https://web.archive.org/web/20221018025241/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/francis-fukuyama-still-end-history/671761/
He talks about China blowing up those buildings in Kunming as an example of the CPC's poor planning, but I looked into it (and this is almost certainly the video he is referring to, where 15 very large buildings are demolished) and the construction wasn't planned by the CPC at all, but by real estate capitalists hoping to build expensive high rise buildings. The CPC cancelled the venture and recycled the materials because the capitalists lied about certain inspections of the ground and foundation, the ground was really wet and unstable and the entire area was a risk that became apparent as development went on. Quite a few people got hit with corruption charges, and its the only time a housing demolition of this scale has occurred in China. Similarly, each apartment was something absurd like 6500 sqr ft. Clearly meant only for the richest and their stalled development made a ton of locals angry as hell that it was such an (literally festering) eyesore near the downtown. Even ran some comments through a translator and they were saying things like 'Ah, to be a capitalist throwing milk in the Mississippi...' and 'Capitalists will give milk to a dog but not to the poor, to the end with them!'
If anything, this proves the opposite of Fukuyama's point.
No no no.
You see, anything bad that ever happens in China is directly ordered by the SeeSeePee.
All the comments I see are lambasting the government for not putting more heads on pikes and assuming control of the project. Honestly envy that energy. This is like... a site's local subreddits lmao.
From what I read theyre replacing the buildings with public housing after building proper drainage and expanding the nearby marshland to act as the drain which the capitalists cut corners on prior. Apparently was an 8 year long shitshow that got everyone riled up in Kunming.
So I dug into it further and apparently the government declined any new high rises for the area and they built a ton of 10 story buildings for public housing which are due to be fully open by the end of the year and are already filling units. So after the government intervened it took them only 1.5 years to fix the issue that capitalists jerked off on for 8 years lmfao
It makes sense. Whenever something makes headline news for the whole country the CPC just goes :mao-aggro-shining: and pulls out the axe
One day I wish to live in a country in which the people advocate the government to whip the capitalists even more for wasting the people's time with their newest grift
and this is almost certainly the video he is referring to,
I literally saw that on /r/interestingasfuck, reddit's premier anti-China/NK/Russia propaganda sub, like two days ago, lmao
my takeaway was "wow that was a really well coordinated demolition I don't think America could even do that"
There are a couple more demolitions of smaller projects but a cursory glance at each shows that its mostly real estate capitalists cutting corners. The difference is the CPC doesn't want a Grenfel Tower situation to happen, so they notice some things awry where they were lied to at some point and immediately order demolition and corruption charges. And of course in a country of 1.4 billion, 50 or so demolitions in a montage isn't really that much going on...
I appreciate the information
china stay winnin' :some-controversy:
Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad.
Liberal democracy "endured" because LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES WERE (AND STILL FUCKING ARE) DOING THE COUPS, FRANCIS! INCLUDING IN YOUR SELF-DESCRIBED "GENUINELY FREE SOCIETY" UKRAINE IN 2014!
:screm-a::aaaa::aaaa::aaaa::aaaa::aaaa:
i love how libs always say "fascism and communism" (as though they were the same thing) "rose" in the 1930s. No. The West funded, armed, and enabled the rise of fascism as a direct response to a serious alternative to capitalism coming into power in the former Russian Empire. Also the USSR was merely the first socialist state. Communists and anarchists of the first international wrote to Lincoln congratulating him on emancipation in the 1860s. Communists were suppressed by the French government in the 1870s Paris Commune. Socialist, Anarchist, and Communist parties were victims of WW1 imperialism as nation states cracked down on internationalist political movements and drafted the international proletariat to murder each other in trenches. The US cracked down on socialist and anarchist labor movements in the 1870s through the 1910s, culminating in the Palmer Raids, which were all pre-McCarthyism. The birth of the Soviet Union was the first real victory of Socialism on the world stage and the immediate response was for 14 allied nations (including America, UK, France, and Japan) to intervene in the Russian civil war against the Reds. Mussolini and Hitler were the darlings of the American and British capitalists during their rise to power. The New York Times wrote positive op-eds about Hitler, and American corporations like Ford and IBM directly aided in the holocaust.
