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China's All-Seeing Eye
krou writes "Naomi Klein writes in Rolling Stone Magazine about China's Panopticon-like experiment called 'Golden Shield' taking place in Shenzhen using technology supplied by companies such as IBM, Honeywell, and General Electric. Klein writes: 'Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data.' According to Klein, this is more than just a Chinese experiment, it's also one that holds ramifications for America and elsewhere: '...the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state... The global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.'"
Anonymous Coward? Not for long...
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
"using technology supplied by companies such as IBM, Honeywell, and General Electric."
IBM making money at the expense of morality; nothing new here.
http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/articles/auschwitz.html
"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed--if all records told the same tale--then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"
Fortunately, somebody had the vision to warn us about this sort of thing, sixty years ago. I'm willing to bet that in China, a land where the government censors almost everything in sight, Orwell is banned.
BTW, has 1984 ever been translated into Mandarin? If so, whoever did it, that person should have a statue erected in every Chinatown in the western world, just like Dr Sun Yat-Sen eventually in Shanghai and Beijing.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I see nothing in the above that we're not already doing here or have announced that we will be doing soon. And the amazing thing is this really big giant coincidence that it's also happening everywhere else. What gives? It's like a world government has been instituted or something.
You can't send a takedown notice to an already printed newspaper.
It has been a while since I've read Rolling Stone, but hey, it gave us the likes of Hunter Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. All that is shiny is not shallow.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Put MediaDefender on it!
It's nothing to do with them being Communists. Actually, if they were to do something with Communist motivation, it would be feeding the poor. This is more about stamping out sedition. Something any government could do, completely separate from their political style.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Why don't you RTFA? There you will find discussion of, for example, China's 130 million-strong population of migrants and how they are the underclass forming the backbone of cities like Shenzen.
If it's anything like web 2.0, we'll be fine.
meep
These are Communists in name only, on two fronts:
- Stalinism wasn't Communist, it was Stalinism. In that regard, whatever China's government practices, it's not Communism.
- Communism on paper was never about putting antifreeze in toothpaste or lead in child toy's paint. That's the exact opposite, Xtreme Capitalism.
It's heartbreaking how the least enlightened people end up running so many countries, and that goes for China present and past, too.
Ever heard about The Great Sparrow Campaign? In the late fifties, the Mao government decided that sparrows, who ate seeds, were a public menace and implemented a nationwide campaign to kill the sparrows. They succeded, by having the population bang pots and pans in the streets, keeping the sparrows in the air until they dropped dead from exhaustion.
As a result, locusts flourished, with their natural predator virtually gone, devastating the countryside, generating a famine that killed, by most estimates, between 35 and 40 million Chinese. All of it covered up, of course, there is not a single photograph that documents this massive catastrophe, even in the second half of the XX Century.
Another fine example of unthinkably ignorant and incompetent government at work, in full effect, and never mind the symbolic Communist tag.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
With due respect, this article isn't about a totalitarian state that watches it's citizens; it's about the fact that US companies are the one's who are making it possible.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
My lasers trace / everything you do,
You think you've private lives / think nothing of the kind,
There is no true escape / I'm watching all the time!
CHORUS:
I'm made of metal, my circuits gleam
I am perpetual, I keep the country clean.
I'm elected, electric spy,
I'm protected, electric eye.
Always in focus / you can't feel my stare,
I zoom into you / you dont know I'm there.
I take a pride in probing / all your secret moves,
My tearless retina takes / pictures that can prove...
(Chorus)
Electric eye (in the sky)
Feel my stare (always there)
There's nothing you can do about it, develop and expose,
I feed upon your every thought, and so my power grows!
(Chorus)
I'm Elected -
Protected -
Detective -
Electric -
Eye.
- Judas Priest, Electric Eye, 1982.
Orwell's 1984 isn't the only functional specification out there, after all.
Germany was the proof-of-concept. Stalin's Russia and the Cold War Warsaw Pact countries were the alpha, which failed due to scaling concerns. China is the beta test site and release-candidate. Unistat goes live in 2009.
"Be your own news source, instead of settling for second-hand sensationalism."
So you are suggesting that once we succeed at being our own news source we keep that info to ourselves? If I chose Rolling Stone to disseminate the information I gathered firsthand it would immediately be devalued?
The RS article is old news, all of which I have seen reported elsewhere in recent weeks, but I fail to see how it is counterproductive to publicize the evolution of surveillance states.
On a side note, Rolling Stone being a glossy mag came about as a nod to the power of photojournalism in popular culture. There are anthologies published of RS photos and they hold significant historical and artistic value. As a disclaimer, I haven't been interested enough in pop culture to actually pick up an issue in years, but that doesn't mean the value isn't still there for others.
