problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
It is admittedly a pet peeve of mine just how irredeemably exoticised Japan has become in the public imagination (largely because I cannot stop seeing it blow up on virtually all of my feeds), and as someone who's been interested in East Asian history and culture for a while, the senseless glazing gets tiring.
There's this idea of Japan as this uniquely Galapagos-like nation stemming from a lot of misconceptions about sakoku as essentially blocking out foreign influence, when in reality Japan maintained contact with the outside world through not one, not two, not three, but four trading portals (Satsuma, Tsushima, Matsumae, and Nagasaki) that brought them directly and indirectly into contact with external ideas, and they would not have used the word "national seclusion" to describe their foreign policy at the time - their foreign policy was in reality not very much more isolationist than China, Korea, or Ryukyu, who all maintained comparable trade restrictions. The word they used at the time was the much softer term of kaikin (maritime restrictions), and it was a word they actually borrowed from what the Ming called their own foreign policy: haijin.
This kind of trade restriction was a common grammar of East Asian foreign policy and there are striking similarities between the Japanese system and the Canton system. It did not wholesale prohibit foreign ideas from making its way into Japan, hell, ample Western influence even shows up in Edo-period art; you can see Western perspective techniques and pigments like Prussian blue making its way into ukiyo-e, including the works of famous artists like Hokusai. They would not have been a "pristine reservoir" even during the years of sakoku, though it would certainly have accelerated after the Meiji period.
Is it isolated? Sure, to a greater degree than Western countries are from each other, but I would argue they're not different from most other Asian countries in this regard (in fact I regard them as more receptive to Western import than most Asian countries apart from Korea). Japan has been obsessed with The Amazing Digital Circus recently, there's always been crosstalk. I'd argue the draw of Japan to a lot of the West is largely because it's culturally similar enough to offer a certain degree of relatability, whereas a China or Malaysia offers such a great degree of cultural distance that it can appear impenetrable and off-putting.
I would say my disagreeableness has reduced ever since I was a young adult in a somewhat complex way, but at my core I have always been a curmudgeonly contrarian fuck with a massive chip on my shoulder that has only matured as I age. This hasn't changed - my best quality is that I hate a lot and hate intensely. What has changed though is my reaction to this cynicism. Earlier in life I would attempt to try and reason or argue with people in an attempt to debate, both online and off in an attempt at dealing with conflict or disagreement, basically "I can fix them" epitomised, lately I have been finding it to be a Sisyphean task. Increasingly I find my reaction to be this muted thought process of "well the thing you said or did is bloody stupid" and then I move on.
(It's part of why I've been losing interest in the CW threads here too and just increasingly declining to read them - as distinct as this forum's discussion norms are, many of the comments on topics I can actually give input on cover ground that's ancient to me, and too many compulsively make posts along the lines of "I found [single case study] here is my extrapolation" or "here is my vibes-based diatribe/just-so story/anecdote" and I have zero interest in dragging out a hundred and one sources I've posted previously to rehash a discussion I've had for what seems like the thousandth time when someone is directionally incorrect enough to ruffle my feathers. I increasingly understand why effortposters seemingly go into flame-outs out of nowhere.)
In my case, I think this is also partially down to increased responsibility and being time-poor that makes the cost-benefit of being argumentative look awful. My takes themselves have barely changed, but my position regarding argumentativeness has shifted from "Someone is wrong" to "What does it matter, it's not like anything will change much anyway, it's like pissing in the ocean". I guess this means I've become less disagreeable, at least outwardly, though it also reflects an increasing jadedness and hopelessness.
Regarding neuroticism, I'm not sure. If anything, that has increased overtime from when I was a kid. In the intervening period I experienced what I would have previously considered as a worst-case scenario for a good few long years, and this has hammered an attitude into me where I'm constantly mindful that things can always get worse, even when they get better. That one probably isn't too healthy.
problem_redditor
4d ago
Scores are independent on the test and don't need to add up to 100% (hence why some users scored "58% German, 47% autistic").
I’m busy at work but will briefly add my two cents: COPS. Call the cops and give them everything you have; even if she’s mad at you afterwards who gives a fuck, this is such a case where it’s better to act first and apologise later. Also possibly check if she has said anything about where she’s going to friends and family, fact-find as much as possible.
