I would mostly agree with this statement, but I'm also of the opinion that the one and only key to learning is caring. It sounds to me like you're confusing learning with memorizing dates.
You know, I'm a bit tired of this supposedly anti-corporate crowd thinking that because we're capitalist, and corporations are "not government" (they are) that corporations can therefore not allow anybody but Burt and Ernie to speak to the masses, and there's no violation of free speach.
The problem for wannabe-Marxists (I'm not implying you're one, just pointing it out) is that the grey stuff doesn't belong to a collective - it belongs to individuals.
Christ, man, if you're going to criticise a phylosophy, at least have some fucking clue what you're talking about before you pick a target. Marxism has never been about collectivism versus individuality. Marxism is about collectivation of the physical means of production.
"The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death,whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour..." -Fredrick Engels
Further, it has always been made clear that intellectual labor counts the same, in this regard, as manual labor. Therefore, it is not that the prolitariate own exactly nothing, ("have nothing to lose but their chains") but that their only means of livelyhood is in their strength and intelligence, as they do not own the machinery (so to speak) for themselves.
As a bit of an aside, one of the less-often sighted "meanings" of the five-pointed star in the Soviet flag was that it represented the intellectuals, along with the peasants and manual prolitarians, as represented by the sickle and hammer.
What exactly is a "charity?" Is it any legal nonprofit organization? If not, I can think of a number of groups that might lose ALOT of funding if they can't call people and beg for donations, and that would be Very Bad.
If Micro$oft really wants to secure the X-Box's place as a dominant contender in the consol wars, and they're willing to throw around obscene ammounts of money to do so, which they obviously are, then I think the one purchase that would do that, all by itself, would be Square. I promise you, if M$ bought Square, that would convince 50% of all PS2 owners that they NEED an X-Box.
I play a few games on SNES also, but that is when the trend from playability to graphics started to take place.
But how about Donkey Kong Country? That was probably the best-looking that came out on the SNES, but it also had a high level of gameplay you don't see too often these days. I consider it the last great 2D platform game.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree greatly there. Is a small shop owner in New York City signing a contract for "protection" under the coercion of some intimadating men not theft?
Is creating an atmosphere where the only way for a musician to become popular is to give away most of their profits to some controlling organiztion, as if they have some moral right to own the music industry, not mass theft?
-Jeff
P.S. For that matter, is owning a company that makes shirts, and paying the cotton pickers, sewers, truck drivers, etc. only a tiny fraction of the profits, not theft? Or is owning the store, controlling the advertising, controlling the streets, having the presense what gives all these people the right?
Thank you, god almighty, for this, after so many years. *Sniff* I'm beginning to tear up. And maybe now it'll do stuff even "worse" than John K. tried before, seeing as it won't be on a "kids" channel.
-Jeff
P.S. Go watch the music video to "Fuck Her Gently" by Tenacious D.
I don't know about you, but I've paid $0 in my lifetime for MS software, so you could say I've gotten at least my share of bang. But I wouldn't say that. I'd say that MS owes me for forcing their way into an OS monopoly, therefore forcing me to use their Piece of Crap in order to use lots of apps I want to use (ie, games).
"it's worth noting that the privacy rules intended to protect us can also work against us."
Ya know, I find that comment a bit disturbing. And not just because of the obvious reason that it appears to support limiting privacy (further). I hope I don't sound like one a them trolls, but honestly, while the "Middle Eastern terrorists" that the White House likes to talk so much about are obviously engaging in activities that are immoral as a whole (death and destruction), I DO agree with them that the "us" you try to speak of, the "us" that isn't really inclusive of us at all, but of the rich and powerful that control this nation, and others, need a serious ass-whooping.
To put it another way, while I will agree with anybody who calls a terrorist bad (not "evil") no matter what his or her motives are, I will also say that I am in full support of the society that those "Middle Eastern terrorists" grew out of.
I think it's really just a matter of looking at who the real enemies are.
I hope I'm not too off-topic by posting this here...
Behind U.S. support for Tibetan feudalists by Deirdre Griswold
Very few people who seek an audience with the president of the United States get one. Even heads of state have to line up to see George W. Bush, who boasts of his short work day.
