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Our struggle with China is racial
There are aspects of human civilization which would, with enough time be understood and adapted by any sexually reproducing species of sufficient intelligence, simply because they are instrumentally valuable with regards to the instincts that all biologically similar animals share. Animal likes food too. Animal likes sex too. Animal plays games too. Animal fights enemies and wages war for resources too. Many animals beat few animals, so animals have incentives to form alliance structures or be outcompeted and exterminated. Yet wouldn't it be surprising if they valued the same things, or felt the same ways, where instrumental necessities didn't require it? Shouldn't we then expect to see, dramatic differences in what are superficially institutions, even amongst intellectually comparable animals?
Consider the family. Every functional civilization has been patriarchal at least until recently; and the physical and cognitive differences explaining this are seen in the animal world as well. Woman needs man, and man must find his mate. It'd be great if she were loyal though. Yes you could punish disloyalty after the fact but that's not exactly foolproof. Hey what if she literally couldn't run away? If every couple breaks the feet of every daughter then she'll make a perfectly suitable mate! The logic here is of course unimpeachable; and yet is there any reason to believe Nero himself wouldn't react with a similar disgust to it as modern (non-anthropologist) man?
Where unimaginable cruelty naturally pervades even the closest family bonds between the strong and the weak; concern for outsiders may be expected to be similarly lacking. A toddler bleeding out in plain view to the complete indifference of most passers by is not at all surprising when you remember what their close genetic ancestors did, nor are the countless similar videos you can find on the Chinese interwebs: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ECeC4R-Gjtc.
I don't need to mention that where humans cannot expect compassion, the fate of man's best friend is not at all uncertain.
Other areas of human life like the ability to be moved by beauty seem similarly lacking in a civilization whose pre-1800s painting and sculpture never approximated that of Ancient Rome, much less Michael Angelo, when portraying human subjects (as opposed to landscapes were they admittedly excelled).
A people with innately different instincts in one field, might also be odd in other ways, like committing mass cannibalism against political enemies in the absence of famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre .
Their literature might include bizzare scenes, like a inferior man demonstrating his pious hospitality to his superior by secretly killing and cooking his own wife to feed him. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ghmx4v/what_can_romance_of_the_three_kingdoms_liu_an/
Different from birth
Someone covers your nose or lays you face first against the bed. What do you do? Seemingly every non-disabled European American newborn that isn't cognitively impaired has the same reaction; to move, struggle and fight against this horrifying imposition. Nearly every Chinese American baby has a different reaction; complete non-reactivity.
Isn't this precisely the kind of difference common stereotypes, a history of slavish behaviour, and the above section would suggest? Can you think of a more elemental test of innately different instincts than a newborn's reaction when you screw with his breathing? Have you noticed that basically everyone still wearing a mask is Asian?
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/2241227a0
** The necessity of racism **
What does it mean to allow members of a high IQ species of alien fundamental moral and aesthetic instincts to increase their power in our institutions?
What does it mean, for an entire nation of them to become the dominant power on the planet?
There are countless flaws in your argument, starting from the fact that Roman patriarchs considered family their literal property; to the obvious ability of the Taiwanese, majority ethnic Han and indeed many of them descendants of Han elite, the type most selected under those Han-specific civilizational pressures, to match and exceed «the white race» in humane civility and even aesthetics of their life; to the fact that the Chinese today have hundreds of millions of beloved pets. And of course there's plenty of love, loyalty and honesty in Chinese art, or found in relationships with Chinese people across the world. And we know generally that racial essentialism is a crude approximation for overlapping distributions, and that it's more sensible to speak of norms of reaction, and clearly such barbarity can be found in European history that the difference can only be said to be one of degree, not of kind... Honestly it's just trash. And your whole interpretation of foot-binding as aggression against kin to prevent running away, or whatever, is either atrociously disingenuous or so stupid as to make responding pointless. Read some interviews of surviving women from traditional families who have had that done to them, see what they think of it.
But let me put this aside. Let's grant the core of your thesis: that the Chinese civilization, with its peculiar circumstances, has created a separate human type, deficient in some aspects of humanity that the «western type» of human finds paramount. Simply put, that from your perspective the Han Chinese are less human.
Okay. This can certainly be the case, and I believe that even highly related peoples can have distinguishable genetic inclinations, like the old European racialists asserted. But, if we're dealing in extreme and stupid generalizations – then by my standard, you Hajnali goodbots are not fully human either, and far more dangerous. You personally are an apt example.
I think there is not a single perfect, fully human, race of man. Evolution is a cruel bitch and it didn't bother to create one I'd feel at home with. Certainly some groups, whites more obviously than others, have better competitiveness on the global scale, but this isn't about it. There are sparks of goodness and greatness in all major populations, but feeble, pointless and spinning into destructive attractors in separation from each other. Everyone is eager to get high on one's own group's supply, double down in natural inclinations. Asians are serious to the point of clowning themselves, thinking on the low level of optimizing the performance of inane arbitrary customs. Blacks are largely incapable of seriousness, which is why they can enjoy life more than anyone else. Arabs have a desire for epochal accomplishment, completely divorced from taste and prudence and so spilling back into their infertile sands as testaments to vanity. Russians are crazy, brilliant at finding ways to fuck themselves up. And you lot are so very marvelous at the scale of a Mannerbund or a village parish, but beyond that you can't handle psychopaths that emerge in any substantial population, and just get used, mumbling your nauseating «u can't get something outta nothing, sonny» or «u just need to believe in yourself» adages. Diversity is our strength indeed, except we're no good at really combining facets of our strengths, because we're blind and hostile to each other's Logos.
The principal mechanism of this is dehumanization. And I'd posit that whites are the worst in this department, this is one of your worst traits. You cannot suffer the heretic, the xenos, the mutant to live. You are overcome with disgust and an extermination impulse when you recognize something as genuinely alien. This fanaticism is not normal; neither are your aspirations to universal dominance of your doctrine, and therefore the fear of the Chinese is largely projection.
Following your Catholic Church programming, your futile wars of religion, and your acceptance of Jews (who are much more similar to the rest of the world, except more intelligent) into the ranks of your elites, you have devised (or have been taught) a way to cope with your tendencies. It's a primitive way: you simply insist on there being no real difference. Few notions in this world are more shallow than a Western liberal's idea of diversity; you think it's about puny cultural artifacts befitting of a theme park – garments, cuisine, language, inconsequential quirks, irrelevant myths and opinions. Even a slight deviation on a morally relevant dimension is cause to suppress the information, or explain it away with circumstances, pin the blame on some organized evil that can be vanquished. That's all just stopgaps.
You refuse to see others for what they are, because when you do, you start to hate. And in the process of not-seeing, you degrade yourself, before something finally gives. I am increasingly sympathetic to the Jewish paranoia that, if you were ever allowed to look past the «Judeo-Christian» front and once again properly notice them as a distinct race, a second Holocaust wouldn't have been out of the question. Where's Jewish Mickey Angelo, indeed?
The Chinese are not Anglo-Germans. They do not share your values. They do not share many of your weaknesses. It is harder to convince a Chinese than a White that being illiterate is «another way of reading», or hallucinating is «another way of knowing», or that economic collapse is desirable to clean our Lebensraum from the invisible poison of radiation. They are, in my impression, a bit less empathetic. But that's a form of wisdom too, which could help your race heal, if only you could see out of your ass anything that isn't either a warped mirror or the Devil himself.
天地不仁
以萬物為芻狗
聖人不仁
以百姓為芻狗
Somehow, googling returns a number of pages where straw dogs are confused with straw men.