Will also second the psychiatric hold, because this clearly is out of hand and isn’t a situation you can or should be expected to handle alone. It’s a very onerous thing to deal with, and it’s not just her sanity on the line, both you and your kid’s are too by virtue of being around this. There needs to be future action taken to keep her away from drinking if you don’t want more dysfunction, things cannot just return to baseline after this. Some long term changes have to be made and you need to get that done, even if you need to force that change.
problem_redditor
7d ago
Sleeping is an enormously difficult task for me and I need something to carry me away and push things into the background.
I'm much the same in this regard, and it's always been viscerally difficult for me to understand people who need pure silence to sleep. Everything just seems too heightened when it's quiet; I become hyperaware of things like the house settling or find myself paying attention to every little sound on the streets outside and it just becomes impossible to relax.
I've never done it myself (and would be terrified to) but it's quite interesting to read these anecdotes about psychedelics and then connect it to some of the research that's been coming out. Psilocybin AFAIK disrupts functional connectivity in the brain quite aggressively and basically causes different brain networks to become less segregated and bleed together, and it does so most severely in the default mode network, which is the piece of mental circuitry responsible for your sense of time, space and self. So you get ego death.
It also helps to suspend depressive symptoms by disrupting the connections between networks, specifically the hippocampus and default mode system, which are associated with that. Your thought patterns are quite literally spilling into each other on the fly in a way that can temporarily disassemble your entire perceptual and affective world, and it offers the possibility of your mental circuitry settling into a subtly changed baseline for better or for worse. It's basically very imprecise, very ghetto biohacking.
I honestly don't think it's all bad and has some possible transhumanisty applications, but as it currently stands the drug is like a sledgehammer where the effects aren't fully understood or controllable. If not I would be all in to be honest.
Thanks for all the recommendations. I am also strongly considering Taishan in a future trip to China, not only for the Daimiao's 62-metre long mural of the God of Taishan with his procession and the hike up the sacred mountain, but also for other things nearby - I hear the Lingyan Temple nearby Jinan is a really nice and expansive architectural complex with some preserved Song Dynasty arhat sculptures, a pagoda forest, and a very active monk community that doesn't attract all too many tourists.
Also not too worried about human DDOS because I travel at very off-peak times (I generally didn't find it too bad to be honest, Temple of Heaven and Terracotta Army were by far the worst in this regard).
Perhaps this is my personal hangups speaking, but it's weird because I wouldn't describe, say, any of my extended family members as being particularly serious about religion. My perception was always that a lot of what they did read less like reverence and more like a Pascal's Wager type thing, as if they were probabilistically maximising their chances of good things happening to them (not that this is inherently bad, it's just quite a casual way to treat belief). But I don't want to be too cynical either, because I ultimately see a lot of value in the culture and generally really like Malaysia, you can see my love letter to the Straits here.
As an aside, my favourite Chinese temple in Malaysia is the Khoo Kongsi in Georgetown. I really enjoy that one just because of all the art, and the fact that there's plaques of all the Khoos and their accomplishments which continue to be updated to this day gives it a sense of continuity and provenance.
But throughout history, the Chinese were generally more pragmatic about it than other historical actors.
Yeah, I don't agree with the idea that the Chinese tributary system was quite so static and Sinocentric. Nominally yes, but in practice it was a very nebulous concept that allowed for some flexibility in organising its foreign affairs; pretty much everyone was considered a tributary in the Qing worldview as long as they had any interaction not covered by formalised structures and rules of engagement.
Providing tribute was more an action than a status per se and was two-sided as well, states such as Ryukyu and Korea would have sent tribute missions once a year or more, but others would be sent at far sparser intervals and did not always involve explicit demonstrations of deference to the Qing state. The Qing might categorise them as "tributaries", but in practice a lot of the states covered under that definition set the terms of the relationship, and maintained a whole lot of their regional autonomy vis-a-vis China.
The precise causes of the Opium Wars were not amazingly sympathetic, but ultimately they, or something very much like them, were inevitable; the only way the Qing were ever going to start taking international relations seriously was to have their teeth kicked in.
