BF2S Forums Presidential Election 2016

Of course there is, but I wasn't referring to members of parliament who after their tenures end up on the board of some large corporation. Positions that hold very real political power are all throughout the civil service. Look at people like Tim Barrow and his peers - educated, competent and a very impressive civil service track record.

You have to somewhat nuance the MP to board position as well, rarely if ever do they end up there to actually lead the business, they are brought in for their political connections.

Last edited by Larssen (2019-12-28 05:22:16)

well i suppose this way of thinking is at least an improvement on your ‘the glory of our civilisation is thanks to the catholic church’ cant, even if the appeal to imperialism is still quasi-fascist. i’m detecting a great urge to kiss someone’s ring, somehow, somewhere, whether they are wearing a pith helmet and jodhpurs or a collar and a surplice.

So if the first sons of the great and good aren't studying PPE and going into politics then what are they doing?

Don't say English Lit Professorships, no-one is going to believe you.

the methods have been hugely flawed – famines arising from incompetent central planning chief among them – but china in the 20th century has represented the single biggest leveraging of humanity to another plane of living in all of history. no other state has raised the standard of living and industrialised/developed in such a short period of time. the chinese people were 'impoverished' before communism; that was the norm. mega cities have been raised in the blink of an eye. a nation of the agrarian-poor now live in 21st century modernity.

i don't really agree with macbeth but to say that the chinese government is the worst thing to happen in human history is just ridiculous.

The​ People’s Republic of China had its seventieth birthday on 1 October. ‘Sheng ri kuai le’ to the world’s biggest and most populous example of ... of ... well, actually, that sentence is hard to finish. There’s no off-the-shelf description for China’s political and economic system. ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ is the Chinese Communist Party’s preferred term, but the s-word makes an odd fit with a country that is the world’s most important market for luxury goods, has the second largest number of billionaires, stages the world’s biggest one-day shopping event, ‘Singles’ Day’, and is home to the world’s biggest, fastest-expanding, spendiest, most materially aspirational middle class. Look at the UN’s Human Development Index: after seventy years of communist rule, China’s inequality figures are dramatically worse than those of the UK and even the US. Can we call that ‘socialism’?

It’s equally hard to claim China as a triumph of capitalism, given the completeness of state control over most areas of life and the extent of its open interventions in the national economy – capital controls, for instance, are a huge no-no in free-market economics, but are central to the way the CCP runs the biggest economy in the world. This system-with-no-name has been extraordinarily successful, with more than 800 million people raised out of absolute poverty since the 1980s. Growth hasn’t slowed down since the global financial crisis – or, as those cheeky scamps at the CCP tend to call it, the Western financial crisis. While the developed world has been struggling with low to no growth, China has grown by more than six per cent a year and a further eighty million mainly rural citizens have been raised out of absolute poverty since 2012. There is a strong claim that this scale of growth, sustained for such an unprecedented number of people over such a number of years, is the greatest economic achievement in human history.

Last edited by uziq (2019-12-28 16:26:28)

Jay wrote:

They improved quality of life after they artificially forced billions of people to be impoverished and killed a hundred million outright. When you start from zero everything looks like progress. The Chinese government is one of the worst things to happen in human history.

Probably the rise of American culture is the worst thing in human history, the greed and unsustainable consumption the rest of the world now aspires to,
and a bloated plutocracy masquerading as democracy.

Under our political leadership the west has gone backwards to ruin, its not as if we've even stagnated.
No surprise the country has swing to the right at all, it was inevitable.

Other countries aren't so liberal, there's no 'yellow china' policy, the idea of allowing foreigners in to benefit from china's good fortune would be absurd and likely get you locked up.

Hey! Lets give welfare to illegal immigrants! - Bullet in the head for you sunshine.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2019-12-28 17:58:25)

No-one likes to hear the truth.

amoral engineers ruining the world again, you see. escalation of an arms race and proliferation of world-ending technology.

all for government largesse, handouts, enrichment, and a few awards. cheap whores and handmaidens of destruction.

schrodinger. i think schroeder was a german chancellor.

uziq wrote:

amoral engineers ruining the world again.

In Soviet Russia engineers who don't deliver get liquidated.

Vladimir Putin studied Law at the Leningrad State University (now Saint Petersburg State University) in 1970 and graduated in 1975.
His thesis was on "The Most Favored Nation Trading Principle in International Law".

Putin met Anatoly Sobchak, an assistant professor who taught business law, was co-author of the Russian constitution, and who would be influential in Putin's career.

Fucking lawyers again man.

Find me a lawyer of similar stature
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Larssen wrote:

There's a subset that spends an awful lot of time trying to discredit democracy and western governance.

I feel like the democracies of the world managed to discredit themselves. However uncomfortable it may make a westerner feel doesn't change the fact that China has managed to produce real quality of life and economic improvements in the last 30 years. Meanwhile what has America been up to? Recession, war, terrorism, opiate epidemic, Bush ,Trump, etc. We invented smart phones and internet shopping but that was all scientist work and not the result of mass democracy.

Democracy as practiced today is only a short time in the history of western civilization. What if democracy really isn't the best mode of governance and we have just been living off of the work done by imperialist in the 1800s?

