“From new roads to wise leadership, sound financials and five-year plans, Beijing has the winning approach.”
And gulags. By why nitpick?
(h/t dicentra)
Search
Archive Calendar
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |
Archives
Categories
- A Government That Can Force You to Buy Health Insurance Can Make You Do Anything (3)
- a protein wisdom philosophy primer (3)
- academics (25)
- armadillo (8)
- Friday Fiction 100 Word Challenge (51)
- from the protein wisdom conceptual series (136)
- identity politics (33)
- If Republicans Win the Senate in 2014 (1)
- in which celebraties comment on current events (67)
- language / intentionalism (88)
- legal (6)
- My brief conversations with inanimate objects (130)
- NSA / FISA (46)
- One Term to Serve, the 2012 Revival (6)
- Overheard in a Fallujah bunker (27)
- Poems from 196x, Revised by the Ghost of Richard Brauti (27)
- protein wisdom's DNC coverage (30)
- protein wisdom's RNC coverage (29)
- protein wisdom: the movie Lists (20)
- Provocateurism (16)
- real-time empirical observations (51)
- red pills found behind the sofa cushions (42)
- Scenes from my driveway (61)
- Talking back to 80s music (41)
- The Martha Stewart Chronicles (58)
- The protein wisdom interviews (10)
- The protein wisdom original poems (142)
- Uncategorized (20,046)
- Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, abridged (34)
Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- In The Mailbox: 07.18.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
People like the author of this piece should have been little Chinese girl fetuses. So they could’ve been aborted without much of a second thought — and saved me from ever having to listen to them trying to sell us into slavery to the fucking state.
The author is certainly a big fan of fascism, isn’t he? Of course, he wouldn’t call it that, but it is just the same.
didn’t read it, but everytime I see the word Ifrastructure with China I think problems. like drywall.
He’s a technologist fascinated by shiny toys. Best to always mistrust such folk when it comes to politics as they’ll more often disappoint than not.
I think you’ve got it sdferr. Love this bit:
who doesn’t hate kids getting porn!?amiright? never mind the disappeared people.
chop chop losers
China, wise leadership, sound financials, marvelous, miraculous planning. Barkeep, gimme two, to go.
And this is one of the assholes who helped make Winblows the hackable paradise we all know and love. Tell you what, Slick. Why don’t you concentrate on fumigating that bugfest you call an operating system as part of a 5 (or 50) year plan? Get your own shit together and then come talk.
Remember the NR Lilla piece geoffb? Even granting the hopelessly skewed view Lilla takes — for the sake of argument only — I can’t see how this Herbold cat would begin to account for such people walking the earth, let alone such Chinese people.
I have traveled in China several times. I stayed in a number of different places. There were some well-appointed hotels, but also plenty of more typical hotels far away from the well-worn path that this guy was on. I traveled on the magnetic levitation train from Shanghai Airport to downtown, but also on the sort of trains that everybody actually uses.
The showpieces like the major-city airports and downtown areas are clearly working as designed on people like this water-head. Yeah, they look real nice. So what. There’s the other 99% of the country to consider, don’t you know.
Once you get away from the sort of places he went to, it’s back into the third world. There is a lot of construction going on, but there is also a great deal of poverty, squalor, hovels, and unpaved roads.
And China is a surprisingly lawless place. As long as you don’t annoy somebody in a postion of power, they don’t care what you do. Disputes are sometimes settled with mob beatings in the street. A lot of government oppression and theft occurs at the local level; think of a town run by Boss Hogg.
In Shanghai there are weeks out of the year when you can hardly see a hundred yards for all the smoke from the farmers buring off their fields. It’s illegal, but nobody stops them.
(An aside: if you step into a crosswalk in China, the cars don’t even slow down. There is a reason that they have a pedestrian fatality rate about a hundred times ours.)
(A further aside: If you want to get something manufactured in China, be aware that it’s standard practice for the sample product you are provided to be something they could not possibly manufacture profitably at the quoted price. They are planning to make their profit by making something of far lower quality than what they showed you. The only way to get quality is to have right of refusal in the contract and your own quality control inspectors in their factory.)
All the despotic regimes have had showplaces for visitors to be steered through, far from the squalor, far from the political prisoners. That’s how, for example, Michael Moore can portray Cuba as a place where the average citizen gets world-class healthcare, although it’s a complete lie.
The same people have been getting the wool pulled over their eyes for going on a hundred years now; the USSR, Nazi Germany, on and on. These squeaky self-absorbed intellectuals just love to take the Potemkin Village tour and get jacked off by mass murderers.
