The Chinese built a wall 400 years ago. Have y0u seen it? Surely with modern technology we could at least equal it. By itself it wouldn't stop the traffic, but throw a group of armed guards every 100 yards with regular patrols on both sides, and you have something that will stop illegal immigrants from even bothering to make the trip to the border.
Once you've stopped the immigrants from trying, you can get serious about the drug and weapons traffickers. Shooting an immigrant is bad. Shooting a drug or weapon smuggler is a different matter. We need to secure the border from all three - illegal immigrants, drugs, and weapons.
Yes, it will be expensive, but it will be well worth it, both for the U.S. and for Mexico.
Of course they're not precisely the same, but they're all the same side of the left-right spectrum and are different manifestations of the same core values.
Political labels aren't simple, and I won't attempt or even claim to be able to explain the history of each one. But it does seem that while the basic idea of heavy government control of industry and commerce in order to more evenly distribute the wealth has been around at least since Marx and has evolved. With that evolution has come new names.
American conservatism also evolved at the same time but without the frequent renaming. I believe at least part of the reason for this is that conservatism hasn't discredited itself to the extent that the various forms of Marxism/communism/liberalism did.
"Liberal" is just the word the extreme right has made up to describe anyone they disagree with. It's a label, almost a pejorative they've created so they can just say, "He's a liberal," instead of dealing with something a person has said that has any validity. It's a way to call names instead of dealing with the facts.
It's been so distorted by people that think there is their way and the wrong way that it really doesn't have any meaning any longer.
At this point in time, Liberal is just the recent word to describe Marxism, all the previous words having developed a bad reputation because of their results. Marxist, socialist, communist - they've all fallen into disrepute. Liberal is going the same way, so now you hear liberals trying to revive the word "progressive" because they think it sounds better and has less baggage. The problem is the ideas haven't changed. If "progressive" becomes the new word for "liberal", then "progressive" will get a bad rep too, and they'll come up with a new word.
As for the contention that conservatives "made up" the word liberal - in fact what American conservatives advocate is what used to be called "liberal" - small government, few regulations. In fact if you read conservative rags you'll see they're actually trying to reclaim the word by using the term "classical liberal" to describe themselves.
As another poster pointed out, the US does have a very strange definition of "middle"... by European standards, Obama would be considered right-wing.... Even by Canadian standards, he's centrist at best, if not somewhat right-wing (though Harper and his lackies are doing a good job of rewriting what's considered extreme right-wing in this country).
And by Chinese and Russian standards our conservatives devotion to a written constitution that guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, rule of law etc. is is even more extremists than the Canadians think it is. With the Russians, Chinese, and Saudis on the far left, and the Canadians and Europeans in the middle, I'm hope the U.S. stays on the far right for a very long time.
(note that in the U.S. politics "right" is the polar opposite of what "right" usually refers to in Russia, China and Saudi Arabia)
I just noticed Stagecoach and How the West was Won are on there. Red River is there which makes 5 for John Wayne. How Green Was My Valley is there which makes 5 for John Ford too.
If The Longest Day and The Quiet Man were on the list, and they certainly should be, that would make 6 for both John Ford and 7 for John Wayne.
Obviously the people making the selections have some catching up to do. Until then, and unless I've missed some, Wayne and Ford are tied with Lucas and Spielberg.
I think you've proven that you can't build such a device (one that both simulates a universe and modifies said universe) - to put it another way, you may not be able to build the universe simulating device inside the universe it is simulating.
But I don't think you've succeeded in proving that there is free will.
The funny thing about the Taiwanese is that they are, as a people, mostly willing to return to China.
Opinion polls show more people in Taiwan desire immediate independence than want to be part of China. I suspect far more would rather return to Japan than return to China; Japan treated Taiwan better than China did. Opinion polls the vast majority want to "maintain the status quo" which is of course de facto independence with no formal declaration. It's easy to see why: they have neighbor 50 times larger than them who keeps threatening war if they formally declare independence. Status quo maintains independence without the risk of war.
The government is very much not and alot of businesses aren't either.