Also, my old grand theory about the Chinese-Western difference in mental style.
I mean, what do you think it is ?
Ruthless goal orientation, lack of adherence to norms, chutzpah, etc. The tales of crying, broken down managers. (not girls)
It's fairly clear what it is. Then there is his father.
You mean sociopathy, I guess? I don't think Musk fits into the construct. Isambard Kingdom Brunel certainly does not. I also don't think low-empathy Chinese managers are lacking in this trait. And chutzpah of the SBF, Adam Neumann or Elizabeth Holmes type is not creative whatsoever, it's merely imitating the superficial aspects of a visionary to divert resources to mundane ends.
No. Faustianism is a peculiar mental type, which doesn't survive in captivity for very long, and one our feminized civilization is no good at measuring or seeing.
It's a problem of semantics, really.
There's considerable amount of evidence to believe there's a distinct human subtype (psychopaths), people who lack affective empathy, most emotions, show anomalous reactions to fearful stimuli, and have no conscience whatsoever. Also are goal oriented to the point punishment doesn't seem to work on them, supposedly. Generally, you can train people and animals to avoid doing something using electroshocks, this doesn't work on psychopaths.
He's almost certainly not a complete psychopath, but probably has a good few traits.
You'd know he was one because he'd have likely kept Amber Heard as a wife. Psychopaths love crazy women, the crazier the better.
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I might credit the idea that Chinese culture is fucked up beyond repair - Maoism was bad, but Great Qing had it's own brand of insane cruelty. But it's not obvious to me that the cause is genetic or inherent to the Han race. Westernized Chinese are pretty normal, if not better functioning than whites. Maybe it's that higher Han IQs make them less able to resist societal trends and fashions.
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I do not know how much truth there is in your rant about the Chinese, but I have known enough Chinese-Americans to be able to tell you that whatever differences in behavior exist between Europeans and Chinese are not genetic, at least not more than to a trivial degree. In my experience, Chinese-Americans who were born in the United States act indistinguishably from European-Americans who were born in the United States.
Then you’re not very experienced with them. They excel at education to the point where they are 7x more representative in elite colleges than whites are, and that’s AFTER affirmative action caps their numbers, they have far less crime than whites as well. Genetics vs environment aside, it’s undeniable Their behaviour is very different from European
Some of that is affirmative action against whites, but not so much Asians.
Most studies I've seen on the subject suggest that discrimination is more significant against Asians rather than Whites. However, we have to be careful here because the White category includes Jews who generally speaking do not suffer from affirmative action. In addition, since Whites have been in the US for longer and in far larger numbers, there are simply more old money types who donate to schools on top of "legacy admits".
If those confounding factors were partialled out then I wouldn't be surprised if, say, lower-middle class Whites without rich parents, a Holocaust grandma story or legacy points were more discriminated against than Asians. However, these are exceptionally sensitive topics so getting data is very hard. Even in the lawsuits against the Ivy League schools, where data has been forcibly extracted from the institutions, the White category isn't separated from the Jewish one.
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If the claim is "Look at this terrible thing that high-class Chinese people did to their children; they crippled their bodies for social fashion.", we can point to the whole trans-grooming brouhaha in the west as a comparison. People are social, and fucked-up societies can and will override the instincts of parents and lay their children on the offer of their particular Moloch; this does not appear to be a race-specific trait, as far as I can tell.
And we can look at a lot of other individual instances of moral atrocity in peoples who don't seem to do that sort of thing super-regularly; we've got the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War off the top of my head. And while I consider that an existence proof against people claiming that the Spanish are saints, I don't think it proves much other than that.
As for the aesthetics, I will point out the degree to which Michael Bay and James Cameron have done really well in China with their movies. I mean, I don't really like the Bayformers aesthetic, but clearly a lot of my fellow Caucasians do, and so do a lot of the Chinese, apparently.
Look, if you want to make an argument here, why not get some actual stats? What do Chinese charity rates look like, both in the mainland and across other nations? How do you see the behavior of Chinese people changing from first, second, and nth-generation immigrants? What are your thoughts on popular Chinese media? Do you have any opinions on the popularity of cultivation novels and stories?
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This post is far too "boo outgroup" to pass muster. You may as well have written it about cardiologists; it would not have been any less on the nose.
Extraordinary claims demand meticulous evidence. While I appreciate you providing some evidence in support of your claims, it seems sufficiently cherry-picked, and your account overall insufficiently steelmanned for your outgroup, that you have failed to clear the threshold here. Furthermore, you have not written in a way that evinces a sense that you are writing for everyone and want them to be included in the conversation.
This is your third warning in about a month; keep it up, and these will start becoming bans.
In cases like this I see a mod warning as more of a reward than a punishment. What is the OP coming here to do? Argue with a bunch of people. What are you doing? Arguing with them.
If you are willing to write up and say something it's costing you time and mental effort. 1 day bans feel like they should be a standard starting point, rather than what we apply after three warnings
That's what gets me, I have no idea if Lepidus wants to actually debate this or if they're just trolling and being weirdly dedicated to it.
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Near universal participation in an activity amongst the upper classes in an activity is by definition not equivalent to selective posting regarding cardiologists. You can claim that it doesn't imply what I think it implies, but pretending it's selective is just open rank dishonesty.
A single instance of mass participation in an activity (mass cannibalism in the absence of famine) engaged in by no other modern society; is also entirely fair, in the same way it would be fair to suggest a deeper biological roblem if America was the only country where people had ever raped children.
As for the Yang Yue case or it's many counterparts, The Chinese themselves don't deny that they have a major crisis of callous indifference, they just blame it on modernity or if outside the CCP's jurisdiction, communism. Am I not allowed to interpret it differently in light of evidence of longlasting cruel tendencies?
Regardless of whether you agree that there is a meaningful link between cruelty to one's children and callousness to strangers', it's fundamentally against the spirit of this forum for you to threaten to ban me for it.
While not completely analogous, there are a few other events that are at least comparable, including several incidents in the Pacific Theater of WWII (most notably Chichijima, nearly involving future president George H. W. Bush). It's not quite as recent, but the story of Johan de Witt is undeniably Western as well.
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I'm not threatening to ban you for drawing connections, I'm telling you that if you're going to post criticism of your outgroup, the rules place a number of restrictions on how you're allowed to do that, and you have failed to meet that threshold here. In particular, the rules suggest quite strongly that you should post about specific rather than general groups whenever possible, and I don't see a lot of evidence in your post that you even realize how many different ethnic (and, arguably racial) groups might be included in sweeping reference to "the Chinese." Furthermore, similar laundry lists of objectionable practices would be possible to assemble concerning any race of people or, indeed, of the human race. Even assuming the Chinese are every bit as bad as you say, that doesn't make them special.
If you think any of this is "against the spirit of this forum" then you have failed to grasp the spirit of this forum.
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Enh, see, I want to agree with you. I really do. And I hate that I have to qualify this by saying that I am Chinese, because I hate that I feel the need to state my race before applying my argument, especially here. Ideas should be colorblind no matter where they originate from.
I want to tell you that you are simultaneously both spot on, and that you are overthinking it.
I think the best way to put it is that (mainland) Chinese are ruthlessly value-optimizing. They hold fundamentally different values, because of course they do. Whether these values are inherent, or they are taught, is not my concern - nature/nurture debates do not interest me, and modern Chinese history involves enough bloodshed to justify the color of the flag. What they are is what they are, and given that a multipolar world seems very likely barring dawning American AI dominance or continued military dominance, it causes me regular frustration that the vast majority of westerners fail to grasp that they're working off of fundamentally different values, let alone understand that they will naturally optimize for those values. Chalk it up to the American belief in universalism, or the standard American practice of saying (or believing!) one thing while doing another.
