ferristriangle [he/him]

I’m not suggesting that what you’re speculating is impossible.

I’m suggesting your analysis is facile and uninteresting

Imagine it was true

Nice thought experiment, but in most cases we have the declassified documents from the CIA and other such organizations who originated the accusations showing that in their internal communications and records that were not public facing that they knowingly and intentionally lied to the public as part of their campaign of information warfare.

The inherent problem is that skepticism is an inexhaustible well. If the only principle guiding your analysis is skepticism, you will inevitably end up stuck in a perpetual and ultimately unproductive cycle doing little more than tilting at windmills.

This is why theory is important to study. You need to have a framework for understanding the world to build off of if you want to have any analysis that’s more insightful than “what if we imagine that he had bad thoughts? Pretty scary, huh?”

What if we imagine a purple elephant? What if we imagine flying sharks? Makes you think, doesn’t it??

You are either very credulous or intentionally engaging in bad faith, and I don’t much care to figure out which

I admire your continued professionalism

Kremlin-aligned government

Me when I want to make having completely normal relations with a directly neighboring country sound sinister, when everyone knows that a Ukraine with true self determination obviously welcomes an administration installed by a US backed coup in order to use the country as a forward outpost/cannon fodder in their ceaseless aggression and military encirclement of their geopolitical targets.

This is some professional level obliviousness, willful ignorance, and weaponized misunderstanding on display. Bravo.

it’s not as efficient as you make it sounds.

No one has referred to capitalism as efficient or entirely rational.

We are referring to the incentive structure that the capitalist mode of production creates, and which behaviors that structure rewards and therefore elevates into positions of authority.

The framework you are describing as the foundation for your analysis sounds very analogous to the anarchist concept of “authoritarian personality disorder,” and I personally don’t find that to be a very rigorous or intellectually sound framework for understanding the world. To the contrary, it is an unfalsifiable orthodoxy. You are basically starting from an assumption of ill intent, and therefore any evidence that is presented is transformed into evidence of malice by speculating on internal and inherently unknowable “bad thoughts.”

It’s an entirely unscientific way of trying to understand the world.

Historically speaking, socialism and communism are terms that are synonymous and interchangeable.

That is certainly not the case today, but the disagreement over terminology largely comes about as a result of state led suppression of communists and Red Scare tactics. As it became more dangerous to identify oneself as a communist the result was that it became more desirable/safer to identify as a socialist and also to argue that socialism was distinct from communism.

And while I’m no linguistic prescriptivist and I recognize that semantic drift happens to nearly all terminology over a long enough time frame, the issue with this changing definition is that it does not come out of any theoretical grounding or ideological framework. It is a reaction to external pressure, and that reaction by different groups and different peoples leads to the situation today where there is very little agreement or consensus regarding what people are referring to when they use these terms. They have been effectively rendered useless for the purposes of political discussion unless you first begin with a lengthy preamble about how you personally define these terms.

One popular way of making this distinction is the framing that Lenin used. He described socialism in terms of the international class struggle in the epoch of imperialism (the epoch we were currently living through). The jist is that the communist theory of “The State” is that it is definitionally an organ of class domination/class warfare. It is the instrument through which one set of class interests are enforced upon the rest of society, and during the epoch of imperialism that instrument of capitalist class domination is wielded on a global scale. Therefore, any communist party seeking to put an end to the tyranny of the capitalist class will necessarily need a plan for opposing the counter-revolution of the capitalist class and the inevitable sabotage, acts of war, and attempts of the re-domination of the working classes during the epoch of imperialism.

In other words, the working classes would require their own state organ to enforce the interests of the working classes and protect against capitalist reaction and domination. If we are talking about this in terms of the common framing of the “endpoint” of communism being a “stateless, classless” society*, the argument goes that you cannot immediately jump to a stateless society so long as capitalism still has a stranglehold over the majority of the world and imperialist nations are still empowered to wage class warfare across the globe.

