TrueTomHarley

Nothing wrong with that in my view. Not draconian. Maybe I should have started my own new topic. The reason I didn’t is that people (such as yourself) do not see new topics and have to ask where they are. Also, plenty of others chime in at will with non-sequitors—the old pork chop was adamant that was the best way—so if they can do it, so can I. Besides, didn’t JWI praise me in an earlier comment for bringing his thread back on topic? The old hen didn’t see fit it acknowledge THAT, did she? Maybe I will join 4Jah and Cesar in dark muttering about how some people get all the breaks, like ...ahem....”ex-Bethelites”...while other truth tellers, even those with ‘true’ as part of their username, get sent to the woodshed!
Never fear. Not to worry. Right in my post I said I have no problem were it switched, and it should be and has been. I figured it was JWI that did it, but it seems it was @The Librarian. All is well.
Plus, as a bonus, 4Jah jumps in with the only topic he knows, a topic he tries to make the lead topic anywhere, but there is no way he can do it with a secular discussion of China. He may not even know where China is and, at any rate, seems to think it wrong for a Christian to know anything other than the Bible. His topic isn’t relevant here, either, but he imagines he can get away with it without being assigned a separate thread, as he should be. Meanwhile, I get to write up a refined post on the Time Magazine/Ehrman article, building upon what is already said, and even benefiting from feedback from some of his dopey remarks. When done, I’ll put it on my blog and here if it is not too repetitious.

I don’t why the obvious answer hasn’t occurred to you. 
You must forbid any comment to have anything to do with the preceding one. All comments will thereafter line up like ducks just to defy you. Dave McClure, a circuit overseer from long ago put it best: “There are people who will not do something until you tell them they can’t.”

@TrueTomHarley so let it be written.  So let it be done. 

Too late. I just tried to leave the house and my head got stuck in the door jamb.
Of course not. I’m amazed you can do what you do. No complaints here at all. I thank you for providing such a forum and being so indulgent with characters like me who push the bounds frequently.

Nothing wrong with that in my view. Not draconian. Maybe I should have started my own new topic. The reason I didn’t is that people (such as yourself) do not see new topics and have to ask where they are. Also, plenty of others chime in at will with non-sequitors—the old pork chop was adamant that was the best way—so if they can do it, so can I. Besides, didn’t JWI praise me in an earlier comment for bringing his thread back on topic? The old hen didn’t see fit it acknowledge THAT, did she? Maybe I will join 4Jah and Cesar in dark muttering about how some people get all the breaks, like ...ahem....”ex-Bethelites”...while other truth tellers, even those with ‘true’ as part of their username, get sent to the woodshed!
Never fear. Not to worry. Right in my post I said I have no problem were it switched, and it should be and has been. I figured it was JWI that did it, but it seems it was @The Librarian. All is well.
Plus, as a bonus, 4Jah jumps in with the only topic he knows, a topic he tries to make the lead topic anywhere, but there is no way he can do it with a secular discussion of China. He may not even know where China is and, at any rate, seems to think it wrong for a Christian to know anything other than the Bible. His topic isn’t relevant here, either, but he imagines he can get away with it without being assigned a separate thread, as he should be. Meanwhile, I get to write up a refined post on the Time Magazine/Ehrman article, building upon what is already said, and even benefiting from feedback from some of his dopey remarks. When done, I’ll put it on my blog and here if it is not too repetitious.

