Well balanced essay, really appreciate the desire to critically approach the issue.
Leaving aside that at this conjunction we should all be concentrating in general degrowth, with growth only on certain areas, China is too big to not fret about it. But peddaling too much on the issue of "authoritarianism" is becoming boring and Mr. Tooze …
Well balanced essay, really appreciate the desire to critically approach the issue.
Leaving aside that at this conjunction we should all be concentrating in general degrowth, with growth only on certain areas, China is too big to not fret about it. But peddaling too much on the issue of "authoritarianism" is becoming boring and Mr. Tooze is admirable in not giving much, if any weight to this aspect. Ultimately, the best government is the one the is the best administrator and has the best results and I would call the Chinese government quasi meritocratic. Dismissing the extremely captured political class in the US for instance by various lobbies (FIRE, Agri, MIC, Big Pharma) ab initio/ab ovo, Mr. Posen shows his profound bias and appears lame due to the fact that he has swallowed the democracy narrative hook, line, and sinker.
The US is a plutocratic republic that abhoors democracy, both internally and externally, and there are libraries written on the topic, with the best books written by Americans themselves.
As for China, mabe they should start applying land taxes to start with.
You misread Tooze to suggest he does not give any - or only little - weight to authoritarianism. That’s very much a part of imagining a middle course which is captured in the use of hubris, that unchecked power leads to miscalculations. What is most interesting in the current seeming policy vacuum in Beijing (the view that BJ is not trying to stimulate a recovery) is that Xi & Co seem to be willing to allow a slow fizzle, the wind back of investment as a share of GDP and in turn increase household share = increase consumption. The problem is how the collapse of a few big corporates and possibly bankruptcy of some local governments can be handled without hurting too many ordinary citizens, many of who have their savings in real estate, and in turn doing injury to the party’s claim to legitimacy based on good eco management.
I have not caught any wiff of hubris in the actions/behaviour of Beijing action players. The fact that they don't share the reasons of their decisions with the west, or that western observers are not versed in Chinese, or wathever the reason, is neither here nor there. But they act. And, as far as I know, all executive power IS authoritarian. That is the nature of power. US presidents have excessive amounts of power as well, etc., etc., etc. Claiming that only the ilk of China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela are authoritarian is just a smearing action of the western world, happy to create a cleavage between "us" and "them" and in the process jump on the high moral horse, for the sole purpose of bamboozling their own population.
ANd in China, if the population has "saved" in housing and are not in debt, the way US population was in 2007/2008, then it shouldn't be that big of a problem - for the population. With Corporates suffer, that might be less problematic. And local governments should stop living only of land sales and maybe start taxing land...
While the "best books written by" Chinese "themselves" seem to get them disappeared, and then, only if their lucky, they pop up months later where their family, friends and neighbors learn their serving prison sentences. What you, Kouros, would refer to as an all expense paid Re-education Vacation. And so your beloved form of repression perpetuates the loop of terror it needs to surround itself with to keep the brainwashed slaves captured within and what you fear are vectors of alternative ideas out.
"Ultimately, the best government is the one the [that] is the best administrator ...", written like we've come to expect from a tiresome water carrying lackey for a blood curdling authoritarian regime. Never a shortage of hacks to put lipstick on pigs. That's one supply chain from China that won't be interrupted anytime soon.
You close with the proposal that "applying land taxes" is the solution!? ROTFLMAO. All but the utterly clueless know you are just proposing the elimination, at first slowly and then rapidly accelerating, of private land/property ownership of the proletariat (plebeians if you ever pull off a Red Dawn here or Taiwan) with that cray-canard, since you'll be sure to exempt your Dear Leader Leninist-Communist Overlords, and Party Members with freshly stamped loyalty certificates, from said taxation. Clearly, Xi is deeply twisted psychologically from the trauma he and his family suffered under Mao's Cultural Revolution that murdered somewhere around 30 million innocent Chinese. The murder weapon of choice being starvation. You sir, are vile. Dante has a ring prepared just for pusillanimous provocateurs of your ilk. When you arrive at your assigned ring, on the elevator that only goes down, you'll have to spend eternity reciting the names of all the men, women, and children Mao killed. Your only sustenance will be bits of bark your cracked and broken malnourished finger nails can peel from the few remaining trees on the barren landscape of your imagination. When you are lucky you might even get a tiny green shoot of parched grass to eat when it pokes out of the ground if you get to it before your comrades in eternity. Of course, in sooth, I've no more use for fairy tales than you. Like yourself, I'd rather see 'just rewards' meted out in a decidedly more temporal fashion upon Traitors to Human Freedom and Agents of Espionage in my country's midst. :) Cheers.
