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Sogol posted:I don't find that the peer review process works exactly as you are advertising it, though that would be a good idea. This is particularly true with respect to innovation, most of which is funded by the DoD. In briefings on the national R&D strategy academics are literally told 'you develop it, we will decide what to do with it'. I have a chart from the NSF displaying this if I can find it. We are blind to the effects of this (as well as some aspects of peer review). That perception may just be some eccentricity of my experience though. A thread on the deconstruction of peer review and the effects of the military-industrial-academic system might be interesting. This is a nonsensical statement because "we decide what to do with it" has nothing to do with peer review.
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Jul 29, 2013 02:10
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Sogol posted:I did not mean to do a drive by derailing on peer review. I certainly do not know enough about how publishing and 'grant' funding works in China to use it as some critical baseline for US peer review, were that even remotely appropriate. I still find my friend's experience interesting. She is by no means nationalistic, yet feels that the questions being asked in her field in China are more relevant. I have asked her about sociologists being suppressed. I believe this to be the case and feel I have found examples in the past. She does not. I would like to understand that without being dismissive in some way. I thought it remotely possible someone might have some experience or insight. You seem to be conflating peer review of grant applications with peer review of publications. These are different processes with fairly different ends. Basically everything you've said since then has been based on this misunderstanding along with selectively ignoring the scope of the question in favor of steering the conversation towards areas you're familiar with instead of areas you seem to know very little to nothing about.
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Jul 29, 2013 05:13
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Sogol posted:Truly and simply, I am not interested in arguing with you. You may list my many irredeemable character flaws and ignorances, as well as all your arguments and I will simply concede them. This is a discussion forum, not a lecture venue and hugbox. You should try responding to questions and criticisms directly instead of passive-aggressively refusing to reply or immediately changing the subject to some other tangent.
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Jul 29, 2013 06:00
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Arglebargle III posted:No it's very much "you're still one of us!" whether the person in question wants to be or not. They mean it in a friendly way, usually. There was some stupid discussion thread I remember reading about Chinese-American soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan and some of the posters either didn't read carefully before posting (likely) or didn't really get the concept of a non-Chinese person of Chinese origin. You can also see this in how most levels of Chinese government seem reluctant to aggressively prosecute foreign citizens but this tends to not hold true for those of Chinese descent.
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Jul 29, 2013 07:29
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MJ12 posted:From what I've heard they're actually pretty big players in nanotech research and obviously they've got pretty good ballistic missile tech. Which again would also contribute in part to their relative lack of international patents even assuming that their hard sciences are top-notch and not full of corrupt bullshit (obviously there's some corrupt bullshit but there's a question of how much and how pervasive). Yeah I tend to view most talk of "innovation" as just a thinly veiled retread of the same dumb ideas from the 80s about the Japanese all being conformist robots incapable of creativity or independent thought because of their culture i.e., magic orientalist bullshit that substitutes nebulous cultural causes for fairly solid material facts. It's basically a coping strategy to say that "hey, they might work harder than we do, but we're special (and it's almost implied inherently more human than they are) because creativity and innovation beat dumb brute effort so no need to worry." Basically, we want to believe that US achievement in sciences is due to something essential and inherently "American" instead of being because of historical advantages and concrete systems that any nation could potentially get, or that the US could easily lose without anything as slow or difficult as a change in core cultural values or "essence." It's appealing because it emphasizes the objective "rightness" of American culture and because it implies that any true rival to the US must first become just like us. You see this, for instance, in the idea that American-styled political freedoms are required for innovation and technical development. Ignoring the fact that the USSR rivaled the US in technology until their economy imploded, and that many amazing, ground-breaking technical developments came out of literal scientific gulags there. I'd say that scientific developments and 'innovation' are about money, expertise, and institutions, just like basically every other nice thing developed nations have that developing nations don't. China's getting there on the money and expertise parts, but they're a long ways away on the institutions at least for civil institutions because of massive corruption and individual fraud that's not adequately addressed or enforced because of limited resources and lax governance and management. At the military level, they're probably less dysfunctional (at least in the sense that the US MIC etc. is pretty dysfunctional too). OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Jul 29, 2013 |
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Jul 29, 2013 07:50