The precise causes of the Opium Wars not being very sympathetic is primarily what I meant. On a larger scale, I think it should be clear by the tone of the rest of the section that I don't view the Qing in all of that as solely a "passive victim of colonialism". I do tend to agree the Qing getting its teeth kicked in was inevitable, and maybe even good in the long run. The High Qing period was a period in which China was legitimately too successful for its own good - after the elimination and assimilation of any regional competitors via their annexation of Xinjiang, they developed a highly ineffective bureaucracy that saw them crippled by interest groups to the extent they were still funding armies established in the seventeenth century. The Chinese state at this point had metastasised to the cusp of stagnation, and the century of humiliation in general was largely what broke all this down.
I also alluded to this, but there is also the fact that China itself at the time was a highly colonial state which ruled over many subjects not entirely happy with their rule (there's at least one instance of ethnic cleansing, with the Qianlong Emperor basically exterminating the Dzungars), and that's not exactly the kind of regime that can really object to colonialism.
Glad you liked it (in spite of the obvious rambliness).
I do recommend Beijing, though it can be overwhelming at times much of the architecture is so iconic that it's what you imagine when you think "China". And the Great Wall is worth everything, though probably steer away from the Badaling section since it's the one all the Chinese tourists go to (in contrast I've heard good things about Jinshanling, which receives few tourists, and you get to walk on both restored and unrestored parts of the wall). But if you're really into history there's no place better than Shanxi province in my opinion, which will be the topic of next post.
I'd be interested to read the Vietnam/Cambodia writeup. I have some rather unkind opinions about Vietnam as well, there's an absolute lack of civic-mindedness on the streets and roads; I hear from most that the experience in Cambodia is rougher and the sense of stagnation is much worse.
I do agree that Chinese tourism is a big thing; due to the massive population some of the more major sites can get swarmed at times with very urban hanfu-wearing tourists trying to take selfies and this kind of confounds the vibe (Malaysia deals with a much lower tourism burden). But that's also not incompatible with the fact that many of these temples are also active religious spaces for the community.
Hell, the Yonghe Temple in Beijing is a famous touristy one too. Perhaps I was lucky, but when I was there, I barely saw the hanfu girls that were all over the Forbidden City and Temple of Heaven in droves and instead there was a lot of incense-burning, people generally engaging in worship and a very big Tibetan monk community. It was really interesting. But IME even largely tourist temples (e.g. Datong's Hanging Temple) still have offerings left by people who just take whatever they have on their person like a water bottle, candy, etc and place it on the altar, which suggests some level of ritual adherence even among tourists.
The experience is also probably dependent on what subsection of China you go to; the country is super heterogenous and there's urban/rural and regional divides. Rural areas have greater adherence, and generally Hokkien Chinese (which constitute a large portion of Malaysian Chinese) tend to be more religious. Fujian province in particular is well known for its massive communal ceremonies, example here. All of the stuff in that video pretty much has the right vibe to me.
Not been to Nanjing yet, but I would love to (I have generally wanted to visit Jiangnan for a while). Anything in particular you would recommend doing there? I'm aware it's one of the Chinese walled cities and there's some Ming mausoleums + Taiping Heavenly Kingdom history, but that's all I really know about it.
I... actually generally agree with your point, have been against this stupid war for the entire time it's been happening, and find myself similarly frustrated with many of the Amerikaposters here tribalistically supporting whatever they do. I am really not in favour of US foreign interventionism (which is long and storied) and have never been regardless of the partisan-political alignment of who's doing it.
The routine blanket portrayal of any country that's not in line with the American regime (not just Iran either, which I would consider more of a defensible position) as a dysfunctional backstabbing low-trust low-skill low-human-capital Third World hellhole is also not helping my sympathy for the pro-Americans, especially since it's so aggressively out of line with a lot of what I've seen in my expeditions travelling and living in many countries.
But yeah, this tone is going to get you banned. And I'm saying this because I think you're directionally correct and would rather you not get banned.
I am finally writing my trip report to China. There is so much ground to cover and things to discuss that I have barely described my first 2-and-a-half days in the country and the word count is 6,571, somewhere about half the word count of my entire Vietnam trip report. This is going to take forever to write, and I've already cut out a ton of interesting historical detours and personal musings I could have written about.
