There's a lot of bad stuff that isn't going away. Global powers projecting that power in various ways is one of them. It would absolutely be better if the US/China didn't do the bad things they have done. Good luck stopping that from happening in the future, it's been happening since civilization was created.
I think you're right that all three parties have been subject to a certain degree of drift. However, applying that back to the original point (is the current regime the same one that did Tiananmen), to me that's an argument that, for the most part, this is the same regime. And if the original commenter wasn't arguing about a continuity in ideology or personnel, then I'm not sure what they were arguing.
It's like saying Hollande and Chirac are both part of the 5th Republic regime. Technically true but not indicative of anything and probably a red herring.
I think there is substantial, non-trivial overlap between (a) China's views about dissent in 1989 and (b) China's views about the same subject in 2017, to the point that they're nearly the same in all respects pertinent to Tiananmen. It was carried out by (a), while criticism of it is censored by (b).
The views of the same party on a narrow subject in the same country are more similar to each other than can be captured by analogy to the full spectrum of ideology of a western first world democracy.
It's a billion people and a big political system that we don't have a lot of visibility into. This whole thread is filled with simplistic, black and white dumbassery.
From my limited view, there's actually been a lot of movement on freedom in expression in China, and Xi has been pushing the pendulum back towards the less free side. Which is bad. It's silly to paint all of that as a single overarching 'china'.
As I'm sure we both know, few of those billion people have anything to do with how the government makes decisions about enforcement against dissent. Power is concentrated to a group of people representing a small fraction of the population that is intensely conscious of its own political and historical identity.
The main problem in this thread is people engaging in whataboutism and obscurantism to signal sophistication, because they look at "is massacring civilians bad" and mistakenly think it's a trick question, and set about looking for oversimplifications to correct which they think are secretly attached to the question.
Just like aaron-lebo points out above, a dichotomy between hellish labor camps and flawed western democracies was never posed, yet somehow got corrected. Similarly, I don't think anybody in this thread ever suggested that the problems with the regime were the collective responsibility of every Chinese citizen from Shanghai to Kashgar. Yet those are the kinds of arguments offered in defense of Tiananmen in the name of signalling sophistication.
The labor camp comment was in response to someone calling quote 'china' a quote 'psychopath' while being very obviously ignorant about what it's like inside the country. So I'm gonna have to disagree if you're saying they were straw-manning a thoughtful and balanced comment.
There aren't billions of politically involved Chinese but there ARE millions of party members, with their own agendas and political battles rolling all the way up. It's not 5 people in a smoky room, and it's definitely not the same 5 people as 30 years ago.
You ever see the shock and awe videos of Baghdad? That our government approvingly worked with cable news to make sure everyone saw it? For an operation very much not endorsed by the UN or international community?
Shock and awe was a brief bombing campaign that hit military and administrative buildings late at night when they were empty. I saw the buildings. They were not apartment blocks. If anyone died in that campaign it was purely by accident.
Yeah, those. Watch the video and tell me how bloodless it was. Or how it's not a massacre.
I'm not defending a thing about Tiananmen square, I'm just marvelling at the power of nationalism to excuse anything.
Bunch of snakes in suits with American flag pins declare a war for no reason, knowing that hundreds of thousands will die, but it's all Legitimate State Behavior. I'm sure it's a huge comfort to the orphans.
Now, the Iraq War and it's aftermath as a whole weren't bloodless, for sure. The "they'll greet us as liberators and there'll be a Western-style democracy in 90 days!" stuff was transparent bullshit.
Shock and awe was a specific bombing campaign, hitting palaces, military HQs, communications nexuses, etc. The targets chosen made it easy to avoid large numbers of civilian casualties, and trying to compare it to stuff like Tiananmen Square is just silly.
"what the market will bear" isn't necessarily appropriate for a public good, though.
It might maximize ticket revenue if they priced some people out of taking the train. Doesn't maximize good for the city, or even revenue for the city if some marginal person decides to stay home instead of going to work.
Maximizing ticket revenue allows the system to offer better service for everyone who uses it. To the extent that people are priced out at the margin, that can be addressed through targeted subsidies (or guaranteed minimum income). In any event, whatever the desirable range may be, having fares that are only about half as much as in the closest comparable city with a well-functioning subway (London), is clearly outside that range.
