In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
leaving aside the factual error of defending health and education under mao (simply lol if it wasn't so tragic), i'm obviously just trying to show up the ridiculous double standard applied by some towards the criticism of contemporary politics and clearly worse alternatives.
it is completely absurd because it's not like hillary, or me, is against equality. im pretty sure aggregating the posts in this thread i've stressed inequality the most of anyone. more than anyone i've discussed long term development for the left behind folks in the present system. long term concerns about equality and democracy in the context of global capitalism also drives my positions on a variety of other issues, including lolprivacy and trade to some extent. that i don't think a blind identification of 'establishment' with bad, or think an overthrow of the current open market consensus is necessary, is all that really differs.
people severely underestimate the cost of 'revolutions,' or in the case of sanders and trump, misinformed disruptions that would not even accomplish their intended results. the cognitively easy to go down suspicion and frustration at 'reformers' is utterly counterproductive.
On April 04 2016 21:48 oneofthem wrote: leaving aside the factual error of defending health and education under mao (simply lol if it wasn't so tragic), i'm obviously just trying to show up the ridiculous double standard applied by some towards the criticism of contemporary politics and clearly worse alternatives.
it is completely absurd because it's not like hillary, or me, is against equality. im pretty sure aggregating the posts in this thread i've stressed inequality the most of anyone. more than anyone i've discussed long term development for the left behind folks in the present system. long term concerns about equality and democracy in the context of global capitalism also drives my positions on a variety of other issues, including lolprivacy and trade to some extent. that i don't think a blind identification of 'establishment' with bad, or think an overthrow of the current open market consensus is necessary, is all that really differs.
people severely underestimate the cost of 'revolutions,' or in the case of sanders and trump, misinformed disruptions that would not even accomplish their intended results. the cognitively easy to go down suspicion and frustration at 'reformers' is utterly counterproductive.
Q: Why does India lag China on important questions like health and education for its people? I think there have been three sources of education/health as a priority in the world. The European enlightenment was where people thought it was very important for people to be educated and healthy. It was an idea shared by Condorcet, Adam Smith, and in different ways, also by David Hume and Immanuel Kant, Europe went in a general education direction, and everyone came around to the view that healthcare is also very important. Even people like Bismarck. Then there is an Asian perspective, initiated in Japan, from the time of Meiji restoration (1868) and they made a famous declaration, saying why is it that we Japanese are so unproductive, whereas the Americans are so productive (it’s of course a very dated question, no one would do that today!). And then they concluded that the Americans are very educated and we are not, and then by the beginning of the 20th century, they had become fully literate. That lesson was followed by South Korea, Taiwan, HK and Singapore. They combined business with literacy and what the market economy can’t do well, the state must do. The third source is Communism as an idea, and in some ways, the most radical commitment it made. This is what Rabindranath Tagore praises when he visits Russia and writes a book Russia theke Chitthi (‘Letters from Russia’) and the book was immediately banned by the Raj because he praised the fact that the USSR was providing education to everyone, so the British, very interested in education for everyone in Britain but not in India, got agitated. Even today, you can see which parts were a part of the USSR by looking at the map. Wherever there is high literacy (99%) and life expectancy (above 70 yrs) in central Asia, it’s the former USSR. China too under Mao Tse Tung, made several changes in the kind of Communism he followed, but this has been a foundational type of commitment of Communism, in China, Cuba, Vietnam, even Cambodia. This was the case in Kerala too, with long years of the Communist party there, remained very big, in some ways, somewhat less in my home state (West Bengal), but in the rest of India, not at all. Some states later, like Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, have gone in that direction. The big difference is the vision, the vision articulated by the Congress party and Nehru, which had an enormous amount of very abstract thought about education for all, but very little concrete planning of education for all and healthcare for all. The first Five Year Plan had nothing on that, the second one spoke little about that. I remember as a young man writing about it, already in the 1960s, when I was teaching in the Delhi School and being horrified how that vision which had sounded great had become so distorted. The Chinese had a bigger vision than we had, we have to admit that.
