Moderation Questions
The last iteration of the moderation discussion thread was a complete disaster. Numerous attempts to keep it on topic fa
Thanks for the insight. What you described with the local officials is the sort of stuff I see putting pressure on the party to allow more and more democratic reform. That's the sort of evolutionary reform I see happening.
Or maybe that's what I want to see. Last thing I want or anyone in the West should want is for their economy to implode and a real revolution kick off. There are less self-destructive ways of curbing China's imperialist wishes, imo.
yeah a lot of people tend to view china as a monolithic state but it's so large that is fundamentally impossible to manage - so a lot of local officials in essence have their own little fiefdoms, ie if you want to own a bar, one thing you'll need to do is get a permit from the local fireman determining it is safe and what the max occupancy should be - which is a good thing - but that fireman only earns $800 a month in salary despite that he is the key to whether to whether hundreds of businesses are allowed to open their doors for business - so inevitably many of them will conveniently forget to file the paperwork or get very creative on rule interpretation unless you come forth with a bribe
and the issue is so widespread, that there's a phenomenon every time the national people's congress gathers in beijing that people from all over the country will go to the capital in order to petition for justice against local corruption
and it becomes a cat and mouse game where the local government doesn't want them to do that - because even if it's a frivolous complaint - it still won't reflect well upon them, so they send their local security forces to intercept and prevent these people from making it to beijing
that's the kind of power local officials have - which is why things like this have so much anxiety, because even if xi jinping gives a speech declaring that all leases will be automatically extended, that doesn't prevent some mayor from selectively targeting a few businesses or individuals he doesn't like where he finds reasons to justify non renewal where they then have control of it
but i need to emphasize, none of this is a ccp issue, these are ancient cultural traditions - something pregnant couples will talk about is the anxiety they get over handing out enough red envelopes to all the right people with an appropriate amount in each when they are going to have a child - the worry is that if they don't give various medical staff a gift, they'll resent them and they'll receive subpar care
likewise in nezha, an ancient fable long predating communism, there's a scene where there's this dragon who he's been cruel to which decides to go up to the the heavens to report his cruelty and nezha decides to intervene and beat the dragon some more to prevent him from petitioning to higher authorities and keep it in house - nezha is a hero in this story
you can see it around the 28 min mark
Yeah, China is just China. I don’t really think of China as a communist country. I think China just does what it thinks will work. Makes me wonder how much reform or change will actually come from the top versus evolving quietly from the bottom. Or maybe the kind of “democratic” reform I’m imagining wouldn’t even look like that to us in the West; they might just end up electing better mayors.
But I think it’s still an open question how they’d react if tensions with the West really ratcheted up. I mean, the whole pretext for giving China access to our markets was that it would reduce the risk of war, not increase it. I really don’t know how the Chinese feel about it, though.
when i first went to china in 1999 your average chinese was pretty awestruck by america and how much money everyone had and how much power our government yielded around the globe
when i said i was american, responses would be of the "wow that's so cool, everything is so modern and wealthy there - how much money does your family have?"
when i left as flights began resuming from covid the response would be that of annoyance or even anger - pointing out some ridiculous thing that just happened in florida or how stupidly our government was mishandling something - i think a lot of that was due to the general buffoonery of the trump admin - something which utterly shocks them given how proper, bland, and distinguished their officials act
look at how stiff and robotic xi is here - and this is him playing it up for the crowd - every single leader inspects the military like this, standing up through a sun roof - they all do it with the same soulless and empty robotic precision
seeing someone like clinton giving a thumbs up was interesting, seeing trump was absolutely shocking to the point they can no longer take us very seriously
Yeah, there isn't much that is independent in Russia these days, and access to outside information is at this point severely restricted through blacklists and VPN restrictions. Russia is no longer authoritarian, it is totalitarian.
They are even building a whitelist model, meaning you won't just be unable to access restricted sites, it might end up that you can only access approved sites.
As for the debate on Stalin, there is not much to discuss. When The Soviet Union finally in the 80s openly admitted Stalin's crimes (as opposed to the muted and more secretive criticism of his horrors under Kruchev in the '50s), this also eventually led to the release of correspondence and archives from his reign. So we don't just know his atrocities from external sources (though there are plenty of those), we know them from his own personal correspondence and the correspondence of his inner circle. From that it is very clear that they were not only committing genocide, purges, ethnocide and widespread political murder through rigged courts, they were proud of it and saw it as necessary.
The current regime whitewashes Stalin, because they pursue irrendentism - meaning they want to reconquer old Imperial territory and the Soviet republics which went independent based on charitable interpretations of old maps. It would be awkward to do that while pointing out the the tsars and later chairmen responsible where sociopathic megalomaniacs who also enjoyed murdering their own citizens at industrial scale. People might start to ponder if the current regime is of the same ilk (which it very much is).