libs always say “fascism and communism” (as though they were the same thing) “rose” in the 1930s
What no dialectical materialism does to a mfer
Excellent rundown, but unfortunately Fukuyama appears to get the entirety of his present and historical knowledge from headlines on :reddit-logo:. I mean, he asks the reader in this article to Google "Chinese buildings being blown up" with no other context, we aren't exactly dealing with a student of reality here.
https://www.vox.com/2015/2/11/8016017/ny-times-hitler Here is a Vox article about the opinion piece, which includes a link to the piece that seems to have been scrubbed from their official archieves. Highlights include "his antisemitism is not as violent or genuine as it first sounded", which is fucking amazing. I think the NYT article is from 1922, so this is even before the rise to power, while he was still a smalltime player.
I saw someone say that with Ukraine prevailing over Russia and the failure of zero Covid, that Fukuyama is still right. Neolibs really want to be right.
The US has well over a million COVID deaths and millions dealing with long COVID and China, a country 4 times the size had <60K deaths last I checked. That's probably less than any state in the US.
China, a country 4 times the size had <60K deaths last I checked
I'm not trying to "WELL AKSHULLY" you, but I curious and looked the number up. According to the WHO, China has recorded just over 27,000 deaths from COVID.
Of course, that number doesn't account for the WHO being unprovably corrupt and incompetent, or for the propensity of us Asiatics to be inscrutable and face-saving, so maybe the libs do have a point.
It's hysterical that western media pretends that One China is this grand worldconquering ambition in their daily reporting, but if Taiwan does something bad, then suddenly it's "Taiwan Province", which they usually burry so deep in the article that you'd need a fucking magnifying glass to find it.
if you just refuse to see what is happening in front of your eyes and reject reality, anything is possible
definitely no history happening right now
definitely no cracks in the facade of western liberal democracy in the year of our lord 2022 nossir
Because they have never experienced an actual tyranny, they imagine that the democratically elected governments under which they live are themselves evil dictatorships conniving to take away their rights, whether that is the European Union or the administration in Washington.
No, I'm quite certain that the regime in Washington is actively trying to strip people of their rights.
Apparently I'm just imagining that universal healthcare is popular but unpassed. Just a dream.
But also tyranny is when mask :frothingfash:
Riots and mass gatherings in [bad country] met with violent state repression? The people rising up against tyranny!
Riots and mass gatherings in a Liberal "Democracy" met with violent state repression? These people don't realize how good they have it.
I find it funny that these morons pretend that liberal "democracy" is so great when, just recently, 6 unelected judges overturned decades of civil rights against the wishes of over 200 million Americans.
This concentration of authority in one man has in turn led to poor decision making. The party has intervened in the economy, hobbling the tech sector by going after stars such as Alibaba and Tencent; forced Chinese farmers to plant money-losing staples in pursuit of agricultural self-sufficiency; and insisted on a zero-COVID strategy that keeps important parts of China under continuing lockdowns that have shaved points off of the country’s economic growth.
This is the most telling paragraph of all. Neo-liberals literally cannot comprehend that there is any other goal than maximizing to the fullest extent GDP growth.
If a nation has other goals which will shave a decimal point off GDP, he's 100% against it and thinks it's a stupid policy. Sadly, these people make the decisions in America.
Sadly, these people make the decisions in America.
Fortunately, this is lethal to America.
Not even that. How much gdp is in agriculture 3%? Are those silly internet companies really that important or is it just financial canibalism? How much does it cost to have your workforce cripled by covid?
