@Geezer: Answers to your last 2 questions - yes and yes. I think you see the problem I've tried to describe. But communists too are living within a global world system, which is essentially capitalist and violently competitive.
@Geezer: Answers to your last 2 questions - yes and yes. I think you see the problem I've tried to describe. But communists too are living within a global world system, which is essentially capitalist and violently competitive.
Money and power can get you a lot of things everywhere, at the expense of those you get it from. Doesn't lead to a 'harmonious society', either nationally or globally. Perhaps best to discontinue the control of the possible (yes, sometimes the actual) benefits of the Industrial Revolution by those with private, and ultimately anti-social, interests - and 'private' can include control by a class-based government of a nation-state.
A difficult, long-term and many-step project, and I'm a bit pessimistic about possibilities of success. alternative could be planetary George Orwell, which then will have to be dealt with...wouldn't be pretty.
@Haali: I agree.
@Geezer: I can't follow your post too well either. Obviously GDP only reveals national averages, not distribution according to economic class etc., and doesn't reveal the results of class interests - but I guess we agree about something there. Beyond that I'm afraid we've lost, or anyway I've lost, the train of the discussion. My point was simply that the idea of eternal and primary competition between wealth-controlling, wealth-extracting (from the purchase of labour power for profit) groups, which is what is certainly reinforced by capitalist ideology and practice (and this is certainly practiced both within China and between nation-states, drives individuals and groups), does not lead to very good long-term considerations of their effects on the overall population of the planet - yet everybody, on both individual and group levels (corporations, public corporations, state economic planners), are caught up in it. Example: note the size & expense of standing armies, as well as the way that ignoring environmental effects of competitive development in the world market, using the relatively 'cheap' coal that China has, has helped to boost China's GDP.
So in fact I don't think we disagree on everything.
On my long sentences: mea culpa.
An awful lot about very little.
No results found.
Not quite what you'd call a jumping place, but not bad at all for rather standard US-type meals, not overly expensive, and with a really good salad bar that's cheap, or free with most dinner dishes after 5:30PM. You can get a bottle of beer or even wine if you really want to, but I've never seen anybody do it - maybe that's just to take out. Chinese Christian run, and they hire people with physical disadvantages, who are pleasant and helpful. Frequented by foreign (mostly North American) Christians and Chinese Christians - was started by a Canadian couple associated with Bless China (previously, Project Grace), who are no longer here, but no religious pressure or any of that. Steaks are nothing special, and I avoid the Korean dishes, which I've had a few times but which did not impress me.
As a shop and bakery, it's very good bread at reasonable prices, of various kinds (Y18 for a good multigrain loaf that certainly weighs well over a pound. Other stuff too, like granola and oatmeal that is local, as well as imported things, including American cornflakes and so forth, which some people seem to require.
Large portions, seriously so with the pizza, which is Brooklyn/American style, I guess. Convivial, conversational, good place to drink with good folks on both sides of the bar, especially after about 9PM.
Too bourgeois.
Really good pizza and steaks. The wine machine fuddles me when I'm a bit fuddled, & seems unnecessary. Good folks on both sides of the bar.
Ain't no flies on Salvador's.
China hands out happy city awards, Kunming sad
Posted bySocial cooperation is also hard-wired into the individuals of an innately social species such as ourselves, without which the individuals of our species would not have survived to pass on any genes..Rouseau's 'noble savage' never existed, both he and Hobbes were wrong.
China hands out happy city awards, Kunming sad
Posted bySubjective reports of happiness mean something, but I'm not sure what.
Kunming smells part II: The good, the bad and the ugly
Posted byYou get used to it all after awhile, as most of Kunming's 7 million inhabitants surely have.
Government sues parents to get kids back to school
Posted by@nnoble: don't follow - who or what is rotting? I can think of various candidates, but I'm not sure which one you're talking about.
Government sues parents to get kids back to school
Posted byThere are economic issues concerning education in China for very poor communities, which obviously need a bigger share of the economic pie than they are getting. Yet China's 'socialist market economy' is increasing the overall level of economic resources within China.
What's wrong with this picture?