JEFF J. BROWN—It’s too easy for people like Engdahl to think that China is just like the United States or Europe, and it’s not. The land is all people-owned. The banks are all people-owned. The insurance companies are all people-owned. Much of the large scale industry is all people-owned. So plus you have a much more honest, caring government that’s actually trying to help the people instead of trying to kill it [or bamboozle it]. It’s just also wrongheaded.
CHINA
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GODFREE ROBERTS—His Rural Cooperative Medical System trained Barefoot Doctors – who lived in their villages all their lives and were available day and night – to administer vaccinations, demonstrate correct handling of pesticides, introduce new sanitation methods and, by teaching nutrition and child care, cut infant and maternal mortality in half. Urban doctors, now required to tour the countryside, provided free treatment and trained promising barefoot doctors at urban hospitals. By the end of 1976, every village in China had a clinic and the death rate had fallen by 18%.
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The Successful Cultural Revolution (Part 1)
33 minutes readGODFREE ROBERTS—Social discontent – rooted in workers’ material lives – was real. Workers’ productivity had increased by 250% since 1957 and the cost of living had increased by 10% but their incomes were 5% lower. Their protests about wages, benefits and work conditions expressed a yearning for human dignity and democratic control over socioeconomic life. One temporary worker recalled, “We were simply inferior. In the factory, if people didn’t know your name, they would just call you linshi gong [temporary worker], which sounded contemptuous. Therefore the word linshi gong was a taboo among us. We would rather call one another lin xiong or ‘temporary brothers’”.
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WEI LING CHUA—Recently, a number of street interviews were conducted in Taiwan province asking young Taiwanese “Do you know the relationship between the Republic of China and Taiwan?”, the reply shocked the interviewer as the majority of the youth in Taiwan didn’t even know their political entity’s official name is the Republic of China (ROC), and that the ROC’s constitution regards the mainland of China and Taiwan being parts of the ROC sovereign territory.
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In A World Ruled By Propaganda, A Sane Worldview Will Necessarily Be A Fringe Worldview
17 minutes readCAITLIN JOHNSTONE—It’s a mistake not only because assuming that the center position must be the best one is a type of fallacious reasoning known as the middle ground fallacy (the correct position between “Drink a gallon of bleach daily for good health” and “Drink zero bleach daily for good health” is not “Drink half a gallon of bleach daily for good health”); it’s also a mistake because the entire framing arises from a situation that has been artificially engineered by the powerful.