i didn't say use them as an example. i only stated they rapped about it. i don't see what's so wrong about the message that the earlier poster had. a bunch of people are truly brainwashed by the media.
Please make an example. How are people brainwashed by news? People getting FACTS are brainwashed? How? Please enlighten me! If you believe what Dead Prez say 100%, you are truly a fool. I listen to rap, I always have and always will... but to believe what they say to be 100% only makes you out to be a fool, and THAT is considered brainwashing.
personally, i would not risk an environment where everyone can enjoy a stable society. if you see what happened to USSR after they fell apart. i mean, that part of the world are worse than there were economically now. with the huge population in China, if anything happens to the stability, then we'll be talking about huge disasters. if that happens, i doubt anyone would give a **** about freedom of speech and press. it's easy for people who have no stake there to ignore those risks. given that my family and relatives are all there, i don't want to see anything happen. they are all happy and living comfortably for most part. but i do agree that environment and social gap are the biggest issues right now. i would prefer the government concentrating on those first.
you are really making assumptions about what i believe. i don't think i have made those claims as you stated. my point about dead prez was that, some people do think that way, rightly or not. but anyways. you do realize that there are people here that truly have no idea about the world except the things they hear on TV right? i mean, some of my friends are like, "wow, China is not dictatorship?" when I hear that kind of statements, it just makes you think what are people learning here. and also, every time the word communism is mentioned, people automatically goes on the offense without truly knowing what communism is. they just assume communism is evil, which is not true. what made communism fail is human nature. yet on CNN, they always mention, "communist China", blah blah blah. a lot of the issues they talk about, has absolutely nothing to do with politics nor philosophy.
That's actually why communism is evil. Never has there been an application of Communism that didn't terrorize, subjugate, and violate every fundamental right of humanity.
well, i guess so much for freedom. don't you think that's pretty much brainwashing? i do know that there are a few American communist members though. there used to be a study group in the university here.
there are examples of small communities that it worked. for larger communities, it's too hard to work out. again, the ideology of communism itself is not evil. it promises equality, not freedom. democracy promises freedom but not equality.
Well, except that normal people won't spend THAT much time to look at that MANY MANY ... SOURCE of information on something they don't actually care a lot about. Everyone tells you that just because of the freedom of press you won't get brainwashed and you believe it, and that's exactly brainwash. You won't get brainwashed IF you can look at the problem from all sides, and that's where freedom of press helps you. But if all you do is listening to CNN or BBC, you are only getting one side of the story, and that CAN get you brainwashed.
You do know that FACTS can be presented in many different ways do you? If you put everything that goes wrong together in America, drugs, shooting, violence, racial discrimination etc, and give it to someone who has no idea about the country, you know what they will be thinking. And if you just pick the rosy stuff, the success stories, you give them the American dream. All of those are cold hard facts, but the way you present them and what part of the story you present will make a huge difference, and that can easily be used to brainwash people.
Its still a ridiculous comparison. The US has never claimed Iraq is part of the US and the insurgents in Iraq have never claimed to the rightful government of the US. FYI Taiwan while not having nukes of their own are under the US nuclear umbrella and the US has sold Taiwan limited anti-theatre missile technology.
I would say that the breakup of the Soviet Union was very much due to the inability of maintaining central control over a huge and disparate entity. Gorbachev's reforms were a last ditch effort at saving the Soviet Union by democratizing and decentralizing power but at that point it was too late. I would disagree with whether things are better or worse in the former Soviet Union while they are worse for some I think it is highly questionable whether they would be better if the Soviet Union had stayed as a single entity. At the time of its breakup its economy was in shambles, Soviet bureacracy and corruption strangled innovation and equity, while nationalist forces were already on the rise in the Baltics and Caucasus. While the dissolution of the Soviet Union was disatrous for Communist apartchaks it has given great hope to people in places like Latvia, and even Russia itself, where they aren't tied down to the old Soviet machine. The PRC has learned the lesson of decentralizing control over the economy which has proved profoundly successful. The next step is to decentralize the government. I'm not going to pretend that that won't mean big upheavels, and FYI I don't have relatives in the PRC proper but family in Hong Kong who might suffer from chaos in the PRC, but IMO its better for the PRC to address those now before things get much worse. Anyway the transition from socialism to capitalism also brought, and continues to bring, huge upheavels, but the on the whole has been good for the PRC.
well, i think everyone would prefer things to change as smooth as possible. after all, a stable harmonious society is what everyone wants. whatever the consequence, it's the people who will face it. politicians can changes to whatever easily. so ya, have to be responsible for ourselves.
Sounds like you're brainwashed! Seriously, your constant attempts to claim we are brainwashed by our media is simply an attempt to make excuses for the lack of freedom of the press/media (we simply call it "Freedom of the Press," that's old school lingo) in China. Just because your media is controlled by your oligarchy doesn't make us brainwashed by the host of different news sources we has access to in this country. I'm really not sure why you continue in this vein. I'm assuming you have had, or have, exposure to all the different news sources in America (and elsewhere). If not, that explains it. If you do, I simply don't understand where you are coming from. We are literally bombarded by a host of news sources. Countless sources on the internet. On local TV in Austin, Texas, where I live, there are several different TV news programs broadcast and most people here have cable TV, where there are many, many more. They do not all broadcast the same thing. It's why many of us "channel surf" and check different channels for their "take" on a story. And we have daily and weekly newspapers, as well as weekly newsmagazines (several of those), who report stories their own way with their own "slant." Why have a host of news sources? To insure we get all sides of a story. The different news sources compete (that's a capitalist term) with each other to "get the scoop" on a news story. They try to get the latest news before the competition (another capitalist term) does, in hopes that they will sell more copies of their daily and weekly newspaper, weekly newsmagazine, etc., then the competition. And it works. If one news sources gets the story first, or the latest details first, they sell more copies. If they are one of our many TV stations or radio stations (Austin has a lot of them), they get better ratings for their news program and can get more money for advertising. Again, you are making excuses for the lack of free, competitive news media in China by making false charges of "brainwashing" by our free, competitive news media. Any brainwashing that goes on here is due to the laziness of the person checking out the news, and there is nothing we can do about that. Here, we are free to be as informed as we wish, or as uninformed. And that's the way it is. Impeach Bush and Send Him to Tibet to Report the News!
i am not trying to make excuses. i think we all know by now that news there isn't free. but my point is that free news doesn't mean good news. you can have all sorts of news here about everything, but it doesn't mean that it's not biased. if people are constantly exposed to biased news everyday, that's pretty much brainwashing to me. if you live in a non western country for a while, and watch the news there, i am sure you will get a completely different view of the world.
There is a difference between getting your news through the lens of another culture, affecting how it is presented, and getting it through a controlled media under an oligarchy, yuantian. Impeach Bush and Send Him to Tibet to Report the News!
honestly, i am glad that i got the chance to live outside of China for decades. it does give me a different view on things. it's hard to explain how some of these bi-cultural children feel, like me. people on both sides have trouble understanding us. i think some of my friends even have trouble understanding about themselves too.