You may be absolutely right that your struggle with China is in fact racial. You may even be right in fearing a high-IQ species with alien fundamental moral and aesthetic instincts.
But at the end of the day, China is simply optimizing for its own values. Everyone does this. Your examples are entirely valid. Foot-binding conferred status and sexual market value at the time, so they did it. The weak exist at the mercy of the strong, so they are subservient to the strong. There are millions of Chinese people who are competition, losing the competition means you are one of the weak, so the toddler will eventually grow to be competition, so why care for it? Man's best friend is made of meat, and meat is protein, so why not eat it? Your political enemies can potentially threaten your existence, so why not eat them? You can sell a literature book by describing a scenario where the lower class gets a moment of catharsis by screwing over those more powerful, why wouldn't you?
I am entirely convinced, given the mess that America is in, that they are also subservient to perverse incentives. While they are not remotely comparable, the mechanisms behind it are the same.
It's simply more naked in China. Everywhere, the weak exist to be destroyed, or to be subservient to the strong. Losing in China is existential. The culture has a long history of genocide, either by the hard, physical method, or the soft method of cultural assimilation. Whatever chance that the weak had of affecting any kind of change was run over by tanks in the streets of Beijing as they were reminded what it meant to be weak, and what it meant to be strong.
You can't change anything about China without changing the values - or, well, as Chinese would put it - the dog-eat-dog nature of reality. If you don't wish to change the values, then there's nothing for it - nuke the bugmen, or attempt to practice isolationism. There are millions of Chinese. The preferred method of problem solving through the years by China's rulers was to throw bodies at the problem. Life is, and always has been, cheap. Winners win, and losers lose. If you can't grasp what this means, you haven't lost hard enough. Losers in China know what it is to lose.
(I lie, maybe I will bring up nurture after all - I have noticed that Chinese-Americans, especially the born-in-the-US generation, have poor comprehension of "winners win, and losers lose". Even if they lose, they assume family, community, social security, academia, the federal government, will be there for them and have managed to optimize for America in many ways. They will wear their "Chinese-ness" on their sleeves to get ahead for diversity points and wouldn't be caught dead wanting to move back to Mainland China. They know how the game is played.)
Maybe Chinese TFR being as critically damaged as it is will change some things. I'm not optimistic, because China will simply apply a top-down brutalist attempt to fix this. Or, alternatively, the opposition will become strong and eat the top, and apply their own fix that might be just as bad if not worse.
Great post, you've made lots of interesting points, thanks for sharing your perspective.
Context, I'm a white American currently in East Asia (not China) and this exact point I think is the hugest difference between the mindset of rich countries and poor countries (or more specifically, today, rich old countries like USA and Japan and currently poor/recently poor countries like China, Thailand and South Korea.) There is more of a palpable understanding of the risks and dangers of reality in the cultures of poor countries that the US and our aging allies seem to be increasingly oblivious to. Your statement above reads as extremely low class and would probably be shocking to most people in the US but it's so blatantly true that I can't help but feel like any culture that understands it is bound to outcompete any that ignores it for political or social reasons.
Yes, that's exactly it. The west is too myopically focused on the belief that everyone is equal that they fail to even imagine that a civilization halfway around the world and thousands years older could possibly have a different set of values, for fear that they come across looking racist, when a bit of cultural pragmatism could really help steer things in a more sane direction.
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I was tempted to join the other commenters in replying directly to Lepidus about why their post was wrong and offensively misguided, but I'll just springboard off of your comment instead:
The conflict between America and China is not racial at all. It is, rather, down to culture and government. As you note, Chinese tend to be competitive, self-serving (where possible/convenient), but also subservient. Probably the biggest argument against this being a "racial" conflict is that, as you get at in your parenthetical, once you take the Chinese out of China, you pretty much also take the China out of the Chinese (to an extent). Someplace like America is still pretty damn competitive, but it's also a much more relaxed environment compared to the earlier People's Republic or the older Empire. It's in a place like America, with all the slack afforded by the general material wealth and opportunity, where you see the Chinese get ahead because the competitive spirit still persists, but also there's less consequences for failure and less holding them back.
Insofar as this conflict is existential, I suppose it might be a general improvement for the world if all Chinese around the world behaved more like Chinese-Americans than Mainland Chinese, but that is a memetic battle that is far from decided.
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This seems pretty heavily coloured by recency bias. It was only less than 150 years ago that the modernisers in the ranks of the Qing elite were arguing that China was too frivolous and insufficiently receptive to Western efficiencies. Indeed, as the Self-strengthening movement wore on some of its greatest advocates complained that most of the Chinese bureaucracy were more or less uninterested in modernising the military at all. Chang Chih-Tung wrote in 1898 that ‘Zuo Zongtang established a shipyard near Fuzhou… Shen Baozhen set up the shipyard administration… Ding Baozhen instituted arsenals to make foreign guns and bullets… current opinion cavilled at every point’ and in consequence ‘their establishments went to waste or operated in a reduced form, none of them could achieve any expansion’, something their licking at the hands of the Japanese had proved in 1895.
Indeed, the controversial Heshang documentary, shown on Chinese television in 1988 argued that Chinese culture was entirely deficient precisely because it privileged tradition and even backwardness instead of the science and progress that they considered to be paramount in the West.
In general I think these sorts of arguments about national character are almost always overwrought and fairly meaningless.
Not to disagree with the overall point, but often the decisions made sense in context, at least in terms of securing power for an individual or tribe. Modernisation would have ceded massive amounts of power to the Han Chinese, something that the Qing were running pretty low on after the Taiping. Resistance to modernisation, iirc, was often as much fear as it was traditionalism.
Anyway, to add onto this.
I think this is understandable when you think about it. China has gone through a period of dynastic collapse, warlordism and anarchy, international war, civil war, and massive civil unrest pretty much one immediately after another, after which there was a blistering pace of market liberalisation under and after Deng Xiaoping.
In fact I would put the direct causative element of this cutthroat-ness to be the latest liberalisation under/after Deng, which is definitely something of an adaptation of Western capitalism, even if you can argue that it’s not directly a Western import. The Chinese had a lot to catch up to in the 1980s.
Perhaps, but worth noting that post-Sino-Japanese war the Guangxu emperor was generally rather reformist, and presumably many of the opponents of the reformers in the civil service were Han.
Yes (and Guangxu was a reformist even before the first sino-japanese war), but Cixi who blocked him had the bulk of the Manchu aristocracy behind her (not to mention the conservative neo-Confucians), and Cixi won. Nor was Cixi necessarily opposed to reform - she didn’t depose Guangxu until 1898, after all - but only that which threatened Manchu power. There were definitely both social and institutional factors to the ineffectiveness of reform in the late Qing era, and the Han themselves were often traditionalist, I don’t mean to downplay that. I just meant that oftentimes being conservative was a pragmatic choice for many elites at the time to try to maintain their grip on whatever power they had.
I tend to think that it was less important at this point, though. By 1898 much/most of the power was held in Han hands, simply because after the Taiping rebellion (a rebellion where the death toll of which would only be surpassed by WW2, and with the Taiping + other rebellions controlling key industrial areas like the Yangtze delta for years) the central government apparatus had bled much power to its Han officials to combat it, many of which were warlords but in name.