Nevertheless, Bush found time May 23 for a meeting and photo opportunity with the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet.
The Dalai Lama hasn't been in Tibet for over four decades. He left for India in 1959 to become head of a "government in exile" that represented the former Tibetan feudal ruling class.
The White House dismissed the date of the meeting with Bush--May 23, which was being celebrated in China as the 50th anniversary of the day in 1951 when Tibet was declared peacefully liberated from feudalism and imperialist influence--as a mere "coincidence."
Bush's sit-down with the Dalai Lama came just two days after Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, had an unprecedented dinner meeting with about 20 members of the U.S. Congress.
To the Chinese people, these two political acts embracing secessionist elements are further proof that the Bush administration has embarked on a dangerous anti-China strategy with serious military implications.
Covert U.S. strategy vs. official stance
Tibet has been under Chinese jurisdiction since the 13th century. Today it is an autonomous republic within the People's Republic of China.
The U.S. government's official stance, even after the Chinese Communists swept to power in 1949, has always been to recognize both Taiwan and Tibet as part of China.
When Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was overthrown by the Chinese people and fled the mainland to set up a U.S.-backed dictatorship on the island of Taiwan, Washington continued to recognize his regime as the government of all China, including Tibet. So how could it argue later that Taiwan and Tibet weren't part of China?
Unofficially and secretly, however, Washington has fomented the secession of both Taiwan and Tibet ever since it became obvious that the revolutionary regime in Beijing was here to stay. As long ago as the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency began training Tibetan mercenaries at Camp Hale in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado (see Chicago Tribune of Jan. 25, 1997, and Newsweek of Aug. 16, 1999).
According to the famous "Pentagon Papers," the CIA made 700 flights over Tibet in the 1950s. Dropping mercenaries into the frozen vastness of Tibet didn't work, however. So in recent years the anti-China forces here have focused on a "Free Tibet" campaign that has made inroads in the United States with its well-financed and synchronized promotion of the Dalai Lama as a deeply spiritual mystic fighting a soulless bureaucracy that oppresses his people.
This view takes advantage of the fact that most people in this country know nothing about Tibet except that it has pretty mountains. They are easy prey for a slick campaign romanticizing the "spirituality" of feudal times.
The Chinese people, however, have a much more recent memory of what it was like when all-powerful landlords ruled the countryside.
Life for the serfs
Nine out of 10 Tibetans were serfs at the time of the Chinese Revolution. They owned no land and had no personal freedom. Another 5 percent were hereditary household slaves.
Their toil was backbreaking. Education for the common people was unheard of.
Conditions were so backward that the wheel had no function except for saying prayers. Roads didn't exist.
Back in the 1930s the British, who had been trying for years to add Tibet to their empire in India and had actually staged several armed incursions, made a present of an automobile to the Dalai Lama. Since Tibet had no paved roads, the auto had to be dismantled and carried to Lhasa on draft animals.
The nobles, upper-ranking lamas in monasteries and administrative officials, together made up less than 5 percent of the population. Yet they owned all of Tibet's farmland, pastures, forests, mountains and rivers as well as most livestock.
The current Dalai Lama became part of this owning class when at the age of 2 he was taken from his family by the monks to be groomed as a demigod. Before that he was just a toddler named Lhamo Toinzhub.
Serfs were really slaves belonging to landowners. According to a white paper prepared in 1992 by the Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China (available online at chineseculture.about.com): "Sometimes they were traded as payment for debts. According to historical records, in 1943 the aristocrat Chengmoim Norbu Wanggyai sold 100 serfs to a monk official at Garzhol Kamsa, in Zhigoin area, at the cost of 60 liang of Tibetan silver (about four silver dollars) per serf. He also sent 400 serfs to the Gundelin Monastery as mortgage for a debt of 3,000 pin Tibetan silver (about 10,000 silver dollars).
"Serf owners had a firm grip on the birth, death and marriage of serfs. Male and female serfs not belonging to the same owner had to pay 'redemption fees' before they could marry. In some cases, an exchange was made with a man swapped for man and a woman for woman. In other cases, after a couple wedded, the ownership of both husband and wife remained unchanged, but their sons would belong to the husband's owner and their daughters to the wife's owner. Children of serfs were registered the moment they were born, setting their life-long fate as serfs."
