The Glade 4.0

I honestly believe that he doesn't want to discuss any of the specifics of the ad, hence his continued use of fiat statements.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

No I don't. Not because the topics aren't interesting or of merit, but because we've already hashed out those discussions ad nauseum here. We all know each others positions and the likelyhood of anyone changing their opinions on the matter is next to nil.

It's the textbook example of trying to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.

Aizle:

How much U.S. currency does China currently have in reserve?
How much money does the U.S. owe to China?
What's the current trade dynamic between the U.S. and China?

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Yet, beyond the OP, no one is asking for your position. People are asking for the reasons for your positions. There are facts. People base their positions on those facts. If you don't want to give the facts or at least the reasoning behind your positions, it leaves me with the impression that you just want a really big megaphone to let everyone know what you think, and then just walk away when you've had your say. That gives me an ugly, ugly impression.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Oh, pardon. It didn't have its own thread. It was, instead, a tangential post in the Arizona citizenship to register thread.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

look, I'm not getting into US policy on this one.

I DO draw issue with the flavor of the ad. Its absolutely absurd to think it ISN'T targeted at fears of a Chinese takeover.

Twenty years ago it was fears about the Japanese ownership of US businesses (despite the fact that in fact the British owned a greater stake in US businesses than the Japanese did.)

On one hand I *DO* believe that this ad raises a valid concern as far as policy.... on the OTHER hand, this ad specifically plays on racist fears about the 'evil Chinese'

It doesn't display gov't officials laughing... its average students. It doesn't display a mixed audience, it displays a homogeneous ethnic Chinese. And who could call this anything other than malevolent at the end?

I get what you're saying, and I've already attempted to explain my position. Yet when I've done so, the response is further clarification. Maybe I'm being too sensative about it, but it came off to me as just trying to nitpick my position. On your last post, all of your why questions were things that we've discussed here in the past and pretty thoroughly hashed out. I really think the issue is that many here disagree with my positions on the economics and policy decisions that are currently in place. I'm not particularly interested in rehashing them all again.

I can see why this add might appeal to those who have those positions, but I also think it's amazingly apparent that this add is targeted at trying to capitalize on that fear and showing an amazingly unlikely worst case scenario in order to scare people into voting a certain way. I really dislike that tactic, whichever side uses it.

Why?
If you don't want to "get into" US policy, I'd imagine you don't want to "get into" Chinese policy either.


I'll reiterate: You might say it is "targeted at fears of a Chinese takeover" while I might say it "highlights a dangerous path". Of course you might also say that telling your children not to touch the stove "plays to fears" of being burned, while I might say it "highlights a dangerous path"...


I'm confused, are you saying that the British own a greater stake in US debt than the Chinese?


Good, I'm glad you chose to discuss policy. Whose policy does it raise a valid concern about? What is that valid concern?



You know I've never heard any racist fears about the "evil Chinese", "yellow Chinese" maybe, "Red Chinese" definitely, but never "evil Chinese". That said, I'll re-reiterate:
You might say it "plays on racist fears" while I might say it "highlights a dangerous path". Of course you might also say that telling your children not to touch the stove "plays on stovist fears" of being burned, while I might say it "highlights a dangerous path"...


Are you saying that those are average Chinese students? What do you know about average Chinese students? How can you presume to know that they are average? Racist! Are you saying that it would have been better and not racist if it had been gov't officials? How about if it had been Norwegian students?

Which of the 56 distinct ethnic groups in China would you call "a homogeneous ethnic Chinese"? Racist! Would it have been more accurate to display a classroom in China filled with Swedish, Spanish and German students?


I'll re-re-reiterate:
You might say it is "malevolent" while I might say it "highlights a dangerous path".

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Ugh, I got halfway through that before I stopped. That's actually worse than the one posted here. I share some of the concerns they bring up, but the delivery there is WAY over the top and absurd.

These are not good examples.

One is a predictive future that is uncertain and has a ton of variables.

The other is a very basic and simple stimulus/response.

It's tantamount to comparing flying a paper airplane to piloting a jumbo jet.

I suppose the question is given the current situation do you find those fears irrational or rational?

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I think that may be partially due to all of our inherent biases(sp? biasi heheh), but I also know that in my case, I don't know what your positions are very clearly, so I have to extrapolate, and that means I try to be as detail oriented as I can rather than taking a more broad view, so where I am mistaken about a particular detail is more easily pointed out. I can see how that can come across as "nitpicky".

I really don't know what your position is regarding our massive debt, China holding so much of it, and the possible ramifications therein.
I am certain that I don't know your positions regarding the reasoning behind the fall of the Greek, Roman, or British Empires.


I can understand that, but it must be clear that those differences will come up on a board such as this, if you choose to participate, even just to make declarative statements - probably more-so if that's all you do.



Aizle, does the ad scare you? I'll presume not. It doesn't scare me. Why do you think it'll scare others?

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I wasn't trying to directly parallel the stove - economic peril, I was attempting to show that what one calls "targeted at fears" someone else might believe it is illustrative of a danger that could come to pass. That said, nah, there are a ton of variables involved when a child touches a stove and the predictive future is uncertain if they were to try, but I don't list all the cases out, I just say "Don't touch it, you'll be burned, it'll hurt."

I could also say that if someone holds hundreds of billions of dollars of your debt, the scenarios are relatively simple too.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I think they are rational concerns. But I think the ad is blowing them out of proportion.

Sure that's maybe fair for a 3 year old, but we don't allow 3 year olds to vote.

And a rational government policy would be to let a politically and economically hostile nation hold billions of dollars of debt?