Despite the catastrophe of Japan’s war years, the lessons of its development experience remained and were followed, in the postwar period, by South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and other economies in East Asia. China, which during the Mao era made advances in land reform and basic education and health care, embarked on market reforms in the early 1980s; its huge success changed the shape of the world economy. India has paid inadequate attention to these lessons.
Is there a conundrum here that democratic India has done worse than China in educating its citizens and improving their health? Perhaps, but the puzzle need not be a brainteaser. Democratic participation, free expression and rule of law are largely realities in India, and still largely aspirations in China.
Ho god, a nobel prize in economy backing those "tragic" ideas.
Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for his work on famine, points out that in 1949 China and India had striking similarities in their social and economic development. But, Sen goes on to say, over the next three decades, “there is little doubt that as far as morbidity, mortality, and longevity are concerned, China has a large and decisive lead over India.” As a result, Sen estimates that close to four million fewer people would have died in India in 1986 alone if India had had Mao’s health care system and food distribution network. (Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 205, 214.)
Noam Chomsky made an interesting calculation using Sen’s data: “There is an anticommunist study called The Black Book of Communism. It talks about what it calls the ‘colossal failure’ of communism and accuses communism of having caused the deaths of 100 million people. Now even if that number were true, which it is not—still, as Chomsky puts it, and let me quote: “in India the democratic capitalist ‘experiment’ since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of the ‘colossal, wholly failed…experiment’ of communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens of millions more since, in India alone.” (Noam Chomsky, “Millennial Visions and Selective Vision, Part One,” Z Magazine (January 10, 2000) http://revcom.us/a/046/health-care-economy.html)
I'd just like to point out that we throw all that holier than thou stuff out the window in America when it comes to the stuff we did.
If you're not familiar with why that's true, I suggest you familiarize yourself with people like J. Marion Sims, Dr. Eugene Saenger, and Dr. Albert Kligman. I wonder how many people on this forum used Retin-A, at some point without knowing?
Anyway, that reminded me about this movie (from a Johnson and Johnson heir) that has Ivanka in it. It's also an interesting movie if one had any interest in the conversation about inheritance from the prospective of an American heir (and other heirs).
She does seem like one of the more well grounded people in the documentary to whoever said that about Ivanka whenever ago.
ye taiwan where all the elites went and got colonized and improved by japan as one of the only colonies japan treated well enough to like japan after the imperial period
great comparison
i honestly cant get over how good this suggestion is
i mean srsly, referencing india to defend china is retarded. compare it to taiwan
its a work of art im considering incorporating it into my sig
On April 04 2016 22:15 oneofthem wrote: western useful idiots lol. you srsly need to talk to people who've been there.
this mao education defense is especially hilarious, please do go on
i mean srsly, referencing india to defend china is retarded. compare it to taiwan
You are so right, omg ! Why should we compare china to india ? It is, indeed, better to compare a country big of a billion people like China to another country with less than 20 million (in 1960-1980), like Taiwan !
getting colonized by a power that wants to show off their power by improving your territory is definitely a better plan than taking a poorer, less educated population over thirty times the size and attempting weird shit like the great leap forward and the cultural revolution under the name of "communism," especially after getting royally fucked by the same power that's trying to improve that smarter group of people who decided to get colonized
This is basic history 101, do not compare the advancements of different cultures as some measurement of merit. Don’t compare cultures in an attempt to find merit, really.
This is getting stupid. Parents lived under the regime of white terror, where anyone suspected of being communist was shot in Taiwan. Tens of thousands dissapeared. Dad personally witnessed friends lined up without evidence and shot, or jailed for 30 years. Chiang kai Shek ran the same MO that China did, seeing as he was a dictator too.
On April 04 2016 22:40 Plansix wrote: This is basic history 101, do not compare the advancements of different cultures as some measurement of merit. Don’t compare cultures in an attempt to find merit, really.
