As usual, good reactionary stuff.
You favor abolishing welfare: What do propose to do with all the able bodied people that are too lazy or too violent or have too short a time preferance to hold down a job?
Once upon a time, such people were put on the chain gang. Progressives did not like private individuals owning slaves, but they just love governments owning slaves. Look how they loved communist china, and look how bitterly outraged and indignant they became when the Chinese government realized that most people do better work as employees, rather than slaves.
[…] Radish defends slavery « Jim’s Blog […]
Radish is wrongheaded.
And hey, they use gmail. Perhaps Google is not that evil after all.
Possibly, but recall that no one was upset that the Chinese economy ran on slave labor, whereas lots of people were upset when it ceased to run on slave labor.
Did it run on slave labor? My recollection is that it didn’t run at all.
You’d be surprised how many middle-age people miss the old socialist days and their cozy socialist jobs. I’d say there was more forced labor 10 years ago that there was 40 years ago.
Do they miss the Great Leap Forward, when 30-40 million people starved?
I’m not being snarky here, I’m actually curious. Or are people that old not “middle-aged” any more?
Oh, that was bad weather. Just some routine famine.
“and look how bitterly outraged and indignant [progressives] became when the Chinese government realized that most people do better work as employees”
I missed this. What should I read?
Jim goes over the top sometimes. The pro-Mao fad faded away around 1970 and it was always superficial. But if you look at the movies they make it’s clear that the only really bad parts of world history are the Holocaust and Southern slavery and Jim Crow. Oh, and that *dreadful* McCarthy Era.
China quietly started switching to capitalism with the removal of the gang of four in 1976, followed by the official announcement of the first special economic zone (capitalist zone quietly run by Hong Kong) in 1980.
Now let us look at when people started to get outraged by evil Chinese oppression. Outrage about Chinese “sweatshops” appears early in the 1980s as soon as they start making simple low tech stuff, most famously shoes, in the first special economic zone. Criticism of Chinese capitalism has been hundreds of times more severe and extreme than criticism of Chinese communism. The intellectuals responded to the Chinese switch to capitalism like a girl stood up at the prom.
I see. I appreciate the clarification.
I assure you nobody approved of China’s practices in that period. They were essentially an international pariah similar to North Korea or Iran until the whole Nixon thing, with the semi-exception of the USSR who didn’t really like them but worked with them because the USSR needed all the strategic friends it could get.
Part of the reason this is a problem now regardless of worse conditions in the past is that until things opened up and adopted aspects of capitalism we weren’t buying large amounts of Chinese produced goods. That means we’ve taken on a personal degree of ethical responsibility for conditions there that we help to support by making those conditions financially viable.
The other part of why it’s being discussed now is that it doesn’t matter if condition A is better than condition B in a discussion about whether conditions are humanely acceptable. The only thing that matters is whether the conditions now are the same as the conditions we accept for ourselves.
Anything less is morally repugnant and ultimately indefensible, because it’s worse than it should be. It doesn’t matter that it’s better than it could be. Any treatment is better than some other hypothetical kind of treatment. It’s irrelevant to the point.
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Oh come on. Every university course had questions that were supposedly on history, geography etc, along the lines “How gloriously wonderful is Mao’s china, where no one goes hungry, and everyone works for the common good”, and it was made very clear that you would be marked down unless you explained that they were even more gloriously wonderful than any of the other students were saying.
I think it’s easy to examine what the academic climate was like at that time: go on Amazon book advanced search, look for China-related stuff published in the 70s. Find a zillion books from prestigious university presses, with many used copies selling for $0.01 with $3.99 shipping; pick any of your choice.
These should be relevant:
http://www.amazon.com/Chinas-Economic-Revolution-Alexander-Eckstein/dp/0521291895/
http://www.amazon.com/Authority-Participation-Contemporary-Institute-Publications/dp/0521098203/
New York Times on Mao
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1226.html
They loved him
The guardian on Mao
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/mao-chairman-china-dead
They really loved him.
Progressives love slavery provided the right people are enslaved, tortured, and murdered and the right people are doing the enslaving.
I like slavery also. It is just that my definition of the right people differs from that employed by progressives.
I’m a bit surprised they would leave this sort of stuff online
I don’t see any ‘love’ there. They’re just biographical pieces. Did you even read the first one or did you just glance at a paragraph or two? The terrible effects of Mao’s policies like his ‘great leap forward’ aren’t ignored or excused, for instance. Don’t confuse discussion about someone’s historical significance for ‘love’ of them or approval of their actions. People like Mao and Hitler and Stalin were tremendously influential and successful in organizing people and shaping their nations, and you can’t write a biography of any of them without discussing that. That doesn’t mean the author is saying they’re great people and all the millions upon millions of innocents dead at their hands were just fine and dandy.
There aren’t many things that progressives hate more than the things you’ve mentioned. I don’t know where you got the idea, but there’s no moral flexibility when it comes to slavery, torture, murder and similar. It doesn’t matter who’s doing them because the acts are wrong in and of themselves. Anyone doing them for any reason is committing a terrible crime against humanity. Eliminating acts like that is a major goal of progressive movements, not something anyone supports.
I don’t know what sort of slavery you support, but whatever it is you disgust me. Trying to reassure yourself that your support for it is OK because leftists are all about slavery too is a pitifully thin rationalization that’s deeply offensive.
Well then you must love Mao and love slavery and love torture and love mass murder even more than they do.
For example “enormous economic progress”. They say that “he ordered the Great Leap Forward, ultimately causing widespread disruption and food shortages”
But somehow neglect to mention that the great leap forward consisted in large part of the old familiar communist tactic, of starving tens of millions of peasants to death by confiscating their grain in order to fund industrialization with which to build weapons of mass destruction.
He did not “cause food shortages” He starved tens of millions to death.
He did not cause “enormous economic progress”. He created slavery, ruin, despair, and poverty. His “economic progress” consisted of building nuclear weapons on a pile of corpses.
Yes they are ignored and excused.
Supposedly he did not starve millions to death, and supposedly his economic policies led to enormous economic progress.
The only thing that progressives love more than they love slavery is having Tutsi women vaginally impaled on large stakes.
Either insane or trolling. Either way, not worth my time.
Progressives supported the army of the Congo politically and militarily, with UN troops, ground and air military support, and pious Wikipedia and media treatment, when it used such means (vaginally impaling Tutsi women with very large objects) to lower the excessive self esteem of the Tutsi minority in its unsuccessful efforts to create equality between Tutsis and other black races.
And this makes you think that all progressives suddenly support those actions, now? Of course not. You’re raving, dripping hate for a group that you’ve constructed in your own mind. It isn’t reality.
If they didn’t like it, they could have stopped it #r2p
Like they stopped the Serbs from removing kebab.
They supported those actions in 2002, and to this day are unable to state the race of the victims and the race of the attackers.
Supporting UN intervention in the first place doesn’t mean supporting horrifying war crimes that non-UN troops might commit. You’re trying so hard to hate that you’re beyond sense. Your bigotry’s painting people as something far different from actual human beings.
did they know it was happening? did they hold protests? did they write exposés about it #r2p in their newspapers, even the marginal communist newspapers?
does Noam Chompsky cry crocodile tears about it?
where’s the poutrage?