free_rms

Is "communist" not a description of the economic system?

How "communist" was Pinochet? He had total 1-party control, after all.

Is North Korea a Democratic Republic? That's what they call themselves, after all.

You information sources are sick though, bro. Nobody has better information sources than you.

US politics have had a "big bad" for 80 straight years now, it's basically a reflex.

I'm all for securing domestic chip manufacturing but can we stop with the vanquishing? It sounds like you're talking about an army of orcs.

I did say I was out on a limb..

Anyways, you've made clear that your reference point for understanding China is Soviet Eastern Europe. If you check a map and a calendar, you can see some places where that reference point might be inexact.

> You don't know the first thing about my information diet.

You've given some pretty strong hints about it in fact, and tripled down in this comment.

I'll go out on a very specific limb, tell me I'm wrong: Moved to the US from an eastern european country at a young age, perhaps exactly 1989, parents talk a lot about how bad it was?

And "state-controlled to the tune of Norway" is approximately accurate, thank you. You know they have gigantic private corporations there? Alongside the state-owned oil behemoths, Norway makes for a particularly nice comparison.

In the book we're discussing, the Cultural Revolution is presented as a catastrophe where the heroes are well-meaning scientists who's neutral observations of nature are twisted into being counter-revolutionary.

The book covers the Cultural Revolution like US films cover Vietnam: not favorably.

This thread started under the topic "believe it or not, Chinese people are actually pretty happy with their government given the record over the last few decades".

Can you think about what would be persuasive to such a person?

They're not American, didn't grow up on your information diet, and really don't give a shit about what's "communist" or not. Their economy is state-controlled to the tune of Norway, or a little less so. Who cares. They are all doing way better than a generation or 2 ago, and here in America, we are comparatively struggling. They see this. Why should they want our system instead?

Do you even know who Deng Xiaopeng is?

Changing systems without a massive, disruptive loss of life is actually a huge accomplishment. No other nation has transitioned out of communism smoothly. It had the side effect of not changing names of various things.

The third book is good, almost as good as the second imo. Manages to become completely insane while still feeling believable at each step.

Germany's an ally. We don't try to beat them up over hitler, and it wouldn't make sense if we did. For basically the same reasons, so good choice of analogy I guess.

I don't know if you read the books but there are some pretty severe consequences.

Can you name the dates and major events within the Great Leap forward or Cultural Revolution without googling and reading wikipedia?

I'm not trying to assert authority here but you could look at the last 500 years, the last 200, 100, years, the last 50 years.. cherrypicking a 25 year period that happened between 70-45 years ago is kinda weird if you're after understanding rather than scoring points.

Apparently the evil alien robot in book 3 is waaaaay more Japanese-sounding in the Mandarin version.

What's happening in India is that farmers were/are going to be screwed, and they're really mad about it.

What has happened in China is that a billion farmers are massively, undescribably better off. You literally cannot describe it to the average American, their scale for lifestyle doesn't go that low.