Fairy tales? Your imaginarium is reeking of brain with long covid...
I am quite confident that you never lived in a socialist / communist country, plus, you would not be able to differentiate between cultural aspect of a society, coming from way back, and ideological impositions of the day. No stone left unturned for you to see the bad, the ugly, and the horrible.
I was born and grew up in a socialist country of ill repute and I know that the life was not only not as bad as presented in the west, and definitely worth living. I remember clearly that on the times Harlan County miners were striking for a better contract https://archive.org/details/harlan.county.usa.1977
you could not see such levels of social destitution in my part of the world.
Kouros you never respond to anyone's criticisms directly. You are an intellectual coward. As best I can discern from the shambolic reflexive propaganda spew you regurgitate you expect the State to coddle you from cradle to grave. News-flash, in the Economic Realm, neither, the State, the World, the Universe, the rest of us, owe you anything that you don't 'contractually' earn first, once you attain the age of majority. So please, while you still have time, grow-up. Become an adult.
That Kouros posts often are at the top of the comment stack suggests his mouth is on fully-automatic long before his brain engages, if it ever does. His post above follows the usual pattern as evidenced in the first paragraph. A craven attempt to ingratiate himself with his host that is really just a cynical ploy to advance his real agenda. The agenda appears to be nothing more than to broadcast his logorrhea's completely mental excrement. Pathetic, an organic bot-mind with Stockholm Syndrome. 30 million dead with Mao in just a few years. The communists in Russia murdered how many? 20 million in not many more years? Who are you going to champion next bot-brain-boy? Pol-Pot perhaps? In that cesspool of nightmares there is plenty of blame to go around before, during and long after, but, Man is a violent Primate, so get over it. Learn to put the atrocities on a scale so that you might weigh them appropriately and maybe you'll, or your programmers, will attain some sense of proportionality regarding Man's crimes against Man. Why? So you can make better choices choosing sides next time around. In the meantime, pull your plug Bot-brain and die like a Man.
Your prozody with invectives is fascinating in its fluidity, but besides that you do not add anything of substance, beside old tropes about the evil communism/totalitarianism. Which is standing on a lot of clouds, since no westerner had access to "vital statistics" data during those times and places.
The civil war in Russia led to lots of people dying, and if I take Mike Duncan's analysis, it looked like the Bolsheviks had something more to offer to the population than the old regime, so they emerged on top. Drought did more after. Same way the blight, and the "liberal" ideology and the feeling of racial superiority of the Englished led to millions dying and emigrating from Ireland. More millions died under the good eye of the Brits in India as well:
You are a willing carrier of water of systems that in fact are full fledged oligarchies/plutocracies, and I prefer the alliance between tyranny & demos to full fledged plutocracy or what the UK has, an alliance between oligarchy and monarchy. Magna Carta was written for the lords only.
The corruption of US plutocracy has been properly described and analyzed by researchers and there is no denial of this fact - "democracy" there is just a circus. Zephyr Teachout has a full volume on American corruption, which pervades every oligarchic network, fully intertwined with the state aparatus. And calculations have been made on premature deaths in the US due to lack of medical care, etc, etc, etc, numbers that would thwart anything Stalin and Mao have done.
You forgot to mention that Pol Pot was supported by both the US and the Chinese and it was another communist country that took him out. I bet you and him would have gotten along handsomly...
Well balanced essay, really appreciate the desire to critically approach the issue.
