• Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    6 hours ago

    This is a very useful graphic for anyone looking at starting a party and understanding what to aim for.

    What I didn't know was that there was a qualification check for local level delegates. Does this qualification check occur multiple times as someone goes up the chain? It seems useful to have in place to ensure someone isn't just charismatic and able to get voted up based on popularity.

    One thing I will say about the layout of this graphic is that the hover-overs are not very obvious, and could be indicated as such. I was asking myself "it would be nice if it said what the responsibilities of this committee were" because it's hidden behind hover overs.

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]
      ·
      6 hours ago

      What I didn't know was that there was a qualification check for local level delegates. Does this qualification check occur multiple times as someone goes up the chain? It seems useful to have in place to ensure someone isn't just charismatic and able to get voted up based on popularity.

      Do we support restrictions on who people can vote for? I thought we usually regarded that as a bad thing.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        5 hours ago

        I don't see a problem with examinations existing for competency. Without it how do you ensure that the committees are elevating people based on merit?

        I don't see it as a restriction on who you can vote for, you can vote for anyone on the committee but they need to be studious enough to pass the qualification check which I assume is like an exam?

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]
          ·
          5 hours ago

          I don't see it as a restriction on who you can vote for, you can vote for anyone on the committee

          Don't give me that. Ultimately the entire thing is meant to restrict candidates to a whitelist, the only question is whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. Saying you can vote for anyone who made the whitelist and therefore the vote is not restricted is silly question-begging and it's below you.

          • Awoo [she/her]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 hours ago

            Huh? No? If you have the capability to pass the test you're not being restricted to a whitelist? It's a test, with pass and failure thresholds. Anyone can study to pass a test, particularly if there's no limit to the number of times you can fail it.

            The party has an entrance exam to join as a standard member at the lowest level, why wouldn't you have further exams for the more advance levels?

            • GarbageShoot [he/him]
              ·
              57 minutes ago

              "Just pass the test to get on the whitelist, then the whitelist doesn't impact you"

              This is like an alternate version of "meritcratic" academic testing, it's still a barrier to people who don't have the same resources as others, which I would dare to assert that is a bad thing.

              • Awoo [she/her]
                ·
                edit-2
                52 minutes ago

                I'm sorry but if Xi could go from living in a literal cave sleeping on a rock bed to being party leader I have to disagree that it's presenting a resource-based barrier.

                With that said he did fail his first entrance exam into the party multiple times.

                • TerribleHands [he/him]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  25 minutes ago

                  Not to downplay Xi's abilities, but he wasn't just some random peasant kid who grew up in a cave, he was the son of an incredibly famous revolutionary and politician. His dad was vice-chairman of the NPC for most of Xi Jinping's early-mid political career.

                  Also, to be clear, Yaodong "cave houses" aren't actually caves; Xi probably had a wooden bed.

                • GarbageShoot [he/him]
                  ·
                  41 minutes ago

                  Literal bootstrapism. I could present you success stories about poor people getting into Ivy League schools, and you'd rightly say that such stories are masking systemic problems.

                  • Awoo [she/her]
                    ·
                    35 minutes ago

                    What do you propose instead? This exists to prevent what occurred with the party in the USSR which ultimately led to the biggest standard of living disaster in history.

                    • GarbageShoot [he/him]
                      ·
                      edit-2
                      24 seconds ago

                      Is that true? Is that how you get people in there who propose that risk is a type of labor? I am pretty sure Xi was involved in things by 2006 as a comparatively petty official, which is not to say that this is his view, but that this shit was allowed in the Party in a relevant timeframe.

                      I'm sure that politicians being uneducated was a problem in the Soviet Union, but there were people who would at least turn revisionist who were among the Soviet vanguard since before the October Revolution. The problem fundamentally isn't ignorance, or it is somehow that many years of schooling are needed not to trip and fall into being a reactionary. The former means that education won't solve it, the latter is basically an excuse for having a party of the elite who the plebians can't hope to understand the intellectual workings of, who they must sit passively by and approve or disapprove from the short procession of learned individuals who had the privilege to go through all this political grooming.

                      But that's a counterfactual, I think the main problem wasn't a lack of education a failure to guard against the ability to be a revisionist based on choice rather than mistake. Given that, I think imposing these educational barriers, most of all ones that weren't decided on a direct democratic basis, is just enabling the party to be insular without doing a thing to protect it from intentional revisionism, the much greater threat if we're worried about an autopsy of the Soviet Union.