Comments by "dixon pinfold" (@dixonpinfold2582) on "Intelligence Squared" channel.

@嘻嘻大好人 Thank you for making my point for me. The CPC treats respect for Chinese people like a tap it can turn on and off. Desirous of greater prosperity, it turned on the economic and social freedom tap, with predictable results. These results having been obtained, its hand is once again on the tap: surveillance, social credit scores, a million in camps in the west, president for life. It's not Chinese communism that has worked; it's relief from Chinese communism that has worked.
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@嘻嘻大好人 "Germany has a much more fair political system than US" That may be so. I am not here to defend the US. I wish to defend multi-party elections. Still, it must be admitted that multi-party elections in Germany would be unlikely without US actions between 1940 and 1990. By the way, thanks to the CPC, I am privileged to have known many dozens of the millions of Chinese people who have emigrated to the West. From them I have learned much that I could never learn from people who have never left, who both lack perspective (70 years of tightly controlled indoctrination) and who could never feel comfortable with the risks of talking openly to a Western visitor. But I plan to visit China within a year or two, that is if it still allows foreign visitors by that time. It's all up to your dad, the CPC!
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@嘻嘻大好人 lol, no problem!
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@BL-wu9jw You wrote: "They don't arrest them. They just shoot them dead especially if you're black or Hispanic." Nice try. For real meatpacking, the Communist Party of China can't be touched. World's best.
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@温中止逆 Yes, the rabbit is poison. They should have let it run into the bear's cave.
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@masakichin6009 Thanks for your reply. All I have to say is that if an all-powerful king is so wonderful that he is never unjust, never unwise, and a brilliant genius, then it's a good idea to leave him unopposed in absolute power permanently, and hope that his children are just as wonderful when they inherit his rule. But it is probably safer to have a mechanism to remove him. In the west it is said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If this is true, then absolute trust is unwise. Without power, trust is simply hope. You have to wonder how many fewer people would have starved to death in the Great Leap Forward if Mao and the CPC were removed by defeat in elections once the disaster began. Democracy certainly has its problems, but when a government is bad at least there is a way to throw the buggers out. A thoroughly free press also provides a way to find out if the government is bad. They are a type of police, or at least public prosecutor, who balance the government's powers. Thanks again for your courteous reply. Best wishes. P.S. By the way, just for fun, here is an old Soviet joke: Under capitalism you have the exploitation of man by his fellow man. Under communism, the opposite is true.
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@masakichin6009 Ha ha, I understand your English perfectly and quite enjoy it, my friend. But I am surprised to learn you are so young. You must read a lot of challenging books and articles and have smart friends and family. It's interesting to hear your hopes that the Chinese government will continue to improve as it did in recent decades. I hope so, too, but I'm worried. For many years bad signs were very few, but there is a permanent temptation to achieve goals through very vigorous moulding of the public mind and stricter control over people. The treatment of Muslims, the AI cameras, and the indefinite extension of Xi's presidency are all bad signs. I think of Rome, where power sharing was demanded and promised century after century but never came. Major difficulty---politically, economically, socially---can't be avoided forever, surely, for governing is hard. When it comes, what form will it take? The character of the next generation of people cannot be known for certain. Can the three pillars of communism, capitalism, and Confucianism really co-exist for a lot longer? They seem like unlikely long-term partners. When the next major shift in the balance between them occurs, will China suffer a hard landing? I feel that something sudden and surprising will have to come out of China eventually. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it won't happen in this lifetime. As to where I live, I'd rather not mention it, although I cannot think of exactly why not. I will just say it's a large metropolis not in the US or Asia, very lucky, and enviably quiet in most ways. Sydney and Hamburg answer to that description, but it's neither of them, so that leaves maybe six or seven others. Thanks for you warm reply and sorry for one last long answer. Something got my inspiration going! Best luck and health. DP P.S. It would be so good to correspond with you again in five or ten years, once we see what happens after a while. I plan to keep my screen name and maybe you will too. And it doesn't have to be years, it could be soon instead!
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@masakichin6009 Concerning your reply which began: "If you don't have the work experience in China..." I didn't get the reply at first because there is a problem with my Youtube notifications. I knew about the problem of barely literate or "stupid" people in China, as I also knew about problems you mentioned in your other post about Far East democracies (party corruption and unfairness, authoritarianism, cronyism, etc. in Japan, South Korea, Singapore). But I wish to say that your emphasis seems to me correct, and you have persuaded me that I never considered these things as important as I should have done. I feel I was mistaken. I try to be neither optimistic nor pessimistic but do fall into error, and I notice that of the two it is optimism that is far more poisonous to my thinking. I must be more on my guard, and I shall remember your valuable insights with gratitude. Thank you. Cheers.
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@masakichin6009 You're the best! I admire your desire to see things with your own eyes, and I've already learned important things from you. China is like a second universe to me, and full of honest people I admire. I've been studying the Analects with enjoyment and I want to start learning Mandarin. Do you know a good translation software program with audio which an English speaker can use? What is it called? If not, I can find one. P.S. You are my second Chinese friend named Chin. A great guy I've known for eight years and I see him every month.
