Making simple connections

About six weeks ago I asked How would you like to help fix the Internet? It was an open invitation to help develop a cheap millisecond-precision time source for instrumented routers, so we can do delay tomography on the Internet and measure the bufferbloat problem.

The discussion thread on that post was lively, but eventually moved to a thumbgps project mailing list out of public view. I’m going to summarize what has gone on here because parts of it are very interesting in a “Wow…it really is the 21st century!” sort of way, and illustrate that there can be a lot of power in making simple connections.

My call went out on 1 March. Dave Täht launched the mailing list on 10 March. Early discussion consisted mainly of a lot of kicking around of concept designs for time hardware. While this was going on, I was holding on to the idea of a simple mod to one of the existing cheap-ass GPS designs, just wiring the 1PPS pin from the GPS to DCD or RI on the serial-to-USB adapter chip and getting PPS with at worst one USB polling interval’s worth of jitter. There’s one simple connection for you

On 15 Mar I discovered alibaba.com. This is a site that make connections in mainland China through which you can chat in real time with trade reps from Chinese electronics fabricators. Turns out these guys are constantly looking for OEM/ODM business, and I was able to interest two different companies that already make cheap GPSes for export – UniTraq and NaviSys.

During the following week I exchanged email with these companies describing in detail the required single-trace hardware mod, explaining exactly how and why I believe it would work, and what the potential market is. I explained all the relevant obscure technicalia – 1PPS, handshake input pins on USB-to-serial adaptors, USB notification events, effects of polling on latency.

It helped that on 16 Mar one of the thumbgps guys breadboarded a test setup and reported measured jitter of 300μs with 1PPS from a Garmin 18 feeding a common serial-to-USB chip, the FTDI SIO. OK, yes, you can in fact crowdsource some of the critical test engineering on a project like this.

And the people in Shenzhen went for it – started modding prototypes and reporting progress.

Now I want to pause for a moment so you can really take this in. In effect, I became the lead designer on a new electronics product by email. Just me. No corporate-backing, no million-dollar development budget, one guy saying “Hey, if you connect this to that, cool things will happen!” – negotiating directly with people on the other side of the planet who’ll never meet me face to face. And it’s more interesting because I’m not famous to these guys and not even a hardware geek.

All that SF/future-shock speculation about disaggregated manufacturing, contract and trust networks replacing corporations, Coasian effects disappearing as communications get cheaper? It’s here. Now. I’m living it. I’m using it.

So, the current state of play is that both companies are working on minor technical glitches. One outfit used a USB-to-serial adaptor, the CP2101, that turned out to be unusable for our purposes when I tested the engineering samples. The chip vendor persistently refused to release enough interfacing info to allow the open-source Linux driver to wait on a change in the state of an emulated handshake line. Now they’ve effectively EOLed the chip. We’re going to have to move to something like a PL2303.

The other design, which does use a PL2303, has been tested with GPSD in China and works – they emailed me the test logs. But they did it with a patch wire, and there’s some internal connector issue they have to work out for the production design.

These are solvable problems. The important point is that (a) the basic concept of adding one PCB trace to pass out 1PPS over USB has been shown to work to sub-1ms accuracy, and (b) the design and communication process is working. Nothing but a little elbow grease and routine product engineering stands between where we are now and multiple-source availability of 1ms-accuracy time sources for about $30 each quantity 100.

Connections are powerful things. This is a novel capability, and a dramatic improvement in the price-performance ratio of existing precision-time sources as finished products that can be deployed immediately. From one PCB trace! Which the GPS vendors could have added years ago if they had known just a little more about their chipsets.

Sometimes the most important connection of all is just knowing that a given thing is possible.

155 comments

  1. Someone told me that the most important in this new world is not to be an expert, but the capacity of being at a node or at a specific cross, for people in charge, at the right time.

    What are your feelings

    1. >And, Eric, you claim not to be a hardware geek…

      I’m not a hardware geek. That’s one reason this story is remarkable. Hm. Might deserve an edit….

      You know what, though? I’m finding that I enjoy the hell out of whole-systems engineering, the kind of thing where you have to think about software and hardware and economics and deployment/sustainability issues and optimize globally over everything. Either I have a knack for this or my first fling at it is having truly spectacular good luck.

  2. > I’m finding that I enjoy the hell out of whole-systems engineering, the kind of thing where you have to think about software and hardware and economics and deployment/sustainability issues and optimize globally over everything. Either I have a knack for this or my first fling at it is having truly spectacular good luck.

    Isn’t this what you were doing when you wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar? I’m just saying.

    Yours,
    Tom

    1. >Isn’t this what you were doing when you wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar? I’m just saying.

      Hm. Yes, in a sense. But this is more hands-on – specific goals, measurable performance targets, well-defined victory conditions. And actual hardware design.

  3. “I’m finding that I enjoy the hell out of whole-systems engineering, the kind of thing where you have to think about software and hardware and economics and deployment/sustainability issues and optimize globally over everything. Either I have a knack for this or my first fling at it is having truly spectacular good luck.”

    “…this is more hands-on – specific goals, measurable performance targets, well-defined victory conditions.”

    You were lucky because of the second quote. You can get caught up in a really nebulous project with no clear end to it – no fun at all. So long as you only volunteer to do projects that you have explored carefully beforehand, your ‘luck’ will continue. Running your ideas through the readers of this blog would be a big part of it; they can talk you out of running into potential tarpits.

  4. Very impressive story. Both in terms of hardware development and social-connection development.

  5. You may find John Robb’s work on fostering what you are experiencing of interest. His foray into Resilient Communities is starting to bear fruit.

    I bring this up because of his latest post is on a pretty awesome whole-systems engineering project you and your readers will probably find fascinating.

    http://www.resilientcommunities.com/extreme-do-it-yourself-resilience-a-home-scale-hydro-electric-system/

    Best of luck on your project. I enjoy reading your blog.

  6. > multiple-source availability of 1?s-accuracy time sources for about $30 each quantity 100.

    Is that really 1us accuracy? I thought it was 1ms… or have I lost something?

    1. >So where can I order 100?

      You can’t yet. We’re still debugging the designs. But I expect you’ll be able to in 60 days or so.

  7. What is your ethical stance of dealing with Chinese companies? My gut instinct would be don’t deal with companies from countries where the government is 1) evil 2) not separated from the private sphere because you are objectively supporting their government. However one could also make a good case that it helps undermining the system. Not sure. At any rate at least make sure the Chinese government can’t put some sort of spying functionality into it…

    1. >What is your ethical stance of dealing with Chinese companies?

      I think the ethics of dealing with a Chinese company depends on the extent to which it is individually entangled with the Chinese government. I won’t knowingly do business with a state-owned company of any government, but particular caution is called for when the government is Communist and therefore especially evil.

  8. @Thierry

    But a good node must be an expert. A good example is an analyst who translates business requirements from managers to specs to programmers. He must understand both business and programming although perhaps neither at the specialist level.

    A good node has a moderate level of expertise in multiple fields, while the endpoints are high level specialists of one field.

    Yes, it is dangerous to be a narrow specialist. I always recommend to young people to major in something and then minor in programming. There won’t be such a thing as “generic programmer” in the future, domain knowledge will be key.

    In fact it is true even now. In my job I cannot hire programmers who can’t think like an accountant, it would mean too much communication overhead. However they don’t necessarily need to have a very deep CS knowledge, we don’t write genetic algorithms and suchlike, even recursion or a sorting algorithm is very, very rare. Probably I could easier teach a good acccountant to code accounting software than a generic programmer.

  9. @shenpen
    “What is your ethical stance of dealing with Chinese companies?”

    I do not know about esr, but I think all people have a right to earn a living by working. People are not to be equated with their government.

  10. I do not know about esr, but I think all people have a right to earn a living by working. People are not to be equated with their government.

    And there are some governments where thinking that is a very serious, possibly very *dangerous* error.

  11. @Greg
    “And there are some governments where thinking that is a very serious, possibly very *dangerous* error.”

    This is so vague, it will always be true, and therefore uninformative. On the other hand, the whole point of a government is that it differs from the people that are governed.

    A random Chinese factory worker will simply work for a living, making things others can buy. She is neither a serf without rights nor a dangerous tool of her government.

    In contrast, a random North Korean factory worker is living under serfdom, has no rights at all and will only have contact with the outside world when she is used as a dangerous tool for her government.

    But you know the difference if you care.

  12. @Winter: Remember that you were the one making the universal claim. Thank you for supporting my correction and proving your initial claim wrong.

    1. >Can the current Chinese government be reasonably described as Communist? It looks to me like a generic authoritarian government.

      They think they’re Communists. They talk like Communists. They act like Communists, though they’ve made some limited concessions to capitalist economics – remember how much of the economy is still state-owned, and that nothing in Chinese law or institutions prevents them from smashing their private sector the way Castro did after a similar period of experimentation.

  13. Esr, I’m a physicist by training who’s learning hardware quickly in my career, so my network understanding is not expertise. However, my closest colleague here is big in the electro-optical networking field. He doesn’t understand what problem you’re trying to solve, and neither do I. I followed that link, and the explanation of specifically what problem exists wasn’t defined.

    What is this bufferbloat problem?

    My buddy here pointed to a problem quite apart from what you seem to be trying to diagnose/solve. He said that the core issue with network delays is the horrendous regional topology designs, where it can take anywhere from 6-10 hops to get to anything resembling a core router in your own area.

  14. You could avoid all the trouble of going to China by looking at something like the Lassen IQ. It has a CMOS TTL 1PPS output and it has a programmable delay on that signal to handle cable delay in transmission of the pulse to the host. It would be pretty trivial to hook that up with a small number of discrete components so that it could be plugged into the audio jack of a computer and use the audio input as the time signal.

    A modern sound card can sample us rates so you should be able to pick up the signal without too much jitter.

  15. > They think they’re Communists. They talk like Communists.

    Thomas P. Barnett I think once describe China as “one part Mao and two parts the Sopranos”.

