People are tempted to bury it in a larger narrative of global complexity, thinking that treating it like a trick question is evidence of sophistication. But what if it's not a trick question?
I'm curious how China currently views Sun Yat-sen's "Three Principles of the People"[0], one of which is Democracy. Does his philosophy attract any attention today?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Principles_of_the_People
/s
There is no need to abandon old principles when you can just use doublethink to make them mean whatever you want them to mean.
If taxation by a non-representative government isn't as much common sense as abolitionism, it's only because of a huge amount of propaganda. It is not even much fundamentally different from slavery.
Yes it is.
What is that large difference? Authoritarian states deal with their people basically as if they were their property. They dispose of their lives at will, they dictate what they think and what they work on, they take their labor at will.
They may not be traded on degrading markets, but that just make people valueless from the point of view of a dictatorship. And I do actually expect people are being mutilated by the Chinese government all the time, we just probably don't hear about it. Again, that what this kind of government normally does.
- China puts a freeze on burning coal, leaving millions of families shivering in the cold http://shanghaiist.com/2017/12/05/coal-ban.php
- China Blowing Major Bubbles In 2017 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2016/12/19/china-bubb...
- In locked-down Xinjiang, China is tracking kitchen knives with QR codes https://www.fastcompany.com/40510238/in-xinjiang-china-some-...
- Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-cre...
- China threatens U.S. Congress for crossing its ‘red line’ on Taiwan https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/10/12...
- Joe Hockey’s stark warning to Australia over Chinese interference http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/joe-hockeys...
- Chinese diplomat in U.S. threatens Taiwan with military attack https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3316709
Love your arguments like this. How about the ban allows everyone to breath fresh air during winter instead of byproducts of coal burning? Omg, few families is going to be shivers. Many more will thank its government for that step. You are welcome to visit Beijing to experience constant smog yourself. I highly doubt you want your children to live in such environment.
Democracies are not immune to that, of course, but the effects are exacerbated when nobody dares to point out obvious flaws like that to avoid embarrassing the leadership.