I am a bit dumbfounded by your approach to reading article. You need trust to read something ? What happened to critical anaylsis. I think most "reasonable" people will read an article and analysis the content of the article rather than taking the content on blind faith. You've basically judged an article simply by the publisher without even considering any of the issues brought up from the article. It seems the question isn't whether you should trust it or not, its whether you can make an informed judgment, and it doesn't seem you can.
And it's not Capitalist, it's a wonderful halfway point called fascist.
From TFA: "Remember how we've always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state"
Free markets require the freedom to chose without coercion in order to be efficient for everyone involved. China does not have a free market. The transactions are not efficient for the low man on the totem pole, namely the worker. China is fascist, and the country is a giant form of monopoly that has huge profit margins by manipulating the labor supply and the rights afforded to individuals to drive down costs. Just because China is having huge profits does not mean they are more efficient.
A lot of people will go on about the horrible violation to civil liberties all of these things China does are, but no one ever talks about the horrible damage these things do to the economic well being of the country.
China IS going to undergo serious reform or revolution. It won't be possible to maintain any level of efficiency without the proper rule of law or a Meritocracy. China WILL become more efficient once more people start demanding a larger share, and the only way they can do this is through greater representation and markets, markets that need informed consumers who are not being forced to act against their best interests.
All successful revolutions have come from the middle to upper class capitalists who are feed up with kings and lords ruling by mandate cutting into their bottom line. China is no different.
From TFA "With political unrest on the rise across China, the government hopes to use the surveillance shield to identify and counteract dissent before it explodes into a mass movement"
If someone is dissenting that means there is something that needs to be changed. That is the best example of why china, like the USSR, will hit a standard of living wall. Efficiency requires freedom.
how can we trust these lousy reporters, 'burn the lot of them' I say.
Lets have everyone, all 300 million of you Americans go and pack up all your bags, move to China, walk up to a chinese government official, and ask them "what's going on?"
thats a brilliant idea! you should go and get right on that.
or, for the sake of efficiency, we can have a small number of people go into an area and report on things for the rest of us!
yea!
We could even give those people special training!
Maybe they could even make a career out of going to these far away places on our behalf and reporting on events, situations and politics! what a brilliant idea!
-I only code in BASIC.-
I agree that Rolling Stone is mostly padded with disposable fluff. But they always take their journalism seriously, so it's a great, subversive starting point for a good chunk of young people: buy the issue for their article on Panic At The Disco, then when you're bored, end up reading the article on how the Bush government has deregulated industrial pollution. And suddenly, shazam! A spark has gone off in your mind and your curiosity is piqued, and you've begun your life's journey as a conscious citizen.
You know what the Greek term is for the citizen who does not participate in public affairs? Idiotis. Rolling Stone has planted the seed to obliterate the idiotis for a huge amount of people.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
And that's why I draw an eye patch on every dollar I get. Plus I give the pyramid an old timey mustache. Cause it looks cool.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
When you reduce Thompson to "a sensationalist" I suddenly take you far less seriously. Yes, he had outrageous style but he was a trenchant observer.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Beetle B.
Sadly, you're so blinded by your ideology you don't even see the lack of factual accuracy in this statement. There is a long tradition of authoritarian capitalism, here are just a few, for your reflection:
- Tsarist Russia
- The Second Empire (Napoleon III)
- Prussia, later Germany
- Nazi Germany
- The authoritarian/fascist states of central and eastern Europe between the wars and during WWII
- Spain under Franco
- Greece under the Colonels
- Iran under the Shah -- a violent and repressive regime if ever there was one
- Chile under Pinochet
- Brazil under authoritarian military rule
- for that matter, all other Latin American dictatorships: Mexico, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Peru, etc. etc.
- Indonesia under Suharto
- South Africa under Apartheid
- The Philippines under Marcos
- South Korea under Military Rule
So as you see, the correlation between capitalism and true democracy is actually quite weak. I don't think the facts can be accused of being "illogical"."that modern China represents a form of authoritarian capitalism whose efficiency is quite remarkable"
I think its open to debate if China is remarkable for its "efficiency". It mostly just has lots of cheap labor, no labor unions and very weak pollution and safety regulation which means its a cheap place to do things like manufacturing. There are quite a few things working against its economic efficiency.
A. The party officials that run the place are extremely corrupt. Corruption is good for business only if it swings your way. If it swings against you, or for your competition it is quite bad for business, and the unpredictability of corruption is especially bad for business.
