chenGOD

I just throw them all into respective playlists. So GAIA has a playlist, CYCLES, ALITHIA, PHANTASIA etc. Put the list on shuffle and you have enough music for the day. So good. Especially on headphones.

Man that will be a trip. All london-ish watmmers should check them out.

I have to say that all the people I met in the city were fine? My hotel was in Saint-Denis, work was in the 16th arrondissement, everyone was courteous enough. Maybe I didn't meet any "true" parisian/parisienne?

chen goes to Paris.

oh thaaaat's what he wants.

Romney never needed the corporate paymaster though. He's got his family money and Bain Capital money. Romney is smart enough to know when he needs to appear principled - a real snake in the grass. Still a thousand times better than trump.

I mean yes and no. They can't not cover him - he's running for the highest office in the land (and he also committed a bunch of crimes while sitting in that office previously). The problem is they cover him completely uncritically. And then of course you have the Republican party which has just completely given up any pretense of integrity from top to bottom (the older Dems are not much better - from my outside observation - but at least there are some policies proposed that actually might do something for the American people as opposed to just "getting back at the Dems"): hence Kevin McCarthy's latest buffoonery. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/top-us-house-republican-mccarthy-calls-biden-impeachment-inquiry-2023-09-12/

https://www.cbc.ca/1.6961527 he’s a literal toddler with power.

Will you be there?

I think there are lots of serious commentators who disagree with that analysis. Cumings himself (good use of the word quislings by the way - Cumings loves it) has written that he sees the war as an extension of Kim Il Sung fighting the Japanese, and especially to seek vengeance on the Koreans who collaborated with the colonizers. Don Oberdorfer digs in to Soviet archives and finds repeated requests from Kim Il Sung to Stalin to authorize the invasion, with no mention of the Cheju massacre. This is hardly surprising, as Cheju is as far away from Pyongyang as it is possible to be, but still be in Korea. North Korea had no interactions with nor provided support for the leftists in Cheju. The overall repression of leftists was perhaps a factor, but not a major one. Kim Il Sung saw himself as some divinely ordained leader who would reunite the peninsula (interesting there was an attempt to remove him from power in 1956), and that was really the driving force for the war. The North even made economic plans that were based on them winning the war and including the southern output in their economic considerations. I'll attach a paper by Don Baker that discusses the collective memory of the four major events of the 20th century (the Cheju uprising is not one of them, but it is discussed). I mean NK did a little bit more than espionage (assassination attempts, landing submarines on SK shores, digging tunnels under the DMZ, kidnapping Japanese citizens etc.) and it looks like NK has gotten around the US cyber program that was sabotaging their missile tests. The US has only ever threatened retaliation should the North Korean military launch another invasion. I find it a little odd that you're willing to wave away plans for invasions sent to the Chinese in the 1960s, as well as the creation of offensive missile capabilities. Maybe if the North Koreans spent less on their aggressive military posturing (it is not about defence - it is about controlling the young male population and posturing to the North Koreans about the strength of their military - they are very proud of it), they would have more money for economic development. Anyhow, we're far off the topic of central planning vs capitalism, and their outcomes. Baker - Exacerbated Politics.pdf

He is mentally unwell https://x.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1701013533901881589?s=46&t=lzb--cRIkaiKMari_HPNtg

They didn't start with nothing. The USSR literally took over the land that was accumulated during Russian Imperialism. China started with less than the USSR, to be fair, but it wasn't nothing. Mao's planning made things infinitely worse for the Chinese population, and it wasn't until Deng Xiaoping's reforms came into effect (accounting for the lag effect of economic policy) that Chinese quality of life started turning around. China hasn't been communist for a long time, they have followed the developmental state model, and now have a mixture of State-owned enterprise and private enterprise. Xi especially has increased the amount of FDI in the country, and reduced the number of SOEs, increasing the number of firms who have private property. I will say this for Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, at least they reversed the privatization of health services in China. Healthcare in China in the 90s was stupid expensive (worse than the US), but they've gradually expanded universal healthcare and coverage by the state. I believe it's up to about 70% of all costs are now borne by the state, which is certainly impressive in a country with China's population. Now if they could allow actual unions, that would be a good turn for the Chinese population. Something the US and China have in common!

Both the USSR and China have engaged in centuries of imperialism, not sure what you're on about. USSR expropriated the wealth and territories accumulated under Imperial Russia, and Chinese history of expansionism speaks for itself - and continues to do so (see Tibet, reneging on the HK treaty, border disputes with India/Nepal/Bhutan).

