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THE POET AS SCIENTIST

THE POET AS SCIENTIST, THE POET AS SCIENTIST

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The Geek's Raven
[An excerpt, with thanks to Marcus Bales]

Once upon a midnight dreary,
fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line,
I took a floppy from the drawer.
Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command
But got instead a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

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Form input - by Günter Born

Friday, March 01, 2024

What if Pol Pot had become leader of Communist China?

I don't think this is quite as impossible/implausible as many people might think. Pol Pot was, I believe, attempting to reunite Indochina with China again. And, if Mao Zedong had lived a few years longer, or if Maoist policies had still been in place and Deng Xiaoping hadn't moved China to a more centrist approach quite quickly, he might well have achieved his goals. Almost certainly, Mao Zedong would not have given up his invasion of Vietnam after just a month the way Deng did, in 1979. That really wasn't Mao's style, at all, when he did things. Mao did not do things by halves! Mao would have pursued his invasion of Vietnam to the end, even if it cost millions of Chinese casualties, and, he would have totally conquered Vietnam. And, the USSR would not have started a war over it, if only because the U.S. had a limited alliance with China at the time, to counterbalance the USSR. So, Indochina would have been reunited with China again, and Pol Pot, as the instigator of this achievement, would have almost certainly been the Chinese lieutenant in charge of Indochinese integration into the greater communist Chinese commonwealth. And, no doubt, as the "hero" responsible for this great achievement, within five or ten years, Pol Pot might well have found himself as leader of China as a whole. So, we have an enormous Maoist communist China running from the Siberian wastes to Indonesia, all under the control of our very good friend, Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, by 1985 or so. What happens next? First of all, the USSR is definitely NOT going to appoint a bureaucratic windbag like Mikhail Gorbachev to run their nation under these circumstances. They'd be much, much too scared of China! More likely, the USSR goes neo-Stalinist. And there are indeed "reforms" in the USSR, but not in terms of liberalization. Instead, the USSR becomes more centralized and controlled. And, needless to say, communism does NOT fall in the Soviet Union. Thoughts?

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