This analysis of the strategy and tactics required for the liberation of the working class was referred to as socialism by Lenin. So in this framework, Socialism is the strategy a communist party uses on the path to communism. If you would like to argue that a communist party working towards communism is meaningfully distinct from being communist, you are free to do so. But the distinction is quite slim.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have people inside the imperial core who describe themselves as socialists, or more commonly democratic socialists, and what they mean when they call themselves socialist is, “I want the system to remain relatively unchanged, but we should distribute the fruits of our country’s imperial plunder more equitably by petitioning the capitalist state to administer more welfare and social programs such as universal healthcare.”

This variety of socialist has very little relation to the historical usage of the term, and comes about much more directly as a result of that Cold war/red scare reaction I mentioned above. I would argue that this kind of socialism is little more than a rebranding of liberalism, but that certainly qualifies it as being distinct from communism.

On this forum at least, if you see someone talking about socialism they are much more likely to be using a definition closer to the first definition than the second one.

(*The framing of communism as a stateless, classless, moneyless society is a very sloppy framing, but is sufficient for this discussion)

Yeah, I feel the same towards Stalin as I feel towards most figures and places that have been relentlessly smeared by Cold War and Red Scare propaganda.

And that is that the entire reason these figures are so viscously demonized is because capitalism cannot survive the threat of a good example. The ruling class needs the most radical allowable criticism of their system to be, “Sure, we have many faults, but all of the alternatives are far worse so you better not dare even thinking about fighting for positive change.”

That narrative can only function if every victory of the global proletariat is smeared as a dystopian hellscape ruled by cartoon villains. And I don’t think it’s to our benefit to cede that rhetorical ground wholesale out of fear that challenging it might be unpopular among Cold Warriors.

The humor is mostly referential. Guess you just had to be there

What else would learning R mean? The programming language?

No one is attacking your “factual and informative” comment.

No one is disputing the difficulties you’ve highlighted. What is being disputed is your assertion that those difficulties are relevant to your assertion that China won’t be able to achieve this.

And the subject of the conversation is a technology that humans have already developed and is in use. So what is it about China/the PRC that would cause you to assert they are incapable of building/employing this technology?

Your argument is that “Hard science doesn’t care about politics,” so I assume you don’t want to imply that you’re critiquing the capabilities of China’s political system. So what’s left? Is it racism? The removed can’t achieve what other humans have already proven is possible because the removed is subhuman?

You are making a political statement whether you intend to or not, you don’t just get to whine about how you were only talking about the science and why is everyone being so mean when you only started a discussion about the science to reinforce (or deflect from) your original assertion.

No one is asking you to?

because there are not actually two parties

“The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”

• Julius Nyerere

I haven’t read through all of the responses in that thread yet to see if someone else addressed the point I’m about to make, but the definition used in the UN resolution is intentionally vague.

To give a brief history of where genocide originates from as a legal concept to the definition we have now, we’re gonna have to talk about legal scholar Raphael Lemkin.

When Lemkin was studying genocide and attempting to draft a law that would cover all aspects of what makes something a genocide, he made note of a few things. One was that genocide as a crime was unique in the sense that the entity carrying out this crime was usually itself a nation-state or working on behalf/under the jurisdiction of a nation-state. Therefore, a legal solution to address/prosecute a genocide could not be administered as a national law, since if a nation was in the process of carrying out a genocide then the entity responsible for prosecuting that crime is already complicit in the crime. So in order to pass a law that would have any effect with regards to deterring/prosecuting a genocide that law would need to be enforced by an international body.

This led to Lemkin petitioning the UN to adopt the UN resolution on genocide. In the original drafts Lemkin presented to the UN when he proposed that they adopt this resolution, the legal definition of genocide that he drafted was far more broad than the definition the UN ended up adopting. It included provisions for stripping a national group of cultural practices and the ability to participate in society in their native language, campaigns of forced assimilation, economic policy that created barriers to the economic participation in society on the basis of nationality/ethnicity, theft of land/wealth based on nationality/ethnicity, and in general any act that was designed to weaken a specific national group in whole or in part in order to benefit the national group who was wielding state power to carry out these acts. These acts of discrimination/disenfranchisement could eventually lead to the slaughter/destruction of the national group being targeted, but in Lemkin’s original drafts the slaughter/elimination of a national group was not necessary to prosecute something as a genocide. An attempt to infringe upon and disrupt the pattern of life of a given national group targeting people on the basis of their identity as part of that national group was sufficient to prosecute something as a genocide.