After praising me for bringing the thread back on topic, JWI will maybe curse me for branching it off again—and Arauna, too, for that matter, because it really is a branch. He may even use his secret powers to make this a separate thread—I could live with that if he did.
The fork in the road here is Aruana’s link to Time Magazine. Enticed by an absurdly low rate, I subscribed to Time two years ago, with the thought I would cancel when the auto-renewal hit. When it hit, I did cancel, because the magazine—once a powerhouse, now upstaged amidst the digital revolution, seemed no more than “same-old same-old” to me. My curiosity had been peaked by the low subscription rate. 
I think it is because a sale was pending. Mark Benoif has bought it, he who is the Salesforce company founder—a guy worth 6 billion, I am told. He joins Bezos who bought the Washington Post, and Lourene Jobs (widow of Steve) who bought a majority stake in Atlantic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/16/business/dealbook/time-magazine-salesforce-marc-benioff.html
Not sure how the new owners will change the brands they bought, however Time Magazine has just run an article about afterlife topics (soul, psyche, Sheol, Gehenna, heaven, hell) that mirrors almost exactly Watchtower publications—I can’t picture this in the old Time (or in fact, anywhere).
And—the author is my new nemesis: Bart Ehrman! The occasion is the release of his latest book (he has over 30) ‘Heaven and Hell.’ 
https://time.com/5822598/jesus-really-said-heaven-hell/
 I have not been especially kind to Bart, and maybe I should walk some of it back. Or maybe I should double down. Is he coming around in his views? Or is he (more likely, I think, but only suggested—far from proof) ripping off the views of the Watchtower without crediting them? 
Not that he would accept the Watchtower as a source in itself, I don’t think. But what I can easily picture is him keeping abreast of their writing and the explanations that only they have, then tracing it back to original sources, whereupon he verifies it all and presents it as though his own research—which it would be, minus the credit for who put him on the right track in the first place. 
A few segments for the Time article, which I think is quoted directly from his book:
Neither Jesus, nor the Hebrew Bible he interpreted, endorsed the view that departed souls go to paradise or everlasting pain.
Unlike most Greeks, ancient Jews traditionally did not believe the soul could exist at all apart from the body. On the contrary, for them, the soul was more like the “breath.” The first human God created, Adam, began as a lump of clay; then God “breathed” life into him (Genesis 2: 7). Adam remained alive until he stopped breathing. Then it was dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
Ancient Jews thought that was true of us all. When we stop breathing, our breath doesn’t go anywhere. It just stops. So too the “soul” doesn’t continue on outside the body, subject to postmortem pleasure or pain. It doesn’t exist any longer.
The Hebrew Bible itself assumes that the dead are simply dead—that their body lies in the grave, and there is no consciousness, ever again. It is true that some poetic authors, for example in the Psalms, use the mysterious term “Sheol” to describe a person’s new location. But in most instances Sheol is simply a synonym for “tomb” or “grave.” It’s not a place where someone actually goes.
and later: 
Most people today would be surprised to learn that Jesus believed in a bodily eternal life here on earth, instead of eternal bliss for souls, but even more that he did not believe in hell as a place of eternal torment.
In traditional English versions, he does occasionally seem to speak of “Hell” – for example, in his warnings in the Sermon on the Mount: anyone who calls another a fool, or who allows their right eye or hand to sin, will be cast into “hell” (Matthew 5:22, 29-30). But these passages are not actually referring to “hell.” The word Jesus uses is “Gehenna.” The term does not refer to a place of eternal torment but to a notorious valley just outside the walls of Jerusalem, believed by many Jews at the time to be the most unholy, god-forsaken place on earth. It was where, according to the Old Testament, ancient Israelites practiced child sacrifice to foreign gods. The God of Israel had condemned and forsaken the place.
In the ancient world (whether Greek, Roman, or Jewish), the worst punishment a person could experience after death was to be denied a decent burial. Jesus developed this view into a repugnant scenario: corpses of those excluded from the kingdom would be unceremoniously tossed into the most desecrated dumping ground on the planet. Jesus did not say souls would be tortured there. They simply would no longer exist.”
Is Bart just taking our stuff? You know, I think he is. If I do a quick search of this site—
https://ehrmanblog.org, nothing about Jehovah’s Witnesses comes up, apart from a post about the name Jehovah itself, where he misses entirely the import of God having a name rather than a title, to focus on its Latin letters, and thus declaring it “false.” But I found nothing else. Nobody espousing on these ‘afterlife’ views like Jehovah’s Witnesses, and apart from them almost nobody does—and yet he never mentions them. I suspect we have found the ‘secret source’ that points him to much of his scholarship. 
Where are these items found in our own literature? I find it hard to keep track of anything, these days, now that all is digitalized and we have taking to presenting matters in bitesize tidbits. Basic study guides will show up much of it, however, and certainly the Insight Book—a Bible encyclopedia. But a favorite of my for being both concise and complete is the 1974 book ‘Is This Life All There Is?’ We were there light years ahead of him, on all topics except for those in which he is muddled, such as:
“Some thinkers came up with a solution that explained how God would bring about justice, but again one that didn’t involve perpetual bliss in a heaven above or perpetual torment in a hell below. This new idea maintained that there are evil forces in the world aligned against God and determined to afflict his people. Even though God is the ultimate ruler over all, he has temporarily relinquished control of this world for some mysterious reason. But the forces of evil have little time left. God is soon to intervene in earthly affairs to destroy everything and everyone that opposes him and to bring in a new realm for his true followers, a Kingdom of God, a paradise on earth. Most important, this new earthly kingdom will come not only to those alive at the time, but also to those who have died. Indeed, God will breathe life back into the dead, restoring them to an earthly existence.” (italics and bolded text mine. “Some mysterious reason”—he doesn’t know that?! after nailing it on so many other points)
Not to mention his muddled:
“And God will bring all the dead back to life, not just the righteous. The multitude who had been opposed to God will also be raised, but for a different reason: to see the errors of their ways and be judged. Once they are shocked and filled with regret – but too late — they will permanently be wiped out of existence.” Sigh...it is as Anthony Morris said: “just stick with publications of the slave, and you will be alright.” The moment he goes off-script he comes up with some half-baked “nah nah—told ya so!” diatribe from his born-again days.
Part of me wants to get my head around this more. Frankly, he’s got a good gig going—I’m jealous over some of it—and so I wonder where his head is at. He presents as an agnostic/atheist in his Great Courses lecture series. I’ve written about ten posts, none of them kind, with several more in the hopper that I may or may not ever get to. Most of them I posted here as well as on my site, but I can find them easier on my site: 
https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2020/01/the-gospel-of-ehrman-according-to-mark.html
Now—back to those Uyghurs...

