are progressing in our moral system as we gain more and more knowledge. This is not a unsustainable position, but isn't there a problem in the degradation of the ideas of a single instance in time with such a position: what do the rights in human rights mean, if it is merely a modern idea that does not exist across all times? This idea that what is right for us is not necessarily what was right for them back then also problemitizes both the assertion that the Roman tradition should be read to educate us on the American system today and that the Roman tradition, if not to be read exclusively, should be read with emphasis. Our system has evolved beyond the Romans--so what does analysis of its historical roots add? I should add that it is obvious I am a supporter of classical studies of many cultures, as that is something I have done myself. But, I don't think you've justified your particular position.
Being American, I agree that the size of our territory is a good thing, but of course what we mean when we say good is it's good for us but maybe it's not good for everyone (problematic because the ideals of democracy are supposedly universal), and the way in which we acquired was highly illegal and most importantly _contradictory_ to our supposed principles. I'm going to take strong issue with your dismissal of treatment of the former treatment of Native Americans and Blacks (and Asians, and Jews, and the old blacks Irish and Italians, and gays, and any easily identified group that had yet to establish itself in America). This is a big deal because you say that we should learn from the past, but I do think it's ridiculously idealized into some kind of ideal myth. Fact of the matter is, founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson were well read in classical studies, and I think they really did understand the full implications of democracy. That is precisely why Jefferson and others struggled so much with slavery, owning slaves, yet believing it to be morally wrong. A more likely explanation to their behavior is something like "but everybody else was doing it", not necessarily that these ideas about equality are so modern or that they didn't know about it. I do agree that classics should be studied, but having been exposed to both Western and Eastern classics (4 semesters of Western, 2 of Eastern), I absolutely would not agree to a curriculum focusing merely on Greco-Roman tradition. They are highly flawed practical models that we should not try and revert to--they do provide however a good source of "intellectual furniture" which we can use to construct our ideal world that we can hope to develop towards in the future. And if we take this more of an idea generation, as a source for paradigms that we can pick and choose from instead of some kind of real, necessary genealogy, then it would absolutely make sense to draw also from Eastern traditions as well, and see how they dealt with the universal problems of suffering, human existence, social organization, ethics, etc.
All of our elites in America were educated in the ideal way you describe above, but at the same time, there is little evidence that such an education saved us in the past. This did not prevent American empire building in our earlier days, racism, corruption, or many of the sins of our past. How would you respond to such a critique?
You really do assume a lot when you already call a two-party duopoly a shortcoming. Why would diversity in the number of parties actually mean anything in terms of more closely satisfying some sort of overall aggregation of voter preference? Is it possible there is diversity within parties and even between the Democratic and Republican parties? Do you really think we would have gone to war for example, if Democrats had won the last election? And is war not a big difference?
One example to blow this all up--Ralph Nader--Had he run from within the Democratic Party, he probably would have been a much greater force for change than running from a third party. He would have gotten national coverage and he would have probably influenced the other candidates, perhaps the way all the candidates, Al Sharpton included, seemed to have formed a mosaic that became Kerry. Nader had the option to do it, but he is too scared to be more than just fringe.
First we can deduce that our current system has led to the concentration of wealth. But then, we must decide what the natural state of affairs is when there is no government intervention. If we discover that concentration of wealth would be at an even higher level, then government intervention has slowed down concentration of wealth.
In any case, it is well known among economists and Jesus that the rich and richer and the poor get poorer (relatively speaking) in a system where there is no taxation. It just makes sense--rich guys can make investments, but the poor have to make short-term gambles at the expense of long-term benefits. Examples--poor might not have enough left over to spend on preventative health care, they probably have 0 invested and nothing significant saved, and any time they get in a tight spot, they're more likely to be screwed. Rich on the other hand invest, can make all the decisions from the long-term point of view, probably wouldn't even need to buy certain types of insurance (because they have enough money and time to probably earn a higher expected value than from buying insurance).