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Arglebargle III posted:Stop talking out of your rear end, you keep doing it over and over. Please try to know at least a little tiny bit about your subject before you tell us about it. I meant less dysfunctional than their civil institutions, not less dysfunctional than in the US. I'm not that well-versed in the internal workings of the Chinese military and its R&D system as I am relatively so in their legal system and civil government, but based just on achievements they seem relatively more competent in terms of end results, at least at the very low standards you'd hold for a large peacetime military (which is what I was trying to allude to with the US military comment). For instance, in terms of ballistic missiles or technical espionage, they seem to run a pretty tight ship (in terms of seeming actually competent at least from the outside). OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Jul 29, 2013 |
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Jul 29, 2013 08:03
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Fojar38 posted:You're right, best avoid that derail. But culture does matter. It depends entirely on what you mean when you say "culture." If culture refers to the norms of behavior and conduct created by the policies and workings of an institution, such as when you say "corporate culture" then yes. But not so much when it's used by people who say "it's just their culture" as in nearly immutable or somehow essential characteristics of a nation. Arguably, culture or "national character" tends to change to fit material factors and not the other way around. If so, then it's a bad explanation for long-term macro historical trends, as opposed to what's happening in the current day on a short time frame. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Jul 29, 2013 |
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Jul 29, 2013 08:08
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Sogol posted:I also found this useful, though it is where the 'market' of scholarship is introduced. I find this language objectionable because of the way such thinking has corrupted higher education in the US. Sogol posted:My first research in China (1986-1989) was asking the question "how do modern ideologies effect traditional cultural practice?" I looked at capitalism, Marxism (in China) and technology. One of the things that I found was that with respect to the various practices post 'the cultural revolution' committees were formed to recover many practices. Committee members were asked to bring the 'best' part of their practice in order to create a superior state sanctioned form of practice. Of course the committee members did not actually wish to give the state the best part of their practice, that the state had been trying to wipe out for the past decade. Instead they offered the middle parts, keeping the best within the tradition. They knew this, but it was not obvious to new generations learning the practice. What does this have to do with the preceding sentence? Nothing. It's a total non-sequitur where you bring something up without doing any actual work to not waste the reader's time. And even as a summary it's vague to the point of meaninglessness. Sogol posted:I do not see how it was 'clearly about the humanities', though some of the examples were. I am clear that for you it was about that. And again we are back to the other side of the false equivalency argument here, in which comments on peer review become impossible. Nothing is offered about the actual process associated with 'making poo poo up' or research in general in China. You still don't get it: You're not talking about the peer review process in the original context in which it was discussed - the use of peer review to maintain standards of quality, rigorousness, and credibility. You are focusing entirely on the role of peer review in guiding the development of a field or future research, but this wasn't the original subject. You also seem to be trying to get into philosophical questions as to the objectivity of science or even somehow implying that "Chinese science" has some sort of unique goals and thus it's apparently a false equivalency to evaluate it by the same standards as normal science, which is a pretty dumb argument anyway and more importantly it's pretty much an attempt to subvert and avoid the entire discussion which pretty clearly uses conventional definitions of science and assumes the applicability of the classical scientific paradigm regardless of its faults. Throwing up your hands and going "but how do we really know anything is true?" and "oh well clearly cultural differences mean we can't judge Chinese science by our own western standards" are just ridiculous excuses. Also, jesus christ, you don't need to quote the entire thread back at us including your own posts and add single-line ratings and reactions for every single thing. It makes your posts hideously unreadable while adding huge amounts of bulk to very little content. You're supposed to paraphrase and make coherent responses, quoting only relevant sections when particularly useful, not copy and paste half a chapter because you thought it vaguely related. Your constant repetition of your personal qualifications is also getting a little tiresome. Your comments on personal experience with Chinese research were relevant and useful, but you're making people slog through a bunch of useless filler to get to it. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Jul 30, 2013 |
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Jul 30, 2013 02:17
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Yeah, no matter how bugfuck crazy the allegation, there's always a non-zero chance that some insanely corrupt minor official in the rear end-end of nowhere may actually be doing it in collusion with various local cronies and/or organized crime because who knows. Though you can always wonder how much of the bad stuff is simply due to a lack of (or the near-impossibility of) oversight versus how much is "meet your targets by whatever means necessary" *wink wink*. From what I remember, for instance, Chinese prisons are in practice basically expected to be self-sufficient, and whatever token state funds are allocated to them are snapped up by corruption way before they even reach near the organizational level of the prison itself.
