site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I don't need to cite a million papers to show that many Chinese people spy for China or take steps to advance China's interests.

You do, however, need good papers to show that ethnic Chinese are Chinese people solely because they are ethnic Chinese, or that 'many' is 'most' as opposed to 'a small ratio,' let alone whether the costs of the 'many' outweighs the benefits of the other 'many' who do not.

This is the typical smuggling of the conclusion that goes on with ethnonationalist constructs, both in the self-identification (what is an 'ethnic chinese') and in the external identification (the observable versus unobservable nature of loyalty) and in the cost-benefit (whether the costs of PRC-loyal ethnic chinese outweighs the benefits of non-PRC-loyal ethnic chinese).

I don't need the most reliable sources to prove that their sympathies generally lean towards the country they have ethnic ties to.

You do, however, need reliable and accurate sources. Particularly, you need reliable sources that can accurately distinguish between 'ethnic ties' and 'familial ties,' as the former has significant organizational and societal implications than the later.

If, for example, you take an ethnicity-based caution, then there are categorical exclusions on the basis of race to positions of trust / the armed forces, which in turn comes with the social and political complications of embracing formal racial discirmination on people for potential actions regardless of guilt, even if they are avowed enemies of the regime. If you take a family-based caution, on the other hand, then perhaps you don't give security clearances to ethnic han with family members in China who can be used as leverage against them, but you can employ people who lack said families in China (or whose families were purged by the CCP).

This is particularly so when much of an ethnic diaspora is a diaspora because of the misconduct of the ethno-state, including a non-trivial number being exiles of the current ruling party for issues in the current living memory.

I can't be bothered to do a 20 second search and bring up examples for pedants, I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

It would be amusing to see you fail to a practically textbook Chinese robbers fallacy, which was memorably coined for its statistical implications of the availability of non-representative examples.

Furthermore, 'Australian' is not an ethnic group.

It is, however, a distinct cultural group, and a national group, and a political-identity group, and various other forms of groupings that make it distinct, foreign, and unreliable to other [groups] due to the divergence of identity, interests, and expected activities, despite nominal genetic commonalities.

No one is particularly confusing the Australians for the Germans, or the Brits and the French, despite their ethnic commonalities. (Not least because the vague concept of 'ethnic' stretches as far or as narrow as needed for the argument of the moment.)

There is a reason that the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Britain are very, very closely aligned and similar in many respects. We both know what that is but one of us is choosing to ignore it to score cheap points.

A foreigner inventing caveats to claim they are not a foreigner and so benefit from in-group bias sounds like something a treacherous and manipulative foreigner would say to gain an unwarranted position of trust and persuasiveness over other people's opinions despite a lack of shared loyalties and interests (because they are a foreigner).

Real self-negating advocacy is taking a straightforward opinion 'states should focus more on national interests than profits or ideology' and trying to twist it into 'beware the Eternal Australian trying to manipulate you into... using your own state to advance national interests', as though this is a wise and useful revelation.

The irony, again, exerts itself, though I doubt you'll recognize the applicability (or nested irony) of citing your earlier post.

People are happy fighting wars to defend their nation, they are not so keen fighting for abstract causes.

I’m not a hard ethnic nationalist, but I think honestly some caution is required in making the assumption that especially for first and second generation immigrants m that they retain no loyalty whatsoever to their homeland. A Chinese immigrant spent all of their formative years and probably beyond that being Chinese in a Chinese nation and in a Chinese culture. His attitude towards just about anything you can imagine are shaped by that, and it doesn’t go away just because he’s been walking around New York or Silicon Valley for five years. And the stronger the ethic and religious identities are, and the less enforcement of assimilation there is the worse it gets for creating loyalty to the new country. Muslims in Europe don’t seem to be very loyal to their new countries, in fact they’re doing their best to subvert those countries into being Muslim countries and are willing to use intimidation and propaganda and so on to get there. Thus, I think at this point, I’d be very cautious about letting first generation immigrants have access to levers of power or knowledge that can be sold off to foreign countries that may or may not be hostile to us. No, I don’t think it’s paranoid to keep Chinese and Iranian engineering students away from sensitive technology and information, especially military and cutting edge computer stuff. Of course in the 21st century, it’s heresy to say that Iranian engineering students should not be allowed on American nuclear submarines no matter their grades. I would consider it common sense.