The government, which despite Taiwan's democracy is still controlled through bureaucratic inertia by the Chinese and their descendents who showed up in the 1940s, is torn between its loyalty to their Chinese homeland and the preference for being a big fish in a small pond instead of a small fish in a big pond.
Businesses are similarly torn. Businesses, unlike the government bureaucracy, are often run by Taiwanese who are loyal to Taiwan. But there is a lot of money to be made in China. Also, even those businesses run by Chinese nationalists recognize that being part of China means a serious degradation in property rights.
And for us in IT since Taiwanese motherboard makers make up nearly all the retail board makers in the world... Is probably best it not scoot back to China right now...
The people though generally support China, and not Hong Kong style China, but the mainland originally CCP government.
Where are you getting this? I suspect you've landed in a group of Chinese nationalists (which means you probably live in Taipei or in an expat community outside Taiwan). Chinese nationalists and their descendents make up only about 10 to 15% of the population. I include "descendents" because I have noticed that anytime someone from Taiwan has told me they consider Taiwan to be part of China, they have anscestors who came from China in the 1940s or later.
But taiwan is strange in general... Historically when they were the pirate port for Chinese goods over the seas, the Chinese government hunted them down and cut off their heads. Around a hundred years later when Manchuria invaded China and took over, the taiwanese sided with the Chinese government against the Manchurians... Only to have the Manchurians take a huge disliking to them to the point of harsh treatment including a scorched earth tactic on the mainland for around 15 years as they built a navy to sail to Taiwan to put them down. Then China looses Taiwan to Japan before the start of the 20th century as they fail to modernize. And after WW2 Taiwan plays a role again as the former dictatorship of China flees from the CCP and ends up in Taiwan as their new home.
Obviously just some highlights, but it's been an... interesting place...
And let's not forget that the Taiwanese fought for the Japanese in WWII. If you read most of the news reports in English, the Japanese era tends to be overlooked. The statement is always something like "Taiwan and China split amid civil war" but this is misleading. The Chinese Nationalists an the Chinese Communists split, but the Chinese Nationalists were not synonymous with Taiwan. They were newcomers taking over a society that had become educated and industrialized by Japan and had fought against the Chinese Nationalists in WWII.
"I would consider China "freer", but they haven't waged war with just about everything like the US."
No, the Chinese prefer to simply bludgeon their own (Tibet, Tienanmen Square, and constantly threatening war over Taiwan...)
The Chinese do consider the Taiwanese "their own", but the Taiwanese are not too fond of slavery and being someone else's possession. Taiwan and China have a lot of common ancestry and culture, but only about the same as the Americas and Europe. They have a similar history two, with immigration from China to Taiwan starting in the 1600s and largely displacing and assimilating the natives.
After Taiwan was separated from the Empire of China back in 1895, back when the Russians had a czar, back before the Cubs last won the World Series, back when Queen Victoria was on the throne, and back before Cuba and the Phillippine were separated from Spain. Since that Time, Taiwan and China have been under the same Chinese government for about 4 year. Right after WWII when the Phillippines were returned to the U.S., Vietnam to the French, and Hong Kong to the British, Taiwan was similarly re-colonized by the Chinese, resulting in the 2-28 massecre in which many thousands were killed.
The Chinese leadership that the Allies put in charge of Taiwan promptly lost their civil war in China, and fled to the island where they declared martial law and continued to imprison or kill too many Taiwanese. Only in recent years have the Taiwanese started to have a voice in government.
Calling them "China's own" offends many of them. Despite that Chinese government spending 45 years of unopposed propaganda telling the Taiwanese that they are really "Chinese", and continuing to do so even to day with control of most of the media, most Taiwanese still consider China a foreign country.
Conservatives by definition "conserve", they try to keep things the same. That is why "conservatives" in Afghanistan are so different from "conservatives" in America, the status quo in the two places is different, so "keeping things the same" or "going back to the old ways" means very different things, so conservative Afghans are very different from conservative Americans.
You are right that throughout history "conservatives" have usually opposed positive change - they oppose change by definition. By that same definition, "conservatives" almost always oppose negative change as well. Conservatives opposed communism, Nazism, eugenics, and a lot of other things that they were right to oppose.
