i'll stay with my 75hz IPS because if i make my rig any better i'm gonna be destroying people left and right, it won't be fun for anybody involved

yea lol

like we just want the revolution it's the bourgeoisie that doesn't let us have it without violence

it obviously depends on the nature of the protests and how the dialectically opposed forces are interacting, there's no "formula" for this

the 2013 protests in brazil were initially good in spite of my country being under a slightly anti-imperialist government, because their demands were reasonable, their targets were correct, and the PT needed to get their shit straight

but later on, with the repression coming from the PT centrists, our left failed to maintain hegemony, the protests were ultimately overtaken by US-funded ngos and think tanks, a lot of astroturfed shit popped up everywhere, and the continuation of the protests, which were initially good and based, ended up helping set the conditions for the 2016 coup

i have no protest fetish and no binary understanding of them either - despite how popular they might be, sometimes they're good and legit, sometimes they're astroturfed to shit and bad, with numerous possibilities in-between, and their nature changes as the forces involved interact with each other

wrong person for that conversation mate, i'm a rojava stan

it's about being pro-american interests, not right or left - putin is a right wing cunt and america would still love a color revolussia

oh you edited it lol

too good

You should post it. I’m really curious to hear about people’s thoughts on this.

haven't listened to it all but this might be what you're looking for

deleted by creator

i was gonna say 3-0 DWG before i remembered G2 got one game off them, it would be weird for suning not to get at least one

but i wasn't convinced by their play, found it a bit inconsistent and their drafts a bit weird, so i think 2 games are too much

i think on a perfect day they can beat DWG though, and league is a strange game

god i always hate these ceremony pop songs lol

i really hope i'm wrong though

3-1 DWG

thanks for elaborated answer! i'll avoid quoting too so we don't delve into massive posts

my discussions about china aren't coming from personal ego, or from picking a team and wanting it to win or whatever; like i said earlier, i'm from the 3rd world myself so i'm interested in discussing every aspect of the chinese experiment (and the cuban, the vietnamese, the bolivian, etc) as they're going to give us clues on how to solve our own problems. so i really like that i can have some useful discussion for once lol

regarding literacy rates: thanks for the sources, and i'm gonna read that book as china really should be compared to india (this is something vijay prashad insists on and i deeply agree with). but i did agree with you that the country improved a lot with mao, what i don't see is how we could say the country was in a good position back then, even compared to other 3rd world countries, aside from specific areas of low material requirements

regarding depoliticization: i'm aware people were more politically active in that sense, and i understand the new left's criticism - but do you think that resulted in an overall positive for china? to me it seems like a defense of aspects that would ultimately result in another cultural revolution, and it would again happen at the wrong time and space

regarding stagism: i dislike the term and i very much disagree with my position being teleological - i think there's a dialectical relationship between ideals and material conditions too, and stating that we need to deal with material limitations before we can move forward is in no way dogmatic, but a way of avoiding what marx used to call the various kinds of conservative socialism. it's not dogmatic to say decommodification requires a certain level of abundance (and therefore, development), it's just empirical observation; it's also just empirical, not dogmatic, to think market forces play a very useful part in the beginning, before the contradiction between productivity incentives and rates of profit becomes unsustainable (as is already the case for so much of the modern economy in developed countries). in fact, i think the dogma lies in believing we can have (and maintain) these large productivity rises under a decommodified economy in spite of all the empirical evidence to the contrary from the previous experiments - especially the USSR before, during and after the NEP, but also just china itself

i guess if we disagree on these premises we're not gonna find common ground in the inferences either; for instance, i'm getting the impression you believe china could've got here (and kept moving forward, in terms of economic, and therefore social, development) without the reforms, and i clearly don't

i'm not well-versed in confucianism and which aspects of it have been focused on in their more recent cultural developments, i would enjoy sources on this if you've got any (though i guess this would be wang hui as well?)

I believe that the level of collusion between Party elites and domestic and international capital is high enough to merit tremendous concern.

can you go into more details on that level of collusion, especially since xi? i understand they negotiate with capital, and like i said, i'm ok with that; actual rampant collusion would be an entirely different thing and yes, a huge issue

We cannot really definitively say that the latest advancements would not have been procured by the state later on

we can't definitively say anything regarding hypotheticals in general, right?

and it's also very hard to compare because, for instance, i could use your example to say "see, even the UK, one of the richest countries on earth, has been unable to provide certain specialized care for its citizens", but that leaves out the fact that they're a capitalist country, which implies different priorities for the government; or i could try to be more fair and mention how cuba, which has a similar per capita GDP and a socialist government still has trouble acquiring medicines and specialized equipments, but that in turn leaves out the embargo and how this relates to the fact that most of those are produced by american companies

but i think that would be pointless as i'm not arguing the current healthcare system is better: but that it has the potential of being such, whereas i don't see this being the case for the previous one

TCM is a moniker that actually a lot of Sinologists really get irritated at. My apology if I did as well.

it's cool, if you did i didn't notice it

i get what you mean about TCM. i'll try to be more specific next time

If you want a good source on healthcare in China today vs the Maoist era, Martin Whyte has written a lot on this.

right, putting it on the list

Universal healthcare is simply a system where all citizens are guaranteed easy access to healthcare

i understand, but if you can't afford specialized treatment that means people won't have access to it

so how universal is that access, really?