B. The legal frameworks in the country are extremely poor. This is a plus if you ware a bootlegger ripping off your competition's product, its not so good if your IP and products are the ones being ripped off.
C. Not sure exactly why but China did apparently pass new labor laws around the first of the year and they undid some of the slave labor aspects of being a worker in China. Workers did actually get some rights under the new laws and it appears they are going to cause a significant spike in the cost of labor, along with the simple fact labor isn't as abundant in China as it once was. This along with a number of other factors is causing wage inflation and making China less and less attractive to Capitalism. The factors that made China boom can also work against it and lead to a bust and for the boom to move elsewhere.
D. China's one child policy is starting to cause a severe shortage of young workers since it began in 1979. Their population is going to start become senior citizen heavy like Japan and the U.S. which has a lot of negative economic consequences. Most older workers can't stand the dormitories and 6-7 day work weeks in China's factories so as the young labor pool drops its going to hammer their sweat shop manufacturing industries.
E. Censorship might have its positives in that it helps eliminate dissent but it also means you can do some incredibly stupid stuff and get away with it because you can suppress knowledge of your stupidity. A free press and a free Internet can server a useful purpose in that it can eventually expose corruption, incompetence and stupidity and led to corrective action if the press and freedom of speech works. For example in the U.S. the free press went dysfunctional after 9/11 and untold stupidity was perpetrated by the Bush administration like the war in Iraq, torture and domestic spying. The press still isn't very healthy but America has started to throw the Republican's out of power for their incompetence, though the Democrats are much of an improvement. In China is if the ruling party turns bad, there are no alternatives except for changing one set of Communist party leaders for another in an internal power struggle.
F. The spiking cost of oil is suddenly starting to work against globalization. Not sure how accurate it is but someone on CNBC said the cost to ship a container from China to the U.S. has quadrupled recently from $2K to $8K and if oil prices continue to spike its going to be less and less attractive to ship goods half way around the world. Its already working against heavy goods with a low labor component like steel. The more expensive fuel gets the less likely you are going to offshore manufacturing for the U.S. and Europe to China. Mexico may become increasingly attractive again for the U.S. labor pool.
@de_machina
Despite the presence of many centralized CCD cameras in London, crime levels have yet to be reduced.
If police cannot effectively track and follow criminals, what makes anyone think China can do any better tracking and following dissidents? It's a lot more obvious on a camera when a real crime is being committed, far less so when a thought crime is...
What makes anyone think we should not laugh at the Chinese for attempting this? Let them waste their money on this fruitless pursuit of technology that someone with a square of cloth or a bit of paint can work around.
People would be wise to remember that China has done a lot worse things than point cameras at people in the past. It seems like dissidents would be better off with a China that has fewer actual agents on the streets to collect and track people, and more worthless cameras collecting so much data they are unusable.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You are confusing communism in theory with communism in practice. It's a common error and your reeducation team will be around presently to correct the error.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'd have to agree the submission is a little breathless, but it is interesting to and important to think about the consequences of a pervasive police state in the digital age. East Germany's police state was extremely labor intensive. You pretty much had to have people to eavesdrop on phone calls, lots and lots of magnetic tape, and lots and lots of people spying on their neighbors.
In the digital age its increasingly possible to actually listen to everything and let computers sort out the keywords and red flag people for closer scrutiny. As everything has moved in to a databases it is much easier to correlate data from multiple databases and look at, for example, all your bank records, your taxes filings, what you buy, your travel plans, the books and movies you read and watch, and get an extremely good picture of any individuals thoughts. Eliot Spitzer is a recent case study of someone who was destroyed by the increasingly pervasive spying on banking activities.
The down side of the Internet is it has created a mechanism to allow the police state to digitally monitor what people are saying, thinking, doing and wanting to do, far more than ever before.
Not sure I would get so excited about China doing this, they are after all a totalitarian state and being doing these things quite blatantly for 60 plus years, they are just going to be a lot better at it in the digital age, and its fairly new that Western companies get to help in their oppression.
I think we should be somewhat more concerned about the fact the governments of U.S. and Great Britain are doing many of these same things, just somewhat more subtly and almost no one seems to notice or care. They are countries that are supposed to have things like civil liberties, like freedom of speech and habeas corpus, but the free societies we so fond of bragging about are being dismantled before our eyes using Islamic terrorism as the excuse. You could blame it all Bush and Blair but I'm pretty sure the espionage state will continue to expand unabated, no matter which party is in power, because:
A. The fear of a new terrorist attach can be used to justify every excess.
B. People in power almost inevitably want more power and more control of their domain, not less. Its a somewhat rare individual who achieves great power and then doesn't use it, abuse it and expand it. It rare indeed to find people that actually relinquish power they already have. Almost the only time it happens is when gross excesses of someone abusing their power lead to scandal, for example Watergate, Vietnam and the abuses of the CIA in the 1960's. Executive power was reigned in, in the 1970's by things like the Church Committee though the Republicans hated everything that happened in the 70's to reign in abuse of power and managed to undo all the check and balances in the last 7 years and push America even further in to a police state than was the case under Nixon and Hoover.
