Law in Contemporary Society

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JStHill_SecondPaper 3 - 10 Aug 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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[Reading Uchenna and Alfain’s essay and edits on the investment relationship between China and Africa, I wanted to offer my insight—and maybe play the Devil’s Advocate. ]
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-- JStHill - 20 Apr 2009 \ No newline at end of file

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  • Adding interlinear comments here didn't really achieve the goal of practicing your editing. What you've said is worthy of thought, and makes a contribution to the conversation, but it not only doesn't render the point of view being expressed in the original draft more coherent, by virtue of adding skeptical comments it necessarily renders the entire text less coherent. Interlinear commentary is important when you are helping others to edit their own work, but when you are the editor yourself, the goal is to produce a text which better communicates the ideas of the draft from which you begin, or coherently presents an alternative idea or ideas necessary to the improvement of the edited draft. If the goal here is to strengthen the original draft's analysis by presenting the alternative views, they needed to be worked in and dealt with, rather than being merely juxtaposed.

  • From a substantive point of view, it seems to me that your version of the story presents the same problem that Uchenna's original draft did: the Chinese campaign to purchase natural resources was a phenomenon linked to the "Chimerica" bubble that has now unquestionably popped. Chinese manufacturing capacity is no longer connected to an inexhaustible reservoir of American consumer demand, and the capital flows that saw China investing surplus value in competition with the "economic development" racket of the US are no longer headed for Africa and South America: they are urgently needed to maintain social stability inside a Chinese Empire whose growth rate has crashed. Whether the phenomena you are discussing were good or bad matters not at all: they are now over, and the situation of the Africans, whatever it might have been under other circumstances, has not now been made less dire because the Chinese poured a great deal of unserviceable concrete before they left.

Revision 3r3 - 10 Aug 2009 - 20:44:12 - EbenMoglen
Revision 2r2 - 19 May 2009 - 03:37:14 - LaurenRosenberg
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