Leaving aside that at this conjunction we should all be concentrating in general degrowth, with growth only on certain areas, China is too big to not fret about it. But peddaling too much on the issue of "authoritarianism" is becoming boring and Mr. Tooze is admirable in not giving much, if any weight to this aspect. Ultimately, the best government is the one the is the best administrator and has the best results and I would call the Chinese government quasi meritocratic. Dismissing the extremely captured political class in the US for instance by various lobbies (FIRE, Agri, MIC, Big Pharma) ab initio/ab ovo, Mr. Posen shows his profound bias and appears lame due to the fact that he has swallowed the democracy narrative hook, line, and sinker.
The US is a plutocratic republic that abhoors democracy, both internally and externally, and there are libraries written on the topic, with the best books written by Americans themselves.
As for China, mabe they should start applying land taxes to start with.
You misread Tooze to suggest he does not give any - or only little - weight to authoritarianism. That’s very much a part of imagining a middle course which is captured in the use of hubris, that unchecked power leads to miscalculations. What is most interesting in the current seeming policy vacuum in Beijing (the view that BJ is not trying to stimulate a recovery) is that Xi & Co seem to be willing to allow a slow fizzle, the wind back of investment as a share of GDP and in turn increase household share = increase consumption. The problem is how the collapse of a few big corporates and possibly bankruptcy of some local governments can be handled without hurting too many ordinary citizens, many of who have their savings in real estate, and in turn doing injury to the party’s claim to legitimacy based on good eco management.
I have not caught any wiff of hubris in the actions/behaviour of Beijing action players. The fact that they don't share the reasons of their decisions with the west, or that western observers are not versed in Chinese, or wathever the reason, is neither here nor there. But they act. And, as far as I know, all executive power IS authoritarian. That is the nature of power. US presidents have excessive amounts of power as well, etc., etc., etc. Claiming that only the ilk of China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela are authoritarian is just a smearing action of the western world, happy to create a cleavage between "us" and "them" and in the process jump on the high moral horse, for the sole purpose of bamboozling their own population.
ANd in China, if the population has "saved" in housing and are not in debt, the way US population was in 2007/2008, then it shouldn't be that big of a problem - for the population. With Corporates suffer, that might be less problematic. And local governments should stop living only of land sales and maybe start taxing land...
While the "best books written by" Chinese "themselves" seem to get them disappeared, and then, only if their lucky, they pop up months later where their family, friends and neighbors learn their serving prison sentences. What you, Kouros, would refer to as an all expense paid Re-education Vacation. And so your beloved form of repression perpetuates the loop of terror it needs to surround itself with to keep the brainwashed slaves captured within and what you fear are vectors of alternative ideas out.
"Ultimately, the best government is the one the [that] is the best administrator ...", written like we've come to expect from a tiresome water carrying lackey for a blood curdling authoritarian regime. Never a shortage of hacks to put lipstick on pigs. That's one supply chain from China that won't be interrupted anytime soon.
You close with the proposal that "applying land taxes" is the solution!? ROTFLMAO. All but the utterly clueless know you are just proposing the elimination, at first slowly and then rapidly accelerating, of private land/property ownership of the proletariat (plebeians if you ever pull off a Red Dawn here or Taiwan) with that cray-canard, since you'll be sure to exempt your Dear Leader Leninist-Communist Overlords, and Party Members with freshly stamped loyalty certificates, from said taxation. Clearly, Xi is deeply twisted psychologically from the trauma he and his family suffered under Mao's Cultural Revolution that murdered somewhere around 30 million innocent Chinese. The murder weapon of choice being starvation. You sir, are vile. Dante has a ring prepared just for pusillanimous provocateurs of your ilk. When you arrive at your assigned ring, on the elevator that only goes down, you'll have to spend eternity reciting the names of all the men, women, and children Mao killed. Your only sustenance will be bits of bark your cracked and broken malnourished finger nails can peel from the few remaining trees on the barren landscape of your imagination. When you are lucky you might even get a tiny green shoot of parched grass to eat when it pokes out of the ground if you get to it before your comrades in eternity. Of course, in sooth, I've no more use for fairy tales than you. Like yourself, I'd rather see 'just rewards' meted out in a decidedly more temporal fashion upon Traitors to Human Freedom and Agents of Espionage in my country's midst. :) Cheers.