Thanks for posting. I worry also that our ability to reason logically, make complex decisions, and express our preferences in words is degrading, partly because the popcorn brain that you describe and partly because of a growing belief that such decisions can and should be offloaded to our machines. The net effect seems like an ill fit witih democracy. [...]
Unregulated machines ran by unregulated operators, and the machine reasoning operates like a black box which is (as of yet) technically impossible to oversee. And what surfaces will be editorialised based on algorithms that suffer the same problems.
It will be interesting times.
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This is an interesting point. To a considerable degree, our technology exerts the same normalizing gaze that Foucault attributed to the panopticon in Crime and Punishment.
That reminds me of Foucault’s point that modern societies didn’t abandon coercion, they just replaced it with normalization. Tocqueville made a related prediction: as societies become more equal, they also become less tolerant of difference, because once everyone is “the same,” anyone who doesn’t fit stands out as a problem.What t_d was saying is r
Seems like I have some reading to do.
Yeah, China is just China. I don’t really think of China as a communist country. I think China just does what it thinks will work. Makes me wonder how much reform or change will actually come from the top versus evolving quietly from the bottom. Or maybe the kind of “democratic” reform I’m imagining wouldn’t even look like that to us in the West; t
China today under Xi can best be described as a Han ethnofascist authoritarian state. It really is the closest we have ever come to Mussolini's vision for ethnonational fascism.
China today under Xi can best be described as a Han ethnofascist authoritarian state. It really is the closest we have ever come to Mussolini's vision for ethnonational fascism.
Well, the right is pushing good ole usa in the same direction. So, I assume you support it.
Thankfully we shut down the trans thread. There's no doubt someone would be misgendering the school shooter. Someone would also probably do the math on school shootings over the last few years and have some inappropriate questions. I guess adults should be shielded from that type of offensive material
The thread had no shortage of absolute geniuses in favor of "gender affirming care". It would have been nice to have them explain something to me.
If the theory is that Trans people are trapped in the wrong body, why does the male to female Trans commit most of the heinous violence? Shouldn't it be the opposite?
In society it's men with almost a monopoly on this type of behavior. Shouldn't it be the men trapped in women's bodies be the members of the trans community behaving this way?
Anyways it would be nice to get the prospective of a prodigy like Crossnerd in this spot. Crossnerd hates men. Who committed this horrific crime? A woman? Behaving like a woman? Hopefully she can untangle this mess for the regular people
There's a school shooting in the US every 5 minutes thanks to you idiots, are we supposed to automatically know wtf you're talking about because there was a trans shooter? I don't think any of us spend anywhere near as much time keeping our ear to the ground on trans news as you do, dude.
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seeing someone like clinton giving a thumbs up was interesting, seeing trump was absolutely shocking to the point they can no longer take us seriously.
I wonder what that could morph into if things really tighten up economically.
I'm thinking if the USSR was in the same economic shape in the 60s as when it collapsed, they probably would have started ww3. The reason I say that is because prior to their fairly rapid rise in geopolitical power, it's easy for the little guys to blame their economic problems on the super powers. I think the Soviets were still at that stage in the 60s, but by the 80s they had - for want of better words - matured to the point of taking at least some responsibility for their problems.
Despite how it may seem otherwise, the US is at the mature level. I mean sure Americans are upset with China's trade and currency tactics, but Americans are vastly more upset with their own politicians for letting it happen.
I don't think anybody really knows until things play out but recessions are pretty much bought and paid for before they happen and it looks like China has a pretty big one coming. We saw how quickly the GFC spiraled. So I kind of wonder if the Chinese people will blame Trump and the West or Xi and the party. I would think a significant recession would be kind of hard to blame local officials for.
Thankfully we shut down the trans thread. There's no doubt someone would be misgendering the school shooter. Someone would also probably do the math on school shootings over the last few years and have some inappropriate questions. I guess adults should be shielded from that type of offensive material The thread had no shortage of absolute geniuses in favor of "gender affirming
The national news network CBC also concerned that we het his gender right. Though on a positive CDN media isn't hiding the fact it was a trans shooter .
China today under Xi can best be described as a Han ethnofascist authoritarian state. It really is the closest we have ever come to Mussolini's vision for ethnonational fascism.
Or Mussolini's vision is the closest we've come to Han ethnofascism.
But to your point I don't have an issue with authoritarian rule, in theory or in the various guise it comes in like kings and dictators. Humans have lived under some form of it since the birth of human civilation. The issue is finding a good king or one that would remain good. So I don't really care if they have that much confidence or trust in their leaders.
