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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