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Cpt_Obvious posted:I had no problem with your description of the NEP, it was your characterization of later reforms that felt inaccurate. No this is the opposite of true and how to understand what's going on. Even at the worst point in relations between the USSR and the West, the West never stopped buying the only thing of value the USSR produced, namely oil and gas. It was the collapse of oil prices in the 80's that triggered the Soviet collapse as it became impossible to continue the shell game of pretending the economy was working. Even today the Russian economy is largely based on natural resource extraction. The lesson China learned from that was not 'sell cheap labour to the West', (although 'be the factory of the world' was an important step in the long term strategy), it was that you cannot be a superpower while your economy is stuck at the bottom rung of the value chain. An export focus wasn't so much about ameliorating Western hostility so much as it forced industries to make things people actually want. Long term China very much wants to be at the top of the value chain. That's why everyone who does business in China has to commit to technology transfer, that's why they've placed enormous bets on being world leaders in AI (while snapping up the critical raw resources necessary to produce high tech products). Alchenar fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Aug 22, 2021 |
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Aug 22, 2021 15:19
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Seriously, you can't ignoring the protracted conflict that the USSR had with the wealthiest nations on Earth, especially in a discussion about economic collapse. You can't just keep saying this without pointing to the specific ways that you want to claim that the Cold War screwed with the Soviet economy (if we are fast tracking to 'military spending' then that was an issue but a massive security state was more a consequence of the fact that everyone living in the USSR absolutely hated it and would have voted to get rid of it had they been given a chance, which wraps back to being a significant problem for the argument that the economy was working just fine).
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Aug 22, 2021 16:32
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Yah know, you could at least do me the favor of reading the words that I wrote: Yeah we read you and you've gone from: Cpt_Obvious posted:In fact, the Soviet Union only began to collapse after the free market was re-introduced. To Cpt_Obvious posted:To "re-rail" this derail, the Soviet Union underwent decentralizing reforms towards the end of it's reign and they did not save it from collapse because centralization had little to do with the economic failings of the Soviet Union. It was the external factors that did them in, namely their relation with the West. And you've been shifting that claim ever further away every time you get called out to explain precisely what it is about the USSR's relationship to the West that caused the failure of its economic model.
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Aug 22, 2021 20:58
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Cpt_Obvious posted:The goal of US foreign policy between 1945-1990 was largely to thwart the influence of the Soviet Union by robbing it of allies and halting the growth of communism across the globe. This resulted in a plethora of invasions and covert actions in Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Chile, Iran, Guatemala, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Laos, Cambodia, and many others. None of that list of countries are in the Soviet Union and we pre-emptively dealt with 'also the arms race'. Also this is not an argument explaining why the USSR planned economy didn't work. Cpt_Obvious posted:Note that one communist country is curiously absent of cold war united states intervention: China. Lol. You might want to read about the Chinese Civil War. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Aug 22, 2021 |
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Aug 22, 2021 21:54
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Cpt_Obvious posted:
Blaming the US for the history of Sino-USSR relations is not helping you get out of this hole at all. e: and you don't have a containment strategy argument because your claims don't survive the basic historic fact of the USSR being a major supplier of oil and gas to Western Europe, or the US of grain to the USSR. You don't actually have anything, all you are doing is asserting that 'containment' worked, which is ironic because I think most people would assess the containment strategy as an abject failure outside of South America. Your narrative is one that neither side that actually fought the cold war seriously believes. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Aug 22, 2021 |
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Aug 22, 2021 22:24
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Apparently US interventionalist foreign policy in the 60's to 80's was wildly successful, a bold claim being made by left wing groups.Silver2195 posted:The best argument I’ve seen that China is “actually communist” in some sense is that Xi seems to be a true believer in Marxism as he understands it. This doesn’t mean being against inequality, or even, in the short term, being against capitalism, really. Xi and people in the party believe (or so the argument goes) that History follows laws, and that the CCP more or less understands those laws. Marxism in this sense is basically a fantasy of being Hari Seldon. So in the grand scheme of things when we talk about 'opening' and 'liberalisation' of markets in China it's worth stepping back and remembering to frame that the public sector (I presume including state-owned enterprises) is roughly 2/3 of the Chinese economy, whereas in the Western world it's 15-20% (typically depending on whether health is counted as public or not). As we've seen and what the thread was discussing before we decided to start talking about the USSR, in practical terms the state can and will intervene in the private economy whenever it chooses if it thinks that decentralisation is taking China away from the CCP's long term strategy. Everyone in China knows they are operating in a system where the state can exercise totalitarian authority if it chooses to do so, it just often does not. I think the ultimate question is therefore probably 'is the long term vision the CCP has for China still a Communist state that they are deliberately building towards utilising 'what works' as intermediate steps, or is it really now just all about stability, one party rule, and a bit of nationalism?' Alchenar fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Aug 23, 2021 |
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Aug 23, 2021 15:31
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Terminal autist posted:Contras, Panama, Pinochet, Cuban missle crisis, repositioning China against the Soviet Union. I'm sure someone smarter than me could go on. The US won the cold war and the victory was complete and absolute. Seems sort of weird to downplay the success If you look at your list (and I'm discounting China because it's really getting cause and effect wrong - Nixon went to China once the US perceived there had been a diplomatic breach between it and the USSR) you are essentially claiming that a string of successful actions in preventing the spread of communism to South America somehow caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. People like to selectively up-play the effect of US foreign policy because it lets them off the hook for having to engage with the fact that the USSR collapsed under its own contradictions.