  16. Hello, ESR. This is mainly related to other posts but sorta kinda related to this one. I sent the donation for the GWG/Penguicon event. Please use what you need, and whatever is left over (this is where its sorta related) please use for your open source endeavors, or as you see fit.

    I hope to make a more substantial contribution in the future. Alas, I have been off the grid prepping for the upcoming and will be off the grid again for the next ??? who knows…

    I’ll look forward to catching up on your work in my downtime, this is one project that I intend to follow closely.

  17. “nothing in Chinese law or institutions prevents them from smashing their private sector the way Castro did after a similar period of experimentation.”

    I doubt this was true at any period in China’s long history, except for the greater effectiveness with which a modern state can suppress people. So it doesn’t contribute to “Communist” vs “generic authoritarian”, which China has been for much of recorded history, the only difference now being they don’t have someone they call the Emperor.

  18. sorry if I am being dense – but which is the market possibility that got the chinese manufacturers’ interest? was it only the 1000 or so chips you need for the bufferfloat project?

    1. >which is the market possibility that got the chinese manufacturers’ interest? was it only the 1000 or so chips you need for the bufferfloat project?

      Stratum 1 NTP servers are a good start. You only need 1ms accuracy for those. Another possibility that’s been pointed out to me is nav systems for UAVs, which move fast enough that 1-second accuracy is not sufficient.

  19. @federico: Maybe they think it opens up new markets for their product – using GPS for precision timing is not new, though AIUI it is typically done with equipment more sophisticated than a USB dongle. It also lets them advertise greater time accuracy than their competitors.

  20. I don’t want 100 of ’em for $30, but I’d actually buy 1 of ’em for $40 just to have an awesome local time source, for no very GOOD reason.

    (So someone should do that, when they’re ready.)

  21. Another possibility that’s been pointed out to me is nav systems for UAVs, which move fast enough that 1-second accuracy is not sufficient.

    I was tempted to point out that this is a dual-use technology. You’re not doing anything that military-grade GPS hardware can’t, but you’re adding militarily useful capabilities to cheap unrestricted commodity hardware.

  22. > My gut instinct would be don’t deal with companies from countries where the government is 1) evil 2) not separated from the private sphere because you are objectively supporting their government.

    No one seemed to worry about this when China was actually communist and was engaged in mass murder and artificial famine. No one seemed to worry about this back when everything China exported was made by slave labor working under the continual threat of capricious execution. But now that they are turning capitalist, and are in some important ways already more capitalist and more free than the US, suddenly lots and lots of people are terribly sensitive about dealing with evil.

    China started turning capitalist, started permitting free labor in place of terrorized slave labor, in 1980. Before 1980, you will not find one person, not one single person, worrying about the fact that back then every single thing that China made, was made by slaves.

    1. >Before 1980, you will not find one person, not one single person, worrying about the fact that back then every single thing that China made, was made by slaves.

      Before 1980, China was not a significant trade partner of the developed world. The slave labor issue only became significant because of partial liberalization.

      In fact, some people were concerned about the slave-labor input to Chinese products back then; I was already aware of the issue. But with trade volume so low there wasn’t any leverage.

  23. The chip vendor persistently refused to release enough interfacing info to allow the open-source Linux driver to wait on a change in the state of an emulated handshake line. Now they’ve effectively EOLed the chip. We’re going to have to move to something like a PL2303.

    My first thought was… i remember a similar scenario being talked about in some essay that some guy wrote but this is a deeper point than “some geeks that may be influential for corporate server purchasing somewhere might ignore you”. This case is closer to “Corporation can’t get what it needs to develop a product so switches to your competitor because they will”.

  24. @JAD You seem to like making elaborate theories about what you presume people actually believe and how they would actually react in various situations.

    Did anyone who is actually present in this blog’s comment section, or ESR himself, actually find themselves in a position to comment on this issue before 1980, and what did they say?

  25. P.S. I’ll note that your assertion seems to be that anti-communism was invented after 1980 and did not exist in any form prior to that year.

  26. JAD:

    “no one cared” back then because very of what was being made in China was being exported to the US. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s it was Japan that was going to kick our manufacturing ass. That shifted to Taiwan in the late 70s and early 80s for small and electronic shit. Then S. Korea got in on the act to a small degree.

    Then as China moved from a non-productive communist model to a more fascist/mercantilist approach (the notion that China is capitalist is fucking loonier than you usually get. There is no such animal as “state capitalism”. It’s called “fascism” and the ONLY reason it isn’t is that the fucking socialists don’t want to admit that Fascism has an economic component).

    When China was a backwards ass country filled with peasants and maoists in pajamas there was no reason to worry about them. They exported very little we wanted, and what little they did was really useful.

    Now, thanks to three decades of spying and buying (thanks again Clinton you traitorous fuck) they are no longer so backwards. They are now in a state where either:

    1) They are feeling their oats and think they have the testicles to run hegemonic over the Asian sphere.
    or
    2) Realize that their economy can stay viable by expansion.

    That is not an xor.

    So now they’re hostile. They’re knocking on every computer the can find looking to get in and see if there’s anything useful. They’re stealing, bribing and selling weapons to some real fuckheads (and yes, we did that in the past. It wasn’t a good idea, but at least the fuckhead we sold it to weren’t religious nuts bent on world domination. At the time anyway).

    That’s about the limit of what I can say, but frankly I try *really* hard to avoid spending money that finds it’s way back to China. I’d do the same thing with Russia, but other than Vodka, Guns and Caviar they don’t export much our way anyway.

  27. @JAD
    “Before 1980, you will not find one person, not one single person, worrying about the fact that back then every single thing that China made, was made by slaves.”

    Simon Leys
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Ryckmans

    I think serfdom is historically a better characterization, or in modern terms, forced labor.

    @esr
    “They think they’re Communists. They talk like Communists. They act like Communists,”

    A marvelous window into your mind and your heroic efforts to understand the political development of 1.5 Billion people.

    There still seem to be people in the world who wonder why USA foreign policy is so destructive to USA interests. I think this quote can help them to understand that USA citizen simply do not take other people’s opinions and problems seriously.

    1. >A marvelous window into your mind and your heroic efforts to understand the political development of 1.5 Billion people.

      Who said anything about the Chinese people? Nancy’s question was about the Chinese government.

  28. @esr
    “Who said anything about the Chinese people? Nancy’s question was about the Chinese government.”

    The Chinese Government is not a invasive force like the Manchus that rule by gunpoint. Communist party membership was 80,269,000 in 2010. That is around 5% of the population. You might have noticed that there is hardly a Chinese left that actually believes that there is a correspondence between what their government tells them and what their government actually thinks and does.

    It trust their insights more than yours.

  29. They think they’re Communists.

    They say they’re Communists.

    They talk like Communists.

    Sometimes, but not with any great energy or conviction. They also say things that are utter blasphemy under traditional Communist doctrine.

    They act like Communists, though they’ve made some limited concessions to capitalist economics…

    The limits on these concessions are extremely broad. China’s economy is well over 50% private, de facto if not de jure. (The latter remains a potential problem.) The Chinese government not only acknowledged this change, it welcomed and encouraged it. China now has flagship capitalist institutions operating on a large-scale.

    The change has gone far beyond the restricted sandboxing in Cuba; it would take an internal revolution to undo it.

    There is another point: China, AFAICT, has abandoned all efforts to preach Communism elsewhere in the world. This is unlike Cuba, which remains deeply enmeshed with red-socialist (i.e. quaisi-Communist) governments throughout Latin America.

  30. Communist party membership was 80,269,000 in 2010. That is around 5% of the population.

    Am I missing something. The CP was always a small slice of the
    population. That does not curb their appetites or behavior.
    Is the point China is ethically and culturally diverse?
    So what! The Communists run the show (at gunpoint if required).

  31. Random832 on Saturday, April 14 2012 at 5:15 am said:
    > @JAD You seem to like making elaborate theories about what you presume people actually believe and how they would actually react in various situations.

    Because you piously stick to the official line and say what you are supposed to say, like a robot. Since the official line is inconsistent, self contradictory, and apt to change abruptly from time to time, I know that you are inconsistent, self contradictory, and changed your line – that what you say now is not what you said then.

    > Did anyone who is actually present in this blog’s comment section, or ESR himself, actually find themselves in a position to comment on this issue before 1980, and what did they say?

    Well actually I was back then, and I said nothing because I was in a more vulnerable position then that I was now, and if back then, I had said then that China was evil, because employing mass murder and artificial famine, and anyone dealing with them was either evil or in danger of being contaminated by the urgent need to rationalize and justify evil, this would have had bad consequences for my career.

    But now that China is no longer employing mass murder and artificial famine, and is nearly as capitalist as the USA, in some important ways more capitalist, you lot react with the rage of jilted lover.

    Back when China was applying mass murder and artificial famine, everyone, every single person who dared speak up, was in total agreement that any contact with China was a good thing and would improve both their attitude and ours.

  32. @JAD
    > > “Before 1980, you will not find one person, not one single person, worrying about the fact that back then every single thing that China made, was made by slaves.”

    Winter on Saturday, April 14 2012 at 10:24 am said:
    > Simon Leys
    > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Ryckmans

    This link fails to show someone worrying about the fact that everything made in China, was made by slaves, fails to show someone suggesting that contact with China, back in the days when it was a totalitarian terror state based on slave labor, might be wicked or corrupting.

    While he was, in 1978 so daring politically incorrect as to comment that that China was then a totalitarian state, he some how neglects to mention any of the more conspicuously and horrifying things that made it a totalitarian terror state, and he certainly did not suggest that any contact with China was likely to be corrupting, certainly did not suggest that China should be boycotted.

    Just as the poster girls for women doing science reveal that women cannot do science, your example reveals the abrupt reversal of attitudes to china.

    The abrupt and dramatic reversal reveals that you guys loved the terror, slavery, mass murder, and artificial famine, and hate the capitalism, hate the end of slavery, mass murder, and artificial famine. Now that China has ceased to be a totalitarian terror state, now its government, like that of white South Africa, needs to be overthrown.