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I am less enthusiastic about your and OP's explanation of all this as a race struggle. In fact the Chinese are one of the few nations where there are different type of societies with arguably the same culture/history: that of Mainland China vs that of Singapore, Hongkong and especially Taiwan. Other examples of similar natural experiments are that of North/South Korea and East/West Germany.
Not everything is inevitable and racially/culturally conditioned to run in the exact same way.
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The lack of empathy you observe in mainland Chinese culture is in large part due to the cultural devastation unleashed by communism over the past century, which has created a far more atomized, materialistic, acquisitive, and sociopathic society than existed previously or that can be seen in ethnic Chinese communities that did not undergo the twin calamities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. This extends even to minority communities such as the Uyghurs, who used to practice a syncretic form of Islam that had integrated into Chinese society before it was torn up by its roots and replaced in recent years by more extremist forms of Wahhabism.
This is not to say that premodern agricultural societies on the edge of starvation or within living memory of such won't in general be numb to human and animal suffering outside of their immediate circle of care in a way that would horrify any First Worlder, but that applies equally to India and Africa as to China, and ignores the extent to which the displacement of traditional cultures by Western ideologies in certain cases caused immense human suffering (like a virus jumping from a well-adapted host to a naïve individual, so to speak).
As for art, while I can't say it was better than what the Greeks or Renaissance masters accomplished, I don't think Chinese sculpture is quite as bad as you made it out to be.
There's not much to say on the topic of footbinding except to agree that it was one of the most horrific cultural practices ever to exist, though my ancestors would insist I point out to you that certain Chinese communities of which they were a part did not participate.
Lastly, regarding masks, I have pretty much run out of alternative explanations for why the degree of imposition they represent is seen to be so different across different populations, so I'm willing to give that one to you. Whether that means me and mine are all alien bugmen with whom the West can never have mutual understanding, time will tell, but I certainly hope not, as ethnic cleansing is really quite a hassle.
Apparently they were quite good by medieval standards!
Some Chinese porcelain art is (…mostly?) quite beyond what other cultures have done with the same, historically. We can’t forget about funny things like the flying horse of Gansu, either. Bird-and-flower paintings, as well.
I've seen a number of traditional Chinese paintings and they are quite good. By whatever standards high art should be judged, I don't see them as lacking.
And I have toured a few Chinese palaces from centuries ago and they did not appear to lack sophistication or artistry. But I'm not an art historian.
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Do we have any reason to believe that this is true? People living with the shame of being part of an inescapably horrible society are not exactly going to be immune to fabricating the idea of a brighter past.
Consider this quote from, Ralph Townsend a US Consular official writing before the war and before the Communist takeover.
"Almost any veteran foreigner who has traveled up and down the rivers of China will be able to recount one or more cases where he has personally observed a man
drown without efforts to save him by other Chinese a few feet away on shore or in a boat. "
His experiences disgusted him so much that he published a book called "ways that are dark, the truth about China", and went around the U.S claiming that the Japanese were actually the good guys (getting arrested and charged with the Manafort offense - acting as an unregistered agent). That, or he was on their payroll from the start and made shit up, I guess we can never know for sure.
Having read it, I can say that the Wikipedia summary in no way understates the allegations he makes:
Through a large number of personal and second-hand anecdotes, Townsend argues that the Chinese may be the only people in the world who are completely unable to comprehend the basic human impulses of sympathy or gratitude toward other people. Because the Chinese feel no empathy toward others, they behave in an unbelievably sadistic and cruel fashion toward one another, and they view altruistic foreigners as targets to be mercilessly taken advantage of.
https://ia802900.us.archive.org/29/items/waysthataredarkthetruthaboutchinabyralph_202003/Ways%20that%20are%20dark%20the%20truth%20about%20China%2C%20by%20Ralph.pdf
“Are Chinese actually lizardmen” is certainly a take, given the sheer amount of moralising and, well, empathy you can read out of the ample historical annals of imperial China, even just from the court records.
This is to a significant degree true, and is quite well known by most who also know about the bystander problem in Chinese affairs. Makes me curious about what source you’re getting this information from, that they take away such context.
If we are to be trading polemics, allow me to quote Bertrand Russell who has a much more mainstream take:
It must also be noted that Townsend was very high on the Japanese, who are quite closely related to the Chinese genetically; and sometimes in ways that age extremely poorly, as apparently he commended the Japanese invasion of China for how “humane” its armed forces behaved.
Interestingly, here is what Russell has to say about the Japanese, at least vis a vis the Chinese, also from The Problem of China:
Interesting how a century changes things.
Anyway.
Forget careful societal analysis, we can dismiss this out of hand through a cursory glance at Chinese literature and philosophy. Would Dreams of the Red Chamber be written by a lizardman without empathy, and would a race of sociopaths keep record of poetry in the Book of Odes for three thousand years? Would a race wholly incapable of any tenderness found philosophies like Confucianism, where the first two of the five virtues are benevolence and righteousness, and Mohism (a warring-states philosophical school that was a major school of thought at the time), which has universal love essentially as its central tenet?
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Let me end with quoting Russell again:
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This is a fair and honest response. I'll make sure to address it when I get the time. Thank you.
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My two cents probably means nothing to you, but Townsend should have traveled more. There are things in a large plurality of non-western cultures that would have horrified him. Although I am willing to bet that China does it at greater scale simply on a pure numbers perspective.
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I don’t even know why i’m bothering to ask this, but have you ever been to China? I’ve only been to major cities but it’s really not that different from the US. All of the major American brands are there, they love Marvel movies and have a work ethic that goes and goes. The CCP might be “communist” but the people feel even more capitalist than Americans. Think the cultures fit well together and we could each learn a lot from each other.
No. I have not.
Please, Name one aspect of Chinese culture that you would like to see implemented here given the option between it, and the similar version of it present in Western countries before the 1960s.
One late European adoption of an old Chinese custom is that of the competitive written examination, first advocated for in Britain and trialed in India, and then spread elsewhere. It is something that has already been adopted, yes, but I find your qualifiers nonsensical, and this serves as good an example as any for a far-reaching social institution that whites felt obliged to adopt for themselves.
The reason for the qualifier was to address a prescriptive claim. @YouEssAyyy was suggesting there was something we could currently learn from the Chinese. But yes, the adoption of the competitive written examination was incrediby valuable.
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Why do you feel the need to add this qualifier? Do you think the Western culture today is what it is because of some racially inauthentic processes?
So I'll ignore your qualifier and respond with a quote from Nick Land.
While I agree with the sentiment that surrendering any part of a city to criminality us barbarous, I can think of plenty of western cities where there is little or no danger.
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I don't think that the current low crime levels of many East Asian cities can be put down to some kind of long-running national culture, much less to 'biological heredity'. Late imperial China was quite a violent place; for just one example, the problem of laoguazei murdering and robbing travellers was thought to be endemic. An assessment of actual figures is obviously impossible to arrive at, guides on travelling published in the 18th century, for instance, often included warnings such as this;
which might be helpful at times. If encountering someone unknown,
even if riding on the same boat or sleeping at the same inn, it is possible
that he has a different agenda from yours. All sorts of valuables should
be kept secret and guarded attentively. At night, be wary of theft. In
daytime, be wary of robbery.
wait until the eastern sky turns bright before setting sail or leaving the
inn. If the eastern sky is still dim without any sign of sunrise, even if
a rooster has crowed, it is still nighttime. If one hurries to unleash the
boat or set off down the road, one must be wary of the danger of being
robbed by evildoers. When the sun starts to set in the west, one should
park the boat or find an inn. As the idiom goes, rest early instead of
late, better to be delayed than to be wronged
Likewise, William T. Rowe's study of Hankow in the late Qing period found that, while again we can't assess things quantitively, the public perception was the criminals were everywhere and that they were effectively free to commit crime as they pleased, and there were certainly 'bad' parts of the city where the more respectable citizen would not wish to find himself. As one newspaper observed in the mid-19th century, 'bandit-types from all over China find it easy to engage in violent crimes... the bad freely intermingle with the good'.
