3 ms·

Not really. I mean compared to 70 years ago. Its not really a question. The difference in living standard now compared to 70 years ago it gigantic. Even to 40

Not really. I mean compared to 70 years ago. Its not really a question. The difference in living standard now compared to 70 years ago it gigantic. Even to 40 years ago. This is just objectively true for the waste, waste majority of the population.

dofm 3mo ago
These improvements include installing suicide nets at factories making products for foreigners using overworked labour living in dormitories, imprisoning two million people for a decade because they are the wrong kind of religious, suppressing democracy protests, essentially criminalising the use of pictures of Winnie The Pooh for political satire, and burying forever the true scale of how many people died in the epidemic stage of COVID transmission by simply not counting the potentially millions of people who died unable to leave their homes.
- panick21_ 3mo ago
  Yeah and 70 years ago they were living in socialist utopia where honey flowed from trees. Do you have any notion what China used to be like? You need to get a grip and get some perspective on what China is like for most people. You can be critical of current day China without losing your brain.
  - dofm 3mo ago
    You could be considerably less rude. > Do you have any notion what China used to be like? Try not to be so patronising. My observation, simply, is that in fixing the old centrally-imposed cruelties, they've created new ones. The current improved situation is predicated on the new cruelties. It is on any philosophical level incorrect to suggest things are better for everyone when they have become deliberately and systematically worse (actually quite recently) for particular underclasses. It is not, in fact, better for the majority if society mistreats the minority; it is an indication of a sickness in "progress" if it invents a new minority to mistreat because progress is predicated on new centrally-managed fears.
    - panick21_ 3mo ago
      But this is not the debate, the topic is 'can society be improved' not 'can society be made utopian'. Nobody said 'China is not the perfect society'. The question is 'has it improved' and by literally every possible metric, literally any metric or measure or estimate of 'cruelties' has improved. That does not mean non exist now. But you are drawing a binary between 'cruelties' existing or not and judging by that if it has improved. That is just a totally unreasonable. By your metric no society has ever actually improved, because almost every improvement in any society ever made some people worse of as well. It just sound out of touch with observed reality even if you can make sense of it with some philosophical mental gymnastics. But I much rather be a delivery driver in contemporary China compared to collectivist farm laborer 60 years ago. Now there is an underclass that is some part of the population before the was a literal slave class that was the overwhelming majority of the population. The different in cruelty and exploitation is not even in the same universe. The amount of starvation, slave conditions, massive famines, the cultural revolution, these are some of the most horrible things that happened in human history. I fear your approach is downplaying some of the largest scale human suffering ever inflicted on a population. I'm all for being critical of China and some of their policies. But if the question is 'has society been improved' the only reasonably answer is 'yes, by a lot'. You can maybe justify this by some philosophical reasoning, fine, but what I interpret this is as is virtue signaling, hence I somewhat rude.

dofm 3mo ago

These improvements include installing suicide nets at factories making products for foreigners using overworked labour living in dormitories, imprisoning two million people for a decade because they are the wrong kind of religious, suppressing democracy protests, essentially criminalising the use of pictures of Winnie The Pooh for political satire, and burying forever the true scale of how many people died in the epidemic stage of COVID transmission by simply not counting the potentially millions of people who died unable to leave their homes.

panick21_ 3mo ago
Yeah and 70 years ago they were living in socialist utopia where honey flowed from trees. Do you have any notion what China used to be like? You need to get a grip and get some perspective on what China is like for most people. You can be critical of current day China without losing your brain.
- dofm 3mo ago
  You could be considerably less rude. > Do you have any notion what China used to be like? Try not to be so patronising. My observation, simply, is that in fixing the old centrally-imposed cruelties, they've created new ones. The current improved situation is predicated on the new cruelties. It is on any philosophical level incorrect to suggest things are better for everyone when they have become deliberately and systematically worse (actually quite recently) for particular underclasses. It is not, in fact, better for the majority if society mistreats the minority; it is an indication of a sickness in "progress" if it invents a new minority to mistreat because progress is predicated on new centrally-managed fears.
  - panick21_ 3mo ago
    But this is not the debate, the topic is 'can society be improved' not 'can society be made utopian'. Nobody said 'China is not the perfect society'. The question is 'has it improved' and by literally every possible metric, literally any metric or measure or estimate of 'cruelties' has improved. That does not mean non exist now. But you are drawing a binary between 'cruelties' existing or not and judging by that if it has improved. That is just a totally unreasonable. By your metric no society has ever actually improved, because almost every improvement in any society ever made some people worse of as well. It just sound out of touch with observed reality even if you can make sense of it with some philosophical mental gymnastics. But I much rather be a delivery driver in contemporary China compared to collectivist farm laborer 60 years ago. Now there is an underclass that is some part of the population before the was a literal slave class that was the overwhelming majority of the population. The different in cruelty and exploitation is not even in the same universe. The amount of starvation, slave conditions, massive famines, the cultural revolution, these are some of the most horrible things that happened in human history. I fear your approach is downplaying some of the largest scale human suffering ever inflicted on a population. I'm all for being critical of China and some of their policies. But if the question is 'has society been improved' the only reasonably answer is 'yes, by a lot'. You can maybe justify this by some philosophical reasoning, fine, but what I interpret this is as is virtue signaling, hence I somewhat rude.