  33. > the notion that China is capitalist is fucking loonier than you usually get.

    Most of China’s internal economy, banks, finance, real estate development, services and low tech goods for internal consumption, stuff like that, is socialist or state capitalist. However its export/import economy is largely run by overseas chinese through vpns and skype, cypherpunk style, and is a lot more capitalist and free market than the US economy. Any Chinese company you cut a deal with is probably owned by persons unknown and registered on some island like Bermuda. That is real capitalism all right, and what pisses people off is not the socialism, but the capitalism, because they were not in the slightest pissed back before 1980 when China was 100% socialist.

  34. esr on Friday, April 13 2012 at 8:30 am said:
    > but particular caution is called for when the government is Communist and therefore especially evil.

    “It is glorious to get rich” (Not an actual quote, but a pithy paraphrase that is widely quoted.)

    I would say that makes them less evil than our political class. Can you imagine one of our political class saying something similar?

    While China overall still has a lot of socialism, Shanghai is markedly more capitalist than the west. Indeed the communists were never entirely successful in suppressing capitalism in Shanghai. As soon as the lid came off, capitalism in Shanghai popped out from underground.

    The Chinese communists are not so much denationalizing socialist industry, as allowing capitalism to outgrow it. The socialist dinosaurs remain but are being rendered irrelevant.

    Our political class are not so much nationalizing industry, as preventing capitalism from growing while the state sector grows.

    China should be overall markedly more capitalist than the west in next decade or so, as the west becomes markedly less capitalist, and China markedly more capitalist.

  35. > but frankly I try *really* hard to avoid spending money that finds it’s way back to China. I’d do the same thing with Russia, but other than Vodka, Guns and Caviar they don’t export much our way anyway.

    All your criticisms of today’s China were a lot more true of yesterday’s China (we fought an actual shooting war with yesterday’s China, remember) and are even more true of the former Soviet Union, (more proxy wars than I can shake a stick at) yet no one was worried about avoiding trade with the Soviet Union. More to the point, no own wanted to overthrow the Soviet Union or yesterday’s China the way they wanted to overthrow yesterday’s South Africa or today’s China.

  36. “yet no one was worried about avoiding trade with the Soviet Union.” – What was the actual volume of trade with them, or with China prior to 1980? Actions speak at least as loud as words, and while it’s possible they didn’t have anything we wanted, it’s equally possible that people chose not to trade with them because of these factors. (And, even if it’s just that they didn’t have anything we wanted…. well, we can’t avoid trading with them if we weren’t going to trade with them anyway)

  37. Random832 on Saturday, April 14 2012 at 5:17 am said:
    > P.S. I’ll note that your assertion seems to be that anti-communism was invented after 1980 and did not exist in any form prior to that year.

    From 1954 to the fall of the Soviet Union, anti-communism was as unspeakable as pointing out the differences between whites and blacks, or between men and women, is today.

    After 1980 or thereabouts, when China began to abandon communism, Western intellectuals attacked China with the rage of a jilted lover

    After the fall of the Soviet Union, those attacking China suddenly started saying they were doing so out of anticommunism – a claim that is clearly false.

    It is hard to say what extent China is still communist. All the old communist institutions are still there and are as communist as ever, but are being rendered increasingly irrelevant by the shiny new high tech China which is hard core capitalist with a strong touch of cypherpunk capitalism,

    What you guys attack, however, is not the old communist institutions, but the shiny new hard core capitalist high tech China that makes cool stuff at low prices and celebrates Christmas day with a shopping extravaganza and creches in the store windows. You attack not communist Peking but capitalist Shanghai.

  38. > What was the actual volume of trade with them, or with China prior to 1980?

    According to Wikiepedia (a highly unreliable source on politically sensitive issues):
    “In the 1980s, the Soviet Union needed considerable sums of hard currency to pay for food and capital goods imports and to support client states. What the country could not earn from exports or gold sales it borrowed through its banks in London, Frankfurt, Vienna, Paris, and Luxembourg. Large grain imports pushed the Soviet debt quite high in 1981. Better harvests and lower import requirements redressed this imbalance in subsequent years. By late 1985, however, a decrease in oil revenues nearly returned the Soviet debt to its 1981 level. At the end of that same year the Soviet Union owed US$31 billion (gross) to Western creditors, mostly commercial banks and other private sources.[1]”

    “In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union attempted to reduce its hard-currency debt by decreasing imports from the West and increasing oil and gas exports to the West. It also sought increased participation in international markets and organizations. In 1987 the Soviet Union formally requested observer status in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and in 1988 signed a normalization agreement with the European Economic Community.”

    I recall it being frequently and loudly affirmed that selling stuff to the Soviet Union and lending money to the Soviet Union was a good thing – indeed, so frequently and loudly as to create a suspicion that it was not really believed.

    In particular, I recall that the Normalization agreement with the EEC was totally and completely one sided in the Soviet Union’s favor, and it was argued that this was fine, because any economic contact with the Soviet Union would morally improve both sides, which is pretty much the reverse of what one hears about economic contacts with today’s China.

  39. > From 1954 to the fall of the Soviet Union, anti-communism was as unspeakable as

    This seems absurd unless I assume there is an unspoken “among academic intellectuals” somewhere in there.

  40. > > From 1954 to the fall of the Soviet Union, anti-communism was as unspeakable as pointing out the differences between whites and blacks, or between men and women, is today.

    Random832 on Saturday, April 14 2012 at 10:13 pm said:
    > This seems absurd unless I assume there is an unspoken “among academic intellectuals” somewhere in there.

    And among anyone who wanted a job in the mass media or in Hollywood. From 1954 till Ronald Reagan’s presidential run, there were no overtly pro capitalist anti communist politicians in the US, though Goldwater was accused of being anti communist and denied it.

    There was some anti capitalist left wing anti communism, indeed Obama’s parents were CIA sponsored left anti communists, but left anti communism was scarcely distinguishable from left communism, and the same people, for example Obama’s mother, casually switched paymasters from the Soviet Union to the CIA and sometimes back again. Indeed, often left anticommunism (the only politically acceptable form of anti communism) was left communism – was the people that Stalin had purged because he was being outflanked to the left. Left anti communists were often communists who were left of Stalin.

  41. @batguano
    “Am I missing something. The CP was always a small slice of the population.”

    Not something, you missed everything. In every totalitarian country, “communist” or not, a large fraction of the population must be recruited to collaborate. Both the Soviet Union and China always had communist membership around 5%. With additional, larger, parts of the population trying to get in in a kind of apprenticeship.

    @batguano
    “That does not curb their appetites or behavior.”

    The point of “totalitarian” is to get hold of almost all resources and production of the population.

    @batguano
    “Is the point China is ethically and culturally diverse?”

    It isn’t. Not to the extend that the USA or Europe are diverse.

    @batguan0
    “So what! The Communists run the show (at gunpoint if required).”

    They don’t. You will not see guns pointing in China. You will see surprisingly few armed or uniformed personnel outside sensitive places, eg, Tian An Men or train stations. And even there they pretend to do security checks.

    The bureaucracy runs the show. And they do it like every bureaucracy, by order. And if you ask around, order seems to be what the Chinese want most in life. Talk to some older Chinese from the mainland, and you will quickly learn why they fear chaos more than everything else.

    @JAD
    “This link fails to show someone worrying about the fact that everything made in China, was made by slaves, fails to show someone suggesting that contact with China, back in the days when it was a totalitarian terror state based on slave labor, might be wicked or corrupting.”

    When you do not buy stuff from mainland China, it is pointless to specifically worry about forced labor camps in China. Pre 1980, the Chinese had little they could sell to the West. All “Chinese” stuff came from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

    After the death of Mao in 1976, we were inundated with stories about the civil war that was called the cultural revolution, and books describing the totalitarian nature of China. Simon Leys published about the totalitarian nature of China and the injustices done to the Chinese people.

    The full content of the declaration of Li Yi Zhe on the Democracy Wall in 1978 was published in the West in 1977 (I still have the book)
    https://www.abebooks.co.uk/China-Gegen-Wen-Zhe-Helmut-Opletal/2929443790/bd

    You might have lived in a parochial bubble, but do not accuse others to have done the same.

  42. @JAD
    “Indeed, often left anticommunism (the only politically acceptable form of anti communism) was left communism”

    Either you were a communist, or a crypto-communist.

    You could have worked for Joseph McCarthy.

  43. “The full content of the declaration of Li Yi Zhe on the Democracy Wall in 1978 was published in the West in 1977 (I still have the book)”

    Sorry, got the dates mixed up in the edit. The Democracy Wall was published by Wei Jingsheng. Li Yizhe posted in 1974. Also on a poster, but that is not the same.

  44. > After the death of Mao in 1976, we were inundated with stories about the civil war that was called the cultural revolution, and books describing the totalitarian nature of China. Simon Leys published about the totalitarian nature of China and the injustices done to the Chinese people.

    “inundated”? I don’t think so. There was a great pile of publicity about the democracy wall, but to this day, who has heard of what Jasper Becker called the “hungry ghosts” famine?

    But, more to the point, not withstanding all the noise about “democracy wall”, back then no one doubted that trade with China was good, that contacts with China were good. No one suggested, or would have dared suggest, that contacts were apt to encourage evil and corrupt those making the contacts.

    The companies that esr has contacted are most likely owned by entities registered in some place far from china, and their true owners and true managers hard to find. That is capitalism that he is being urged to boycott, not socialism.

    1. >The companies that esr has contacted are most likely owned by entities registered in some place far from china, and their true owners and true managers hard to find.

      I am certain that one of these companies is run by Taiwanese – there’s no problem tracing country of registration and beneficial ownership in this case. The other may be local to Shenzhen or also (though less obviously) Taiwanese-run.

  45. @JAD
    > > “Indeed, often left anticommunism (the only politically acceptable form of anti communism) was left communism”

    Winter on Sunday, April 15 2012 at 4:02 am said:
    > You could have worked for Joseph McCarthy.