Originally I wanted just TomHarley as a username, but it was already taken. I thought of RealTomHarley, but it sounds too much like Trump. So I settled on TrueTomHarley. I never intended the moral implications that the name carries—that was just an unanticipated plus.

Fear not, the comment is here: 
 
Plus, you-know-who has joined in—the prospect of which probably contributed to my comment’s removal. Note how he broods that comments on “worldly” topics such as the discussion here is part of an evil smokescreen.

All one has to do is read this sample statement of Bart already quoted:
“Most people today would be surprised to learn that Jesus believed in a bodily eternal life here on earth, instead of eternal bliss for souls, but even more that he did not believe in hell as a place of eternal torment.”
Why would they be “surprised?” Because such things were never taught, despite a multitude of scholars most churches defer to. Instead, the near-universal teaching of church Christianity is that when you die, you go to heaven if you were good, and hell if you were bad. That is what just about everyone of “Christian” background thought before becoming a Witness, because apart from some occasional deviation on some minor point, that is what nearly all churches taught.
I have said since that, given the universality of the heaven/hell teaching, you would almost expect it to be on every other page of the Bible. Instead, apart from a handful of verses that can be tortured for that meaning, one never encounters it. Bart says something similar in his article, which I did not quote above: 
“There are over two billion Christians in the world, the vast majority of whom believe in heaven and hell. You die and your soul goes either to everlasting bliss or torment (or purgatory en route). ...The vast majority of these people naturally assume this is what Jesus himself taught.”
You have forgotten entirely the typical experience of most who become Witnesses, excepting only those born into the faith, of amazement at learning the truth of the scriptures for the first time. Some of them had made a lifelong search, and the crystal clear explanations of the Witnesses they had not seen anywhere else. I will grant that there may be a few quirky backwater faiths that have a piece or two of it, but nobody that has put it all together into a coherent whole. That typical experience is where the expression “coming into the truth” originates. It is an expression still in common use by Witnesses, and used no where else that I know of. Nobody says they have “come into the truth“ when they become a Methodist, for instance
There was a pesty fellow who used to challenge me a lot on trinity and other church teachings. One day he sent me a video of “4 famous church leaders“ hubbubing in conference, which he said acknowledged that everlasting life on earth was known to them, too, as the Bible hope—it wasn’t just JWs who taught it. I told him I’d take his word for it. Though these leaders knew and discussed it, this fellow pointed out, the problem was “Bible illiteracy” among the masses, he said. 
If the problem is Bible literacy among the masses, I replied, why don’t they fix it? Isn’t that their job as leaders? Our religion manages to keep its people on the same page.
No, this accurate take on scripture is not found just anywhere, for anyone to pick up on. In its entirety, it is found in only one place. You must have known that at one time, if you became a Witness in the usual way. But I fear, in harping on human imperfection, you have long ago gone the path of Titus 1:15:
“All things are clean to clean people, but to those who are defiled and faithless, nothing is clean, for both their minds and their consciences are defiled.” You just keep harping on one thing, and so plainly can’t see the forest for the trees. 
Unfortunately, you have shown time and again that you cannot.
You would never have found it on your own. You would have been thoroughly flummoxed by church doctrine that sweeps away the verse as though it Is nothing. An evangelical relative of mine, for example, attributes it to Solomon losing God’s spirit as he started multiplying wives for himself and saying some sour things that he would never say were he in his right mind.
Your typical oversimplification of everything means that you miss most points:
I never said that. I said just the opposite:
Okay? He didn’t “copy.”
Technically, he’s doing nothing wrong—if indeed, he is doing what I theorize.