And I don’t see how any country can survive if they’re giving away the levers of power or their greatest military and technology resources to people with no demonstrated loyalty to the actual country. If you don’t care what happens to your country or its people, at best it’s going to end with those people choosing personal interests over those of the country and at worst will choose other loyalties they may have over the interests of people they don’t care about. Even without the threat of family back in China who would face harm, but even without that, they are open to bribes and corruption because they’re here for their own reasons, mostly for some form of personal benefit.

Sure. This is a measured take. Familial ties are real, childhood upbringing is influential, and they impact things.

This is not, however, an argument of inherent ethnic loyalties overriding all else.

Moreover, it's also not approaching a policy argument of the tradeoffs- costs, benefits, opportunity costs, and so on- that go on with addressing policy questions on, say, college research. Particularly when the actor these people may hypothetically support is using them as complimentary, as opposed to primary, sources, and you do not actually have a monopoly on information control.

China, for example, is generally understood to conduct not only human espionage (asking ethnic Chinese to do things), but engage in routine cyberespionage against not just governments, but commercial actors, including almost certainly universities. (I say almost certainly because attribution is hard.) If the same thing is stolen from all four sources by different means- by the Chinese student, from the university the Chinese student worked at, from the corporation commercializing the research, and from the government that was funding the project / holding the data- then the Chinese student is not, actually, that important to the loss of information.

To be clear, it is a thing, but the nature of information security is that you have to be secure in all zones, and the adversary has to only succeed in one for all the measures taken to fail. There are, in turn, different policy implications for whether you can expect to control the loss of information versus if you cannot. If the student would go to another university at home but get the same research data thanks to theft, there may be an (in)efficiency cost with that for the adversary but it's not like the student isn't getting their hands on the data anyway.

This makes the strategic competition less about 'can students get the data'- the assumption is already 'yes'- to 'who benefits the most when they get their hand on the data.' In other words, who benefits the most- not exclusively- from human capital.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute maintains a Critical Technology Tracker intended to track various critical technologies and who writes the most cited papers on them. This includes their human talent flow tracker, which tracks where the authors of those papers went for undergraduate education, graduate education, and follow-on employment.

From a strategic competition perspective between states, even if you doubt the trustworthiness of these students, the optimal allocation is not 'more educated students employed in the hostile country.' Instead, you want to minimize the number of employed top performers in the countries you want the least benefit. Just like you can't control / maintain a monopoly of the information, you can't maintain a monopoly on the employment prospects of the students. That Top Producer of Cited Research is going to be employed somewhere. You can't feasibly prevent that.

What you can do- and where the cost-benefit tradeoff comes- is shape where they work.

Yes, a Chinese student doing industrial theft is bad. That is both a cost (loss of profits) and a relative loss (gain to the Chinese CCP). But if the cost is going to be incurred in some form regardless (alternative modes of theft), is it a worse cost than the gains of employing the student yourself, and denying them to the competition?

Or- put another way- is China benefiting more from a student-who-could-be-a-rocket-designer being a possible corporate spy facilitating the occasional IP theft, than by having them home being a senior rocket designer?

For a strategy game metaphor, in strategy games there are occasional tradeoffs between an ability that provides a buff with no downside, and another ability that provides a greater buff but with a downside, such as reducing health in exchange for greater offense. While the actual best option is context-dependent, as a matter of human psychology a lot people instinctively shy away from assuming known costs, even if they would be better for it. (Such as the health debuff actually letting you kill more enemies before they can hit you, saving you health despite an upfront cost.) Loss-aversion is real, even if the losses accepted enable greater profits / reduce greater lasses.

This is- loosely- analogous to the costs/benefits of brain drain of foreign students and would-be experts. There are costs to the receiving party / benefits to the sending policy, but these alone do no make refusing the costs an ideal position.

