http://www.ecns.cn/2017/05-24/258802.shtml

http://www.ecns.cn/2017/05-18/258072.shtml

http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0523/c90000-9219327.html

I see claims everywhere that "China is censoring coverage of the match", but anyone can just click on those links and see that it is untrue.

What solution did Marx propose? In the afterword of Capital, Marx notes "The Paris Revue Positiviste reproaches me in that...[I] — imagine! — confine myself to the mere critical analysis of actual facts, instead of writing recipes (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future".

Also Marx wasn't worried that CEOs were paid well as The Economist and "shareholder advocates" seems to be. At least that would be paid to someone who showed up for work. Marx was more concerned in noting the dividend checks that went out quarterly, if joint-stock company dividend checks went out quarterly in those days.

The Economist is being indirect in stating Marx's concerns. I'd guess more out of ignorance than malice. Even the first chapter of Capital is famously a hard slog to get through. I doubt the young Economist author made it through Anti-Dühring.

More importantly, Marx thought the various contradictions of capitalist production would lead to economic crises that the world saw in the 1930s (outside the USSR, whose economy was booming at the time). Eventually, the companies which are too big to fail really would fail. Capitalism's taxpayer bailouts of big business that worked in 2008 will in some future crisis not work, according to Marxian thought.

He also noted how various world economies and societies were swept aside by new ones over the past ten millennia - hunter-gatherer bands for slave societies, slave societies for feudal societies, feudal societies for capitalist societies. In the red flags and worker's councils of the Paris Commune, he saw the hazy, nascent harbinger of the social relations and forces of production of those cook-shops of the future.

He didn't, really. His proposals were pretty vague. 99% of what he wrote was a (pretty spot on) critique of capitalism.

Needless to say most of the propaganda attacks on his ideas are based upon guilt by association.

> He didn't, really. His proposals were pretty vague. 99% of what he wrote was a (pretty spot on) critique of capitalism.

The Communist Manifesto was fairly detailed and prescriptive. It's true that Capital was mostly description and critique of capitalism, but that's not all Marx wrote.

> Needless to say most of the propaganda attacks on his ideas are based upon guilt by association.

Specifically, most are based on association with Leninist vanguardism, which is a fairly radical departure from Marxism prescriptively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=What_Is_To_Be_Don...

Part of this is commodity fetishism, where people can see commodities, but not the social relations surrounding the production of commodities.

This sounds like the taking of this to the next level - where the social aspect of exchanging currencies for commodities becomes more and more hidden. You press some buttons on a website, and two days later a box shows up in an Amazon locker or on your front porch. Not only is the social aspect of the production of the commodity hidden, the social aspect of the exchange of currency for that commodity is now hidden as well.

The USSR signed the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 because England signed the Nazi-UK pact of 1938 in Munich. Molotov wanted and would have preferred a pact with the UK and the west, and had made such diplomatic offers and was rebuffed. Finally for the Soviet Union's survival Molotov signed a non-aggression pact in 1939 while kicking industrial production into overdrive at home. If the "Nazi-Soviet pact" is a "morally darkest moment", what was Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time"?

Also, for those HN-ers who want to really get a good, more truthful look at the causes behind WW2 I heartily recommend Ernst Nolte's "European Civil War". From the wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Nolte):

> Nolte contends that the great decisive event of the 20th century was the Russian Revolution of 1917, which plunged all of Europe into a long-simmering civil war that lasted until 1945. To Nolte, fascism, communism's twin, arose as a desperate response by the threatened middle classes of Europe to what Nolte has often called the “Bolshevik peril”.

We always tell people that HN threads should be like good conversation, but there's one way in which that isn't true. When we're sitting around talking about intense stuff with friends or compatriots, there's a latitude for intense expression that we don't have here. That's because in a large internet community like HN, the bonds between members are much weaker, and there are many tribes and competing loyalties among us. Talking about, for example, how the British never really suffered, is the kind of thing that can stir up conflict all over again (albeit, fortunately, in a trivial teapot). In such a place, we all need to bring our diplomatic skills. I'm sure you can use those and still share your historical insights.

You should be able to understand that it's a hypothesis you find convincing without evangelizing it as "truthful."

To be fair, he is (now) widely derided for his policy of appeasement.

Also, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had the little caveat of partitioning Poland... To the benefit of both signatories. Not to mention the invasion of the Baltic states.

The attempted tripartite alliance between the UK, France, and the USSR would have also given up Eastern Poland to the Soviet Union. If the UK and France drew the line to Hitler's aggression in Poland, it would have been quite hypocritical to agree to give it to Stalin, instead.