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Aug 23, 2013 05:22
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hitension posted:Man, Meimei Guo is so 2011. Dunno, in America "man shot and killed" is a news headline.
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Aug 26, 2013 14:48
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Honestly, every culture is a shame-based culture. If anything, modern China seems pretty shameless overall. I tend to believe that it's just one of those generic observations people make of other cultures because they're blind to how big a role it plays in their own culture.
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Aug 31, 2013 03:06
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Fojar38 posted:How does he know that the world would suddenly become socialist and not revert to feudalism? Unless he's making a claim that only Westerners are "imperialists?" It's because the most common interpretations of Marxism see communist revolution as a rational, inevitable historical process following the Historical Trend.
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Sep 2, 2013 15:59
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Uh the Japanese and Chinese legal systems are completely different. Also, "round up the usual suspects and beat one into confessing" is actually how all police work was done until maybe 40-80 years ago in the US, too. And it's never completely fallen out of vogue here, either.
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Sep 4, 2013 19:46
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I'm not making excuses but honestly it's there's plenty of modern stories of US police officers or prison officials torturing and killing prisoners or suspects. It's definitely progress even though it's only happening in this case because of a relatively high-profile political victim. Even today if you're poor and the wrong color in the US, deaths while in custody are seriously under-investigated or swept under the rug.
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Sep 4, 2013 20:35
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pentyne posted:There's still an institutional rule of law that does what it can to prevent forced confessions from being used. Tons of the Innocence Projects cases and other Justice organizations fight to get convictions made using coerced or suspicious confessions thrown out. Tell me if there are any Chinese legal aid groups that fight to overturn rulings gained from forcing a confession. And while there are still problems with the US system, it's still got a vastly superior legal apparatus to obtain 'justice'. Cops caught killing a prisoner in the US don't get a 'accidental harm' charge levied against them. Actually my response is because cops or prison officials killing a prisoner in the US often get limited to no punishment, too, so acting all surprised seems a little excessive. It's not an excuse, it's just that your reaction seems to be ignorant. You're also massively oversimplifying and in the past have shown you don't know what you're talking about, which is why I responded specifically to you and not other people getting upset about this.
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Sep 4, 2013 23:13
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I'd guess that it's probably "双规" which is a sort of Stalinist extralegal goon squad / Internal Affairs agency under the umbrella of the National Congress itself. I found a general info US article about it on google: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/15/world/asia/accused-chinese-party-members-face-harsh-discipline.html?_r=0 OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Sep 5, 2013 |
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Sep 5, 2013 00:04
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MrNemo posted:I believe it was in this thread someone explained at the different attitude the Chinese have to apologies. It's tied in somewhat with the 'face' culture but apologies are effectively a power play when it comes to politics. They act as an admission of wrongdoing and a sign that you are the weaker partner in a relationship. The Chinese government can play up other nations apologising for various acts as basically a way of showing their own population how powerful China is on the world stage while simultaneously providing moral cover for any criticisms they receive regarding human rights or pollution (basically, 'China you're destroying the environment in the South China Seas and wiping out the fishing industry for the region, please stop.' 'gently caress you Japan, apologise properly for the Rape of Nanjing and stop imposing your political pollution on the great Chinese people!'). Dunno, that's how apologies work for basically any international diplomacy. Look at what just came up regarding the US and Afghanistan, with administration officials issuing statements to quash any rumors of possible apologies as "completely false," and more generally the accusation that the president would ever apologize for America being used as an attack during the election. Basically, when's the last time the US officially apologized for anything? It's vanishingly rare. Even at a individual level, pointing out how a superior hosed up in almost any American workplace is just not done, at least when you enter the corporate or professional world. And anyone apologizing for anything usually means they're either already screwed or else are one step away from being shitcanned and are being forced to apologize to a powerful client or similar figure. American culture is pretty seriously obsessed with image and perceptions of power so I just don't see that huge a difference on this issue.
