FYI the thing about a central guy in charge has always been a myth, even since Stalin’s time:
What happens with China is essentially you have local committees for things like small towns and villages, where anyone can run for office. Then those many small councils form the pool of candidates for promotion to larger regional and federal committees, forcing would-be bigwigs to work their way up from the bottom. I believe the DPRK uses a similar system.
I hope this hasn’t come off as hostile, since I know these conversations can get contentious fast. But you seem like a refreshingly normal person rather than one of the ideologically motivated internet cold warriors we often get around here, so I figured I’d try and add constructively instead of tear down.
Some Background: History conditions much of our thinking about our political systems and most Western democracies resemble Rome’s in 60 BC when, as Robin Daverman humorously says, three aristocrats–politician Julius Caesar, military hero Pompey and billionaire Crassus–formed a backroom alliance that dominated the elected senate. The oligarchs ensured that proletarii votes changed nothing and that the masses remained invisible unless they rioted or died in one of the elites’ endless civil wars. Two thousand years later, in Britain’s general election of 1784, the son of the First Earl of Chatham and Hester Grenville, sister of the previous Prime Minister George Grenville, and the son of the First Baron Holland and Lady Caroline Lennox, daughter of Second Duke of Richmond, offered voters offered a choice of dukes. Today, in many European countries (even egalitarian Sweden) ‘democracy’ is a mere veneer over powerful feudal aristocracies that still control their economies. American voters recently watched a former president’s wife competing with a former president’s brother being defeated by a billionaire who installed his daughter and son-in-law in important government positions and ensured that, as John Dewey said, “U.S. politics will remain the shadow cast on society by big business as long as power resides in business for private profit through private control of banking, land and industry, reinforced by command of the press and other means of propaganda”. Most Western politicians are related by marriage or wealth and have, like all hereditary classes, lost sympathy with the broad mass of their fellow citizens to the extent that, as American political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found, ‘the preferences of the average American appear to have a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy’: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
My system is clearly the best, and its a shithole of corruption and nepotism. Therefore all other systems must be even corrupter and nepotister, otherwise my system wouldn’t be the best Q.E.D.
It’s sad that if I literally see ml I assume the truth is inverted. But even then, you assume too much, it’s good advice to always assume you’re talking to someone smarter than you so you make your argument clear and simple.
Why do you immediately assume communists are the opposite of correct? Not to hyperbolize, but taken to the logical conclusion this is just a belief in fascism.
FYI the thing about a central guy in charge has always been a myth, even since Stalin’s time:
What happens with China is essentially you have local committees for things like small towns and villages, where anyone can run for office. Then those many small councils form the pool of candidates for promotion to larger regional and federal committees, forcing would-be bigwigs to work their way up from the bottom. I believe the DPRK uses a similar system.
I hope this hasn’t come off as hostile, since I know these conversations can get contentious fast. But you seem like a refreshingly normal person rather than one of the ideologically motivated internet cold warriors we often get around here, so I figured I’d try and add constructively instead of tear down.
Do you have a source for this that isn’t an easily-generatable png? I’m having trouble finding it.
hehe thanks, i try to be.
But a soviet style system like that is ripe for corruption and nepotism.
The opposite. From here:
My system is clearly the best, and its a shithole of corruption and nepotism. Therefore all other systems must be even corrupter and nepotister, otherwise my system wouldn’t be the best Q.E.D.
It’s sad that if I literally see ml I assume the truth is inverted. But even then, you assume too much, it’s good advice to always assume you’re talking to someone smarter than you so you make your argument clear and simple.
Let’s try this: The sun is not blue.
Why do you immediately assume communists are the opposite of correct? Not to hyperbolize, but taken to the logical conclusion this is just a belief in fascism.