Slashdot Mirror
The Chinese Socialist MMOG
GP writes "How different is China? In the online game version of the idealized Socialist state, you gain experience points by 'doing good deeds' and 'thwarting spys'. You can even meet Chairman Mao!" From a great writeup by Scott Jennings on the game: "And now we have the online MMO version, 'Learn From Lei Feng Online', which allows you to... mend socks. Again - not making any of this up. To quote from the original Xinhua story 'For beginners, sewing and mending socks is the only way to increase experience and to upgrade,' said Jiao Jian, a six-grade pupil in Yuexiu District, quoted by the newspaper. He then continues. 'Every time you are promoted to a higher level, your clothes will become more average,' he said. I'm pretty sure this isn't a translation screw up. The longer you grind, the more you look like everyone else. I guess new users wear designer pastels or something."
Yeah, cause countries like the United States never make propaganda games, right? Man, china's such a fucked up country! How dare they do this?!
MABASPLOOM!
I dunno. How much do you get for stuffing your aging parents in "retirement communities" where they can be conveniently forgotten?
(Before you ask--yes, Chinese people really do consider us barbaric for our cultural idiosyncracies. And killing infant girls really isn't pervasive in modern China, even in rural areas, regardless of whatever uninformed drivel Microsoft-NBC is spewing today. Gain some perspective, please.)
Most slashdotters don't know a damn thing about China. It is like listening to a bunch of humanities students talking about computers.
"Man, I just re-formatted my processor because I got a virus or a bug or something in my window."
"Yeah I know, you should use that linux-program I heard it really zaps those bugs!"
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
No, abortion = foeticide because foetus != infant.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
"Well, actually, you can't have a communist democracy, because communism requires a totalitarian government. You simply can't allow the slaves, sorry, the workers, to choose other forms of government, because they'll choose the freedom provided by personal economic power (money) if you do. That's why every communist leader has been a dictator."
No. Trying to enforce _your_ own point of view, regardless of what people want, is what's incompatible with democracy. It's not even just about communism. The USA McCarthy era trying to enforce capitalism and weed out any communist thinking wasn't a particularly democratic process or a case of "land of the free".
Freedom and democracy mean that the people are able to choose whatever they choose, including communism, capitalism, something in between, or something very stupid. (E.g., ancient Athens democratically chose to wage war on Sparta, even though the power of Athens was naval and Sparta was landlocked on a mountain. And most land battles had been won for Athens by the Spartan elites. Let's just say Athens never recovered from that mistake.) But that's what democracy means: letting the people choose for themselves.
And there's this fundamentally post-McCarthy American point of view that, given freedom and a right to choose, anyone would choose a cult of the psychopaths. (In the medical sense, not in the axe murderer sense.) That anyone would choose a dog-eat-dog world, where it's only right to be chewed up and spit out by those more powerful than you. And that there are no other shades of grey.
In practice, in Europe for example most countries have democratically chosen something in between. Something where enough economic freedom is left to keep the economy going, but there are plenty of safety nets for those who aren't CEOs. Some countries, as was pointed out, veered pretty far to the left.
But even if I was to accept your points, the GP point still stands: there's something particularly stupid in claiming basically "everything I don't like is communistic." In this case someone argues that "working" in WoW to gain an advantage over other players is somehow communistic, because he doesn't like that. Excuse me? Last I've heard having to work to gain an advantage was the very fundament of capitalism.
That's really the whole problem. For some people "communism", "capitalism" and so on have lost any trace of their real meaning and are some generic synonim for "evil" and "good". Everything they like, including getting a free meal, is "capitalistic" and "democratic". Everything they dislike, e.g., having to work to get a reward, is inherently "communist" and "totalitarian". They've become just buzzwords triggering some Pavlov's Dog kind of prescribed response, without any thinking involved.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.