Of course constant attack is not necessarily in military form. I think US sanctions have been a massive failure with respect to North Korea, and wish they would reconsider the targets of those sanctions. I do find it somewhat ironic you consider espionage, or the threat of attack when the majority of those pressures come from North Korea (see assassination attempts such as the Blue House Raid, the bombing in Yangon that attempted to assassinate the SK president Chun Doo-Hwan, the targeting of North Korean defectors), or look at this long list of provocations and see how many originated with North Korean soldiers/agents infiltrating the South: https://beyondparallel.csis.org/database-north-korean-provocations/. This interview for the BBC from a defector provides some interesting insight: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58838834 Perhaps if the North had spent less of their budget on the military and more on economic development, they might not be in the state they are in today - but of course, the ultimate goal of juche thought was really about keeping the Kim family in power, and not about creating a centrally planned economy that was beneficial for all North Koreans. The US/USSR both wanted to form a trusteeship to govern Korea, as they both believed Korea wasn't ready for self-rule, despite centuries of self-governance in Choseon Korea. For all his faults, Rhee at least opposed this. The Communists in the North supported it (btw, I'm sure we are in agreement that North Korea post-1950 was not communist?). Regardless, the lack of support in the South led to the withdrawal of American forces by the end of 1948, and the same with Russian forces in the North in the same year. I am curious though how you think the repression of Communists in the South caused the North Korean military to invade? Do you honestly believe that the right-wing factions in the South wanted to cause the invasion? Speaking of reading history, while Cumings is great, he does make some very specific leaps of faith in his writing, and continues to deny that the DPRK initiated the Korean War (which started when North Korean troops rolled across the 49th parallel on June 25th, 1950) - but at least he finally alludes to both the Soviet Union and the US in being culpable in their roles, instead of just blaming the US. All of these events took place against the economic backdrops of central planning and capitalism. And there is no doubt which one ended up providing more for its citizens. And yes, even while capitalism does have many failings, it has been better than any implementation of central planning we have seen to date.

Ugh I'm going to bed sorry for not being more clear, I meant to convey that NK had 80% of the peninsula's heavy industry before the war, so the South had 20% and much of that was wrecked during the war. Ultimately they really started from the same place. Look - here's a series of pictures of Cheonggyecheon (a stream that runs through Seoul) from 1950s, 1961, 1980s, 2007. You can see the South started from the same place - it all looked like that. The 1997 crisis really was a hiccup - and it wasn't capitalism - it was the lack of regulation that had been imposed on capital flows combined with investors' tendency to panic in the face of uncertainty, as well as regional contagion. The IMF prescriptions made things worse. North Korea hasn't been under constant attack since the end of the Korean War, and were actually planning to start a second war with Chinese support in the 1960s: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/sino-dprk-relations-and-kim-il-sungs-militant-strategy-1965-1967 I'm not versed enough in African history/political economy to pass any verdicts there, but I'd point out in Vietnam, just as in Korea, the initial aggressors were the Viet Cong, who were supported by the North Vietnamese.