I saw a PBS show, China—Power and Prosperity not long ago. The segment about the Uyghurs (toward the end) seems to back what Arauna says, minus only the medical tourism part. Several witnesses who lived through it are interviewed—ones now in “self-imposed exile” in Istanbul. One man tells of massive detention centers where he saw ones interrogated with “unbearable brutality,” one woman of her block mates taken for interrogation 15 at a time, and would reemerge “bruised and swollen.”
They testified as to this, too. They all assert that state video of helpful retraining is “staged and scripted.” The justification for all of it is some terrorist attacks from that ethnicity. It seemed convincing to me. Easy to find, if you have not seen it. Google the topic and bring up some YouTubes. The government spokesman who denies it all wonders “who is paying them?”
There is something about a PBS offering, or any offering from ones of similar background. How to put it?
Interviewing one Chinese company spokesperson about this, the interviewer asks: “Does it work?” that is—does the system of incentives and disincentives serve to change people’s conduct? The woman seems flustered at this, and mumbles that “Of course it works,” before breaking away. “Something about our question disconcerted the hosts, who suspended the interview and withdrew,” says the narrator, “but our mics were still on and recorded what they next said privately” (not exact quote, but close).
The first thing the woman said privately to some cohorts was: (in the full version, not the edited one) “What kind of a question was that?” That had been my impression, too. What was disconnecting about the question was the sheer stupidity of it. Do incentives and disincentives serve to mold behavior? Of course they do! There is something so naive about persons who have been raised with “enlightened” views of discipline. The next backstage remarks are of how they can’t really refuse an interview, but they want to take care not to criticize the party, and of course, this is what the program seizes upon, as though their dopey question served to expose the underbelly of the beast. 
If a stove is red-hot, and people know it is red hot, will they touch it? Only in the West will moral revisionists question this, extrapolating the few who will indeed touch it anyway into the many. The truth is more in accord with Mark Twain’s observation that “a cat that sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. Nor will it sit on a cold one—for they all look hot.”