I'm curious if it would be better to post here in instalments (say, one post per city, four posts in total) or in one go. With the level of detail I'm going into, a full post is going to be somewhere around 36,000 words.
I can't really compare cultural conditions in Malaysia to my part of India, but my brother is close to being maximally lucky in terms of what he can expect in these parts.
Same here; I come from a relatively liberal, atheistic family, though the same thing could not necessarily be said about the extended family. My immediate family have basically agreed it's a good idea not to tell them lest they Actually Die.
Ultimately, it's up to him and I'll help figure out how to make it work.
It's good he has supportive people like you helping him along.
I wouldn't go that far, honestly. India isn't Uganda or Saudi Arabia. He could probably cohabit with another man and dodge questions indefinitely, unless he publicly declares that he's married to a man and starts making out in public. Even then, I think he could get away with not much greater risk to life and limb.
It has less to do with life and limb (I didn't perceive that as anything other than a remote risk) and more to do with my uncertainty about how sustainable the situation really was in the long run; for example whether the extended family would ever seriously pressure him to get a wife and child or something similar. Extricating yourself from pointed questions about that is a bit more difficult when you regularly see them, and there's less of an excuse to not show proof of whatever you lie to them about. Admittedly this was also based on a bunch of stereotypes about the extremely close-knit and privacyless nature of Indian extended families which I imagined would have made it harder. Or maybe that's just representative of the type of Indian who chooses to migrate to Malaysia.
But if the family situation is such that you can indefinitely deflect it and get away with not telling your extended family anything, then yes, ignore that part of the comment; the calculus changes significantly. Though the ban on commercial surrogacy is definitely still a consideration.
Thank you. He really doesn't want me to walk on eggshells around him, or to treat him any differently. I don't intend to.
I think this is one of these attitudes that's very common among gay people who don't centre their identity around being gay or relish using it as a social bludgeon against others, the type that doesn't care about being an Activist and mainly wants to live undisturbed as you've stated your brother does. The converse is depressingly common in some circles though - I was once in a friend group with a "non-binary" woman who compulsively engaged in such tactics to police people's behaviour, and it took a herculean effort for me to contain my disgust. I find myself so estranged from these people, it's almost as if I'm looking at a different species entirely.
I'm pretty much your brother except I'm in accounting and am more of an autist. Grew up in the third world, thick skin, very heterosexual-passing in attitude, zero patience for flamboyant and dramatic anybody. My circumstances probably don't apply to your brother and Malaysian Chinese might actually be more chill than Indians about this, but I came out to my immediate family relatively early in life (in spite of my sister seeming to find it very weird and barely speaking to me about anything relationship-adjacent even today), and I hold my extended family at enough arms length that I don't really have to tell them honestly what I'm up to. I could not be more happy to not have to deal with female bullshit in dating, and am currently in a very committed long distance relationship with a bisexual guy (note I've already met his mother, it's a serious thing, there is a plan down the line to actually move in together).
In other words, it's possible to actually make this work. I second the advice of expanding his social circle into countries that are more accepting of these things, the more widespread buy-in there is to the idea of the Rainbow Identities, ironically enough the more normal the open homosexuals become. It's a consequence of social pressure that only the people who are super comfortable being openly gay in places like India are also probably not the kinds of people you would want to partner up with ever, virtually everyone else that's more normal is also less likely to be contrarian and radical for the sheer sake of it and as a result more susceptible to the pressure to conform. But don't rush into anything after a breakup. It's a recipe for bad decisions you'll just end up regretting. And bars dedicated to the Rainbow Community are never good places for finding long-term commitment.
Ultimately though, there's an inherent tradeoff between staying in India and being close to one's same-sex partner. You can't have it all in that regard. And keeping a relationship under wraps while pretending to be asexual or having a lavender marriage is a half-measure that's likely to involve a lot of deception and will probably be ridiculously exhausting after a while. I'm not sure how easy it is for him to keep his extended family at length in the same way I do, or to fail to inform them of goings on in his life. But in my experience being overseas makes the act of deflection way easier. I just lie to my extended family about my life every now and then, and barely think about them again. He's got you and your mother to back him up, which also makes any spiel he spins more convincing.