We're not comparing "culture" but the effect of health and education policies on countries with similar size (India and China) and that were in similar situation before the said policies (in 1950).
On April 04 2016 22:40 Plansix wrote: This is basic history 101, do not compare the advancements of different cultures as some measurement of merit. Don’t compare cultures in an attempt to find merit, really.
I'm not sure I'd go that far, rather that when attempting to perform an act of comparative political history, one must be extremely careful and narrow in their pursuit; the notion that socialism lends itself to some kinds of public good, namely education and healthcare, has support in historical analysis, like WhiteDog pointed out above.
On April 04 2016 14:57 ticklishmusic wrote: You keep drawing parallels between different situations. There's winkwink nudgenudge stuff going on with coordination b/w a campaign and SuperPACs, but it's very different from campaign donations. You can track the money pretty clearly and if the FEC thought there was anything going on there, they would run an audit.
You seem to again be engaging with an argument you don't understand/I'm not making.
What I was showing is that Hillary legally circumvents FEC contribution laws by exploiting this loophole (or whatever one wants to call it). On top of that she brags about it as "supporting Democrats down ticket" even while the WP rightly suggests she's the one benefiting from this (and DWS, as it's being used to pay off DNC debt).
Before the Hillary Victory Fund, the money she is receiving directly from the Hillary Victory Fund would of had to go to a superPAC or at least stay within the DNC, as it would be in excess of the $2,700 limit for candidates.
I was attempting to show you what that means. Let's try again this way.
By those donors giving a $300k check to her at an event, then her handing it to her campaign staff, then her campaign staff handing the check to her HVF staff (in at least one case, that's the same person), the HVF staff can then legally hand the check back to Hillary to spend however she pleases. Which is precisely what I just showed you, with pictures and everything.*
Are you refuting that it's happening or are you trying to say that because it's legal that I should use different words to describe it?
EDIT: *I hope you realize that's a simplification. Obviously they have to do the normal accounting for donations but I used the check to illustrate the absurdity of it.
No, she can't, and you're writing fiction about a non-existent loophole. As I said before, the source and amount of donations are tracked. Because of that, there is a money trail that is very easy to follow for the FEC, which has all these records. She can't pump money into her campaign by breaking the max, unless you're suggesting that she's taking big chunks of money and committing fraud by breaking it up into smaller fake donations. It would be stupid and blatantly obvious, and looking at it Hillary really doesn't need the money right now. There is no evidence and no real motive.
There could be better separation of powers between HVF since it's embedded in the Clinton campaign. However, I'm sure that it has been properly firewalled off, and it definitely has financial controls like separate accounts at a minimum. The worst violation I see is the campaign overallocating expenses to the fund for stuff like salary, though then you get into shades of grey like "HVF duties make up 20% of this employee's responsibilities (however that is defined), but they are being paid 40% out of the fund which is improper etc. etc."
Is anyone else interested in belaboring this point? Or is it a GH-only idea in which case I'll move on.
On April 04 2016 22:40 Plansix wrote: This is basic history 101, do not compare the advancements of different cultures as some measurement of merit. Don’t compare cultures in an attempt to find merit, really.
We're not comparing "culture" but the effect of health and education policies on countries with similar size (India and China) and that were in similar situation before the said policies (in 1950).
I am sure someone can justify that study as having some kind of usefulness. But with populations that huge, they should be able to find comparisons internally over such a long period of time. Numerous in education likely took place over those 70 years and comparing them to see “who did it better over all” has to be the most purial use of that information.
On April 04 2016 22:40 Plansix wrote: This is basic history 101, do not compare the advancements of different cultures as some measurement of merit. Don’t compare cultures in an attempt to find merit, really.
I'm not sure I'd go that far, rather that when attempting to perform an act of comparative political history, one must be extremely careful and narrow in their pursuit; the notion that socialism lends itself to some kinds of public good, namely education and healthcare, has support in historical analysis, like WhiteDog pointed out above.