Yes, I believe you are right that there is a parallel to the claims Iraq was making to Kuwait based on Kuwait and Iraq having been part of the same empire at some time in the distant past. It is true that as recently as 1895 Taiwan and China were both part of the Manchu empire (while originally considered foreign, the Manchus eventually came to be considered Chinese).
I've heard it said that much of the Chinese government's restrictions on free speech, protest, etc. are to maintain social stability.
Is that an ideal that's especially resonant with the Chinese culture for some reason? If so, why?
They've had plenty of problems with instability, including as recently as the cultural revolution. Prior to that they had the Chinese Civil War. Prior to that World War II in which both the Chinese and the Japanese killed a lot of Chinese. Prior to that they had many decades of great power contests over the Chinese empire. So it does seem to make sense that they would place some value on stability.
What gets me is that they even claim their imperialist ambition to capture Taiwan is somehow tied to stability.
It is more accurate that a person's basic human right to free speech (UN article 19) may have been violated if it is shown that it didn't infringe on another person's basic human right to not be falsely accused (UN articles 8,9,10 and most importantly article 30). These are listed within the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights [un.org].
Being falsely accused in a conversation is different from being falsely accused by a court of law.
Fortunately the U.S. is governed by the U.S. Constitution not by the U.N.. We still have some freedom here, and some semblance of democracy too.
My local blockbuster kept getting smaller. I was having a harder and harder time finding the movies I wanted to rent. After years of waiting for prices to drop, I finally bought a high-def TV and was looking forward to seeing movies on it. I went to BlockBuster and couldn't find anything. I had bought an internet enabled TV, expecting that Netflix et al. would be the wave of the future. As they were online and didn't need physical media, I figured Netflix would have a HUGE selection. But they hardly had anything! Blockbusters internet pickings were pretty slim too! I couldn't find "The Quiet Man" (which I have wanted to see in high def for ages). I couldn't find Abbott and Costello films for the kids to watch. They had very few movies that were less than 10 years old. There are 80+ years of talking movies! Even if I had seen everything made since I was born I would have seen less than half of the best movies. My kids have seen even less. Why does Netflix think we only want to see the recent stuff - it's not like we've already seen everything else.
Anyway, while I would love to watch movies on my new TV, I hardly watch anything because I just can't find anything to watch. Maybe once or twice a year a new movie comes out that's worth seeing, but I can't justify a subscription service based on that.
Blockbuster should have made their whole library available on streaming video.
IQ tests usually measure a kind of intelligence that has little to do with teaching and little to do with becoming an "accomplished scientist". Edison didn't just invent stuff - he organized and lead a large staff of inventors. I always point out to kids that Einstein didn't become famous when he came up with theory of relativity - he became famous when he wrote a paper about it and persuaded large numbers of fellow scientists to believe him.
Having a high IQ that allows you to come up with great ideas for humanity is useless if you can't persuade anyone to listen. All get from that is later being able to say "I told you so" to people who still aren't listening.
"Taiwan will ban Google even faster than Chinese government because Taiwan doesn't think that they are part of China"
Actualy, the people who would do the banning, the government of Taiwan, thinks Taiwan is part of China. It is the people of Taiwan who think Taiwan is not part of China (though a minority agree with the government).
Slashdot Mirror
That's not a problem for Taiwanese, as these two babes demonstrate.
The Chinese built a wall 400 years ago. Have y0u seen it? Surely with modern technology we could at least equal it. By itself it wouldn't stop the traffic, but throw a group of armed guards every 100 yards with regular patrols on both sides, and you have something that will stop illegal immigrants from even bothering to make the trip to the border.
Once you've stopped the immigrants from trying, you can get serious about the drug and weapons traffickers. Shooting an immigrant is bad. Shooting a drug or weapon smuggler is a different matter. We need to secure the border from all three - illegal immigrants, drugs, and weapons.
Yes, it will be expensive, but it will be well worth it, both for the U.S. and for Mexico.
