Nytt konservativt program från MWM med Garrido. Namnet föranleder mig att påminna om hur jag förra året avslutade mitt inlägg ‘Millerman och fascismbarriären’: det kan inte finnas någon socialism utan platonism. I andra hälften är Haz gäst.
Escaping the Cave
Jan Olof Bengtsson 
Interesting.
If the Chinese are going to bring these ‘free’ apples to the US markets, then they are still going to have to pay tariffs. So the net position becomes one of loss.
Then there is the issue of how ‘success’ is defined. Does it accept that human slavery and child trafficking/adrenochrome is unacceptable or somehow acceptable?
The CCP Sovereign Wealth Fund, run by Larry Fink, is the second largest in the world (after Vanguard). Who does the value accrue to. Is it the Committee of 205 (plus 171 Alternatives) or to the Chinese citizen as a whole?
When all is exposed, 98% of Washington will fall ~ Julian Assange
The same will apply to all other governing bodies in the world…
This was about escaping the cave. In other words, it gives a somewhat idealized, Platonic view of China. I fully agree – whether or not all of what you say is correct – that there are serious problems with the real cave that is China, and I have myself tried to contribute to calling attention to and working against them in organized political forms. But the basic idea of the system as given here (and in other presentations I have posted), and as free from the imperfections, is an ideologically relevant one, a norm aspired to and an ideal to be realized, to the extent and in the manner in which ideals are at all realizable outside the cave but still in this world. The tariffs are a US question, however.
Thanks for your response and I appreciate the points you raised.
Accept that the Escaping the Cave was the subtitle to the video but Mr Garrido might have taken the obvious preliminary step in informing himself about the industry which he was going to justify his entire political approach upon.
It is much commented upon, in political circles, but we have very little evidence to see apart from image manipulation in the field of making something appear as real when it is in fact false. Here pattern recognition is used to fill in the blanks and this was used by Joseph Stalin’s retoucher to erase Nikola Yezhov (pictured alongside him alongside the White Sea Canal at Leningrad) after the later was executed. The record is not so good with the Communists, but people have short memories. ‘MAGA Communism’ – one has to admit that that takes chutzpah.
https://www.malumatfurus.org/wp-content/uploads/stalin-Nikolai-Yezhov.jpg
Under FDR, the CPUSA peaked at 70,000 members. Last time I looked it had 6,000 members but many did not pay their membership dues. That’s communism…
Finally, to ram this point home, here is an 11 year graph of the projected growth of AI:
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/static/img/research/global-artificial-intelligence-market-size.png
It’s geometrical progression may even turn out to be right! But the 12 five year plans of the Soviet Union, they probably all led to its failure and ultimate demise. Control the media and all one says ‘becomes true’ until the day it collapses.
My concern is with the misuse of Idealist concepts like Plato’s Cave, which was never about wilful ignorance, but still potentially frustrating and even dangerous for the allegorical escapee upon his return. It has become super-relevant today with Facebook posters finding themselves jailed in Britain whilst police fail to pursue crimes against the person or property. Nettleship’s epistemological take and Ferguson’s philosophical one (I relish both because they are different – maybe I am not the only one?)
I am an Idealist myself but I am also an empiricist – see no problem with that. The only remaining worthwhile work left to be done in philosophy is in metaphysics.
Also I see Karl Popper’s Open Society and It’s Enemies (in 2 Volumes: Plato and Hegel and Marx) as presenting yet another Line, if you will.
Others will condemn George Soros for an unimaginable number of things. Few will condemn him for complete misappropriation of the title of his tutor’s Opus Magnum for his charity (not-a-charity). Unforgivable.
Please feel free to criticise.
It was not least Western capitalism that took advantage of cheap labour in China, with its poor working conditions, thus deindustrializing the west and hurting the western working class. This seems no longer to be possible to the same extent, given the Chinese system’s historically unique achievement of xiaokang, general moderate prosperity. Yezhov was executed and erased when Stalin turned against his mass purges and mass executions. The MAGA communists strongly oppose today’s dwindling CPUSA and their claim to represent communism. Strictly speaking, there has never been any communism, understood as a social and political system, only different forms and stages of socialism; in Marxism, it is the name of a future stage of the development of socialism. Apart from that, it has just been a party name, chosen (or resumed from the early period of the work of Marx and Engels) for the sake of differentiation from those social democrats who betrayed the resolutions of the second international by supporting their national governments in WWI. I don’t understand your argument about idealism, and am critical of both Popper and Soros.