China’s rise is more than a problem. It’s a puzzle.Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, most Western analysts have assumed that China is a communist country in the way that France is a Catholic one. That is, there remain Marxist believers in China and practicing Catholics in France, but Beijing is as little guided by Marxist ideology as Emmanuel Macron is led by the precepts of Pius IX.
That turns out not to be true. While Xi Jinping likely spends little time reading Marx’s “Grundrisse” or debating the labor theory of value with his comrades, today’s China combines a Leninist party structure with state control (if not always ownership) of the means of production, a planned economy, an intolerant atheism and a ruthless determination to hold on to power at all costs. That Beijing incorporates market mechanisms into its communist system is not new; Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy in 1921 to speed recovery from the Russian Civil War. But the Chinese Communist Party — armed with information technology that lets it monitor and control economic activity on a scale Lenin could only dream of — has grafted market mechanisms onto a communist state structure with great success.
One reason I am highly dubious about Marxism is that the pitch for it always sounds a lot like the pitch for joining a church. https://t.co/0DGUXGZF7x
— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) August 6, 2020
These are hard challenges. The media specializes in fighting the last war, and has done a decent job this cycle of avoiding the mistakes of 2016. Reporters are calling out Mr. Trump’s falsehoods, showing skepticism about polls and avoiding turning politics into a sport.
But the American media plays a bizarrely outsize role in American elections, occupying the place of most countries’ national election commissions.
Here, the media actually assembles the results from 50 states, tabulates them and declares a victor. And — we can’t really help ourselves — the media establishes the narrative to explain what happened. That task was most memorably mishandled in 2000, when inaccurate calls that George W. Bush had won Florida led to a wild retraction by Vice President Al Gore of the concession he had offered to Mr. Bush earlier that evening, followed by weeks of uncertainty.
The flashy graphics and sober, confident hosts embody a long tradition of television flimflam. When CBS invented the election night tradition of dramatic vote projections and official calls in 1952, it outfitted its set with a blinking, Remington Rand Univac computer. The blinking device made for a good show. But the computer was a prop, a fake, as the historian Jill Lepore noted in her podcast, The Last Archive.
The TV presentation is always slick, but the underpinnings of county-by-county electoral systems are baroque and antiquated. And the pandemic means more people will vote by mail this year, in states with little experience processing those votes.
Oh? On God?
shriekingviolet posted:i think i just stumbled on a network of machine generated bot news sites that are gaming the google news algorithm and copying journalist's linkedin blurbs to make their "writers" appear legit but i've been up all night and have to go to sleep god damn it what a rabbit hole to fall down at the worst time
and that websites name? guardian.co.uk
guess the source and you win a no-prize
Proper context of this nuclear hot take why China is bad for ending poverty: David’s dad was MI6 Director, David’s brother ran Opium out of #HongKong as late as 1970s https://t.co/emjRCqAyUY
— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) September 18, 2020
One divides into two as Mao says
😬
e: a wake was held for the fucking dog by its pig co-workers & its corpse was escorted along a thirty mile procession route (public invited to line the route to pay respect) down a major thoroughfare to a crematorium, memorial service to be held at later date. in other news the dog executioner had a name
Edited by zhaoyao ()