@de_machina
So... not being a glossy magazine, or, as far as I can see, involved, what does your opinion matter? You can't seem to verify, or disprove Rolling Stone's information, you haven't posted any proof that you are actually in China, or have witnessed anything there, you provide no credentials, and so by your own criteria why should anyone listen to you?
/. account, get good karma, and post. At least the RS there is an editorial board, hiring procedures, and I'm guessing some degree of journalistic standard.
Basically your response is to tell people to discredit a source because you don't like them. This isn't even weak proof, since your subjective opinion is worth less than even Rolling Stone's. Any moron can get a
Yes, I won't take the spin as fact since spin is opinion. but the actual events seem worth further examination, and are easily verifiable.
The same goes for the "spin" you yourself are projecting...
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
A key point about canecubo's list is that many of these regimes were at least condoned by the U.S. while many were puppet regimes out right installed by the U.S. just because they were anti communist, anti union and pro big business. Nazi Germany was openly embraced by the elites in the U.S. right up to 1939 and sometimes after. George W. Bush's grandfather, for example, was the American banker for the Thiessen family who bankrolled Hitler's rise to power.
If the United States is the guiding light to Capitalism and Freedom around the world, how come the U.S. is so closely aligned with so many repressive regimes. The answer is because capitalism has no real correlation to freedom. Capitalism is just as much at home in repressive right wing states as it is in liberal democracies. There is no real correlation between economic system and governmental model.
Capitalism does in fact flourish in right wing states, often very oppressive ones. Unbridled Capitalism has a nasty tendency towards wealth concentration in the hands of an elite few and the people with all the money almost inevitably seek to control all the levers of political power because it protects, supports and nourishes their economic interests. This is a cocktail which often leads to right wing dictatorial governments which are no friends to freedom. In particular they often are extremely fond of breaking up labor unions, because labor unions are good for workers but bad for profitability. They are also fond of rigging elections or getting rid of them all together because ruling elites are small and easily outvoted if you let all the poor unwashed masses have an actual say in their government. In the U.S. this has been accomplished by a two party system where both parties are controlled by the ruling elites and which never offer an actual choice to ordinary people.
The U.S. being a free society can mostly be attributed to the immense wisdom of our founding fathers who did create a remarkable framework for a free society. Unfortunately, its been slowly unraveling ever since. I think if the founding fathers saw the horror that is the Federal government, the state of civil liberties, and our two party system today, they would no doubt launch a second revolution to topple it and restore the government outlined in the Constitution which has been almost completely obliterated by our two political parties and the corporations and ruling elites which own them.
Capitalism is about profit, pure and simple. Freedom doesn't really have anything at all to do with profitability and often gets in its way. Capitalism and Freedom can coexist, in fact Capitalism is a helpful ingredient for freedom since it is extremely beneficial to control your own wealth rather than letting a bureaucratic state do it for you. Unfortunately Capitalism can and does flourish in repressive right wing states, always has and probably always will.
@de_machina
Yes, why develop critical reading skills when you can rather lay your trust in known authority. If a source is good, the information will be good, if a source is bad, the information will be wrong. I know this because everything I read confirms my worldview.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
It's always worked in the past, right? What a bunch of fucking bullshit. Know what else? We won't have to fire a single shot against China, ever, because they continue to perpetrate crap like this, there's eventually going to be a civil war over it. Human beings don't like being treated this way, and they can't jail the whole billion-plus of them -- not even by making the whole country into a prison -- which is essentially what they're trying to do. I don't care WHAT culture you're from, you can't make me believe that you LIKE being treated like a prisoner.
I could not explain my family life otherwise.
It just doesn't scale up.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There are lots of comments using big words like "capitalism" and "communism" and "totalitarianism", and as expected on /. the actual economics knowledge is very poor.
Capitalism is not industrialism, nor is it corporatism. It is the inclusion of the passing of time in economic calculations, which means three things: connecting markets of different time periods as in connecting present offer with future demand (speculation), integrating time preferences (interest in loans), and anticipating risks in your costs (insurance). The first two features have been in extensive use since at least the 1st century B.C., as is evident in the Roman Empire's banking system. The last one was invented in the 13th century by a monk and has, too, been in extensive use from then on. Capitalism has been in full use ever since. It's not to be conflated with any political system in particular - no political system can abolish capitalism since they can't abolish the passing of time and its effects on people's trading habits, they can only suppress trade directly.