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Aizle, as I clarified in my edit above, it wasn't meant as a direct correlation between this situation and that, it was meant to show that it's possible that valid reasoning exists for saying "Don't do this" that some would characterize as "playing to fears" while others would think it is an effective warning.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I think it's a good commercial.

I think the joke or problem with the commercial is the belief that there are choices you could vote for in America that would fix the problem it is talking about. The Republicans and Democrats are both just as bad...remember, Bush started all this "stimulus spending." Clinton owns the dubious distinction of being the president who "increased federal spending the least" of all presidents since sometime before Jimmy Carter. "Increased federal spending the least???" What a grotesque accolade! Until federal spending in the USA starts actually decreasing (by orders of magnitude, at that), nobody in the oval office has any business calling themselves economically sensible.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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Our current debt is far too high, much of the recent increase was in my opinion unavoidable if we wanted to prevent a financial meltdown. I believe we need to get the budget balanced and back down to a reasonable level. I'm not sure what a reasonable level really is, but my gut tells me a fraction of where we currently are. I believe that's only going to be accomplished by a combination of spending cuts and revenue generation. I think having any single country owning a controling amount of our debt is risky, we should attempt to diversify that as much as possible. Really the Chinese need us to be a strong economy because we are the largest consumer of their goods, so while we may feel additional economic pressure due to the amount of debt they own, there are very real limits to how hard they can push because if the damage us, they damage themselves.



Very true, but on topics that have been hashed out time and time again, I lose my interest in being the underdog here.



Well, yes and no. What scares me about it is the number of people that I run into that seem to just parrot what they hear on the various ads or commentary programs without giving it any real thought. I don't really worry about anyone who posts here, because anyone who doesn't think around here gets routed out fairly quickly. But there are plenty of folks in the real world who are happy to get lead by the nose and told what to do. This is who this ad is targeted at, and I'm scared that it may be successful in that. First impressions mean a lot. I've had numerous conversations with conservatives at work here, where they are all riled up by something that they heard on Rush or Beck, but when you actually do a little research on it you find out that it's not as crazy or unreasonable as was presented. But Rush and Beck have already done the damage, what's imprinted in their heads is "crazy liberal plot BAD!" not "that was a sucky situation with no good answer so we chose the one that was lead damaging" or similar.

Of course it does. China is an essentially ethnically homogenous country, especially compared to the United States. What the hell is it supposed to depict? It's somehow racist to ascribe jingoistic views to other countries if they happen to be ethnically homogeneous?

Jingoism is not the uniquely American trait it's so often portrayed as. In fact amusingly, one of the more common forms of jingoism these days is how socially "improved" other countries are by not doing things the way Americans are, or about how much more "multilateral" or "internationalist" or whatever they are.

This is just like the allegation that steps taken against illegal immigration are racist just because most illegals happen to be Hispanic. So what if they are? It isn't our fault that China happens to be ethnically homogenous or that Mexico is populated by Hispanics.

The real problem is the mentality that we're not allowed to think anyone else might be hostile towards the U.S., or if they are that it's anything other than completely our fault for being big meanies or something. Especially if they happen to be non-white countries. Like Khross pointed out they are politically and economically hostile; we can't be aware of that because they aren't white? We can't be aware that communism isn't as dead as it seems? There's plenty of people that want it back and they all think they know how to make it work without USSR style gulags this time.

This has nothing to do with 'evil Chinese' being evil because they're Chinese; it has to do with China being a semi-unfriendly nation regardless of what the **** they look like.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

For those of you who think the ad oversimplifies the economics, I should point out that even the Obama Administration and the Federal Reserve Board are abandoning standard Keynesian practice at this point. Unfortunately for us, they're going with historically dis-proven methods. Quantitative Easing is little more than monetizing Federal Debt in order to create more debt in the consumer sector; which, ironically, I said this was the path they were headed for last year. They will literally put trillions of new dollars into circulation by crediting treasury bonds to the banks without actually generating the income to pay them off. The countries that have tried quantitative easing and failed are ...

Zimbabwe, Japan, Post World War I Germany, New Zealand (Twice) ...

The list of countries that have tried quantitative easing and succeeded includes ...

No one. Japan was arguably the most successful, but it created the most spectacular housing market anomaly of all time. Prices in Japanese housing have been falling for 19 years year, despite increasing demand. And on top of monetizing the debt, the President wants to raise taxes on the still employed.

Now, I'm just going to point out I called all of this in advance. I'm going to remind those of you who actually do read that I laid the President's game plan out as soon as he was elected; and, much to my dismay, Obama's administration and the Democrats in Congress and the Fed are doing exactly as I predicted. So, you want to know what crumbles empires? Hubris, something the U.S. is chock full of politically right now. Our President and his advisors continue to advocate a disastrous policy ...

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Of course it is...and the concerns have merit. It isn't because they are chinese, it's because they hold most of your debt. If Canada held most of your debt, the ad would be perfectly justified in having the professor end his speech with "so now they work for us, eh."

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I'm not afraid of the Chinese taking us over. I'm afraid of losing our position of economic dominance, stability, and excellence (which we've been steadily eroding for decades, now).. to anybody. I like it on top, and I'd like for us to keep it that way.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Realistically, even if the government didn't help **** things up, it's really not possible for the US to maintain "dominance" over China. The fact is they have five times the population of the US, greater natural resources, and the average Chinese person is willing to work twice as hard as the average American. They save 25%-33% of their income on top of that. We pretty much have the Chinese government to thank for them not killing us already. In the long term there's no way we can beat them, given that, no matter what our government does.

QE and now QE2 have been visible for a long time now. We are looking at either 500 billion to 2 trillion being poofed directly into the economy with no backing.

Value of dollar go down.

And the way to beat them is to save -25%to 33% if you believe our planners.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville