10-25-2017, 10:50 AM
(10-24-2017, 05:00 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: > I think you're getting your Friedmans confused. This is George
> Friedman, not Thomas, and he's anything but left wing.
Sorry about that.
(10-24-2017, 05:00 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: > The fact is, Xi's military is now comparable to - slightly weaker
> than - France's. His timetable is realistic; it takes a very long
> time to build up a navy, and he has a long way to go.
The timetable may be realistic in a technical sense, but not in a
political sense. The Chinese people consider themselves superior to
us and their system superior to ours. They consider the US and the
West to be weak and indecisive. They believe that they can defeat us
today, just as Japan thought they could beat us and the South thought
they could beat the North. These things are not rational decisions,
any more than the decision to have a sexual affair is rational, no
matter what the consequences. I also believe that Xi knows that the
Chinese people have no intention of waiting until 2050 to assert
their rightful place as rulers of the world.
(10-24-2017, 05:32 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: > You might not want to put too much trust in teachers who thought
> Communism was good and capitalism was bad.
> The fact is, National Socialism is not capitalist at all; it's
> socialist. In Germany, it happened to include former "captains of
> industry" in its chain of command, but the only difference from
> Communism was that the central planning apparatus was less tightly
> controlled by the dictator.
Sez u. People on the left absolutely HATE it when you say that
National Socialism is Socialism. This is particularly true today,
when people on the left want to call Trump the new Hitler, which is
wrong, when in fact the new Hitlers and would-be Hitlers are Xi
Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Nicolás Maduro, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie
Sanders.
As I've written many times in the past, Marxist Socialism is
mathematically impossible as population grows. The number of
regulators grows exponentially faster than the population grows, so by
the time you get to, say, 50-100K people, everyone would have to be a
regulator.
A Socialist economy regulates as much as it can, while a Capitalist
economy debates how much regulation there should be. So it's hard to
define the difference between socialist and capitalist economies,
unless you want to go with something like "If X% or more of the
economy is regulated, then it's socialist, otherwise it's capitalist."
A Socialist economy during a non-Crisis era simply falls apart.
We've seen this happen in Russia, China, East Germany and Cuba,
for example. A country that tries to maintain Socialism gets
defeated by the mathematics of the situation, and the economy
simply gets frozen, as we've seen in all of these countries.
As the Crisis era approaches, the country can go in either of two
directions. The Socialist economy can simply collapse, as happened in
the above countries, and get replaced by capitalism or partial
capitalism. Or the leader can try to maintain the socialism into the
Crisis period -- through nationalism, xenophobia and racism -- blaming
the United States and other Western countries for their economic
troubles.
So instead of collapsing into Capitalism, that's the point when the
Socialist economy takes the second route -- National Socialism
(Nazism). So the reason that Xi's Socialism with Chinese
Characteristics for a New Era is identical to Hitler's National
Socialism is not because the minute details of the economy are the
same, but because in a generational Crisis era, the Socialism has been
combined with nationalism, xenophobia and racism. North Korea is
firmly in that direction, while Maduro is trying to create National
Socialism by blaming everything on the United States.