What it should mean- in a reasonable exchange- is setting reasonable limits of cost-benefit tradeoff.

You don't want Iranian students to be on nuclear submarines? Sure. But how about the experimental reactor design program? It's not exactly enabling Iran to go from non-nuclear to nuclear. Or how about Fusion? If that is invented, it'll probably be the fastest-stolen tech in history anyway. Etc. etc.

But once we get to this point of discussion on 'which jobs,' we're already accepting the premise that letting them in has merit in the first place, as opposed to the opposite.

If the same thing is stolen from all four sources by different means- by the Chinese student, from the university the Chinese student worked at, from the corporation commercializing the research, and from the government that was funding the project / holding the data- then the Chinese student is not, actually, that important to the loss of information.

By that reasoning, none of the four sources is important to the loss of information and generalized, nothing at all is important.

Not quite. It's not that nothing is important, but rather that certain objections start to lose value when they amount to special pleading rather than an actual standard of differentiation.

Think of it as analogous to swimming in the rain. Not wanting to go outside when it's raining because you don't want to get wet is fine. Not wanting to go swimming because you don't want to get wet is fine. But if you are getting in the pool, getting out because it's raining isn't compelling on 'because rain gets you wet' grounds. There may be other grounds of leaving- a storm, a need to prepare other things for the rain, what have you- but the specific 'because I'd get wet' basis isn't compelling if you're already wet.

In decision-cost frameworks, costs cease to be disqualifying objections if they're shared across the proposed courses of action. That doesn't mean costs aren't worth controlling.

That's inherent in handling problems one at a time. Otherwise, it becomes "the rain is not important to getting wet because you need to get out of the pool first" and "the pool is not important to getting wet because you need to get out of the rain first", said to someone who is stuck in both of them at once.

If the student "isn't important" because the university, corporation, and government all leak, you could equally say that the university isn't important because the student, corporation, and government all leak. Then you can say that the corporation isn't important...

The effect is that every cause of the problem is "unimportant" because whichever one someone points to, you reply that that wouldn't solve the other causes. Of course it wouldn't. You have to solve them too, but you also have to start somewhere.

need good papers to show that ethnic Chinese are Chinese people solely because they are ethnic Chinese

No, I do not need to defend the meaning of words no matter how much confusion you try to impose on the English language. You can draw up all these hypotheticals (what about this family, five generations of pure ethnic Chinese who've been living in the US their whole lives and have never been to China or speak Mandarin really, they're not really Chinese are they haha!) and they will still be irrelevant to the general case. Use wisdom!

let alone whether the costs of the 'many' outweighs the benefits of the other 'many' who do not.

I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about whether relying on foreign talent left countries wide open to treachery and manipulation? The line from me that you quoted? The answer is obviously 'yes'. The question is not 'can you accurately produce counterfactuals over nearly a hundred years accounting for endless second-order effects', which nobody can answer, least of all social sciences papers.

much of an ethnic diaspora is a diaspora because of the misconduct of the ethno-state

So along with the patriotic Chinese we have the Falun Gong and similar who, if anything, have even more of an incentive to manipulate and propagandize. No, national policy should not be influenced by foreign grudges but by national interests. The US manages lobbying extremely badly, so I wouldn't expect you to understand why it can be a bad thing if you have your country's elected representatives wearing foreign army uniforms or describing how their first priority as secretary of state is to help a foreign country.

A foreigner inventing caveats to claim they are not a foreigner sounds like something a treacherous and manipulative foreigner would say to gain an unwarranted position of influence over other people's opinions despite a lack of shared loyalties.

A US government official using critical theory, misrepresentation and legendary goalpost manipulation to defend US government policy sounds like something a deceptive and disingenuous US government official would say to manipulate opinions.

It's a particularly shameless given how well Australia has behaved as an ally. Australia shows up to even the silliest US wars, regardless of where they are. Australia provides good bases and good signals intelligence. Australia is paying for America to get its submarine production up to standard. It is not 'treacherous and manipulative' for an Australian to straightforwardly urge friendly countries to pursue national interests.