As an aside, you should not feel that bad about making gay jokes. You've been supportive, and if he tells you it's fine I see no reason to disbelieve him. I make quite extreme and very slur-filled jokes in that caliber all the time with close company, and can relate to seriously not wanting someone I know to tiptoe around me for fear of hurting my feelings. It can be very condescending to feel like you're being coddled or unintentionally forcing someone to self-censor when you would just prefer they be themselves, to the point that every time I get a sense that any of my friends are doing that I sometimes push them in the direction of making these jokes. Probably not a good time at the moment since he may be going through a breakup soon, but just thought I would add that.
It's always been a trait that people consider positive, but there are tradeoffs and at least to my recollection, there was a time when a lower relative value was placed on its importance (specifically a certain era when a lot of story-based games came out, indie and triple-A alike). There's inherent tension between many of the goals a game can aspire to, and at the moment more emphasis seems to be placed on conceptual ideas based around "player agency", "nonlinearity", "replayability", and other such concepts that actively interfere with the ability to satisfyingly curate and pace a game. Rare is the game that actually manages to balance these goals.
I do agree that replayability makes a bit more sense for those time-rich and money-poor. But it's also somewhat dependent on whether you're personally receptive to the addiction-adjacent feedback loops that these games actively try to foster. I've been in this situation before, and still would not buy a game like that, my preference ranking tends to prioritise ephemeral but memorable experiences over less impactful experiences that can be stretched for longer. It doesn't take long for my enjoyment level of a game to hit the point where I have better things to look at and read and do, rather than play it for the 116th time. Your mileage may vary though.
In general, I have never understood this fixation on "content" and "replayability" in games and this denigration of linearity, which ends up being reflected in every new game trend ranging from roguelikes to open-world games to (most recently) immersive sims. It always just ends up feeling like yes, there's theoretically massive or even unbounded replayability, but in practice almost none of this variation is meaningful; it's the game equivalent of finding variation in a pine forest, ceaseless randomly-generated content featuring all of the same building blocks. Unless you're treating the game just as a tool to occupy your fingers, one's actual interest in it wanes very fast, and the prioritisation of endless "player agency" and endless "replayability" often means that you have to sacrifice any sense of satisfying pacing and progression. Don't even get me started on the de-prioritisation of meaningful narrative as a casualty of this focus. It's an approach that reduces games to absolute brainrot.
I really hate all of these terms that games get judged by now. It's almost as if we were having the whole Games As Art thing a while back where a lot of developers briefly tried to make games indistinguishable from movies with extra interactivity, and then we overcorrected quickly and basically treated games as glorified content farms, which we still haven't come back from after years and years of genericised slop. A lot of players have a serious problem with viewing games like a product, as if the measuring stick for a game's quality is how many hours one could theoretically get out of it, and this really fucks up how games get designed.
That is a good list.
I've been on a bit of a roll listening to gamelan lately (going to Singapore had something to do with it).
Gamelan is very nice. There's a few regional types extant in Indonesia; Balinese and Javanese are the major traditions. The one you posted (and the one that seems to have gotten popular among Western listeners) is the Balinese style, which I suppose is understandable since Bali was the first Indonesian island to be developed for international travellers, and it is fantastic - but I would actually say the Javanese style is the more elegant and delicate of the two. It's such an utterly alien sound and it even still gets played as court music in Yogyakarta, here's a pretty good example of what it's like. Indonesia generally has a lot of very fascinating regionalised culture, much of which doesn’t get exported.
There's also other musical traditions in Southeast Asia that stem from a similar root of "bronze gong culture", such as the piphat of Thailand, Laos, Burma, etc and the kulintang of the Philippines and Borneo. All worth checking out in my opinion.
How was Singapore, by the way?
Your post reminded me of a kora jazz piece that someone introduced me to in grad school.
Saved this one. West African fusion pretty much never fails to grab me.
You said no anime, but maybe non-anime Japanese material is fair game? I rather like some of Shiina Ringo's songs.
