Comments by "dixon pinfold" (@dixonpinfold2582) on "Intelligence Squared"
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@xiaoq8329
"China refuses to be TAUGHT as an elder brother who has survived with its own teachings for 5000 years."
No, it abandoned its own teachings in 1949.
China does not refuse to be taught, the Communist Party of China refuses to be taught.
The CPC is not China. They have just been telling you so for your entire life.
The CPC rules China and China has no choice. It imposes a non-Chinese system on China. It came from Europe.
The West has no desire to make China non-Confucian. The West likes the Chinese people. It welcomes them by the million into its countries, universities, companies, public positions, and into its people's homes as friends, guests, and even family members. Chinese people are respected in Western communities and enjoy life here.
If you personally are born to be ruled and like it that way, you can have it. Stick with the CPC. You're living under your strict and ruthless dad, for life.
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Ironically, while 'Western' democracy works quite well in Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, etc., where the people are free and much richer than in China), in China a thoroughly un-Asian philosophy, Communism, had led to poverty and unhappiness.
Communism has made China the retarded giant of Asia, and only the partial institution of Western-inspired economic freedoms has allowed its GDP per person to rise to $10,000 a year.
Meanwhile democratic Asian lands enjoy $40,000 to $60,000.
You confuse communism with being Asian, the result of 70 years of government force-feeding. It's little surprise, but still tragic. Cheers.
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@peetsnort So far as I can tell, in the UK only The Economist has a leg to stand on, and it's only half what it used to be, as through hiring it samples a degenerated group of millennial graduates. (I also grew out of their 19th c. Liberalism, i.e. present day globalism. It spurs wealth creation, true, but just one family in a thousand hoovers up half of it, and the colours of life round the world all turn gray, i.e. monoculture. Screw that.)
The rest of the papers and broadcasts are just crippling and warping the public's mind with current University Taste and hipsterism. You say the BBC reached down to SA and damaged it. I can well believe that, and what's worse is it emboldened them to ramp things up.
If you don't mind a question, is emigration much on the minds of you and those you know? If so, to where? I know, nosy question.
All the best.
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Robots. Droll, that. Yes, all four, in fact, are inadequate at framing the overall importance of their findings within the question at hand, making you wonder why. The moderator could do it for them with ease, and must be biting his tongue. It'd be less frustrating for us if he could play the lion tamer a little, and have the authority to ask questions, demand answers, switch around from one panellist to the other, etc.
Hey, if you miss Hitchens, try his brother Peter (who wrote incisively on cannabis earlier this month). I myself ignored this advice for a few years and regret it a bit.
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@Myndir Yes, the panel, esp. those on the right hand side, and a lot of commenters were/are talking past each other.
The men were saying personality type, with all its consequences, cannot much be swayed by parenting. The women seemed to miss that, defending parenting as making a big difference in lives. The men never denied that it does, denying just that it makes you a different person in character. Women's self-image is very tied up in their self-serving if understandable view that they are all-important in children's outcomes. The thought that they might not be so important is crushing to them.
Men can be thoughtless assholes, but women have much less ability on average to look at things without instinctively factoring in their self-interest in the matter, and so they resist seeing the truth in anything that might harm their personal advantage or that of their side. When boys are growing up this is gradually knocked out of them---not just at school, by other boys and their fathers but often, ironically, by their mothers, who tell them, over and over, to 'be a man.' It's a major cause of divorce, and it's a pity. How much it's innate and how much it's socialization, I don't know.
Sorry to go on at length and off topic quite a bit, but the debate brought all this to the front, I thought. Cheers.
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高东锋
It's hard for me to see a great imbalance of costs and benefits in the trade relationship between China and the West. Your people massively mobilized and worked extremely hard to provide us with cheap goods of decent quality.
As a result of that massive effort, the European and North American continents groan under the weight of trillions of dollars worth of Chinese goods which raised our standard of living, as they would have cost ten times more to produce domestically.
The cost was the disappearance of tens of millions of jobs, undermining longer term economic and social stability, and the loss of consumer and capital goods independence, undermining longer term economic and national security.
Any imbalance of benefits is in the eye of the beholder. Overall, China appears to have made a good long term investment, but their people also had to make a great sacrifice. Time will tell.
