Hua Guofang

I support having him hit with a hammer now? I said he was lucky that some one/the kid didn't hit him with a hammer, based on the fact of how many people are pissed off at him, from almost every spectrum of politics. A stretch to say that was me supporting such a thing. For the record, I don't support giving the guy and his National Front fools any attention at all. All egging him did was give him more oxygen. I'd prefer that no opposition turn up to their protests, no one write about them in the media or take any notice of them, that way their message of hate and dog whistles for violence will fade away into history. I did figure his reaction to a little kid was overboard. One slap, yeah, maybe. Two, nah, more than that, you gotta be kidding me. For a politician, it was an indication of how dumb he is. Sure, it may have resonated with his support base but the reaction here was pretty much the same as @Mercerbig dude beating up on a little kid who put a bit of food on him.

Will have to look around over the weekend, it was blanket coverage on TV from eleventy four billion angles when it happened.

You aware what that old cunt actually did though? He blamed the victims of the massacre for being Muslims. Little kids were killed with a shotgun and he argued that it was their own fault. He he was placed into the senate as a seat holder by his party whilst the elected guy dealt with some legal shit. The second he got there he betrayed his own party by leaving them so he could keep the seat after only getting 19 votes. The guy is a fucking maggot in so many ways and only proved it by the way he reacted here.

Given what the dude said about the NZ massacre, he’s lucky it was an egg, not a fucking hammer. He is reviled here in Australia by everyone but the extreme right wing/white supremecists. He won’t last through the next election and is only there through a quirk in our electoral system- 19 votes out of a few million. If if you see the footage from behind the kid you can see his hand was open.

Isn’t that a scene out of Platoon? still representative of reality though.

It was actually an open handed slap. You want an indication of how fucked up things are? That senator got 19 votes and now represents millions of people.

Doesn't the former imply the latter? I get woke every damn day. But I always fall back into the sleep. Shit is hard.

YEah, I don't disagree with much of that at all. I think that anyone who thinks that government involvement is a 'good' outcome is wrong. I am probably some one who is prepared to accept more govt involvement than you (I'm happy with a substantive amount of return I get for my taxes - I support a state health system, I'm happy to pay for welfare that helps those who really need it, etc.), but I am also very clear on how inefficient govt often is. In saying that, my wife works for a company that provides private solutions for what is commonly the govt realm (they work both private and govt clients and are what a lot of 'small govt' folk would support in terms of govt making high end decisions that involve national defence, etc. but contracting the market to provide the solution and services) and I am blown away at how inefficient and costly that organisation is. And they are a $350m a year turnover company, leaders in their field for this part of the world. So I don't accept that private industry is always a better solution than govt., it's possible to be the other way around sometimes. I guess my bottom line would be: Communism, GTFO. Socialism, no thanks. Laissez-faire economics, no thanks (private organisations left alone can cause serious harm as well). Mixture of largely market economics with, what you would call socialist-style policies on a case-by-case basis - yes please. I live in Australia and have spent a lot of time in Nordic/Scandinavian countries as well as the US, China and a few Southeast Asian countries. Out of these, Aust, Sweden and Norway have, by a longshot, the best standards of living. They benefit from smaller populations, good natural resources, democratic government and a constant tug-of-war between progressive and mainstream conservative govt. Each country has its problems but none of them have poverty, oppression and environmental degradation like China and some of Southeast Asia. None of them have the social issues and poverty like the USA, and none of them have the religious BS that you see in Malaysia and Indonesia (and the US, to a degree). I note that whilst China, Southeast Asia and the US all have different gun ownership laws, Sweden, Australia and Norway all have relatively strict laws (I say that as a shooter myself). So whilst I am not prepared to see my country run a socialist system. I'm also not ideologically opposed to socialist policies like that which my country has (social welfare, state health, state schools, unions, minimum wage, sliding tax scale, etc.).

