[Asia/Oceania] Yellen says she hopes China wont mount retaliation against any steps Washington takes

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Asia/Oceania] Yellen says she hopes China wont mount retaliation against any steps Washington takes

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(Thread IKs: fart simpson)

studio mujahideen: May 3, 2005

maybe being more direct might help this: the political compass chart is the most effective piece of libertarian propaganda ever produced because it convinced people that it makes sense to have a binary scale where one end is "authoritarian" and the other is "libertarian"

# ? Aug 21, 2020 08:01

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# ? May 27, 2024 19:59

Atopian: Sep 23, 2014; I need a security perimeter with Venetian blinds.

Re: recent posts, gently caress the chengguan. Whatever their theoretical purpose, their practical effect is to bring US-style policing to the streets of China.

Re: this earlier post:

Ferrinus posted:

who are you quoting? i didn�t say �deserve�. it�s just a fact that you need power to enact policy. the side that �gets� to decide things is the one with power. this is why acquiring and holding on to power needs to be the chief concern of any working class movement - power is a prerequisite for change. if nobly cleaving to your principles means you lose, then your principles are bad.

If you don't hold on to any principles while you're struggling, then you aren't left or right or whatever, because you don't have politics beyond "I should be in charge!", and then sure, yeah, join the queue and/or stab your way to the front of it, not going to help the world much.

# ? Aug 21, 2020 08:09

Kill All Cops: Apr 11, 2007; Pacheco de Chocobo; Hell Gem

https://twitter.com/alphacentauriii/status/1296497447858925574

https://twitter.com/alphacentauriii/status/1296580113400659968

Bro Dad posted:

https://i.imgur.com/v41RbpQ.mp4
https://i.imgur.com/441ukpX.mp4

i'd unite behind a CCP led by hebei pangzai

the gif isnt him, but point still stands

Kill All Cops has issued a correction as of 08:29 on Aug 21, 2020

# ? Aug 21, 2020 08:14

Not So Fast: Dec 27, 2007

Kill All Cops posted:

https://twitter.com/alphacentauriii/status/1296497447858925574

https://twitter.com/alphacentauriii/status/1296580113400659968

i'd unite behind a CCP led by hebei pangzai

the gif isnt him, but point still stands

not entirely surprising that "pretty blonde girl" gets tons of followers, but her husband is pretty lol

# ? Aug 21, 2020 08:38

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

BrainDance posted:

Which is the entire point, I don't know how you would expect an anarchist critique of South Korea to be any different. That movement away from centralized state power is not, necessarily, anything better if the state still exists and cooperates with capital, which is what South Korea did, in that case. That's why it's "lib-right bullshit", which I thought would be clear in the first place but I guess you really don't want it to be.

If you say so, but you haven't made a very good case for that. Your approach hasn't been anything different from the way libs argues against Anarchism and Socialism.

South Korea not North, but I wasn't getting at fines, I was getting at Sewol and the causes for that but I didn't actually say that so whatever, it's not like South Korea is lacking in examples. I just don't want to downplay the absolutely horrible impact of what they did was.
But, yes it does make them more lib-right, because that's what that ideology is. Which again is also a bad thing and nonsense, which is something you really want people to argue against for some reason but I don't think anyone in this entire thread or c-spam at all would.
"lib-right is a broken failure, therefor authoritarianism does not exist" is where I disagree with you.

"lib-right" isn't a broken failure; it just doesn't exist. there is no libertarian right state; there isn't even really a libertarian right ideology. when a capitalist government relaxes regulations on corporations, that government doesn't become more libertarian than before. the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie persists regardless of the corporate tax rate.

capitalism - even the kind of capitalism that reduces regulations on corporations, as in south korea - is unfortunately not a broken failure. it works very well at its accomplishing its objective, which is concentrating wealth in private hands. but whether it regulates corporations tightly or loosely does not actually make it less authoritarian and more libertarian, because the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie persists regardless of the corporate tax rate. i'm repeating this word for word because you don't seem to understand the point i am making and i want to make it REALLY clear.

quote:

This is a very weird question to ask anyone lib-left. Because the obvious answer is, near god drat every state is authoritarian. It barely matters which are more or less because the whole thing is rotten. You're trying to force the argument into things that are not relevant, or that no one actually believes. I get that you want to say "If all states are authoritarian none are" but that doesn't make any sense and nothing you've said explains how it does.

if all states are authoritarian... all states are authoritarian. there is no "non-authoritarian" state because every state is a dictatorship of one class over another which makes it non-optional to participate in that state's prevailing mode of production. it's you who doesn't seem to understand this, because you think you can somehow sort states by which ones are more libertarian or authoritarian than others, when in fact this doesn't make sense because the exercise of coercive force to mandate a particular mode of production is a defining attribute of all states.

quote:

I'm not, those are things that are authoritarian acts, they are not definitions for authoritarianism.