Of course NK et al would be an exception to that but those are repressive regimes to the core which China really isn't despite how it may look through our eyes. Oppressors just don't create prosperity for their people.
when i first went to china in 1999 your average chinese was pretty awestruck by america and how much money everyone had and how much power our government yielded around the globewhen i said i was american, responses would be of the "wow that's so cool, everything is so modern and wealthy there - how much money does your family have?"when i left as flights began resuming from co
Among younger, highly educated Chinese, the view that the U.S.'s time had passed and that it was China's time now predated COVID. Otherwise, I agree.
Or Mussolini's vision is the closest we've come to Han ethnofascism.But to your point I don't have an issue with authoritarian rule, in theory or in the various guise it comes in like kings and dictators. Humans have lived under some form of it since the birth of human civilation. The issue is finding a good king or one that would remain good. So I don't really care if they hav
You must be American.
Of course NK et al would be an exception to that but those are repressive regimes to the core which China really isn't despite how it may look through our eyes. Oppressors just don't create prosperity for their people.
To state the obvious, the bolded really, really, really depends on who you ask. I suspect that I could find a few people in Xinjiang with a different perspective.
Or Mussolini's vision is the closest we've come to Han ethnofascism.But to your point I don't have an issue with authoritarian rule, in theory or in the various guise it comes in like kings and dictators. Humans have lived under some form of it since the birth of human civilation. The issue is finding a good king or one that would remain good. So I don't really care if they hav
People who live in democracies are quick to point out that the skillset to win elections does not always coincide with being a competent leader or government.
A similar rule applies to autocracies: The skillset needed to rise in power and stay in power does not translate to being a competent leader or government. However, they have the political luxury of making it illegal or very dangerous to point out that you are incompetent. And since their government invariably serves the party or the person, it will only be allowed to criticize the rulers within acceptable boundaries.
Some autocracies and totalitarian regimes can therefore look superficially impressive, because there is an illusion of focus and stability that comes with suppressing speech, press and assembly. To this day and age a lot of people are convinced Nazi Germany was an orderly society because that is the legacy of its regime's propaganda, but in reality was a hellhole of corruption, ineptitude and insanity. It was barely tied together; at first through violent political militias, later through one of the most violent police states in history.
And this is the case with these states. When you look beneath the facade, you'll find enormous amounts of stupidity.
Of course, developed democracies these days are increasingly corrupt and authoritarian, which just magically happens to coincide with the rise of idiots in power.
Among younger, highly educated Chinese, the view that the U.S.'s time had passed and that it was China's time now predated COVID. Otherwise, I agree.
China's handling of Covid-19 was also catastrophically bad, but I'm guessing it less popular to point it out for their citizens.
I wonder what that could morph into if things really tighten up economically. I'm thinking if the USSR was in the same economic shape in the 60s as when it collapsed, they probably would have started ww3. The reason I say that is because prior to their fairly rapid rise in geopolitical power, it's easy for the little guys to blame their economic problems on the super powers. I
fun fact - your average chinese person blames americans for covid
Among younger, highly educated Chinese, the view that the U.S.'s time had passed and that it was China's time now predated COVID. Otherwise, I agree.
yes that transition had been happening for a while
but covid is where we became a meme for them - they utterly lost all respect for us watching as we ran around like chickens with our heads cut off where everyone had a different opinion over what to do and we closed our eyes and covered our ears ignoring the playbook that every asian country followed to stupendously better results
this is a great shame on our system - the usa and europe not only had much better healthcare and much lower population density but also had more time to prepare and yet oddly had 1000x more mortalities
we completely flubbed everything and very few of us are willing to admit that
It is hard to know exactly what form of government Socrates actually preferred in real life, and even harder to know what we have would have preferred in a modern context.
In any case, this is a silly way to evaluate the merits of authoritarian government.
Well to evaluate we need the term defined. For instance, it's not baked into the definition that authoritarian governments prevent their subjects from leaving. I don't think a philosopher-king would do that. So a country like NK isn't merely authoritarian.
George Will years ago suggested a "Gate Test" for countries.
A country that has gates (walls, fences, or whatever) to keep people in is probably a bad country for its citizens.
Alternatively, a nation whose gates are for keeping folks out is probably a good country for its citizens.
It is hard to know exactly what form of government Socrates actually preferred in real life, and even harder to know what we have would have preferred in a modern context.
In any case, this is a silly way to evaluate the merits of authoritarian government. Leopold II and Idi Amin also thought highly of authoritarianism. I doubt you consider them good company.
One thing Socrates (Plato?) may have been right about is that democracy is one of the worst forms of government.
One thing Socrates (Plato?) may have been right about is that democracy is one of the worst forms of government.
The first government I had a hand in forming back in jr high civics we settled on a 2/3 majority before the group could act. If we're looking for the will of the people, I think that's pretty close. 51% is more like the whims of the people.