I get the feeling that I’m not explaining myself clearly and that you get the impression that I’m trying to defend socialism. I’m most definitely not doing that. Ive probably chosen the wrong thread to bring this up as it’s only tangentially related to AOC. The point I was looking to stress was that you seem to place disproportionate weight on market intervention for the failure of socialist and communist nations/states. I don’t disagree that these were failures, I argue that there was much more than market intervention at play here (such as cult of personality, arbitrary incarceration, ideological education, genocide, civil war, etc). Market interventions were definitely one of the major failings, but I feel your analysis suffers from not properly considering the other variables involved. In saying that, I’m just going off what’s been casually discussed here and there, which may not fully communicate your thinking on the matter.

Just quickly, I want to reiterate that I’m not trying to argue socialism’s merits. I’m just trying to say, leaving AOC aside, that you only ever focus on the economy as socialism’s failing. I see the failings of DPRK, Mao’s China, Stalin’s Russia, etc. as much more than the economic failure (as in their market interventions). It almost feels to me that you’re saying that everything is “the market” or that genocide, arbitrary incarceration, ideological indoctrination and such won’t matter if you have a free market.

Also never realised that you're a fellow Aussie, hit me up if you're ever in CBR

**nervously waits to see NEw Zealand masacre memes start popping up.

Love PRague. Interesting to hear what has become of MEridian/Svetlana. I remember her from 90s porn and it's always good to know that they weren't victims of human trafficking or OD'd or something. I'm weirdly happy to hear that she's doing ok, even though I've never met her.

Again, I frame my remarks with the disclaimer that I'm not an economist, so you'll have to excuse me if I misunderstand something. But I think the issue is a misrepresentation of cause an effect and/or different perspectives and definitions. "All famines are economic, in that the supply of food does not meet the market demand. When people are unable to purchase, trade, or barter for enough food they slowly starve to death in mass" What that statement says to me is that the effect, in the case of Mao and the Great LEap Forward, was economic failure - the supply could not keep up with market demand. However, I struggle to see how the cause was through intervention in the economy rather than intervention into market behaviour - and this may be where the perspective/definition difference is. When Mao dictated farming methods of the communes he was intervening in agricultural policy, not economic policy. When Mao said kill all the flies, sparrows, rats and mosquitoes, to me he was intervening in environmental policy. The knock on effect was that suppliers failed to meet demand, but this was a scend, to third order impact of a failed agri/enviro policy. I clearly have a policy approach to these things, which is different to yours. However, I reckon we can both agree that it was Mao's intervention that caused the problem and the 'people's' reverence (Confucianism) and fear (authoritarianism) of him that stopped them from saying "that's a bad idea, we should not do that". Where I think your statement might fall down altogether is in cases of war and environmental disaster. Civil or international war occurs (caused by govt or not) and crops are destroyed, infrastructure destroyed and farmers displaced or killed. Thus, supply can't meet demand. But this is not a failure of economics, it's a breakdown of the food sector of the economy because of security policy or a response to another nation's security related policies. I would also go back to the issue of the Ethiopian famines, one of the big ones of the 20th century (There was more than one there). Neither famine was caused by a policy based on socialist principles, yet famine occurred. I can also look at countries where socialist economic principals occur and there is no famine. So, I have to ask, is socialist ideology the determining factor or bad leadership the determining factor?