You're underestimating the amount of dissent that existed, and exists in China towards the party about its handling of the coronavirus, though most of it is aimed at different aspects of their response than in America. I'm not defending America as much as you want to pretend I am, I honestly cant imagine a worst response a country could have. Authoritarianism as an idea does become meaningless when you conflate it with "everything bad" the way you're doing though, but you're the only person doing that.

It makes sense why you would underestimate the dissent here, because the majority of it had been silenced. Either directly through arrests, censorship, etc or by people themselves keeping it out of the public because of the potential consequences. Which is an authoritarian act, going by the definition I gave you.

excuse me, did you give me a definition of authoritarianism or didn't you? should I treat authoritarianism as silencing dissent and preventing organization or should i assume there's some other, better, secret definition i should be referring to instead? can you be consistent?

that aside, you're asserting here with no basis that the chinese people are more unhappy with their government than i think they are. the problem with your assertion is that i myself never gave you a specific approval percentage. is it 70? is it 90? maybe the official polls say it's 90 but thanks to your CIA contacts you know it's really 65? who knows, and also, who cares, because i brought up the handling of the coronavirus to contrast china and the united states.

remember, you assert that it's possible to be more or less authoritarian, and specifically that the united states are less authoritarian than china. i trust you understand why the question of handling the virus is relevant to an examination of the degree to which a government is beholden to its citizens. true or false, the chinese government served its people better than the us government did with regards to the coronavirus. true or false, when you're dead of the coronavirus you can't voice dissent or organize with your fellow workers.

quote:

Sure, and that is an example where America is authoritarian, too. Do you think it's not? If you don't believe authoritarianism exists/is meaningful what else do you call the US police? Are the US police not more able and willing to suppress opposition to a dominant ideology than in some other place, if not just because they're so much more militarized?

But as for dissent, you're aware of it America, people everywhere are aware of it, whatever. But your guess as to why China has less internal unrest is way off.
3 or 4 days ago a town over from where I live, where my girlfriend's family lives, there was an old woman selling vegetables on the side of the road. So, chengguan (because of course it's them) absolutely beats the poo poo out of her. There's phone camera video and all that, you can probably still find an edited video if you look around on bilibili or something, the full video I saw is gone, which was a different copy of it than what other people had seen but that video is gone too, you know how that goes. People there are pissed off, cuz shes just an old lady right? And selling vegetables is as much of a victimless crime as you can get. It's huge news in the city, everyone is aware of it, everyone's got an opinion. Public officials are making bullshit statements defending the chengguan. But it's not going to be really reported on, I doubt many people outside of that city are going to be aware of it just like we're not aware half the time something happens in some other city.

The woman's family, from what I know, doesn't actually know where the woman is now. I guess arrested, but last I heard (I got a few degrees of separation from them so who knows) they don't exactly know.

People aren't going to take to the streets not because they aren't pissed off. It should be pretty obvious though why this is going to mostly stay a local issue spoken about in private. It's not bring in the tanks crushing dissent, but it doesn't have to be. American media is "free" but always happens to report a lot more on the horrible atrocities done by America's "enemies" and keep quiet on things being done by states whose existence benefits the US government. It's all a way to limit opposition to a particular ideology.

But you don't hear about it because it's, if anything, very effective and keeping it from you. Maybe that makes America less authoritarian because it's more incompetent about it, or because it's not necessary.

It's the same as;

yeah that random anecdote you just told me is fascinating but america just had violent uprisings in literally all fifty states because of a campaign of racial terror that its police forces have carried out for centuries. somehow this is less "authoritarian" because people know about it? but the thing is, people also know about that old lady to the extent that public officials are making statements about the incident. people in a neighboring city don't know? buddy, i don't know when police harass or even beat up random people in cities outside mine, either... except, sometimes, when police outright murder those people to uphold white supremacy. our police are armed with lethal weapons, remember, and killing black people periodically is basically part of their job description. oh but they're less authoritarian because people have phone cameras and sometimes manage to escape with those phones intact after capturing footage, right?

quote:

This. Absolutely no one who has ever actually seen the allowed union in China would ever view it as a genuine worker's collective. Makes me actually wonder what steventhinkpad has to say about that union because, as much as he's got hot take after hot take I just have not even met a person with any experience with it who takes it seriously.