I think its open to debate if China is remarkable for its "efficiency". It mostly just has lots of cheap labor, no labor unions and very weak pollution and safety regulation which means its a cheap place to do things like manufacturing. There are quite a few things working against its economic efficiency.
You hit the nail on the head here. The very particular ownership regulations of China, which are still very communistic in both spirit and letter, prevent the integration of a great many costs in the economic calculations. For example the land is owned by the state and cannot be owned and traded by the people making use of it: the owners have no incentive to increase or protect its value, so instead they milk it off as fast as they can for immediate gains in influence, renting it out as cheap dumping ground for industries that employ the citizens. The value lost here is monumental, and it does not make it to the GNP because there is no market for it - no valuation, no losses recorded. Same goes for homes, which are still extremely regulated, and a million other things they Chinese are not permitted to have and trade on their own.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
I have visited Shenzhen twice and posted my photos of Shenzhen. I took photos in public with a large camera/lens with no trouble from the authorities. I was hassled by the shoe-shine scammers and massage parlor hawkers near the Shangri-La hotel in Luohu, but my photos were not sensored by customs and my gear was not stolen/confiscated.
www.cgstock.com
Well, is the Pope catholic? Seriously - is he? That would depend on whether he really believes in the religion he preaches - some Popes in the past did not, but in modern times that's not actually a problem for the catholic church. I'd say the same criteria would have to be applied to any ideology: if you believe in an ideology and base your policy on it - then your reference to it is not just symbolic. Was the Mao regime (and that does not just include himself, but the vast numbers actually running the country) communist? Did they read Marx and believe in his ideas? Who can claim that their claim to be communists is less valid then their own? Is real communism only defined by people who are "theoretical communists" - i.e. people who never actually attempt to run a country on their own? I think Mao has a much better claim.
As it's "in vogue" in this country to throw those terms around (bias, etc.), you've revealed your identity as an American citizen.
gg
did you read a single thing in Davemania's post? I can't believe you're replying to what he said, with what you said.
I want to mod you funny, but I'd rather get this out there.
BR What happened to critical analysis. indeed.
-- arstchnca
--
I can't think of anything intrinsically wrong with glossy magazines other than when you're reading one in the toilet and you notice you're out of lavatory paper. At that point, they are evil.
Do you actually read Rolling Stone? Sensationalist? More like soporific a lot of the time.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
Yes, but what you're doing to the article here is called ad hominem, and it's a fallacy. If you want to ignore it on account of the publisher, feel free to do so -- but if you're going to speak regarding the article's merits, it behooves you to read it first.
It's a heckuvalot more informative than your post, and raises legitimate issues (ie. mechanisms in use to circumvent laws specifically forbidding export of law enforcement equipment to China) even should you choose to ignore the editorializing.
Please use paragraphs.
You know, for all the accusations of communist wingnuttery that abound on the internet, the substance just isn't there. Apparently, Daily Kos is supposed to be a far left hate site, but when I go there, all I find are disaffected liberals and social democrats. I'd love to believe that there are authoritarian leftists just waiting to turn Western countries into police states, but I just can't find them.
Klein is a slightly cute Canadian lefty liberal. That's about it.
On the other hand, you cannot go anywhere on the internet without finding an endless supply of free market nutcases who are obvious fanatics, and who continue to pontificate on about Austrian Economics, an economic doctrine that no reputable economist endorses and which has never been shown to work. For all their problems, at least the communists managed to keep a society together for longer than ten minutes, and sometimes actually achieved stuff (like putting a guy in orbit).
The vast conspiracy of leftwing nutcases is in fact a conspiracy imagined by the vast actual conspiracy of rightwing market fundamentalist nutcases projecting their nuttiness on others.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
You think Time Magazine has a political leftist agenda? You must be to the right of Bush to see Time magazine as leftist. On international politics it is right wing.
.00001% of the crimes the U.S. Government does in the world, the Right Wing accuse it of being leftist.
The mainstream American Press as a whole is very right wing. The publishers are right wing. If a news source prints
That's why such a large percentage of the American people are so ignorant. They've been fed propaganda all their lives about how America is some goody two shoes trying to help the world. The millions of innocent people killed directly and indirectly by the U.S. Government around the world since WW II is not reported on.
This is similar to what happened to the Native Americans. The Presidents slaughtered them and stole their land, but almost none of it makes it into the mainstream histories taught in schools. Of course, people like you would accuse any such accounts of being left wing.