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Aug 23, 2021 16:17
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Or to put it another way, Soviet allies were virtually all net burdens and recipients of subsidies/aid and it is unclear how having more of them would have been a good thing.
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Aug 23, 2021 17:25
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Android Blues posted:I think this misunderstands a key point of international relations. Having allies who are net recipients of subsidies or aid is generally beneficial in the long-term if your aim is (for example) to have global access to specialist goods or services, to have a bunch of areas where you can build military bases and airstrips, and to build a geopolitical consensus favourable to your ideology. Yes I agree, but that's not the argument that Captain Obvious is making in this thread. e: also it's only beneficial in the long term if you can afford it and you actually have a plan to do any of those things. e2: trying desperately to get back on topic: China's belt and road strategy for example is subsidy from a position of economic strength clearly targeted at establishing preferential trade logistics and rights to rare earth minerals. The USSR was mostly just throwing money at ideology. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Aug 23, 2021 |
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Aug 23, 2021 18:04
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Yeah but... the case study you have chosen of the immense benefits that central planning can provide is literally a well regulated marketplace. To try and put a cap in this - I do actually converge with you in the long run. Once you can replicate the information gathering capacity of the marketplace through a nightmare Orwellian surveillance process and automate enough of the economy (including passing innovation and design to AI) that you can escape the problems of human behaviour and incentives in management then something looking like fully automated luxury communism is the hopeful vision of the future. But there's a lot of prerequisites there.
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Aug 24, 2021 20:08
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Josef bugman posted:Except that those are unstable because the "well regulated" bit is always being undermined by the "marketplace" bit. Also, claiming "it only works with weird Orwellian Uber-control of info" is kind of an overreach, wouldn't you say? I think we are heading towards axioms here because it depends on exactly what you mean by instability and if you think that certain kinds of instability are necessarily a bad thing. I will readily concede it's terrible for individuals who need protection but on a macro level every economic system needs a function to allow for error identification and correction. The failure of planned economies to have a functioning model for identifying errors in their systems is one reason why they've historically proven to be far more prone to irrecoverable instability than market economies. And the value of the market is that it's the decentralised aggregate information flow of every economic decision every individual makes. If you centralise that information flow you end up with.. well, China. e: \/\/ yeah I'd like to apologise to everyone who wants to read about China here - Alchenar fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Aug 24, 2021 |
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Aug 24, 2021 21:22
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Josef bugman posted:What is this supposed to prove or talk about? Why is a person questioning a chat bot? My (really tenuous) layman's understanding is that the chatbot works by scanning the whole net for knowledge and then the AI bit is parsing that information into a sentence that appears meaningful. So returning "I'm sorry, the answer to that question is too sensitive" implies: a) if you flood the internet with enough propaganda you can create a situation that is the opposite of the usual assumption that 'information wants to be free' b) if you try hard enough then you can make someone else's AI in a different country give the answers to questions that you want it to give. It becomes an extension of your propaganda network. If you want an unpleasant vision of the future of the information revolution, imagine a thousand AI trying to edit every wikipedia page every second, only it's every single page on the internet. The specific example of asking questions about China just demonstrates the degree to which the CCP has already managed to shutter away alternative sources of information about what's going on. e: all of which is in principle the problem, but as pointed out below that's not a real problem yet Alchenar fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Aug 26, 2021 |
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Aug 26, 2021 10:40
