>>/46360/
> So Maoist China was no dictatorship. Neither was Brazil in 1970, a regime with infinitely less expansive and sophisticated methods of control than what China has today.

This is a good point. Of course I have seen china take some steps towards what many among anti-china commentators and ostensibly impartial technologically-savvy defenders of privacy consider large-scale erosion of privacy and an incipient technocracy. (The impartial techno-savvy privacy defenders will remember to also mention Snowden, Assange, and NSA in the USA, the anti-china commentators will conveniently forget.) And I have seen also other dynamics which I don't understand and consider a mistake (such as the removal of presidential term limits [in russia too!] or the recently tightened regulations around certain kinds of genetic-embryonic applied research which, among other things, can be connected to intelligence enhancement)
However, the idea of a "dictatorship exacting mass obedience" invokes grim images of mass coercion that one doesn't see in china today, on the contrary most people seem hopeful and confident. Some people, already sure of everything, will brush that aside as nothing more than smoke and mirrors and a confirmation of just how terrible and effective the technocratic grip of the govt is. I think that's nonsense. Of course there is propaganda and other means of control in China, as there is in USA, and there is also the often-mentioned greater "collective/individual" trait ratio of east-asian societies to consider. But to dismiss it all with a simplistic comparison to mao or a military junta is, again, a distortion. The world history has not seen before the scale of growth in prosperity that were seen in china during the last 40 years. Are they just "pulling a NEP" of massive proportions? I don't know about internal chinese politics, but from outside, I prefer to take the more hopeful view. A shift in global power dynamics away from the US hegemony with a universalist degenerate ideology can only be good for the world

 >>/46362/
 >>/46363/
Meh. I don't know what to answer here. I answered jokingly with those ripped flags and now seems you didn't like it, I answered seriously by differentiating between "knowdledge" and things you might see in dreams and that also upsets you? I guess, there's no pleasing some people