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You sound like a kid. China has lent the US about 2 weeks worth of GDP. Big deal. And the US could have unloaded those Treasuries anywhere. If China wants that money back tomorrow, the US could merely transfer the money at once and tell it to bugger off. The US debt held by China does not constitute a friendly favour. The CPC does what's good for the CPC. That's the system. If it's good for China, then lucky for China. If not, too bad for the Chinese people, since they can't throw the bums out. This has gotten boring. Cheers.
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Hey, you're right. So should countries be broken up into small pieces then? Because this is what big countries do. I invite your reply. Cheers.
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Marx was largely correct in his analysis of economic matters and the faults of capitalism. The West has partly taken his views into account in their adoption of welfare and unemployment insurance schemes, wealth redistribution, regulation of business, and public education. Of this, there ought to be more, but at present it is weakening. I hope this can be reversed and that capitalists will be further saddled by taxation. His ideas on society were much less valuable. I think he bizarrely overestimated the malleability of human nature, for example stubbornly ignoring the facts that people wish to breathe free from authority and always want the best for their children. Your suggesting parents could be dispensed with horrifies me. It's simply inhuman. May I suggest a widely varied program of serious reading not omitting Orwell and Solzhenitsyn. There's nothing to fear. If you read something and despise its thought and message, throw it on the fire. Let me share a warning from 1984: 'If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face---forever.' Remember that 100 million Russians and Chinese were put to death in the last century, many within living memory. Best regards. @wuweimarx1725
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小熊维尼 Don't you understand. these aren't the same people? It was their ancestors, and not for all of them either, for most of their ancestors were nowhere near the possessor or ruling classes, and now many people in Britain have no roots there at all but come from elsewhere, or their parents did. It's nearly complete nonsense to say "they" anything. What would be the sense in saying of the Central Committee in 2050 that "they" caused the starvation of so many people during the Great Leap Forward? You're a proud nationalist --- which I define as someone with a grudge --- and if people like you have any say in important matters in the years to come I expect they'll out of pique steer China into a number of wars. Then you'll have become just like the Britain of the mid- and late-Victoiran era you clearly despise with a good deal of justification. It's an easy trap to fall into and difficult to avoid unless you make a priority of keeping a balanced outlook. That means developing a certain hostility to people with all the answers or who say they're all in one or two books. It means Marx and the Analects have to make room for others, some of them from very far afield. I urge you to bear in mind that only a crowd can be nationalistic. And crowds are mad, so stay away from them and you can if necessary straighten out your mind concerning China's relation to other countries. In my view it's largely a matter, aside from giving and demanding tolerance and respect, of refusing to nurture a grudge about anything dating back two generations or more, or about forty years. All the best.
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Is enlightened individualism the same thing as 'enlightened self-interest'? I ask because the word boring so used seems both highly individualistic and an indirect claim to enlightenment. On the face of it, anyway. But, yes, he sees people as self-interested and notices they practically all shoot themselves in the foot on the way to their selfish goals, both as individuals and in their aligned-interest groups. He seems too nice to be purely selfish himself, but I don't see why that would stop him from observing it in human societies. I don't think he's saying it stands by itself as the best way to go. Cheers.
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@LaureanoLuna Anybody considers their duties moral, I think; so just 'duty' is fine. And who says we ought to inherit our duties? I think this pays too much respect to tradition and filial piety, if not mindlessness. So in my view it's about 'duty to a community' unadorned with either qualifier. Now, how does Prof. Harari stand for shirking of community duties? He may describe such shirking, and he may describe it without much criticism, but you ought not to assume, if you have done so, that this means that he approves of it. A minority of people despise calling attention to their own virtue by loudly condemning the obviously contemptible. I think he's one of them. That doesn't mean he has terrible morals. Sometimes there's more to people than meets the eye. With those who promiscuously moralize, there's ordinarily less. I recommend assuming he feels duties towards society.
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The irony of your remark is that in the West you are entitled to speak about what is fair. Yet you use that right to stand up for a government that would never back such a right. Let that sink in. Probably because of traditional filial piety, you confuse being a communist with being a good Chinese. That's tragic.
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@jonhone1 Yes, it is fair, because it's not a street fight, but a discussion. In group discussions of any sort, I always seem to be in the minority, but I have never considered that unfair. Even if three members of the State Council of China were debating against one member of the Western intelligentsia, it would not be unfair, so long as the conduct itself of the debate were not unfair. The professor was not excluded nor shouted down; in my view, since you ask, there was no unfairness. In China, it would have been four against zero. I struggle to understand what sort of fairness you believe in. Cheers.
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@MtRevDr It's certainly not what it once was, alas.
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@mykegoh That's right, I'm ignorant and gullible. There's no more freedom of thought in the West than in China. Right. That's why millions of Chinese come to study in our universities and zero Westerners attend university in China. Right. People like you make Youtube into an intellectual waste land. Talk to me once you've been living in mental freedom for a couple of decades and have used that freedom to build your mind. Good day.
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A Chinese communist speaking on behalf of Japan? Quite rich, that. But somehow Japanese never make the same complaint about the US. Never. At least you're earning Social Credit points from your AI master.
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I know, these hosts are almost always unctuous in their intros. Nay, always. I find it corrosive to the dignity of all involved, including me.
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