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If management in the private sphere adds no value and is unnecessary, then presumably management in the public sphere adds no value and is unnecessary. And that implies... that all of government is unwelcome and Ayn Rand describes the marxist workers paradise? e: I mean 40 years on this is still Gorbachev's dilemma we are talking about. It turns out effective management is really important and adds crucial value, and centralised socialist economies have not established a mechanism or a theory of a mechanism to ensure effective management. e2; \/ no it's not consistent with marxist analysis, it's just consistent with the garbled understanding of marxist analysis that posters above have. Also as per the above edit I don't think there is a coherent marxist answer to this problem which is one of the reasons why it hasn't been seen as a valuable economic theory in 100 years Alchenar fucked around with this message at 09:29 on Sep 2, 2021 |
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Sep 2, 2021 09:13
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fart simpson posted:there is a coherent marxist analysis to it. marx talks about productive vs unproductive labor pretty clearly, and those aren’t really moral terms. Okay I really don't want to dive into this too deeply because a) China thread, not marxism thread and b) people are going to get absolutely furious at me and I'm not really up for that but: 'Length of time marxism has been refuted in the mainstream' varies depending on if you are looking at it economically, sociologically or politically, but the main critiques of the labour theory of value and marx's understanding of the function of unemployment were made over 100 years ago and in mainstream economics nobody has felt the need to really look back. Capitalism vs Socialism is not an argument that is ongoing in university economics departments, people are getting on with doing useful work in understanding how markets work. The reason this is/isn't relevant to the China thread is that China has opted for a system of industry management that is explicitly capitalistic at the business level, with the state intervening to produce redistributive outcomes/strategic guidance at a very high level. Ie. they aren't doing marxism at all, they're doing welfare state (crony) capitalism through a one-party state model. e: and to be clear, I do appreciate that marxist thinkers have attempted to respond to those refutations and that within Marxist circles there has and continues to be a fair bit of thought and writing going on. It doesn't change the fact that that community is firmly outside of the mainstream and their responses have not been considered effective. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 10:04 on Sep 2, 2021 |
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Sep 2, 2021 09:58
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Terminal autist posted:I would much prefer if we didnt but we certainly do and America is probably the biggest proponent of this philosophy. I just don't think the possible extermination of the human race is worth it to fight for the political system of people halfway across the globe. How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.
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Oct 4, 2021 21:04
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Sedisp posted:That's not what I said. The US uses it's intelligence agencies far more multifaceted than for instance the USSR used theirs for. There was not an extensive KGB propaganda network attempting to overthrow the US because there was no money for it. There is and was an extensive network of various CIA attached orgs in the USSR/China/Cuba/Venezuela with the goal of overthrowing the government. Oh ho ho man you need to talk to anyone from the Baltics or Scandanavia.
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Oct 4, 2021 22:26
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Sedisp posted:I forgot my claim was that the USSR had zero dollars and not they had less money to work with. Silly me. Your original claim was that the USSR had to shut down free speech because otherwise the US would have funded media that would have explained to its citizens how poo poo their lives were and outside of an oppressive environment the USSR would have been unable to win that argument with its citizens. And I think we probably all agree with you on that one.
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Oct 4, 2021 23:04
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:The Chinese military on mainland China is closer than these flights over international waters were, and the flights weren’t heading towards Taiwan, so I’m not sure how this is saber rattling? Because they know exactly where the adz is and deliberately went through it.
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Oct 5, 2021 18:42
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They don't claim to be part of the mainland government.
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Oct 5, 2021 20:32
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It does lead to the possibility of a ROC reconquista that would leave a rump PRC existing in a half dozen slices of land beyond the 1911 borders.
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Oct 5, 2021 21:25
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Solaris 2.0 posted:I have a hot take maybe the Taiwanese do not want to be directly ruled by Beijing and that should be respected. It seems plausible that it is not-good to be a minority ethnic socio-political group under the rule of Beijing.