    Back before the fall of the Soviet Union, if you were a left communist you said that the liquidation of the kulaks did not happen, but the peasants had it coming to them anyway. If you were a left anti communist, you said that the liquidation of the kulaks was a politically motivated exaggeration, and regretted that the stubbornly reactionary character of the peasantry provoked excessively vigorous communist reforms.

  46. @JAD
    You must have lived among genocidial people.

    Even the declared communist around me were shocked by the Soviet and Chinese massacres. And I was told about them by a communist teacher in high school.

    You are so out of touch of reality that I worry about your sanity. But maybe you are only a real fanatic.

  47. Winter on Sunday, April 15 2012 at 5:15 am said:
    > Even the declared communist around me were shocked by the Soviet and Chinese massacres. And I was told about them by a communist teacher in high school.

    Really?

    Here is a google search over books written in the relevant period

    A fair paraphrase of most of the hits, all of them as far as I could see, is that nothing very bad happened to the kulaks, and if something bad happened to them, it served them right, for misunderstanding the party’s benevolent intentions towards them.

    And that was the standard attitude until the Soviet Union began to fall apart – to disagree was apt to have the same adverse effects on one’s career as noticing that very few female computer science graduates can write a program.

  48. Lame excuses. You are simply wrong.

    The trial of the gang of four were evening news world wide. Including the massacres of the cultural revolution.

    The massacres in Ukrain were part of our high school curiculum. That was in the 1970s. And even suggesting Dutch schools would try to say “they had it comming” is ridiculous.

    You are simply making up history to demonize your political opponents.

  49. Winter on Sunday, April 15 2012 at 8:48 am said:
    > The massacres in Ukrain were part of our high school curiculum. That was in the 1970s. And even suggesting Dutch schools would try to say “they had it comming” is ridiculous.
    >
    > You are simply making up history to demonize your political opponents.

    I performed a google advanced book search for “kulaks” for the period Jan 1955 to Jan 1987, limited to books with limited preview and full view.

    https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=kulaks&tbs=,bkv:p,cdr:1,cd_min:Jan+1_2+1955,cd_max:Jan+31_2+1987&num=10

    The first three hits gave the general impression that nothing terribly bad happened to the kulaks, and anyway they had it coming.

    And that is what everyone respectable was required to believe back then, or pretend to believe, though some disreputable people mentioned stuff they should not mention, much as I keep mentioning large discrepancies by race and gender between graduates with identical degrees, to which they got much the same reaction as I get. Since you, Winter, always believe, or claim to believe, what all good respectable right thinking upper class people are required to believe, you believed it also. And then, when the Soviet Union fell, history was adjusted once again, but this time to be more truthful rather than less truthful, and you believed the new version with equal confidence. And you believed you always believed this. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

    The first three hits I got:

    The agrarian policy of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party … – Page 74

    books.google.comMaureen Perrie – 1976 – 216 pages – Preview
    The prosperous peasants were among the most receptive elements in the villages to new political ideas; but the correspondent was concerned that the critical references to kulaks in the SR pamphlets threatened to alienate these men from …
    More editions Add to My Library?
    The making of the Soviet system: essays in the social history of … – Page 139

    books.google.comMoshé Lewin – 1985 – 354 pages – Preview
    During this period kulaks still continued to participate officially in the cooperative movement, although without … The famous Shevchenko sovkhoz saw no objection to making contracts with kulaks to till their land— albeit with certain …
    More editions Add to My Library?
    Terms of trade and class relations: an essay in political economy – Page 42

    books.google.comAshok Mitra – 1977 – 193 pages – Preview
    The kulaks and the rest of the bourgeoisie would be eliminated from the rural scene, Bukharin argued, again through the … Alongside the small peasants, the kulaks too would, however, be at a severe disadvantage in competing with the …
    More editions Add to My Library?

    The third hit, for example, tells us that a smooth transition to socialism was rendered difficult because the kulaks “could frustrate whatever good intentions the state and its agencies might have harbored” It refers to the terror famine as “the procurement crisis”. That the procurement crisis involved setting children on fire to force their parents to reveal where the seed corn was buried is not mentioned.

    We get vague hints that possibly something unpleasant might have happened to the kulaks, due their stubborn efforts to wreck socialism, but exactly what is never made clear.

  50. Winter wrote:
    > The massacres in Ukrain were part of our high school curiculum. That was in the 1970s. And even suggesting Dutch schools would try to say “they had it comming” is ridiculous.
    >
    > You are simply making up history to demonize your political opponents.

    I performed a google book search for “kulaks” limited to Preview and full view› for the period Jan 1, 1955–Jan 31, 1987

    https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=kulaks&tbs=,bkv:p,cdr:1,cd_min:Jan+1_2+1955,cd_max:Jan+31_2+1987&num=10

    Until the fall of the Soviet Union, official history left out what happened to the kulaks, while mentioning their bad conduct in obstructing socialism.

    And you, Winter, always believe official history. And when official history changes, as it so frequently does, you believe the new version, and believe that you always believed the new version.

  51. “Here is a google search over books written in the relevant period”

    None of these appear to be written at a level that indicates they are likely to have ever been part of a high school curriculum. What english-speaking academics were writing in that period is probably not a reliable indicator of what dutch-speaking high school students were learning.

    Also, your results are selected for those that would use the term “kulak” which is tied up in soviet propaganda, and thus is heavily skewed towards those who bought into it.

  52. Clearly, James A Donald has a mind reading crystal ball.

    But not just a mind reading crystal ball, a time-travelling, mind reading crystal ball.

    But not just a time-travelling, mind reading crystal ball, a fully automated, time-travelling, mind reading crystal ball.

    But not just a fully automated, time-travelling, mind reading crystal ball, a massively parallel, fully automated, time-travelling, mind reading crystal ball.

    Man, do I want to see his basement!

    Yours,
    Tom

  53. Tom DeGisi on Sunday, April 15 2012 at 4:29 pm said:
    > Clearly, James A Donald has a mind reading crystal ball.
    >
    > But not just a mind reading crystal ball, a time-travelling, mind reading crystal ball.
    >
    > But not just a time-travelling, mind reading crystal ball, a fully automated, time-travelling, mind reading crystal ball.

    I do indeed. It is called google books advanced search. You can set the date fields on your google books search, and discover officially approved reality on a certain topic changed at a certain date.

    And since you guys always endorse officially approved reality, I know what you thought on that date.

    Try doing a date limited search on “kulaks” with the dates set for books between 1954 and 1986. You will discover that all the good and the great, all respectable opinion, thought that nothing bad happened to the kulaks, if something bad happened to them it should not be mentioned, and anyway they had it coming to them.

  54. > I am certain that one of these companies is run by Taiwanese – there’s no problem tracing country of registration and beneficial ownership in this case. The other may be local to Shenzhen or also (though less obviously) Taiwanese-run.

    If owned and run by locals, probably owned and run by people with communist party connections, hence arguably state capitalist. If owned and run by people outside china, probably free market capitalist. If run by people whose identities are obscure and ambiguous, chances are that the nominal owner is not the beneficial owner, in which case free market capitalist and probably cypherpunk capitalist.

    1. >chances are that the nominal owner is not the beneficial owner, in which case free market capitalist and probably cypherpunk capitalist.

      In China, the PLA is at least as likely.

  55. > > “Here is a google search over books written in the relevant period”

    Random832 on Sunday, April 15 2012 at 3:18 pm said:
    > None of these appear to be written at a level that indicates they are likely to have ever been part of a high school curriculum.

    They were written at the level of those who write the high school curriculum.

    Near as I can tell, the average guy, Joe Sixpack, always knew the communists ruled by terror, mass murder, and artificial famine, but from 1954 till 1986 or so, the intellectuals, the universities, the mass media, and so on and so forth, respectable opinion, managed to forget it.

    And since you and winter are the voices of respectable opinion …

  56. > > chances are that the nominal owner is not the beneficial owner, in which case free market capitalist and probably cypherpunk capitalist.

    > In China, the PLA is at least as likely.

    In utilities, real estate, power, and so on and so forth, probably PLA. In high tech, or stuff that requires responsiveness to customers, such as shoes, considerably less likely.

  57. “You will discover that all the good and the great, all respectable opinion, thought that nothing bad happened to the kulaks, if something bad happened to them it should not be mentioned, and anyway they had it coming to them.”

    I’ll take your word that this is the majority opinion among people who called them “kulaks”. My understanding had been that this is a pejorative term originating from soviet propaganda.

  58. @Tom DeGisi: No, you don’t. It’s entirely filled up with a huge tinfoil ball made of the discarded remnants of the hats he wears.

    You are using Alinsky tactics. Remember that Alinsky tactics were designed for smart people to use to manipulate stupid people that they despise, blacks and single mums, so that they could use these stupid people to destroy other smart people. For such tactics to be useful, you need an audience of stupid people, and a means whereby they can harm the smart person you are targeting.

    You lack the latter.

  59. Random832 on Sunday, April 15 2012 at 7:29 pm said:
    > I’ll take your word that this is the majority opinion among people who called them “kulaks”

    So who called them something other than kulaks, and yet reported the terror against peasants?

    Everyone who reports communist crimes, uses the word “kulaks”. If they don’t use the word “kulaks”, they don’t report communist crimes, or they report communist crimes while minimizing, rationalizing and justifying communist crimes.

    Of course now that communism has fallen, (Communist China only being pro forma communist) we no longer see the massive falsification of history in favor of communism. The history of communism is rapidly become as accurate as it can be given that the all documents recording the truth have been destroyed, and everyone that knows the truth has been murdered, but let us remember that when communism was a going concern, knowing the truth and mentioning the truth was low class, low status, and would get one swiftly excluded from any high status occupation.

  60. @JAD
    “So who called them something other than kulaks, and yet reported the terror against peasants?”

    If you search for “Ukrainian Famine” you get more results. You really bought into the Soviet propaganda.