It also happens that this libertarian position on taxes is also the biggest problem with Bush's tax cuts. The overall pie may really grow (and a lot of very intelligent macroeconomists would challenge that and up till now it looks like they would be right), but a decrease on income taxes will accelerate the natural growth in difference between rich and poor.
Uh... you realize that that was one of things he did right? Install solar panels? And he does give rational and justification on an economic basis for why solar panels can be better than fossil fuel fired plants.
The problem is that there is no reason reality must be so balanced. If you took all the negative charges from both sides as being entirely truthful, then fine, because they are partisan, of course it turns out both candidates suck, both candidates are liars, whatever. But come on, do you really think all of those negative charges are true? If they really are dishonest, then are you going to believe their charges about the other guy being dishonest just on the face of it? Before you accept those charges, I suggest you do research, and if you want expert opinions, I personally think [slate.com] has some high, high quality well-written, well-researched pieces, mainly because these guys are some of the best journalists around and they call other journalists on their bullshit.
Most people that claim Adam Smith know little about economics and even fewer have ever read him. I take very strong issue with those that claim Adam Smith very casually. With that said, I think my reaction is driven by the posts on Slashdot, and not any one person's ideology. Adam Smith said invisible hand, but that's because it seemed to meet the interests of everyone at the same time. Smith decided that it was okay that Mr. Capitalist-Bitch can make a buck because he makes society better as a whole and doesn't just benefit himself. So if you see something fucked up, you don't need to go back to economics and say, well, gee, that's what the market decided so it's okay--the market was only justified, the rules were only accepted, because it's supposed to be good for everyone. I think that's the biggest fallacy when people claim free markets. You can't use the market to justify that something is okay. The market is okay because we decided that it appears to usually bring an outcome that's good for everyone--if it brings an outcome we don't like, then we certainly don't have to accept it. It's not sacred, even if some people act like it is.
hey, this is off topic, i know, but i take issue with: "On the other the peasants never really mattered in China..."
um... can we say COMMUNIST REVOLUTION? seriously, the whole reason mao succeeded is because he got the support of the people.
on topic--here's an example of how weak the filtering is in some ways. a friend of mine tells me that Taiwan's president, "Chen Shuibian [in Chinese of course]" is blocked on Google, but this is easily circumvented by simply searching for "Chen Shui".
you can probably think of many ways of circumventing IM filtering or google filtering as well.
50% of people are NOT dumber than the average person. Think distributions with heavy tails, such as the wealth distribution--a few people are really, really rich, bumping the average up, but having no effect on the dense middle part of the distribution. 50% of people are dumber than the median person, and such a person does not exist if the set has an even (non-odd) population.
Come on, you are really pulling the heart strings, but there are many actions which a starving man may take or a woman with a starving family may take, but many of those actions are illegal. Let's not prejudice this by calling it Un-American either since that's exactly how it was used in the McCarthy era--as a dangerous political tool where no one dared oppose for fear of being called "Un-American".
Fact is, we have all sorts of laws creating intellectual property, and the idea is that it should give incentive to and spur further acts of creativity and hard work. This is what is supposed to happen in most cases, under normal circumstances, even though I suppose Slashdot gives quite a bit of coverage to cases where this doesn't occur.
So, I don't think "feeding your family" is such an automatic excuse--the effects of bringing down non-compete agreements is much larger than this poor guy getting to feed his family. And you don't know that he's poor either.
FYI, The reason IBM sells lower clocked processors is because the chips they use are much higher quality, with a lot of error correction built in.
With something this huge and parallel, you're probably going to have a lot of error correction going on, so to see what would give you the most bang for the buck, you'd have to examine the economics of getting fewer more reliable chips versus getting more less reliable ones (and I bet the answer isn't necessarily so clear).
Agreed. Plus another angle (without absolving any already covered causal entities):
What about the computers that are being taken over, all of the world, many in the United States, almost entirely msft pcs?
I'd query the OSA foundation (http://www.osafoundation.org) since they're using python to make a pretty hefty GUI PIM. Dang, what they're doing sounds like such a good idea; I hope they finish soon.