This ad space for rent.
You just shoot the first few hundred who try anything then the other 999.9999 million suddenly find that keeping their heads down and tending their crops or working in a sweat shop suddenly seems that whole lot more appealing. Works everywhere in the world - look at Zimbabwe for another example.
I have (had - he died in 1979) a great uncle that served as an intelligence officer in Palestine during the Mandate, and heard from him first hand about the terrorism conducted by Irgun, Rosh Haganah and their like.
Funnily enough, he was quite complimentary about the Arabs.
I think that may have coloured my opinion somewhat.
Thanks for your solicitude, though - if I fancy a warm death I will certainly consider your advice.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
It's referring to the staggering success of Shenzhen - a centrally planned capitalist city (an ecomonic enclave within a communist state) that didn't even exist 30 years ago, and now, per the article, probably produces HALF of everything you own. It's hard to imagine the meandering forces of democracy or the free market coming up with something so successful - rather like an optimal designed solution vs an evolutionary sub-optimal one.
Mao was a charismatic leader who's probably much better leading troops than governing a country. There's no doubt that however you hold him as a person, he did blunder quite a bit with his economic policies. The leaders today are better. The economy is growing, people are *generally* getting richer, and say what you will about China's human rights situation, it's *slowly* getting better, and at least not getting worse. Then look around and see many other countries regressing, and given the complexities of running the world's largest (most populous) country, I'd say that they can't be too incompetent.
Don't quote me on this.
Truthfully, the hand-holding reporting when it comes to the U.S. Government from U.S. media is less about right/left bias and more about access. To get the juicy stories out in time to "scoop" or at least keep-up with competitors, a news outlet must fall within the good graces of the government.
Sure, you can print an article outlining all the gross incompetence and criminal behavior of the current administration, but then you can kiss any hope of being invited to a presidential press conference ever again. And, when you start becoming the last news outlet to print stories about politics, your readers switch to another news station that gets the stories faster, even if the other station consistently has a pro-administration slant.
The problem with U.S. media isn't one of bias - it's one of business needs trumping journalistic integrity.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Given the choice of reading material you put up, I'm assuming this is not the case, but on the internetwebitrons, "rabid anti-zionist" links in to a particular brand of conspiracy-whackjobbed anti-semitism. I think you're identifying with non-support of Israeli policy coupled with non-belief in "the Holy land belongs to Jews on religious grounds," as opposed to "Ah'm a skinhead but don' lahk to let on, then the gummint will take mah kids and guns away."
Assuming you're not looking to identify with that definition, explicit definition of what you mean by anti-zionist might avoid some grief based on the median (perhaps also mode) anti-zionist.
The right balance between keeping the rift-raft under control and keeping them motivated and working hard = maximum profit.
This goes a long way to explain why the memes of "America land of the free", "America the greatest country in the world" and "In the US everybody has a chance to make it big-time" are constantly being pushed by US media, even though nowadays they are all false:
But hey, it's still better than North Korea.
Signed: One European that has been exposed to one too many ignorant American.
PS: In my experience, most Americans I've met that actually spent some time living and working in a country other than the US - vacations do not count - are usually much more well informed and realist about the US itself and the rest of the world than most of those who didn't.
Time magazine leftist? BWAHAHAHA!
You've been Punk'd.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I'd mod the post "informative," and I know it's just a slip of the ear, but:
"sensored" is way too good a word to have no meaning. I call upon slashdotters to define this new verb so we can use it.
(And I am being entirely serious. Sort of.)
But I'm not antisemitic - hell, I went to a school that was about 1/4 Jewish, and had a lot of non-Zionist Jewish friends.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
I agree that Klein is a little over-the-top on a lot of issues, but you're making a few silly assumptions yourself there.
1 - note that she calls it a prototype of a HIGH TECH police state. that's an important distinction there. wether you agree with her general position or not, this technology is in fact a new thing that makes an old, standard police state high tech. so yes, it would be alright to call it a prototype. If you disagree with her general thesis, that's fine, but if you're going to complain about her phrasing, at least read the phrasing right.
1b - 'to deal or not deal' with socialist states? The question is not about dealing, the question is about dealing ethically. The embargo on cuba is bad and unethical, punishing a people for its (unelected) dictator, in fact allowing that dude to stay in power. Just like american companies doing dirty jobs for dirty governments is bad and unethical. Also, you can't compare governments and multinationals one-on-one. Here Klein talks about companies doing unethical trade in China. With Cuba, she talks about the US government not allowing any companies to do any trade in/with Cuba. Big difference.