    Read “Don Camillo in Moscow” (1965). It already tells you about all the horrors of the collectivization (the Ukrainian famine was part of that) and goes to great lengths to show how bad the situation was in the USSR. And that was a humorous book. And extremely popular in Europe (many films made)
    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059049/plotsummary
    So much for “no one dared to tell the truth”. They made popular movies about it.

    But as always, you will claim all contradicting information is lies and propaganda. And as the Don Camillo books paint (Italian) communists as real humans, it won’t fit in your Angels and Demons world view.

    Your point is moot anyway. Your original claims were towards China in the 1970s. Now you shift towards a completely different genocide half a century earlier. I take this as a sign that your original claims were meritless and you try to shift the attention to something you hope you can confuse us enough to forget.

  61. @ESR – your gray boxes are broken.

    It is broken because esr accidentally used admin account for replying.

  62. If they don’t use the word “kulaks”, they don’t report communist crimes, or they report communist crimes while minimizing, rationalizing and justifying communist crimes.

    My understanding had been that “kulak” was a soviet propaganda term associated with rationalizing and justifying their crimes.

    1. >My understanding had been that “kulak” was a soviet propaganda term associated with rationalizing and justifying their crimes.

      That is correct. The word translates literally as “fist” and was adopted by Soviet Communists as a propaganda tool during the forced collectivization of agriculture.

  63. “when communism was a going concern, knowing the truth and mentioning the truth was low class, low status, and would get one swiftly excluded from any high status occupation.”

    Yes, you’d be called a “Bircher”. It was never explained exactly why the John Birch Society was to be mocked so. It was just a given: “They’re a bunch of nutters.” Then any anti-communist could be called a “Bircher” and therefore his views were “nutty” and unworthy of serious discussion.

    That guilt-by-association technique ought to have a name. Oh, that’s right, it does have one: “McCarthyism”. The irony goes to 11.

    1. >It was never explained exactly why the John Birch Society was to be mocked so.

      Yes it was, though the reason is now largely forgotten.

      In the 1950s the Birchers claimed Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist agent. This quite rightly got them written off as loons, and did much to discredit accusations of Communist infiltration in general – many of which we now know to be true from the Venona transcripts and Soviet archival sources. Of course it mattered that the actual Soviet agents of influence had already burrowed into show biz and the media and were ideally positioned to make anti-Communists look ridiculous and exaggerate their errors.

  64. @esr
    “This quite rightly got them written off as loons, and did much to discredit accusations of Communist infiltration in general – many of which we now know to be true from the Venona transcripts and Soviet archival sources.”

    Another example of the old wisdom that too many false positives makes any test worthless. Especially in a population screening of rare “afflictions”, even 99.9% correct detection can lead to 99.9% false positives.

  65. Interestingly, no one ever said “you sound like those Birchers who called Eisenhower a commie”. It was always just accepted that they were nutters, and no specifics were required.

    By the time I was old enough to understand what “communist” really meant, “Bircher” had become an epithet for “anti-communist”.

    1. The JBS said Eisenhower was a commie
    2. Eisenhower was not a commie.
    3. Therefore everything the JBS ever said was nuts.
    4. The JBS was anti-communist
    5. All anti-communists are nuts.

    Yeah, “guilt by association” works. So does “argumentum ad Hitleram”.

  66. @JAD
    > > “So who called them something other than kulaks, and yet reported the terror against peasants?”

    Winter on Monday, April 16 2012 at 3:05 am said:
    > If you search for “Ukrainian Famine” you get more results.

    Bullshit:

    Google advanced book search “kulaks” Books›Jan 1, 1954–Jan 31, 1986 about 44 800 results

    Google advanced book search “Ukraine Famine” (exact phrase) Books›Jan 1, 1954–Jan 31, 1986 about 281 results.

    Back then official truth in the United States was similar to official truth in Soviet propaganda, though somewhat toned down.

    People’s hostility to China is not based on the fact that it is in part still communist, but rather that it is in large part no longer communist. We are seeing the rage of a jilted lover.

  67. 1. The JBS said Eisenhower was a commie
    2. Eisenhower was not a commie.
    3. Therefore everything the JBS ever said was nuts.

    JBS was wrong in that they did not think big enough. The problem was not that Eisenhower was an agent of Stalin, but that Stalin was, in a sense, an agent of Eisenhower – in the sense that the American permanent public service was fundamentally hostile to capitalism, individual rights, and the constitution, and regarded communism, like La Raza and the black Panthers, as useful tools for the project of unmaking America.

    The great victory of totalitarians against capitalism, private property, and individual rights, was not the communist coup in Russia, but the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. When that is repealed, or, more likely, rendered irrelevant by the fact that the US dollar has become worthless, that will be a far greater victory for liberty than was the fall of the Soviet Union.

  68. @JAD “People’s hostility to China is not based on the fact that it is in part still communist, but rather that it is in large part no longer communist. We are seeing the rage of a jilted lover.”

    If I take all your claims about the state of “official history” then and now at face value, this claim still fails on the idea that it is the same people disapproving of China now (and, more specifically, on this blog) that failed to then.

    Even granting that, another alternate hypothesis is that the truth was so effectively suppressed from reaching the west back then that people _actually believed_ back then that life under the communists wasn’t so bad, and that more is known now about negative still-communist-aspects of China than was known then about the same things (which were in fact much worse, but unknown).

    You simply haven’t provided anything that can justify an inference that what people dislike about the China of today is its capitalist aspects rather than its communist/totalitarian aspects.

  69. @JAD
    I linked to a 1965 European popular bestseller that depicts the Soviet Union as a poor dictatorship. That tells avout the failed collectivization and the famines.

    And yiu still claim that no one dared to speak. You are a fanatic fool indeed.

  70. James A Donald comes to a place where there are plenty of people willing to condemn the Communists in China and elsewhere as the bloodthirsty mass-murderers they are, and somehow, through wild invective and absurd overstatement, gets everyone to argue against him.

    America’s Got Talent!

    Yours,
    Tom

    1. >America’s Got Talent!

      To be fair, he’s not completely wrong. The Soviets did acquire an unhealthy degree of influence over U.S. politics between 1930 and 1980, and we’re still fighting the toxic legacy of that influence. I’m old enough to remember, pre-Reagan, when their agents of influence were quite effective at making ideological criticism of Communism seem at best vulgar and at worst loony and paranoid.

  71. @JAD
    > > “People’s hostility to China is not based on the fact that it is in part still communist, but rather that it is in large part no longer communist. We are seeing the rage of a jilted lover.”

    random832:
    > If I take all your claims about the state of “official history” then and now at face value, this claim still fails on the idea that it is the same people disapproving of China now (and, more specifically, on this blog) that failed to then.

    The people who disapprove of trading with China now are people who always faithfully parrot official truth. Official truth now is “China evil”. Official truth back when they were really were communist, really did rely on slave labor, mass murder and artificial famine “China has good intentions, perhaps a little overzealous, but see how much better they are doing than the oppressed nations of the third world”

    I know what you said back then, because you faithfully parrot your master’s line, and I know what your masters said back then.

    Among the many accusations I have made, the accusations of faithfully parroting the master’s line, and of being terrified of Muslims, could easily be falsified, if false. Why don’t you falsify them? The official line has ten thousand points, of which several hundred cannot be criticized without dire consequences. There must be something in there you could repudiate. And we all know what Muslims will not let you say.

  72. “I know what you said back then”

    Disregarding all the other problems with that statement (everything who says something says it for the same reason), I wasn’t alive before 1980.

  73. > The Soviets did acquire an unhealthy degree of influence over U.S. politics between 1930 and 1980, and we’re still fighting the toxic legacy of that influence.

    My mom remembers kindly Uncle Joe Stalin from when the U.S.S.R. was our ally against the Nazis.

    Yours,
    Tom

  74. Random832 on Monday, April 16 2012 at 5:09 pm said:
    > Even granting that, another alternate hypothesis is that the truth was so effectively suppressed from reaching the west back then that people _actually believed_ back then that life under the communists wasn’t so bad, and that more is known now about negative still-communist-aspects of China than was known then about the same things (which were in fact much worse, but unknown).

    I don’t think anyone actually believed. I frequently draw the distinction between believing the way that people believe that flight UA733 will get them to Australia, and believing the way that people believe that Jesus Christ will get them to heaven.

    But back then it would be terribly lower class, impolite, and bad for one’s career to call for a boycott of China, while today it is terribly higher class, polite, and good for one’s career.

  75. @JAD
    “But back then it would be terribly lower class, impolite, and bad for one’s career to call for a boycott of China, while today it is terribly higher class, polite, and good for one’s career.”

    Then China was not a competitor for one’s job, now it is.

    See, pure unadulterated self-interest can explain it in a few words, instead of your global conspiracy that flies in the face of our own memories.

  76. @TomDeGisi
    “My mom remembers kindly Uncle Joe Stalin from when the U.S.S.R. was our ally against the Nazis.”

    My parents too remember that the USSR was one of the allies who defeated the Nazis. But I would not say they remember him “kindly”. The Great Terror of Stalin was well covered here. And we also knew about the rape of East Germany.

    JAD seems to have lived in a bubble among the complete ignorant. Or just in the blindness of his fanaticism.

  77. Winter on Tuesday, April 17 2012 at 3:36 am said:
    > The Great Terror of Stalin was well covered here.

    No it was not. The Moscow show trials when Stalin halted the ever leftwards drift to ever greater levels of terrorism and extremism by killing those who were outflanking him to the left was well covered. When leftists get murdered, it is news. When peasants get murdered, not news. The great terror was great because millions of ordinary people were murdered for failure to follow the plan, but this did not receive publicity until the late1980s. What got publicity was the Moscow trials: that a handful of left wing communist terrorists were murdered for being even further to the left and more terrorist than Stalin.

    > JAD seems to have lived in a bubble among the complete ignorant. Or just in the blindness of his fanaticism.

    We both lived through those times. I remember one thing, you claim to remember the other. Google books advanced search, date limited, 1954 to 1986, supports my recollection of what was then the official, respectable, truth in those days. It does not support your recollection.