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Nov 22, 2013 04:53
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Fojar38 posted:There seems to be a trend of communist countries reverting to nationalism once they abandon communism. Reverting? Chinese communists and Russian communists never really got along, probably because of nationalism and competing national interests. The only reason the Warsaw pact toed the party line was because they were puppet states and any overt nationalists that threatened this uniformity in favor of more national interests tended to end up dead.
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Nov 22, 2013 04:59
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MrNemo posted:It's more along the lines, 'This school is using a horrible text book/this local official said a horrible thing. Japan has mortally offended the Chinese people we demand an official apology from the Japanese government and the discussion of reparatations for the Rape of Nanjing at the opening to discussions over the sovereignty of the Daiyou islands'. Again, though, this isn't really a practice exclusive to China at all. Demanding apologies or random subordinates with little actual responsibility offering up apologies and resigning is pretty common coin anywhere. The Chinese like to demand apologies they know they won't get in part to build up the idea (particularly for internal consumption) that they're constantly being snubbed and ignored by other nations, and to manufacture grievances for both internal and external use. Arguably this isn't done as much by other countries largely for tactical/strategic reasons instead of cultural ones, and also because it's just a very blunt tool. Similarly, China's historically not been very interventionist arguably not just due to cultural factors but simply because they have lacked the means to do so for most of their history (and still do), especially compared to the other players in the game and the danger of any sort of confrontation or action escalating.
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Nov 22, 2013 05:13
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sincx posted:Heh it'd be hilarious if China sent out fighters to intercept every NH, JL, KE, and OZ flight that overfly the region. They won't dare shoot them down, and it'll cost them so much money. Dunno, it was a different era but civilian airliners getting accidentally shot down by fighters doing routine air patrols is a real thing that has happened before.
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Nov 26, 2013 19:29
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VideoTapir posted:The only thing that would get me into another zombie shooting game would be to set it in China. Sounds risky. If some idiot official takes it out of context as being in any way anti-China it could not only end up with restrictions on sales in China but also result in more general retaliation against the publisher, etc.
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Nov 29, 2013 05:55
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WarpedNaba posted:Retaliation how? Aside from denying them an admittedly huge market (Which you can go around by setting it in Denying them a huge market as well as potentially altering terms for future access to a growing market is a pretty big deal. Especially since a lot of game publishers are parts of larger corporate groups with significant interests in other media. "Your competitors get to make money and build a brand here, you don't" is pretty much the complete opposite of laughable or ineffective. You'd be surprised how paranoid execs can get over things like that, especially since most of the processes involved are non-transparent and rather arbitrary. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 07:36 on Nov 29, 2013 |
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Nov 29, 2013 07:32
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WarpedNaba posted:Like I said, Aside from denying that market, what could they do? Deny them other media markets. It's not like these are highly principled artists or something. They care about making money and/or looking like they're not screwing up to their bosses, so denying access and the fear of future denials requiring more money and favors to fix is pretty much the worst thing that could happen to them. If you greenlight something that causes protest from the Ministry of Culture, you bet your superiors will be up your butt about it even while you argue that it's a tiny market right now and you aren't losing that much revenue, because sucking up to China to get more access to their market as it expands is a real big deal, and because execs in general are incredibly risk averse and any hint of trouble can be considered a sign of bad decision making.