Serfdom, whether in Europe during the most backward feudal period or in China more recently, was a ruthless system of exploitation through usury and corvee--unpaid labor that the landlords assessed on the serfs, like taxes.
The Chinese white paper continues: "Incomplete statistics indicate the existence of more than 200 categories of corvee taxes levied by the Gaxag (Tibetan local government). The corvee assigned by Gaxag and manorial lords accounted for over 50 percent of the labor of serf households, and could go as high as 70-80 percent.
"According to a survey conducted before the Democratic Reform, the Darongqang Manor owned by Regent Dagzhag of the 14th Dalai Lama had a total of 1,445 ke [a ke is about one sixth of an acre] of land, and 81 able-bodied and semi-able-bodied serfs. They were assigned a total of 21,260 corvee days for the whole year, the equivalent of an entire year's labor by 67.3 people. In effect, 83 percent of the serfs had to do corvee for one full year.
"The serfs engaged in hard labor year in and year out and yet had no guaranteed food or clothing. Often they had to rely on money borrowed at usury to keep body and soul together."
Class law
Tibetan law divided people into three classes and nine ranks. Inequality was stipulated in the law. The codes said:
"It is forbidden to quarrel with a worthy, sage, noble and descendant of the ruler."
"Persons of the lower rank who attack those of the upper rank, and a junior official who quarrels with a senior official commit a serious crime and so should be detained."
"Anyone who resists a master's control should be arrested."
"A commoner who offends an official should be arrested."
"Anyone who voices grievances at the palace, behaving disgracefully, should be arrested and whipped."
Any socially conscious person in the United States knows that while everyone is supposedly subject to the same law, it is applied differently to rich and poor. But in Tibet the law itself demanded different punishment for the same crime depending on class and rank.
The law concerning the penalty for murder said, "As people are divided into different classes and ranks, the value of a life correspondingly differs." The lives of people of the highest rank of the upper class, such as a prince or leading Living Buddha, were calculated in gold equal to the weight of the dead body. The lives of people of the lowest rank of the lower class, such as women, butchers, hunters and craftsmen, were worth "a straw rope."
Servants who injured their masters would have their hands or feet chopped off; a master who injured a servant was responsible only for the medical treatment of the wound, with no other compensation required.
A saying among serfs was, "All a serf can carry away is his own shadow, and all he can leave behind is his footprints."
The Chinese Revolution eventually ended serfdom in Tibet. Those among the former rulers who resisted democratic change were then embraced by the CIA--which according to the Chicago Tribune article gave a special retainer to the Dalai Lama of $180,000 a year during the 1960s to keep a government in exile in Nepal.
Today's budget for this high-powered anti-China campaign has not yet been revealed.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but I'm gonna bet that I'm not the only one who is unhappy about the legality of it, but excited that KaZaa might crash and burn.
No, they're supposedly socialist. And, in some areas, they still are. The ideology that the nation follows is supposedly Marxist, ie communist.
The US are 15 years behind schedule because the corporations started milking the system. The Chinese leadership just has to say "it shall be thus" and it is--the reason they haven't started sooner is because their leadership made the concious decision to work on other things first. Now they have turned the corner and decide that they want to go to the moon--permanantly.
This is somewhat true, a result of the great efficiency of socialism. However, as the working class is no longer the only class with official representation (making one wonder how they can be called "Marxist"), the capitalist class also wants to "milk the system" in China.
And as a bonus, they have a red flag, so we can just recycle the rhetoric about "the reds"!
Calling Marxists (or any socialists, for that matter) "reds" existed long before the Soviet flag. It's at least been around since socialists all over Europe flew a solid red flag as their banner. The Russian revolutionaries did the same, and when it came time to create a new flag, they based it off the red flag. Note that the red flag is STILL flown by socialist revolutionaries all over the world.
I think you misunderstand the analogy. To give something away has no more to do with communism than capitalism, or for that matter, free/open source software. What they have in common is the concept that "the people," the society in general own something, instead of corporations. That's just socialism in a goddamn nutshell.