  78. @JAD
    “The great terror was great because millions of ordinary people were murdered for failure to follow the plan, but this did not receive publicity until the late1980s.”

    You are telling me what I have to remember? What I was taught in school? What I read in the papers? What my parents told me?

    I gave a simple link to a book which mocks hard-line communists and would be fellow travelers with the real hardship of the Russian peasants. A book for the common man, based on a broad coverage of the (mis)development of the USSR. And you simply ignore it.

    You did not read “Don Camillo in Moscow” published in 1965 and a Europe wide bestseller which was brought out as a film. And you come here with a lame Google search as counter evidence?

    To you reality is just a poster you stick on your window so you do not have to look out.

  79. @JAD
    And you are completely incapable of using a search engine. I used Google Scholar and got 307 results. You are as incompetent and ignorant as you are fanatic.

    Use: ukraine famine 1932

    http://scholar.google.nl/scholar?hl=nl&num=100&q=ukraine+famine+1932&btnG=Zoeken&lr=&as_ylo=1954&as_yhi=1980&as_vis=0

    Some examples:

    [CITAAT] Organized Famine in Ukraine 1932–1933
    M Haliy – 1963 – getcited.org
    … Organized famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Haliy, Mykola. PUBLISHER: Ukrainian Research and Information Institute (Chicago). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1963. PUB TYPE: Book. VOLUME/EDITION: PAGES (INTRO/BODY): 48 p. …

    [CITAAT] Genocide of the Ukrainian people: The artificial famine in the years 1932-1933
    V Plëiìushch – 1973 – getcited.org
    … Genocide of the Ukrainian people: The artificial famine in the years 1932-1933. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Plëiìushch, Vasyl§. PUBLISHER: Ukrainisches Institut für Bildungspolitik (München). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1973. PUB TYPE: Book. VOLUME/EDITION: …

    [CITAAT] The Great Famine in the Ukraine, 1932-1933: a Bibliography
    A Pidhainy – 1968

  80. @JAD
    To add some more example of your complete incompetence, let me address “slave labor” in the USSR.

    If you search Google Scholar for that period with:
    soviet “slave labor camps”
    http://scholar.google.nl/scholar?hl=nl&num=100&q=+soviet+%22slave+labor+camps%22+&btnG=Zoeken&lr=&as_ylo=1954&as_yhi=1980&as_vis=0

    You get 144 results, eg:

    [CITAAT] Soviet” justice”;” showplace” prisons vs. real slave labor camps: Consultation with Mr. Adam Joseph Galinski. April 4, 1960
    United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un- … – 1960 – USGPO

    [CITAAT] … Twenty Years in Soviet Prisons: Experiences of a Russian Jew, who Survived Twenty Years of Captivity in the Prisons and Slave-labor Camps of the Soviet …
    A Netzach – 1979 – Moriah Offset

    [CITAAT] The Russians: True Stories of the Slave-labor Camps in Soviet-land, and of the Brutalized Men and Women on Both Sides of the Barbed Wire
    A Percow – 1957 – Greenwich Book Publishers

    [CITAAT] For this was I born: the human conditions in USSR slave labor camps
    YR Shymko – 1973 – UCRAINCA Research Institute

    [CITAAT] Recollections of Soviet labor camps, 1949-1955
    NM Nagy-Talavera… – 1971 – Regents of the University of …

  81. Winter:
    > And you are completely incapable of using a search engine. I used Google Scholar and got 307 results. You are as incompetent and ignorant as you are fanatic.

    > Use: ukraine famine 1932

    only seven of which actually refer to the Ukraine famine. Try using Ukraine Famine exact phrase
    http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=&num=10&btnG=Search+Scholar&as_epq=ukraine+famine&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=any&as_sauthors=&as_publication=&as_ylo=1954&as_yhi=1986&as_sdt=1.&as_sdtp=on&as_sdtf=&as_sdts=5&hl=en

    your search pulled up a three hundred of articles that referred to the ukraine, and also referred to some other famine – which shows how allergic scholars were to referring to the Ukraine famine.

    Now let us try “kulaks” for that period

  82. Google scholar gives seven articles referring to the “Ukraine Famine” for the period 1954 to 1986. The rest of the three hundred that you googled up are articles that refer to the Ukraine, and also refer to the famine – false positives.

    Google Scholar gives eighteen hundred articles referring to kulaks for the period 1954 to 1986 – most of which gloss over anything bad that might have happened to the kulaks, while pointing out how they deserved to have something bad happen to them.

  83. @JAD
    “Now let us try “kulaks” for that period”

    You are trying to shift the goalposts again. This is not an exercise in who can cite the most references.

    The examples I copied were exactly the type of papers you were asking for from the period you claimed there were no scholarly reports.

    You were simply wrong, as you generally turn out to be. The use of famine to massacre the people of Ukraine was widely published and common knowledge during the whole of the post-WWII period. As were most of the other atrocities committed by the leaders of the USSR.

  84. > You are trying to shift the goalposts again. This is not an exercise in who can cite the most references.
    >
    > The examples I copied were exactly the type of papers you were asking for from the period you claimed there were no scholarly reports.

    I did not claim there were no scholarly reports: I said that scholars displayed gross and overwhelming bias – in this case, a bias of about eighteen hundred exonerating or rationalizing to seven accusing.

  85. @JAD
    Some more examples as you keep denying anyone spoke out:

    The Soviet famine of 1932–1934
    ‘Food is a weapon’ — Maxim Litvinov, 1921
    Soviet Studies, Volume 15, Issue 3, 1964
    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09668136408410364

    Man?made famines: Some geographical insights from an exploratory study of a millennium of Russian famines
    Ecology of Food and Nutrition, Volume 4, Issue 4, 1976
    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03670244.1976.9990432

    Though natural factors contributed to famine situations, Russian and Soviet famines were largely man?made.

    CALVIN B. HOOVER. The Economy, Liberty and the State. Pp. 445. New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1959. $5.00
    The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science January 1960 vol. 327 no. 1 166-167
    http://ann.sagepub.com/content/327/1/166.extract

    Cat and mouse in the Ukraine
    V Swoboda – Index on Censorship, 1973 – Taylor & Francis
    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03064227308532203

    … 4, 1972]. This progress was brought to an abrupt end in 1932-3, when Stalin ordered
    the compulsory collectivisation of agriculture in the Ukraine, resulting in several million
    dead, mostly peasants, in the 1933 famine. At the same …

    Here more about the slave camps:

    http://scholar.google.nl/scholar?q=related:6JvUop8iDvEJ:scholar.google.com/&hl=nl&num=100&as_sdt=0,5&as_ylo=1954&as_yhi=1980

  86. @JAD
    “I said that scholars displayed gross and overwhelming bias”

    And you would not even believe we were told about all these atrocities in high school. Communist fellow travelers were already mocked in popular books and films in 1965, Europe wide.

    Now we have gone from “Not a single soul dared to speak out before 1980” to comparing the number of items returned by a biased Google book search.

    You clearly have no clue how to conduct a systematic literature review that would be needed to support such a gross gross bias.

    Pathetic.

  87. @Winter

    The meme was alive in the USA as late as 1978 that the Soviet Union wasn’t so bad. I had to describe the Berlin Wall to classmates. I had to explain that a U.S. passport isn’t permission to leave the country, it’s permission to come back.

  88. @Bob
    Won’t dispute things in the USA. In Europe we most certainly knew about the Iron Curtain. And about what happened at the other side.

  89. Winter on Tuesday, April 17 2012 at 10:22 am said:
    > Now we have gone from “Not a single soul dared to speak out before 1980” to comparing the number of items returned by a biased Google book search.

    Where did I say “Not a single soul dared to speak out before 1980”?

  90. Winter on Tuesday, April 17 2012 at 5:25 pm said:
    > Won’t dispute things in the USA. In Europe we most certainly knew about the Iron Curtain. And about what happened at the other side.

    Bullshit

    The closer people were to the Soviet Union, the more they purported to love the Soviets and hate the US. Every US traveler in the period reported the Zeitgeist, the pressure to denounce the US and love the Soviets.

  91. I said:
    > Every US traveler in the period reported the Zeitgeist, the pressure to denounce the US and love the Soviets.

    That is of course hyperbole. Only a few US travelers reported the pressure, but they reported that it was omnipresent, much as anti “Zionism” is omnipresent in Europe today.

  92. @JAD “Before 1980, you will not find one person, not one single person, worrying about the fact that back then every single thing that China made, was made by slaves.”

    HTH

  93. Earlier I wrote:
    : “Before 1980, you will not find one person, not one single person, worrying about the fact that back then every single thing that China made, was made by slaves.”

    You guys have produced a tiny handful of people who worried about the liquidation of the kulaks before 1986, and a vast amount of indignation about the lack of democracy and free speech in China before 1980.

    Produce the one person who before 1980 worried about the fact that every single thing in China was then made by slaves.

  94. @JAD
    “You guys have produced a tiny handful of people who worried about the liquidation of the kulaks before 1986, and a vast amount of indignation about the lack of democracy and free speech in China before 1980.”

    In your imagination.

    You are simply unable to do a good search even in English. You should try it in German or French. Let alone in Dutch or Finnish.

    I have a shelf full of books from the 1970s about China, and except for those published by the Chinese governments, they all discuss the civil war of the 1960s and the horrors before and after that. Read Simon Leys.

    And, as I have repeated many times, we got it explained in high school, in all gory details. And do you really, even in your delusional state, assume that German school children would have any illusions about life in the DDR? Or USSR?

    About the Chinese slave labor camps. We did not buy stuff from mainland China in the 1970s. Moreover, we had to make priorities. The Chinese civil war (30 million causalities), the Cambodian Killing Fields (2 million causalities), the Indonesian coup (1 million causalities), Uganda (tens-hundreds of thousands?), Apartheid (tens of million of people living in slavery) were all rather more pressing points of attention.

    We felt we could not afford your selective outrage.