So what do you think: to what extent is it pure naive idiocy, and to what extent knowingly telling a lie a la Walter Duranty? I can’t decide.
Anyway, I agree with people who say that China is going to crash economically in the near future. They have done things just as stupid and wasteful as we have; they are just much better at concealing the cracks right up to the moment that the dam bursts.
For readers who don’t know, the five year plan was a distinguishing feature of the USSR. It was, in the olden days, a thing to be mocked by freemen.
“The author is certainly a big fan of fascism”
Maoism, I think. Also Che no doubt.
So a retired MS CEO doesn’t understand manipulated currency, gross wealth aggregation at the top, communism, and on the other side of that same coin, a corrupt banking system conduited directly into and out of our own equally corrupted halls of power? And this we’ll bring to heel with nicely balanced trade?
I understand that stuff, even by logical deduction, and I’ve never been a retired MS CEO. I’m sad to report that my chances diminish a little every day.
Although we’re both jerks by a lot of folk’s estimation. The difference is that this guy apparently still thinks all motive is identical and heck, we’ll just snap out of it on both sides of the Pacific after a good talking to and a nice five year plan.
FTFH
zsa zsa gabor,
aka the hungarian gulag,
has had nine five year plans.
I remember that sdferr. The Chinese students seemed to lean toward Schmitt and the Roman Empire for enlightenment and knowledge.
I think it is almost exclusively idiocy, Sherman. If they were smarter they would have won by now.
Man, these guys lurv them some corporate fascism, don’t they?
Boudreaux writes the Journal.
Oh look! Another Progressive yearning for a totalitarian one-party state.
Really? That’s all he’s got to say? Really? It almost appears that he’s blaming us for complaining.
I wonder if Herbold also admires China’s “don’t give a flying fuck” attitude towards environmental regulation…
Scratch a liberal, find a fascist.
geoffb,
I wonder if Herbold realizes he’s been shown one big-ass Potemkin village.
I think California’s infrastructure would be in far better shape if it weren’t costing us $9 billion more a year to provide public services to illegal immigrants and their children than what they contribute to the state’s economy, and if the state’s public employee unions weren’t bleeding us dry.
And this is one of the assholes who helped make Winblows the hackable paradise we all know and love.
Hear, hear. I still think Microsoft should have been prosecuted under anti-trust laws. The damage they’ve done to the computer technology market with their “bundling” is incalculable. Solution should have been to make Windows open-source. Maybe then it wouldn’t suck.
And yes, I realize how anti-Rand that sounds, but Bill Gates is a menace: he doesn’t aspire to have the best software company in the world, but the only software company in the world.
</spends half her day tweezing obnoxious mso- tags out of HTML>
I wonder if Herbold realizes he’s been shown one big-ass Potemkin village.
He doesn’t care. None of them care. This isn’t about the truth; it’s about power. Herbold and his ilk just lurves them some centralized economies because they can insert their peeps in the gubmint and then make sure that their company is the only one that thrives.
That’s why conservatives should insist that we’re supportive of the free market, not of business in general, especially not mega-businesses like Microsoft and GE and GM, who use legislation to favor themselves and hobble or destroy their competitors.
Last time I was in China was about 2002, so what the fuck do I know?
But it’s true that China can choose to show you what they want to show you. Did this idjit not read about how Beijing basically facaded over its less sightly districts so as to present a nice face to the Western world?
So what do you think: to what extent is it pure naive idiocy, and to what extent knowingly telling a lie a la Walter Duranty?
Again, they’re not stupid; they’re venal. They WANT to be shown the Potemkin villages so that they can justify their own lust for power by showing that “it works” when people like them are in charge. If they were merely stupid, they’d be shocked and disillusioned by the dark side of totalitarianism, but they’re not, because they don’t care if people suffer for their grandiose delusions.
Narcissists.
Never.
Do.
They’ll stop at nothing to fulfill their grand plans, and when things go wrong, it will always be the fault of wreckers and saboteurs.
Dammit if people need to stop letting these types get away with their sophistry.
I think we should hold open the possibility that they’re both.
Tom Friedman is going to be pissed that someone else is stealing his lyrics.
Confirmation bias explains how they so easily avoid becoming shocked and disillusioned. Add in a nearly perfect epistemic closure and you don’t even need that explanation nine times out of ten.
Some of these people are indeed stupid.