I can't speak for Apple about it's attitude towards religion, but considering that Apple is owned by individuals, and hires workers for less money than they create, that's a really silly way to be communist.
Now, if Apple declared itself a worker-owned cooperative and made an officially statement against the dehumanizing and disinformative effects of religion by definition, I'd have to seriously reconsider OS X.
What's that? It was a joke and I'm taking it too seriously? Ya, well, screw you, jerk.
There is no "transition toward socialism," other than the process we're going through right now all over the world. Otherwise, socialism is just implemented.
As you may know, Marxists view modern society as the conflict between capitalists and prolitarians (workers), complications like peasantry aside. Capitalism is said to be the dictatorship of the capitalists few and the suppression of the prolitarian many, while socialism is said to be the dictatorship of the prolitariat many and the suppression of the capitalist few. The theory follows that the capitalists will no longer be able to exist as a class, and so will become part of the prolitarians.
Perhaps you are forgetting that communists are a subsect of socialists. And that it is very improper to call a socialist nation, Marxist or non, "Communist." Communism is both a theory and a method, but NOT a government type (except for the theoretical state of communism, which has never existed, and will never exist for many many generations, if ever).
Also, while it's true that most non-communist political parties (and even many communist ones) have been reformist, that is, they try to work within the existing system instead of overthrow it, many, if not most, socialists, Marxist or non (such as anarchists) would be offended by your generalization.
NZ is not capitalist either, you can go to college for free, hell you even get allowances from the government.
Free education from the state does NOT a socialist nation make. Socialism is about where the means of production is, in the hands of rich indivuals, or the nation as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
I would mostly agree with this statement, but I'm also of the opinion that the one and only key to learning is caring. It sounds to me like you're confusing learning with memorizing dates.
Damn you, heathen. I was about to say the same thing. I was going to propose that "ironic" would be a suitable word.
You know, I'm a bit tired of this supposedly anti-corporate crowd thinking that because we're capitalist, and corporations are "not government" (they are) that corporations can therefore not allow anybody but Burt and Ernie to speak to the masses, and there's no violation of free speach.
The problem for wannabe-Marxists (I'm not implying you're one, just pointing it out) is that the grey stuff doesn't belong to a collective - it belongs to individuals.
Christ, man, if you're going to criticise a phylosophy, at least have some fucking clue what you're talking about before you pick a target. Marxism has never been about collectivism versus individuality. Marxism is about collectivation of the physical means of production.
"The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death,whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour..." -Fredrick Engels
Further, it has always been made clear that intellectual labor counts the same, in this regard, as manual labor. Therefore, it is not that the prolitariate own exactly nothing, ("have nothing to lose but their chains") but that their only means of livelyhood is in their strength and intelligence, as they do not own the machinery (so to speak) for themselves.
As a bit of an aside, one of the less-often sighted "meanings" of the five-pointed star in the Soviet flag was that it represented the intellectuals, along with the peasants and manual prolitarians, as represented by the sickle and hammer.
I live in California. The Bay Area, specifically. Believe me, sirs and madams, you do NOT want to live without weather.
Now please excuse me while I go hit my head against a wall.
What exactly is a "charity?" Is it any legal nonprofit organization? If not, I can think of a number of groups that might lose ALOT of funding if they can't call people and beg for donations, and that would be Very Bad.
Damn straight!
If Micro$oft really wants to secure the X-Box's place as a dominant contender in the consol wars, and they're willing to throw around obscene ammounts of money to do so, which they obviously are, then I think the one purchase that would do that, all by itself, would be Square. I promise you, if M$ bought Square, that would convince 50% of all PS2 owners that they NEED an X-Box.
I play a few games on SNES also, but that is when the trend from playability to graphics started to take place.
But how about Donkey Kong Country? That was probably the best-looking that came out on the SNES, but it also had a high level of gameplay you don't see too often these days. I consider it the last great 2D platform game.
A legal tranfer of rights is not theft.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree greatly there. Is a small shop owner in New York City signing a contract for "protection" under the coercion of some intimadating men not theft?
Is creating an atmosphere where the only way for a musician to become popular is to give away most of their profits to some controlling organiztion, as if they have some moral right to own the music industry, not mass theft?
