181–190 of 477 posts
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Jeremy Lin is not Chinese.
>Lin is the first American of Chinese or Taiwanese descent to play in the NBA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Lin Jeremy Lin is of Chinese descent. I didn't say he was born there.
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The US jails something like 5 times as many people as China. That's today, not 60 years ago.
I believe that stat is only true for Chinese people that are in prisons and have been convicted of crimes. If you count ALL people being held against their will (e.g. including the Xinjiang "Reeducation" camps), China has more than the US.
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Appropriately enough, the term you’re looking for is kowtowing (not towing cows), a Chinese term for a deep bow of respect.
> a Chinese term for a deep bow of respect Not so much a "deep bow" as "prostration on the ground".
Is it just me, or are there a lot of stories now about China throwing its financial weight around to influence speech? We had the Blizzard/War of Omens thing [1], and the Houston Rockets remark being rescinded [2], and the South Park cancellation [3], and now this, all in the span of about a week. [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/blizzard-removes-blitzchung-from-h... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/07/houston-rockets-g…
Instead, we've played ourselves for absolute suckers, and as China's economy and military muscle continues to rapidly expand and the rest of the world is increasingly dependent on its products and markets, they're beginning to throw their weight around. All the pearl-clutching over Trump's tariffs and attempt at a renewed industrial policy (however poorly executed) elided the question of what exactly anyone else was proposing to do, with the default being the continuation of business-as-usual.
People need to wake up and realize China is a far greater geopolitical threat than the USSR ever was. They have a massive population and they've melded together free-ish market strategic industrial capitalism with a totalitarian panopticon state unlike anything the world has ever seen. Their military is rapidly catching up with if not in some areas surpassing our own, and we're sitting on our asses arguing over idiotic domestic squabbles assuming the unipolar post-cold war world will continue on forever. Because Muricuh!
Frankly, thank god this is finally bleeding out into popular culture, because maybe average citizens will start to realize what a straight-line projection of our current situation is going to look like in a decade or two.
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>calling Hong Kong protesters “separatists”, etc. Devil's advocate here...Are they not separatist? If not, shouldn't they be? It's hard to imagine your "country" working on a death clock. In 2047 it all ends. So, what is the point of fighting the good fight at this point? Why not face the inevitable and leave while you can? Or fight for a final independence now, while you can?
> So, what is the point of fighting the good fight at this point? Why not face the inevitable and leave while you can? Or fight for a final independence now, while you can? Because there's still 28 years to go, and a lot can happen in 28 years.
A lot can happen in that time. Given the direction of things, do you think it will be better? I guess I don't.
When HK is supposed to hand itself over to China's rule in 2047, do you think there will be ANY international support for their independence? I don't. That would be directly against the deal that was struck.
Wouldn't it be better to use China's interference as a pretext for independence, claiming it was China who has broken the bargain?
American independence wasn't about a tea tax or a few soldiers defending themselves in Boston. It was about inevitability and using those events to propel it.
China presents a huge opportunity for growth to the NBA, and this is a really crucial period for them as it seems like the NFL's stranglehold might be weakening and extra money to reinvest might help that process. I don't understand how people can act like losing the Chinese market is some sort of trivial decision?!? I would love for the NBA to stand up to China on this issue, but it IS NOT AN EASY OR OBVIOUS DECISIO…
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As Michael Jordan didn't say... "Republicans buy sneakers too." Billionaires didn't get to be billionaires by leaving money on the table. We need large scale political action against China.
Billionaire's shouldn't exist. Name literally one benefit of having a billionaire in our society. Any one thing we wouldn't otherwise have.
#2 Sell regular folks the idea that they _may_ one day become billionaires too, convince them that they should vote down any tax increase on the 1%; Continue brainwashing them that there's plenty of room at the top, maybe, just maybe room opens up for them as well.
#3 Monetize on the image of billionaires and sell luxury goods and billionaire lifestyle to poor cretins
Except with China it's 1000x worse. It's not an app, it's not just an extra feature, it's the wholesale export of their authoritarian society to the rest of the world. When the statements of a user of your system (as with Hearthstone) risks your company being banned in China, self-censorship inevitably ensues. How long will it be until China insists that anyone, anywhere be deplatformed for this sort of thing?
It's not much of a dilemma though, is it? Already-rich folks kowtowing to fascists for a quick buck is beyond pathetic. US companies should stop targeting China for growth. If they don't steal your IP completely, they'll eventually freeze you out like they just did the NBA. It's happened to many companies and will eventually happen to you too. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
China is just flexing its financial muscle to try and tamp down what's going on in Hong Kong. The fact is, US companies does this on a regular basis to get vendors to comply to their crazy demands. Tim Cook was Apple's strongman who basically blackmailed Apple's entire Chinese supply chain to meet insane shipping and quality standards. Amazon has done it with their local delivery contracts with third party vendors. F…