As long as it's sufficiently local and hasn't been globalised in the same way that anime has (Nintendo would not be an acceptable answer either), Japanoposting is fine. I see your Shiina Ringo, and raise you another obscure Japanese artist called JAGATARA, here's an exceptionally funky album from that band I particularly enjoy.
Some good things come of this, like this appropriation of a Thai-adjacent people's choral tradition for dark techno game BGM.
It's not all too common to see modern Mainland Chinese media mentioned in forums, so you get extra points for that. Been getting into a good amount of Chinese music too myself; there's a surprising amount of fantastic media from China that goes virtually unnoticed like the underground Beijing and Wuhan punk/post-punk scenes. RE-TROS is a particular favourite of mine, here and here are two songs of theirs.
There's been a lot of posts here about Mainland China's lack of global cultural appeal and why this is the case; I've been meaning to make a post in the Fun Thread detailing some excellent Mainland Chinese media that I think people should check out (for example the Shanghai Animation Film Studio's 20th century works of ink-wash animation are beautiful in a distinctly Chinese way), but I'm lazy. The sheer amount of important media properties that are only culturally relevant in China and receives no traction outside of that sphere is staggering.
Chinese poetry is absolute crack, though I hear not knowing Chinese kind of takes the teeth out of them. A lot of them are based in the peculiarities of the Chinese language and are thus untranslatable.
The cat poem you quoted is even funnier in context, by the way, because that's a Southern Song poem. Song Chinese were absolute ailurophiles, and they even had cat contracts known as namaoqi (納貓契) specifying the cat's obligations to its owner and vice versa, signed with a paw print. Here is such an example where the cat agrees to patrol tirelessly, catch mice, and leave the numnums alone.
In my experience China to this day is full of cats roaming freely as well, the country is practically covered in them. They prowl sections of the Great Wall, climb over pagodas, and so on: they're just everywhere.
Transnational Media Thread
Any local art, music, film, etc you've been consuming from far-flung parts of the globe? (No, anime doesn't count, that shit has been thoroughly mainstreamed and globalised by now.)
For my part, I've been enjoying quite a lot of Mande music as of late (basically the folk musical tradition of Mali that began with the 13th century Mali empire). They developed a highly polyphonic music style independently from Western traditions, passed down through the centuries by hereditary griot storytellers; their music was modernised in the 1970s, fusing quite a lot with other styles. One of my favourite artists to play in this tradition is Toumani Diabate, a ridiculously prolific musician who specialises in the kora, a 21-stringed instrument that falls somewhere between a lute and a harp. Here is a particularly nice example of traditional kora music from him, and here and here are examples of some of the fusion he has produced. I find there's an exceptionally atmospheric, almost mystical sound to a lot of this music I can't get enough of.
When it comes to art, traditional Song Dynasty handscroll paintings are just incredible. Yes, I am continuing my recent trend of Sinoposting, deal with it. They were painted on these massive pieces of silk meant to be slowly unravelled from right to left, revealing different parts of the painting as it went along. Probably the most famous one in existence is Zhang Zeduan's impossibly detailed 12th century Along The River During The Qingming Festival, depicting the commotion in the Song capital Kaifeng during the Tomb Sweeping Day. Other art in this vein is the extremely fluent 13th century Nine Dragons handscroll by Chen Rong, Composing Poetry on a Spring Outing by Ma Yuan, and Water Map by Ma Yuan, a uniquely liminal painting focusing on the rendition of water textures. (For Water Map, here are all the panels in the handscroll presented individually; I can't find it in the University of Chicago's archive of scrolls, and the one on Wikimedia is so large that it's capable of causing your browser to stall, and zooms in too much).
EDIT: A funny detail in the Nine Dragons scroll is the overabundance of Emperor Qianlong's massive seals and even poems throughout the body of the painting. While it's actually desirable to place seals on paintings - in fact Chinese paintings often leave spaces for stamps for collectors to leave their mark, with seals being a sign of history and provenance, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it, and Qianlong was unfortunately a prolific art connoisseur who had no sense of taste himself. I'm pretty sure I've heard him called "Stamp Demon" before in Chinese.