2 - 'classic affluent socialist families'. Yeah, go ahead and pull that one out of the big magic hat again. Somebody can't be socially concerned and 'affluent' on the same time? A classic ad hominem that never grows old, innit?
2b - how do you connect capitalism with a police state? Well, very simple. Let's take china. A maoist-communist state in its political sphere, with a capitalist, freemarket economical sphere. She's not linking (economical) communism and capitalism here, she's linking the opressive-totalitarian tendencies of post-communist regimes with capitalism, which really is not all that strange. Ask Deng Xiaoping, it's been working out pretty well for his comrades.
I agree that her article is full of loaded language and silly rethorics, but this comparison really isn't so strange.
Klein is silly in a lot of aspects, but ignoring the rethorics for a second, it is important to keep pointing out the misconduct of multinational companies. It seems people are entirely ignoring the subject at hand just to complain about Klein, 'socialism' (or at least the misguided american conception of it) and 'those leftwing radicals' here.
"Why does the US foster oppressive regimes?"
The U.S. fosters repressive regimes just because they are anti communist, anti worker, anti socialism and pro big business and Capitalism.
Some of the big historical reasons for U.S. sponsored coups are control of natural resources in countries when the population realizes they are being exploited by foreign multinationals. In the case of Iran the U.S. and Britain ran Operation Ajax to overthrew Mohammed Mosaddeq because he was nationalizing Iran's oil fields because Britain and the U.S. were taking Iran's wealth and giving Iran chump change for it. Certainly the oil companies deserved compensation for their substantial investments to find and develop those oil fields but the deals given the host countries were often bad and still are today. As I recall in the oil fields being developed off the west coast of Africa, the oil companies are still cutting deals that lined the pockets of the corrupt people running the host countries but are largely screwing the people of those countries out of much needed wealth. That Iranian coup installed the Shah of Iran, who was despised by his people en masse and lead to an Islamic revolution we are still dealing with today. The U.S. very much wants to topple Chavez in Venezuela for the same reason today because he nationalized oil fields controlled by the likes of Exxon Mobile.
The term "Banana Republic" refers to the tendency of the U.S. to send Marines in to Central and South America to protect the interest of United Fruit company(now Dole) which acquired ownership of vast plantations in those countries, manipulated the governments of said countries, and did its best to profit at the expense of the indigenous people in places like Honduras.
"Simple fact: poor people can't buy shit."
You do have a point here. There is certainly a big motivation in the mutinationals to get the Chinese and Indians rich enough to buy cars, TV's and all the other things they want to sell, and for which markets have peaked in the west. They want them to get just rich enough to afford these things, but not so rich that they turn in to "expensive" labor though. They are doing quite a good job of it appears since these markets are growing in China and India. Unfortunately its kind of a bad at a point in which there isn't enough oil to run all those cars, and where China in particular is going to burn massive amounts of coal to run all those appliances and global warming is going to snow ball.
It should be pointed out that Capitalists have divided loyalties. They do want affluent consumers to buy their goods. But they also want dirt cheap poor people to work in their factories for nothing. Globalization has been working perfectly for this because Capitalsts can just move the factories to where all the dirt poor people are and sell to where the affluent are. Unfortunately the affluent U.S. the economy is cratering since it doesn't produce anything of value any more. In China the cheap labor is starting to inflate so its not as desirable a place as it was to off shore.
Capitalism is all about a delicate balance of stratifying society. It doesn't want everyone to be rich because that results in expensive labor which is pure poison to capitalism. Unregulated it has always created a very wealthy elite because once you have a lot of money its very easy to make a lot more. If you don't have any money its very hard to ever get any. You live from paycheck to paycheck spending everything you make and you fill the role of cheap labor.
It will be interesting to see how many more iterations of moving the factories to the dirt poor countries can be done before there are no dirt poor third world countries to move to. Its possible by then the U.S. will be the dirt poor third world country and they can start offshoring work from China and India to the U.S.
If the robber barons of the late 19th century U.S. are any guide I seriously don't Capitalism goal is to enrich everyone. Their goal is to squeeze
@de_machina
Ok, so here we have an article about Big-Brother-style government in China. It seems pretty important, right? This is a big deal.
But actually, the more interesting thing, in my opinion, is the Slashdot commentary about it:
An article in Rolling Stone? The pop-culture rag? How important can it be? Why haven't I heard of this before? Can this source be trusted?
Let's consider the article itself, found on RollingStone.com. There, next to the boring black-and-white text (that you actually have to read) are lovely full-color ads. Meet the Spartans! The all-new VW Tiguan! Caffeinated liquer! Come to the dark side of Toyota! More than 1000 smileys and emoticons... FREE!! Meet sexy singles!