You and Gregory Moore both make several good points, but I encourage you both to see each other's lands as competitors, not enemies. A competitor one tries to outperform, an enemy one tries to destroy.
Also, both sides should be careful not to overestimate the racism of the other side. There is also a lot of respect on both sides.
Chinese racism of the present day is rooted in the experience of a class of rapacious Westerners in the past, Western racism of the present day is rooted in 70 years of CPC cruelty. (Note the great respect of Westerners for Japan, which is on account of Japan's successful adoption of a free and open system.) So not much of the racism on either side is real ethnic hatred.
If it were real ethnic hatred, tens of millions of Chinese would never have moved to the West, and the West would never have accepted them. If you've never seen it, I can tell you the relationship in the streets and in the workplace and socially is quite harmonious.
All the best. Cheers.
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@meganh9460
It seems uncertain just how expansionist China will become. I prefer to ignore its historical record, because of the huge remoulding of the nation and its culture which the CPC have had roughly a lifetime (70 years) to achieve. But it still bears pointing out that conquering other countries isn't very Confucian.
To judge by the present, the country keeps much more to itself than is strictly necessary, but I see this mainly as an expression of prudence and patience. The reason I see it that way is that as China gains economic and military power, it begins to use it, again with prudence but something quite opposite to timidity.
Much depends on what the Party tells its people. If it teaches grievances and grudges, the results will be predictable. If it teaches benevolence, likewise. It will probably do both, and try to maximize the benefits of each.
The other wildcard within the country is the rich. There are now about 500 billionaires there. The rich could foment hostility against other countries for commercial reasons but under a cloak of patriotic spirit. In this way, mercantilist-inspired expansionism could quite conceivably take over in time This has happened before in the world.
Or the rich could even go the other way and have a pacifying influence, or even outright oppose an expansionist government. Although they and the government are now comfortably allied, either one could cancel the partnership eventually. It may seem far-fetched that rich Chinese people would counter their government, but it doesn't have to stay far-fetched forever.
The balance of the uncertainty comes from abroad. We don't know how voters in Western countries, India, Southeast Asia, and Japan are going to feel about China down the road, nor the Russian government. People and governments try to serve their own best interests, but they do make mistakes.
You didn't ask to hear all this, so I hope you don't mind my expressing it.
Cheers.
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Capitalism and religious myth certainly do have similarities in the foundation of each in the human mind. They strive and succeed at offering relevance to people's vital self-interest, they offer explanatory power, and they offer prescriptions for living--that is to say, morals. And, like religious myth, faith in money does indeed rest on trust, including trust in 'magic', if I may use that term for the aspects of money that are just about that murky.. The more you learn about economics and finance, the clearer this will be to you. Look into how banks create money, if you don't already have a solid idea of it, for example. If necessary, you can then move on to the hocus pocus of the securities markets.
I guess you don't see 'story' as being anything but a narrative, like a creation myth or the gospels. Give Prof. Harari a break. English is not his first language and he picks up what he hears when he listens to Anglophones, the younger, more liberal, and more female among which use the word to mean just about anything we're told about. For the past ten or 20 years, everything's a 'story'. Whenever anybody says anything, they 'have a voice'. (See Prof. Harari onstage last year with Natalie Portman (!) if you want to see evidence of what I mean.) Canting, yes, but innocently used and not in his case evidence of errors in thought. Many Eurasians are understandably out of tune with how loosely most Americans talk, even supposedly educated ones like Portman (BA, Harvard).
I don't doubt he's aware of and in agreement with the boilerplate financial markets epistemology you outlined, though not with the extension to pure maths. (So I would guess.)
Check him out in his talk at the Royal Institution. In the Q&A he is taken to task for referring to millions of future AI-idled people as 'useless'. He patiently explains that he means for us to hear viciously skeptical quotation marks installed around the word. (Portman and RI talks are on YouTube.) First language or not, he has great power over English; whether 'provocative' (his term for his use of 'useless' at the RI), ironic, or neither, his use of it, as of historical learning, aims high. Since in my view, if you hit a bullseye every time, you're standing too close to the target, I approve. Many would not.
