111–120 of 140 posts
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Why would that matter? Hong Kong was originally seceded to Britain without asking whether that was what the inhabitants wanted. Territory is a matter between states, not inhabitants.
Not according to the United Nations Charter. In international law, people have a right to self determination.
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There's a well developed banking system that allows for fast, cheap, and easy transfer, standing orders, and direct debit. Checks fell out of favour many decades ago, unlike in some more, well, traditional societies. There was the "ec-card", then Cirrus/Maestro debit cards, now cash card, which allow for cheap immediate cashless payment. Why would one want to let a large part of the economy run through oligopolistic…
Debit card fees are closer to 0.3% to 0.5% or so, than 2% or 3%. See e.g. https://www.cardswitcher.co.uk/2016/05/uk-card-processing-fe... Of course in the UK fees have been "banned" a few weeks ago, which means everybody will get charged the fees via price increases, effectively subsidizing card users.
My point is that both cash and modern cashless payment systems (debit/cash cards) are way better than oligopolistic credit cards with their gaudy marketing and high fees.
> Julia Lovell, a British historian, makes a similar point. In her book “The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China”, she says the move into opium by British traders was not, as claimed by many Chinese historians, a deliberate conspiracy to make narcotic slaves of the Chinese. “It was a greedy, pragmatic response to a decline in sales of other British imports,” she writes. Is there a name for this fallacy?…
I call it nationalist denial. Or deliberate ignorance. This type of nonsense is embedded in English accounts of the British Empire. Variants of the “white man’s burden” and the sacred principles of the market can be spun in all sorts of interesting ways. The most galling example of this that I’m familiar with is the Irish famine. Millions died of starvation in the midst of a record bumper crop for export. The British…
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Communism is not a centrally managed economy. It is an anarchistic form of society with no state. You might be confusing it with socialism which is what most states that are colloquially referred to as "Communist" really are. Socialism is supposed to be a short term form of government for transitioning to a communist society, but no real-world socialist state has made any significant progress at transitioning to comm…
Communism is certainly is a centrally manged state owned economic system. Under communism there is no individual ownership and the state owns all of the means of production.
You may be confused because of all of the states where the main political party is called the Communist party, but those states do not self-identify as communist. They self-identify as socialist states that are in the process of transitioning to communism.
China had accumulated a lot of the world silver reserves by selling tons silk and porcelain but buying basically nothing. Selling Opium to China "solved" this problem. Today the have the idea of exporting everything to the world and buy nothing besides a few raw materials, creating a giant trade deficit. Let's see how it ends.
They already bypassed much of this generation's "drug of choice" by making foreign social media difficult.
I am surprised that the article makes no mention of the many Chinese action movies made that are set in the time period of the Opium Wars and that make explicit reference to it. Given that the film is made in China and received state support, it is not an accident. By the way the story of Baghdadi Jew, David Sassoon and his rise in prominence as a result of profiting from the Opium War is quite interesting in itself.
I love foreign films. Any reasonably high brow recommendations?
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Communism is certainly is a centrally manged state owned economic system. Under communism there is no individual ownership and the state owns all of the means of production.
That is absolutely incorrect. Communism has no private property, but also has no state. You are thinking of socialism. That said, there are no large scale examples of real-world communist societies, so it is for the most part purely hypothetical, unlike socialism which has many real-world examples. You may be confused because of all of the states where the main political party is called the Communist party, but those…
The “abolishment” of the state under communism does not do so in practice but rather in principle when everyone belongs to the state there is no state but it’s an empty and meaningless starlet.
Communism also outside of some fringe Marxism and anarcho communism is not anarchist at all but rather very centralized.
" Then, in revenge for the torture and killing of a group of British negotiators by the Chinese,... " Wait, what? The Chinese weren't entirely the victims? (Just seems a little out of place, given the rest of the article.)
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It bothers me that almost every nation in the world has a "big shame" but probably the only people that faces, admits and owns their "big shame" are the Germans. Belgium still keeps statues of King Leopold, Spain keeps statues of Cortez and Pisarro, Portugal of Vasco da Gama, the US is only now arguing about the statues for Confederate soldiers; Italy, Poland and France never did a real "mea culpa" on how they actual…
Us dutchies are decent on admitting our faults. I think we are pretty clear about our mistakes in Indonesia, the biggest issue is probably the triangle trade in slaves. This is not something we stand behind as far as I know, though we still harken back to the times of the VOC as good because it was a 'golden age'.
I respectfully disagree. I've always thought of Dutchies as open-minded but I remember reading a plaque at the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) that left my jaw on the floor by being overly euphemistic. It was an exhibit of about 2-dozen weapons symbolically surrendered by Indonesian leaders; the text was worded as if it was a voluntary gift of their own volution. I thought a little self-honesty would go a long way.
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That is absolutely incorrect. Communism has no private property, but also has no state. You are thinking of socialism. That said, there are no large scale examples of real-world communist societies, so it is for the most part purely hypothetical, unlike socialism which has many real-world examples. You may be confused because of all of the states where the main political party is called the Communist party, but those…
I’m not confused because communism does not exists in a vacuum a communist society will be a state. The “abolishment” of the state under communism does not do so in practice but rather in principle when everyone belongs to the state there is no state but it’s an empty and meaningless starlet. Communism also outside of some fringe Marxism and anarcho communism is not anarchist at all but rather very centralized.
I think the only way that it could possibly work is with post-scarcity or at least much less scarcity that currently exists.