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Nov 29, 2013 16:17
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Daduzi posted:In terms of the spreading of Chinese culture through media, this has been something I've been thinking of for a while. Though I was (and still am) critical of a lot of the government's approach towards culture, and have told them as much, I've come to realise whatever they do they're probably onto a losing prospect as far as any established media are concerned. How many people in any English speaking country could name more than handful of non-English language novels or films? Animation isn't exactly a new medium, though. It's been around for long-rear end time and there were a ton of established classics/juggernauts of the genre like Disney, Warner Bros, etc. when Japan started out. The big thing is money - Japan spends money on animation. There's a strong domestic market for it (originally as a cheaper alternative to films) and there's cultural and language market barriers that keeps foreign animation and alternative media less competitive. What you see as the colonization of new market niches, I see as simply accidentally reflecting the technology-driven economic/market changes in the popular media industry. With a growing middle-class, there was more money to be made in vulgar theater and the novel than by making artistic paintings for wealthy patrons by the time Imperial Britain rose to prominence. Recorded music and films are more profitable and reach a wider audience than theater, and by the time the US became wealthy enough to start developing competitive art they were the premiere media. Also, to expand on another post, reason Korean media is becoming such a big deal is because its heavily subsidized by the state as a way to build soft power and develop non-industrial/manufacturing cultural industries. They're actively developing talent in both the technical and artistic areas of media production, allowing promising directors serious artistic autonomy to go with their financing. And on the technical side, look at the cast rolls for korean films - even 20 years ago many of the technical roles were still Hong Kongers, and now they're predominantly native. Apparently it's also gaining an audience in the developing world as far out as africa. Cultural industries are arguably no different from other industries. They will develop if government invests in them (financing, expertise, infrastructure) and maintains market conditions that allow them to grow initially without being crushed by well-established outside competitors (language, cultural, and trade barriers). These conditions are hard to come by in english-speakign and other westner countries because of the relatively small size of language and cultural barriers to US media, along with open trade and press policies. If anything, because of the size of the Chinese market and aforementioned barriers, China is well-placed to develop its own media presence as the money to be made there increases so long as the government and finance sector doesn't gently caress it up. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Dec 9, 2013 |
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Dec 9, 2013 17:21
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Fojar38 posted:If the prevailing elements in your cultural exports are "exoticness" then you aren't really exporting your culture; you're exporting a curiosity that might hold people's attention but won't really influence them. Accessibility and cosmopolitanism are pretty critical in any cultural export that you're hoping will create cultural influence. It's one of the reasons that for all its successes, Japanese cultural exports have struggled to gain influence other than niche influence. Japanese culture has had a lot of influence in the design world and other artistic areas. You just don't notice it because its been for the most part fully integrated and those elements are not marked or marketed as outwardly japanese. Also, exoticness is only tolerated if it fits within existing stereotypes. Otherwise it's just sort of ignored or downplayed when selling something.
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Dec 10, 2013 00:11
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Fojar38 posted:You raise an interesting point about any potential for Chinese culture to become influential abroad. Currently Anglo culture dominates the world in part because it seems rather adept at absorbing new ideas, integrating them, and making them its own. This is doubly so for the North American Anglosphere because they have a long history of absorbing immigrants. Even if China did gain the cultural exporting power of, say, Japan what's to stop the meat of it from getting absorbed and converted as well? Is this really true, though? Is the US really better at absorbing new ideas? Especially in a way that impacts its media products? I'm not particularly convinced that this is true. I'd argue that mostly what the US does is package existing bits of its own culture in a safe-yet-novel and ethnic-looking wrapper without really retaining much of its origins or core at all, just like every other country. Ethnicity in US media arguably still exists mostly as a thing to be mocked and overcome, as a blank spot to project your fears and fantasies, or as an exotic treat for the upper classes to show how broad-minded they are (because facing evidence that your way of life isn't really normal or natural at all is really stressful and hard). Ideologically, I'd say US culture is exceedingly hostile and corrosive to any sort of traditional culture or outside values. Consider the bagel, or any other ethnic bread. Within a generation, it turns from weird, hard, perishable ethnic foodstuff to fluffy