Among the broadest thinkers, some with the most merit strike narrower ones as outlandish in their vision and unjustified in their conclusions. The latter say 'how does he know that? How can anyone know that?' The answer, in this case, is brainpower, learning, experience, character and I assume a rich family life, all combining to produce vision. The word fallacy weighs about a thousand pounds. When heaved, if the reasoning behind it is weak, it can fall on one's toe.
All the best. I appreciate your clear style.
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@masakichin6009
If you ever had freedom you would never want to give it up.
In the West you can criticize the government all day long and never suffer ill consequences.
It allows you to feel a type of dignity that's very reassuring and energizing. You may still be an undignified loser in the West and you may still feel dignity and be a winner in China.
But there's a difference: Under one-party rule you are living like a boy under your tough dad. He can beat your mother and the whole family and then brag about how smoothly the household runs. And you can't say anything.
Yes, I believe the countries (e.g. South Korea, Indonesia, Chile) that have gotten a lot richer in the last 40 years owe a lot their gains to democracy. It builds trust, and a lot of things can happen with a little money and lots of trust.
Democracy breeds kleptocrats, yes, but compared with other forms of government, much, much less---and they are rarely bureaucrats or party officials but rather business people who at least produce something.
The best system is a multi-party democracy with high taxes that finance excellent education, health care, and infrastructure. Its free citizens can sort the rest out from there.
Yes, I believe the social credit stuff. You mean the CPC publicly disputes it? Not to my knowledge.
Cheers.
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@masakichin6009
Thanks for your interesting reply. It's true, one can criticize democracy all day long. People in the West certainly do that all the time, whether they realize it or not. It's a major pastime.
Among its many demerits, democracy has never been long-lasting. It goes on for a few or several generations and then tips over into the mud. Ordinarily the cause is its tendency towards oligarchy.
Oligarchies are implicit in human nature. As Freud pointed out "nature introduces inequalities against which there is no remedy." Clever and useful people, especially if pleasing everybody isn't their goal, soon come out on top. They then marry the children of others like them.
A sense of guilt, perhaps, in the end overcomes a corrupt oligo-democratic elite which does not answer to the people. Children, not least the children of the rich, never believe all the justifications told them their parents. It might also be fake guilt, but either way countless family-level abdications take place across the classes.
In any case, a major weakness of liberal democracy seems to be its feebleness at producing the kind of people who can sustain it.
And democracy certainly does not do an ideal job of promoting good society generally, because it opens up to people the possibility of improving their rank by the accumulation of money. Where there are different arrangements, as in an aristocracy, urges to rise in social rank are curtailed, being as a rule so far-fetched. But in a liberal democracy, the fact of plausibly having a shot at social distinction distorts individual personalities on a large scale and thus goes a long way towards harming the chances of good society.
However, sensibly high taxes and the best possible public education (and health care and infrastructure) go a very long way towards moderating these problems. Of course in any democracy the best-off ten percent will be decently-behaved and will promote stability; the trick is to continually show to the rest that they can succeed with just average merit.
In light of this, democracy is thus a juggling act with many balls, dinner plates, axes, and smoking chain saws in the air.
But then, what is the alternative to it? If you live under a king, you can only hope he and his son and grandson will not abuse and rob you. That is not likely And whether under a king or a repressive bureaucratic state, how pleasant is it to be utterly without a say in what the laws are? And not just for oneself, but for everybody outside a ruling elite numbering just several thousand or even only a few hundred. I recall you mentioning that public protest in China can affect government policy, but such an outcome is at the pleasure of the government, for they cannot be thrown out.
Protest in such a case is not a right protected by the constitution, courts, and police. It is specifically opposed by the constitution, courts, and police, never mind the party, a restricted press, and an intimidated society at large.
No, such a ruling party merely have to appear flexible enough to prevent a serious attempt at revolution. That is a standard low enough to guarantee that the people will be abused, as long as the the government's power is great enough.
If that is so, large numbers of people can be imprisoned or starved to death, without its rule facing danger of overthrow. Unrestricted power is not safely put in the hands of a small number. To disagree with this is to forget about the role of instinct in human behaviour, to forget that human lives are run on hormones, appetite, and fantasy more than anything else, to forget how our cousins the chimpanzees live and the fact that they make war on one another. It also ignores millennia of history.