I do think there is a difference in that the late Qing was a period of decreasing state power and resulting anarchy, while as far as I understand it “bad neighbourhoods” have been around in Western cities even in their high points. My understanding is that in earlier periods of stronger state power, Chinese roads and cities were relatively quite safe compared to the rest of the world (and were remarked as such by travelers and merchants).
Nevertheless, this is better explained by culture and institutions than by genetics.
Eh, sort of, but that first quote (and more generally the problem of murder and robbery of long-distance travellers) dates back to the early 18th century, so this was still some way off the real crisis of the late Qing. In fact, state officials exerted enormous effort to stamp the problem out; towns in the most affected regions were supposedly plastered with appeals for help in murder-theft cases. They weren't always very good at it, of course.
Yep, this is it really I think, institutions.
That would be the high Qing? Did you mean early 19th century?
Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if post-Qianlong the Qing was mostly completely inept at policing its cities. Tax was light enough that the bureaucracy was extremely stretched, corruption was rampant just to keep the machine going, and this was the time where rebellions just started sprouting like weeds throughout the empire.
I did mean early 18c. I only meant to say late imperial China in respect of that part, I didn't mean to imply that this was in the late Qing (well the problem did persist of course, but it didn't start then).
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I was trying to follow the path of sino friendship advocated by the Anglin fellow and some others, in the face of eternal militaristic Americans, but Guangxi Massacre hits hard.
I knew that Western travelers in China reported them having elaborate cookbooks for human flesh but that was centuries ago...
Now the White Man is a frog in a boiling pot, must it stay in there and have its kids turned gay, mutilated and sterilized, lobotomized, propagandized, or jump in the actual boiling pot and literally be boiled and eaten?
A priori the White liberal is still a more direct, mortal enemy than the Chinese, but clearly Asian dominance is not sustainable in the long run.
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The chinese individuals I've met (and the descendants of chinese individuals I've met) seem to adopt western culture easily. If there was some genetic basis for chinese culture wouldn't you expect the opposite? (admittedly this is totally anecdata)
Furthermore aren't there examples of chinese-american celebrities adopting western culture? Jackie Chan? Bruce Lee?
It seems like you've cherry-picked some ideas and woven them into a nice narrative-- and while the narrative is coherent, it doesn't really do a good job of modeling reality.
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I'm pretty sure I can answer all your half-assed leading questions with "no."
No, a Gish gallop of of historical anecdotes is not a convincing argument, nor a particularly impressive one.
You need to go practice your five virtues.
The multi-century near universal practice of footbinding amongst the most educated and intellegint strata of society (but going down far lower) is definitionally not anecdotal. Footbinding represents a fundamental qualitative deviation from any widespread european practice and was continued up to the peak of independent Chinese civilizational development. Unless you reject HBD entirely, it is exceedingly stupid to claim that it cannot be cited as evidence of differing innate genetic dispositions.
Only if there was no plausible explanation in the distinctive historical features of Chinese culture.
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Of course it's evidence. It's not convincing evidence.
You've crawled astonishingly far up your own ass. It could mean that you are innately optimized for the effort, a real ubermensch. Or there might be another explanation. Until you put in the effort to disprove competing theories, and defend against others' counterarguments to your own, you haven't proven anything.
Don't do this, please.
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You cant simply cite cultural practices as evidence of genetic deviation. Statistics doesn't conform to our whims to that extent. You can cite genetic predispositions that might have given rise to that practice, not the practice itself. You must realize the illogic of trying to correlate a qualitative measurement with a quantitative one. Let alone not taking into account that culture itself is probably an independent variable if exotic enough. Or disrespect the notions of chaotic systems altogether.
With this line of reasoning I can make a convincing enough case that something about Anglophone genetics really predisposes them to get confused about their gender. If it only were that simple.
Let me indulge this theory, like a person with basic curiosity might except for German genetics:
Bordering on the Suiones are the nations of the Sitones. They resemble them in all respects but one - woman is the ruling sex. That is the measure of their decline, I will not say below freedom, but even below decent slavery. - Tacitus on a German Tribe
The dowry is brought by husband to wife, not by wife to husband. Parents and kinsmen attend and approve the gifts - not gifts chosen to please a woman's fancy or gaily deck a young bride, but oxen, a horse with its bridle, or a shield, spear, and sword. In consideration of such gifts a man gets his wife, and she in her turn brings a present of arms to her husband. This interchange of gifts typifies for them the most sacred bond of union, sanctified by mystic rites under the favour of the presiding deities of wedlock. The woman must not think that she is excluded from aspirations to manly virtues or exempt from the hazards of warfare. That is why she is reminded, in the very ceremonies which bless her marriage at its outset, that she enters her husband's home to be the partner of his toils and perils, that both in peace and in war she is to share his sufferings and adventures. That is the meaning of the team of oxen, the horse ready for its rider, and the gift of arms.
Wait, what? A society where men gift their brides swords?
But wait, there's more...
"The Naharvali proudly point out a grove associated with an ancient worship. The presiding priest dresses like a woman."
Ok, fastforward roughly 1900 years.
From Wikipedia:
[1908!] A transvestite pass (German: Transvestitenschein) was a doctor's note recognized by the governments of Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic – under the support of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld – identifying a person as a transvestite. Transvestite at this time referred to all individuals whose gender identity and preferred clothing was discordant to that associated with their assigned sex, and so included both crossdressing and transgender people.
Karl M. Baer (20 May 1885 – 26 June 1956) was a German-Israeli author, social worker, reformer, suffragist and Zionist. He came out as a trans man in 1904.[1] In December 1906, he became the first transgender person to undergo sex reassignment surgery.
1931 – In Berlin in 1931, Dora Richter became the first known transgender woman to undergo vaginoplasty.
I don't know I'm really starting to think there might be some genetic link here... Unfortunately, none of this explains the current problems of the anglosphere. It's not like we have any German DNA or anything [/sarc].
The explination for current problems, looking at the Hirschfeld, Baer and Richter examples is antisemitic.
There have been millions of Jews outside of Germany and Austria, especially in the Russian Pale of Settlement, but those did not particularly care for transgenderism. I guess an anti-Semitic explanation of jewspecialization of subversive activities per country is not hard to come up with, but the point is even then it takes two to tango. Hirschfeld, Baer, Richter, Freud and others worked in the cultural context where their ideas fell into fertile soil.
There's always a cohort ready to embrace degeneracy.
They found fertile soil right up until they fled the country.
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China really is not so different from the West. There are weird practices and different paths taken, but they're basically in the same category of great civilizations. There are no fundamental qualitative differences.
For some reason the US has a practice of commonly mutilating the penis of babies. This doesn't cause so much harm as foot-binding yet it's bizarre and hostile. If you walked up to someone on the street and offered to cut off parts of their penis, a rude rebuff is the best you can expect. The Chinese thought small feet were attractive and high-status (and a part of it got mixed into resistance to Manchu rule when they tried to outlaw it), so what? Cultures do strange things from time to time. Weird foot fetishes are not unheard of. Right now, there is an emerging school of thought that non-heterosexuals are high status - thus LGBT parades, Pride events and so on. This is also very strange. A Chinese scholar might well say 'we selected eunuchs to run institutions for strategic reasons so they couldn't build dynasties or interfere with the imperial harem, why are you glamorizing it for the whole population, creating such perverse rituals?'