It's the further thing from workers working collectively. It is in no meaningful way democratic, it accomplishes near nothing for Chinese workers, and it is not independent. It's just another bureaucracy but it happens to put on the aesthetics of a labor union. It is not a labor union under most definitions of the word, and definitely not a labor union from an anarchist perspective.

What it does do though is limit worker freedom's even more by giving them one, ineffective, "approved" channel for dissent. When you do see the workers trying to get their own it's a small wildcat strike here and there that is easily put down, but since the fake union is the only legal union, what else they gonna do? This also fits the earlier lovely definition of authoritarianism.

As neutered as American labor unions are, which is extreme, they are far more effective than the Chinese union. Which is probably why there has been such a push to neuter them over the years in the first place. Even the smallest union I've been a part of (I've been in a small union, and one really big, really well known one) was incomparably more effective than the Chinese union.

China having the union lets them con people like you, too, I guess. But I doubt that's the point of it.

the ACFTU is obviously there to maintain communist party hegemony. it does provide some benefits and occasionally step in, but even that aside and as you say, it's not actually the sum total of worker collective action. how common are strikes in china compared to strikes in the us? how often do strikes in china get results as opposed to strikes in the us? the radio free asia-funded china labor bulletin tells me that striking workers in china are arrested maybe 5% of the time and mostly for a few hours or days. do you think americans get off that easy?

if american unions are effective... but rapidly decaying and increasingly legally neutered, and otherwise strikes in america are rare, ineffectual, and ruthlessly suppressed, then in what sense do american workers have a greater ability to organize without government interference?

# ? Aug 21, 2020 09:37

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Atopian posted:

If you don't hold on to any principles while you're struggling, then you aren't left or right or whatever, because you don't have politics beyond "I should be in charge!", and then sure, yeah, join the queue and/or stab your way to the front of it, not going to help the world much.

this itself is a liberal fantasy of random crazy/evil people who simply crave power for power's sake and are totally free of goals or ideology. not even bourgeois revolutions were just a matter of "i should be in charge!"

# ? Aug 21, 2020 09:41

Atopian: Sep 23, 2014; I need a security perimeter with Venetian blinds.

Ferrinus posted:

this itself is a liberal fantasy of random crazy/evil people who simply crave power for power's sake and are totally free of goals or ideology. not even bourgeois revolutions were just a matter of "i should be in charge!"

Well, how else should I parse what you wrote, then?
If any and all principles can and should be abandoned on the path to power - which included some fairly fundamental leftist ones when people gave you examples - then what remains? What's the point of it all?

Or, are there actually some principles that you think shouldn't be abandoned?

# ? Aug 21, 2020 10:26

uninterrupted: Jun 20, 2011

https://twitter.com/bopinion/status/1296632713760440320

lol this is a hell of a way to frame �capping pawn shop and pay day loan lending rates at 15% versus 25%�

# ? Aug 21, 2020 13:37

THS: Sep 15, 2017

authoritarianism is good if i agree with the authority

# ? Aug 21, 2020 15:02

Malkina_: May 13, 2020; by Fluffdaddy

How good are Xi Jinping�s The Governance of China books?

# ? Aug 21, 2020 15:17

Top City Homo: Oct 15, 2014; Ramrod XTreme

THS posted:

authoritarianism is good if i agree with the authority

this is literally it

# ? Aug 21, 2020 16:24

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

THS posted:

authoritarianism is good if i agree with the authority

Yup

# ? Aug 21, 2020 16:25

THS: Sep 15, 2017

oh yeah i should have made it more clear i wasn�t kidding. all power to the communistic revolution, there is a world to win, the stakes are higher than anything else in history, etc.

# ? Aug 21, 2020 16:28

Top City Homo: Oct 15, 2014; Ramrod XTreme

THS posted:

oh yeah i should have made it more clear i wasn�t kidding. all power to the communistic revolution, there is a world to win, the stakes are higher than anything else in history, etc.

it was pretty clear

# ? Aug 21, 2020 16:31

THS: Sep 15, 2017

i can imagine some liberal or ultraliberal (anarchist) misinterpreting it as some pithy way of making communists look like instrumentalist hypocrites

# ? Aug 21, 2020 16:36

Malkina_: May 13, 2020; by Fluffdaddy

Totalitarian communism, also known as communism, is going to be required in order to prevent capitalism from destroying the very biosphere on this planet.