I am always suspect of any discussion that ends with one side doing it better than the other. Rarely are the results that cut and dry or without some other context.
I don't think the idea of providing what should be regarded as basic services is an idea that is inextricably tied to socialism, though it may have been first popularized or implemented in that context. I would hope not, since historic examples of socialism have all had plenty of problems.
On April 04 2016 22:40 Plansix wrote: This is basic history 101, do not compare the advancements of different cultures as some measurement of merit. Don’t compare cultures in an attempt to find merit, really.
We're not comparing "culture" but the effect of health and education policies on countries with similar size (India and China) and that were in similar situation before the said policies (in 1950).
I am sure someone can justify that study as having some kind of usefulness. But with populations that huge, they should be able to find comparisons internally over such a long period of time. Numerous in education likely took place over those 70 years and comparing them to see “who did it better over all” has to be the most purial use of that information.
On April 04 2016 22:40 Plansix wrote: This is basic history 101, do not compare the advancements of different cultures as some measurement of merit. Don’t compare cultures in an attempt to find merit, really.
I'm not sure I'd go that far, rather that when attempting to perform an act of comparative political history, one must be extremely careful and narrow in their pursuit; the notion that socialism lends itself to some kinds of public good, namely education and healthcare, has support in historical analysis, like WhiteDog pointed out above.
I am always suspect of any discussion that ends with one side doing it better than the other. Rarely are the results that cut and dry or without some other context.
You know, the critic you gave can be said about anything in social science, it is both the limit and the quality of the field, why it is "always young".This kind of pseudo methodological critic is made everytime someone disagree with the conclusion but does not have any kind of actual rebutal to any of the arguments. You think someone like Amartya Sen does not know about such basic critic ? To actually discard his arguments, simply saying "comparaison is not reason" is not enough, you have to show what makes this comparaison unreliable, or what change the relation between variables, through the micro studies of India and China's history and culture for exemple. By the way, saying that history "101" argue that we should not compare the "advancement" of "culture" is such a fraud for anyone who has any kind of knowledge in sociology. It's like you're pushing the entirety of Weber's work under the bus, or Durkheim's (which methodology is the study of "concomitant variation", comparaison of statistic variations...), or anyone else for that matter.
On April 04 2016 14:57 ticklishmusic wrote: You keep drawing parallels between different situations. There's winkwink nudgenudge stuff going on with coordination b/w a campaign and SuperPACs, but it's very different from campaign donations. You can track the money pretty clearly and if the FEC thought there was anything going on there, they would run an audit.
You seem to again be engaging with an argument you don't understand/I'm not making.
What I was showing is that Hillary legally circumvents FEC contribution laws by exploiting this loophole (or whatever one wants to call it). On top of that she brags about it as "supporting Democrats down ticket" even while the WP rightly suggests she's the one benefiting from this (and DWS, as it's being used to pay off DNC debt).
Before the Hillary Victory Fund, the money she is receiving directly from the Hillary Victory Fund would of had to go to a superPAC or at least stay within the DNC, as it would be in excess of the $2,700 limit for candidates.
I was attempting to show you what that means. Let's try again this way.
By those donors giving a $300k check to her at an event, then her handing it to her campaign staff, then her campaign staff handing the check to her HVF staff (in at least one case, that's the same person), the HVF staff can then legally hand the check back to Hillary to spend however she pleases. Which is precisely what I just showed you, with pictures and everything.*
Are you refuting that it's happening or are you trying to say that because it's legal that I should use different words to describe it?
EDIT: *I hope you realize that's a simplification. Obviously they have to do the normal accounting for donations but I used the check to illustrate the absurdity of it.