white bread with a hole in it that you can get filled with ham, egg, and cheese at McDonalds. I'd say that Anglo cultural influence is big because England was a wealthy world power and then the US was a wealthy world power with lots of money to spend on leisure and culture. In terms of absorbing new ideas, what of modern China isn't new? Modern China is made up mostly of various western-inspired elements (to the extent that the Soviets, etc. are also lumped in as "western") combined and interacting with their own inventions/accidents, most of which are relatively modern developments anyway. Culturally speaking, it's all about inertia. And the inertia of China's population is so big that no matter how sophisticated your media machine, they're going to be charting their own course. They're not like those tiny nations or minority groups that have to worry about being wiped out or massively altered culturally and ethnically. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Dec 10, 2013 |
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Dec 10, 2013 04:17
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Arglebargle III posted:Funny that you'd say that China's inertia prevents it from being changed in the same breath as saying that almost all of its culture is recent. Well arguably it certainly makes it difficult for outside forces to affect it unilaterally, in the context of my response being to someone who talks about China being "absorbed and converted." And on top of that, stuff like the cultural revolution was able to push changes only after massive trauma and some seriously drastic use of force. WarpedNaba posted:'Charting one's own course' is not an expression I would associate at all with a Confucian society. Likewise, with China's enormous pressure against expression, I would not associate it with cultural or medial impetus. China isn't a confucian society. Also perhaps a better phrasing would be "going their own way". I'm also puzzled by how you interpret "their" as anythign other than a collective term referrign to the amorphous entity that is "Chinese culture." If you believed China was a Confucian society, why wouldn't you consider it amenable to top-down control and steering of culture? OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Dec 10, 2013 |
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Dec 10, 2013 04:29
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Ardennes posted:If anything I think it is less amount China than the international market altogether becoming much more potent, and Hollywood is catering to an international audience which includes China but also yeah the rest of the world.Elysium for example made over double overseas than it did in the States, it would have been a bomb if it had to rely on mostly US revenue. Well that and I hear the US market is becoming less profitable, in part due to the economy and the internet, but also due to changes in the distribution/business models of movies and theaters themselves. Though I'm not that knowledgeable about how the whole consumer side of the movie business works outside the US.
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Dec 10, 2013 04:46
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Fojar38 posted:I disagree and think that most of your criticisms are superficial ones. The melting pot and the concept of a nation of immigrants (which itself ties into the "city on a hill" ideology that frustrates so many D&D posters) are still very much in play even today. There's a great deal of European, Native American, African, Asian, and Latin American influences in American culture that in turn are absorbed and made common-place in the United States. A great example of this is New York. You cannot walk 5 feet in New York City without running into something that is the product of immigrants bringing their culture with them to the United States and their cultural traditions subsequently becoming intertwined with American traditions. This is true of any country with immigration (or outside conquerors), though. You could say the same about Mexico, which is made up of a mixture of Native and European elements (leaning far more strongly to the native side) with influences from various immigrant groups over time ranging from the Japanese to Germans to Lebanese. Pick any region in China and you'll see a long history of migration, conquest, and cultural mixing too. What makes America so special in essence? That is to say, what of this situation shows the distinct strength of Anglo culture or character and not simply the historical circumstances of large waves of immigration? How is the melting pot, the idea that immigrant cultures and identities should be homogenized, diluted, and destroyed in order to maintain a common national culture and identity, any different from the integration of immigrants in any other country beyond the fact that it's harder because there were a lot more immigrants coming in groups? Especially with the common (if unsaid) corollary that American Values are non-negotiable and not open to change. If our values aren't supposed to change, then isn't the rest of culture all just window-dressing anyway? OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Dec 10, 2013 |
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Dec 10, 2013 04:59