The Munich Agreement explicitly excluded the Soviet Union because the Western Allies hoped that Hitler would set his sights on the Communists and leave the West alone. By the time of the Molotov pact the USSR really had little to no choice.

The invasion of Poland by the USSR was criminal but whether Poland got divided or not was probably going to have little impact on the more general course of WWII at that point, in 1938 perhaps it still could have been averted (at least at the scale at which it occurred). Actually up until the pact in 1939 Stalin was still hoping for an alliance with the West.

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/map-russian-empire-191...

If you look at the 1914 map you see that Churchill and co bundled up a bit of three former empires to build out this new nation. I imagine if there was some conflict in America and Texas was bundled off with a chunk of Mexico to form 'Greater Texas' as a new sovereign state, with the borders being drawn up by Russia and China, then I imagine it would not take much for the U.S.A. to 'invade' this 'Greater Texas' and to collaborate with Mexico to restore the borders.

Note the first picture in 1772 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland#/media/Fi...), showing a Poland that looks remarkably like the Poland of 1939.

The islamic conquest started in a small village near Mecca, more like a square with some tents. Big tents, but tents. This is according to their own legend. Now on the lands they conquered and massacred their way across, there is about a billion people that are very different from the original inhabitants of those lands.

Let put em back in that small village and give Saudi Arabia back to the Jews (the south) and recreate the Eastern Roman Empire and give the North to them !

The same modulo historic details is true for Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, even Africa. The group currently living there either fought or massacred it's way to control of those lands.

The Islamic conquests are the same situation as the American conquests: numbers make it impossible to give the land back to the surviving descendants of the conquered, but they shouldn't be treated as second-class citizens of their own countries. The conquerors' descendants should stop celebrating the conquest; they should acknowledge that what their ancestors did was profoundly wrong; and they should give the conquered peoples more privileges and social prestige than the conquerors, not less.

Once things settle down like that it's been too long and practical assimilation into the victors has long happened.

There are a few exceptions when the people are too dissimilar and assimilation has not completed as in Turkey and the Kurds.

But looking at the American Indians' situation, I'm not entirely convinced. The descendants of the expropriated Indians are strangers in their own country just like their ancestors were -- the effects of a land grab or whatever don't end with the deaths of the perpetrators and victims. If handing the land back isn't possible (too many whites, blacks, and others for everyone to emigrate, and not nearly enough Indians to inhabit the country afterwards), then giving the dispossessed tax exemptions and other privileges is certainly a good idea.

As far as Serbia, I was going to disagree with the particulars of your example until I realized that you meant the Kosovo War, not the Yugoslav Wars. That's a related but at least equally thorny question, I think: is there a point at which facts on the ground can override historic rights? My instinct is to say no: if the Serbs can't grab the parts of Bosnia inhabited by Serbs, the Albanians can't grab the parts of Serbia inhabited by Albanians. I think that should be uncontroversial in this context, but it gets more troublesome when you try applying it further back in history...

So, I guess the smartest thing you can do when conquering a region is to allow and encourage the conquered people to join the conquerer's society, and to treat them as first-class citizens when brought on board. That worked for the Roman Empire -- and it's honestly not a bad way to treat conquered peoples.

Should we also recreate the Southern kingdom of Ancient Egypt (a country that can probably make a claim of being the first state on that piece of land), defeat Egypt, throw out all Egyptians and Sudanese, and give the land back to whomever makes a reasonable claim of descendence from the last king of the Southern Kingdom ?

You guys talk about Indians as if they're the only ones that were displaced, but they're hardly the only ones that got displaced. The truth is pretty close to that none of the ethnic groups currently in control of territories originate there.

Hell, the truth is that most Indian tribes are not the original colonists of North America. Most Indian tribes are groups of people cast out (left ? it's unclear) of the Mayan empire who decided to conquer those lands North, displacing others. Should the Native Americans give privileges and land to the ones they displaced as well ?

And if the Indians themselves were not shy of displacing others when they had the means, why do they get special treatment ? Frankly, since I'll be downvoted anyway, allow me to add another politically incorrect tidbit: if the records we do have of inter-clan warfare tactics are true (they are not written by independent observers, so you can argue otherwise), then Indians were not exactly shy about using genocide-and-mass-rape tactics to expand their own tribe's influence.