I dare say the Indians would have been better off had they been able to agree on stricter immigration laws and been able to enforce them.
Of course they're not precisely the same, but they're all the same side of the left-right spectrum and are different manifestations of the same core values.
Political labels aren't simple, and I won't attempt or even claim to be able to explain the history of each one. But it does seem that while the basic idea of heavy government control of industry and commerce in order to more evenly distribute the wealth has been around at least since Marx and has evolved. With that evolution has come new names.
American conservatism also evolved at the same time but without the frequent renaming. I believe at least part of the reason for this is that conservatism hasn't discredited itself to the extent that the various forms of Marxism/communism/liberalism did.
"Liberal" is just the word the extreme right has made up to describe anyone they disagree with. It's a label, almost a pejorative they've created so they can just say, "He's a liberal," instead of dealing with something a person has said that has any validity. It's a way to call names instead of dealing with the facts.
It's been so distorted by people that think there is their way and the wrong way that it really doesn't have any meaning any longer.
At this point in time, Liberal is just the recent word to describe Marxism, all the previous words having developed a bad reputation because of their results. Marxist, socialist, communist - they've all fallen into disrepute. Liberal is going the same way, so now you hear liberals trying to revive the word "progressive" because they think it sounds better and has less baggage. The problem is the ideas haven't changed. If "progressive" becomes the new word for "liberal", then "progressive" will get a bad rep too, and they'll come up with a new word.
As for the contention that conservatives "made up" the word liberal - in fact what American conservatives advocate is what used to be called "liberal" - small government, few regulations. In fact if you read conservative rags you'll see they're actually trying to reclaim the word by using the term "classical liberal" to describe themselves.
As another poster pointed out, the US does have a very strange definition of "middle"... by European standards, Obama would be considered right-wing.... Even by Canadian standards, he's centrist at best, if not somewhat right-wing (though Harper and his lackies are doing a good job of rewriting what's considered extreme right-wing in this country).
And by Chinese and Russian standards our conservatives devotion to a written constitution that guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, rule of law etc. is is even more extremists than the Canadians think it is. With the Russians, Chinese, and Saudis on the far left, and the Canadians and Europeans in the middle, I'm hope the U.S. stays on the far right for a very long time.
(note that in the U.S. politics "right" is the polar opposite of what "right" usually refers to in Russia, China and Saudi Arabia)
I just noticed Stagecoach and How the West was Won are on there. Red River is there which makes 5 for John Wayne. How Green Was My Valley is there which makes 5 for John Ford too.
If The Longest Day and The Quiet Man were on the list, and they certainly should be, that would make 6 for both John Ford and 7 for John Wayne.
Obviously the people making the selections have some catching up to do. Until then, and unless I've missed some, Wayne and Ford are tied with Lucas and Spielberg.
Which means that Lucas and Spielberg are tied at five each for films included in the Registry (unless I have overlooked some).
How many for John Ford? I saw The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance on the list. Anyone recognize any others?
Excellent Explanation AC.
To give a simpler example of the same fallacy:
X = -1
squaring both sides we get.
X^2 = 1
Taking the square root we get.
X = 1
Substituting back into the original equation we find:
1 = -1
I think you've proven that you can't build such a device (one that both simulates a universe and modifies said universe) - to put it another way, you may not be able to build the universe simulating device inside the universe it is simulating.
But I don't think you've succeeded in proving that there is free will.
The funny thing about the Taiwanese is that they are, as a people, mostly willing to return to China.
Opinion polls show more people in Taiwan desire immediate independence than want to be part of China. I suspect far more would rather return to Japan than return to China; Japan treated Taiwan better than China did. Opinion polls the vast majority want to "maintain the status quo" which is of course de facto independence with no formal declaration. It's easy to see why: they have neighbor 50 times larger than them who keeps threatening war if they formally declare independence. Status quo maintains independence without the risk of war.
The government is very much not and alot of businesses aren't either.
The government, which despite Taiwan's democracy is still controlled through bureaucratic inertia by the Chinese and their descendents who showed up in the 1940s, is torn between its loyalty to their Chinese homeland and the preference for being a big fish in a small pond instead of a small fish in a big pond.