When you see such shenanigans in the present human interactions of entirely different spheres, you don’t assume that you are seeing it for the first time ever. Rather, you figure that this is but the latest example of what humans will do in pushing their own point of view. Thus, everything you say is plausible. Exaggeration, over-promotion, running the other side off the road, muddying the waters so the other side will give up, outright denial, seeing only what one wants to see: these are the stock in trade tools of humans. Whether right or wrong, to have someone assert it has been put to work here, as well, in the analysis of Chinese communism, is not shocking. It doesn’t speak well of our ability to “know” anything. If we may go from your “lofty” example to one of pop trivia, if there is one fixed star in Dylanography, it is that Bob was booed at the Newport Festival of folk music snobs because he forsook acoustic for electric. Not so, says Pete Seeger, who was there, and who is usually thought the foremost critic. It was because the sound was so garbled nobody could understand him, but the producers refused to fix it, saying “young people like it this way.”
https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/08/i-aint-going-to-work-on-maggies-farm-no-more.html
This is another reason that I like the Bible—it doesn’t make nearly the attempt to appeal to the head that it does the heart. Try to appeal to the head and you must compete with liars, frauds, loonies, and zealots. Try to appeal to the heart and it is a straight shot. Those too “educated” for the Bible might reflect on Carl Jung, who not only acknowledged that there is a spiritual side of things, but maintained that the spiritual side is the more genuine, the more real, the more true. The “statements of the conscious mind,” he says, “may easily be snares and delusions, lies, or arbitrary opinions, but this is certainly not true of statements of the soul.” 
When it comes to government, I very much like the Bible analogy of ancient rulership being like the heavens over mankind that might rain on you one moment, bless you will sunshine the next, blow away in a windstorm all you own in yet another moment, and there isn’t a thing you can do about it. For all the material advances in both education and “political science,” the reality is not so different today, but participatory government better presents the illusion that “we” are in control. Communism makes no bones about saying we’re not. Someone else is. You are cogs in someone else’s machine. You have no say.
If you are going to take over someone’s life, you’d better not screw it up. 
For all practical purposes, most people have no say in Western government either, but they do have some. Put in $1000 worth of effort and you may see a $10 return. That’s not a lot, but people like the idea of control. Even in situations where communism might produce a $20 return, it will be opposed by many, as it goes against human nature.
I took a public speaking course in college in which the professor coincidentally happened to be a huge advocate of participatory government. With student elections coming up—you know, nothing important, just who will run the Student Council of campus affairs—he relentlessly pushed for getting out the vote, and I got fed up. When it was my turn to plan and present my speech, I chose the topic, “Why we shouldn’t vote.” (This was before I knew anything about Jehovah’s Witnesses) I developed three reasons not to vote: 1) candidates lie, saying whatever they must to get elected. 2) Candidates “grow”—they reassess their views afterward—maybe for good or maybe for ill, but independent of your wishes. 3) Candidates may earnestly try to deliver, but find themselves outmaneuvered by those of opposite view. The upshot the three points is that it is just not worth it sinking that much time into politics—there are plenty of other things that offer better payoff. The professor was fairly sporting about it, mumbling that he didn’t agree but that I had raised solid points. He didn’t flunk me.
I doubt it shows that at all. The success is more likely due to the Chinese people better capturing the spirit of Proverbs 6:6: “Go to the ant, you lazy one, consider its ways, and become wise.” Substitute only “cooperative” for “lazy” and you have a perfect fit. China had an “industrial revolution” that precedes that of the West by almost 1000 years—Mao had nothing to do with it.
“In the State of Wu of China, steel was first made, preceding the Europeans by over 1,000 years. The Song dynasty saw intensive industry in steel production, and coal mining. No other premodern state advanced nearly as close to starting an industrial revolution as the Southern Song,” says Wikipedia. Only lack of a middle class, Wiki speculates, prevented that early revolution from catching on, something that makes a hero of Henry Ford, for realizing that without someone to buy his products, he could only go so far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_industrialization
One author I came across raised the point of Chinese cooperation due to long-engrained Confucian value system that  emphasizes responsibly and holds that the group is more important than the individual—and asks whether that isn’t the very antithesis of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, that holds as “self-evident” the individual’s right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. I think his point is well-taken. The only trouble with too much “group-think” is that it is easy for a scoundrel to insert himself at the head and direct the body per his will.
 