# ? Aug 21, 2020 16:36

Lostconfused: Oct 1, 2008

THS posted:

i can imagine some liberal or ultraliberal (anarchist) misinterpreting it as some pithy way of making communists look like instrumentalist hypocrites

Nah, just you.

# ? Aug 21, 2020 16:37

THS: Sep 15, 2017

Lostconfused posted:

Nah, just you.

gently caress you b1tch

# ? Aug 21, 2020 16:39

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Atopian posted:

Well, how else should I parse what you wrote, then?
If any and all principles can and should be abandoned on the path to power - which included some fairly fundamental leftist ones when people gave you examples - then what remains? What's the point of it all?

Or, are there actually some principles that you think shouldn't be abandoned?

the principle that the working class needs material, coercive power to protect itself from the owning class. this is a principle that anarchists, leftcoms, etc abandon all the time, which is their philosophy is at best hopelessly defunct and at worse deliberate miseducation and sabotage. if you abdicate the responsibility to actually win, nothing else you believe matters - not to you, not to the rest of your class, certainly not to your class enemies

a lot of communist/leninist/whatever thought is basically strategic suggestions rather than axioms, along the lines of having a good grasp of which unit counters which unit in an RTS. but your ability to carry out those strategies, or devise more appropriate strategies of your own that better suit the moment, is contingent on your ability to wield power

# ? Aug 21, 2020 17:30

stephenthinkpad: Jan 2, 2020

The mother earth can take care of the resouce hungry capitalists all by herself, she doesn't need help from the Communists or the Jains or whoever.

# ? Aug 21, 2020 17:35

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

this argument was sorta interesting but can u guys take it to the communism thread, thank you

this was an interesting read: https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/1296814312044892161

Xi Jinping is trying to remake the Chinese economy
Party control is mixed ever more intimately with market mechanisms

quote:

He has brought reforms that liberalised the economy to a halt and has smothered market forces, returning to a top-heavy state-dominated growth model which looks distinctly creaky. Private companies have rushed to set up party committees with an increasing say over strategy. Their once-swashbuckling bosses have adopted lower profiles. The title of a recent book by Nicholas Lardy of the Peterson Institute, an American think-tank, sums up the worries: �The State Strikes Back�.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYt0WbDjJ4E

# ? Aug 21, 2020 17:49

THS: Sep 15, 2017

mila kunis posted:

this argument was sorta interesting but can u guys take it to the communism thread, thank you

there are two communism threads, this is just the actually existing communism thread

# ? Aug 21, 2020 17:59

sincx: Jul 13, 2012; furiously masturbating to anime titties

sincx has issued a correction as of 05:31 on Mar 23, 2021

# ? Aug 21, 2020 18:04

stephenthinkpad: Jan 2, 2020

There must be a conspiracy that only The Economist but no other western think tank/academia consistently call China a State Capitalism country and conduct indepth coverage of said economic model.

Who owns Economist btw?

# ? Aug 21, 2020 18:11

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

quote:

Take for example integrated circuits, an area perennially targeted by planners without huge success (see chart 3) and which is now of huge significance. The government is funnelling more than $100bn to SOEs, private firms and, most often, projects that bring the two together. There is a lot of waste. But there are signs of progress. In April Yangtze Memory Technologies Co (YMTC), a semiconductor company founded in 2016 with both public and private capital, announced that it could now make memory chips as technologically advanced as the best Samsung has to offer, boasting 128 distinct layers of circuitry.

wow! one weird trick for generating actual technological progress: an actual state that does things allocating capital to things which may not generate immediate returns!

# ? Aug 21, 2020 18:14

Grapplejack: Nov 27, 2007

Tbh I'm really curious if Xi is going to focus on batteries; getting a new generation of battery plants up that can be reliably used for clean energy storage would be a big deal, but most Western companies won't invest in new battery technologies because of the upfront cost

# ? Aug 21, 2020 18:54

Gorman Thomas: Jul 24, 2007

I mean, I'm a baby Marxist with a child's understanding of economics but the CPCs role always struck me as a midwife for the SEA Capitalist mode of production era. They saw what happened to the USSR and determined the conditions for a strict state economy didn't exist. Hope it works out!

# ? Aug 21, 2020 19:02

uncop: Oct 23, 2010

stephenthinkpad posted:

There must be a conspiracy that only The Economist but no other western think tank/academia consistently call China a State Capitalism country and conduct indepth coverage of said economic model.

Who owns Economist btw?