-Jeff
P.S. For that matter, is owning a company that makes shirts, and paying the cotton pickers, sewers, truck drivers, etc. only a tiny fraction of the profits, not theft? Or is owning the store, controlling the advertising, controlling the streets, having the presense what gives all these people the right?
Thank you, god almighty, for this, after so many years. *Sniff* I'm beginning to tear up. And maybe now it'll do stuff even "worse" than John K. tried before, seeing as it won't be on a "kids" channel.
-Jeff
P.S. Go watch the music video to "Fuck Her Gently" by Tenacious D.
Will I ever get the bang for my MS buck?
I don't know about you, but I've paid $0 in my lifetime for MS software, so you could say I've gotten at least my share of bang. But I wouldn't say that. I'd say that MS owes me for forcing their way into an OS monopoly, therefore forcing me to use their Piece of Crap in order to use lots of apps I want to use (ie, games).
Love and kisses,
Jeff
The online edition of China's publicly-owned newspaper, the People's Daily, has this artical: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200206/28/eng200 20628_98699.shtml
Hear it from the dragon's mouth.
The real question, in my little mind, is why they're too mean to call it "Gentoo GNU/Linux." It makes me sad.
*Sniff*,
Jeff
"it's worth noting that the privacy rules intended to protect us can also work against us."
Ya know, I find that comment a bit disturbing. And not just because of the obvious reason that it appears to support limiting privacy (further). I hope I don't sound like one a them trolls, but honestly, while the "Middle Eastern terrorists" that the White House likes to talk so much about are obviously engaging in activities that are immoral as a whole (death and destruction), I DO agree with them that the "us" you try to speak of, the "us" that isn't really inclusive of us at all, but of the rich and powerful that control this nation, and others, need a serious ass-whooping.
To put it another way, while I will agree with anybody who calls a terrorist bad (not "evil") no matter what his or her motives are, I will also say that I am in full support of the society that those "Middle Eastern terrorists" grew out of.
I think it's really just a matter of looking at who the real enemies are.
-Jeff
I hope I'm not too off-topic by posting this here...
Behind U.S. support for Tibetan feudalists
by Deirdre Griswold
Very few people who seek an audience with the president of the United States get one. Even heads of state have to line up to see George W. Bush, who boasts of his short work day.
Nevertheless, Bush found time May 23 for a meeting and photo opportunity with the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet.
The Dalai Lama hasn't been in Tibet for over four decades. He left for India in 1959 to become head of a "government in exile" that represented the former Tibetan feudal ruling class.
The White House dismissed the date of the meeting with Bush--May 23, which was being celebrated in China as the 50th anniversary of the day in 1951 when Tibet was declared peacefully liberated from feudalism and imperialist influence--as a mere "coincidence."
Bush's sit-down with the Dalai Lama came just two days after Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, had an unprecedented dinner meeting with about 20 members of the U.S. Congress.
To the Chinese people, these two political acts embracing secessionist elements are further proof that the Bush administration has embarked on a dangerous anti-China strategy with serious military implications.
Covert U.S. strategy vs. official stance
Tibet has been under Chinese jurisdiction since the 13th century. Today it is an autonomous republic within the People's Republic of China.
The U.S. government's official stance, even after the Chinese Communists swept to power in 1949, has always been to recognize both Taiwan and Tibet as part of China.
When Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was overthrown by the Chinese people and fled the mainland to set up a U.S.-backed dictatorship on the island of Taiwan, Washington continued to recognize his regime as the government of all China, including Tibet. So how could it argue later that Taiwan and Tibet weren't part of China?
Unofficially and secretly, however, Washington has fomented the secession of both Taiwan and Tibet ever since it became obvious that the revolutionary regime in Beijing was here to stay. As long ago as the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency began training Tibetan mercenaries at Camp Hale in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado (see Chicago Tribune of Jan. 25, 1997, and Newsweek of Aug. 16, 1999).
According to the famous "Pentagon Papers," the CIA made 700 flights over Tibet in the 1950s. Dropping mercenaries into the frozen vastness of Tibet didn't work, however. So in recent years the anti-China forces here have focused on a "Free Tibet" campaign that has made inroads in the United States with its well-financed and synchronized promotion of the Dalai Lama as a deeply spiritual mystic fighting a soulless bureaucracy that oppresses his people.