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Oct 5, 2021 22:17
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Plastic_Gargoyle posted:what about the people who actually live in Taiwan, who demonstrably want no part of the CCP's nonsense This is the bit where you get told that democracy is not a real expression of popular will (because it never produces results the OP wants) and that the Taiwanese people will rapidly come to accept the new order once all independent media gets banned and foreign agents and dissenters are sent to re-education camps.
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Oct 7, 2021 22:15
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Here's a take: if a US state forms a clear political consensus that it wants to leave the union then it should be allowed to do so. Democracies only work if the minority accept the legitimacy of the majority.
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Oct 8, 2021 08:34
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It's not imperialism unless it comes from the Imperial War College in London, otherwise it's your continued existence is an abrogation of China's sovereignty and self-rule.
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Oct 8, 2021 14:28
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Silver2195 posted:Yeah, the "soft power" thing is unhelpful. It's unhelpful because of the tankies throwing sand in the air to try to claim that nobody can agree on what words mean and therefore who can know what is right? China does explicitly imperialist things, like flying armed planes repeatedly into another nation's airspace to demonstrate that it doesn't acknowledge their sovereignty.
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Oct 8, 2021 14:35
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Ron Paul Atreides posted:what do you base this claim on? They're literally putting an entire ethnic group into concentration camps. Someone paid for you to have that red text, the least you could do is read it e: \/\/ I think the grimmest thing is that given it's the 21st century despite the fact that it's happening in a remote corner of China this isn't hidden. You can see the commercial satellite imagery showing mosques disappearing, the prison complexes expanding. They're doing classic barefaced denial in the face of the evidence everyone can see. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Oct 8, 2021 |
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Oct 8, 2021 16:00
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There's nothing wrong with US troops being in Taiwan any more than there's anything wrong with them being in any other country where they've been invited in, and the only inconsistency (that technically Taiwan is recognised as a part of China not under the control of the government of the PRC) is one that the PRC insists everyone else cling to.
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Oct 8, 2021 16:47
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How are u posted:I wonder how many years Taiwan would need to be an independent nation in order for folks like Ron, for example, to concede their legitimacy? We are up to 300 years on Gibraltar and while it is a bit silly it never got returned, check out the Spanish government's attitude towards whether Ceuta and Melilla are integral parts of Spain. (Irredentism is bad, there's a point where you have to accept that borders have changed constantly in history, there's no date you can wind the clock back to that would be fair, and people have a right to live and self-government where they were born). Alchenar fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Oct 8, 2021 |
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Oct 8, 2021 16:58
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I went back to the OP and while lots of it is still good it's also very written pre-Xi Jinping and so is an interesting look at China from a decade ago. e: and yeah it's wild to me that genocide denial doesn't result straight away in a long timeout followed by bans for repeat offences. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Oct 8, 2021 |
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Oct 8, 2021 23:40
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The question was about contemporary native americans in reservations - I don't think that counts as genocide. The genocide of the native peoples was a thing that happened and it successfully both destroyed the physical populations and their existence as sovereign political entities and prevented any meaningful chance of restoration, but everything we see today is the after-effects of those policies echoing down through the generations, rather than an active attempt at genocide.
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Oct 9, 2021 00:11
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A big flaming stink posted:Even though native people have a life expectancy that is a decade shorter than white Americans? (or something like that) Yeah. Genocide is a pretty high bar and entrenched inequality isn't it. Someone has to be trying deliberately or through neglect to either wipe you out or wipe out the concept of you. As I posted above, the concept of the native peoples as sovereign states was successfully wiped out (which was the primary objective - eliminating any threats to the US's manifest destiny), and it's unclear that there is any sort of active or passive ongoing effort to squeeze out the rest of the reservations for the sake of it.