traditional Chinese medicine’ (a nonsense term btw)

what do you mean by that? TCM has a very identifiable theoretical basis for each of its branches, i don't see the issue with the term

but it is actually being significantly more espoused TODAY and even by government sources.

this wasn't really my point, and i don't know how much more espoused it is today

but it's still far more incentivized by the government than i deem ideal, that's for sure. i don't know if they've just decided these practices are so deeply rooted in their culture that they're impossible to suppress, and that it was better to just cave in and regulate it instead, but it's a waste of resources that could be used for stuff that actually works

The justification as for why basic treatment’s access was changed was because the nature of health care largely changed. It stopped being solely the purview of the state. Private actors were allowed in, provincial governments felt they could let budgets slide. You can say that ah they couldn’t have gotten better tech if not for this budgetary change but I mean most government run healthcare programs would disagree.

this makes sense, do you have a source i could look at? especially for the effectiveness of government run healthcare programs

literacy rates were incredibly high

can you source this? because the sources i have put literacy rates at 65% in 1982, which means it was probably even lower during the maoist period

it was even worse for women as about half of them were illiterate

the maoist period improved things for sure, in many ways - the country absolutely started at a miserable state, having to rebuild everything after decades of war and over a century of colonialist plundering, and their synthesis at this time put the country at a relatively decent condition, though still poor and mostly rural

but the progress coming with the reforms has never been seen before, even in the USSR (though i argue it would have, if stalin had been allowed to let the NEP stay in place for longer)

What happened in the reform era was a very definite switch in terms of total political economy

certainly

depoliticization of local life

i'm interested in this, what leads you to say it? this is actually my biggest worry regarding china, have you got any numbers i could look at?

i mean, i obviously don't think ideals can ever lead anyone to socialism, so no matter how much politicization we get it won't do much in the present, but once the necessary material conditions are set you definitely need a supportive, ideologically sound majority to suppress any conservative and/or reactionary forces

It is not enough to have a communist party in government if they do not try and establish some sort of decommodified understanding of economic life imo

i think this depends on the stage of development

you can't have a decommodified understanding of economic life if your material conditions don't allow you to have a sustainable decommodified access to and production of material resources in the first place

or rather, you can, but you're bound to fail at some point

this is why, though i've criticized cuba's reforms before, now i'm very thankful they've done it

Just calling yourself communist hardly fixes things.

the important thing about a communist party is that it is able to impose its will on reactionary forces and to negotiate from a position of strength with the conservative ones

everything else is highly dependent on whatever situation we're in

this is why i mentioned basic healthcare

the system during the mao period managed to do that really well - this is doable, since whenever the material requirements are low enough you can change things through sheer force of will, as the barefoot doctors certainly did and got huge gains from it

but it wasn't universal healthcare - or do you think the barefoot doctors had access to the latest chemotherapy medicines? radiotherapy machines? MRIs? respirators, ICUs, and so on

unless you believe traditional chinese medicine can take care of this stuff, which it obviously can't, there are very real material limitations and ideals can only take us as far as they allow us to

my criticism to the reforms was shutting off free access to basic treatment in the short term, because this, as you said, could have easily been provided - but i haven't read their justifications for it

i know, and i understand the skepticism, but you're thinking of the situation as it stands while ignoring the historical process leading to it

this is why i don't like calling china X or Y, because i think even classifying china as a socialist market economy is a mistake since it gives the impression that there's a final historical point

i don't even have an issue calling it state capitalism - i have done so myself here, and i still do, i think it's a fitting name for this exact point in chinese history - my problem is when these names make people think this means there's no more dialectical movement forward in the country, managed by the party

eh i think this guy is just one of those people who think you can just smash the "activate socialism" button and create a new world out of thin air

it's 5 years though

by multi-tiered i think they mean accessibility to/affordability of different levels of treatment, complexity wise

to use a somewhat large country (brazil) with universal health care (public option called SUS) as an example: we have it on paper, but in practice we lack doctors and it's really, really hard to execute it in "deep brazil" (mainly the countryside) - existing doctors don't want to go there, there's barely any useful infrastructure, etc

another issue is that, when it comes to specialized treatments and exams, where the technology is much more expensive, supply often doesn't meet demand

to make things worse, these technologies also need technical training to be used, so sometimes we have the machines but no one who can properly and safely use them

now, this is for a somewhat large country with a rural population of 14%; imagine a massive country like china, with a rural population of 40% and vastly underdeveloped regions more to the center (as they had been focusing mostly on the coastal cities until recently)

and still they already have 95% coverage for basic treatment, so i guess they're doing ok? i mean, my main point is that i wouldn't criticize this without really knowing in detail what they're doing wrong, because in my country we literally have universal health care in our constitution, but regardless of our printed words our actual conditions haven't allowed us to make this a reality

eh i play on the brazilian server so i'm unironically jokerfied regarding toxicity, i genuinely have a lot of fun watching people rage (and provoking them further until they have a stroke), it's like half the fun for me

in fact whenever people ask me if i miss league the conversation usually goes like

"man i do miss league, especially the interaction with people"

"really? wtf, they're all so toxic"

"exactly! god i miss that, so much fun"