In my view, if an unelected government not only has a monopoly on force, but also omnipotence in counteracting opposition (as when it has 400m surveillance cameras plugged into facial recognition software) great abuses of the people are absolutely guaranteed.
What the absolute monarchy, dictatorship, or one-party state can offer is a sort of stability. But then, the government is something like a strict dad, and one lives under his roof. In a way you can never really leave your teens.
And that is only if you are lucky. If you are unlucky, you live under cruel gangsters and spend your life not like a teenager but like a dog.
I enjoyed your reply. We might have different opinions, but I can see you have observed life carefully for a long time.
Forgive the length of my reply. All the best. DP
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@Oners82 No one, I think, would fail to grant that the panelist has attained to the status of adulthood, as opposed to childhood. But would you not grant that such a bipartite scheme is a rather crude and insufficient one in this context, which requires the most fully-developed qualities of mind and judgment, backed up by considerable if not thoroughgoing learning and experience? Not to grant this, in my view, is tantamount to accusing the other panelists of wasting their additional decades by omitting to gain anything from their reading, thinking, and experience.
I do not say that only a panel of eighty-year-olds could do the subject justice, only that the young woman, in her fourth or first year of adulthood depending on one's definition, simply hasn't had enough time yet. She's of course fully entitled to her opinions; so is any 34-year-old in the US entitled to vote, but that person is not permitted to stand for election to the presidency.
There's something disagreeable about weighing things of this nature like groceries, yet it's impossible to avoid completely.
Finally, I wonder what sort of objections might have been raised had she been middle-aged, facing in the debate a lad of just 21 summers.
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@Oners82 It was you, not me, who asked about her age. You chose the topic. I addressed the matter of her age because you raised it. I addressed other matters elsewhere. Are you ok?
Yes, a 21-year-old hasn't had the opportunity to give consideration to these things. Would you want one as your president or prime minister? I bet you'd be open to the idea, as you sound quite daft.
If you're looking for a way to improve the world, never mind others for now and start with yourself. The world will appreciate it and you'll be glad, too! Consult a professional, maybe.
Lastly, thanks for sharing the term genetic fallacy. Though I knew of the thing since boyhood, I didn't know of the term for it. It's misleading, though, to one unfamiliar with it, having the word 'genetic' in it. It's likely older than the science of genetics, I suppose.
Do have a nice life, my dear little pompous one. You'll be fine.
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I decided to find out about the guy sitting next to Rosamund Pike who, in the course of a 90-second question-speech 59:28, pointedly called Eagleton an elitist, then alluded about half a dozen times to "controlling" elites. As might be guessed from her spectacular eye-roll at 1:00:06, he was, and is reputed to still be, her boyfriend and partner, one Robie Uniacke. From his tendentious question one would think he is as far as can be from privileged, controlling elitism, surely?
Not quite.
Details are few and perhaps unreliable, but he is called a businessman and "mathematical researcher".
An Old Etonian, at 22 he married the daughter of an earl. While married to her, he reportedly gave up a job in the City to scuba dive for sunken Spanish treasure for several months. The marriage ended after about five years, multiple sources claiming both he and his wife were treated for serious heroin addiction not long afterward.
In 2004, when he was 43, the 19-year-old daughter of former Tory minister Lord Hesketh (once the owner of a £50m mansion) had to publicly deny that she was his girlfriend. The two had been seen out together at London cinemas and restaurants. "Just good friends," she said of Uniacke, who was more than twice her age. He was at the time "a City speculator."
A company of his went insolvent and folded a few years ago. It was reported he failed to pay £179k in taxes and was overdrawn by £133k, although he had withdrawn £144k for personal use.
He has six children with his two wives and Pike. His current partner's net worth is variously estimated at $6 million and $9 million.
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@alanfriesen9837
Our assessment of the business-govt relationship is quite the same, I think. Although I said 'comfortably allied', I thought it went without saying that the govt absolutely wears the trousers. And like you (it seems anyway) I'm watching for signs that the rich will start very very carefully to assert themselves. They will have to wait for men born later and with more regard for rich businessmen to move up in Beijing, I believe. And even then they'll be risking their necks.