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Oct 9, 2021 00:16
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Take a look at Putins poll ratings immediately before and after the Georgia and Crimea wars. A short victorious conflict is enormously successful at boosting an autocratic regime's popularity, even if the long term consequences (military standoff, sanctions) make the economic situation worse. If you get it right then you get to stay in power. If you get it wrong then you are Austro-Hungary in 1914. In any case the moral response is effective collective deterrence, not to feed a small country to the dictators once in a while to keep them satisfied. e: /\/\ in 1914 the economies of Europe were more interconnected than they had at any point previously in history. In 1940 Germany's largest trading partner was the USSR. You are right that trade between blocks wasn't huge during the cold war but Europe relied heavily on gas imports from Russia and Russia relied heavily on grain imports from the US - even a limited conflict would have been economically devastating just if the two sides blockaded each other. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 09:50 on Oct 9, 2021 |
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Oct 9, 2021 09:44
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Muscle Tracer posted:And... an invasion of Taiwan would be short and victorious? Not today. But give it another 15-20 years. There's some super bad takes about what a modern peer conflict would look like on this forum but essentially Russia and China (and also to an extent Iran) have all been using the same playbook when it comes to confronting US military power, which is to say that you mass enough short and medium range missiles in an area to make any kind of immediate intervention hideously painful, and then make sure the 'hot' period of a conflict is over and done before the US and allies can mobilise enough power to break into the conflict zone. So China's strategy is to keep building up the navy, keep building up those artificial airbases in the South China Sea, keep building those carrier killing long range missiles, all until it is clear to everyone that you can't enter the South China Sea without their permission. Then they'll just squeeze Taiwan politically more and more, while the reality that nobody from the West is coming to the rescue hits. Same thing as what happened to HK. If Xi does panic because it looks like the balance of power isn't going to perpetually tilt China's way and he has a limited window to get things done then they don't need to take all of Taiwan, they just seize all the ports and say "do as you are told or you all starve".
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Oct 9, 2021 12:54
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LimburgLimbo posted:In some broad senses HK has similarities as an entity that’s majority Han Chinese while not being completely in the fold of mainland China et al, but it was officially Chinese and part of Chinese territory. Drawing parallels between it and Taiwan insofar as US military intervention is concerned makes no sense. It's not about military intervention as a means of unification, it's about precluding the prospect of US intervention to magnify the impact of coercive economic/political measures. The model of HK shows that China has historically been content to move slowly on integration as long as it is confident it is in complete control of the security situation.
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Oct 9, 2021 16:59
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I don't think it's an immediate risk by any means, but you have to remember that we are talking about a political lifespan that is far in excess of any democratic leader and will continue long past the point where a democratic leader would be unpopular enough to be voted out. Biden can win another term and this is still a risk his successor will have to contend with. Also autocratic leaders genuinely unconcerned that the people love them don't invest in enormous censorship and internal security regimes.
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Oct 9, 2021 22:23
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You joke, but the regime definitely cares about candidates not even pretending that elections are real :https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3149468/hong-kong-elections-patriots-may-have-triumphed-lazy A key element of supressing dissent is giving people the option to suspend disbelief that they have a say in their rulers. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Oct 11, 2021 |
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Oct 11, 2021 16:12
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You can express your culture any way you like!* * as long as it is through a state approved institution and explicitly acknowledges the primacy of the CCP as the sole source of legitimate authority in China. Also that the place you live in is definitely China now and forever. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Oct 12, 2021 |
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Oct 12, 2021 13:56
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Eh, I'm reminded of the Orwell quote:quote:A French journalist said to me once that the monarchy was one of the things that have saved Britain from Fascism. What he meant was that modern people can’t get along without drums, flags and loyalty parades, and that it is better that they should tie their leader-worship on to some figure who has no real power. In a dictatorship the power and the glory belong to the same person. Every society expects to some degree some sort of ritual demonstration of shared values and community. The things to watch out for are: To what degree is the ritual centralised or decentralised? Is the ritual an inclusive or exclusive exercise? Does the ritual promote certain worrying behaviours (are we all dressing up in jackboots and marching down streets?)? If we don't participate in the ritual will we get dragged off to a concentration camp?
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Oct 12, 2021 14:57
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Every poo poo society. Oh wait the independence day ball If you don't think your society has something like this then you've just internalised it as normal. But obviously 'every year we have a big party and some fireworks' is right on the benign end of the spectrum.
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Oct 12, 2021 17:16
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SlothfulCobra posted:
In this particular instance the nuance is that there's a big difference between a state requiring people to acknowledge it as the legitimate source of power in a territory and a political party requiring the same. Deliberately muddying that distinction is in the interests of parties who want to skip over the detail of what precise kind of loyalty is being demanded and whether the entity demanding it is really justified in doing so.
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Oct 12, 2021 18:29
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