Russian propagandist argues that authoritarianism is better than democracy because money.

[DetlefK]

Warning: RT lies by omission. Handle with care.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/441873-china-socialism-capitalism-zizek/

Despite occasional exceptions, it was once considered almost gospel that democracy and capitalism went hand in hand. China's successful rise knocks the notion on the head.

...

Years ago, a Chinese social theorist, with links to Deng Xiaoping's daughter, told me an interesting anecdote. When Deng was dying, an acolyte who visited him asked him what he thought his greatest act was, expecting the usual answer that he will mention his economic opening that brought such development to China.

To their surprise, he answered: "No, it was that, when the leadership decided to open up the economy, I resisted the temptation to go all the way and open up also the political life to multi-party democracy."

...

We should resist here the liberal temptation to dream about how, in the case China were to open up also to political democracy, its economic progress would have been even faster: what if political democracy would have generated new instabilities and tensions that would have hampered economic progress? Such as were witnessed in most of the old USSR?

What if this (capitalist) progress was feasible only in a society dominated by a strong authoritarian power?

Btw, in one of his earlier columns he wrote about romance and sex and complained that political correctness is killing dirty smutty sex because we're all obsessed now with treating each other respectfully.

[Hortensis]

1. DetlefK, I know you like to present these points of view,

but I'm not buying the warning for where it came from.

Notably, lies are not merely in omission but in exactly what is being said. This is total RT and anti- western liberalism propaganda.

Though one notable omissions is that China's economy, in danger of collapsing, was rescued by its central leadership in part through legalization of capitalist enterprise, which provided a great infusion of energy.

[DetlefK]

2. I'm a regular reader of RT...

One of their usual tactics to make their readers angry is to talk about a bad thing that has happened to somebody, while at the same time carefully evading an explanation WHY that bad thing happened.

For example, russian athletes were excluded from sports-events because of doping. RT wrote a whole article about how unfair it is that russian athletes were excluded... without a single word about the doping-allegations.

For example, just a few days ago there was an article about frictions between Russia and some european committee. That committee has been discriminating against the russian delegation since 2014! So unfair! What the article did not mention was what reason the committee gave for this treatment. And 2014 matches the Crimea-crisis.



Sometimes they simply ignore what they don't want their readers to know.

For example, did you know that nobody has ever presented a single piece of evidence that Russia meddled in the US-election? (Please ignore the Trump-Tower-meeting and the Kushner-Kislyk-meeting and the Sessions-Kislyak-meeting and the Papadopolous-Mifsud-meeting and the thousands of cases of online-propaganda traced back to russian trolls.)



And sometimes they simply lie.

For example, when Skripal was poisoned and the UK said it was Novichok, Russia demanded that the substance be tested by the international chemical-weapons watch-body OPCW. The OPCW tested the chemical and wrote a report with the result that they "agreed with the conclusion presented of the british government".
And RT hailed this report as proof of Russia's innocence because the report failed to spell out word for word that it was Novichok.

For example, once they wrote an article about an interview they had with a US Senator who just hated Obama...
I googled him. He's not a US Senator. He's a State Senator and such a cook that even fellow Republicans keep him at arm's length.






And you wouldn't believe how many Neonazis hang out in the comment-section. RT basically calls the ukrainian government Nazis and half of their own comment-section is anti-semitic conspiracy-theories.

[DetlefK]

3. Concerning the chinese economy:

The big problem of the chinese economy is that unemployment must be Zero in a socialist state. That means, everybody gets a job. Whether the economy needs that job is irrelevant. Everybody gets some kind of job.
(Ask a Chinese what he likes most about the chinese government and he will talk about the well-paying jobs they created.)

And that's why China produces too much steel and builds too many buildings nobody needs: Because this central leadership creates jobs the economy doesn't need. It's not the chinese economy per se that creates jobs in a supply-demand balance. It's politics.

What do you think why China doesn't want the illegal immigrants back that make it to California? Because then they would have to create jobs for these people as well!





The other big problem of the chinese economy is that it must grow as much as possible at any cost, to keep unemployment at bay.
This is already leading to massive environmental damage.
And the hunger for natural ressources has China setting eyes on Africa in a colonialist/imperialist manner.

[Hortensis]

4. The number of Chinese capitalist billionaires has exploded.

A couple years ago we were #1 in the world with 550 billionaires, half of the world's total. No more. Now we have 680 at last count (or at least one of them), and China has 594, presuming none have been executed or stripped of wealth since that number was arrived at.

China doesn't begin to come close to 0 unemployment. Of course. But perhaps RT doesn't choose to point out the millions of discarded citizens moved off the land, villages razed, whom they don't bother to find jobs for.

[Initech]

5. Well fuck your money then.

I'd rather be broke and have freedom then be rich and miserable because I don't have freedom.

[AllyCat]

7. Folks, this is a bot

Repeated posting of gibberish on many threads in last few minutes