YOU are bombing a civilian population, unleashing toxic rain on them, destroying their desalination facilities, generally committing war crimes and crimes against humanity while your "president" gloats with all the wit of a stunted 8 year old sadist.
The hypocrisy of it also annoys the absolute piss out of me, considering the sheer amount of criticism the US levels at virtually every other country for exercising any degree of regional power (unless they're US vassals, then it's all okay). Russia is bad for starting shit with Ukraine after NATO threatened to expand into the literal historic core of Kievan Rus without so much as a pretence of a buffer zone. China is bad because of Hong Kong and why can't they stop being mean to Taiwan and something something territorial claims in the South China Sea.
It is, apparently, A-OK for America and its allies to ceaselessly fuck with Afghanistan, fuck with Libya, fuck with Venezuela, fuck with Iran and destabilise or outright destroy countless other societies while justifying it all with flimsy excuses or worse, invoking their Civilising Mission of proselytising Democracy, Whiskey and Sexy to rescue these poor unwashed natives from their state of barbarism (this is even applied to countries whose material conditions could not be further from their own, and where instituting an America-esque "liberal democracy" is barely feasible and cannot work). It is a national pastime for Americans, producing propaganda to justify their endless imperialism around the world while at the same time condemning when regional powers attempt to exercise influence over their immediate geopolitical sphere without the US's permission.
I'm not a leftist (I have spilled enough ink in the process of explaining how much I dislike them), but the only thing I do agree with the hippie crowd on is that US foreign intervention is absolute poison. And that's not to mention their laughable domestic politics, the likes of which they regularly export anywhere they have even the slightest amount of influence. Just unconscionable, the fact that such a country is a hegemon is disgraceful.
CBO suggests that hypersonic missiles may be traveling below Mach 5 in the terminal phase.
Speeds can be possibly below Mach 5, yes, it depends on the IRBM in question. If you believe the Ukrainian reports on the Oreshnik, it has a terminal velocity of Mach 11, well within the hypersonic range.
But even if the ballistic missile in question travels at only supersonic speeds in its terminal phase, HVPs still can't hit them. Note that due to the limitations of HVP the study here does not even bother to engage it with weapons that come close to the speed of IRBMs, note in this model the offence is utilising anti-ship missiles that are "subsonic and supersonic", not hypersonic. The authors go so far as to state "Due to the inability for the HVP to engage supersonic targets, an HVP-only configuration for anti-missile defense is not recommended" and therefore limit HVP engagement only to the subsonic targets in the simulation.
Right, on a ship it is part of a layered defense against large salvos. If they had run the simulation against a salvo size of one, the savings would look different: they estimate each HPV costing $100,000, with an ESSM (the low-end missile) costing over $600,000. So if your options are a five-round burst from your 5-inch or a single ESSM, you're looking at a 20% saving to deal with a single leaker.
Yes, you're potentially capable of saving large percentages when you're looking at small salvo sizes that the HVP can hit. This is not always the situation you are looking at, and you cannot utilise HVP against supersonic missiles, as admitted by the study itself. It may be able to be used instead of a more expensive missile, but if that salvo size of one is travelling at a high enough speed, using HVP to intercept it is not prudent, and you cannot rely on the assumption that the offence will use a missile the HVP can deal with.
Ultimately, the end effect of utilising HVPs like that is that you are capable of making the enemy waste some resources by forcing greater reliance on supersonic missiles in certain specific contexts where it would not otherwise have been used. It's an interesting technology capable of subtly shifting the balance of power in certain contexts, but I don't find myself particularly convinced that it will revolutionise missile defence wholesale or shift the cost balance anywhere near parity.
I don't think missile defence is intractable, but it is very difficult.
My recollection was the US was getting comfortable using 1 missile for certain types of targets
News to me if so, perhaps true for certain types of targets but I'm not confident that extends to many of the ballistic missiles types being used at the moment (MRBM/IRBM).
The US Navy is also porting the hypervelocity projectile (originally intended for a railgun) over to its five-inch gun. The HVP is assessed to be capable of dealing with ballistic missiles (it's guided) and it is likely, if produced at scale, to be much cheaper than a ballistic missile.