Fairy tales? Your imaginarium is reeking of brain with long covid...
I am quite confident that you never lived in a socialist / communist country, plus, you would not be able to differentiate between cultural aspect of a society, coming from way back, and ideological impositions of the day. No stone left unturned for you to see the bad, the ugly, and the horrible.
I was born and grew up in a socialist country of ill repute and I know that the life was not only not as bad as presented in the west, and definitely worth living. I remember clearly that on the times Harlan County miners were striking for a better contract https://archive.org/details/harlan.county.usa.1977
you could not see such levels of social destitution in my part of the world.
As for China, Kathine seems to contradict you at every step she takes in her great journey to the east: https://www.youtube.com/@kats_journey_east
Kouros you never respond to anyone's criticisms directly. You are an intellectual coward. As best I can discern from the shambolic reflexive propaganda spew you regurgitate you expect the State to coddle you from cradle to grave. News-flash, in the Economic Realm, neither, the State, the World, the Universe, the rest of us, owe you anything that you don't 'contractually' earn first, once you attain the age of majority. So please, while you still have time, grow-up. Become an adult.
That Kouros posts often are at the top of the comment stack suggests his mouth is on fully-automatic long before his brain engages, if it ever does. His post above follows the usual pattern as evidenced in the first paragraph. A craven attempt to ingratiate himself with his host that is really just a cynical ploy to advance his real agenda. The agenda appears to be nothing more than to broadcast his logorrhea's completely mental excrement. Pathetic, an organic bot-mind with Stockholm Syndrome. 30 million dead with Mao in just a few years. The communists in Russia murdered how many? 20 million in not many more years? Who are you going to champion next bot-brain-boy? Pol-Pot perhaps? In that cesspool of nightmares there is plenty of blame to go around before, during and long after, but, Man is a violent Primate, so get over it. Learn to put the atrocities on a scale so that you might weigh them appropriately and maybe you'll, or your programmers, will attain some sense of proportionality regarding Man's crimes against Man. Why? So you can make better choices choosing sides next time around. In the meantime, pull your plug Bot-brain and die like a Man.
Your prozody with invectives is fascinating in its fluidity, but besides that you do not add anything of substance, beside old tropes about the evil communism/totalitarianism. Which is standing on a lot of clouds, since no westerner had access to "vital statistics" data during those times and places.
The civil war in Russia led to lots of people dying, and if I take Mike Duncan's analysis, it looked like the Bolsheviks had something more to offer to the population than the old regime, so they emerged on top. Drought did more after. Same way the blight, and the "liberal" ideology and the feeling of racial superiority of the Englished led to millions dying and emigrating from Ireland. More millions died under the good eye of the Brits in India as well:
https://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-newsletter-100-amateurs-talk-cancel-pros-talk-silence/
You are a willing carrier of water of systems that in fact are full fledged oligarchies/plutocracies, and I prefer the alliance between tyranny & demos to full fledged plutocracy or what the UK has, an alliance between oligarchy and monarchy. Magna Carta was written for the lords only.
The corruption of US plutocracy has been properly described and analyzed by researchers and there is no denial of this fact - "democracy" there is just a circus. Zephyr Teachout has a full volume on American corruption, which pervades every oligarchic network, fully intertwined with the state aparatus. And calculations have been made on premature deaths in the US due to lack of medical care, etc, etc, etc, numbers that would thwart anything Stalin and Mao have done.
You forgot to mention that Pol Pot was supported by both the US and the Chinese and it was another communist country that took him out. I bet you and him would have gotten along handsomly...
And while the Chinese have no problem fighting against corruption, that is impossible in the US: https://www.unz.com/article/corruption-in-china/
So go and spew your bile and venom and impotence wherever you want, it only
reinforces the perception of you being unhinged.