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Fojar38 posted:In the case of the US, there are several critical differences. China is an even younger nation than the US, though. Ethnically speaking, the entire idea of a Han people that makes up 95% or whatever of China is basically made up. Han Chinese is about as descriptive as White American, and arguably serves a similar role socially. And don't forget the many ethnic groups that still maintain some level of identity, even if its as petty as getting to march around at the Olympics. The idea of just grabbing random settlers from a poor region to fill out the borders and crowd out the pesky natives who might become separatists is something China actively engages in right now as well. If anything, I'd say it's way way easier legally to enter, work, and live in China than it is for a foreigner to enter the US, especially if you come from a non-white country with more restrictive numbers. Socially, of course, not so much, but then again, how many first-generation immigrants (who don't pass for white) do you know who live comfortably away from their own ethnic enclaves? If anything, you'll probably not be treated actively badly as a white foreigner in china - after all, white immigration is still small enough that it isn't considered a big threat to the country like non-white immigration is considered in the US, and thus doesn't trigger the same hostility. Of course this isn't to paper over the fact that China is overall an incredibly racist country by any standard, let alone relatively decent US standards. But this is so arguably because the goverment there actively encourages it as a means of social control. Also, I see the ideal of cultural and ethnic homogeneity expressed plenty among Americans, too. "I plan to marry a non-white person so we can all be the same one day and live in harmony" - a thing some American college kids actually say. I don't really have a super strong position on the issue, btw. I'm mostly just spitballing, but then again I've always seen culture more as an accretion of historical accidents interacting with current needs than an issue of inherent or essential characteristics. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Dec 10, 2013 |
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Dec 10, 2013 05:33
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Smeef posted:This bit confuses me. Do you mean momentum? Inertia is resistance to change in motion. Momentum is the direction + energy of movement for a moving thing.
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Dec 10, 2013 07:10
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I'm pretty sure alluding to significant works of literature is common in English too. It's the choice of a recent children's book that makes it silly. Even an old children's book would have worked if they were trying to make a familiar reference or imply that the situation is childishly clear-cut, but Harry Potter is arguably just too recent to not be ridiculous. Especially when they go into way more detail than the average adult knows about Harry Potter. That and/or the pre-existing image of Chinese officials makes it harder for them to do stuff like that witout people just assuming they're being unironically dumb and ignorant of other cultures. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Jan 6, 2014 |
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Jan 6, 2014 19:10
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Forums Terrorist posted:The Japanese have gently caress all institutional knowledge of carrier warfare since the Imperial Navy got dismantled 70 years ago, and if events like the Forrestal fire and the F-35 debacle are any indication the US isn't too far behind in institutional rot. The British Navy ruled the waves in the 1800s but Jutland and the Prince of Wales proved that having an active navy during peacetime only helps so much against knowledge decay. I'm pretty sure the latter is all China really cares about anyway. For the former that's why they (or anyone) have nukes.
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Jan 24, 2014 01:42
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Rosscifer posted:All this carrier talk is pretty funny since they're basically irrelevant in terms of South-East Asian security. In the the event of a hypothetical war all of the 5 carriers the Chinese want to build will be sunk in the first twenty minuets by American transonic missiles while the western/Japanese navies won't be able to go near China due to ballistic missiles, cruise missiles barrages, and stealth fighters launched from China's airbases built into mountains. If it was a real "existential threat" total war that they were losing they'd launch. Which is silly because it snot going to happen, but weirdly enough military strength somehow manages to affect negotiations anyway even when both sides know nothings goign to happen.
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Jan 24, 2014 03:01
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All Gawker media is poo poo. No exceptions.
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Jan 26, 2014 17:15
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Dr. Witherbone posted:What, seriously? Not even getting into the politics of the whole "was there an apology" thing with Japan, assuming they hadn't, that makes Germany still Nazis as far as some top brass is considered? I don't think you're interpreting that quote correctly. Also the lack of proper reconciliation thing is a real grievance, though obviously an old one now. Germany had Nuremberg. The war crimes trials for Japan were much less public or sweeping and a lot of no-poo poo war criminals were set free and left to become rich and powerful and even be part of the government.
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Apr 2, 2014 02:13
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dilbertschalter posted:I would say it's more "China" vs. "Not China." No they also count a lot of nearby not China as China because they once sent a tribute to some random dynasty.
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May 4, 2014 17:53
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