>Maximizing ticket revenue allows the system to offer better service for everyone who uses it
So only rich people will ride the subway but those who do will have a better experience?
> To the extent that people are priced out at the margin, that can be addressed through targeted subsidies (or guaranteed minimum income).
Please provide examples of this working in practice.
It doesn't seem to work for healthcare, education, etc.
The places with "good" healthcare, education, transportation, internet, etc, don't make it expensive and then hand out vouchers to poor people. They make it free or so cheap everyone can afford it.
> So only rich people will ride the subway but those who do will have a better experience?
Most people can afford a $5 subway ticket.
> Please provide examples of this working in practice.
London Tube fares range from 2.4 to 5.1 pounds. That’s $3.50-$8.00 using typical exchange rates, versus just $2.75 for the NYC metro. Somehow non-rich people in London manage.
Yeah. Academia doesn't care about interesting applications, they care about novel methods.
"I made a huge difference for the business by being thoughtful about feature selection and then applying a bog-standard regression method" isn't appealing to the academic mindset.
To be fair, people are chasing a force multiplier here. Yeah, that is a buzzy term. :( No I don't like that.
So, what I mean is that people are looking for something where they can apply one team's work and use it across many teams. The more the better. The idea is that you don't have to have many people being thoughtful producing methods, you just need many working hard applying them. If there is a better term for that, I'm game to use it.
I'm sorry, are you saying that India should control the whole Indian ocean and the West Indies for good measure? Maybe some reservations in Arizona as well?
That's all fine, but IN CONTEXT, OP is still getting robbed. They're paying higher taxes while the super-rich pay lower taxes.
They could have passed a bill that eliminated those deductions and gave corresponding tax breaks to the middle class. They could have passed a bill that skipped the tax breaks for the super-rich and actually cut the deficit. I'm OK with paying my fair share if we were actually solving problems.
But no. We've gotta pay higher taxes while still blowing a hole in the deficit? In what world does that make sense?
There are tax breaks to the middle + lower classes. Lower bracket rates are lowered, the standard deduction (which is used by people on the lower end of the income spectrum much more) is dramatically increased, and the child tax credit is increased.
> There are tax breaks to the middle + lower classes.
The net impact is a tax increase on the very poorest in the short term; and on pretty much the whole segment up to a bit above median income over the 10 year period. Yes, there are individual provisions that, taken in isolation, benefit the working class, but in net it's a loss not a gain.
1) If we're also talking about how the cost of health insurance might change then you could be correct about the very poorest. It's a bit hard to say.
If we're only talking about taxes paid, then you are wrong there.
2) I think that the whole "over the 10 year period" is a bit of a red herring. The US tax system isn't getting set in concrete with the (potential) passage of this bill. Numerous things will almost certainly change over the next 10 years. Tax breaks set to expire will get extended. Rates will get tinkered with. It's hard to know what might happen. Because of this I think the short term effects matter much much more than what is theoretically set to happen in 10 years.
This tax law has specifically baked in expirations of some portions. When they come up for renewal the GOP will whine and moan about the unbalanced expenditures and they'll either lapse or be supplemented with additional cuts, the corporate side of these cuts is not subjected to this.
It's fine to say "Oh, things may change down the road" but today they designed a tax cut that will benefit the rich, I do hope we're saved from this ridiculous hand out down the line, but that will be by the actions of other people, these politicians have written the bill as they desire it.
Specifically, what will happen is Democrats will have to clean up the mess, and the GOP and their cheerleaders will call the fix 'job killing tax hikes'.
But that's later! Right now it's a red herring to call the mess a mess.
The relevant quantity is standard deduction + personal exemption(s) which is barely increasing for single people and declining drastically for families.
Do most of your coworkers self-apply the term 'leftist'? If not, why would you call them that? Seems impolite. Especially if they're actually a mix of neoliberal and libertarian technocrats.
Maybe it's just zero tolerance for inaccurate name calling.
You've got some causality backwards, there. Interest rates were at basement levels before QE. QE was an inflationary measure in part intended to keep rates from going even lower into the negative.
QE was a reaction and counterpressure to low rates, not the cause.
Why's it worse in this case?