No, I do not need to defend the meaning of words no matter how much confusion you try to impose on the English language.

Yes, you do need to provide studies that support the motte position you are claiming if you want to claim studies support the motte you are claiming.

Particularly when one of the more influential past works that forms a foundation of the community ethos you are posting in is on the Chinese Robbers fallacy, which is always relevant to topics that mix media posting and China and would also be applicable to gish galloping examples that do not prove population-level assumptions.

Another foundational work being I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup, which reviews why ethnic solidarity is not the pre-eminent automatic loyalty determining factor for in-group/out-group dynamics.

I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about whether relying on foreign talent left countries wide open to treachery and manipulation?

You may be, but no.

We were talking about the amusing mix of irony and self-awareness for you to argue for a presumption of suspicion of treachery and manipulation on the basis of foreign origin, when you are not only a foreigner to the majority of your audience, but you routinely express credulous confidence in foreign-controlled social media known to try and manipulate foreign audience perception at an algorithmic level, and you regularly praise foreign policy thinkers who make exceptionally blunt arguments of the properness of manipulating foreigners-to-them like yourself for their own nation's benefit.

A US government official using critical theory, misrepresentation and legendary goalpost manipulation to defend US government policy sounds like something a deceptive and disingenuous US government official would say to manipulate opinions.

This, too, sounds like something a foreigner would say to manipulate other foreigners with whom they share no shared identity or loyalties. Truly, such foreigners should be viewed with suspicion and their potential contributions to the community of one's own should be rejected out of hand as obvious manipulations to influence. Particularly when so heavy handed as with the amusingly blatant use of forum pejoratives tailored to the sub-audience.

(I shall update my list of accused pejoratives to now include 'critical theorist,' which will sit nicely next to the 'neocon,' 'neoliberal,' 'fascist,' and other such ideological slurs. Unfortunately, American was already included in my (multi)nationality mutt pedigree.)

Unfortunately, rejecting such foreigner influence out of hand would require incorporating the influence of said foreigner, which would not be rejecting the untrustworthy influence, hence categorically invalid on its own premise.

It's a particularly shameless given how well Australia has behaved as an ally. Australia shows up to even the silliest US wars, regardless of where they are. Australia provides good bases and good signals intelligence. Australia is paying for America to get its submarine production up to standard. It is not 'treacherous and manipulative' for an Australian to straightforwardly urge friendly countries to pursue national interests.

Unless you have put on an unprecedent amount of weight over Christmas feasting, you are not Australia, and no one would particularly confuse you for a continent, a nation, or about 26,000,000 other people of various ethnicities, of which only a minority are even ethnically Anglo-Celtic.

I also highly doubt you have ever in your life shown up for even a single American war, based a single American solider in your home, provided the Americans any intelligence function, or made a single decision in the Australian defense community that would warrant anyone to identify you, individually, as an 'ally' of the US, as opposed to someone who lives in the geographic landmass of Australia with a hobbyist level of interest in geopolitics.

I'll leave it to other self-identified Australians of the forum to say whether you are representative of Australians in general. You are certainly not representative of various wings of the Australian foreign policy establishment.

Can you dial down the contempt a little bit? You are great at long-form arguments and there is nothing wrong with taking apart someone's post, but trust me, you don't need to layer the condescension on that thickly for the subtext to get through.

Sure. I'll even disengage from this topic and any not reply to any replies from him for the rest of the year to clear the air.

Australia is paying for America to get its submarine production up to standard.

To be sure, that is because the French were completely screwing the Aussies over with that contract.

No, it is because of corruption. The PM who trashed the French deal in exchange for the comedically terrible AUKUS one (America is entirely within their rights under the contract to take our money and give us nothing in return) has an incredibly plumb job with one of the American companies that are going to be profiting from that deal (look up Scott Morrison).

The French were also laughably corrupt -- they kept not delivering anything while raising costs and pushing back dates. If that was permitted to continue, it's not clear what stopping point they'd have ever found.