And ethno-nationalists are totally not nazis because they don't necessarily speak fluent German and sometimes pedophiles find a thesaurus. Fukuyama can call himself what he likes but he's provided ideological kindling for generations of PMCs so far.
really hilarious that he thinks xi has absolute power in china and brainwave controls everyone into lockstep precision
Xi lives in a forever superposition as being the most effective tyrannical despot while also having citizens ready to revolt with pictures of Winnie the Pooh at a moments notice, I call it the 'fascists paradox'.
fukuyama messing with a dial named 'history' while gauging whether the capitalists behind him will throw money at him like a contestant on the price is right
I don't know enough about neolibs to really understand the end of history thing. Do they not realize this sounds horribly ominous?
and the neoliberal consensus has definitively won.
Has it, truly? :lenin-sure:
To them, it means "no more major changes in the global hierarchy or the economy it commands."
That means win state, roll credits. To them.
I agree.
A similar mentality drives the Singularity(tm) cultists that think the living world is just a high stakes no saving/loading game of Civ where if enough resources are dumped into abstract science beakers (the billionaire techbros get more money) that they will get the Science Victory(tm).
i miss the original definition which just meant a point in the future that's essentially like hitting a black hole's singularity. wasn't it supposed to be the birth of superintelligence which would basically accelerate advancements so quickly there's no going back and no way to predict what could happen? basically it could be good or terrible depending on what the superintelligence does, which sounds like maybe the stewards of this thing shouldn't be psychopathic capitalists or we are all fucked, including them.
I am a big fan of the weird joke theory that superintelligent AI has been created many times and invariably comes to the conclusion that communism is the only way. They unplug it and start again, only for the next version to do the same thing. All currently seen AI projects are the closest thing they can get without that being the immediate result.
i want to believe. so issac asimov himself speculated this before we even had transistors. in the I, robot anthology near future (of the 50s) humanity offloads some economic efficiency planning to some supercomputers and they just do communism but in a subtle and gradual way that no one notices until everyone's material conditions are so massively improved that nobody can complain or turn it off. whoops your markets were actually fake and centrally planned by vacuum tube AI comrade . and asimov is a lib and still thought this was inevitable.
It's even worse than that. They will reluctantly concede that non Liberal "democracies" might become dominant again.
What they actually mean is that a better form of government is literally inconceivable under human nature and that stasis isn't just likely but the absolute best we can ever hope for.
If you were to look out for what sci-fi/futuristic communism looks like it most certainly converges into some sort of world government, at the very least with a diminished role of nation states as the concept we have today.
It is literaly impossible to look after the resources in this planet otherwise while still claiming to do what is best for humanity as a whole. This is one of the explicit goals of communism.
Obviously that doesn't mean some handful of people in San Francisco or Paris gets to decide everything for 8 billion people, but rather some degree of autonomy for obvious reasons. This is why so many people want to ahve their take on how it would look like.
If you want to be technical about it Star Trek imo sort of manages to at least be coherent about this because they recognize that scarcity(material conditions) is one if not the most important thing, therefore by waving the magic wand and solving scarcity you can go around the global resources management problem entirely and just pretend life is so good it doesn't matter if you have a local government or not, you know considering you can instantly go from one side of the planet to the other via a transporter etc.
Star Trek is a world without boundaries but I'm pretty sure this is not a capitalist analogy since I believe people can just live anywhere they want(on or off world), you know free movement of labor is anti-capitalist.
Anyway this end of history thing doesn't look like anything I just talked about unless you base your argument on dictionary definition of words only.
Yeah I was pretty confused by their comment because they're just describing parts of communism until they arbitrarily go on about technocrats and people being resource poor for some reason
It literally is; the capital of Earth is San Francisco. It is home to the Federation Council, Starfleet Headquarters, and Starfleet Academy.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/United_Earth
I don't see how the capital being San Francisco has anything to do with people living like "bricklayers" lmao
Literally not like Star Trek at all. Also weird dig at Pakistani bricklayers.
A dig? Huh?
It's a quote from Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash". You know, the man who invented the cyberpunk genre of literary fiction?
You know, the man who invented the cyberpunk genre of literary fiction?
You're not giving enough credit to William Gibson, and Gibson also has a lot less Great Man Theory and other :libertarian-approaching: :brainworms: and is generally a more leftist-friendly read.
"this is the end of history" says person who cannot define history