Thanks for this - I majored in Asian Area Studies with a specific focus on the Korean peninsula (wanted to make use of my 10 years living in South Korea). Who would you suggest I read? Bruce Cumings for his revisionist history (The Origins of the Korean War Vol.I is outstanding, Vol.II not quite as good, and Korea's Place in the Sun also very good), or should I read Andrei Lankov's Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956 (particularly relevant to this topic), or his earlier From Stalin to Kim Il-Sung? Maybe Balazs Szalontai's Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era: Soviet-DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism, 1953-1964 (which is incredible and everyone should read it), or maybe Don Oberdorfer's The Two Koreas? Or the large number of Korean historians who write in both English and Korean - especially economic historians? You are right, North Korea was bombed much more extensively than South Korea. However, North Korea also contained around 80% of the peninsula's heavy industry, and so the South and North were essentially starting from the same industrial base. They were both fairly egalitarian at the start, as the decades of Japanese colonization had removed much of the land from the landowners. North Korea received massive aid from the Soviets, Eastern Bloc members, and China, which arrived in the form of monetary aid and consumer and industrial goods. While North Korea maintained good relations with the Soviet Union their economy did grow very quickly, faster than the South until the 1970s for sure (but probably not by as much as is made out - official statistics from North Korea then (and now) remain limited). South Korean growth was limited largely because in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, the South Korea president Syngman Rhee chose a path of import substitution industrialization, which limited growth opportunities for South Korea. As well, US aid was largely conditional on maintaining stability rather than promoting growth. When Park Chung-Hee took over control of the South Korean government as dictator, there was ironically a large degree of government intervention in economic policy, but not anywhere close to the central planning of North Korea. Instead, South Korea pursued an export oriented industrialization that promoted state-backed companies (chaebol) or in the case of POSCO (the steel company) actual state-owned enterprise. But instead of setting quotas and guiding development of specific industry (apart from steel), the South Korean government intervened by setting prices through the use of subsidies with performance bonuses (hyper simplified but it'll do). North Korean economic policy as dictated by Kim Il-Sung was the introduction of juche, with clearly laid out ideals that were established with the goal of making the country independent, self-confident, and self-sufficient. Yes they were overly reliant on the Soviets, but the central planning that originated in the aftermath of the Korean War and continues to the present day has led to much of the disparity between the two countries. An example of central planning that failed even during the period of good relations between the Soviets and North Korea is the chollima movement. Increased quantity to meet quotas, but killed the quality of goods being produced, and then directed resources to certain sectors at the neglect of other sectors. I could go on and on, but at the end of the day - the central planning in the DPRK remains to this day and continues to be a failure, while South Korea encouraged state-managed capitalism in the 1970s and even with hiccups like the 1997 recession (the so-called IMF recession) or the 2008 recession, the difference in the two economies is stark. The North Koreans have never bargained in good faith, and they have arbitrarily ended economic arrangements that had been put in place. As to support by South Koreans for unification - it waxes and wanes. https://www.nknews.org/2021/10/south-korean-support-for-reunification-drops-to-record-low-poll-finds/ https://www.e-ir.info/2022/04/24/opinion-south-koreans-support-unification-but-do-they-really-support-integration/

Why can't you stick to the question that you asked me instead of taking a gish gallop approach to this? Why don't you come up with a counter-example where a centrally planned economy has resulted in better outcomes than one which uses capitalism as its basis? There's a perfect example - North Korea vs South Korea. Both created at the same moment in time, with the exact two approaches we're discussing being used, both starting from the same economic/industrialized base. So why don't you tell me why you think North Korea's central planning and devolution to a fascist state with autarky is the better option than South Korea? This shit is particularly hilarious, as if any of the nations that have tried to implement communism haven't engaged in the same practices (stolen goods, human trafficking, exploitation of labour, etc.)

This is a very nice photo with a lot of lens flare. But not sure how it relates to my question? Sorry if I'm missing something obvious.

Man the OCD on display in the linked autechre thread there was wild. (null)

That isn't what I said, at all. Certainly they have an impact, but they are not inherent features of capitalism (especially imperialism). Central planning is an inherent feature of Communism. The question we were discussing, was whether I thought that that all implementation of central planning on a national scale has been a failure to date, in comparison to capitalism. If you would like to talk about foreign policy of the US and China, we can certainly do that, but I think there's another thread for that discussion.

What in the actual fuck are you talking about? I’m talking about the failure of central planning as an economic policy, not foreign policy, domestic health policy, or anything else. The simple fact is that all efforts at central planning and collectivization on large scales have been a failure. This is not to say that everything is perfect with capitalism (in its many iterations), far from it, but you asked if communism as tried so far was a failure in comparison to capitalism. So far the answer is yes. Also, toll, not tole.

Any watmmers in Paris and have a heads up on goings on on the 22nd? I’ll be there and that’s the only night I have some free time.

Yes. As bad as shit is right now, every communist effort to date has been even worse. Look at the numbers of how many died under the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. Look how many died of starvation in Stalin’s Soviet Union, or the numbers of people living on subsistence-level rations, while working insane hours to meet centrally planned quotas. Comparative poverty in the US/Canada/Western Europe is shitty, but nothing compared to those examples above, and certainly nothing compared to the centrally planned economies that exist today (Cuba, North Korea, etc.)

You can, but they don't work as well as market economies. That's clearly what I said. People can change careers, obviously, but it takes time to become proficient to where you're as productive in your new field. That's simple. All efforts to date to centrally dictate where capital should go have been failures for a number of reasons.

Therein lies the rub - you need X number of widgets to complete project Y. You don't have those widgets, but someone in the neighbouring town does. But they need them to complete their own project W. You can offer to trade them for something else so they can complete a different project, they will evaluate the opportunity cost of completing project W later and determine if the trade outweighs the cost. Which people and workers? Marx literally says: "Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves with the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in response to the needs of society or their own inclinations". Maybe it won't be a carpenter being told to program some accounting software, but carpenters just can't up and magically become electricians or plumbers or farmers. Chinese history shows it is actually not viable at all. See "the Great Leap Forward" and consequences thereof.