Businesses are similarly torn. Businesses, unlike the government bureaucracy, are often run by Taiwanese who are loyal to Taiwan. But there is a lot of money to be made in China. Also, even those businesses run by Chinese nationalists recognize that being part of China means a serious degradation in property rights.
And for us in IT since Taiwanese motherboard makers make up nearly all the retail board makers in the world... Is probably best it not scoot back to China right now...
The people though generally support China, and not Hong Kong style China, but the mainland originally CCP government.
Where are you getting this? I suspect you've landed in a group of Chinese nationalists (which means you probably live in Taipei or in an expat community outside Taiwan). Chinese nationalists and their descendents make up only about 10 to 15% of the population. I include "descendents" because I have noticed that anytime someone from Taiwan has told me they consider Taiwan to be part of China, they have anscestors who came from China in the 1940s or later.
But taiwan is strange in general... Historically when they were the pirate port for Chinese goods over the seas, the Chinese government hunted them down and cut off their heads. Around a hundred years later when Manchuria invaded China and took over, the taiwanese sided with the Chinese government against the Manchurians... Only to have the Manchurians take a huge disliking to them to the point of harsh treatment including a scorched earth tactic on the mainland for around 15 years as they built a navy to sail to Taiwan to put them down. Then China looses Taiwan to Japan before the start of the 20th century as they fail to modernize. And after WW2 Taiwan plays a role again as the former dictatorship of China flees from the CCP and ends up in Taiwan as their new home.
Obviously just some highlights, but it's been an... interesting place...
And let's not forget that the Taiwanese fought for the Japanese in WWII. If you read most of the news reports in English, the Japanese era tends to be overlooked. The statement is always something like "Taiwan and China split amid civil war" but this is misleading. The Chinese Nationalists an the Chinese Communists split, but the Chinese Nationalists were not synonymous with Taiwan. They were newcomers taking over a society that had become educated and industrialized by Japan and had fought against the Chinese Nationalists in WWII.
"I would consider China "freer", but they haven't waged war with just about everything like the US."
No, the Chinese prefer to simply bludgeon their own (Tibet, Tienanmen Square, and constantly threatening war over Taiwan...)
The Chinese do consider the Taiwanese "their own", but the Taiwanese are not too fond of slavery and being someone else's possession. Taiwan and China have a lot of common ancestry and culture, but only about the same as the Americas and Europe. They have a similar history two, with immigration from China to Taiwan starting in the 1600s and largely displacing and assimilating the natives.
After Taiwan was separated from the Empire of China back in 1895, back when the Russians had a czar, back before the Cubs last won the World Series, back when Queen Victoria was on the throne, and back before Cuba and the Phillippine were separated from Spain. Since that Time, Taiwan and China have been under the same Chinese government for about 4 year. Right after WWII when the Phillippines were returned to the U.S., Vietnam to the French, and Hong Kong to the British, Taiwan was similarly re-colonized by the Chinese, resulting in the 2-28 massecre in which many thousands were killed.
The Chinese leadership that the Allies put in charge of Taiwan promptly lost their civil war in China, and fled to the island where they declared martial law and continued to imprison or kill too many Taiwanese. Only in recent years have the Taiwanese started to have a voice in government.
Calling them "China's own" offends many of them. Despite that Chinese government spending 45 years of unopposed propaganda telling the Taiwanese that they are really "Chinese", and continuing to do so even to day with control of most of the media, most Taiwanese still consider China a foreign country.
But I do agree with you that US conservatives admire China.
Name one.
Does anyone in Korea understand what SATIRE fucking is?
Isn't that when you get screwed by a comedian?
No, its when you get screwed by a half-man half-goat. It's illegal in most countries.
It wasn't South Korea in the cartoon, it was China. South Korea doesn't have pandas. (They do have unicorns, but that's a state secret.)
Conservatives by definition "conserve", they try to keep things the same. That is why "conservatives" in Afghanistan are so different from "conservatives" in America, the status quo in the two places is different, so "keeping things the same" or "going back to the old ways" means very different things, so conservative Afghans are very different from conservative Americans.
