2008 Summer Olympics

[OperaTenor]

Haggis, thank you for linking that 27 seconds of defining moment.

The right wing noise machine is going wild with it at the moment, but my money says it is once again something that has been taken grossly out of context and blown way out of proportion.

[piqaboo]

I think our best bet to 'straighten out' China is to work toward citizen prosperity.
China views the world much differently than we do. We worry about the rights of our pets, more than the Chinese gov't concerns itself with the rights of its citizens.
It will be happy when only Han chinese make up the population. Traveling in China, even in a tourist bubble, is eye opening.

[GreatCarouser]

He's an embarrassment and either misinformed, ignorant, a communist, or closet Socialist. I'm good with any of those. some dialogue/quotes omitted due to quoting limits...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-IvjXnkHwA

I'm rather astounded you could miss his whole point assuming your ears didn't suddenly stop functioning before he said "why aren't we doing the same thing". Seeing all the stuff stamped 'Made in China' we have over here I'd say his question hardly sounds 'communist , ignorant, misinformed or closet Socialist'. I suppose Dick Nixon was all those things when he went over to China in the 70's.
Maybe you say Obama's misinformed about how the improvements to their rail, port, and air facilities make them 'vastly superior' to ours (and you might have an argument, I'd like to hear more specifics from him about areas of supposed superiority.) but I don't see many big businesses looking to manufacture here in textiles, for example. They are sending at least part of that process over to China or other countries outside the US. Judging by what you can find at your local Wal Mart with the 'Made in China' brand I'd say textiles isn't the only area of concern. Those Wal Mart execs are all 'closet Socialists and communists' obviously. And don't get me started on the Reds over at McDonalds, Coca Cola etc.....

[Haggis@wk]

Haggis, thank you for linking that 27 seconds of defining moment.

The right wing noise machine is going wild with it at the moment, but my money says it is once again something that has been taken grossly out of context and blown way out of proportion.

Please tell me you either snickered to yourself or blushed as you wrote that, I have too much respect for you to think otherwise.

If it's out of context, please, put it into context. I want you to put it into context that makes sense to me. I don't care what party he's in or represents I want to believe that Americans that reach that degree of responsibility aren't as pig ignorant or stupid as he sound.

I have no respect for him because he (out of context or not) repeatedly says things that are historically ignorant. I'm not criticizing his political stand, that's subjective. History is objective and my personal requirement is this, I demand that people who want to be my president have the same level of historical knowledge I had when I graduated from high school.

You might not believe me but I would love to hear this in any context that makes more sense that what it appears to be now; dumb, ignorant or total disregard of realities.

[OperaTenor]

I will, as soon as I find it. Right now, the first several pages of Google are froth-covered.

Of course I chuckled - I thought I was witty......

[Haggis@wk]

I'm rather astounded you could miss his whole point assuming your ears didn't suddenly stop functioning before he said "why aren't we doing the same thing". Seeing all the stuff stamped 'Made in China' we have over here I'd say his question hardly sounds 'communist , ignorant, misinformed or closet Socialist'. I suppose Dick Nixon was all those things when he went over to China in the 70's.

Maybe you say Obama's misinformed about how the improvements to their rail, port, and air facilities make them 'vastly superior' to ours (and you might have an argument, I'd like to hear more specifics from him about areas of supposed superiority.) but I don't see many big businesses looking to manufacture here in textiles, for example. They are sending at least part of that process over to China or other countries outside the US. Judging by what you can find at your local Wal Mart with the 'Made in China' brand I'd say textiles isn't the only area of concern. Those Wal Mart execs are all 'closet Socialists and communists' obviously. And don't get me started on the Reds over at McDonalds, Coca Cola etc.....

GC, I don't know how to rephrase it better but I'll try; he has no idea what conditions are in China but immediately assumed that whatever they are, they're better than our. That's an ignorant statement, or its a disloyal statement or its an admiring statement or it's a stupid statement. You can add additional provisions if you like.

You confuse merchandising with capital and technological commitment. Wal-Mart doesn't have factories in China they buy from China. Huge difference. China doesn't have recognized business laws and their Intellectual Property laws are ignored.

Look at what kind of foreign businesses actually go to China. Very few foreign companies will establish research or technology innovative businesses there since they have no guarantees their IP will be safe from piracy.

Although I left the semiconductor industry in 2001, As the proprietary security manager for a major semi company I can tell you that despite China’s enormous efforts no western company has committed to building a wafer fabrication plant in China. The reason why is glaringly apparent.

In 1998 China hosted CEO and major players from several semi companies from around the world. During the conference the semi companies stated that they would consider build a wafer fab in China if China would match the funds to build the wafer fab approx., 1-3 BIL U$D, in a fund outside China. The fund was for one reason. If China nationalized the wafer fab, the company that built the fab would be reimbursed. If they didn't the funds would revert to China at some future date.