The problem with this definition is that in order to be ratified in the UN, it would need to pass a vote from the UN member states. And a large number of countries refused to ratify the resolution with its original wording because they were concerned that the existing wording could be used to prosecute their country. With notable examples being the USA still having Jim Crow laws in full effect at the time, as well the legal status of Native Americans and “Indian Reservations” being called into question by the original resolution, as well as the legal status of every colonial government held by the various countries of Europe falling under the jurisdiction of the original resolution.

Lemkin fought hard to keep those provisions in the resolution he drafted, but eventually relented because he saw a weaker resolution with the force of international law behind it as being preferable to a stronger resolution that only had partial support. But the result is that the current language of the UN resolution on genocide is the result of a process where the criminals were allowed to rewrite the law until they were no longer guilty.

Because the remaining language is so vague, it gives cover for powerful countries to legally squirm their way out of repercussions on pure technicality, while also giving those countries the ability to weaponize the resolution based on technicalities to accuse their geopolitical opponents of genocide as a pretext/justification for intervention and adversarial foreign policy. For example, the language in the UN resolution which references attempts to prevent births in a national group has been used in international politics to target developing countries. As different areas of a country become more economically developed, that development also usually results in greater accessibility to medical resources, which includes contraceptives. As families are given more control over when they choose to have a child, the overall effect is usually a decline in birth rates among a given population. This data showing declining birth rates will then be presented as evidence that a country’s policy is resulting in births being prevented in a national group, which is sufficient grounds for accusing a country of genocide under the current language of the resolution. And whether that accusation is ultimately prosecuted by the UN, the pretext of “Human Rights Concerns” is usually all that countries like the US need in order to initiate “Non-combatant warfare” against a country in the form of imposing unilateral sanctions on them as a way to gain leverage against a geopolitical entity that controls resources which are valuable to US state/business interests.

Well Israel is a settler-colonial project propped up by a global military empire who wants a military ally/outpost in the middle east, and that settler-colonial project is ripping people out of their homes to give land to settlers.

Palestinians are the ones getting ripped out of their homes, having legal rights stripped away from them, and ultimately being corralled into what are fenced-in, open air concentration camps as Israel continues expanding its borders. This is what has resulted in conditions like what we see in Gaza, which is currently one of the highest population density places on earth as a result of Palestinians having more and more of their land colonized and the families who weren’t murdered in ethnic cleansing campaigns had to live closer and closer together as they were driven out of their homes. And as more and more people keep getting shoved into smaller and areas of land as Israel closes its borders in more and more via military occupation, Israel uses its control of the land surrounding these settlements to restrict food, medicine, and electricity from getting to Palestinians. Gaza usually only gets 4 hours of electricity every day despite living in an arid climate where not having air conditioning can result in death from heat stroke on particularly hot days. ~95% of the water in Gaza is not safe to drink, so death from starvation and dehydration are both incredibly common. And with extremely limited access to medical resources, very few people live to/past middle age, with the average age in Gaza currently sitting around 19 years old. Living conditions are so bad that suicidality among children is incredibly common, with over half of people under 18 reporting that they have no will to live when surveyed. And when Israel is not expanding its borders and settling more land, it preys on the desperation of the Palestinian people who have had their lives ripped away from them by employing them for cheap labor to make the lives of the settlers more comfortable. Those are the Palestinians who also have citizenship in Israel so that they can work in Israel, but even with citizenship they are second-class citizens without access to most political and legal rights.

Israelis don’t have any particular reason to hate Palestinians, they’re just doing what every settler-colony does and they keep experiencing blowback from the people they are colonizing. All of the propaganda about thousands of years of Holy War over a Holy Land is just a founding mythos used to obscure this colonizer/colonized relationship by pretending that these are two groups on equal standing that are bickering with each other because they just can’t get along.

mismanagement

When talking about the US, it’s more often correct to assume malice rather than incompetence

I wrote a long comment about this a few days ago (not about the DPRK specifically, but still very relevant)

Real

Yeah, we’re on the same page. I never said that Americans had exhausted all their other options yet.