What I wonder is, can that day ever arrive? Rich people get their way in this world, but I hear rumblings about govt intentions to swing way Marxist again as soon as growth has funded enough civil infrastructure, productive capacity, and weaponry. That would be one colossal stratagem. If it were to come about, fortunes would be seized, their owners exiled, jailed, or, you know, disposed of by New Red Guardsmen, surely?
Till next time. I'll always keep my eyes open for your comments. I don't know about you but I dabble all over the place. Cheers.
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@alanfriesen9837 Thanks for your reply. I'm not going to dig through the thread for my old comment, but I certainly never meant to "advocate for private fortunes". I probably just said Xi or his CPC successor is likely coming for them. So that's your inference, one made, I would imagine, after accurately detecting that I'm not a socialist or communist.
And it's not a surprising one given your overall tone, which matches that of typical Western sympathizers of the Soviet state in the mid-1930s---haven't seen any abuse by Stalin, great advances made, some things slightly troubling, injustice probably no worse than things in the US or Britain, repression no more than breaking some eggs on the way to an omelet, etc., etc.
That worked out well.
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Ordinarily I would pass over your comment without comment of my own, but considering that good English is itself the subject, I feel it apposite to suggest that you recast it, removing the awkwardness so that readers may understand it first time through. (f you do, I'll remove this paragraph. Fair is fair.)
As to your point itself, invoking Shakespeare, I think I'll leave the Lloyd Bentsen-Dan Quayle debate largely out of it, but wasn't there a Roman saying along the lines of 'Jove is permitted what an ox is not'?
P.S. I'd like to be helpful, not just critical. If you like, you may avoid all caps by italicizing. Type an underscore on both ends of the text concerned, no spaces, and presto, italics !
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@thchen8312
Thanks for your reply.
True, China and Japan are not to be too closely compared.
But if you think Japan did not scare the US throughout the entire 1980s, I suspect you were not alive at the time, or if so were in short pants. Surely even in China people knew this.
Many people in the US, even the educated, though not most I believe, thought that Japan could replace the US as the world's leading economic power. I'm not kidding.
The loss of manufacturing capacity, rising imports from Japan, massive inflows of Japanese capital to buy up major companies and landmark real estate in the US, technological outpacing by Japan, the strong yen, incredible real estate prices in Japan, and the immense size and strength of Japanese banks were some of the most important reasons, but not the only ones.
Now you know more.
My impression, moreover, is that Japan was at that time a bigger worry to Americans that China is to them now. That is, if the culture and media are any indication. I think Americans worry somewhat about war with China, but not that China will buy their country or do much more to threaten its economic future than it already does.
I can only guess why, but it's an easy guess. I think Americans vaguely believe that China will sooner or later stumble so badly that it is set back for a few decades or longer, because it does not have a multi-party system, in contrast to Japan, which they expect to persist for a long time. When China's crisis hits, I think it is assumed, its form of government will change and it may splinter, in all of this scenario surely recalling the example of the USSR, with whose flag the Chinese flag shared its colours. Americans think communism, even the sham communism of China, doesn't work. They think a people who are not free could never defeat them. This surely includes many or even most important politicians and many journalists.
They may be proved wrong or right. For my part I feel their belief is too strong. Cheers.
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@thchen8312
You convince me of the likelihood that your disposition is dominated by sweetness, which is itself a fine thing, but I maintain that vigorous criticism is the job of educated people in a free society. Such a society quickly falls apart without what you call critical judgments. If you don't care much about whether a society is free, you may wish to consider that Confucius himself is relentlessly critical of unenlightened men and their errors.
No conversation is over just because somebody utters the word 'bias'. If you think you are free of bias I respectfully suggest you ponder it further. One may with hope in their heart regard themselves as low on unfair bias, but that's not the same thing.
Moreover, while you stress how full you are of love, respect, spirituality, and acceptance of difference, one can't fail to notice the strength of the criticism you direct at me in your last post. Although it's couched in polite language, you're actually saying I'm biased and disrespectful. But while I find this frankly hypocritical, mealy-mouthed, and passive-aggressive, I'm not in the least hurt or offended. I'm a big boy and I can take criticism whether I feel it's fair or unfair. I merely assert that improving the world starts with looking in the mirror.