If you study Chinese history more deeply, you get the sense of a civilization which went down a different path at the beginning. Back in the era of Aristotle and Plato, the Chinese also had a period of division and many schools of philosophical thought. They had people who were interested in formal logic and mathematics, just as in the West. They had proto-utilitarianism too, in Mohism.
But in the end, Confucianism, Daoism and Legalism won out. These are more on the 'social science' end of philosophy, they're not concerned with whether something is true, logical sense but upon how society runs. Confucianism is about ritual, about stable relations between people (there's even an element of social contract in the mandate of heaven). Daoism is very abstract and consciously opposed to defining itself (it's a little bit like a cope-religion where terrible things happen but if you're a true galaxy-brain/sage you can just ignore the difference between good and bad so you're never hurt and eventually ascend to the astral plane). Legalism is about putting boots on the ground and cutting off heads, on min-maxxing your agricultural power base and conquering the world with blood and iron.
I think it's useful to think about China as a civilization that was more based on politics than technology. They were very good at the social end of things, running a gargantuan empire, organizing massive irrigation works. Of course they'll be better at moulding people and making them more disciplined. Their mainstream civilizational philosophy of Confucianism/Legalism was all about moulding people. There just wasn't so much emphasis on technology, mathematics and so on. They definitely had good mathematics and technology but it wasn't emphasized. As far as they were concerned, moving wealth around and administration was more important than growing the pie.
Whatever backwardness there was in the social end of things was due to the Qing government maintaining an ideological small-government stance for a few centuries, refusing to raise taxes and increase the size of the administration even as the country's population tripled. Obviously this caused administrative issues and corruption, it inhibited statebuilding and military efficiency when the Europeans showed up. The weakness of the Chinese state in the 19th and 20th centuries was fundamentally due to choice and then bad luck as they kept getting pummelled by outsiders and didn't have time to build up or modernize.
The Mandate of Heaven predates Confucianism, it being what the Zhou used to justify their overthrow of the Shang (at least in classical understanding).
I’m not sure that Europe was too different, at least until recently (historically speaking)? Perhaps the Chinese did go super-super-hard into what (iirc) Leibniz calls “practical science”, but I don’t get the feeling that Europe was consciously emphasizing science and technology until at least mid-modern history.
Honestly I would date it to the Ming. The Qing in many ways just continued with Ming policy, and the Ming were often a basketcase, just not so obviously; and while Ming society was undoubtedly commercial, much policy reversed previously industry- and merchant-friendly tendencies in the Song. The Qing may have simply done the best they could with the existing trajectory and the limited knowledge at the time.
Though Kangxi declaring that land taxes would never be raised after him, among other things, didn’t help.
Good post.
I was sort of thinking of people like Henry the Navigator and Leonardo da Vinci. European sovereigns would fund all kinds of technology to get ahead - they wanted to make money, thrash their enemies, obtain land. Zheng He is the obvious counterexample yet his voyages seem more political to me. They sailed around the Indian ocean showing the flag and scaring the hell out of the natives, brought back some animals but nobody was terribly interested in profit, conquest or expansion. It was more like the moon landings, a cool way to show off Chinese power rather than achieve anything substantive. Of course, they had other problems to deal with on the steppe front.
Likewise, I recall some of China's tributaries eagerly wanting to have more tribute missions because they'd actually get more in gifts than they 'paid' in gifts. It wasn't even an extractive scheme (though there were all kinds of gradations in the tributary system). They were interested in maintaining social order internationally and domestically, there were huge redistribution systems to take money from the rich agricultural regions to fund nomad defense in the harsh interior.
A better parallel may be the Song dynasty from 970-1279, then; quite a lot of innovation happened during that time, and had a serious threat in the Liao, then the Jin.
Even the Ming were happy to get their hands on superior European designs, though, after they started lagging behind - the idea of the Chinese being unaware that the frontiers of technology were passing them by isn’t really true, at least for the elite.
Surprisingly, there are examples of “military conquest” during the treasure cruises. Off the top of my head, the voyages deposed a Sinhalese king and a Samuderan usurper. Of course, while they then installed someone favourable to the Chinese, the treasure cruises largely then fucked off and left the territories alone. On the whole I think your point is well made, however - only to add that they were thought as useful to signal that China was returning to form after a century of Mongol rule, and once the voyages had made their point the balance of utility of the voyages shifted pretty dramatically for the court (new emperor being against it also did not help).
The sea ban and deconstruction of the treasure ships also meant that China went from being (iirc) the greatest naval power in the world to being almost entirely land-bound in its aspirations. A lot of shipbuilding knowledge was lost in the 15th century in China. While it might’ve made sense at the time, it was also an enormous self-own in the long run.
That might be another sort of thing to look at as for why China didn’t manage to stay ahead.
Indeed!
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Damn it random-ranger, here I was preparing the theory that adherence to non-racism makes Europeans into a moral mutants capable of suppressing their most basic moral instincts, and now I'm gonna have to add anti-semitism to the list. Seriously, I share a revulsion towards circumcision but let's compare the acts shall we.
Circumcision:
Brutal painful act lasting a few minutes, with additional suffering during recovery period
carried out against a creature who will not remember or know the difference,
reducing sexual fitness by (I'll just guess) 20%,
carried out by medical professionals beyond the sight of Non-Jewish parents.
Footbinding:
Several rounds of brutal painful acts distributed over several years, with additional extreme pain in between them,
carried out against a creature who will remember every moment of it, and is fully aware of the difference (she used to have fully functional feet),
permanent partial crippling into this disgusting... (I'll omit any words, you either feel it or you don't)
Carried out by the parents themselves with full knowledge and awareness of their actions as their daughter screams, over and over and over again.
/images/16772047502996655.webp
I agree that footbinding is worse than circumcision, I said it myself!
But they both belong in the category of 'really weird things that you'd surely not expect to be cultural practices'! China thought for some reason that small feet are better, that they were high-status. Then it got locked in as a cultural trait, this is what high-status women do and how you get married. As for 'extremely disgusting pseudo-medical operations carried out by parents thinking they're doing good for their child', we can hardly claim the high ground. I won't post images or testimony of gorey botched gender transition surgeries because I don't really want to see or think about the things that are happening right now, in our countries, today.
People are prepared to die for status! They'll cut off their balls for status, flagellate themselves for status, people will do anything for status.
Fundamentally both the West and the Sinosphere + Japan are great civilizations. We basically have the same problems in terms of diminishing fertility, technological anomie and so on. It's a symmetrical situation.
Edit: Chinese and North East Asians are categorized as 'white adjacent' for the purpose of getting discriminated against in our education system. There's a certain essence of whiteness that they have possessed by few others.
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This is just basic signaling theory. It's high status to have bound feet because its a credible signal that:
I don't have to work. You know this because I physically am unable to work, and yet am obviously not malnourished.
I come from a high-status household. You know this because they bound their daughter's feet instead of putting her to work.