  95. > > “You guys have produced a tiny handful of people who worried about the liquidation of the kulaks before 1986,

    Winter:
    > In your imagination.
    >
    > You are simply unable to do a good search even in English. You should try it in German or French. Let alone in Dutch or Finnish

    I asked for one person who before 1980 complained that everything in China was produced by slave labor.

    Despite your supposedly superior google skills, you still have not produced that one person.

  96. Winter:
    The Chinese civil war (30 million causalities), the Cambodian Killing Fields (2 million causalities), the Indonesian coup (1 million causalities), Uganda (tens-hundreds of thousands?), Apartheid (tens of million of people living in slavery) were all rather more pressing points of attention.

    About thirty or forty million chinese were starved to death in artificial famine, created by food confiscation, as with the kulaks. About thirty million were simply executed for suspected political deviation, or failure to fulfill the plan, all of which you ignored and denied, and continue to deny.

    But now that Chinese are reasonable fee, now there is no more slave labor, no more artificial famine, no one is punished for failure to fulfill the plan, and very few are executed for political deviation, now you are angry at China.

    As I said, the rage of a jilted lover.

  97. @JAD
    “I asked for one person who before 1980 complained that everything in China was produced by slave labor.”

    That would be problematic. Because without redefining Slave Labor to include every Chinese worker, this is a ludicrous position. Chinese people were not bought and sold on markets by plantation owners who could then sell off the children they forcefully sired with them.

    All, but a few loony Americans like you, discuss and understand the lack of freedom of a population in useful social and political terms. Therefore, many people described, and lamented, the lack of freedom of Chinese people to work where they wanted. Read Simon Leys. They did not consider it worthwhile to kill off the discussion by redefining words into meaninglessness to fit their personal local political agenda.

  98. Winter on Wednesday, April 18 2012 at 4:07 am said:
    > Because without redefining Slave Labor to include every Chinese worker, this is a ludicrous position.

    Almost every chinese worker was a slave laborer, for he worked not for wages, but to avoid punishment, worked at a job not of his choosing, but of the state’s choosing.

    And a hell of a lot of them were were punished.

    This is the big change between what China was then, and what it is now, and that is why you hate china now, and did not hate china then.

    Today, in China, your boss cannot have you shot for poor job performance, and if your boss performs poorly, he goes broke, rather than getting shot.

    And that is why you hate China today and did not hate it back then.

  99. @JAD
    “This is the big change between what China was then, and what it is now, and that is why you hate china now, and did not hate china then. ”

    I really do not follow you here. Where did you get the idea I hate “China”, either now or then? And exactly what should I hate in concrete terms when I would hate “China”?

    @JAD
    “Almost every chinese worker was a slave laborer, for he worked not for wages, but to avoid punishment, worked at a job not of his choosing, but of the state’s choosing.”

    The Chinese term is “Iron rice bowl”, and it was nothing of the sort that would be filed under the header “Slavery”. And neither has it been different at any other time in Chinese (or Russian) history.

    This is not a good definition of “Slave laborer”. And certainly not one that was used by writers pre-1980.

    Every time I turn down my expectations of you and every time I find out I still keep over-estimating you.

  100. You seem to believe that anyone who has problems with China as it is today – no matter who they are or what position they actually had or did not have before 1980 – has problems with the direction it is moving in, rather than simply where it is now and how it does not have enough freedom.

    You also seem to believe that any silence on the issue is because people did not care or approved of what was happening there, rather than simply because trade with China was not a major concern because it did not happen in any volume.

    But in your world, either their current situation is good enough, or it does not matter because you believe any economic contact with them will morally improve both sides, and anyone who disagrees is a secret communist.

  101. @Random832
    “…and anyone who disagrees is a secret communist.”

    At least that part I understood. ;-)

  102. Winter on Wednesday, April 18 2012 at 7:30 am said:
    > I really do not follow you here. Where did you get the idea I hate “China”, either now or then?

    You told me that back then, back when it was officially required to believe that China was OK, and hate South Africa, you hated South Africa and not China, even though blacks in South Africa were more prosperous, more free, and safer than in any other part of subsharan Africa. Now it is officially required to hate China, and hope for the “liberation” of China the way it was required to hope for the “liberation” of South Africa. Since you unfailingly believe what all good respectable people are officially required to officially believe …

    > The Chinese term is “Iron rice bowl”, and it was nothing of the sort that would be filed under the header “Slavery”

    The “iron” worked the other way around. Ordinary Chinese were given a job, and compelled to do it, so in that sense the job was guaranteed. The rice, however, was by no means guaranteed. A great many Chinese starved to death, and the vast majority frequently did not get enough to eat.

    That he was given a job, whether he wanted that job or not, and forced to do that job under threat of punishment makes it slavery.

    When plan goals were not successfully accomplished, and they seldom were successfully accomplished, people were punished for failure to perform to the plan. That people were punished for failure to accomplish the plan makes it slavery.

  103. Random832 on Wednesday, April 18 2012 at 8:26 am said:
    > You seem to believe that anyone who has problems with China as it is today – no matter who they are or what position they actually had or did not have before 1980 – has problems with the direction it is moving in, rather than simply where it is now and how it does not have enough freedom.

    No one who opposed China on the record before 1976 opposes China today.

    No one who opposes China today opposed China on the record before 1976

    Thus opposition to China today is based either on hostility to the direction it is moving (towards capitalism and liberty) or it is based on being politically correct and conforming to official truth, and the official truth on China is based on hostility to the direction it is moving (towards capitalism and liberty)

  104. @JAD “You [Winter] told me that back then, back when it was officially required to believe that China was OK, and hate South Africa, you hated South Africa and not China” Where did he say this?

    “No one who opposes China today opposed China on the record before 1976” This claim is shifted – trivially, from “before 1980”, and more significantly, from the more specific claim that no-one argued against trade with china (which can be alternately explained by trade with china not having existed back then). Anyway, I did not have an opportunity to make statements on the record on this matter [or any other] before 1976 [or 1980], due to both the internet not existing (and thus to go “on the record” you had to have a publisher) and to the fact that I did not exist at the time. I am reasonably sure that ESR existed, but I am less sure he had the opportunity to make statements on the record about it. I don’t know if he was famous back then.

  105. @JAD
    I have hated war, racism, murder, and torture for my whole life. That gives you a good indication of whom I opposed and whom I supported. Hint, I am pretty consistent.

  106. Random832 on Wednesday, April 18 2012 at 4:39 pm said:
    > “No one who opposes China today opposed China on the record before 1976? This claim is shifted – trivially, from “before 1980?, and more significantly, from the more specific claim that no-one argued against trade with china (

    Different dates, different claims.

    I make a numerous independent and distinct claims. I stand by all of them, you have refuted none of them, and I shift none of them:

    Among the claims I made:
    1. Not one person who openly opposed Maoist China on the record before 1976 condemns China today.
    2 . Not one person openly opposed slave labor in China before 1980
    3. From 1954 to 1986 rationalizations, excuses, justifications, evasions, and denials of the liquidation of the kulaks vastly outweighed, by a factor a hundred or so, condemnations of the liquidation of the kulaks

    All of these claims are true, and whenever you try to refute them, you shift the ground by refuting a different claim, a claim I never made.

  107. Winter:
    I have hated war, racism, murder, and torture for my whole life.

    Liar

    You don’t hate racism, murder, and torture enough to criticize what is happening in Indonesia, Egypt, and Zimbabwe right now. You would have to read the New York Times to find some approved columnist who shows how far one may go in criticizing such things in those places, and then you would criticize those things by exactly as much as the approved columnist did, and no further.

  108. “1. Not one person who openly opposed Maoist China on the record before 1976 condemns China today.”

    This is actually the converse of your other “1976” claim.

  109. > > “1. Not one person who openly opposed Maoist China on the record before 1976 condemns China today.”

    Random832 on Wednesday, April 18 2012 at 6:46 pm said:
    > This is actually the converse of your other “1976? claim.

    Fine: I make both claims. Not one person who openly opposed Maoist China on the record before 1976 condemns China today, and not one person who condemns China today openly opposed Maoist China on the record before 1976

    Actually, neither claim is quite correct: To be strictly correct:I should have added a start date as well as an end date: Not one person who openly opposed Maoist China on the record after 1956 and before 1976 condemns China today, and not one person who condemns China today openly opposed Maoist China on the record after 1956 and before 1976

  110. @JAD

    You don’t hate racism, murder, and torture enough to criticize what is happening in Indonesia, Egypt, and Zimbabwe right now.

    1) You are again trying to divert attention from you unsupportable earlier claims with a lot of new claims and countries. Still ignoring the arguments we bring up
    2) You must be delusional if you think you know what I think, do, or say outside of this blog on subjects that have not been discussed before
    3) You obviously do not understand what is happening in the countries you mention

    @JAD

    1. Not one person who openly opposed Maoist China on the record before 1976 condemns China today.

    That is almost 40 years ago. Hardly anyone active today was active then and vice versa. Moreover, there was no internet then, so you depend on those who have the money and incentive to put their archives online. So these dates are chosen rather deviously.

    But here there are some:
    Amnesty International, The Economist, the Dalai Lama, The Vatican
    Sadly, these mostly have only paper archives from these times

    @JAD

    Not one person openly opposed slave labor in China before 1980

    You use the “magic word” argument. Because people in other times did not use your magic words, “Kulaks” and “Slave Labor”, they must have condoned it.

    “Kulaks” is an insult to Ukrainians. Slavery is not the same as forced labor. Using “Slavery” to describe every system without a free labor market is pure agitprop, “1984” style. And your misinterpretation of the “Iron rice bowl” shows me again how much out of touch you are with historic reality.

    Your use of “Slave Labor” is telling. Before 1980, all relevant writers knew first-hand reports of what a “Labor Camp” really is. Actually, they knew well the German equivalents “Arbeitslager”, “Abreitseinsatz”, and the phrase “Arbeid macht Frei”. They did not need to play semantic games with words from a different epoch describing a different practice. Everyone understood what “Labor Camp” meant.