When you see such shenanigans in the present human interactions of entirely different spheres, you don’t assume that you are seeing it for the first time ever. Rather, you figure that this is but the latest example of what humans will do in pushing their own point of view. Thus, everything you say is plausible. Exaggeration, over-promotion, running the other side off the road, muddying the waters so the other side will give up, outright denial, seeing only what one wants to see: these are the stock in trade tools of humans. Whether right or wrong, to have someone assert it has been put to work here, as well, in the analysis of Chinese communism, is not shocking. It doesn’t speak well of our ability to “know” anything. If we may go from your “lofty” example to one of pop trivia, if there is one fixed star in Dylanography, it is that Bob was booed at the Newport Festival of folk music snobs because he forsook acoustic for electric. Not so, says Pete Seeger, who was there, and who is usually thought the foremost critic. It was because the sound was so garbled nobody could understand him, but the producers refused to fix it, saying “young people like it this way.”
https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2019/08/i-aint-going-to-work-on-maggies-farm-no-more.html
This is another reason that I like the Bible—it doesn’t make nearly the attempt to appeal to the head that it does the heart. Try to appeal to the head and you must compete with liars, frauds, loonies, and zealots. Try to appeal to the heart and it is a straight shot. Those too “educated” for the Bible might reflect on Carl Jung, who not only acknowledged that there is a spiritual side of things, but maintained that the spiritual side is the more genuine, the more real, the more true. The “statements of the conscious mind,” he says, “may easily be snares and delusions, lies, or arbitrary opinions, but this is certainly not true of statements of the soul.” 
When it comes to government, I very much like the Bible analogy of ancient rulership being like the heavens over mankind that might rain on you one moment, bless you will sunshine the next, blow away in a windstorm all you own in yet another moment, and there isn’t a thing you can do about it. For all the material advances in both education and “political science,” the reality is not so different today, but participatory government better presents the illusion that “we” are in control. Communism makes no bones about saying we’re not. Someone else is. You are cogs in someone else’s machine. You have no say.
If you are going to take over someone’s life, you’d better not screw it up. 
For all practical purposes, most people have no say in Western government either, but they do have some. Put in $1000 worth of effort and you may see a $10 return. That’s not a lot, but people like the idea of control. Even in situations where communism might produce a $20 return, it will be opposed by many, as it goes against human nature.
I took a public speaking course in college in which the professor coincidentally happened to be a huge advocate of participatory government. With student elections coming up—you know, nothing important, just who will run the Student Council of campus affairs—he relentlessly pushed for getting out the vote, and I got fed up. When it was my turn to plan and present my speech, I chose the topic, “Why we shouldn’t vote.” (This was before I knew anything about Jehovah’s Witnesses) I developed three reasons not to vote: 1) candidates lie, saying whatever they must to get elected. 2) Candidates “grow”—they reassess their views afterward—maybe for good or maybe for ill, but independent of your wishes. 3) Candidates may earnestly try to deliver, but find themselves outmaneuvered by those of opposite view. The upshot the three points is that it is just not worth it sinking that much time into politics—there are plenty of other things that offer better payoff. The professor was fairly sporting about it, mumbling that he didn’t agree but that I had raised solid points. He didn’t flunk me.
I doubt it shows that at all. The success is more likely due to the Chinese people better capturing the spirit of Proverbs 6:6: “Go to the ant, you lazy one, consider its ways, and become wise.” Substitute only “cooperative” for “lazy” and you have a perfect fit. China had an “industrial revolution” that precedes that of the West by almost 1000 years—Mao had nothing to do with it.
“In the State of Wu of China, steel was first made, preceding the Europeans by over 1,000 years. The Song dynasty saw intensive industry in steel production, and coal mining. No other premodern state advanced nearly as close to starting an industrial revolution as the Southern Song,” says Wikipedia. Only lack of a middle class, Wiki speculates, prevented that early revolution from catching on, something that makes a hero of Henry Ford, for realizing that without someone to buy his products, he could only go so far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_industrialization
One author I came across raised the point of Chinese cooperation due to long-engrained Confucian value system that  emphasizes responsibly and holds that the group is more important than the individual—and asks whether that isn’t the very antithesis of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, that holds as “self-evident” the individual’s right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. I think his point is well-taken. The only trouble with too much “group-think” is that it is easy for a scoundrel to insert himself at the head and direct the body per his will.
 

Mao, while alive, had already purged Deng twice. In doing so, Mao sullied his reputation by bringing up past disloyalty and an unexplained military defection, and asked Deng to self-admit his own (Deng's) failings. He had been critical of Mao, but had also been used by Mao and the party for his leadership abilities. After Mao, the "Gang of Four" wanted to continue Mao's legacy and leadership style, and thought of Deng as a political threat to their continuance. Deng's choice to gain political power was to do unto Mao's legacy what Mao (and others) had done to him. This resulted in exaggerations on both sides. But it does show insecurity by both Mao's side and Deng's side, showing that there was some basis of truth even in the exaggerations.
Deng's old political slogan against Mao "70% right; 30% wrong" apparently evolved into a new view of "70% wrong; 30% right." That effectively erased Deng's initial ability to argue that he could build on any "fine foundation" left by Mao. And some of Deng's policies were of this same sort of swapping priorities from 70/30 to 30/70.
I also get the impression that Deng knew the actual numbers of deaths from the famine (and political mistakes that made it much worse) had resulted in perhaps 4 million deaths. (That's my guess for a probable minimum based on the evidence of statistical manipulation. [Some of the researchers admit that they took numbers from smaller, worst hit areas and simply assumed it was like this in all areas of China!]) Pushing this number to 16.5 million was necessary for the "gasp" factor in hurting Mao's party faction and Mao's ideas which had become a "cult of personality." It might have been meant as a kind of "negotiation" number, just to make sure it remained extremely high even when challenged.
Of course, the number not only stuck, it was multiplied in the imaginations of both Deng's and Mao's political enemies, especially those that could be influenced by the West. Here is Ball's take on this:
The reason for this vilification of the Great Leap Forward had much to do with post-Mao power struggles and the struggle to roll back the socialist policies of 1949-76. After Mao’s death in 1976 Hua Guofeng had come to power on a platform of “upholding every word and policy made by Mao.” Deng Xiaoping badly needed a political justification for his usurpation of Hua in 1978 and his assumption of leadership. Deng’s stated stance of Mao being “70% right and 30% wrong” was a way of distinguishing his own “pragmatic” approach to history and ideology from his predecessors. (The pro-market policies Deng implemented suggested that he actually believed that Mao was about 80% wrong.)
The Chinese party did everything it could to promote the notion that the Great Leap Forward was a catastrophe caused by ultra-leftist policies.
I agree.

