it's baraka hussein osama bin hitler. get it right. 

 

"Survival of the fittest eh? So if someone bigger and
stronger comes to your place, kicks your ass and takes your stuff you are fine
with it because it went to someone more apt at surviving than you?"

-Aphyrax



I may not agree with what Ming says, but he does have a point. It’s not about
what’s fair. To quote Rambo: you can’t change what is. When it comes to
nations, it is a constant jostling for position and power. "Survival of
the fittest" is a simplistic and inaccurate way of putting it, but ever
since the US rose to world prominence with WWII, it has been battling to maintain
its supremacy atop the dungheap of this planet.



It’s not surprising how negative our media has treated China.
The biased media coverage  is simply yellow
journalism. Not as bad as the state controlled media in China, but it is
perhaps more insidious. With Chinese journalism, you know what you're getting.
They're blatantly obvious in their censorship. Just imagine if China decided to
go in and "liberate" those poor Iraqis from their brutal dictator
while subtly liberating them from their oil fields.



How would the US
media cover such a war as civilian casualties reach 300k and continue rising?
Would we accept their excuses of looking for "weapons of mass
destruction" or "liberating the Iraqi people"? Hell, maybe we'd
be calling the fedayeen and al qaeda "freedom fighters" against the
tyranny of a foreign occupying force. Oh wait, we pretty much did that already
in Afghanistan
back when the Mujahideen and the US
were BFF.



The US media has built an image of China that seems a caricature of the
nation's faults. An entire nation comprised of hundreds of ethnicities with a
rich, vibrant culture and thousands of years of history has been reduced to a
human rights abusing, freedom of speech suppressing, Buddhist monk beating,
organ harvesting, state secret stealing commie pinko, and yet also a surging,
unchecked capitalistic (irony?) behemoth that's devouring the world's resources
and polluting its air.



The Chinaman has replaced the Soviet Union as the new
bogeyman. Hallelujah. So long as we still have enemies, the military-industrial
complex can roll on. If we even spent 1/10 of that money on scientific
research, we could have cured cancer by now. But no, we need more smart bombs
so we can vaporize more caves in Afghanistan.




And as regards your comment that the Chinese will eventually revolt, that's
pretty much been the last three thousand years of Chinese history. One could
say China has a greater history of revolution against corrupt authority than
every other nation, including the US. But they won't revolt because they want
our "Western" human rights. They'll revolt for the same reason we
did: economics. You think people just sit around in cafes complaining about
their rights being violated, and then decide to have an uprising? Who does that
except the French? Outside of war, popular unrest usually stems from poor
living conditions, which mostly are due to poverty.



The US had the idea when they placed economic sanctions on Iraq. Saddam kept
building his palaces, and the people ended up bearing the brunt of those
sanctions. With an unhappy populace (The Shiite majority anyways), Saddam had
only one option. The harder we squeezed the Iraqis economically, Saddam
likewise tightened his iron grip to quell popular unrest. Eventually, the
people will have had enough. I guess we got a little impatient. Oops.



Similarly, when Chinese people can no longer afford to feed their families
because the govt policies have failed to maintain the level of economic growth
required to sustain the inevitable aging population bulge in 30 years, we will
have blood. Think about our baby boomer generation, but ten times worse. At
least there's no social security to pay for, right? You'll just have to take
care of your parents and the in-laws. And their siblings along with their
spouses. And anyone else who's an aging relative with no children to feed them.




Yea, I can see China supplanting the US as the dominant world power, but I
wouldn't forecast its tenure to endure unless it makes some drastic changes in
the near future.



In summary: TLDR/Wall of text crits you for over 9 thousand/paragraphs are your
friend/political blog -->

 

america lost its war on drugs years ago--the govt simply doesn't want to admit it. we should just make our unconditional surrender and legalize everything. that should solve all our problems. and if it doesn't, we'll be too high to give a damn.

 

I find this discussion interesting in that everyone's making the same assumption of this great distinction between athletic prowess and intelligence.

Do you always shoot a basketball with your right hand? Try doing the same thing with your left. Athletic skills are learned just as you would a musical instrument or writing good blog articles--they all take practice. I agree that certain people have more natural ability, but I'm also gonna side with Mortale's argument that intelligence is also impacted greatly by genetics. I believe you were ultimately arguing semantics on the nature of intelligence and skill.

I'm not sure what you mean by intelligence, but as far as pure computing power, a 50-yr-old chess player would not have the mental acuity to keep up with his 30-yr-old self. Terence Tao, the guy who recently won the Fields Medal (Nobel Prize of mathematics), said that mentally he's not as quick as he used to be, but he feels more confident in his abilities because of his accumulated knowledge and experience. I would compare this to your Michael Jordan analogy in which his superior "skills" compensated for diminishing athleticism. When you use the term "intelligence," it feels to me like you are really speaking of knowledge and experience rather than pure gigaflops/second.

Even a person of below average intelligence can become knowledgeable and wise if he puts in the effort to acquire said knowledge. An intellectually gifted individual may spend all his time browsing porn and wind up totally ignorant. But put them side by side, teach them how to play chess for the first time (or some other analytical game; chess may not be the best example), and I'll put my money on the gifted dude. Pure brain power wins. There's a reason why most math geniuses make their greatest discoveries in their 20s. But put these two in a more complex scenario like a debate, and experience has the advantage.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but your argument suggests that intelligence is more plastic than athletic ability in that people can work to become more intelligent while athletes are just born with it. I'm basically saying intellectual and athletic potential are both genetically determined. It's the environment you're in and the choices you make that determine how much of that potential you tap.

A man who has spent his life training in martial arts or gymnastics or any number of other sports will have learned to move his body in ways he never would've dreamed of had he not put in the practice. Shooting a basketball, catching a football, or doing a jump back spin kick may seem like simple mechanical motions, but they actually require complex mental calculations. We're just not aware of it because we've been practicing using our bodies since we were born--not like we busted out of the womb in a full sprint, eh? Gotta learn to crawl first.

It sounds cliché, but the mind and body are inseparable. Rather than make the arbitrary distinction between physical and mental ability, I'd just argue for a general "skills" category. You can have your basketball skills, chess playing skills and your one-handed upside down monkey spanking skills. Whatever floats your boat, guys.

Here's a summary for those too lazy to read: TL;DR/Wall of Text Crits You for Over 9000

 

good lord, if someone is crazy enough to try gene/viral therapy just to boost performance (and not for say fighting cancer), then he deserves the gold in special olympics for being a complete retard.