Still, I do appreciate and see value in a veneer of politeness, as long as it's within certain limits of sincerity. We ought not to be at one another's throats, after all. The estimable Confucius would approve, too, I think.
Cheers.
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@Le Ploutonomiste I wondered whether, in borderline cases, native intelligence and sensitivity (neither in any way pathological, meaning healthy) lead to pathology on account of preventing healthy social development (or, to make it simple for you to grasp, if life is easier for average people), or if poor social development owing to any reasons at all can foster high intelligence and sensitivity by forcing a search for answers in the face of painful maladjustments (again translating so you can get it: if being a fucked-up social loser benefits perspicacity and cleverness).
I didn't say anything about myself. So your empathy and advice, though appreciated for its earnestness, is misplaced. A very neat line in presumption, officiousness, and vulgarity. You understood what didn't exist to be understood and did not understand what I did write.
(By the way, gay and homosexual may be different things to you but they mean the same thing in the Anglosphere, and gay is an English word.)
I won't wish you well with your mental problems, if any, as they are none of my business. But please accept a cordial adieu.
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@masakichin6009
Thanks for your reply.
All I have to say is that if an all-powerful king is so wonderful that he is never unjust, never unwise, and a brilliant genius, then it's a good idea to leave him unopposed in absolute power permanently, and hope that his children are just as wonderful when they inherit his rule.
But it is probably safer to have a mechanism to remove him. In the west it is said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If this is true, then absolute trust is unwise. Without power, trust is simply hope.
You have to wonder how many fewer people would have starved to death in the Great Leap Forward if Mao and the CPC were removed by defeat in elections once the disaster began.
Democracy certainly has its problems, but when a government is bad at least there is a way to throw the buggers out.
A thoroughly free press also provides a way to find out if the government is bad. They are a type of police, or at least public prosecutor, who balance the government's powers.
Thanks again for your courteous reply. Best wishes.
P.S. By the way, just for fun, here is an old Soviet joke: Under capitalism you have the exploitation of man by his fellow man. Under communism, the opposite is true.
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@masakichin6009
Ha ha, I understand your English perfectly and quite enjoy it, my friend. But I am surprised to learn you are so young. You must read a lot of challenging books and articles and have smart friends and family.
It's interesting to hear your hopes that the Chinese government will continue to improve as it did in recent decades. I hope so, too, but I'm worried. For many years bad signs were very few, but there is a permanent temptation to achieve goals through very vigorous moulding of the public mind and stricter control over people. The treatment of Muslims, the AI cameras, and the indefinite extension of Xi's presidency are all bad signs. I think of Rome, where power sharing was demanded and promised century after century but never came.
Major difficulty---politically, economically, socially---can't be avoided forever, surely, for governing is hard. When it comes, what form will it take?
The character of the next generation of people cannot be known for certain. Can the three pillars of communism, capitalism, and Confucianism really co-exist for a lot longer? They seem like unlikely long-term partners. When the next major shift in the balance between them occurs, will China suffer a hard landing? I feel that something sudden and surprising will have to come out of China eventually. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it won't happen in this lifetime.
As to where I live, I'd rather not mention it, although I cannot think of exactly why not. I will just say it's a large metropolis not in the US or Asia, very lucky, and enviably quiet in most ways. Sydney and Hamburg answer to that description, but it's neither of them, so that leaves maybe six or seven others.
Thanks for you warm reply and sorry for one last long answer. Something got my inspiration going! Best luck and health. DP
P.S. It would be so good to correspond with you again in five or ten years, once we see what happens after a while. I plan to keep my screen name and maybe you will too. And it doesn't have to be years, it could be soon instead!
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@jonhone1 Yes, it is fair, because it's not a street fight, but a discussion. In group discussions of any sort, I always seem to be in the minority, but I have never considered that unfair.
Even if three members of the State Council of China were debating against one member of the Western intelligentsia, it would not be unfair, so long as the conduct itself of the debate were not unfair.
The professor was not excluded nor shouted down; in my view, since you ask, there was no unfairness.
In China, it would have been four against zero. I struggle to understand what sort of fairness you believe in. Cheers.
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