At the time the President of China was Jiang Zemin. He both declined to commit to the fund and more importantly declined to offer his personal commitment that the fab wouldn’t be nationalized.

China is a totalitarian state that meets my primary definition of an evil country. “Any country that tries to restrict the flow of information into or out of that country is an evil totalitarianism”

The reality is that China's too damn big to ignore. If it was the size of North Korea, or Zimbabwe we'd have roughly the same business with it as we do with them; none.

[piqaboo]

I've ridden Chinese trains - they are not superior to those in the US.
I've been thru several Chinese airports. Not a whole lot different than the US, from a passenger perspective. Certainly it wasnt a 'superior' experience.

OTOH - Getting out from the Mainland to HongKong was a royal PITA. Luggage inspection, luggage weight, passport control, etc. I was in that airport for 5 hours, to catch an on-time flight. Nearly didnt make it thru customs in time to go thru security in time to catch the flight. And all my stuff was A-Ok.
And no food available from the time the bags were checked, except what I had in my bag. Bathrooms were available, but then one risked losing one's place in line.

[Haggis@wk]

I've ridden Chinese trains - they are not superior to those in the US.
I've been thru several Chinese airports. Not a whole lot different than the US, from a passenger perspective. Certainly it wasnt a 'superior' experience.

OTOH - Getting out from the Mainland to HongKong was a royal PITA. Luggage inspection, luggage weight, passport control, etc. I was in that airport for 5 hours, to catch an on-time flight. Nearly didnt make it thru customs in time to go thru security in time to catch the flight. And all my stuff was A-Ok.
And no food available from the time the bags were checked, except what I had in my bag. Bathrooms were available, but then one risked losing one's place in line.

Piq,
That's why I made the observation about how uninformed some people seem to be about China. I haven't been there since 2003 but I was a pretty regular visitor from 1995 through 2003 and while things got better some places (Shanghai) they got worse other places (Hong Kong).

China is also a totalitarian state with absolutely no regard for its citizens. When it wanted water for the Olympic, no problems; divert as much as you need from some nearby Chinese province. When the citizens of the province protest, no problem. Deny any redress to their concerns and isolate them until they die or move elsewhere.

Need the property for an airport, no problem, give the residents notice to leave or get plowed under. No relocation, no compensation, nothing.

Even a cursory review of the Three Gorges Project should convinced the most ardent admirer of Communism that Marxism was truly a flawed theory.

That Google, and Microsoft, and other supposedly "principled" companies not only rolled over but now act as informants, using their software to identify "activists" to the government so they can make a coupla $$ is so shameful that I feel dirty using their programs (I have stopped using Google, a very minor protest on my part.)

China is huge, mind boggling, incomprehensibly huge. Probably a third of the hundred largest cities in the world are in China and most of them are places most of us have never heard of.

That Nixon realized that at the urging of Kissinger was good politics.

But no one should forget that the greatest human calamity of the 20th century-- greater than the Holocaust, greater than World War Two itself-- was the famine that swept China in the "three bad years" 1959-61. At least thirty million died. That was solely due to Mao’s policies, there was no famine, no drought, just the evilness of a government who had so many citizens that 30 million was insignificant.

Even Shos would (hopefully) blanch at that level of vile indifference to human life.

I'm sure that there are some things admirable about the Chinese but there is nothing admirable about the Chinese government. It is evil and despicable.

Anyone who finds anything admirable about the government is as stupid as those who remarks that "at least the trains ran on time" during the Third Reich and Facist Italy.

[dai bread]

My parents' generation used the remark about Mussolini making the trains run on time in an ironic way, as if it was a matter of supreme importance. Of course, having fought the guy's military, they didn't believe it for a nanosecond, and nether did their children.

The Chinese Govt. will find that democracy follows trade. The Chinese people will find then that democracy can be manipulated by Party bosses just as easily as a dictatorship.

Until we got MMP, there were regular references in the press and elsewhere to our Govt. being an elected dictatorship. That was one reason MMP was voted in. The situation is better now, but not much.

[Shapley]

Richard M. Nixon seemed to think that China was worth dealing with too.

Nixon opened China to U.S. trade and political communication. He recognized that China was a rising power, and had to be dealt with. We were battling Chinese-armed troops in Vietnam, and part of the issue of meeting with the Chinese was to reduce their support for the North Vietnamese, or at least to avoid open warfare with them when we attacked the North Vietnamese directly (something we largely avoided doing during previous administrations).

It was believed by Nixon's opponents that the mining of the North Vietnamese harbour would end our negotiations with the Chinese. They turned out to be wrong. Nixon believed that it was our willingness to stand firm on the war, rather than buckling out of fear of angering the Chinese, that strengthened our negotiationg position.