I care about my future husband. You know this because I had my feet bound to be more appealing to him
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As far as I know as an ignorant non-expert, the genetic separation between Han Chinese people and Japanese or Korean people is pretty small, small enough to make genetics not seem like an obvious explanation for things not shared between those populations. Especially if you're going to characterize it as a millennia-old difference, rather than some more recent bottleneck like who survived under Mao (or at least civil wars postdating the separation). Something like conscientiousness or conformity I could buy, those seem similar between East Asian subgroups, but dramatically lower empathy is a much harder sell. Even if you think East Asians in general harbor a lower level of empathy that the high-intelligence and conformity is compensating for in some subgroups, it means the primary driver of conflict is cultural and political rather than racial. Certainly the racial differences don't seem to have stopped Japan from rapidly becoming an ally after WW2. Even pre-WW2 Japan doesn't seem to have been particularly cruel to each other like current Chinese culture stereotypically is, especially not when compared to pre-modern cultures of any race. Even if we buy the argument that Europe's heavy use of the death penalty made the population more genetically empathetic quite recently, either Japan benefited from a similar phenomenon or the difference isn't big enough to stop them from riding their high intelligence (and possibly conscientiousness) to one of the lowest crime rates in the world anyway.
If you want to do population genetics, even speculative amateur genetics, then you should actually do population genetics. Look at when populations split off from each other, research whether it's plausible there was the appropriate genetic bottlenecks, see what work has been done of the subject. Actually try to disprove your hypothesis, don't just go looking for things that fit your story. Don't just point to some anecdotes of Chinese culture being low-empathy and assume it must be genetic. A glance at history shows quite a lot of low-empathy behavior in every population group, and meanwhile you haven't justified why they would have such a large genetic difference from other East Asians, so cultural explanations seem quite plausible. And while I share your impression that Chinese culture is unusually low-empathy, you didn't even try to establish that beyond some scattered anecdotes. Objective measures like crime rate, while worse than other East Asian countries, aren't that bad compared to white countries, especially similarly poor or low-trust countries like Russia. I don't even know how many of the "Chinese society being weirdly sociopathic" anecdotes I hear are the product of actual differences vs. it being a product of how China views itself, like how Japan is more preoccupied with low birth-rates than various other countries that have since declined until they are even lower. Or something like Chinese people playing up low-empathy explanations for their actions because being a compassionate 'sucker' is low-status, while people in other countries do the opposite.
This is particularly silly. Japan has of course been spectacularly successful at exporting anime, an art form especially focused on human beauty. There don't seem to be any notable differences between populations in the ability to appreciate either it or beauty in general, let alone between population groups as closely related as China and Japan.
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So, this is certainly a valid and understandable interpretation of the phenomena you’re referencing. However, I want to offer an alternative interpretation.
Perhaps rather than seeing the European and Asiatic peoples as headed for conflict due to their differences, perhaps what is needed instead is a sort of biological Hegelian synthesis: a recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of the two races, and the ways in which they are actually complementary. Perhaps the creation of a Hapa race, occupying a healthy middle point between the excessive individualism, sentimentality and recklessness of Europeans (the acute failure modes of which we are witnessing all around us) and the excessive communitarianism, coldness and safetyism of Asians, is the key to unlocking a superhuman race of people who alone will be worthy of the task of making humanity an interplanetary species. When I imagine a race whose women all look like Mina Kimes playing beautiful symphonic music in a Tokyo-like super-metropolis on Mars with Greco-Roman-Japanese fusion architecture, I admit I find very little to quibble with.
Wait what?
This reminds me of Russia fetishism among the Trad-right. Oh here look a 'traditional" society with a third our church attendance, higher abortion rates, higher divorce rates, lower fertility, extreme alcoholism and spousal abuse... But look at manly Army ad they have. Yes, and what does traditional comradery mean in a nation with Russia's history of de-facto slave armies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina
You can't just use words, and assume that the versions of them that exist in other societies have anything to do with what you are envisionining. What does communitarianism mean here?
Well, even in the most atomized White American neighbourhood, If I have an accident and am dying in public view, I can be 100% certain that someone, who i've never met will stop and try to help me within seconds. Can you say the same in China? Why not?
And how, in the wake of our covid response do you feel like describing Americans as reckless and asians as safetyist, with the ideal somewhere in between, is reasonable. I mean, I know there are some Whites who feel we didn't mask enough, but you might be the first White nationalist sympathetic person I've found expressing that view.
To be clear, I am not talking about Covid at all here; I’m as vociferously anti-mask as any right-wing poster here and was from pretty much the second I saw the early IFR estimates for Covid. I’ve never felt more in-sync with the Red Tribe than I did during Covid. However, all that is contingent on the fact that Covid was not remotely as dangerous as it was advertised to be. I do think there is a persuasive case that if it had been the kind of super-pandemic it was initially purported to be, there probably would have been untold millions of working-class white people who would have died like flies from not taking precautionary measures, due to apathy or generalized (justified) distrust of the government or pig-headed “if I want to get sick and die that’s my God-given right”. It happened in this case that those traits were adaptive to the reality of the actual disease, which was a nothingburger; there’s no guarantee that the next pandemic will be as fake and gay, and in that scenario it may very well make sense to talk about whites as reckless.
No, what I actually had in mind were things like the massive disparities in tragic fatalities, firearm accidents, concussions from bar fights, and all the other sorts of mayhem you can encounter in the ER at any major hospital in the U.S., versus what you’ll find at an equivalent hospital in Asia. Yes, I’m aware that the 13% are contributing far more than their fair share to these phenomena, but if all the ADOS got teleported to Jupiter tomorrow, U.S. numbers, and European numbers more generally, would still differ markedly from Asia’s.
I do agree with you that China seems qualitatively different from other East Asian countries in some really interesting and unflattering ways. It almost seems to be simultaneously very communitarian - in the sense of high conformity, willingness of the population to follow orders and to not make trouble, and a general low-agency environment - and also low-trust and low-altruism. The worst of both worlds, in a way; all the bad parts of communitarianism without any of the good parts.
However, your post wasn’t just about China; your argument is that this battle is racial; that there’s something about the Asian race generally that makes it fundamentally incompatible with the European race. And what I’m pointing out is that many of the failure modes you’re pointing to appear pretty much specific to China and not generalizable among East Asians as a whole, or even Han Chinese as a whole, given that I don’t think we see some of these problems in Taiwan or in Singapore or in the communities of overseas Chinese in places like Indonesia and the Philippines. So, while I agree that there are points of profound difference that present significant potential for conflict between European-derived civilization and Chinese civilization as currently constituted, I disagree that this conflict is properly a racial conflict.
And, perhaps as relevantly, US numbers would be much higher than most of Europe's, which would be higher than China's, which would be higher than Japan's.
I mean, yes, obviously there's overlap between the US murder rate and Europe's, but the white homicide rate, firearms death rate, etc is still noticeably higher than, say, France or England or Germany.
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What about in an Asian American neighborhood? Do you think they would let you die on the street? If yes, why? If not, what is different between Chinese-Americans and Chinese-Chinese?
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Congrats, you invented Russia. Beautiful women, not sure about the Japanese-Roman metropolises though.
I thought Russia was where they achieve excessive individualism, sentimentality, recklessness, communitarianism (perhaps at gunpoint), and coldness all at the same time.
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Haha, believe me, this has occurred to me before. Although sadly Russia seems to take more culturally, on the Asian side of its origins, from the rather more brutal Mongolic/Turkic substrate rather than from a more refined Japanese-Korean-Sinitic element.
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You aren’t really doing a good job of making the Chinese all that alien. They don’t have Michael Angelo but what Civilization outside Europe in a certain era does? Certainly not the US. They do have the terracotta warriors, and while not fond of eating dogs Rome had crucifixion.