    After 1980, to accommodate an American public that seemed to confuse a “labor camp” with a “summer camp”, the word “Slavery” was recruited and bend semantically because even Americans are familiar with that word.

    Requiring authors from almost half a century ago to use your modern “magic” words shows me you are not seriously trying to understand these authors.

    In short, you are an ignorant fanatic who tries to fool us with your own version of “Reality” and “History”. You do not begin to understand the developments in the countries you are writing about, and you are absolutely not interested in what we answer to your “questions” (or rather, demands).

    You are not interested in understanding anything, really. You are here to make propaganda for your distorted views, and nothing else.

  111. Using “Slavery” to describe every system without a free labor market is pure agitprop

    If someone is able to command you to do certain work, punish you if you don’t, and you have no choice in the matter (save to do as your told or suffer), how can any word but “slavery” apply?

    Or is “slavery” only allowed to describe a situation where a nominally free economy allows one person to hold another as a piece of property?

    It seems to me that if anyone is redefining terms for agitprop, it’s you. You’ve conveniently defined the word so as to not apply to a political-economic system you support.

  112. @The Monster
    There are many forms of servitude.

    Slavery is the one where the owner owns the body of the slave and can dispose of it as he sees fit. A slave can be castrated or amputated as the owner’s whim.

    Children of slaves can be sold or drowned whatever is convenient.

  113. > > You don’t hate racism, murder, and torture enough to criticize what is happening in Indonesia, Egypt, and Zimbabwe right now.

    Winter on Thursday, April 19 2012 at 3:24 am said:
    > 1) You are again trying to divert attention from you unsupportable earlier claims with a lot of new claims and countries.

    Odd that I continually repeat my old claims, which you are entirely unable to refute.\

    But, back to the new claims. If you cared about terror, torture, mass murder, and state sponsored rape, you could easily disprove my claim by showing awareness of those crimes that are currently under way.

    > ignoring the arguments we bring up.

    Your arguments are irrelevant to my claims which is why I keep repeating my original claims. You, not I, continually change the subject.

    Repeating my earlier claims once again:

    1. Not one person who openly opposed Maoist China on the record before 1976 (and after 1956) condemns China today.
    2 . Not one person openly opposed slave labor in China before 1980
    3. From 1954 to 1986 rationalizations, excuses, justifications, evasions, and denials of the liquidation of the kulaks vastly outweighed, by a factor a hundred or so, condemnations of the liquidation of the kulaks

    > That is almost 40 years ago

    The new China came into being when they stopped trying to suppress capitalism in Shanghai.

    That happened in 1980 August, throwing you lot into rage.

    So I now assert that: Not one person who openly opposed Maoist China on the record before 1976 and after 1956 condemns China after 1981, and not one person who condemned China after 1981 condemned China on the record before 1976 and after 1956

  114. > > Not one person openly opposed slave labor in China before 1980

    > You use the “magic word” argument. Because people in other times did not use your magic words, “Kulaks” and “Slave Labor”, they must have condoned it.

    I gave a google search for “kulaks” for the period 1956 to 1986. Read their words. Most of them condoned what you like to call the “Ukraine famine”

    Then I gave a google search for “Ukraine famine” (exact phrase). Very few hits in the period.

    You yourself condoned slave labor by trying to define slave labor in a fashion that only referenced private ownership of slaves, and interpreted state ownership of slaves as a welfare scheme to provide security for the slaves that the slaves really loved, and were sadly disappointed to be denied in the new China.

    I am not using the magic words argument, because my preferred words find huge numbers of examples of the hatred of freedom and the love of slavery and terror, and your preferred words don’t find counter examples to my claims.

  115. I wrote:
    Not one person who openly opposed Maoist China on the record before 1976 and after 1956 condemns China after 1981, and not one person who condemned China after 1981 condemned China on the record before 1976 and after 1956

    I meant, of course, condemned what was happening in China after 1981, condemned the China of 1981. Lots of people who condemned what had happened before 1976 went right on condemning China’s past, and continue to do so.

  116. To clarify by repeating in other words:

    Those who condemned the old China in a timely fashion do not condemn the new. Those who condemn the new China never condemned the old back when it was politically incorrect to do so, the old China being China between 1956 and 1976, and the new China being China after 1981

    Thus those who condemn the new China do so because they hate freedom and love slavery mass murder, and terror, or because they servilely submit to the politically correct who hate freedom and love slavery, mass murder, and terror.

  117. > > 1. Not one person who openly opposed Maoist China on the record before 1976 condemns China today.

    > Amnesty International, The Economist, the Dalai Lama, The Vatican

    Well I will grant you the Dalai Lama, but his issue is Tibet, not what is wrong in China. On every issue other than Tibet, he seems reluctant to offend the Chinese, then or now.

    As for the Amnesty, just not true. Amnesty seems to have thought that any problems with red china were minor, trivial, and much less important than problems with South Korea and Chile etc. They only got cross with China when slave labor and mass murder ended, from which I infer that they got cross because slave labor and mass murder ended.

    “The Economist” purports to contain columnists with a multitude of views,. Try choosing a specific columnist or identifying a specific Economist editorial.

  118. “They only got cross with China when slave labor and mass murder ended, from which I infer that they got cross because slave labor and mass murder ended.”

    I dispute that this is a valid inference and recognize that this discussion cannot continue further with this fundamental inability to agree on terms. Many other things change over time too, and it’s possible that they didn’t have good information about the situation at the time you allege they thought it was “minor, trivial”. It’s also possible that Chile and SK really were worse, or that they had better information about it so they thought it was worse.

  119. @Random832
    “dispute that this is a valid inference and recognize that this discussion cannot continue further with this fundamental inability to agree on terms.”

    I agree.

    The random use of words like “Slaves”, accusations that lack of information was condoning the abuses, mixing up oppression and civil war, using counts of random Google searches as evidence etc, dismissal of written evidence that does not suit him, all point to someone who cannot participate in a real discussion.

    Add to that the suppression of unwanted information, eg,
    – The Vatican has consistently criticized communist China
    – The fact that Amnesty International is prudent and only works on hard evidence is suddenly used as evidence that they agreed with the human rights abuses in China which they could not verify
    – The Economist has a century long history of consistently criticizing governments that curtail free markets. But suddenly, only individual columnists that wrote today and 40 years ago count.

    But the most delusional thing is, I am suddenly accused of loving Mao and hating current day China. By a person who has not the slightest idea who I am or what I do. And that while I point out Simon Leys as an authoritative source of pre-1980 China. Simon Leys, btw, criticized Mao in 1971 and still loves China today.

    Indeed, what is the use of arguing? Moreover, I see that I am starting to repeat myself, so I call it a day.

  120. > The random use of words like “Slaves”, accusations that lack of information was condoning the abuses

    Long before 1976 we already had ample information that China was practicing slave labor, mass murder, and artificial famine.

    > mixing up oppression and civil war

    The vast majority of deaths in China, around sixty million or so, occurred after the Maoist had won the civil war, and had defeated their opponents, and had them at their mercy.

    > using counts of random Google searches as evidence etc,

    What I have been doing is using the date searches that are possible in Advanced Google Book search, and Google Scholar, to show how official history has changed from time to time – and changed in ways that reveal evil intent.

    > dismissal of written evidence that does not suit him

    You have produced no relevant written evidence. I make very specific claims, very carefully specific claims, and you guys produce written evidence contradicting some vaguely similar sounding claim.

    Or, as with the vatican and the economist, don’t even produce any evidence, just claim it exists. If exists, produce it.

  121. I wrote:
    > The vast majority of deaths in China, around sixty million or so, occurred after the Maoist had won the civil war, and had defeated their opponents, and had them at their mercy.

    I meant of course, the vast majority of wrongful deaths.

  122. @JAD
    A last piece of education. Most deaths in China were the result of a disatrous economic policy, the great leap foreward, which ousted Mao from power. Mao regained power by starting a civil war called the cultural revolution. This civil war killed another ten million people or so.

    The rest of your writings are elaborate plots to prevent admitting anything about reality.

  123. I don’t know JAD and I wasn’t born in the 60s either; however, as far as I can tell he pretty much demolished the opposition here. Maybe that’s because I grew up in a communist country, I don’t know.

  124. Winter on Friday, April 20 2012 at 6:24 am said:
    > Mao regained power by starting a civil war called the cultural revolution.

    It is not a civil war when one side has all the power, and the other side confesses its sins and begs for forgiveness. It is a terror.

    The cultural revolution was analogous to the terror against the party that followed collectivization. Collectivization was a failure, so Mao declared that ten percent of the party were traitors, and proceeded to purge ten percent. The great leap forward was failure, so he did a similar number against pretty much the entire population of China.

  125. Since sound travels at about 5s/mile that’s about 1 foot per millisecond. If you have a bunch of cheap computers, say on the same WiFi network that can synchronize their clocks within an accuracy of 1ms, then they can use sonar pings via their microphones and speakers to plot their relative position within an accuracy of ~1foot.

    Could be useful if you have a household with multiple laptops, phones, and tablets, and you don’t know that a phone is lost in the cushions of a couch.

  126. I had heard somewhere that the edge of the start bit of the RS-232 stream that sends the
    once-per-second time stamp from a GPS was precisely timed, so that you don’t actually need
    this hack, if you just timestamp the RS-232 itself. Am I wrong about that?

    1. >I had heard somewhere that the edge of the start bit of the RS-232 stream that sends the
      once-per-second time stamp from a GPS was precisely timed, so that you don’t actually need
      this hack, if you just timestamp the RS-232 itself. Am I wrong about that?

      Some devices claim this (I think the Venus SkyTraq series is one of them), but there are reasons not to trust it. Remember that even if the RS232 data coming off the chip is leading-edge-synced to PPS, there’ll be a USB adapter in the way with some variable on-chip latency. SiRFs, the most common GPS engine, are nowhere near synced; we’ve observed a long-period wobble of 100-170ms in their reporting starts.

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