I've actually visited "original" villages in Africa, and if what's happening there is anything like what has happened in America long ago, here's how displacement happens : the people in those villages do not want that life. The life civilization provides in cities is far superior, and far more reliable. As soon as enough locals know about it, those villages suddenly bleed dry. Why ? Because for instance such a village has a "beer" culture. Now native beer, well it sucks. It's slightly alcoholic, very acidic and bitter, incompletely fermented and has quite a few toxins (in other words, it's a slightly alcoholic drink that you can only drink one cup of without getting ill. Even teenagers one-upping eachother do not drink more than 3) (great curiosity for tourists, not so great as an actual drink). Then one of them finds out that 250km from there, there's a brewery. More than that: it's hiring people, which means that if you work there ~6 hours loading trucks, they'll give you enough money to buy 4-5 cases of beer. For just one day ! You have to understand that these villages have their culture centered around that bad drink they have. It's their definition of luxury, "wealth", desirability, (wo)manhood, etc. Other villages have a culture of wood sculptures (they use wood sculptures as pillows. Amazing but yes, you can make a halfway comfortable pillow out of wood. And, for women, it keeps their hair out of the dust so they can make it beautiful, and work for weeks on their hair without it turning into a dirty mess) ... and then someone brings back a plastic power rangers doll (that in 2 decades somehow made it's way into rural Africa). Well, good luck stopping the kids from going to the cities and getting more of those. Or there's a famine in the village, and there's a monastery in the city that will provide food. Well they'll move the village to right next to the monastery. Or there's an outbreak of disease and a monastery with a hospital. Or or or or or ...

Best of all, most of them will speak a language that resembles arabic, and have notions of French, so a French speaking guide is not hard to find. All government employees will speak French, for instance. So you can understand them and talk to them.

Yes there's cruelty. Yes, there's displacement. Yes, there's even killings (even though it's 99.9% village-on-village violence, 0.1% things like the government forcing them off the land for a mine). But they don't matter. Natural human population replenishment (ie. fucking and babies) will rapidly make up for those. It's the fact that civilization is vastly superior and allows them to join. I understand that "superior" is a sensitive description, but I guarantee that's how they see it. Hell, population replenishment almost makes up for the vast number of people those tribes "lose" to the cities. In some ways it's about every 80s movie teenager having the same wish: getting out of whatever "godforsaken" hole they were born into and into the cities. These villages don't have traditional parent-children relationships so it's a bit hard to tell what the fertility rate is, but a village will have 20 or so women and often close to 100 children of various ages, so probably 5 children per woman is a minimum. They essentially have a kid every year and a half starting at 14 or so until they die (which is at age 35 or 40 or so). Only two things allow for this culture to survive (perhaps better: decay only slowly): ignorance, on the part of the people stuck in those villages, and their massive population growth, producing massive numbers of new ignorant humans.

But their culture and the memory of genocide isn't.

This is just historical revisionism. The Soviets didn't care about Czechoslovakia. Stalin decided to throw his lot in with Hitler for three reasons:

1) He wasn't happy with the way troop commitments were shaping up were the USSR to help the allies resist a German invasion of Poland. The UK and France were only pledging a handful of divisions and apparently expecting the Soviets to do most of the bleeding.

2) The government of Poland was divided among a coterie of "colonels" who weren't unified enough to provide a robust defense, but they were mostly unified in their reluctance to allow Soviet troops into Poland on the way to the German border, fearing (quite reasonably, as it turned out) the Soviets would never leave. So even assuming they didn't just gobble up Poland, Soviet troops would be out of position when the war started.

3) Greed. Pure, unadulterated greed. It was an easy way to snatch up half of Poland while France and the UK were busy dealing with Germany. If all went well the three countries would fight to an exhausted standstill, leaving the Soviets in a very strong strategic position.

>Finally for the Soviet Union's survival Molotov signed a non-aggression pact in 1939 while kicking industrial production into overdrive at home.

You might be able to make the case for this if the USSR hadn't invaded Poland, but that's not what happened.

>If the "Nazi-Soviet pact" is a "morally darkest moment", what was Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time"?

That's false equivalence. Chamberlain and Daladier certainly sold the Czechs down the river, but they weren't busy dividing up Europe with the Germans like Stalin eventually did.

Stalin's deal with Hitler had to be one of the biggest blunders in world history, which he compounded by ignoring obvious increases in German troop strength in the spring of 1941. The USSR was very, very lucky the Brits didn't sue for peace after the fall of France.

And yes, I do believe that Native Americans also have the right to self-determination. Funny thing though: I can express that opinion and not be jailed (or worse) in US.

If you look at the wealthiest people in the US, they are people like the Koch brothers, who inherited their wealth, or the Walton heirs, who inherited their wealth, or the Mars children, who inherited their wealth, and so on.

