Sure. Still amounts to a large state apparatus, though. Using such projects as means of punishment of criminals was not unknown in China (particularly the aforementioned First Emperor), but probably levy labour is fine.
Whether the state extracts its taxation in the form of labour or cash (and the two tend to blur into one another, buying out of your labour term is a common development) does really change the essential position here - the state is a big part of life, that is able to perform huge projects due to the enormous amount of labour available to it.
>When I see eight exarchs, being dragon kings in their own
>right, governing the provinces, centralization is not exactly the
>word that springs to mind.
That some power is devolved doesn't mean its not a large centralised state. The provinces do not control the armies or navies directly, the Emperor has enough power at his command to perform great works like the Bridges, and so on. The Emperor has plenty of power. Ancient states generally gave the local rulers lots of power, so that they could react quickly to local issues. In any case, it wasn't really the degree of centralisation but the size of the state - that there are both central and provincial layers of government implies rather that the state as a whole is large and complex.
> And a large centralized state would
>have reacted far more swiftly than the five years that Godunya
>took to the crisis of Sheng Seleris's second invasion.
I didn't say an efficient responsive large centralised state. There can be all sorts of reasons for it to fail to respond (and centralisation doesn't always help, if you have to keep sending messages back and forth, and communicate the urgency of your situation to officials a long way away with their own unrelated agendas).
>But Sha Ming has _never_ paid its taxes on time which at last
>reckoning means that there have been at least 1,621 such late
>payments since Yanoor was enthroned (or multiples thereof
>depending on how often tax is paid during the year). For late
>payments to be a cause of sackings,
Some years its just late, some years its so late or has run up a huge accumulated debt, and with so little excuse or real intention to pay, that the Emperor doubts it ever intends to pay them, and acts to enforce it. And some years, the whole situation escalates somewhat, and ends up in violence. Non-payment of taxes is a straight out challenge to the power of the state.
>I see no reason to assume
>the stronger sense, given that it leads to an absurd
>conclusion.
What absurd conclusion? That non-payment of taxes is on occasion punishable with armed force?
>>And there probably ARE mandarins who would not resort to such vicious
>>punishments, but there are other mandarins who would.
>
>But you are positing the ITC as an official punishment. Which
>means that _all_ Mandarins are tarred by its awfulness whether
>they like it or not.
I thought that there was a genuine mystical path of reform there? The good mandarins can say that they send only those who they know will be genuinely reformed there, and decry its use by others.
>Mikaday wrote down laws rather than made them and his laws were
>positive principles to follow rather than a list of actions that
>were forbidden.
So the maker of laws is really the writer down of suggestions? Like your attitude to the size of government, I'm simply going to have to say I disagree, and if feels wrong, and I'm happy to say it is wrong - the difference being I'm only disagreeing with your personal interpretation, as I can't find any evidence to suggest it elsewhere.
>I would be very hardpressed to describe Immanent Mastery as a mere
>thoughtcrime
Why? Perhaps we differ from each other in what I mean by thoughtcrime. At worst its guilt by association.
>> I never said that the camps might not have a mystic explanation -
>
>So why did you feel the need to call me mistaken then?
Because you insisted that that was the only level in which they could be understood. I still believe that looking at it purely as a mystic path misses the point of why many of the inmates are there, which has a more mundane explanation.
End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #389
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