iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

no it does not imply that. good governance implies intelligent land use in this context

000

lol u react so easily to one casual word choice

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That’s not true. Digital systems can approximate analog systems to arbitrary levels of precision. Eg you could keep developing ever more and more high fidelity music formats but you will never capture all of a live performance

100

dressing too well can be sort of an anti signal in STEM--suggests you're more interested in what people think of you than being good at your job

100

i think it depends on the field. like, i would not judge an engineer showing up to an interview with an iced coffee. i would be asking hard technical questions such as, what have you blown up recently? those social norms make more sense in fields where people skills are required

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broadly speaking, texans choose sprawl over densification--isn't that a form of poor governance?

630

you can, in fact, if you bother, google the history of taiwan and see how many people he massacred once he got there. he only had to slaughter fewer people because taiwan has a much tinier population

000

the other reason this discourse is incredibly stupid is that pretty much anyone who succeeds in consolidating power to the extent mao did, turns into a paranoid authoritarian. this is a big reason chiang kai shek in a similar position may not have been better

100

you said that south korea proves it's possible to accomplish the positives of what mao did without the devastation. i am pointing out it only accomplished that with the kind of help that would never have been available to china, for political reasons.

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i think you can accept physicalism while rejecting functionalism. perhaps there are certain kinds of computations that only a biological substrate can accomplish. this is not a vitalist position either

210

yeah he was shitty. OTOH he knew how to win over people, and the KMT didn't. mao did a lot to prevent colonization and advance gender rights. hard to see CKS doing the same

000

the KMT was in addition very corrupt, and interested in preserving the same pseudo-feudal relations that impoverished the peasantry. the communists made an effort to end prostitution, detox opium addicts, and stop crime. there's a reason the CCP won over so many people

100

i'm chinese and happy to own that mao killed millions of people through bad policy and also did a lot to modernize china. chiang kai shek was a shitty alternative. more obsessed with tamping down communists than fighting off the japanese. google xi'an incident

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he was, in addition, extremely right wing and opposed to feminism. once he got to taiwan, he murdered thousands of taiwanese and imposed martial law. if mao doesn't get credit for setting china on a good path, neither does CKS. taiwanese democracy only happened after he died

the japanese were just as bad as the germans during wwii. one newspaper ran an article about a bayoneting contest the japanese soldiers had. big prize to whoever could shank the most chinese civilians. chiang kai shek was insane.

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Xi'an Incident - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an... this is the guy all the white people think would have done a better job modernizing china. chiang kai shek wanted to keep murdering his fellow chinese more than he wanted to repel the japanese invaders. google unit 731 to see how evil they were

en.wikipedia.org

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nooooo they don't, that's the answer. if the dan nexon in your replies is the dan nexon who's a professor at georgetown, i'm shocked that he's so freaking confident about the counterfactual that jiangjeshi would have been better. that's academic malpractice

010

i'm not a mao supporter. my family suffered too much. but i think birb's point that mao is a complicated figure who was a better leader than chiang kai shek would have been shouldn't be that controversial

you simply cannot say with a straight face that those three countries managed to prosper without the same tribulations that china did, without neglecting that foreign influence was directed towards building them up. china faced a much more hostile foreign policy front

excuse me? all three countries received considerable foreign aid after wwii. from 1950-1965, foreign aid from the US represented about 9% of taiwan's GDP. south korea and japan also received considerable financial help

i am also not loving how none of these white male haters of mao are acknowledging he was much better on gender than chiang kai-shek

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