Footbinding, as a universally engaged in practice among the Chinese upper class for hundreds of years basically the entirety of my point, in that it represents a qualitative deviation from anything the Europeans ever did; in that it represents extreme entirely unprovoked cruelty carried out personally again close innocent kin. As the treatment of close kin is the most basic area where base moral instincts could be expected to operate in, one could expect those who are qualitatively depraved in this area to exceed others in their quantitative depravity elsewhwere. Everything else is just window-dressing to show that the same soulless genes has not dramatically altered it's nature.
Most civilizations outside of Europe have populations of considerably lower IQs. No one has ever suggested that the problem with the Chinese was mere stupidity, with eugenicists like EA Ross (who campaigned to keep them out of the US, nonetheless agreeing that they were our intellectual equals. Thus, where people of equal or higher capacity to do something, do not in fact do that thing, inferring an absence of interest is more than reasonable.
The dog issue is only relevant in that they are still up to it - today. I'm fully aware that both European and non-european civilizations have been extremely cruel to animals in the past. Find me evidence of Brits or Germans cooking dogs alive when they had similar material conditions to modern China (beginning of 1900s) and you'll have a strong point.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for Chinamen, but you're aware that Euros sold their children into slavery for centuries?
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Dire conditions spawn traditions that take a long time to die off.
The Swiss dog and cat eating in remote valleys doesn't mean the people there are nutritionally deprived. Merely some almost certainly old people keeping a dying tradition barely alive.
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Ah, cruelty carried out on the innocent. My favorite topic. There was the castration of church choir boys, that went on for a couple hundred years. And circumcision of infants, americans still do it. People in sicily sold their children into slavery to miners as late as the turn of the century (the last one, not this one). Corporal punishment in school was common in some places until the 70s, what's 7*6? I don't know. Hands slapped with a wood stick.
China today is not comparable to any place in europe in the last century. Some place are very rich but some places are extremely poor. How many places in europe can you find where people resort to eating rats? None, but it still happens in china.
That said, depending on how you feel about horses, I may have bad news for you.
Go further back in time to Anglo-Saxon England and you'll find my favorite (read: most disturbing) example.
And this was in a literate society. I get that parchment wasn't cheap back then, but Christ...
Wait, you're telling me they whipped the shit out of children as a primitive form of court stenography???
I know it sounds like a Monty Python skit, but there it is...
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Agamemnon, leading the great expedition to Troy, had to sacrifice his own daughter for favorable winds.
Herodotus tells us of an Egyptian pharaoh who, finding himself trapped in a burning room by his enemies:
The great bulwarks of Christendom in Constantinople were fond of blinding or castrating political rivals and brothers in order to render them nonthreatening. Their successors in Constantinople would take it a step further, Mehmed II would legalize fratricide:
Later, Mehmed III would murder 19(!) of his brothers upon ascending the throne.
Meanwhile in the Americas, To quote my man Douglass on the plight of the slave children fathered by slaveowners:
So either America should accept that the Chinese are people, or we should accept that Southerners weren't.
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Do you realise what European childrearing was like before the 1950s-or-so turn against corporeal punishment? Either way, you've singled out one particular type of cruelty that your culture happened to not engage in. On the other hand, while China did have some form of slavery, to my best knowledge it has no recent history of anything resembling the Atlantic slave trade and the institutionalised slavery that waited at the end of it, or the Holocaust. Are you sure the Germanic peoples of Europe are not the ones with the "soulless genes", considering especially how the almost same memes played out conspicuously more humanely in Fascist Italy and the Hispanic Americas?
Why do you single out dogs, except because your culture just happened to put them in the "fur babies" category? Liveleak is unfortunately gone, but a few years ago it carried a number of videos from a pig slaughterhouse in Northern Europe that hinted at a completely normalised culture of wanton cruelty towards animals that are generally considerd to be more intelligent than dogs. Fox hunts and safaris also didn't exactly emerge and persist under conditions of scarcity, and I hear kosher slaughter is not the nicest thing either.
The use of "equals", rather than "superiors", in this context to me seems to hint at plain old motivated reasoning, seeking to rationalise prior disdain in the face of inconvenient absence of the most common criterion to do so (average IQ).
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Michael Angelo, you say? But the real question is: How does their art compare with that of Leo Nardo? Or Carol Vaggio?
"Da Vinky?"
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West Germany only outlawed eating dogs in 1985.
The Swiss steal eat dogs at times.
There's the infamous cat-eating scandal where an oldster chef who saw the lean years in post-war Italy reminisced about the dishes of his youth, and was fired from a TV show..
Americans really have no idea how bad things were in densely populated civilized regions re: hunger. Allegedly, there were no rodent problems in 19th century China, just like there weren't any in Japanese POW camps, but I'm not completely sure about that.
They're not particularly combative or expansionist. Historical record suggests they'll leave you alone if you'll show then some respect and maybe tribute.
Being racist and aware their system depends on their own racial characteristics, they don't seem keen to foist it on other people, unlike liberal imperalists. Whether their communist legacy will override this insular, non-missionary tendency once they're the unquestionably the most powerful country and recognized as such - I don't know.
Personally, I'd like to fuck off from this planet into deep space as soon as it becomes possible, purely on risk reduction grounds. Hacking your brain to see airless frigid voids as comfy as misty forests is much easier than surviving whatever artificial life monstrosities will arise on this planet.
One still notices this in China, where people eat meats that Western cultures have long since put into dog food, sausages, or burgers. As someone who enjoys things like tripe, heart, and gizzards, this is something I like in their food, but it's symptomatic of the difference in protein supply between Europe/North America and China in living memory.
A lot of this is just fashion. In my Texas suburb grocery store tongue costs as much as steak and boudin(spicy liver paste, sold in a sausage) is reasonably popular, while farther away from mexicans or cajuns such things would have to be special ordered at non-ethnic grocery stores. Allegedly blacks still eat gizzards and tripe because they want to, not because they have to, but I've never confirmed this. And of course snails and frogs are high status in france while urban americans see them as gross. And of course I've run into several canadians who find the southern custom of eating catfish off putting, despite this being well entrenched and normal among even wealthy southerners.
And that's without getting into the rural-urban divide on squirrel consumption.
I've honestly never understood squirrel. They're so fiddly and the meat's not even worth a round of 22. At least rabbits have most of a meal on them. Is it mostly just bragging rights?
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Really? Did they say why?
Gritty or poor tasting trash fish was the usual explanation.
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I feel compelled to add that here in Italy eating liver and tripe, and to a lesser degree heart, brain, and lungs, is still quite popular, even to the point of being considered a delicacy. I can tell by personal experience that Tuscan liver paté is excellent.
Liver seems to be an exception in most places, at least because of paté.
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The Vietnamese, Koreans, Tibetans (I actually think China is the good guy here), and Cambodians would beg to disagree. Everyone else has been historically protected by even greater natural barriers. We have absolutely no reason to believe that a powerful China will be non-intrusive.
Yeah. All closely neighboring regions.
And contrast that with armed action by various European powers abroad. A vastly more extensive list.
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Also not sure how much of it is based on a false stereotype or not, but the old song "Johnny Verbeck" is about a Dutchman who invents a sausage making machine and grinds up all of the neighborhood's cats and dogs in it.
The Dutch have made an impact on the English language due to past enmity.
I've only see 'Dutch courage' (old books only) and 'going dutch' in use, but I feel we ought to revive the use of 'Dutch wife' just to yank the Dutch chain.
Going full Double-Dutch?
Huh.
I guess today I learned a new idiom! Double-Dutch means nonsense.
I actually didn't intend that--I thought "double-Dutch" was just a jump-rope thing.
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