Here’s a thought experiment, di. Imagine you were the author of this piece. You’d easily avoid some of these laughable arguments. You’d present far better bullshit.
‘Cause you’re not dumb.
Mr. Instapundit’s little brudder went to the greatwallerchina and he called Mr. Instapundit and Mr. Instapundit said the cell phone reception sounded even better than what they usually got at home!
I wish we had a greatwallertexas.
yo naysayers the trains run on time. put that in your pipe and chop chop.
Dicentra, the only way Mickeysoft would make something that didn’t suck is if they went into the vacuum cleaner business.
‘Cause you’re not dumb.
That assumes that his failure to detect how stupid he sounds comes from stupidity, not from having an entirely closed epistemic structure that’s alien to mine and yours.
I could write a piece that I felt was entirely logical and reasonable, but to some lefties I know, who are not stupid, it would sound absurd because my base assumptions are ipso facto absurd to them. I may not be a moron, but I also can’t write in leftyspeak so as to not sound absurd to a lefty.
You don’t get to be COO at Microsoft by being a total moron. And you don’t get to the top of the Chinese Communist party by being a moron, either.
They’re not stupid; they’re immoral, and immoral people lose the ability to discern the moral universe that the rest of us inhabit. That’s why he can’t see the problem with praising a five-year plan while most of us still remember the USSR: he can’t predict how moral people will react, because he’s essentially blind to ordinary morality.
Power lust tends to do that to people.
Dicentra, the only way Mickeysoft would make something that didn’t suck is if they went into the vacuum cleaner business.
ROTFL!
Tom Friedman can’t be reached for comment becasue he’s still enraptured in the ecstasy of the WSJ publishing such utter propaganda; he’s going for the gatorade, more astro-glide, and a new sock…
I can’t figure out what’s most disturbing, the overall useful idiocy, the willfull ignorance of stubborn facts like entire vacant cities and the mother of all housing bubbles threatening to pop at any moment, or this:
Coming from someone who used to essentially have control via the software, and arguably a macro-back-door, to most of the computers in America.
Who needs free speech? Why, with 2 we get egg rolls.
I think that we both agree that epistemic closure is a large part of the answer here, di.
Towards the idea that you couldn’t be the COO of Microsoft and also be an idiot? I disagree. I’ve known one true genius in my life and his high capacity in two or three areas gave him no advantage in all the remaining domains.
He was well and truly retarded with half the things you’d expect a sixth grader to perform without any attention.
w00t! Steynism ahoy:
He was well and truly retarded with half the things you’d expect a sixth grader to perform without any attention.
That’s just the Aspie tradeoff. IQ points have nothing to do with most kinds of intelligence.
These COOs usually have the ability to schmooze and bootlick and backstab and otherwise crawl to the top using those very skills and none other. Or in the New Tech World, they are good programmers and rose to the top as the company grew, so yeah, maybe this is an Aspie tradeoff thing with this guy.
I’m just weary of conservatives saying, “Don’t these people realize [x]?” when what these people do or do not realize is irrelevant. You could sit Herbold and his ilk down and give them The World’s Most Persuasive PowerPoint Presentation on The Real Soviet Union or The Real China, complete with data and charts and photos and everything you could possibly throw at them, and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference.
Why not? Because those who pursue power are not going to be dissuaded by mere truth. Herbold wrote his column because he’d like to see more centralization and consolidation of political and economic power in this country—not because it would benefit US but because it would benefit HIM.
The only stupidity on his part comes from not realizing that WE care about the dark side centralized economies and that we can see right through is transparent plea for more power to fall into his hands.
But again, that’s not IQ stupidity; it’s moral stupidity.
I completely believe that, not that it means all that much. When I was last in PRC (2002, yeah) there was a shocking number of cell phones. I didn’t even own a cell phone yet. I’m guessing it’s because they hadn’t bothered running much land-line yet.
It’s more a shame-on-our-cellular-providers than yayChina!!!
Heh, phrased like that — and given what we were just talking about — I find it much harder to disagree.
(I’d say you phrased it like that because you’re not a dummy. Unlike this dude… who might just be morally retarded.)
(Ever think that this one size fits all ellipsis pause doesn’t really work sometimes? I’d double pause that ellipsis if I had a way to express it properly.)
Crony capitalism: my favorite flavor is Chinese, though the Russian does have some nice mafia undertones. Less statey than the Chinese. But no one can touch the Chinese for raw pollution tolerance, if the price is right.
What’s Thomas Friedman doing writing for The Wallstreet Journal?