No, she can't, and you're writing fiction about a non-existent loophole. As I said before, the source and amount of donations are tracked. Because of that, there is a money trail that is very easy to follow for the FEC, which has all these records. She can't pump money into her campaign by breaking the max, unless you're suggesting that she's taking big chunks of money and committing fraud by breaking it up into smaller fake donations. It would be stupid and blatantly obvious, and looking at it Hillary really doesn't need the money right now. There is no evidence and no real motive.
There could be better separation of powers between HVF since it's embedded in the Clinton campaign. However, I'm sure that it has been properly firewalled off, and it definitely has financial controls like separate accounts at a minimum. The worst violation I see is the campaign overallocating expenses to the fund for stuff like salary, though then you get into shades of grey like "HVF duties make up 20% of this employee's responsibilities (however that is defined), but they are being paid 40% out of the fund which is improper etc. etc."
How...
Ill try to say this very simply. The HVA can give Hillary as much money as it wants, see that they have already given her $4 million+. She can raise money for the HVA. So instead of writing a $33k dollar check to Hillary's campaign, they write it to the HVA. The HVA takes it and divides it. The first chunk fills the FEC limit to Hillary. The next chunk gets dumped into the HVA. The HVA piles up those donations, then hands them back to Hillary to spend as if they were standard campaign donations.
So they aren't added to the maxed out total of the person who gave the HVA and Hillary money, instead they are counted as coming from HVA even though HVA was just serving as a pass-through for the donation that the Hillary campaign can't legally accept directly from the original donor.
Her campaign staff is the HVA staff, the treasurer is the COO of her campaign. So yes it's all legal with separate accounts and such, that was never my point although you seem insistent on arguing that instead of what I am telling you.
As for the tracking, there's several reasons why you can't find anything showing you how much money the Hillary campaign, of the ~$23M they raised last month, or any other month for that matter, came from the HVA. But again that would just be for us, as I've already said several times, there's nothing the FEC could do anyway because using the HVF as a pass through for large donations (while pretty unethical and not great PR) is totally legal.
and to add to the discussion about health: vaccination, child care, general physicians (even in rural areas) all went pretty well, but negative things like suicides got less focus than in a more open society
At the start of my research, my own presumptions were not entirely different, I have to confess. My personal experience of the ramshackle GDR as a depressing society had tuned me that way. The suicide rate of East Germany was, indeed, consistently 50 percent higher than in West Germany (about 6,000 suicide cases were registered every year in the GDR until the fall of the Wall). But East German suicide rates have to be viewed in a broader comparative context. European states like Austria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Hungary and Finland also had high suicide rates, despite variations in their political systems. Historically, suicide rates in the parts of the German Empire, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich that later became the GDR were consistently higher than the suicide rate in Western Germany. I have looked at all possible explanations, examined specific social groups such as prisoners, soldiers, youth, reached out to all available statistical data. But the result was surprising once again. In prisons, there was a relatively high suicide rate around 1960, but after 1970 the rate was almost the same as elsewhere. My inquiry into the army yielded a similar result. Regarding the youth, I found a markedly higher suicide rate compared to West Germany until the 1970s. But the generation of young people born in the GDR showed almost no difference in comparison to suicide by their West German counterparts.
tl,dr: it is more complicated, and baselines matter
On April 04 2016 22:40 Plansix wrote: This is basic history 101, do not compare the advancements of different cultures as some measurement of merit. Don’t compare cultures in an attempt to find merit, really.
We're not comparing "culture" but the effect of health and education policies on countries with similar size (India and China) and that were in similar situation before the said policies (in 1950).
I am sure someone can justify that study as having some kind of usefulness. But with populations that huge, they should be able to find comparisons internally over such a long period of time. Numerous in education likely took place over those 70 years and comparing them to see “who did it better over all” has to be the most purial use of that information.
On April 04 2016 22:44 farvacola wrote:
On April 04 2016 22:40 Plansix wrote: This is basic history 101, do not compare the advancements of different cultures as some measurement of merit. Don’t compare cultures in an attempt to find merit, really.