You could also look at others. Bill Gates was born with a million dollar trust fund - his great-grandfather ran National City Bank, his mother was on United Way’s executive committee with the CEO of IBM, his father ran a law firm, he went to Lakeside high school (current annual fee: $33,000) which had teletypes and access to a GE mainframe in the late 1960s. Warren Buffett is also "self-made". His grandfather owned a chain of grocery stores, his father was a congressman, he went to UPenn and Columbia. Mark Zuckerberg's parents are professionals, he went to high school at Phillips Exeter (current tuition $36,000, more if boarding there).

The first group did absolutely nothing. They're not really being "rewarded" as the article says. They can just jet from Aspen to Monte Carlo their whole lives, expropriating surplus labor time from those of us who work and create wealth. You can watch the documentary "Born Rich" which was made by one of these people (it's sometimes on Youtube) and is about these people. The second group - 1%ers who made it into the 0.1%, I suppose transitioned from one class to another, and had a hand in codifying how a large number of people worked. Even doing some of the initial stuff themselves - porting BASIC to yet another platform, selling a CPM ripoff to mom's friend on United Way's board, starting yet another social network (and being sued for stealing it), beating the S&P 500 year after year.

This is all helped by a massive mechanism of basically all of society tilted to let this class of what I consider parasites to expropriate the surplus labor time of those of us who work. It's a social relationship - workers work and create wealth, and heirs expropriate our surplus labor time and the wealth we create during it. And use it as a cudgel against us not just in the world of business, and not just in the governments they created and maintained, and the schools those governments run, or the media they created and maintain and to a large extent monopolize, but also other social organizations as well like churches. Through the corporate owned news I learn Trump, an heir and businessman now running the government, this week signed a document which would allow churches to be more involved in selecting who is and is not in government. All goes into each other - you organize the wretched of the earth at the bottom of society to believe in some superstitious fantasies in order to select certain leaders who will be even more vehemently against their economic interests. One part of society flows into another, but it all flows back to the center, which is what we all wake up and do most days - work and production, and the relationship between the worker and those who are parasites on worker's labors and who have the upper hand at the moment.

Of course, several centuries ago it was the royal families who had the upper hand on the poor and the workers and the merchants, so these things seem to shift around as history marches on.

If the US and France are going to meddle in Russia's elections and affairs, what is the big surprise if Russia does the same?

Insofar as who benefits from "isolationism" and breaking up western [military] alliances, the answer is me, an American worker and taxpayer. I gain nothing with my tax money going to kill or rape some Vietnamese farmer, or overthrow an elected government in Ukraine.

Trump has a lot of negatives, but that does not apply to whatever notions he has of not getting the US involved overseas militarily more than he already as.

NED is maybe working in a gray zone, but using illegal means to influence an election is, if not an act of war pretty close to it.

Then why does Voice of America have a Russian language TV and radio broadcast? All it does is spread disinformation about Russia.

There's no proof Russia hacked into these computers. The US hacks into foreign computers all the time - the US created Stuxnet, perhaps with the Israelis. Thomas Reed from the NSC said the CIA got software into a Russian pipeline (in the 1980s!) that blew it up. Never mind spying, they bragged about explosions that disrupted oil pipelines in the 1980s and could have killed people.

I think most people on this board are under the age of 50, and an international audience, and the "wild allegations" are not what I said, but that this is all "standard Russian propaganda". The Democrats have more-or-less been saying that Trump and his cabinet are all Russian agents, and it's making the Democrats look a little loony. They'd be better off pointing out Trump's errors, which are often bad enough.

Sometimes vacations are very demotivating. If the work situation is bad, it is nice to get away for a week, but then after a week you're right back in it again, and it can seem worse than before, in contrast to your pleasant vacation.

So a visa only available to workers with a certain skill set that chained them to companies is the free market?

> It's surprising how quickly the terms "free market" and "free trade" have disappeared from HN.

Because a phrase like "free market" is propaganda and meaningless.

That the word free is attached to it is part of the propaganda element, what's the alternative, an unfree market?

And the word market is the meaningless. How is a market selling radishes in the USA for dollars today different than a market selling radishes in the USSR for rubles in 1951? They're the same thing. What's different is production, namely who controlled it - in the USA, production is overwhelmingly owned and controlled by heirs who do not work and who spend their days jetting to things like the Fyre Festival in the Bahamas - in the USSR production was not controlled by that class.

Well, if not propaganda, at least ambiguous, yeah.

Adding on to that: If there's any group that distrusts the modifier "free", it's techies who've seen enough open-source stuff to remember "free as in beer" versus "free as in speech".

"The professor’s experiments conclusively show that climate change is causing the island to sink into the sea. Gilligan erases his papers and tries to stop him from talking, thinking that will make the problem go away."