The Chinese state does not tolerate open critique of its governance from Chinese citizens. Instead, a great deal of effort is put into the manipulation of history and education to underline the supposed infinite wisdom of the party and its leadership. Legitimacy is also derived from criticisms of other forms of governance which they are keen to paint as inferior. In particular democracy in the West. Whatever you read seems to me a chinese imagination/caricature of the west to be narrated to its own people rather than a western audience.

As for the material progress that has been achieved in China versus in the West or the USA, certainly, they've come far. But I'd like to argue that while the sole focus of the PRC was to increase its wealth to lift its citizens out of abject poverty, our more well-off western societies have prioritised moral and ethical issues and the maintenance of our power position on the global stage over the economy. Even during the Cold War the superiority of the West vis-a-vis communism wasn't argued through spreadsheets or only by the virtue of free market economics. While our prosperity compared to those parts of the world helped, democracy, individualism & globalism were the poster children of Western greatness.

Since the 1990s it is evident the economy and our standards of living are still important, but the political priorities and headlines mostly focused on other issues. Security, law, global influence, nation vs corporation, nationalism vs globalism, climate change. For a long time now we've been trying to create sustainable, inclusive, values-based societies where the interests of all different groups of people are respected.

For the Chinese, the interests and progress of the many have always superseded the wants and needs of the few. It has spawned a society with radically different priorities and methods to our own. Economically they've certainly been succesful, but is that the quintessential measure of greatness? How do we feel they've fared socially or ideologically? Democracy has its perils at the moment and is under threat, but I wouldn't look to China as a viable alternative. Their future, especially with regard to Xinjiang, HK, Tibet and other places may hold even more instability than our own.

the truth is, unsurprisingly, somewhere between macbeth and larssen's salutary account. i wouldn't say macbeth is only parroting chinese propaganda and disinformation; rather, his line is something more like the critique of liberalism that you could find in the frankfurt school. the point being that underneath all the loudly proclaimed idealism and the 'greatness of vision' of individualism, is actually just a cynical system to isolate people and render them into consumers; or to appeal to 'universal' values in the actual interests of a particular few; and so on. i mean, america had a black president for two terms and then duly had a huge blowback in the form of snarling, pugnacious, flyover-state Trumpism. a huge part of the swing to populism is obviously due to economic hardship, and the dispossessed finding a voice; but a huge part, also, is the reactionary elite organising and closing ranks to not allow such a thing to happen again.

the levels of systemic racism, misogyny, inequality, as well as the successive critiques made by, variously, psychoanalysis, feminism, post-colonialsm/neo-colonialism, new historicism, deconstructionism, ethnic studies, gender studies, etc. etc. (the list is long and very easy to parody ...) should show you that your idea that the West has always had the upper hand in the 'winning' moral vision is problematic, at best.

and it's not a clear case of the West being great because it tolerates said critiques, either, because often its governments have not (good luck being a communist in 1950s america; julius and ethel rosenberg, for instance, or the McCarthyist show trials). there is a great deal of unofficial intolerance and invective even now, in 2020, to above cases being made. look at jay's revulsion towards women of colour in congress making their case, where they must be 'stupid and ignorant', or macbeth's dismissal of a polyglot young politician because of her accent, or dilbert's pathological fear of lesbian schoolteachers: you will always find a particular few, normally with established interests, defending their slice of the pie from true universalism. democracy for all! as long as it's white/male/christian etc...

and i find your blithe defense of america's 20th century record of regime change, dictator support, funding death squads, etc. a little nauseating, as if it was all in the name of some 'higher goal' of freeing the individual and so is a posteriori a-okay. there was nothing noble about banana republics and pinochet. the West has stymied young democracies as often as it has encouraged them, which rather scuppers your naive universalism. i guess some individuals' freedom for representation and material affluence comes before other individuals' freedoms? a dizzying freedom Inception ...

so your whole account of democracy being the most edifying, noble, successful vision of human society seems to me a little high-falutin'. there are plenty of available critiques of the system which are more nietzsche or foucault than xi jinping. you don't have be a chinese shill or a Diogenes to point out that most of the west's material greatness and accumulation was attained through exploitative early trade capitalism, or rapacious empires, or the system of slavery; and it's not hard to see all the 'justice and liberty for all!' talk as a little bit hypocritical when it was tossed out by ruling elites lining their coffers. to the victors, the spoils ... it's very easy to appeal to the 'wisdom of the market' and 'tolerance' when we've spent three centuries stacking the cards in our favour.

Last edited by uziq (2019-12-29 03:26:42)

well it also kind of buffets your earlier point that china could have leveraged billions of people out of poverty without cracking a few eggs. even the most superlative democracies on the planet have histories littered with corruption, chicanery, exploitation, inflicting widespread misery, etc.

there's nothing, really, even to say that societies based around the whims of the individual are more laudable than societies organised around group collectives, whether they be the family unit, or the communist party, or the state. we are living in an era calling for unprecedented collective action, on the environment above all, and individualist societies, chasing their 2.5 children and 2 cars in the driveway, do not have any convincing response. as you've said yourself, societies such as india pursuing a 1950s individualist vision of modernity spells nothing less than a catastrophe for the planet.

the individualist screed mostly seems to have simmered down to an individuals' right to eat poorly and unsustainably, consume supersize colas, and to envy their neighbours' possessions. and history shows us that it is always easier to co-opt atomised individuals into the worst kinds of fascism and mass populist hysterics, when they have no existing group identity or sense of solidarity.

Last edited by uziq (2019-12-29 04:09:04)