I'm not sure I'd go that far, rather that when attempting to perform an act of comparative political history, one must be extremely careful and narrow in their pursuit; the notion that socialism lends itself to some kinds of public good, namely education and healthcare, has support in historical analysis, like WhiteDog pointed out above.
I am always suspect of any discussion that ends with one side doing it better than the other. Rarely are the results that cut and dry or without some other context.
You know, the critic you gave can be said about anything in social science, it is both the limit and the quality of the field, why it is "always young".This kind of pseudo methodological critic is made everytime someone disagree with the conclusion but does not have any kind of actual rebutal to any of the arguments. You think someone like Amartya Sen does not know about such basic critic ? To actually discard his argument, simply saying "comparaison is not reason" is not enough, you have to show what makes this comparaison unreliable, or what change the effect of variables, through the micro studies of India and China's history. By the way, saying that history "101" argue that we should not compare the "advancement" of "culture" is such a fraud for anyone who has any kind of knowledge in sociology. It's like you're pushing the entirety of Weber's work under the bus, or Durkheim's (which methodology is the study of "concomitant variation", comparaison of statistic variations...), or anyone else for that matter.
Yep, but allowing for comparisons between cultures wrecks the narrative of the uber-politically correct left, so we definitely can't allow that! We aren't supposed to judge!
As for the discussion on the merits, I don't think that there's any denying that socialist systems such as China's do some things well (whether it be healthcare or education). The real issue is the true cost of those successes, and, more specifically, the gross inefficiencies and socio-economic distortions created elsewhere within the socialist system. Hell, China has been having all sorts of problems over the past year or so arising from the misallocation of capital and resulting bad debts.
On April 04 2016 22:40 Plansix wrote: This is basic history 101, do not compare the advancements of different cultures as some measurement of merit. Don’t compare cultures in an attempt to find merit, really.
We're not comparing "culture" but the effect of health and education policies on countries with similar size (India and China) and that were in similar situation before the said policies (in 1950).
I am sure someone can justify that study as having some kind of usefulness. But with populations that huge, they should be able to find comparisons internally over such a long period of time. Numerous in education likely took place over those 70 years and comparing them to see “who did it better over all” has to be the most purial use of that information.
On April 04 2016 22:44 farvacola wrote:
On April 04 2016 22:40 Plansix wrote: This is basic history 101, do not compare the advancements of different cultures as some measurement of merit. Don’t compare cultures in an attempt to find merit, really.
I'm not sure I'd go that far, rather that when attempting to perform an act of comparative political history, one must be extremely careful and narrow in their pursuit; the notion that socialism lends itself to some kinds of public good, namely education and healthcare, has support in historical analysis, like WhiteDog pointed out above.
I am always suspect of any discussion that ends with one side doing it better than the other. Rarely are the results that cut and dry or without some other context.
You know, the critic you gave can be said about anything in social science, it is both the limit and the quality of the field, why it is "always young".This kind of pseudo methodological critic is made everytime someone disagree with the conclusion but does not have any kind of actual rebutal to any of the arguments. By the way, saying that history "101" argue that we should not compare the "advancement" of "culture" is such a fraud for anyone who has any kind of knowledge in sociology. It's like you're pushing the entirety of Weber's work under the bus, or Durkheim's (which methodology is the study of "concomitant variation", comparaison of statistic variations...), or anyone else for that matter.
I am sorry, I cannot help but roll my eyes as grand, over sweeping declarations like this:
It talks about what it calls the ‘colossal failure’ of communism and accuses communism of having caused the deaths of 100 million people. Now even if that number were true, which it is not—still, as Chomsky puts it, and let me quote: “in India the democratic capitalist ‘experiment’ since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of the ‘colossal, wholly failed…experiment’ of communism everywhere since 1917:
I am sure we could add up all the deaths “caused by” the pursuit of democracy and compare it to communism too, if that seemed like a productive thing to do. There is a discussion to be had, but comparing the number of people who died over periods of time is a shit way to prove a point.
EPT