There's no mystery really. The Economist (and similar publications like Financial Times) are unashamedly right-wing publications and consistent cheerleaders for imperialism, but live off of practical information for businesspeople that they can't mix dishonest propaganda into or they would betray their most important and powerful readers and sink in prominence.

Western capitalists engage in business with Chinese firms on a plainly capitalist basis, or else they would report on it differently. Even the special state factor doesn't really complicate things that much given that public-private partnerships are basic investment stuff everywhere.

The propaganda apparatus that calls China communist and the like is aimed for the rubes and Cold Warriors whose purpose to the system is to cheerlead for unilateral policies intended to make the Chinese people suffer, not people who actually need to engage with them in contracts and partnerships, negotiate successfully and build long-term relationships with them.

# ? Aug 22, 2020 19:13

stephenthinkpad: Jan 2, 2020

uncop posted:

There's no mystery really. The Economist (and similar publications like Financial Times) are unashamedly right-wing publications and consistent cheerleaders for imperialism, but live off of practical information for businesspeople that they can't mix dishonest propaganda into or they would betray their most important and powerful readers and sink in prominence.

Western capitalists engage in business with Chinese firms on a plainly capitalist basis, or else they would report on it differently. Even the special state factor doesn't really complicate things that much given that public-private partnerships are basic investment stuff everywhere.

The propaganda apparatus that calls China communist and the like is aimed for the rubes and Cold Warriors whose purpose to the system is to cheerlead for unilateral policies intended to make the Chinese people suffer, not people who actually need to engage with them in contracts and partnerships, negotiate successfully and build long-term relationships with them.

Going by the current growth rate of China and US, China is going to catch up to the US GDP in a matter of 5 to 10 years. Yet not a single American think tank has talked about it. I listen to tons of hour long think tank chat everyday thanks to the Covid. I mean nobody from the American think tanks has touched this subject. All of them are either looking at the China economy purely from the authoritarian, and unsustainable angle; or just brush the Chinese numbers off as fake numbers.

The Economist is based in UK; the FT IIRC was brought by the Japanese recently. I think them are building the theological foundations for their masters, which are the international capitals who want to parlay with China and accept China as a Capitalism sect and don't want to be tied to any moral obligation with the US.

# ? Aug 23, 2020 02:15

Atrocious Joe: Sep 2, 2011

all the US State Dept does on social media is threaten China and Iran
https://twitter.com/StateDept/status/1296889343416635392?s=20

# ? Aug 23, 2020 04:05

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

https://twitter.com/HuXijin_GT/status/1297523688653205504?s=19

# ? Aug 23, 2020 14:19

comedyblissoption: Mar 15, 2006

uninterrupted posted:

https://twitter.com/bopinion/status/1296632713760440320

lol this is a hell of a way to frame �capping pawn shop and pay day loan lending rates at 15% versus 25%�

this is also the traditional domestic way in the US to campaign against regulating consumer interest rates and loans

# ? Aug 23, 2020 18:39

BrutalistMcDonalds: Oct 4, 2012; Lipstick Apathy

Atrocious Joe posted:

all the US State Dept does on social media is threaten China and Iran
https://twitter.com/StateDept/status/1296889343416635392?s=20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDWNQADaw7g

# ? Aug 23, 2020 19:08

BrutalistMcDonalds: Oct 4, 2012; Lipstick Apathy

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1297565380681113600

# ? Aug 23, 2020 19:13

Grapplejack: Nov 27, 2007

I'm glad they're hard-capping personal loans

# ? Aug 23, 2020 19:55

Cao Ni Ma: May 25, 2010

Our boy Kim is apparently in a coma again, pray for him

# ? Aug 24, 2020 01:51

Okuteru: Nov 10, 2007; Choose this life you're on your own

Cao Ni Ma posted:

Our boy Kim is apparently in a coma again, pray for him

Ah, gently caress. We're gonna have white guys on Twitter simp over his sister again.

# ? Aug 24, 2020 03:06

stephenthinkpad: Jan 2, 2020

Kim was seen driving around hinself just 10 days ago.

https://twitter.com/juche0071/status/1292030660828450817?s=19

# ? Aug 24, 2020 03:10

Atrocious Joe: Sep 2, 2011

How many months back was the last "Kim Jong Un is dead" news cycle? It feels like these things are happening more often.

# ? Aug 24, 2020 03:15

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# ? May 27, 2024 19:59

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

can't believe they're going to have to decant another kim jong un from the cloning vats this soon

# ? Aug 24, 2020 03:52

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Asia/Oceania] Yellen says she hopes China wont mount retaliation against any steps Washington takes

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