What am I to make of all this? Does China's all-seeing eye matter? Does it matter as much as sexy singles or sleek new cars? Flashy emoticons? Pop culture? Or is it just another maybe-factoid to file away in my data-bank of useless knowledge?
At least a handful of Slashdot commentaries don't buy it. But others seem almost frantic: the sky is falling!
So we'll argue about it. But what does it mean? Is there something to be done? Not likely: we'll forget this bit of news shortly. There are a million other stories ready to inundate us with something new to get momentarily impassioned about.
So, while we're fretting about Orwellian nightmares, something else equally interesting is happening.
The social critic, Neil Postman, picked up on it. So did Aldus Huxley and even Ray Bradbury. Their dystopias look very much like Orwell's, except for one critical point: There is no Big Brother, no bogeyman or coercive external agent to suppress information.
How can people be manipulated to act as cogs in a great machine? Not a communist machine, but as agents of the Invisible Hand? How can we make servants to a mass-production economy?
Too much information, it turns out, is just as mind-numbing as too little. Stories of great importance in a pop-culture magazine? How does one discern what matters and what doesn't? What is real, and what is fake? All information is now equal: the ravings of True Believers, the theories of scientists, the saccarin glurge of advertising, the maudlin patriotism of politicians, this post on slashdot... It's all carries the same weight.
Choose your preferred information opiate and plug in. You'll forget, soon enough, what really matters. It's the non-thought of received ideas now. There is no time to own thoughts anymore. Even the skeptics have their own preferred formulas for labeling things as useful or not. Besides, after 6.5 hours in front of Tivo, GTA IV, iPod and StumbleUpon, who has time sit and think?
We mostly live, like Dilbert, in 4x6 cloth-covered cubicles, and in small automobile cabs. Our human relationships consist of attaching little machines to our ears and fingertips as we zoom about, alone. Our world-view is shaped by an electronic fire-hose, where everything is made irrelevant by sheer volume.
How will things be different when we are spied on and brainwashed? Whose dystopia is the preferred one? Maybe that is something to argue about, but it seems silly.
Whilst there was naught to see beyond the mist of his bedroom, he knew the computer was there, watching.
"Up you go", he said to himself. Into the shower, into his polo shirt, into his fucking docker kakhis. Out the door, neighbors in their own fucking kakis. Neighbor wives into their own fucking kakis.
A fucking brown golden retreiver got him to think about the color kaki and to wonder about why does it contrive such peacefullness to him. He disregards that thought. He moves on.
He gets in the brown bus, heading to the brown office of Brown-Red Hat food division. He does not stop for lunch: its waiting for him in the cafeteria the exact momento his meal time comes up.
"Just in time, is how the japs did it, just in time is how i like it", its eleven o'clock, he finishes lunch. He goes back to the office. He gets no calls. He only codes two lines, and hits the green button, then the machine tells him what to do next. If he does not hit the green button every exactly one minute, a big red buzzer comes up, and that lady from up there will come and look down on him, she will tell him how he is endangering the possibilities of their kids, he is telling him about the new legal provissions that provides for the automatic inheritance of both credit and work records to his children.
She will drop a final line about the war, about how the red-chinks are going to "get us" because we do not know how to work for a common goal, as a team, and they can. Theyve learned to sacrifice for the lot. Theyve learned to trust their leaders.
Theyve learned that the gene-fight the cultural-fight is for the long run, and while we, a young occident, were fighting about whats the right ammount of freedom, they were building the mega-machine-economic-behemot covering from Moscow to Tokio, from Siberia to Malasya. And we are loosing this war because of selfish people that do not understand the importance of the green button. It allows us to plan on the long run, to calculate mistakes, to get ahead of them, to be more productive.
"You should feel fortunate", she would say, turning on her heels and moving away, gesturing as if she were crying, just like the Corporate Human Resources IT Coach Management Manual says she should gesture.
NO SIG
If you've found fault with arguments made by an individual or organization in the past, that may legitimately make you less likely to want to spend your time listening to and considering their current argument -- but an argument you're choosing not to listen to is not necessarily bogus, it's merely something you choose not to consider; that distinction is important. Assuming that everyone you don't like is wrong (or that every position espoused by an individual with whom you strongly disagree on some things is wrong) is the kind of mistake that gets wars started; people generally hold positions that make some kind of sense, once you understand their assumptions and perspectives.But the GP didn't just decide not to watch; rather, the GP publicly attacked a specific segment which other folks (by submitting the article to
Mod Parent up! The only rights you have are the rights you /think/ you have!
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