You are right that throughout history "conservatives" have usually opposed positive change - they oppose change by definition. By that same definition, "conservatives" almost always oppose negative change as well. Conservatives opposed communism, Nazism, eugenics, and a lot of other things that they were right to oppose.
A computer has beaten a human at shogi, otherwise known as Japanese chess, for the first time.
A computer beat me at shogi decades ago.
Computer Defeats Human At Japanese Chess
Nonsense! A computer beat me at shogi decades ago.
Yes, I believe you are right that there is a parallel to the claims Iraq was making to Kuwait based on Kuwait and Iraq having been part of the same empire at some time in the distant past. It is true that as recently as 1895 Taiwan and China were both part of the Manchu empire (while originally considered foreign, the Manchus eventually came to be considered Chinese).
Taiwan wants to be free of China, but can't even discuss it without getting China's saber rattled at it.
It's worse than that. Most other countries (include at times partial allies like the U.S.) help China rattle that sabre, even to the point of opposing the practice of democracy in Taiwan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_United_Nations_membership_referendum,_2008#External_responses
I've heard it said that much of the Chinese government's restrictions on free speech, protest, etc. are to maintain social stability.
Is that an ideal that's especially resonant with the Chinese culture for some reason? If so, why?
They've had plenty of problems with instability, including as recently as the cultural revolution. Prior to that they had the Chinese Civil War. Prior to that World War II in which both the Chinese and the Japanese killed a lot of Chinese. Prior to that they had many decades of great power contests over the Chinese empire. So it does seem to make sense that they would place some value on stability.
What gets me is that they even claim their imperialist ambition to capture Taiwan is somehow tied to stability.
It is more accurate that a person's basic human right to free speech (UN article 19) may have been violated if it is shown that it didn't infringe on another person's basic human right to not be falsely accused (UN articles 8,9,10 and most importantly article 30). These are listed within the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights [un.org].
Being falsely accused in a conversation is different from being falsely accused by a court of law.
Fortunately the U.S. is governed by the U.S. Constitution not by the U.N.. We still have some freedom here, and some semblance of democracy too.
My local blockbuster kept getting smaller. I was having a harder and harder time finding the movies I wanted to rent. After years of waiting for prices to drop, I finally bought a high-def TV and was looking forward to seeing movies on it. I went to BlockBuster and couldn't find anything. I had bought an internet enabled TV, expecting that Netflix et al. would be the wave of the future. As they were online and didn't need physical media, I figured Netflix would have a HUGE selection. But they hardly had anything! Blockbusters internet pickings were pretty slim too! I couldn't find "The Quiet Man" (which I have wanted to see in high def for ages). I couldn't find Abbott and Costello films for the kids to watch. They had very few movies that were less than 10 years old. There are 80+ years of talking movies! Even if I had seen everything made since I was born I would have seen less than half of the best movies. My kids have seen even less. Why does Netflix think we only want to see the recent stuff - it's not like we've already seen everything else.
Anyway, while I would love to watch movies on my new TV, I hardly watch anything because I just can't find anything to watch. Maybe once or twice a year a new movie comes out that's worth seeing, but I can't justify a subscription service based on that.
Blockbuster should have made their whole library available on streaming video.
IQ tests usually measure a kind of intelligence that has little to do with teaching and little to do with becoming an "accomplished scientist". Edison didn't just invent stuff - he organized and lead a large staff of inventors. I always point out to kids that Einstein didn't become famous when he came up with theory of relativity - he became famous when he wrote a paper about it and persuaded large numbers of fellow scientists to believe him.
Having a high IQ that allows you to come up with great ideas for humanity is useless if you can't persuade anyone to listen. All get from that is later being able to say "I told you so" to people who still aren't listening.
IQ and accomplishment are not the same thing.
"Taiwan will ban Google even faster than Chinese government because Taiwan doesn't think that they are part of China"
Actualy, the people who would do the banning, the government of Taiwan, thinks Taiwan is part of China. It is the people of Taiwan who think Taiwan is not part of China (though a minority agree with the government).