This view takes advantage of the fact that most people in this country know nothing about Tibet except that it has pretty mountains. They are easy prey for a slick campaign romanticizing the "spirituality" of feudal times.
The Chinese people, however, have a much more recent memory of what it was like when all-powerful landlords ruled the countryside.
Life for the serfs
Nine out of 10 Tibetans were serfs at the time of the Chinese Revolution. They owned no land and had no personal freedom. Another 5 percent were hereditary household slaves.
Their toil was backbreaking. Education for the common people was unheard of.
Conditions were so backward that the wheel had no function except for saying prayers. Roads didn't exist.
Back in the 1930s the British, who had been trying for years to add Tibet to their empire in India and had actually staged several armed incursions, made a present of an automobile to the Dalai Lama. Since Tibet had no paved roads, the auto had to be dismantled and carried to Lhasa on draft animals.
The nobles, upper-ranking lamas in monasteries and administrative officials, together made up less than 5 percent of the population. Yet they owned all of Tibet's farmland, pastures, forests, mountains and rivers as well as most livestock.
The current Dalai Lama became part of this owning class when at the age of 2 he was taken from his family by the monks to be groomed as a demigod. Before that he was just a toddler named Lhamo Toinzhub.
Serfs were really slaves belonging to landowners. According to a white paper prepared in 1992 by the Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China (available online at chineseculture.about.com): "Sometimes they were traded as payment for debts. According to historical records, in 1943 the aristocrat Chengmoim Norbu Wanggyai sold 100 serfs to a monk official at Garzhol Kamsa, in Zhigoin area, at the cost of 60 liang of Tibetan silver (about four silver dollars) per serf. He also sent 400 serfs to the Gundelin Monastery as mortgage for a debt of 3,000 pin Tibetan silver (about 10,000 silver dollars).
"Serf owners had a firm grip on the birth, death and marriage of serfs. Male and female serfs not belonging to the same owner had to pay 'redemption fees' before they could marry. In some cases, an exchange was made with a man swapped for man and a woman for woman. In other cases, after a couple wedded, the ownership of both husband and wife remained unchanged, but their sons would belong to the husband's owner and their daughters to the wife's owner. Children of serfs were registered the moment they were born, setting their life-long fate as serfs."
Serfdom, whether in Europe during the most backward feudal period or in China more recently, was a ruthless system of exploitation through usury and corvee--unpaid labor that the landlords assessed on the serfs, like taxes.
The Chinese white paper continues: "Incomplete statistics indicate the existence of more than 200 categories of corvee taxes levied by the Gaxag (Tibetan local government). The corvee assigned by Gaxag and manorial lords accounted for over 50 percent of the labor of serf households, and could go as high as 70-80 percent.
"According to a survey conducted before the Democratic Reform, the Darongqang Manor owned by Regent Dagzhag of the 14th Dalai Lama had a total of 1,445 ke [a ke is about one sixth of an acre] of land, and 81 able-bodied and semi-able-bodied serfs. They were assigned a total of 21,260 corvee days for the whole year, the equivalent of an entire year's labor by 67.3 people. In effect, 83 percent of the serfs had to do corvee for one full year.
"The serfs engaged in hard labor year in and year out and yet had no guaranteed food or clothing. Often they had to rely on money borrowed at usury to keep body and soul together."
Class law
Tibetan law divided people into three classes and nine ranks. Inequality was stipulated in the law. The codes said:
"It is forbidden to quarrel with a worthy, sage, noble and descendant of the ruler."
"Persons of the lower rank who attack those of the upper rank, and a junior official who quarrels with a senior official commit a serious crime and so should be detained."
"Anyone who resists a master's control should be arrested."
"A commoner who offends an official should be arrested."
"Anyone who voices grievances at the palace, behaving disgracefully, should be arrested and whipped."
Any socially conscious person in the United States knows that while everyone is supposedly subject to the same law, it is applied differently to rich and poor. But in Tibet the law itself demanded different punishment for the same crime depending on class and rank.