This would be significant if HVP was capable of intercepting ballistic missiles at any meaningful rate by itself. But according to your source it travels at Mach 3, limiting what it can be used for (IRBM terminal velocity can be somewhere in the range of Mach 16).
This study is attempting to assess the feasibility of using HVP as an augment to current ship loadouts instead of used on its own, the model in use here combines HVP as part of a larger defence system alongside "analogues for the SM-6, designated in the simulation as “Taller”, the SM-2/SM-2ER (“Lancer”), Enhanced Sea Sparrow (“Robin”), and the Phalanx Close-In-Weapons-System (CIWS) (“Pillbox”). The ships defend against anti-ship missiles consisting of analogues of four types of sub-sonic and super-sonic enemy weapons".
Note also that the other interceptors it's being paired with are not cheap and ship VLS units utilise many of these, with the Ticonderoga Class Cruiser boasting "12 Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), three Standard Missile-2 Extended Range (SM-2ER), 56 Standard Missile-2 Medium Range (SM-2MR), 12 Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM), 10 Standard Missile-3 (SM-3), 32 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAM), six Vertical Launch Antisubmarine Missile (VLA), and eight Harpoon missiles". HVP is just meant to be included as a component part of a whole package, which is very expensive.
In addition, they didn't know what the kill rate for HVP was due to the newness of the technology, so they just made assumptions about its probability of intercepting a target. "With the probability of hit and kill for the HVP unknown, simulation runs were created for an HVP probability of hit of 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3." And even using these assumptions, using a three round burst the inclusion of HVP increases salvo destroyed by.... 7.8% (this only applies to salvos of 75 missiles and above; it has a negligible effect on salvos sized 50 and below), using a five round burst it has an effect of 12%.
And as for the savings of HVP? It varies depending on salvo size, size of round and assumed kill rate, but for the most part they're not large, featuring savings in expended munitions like a cost of $284.7m being reduced to $279.7m, and other cost reductions in that ballpark (it bears noting that use of HVP increases costs in some contexts, particularly the ones where they carry the highest benefits wrt salvo destruction). The savings aren't nothing, but I'm unconvinced that they meaningfully alter the defence-offence asymmetry, and I'm very unconvinced it does anything when it comes to ballistic missiles capable of achieving super- or hypersonic speeds.
I pretty much agree, yeah. Though Orientalism seems to imply that this viewpoint is one unilaterally imposed on Japan by Westerners; that can be the case and it perhaps was in the example you offer up, but I'd note it can be a two way thing where the romanticism is sometimes the intended outcome. The current-day Wakandaism of Japan was partially stimulated and encouraged by Japan itself in the post-war period to rehabilitate their global image from being that of an imperialistic enemy-state (see "Cool Japan"). There were both economic and geopolitical incentives to produce cultural exports, and there was government interest in using pop-culture diplomacy as a branding strategy (especially in the 1990s onwards).
The fact that there are weeaboos is not surprising; many things that Japan produced with its newfound economic power were massively intended for foreign consumption, with local Japanese elements downplayed for that reason. An early example of extremely successful Japanese cultural export was NHK's "Oshin", which was aired in many countries essentially free as a soft power gambit, with care taken to not trigger a sense of "cultural invasion". The kawaiiness and globalised nature of Japanese media was a way to make the product maximally approachable and unthreatening to international audiences (see the concept of mukokuseki (無国籍), or statelessness). This eventually also ended up spilling over into the local media landscape - in this light, the notion of Japan as an untouched land is a bit ironic. It's sometimes hard to know if the Wakandaism stems from people wanting to promote an untainted view of Japan because it legitimises their politics, or if it's the other way around and people attach their politics to something already high-status and exoticised for legitimacy.
South Korea seems to be undergoing a similar trajectory, gaining a huge amount of soft power by consciously adopting international idioms for broader appeal. And this is not to say I think this media is bad at all - I quite enjoy a good amount of Japanese and South Korean media. OTOH, a stark counterfactual is China, who in spite of economic success failed to develop significant soft power overseas and never really appropriately globalised their media (I actually really like many Mainland Chinese media properties, and this is not to say China absorbed zero foreign influence either, but there's a certain obstinate insularity to Chinese media; appreciation often relies on a preexisting understanding of a foreign cultural meta).
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