There's a 1960's era joke about a family in their car just pulling out of their driveway in sweltering heat with the all the windows up. The kids ask why they can't roll down the windows to get some air, and the father says: "What? And let the neighbors know we don't have air conditioning?"
This reminds me of one of the claimed blunders of Mao Zedung, who continued to export wheat during a famine so as not to appear weak to the rest of the world. (And Stalin similarly wouldn't import wheat when he needed to, for about the same reason.)

Spin a book out of it. That is what I did when I found myself heading the thread: ‘TrueTom vs the Apostates.’
Initially, I protested. I didn’t want the job. I don’t go out of my way to pick fights with these guys, and didn’t want it presented as though I did.
My protests fell upon deaf ears. So I warmed to the task and went after them with such ferocity that the same powers-that-be that assigned me the thread yanked me off it—not just me, but the entire thread. 
A year or two later the experience became the intro for the still-free ebook.
 
 

Spin a book out of it. That is what I did when I found myself heading the thread: ‘TrueTom vs the Apostates.’
Initially, I protested. I didn’t want the job. I don’t go out of my way to pick fights with these guys, and didn’t want it presented as though I did.
My protests fell upon deaf ears. So I warmed to the task and went after them with such ferocity that the same powers-that-be that assigned me the thread yanked me off it—not just me, but the entire thread. 
A year or two later the experience became the intro for the still-free ebook.
 
 

Why did it do this? Why not proceed as though building on the fine foundation that had been laid?
This smacks a lot of like “putting lipstick on a pig.”
 

Why did it do this? Why not proceed as though building on the fine foundation that had been laid?
This smacks a lot of like “putting lipstick on a pig.”
 

It is even worse for me. Every day the Librarian (that old hen) makes me comment. I don’t want to. I really don’t with all my heart. But she forces me to, using mind control.
You might just try hitting the ‘leave club’ button at top of forum.

It is even worse for me. Every day the Librarian (that old hen) makes me comment. I don’t want to. I really don’t with all my heart. But she forces me to, using mind control.
You might just try hitting the ‘leave club’ button at top of forum.

Huh! All that you have to do here to establish your reputation as Teller of TRUTH is to disappear!
If I wasn’t worried about breaking the heart of the old hen, I’d do it myself!
”Ah, TrueTom,” they will say. “He really was true! But we didn’t realize it until he was long gone! If only we had recognized his genius and integrity while he was with us!”

that old hen
You’re such a loon, 4J. You’ve been told any number of times just who runs things here—it is entirely unremarkable—and you choose instead some paranoid and zany version.

Huh! All that you have to do here to establish your reputation as Teller of TRUTH is to disappear!
If I wasn’t worried about breaking the heart of the old hen, I’d do it myself!
”Ah, TrueTom,” they will say. “He really was true! But we didn’t realize it until he was long gone! If only we had recognized his genius and integrity while he was with us!”

Huh! All that you have to do here to establish your reputation as Teller of TRUTH is to disappear!
If I wasn’t worried about breaking the heart of the old hen, I’d do it myself!
”Ah, TrueTom,” they will say. “He really was true! But we didn’t realize it until he was long gone! If only we had recognized his genius and integrity while he was with us!”

that old hen
You’re such a loon, 4J. You’ve been told any number of times just who runs things here—it is entirely unremarkable—and you choose instead some paranoid and zany version.