The law concerning the penalty for murder said, "As people are divided into different classes and ranks, the value of a life correspondingly differs." The lives of people of the highest rank of the upper class, such as a prince or leading Living Buddha, were calculated in gold equal to the weight of the dead body. The lives of people of the lowest rank of the lower class, such as women, butchers, hunters and craftsmen, were worth "a straw rope."
Servants who injured their masters would have their hands or feet chopped off; a master who injured a servant was responsible only for the medical treatment of the wound, with no other compensation required.
A saying among serfs was, "All a serf can carry away is his own shadow, and all he can leave behind is his footprints."
The Chinese Revolution eventually ended serfdom in Tibet. Those among the former rulers who resisted democratic change were then embraced by the CIA--which according to the Chicago Tribune article gave a special retainer to the Dalai Lama of $180,000 a year during the 1960s to keep a government in exile in Nepal.
Today's budget for this high-powered anti-China campaign has not yet been revealed.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but I'm gonna bet that I'm not the only one who is unhappy about the legality of it, but excited that KaZaa might crash and burn.
Long live Gnutella!
-Jeff
they are (in theory) communists
No, they're supposedly socialist. And, in some areas, they still are. The ideology that the nation follows is supposedly Marxist, ie communist.
The US are 15 years behind schedule because the corporations started milking the system. The Chinese leadership just has to say "it shall be thus" and it is--the reason they haven't started sooner is because their leadership made the concious decision to work on other things first. Now they have turned the corner and decide that they want to go to the moon--permanantly.
This is somewhat true, a result of the great efficiency of socialism. However, as the working class is no longer the only class with official representation (making one wonder how they can be called "Marxist"), the capitalist class also wants to "milk the system" in China.
And as a bonus, they have a red flag, so we can just recycle the rhetoric about "the reds"!
Calling Marxists (or any socialists, for that matter) "reds" existed long before the Soviet flag. It's at least been around since socialists all over Europe flew a solid red flag as their banner. The Russian revolutionaries did the same, and when it came time to create a new flag, they based it off the red flag. Note that the red flag is STILL flown by socialist revolutionaries all over the world.
-Jeff
Please ignore the above troll/bastard. If only karma mattered for Anonymous Cowards, he'd get the negative karma he so right deserves.
I think you misunderstand the analogy. To give something away has no more to do with communism than capitalism, or for that matter, free/open source software. What they have in common is the concept that "the people," the society in general own something, instead of corporations. That's just socialism in a goddamn nutshell.
-Jeff
I can't speak for Apple about it's attitude towards religion, but considering that Apple is owned by individuals, and hires workers for less money than they create, that's a really silly way to be communist.
Now, if Apple declared itself a worker-owned cooperative and made an officially statement against the dehumanizing and disinformative effects of religion by definition, I'd have to seriously reconsider OS X.
What's that? It was a joke and I'm taking it too seriously? Ya, well, screw you, jerk.
=D,
Jeff
Ya, right up until Lucasfilms sues you for giving them free promotion.
There is no "transition toward socialism," other than the process we're going through right now all over the world. Otherwise, socialism is just implemented.
As you may know, Marxists view modern society as the conflict between capitalists and prolitarians (workers), complications like peasantry aside. Capitalism is said to be the dictatorship of the capitalists few and the suppression of the prolitarian many, while socialism is said to be the dictatorship of the prolitariat many and the suppression of the capitalist few. The theory follows that the capitalists will no longer be able to exist as a class, and so will become part of the prolitarians.
Um...
Perhaps you are forgetting that communists are a subsect of socialists. And that it is very improper to call a socialist nation, Marxist or non, "Communist." Communism is both a theory and a method, but NOT a government type (except for the theoretical state of communism, which has never existed, and will never exist for many many generations, if ever).
Also, while it's true that most non-communist political parties (and even many communist ones) have been reformist, that is, they try to work within the existing system instead of overthrow it, many, if not most, socialists, Marxist or non (such as anarchists) would be offended by your generalization.
NZ is not capitalist either, you can go to college for free, hell you even get allowances from the government.
Free education from the state does NOT a socialist nation make. Socialism is about where the means of production is, in the hands of rich indivuals, or the nation as a whole.