I'm not sure how this addressed my argument. IF I follow your train of thinking, I'd say that some of it actually backs up what I'm saying, which is that you seem to be disproportionately focusing on economics. You cite famines as an outstanding example of intrusive socialist economics. I look at the one major famine that I know about, the Chinese famine after the Great Leap Forward. I follow the link you provided and even Wikipeadia explains that the cause of the famine was political leadership and not economic policies. The page misses a number of things relevant to that famine, such as Mao dictating the use of unworkable farming methods and no one wanting to say no to the great leader. Mao also encouraged the killing of small birds so they don't eat the grains, which then resulted in an over-abundance of insect pests, which ate the crops. But the most important was that regions competed for the favour of Beijing by falsely reporting their yield, which gave falsely inflated numbers for central planners. The things that led to the great Chinese famine were not economic, they were based on cult of personality politics and failed agricultural and environmental policies. So I clicked on another famine out of the list you provided, the famine of Tigray in 1958. Ethiopia wasn't a socialist country in '58 and the famine occurred due to Salasse's decisions not to assist the region. This famine was not due to economic structures but leadership decision. I then looked at the great famine in Ethiopia, that we all remember, in the 1980s and it seems that it was a direct result of both civil war and drought. It was exacerbated by the government refusing to allow aid to spread to rebel areas. This famine was not due to economic structures but conflict and environmental factors. IF I look down that list, I can see numerous examples of famine in the last century that were explicitly a result of war, not socialist economic policies. And that brings me to my rebuttal to your post, that economics is not the single most determining factor in quality of life. I argue that security is the most determining factor. The reason for this is that if you don't have security (defined here as the freedom from violence or the threat of violence and arbitrary incarceration) you can't really have an economy, regardless of your economic ideology. It would be like trying to tell a jew in the Warsaw ghetto that the Nazi's economic policies were more important their quality of life than Hitler's final solution or telling a dissident lawyer in a Chinese prison that China's policy of supporting state owned enterprises with central banks is more important to her qualify of life than the Party's practice of extra-judicial incarceration. I'm not trying to argue that economics is not important, it is clearly one of the central pillars of life in the modern world. You could have an excellent government in terms of security, but if they fuck the economy up then life is going to suck, no doubt. I just think that there is a tendency on this website to see economics as the only consideration and when socialism is discussed, it is done so without any consideration of numerous other factors that likely have a greater impact on the failing of a state and nation. The result of this is that socialist economics may be attributed with failures that it's not wholly responsible for. My argument is that many things you blame socialist economics for is likely to be the fault of leadership decisions not related to economics.

I like to think that's him.

Hey Casek, you still got my email address? hit me up with the OSINT stuff you did so I can read it. Geopolitics is still my main interest but I'm doing a lot of futures work now and not so much the analysis but how to get the info (scenario activities, wargamming, deep dive workshops, etc). I'll send you some of the public stuff I've worked on over the last year. You ever done anything with Bellingcat? Back on topic, I see Mero on here late night sometimes, when I'm powering the brain down for the night. I've always gotta sit down and watch it if comes on.

I'm not big on economics but have worked in politics and security for the majority of my adult life. So I can't say socialist economics is good or bad in any way. However, I Can say that in the majority of socialist countries where things turned to shit, it wasn't just the economics that did it. Chavez, for instance, was what any normal person would call corrupt, manipulative, megalomaniac, dictatorial, etc. etc. Mao was the same, Stalin was the poster boy, etc. etc. They, and their ilk are authoritarians and despots, they did shit load more than just implement economics. They murdered opposition, manufactured truths, started wars of revenge and national prestige, they committed genocide, they implemented retarded farming techniques, they killed off scientists and experts and replaced their school curriculum with ideology and retarded the intellectual growth of their populations for generations (I've travelled extensively through rural China and it is mind blowing how you can see the ripples of the revolution and cultural revolution pulsing through the family trees and the community) I don't always read the walls of text on these matters as I often get left behind, and I do this shit for work and couldn't be arsed in my spare time. But I get the feeling that you cats are only focused on part of the picture. Sure, socialist economics may be fucked, I wouldn't know. But it's only part of the picture and I sense that you cats simplify it by making out it is THE single point of failure in the cases you cite.

Fuck those little flies, the ones that love rotten fruit, for landing in my beer.

Trash but be sure to use the recycle bin so all that plastic can be put to better use in fleshlights

No argument there, I’m just not a real movie/TV kind of guy. In saying that, I do actively avoid what I reckon would be good (The Wire, GoT, Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc) because I don’t have the time to commit and know I’ll get sucked in, like I did with Walking Dead, which jumped the shark with record height and distance. I think the last thing I saw at the cinema was The Maltese Falcon.

From the sounds of it she already destructed herself.

Just saw World War Z with Brad Pitt. Reminded me me of why I don’t watch movies.

Voiding.

If you can add another 3 hours to my week, I’ll even do requests!