Its a nice simple intro to how China sees State mechanisms relating to Market Mechanisms in its overal strategy. It also clearly reinforces that China is socialist, because it’s use of these mechanisms is entirely in line with goals above profit and bourgeois interests, namely, proletarian interests and Chinese interests.
I’m about 50/50 on parts of that being sarcastic vs. all very serious.
If you (poster above OP) are serious: there is a lot to learn about Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, and about the history of socialist countries in general, which could help you make sense of this stuff. I’m big into Losurdo, but I think Roland Boer had lots of good stuff on how this works which can be helpful at this stage. China is entirely socialist while utilizing some mechanisms developed during capitalism in order to grow and develop China economically.
Whoa what?? Avoid Anki? I’ve never heard a single person say that Quizlet is superior in the wild. What makes you conclude this?
Unintended may be somewhat true, in that nobody explicitly had that as a conscious reason, but it was an obvious result that they could’ve known beforehand. So I don’t think it’s useful at all to call it unintended. Just an easily understood and expected side effect
Libs and your obsession with whataboutism. This one isn’t even “whatabout,” the point is that the guy in this picture was fine, and in fact the army did everything in their power not to harm him.
In a complete opposite fashion, US drone operators gleefully shot random people and caused unbelievable harm to an entire region.
I proudly defend whataboutism when it’s used to exemplify the necessity of some tactic elsewhere or to compare similar cases for better understanding. But this isn’t even that
Yeah I should say, I’m not worried about theft as a phenomenon, I just wouldn’t have an electric bike outside considering I don’t earn enough to lose something like that. Theft is a tragic symptom but I also prefer not to be affected by it lol
But smart, having inside places is cool. Most places I go and bike to wouldn’t have that
Is bike theft not a major issue in New York It’s the main thing keeping me from getting one. Bikes get stolen so frequently that I prefer my 100 buck bike, much more easily replaced.
Philosophy absolutely has the ability to examine and propose better definitions when definitions (like the ones you linked) do not capture the phenomenon. Losurdo read more books than you’ve seen by liberals in order to write his “Liberalism” book. He understood the phenomenon deeper and further than its dictionary use.
How do you capture such a thing in your world view? Because he found flaws in definitions and worked deeper, he just did nothing because it wasnt the Oxford definition?
Liberalism is associated with those things because it allowed them to happen to avoid a negative effect to property rights (revolution, riots) once more radical people pushed for them. Liberalism is reactionary and regressive, but some liberals are easier to convince of specific rights extensions than others. You’ve been lied to a lot if you think liberals did these things
Now I’m not sure about making those 1 thing or relating them at all.
Max Ajl is famously at least hopeful about Degrowth but rails against half-earth socialism.
Degrowth has nothing to do with population, it claims that overconsumption for the purpose of profit (like single-use, non-repairable, non-renewable) all correlate much more strongly to destruction that population. Degrowthers often see humans living harmoniously with nature as the goal, and often in integrated ways.
Half earth socialism sees earth being split into 2 portions and “not touching” some and allowing others to have human activity. It misunderstands the issue at base and assigns a solution which will almost definitely require genocide of those who already live harmoniously with the environment in places that humans are forced out of.
Goddamn, a significant amount of commies in the country where I live consider themselves some absurd combination of “Post-Trotsky Kautskyists” and I haven’t a damn clue how it’s unironic. It’s mistaking ideological positions for methods and analysis. Pisses me off
Well we at Hexbear like to assume, rightly or wrongly, that shame is the best to convince some sorts of people to rethink. People have wasted much energy trying to nicely convince these types when it turned out they were entirely unwilling to consider that they are misinformed. Your comments have mirrored how those look with a very reddit-like demeanor. If you’re sincere, consider commenting as if you’re not on reddit and looking to figure out what’s true and people will engage happily. I’ve learned a lot by doing that.
Remember, the US have spent tens of times more money on propaganda around the world than any other country (remember, US propaganda is different in form than e.g. USSR, but mostly because their way is MORE effective). Europe+the US has spent more in 40 years than the rest of the world ever. Imagine the impact this has on your worldview before reading any news or positions taken in politics around the world.
I have also said many times that I’d love to volunteer my skills and knowledge to Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Loas, Ethiopia, or any other “non-luxurious” country which has been held back by imperialism. I just don’t necessarily think it’s the best way to help until we have a much more equal world. Bringing that about is priority even if it makes you feel like you’re not directly helping at the moment.
Honestly, I see this text often quoted form the book but I don’t find it super useful as a way to understand fascism. The steps and reforms were all taken for a reason and people agreed with that reason, even the apprehensive agreed enough to stay seated. I think this “separation” isn’t the best thesis out of this book, because the Nazi Party didn’t shift too much in terms of popularity throughout these shifts, except to grow more popular during wartime. The government promised something and many accepted those conditions or at least lent moral license to the achieving the goal and were unwilling to oppose the conditions.
Fascism is Liberalism when and where Liberalism fails to accomplish it’s promises and must consume the people and stuff at the periphery to achieve its goals. A government is just as “far” from its people when it is doing good things that it’s people desire as when it does bad things.
I love the book but have major issues with the ideological assumptions, mostly surrounding fascism’s relationship to its people and to other ideologies
They Thought They Were Free. Book caused me to reevaluate exactly how politics at individual and social levels happened and how fascism works without any individual being inherently “evil.” Class politics and interests followed closely behind to explain how evil can arise among populations that all consider themselves “good people”
Thanks comrade. Language philosophy is why I got into reading in depth books. The national question arises reallllly quickly once you try to understand this whole amazing tapestry of speech and writing around the world. And communism follows quickly to provide a framework for analysis and answers.
Sorry that rant got off topic but I still want to leave it
The flattening of dialect continuums for either nationalist reasons or ease of reading a certain written version of important books (the Bible, often) has had some absurd results. The Russian dialect spoken in east Ukraine is not something that historically was spoken there outside of the influence from the Russian empire or the soviet union, but it’s similarity to Russian was close enough for that to be an easy pickup. The dialect can shift more regionally until it’s less intelligible and Russian was seen as always something different enough to need to speak it separately (as opposed to just shifting some sounds to be more understandable).
This whole thing gets flattened to meaninglessness and just “2 languages” or “2 dialects” because we obsess with this categorization with the desire for some meaningful Continuum through time. It’s idealist to name this “distinction” as causal, but it still is easy to see the results of these processes as being tragic in so many contexts.
There is a gorgeous aspect to this historical situation, but of course we can’t return to that: now we have standardized languages in much of the world and people who have been convinced to fight for those sets of ways of speaking. Idk what my point is exactly, besides that this is all socially determined (whether or not a language is mutually intelligible is determined by a social history, and whether it’s considered to be a specific of some universal is also socially determined) and we communists should keep that in mind. It becomes material is liberation struggles, as well as during the oppression before it. But it’s material under more primary material aspects
I literally can’t imagine a better method of destroying the US empire than these sanctions