81–90 of 106 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This trick no longer seems to work on The Economist. Any alternative?
If you really want to skip the paywall (I don't take any official position), you can use the Bypass Paywalls extension¹. ¹: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
https://www.economist.com./by-invitation/2021/09/24/noam-cho...
I wonder how much of the authoritarian tendencies of the government of certain countries (e.g. Russia, China, Iran) is driven by a desire to maintain the stability and control presumably needed to resist hostile actions by the US empire that ironically professes freedom and democracy.
Do you even have basic knowledge of communist history? Please read some. All communist parties had party cleansing before they even gain power in their own countries. And the first thing they did after they gain power was newer round of party cleansing, killing millions. No, communist parties are not book clubs. In mao’s expression: 干革命不是请客吃饭。 This is a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
Wow, never thought I'd see a Chomsky essay on the Economist, of all magazines.
I respect Chomsky very much, and I have learned a lot from him. But I do wonder to what extent his views are based on a possibly over-optimistic view of the world's potential, and a refusal or inability to accept that the the universe might be fundamentally unjust and that life is not always dignified or sacred. I would like to share his hopeful outlook (hopeful in the sense that he seems to think there ought to be a…
These people are hardly different from Ghenghis Khan or have a different approach to conflicts if they have the upper hand with any advantage at their hand. So, many "western" "human" ways to engage and solve problems are for them, in fact, chances to get away with their objectives.
This is the world as it really is, not the world as we would like it to be.
That's the people you're gonna face with maybe a gun and few spare magazines, but the technology is nothing, they have the upper hand: no morals, no human rights to respect. They just have to win a game respecting no rules at all, those which you'd have to respect.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what sense can 'totalitarianism' be measured as a moral wrong besides the amount of violence and oppression it inflicts? By that measure there's infinitely more reason to need to look inward at America's domestic and foreign policy than there is to enable the cold warrior type's fantasies of war with china.
Even if the US was perfectly saintly, that wouldn't change the nature of the totalitarianism of the CCP, and the ambitions that are inherent in it by necessity (since you cannot control and rewrite history without controlling the globe in some way or another). It's also not a binary choice. The same values that require resisting oppression and violence perpetrated by US administrations, would also lead a person resis…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you even have basic knowledge of communist history? Please read some. All communist parties had party cleansing before they even gain power in their own countries. And the first thing they did after they gain power was newer round of party cleansing, killing millions. No, communist parties are not book clubs. In mao’s expression: 干革命不是请客吃饭。 This is a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
That's besides the point. Countries can change their systems; political regimes are not permanent and don't exist in a vacuum but respond to the environment. Who is to say that US actions did not give more domestic political legitimacy to the CPC so that democratic reform/revolution was down-regulated?
There is a really interesting passage in Ron Suskind's book 'One Percent Doctrine' about the 2004 release of Bin Laden video, released four days before the US presidential election (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Osama_bin_Laden_video). The intelligence consensus was that this was released to help re-elect Bush, as the Bush-led US gives legitimacy to Al Queda's actions as much as much as Al Queda's actions legitimize US war on terror.
edited: corrected the book reference.
The thing about America is that if you don't like it, you can move to the US and promote political ideas to change what you don't like. It doesn't always succeed, but it's non-violent and it works. It's why so many people move to America.
Through the visa lottery system?
And vote the populists who will give you free citizenship and scholarships!